Social and Mobile Rocking Organizational Charts and Processes

Yesterday in my research on enterprise mobility and social businesses, I came across two statements that I want to share with you.  They are from the book Social Business By Design.

1. The impact of new social models and enabling tools, combined with the means to employ them effectively (think mobile), are remaking the landscape of business, society, culture and government.
2. Social business is one of the biggest shifts in structure and process of organizations in business history.  It taps into entirely new sources of creative output (everyone on the network...mostly mobile), relinquishes structure that reduces productive outputs, and inverts methods of traditional control and decision making in work processes (as anyone on the network can contribute).

I don't think most businesses are yet aware of how transformational the SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) wave really is.  In my SMAC strategy workshops I compare this wave to a tsunami.  It does not care if social collaboration and enterprise mobility are budgeted in your three year plan, it is happening today, budget or not.

The Arab Spring, sprung without warning.  It was inspired by a shared situational awareness and organized by social networks and collaboration platforms.  We see similar flash responses to Bank of America raising service fees, and Netflix and Instagram changing their policies.  The world is a different place in 2013.  Companies must recognize the impact of real-time news and information flowing 24 hours a day around the world on mobile devices.  They must adapt their methods, operations and communication strategies to meet these new realities.

Companies can no longer control their brand or communications.  The crowds on social networks now control your brand and communications.  If you wish to influence the crowd, you must listen, engage, have a plan and a philosophy on how to participate.

This new reality significantly impacts how companies must address the needs of their employees, customers, prospects and partners.  People no longer look to the manufacturer or to the corporate office for answers, they ask the crowd on the social networks.  The sentiment of the crowd is where truth lies today, whether it is true or not.

Companies that seek to control all information and communications lose credibility in today's world.  Today businesses must be active members of the online community and be willing to participate in conversations about their business, products and services.  They must apologize when they make mistakes, thank the community for constructive feedback and share both good and bad on the networks.  Companies that embrace this social business concept will develop a community of loyal followers.

I am a long time enterprise mobility guy.  I default to thinking about moving data out to mobile apps and collecting data to sync back into an enterprise system.  The efficiencies are important in these scenarios, but today's SMAC developments are far more impactful and transformational.  They aren't just about efficiencies, they are about a revolution in business.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Speed, Change and Mobile Banking

I am reading an interesting book titled Bank 3.0 by Brett King.  In this book King discusses the revolution and upcoming demolition of traditional banks in light of mobility.  Here are some interesting numbers from the book:

• In 1980 - credit cards took 14 days to approve, personal loans 7-14 days, home mortgages 30+ days.
• In 2008 - credit card were instantly approved, personal loans pre-approved/24 hours, home mortgages 24 hours.

The increase in speed between 1980 and 2008 was primarily the result of the internet evolution and e-commerce.  Now jump forward to 2013, and mobility is the cause of the next increase in tempo.  People with mobile devices want instant access to their personal account information.  They want their business relationships and shopping experiences to be wonderful, convenient, digitized and instant.  

My wife is my guide in this area.  She wants a great mobile app from any company we work with.  She directly associates the brand quality with the mobile app quality.

We are quickly coming up on a time when banks need to completely rethink their purpose and retool.  Many of us receive our paychecks electronically.  We receive and pay our bills electronically.  We use debit and credit cards for most transactions, and checks are nearly obsolete.  This is the digitization of banking.  The less cash we use, the less need for ATMs, and the less need for bank buildings. 

Our mobile banking apps become our bank, and banking is a service that is offered by our mobile apps.  Research shows we access our banking information many times more in a year via a mobile app than through our bank branch.  The unstoppable trend is already here.  

King points out in his book, that once banking becomes "unhinged" from a physical building, banking becomes a "thing" that can be offered by many different kinds of companies.  Suddenly banks find themselves competing with a new and massive number of different companies offering a variety of traditionally bank only services.

Traditional banks need to immediately understand the mobile app is the new bank, and services will include mobile banking, mobile payments, e-wallets, financial services, advice, social interactions, guidance, gamification of our financial plans, Big Data comparisons with others in our demographic etc. Competition will come from companies far outside of traditional banking circles.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Devices, Management Structures and SMAC, Part 4

Today Blackberry announced their new Blackberry 10 platform.  It sounds very interesting as it integrates social networking, enterprise security, dual personas, and more.  Here is an excerpt from an article written by Steve Costello, "At the heart of the new OS is the BlackBerry Hub, an integrated contacts and social networking app with support for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  Messages and updates can be read and posted without the need to leave BlackBerry Hub, and contact information can be viewed regardless of the app in which it is stored."

In a series of articles that I have written this week titled Mobile Devices, Management Structures and SMAC, I have shared my views that the SMAC stack (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) is a combination of technologies that as a combined foursome are transforming the world of business today.  You can download and read a great whitepaper on this subject here.  This announcement by Blackberry further solidifies my views.  Mobile and social supported by the cloud are embedded into the very operating system of the new Blackberrys. 

The article goes on to discuss support for dual personas in mobile devices, "It also supports the BlackBerry Balance feature, which enables users to switch between private and work profiles, with the ability to run both personal and work apps at the same time while keeping corporate data secure and encrypted."  I read corporate data to mean things like business analytics and other enterprise data and mobility apps.

Blackberry (they re-branded from Research in Motion/RIM to just Blackberry now), recognizes how important personal mobile devices are to people (think contacts, personal calendars, mobile wallets, photos, Facebook, mobile banking, etc.).  They seem to have embraced the BYOD trend and delivered a solution to address both personal and enterprise concerns.

In the book Grouped by Paul Adams, there is a very good line, "The web is being fundamentally rebuilt around people, because our online life is catching up with our offline life."  Blackberry seems to get this message and has delivered an operating system designed to accommodate it.

Read the rest of this series here - Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

The Pitfalls of Real-Time Mobile Commerce

Today I bought my wife an iPad mini.  It was to be a surprise.  On an alleged trip to the grocery store, I instead drove to the Apple store at the mall.  I ran into the store, gave the specifications that I wanted, the bearded Apple sales guy swiped my credit card with his wireless iTouch, and handed me the iPad mini.  I thanked him and ran out to my car with the present.

Moments later as I was leaving the mall parking lot my wife called.  She had just received an email, on her iPhone, with the receipt from the Apple store attached.  Hummm... I hadn't thought of that.  Seems we have a business account at the Apple store with her email address associated with it.

Real-time mobile commerce removes friction from the business process.  Sometimes, however, a little friction is good.

The geostrategists Paul Virilio studied Dromology - the science of speed.  He particularly studied the impact of speed on societies, processes, culture and people.  Today Apple's speed impacted me.

Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.

Mobile Devices, Management Structures and SMAC, Part 3

I just finished a book titled Social Business By Design by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim.  I recommend this book to anyone interested in the impact SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) is going to have on your industry, market and company.  Mobile devices have empowered social networking platforms for both consumers and the enterprise.  The SMAC stack is shaking up retailing, banking, healthcare, media, government, insurance, etc.  Industries that are primarily about information will experience the biggest initial impacts of this transformation.

Figure 1.

One of the insights I gained from this book is the impact social enterprise collaboration tools and internal social networking platforms can have on management structures.  In Figure 1, a typical hierarchical organizational chart is depicted.  Ideas and innovations that come from the people at the bottom of the chart, where most people are, have a great deal of trouble moving up and it can take a long time to move up.  At each level there is a gatekeeper.   This gatekeeper, has his/her own agendas, political considerations, priorities, limited time, poor memory, and communication challenges.  Many good ideas and innovations simply die with these gatekeepers.  The potential economic costs due to inefficient and slow communications in this model is enormous.  Just think about how many innovations, good ideas and problems could be quickly solved if the right people with the right knowledge could be instantly notified and involved.

In Figure 2 you have a simple illustration of an organizational chart when a social networking site, or social enterprise collaboration platform is involved.  Anyone can share an idea with the entire group.  The idea can be openly discussed, debated and voted on.  Innovations and ideas get their fair consideration.  In this model, the power in the organization is not dependent on the gatekeepers and titles people have had bestowed upon them, but with those that have the best ideas and answers.

The people with the best ideas and a willingness to share in social networking environments gain a reputation and credibility that raises their social power, or as one social media vendor calls it "Klout."  The power structure changes when information is in an open social democracy.

SAP's SCN (SAP Community Network) is an example of the power of social networking and collaboration tools in use.  Here is a description of its purpose and value as described in the book Social Business By Design, "The goal was to enlist customers and other interested parties to come together online and share ideas and solve problems. In this way SAP could engage and mobilize the people who were smartest about using its products in the field. Customers could then work together directly and exchange valuable knowledge."

Note that many problems SAP users have, can be more quickly and efficiently resolved by other users on the network.  This helps the end user, and reduces support costs on SAP.  It is a win-win.  The more time that goes by, the larger the database of answers and useful content grows which just increases its value for the entire community.

SAP is one of the first companies to identify specific ROIs from implementing social collaboration platforms.  Again from the book Social Business By Design, "SAP cites SCN for improving customer retention, creating efficiency, and driving top-line growth and revenue."

Let's now reflect on the role of mobile devices in this process.  In days gone by, the people with the power were those "in" the corporate office. Those actually physically in the building.  Slow and tightly controlled communications that followed the hierarchy of the organizational chart meant often the powerful needed to be in the room where data was available and decisions were made.  However, in today's mobile and social world, where the most knowledgable people, and those with the most "social" power and influence in the company are often traveling and spending their time with customers, prospects and partners, mobile access to important data, social networks and collaboration sites enable them to continue to provide value to the company and to the community from anywhere.

Mobile technologies are enabling the abstraction of power from a management hierarchy, or a building location to wherever there are the best ideas and people are willing to share them.  That means the corporate power structures have now been digitized, mobilized and socialized.  If you want to be somebody in the company, you will need to be somebody on the social networks.

Enterprise mobile vendors must now add to their portfolio's tools and APIs that will enable them to connect with and support social enterprise collaboration and social networking sites.  They must think beyond just delivering business process specific mobile apps, and now integrate with the larger social enterprise collaboration strategy and conversation happening in companies.

Read Part 1 of this series here.
Read Part 2 of this series here.

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Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for SMAC, Cognizant

Read The Future of Work

Visit MobileEnterpriseStrategies.com

Follow me on Twitter @krbenedict

Join the Linkedin Group Strategic Enterprise Mobility

Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and SMAC analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.