Getting Enterprise Social by Mark Stone

From Mark Stone, Microsoft Enterprise Social Product Manager, Engage RoadShow at #jsb12.

Great speech from Microsoft’s France Social Business Day #jsb12, vision for enterprise value. It was really captivating, « I enjoyed » his sharing of enthusiasm and passion, a vision of a close future that is already surrounding us. Microsoft will soon share the full presentation, here are my notes

For modern employees, expectations have changed (social, faster innovation, usability, mobile, cross org collaboration)

Some expectations:

Employee don’t want training, they want simpler products
Faster Innovation for short time to market
Cross organization collaboration: expectation for partners as the same team. People want to have access from anywhere (concerns about security, privacy)

Social transformation

Enterprise social will wrap around all. It is a trend.
Social technology is pervasive in our life. (Example of Facebook in 2012: 600 M engaged users. 250 Mo likes / days)
Social is transforming the way we work together, we do business together
It never existed in a way that was easy for us
From document centric tasks to people-centric interactions
« We live in the age of the customer and employee » (Forrester Research Wave, Enterprise Social Platforms, Q3 2011).

What is Social?

There are fundamental gaps with customers. We need more social relationship. Social intensity is growing..
3 keys: individuals, group (work in tightly coupled teams focused on the success of specific joint goals), community (work together in loosely coupled groups of people with similar interests or common high-level goals), individuals : work one-on-one with others to share knowledge.
Social is about empowering bottom-up organization (individuals, communities, group), to make top down business goals successful (Increase Revenue, lower costs, reduce turn-over…). Collaboration is not only bottom up, but can also be top down.

What to do to become Social?

Before your organization can « be » social:

Engage Individuals. (1:1 engagement). Individuals: finding an expert, sharing a presentation
Build Communities: they share common interests. Ex: #bikes, #cars, #boats. Users organize themself from bottom up. Central gravity: Product (content, customer case…). Communities are valuable information sources. From communities and individual you can guess where should you launch the product first. Communities build network links (Crowdsourcing with growing external vectors). Some communities are ad-hoc, they can disappear. Some communities are structured, and users are driven into these spaces, they have a place to go ( you need for both, it’s a matter of how it’s organized, with different directions)
Build Groups: Team use groups to coordinate their work. They’re building a product, we’re helping. we’re supporting a customer. It’s the result of work done with other people. Some groups are virtual. They don’t necessary exist inside a company (ex: with customers). Some groups are working on a similar product.