Social Business: Because people do the work

People, working together achieve business goals. Processes, plans and organisation charts don’t.

A group of people forming human relationships and interacting is often called a “team” but another equally applicable term is a “social network”. Add a common goal to do some work as opposed to sharing pictures of their latest cooking/pet/kid and you’ve got a bit of social business going on whether it’s recognised or not.

To get work done effectively you need teams to work together effectively and that means enabling the team to form relationships and collaborate together as a social network.  So how do you create an environment that fosters social networks focussed on achieving their goals and interacting with the wider organisation?

The answer to that question is variously termed “Enterprise 2.0” (which I hate), “Social Enterprise” and “Social Business” which is a little ambiguous as it could relate to a business incorporating internal social awareness into it’s ways of working but it also refers to businesses who are aware of their interaction with their external community. Both of these meanings are based on the same awareness, only the direction of attention is different.

Any business can be enhanced by enabling people to work well together through cultural changes, process (ways of working) changes and supporting tooling. Image a world where:

• You have an idea to improve your business capability, talk to your work mates who are sitting near you about it who help you refine the idea a little
• You post the idea on a general ideas list within your organisation adding some tags to relate it to general topics
• Other people in the organisation react to your idea based on finding from a tag feed, an activity stream, their relationship (work or social) with you etc.
• They comment on your idea adding relevant experience and knowledge
• Someone else IMs (Instant Messages) you about the idea and adds some useful thoughts
• The idea has formed into something that sounds like it might be worth the company investing some time in, you promote the idea to a company backlog.

So far none of this feels like “work” and yet a network of people are forming around an idea that improves the business adding their expertise and opinions, collaborating on and for the business.

• The idea gets given some time to investigate so you create an online project area, inviting the previous contacts to have a look and interact
• You decide to have a meeting to look at the various ways forward for the idea, two team members are remote so they video conference in
• You blog the meeting minutes to the project area so other interested people can add useful insights
• During the lifetime of the project various team members post status updates and blogs about the progress, customers and users interact directly through face to face discussion, virtual discussion threads, vote on requirements etc. while the team continuously radiates progress and quality information in an open transparent fashion.

This part was definitely work but socially aware collaboratively work making use of a range of technologies to enhance the team’s way of working.

This is an example of social business, and one which I’ve had for real with one of my clients. You might already have things like wikis, a blogging platform, micro-blogging, social group areas, project areas etc. in which case integrating them and driving cultural change through soft practices to “allow” individuals to interact in a trusted collaborative environment might be necessary.

Alternatively you might have none of these things, but don’t worry you can get them for close to nothing as there are several excellent open source solutions for each of the technology features mentioned, in fact some open source packages (Social Business Software or SBS) can do most if not all of the above!