CIO Update: Co-Directors of Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant Write About Building a Social Enterprise to Win in the 21st Century

Ben Pring and Paul Roehrig, Co-directors of Center for the Future of Work at Cognizant

“Key to the next chapter of competition is an understanding that the new world of “digital value webs” is quite different to the old world of “physical value chains” and that the new world requires work to be re-imagined in profound new ways; profoundly better ways,” write Ben Pring and Paul Roehrig.

“At the heart of this process of re-imagination is the objective of building what we call the “social enterprise,” an organization built to succeed in the 21st century; not plod along from the 20th (or 19th) century and which reflects the digital age we live in. Outperforming 21st century businesses will rethink, reinvent, and rewire work with new organizational principles facilitated by application of social media, mobility, advanced analytics, and cloud computing,” they observe.

“By understanding, accepting, and embracing the new to re-imagine how work is done, companies can re-invent themselves and re-establish their relevance for the new world ahead,” they write. “Social enterprises will exemplify leading edge thinking about business and technology models and will thrive in an era of acceleration and dynamic volatility.”

The authors add, “The successful 21st century business will leverage new service models, implement new commercial models for externalized business solutions, and deploy the SMAC stack to be asset light and agile, to collapse time and space, to add new layers of richness to interactions, and to gain clairvoyance buried amidst the zettabytes (soon to be yottabytes) of data in which we now all swim.”

According to Pring and Roehrig, the social enterprise will be born (or re-born) digital, global, and virtual. “It will be designed for impermanence, built to fail fast and learn, and will value speed over perfection. As we have seen already, achieving this new business reality will not be simple, but enough firms are succeeding for all of us to realize the art of the possible,” they state.

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