Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

If you’re a large organization using enterprise content management systems (ECM), chances are that its powering images, documents and records management, and web content. These systems enforce roles, workflows, access control and versioning to enable the creation, management and dissemination of media assets.

What this means is that from the very beginning of a given business activity, a few people control the creation of information that employees, customers, partners and suppliers rely on to move your business forward. Like it or not, this puts the responsibility/power to influence business performance in the hands of a few, with little input from other unknown experts, or consumers of this data. You only find out how effective the content turned out to be once its consumed (and long after you can optimize).

I’ve spent a decade working with business units at large organizations designing global communication and collaborative initiatives in the areas of sales and marketing, employee comms, channel collaboration and brand management. But I wanted an outside perspective. So i reached out to Billy Cripe, co-author of Reshaping your Business with Web 2.0 and Director of Product Management in Oracle’s Enterprise Content Management Group. An Enterprise 2.0 advocate himself, Billy brings a unique perspective given that he focuses on understanding how social computing blends with existing enterprise content management – something that many medium to large organizations are going to have to deal with if they buy into the design and promise of Enterprise 2.0. All control is not good but all social is certainly not always optimal. That’s an important part of any E2.0 execution plan.

Achieving a state of Enterprise 2.0 requires surgically moving the nucleus of a business activity from process driven systems to people centric environments. I asked Billy to identify 3 inefficiencies in traditional content management processes that impede business performance, where social computing can help:

Wrapping the best brains around the problem

Billy and I also talked about how Enterprise 2.0 enabled organizations will blend social computing and structured process by turning siloed unstructured content into ‘social objects’ early on in the process. For instance, instead of using traditional access control-heavy CMS workflow when working on early drafts of marketing collateral for a product launch, or market projections for a new line of business, a wiki – style environment opens up discussions around early drafts to more constituencies before the owner moves this into formal production. Social networking features enable you do discover ‘experts’ and invite them to contribute. Micro blogging concepts make your business activity noticeable across the organization so others can be aware of where they can help. In addition to refining the end product, think of the risk you can mitigate by having the right voices pipe in, early on. Examples of early collaboration include:

• Early feedback on product specs from loyal customers before you lock feature sets.
• Deeper understanding of product strengths from supply chain partners that intimately know the power of each component in your product.
• Feedback from channel partners that might be critical to meaningful distribution and adoption, post launch.
• Getting previously unknown subject matter experts in distributed organizations to provide insight on an RFP response.
• Leveraging the signals: A contact center rep gets to peer into community content or find experts to support sometimes bland one-dimensional answers coming from the knowledge base or ERP system.

When you layer in social computing concepts at the early stages of content creation, you have the ability to encourage such uses of raw ingredients (or social objects). These social objects, previously hidden in an access controlled CMS environment are now unlocked via social computing concepts and tools. The beauty is that they can now be work in progress for some, finished product for others that participate or discover it, or can be interpreted in totally different ways, never intended by the original participants.

Does Your Content have legs?

Analytics gained via social computing architectures fold in accountability and measurement at the social object level as well as the meta-data (rankings, ratings, tags etc) on each content type. This enables you to learn if/how content is being used to truly accelerate business performance. What types of content are highly rated or most re-used, what business activity was most impacted by specific social objects? The business of creating and managing content (and budget) is often a “black hole” at large organizations. Social computing analytics let you measure the value of each building block (and the programs that create them) so you know which horse(s) to back, going forward.

Important Execution Elements to Consider

In no way do I want to imply that just throwing in a social suite will make this work model a reality. It won’t. A couple of important considerations:

• This is not about a more effective content management process. Its got to do with strategically using social concepts to change how your organization collectively creates, vets and leverages content.
• Design processes and select applications that can accelerate business activity. If you start with “I need a new content management strategy”, you’re likely off to a wrong start. If your thinking about say how to improve sales close rates by better alignment between sales and marketing content, you’re approaching the problem correctly.
• Make participation available but surgically enforce controls where needed.
• To ensure adoption and mitigate risk, check whether you’ve answered the “what’s in it for me” question before you expect partners, employees, organizational departments or customers to jump in and play.
• Vendors may call their offerings platforms, solutions, whatever. At the end of the day these are tools. Lead with the inherent business performance goals that should govern any potential Enterprise 2.0 organizational design and work backwards to figure out the right platform or best of breed solutions architecture.

Vendors Moves

ECM technology offerings are going to morph at a phenomenal rate over the next 6 months. Some will bring social computing to ECM. Others will wrap Social Computing and ECM around ERP. Oracle is making very commendable moves by fusing its ECM, Portal and Social Offerings. OpenText is also going back to the drawing board (interview by Cheryl McKinnon) on what content management means in the socially connected enterprise. And Acquia is bringing an industrial strength offering to businesses, based on its hugely successful Drupal open source CMS offering. More on OpenText and Acquia in subsequent posts.

I’d like to close with a special thanks to Billy for taking the time to chat.  He was very careful to disclaim that his lens might be slanted towards incumbent content management processes.  In fact that’s exactly what I was looking for, so we could provide value to thousands of large organizations that have heavily invested in some formal content management process.

I’m going to be on a panel at the New Metrics for New Media Workshop at Stanford University on August 6th, in Palo Alto. The event is organized by Martha Russell, Associate Director of Media X at Stanford, and Marc Smith, Sociologist and Chief Scientist at Telligent Systems.

Some details about the event here:

The conundrum of the participatory media culture is that participation is expected, but continuous, dedicated attention cannot be assumed.  Legacy audience media metrics, such as CPM (cost per thousand) and CPI (cost per impression), have broadcast media as their reference. These metrics were developed because channel developers, advertisers and their clients needed to quantify the cost/benefit of media purchases. At the time they were developed, these legacy metrics assumed that each channel delivered media to its audiences (individuals, family, etc.) in a singular fashion.  The legacy media metrics assumed that each media exposure occurred in isolation, that viewers were attentive, and that viewers’ attention was dedicated to a single medium.

Consumer generated content has further complicated the differentiation of purchased media (space in the media that is purchased by advertisers) and earned media (space in the media that is acquired without payment through journalistic and public relations efforts).  To more accurately measure the quality and quantity of viewers’ engagement, the distinction must also be made between assumed attention, in which audience metrics count the number of people who could potentially pay attention to a message, and earned engagement, in people actively choose to pay attention.

Social media and virtual worlds offer two important frontiers for measuring earned engagement. In both, audiences are actively engaged as participants. This workshop will cover foundational concepts in media measurement, describe new frontiers in measuring audience engagement in social media and virtual worlds, and provide hands-on experience in using new analytical tools.

I’m involved in this session:

Day One:
Media usage, measurement and analysis: legacy concepts, forces of change, emerging metrics for social media and virtual worlds, and the creative tension of academic and business influences.

Given my Enterprise 2.0 focus, and in particular, our work with Sales and Marketing groups at large organizations, I plan to focus on how businesses can accelerate performance via new forms of insight, brought about by social media analytics. Something that’s integral to overall Enterprise 2.0 enablement.

Full details on the event and a short video by Martha and Marc available here:

http://mediax.stanford.edu/WSI/metrics.html

If you would like to see specific data points covered, chime in in the comments or drop me an email.

Hope you see you there.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last month, I met with a few interesting companies that I wasn’t familiar with, prior to the event. I thought I was “plugged in”. Clearly, not enough. The next few posts uncover how some of these companies hope to move the needle on Enterprise 2.0 enablement. First up: Supply Chain Management.

McLean, VA based SIM (Supplier Information Mgmt) provider, Rollstream was one of the more impressive but lesser-known-companies (to me) that I had the chance to meet with. If you read this blog often, you’ll get why I instantly liked their business. RollStream fixes specific problems – inefficiencies in the supply chain via Private Supplier Social Networks. Counting well known companies such as Walgreens, Owens & Minor, Johnson & Johnson and Tesco as customers, their SaaS solution services the partner relationship lifecycle for retailers, manufacturers and distributors. Business activity-focused capabilities cover partner on-boarding, compliance, performance management and dispute resolution.

Founder Nick Parnaby and CEO Kristin Muhlner discussed existing bottlenecks and cliffs in the supply chain mgmt process and how Rollstream hopes to open up the lines of communication, add visibility, and remove unnecessary interaction toll gates enforced by decades old SCM and ERP influenced work models. Also, today’s resource heavy supply chain management interaction models force relationship managers to pick specific partners to deal with. RollStream offers social software to reduce manual intervention during on-boarding and to help organizations more easily identify high performing partners in the network.

Re-casting the supplier relationship via Enterprise 2.0 enablement.

RollStream considers its’ primary value to be in the area of efficient partner management. They know their business of course and it’s early pickings, but to me, one of the biggest opportunities to enterprises using such social computing technology is be able to to pry open the gates that lock out supply chain access to core processes such as product management, R&D, marketing, end customer support, etc. And conversely – giving these business units access to knowledgeable supply chain partners as well. That’s where SIM providers can really help.

Why? First, no one knows the true power, limitations and opportunities for each component of a product better than the very folks who build them. Second, component manufacturing is largely a commodity business.  As a supplier, I need to differentiate myself from competitors who are waiting for me to falter or cut me on price. I need to be a strategic partner to be somewhat indispensible. Social Software can open up the lines of interaction beyond R&D, Procurement and Product Development, allowing suppliers to learn, first hand,  any pain felt by the end customer. Or help marketing really understand the deep competencies of each component of the end product. Or provide new insight to R&D on early technology innovation at the component level. And on and on.

That’s purpose built collaboration (a.k.a business case) with dead clear incentives for suppliers to participate (a.k.a adoption) and play a role in the success of an end product in the market place.

There’s sizable opportunity here, however, solutions such as RollStream may not be for everyone. And I suspect that gaining sustainable adoption across hundreds of suppliers for each customer can sometimes be culturally and programmatically daunting.  I’ve seen one too many partner extranets that eventually turned into ghost towns thanks to re-orgs, shifting priorities and erratic shepherding.

All that said, the use of collaborative software in this context can bring massive, measurable business benefit if its treated as a strategic initiative by enterprises. Pulling in a snippet from an older post….

ZDNet blogger and eternal pragmatist, Dennis Howlett says:

In my argument, breakthrough ROI comes from seeing these technology through the lens of collaboration, which in turn implies process and context. I am mindful that huge amounts of value continue to be locked up in supply chains. AMR quoted a number of $3 trillion in 2005. Has that materially changed? Simply being able to communicate across supply chains in a meaningful manner could do wonders to lubricate those rusty wheels.

Have other ideas about how an Enterprise 2.0 design can improve supply chain processes? Chime in.

Outside of security (something the CIO cares deeply about), I can’t tell you how many times business execs I deal with say that are terrified at the prospects of their SaaS based intranets or extranets disappearing during a critical time.

For all the excellent analysis out there about Enterprise 2.0 adoption strategy, reliability is extremely critical to piercing the culture barrier in any sustainable way. Any well thought out adoption plan will fizzle out with a broken promise on system uptime. Folks will go right back to their old ways.  And the naysayers will throw the “i told you so” argument in your face to derail the initiative.

SaaS is extremely promising and I’m a big proponent. And this is not about Yammer who seem to be communicating well about this issue with customers on Twitter.

However, balancing the mission critical nature of your intended business activities with optimal software delivery is critical. SLAs really don’t mean much in the case of mission critical systems. Really, what’s the point of getting a few months of free service in return if it means 1000’s of productive hours lost or worse, lost new business or unhappy customers. And for many smaller, growing businesses, a lawsuit is hardly worth it.

Earlier this week I wrote about the Google ChromeOS announcement and its impact on the Enterprise. Disqus, one of my all-time favorite blog tools, dutifully posted Social Media reactions across Twitter and Friendfeed. However, the most spirited debate sparked by this post happened not in my blog comments or on Twitter. It happening on Facebook as I write this. Here’s what’s there, so far.

(sorry for the low res pic. Ill update with another one as soon as I can)

Want to know who these very smart folks are? Too bad.

The irony here is that Facebook and LinkedIn do allow my friends, who have never heard of each other, to have a discussion. And Facebook is happy to make it very easy to pull in my blog RSS feed to spark that discussion. So why not let Disqus expose this to all my friends on other networks. If you must, insist that a participant sign in or sign up to your network to add to the discussion, but expose the damn conversation, will ya?

I get that LinkedIn and Facebook sprouted back when it was all about creating closed networks and these platforms have adapted since then but the willingness to let specific conversations seep out is woefully tepid. Had you let MY social network (of which any one platform controls but a small fraction) see the discussion ensuing on YOUR service, between very smart people in YOUR network , my guess is that more people would be inclined to engage on your platform. And maybe others would be compelled to sign-up if they haven’t already done so.

But no – you’re so hell bent on keeping Google’s crawler in the dark that you’re willing to prevent plenty of super smart people on my other networks from participating in a great conversation that you facilitated.

User engagement on a blog post or other social objects (photos, videos etc) that I syndicate into Facebook is a true showcase of intent, and that’s gotta mean higher CPMs for you. That’s much better than silly defensive tactics such as copying FriendFeed/Twitters UI that early adopters like me might appreciate but alienate your mainstream users.

You’re just cutting your nose to spite your face.

End of rant.

Update: After writing this it got me thinking about the TechCrunch Real Time Crunch Up that’s underway right now.  Its great that were discussing this topic but really, what’s the point of real-time anything in the context of the social web, when two of the largest social networks throttle output to any real time engine.

I’m headed over there this afternoon. Lets see if this topic comes up.

Google announced its intent to get into the Operating System business with the upcoming release of Google Chrome in 2010. You can get a sense of all the premature gushing on Techmeme – journalists and bloggers one upping each other on when (not if) Google will each Microsoft’s lunch. The blog title award goes to TechCrunch: “Google Drops a Nuclear Bomb on Microsoft…”

Before we get into Enterprise 2.0 ramifications, lets get Enterprise 1.0 out of the way….

Chrome OS’ allegiance to the Netbook as a distribution platform is snooze-provoking in the context of the enterprise.  As Dennis Howlett on ZDnet opines:

Even then and despite the proclivity among geeks for all things OS, when ChromeOS does emerge it will be a v1.0. No enterprise buyer I know will go within a country mile of committing its users’ kit to something at that level of maturity. Can you imagine the chaotic disruption this would cause in IT departments used to burning images and distributing a standard desktop?

Beyond this, broadband proliferation is the single biggest issue even if the IT department does come around to the idea of cloud based storage. Stacy Higginbotham at GigaOM puts forth a realistic question:

Can Google convince carriers, which aren’t big fans of the search giant, that selling netbooks with Chrome OS is the way to go? Most analysts expect carriers to become a huge distribution channel for netbooks.

If your data is in the cloud, accessibility needs to be 100%. And Netbook implies, pick up and go. That means rely on tethering your phone or ponying up the cash for wireless cards. For everyone. That’s already expensive for Sales reps, let the whole organization.

David Coursey of Linux World provides some great we’ve-seen-this-movie-before analysis by illustrating some painful lessons learned from when Linux tried to take on MS in the Netbook wars, and lost.

The Netbook is really Google’s attempt to find new advertising revenue sources and users, allowing it to mine all consumer data that it will store in its own cloud. Also, as Sridhar from Zoho opines, its a great value proposition for places like India where PC penetration is ~10%.

On to Enterprise 2.0

Assume I’m totally wrong and Netbooks are all the rage in the enterprise. Here’s one scenario that plays out:

Google packages up a Netbook  with ChromeOS, Google Apps, Umbrella Analytics, Google Gears and and Wave-enabled Enterprise 2.0 capabilities. The full enchilada along with a developer platform to enable customization for specific use cases in the enterprise. Now that’s a software distribution model that in theory can give SharePoint bundled with Exchange, a serious run for its money. And that also speeds up commoditization of Enterprise 2.0 solutions.

But its all very unlikely for the foreseeable future.

First, given that ChromeOS doesn’t come out until 2010 and that IT departments are not going to throw out existing MS software and their laptops the next morning, Microsoft has plenty of time to counter.

Second, the true promise of an Enterprise 2.0 design will not materialize if your social software is not cognizant of /doesn’t enrichen what’s going on in your ERP, CRM and ECM-enabled business activities. So unless you’re comfortable with the farfetched assumption that all your other non Google powered business applications will also live in the cloud reliably, and will magically talk to each other, this is a non-starter. Oliver Marks has some other excellent comments on the impractically of this working out in the enterprise that are worth a read.

In some ways, Microsoft commanding the OS over Google may just be a gift for Enterprise 2.0 upstarts.  As theoretical as the scenarios is that I’ve laid out above, it’s a pretty compelling blueprint for Google to work towards.

However, lets face it, a comprehensive silo breaking Enterprise 2.0 design is years away for most organizations, let alone one that’s powered by a 100% cloud solution. So in the meantime, Microsoft’s platform offering leaves room for others to provide more visually appealing, context aware social overlays to SharePoint. Something that Enterprise 2.0 providers such as Newsgator and Telligent have become very good at building upon. Even non .NET solutions such as SocialText have strong hooks into SharePoint.

Any more discussion on this topic right now is like asking a jury to call a case before hearing the defendant. Lets see what the complete picture looks like when Microsoft shows its’ hand next week.

Simple: Delete all emails and attachments from the server after 45 days.

Everyone flocked to the wiki for fear of loosing access to valuable discussions and attachments in the future. That’s what a friend who works there told me over 4th of July BBQ.

Sounds a bit brute force-ish no? It does but its an easy way to get a lot of people to really immerse themselves in a better approach to collaboration. And should anarchy ensue for some reason, it’s a policy that’s easily reversible.

Is it a strategy? No. Can it be a tactic that’s part of a larger revenue generating or cost saving plan? Totally.

Low risk approach with lots and lots of potential gain and cost savings if it sticks.

Oh..and in the case of this un-named company, it worked like a charm for all of its 4000+ employees.

TweetDeck, Seesmic Desktop and CoTweet -  three of the leading social media dashboards that are in fierce competition to be our chosen gateway into social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed. These, amongst other worthy competitors, have been analyzed with a jewelers loupe on criteria such as breadth of service, social network integration, stability, usability, and more (see Techmeme).

What these apps are really good at is facilitating stronger explicit relationships and conversations: View and engage with friends, group followers, monitor topics. And being rescued from Twitters terrible UI. And these are huge benefits.

But does this really helping me leverage the social capital that’s created every second, across my network? No. These apps are really duking it out on convenience as the primary value proposition. Via any of these services, I get to interact more efficiently with those I know or happen to stumble upon, IF I’m online at the right time. And I get to do hail mary keyword searches, across the wild west, that is unstructured social media content.

The Neglected Smarts

The metadata that exposes my current interests is sitting in a number of Twitter services as well as in my Twitter client today. And it’s mostly freely available. Associating that data with the metadata of millions of Twitter users is also available for the taking (more on that below). Simply put, connecting those two constructs is what makes a Twitter client (and me) smart.

Here’s a couple of ways that these social media dashboards can move from being a better gateway to social networks, towards making me smarter via social leverage.

• Groups Sharing: Let me share groups with experts on a topic. For instance, Susan Scrupski, an Enterprise 2.0 thought-leader I respect, most likely has a group of Enterprise 2.0 related folks in her Twitter app of choice. So do I. With her permission, I’d like to us to share access to our groups, so we both make sure we are following the smartest minds in this space. That’s 2 individuals who by sharing will each create a better grouping of people, around the topic of E2.0. We in turn share these with other users of said Twitter client. Lots of value to us users and sticky for the client, on many levels.
• Hottest links in my groups and networks: Persistent search is a hopeless way to find important, relevant links. Todays solutions at best represent a flash back to pre Alta Vista days, let alone pre Google. There’s too much noise with no social search considerations, built in. For starters, Twitter clients should flip the persistent search feature on its head and show me hottest links by topic. Across my network and across Twitter. Consider how the incredible Microplaza facilitates this:

An example of the  hottest stories on Microplaza for “Enterprise 2.0”, right now:

• Smart Follower Sorting: Finding relevant people on Twitter, sucks.  For instance, Innovation is becoming increasingly important to me in my Enterprise 2.0 work. But the idea of being subjected to the noise via a persistent search on ‘Innovation’ is heart-burn inducing. Here’s another way to do it: Hutch Carpenter is someone I follow and trust on the topic of innovation. When I search for Innovation, let me know who Hutch is influenced by (as Klout does) and who he interacts with on the topic of innovation. Show me people (both in my network and outside) who tag them selves as Innovation (as provided by WeFollow). Let me find people based on what you the client, and the Twitter marketplace already knows about me.

Plenty of other concepts come to mind but these should get the juices flowing.

As these Twitter clients move from primarily capitalizing on the network effect created by Twitter, to creating their own network effects and facilitating social search, they become indispensable. And we become smarter.

This post reflects what I’ve learnt from a few Twitter tools I use. So how do you use Twitter and how can social media dashboards make YOU smarter?