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”
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.
