I originally posted this over at the TLT blog, but thought I’d leave a copy here as well.

Last week I had the great opportunity to talk at an ITS Collab meeting about how yammer could improve collaboration and awareness across ITS. It forced me to try to hone some thoughts that have been rolling around around in my head since we started working to bring Yammer to Penn State.

I used a few quotes from this Gartner press release to frame the message:

By 2016, 50 percent of large organizations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and that 30 percent of these will be considered as essential as email and telephones are today.

…

Traditional technology rollouts, such as ERP or CRM, followed a “push” paradigm. Workers were trained on an app and were then expected to use it. In contrast, social initiatives require a “pull” approach, one that engages workers and offers them a significantly better way to work

There have been many attempts to get people to use various internal spaces. Some of them are dumping ground for documents and policies, others have been places where everyone in the organization is offered an opportunity to share their thoughts or contribute data. Keeping people engaged in these spaces is tough, though. People are busy and nothing spurs them to visit often enough for the site to become beneficial to the organization or to the individual. The collaboration and awareness piece seems like an extra job, something to be tacked on to the myriad other tasks and systems a person visits in the course of his or her day. What I like about the new social breed of internal collaboration tools is that they are where people go to get work done. For me, tons of the day to day communication involved in getting work done happens in yammer. Visiting there multiple times a day has become a habit. Now there is less communication trapped in isolated emails and more people are able to become aware of what is happening. Clive Thompson famously compared twitter to a sixth sense, a social proprioception. I think that is a great sense to take advantage of in the work place. Anecdotal evidence suggests we are on the right path. One manager in ITS who recently adopted yammer in her organization told me she was able to cut meetings back to thirty minutes from sixty since there was no longer a need to “report out” and meetings could just focus on discussion and decision making. I like that the sound of that.