Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

Nmachi Jidenma writes about the undue focus we put on the competition. This is written with individuals in mind but I think it matters to emerging software categories as well. My favorite lines:

“It only makes sense that competing with others distracts from the distinctiveness that makes our art special. By comparing ourselves with others, we lose the magic that developing our core art affords the world. Competition with others in a sense makes us ordinary. It encourages imitation and, if we are not careful, makes us lose our essence. How boring.”

and

“Perhaps the best illustration of the magic that competing with oneself can bring to our art is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs’ maniacal obsession with his art was apparent to all in the careful attention to detail observed in most Apple products. This was clearly born out of his internal vision, which would not have seen the light of day if he did not stay committed to tapping into his inner creativity. We owe it to the world to bring our originality and insights to the work that we do.”

When it comes to emerging or low maturity categories,obsessing focusing too much on competitors can amount to at best, much ado about nothing and at worst, be down right dangerous. Not to mention really expensive when we can afford but a few marketing arrows. The reality is that in early stages of market maturity a good chunk of your competitors product and market strategy is experimental anyway. And the kicker is that even they don’t know which 50% will really work. And too often all it does is just distract product teams by putting a read view mirror in front of them and sucking every ounce of ingenuity out of their thinking about what can be. The wildly successful Tesla S, for instance, has redefined what a car should be and can be with a software-first ethos, yet with an appreciation for the basics. Can you imagine if Tesla had merely copied all the elements of the traditional car, save for the battery?

Software marketing has changed forever with the advent of cloud base delivery. The speed at which you need to move lets you define or re-define categories like never before. The very definition of what massive categories such as core HR, in-memory computing platforms, Collaboration, even CRM, is up for grabs, right now.

Sure, you need to have an understanding of where the competition is going, inform your play books and set your land mines. But too much focus on the competition just means you end up being reactive to a wobbly market definition instead of thinking about how to lift and shift the goal post.

About the only thing that is in fact constant is the ingenuity of your products your products innate understanding of the customers need and how well you communicate this.

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April marks my one-year anniversary at SAP.

It’s been an incredible ride to say the least. I’m a lucky guy – I came to SAP to help build out its products and go-to-market in the social and collaborative software category. But what I really I got was a chance to get in on the ground floor of a unique opportunity to participate in shaping SAPs place in the larger software category with SAP Cloud.

Our mantra has always been clear that social is not a destination but a critical enabler to established performance KPIs and that’s what driven our product strategy and our value proposition to customers. We started not with social but with the state of our customers businesses – both challenges and opportunities to drive revenue, lower cost and mitigate risk. And then identified the needed dance between data, business process, content and people. And executed like mad against that strategy culminating in a re-launch in last year.

Thanks to the efforts of an incredible cross-functional team we doubled our growth in 2012. The sheer tenacity and close partnership between SAPs amazing cloud and on premise application development teams has been something to write home about. I was warned numerous times about how impractical cross-functional collaboration can be. But the lines between transactions, process and collaboration have been blurred forever and the customer demands a default process + social experience, now. And the teams made it happen.

I’ve always been straight forward with respect to my opinion about the various strands of “social business”, here. But the role of social and collaborative constructs to truly accelerate performance in the enterprise has never been more critical. I’ve covered this on this blog for 4 years now and in my past roles but after working closely with customers and with numerous internal industry and products groups at SAP, you truly get an appreciation for the role that systems of record play every day but also the gaps that remain in day to day work for your customers, your employees and your partners.

The power of connected networks, the availability of business and process context in the cloud or on premise or both is extremely powerful. This is why I was attracted to a company rooted in business process. As an industry, we’re just starting to understand how to leverage this. SAP has given me the opportunity to go really deep on this subject – understanding how for instance, thousands of contingent retail employees, or floor staff at casinos need to be on boarded and enabled at scale, or the costs of ramping up sales teams, the power of customer networks thanks to SAP SCN community efforts, or how the white spaces in tight fraud management processes or in transportation and logistics can expose unmitigated risk. And against that backdrop, where social collaboration can move the needle and where it can’t and with cloud economics in mind. I could go on and on.

I’m really privileged to be able to do what I do and especially at a time when the re-wiring of enterprise software to focus on getting work done (as opposed to a list of features) is only now underway.

A big thanks to our team and the teams we work with across SAP, every day.

Phase 1: Check.

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With respect to why “Social Business” is a natural fit for the world of work, I said on Twitter:

@sameerpatel: Often heard #socbiz argument: “humans are social by nature”. Then why is it that #socbiz s/w adoption has been so hard historically?

Contradicting this is another popular statement about Social Business: “Its not about the technology, its about the people and culture”.

So which is it? The people or the tech?

I got some fabulous commentary in response to my tweet:

Bertrand Duperrin does what he does best (and why we became good friends instantly, years ago) by cutting to the chase on under currents:

@SameerPatel not sure that “human nature” is only made of good things . Greed, jealousy, anger are also part of it.

James Dellow, a seasoned collaboration practitioner brings up politics

@bduperrin @SameerPatel organisational politics too. “Results may vary”

Liz Coleman responds with the habitual preferences or the well known theory that technology needs to be 10x better to get users to change habits:

@SameerPatel interesting point. I would argue humans’ resistance to change, esp in regards to new technology (for vast maj.), could explain

Mike Boysen, one of the funniest and super smart CRM consultant says the fault really lies with organizational designs.

@SameerPatel I believe the design of the org is the driver, not the tools. Unfortunately, tools can’t do it alone yet. Tools should enable.

They are all right. But just imagine if you were an executive subsuming these arguments. You can see why you might pop an aspirin and say “to heck with it, I’m just going back to my old ways of work. The way we work today may well be woefully inefficient, but I know the devil I’m dealing with.”

Bertrand is right. Humans are some combination of social, greedy, jealous, angry and a 100 other things. And success against that backdrop is going to always be a function the people you hire, the culture you embody and the technology you pick to execute. The reality is that our historical definition of “social business” often requires you to go against energy that flows inside organizations, thereby requiring massive behavioral change. Social Networking is better than Email. Sharing is better than hoarding. And on and on. And Mike, Liz, Bertrand and James are well justified in their push back arguments.

In the face of all these extremely valid and conflicting arguments, one thing remains constant: Your best employees are always working towards their soft and hard incentives. Note: I didn’t say Goals. That only happens if your goals and incentives are well aligned and thats a different show. But ways to drive efficiency and execution performance will come from a) individual self improvement and b) working with others to improve output, if thats warranted for the job at hand. If the underlying technology forces you to do more of a) or b) than is needed, your carefully thought out plan to improve social collaboration is dead on arrival.

In reality, it is about both: human nature and the right underlying technology. But most important, its about stepping out of the people vs tech discussion and honestly identifying where social and collaboration concepts can in fact move the needle in terms of incentive alignment, and frankly, where it can’t.

Social Business has no doubt seen success in pockets. But mostly, Social Business to date is like a Salmon swimming upstream. We all know how that movie ends. It’s time to see how you can leverage social computing to enable the organization to swim in the direction of the incentive currents and help them collaborate more effectively where its apparently needed. And identify which technology puts flippers on your employees feet.

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Last week I had the privilege of keynoting CeBIT in Hanover. The theme was “Shareconomy“. From the CeBIT website:

“Shareconomy” describes the societal shift from owning to sharing. According to Pörschmann, this is evident in several dimensions: “First, Shareconomy is profoundly influencing enterprise processes, because social media tools will become more and more popular. Second, the Internet is the place for teamwork, both in and outside the company. Partners, consultants, suppliers and customers will be more closely integrated as part of a networked process. The borders separating companies and organizations will become ever more transparent. Therefore, employees and managers must rethink and be prepared to share know-how, contacts and assets.”

My presentation was on the commercial value and benefit of the Shareconomy for the Enterprise. And if you have read this blog before, you know that I took the idea of “Facebooking of the global economy” to task somewhat. -). But in all seriousness, the theme was fantastic and the questions after were very engaging.

When I find a link to all of the keynote presentations I will update it here but I highly recommend giving them a quick look. Really excellent content from a great group of industry doers and thinkers.

Here are my slides on SlideShare:

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Wrote a post about what today’s customer expects in terms of “relationships” on SAP’s Customer Edge Blog. Here is a snippet:

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Transactional CRM, the system of record technology that lets you manage a sales cycle, a customer service request and marketing activity, is critical to make official records of who did what.

But here’s what striking to me: Traditional CRM, which stands for customer relationship management is a transactional and operational technology that never really touched the customer.

That may have been OK in the past, but today’s customer who is extremely well connected and networked thanks to the social web has radically different expectations of the companies that they do business with.  Beyond socializing, the social web is where we seek to research and engage with both, like-minded buyers and with purveyors with whom we want to do business. In a 2011 IBM study on Social CRM⁽¹⁾, 42% of those polled use the social web to share opinions about products they use, 39% use it to access product reviews, 23% said they outright rely on the “social web to interact with brands”.  Yet another supporting point to CRM pundit Paul Greenberg’s assertion that “the customer is in control of the conversation.”

Let’s dispel three misconceptions about the social web first:

1. This isn’t about bleeding edge industries anymore. A 2009 business.com study⁽²⁾ showed Real Estate and Construction, Healthcare, Media and Entertainment as top contenders for social media.
2. Access to social and traditional web content is now equalized. Even if you believe that a majority of your customers don’t use social media, traditional web properties such as Google and LinkedIn index even the few conversations that might exist and make positive or negative opinions about our wares visible to everyone.
3. No, the social web isn’t just about Twitter and Facebook where you may argue that your prospects don’t really hang out. Amazon Reviews (Retail), Trip Advisor (Travel), FlyerTalk (Airlines), Yelp (Restaurants), AngiesList (Services) and literally a hundred other topical forums are all part of the social web or what Mike Fauscettecharacterized as “systems of relationships” that are dis-intermediating your controlled marketing every single day.

Five Design Considerations

So how do we prepare for this changing interaction dynamic? The needs of this new breed of customers centers on the following 5 design considerations:

I’ve broken down each of these Design Considerations on the Customer Edge Blog, here.

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This snippet by way of Stowe Boyd really struck a chord with me with respect to the difference between social networks and enterprise social networks. Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook got called out by Maureen Dowd in this New York TImes article:

“Sandberg may mean well, and she may be setting up a run for national office. But she doesn’t understand the difference between a social movement and a social network marketing campaign. Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching people”

I’m not going to debate Sandbergs motives in the context of Maureen’s article – not my bag. But as I spend my time thinking about product vs real established customer needs at work, this last statement about connecting vs reaching exposes the stark difference between consumer social networking and what happens in the world of work.

Enterprise social networking as we’ve known it thus far has had the exact opposite problem:  Just because digital technology makes reaching possible doesn’t mean you’re actually connecting.

Reaching people is accounted for. It’s called Email. In the world of work, connecting doesn’t come from just bringing people together. Really really connecting to impact performance and execution comes from surrounding real purpose and context such as a sales forecast data point, a problematic travel expense statement, a curve ball customer request, a need for supplier arbitration, with your network of people. You can reach people all day long but to get the network to truly galvanize around a problem, you need to infuse smart expertise identification and social or collaboration at the point where problems and opportunities emerge.

This is the expectation of “social”, in the enterprise.

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Facebook announced Graph Search yesterday. From Meghan Kelly at VentureBeat:

When you start typing your questions, Facebook will suggest search queries and clean up your question. You might ask, “Which of my friends like The White House?” and it will simplify and suggest “My friends who like The White House.”

The search could be most useful for situations like finding friends in a specific city you plan on visiting or finding people who like a band you’ve got an extra ticket to see. You can also use it to search for things “nearby.” If you’re looking for friends who live near your current location, you can look for “friends nearby.” If you need a hospital, you should call 911, but you could also search on Facebook, and it shows you the hospitals in your area  (while you’re bleeding out, of course).

There’s plenty of other analysis. See this by Danny Sullivan on how it works and just so you’re not getting too carried away, Om Malik does what he does best by digging into practical feasibility of getting this right  But lets assume that Facebook does pull it off for a min. In that case….

This is massive for Facebook and Google’s never seen any competition like this. Simply put, being able to choose people as filters to your search is extremely powerful.

That said, two things come to mind as I read this:

First, this is far from a Google killer.

Google still has a lot of runway to get this right. Ultimately we are talking about the war on owning Purchasing Intent. Facebook might have a stronger hold on consumer or B2C products (e.g. “I like this new Viking Stove”), but it’s far from perfect. Personally, I’m really suspect about any search algorithm that puts too much emphasis on “Like”. It has to be the most abused social metaphor of all time – first, we barely think twice before “liking” something. Second, given all the marketing gimmicks to get you to Like stuff, it’s hardly an objective filter. And third, even it they manage to get it right, the whole world of B2B just isn’t part of the conversation on Facebook in any meaningful way. Those conversations are still happening outside Facebook’s walled garden on branded communities. This game is far from over.

The real winner is vertical social networking.

Most significant in my mind though is that the real winner here is vertical social networking. Facebook just bifurcated search forever. They now propose to own the “Here’s what my friends think” segment. The other major segment is “What do the experts think?” And that data is neatly indexed on vertical and topical social networks. Think Yelp, think ChowHound, think WebMD, thin TripAdvisor and the biggest, Amazon Recommendations. The reality is that our friends can often be terrible references. If I’m looking for a great kitchen knife, I want advice from a chef or a seasoned cook. Not just my best pals. And that’s still the work of other topical sites. I use experts lightly but when it comes to serious purchases, you will want to rely as much on unknown strangers who are qualified on a subject as much as you will your friends. And those “unknown experts” passionately opine not on Facebook but on these vertical social networks. Their relevance just went up 100 fold.

As the social web confuses most of us on where to find what and the sources increase by the day, Facebook just added an intense level of clarity by letting you toggle between people you know and people you trust on a topic. And this level of clarity is THE single most risky thing to happen to established web search. Feeding on the ambiguity of sources is what search engines thrive on. If Facebook gets this right, this ambiguity has now been seriously eroded and between what our friends think and what the experts say, we might just have all the information we need to make the purchase.

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