Social Business a Multi Front Evolution

Innovative companies are beginning to address the challenges centric to becoming socially driven enterprises. I talked last week about two of the opportunities surrounding this evolution, one being the utilization of the data that these communities produce and the second being the integration of the tools and processes that enable employees to apply social networking methodologies to their work process. Both hold great promise for ROI and innovation. 

At Defrag this year Stowe Boyd spoke about Real-time streams and the Social Business. I've been following his blog ever since (and you should too). Recently he did a post on defining some of this thoughts around the topic. Stowe lists seven features of a social business (follow the link to read them all) the one that really caught my eye was "senior management operating more like Hollywood producers or investors than autocrats." it struck me that ideas and innovation within the enterprise could evolve to something not dissimilar to the "green lighting" process movies studios and networks employ. The best ideas get the funding and the executive reap the rewards of those decisions.

The challenge is enabling the creative process around these new ideas and helping the best ones surface above the noise especially within large company ecosystems. This is where socially driven business intelligence has the opportunity to thrive and enable. Generally the people within the company that create access to information are IT focused and are a small minority within the corporate community when compared to the number of individuals who consume the information. As social business intelligence evolves to support the majority and it enables them to leverage and collaborate instead of just eat what they are feed, creativity will lead the way and these systems will start to produce business intelligence that reflects the business knowledge and creativity of the information consumers. 

In the recent Forbes report "The Rise of the Digital C-Suite" 71% of CIO's said that they found guidance from colleagues in online communities very valuable. What would this number look like if that community was within the trusted walls of their enterprise and fueled by the domain knowledge of their employees?

Creating a social business will include data, tools and highly integrated platforms. It won't happen overnight but its coming and business intelligence solutions and platforms will play a key role in the success of your social business strategy.