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Completing the Social Business Transformation: A Manifesto

This article is more than 10 years old.

Ray Kurzweil’s analysis in the “Singularity is Near” predicts that technology capabilities grow at an exponential rate. Long periods of preparation and solving many small problems set the stage for the ability to combine those smaller solutions together and solve bigger problems. Moore’s Law is used as the canonical case, but my favorite example is the rate of progress in mapping the Human Genome, which followed this pattern.

What has become known as Social Business is now at the elbow of such a curve, in my opinion. From basic telephony, to email, to centralized forms of collaboration such as forums, wikis, and blogs, we have come to an integrated suite of capabilities served up to us through Jive Software, IBM Connections, Salesforce Chatter, Yammer, and in many other products.

It is possible to see these suites as the end of the road, as the culmination of a set of capabilities into a product category that will last for 30 or 40 years like ERP or CRM. I reject that view and instead assert that the culmination of Social Business will instead be a new paradigm that changes how knowledge is captured, how processes are designed, how applications are created, and how work gets done. Consider the rest of this article a manifesto for completing this transformation.

The Body Parts on the Table

The culmination of Social Business will come through the convergence of the following elements:

  • Business Process Management (BPM) will provide a framework to understand and capture how social activity in the enterprise will transform and reshape core business processes.
  • BPM will provide the model-driven development platforms that will allow applications to emerge incrementally in a bottom up fashion driven by users.
  • Social business platforms will provide the framework for collaboration and knowledge capture.
  • Existing applications will provide the data capture and process automation.
  • Mobility will provide the connectivity, devices, development platforms, and applications to provide the ease of use and ready access to keep communication and work flowing.

These elements will allow us to work in new ways as described below and together will complete the transformation started by Social Business.

Social Process Transformation: Discussions of BPM often get bogged down in the details of how to model processes or what notation to use. To me, the heart of BPM is the design and implementation of repeatable processes that lead to business success. What we haven’t seen a lot of yet is the impact of social collaboration on process design and execution. Most BPM imagines a process as a beginning state, and ending state, and a set of steps in between. Social business platforms and model-driven development environments allows us to define processes in a fuzzy way and let people collaborating fill in the blanks. When patterns are discovered, they can be captured in checklists or document templates. The biggest opportunity here is to redesign processes to take advantage of ability of social business to allow hundreds or thousands of people to participate in a process in an orderly way. Once companies show how this can be done, existing processes will be redesigned to become more social and informal processes will be far better documented. Gamification is a great example of how social mechanisms can reshape and improve processes.

User-driven, Agile Development: The bankruptcy of the waterfall method of application design is well known. But incremental, agile development methods still require intermediation between a development team and the users of the application. Model-driven development environments of the sort that leading BPM vendors like Appian and Pegasystems have created allow much more direct control over application development. While complex large scale applications will never be a roll-your own endeavor, there is a huge opportunity for users to do much more to meet their own needs and experiment to create the applications they need.

Knowledge Capture: Social business allows for knowledge capture in shared documents and archives of message conversations. Model-driven development allows for capture of descriptions of processes, checklists, and an audit trail of messages and events that have occurred. Existing applications allow for capture of core data about the work that is being done and an audit trail of what happened. All of these forms of knowledge capture can be now unified to provide a coherent view of what is happening that lays the foundation for analysis and process improvement.

Unified Work and Collaboration: Right now social business suites support collaboration but when work must be done using an application there is a context switch; you must jump to another application. Devices like activity streams are intended to make this transition easier and in some cases allow direct access to application functionality, but to get the full experience you must jump to the application. Applications on the other hand are starting to include more social and collaborative features, but, like activity streams, they are limited and to get the full collaborative experience you must jump to the social business environment. The full potential of social business will be reached when there is no context switch required, when you have all the application and collaborative functionality in one unified environment. Combining model driven development, social business platforms, and existing applications can achieve this unity of work and collaboration. This synthesis represents the completion of the social business transformation.

Ready Access, Ease of Use: If everything discussed so far just worked on a desktop or laptop, what good would it be? However, for the completion of the social business transformation to occur, it must follow us wherever we go and however we work. This means it must be ready to access on mobile devices and easy to use there and when we are on laptops and desktops and other places. Of course, not everything will be available from every interface, just as you can do more with the iTunes software than you can with an iPod. The point is that the completion of the social business transformation must be both mobile and easy to use to be relevant. The good news is that almost everybody is aware of this and is working on it.

Remember all of these parts are now on the table. They don’t all work together to achieve the transformation yet, but we are far closer to the end of the journey than to the beginning.

What Social Business Could Be

So instead of one environment for work and one for social business, in the world I am imagining applications will be more like the heads-up display in a first person shooter video game.

  • You will have information coming at you in context about what you are doing along with messages from people you are working with.
  • You will be able to take action and communicate in one environment.
  • You will be able to monitor the activity of others and subscribe to be notified about events.
  • You will be able to reshape and extend the environment, adding new knowledge or descriptions of structured or partially structured process.
  • You will be able to see an audit trail of what is happening in different arenas.
  • You will be able to draw on the collective intelligence of the enterprise to make the most effective decisions.

Of course, this is just a dream if it means starting from scratch. This new type of application must be built on top of existing applications. Remember, the type of application described need not be where all work is done. Existing applications will continue to be used. But as time goes by, this environment should be where the action is because people will like it and it will be more productive.

We can see this vision coming to life in various forms:

  • QlikView has added collaborative functions to its business discovery environment so that it is possible to bring others into a conversation about what is happening in an analysis.
  • SAP StreamWork is an attempt to model decision making processes in a social way that provides an audit trail.
  • Jive Software, IBM Connections, Yammer and other social business suites offer APIs and frameworks for embedding its functionality or putting a collaborative chrome around other applications.
  • Salesforce Chatter has integrated social capabilities into its CRM capabilities.
  • Pegasystems offers a popular model-driven development environment that integrates elegantly with existing applications.

Of all the companies I have looked at, however, Appian seems to be the leader in combining the social business capabilities, the structured and partially structured process description functionality, connectivity to existing applications, model-driven development, and mobility in a vision they call Worksocial. The crystallization of this manifesto for me took place after I conducted an interview on CITOResearch with Matt Calkins, founder and CEO of Appian. (See "Matt Calkins, CEO of Appian, Explains How Social Business + BPM + Mobile + Existing Apps = Worksocial".)

But to me, the vendors and the technology is not as important as the realization, the messianic vision if you will, that the culmination of social business is not a separate environment but the synthesis just described. If CIOs and CTOs keep this vision in mind and move toward it, they will be doing their businesses a big favor.

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Dan Woods is CTO and editor of CITO Research, a publication that seeks to advance the craft of technology leadership. For more stories like this one visit www.CITOResearch.com. Dan has performed research and writing for Appian, QlikView, Salesforce.com, and SAP.