Social Network Observatory for Innovation in Enterprise-Employee Engagement

The innovation potential of social computing and real-time analytics is mainly untapped. We focus here on obtaining employee-engagement insights from messages posted on the enterprise Social Media. At the start, management feedback indicated that while current tools provide aggregated data views for overall trends, they were also of ´low-resolution´ and lacking in specific causal details needed for implementing interventions at the individual actor or team level. This led to the formulation of a ´high-resolution´ Observatory - an innovation to aid the design of interventions to increase employee engagement. The Observatory framework treats the enterprise as a complex system with macro, meso and micro contexts that have to be aligned through ´little experiments´. The implementation is a semantic network-based feature at the meso (infrastructure) level. The management users felt this feature allowed them design interventions and observe the results needed to arrive at decisions beneficial to the actors at the micro level. This also achieved goals for the executives at the macro level. The use of technology to create semantic network views and the lessons learned are also presented.