That’s not to say that some organizations, either by inclination or through gifted leadership (or both), won’t naturally adopt social business methods. To them, the patterns, tools, and modes of participation are even easier ways of working than what they do today and there are relatively few obstacles. Those aren’t the companies that will ultimately have a dark night of the soul as they look at what their competitors are starting to accomplish and wonder how they can get there too. As the evidence mounts that socially engaged workforces, along with their trading partners and customers, result in more productive, efficient, and profitable enterprises, it will be — by definition — the organizations less likely to be able to make the transition that will have the most challenges and the longest path.

This was a key point made at Dreamforce, namely that there is a growing “social divide” between 1) our customers and workers, and 2) our organizations, the latter of which have been much slower to adopt social methods of engagement, both internally and to the world at large. Like Benioff, I’ve long predicted that the gap between how we’ve changed as a culture and society will become untenable with the relatively slow rate at which many of our businesses are adapting to these changes. Benioff has gone so far as to seriously suggest that there will be a “Corporate Spring”, analogous to what’s happened in the Middle East this year, that will change the status quo positively from companies to governments as aging and obsolete methods are cast aside by workers for better social ones.

Frankly, this loss of control is evident in many organizations when they do any kind of application audit these days: Workers are using the means that pose the least barrier for them in getting their work done. Social media is increasingly winning the growth game with shadow (unsanctioned) social tools for collaboration, for example. These are technology and behavioral shifts that just about every CIO is closely tracking at the moment.

But the transition to the social enterprise, as inevitable as some (including myself), think it will be, will not be as simple as buying the latest social software solution — no matter how good — and declaring victory. For starters, the process involves genuine cultural change even more than than it requires technology enablement. Then there is the sheer size and variability of the enterprise itself to contend with. The truth is that as compelling as comprehensive platform visions such as what Salesforce articulated last week are, the journey towards social enterprise involves conscious decisions to change organizational behavior, business strategy, and technology.

How Social Business Convergence Is Happening

Here is my premise: Just as the early rise of departmental use of social media in marketing, communication, and collaboration has escalated to more organized and sophisticated methods, I’ve noticed that there has started to be what I’ll call a convergence to social business. This is opposed to a “revolution” or a “transformation” though those will certainly happen in the large over time. Instead, based on what I’m seeing in the case studies, stories, research, news, and with clients are the following changes that — is a series of loosely connected yet closely related changes — gives us a portrait of how our organizations are most likely to evolve in these directions over time. The exact details may vary for you, but this is how organizations generally will make the transition to social business:

• Moving from some participant channels, then to all separately, and finally together. Right now most organizations are just developing their social engagement capabilities for B2C, B2B, E2E, and E2B. They will develop them separately for the most part, then learn the importance (and need) to cross-connect them strategically and then begin unifying the platforms, organization roles, resources, and processes so that there is consistency, reduced duplication, better governance, and higher business impact. The organizations that can do this in the fewest steps will be the winners and they will be aided by increasingly mature platforms from the largest vendors, though some companies will roll their own.
• Going social generally first, then connecting social activity to work processes. Those that have been following the extensive discussions recently in the social business community are becoming more aware of how important that social activities be integrated with high value work streams. If business applications for customer care, product development, operations, and so on are isolated from social tools, then by definition there will be limited impact. Most organizations will adopt general purpose social communities (internal and external both) and then begin the hard work of integrating them to line of business applications as well as producing new kinds of socially-enabled applications that didn’t exist before, such as social intranets, location-based apps, and much more. Lesson: Those that can put social to work with business apps via a more direct and meaningful route will generate substantially more business value than those that don’t.
• Starting at the departmental level and then creating enterprise-level social business capability. This is the story around the social business unit and CIO-level programs to provide the strong technical support. Unfortunately, cultural support for change will lag in many organizations that don’t have strong social business leaders at an executive level, as serious a hindrance as not having social business capabilities themselves.
• Top-down leadership and grassroots initiatives meet in the middle, then sort it out. Most organizations have blogs, wikis, social CMS and other social media lurking in the margins, some even that are quite successful. At the same time, many organization are indeed pushing out official efforts but ones that don’t necessarily have support and buy-in from workers. Very often, the issue is with different parts of the organization at approximately the same level will engage in internecine conflict until their approach, platform, or preeminence wins out. While this is what happens at first, slow in same cases, though more quickly for high functioning organizations, the issues get resolved and the various parts of the organization generally becomes “calibrated” in the same direction, resulting in a unified approach to social business in general.

It’s clear that social business can be an arduous and difficult road for some, but it’s also a profoundly rewarding one as organizations consciously update their digital strategies for the 21st century to reflect the realities of and changes in the modern world today. The good news is that we now know more than ever before what the broad outlines of the transition to being a social enterprise will look like. I think you’ll find that aids like the list above helps see the context and the eventual end point to aim for. There are also many other valuable lessons learned accumulating in places like the Social Business Council and the Community Roundtable. For now, smart and forward-thinking organizations will begin looking more holistically at how they are evolving and develop strategies to make the transition with the least disruption, fewest steps, aimed at the most constructive and valuable outcomes.

What else are you seeing in terms of convergence of social business activities in your organization?

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.

I was sorry not to be there in person, but following the San Francisco event via the web gave the impression of a well-attended event and a still-growing community of vendors, consultants and users. But, there were also signs of impatience and defensiveness. It hosted some good discussions about implementing enterprise tools, and it was nice to see Susan Scrupski’s Adoption Council active in many of these debates. Dion Hinchcliffe shared a typically comprehensive and, I think, very useful presentation about overall implementation methodologies, and there were also a few interesting case studies. But the debate about business value and how these technologies play into the future of the workplace and organisational design seemed to me to be quite basic and also rather polarised.

The conference devoted an entire session to disproving the critique of a single blogger, Dennis Howlett, that claimed the field is without merit, and companies have more important things to worry about, such as continuing with large-scale CRM or ERP projects. Read-Write web (politely) labelled this a straw man argument, and to my mind, Andrew McAfee and other respondents had already answered this back in early September, so I was surprised it got so much attention.

There was also a lot of talk about process, and whether or not E2.0 supports it. Nenshad Bardoliwalla wrote an intelligent post about the need for strategy-driven execution, and argued that E1.0 will continue to exist alongside E2.0. Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel ran a session about making a case for accelerated business performance using E2.0; Oliver followed up with a post asking where’s the beef? in relation to a clearly stated value proposition for E2.0, whilst Sameer chipped in with a well written and detailed post arguing for greater focus on supporting and improving ‘traditional’ process performance. Each made some good points.

Andrew McAfee’s keynote spoke of signs of progress and a shift from business skepticism to acceptance of enterprise social tools, but he also offered a few words of advice on things to avoid when trying to bring companies on board. These included sensible warnings against arguing that all existing models and tools will become obsolete – including email – and against ‘featuritis’; but he also suggested that the use of the word ‘social’ is problematic and to be avoided, because it carries serious negative connotations for many a “busy pragmatic manager.” His slides even implied a link between the term social and the twin evils of Marxism and Woodstock, which is ironic given that it was the post-Woodstock baby boomers who ran the banks aground requiring state intervention.

If Enterprise 2.0 is all about selling software tools, then I might agree that we need to simply parrot the language we are hearing from potential buyers. But selling, and even adopting tools, is not why we are here. We are here to improve and update the way people operate and interact with businesses, or perhaps as Karl Long put it recently, to re-write the business operating system. Indeed, it is partly this over-emphasis of the role of software in the definition of E2.0 that led us towards adopting the broader term social business design.

Actually, I think the emergence of reactionary positions such as avoiding the word ‘social’ so as not to scare the horses, or suddenly believing that ERP and CRM were ‘good’ innovations just because businesses are still buying them, or even that management by repeatable process actually works, is proof that we are on the cusp of change. As Stowe Boyd mentioned in an excellent contribution to the debate, this is a feature of a paradigm shift:

[Thomas] Kuhn … makes the case that the old paradigm — in this case the conventional establishment IT perspective of functional silos and silo-based business processes — cannot effectively disprove the new paradigm, and vice versa.

It is precisely at this point in the cycle that there appears to be the greatest dissonance between old and new paradigms, and this causes some people to lose their nerve and seek assimilation in the comfortable old ways that seem to be so safe and uncontroversial. Also, at this point, we see an influx of people coming from the old paradigm, such as CRM, CMS and ERP consultants, who continue to see the world in terms of their existing product categories and lenses.

Dennis Howlett, in a follow-up post seeking to claim credit for the debate that he began with his initial post, concluded:

It is good to see that in the discourse even my sharpest critics have acknowledged the emphasis and use of ’social’ as a dreadful mistake.

Is the word ‘social’ unbusinesslike? Well, of course not, and you will rarely find a senior manager who does not agree that business is also social, people buy from people, etc; and it is very hard to think of a more accurate term to describe harnessing people and networks for business. But that doesn’t those much lower down the value chain falling over themselves to come across as more Gordon Gecko than the managers whose language they imitate.

What counts here is outcomes, not terminology, prejudice or ideological insecurities. If we are communicating the value proposition of E2.0 or social business design simply in terms of labels, then we will not get very far. There is plenty of evidence that the move towards socialising business, by which I mean making smarter use of people and networks to create value, produces excellent outcomes. There is also plenty of evidence that much existing business practice, such as the ERP systems Dennis talks about, are often not worth their exorbitantly high cost.

How about process? Well, some of the newcomers to this debate may not be aware, but there is a lot of prior art regarding the relationship between social business and process. One of the key drivers of social business is the idea that the mid-to-late C20th was guilty of valuing process over people, based on factory thinking and Taylorism, and that this has caused both an inflation in internal costs around process management, and a reduction in productivity and performance as people are disincentivised to use their initiative or take personal responsibility for outcomes. Anybody working in a large corporation today can tell horror stories of how the simplest activities can take weeks and costs a fortune because inefficient and sometimes unnecessary process has gradually built up around what should be simple tasks. This is one of the greatest areas of potential cost saving in business today, largely because the assumptions that underpinned the development of this way of working no longer hold true. But over the longer term, this is also one of the greatest sources of value creation as employees and networks become more productive and collectively intelligent.

This is not to suggest process is no longer important – far from it. Within the E2.0 field, there has also been some good thinking about the importance of embedding social interaction within the daily flow of work, to support concrete use cases and workflows. Indeed, finding better ways to support necessary business processes is a core part of our methodology and value proposition.

I see social business and E2.0 as evolutionary, not revolutionary. But that does not mean that we should not be open to the idea of transforming and improving business structures, rather than just selling software under labels that buyers believe are safe choices. It is easy for commentators to stand up and claim to represent the business mainstream, but this is patronising to both business leaders (who are painfully aware of the limits of current IT-supported practice) and those of us who are actually practitioners in this field.

The one area where we agree, however, is that E2.0 has become too focused on software products, rather than business outcomes. My colleague Jeff Dachis gave a keynote at the San Francisco conference, placing social business in an historical context and making the point that IT is only part of the solution. I think this message is in danger of getting lost in a debate that is focusing too much on software categories.

At the E20 Summit in Frankfurt, we shall be discussing topics such as business value propositions, collaborative performance, internal communication, knowledge sharing, leadership, the power of feedback, organisational design and role of social tools in a downturn. Hopefully there will be less semantic posturing and more substantive ideas that can help us take forward our practice. You can follow the debate on twitter, or by taking part in one the experimental Google Waves that we are using for collaborative note taking and discussion – just search public waves for the tags ‘e20s’ or ‘e20summit’.