Social Business strategist, podcaster, blogger, founder of Social Connections and conference speaker
Fantastic new ‘Connected Social Business’ deck from IBM’s Louis Richardson:
Also available as a video:
Love Louis’ work and this is one of the best. Nice work, Sir!
Rooven Pakkiri, Head of Social Business at Collaboration Matters has recently had a paper published by the well-respected UKSG organisation. It is entitled ‘The social business imperative – a time of radical corporate change’ and is featured in their ‘Insights: the UKSG journal’ publication for July.
Here’s the excerpt:
Covering topics such as ‘Background economics: the evolving dynamic between labour and capital‘, ‘The promise of social business: optimization of knowledge‘ and ‘Understanding the value of pattern over process‘, Rooven presents an overview of what Social Business is and how Collaboration Matters takes it to our customers. This isn’t about technology for technology’s sake, instead as an enabler for a paradigm shift ‘that will reshape the culture and processes of organizations within five years’.
Wow, this is quite a write-up from Mark Fieldman at Business Insider, not least in his assessment of IBM’s Jeff Schick:
There are executives who are social and there are executives who are anti-social. There are executives who do social well and executives that don’t. Some claim to be leading social organizations, and there are those that boast that they are not. There are executives who have thousands of followers, and there are executives that have none.
There are social executives that say, “Trust me” or “Admire me,” that tweet, “Believe me” or “Look at me,” or that yell, “Follow me.” But there are very few executives, only a fraction, who are actually creating next-generation social experiences for their companies like Jeff Schick.
The IBM executive doesn’t just leverage social business solutions, he and his team create them.“We started well over 15 years ago. We’ve been thinking about how to better connect people with people and people with information in terms of IBM itself,” Schick says, “the idea of getting the right person over the right opportunity at the right time to yield the right result was genuinely a business imperative at IBM.”
The article goes on to cover IBM’s leadership position in the Social Business space:
Becoming a social business is hard. In reality, a struggle. Fortunately there are companies like IBM that can afford to experiment with cultural and technological – social transformation while the rest of us observe and learn.
So why do they do it? Since they are both an early adopter and creator of social technologies, they’ve learned that content management, business process management, collaboration, commerce and analytics must all be combined with a social layer to create a universal and unified solution. Consequently, IBM recognizes and is capitalizing on the market opportunities for these solutions because 400,000 employees have proved it in their corporate laboratory.
To emphasize the point, Schick said that most of the technologies they bring to market are a direct result of the research and testing they’ve done internally. So IBM does represent the future of Social Business because they are willing to invest, test, fail and succeed in becoming a social business.
That’s why while everyone else seems to be asking the questions, IBM has the answers.
My comments:
Sure to be quoted at an IBM event near you 😉
Gartner Says Spending on Social Software to Support Sales, Marketing and Customer Service Processes Will Exceed $1 Billion Worldwide By 2013
The customer relations management (CRM) market will enter a three year shake up in 2011, as a number of key trends take hold, according to Gartner, Inc. Sales, marketing and customer service technologies, projects and implementations will all see rapid changes over the next few years.
“Over the next three years, social CRM will continue its exponential rise, software as a service (SaaS) will become routine, salesforce.com will reshuffle the market order, and consultants and system integrators will sell their own CRM software,” said Ed Thompson, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner.
In order to offer sales, marketing, service and other business line managers, as well as C-level executives’ guidance with their CRM investments, Gartner has detailed its predictions for CRM in 2011 and beyond.
By 2013, spending on social software to support sales, marketing and customer service processes will exceed $1 billion worldwide.
The $1 billion prediction for spending on social CRM compares with Gartner’s forecast of more than $12 billion for overall spending on CRM software in 2012, means that social CRM will encompass approximately 8 percent of all CRM spending in 2012, up from approximate 4 percent in 2010.Gartner recommends that buyers of social CRM should take a three-step approach to enable them to develop a social CRM strategy over the next 12 months:
Determine if there are any social CRM projects already under way; look in the marketing or customer service departments first.
Calculate the likelihood that you will be forced to start something in 2011 — your industry and culture are the best indicators.
Find case studies specific to your industry that can provide examples of what is possible, and share them with other decision makers in your organization.By 2015, one-third of spending on new CRM software will be SaaS.
In 2009, 24 percent of the CRM software market was delivered by SaaS, and this rose to more than 26 percent in 2010, up from virtually zero in 1999. By 2015, Gartner forecasts that 32 percent of the CRM software market will be delivered by SaaS.Gartner said that buyers of CRM applications should resist the temptation to bypass the IT organization in the short term. Instead, involve IT in purchase decisions early on to avoid the most-frequently cited downstream issue of data integration, and to address potential concerns about inadequate security, scalability and privacy. IT organizations should focus on integration skills. The other limitations of SaaS remain, but are eroding over time, whereas integration skills remain problematic.
By 2015, all Tier 1 CRM ESPs will invest in their own bolt-on CRM application software.
In 2010, all Tier 1 CRM external service providers (ESPs) custom-built application functionality on projects; developed configurations or industry templates for major independent software vendors (ISVs); packaged CRM applications, such as SAP and Oracle’s Siebel; and productized work done on projects for use on later bids. However, less than half of the Tier 1 ESPs developed additive stand-alone CRM applications that coexist with ISV packaged applications. The majority of Tier 1 CRM ESPs are now investing in client-agnostic R&D that is not project-funded to build their own bolt-on or best-of-breed CRM application software to run on platforms such as Force.com and Microsoft’s xRM.Gartner recommends that consultants and system integrators should carefully select areas of investment, start with their industry and process strengths, and avoid overinvesting in the short term. Buyers should watch for further declines in independent advice on the selection process from ESPs and take appropriate caution when evaluating ESP applications. Above all, they should avoid letting existing brand and reputation cloud their perceptions of the applications.
Sounds as though Social Business is the right horse to back…