How to Increase IT's Value Proposition Within Your Organization

Method No. 3: CIOs can measure the impact of their collaboration investment

With CIOs gaining visibility within the enterprise and meeting regularly with their C-level peers, having the capability to quickly analyze, trend and provide analysis on how people are contributing within your employee community is more than just necessary, it's mission-critical.

Adopt business intelligence tools that will help you analyze the metrics of your online community. Employ committed resources within your organization whose job is to consistently analyze the ebb and flow, decide what's working and what's not, and determine what to focus on.

In order to translate your investment into a tangible business value, you'll need to report on your community network data. The information provided will help you determine exactly how much value your investment is adding to the organization.

Your enterprise collaboration software should be able to connect your employees and mine your community data and activity—only then will you know how efficiently information is flowing throughout the company.

Method No. 4: CIOs can set structure in place today to prepare for the future of the IT organization

This one's simple: build networking into the growth of your organization. As daunting as it may be, 40 percent of today's corporate management will retire in 10 years. What are you doing today to prepare for the Millennial Manager? Are you capturing, indexing and making searchable the extensive knowledge hiding in the minds of your current employees?

With a proven enterprise collaboration platform, CIOs won't have to lose sleep over how to best harness their corporate intelligence. They'll be able to provide a 360-degree view of how their employees collaborate and manage knowledge, while also extending that group effort beyond the firewall to their customers, prospects and partners.

In a world where the boundary lines are currently being erased and redrawn, now is the time to prepare for the future of business.

Ken Vernon is Vice President of Marketing at Telligent where he guides strategy and execution of go-to-market strategies. Beginning in 1995, at his firm McMann & Tate, Ken was an early adopter of online marketing technologies for enterprise business-to-business and business-to-consumer clients. Since then, Ken has been instrumental in the online success for a blue chip list of clients. Joining Telligent in late 2007, Ken has utilized his passion and experience in online marketing, search marketing and social media to help Telligent expand its online presence and execute successful programs. Ken may be reached at kvernon@telligent.com.