Michael MaozWe are leading up to our own Oscar of sorts in my team, the Social CRM Magic Quadrant. As much as there is enthusiasm from the various lines of business in our client base for leveraging communities, blogs, fan pages, crowd-sourced ideas to improve the customer experience and better pinpoint marketing efforts, there is far less fervor from IT.
Why the lack of CIO commitment to an enterprise-spanning Social strategy? One reason I may not be seeing it might be that CIOs are speaking to other groups in my company – folks who look at the broader implications of Social from a perspective on hiring, workforce allocation, change management, and prioritization.
Factoring out the percentage of CIOs who may be engaged, but not with the Social CRM team, still exposes a lack of intense involvement: the participants on the phone conversations and meetings with clients are rarely CIOs or even their direct reports. This is not necessarily a bad thing. SaaS followed a similar trajectory: first the line of business – usually sales managers – subscribed to a SaaS-based business application, and only later did the CIO and IT begin to assert their influence as key issues of scalability, availability, security, integration and procurement became bigger factors as initiatives spread.
What happens next? Over the next 24 months the various loose strands of Social Media initiatives will need to be orchestrated, and integrated, and at that point the good office of the CIO will most likely offer guidance and support – and for some companies leadership.
If you are in a line of business working on a “Social” initiative, do your CIO a favor: have your metrics at hand.
Category: Applications Cloud CRM Customer Centric Web Innovation and Customer Experience Leadership SaaS and Cloud Computing Sales Force Automation Social CRM Social Networking Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
1 response so far ↓
1 Laef Olson March 2, 2011 at 8:03 pm
Michael,
Great close to this blog – have your metrics at hand. CIOs live and die by our metrics. Metrics help us accomplish our IT Governance obligations, help make our increasingly complex domain approachable and understandable, and unfortunately sometimes get in the way by distracting us from innovation that isn’t always immediately measurable in the way we would like it to be. How do you measure the benefits of increased customer to customer connections? How do you account for the increased employee satisfaction that comes from the enhanced peer communication and information sharing? Is it worth the expense? In a world of choices, does it rise above shaving a day off of monthly close through better automation in our order management processes? For those of us who work in the Social CRM space every day (and by association have been adopting these social solutions within our own organizations) the answers to those questions is more obvious, but in many IT shops the benefit of “Facebook-like” services is about as obvious as the Web was in the age of 3270 terminals.
Will Web 2.0 social tools be adopted more rapidly than Web 1.0 was? Absolutely. It is a different world, even in IT.
That said, you are right. I wouldn’t have given The Social Network an Oscar.
Best,
Laef