Recently, I have observed that new Enterprise 2.0-terms that contain the word “social” are created almost monthly (see e.g. “Social Business” by IBM, [Kulz11]). Therefore, I have decided to publish my first thoughts on the use of such “social terms” in business environments. Speaking as an experienced consultant, the term “social” is generally associated with more unpleasant and productivity reducing connotations. Even though I’m not a classic “Top-Down-Thinker”, I daily deal with the middle and top management of companies and I am quite familiar with the association CEO’s have if you want to present or introduce “SOCIAL media”, “SOCIAL business” or “SOCIAL computing”. As you can imagine, they will not be happy about pretended “SOCIAL activities” in their companies. And – as you can imagine as well, “the business” quite often struggles to see how so called “SOCIAL activities” can leverage efficiency and therefore generally aim at limiting “SOCIAL activities” to the extent necessary.

Putting business first - Nothing else matters.

Persuading “the business” about social activities is like a Sisyphus-task. Or to put it more candidly, using the term social in a business environment is from my perspective not the best way to persuade people of promising investments – Although I have to admit that some of the creators of the “social terms” are substantially correct. As described in my book (see [Domb11, p. 20 et seq.]), I’m not the only person, who thinks in this way:

“When some managers hear talk of social technologies, they immediately think of technologies, that facilitate activities like happy hour, fantasy sports league drafts, and office gossip. They hear ‘social,’ in short, and think it means not work-related, or time-wasting, or productivity-draining.” [McAf09, p. 15 et seq.]

Like Andrew McAfee, I prefer the term “collaborative” or other terms like “Enterprise 2.0″ and “Enterprise collaboration”. Terms like these are easier to understand from a management and/or business point of view particularly when you are talking about new collaborative technologies that provide cost savings and efficiency advantages in a competitive market… Although Enterprise 2.0 (“Enterprise collaboration” respectively) is about “transparency” and “involving” the product- and process-knowledge of staff, it does not mean, that “SOCIAL activities” will totally override the authority and responsibility of the management. Rather you need to activate the passion for interaction of your employees to optimize enterprise collaboration.

“If you can get people to help you even though it is not their job description, you are going to get scale that you can never achieve with traditional budgets.” [Francois Gossieaux, see Tucc10]

Even though this citation (from Francois Gossieaux) is from an article about “SOCIAL passion” in enterprise collaboration (see [Tucc10]), I like the message about “passion” (although I do not follow the term “social”, as outlined above). First you need the aforenamed passion for enterprise collaboration to put business first and gain scale effects – the term social is not the crucial aspect, it is only a less perfect “label”… With the passion of your staff, Enterprise 2.0 can get a well-coordinated and effective factor to promote competitiveness through solving problems in a collaborative manner, optimizing transparency of enterprise processes and providing enterprise knowledge.

Well – make careful use of the term “social” in business environments – do not irritate, just persuade  your clients of the value added through these new opportunities.

Any thoughts? Please do not hesitate to send me an email – or simply use the comment function…

Reference list:

• [Domb11] Dombrowski, Boris: “Potenziale und Herausforderungen des Geschäftsprozessmanagements im Enterprise 2.0 unter der Berücksichtigung der Dynamik unternehmerischer Systeme.” – More Information here.
  Berlin: Logos Verlag, 2011
• [Kulz11] Kulzer, Rudi: “IBM: ‘Social Business’ verändert auch das ECM-Portfolio.” URL: http://www.zdnet.de/it_business_technik_ibm__social_business__veraendert_auch_das_ecm_portfolio_story-11000009-41551369-1.htm, last verified on April 18, 2011
  München: CBS Interactive Gmbh (ZDnet), 2011
• [McAf09] McAfee, Andrew P.: „Enterprise 2.0 – New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.“
  Boston MA: Harvard Business School Publishing, 2009
• [Tucc10] Tucci, Linda: “Make social passion the cornerstone of enterprise collaboration.” URL: http://searchcio.techtarget.com/news/2240025541/Make-social-passion-the-cornerstone-of-enterprise-collaboration, last verified on April 18, 2011. Please have notice: The citation above is from Francois Gossieaux in the named article form Tucci
  Newton, MA: TechTarget Inc. (SearchCIO), 2011

Last friday I had an interesting discussion about “outsourcing” and I therefore decided to pick up this business-relevant topic in my blogsphere…

Fear of outsourcing your IT? Fear of terms like “Cloud Computing”, “SaaS” or “ASP”… Behind these buzzwords is nothing special, but proven and mature technology. The truth is in any case the fact that outsourcing is not just about IT, but also about the organization (personnel included) and its processes. If you have problems with your IT and your Business/IT-Alignment, don’t hope to fix them with outsourcing – it’s no charm.

But what are the advantages? Below I will mention only some:

• No need to buy and install physical servers and hardware
• No maintenance required, your provider is the “IT professional”
• Ready for use in short order, enable Enterprise 2.0 applications within minutes or hours
• Highly scalable, set up new resources immediately “on demand”
• You pay only what you actually consume
• etc.

And, the most important fact: In many cases, highly specialized providers understand more about safety, security and risks than yourselves. Beyond, they’re ISO-certified, have principles like “Safe Harbor” adopted and so on. If needed, your data will be encrypted – the employees defined by you are the only ones who have access to the information. The greater threat comes from the core of the company itself – of employees, media, lack of maintaining infrastructure, software, security flaws, etc. If Google’s, (sales)force.com’s, Amazon’s or Microsoft’s Cloud Services had safety or security deficiencies, these companies would surely have to give up their business soon…

But what need do you have? IaaS, PaaS, SaaS – ASP – Private, Hybrid or Public Cloud? Know your requirements: First of all, have a look at your processes. If you have determined which technologies support your core competencies, you can outsource those processes (services respectively) that are commodity. Define outsourcing-potentials by measuring attributes like strategic relevance, value, risk and criticality. There are a lot methods and best practices to find out about the technologies and processes that allow competitive differentiation of your company.

In the end, by outsourcing and cloud computing “only” competitive advantages can be achieved. According to the mentioned potential, it’s worth  thinking about the topic. Do you need help to find the right provider, to set up the right contract or to evaluate your processes? Do not hesitate to contact me. Do not take the risk to “backsource” after months…

Current related articles are in following professional journals (extract):

• Fröschle, Hans-Peter (Ed.); Reinheimer, Stefan (Ed.): “Cloud Computing & SaaS.” HMD -  Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik, Issue 275, October 2010.
  Heidelberg: dpunkt.verlag, 2010
• Pagel, Peter (Ed.); et al.: “Software as as Service.” Wirtschaftsinformatik und Management, Issue 3 / 2010.
  Wiesbaden: Gabler, 2011
• Buhl, Hans-Ulrich (Ed.); Bichler, Martin (Ed.); et al.: “IT-Service-Management und IT-Automation.” Wirtschaftsinformatik, Volume 53, Issue 1 / 2011.
  Wiesbaden: Gabler, 2011