Public Beta Release at Social Network Conference
Examples of enterprise process innovation feature LinkedIn®
I am pleased to announce that I beta-released my new social network roadmap at the Social Networking Conference last week in San Francisco. The roadmap helps enterprises to effectively assess, plan and apply social networks’ new technologies and behaviors to business while minimizing risk. It offers a structured approach to evaluating and using social networks for process innovation in marketing, business development, client service, human resources, research & development and others.
I created the social network roadmap because roadmaps are invaluable tools for companies that are adopting significant change. By articulating the adoption path, a roadmap helps educate people about how the novel technology affects their company and what they can do about it. It aligns them around orchestrated plans for action, and it gives them a vocabulary to talk about the change process. I have created and used roadmaps for over twenty years as a management consultant and marketing executive.
The Enterprise Social Network Roadmap’s Three Phases
- Feasibility builds the company’s vision around social networking and Web 2.0. It helps executive sponsors understand customer, partner, investor and other influencer activities in LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, blogs, virtual worlds and other venues as well as competitors’ activities. Subphases are Due Diligence, Baseline and Benchmarking.
- Strategy helps the company build an explicit plan for its structured adoption of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Second Life and other Web 2.0 sites, as well as its plan to apply them to business processes. Notably, it targets processes to which pilots will apply social networks to boost innovation through cross-boundary collaboration. Subphases are Governance, Metrics and Adoption Plan.
- Implementation is a measured process for applying the company’s activities in social networks and Web 2.0 to business processes for process innovation. Social networks, since they enable members to find each other and collaborate around very specific interests, hold extensive promise to boost the value of collaborative knowledge work. In Implementation, companies use social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn to innovate in business development, client service, marketing, research/product development and recruiting/human resources processes. Implementation contains Pilot, Scale and Integrate subphases.
At the Social Networking Conference
The Social Networking Conference was well run and featured enterprise presenters General Electric, GM, the U.S. Air Force, Motorola, IBM and Deutsche Telekom as well as a slew of start-ups. Executive Producer Marc Lesnick was enthusiastic about the corporate interest, which was a first since his Ticonderoga Ventures launched the conferences several years ago. The conference educates business and government leaders on emerging trends in social networks and mobile computing.
The conference was keynoted by Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak, and other speakers included executives from LinkedIn, Visible Path, Jigsaw, Twitter, GM, IBM, GE, Deutsche Telekom, Motorola, HP, Perfspot, Gemini Mobile and others. Immediately after my roadmap presentation, I moderated the panel, “Business Social Networking and the Changing Nature of Data,” featuring executives from LinkedIn, Jigsaw and Visible Path.
Adding Value to “Enterprise Facebooks”
Most companies are thinking about launching “enterprise Facebooks,” or they have already built them with software like Lotus Connections or Microsoft SharePoint. As I’ve written repeatedly in these pages, these solutions can add incremental value by helping employees connect with each other inside the enterprise, but they largely miss the point of the Web 2.0 age: as IBM itself has emphasized, cross-boundary collaboration is the holy grail of innovation: employees need to connect seamlessly with expertise wherever it emerges, whether inside or outside the enterprise.
“Enterprise social networks” do not readily allow this due to security and intellectual property concerns. The roadmap has an explicit process for harnessing internal and external information within the protected enterprise environment in a way that does not compromise intellectual property or security. This will add significant value and dynamism to proprietary environments.
Web 1.0 All Over Again
Web 2.0 in 2008 is strikingly similar to Web 1.0 in 1998, when I joined PricewaterhouseCoopers Management Consulting. Overnight global enterprises, having watched from the sidelines since 1995, needed to understand the Internet’s implications for their businesses, and they needed to understand the disruptive technology and how to integrate it. I landed at PwC at the perfect time, as I’d had several Internet ventures under my belt, so I got to play a significant role in building the firm’s roadmap and services framework while serving industry teams and clients in automotive, energy, consumer products and high tech. The Social Network Roadmap also borrows from my exposure to fast-cycle software development. It manages risk by identifying, creating process for and testing the riskiest parts of a proposition prior to extensive investment.
The Implementation Phase Often Features LinkedIn
Companies that sell to other companies (“B2B”) often have a focus on LinkedIn because it is arguably the most prominent executive network for making and maintaining executive connections globally, which is the raison d’être of the Executive’s Guide to LinkedIn. As my presentation showed, LinkedIn has extensive promise for enterprise process innovation in business development/sales, client service, research/product development, recruiting and public relations.
Additional Reading
- The Roadmap San Francisco presentation: “Using Social Networks to Drive Enterprise Process Innovation”
- The Roadmap Explained: “In Beta: Enterprise Social Network Roadmap”
- The original news release
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