This is the next in a series of posts which present different views on the state of Social Business in the UK from a video interview series compiled by our friends at Kongress Media. At our #e20s Meetup sessions Bjoern Negelmann asked well known consultants, practitioners and thought leaders in this space where we are with digital and social collaboration compared to the rest of Europe and elsewhere.
Here is Benjamin Ellis. We’ve known Benjamin from the London start-up, social media and social business scene (OpenCoffee, Tuttle Club, etc.) for around 10 years. Benjamin, like us, is on Microsoft’s list of leading social business influencers for the UK, and runs two businesses – Redcatco which develops, builds and delivers social technology solutions for business, and SocialOptic which provides provide SaaS and Cloud-based applications and in particular Milestone Planner, a combined cloud/social/mobile approach to planning which gives you a new way to agree, track, and manage who does what, by when on a project.
Watch the video, but here are some highlights:
at a particularly interesting time right because the early adopters of social media technology are quite mature and starting to think about what’s the next step for them
at the same the bigger majority of businesses are now just getting kick started with their projects so you’ve got this dynamic of one set of people looking at what is the second generation of what they do with these tools, and whole other set of business saying we’re just starting off, what can we learn from what those other businesses have done?
first group were more entrepreneurial, tended to experiment, try social t0ols in certain areas of the business before rolling it out across the whole organisation, and so experiment and pivot and learn
some of them have been through multiple tools already
people starting with their first adoption are much more structured, and they’re really looking to deploy across the whole of the organisation, and they tend to have settled on one tool… …so quite different approaches
more of an uphill push to get people using the tools and incorporating them in their business process
interesting thing about organisation change is that it is a phenomenally slow process and you have to be realistic about that
talking to the CEOs they talk about 5 years, 7 years sometimes even 10 years
we can deploy a Software as a Service tool within minutes or weeks but the change in business culture, you’ve really got to allow time for that
the interesting thing for me is that you can use social tools to change the culture, so a combination of change of culture and using the tools to accelerate that change
If you want to find out more and about what works, what doesn’t and what next then take a look at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit London on November 26. Benjamin will be one of our panel speakers. More information here.
More #e20s state of UK social business interviews in the series here.