The Social Business Frontier: Randal Ries on Measuring Progress

Published on the IBM Social Business Insights Blog on April 30, 2015.

“The Social Business Frontier” is a video blog series consisting of a number of short interviews taking a deeper look inside the IBM Research Labs to explore the groundbreaking and innovative social analytics research that's redefining the future of social business. 

In the fifth and final episode of The Social Business Frontier we speak to Randal Ries, IBM Senior Research Analyst, about how IBM is providing an example for businesses to measure the progress of their social business journey. A key aspect of an organization’s transformation into a social business is culture change. In order to measure culture it’s necessary to rely on traditional research methods. It’s Randal and team’s mission to understand employees’ attitudes and behaviors toward working socially. To do this they’ve developed a survey that measures different aspects of a social workplace. Their strategy helped them understand how employees felt about the value of working socially, how their management was embracing social and if there was enough education on how to work socially. Listen in to hear Ries explain how these results helped IBM understand where it is in its social transformation journey and how it can continue to grow as a social business.

Social Business: Shifting From Noun to Verb

Published in ClickZ on March 17, 2015.

Increasingly, businesses need to embrace social strategies in order to succeed in the digital world.

The meaning of the term "social business" needs to and is evolving from being a thing, an end-state, a noun to an action, a methodology, a practice…a verb. The idea that collaboration technology allows us to connect with one another and share ideas is wonderful, but there are fundamental strategies that are even more important.

In 2014, the IBM Social Business Category Management team joined forces with The Economist Insight Unit (EIU) to uncover how different thought leaders in a variety of industries across the globe are enabling social business in their organizations. Leadership driving social business change is diverse — in some cases sprouting up from management systems, in others from customer engagement strategies — but in all instances focused on true people-centric engagement.

The social business phenomenon isn’t just about tweeting and likes – it’s about something far more powerful. As Bryan Kramer explained in his book: "There is No B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human: #H2H" businesses are starting to behave and sound like real people dealing with other people, rather than "business" to "consumer."

We are at a unique point in time with the concepts of social business truly starting to gain a wider foothold, and as such we see companies at various points in the maturity curve for adopting social principles. They have reached their current state by taking varied paths, and yet these pioneers have one main thing in common: action. They are actively seeking information, methods, and practices that can harness the best of the people inside and outside of the organization. These social business leaders are allowing people to share their stories and forge relationships with each other and the brand – and as change agents, they’re asking the tough questions to push their organizations out of "business-as-usual."

"The first question we had to ask ourselves is, 'Can a bank be a social business?'" a Toronto-based bank’s vice president of social media and digital marketing said at a New York conference last year. "We’re a heavily regulated industry, and we take a very conservative approach."

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The study was launched publically about 10 months ago, and beyond the findings of the study itself, we have reflected on the process undertaken to conduct and drive awareness of the study, and have learned some details about the process itself. This effort was social from the start, when we leveraged social media to request nominations for social business leaders in one of five categories: Visionaries, Strategic Thinkers, Culture Shapers, Storytellers, and 'Fully Social' (Adaptive, Open, Entrepreneurial). After the advisory board finished the task of narrowing to 25 leaders and the campaign was launched, we went back to social media.

Now, the beauty of highlighting social business leaders is that they have large networks of followers, so with a social plan and content (blogs, video, memes, and more) the campaign took off.

I love when it works out that the message is the medium and vice-versa. In this case leveraging social media to reach social business leaders through a community-based nomination process that then was able to be shared and amplified through a strategic social campaign. During the campaign promoting the study we featured each of the honorees for a week, which gave us content for 25 weeks to use in our newsroom and our employee evangelism - leveraging their profile videos, creating social tiles, and writing blogs to support the leaders' various social business successes. You can see more about what we learned behind the scenes here.

Top 5 Social Business Leaders From the 25 Leaders Named in the Study

Scott Monty
Former chief of global digital communications, Ford Motor Co.
MAKING MESSENGERS: Using old values to make new connections

B. Bonin Bough
Vice-president of global media and consumer engagement, Mondelez International
FUTURE FACING: Embracing the ethos of a start-up

Gilberto Garcia
Director of innovation, Cemex
SHIFT WORK: Making communication simple within a global enterprise

Marisa Thalberg
Vice-president for corporate digital marketing, Estée Lauder
ONLY CONNECT: Using social causes to connect with customers

Chris Laping
Senior vice-president for business transformation, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers
COMMUN(ICATE): Giving employees a sense of purpose and ownership

Thanks again to our advisory board for selecting such a varied example of inspiring social business leaders: Brian Solis, Cheryl Burgess, Lisa Gansky, Nick Blunden, Maria Winans and my special thanks to Maria Huntalas for leading the project.

Insights for Business Transformation in This 3rd Platform Age

Published in ClickZ on June 11, 2014.

There are many challenges that come when attempting to transform a legacy brand into a modern customer-focused organization. Here are some tips for making the process simpler.

I am lucky to live in Silicon Valley and have the opportunity to be a part of the lively gatherings and discussions that occur as people come together to think through this changing world we are all a part of.

Last week I attended a particularly interesting event that I think you'll enjoy sharing in: The Churchill Club's open forum event "Business Transformation Insights and Strategies: D&B CEO Bob Carrigan with Advisory Geoffrey A. Moore" - two extremely well-known thought leaders who combined made for a fascinating discussion about business transformation. Bob Carrigan assumed the chief executive (CEO) role at Dun & Bradstreet eight months ago; prior to that he was CEO of IDG Communications. Geoffrey A. Moore is a renowned author focusing on market dynamics surrounding disruptive innovation; his books includeCrossing the Chasm and Escape Velocity.

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Geoffery A. Moore and Bob Carrigan at The Churchill Club event at the Rosewood Sandhill on June 3, 2014

The conversation was broadly centered on business transformation and some of the key elements Carrigan is focused on in his role as CEO for Dun & Bradstreet as he tackles the challenge of modernizing a legacy brand of a 173-year-old company into a modern customer-focused organization.

Third Platform Age

Moore explains that there are basically two reasons a company undergoes the terrifying process of transformation: 1) to catch the wave of the next big thing and if we don't transform we're going to miss it or 2) to react to an existential threat and a competitor will take our business away from us. He cites 45 iconic tech brands that he has worked with no longer exemplifying the high stakes of business transformation.

As we all know, cloud, mobile, social, and big data are changing everything from the way we shop to the way we interact - analyst firm IDC calls this the "Third Platform Age" (first platform: mainframe, second platform: client/server). For established organizations to survive and thrive as the pace of change quickens exponentially is a huge challenge as everything become more digital and Internet-based - creating the need to foundationally change how their businesses are run, especially as threats like commoditization and pure-play digital upstarts loom.

Organizational Transformation

After spending time with numerous customers, Carrigan started his tenure by investing in innovation - that isdiverting returns - which can be difficult to explain to investors. One of the (I think brilliant) ways that Carrigan worked with his strategy team to look at investment options was to visualize the decision-making process by setting up a table with poker chips and different investment options. The strategy team physically moved the chips as they considered how to spend their investment dollars for the company, all the while keeping customer needs top of mind. Of course as some budgets are diverted to fund new projects; this raises the cultural issues that surround business transformation as it changes standard practices and the stakeholders who grasp onto the "this is how we've always done it" mentality.

In this modern organization transformation, Carrigan took some of the following actions:

• Creating a more transparent and flatter organization: reducing his direct reports from 13 to six
• Hiring of a chief people officer: someone new to the organization who is an experienced change agent focused on people and talent development, who looked at new compensation models, who was intentionally not "human resources" (this role is one of the six that report to Carrigan)
• Allowing for employee advocacy: their social media policy had been more restrictive than open; they now encourage employees to socially engage inside and outside of the organization
• Hiring the first chief marketing officer in D&B's 173-year history: recognizing that today the "medium is the message," that look and feel needs to be modern and crisp and clearly convey what the brand stands for (this role is one of the six that report to Carrigan)
• "Moving from arthritic to agile" infrastructure: look inside (customer-centric) out, instead of outside (company-centric) in to figure out what should no longer be done so that technology supports the strategy
• Thinking globally: breaking the silos of "U.S." vs. "rest-of-the-world" to address the growing global economy and his client's global growth needs, and the data consistency to support them

The Way Forward

Like many organizations in this Third Platform Age, D&B sees its future in the power of data. It is moving forward by holding on to its foundational value for its clients in the "DUNS Number" (the unique identifier in its global commercial database) and coopting data from other sources - like social data and interaction data - combining structured and unstructured data into system that can be leveraged by predictive analytics capabilities. Carrigan sees the company's evolution forward as a goal of "liberating content" (data) - making it more accessible to their customers: in the cloud, through easy API integration, and data feed services. They are hosting hackathons for API development and strategically acquiring companies (and with them "aqui-hired" talent) to support that goal.

As a professional immersed in these strategic changes around cloud, big data and analytics, mobile, and social daily as I approach my work, I found it fascinating to hear how a company with such a long history is transforming itself to compete in this hyper-competitive, digital landscape. I'd like to thank Bob Carrigan and Geoffrey A. Moore for an insightful conversation and The Churchill Club for organizing it. You can watch the full exchange here on YouTube.