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Rich1
Product and Topic Expert
Product and Topic Expert

In Part 1, we discussed a simple model that allows you to benchmark the maturity and depth of your organization’s adoption of social technology. Now that you understand where you are and where you want to go, how do you get there?

If our goal is to make social part of the company culture, than we need to design our SAP Jam groups such that their usage becomes a regular habit for all employees. To achieve this goal, we can take a page from the playbook of applications like email, Twitter and Facebook which are being used multiple times a  day by millions of users. According to Nir Eyal, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products the hook is “an experience designed to connect a solution to the user’s problem with enough frequency to form a habit.”

If we think about what this means in a business context, we need to find a business goal or initiative that can be advanced by using SAP Jam on a frequent basis. This business goal can be at a corporate, division or regional level. It can be targeted at employee engagement, revenue growth or innovation. It can be documented as a formal MBO or it can simply be a highly visible company initiative. The important criteria are that it is a goal with a specific executive held accountable for the execution and attainment of well-defined KPIs. In this way, we connect SAP Jam to an important and measurable business problem which drives user motivation and adoption.

Identify Business Goals that SAP Jam can Advance

After selecting two or three SAP Jam groups that you believe have the potential to become habit forming, you then need to design those groups for maximum adoption. BJ Fogg from Stanford University has developed the Fogg Behavior Model which asserts the following: “for a person to perform a target behavior, he or she must (1) be sufficiently motivated, (2) have the ability to perform the behavior, and (3) be triggered to perform the behavior.”

This behavior model has been validated with our experience of social adoption at SAP. One of the most active Jam groups is the SAP Strategy Group sponsored by the CEO. The purpose of the group is to brainstorm important business objectives for 2014. Employees are highly motivated to participate on a frequent basis due to the executive visibility and importance of the content to their jobs. This is in stark contrast to our Mindfulness @ SAP group. This is a group which is not directly tied to business goals and does not have enough content to motivate frequent usage.  This is not to say that we should not deploy groups based on employee interests. We just want to be aware of these dynamics when deploying SAP Jam groups and make sure that our design includes groups that will have maximum exposure and business impact to drive the cultural change we are seeking.

In summary, our goal is to design our social network so that it becomes part of the company culture. To accomplish this, we need to select SAP Jam groups that advance important business goals. We then need to design these groups such that users are motivated and able to use them on a frequent basis.  Please share your thoughts and experiences. Have you designed your SAP Jam groups around business problems? Which groups have seen the most and least adoption? Could these outcomes have been predicted with the design principles outlined above?

In part 3, we will drill down into how to identify habit forming groups and in part 4, we will examine how to design groups for maximum user motivation and ability.

Follow SAP Social Software on Twitter: @SAPSocial