The Social Business

In the late 1960s, IBM engineer Ben Riggins was working on implementing IBM computers for the Virginia Electric Power Company. VEPCO was interested in setting up customer service centers that were…

Since 1990, IBM has worked with the All England Tennis Club to make the Wimbledon Championships the smartest professional tennis tournament, delivering a front-row experience to millions of fans…

Dave Gray is onto something with his Connected Company project (with Thomas Vander Wal), which is ostensibly looking at the way companies are changing as they move away from statically designed hierarchies and processes to dynamically self-organized networks:

Dave Gray, The Future Is Podular

One of the most difficult challenges companies face today is how to be more flexible and adaptive in a dynamic, volatile business environment. How do you build a company that can identify and capitalize on opportunities, navigate around risks and other challenges, and respond quickly to changes in the environment? How do you embed that kind of agility into the DNA of your company?

The answer is to distribute control in such a way that decisions can be madeas quickly and as close to customers as possible. There is no way for people to respond and adapt quickly if they have to get permission before they can do anything.

If you want an adaptive company, you will need to unleash the creative forces in your organization, so people have the freedom to deliver value to customers and respond to their needs more dynamically. One way to do this is by enabling small, autonomous units that can act and react quickly and easily, without fear of disrupting other business activities – pods.

A pod is a small, autonomous unit that is enabled and empowered to deliver the things that customers value.

via stoweboyd:

More businesses are embracing social tools to build internal and external communities, improve communications, and delight customers.

When the Enterprise 2.0 conference, a UBM TechWeb event, opens in Boston next week, corporate technology and community managers hope to shift some of the conversation away from potential applications and toward real achievements.

Conference track organizers for Enterprise 2.0 say they expect to spend less time selling a vision for enterprise social networking and collaboration because the vision is more widely understood. Turning it into a reality for more people is still going to take some work, however. The Enterprise 2.0 conference is sponsored by our publisher, UBM, and brings together technology and business leaders exploring the potential of Web 2.0 and social media in the enterprise.

“One thing that I think has changed is we’ve kind of entered the mainstream—most executives at most companies are kind of intrigued and exploring,” said Rachel Happe, who is chairing the conference track on managing communities to engage external audiences. Some of those business leaders are still seeking to establish a business case for moving forward, she said, “but we’re not having to convince people that it’s interesting, or that they should pay attention to it.”

Many banks still forbid their employees from using Facebook, Twitter or any other social media tools. But for Daniel Marovitz, MD, head of product management, Global Transaction Banking, Deutsche Bank, it is “nonsense” for banks to ban their employees from using these sites.