How do you establish a meritocracy in a highly dispersed environment?

The title of my post today is a quote from the New Your Times interview with SunGard President and C.E.O Cristóbal Conde titled Structure? The Flatter, the Better by Adam Bryant . The idea of flattening your organization and introducing platforms and cultures that spawn creativity and innovation through coolaboration and social networking tools hits me right where I live! He made many good points throughout the interview but his focus on collaboration was the most noteworthy.

Mr. Conde praised the social platform Yammer for opening up the conversations within his company on a global basis and allowing his teams to share ideas.

I think that a C.E.O. needs to focus more on the platform that enables collaboration, because employees already have all the data. They have access to everything. You have to work on the structure of collaboration.    -Cristóbal Conde

On Monday I talked about the evolution of the Social Business and focused on the Project Greenlight effect of managers using social and coolaborative platfrom to surface innovation and to act like movie producers green lighting the best of the best ideas it seems the Mr. Conde sees things in a similar light.

I think the role of the boss is to then work on those collaboration platforms, as opposed to being the one making the decisions. It’s more like the producer of the show, rather than being the lead.   -Cristóbal Conde

Congratulations to Mr. Conde for seeing the upside of structured social networking within the enterprise to drive his company forward.

In great company...

Its great to be validated by others in the Business Intelligence space. Every so often when I talk to people in our industry I see that "Shawn your a geek" look in peoples eyes especially around the topic of social business.  Big data and BI/DW appliance expert Krish Krishnan has declared 2010 the year of social analytics in business intelligence. Krish is a good friend and his views on where and how the data fits will add great insight to the conversation. Check out Krish as he starts to cover this topic.

Social Business a Multi Front Evolution

Innovative companies are beginning to address the challenges centric to becoming socially driven enterprises. I talked last week about two of the opportunities surrounding this evolution, one being the utilization of the data that these communities produce and the second being the integration of the tools and processes that enable employees to apply social networking methodologies to their work process. Both hold great promise for ROI and innovation. 

At Defrag this year Stowe Boyd spoke about Real-time streams and the Social Business. I've been following his blog ever since (and you should too). Recently he did a post on defining some of this thoughts around the topic. Stowe lists seven features of a social business (follow the link to read them all) the one that really caught my eye was "senior management operating more like Hollywood producers or investors than autocrats." it struck me that ideas and innovation within the enterprise could evolve to something not dissimilar to the "green lighting" process movies studios and networks employ. The best ideas get the funding and the executive reap the rewards of those decisions.

The challenge is enabling the creative process around these new ideas and helping the best ones surface above the noise especially within large company ecosystems. This is where socially driven business intelligence has the opportunity to thrive and enable. Generally the people within the company that create access to information are IT focused and are a small minority within the corporate community when compared to the number of individuals who consume the information. As social business intelligence evolves to support the majority and it enables them to leverage and collaborate instead of just eat what they are feed, creativity will lead the way and these systems will start to produce business intelligence that reflects the business knowledge and creativity of the information consumers. 

In the recent Forbes report "The Rise of the Digital C-Suite" 71% of CIO's said that they found guidance from colleagues in online communities very valuable. What would this number look like if that community was within the trusted walls of their enterprise and fueled by the domain knowledge of their employees?

Creating a social business will include data, tools and highly integrated platforms. It won't happen overnight but its coming and business intelligence solutions and platforms will play a key role in the success of your social business strategy. 

And the survey says...social media not useful for BI yet

I am posting this in response to the ComputerWorld article by Joab Jackson titled "Survey: Social media not useful for BI yet" The article is based on results from the recent Kognitio Survey released at the National Retail Federation's annual conference this week in New York. The survey showed that only 14% of the respondents have any desire to incorporate social-networking data into their current data analysis efforts. A total of 63% of the respondents were "undecided" about the potential value of aggregated social-networking data, and 23% called social media "overrated."

The results of the survey are great from a data aspect you can find more on the survey here. Its still early for companies to be supplementing their data warehouse and business intelligence programs with data from Twitter and Facebook but I can assure you that the14% who are looking at it see an innovative differentiator that they can profit by. The 23% who see the data as over rated should run down to the corner store and buy a clue!

My concern with the article is it left out 50% of the social networking and business intelligence story its not just about the data. Social networking tools and processes are making their way into the enterprise and are being adopted. Just look at enterprise search, many vendors are trying to match the needs of the "Google Generation" knowledge worker with solutions that match their social tools and favorite internet resources. The same is happening to the BI space. Some vendors are taking a low level approach such as allowing you to favorite a report or collaborate with your peers this only scratches the surface. The big value comes from integrating the tools and the workflow so it makes sense and is easily adopted by all levels of user within the business intelligence environment.

So before you write off social media and BI solely based on integration of Twitter data lets look at the huge value companies can achieve by adopting solutions that deliver fully integrated tools and processes for social networking in enterprise business intelligence.

Crowd Sourcing Logo Selection

I have gone through a bunch of different iterations of my new company logo. And now that I am down to a final style I wanted to get input to select the best one. I used Elance to get the logo designed, its a great site that allows you to post your job to a huge community of talented people, they then bid for the work, you select who you want to work with and the payments are handled by an escrow account managed by Elance. The contractor Username: Logo_Inventive is in Pakistan and has excellent credentials and feedback from the Elance community. You should give this site a try next time you need a logo, banner or even PHP coding done fast and inexpensively.

I would love it if you could leave a quick comment below and tell me which one you like the best. Thanks in advance for the help!

Analytic Response Logo 1

Analytic Response Logo 2

Analytic Response Logo 3

Analytic Response Logo 4