Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

Eric Norlin, organizer of Defrag, Blur and Glue Conferences and seed investor, has a good post up today about what enterprise development means in the age of big data, mobile and cloud and the coming age of convergence of these big innovation spurts.

I really recommend that you take 3 minutes to read his post for proper context but here’s the quote that summarizes his stance:

Amidst these three mega-trends [Mobile, Cloud, Big Data] sits a lynchpin. The developers know it because they’re building. The buzzword maniacs haven’t caught it yet, and they may never (we can only hope), but it’s there. That lynchpin: APIs. APIs tie together the mega-trends in a fundamental and unalterable way. APIs are the lingua franca of the new wave of enterprise development.

So, as these three mega trends (and our super top-secret, don’t tell the marketers, lynchpin) converge, we’re seeing one overriding trend: the opportunity, means and necessity for the developer (engineer, architect) to play the central role in building and rolling out new enterprise IT capabilities.

He’s right. I wanted to build on two specific repercussions or elephants in the room in this discussion around what convergence means for the enterprise developer community:

• Changing Customer Expectations: Cloud and SaaS have once again started to move the buying pendulum to a decentralized model and towards the Line of Business buyer. And whilst its way early in the enterprise setting, mobile is threatening to move the buying power even further way towards the end participant. Enterprise developers need to understand what selling and supporting into the Line of Business and appealing to the end participant means. Whilst IT might have hired a traditional analyst firm to do a feature shoot out or looked at a Quadrant, the Line Of Business will want an integrated result of cloud, big data and mobile that speaks to specific business scenarios and use cases. So if enterprise software developers were to build competing products, feature parity is price of entry. You can’t shy away from really really understanding usage models and design thresholds. That’s a big cultural shift at least for those developers who’ve been supporting IT – which includes most on and offshore SIs.
• Monetization: In my mind, each of these three technology trends (on their own) will be on the fast track to commoditization and will risk facing the same fate as did most social business software plays. The magic and the premiums will come from contextual application of this innovation and as Eric says, smart integration. Take storage for example: Dropbox as storage without document and device sync is commodity. Box.net as storage without document and device sync and collaboration is commodity. Apple’s iCloud as storage without ubiquitous local and iTunes media sync across devices is commodity. And Google Drive (as discussed here in Ben Kepes’ CloudU community) is also a commodity business not worth getting into had it not been for Google’s services such as Google Apps, Piccasa, and its media and unified communication capabilities under the Google Plus brand. The premiums from big data, mobile access and cloud comes from  a) dynamically assembled media and content, and interpreted data in the cloud, b) available wherever you need to consume and / or collaborate and c) insanely focused and simple interfaces to complex backends. That’s what enterprise developers are looking at if they really want to be on the money making side of these innovations.

These are the elephants as I see it.

Side Note/Disclaimer: Eric puts on mind-bending summits (he calls them conferences but I keep telling him that that doesn’t do justice to the content he produces). I’ve been an advisor to Defrag and  I’ve been privileged to keynote Defrag before and will be doing so again, later this year. But this is about Glue.

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Tom Friedman had a good article up in the Sunday Review Section of the Times in late December on the implications of “the merger of globalization and the Information Technology revolution”. The crux of his reasoning and conclusions lies in this quote:

The days of leading countries or companies via a one-way conversation are over,” says Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN and the author of the book “How.” “The old system of ‘command and control’ — using carrots and sticks — to exert power over people is fast being replaced by ‘connect and collaborate’ — to generate power through people.” Leaders and managers cannot just impose their will, adds Seidman. “Now you have to have a two-way conversation that connects deeply with your citizens or customers or employees.

Netflix had a one-way conversation about raising prices with its customers, who instantly self-organized; some 800,000 bolted, and the stock plunged. Bank of America had a one-way conversation about charging a $5 fee on debit cards, and its customers forced the global bank to reverse itself and apologize. Putin thought he had power over his people and could impose whatever he wanted and is now being forced into a conversation to justify staying in power. Coca-Cola repackaged its flagship soft drink in white cans for the holidays. But an outcry of “blasphemy” from consumers forced Coke to switch back from white cans to red cans in a week. Last year, Gap ditched its new logo after a week of online backlash by customers.

Tom calls it a problem of one way conversations. He’s spot on. And he cites kerfuffles that many of us are all too familiar with.

This morning, I dipped into the Social Business Atlanta Summit twitter stream, organized by the super smart Brent Leary. I encourage you to take a look at the hashtag on Twitter but this comment made by GetSatisfaction Executive Jeff Nolan and syndicated by Paul Greenberg (both fellow Enterprise Irregulars), stuck with me:

@pgreenbe: #socialbizatl @jeffnolan in last 30 yrs, customers were tangential to the process; now they are at the core of it all”

So how do you have a two way conversation as Tom suggests and move customers to the core, as Jeff says?

You do it by being connected to your customers in the public forum and on your customer communities, of course. But also making sure that your employees and partners are as wired internally to collaborate across the entire engagement chain. The kinds of pickles that Tom describes above emanated from different spark points across the organization. Sometimes the root cause is in marketing, other times its a product design issue and other times it could be a logistics problems. All these constituencies need to be connected to the customer and to each other if were going to get anywhere close to a two way conversational model and putting their needs “at the core of it all”.

Neither that two way conversation nor customer centricity will come from your traditional ERP or HR or CRM systems, alone. It comes from having a collaborative fabric (and social software) that transcends the work done in your process systems and data served by your performance and analytics systems by connecting people who are silo’d by a functional organizational design. Today’s customer expects us to break old notions of front and back office, or primary and support activities made famous by Michael Porter’s value chain framework that most large organizations subscribe to. SuperVALU is doing it, Toshiba is doing it, Target is doing it, Spotify and WebTrends are doing it. The list goes on.

To be clear, I’m not advocating that you throw these process systems out. They are your systems of record. I’m saying you need to cut through them with people engagement layers.

Coca Cola didn’t turn the cans from red to white because they were bored – they thought the customer would like it. But they didn’t tap the network effectively to test their hypothesis. Similarly, Bank of America probably thought that 5 bucks, the price of a morning venti Mocha, won’t matter. It did and the jokes on them for not testing the idea first which is dead simple in todays socially networked customer world.

As executives trying to understand what information flow and people connectivity in the 21st century means means to you and your organizational performance objectives, its the very concepts around social and collaborative approaches that become the central design theme for such-directional connectivity to keep your employees, customers and partners in synchronicity.

I’m not a fan of overtly revolutionary / FUD’ish tones on why you will be forced to embrace social and collaborative ways of work. True – it sometimes takes catastrophes to give us the needed kick in the rear to change how we organize and share.  9/11 was one such catastrophe that made governments re-think how they share intelligence. And for many Heads of State and politicians, WikiLeaks was another that also led to design change. But it doesn’t have to be so. Get ahead of it and start understanding how traditional process technology has shackled knowledge, data and content into silos and how simple engagement platforms can free the best talent up, to rally around business objectives and customer needs.

The snafus that Tom describes occurred not because of the social web. But Tom’s post supports the notion that the customer / purveyor contract has changed thanks to the social web which gives prospects and customers organized power to voice opinion and that we need to adapt accordingly.

His list of public, and even market-moving failures above, will sadly remain a dynamic one. So enhance your process-laden one way communication at customers, with conversation synchronicity across customers, partners and employees so you’re not in his sequel post any time soon.

Comments rolling in on Google Plus, here.

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Information Week contributing editor Lenny Liebmann and I had a chat at IBM’s Lotusphere 2012 / IBMConnect event in Orlando last week.

Lenny wanted to dig deeper into Social Business and get into the ‘why’s’ and ‘how’s’. We talked about a decisive approach to connecting customers, employees and partners and covered a number of topics including:

• The implications of todays increasingly social, vocal social customer on business and why Social CRM matters to customers and to the sales enablement process.
• Why building and connecting vibrant employee and partner engagement networks is imperative to get customer relationship management in the 21st century, right.
• How analytics will play a role.
• And finally, how organizations can get started.

Conversations with Industry Innovators Series with Lenny Liebmann.

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+1 for Social Business. IBM is in. Whole hog.

6000+ faithful Lotus attendees and 100s of Lotus Partners got fed IBM’s ebusiness equivalent play for the 21st century. Simply put, that they are betting their entire portfolio of collaboration solutions, both old and new on Social Business.

One fat caveat before I put my thoughts here. Connections Next, IBM’s enterprise social software offering that was the star of its presentation won’t be here until later this summer. But given the play it got at Lotusphere 2012 and IBMConnect, it’s too large a bet on IBM’s Collaboration portfolio to not consider seriously.

I was kindly invited to IBMConnect, the section of this conference for IBM’s business customers, to speak about what customer relationship building truly entails in the 21st century. It was great speaking to an outside-the-beltway audience about tectonic changes in customer expectations thanks to the social web and how we need to wire our customers, employees and partners together to deliver on these new expectations. In insider baseball lingo – how Social CRM and Employee Collaboration are interdependent. The deck is here on Slideshare.

There are some great posts out there that have that covered feature rundowns very well. Take a look at excellent reviews by Mike Fauscette,  Daryl K Taft, David Carr and Steve Lohr for starters. And Luis Benitez has a comprehensive list, here.

These are my key takeaways on the business viability of IBM’s social and collaborative offerings.

Connections Next embraces the “me-web”: Fundamentally, it all boils down to this: IBM in my opinion has made great strides towards understanding access to and the interplay between content, data, process and human connection that gets us on the path of social finally meaning business. The workplace has long been imprisoned in a systems-web where you have to work separately with a bunch of disconnected data, process, content and interaction platforms and to top it off, no clear way of assessing the knowledge depth and breadth of an organization. The significant overhead that comes from orchestrating these disparate value points into even a rudimentary symphony would make Zubin Mehta‘s job look like a walk in the park. That’s the world or work we’ve lived in thus far and IBM is proposing to change that. The demos of Connections Next illustrated read-write capabilities with a set of native and external sources of content and documents and business intelligence – be that finding and editing documents, consuming and contributing to workflow from ERP, social and private interactions with people, and finally basic unified communications capabilities. Arguably this is one of the more comprehensive offerings in the social software space.

Contextual Collaboration: Connections Next isn’t just another grab bag of social networking features. Instead, IBM has done a commendable job of rationalizing native assets and ISV relationships to foster contextual collaboration that’s missing in many social business programs and a design that doesn’t impedes process and task facilitation. Whether that’s email and calendaring or content management, Connections pulls in relevant IBM technology assets to provide a more comprehensive collaboration suite, as opposed to just social networking. In addition, long standing relationships with technology providers such as SAP promise to bring read-write capabilities to and from business systems, ultimately casting ‘social’ as a pivotal enabler of get-work-done systems.

Finding needles in the social haystack: Moving conversations from email to a social network doesn’t really do much when it comes to reducing information overload or making you more efficient necessarily. In fact it just amplifies the problem as we listen to what everyone has to say.

Credit: Brendan Farnand

Add customer conversations to the mix and you really have a headache on your hands. Many social business software powered programs today suffer from this today and I suspect 2012 will find many organizations looking for good standalone filtering and analytics technology or an outright replacement of the social platform in favor of one that enables meaningful discovery, business and event context, consumption and participation. With a comprehensive analytics offering that spans customer and employee conversations and combines both Cognos based analytics and Social insight from the Lotus environment, IBM becomes one of the few serious providers (not the only one to be clear) that can help discover people, content and data, all in context of the specific job at hand. IBM’s Brendan Fernand has more, here.

Research: When you have a $6 billion dollar research budget and the smarts of people like Marie Wallace and others on the research team pushing the limits of how to marry process and social data, it’s a very powerful differentiator. With its new Social Business focus (and an outright name change for the research group to reflect this), we saw a good chunk of the lab efforts now focused on making social networking more meaningful — both by making sense of shared data and conversations, and also by surfacing social insight right inside system of record applications. For instance, Marie demoed how social network analysis could recommend the most qualified sales rep for a new lead that just dropped into SugarCRMs CRM application. I introduced a concept I’ve been spending time on recently called Network Attached Value in my presentation at IBMConnect that basically aims to identify how process and task activity is accelerated when you can attached the value of your business network to workflow. Coincidently, Marie presented a sandbox version of this and it was great to see how the work of structured process can be enriched by analyzed employee data. It’s clear that IBM can cement its competitive position with this sort of leadership, as opposed to a social networking feature shoot out.

A few things that IBM needs to pay attention to, in my opinion:

Brand: IBM needs to brutally assess the future of the Lotus brand. For better or for worse, there are a lot of passionate feelings in the market for Lotus as a brand and as long as it’s alive, even disconnected collaboration offerings such as Connections will get lumped into the same basket. You saw early signs of the Lotus brand taking a back seat at the event. For instance, Lotus Live has already become IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business.

Distribution: Lots and lots of attention played to the Partner landscape at Lotusphere. The good news is that thousands of IBM Lotus and UC partners now get to play in the social business game. But when you look at the comprehensive offering that is Connections Next, with tie-ins into content management, messaging, and business process, I wonder if the typical Lotus and other  CMS partner base can immediately deliver on the needed business transformation. I suspect IBM Global Business Services (GBS) will have to lead the way for sometime until a more mature market of partners surface who know as much about messaging, collaboration, process and industry knowledge. And it seems like a slam dunk to me to leverage people such as Luis Suarez and Rawn Shah to communicate the nitty gritty benefits and value points of using social software to customers once the air cover marketing on social business has run its course for a prospect and when its time to convert. And I wrote last year about where the hidden domain smarts around communicating and executing social business lies inside IBM. After attending IBMConnect, things are no doubt moving in the right direction, but I still stand by that line of thinking.

Can it Rip and Replace? I asked why IBM thinks it can replace incumbent (free, cheap, open source) social offerings that have penetrated organizations thus far in one of the briefing sessions. The answer I got was IBM has better security. Ah – I expected to be treated to a slew of answers such as distribution strength, product superiority, industry focus, research commitment, process knowledge and the like. Connections Next has the goods to replace many sub optimal offerings in the market but organizations don’t buy best; they buy good enough. And so it’s going to take a lot more than security to unhinge a social business program that already has momentum.

Closing thoughts:

All up, IBM’s advancements with Connections is fantastic and given the play it got on the main stage, it would be shocking if the application doesn’t deliver as advertised later this year. The disciplined approach to rationalizing its technology assets, providing a bridge between the old and new by folding in email and calendaring and a concerted effort to provide one dashboard where collaboration can happen with people around unstructured and structured events is really good. And at an infrastructure level, Project Vulcan promises to help customers make a move from their existing systems to more efficient innovation at a palatable pace. And the customers such as TD Canada Trust who spoke at the event were solving gnarly business problems with collaboration. Whilst I think there are multiple pathways to infusing social software into the enterprise stack, ”IBM shops” out there will be pleased to see that they don’t have to endure more spaghetti integration between disparate systems as Connections offers a serious platform. Huge kudos to Alistair Rennie and team for making this a CIO-friendly solution.

The event itself was executed very well and the events team brought heavy weights to the keynote stage with Alistair, Mike Rhodin, Jeff Schick, Bridget van Kralingen, Sandy Carter and others to enforce that. The one thing that did strike me was that given the massive pivot push around Social Business and the expected impact on the IBM mothership, it would have been a nice touch if CEO Ginni Rometty made a surprise appearance, even if for just 60 seconds via telepresence. Not that they needed any more muscle but that would have put a bow on it.

There’s no doubt that its game on from IBMs perspective and any older perceptions of Lotus is a thing of the past. Given my strand of collaboration and social business (as illustrated on this blog), I feel that this is one incarnation of social business that has a shot at making social, truly mean business.

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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.

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Designed to build a transparent, results-driven work culture, Rypple replaces the traditional performance review with an easy, social and collaborative approach. People always know where they stand, and are accountable for achieving their goals.

To me, this is more about strengthening SFs ownership of the professional social graph first and foremost. Radian6 gave Salesforce.com more intelligence into the prospect and customer social graph and the ability to infuse said insight into their front line apps such as Sales and Service Cloud. This purchase, along with Chatter and Chatterlytics strengthens SFs control over exactly who is good at what inside the organization and allows them to federate this information into SF apps today and into AppExchange apps in the near future. That moves this intelligence data set to the front office and right at the point of employee decision making, as opposed to just HCM insight for HR professionals.

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TechCrunch quotes a warning of sorts by Venture Capitalist Josh Kopelman who basically says 2012 will be more like a correcting 2008, as opposed to a euphoric 2011. Lots of good for and against arguments on the VC investing front by the likes of Dave McClure and others in the comments on TC.

Regardless of who is right, I’m optimistic on the enterprise front.

In 2003, in the midst of the dot bust, I founded a consulting firm that had a singular value proposition. Work with CIOs and LOB leaders at large organizations to help them with a specific strand of operational efficiency. The idea was to capitalize on two realities:

1) Whilst budgets were nose diving, the long list of performance objectives that kept executives up at night showed no signed of dissipating.

2) The blank checks during the preceding dot com boom days meant lots of purchased technology was now sporting cobwebs on CDs in a drawer under a sys admins desk or in data centers.

So we set out to do two things: 1) Bring in the right business and technology strategy muscle that could help sales and marketing, HR leaders and CIOs understand how to do more with less and 2) once operational efficiency and performance objects were set, scour the basements and attics for procured technology that could best facilitate realizing critical revenue and optimizing objectives.

Customers got to do more with less and without antagonizing the CAPEX Gestapo, in exchange for a reasonable services spend. And our lean structure consisting of very available strategists, marketeers, designers and technology architects meant we made out like bandits.

But it was much harder then. Systems didn’t talk to each other easily, data came from a plethora of external and internal systems and immature offshore development was the only way to afford execution skills. You had to prioritize what you could afford and given the cost and difficulty you could only take on a few things. And by the time portals, customer support and channel extranets went live, the requirements changed. But you did the best with what you had. And smart customer executives always find a way to ‘make it happen’ come hell or high water.

If 2012 looks more like 2008 for executives looking for opportunities to get operationally efficient, I’m even more optimistic than I was in 2003. I’ll cover this in my year end post in detail but a couple of quick reasons why:

• The plethora of cloud based systems means you don’t have to make incumbent technology do unnatural things. Chances are very good that there’s a OpEx-enabled technology solution that’s designed to solve precisely the problem you have. Every single system of record has either a cloud based forklift solution available, or a powerful add-on that helps you to keep the ball moving forward at a palatable cost. Even on-premise purveyors such as Oracle and SAP are going to offer cloud based off-shoots.
• APIs for most systems were dismal back then. More systems are built with integration in mind from the get go than ever before. And the likes of SolutionSet or Appirio would be happy to integrate your gnarly on premise File Management system with say Jive or Tibbr or Chatter in the cloud.
• Sources of competitive, customer and market intelligence is much less intermediated, now. Back then, we had to go to brokers (HarteHanks, Factiva, etc) to get lead, customer, competitive insight. Today that data sits at the edge, either available directly via the firehouse from say Yelp or Twitter, crowd sourced from a band of enthusiastic customers by say Spigit, aggregated and process-ized by GetSatisfaction or Assistly, or crunched by the likes of InsideView, The Dachis Group Social Business Index Service or Radian6 (based on the use case).

There’s many many more but you get the idea.  Fundamentally, this adds up to radically more approachable access to both sources of insight and the platforms that enable them.

It’s also important to note that the stakes are higher this time. In the 2003 post-crash world, relatively speaking, we were still serving the same pre-crash customer persona. Sure, we saw the likes of Amazon eat into brick and mortar commerce. But not at the scale that were witnessing at this time. Whether 2012 looks like 2008 or 2011, this market has some unique characteristics that demand that organizations can’t sit it out when it comes to specific trends that will impact who wins and who loses in the next few decades. Broadly speaking:

1. The customer contract has changed, forever. A prospect or customer’s expectations of how we engage and service her is now wildly different thanks to the social web. This requires a change in not just how we work at the edges (sales, marketing, support) but also depends on how nimble we are as organizations to rally employees, partners and suppliers around the prospects cause at hand.

2. I still remember the CEO of one of the largest spirits distributors sitting across the table and literally shaking at the idea this his business could get easily “Amazoned”. If Amazon was a threat to Barnes and Noble in 2000, imagine what the world looks like when I can walk into a BestBuy, scan a bar code on a SKU, have Amazon send me the best price online and proceed towards the exit. That’s a frightfully more radical scenario in any economy, good or bad. Service starts to become much more important if price arbitrage starts to become a thing of the past. Coined by Get Satisfaction, “Customer Service is the new Marketing” starts to become more of a striking reality.

3. Building on the Amazon / Best Buy example, a location aware mobile-first interaction with your business means that the lines are blurred between brick and mortar and digital for the foreseeable future. Fry’s Electronics here in Palo Alto gave me a discount when I showed them a lower price at Amazon on my mobile device. If the market is going to take a step back, you need to understand these dynamics so you can widen your customer footprint as much as you can. That means both find prospects wherever they are hiding but also have access to your best talent at all times to service this more demanding potential buyer.

This might sound like FUD but it’s not. Its an opportunity to understand and then react to a changing market. Same thing you’ve done as executives in down turns and customer shifts in the past. But more practical to do this time and in a way that won’t make your CFO reach for the antacid.

All of this makes me optimistic for the near term future of our industry. On one hand, it’s going to be more important to keep moving the ball foreword in 2012. But the mechanisms to do that thanks to easier interoperability, comprehensive availability of cloud based application services that looks like the longest Chinese restaurant menu you’ve ever seen, and finally, unfiltered visibility into what a prospect and customer expects from us has never been clearer. This results in a much more efficient approach to deciding where to spend dollars that really really matter. Note, I didn’t say easy. I’m saying necessary yet, much easier.

That to me is optimism not only to keep the lights on in a presumably tough 2012 but also to set the foundation for what competing means way beyond the living embers from this coming forest fire.

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