Last Summer I published a Social Business Maturity Model that we developed to help companies understand their level of adoption of social business. The idea is that you can identify a set of criteria to use to evaluate the progress a company is making on it's rollout and adoption of social tools and the accompanying process and culture change that enable the business transformation. Companies could then take that criteria and use it to benchmark their own progress and also plan out a strategy to accelerate adoption and build more momentum. We looked at culture, organization, technology and barriers to change across five maturity levels, and built criteria out for each intersection that could help identify where the company would fall and help with planning future projects. The whole model is based on the results of our semi-annual social business adoption surveys and our interaction with a wide set of companies that were evaluating and using social tools both internally for employee collaboration and externally to engage customers and create more effective partnerships. We have published a series of case studies that relate some of the specific company stories over the past year. The model, just to refresh you, looks like this:
We're now in the middle of an IDC marketscape on social solutions that focuses on tools for use in social collaboration. The marketscape is a fairly exhaustive examination of each vendor and the solutions along two axis, strategy and capabilities. Strategy is focused on the future and reflects the vendor's 3 - 5 year plan. Capabilities is focused on the here and now and is an assessment of what the company and its products do currently. This process involves direct interviews with the vendors and also collection of feedback data from customers using the solutions against a set of predefined criteria. The social solutions marketscape will be released in the Spring of this year.
Because we're in the process of the vendor interviews I started thinking of the maturity model for end users and the idea of maturity of both solutions vendor and the actual solutions. Now I wouldn't suggest that you could really do a maturity model in the same way you can for user adoption, and really in some ways the marketscape will infer maturity anyway. Still though, are there criteria that could be applied to at least start to think about the maturity or sophistication of a solution? In fact, those criteria would look similar to the criteria we're using to look at the vendors and solutions in the ongoing marketscape process. So while I don't offer a true solution maturity model today, I will provide a list of some of the criteria that I think are important in evaluating a social collaborative solution:
- Single, consolidated UI that is built to current, modern standards and aggregates access to all features and functions in one place.
- The ability to interact and consolidate interaction between employees and all supporting content, data, communication channels (email, video conferencing, IM, etc.), enterprise systems, external social networks and media into a single UI.
- Ability to define personal and role based information filters to make information streams useful.
- Connectivity that extends outside of the firewall in a controlled and secure way to bring in partners, customers, suppliers, etc. into the conversation when desirable.
- Ability to maintain enterprise profiles for each employee and access from the consolidated environment.
- Ability to embed the activity stream into other enterprise applications, particularly email clients.
- Mobile support for at least the 3 major OS, IOS, Android and Blackberry. Support for tablets and smartphone form factors.
- Configurable and granular security to protect the intersection with public social properties.
- Ability to deploy in the cloud (at least public cloud, although private cloud support is a plus).
- A full socialytics suite of capabilities as a part of the solution or through a partnership.
- Provide operational transparency and provide an agree service level.
- Continued investment in product enhancements on a regular basis.
- Subscription and/or pay for use pricing.
- Pre-packaged API / integration to common 3rd party systems.
- An SDK for extensions to meet vertical and specific customer needs.
- Open standards support
- Product support that incorporate the use of social support through peer to peer communities and public social channels.
- Published product roadmap available to prospects and customers.
- Partnerships to provide complementary technologies. Providing a partner marketplace is a good method for helping customers find solutions.
- Services / consulting partnerships that help foster customer success.
- A method for collecting, prioritizing and using customer and partner feedback to increase innovation and improve products (innovation management process).
So there's my list, what do you think? If I missed some please add them to the comments.
Tags: socbiz, social, solutions, maturity, vendor, software, technology, cloud, UI, UX, roadmap
