Here is an interview that I did with IBM at the recent SXSW Interactive in Austin, IBM @ SXSW 2012: Interview with Bill Ives, a partner with the Merced Group. It was my first time there. Here is a link to a summary of my posts on the event. I was asked about success factors in making social business work within the enterprise. I talked about the need for integration of both the tools and the people with business processes and added:
“And part of that is cultural and part of that is the thought process. And one of the reasons why I like the term social business rather than enterprise 2.0 is that it's both sides of the equation. And I've presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference several years. I did a panel on Twitter, I did a panel on blogs. And I had people in the audience saying, well, what does this have to do with the enterprise? And I was thinking to myself, and I think even said out loud, this is the problem with our mindset. You need to align what's inside with what's outside. And that's what social business does.”
I later added:
“Which gets to the one other point that I wanted to make about integration. And I've written some sort of intentionally iconoclastic blog posts about, maybe enterprise 2.0 is about the technology, because you go to these conferences and everybody says, oh, it's not about the technology. I was even on the panel where it says, you know, it's 90 percent people, 10 percent technology except people use the budgets in the inverse relationship. But what's key is you've got to get the systems of engagement, the social business, talking to the systems of record, the enterprise applications. And so you have to have that integration, and otherwise all you're doing is recording water cooler chat.”
I concluded:
“I think you have to be aligned with a business problem. I never saw a knowledge management system that was not business process aligned succeed. And when the social tools came out, I thought, well maybe this is the thing like, okay, you throw out at a wiki see what people do, so, maybe this is the case. And I've completely reversed that thinking. You've got to be able to align the enterprise social business tools with a business process and business process tools. And all that works together. So you have to be able to solve a business problem.”
Thanks to IBM for the chance to talk about these issues.
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