This Year’s Ten Digital Strategies for the Next-Generation Enterprise

It’s time for most organizations today to uplevel their technology stance: They must become profoundly proactive about external change and innovation. That’s because technology change is currently happening much faster than most organizations can readily absorb, at least how they’re doing it today. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. More importantly, they should begin putting in place the processes and structural changes required to begin adapting and co-evolving more quickly.

Technology is an enormous amplifier of human effort. However, because it also uses itself as a ladder, it changes more and more quickly as time goes by. Add in the fact that anyone, anywhere can now innovate on top of the current technology curve and distribute their efforts to the world at practically zero cost, and you have a near-perfect recipe for disruption of the traditional status quo for IT in the enterprise. So how can a central bureaucracy that is greatly outnumbered by its customers ever help bring in enough new technology to satisfy the increasingly voracious demand for apps, data, devices, and more?

In short, it’s much later than most IT departments think. Disruption is coming fast in a mobile, cloudy, social world.

Fortunately, there are indeed some ways that might work to address this headon as I’ve explored recently. But as organizations implement these strategies, they also need to bring in the fundamentals of the biggest and most important advances right now. Falling too far behind and becoming a technology laggard means significant and sustained loss of competitiveness that’s very difficult to recover from. With change happening so rapidly, and technology creating a widening gap between the top performers and the 2nd tier, it requires organizations to run a bit faster just to stand still while they make the changes needed to have a more sustainable future. What’s needed is a short list of specific high-impact changes that will also lay the groundwork for future growth and digital transformation.

In my professional opinion, the list below represents the absolute minimum that enterprises should be building skills in and piloting this year. However, most of these are really must-haves now, to have at least in the experimental phase in your organization today. I also realize, from working with hundreds of companies in the last few years, that you’ll typically have less than half of these represented in your organization today. But that’s the point of the list, to find the gaps in your next-generation IT arsenal. I’ve omitted obvious items like BYOD and Big Data platforms like Hadoop, since virtually all organizations have these on their lists already. Note that this is a more tactical viewpoint that what I usually provide. For example, I pick out key planks of new approaches, such as Social CRM and employee social networks, instead of the entire view of social business. Organizations need clarity on where to start to become a next-gen survivor, and this breakdown will help I believe.

First though, what’s a next generation enterprise? My definition is this from my recent breakdown of emerging enterprise IT for 2012:

A next-generation enterprise describes organizations that are proactively moving into the present by changing how they assimilate, architect, apply, and maintain their technology solutions in the context of updating and transforming their processes, structure, and business models to effectively align with and work natively in today’s networked and highly digital economy. While that may be a mouthful, it also accurately describes what most organizations must do to ultimately avoid disruption in the marketplace as technology increasingly defines how our businesses engage with and provide value to the world.

How do organizations start moving into today’s technology present? Below are the top ten digital strategies I believe more enterprises are behind in and need to begin addressing this year:

Mobile customer self-service. This is an official company mobile app that lets your customers engage in (at least) the top ten most frequent customer service activities. The best of these won’t copy the features from your web site but enable new models of customer interaction made possible by mobile device capabilities. Example: The financial services firm USAA turned every one of their customer’s smart mobile device into a mobile bank branch, allowing customers to deposit checks by taking a picture of them inside their app and transmitting it, saving them a trip to the bank.
Open supply chains/APIs. If you aren’t strategically opening up your business for the world to build break-out new products and services on top of, then you should start and start this year. Organizations like the World Bank, Best Buy, and many others are doing what the Internet giants are doing: Building ecosystems. You must too. Get a sense of where the fast moving world of the Internet is heading with this from an overview of my good friend John Musser’s talk at Glue last week.
Employee social network. There are many genuinely potent ways to apply social media to significantly improve outcomes across any organization — see the detailed case studies in Social Business By Design (Wiley, 2012) for game-changing examples — but it’s now clear that every company is getting its own social network. While some will not be strategic to the business or have low levels of use, the data increasingly shows that most organizations get value from them. We already see that organizations are finding social networks proliferating with Chatter, Yammer, Socialcast, SharePoint, and many others. Enterprises much take charge, provide clear leadership, and anoint official social network(s) as appropriate. Bonus points for understanding where ROI in social business comes from and focusing on it with this effort.
Gamified business processes. Perhaps the least important sounding of all of these next-gen enterprise trends, yet I’ve been surprised at how fast some Fortune 500 companies have adopted this. I spoke with the CEO of Badgeville recently and he indicated that nearly 150 of the Fortune 500 were using their gamification platforms. I recently wrote a detailed breakdown of the enterprise gamification space as well that explores some truly impressive results.
Community-based customer care. Organizations like SAP, Intuit, American Express, and others have all demonstrated that customers can support other customers (in general) far better than a company can. Companies have limited resources, customer care is considered overhead, and other customers with similar backgrounds and needs already have better insight they can share. While Social CRM is the official buzzword for this approach and is the industry where you can find the most applicable technology support, you really only need some community software, a simple strategy, and some community managers. Don’t wait, start now. This is where some of the easiest and quickest returns are on this list.
Unified communication. After years of languishing and with market penetration hovering around 30%, unified communication is set to explode this year to help address the channel proliferation problem today. UC is also incorporating social media and otherwise moving beyond the telephony and IM space to become much more strategic. While I’ll be exploring the intersection of UC and social business soon, the latest data from IDG shows that 90% of organizations are looking at unified communications in 2012, a huge leap from last year and one that should be on everyone’s next-gen roadmap.
End-user led IT and competitive #CoIT. Users are going to help lead the technology adoption for next-generation enterprises. Collectively, they have the resources and bandwidth to explore, evaluate, and apply new forms of IT. These include SaaS, disposable apps, mobile devices, and much more to their local technology problems. IT departments will become the curators and enablers, collecting and disseminating best practices across the edges of organizations. As part of this, IT organizations will deliberating put themselves in a competitive position with outside suppliers and 3rd parties. They’re already facing stiff competition from app stores and outsourcing firms, and now they must demonstrate they can effectively compete. You can read up on the CoIT model in my explorations on the topic over the last year.
Mobile IT reinvention. You must be mobile-first for most of your future IT deployment. Mobile is also going to require rethinking IT. Most organizations already know this now, so I don’t need to belabor this point, other than simple translations of legacy IT to tablets will be woefully insufficient and will drive users to 3rd party apps. Read two great cautionary stories about this from Gartner’s Andrea Di Mao.
Migration to the cloud I currently see less focus on moving to the cloud these days. Part of this is because it’s just happening and being baked into many of the services we now use in the enterprise. But I also see a lack of understanding of how strategic the cloud can be. Start moving the edge of IT into the cloud to reap the benefits that go far beyond cost containment and into business agility and innovation. The cloud really does enable entirely new solutions to old problems.
Digital business leadership and transformation. Start laying the groundwork to drive the business when it comes to moving to digital business models, where the future of most companies lies. CIOs and other IT leaders should be moving away from an infrastructure focus and to a business innovation focus as quickly as possible. While this is far easier to say than do, the very future of IT is at stake as CFOs increasingly focus on moving infrastructure out to the cloud. The future of IT is digital leadership, and less in technical plumbing, even though that will remain vital at a strategic level.