Chapter 8. Technology as a Competitive Ingredient
Yes, the Technology Is Important
As a business leader, you’ll find that your Social Business will be dependent on technology. Technology is indeed the key ingredient that companies use to transform themselves into Social Businesses and outperform their competition. Clearly, it was Internet technology that broke down many traditional barriers to relationships and formed the foundation for new technologies that enable Social Businesses today. While the Internet has been a catalyst for new unchartered ways for people to collaborate, it is the new social technology capabilities that take these functions and supercharge them for business.
For example, community and forum functions enable relationships to be created, nurtured, and leveraged across boundaries of geography and culture; blogs and managed activity spaces break down barriers of organization and hierarchy even further; file sharing supports collaborative decision making; and instant e-meetings and chat increase the efficiency and speed of processes through timely collaboration. In a nutshell, these new social technology capabilities enable people to operate the way they have always wanted to operate, trading, sharing, developing, rating, discussing, and so on, all without restrictions and barriers that get in the way of productive business relationships.
This chapter is included in the book so that as a business leader you can work hand in hand with your CIO or IT department to select or build the right Social Business platform. Familiarize yourself with some of the core areas that are required. Figure 8.1 shows the key technical capabilities that are essential to a Social Business. This high level diagram illustrates the capabilities required to have a people centric Social Business platform.
Figure 8.1 Social Business capabilities diagram
As I mentioned in Chapter 5, “(Social) Network Your Business Processes,” I’m asked a lot by business leaders how to get started with Social Business, and I mention areas such as HR, marketing, customer service, product development and innovation, and supply chain. This question of where to get started is also common among IT departments.
The good news is this: Getting started with social technology is really no different from getting started with traditional technologies, applications, and platforms. It starts with strategy, planning, design, and an executive champion in most cases.
But there is a difference! Since social technologies are inherently oriented toward the end user, the strategy must embrace the realities of rapid change, unpredictable demand, and unforeseen requirements. As we saw in the example of CEMEX in Chapter 5, once a social platform is made available, it may have enormous uptake in the company, stressing network and storage capacities. The strategy, plan, and design of this system required flexibility and scalability to meet the demands of 17,000 users participating in more than 400 communities.
The need for very dynamic response to unpredictable end-user demand also requires significant consideration for the solution delivery and management capabilities of the IT environment. This is represented as “Change Management” in the diagram shown in Figure 8.1. Most, if not all, companies today are reluctant to spend money based on scenarios of theoretical usage. Instead, they’re looking to various virtualization technologies, technologies that allow spikes in usage to take advantage of dormant processing resources, to provide the level of dynamic flexibility required. Many are also leveraging cloud options, with hybrid models integrating cloud and on-premises capabilities becoming an increasingly popular consideration. What does all this mean? Your IT team will need to consider delivery and change management from the beginning of the Social Business implementation. Flexibility must be designed in from the start!
What is your IT group’s technical strategy and does it map to your overall Social Business strategy? Does the strategy fully anticipate the level of flexibility that will be required to handle unpredictable change?
Social Technologies Extend Existing Systems
While the bold AGENDA of Social Business has the potential to revolutionize business operations, inside and outside the company, the adoption of the Social Business technology must be done in the context of operational systems today. Social Business technologies extend cooperative application technologies to “socially enable” the applications and data they support. In other words, Social Business technologies are evolutionary; they integrate into the fabric of tools already in use; and they extend the ability of end users to more fully collaborate and meet objectives.
Many social strategies simply require the implementation of a platform of capabilities not technically linked or tightly integrated to any specific application or business process. Instead, the platform provides general functions such as discussion forums, blogs, wikis, and communities. The linkage to a given application or business process is then determined by the end user through their use of the social functions. This is great news! Generally, the technical work required to support your Social Business strategy is relatively simple. Of course, there are situations where the degree of technical integration may be more extensive, but the end objective, providing social functions to better connect people, processes, and information, will be the same.
Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions (Arrow ECS) was looking for a community-based solution that would help increase collaboration within the company’s partner community. To meet its business challenges, they created a social collaboration application that allows the partner community to collaborate by matching customer needs with the capabilities of members of the partner community. Using profiles, the community can be used to easily search and find other partners with skills required for a project, issue, or collaboration need. In addition, partners can post their needs. In other words, the community is used for two-way resource identification and engagement. The application did not require extensive technical integration; it was implemented using common social functions of communities, profiles, and so on.
Another example, Cardiff University, has taken an approach that more fully integrates social capabilities into its research, teaching, and administrative processes. Their objective was to stimulate collaboration and learning through distinctive experiences that would attract and retain students, staff, and researchers. The technical approach was to integrate a set of features, including social capabilities such as instant messaging and collaborative workspaces, into a portal environment. Users select from various services and content to create their own portal experiences tailored to their specific interests and needs. Through social communities, users not only collaborate with their colleagues, students, and instructors, but also provide (“crowdsourcing”) feedback to the university on new services and content they would like to see added to the available portal site.
Of course, these examples indicate that technical integration required to support a Social Business strategy may vary.
What level of technical integration is required for your solution? The good news is that many Social Business solutions can start quickly with the implementation of a basic platform of social functions (blogs, wikis, communities, and so on) and can evolve to more deeply integrate into specific processes over time. Regardless of the level of technical integration, social technology implementations leverage a core set of capabilities.
Social Technology Core Capabilities
Let’s dig a little deeper into the foundational capabilities of social technology: interaction, content, and insight, as shown in Figure 8.2. Many of the case studies like Sogeti, Practicing Law Institute, and Teach for America among others that I have already covered in the previous chapters were based on these foundational capabilities of social technology.
Figure 8.2 User experience and mobility
Interaction capabilities are the heart and soul of social technology; we could even say they are what make social technology social! It is through social interaction that people engage and involve other people in their decisions, actions, and processes. Of course, people have always worked together in these ways, mostly face to face; business has always been a social activity! But with social technologies, the interactions are simpler to make happen, they may be direct or indirect, and they are expedited.
Social interaction capabilities accelerate communication and collaboration across networks of employees, customers, and business partners, thus shortening cycle times, increasing worker productivity, and creating better structured and more transparent management of collaborative processes. Traditionally, email has been used as a primary mechanism for social interaction in business. With the new capabilities of blogs, discussion forums, wikis, communities, and shared project activity spaces, however, social interaction no longer requires the back-and-forth flow of notes; it’s no longer dependent on a known distribution list for participation; and it’s scaled to a broad group of interested parties, regardless of the formal job title or organizational position.
But how will we cope with an exploding set of options for social interaction? This is a key question. Technical functions are required that help end users organize, filter, and efficiently use the huge amount of information available to them. New capabilities, called activity streams, are emerging in many collaboration systems today to address this specific requirement. An activity stream is a list of recent activities performed by an individual. Activity streams will enable end users to blend information from internal and external sources, including blogs, wikis, business applications, and so forth, so they can be effectively used in day-to-day work and enable efficient collaboration across a broad network of people. With activity streams, it is likely that many people will shift from an email-centric model of interaction to an activity-centric model that is much more open and dynamic, yet tailored to the end user’s specific task needs.
There are, of course, situations that require direct, immediate interaction between a number of people, sometimes one-on-one, sometime one-to-many, and sometimes many-to-many. Social interaction capabilities make these interactions more effective as well. Using integrated instant messaging, “click to chat,” instant e-meetings, and so on, individual discussions can be held wherever the two parties are located, even when mobile devices are used for the chat. With the emergence of simple-to-use video capabilities, e-meetings are becoming much more viable for direct, yet virtual, interactions.
Take, for example, a situation that happened to me recently. I hurt my back and was grounded from flying for a period of eight weeks. What was I to do with all my meetings and commitments? Fortunately, I was able to use video e-meetings to successfully present to IBM internal and external audiences. In fact, there were some very interesting lessons learned from these meetings:
• In the case of an external presentation, I was able to respond to audience interest and understanding covering different topics in the presentation by using a hashtag set up in Twitter as a way for the audience to ping me throughout the session.
• I asked IBMers in the room to instant-message indications of audience interest and engagement to me so that I could adjust as the session progressed. While this was not a complete substitute for the ability to sense audience attention in person, it provided me with valuable insight I would not have had without their input.
• Video technology is still emerging, so testing it before the meeting is a must!
The power of social interaction is clear, but what about content? Social content capabilities allow social data to be captured and managed so it can be used effectively for interaction and insight. For example, in the discussion about activity streams, I indicated a need to filter what flows into the activity stream so the end user is not inundated with too much information. How will the filtering be done? Using profile information. For example, a blog may or may not be included in the stream. Profile information is clearly one form of social data. But, more broadly, what is social data?
Social data is information about people (locations, relationships, expertise, etc.) that is important in engaging them in appropriate networks, processes, and interactions. It is data that, when analyzed, may indicate preferences, affiliations, relationships, and so on that are appropriate for the business to know and to leverage for improved service to employees, partners, or customers. As I just mentioned, often this data is thought of as profile information; however, it is also data that might be derived from internal and external systems. It’s the ability to capture and manage this data, integrating it with transaction or process information, that is required for Social Business. Social data can, of course, be seen as an extension to customer data or partner data that is already captured and maintained for many business processes today. But it is an extension that takes into account the broader social context of the relationship the individual has with the company and his or her network, and therefore is an extension that provides the basis for better insight and improved interactions.
To illustrate this, let’s take the need for social media aggregation (the collection of social data from social media sources) in the retail industry. All retailers have traditional information about their customers, demographics, transaction histories, payment histories, and so on. This allows the retailer to have a profile indicating who the customer is and what they have done.
But what additional information can help the retailer be more proactive in the relationship? What does the customer really think about the company and how they do business? This is social data indicating the attitude of the customer toward the company. And where is that data? Embedded in the posts on social media sights, Facebook and Twitter for example. Retailers see this data, what customers say about them in the social media, as an indication of their “earned” reputation, and they use it, once it’s captured, to perform predictive analytics, to better target individual customers, and to discover new customers from the social media networks of their existing customers.
Social content capabilities also enable the management and use of the growing amount of unstructured information available to meet a particular objective of the company. For example, employee learning can be revolutionized by using community-based methods for aggregating digital instructional content from experts “on the ground,” ranking and tagging that content to establish its value and relevance to other users, and ultimately delivering the content on demand to whoever needs it as they go about their jobs. In other words, the best instructors covering a given topic may be a set of practitioners, not in headquarters, but out in the field. These people can quickly and easily create videos, movies, and so on that provide instructional value to others in the company, and with social content capabilities those videos and movies can easily be made directly available to the people who need them.
Social insight capabilities are functions that bring together business analytics and social decision making, as well as social analytics. Working for IBM has given me an opportunity to see the power of this combination in a globally integrated enterprise. Every day, I’m involved in decision-making situations involving sales of software products that involve business leaders all over the world. As large as the organization is, we are empowered to operate with incredible speed because as leaders we leverage a common set of business analytics, and in an open and interactive way, we move forward on business decisions that benefit from the collective assessment of that data.
In May of 2011, it came to my attention, as well as to the attention of my peers, that one of the software products in the portfolio I manage did not have a strong pipeline. Our predictive analytics based on historical data and real-time sales data from our CRM system created a red flag. IBM’s social analytics dashboard allowed my team and me to also review recommendations to help correct this issue and provide the highest probability to make our quota in spite of the weak pipeline. Within 4 hours of discovering this issue, the predictive analysis had already made some recommendations. Within 8 hours, my team had met to review and assess the data and situation. Within 24 hours, we had consensus on a solution, and within 48 hours of being notified, we had communicated out to all WW sellers a new sales promotional offering to help close the deals needed to meet the quota.
Social insight capabilities also leverage social data to perform predictive analytics. As indicated in the preceding retail example, retailers use data aggregated from social media sites along with data aggregated from customer website navigation for targeted marketing and customer outreach. Marketing campaigns can be adjusted more quickly when the demographics of various groups cluster and show unexpected interest in a set of products.
Insight capabilities enable businesses to derive enhanced levels of business awareness and decision making by integrating social data and network analysis with transaction and process-oriented data analysis. For example, content analysis, the exploration of structured and unstructured data, enables companies to determine patterns, visualize trends, and predict possible future patterns and trends. When this is combined with social network analysis, it may be possible to determine impacts of relationships, organization affiliation, or other social factors into the patterns and trends. This can be extremely powerful. It can open new ideas for targeted marketing, for market creation, or for new market penetration.
I recently saw an example of the level of insight that can be achieved. I have been working with a large financial institution in the U.K. to determine how they can more effectively analyze and use competitive data. They wanted an efficient dashboard to combine competitive information from various sources with effective tools to enable business leaders to collaborate on specific responses and actions. Using the social media aggregation functions, data analytics, and communities, a prototype was actually created for this social analytics dashboard and built in a matter of weeks.
The dashboard combined graphical representations of trends from website searches; lists of social media posts (Twitter) covering searchable keywords/topics; pie charts and line graphs indicating sentiment and associations (keyword/company); and views of evolving topics (“wealth,” “stocks,” “Africa,” etc.) by keyword. The graphical representations could be modified through selection of various filters, enabling the end user to very quickly focus on specific topic areas. And through the integration of communities into the dashboard, the team was able to establish and complete specific activities, post blogs, have discussions, and so forth. In other words, the competitive team was able to effectively collaborate and take action, working from a common dashboard of key data indicating reputation, sentiment, trends, and the like.
As you can see from the discussion in this section, there are a number of core technical capabilities that should be considered as you address the technical implementation approach for your Social Business strategy. But the critical factor is alignment—alignment of the strategy and implementation plan of the IT group with the business timing and needs for the Social Business strategy. What degree of social interaction is required? How will social data be aggregated and managed? What capabilities will support the degree of insight required to meet your business objectives? Using these questions can help you effectively align your IT group to your Social Business strategy.
But we’re not quite finished yet.
Implications for Underlying Infrastructure
No discussion of Social Business technology can ignore the implications on fundamental infrastructure capabilities. The increased use of social networking and social capabilities will also increase the risks and challenges associated with protecting sensitive company information. Regulatory and company-mandated rules that once applied to tightly controlled company information must now be applied to information that can easily move inside and outside the company. And what about archiving and storage requirements that must be met for legal reasons? What social data must be included?
Clearly, there are a number of risk factors that must be identified, assessed, and woven into social solutions, and imply a need to focus on governance, compliance, and security. In addition, privacy laws, which vary significantly around the world, are critical to consider as well.
When asked how these basic infrastructure issues will be addressed, we fall to the favorite answer of architects: “It depends.” Your IT group will need to understand the targeted use cases, users, data, and so on in order to fully determine the requirements and implications on the underlying infrastructure. As I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Social Business capabilities are evolutionary. In some cases, the implications will be minor and simple to implement by the technical team. In other cases, they will be more complex.
A final technical topic (of course, this topic could be chapter by itself, but I will just barely touch on it here)—everyone is aware of the mobility explosion that is in progress today. This move to mobile computing is certainly a core element of the technology of a Social Business. Process, transaction, and collaboration functions all need to be available to interested parties whenever and wherever the individual wants access. And while mobility is already being addressed through mobile access to company portals and some internal systems, the shift to Social Business will only accelerate the need for mobile capabilities to be in place.
Conclusion
Social Businesses depend on the implementation of social technology. For the business goals to be reached, business and IT need to join together to create a platform that enables deeper customer and employee relationships, enhances speed to market, and adapts with flexibility to market changes. This chapter provides an introduction to the types of capabilities that your company should begin exploring. Even if you are not a technologist, join with your CIO in the Social Business mission because technology is core to your company’s success. These are the questions that we discussed in this chapter that you need to work through:
1. What is your IT group’s technical strategy and does it map to your overall Social Business strategy?
2. Does the strategy fully anticipate the level of flexibility that will be required to handle unpredictable change?
3. Does the solution take into account the need for social analytics? Mobile?
4. Does the technology support the regulatory and legal policies of your company and industry?
5. What capabilities will support the degree of insight required to meet your business objectives?
Now let’s continue on to draw up your company’s Social Business AGENDA!
Special thanks to Bill Hassell for his amazing work with me on this chapter!