Jennifer Okimoto, an Associate Partner with IBM spoke about the social business payoff and gave a lot of examples on where it’s happening.
The knowledge based economy was originally coined in 1996. It came with the realization that computers and knowledge change how the work is done. Jennifer highlighted that a knowledge worker is not just someone in a cubicle farm. It could be an oil field worker, a sales person, a chemist., people in health care, and yes, people in cubicle farms.
- email has become the default horizontal collaboration platform for most organizations.
- Documents that are harvested or stored lack context. (oops, that what most organizations want to do) Context is king now……not content.
- Explanations, insight, and decisions from meetings, phone conversations are locked in peoples notebooks, hard drives and heads.
- Locked up knowledge and expertise creates “key man risk” situations.
- People and teams recreate the wheel over and over again.
- The proliferations of collaboration tools and technologies create knowledge islands across the enterprise.
Cool quote: If social business is the answer……… Many people don’t understand the question.
A social business………
- is open and transparent. People work aloud.
- is collaborative
- requires individual will and skill
- bridges strategy and adoption with clear patterns and use cses
- builds a culture of desired behaviors and practices
- engages people across historical silos and ecosystems
- considers personal, group, and enterprise value. This is from a payoff perspective
Cool quote: Ask the question, what is the risk of not being social?
Is social the new production line? You can now harvest a lot of data from these social interaction. Jennifer believes that you can use this for performance management to take into account individual employee contributions.
Remember, it’s not a bottoms up organic solution. It’s not a top down edict or forced march solution. It’s more like a a marching band working together.
I absolutely agree with all your points. Social biz is a game changer and a new paradigm for businesses. The struggle to achieve should not be underestimated. We have all seen many companies fail to deliver the benefits of integrated business systems such as ERP and many of those failings were down to trying to deploy an integrated system in a NON integrated organisation. CRM offered some “hope” for customer ‘management’ or engagement but this was largely according to the Company’s rules. Both these were company centric applications. Social biz is dramatically different in that the rules are more ‘defined’ by the customer – pull not push. Truly Customer centric. To make it work will require rethinking of corporate culture and business process integration. Thus Social biz offers huge gains for those who get it right. But it is not simply PR, Advertising or Media or a new channel. It’s a whole new way of doing business.
Social biz is first-of-all a new way of leadership. It requires that leaders recognize the power of shared goals and understand that successful implementation depends on their capabilities to inspire people to align with shared goals, to give them sufficient autonomy and the possibilities to acquire the knowledge and expertise required to perform and to grow.