Social Business – Page 3

Focusing on Adoption (exclusively) is a Dead-End

For an early adopter market, adoption in this space always seems to get a bad rap. Why is that? Because adoption is not the end-game. It’s the beginning. In the Council, the members are focused on changing hearts and minds and promoting the use of social tools in order to drive acceptance for a new way of working. In Deloitte’s excellent report issued today, Social Software for Business Performance, we couldn’t agree more with the findings. In fact, the rap on “adoption” uses our research to make the point. There is no benefit in adoption for adoption’s sake.

It’s important to understand that “technology” adoption is the beginning of the journey. It’s the first wagon wheel turn on a Westward Ho! trek toward complete embrace of a workforce that is socially calibrated and connected. If you want to experience the benefits of working socially, workforces need to be comfortable and see the benefit of the radical internal organizational change it requires. It sometimes amuses me that the folks who are critical of the adoption effort required are not particularly proficient in working socially in the first place, and cling to the world they know which is process-oriented and rooted in the industrialization (machining) of the enterprise.

I’ve often said that the adoption story is much less about the technology than it is about the organizational dynamics required to rewire the culture toward a more open, more egalitarian society if you will. My source on this does not hail from any new technology fad. In fact, it’s a paper originally published in 1957. It is a supplement to a paper called, “How Farm People Accept New Ideas.” It draws from a sociology, not technology foundation.

Introducing these concepts and making them stick inside a large organization is, indeed, a lot like cat-herding. But, these are not cats or kittens. Change is painful and difficult inside large organizations. One of the best quotes we heard from last year’s BlackBelt Workshop at the Boston Enterprise 2.0 conference was from one of our members who said, “These are not cats we’re herding; they’re Tigers, and they bite!”

Business process oriented vendors are getting savvy to social. Council members just had a great Q&A yesterday with SFDC’s Chatter lead, Chuck Ganapathi, yesterday, and we’re planning a demo and conversation with Tibbr in the near future. My prediction is we will see new business processes that replace or obsolete old ones more and more as, well, adoption proliferates throughout the enterprise.

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.

Social Business on the Ground

When we set out to investigate case studies, we were looking for “slam dunk” examples where 2.0 initiatives were inextricably tied to business results. In effect, we wanted to begin to dispel the criticisms that e20 was just the next silly, narcissistic exploit to enter the enterprise on the heels of yet another consumer fad: web 2.0.

Well? We didn’t find those “slam dunk” examples. But, neither did we find any “failures.” What we did find was a massive movement shaking the bedrock of enterprise as we know it. The enterprise plates are still firmly in place, but our investigation revealed tremors– sudden energy being released among the employee population that is poised to crack the foundation of business as we’ve known it.

Time and time again we heard, “This is the most important initiative I’ve ever worked on in my professional life.” There’s something chilling, something inspiring about the people and companies who are leading the charge toward reinventing themselves to become socially savvy. As you read through these profiles and cases, you’ll come to appreciate while all of these companies are still early in the process, they all are confident they will succeed in their long term goals. Some are realizing early successes already. The prevailing operational mission at present, however, is to succeed at catalyzing the “ideological reformation” at the root level of the organization that needs to take place before real business value can be extracted, measured, and fine-tuned. It’s a bit of a Catch-22, and almost as maddening and dangerous as originally described in the novel that coined the phrase.

We will continue to track the progress of these early adopters. Regardless where you are in the spectrum, we all succeed when every case succeeds. We’d like to thank IBM and MIT’s Center for Digital Business for lending support and sponsorship to this series of cases and profiles. Special thanks to all @20adoption members who participated in the series.

Current profiles and cases are posted on The 2.0 Adoption Council web site. Feel free to download at will. We have a few more coming, as well.

Mama Weer All Crazee-Social Now!

Indeed, a Quiet Riot is percolating in the heretofore boring ERP sector. I spotted Josh Greenbaum‘s post on “Enterprise Relationship Planning” this afternoon. In the Council, we have dredged up a 90s label– The Extended Enterprise— to categorize discussions about how our members are architecting their socio-collaborative initiatives to span partners in their supplier, distributor, and delivery chains. Included here is the massive momentum around Social CRM that is touching the customer in personal ways as well and reinventing what it means to be proactive and responsive to existing and potential buyers. One of our largest members recently made a platform selection choice based nearly exclusively on the chosen vendor’s ability to bridge to external collaborators while retaining the ability to keep the conversation secure behind the firewall. All of our members are somewhere in the adoption phase of evaluating these options. The confluence of all SaaS and enterprise legacy systems and social is coming… It’s not if, it’s when.

The unique thread that links the revitalization of all these mechanical, cumbersome, process-driven software “systems” is people. People with intelligence, with tacit knowledge, with “exceptions” expertise. We had a fantastic Council guru Q&A last week with Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield. Socialtext cites a whopping statistic that turns traditional ERP on its head, “An estimated 60 to 80% of an organization’s work is ‘exception’ oriented.” Squeezing the life (variability) out of a process is passe and will be replaced or supplementing with social data to improve its effectiveness, not detract from it. This is a revolutionary idea.

This sentiment is expressed by one of our members, Todd Weidman, who was discussing the rigidity of the Six Sigma process:

“In my experience in financial services, it’s used as a framework to eliminate as much process variation as possible. The processes become repeatable, follow a strict pattern, and ideally you reduce the cost of any transaction (and make it predictable, standard, and outsourcable). That’s fine if your building something to spec (manufacturing), but in any service-based industry, client needs demand many different types of solutions – think financial planning – there may be a number of different inputs for a customized solution. That, of course, requires collaboration between participants.”

Indeed, the future is about relationships. And relationships are about people, not stuff.

A Year’s Summary of Personal Reflection IV

Every year for the past four years, after the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, I have written an introspective piece about where we are on our journey bringing 2.0 to the large enterprise. These pieces tend to be idealistic, and I ask readers to bear with me. You can read their predecessors at this link.

I’ve decided to write a final piece in this series, as we are now well on the road to market acceptance.

In short, the Enterprise 2.0 journey reminds me of learning how to drive a stick shift my first car: a ’66 Ford Mustang convertible. Like every new driver, I was extremely excited about the prospects of getting behind the wheel and experiencing the life-changing freedom that comes with mobility. Each year the Enterprise 2.0 market has grown, it’s been like a new gear on my 3-on-the-floor stick shift.

1. Years 2006-07/Gear 1. We focused on just getting the clutch engaged and propelling the the damned thing forward. Those early years were the most difficult of all. I used every trick in the book to get people interested in the space, including invoking the name of Bruce Springsteen.

“I believe there is something BIG going on here– not because I’m an investor, not because I’m a CEO of a web 2.0 company, not because I’m a journalist of a SF-based publication, heck– I’m not even on the West Coast. I feel a little like Mr. Springsteen in those early days, playin’ his heart out in those NJ dives hoping someone would dance, or better– listen to the lyrics.”

A handful of us hardcore Enterprise 2.0 bloggers kept pounding away and trying to get some attention for what we all saw as something, “New under the Sun” to quote Andrew McAfee.

2. Year 2008/Gear 2. We got the thing to move by 2008 albeit in slow gear. Momentum began to pick up toward the end of 2008 with