A presentation summary of the recent trends in the Social CRM space. Many thanks to SCRM thought leaders (such as @pgreenbe @jowyang @ekolsky) who provided the building blocks for this presentation.
I submitted a case study proposal for the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara on November 8-11.?? The proposal is titled David vs. Goliath: How IBM used a mashup to help sunset a costly CRM capability and will discuss how IBM leveraged an enterprise mashup to help speed the sunset of a costly and cumbersome CRM capability.?? We will share some of the lessons learned from this effort as well as explore the benefits and drawbacks of enterprise mashups.?? Along with my co-presenter, Ron Lynn, we hope attendees will gain insights from a real-world enterprise mashup and how they might identify opportunities to remove costs and speed the sunset of more traditional but costly solutions.
Please take a look at the proposal and provide any comments.Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: :
We’ve all heard the stories about web 2.0 and social computing and the difficulties some have in understanding its value inside the enterprise. Seems like many people are confused or uncertain about why social web 2.0 tools inside the enterprise even exist. They struggle to know where to start and how to apply it to the work they do.
Well, we’re all on the hook to do our annual reviews. And that assessment can have some important impacts on both our personal and professional lives. Perhaps introducing how social computing can help us all tackle this annual review challenge can help to unlock the value for some folks.
Once you’ve used Web 2.0 tools to help with a personal / business effort, think how you could use it in other ways.
There’s an old saying….. give a man a fish and he eats for a day… teach a man to fish and he’ll eat for a lifetime. Good luck fishing!
Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm is written with a specific focus of marketing high tech products to mainstream consumers. It cautions how many high tech new ventures fail in reaching mainstream adoption primarily because those companies don’t evolve their marketing strategies to cater to the tastes and preferences of a the very pragmatic early majority audience whose motivations and risk tolerance differ significantly from their existing visionary/early adopter clients.
I believe there is some wisdom in Moore’s pages for internal innovation teams as well. Complementing Andrew Chen’s recent blog, it seems we largely lack a consistent process or approach with respect to stimulating demand with more pragmatic and conservative user communities inside the firewall. Some firms have great internal programs for gaining early adopters and refining some of their technical innovations. But what happens we the pilot ends? Where is the graduate program that guides those early successes into more mainstream audiences? Don’t get me wrong… being successful with innovator and early adopter types accounts for nearly 16% of the user population. In a firm with 300,000+ employees, 16% represents nearly 50,000 users. Reaching 50,000 internal users is remarkable and should be celebrated as an incredible success in and of itself. BUT if we can break through to the early majority types, that is where the significant economies of scale and ROI really kick in. By gaining traction in the early majority, the usage would grow from 50k to 150k users. That is 3 times the value at nearly the same cost to support just 50,000 users. Sure there are some internal innovations that have made it to the “big show” primarily through viral growth inside the firewall. But there are many other promising capabilities that seem to plateau and don’t quite make it to the more mainstream internal user. I believe we can overcome this adoption challenge through marketing innovation rather than technical innovation.
I recently heard a very telling story about Lou Gerstner, the executive largely credited with turning IBM around in the mid-1990s. When he joined IBM he commissioned a benchmarking study on payroll systems used by large enterprises. When the group presented their findings, they told Lou they had some good news and some bad news. The good news was that the firm had the best payroll system they had ever come across. The bad news was that the firm also had the 4th, 8th, 23rd and 28th payroll systems. The message was clear and Lou took aggressive action.
My experience tells me this overlap and redundency is a frequent and widespread occurance in large firms where there are substantial business units that either had the autonomy to build infrastructure to support their activities or they were acquired with little integration with the “mother ship” of the acquirer. I’ve seen this silo-driven culture saturate many critical enterprise efforts ranging from simple web site management to corporate strategic planning. Why is this so prevalent and what is being done to prevent making the same mistakes again and again? Seems to me this is clearly a question of governance (or lack of governance) and the expense of poor/weak governance grows steeper with each new application and business unit that gets created rather than brought into the fold. There don’t seem to be many hard-liners who are willing to say “this is when the madness stops” followed by swift and meaningful action that includes going after legacy efforts. I guess I just wish there were more big game hunters in corporate America. There’s plenty of productivity and cost savings to be had if you can fell a few elephants. I’ve often seen many who are willing to pounce on fledgling efforts to make them join the flock but few want to try going after the bigger legacy items. The hard and unglamorous decisions to effectively govern internal processes and systems (that aren’t necessarily broken) seem to be inevitably delayed until the firm is in dire trouble. Why wait until its nearly too late?