Chapter 5. (Social) Network Your Business Processes

(Social) Network Your Processes

A Social Business embeds social tools and techniques in all processes for greater competitiveness and efficiency. Processes organize the way that businesses are run. Most companies have a process established for events such as on-boarding a new hire, acquiring new capital expenses, changing passwords, completing sales transactions, and the list goes on! In this chapter, I’m going to discuss how and why you should consider reengineering your existing processes or augment them to be more efficient with social tools and techniques.

Even the process of managing business processes is becoming more social. IBM just launched Blueworks Live, a cloud-based business process management (BPM) tool that lets you discover, design, automate, and manage business processes for your organization. Mondial Assistance Group, the worldwide leader in assistance services and travel insurance, used Blueworks Live to increase quality and efficiency of operational processes and has saved several million euros in the first year. This corporate program helps them collaborate on improvement ideas as well as capture and exchange process knowledge with an easy-to-use tool.

In the past, layers in your organization chart dealt with and understood details and information about your company, clients, and partners. According to well-established processes, they passed information up the chain when it was important or needed an exception or approval, as illustrated in Figure 5.1.

Figure 5.1 Typical organization structure for today’s processes

The problem in today’s social world is the vast amount of information flooding the organizational chart. It’s getting stuck at each node in the chart, where companies are discovering that there aren’t enough people, or enough context, or talent, or meaning, or processes, to figure out what to do with the information. Our lack of attention is letting our information fall on the floor unused.

A Social Business approaches this problem very differently. A Social Business has, of course, an organizational chart and an enterprise boundary, as illustrated in Figure 5.2.

Figure 5.2 Social Business organizational flow

A Social Business doesn’t think of that organizational chart and those boundaries as determining how information flows. Using attention-enhancing, social techniques, a Social Business routes information to the people who need it, making sure it applies rules common in business, like compliance or nondisclosures where appropriate.

By obeying those filters and rules, a Social Business engages the right constituents—wherever they are in the hierarchy, or even outside the enterprise. This approach is a very radical social and technological revolution that requires reexamining our business processes. With connections forming and reforming in real time according to the need and conversation, across org chart, organizational, and even enterprise boundaries, Social Business enables the delivery of what we need, when we need it. This is what we call social networking your business processes, as illustrated in Figure 5.3.

Figure 5.3 Social-empower your processes

Let’s walk through some different examples to see what this means to different functions, enterprises, and processes. In Figure 5.3, you see that the heaviest focus for most Social Business processes will be on marketing, customer service, product and service development, operational, HR, and talent management.

Marketing and customer service in a traditional enterprise are control-oriented, pushing out preferred messages and managing customer incidents in a defined and perhaps even secretive way. In a Social Business, marketing and customer service have a different objective—to create customer advocates by building customer relationships. This means engaging customers where they are and proactively resolving their problems, perhaps even openly admitting failure and asking for assistance.

This Social Business process view is a very different approach to marketing and customer service; however, this cultural transformation from “control” to “transparency and openness” is a major theme of a Social Business (and hence this book!). Whether a leadership team likes it or not, businesses, not just marketing, cannot be controlled. A Social Business learns that being open and transparent is a competitive advantage. To embed that into your business, embed that concept into your processes!

Similarly, product development is transformed in a Social Business context. In a traditional business, R & D elaborates an idea into a product in relative isolation, off of a clear plan evolved from product management and from research insights.

In a Social Business, R & D develops these breakthroughs through a process of shared insights—shared across the enterprise, and even across enterprise boundaries with valued customers and partners. The result? Better products, faster. In the technology industry, there is even a movement around social application development. This provides developers direct access to social and collaborative solutions embedded into their application development platform so that they can easily collaborate and search for similar code snippets while writing software code. The users who are responsible for testing new software code can also discover similar problems and solutions that have been shared from other software testers.

Operations and HR processes change also. In a traditional business, we organize people according to fixed structures, and interact with them via email and phone in predefined patterns and times. While groups have goals, they are not typically leveraging talent and expertise outside the four walls the same as inside the four walls of a company.

In a Social Business, the enterprise and its network of partners and customers become a single large network of professionals, working together toward a common goal. As discussed in Chapter 1, “The AGENDA for Social Business Success,” more than 80% of Fortune 100 companies leverage LinkedIn and Facebook as recruiting tools today, leveraging outside resources to help judge talent. From IBM’s Social Business 2011 Jam report, more insight is shared on employees’ views. It shows that a socially enabled HR process needs to embrace the fact that employees have their own personal brands that exist both inside and outside the business, and that it does not own these brands but merely “rents” them while employees are at work. Personal brands need to be measured and rewarded based on how they help your company throughout the social network. As employees transition and become alumni of an organization, it becomes even more important that HR maintains relationships with its alumni network. Social tools can help provide a strong, dynamic way to keep the alumni network active and useful, enabling the organization to keep an invaluable source of knowledge, mentoring, and connections.

In order to take full advantage of the capabilities, HR must work with leadership to expand and instill the use of social technologies in practical and significant ways—a fundamental cultural change. Information can get lost and conversations can taper off when email is the primary form of communication. “I think leaders have a responsibility, where it makes sense, to move people out of email,” a participant wrote. “I heard someone once say that ‘email is where information goes to die,’ implying that we lose something by forcing knowledge into that channel.”

Let’s look at a great example. BASF is the world’s leading chemical company. With about 109,000 employees, and close to 385 production sites worldwide, they serve customers and partners in almost all countries of the world. To improve their internal collaboration, they created connect.BASF, an internal community for their employees. They have socially empowered their HR process so that their employees link socially to form expert networks. This networking among employees and communities across units and regions enables faster and more efficient knowledge sharing and improved collaboration for success. At press time, more than 20,000 employees are active in the community, with 36% joining connect. BASF from another employee’s recommendation.

An example that Cordelia Krooss, BASF Senior Enterprise Community Manager, gave to a group of Social Businesses in Berlin showcased the business value of HR being socially empowered. There was a project team with members from four continents that needed to evaluate and select a supplier for a new service. The project team formed a collaboration hub in connect.BASF where all information came together. The project was self-documenting so that new team members could easily orient themselves and actively contribute immediately. The open exchange accelerated project progress so that the time to complete a crucial project step could be shortened by 25%.

Let’s look at a couple of businesses that have progressed along the path today. The list that follows outlines how some IBM customers are already leading their organizations toward greater success:

• Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts: Where they are working to create a better, more transparent healthcare system by integrating collaboration capabilities in their customer service process, providing communities, team rooms, and real-time communication for the service staff. It enabled them to have faster and more transparent access to information and expertise in support of customer claims and health issues. The business benefits were reduced training costs. Also, because they were freed from unproductive processes and outdated tools, they had more time to spend with customers and hence close more sales.

• Caterpillar: Where they are gaining customer loyalty by providing individualized, web-based customer experiences through socially empowering their marketing processes of engagement. Their blog was just named by Business 2 Community as one of the Top 10 in the world for the remarkable connection they are creating with their customers.

These organizations have chosen different approaches, and they are changing different parts of their enterprises. Even though these industry leaders all serve different customers, the one common theme running through their stories is that they are all applying social networking in their processes on their path to becoming a Social Business.

Socially Empowered Business

Social networking business processes deliver tremendous ROI and, as shown in Figure 5.4, drive the “next wave” of adoption being integrated into daily activities. This ROI is driven by reduced costs in training, finding experts, increasing revenue with more time for sales calls, and the list goes on. In the recent Social Business Jam run by IBM where more than 2,600 people around the world shared their viewpoints and options around Social Business, 47% of participants stated they would be more encouraged to use more social techniques and tools in their job if it was embedded in the applications they use to do their job.

Figure 5.4 Social networking processes drive results.

Let’s take a look at some common business processes, and consider how these might change for a Social Business. We will not go through all business processes, but use some for a frame of reference to see the change that social brings.

For each process, we are going to explore engaging customers and employees where they are, with problems as they have them, before they hit their frustration point. For each process, “where they are” will be different. Will it be Twitter or Facebook? Will it be specialized expert networks? Perhaps even in-person venues? A Social Business lives with its customers, without artificial boundaries constraining how customer issues get discovered and addressed.

I am asked a lot by business leaders, such as CMOs, CHROs, CIOs, and others in the C Suite, about where to get started in evaluating the best ROI results for socially empowering business processes. I recommend beginning by reevaluating how to approach the internal processes of collaboration and human resources because this enables experimentation internally and allows for social learning inside the organization with solid ROI. The HR process ROI is typically driven by increased speed in finding the right subject matter expert, and reduced costs in training and communications. The next processes are typically marketing, as this began with roots of social media, and then customer service, product development and innovation, and supply chain.

The sections that follow explore these key processes with a few leadership Social Businesses that have already begun to take those bold first steps. We will go through HR, Marketing, Customer Service, Product Management, and Product Innovation. Then we will proceed to discuss Social Business process maturity. Let’s get started!

HR

Human Resources today is faced with three major challenges:

1. How do companies rapidly develop workforce skills and capabilities since new opportunities and competitive threats appear faster than ever? Whether industry, sector, technological, geographic, or social, the need to quickly learn new skills and readjust workers’ capabilities is more important than ever.

2. As organizations and their environments become increasingly complex and networked, knowledge is more and more diffuse among larger groups of people. Shared information is therefore becoming the new currency, where power is derived not from information scarcity, but from insights gained through sharing.

3. These complex, interconnected environments require a different kind of leader, one who is comfortable with rapidly shifting leadership styles and modes. A one-size-fits-all leadership strategy is increasingly irrelevant in a global mosaic of cultures, styles, technologies, and workers.

Given these challenges, how could socially enabling key HR functions help make your company more competitive?

Let’s first look at deploying resources internally. Think about how we all tend to do this today. We find an idea, we create a project, and we assign people to the project. Some are the smartest and best-motivated people for the job. Some aren’t. Some insights, perhaps critical to the project’s success, are locked away in other people’s minds, in other divisions, maybe even in other departments.

A Social Business doesn’t do this. A Social Business lets the talent and the problems find each other, letting the network of expertise in the enterprise self-optimize. This is a new, more powerful kind of management, requiring new processes, technologies, and new leaders.

Because of the shifting landscape, where real power comes not from knowledge hoarding but knowledge sharing, it is increasingly in the informal structures and personal relationships of the enterprise’s social network where opportunities for innovation and growth lay. The key is in empowering your processes for social collaboration to serve as a catalyst for this type of networking.

This isn’t new—great leaders have always leveraged personal relationships, and workers have always leveraged the “softer” business relationships nurtured at the water cooler or business dinners or social outings. What is new is that in a globally integrated world, the water cooler is no longer just down the hall, nor is the business dinner just down the street at the club—it’s across the world.

Organization charts are not necessarily the best indicator of how work gets done. Top performers are often overlooked or unidentified in formal structures. Senior people are not always central to solving each problem; people at the periphery of formal structures can actually represent a direct line to top management and untapped knowledge. Increasing network visibility by improving social collaboration makes untapped knowledge actionable.

Your employees are already collaborating this way today, regardless of whether your systems and processes acknowledge it. IDC, a global provider of marketing intelligence in the areas of technology and business strategy, estimates that 57% of U.S. workers use social tools for business purposes at least once per week, and 15% use consumer social tools instead of corporate-sponsored sites (source: IDC, “The State of Social Business: 2009 Survey Results,” Doc #221383, December 2009). Ironically, IT professionals are the most frequent users of social tools for business. Done the right way, and within the organization’s cultural context, extending the support for informal networks can have a market-positive effect on the organization’s agility and productivity. Additionally, this support will groom the next generation of leaders who, by working and growing in this net environment, are better able to lead corporations to newer heights.

According to Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui, “The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday,” McKinsey Quarterly, www.mckinseyquarterly.com (December, 2010), social-empowered HR processes show real business benefits. Some of the key results are the following:

• 30% median improvement in time to find internal experts and knowledge

• 10% median reduction in costs associated with training and communications

The following sections present three examples of Social Businesses that have taken the bold step with their HR processes. Both Sogeti and IBM are great examples of how to empower your HR processes for social collaboration. In addition, the large U.S. utility company shows with real financial results the potential for competitive advantage by starting with this business process.

Marketing

Marketing executives are focused today on increasing revenue with new markets and opportunities opening up quickly, producing more competitive offerings, and reducing their costs while increasing engagement with clients. Marketing must deliver an experience that is engaging, memorable, and compelling. In addition, they need a way to provide consistency in message everywhere they go and relevant and personalized information customized to customers. A pretty tall order and one for which social tools can excel.

Business imperatives for marketing processes include creating a consistent multichannel experience, delivering relevant interactions that increase customer loyalty and satisfaction, creating brand ambassadors, and integrating across online and face-to-face channels.

Given these challenges, how could socially enabling key marketing functions help make your company more competitive?

Let’s first look at marketing in the traditional sense. Think about how we all tend to do this today. We create a message, and push it into the marketplace through traditional channels. The process assumes control over brand image and brand communication. It would take weeks or months to launch a new campaign. Furthermore, marketers would only be able to launch individual promotions.

In the traditional approach, many campaigns are pushed “blindly” with no customer input or feedback and are very call-center and mailing intense. The direct sales teams are challenged to convey values of each new campaign in relevant context to customer.

A Social Business doesn’t adopt this approach. A Social Business knows that its marketing department is composed of customers. A Social Business enables creation of new promotions and launches in real time, leveraging multiple campaigns to different targets—end consumers. The Social Business understands customer preferences, and quickly tailors offers and communications to meet their needs. It quickly and reliably gauges the performance of marketing programs to understand when a change is needed. As it socially enables its marketing processes, clients and partners participate at every step. For example, the lead generation process could be socially enabled by adding in communities as a source of high-quality leads, and by analyzing client-stated habits and preferences to “hyper-target” campaigns.

According to Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui, “The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday,” McKinsey Quarterly, www.mckinseyquarterly.com (December, 2010), social-enabled marketing processes show real business benefits. Some of the key results are these:

• 20% median improvement in awareness

• 15% median improvement in revenue

• 10% median improvement in effectiveness of conversion

The following sections present two examples of Social Businesses that have taken the bold step with their marketing processes.

Customer Service

The primary goal of customer service is about serving clients, sometimes in their most frustrated state, as typically they are calling about an issue or a problem. The outcome targeted through listening to the customers and assessing the customers’ needs is to help them while leaving them with a pleasant experience. Most are struggling to keep pace with rapidly increasing consumer expectations. High turnover, new communication channels, and budget cuts make the job of client satisfaction even more difficult.

Given these challenges, how could socially empowering key customer service functions help make your company more competitive?

The typical customer service operation today measures customer service in a set of siloed metrics, not looking at the process as a whole. According to Francine Richards, writer for eHow Business, a typical customer service operation measures

“the average speed of answer of phone calls and the number of calls abandoned before getting to a customer service representative. Additionally, companies may use customer satisfaction surveys and track the number of customer complaints. Setting goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) such as all calls are answered within 10 seconds are critical for success.”

Most traditional service centers have limited web self-service and they elevate call levels, especially to support new promotions. With traditional input mechanisms like phone calls, they are challenged to service concerns coming in from Facebook, Twitter, and the other new social channels. More common than not, there is no integration of frequently changing campaigns into frontline sales behavior. For example, if marketing ran a campaign, there is typically not interlock between the campaign and the service center’s knowledge when questions come in about the new campaign’s offer.

A Social Business doesn’t do this. In a socially enabled customer service process, customers interact with each other and directly with relationship managers. They have a rich new community for members that increases trust through interactions with each other and the support team. As an added benefit, their campaigns enhance online communities and relationships.

A Social Business enables a call-center manager with the ability to update web content based on customer behavior—providing critical information when needed, or sharing best practices with blogging, shared bookmarks, shared files, and activities. Those companies that can leverage these new social tools are much fiercer competitors, and more important, understand more about their clients. To further showcase the value of this engagement, the Social Business should also alter the process to provide online services to promote self-service within communities, instant click to chat, and easy access to experts.

In this new world, there is the chance for everyone to complain in many different forums. The new customer service process integrates these social platforms into its strategy as well. According to IDC, there are five areas that enable a Social Business to understand and help clients through social channels (source: Michael Fauscette, IDC Group VP, Software Business Solutions: http://www.mfauscette.com/software_technology_partn/2010/05/the-social-employee-manifesto.html):

• Acquire knowledge and ask questions of a community.

• Share knowledge with and contribute new ideas to a community.

• Initiate conversations about my company’s products and services online.

• Gather feedback on existing products and services from the community.

• Manage relationships with customers and prospects.

According to Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui, “The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday,” McKinsey Quarterly, www.mckinseyquarterly.com (December, 2010), social-enabled customer service processes show real business benefits. These are some of the key results:

• 30% median improvement in the speed of access to internal experts

• 30% median improvement in the speed of access to internal knowledge

• 15% median reduction in external communications expense

Zappos.com, IBM, and Southwest have built best-of-class service and support organizations by socially empowering this important client process.

• Zappos.com has world-class customer service and support processes with social insert at many steps in the process: Listening to blogs, tweets, and communities; proactively responding to any issues or opportunities; encouraging collaboration by providing communities for internal employees to chat, and for clients to chat with clients.

• IBM has world-class customer service and support and has been leveraging social tools for many years to ensure that the level of support occurs by sharing client feedback through social networks, celebrating customer success, and using social tools to give customers a view of how committed IBM is to its quality and support.

• Southwest Airlines has embedded its customer support processes with social from start to finish. Their online portal has more than 12 million monthly visits; they have more than 1 million Twitter followers and 1.3 million Facebook Likes, and 29,000 reviewers on their Travel Guide. In addition, their CEO is active on LinkedIn Answers, constantly asking potential business travelers, “What else do you need for Southwest to become your go-to business airline?”

The case studies that follow provide two other examples of how companies are taking this bold step: Sennheiser Electronic GmbH & Co., and Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

Product Development and Innovation

Product development and innovation challenges are finding effective methods of identifying and developing breakthrough innovation ideas. Innovation used to be the preserve of a select band of employees (be they designers, engineers, or scientists) whose responsibility it was to generate and pursue new ideas, often in a separate location. That thought process is changing, however. Google now has “20 time.” Employees can spend 20% of their time doing what they deem is valuable to think and innovate. Out of this initiative came the RechargeIT project, geared at making the new hybrid cars affordable and efficient for the average consumer.

According to MIT Sloan Management Review, in “The Five Myths of Innovation,” innovation has increasingly come to be seen as the responsibility of the entire organization.

Two of the key takeaways of MIT’s latest research are the following:

• External innovation forums have access to a broad range of expertise that makes them effective for solving narrow technological problems.

• Internal innovation forums have less breadth but more understanding of context.

Smart companies use their external and internal experts for very different types of problems. The way they socially empower the process for internal and external is taken into account.

Think of the way we all manage products today.

We go out, we listen to customers, then we disappear for a while, and reemerge months later with a prototype, asking, “Is this what you meant?” What if it isn’t? What if the requirements have changed? What if what looked right looks less right once you start building it?

A Social Business is different.

A Social Business builds its products with customers and partners. In fact, from IBM’s Social Business 2011 Jam report, the 2500-plus people agreed that for innovation to grow in corporations, companies must leverage the experience and connections of their alumni network, and embrace the wisdom of the crowds, while rewarding those employees who take full advantage of those networked ideas.

Product plans are less predictable, but product results are more predictable: Social Businesses have a better chance of building what customers want. According to Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui, “The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday,” McKinsey Quarterly, www.mckinseyquarterly.com (December, 2010), social-empowered product development and innovation processes show real business benefits.

Here are some of the key results:

• 25% median improvement in the speed of access to external experts

• 20% median increase in the number of successful innovations

• 20% median reduction in the time-to-market for new products/services

Market-leading organizations have reached out to other parts of the business and to partners and customers for product insights. Market leaders such as Proctor & Gamble have been using crowdsourcing techniques to challenge the best and the brightest (wherever they may reside) to offer up new product ideas or ways existing products can be improved. As a reminder, to crowdsource a product means that you leverage the wisdom of the crowds, usually in the blogosphere to generate new ideas, refine the ideas, and vote on the best idea. Some people also refer to this as collective intelligence.

Because crowdsourcing is leveraging the value gained from multiple people in an online methodology to gain new insights and validate ideas, it can enhance your traditional product development and innovation processes. It ensures that client input is seen in real time, and it enables your development team to garner input from nonclients as well.

In fact, crowdsourcing is growing exponentially. Matt Johnson, leader of UTest’s marketing and community management teams, works for a company whose entire business model is built on crowdsourcing, UTest is a venture-funded software testing marketplace based in Massachusetts that crowdsources testing of software for major corporations. Matt Johnson predicts:

“The line will be drawn clearly between loosely affiliated mobs and highly skilled, well-paid, collaborative communities of experts. In other words, work categories that require greater expertise (for example, software testing and online advertising) will mature from crowdsourcing to expert-sourcing.”

Many companies leverage crowdsourcing today. From Snapple and Mountain Dew in the beverage business, to Coach in the luxury space, to IBM and UTest in the software space, and even the National Football League in sports advertising, crowdsourcing is moving from experimentation into mainstream innovation.

But the key here is how you embed this concept into your processes. Stephen King, CEO of Mob4Hire, has built his competitive differentiation on crowdsourcing. Mob4Hire is the only crowdsourced company that provides true mobility testing as well as the ability to conduct market research with the Mob4Hire team of testers. He commented:

“Crowdsourcing will continue to move from being a source of free/cheap contribution to one where people get compensated for their time. As more and more mainstream businesses embrace crowdsourcing, we’ll also see better systems built to ensure better quality through better processes.”

In addition to delivering broader transparency across projects and divisions, these social capabilities have been used to communicate and collaborate with external constituents such as partners and customers. By inviting them into the conversation around product innovation, companies like China Telecom have been able to deliver new and updated products to market faster and with less risk knowing that a market for the new product already existed.

Socially empowering your product development and innovation process enables you to have transparent knowledge sharing by tapping into employee knowledge and creativity across business divisions and time zones to enable an agile and dexterous organization. It enables you to gather more ideas from clients and partners using crowdsourcing and other techniques to deliver compelling offerings to market faster. And finally, a Social Business enables constant product improvement through frequent feedback. The ongoing and responsive conversations with trusted product advisors from top customers keep existing products out in front of the competition.

The sections that follow present two case studies of Social Businesses that have taken the bold step with their product development and innovation processes, both outside the United States: China Telecom and CEMEX.

Social Business Maturity

The maturity of your Social Business makes a difference in how you start your journey and how you invest. I work a lot with Altimeter Group. Altimeter Group is a research-based advisory firm that helps companies and industries leverage disruption to their advantage. Altimeter Group was formed in June 2008 by Charlene Li, a veteran technology and business analyst and co-author of the bestselling business book Groundswell: Living in a World Transformed by Social Technologies. In addition to Charlene, Jeremiah Owyang, a Partner at Altimeter, is a Social Business expert, well known in the industry.

Altimeter’s 2011 report titled “How Corporations Should Prioritize Social Business Budgets” suggests a model for your investment based on your maturity level. A company needs to have a clear idea of where it is on the path to Social Business—whether its business is well-suited to social techniques and how mature its Social Business implementation is.

In Figure 5.5, you can see the results of Altimeter’s survey of 140 global corporate social strategists.

Figure 5.5 Most corporations are at intermediate levels.

They rated themselves as being one of three stages of Social Business maturity: Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced. The majority of companies consider themselves intermediates in today’s world in their pursuit of becoming a Social Business. The most interesting conclusion from the report is how companies progress in their organizational model in their pursuit based on that maturity (see Figure 5.6).

Figure 5.6 Corporations organize for Social Business differently depending on their maturity level.

From the report, we can see that a centralized model is most prevalent (37%) among Novice programs, where Social Business is least likely to have permeated the enterprise. Another quarter percentage (23%) are decentralized, with no central coordination. Low barriers to entry mean that employees adopt social channels before the company formally organizes for Social Business. However, as demands in Social Business compound from customers and internal stakeholders, corporations reorganize and they need their programs to scale. Altimeter found that 67% of Intermediate and 63% of Advanced programs organize into hub and spoke or multiple hub and spoke—models that involve multiple departments and business units outside the corporate function. The shift toward these two models will continue as Social Business programs mature and corporations realize that they cannot manage increasing requests with either a centralized or decentralized model.

The conclusion is that corporations should gauge their own Social Business maturity and prioritize spending decisions. In Figure 5.7, you can see that novice programs must focus on getting their internal teams trained; intermediate programs must scale customer-facing initiatives; and advanced programs must integrate Social Business throughout the enterprise.

Figure 5.7 Corporations should budget spending based on their maturity level.

Thanks to Altimeter, a sample maturity test is included here!

Conclusion

A Social Business turns its business processes on their side and ensures that the existing business process flow and the network of people responsible for each stage in the process are able to collaborate. In some cases, new business processes are created.

The power of the Social Business Agenda is in its bold, but systematic approach, with all your company’s processes, but at a rate and pace that is acceptable for your risk level. Unlike social media that tends to hone in on marketing only, a Social Business expands its focus to include sales, customer service, product development, product innovation, human resources, and supply chain. The cultural transformations must support these key global processes as Jacques Bughin and Michael Chui, “The rise of the networked enterprise: Web 2.0 finds its payday,” McKinsey Quarterly, www.mckinseyquarterly.com (December, 2010), showed us that there is a powerful ROI for this focus:

• 30% increase in speed to knowledge and experts from a focus on HR

• 15% increase in revenue from a focus on Sales and Marketing

• 20% increase in time-to-market and successful innovations from a focus on product innovation

Empowering your processes with social techniques like networking will enable the needed transformation. Multiple disciplines and departments will benefit, and the assembly or adaptation of infrastructure is required to streamline and manage social workflow.

Each of the processes of focus—whether it is human resources, marketing, customer service, product development and innovation, or supply chain—will require a wider scope of active listening and participation across the full spectrum of influence. The recognition that this is people-led, not technology-led, will help to guide each of your processes. Your maturity will impact your starting point, your organizational model, and even your focus.

The next chapter explores how to design for both reputation and risk management.