Enterprise 2.0: Accelerating Business Performance

How your organization engages with and responds to customers experienced with online social experience expectations and demands and how to best manage those continuing relationships is an important facet of Enterprise 2.0.

Customers are often looking for answers to questions that are beyond what a community manager or a marketing specialist can answer. The best input resides deep inside the enterprise or even in the partner ecosystem.

To achieve a desirable state where the appropriate minds within the organization can rally around customer needs, a carefully conceived internal enterprise 2.0 flow design is required to notify the right people, galvanize teams and document for repeatability, all wrapped up within the confines of a central governance model.

Designing and applying this internal social and collaborative backbone is critical to connect the organization with prospects and leads to drive performance.

Other examples include the importance of building innovation cultures: where innovation programs were traditionally limited to a defined set of “known experts”, Enterprise 2.0 concepts can enable distributed idea generation and initial brainstorming from the best minds across employees, partners and customers.

Gathering information “in the flow” as people work gives Human Resources managers the opportunity to fold in important behavioral data such as the degree of sharing, helping, engaging, contribution and involvement. This ultimately provides a broader set of talent performance measurement data points about an employee’s allegiance to the firm to supplement closed management and peer performance measurement programs.

A well planned channel engagement strategy that’s enabled by enterprise 2.0 concepts can be instrumental for designing strong relationships with partners based on ongoing dialogue, open and near real-time collaboration to find and serve prospects and customers effectively.

This brings the best minds inside all participating organizations together to address and resolve problems, and allows in-the-flow measurability of channel marketing effectiveness and return on investment.

The next wave of supplier relationship management will move from transactional designs to a network design that fosters true partnering around the end customers needs, deep supplier product knowledge and buyer strategic objectives.

Whilst well planned strategic sourcing and procurement programs have been effective at managing cost in many cases, a significant opportunity exists to improve supplier partner relationships as well as cross organizational collaboration. The strategic use of Enterprise 2.0 based secure relationship and communication networks in concert with traditional Supply Chain Management (SCM) software streamlines on boarding, resolves disputes and reduces compliance risk.

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Oliver Marks and Sameer Patel are partners at the consulting firm Sovos Group.