A recent survey conducted by Proofpoint found that 8% of companies had terminated employees due to social media usage (common causes including sharing sensitive information on a network). And while the statistic seems significant, it only underscores one of several upcoming challenges nearly every organization will face as changes in people, process and technology fueled by the collective movement we call social media begin to transform business. Here are a few challenges that every organization should be planning for right now:

1. Integration. Becoming a "social business" (meaning true participation as opposed to leveraging social media as a new form of marketing) can impact nearly every function of a business. Marketing, PR, communications--even supply chain and any function that deals with employees. So where does it live? Is it a department? Do organizations hire a "Chief Social Officer" much like they would a Chief Technology Officer? All organizations will eventually grapple with integrating social into their entire ecosystem adopting either centralized, distributed or hybrid approaches.

2. Governance. Many organizations now understand that anything that can and will be said about them on the internet will be. The good, the bad, the ugly. And this includes content produced not only from the general public, but also from internal constituents such as employees. Organizations will not only need to begin actively listening so that they are in the know, but they will need rules of engagement for how they deal with multiple types of scenarios from responding to a compliment to dealing with a detractor to following up with an employee who just posted something inappropriate or sensitive.

3. Culture. All organizations fall somewhere on a spectrum of being "open" or "closed" meaning that they are either more transparent with how they operate and collaborative or they hoard knowledge internally. Consider that it's probable that the Zappos purchase by Amazon had a good deal to do with their notoriously open culture. Likewise, even Apple, which can be notoriously secretive, is benefiting by leveraging a strategy that opened up their iPhone application ecosystem. Sure Apple has a great deal of control over it, but for the first time in history, they have legions of people developing applications that run on their hardware. Organizations have the potential to benefit from embracing customers and employees in new ways, but will have to manage it intelligently and with purpose.

4. Human Resources. In order to transform from a business to a social business, companies are going to have to upgrade their HR protocols, as well as legal. And it's likely to be a never-ending process as new technologies continually hit the scene. Before there was Twitter, companies scrambled to publish blogging guidelines for employees, now the wrong tweet or Facebook status can get you fired. Organizations will not only need to update guidelines but actually train their people who may be leveraging social technologies for work. Customer service in particular comes to mind.

5. Measurement & ROI. Every organization will continue to struggle with measuring results and reporting ROI. Philosophically, this question can be answered with another question: "what's the ROI of e-mail"? But it's a question that won't go away. New social constructs will be needed to measure social initiatives such as attention (the size or number of participants actively engaged) or authority (the amount of influence a participant has in the ecosystem). Because social business is enabled by technology, it is by definition measurable. However, tying it to realized revenue or savings becomes more of a challenge.

In order for business to transform into something that can function in a less formal, fast moving social space--it will need to do so at scale. These 5 issues are but a handful of the types of growing pains we'll see as this happens.

Choosing Salesforce CRM is a strategic business decision. Our CRM consulting services are designed to assure its successful execution through a sound CRM implementation strategy tailored to your business needs.

Whether you’re creating your first CRM system, replacing an existing one, or customizing your Salesforce CRM application, our experienced CRM consultants provide the strategic guidance and hands-on know-how you need.

The goal of Salesforce CRM consulting services is to help you think through and execute all four key phases of your CRM initiative: planning, implementing, driving adoption, and optimizing. Our CRM consulting services will help you create value from features and functionality you may not be able to leverage on your own, or might have considered beyond your reach.

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CRM Consulting Services for Data Migration and Quality Assurance

To get the greatest value from your investment in Salesforce CRM, your CRM implementation strategy needs to include a plan for consolidating and managing the
customer information that is typically spread out among various databases, formats, and data fields. This is where CRM consulting services can help. Doing the job right, and completely, is well worth it: assistance from our expert CRM can make the difference between an optimal, productive transition from your old systems, and something considerably less.

• Data migration. In the real world, data migration doesn’t always find its way into a company’s overall CRM implementation strategy. Many customers engage our CRM consulting services after deployment, because multiple data sources are creating inefficiencies in their use of Salesforce CRM. Sales and customer support may be using different customer data, or worse, sales management might be working with information at odds with what sales reps are using in the field. For data management, our CRM consulting services begin with an analysis of your business drivers and processes. With this understanding, our CRM consultants then help you craft the appropriate strategy to migrate your data quickly, efficiently, and effectively, to optimize the value gained from your Salesforce CRM applications.
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1- Business Objects

2 - SAS

3 - Cognos

4 - Microsoft

5 - Hyperion

The most common tools used for business intelligence are as follows. They are listed in the following order: Increasing cost, increasing functionality, increasing business intelligence complexity, and decreasing number of total users.

Excel

Take a guess what's the most common business intelligence tool? You might be surprised to find out it's Microsoft Excel. There are several reasons for this:

1. It's relatively cheap.

2. It's commonly used. You can easily send an Excel sheet to another person without worrying whether the recipient knows how to read the numbers.

3. It has most of the functionalities users need to display data.

In fact, it is still so popular that all third-party reporting / OLAP tools have an "export to Excel" functionality. Even for home-built solutions, the ability to export numbers to Excel usually needs to be built.

Excel is best used for business operations reporting and goals tracking.

Reporting tool

In this discussion, I am including both custom-built reporting tools and the commercial reporting tools together. They provide some flexibility in terms of the ability for each user to create, schedule, and run their own reports. The Reporting Tool Selection selection discusses how one should select an OLAP tool.

Business operations reporting and dashboard are the most common applications for a reporting tool.

OLAP tool

OLAP tools are usually used by advanced users. They make it easy for users to look at the data from multiple dimensions. The OLAP Tool Selection selection discusses how one should select an OLAP tool.

OLAP tools are used for multidimensional analysis.

Data mining tool

Data mining tools are usually only by very specialized users, and in an organization, even large ones, there are usually only a handful of users using data mining tools.

Data mining tools are used for finding correlation among different factors.

The Pygmalion Effect: The Power of the Supervisor's Expectations
By Susan M. Heathfield, About.com

Your expectations of people and their expectations of themselves are the key factors in how well people perform at work. Known as the Pygmalion effect and the Galatea effect, respectively, the power of expectations cannot be overestimated. These are the fundamental principles you can apply to performance expectations and potential performance improvement at work.

You can summarize the Pygmalion effect, often known as the power of expectations, by considering:

• Every supervisor has expectations of the people who report to him.
• Supervisors communicate these expectations consciously or unconsciously.
• People pick up on, or consciously or unconsciously read, these expectations from their supervisor.
• People perform in ways that are consistent with the expectations they have picked up on from the supervisor.

The Pygmalion effect was described by J. Sterling Livingston in the September/October, 1988 Harvard Business Review. "The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them," Livingston said in his article, Pygmalion in Management.

The Pygmalion effect enables staff to excel in response to the manager’s message that they are capable of success and expected to succeed. The Pygmalion effect can also undermine staff performance when the subtle communication from the manager tells them the opposite. These cues are often subtle. As an example, the supervisor fails to praise a staff person's performance as frequently as he praises others. The supervisor talks less to a particular employee.

Livingston went on to say about the supervisor, "If he is unskilled, he leaves scars on the careers of the young men (and women), cuts deeply into their self-esteem and distorts their image of themselves as human beings. But if he is skillful and has high expectations of his subordinates, their self-confidence will grow, their capabilities will develop and their productivity will be high. More often than he realizes, the manager is Pygmalion."

Can you imagine how performance will improve if your supervisors communicate positive thoughts about people to people? If the supervisor actually believes that every employee has the ability to make a positive contribution at work, the telegraphing of that message, either consciously or unconsciously, will positively affect employee performance.

And, the effect of the supervisor gets even better than this. When the supervisor holds positive expectations about people, she helps individuals improve their self-concept and thus, self-esteem. People believe they can succeed and contribute and their performance rises to the level of their own expectations.

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