“Mama Said Knock You Out”

- LL Cool J

While I founded the company several months earlier, this week marks 3 years since I announced the formation of Dachis Group.

To put things in perspective:

Over the last 17 years, I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to work with some of the world’s most talented professionals for some of the largest companies in the world helping to pioneer the nascent digital communications field we know today.

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to play a small role in helping shape the way businesses navigate the most profound and exciting shift in the communications landscape in the history of mankind.

From digital change management, user experience design, information architecture, mobile application development, eCommerce, eBusiness, SEO, SEM, and digital advertising, to Web 2.0, E 2.0, Social Networks, Social Business and Social Business Design, not everyone has always understood the profound and fundamental impact the shifts we experienced and were trying to define for clients, were having on the future of business.

That’s OK.  Re-contextualizing things can be a jarring experience. It’s not easy describing the future to those that are wedded to the past or without a view beyond the present.

Throughout the span of that time period, I have been un-wavering in my belief that the most exciting times are ahead of us and that these dramatic shifts we have seen over the past decade and a half have only been the precursors to the even more profound set of changes we have yet to see.

Social Business Opportunities Defined:

John Hagel, who recently spoke at our Social Business Summit, along with John Seely Brown has written about comparing the diminishing returns generated from an economic model based on ‘knowledge stocks’ to the increasing returns generated from ‘knowledge flows’ and moving from ‘stable environments’ to ‘dynamic environments’.

Dave Gray has spoken and written about the resilience of a connected company and how a more fluid, living breathing company that listens, connects, communicates, participates, engages, and creates actions to exchange value with its constituents is one that will survive longer and thrive.

Social Business Design is the intentional creation of socially calibrated organizations. The purposeful creation of organizations that are designed and organized to listen, connect, communicate, participate, engage, and create action from its constituents.

Why Social Business Design? 1) Simply put, because it’s not going to happen all by itself, and 2) Because a company that is set up and organized to be more engaged with its constituents will first create leveraged outcomes capturing dramatically greater market opportunities and dramatically more operational efficiencies by removing the friction in communications from the core functions of a business. Second, it will create emergent outcomes created from the serendipitous connections and communications that might not have come otherwise, thus pulling the business in dynamic new directions.

Social Businesses by design, will survive longer, thrive, and generate increasing returns.

We believe that every business will become a social business.

Thinking ahead:  Social Business Intelligence

Moving forward.

Initially, we have seen businesses exploring how to organize for Social Business by designing and experimenting with new methods, process, tools, and by testing strategy and engagement programs to find out what works and what doesn’t. Some businesses are just starting to experiment and others are further along a path. In many instances efforts are tactical, and in others, efforts are applied with a laser focus on proper strategy and getting things right for the future. We’ve seen some amazing successes and some fantastic failures across various business functions and industry verticals, but experimentation leads to figuring things out and we are seeing our clients get it right.

The real opportunities begin to realize value materialized from integrating and aggregating the strategies and tactics that worked well in the initial phases of the journey to operationalize them into the core functions of business. This involves deeply integrating forms of listening, connecting, communication, participation, engagement, and constituent action throughout all business functions.  This will take the form of an integrated Social Business stack.  Many businesses may not be staffed, trained, or have resources dedicated to managing Social Business, but will realize that these integrated and aggregated forms of Social Business are increasingly the mission critical components to operating and succeeding in this networked economy and seek solutions to manage these efforts.

Going forward, it isn’t enough to just simply connect or communicate.  An ongoing never ending effort will be required to optimize Social Business operations by gaining insights and intelligence derived from the analysis of operationalized social signal data in the Social Business Graph and driving action on the part of the company.  Social Business Intelligence is the key to the intentional creation of socially calibrated organizations.

Without question, every single day we have been 100% focused on building a company to harness the power of Social Business Intelligence because we have always believed that Social Business Intelligence driven insights and action will be what powers the business of the future.