Stowe Boyd

Another Consultingology Business Goes Social

Just as predicted, more of the major business consulting firms are reorienting their services around ‘social business’, even if they are avoiding the term itself.

As I have argued strenuously elsewhere (see Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, And Work Media), we have seen the rapid transition from tactical proselytizing about ‘collaboration’ to ‘enterprise 2.0’, and now the movement to strategic reconceptualization of the company using the metaphor of ‘social business’.

Here, the newest adherent appears to be CapGemini, being counseled by Dr. Enterprise 2.0 himself, Andrew McAfee. McAfee can’t stand to say ‘social business’, since he spent years arguing against the term and at least some of what it has come to mean, so he and CapGemini are talking about ‘digital transformation’, instead.

Mark Fidelman via Business Insider

Don’t believe the world’s businesses are going social? Take this recent declaration from CapGemini’s Managing Director, Global Head of Practices, Didier Bonnet when discussing Social Business with me: “We’ve actually repositioned the entire practice around digital transformation. So for us it’s not just changing one service offering; it’s our entire focus globally for our teams to deliver and to sell.” He came to that crucial decision after MIT and CapGemini interviewed over 160 executives throughout Asia, Europe and North America and discovered that businesses are digitizing.

CapGemini’s decision was further supported by Andy McAfee, MIT’s Principal Research Scientist for Digital Business, view that, “analog companies eventually are going to get swept aside by digital companies. It’s my firmest belief about the future of business.”

While Bonnet and McAfee are careful to avoid the S-word, “social” in our discussions because for most executives it still equates to happy hour, social technologies are an important aspect of their research. Bonnet explains, “it’s becoming a powerful and common word so we’re not fighting it anymore.” Indeed, executives are still terrified of their employees wasting time on social activities, but the visionaries are embracing social as a competitive differentiator.

But just to beat the drum one more time — after all, it’s New Year’s Day, so I should start 2012 fighting this battle — the transformation at work here isn’t companies going digital: it’s companies going tribal. It’s a transition to the open follower model — a la Twitter and Facebook — and a decisive step away from top-down, hierarchical, and centralized management.

The social tools that we have seen work so well, with such enormous and quick uptake in the open web, are based around social networks, and built upon the premises of social media. The versions of these social media tools being adopted for the business context are what I chose to call work media:

Work Media: social tools designed for the enterprise but based on the patterns of interaction, influence, and communication from social networks of the open web. Work media tools share a number of characteristics, most centrally the streaming metaphor of Twitter and Facebook, with short updates from a variety of sources cascade into each user’s dashboard, from which each can derive a networked gestalt of the world. Work media is altering the DNA of business.

So, on a tactical level, businesses are adopting work media, and that is shifting the nature and dimensionality of business communication. When you change the way that people communicate and interact, you change everything. So this seemingly tactical change has deep, strategic impact on the business, and the consultingologists want to ride that wave. There’s money to be made, after all.

It’s not necessarily venal, however: companies can certainly use help in making this transition. But, at the same time, I am not sure that well-established consulting businesses — except younger, smaller, and less old-school ones — are the right resources to look to when trying to make sense of the social revolution. Better to find people who have been scuffling down that road a little bit longer.

Source: Business Insider