Michael MaozFor my CIO friends and clients, I understand why you shake your heads a bit over Social CRM. “What do they want from my life, these sales and marketing and customer service directors? Everyone else has to come with a business case, but the Social Mavens? They bring me the logic of a Winchester House.” It’s one thing to ask them about custom code, Cloud Security, semantic models and authentication and e-discovery and systems integration, mobile computing or ERP - they can help you out with any of these. These are real technologies solving real problems. But cotton candy (or candy floss for those who still think the best tree is the family tree of Alfred the Great) notions of ‘outside-in’ and Crowd-Sourcing and ‘voice of the customer’ are not in the CIO’s vocabulary. Not even in their dictionary. And the lines of business have not provided them with a look-up table or a glossary.
It’s amazing that CIOs have been as tolerant of Social CRM projects as they have. Since so many US corporations are floating atop oceans of cash, IT can at least point to a few underfunded and under-resourced “Social” projects as signs of innovation. Mammoth amounts of money flow into the maintenance of ERP systems and legacy applications and custom development (i.e., 99% of the budget) with little regard to issues of revenue growth, customer retention and new customer capture. Read the business section of just about any newspaper across the globe: you won’t find CEOs focused on these issues and directing the CIO towards the same. Maybe they mention Social CRM or Social Media at a conference, far from shareholders, but when they get back to the office? Mum’s the word.
To seal the deal, so much of the technology and so many of the applications to run a Social CRM initiative are Cloud-based, or cobbled together with Consumer-Grade technologies (i.e., free and easily accessible to anyone with Web access), that the lines of business most involved with Social CRM projects don’t invite the CIO to the party.
Is this situation so bad? It is from the perspective that the CIO holds the keys to the IT castle, and sooner or later Social projects will need to be embedded in core processes. Maybe that will take three to five years, but it will happen. That means integration, process modelling, data security, and scalability: jobs that the CIO knows very well. But why wait until then? Marketing and sales and service directors could do everyone a favor and, at a minimum, create notional arguments about return on initiative – something that can be assessed and used in a budget meeting. Yes, it is not always fun to be a grownup, but at least if you are grounded in economics your Social project won’t be.
Category: Applications Cloud CRM ERP Innovation and Customer Experience IT Governance Leadership SaaS and Cloud Computing Social CRM Social Software Strategic Planning Tags:
1 response so far ↓
1 Chris Boudreaux August 12, 2011 at 9:12 am
Michael,
While it is true that most social media investments still travel with no business case, we’re helping clients change that. And, you’re right that it requires a business process perspective.
One challenge is that most communications professionals and social media consultants don’t have much experience in organizational change. They’ve never led cross-functional change programs. They’ve never built a business case that had to stand up to the CFO’s rigor. So they just don’t know how to do those things.
And, in the corporate communications arena, they never had to measure business impact from their efforts. Clippings were all they ever counted.
But that is all changing as marketing, sales and customer service leaders begin to ask for real dollars for social media.
However, the one critical factor that is changing the slowest is that CIOs are simply not getting in the game. CIOs and their teams are simply not at the table when cross-functional social media efforts are launched. And, ultimately, the CIO has to change that. CIOs need to start reaching out to their VPs of Communications and Marketing, and start figuring out how enterprise IT will enable the business goals that social media supports.
The bottom line is that CIO can not sit back and wait for other functional leaders to bring them a business case or a well-defined social application architecture. CIOs need to get out of their foxholes, and go be the smartest person in the room about how the organization should use technology to solve challenges in marketing, communications, sales and service.