business innovation – Page 2 – Agile Elephant making sense of digital transformation

July 10, 2014 By David Terrar

Agile Elephant shortlisted for Best Cloud Start-Up Innovation award

I’m pleased to report that Agile Elephant was shortlisted for this year’s edition of the prestigious EuroCloud UK Awards. The award categories cover Best SaaS Offering, and Best IaaS/PaaS (platform) Offering, as well Best Public Sector Case Study, and Best Business Impact. However we entered the Best Cloud Start-Up category which was split into 2 separate Awards, both for companies active in (any) market 3 years or less – Start-Up: Best Business Potential and Start-Up: Most Innovative. It was the latter where we were shortlisted. We’re proud of how we’ve set up Agile Elephant and how far we’ve come in less than six months.

The award ceremony was hosted and sponsored yesterday by Baker Tilly at their Farringdon Street office. You’ll hear more via 3 media sponsors who are showcasing the entrants. CompareTheCloud, Diginomica and Cloud-Channel.TV have combined to shout a bit about the achievement of UK Cloud.

We are honoured to have the innovation of our Agile Elephant approach recognised and to be in such great company. All of the shortlisted candidates got to present at the event, and the photos are here. Sadly, we didn’t win. However, if we had to lose to somebody, I’m delighted that we it was our friends at Fedr8 with Argentum – a revolutionary set of SaaS based analysis solutions that helps secure, optimise and integrate application code to enable a seamless and speedy transition to the cloud. They’re smart people with clever technology addressing a vital area of application management – we wish Dean Chapman, Rhys Sharp and the team the best of luck. Maybe next year?

March 4, 2014 By Janet Parkinson

Salary Transparency: The Cultural Dilemma

Buffer , a social-sharing app and site, recently announced that as part of its strategy towards workplace transparency it has decided to open up every single employee’s salary on its website:

“Its salaries formula, used to calculate what each worker will earn as they join the company, has become more nuanced and is being emulated by startups such as Groove and CustomerIO, says Gascoigne. Buffer also plans an “open equity” program where everyone knows how shares are divided… It takes a certain kind of person to work at Buffer, Gascoigne says, listing traits such as empathy and gratitude – in addition to being very good at the core job skills… “The percent of people who were a good culture fit was a lot higher after all the media coverage of sharing the salary of every person on the payroll,” he said. And of workers turned off by it, he says, “it scares the right people away.” Qz.com

The question is whether the move towards workplace transparency should include transparency of salaries and what the implications could be. Will this eventually become normal across businesses around the globe or is it just a fad? One year ago I wrote about this question and doing an update today has highlighted some interesting developments in a country which has had some level of salary transparency since 1863 – Norway.

Cultures and Transparency

A country’s culture usually dictates what is considered acceptable in its society and what is not. Certainly the UK culture regarding salaries has always been – until now at least – a pretty taboo subject – even amongst the best of friends.

Last February I compared the UK’s attitude towards this with Norway where at the time anyone could go to the Norwegian mainstream newspaper Aftenposten’s website and with one click check out the norwegian tax list which shows a large proportion of the country’s tax payers’ details including their annual income, tax paid, value of investments and date of birth. For those in the UK this would seem a gross intrusion into private lives but for norwegians they have never really had much choice – tax and income records have been publicly available since 1863. This transparency dates back to the deeply rooted Norwegian culture which prescribes egalitarianism, collectivism and conformity as values to be protected and practiced by its citizens – Janteloven (Jante Law).

Until 2001 the norwegian tax and revenue list was openly available but only via the tax office in paper format, therefore it was an effort to go and search through it. But in 2008 the government made the list available to the media enabling newspapers such as Aftenposten to give instant online access to all via a searchable database on their websites. As Channel 4 noted in 2012:

“Jan Omdahl, from the tabloid Dagbladet, wrote at the time: “Isn’t this how a social democracy ought to work, with openness, transparency and social equality as ideals?” However a poll carried out in 2007 found most of his countrymen disagreed: just 32% thought the list should be published, while 46% were opposed… What some see as an honest commitment to fairness is for others, an invasion of personal privacy, and a licence for what the Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet described as “tax porno”…”

As if this wasn’t bad enough it was Dagbladet who in 2009 even offered their readers the chance to automatically check and compare the income of their Facebook friends and to offer the service as an iPhone application – leaving Trine Skei Grane of the green party Venstre to comment how:

“We took part in opening up the system, but now the principle of openness is totally out of proportion” BBC, 2009

So even in a country where salary transparency was generally accepted people do have their limits. The ease of availability and what can now be done with personal data proved to be a step too far. When I wrote my post last year the media still gave direct online access to tax and salary details – but following much controversy the Norwegian government has now stopped access of online information via the media – you now have to enter the Tax Administrator’s website to find out the information instead:

“Today, the tax assessment for 2012 laid out, and we can probably immediately seek to arrive at what neighbors, friends and colleagues in income and wealth and what they paid in taxes. Certainly, the search has become more complicated since one must now enter the Tax Administration’s website and log in with MinID to access the information. But despite the fact that one can no longer use the readily available search engines on the newspapers’ websites, the search activity still great. The IRS reported, for example, that in 2011 was over 700,000 users conducted 13 million searches on the tax rolls for 2010… Knowing that your neighbor can see what you earn, prevents any cheating. If there is a large gap between income and living standards observed that consumption of cars, boats and cabins, a risk being suspected of evading income from taxation. Such suspicion means lost reputation in the family and community, and some also possible to call phoning the Norwegian authorities.’ Aftenposten, October 2013, translated by Google Translate

The Norwegian government holds the view that the ability for everyone to check out their neighbour’s details easily through the internet must be a positive thing as it leads to less tax cheating and reduces the shadow economy…

Interestingly Valve who are adopting the ‘radical transparency’ approach recently introduced the holacracy model by eliminating the typical corporate hierarchy and have a stack ranking system where staff working on the same project rank each others’ technical skills, productivity and other contributions which helps determine who gets paid what – so salaries are, to a certain extent, open. Professor Oswick of Cass Business School warns that it could go awry were the firm to face a financial setback:

“Peer-pressure is a fantastic way of organising a business,” he says. “And so long as everyone is well paid people don’t mind being in the bottom earning quartile. But as soon as resources become more scarce, then competition increases, which creates conflicts, which creates tensions, which creates hierarchies, which creates concern about relative positioning.”

And bear in mind that this scenario could occur when employee salaries are known by only those within the company let alone being displayed openly to the public.

So perhaps ask yourself again – it may seem quite cool to some, but is having your salary details made available on your employer’s website really what you want?

February 17, 2014 By Janet Parkinson

Employee Engagement : The New Heart of Enterprise 2.0?

‘7 out of 10 of your colleagues don’t give a sh*t about your company. The biggest problem is employee engagement” Luis Suarez at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit, Paris 2014

Luis was using figures from this Gallup survey which highlights how only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. He’s right – but why is this? You only have to look at the rise in volume of Google searches for the term over the last 5 years to see just what a buzzword ’employee engagement’ it is becoming, and it does lie at the heart of the Social Business / Business Transformation / Enterprise 2.0 ethos – so why the poor figures?

There has been so much research produced over the years showing that employee engagement really does help the bottom line that no one can deny that benefits really do exist. Take just one set of results by Gallup of meta-analysis of 1.4 million employees which shows that organizations with a high level of engagement do report 22% higher productivity, and Harvard Business Research which states:

‘strong employee engagement promotes a variety of outcomes that are good for employees and customers. For instance, highly engaged organizations have double the rate of success of lower engaged organizations. Comparing top-quartile companies to bottom-quartile companies, the engagement factor becomes very noticeable. For example, top-quartile firms have lower absenteeism and turnover. Specifically, high-turnover organizations report 25% lower turnover, and low-turnover organizations report 65% lower turnover.”

Social tools have been shown to be some of the most powerful enablers of employee engagement over the last few years as reports by McKinsey have shown.

Yet it seems that only now companies are catching up with the technology and beginning to take on board the true power of the social tools available to them. Having spent the last 5 years or so adapting their external marketing mix to absorb the power of social media, they are beginning to realise the full potential of internal social tools which are speeding up business processes and breaking down silos allowing employees to collaborate more effectively and at greater speeds. Happier employees providing customer service support really does produce better customer service results. Companies now realise that with social tools which run in realtime they cannot remain hidden behind a wall. They therefore no longer have the option to ignore it – employee engagement is about to hit big time.

As Luis notes in the interview below it is only in the last 2 years that we are beginning to hear more about behavior and how to influence mindsets rather than just hearing about the social tools. “We are not there yet… but now that we are talking about behavior we will begin to see a massive shift in the way that employees are engaged in the work that they do”.

It was great to see though that employee engagement appeared as a key component of the Summit (which was after all traditionally a technology conference). Yet it was right up front with both headliners. Dan Pontefract of Telus stated:

It’s not the tools it’s the behaviour
Engagement is a big driver of profitability which in turn is driving HR activity now
You can tie engagement to KPI drivers

and Jon Mell of IBM who noted:

Employee engagement drives customer satisfaction which drives profits
There are analytics now behind employee engagement which are key to the whole process, from interview questions to the proactive retention of the best employees
HR now has a seat at the table and has the power.

Many of the case studies touched upon engagement – though more often in terms of collaboration than specifically in terms of engagement.

Emanuele Quinterelli of Ernst & Young noted how in a survey of 300 Italian firms:

Currently the laggards tend to have no one in charge of collaboration as such
56% of laggards have virtually no budget for collaboration while the top performers have at least 100k Euros of yearly budget and use business metrics 3 times more
50% of laggards have no measurement, though only 9% of leaders have measurement in place
Leaders are engaging employees to engage customers

Martin Risgaard Rasmussen described how Grundfoss have deployed a program of culture change called Global Working Culture – run by HR.

HR – the company leaders of the future?

Following on from Jon Mell’s remark there are others who agree that HR really does have a seat at the table and Mar. Oracle president Mark Hurd last October called for HR to transform itself and start to lead and drive businesses:

‘I want HR to help me run the company, to help with insight that will allow me to make the key business decisions, which will help the company grow… Over the next decade HR as a function needs to lead and drive the business rather than react to it… It’s going to have to drive it in a way that’s more complicated than anyone has ever experienced before… Turning from a support function to a leadership function will be core to what HR does in the next decade”

But in addition to HR let’s not forget the role of community managers. At the Summit Rachel Happe discussed how to drive engagement and adoption on social platforms. “A Community Manager has to inspire, establish and normalize a behavior change, this drives ROI” she said in a recent interview. Community managers do act as lynchpins to networks which are increasingly crucial to the whole social business process. Their role can encompass not just the monitoring and enhancement of engagement right across a company but also can provide and evaluate what can work better for the success of engagement across the whole community.

Employee Engagement – The Vision

But perhaps the killer statement for me in terms of employee engagement came from a casual tweet by Luis on the second day of the Summit:

To truly engage employees to increase the performance and profitability of companies isn’t the ultimate deal to enable employees to own shares in the company?

Employee ownership is indeed on the rise:

“Employee ownership, where workers have a voice as well as a stake in the success of their business, is recognised as a sustainable business model which helps drive staff commitment, productivity, resilience and innovation.” Real Business

And:

“Total return for shareholders in FTSE companies with employee share ownership rose by 53% in 2013, compared to 21% for companies in the FTSE All-share index, according to research by corporate finance firm Capital Strategies and the London Stock Exchange.” Employee Benefits

It’s becoming clearer that the way companies currently structure measurement and reward just isn’t working. If you want employees to be truly engaged and really feel part of the big picture then treating them as cogs in the wheel and rewarding them for just being good cogs is never going to be enough. Having a stake in the business will motivate them to take a business sized view.

Best of all it appears that Luis even has the UK government on his side…

“Policy makers are increasingly embracing employee ownership as a key sustainable business model, and over the last 18 months we have seen a significant increase in support for this sector. In his budget in April this year (2013), George Osborne announced that, with effect from 2014, the Treasury would set aside £50m in tax reliefs for the employee ownership sector. On top of this, in yesterday’s Autumn Statement George Osborne put the Government’s money where its mouth is, pledging a further £25m in support of this fast-growing sector of the UK…” Real Business

Well, we’re not sure how many years we’ll have to wait for employee ownership to really take off and become the norm – but perhaps Luis should come over to London to give George a helping hand 😉

Image by Frederic Williquet: @fredericw : https://twitter.com/fredericw/media

February 15, 2014 By David Terrar

Key factors for Strategic Enablement

Here is the panel session that I took part in at the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris this week, on 11th & 12th February 2014. We were discussing the key factors for strategic enablement of enterprise 2.0, social business, and social collaboration in organisations. Emanuele Quintarelli set the scene presenting a survey of Italian firms. Then the discussion, moderated by Bjoern Negelmann, was between:

Emanuele Quintarelli – Digital Transformation Practice Leader, Ernst & Young
Luis Suarez – formerly Social Computing evangelist, IBM Software group
Dr. Chee Chin Liew – Enterprise Community Manager, BASF SE
David Terrar – Founder & CXO, Agile Elephant
Simon Levene – Senior Strategy Consultant, Jive Software

There was actually some tension between the speakers, resulting in a great discussion. The tension is between the likes of Emanuele and myself who want to lift the argument to real, hard, business numbers and metrics that the executives in the C-Suite can understand in a business case, versus Luis and others at the conference who want to focus on the culture change required in the workplace, on improving employee engagement, the move to knowledge sharing, open business and collaboration, with use cases that are effective. Both are important. But to accelerate things, it’s my belief we need cold, hard business logic combined with the inspiration to change to open business. Listen to the discussion and you decide.

Here are a few key quotes I’ve lifted out of the dialogue:

“7 out of your 10 colleagues don’t give s#%! about what you do today!”

“need more doing than talking”

“go back to the core nature of how work gets done”

“how can I help you today?”

“but first of all we need to make it clear to the business where is the benefit”

“does management agree or recognise social as an enabling tool for more engagement and to solve the problem of the fundamental (financial) crisis?”

“not happening yet because we are talking about collaboration, we are not talking about measurable business benefits”

“the majority of people in this room are believers in this thing”

“it’s up to us as a community to get out there and communicate it better to the average business person in the street

“it’s all about use cases, if you come up with a list of top 10, 15 use cases of how people work and socialise them”

“break a silo, and you go in to openness and transparency”

My post setting the scene and introducing the show is here, and my conference report will follow shortly.

February 3, 2014 By Janet Parkinson

Thesis 2 – Business has become a Social Object

Why do we need a Manifesto?
We’ve been talking about applying social tools inside business since 2006 or before and we are no where near realising the potential for real social collaboration to make business more effective. We need a roadmap to set us on the right course, we need to think differently and to change culture. The Agile Elephant Manifesto encapsulates our blueprint for making Social Business work in thirteen theses. This post is the second in a sequence of 13 which explains each thesis in sequence.

Why Social Business?
We don’t mean the Professor Muhammad Yunus definition of a business which has a social rather than financial objective. We do mean a business adopting social tools and a different, more open and collaborative approach. We’ve been using terms like Web 2.0, Office 2.0, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Enterprise 2.0, Social Enterprise or Social Business. Social Business is probably the best term currently, but the language is of minor importance compared to the real objective of changing business culture to add value.

2 of 13 – Business has become a social object

It’s our belief that although business has always been social, it is now becoming a social object and we need to foster and facilitate those networks to add both tangible and intangible value.

Business as a Social Object: Social networks are acting as platforms for individuals to coordinate all the activities businesses used to do. The collaborative economy is now making headlines. Companies like Airbnb and Uber which rely on trusted parties are completely bypassing traditional hierarchical capitalist business models. Airbnb has risen in 6 years from a concept (dreamt up by 2 people when they rented out their apartment floor for the night) to a social platform which will potentially become the world’s largest hotelier within the next year. We believe that many – even all – markets could become just nodes in this social mesh – business is becoming a social object.

World as a Social Market: Social networks will allow any capacity to find any demand. Transaction costs will be minimised between buyers, sellers and information holders as the cost of bringing buyer and seller together falls to insignificant numbers. Ronald Coase predicted this in the 1930’s. The size of the firm in the case of a supplier to Airbnb is nothing more than your spare room and an internet connection.

Trust and transparency: We foresee that trust and transparency will be maximized. Any business which tries to limit transparency and remain opaque or tries to create arbitrage where there is none will find it difficult to compete and maintain their strategic position.

Regulation: The social mesh will become part of the infrastructure – just like the Internet itself has become part of the infrastructure. Over time, this mesh will be regulated – infrastructures always do. Regulation will be complex and we need to ensure that the regulations introduced have society’s best interests at heart.

You control your network: The sheer scale of the mesh will be vast and we will need tools to navigate it. Some tools will come from the infrastructure but we imagine that some will come from yourself. Think VRM , the concept of tools being created for individuals to manage and control their own data, allowing access only to those to whom they give permission. We imagine that we could all own our own smart systems with data controlled by ourselves – like owning an electric appliance which you plug into the mesh. It could source the relevant data, barter the deal and present the options in order of importance, then automatically make all the necessary arrangements for you. The opportunity for profiteering in these transactions would be minimal.

Utopian dream?: May be. It would rely very much on total trust and could go very wrong in bad hands. Be prepared for the shadows.

“The Future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed” – William Gibson, 1993

You can find the full Manifesto here, and contact us if you want to find out more.

Thesis One

Thesis Three

February 1, 2014 By Janet Parkinson

Business as a Social Object

“Could business become nothing more than a social object, with individuals collaborating via social networks, doing what businesses used to do?”

I put out this idea last September at our Patchwork Elephant Conference about what the future could hold for Social Business. Our first conference was hosted 4 years ago when the term ‘Social Business’ hadn’t really been coined – how rapidly things can change.

With this in mind I talked about the possible future of social + business and how, if you take an idea that can seem totally unthinkable and unacceptable, it can become thinkable given the right ‘window’ of time. This is based on the Overton Window theory that there is a narrow ‘window’ when a range of ideas will be accepted by the public. If you take a ‘way out there’ idea which appears completely unthinkable, then push it as far as you possibly can then sometimes, given the right ‘window’, that idea eventually becomes thinkable and acceptable.

Here are 2 concepts which could be possible in 40 years time. They may seem pretty unthinkable – but can they become truly thinkable if pushed to their extremes?

“What if businesses became nothing more than a social object – that’s to say that social networks would be used simply to coordinate all activities that businesses used to do?”

“Nanotechnology will destroy the present social and economic system – because it will become pointless” (James Burke on Radio 4 PM, August 2013)

James Burke was a famous BBC reporter on Tomorrow’s World in the 1970’s and chief presenter for the BBC’s coverage of the first moon landing in 1969. In 1973 he was asked to predict what life would be like in 20 years time – that’s 1993. Back in 1973 the only computers around filled floors and there were very few. There was no internet, no email, no mobile phones.

He predicted that:

Storage of personal information in databanks would be accepted – at least by the young
People would realise that the sharing of information would help organise society better
Computer aided learning systems would provide children with their own plug in superteacher
300,000 computer terminals would be in use by the year 2000 providing forecasts on the effects of management decision making

There were in fact 146 million computers by 2000 so his timescales were a bit inaccurate but he did well. Yet in 1973 most people viewed these predictions as totally unthinkable.

So when Burke last year suggested on Radio 4 PM that in 40 years time “Nanotechnology will destroy the present social and economic system – because it will become pointless” this may sound unthinkable, but it’s probably worth thinking about…

Burke believes that it may be possible that in 40 years time we could all own personal nanofactories which could reproduce stuff on a molecular level. It should be possible to make virtually anything – for virtually nothing. All we would need, he says, is air, water, dirt, and acetylene gas (for carbon) and we could manufacture virtually everything – from gold, food, our utilities or even a house.

We could, he suggests, become entirely autonomous!

This does sound really unthinkable – but perhaps this isn’t quite so far out there as it sounds. Take the current trends of everything becoming smaller, cheaper and networked – like 3d printing and the internet of things and push this out over 40 years… Machines are already working at the molecular level – the University of Manchester has recently built one which they’re planning to modify to build penicillin.

The Endgame: Radical Abundance

So what’s the endgame with all this? Radical Abundance! The latest new new thing that’s just about to hit us and is being pushed not just by Burke but by others like Eric Drexler too.

So assuming that we could produce everything we needed, what could this mean for business? Here’s a possible snapshot:

Production: whether goods were made at home or locally on demand it could mean that large scale manufacturing would be knocked out
Transport: if there were no goods to be moved around the transport industry would be under threat
Consumer facing businesses selling goods: would have serious problems
Sales & marketing: what for if there were no goods to flog?
Business support services: would dwindle
Finance: a lot of the current financial system is based on betting on firms

Is this all becoming thinkable to you yet? Or at least more thinkable than before you started reading?

So let’s now return to my original concept:

“Could business become a social object with social networks acting as platforms for individuals to coordinate all the activities businesses used to do?”

Following on from Burke’s predictions perhaps now this idea doesn’t seem so far fetched. We only have to look at the current and quite sudden rise of the collaborative economy (another term which wasn’t really known 4 years ago) to see how companies in this space such as Airbnb and Uber are seriously challenging traditional business models.

Here are the beginnings of business models being redefined with individuals collaborating via social networks and relying on trusted parties, bypassing traditional hierarchical capitalist models. Platforms are being used by crowds to do what businesses used to do.

“The Future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet”

William Gibson‘s “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet” now springs to mind. Let’s take the social platform Airbnb to illustrate what we mean. Founded in 2008 by Brian Chesky and his roommate when they charged visitiors to sleep on their apartment floor, Airbnb has risen within 6 years to arrange 10m stays in 550 000 rooms in 34,000 cities and is likely to become the world’s largest hotelier within the next year.

As the collaborative economy expands, it’s clear that it will impact various markets, potentially reshaping them as integral parts of the social networks we engage with daily. Social networks are poised to streamline the way capacity meets demand, across the spectrum. Functions once novel, like Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft, are now foundational, much like how AOL was once a gateway to the web experience, which has since become part of our ubiquitous digital infrastructure. Similarly, online markets are evolving, with rating services becoming essential. Top rated property brands, along with other businesses, may find it inevitable to integrate as nodes within this sprawling social mesh—becoming, in essence, social objects that are inherently connected through user interactions and reputations.

The World as a Social Market

Trust and transparency will be maximised, transaction costs will be minimised. The whole trend of these social infrastructures is to drop transaction costs between buyers, sellers and information holders so the cost of bringing buyer and seller together will fall to insignificant numbers. Ronald Coase predicted this in the 1930’s. He foresaw that the inevitable outcome is that whenever possible the size of the firm will be reduced to a minimum size rather than keep all the extra functions it needs today like finance and sales etc. The size of the firm in the case of a supplier to Airbnb is nothing more than your spare room and an internet connection. Ebay was a forerunner to this – but it’s becoming clearer that eventually all the world will become a social market. Any business which tries to limit transparency and remain opaque or is trying to create arbitrage where there is none will find it difficult to compete and maintain their strategic position.

Over time, this mesh will become regulated – infrastructures always do. Electricity, water, telephony all ended up as part of the utility infrastructure and this will be no different. The main problem for the individual will be the sheer scale of the mesh – we will need tools to navigate it. Some tools will come from the infrastructure itself but we imagine that some tools will come from yourself. This ties in closely with the VRM concept of tools being created for individuals to manage and control their own data, allowing access only to those to whom they give permission. We could imagine us all owning our own smart systems with data controlled by ourselves – a bit like owning an electric appliance which you plug into the mesh – that could source the relevant data, barter the deal and present the options in order of importance, then automatically make all the necessary arrangements for you. The opportunity for profiteering in these transactions would be minimal – regulation would be complex.

Yet this is a utopian view of the world. It would rely very much on total trust and could go very wrong in bad hands. In my next post we’ll look more deeply into the shadows of a potential future for Business as a Social Object.

January 31, 2014 By Alan Patrick

The Dark Side of Open Data

I gave a talk at the Open Data Institute on “The Dark Side of Open Data” – short writeup on the Broadsight blog over here.

Picture above is from one of the slides, imagining augmented reality glasses which use facial recognition then search social media and various databases to get the dirt on people at a cocktail party. All the cases in the picture have already occurred, or could if data from proposed Open Government databases was triangulated.

My presentation is over here; and the audio is here

January 30, 2014 By Alan Patrick

McKinsey technology impact on business and Social Business’s role

McKinsey has published a model showing the impact of technology on business over the next 5 or so years (diagram above). They define 4 main areas where technology drives business:

enhanced connectivity,automation of manual tasks, improved decision making, and product or service innovation . Tools such as big-data analytics, apps, workflow systems, and cloud platforms—all of which enable this value—are too often applied selectively by businesses in narrow pockets of their organization, particularly in sales and marketing.

We have added to this diagram the areas where we think Social Business will mainly impact (the big purple patch on diagram above) – in short:

Enhanced Connectivity – the social network and connectivity, conversational and collaboration tools that Social Media provide will have the major impact on this quadrant. With the availability of it services jacksonville, the reach can also be enhanced.

Improved Decison making – this is partly a function of data analytics (which social tools provide a lot of), but also partly a function of rapid movement of qualitative information and knowledge round an organisation, allowing “hive mind” and “wisdom of criowds” effects to occur. Clearly, social technologies will have a huge impact on this area too, espcially in its ability to move and surface unstructured information. Also, we believe that the really high impact decisions will not be from teh Executive Suite, but from the millions of daily small decisions going right, as information permeates the organisations so large numbers of staff have a proper apprectaion of the situation and can make the correct micro-calls.

Product and Service Innovation – Social tools allow companies to take a much richer view of the market, the competition and their customers, at a far more granular level. By knowing the websites using wordpress, this will drive a far better understanding of where there are problems and opportunities with their products and services. We know from our work that it also makes it far easier to understand and analyse the relative value of making different adaptations. It is also already well known that social technologies are excellent for “crowdsouring” innovation from people outside the organisation, as well as picking up ideas from staff, suppliers and customers

Automation of Manual Tasks – Social tools’ main impact is on automating information flow and message switching. A by product of this is it creates a data “mesh” that can move data around, so reducing “knife and forking” data from various silo systems into the end to end business flow. Social Business will probably have a lower impact overall here compared to its effect on the other 3 quadrants, but in industries where information automation is the main value driver, it will have a major impact.

There is a kicker in that McKinsey statement though – “platforms—all of which enable this value—are too often applied selectively by businesses in narrow pockets of their organization“. In other words, the real value will be gained when it is implemented end to end. Few systems are as flexible and lightweight to build as end to end systems as social network technologies.

As to the 6 “bubbles” in the diagram – It’s clear that social technologies will have an impact on all of them – impact will vary by industry of course, depending on its structure (see below). Howver, I do suspect Social technology’s impact on identifying risks will be surprisingly large if the wisdom of the crowd hive mind and the enhanced “voice of the customer” starts to reduce “group think”

McKinsey claim huge productivity increases from all these technologies:

Digital transformation can make a big difference. To calculate just how big, we examined ten industries: retail banking, mobile telecommunications, airlines, consumer-electronics retailing, apparel, property-and-casualty insurance, hotels, supermarkets, pay-TV broadcasting, and newspaper publishing. …

…On average across the sectors we examined, we found that digital transformation can boost the bottom line by more than 50 percent over the next five years for companies that pull all levers. This ranged from 20 percent in pay-TV broadcasting to more than 200 percent in music retailing, with most sectors clustered in the 30 to 60 percent range. These headline figures are underpinned by a few critical insights: most sectors are expected to double their share of sales coming from digital channels over the next five years. Additionally, digital leaders are on average growing their digital sales at 2.5 times that of their sector peers, with as high as a 9 times multiple seen in newspapers, for instance. Furthermore, we found that companies can, on average, cut the total cost base by 9 percent, resulting in average bottom-line impact of 36 percent, through shifting customer interactions to digital channels and automating paper-heavy processes. This ranged from 3 percent of total costs in grocery retailing to 20 percent in retail banking—substantial impact, which passes directly to the bottom line and reshapes the economics of competition across these sectors.

A certain pinch of salt is required to such projections, execution is always harder than anticipated, but its clearly going to be significant. How much of this will be due to Social Technologies is going to be a major area of discovery over the next 5 years. We’re betting its going to be a major portion.

January 22, 2014 By David Terrar

Thesis 1 – We want to transform “business as usual”

Why do we need a Manifesto?
We’ve been talking about applying social tools inside business since 2006 or before and we are no where near realising the potential for real social collaboration to make business more effective. We need a roadmap to set us on the right course, we need to think differently and to change culture. The Agile Elephant Manifesto encapsulates our blueprint for making Social Business work in thirteen theses. This post is the first in a sequence of 13 which explains each thesis in sequence.

1 of 13 – We want to transform “business as usual”Business is changing faster than ever. Every organisation’s business model is under threat from new technology, new challengers and new, more agile ways of getting the job done. We now live in a landscape of digital disruption caused by three new technology paradigms – the simultaneous rise of Cloud, Social, and Mobile technologies have the potential to change the way we do things in every part of our lives.

It’s our belief businesses have no option – adapt and change or risk being leapfrogged by a more nimble competitor.

In this era of rapid technological evolution, managing services effectively has become crucial for businesses striving to stay competitive. Cloud, Social, and Mobile technologies are not just tools but drivers of transformation that necessitate a strategic approach to service management. Organizations must harness these technologies to streamline operations, enhance customer engagement, and drive innovation.

A key player in this landscape is DataTel, which provides cutting-edge solutions designed to integrate seamlessly with these emerging paradigms. By leveraging their expertise, businesses can optimize their service management processes, ensuring they remain agile and responsive in an ever-changing environment.

It’s our belief that enterprise social software and enterprise social networks have a key role to play in driving efficiency and adding value to the bottom line. These platforms include key functionality like profiles, activity streams, document sharing, blogs, and wikis but the best implementations do more than just providing a social media replacement for email, or an extra layer of communication over the top of the business. What is needed is a set of services that offer the integration of these internal capabilities to both structured and ad hoc business processes as well as to external customer-facing solutions. The key to success is connecting social to the heart of the business process.

Social software can operate as a distinct layer, but companies will increasingly look to social solutions as decision support and ad hoc work facilitators to support current workflow and enterprise application tasks. To enable the core features of enterprise social software to be surfaced inside enterprise workflow, open APIs need to be provided to enable information assets to become productized, syndicated, and distributed as callable IP assets via an API. These are the kinds of social collaboration solutions that our business experience and deep knowledge of social technologies and behaviours can help you deploy.

We want to move beyond business as usual. We want to put “social media” to work inside business as well as out.

You can find the full Manifesto here, and contact us if you want to find out more.

Back to the Manifesto

Thesis Two

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