That’s certainly the case at Textron Information Services (TIS), which provides IT resources to its parent company, Textron Inc., a $14.2 billion company based in Providence, R.I., that serves the aircraft, defense, industrial and finance industries. TIS uses social networking to help its 800 IT employees communicate with each other and find answers to difficult problems. “People can reach out and find someone who has a skill set that can help them,” says Gary Cantrell, VP and CIO. “Social networking connects them in a way that just wasn’t possible in the past.”

For CIOs, social networking brings a mix of challenges and opportunities. Get it right, and the company can benefit. Get it wrong — and many do, experts say — and the CIO faces wasted time, manpower and other resources at a time when few companies can afford such losses. “Social networking isn’t something you can just turn on,” says Ross Mayfield, Chairman, President and Co-Founder of Socialtext Inc., a Palo Alto, Calif., developer of enterprise social networking software. “You need to be aligned to a business goal, and if you are a CIO, you need line-of-business alignment and a line-of-business manager engaged in the implementation process.” In fact, companies that take a try-an-installation-and-see-what- happens approach have a 90 percent failure rate, according to Mayfield.

Statistics like that led Nickolaisen of Headwaters to select his social networking tools carefully. First, he determined the business need. Headwaters executives knew that most new product ideas come from solving new customer problems, which — more often than not — require the company to spend time with customers, understanding their business challenges. “But in our business, we don’t have a lot of people in the field, so we have to be smart about gathering information,” Nickolaisen explains.

Social Pilots
So Nickolaisen turned to social networking. He and his team began by evaluating Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and other popular services with firsthand trials. He spoke with other CIOs, both at industry events and online, asking them what they had accomplished with social networking. And he instructed his team to launch pilots with select clients to see how they liked using social networking to interact directly with Headwaters.

Ultimately, in a bid to save money and reduce complexity, Nickolaisen selected a software solution that the company had installed earlier and which provided a portal. Headwaters was using the software as an internal resource to post ideas and track their process through the R&D process. To foster internal collaboration, Headwaters set up a wiki.