I spent much of last week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Santa Clara meeting customers and analysts, attending the presentations and walking around the expo. It was my first time at the event and I was clearly not the only one. I had an excuse of course; this is my first year living in the Bay Area. But I’m told that in past years attendance by big name customers and sponsors has been limited. Not so this year. Enterprise 2.0 has, it seems come of age.
Many customers I talk to are still blissfully unaware of this new phenomenon. Enterprise 2.0 is defined as the use of ‘Web 2.0’ technologies within an organization to enable or streamline business processes while enhancing collaboration – connecting people through the use of social-media tools. Enterprise 2.0 aims to help employees, customers, suppliers and partners collaborate, share, and organize information. Sharing and organizing information is nothing new in business of course, but Enterprise 2.0 is about how it is shared.
RelayWare has been at the forefront of the development and deployment of collaboration solutions for vendors and their partners for years of course. We have called what we do ‘partner relationship management’ or ‘PRM’ – a term that’s been around for over a decade. But to be more precise, we’ve been pioneering the concept of partner ecosystem collaboration – upstream, peer-group and downstream partner collaboration for manufacturers – PRM 2.0, if you like for quite some time.
Brent Leary defined social CRM rather well as “using any tool available that will allow us to meaningfully engage with more people like [our customers]. It’s realizing people like doing business with people they like – and understanding we love doing business with people we trust”.
So PRM 2.0 could also be termed ‘Social PRM’ which is about taking precisely the same approach with the members of our partner ecosystem. And since those people are the ones most commonly interacting with your customers and those most likely to impact your customer’s buying and ownership experience, don’t you think you need to be including partners in your company’s Enterprise 2.0 strategy for 2011?
There’s no doubt that Enterprise 2.0 tools, have huge potential value for the modern business. It’s even more exciting to see how tools will soon combine with customer-facing 2.0 technologies (i.e. sCRM) to create a fluid, connected eco-system beyond traditional B2C models of interaction.
Some people are talking this up to such an extent now that the merger is seen as inevitable. While, I think it’s important to discern between the two until each has come of age (they’re both still evolving at such a rate that it’s difficult to pin them down), I’m not sure whether coining a new term (PRM 2.0 or sPRM) for this so-soon-to-be-crossed middle-ground adds much value. That’s not to say that the practice (nor indeed your product) isn’t a valuable one, just that it’s already implied in the concept of sCRM ecosystems. I just worry that giving it a name at this stage is like starting to build sand castles just as the tide’s coming in.