Regardless of your position, role, responsibility, there is one thing that you can be sure of in our environment. You are part of one or more business models within the enterprise. The bottom line is that all of us provide some form of service to either outside entities or internal customers. Take a look at the following model and see how many of the boxes you can fill in with your own model.

We all have directives, goals, and defined objectives that start the business process. We develop and manage partnerships with other groups, vendors, and co-workers which help us perform various activities in order to deliver our defined value. The activities have costs associated with them that we try to reduce and control. Ultimately, this leads us to our products, services, and solutions that we provide as an offering. This offering can then be delivered through various channels. As with any offering, you must manage the client or customer relationships. Revenue is a perhaps the one thing that we might struggle to map to our job. If you are like me, you are in a cost center and we are not allowed to charge back for services. That being said, you have seen us comment on how methodical we are in tracking metrics. Our metrics represent our general ledger in the sense that we generate revenue through cost transformations, patent portfolios, and mass adoption. So why the title “Business Model 2.0”? If you back up and look at your business model and I encourage to do this, then you will see that your current information systems don’t handle every aspect of your model. Maybe you do have a project management system or a system to procure network addresses but you don’t have systems in place that manage your customer relationships, your cost tracking, or simple communications within the group. I have yet to meet a group that has information systems in place for every dimension of their model. The reason for this is that information technology systems are expensive. Even utilizing open source, the cost of maintenance and customizations can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Here is where Collaborative and Social Solutions can fill in the gap. In fact, when Hurricane Katrina hit a few years ago, we were able to deliver three core applications within two days. One application was used to locate 278 missing employees while the other two collected emergency needs of company victims and then matched them with donors. In fact, SharePoint has been used to manage Cancer Screenings, Habitat for Humanity, Volunteer Groups (Women’s Network), and other functions. With 25,000 sites within the enterprise, there is no limit to what is currently being automated. There is a learning curve on how these tools can be setup, configured and even programmed to some level. But, they are really no more complicated than Excel or Word. Over the next few years, we will continually be asked to deliver more value, faster delivery, and utilize less resources. The only way to accomplish this is to automate as many of the small tasks as possible and you have the tools within your own company.