There’s lots of amazing thought leadership out there with respect to how collaboration and engagement between employees is broken. Whether the early cases that were made for bottom up  emergent uses by professor Andrew McAfee, to dynamic  networks, to collaboration at the intersection of process and context and finally, purpose driven engagement. Along the way, the Enterprise 2.0 community has been pushed to raise the bar, but to which some of us pushed back with real  examples of where Enterprise 2.0 has in fact played a critical role in accelerating performance.
Last month, I keynoted at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Milan about the need for 21st century collaborative enterprises, but from the vantage point of customers and prospects. The focus was the rise of an increasingly connected, vocal customer and her expectations for how organizations need to serve and transact with her.  And ultimately how 21st century collaborative organizations will have a unique opportunity to embrace and accelerate performance from this shift over the coming years. Specifically:
  • lay out changes in the global customers access to information
  • how Google is flattening access to social vs traditional web content
  • how they expect marketing to get out of the way and become facilitators and brokers of expert information
  • how  new customers in emerging markets expect  global competency but local relevancy when it comes to innovation
  • why the revered Value Chain that we’ve been optimizing for over the last 2 decades has created walls that prevents fluid collaboration
  • how Collaborative enterprises foster trusted relevant engagement mediums and bring more elastic and cost effective relationship models that can outlast individual transactions.

E20Forum plenary conference Sameer Patel from International Forum E20 on Vimeo.

I've always said that this wall between customer interaction and service, and internal collaboration is largely artificial. Though if you’ve read this blog before, you know I’m  the last one to suggest we rush to blindly institute social across the organization and barf on all things process. That simply doesn’t reflect the reality and problem sets that we seen on the ground in our consulting work with larger organizations. That said, there’s a mature, performance centric discussion that needs to happen where organizations can understand the relevancy of this shift in the customers access to information (regardless of whether they actively partake in social network activity) to your business,  and evaluate how your internal processes are wired to deal with changing  competitive dynamics in your business. Surgical and decisive. Not spray and pray.

Comments welcome, as always.

Slides here:

International Forum on E 2.0 – Sameer Patel – Accelarting biz performance