Chapter 13
Identifying Priorities and Planning
Starting down the road of social business transformation requires, as one might expect, an effective plan. Although few plans involving significant innovations for an organization survive for long in their original form, social business projects typically benefit from a process that embraces change and makes rapid course corrections from early lessons learned. Organizations can even elect to employ social business methods in the business design process, opening them up using social media to a broad range of interested stakeholders across the company.
The first step is determining the business objectives of a social business strategy that, when followed, will lead to the desired outcomes. The objectives to be achieved by moving to social business should be captured from two essential sources. The first is the set of participants who will be involved—exclusively workers for internal social business improvements or a combination of workers and customers for a social customer relationship management effort or social marketing effort, or just a set of business partners for a business-to-business community. The second is the set of enterprise objectives, typically defined by the executive team, board of directors, and or other existing high-priority strategy efforts. The point of this process is to gather from the critical stakeholders a set of goals that are mutually aligned at an organizational level and in the broader context of the business and with the front lines of employee-to-customer interaction where work actually takes place and with the groups of people who will be directly involved.
First, however, it's worth briefly exploring the larger process of deliberately encouraging intentional and emergent change. Neither one nor the other alone will result in the kind of results most organizations are seeking or must achieve in order to see the results set out in the social business stories we have related in this book. Consequently, for the purposes of putting the techniques under a single rubric, this combined intentional process is sometimes referred to as social business design: that is, the process of intentionally transforming a business with social media through a well-defined, agile, and adaptive process so that both specific and emergent benefits result.
Social Business Transformation: The High-Level Process
To put the requirements and the prioritization process in the full context of social business design, it's worth looking at the entire process, which forms the foundation of and is the goal of the concepts described in the chapters in Part Three. Posing the simple question, “What problem are we trying to solve?” can go a long way toward identifying the initial direction of a social business initiative; in addition, a brief introduction to the entire process is highly effective at the beginning of an exploration of this topic.
Figure 13.1 shows the entire process of social business design, along with the major resulting activities, change processes, and outcomes. At the center of this figure is the establishment of strategic goals and a road map that will be revisited regularly throughout the social business design process. Around this, in the center stack, are the elements of change that help support a far-reaching yet well-managed social business design process. Although we focus primarily on this activity in this chapter, here is a breakdown of each of the key elements of social business design (we explore each of these in detail in Part Four):
- Culture change. Applying the ten tenets of social business requires a deft touch to drive the desired changes in organizational culture that define how work gets done. Encouraging workers to think about their processes and interactions as much more open, participative, and community based than in the past is the goal. Typically part of a social business change management program that's integrated into a targeted business process redesign effort, culture change is driven by a simultaneous effort of high-level leaders (executives and managers) in concert with a conscientious and dedicated community management team in carrying out a change management program. The companies that have achieved rapid adoption of social business (IBM, Mountain Equipment Co-Op), meaning that this affected more than a third of workers in a single year, engaged in this dual culture change process.
- Executive leadership. One of the earliest lessons learned when social business began appearing in the workplace was that the actions taken by internal leaders have a profound effect on adoption and positive outcomes. In fact, Andrew McAfee, in his original exploration of the early business users of social collaboration, found that success “depends greatly on decisions made and actions taken by managers.”1 This means that identifying internal champions among managers and executives is a key part of the early process. Cultivating their sponsorship, involvement, and even their participation can make a substantial difference.
- Strategic goals and road map. Clearly identifying and establishing the objectives of a social business strategy create a vision and provide the ingredients to build a description of how to get there, often a road map, which we explore in more detail in Chapter Sixteen. Once the goals of the strategy have been identified, at least the intentional ones, the process of determining priorities and planning, the focus of this chapter, for the entire strategy can begin.
- Business process redesign. Driving the results of a social business strategy requires that the process of applying it ends up changing the way the target organization or business processes operate. Some of these changes will be planned from the start, and others will be identified, evaluated, and either encouraged or discouraged depending on the criteria set by the strategy. Cultivating and managing for emergent change is discussed in Chapter Seventeen, and control and oversight over the process are covered in Chapter Eighteen.
- Risk management. For many organizations, the perceived risks of social business are significant concerns, particularly in regulated industries but also for global brands that are engaging externally. There is risk in both not acting, as when Toyota or BP inadequately responded through social media during their respective crises, and in acting in a way that exposes the organization to risk. A successful social business strategy spends due diligence on risk while not making it the focus of the effort.
- Social business solutions. Typically developing a social business strategy and matching social business design requires the introduction of new technologies. These are usually social media tools or infrastructure that provide necessary communication and collaboration capabilities. It can be general purpose and encompass the entire organization, or it can be focused on a particular function, such as customer care or product development, and affect only a department, responsibility, or function. (Any combination of these is also possible.) Most often companies select a social network, solutions that provide integration with security and identity standards, some external social media, and analytics tools. (The building blocks of social business are set out in Chapter Fourteen.)
- Social business intelligence. Guiding a social business strategy once social business capabilities are operational in the organization requires the ability to tap into and listen to the work taking place to glean the metrics, trends, and sentiment of the participants. This wealth of knowledge permits the social business effort to begin to manage what it is able to measure, invaluable for identifying not only areas encountering difficulties (such as low levels of effective collaboration) but also opportunities. Social business intelligence provides a window onto the activities of a community and can be used to measure effectiveness, return on investment, and key performance indicators that should align with the goals and priorities that have been established and kept updated.
At a high level, social business design (as pictured in the upper left of Figure 13.1) is the deliberate process of transforming the organization to social business and involves its existing culture, connections among all communities relevant to the organization, architectures of participation to engage constituents in useful outcomes (both intentional and emergent), and analytics that drive the process of improvement, management, governance, and risk. Structuring and enabling are the principal activities of a social business strategy. When these are done effectively, the results that the organizations described throughout this book have achieved are possible for most organizations. The outcomes (shown at the bottom of Figure 13.1) are the social business solutions, both planned and spontaneously discovered or created by the participants themselves, that achieve the shared and top-down goals of the organizations.
Revisiting Priorities and Planning
This examination of the process of social business transformation will help organizations better understand what planning for social business transformation entails. It must describe how the organization will apply social business design combined with the organization's commitment to realize the elements of change. Only this will result in a successful and least disruptive move to social business. Like SAP's Community Network and Procter & Gamble's Old Spice campaign, social business success was achieved through a clear set of objectives: better engagement and support of customers using complex products (for SAP) and updating a brand and improving sales (for Procter & Gamble).
It's usually not hard for companies to articulate interesting high-level social business objectives: a more useful and vibrant intranet, better marketing that's less expensive and more engaging, or tapping into better sources of innovation to solve long-standing business problems, for example. However, this is a limited view that largely accepts the existing ways of doing business. There is a more pervasive and far-reaching way of looking at social business transformation, which requires that many more assumptions are laid bare for reconsideration. How can we achieve business objectives by completely setting aside the old ways of conducting operations and directly plugging in the tenets of social business? The answer is by casting off notions of how work should proceed, who does it, and even what the economics should be; only then can sustained, meaningful, and effective transformation occur.
However, most organizations are not prepared to immediately engage in widespread and deeply affecting business transformation, no matter what the upside potential might be. It entails too much perceived risk, more change than the organization can handle in a short time, and many other reasons. Consequently, here are some key insights into planning a social business strategy and design effort:
- Clearly identify goals, but don't assume how they'll be achieved. Create an environment of strategic thinking about social business that never prescribes how solutions will be achieved. The social business design process will address this, but the planning process should not at first, as hard as that may be. This can be achieved most directly by changing how social business strategy goals are defined. For example, instead of, “Incorporate social media to cost-effectively amplify outbound marketing,” phrase this as, “Employ social media to increase customer engagement levels while lowering costs.” “Add social media to the intranet so that workers can more easily share information and collaborate” can be changed to, “Provide an environment where workers can more easily participate with each other and their stakeholders.” “Improve customer care with an online self-help community” can be turned into, “Apply social media in new ways to increase customer satisfaction and lower support costs.” Removing the how is key to ensuring that the thinking does not overly focus on the solution at first, which can contaminate thinking and limit outcomes. One lesson learned in many of the case examples presented in this book is that the first thing that's tried often needs to be followed up with a more experienced and informed solution.
- Use a phased approach. A social business strategy can easily encompass too much change by looking at the many areas of the business that can be improved with the use of social media. While some social business experts, including Andrew McAfee himself, advocate doing away with the use of a pilot process (arguing that it limits critical mass and participation, a topic explored in Chapter Fifteen), it's possible to try to accomplish too much too fast.2 Getting the timing right and determining the successful rate of transformation are keys to achieving a balance that doesn't go too slow or too fast.
- Understand that planning must continuously evolve. Serendipity is one of the most startling outcomes of social business. While organizations can intentionally reach impressive outcomes that collapse costs and improve objective performance measures of specific business functions (such as Intuit's Live Community approach to customer support in Chapter Three), just as often a group of workers or customers, using the free-form platforms of self-expression they've been offered by the organization, will cobble together new processes, solutions, products, and outcomes. Beyond this, the social business strategy will also make numerous discoveries of its own because of social business intelligence and the fact that processes are much more open and observable than in the past, leading to insights that should be feedback into the planning process (shown as the rapid iterations in Figure 13.1) and resulting in updated goals and road map. The social business strategy, including the goals and road map, should be updated routinely—not just during the effort but as long as the organization engages in social business and wishes to guide the outcomes both deliberate and spontaneous.
- Expect more frequent “disruption.” Classic business processes based on fixed, repeatable processes are giving way to more dynamic ones enabled by social business. Process flows and critical methods evolve more quickly with the rapid information flows of social media, as well as the introduction of new actors and stakeholders at a faster pace and from far-flung corners of the organization and even the rest of the world. The process of growth, refinement, disruption, and renewal (see Figure 13.1) is present in all business cycles, but it occurs much more rapidly with social business. Change is the norm, and the process explored here seeks to apply the proven results of agile methods to adapt to change more naturally and continuously.
The planning process should therefore consist of capturing business requirements in a way that the local organization is competent in using, while also expecting, and even encouraging, local solutions by those using the social media solutions they've been given in novel and useful new ways. Prioritization can be determined through dependency analysis, business urgency, cost and impact estimates, and other traditional measures, but they should be revisited as part of the overall replanning process. Because social business processes evolve and change quickly and with less deterministic outcomes, the transformation process is never complete. Although a social business design process has a definite beginning and end, at least for the deliberate outcomes, the social business transformation process never truly ends and can even creatively disrupt itself if the organization so desires.
