Lee Bryant talks Social Business at #DellB2B

Dell B2B kicked off with Lee Bryant from Headshift talking about Social business.

As we begin our digital and social shift, we, as businesses are expected to have an open and accessible network externally but what about internally. With cost pressures and increased competition, though our organisations can seem advanced, they are often too expensive internally in how they function so they can't be global. Corporate IT is ripe for re-invention & humanisation but we need to make a deep structural change to a network centric world. Then we can have the speed and agility that are needed to have continued success.

Lee made a point about how we are moving from bureaucracy and friction to a place of network and collective intelligence - google did that with search. People enter in what they want to search for personally but that insight adds to the greater needs of the community. Our search becomes better through the gathering of that data.

For Lee, there are 5 main trends that we will see filtering through our organisations:
1) Mobile: The user experience is changing. It must be ubiquitous, personal and integrated.
2) Cloud: Getting to your server should be two clicks away - computing needs to be a utility and when it is, that is when you can do interesting things.
3) Consumerisation: experience beats features - you need to give your employees as good an experience as your consumers. Without a consumer-grade user experience your employees won't be able to achieve their full potential.
4) Big data: mining large data sets for the minutia gives us insights to customer needs that helps us to get insight to our customers. Indentification in real time will be necessary moving forward.
5) Social: This needs to be on the inside, not just the outside. Technology is driving a lot of this change. You need to know what the customer thinks but if you are not engaging with your suppliers/ employees, etc, then you won't be able to deliver on the outside.

My favourite quote of the discussion: "Never waste a good crisis" Necessity leads to invention so really we need to humanise the enterprise: people over process to make better use of our talent and brain power. Let them get on with it instead of micromanaging. With a rise in activity streams: Yammer, tibco and socialcast, scale and intimacy are where trends are leading to. For some of us, we're already there but what do you think the future is?