Links for this week (weekly)

  • Becoming a supplier to a large business can be just a pain, particularly if you are a small business. The overhead involved can even consume more time and effort than the actual work itself. When you consider that in the US 70% of our businesses are small and medium sized, this is a large scale headache. More so, what is crucial is that small businesses hire employees faster. The White House Blog indicated that: “after a small supplier lands a big purchase order or a contract from a bigger company, the small company’s revenues go up 250% and they create about 150% more jobs in just two or three years.”

    To get a stalled economy moving again, improving the purchasing process in large businesses particularly in relation to hiring small suppliers would do wonders for everyone. Within these processes, there can be small changes that can create large waves of transformations that help to open up the economy.”

    tags: smb jobcreation employment bureaucracy economy

  • “Also, truthfully, I’m kind of uncomfortable with this post too. While I’m pretty sure my conclusion is right, I’m not entirely at ease with what it took to get there. I’ll leave it at that. So I reserve the right to treat this as a work in progress.

    Also, Part II of this post is on PGreenblog here. The actual “predictions” are there. This part is the explanatory justification for what I see as the shifting of the dynamics in the (social) business world.”

    tags: crm socialcrm customer socialcustomer customerengagement loyalty engagement systemsofengagement

    • First, It doesn’t mean the era of customer intimacy though that is an optimally desired “condition” for a company’s view and relationship to its customers
    • It also doesn’t mean customer loyalty.
    • What customer engagement does mean (so there is no nebulosity here) is the company’s and the customer’s relationship is defined by the customer’s ongoing involvement with the company for their own specific reasons. The company doesn’t have to know all of them.
    • It does mean that it is an era where the engagement the customer has with the company is controlled by the customer
    • experiences that the customer needs to make an intelligent decision on how they want to be (selectively) engaged with the company.
    • It does mean the use of systems of engagement (see Ray Wang discussion here and Dion Hinchcliffe here) which are systems that foster the interaction of the company with the customer.
    • Social customers, because of their aggressive approach to using the social web, stood out and forced businesses to start to respond to the new forms and channels of communication that the customers were engaging in. For the first time, marketers and customer service agents, and to a lesser extent, sales people were forced to respond to people they couldn’t push a message to or define a response to and to people who were communicating in channels the company didn’t control.
    • In other words, there was less and less reason to distinguish between CRM and Social CRM. Social CRM has almost (note the word “almost”) become what CRM is.
    • The social customer is no longer a customer to gawk out, just a customer to deal with – like any other customer, with one explicit difference.
  • “Le supercalculateur Watson d’IBM doit commencer son travail d’évaluation en matière de traitement du cancer, à l’hôpital Cedars-Sinai de Los Angeles. Il pourra suggérer aux médecins le traitement le plus adapté en quelques secondes.”

    tags: IBM watson health health2.0 bigdata bestpractices unstructuredinformation

    •  Là où Watson se montre vraiment utile dans ce contexte, c’est sur la richesse des informations qu’il est capable de traiter, informations en constante évolution, qui lui parviennent sous différentes formes, structurées et non structurées, depuis des systèmes eux-mêmes disparates », a expliqué Steve Gold. « Le secteur de la santé est particulièrement bien adapté pour tirer profit de cette compétence. Â»
  • “Identity management is going beyond managing passwords and resource permissions. It’s now also about productivity and mineable business data. And this expansion of scope could soon lead employers and employees into conflict. And that’s not to mention the number of companies that want to find ways to leverage this data for their own profit.”

    tags: identity identitymanagement professionalidentity portableidentity humanresources dataportability

    • This suggests that employee identity is about to become much more valuable, since it’s not just going to be about keeping track of passwords and who has access to what. There could be actionable business intelligent in that identity data. So it will be more valuable to employers and to the companies, like Salesforce.com, that manage that data.
    • At the same time, the employee, now more than ever, has an interest in managing their own identity. Partially for the convenience of having a single sign-on across enterprise and personal productivity services. But also for the ability to present evidence of of one’s past accomplishments to new employers
    • Employers have a claim to their employees enterprise identity, and security and compliance mandate to protect certain data. But employees have a greater stake in their own data now.
  • “This data, in the below graphic, is compiled from Altimeter’s recent survey to 144 global national corporations with over 1000 employees shows how today’s teams in 2011 are breaking down. This is the core team that operates the social media program within a corporation, often within corporate communications or a marketing function they will work with other business units. For very large corporations, they may be fragmented among many business units (the Dandelion model), and this data doesn’t even include agency, consultants, or even research firms who help out. Here’s what we found:”

    tags: socialmedia organization socialmediamanagement

  • “For IBM and Forrester Research, the business value [of social networking] lies in the ways it enables collaboration to succeed within a business environment. Here’s what some business are doing with social business clouds now.

    EMC, Oracle, HP, Dell, NetApp and other big vendors can be expected to come up with social business cloud offerings. IBM, however, with its LotusLive Social Business Cloud has emerged as the leader with real businesses actually profiting through social cloud collaboration:”

    tags: ROI socialnetworking IBM lotuslive casestudies Newlywedsfoods panasonic russellsconvenience

    • The benefits: cut response from days to hours, saves 4-5 days per month in travel time, and cut travel costs by 10%. And a no-cost guest account lets them invite clients to collaborate on recipes.
    • The benefits: reduced cost and immediate accessibility to advanced collaboration tools across all regions of the global company, but especially for product research, development, and sales.
    • The results: travel costs reduced by 33% and postage costs by 50% for $30,000 in annual savings. It also increased revenue as a result of more timely communication around inventory and purchase trends.
  • How do you manage a very large, very complex organization that is geographically disbursed in many different countries around the world? You already know that the outdated hierarchal organizational structure won’t work and if you are like many companies you are probably beginning to realize that the matrix type structure (where each employee reports to both a task manager and a resource manager) has its own limitations. Electronic Arts (EA) established cross-company communities that provide the benefits of coordinated decision making while preserving the independence required for creativity and innovation. These communities are supported by a unique governance structure and a fun and engaging technology platform”

    tags: communities electronicarts casestudies

      • Leverage (re-use) existing services, processes, technology solutions
      • Reduce complexity and duplication  (of services, processes, technologies, capabilities)
      • Promote principles of simplicity, standardization, efficiency, integration and continuous improvement
      • Mentor & develop careers for our team members so that they feel empowered to their job better or are able to pursue new and exciting opportunities
    • An overall community steering committee.  The steering committee oversees the investment in and achievements of the communities across the company.
    • A community champion who facilitates the firm’s overall collaborative efforts and evangelizes the benefits and goals of a communal structure within the enterprise
    • Community sponsor: a community sponsor represents each community in EA’s leadership ranks.
    • Community team lead: a community team lead is initially nominated by the EA community steering committee, and once the community is thriving, the next team lead will eventually be elected by the community members themselves.
    • Community council: if the community membership is very large, each community has the option of forming a community council.
    • The first hurdle was explaining the role that the communities played within the enterprise.  Employees were used to the traditional organizational team structure and they were used to working in project teams. Initially there was some confusion about how this new communal model would not conflict with the efforts already underway within teams and projects
    • Another challenge was convincing the employees that participating in a community was not another “job” they had to do on top of their existing workload
    • The platform used to enable the communal and social interactions was also key to adopting communities. The platform had to be intuitive, engaging, and offer the content people need in a way they can easily digest
    • EA initially launched too many communities, too quickly. Multiple communities diluted participation, which caused people to conclude the approach was ineffective, and the participation in some communities waned. “We launched with fifteen communities, but we soon found that in order to have a viable community you need at minimum thirty to fifty active participants. We should have targeted between four and six communities instead,”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Head of People and Business Delivery @Emakina / Former consulting director / Crossroads of people, business and technology / Speaker / Compulsive traveler
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