Dachis Group – ITSinsider

What’s Your Story?

Every social graph tells a story. In this sweeping visualization of nodes and connections, you can see the shape of my career history and relationships. This imprint of my LinkedIn social network was generated yesterday. You can see how new contacts and interrelationships jettisoned off from my base when I started to work at 7Summits. You can also see how one person in my network connected two clusters. You can also see how some of my “Austin” friends are also “Dachis Group” friends. The LinkedIn Maps tool will show you who is most influential in your network and how their connections overlap with yours. Definitely worth a download and a journey into your own path.

I have been invited to speak to an upper level undergraduate class at UT Austin, The associate professor is Dr. Jeffrey Treem teaches a course called, “Social Media and Organizations.” Among other things, I plan to talk to the students about the vital role our network plays in our career. It can serve as the very foundation of our success. Regardless of the company or the organization you are affiliated with at any moment, the real value in your work experience comes from the relationships you form. The reciprocal trust and value exchange you negotiate with each and every node in your network is the real asset of your career. Sure – credentials, knowledge, performance, achievements – all matter a great deal, but they pale in comparison to the power of your own personal network. Think carefully about your most significant career changes, chances are someone you know played an assist in your move.

I’ve always been fascinated with Social Network Analysis to draw conclusions and make predictions about organizational performance. The science is there, and I know that some of the larger social collaboration and community platform companies are doing impressive work in this area. Michael Wu, Chief Scientist at Lithium, is one of the more interesting veteran researchers to talk to on this subject. He has been applying social sciences and large-scale network analysis techniques to make actionable observations and predictions for the benefit of Lithium’s many customers for years. I know that Jive has expertise and some ongoing work in this area too. David Gutelius, whose company Proxima was acquired by Jive, is a lead in this area for Jive. While I was at IBM Connect last month, I saw a number of experimental research projects showcased in IBM’s Innovation Lab. Several of them held a great deal of promise. For instance, Community Player analyses how a certain event or community member influences behavior in a network. Community Player is being developed by researchers at IBM Research in Haifa. It originated as part of the EU-FPZ project ROBUST. System U focuses on exploring computational discovery of people’s intrinsic traits from the traces they leave on social media. The project focuses on profiling customers as individuals, yet on a very large scale. This research is being done at IBM Research – Almaden. And something that a few of us have been kicking around for a while is being explored at IBM called Work Marketplace. It’s a concept around crowdsourcing your network for work and projects.

Dr. Treem and his academic colleagues are working on studying this area. I’m really looking forward to diving into this more and learning as much as I can about the current state of this sort of organizational science. If you have sources (academic and commercial) on how SNA is being applied in enterprise networks, please let me know. It’s a key area that holds tremendous promise.

Social Means Business

I just read Kate’s post on today’s announcement about Dachis Group acquiring Powered. I had to chuckle, because those of us in that “alternate universe, E20” used to think the same about the social media space. In fact, I joked to Peter Kim this year at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, “How does it feel not to be a celebrity?” I feel the same way at SXSWi. (Truth is, I didn’t even go last year.)

But, Kate is correct, the world is changing and fast. Every day one of our Council members, who’ve historically come from an E20 orientation – what we at Dachis Group refer to as “Workforce Collaboration” – is being asked to help out with the enterprise social strategy whether that means social media initiatives, connecting to suppliers, or partners. Some of our members have relocated entirely out of IT and into Marketing (who wouldda thunk?). And it’s not just IT and Marketing driving these initiatives, either. Social is touching every business unit in the organization.

I caution all our members to keep their eye on the bigger picture. The Council is expanding to embrace all facets of social business. Going forward, it will not be possible to separate where social media initiatives begin and e20 ends. And, every customer will tell you they rarely use any jargon when they’re presenting business cases to their executives. The language they use is rooted in the benefits of social collaboration, not the features. This is typically different for every company too, and becoming more and more strategic.

This next phase of the evolution of the social business market is about integration. Social Integration of people, process, and technology. Integration of Work, Society, and Technology. Integration of the past with the future. It’s all good, and it’s why I’m particularly thrilled to be a part of a company executing with precision on that vision.

Fact-gathering on 2.0 Adoption

The recent acquisition of Headshift by the Dachis Group was largely celebrated in the e2.0 community. As I commented for RWW, it’s a testament to a growing, maturing market. Enterprise interest in incorporating 2.0 tools and practices has never been higher. With this stage of evolution comes the good stuff, the fact-based data that helps guide our understanding of where we are, what it takes to get this right, who’s behind Enterprise 2.0 initiatives, what expectations are for business results, how much money will move through the market, etc.

I was really excited to see McKinsey’s 2009 “How Companies are Benefiting from Web 2.0” report that came out this week. Having come from a large consulting background tracking the IT services sector, it’s a raw indicator that the 2.0 phenomenon is about to break out of the echo chamber when the large consulting firms start paying attention. Some of our best contributors in the Council are large consulting firms who are rolling out their own initiatives, and I expect these firms will leverage this intelligence to build their own practices at some point. During the first evolution of the web, a whole host of IT services firms cropped up to take advantage of the promise of enterprise transformation via the web. Most of those firms fell flat in the dotcom meltdown bringing down investors, customers, employees, and the echo chamber. I did a huge research report that profiled who those companies were and what dynamics were driving that sector. What did succeed, royally, from that era is the undeniable impact electronic commerce brought to the consumer and enterprise sectors. Seeing “what could be” drove the vision of many of those early firms, and even if their dreams crumbled under the weight of their own ambition (and hubris), they were correct about identifying the potential of the Internet to radically change business.

So, we’ve moved from e-business to social business in a decade. While the hype factor is still a little deafening, I’m thrilled to announce we will be kicking off the first in-depth exploration into the 2.0 adoption phenomenon to bring some clarity to the maturing market sector. To conduct this research, I’m pleased to announce the Council has signed a strategic partnership with Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen of Information Architected to conduct a qualitative research study on the dynamics surrounding 2.0 adoption, as well as quantitative data on our members relative to industry, professional profiles (titles, organization), budgets, and other data points that present a portrait of who the early adopters really are. I’ve done some preliminary inquiries on our Council members and have already discovered a number of surprising findings that I would not have predicted. For instance, budgets for 2.0 are a lot higher than I would have guessed (if at all even established).

budget
Other interesting findings reveal that IT is not driving many of the decisions to implement a wide-scale enterprise 2.0 initiative. Lines of business comprise the lion’s share of our members.

One of the greatest goals for this research is to finally highlight salient case studies that explain the motivation behind the 2.0 effort as well as the expected business results.

For example, I conducted an interview this week with a very well known Wall Street investment bank. It was the audit and compliance global organization that drove an e20 solution to answer an age-old problem: high inefficiencies and underutilization. It’s an impressive global rollout that incorporates 5 financial center locations with approximately 200 of the firm’s subject matter experts in product, trading desk, regulatory, and banking. The initiative has yielded a “huge leap forward” according to the bank due to the transparency and visibility the firm has now as a result of breaking down the fiefdom walls that impeded the firm’s progress in years past. Greatest challenge? The people issues. It forces employees to communicate more. Additionally, the new processes expose the weak links in the firm and threaten job security/relevance. Greatest benefit? The initiative answers to the Board of Directors and provides predictable, reliable reporting that mitigates risk and ensures regulatory compliance. I asked my contact if the effort played any role in the financial recovery of this particular firm, he said not really because this was purely a cost-containment effort, yet he added, “The platform should, however, allow [the firm] to be more nimble in the face of increased regulatory scrutiny. Management can now see the effects of re-allocating resources to review areas of the firm with a higher perceived risk.”

All good stuff. There are so many exciting initiatives going on within the Council membership, I am thrilled to be able to bring them to light via our research. We will be presenting top-line findings of this research at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco (Nov. 2 – 5). The Council has a number of initiatives going on at the conference, and I’ll be blogging about them in the upcoming weeks.

If you are a customer in the throes of adoption and would like to participate in the research, please simply request to join The 2.0 Adoption Council. Membership is free and you will receive a tremendous return on your (non) investment.