The maturity issue related to social business is important for companies. Really understand that there is different levels of development on the social business is not always easy. Especially to understand that climbing a maturity curve may take time by doing it step by step. But there is also a way of understanding the social business that is important in this process, based on the sharing of your vision. This second approach largely determines the first. In fact to summarize, there is a double maturity analysis. The first is more descriptive, how mature is the company and a second covering the way to deploy it and its impact on the transformation of the organization.

So to start a maturity curve of Social business

Pre-Social : Less and Less enterprise are at this level, at least large companies. It is very rare that no experiments have been setting up. Or if they are not listed, they should have existed, but under the radar (so may be they still exist).

Experimental : Testing an entreprise social network (as a pilot) for primarily thin the internal communication. Without any strategic thinking, and outwards all business processes. The idea is to streamline the flow of information by making it a little less top-down, but that’s all. Collaboration in one hand with new forms of communication and business processes on the other hand. The vision is often limited to the tool, although the speech of firms evole. Most of the company are to this stage.

Connected : A real conversational approach, but overall strategic vision. Companies left a little more room to work collaboratively, get various communities, business or not, but that’s all. Some companies are there because there were among them pioneers who have made advance the « cause », but there is still lacks of true vision. Or if the vision exists, it remains in a state of speech, because it is not backed up.

Collaborative : Start of a broader use, although remaining silos but business processes are all integrated. Driving the change took place and social exist for employees who have thinned their business practices, perhaps even they have started to develop new social uses. More and more business and HR processes are social and the entire company begins to be aligned to this purpose.

Strategic: Approach coordinated and integrated with the various business processes. The social is the backbone of the company with all internal and external stakeholders .

With this description you can position your company on this curve. After that, if you want to know how your business will evolve, you have to think about this second maturity cycle:  Vision and project management. That’s why for many companies it will be difficult to go beyond the level of « connected » and they will eventually blow out, because they won’t have been to the end of the process and the value expected added will be much less.

Tools Vision : The widespreadvision. Although the speech has changed and companies no longer speak about tools, but the vision is limited to tools, so those companies are going to join Gartner statistics on the failure of the establishment of collaborative organization (at least 80 %). They have set up an enterprise social network and that’s it, even if they talk about business every the three sentences.

Change management vision : The world is divided into two. Those who say yes we’ve understood that tool is not everything. But there are 70% -80 % of the social business budget for the tool and the remains for managing change. Just recall that the opposite is needed. And then immediately, there is much less companies. We are talking about changing the culture, not managing a tool, especially on global projects. So the purpose is to show to employees how they can work in a better way every day and later how to make evolve their social practices. Difficult to go further the connected stage with this approach of a limited budget dedicated to change management. Change management is limited because there is no real vision behind. Employees just join a tool.

Process vision : Managing  change without a clear purpose is a nonsense. Otherwise, you will  continue to be collaborative on one hand and « real life » the company of the other. You need to have this vision of the collaborative serving the business and align processes accordingly. Then you will be able to go to the collaborative and strategic level. It means a real strategy of deployment in line with the business needs. So of course a sufficiently flexible governance to allow this shift.

Business vision : It’s the business model that is impacted. I’m at the strategic level, so I’ve digitized my company, but I have to go further in my vision. How digital / social allows me to change my products / services, so my targets / customers and my business model . Here we go beyond the simple implementation, it is really a strategic vision for the development of the company and its business model. Meaning really understand the impact of digital on the business model and its implications on daily basis.

So if the first model allow me to check where my company is, the second will allow me to see how far I can go. Although of course any model is limited in its approach and the aim is to give you a vision.