Social Business Design
Social Business Design is design for organizations that are made out of individuals. It is design for complexity, for increase productivity, and for sustainability. It is not design by division but designing for their nodes, hubs, constituents, connections, and signals and networks. The organization can be related to decentralized organism that has eyes and ears everywhere that people touch the company, whether they are employees, partners, customers, or suppliers. Social Business Design is a new discipline with some basic guidelines emerging. In addition, these emerging guidelines have less in common with traditional business design and more in common with social and business issues.
Technology, society, and work are all changing at breakneck speeds, creating new opportunities for value creation and capture across industries and geographies. However, businesses are having trouble-keeping pace, stymied by filter failure, isolated approaches, and legacy structures.
Social Business Design provides a solution, in the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture. The goal is improving value exchange among constituents, through a framework consisting of four key archetypes: ecosystem, hive mind, dynamic signal, and metafilter.
It indicates the analysis of the social architecture, social exposure parameters of the social business. Social Business Design influences three key practice areas, customer participation, workforce collaboration, and business partner optimization. When applied, it produces both improved and emergent outcomes.
We foresee that organizations adapting to the Social Business Design framework designing for their nodes, hubs, constituents, connections, and signals will be more highly distributed, collaborative, and agile and better positioned to succeed.
Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture. The goal is improving value exchange among constituents.
Through Social Business Design, businesses re-envision their inherent architecture preparing them to meet the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities that these trends present. Workplace organization, management, & technology need to better integrate and adapt to the social needs, preferences, and nature of people.
Technology, society, and work are all changing at breakneck speeds. Businesses that seek to create and capture value from these changes must harness opportunities at their intersection, the hub of social business. We need to design for business intent and utilize our efficiencies as tools to help solve real business problems
It is understood that technological evolution has fueled every major business revolution, from agrarian to industrial. However, innovations spurred every major business shift that was unpredictable, yet visible to those with keen foresight.
Currently, the ever-increasing overlap between consumer and enterprise technology is opening up a number of opportunities for businesses to evolve and this continued overlap will only increase the pace of change. The technology tools and platforms are highly participatory and social. They take advantage of intrinsic human motivations to contribute in order to share opinions and knowledge, to be a part of something greater than what we would like to believe.
Cloud computing offers a flexible new approach to delivering IT services one that better responds to business needs. It is the most trusted solutions for transforming IT environment to support more flexible, agile service delivery with improved security and control. Bridging cloud-computing solutions, web based services, and on premise IT, deployments can provide organizations with new levels of infrastructure flexibility, user satisfaction, and significant cost savings opportunities.
Consumer adoption of technology has exploded, and people expect that their tools at work will provide the same robust level of communication as their personal computing options. The sophistication of affordable consumer devices is only going to increase and user expectations are set to spike as well. Over the last few years, the meme around social has filtered down into countless activities and processes across the business world, giving rise to now significant trends like Enterprise 2.0, Social CRM, customer communities, and so on.
Content and data are everywhere. People are creating and curating content like never before.
As data storage becomes cheaper, businesses are storing, archiving, and mining more data than previously possible. The increasing openness of APIs and data portability makes more enterprise data available for both consumers and employees to consume. Free flow of data also allows business partner relationships to be readily analyzed and optimized.
Exploiting these trends requires more than simply adopting new technologies. It requires forward-looking organizations to embrace change, mapping these trends to the strategic goals of the business.
Social networks are fundamental to how people communicate with each other and with companies. Organizations that can embrace new technology processes, and attitudes stand to benefit greatly from better-engaged customers to better-connected employee networks, businesses have a chance to leverage connectedness to achieve strategic goals. However, the most valuable resource that a person or company can have in the future is social capital, the sum of the deep relationships they have acquired over their lifetime in the networked economy.
People are increasingly wired and connected. Many countries see internet penetration rates over 70 percent with high percentages of users on broadband connections. Social networking sites have grown at dizzying rates; for example, Twitters user base has been growing by percentages of hundreds, if not thousands, and Facebook now connects hundreds of millions of active users worldwide.
The edge being the most decentralized part of the network. The best ideas and inputs will be far more transparent, spot, to capture as well, both internally and externally of organization.
Social innovation as new ideas that work to meet pressing unmet needs and improve peoples lives. (Mulgan, 2006) Social innovation is continuously emerging in the form of new behaviors, new organization models, and new ways of living. Transition towards sustainability requires radical changes in the way we produce, and generally, in the way we live. In fact, we need to learn how to live better, while reducing our ecological footprint and improving the quality of our social fabric. In this perspective, the link between the environmental and social dimensions of sustainability appears clearly, showing that radical social innovationswill be needed, in order to move from current, unsustainable models to new, sustainable ones. we have to see transition towards sustainability as a wide-reaching social learning process in which the most diversified forms of knowledge and organizational capabilities must be valorized in the most open and flexible way. Among these, a particular role w ill be played by local initiatives that, for several reasons, can be seen as promising cases of new behavior and new ways of thinking. We can consider three main clusters, cosmopolitan localizations, creative communities, and collaborative networks.
Local communitiesinvent unprecedented cultural activities, forms of organization and economic models. We can refer to these initiatives, as a whole, as cosmopolitan localization. It is easy to recognize that cosmopolitan localism is the result of the balance between being rooted and being open to global flows of ideas, information, people, things, and money.
There are groups of people the creative communities who have been able to think in a new way, developing a form of Collaborative creativity which they have managed to put very innovative forms of organization into action.
The starting point of collaborative networks is the organizational model emerging from the open Source movement collaborative approach has increasingly been applied to areas beyond the coding of software.
Now we can observe that these principles have been highly successful in proposing collaborative and effective organizational models in several other application fields. Quoting the British Design Council, which refers to them as Open models, they are new forms of organization that do not rely on mass participation in the creation of the service. The boundary is blurred between the users and producers of a service. It is effectively often impossible to differentiate between those who are creating the service and those who are the consumers or users of the output.
Institutions recognize the need for community support to achieve objectives.
Consumers desire to engage brands via social media channels for many reasons, including customer support and feedback. Brands now have an opportunity to engage with consumers directly, without the perceived spin of a traditional marketing message. For example, companies like Intuit and KFC have corporate representatives participating in online conversations with customers. Through active engagement, consumers seek opportunities to participate in the businesses of their favorite brands.
Social tools are making relationships engaged and collaborative among users, among employees, and between users and brands in every industry. How companies adopt these tools to evolve will set them apart.
The way people work has changed dramatically as new tools and technology challenge the traditional rules of how and when people can do their jobs. This new definition of work as a constant and collaborative function means that organizations have an opportunity to adapt in order to leverage a new ethos of the hyper-connected, always-on workforce. Advances in technology, changes in socio-demographics and attitude to work, economic markets, the sustainable construction agenda, and security issues are just a few of the factors impacting workplace design and operation.
Globalization means that work no longer requires three sequential shifts in one location each day; work is done by the first shift in a different location around the globe, around the clock. The nature of collaboration has expanded from inter-department to inter-office to international.
As born-digital workers enter the workforce, they bring new concepts of work/life balance to the table. The shift to information-based industries also makes the traditional delineation of working time difficult to pin down people dont turn their brains off when they walk out of the office, nor do they stay 100% task focused during the day.
Organizations have always attempted to optimize their operations with new forms of measurement, like Six Sigma or Activity Based Costing. However, the impact of social functionality has yet to be accounted for using traditional approaches. Corporate scandals and the global economic downturn have increased focus on corporate accountability and transparency, making measurement an absolute must.
As the idea of work is changing for employees and other stakeholders in a business, a crucial opportunity has emerged for businesses to become more flexible and open increasing efficiency and reducing inertia.
The Social Business Design Framework
Trends in technology, society, and the workplace are changing the way we do business and we need to rethink how we structure our organizations to take advantage of these emerging trends while overcoming associated challenges.
The intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.
Social Business Design is a holistic, comprehensive business architecture that helps an organization improves value exchange among constituents. The Social Business Design framework consists of four mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive archetypes:
Every business contains these archetypes; however, the extent to which they are dynamic and socially calibrated can typically be improved. Social business design provides insight to help measure and manage these areas to produce improved and emergent outcomes.
A robust, integrated network of nodes and connections when thinking of a business as a social ecosystem, it consists of a network of independent nodes and their interconnections. Internal departments, customer segments, and local area networks can all be thought of as independent nodes at the micro level.
At a higher level, businesses function as part of a system comprised of dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of smaller ecosystems. Addressing the business as a series of interconnected, yet independent nodes is vital to an effective business design.
The technology within a social business ecosystem comprises devices, services, and applications that mix proprietary and open offerings. For example, this includes the hardware and software owned and managed by the firms IT department, in addition to personal devices and applications used by employees. A successful social business design takes a comprehensive and inclusive approach to all of these tools. The construction of this new ecosystem requires a new kind of architecture, focused on digital structures of information and software. As we spend more time working in these shared information spaces, people will need and demand better search, navigation, and collaboration systems.
Itistime for a new view of organizations. The people in a companys ecosystem include employees as well as suppliers, distributors, customers, consumers, shareholders, local community, competitors, and others. These people compromise the various nodes that make up the new social business ecosystem.
The traditional pyramid-shaped organizational chart should not be flattened it should be deconstructed to resemble an interconnected network instead.
Once properly mapped, an ecosystemsbreadth and depth can be monitored, as well as the strength of ties therein. By staying vigilant about ecosystem health, a social business can take action based on strategic goals.
Several factors can be measured here to make an ecosystem more effective. Visually mapping an ecosystem gives us insight into its size, shape, density, types, and numbers of connections, types of roles, and patterns of reciprocal communication. Other analytics can pertain to email and intranet volume, social media activity, and manufacturing connectivity. Precision is critical; its not about getting everyone connected, its about getting the right groups connected in the right way.
A primary social calibration
As social tools and functionality are adopted more widely, it becomes less important for businesses to use traditional methods to force collaboration in the workplace, e.g. panoptic cubicle arrangements. Employees are entering the workforce socially engaged and used to collaborating.
The social business hive mind is a new kind of corporate culture whereby all participants move together towards common goals. Physicists refer to this as synchronous lateral excitation.
The social business hive mind makes decisions and receives continuous reinforcement through business interactions; a social inclination resides within a companys culture and tempers planning, decision-making, and work output.
Employees approach works with a social and collaborative mindset; customers expect participation and engagement; suppliers anticipate optimized and efficient process towards common goals.
Hive mindedness can be measured by assessing levels of collective awareness, engagement, and participation. Measurement here focuses on subjective perceptions analytics can include surveys, interviews, text analysis, and so on.
The goal is always to gain insight into constituents attitudes towards the value they get from participating versus the potential for trust issues and conflicts that they perceive. Once perceptions are measured, they can be constantly cultivated and re-measured to move the dial. Recently, scientists have begun to apply an epidemiological lens to many social phenomena, such as happiness, obesity, criminality, health behaviors, and others. Turns out that what we have traditionally seen as others shape individual behaviors.
A new mode of authorship and ownership
In a socially designed business, signals produced from all points are considered potentially relevant. Technology gives consumers the ability to author, own, and transmits signals, validated by search engines for relevance. In response, businesses can benefit from this dynamic information flow produced by constituents. Communication as work, not for work
With Social Business Design, communication becomes an integral part of how work streams relate to one another allowing decisions to be made with fresher information. Businesses progress towards strategic goals, under the assumption that all activities are on a need to know basis and anyone and everyone needs to know, all the time. Developing the perfect Dynamic Signal for an organization is 50% design work and 50% implementation. Designing a Dynamic Signal does not mean just creating a stream of data and events, but defining the user-relevant outcomes and identifying how those can be leveraged.
The perfect dynamic signal will combine existing enterprise data sources and will allow user-created events to be added to the stream. These sources should include outside services as well as internal sources. Few interesting enterprise systems lately, which take different approaches to integrating third parties such as Facebook, Twitter and cloud, based services like Sales force and WebEx.
The strength of a dynamic signal can be measured at transmission points and subsequently analyzed to drive business activity in response. For example, signaling within an ecosystem can be broken down into types and measured for frequency: status updates, email transmissions, or calendar updates can be assessed for signal strength or flow over time. When viewed in tandem with server traffic or signals derived from points in a manufacturing process, a business may be able to recognize obstacles in their current process or optimize this signal flow to achieve a particular business goal.
Collecting diverse data sets
As social businesses filter the tidal wave of information produced, they distill meaning from the qualitative and quantitative data emitted from their various nodes. Existing business intelligence tools help to create fairly orderly operating data sets, working in tandem with applications focused on parsing user-generated content that help make sense of unstructured data sets. APIs make two-way integration with public data sources increasingly seamless.
Social businesses require parallel processing of information so insight can be made actionable, faster. Information needs to be segmented into meaningful and manageable sets. Whats important to one person may be meaningless to another, but they must be able to process parts smaller than the whole.
Making sense of collective action, effective filtering, tagging, and sorting of data and measuring, its impact can produce opportunities for social businesses to capture valuable insight buried deep in data sets.
Here, almost all content types can provide meaningful data: shared documents, knowledge management activity, and user-generated content can provide valuable insight into business processes and topical importance when metadata is deployed, collected, and measured in the right way.
Applying Social Business Design
Social Business Design is a framework for rethinking how business gets done. This framework can be applied to help businesses solve the problems they face today. We focus on companies at the level of their component parts when applying Social Business Design, as each major operating function has its own inherent challenges and opportunities.
To that end, we focus Social Business Design on three key practice areas:
Customer Participation
Social business affords companies an opportunity to engage with customers in ways that traditional one-way communication cannot support.
With the ever-increasing adoption of consumerzed technology, people now carry powerful, networked devices everywhere. This constant connectivity drives the expectation of an always-on, always-available interaction with companies. With countless brands now participating on networks like Twitter and Facebook, consumers have come to expect, if not demand, that companies make themselves available for multi-directional communications.
These changes present enormous opportunity for brands to harness customer participation to drive value in numerous ways. Before this can happen, companies must overcome substantial new challenges. When internal company interactions arent interconnected, this increased customer communication results in disparate threads of dialog, instead of a holistic, meaningful conversation with measurable and actionable results. Further, the sheer
amount of information this customer engagement can create makes it difficult for existing organizations to discern signal from noise. Finally, measuring the impact of social endeavors can be difficult with traditional methods, but businesses demand objective ways to prove results.
Social Business Design provides a framework to help companies create value from customer participation. Applying the archetypes to core issues exposes clear opportunities for value capture. Customers can be virtually integrated into innovation process. New interaction tools allow companies to gain valuable input from customers via the Internet. New virtual interaction tools and virtual product experiences help to overcome these problems and enable customers to transfer their explicit and implicit knowledge to innovation teams. Through social business design and by employing powerful online participation tools, companies are starting to create deeper and more engaging community based relationships, where customers are treated more like partners .
Instead of being targeted by advertising messages, customers are recast as part of a network of participants in addition to corporate marketing, public relations, and customer service staff. Their connections facilitate open, multi-directional communications. The strength of ties between network nodes can be measured to determine ecosystem health.
The propensity of customers to engage with the company and each other can be assessed and cultivated. This leads to success in outreach and advocacy efforts.
Customers are recognized for the content they create and new modes of authorship and ownership come into play. Brands encourage signaling and respond with their own, in addition to initiating contact and anticipating response.
Content generated via participation is harvested and analyzed for relevance, providing feedback to the organization, which can be used to improve the nature and quality of participation going forward
Customers can be virtually integrated into innovation process. New interaction tools allow companies to gain valuable input from customers via the Internet. New virtual interaction tools and virtual product experiences help to overcome these problems and enable customers to transfer their explicit and implicit knowledge to innovation teams.
Workforce Collaboration
Social business renews focus on improving an organization from the inside out. At its core, a workforce needs to collaborate and coordinate efforts to meet business goals.
Employees benefit from evolved technology in the form of robust personal applications, networks, and devices, allowing for constant connection and more synchronous communication. Increased connectivity allows better management and coordination of distributed teams, whether around the country or around the globe. At the enterprise level, cloud computing allows companies to create collaboration platforms that support business activities with more flexibility than standalone legacy applications.
Even the most participation-minded workforce must overcome legacy structures to take advantage of enabling innovations. Organizationally, managers reinforce functional and operational silos to retain control of fiefdoms that align with rapidly dying business models. Technology supports disparate objectives within these silos, resulting in a landscape of point solutions instead of a unified platform when viewed at a company-wide level.
However, these issues are only exacerbated by incentive structures that motivate individuals to maximize nearsighted goals, only loosely connected to greater business objectives.
Social Business Design provides a framework to help companies create value from workforce collaboration.
Applying the archetypes to core issues exposes clear opportunities for value capture.
Ecosystem:
The definition of a companys workforce requires an expanded perspective of its constituent base beyond employees in a business unit or division. Besides breaking down internal silos, corporate networks must incorporate previously external nodes as contributing participants as well. The technology required to support this network must operate as a platform delivering what is necessary and relevant for nodes to perform and progress towards business goals.
The social calibration of the companys workforce needs to be measured and cultivated. Moreover, the business operates with distributed governance, which allows the best ideas to evolve from all corners of the network.
Dynamic Signal:
Communication takes on a new role and happens in social business as work, not just for work. Information like status messages and location updates allow workers to relate to each other and make better decisions more rapidly, with fresh data.
Content generated via collaboration is harvested and analyzed for relevance, providing feedback to the organization, which can be used to improve the nature and quality of collaboration going forward.
Business Partner Optimization
Social business requires rethinking value chain relationships, including connections like
Suppliers, distribution networks, and vendors/delivery partners.
Terabytes of data are available for companies to exchange, analyze, and act upon, driving
new possibilities in business intelligence. New data sources allow greater depth of understanding, whether via mining internal and external communities with specific business intent or combining sociological and psychological principles with technology. Operations have always been managed for efficiency and social business requires no less, albeit accountability at a system level.
For most companies, the business partner landscape unfolds as a tension-filled competitive environment. Different departments often interact with the same customer, prospect, or partner, pursuing disconnected corporate goals. Most strategies boil partnerships down into simple us-versus-them relationships which prevent genuine collaboration and dampen long-term system-improving results. Moreover, in the case of data more doesnt always mean better and the existing people and processes in many businesses struggle to filter and stay
on top of information overload.
Social Business Design provides a framework to help companies create value from business partner optimization. Applying the archetypes to core issues exposes clear opportunities for value capture.
Ecosystem:
Evolving the competitive nature of value chain relationships into a jointly-held system perspective will help optimize outcomes for all involved. Alliances move from defined supplier relationships to a dynamic network of business partners. Value creators are encouraged to innovate within the network to create value.
Hivemind
A social calibration of company and partners leads to higher overall returns. Business partners operate in a state of ready collaboration to respond more quickly to new opportunities and challenges, and with greater resources.
Dynamic Signal:
Data can be exchanged with intent that signals direction (albeit legally), allowing partner
ecosystems to react rapidly to capitalize on opportunity. Signals prepare systems and resources to align and respond quickly to changing market conditions.
Metafilter:
Content generated via partnership is harvested and analyzed for relevance, providing feedback to the organization which can be used to optimize the nature and quality of relationships going forward.
Results
When an enterprise chooses to recast itself with Social Business Design, two types of outcomes will be produced.
By redesigning customer participation, workforce collaboration, and business partner optimization from the perspective of the four core archetypes of Ecosystem, Hive mind, Dynamic Signal, and Metafilter, a company will increase value from its business activities. What this means is that application of Social Business Design concretely influences how people work, the efficiency of process, and effectiveness of technology infrastructure.
Business goals and objectives will be achieved with better outcomes than expected.
The most compelling outcomes are the ones that cannot be immediately predicted, but will appear over time because of the altered system working in dynamic, social calibration. We call these Emergent Outcomes and their potential inherently lies beyond the current scope and focus of the business. Being emergent, these outcomes become apparent only with a shift in business operations. Their existence lies on the border between the knowable and the unknown, requiring companies to forge ahead to reveal emergent opportunity.
As organizations become more adaptive to constituent needs, they create symbiotic relationships, as social business becomes business as usual. Doing away with traditional internal obstacles to growth and becoming more responsive to its ecosystem, a company organized around Social Business Design stands to gain new value previously unseen or anticipated. The future of business lies in intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, process, and culture.
