Doculabs

Over the last few months, I’ve had the opportunity to hear first hand from clients how they’re scrambling to get their arms around social computing and collaboration technologies for the enterprise (aka Enterprise 2.0, or E2.0). And although they’re concerned about what technologies to use, more often than not, the business value of E2.0 capabilites are top of mind for them. They want to know whether, once you cut through the frenzy over these tools, there’s any real business value to be had.

In this post, I’ll take a look at how my clients in one vertical – heath payers – are thinking about ways to apply E2.0 capabilites to drive meaningful business value.

I’ll begin by saying that, unlike those technologists who see E2.0 capabilities as essentially the repackaging of old concepts (“The cloud? Nothing but mainframe computing. Collaboration tools? Just BBS with a fancier interface” and so on), I think these capabilities in fact represent a difference in kind rather than degree over what’s come before. Despite that, I also believe that E2.0 capabilities should be held to the same standards of business accountability as their E1.0 counterparts. In the end, they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves, and should be used (or not used) based on how well they enable an organization to meet its goals.

I’ve heard about a lot of ideas of how health payers could use E2.0 capabilities, but two stand out as the most promising to me in the near term:

• Delivering apps to the public related to health and wellness. Think of these as an extension of the web sites health payers have used for some time now to promote general heath and wellness. The difference, however, is both in the “stickiness” of apps for mobile devices (can be running in the background all day while someone carries their phone with them) and the richness of functionality that apps can provide over a typical web site.
• Customer service. This involves treating external social media services (like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, blogs, etc.) as inputs to customer service alongside phone, paper mail, fax, secure chat, and email. This would allow health payers to gather potential customer service issues that appear on external media services and respond to them in a structured, repeatable way rather than allowing these very public complaints to seem to go unanswered. Note that in the E1.0 customer service model, if the insured who rants on Twitter happens to call customer service, the resolution will remain private, while the negative Tweet  sits out there forever–unaddressed–for the world to see.

Longer-term, core health payer business processes (like claims processing, renewal, and the proposal process) will no doubt benefit from E2.0 (3.0, 4.0) capabilities. But my money’s on these two in the short term for viable applications with immediate business value.