Your Company As Network Nodes

Network? Nodes? Faz-me lembrar a apresentação do Marc Smith a semana passada :)

"Your Company As Network Nodes

Companies today are doing a lot of redundant work. They build costly infrastructure and process to internally replicate functions that customers and prospects give away for free online. This is clearest in the world of customer service where third-party ecosystems like Get Satisfaction and Yahoo Answers are building a case for social media as a supplement (if not replacement) for the traditional internal customer service and research model.

Lane Becker, President of GetSatisfaction, gave a presentation at Dachis Group’s Social Business Summit on how enterprises need to re-organize to grapple with this phenomenon. His solution? Recognize that a corporation is not separate and distinct from its customers, prospects and employees, but rather is a networked creature composed of all these stakeholders. In essence, your company is a bunch of nodes in the network.

Suspend disbelief for a moment and swallow this definition wholly. What are the ramifications? If you can accept that the chief difference between your employees and customers is that some get paid to discuss your product, then it isn’t much of a logical leap to start grabbing and internalizing anything of value that your customers and prospects are willing to give you.

In his presentation Lane outlined a series of principles aimed at helping companies wrap their mind around this change:

Control to Cacophony – Companies move slower than technological change happens. Failing repeatedly (or put a nicer way “iteration”) is the only way to change quickly enough to keep up.

Less Hierarchy – Don’t get rid of all hierarchy, but empower your employees to improvise based on the signals they receive from your internal and external networks.

Prevention to Recovery – Rather than preventing negative outcomes, embed the capacity to recover quickly from failure. Empowered employees will fail. Build the capacity to apologize, learn and move on.

Walls to Windows – Create transparency at the edges of your business – this means letting your network know who owns what aspect of their favorite (or most hated) product. Give them access to that person.

Ownership to Stewardship – Understand that you probably shouldn’t be in charge of every aspect of your products. Don’t try to move the customers away from where they want to be and embrace where they are.

Some of these principles are more easily executed than others, but the overarching theme is the same – if you aren’t fully utilizing your ecosystem, then you are leaving value on the table.

What do you think? Is your company still duplicating functions that your network would give you for free?"

artigo retirado DAQUI.