By M. Isi Eromosele

Social Business Design is the intentional creation of dynamic and socially calibrated systems, processes and cultures with a company. The goal is to vastly improve value exchange among constitutions within the corporate entity. Through Social Business Design, a company can re-envision their inherent architecture, preparing them to meet future operational and market challenges as well as the opportunities that future market trends could present.

The ever-increasing overlap between consumer and enterprise technologies has opened up great opportunities for businesses to evolve, further spurring the pace of change. Social Business Design can be applied to three key business practice areas: customer participation | workforce collaboration | business partner optimization. Companies that adapt to the Social Business Design framework, which involves redesigning their process nodes, hubs, staff constituents, connections and signals will be more highly distributed, collaborative, agile and better positioned to succeed.

Trends in technology, society and the workplace are changing the way global business is conducted and there needs to be a rethink of how organizations are structured to take advantage of emerging business and market trends, even as they overcome associated challenges. Social Business Design is a holistic, comprehensive business architecture that facilitates an organization’s ability to improve value exchange within internal constituents as well as their external customers. Social business design turns isolated business silos into dynamic and socially calibrated work environments. Social business design provides insight to help measure and manage various areas of a company in order to produce improved and emergent productivity outcomes.

Addressing a business as a series of interconnected, yet independent nodes is key to an effective business design implementation. The traditional pyramid shaped organizational chart should not be flattened. It should be deconstructed to resemble an interconnected network instead. Precision is critical; it is not about getting everyone connected, it’s about getting the right groups connected in the right way.

Employees will now approach work with a social and collaborative mindset; customers expect and get participation and engagement; suppliers anticipate optimized and efficient processes toward common business goals. The level of collective awareness, engagement and participation is measured with focus on subjective perceptions. Analytics can include surveys, interviews, text analysis and so on. The goal is to gain insight into constituent attitudes towards the value they get from participating versus thee potential for trust issues and conflicts that they perceive.

With Social Business Design, communication becomes an integral part of how workstreams relate to one another, allowing decisions to be made with fresher information. Businesses progress faster towards strategic goals, under the assumption that all activities are on a “need to know” basis and anyone and everyone needs to know all the time.

Social business affords companies the opportunity to engage with customers in ways that traditional one-way communication cannot support. With the ever-increasing adoption of smartphones and other mobile devices, consumers now carry powerful, networked devices everywhere. This constant connectivity drives the expectation of an always on, always available interaction with companies. With countless brands now participating on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, consumers have come to expect, if not demand that companies make themselves available for multi-directional communications.

The above changes present enormous opportunities for brands to harness customer participation to drive value in multiple ways. However, when internal company interactions are not interconnected, this increased customer communication results in disparate threads of dialog, instead of a holistic, meaningful conversation with measurable and actionable results. Social Business Design provides a framework to help companies create value from customer participation.

M. Isi Eromosele is the President | Chief Executive Officer | Executive Creative Director of Oseme Group - Oseme Creative | Oseme Consulting | Oseme Finance

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