Our Approach

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

Traditional approaches will not work.  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.

Ecosystem

A robust, integrated network of nodes and connections
When thinking of a business as a social ecosystem, it consists of a network of independent nodes and their interconnections. Internal departments, customer segments, and local area networks can all be thought of as independent nodes at the micro level. At a higher level, businesses function as part of a system comprised of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of smaller ecosystems. Addressing the business as a series of interconnected, yet independent nodes is key to an effective business design.

A holistic technology architecture
The technology within a social business ecosystem comprises devices, services, and applications that mix proprietary and open offerings. For example, this includes the hardware and software owned and managed by the firm’s IT department, in addition to personal devices and applications used by employees (which may not be standard-issue, e.g. iPhones, Firefox, Facebook, Twitter, individual blogs). A successful social business design takes a comprehensive and inclusive approach to all of these tools.

An expanded constituent base
It’s time for a new view of organizations. The people in a company’s ecosystem include employees as well as suppliers, distributors, customers, consumers, shareholders, local community, competitors, and others. These people all compromise the various nodes that make up the new social business ecosystem. The traditional pyramid-shaped organizational chart shouldn’t be flattened – it should be deconstructed to resemble an interconnected network instead.

Continual monitoring and measurement
Once properly mapped, an ecosystem’s breadth and depth can be monitored, as well as the strength of ties therein. By staying vigilant about ecosystem health, a social business can take action based on strategic goals. There are several factors that can be measured here to make an ecosystem more effective. Visually mapping an ecosystem gives us insight into its size, shape, density, types, and numbers of connections, types of roles, and patterns of reciprocal communication. Other analytics can pertain to email and intranet volume, social media activity, and manufacturing connectivity. Precision is critical; it’s not about getting everyone connected, it’s about getting the right groups connected in the right way.

Hivemind

A primary social calibration
As social tools and functionality are adopted more widely, it becomes less important for businesses to use traditional methods to force collaboration in the workplace, e.g. panoptic cubicle arrangements. Employees are entering the workforce socially engaged and used to collaborating. The social business hivemind is a new kind of corporate culture whereby all participants move together towards common goals.  Physicists refer to this as “synchronous lateral excitation.”

Distributed governance
The social business hivemind makes decisions and receives continuous reinforcement through business interactions: a social inclination resides within a company’s culture and tempers planning, decision-making, and work output. Employees approach work with a social and collaborative mindset; customers expect participation and engagement; suppliers anticipate optimized and efficient process towards common goals.

Measurement and cultivation
Hivemindedness can be measured by assessing levels of collective awareness, engagement, and participation. Measurement here focuses on subjective perceptions – analytics can include surveys, interviews, text analysis, and so on. The goal is always to gain insight into constituents’ attitudes towards the value they get from participating versus the potential for trust issues and conflicts that they perceive. Once perceptions are measured, they can be constantly cultivated and remeasured to move the dial.

Dynamic Signal

A new mode of authorship and ownership
In a socially-designed business, signals produced from all points are considered potentially relevant. Technology gives consumers the ability to author, own, and transmit signals, validated by search engines for relevance. In response, businesses can benefit from this dynamic information flow produced by constituents.

Communication as work, not for work
With Social Business Design, communication becomes an integral part of how workstreams relate to one another allowing decisions to be made with fresher information. Businesses progress towards strategic goals, under the assumption that all activities are on a “need to know” basis – and anyone and everyone needs to know, all the time.

Signal strength
The strength of a dynamic signal can be measured at transmission points and subsequently analyzed to drive business activity in response. For example, signaling within an ecosystem can be broken down into types and measured for frequency: status updates, email transmissions, or calendar updates can be assessed for signal strength or flow over time. When viewed in tandem with server traffic or signals derived from points in a manufacturing process, a business may be able to recognize obstacles in their current process or optimize this signal flow to achieve a particular business goal.

Metafilter

Collecting diverse data sets
As social businesses filter the tidal wave of information produced, they distill meaning from the qualitative and quantitative data emitted from their various nodes. Existing business intelligence tools help to create fairly orderly operating data sets, working in tandem with applications focused on parsing user-generated content that help make sense of unstructured data sets. APIs make two-way integration with public data sources increasingly seamless.

Compartmentalizing data
Social businesses require parallel processing of information so insight can be made actionable, faster. Information needs to be segmented into meaningful and manageable sets: what’s important to one person may be meaningless to another, but they must be able to process parts smaller than the whole.

Analyzing for meaning
Making sense of collective action, effective filtering, tagging, and sorting of data and measuring its impact can produce opportunities for social businesses to capture valuable insight buried deep in data sets. Here, almost all content types can provide meaningful data: shared documents, knowledge management activity and user-generated content can provide valuable insight into business processes and topical importance when metadata is deployed, collected, and measured in the right way.