Saturday 14 November 2009

Redefining the meaning and goal of Social


Julie Cottin and Alex Williams plea for cutting through the wood by bringing what I call a countermessage

This usually happens when a hot topic or hype gets picked up. A hype is nothing else but a new way to do pretty much the same thing, albeit (much) faster, better, cheaper or more efficient. In that, it is a new means to (roughly) the same goal

After a while, means are being mistaken for goals. Then people start criticising the hype because their perception of it (it is a goal) doesn't allow for a business case, or ROI

Then, the people who consider it to be just a means start redefining the meaning or even completely rebranding the initial term that has become tainted

And then, after long debates and disagreements and the creation of new camps and fragmented subgroups, we end up interpreting and selling the new hype as either means or goals or any half-hearted solution in between – and missing the goal nearly completely (sigh)
It's just the way we think we are. Look at how we have done religion, politics, anything. We hate to be perceived wrong, especially by ourselves - oh well

So we now seem to have indeed come to that point

But, in the middle of this barfight (Andrew McAfee seems to be occupied with signing his book),
Fresh addition Nov 17th 23:19 CET: Andrew's latest view on social (feel free to skip to Jevon's question #9)
Dachis comes along with a vision, goal and approach:

- People
- Process
- Technology

Dachis also just sticks to the (their) term Social Business Design, fortunately

People are first, clear on that
Process is fine, but David's clearly lost for focus there:
An organization may need to architect a series of flows which can handle a multitude of scenarios.
Oh well, too early for that anyway (orchestrating your social stuff enterprise-wide real-time)
Technology has an interesting spin on upscaling and control. Looks like that's enterprise-ready already...

I say it's a milestone, just don't ask me why, I'll have to sleep on that. Still quiet around Altimeter (Ray's been busy with Dennis this week!), what's cooking?

5 reacties:

Rick Mans said...

I don't think it is too early for something like a process on the fly / orchestrating social stuff, however it is something that is too early for most companies (they can be ready in 2-5 years for it). Most companies aren't ready for orchestration of their key production processes and if you cannot have those on the fly then there is no use in enabling this in other processes around the key processes.

You go either the full monty with process on the fly, or not. Social stuff (please coin this term Martijn ;)) is not something that can be seperated from other pieces in the enterprises, since the enterprise is social no matter what they are thinking.

Rick Mans said...

Plus I don't think the organization has to define the flows (nor the scenarios), it should define core reusable components that can be in a flow. The flow will be created in the end by the user.

Martijn Linssen said...

Thank you Rick. It's the horizon in the roadmap, and I think it's promising too much - it reminds me of BPM which pushed BPEL and it was all so hard and companies ended up just shoving ESB's in there to wrongsource the entire problem - let's just not repeat that again

As long as we stick to 100% business first and don't sink our heads into IT. Define your business processes, identify them IT-wise, orchestrate them business- and IT-wise, and then you can Fly or People them

Oh and btw I HEREBY COIN THE TERM 'SOCIAL STUFF' - good idea!

Peter Evans-Greenwood said...

I like the lifecycle of a concept, as you laid it out. "Mash-up" seems to going through the same process, now that portal vendors are claiming the label as their own.

Flow/processes is an interesting question. Business don't think in terms of processes: IT folk do. Business is really a bunch of decisions. Processes are just the paths between decisions. Back when business was a bit simply, a linear model of the business (process, value-chain ...) was a useful simplification, even though it didn't capture the true nature of the business. Now, with tighter partner and customer integration, SaaS, BPO et al, that simplification no longer works.

In a decision centric world, People rule.

r.

PEG

Unknown said...

Hey Martijn. I get the link to what I said on my blog and you are, of course, quite correct. Where SCRM is concerned I feel we are all in a strange place right now. The big vendors and being a little canny and playing a wait and see game, the smaller (historically more agile) vendors and seizing the hype as a point of potential, positive differentiation and developing but with an unclear roadmap, and the real trailblazers like Ray, Jeremiah, PaulG, and EKolsky et al (on the #SCRM Twitter hashtag) are blatantly, and understandably, engaging in a spot of market engineering where there are huge swathes of followers eager to provide RTs and comment hoping some of the 'cool by association' will rub off.

Certainly easier to become an expert in a rapidly defining market (where you can own the definition) than be one in an established game.

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