louder than God's revolver and twice as shiny
Now, having come back from Dreamforce, and having had the opportunity to speak to customers on the way back, and having had time to rest and reflect, I think it’s about more than that.
I think Marc Benioff’s vision for the Social Enterprise is about more than just enterprise software, it is about changing the way customers deal with companies. Transforming it. Irrevocably.
Read more at Confused of Calcutta …
There’s been a lot written recently about the issue of online anonymity, and in particular how Google believes that a “real names” policy is necessary so that the Google+ network maintains a certain tone and level of trust.
If Google is serious about creating an actual community on Google+, it’s an idea worth thinking about.
Have you been recruited purely through the social channels ?
LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Naymz, they’re all there boasting your profile to all and sundry and a carefully crafted profile can attract the right attention. But here’s a thought. Organisations utilising social software can easily identify those internally in the business who really need to be retained and nurtured.
I wrote a few weeks back how using networked communities and social enterprise software can help monitor and track individuals worth keep hold of that old silo’d and hierarchical org structures would keep hidden from view (especially if they’re perceived as a threat by peers)
“There’s another advantage in understanding the social enterprise network dynamic. What is the impact of a key networked resource leaving the organisation. Right now it’s build on their place in a traditional hierarchy and how many people sit below and above them in the chain. Under a community operating model that span of influence could be exponential yet completely hidden. Would you really let this person go if you understood how much the larger community relied on them ? I seriously doubt you would.“
Apart from the typical areas which would benefit from greater collaboration and social interaction such as customer facing departments and process professionals, HR departments should also take advantage of this paradigm to leverage the level of transparency it can bring, monitor who the resources are in the enterprise with the awareness and knowledge that others are using outside of their normal job remit
In this way, HR could be at the forefront of actually helping shape how talent should really be distributed across the enterprise. And I bet it would look nothing like how it would be structured using traditional top-down org charts.
Wired Magazine (UK Edition) ran a feature in April 2010 giving examples of 20 companies pushing the boundaries of how they work internally; collaboration, cloud-based teams, loose internal structures, social media…
Topics range from -
Definitely worth a read through to get some ideas of how companies are achieving this (mostly without software).
To read the article in full and all 20 companies, go to Wired.co.uk
I had an interesting briefing with ActionBase recently and we touched on the “Social BPM” scene and process discovery. Initially I had suggested that their ActionMail solution could be used as a process discovery mechanism, tracking ad-hoc processes and how they work via email and Jakub, CTO of ActionBase came out with an interesting statement: as soon as you start observing something or someone the behaviour will change.
Jakub quoted the Hawthorne Effect, ‘whereby subjects improve an aspect of their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are being studied.’
So could this also be true of using social/ collaborative techniques ?
For example, if we used a collaborative platform and invited more participants into the process and improvement forum would we face a situation that because of the open nature people could start to react differently and for the wrong reasons ? Resistors to change could in effect throw in more misinformation because now they have the means to whereas before they may not have been involved in the discovery process.
I firmly believe that social software and Enterprise 2.0 has the means to rip apart an organisation on a technical and cultural level (for the good) but it’s new territory and has a lot of potential to go the other way too and so whilst we are all getting carried away with the buzz and promise let’s still be mindful that there are many more pitfalls and hurdles to overcome and consider fully before we rush and buy our first solutions.