Enterprise Weather Forecast: From Social Wind to Social Rain

Just like this Summer, people pray for rain worldwide, same as at many organizations, culture is a bit drought, and morale is a little low, after getting enough social technology insight, they look forward to have some social wind blow up, and social rain is coming soon: 

1. From Social Organization to Social Economy

 Social Computing grows with speed and scale, a just-published McKinsey study, "The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies," indicated, about 1.5 billion number of social networking users globally; 70% proportion of companies using social technologies, 90% proportion of companies using social technologies that report some business benefit from them; 20-25% potential improvement possible in knowledge worker productivity. Overall, it is estimated that between $900 billion and $1.3trillion in value can be unlocked through the use of social technologies.

• Social technologies enable social behaviors to take place online, endowing these interactions with scale, speed and disruptive economics of the internet;

• Provide platforms for content creation, distribution, and consuming. Co-creation and transformation of personal and group communication into content.

• The real power of social technology also comes from the innate appeal of interacting socially and pleasure and intellectual stimulation that people derive from sharing what they know, expressing opinions and learning what others know and think.

2. Social Rain Strengthen Social Architecture & Culture of Innovation

Social organization need solid foundation and well designing, social architecture will help such works. The Wikipedia definition “Social architecture" is the conscious design of an environment that encourages a desired range of social behaviors leading towards some goal or set of goals” applies to organizational culture, social psychology, and community psychology.

• Encourage Innovation: Using boundary spanning to fill out structural holes: Social Architecture is the fundamental structure of how we connect. One of the barriers to creativity and innovation is structural holes (connections that need to exist to make further connections). Boundary spanners (those that walk between groups) close the structural holes so that innovation can pass along in an organization. Using compensation, positive reinforcement, and providing organizational incentives for these boundary spanners to exist the organization becomes more innovative. However, boundary spanners tend to control the lines that connect the groups. Too many can cause problems in the organization. So the structures need to be set to encourage these behaviors, but only to the extent that it has positive impact.

• Culture Trumps leadership & strategy to be key business success factor:  culture is about attitudes and behaviors, there isn't just one corporate culture. There's an overall corporate culture, lots of sub-cultures, and sub-sub-cultures within those: Seen in isolation, the interactions between various groups within an organization, provide little insight into the culture of the organization as a whole. Which of course means that have understand “what the culture of the organization is” via series of cultural analysis such as: social interaction analysis, sociograms, sociomapping and sociometrics;

• Enforce Culture of Innovation at Agile Business: There’re three different types of groups: Organization structure (formal hierarchy); Work structures (tend to be horizontal interactions); and Social structures (tend to be any which way). The reason for identifying and using these three sets of groupings is to discover the degree of ‘cultural coherence’ within an organization, which may help recognize those positive cultural or sub-cultural traits, then using social technologies to amplify and enforce them to cultivate seven habit of the culture of innovation, as culture is a self-reinforcing loop.  It also reflects business’s core values & beliefs’, which is correlated with business strategy/execution and talent management for long term.

3. Social Rain Nurtures Big Data Oasis

 Data from social media sites, videos, audio files, images, emails, text messages, mobile transactions, and more have put us on pace to see a total of 35 zettabytes of data by 2020, that being said, social rain is nurturing Big Data oasis:

• Business Foresight: Big Data created by social technology can help forecast and monitor operations and distributions, and optimize demand-supply value chain via improving intra-or inter-organizational collaboration and communication.

• Customer Insight: Big Data also derives customer insights, helps real-time, multi-channel customer interaction & communication, to improve customer care and gain insight about what customer need next before they know themselves.

• Deliver ROI for Social Business: Big Data analytics is about getting a working feedback loop from the social world back to us, let business quickly processes the vast data streams, analyze them, and deliver ROI for social business.  

From social business to social economy, from social wind to social rain, social echnology brings up the scale and speed of influence, to inspire enterprise creativity and amplify collective human capability.

Posted in: Change Management,Innovation,Social Computing