Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

IBM has recently completed a study on the Social Workplace, based on conversations with over 700 Chief Human Resource Officers worldwide. The study is focused on the following:

• Cultivating creative leaders — who can more nimbly lead in complex,
  global environments
• Mobilizing for greater speed and flexibility — producing significantly greater
  capability to adjust underlying costs and faster ways to allocate talent
• Capitalizing on collective intelligence — through much more effective
  collaboration across increasingly global teams.

Heres a summary of what IBM researchers found:

We surveyed more than 700 Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) in 61 countries around the world, from companies large to small, and in both mature and growth markets. From in-depth conversations with hundreds of HR leaders, we found that numerous boundaries are restricting the ability of organizations to effectively match resources with opportunities. CHROs told us key gaps exist in the ability of their companies to develop future leaders, rapidly develop workforce skills and capabilities, and effectively collaborate and share knowledge.

IBM has been kind enough to ask me to join the Live Stream Panel to talk about the findings and comment based on what we are seeing in our customer work and experience.

The timing is great since I just spent 3 days in Monterrey with HR leaders from some of the largest organizations in the world discussing and debating what the five year outlook for HR and Collaboration looks like and how it supports burning talent acquisition and performance issues.

Here is some information on the event:

Panelists
Jennifer Okimoto, IBM Global Business Services, Strategy & Transformation, Organization & People
Dr. Jennifer Deal, research scientist, Center for Creative Leadership
Sameer Patel, partner, the Sovos Group, Enterprise 2.0, Organizational Leadership & Collaboration strategist

Video Cast: Here’s where you can chime in to the video cast tomorrow – http://bit.ly/vPanel2

Link to the Report: IBM | The 2010 IBM Global Chief Human Resource Officer Study

I stumbled upon this insightful blog post by SAP CIO Oliver Bussmann about how SAP realizes value from its own SAP HANA (High-Performance Analytic Appliance).

HANA is powered by in-memory computing – a way to store and process data in the main memory as opposed to disk storage . For a primer on In Memory, see this video of Hasso Plattner embedded in a post by ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett and this piece by CIO.com’s Chris Kanaracus.

Citing a use case, Oliver writes:

Here’s the problem many companies face today: global executive pipeline reports are at least a day old, making real-time decisions and tactical adjustments impossible. In-memory computing allows you to process huge amounts of real-time data in the main memory of a server to provide instantaneous results from analyses and transactions. By the time critical information or trends reach decision-makers, it could be too late. The benefits of in-memory computing are phenomenal – imagine being able to access real time operational information within seconds.

That’s a pretty amazing feat – surely to be appreciated by technologists who have lived through various generations of computing evolution as well as business struggling to make timely decisions.

But there’s a missing piece. I’m not belittling the value of in-memory in any way but Oliver’s post made me think hard about what’s needed for the benefits of  In-Memory processing to permeate business process in a scalable way. And my conclusion was this: unless the system is also going to magically make a decision or auto invoke an action (e.g. transact or place a stop order on a check) based on this real time insight , we have a universal bottleneck in that our decision makers who need to band together to use this data are woefully scattered (and worse, unknown) across most organizations today.

Of course, certain decisions are made by individuals and in those cases, there’s direct value from this technology. And if were recreating BI with these nifty advancements for the benefit of the executive brass all over again, that’s fine too. But the next wave of analytics needs to be pushed down into the hands of teams and line individuals to truly drive performance. And for that, we need a strategically designed collaborative fabric that can locate the right people to group together to leverage this real time data, facilitate the decision in an auditable fashion and update systems of record with better, more timely data, accordingly. Well designed collaborative plans will leverage dynamic rich identity profiles and and the appropriate collaboration metaphor (streams, project spaces, etc) to create that perfect compliment to real time data and intelligence access. Together, these two advancements comprehensively accelerate process performance.

Today’s often siloed ERP system-based designs stand in sharp contrast to a more people centric enterprise footprint that is needed to improve discrete non repeatable business output. In-Memory has tremendous promise and I loved the demos at SAP Sapphire. And I expect to see more at SAPTechEd next week. But I hope its’ wide scale adoption doesn’t stutter due to an acute case of technology innovation outpacing practical, scalable, real world applicability.

I remember how we used to admire Cisco’s ability to do a virtual close on its accounting books every day. That was a cool technology feat for its time. But it didn’t do much to help the company preemptively respond to the downward demand forecast thanks to the market crash of the dot com days or the recent recession. Analytics and Business Intelligence capabilities needs to leave the top floors and corner offices and become an active tool for all managers and workers in the enterprise. In-Memory brings that sophistication no doubt but collaboration federates the use of this amazingly accurate snapshot of progress-in-the- moment.

Next week, The Future of Talent Institute will be hosting its monthly webinar on talent performance. The good folks at the institute were kind enough to ask me to speak about why HR should care about Enterprise 2.0.

I’m going to keep it pretty high level – talk about where we’ve been as organizations over the last decade, the changing nature of tomorrows customer and of course, and why its imperative that we become 21st collaborative enterprises. Most important, how HR can play a pivotal role in leading this transition.

The Webinar is for HR leaders to get high level insights into the following:

• Understand the value of collaboration to responding to current opportunities as well as challenges of today’s business environment;

• Why HR is in pole position to lead the way;

• Provide an overview of the benefits of layering in new collaborative constructs and social software at large enterprises; and,

• Provide a framework for understanding how to look at potential technology offerings.

• Sharpen your questions and get a clearer perspective about what is ahead.

Sincere thanks to Susan Burns and Kevin Wheeler of the Institute for having me on.

About the Institute:

The Future of Talent Institute is a consortium of organizations and individuals who explore emerging issues in talent management, staffing, recruiting, employee development, retention and leadership development. Our members comprise a wide range of sizes, industries and locations.  We have members from Europe, Australia, and Asia as well as North America. We have Fortune 500 organizations and many that are start-ups or very small.

We focus on providing early insights into what is about to happen in the talent world. We look at employment and demographics trends as well as the differences between generations and changing workforce attitudes.  While it is not hard to find facts related to talent, it is much harder to make sense of them.  And that is what we specialize in – making sense and providing a context for the many perspectives that exist regarding the talent market.

Our surveys, white papers, webinars, on-line chat forums, and face-to-face meet-ups give you information and advice to help you chart a more successful talent strategy.

Event Details:

The event is  on Tuesday, October 5th at 2pm PST and is free to attend. Click here to Register.  More details on the event here.

Look forward to engaging with you on the call.