Innovation: The Mirror, Window, and the Door

Dennis has responded to my Social Computing for the Product Life Cycle post, which is a “How to”. In his viewpoint he asks a different question, he wants to know “Why” and gives some examples of some industries where customer and community feedback isn’t a good idea. I could list a ton of industries where it does work (even shifting the “x”s over to the Yes in the industries he’s listed out) but I’d rather elevate the discussion.

We can draw upon our innovation to improve our businesses through a variety of strategies, I’ll break them down as the Mirror, the Window, and the Door.

The Mirror
Relying on the Enterprise (IT in particular) to lead progress in this new world isn’t the solution. Dennis observes,

“I want to know how these processes get baked into existing systems. To date, I’ve seen almost no attempt at integrating social computing/media projects into the systems upon which industry depends. That should not be a surprise but it cannot be ignored.“.

This movement isn’t coming from IT, the CIO, or the powers-that-be. It’s coming from the people, the people who are using these easy-to-use tools to communicate and make their lives easier. I can’t think of any customers who are going to ask the permission of a CIO of a vendor before starting a blog or being involved in a brand forum on a third party. He suggests enterprise IT isn’t ready for the new world, and he’s right, the customers and savvy business units will just pass them up

Let’s stop looking in the mirror to see if this is being adopted, because the activity isn’t even happening in our own house.

The Window
Here’s where many of us are at now. For those who read this blog, or other blogs like it, we see the power shifting outside our windows. We’re looking out and see that customers are building websites in tribute to our brands, or are talking about how to make products better, or even how to fix them all together, we’re watching and learning.

Dennis is right, I don’t want the “crowd” designing the brake system of my car, but I would sure want the experts in that industry who are designing them into my car to participate. I also want to buy a car that has involved customers as many areas of the product life cycle, form analyzing support requests (on their site and ours) getting customer feedback in real time, and involving advocates. In fact, for many of the products we buy, we’re going to lean on customers to lend their opinion.

For most, some are just peeking out of the window, amazed and scared to see that customers are building on our front lawn, some shut the blinds, and others open the window, one thing is for sure, it’s not going away.

The Door
Here’s the future, and maybe my post wasn’t ready for the market, or maybe just Dennis. It’s unavoidable that every brand will be impacted by social computing, it’s up to the product teams to determine if voices are to be included. The risk? The competitor may recognize this, harvest and benefit.

For most, we’ve not even opened the door, welcomed the customers in our house, let them give input to our cooking, but the savvy companies will. To be fair, how far we’ll let them in our house depends, but let’s at least analyze the opportunities.

We’ll continue to see customers building their own community sites, not on the corporate website, to do nothing is missing the opportunity.

For what it’s worth, I’m no stranger to IT. I’ve worked in IT for 3 years, managed 2 enterprise intranets, and helped out with 2 others. I’ve also managed one enterprise extranet and have worked at 3 Enterprise IT companies (Web hosting, Telecom, and Enterprise Data Storage) who were selling to IT decision makers.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 16th, 2007 at 7:54 am and is filed under Enterprise Web, Web Industry, Web Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.