From Could to Should. Or how to rethink #scrm or even your business?

Logo of the Dutch East India Company from Wikipedia

In my last hurried post titled "What led us to Social CRM? Or why you should be serious about #scrm?" I jotted down a few points on how the customers have been given a rough hand since Industrial revolution and how they are trying to hit back in the information age with the various digital technologies at their disposal.

In this post I try to jot down a few thoughts on how the business needs to rethink itself and this is not an easy task. Its a hurried post again.

From Could to Should

I ended my previous post thusly:

"It should always have been about the customer, but thanks to the industrial revolution, it was about the capabilities of the organization rather than the needs of the customer ... and this led to transactions being paramount to relationships (how else would you get better capabilities than competition?)."

And I left it hanging there.

What I meant to say was that businesses have always been doling out products/services (offerings) based on what they could, given the limited resources and capabilities. The more innovative of them would look for procuring newer resources & acquiring newer capabilities so that they could differentiate themselves from the competition. But never was a offering built to help customers accomplish whatever jobs they had to get done. Since businesses exist to provide service to the customers this is what they should have been doing all along.

Jobs

Say Christensen, Anthony, Berstell & Nitterhouse in MIT Sloan Management Review Spring 2007 issue:

"Most companies segment their markets by customer demographics or product characteristics and differentiate their offerings by adding features and functions. But the consumer has a different view of the marketplace. He simply has a job to be done and is seeking to "hire" the best product or service to do it. Marketers must adopt that perspective."

And in the Spring 2008 issue say Ulwick and Bettencourt:

With a clear definition of what a customer need is, companies are able to get the inputs that are required to succeed at innovation.

Bettencourt shares the following four questions in HBR Blogs:

1. Out of the many different jobs that our customers are trying to get done, which offer the ripest opportunities for service innovation?
2. If we mapped out the job the customer is trying to get done, where would we see the biggest points of inconvenience, frustration, and poor results?
3. What is our customer's experience of doing business with us, and what aspects of it could be better?
4. As a seller of products, what services could we also provide to help customers get their jobs done well?

Once you have a grasp on the customer jobs to be accomplished and have an offering to help achieve them, the next should be to provide a great end-to-end experience to the customer at all stages of the customer's buying process and not the company's sales cycle. Businesses should also take into consideration Customer engagement, which is defined as "the behavioural manifestation from a customer toward a brand or firm which goes beyond purchase behavior".

Customer Experience

As I mentioned in my previous post, value is realized by the customer across multiple touch points. But value is both in use as well as other aspects. A good understanding of the customer jobs would help you deliver value in use. Choose customer moments of truth if you will or Voice of Customer or both to help you figure out these 'other' aspects.

In his clear and simple post on Focus.com Paul Greenberg posits Voice of Customer as the first component of Social CRM to help in Customer Experience Mapping.

Only after you have a grapple on the jobs customers are trying to accomplish (and what offering you would provide to help them accomplish those jobs) and ensure a great end-to-end customer experience (considering VOC, MoT, Customer Engagement, etc.) should you look at the resources at your disposal and your current capabilities, which I am guessing most businesses reading this post are already good at.

Resources and Capabilities

When it comes to resources and capabilities, consider your complete business ecosystem, not just yourselves (and your partners). Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, as I have explained it before and working with the business ecosystem requires communication & collaboration. This is where social computing (social media, social networking sites, enterprise social software) comes into picture along with social network analysis.

Social and Collaboration

I wrote a post about collaboration and biomimicry recently where I put forth these key aspects:

1. collaboration in the user tasks as part of various business processes (Social CRM/ERP/BPM, ACM, etc.),
2. learning inherent in the system/platform (Social Learning) in conjunction with the corporate training goals & systems and
3. finally the epitome of connected individuals - innovation - both democratized sourcing/filtering/execution as well as beuracratic sponsoring.

Remember, communication and work output both are key components of collaboration, without either of which the later is not possible.

Social Media, Social Networking Sites and Firm Hosted Online Communities are all crucial components of customer channels as well as the business ecosystem whereas Enterprise Social Software (online communities, intranet, portals, other enterprise systems, analytics, etc.) forms the key component for employee (and maybe partners too) collaboration.

This is where all your social media marketing, social media monitoring, social media policy, PR & IR on social media, crowdsourced customer service, etc. come into picture. But understand that the social channel needs to be integrated with the other traditional channels of communication, transaction as well as engagement with customers. And merely a multichannel approach wouldn't do, you need a proper cross-channel approach, which then means a 360 view of the customer by the business and a unified face of the business to the customer (Facilitated by what I like to call as the 4π view of what the customers perceive about the business).

Acknowledgement

This post has been structured loosely around Graham Hill's Seven Step Framework on Customer Collaboration that he described to me via tweets:

Jobs > Customer Jobs > Resources > Capabilities > Collaboration > Social Media > Customer Development

Hope I have been a bit more lucid in this post than in the previous one. Please do let me know your feedback/inputs.

What led us to Social CRM? Or why should you be serious about #SCRM?

Image via Wikipedia

Though I have been tinkering with or thinking about Social Media/Networing/CRM/Business for more than three to four years now, I never got a complete hang of why I felt it was the right thing to do. I have been reading &/or talking to a lot of others who feel the same and I have managed to collate a few salient points here. This is a very hurried post. So please excuse me for my 'brevity'. :)

A few trends lead to SCRM:

1. Social media is a communication revolution, especially for its users (customers & employees of an organization)
• Digital - meaning next to nill cost of production/distribution & no gatekeepers
• Proactive - articulation & co-creation
• Networks - explicit & implicit
• Visible - UGC is visible to all, including ur location thanks to LBS
• Real-time yet persistent (thanks to falling costs of broadband & memory)
• Ubiquitous - mobiles & internet of things
2. Customers transformed from being exogenous to value creation to endogenous to it, from a firm's perspective
3. Since Industrial revolution things progressed so:
• Supply-Demand economy or Mass production - top brass decided what to produce & limited by availability of raw materials, human resources & supply chain - customer not considered at all - customer a passive receipient
• Service economy or differentiation - matrix organizations created to enable innovation & thus differentiation - customer needs guessed by secondary means, rarely via direct VOC - customer gets taste of what she can demand for, still passive receipient but post purchase behavior begins to matter - value exchange still happens at single point
• Behavioral economy or Pull platforms - open collaboration, innovation, co-creation, customer centricity raise their head from obscurity, thanks to a more aware customer enbaled by social media - customer demands, dictates & tests (co-creates) products/services & helps other customers - customer is integral to value creation - value exchange happens at multiple points - customer engagement goes beyond transaction into WOM, co-creation & complaining behavior

It should always have been about the customer, but thanks to the industrial revolution, it was about the capabilities of the organization rather than the needs of the customer ... and this led to transactions being paramount to relationships (how else would you get better capabilities than competition?).

Biomimicry and the Future of "Social" Business Software

Credit: Benedict Campbell

As I stated in my previous post (Complex Adaptive System and the "please adjust" culture of India), I am getting back to my first love, BPM, as part of the bigger picture view I want to take on how 'social' is going to affect businesses. No, am not abandoning Social CRM, just trying to figure out an integrated approach that would include BPM, Learning & Innovation. CRM is just one of the many business processes in an organization, and thus, I look at CRM as a subset of BPM. However, that is not what the market believes in I guess. [Update: I am considering CRM as a subset of BPM solely from a business processes perspective, as in, when a BPM consultant would model the processes. CRM is a business strategy, since customers are core to the business, and building & maintaining relationship with them is paramount to the existence of the business.]

As far as personal experience goes, BPM for me started out as a set of either workflow automation tools or middleware tools and merged sometime back. And then as an afterthought lessons from BPR where incorporated and BPMN was created to keep everybody happy. But thats just my understanding of the way things developed and am bound to get hit on that take. :) (I was not into reading analyst reports or attending conferences back then, definitely not into blogs.) So, to keep things on a safer ground, in this post I will just consider how the use of social technologies are going to affect the way business processes are handled.

Collaboration
The main theme emerging out of the noise of social computing in business terms is collaboration - within, outside & across the organizational boundaries. And this when collaboration is in reality a fundamental biological behaviour which takes place anywhere humans work together. Collaboration cannot happen in the absence of communication, but the only means of communication available in an enterprise are private channels. Even emails, though can happen among a group of people, is not public. Nobody outside the group is free to view the email, let alone participate in the conversation. If help is needed from someone outside the existing group, they need to be included by the existing members. Collaboration under such circumstances becomes all about social negotiation and not about the creative output.

What social technologies offer is a way to communicate in public, attracting people who might be of help or value, allow people to discover newer things they might not have known. And since they are transparent and in the open, it lends to increased trust among the members and thus a tighter group thats goes out of the way to help each other.

Thankfully thought leaders in collaborative/social BPM have been considering the impact of the above aspect both for process modelling as well as execution.

Emergence
The other theme emerging is that of emergence itself. Though it is not of surprise to those who are innovative or creative, it certainly is a big deal for the traditional command & control style businesses entrenched in the "push" market/economy. Luck & serendipity are two other closely related aspects to that of emergence. As opposed to determining what the outcomes will be everytime, we need to let things emerge out of the seeming anarchy/chaos that is social media. In business context, employees already follow certain rules & regulations of the company as well as have a certain organizational culture and individual work habits. By letting employees communicate & collaborate with each other across departmental/functional/informational/other silos we are not only letting serendipity to happen but by allowing them to share & build upon/use knowledge & ideas of other employees, are also letting solutions & innovations emerge.

But today's enterprise systems do not allow serendipity to happen emergence in business, if any, is outside the system. ERP, CRM, BPM, HRM, etc. are all modeled top down and allow for only certain information to be processed, a work to be done. Communication, if any, in these systems are limited to that which is obligated by regulation/process. There is no scope for new patterns to emerge since every outcome is predetermined. That which is not, is an exception. Ask an average BPM consultant and chances are that she/he will prattle that the increasing number of new situations we infrequently face in the fast changing world it is today are an exception and needs to be handled as such by the system. Number of times a situation is faced may be too few to warrant for incorporating it into the system, but number of such situations is increasing. Kind of a long tail of business processes in the enterprise.

Biomimicry
Wikipedia defines Biomimicry or biomimetics as:

"examination of nature, its models, systems, processes, and elements to emulate or take inspiration from in order to solve human problems."

I have been interested in Biology since very young. Though I did not like the prospect of having to read for so many years to become a doctor & thus gave that profession a pass, Biology has always been a close second to my love for computers. And no wonder that I look for inspiration from it when I have to think through the various aspects of leveraging social computing in a business context. Thankfully I am not alone in this and am discovering more people as with each day I spend looking for inspiration from nature.

A living system is defined as a network of processes that simultaneously produce and realize that same network as a unity.

I consider a parallel between living systems and a group of people collaborating/working together. The above definition hopefully provides you insights into why I consider biology for inspiration wrt social computing in general. And in particular, where it comes to business innovation, I can't help considering about the brain.

Synapses
In neurology, a synapse is a junction that permits a neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell. An electrical synapse is between two neurons & has been associated with memory storage in the cerebellum. A chemical synapse is between a neuron & a non-neuronal cell, like those in a muscle or glands and thus producing a direct action (muscle) or a directive (hormones from glands). As this MIT Technology Review article states about a research on Memristors by HP labs:

One of the defining features of the connections between neurons is that they become stronger when neurons fire together; hence the phrase "neurons that fire together, wire together", a phenomenon otherwise known as Hebbian learning. Various experiments have shown that this effect is most pronounced early in the learning process, when the increase in connection strength is greatest. Later learning merely reinforces the links.

And this is exactly why I have chosen the word Synapse to name a framework I & my team (they are right now being convinced to get a complete buy-in) are trying to come up with for leveraging social technologies for business.

Synapses 2.0, as I call it, aims at bringing value to the business in terms of addressing

• collaboration in the user tasks as part of various business processes (Social CRM/ERP/BPM, etc.),
• learning inherent in the system/platform (Social Learning) in conjunction with the corporate training goals & systems and
• finally the epitome of connected individuals - innovation - both democratized sourcing/filtering/execution as well as beuracratic sponsoring.

To know more about my inspirations from Biology, do read the following posts:

• Business as a Neuro-organization
• Lessons in Stigmergic Collaboration from social insects to groups of people
• Autopoiesis in a biological Cell & business

As a bonus, do read this post on the Eight Metaphors of an Organization, that tries to capture the essence of the complex & expensive book, Images of Organization: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/13/the-eight-metaphors-of-organization/

So, are you convinced that emergence needs to be included when considering BPM in the light of social software for business? I would love to have your feedback/inputs/brickbats. And I hope I can cover more ground in the next few weeks.

Related articles

• Michael Fauscette: Socializing Software (mfauscette.com)
• Ten top issues in adopting enterprise social computing (Dion Hinchcliffe, 27/07/09) (zdnet.com)
• Handbook on BPM (enterpriseirregulars.com)
• The Problem with BPM Flowcharts (isismjpucher.wordpress.com)
• Have we been doing Enterprise 2.0 in reverse : Socialising processes and Adaptive Case Management (libraryclips.blogsome.com)

CAS & the 'please adjust' culture of India

Image via Wikipedia

I have been interested in Complex Adaptive Systems (the concept, not the details & the mathematics!) ever since I read Sukumar's tweets from a KM meet in Chennai where Dave Snowden talked about it and then I listened to the recordings of Dave's speech at the event. As is my wont, I Googled about it, got a Wikipedia article about it, went deeper thanks to the various hyperlinks and also read some of the PDFs that Google scholar threw up in addition to looking at some of what the Google image searches threw up. Here is a great 101 on CAS: http://www.trojanmice.com/articles/complexadaptivesystems.htm. As Wikipedia puts it:

Complex adaptive systems are special cases of complex systems. They are complex in that they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements (and so a part of network science) and adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience.

Since then it has given me insights, by drawing analogies with CAS, into many of the mundane stuff I never paid attention to before, like why is the traffic so chaotic in India and yet we survive?

Traffic rules are easy or complicated depending on the local rules & their interpretations and implementations. But navigating a heavy traffic is complex, especially so in India. This is so because nobody follows much of the rules, except for driving on the left side of the road, but theres no guarantee on that either. And so you see chaos like the one depicted in the infamous video below.

But do you see patterns emerging in this video? If you haven't watched it yet or it was long since you watched it for a chuckle, please do so now, I'll wait for you to answer. Did any mishap happen? While most of the western world laughed at it & most of the Indians just shrugged it as yet another day, what struck me interesting when I saw that was the patterns I could see in it.

I have driven in many cities & small towns in India, and recently in the US too. Dreaded road traffic of Kolkata, Bangalore & Chennai, though congested, have an identity of their own. You can even feel the difference in the driving pattern in different parts of the cities. Or the marked difference when you drive on the highway & then enter one of these cities, or vice versa. I could see that in the US too. Though I did not drive myself on the highways, Mitch Lieberman, a very good friend and great thought leader in Social CRM, recently took me on a road drive from Boston to NYC, via the quaint Mystic where we stopped for lunch. And we passed through various states and I could feel the difference in the driving patterns.

There may be some other reason to all this that I am unaware of but it did strike me that may be this is all because we drivers learn & adapt on the fly and though some generic rules are followed, thus constrained into a system, patterns emerge.

In India we call this the "please adjust" culture. That is, adapt to the environment and the other actors in the system. There is a funny ad that captures the culture perfectly, no adjustment needed (pun intended).

And another key aspect is that the actors in the system 'learn'. Sure, some like to call this a Complex Evolving System, but thats getting too academic I guess. For simplicity lets just stick with CAS as the common term.

Business processes needs to be considered as CAS, as Max brings to our attention in his latest post on why BPMN & Flowcharts are insufficient. Or as mentioned here, not a CAS rather an analogy of CAS.

Whichever it is, I am decided that I will need to look at emerging patterns thanks to the use of 'social' platforms in the business ecosystem (both inside & outside the organization) as John Hagel put it at the #e20conf:

"Social softtware adoption starts with tasks (problem solving) and moves to social learning & innovation."

So expect more from me in terms of BPM, Learning (training) & Innovation that are modeled taking into consideration the fact that business is a CAS and not merely a complicated system that can be explained/modeled with reductionist methods. Top-down modeling though good for strategy & business goal setting, bottom-up emergence needs to be leveraged for implementing them.

If it gains attention if I call them Social BPM, Social Learning (which is an old pedagogical term and not yet another new term) or Open Innovation then so be it. I am not one to fight over nomenclature beyond a certain point. Granted names & definitions are important, but I do not want to spend my time & effort in their nuances.

I strictly believe we need to look at an integrated approach to these three things for maximum leverage. When I say we might be able to use a social software, like say Jive or SocialText or Drupal Commons, to perform certain business activities, like say processing claims, I do not think it is unattainable. We can give a general construct and then allow the users to tweak their business processes by using folksonomies, activity streams, etc. and even learn from each other while doing their work. KM & Learning objectives too met on the job. And when they are tweaking their own processes, of course they are innovating, but we could also consider open innovation as a dedicated process in itself.

What do you think? Am I daft? Think this won't work? Is it Sci-fi? Pipe dream? Might be achievable? Someone needs to show it in action? Need case studies to prove they are worth looking into?

Please do let me know.