From Social Tools to Social Business Design

There has been a lot of debate about the terminology surrounding social computing, social software, Enterprise 2.0 and Social business design, as Peter Kim talked about here recently.

For me, the key issue is whether or not you believe software alone is sufficient to engineer fundamental business change. In some cases, perhaps it can; but in general, simply grafting new tools and systems onto existing business culture and practices is unlikely to result in the change we are looking to achieve.

Traditionally, this has been addressed through the idea of adoption of tools – a secondary process of persuasion, education and engagement that is required to get people using new software. But tool use in itself is not a meaningful outcome. What many Enterprise 2.0 practitioners mean when they talk about adoption is the adoption of new ways of working, but there is not a direct and inevitable link between this and tool use if the underlying context of business process does not change. I spoke about this at greater length earlier this year in Boston.

If we look back, one of the drivers for Enterprise 2.0 was the Cambrian explosion of innovation and new tools in the consumer world of Web 2.0, which inspired people to take the lessons of blogs, social networks, social bookmarking, RSS and other tools inside the enterprise to rejuvenate the stagnant rock pools of corporate IT. This process is ongoing and necessary. But it is not enough.

Some of the most important features of the social web and its new tools are not manifested in the software per se, but in the affordances and network effects they can create, and in some of the lessons they have taught us about incentives, behaviour, feedback, information networking, ambient awareness and so on. These have implications not just for which tools we use, but for how we see the structure of organisations and networks, and how we organise work.

Many business processes are the result of an accretion of lots of small rules, workflows or responses to prior problems or risks that the business has faced in the past. Taken as a whole, the focus on management by repeatable process has gradually made organisations less and less agile, and more and more expensive to run. This is why we continue to see new competitors emerge without the baggage of legacy process in various sectors that should be dominated by well-established incumbents. We have all seen examples inside companies where groups of intelligent people collectively do something they all agree is dumb, but that is what the process (and sometimes culture) demands. This is not just a feature of the commercial sector either. Governments and public sector bodies have been run for many years as if they cannot trust their employees to do the right thing, and rigidly following a process regardless of the outcome is completely acceptable, or as the old joke has it: the operation was a success but the patient died.

Society as a whole seems to be moving away from this process-driven culture in many areas of our lives, and in computing we have long since moved away from an obsession with automation and artificial intelligence towards a recognition that augmenting human intelligence and capabilities is a more sensible use of processing power, and more effective. Even proponents of Knowledge Management (KM) have moved away from the obsession with software solutions, systematisation and explicit knowledge capture, returning to the basic principles that lie behind this field of enquiry before it became a software vendor-fest. Dave Snowden’s latest mini-definition of KM, for example, is really all about helping people make better decisions:

The purpose of knowledge management is to provide support for improved decision making and innovation throughout the organization. This is achieved through the effective management of human intuition and experience augmented by the provision of information, processes and technology together with training and mentoring programmes.

So if social business design goes beyond the implementation of social software to make organisational design more socially calibrated, with all the potential for greater efficiency, agility and value creation that implies, then where do we begin?

Firstly, I think the four archetypes of social business design provide useful lenses through which to view a business or department, and we are already using them in our consulting to help identify where to begin. These are not just theoretical constructs, but rather ways of thinking about some of the key features of social computing, as already practised, and social business design:

• Ecosystem: assessing the health of your networks, identifying structural holes and other issues that prevent people finding and connecting with each other to get things done. Typically involves social networks analysis and measurement, but also standard workflow and task-fulfilment analysis.
• Hivemind: looking at how well these networks are harnessing informal knowledge sharing and collective intelligence, and whether or not customers and partners are involved in this process of creating meaning. Examples of tools in this area include social bookmarking, Digg-type ratings and even collaborative wiki spaces.
• Dynamic Signals: looking at how to make hidden data visible and make sharing a by-product of action to create ambient awareness of what others in the business are doing. Internal twitter-type tools are useful here for real-time signals, as well as good old RSS feeds and others. These types of dynamic feedback are key to evolutionary improvement and innovation, as we have seen in the social web.
• Metafilter: helping people cope with information overload and turn signals into actionable insights, and improving findability using social networks. Simple examples might include social search, personal dashboards or alerting systems. We think this area will increase in importance as more and more social tools achieve adoption.

Second, we need to look at how to apply these ideas from different business perspectives, such as internal collaboration, external customer engagement and the wider value chain, involving partners and the market as a whole.

Third, on a practical level, I think any intervention needs to achieve the right blend of strategic goals, tactical use cases and straightforward problem solving using social tools. Too much strategic consulting in large organisations today fails to embrace the people it will impact, making them part of the solution, and it leaves implementation to others lower down the food chain. Covering the whole stack from strategy to implementation makes more sense and is more accountable. Although software is not the only answer, there is no doubt that the existing backward state of internal IT – in particular the factory model of one-size-fits-all provision that we have talked about for years – is a major block on progress. Therefore, there are real and immediate benefits to be achieved by giving people and groups smarter, simpler social tools that they can use to get their job done, and this can light little fires of emergent behaviour that are so important in stimulating change and showing what can be done. Top-down and bottom-up are not mutually exclusive. We need to work at both ends simultaneously and create more feedback loops between them.

This implies that we need to focus on creating longitudinal programmes for social business design inside organisations, which raises the question of who owns and manages such a programme given it is likely to cut across internal communication, know how, business development, marketing and IT, but does not comfortably sit within any one of these areas. Given the huge potential for efficiencies and time/cost savings that social business brings into play, these programmes will pay for themselves over time in many cases, but in addition to investment, the most important success factor in my view will be to avoid being dragged down into becoming simply an IT project, under IT governance, or a conventional change programme.

Running a programme of activities and projects, with clear feedback, monitoring and evaluation criteria, will also help create some objective measures of success. Until now, running stand-alone pilot projects has sometimes been a hit-and-miss way of influencing change, partly because of the scale issues that Michael Idinopulos has written about and partly because however successful some pilots become, if they are politically vulnerable or seen as marginal, then they can be canned anyway.

It will be a fascinating journey from social tools to social business design, and whilst we have lots of ideas based on six years work bringing simpler, smarter social tools into organisations of all kinds, we are of course still at the early stages of what feels like a major sea change in the relationship between people, technology and organisations. We don’t have all the answers, and we are always open to learning from the experience or insights of others, so we welcome your feedback.