HR and enterprise social software were made for each other (CMSWire)

This is a very interesting posting by Michael Idinopulos (from SocialText) on Social and HR, a natural partnership. Having in mind the intention of IBM to acquire Kenexa it is in particular interesting for me. Check out the use cases for Social! Most of them we already know, but useful summary.

Most enterprise technologies have natural owners inside the enterprise. Sales owns sales force automation. Finance owns the financial software. Marketing owns marketing automation. It’s not exactly rocket science.

But social software is different. It doesn’t map to a single business process. Social software is all about unlocking the potential of all employees across an entire organization — … Large organizations are also nothing new, and for the past hundred or so years most of them have created a special group whose sole purpose is to optimize for the value of its people. This group is called Human Resources, but is better known as HR.

HR and enterprise social software were made for each other. Both are in the same business of making talent more productive.

Unlike lines of business, HR has responsibility for the entire enterprise. Moreover, HR already owns crucial data on each individual: pictures, contact information, roles, reporting relationships, resumes. That makes HR the natural owner of enterprise social. …

Social offers HR an extraordinary opportunity to move beyond back-office process, and wield real, positive influence on the entire organization in a fundamentally strategic way. …

There’s a wealth of ways in which HR can use social to assume this mantle of business leadership. Here are a few examples:

– Enterprise profile: Creating one consistent, authoritative profile for each employee that pulls together everything the enterprise knows about that person

– Social onboarding: Accelerating time to productivity for new hires by exposing them to documentation, conversations and content created by their new colleagues

– Informal learning: Augmenting structured learning courses and modules with unstructured interactions and peer mentoring

– Social communications: Replacing traditional static, out-of-date intranets with dynamic social Intranets that are a real work tool for getting things done

– Social performance management: Harvesting such social activity as liking, following, badging and recommending to identify an individual’s value to the organization

– Expert location: Using tagging, conversations and search to surface specialized experts and expertise across the organization

… The direction of enterprise social will define HR’s role for the next decade. Will HR retreat to the back office, and simply focus on compliance and transactional automation? Or will HR seize the opportunity to become a strategic player in the organization, driving the cultural norms and collaborative patterns of the modern organization?

via HR + Social = Like.