You may have seen our announcement of our partnership with Lecko, the leading French Social Business and Research consultancy. We are carrying out 2 pieces of research work with them:
The reason we are doing this is that there is virtually no research on the UK market, and even less that is up to date – and yet there are already many suppliers operating in the UK, and many customers. This is odd, as most forecasts point to this overall area as one of the faster growing areas of adoption in the business arena. There is generic “Global” data available, but it tends to be US centric and is at best indicative, but does not drill down to the differences in the UK market.
Software Analysis for UK market
Our first project is converting their extremely detailed research on Enterprise Social Networks and the various Collaboration, Community & Engagement packages for the UK market (a typical example of their analysis is shown in the picture below that represents a 3d product animation). We will link to this work as soon as it is available (we plan to have completed this by July 2015)
Detailed Research on UK market evolution
Our second project will be to map to their research on how Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) and Community/Collaboration Managers (CM) in in the UK work within their businesses compared to France, to observe similarities, differences, trends and lessons for both countries, and we will widen it out to other major economies as well over time.
One of the first things we have found for example, is that in the UK, those responsible for social business are often called by different names – those involved in managing internal communities can be from different areas of the business (e.g.: Communications, Marketing, HR, IT) and can be given different titles – Internal Communications Manager, Intranet Manager, Social Media Managers, Transformation Managers, or CIO – all who carry the Social Business mantle in the UK.
This research contains 3 main pieces of work:
1. Collaboration – the ongoing evolution of the Social Business arena, and the evolution of the Enterprise Social Network (ESN) and the core position of Collaboration systems in driving value
2. Organising for Transformation – what companies are doing about Digital Transformation today, and how they are going about it
3. Constructing a collaborative offer – how they are implementing the software tools and systems
In addition we look in some detail at the probable evolution of Enterprise Social Software (ESS) and the overall Enterprise Social Network (ESN) over the next few years.
Our aim is to have this finished by Q3 of 2015
Practitioner Involvement
This piece of work has two main research components involving user participation:
- An anonymised survey of Community/Collaboration system Managers using the same survey (translated by us into English) that Lecko used in France so we can compare and contrast.
- Structured interviews with Chief Digital Officers, aagain using the same format as Lecko used in France. They spoke to many companies including L’Oreal, Credit Agricole, Luois Vuitton and many others. W plan to cover a similar range of UK practitioners from SMEs to large Corporates.
We hope you choose to take part, for those that do there will be a raffle and several tickets to our autumn Digital Business Summit conference will be won.
(Below – Lecko analysis of Jive, one of the many major community software products in the UK market that we now have Lecko’s detailed breakdown of)
