Can social media be master planned as part of an organisation’s enterprise architecture?
At the latest forum organised by the Architecture Community of Practice (ACoP) titled Business Use of Social Media And Impact On Enterprise Architecture, five experts from diverse fields came together to offer their perspective on the topic.
Goh Boon Nam, Chief of New Initiatives & Strategic Planning at ISS, opened the forum with his concise summary of enterprise architecture. Enterprise architecture is about converting business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change. Essentially it is about selecting the right things to do and ensuring that the right things get done.
According to Boon Nam, the perception is that social media cannot be architected for business use because “social can’t be planned – it just happens”. In addition, social processes are thought to be too fuzzy to be incorporated into a design.
Goh Boon Nam, Chief of New Initiatives & Strategic Planning at ISS, capturing the audience with the latest update on social media and enterprise architecture
It is possible, however, to plan for business processes to be enhanced by social media, said Boon Nam. He gave examples including business that had successfully switched from conventional one-way advertising to two-way communication between themselves and their customers, and those that had successfully evolved their help desk from the conventional model to customers’ self-help portals.
Social media tools such as Salesforce’s Marketing Crowd, HootSuite and Tweetpeek help organisations with internal collaboration and to set tasks.
Responding to a question from the audience about what to do with the huge amount of data from social media, Cecilia Pang, Director of Corporate Communications at Khoo Teck Puat Hospital said, “One of the things we try to do with the data of our customers is to create what you would call a computerised view of our customers. When a customer walks up to us, how do we see from a single view that this person is not a nice customer or owes us money. We think about how to turn this data into useful information at the point of interaction; useful information that will help us reach out to the customer on a one-to-one basis.”
(from left) Peter Tan, Principal Architect at Integrated Health Information Systems; Kia Siang Hock, Assistant Director, Solution Architect Office, NLB; Goh Boon Nam, Chief, New Initiatives & Strategic Planning, ISS; Ian Loe, Social Business Evangelist, IBM Collaboration Solutions; Cecilia Pang, Director, Corporate Communications, Khoo Teck Puat Hospital
To a question about how to harness social media both internally and externally from a big data perspective, Ian Loe, Social Business Evangelist at IBM Collaboration Solutions conceded, “Right now, it is very unstructured data. You have to be very purpose-built; You have to specify where you want to look, and you want to know who are the influential bloggers, for example, financial bloggers whom people take advice from. Then you build a model for the key phases and you comb through. It takes a long time to model what you are looking for. There are no turnkey solutions.”
Kia Siang Hock, Assistant Director of the National Library Board’s Solution Architect Office and Peter Tan, Principal Architect at Integrated Health Information Systems were among the other experts who spoke at the forum that was conducted at ISS.
Interested to attend future events such as this? Get in touch with The Architecture Community of Practice (ACoP) at isstet@nus.edu.sg.
ACoP is a group of architecture practitioners committed to advancing architecture as a foundational discipline in the industry. The group regularly hosts events to share knowledge, experience and insights in order for practitioners to learn from each other.