Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Social Collaboration and the Social Business

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Source: forbes.com 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social media has become a valuable means for many organizations to better engage and retain customers, to attract prospects, make sales, and help customers solve problems. But it still seems to be much harder for organizations to understand social 'on the inside' and why it matters. Companies must come to understand that social 'on the outside' won't be substantially achieved – let alone sustained - if social on the inside isn't working.

The internal social business interconnects with enterprise collaboration platforms and intranets, that are now taking a more social media kind of approach to better engage and support employees. Additionally, many diverse kinds of software solutions used by enterprises incorporate social capabilities as methods to improve solution usage and value, as well as do a better job of including that all important human factor. In enterprise activities such as knowledge management, BI and analytics, business process management, and adaptive case management, there is a significant role to be played by social / collaborative capabilities to improve how these activities provide relevance and effective results.

Social business initiatives, internal and external, pertain to all company teams that touch customers, prospects, partners and suppliers – basically the vast majority of the company. The commitment, usage and value of social, whether internal or external, must be authentic -- employees, partners, and customers will quickly figure out if a company is trying to fake it. When an organization chooses to become a 'social business', the divide between social-inside and social-outside should blur as more and more silos within the organization hopefully disappear, and as bi-directional connections to customers and prospects, partners and suppliers become more natural and more immediate.

The decision to become a social business has to come from upper management and boards of directors – it has to be a key strategy of the organization – or it won't happen in any significant or sustained fashion. Understanding and nurturing the value of all the people in the enterprise impacts how the company operates internally, how it does business externally, and how the company will survive as a healthy, successful business. For those organizations that become social businesses come these rewards: drawing the best out of employees; healthy impact on continuous innovation and relevant business models; collaborating with customers and partners on future direction and products; and listening to all of the people of the enterprise ecosystem to draw on their experiences and expertise for building and sustaining competitive edge. 

 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I've been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

Social Re-Connects Enterprise Search

                                                            Originally published in CMSWire October 23, 2012

 

Enterprise Search continues to go through transformations to improve its usefulness for all employees, since information is common currency for practically everyone in every organization. To be able to agilely collect and reconcile information across disparate repositories and formats, unified search platforms will have to combine multiple search capabilities from enterprise and internet search technologies, as well as BI search and other kinds of analytics. And for it to work well, people need to be able to make use of these layers of disparate search technologies through a single point of access.

It is critical that all employees have the ability to find and analyze information and data across the enterprise. Search is not a separate technology or program – it must integrate with business processes and corporate initiatives as vital infrastructure. Search for all employees aligns with communication, connectedness and collaboration – bringing us into Social constructs.

 

Social Search Tuning for Enterprise Search

Many attributes of Social Search can help Enterprise Search work better – but Social Search alone isn't enough to replace Enterprise Search. Too many capabilities are needed to deliver what employees need from comprehensive search inside the firewall. But Social can serve to fine-tune or filter search by leveraging additional information about the Searcher, as a valuable enhancement.

Social also aligns well with one of the key success factors for Enterprise Search: Context. Many have advocated role-based context as a particularly powerful filter for effective search results. Contextual factors are usually the over-arching driver for a particular search by a particular person. As such, search needs to engender the right user experience to return the best results.

Enterprise search can tap into employee profiles, internal networks, other work-related interactions, and systems usage to personalize search and extend context in order to return the most relevant results. Beyond the usual 'systems of record', social networks and activities provide a great deal of contextual information, especially in terms of topics. The composite of all of these attributes can indicate each person's professional purview and work focus, which can better connect that person to the right information.

Social helps Enterprise Search through:

• Social Networks – people who know stuff, connections to other people who know stuff
• Social Artifacts – opinions about information, expressed through ratings / rankings, reviews / comments, tagging

 

Social Learning

Concepts from Harold Jarche for Network Learning provide lessons for the social aspects of enterprise search, both through inter-dependent connections and collaboration, and through independent pathways via technology (tools) and the information itself:

One way to look at network learning is as a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing.

• Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard—it not only allows us to "pull" information, but also have it "pushed" to us by trusted sources.
• Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.
• Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks and collaborating with our colleagues.

 

Also of importance is the serendipitous or accidental acquisition of information or knowledge, very much an affect of social interactions.

 

Social Networks: Information Acquisition

Software vendor IBM Vivismo (the Velocity Information Optimization Platform) provides an interesting story from 2009 describing how the U.S. Air Force has used social capabilities to improve enterprise search. The USAF information system is called Air Force Knowledge Now (AFKN) and has been around for several years in various iterations.

Organized into thousands of "Communities of Practice", Airmen share their expertise in postings that range from F-16 tactics to procurement regulations.  AFKN was launched in 2002 and now rivals the largest corporate intranets.  Open to anyone with a .mil email address, AFKN has nearly 300,000 registered users who view 10 million pages per month.  AFKN supports about 170,000 searches a month, but Adkins expects that to double with implementation of the new features (based on Vivisimo's platform).

"We want the tags and ratings to make the system smarter as a result of hundreds of thousands of people interacting," says Adkins. "The secret to success is it has to be easy for folks to use, or they won't use it."

AFKN aims to provide quick, easy access to millions of pages of content.  Social search adds two elements that improve relevancy of results.  First, keyword tags, ratings and comments add new navigation aids to AFKN users, speeding access to results they need. Second, social search tools make it easy for users to contribute their insights and experience to AFKN.  When these insights become part of the search index, search relevancy is improved for the next user.

 

Social Networks: Relationships as Search Filters

Sociology in the workplace provides insight into the value of social networks for improving enterprise search. In environments where collaboration is encouraged and communication across the enterprise is effective, the natural way to search is to ask colleagues for ideas on how to find what's needed, to share information, to brainstorm on how to refine search results, and to figure what's missing (leading to more searches). Obviously search relative to social networks is collaborative.

The social network as a construct doesn't engender successful search activities. It's how individuals connect to and work with people in the network for finding information that make social networks useful for search. Gartner's Larry Cannell examines "the synergy between search and enterprise social network sites":

As enterprise social network sites integrate with more business applications, the similarities between enterprise social network sites and search will become evident from two perspectives. First, from the point of view of how workers will expect to interact with business application information via a social network site. Second, there are significant similarities between how business application information is aggregated into a social network site with how the same is done with search-based applications.

In addition, these integrations (business applications and social networks) offer longer-term opportunities to build the enterprise social network into a powerful knowledgebase that consolidates information across business applications; much like the role enterprise search can play today.

 

There are also obstacles to finding the right information through social networks:

As multiple business applications become integrated with a social network site, a significant challenge will be the normalization of business entities across applications. For example, aligning a customer record in a CRM system with the same customer record in a warranty claims system. Without this alignment, cross-business application relationships cannot be captured within the site's social graph and workers participating in the network will see duplicate customer profiles (one from the CRM system, the other from the warranty claims system).

 

Social networks and collaborative processes are growing in many enterprises, as effective conduits for helping employees work better and more efficiently. It's now falling to the enterprise search platform to orchestrate alignment of the knowledge held by social networks with current information repositories. Part of that integration is to incorporate search capabilities already provided by social applications into the enterprise search platform. Since social venues enable real-time collaboration, enterprise search may need to change from displaying results to becoming a sort of a command center that allows actions to take place directly from search results, such as adding a comment to a blog post.

 

Activity Streams: Topics as Filters

Activity streams are another social venue that has been gaining increased enterprise adoption. Streams can be personalized for individual need, subscribing to an array of topics that tie to work activities. These streams are more about real-time information as it is created and shared, but are rapidly becoming large information archives as real-time continuously becomes 'yesterday'. And a new challenge, and opportunity, emerges for enterprise search bolstered by analytics, since most of the information resides in multi-structured content.

While it is not meant to be an enterprise search tool, Tibco's tibbr offers activity stream collaboration driven by a topic-oriented approach that is designed to find the people who need particular information items. The focus on topics is meant to cull out irrelevant information – employees subscribe to the topics that matter to them. Topics can be information, colleagues, software systems, and business processes. The business process is of particular importance, since the tibbr approach, coupled with Tibco technology, ties information acquisition to the work being done by employees.

In activity streams, topics are context and the streams capture continuous collaborative 'conversations'. In the Forrester Wave for Activities Streams, Rob Koplowitz comments:

Social activities streams are a bridge to this enterprise social vision. They connect workers to each other and to information. On its own, the information workplace lacks a mechanism that pulls together events, along with their context, background, and required actors, in a manner that is attractive and easily consumable for knowledge workers.

 

The Evolving Workplace

There is quite a bit of research on the significant value of making the right information available to the right person at the right time – and quite a bit of research shows clearly that Enterprise Search has a direct impact on the success of organizations. So enterprise search platforms must include social capabilities to tap into powerful ways to find the information that employees need more quickly and accurately. This calls for integration into a single platform that continuously evolves as the workplace changes.

 

 

Related Links

Enterprise Search: Un-Cool and Mission Critical

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

 

Enterprise Search: Un-Cool and Mission Critical

  

Here we go again: another significant enterprise problem that isn't being solved, a problem that has been around for most of the digital era. Is it because the problem isn't cool enough to capture the attention of upper management? -- so it's seen as 'somebody' else's problem, instead of recognizing that real costs, productivity and value are being squandered because this problem isn't being solved

There are good technologies that could help with the problem now. But strategies are missing regarding how these technologies should be used. Newer technologies are coming along that will make the job easier, but there are no strategies for adopting them either.

 The problem? Enterprise Search and Findability

Obviously an enormous amount of digital items are created every day – but inexplicably there is an equally enormous vacuum for how to find the right stuff. There is a debilitating disconnect between the proliferation of electronic information and the constant need to quickly and accurately find all of the information and expertise that is essential for work every day. From top to bottom, enterprises have failed to take seriously the high cost of being grossly inadequate at finding information, data, documents, experts. Instead they have settled for low performance, low-return techniques to… sort of handle Search.

  

Surprise! Lack of Strategies

There is quite a bit of research on the significant value of making the right information available to the right person at the right time – and quite a bit of research shows clearly that enterprise search and findability have direct impact on the success of organizations:

The growth of information and data makes findability increasingly more critical in order to get the right information to the right person at the right time.

Gartner states that "by 2015 organizations integrating high-value, diverse, new information types and sources into a coherent information management infrastructure will outperform their industry peers financially by more than 20%".¹

(But) solving the problem of finding the right information is not a priority according to this survey (The Enterprise Search and Findability Report 2012):

Most organisations do not have a strategy for search, neither a budget, nor any resources.

 ¹ A Framework for Creating Value From Information Assets: The Key to Information Management Success", Gartner Symposium Nov 2011, Ted Friedman and Regina Casonato

 

But enterprise search continues to elude C-level managers as a strategic imperative for building a "culture of success" within the enterprise. The multitude of studies that have been done to show the high cost of manual processes for locating the right information seems to have made no impact on upper management when it comes to creating a strategic approach and implementing right-fit search technologies and practices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: IDC report – Information Access in Tomorrow's Enterprise - 2009

 

Undoubtedly upper management at most companies view enterprise search as an IT project, as a nice-to-have, as something so unglamorous that it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the competitive DNA of the company, let alone innovation and responsive change. Upper management is failing to lead the enterprise into the 21^st century by building strategies, engendering culture and selecting technologies to energize how information can be continuously found by everyone in the enterprise.

Here's the flaw that plague most organizations when introducing enterprise search: a search technology is established within a silo – a business unit, group or function – without a strategic plan in place, without a view to fanning out the particular search technology for the entire enterprise. Meanwhile, other business units may bring in silo'd search functions. A loosely stitched patchwork emerges. No focus, no big picture, no notion of a search platform that governs one or more approaches to search, as needed by the enterprise. Instead search is implemented as too tactical, too dependent on IT as the driving force.

For search to be strategic, the push must come from upper management with purposeful collaboration with end users (who understand the business needs). Search must be tied to real outcomes and impact on the business, to help the enterprise leverage insight to best advantage.

 

Hierarchy of strategies

Too often organizations don't understand that centralized functions that impact most of the enterprise can only succeed based on a hierarchy of strategies. There has to be than an over-arching C-Level strategy, not just a silo'd "strategy" that only benefits a small group. Strategies for Search have to include more than "information and knowledge management pros". Collaboration with all users must occur – strategy cannot be something dictated without understanding how people in the enterprise work (this parallels the failures when IT only decides on the selection of software systems – of course, with the approval of upper management).

A hierarchy of strategies means that lower level strategy has to meet the needs at the business unit or group level -- but also align with desired business outcomes. Lower levels map back into the over-arching corporate strategy that is tied to high level goals and objectives. The result is an approach to search and findability that makes sense, can be measured and is an essential platform that is greater than the sum of the parts.

As with many other strategic initiatives, those enterprises that purposefully dedicate time, money and people to supporting enterprise search find the best results and real impact on the business:

Thus addressing those deficiencies in how an organisation manages search can deliver great returns for a relatively small investment, preferably in personnel. The survey reveals that:

Amongst the organisations that are very satisfied with their search, they have a (larger) budget, more resources and systematically work with analysing search.  

Search is not a separate technology or program – it must integrate with business processes and corporate initiatives as vital infrastructure. Search for all employees aligns with communication, connectedness and collaboration

 

Quantitative and Qualitative Value Metrics

For Search technology and processes, qualitative value is as equally important as looking for quantifiable returns. Each enterprise will need to select the attributes to be measured, hard and soft, and how they will be measured. For each enterprise, the "right" metrics are the ones that measure the actions and outcomes that relate to key business context and goals. Once a matrix of metrics has been selected, it's likely that each organization will need to constantly assess that set of metrics for validity and effectiveness.  

A leading Canadian IT consulting firm, NLC, recently tackled the (metrics) question head on in their 'Building the Business Case for Enterprise Search' whitepaper last week. While maintaining that a formal analysis 'misses' the real value of Enterprise Search, the paper does go on to provide a formal approach based on the IDC report, The Hidden Costs of Information Work (May 2009).  

The proposed formula boils down to measuring:

Search Cost Today = # of knowledge workers X avg. salary (incl. benefits) X % of time spent searching

Potential Annual Benefit = Search Cost Today X The Search Lift Ratio (%)  

Once deployed, estimates around 'The Search Lift Ratio' can easily be quantified through a combination of A/B testing…'accurate' time-on-page measurements and traditional survey/feedback polls.

 

For many enterprises the qualitative value of search may be the more significant set of metrics for determining what has been gained:

With enterprise search capabilities expanding and more companies looking to how search can help their business, the question now is what the true benefits of enterprise search are. According to Glotzbach, the biggest opportunity offered by a good enterprise search tool is a phrase he calls "information velocity", which basically refers to the notion of businesses trying to move faster and more efficiently. It means different things to different businesses. For a business with a large customer support team, being able to find the right answer for a customer faster would translate to hard-dollar benefits around operational efficiency, shorter call times, etc., and then soft-dollar benefits around improved customer experience. For a technology or engineering-driven company, it means being able to quickly assemble a team's collective wisdom for improved decision-making.

Another overarching benefit of enterprise search that applies to all companies is improved collaboration. “We see search as a key component of collaboration, especially in today’s global economy,” Glotzbach says. “It’s not uncommon for even midsize companies to have offices located throughout the world. Unfortunately, with that geographic dispersion, the left hand doesn’t necessarily know what the right hand is doing.” Search can thus become the glue that helps to connect teams with all the same information, so everyone is working on the same page and sharing the same insights.

 

Qualitative benefits of enterprise search and findability can contribute a significant financial punch:

• Continuity – knowledge available after employees leave
• Productivity – working smarter, more efficiently, less "reinventing of the wheel"
• Consistency – similar practices and processes to make sure all employees benefit from optimal search guidelines for faster and more successful results
• Reducing Risk – this has big impact: ensuring that the right information is being used for all sorts of work needs, including decision-making, innovation, customer service, risk management

 

Obstacles to Finding the Right Information

In too many enterprises, people at all levels spend too much time in manual processes and poor search techniques to acquire information, usually stored in multiple repositories and in disparate formats.

Organizations encounter the same issues over and over for enterprise search:

• Trying to find all of the right information quickly
• Implementing meaning-based search: Ensuring relevance and context as essential attributes of the right information
• Requirements for tagging and taxonomy in traditional document and content management systems are unrealistic for most enterprises – these processes are hard to implement and are usually abandoned – most employees don't have the mindset, nor the time, for this type of classification
• Extensive variety of information and content types, extensive array of locations >> need for multiple search approaches – how to manage this and make it easy for most people in the enterprise

Further hampering enterprise search strategies is the employee desire for the experience to be just like using Google. But there are vast differences between Internet search and internal enterprise search – this 'conflict of interest' must be reconciled to choose the right search / findability technologies, and for how employees view search itself.

Google-type search requires knowledge of keywords for the topic in question. The searches cover web content that has been optimized to be found. Google results are ranked by popularity and somewhat by relevancy to keywords and to who you are as a searcher. Now false expectations have been created that the 'Google way' applied to the internal enterprise will yield everything that is needed.

Enterprise search is more complex and subtle. It requires multiple distinct search technologies to cover all use cases. Within the enterprise, different groups and software systems are creating digital items within silos that are frequently searched solely with proprietary technologies. Enterprise Search needs to take place across multiple disparate repositories, navigating security and permissions – where none of the content has been optimized to be found, except in instances where taxonomies have been created (which is often not done). Often the goal for enterprise search is to uncover an array of data and information that then has to be read and analyzed to determine relevancy to projects and decision making. So "popularity" of content is rarely the right attribute for determining meaningful information for enterprise tasks.

 

                 

  Source: The Future of Enterprise Search and Information Access

 

Determining the Platform Mix

It is critical that enterprise staff have the ability to find and analyze information and data across the enterprise. At this point for any enterprise, search and findability should be considered mission critical, especially with the continuous creation of digital items, now at critical mass.

A well-structured approach to determining the right search platform should include:

• Thorough analysis and understanding of all search requirements and needs, from simple to complex – aligned with enterprise groups and business activities  
• Segmentation of information, data and content types
• Segmented user roles - analyze the kind of user experience expected by different enterprise roles – impacts the kind of UI needed to improve search productivity  
• Mapping search requirements to different kinds of search capabilities and solutions: full-text, structured data, e-discovery and so on  
• Setting right expectations for employees to understand why enterprise search is different – why this is better for what employees need (not popular pages à la Google, but the right information contextual to the needs and objectives of the organization…)

Include processes to evaluate and analyze the effectiveness of different search solutions – then act on results to continuously improve, plus recommend changes for how information is stored, what business needs are not being met, and so on.

To be able to agilely collect and reconcile information across disparate repositories and formats, unified search platforms will have to combine multiple search capabilities from enterprise and internet search technologies, as well as BI search and several kinds of analytics. Analytics right now can be limited by 'artificial' filters that may lead to failures to include or even recognize the right data. A lot of enterprise information is in content / document form, but content, text and semantic analytics are still not where they should be and can be quite pricey. Parallel efforts in BI search may end up the Next Gen findability intelligence tool that enterprises need.

 

One More Processing Tool

Too often upper management fails to understand that the means to competitiveness, innovation, and agile change exists within the organization with the right processes and technologies – and enterprise search can be one such means. The right search platform can be fully available to the enterprise, if upper management understands the strategic importance of connecting everyone in the enterprise to the information that is so important to key decision-making, project work, customer support, and for moving the organization forward.

Enterprise search is more than search or findability – it is a conduit for bringing together seemingly disparate items of information and knowledge to be analyzed by one of the best tools people have – the human brain. Frequently the human brain can identify salient points in unlikely places, consider and weigh the importance or non-usefulness of all kinds of information, intuitively discerning significant patterns that may not be entirely logical but nonetheless important for arriving at insight and intelligence.

 

Related Links

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

 

   

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

Virtual Community: The New Home of Customer Service?

 

Companies have begun to extend customer service functions into the external online communities and forums that they sponsor. Communities offer a dynamic opportunity for collaborative support of customers to answer their questions, to give them guidelines and ideas for solving problems, to discuss new ideas and critiques for the company’s offerings.

However “Community” isn’t just one destination – it’s not limited to venues sponsored by individual organizations. Community is in every social venue that touches the customer and the company: other forums and social media sites offer support and sounding boards for customers of that company.  Companies should understand that an overall Virtual Community can come into play for providing customer service “anywhere anytime”.

Listening to these other social venues or communications channels has become very important to achieving highly responsive customer service/support. Listening may spur the company to join in on the discussion to offer answers and assistance. Or listening may be about clearly hearing what customers are saying and then acting on that feedback by making changes and improvements to offerings, support, marketing, and even strategic company direction.

 

According to Mark Studness, Director of eCommerce at Verizon, the Community Forums have been well-received since rolling out last July, generating more than 10 million page views.

"The Community Forums have spurred interaction among customers because people today expect to be able to find answers to their technical questions online," said Studness. "The feedback we've already received shows that our customers value the personalized peer-to-peer advice and feedback they receive from fellow users."

 

To achieve effective customer service in the Virtual Community, there’s plenty of work to do. It takes quite a bit of management, new processes, new culture and attitude adjustments, to communicate with and support customers, to glean feedback, and to add value to the customer experience, no matter where the conversation is taking place. Customer interactions on the Virtual Community plane must be synchronized with CRM and customer service practices and processes to ensure that all of the appropriate teams are tapped to participate. Strategy, goals and metrics also have important roles.

 

 
http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/enterprise/2010/03/community_management_the_strat.php

 

 

Effective Customer Service Communities

It’s pretty obvious that traditional customer service practices are broken for a lot of companies. Companies are making investments in social connections to customers often with the intent of doing a better job of providing answers and support, and to learn from the conversations customers are having in a variety of social venues. The Virtual Community is taking shape as it encompasses social sites external to the company as well as company-sponsored communities, both for customers and for employees.

Companies wanting to set up their own communities with customer service orientations must first engender an internal community and collaboration culture for employees and partners. Part of the collaborative activities are the empowerment and enablement of most or all employees to be customer advocates, and when appropriate, provide direct customer support. Communities can be silo-busters for enterprises where cross-departmental communication and cooperation are important.

When creating company-sponsored communities with a mind to customer service, Esteban Kolsky provides these guidelines:  

“Treat communities as the most important link between you and your customers since there is nothing that can replace the direct link you can have with them – and the free flow of information both ways...So, how do you make the move? Three things to get started”:

1. Make sure your customers want it – Quite simple, there ain’t no community without people. If your customers are not going to participate, nor do they feel they can get value out of it then the community will not succeed. …Best way to start? start a community alongside the rest of your support structure...Commit time and resources to grow it. then you start shifting people over slowly, finally make it the channel of choice. Sounds simple; it is simple.

2. Make sure your company can support it – Despite claims to the contrary, the most successful examples of community service are those where the company commits time, resources, knowledge and participants to them. If your experts are involved in the community, take interest in it, answer questions and receive feedback from customers the community will grow and become useful to you. If no one from your company ever enters the community, and it builds with its own content and resources, if you seem not to care about the feedback and knowledge built in it, then it will be a failure.

3. Let it be – I know this is hard to understand, but you have to let the content be free. Monitoring content, censoring entries, and controlling what goes where and how it flows through your community is not the way to go…It is likely that you will have to do some policing to get it started, but go lightly and err on the side of freedom. Once the community is up and running, make sure you use reputation tools built into them so the people that matter the most (engineers and outside experts as an example) can be recognized. Communities center around self-elected leaders and they are the ones that will control the content and quality of the community. Feel free to court them – but try not to control them.

 

The Customer Experience

The number one imperative for working with Community venues for customer service activities is to understand that the Customer Experience with the company is the real focus. Most customer service initiatives and practices have been pointed towards increasing agent and process efficiencies, while reducing costs, which benefits the company in the short term while offering limited benefits to customers. Changing the imperative to the Customer Experience does much more to lead companies to real customer relationship management and retention, as well as nurturing customer success, in a more scalable fashion.

 

The emerging view is to create a customer experience strategy focused on the business success of the customer. By being a vehicle for the customer’s success, companies expect to:

 - Extend the life of the customer

 - Develop a proactive advocate for their products and services

- Extract usable value from the customer’s experience that can be repurposed

- Reduce transactional support costs by developing more educated users

- Increase the value of the customer through additional product and service revenue

There is considerable evidence pointing to the success of this approach. A study by Booz Allen found that customer-centric organizations outperformed their industry peers 2:1 in revenue growth and generated profit margins five to 10 percent above their competitors. However, to deliver these results, organizations have to walk their talk. If a company wants to evolve from pushing product to delivering customer advocacy-level value, a shift in thinking and attitude is required.

 

 

The Customer Experience is only as good as what a company offers for its customer focus: customer-centric processes, reliable quality products, partnerships with customers for customer benefit. The entire company is responsible for positive customer experiences. The entire company can only provide effective customer focus if the internal company culture maps directly to the success and satisfaction of its customers. Again, the Virtual Community that benefits customers transcends delineations internal and external to the company. A major challenge for companies is to provide a consistent customer experience throughout the Virtual Community.

 

Bi-Directional Value of the Virtual Community  

The Virtual Community of interactions with customers provides many ways to enhance and grow positive customer experiences on a continuous basis. These interactions can be quite subtle and frequently can’t be easily measured using metrics that tie to company goals. For example, through the Virtual Community, new customer advocates arise bringing influence from their individual social networks. Tracking such influence is complex and, at times, elusive. However, significant new business for the company may result.

Dion Hinchcliffe writes extensively on the “Social Business” examining both technology and human implications, as in Social Business and Next-Generation CIOs - The Business Models:

Customer engagement on a whole new level. Leading enterprises are now finding that holding customers at arm’s length out of concern for cost is no longer necessary. Better customer service, higher satisfaction levels, and better retention are possible by employing techniques and platforms such as social CRM, online communities, and social media marketing that are especially high value. For example, financial services leader Intuit has been offering co-created customer support via Live Community to millions of customers for years, driving down costs and supporting customers much better than traditional non-social methods.

 

An article on DestinationCRM details the benefits identified by Dr. Natalie Petouhoff in her Forrester study, The ROI of Customer Service Communities:

While Petouhoff says she expected cost savings, the rise in product ideation was a surprise. In the study, she writes that customer service departments are rarely responsible for product ideation, but the nature of leaving commentary in the online community lends itself well to the process -- and can lead to other benefits.

"You wouldn't think 'customer service' when we went down this path," she says. "But because the ideas are in the community, interdepartmental collaboration can take place with them. As a result, customer service has an opportunity to step up to the plate and be an extremely valuable executive player."

In the study, Petouhoff notes several benefits that positively impact company customer service operations. Customers share the “win” from these benefits:

- increase in first-contact resolution

- boost in relevant Web-site content

Two more benefits listed in the Petouhoff study stand out as very important for customers: the already-mentioned new idea co-creation, and this one: improved customer retention and customer lifetime value. If customers are sticking around, it usually means that they are finding what they need and that they are satisfied well enough to continue dealing with the company. It likely means that customer frustrations have been reduced and confidence in the company has grown. Taking improved customer relationships one step further, communities for customer service help customers become more successful with the company’s products and services.

 

Often in the Virtual Community, problems, questions and requests are resolved faster and more accurately for the customer, by fellow customers, company employees, SMEs, and other community participants. When active on the Virtual Community, companies should be attuned to what each customer needs, and then take the appropriate action, which might be proactive, responsive, or passive. Many times listening to and understanding the customer is the best “action”.  The next step is to translate that understanding into a significant component of the strategy and direction of the company to further meet customer needs and sustain competitiveness.

 

  

Related Links

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

 

Google and Search are now infamously synonymous for successfully looking for almost anything out there on the worldwide web (regardless of recent speculation about Google Search losing some of its edge). Unfortunately, inside the firewall, it’s a different story. Many organizations have increasing explosions of content, intelligence sources, data, and internal collaboration sites: all of which contain information that the staff of these organizations need to do their jobs.

It’s very clear that there is an “information overload” and also quite clear that people in enterprises aren’t connecting to the information that they need. This is despite the advent of intranets with search built in, desktop search, cross-enterprise search, knowledge management initiatives, content and document management platforms, and other technologies.

One symptom of information overload is the inability to get the right information to workers at the right time; 40% of those surveyed said they had the information they needed less than 75% of the time.

Technology is seen as one clear way to address the information overload/clutter problem, with 35% of the total sample – and 70% at companies that manage their information well – rating technology as very helpful (8-10 on a 10 point scale).

                 Xerox study

 

There is a mismatch between the needs of the staffers of enterprises, and search methods and technologies to find relevant information quickly. Classic search and search optimization of information and content do not organize into role-based approaches to locating what workers are seeking. Enterprise staffers are rarely trained to be knowledge or information workers, both in terms of generating content that can be easily found by others and how to effectively find content, documents, data and information.

 

 
Source: Google

 

I’m not very fond of the terms ‘knowledge worker’ and ‘information worker’, as they seem to serve to reduce people to drones instead of recognizing that these enterprise workers are: thinkers, analyzers, innovators, problem-solvers, communicators – not repetitive ‘bots. Improving productivity means working smarter, not necessarily faster, and enterprises should be doing everything to remove obstacles for staff to work smarter. Besides, almost everyone is an ‘information worker’ anymore, regardless of profession or job title – we all have oodles to deal with in terms of data, content, information, intelligence reports, dashboards, mashups, ad infinitum. 

  

Conceptual Shift: From Search To Findability

The Internet search paradigm is predicated on already knowing which key words will likely produce relevant content/information results, and then hoping that everything that matters will show up in the returned results. Internet search has also been classically performed with a lack of context, where the search is independent of professional roles, work goals, context, or business processes relative to the content resources provided in results.

Inside the firewall, locating content and people with answers is better served by ‘findability’. A lot of definitions for ‘findability’ are rather circular; I think a good definition for enterprise findability comprises: ease in locating information and resources for specific worker needs while reflecting relevant aspects of content attributes, context, worker roles, people/social resources, and business processes.

I see findability for internal content and information akin to usability aspects of software solutions: it doesn’t matter how great the information or content is if the people who need it can’t figure out how to get to it. And findability can be the most useful if it functions the way people work in the enterprise.

 Workers need processes and technologies that … 

INCREASE

• collaboration with each other
• connections and relationships to get insight from others
• creative efficiency to produce new knowledge and product
• transparency of existing documents to build upon

DECREASE time spent:

• duplicating work
• searching for documents
• locating others they need to talk to
• finding knowledge that will help them
• re-building something when a template already exists

 

 Bob Mixon is a solution architect and Microsoft MVP techie for SharePoint solutions who writes and teaches extensively. In a seminar, Mixon discussed findability for intranets: 

Mixon defines findability as "the art and science of making information available to users," noting emphatically that this means "it's not just search."  In addition to search, the key components of findability were identified as being: governance, architecture, design, and navigation.  Mixon noted that most users tend to search on the internet, but resort to browsing (i.e., point and click) on intranets.  Once thousands of sites/documents exist within an intranet, however, search becomes essential in that environment as well.

  

Content Optimization -- Enterprise Search: Complex Solutions and Frameworks

Many enterprises have built out solutions based on enterprise content management, document and records management, enterprise search, with content lifecycle management and governance. Enterprises also adopt optimization initiatives using information architecture, as well as functional work with taxonomies, tagging/favorites, semantic search, text analytics, data dictionaries, and so on.

The various content-related solutions offer enterprises frameworks to create, store, publish, and archive content across all channels inside the firewall. And these enterprises can set up good processes and practices for the above activities. However, most content management solutions equate the ‘findability’ of content and information to Search. Unfortunately most search functions that are built into CM solutions are inadequate.

There are various approaches to making content management more effective for findability including combining knowledge management practices and processes with CM frameworks. But this introduces more implementation, maintenance and governance layers, as well as added costs and resource requirements.

A good many practitioners provide guidelines for optimizing content to be more findable: Bob Boeri of Guident presented on elements of findability at the Enterprise Search Summit May 2010 where he made this statement:

Documents constitutes 80% of our business knowledge assets.

Databases etc. the other 20%.

Boeri lays out a comprehensive program for enhancing content and information findability along with lifecycle management, and his presentation includes a number of useful data points on the huge proliferation of content in enterprises. Further ideas for making enterprise content findable come from the recommendations of Ephraim Julius Freed and Bas Zurburg in their respective blogs.

 

Other enterprise platforms and applications often have search functions, but again, the search usually does not work very well (compared to optimal Google standards). So not only are content and information spread across different silos, but search is also silo’d, since individual app-based search capabilities do not function across all enterprise repositories. Uber-search inside the firewall, dubbed ‘Enterprise Search”, does perform cross-silo functions but can be an expensive investment. And again, content and information must be optimized to support better results in enterprise search.

In a recent blog post, Coveo VP Diane Berry speaks about Enterprise Search 2.0:  

Enterprise Search has evolved from its repository-centric start to today’s ever-changing landscape where Enterprise Search 2.0 powers and supports critical business processes. In fact, often Enterprise Search 2.0 doesn’t even look much like search, because the search – of virtually any and all enterprise systems – is conducted in the background, the information is housed in an always-on index, and it is presented in composite information mashups for high value decision support.

 
Source: Coveo

  

Enterprise Findability 2.0 – Goal-, Role- and Process-Focused

We are already seeing traditional Enterprise Search evolving into the findability paradigm where enterprise information is more integrated with context and business processes.  There are other software technology solutions that are evolving to provide findability of information in new ways.

 

  >> Adaptive Content Delivery

Baynote has evolved its recommendations and personalization capabilities for websites to what the firm is calling ‘adaptive web experience’:

The Adaptive Web dynamically maps the user’s intent, then adapts in real-time – based on the engage­ment patterns of like-minded peers.

The Adaptive Web is intent-driven. It uses past histories, but isn’t beholden to them; what’s most important is what’s happening right now.

Since Baynote technology can be used on intranets, it is worthwhile to consider what Baynote-style technology might offer for improving findability across an enterprise, should that become an extension of adaptive content retrieval.

Real relevance requires knowing what your customers want (their intent), knowing which of your content best matches that intent (most engaging), and giving them that content in real-time (adapting)

 

>> Findability As ad hoc / Adaptive Process: Adaptive Case Management

Tangential to business process management (BPM), adaptive case management is an emerging solution that pulls together information in the context of ad hoc business processes while focusing on business goals, worker roles, and knowledge domain context. ACM also taps into the increased use of collaboration and social media to support unstructured business processes. So information is surfaced to workers when needed for particular situations. Behind the scenes, a great deal has been set up via ACM software and practices to sustain robust ad hoc business processes as they occur.

Although discussing the need for the Social Intranet, Oscar Berg could also be referencing ACM:

Knowledge work is about such things as solving problems, performing research and creative work, interacting and communicating with other people, and so on. Such work is by nature less predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work (transformational and transactional activities organized into repeatable processes). Both the inputs and outputs of knowledge work – which is information and knowledge – vary from time to time, from situation to situation. So does the purpose, activities, roles and resources involved in knowledge work. Knowledge work is also less structured and the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the work proceeds.

The unpredictable nature of knowledge work is why we need to give knowledge workers access to all information that exists and that might be relevant. Since we don’t know what might be relevant until a certain need arises (which we never might be aware of until we discover certain information), we can’t really put the relevant information in one “for keeps” pile and all other information in another “to be trashed” pile. 

  

Max Pucher, Isis Papyrus Founder and Chief Architect:

ACM allows the business to empower selectively and securely all the people that do things and those for whom things are being done. ACM is about communication and process as ONE! ACM leaves the automation of the low-value, highly repetitive administration tasks to BPM, but it provides the platform for the high-value, unique and skill or knowledge intensive processes.

ACM may evolve beyond its ‘roots’ in business process management to become a much-needed internal platform of technology and practices to more relevantly and immediately surface the most-needed information, content, and data, wherever it exists in the enterprise, all in the context of immediate situational business process for a particular worker’s responsibilities.

  

>> Findability of Structured Data: BI and Analytics That Surface Data and “Intelligence”

In a previous article, I detailed a number of interesting trends for BI and Analytics that may result in better intelligence results for businesses. BI and Analytics present information in specialized formats in support of “knowledge workers” and to help businesses make better decisions. As collaboration processes are married to BI and analytics, unstructured content will have a place along with traditional structured data, contributing to the findability of a greater breadth of relevant information.

Enterprise search meets BI:  Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine is an example of unified information discovery and analysis across the enterprise. Somewhat like the ease-of-use of Google search combined with context-savvy and relevance-focused analytic technology to help find much more than non-contextual bits of information. BI Search also allows findability of unstructured content as well as the traditional BI sources in structured data repositories. Hopefully BI Search will help workers find related information and content, as well as unexpected but highly relevant information sources.

 

 

 

Information Mashups and Situational Awareness:  For information delivery primarily from structured data sources, software vendor JackBe can, on demand, pull data ‘as is’ to build out information mashups from multiple pre-prepped sources. Harkening back to the thinking behind ad hoc processes and ACM, JackBe’s Presto mashup platform has been drafted into providing intelligence for situational awareness needs, where there has been no specific anticipation of the situation, and where the situation may be gone after a day. For properly utilizing information revealed for situational awareness, it is essential that the users of the Presto platform possess significant subject matter expertise to understand whether the JackBe mashups are accurate, meaningful, and useful -- or not. However, again we have another approach to finding information needed by workers, somewhat in context to their roles and responsibilities.

 

Content analytics and Content Intelligence: Seth Grimes explains findability as it relates to analyzing content to bring its value into intelligence processes:

"Content analytics" can be seen as business intelligence (BI) for/from content, as text (rather than number) crunching that generates insights to improve business outcomes. The two practices, content analytics and BI, certainly share motivations. If you don't analyze your content/data, you may be missing opportunities and running risks.

Analytics also boosts value for users. Semantic search, faceted navigation, and content annotation/enrichment create findability and improve user experience and value for users. They also let users treat content like data. Call the goal "content intelligence," enabled by "smart content."

Although Grimes is talking about content for external-facing websites, the applicability to internal enterprise content is obvious.

  

>> ‘Now, The Information Finds You’

TIBCO Software recently announced a new release of tibbr with the above tag line, fully remade from its 2009 debut as an internal microblogging tool. In this new incarnation, tibbr still benefits from the TIBCO sophisticated backbone of enterprise infrastructure management, including data integration, messaging and process management, and, as such, is infrastructure-agnostic. Or as Ram Menon, TIBCO CMO, puts it:

We’re leveraging a billion dollars of integration technology investment to offer customers the ability to get at the information they need, in real time, if they choose

While tibbr is built more for real-time information streams than archives of content and information, tibbr and Tibco have created a platform with a lot of potential for improving overall information findability that adheres to context and worker roles.  It connects to process, people/workers, collaboration venues, data and information streams, centralizing all event streams into one dashboard. Information can be organized by subject or topic, rather than by people. tibbr enables users to create, contribute to, and subscribe to the real-time event streams that matter most to them.

Dennis Howlett provides this description of tibbr:

It intelligently marries people, process and context, delivering information the way people want to consume

tibbr provides flexibility in the delivery and consumption of information by allowing users to select the form, frequency and manner in which they want to receive updates. Updates are delivered at the requested time, to the device or interface of choice, with the appropriate context. With its integration capabilities and bi-directional feeds in and out of business applications from vendors like Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com, Tibco connects tibbr to business processes and event-triggering that are then exposed in tibbr for taking action.

Since tibbr has a customizable subject / classification structure, companies can build an information model that works best for them. With that in mind, will tibbr also call for Information Architecture and governance capabilities to ensure the findability of information as it is handled by tibbr dashboards?

 

Convergence or Patchwork?

Lots of different technologies are available for both search and findability in the enterprise, and new ones are emerging. Right now, all of these technologies somewhat resemble a patchwork of possibilities, but with some very significant overlaps of capabilities and solution strategy. Realistically, for many enterprises, multiple options may be what are needed to achieve overall findability for all worker roles. And this a case where tech really matters to help enterprise workers find exactly the information and intelligence that they need as quickly as possible.

It is also likely that large enterprises will continue to benefit from rigorous content-generation strategies, Information Architecture, and governance systems to enhance whatever methods are used to find information in context. Sophisticated solutions for findability will require diligence and consistent oversight to ensure the best results for workers.

What interests me a great deal are a couple of things: how the newer solutions evolve, and what sort of convergence will occur from solution spaces that started off quite separate from one another.

 

Related Links

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

 

Disclaimer: Julie Hunt is not affiliated with any of the vendors in this article.

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

 

 

A Smarter Edgier Collective: Business Technology Professionals on Twitter

 

As a departure from my usual in-depth article I’m sharing my somewhat ‘social-logical’ thoughts on the community of business technology professionals on Twitter.

Twitter has many faces for its users. There is one Twitter where masses of people tweet about pop culture and everyday life. There are also the Twitter worlds of brand promotions and consumers. And then there are Twitter “collectives”, floating through the Twittersphere with distinct flavor and vigor, where certain “birds of a feather” come together.

One particularly strong “collective” swirls around business technology professionals. These tech professionals work with hardware and/or software, as: users, vendors, analysts, consultants, marketers, product managers, practitioners, writers, developers, critics, innovators. And most of these seemingly disparate professionals are continuously and serendipitously crossing paths on Twitter, in a way that was never possible before.

Of course, this tech professionals’ collective on Twitter is not formally organized nor does it need to be to result in effective communication and interaction. I like to think that the some of the propensity for technology folks to interact on Twitter has origins in software / hardware in “old school” developer communities, BBSs, and forums. “Special interest groups” within the tech professionals collective exist on Twitter (frequently marked by hashtags) – but mixing and interaction amongst all such groups are continuous and fruitful.

In mixing it up, software analysts are talking to social media agencies and practitioners, marketers to systems analysts and developers, big fish talking with not-so-big fish. Silos are being evaporated, as individuals are walking a bit in another professional’s shoes and seeing from another’s perspective. Twitter has been an extended and natural collaboration experience with open communicators, willing listeners, change agents and change acceptors. For these tech professionals, is Twitter becoming “collaboration as business process” that is essential to their professional endeavors?

As a collective, technology professionals take advantage of many activities, both organized and impromptu, that are possible on Twitter. Many lead and/or participate in chats or tweetjams via organized events, or jump in on lively exchanges that start with a couple of people. Connections and brainstorms spring up where impromptu conversations are usually open to all, with an almost stream-of-consciousness flow. Unexpected new relationships develop. When disparate worlds willingly collide, it can enable the emergence of new ideas, perspectives, unexpected slants on topics and problems.

 

Interactive Social Caretakers

On Twitter, each tech professional might be considered individual social caretakers or personal “community managers”. David Armano articulates how effectively trained community managers should posses the following seven qualities:

Articulate: Able to communicate effectively in a variety of media

Social: Engages in authentic conversations and interactions

Professional: Acts as a responsible ambassador of brand/org

Adaptable: Can make decisions quickly, handle crisis situations

Enthusiastic: Energetic, passionate and engaged in relevant topics

Connected: Has ties to the right people within the community

Organized: Can keep track of data, relationships, content calendars, and a variety of assets essential to maintaining community  

I find that this list captures the traits embodied by many of the tech professionals interacting on Twitter. The “communities” they manage permeate the collective.

 

Twitter as Social Intranet for Tech Professionals?

Looking at this loosely-organized Twitter collaboration phenomenon for tech professionals, is it reasonable to think of Twitter as an über Social Intranet for such professionals?  This would be a very public intranet but this Twitter intranet has much in common with the current fledgling social intranets behind the firewall.

Toby Ward describes a social intranet as:

An intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other Web 2.0 (intranet 2.0) tool with at least some or limited exposure (optional) from the main intranet or portal home page.

Intranets are places where an organization goes to find knowledge, experts, documents, discussions. If we consider the intermingled tweetstreams of the tech professionals collective as the “home page” or the gateway to the treasures of this “social intranet”, then a smörgåsbord of blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networks, and so on are available to all of the collective. Indeed Twitter itself may be the ultimate open forum. The Twitter “social intranet” also reflects continuous change: unpredictable, dynamic, significant, evolving – allowing exchanges of unexpected information and opinion.

In his presentation on Social Intranets, Oscar Berg sees a shift to Value Creation, emphasizing Collaboration – Learning – Innovation – Relationships. Twitter interaction experiences encompass the tenets of Berg’s Value Creation as well as these points called out by Berg regarding the greater expectations people have for organizations:

• Fast response
• Accessibility
• Simplicity
• Freedom of choice
• Transparency & influence
• Need-driven

 

Holism through social networks and cultural change

If each tech professional on Twitter is their own community manager (and brand manager), and is participating in a social intranet super-structure, what sort of “social organization” describes the overall collective?

In the work that Jeremiah Owyang is doing on social businesses, he maintains that companies organize social in 5 ways: Centralized, Distributed, Coordinated, Multiple Hub-and-Spoke, and finally Holistic. Holistic is the least frequent in organizations where everyone uses social media equally and consistently across all organizations, somewhat as “social masters”, with the essential qualities of community managers.

The central notion of holism is that the whole ends up greater than the sum of the parts, meaning that something organically greater emerges. The tech professionals’ collective derives its organic strength from such parts as mutual respect, active listening, cross-culture, cross-geo, cross-functional to achieve a collaboration that is alive and kicking.

 

 

Related Links

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

 The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

 Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

 

For the past few years, companies have been exploring initiatives internally and externally that dance around the notion of “social” methods for engaging all of the people in an enterprise ecosystem - to bring about better results for these companies. These social methods have been described with terminology such as “enterprise 2.0”, “social computing”, “web 2.0”, “social media”, and so on. The evolution of these social methods has led now to another term: the Social Business.

I find the term “Social Business” a necessary one:  to remind companies that people are very important to their success: customers, employees, partners, suppliers, and so on. I see the term “Social Business” encompassing what companies might become to engage people - inside and out – to achieve business goals, and frankly, to stay in business. Again looking at terms in common usage: Enterprise 2.0 has been concerned with the “inside” (I call it social collaboration) and social media / web 2.0 have been concerned with the “outside” (external-facing customer engagement). A blurring between Social Inside and Social Outside has begun, partly driven by the adoption of customer-facing social media tools by internal collaboration programs.   

A lot of the conversation for the ins and outs of social these days has focused on technology and practices - and even on “naming conventions” - but People as the focus is what really makes a difference for a business to achieve success. People participating in the “Social Business” are cross-generational: there are lots of people of all ages who are savvy about collaboration, communication, social media, respecting colleagues and customers – none of these activities are the sole turf of any generation. And I’ll repeat: the focus on the value of People and trust in what they can accomplish (not just on tech and practices or processes) is at the heart of healthy companies.

Why does a renewed - and authentic - interest in People matter to a business? From the customer perspective, much has been written about customers now driving relationships with businesses where businesses listen to what customers want, like and don’t like. From the perspective of employees and partners, a great deal of what companies need comes from people:  innovation, creativity, ideas for new directions, passion, enthusiasm, customer relationships, knowledge, experience, judicious consideration, and so on. 

The Human factor always has to be distinctly considered in anything called “social” -- otherwise it’s just a buzzword shell game. First there must be authentic respect for all the people in the enterprise ecosystem; then enterprises can work on building out social practices that consider the human element – afterwards, apply technology and processes where they make sense.

  

Value of Social Business - Inside

In enterprise activities such as collaboration, knowledge management, business intelligence, business process management, adaptive case management, there is a significant role to be played by social capabilities to improve how these activities perform and provide relevance and results. Social business on the inside is also rightfully tied to enterprise collaboration and intranets that are taking on more social media type capabilities. Many software solutions are including social capabilities as methods to improve solution usage and value, as well as do a better job of incorporating the importance of the human element.

For example, Business Process Management (BPM) solutions encompass practices and tools that are evolving and including more people-oriented methods in terms of social collaboration capabilities. Forrester’s Clay Richardson comments:

Enterprise social – and social BPM by extension – is seeing healthy adoption in industries and organizations that have open cultures and have a need to innovate and share ideas quickly. Although it might seem counterintuitive, we’re seeing the greatest adoption of social BPM patterns in the healthcare and public sector – specifically in defense.

Sandy Kemsley, independent analyst and systems architect for enterprise infrastructure, also understands well the people side of business:

Tom Davenport recently wrote about the need to add structure to social in order to bring enterprise value: Transaction systems like ERP and CRM, tools for workflow and document management, and project management systems all made it more clear to people what they need to do next in their jobs. That capability has undoubtedly led to productivity gains.

But work effectiveness also demands that people share their knowledge and expertise with each other. That’s where social media comes in. It makes it easy to reach out to others for help in making a decision or taking an action. And the transfer of knowledge through social media doesn’t require a lot of difficult knowledge management work in advance.

Business Intelligence is another software solution space that is looking at building in collaborative layers throughout the BI lifecycle. The possibilities for new applications of analytics increase with collaboration. Inviting in many-to-many interactions also opens up processes to new ideas from participants. Gartner found that social venues and collaboration help to track and capture outcomes of the decisions made based on BI / analytics:

Gartner's user surveys show that improved decision making is the key driver of BI purchases. However, most BI deployments emphasize information delivery and analysis to support fact-based decision making, but fail to link BI content with the decision itself, the decision outcome, or with the related collaboration and other decision inputs. This makes it impossible to capture decision-making best practices. Solutions are emerging that tie BI with social software and collaborative tools for higher-quality, more transparent decisions that will increase the value derived from BI applications.

Promoting social on the inside draws on the rich value that lies in the many people who populate the enterprise.

  

Value of Social Business - Outside

Social media and social CRM solutions and practices are gaining interest and usage as means to work with customers throughout the customer lifecycle with the company. Social media and social CRM also play important roles for connecting the Social Business-Inside with the Social Business-Outside.

Social media is not just the latest fad in marketing; and to really work, social media is not “one-size-fits-all”.  Enterprises must understand how a go-to-market strategy that includes social media will help with objectives and obligations; then enterprises must figure out which social media to use and why. Social media commitments require an authentic personal touch, both for how customers are communicating with the enterprise, and how the enterprise responds and sustains customer conversations.

Maria Ogneva comments on the social customer and social CRM:

The ability for everyone to engage and be in alignment: Social media is not a silo, and no one department owns it. There must be a process in place by which each message gets automatically routed to the right person, classifying it by type (question, complaint or compliment), content (what it actually said), sentiment, action needed, and influence. This helps automate the triage process, which until now has been mostly manual.

Jeremiah Owyang’s work with brands employing social media to better connect and support customers is extensive and well-known. In his presentation on “Three Trends Companies Must Invest in for Social Business”, Owyang introduces the notion of Rings of Social Influence which include employees as company ambassadors for communicating with customers, as well as these recommended best practices for such employees:   

• Establish guardrails to protect both employees and the company
• Offer internal training courses, (like Intel’s certification program) and recurring training
• Offer an internal water cooler where they can talk in a safe place and plan: Yammer, Socialcast, Community Platforms

And of course companies must recognize the power of the customer voice and consider Owyang’s recommended best practices for customers active in social media:

• For better or worse, customers are already talking about you – how can you aggregate their voices closer to your brand?
• Develop an advocacy program to recognize and reward your top customers.
• Change your mindset to understanding that critical feedback is an opportunity for product and service improvements – then use to increase loyalty and WOM.

 

Social Business Equation: Inside + Outside = Eliminate silos

Many enterprises are understanding the value of social media to better engage and retain customers, to attract prospects, make sales, help customers solve problems: Social Business - Outside. But it seems to be much harder for enterprises to understand social on the inside and why that matters. Enterprises must come to understand that social on the outside won’t be substantially achieved – let alone sustained - if social on the inside isn’t working.

Social on the inside pertains to all company teams that touch customers, prospects, partners, and suppliers – basically the vast majority of the company.  The commitment, usage and value of social on the inside and the outside must be real – employees, partners, customers will quickly figure out if a company is faking it.  With healthy social practices inside a company, the support and growth of social for any interactions involving the enterprise human ecosystem – inside and out – should then be a natural and vital part of overall company strategy.

Here are the big questions:

1. Can the enterprises that need to, change quickly enough to re-humanize?
2. More importantly, will enterprises even choose to change?

This change – understanding and nurturing the value of all the people in the enterprise ecosystem – impacts how the company operates internally, how it does business externally, how the company effectively engages the human ecosystem that is truly needed for the company to survive as a successful business – inside and out.

From this change comes these rewards:  big impact on continuous innovation / relevant product development, drawing the best out of employees, collaborating with customers and partners on future direction and products, listening to all of the people in the enterprise ecosystem to draw on their experiences and expertise for building and sustaining competitive edge >> all contributing to the success and relevance of company.

The strategic decision to become the social business has to come from upper management and boards of directors – it has to be a key aspect of the enterprise – or it won’t happen in any significant or sustained fashion. When an enterprise chooses to become a “social business”, the divide between social-inside and social-outside should blur as more and more as silos within the enterprise hopefully disappear, and as bi-directional connections to customers and prospects, partners and suppliers become more authentic and more immediate.

 

                                                                <<<<<              >>>>>

Jeremiah Owyang has produced a very good starting point for depicting the Social Business Stack, expressed in terms of technology. I’ve added a “reminder” element to his diagram:

 

 
 
 

 

Related Links

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid – business technology hybrids bring real value to company competitiveness

  

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

 WEM technology can make enterprise collaboration more effective

 

 

Enterprise intranets are usually created to act as the main conduits for internal collaboration, including content creation / acquisition. But, to-date, most are failing to engage their internal customers: the employees of corporations.  According to a 2009 report by Watson Wyatt, only 50% of employees accessed the intranet on a daily basis; 80% said their company’s system needed improvement; and 50% said searching on their intranet was too difficult. Instead of functioning as a framework to access self-service portals and the apps/tools needed to be more productive, intranets are often difficult to navigate, out-of-date, non-intuitive, and bulky.

 

Bill Ives notes in his review of the Global Intranet Trends 2010 Report:

The intranet is starting to become the entry point into the “workplace web” – the collection of resources and information needed by staff. This includes applications, intranet sites, specialized portals, team spaces, collaboration spaces and so on. This was the original vision for many intranets but rarely realized.

 

To improve intranets to act as effective “gateways” for collaboration, intranets would likely benefit from many capabilities incorporated into Web Experience Management (WEM) for external-facing websites, including the use of social apps. In this case, a company’s employees are the customers to be engaged and converted.

 

 

Processes, Tools, Interconnected Employees

Community and collaboration in business enterprises are about people working together more effectively, quickly, and proactively – to achieve the goals of the business in dynamic fashion. This definition of collaboration seems to be eluding many companies that have enterprise intranets and are adopting social media tools. It’s not about tools adoption, but about interconnected employees working together more often, reducing silos of knowledge and expertise, and sharing relevant insight as quickly as possible.

 

The intranet can utilize approaches “borrowed” from WEM-oriented external websites to improve usability and engagement, but intranets must also integrate with business processes that are part of individual employee workflows. The intranet can become a personalized focus for an employee’s essential information flow related to the business operations that the employee ties into. The context for collaboration on intranets is connectivity to business processes and work. To increase employee use of intranets requires that intranets embody the employee’s "way of working".

 

Sameer Patel makes this observation in his post on the Google Wave discontinuation:

Organizations still need to understand how to design work processes that blend optimal process and collaboration but its hell of a lot easier when the software plays nice…end users are still struggling to understand the basic applicability of these new tools to meeting their performance requirements better/faster/simpler. Organizations on the other hand often have a huge gap between declaring big picture strategic collaborative intent and tool selection.  

 

 

WEM for Intranets

For intranets built as “engaging” sites, several WEM capabilities work well:

· End-to-end software solution, with excellent usability both for business users and IT personnel (includes behind-the-scenes document and content management, workflow, design tools, and so on)

· Recommendations-like technology for social search and personalization (as well as enterprise search)

· Analytics – for usage and performance stats and improvements

· Rich media and video capabilities

· Social collaboration / communication capabilities

· Mobile access / multi-channel

· Extensive integration / interoperability capabilities at several levels of the enterprise infrastructure

 

Like external-facing websites, usable and relevant intranets must be designed from employee POVs, but with this difference: the larger the organization, the more diverse the employee perspectives and needs. External-facing websites usually have much more focused target markets. To deliver effective intranet experiences to all employees, it may take a composite of applications, not just one main platform, to achieve all of the necessary services. Beyond tools for overt collaboration, communication and user-generated content, there are needs for more “formal” services for document management, forms management, legal and HR processes, and so on.

 

Personalization and Customization

Personalization is one of the main keys for the engagement and enablement of employees using intranets more effectively, while also greatly aiding the work employees do each day. Personalization is becoming increasingly sophisticated, which helps the customization of intranets to have more impact. There are technologies available for social search, federated search results, self-adaptive UIs, recommendations, bookmarks, “my links”, “my sites”, and so on. Even basic customization can often lead to decent productivity gains for employees. Role-based personalization has great potential for connecting employees much more tightly to the content, social media and business apps that matter most for their jobs. Personalization / customization advances should lead to aligning intranet usage to the business processes of daily work.

 

Search and Relevance

Search is the other essential key; unfortunately intranet / enterprise search is still far from the Google-quality search employees would like for fast, efficient acquisition of relevant information. Intranet solutions will have to continue to focus on improving search, including highly customizable approaches to advanced search. For collaboration purposes, “people search” has become more important to locate experts and project resources. Recommendations technology can also play a part here.

 

Interactive Collaboration and Content-Creation Through Social Apps

Social media content resources include the usual roll call of blogs, wikis, forums, KB, etc. Ease of use, acquisition and curation for all social venues will make a big difference for aiding employees in work. Wikis in particular need excellent oversight to remain current, relevant and usable. Social media can also provide a wide range of communication venues between employees and teams. Intranets are becoming more real-time through chat, micro-blogging, and other tools, especially useful for the growing prevalence of virtual teams. As with all intranet capabilities, social apps require frequent and energetic tending.

 

Intranet Content Management / Document Management

Social apps can enhance how intranets are used, but do not cover all that the intranet should offer. Other services include sophisticated content management, document management, and access to more formal content from HR / legal departments. In the realm of content management, many different kinds of content live on intranets. Mark Morrell, in his post All intranet content is not the same lists four types: Formal, Team, Crowd, and Personal. “A fifth category covers services, which are online processes where people do tasks to fulfil their roles.”  In many cases, it will take composite technologies to meet all intranet content needs.

 

Multi-channel Management - Mobile Access to Intranets

With the wider distribution of employees and growth of virtual teams, mobile access to intranets must evolve and improve. The ever-improving sophistication of mobile devices is increasingly making it easier for employees to use mobile access to perform work tasks via intranets, especially with tablet devices now in the mix. It is likely that the intranet design for mobile users should be separate from the traditional enterprise network-based intranet, but should also include the WEM approach to provide better usability and engagement. In fact, with the proliferation of customer-centric apps for mobile, there are even greater expectations for what enterprise intranets should provide for the employee experience.

 

 

The Human Side of Intranets for Enterprise Collaboration

There are multiple obstacles to achieving effective intranets that engage and convert employees, including the failure to allocate sufficient money and permanent staffing to build and maintain high-quality sites. After the intranet is in place, enterprises must next create and sustain processes to continually improve and innovate intranet applications and services. But the biggest obstacle comes from the “human side” of intranets.

 

Ironically, for many companies, implementation efforts for collaboration technology, such as intranets and social apps, will be doomed to failure for one simple reason: most enterprises have failed to engender a “collaboration culture” based on real human interaction. Enterprise collaboration as a practice requires true top-down corporate commitment to a collaboration culture that is strategic to business goals and is an important component of internal business processes. While employing a WEM approach to create more effective intranets is an excellent idea, it is still essential that companies grow and nurture live collaboration cultures, where collaboration is a natural response for business activities, for any departments in the enterprise.  Planning a healthy collaboration culture also requires a dynamic plan for the role that WEM and social technology will play to bring the people in the company together for productive interaction and interconnectedness.

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services

 

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

When I started writing articles for my blog Highly Competitive, I had in the back of my mind the “classic” advice for professional blogging: pick one main area to cover and as such, show my SME-ness for that area. So I should have selected a particular software solution space and stuck to it.

 

Well that doesn’t really work for me and isn’t even realistic for anyone analyzing today’s software infrastructures in most companies. As such, I find myself covering multiple software topics, largely due to my diverse software tech background, and it all makes sense as we see more and more overt overlap and interconnection between the different applications of any-size enterprises, and between the activities and processes of how enterprises do business. As enterprises become more customer-focused (outside-in), what has become especially interesting is the evolution of change that eventually will produce Social businesses.

 

Starting with systems infrastructure, many enterprises have multiple points of integration and interoperability. It is this interrelatedness of systems that increases the business value to the enterprise. Integrations and interconnections are happening at multiple levels in businesses: their IT/application infrastructures, the applications themselves, how teams function in the enterprise interacting with systems and people, and how companies are evolving for doing business and engaging buyers. To become an effective Social Business, enterprises will have to nurture integrated internal systems and processes, as well as social strategies and practices for external and internal collaboration and communication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enterprises Can’t be Built on Silos – First, a Look at Internal Interoperability

It has become more and more clear that enterprises work better with overtly interconnected systems and business processes. Silos within enterprises both for systems and internal processes have caused a lot of problems. Enterprises, no matter the size, cannot have teams, or systems, operating in vacuums. Where too many silos persist, businesses are doomed, whether the silos are technology or human based.

 

Understanding how to reduce duplication in systems infrastructure, business processes, team activities, and strategy implementation does much to improve the health of the enterprise. Enterprises want to achieve efficiencies of operation and want to do more with fewer resources, so the elimination of duplications in systems and teams, and the increase of integration (systems) and collaboration (people) is essential.

 

Since we’re talking about the integrated enterprise, I see enterprise data integration as an illustrative “metaphor”. In most cases data integration endeavors to cut through almost everything in systems infrastructure and involves multiple teams, both IT and Business. Building really good DI processes requires the involvement and collaboration of many teams. Data integration solutions cannot be built in a vacuum to be effective; DI initiatives embody a metaphoric sense of interrelationships and interoperability: process, collaboration, disparate data feeds (information sources) coming together, business rules, business needs. People, business process and technology have worked together to achieve the right results. 

 

 

Social Capabilities and Strategies Appearing in Many Enterprise Software Solutions

Increasingly, enterprises are introducing and integrating social media for internal and external applications.  And now many “traditional” enterprise solutions are adding / integrating social capabilities, to enhance the usability and relevance of these solutions.

 

Business cases for social media include: internal implementations for enhanced collaboration and communication purposes for employees; external initiatives for better engagement and support of customers/buyers. Many social media guidelines rightly advise that introducing social practices and technology into an enterprise should come after a thorough understanding of what is to be accomplished, and then after an articulation of the strategy. Additionally, businesses have to figure out what cultural changes need to take place internally, for social to make a big difference. Business social process is something that people have to do authentically. Technology and tools do matter as a means of enacting and managing social business processes, but they are no substitute for strategic planning, best practices, real goals, and serious consideration for the human participants.

 

Beyond the social media technology that is being adopted by enterprises, many “traditional” enterprise applications are becoming more “social”. This is reasonable considering that software solutions are for use by people, whether employees, customers/buyers, or partners. Most software solutions are components of people-oriented processes. These “socializing” solutions include: BPM, BI, CRM, ERP, internal collaboration / intranet, and content management.

 

Recently Forrester’s Connie Moore - @cmooreforrester - commented on Twitter: “social computing has become the tipping point for businesses and vendors finally marrying collaboration and process” and then “Collaboration between business and business and business and IT is core to any successful #bpm effort.” Connie Moore has extended her coverage of BPM to include social capabilities that will transform BPM solutions.

 

For many software industry analysts and writers, there are no longer clear demarcations between software solution spaces.  The “classic” approach of separate software solution categories being covered by SME writers is giving way to analysis that acknowledges the interdependencies of different kinds of software solutions.  We are seeing more collaborative work across solutions, with social computing as a common thread of discussion.  Analyst firms like Altimeter Group and Forrester are working with more collaborative efforts from their staff analysts across formerly separate software solution spaces to reflect the realities of how enterprises operate.

 

 

And People Complete the Integrated Social Business

My tech background has a markedly strong emphasis on people since software companies are very people-intensive enterprises.  Many teams need to collaborate to accomplish company goals and customer needs, with the result that most teams are customer-oriented. If you have a career in software technology, it is essential to recognize the value of people, especially customers. Not surprisingly, many customers of software technology are driving the change to Social Business where the focus is more on people and less on tech.

 

It’s not just about why people buy or make technology decisions but about respecting people who are trying to accomplish business tasks and solve real problems, and who just want their software to work as advertised without a lot of pain to get there. Software technology ultimately is a product to be sold, so the focus must be on the purpose and real value the technology provides customers.  

 

On the software vendor side, people collaboration should be a top priority: collaborations to sell solutions, collaborations to contribute to customer/buyer success, collaboration with partners and customers for success. Businesses can be very successful if they encourage and engender internal cross-team collaborations focused on customer needs. The growing interest in Social CRM addresses how businesses develop customer relationships to contribute to customer success.

 

Social is partly about tapping into the connectedness that people are building with the web as a platform.  Social Business adoption by software vendors must be based on the fact that people and relationships are what really drive success and longevity. The lesson to enterprise management: Social media adoption has been driven by the people who want to use it to communicate and work efficiently, no matter the purpose.  Social media invaded enterprises because people really want to use it – because it is effective for what they are tasked to accomplish. 

 

 

“Social Business” practices have been around for years  

The essentials of Social Business have been around for years in many software enterprises – frequently as a “shadow” culture. A lot of employees in the software industry have intuitively understood and practiced aspects of the “social business”, recognizing the importance of the customer and of collaboration.  The process of selling software solutions to enterprises involves a lot of people working with many other people, for internal and external purposes, no matter the sales model.

 

Ironically employees, customers, partners have been open to adopting social capabilities as part of doing business; the executive level, however, is the laggard for authentic adoption of social collaboration culture and processes. Upper management often has impeded real efforts for social business and has also contributed to creating silos within the company and chasms between teams. Many software companies have been poorly structured for many years to be able to nurture “social business”. Usually not enough people and not enough budget have been allocated for fully supporting strong customer-centric processes and initiatives. 

 

It’s very important that executive and other management levels formalize strategies for Social Business and better empower the many employees who already intuitively know how to find and keep customers/buyers through social relationships and support for customer success.

 

Fully empowered collaboration with customers and partners will improve sales, product offerings, long-lasting relationships, and will lead to fewer problems. Enterprise teams will be better connected to customers, and to one another. And upper management may finally get real perspective on employee motivations as well as customer desires.

 

 

 

Profile of a Software Aficionado

Indeed, my software technology background contributes to my SME “schizophrenia”: Extensive stints as enterprise and small business developer, SE, solutions consultant, market and competitive intelligence analyst. Plus time served in multiple software spaces:

· developer and systems analyst for materials management systems in semiconductor manufacturing; also small business software solutions developer

· very deep dive in data integration solutions, for many years

· whirlwind couple of years providing strategic analysis for WCM/web experience management, social collaboration, presentation portal, web 2.0 apps, and transactional content management

· continuous auditing and analysis of SaaS, OSS, cloud computing, Agile -- impacts on software industry and on vendor business goals

 

 

 

  

Related articles:

 

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

 

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

 

The incongruous worlds of “data integration” – Making data accessible for any-size companies

 

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services  

 

 

Social collaboration in the enterprise: The heart – and goal – of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

 

Community and collaboration in business enterprises is about people working together more effectively, quickly, and proactively – to achieve the goals of the business as robustly as possible.  This may sound like a simplistic statement, but it seems to be eluding many companies that are adopting social media tools.

 

There is a constant stream of information on the internet on how to implementing social collaboration software in enterprises, both for internal and external purposes.  Quite a healthy industry of solutions, consultants and advisors has sprung into being.  Many blog posts and articles are devoted to recommending the best ways to take advantage of social media software.

 

But for many companies, implementation efforts for social collaboration software will be doomed to failure for one simple reason:  most enterprises have failed to engender a “collaboration culture” based on real human interaction. The executive management of many companies does not even understand what a “collaboration culture” is.

 

Frankly, executive management of many companies is hard put to authentically value employees – these companies want to de-humanize employees with such terms as “resources” and “human capital”, and think that it is enough if they sling around a few “mission statements” claiming that they “value” employees.

 

The proliferation and subsequent failure of traditional formal enterprise collaboration tools proves that collaboration is not successful just because there are software tools.  These formal collaboration solutions are usually unwieldy, result in silos of information,  are extremely opaque, and most importantly, fail to engage the humans for whom the collaboration venue is meant.

 

The newer social collaboration tools are better at ease-of-use, agility, relevance. But it is still essential that companies grow and nurture live collaboration cultures, where collaboration is a natural response for business activities, for any departments in the enterprise.  Planning a healthy collaboration culture also requires a dynamic plan for the role social media tools will play to bring the people in the company together in worthwhile interaction.

 

Returning to the human side of business won’t happen magically – it will take real work and real commitment, from the executive level through all levels of management and employee departments. 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services