Raising your ‘SIQ’ (Social Intelligence Quotient): 5 Key Business Indicators

Updated: January 29, 2011

In today's world, the word media is no longer proprietary to the conglomerate of the news and press. With the multi-flexed, multi-faceted growth of social media sites richer in content and live-usability, the phrase ‘keep in touch' seems to have advanced too fast and too soon to ‘get connected' on LinkedIn, to be ‘liked' on Facebook, and ‘followed' on Twitter. And YouTube seems to be nothing short of a 360-degree revolving channel across the globe - in any desired direction and manner. As curious as it might seem, the use of social media is gaining edge as the unique and universal platform for near real-time communication, collaboration, and co-ordination - right from the palm of one hand. Helped by revolutionary technologies of 3D visualization, digitization and beyond this has resulted in what I call the ‘Socially Enabled Digital Intelligence' age. Refactoring this paradigm into the Business-IT innovation landscape it seems to make perfect sense to do leverage this social content-sphere for business innovation - in order to quantify their performance using a new imperative the Social Intelligence Quotient (SIQ) or more precisely, the Business-Social Intelligence Quotient. To this effect, here are a list of High-Fives that enables companies of any size and industry vertical to raise the bar on SIQ or (Business-) Social Intelligence Quotient:

1. Business social is the new (intelligent) Business Model. The new 'Business as usual' is the 'Business social'. This is the new baseline of 'Business Modeling' that's gaining speed AND AN OPEN SOURCE APPROACH SPEEDS THIS UP TO GO MAINSTREAM! This greatly simplifies, standardizes, and seamlessly seeps the end-to-end pragmatics from concepts to customization! Hence use the 'USE OF OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE' AS A BUSINESS ANALYTIC (i.e., as a BUSINESS MODEL analytic to derive the BUSINESS ANALYTICS behind the growth of the business) TO DRIVE the Awareness, Adoption and Adaption of an Open Sourced enabled EDW/BI Solution - by way of C-UX feedback loop. Using Open standards and Open Source methodologies, as far as possible, for the end-to-end Social Analytics implementation enables eases the complexly unstructured content for consistency, control, and flexibility of the solution infrastructure; and also adds to the robustness of the in-built security framework.

2. Use Social Analytics for Business Process Mining - Apply research as an agile process to Social content by way of iteration cycles of search, re-search, and re-search on Social Media sites. Sometimes this can be done in a pipelined fashion too. By doing this not only are data and information about trending and behavior patterns can be uncovered but new details in regard to process/model patterns can be discovered, that eventually can lead to business process/model mining. Social Media Content is a best-fit for this purpose as it is Open Source-oriented and aligns closely with the facts in context. This can help in getting to the core of ‘Social Analytics for Business Process Mining' by way of implementation using a plethora of programming languages, technologies, techniques, and tools - from SCRATCH programming to FAST search algorithms to context-aware VECTORIZED appliances. And these can seamlessly search, store, sync, simulate, and SOCIALIZE the mined data-to-information-to-knowledge-to-intelligence around a business context to evolve into a Business Process that can be standardized as a ‘Model for Business Process Execution' and as ‘Social Analytics for Business Process Mining'. Remember that SEO is still an imperative that when optimized can accelerate this end-to-end process.

3. Recognize the Social Landscape as the evolving and emerging additional dimension when architecting a best-fit EDW/BI solution. Today as Business moves to Business-on-the-go (or Business-on-the-fly to be precise), this seemingly-slight shift in business model is enormous in potential to transform the Business-IT-Customer landscape of such a solution into a Business-IT-Customer-Social landscape. With this come the following benefits too:

  • The Business accelerates in terms of improvement to involvement
  • The Business-IT forecast looks All-CLOUD-y (irrespective of climate change!) - starting from cloud bursting to crowd sourcing
  • The Business-Social gets wiser from Business-as-usual as data gets intelligent to information-in-action
  • The Business-network communicates and collaborates to become Business-competition, from inside-the-net in the real world through the Internet to the Social Net and result in competitive business processes
  • The Business Services (including BSS and OSS) evolve into Business-Social Services thereby granting them tenure - and business assurance through the Customer Lifecycle of the business

4. Improvise Social to become Self-Serviceable. This a boon to the so-called Social Customer in that it delivers currency of information in near real-time. Businesses can leverage the so-called ‘gold' mines of intelligent information as more and more data mining gets practical - in unimaginably fast, actionable, synchronized, transparent and social ways - wherein users across all touch-points get to involve interactively in a 360-degree variance to feed and feedback their (business) input. This self-serviceable input can then be auto re-wired as ‘intelligent business rules' via the tenor of self-adaptability of the open source BI solution in near real time.

5. Take Social Intelligence to the next level by making it Pervasive Social Intelligence. Let the Social Prevail so that businesses become the Social Enterprises. Getting to know how social analytics can aid decision-making that drive business success is not just new knowledge but can be a key business driver by way of best-fit use cases and Customer Success stories, like using Social Media for Recruiting, eLearning, and Talent Management; using CRM Software to drive CRM adoption by way of Customer experience feedback loop.