Social Intelligence = Business Intelligence

Throughout my career I have always tried to sense — what’s the next big change or wave to occur in technology.  The    “Internet revolution,” and I am choosing my words deliberately, was just that — every aspect of communication was impacted as the framework of the web came together in a commercial sense.  I was fortunate to ride the wave forward and participate in this window of time that allowed for widespread creativity and paradigm shifts (young technology folks were able to avoid the corporate ladder — myself included).   Since then, there have certainly been breakthrough companies/models (Google, Amazon, etc).  However, it has not been until recently that I have sensed another groundswell, which I think many folks sense as well — what I like to call the bottom up revolution or the “voice” of the internet (blogs, twitter, facebook, etc).  It’s exciting to see that big companies and Corporate America alone cannot dictate the results of how businesses are perceived.  It’s not what you say about you, it’s what “Google” says about you.  This is just the beginning folks — your online brand, reputation programs are at their infancy — as the web move to greater interactivity (video, web cams), so will marketing and client/customer interactions.  I’ll leave this post with a look at an interesting article I came across in brandweek, a bit dated, but illustrates the point:

http://www.brandweek.com/bw/content_display/news-and-features/digital/e3i6f1a697eee327ba0e15676d4aea4263c

I have the pleasure of participating in a CKO/CIO Roundtable dating back to my days at Paul Hastings (where I held the position of CTO/CKO).  The group meets every few months and consists mostly of AMLAW 150 firms.  Top on the group’s mind as of late have been: (a) KM lite — doing more with less;  (b) AFAs — creating workflow systems to help manage and (c) Normalizing Data.  It’s the last topic I want to spend a few moments on today — in that it’s so very critical to being able to effectively offer a client an alternative fee or fixed fee arrangement.  I am not convinced firms have nailed normalizing their data to be able to justify and clearly defend to management profit margins in fixed fee or alternative fee arrangements, other than for the simplest of matters.  If others out there have had success — would welcome your input.