by Joe McKendrick
August 20, 2011 at 11:06 am · Filed under
2.0 Design Thinking, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SOA, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, User Revolution, Web 2.0
I have been covering and reporting and analyzing the business technology scene for more than 25 years now.
And every couple of years or so, a new technology “revolution” would spring up. Not the stale, overhyped prior revolution that had just passed — but a new, exciting revolution.This time, things would be different. This new revolution would change the way we thought about technology. This revolution would change the business. This revolution would bring the power of information technology to the masses. A revolution unlike any other revolution that ever came before it. The most incredible, unbelievable, paradigm-shifting revolution ever. Yada, yada. Promises, promises. Here are a few revolutions:
- In the late 1980s, it was client/server computing — sticking a PC in front of a larger computer.
- In the late 1990s. it was Web computing — sticking a browser in front of a network.
- In the late 1990s, it was dot-coms — sticking a browser in front of a store.
- In the early 2000s decade, it was Web services and XML — sticking standardized code in front of an application.
- In the late 2000s decade, it was cloud — sticking a cloud in front of everything.
- And lots of revolutions in between — usually sticking something in front of something else.
Note on the above list: some would call these techniques “putting lipstick on a pig.”
And when I would come home for dinner at night, or saw friends over the weekend, nobody would ask me what I was up to, and eyes would glaze over if I attempted to tell them. I wouldn’t even attempt to begin to explain to people what I had been writing about all day long. What’s so revolutionary about speeding up a purchase order process or building a rules engine that reduced exception reporting? What’s revolutionary about displaying 3270 “green-screen” code within a terminal emulation window? (Good stuff every business should pursue — but not something that will make you the life of the party.)
Then, one day a couple of years ago, I came home — and found my daughters (tween and teen) actively participating in the revolution. The social networking revolution. An information-technology revolution had finally hit home, and in a big way. Unlike the decades of vendor pronouncements about revolution, this one was real. The old order was being driven out — by employees and children of employees.
I knew this time, it was different. So, my daughters may someday ask me: “What did you do in the Social Networking Revolution, Daddy”*? I will tell them about the writings my colleagues and I did here at the FastForward site. And where the revolution took us.
Social media was more than a platform or a new mode of computing — it was a new way of connecting, of doing business, of leading nations, of working, of making friends and renewing friendships. But, for purposes of this site, first commissioned in December 2006, the theme was to explore to unfolding new world of Enterprise 2.0 in work and business settings. Consider where the social revolution has taken us in just a few short years:
Personal outsourcing: For the first time, employees all up and down the line have access to information they need to do their jobs better, advance companies, and advance their careers. John Schmidt so accurately described it as “personal outsourcing.” Unlike the traditional model for outsourcing — firms contracting out functions or processes to an outside firm — “individuals are starting to outsource their problem-solving and their own professional development,” he says. “They’re leveraging things like wikis, blogs, other collaboration events to collaborate in real-time with other individuals.” IT professionals go to Google, Wikipedia, and other online sources of support, Schmidt says. “They write out their question in their blog and look for their community to respond and help them. …they extended their network of peers to outside the four walls of their company. …they’re taking their problems and their professional challenges to the world.”
Economic revitalization and opportunity: Social networking and E2.0 provides a vast new array of tools for seeking out new markets, as well as managing through the tough times. Companies have means to better leverage the knowledge coursing through their corporate veins to turn around distressed lines of business. Employees have tools to ride through tough times, by staying well-connected with their professional networks and potential employers — even after they have been laid off. They no longer have to be powerless victims of recessions. (I called it the LIFT phenomenon — LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.) Employers have a resource to identify key talent to build their organizations.
Improving the quality — and joy — and therefore productivity — of work: The 9-to-5 rut had been withering on the vine for a number of years, and social networking is putting the final stakes in the industrialized, command-and-control model of management. Productivity is not something that occurs in a cubicle between 9 and 5, it’s something that comes in “bursts.” Social networks and E2.0 give everyone the flexibility and connectivity to respond to those bursts. In the process, the lines between work and personal life have not only just blurred — they’ve disappeared completely. Some Gloomy Guses say that’s not a good thing, and that employers will exploit it. I say it’s a real good thing. People should be proud of their work, and have the passion raging within them to want to pursue it, think about it, and embed it into their lives. Good riddance, 9 to 5.
Return on investment: A hotly debated topic. But the ROI is there. McKinsey & Company, for one, did countless studies the past few years that proved it. A couple of years back for example, they published the results of a survey of nearly 1,700 executives from around the world which paints a highly positive picture of the business returns being seen from E2.0 deployments. Close to seven out of ten respondents (69%) report that their companies “have gained measurable business benefits [italics mine], including more innovative products and services, more effective marketing, better access to knowledge, lower cost of doing business, and higher revenues.”
It’s been close to five years that we have been covering the revolution — a real revolution — at this site. And it’s only just begun.
(*By the way, the title of this post is a paraphrase of the 1966 movie “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” in which a bunch of soldiers in World War II hosted a street festival in an Italian town. One could say social networking is a global festival of sorts.)
by Joe McKendrick
July 31, 2011 at 12:45 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Media, Web 2.0
In many aspects o technology business innovation, maturity models have served to define stages of development, serving as benchmarks for companies to see how far along they have progressed. The model serves as a guideline for process improvement. For example, the Capability Maturity Model Integration Framework (CMMI), first published at Carnegie-Mellon University, has served as a set of guidelines for software development.
Now. IDC has proposed a similar approach for social enterprise development, called the Social Business Maturity Model, which is intended to help companies that are growing in their adoption of social business and want to optimize their use of social tools.
IDC’s Social Business Maturity Model consists of 5 stages:
- Experimentation
- Compartmentalization
- Integration
- Operationalization
- Optimization
Do these identified stages make sense for identifying where organizations stand on the social enterprise spectrum? The final stage, optimization, suggests that it isn’t until this point that significant benefits are being delivered to the business.
by Joe McKendrick
July 11, 2011 at 11:51 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Social Media
We’ve been talking at this blogsite about the potential of Social customer relationship management (CRM), in which typical CRM – an internally generated and maintained collection of knowledge about customers and their interactions with a company – is enhanced with information streaming in from the virtual communities that now are part of many customers’ experiences.
As part of my work with Insurance Networking News, I had the opportunity to talk with insurance executives and analysts about the viability of Social CRM within this industry, which relies intensely on trust and the goodwill of customers. Frankly, it was difficult to identify insurance companies that had Social CRM programs that they were willing to talk about at this early stage.
I spoke with Craig Beattie, analyst with Celent, who observes that much of the push toward Social CRM is currently coming from the vendor side: “Insurers aren’t really thinking about this yet. The kinds of offerings you get from vendors tend to focus on views of the customer, with all their emails, phone calls and policies, and alongside that, Facebook entries or tweets that might be relevant – a blending with public data, to get some idea of the kind of conversations people might be having. We haven’t seen insurers employ it yet for underwriting purposes, pricing purposes, or getting along better with clients.”
Current survey data shows Social CRM to still be in its infancy – though its likely uptake may be fast and furious over the next few years. A recent survey of 3,342 marketing directors by MarketingSherpa found that six percent of companies already had functioning Social CRM efforts underway, but a whopping 56 percent were planning such initiatives in the near future. Gartner, in the meantime, predicts 30 percent of companies will extend their social networking efforts to Social CRM processes within the next two years.
One company that is leading the way on this front is Farmers Insurance, which began its Social CRM effort in earnest last fall. I spoke with Marc Zeitlin, vice president of eBusiness at Farmers Insurance, about the effort, which involves the sharing of information, via Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn among its network of 15,000 agents, enables the company to better compete against direct-to-consumer insurers. And the effort is delivering along many fronts, according to Zeitlin: “We’re driving growth and new business, as well as customer retention. We also gain product knowledge and service. We’re able to determine whether there’s a need in the market that we’re not meeting.”
Ultimately, Social CRM will lose its cachet, simply becoming a part of normal CRM. But until then, the industry has just begun to explore the possibilities this new dimension of data provides.
by Bill Ives
May 2, 2011 at 3:55 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, enterprise content management
Here is an interesting report I received from Forrester, Plan your ECM Strategy For Business, Persuasive, Transactional, And Foundational Needs by Stephen Powers and Alan Weintraub with Matthew Brown and Anjali Yakkundi. They note that enterprises are now struggling under increasing volumes of varying types of content (aka multi-channel information overload).
In the past firms have taken a product-specific approach to their enterprise content management (ECM) strategies: “document management for office docs, web content management for online content, records management for corporate records, and so on.” Now the reports argues when “developing a content strategy, they should consider persuasive, transactional, and foundational content functionality to support specific business use cases.” They suggest taking a content centric approach rather than a tool centric approach to handle this complexity. This makes sense to me.
They discuss three types of content: transactional, business, and persuasive. Transactional content often originates outside the enterprise from customers and partners. It often relies on complex workflows or business process management to drive processes. Formats include scanned e-forms, faxes, print streams from back-office applications, and electronic records.
Business content starts within the enterprise and is part of workers daily tasks. Business content includes office documents, presentations, spreadsheets, e-forms, web content, and mobile content. Persuasive content may originate from many sources. There are many use cases including: “multichannel marketing, lead generation, eCommerce, customer self-service, in-store kiosks, and partner extranets.” Here tools such as web content management come into play.
The authors provide a useful framework that shows how foundational issues go across these three content types. They the look at how the different tool types fit into this matrix. They conclude that you need to remain flexible as you handle the increasing complexity of content types today. I found it a useful way to think beyond traditional approaches to content management that were operating when I helped implement these systems a few years back.
by Joe McKendrick
March 25, 2011 at 10:40 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Social Media, Social Networking, Web 2.0
In a previous post, we pondered the lack of social CRM in evidence, asking whether all CRM should be social anyway. In a new post, Umberto Milletti talks about the issues getting in the way of social CRM.
Milletti says marketing and customer service have actually been effectively engaging in social media, but sales has been missing the boat. Kind of ironic, since sales is the most social activity there is in the business.
- Salespeople are not techno-geeks: They see technology as a tool, nothing more, nothing less.
- Salespeople need to understand what’s in it for them: They know time is money, and don’t want to invest valuable time to learn technologies they don’t fully see a return on.
- Social media tools have not been integrated into the sales workflow.
- Salespeople rely on their employer for training on new sales processes and tools to support them.
