Looking to the Frontiers of Social Business
Blog PostRecently I've been taking a close look at what is coming next in social business. While social media has grown to become standard in just about every company's business portfolio, it's just as clear that things are not standing still. The business blogs and customer forums of a half decade ago are still here (and still important), but the larger strategic discussion has moved on well beyond them to more transformative thinking, with approaches to match.
Connecting Digital Strategy with Social Business and Next-Gen Mobility
Blog PostHow do the overarching digital strategies of today's 21st century enterprise relate to social business and smart mobility? It's a question I've been asked more and more frequently as these two major new trends become primary areas of focus in organizations around the world. The reality is today that large organizations continue to struggle with how they are organizing around digital strategy in general. In this context I'm referring primarily to Web strategy -- including the various aspects of a business it touches -- since that's almost entirely where digital is headed as a whole. One of the aspects that stands out the most when I've worked with companies recently is that most traditional businesses often have a dramatically lower level of maturity around digital delivery of their capabilities than native Web firms. This despite it being almost twenty years since the Web arrived. It's clear there is significant impedance between the way digital business works and the way many companies still operate.
The Social Business Stack: The Elements
Blog PostTrying to stay up-to-date with the many moving parts of social business can be a full time job today. The technologies, trends, and techniques of social media as applied to business is evolving constantly and moving so quickly that it can be difficult to understand how all the pieces currently fit together. In information technology, we have long used the stack model to break down the description of a complex system into sets of related functions. It's not perfect in that it's a static view, and social business is very dynamic, but it's a good start and lets us achieve some useful intellectual control over the elements of social business and how they relate to each other.
2011 Sydney Social Business Summit
Blog PostFor the last two years, the Dachis Group has held a curated series of events around the world on the topic of Social Business, known as the Social Business Summit. We believe that helping organizations explore the relevant issues on this increasingly vital topic will help provide the background and insight to make decisions on acting on Social Business simpler and easier. As I explored recently in our Social Business series for CIOs, while social media is very much a full spectrum, company-wide activity, it will be business leaders that will provide the support to make it happen. So everyone can benefit from the information, we are releasing the 2011 Sydney Social Business Summit videos and presentation slides in their entirety. This opens up the leading-edge knowledge and experience assembled that day in a way that is very "Social Business" in nature.
Social Business Strategy: The CIO Shortlist
Blog Post, The Connected CompanyOn and off over the last year on ebizQ, in an ongoing series for large enterprise CIOs, I’ve been exploring how social business has begun overtaking the ongoing transition to digital business in many companies. The majority of large organizations have been investing in their digital business capabilities for over a decade now with varying
Moving Beyond Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement
Blog PostWhen we look back at the first decade of the 21st century, it will be obvious that a few momentous changes in the business and computing landscape occurred. Of these, one of the most profound has been a decreasing emphasis on systems of record and the move towards what are called systems of engagement. Over the last 30 years, information technology has transformed the business landscape by capturing, structuring, and automated a growing percentage of the information that our businesses require to operate. This has offered a multitude of benefits to the organizations that have heavily invested in IT, not the least that information technology has been the one area where world class companies typically invest more than average performers. This is in contrast to finance, HR, or procurement, where the best companies usually spend far less than middle-of-the-road companies.
The impact of social media on IT
Blog PostYesterday I explored in detail on ZDNet some of the issues that businesses are encountering as social media moves into the enterprise space in a truly strategic way this year. Not only is there a proliferation of new applications for external and internal social media, but traditional business applications are often getting social media capabilities
Organizing for social business: The issues
Blog PostHow best can employees and managers adapt to today's changing and increasingly social workplace? This has become one of the central questions as organizations look at social computing as a new primary channel in their organization, both amongst their workers as well as for their customers and business partners.
Reflections on Social Business Summit 2011 – Sydney and Austin
Blog PostOver the last year, the discussion of the many business uses of social media has been coalescing into an industry-wide, interdisciplinary conversation that's increasingly focused around the moniker of 'social business.' This conversation -- which many think provides the clearest perspective yet on how social computing is transforming how we work -- has begun to connect, integrate, and reconcile the gamut of enterprise social media into something more useful, specific, and business-directed. As we better discern the moving parts of social business and how they relate to each other, the opportunities and road ahead has resolved more clearly while emerging new horizons are also being mapped out.
Introducing The Social Business Unit
Blog PostOne of the trends that we clearly see this year is that organizations are taking stock of all their social media efforts, internally and externally. Usually they are trying to get beyond the initial learning years and the resulting early chaos to determine how they should best be structured to deal with what has become the world's largest and most engaged marketplace. And, while everyone can and should be a foot solider in the modern social enterprise, businesses are also starting to realize that the days of isolated tactical experiments are drawing to a close.