Industry experts and CIOs have talked for years about the need to eliminate silos and integrate decentralized devices, software, knowledge and infrastructure into one cohesive strategy. Are we there yet? Not exactly, but we are beginning to see some real progress, and happily, the results are much less terrifying than many had imagined.

For example, there is now widespread agreement that clouds are tying together and giving access to disparate mobile devices, proprietary software platforms and previously incompatible networks — and that’s a giant leap forward. Additionally, and very much related, the debates about social media’s role in the enterprise have calmed down, and the benefits are unfolding. What all of this means is that real transformation is starting to occur — and IT is squarely behind it. Better still, transformation is no longer the “T word” feared and loathed by IT and business alike. Transformation — and its partner, disruption — are seen as necessary conduits to business agility and innovation.

A new book, Social Business by Design (Jossey-Bass, May 2012), by thought leaders Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim of Dachis Group, offers insights about what’s happening. In the book, Hinchcliffe, (who wrote for Smart Enterprise Exchange last year about social business and agile methodology), not only tells businesses to rethink the modern organization in light of social media, but along with Kim offers ways to go about it. The authors explain how to choose and implement a social business strategy and maximize its impact. Several impressive examples, such as SAP, Procter & Gamble, MillerCoors, Bloomberg, HBO, Ford and IBM, are included to illustrate successful strategies.

Equally impressive to me is the fact that Dachis Group as a whole “gets” that although the benefits are crystallizing, becoming a truly social business isn’t an easy transition — especially for those with legacy systems and mindsets in place.

Dachis consultant, Tom Bennett, recently wrote in his blog that: “No matter what the ultimate definition of Social Business becomes, it is a major shift from the current way many organizations work … One can’t simply dismiss everyone and start over.” Adopting social media models is “as much about a change in behavior, skills and activities,” as technologies. Bennett goes on to say that transformation will require the right mix of strategy, design and leadership in order to succeed.

For its part, McKinsey also is offering its perspective on “Demystifying social media.” A new report, mainly geared toward consumer marketing, explains how non-marketing executives can harness social media to drive business and generate revenue. Clearly, as McKinsey states, social media is no longer an experiment. In a related video — “Making sense of social media” — consumers share their experiences, and McKinsey partners provide advice on how companies can build brand loyalty and manage the organizational challenges.

Another compelling discussion about business transformation is taking place at Saugatuck Technology. Researchers there note that the real potential for business innovation lies in the synergy and “combinations among mobile, social, data analytics, integration and collaboration, all playing off each other and exchanging value in their interactions.”

The heavy lifting, according to Saugatuck, will come in the form of a Master Architecture that has to take shape, enabling what the firm calls the Boundary-free Enterprise™ — “with solutions that free the mobile knowledge worker and executive from their desks and build on the cloud, as well as other capabilities,” such as social/collaboration, data analytics and integration.

Figure 1 - Emerging Master Architecture ©

Others have coined terms for collaboration platforms before, but I’m intrigued by the vision of a boundary-free enterprise that uses “time- and location-independent computing capabilities — Cloud, Mobile, Social and Data Analytics (CMSA) plus integration” — to function efficiently and collaboratively. Like Dachis, Saugatuck also acknowledges that much work has to be done, particularly in the area of integration — “the glue that links capabilities together and joins them to on-premises data assets in data centers where mission-critical money systems still operate behind highly-secure firewalls.” Saugatuck’s founder and CEO Bill McNee will talk about these concepts at the upcoming All About the Cloud conference, co-produced by the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) and OpSource May 8-10, San Francisco.

In coming months, Smart Enterprise Exchange will be featuring more details about many of these research efforts, as well as other tools and approaches that enable business innovation. Meanwhile, share your tales of terror-free transformation and how your enterprise is becoming more innovative as it becomes a more social business. How are you closing the gaps between silos at your enterprise? Is transformation back?

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

As we dive into the New Year, a myriad of IT trends are unfolding — from Amazon’s success with the Kindle Fire, to Facebook’s expected IPO and RIM’s ongoing business challenges — that make it easy to be distracted. But from a macro viewpoint, there are only two key metrics that require your laser focus: keeping pace with technology and staying relevant in your market. Everything else is background noise.

That’s not to say you and your staff should ignore the astounding rate at which iPhones and Androids are entering your workplace. And you should clearly be concerned about the recent security breaches affecting 24 million Zappos customers.

On a daily basis, however, you — like CIO Larry Bonfante — are probably finding ways to incorporate mobile devices and social media into your enterprise and moving back-end systems to the cloud. At the end of the day, as Larry writes, you aren’t just buying technology, you must answer the question: “What matters to our clients and consumers?” (You can re-read Larry’s Smart Enterprise Exchange blogs for other tips on IT leadership here.)

Nowhere is the customer more of a No. 1 priority than in the retail industry — and that mandate is only growing stronger. At the National Retail Federation’s annual conference in January, several speakers addressed ways that social media, business intelligence and mobile devices will make or break retailers in the coming year — and it’s not just CIOs who are involved in these strategies. DSW’s Harris Mustafa, EVP Supply Chain and Merchandise Planning and Allocation, spoke about smart ways to leverage customer data and mobile technologies, as did several CMOs, brand managers and CTOs. Forrester Vice President and Principal Analyst Sucharita Mulpuru looked back and ahead at key retail IT trends.

We want to help you stay focused, too, and are offering expert advice on decision making this month and next on Smart Enterprise Exchange. In addition to Pete DeLisi’s thoughtful comments about decision making in the age of speed, book author and Babson Professor Tom Davenport will provide community members with a preview of his upcoming book, Judgment Calls, next month. Tom and co-author Brook Manville discuss organizations that have successfully tapped the diverse and deep knowledge of their people — often using collaborative technologies — to build an organizational decision-making capability.

We also feature an insightful Q&A with Randy Gaboriault, CIO at Christiana Care Health System — another industry sector where IT is making dramatic changes to everyday business. In recognition of this important sector, we've added a Healthcare common interest group to the Smart Enterprise Exchange. Please join it and post discussions, comments and ideas to share with other like-minded IT executives.

How is your business staying relevant in its market and using technology for customer satisfaction? Join the conversation and share your wins and thoughts with your peers on the Exchange.

Paula Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

Like you, I’ve learned a lot about leadership over the years. Why then does it still seem counterintuitive — and maybe a little uncomfortable — to read that we can achieve better results without a top-down, command-and-control strategy? I thought about this as I read Charlene Li’s insightful blog post this week.

Many years ago, as a newly appointed manager with more than a dozen direct reports — some of them in remote bureaus — I was super-diligent about staying in touch, tracking performance and staying on top of the work.

In my defense, we didn’t have IM or tweets or smartphones to connect us, and I thought my primary job was to be hands-on and to keep the momentum going. I also worked hard and thought that if I led by example, the rest would follow.

The results were mixed. We produced great products to the highest standards, but people got burnt out, including me. We weren’t enjoying the work as much as we could have, and there was a “creative tension” most of the time. Of course, the corporate culture promoted and encouraged this approach, and I was merely carrying out orders. But in fact, they weren’t the right orders for people who were already motivated, creative and talented.

Charlene’s advocacy of open leadership may have helped somewhat, but without the technology and the urgency that’s present at most enterprises today — what Peter Hinssen in his animated video calls The Era of Now — there would probably still be a disconnect between executives and workers.

Many thought leaders — such as Don Tapscott — have promoted transparency over the years, and the archives (and business schools) are full of books, courses and white papers that espouse formulas and theories about effective team management.

What’s really different right now, however, is IT. Social media really does change everything. Because it’s disruptive, old lessons don’t apply; yet new solutions—even among younger managers-- are still evolving. What does management look like when collaboration is a mantra, crowdsourcing is acceptable and customers have their say? Where do CIOs fit in when, as Alistair Croll wrote last year, the democratization of IT and the enterprise are the direct result of consumer technologies? How do you get out of the way and still be an effective leader? Do we need new strategies or new leaders?

Smart Enterprise Exchange is continuing to offer many perspectives about social media and leadership to help you answer these questions and adapt to the rapid-fire pace of change. Nathan Clevenger, author of the recent book, iPad in the Enterprise, offers four concrete steps you can take to adopt a mobile strategy. When I spoke to Nathan recently, he suggested many practical tips based on his interviews with global CIOs for the book. As you would expect, the first step is to accept, rather than resist, the notion of shared leadership — exactly what consumer technologies support.

Executive coach Dina Lichtman also addresses this topic in a recent blog and in an upcoming one where she asked Elizabeth Osder for her perspective on social media’s organizational impact.

Apparently, there’s still a lot to learn about leadership. And while you may not find a one-size-fits-all solution, as IT executives leading teams of technologists, business partners and social media-savvy customers, you must leave your comfort zone, try out the options and see what works best (then, share your experiences on the Exchange). The stakes couldn’t be higher, and there’s no time to waste.

Paula  Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

I love the Dilbert comic strips because they point out the humorous side of our daily business lives. They can be biting at times, and certainly they exaggerate enormously, but like a lot of humor they are funny because they often ring true.

IT has received its fair share of attention from Scott Adams, the creator of the strip, over the years and that seems to be stepping up recently as the disruption accelerates. In just the past week or two, for example, Dilbert’s world has poked fun at IT monitoring employee Web sites, the proliferation of passwords, and inattentive tech support. It’s good to laugh at these caricatures sometimes and see the light side of the bureaucracies we inadvertently create. At the same time, we should be careful that life doesn’t imitate art in this case — and that IT is solving business problems, not creating new ones.

Oddly, perhaps, I thought of Dilbert when I read a recent white paper published by Accenture’s prestigious Institute for High Performance, which raised a very serious question: Can Enterprise IT Survive the Meteor of Consumer Technology?

It’s an excellent position paper that lays forth several premises about the consumerization of IT — something we have all heard about and are experiencing daily. Fundamentally, Accenture says: “As consumer technologies become ever more powerful and useful, IT leaders face difficult questions about how to adapt. While definitive answers are elusive for now, they must be grappled with today if enterprise IT is not to be pushed completely to the sidelines in the next few years.”

I would include cloud computing along with the consumer technologies that line of businesses are adopting on their own, often circumventing traditional IT purchasing processes.

Accenture is not alone in considering these issues, of course. In a report late last year, McKinsey also concluded that “fully networked enterprises are not only more likely to be market leaders or to be gaining market share, but [they] also use management practices that lead to margins higher than those of companies using the Web in more limited ways.” Smart Enterprise Exchange has featured companies that are implementing these practices, as well, such as Procter & Gamble’s e-commerce efforts, and Schumacher Group’s dive into mobile technologies this year.

Yet Accenture’s paper seems most significant to me because it focuses on the CIO and the IT department transformation that’s taking place. Its analysts pose very provocative and direct questions when they ask: “Is it inevitable that IT will become irrelevant over time? For that matter, is it possible that the CIO has already lost the control he was fighting so hard to keep?”

Smart Enterprise magazine and the Smart Enterprise Exchange community will be taking an in-depth look at these critical IT issues in the coming months. Specifically, how are collaborative and consumer platforms disrupting business and repositioning IT in the enterprise, and how can CIOs get ahead of the curve?

We will speak with CIOs at businesses such as Kaiser Permanente, CorePLUS and JetBlue Airways who are not only embracing consumer technologies in their global enterprises, but are finding ways to use them for competitive advantage, revenue-generation and customer satisfaction — exactly the IT topics that Dilbert and others have criticized in the past. Perhaps it is by seizing the opportunities new platforms represent that IT will not only maintain its relevance, but grow even more important to the enterprise.

In addition, we’ll highlight the results of two in-depth, global research studies that CA Technologies conducted with IDC. The first, with more than 1,000 consumer-tech user responses describes “the booming adoption of mobile and online/cloud technologies for personal and business use and consumers’ expectations of much higher usage going forward.” The second, surveyed more than 800 enterprise IT executives to get their perspective and strategies in light of the rapid pace of consumer tech usage. The key recommendations? Offer support and focus on automation, management and security. [See related article here.]

We also invite you to help lead our online discussion and offer your experiences, opinions and solutions foryour peers.You can begin by taking this poll and also by leaving a comment on this blog. You can also create a discussion thread on the site’s Web 2.0 in the Enterprise Group or on our Linked In group.

Paula  Klein

Editor and Community Manager

Smart Enterprise Exchange

June 2010

"What good are all of the IT tools and dashboards, social media and analytics if business users don’t use them or use them incorrectly?"

     
Ever since CRM and business intelligence technologies were first introduced, their ROI and business results have been debated. The first round of offerings — like ERP and other “umbrella” platforms — became the bane of CIOs who overspent their budgets and overextended their resources to maintain these unwieldy, complex customer-relationship systems.

Fast forward a decade or more and we have “social” CRM, predictive analysis, “lite” business intelligence and other new-and-improved tools. Are these more-granular products demonstrating better business results? Not exactly, according to a few recent polls.

It’s true that customer information and BI are pouring into the enterprise through multiple channels — voice, Web, contact centers, social media and database customization. But that also “makes it extremely difficult to separate the chatter from the customer feedback that matters most to your business,” according to 1to1media.com, a Peppers & Rogers Group research company.

The firm cites a recent global survey of more than 600 chief marketing officers, conducted by The CMO Council, which found that 62 percent will continue to focus on analyzing customer data to improve segmentation and marketing this year, and nearly a third (32 percent), ranked the need to improve customer data integration and analytics as a top goal. That puts analytics high on the priority list for CIOs.

And another study, released in early June by the Business Marketing Association and SPSS, an IBM company, found that while nearly two-thirds of B-to-B marketers say customer engagement is a high priority, most are not satisfied with their organizations’ customer relationship efforts. Of the 230 senior-level B-to-B marketers surveyed, 72 percent rated customer engagement as a high priority within their marketing organization. However, 44 percent gave their organizations a grade of C in current practices (on a grading scale where A is the best).

CIOs will probably find it most disheartening that only half — 51 percent of marketers surveyed — currently measure the success of their customer engagement efforts at all. The biggest challenges they cited were a lack of cross-functional coordination and a lack of centralized customer data. That doesn’t sound like much progress to me.

As our Business Technology Execution article this month describes, IT and marketing must work together to ensure that these efforts achieve their goals. Eileen Slevin, CIO at New York Life, is correct to encourage social media usage for customer relations. She’s also correct when she says: “Everybody is trying to understand just how to use the new tools” to show business value.

And that’s the first goal that has to be addressed.

Paula Klein
Editor and Community Manager
Smart Enterprise Exchange