Optimizing Organizational Effectiveness Through Social Business

Many organizations today are seeking opportunities to be more responsive and effective. Typical goals are to improve sales efficiency, accelerate innovation and increase responsiveness to customers. As companies have leveraged the benefits of external communication using social networking, leading organizations have recognized the potential for similar impact through full transformation into a social business.

Collaboration in Demand 

IBM's 2012 CEO Study identified that collaboration is the number-one trait CEOs are seeking in their employees, with 75 percent of CEOs calling it critical. A new, unprecedented era of internal knowledge sharing, catalyzed by “digital natives” entering the workforce, brings expectations of connectedness and contributing to the overall organization. Becoming a social business drives both the cultural change as well as technology adoption required to meet the expectations of employees as well as customers, partners, and suppliers.

The largest potential for improved collaboration is insertion of social into business processes. Inside the organization, this can lead to measurable improvements in the responsiveness and close rate of salespeople, faster delivery of new products and shorter cycle time in providing customer service. There are efficiency benefits as well, as organizations turn from sending information in private channels such as email to sharing information through social file repositories, wikis, blogs or profiles.

Putting Social to Work at IBM

At IBM, we have proven the value of social business tools in several ways. Here are a few examples:

• Our inside sales organization has increased its successful conversion rate for leads and opportunities, based on utilization of internal social tools. Salespeople now have direct access to product expertise and information, which they can then utilize to address customer requirements and objections more quickly. We have measured a several percentage point improvement in results which can be directly correlated to the use of internal social networking.
• Project teams at IBM increasingly are comprised of talent clouds, where the best subject-matter experts and skilled leaders are assembled for a particular activity. To help identify and leverage expertise, employees create and maintain their own organizational profiles, including much richer data than the typical corporate directory. IBMers document their technical skills, spoken languages, customer affiliations, interests and previous employers, all of which feeds into an expertise location system.
• Unstructured activity tracking has replaced formal project management for group-oriented task management. The activity-centric model provides significant improvements versus email oriented approaches, which tend to focus on individual to-dos and keep most of the knowledge hidden in individual user mailboxes. 
  Shared activities store everything from meeting minutes to presentation material to document templates, all in a outline-oriented shared repository. Activity contributors typically can be added by anyone already involved, ensuring that new contributors are enabled organically.

In my own experience, the motivations for participating in internal collaboration through social business tools are clear. My daily email volume has decreased over the last three years, despite greater responsibilities. The constant inbox assault of requests for current presentations, attempts to locate me or determine the status of current projects or activities has all disappeared.

By providing all of that information through our use of social business tools, those IBMers who I normally interact with or influence can find useful information on their own, by utilizing tags, search tools or notifications. This has resulted in a transformation of email into a social mail experience, where only relevant content arrives in my inbox with a faster path to action.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Weekend Reading: Time to Show Big Data Who's the Boss

We've heard the tales of how quickly companies are amassing data. We've seen the capacity to store and create data increase at a dizzying rate. We've heard the warning tales of big data thrown around so much it's taken on the status of the bogeyman.

Our contributors this week offered some hard-earned wisdom to help calm our fears about the big data deluge. But as soon as our fears were relieved about big data, we were told to fear content marketing and had cause for concern about the future of SharePoint Designer. 

Curious? Read on. 

Taming the Big Data Beast

Three Big Data Rules to Live By

Chelsi Nakano (@chelsi): The Internet walks into a [karaoke] bar: “Every breath you take, every move you make…I’ll be watching you.”

In today’s increasingly connected world, practically everything we do creates an electronic record. Every purchase, every status update, every Like becomes a part of the digital ether — a tiny but permanent speck in the growing collective. And as organizations continue to amass this so-called Big Data, so grows the pressure to prove its intrinsic value. If you’re lost as to how, you’ve got a lot of company.

Is 'Big Data' Marketing's Next Frontier?

Trip Kucera (@tripkucera): Big data is everywhere, both literally and figuratively. On the figurative side, it’s hard to escape the hype about big data, the term appearing in headlines of major national newspapers and business publications (most recently the cover of the "Harvard Business Review"). But the hype is happening for a reason, and that’s the amount of data we’re all collectively generating in our off- and on-line worlds.

Analytics: Tap into Data to Build Real Customer Relationships

Tyrona Heath (@tyrona): With the explosion of big data, most businesses are acutely aware that they are sitting on a mountain of untapped data, struggling to get an in depth view of the customer. Along with the rise of social media, multiple disruptive forces like empowered consumers, shrinking budgets, insanely fast innovation cycles and an ever growing number of channels underscore the importance of making marketing informed by data easier.

Reaching the Empowered Customer with Data-Driven Marketing

Lisa Arthur (@lisaarthur): The average consumer in 2012 is very different than the average consumer 10 years ago. For that matter, consumers today are a lot different than they were 10 months ago. Empowered by technology and with instant access to vast quantities of information, people have new rules for shopping, communicating and even relaxing. The bottom line is that consumers are now data-driven, which means marketers have no choice but to dive even deeper than their customers and competitors into the information goldmine.

Discussion Point: From Data to Decisions -  Real-Time Analytics Support the Customer Experience

Katie Ingram: Every organization captures data — social media analytics, customer interactions, website traffic and other metrics, the list goes on. That the amount of data collected is growing exponentially is no surprise, that technologies are emerging every day to help us capture and analyze this data is also no surprise. But how are these analytics and data support tools changing to help better support the customer experience and what can we expect from these technologies in the next few years? That's the question we asked our esteemed panel in today's Discussion Point.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

The Digital Workplace: The Need for Good Practices in a Complex Work Environment

Today's workforce has a growing number of tools at their disposal to communicate, collaborate and get work done. But there is a concurrent increase in workflow complexity, which, left unmanaged, results in time lost and inefficiencies. It's time to bridge the gap between the two.

For easily repeatable tasks, the process has often been defined and implemented in the systems you are using, such as an ERP system. In knowledge-intense and highly dynamic and collaborative work environments, processes are often barely repeatable (check out Thingamy for more on the concept of barely repeatable processes).

This means that knowledge workers who participate in a task have to design or redesign the process each time it is executed. Much more is required from those who participate in a barely repeatable process than an easily repeatable. Instead of simply following instructions created by a process engineer, you have to be a process engineer yourself and design the process on the fly as you execute it.

Efficient Practices Lead to Results

In such a work environment, it is very important to have efficient practices — ways to perform common individual tasks — that allow you to execute the job in an efficient way. You also need to have those practices in common with the other people who will be involved, otherwise you will have to revert to “whatever works” practices, using the most convenient but not necessarily most suitable tools and methods to collaborate, such as email and ad hoc physical meetings.

Here’s my key point: how efficiently tasks and processes are executed is very much dependent on the practices and tools used. For example, there can be extreme differences in efficiency between a scenario where you co-author content by emailing documents back and forth and a scenario where you can co-author the content directly using a tool like Google Docs or the co-authoring capabilities of SharePoint 2010 in Word.

First Identify the Problem

When I talk to people they often recognize the symptoms of bad practices, but they often lack the insight and awareness of what causes the symptoms and why, which of course makes it harder to treat and cure the “disease." Many of the underlying problems can be fixed by developing better practices using new tools. 

You hear people complaining about too many emails and information overload and when they hear about new tools or new ways of working, they often react negatively, saying they can’t handle more tools or information. What you really need to do is to help them get an understanding of why their situation looks like it does and that it is related to how they currently work with information and communicate and collaborate with each other.

It all starts with asking questions:

• How do you overcome geographical and time differences, i.e. how do you handle a task that involves several people but all people cannot be physically present at the same time to execute the task?
• How do you overcome organizational barriers, .i.e. how do you involve external parties in the execution of a task or process? How do you exchange information with external parties in secure and efficient ways?
• How and where is information created, stored, organized, shared and accessed for each task?
• How and where is information created for one task made available for other tasks performed later by the same or other people?
• How and where are tasks that are inter-dependent coordinated? How do you get notified about the need to execute a certain task, and how do you signal current status to the people you collaborate with — that it has been executed, delayed, interrupted or stopped?
• How and where is information shared in an efficient way to stakeholders that need, or could need, the information?
• How are generic, frequently performed tasks carried out, .e.g.
  • Find information
  • Find a person
  • Co-create information
  • Update information
  • Review information
  • Collect feedback

The Solution Often Already Exists

When questions such as the ones above have been asked and answered, we need to ask ourselves how existing — and new — technologies can be leveraged to work smarter and be used to develop better practices, in particular for tasks that require collaboration and interaction between several people from different organizations, locations and time zones. 

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com