The power of social automation

Computerworld - The ultimate value of social business may not be in the areas of customer engagement and employee knowledge management and collaboration. Those things certainly have tremendous and clearly demonstrable benefits, but the greatest opportunity in the years ahead may be in the social enablement and modernization of enterprise applications.

So far, though, this area has gotten little attention. That will probably change; Gartner predicts that as early as 2015, 20% of enterprises that employ social media beyond marketing will lead their industries in revenue growth. I believe that the value will derive primarily from what I'd term "social automation."

Many enterprise applications are legacy tools that remain vital to running core operations. They often automate key business transactions such as managing flight bookings at an airline, transferring funds at a bank or distributing financial aid at a government agency. And many of them have been modernized, so that they are accessible via browsers, mobile devices and the cloud. Today, they are being enhanced and modernized anew, this time for social computing. (See my column on charting a four-phase adoption cycle for this.)

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Computerworld - The ultimate value of social business may not be in the areas of customer engagement and employee knowledge management and collaboration. Those things certainly have tremendous and clearly demonstrable benefits, but the greatest opportunity in the years ahead may be in the social enablement and modernization of enterprise applications.

So far, though, this area has gotten little attention. That will probably change; Gartner predicts that as early as 2015, 20% of enterprises that employ social media beyond marketing will lead their industries in revenue growth. I believe that the value will derive primarily from what I'd term "social automation."

Many enterprise applications are legacy tools that remain vital to running core operations. They often automate key business transactions such as managing flight bookings at an airline, transferring funds at a bank or distributing financial aid at a government agency. And many of them have been modernized, so that they are accessible via browsers, mobile devices and the cloud. Today, they are being enhanced and modernized anew, this time for social computing. (See my column on charting a four-phase adoption cycle for this.)

The great thing about modernizing an enterprise application for social computing is that the application can be enhanced in ways that weren't possible when it was brought into the Internet age, for example. Then, you could make an application accessible from a browser, but the application itself still worked pretty much the same. With adaptations for social computing, however, you can advance the overall level of automation for business processes by adding social automation to the existing transactional automation.

Those are the areas where the automation of transactions fell short. Every time an exception occurred that required human intervention, the application ground to a halt. Social automation is a way to lubricate the gears and keep those applications humming with fewer interruptions that require human intervention.

Of course, many human interactions cannot and should not be automated, and human collaboration and decision-making are vital parts of the equation. So social automation doesn't mean removing the human element completely; it simply means using social business technologies to help further aid and partially automate human collaboration and decision-making processes where appropriate.

You can think of this as modernizing enterprise applications so they support both transactions and collaborative processes, just as information systems now need to support both structured and unstructured data. That's to say the ad hoc and collaborative nature of social computing complements transactional applications in much the same way that big data techniques complement traditional structured data analytics.

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