Is Social Business the Next Area of Investment for IT?

By Jacob Morgan (@jacobm) Nov 4, 2010

Is collaboration the solution for companies during this tough economic period? AIIM and author Geoffrey Moore say yes, but do you agree? What does the future of social business really look like?

According to a report by AIIM chair Lynn Frass and author Geoffrey Moore, social business is going to be a huge area of investment for economic recovery of organizations. Why? To quickly enhance the ability of knowledge workers when collaborating together in hopes to unlock revenue potential and to save costs.

Social Business Systems Are Getting a Lot of Attention

According to Moore

"We have spent the past several decades of IT investment focused on deploying 'systems of record.' These systems accomplished two important things. First, they centralized, standardized, and automated business transactions on a global basis, thereby better enabling world trade. Second, they gave top management a global view of the state of the business, thereby better enabling global business management.

While I agree with Moore that social business systems are going to become crucial, we need to remember all the failures (and yes the successes) from prior implementations of traditional systems.

Michael Krigsman, for example, has an entire column devoted to highlighting CRM failures, and there are a lot of them. Social business systems are important but success isn't going to come from a system, it’s going to come from how those systems are implemented, the strategies that support those systems, the processes that are built around those systems and the culture of change management issues that most organizations are going to have to go through. In short, the success is going to come from people and yes, technology is going to help.

If you ask any company about how well their business transactions and information resources are standardized and automated on a global level, or how well top management sees the global state of business, chances are you’re not always going to get a, “yeah, things are great,” response.

Organizations are always adapting and changing to evolving landscapes and consumer demands and expectations. It’s unreasonable to think that a “perfect” enterprise will exist, at least in the near future. If you look at the numbers from a report on employee engagement put out in Europe, you’ll see that the numbers aren’t all that aggressive, at least not for the next few years.

I believe the key point of the report was to highlight how consumer IT is impacting (and will impact) enterprise IT. The following visual taken from the report sums up enterprise computing as shifting from systems of record to systems of engagement.

The argument is that enterprise organizations are quite adept at systems of record. Personally I don't think that's the case and it's not what I have seen from many of the enterprise organizations I have been speaking with. The main reason is the lack of social data and social customer integration in existing enterprise systems. How is it possible to have a single source of truth without integrating all customer data (social, transactional, history, etc)?