Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

I’m privileged to be doing a keynote discussion with ZDNet columnist and Asuret CEO Michael Krigsman at a pre-conference event at ASUG / SAP SAPPHIRE event tomorrow (Sunday).  The larger topic is consumerization of IT and the move to the Cloud, but in many ways, the idea is to talk about the reset of the relationship between IT and the LoB as purchase patterns move towards the latter.

It’s a natural tendency for this to often be an antagonistic relationship But where this gets productive is when IT starts to understand the larger trends in changing expectations of prospects and customers and the LoB is often dealing with especially with the advent of the public social web. As you start to peel those layers away, one by one, you start to see how IT can not only support but lead on the task of supporting and serving today’s increasingly social, sometimes vocal but definitely informed prospect and customer.

We will probably ruffle some feathers but I think we’ll leave attendees with a few new ideas about how to play this out. I’ll update this post with details of the push back I receive and what the audience teaches me.

Oh, off topic but if you’re attending SAPPHIRE, come ask me about “Project Robus”.

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The carbon footprint of a beef burrito is 5 times that of a chicken burrito. That’s per Eugene Cordero, Professor at San Jose State University, and came my way via my pal, Frank Scavo, a few weeks ago.

You want to take massive causes or opportunities and humanize them down to a single unit of “Human Computational Threshold” (which I think should be a standard hi-tech marketing measure in this current climate of buzzword bingo, BTW), that’s how you do it.

You can keep going on about the impact of climate change and the virtues of sustainability, but nothing’s more effective than winnowing it down to a tiny digestible unit – a burrito in this case, to get you to understand what you can do about it as an individual.

Cloud has it – its called SaaS apps for the enterprise that touches users. Or simple elegant tools such as Dropbox and Expensify and Foodspotting that distill the essence of cloud computing down to 2-3 simple  but ridiculously useful capabilities. These apps humanize the cloud and get us to appreciate the value of this massive opportunity that otherwise would only appeal to CFOs lured by Opex benefit.

Social Business doesn’t. But I wrote a whole post about it.

You know who else needs its burrito? Big Data, that’s who.

The opportunity from Big Data (of which social data is a part) is gigantic. Even that doesn’t do it justice. But Big Data needs its unit of human computational threshold so it appeals to the billions that can benefit from it.

Me? I’m waiting for Big Data to become Tiny Insights. Tangible bites of intelligence that help me make better decisions and improve outcomes. Make no mistake: Tiny Insights doesn’t mean tiny value. Tiny insights inform massive decisions for business or important decisions for individuals.  Alert me when I walk into a restaurant that just got panned consistently across many social networks, or an employee I follow on my enterprise social network who might be able to help with my presentation for next week, or a real time reset of which component supplier is best suited  the minute my production requirements or S&OP assumptions change. There’s very little of this discussion and too much chest thumping.  We need to make billions of consumers, and end users of enterprise wares give a hoot.

Constellation Research Analyst Neil Raden made a similar, hilarious point on Twitter about the careless use of Big Data, saying: “I heard #Bigdata found Jimmy Hoffa”. That sums up the hubris.

Big Data provides the source to be processed. But until we start talking about tiny hidden insights delivered fast (in-memory), in context (apps), where I need it (device agnostic/mobility) with my social/enterprise network to help me parse it , and in a way that shields me from the enormity of the data size and complex behind the scenes computational effort, Big Data as its currently touted may well be one gigantic opportunity that progress left behind.

So to those of you on the Big Data wagon I say, órale vato. Find Big Data’s beef burrito.

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Speaking at a bunch of events this year. Here’s my calendar as it stands right now.

• Panel: El Dorado Ventures Portfolio CEO Summit, Cordevalle, CA. April 27th.
• Keynote: Social Business Summit, London. 31st May.
• Keynote and Closing FireSide Chat: WebCOM Montreal. 16th May.
• Social Business Forum, Milan: 4th June.
• Keynote: Defrag, Boulder. Nov 14-15.

And of course, I’ll be doing something at SAPPHIRE NOW / ASUG Annual Conference 2012.

There’s a few more in the works and I’ll update as they firm up.

So looking forward to charting how we put the business back in Social Business along with a number of industry colleagues at each of these events. It’s time.

Come say hi if you’re attending!

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A personal note.

I’ve accepted the role at SAP for Global Vice President, Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Solutions.

In the fall of 2011 I began to chart the next chapter of my career. I’ve had an amazing run over the last 10 years. Since 2002, well before the dawn of social networking, I’ve had the chance to lead teams that managed large scale transformation initiatives for some of the most well known organizations to blend process, intelligence and collaborative approaches and technology, to accelerate performance. As we saw the entry of new social and collaborative technologies in 2006 and the advent of the social customer, an opportunity arose to help articulate why connected enterprises matter, why it’s finally within reach and how to get the Business part right in Social Business. Along with my colleague, the super smart Oliver Marks, I got to help organizations execute on their business objectives under the Sovos brand.

Now it’s time for me to get in front of what I think the next incarnation of people-centric customer, partner and employee experiences will entail.

Many of you are familiar with my strand of social in the enterprise, as seen on this blog, client work and on stage at industry events. As I wrote last week, the first innings of social in the enterprise is over. Those organizations that are pre-disposed to experimentation have done so. And a good many have seen the light through the work of some amazing practitioners and leaders who have given social and collaborative constructs a shot. Yet at a majority of organizations, executives who generally invest in concepts and technology only when they easily see direct and obvious impact on performance objectives haven’t yet had their “aha” moment. And if they were tempted by the promise around social business, many are still looking for that bridge that practically takes them from a world designed around structured process to one that gets them to blend collaboration at every step of business tasks and processes and in a way that drives revenue and margin, lowers cost and mitigates risk.

Why SAP

My assessment of what it would take to execute this – specifically, aligning core business activity, data, process and exceptions with the right people and insights at the right places, quickly winnowed down the list of organizations that could most logically make this transition a reality for customers. With a pedigree in core business process, business intelligence and industry solutions, and a decisive go forward strategy that now includes real time processing, cloud and mobility, SAP’s product and solution portfolio is one of the few that affords the needed canvas to improve how we engage with customers and partners and how work really gets done internally. The right design will come from the proper infusion of collaborative constructs right where business context emerges for individual users at every customer – a) not just inside or along side but across applications that power complete each business activity, b) when and where real time business intelligence emerges, and finally, 3) at the right (device agnostic) points of consumption. Each of these contextual elements are core to SAP’s portfolio of offerings today – both directly and via its partners.

My work in this market over the years has given me a clear sense of what a product portfolio needs to offer to deliver what I describe above. And as important, the kind of program design follow-through to make sure customers can truly change how they connect employees with each other and to customers and partners. I’ve got a superb team that I’ve already started to get to know over the last few days. I’ll say more about our plans over the weeks and months to come.

Thank You

Over the last 6 months, I’ve made some big bets personally on what I think the future of social in the enterprise will really entail and I discussed this with a range of folks. Some helped validate my thinking on the overall software market at the early stages and others when it came time to pull to trigger. You know who you are. I can’t thank them enough for taking the time. I will post separately on this in the next few days.

Finally, I want to thank John Schweitzer, SVP, SAP, Sanjay Poonen, President, SAP and Chakib Boudhary, SAP’s Chief Strategy Officer. Each created a very open environment that allowed for both radical and practical thinking with respect to what can be, as we talked about my potential role and SAPs ambitions.

The enterprise software business is witnessing formulaic changes that will play out over the next decade and beyond. Today’s hot topics may well be SaaS, (big) data, social, mobile and whatever’s next. But fundamentally, it boils down to this: Employees, Partners and end Customers of software buyers are looking for a more meaningful, networked experience that positively impacts their 9-5 work day. Traditional measures of per seat and per user subscription will remain but what’s really underway in both the consumer and enterprise world is a race to power every hour of the end participant in a way that resembles how they want to work or play, yet ensuring meaningful outcomes. Looked at this way, you can easily see how traditional enterprise software caters to a fraction of the end users interaction needs between 9-5. The rest of that 9-5 time often involves substandard and fragmented engagement to meet stated goals. All of this means that the total addressable market for software is far larger that previously imagined and more importantly, those of us focused on purpose-driven systems of engagement will end up powering the majority of our customers, employees and partners time online.  It’s this coming change that really excites me to get to work.

The formal announcement from SAP is here.

News articles by Dennis Howlett, Paul Greenberg, Vijay Vijayasankar and Alan Lepofsky on the announcement.

On to the next chapter. I’m so, so stoked.

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P.S Going forward, the content here won’t change all that much. I actually plan to write even less about technology and more about what made this blog popular in the first place – how social and collaborative concepts can accelerate operational and financial performance.

P.P.S I’m a cook and white asparagus is a Walldorf specialty. -)

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The hubris around Social Business is scaling new heights these days, and yet in many ways the concept seems to be redlining to nowhere.  As an example, take a look at this thread on Google Plus by Francine Hardaway. 133 comments later, there’s little agreement on what all of this really is, who the experts are, what it entails and who the buyer is. Foundational elements of anything that you would characterize as a market. With marketers, PR leaders and collaboration specialists racing to lay claim to the movement from their own comfort zone / vantage point, I can only imagine executives getting very confused about what exactly all of this means to their business and if the needed upheaval is even warranted.

In the context of internal collaboration specifically, this report from Charlene Li at The Altimeter Group illustrates just how insufficient the progress has been for general purpose social business in the enterprise. And when you benchmark the technology category of social business software (that includes employee, customer and partner engagement) against say CRM, or BI or ERP, its even more striking how nascent the sector is compared to its predecessors. Yes, I get its about people before technology but tech spend is a good indicator of rubber-meets-the-road market uptake, when it’s all said and done.

I recommend you give the data a good look to see what’s working and what’s not. Some big takeaways for me:

1. We’re still miss firing on what should be big wins, if social business is all that:

The report shows that table-stakes benefits of “social” such as expertise finding and the like are not showing up as runaway successes. To be fair, there is realized benefit but given all the options in Fig 5, you would expect to see at least some categories get a “significant impact” rating, six years after Professor Andrew McAfee coined the term Enterprise 2.0 which laid the groundwork for new approaches to connect enterprises.

2. We’re still asking the wrong questions: Casting Social Business as everyones problem makes it no ones problem. There isn’t a single CEO I’ve spoken with (or that you can speak with – I bet you) who would argue that his/her organization should not be collaborative or should not be innovative. But that nebulous intention is really hard to crystalize and delegate without baselining established strategic goals as yardsticks of success when it comes to becoming collaborative or innovative. Promises made to Wall Street come in the form of revenue, earnings and predictability of forward success. Yet we’re still looking at things such as “Encourage Sharing”, “Enable Action”, “Knowledge Capture” and “Empowerment” as end value points via social business. The report does a good job of highlighting what the typical organization considers to be value drivers of “social business” but I think thats exactly the issue here.  If practitioners can’t draw connectors between strategic and tactical objectives and how social networks facilitate execution, end users and executives won’t get experience the needed aha moment.

3. No Context? No Collaboration: The thing that nags me the most about this is that we have an incomplete skill set involved in defining, evangelizing and executing what “social business” (or what ever term you use), entails. No question that we need solid practitioners and community managers to tie it all together and we have some amazing folks in the community without whom all of this would be a non starter. But context points that spark collaboration in the first place lie deep inside functional units – the folks that bring revenue in, ship products, serve customers, build components, close the books. The messaging and potential sources of value presented just won’t keep these people up at night. Those getting work done need to be involved in crafting the value proposition as much as we need “social experts” in the mix so we force the topic of context at the outset and then understand how people, data and process come together.

4. Tactical Measurement:

Altimeter Group Social Business Research

Look, there have been changes in the public social landscape and we need to change what we measure to some degree when it comesto catering to this new social, vocal customer. But beyond that, performance metrics are in place for managers and business units and we need to support those. Figure 6.1 presents a host of tactical metrics that managers are subsumed in that the business just doesn’t care about, in and of themselves. Each of these programatic health measures need to be casted as ways to meet metrics that have been promised to the market. “More and faster collaboration across the company, frequency of use, lowering reliance on email” are hardly things you’re going to hear at your annual shareholders meeting.

This blog is precicely about the value of connecting our emplotees, customers and partners. Obviously, I’m a believer. But lets call a spade a spade if we want to get this right.

I hope this report will serve as a wake up call to many. The first innings of social in the enterprise is over. Those organizations that like to experiment have done so. Beyond those, a small number of executives who innately believe that collaboration is absolutely critical to execution have put their weight behind these programs. Industry colleague Dion Hinchcliffe has been documenting examples of both kinds. But there’s massive untapped opportunity out there to revise the value proposition for those numbers-driven businesses who will want to understand how all of this enhances what they’ve invested in for the last decade. Until then, this massive bucket of executives will treat “social business” as another Mickey Mouse program until they see how it matters to revenue increase, cost reduction and risk mitigation.

On a related note, ZDNet’s Dion Hinchcliffe and Dennis Howlett are going to go to battle on this very topic of value realization tomorrow (Tuesday).

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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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