Brands that thrive and profit from employee and customer empowerment generate significantly greater awareness and revenues, while also decreasing costs of marketing, selling and customer service. However, employees must engage in public, real-time conversations. And most people are not professional communicators.
As I spend a great deal of time every year looking at the latest technological advances for the enterprise, I’ve noticed a trend in recent years that’s long been true but is clearly mar…
The reality today is that despite seemingly endless advances and a steady river of emerging technologies, many of the key insights, strategies, and lessons in the digital age have still yet to be d…
A bird’s-eye view of social business today then, from an architectural perspective, can give us a detailed sense of what we’re dealing with. Hard questions can be answered: What platforms and systems are involved in the transformation to social business? How are they connected? Are the systems of record connected to the systems of engagement? In what way? Where is social data stored, how is it structured, and how can best can we analyze and derive insight from it? And so on. These sorts of questions can be addressed by creating an architectural view for your organization that makes sense of the social technology onslaught, for there’s really no better word for what’s happening today. To help organizations get started, I’ve provided above a notional and non-industry specific view of the high-level architecture of a social business. This view contains most of the key elements for the typical organization and how they are connected. It’s not a process view; architecture is primarily concerned about structural concepts and how they are related. For a dynamic perspective over time, I’ve explored the virtuous social business cycle before, though individual social business processes will all have their own unique and socially co-created workflow. Instead, this is about the nouns, something I’ve explored at an even higher level with a enumeration of what is contained in the social business stack, a useful way of cross-checking the total palette that a social business effort can pull from. The architectural view presented here is by definition incomplete and only goes down to a certain level of detail, yet I believe it’s one of the most updated views of social business architecture available. Some of the elements that have been incorporated, such as unified communication, will be slightly controversial, yet if they are included here, the element is important and frequently encountered. In fact, the real point is that virtually all aspects of the enterprise will eventually have to reconcile with social in some way. Sometimes this will be almost automatic and sometimes it will be a major technical, political, or cultural battle. Technology adherence has aspects of religion to it in most organizations. So while the picture presented here looks attractive and compelling, it’s also one that will be far more complex and messier in reality. This said, creating the picture of the architecture of your social business will help you be more proactive, innovative, and focused, all while also helping you communicate the changes that need to happen in your organization. From The Architecture of a Social Business | Dachis Group Collaboratory See Also The Operations of a Social Business | Collaboratory Moving Beyond Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement | Collaboratory Connecting Employees to Social Media: New Possibilities | Collaboratory Choose Your Social Business Strategy Before Your Tools | InformationWeek The convergence of mobile and social: The next IT battleground | ZDNet How to up IT's game with social apps | ZDNet The Intersection of Digital Strategy, Social Business, and Smart Mobility | Flickr The Social Business Index | Dachis Group Social Business By Design | Amazon Hardcover (John Wiley & Sons, 2012)
That didn't take long to get big: The #IoT industry in 2016. Full list of companies: https://t.co/8kDX6Y1Q4e #cio
New Post: The bar for digital experience is rising in exponential times https://t.co/PFdhaRDbGN #dx #cx #crm #socbiz
Dion Hinchcliffe: In my analysis, all of the listed technologies should be on the short list of organizations in the process of digital transformation, which is to say enterprises that are proactively on a concerted effort to become more technology-centric … Continue reading →
To be sure, there are many different flavors of social business intelligence just as there are many reasons why organizations will want to create business processes around the feedback loop that forms. Currently, many of the processes involved are manual and ad hoc as the industry has felt its way forward and learned how to engage more meaningfully with social media. A few companies on the leading edge have increasingly formal social business intelligence processes based on sets of capabilities they’ve acquired or built. Other firms have hardly any technology at all, other than perhaps some reports and spreadsheets. They are all seeking the same thing however: To pinpoint the opportunities and identify the events that matter most to them so they can engage. The actual response to social business intelligence insights will vary entirely based on what is learned. It can be strategic and affect how the companies evolves its products and services or the way it engages in entirely new and innovative ways with customers. Or just as likely, it’s on-the-ground insight that drives individual interaction or collaboration with prospects, customers, business partners, and others whose current and past activities social media have been identified as important. From: Social Business Intelligence: Positioning a Strategic Lens on Opportunity See Also: How To Accelerate Social Business Using Employee Advocates | Collaboratory Harnessing Social Business Intelligence: Nine Strategic Uses | ebizQ Adopting social media in 'difficult' businesses | ZDNet How Social Media and Big Data Will Unleash What We Know | ZDNet The Social Business Index | Dachis Group Social Business By Design | Amazon Hardcover (John Wiley & Sons, 2012)
Just updated my #workingoutloud visual w/ feedback from @TheCR's latest & others. Suggest improvements! #wol #socbiz
I’ve spent a lot of time in the last few years identifying the best approaches for that urgent enterprise topic of our time, digital transformation. When I first started, I often looked to to…
For the best part of a century, architectural discussion has been dominated by modernism and other related forms of f...
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It is a remarkable time in this particular moment in human history, where most organizations have become almost entirely distributed, yet for the first time still remain largely functional. We can …
Our focus much of the time in business these days is about strategies to deal effectively with the latest disruptive tech — that it’s up to us to have an abundantly clear vision of the big picture of what we’re actually aiming for as a whole. This is particularly true now since the choices we make today on how we build and evolve our businesses will either lead us to 1) break out of the box and thrive or 2) just make incremental improvements that are unlikely to propel us towards a sustainable and successful future. Key to this discussion is this question: Are we building businesses? Or are we building platforms? Of course the answer to both is yes, but most of us still possess a very 20th century notion of what a business is. We think of business in very solitary, disconnected terms, where partners can’t rapidly connect with us and integrate their supply chains, where we can’t even readily reuse and build upon what we have ourselves, and most of our data and systems are closed off from us and each other. Unfortunately, we now live in a new time and this is no longer an option. In the big data era, those days are definitively over. For a good backstory, I urge you to read Steve Yegge’s epic and widely discussed rant recently about how Google doesn’t get platforms (and how Amazon does). I think it clearly conveys the new chess board that next-generation enterprises must be playing on. From: Are We Building Businesses? Or Are We Building Platforms? Yes. | On Web Strategy See Also: 2012 Is Shaping Up As the Year of Open APIs | ebizQ Consumerization in 2012: Cloud and mobile blurs into other people's IT | ZDNet This Year’s Ten Digital Strategies for the Next-Generation Enterprise | On Web Strategy Transforming Software Architecture for the 21st Century | Slideshare Connecting Digital Strategy with Social Business and Next-Gen Mobility | Collaboratory
Looking back at it from the vantage point of the current coronavirus pandemic, it’s clear now that most organizations missed a golden opportunity about five to seven years ago. This was the h…
It goes hand in hand with another key principle that sets digital strategy well apart from many other traditional ways of achieving organizational objectives. One of the counterintuitive lessons of…
These days it’s still pretty common to talk about social business, mobility, analytics (especially when it’s called big data), cloud, and the Internet of Things — SMACT is the cur…
As I spend a great deal of time every year looking at the latest technological advances for the enterprise, I’ve noticed a trend in recent years that’s long been true but is clearly mar…
“The blogosphere flew into its usual uproar a few days ago when the inventor of the World Wide Web himself, the venerated Tim Berners-Lee, was recently recorded in a podcast calling Web 2.0 n…
This is now the question that is top of mind in a large number of enterprises today, as speeding up adaptation to rapidly evolving digital markets is now not just a requirement to grow today, but i…
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In reality, the technology of social business isn’t much of an obstacle, at least once you get beyond the internecine platform battles that are common in many large organizations. No, the problem is a human one, which is ironic because social is all about people. Yet businesses are also a kind of organism in their own way. And like a living organism, they have a defense mechanism in place that acts like an immune system to anything that would disrupt the status quo. This corporate immune system, as you might have guessed, is known as company culture. It’s a shared set of norms, practices, customs, expectations, and habits that have formed around and perpetuate how a company works and operates. While company culture is great at making the business function as expected and helps foster continuity and order, it’s also astonishingly good at killing off attempted changes to the system; undesirable and desirable both. It’s one reason why the entire industry of change management has emerged, so that companies can keep up with the our era’s ever increasing rate of change, of which technology itself is the most disruptive and high-velocity example. Adapting Company Culture For Social Business My industry colleague Dave Gray notes that we are now aware of much better ways of structuring and managing our businesses in a post-industrial era. We can move from hierarchical to networked models (what he calls podular) that are far more dynamic, efficient, and productive ways of working. Another of my industry colleagues, the always insightful Rawn Shah, has been suggesting that for companies to modernize, they will have to reinvent the company model, throw away the current (and broken) advertising model, and move away from the outdated industrial company model. From Getting to Effective Social Business Results: Applying Culture Change | Collaboratory See Also Looking to the Frontiers of Social Business | Dachis Group Collaboratory Social Business = Social Bonding | MIT Sloan Management Review The Operations of a Social Business | Collaboratory Moving Beyond Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement | Collaboratory Six Strategies to Optimize Your Social Business Efforts | Collaboratory Choose Your Social Business Strategy Before Your Tools | InformationWeek How Smart Organizations Reorganize For Social | InformationWeek Enterprises grapple with social engagement | ZDNet The Intersection of Digital Strategy, Social Business, and Smart Mobility | Flickr The Social Business Index | Dachis Group Social Business By Design | Amazon Hardcover (John Wiley & Sons, 2012)
It’s a little hard to believe that it’s been over ten years now since the first early enterprise social networks (ESN) emerged on the market to make their initial forays into our organi…
As we’ve watched digital networks reshape just about every aspect of business these days, I’ve found that we’ve struggled to come up with the right words and ways to describe a ve…
The history of human communication. Now have to add #VR, #IoT, mind/machine, #bluetooth, #socbiz #collaboration, etc.
Jusqu’à présent la définition qui faisait référence pour décrire de façon rapide et mnémotechnique le concept d’Entreprise 2.0 était celle d’Andrew McAffee avec son fameux acronym…
Despite all-time high levels of adoption in many organizations, the early results have at times been decidedly mixed. However, this has long been the case with emerging tech, whether the next big "revolution" was ERP, CRM, cloud, etc.
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