Strategic business planning needs social business software
19 April 2010
We’ve all learnt bucket-loads! We’ve spent the last year engaging with our community of users and partners, learning more about their requirements and pains regarding strategic business planning.
As well as confirming some of the issues around defining, communicating and analyzing business strategy, our research has highlighted the need for an inclusive, social and visually engaging environment for strategic planning. Below are some of the key requirements we captured from the research chatter:
1/ Interactive groups: We need to be able to define flexible groups to interact and collaborate on different strategic business roadmap activities.
In many cases these groups were said to include external participants such as business and supply chain partners, as well as customers, who have a stake in the process.
2/ Sociability: We want the best bits from social platforms but applied to business. And we don’t want the inflexibility of traditional business hierarchical workflow!
We heard a lot about the need for a more intuitive and less prescribed social networking type of feel, similar to a Facebook or a Twitter, and in the majority of discussions, sociability was described as a key attribute in engaging people to participate in and add value to business strategy discussions.
3. Visualization: Make it simple, make it enticing, make it visual.
The desire for an immersive application for business strategy and planning is clear from our engagements. And the attitude ‘why can’t it be more like a Wii or an X-box’ is becoming more common. Tellingly the general consensus on the current breed of business software is that at best it’s visually uninspiring and at worst, it’s a burden as part of their daily activities.
As well as home use games our research community really liked visual tools such as: Microsoft’s new UniveRSS (a 3D RSS feed reader) and the Google Timeline view in Viewzi.
We may have missed something so keep letting us know what you need.
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