Business Relationship Management and the internal social network

Should the Business Relationship Manager play a pivotal role in the internal social network of an organisation? Recently there has been an upsurge of internal social network implementations within organisations with products such as Yammer, Tibbr and Jive. These tools help increase internal communication and engagement so should the BRM role be a part of this and if so how big a part?

As with any tool such as this, it is often not how feature rich the tool is but how aligned the implementation of the tool is to the requirements of the users which counts. A badly implemented tool will seem useless and unwieldy and as a result be met with resistance to adopt it, so it’s important to get the implementation to be as best fit to the organisational needs as possible. A lot has been said before about successful system implementations but I found this paper said it particularly well:

“scholars and practitioners recognize and appreciate many of the same issues integral to the success of system implementations. Practitioners, through the school of hard knocks and years of experiential analysis, have learned “what” seems to work and what doesn’t. Scholars, through years of academic study and research, can tell us “why.” By blending the whats and the whys, and tossing in a bit of common sense, we strengthen the guidelines for successful implementations” 

Paula Vaughan, System Implementation Success Factors; It’s not just the Technology 

So presuming a successful implementation has occurred then the BRM has the opportunity to exploit this tool and use it for their advantage. It can be used to engage more across the business, break down the walls of communication, remove those silos of information, to gather opinion and add weight to business cases or even as a collaborative tool within the BRM function. The increase in communication and transparency of work across projects can really help BRMs, remember the BRM function can have IT requirements as well. 

So just for one day take a look internally and think about tools which can help you as BRMs rather than what can help your business partners, ultimately everyone will benefit and more business value will be made.