Internal Social Business – 2.0 Adoption: People in Progress
The 2.0 Adoption Council has been researching what’s happening on the ground inside of large organizations in the process of internal social business transformation. Along with IBM and MIT’s Center for Digital Business, we’ve created a series of short vignettes and company narratives on how large organizations are finding opportunities and challenges reinventing themselves.
These initiatives are often led by a small team, sometimes a single individual who is driven to help the company work a better way — a more connected, dynamic and socially calibrated way of interacting for business.
The business of transforming a worldwide organization is difficult. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be as rewarding and meaningful. It requires a large amount of patience, perseverance, and oftentimes, courage. We are asking a lot of our fellow corporate colleagues and executive leadership when we ask them to embrace working socially. We are asking them to veer far from their comfort zone and risk more communication, more connectedness, and more transparency in the service of empowering people to do more with less.
In spite of this difficulty, repeatedly we have heard, “This is the most important initiative I’ve ever worked on in my professional life.” The prevailing operational mission at present is to succeed at catalyzing the “ideological reformation” at the root level of the organization that needs to take place before the real business value can be extracted, measured, and fine-tuned.
There’s something extremely inspiring about the people and companies who are leading the charge toward reinventing themselves to become social leaders within their organizations. As you read through these profiles, we hope you’ll come to appreciate that while all of these companies are still early in their process, they all are confident in the success of their long term goals. Some are realizing early successes, while some are struggling. All are passionate believers that there is a powerful evolution at hand driving change in their organizations, an evolution towards Social Business.
You can download the first set of profiles on People in Progress here:
We will continue to track the progress of these adopters.
We’d love to hear your story in the comments, or better yet join the The 2.0 Adoption Council.
Join The 2.0 Adoption Council
If you are working to bring social transformation to your large organization, we invite you to join The 2.0 Adoption Council, an influential peer to peer knowledge sharing community made up of other large enterprise adopters who share your passion for opportunities and the difficulties and challenges associated with adopting Social Business inside large organizations. Membership is free provided you meet the eligibility criteria. More information is found on The 2.0 Adoption Council in the section on how to join.
We’d like to thank IBM and MIT’s Center for Digital Business for lending support and sponsorship to this series of cases and profiles. Special thanks to the @20adoption member companies who participated in the series: Alcatel-Lucent, Alstom, Avery Dennison, Eli Lilly, IBM, MetLife, The MITRE Corporation, Nokia, and Swiss Re along with other The 2.0 Adoption Council members providing anecdotal information.
IBM Social Collaboration Software
Market leaders are using social software to get closer to customers and to transform how work gets done, to accelerate innovation and more easily locate expertise. Organizations that establish a social business environment across their internal and external relationships are outpacing their competitors. IBM Collaboration Software empowers individuals within organizations to stay connected, current, and creative any where, any time, so great thinking doesn’t stay locked behind closed doors. IBM offers the broadest, innovative set of secure Social Software and Unified Communications services for creating Web communities, locating subject matter expertise, project collaboration, content and idea sharing. Quickly locate the expertise you need, no matter where it exists inside or outside of your organization to get the job done faster. Smarter Software for a Smarter Planet.
MIT Center for Digital Business
Founded in 1999, the MIT Center for Digital Business (MIT CDB) is the world’s largest center for research focused on the digital economy. MIT CDB has worked with more than 50 corporate sponsors, funded more than 60 faculty and performed more than 75 research projects. The center’s faculty and sponsors represent the leaders in Digital Business research, analysis and practice worldwide. Together with its partners, MIT’s Center for Digital Business is inventing the future of Digital Business.
