Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

Oliver Marks and I are co-chairing the Enterprise 2.0 Strategy and Execution Planning Track at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco next week. Details on each session can be found here. The premise of this track is two-fold:

- help folks understand the conceiving, selling and planning phases of a transformation to social constructs in the context of enterprise performance.

- learn how to make the business case for using social constructs to improve specific line of business performance. For the San Francisco Event, we will focus on: Purpose Driven Collaboration and how to plan for Scale, Customer Support and Product Innovation.

Here’s a line up of our sessions.

Monday – Selling the Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration and 2.0 Technologies #e2conf-3

~60% instructional led by Oliver and me. We will walk you through the process of getting the raw ingredients together, framing the discussion for executives, the pitch and finally the execution plan.

To add other credible voices to the conversation we have 2 panels built into the session. First, to help you be prepared for just about any question that can be thrown at you by the most skeptical executive, we’ve asked a few folks from the vendor community to join us and give us a taste of what they hear every day, out in the market. We’re thrilled to have the following folks join us:

Chris McGrath, ThoughtFarmer

Scott Schnaars, Socialtext

Tom Kuegler, PBWORKS

To help you with planning a successful launch, Bevin Hernandez from Penn State University will show us how they generated buzz and got folks jazzed about the launch of their collaborative intranet.

Tuesday: Collaboration at Scale

Alan Cohen, Vice President, Enterprise, Cisco Systems

Jon Pyke, Chief Strategy Officer, Cordys

Wednesday: Lowering Customer Support Costs via Social Tools

Lois Townsend, Director, Social Media Strategy and Operations, Hewlett Packard

R Wang, Partner, Altimeter Group

Steve Woods, Eloqua, CTO

Todd Shimizu, Director Communities, Juniper Networks

Treb Ryan, CEO, Opsource

Thursday: Launching winning products in the marketplace. How Social Software Improves your odds

Bill Truettner, Implementation Consultant, Imaginatik (Note: Bill will talk about his experiences in his previous role as an Innovation Manager for Hewlett Packard)

Jack Anderson, Innovation Specialist, Chevron

Patrick Asher, Innovation Leader, AT&T

This track is all about where the rubber meets the road. Our goal is to begin to move to discussion from tools and tactics, to accelerating performance via social computing constructs and software. Every one of these sessions focuses on practical approaches to social transformation in the enterprise. In turn, the esteemed group of folks that have been kind enough to join us have either (as executives themselves) led the charge to moving to social computing platforms to accelerate performance them selves, or as managers, have made convincing arguments to executives on the opportunity that social computing presents in the context of discrete business process.

We look forward to seeing you next week.

I just saw something go by by my tweet stream that brought back some old memories (thanks @rpolom) – the 2009 Gartner report on the horizontal Portal Vendor landscape. Here’s the Magic Quadrant:

Around 2001, I led a strategy and execution planning engagement for a then F500 Hi tech firm looking to recast how its 9,000 strong global sales force collaborated with the rest of the ~40,000 person organization. My teams charter was to identify breaks in the interaction process with sales engineers, global field marketing and sales operation and devise a plan to improve the ‘contact to revenue cycle’ for sales reps via new collaborative constructs and sales intelligence access.

As part of this we were also on the hook to put an execution and operational plan in place. That ended up including a technology solution from the portal marketplace – the sizzling hot technology that promised to provide a single homepage to data and information from scores of traditional ERP and custom built systems. My team looked at 27 vendors. Yes 27!  Here’s the list from one of the drafts that I dug up:

Thats a snapshot of where this Portal Market started. And look whats left based on the Gartner MQ above.

On to the Enterprise social software landscape:

Dion Hinchcliffe’s lays out the market in this vendor landscape diagram in this post “Assessing the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace” below thats a prettier E2.0 software equivalent to my table above.

The Enterprise 2.0 solution landscape may well track the portal market evolution. To be fair, Enterprise 2.0 software does a lot more than portals but there’s some parallels to be drawn. Portals brought it all together with personalization around data and unified system access. But no cognizance of context or behavioral design for each participant type. A good chunk of Enterprise 2.0 software also promises people interaction and activity stream access as a better option to static portals. But for the most part, out of the box, it’s still general purpose ‘build it and they will come’.

That said, there’s a difference this time around. I’m seeing more and more instances of process centric business challenges where social software can help tremendously. As a consulting practice, our focus is enterprise performance acceleration and so that’s validation. The good news is that customers seem to be pushing social software/ E2.0 technology vendors to fix business processes relatively early in the lifecycle of this technology category compared to portals. That’s great news for both technology and services vendors that have a solution set and credible experience to help customers respond to real business problems. In other words, sensible applicable of social constructs as opposed to social as the cure all.

As for the E2.0 upstart vendor and services marketplace, I expect that a handful of vendors will do very well based on a “replace your intranet” value proposition. Even out of the box, the social software stack is far better than static intranets but its becoming a commoditized business. The rest better start focusing on line of business performance if they don’t want to get left by the wayside. In fact, as I’ve stated earlier, I think the market is far larger for that anyway.

Using Dion’s diagram as the E2.0 equivalent of my portal landscape cut out, any bets on what which names we should expect to see on the Garter MQ for Social Software in 2-3 years?

This has little to do with Enterprise 2.0. But its a celebration of open constructs and transparency around a topic that’s significantly larger than the business of social computing – how we vote.

I’m thrilled to see this report in Wired Magazine that OSDV – the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, has officially released the source code for its prototype election system. And the pseudo geek in me is especially tickled to see this make it to Techmeme and Digg.

A little about OSDV from the Wired article:

The OSDV, co-founded by Gregory Miller and John Sebes, launched its Trust the Vote Project in 2006 and has an eight-year roadmap to produce a comprehensive, publicly owned, open source electronic election system. The system would be available for licensing to manufacturers or election districts, and would include a voter registration component; firmware for casting ballots on voting devices (either touch-screen systems with a paper trail, optical-scan machines or ballot-marking devices); and an election management system for creating ballots, administering elections and counting votes.

A few years ago when Gregory and John started chatting with me about this project, the single data point that got my antenna up was the fact that 80% of the Vote is impacted by 2 vendors. And yes, lets not forget the issue of hanging chads. I’m big on capitalism and I’m all for ‘may the best man/woman win and win big”. But in this case, the ramifications of closed systems that ultimately decides who has the finger on the economic/ healthcare/ nuclear flip switch or state level welfare begged for a broader, open system to ensure that each of us is heard.

OSDV promised to create an open spec, reference architecture and sample stack of software and hardware for all election system vendors to license. This way, we the public, have an open lens into the design and security of the vote counting and documentation process yet still allowing for the free market system to offer up competitive system and services providers to state and federal governments.  

Today OSDV includes other well known advisors such as Mitch Kapor and technology leaders such as Oracle, Sun and IBM are also looking to get involved. Trust the Vote is the flagship project and works closely with MTVs Rock the Vote initiative.

Photo (left to right): Dean Logan, Mitch Kapor, Heather Smith, Debra Bowen, Greg Miller. Courtesy Luke Wooden

I have served as an advisor to OSDV for over 3 years now and our firm, chipped in services to the foundation around business development and experience design. Its so nice to see this all come to fruition. Huge props to Gregory and John and my colleague Jane for helping with the initial identity work. I remember when the idea of OSDV was little more than a placeholder website and a back of a napkin concept and its awesome to see it all come together. Here’s to more wins in the near future.

For the geeks out there, here’s a link to the first chunk of code thats been released (online voter registration and tracking). For the rest of us, here’s how you can get involved with your wallet or your time.

Other coverage on Slashdot, WhyTuesday.org and RockTheVote

Yet again, thanks to Eric Norlin, a bunch of us get the opportunity to escape to Denver next month to talk about what’s next in social software. At the Defrag conference next month on November 11th and 12th.

I’m going to spare you a diatribe about why its a great event and distill it down to five reasons, (or fragments) that make me go back and why  this an awesome event for the enterprise folks out there:

• Its about debating solutions to big big business and economic value challenges that will consume us all over the next 12-24 months. That applies to the buy-side as well as the sell side.
• Its about the ramifications of eventual large scale adoption of a lot of what a serious IT executive will deem to be well, “cutesy” ideas today (e.g. Real Time Enterprise).
• A cut to the chase discussion on which consumer trends we see and use today might one day be enterprise worthy. Remember when people laughed at the concept of ‘Facebook for the Enterprise’? Yep, that probably came up at Defrag two events ago.
• Little talk-to-the-crowd panels. Everyone is deemed to be intelligent and has an equal voice. You’ll spend more time talking to the person sitting next to you than you will listening to someone on stage. Guaranteed.
• Its frightfully practical stuff. No fluff. All actionable thinking that makes you look at work differently when you leave. And makes you want to come right back the next year.

I’m going to be facilitating a discussion on ‘Communication Metaphors’ with Tim Young, Alexander Moore, Michael Cerda, and Matt Brezina.

Hope to see you there!

This morning brings a new relationship in the Enterprise 2.0 Services arena: Hinchcliffe and Co, an enterprise ‘web 2.0’ consulting and education provider, Asuret, an enterprise risk mitigation software and services provider and Socialtext, a social software provider join forces to deliver the first stack of services and software to take organizations through planning and technical implementation of social software projects.

Together, this alliance is set up to offer requirements and technical design, the necessary project risk management levers and finally, a well respected software suite to bring it all to life. Coming out at the customer end are solutions for social collaboration, intranet redesigns, customer communities, corporate social media, Social CRM and finally Business and Industry Social Networks.

As seen in the diagram below, the overall stack of service covers includes architecture and design, technology selection and application, as well as project management.

To compliment methodology and implementation experience brought about by Hinchcliffe and Co., the Asuret software + consulting service offers project risk management methodologies and processes to identify pressure points that can derail engagements in areas of stakeholder alignment, executive sponsorship, project management, business case and the like.

The promise of this alliance centers on the reality that in many cases adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools today is low and that most organizations are still learning the social computing ropes. Moreover, as with any large scale IT project, social computing engagements also face skepticism around the management of risk, control and trust. The group plans to bring structured methodologies, risk management tools and with Socialtext, mature social computing software package to holistically deploy social software solutions.

There’s certainly a place for such a partnership where IT is looking for strategic technology services combined with mature social technology. The IT manager has been severely burnt in the past due to lack of a comprehensive program management methodology and ineffective risk mitigation controls. Both led to more delays and consulting change orders than she would like to remember. This alliance of course has to prove that it has the execution wherewithal to get business results and reduce project risk but as far as a framework goes, it’s clear that a lot of careful thinking has gone into the design of this service set. Oh and there are some very smart folks involved here so there’s no reason to doubt their ability to pull it off.

Another thing I particularly liked is the implicit acknowledgment that social transformation doesn’t always mean throwing out incumbent process and technology whole hog, in favor of social. The answer lies within a balance of best in process-laden technology (e.g. CMS) and new open constructs. As seen in the diagram above, this partnership is designed to help customers leverage existing investments in content and knowledge management and business intelligence and fold in social computing, where applicable.

The Enterprise 2.0 services market is beginning to take shape but is still very young. At this time, the ‘E2.0′ discussions that command the airwaves are taking place primarily at 2 levels: 1) Ten thousand feet above the customers head and 2) deep down in the trenches around tactical tool selection and post deployment adoption. Both important in their own right. However, there’s plenty of room between these two for alternate value propositions. This alliance serves as a credible option for many of those projects in the middle, especially ones that are spearheaded by the IT department.

I’m personally excited to see this alliance enter the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ services space. We can’t have a market without a marketplace so the more credible service providers that surface, the better for customers and the ecosystem in general. Congrats to all involved.

Here’s the official statement and some good write ups by CRM champs Paul Greenberg and Esteban Kolsky.

Disclaimer: Dion Hinchcliffe and I both serve on the advisory board of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

Two interesting news items over the past week – one consumer related and the other, enterprise social computing.

First: this article on eMarketer titled: “Behavioral Targeting Misses Mark” quotes a study by  researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of California Berkeley School of Law and the Annenberg Public Policy Center:

“Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests,” according to the paper. “Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages— between 73% and 86%—say they would not want such advertising.”

As important, the article goes on to show that close to 50% might be ok if behavioral targeting its used to surface deal and promotions. Take away: sort out the “what’s in it for me” incentive and you have a better chance at earning my permission to monitor my movements.

Second: SocialCast, a leading micro blogging and collaboration platform for the enterprise announced a user interface refresh and its new Social Business Intelligence Premium service offering that in their own words, helps organizations with “real-time feedback and actionable insights into the employees, topics and conversations that users are finding important and that spur active participation.” A detailed review by Alex Williams, the new ReadWriteWeb Enterprise blogger, here.

The Case for Enterprise Social Behavioral Analytics:

Enterprise Social Analytics can bring significant benefit towards performance acceleration through a better understanding of how individuals and groups behave in the context of business process. Some examples….

HR Performance

If you’ve moved up the ladder at work, you’re aware of 2 things: 1) Manager/Skip Level/ Peer Performance reviews drive progression BUT 2) Soft Metrics (i.e. how your boss and peers generally feel about you) often trump hard documented goals.

Enter Social Analytics. You now have the opportunity to fold in important behavioral data such as degree of sharing, helping, engaging, contribution and involvement, giving HR a broader set of data points about the employees allegiance to the firm and dare I say, employee lifetime (with the company at least) value. These important data points complement tradition performance metrics giving you a sense of how critical each employee might be to a business unit, a product line, a geographic territory and ultimately to the company as a whole.

Communications Performance

Moving beyond people monitoring, the organization gets a clear sense of what’s top of mind for employees based on participation as well as lurking trends, how well a news announcement is being received by employees in near real time or bubbling issues that they need to nip before they take a life of their own. And on and on.

I’ve yet to come by a large organization where executive communications pushed out via email and intranets gets acceptable readership rates. Thus, millions are spent getting people to listen and engage in a typical large enterprise. With social computing constructs, we have the opportunity to carefully fold in emergent structures to compliment traditional top down communications designs. Employees now can become crucial information brokers for these communications and social analytics gives exec comms a good idea of which pockets of influence to tap into to spread specific messages.

Line of Business Performance

Where this really starts to get interesting in terms of business objectives alignment is learning how the organization interacts in the context of known functions such as field marketing, product launches, customer pitches and support inquiries. Social analytics show how the teams as well as unsuspecting groups in the organization came together (or not) to drive performance at the activity or process level. There’s crucial lessons to be learned here in terms of not only identifying who the rock stars were, but also how to institutionalize well performing processes, simple hacks and interaction models going forward.

Its Not All Rosy Though….

Transparency is a two way street

Whilst employees are clamoring for more transparency and open work constructs, that really applies primarily to inbound transparency – seeing what management and peers are doing. The other form – outbound transparency, where the enterprise monitors their every move, might be another story. And the skeptics will consider that to be a form of behavioral monitoring. Design and communication is key.

Incentive

Similar to consumer behavioral targeting, if the what’s-in-it-for-me incentive is not clear, the naysayers will come out of the woodwork. Analytics need to be returned back to individuals so they can use it to perform better. Help individuals work faster/better by leveraging network relationship and usage insights beyond management insight.

Policy

Policy will cut both ways. First, there’s a whole slew of enterprises that won’t have any of this for policy and legal reasons. For those, social analytics will have a place but its going to be more about ‘what’ and not the ‘who’. For others, they will need insist on paper trail into every discussion.

Shedding the Perception of Behavioral Targeting in favor for Performance Acceleration

There’s a boat load of insight to be had from social constructs in the enterprise and the Socialcast release is a really commendable version one of where social analytics need to start. And its only a first release. But I hope Enterprise 2.0 vendors consider these older reporting- style BI constructs that were designed only for management, to be ground zero.

Mike Gotta of the Burton Group suggests that “Analytics may be the key to the long-term success of the company as well – social messaging is something that will become a feature within larger platforms from IBM and Microsoft.” I agree in general, though what we’ve traditionally known to be ‘BI’ is in for a serious revamping in preparation for the coming of the socially networked enterprise. True to the dynamic, in-the-flow nature of social computing constructs and tools, analytics need to unlatch themselves from line items in reports that no one reads, and re-appear as nuggets of decision facilitation data points that support individual and organizational performance objectives. If I’m a Financial Analyst writing a report about Pork Belly Futures, the analytics should be the plumbing that suggests who else I should be talking to and what documents I should be looking at for reference, across the network. Now that’s enabling performance acceleration.

The net net is that if enterprise social analytics are going to look like behavioral analytics on the consumer web, they’ll be likened to targeting engines. In the case of the consumer web, that means more ads or some yet-to-be-determined interpretation of my interests in the future. In the context of the enterprise, it means possibly targeting my career progression or paycheck. Contrast that with a model where its a balance between both organizational wide insight, plus in the flow, contextual insight for individuals and groups. Now you have the “what’s in it for me” data point covered and you might have secured some currency to gather organizational wide analytics as well. All up, extremely important considerations for overall programmatic design in the context of accelerating performance via social computing concepts.

This represents a sliver of the types of customer discussions I’m seeing around the larger issue of actionable insight. I expect more and more vendors to be announcing analytics in the near future and there’s no question about how valuable management level sight can be (as I lay out above). Though, I for one hope that analytics/BI is re-casted as raw ingredients to individual decision support for better product output, beyond pie charts.

A quick shout out to my friends Oliver Marks, Dennis Howlett and Vinnie Mirchandani, and to R Ray Wang and Frank Scavo on the launch Enterprise Advocates.

This signals a new trend in the consulting and analyst landscape, characterized by loose federations of both independent consultants and firms that collaborate as advocates for the end customer.

Dennis talks about the need for agile advisory:

One of the main reasons we formed this group is because we believe there is a need for agile, flexible teams capable of rapidly responding to client needs. The big analyst/consulting firms struggle with that. We also see the problems companies face as global albeit with local nuance. That means as opportunities emerge, some or all of us will be involved with projects, drafting in appropriate specialists on an as needed basis from our extensive network of contacts. Our offer is based on solid practical help backed by more than 100 years combined experience with companies both large and small.

The money quote from Vinnie for the need for customer advocacy:

We think the time is right. Technology vendors spend 20 to 50% of their revenues in sales and marketing. Give or take that is a trillion dollars a year. The buyer’s voice is often drowned in that roar.

And Oliver, who like me, comes from the social computing and collaborative design view point, says:

My involvement in enterprise advocates is also two fold: to help the buyer get a good deal on technology which will help them be more efficient and make more money, and to address the increasing friction between the office and infrastructure areas, and help design greater interoperability for buyers.

I’m actually surprised that we haven’t see a federation like this pop up earlier. That said, I can’t think of a more experienced team of individuals in the Enterprise arena that can credibly have the customers back.

The technology industry is seeing tectonic shifts right now with the advent of Cloud Computing alternatives, a heightened awareness of maintenance costs for on-premise software and the (somewhat yet to be realized) promise of social computing constructs at a large scale. And so its more important than ever to have a customer advocacy group that can navigate vendor marketing hoopla, putting the customers needs and interests at the nucleus of the discussion.

To kick things off, the group will host its’ first webinar:

The inaugural one-hour webinar is planned for 22nd October ( 9:00 am PDT/ 12:00 pm EDT/ 4:00 pm GMT / and 5:00 pm CET) and will focus on helping SAP customers understand what they are dealing with, how maintenance can be managed, what alternatives are available, how to build a long-term contract negotiations strategy aligned with the organization’s applications strategy, and why buyers must act now. Time is set aside for Q&A and, should the session run out of time before all questions are answered, then full answers will be offered at the website following the webinar. Interested individuals may register at the following link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/435331515.

Best wishes to all of the folks in the Enterprise Advocates. The official site, here. And, on Twitter.