Social Software Governance Explained

By Michael Idinopulos | March 9, 2012, 6:55 pm | 5 Comments

There’s a lot of needless angst out there about social software governance.

I can understand the angst when you’re talking about public-facing social software deployments. There are very tricky questions about monitoring and moderation. Getting the answers wrong can lead to very public missteps.

Internal social software is a different story. The governance just ain’t that complicated. Successful internal deployments follow a principle I call the “Ownership Principle”.

Ownership Principle: IT owns the technology and content owners own the content.

Sounds obvious, right? IT should focus on central maintenance of the solution—making sure that the technology is running smoothly and supporting other business units and functions in their use of the system. All content decisions, however, should be left to the individuals and business units who are affected by that content. The Marketing Team drives decisions about marketing content, the HR team defines the process for posting HR content, and so on.

In practice, this means you should implement a kind of state/federal model of governance, in which IT and HR provide central infrastructure (technology, training, and support), and champions in the business drive content and collaboration around their local business needs.

At the central (“federal”) level, there are three main steps you can take to make sure you’ve covered the bases from a policy and process standpoint.

Post rules and guidelines where all users can see them. (Many companies post these on the login screen.) Consult your Legal Department to come up with suitable language.
Make sure that your Core Leadership Team (see above) contains representation from the different business units, so that you have clear lines of sight into the different content areas
Train your HelpDesk on how to assign and manage permissions, so that they are able to assign the appropriate levels of administrative control to local champions.

Once you’ve put these central measures in place, you should leave the substantive governance questions up to the individual business units or use case champions (“states”):

Who can post content? For some use cases (e.g., project team collaboration) you will want to encourage all team members to participate. For others (e.g., posting HR policies) the champions will want to restrict contribution to a select few. You should leave these decisions up to the local champions.
Who can add users? Here again, the answer should be left up to local champions. Sales and Marketing should be decide who can add users to the Sales and Marketing Groups. Leaders of the Women’s Initiative should be allowed to decide whether the Women’s Initiative Group will be self-join or private. IT’s job is just to make sure that these local decisions are centrally supported by your Socialtext configuration.
Who will monitor content? By now you can probably guess the answer: The local champions are responsible for their content. For some use cases (e.g., HR and Legal conversations) this may require strict supervision of the content. Other Groups (e.g., Marathon Runners) will see no such need.

One final piece of advice on governance: Relax. In our experience, governance concerns loom much larger in theory than in practice. This is not social media on the consumer web where users can post content anonymously. Because authors know that their content is attributed to them, their posts are respectful and appropriate.

Comments (5)

5 Replies to “Social Software Governance Explained”
	But gosh, isn’t that all a bit too straightforward and pragmatic? How are Social Governance Consultants supposed to make money, then? By Robert Todd \| March 9, 2012, 7:03 pm
	By Michael Idinopulos \| March 9, 2012, 7:05 pm
	All sounds eminently sensible. However the challenge we have faced is that we are subject to some quite stringent information assurance processes, and there is a lot of nervousness in some quarters about the lack of central control inherent in a federal model. I think this is partly because people who are used to traditional IT applications don’t really understand how security works on Socialtext, nor are they used to self policing environments. We still get a lot of concerns raised along the lines of “what happens if someone posts something inappropriate onto Socialtext”. My response has always been to say it will almost certainly be spotted and removed straight away – which has proved to be the case in the odd instance when inappropriate information has been posted. I’ll usually also point out that email is far less secure since there is no visibility on what information is contained in emails and where it is going. Sadly this doesn’t always quell the concerns. Perhaps you could create some kind of briefing note or presentation that explains Socialtext security, and your ideas around federal governance, in a simple form that can be easily understood by senior managers who often still need to approve any sort of governance arrangement. By Danny Golding \| March 16, 2012, 9:40 pm
	Danny, thanks for the comment. We’ve prepared a set of simple (I hope) FAQs and answers as part of our Enterprise Rollout Cookbook. I will forward to you. By Michael Idinopulos \| March 16, 2012, 9:44 pm
	If I had a dollar for every time I have heard ‘what if someone says something dumb’, I would be sipping a piña colada in the Bahamas right now. The answer is simple. Yes there is a possibility that someone will ‘say something dumb’ but they will do under their OWN name. We have found that people are much more thoughtful in the way they interact with Socialtext and I believe this is largely because they need to stand by what they say. I tell my customers that yes, if need be, I could remove content, particularly in relation to signals but I can’t see a time when this would ever be necessary. I can count only two occasions where I thought a staff member was pushing the boundary. The interesting thing on both occasions, the community responded with comments like ‘do you think this is an appropriate place for this’. I think most orgs are still a long way off from people feeling comfortable using these types of tools but my advice is have faith, you have more amazing staff out there than you realise and they will do the best to protect their right to have a voice. By Sally Dowling \| March 26, 2012, 8:59 pm

5 Replies to “Social Software Governance Explained”

But gosh, isn’t that all a bit too straightforward and pragmatic? How are Social Governance Consultants supposed to make money, then?

By Robert Todd | March 9, 2012, 7:03 pm

By Michael Idinopulos | March 9, 2012, 7:05 pm

All sounds eminently sensible.

However the challenge we have faced is that we are subject to some quite stringent information assurance processes, and there is a lot of nervousness in some quarters about the lack of central control inherent in a federal model.

I think this is partly because people who are used to traditional IT applications don’t really understand how security works on Socialtext, nor are they used to self policing environments.

We still get a lot of concerns raised along the lines of “what happens if someone posts something inappropriate onto Socialtext”. My response has always been to say it will almost certainly be spotted and removed straight away – which has proved to be the case in the odd instance when inappropriate information has been posted. I’ll usually also point out that email is far less secure since there is no visibility on what information is contained in emails and where it is going.

Sadly this doesn’t always quell the concerns. Perhaps you could create some kind of briefing note or presentation that explains Socialtext security, and your ideas around federal governance, in a simple form that can be easily understood by senior managers who often still need to approve any sort of governance arrangement.

By Danny Golding | March 16, 2012, 9:40 pm

Danny, thanks for the comment. We’ve prepared a set of simple (I hope) FAQs and answers as part of our Enterprise Rollout Cookbook. I will forward to you.

By Michael Idinopulos | March 16, 2012, 9:44 pm

If I had a dollar for every time I have heard ‘what if someone says something dumb’, I would be sipping a piña colada in the Bahamas right now. The answer is simple. Yes there is a possibility that someone will ‘say something dumb’ but they will do under their OWN name. We have found that people are much more thoughtful in the way they interact with Socialtext and I believe this is largely because they need to stand by what they say. I tell my customers that yes, if need be, I could remove content, particularly in relation to signals but I can’t see a time when this would ever be necessary. I can count only two occasions where I thought a staff member was pushing the boundary. The interesting thing on both occasions, the community responded with comments like ‘do you think this is an appropriate place for this’. I think most orgs are still a long way off from people feeling comfortable using these types of tools but my advice is have faith, you have more amazing staff out there than you realise and they will do the best to protect their right to have a voice.

By Sally Dowling | March 26, 2012, 8:59 pm

Enterprise Social Software Blog

Social Software Governance Explained

About This Blog

Weblog on gaining business results from social software.

Don’t Get Stuck, Get Social

Stop Talking at Your Employees and Start Creating Discussions

Goodbye Boring Orientation, Hello Social Onboarding

Separating the Nice to Have from the Must Have Technology

That Was Easy: Using Social to Find Answers to Questions

How to Help Your Employees Overcome the Fear of Change

Socialtext’s Growth Leads to Corporate Expansion

Meet Rich Szeto- Socialtext’s Newest User Experience Designer

A Social Story: How a Group of Passionate Software Testers Used Social to Write a Book

Building a Team the Social Way

Try Socialtext Today

From Warm-up to Winner’s Podium: Social Onboarding Goes for the Gold

Free Recorded Webinar with Peoplefluent