The pace of advance today can seem overwhelming. It is new mobile devices, social media, cloud services, avalanches of sensor or crowd-created data, all brought to our doorstep via new digital channels and platforms such as mobile apps, app stores, open APIs, new social networks, gamification tools, to name just a few of the bigger and more disruptive technologies.

To proactively deal with all this, I currently advise most companies to develop a “strategy book” that they can readily use to identify important new advances, understand their abilities and ramifications, and then determine the impact to their business, both in terms of opportunity and challenges. Note: The aforementioned workshops typically provide the basis for such a strategy book and the processes required.

Unfortunately for most companies, there are often more challenges than opportunities, since many of these new technologies go against the grain of how traditional companies are structured and operate. Openness, decentralized processes, mass participation, network effects, and radically new distribution models for communication and work are not merely typical of today’s consumer technologies, it’s how they fundamentally work and compete against each other.

Put simply, to survive these generational shifts, organizations must figure out how to absorb new technology changes effectively and at scale. This will require potent strategies that will begin with requiring genuine rethinking of service delivery within our organizations and ultimately arrive at a profound transformation of the company. This will ultimately include its business models, motivations, and sometimes even its reasons for being. One can look at Amazon as an exemplar of this, starting out in e-commerce, and ending up a true and surprisingly pure digital platforms company, successfully wielding mobile, platforms, cloud, and big data to achieve market domination. Amazon is the most well known, but there are others and the route is repeatable, just as it is sometimes difficult.

The end point of all this is where everything is a service, as Dave Gray famously predicted. But also it’s more than that. The future of the enterprise, what I’m calling the next-generation enterprise, requires a mindset that doesn’t think in terms of fixed markets or point products or services. Instead, we must create, cultivate, and control fast-moving and highly competitive ecosystems of people, information, and value across a virtually unlimited number of channels. Those who can move first, co-create, and own the best class of information and then deliver it in forms the market wants, when it wants it, will be the winners in the short-term and long-term. Companies organized to do any less than this will falter and fade.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about and exploring how organizations can get there. There’s still a lot we need to learn, but we’re beginning to see the broad outlines. Unfortunately, there still more questions than answers, even today. Can most organizations make the transition? Does the transition to a next-generation enterprise have multiple routes, if so, what are they? How much investment is required and what is the likelihood of failure? Can we quantify and manage the risk of transforming? All of these questions and more remain difficult to answer.

Related: How Digital Business Will Evolve in 2012: 6 Big Ideas

However, we do know with a fair degree of certainty that most large organizations will need to begin changing faster — starting now — if they intend to survive. Most will need to become next-generation enterprises in a meaningful way within the next half-decade. And they need to have started several years ago.

As we enter the age of digital engagement, the untapped possibilities still largely exist. Most organizations should be utterly thrilled by the uncharted territories in front of them. Unfortunately, I see that most do not even see these as more than a threat, if they see them at all. That then is the first challenge: Changing how we regard our connection and relation to the world, for the biggest changes happening today are not only digital, but to ourselves and what makes our companies work.

Slide provided to industry analysts and press by Salesforce

Liveblogging and analysis of the Dreamforce opening keynote

9:00am: Peter Coffee is doing opening introductions and safe harbor notices.

9:01am: Now introducing MC Hammer onto the stage…

9:03am: Really trying to pump up the crowd, like it needs it very much… Singing Too Legit to Quit

9:07am: OK, MC Hammer is offstage after doing a quick shout out to social business platforms.

9:09am: Montage of Salesforce and customer stories. Burberry, General Electric, Men’s Wearhouse, Perrier, and many others.

9:11am: Plenty of pounding music and video about Salesforce products, customers, and stories. Quite a bit of mention of both social and sales. No one on stage yet, it’s all video.

9:13am: Now Marc Benioff is up on stage in front of a Business Is Social banner. “I’m going to help you walk through a door. You’ve created the world’s largest technology event. Saying 90,000 people registered for the event. “The Cloud is coming…”

9:17am: Reviewing Salesforce’s charitable efforts. Putting 1% of their equity, profit, and product into a 501(c)3 charity. Very proud of the 350,000 hours of service and $40 million in grants donated.

9:19am: Announces they’re giving away $10 million to San Francisco District 10, five grantees in all. Also grants to $4 million to JCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital.

9:20am: “We are standing on the shoulders’ of giants.” Talking about mainframes, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, and client/server computing. Google for creating the cloud. Amazon and Jeff Bezos gets a shout-out. Mentions the “late great” Steve Jobs as a visionary, gets a big hand from the crowd.

9:21am: “The social revolution is being led by many new prophets.” Mentions Mark Zuckerberg. Moving forward in the continuum. That’s why we’re all here at this conference. “This social revolution is unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before.” A single video on YouTube can cause massive disruption around the world. (Clearly referring to the Innocence of Muslims video.)

9:22am: Asking the audience how many companies use social in their busineses today in some way. Most of the audience raises their hands. Says 70% of businesses use social in how they work. Cites McKinsey’s $1.3 trillion economic benefit stat for social business. Most of the audience raises their hands.

9:24am: Says social is now the fastest growth investment of any IT category.

9:25am: CEO study reports that business leaders think social will be one of top 2 ways to engage with customers.

9:27am: “Our core mission is to help you connect with your customers in a whole new way.” It’s not just about how or why we’re connecting. It goes deeper. It’s getting down into the fundamental interaction between each one of us. Because we’re changing how we’re doing business. How we interact with our employees, customer, partners. It’s incredible what’s happening. It’s getting down to a fundamental change in business.”

Related: Eight Ways to Prepare to Socially Engage at Scale

9:28am: “About 5 years ago we went through a big transformation. We realized we had to change our core values. Customer success was our highest value. But we saw something else. To really be successful in this new time. We would really have to become a company customers could trust. We’d need more openness and transparency. Half transparency isn’t enough. We’d have to focus on individuals, with greater alignment, and leadership than ever before. To do this we’d have to get to a level of trust that would take our industry — and that would take us — to a whole new level.”

9:30am: “The social revolution is a trust revolution. The incredible value of trust.”

9:30am: “Are you and your company going through a social revolution? We believe that this will demarcate the companies that will be successful going forward. The future is about being connected to workers, customers, and partners.” Now talking about Jeff Immelt reaching out to Mark to talk about the future of GE. He went to talk to GE’s top executives.

9:32am: Continuing the discussion about talking with Jeff Immelt about the future of GE. Immelt said two things. First, said the future of GE is about the man/machine interface. They make CAT scanners, turbines, jet engines. Those machines are becoming more and more intelligent. The future of our profitability and revenue is about the effectiveness of their customer engagement. Talking about APIs and ‘socially’ collaborating with GE products which will get feeds, status updates, and other social trapping around their products. Side note: Social products is a hot topic.

Related: Last year’s Dreamforce 11 Keynote Live Blog

9:34am: Talking about the GE Share vision still and how GE is planning to connect with customers in a whole new way. Citing Toyota Friend from last year’s keynote. Now showing a video of how GE is using social to connect employees to customers to machines.

9:38am: Video is exploring how jet engines are being integrated into the social fabric of running GE. Social and Salesforce “helped connect the dots” and makes the business more approachable. “If you’re a business, you need to become social to get closer to the customer.”

9:40am: Mark is back and talking about how social adds value to the business. Now inviting Charlene Begley the President and CEO of Home Product Division up to talk. Saying “GE is Social.”

9:41am: “Social is about accelerating learning, communication, and access to information.” Have 300,000 people that need to turn data into information. Social unlocks huge value.

9:42am: Mark: “How to transform the way that you sell to your customers? Market to your customers? Support your customers? How to do you transform the way that you collaborate with your customers? How to transform how you fundamentally work inside your organization.” Says Forbes has selected Salesforce has selected them twice as the most innovative company. “How do you transform how you innovate?”

9:44am: “Social Revolution: The New Social Front Office, Where Trust Lives.” Now breaking down the benefits of social business. “How do we give you the information you need to go back and transform your companies?” Going to tell six stories of six companies to illustrate how it’s done.

9:46am: Marc’s social business benefits summary slide: +32% sales productivity, +29% innovation, +34% employee satisfaction, +31% employee productivity, +37% campaign effectiveness, +34% customer satisfaction. Jibes well with our meta-synthesis of benefits as well.

9:48am: The first story is up. Rossignol discusses in detail their experience with social business and sales.

9:52am: Announcing Salesforce Touch: “Sales is now social. Data is now social.”

9:53am: Talking about Salesforce Partner Communities. Doing a demo of how companies can selectively open up to partners to enable them to collaborate better. Using example of REI, Rossignol, and skis where they can plan collaboratively using social tools. Really switching from the vision down to specific product information. Crowd a little less engaged but it is useful functionality in terms of getting the full context of what’s going on in terms of complex sales environments.

9:56am: Continuing the demo, showing mobile devices and Salesforce Touch in context of a meeting in the field. “Has everything she needs in her hand, can see her Chatter feed, last minute updates. Using ‘digital sales aid’ instead of PowerPoint. Doing a presentation with video and answering all questions on the fly, all using the Salesforce experience. Has integrated experience right to the customer signature and closing the deal in a single seamless experience from presentation to closed deal. Fairly impressive. Saying “That is social selling.” Seeing the power of “social data”.

10:00am: Switching back to Mark (didn’t catch the name of the last person.) Talking about seamless integration of Salesforce and Chatter. Says he lives in the app himself. Now introducing CEO of Rossignol, Burno Cercley.

10:01am: Going to explore how social is transforming Rossignol, says “saving time is part of the DNA of Rossignol. In racing, 100th of second can make you very sad or very happy. Time is of the essence. If we lose a day, we can lose a season. We need to understand the business as quickly as possible. The only way to get the info from the sales guy to marketing, product development, etc is key. We need to understand what’s going on. [Social] is how we will do this.”

10:03am: Now Charles Schwab’s CIO, Brad Peterson is up and talking about becoming a social business. I like what Mark is saying about trust (he should, given the industry.) “To be a social business, you have to have the DNA of your company support this.” 7,000 advisors are building on the Schwab platform, which Salesforce is providing. Advisors build the relationship with the customer, are building communities to improve this connection.

10:05am: Mark: “We are telling you these social business stories to help you transform yourself and your organizations.” 7,700 employees. #1 video game publisher. Rolling a video on how they’re using social. Says they believe that the “swarming aspect” of addressing an emerging problem is going to be key to success. Great Social CRM example, though would love hard numbers.

10:08am: Fergus Griffin, senior VP of marketing, is up. “We’ve just seen this fantastic social transformation of Activision.” Using Service Cloud to do this. Citing http://ideas.salesfore.com. Really pitching Service Cloud, includes federated search, internal objects as knowledge, external sources such as SharePoint. Available as pilot in 2013. Talking about new Chatter Communities for self-service. Combined best of social networking with customer self-service processes.

10:12am: Fergus is going through some detailed scenarios of how they support customers using social CRM. Examples include GameStop, Activision, and Twitter.

10:15am: “Bringing together people to support each other is a customer service dream.” Talking about how Activision has created a ‘Facebook for gamers.’ Have one for Call of Duty and shows examples of how customers support each other, including using gamers to rate the accuracy of socially co-created answers.

10:17am: Continuing very detailed scenarios about using multichannel customer support, including FaceTime and other ways to ensure customers can get the help they need.

Related: CRM investments ramp due to social media and smart mobility

10:19am: Using Service Cloud to redefine what customer service systems looks like. Inviting Robert Schmidt, global CIO of Activision up on stage. Interviewing him on his vision for the future. “Our games are very social, we have 1-2 million people play every day. What the future holds for us is that [social] is not just a technology change, it’s a cultural one.” Telling a story about how social networking in their company. How an employee was hesitant to respond to an issue because their boss hadn’t yet. Said this is the cultural change we need to enable.

10:22am: Mark: Introducing the CEO of Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman, says he’s the “Father of Trust.” Mark: “Give us some insight on the medium of social networking.”

10:23am: “We have so many tapping into content on the go. All over the country and all over the world. Mobile is one of our key focus areas as social goes mobile.”

10:24am: Mark: “We want to start a new journey with you. We’re going to show you a brand new application today. It’s really incredible. The company that we’re going to use to illustrate this is Commonwealth Bank. Australia’s largest bank.” Rolling video.

10:25am: “You can extend this new world to any one, any time. If you look at the social integration in the business, things like Chatter allow the narrative of the organization to be captured and shared.”

10:27am: Mark: “By 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs.” Sidebar: My take on the future of CIOs and CMOs.

10:28am: Introducing Brett Queener, EVP of Marketing Cloud. “Social represents the biggest change to marketing in the last 60 years.” We’re hearing: “We’ve been managing social with one or two people over here in the corner. That’s not going to work any more. They need to manage marketing over every one of their workers and customers.” Talking about the integration of Radian6 and BuddyMedia. “The industries first integrated marketing suite. We all have the ability to do social marketing right.” Certainly, this is a hot space. Note: We’re not doing so bad on this either, as are some others, but it is a compelling story.

10:34am: Brett continuing to show the integrated vision of Marketing Cloud, with real time connection between mobile, Facebook, Twitter, and the social Web. Showing campaign performance, dashboards, demographic breakdowns, and drill downs using Commonwealth Bank as an example. High polish, all in the inimitable Salesforce style. Mobile is a major, if not the primary, focus here, which is interesting.

10:38am: “We can employ the marketing cloud to use the voice of our customer. We can show ROI across both paid and earned media. Can clearly show the number of new customers that we’ve brought into Commonwealth Bank through the power of social. Can you really easily engage and advertise, and understand the return on social? Yes, you can.”

10:40am: Mark is back thanking how everyone collaborated together to create the Marketing Cloud, “it’s a new door for us, an incredible new capability. Bringing up Andy Lark, CMO of Commonwealth Bank. “What is your vision for marketing?”

10:41am: People don’t have PCs as much, now they have smartdevices. Marketing has had all these point solutions, unlike ERP and other IT systems, it’s been hard for companies to adopt. The implication is that Marketing Cloud is an integrated enough solution to be the face of marketing capability.

10:43am: Introducing George Zimmer, CEO of the Men’s Wearhouse, famous gravelly voice and all. “Well as you know, we built our business on baby boomers and a billion in advertising. We’re now transforming our company to address the millennial generation. Using Marketing Cloud to find out what they like and don’t like.” Nice: “You’ll like the way Salesforce works, I guarantee it.”

10:45am: Now Mark is talking about Virgina America, a $1 billion airline with 2,500 employees. “Culture is something the other airlines can’t replicate. The people are our business, it’s the one thing that makes us a lot different. We’ve been through a rapid growth phase that’s been challenging. This linear communication era that we’ve come out of is no longer happening. How can we make our customers part of the conversation? We found Chatter to be part of the solution. Chatter will let us give customers a personalized experience.” They’re showing how the airline can engage with customers right in the seat, on the screen they provide.

10:49am: Now Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris is up on stage talking about Salesforce Chatter. “Chatter brings social to collaboration.” Introducing Salesforce Chatter for Communities. Facebook for Customer, Partners, and Employees. Trusted security and sharing, pilot with Winter ’13 release.

10:51am: “I’m here today to announce Salesforce Chatterbox.” Sync files across any device. Preview/read documents. Secure File Sharing. Essentially a social Dropbox. Showing a Virgin America skinned version of Chatterbox, “because it’s a platform”, says Parker.

10:54am: Continuing a demo of Virgin Atlantic with many specific examples and using Chatterbox. Interesting demo of sending a Chatter message to an airplane in flight. “Sees a message popup in his seat back.” Shows how Virgin America can provide information on his late flight, his next gate, etc. using Salesforce Chatter Communities. Looks like real functionality from their Red platform. Hands it back to Mark. “Isn’t that an incredible demonstration of the future, integration.”

11:00am: Inviting CEO of Virgin America, David Cush, up to talk. “Social is the best way to get a tip about an airline.” Typically airline communication is very chain of command, we’re changing that to be very egalitarian.”

11:01am: Just brought up famous motivational speaker Tony Robbins, who has a keynote on another day. Aggressive user of Chatter in his organization, they are creating communities where customers can solve their own challenges (using Chatter of course.) Talking about the notorious firewalk emergency recently, how they used Radian6 to manage the crisis. “I’d say the future is connect or die, connect and you win.”

11:05am: Showing a video about how the workplace is changing. “In today’s world, how work gets done is very much social. With your peers, co-workers, and customers.”

11:07am: This is going to be a spectacular new journey. Introducing John Wookey, EVP of Work.com, and Social Applications. “The world of work is changing. Work is social, business is social.” When they see high performing companies, they see alignment. “We talk about leadership, passion, and hard work. But we don’t talk about human resources.” We have to align our team and drive our teams to give great performance over and over.”

11:09am: Announcing Work.com, and a social HR Performance Management Platform. “Completely redesigned from the ground up. We’ve created a continuing evolving vision of work.” Giving a demo of how Work.com supports the culture of the company and helps organizations come together to create success. Can help create motivation, “like a Tony Robbins avatar.” Work.com is a set of applications that will motivate, align, and create great performance. It will drive engagement and impact. Work.com is goals, it’s the foundation. Created with a manager and their team.

11:12am: “Traditional performance reviews are demotivating. They don’t work.” “Creates a single simple real-time performance review. Employees or managers can have a conversation at any time about their performance with the company.” Walking through Facebook’s recruiting process.

11:14am: Have created a new iPad recruiting app. Now talking about Facebook, about how it has created a holistic talent management platform with Workday and the Work.com platform. Pretty impressive stuff and a good view of the workings inside of Facebook.

11:17am: Back to Mark. Welcoming Tim Campos, Global CIO of Facebook, to talk about their story. “Social is inherent in who we are. And it’s helped propel us to have more than 950M people on the site. At Facebook, we say the site is only 1% finished. The way we’re going to get there is through our workforce, and it’s about the people. We have incredibly intelligent individuals. But it’s not about the org chart or structure. It’s about the relationships. We need tools to help us facilitate that.”

11:19am: The new view de-emphasizes the the cost center. “Our workforce is encouraged to provide continuous and authentic feedback every day.” Talking about how they use Work.com presumably. “The next generation of workforce tools is going to create this kind of relationship between employees.”

11:21am: Introducing Aneel Bushri, CEO of Workday, thanking Mark and talking about their partnership. Now switching to the social business story of Coca Cola and how they’re making their beverages social. It’s clear Salesforce is trying to show how social is really happening, now.

11:25am: Continuing video of Coca-Cola, which is talking about mobile, cloud, social, networked environments, and how they are trying to embrace consumerization and mass personalization. I expect another executive introduction.

11:27am: Introducing George Hu, COO of Salesforce. “I want to bring it all back to the most important question. How do we get there? How do we get our organizations get to that level of innovation that we’ve seen [here.] How do we get there. The how is at the heart of Salesforce.com. We want to make the social transformation as easy as a post on Facebook.” Giving a hard pitch for the entire Salesforce.com platform and all its many component for cloud-enabling social.

11:29am: Talking about Touch and Identity as two major announcements. AppExhcange, 1,700 apps, 70% of Fortune 100 customers have installed apps. I think he said 1.4 million users.

11:31am: Looks like Salesforce Identity is going to open the social graph for enterprises, very interesting. All standards-based says George. “Many of us have thousands and thousands of apps written on other platform. We want to create a seamless social identity for them.” Potentially bigger news: Introducing Force.com Canvas, Gets enterprise apps in Salesforce, just like Facebook. “Can unlock a tremendous innovation. Makes all your legacy applications social and mobile.” Wondering how OpenSocial fits in.

Related: Enterprise Social Networks Need Open Standards

11:34am: Now announcing Salesforce Touch Platform. Write Once Deploy Anywhwere. HTML 5, Native, and Hybrid. Secure as well they say.

11:40am: Very detailed demos continuing. Lots of mobile and social.

11:42am: Back to Mark. “I’m so excited about this vision. We keep seeing this same thing: We’re connected to our customers, to our companies, and products.” Introducing Ed Steinike, CIO of Coca-Cola. “Ed, you’re an amazing CIO. One of the industry leaders. Made a major investment in SAP in the back office. Now you’re making a major investment in the front office in social.”

11:44am: Ed: “We do 1.8 billion servings per day of our product. We want to connect those 1.8 billion happy customers with all layers of our company. Mobile is the way this happens.” Mark thanks Ed, that was quick. Now talking about the mobile tsunami.

Related: The “Big Five” IT trends of the next half decade: Mobile, social, cloud, consumerization, and big data

11:45am: Final vignette of the keynote: Burberry. Their CEO, Angela Ahrents, talking on video.

11:50am: Now she’s actually here up on stage. I’ve told their social business story in detail before, which is quite impressive. Talking about their mobile engagement at the Olympics in London. “This is the future [holding her mobile device.]“

11:52am: Going over their new mobile experience and putting RFID into the products and immersive virtual experiences that gives the backstory of the products your holding. Thanking Angela, who is definitely a social business and next-generation enterprise leader.

11:54am: And that’s a wrap. Marc finishes and the lights and music turn up. I’ll post analysis on ZDNet as soon as I’m able.

Technology is an enormous amplifier of human effort. However, because it also uses itself as a ladder, it changes more and more quickly as time goes by. Add in the fact that anyone, anywhere can now innovate on top of the current technology curve and distribute their efforts to the world at practically zero cost, and you have a near-perfect recipe for disruption of the traditional status quo for IT in the enterprise. So how can a central bureaucracy that is greatly outnumbered by its customers ever help bring in enough new technology to satisfy the increasingly voracious demand for apps, data, devices, and more?

In short, it’s much later than most IT departments think. Disruption is coming fast in a mobile, cloudy, social world.

Fortunately, there are indeed some ways that might work to address this headon as I’ve explored recently. But as organizations implement these strategies, they also need to bring in the fundamentals of the biggest and most important advances right now. Falling too far behind and becoming a technology laggard means significant and sustained loss of competitiveness that’s very difficult to recover from. With change happening so rapidly, and technology creating a widening gap between the top performers and the 2nd tier, it requires organizations to run a bit faster just to stand still while they make the changes needed to have a more sustainable future. What’s needed is a short list of specific high-impact changes that will also lay the groundwork for future growth and digital transformation.

In my professional opinion, the list below represents the absolute minimum that enterprises should be building skills in and piloting this year. However, most of these are really must-haves now, to have at least in the experimental phase in your organization today. I also realize, from working with hundreds of companies in the last few years, that you’ll typically have less than half of these represented in your organization today. But that’s the point of the list, to find the gaps in your next-generation IT arsenal. I’ve omitted obvious items like BYOD and Big Data platforms like Hadoop, since virtually all organizations have these on their lists already. Note that this is a more tactical viewpoint that what I usually provide. For example, I pick out key planks of new approaches, such as Social CRM and employee social networks, instead of the entire view of social business. Organizations need clarity on where to start to become a next-gen survivor, and this breakdown will help I believe.

First though, what’s a next generation enterprise? My definition is this from my recent breakdown of emerging enterprise IT for 2012:

A next-generation enterprise describes organizations that are proactively moving into the present by changing how they assimilate, architect, apply, and maintain their technology solutions in the context of updating and transforming their processes, structure, and business models to effectively align with and work natively in today’s networked and highly digital economy. While that may be a mouthful, it also accurately describes what most organizations must do to ultimately avoid disruption in the marketplace as technology increasingly defines how our businesses engage with and provide value to the world.

How do organizations start moving into today’s technology present? Below are the top ten digital strategies I believe more enterprises are behind in and need to begin addressing this year:

1. Mobile customer self-service. This is an official company mobile app that lets your customers engage in (at least) the top ten most frequent customer service activities. The best of these won’t copy the features from your web site but enable new models of customer interaction made possible by mobile device capabilities. Example: The financial services firm USAA turned every one of their customer’s smart mobile device into a mobile bank branch, allowing customers to deposit checks by taking a picture of them inside their app and transmitting it, saving them a trip to the bank.
2. Open supply chains/APIs. If you aren’t strategically opening up your business for the world to build break-out new products and services on top of, then you should start and start this year. Organizations like the World Bank, Best Buy, and many others are doing what the Internet giants are doing: Building ecosystems. You must too. Get a sense of where the fast moving world of the Internet is heading with this from an overview of my good friend John Musser’s talk at Glue last week.
3. Employee social network. There are many genuinely potent ways to apply social media to significantly improve outcomes across any organization — see the detailed case studies in Social Business By Design (Wiley, 2012) for game-changing examples — but it’s now clear that every company is getting its own social network. While some will not be strategic to the business or have low levels of use, the data increasingly shows that most organizations get value from them. We already see that organizations are finding social networks proliferating with Chatter, Yammer, Socialcast, SharePoint, and many others. Enterprises much take charge, provide clear leadership, and anoint official social network(s) as appropriate. Bonus points for understanding where ROI in social business comes from and focusing on it with this effort.
4. Gamified business processes. Perhaps the least important sounding of all of these next-gen enterprise trends, yet I’ve been surprised at how fast some Fortune 500 companies have adopted this. I spoke with the CEO of Badgeville recently and he indicated that nearly 150 of the Fortune 500 were using their gamification platforms. I recently wrote a detailed breakdown of the enterprise gamification space as well that explores some truly impressive results.
5. Community-based customer care. Organizations like SAP, Intuit, American Express, and others have all demonstrated that customers can support other customers (in general) far better than a company can. Companies have limited resources, customer care is considered overhead, and other customers with similar backgrounds and needs already have better insight they can share. While Social CRM is the official buzzword for this approach and is the industry where you can find the most applicable technology support, you really only need some community software, a simple strategy, and some community managers. Don’t wait, start now. This is where some of the easiest and quickest returns are on this list.
6. Unified communication. After years of languishing and with market penetration hovering around 30%, unified communication is set to explode this year to help address the channel proliferation problem today. UC is also incorporating social media and otherwise moving beyond the telephony and IM space to become much more strategic. While I’ll be exploring the intersection of UC and social business soon, the latest data from IDG shows that 90% of organizations are looking at unified communications in 2012, a huge leap from last year and one that should be on everyone’s next-gen roadmap.
7. End-user led IT and competitive #CoIT. Users are going to help lead the technology adoption for next-generation enterprises. Collectively, they have the resources and bandwidth to explore, evaluate, and apply new forms of IT. These include SaaS, disposable apps, mobile devices, and much more to their local technology problems. IT departments will become the curators and enablers, collecting and disseminating best practices across the edges of organizations. As part of this, IT organizations will deliberating put themselves in a competitive position with outside suppliers and 3rd parties. They’re already facing stiff competition from app stores and outsourcing firms, and now they must demonstrate they can effectively compete. You can read up on the CoIT model in my explorations on the topic over the last year.
8. Mobile IT reinvention. You must be mobile-first for most of your future IT deployment. Mobile is also going to require rethinking IT. Most organizations already know this now, so I don’t need to belabor this point, other than simple translations of legacy IT to tablets will be woefully insufficient and will drive users to 3rd party apps. Read two great cautionary stories about this from Gartner’s Andrea Di Mao.
9. Migration to the cloud I currently see less focus on moving to the cloud these days. Part of this is because it’s just happening and being baked into many of the services we now use in the enterprise. But I also see a lack of understanding of how strategic the cloud can be. Start moving the edge of IT into the cloud to reap the benefits that go far beyond cost containment and into business agility and innovation. The cloud really does enable entirely new solutions to old problems.
10. Digital business leadership and transformation. Start laying the groundwork to drive the business when it comes to moving to digital business models, where the future of most companies lies. CIOs and other IT leaders should be moving away from an infrastructure focus and to a business innovation focus as quickly as possible. While this is far easier to say than do, the very future of IT is at stake as CFOs increasingly focus on moving infrastructure out to the cloud. The future of IT is digital leadership, and less in technical plumbing, even though that will remain vital at a strategic level.

What’s on your list of the top digital strategies for organizations this year? Please add your thoughts in comments below.

See Also:

Connecting Digital Strategy with Social Business and Next-Gen Mobility

Reconciling the enterprise IT portfolio with social media

However it’s people like you and me, sometimes referred to as consumers by the business world, that have been leading this particular technology and societal revolution. Consequently, it’s been taking longer for those in the enterprise to sort out how the “Corporate Spring” will affect them. I’ve written about the concerns over ROI as organizations try to figure out their appropriate level of investment in social media, internally on intranets and externally for social marketing, customer care, and product development.

Australia has been interesting case in particular, and one in which I was fortunate enough to visit for the first time last year when I spoke at Social Business Summit 2011 Sydney. Australia has been listed most recently — along with other highly developed countries such as the U.S., the U.K., France, and Germany — as “social mainstream and mature” by the Boston Consulting Group. 90% of Australians use social networks, ahead of other advanced countries, such as Canada. Facebook usage exceeds 50% of those using social networks.

As in other countries, Australian businesses are now catching up now that their customers and workers have change their communication habits and behaviors. The same report I cite above says that 77% of organizations in Australia expect to increase investment in this social media over the next 12 months. But the fundamental question is, given the many directions that social media can take, how best to architect social media into the way a business works? How can social business best be situated in the way that organizations work to derive value that really moves the needle?

To help answer that, I’m pleased to report that I’ll be kicking off the book tour for our new book, Social Business By Design, in Australia with a series of appearances in Sydney later this month, from May 14th-18th. In addition to speaking at Intranets2012, I’ll be giving two workshops that are being exclusively sponsored by Headshift Australia. Details are below as well as here.

I genuinely hope to see you if you’re in Sydney or surroundings so that we can continue the discussion and explore of the future of how organizations will operate and create value for themselves, their customers, and shareholders.

Sydney Workshop Details – May, 2012

Social Business 101

The social media era has arrived and organisations are looking for ways to grapple with the many implications to their business. Companies are increasingly seeing the benefit and need to approach social media activities with integrated external and internal efforts. Professionals can no longer rely on point solutions and isolated activities — no brand, department, or employee is an island in the social landscape. Today, firms can learn from the lessons of early adopters and craft a solid plan for success that includes formulating a winning strategy, applying appropriate game-time tactics, and measuring for meaningful return on investment.
This session provides a cohesive and readily approachable introduction to social business that is immediately actionable by executives, line managers, and workers.

Participants at this session will learn:

• What social business is and why it matters
• The key tenets to social business success
• Strategy and tactics to apply your own situation

When: 9am-12pm, Thursday 17th May, 2012
Who should attend: This workshop will be relevant to people working in different management roles, including sales & marketing, customer service, HR and operations.
Where: Headshift Asia Pacific, East Sydney.
Cost: $275 (excl. GST) per person (includes a signed copy of the book).
Tea, coffee and light refreshments will be provided.

To book this workshop, please use our online registration and payment page here. Please note, that places are strictly limited.

Consumerisation of IT

Employees have begun driving the use of consumer technology in the workplace—bringing their mobile devices, Web apps, and social networking experience with them from home—but the trend goes even deeper than that. It’s a fundamental shift away from IT creating and managing the organisation’s IT assets to accepting that employees now own significant swaths of technology and will lead the enterprise march into the future. Dion has watched organisations large and small struggle with this convergence of mobile, social, cloud and big data, and has helped them prevail in their quest to harness it for innovation to transform the way the enterprise does business.

Dion will explore the new IT landscape and share his consumerisation experiences in the field to set the stage for consumerisation in your organisation by showcasing real-world companies that represent the new generation of IT and business. Participants will be equipped with strategies that will enable them to take steps towards managing the trends and keeping ahead of current trends.

When: 2pm-5pm, Thursday 17th May, 2012
Who should attend: This workshop will be relevant to people working in different management roles, including sales & marketing, IT, customer service, HR and operations.
Where: Headshift Asia Pacifc, East Sydney
Cost: $275 (excl. GST) per person (includes a signed copy of the book).
Tea, coffee and light refreshments will be provided.

To book this workshop, please use our online registration and payment page here. Please note, that places are strictly limited.

In fact, the business landscape is now rife with organizations of all sizes who are attempting to grapple with the rapidly changing business conditions brought on by the global growth of social media, particularly its rising domination as a form of communication. There is also a large and vibrant ecosystem of vendors that supply products and services to help said customers, and analysts and thought leaders that observe the interplay between the two — with the rest of the world for that matter — and try to figure out where it’s all going.

The good news, since we’re near the end of the beginning of the social business journey, is that there is a lot of information that can be drawn upon now, particularly some excellent books on the subject, which I’ll list in a moment. However, one question that has come up often about books on social business is whether the format is appropriate for a way of living and working that is essentially based on open participation. In fact, that’s the core tenet of social business: Anyone can participate. While I’ll save a longer answer for my formal announcement of Social Business By Design when it hits the shelves by the end of April, let’s just say that books are still a widely used communication and learning channel, and one that has a large global ecosystem that remains well established and highly valuable. In other words, books (paper or digital) are still an effective way to reach people and quite acceptable as long as its starts a meaningful conversation amongst their audience that continues onward, which Peter Kim and I hope it will.

But if you’re reading this, you probably just want to know what the leading social business books are and I’ll get to that now. Please keep in mind that this is not a definitive list and I’m aware of several other excellent books making their way to the market. I’ll update this list if appropriate. So, in no particular order, here are the leading books on social business in my opinion…

The Leading Books on Social Business

1. Smart Business, Social Business by Michael Brito. In his book, Michael clearly conveys why it takes more than social marketing to succeed in today’s deeply connected business world. I particularly liked how he explained what’s often the toughest part: That social business transformation requires a genuine cultural shift in how companies do business and in the way they interact with customers and prospects. Readers are given a detailed tour of the people, process, and technology shifts needed to succeed with plenty of details. The book explores social strategy, governance, tools, and metrics with a healthy dose of real-world case studies.
2. Socialnomics by Erik Qualman. Views on this book vary widely, yet it’s clearly one of the most popular books on social business, albeit primarily of a marketing and customer engagement bent. Erik explores the impact of social media on business to uncover how businesses can take drive better outcomes in new and innovative ways. His best material is about the changes that must happen to achieve results, specifically the transformation of businesses produce, market, and sell products. Much of the focus of the book is on the different methods businesses must use to connect directly with their customers through today’s global social media platforms.
3. Engage by Brian Solis. Brian has written a number of books on topics related to social business but this one is the most focused on the specific process of social media enablement and transformation. The book lays out how to develop an online ecosystem for the business and cultivates customers’ loyalty and trust in order to engage them for better business outcomes. Other useful details include how to establish an organizational structure that effectively delivers on social media while being poised for the next-generation just around the corner, including “detailed and specific steps required for conceptualizing, implementing, managing, and measuring a social media program.”
4. The Mesh by Lisa Gansky. While not directly about social business per se, this book articulates a crucial endpoint for processes that are highly open and where everyone can participate (yes, social business.) In Lisa’s view — and I agree — business today is now about enabling entirely new operating models and ways of creating business value that are highly cooperative and self-organizing. Lisa’s book is vital for understanding the bigger picture for which social business is a key plank. Highly recommended for getting business leaders to think outside the box and get ready for culture and organizational change (and innovation.)
5. Empowered by Josh Bernoff and Ted Schadler. A follow up for Bernoff of the highly influential Groundswell, Empowered is a detailed look at how employees with great ideas in an organization can be enabled to innovate and transform a business to better serve its customers. In their view, powered by pervasive social technologies, customer service (aka Social CRM) has definitively become the new source of marketing. Empowered lays out a detailed process for getting there with managers eponymously empowering employee innovators (described as HEROs in the book) and IT/business stakeholders to better serve customers directly to generate a wide variety of interesting results, from word-of-mouth marketing to better product ideas. Bernoff’s and Schadler’s analyst roots pay off with many case studies and pragmatic examples that demonstrate how social business empowerment is already happening in scale.
6. Macrowikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. The successor to Don’s hugely successful Wikinomics, this book takes the social business conversation up to a whole new level. While some have pointed out that actionable specifics are largely not included in the book, that’s beside the point: The goal of the book is to present a compelling case for the way we’ll organize our businesses, governments, and society now and in the future. A powerful book for those that want the entire big picture of social business (here called mass collaboration) and how it can solve problems that have been intractable or merely just very hard. While not a practitioners book, I advise everyone to be familiar with the strategic conversation Macrowikinomics lays out to get a clear view of the all moving parts that everyone must support.
7. Cognitive Surplus by Clay Shirky. Coined from a concept that Clay frequently discusses, namely that we’re just now learning how to tap into the full productive and creative capacity of our collective cultures and communities, this book lays out the whys and hows of using participation to create compelling and unique business outcomes. Subtitled “How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators“, this book the means, motivations, opportunities, cultural issues, and supporting examples into a coherent story about how emergent business solutions powered by social media will change business forever.
8. The Social Organization by Bradley and McDonald. Authored by two of Gartner’s leading analysts, this book makes a very strong case for employing social technology in the enterprise to get work done better. Sharing insights from their research into the successes and failures of four hundred plus organizations that have employed social technologies for workforce and customer-facing business solutions, the authors go well beyond technology and into the human element. Discussion includes how and why to build strategic communities, designing new ways of openly collaborating, and how to guide social business efforts to achieve a purpose, and so on. Bradley and McDonald also identify the core disciplines managers should master in order to transform social collaboration into otherwise unlikely yet highly potent results.
9. Get Bold by Sandy Carter. One of the most interesting social business stories of the decade has been IBM’s not-so-gradual conversion to being a social business. While such transformation is generally quite hard to do for large companies, the global technology giant did it in record time. This book, by one of IBM’s top social business evangelists, clearly demonstrates that they truly “get” the changes happening and know how to get there. After making the case for what social business entails, Sandy lays out the steps to reach social business maturity and includes her AGENDA framework for achieving it.
10. The Social Customer by Adam Metz. Metz treats Social CRM comprehensively considering it from many angles and aspects, from process to tools. He explores the 23 use cases that simultaneously provide the fabric for actionable, practical and approachable methods for engaging usefully with the social customer. Metz borrows from and builds on the excellent work of Greenberg’s CRM at the Speed of Light and Kim and Mauborgne’s Blue Ocean Strategy to create a picture consistent with a larger set of thought leadership.

Honorable mentions:

• The Executive’s Guide to Enterprise Social Media Strategy by Thomas and Barlow.
• Social Networking for Business by Rawn Shah.
• Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead by Charlene Li.
• Organizations Don’t Tweet, People Do: A Manager’s Guide to the Social Web by Euan Semple.
• We First: How Brands and Consumers Use Social Media To Build a Better World by Mainwaring and Lee.

Please note, that while I tended to emphasize books that were highly approachable, all of these are worth the time and effort either for your own edification about social business or to help educate your business and technical leadership teams. Finally, while there is no doubt I may have left a few good titles out of this list, I’m happy to — and will — add any titles to this list that commentors are particularly passionate about. I hope you find this helpful and a useful resource for assembling the definitive literature on social business.

Related Reading:

The Social Enterprise: A Case For Disruptive Transformation

Baselining Social Business Maturity: Why and How

Converging on the Social Enterprise

The Path to Co-Creating a Social Business: The Early Adoption Phase

For those just joining this conversation, this transformation is about opening up and digitally enabling the strategic assets of our organizations for better consumption and participation, with as low a barrier as possible. It’s also means doing so in a way that continually maximizes their value over time in today’s deeply networked marketplace. Achieving this triggers the primary engine of growth for digital ecosystems, namely network effects. This is how Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon (new guard), and Microsoft, IBM, SAP, Oracle, and many others (old guard) eventually built hundreds of billions in combined value. They tapped into the relevant power laws of networks by carefully and deliberating cultivating and then closely managing them by harnessing peer production over the network.

How exactly was this accomplished? They did it by digitally platforming their businesses in specific ways: Enabling self-service on-boarding, viral adoption, open participation, best-of-breed data capture, ownership and control, and took advantage of the fact that relationships — and therefore, ultimately transactions — must take place on the network with as little friction and cost as possible. They realized that we are now all connected together continuously in a single global network and then designed their organizations around this central fact of the digital age. They are now reaping the results of this mindset:

Networked ecosystems must be a core focus and competency of modern business.

This begs the increasingly urgent question: Why then are a large number of older organizations neglecting their digital ecosystems, often failing to meaningfully cultivate them at all for many of their most valuable assets?

This is a key question that fellow Enterprise Irregular Vinnie Mirchandani recently asked in an internal EI mail thread and later posed on his blog:

But for every Apple which has gone one way, I see so many others piss away this huge asset that is their ecosystem. I hear about musicians and filmmakers auditing, even suing studios for accounting disagreements. I hear SAP mentors complain about legal issues getting licenses and other access to new technology. It’s easy to dismiss Joe Konrath’s litany of complaints against book publishers as one from an unhappy author, but the 230+ comments it has drawn shows a deeper angst about how poorly publishers are managing their author ecosystems.

Ecosystems, communities – call them what you want. They are a vibrant organism which deserve far more ink from all of us. And they need professional managers at the companies at the middle who nourish them and not just treat them as railcars to be hustled away whenever inconvenient.

As companies remain inadequately connected to their customers, partners, and workers via digital ecosystems, many of which they do not control, they are missing a rapidly narrowing opportunity. That’s because it’s very, very hard to disrupt a well-established network effect, which is much more powerful than the equivalent notion in the pre-digital era: traditional market share. Network effects are primary focused on pull distribution, while marketshare is heavily based on push, which is much harder and much more expensive to sustain. As digital natives sew up more and more industries and lay down network effects years ahead of their traditional brethren, any chance to reclaim the throne will be very unlikely.

For leading examples of potent digital ecosystems, see open APIs, social customer care, and app stores.

Why is this? There are a number of reasons but a few are particularly significant. What I wrote in the EI thread in response to Vinnie’s original question was this:

I find that in general, the farther you are from the tech business, the less native skill or familiarity there is with system thinking, which is perhaps the critical capacity to have in order to regard your business in ecosystem terms. This is something that in tech is standard fare with constant discussion and focus on platforms, network effects, SDKs, open APIs, app stores, etc.

Traditional publishers are typical of the technically challenged industries that are being blind-sided by newer, much savvier, techno-centric, network-oriented new digital businesses.

Business leaders that can’t deeply see the way forward for their organizations as flexible, highly dynamic, and organic digital networks of customers, partners, workers, and other (likely and unlikely) participants will ultimately fail. But this isn’t the set of skills or mindset that made them successful in the first place, so they don’t value it and don’t think in these terms. They literally throw off digital rethinking like a sort of corporate immune system. Surprisingly, from my talks in the C-suite the last few years, everyone individually seems realizes they have to change, but collectively they are resistant, it’s fascinating to watch.

A big part of the problem boils down to this: Companies are inherently designed to perpetuate the problem they were invented to solve. It’s a particularly thorny instance of the Innovator’s Dilemma, which ensures that a company is unlikely to aggressively re-invent itself until it’s in the process of being disrupted. Unfortunately, this often means it’s already too late.

In fact, it may be too late for a growing number of industries to fully make the transition to being ecosystem-centric. This includes media, publishing, telecom, retail, and many software companies. Under looming threat is real estate, higher education, financial services, professional services, accounting, and even venture capital. In each of these categories, ecosystem-centric firms are building network effects with open network-based products increasingly built by worker/open communities and delivered to customer communities. Those products are in turn built upon by hundreds or thousands of loyal 3rd party partners to bring their own customers and ecosystems to the table. This is an embarrassment of riches that only a few companies, again mostly digital natives, seem interested or able to tap into.

As Fred Wilson once said, the Web (and therefore digital business) is all about “building networks on top of networks“, which leads to even more powerful outcomes, like 2nd order network effects.

Fortunately, the force multiplier of the ecosystem model can be stated in a simple, fundamental way: It allows one to tap into the vast size and strength of the external network to drive growth, innovation, and revenue for your own ecosystem. As Peter Kim and I wrote in our new book, the fundamental principle of business in the ecosystem era must be to let anyone participate in every aspect of the business, primarily by inverting the facilitation process of driving shared value (i.e. network effects by default.) Being able to elicit the network (Internet, community, shared data, whatever) to maximum effect to fuel and growth your ecosystem is thus the core competency of the digital era. Unfortunately, this lesson is being lost to most organizations that were built well before this next-generation business model was understood. It will be a great loss that doesn’t necessarily have to happen in my opinion, but will ultimately result in the needless disruption of a large number of companies that just aren’t able to become digital natives.

For additional reading see:

4 Ways to Create Sustainable Business Ecosystems

Why Information Power Is The Future of Business

What Will Power Next-Generation Businesses?

A View of Digital Strategy in the Ecosystem Era

Are We Building Businesses Or Are We Building Platforms? Yes.

How Digital Business Will Evolve in 2012: 6 Big Ideas

One fact stood out: Many of these tech trends are happening with or without waiting for information technology departments to embrace them and bring them into the organization in an orderly and controlled way.  I’ve spoken about shadow IT for a few years and it’s clear, particularly with mobility, that loss of control is firmly entrenched in a growing number of large IT organizations.

The mega trends that we discussed that day were the usual suspects. They are the ones that I’ve been exploring in detail recently: Next-gen mobility, cloud computing, social media, consumerization (#CoIT), and big data. In attendance were the CIOs from American Express, Bechtel, Chevron, Eastman Chemical, Eaton Corporation, the Hilti Group, Holcim, Nestle, Sysco, and Time Warner Cable, as well as executives from CompuWare, the Dachis Group (myself), Dell|KACE, and ViON. The Roundtable itself was hosted by the Directors of the Center for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business. The session was moderated by Maryfran Johnson, Editor-in-Chief of CIO Magazine and hosted by Adjunct Professor Hans Brechbuhl, who also wrote his own summary of the day.

The discussion itself was far ranging and explored all of these megatrends in detail. The resulting outcome, a new 17 page report that has just been issued by the Center for Digital Strategies at the Tuck School of Business, confirmed that companies fall across the spectrum when it comes to adoption of these disruptive technologies. While virtually all the companies represented were feeling the full brunt of smart mobility, others had widely varying experiences with areas such as enterprise social media (aka social business in this context), big data, and cloud, though the first two had the most votes I believe in terms of the trends with the longest term and farthest-reaching impact.

Six key insights about new disruptive tech were derived during the back-and-forth discussions that took place at the roundtable session. These are:

• “Consumerization of IT” is a core catalyst for other IT mega-trends. The spread of social media and BYOD are clear outcomes, but “consumer” expectations play a surprisingly large role in the development of Big Data and cloud-based applications.
• Mobility is forcing new approaches to data security. User expectations of anytime/anywhere access to enterprise data conflict directly with IT’s charter to secure and protect the same data; this conflict is one of the sources of the rise of rogue IT.
• Both mobile and social applications are (finally) adding definable value to enterprises. Social media apps with definable ROI are primarily customer-facing; high-value mobile apps are still mostly internal.
• “Big Data” will affect every aspect of business. From plant operations to stock trading to predicting terrorist behavior, the combination of huge data volumes and massive compute power is beginning to answer questions never even asked before, particularly with respect to predictive analytics.
• “Designing for loss of control” is one of IT’s key challenges. Between consumerization/BYOD, rogue IT and the cloud, centralized IT can’t keep up with demands yet will still be held accountable for security, reliability and performance.
• IT’s future differentiation is far more about insight than about operations. With technology so widespread, the ability to compete on IT operations has vanished. IT’s future value lies in delivering immediate, actionable knowledge.

What companies are going to do in order to embrace these trends effectively is going to be the signature generational challenge of our era. I’ve explored the various possibilities (ten strategies to be exact), and no doubt others will discover other routes to success. But the fact that so much of the change is externally imposed on IT departments and the lines of business outside of traditional channels is what makes the transition to them so disruptive. Thus, consumerization may ultimately be the underlying root cause of the rest of the trends as well as the primary driver of enterprise technology for the foreseeable future.

Tuck School of Business CIO Roundtable in October 2011

Be sure to read the IT megatrends report itself for full details directly from the original sources.  In the meantime, I’ll keep exploring these trends and how companies are planning, coping, and hopefully enabling them for their internal and external customers as IT gears up to have its most exciting decade in a very long time.

Related Reading:

Consumerization in 2012: Cloud and mobile blurs into other people’s IT | ZDNet

The “Big Five” IT trends of the next half decade: Mobile, social, cloud, consumerization, and big data | ZDNet

CoIT: How an accidental future is becoming reality | ZDNet

Dion’s Defrag 2011 Keynote on CoIT | On Web Strategy

Perhaps more than anything else these days I’m getting this increasingly urgent question at an senior executive level: What specifically are the business benefits of social media? While I’ve covered that in detail many times, this new-found interest on exact outcomes shows that the business leaders are increasingly feeling compelled to wrap their mind around the inevitable changes facing their organization. To help with this I’ve recently distilled it into the chart you see below, based on the McKinsey data they collect every year from large organizations. These double digits performance improvements then, embody the social business imperative:

Then there is the whole consumerization story that’s unfolding at the moment. This has been a seismic event for many organizations as smart mobile devices, enterprise app stores, and software-as-a-service from the Web all combine to make adoption of the latest apps and IT solutions is just a mouse click or tap on a touch screen. At the same time, there is a growing sense that the classic line dividing IT and business is blurring, just like there is so much blur in many key business boundaries today. The lesson: Everyone can and should be be involved with making these changes happen constructively and effectively for their organization, whether it’s social media, information technology adoption, transformation to new digital business models, etc. Many of you know tat I’ve started to call this confluence of IT trends “CoIT” and it’s something I’ll be researching and speaking about extensively this year because I believe IT is about to change — no, is changing — in a substantial and irreversible way. The changes themselves are largely good but it will certainly leave some ‘creative destruction’ behind, to use the popular euphemism for what happens when innovation cuts through an organization in an unplanned way.

Now that the basic platforms for social business have matured to the point that they’re ready for most organizations — and by this I mean both internally and externally for most common business functions like operations, CRM, marketing, product development, etc. — we’re moving into more sophisticated and higher-order capabilities. Capabilities like social business intelligence, enabled by the rise of both older and radically advanced new technologies now known as Big Data, are making it possible for us to actually make sense of the huge knowledge flows moving around us. I’ll also be closely following analytics, machine learning, natural language processing, metrics, and much more, both in terms of technologies as well as how to best embody them in operational business processes.

2012 is also shaping up to be the year of open supply chains, or as people on the Web call them, open APIs. The number of products and services that are now open to be remixed into other companies’ offerings has exploded in the last year. See this terrific visualization of API growth on ProgrammableWeb to get a sense that something big is indeed happening here. I’m now seeing sustained interest beyond the Internet community by traditional companies that are starting to see how much value they missed by looking at their businesses through like silos, disconnected from the digital rivers of commerce, ideas, engagement, and so on. Open APIs are now officially on the radar of big company CIOs. They are seeing how it will be a significant competitive advantage to offer a compelling API in an industry that does not have strong uptake yet. 2013/14 will start looking bleak for those firms that don’t yet have them, or at least have developed competency in both the technology and business models. In the meantime, the tools, techniques, and business models for making APIs work for a wide range of industry has greatly evolved and will be important to watch.

There’s plenty more I’ll be tracking this year; there’s really no shortage of topics that will be vital for all of us to watch including augmented reality, new mobile technologies like NFC, the rise of HTML5 and its coming battle with iOS and Android, gamification of just about everything, location-based social networking, enterprise OpenSocial, and much more.

2012 Speaking Calendar

In the meantime, my speaking calendar for 2012 has started to fill up quickly. While you can always read the latest on my blogs on ZDNet, ebizQ, the Dachis Group Collaboratory, here, and elsewhere, I’ll also be releasing a major new book on social business that I co-authored with Peter Kim that will be out from Wiley this May. I’ll be writing a detailed blog post about the book soon, but in the meantime, you can get the details here on Amazon. But for those of you that can make any of these conferences, I’ll be sharing my very latest findings at the following events:

• 60 Minutes with Nir Zuk. January 31st. I’ll be having a live fireside-style chat with Palo Alto Networks founder and CTO, Nir Zuk in a Web-broadcasted discussion about how enterprises must make the right policy decisions, in context, to safely enable social media in their organization in order to attain the corresponding business benefits. It’s a free event.
• Enterprise 2.0 SUMMIT, Paris. February 7th-8th This is one of the best enterprise social media events in Europe in my opinion. I’ll be speaking here again for the 3rd time, providing the closing keynote on the 2nd day on “Next-Generation Ecosystem and its key success factors”. I’ve arranged a discount code for my readers from conference organizer Bjoern Negelmann. Use code ‘dhinchcliffe10′ for 10% off the registration fee. I’ll be there both days for anyone that would like to meet up.
• Enterprise 2.0 Virtual Conference. February 16th. I’ll be providing the opening keynote on social analytics at this virtual event. I’ll be bringing with me real case examples, an overview of the latest tools and techniques, and primer on how to get started. You will be able to sign up here soon.
• CITE Conference & Expo 2012, San Francisco. March 4-6th. I’ll be providing the opening keynote on the topic of consumerization and CoIT, which is also the main topic of this conference. In addition, the day before, I’ll be providing a deep dive on how organizations can make it through the era of IT consumerization in much more detail in a half-day workshop. CITE is run by IDG and they are hoping to make this even one of the leading events on the topic.
• AIIM Conference 2012, San Francisco. March 20-22nd. This major event being held by AIIM has an all-star cast including Clay Shirky, David Pogue, Ray Wang, and many others. I’ll be providing the closing keynote on the 2nd day on next-gen mobility and mobile/social convergence. Highly recommended.
• Social Business Summit 2012, Austin, Shanghai, Rio, Berlin, London, Singapore, New York. March-September. This is our official social business conference series for the Dachis Group. It attracts the top thought leaders in the space and is in its 3rd year running. Previous speakers have included John Hagel, Charlene Li, JP Rangaswami, and Dave Gray. It’s invitation-only and most locations sell out quickly, so I’d request an invite now. I’ll be speaking at most of these to promote our new book. Also highly recommended.

That’s it for now, but plenty to mull over. This year we’ll see many of the changes we’ve been tracking that last few years actually happening in the enterprise a widespread way. I’ll be covering them in my blogs and on Twitter as much as possible. As always, I’m interested in hearing from anyone in the trenches making these changes happen in their organization. Happy social business!

The pace of new app development dwarfs the release of other kinds of media. [my emphasis] “Every week about 100 movies get released worldwide, along with about 250 books,” said Anindya Datta, the founder and chairman of Mobilewalla, which helps users navigate the mobile app market. “That compares to the release of around 15,000 apps per week.”

The Web can’t keep up either. Mobile has mindshare now. While classical Web pages made purely of static content still easily beat apps, that’s also not where the value or the action is today. As with any distribution curve, it’s true that much of what is being produced in mobile apps isn’t very interesting or even useful. But that’s not the point; it’s the sheer volume of investment that apps are attracting which means that the high side of the curve is aggregating some of the best talent, and results.

Moreover, there may be no easy way to catch up. A new generation of apps is appearing that takes advantage of the unique abilities that next-generation mobile devices alone usually possess. This includes location (GPS), orientation, images, video, audio, and increasingly, new capabilities like near field communication (NFC). Innovative apps like RunKeeper, StarWalk, and WordLens are only possible because of their deep integration with the rich sensors located in today’s mobile devices. HTML5 is going to address some of this disparity, but not quickly enough to address the tide of defections — and venture capital — from Web apps to mobile apps.

The genie won’t go back in the bottle

The sometimes-blind rush towards mobile apps has begun to concern me. For one, there’s little question that the proprietary element of apps — including their developer APIs, associated app stores, and underlying run-time platform and ecosystem — represents a very slippery slope back to the old days before the broad adoption of open standards (which includes virtually all of the Internet, even today.) That was back when industry giants like Microsoft and IBM called the shots and practically everyone was at their mercy, with independent developers at a distinct disadvantage with the platform owners themselves. There was often little choice and lots of lock-in. The arrival of the Web — and to an almost as large an extent open source — broke the stranglehold on proprietary platforms and put everyone on roughly the same playing field.

Then there is the model of the Web itself, something which has intrinsic properties that make it very, very special indeed. This especially includes deep link structure, which makes search work and provides link addressability to just about every element of information in the world (if it’s Web enabled that is.) After many long years of struggle, we are now finally seeing large companies starting to get the message that Web-orientation is a fundamentally powerful concept, perhaps more important than any computing idea since von Neumann architecture. The Web of pages, data, and even apps creates possibilities for ecosystems, integration, and synergy that’s more profound each and every day after nearly 20 years of continuous co-creation by everyone that uses and contributes to the Internet. All of this is now potentially threatened by the return of platform and app silos, proprietary mobile technology, and the seduction of new single-source forms of monetization of software, combined with a perception that app stores provide consumer safety that just doesn’t exist in the wild environs of the Web (which indeed they can.)

Related: Why The Next App You Use Might Be In A Social Network

To be clear, I’m actually a genuine fan of mobile apps and have hundreds of them on my iPhone and iPad. They are sometimes well-integrated with the Web, but I’m constantly battling the “lock-up” they introduce: 1) I can’t easily copy and paste data in many apps, 2) you frequently can’t link to information, 3) it’s not searchable from one place, and so on. Worse, it’s usually stuck on one platform or even for a single device (I have plenty of iPad apps that won’t run on the iPhone for example.) In comparison, the Web gave us real choice in browsers, search engines, servers, services, apps and much more as well as an revolutionary data architecture that has unleashed the knowledge of humanity along with the social media revolution, which has ultimately given us (everyday people) leadership over the production and sharing of global information. We give this up at great peril.

Can we still get to a good place? Yes, but it’s up to you.

There is a distinct and sharp inclination today towards mobile apps. They are convenient, fast, fun, and always with us. I’m actually mostly for mobility in all its form — especially apps — but it now looks like we may have to re-fight the long and arduous wars of open standardization that got us to the right place with the Web. Like it was before, it will be hard going but worth it in spades.

I should also note that the evolution of the Internet did fall down in a few key places that originally led to the rise of native mobile apps — namely not keeping up with the capabilities of mobile devices and by not introducing a way to make apps as safe, easily distributed, and monetized as say, iOS has. For that, we might pay a very high price indeed; our autonomy, competitiveness, and freedom to choose. Unfortunately, it’s often a zero sum game in terms of the shift in investment: Most Web apps simply must have a native mobile front-end now. That means it costs more to produce or the app collectively does less. Worse, while most mobile apps also have a Web experience, I notice that a growing number of them are using them primarily for support and brochure-ware instead of providing an integrated Web experience. That’s the slippery slope defined.

Where all of this is headed is unclear and there are certainly many people working on unifying today’s Web and mobile devices. However, none have yet hit upon a solution that will be broadly adopted. I’ll explore this topic in more detail throughout 2012, but increasingly it is looking like a very large yet largely silent struggle is brewing between these two vitally important worlds. The upshot: The Web could potentially — in the long-term — become a second-class citizen and I’m very sure that’s not a good thing. Fortunately, in the end, I’m not overly worried about this yet, as the network effect of the Web is just so large. Then again though, so is the growing network effect of mobile devices. I’m certainly not alone in tracking this closely, a good piece by Gigaom’s Matthew Ingram this week discusses how folks like Dave Winer and John Battelle are thinking about the consequences. We all must do the same.

Mobile is just one of the Big Five IT trends that we must grapple with in order to make the transition to next-gen enterprises.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been following this set of closely interrelated trends, each one that began “out there” on the Internet or in the consumer world, and have little or no roots in the enterprise world. It’s this singular fact that induces in so many IT executives and business leaders a profound feeling of disquiet. Yet the ones I’ve spoken to this year realize that they have to respond to these changes. Why? Because technology innovation today is driven mostly by the Internet or the consumer world, yet technology is one of the leading ways we use to automate and drive productivity improvements in business. High technology — and particularly the fundamental architecture of the Internet — also has an innate tendency to dislocate the old ways of working. It tends to tear down the traditional — yet less effective — means of operation, along with their associated cultures, norms, and expectations. However, it’s fair to say that no one being held to a quarterly earnings cycle or holding a market leading position vulnerable to technology change (media, software, travel, education, etc.) likes to experience dislocation. So it’s up to organizations to get (much) better at realizing an effective digital strategy, just as innovation and change is happening much faster than any other time in human history.

Recently, the phenomenon of “CoIT” has been growing. It’s a new concept that says that the adoption of IT is now proceeding rapidly outside of the CIO budget, often in entirely unsanctioned initiatives by lines of business. In its more mature form, CoIT also stands for a much closer yet decentralized notion of IT where innovation and technology leadership is driven on the ground by the business, yet supported by IT. The business — as well as IT — brings in the latest new cloud services, mobile apps, APIs, data sources, and mobile devices. IT then makes it safe, secure, and manageable, or provides guidelines for doing so. It’s a smart, efficient, scalable new partnership. The former is the “Consumerization of IT” while the latter model is the “Cooperation of IT”. Both are represented by the moniker, CoIT, which was originally coined by Computerworld Editor-in-Chief Scot Finnie a little while back.

Clearly there’s widespread interest in the topic, as one of my most popular writings this year was the exploration of the “Big Five” IT trends of the next half decade, one of which is consumerization, for which it could be argued it’s actually an encompassing supertrend. All of this ultimately culminated in a gracious invitation by Eric Norlin to come and present my research at Defrag 2011, which I did last week.

Below is the deck itself, which I gave as a keynote last Thursday morning:

If you don’t have time to review the deck, the key points to take away are the following:

5 Strategic Points about CoIT

• Evidence is growing that current productivity gains aren’t coming from traditional IT investments. They are coming from somewhere else, or the cost of IT is collapsing radically. Almost certainly both are true by comparing slides 3 and 4.
• There is far too much new tech for any centralized process (like IT) to absorb. New types of processes must be created that can unleash and scale the application of powerful new technologies (next-gen mobile, social business, cloud computing, big data, etc.) to the business..
• If the only real constant is change, change must be in our DNA. But these ‘genes’ are usually not present in large enough quantities in the enterprise. This is the concept of moving from fixed processes to dynamic relationships embodied by the Big Shift in order to transform the enterprise as we know it.
• Some changes will be more transformative than others. While mobility is the hot topic right now, social business and big data will have the largest long-term impact and especially the former will have truly game-changing and transformative consequences.
• Ten to hundreds of times more apps and data are coming soon, get ready for it. Cultivate the skills, create enterprise app stores, build social layers into the organization, define decentralized enterprise architectures (really, business architectures), and create a new CoIT playbook. Or this will all route around you. 30% of IT is already outside the purview of the CIO and growing fast.

I’ll be exploring this more soon with new data and examples. In the meantime, I’d love your thoughts on where you are seeing IT going in a rampantly mobile, social, big data world. In addition, here are 10 strategies for coping in the CoIT era.