When it comes to designing connected business apps, we believe there are four connection types: intra-company, ecosystem, personal connections and public, that need to be natively addressed and interlinked.
Dynamic business solutions should be designed to seamlessly let you take advantage of the various new social experiences to power your existing business practices and introduce new business opportunities.
We have identified four connection types that we feel need to be natively embedded in dynamic business apps. Some of them are already used occasionally and disparately in limited number of business processes.
Employ social communication constructs to the inner company group – Social networks have introduced the concepts of ‘friend’, ‘follow’ and ‘like’ to effectively share information, in context, across organizational silos, thereby increasing transparency. They enable you to reach your close professional colleagues as well as your “weak ties” as defined by Andrew McAfee in his Enterprise 2.0 book. Several business solutions, like Microsoft Dynamics CRM, have already adapted these concepts to harness insight across the company by sharing information about leads, opportunities, accounts and contacts.Expand to the Ecosystem group, by removing company’s boundaries – Communication, ideally, should flow from person to person across company boundaries while ensuring privacy and security. In the sales world this would allow people to bring customers and partners seamlessly into a sales opportunity discussion. In the supply chain and project management worlds, getting visibility into resource availability and the production plans of first and second tier suppliers will improve execution as well as the ability to adapt to changes.Then, try to get your connections to help – As we all know acquaintances’ comments, recommendations and ratings are highly influential in consumer’s decisions. In the business world it is also possible to harness the collective connections of a company’s employees to expand the reach and determine possible connections with decisions makers while prospecting. Other interesting scenarios include sourcing and filtering work candidates, generating sales leads and gaining insight about a potential supplier.And lastly, engage ‘others’ (the Crowd) through social media– Crowd sourcing has been shown to play a powerful role in marketing and customer support scenarios. For example: a consumer raises a problem he faces with a camera he has just bought. Another consumer steps in and she suggests a resolution. The answer is then rated by the crowd, aka crowd sourced, and can become standard guidance. Throughout the experience, the brand owner role is mainly to facilitate the process. Crowd sourcing can also be applied to other areas, like product forecasting, supplier satisfaction benchmarking, and employee rating. The group could go from completely public usage, as in the camera example, to a closed loop of companies that are rating suppliers.To streamline communication within and across groups, connected business apps will strive for owner managed profile information. On social networks, individual members maintain their own personal profile information, which keeps them accurate and pretty much up-to-date. The business world is heavily investing in obtaining, cleansing and harmonizing somebody else’s information. And that doesn’t even address the potential of harmonizing data across companies. Imagine how powerful a central repository of data including companies, products, employees and locations –each maintained by their owners–could be in simplifying business communications.
What do you think? Feel free to comment and add more ideas. We would love to get your input and promise to consider it.
