Strategies for Social Business

Supporting Social Business Enterprises

Something different happened at the 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston.  Something that goes beyond the Enterprise 2.0 Community.  A paradigm shift that affects all people.

Employers will no longer be hiring employees, they will be hiring a Workforce of Networked Workers.  Employers will embrace the “Innovation Age” with employees leveraging their networks to tap the exponential value in co-creation.  These new Social Business Models will generate the business intelligence required to succeed  in competitive markets.  Its hard to believe Enterprise 2.0 is only a few years old, but eventually there will be no Enterprise 2.0.

The term “Enterprise 2.0″ is relatively young, Andrew McAfee used this label in his “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” article written for “MITSloan Management Review” in 2006.  This article explored the possibilities of using “Social Web” technologies in the Enterprise.  I met Andy shortly after this article was published and discovered he had many more ideas on this topic.  We talked about the challenges ahead, mostly workforce cultures and business leaders’ perception of “Social” technologies.  It is amazing how much has been accomplished in so little time!

Sociocultural Evolution in Social Business

The sociocultural evolution in Social Business supporting the transformation of collaboration with the process of co-creation for reducing the complexity of innovation.  A quick timeline that starts with Mainframes and Dumb Terminals shows an accelerated growth pattern.

Mainframes and Dumb Terminals

A few years ago, a time most young people consider the “Stone Age”, Mainframes and Dumb Terminals (green screens of text) were all the rage in the Enterprise. These huge Mainframe computers were too expensive for most businesses at the time and had the computing power comparable to the iPhone of today.

Enterprise 1.o

August 6, 1991 marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet.  Business owners saw the value in web-based applications and invested in this technology.  Businesses eventually moved past creating static brochure web sites about their business and started creating web-based business applications.

Enterprise 2.0

• 2006: Andrew McAfee publishes “Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration”.
• 2006 – 2009: Business teams implement blogs, wikis, & copy features from social networking sites.  The phrase, “Enterprise 2.0 is like Facebook behind the firewall” was the non-helpful marketing buzz.  The misguided had the mentality of,  “build it and they will collaborate”.  Thought leaders were busy collaborating with others and building platforms.  Everyone was focused on tearing down, destroying, and blowing up “silos”.
• 2010: “Enterprise 2.0″ transforms to “Social Business”
• 2009 – 2011: Focus starts to shift from “user generated content” to “Collective Intelligence“
• 2011: More Enterprise 2.0 conversations about Open Social, Social Graph, XFN. FOAF, and APIs (see “Top 10 Reasons NOT to Use WOA & APIs in the Enterprise“).

Enterprise 3.0

Cultivating Network Effects: If Enterprise 2.0 is a play on Web 2.0, then Enterprise 3.0 is Semantic Social Business (Semantic Web).  This is where things really get interesting.  The future of searching for things in the Enterprise will be more about things finding you.  Collective Business Intelligence takes center stage.  More time is invested into social graph engines and algorithms. This is where some business IT money shifts to social science investments.

Andrew McAfee at Enterprise 2.0 Conf Boston 2011

Anyone involved with Enterprise 2.0 or Business Innovation should watch Andy’s video E 2.0 Boston 2011 presentation. You can also find it after logging into the E 2.0 Conference web site here. His topics include Wisdom of Crowds, Collective Intelligence, Prediction Markets, and more. He covers a lot of valuable information in a short period of time, so you may need to watch it a few times and take notes.  Here are 3 quick notes:

• Give Community Members a voice
• Let Computers do what they are designed to do
• Let People do what they are designed to do

If you liked Andy’s presentation at the E 2.0 Conference Boston 2011, then you may like this video of him talking about most of the same topics.

Gamification in the Enterprise?

About 4 minutes into Andy’s presentation at Boston’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference, he mentions “Gamification“.  Social Business Gamification is a very interesting topic.  Examples of how this works are everywhere, we can see how this looks in the employee review process in Rypple’s  video.  We can also learn more from Spigit, Bunchball, and Badgeville.  The AppFusions Team can integrate custom Gamification solutions for your business needs.

People at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston 2011 seemed to appreciate Michael Wu’s session about Big Data Analytics for Social Media, but he has also put a lot of thought into how the Future of Enterprise Software will be Fun and Productive.  I wrote about his work in this article, “The Secret Social Science Sauce of Gamification“.

I believe many members of the Enterprise 2.o Community can benefit from his work.  I hope people encourage him ( @mich8elwu ) to give a keynote at The Enterprise 2.0 2011 Santa Clara Conference scheduled for November 14 – 17.

Resources:

There are so many great people willing to help others with Social Business and Enterprise 2.0 all over the web and in your neighborhood.  It is almost impossible to mention all of them here.  I recommend reviewing all the shared resources at http://www.e2conf.com and attending one of their events.  You will meet great people and learn fascinating things.

Jim Worth @jimworth did an Outstanding job of putting a huge collection of Enterprise 2.o resources here.

• Future Tech Jobs: We Need Social Science Graduates by Rawn Shah @rawn
• Dion Hinchcliffe @dhinchcliffe, (Dion shares important information about APIs and Social Business).
• The Wall Street Journal: Enterprise 2.0 Is Growing Up by Russ Garland
• Social Business and Next-Generation CIOs – The Business Models by Dion Hinchcliffe
• Enterprise 2.0 Conference – Boston 2011: Resource Materials by Janet Kuntz @IM4WARD

I wrote this article because I like what the Enterprise 2.0 Community is doing.  If you like this article or if you believe education for children is important, then please leave a comment on this blog about our brothers and sisters from the Washington DC area helping the children, teachers, and staff at Humble School Uganda Africa. http://humble-school.blogspot.com They will appreciate knowing somebody is thinking about them and wishing them well.