Perspectives & Strategy

According to Chris Potts “the CIO role… is destined to become either an executive leader of business change or absorbed into another role” and “the need for corporate leadership in change has never been greater and is unlikely to recede”. I wholy agree with Chris here. In looking at this statement it is to me that the change is happening more rapidly now than at any time in the past.

Over the last 12 months the value of the Chief Information Officer’s role has been called into question by a number commentators. In an earlier article (CIO Strategy Development) I stated “CIO’s role is more than simply managing IT staff and ensure that systems and networks are up and running” and that they “have largely become the Chief Change Officer by leading their organization’s strategic business change initiatives”. We are at a time when many CEO’s are questioning the value of the entire team on the top table, with The Bolton Group stating that 20% of CEO’s rate their top teams as ‘High Performing’ I feel it is particularly important that IT provides an extraordinary performance. In fact there is a revenue generating opportunity opening up right now that many corporations are missing as the world changes in front of our eyes.

Web 2.0 is adding to the corporate challenge. The relationship between employer and employee is changing. The change is more of a social change than it is a technological one, albeit founded on a technological platform. Each worker connections booth professionally and in a social context. The development of Social Media may have allowed us to reconnect with out old school and college friends but it also has the perspective to allow business development. However in some respects the world of Business and Social activities are different, but are they? The biggest group of new users to Facebook is in the 50 to 59 age bracket, many of whom are people of real influence in business today.

In the business world we are not interested on my auntie Mavis as she explores the world (well perhaps you are if you are in the Travel industry), but you may be interested in connecting with the production manager that I know in order to sell them Lean/6Sigma training. The fact that we are connected may facilitate that sale.We must understand that posting something on a social networking site has a different dynamic to chatting at the water-cooler. Having a Twitter conversation is not private – others will be listening. Whilst the majority of our listeners are ambivalent to our messages, some can have sinister intent. Some listeners may also be clients or prospects, so we had better watch what we say. The way we leverage relationships is changing, our network is one of the keys to building our business. We also have to be on our guard for mis-information, especially where we are looking to react to changes in the marketplace.

However should a corporation change everything that it is doing to adopt Social Media? This is where it is important to understand whether any new channel is going to give benefit. This understanding comes from leveraging a technology the corporation already has, its Business Intelligence solution. This is developing a new focus, a Marketing Intelligence. Marketing intelligence should look at our sales, customer services, and marketing efforts and ensure that they are correctly focused. There is little point is saying “All is well we are selling millions of widgets” when the company wishes to expand the market for ‘dongles’. The question is largely selling the right thing to the right person at the right time.

A couple of years ago I deployed a solution for a Telecom company that leveraged Business Intelligence to enhance the existing Customer Services and Sales solutions. The demographics about the customer, plus information on past performance would determine whether to offer an improved service to a customer, particularly when they wanted to terminate their service and move to a new supplier. If the demographic was right valuable offers could be made that would retain the customer. For this corporation BI drives their sales and marketing efforts. At the same time you must also be able to recognise that a customer is not worth the effort and therefore minimise sales effort as they are not profitable.

This value proposition is even more important when is comes to marketing through the Social Media channel. Whilst Dell have claimed to have made $1million via the Twitter channel in 2008, see here, I am not sure that many corporations can quantify the impact of Social Media sales so accurately. Predicting it is much more complex.

Leveraging Social Media for marketing must be cost effectively deployed. This is more that merely defining a Social Media policy it is about having a corporate policy that leverages this new channel to its advantage.