Delivering new business value with social software

Mr. Hinchcliffe writes about the use of Web 2.0, social software in the enterprise and how organizatins can apply it as a light weight solution to some of the vexing customer relationship problems.

 "With IT budgets slack, delivering business value is paramount" Posted by Dion Hinchcliffe.

"And use of Web 2.0 techniques to service customers is part of where a lot of thinking is currently aligning, around business value across efficiency, revenue generation, deep automation, and execution.

• Control is moving to the business. No longer content or able to wait for IT to solve problems, business units are increasingly comfortable in self-service IT techniques.
• Smaller investments allow new problems to be solved. An business problem that was solvable using older, heavyweight IT techniques for $1M could only solve problems where the return on investment would be greater than $1M. If that problem can solved for $10K today using Web 2.0-style architectures, it opens up a whole new wave of IT value. 
• Relentless Transactional automation.Rote business processes should be and will be automated extensively over the next few years, freeing up employees to be inserted into the most high-value processes that require human intelligence.
• Increasing Dynamic Decentralization of Execution. The new social, collaborative tools allow ad-hoc and emergent teams to network, form, and execute business processes as needed.
• Tacit Customer Relationship Management. Automated customer self-service is as critical for transactional business processes as ever, but this has been done in a relatively tone deaf fashion up to this point and it's been an all-or-nothing process for the most part up until now. "