This is another in a series of my notes on Lotusphere 2012. I am very pleased to be back again after last year thanks to IBM’s support. The Tuesday general session included: Keynote Speaker: IBM Senior Vice President, Software Solutions Group, Mike Rhodin; and other speakers including Wendy Arnott, TD Bank; and Bill Taylor, Author & Founding Editor, Fast Company.
Mike Rhodin began by recapping yesterday. Michael Chui from McKinsey came out to discuss their research on the connected enterprise. I have written about it (see - McKinsey: Social Business Software Continues to Improve Organizational Performance). They have been studying technology in the enterprise for the past ten years and have done their current survey series for the past five years. They found a recent jump in micro-blogging and other social capabilities. The adoption is across industries.
Mike asked about micro-blogging. Michael said your need a business strategy connected to it. At the same time there is n bottoms up adoption. Some use it for sales, others for different reasons. You need to identify where benefits occur and then try to scale that benefit.
Mike asked whether it is one tool or an aggregation of tools. Michael said there is great variety. The benefits include increased access to knowledge but also things like decreased time to market. There are a great variety of benefits.
Mike pointed that over 90% of companies are getting hard ROI benefits. But you often have to start with a soft ROIs and then get the hard ones. The fully networked enterprises, using tools inside and out, are getting more benefits on either side of the firewall than those who work only on one side of the firewall. I used the old term firewall but I think that concept is also changing as the McKinsey data indicate.
Michael said that there are interconnections between different uses of social tools across an enterprise. This plays out in analytics and seeing where results occur. There is more than sentiment analysis as you can also turn employee actions into useful content and data. You can mine what people are doing to learn from it. It is a better way to create a knowledge base than old school knowledge management. This was also why I first got excited about the opportunities for social media in the enterprise back in 2004 (see An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department). Mike said that now you create a corporate asset of the accumulated knowledge. Michael said you can also reach outside the enterprise.
Michael found that some of the networked enterprises back slip. He concludes that work needs to be done to ensure success. You need to embed social in the work flow to get results. Ahem (see Putting Social Media to Work).
Mike noted that becoming a social business requires a cultural shift, Wendy Arnott from TD Bank Group came out next. I thought she would bring Regis along but I guess he had other plans. They have 85,000 employees, some working at home and on the road. They focus on their retail strategy and have become the 6th largest bank in North America. They are trying to weave social into everything they do. This is a challenge as an early adopter in a highly regulated environment. But to win you need to change the game. They saw that their customers are actively involved in social media. So they established a social media team to listen and respond.
They decided to open on Sundays and this was first in Canada. Their employees were less excited at first. They involved employees in the process to understand their concerns. At the same time many employees were positive and helped shift the culture to see this as a source of company pride. In another example, a person at small remote branch came up with an idea that spread across the enterprise and social media amplified it so it got recognized and adopted.
Their mobile app was launched and employee feedback helped refine it before it was launched with customers. They have a saying, believe in the value and not the problem. They were able to listen to objections and shifted the focus from risk to opportunity the help make the cultural changes. Social media was involved in this transformation.
Wendy offered five keys to success:
Leadership commitment matters – always on any change
Dedicated social business team- you need stewardship
Greta partnerships – get all stakeholders at the table
Get into the weeds – with business teams and showcase successes
Engage employees – they will become great advocates.- they developed champions who played a major role in adoption
At TD success was defined as a great employee experience. One challenge was a single sign on and the solution was a combination of business and IT efforts. A second challenge was content integration and much progress has been made here also.
Mike introduced the co-founded editor of Fast Company, Bill Taylor. He said he was going to cover strategy innovation and leadership, rather than technology. We are in the age of disruption. You need to be original. Strategy as advocacy. Winners stand for important ideas. We lived in a world where the big guys win. Now the smart can take form the strong by redefining the stakes of competition.
This is the promise of social business. You can make people passionate but you need to give them something to be passionate about. How to become the most in a new area is the key to success. You cannot be in the middle of the road. It is the road to nowhere.
He gave an example of the Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. It has become one the crown jewels in American healthcare. They won the Baldridge award for total quality and improvement. They build a new hospital from scratch so they decided to redesign everything including the role in the community. This is their West Bloomfield Hospital. It is built to look like a resort. You check into your room from home over the Web. A person meets you to help with the details. There is great food and people pay good money for them to carter their events. The hospital is more like a great hotel. They wanted to create a way to provide a sense of comfort so they recruited a person from a high-end hotel to deign the experience. It worked because they took an original approach. They now have 50,000 applicants for their 2,000 nursing jobs.
Bill said that instead of thinking about what keeps you up at night you need to think about what gets you up in the morning. I like this switch and try to do it in my own life. Success today is more about passion that the numbers. What is the emotional contract you are making with your customers? What holds your colleagues together? Social tools can enable this connection.
Next he talked about USAA. They restrict their market to military and their families. They are number one in customer service every year and they win IT awards also. They have 13,000 customer service people. Much of their training is in cultural changes. When you are hired you get 10 weeks training in San Antonio. It simulates a lot of things that military personnel encounter so you can see what your customers experience. Every day ends reading letters to and from soldiers in the field. They want to emerge employees in their customer’s experience. It creates bonds with customers and between employees. Bill said it is not just what separates your from the competition but what holds you together as a team.
As I listened I was thinking he is great is speaking in sound bytes. The Twitterers must be having a field day. I say this as a compliment. He wrote the book, Practically Radical. He also mentioned a top shoe designer who has invited customers to help design shoes and they have become the best sellers. He calls this open source footwear. It is great example of involving customers. He closed with the idea, “You need to learn as fast as they world as changing.” (52 characters – good Twitter feed). It was a high energy morning session with excellent content.
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