Social Enterprise Maturity

March 8, 2013

The maturity of an enterprise is always related to a Practice. Just as the original notion of maturity came from Software Development, in the case of the Social Enterprise, it should be linked to the ability of an enterprise to leverage the new models in business practices.

Here are a list of practices that I believe an Enterprise needs to master in order to progressively become more mature:

An Enterprise-wide understanding of the potential of Social Innovations – monitoring trends and understanding implications of trends for its own business. In short – Foresight, and Impact Analysis.

An enterprise must be able to build a ‘Case for Change’ – must be able to identify where in its business it makes most sense to use new approaches, what their value is and be able to create a compelling case that motivates all stakeholders. It should therefore have a practice around developing Strategies Road-maps, and mobilizing support for wide-ranging transformation.

Product Management and the introduction of Innovations in the Enterprise. This practice is not unique to Social Innovation, but if this is not a practice and well mastered, all non-trivial initiatives will fail.

Like all innovations, new ideas will need to be marketed and there must be a strategy to ensure adoption through the management of change.

There must be a disciplined approach to spreading successful new ideas throughout the enterprise, including the on-boarding of new segments of the enterprise. There must also be a disciplined approach to managing the overall road-map, ensuring that it is coherent and always aligned with Business Strategic priorities.

The Enterprise will need to master the design of Socially-calibrated solutions. Solutions must necessarily be holistic and systemic.

There are new disciplines such as Design Thinking and Co-design that should be practiced.

There is a new approach to creating Value, leveraging new organizational structures, and among other things it should all result in creating ‘experiences’ that ‘clients’ want.

Technology is just one part of this equation, certainly very important.

There is a new discipline to how these Social Solutions/Design must be Operated:

This goes to the notion of Open leadership, Community Management etc.These are new practices for most enterprises.

Operations is the heart of the value for the enterprise, for it is in Operations that the enterprise will realize intended business outcomes.

These must be systematically measured and interventions designed when desired expectations are not met.Therefore, the enterprise must master the art of designing social interventions that deliver the desired purpose.(Incentives, Motivations, Network Stimulation, Culture Change etc etc)

The entire Life-cycle of the ‘Solution/Design’ must be managed, from inception to growth and evolution.

Governance – needless to say, if this is to be a transformational initiative, then the introduction of Social Innovations must be linked to a strong Governance structure.

This includes the creation of new ‘Design Principles’ that the enterprise operates with and uses to make decisions, and things such as the creation of policies that encourage Open Participation etc.

Finally, the enterprise should commit to the Mastery of these Practices and should have some investment in a Center-of-Excellence or Practice. This practice, whether formal or informal must ensure that the organization learns from its initiatives and is therefore able to accelerate the leveraging of this new way of doing business.

These seven practices, should become the basis of evaluating maturity.