Each of these are issues every organization faces.
Decision 3D helps clients address these issues by extending the existing communication capability, of the organization, with social technology. The effective depolyment and integration of social technology enables employees to make better decisions and be more productive.
To help articulate why building a social infrastructure within organizations yields benefits, Decision 3D has developed a list of six reasons, that we call “REWIRE”.
Recruitment
Engagement
Workforce Management
Innovation
Risk Management
Education
In every organization, most, if not all of these issues are key to success. A concerted effort by organizations to enhance social connectivity will have the benefit of improving outcomes related to these issues. Let’s see how:
Recruitment
As individuals gain more control over their own information and have a growing ability to communicate globally, they will avoid organizations where these abilities are limited. Organizations that embody the principles of transparency, openness and sharing will have the advantage in hiring tomorrow’s best and brightest.
Engagement
Engagement means getting and keeping people’s attention. It means generating passion around a topic, issue or product. It means getting people to invest their discretionary resources in the organization’s behalf. If we are talking about employees, that discretionary resource is effort/time/focus. If we are talking about customers, that discretionary resource is money and/or time spent telling others about the brand.
Workforce Management
Retaining your best talent, knowing who knows what, and identifying competency weaknesses are all critical for workforce management. In an open, social environment where transparency is a core value, getting the right people to the right job becomes significantly easier. If someone is particularly skilled or has unique knowledge of a certain topic, that person is easily identifiable in a social environment. It is also easier to identify workforce shortcomings and find ways to overcome them.
Innovation
The key to innovation is combining disparate information to generate new insight. The process of social connection reduces the friction of information flow between disparate sources. This is essential if people are to get information that they traditionally do not have access to. Opening information channels across boundaries allows innovative ideas to emerge.
Risk Management
Projects, product development, organizational change efforts, all have elements of risk associated with them. The reduction of risk should yield improved results. An open, social environment that exposes all phases of a project, development effort or change initiative, will uncover problems sooner than traditional approaches. The sooner problems are identified and resolved the lower the risk of time-line extensions and cost over runs.
Education
It has been said that the only true competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than the competition. There are few ways better for learning than sharing your knowledge and experience with others. A social infrastructure that facilitates the easy sharing and finding of information will improve an organization’s learning capability.
REWIRE the Organization
The process of REWIRE’ing an organization is primarily a culture change. Technology can support the effort, but the key element is the willingness for decision makers and opinion leaders to move to an open, transparent mindset. The way an organization choses to approach information and how it flows through an organization is critical. To achieve the full impact of REWIREing an organization, access to information must be based on the assumption that all information, by default, is public. From that initial state a justification must be made to limit access to information. This approach is contrary to most organizations, but the opportunities are huge for those that can master this paradigm shift..
For years companies have created customer bundles based on age, ethnicity and gender on the assumption that if a group of people share some physical attribute, they must all think and behave similarly. In the distant past, maybe that made some sense. Today it doesn’t.
This is not to say that groups of people cannot think and behave similarly. A group of people that share a common interest or objective is called a community, not a demographic segment.
There are many distinctions between a community and a demographic segment. Let’s look at a few and consider why the continued use of demographics makes less and less sense in today’s connected society.
Interests vs. Attributes
By definition, a community is created based on shared interests. If a company can identify a community whose shared interest is relevant to the company’s objectives, you have a nice hand in glove fit. Here is a self-defined group of people that are already talking about something the company wants to learn about.
On the other hand, a demographic segment based on attributes, is just a random heap of people that will have a variety of opinions on any given topic.
Many vs. Single
By definition, individuals can only be associated with a single demographic group at a time. It is kind of hard to be “35 – 44″ and “45-64″ at the same time. The problem with this is that if your interests and opinions differ from the majority of your “Group”, then you have essentially no input.
An individual’s opinion can be represented many times by being affiliated with multiple communities.
Choice vs. Defined
People choose to be a member of a community or not. It is their choice to engage and be heard, or not.
As a demographic statistic, you are defined by a characteristic that has nothing to do with your thoughts or opinions, and you have no option but to be affiliated with a specific group.
Engage vs. Research
Companies are looking for information from groups. Gathering information from a community is a rather straight-forward, and cost-effective process. Simply join in the conversation the community is already having. A company can just listen, and obtain significant understanding. Actively engaging in the community conversation yields even more benefits.
Getting information from a demographic group is a tedious and expensive process; focus groups, surveys, etc. Once you gather the data and process the information, you only have a snapshot in time, that is probably already out of date. To maintain current data, the process needs to be repeated over and over again.
Emergent vs. Stable
Communities are emergent, meaning that they form spontaneously as necessary, and disappear as the need diminishes. This means that when you find a community, it is by definition active, full of energy and ideas.
Demographics are nice and stable. Men are men, women are women, a nice straight-forward way to collect data. IMHO this leads to a false sense of security about the information you collect, because there is an underlying premise that stability connotes meaning, and therefore is good.
Current vs. Unknown
Because of their emergent nature, communities inherently deal with what is current. Discussions are about current events; conversations address current issues.
A demographic group has no center, so there is no focus of discussion, or even a discussion for that matter. The group only exists in the data tables of the demographic researchers. The only conversation among the “group” is one that is forced and artificial, in settings like focus groups. So what do you really know?
Conclusion
This all reminds me about the old joke that asks why do dogs lick their (well you know) …because they can. Why do companies collect demographic data … because they can, not because it provides the best insight. I believe that all the nice structured data collected in demographic research provides a false sense of security to company decision makers, and ultimately does a disservice to the company’s stakeholders.
Engaging with communities is new, it feels soft, non-analytic and not very comfortable to company decision makers, but in the long run it will lead to better decisions and yield better results than over-reliance on demographics.
I see this question come up a lot, and everyone comments that it is a hard question to answer. Of course it is hard to answer, because the question is pointless. To try and define the universal value of a tool makes no sense. A tool only has value when it is used in solving a specific problem. The problem statement must precede any consideration of tool use. And then the tool is only a component of the total solution. Would you ask, “What is the value of a hammer to the construction industry?”
The right approach is to first determine the problem you are trying to solve. The implied problem in the post above is how do you capture, codify and get value from unstructured customer insight. Yes, understanding and engaging with social media will likely be part of the solution, but there are other significant questions to be answered as well.
Who are the customers you want to listen to?
How are you currently listening to them?
How do you currently deal with customer insight?
Who controls and has access to the existing structured data?
etc.
I hope that people will stop looking at social media as some sort of silver bullet and start looking at objectives and the core problems that need to be overcome.
The key concept to pull out of this thread is that technology and behavior must work in concert to achieve improved results. This is a must watch video if you want to get a better idea of our objective here at Decision 3D. When you read the articles and watch the post, think about the intersection of tools and behavior…
From the Oliver marks article:
Chambers talks about the gradual huge transition in the management of the company – the shift from Command and control management to collaboration and teamwork.
This is a behavioral change for Cisco management, that aligns with the capabilities of the networking products they use and sell. Having all of those tools available but not changing to a collaboration and teamwork culture would have propogated a disfunctional organization. Instead, Cisco is one of the strongest and most admired companies around.
I see this question come up a lot, and everyone comments that it is a hard question to answer. Of course it is hard to answer, because the question is pointless. To try and define the universal value of a tool makes no sense. A tool only has value when it is used in solving a specific problem. The problem statement must precede any consideration of tool use. And then the tool is only a component of the total solution. Would you ask, “What is the value of a hammer to the construction industry?”