Oliver Marks provides seasoned independent consulting guidance to companies on the effective planning of ‘Enterprise 2.0’ strategy, tactics, technology decisions and roll out. In this article, he talks about the challenges financial businesses are facing when implementing social tools and the benefits they gain when using them.
What advantages does ‘social business design’ bring to the financial enterprise?
Getting beyond the hype around social media and finding the core business value and potential that will bring efficiency, success and profit to your business is key to exploring this fertile area.
Social media is a catch-all term with overly broad connotations. The marketing and public relations world – always experts at publicity and messaging – use the term to describe word of mouth marketing online. Customer relationship management – long a tight margin for maximum client coverage business area – uses the term to define interacting with customers and listening to their online comments and conversations.
None of the above usage areas are overly useful or relevant to the financial community. The two poles of the ‘social business’ space are focused around structured and unstructured data, and it is the changes brought about by ‘Web 2.0′ technologies in the consumer world which can provide real business value in appropriate context.
Where manufacturing enterprises value open ‘unstructured’ collaboration internally, between partners and also with customers, often with relatively free flowing communication and knowledge capture and share, the more tightly regulated industries need to be much more aware of legal information despoilation, intellectual property protection and of course security.
The attraction of using social tools such as wikis, blogs (and micro blogs such as Twitter) to capture tacit knowledge and other unstructured information is tempered by the need for existing processes and security measures to be enhanced rather than compromised by them.
The real challenge for the financial community then is to identify internal processes which will be enhanced by greater contextual awareness around topics without compromising security.
Social business design is like tailoring clothes: solutions need to be cut to fit the precise form of your specific business to enhance productivity, while gradually moving employees away from the highly limited and siloed ways of postal/email and document driven workflows.
The benefits are vastly improved performance, greater contextual information awareness and easily found and retrievable information – but only if you have thought through the parameters of what information needs to be protected and who can see what and when.
With extensive practical senior management experience in international enterprise collaboration, Oliver previously managed the Sony PlayStation ‘WorldWide Studios’ collaboration extranet, and has worked with the American Management Association, Sun, Docent/SumTotal Systems, Harvard Business School and McKinsey & Company on major initiatives around knowledge transfer and change management. Oliver’s deep pragmatic knowledge of people types, business processes and associated technology stacks makes him an in demand consultant, providing strategic roadmaps tailored to anticipate efficient scaling and growth aligned with cost saving efficiencies. Oliver has dual US/UK citizenship and has worked on Asian, European and American global enterprise collaboration, and has helped organize and spoken at various conferences. He is based in San Francisco and writes the widely read ‘Collaboration 2.0’ blog on ZDNet.