I enjoyed some great days in Boston this week, visiting the Enterprise 2.0 conference and gaining new perpectives on strategy at MIT Sloan.
At the E2.0 conference it seemed that Social Media has entered the main stream. Big sponsors includes IBM, Microsoft, EMC, Novell, SAP ... so basically the who-is-who of corporate IT. While not much progress has been made on the product front since last year's event I was very pleased to see my friends at Open Text release their Social Media offering. You may recall that this was originally presented as part of the overall Bloom vision.
What I found most interesting about the E2.0 show this year was not what was presented but what was missing: Customer Focus & Strategy. With the economy down and budgets tight, you would have expected everybody to be 100% focussed on the customer, with clear use cases, easy to implement solutions and a solid strategy how to not just implement a piece of software (or to turn on a service) but how to achieve real results. But interestingly the focus was again entirely on products. Sure we need good products but I have to agree with Craig Hepburn from Open Text that we need "more education and understanding".
This brings me to my second stop, which was just across the river in Cambridge. I had two exciting days with Professor Arnoldo Hax from MIT Sloan. In his executive training session "Reinventing Your Business Strategy" he presents a remarkably simple and compelling strategy model (the Delta Model) that puts the customer in the center of the strategy. Instead of fighting your competition (war) you should care about your customer (love).
I wish that concept would also be applied to by all stakeholders in Social Media: focus on the customer, care so much about them, that you even base your strategy on that. I strongly believe that Social Media will have a major (and positiv) impact on the way we do business. The Social Workplace and the Social Marketplace are going to be a reality very soon. But in order to be successful we need put the customers and their needs in the centre of our thinking.
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I like Arnoldo C. Hax's idea of the different mindset for company strategy. Is the love for the customer he is talking about bought dearly? It might be thinking of traditional ways of listening and reaching out to the customer. Here the web bears the potential to strive after the ideal of the Delta Model with reasonable cost at the same time. I am excited to see more companies and escpecially the management to approach their customers on the web and become aware of the necessity of a social customer focus and dialogue.
I wonder if there is a cyclic aspect to the Delta model as well. Given all companies focus on the customer in the end we might see a lot of sameness. That might be the turning point towards times of war again.
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