On Wednesday, we hosted a webinar on the CIO & CMO Convergence: Microsoft for Cloud, Social & Mobile Enterprise Social Networks. Guest speaker Rob Koplowitz from Forrester, and Perficient’s own Director of Web & Social Collaboration, Rich Wood, discussed what defines an enterprise social network and where the true value lies.
Rob kicked off the session with a presentation around driving social business value. Forrester is seeing a fair amount of investment in enterprise social, with a lot of organizations investing in it – and most people want to get there, if not there already. First he brought up the classic movie, Field of Dreams, and the famous quote, “If you build it, he will come.” While no doubt a great movie, and a great line, it doesn’t translate perfectly to social business and the enterprise.
So how do organizations get the people to come and embrace this new way of working, once they’ve built it? As with any tool, you look for hot spots of adoption – and Forrester found one such hot spot is sales. The sales team is often a driver of new technology (think back to car phones) because it allows them to connect more effectively and efficiently with customers and access various sources of information. In addition, sales and marketing are more likely to use external social networks, and evidently, also more apt to quickly embrace internal social networks such as Yammer and SharePoint. They are not only connecting more effectively with content, but also with prospects.
The role of the CIO and CMO coming together is an interesting topic. Within the market, Forrester and Perficient have seen that people actually follow value, and use the tools that provide immediate measurable value to the organization. The cloud is a different way of working, and CIOs and CMOs really need to be talking about it in order to reach customers more effectively while maintaining internal systems. The CIO and the CMO must work together to accelerate the path to better collaboration.
Rob finished by explaining that organizations need to find one limited, high value opportunity, and more success will follow from this initial success. Focus on driving change and adoption, and prove value and grow from there.
Rich went on to cover how SharePoint, the cloud and Yammer fit into all of this. He discussed how the evolution of Microsoft equates to more success with ESNs and the cloud, particularly around customer engagement, and using ESNs as an engagement tool. He spent time explaining the value of extranets, and their use cases. What about Yammer? Yammer external networks are a great way to build an extranet that’ll engage customers and prospects. Rich broke this down into adoptability, interactivity, governance, mobile accessibility, and cloud advantages.
The attendees asked great questions, and Rob and Rich wrapped up with enough time to answer quite a few of them. To listen to the webinar in its entirety, along with the Q&A portion, here is the replay.
Webinar Replay: Forrester & Perficient on CIO & CMO Convergence
by Taylor Rhyne on November 15th, 2013 | ~ minute read
