Next in our series of opinions on Social Business is SAP. Interested in the previous ones? Check out Oracle, Attensity, and Fuze Digital.
1) Where is the Social world going to be in 12 months? 24 months?
Companies have traditionally segmented their external customer information from their internal enterprise collaboration, but the real value and power will come from bridging the two. The integration of external customer facing communities and internal employee engagement solutions, will lead to a breakthrough in the way companies collaborate and engage with each other, their partners and customers. This will lead to measurable business value from accelerating innovation to improving communications and delighting customers.
Businesses will see faster innovation, deeper customer relationships, expanded market presence, improvements in complex business processes, and ultimately a stronger competitive advantage in marketplace. This realization of the value of mobilizing collective knowledge, capability, and resources will empower and inspire teams and workgroups and spark an even deeper commitment to creating and fostering a collaborative culture. To meet the ever increasing demand, social enterprise software vendors will evolve solutions with deeper and richer distribution, filtering and organization of business data.
2) How can businesses not be left behind?
The very first step for an organization is to create and nurture a climate for sharing, connecting and solving problems collaboratively. Participation needs to be intuitive, easy and require no training. Participants should be rewarded for contributing expertise and helping each other.
Consider social enterprise software that is designed around the way people work, not around workflows and documents. This will dramatically increase adoption and help avoid creating collaborative environments that are “empty” and disconnected from what individuals need to get their work done. The solution they pick needs to offer an intuitive user experience with zero training required and plug easily into existing business applications. Companies have invested a lot in other enterprise applications and any solution that drives collaboration, needs to easily integrate with existing systems that people use for document management, email, calendar, etc.. And finally, it needs to easily adopt the existing security standards set by each company, so each user can access data and approve processes they are authorized to do so from within their social enterprise software.
3) What is going to happen in three years and beyond in the world of social?
Macrowikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World, co authored by Don Tapscott, Chairman of nGenera Insight a business unit of Moxie Software examines the impact of collaboration on business and the world. The authors state the many of today’s institutions are not functioning properly and have reached the end of their lifecycle. They explain the need for mass collaboration in areas such as transportation, finance, education, health care, journalism and government.
Changes of this magnitude have occurred before. In fact, human societies have always been punctuated by periods of great change that not only cause people to think and behave differently, but also give rise to new social orders and institutions. In many instances these changes are driven by disruptive technologies that penetrate societies to fundamentally change their culture and economy.
Wikinomics heralds the profound benefits of social, including the opportunity to broaden access to science and knowledge, impose greater transparency on financial markets, accelerate the invention and adoption of green technologies, and help make today’s leaders in business and government accountable for delivering outcomes that enhance well-being around the world.
