The permeable enterprise

A while ago it was perfectly sufficient for enterprises to focus on managing the internal information flow, how departments worked together, why and where decision processes needed up-to-date information in order to work or what upcoming trends and developments might influence the strategic decisions taken. Only PR and communications departments tried to listen to the ongoing conversations in the market and gather outside information to feedback into the organizations.

“Today's managers have the opportunity to stage their own revolutions, unleashing new levels of prosperity.”
-Michael Schuster

However the landscape has changed dramatically in the last few years, due to the advent of regular use of public or semi-public communication platforms by employees, clients and partners. Today it is more likely that one of your employees will use a blog, Facebook or Twitter to publish valuable information and most of the insights retrieved are from close monitoring of public information streams full of knowledge.

You probably heard of one or two PR disasters, where international companies lost not only trust from clients or partners, but stock prices dropped due to bad publicity spread through social media. That is only the bad side of modern information markets, but what you might not have heard of are all those examples, where those online conversations helped to make better or faster decisions. That is most likely due to the fact that hardly any organisations have a structured approach to monitoring these conversations.

A recent survey by McCann Erickson found that 45 percent of communication managers don't have a monitoring strategy and just use Google Alerts tracking the organisations name or brands. The firehose of Google Alerts controlled centrally can't be viewed as a viable strategy, nor can a pure demand and search based approach. Some employees might already be using other tools such as Google Reader to build a diverse and manageable information inflow.

What are the alternatives? At first you might consider training your employees to bring the social media monitoring topic to everyone's agenda. Then you might consider specialised tools that help manage all the sources, be it printed news, web news or social media. For US companies Radian6 or Sysomos offer comprehensive solutions, exclusively targeted to social media and with a clear US focus. System One Radar is a integrated solution, covering print, web and social media news, especially for Europe.

It seems that this approach is not just a necessary step to better control the information inflow into the organisation, but a true game changer when it comes to information use. Through social collaboration tools that span partners and clients outside the organisation many companies have already opened up the knowledge space and let others take advantage of the many insights within the company, creating a vibrant ecosystem that sometimes makes it hard to distinguish between inside and outside of the organisation.

Monitoring public information streams is just the other part of the equation, letting more outside information in, by actively exposing the organisation to the wealth of data without letting it drown in it. The key to this, looking at best practice solutions, is the semantic analysis of content and semantic search in general, to minimise the noise and filter out the signal that is hidden in all that information.

Most likely many of your employees will already use public information and their own 'semantic' algorithms to harvest public information sources, be it through following the right Twitter users or sifting through industry insight blogs. The permeable enterprise accepts that fact and offers tools and strategies to manage the barrier, or as Mark Plakias, VP Strategy from the Orange Labs SF puts it in his strategy paper on the Porous Enterprise: "The toppling of the Berlin Wall marked a dramatic transition from a structured, command-and-control regime, to a more vibrant, democratic and market-driven society - a triumph of dynamic over static. Today's managers have the opportunity to stage their own revolutions, unleashing new levels of prosperity. One thing is for certain, if the leaders don't stage this revolution, the workers will."

Biography

Michael Schuster is Head of Products and Services at System One, a semantic technology company from Vienna. He has been working in social media, strategic consulting and software development for over 10 years, helping companies adapt to the changing media landscape.