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No Business Case for Social Business

Social Business Expert Blog

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If a business can check all or most of the items on the checklist below, then there is probably no business case for social business. It can carry on with business as usual.

1. The lifespan of its products stretches across many years, possibly even decades, if the products are only slightly improved or changed every now and then. 
2. Customers have few alternatives to choose from. No low-cost alternatives with the same or similar benefits ever emerge.
3. Tradition is the most important reason why customers stick to the brand. 
4. The buying decisions of customers are greatly influenced by the marketing efforts and what other people in their close proximity think of a specific product. They are not connected to or influenced by other customers than those who can be found among their neighbors, family and friends in close proximity, or colleagues at the same unit or location. 
5. It is hard for other businesses to copy the products as well as the processes which are required to produce and sell the products. 
6. The vast majority of the workforce is doing highly repeatable and formalized industrial work.
7. How work is done rarely changes. Interruptions and failures which require speedy problem solving also happen very rarely.
8. Employees are motivated by having a work to go to. If not, their employers can easily replace them with someone else, possibly at a lower level of compensation.  
9. Processes and routines look exactly the same everywhere with very little, if any, local variations. They can be implemented in the exact same way across locations and units. 
10. The business environment is stable and homogeneous enough to allow top management to define, plan and implement all decisions in a one-size-fits-all manner across the enterprise.
11. Strategies as well as local execution can be defined and commanded top down. 
12. Most of the know-how required to do the job can be obtained via formal training, reading instructions and peer-to-peer (master-apprentice) knowledge transfer at the same location. The need for continuous and individual-driven informal learning is very limited. 
13. Whenever new knowledge is gained somewhere inside or outside the organization, there is plenty of time to formalize it and share it across top-down with the use of formal training and simple updates of instructions.
14. There is very limited pressure from the business environment forcing the organization to optimize its use of resources across locations with the use of specialization and collaboration.
15. There are very few external parties involved in the enterprise and the relationships and collaborations that exist are stable, not very complex and have existed for a relatively long time.

This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International