It seems that everyone has a strong opinion on the topic of the social enterprise. I’ve heard everything from “it’s the biggest game changer in business today” to “it’s just another fluffy marketing term.” Well, last week I tuned in to the SAP radio show In the Cloud with Game Changers to listen to a panel on the social enterprise to get a sense of how the industry perceives itself.
The panel featured some very well-recognized experts on the topic of social business (Brent Leary, Sameer Patel, Dr. Natalie Petuohoff and Heather Davis) and everyone had some interesting thoughts to add to the debate. While listening to the broadcast, however, I was struck by a comment Dr. Petuohoff made about where the social enterprise would be in five years time:
20 percent of businesses that are currently in business [will go] completely out of business, and the businesses that do adopt social business, that become collaborative enterprises, [will increase] their workforce and their revenues and their profits by 100 percent.
That’s an audacious claim. While I agree that there are benefits to social business tools and principles, I don’t think that they’re powerful enough to force whole companies to go out of business. Furthermore, I don’t think that we’ll ever be able to verify this claim. How will we know whether a company went out of business in five years because of a failure to adopt social business or because of economic reasons, poor decision making, or 1000 other reasons?
I decided to see what two of my favorite bloggers are writing on this topic. What I found was that there is hardly agreement on the topic. For instance, Dennis Howlett penned his criticism of social business as follows:
Contrary to what I hear from ‘social anything’ folk, the vast majority of people go to work to get paid and hopefully advance their careers. They’re not sitting around pondering how much better the workplace could be if only they had the latest shiny new social toy.
The next day, however, he had a slight change of heart and said that the social enterprise could be a reality. Importantly, he did not say that it is, just that it could be.
Then, Sameer Patel weighed in with his thoughts. For those that aren’t familiar with Patel, he’s Global VP of Enterprise Social Software at SAP and an advocate of social business. However, he still thinks that there is room to grow and that, in order for this concept to really work, the tools we have at our disposal need to better align with the taks that need to get done. Sameer said on the radio show:
… until we start to move beyond the general purpose benefits of being more productive and sharing more and collaborating better, to align it with core objectives.
Personally, I think the reality of social business is somewhere in between. It’s something that has potential but hasn’t been fully realized or actualize. And it’s something that isn’t to a point where it helps us get better at doing our jobs. But that’s just my POV.
I want to know where you stand. Please stop by the Software Advice and participate in our poll to let us know how relevant the social enterprise is to you. You can access the poll (or leave me a comment) at: Social Business: Interesting Concept or Reality?
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