At Dachis Group, we’re working with a major enterprise client who is in the long process of shifting their business model from being a manufacturer of a single line of devices, to one who needs to harness innovation to create a range of ever more relevant consumer products. The 100, 000+ employee organization (Let’s call them Unitrode) has a lot of work to do. Their desired transformation requires a major internal re-think of every possible process, including how marketing and innovation resources can be re-aligned and harnessed to confront this new reality.  This company needs independent thinkers, who have an active stance toward change and innovation.  Allowing a passive population of cube-dwellers is a major risk to transformation.

Content is King

Outside the business case for change, and the communications platforms necessary to even launch such a project, one common element at the core of this transformation is the value and motivational quality of content.  All organizations struggle to share IP, and move thoughts and innovations to the groups that need it.

Vast networks struggle to keep up with the load, as PowerPoint decks and meeting requests flood in-boxes. So enamored are we with deliverables that conference rooms are designed around the projected screen, with large leather chairs in which to sit back and take it all in. All of this passive consumption has its costs, creating apathy and a sense of disenfranchisement within organizations.

Innovators are Critical to Success

What’s missing in this equation is the value of the ideas at the core of all this activity.  Ideas are the core of IP- presentation is not.  We’ve been working hard in our partnership with Unitrode to define what valuable content IS, and what are the factors that go into creating it.  Since the efficient and compelling movement of ideas is paramount to transformation, we’ve put in some time focusing on how an idea moves, what makes it compelling, and what forms the ultimate value to a company in the long term.

Deliverables waste energy

Consider the standard PowerPoint deck that we’re all subjected to on a regular basis. If it is created and merely uploaded to a location online, (maybe the lonely and under-used Wiki), it rises to the standard of Available, and perhaps Accessible (as long as the creator sends out an email about it to everyone on a distribution list.)  True, people can find it, but then what?  Will anyone bother? Is it possible to quickly understand the core points, and its relevance to the reader? How does any of it create new behaviors or innovation?  Is any of it owned by an individual, backed up by passion and dedication?

Content with Empathy is Motivation

We’ve discovered a relationship among three points that can help recover idea-value for an organization:

• Empathy
• Accountability
• Engagement

Consider the following diagram:

The higher one can be on this diagram the better, as you will see.

You’ll notice that in our deliverable example above, the level of content value is relatively low, since it is not tied to any audience or outcome. The time and effort in creating the deliverable is wasted, and the idea-value is potentially lost. In fact, the mere existence of this semi-relevant item on the network has a negative effect. It creates a culture of apathy as successive deliverables keep happening with so little apparent value to the reader. Where are the ideas?

This is a pretty common practice at Unitrode, and I would hazard a guess at your organization too.

Empathy Fosters Engagement

What if we consider the packaging of an idea differently? What if we can tie outcomes to the value of personal input and collaboration? What if we invite colleagues in, and ask for input along the way? Who says it needs to be polished and presented on a projector? What if we work in low-res, on sketches and on white-boards? By not focusing on the deliverable value, but on the quality of the idea within, we stand to motivate and engage people to a much higher degree. By helping focus colleagues on the value of their direct input, we stand to create a sense of accountability as ideas spread and evolve.

Remember the deck that someone posted on the Wiki? What if it came with this email attached?

By simply providing respect to others’ contributions and time, we hope to foster a sense of collaboration and active ownership of IP. By inviting others into a dialog, and tying success to their contributions, we hope to overcome apathy and create engaged innovators.

What you can do with this

We’re working with Unitrode to help everyone involved see the value in this model. It seems like a simple step to add a few lines to an email, but try it in your environment. Consider the model as you create anything for consumption. What are you asking your reader to do? Do they have critical input?  Is there something that relies on their expertise directly for success?  By inviting others in to a process, we stand to benefit from the value of their engagement and contributions. This is the core of collaboration- the sharing and development of ideas.

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.

Updating Digital Strategy For Social Business and Mobile

The long-term ramifications of the Web continue to be felt by most organizations, particularly since the evolution of the Internet has not only picked up pace, it’s now profoundly situated in the way society and culture works today. Businesses do increasingly feel the need to catch up and reconcile themselves with these broad changes. Conscious attempts at this include formulating a comprehensive view of what digital strategy means today and this is what we’ll explore in some detail here.

Though recent global trends such as social media and next-generation mobile have both appeared over the last five years, an eternity in the online world, most businesses are still only engaging peripherally in these areas. They are the proverbial digital immigrants often significantly behind the curve compared to their Web native counterparts. While most companies have started using social media or providing mobile experiences, the efforts are often experimental and too-often poorly integrated with their older channels such as Web presence, traditional marketing, e-mail, etc. to be truly effective or transformative to their organization.

The good news is that it’s abundantly clear that companies clearly perceive the need to change, even if they are experiencing continuing trouble in deciding on how best to proceed. For example, a new and more detailed breakdown of Jive’s recent social business survey shows that while three quarters of senior executives believe social media is of major importance to their business right now, only 27% think it’s a top strategic priority. However, as I recently explored in detail, there has already been a tectonic shift in the way the world communicates and engages. Traditional channels are declining rapidly in effectiveness, while new channels with entirely new sensibilities and modes of behavior are replacing them.

We also should not forget that the shift to social business is far more than just a channel switch for the world population. Along with it comes a global behavior change in how the people engage with each other. This discussion holds true to a lesser extent of next-gen mobility as well. More importantly, while social business and mobility are sometimes perceived separately, a recent report on mobility by Forrester’s TJ Keitt, explains why they are so deeply connected and belong together, technology strategists “must now must have a mobile-first mindset when designing workplace policies.”

Crafting The Big Picture

As I alluded to above, a major question I’ve been getting from senior executives quite consistently recently is how these changes relate to the existing digital strategies they’ve been crafting and refining over the years. What they really want to know is if the strategic application of social media and next-gen mobility can be smoothly incorporated or otherwise slipstreamed into what they’re doing today. The short answer is that yes, there is clear overlap and connectedness in this space. But the less happy news is that that successful admission requires much deeper rethinking of the way the business operates, particularly the timeless issues of control, trust, and risk. This is part of the impedance I referred to earlier and is much harder for organizations to work through, which is why many have done so only partially. Consequently, much social business and next-gen mobility consists of “paving the cowpath” instead of getting down to the difficult yet rewarding work of transformation the organization to new modes of operation. Fortunately, part of the solution lies in clearly and explicitly connecting your digital strategy with social business and next-gen mobility instead of implementing it side-by-side or in a vacuum. Of course, it’s usually easier said than done.

We should not forget that most digital strategies are reflections of the parts of the business that were involved in created them. Typically such initiatives are medium to long-term planning tools for marketing or customer relationship management (CRM) departments. Sometimes they are more B2B, Web presence, or e-commerce focused. But whatever their primary goal, the digital strategy picture of today’s business landscape must be complex, nuanced, and filled with a great many (and still growing) critical activities that must be addressed to remain relevant in the marketplace.

Depicted above is an up-to-date representation of the major moving parts of a modern digital strategy, including how social business and next-gen mobility relate. It is not exhaustive but I believe it does successfully connect the main elements of Web strategy to the two major new components that most companies have now added to their operational priority lists in the last two years. Though every company’s digital strategy will vary, there are typically components of social business and mobile that aren’t part of a digital strategy proper yet are a pre-requisite for success. The level of appropriate cross-over is largely up to organizations to decide and prioritize for themselves. I should note that the view of digital strategy shown here holds fairly true for corporations, government, and non-government organizations and indeed, for most entities large and small. Note that this view does not include management, budgeting, policy, or governance functions, which are separate from this functional view of digital strategy.

The Elements of Digital Strategy

Exploring the visual conception of digital strategy above, here is a brief tour through the various elements and how they are connected to and reinforce each other. These explanations are neither complete or sophisticated enough to use as their own basis. For that, you’ll need to delve into the subjects themselves and map your own requirements onto them. When possible, I’m provided supporting links and explanations to assist in this.

The list below travels roughly clockwise around the digital strategy visual above starting with social media marketing:

• Social Media Marketing. One of the earliest areas of focus in social business, social media marketing remains a major strategic focus in most organizations and will be for some time. Covering an enormous amount of territory, social media marketing is typically the easiest and least risky to start with and is increasingly affecting all areas of digital strategy. Consequently, social media marketing is farthest along in capability in many organization skill levels, capability development in areas such as community management, tool selection, and so on. One of the biggest challenges in this area remains the impedance between push marketing and engagement marketing. In general, simply copying push marketing techniques into social media channels doesn’t work well. The best results come from strategically partnering with the marketplace to jointly co-create the the desired outcomes and network effects. Social media marketing is now near the end of its beginning, and a lot has been learned about how to unlock real ROI with it.
• Demand Generation. A relatively new aspect of digital marketing, demand generation consists of targeted digital awareness efforts to drive an understanding and interest in a product or service. Most frequently used in business to business, public sector, and longer term business-to-consumer (B2C) sales cycles, demand generation involves multiple areas of marketing. It has been described as the fusion of marketing and sales into a holistic effort using sophisticated support tools that combine data management and intelligence to reach strategic goals. Effective social business integration has also been appearing recently in demand generation platforms like Eloqua.
• Search Engine Optimization. Long a part of Web strategy, SEO is as important as ever as the proliferation of content accelerates. With pace of content creation increasing, the vast majority of it being user generated, SEO is the intentional treatment of Web markup to ensure that content, traditional and social media both, are readily discoverable. SEO is important both externally as well as internally to an organization and remains a key aspect of digital strategy, though internal implementation is typically neglected to the extent that productivity and efficiency suffers in many organizations making it difficult to locate information on intranets. SEO itself continues to evolve and expand as video, speech recognition (for audio), semantic, and social search engine optimization have entered the picture.
• Search Engine Marketing. Tightly coupled with SEO capabilities, SEM is the marketing aspect of SEO to promote Web sites and content to increase their visibility for sales and branding purposes.
• Social Networking Services (SNS) Apps. Applications embedded into social networks have become particularly significant as engagement mechanisms via the co-location of a convenient and potent user experience within the social networking experience. By tapping into users’ activity streams and social graphs, social networking applications have both the immediacy and full social context of their users to create a high-impact and shared social experience. SNS apps run the gamut of purposes including informational, productivity, gaming, and marketing. Most popular in the consumer world, where market leader Facebook has hundreds of thousands of available apps, social apps are now beginning to move seriously into the enterprise as well.
• Online Advertising. While all businesses must have an online advertising strategy, I find that it is underaddressed in all but the most sophisticated Web industry firms where arbitrage and adaptive ad strategy is commonplace. For example, Amazon allows competitive ads on their own product pages, allowing them to generate revenue on the momentary visitor engagement, even if the customer decide to purchase a product elsewhere. Advertising now goes well beyond text ads into sophisticated user experiences that leverage rich media, social media, cross-platform experiences, contests, co-creation, and carefully designed demand generation funnels.
• Consumer Social Media. The early world of consumer social media consisting of blogs, wikis, and simple social networks has exploded into a sophisticated world of global social networks, mobile applications, and aggregation involving the majority of the developed world population. Social business strategy connects to this complex landscape by exploring the many motivations and options in engaging with consumer social media to create better business outcomes. I find that many strategists are still not aware that most of the world now uses social media for communication and collaboration, over virtually all other forms of human interaction. Thus, if your organization is looking at engaging the marketplace, consumer social media is at the top of the list even while legacy channels still need to exist for continuity and consistency, while they still bring value.
• Social CRM. Customer relationship management has been moving into the social sphere for several years now, though the practice is still early in the maturity stages. CRM itself covers the gamut from sales, marketing, customer services, and technical support, and each one of these aspects can benefit from social media. Pre-sales Facebook engagement, online support communities, and crowdsourced technical support are typical uses of Social CRM, with world class examples being GetSatisfaction and Fixya, respectively, have shown that CRM costs can be significant reduced while simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Customer Communities. A while back I noted that the best customer communities were often created by customers themselves, instead of by the companies whose products or services they care about. Intentionally creating a successful community is still more of an art form than science, yet some companies have been very successful at it, most notably SAP. Customer communities, which started as little more than online discussion forums, have gone on to become a key differentiator in the way that businesses engage with the marketplace. In this new era, the traditional static corporate Web site is usually a marginalized brochure, with the more meaningful and productive aspects of customer engagement taking place in the structured and unstructured activities of online communities.
• Community Management. A vital yet growing aspect of digital strategy, community management provides the needed oversight, moderation, and support that social media needs to be successful and sustainable long-term. Often informal, and increasingly recognized as a key function, community management has been gaining respect as a indispensable capability of modern digital experiences that can assure higher levels of success.
• Affiliate Portals and Communities. These days I hear from a lot of companies that no longer have the staff to reach out to and directly support thousands of business partners and affiliates. These can be everything from supporting broker networks and franchisees to managing suppliers and licensees. Private label communities and social networks have become a prime tool in servicing these constituencies with a fraction of the staff, yet frequently lead to higher levels of awareness, engagement, service, and transaction levels than before.
• Social Supply Chains and Open APIs. While supply chain management has been one of the last bastions of traditional business to be affected by social media, that is beginning to change. The most recent significant case study is Teva Pharmaceuticals, which reported a manufacturing cycle time reduction of 40% as well as reducing supplier lead time by up to 60% by applying social software to communication challenges. The other related — and just as big — story is open supply chains, typically via open APIs and supported through developer communities, which has lead to a major shake-up in the way business partnerships are digitally delivered.
• Innovation Management and Crowdsourcing. Peer-production of ideas and work has become an increasingly popular topic as the tools and techniques have matured. Idea management tools using social collaboration, such as Spigit, and crowdsourcing platforms like Crowdspring or Mechanical Turk have led to a small and steadily growing revolution in the way business gets done. I’ve explored the growth of this topic in detail before, but it’s clear it’s just ramping up as co-creation increasingly becomes the norm in the way innovation and work output is achieved today.
• Workforce Collaboration. Also known as Enterprise 2.0, internal social media has become a very popular topic in the enterprise these days. The way social media is entering organizations varies widely and will often form an initial beachhead in social content management, enterprise social networks, even (and more recently), unified communications. While interest in social intranets in particular is currently on the upswing, the business results are in from many different surveys and case studies: Information can be found faster, knowledge is retained better, and employees are more efficient and productive when there is widespread social collaboration.
• Web Presence. One of the earlier elements of Web strategy, Web presence now must take into account rich media, CRM, mobility, e-commerce, and more. Often Web presence is put into a silo next to, rather than integrated with, newer digital capabilities since the platforms and tools upon which it is based is either aging or technologically incapable of moving into the present. Web presence remains an important part of digital strategy, but its relevance is steadily being eroded by newer forms of engagement, particularly social media. Proactive firms will find ways to reconcile newer digital strategy elements with what’s becoming a legacy channel for a growing number of organizations.
• Microsites. The darling of targeted engagement a few years back, microsites remain a popular way to narrowcast online to a target audience or community to increase relevance, deepen reach, and foster engagement. Social microsites have become the next generation of microsite and it can be argued that Facebook pages themselves have become the ultimate microsite platform.
• E-commerce. The long and steady growth of e-commerce has continued unabated and is on pace to grow into a quarter trillion dollar business in the U.S. alone by 2014. The latest developments include the “Grouponing” phenomenon of connecting discount e-commerce to local business, mobile e-commerce and payment systems, as well as social SEO (now the leader in driving inbound leads) and gaming. Doing businesses online is a booming business, but new entrants will need to use existing distribution networks to catch up while deeply incorporating mobile and social into their efforts.
• Influencer Engagement. The premise here is that it’s more scalable and easier to reach influencers directly and take advantage of the audiences they’ve created for themselves, rather than reproduce their respective engagement level. While still an important part of any digital marketing strategy, influencer engagement remains largely a bespoke activity while the tools for doing it more scalably are still in their infancy.
• Analytics and Business Intelligence. Along with Big Data, analytics and business intelligence across the digital spectrum is one of the hot spaces in the industry right now for its promise to derive deep insights and harvest value from the endless streams of social activity taking place today. It’s one of the major reasons we developed and recently launched our Social Business Index and why other companies, such as Salesforce with their Radian6 acquisition, have been focusing their attention on it as well. The premise here is that companies that can make sense of combined behavior of their workers, customers, and partners and make meaningful use of their collective intelligence will have a real competitive advantage.
• Digital Branding. Branding remains an essential component of digital strategy, even while brands themselves are becoming ever more directly influenced by their customers. The rise in customer-driven marketing and advertising is only matched these days by related branding efforts, which despite cautionary notes to retain essential control, have already been conducted by some of the world’s largest and most influential companies including Ford, Kraft, and LG.
• E-mail Campaigns. While e-mail is finally in decline in terms of usage, it remains an integral part of digital strategy for the foreseeable future. With the rise of spam and social networks, e-mail is no longer the particularly appealing channel it once was yet it’s still an important touchpoint for CRM and to a lesser extent marketing.
• Location Services. Location-awareness consist of GPS, compass, RFID and other sensors in mobile devices to drive marketing, sales, CRM, and operations. Still in its early stages for most businesses, location-awareness can drive personalization, useful geographic context, analytics, and usage efficiencies in general for many kinds of applications. Digital strategies should maintain a proactive roadmap for where ambient location information can be incorporated over time to improve the digital user experience along with their supporting capabilities.
• Mobility Platform Support. Businesses are getting serious this year in adding support for iOS and Android platforms for service delivery of internal and external mobile applications. This requires application development capability and operations support as well as matching analytics, branding, advertising, and other related aspects of digital strategy.
• Mobile Content Enablement. Mobility support usually includes updating existing content and layout so that it works well with today’s newer mobile devices. This can be extensively automated and is also generally less challenging than developing entirely new mobile applications, though it is also often less effective. Content enablement for mobile can involve a wide range of activities including converting Flash to HTML 5 friendly formats, reformatting and testing Web forms and applications, and wholesale stylesheet/document repository transformation so that existing information assets are readily usable in popular mobile form factors.
• Consumer and Customer Mobile Apps. The barriers to delivering high quality user experience continue to drop as the cost of high quality mobile app development falls. There is no avoiding the fact that mobile apps are becoming one of today’s prime customer touchpoints. One of the single most effective ways to engage with someone under 30 is to have your app on the first or second screen of their smart mobile device. Mobile applications are on track to become one of the leading ways to engage in the digital marketplace. In my opinion, virtually all companies should be developing competency in this space and ensuring integration with the rest of their Web strategy.
• Mobile Messaging. SMS and MMS still have some life left in them and indeed remain one of the most popular communication services on the planet. However, they are threatened by new proprietary services such as Apple’s recently announced iMessage service and a growing chorus of independent providers such as Pinger’s popular Textfree app. Despite the technologies long history, businesses are just now beginning to build up real competency in mobile messaging for CRM and marketing (and to a lesser extent co-creation). The coming market fragmentation with major new non-carrier messaging services will likely just be a curve in the road. In general I anticipate that mobile messaging will be even more integrated into new digital touchpoints.
• Mobile Line of Business Apps. The internal business use of mobile apps is growing in leaps and bounds. Most CIOs I speak with these days are now under significant pressure to deliver existing services via iPads, tablets, and smartphones. While internal app stores are a few years away for most organizations, content and application enablement are now well under way in many companies. Digital strategies typically don’t explore internal apps nearly as much as external, but that may change given the amount of audience blur developing across the channel.
• Mobile Operations. A fair amount of operational competency and infrastructure development must be brought to bear the deploy the full experience of smart mobile in the enterprise. Bandwidth management for video chat is just one example of the headaches that mobile operations makes acute. Investment in all manner of smart mobile skills is another key area required to fully capitalize on what is one of the fasted growing segments of computing today. Operational capability is needed to deliver successfully on digital strategy in a timely fashion. Planners should be aware of capability levels and should proactive pursue and support funding to develop this area of their organization.
• Mobile App Stores. App stores are positioned to be the solution delivery conduit for both external and internal mobile applications for the foreseeable future. Digital strategies should plan for this on their roadmaps. While app stores are already the primary acquisition channel today on smart mobile devices, the enterprise itself (as well as the supporting technology) has a long journey to resolve issues around data security, provisioning, and governance.
• Mobile Security. Not part of digital strategy normally, yet impactful on it, mobile security is going to be a hot topic this year and next, particularly on platforms that are less controlled such as Android. Ensuring customers and workers have a safe and effective mobile experience will be a high priority — though sometimes a significant challenge — for those delivering through digital channels in the next few years.
• Content and Document Management. Social media has had a sustained and continuing impact on content and document management, to the extent that many of the latest iterations of these tools are major social platforms in their own right (such as Drupal). While this is true to a lesser extent in the enterprise, reconciling the current proliferation of social media, content management, and document management platforms, many which also connect to the public and have digital strategy implications, is one of the bigger challenges for IT departments right now.
• Intranet Strategy. Intranet strategy, a key aspect of social business, is usually not part of digital strategy proper but ends up being intertwined in it as the boundary blur continues to grow across worker to marketplace touchpoints. I’ve depicted the progression of intranets as one where social media is inevitably a key aspect, de facto or otherwise. Unfortunately, I expect that there will continue to be only a mild integration between digital strategy and intranet strategy given the diversity of their stakeholders.
• Unified Communication. Social business delivery will increasingly happen in unified communications channels, even if they often aren’t the monolithic software and infrastructure suites that were gaining some traction a few years ago. Unified communications is often moving inside social networks these days rather than the other way around (witness Skype integration with Facebook as just one example), though the jury is still out on IBM and Cisco’s offerings which are growing increasingly strong.
• Online Video and Podcasting. Rich media remains an important and significant part of digital strategy and social media (when it’s user generated.) However, the growth areas are in multipoint video chat, video archival and search, mobile video (both recorded and live broadcast), and of course, sharing capabilities. Integration of video into Web experience and applications is also increasingly popular and the case is increasingly being made that it’s a productivity driver as well. Digital strategies that treat video as a driver of network effect and accumulated value growth will have the largest long-term ROI.

Those organizations that take the time to coherently plan their digital strategies, as long as they are agile and flexible in keeping them updated, revised, and connected to ground truth, will do far better than those that only adopt approaches ad hoc and hope for the best.

For most however, digital strategy planning can be one of the most rewarding and beneficial tools in helping organizations rethink what they are doing in order to adapt to the seemingly onrushing future. Without appropriate care, however, they can also be an unrealistic albatross without deep connection to internal stakeholders and change champions that are effective in turning vision into reality. I urge you to look at the recent work on emergent strategy and business architecture as well as an updated view of IT consumerization to help you in your planning and create the best result.

You may also find our new Social Business CIO Shortlist as well as the Social Business Landscape as useful cross-checking aids.

However, in the last decade, a few industry observers have noted seemingly diminishing returns on the strategic value of technology to drive additional business value. In fact, towards the turn of the millennium, debates raged on whether IT had become just another commodity (or not) while the the gap continued to grow between companies applying IT well in terms of business performance and those who weren’t. As I pointed out in a recent post on organizing for social business, that the productivity gap looms ever larger. In a closely related trend, my colleague, well known business thinker Dave Gray, has been exploring how companies, becoming ever more global and conglomerated, experience dramatic productivity drops as they grow. This paints a discouraging picture for companies that have either not become digital natives or are dealing with the intense communication and collaboration overhead of today’s massive organizations: Better business performance is increasingly harder to come by as the easiest opportunities are seized.

The reality is, however, that the vast majority of large organizations have been direct beneficiaries of decades of IT investment. To date, the bulk of that investment has been in a category of IT sometimes known as systems of record. These are the well-known bread-and-butter applications (and their databases) that run our firms and contain the business records, electronic documents, and countless other information artifacts that we use to conduct the routine minutia of daily business. It’s safe to say that most firms would go out of business without the data within and automated capabilities of their systems of record. But systems of record are increasingly 1) becoming commoditized by SaaS and the cloud and 2) most organizations have reached the carrying capacity of the approach: There’s very little left to store and automate that isn’t already. So where are new business gains to be had?

Systems of record have matured to the point where there’s only a little strategic advantage to having your own unique capability. Instead, the discussion on strategic technology has shifted to the other 40% of what businesses in industrialized nations do: Knowledge work. These are highly variable, dynamic, and increasingly fast-moving processes that focus on the higher order activities of a business. Knowledge work involves high levels of communication and collaboration amongst the most valuable workers a company possesses. They are also represented in the most strategic activities taking place within an organization.

Thus, using technology to enable knowledge work as a strategic capability has sparked a growing interest in improving what are increasingly known as systems of engagement. As a key part of this, the rise of social media in the middle of the last decade has done a lot to change the global focus on how we look at communication and collaboration between knowledge workers. A corresponding change came when technology innovation and rate of change in the marketplace began to outpace what most organizations could adapt to. This has led to the aforementioned generational shifts in focus, and in certain early instances industry disruption, in the way we apply technology to business problems. Witness what open source has done to commercial software or what the Internet has done to traditional media (music, TV, movies, newspapers, electronic gaming, etc.) to get a sense of what is now also happening to the information technology and communication industries today.

For enterprises, ground zero for the transition to systems of engagement in many companies often centers around any pending update of the corporate intranet. Even today in most organizations, the intranet is much more of a system of record than it is a system of engagement. This is beginning to change and we can clearly see it in discussions that members have in the Social Business Council and in the initiatives that they are taking, which I’ll explore in coming months.

What’s also clear about the changes taking place in businesses today is that systems of record are not going away. They’re a critical element of our business infrastructure and have their rightful place. Instead, we’ve discovered how we’ve often overestimated them and their ability to provide us with the tools to empower the most valuable and highest leverage aspects of our organizations. Watching what’s been possible on the Web, we’ve learned that we’ve correspondingly underemphasized the ability to enable and transform the most important element of business today: How we as humans can best work together to create value and achieve objectives. In last year’s survey of the social business landscape, I explored in detail the many emerging ways this is changing in the large and how enterprises are generally behind the times as the consumer world creates and proves out powerful new ways of tapping into and unleashing human potential. Enterprise 2.0, in the form of internal social networks and other models, are just the beginning here.

New systems of engagement are now receiving considerable attention in the forms of online communities, crowdsourcing, Social CRM, open APIs, and many other means as a way to connect customers and business partners together to achieve useful outcomes with the most cost-effectiveness and largest result. From just one recent example of many of this trend, this week Gartner reported that “within five years we expect that community peer-to-peer support projects will supplement or replace Tier 1 contact center support in more than 40 percent of top 1,000 companies with a contact center.” Social systems of engagement have already become the primary way that we communicate in our personal lives and this is also happening for businesses.

In recent conversations around how IT is changing, it’s been clear that this is part of a larger trend, part of it the move from push to pull systems, part of the move from the center to the edge, but all of it shows how networks and simple, freeform, emergent tools can enable much bigger results than the transactional systems of old. If you are investing in strategic new technologies today to drive your business forward, I believe this is one of the most important investments you can make at this time. Make no mistake, however, that this is very much an unfolding story and we’re all learning from watching the leaders. But as I’ve covered here and many times in the past, it’s a change that very few organizations will be able to skip and survive.

I’ll be exploring systems of engagement in more detail as part of my Why Social Business Is Different series. Stay tuned.

This is posing a growing challenge for organizations that are trying to assemble a mature set of social media capabilities across their business. It hasn’t helped that social business initiatives have — up until recently — consisted of very separate efforts focused primarily on social media marketing and internal collaboration (aka Enterprise 2.0) often with side bets on crowdsourcing and Social CRM. This has often meant the acquisition of very different social media products and services both on-premises as well as SaaS, each with their own social architecture, social identity, search functionality, etc. Now that the social business discussion is moving up to the CIO level in many of the large organizations I’m talking with, this has led to a growing desire to reconcile and make sense of social media platform investment and application portfolios across the enterprise.

To put in plainly, there’s a lot of work to do here, both on the IT side and the social media vendor side. It’s currently too difficult to integrate today’s social media products into a set of coherent and consistent social business capabilities with unified security, identity, discovery, analytics, management and governance. Some of the issues are technical and some of them are organizational but fortunately it turns out that gaining intellectual control of enterprise social media is certainly possible today. Frameworks and approaches of above 1.0 maturity for this now exist, such as Social Business Design (disclaimer: This is the process we use ourselves.)

So businesses have some choices to make today if they want to organize better around social media. The first choice is the set of platforms, technologies, and standards they would like to have. The second is the processes, organizational structures, and cultural/behavioral changes they’d like to see realized. And finally, the third set is the level of resources, prioritization, and funding that will be provided. IT departments will be affected by all of these, but the first and last ones the most, and yet they must also understand that it’s likely that social media is going to become a function in the organization that is somewhat similar to theirs. I currently see a growing parallel between IT departments and social business units, in that they supply capabilities across the business and support new business initiatives so that they’re successful in using technology to create better outcomes. Whether social business units ultimately become part of IT (not likely in most organizations in my opinion), move into HR or corporate communications, or become an independent unit is a trend that is still unclear, but these are the most likely scenarios of who ends up in charge of enterprise social media.

What is clear, however, is that social media is having an immediate and sustained impact on IT decisions at the moment. Sometimes this is a disruptive impact because social media now deeply affects how IT delivers on intranets, portals, collaboration, unified communication, content/document management, workflow, and business intelligence (at the very least.) This means there are some hard choices to make. They are also ones that once made will well situate the organization to much more naturally, gracefully, and effectively incorporate social media in the way it achieves top-line business objectives.

To reduce the undesirable aspect of social media impact and better capture the many upsides, IT departments should think carefully about several key issues related to 1) social media standards, 2) federated platform selection, and 3) on-the-ground consumer-style enablement of business uses of social media. In particular, this will help define a clear vision as social business service delivery is becoming increasingly blurry as organizations acquire a growing portfolio of internal and external social business platforms that also connect to existing IT systems that are in turn getting their own social media features. The list below will help focus on what’s important while enabling the business to meet its needs.

Preparing for Social Business as a Strategic IT Capability

I’ve covered the highest level management issues in getting a large enterprise strategically ready for social business before in Introducing The Social Business Unit and Organizing for Social Business: The Issues, so these are the concerns specific for preparing on the IT side of the house:

1. Vigorously encourage social computing standards, but don’t be held back by their immaturity. Enterprises have not pushed hard for standards in social software like we’ve done in previous generations of IT. Consequently most of the social media standards that exist today are consumer-focused. We cannot forget standards enable choice, interoperability, ensure pools of talent, prevent lock-in, lower costs, and provide many other benefits. Portable social graphs, open activity streams, standardized social applications are the focus here but there are other standardization issues as well. Not every vendor will support the emerging standards for enterprise social media and choices are going to be limited at first. It is essential for IT to defend this position and provide the advantages to the business in regards to social media. Security and mobility should also not be an afterthought in this discussion either.
2. Actively support business-centric social media platform selections. Unfortunately, I see IT departments encouraging the use of legacy platforms that aren’t what are sometimes called “born social”. There’s also more capability to acquire that just a base social network, social CMS, or social intranet platform. There is also social listening, analytics, management, compliance, and governance. Business users won’t necessarily know all the required moving parts for a mature and sophisticated social media capability but IT should and must. I’ll be exploring the social business stack soon to look at this in more detail, but the key is for IT to have a very open mind about building a set of strategic capabilities that makes sense for each of the various functions of the enterprise that will be heavily involved in social media. This is essential for genuine success since what IT either has on the shelf or wants to deliver as a one-size-fits-all to everyone is usually inadequate. Significantly poorer outcomes will also result when dealing with the platform capabilities of each part of the social business spectrum in isolation.
3. Proactively enable independent social media action on the ground with strong IT support. Social media is about empowering people and specifically here we’re talking about empowering workers with social media. They need tools, help, and support for their particular social business activity, whether that is sales, marketing, product development, customer care, or what have you. They will be looking, perhaps just once, at IT for help for service delivery with this. IT must enable and support choice and the widest possible options for both internal and external social business. Not doing so means that business users will be driven to service providers that can meet their requirements and deadlines, which often puts social media outside the range of IT involvement and governance. Preparing ahead of time for the growing lists of requests that I’m already hearing from IT managers means planning ahead and following an emergent enterprise architecture approach. Take this to heart and support centrally, while empowering locally.

For additional details, please read Reconciling the enterprise IT portfolio with social media and stay tuned for a deeper dive into the moving parts of what Peter Kim calls a modern holistic social business capability.

My friend and industry colleague Rachel Happe wrote recently about something she calls A Vision for the Social Organization. In this, she explores the current situation in companies today and what a social organization of the very near future might look like. Reading over this, I was struck both by the clarity of the vision and by how far off many organizations are from closing the gap between what’s now possible in terms of performance improvement and what they can deliver on any time soon. It underscores an essential point that Andrew McAfee has been making for a while now, namely that information technology is a strategic force multiplier that is inexorably “driving the leaders and the laggards farther apart” in today’s business landscape. Like previous generations of IT, this is true of social business as it was once with both the early Internet and personal computing.

At the executive level, the clarion call is here. Deloitte’s new study on using social software for improved business performance has made bold pronouncements for business leaders of today’s organizations, namely that social business offers “unique capabilities to address current operating challenges and improve operating metrics”, but that skeptics will be among the very last to reap them, if they ever do. This observation and many others in top management and business circles is creating the drive to better prepare for social business.

Currently, I see a confluence of core issues holding back executive teams as they attempt to determine what kind of focus on social business they need to have. Though we’re now years into the tactical adoption of enterprise social media, we’re only now seeing widespread strategic adoption that will have real effect on competitive position and long-term financial health and growth of a business. The good news for those long in these trenches is that the social business imperative is indeed being felt by most senior business leaders these days, and there is readiness to invest and make it a priority. But the way forward is too unclear for many still.

From what I’ve seen, the issues, and what you can do about them, are as follows.

Organizing for Social Business: The Top Executive Issues

1. What do new social business models actually look like and how to they apply to our business? Because most traditional organizations tend not to have deep digital roots or connections with emerging technology, there is often a fairly limited understanding of how enterprise social media has impact and could strategically affect the business. Frankly, one cause of this is because internal social business is very closely related but not quite the same as consumer social media. This means there are fewer visible exemplars to point to outside the organization and it requires the ability to adapt outside ideas to the inside of the organization. Consequently, while notions of an ‘enterprise Facebook’ can be elegant shorthand for the first step towards a more effective and better performing organization, it’s too hard for those unfamiliar with the tools and approaches of social business to extrapolate beyond this and clearly understand the bigger opportunities. Fortunately, at this point, there are strong examples in just about every part of the business spectrum to point to, whether that is your industry, or a specific function like workforce collaboration or innovation management. The hardest part about social business is changing your thinking and I encourage to refer to earlier explorations of the fundamentals such as Communicating the Value of Social Business and Social Business: A Case For Disruptive Transformation.
2. Is there a way to determine which social business approaches will have the largest benefits with lowest risk? This is the part where demands are made for case studies, industry comparisons, and executive surveys, and other data to support what is working for other organizations, as opposed to self-determination of what’s best. In reality, the companies that are already getting significant rewards today (and there are quite a few now) aren’t eager to report how they achieved them to their competition. In the meantime, executives will frequently wait until they have enough information to have high confidence in their social business direction. While strategic analysis and careful research can certainly help address this issue, there is little replacement for actually developing capability and discovering how to create value through real-world application in your own business. Yet this also isn’t a recipe for enterprise-wide change. I don’t advocate half-hearted, poorly resourced experiments (see our debate here about failing fast) nor will bet-the-farm, all-or-nothing approaches be acceptable to businesses either. It’s far more likely that supporting and resourcing continuous local change across the organization will result in the most sustained and long-term effect, along with near-term strategic transformation of targeted products and services. For more detailed information, I currently recommend spending some time with The 2.0 Adoption Council, the world’s largest group of firms sharing knowledge and lessons learned on the strategic embrace of social business. Along with this conversation, executives will also want to know the approximate investment required. An estimated cost model for the next budget year for the top social business options is very good to have handy.
3. What are the best tools and technologies for engaging in social business? For companies, and large ones in particular, there is almost inevitably a focus on selecting one social business tool to rule them all. These days, it should be clearer to a growing number of organizations that there just is no one social business tool, just like there is no one IT application. While there are certainly economies of scale and other advantages to a common platform, we are exiting the era of massive application suites and entering an interesting space where social business software will either be 1) true social delivery platforms complete with their own app stores of vertical social software, and/or 2) regular business applications that have forged deep connections to the most popular/relevant consumer and enterprise social networks. Either way, the technology discussion can become a significant management distraction because the technical issues either seem beneath executive purview, there are multiple vociferously competing vendor camps, or the platform issues appear to be beyond the ability for non-technical managers to understand and direct. So paralysis sets in. In fact, it is the organizational, cultural, and behavioral issues of social business transformation that require as just as much attention as the selection of technologies. This is the best place for leaders to focus. It’s also good to keep in mind that the pace of technological change has the potential to overcome any short-term decision on platform. Instead, executives should spend their time preparing for the business part of social business, with attention to technology primarily in terms of whether it will address the capabilities they need to support desired changes.
4. Who should be responsible for realizing social business transformation? This has become one of the most frequent questions I receive: “Where does all of this belong?” There seems to be no natural location in the org chart for social business. Should it be in corporate comms or HR? Or should IT be in charge of it? How about the line of business? Unfortunately, none of these have the combination of organization-wide support capability, expertise in specifically what the business does, and actual experience in social business strategies and tools. I’ve discussed this challenge before in Introducing The Social Business Unit, namely that 1) it’s likely that a new organizational function needs to be created and 2) that social business skills and know-how be driven directly into the broader organization, starting in places where the business is most impacted by external changes in the marketplace. Short answer: Start with an internal social business committee composed of all the stakeholders and spin it off as an internal, independent group when it makes the most sense.
5. How should we reconcile new social business initiatives with [insert existing project or function here] (i.e. intranet, portal, document management, search, HR services, CRM, ERP, supply chain, etc.) One of the biggest obstacles of them all turns out to be that social business will impact existing areas of responsibility and ongoing projects that have deadlines that internal and external customers may be counting on. Decisions and actions that require other strategic decisions to be rethought or undone can have the most chilling effect of all when it comes to driving social business transformation. Analysis paralysis is just one manifestation of this issue. Another is the inevitable power redistribution as fiefdoms and political boundaries are rethought and recast as social business transformation changes the way things work. This can range from how customer care operates and employee hiring takes place to how product innovation and development is realized in a social organization. For this issue, the answers can be tough but often boil down to letting existing projects finish and then reconcile with the social business strategy, while looking for easy opportunities to integrate them earlier. Often, however, the answer is to pause existing investments and move them under growing social business efforts before too much time and resources are spent on outmoded work.

Of course, there are other issues that organization have as well, but I believe this is a useful snapshot of the most common and significant ones that will have to be addressed as organizations plan for their future. I would be very interested in hearing in comments below from those that are encountering their own set of discussions and use this as a starting point to share and work through the fundamental issues the companies are encountering as they begin the strategic voyage to becoming social businesses.

Many companies have multi-zone failovers and other disaster recovery plans. On the technical side, we had most of our clients back up and running within an hour of the Amazon outage by leveraging our backup and internal recovery plans.

What did we do to respond to the situation from a Social Business perspective?

PLAN: Firstly, it’s important when working with any technology that you need a disaster recovery plan. Technology does fail and will continue to fail. It’s how you are prepared internally for these emergencies and execute when it does occur which will make all the difference. We’ve seen hardware and software fail before and know the importance of having a chain of command, operations, and procedures in these situations. This is documented and communicated through internal collaboration tools such as a corporate wiki, server documentation, and readily accessible information for the appropriate team members on the web. Generally, this just boils down to good business practices and the current tools adopted by our organization enable plans to be developed and documented more effectively.

SIGNAL: Through our server monitoring systems and communications measures the appropriate team members were notified instantaneously at critical points through the outage. This began with server monitoring tools at the root issues level (sending emails, SMS, etc) and the signal transitioned all the way  to our account and executive teams through our collaboration tools and communication practices.

DECIDE & ACT: We had to make necessary and demanding decisions before the sun was up for many of our clients. Do we wait for EC2 to come back, only migrate particular environments, notify all users? With the preparation and communication we had the right people with the proper knowledge available and briefed to make the best decision for our clients. On our end, we made the critical decision to migrate all live client applications associated with the Amazon EC2 environment in a time frame scheduled with the team (who were already notified through the signal stage and had an understanding of common options, responsibilities, and steps through our planning).

COMMUNICATE: On the account side we communicated the timeline and demands to make the migration happen internally along with a communication strategy for each client. All engineers, project managers, account managers, and appropriate team members were fully briefed on the status and progress thus far by seeing the alerts, briefings, and communication streams on their mobile devices prior to arriving in the office. Each client application that was moved to the new environment was tested by our QA engineers. Notification plans were setup for clients to ensure they were aware of the situation, our response to it, and how we are proceeding to manage in the coming days. Most of these occurred through emails to the clients coupled with direct phone calls early in the morning to provide transparency and responsibilities moving forward.

Effective collaboration, planning, and communication strategies made the situation much less stressful and clear across the team. We of course still experienced some stressful moments (and long hours), which is expected in emergency scenarios. However, each and every decision and action was made with the goal to stabilize our client’s environments in the available time with a cohesive plan and workforce. I thank the Stuzo | Dachis Group team who was by my side during this process, the dynamic signals that awoke me from my bed very early in the morning, and the understanding clients who appreciated our mission and decisions made to ensure the best user experience and account services we could provide given the outage.

Last week, I helped facilitate a client’s global social media summit. Dachis Group was asked to share the latest and greatest in social business and lead discussion among corporate and their portfolio of brands. The best part of the day, in my opinion, was the brand roundtable. As managers from each brand presented on the coming year in social media, they turned to us for validation, additional insight, and expert advice.  Then, as they presented their past year in social, they began sharing and discussing the pros and cons of their tactics, internal best practices, and areas where they’ve fallen short.

It’s the last part that I was truly impressed with. In our experience many large companies struggle with internal knowledge-sharing; it is practically non-existent. In fact, some of the companies we’ve helped see competitive relationships between their brands. In some cases, none of the brands wanted to share successes or warn others of potential failures. It’s not all that surprising, given the structure of some portfolio inter-company relationships. Typically, each brand has their own budget, resources, and agencies. So, it takes a vested interest on behalf of corporate to coordinate an event for all of their brands and a thoughtful framework for collaboration to encourage sharing.

It was refreshing to see successful and organic collaboration happening during the summit, especially given that a number of our strategy projects to date have included a strong focus on setting up frameworks for people to collaborate and have open discussions. This injection of structure and creation of a forum for open conversation sets the stage for collaboration.

To organizations that seek to foster internal-sharing, the most important factors are the intentional creation of structure and the involvement of a neutral, third-party participant (who can provide value to all parties involved). Once a framework is in place and a reliable moderator has been chosen, brands can begin sharing their ideas: big wins, potential pitfalls, and future action items to help each other achieve common goals.

As my colleague Kate Rush Sheehy pointed out recently, forming a company’s social business strategy and resources requires speed and scale — and for some organizations these two qualities don’t come naturally. Many employees fear the departmental silos they don’t understand. The complex processes that don’t always work. And the colleagues they don’t know — constantly concerned these people will object to their ideas, plans, or points of view. This sometimes irrational worry can frustrate employees, but inactivity typically persists within their organizations anyway.  Some companies refuse to let these concerns constrain them, and are trying to do things a little differently.

One example is a social business center of excellence (SBCE); an organizational structure that exposes each of these fears. The people you work with, how you communicate, and perhaps even your role are different. It’s exciting and jarring all at the same time, but slowly each member of this group comes to the same realization. The people you work with share your motivation for creating resources, educating the organization, and innovating to reach business goals.

But herein lies the problem: How do you shift from discussing the ideas you have to executing on them?

• Focus on specific  goals — and how and when you will attain them. Even the best ideas are left inactive without a realistic plan to achieve them. Typically SBCE involvement rests outside of an employee’s regular responsibilities. A clear roadmap marked with a relevant timeline, defined activities, and targeted accountability will decide how many tangible outcomes this group achieves.

• Resist gaining consensus on decisions. Agreement creates comfort no matter what decision you’re making. But this same process can dilute ideas and decrease how quickly the work gets done. For projects that require multiple rounds of input, assign a lead contributor whose job is to facilitate and incorporate group feedback — and communicate the final product back to the team. This way you can protect the group’s progress and ensure the openness initially created stays intact.

• Address member hesitancy early. While information flows within SBCE meetings, members’ contributions stem from the role they perform every day. This inability to see the bigger picture can sometimes cause uncertainty. Combat this feeling early by fully explaining the facts that support your perspective. Sharing provides clarity and gives members fodder to ask questions, ones they might not have felt comfortable asking otherwise.

What do you want to know about centers of excellence as they relate to social business?

Leave your questions and thoughts in the comments and we’ll incorporate them into our SXSWi 2011 panel on this very topic: Social Business Zen: Finding Your Company’s Social Center.

We’re spending more and more time using social tools for personal entertainment and productivity. So what about work?

Dachis Group’s head of alliances Bryan Menell has proposed a panel for South by Southwest 2011, titled Work Should Be Social Too. Bryan works with our technology partners and a fundamental element of social business design is the belief that communication should happen as work, not for work.

Here’s what Bryan will cover: Collaborating with friends is easy with today’s public social tools. They require no training, and make the fun things in your life seamless to organize. So why is it more difficult at work? Join us for a panel consisting of executives from some of the leading collaborative tool companies, as we discuss some real corporate case studies, and the social barriers to sharing at work.

His panel will address these questions, answered by the experts:

1. What is the business case for being more social?
2. What other businesses have seen benefits from enterprise social tools?
3. What social technologies have crossed over from consumer to the enterprise?
4. How can you pitch your superiors on embracing social tools?
5. What are the people issues surrounding social adoption at work?

We have several executives from the leading collaborative software companies that have committed to being on the panel if if gets selected. If that sounds interesting to you, I encourage you to give a thumbs up to Work Should Be Social Too.

FINRA, FDA, HIPAA, SARBOX and ITAR, are regarded as curse words in social media and workforce collaboration circles. People don’t want to say them. They don’t want to hear them and they really really don’t want the regulators to swing by for a “chat.” The outcomes created by this mentality are predictable: hesitancy when approaching new technology, over-engineered solutions that inhibit adoption and the pursuit of risky grassroots experimentation.

These approaches are born out of hard-learned lessons, because let’s face it: collaborating in a regulated industry is hard. Regulations change, are enforced with different points of emphasis and are frequently incomprehensible to everyone except their authors. Our colleague Dion Hinchcliffe (@dhinchcliffe) has a great phrase for this: regulatory quicksand. Nonetheless, we can’t ignore the value that social technologies can bring to regulated industries. So, what’s the answer to regulated collaboration and social media implementation? Plan better and execute smarter.

The rest of this blog post will focus on a high-level methodology for the strategic implementation of social technologies in regulated environments.  The aim is to provide a framework within which regulated businesses can maximize social media and workforce collaboration tools in a compliant way*.

Framework Overview

The goal here is to create a simple, repeatable strategic process.  In a nutshell: start by building your business case, then identify your lowest compliant denominator, don’t miss the last responsible moment, and finally roll out to your workforce.

Build a Business Case

The first step is to establish a collaboration pilot in a controlled environment. Before you get antsy – this is not the same old advice to start with a ‘small pilot.’ The key difference here is the realization that even the most highly regulated business has processes that are just not that risky, but do offer high value returns on collaboration. The implication is that by identifying an internal area where risk of external data leakage is minimal and the fruits of collaboration would be valuable, an enterprise can initiate a much larger and more meaningful ‘pilot’ than otherwise possible.

For example, a financial services firm might identify expertise location as a key challenge in their trading operations. Knowing that the regulatory expectations are the same across the whole of the ‘trader’ job role and that information would be bounded by that department’s lines it becomes feasible to pilot ad-hoc information seeking tools like enterprise micro-blogging to aid in expertise and knowledge location.

Find the Lowest Compliant Denominator

The second step is to synthesize all the data captured from the pilot (you were capturing data right?) into a collection of requirements and outcomes for broader implementation. One of the odd nuances of social software is that the best use cases are frequently only discovered once the users actually have their hands on the tools. The key insights you are scanning for are lowest common denominators for compliance or, “lowest compliant denominators.” Say to yourself: “What is the lowest barrier we can set while facilitating collaborative outcome X?”

For example, the financial services firm we discussed earlier might find that their pilot revealed a mass of associate level employees asking questions that only more senior colleagues could answer with any confidence. This manual process might be a blessing in terms of knowledge transfer, but a curse because senior employees have better things to do with their time. The answer would be to maintain the emergent Q&A culture while also instating a better system for capturing and sharing institutional knowledge – perhaps a wiki. This need and solution might never have surfaced and been synthesized if not for the advanced ‘pilot.’

The Last Responsible Moment

There’s not a bad time to begin to plan for compliance, but there is a point where it is too late not to have done so.  Now that you’ve run your pilot and with metrics, survey results and anecdotes created a business case, you are no doubt postulating how the benefits of collaboration multiply across your company.  With the momentum and demand you created in the pilot, if you haven’t done so yet, now is the time to partner with HR & Legal to create a compliance map.

Employees and artifacts in your business have characteristics.  Characteristics are things like: geographic location, security training, department, job title, or government clearance.  A compliance map simply details which combinations of characteristics are off-limits.  As an example, US-defense industry employees have to abide by International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).  Employees without ITAR training (characteristic) should not have access to ITAR protected artifacts.  So, when an employee without ITAR training uses their company’s search engine, no ITAR protected artifacts should be returned.

Scale and Train

Once you have developed a compliance map, you can identify your boundaries and then roll out your solution as far as those boundaries allow.  Of course, sufficient technology will be necessary to scale as well, but you’ve likely charted that course before.  Linking departments together is technologically nothing new, understanding whether or not you can link them from a compliance stand point is.   Your compliance map gives you the advantage of scaling accurately and aggressively.

But, just as spell check doesn’t turn you into Hemingway, having a compliance map won’t turn every employee into a compliance officer.  Training employees on compliance issues is the ultimate fail-safe.  Where technology fails, humans should know better.

Conclusion

Regulated companies can be collaborative, but they must plan better and execute smarter than others.  For many companies looking to become more collaborative FINRA, HIPAA, SARBOX and ITAR represent reality checks.  However, these reality checks are not blanket cease and desist orders.  You can remain in the good graces of your legal and HR departments AND still bring effective and beneficial collaboration to your company by following the framework outlined above.  Of course, this framework will need to be customized for your company.  Reach out to us if you’d like some help.

For additional reading on this topic, check out Ellen Reynolds‘ case study on Managing Risk in Regulated Industries.

*One caveat to keep in mind is that this methodology presupposes a strategic executive commitment to adopting social tools and while it could work for a grassroots implementation the entry points into the process would be quite different.