Systems of Engagement
Discussion
From Systems of Record to Systems of Engagement
1 John Mancini, on a new report by Geoffrey Moore:
“We have spent the past several decades of IT investment focused on deploying ‘systems of record.’ These systems accomplished two important things,” notes Moore. “First, they centralized, standardized, and automated business transactions on a global basis, thereby better enabling world trade. Second, they gave top management a global view of the state of the business, thereby better enabling global business management. Spending on the Enterprise Content Management technologies that are at the core of Systems of Record will continue — and will actually expand as these solutions become more available and relevant to small and mid-sized organizations. However, there is also a new and revolutionary wave of spending emerging on Systems of Engagement — a wave focused directly on knowledge worker effectiveness and productivity. Social Business Systems are at the heart of Systems of Engagement.”
According to AIIM Chair Lynn Fraas, Vice President of Crown Partners, “Social Business Systems provide a means for organizations to build on their investment in content management solutions. Increasingly, Systems of Record have become a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for business success. In the future, organizations will differentiate themselves based on how well they deploy Social Business technologies to improve organizational flexibility and better engage customers. These Social Business technologies are transforming customer engagement through such consumer facing tools as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. They are simultaneously creating new models of employee and partner collaboration, cooperation and conversation within organizations — models that will eventually replace e-mail as the primary means of internal collaboration.”
According to Moore, “The first wave of spending left knowledge workers mostly on their own. We gave our workers laptops, connectivity, email, and the Office suite, and told them to go be more productive. The world of consumer social technology has given our workforces a taste of what is possible beyond this kind of rudimentary e-mail driven collaboration. Given the pressures that global business models are putting on collaboration and coordination across enterprise boundaries, the demand for increased capabilities is escalating rapidly. The implications of this for IT organizations and CIOs are revolutionary — organizations need to quickly get in front of this curve or they run the risk of getting run over by it. We are on the cusp of a new wave of investment in Social Business Systems that will focus on providing knowledge workers with the tools to collaborate with a business purpose.” (http://aiim.typepad.com/aiim_blog/2010/10/investment-in-knowledge-workers-critical-to-economic-recovery-socialmedia.html)
2. JP Rangaswami:
"Businesses are morphing from customer-product hierarchies to relationship-capability networks. This is placing intense pressure on enterprise systems bases, which have traditionally kept the Fort Knox-like “systems of record” distinct and separate from the somewhat more promiscuous “systems of engagement”.
Systems of record often dealt with private objects, hard to access, secure, confidential: unpublished trading figures from an accounting system, for example. Systems of engagement, on the other hand, often dealt with public objects, usually accessed via the web: a link to a blog post recommended by someone in your network, for example.
Systems of record were perceived to be secure and confidential in comparison to systems of engagement; however, as extracts from systems of record were usually embedded in documents, spreadsheets and presentations, and then sent as e-mail attachments, the true level of security is questionable. Witness what Bradley Manning did.
Systems of engagement are perceived to be open and “insecure”; yet, learning from the facebook model, it can be argued that the granular nature of the security of access is actually of a far higher order than that afforded to the systems-of-engagement-information-accessed-via-email-attachments." (http://confusedofcalcutta.com/2011/02/24/thinking-more-about-social-objects-in-the-enterprise/)
More Information
- Geoffrey Moore's report via http://www.aiim.org/futurehistory
- Social Business Design