Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

I’ve always been a bit of a closet branding nut with specific interest in tag lines. Something about meaningful one-liners that express the essence of an institution. How well they live up to it is another matter but there’s something about winnowing it all down to a single sentence that expresses your raison d’être.

“Live Richly”, the tag line adopted by Citi years ago was always one my favorites. More so than even Apple’s “Think Different”. Within seconds, Live Richly made you re-think personal money management from one of a die-rich strategy to one that suggested an enjoyable journey might be entirely possible.

Live Richly also led me to think about how employees would like to spend their 9-5 workday. Dying richly equates to just the paycheck that comes at the end, which of course is important. But living richly comes from richness in terms of peer, partner and customer interactions, in terms of richer quality of insight, richer intellectual stimulation, richer idea creation and ultimately, richer output with respect to the stated business goal.

Traditional structured enterprise software that binds participants to a forced sequence of steps is far more restraining and claustrophobic than the highest walls of any office cubicle. It insists that work gets done from start to finish in a certain way, limited to only what you think/guess to be the best answer, and with little maneuverability until well after the outcome and when its often too late to course correct. In and of itself, there’s no richness of anything in that. We might as well sit robots down at the keyboard, like we do on the factory floor.

Structured process software such as ERP, CRM, ECM, SCM and the like, you absolutely need. It closes the books, keeps the various authorities happy and offers an audit trail.  And some jobs are in fact robotic in nature. But for the rest, well designed collaborative approaches to work and effective use of social software reduces risk and improves output by enabling you to bring your rich network along with you to every blind corner, to every fork in the road and to every dart game presented by structured process. That’s improved outcomes for the business. And for employees, Working Richly day in and day out.

Gartner Research says a total of $3.8 Trillion will be spent on IT in 2012 by you and your peers. As buyers, before you start to spend your 2012 budgets on more of the same old, same old, take a deep breadth and envision how rich your working environment will be when its all said and done.

That’s all I’m saying.

A panel I sat on at the GigaOM Mobile Enterprise Summit a few weeks ago got me thinking a lot about how mobility is taking shape in the enterprise.

There’s little argument that Mobile is going to have a profound impact on how we work. Here’s my colleague Maribel Lopez, one of the sharpest minds on Enterprise Mobility, sizing up the opportunity:

Mobility represents one of the most fundamental changes in technology over the past two decades. Mobility will change business in three ways: 1) what we connect 2) How we connect and 3) how we interact with data and services. What we connect moves beyond smartphones to billions of devices including tablets, cars, equipment and sensors.  How we connect discusses the changes in operating systems and the move to the web. How we transact business also changes as mobile allows us to move to anytime, anyplace operation. It requires a company to rethink its computing and business process strategy.

She’s right. But as many of us partake in the great mobile enterprise land grab, a noticeable rift is emerging between process and data, and people connectivity where round one of mobile enablement strikingly resembles yesterday’s disconnected workplace. Todays enterprise mobile enablement strategy has three exciting but parallel streams:

• Mobile versions of our social and collaborative programs for the office worker.
• Mobile interfaces to systems of record (BI, CRM, ERP, SCM ECM, etc.).
• Remote worker-to-machine mobile solutions for those not traditionally at a desk.

On the collaboration front, the first wave of leveraging Mobile for collaboration and enterprise social networking has focused on emulating desktop functionality on a mobile device. And for good reason. Organizations are yearning for a mobile-ready experience of their internal and external social and collaboration efforts to fire up employee, customer and partner connectivity.  We see numerous instances of execution plans mandating something to the effect of “we need to mirror everything desktop web browser feature and capability on our mobile phones and tablets”.

Over on the data enablement end, two things are happening. First, real time access thanks to in-memory advancements (try this post for size), a new focus on attractive user interface design and cloud-enabled flexibility are leading to device agnostic ‘mobili-fication’ of ERP, CRM, CMS and BI, again to better arm desktop workers where ever they might be. Second, there’s (finally) been a recent surge in capabilities showing up for non desktop workforces today that leverage data and location in creative ways. For instance, Roto Rooter employees in the field use location aware apps on their phone that automatically time stamps the service and application POS capabilities to close out transactions. PRN Medical Services, uses bar code scanning apps on a mobile app to manage inventory management for home based health care equipment.

In totality, we’ve got some amazing capabilities that can significantly improve performance. Enterprise mobile social and collaboration gets us access to the best insight even when our rock stars are not tethered to their desks (dirty looks from our spouses, notwithstanding). On the other hand, as remote workers, as illustrated above get productivity bursts when location based data can now tango with back end systems, thereby removing time consuming and error prone manual input. Awesome.

But here’s the ‘but’. Once again remote workers who presumably know most about customer needs and our products are connected back to people and systems on a different radio frequency, leaving them out of our social and collaborative efforts for the most part. Why do we need them in the same connectivity loop? Some illustrations:

• The assembly line employee (or contractor) or component supplier knows more about the components that make up your product.
• The physician standing over you on an operating table wants to tap into private doctor networks about an ongoing procedure.
• Even customers who walk into your retail store armed with location-aware mobile apps can express preferences and trends by their gestures. Todays marketing campaigns only get them to the parking lot.

These are a but a few examples of where critical questions and answers lie a) at remote locations, b) between remote peers and c) experts back at HQ, partners or suppliers. Todays Enterprise Mobile business and technology strategy just doesn’t take this into consideration in any holistic way.

I asked noted ERP specialist Vijay Vijayasankar, an Associate Partner at IBM and good man all around on how these worlds might come together:

Remote workers are an often ignored part of enterprise collaboration story. Remote workers are usually the only face of the company that customers and partners see. They often have to be a sales person, marketing person, pricing expert etc., all turned into one. If these folks don’t get a chance to collaborate bi-directionally with rest of enterprise; more often than not – they will improvise in ways that don’t align with rest of the company. The cost to fix that might be higher than cost to prevent it.
If remote workers can collaborate freely, useful information on new trends in product demand, changes in customer buying behavior, etc can be identified a lot sooner, and acted up on.

The various technology options today shows tremendous promise to truly connect the enterprise, as presented by Maribel and Vijay. As you size up the prize and consider the plethora of mobile tools and applications that can help you get to the finish line, step back and think through the right combinations of process, people and data to leverage the collective brain in a way that can drive process / operating / financial performance. Make sure your strategy can leverage these trends in the right combinations, and that your application vendors have ready hooks and needed extensibility to help execute a more cohesive strategy. The good news is, relatively speaking, technology today is getting ever more cost effective and platforms offer simpler connectivity between each other. And Enterprise social and collaboration platforms are increasingly becoming layers that permeate systems of record that those very remote and desktop workers can use in context, if executed correctly.

The promise that is mobile is not just about mobile enabling existing unconnected parts of our organization or creating a tablet view of data and people. That’s how we did it decades ago (well before my time, I might add) when we went from paper to green screens. It’s about mobilizing the skills across your entire ecosystem of customers, partners and employees, in concert.

If you know of situations where this is starting to happen or have a view on what needs to be done to make it a reality, chime in.

Over a year ago I wrote about Why ECM is critical to your Enterprise 2.0 Execution Plan. I wrote then about the pitfalls of closed content management processes:

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 had also reached out to Billy Cripe, then a Director in Oracles Enterprise 2.0 group and now a VP at Fishbowl Solutions. We identified overarching inefficiencies in Content Management where social and collaborative concepts can help:

Now its 2011 and as we see more business challenges emerge, there’s more to be said about the inefficiency of excessively locking down the creation, management and dissemination of content. To summarize:

Context: “One man’s food is another man’s poison”. A central taxonomy can never account for varied and dynamic usage scenarios of each digital asset. Every asset has a different purpose for, say, a sales, marketing, product management and service professional. When you let content flow through social and collaborative metaphors, its amazing how each of us can fulfill our unique consumption use cases.

Data Association: Systems Integration to associate events and data from ERP/CRM/SCM systems to ECM content is extremely expensive and static. You get IT to make a customization and then go back to the end of the line when you need another one. As a result we have limited system scaling to meet evolving business requirements. In contrast, integrating people does bring scale and can serve as a far more effective glue between events that need action and content/documents/digital assets that can help you take an optimal course of action.

Enterprise Search: Know anyone working at a large company that loves their enterprise search functionality? Yeah, me neither. It’s time we give people a shot at recommending the right content and documents. For that we need a social layer that sits atop enterprise content management to offer contextual meta data.

The solution still remains the same: Infuse Content and Document Management with Social and Collaborative approaches to get the best minds to contribute, vet, validate and recommend digital assets in the context of varied business activities.

Microsoft SharePoint has seen a majority of the social platform integration effort, thus far. Oracle has its own content, portal and collaboration components systematically meshed together. And I have other examples in my previous post.

This morning Jive Software, Alfresco Software, and SolutionSet announced that they have collaborated to turn content, documents and digital assets into social objects. Jive offers the social components, Alfresco does the Content Management heavy lifting, and SolutionSet, (the most experienced social software SI you’ve likely never heard of) engineered the connecter that makes this happen. This integration enables bi-directional content creation, editing and management. Per Matt Tucker, CTO and founder of Jive:

“Alfresco provides a proven enterprise content management system. Jive taps into the Alfresco system to ‘socialize’ the content, facilitate collaboration, and make it available in the activity stream. Access and interaction with Alfresco content becomes seamless in Jive. This makes content management more searchable, ratable, likable, commentable, and most importantly, more social.”

I don’t generally cover software announcements on this blog but when I see an attempt to combine content, process and people in an effort to contextualize work (as opposed to social for social’s sake), I consider it a meaningful effort towards performance acceleration – something I do write a lot about.

The devil is in the details when it comes to making two systems talk to each other. But what’s neat is that this connector is not about just adding comments and ratings to documents. It proposes to enable broad collaboration when it comes to the creation, validation or approval of content and digital assets.

We see a growing need for this in our work: Talk to most executives at large organizations and they will quietly admit that content creation budgets have become a “black hole” over the last decade. What’s worse, it’s extremely challenging to find a way to get off the spending treadmill or know which efforts truly provide value. Such integration can now federate the creation and uses of content to reduce significant risk, give you crowd sourced insight into top performing assets, and promote new applicability for a very expensive line item in the operating budget of many many large organizations.

For more, see this post by Barb Mosher on CMS Wire and from Tim Ross, GM at SolutionSet Digital.

Kudos to all involved.

This morning I was reading some stuff from SAP StreamWork that provided a rundown of integration partners that its chosen to work with: Doodle, MindMeister, CS Odessa, Evernote, Altassian. And others such as Google Apps and Scribd.

I wonder if ~80% of the Fortune 500, SAPs customer base, will get these relationships.

I said to Todd Morrison at Tech Target a few weeks ago:

“I’ve always wondered why Streamworks is focused on seemingly lightweight offerings that most of its large enterprise customers don’t generally adopt,” said Sameer Patel, an analyst with The Sovos Group who follows social media applications.

Still, Patel credited SAP for its decision to incorporate Atlassian, which he said has “deep tentacles” inside many large software organizations. Activities like brainstorming and collaboration are important parts of decision making, he added.

Net net: Trying to be relevant / hip / cool, SAP is looking to get its mojo back in its old age.

Contrast this with what start up/ pure play social software vendors such as Jive, SocialText, NewsGator, Moxie, etc., often see:

As they get beyond the initial deployments that are general purpose in nature, their customers (and ours) are increasingly asking for a plethora of integration points for all sorts of data sources sitting inside mammoth ECM, ERP, BI and CRM systems. All in an effort to make social interaction, be that inside communities or on an activity stream, contextually richer.

Some social and collaboration vendors such as Socialcast, Qontext, SimplyBox (and others quietly in beta) are even creating engagement modules that sit right inside the system of record where critical processes are completed. Others provide the conversational glue between traditional call centers that deals with the external world and static employee intranets.

Net Net: The smaller guys are working on growing up.

I’m not criticizing either move. To be fair, SAP announced support for OpenSocial which re-affirms its commitment to nurturing the developer ecosystem and by all respected accounts, the (quite social) Sales On Demand product is the bees knees. In turn, the younger/startup software vendors have some work do to to blend process and social together – a fact that most will readily admit as they work very hard to make happen.

But I couldn’t help feel like we have one camp that’s having a mid life crisis and another that’s trying to muscle in on an adult conversation.

I found it entertaining. Life in the enterprise world would be a tad bit boring without either of these cases. That’s all there is to it : – )

Ever since I started blogging about the work we do around collaboration and strategic use of enterprise social software, I’ve long advocated for purpose built, in context use of social constructs to make a meaningful impact on business performance. One one hand, Enterprise 2.0 – the value proposition and enabling software began its journey as a stand alone solution trying to unseat Microsoft SharePoint. Most vendors have begun to focus on contextual use cases centered on business process or via ERP and CRM process integration, to surgically enhance specific outcomes. Be those CRM via PBWorks, Crowdsourced Innovation via Spigit, Supplier Management Via RollStream, and the like.

Coming at it from the other end, Enterprise Resource Planning Applications, Supply Chain Optimization Apps or Customer Relationship Management Apps – the BIG systems of record at larger enterprises, have seen little business process innovation in the last decade. Most of the innovation has been on the infrastructure and delivery end of the stack or feature updates. On Premise to Cloud based services, Feature Release X to Release Y, In Memory Databases and Applications for faster throughput and access. Significant benefits to IT and to the end user from this, no doubt, but more to do with convenience and evolutionary improvement, as opposed to objective re-thinking on how to best execute a given business activity, today.

Injecting Social at the Source with Fusion

What we haven’t really seen is back to the drawing board innovation on business process design. Over the last decade we’ve mistakenly begun to believe that the best way to execute a given business activity is synonymous with how our ERP systems enforced our way of work. Ever since the wide scale adoption of ERP applications, largely thanks to the Y2K hoax, we’ve been judiciously streamlining process in black and white. Ensuring that every application has a Submit and a Cancel Button. Commit your decision now, or roll back. Choose now and forever hold your peace.

Decisions are not always black and white in the Enterprise context. To me, the ultimate promise of social computing lies in improved process execution outcomes. What I’ve been looking for is an in-context and even onscreen utility inside enterprise process apps that helps you answer: “I’m not sure” OR “What’s the best selection from that dropdown menu” OR “Who knows more about this than I?” OR “Can I first take a vote from a few smarty pants before I commit, please?

Oracles ECM, HCM Fusion and OnTrack applications offer a sneak peak into how this might work in the future. The core of the application centers on 4 questions, as seen in the screenshot above. And in a visually appealing way.

I spent hours away from the pitches and deep in the demo pits working through a ton of applications from Fusion HCM to CRM to SCM and on and on. I’m not going to go into the details here but in a nutshell – your social network is one click away. Whilst I would hardly call this deep collaboration in its’ truest sense, there’s built-in rich profiles inside ERP apps tied to Roles and Identity Management. Enabling me to find expertise and people based on skills and interests, click a button to chat, add people to my contacts or my social network and even initiate a VOIP call.

In general, engagement metaphors are applied with different doses across the Fusion portfolio. The Fusion HCM  and CRM applications have more of what most would consider collaboration but most of the other apps have in context social networking. The purist Enterprise 2.0 or Social CRM thinker would balk such minimal functionality and I think they would be correct. In fact, al lot of it isn’t even new. But the kicker is that it’s in context, at the source of the problem, at the fork in the road. And that’s what makes it valuable. The chances of you needing to talk to someone or get answers quickly makes Unified Communications – type functionality + rich profiles more of a priority than the whole enterprise 2.0 stack (wikis, communities, document access etc). The key word is priority though – there’s lots here that is missing and needs to be dealt with – supplier and partner communities, document collaboration, for starters.

Why No Balloons and Confetti?

What was puzzling to many was that Larry Ellison did not come out thumping his chest when introducing Fusion. Using phrases such as “God Bless You if you do so” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

I suspect it’s a combination of things:

• First, as people like Dennis Howlett suspect, it’s not ready for large scale adoption; just for a controlled GA for now.
• Second, Oracle is facing heat in the market. When the keynote names names – Workday, SuccessFactors, Taleo, you know something’s up. For relevancy sake, it needs to tout innovation at the same pace as the rest of the market.
• Third, and most likely in my mind though not mutually exclusive: Fusion can truly be an enormous undertaking for any enterprise. Oracle is legendary for executing for where the proverbial puck is and surgically moving to where it will be closer to mainstream acceptance. Either by buying its way there and sometimes by innovation. But never at the cost of revenues the next few quarters out. I suspect its pipeline is looking fine for now and there’s no financial reason to fall for the innovators dilemma and confuse the market.

Oracle ECM

On the ECM side, there’s extensive use of SOA that allows pulling in analytical and other data as social objects from business applications to comment and collaborate on. Oracles view of Enterprise 2.0 seems to be closer to traditional ECM + Activity Streams + SOA based access to structured data. Very different from the traditional wiki + social network + micro blogging combo that’s come to be known as a complete Enterprise 2.0 suite.

In his keynote, Larry talked about how different middle ware groups at Oracle had to shed their differences and collaborate on a single middleware offering. I strongly suggest the same happen in on the ECM and Enterprise Social Networking side of the house. It’s going to get really confusing really fast for customers when they see social capabilities peppered across ECM, UC inside ERP apps and standalone products such as OnTrack (more below). Whilst they seem to be serving different purposes, organizations still need a single collaborative backbone for all its interactions. The Spaces product seems to be a great foundational home for these solutions as long as they can be offered in a modular way.

Talking about Spaces, the product has good social networking capabilities inside the ECM suite and good extensibility, out of the box. For instance, integration with Microsoft outlook to take long threaded email conversations and turn it into message boards instantly in nifty, good collaboration on documents inside the CMS system, and social networking hooks to other non Oracle collaboration systems.

On Track:

It’s still in the oven, but OnTrack looks to be pretty slick and was without a doubt my favorite ‘enterprise gadget’ demo at the event. As much as we hate to use the Facebook for the Enterprise metaphor, its just that – a simple to understand connection and conversation facilitation hub, with enterprise context built in. To draw comparisons, it reminds me more of a purpose built GoogleWave (RIP) and StreamWorks from SAP than it does mature activity stream offerings from Socialcast, Socialtext or Newsgator. Designed to be purpose built around ‘conversations’ as the primary social object, it works as a central engagement utility in the enterprise that can be triggered from anywhere – natively or (soon) from other applications. With light collaboration features such as annotation on digital assets, business intelligence integration, support for voice and video, and integration into various Oracle Apps it offers a solid 2010 design for unified communications. I’d love to know if it comes with an API so if anyone from Oracle knows, please chime in.

Closing Thoughts:

All up, the event was a good one. There was too much lots of focus on the Cloud. In a box. But taller than a Human. The depth in the sessions made up for the sometimes rocky keynotes, with folks such as Steve Miranda doing a solid job balancing pitch and customer analogies when giving an overview on Fusion. For my part, the demos by knowledgeable product mangers gave me deep, marketing-free, insight into many products.

Was this breakthrough innovation on the Enterprise 2.0 front? Not by a long shot. But its engagement in context and that’s a huge leap forward in the ERP space. As I’ve said before, the thing we often forget when pontificating about enterprise software innovation is that buyers don’t buy best, they buy ‘good enough’. And so whilst the race is partly about out innovating the competition, it has as much to do with execution. And part of that depends on who has the deepest tentacles inside the customer base, whether directly or via a channel ecosystem.

Whilst Oracle is late to the enterprise social party when compared to stand alone Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM vendors, it pacing very well when compared to other ERP vendors. With that in mind, a lot of the social and collaboration innovation seen here will ultimately get into the hands of it’s large installed base.

In addition to the posts I’ve linked to here, here are other must read articles that I’ve seen thus far:

Thomas Wailgum: Oracle OpenWorld 2010: 10 Buzzwords to Know, Love and Hate

Brandon Bailey – Ellison closes Oracle OpenWorld: ‘More new technology’

Robert Falerta – What’s Larry Ellison Thinking About The Indirect Sales Channel?

Mike Fauscette – Oracle OpenWorld 2010 – The Recap (good screenshots)

Next Up – what this all means for the rest of the Enterprise 2.0 landscape.

Tom Davenport (who holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, my alma mater) has a post on Harvard Business Review where he makes the case that Knowledge Management may well have been the most palatable solution to preventing Underwear Bomber security breach that look the peace and joy out of Christmas Day, 2009.

Professor Davenport concludes:

There are, of course, some remedies to this problem. One would be a really nasty police state, with a lot of false positive detentions. Another would be an international data management agency. A third would be lots more money and intrusiveness spent on airport searches, behavioral screening, etc., a la Israel and El Al. All seem somewhat unlikely.

Perhaps the only palatable remedy would be an intelligence community that views high-quality information and knowledge management as its primary job. If I were Barack Obama, that’s the approach I would be viewing as the real solution to the “connect the dots” problem.

I’d contend that, in this case, knowledge was too managed. And that’s the crux of the problem – too much general purpose management of data, silos, content artifacts. And too little context around discrete tasks that in actuality is what should have been manage -Where data, content and people would wrap around the task to solve it.

There’s plenty of analysis on how the billions spent on information sharing post 9/11 failed. The New York Times writes:

Some government officials blamed the National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism threats, as failing to piece together information about an impending attack.

Others defended the center, saying that analysts there did not have enough information at their disposal to prompt a broad investigation into Mr. Abdulmutallab. They pointed the finger at the C.I.A., which in November compiled biographical data about Mr. Abdulmutallab — including his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen — but did not broadly share the information with other security agencies.

KM is hardly the place to start to wrestle this challenge. The problem with KM is that it’s often (not always) measured by somewhat nebulous yardsticks such as amount of shared and reusable content, amount of contribution, lowered email use and number of docs stored on the network. All of this is done in closed networks. As a result, just like we see in the enterprise and its use of Content Management Systems, the government also suffers from ‘silo-ization’, poor findability, and poor analytics.  The fact is, no amount of closed loop information sharing is enough of an air tight strategy to prevent intelligence from falling through the cracks. There’s too many systems in place to let computer based intelligence automatically throw up red flags every single time.

The solution lies in putting people at the core of this difficult problem. The Social Computing Frameworks that we use, in contrast, consider the concept of ‘closed’ to be an exception rather than the rule. This allows those responsible to take ownership of the task but other unknown “experts” get to watch the flow and participate where they can enrichen the quality of the outcome or even better, as in this case, raise a big red flag. Once clear unified objectives are set across agencies, open up the execution so that the best known and unknown minds can chime in.

Whether Social Computing or traditional KM, the larger problem is with lack of objective setting to getting the right information to the right people. It’s about setting the right objectives upfront at the highest levels and identifying which of these objectives can in fact be addressed by information management solutions and frankly, which can’t. And whether the right incentive structures are in place for individuals and groups to collaborate towards a common goal. I’m willing to bet that the strategic and execution objectives laid out by the chiefs of each agency don’t line up in a way that can practically lead to a unified collaboration and intelligence discovery execution plan.

I’m afraid the crotch bomber event will result in hundreds of millions being thrown at “information/knowledge management” solutions that centers on better sharing, transparency as a strategy in and of itself,  as opposed to as an execution path towards defined strategic goals that everyone is firmly behind.

I hope I’m wrong.

These were the most visited posts from December 1, 2008 to December 1,2009, per Google Analytics.

I just realized that this blog is only little over a year old. Feels like I’ve been writing for much longer.

A sincere thank you for reading, commenting, referencing and re-tweeting my posts. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it and how much I’ve learned from the debates and exchanges we’ve had here and on Twitter.

Ok, back to the topic of this post. Top posts here, as follows:

Friendfeed: Inspiration for Sales Intelligence in an Enterprise 2.0 world?

This post took the top spot. It did well on its own but some of the popularity was thanks to a link in the New York Times via ReadWriteWeb.

Summary: How to approach sales performance acceleration using Enterprise 2.0 constructs and account for interaction and data preferences of the typical sales rep.

Enterprise 2.0 Software: Commoditization before Monetization

Summary: A software market perspective on where we’ve been and where the category may end up given the entry of free and open source alternatives. This post could use an update given the entry/imminent entry of Microsoft, Salesforce, TIBCO and SAP – all of whom have chosen to build and not buy.

Why Process Barfs on Social

Summary: Taking the battle to the enemies turf. This is in response to “Enterprise 2.0: What a Crock” by Dennis Howlett, addressing what I hope is a balanced view on where process pundits are wrong about Enterprise 2.0 2.0 and the value of ERP that they closely guard. As well, it shows tangible examples of where social computing has in fact accelerated performance and suggests what we in the E2.0 community can reduce this friction between process and social. Dennis comes around with his balanced opinion as well.

Don’t Confuse Enterprise 2.0 with Social Computing Concepts

Summary: An early post – one of my last on definitions and naming – a topic that I generally stay away from. This post suggests focusing Enterprise 2.0 as a state the enterprise achieves via strategic use of social computing.

Why Unlocking ECM is critical to your Enterprise 2.0 Execution Plan

Summary: How you can leverage existing ECM/CMS investments and Social Computing to drive better outcomes for your marketing investments. Also included was a conversation with Billy Cripe, then Director of ECM at Oracle.

Happy New Year. See you on the other side. I’m pumped about 2010.