Live from Lotusphere: Customers and Accidental Social Business ROI

I’ve been at IBM Lotusphere since Sunday evening. My primary goal in coming to Lotusphere was to find user executives willing and able to discuss their social business IT efforts, so that we could add to our quantification of real-world results from social IT implementations, along with sundry other Cloud-driven, Cloud-enabled IT phenomena.

I found them – dozens of them. In my two-plus days, I’ve had more than 30 conversations with IBM users who have not only implemented and benefited from social business IT implementation, but have quantified the results.  I’ve also spoken with another dozen conversations with IBM business partners (mainly VARs and ISVs) who shared similar stories of their own customers.

I won’t go into a lot of details here – I plan to write those up over the coming weeks for our Continuous research Services (CRS) clients. Let me just summarize what I see as the two key trends and realities of social business IT use across a wide range of user enterprise types, sizes, and industries:

1. The ROI is real. There are no parameters for what scale or amount of ROI or payback to expect, because there are no standard social business IT costs and implementations. But implementation times for the most complex solutions tend to be less than six months, and less than a week for the simplest implementations, and costs tend to be recovered within 60 to 90 days in most cases.

2. Social Business IT solution use is more or less accidental. There are practically no social business IT strategies in use right now. Conversation after conversation, and several customer presentations sessions, reinforced the experience that social solutions tend to be found and implemented in response to a need for improving one or more parts of a  process. Time after time, I listened to CEOs, CIOs, LOB executives, and department managers explain how they went not in search of a social business solution, but a solution that would improve their abilities to improve a process, almost always through improving the communication of important business information. Some were looking for ways to store and access business data; some were looking for ways to overcome barriers to communication of different types; some were looking for ways to improve documentation and version control. None went looking for a social business IT solution specifically - and very few had any idea that social business IT solutions existed for their needs.

3. Social business IT is tactical now and strategic later. We coined the term “tactically strategic” several years ago to denote and describe IT investments that reduce costs or improve business today, while enabling long-term improvements, especially in competitive situations (214RA, Key Trend for 2006: Tactically Strategic Investments Continue, 29Dec2005). While many Cloud-based IT and business services implementations today are tactical without being strategic, it certainly looks as though a majority of Social Business IT implementations could be both.

Obviously, there’s a lot more. We will be developing a series of research notes, both our free weekly  Research Alerts and premium Strategic Perspectives, that will dig into more specifics, and which will provide useful parameters, selection criteria models, and guidance for making the ROI less accidental and more tactically strategic.  

And thanks to Jennifer Rego, Eydie Sperling, and Don Neely of IBM for a terrific job enabling and assisting the entire analyst community at Lotusphere.