One of the fundamental philosophies behind the way we have built - and continue to evolve - Knoodle is that the cloud makes it possible to extend critical business process and interactions beyond the four walls of your company to encompass key 3rd party constituencies such as your customers, partners and distribution channels. In our case, we’re focused on applying that network effect to social learning, but as has been proven time and again by other successful companies like Salesforce, Zendesk and Box, the same is true for just about any set of use cases within the enterprise. Debra Donston-Miller published an interesting post at the Brainyard exploring the same philosophy last week, based on a recent report from Forrester about the rise of ‘Business Networks.’
The gist is simple - the interactions that happen through networks bring value that otherwise wouldn’t be attainable without the network, and in the process, help business perform at a higher level and deliver better results. Business networks can help get rid of bottlenecks in information flow, reduce transactional and operational friction in distribution channels, and ensure that every company, team or person that touches a product from concept through end-of-life has access to the best information and expertise to maximize the value of that product for everyone in the value chain, including the customer.
But think about the networks in your own company. Do they extend beyond other people with the same domain as yours in their email address? Or, as with the vast majority today, are your networks restricted by your IT department to only those with an account on your LDAP server? My guess is that IT isn’t particularly involved in your product development process, so why do they get to restrict networks that could help your company do a better job selling, delivering and supporting those same products?
After all, as we have known about access networks since the '80s thanks to Metcalfe’s Law, the value of a network increases exponentially based on the number of nodes in the system. There’s little argument that the same logic couldn’t - or wouldn’t - be just as applicable to business networks, so what’s stopping businesses from embracing it, just as network providers have already been doing for decades?
Before ‘the cloud’, it was easy to chalk this up to lack of technical feasibility. Creating point to point connections between all the touch-points throughout your ecosystem was just too expensive and time consuming.
Not so anymore.
Everyone is in the cloud these days, but as Donston-Miller and Forrester correctly point out, the lions-share of focus on the cloud has been on it’s capacity to dramatically reduce IT costs, and to a lesser extent, facilitate the exchange of data. Nothing wrong with that - IT’s job since day one has been to manage the cost of technology, and the cloud is increasingly becoming their best friend in that endeavor.
But, it’s time for sales, marketing, support, HR, and every other organization to embrace the networking value made possible by the cloud just as enthusiastically. Just as IT leverages the cloud to connect storage, compute and delivery technology to build cheaper and more robust tech infrastructure, other organizations should capitalize on the same ‘networking’ capabilities offered through the cloud to connect resources - corporate, human, and data - that can help them achieve their goals. Whether the goal is increasing sales, improving customer service ratings, reducing channel costs or improving employee retention, just about any objective in your business could benefit from exploiting the latent value in your business network.
The gist is simple - the interactions that happen through networks bring value that otherwise wouldn’t be attainable without the network, and in the process, help business perform at a higher level and deliver better results. Business networks can help get rid of bottlenecks in information flow, reduce transactional and operational friction in distribution channels, and ensure that every company, team or person that touches a product from concept through end-of-life has access to the best information and expertise to maximize the value of that product for everyone in the value chain, including the customer.
But think about the networks in your own company. Do they extend beyond other people with the same domain as yours in their email address? Or, as with the vast majority today, are your networks restricted by your IT department to only those with an account on your LDAP server? My guess is that IT isn’t particularly involved in your product development process, so why do they get to restrict networks that could help your company do a better job selling, delivering and supporting those same products?
After all, as we have known about access networks since the '80s thanks to Metcalfe’s Law, the value of a network increases exponentially based on the number of nodes in the system. There’s little argument that the same logic couldn’t - or wouldn’t - be just as applicable to business networks, so what’s stopping businesses from embracing it, just as network providers have already been doing for decades?
Before ‘the cloud’, it was easy to chalk this up to lack of technical feasibility. Creating point to point connections between all the touch-points throughout your ecosystem was just too expensive and time consuming.
Not so anymore.
Everyone is in the cloud these days, but as Donston-Miller and Forrester correctly point out, the lions-share of focus on the cloud has been on it’s capacity to dramatically reduce IT costs, and to a lesser extent, facilitate the exchange of data. Nothing wrong with that - IT’s job since day one has been to manage the cost of technology, and the cloud is increasingly becoming their best friend in that endeavor.
But, it’s time for sales, marketing, support, HR, and every other organization to embrace the networking value made possible by the cloud just as enthusiastically. Just as IT leverages the cloud to connect storage, compute and delivery technology to build cheaper and more robust tech infrastructure, other organizations should capitalize on the same ‘networking’ capabilities offered through the cloud to connect resources - corporate, human, and data - that can help them achieve their goals. Whether the goal is increasing sales, improving customer service ratings, reducing channel costs or improving employee retention, just about any objective in your business could benefit from exploiting the latent value in your business network.
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