How to drive a Social Business Adoption and what is the leverage of embedding Social Platform at the heart of Business.
Guest Speaker: Michael Martine, Director, Supply Chain Transformation at IBM
Executives play a critical role in establishing trust. The research shows over 80% positive impact on trust for CEOs who openly communicate on social. IBM is a great example with our CEO Ginni Rometty. Ginni’s first communication as CEO was social – a video blog. It was also part of an ongoing community called “ThinkTogether” that continues the conversation on strategic issues.Ginni also took her participation down to a deeper level with an annual award to the top 500 IBMers. Over a series of 2 weeks, Ginni had a message on congratulations to each recipient on their wall. This recognition was very public for the recipient’s teams and friends and led to greater conversation.Overall, the CEO gives permission to act in a social manner!
We are talking about Social Business within the enterprise - - a purposeful collaboration to achieve better results for Clients, Employees and the enterprise overall. And we believe Social Business is necessary for IBM…... because Social Business will replace parts of our current work, it will change how we execute processes – because it is easier, better and faster. Social business will enable us to access full expertise as well as experts, enables team, network and knowledge building without a single point of control, can enable time shifted/parallel work for all, not just specific project teams. It can be easier to know the context of our clients and employees when we interact with them and even solicit their input in shaping our approach to help them do more.Our challenge is to understand the building blocks of social with the technology that is still evolving to support them, and the behavior changes needed in the workforce to and determine how we can harness the power of these game-changing capabilities within our processes to drive that leap-frog value.ORIGINAL TEXT:Social business will make it possible to access expertise, not just known experts, where the strength of the team can more effectively build on itself, not pre-dominantly from a strong leader. It is where time shifted/parallel work is enabled for all, not just specific project teams. It will be easier to know the context of our clients and employees when we interact with them and even solicit their input in shaping our approach to help them do more. Effectively it will allow us to personalize our interactions with scale. Our current tools are the building blocks: Email, lotus connections, sametime, phone calls, skills databases, etc…, but they are not enough, we need to make them irresistible, motivating and we need to tailor them to the people doing the work. Without this, the change will not be complete and the potential will not be reached. Consider that Connections usage has already peaked within IBM.Social Business is about turning on the whole network and leveraging it. Not just relying on pockets of creativity and ad-hoc go-betweens to pass the good ideas along. Our GIE transformation is envied by many companies because it allows us to scale out good ideas and investments. The GIE makes it possible for our hugely complex far-flung global organization to move quickly and efficiently in many ways. Our Social Business transformation will enable us to make even better use of our scale and GIE. It will decrease the distances between people. The new workspaces will allow purposeful collaboration - bringing together the relevant people and the relevant content in a way that ideas can be shared and built. We are reducing time spent looking for who to contacts/information and giving status updates, and making time for pushing the ideas forward. The workspace will also record the previously invisible work efforts, enabling future analytics to be applied to the data.Our conclusion is that Social Business is how we will work - changing our processes, it is how we will personalize at scale - leveraging our people, and it will be enabled by irresistible technology. We can shape this or let it shape itself. Mastering this new capability will not be easy, but we have 3 recommendations as next steps to take.