Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the awesome Net:Work Conference by the GigaOM Network in San Francisco last week. Net:Work offered a wide spectrum of important topics that together projects what the future of work will look like: collaboration in context, remote work, mobility and cloud. And its impact both on the SMB market as well as large enterprises.

Simon Mackie has a great wrap up post on the big takeaways from the event.

This power packed one day event brought together great speakers including Marc Benioff from salesforce.com, Evan Kaplan of iPass, Rebecca Jacoby of Cisco, John Hagel and John Seely Brown of Deloitte, Zach Nelson of Netsuite and a few others listed below.

For my part, I sat down with David Coleman of Collaborative Strategies and JP Finnell of Mobility Partners for a ‘fire side’ chat to Analyze the State of Collaboration:

In this fireside chat we talk to two analysts focusing on the world of collaboration and ask questions such as: Where is the industry is heading next? Who will be the next big players? What will cause the next seismic shifts? Where should the Enterprise customer be investing their dollars? Join us as we start the day’s program by getting some insider insights into the state of collaboration in the enterprise.

In this ~17 minute video we talked about how collaboration needs to be framed, some context on where we came from in terms of collaborative approaches, the issue of millennials, and why today’s state of innovation offers phenomenal opportunities to the world of work.

Stacey Higginbotham has an overview post about this opening session on and you can see and read about all the other phenomenal content at the show. For deeper research, my pals at GigaOMPro – the research arm of GigaOM led by Michael Wolf just released a paper on this topic (subscription required) authored by JP Finnell.

Some of my favorite sessions:

• The State of the Human Cloud: As we continue to federate unit tasks of works to remote and sometimes contingent workers  – this will have a significant impact on how we plan and execute our enterprise collaboration initiates and what we expect from our enterprise 2.0 and social business technology platforms. Were seeing lots of this in our work with customers already so I was thrilled to see this covered.
• Information Overload: Mathew Ingram speaks with Dave Hersh (Jive Software) and Bradley Horowitz (Google) about how activity streams  and other social gestures are adding to information overload in the organizations. Again a great topic. As I see it, as more organizations start to understand how to accelerate performance from their enterprise social software enabled programs, we will start moving to right time consumption designs to rescue employees, partners and customers from the real time fire hose.
• Design Principles for Maximizing Value from Collaborative Technology: Most first iterations around social technology were emulations of popular consumer metaphors out there, be it Wikis, Facebook, Friendfeed or Twitter. Good to hear how technologists are looking at applying unique business driven design principles that re-frame the plumbing behind organizational interaction. Stowe Boyd sat down with Tom Kelly of Moxie Software and Doug Solomon of IDEO to discuss this.
• Innovating Employee Engagement and Productivity: Nothing like listening to a customer talk about a personal experience on how collaborative and social concepts are helping the organization drive performance. Humana’s Jeff Ross and Tim Young of Socialcast speak with Stowe Boyd on the trials and tribulations of making collaboration work and seeding this  new mode into the enterprise fabric.

All the videos for these sessions can be found here.

Many thanks to the GigaOM and GigaOM PRO team for having me.

At its’ annual Dreamforce conference, Salesforce.com announced a version of Chatter, its collaboration application as a free utility. There’s lots of opining on Twitter and the blogs about how enterprise 2.0 start ups are going to be in serious trouble as Chatter steam rolls into their markets. There’s no question that Chatter is going to have a ridiculously big impact and they have a killer go to market strategy. But before we start writing obituary notes forcollaboration startups, lets really understand the world outside of Salesforce.coms existing customer base, the nascent state of social technology innovation today and the fact that – gasp – CIOs might just have a range of opinions on what’s optimal for their organizations. 

I’ll do a separate wrap up post on Dreamforce but here’s some thoughts on this peculiar particular discussion….

Chatter Sales Model

For starters, Free Chatter is for organizations that have salesforce.com accounts and from a go to market perspective, I’d take a somewhat similar route if I ran the business. The existing Salesforce.com account holders offer a very qualified pool of prospects for Chatter given its native out of the box integration with other salesforce.com and app exchange modules. As important, straight up fremium models to everyone can quickly create a cesspool of unqualified leads that are really expensive to convert to paying customers and require a very different sales model from what salesforce.com is used to. Execute closer to where the puck is – that’s what anyone who is injected with Oracle serum Benioff does.  Simple.

That said, Salesforce has roughly 90,000 customers that include a ton of small businesses and large enterprises. That’s a drop in the bucket in terms of TAM (totally addressable market) leaving lots of room for other vendors that are either not salesforce.com customers today or those that have seeded enterprise social computing and collaborative initiatives in pockets, other than sales, support and marketing.

Empty Social Spaces In Functional Process

The center of gravity of the salesforce relationship is in sales, support and marketing for the most part and their current integration points for Chatter reflects this. Sure, Free Chatter can work for all employees but in terms of meaningful process execution across enterprise functions, Chatter is still very closely tied to the CRM object model (opportunities, leads, customer and the like). What about product, bug, SKU, supplier component and other objects that the rest of the organization cares about? Free Chatter integration not really an option here from what I heard. So there’s plenty of open spaces where collaboration needs to still come to the rescue.

I’ve been calling from process alignment for over a year now and with respect, cautioned against what I’ve called “rudderless social”. And a set of enterprise 2.0 vendors have swiftly moved towards a model where they embed collaboration and social into process context across ERP enabled processes, beyond CRM. Klint Finley and Alex Williams at ReadWriteWeb have done a good job following this advancement.

Gaping Technology Leadership Holes

The social software space has spent the last 3 years on the consumerization of IT, and emulating and re-thinking elements of Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia metaphors that are relevant to the enterprise context. There’s some value to this but its also a) distracting from the task of process improvement to impact operational and financial metrics, b) a fast path to commoditization, and c) been a catapult to entering price wars.

Chatter offers some very good process context this year with Cloud 2 but for the most part, winning via real IP creation still remains anyone’s game. Identity management is grasping for a overhaul, analytics have yet to embrace social data to facilitate decisions and finding the right people, conversations and process intelligence in real time at the right time is still no where near acceptable. Social done right can remove noise but social done wrong can horribly increase the volume of useless banter for individual usage scenarios. And so there’s plenty of room to define the future of work. In some ways start ups that are not anchored to the sea bed with the challenge of cannibalizing existing lines of revenue and can move more swiftly in these areas.

CIOs are from Mars AND Venus

One one hand, on the buy side, the needs of organizations outside of Hi-Tech silicon valley adopters are very very different and the need of a range of solutions will always have a place. I’ll cover this separately but on the the sell side, the lines are being re-drawn in the social software place as mature software organizations enter the field. And no, its not about the largely religious, sell-side messaging between Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business. Its got to do with how CIOs work social and collaboration into their enterprise stack and re-assess the different forces that brings these capabilities – Collaboration, UC, Content Management, Engagement, and ERP/CRM. Some will want to make the deep change in their collaborative fabric with the likes of Cisco Quad and Moxie Software. Others won’t want to ruffle too many features and will choose to go with simple, easy to procure engagement layering on top of collaborative stacks such as Microsoft SharePoint.  Chatter is closer to the latter but its certainly not the only game in town. The Yammers and Socialcasts make it just as easy to procure, are also in the cloud, and arguably with a Switzerland model – equally impactful to all business processes.

Closing thoughts….

As I leave Dreamforce and settle in at GigaOMs Net:Work conference (live feed here) right now, these and other opportunities start to become clear for the rest of the software market. And based on our work every day with some of the leading organizations in the world that are looking to use collaboration to improve employee, partner and customer performance, I’ll re-iterate what I’ve said before: Chatter is going to be big and in a year it’s made commendable in-roads already, masterfully leveraging its distribution reach. I loved some of the process thinking announced here at Dreamforce and how app exchange partners that I spoke with are leveraging Chatter to enrichen their process applications. And I’ve always thought coming at social computing from a sales, support and marketing angle is extremely palatable to certain types of orgs as its close to revenue and customer satisfaction.

This release re-enforces all these elements. But no, that doesn’t mean it botches all other options and current and future innovation opportunities that the market hasn’t seen and will come to expect in the years to come.

- Sameer | @sameerpatel

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Social Business

Image Design Credit: My sister, Zia.