The Inovis Blog

Business Community Management starts with getting everyone onboard, engaged, and working together. Once this is accomplished, many feel they are free to move on. In reality, these individuals are making a simple assumption that the community onto itself is static. As with most challenges, business community management is an ongoing battle. It’s like going on a diet, focusing and working through it, and then going back to the way you were once you reach your goal. It doesn’t work.

Think about the management of a community as a life cycle event. It’s dynamic, and requires attention and focus in order to maintain its efficiency to the extent that if you don’t continue to focus on it, it will become stale and ineffective over time. For example, just thinking about managing who’s in the community. People come and go all the time—especially if you take the concept of a supplier community. There are companies who are being added to the community that fall on their own because they can’t produce, they may be torn out because they don’t produce well enough, they may get distracted with customers that aren’t viable, or there are simply just too many alternatives and they get kicked off a list. There are a thousand companies that come and go, and they come and go every day, especially in a large community. Exit points and entry points are in the top level of managing a community.

Once a company’s in the community: who in that company is the right individual to engage to get things done in that company in maintaining and keeping track of that level of point of contact and keeping it current so that if there is an issue that needs human interaction, the right person is there to react to it? Again, people come and go out of jobs, get sick, and leave the company all the time. You may not need to manage it every day, but if you don’t deal with it, it will bite you because if you try to fix something, the person you need may not be there, or even the company may not be there to correct the issue.

Inside of that, companies usually have to live up to a certain level of goodness in the way that they perform business with you. If you’re a hub, you expect that your partners will perform in a certain fashion. Whether that be to meet your standards, comply with your specs, or return certain documents in the time frame they’re given, a certain level of quality in the data that’s there, etc. You have all of those expectations surrounding that.

With all of the other dynamics going on, it’s highly likely that they may not always maintain the same level of quality. You’re going to see dips, peaks and rallies of performance that at any given point of time may have a bad effect on your company if they can’t deliver on time. So, the concept of compliance, compliance checking, and validation really should be a life cycle discussion. They should always be checked. Whether that’s a spot check on a regular basis or a continuous check is up to the organization that’s trying to meet the overall quality.

You maintain your community so that it’s current, accurate, and complete. You’re validating that what you’re doing meets their standards all the time. You’re not going to find yourself in a dark corner where all of the sudden you can’t do what you’re supposed to do although everyone passed on the test, and even though the last time you checked and they were all there—they’re not there now. Or they’re not performing at the right level. In short, Community management should really be Community Life Cycle Management and it should entail all aspects of the life and death of a community and community members, how you deal with that, and how you deal with everything in between.

Their life cycles are probably different. I would urge people to think of the concept of community management, or compliance, or enablement as a life cycle rather than as an event or a series of discreet events.