Emerging Opportunities

As the idea of work is changing for employees and other stakeholders in a business, a crucial opportunity has emerged for businesses to become more flexible and open – increasing efficiency and reducing inertia.

Technology

It goes without saying that technological evolution has fueled every major business revolution, from agrarian to industrial. But every major business shift was spurred on by innovations that were seemingly unpredictable, yet visible to those with keen foresight.

Currently, the ever-increasing overlap between consumer and enterprise technology is opening up a number of opportunities for businesses to evolve – and this continued overlap will only increase the pace of change. Exploiting these trends requires more than simply adopting new technologies. It requires forward-looking organizations to embrace change, mapping these trends to the strategic goals of the business.

Society

Social networks are fundamental to how people communicate with one another and with companies. Organizations that can embrace new technology, procesess, and attitudes stand to benefit greatly; from better-engaged customers to better-connected employee networks, businesses have a chance to leverage connectedness to achieve strategic goals.

Social tools are making relationships engaged and collaborative – among users, among employees, and between users and brands in every industry. How companies adopt these tools to evolve will set them apart.

Work

The way people work has changed dramatically, as new tools and technology challenge the traditional rules of how and when people can do their jobs. This new definition of work as a constant and collaborative function means that organizations have an opportunity to adapt in order to leverage a new ethos of the hyper-connected, “always-on” workforce.

As the idea of work is changing for employees and other stakeholders in a business, a crucial opportunity has emerged for businesses to become more flexible and open – increasing efficiency and reducing inertia.

New Challenges

Trends in technology, society, and work converge to create enormous opportunity for businesses to become more effective, efficient, transparent, and agile. But navigating the challenges that these emerging trends present demands a willingness to embrace change and a fundamentally different approach to how business gets done.

Filter Failure

Technological advances have given us countless new tools to produce content, but they come with specific challenges in the form of information overload. Filter failure is the inability to intelligently manage and reuse this volume of content in a meaningful way, on both a human and a systems level. Individuals are unable to synthesize and understand the vast amounts of information being generated by an organization.

Isolation Vs. Integration

Modern organizations have always struggled to manage internal silos. When pools of knowledge and business processes develop in isolation, the entire organization suffers. As these organizations become more complex and adapt to emerging trends from within and out, sharing and managing knowledge across the business becomes increasingly difficult. Isolation presents concrete challenges to growing, dynamic businesses.

Silos isolate work and information within organizations, creating lots of new, varied, and often repetitive processes and pieces of data. Most businesses operate as fragmented ecosystems where data is captured but held from those who need it, limiting what goals can be accomplished.

Legacy Structures

New trends, no matter how revolutionary, must still overcome the limitations of the past before becoming fully adopted. Legacy systems and platforms, cultural elements, and governance requirements all work to limit the organization’s willingness to experiment and innovate.

In order to meet these looming challenges, businesses need to fully understand the legacy structures in place within an organization and determine how to leverage these structures while implementing new processes to improve results.

Our Approach

Trends in technology, society, and the workplace are changing the way we do business. We need to rethink how we structure our organizations to take advantage of these emerging trends while overcoming associated challenges. Enter Social Business Design:

The intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.

Social Business Design is a holistic, comprehensive business architecture that helps an organization improve value exchange among constituents. The Social Business Design framework consists of four mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive archetypes:

• Ecosystem
• Hivemind
• Dynamic Signal
• Metafilter

Every business contains these archetypes; however, the extent to which they are dynamic and socially calibrated can typically be improved. Social business design provides insight to help measure and manage these areas to produce improved and emergent outcomes.

Results

So what does this all add up to? When an enterprise chooses to recast itself with Social Business Design, two types of outcomes will be produced.

Improved Outcomes

By redesigning customer participation, workforce collaboration, and business partner optimization from the perspective of the four core archetypes of Ecosystem, Hivemind, Dynamic Signal, and Metafilter, a company will increase value from its business activities. What this means is that application of Social Business Design concretely impacts how people work, the efficiency of process, and effectiveness of technology infrastructure. Business goals and objectives will be achieved with better outcomes than expected.

Emergent Outcomes

The most compelling outcomes are the ones that cannot be immediately predicted, but will appear over time as a result of the altered system working in dynamic, social calibration. We call these Emergent Outcomes and their potential inherently lies beyond the current scope and focus of the business. Being emergent, these outcomes become apparent only with a shift in business operations. Their existence lies on the border between the knowable and the unknown, requiring companies to forge ahead to reveal emergent opportunity.

As organizations become more adaptive to constituent needs, they create symbiotic relationships as social business becomes business as usual. Doing away with traditional internal obstacles to growth and becoming more responsive to its ecosystem, a company organized around Social Business Design stands to gain new value previously unseen or anticipated.