Social Business Summit 2011, London - some thoughts

This was the London leg of the 4 global events organised by Headshift/Dachis Group.

The day at The Imagination Gallery got off to a good start with tea and bacon rolls and an interesting chat with one of the Headshift team about social CRM - he outlined his thoughts on how to make CRM systems more effective by linking into social networks like LinkedIn rather than everyone trying to update their own systems.  I guess Salesforce.com's acquisition of Jigsaw is a move in that direction as well as smaller startups like Batchbook.

JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist of Salesforce.com reminded us that business has always been social and that social business is about remembering what we've forgotten.  "We engineered the social out of business and now we need to bring it back."  I'm not sure how effective the current tools will be at doing this but I wouldn't argue with the sentiment.

John Hagel, management consultant, writer and co-founder of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation expanded on his recent research and argued that we are moving from a world of diminishing returns into a world of increasing returns through the power of collaborative networks.  While the idea of reduced transaction costs and friction brought about through networked companies/people is not particularly new, John gave some good examples of how this is working in practice.  "Change management is most successful when it starts at the edge not the core of the organisation". John wins the "No PowerPoint" award for his talk - not a slide in sight.  

Stuart McRae, Executive Collaboration Evangelist at IBM, talked about the IBM Jams that have taken place over the last 10 years and helped the company clarify its core aims as well as drive innovation through networked discussions.  Stuart asked an interesting question, "Is social software an aspirin or a vitamin pill?".  His conclusion was that to generate interest in social software you need to identify a problem in the organisation and offer a solution.  This is similar to John Hagel's point that you need to identify pain points and then work out the metrics you will use to determine whether the solution has been successful.

Dion Hinchcliffe, Senior Vice President at Dachis Group showed some interesting slides about where social technologies are heading and made the point that "technology is changing faster than companies can keep up".  This is certainly an opportunity for companies like Dachis which can help organisations navigate their way through the confusion.

Lee Bryant, Headshift co-founder, wrapped up the day by talking about the importance of data to improving business performance and built on the points made previous speakers. I liked his point about exposing companies to the "fresh air of customer insight" through greater interaction and listening.

The other speakers also offered useful insights into the deployment of social technologies in the workplace but the above 5 were probably the most interesting for me. 

Overall, it was great day and I had some interesting discusions in the breaks.  It felt a bit like some of the knowledge management events and conferences I went to in the late 1990s; lots of talk about the potential of new technologies to improve organisational performance and knowledge sharing with some examples thrown in for good measure.  There was a bit of this yesterday but, as one of the delegates I spoke to in one of the breaks said, "perhaps this time it is different".  I tend to agree; there is a lot of hype around the transformative power of social technologies in the workplace but the reality is that they are creeping into organisations from a number of directions and that is only going to increase.

UPDATE: Jim Worth's wiki of the event has lots of links to pictures and blog posts for those interested.