Social IT

Social IT involves the use of collaboration-based tools and solutions that transform the way IT professionals and related business line leaders enhance communication, productivity, knowledge-sharing, collaboration and decision-making. Social IT redefines the way IT professionals manage IT operations within corporate, government, academia, and other organizational settings.
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There are two main aspects of Social IT. The first type of Social IT is the use of social media based communication methods to monitor, engage, and communicate with IT users. This includes IT departments monitoring popular social media sites (both internal or external) to understand if employees or customers are dissatisfied with current services or in need of help or guidance. It further includes the use of social media techniques and sites to communicate the status of IT services, new services being provided, tips and tricks, etc. Finally, this “outbound” aspect of Social IT also includes the ability for users to directly request support or help from IT departments and service providers via social channels. Many IT management tool providers provide add-on support for one or more of the above Social IT capabilities. The value of this aspect of Social IT can be measured in terms of improved IT user satisfaction as well as the avoidance of IT service calls when IT proactively contacts users in order to notify them of new IT services or to resolve IT issues. For more perspective on Social IT's role in the support process visit http://www.servicesphere.com/blog/2012/5/9/what-is-social-it.html
The second aspect of Social IT is the internal use of social collaboration techniques to foster the capturing and sharing of knowledge in order to improve the management of IT environments as well as the enhancement of traditional IT processes such as those found in the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). This type of Social IT has even greater potential than “outbound” Social IT to improve IT staff productivity and service performance. The main benefits from improved knowledge collaboration and the use of social principles in day-to-day IT operations are a better use of staff expertise which generates significant improvements in productivity, speeds the , decreases incident resolution time, reduces the risk associated with IT changes, and further assists with making more accurate and timely decisions in areas such as disaster recovery and business continuity, application release planning and rollout. Essentially, any IT activity or decision that would benefit from crowd-sourced and peer reviewed IT knowledge will benefit from Social IT collaboration.
Social IT is one of several major trends that are re-shaping IT. These other related trends include: big data; cloud computing; Bring Your Own Device (BYOD); DevOps (the closer alignment and collaboration of application development and IT operations) and the increasing threat of insider attack and increasing cybersecurity risks. The combination of these trends is driving IT organizations to re-evaluate their IT management approaches, and Social IT is gaining interest as a means of leverage the human element in IT along with traditional process-based approaches. In addition to offering Social IT as an add-on capability, there is an emerging class of IT management vendors who are building solutions that are based on Social IT principles.
Leading industry analyst firms, such as Gartner, are calling for enhanced solutions from vendors that offer social IT capabilities. For example, this was called out as an area of weakness from traditional ITSM vendors in the August 2012 [http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id1-1BS56X7&ct120821&st=sb#dv_1_as_of Magic Quadrant] for IT Service Support Management and recently vendors that are basing their offerings on social IT collaboration were highlighted in the [http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id1-1F5NGML&ct130423&st=sg ‘Cool Vendors’ in IT Operations Management report] for 2013.

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