A very interesting post combines the idea of social CRM to communicate to customers, and Adaptive Case Management (ACM) for continual improvement within the enterprise, to for a compelling vision for the enterprise of the future.
Emanuele Quintarelli posted “From clients to processes. The marriage between Social CRM and Adaptive Case Management.” The social CRM engages the customer for feedback in order to provide a better experience, while the ACM side engages internal communities to improve processes in order to gain better actionable insight. The idea is summarized best in the following graphic:
This is similarly a representation of “Agile Business” which is a business that is able to monitor its effectiveness, and quickly modify behavior to meet the needs of the market. Agililty has been the goal of business for a long time, and it seems that “social networking” is a new way to help achieve this.
He has a whole series of relevant posts on social business and social CRM topics. Highlights:
- Toward the Social Business – offers a definition of Social Business (which looks like Agile business) and includes reflections of what this means, including this gem:
The ultimate reason of existence for the corporation is no longer to generate value for its traditional stakeholders but the maximize the exchanged value between the company and the entire ecosystem
- A social business maturity model – he outlines four dimensions along which we can measure the amount of adoption of social techniques, (culture, organizational approach, customer involvement, and social technology) and five steps along those dimensions that take an organization from island, to membrane, to channel, to social CRM and ultimately to social business.
As more companies begin to be interested or in some cases to effectively launch new initiatives for involving customers and employees to improve their business, a possible sequence of cultural, technological, organizational maturity stages starts to show up.
Very interesting; looking forward to future posts in there.
Thinking Matters 
Keith,
I’m simply flattered to be part of your posts. I’m reading Mastering the Unpredictable and trying to catch up with all the great material you and the ACM community has been sharing.
I believe what is really needed is breaking down silos and creating a common ground among a bunch of different domains like ACM, Social CRM, Social PLM, Social ERP. While Social Business is starting to be the umbrella term under which many of these discussions are coming together, many more (especially not technological) central pieces are still in their infancy like new management paradigms, open leadership, employee empowerment and customer engagement.
Would love to talk more about this bigger picture and to bring some of these insights at next year Social Business Forum (4th edition of the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0, see http://www.enterprise2forum.it/en) we’ll be organizing in Milan.
Cheers,
Emanuele
This comment from Frank Michael Kraft (from Linked in):
Yes, a lot will change in the company of the future. The waterfall model for product develoment is like stone age. Knowledge workers in develoment will increasingly profit from direct customer feedback.
On the other hand, it is obvious, that including customer feedback into product planning – even if it is no waterfall model – will still be challenging, because it is clear, that there are irreducible complex units of work, that can only be done as a whole or not (because if they are done half, they cause more harm than improve anything). And there are dependencies.
Understanding and judging all of these constraints is and will be the task of the knowledge worker.
And ACM in product develoment combined with CRM is definitely a big application area.