Way back in 1999, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, one of the creators of the World Wide Web, pronounced that “In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else.”
In the workplace, these personal connections could previously be defined by places — offices, meeting rooms, water coolers — that were the physical repositories of human engagement. But that was largely before the advent of online social networks and the new business equivalents they have helped spawn.
Social business is an umbrella term that includes all social-driven workflow, internal and external, to an organisation, and its growing implementation is being accompanied by organizational, cultural, and process changes that are aimed at improving business performance. In some ways, however, the term social is a misnomer because social business is unlike any kind of socialisation that preceded it. That’s because it is defined less by people making direct personal contact with each other and more by people who have the ability to mediate experiences through a variety of social applications, channels, and interfaces.
Indeed, today’s social business can be defined by interconnecting systems of public and private social networks, by “smart” applications that engage people directly, and by repositories of Big Data that record the frequency, nature, duration, and outcomes of social contact.
It is an evolving ecosystem of transactions and digital commerce between people, machines, and a growing framework of interfaces that have the power to create a network effect courtesy of the millions of interactions that take place every single day.
Social business virtualiser the enterprise in a number of important ways and, in so doing, changes how its customers, its partners, and even its own employees perceive it. In many cases, it will be necessary for businesses to extend their own internal social networks to fully integrate customer experience into their own applications and databases. In other cases, piggybacking on existing platforms such as Amazon and Facebook will be the only way to realise the potential value without incurring massive build out and management costs. When considering what kind of business outputs will change as a function of using social business solutions, the most significant opportunities lie in the areas of improved business processes, more rapid speed to market, reduced cost of sales, more effective risk management, and a clearer understanding of how to enhance the employee and customer experience.
Top-line and/or bottom-line returns will depend on how social business supports the broader strategic goals of executives. Improved speed to market may be the result of using social business to identify an unexploited market niche, but execution (e.g., marketing, packaging, sales, and operations) will obviously be the final determinants of success.
So how will social business evolve, and what will its impact be on the enterprise in the next 3—5 years? First, and most importantly, it’s critical to remember that businesses react to societal changes. The evolution of social business has followed the major social changes that have shaped the past 10 years.
Indeed, it’s worth remembering that Facebook is only 11 years old and virtually every other major social platform is even younger than that. Given that reality, it’s clear that the impact of social workflow on business is in its infancy and will only increase as we move forward. So what does the future hold for social business and what role will the Internet of Things play in it? The Internet of Things is a loosely defined descriptor of a future in which the number of devices that communicate and receive information increases exponentially in society.
At IDC, we expect these devices to number 28.1 billion by 2020, up from 9.1 billion in 2013, and one key component of the Internet of Things will be ‘wearable’ technologies, phone-like devices that will initially monitor health and provide communications services, marketing/sales alerts, and (bidirectional) monitoring services for individuals.
Wearables will rapidly morph into a more general meaning for conveyable devices — embedded in clothing, appliances, cars, PDAs, and any of a multitude of other applications. Along with more passive technologies such as RFID, wearable devices will frame a global infrastructure that creates institutions that become the sum of their constantly moving, changing interfaces. The other interesting place to look for the future of social business is in so-called “mash-ups” of IT capabilities — that is, the combination of social business with other pillars of the third platform: Big Data, mobility, and cloud services. Social business depends on an underlying infrastructure of cloud services and Big Data to generate meaning from the interactions and experiences that it accumulates, and the relationship between these four technology pillars is only going to become even more intuitive and intertwined as the years go by.
There is no question that the scope and effects of social business on enterprise strategies will grow exponentially in the next five years. As such, I urge senior business executives to start planning now for how their enterprise will be transformed by the evolution of social, market, channel, and public infrastructure toward a continuously mobile and transient future business environment.
Credit: The columnist is group vice-president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Africa and Turkey at global ICT market intelligence and advisory firm International Data Corporation (IDC).
