3 social forces that make social business compelling

  • Changing expectations / consumerization of IT –  People are bringing innovative consumer devices to work, with  dramatic impact on people’s expectations of the way they use technology and the way businesses use technology. New expectations are emerging from the “social” customer while employees are looking for a new level of engagement at work. Expectations from both sides require a new way of getting work done.
  • Doing more with less –The relationship of labor force growth to productivity started to change in the mid-2000′s — as labor force growth slowed productivity continued to rise through automation. Although we’re not there yet, over time this type of productivity gain is likely to slow as well. At that point, increased productivity will come from the shift to an engaged, empowered and collaborative work paradigm.
  • Systemetizing ad hoc work – Exception processing for business decisions and customer service is a whole area of work that cannot be automated by current systems of transaction. The person or a group of people getting the work done will often require specific data  and a  system to support the decision process for work at hand. 
Via Enterprise Irregulars

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Case management: what businesses can learn from detectives and social workers

Excerpts from Enhancing the productivity of an evolving workforce:

In the past two years we have seen a dramatic increase in interest in a new approach for systems that support office workers. Much of the focus for information technology deployment has been on automating or even eliminating less skilled jobs. This has been largely effective, and organizations today are able to much more with fewer people. People today spend less of their time on routine tasks, and more of their time on things that make a difference, than was possible just ten years ago. 

An unpredictable process is simply a process that has to be figured out; it emerges as the work is done. That is precisely what knowledge workers do.  

Case Management (CM) is an approach which has been used for years in the fields of health care, social care, the courts, and law enforcement but now we are seeing this basic approach being used for all knowledge workers across all industries. We call it case management because all the work is structured around a case, which is simply a place where everything for the job is collected.  It is not just a folder, but is also has an implicit or explicit goal.  

Sherlock Holmes has the goal to solve the crime, so he keeps all the relevant information in a case folder. The case is considered “closed” when the crime has been solved. Today, that case is not a physical folder, but instead an information system structure that can be access by multiple people from multiple locations simultaneously, but it is the same concept. 

Adaptive Case Management Systems automatically keep a record of everything that happened along the way, so that there is a complete history to learn from.  The history is helpful in reaching the current goal, but even more valuable when many cases are reviewed to see what patterns are having the most success.  Process Mining is a technique that is used to show what patterns of actions have been occurring, even when no process diagram was set up in advance. 

Via socialenterprisetoday.com

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“Organizations can achieve unprecedented business results by using social media to effectively tap into the power of mass collaboration. New mass collaboration capabilities are irreversibly redefining what it means to be a highly productive organization.”

Mark P. McDonald, group vice president and head of research at Gartner Executive Programs.  From “Gartner Reveals the Next Chapter in Modern Business Management: The Social Organization” (via horizonwatching)

(via eeehutton)

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 Solving Email Overload With A Company-Wide Ban | TechCrunch The CEO of a large European-based tech firm hates email and wants his 74,000 employees in 42 countries to stop using it. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, wants his “zero email” policy to be in place within a year-and-a-half. He told the Daily Mail only 10% of emails turn out to be important and that “email is no longer the appropriate tool. It is time to think differently.” TechCrunch writers have a long history of trying to solve email overload. MG Siegler quit email for a month earlier this year and wrote about it when his experiment ended. Michael Arrington has discussed his email overload problem and how it’s an opportunity for an entreprenuer. We covered Gmail Priority Inbox which helps you focus on the important emails. I wrote about the 3 sentence email concept. We’ve also written about Shortmail, which tries to keep email, well, short. And there have been many other posts too.

 Solving Email Overload With A Company-Wide Ban | TechCrunch

The CEO of a large European-based tech firm hates email and wants his 74,000 employees in 42 countries to stop using it. Thierry Breton, CEO of Atos, wants his “zero email” policy to be in place within a year-and-a-half. He told the Daily Mail only 10% of emails turn out to be important and that “email is no longer the appropriate tool. It is time to think differently.”

TechCrunch writers have a long history of trying to solve email overload. MG Siegler quit email for a month earlier this year and wrote about it when his experiment ended. Michael Arrington has discussed his email overload problem and how it’s an opportunity for an entreprenuer. We covered Gmail Priority Inbox which helps you focus on the important emails. I wrote about the 3 sentence email concept. We’ve also written about Shortmail, which tries to keep email, well, short. And there have been many other posts too.

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11 iPad Apps For Better Collaboration - The BrainYard - InformationWeek What makes a tablet a tool? The apps, of course. Apple’s iPad is clearly finding its way into the enterprise, whether on a corporate purchase order or as a personal device brought into the office. No matter its origin, the range of productive—and hopefully profitable—uses for Apple’s market-leading tablet seem to expand by the day, thanks largely to a similarly growing menu of business-ready applications. That’s perhaps most evident in the collaboration world: now more than ever, business users are able to connect and achieve their goals anywhere, anytime.

11 iPad Apps For Better Collaboration - The BrainYard - InformationWeek

What makes a tablet a tool? The apps, of course. Apple’s iPad is clearly finding its way into the enterprise, whether on a corporate purchase order or as a personal device brought into the office. No matter its origin, the range of productive—and hopefully profitable—uses for Apple’s market-leading tablet seem to expand by the day, thanks largely to a similarly growing menu of business-ready applications. That’s perhaps most evident in the collaboration world: now more than ever, business users are able to connect and achieve their goals anywhere, anytime.

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Social Business @ IBM Global Business Services

A presentation with some samples of projects I’m working on to help our consulting organization, GBS, become a “social business” unit, part of IBM’s broader transformation and embrace of social innovations deeper into its global operations and institutional DNA.

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Tony Schwartz, MIX Maverick and author of The Way We’re Working isn’t Working, shares four simple but powerful changes you can make today to ramp up your productivity, creativity, and well-being.

Paul Higgins: I have been involved in the MIX on a management hackathon project and have both enjoyed the experience and been given lots of ideas and different perspectives. On top of that there is lots of great material available. This one is just under 9 minutes long but well worth the trouble. You will make up the 9 minutes the day you watch it.
 

via emergentfutures:

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 Enterprises warm to social tools, but implementation is key - The Globe and Mail Companies around the world are about to start using social media software internally to make their businesses better … and many aren’t sure how to measure success or failure. I am not talking about companies using social media for external purposes. If a cheese company wants to start up a Facebook page or monitor its brand on Twitter there are buckets of tools for measuring effectiveness. And the desired goals are pretty obvious – usually something along the lines of “sell more cheese.” When companies move toward “Enterprise 2.0” and adopt social media technologies for processes inside their business, things get murkier. The whole idea of measuring enterprise software is a recent thing. For years, companies spent tens of millions of dollars on expensive software. At the end of it, the CEO would ask the IT department “How did it go?” When things went well, the IT folk would say “It was a success – it came in on time and on budget.” Champagne for all! However, some particularly smart and crafty CEOs started asking follow up questions like “Do our employees like the software? Are they more productive? Are they even using it? And are we making more money?”

 Enterprises warm to social tools, but implementation is key - The Globe and Mail

Companies around the world are about to start using social media software internally to make their businesses better … and many aren’t sure how to measure success or failure.

I am not talking about companies using social media for external purposes. If a cheese company wants to start up a Facebook page or monitor its brand on Twitter there are buckets of tools for measuring effectiveness. And the desired goals are pretty obvious – usually something along the lines of “sell more cheese.”

When companies move toward “Enterprise 2.0” and adopt social media technologies for processes inside their business, things get murkier.

The whole idea of measuring enterprise software is a recent thing. For years, companies spent tens of millions of dollars on expensive software. At the end of it, the CEO would ask the IT department “How did it go?” When things went well, the IT folk would say “It was a success – it came in on time and on budget.” Champagne for all!

However, some particularly smart and crafty CEOs started asking follow up questions like “Do our employees like the software? Are they more productive? Are they even using it? And are we making more money?”

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Smarter Planet - Social business - Overview The world now spends more than 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites per month. This equates to 22 percent of all time online―or one in every 4.5 minutes.  Just ten years ago, there was another significant shift in the way people interacted with each other: the Web came to the workplace. From e-commerce and peer-to-to peer file sharing to the emergence of web-based solutions for financial, accounting, and supply chain systems, the web has become a serious business tool for organizations and industries of every kind. And the evolution continues. Now social networking services are on track to replace email as the primary communications method for many business users in the next few years. It’s a concept IBM social computing evangelist Luis Suarez has advocated for several years. But this new paradigm impacts more than the inbox. As each company looks to incorporate social networking technologies, it is, in fact, becoming what IBM calls a Social Business. This approach shifts the focus from static content and other temporary artifacts to the source of the energy, creativity, and decision making that moves the business forward: people. As a result, people not only find what they need, but also discover valuable expertise and information they weren’t even looking for that might solve a problem in a new way. It’s no longer a BtoB or BtoC relationship. It’s PtoP. People to people isn’t about file sharing. It means that every department, from HR to marketing to product development to customer service, uses social media the way it uses any other tool and channel to do its job. A company that uses social networking tools fluently to communicate with people inside and outside the company acts as a Social Business. So what does a Social Business look like? A Social Business isn’t just a company that has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. A Social Business is one that embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organization—both internally and externally. IBM has identified three distinct characteristics of a Social Business: A Social Business is engaged—deeply connecting people, including customers, employees, and partners, to be involved in productive, efficient ways. A Social Business is transparent—removing boundaries to information, experts and assets, helping people align every action to drive business results. A Social Business is nimble—speeding up business with information and insight to anticipate and address evolving opportunities. Download Social Business white papers Social Business: advent of a new age (959KB) Becoming a Social Business: the IBM story (180KB) IBM Social Business Jam Report (2MB)

Smarter Planet - Social business - Overview

The world now spends more than 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites per month. This equates to 22 percent of all time online―or one in every 4.5 minutes. 

Just ten years ago, there was another significant shift in the way people interacted with each other: the Web came to the workplace. From e-commerce and peer-to-to peer file sharing to the emergence of web-based solutions for financial, accounting, and supply chain systems, the web has become a serious business tool for organizations and industries of every kind. And the evolution continues.

Now social networking services are on track to replace email as the primary communications method for many business users in the next few years. It’s a concept IBM social computing evangelist Luis Suarez has advocated for several years. But this new paradigm impacts more than the inbox. As each company looks to incorporate social networking technologies, it is, in fact, becoming what IBM calls a Social Business.

This approach shifts the focus from static content and other temporary artifacts to the source of the energy, creativity, and decision making that moves the business forward: people. As a result, people not only find what they need, but also discover valuable expertise and information they weren’t even looking for that might solve a problem in a new way.

It’s no longer a BtoB or BtoC relationship. It’s PtoP.
People to people isn’t about file sharing. It means that every department, from HR to marketing to product development to customer service, uses social media the way it uses any other tool and channel to do its job. A company that uses social networking tools fluently to communicate with people inside and outside the company acts as a Social Business.

So what does a Social Business look like?

A Social Business isn’t just a company that has a Facebook page and a Twitter account. A Social Business is one that embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organization—both internally and externally.

IBM has identified three distinct characteristics of a Social Business:

  • A Social Business is engaged—deeply connecting people, including customers, employees, and partners, to be involved in productive, efficient ways.
  • A Social Business is transparent—removing boundaries to information, experts and assets, helping people align every action to drive business results.
  • A Social Business is nimble—speeding up business with information and insight to anticipate and address evolving opportunities.

Download Social Business white papers

Social Business: advent of a new age (959KB)

Becoming a Social Business: the IBM story (180KB)

IBM Social Business Jam Report (2MB)

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