Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

This week brings yet another virtual conference on the latest and greatest in enterprise 2.0 and social business concepts and technology. And I’m thrilled to be speaking.

The team at TechWeb (United Business Media) have put together s solid agenda that centers on making the business objective at one end and lessons learned at the other. Here’s the agenda:

• High level Organizational Design by John Hagel (Co-author, The Power of Pull and Co-Chairman, Center for the Edge, Deloitte & Touche)
• Lessons learned on becoming a connected enterprise by Christian Finn (Director for Collaboration and Enterprise Social Computing, Microsoft)
• Why winning and keeping our Customers business will demand that we collaborate effectively (That’s my spot)
• Applying Social Media to core business and marketing objectives by Kimberly Edwards (Collaboration Program Manager, Open Text)
• Engaging employees through collaboration tools by Sara Roberts (President and CEO at Roberts Golden Consulting)
• And a case study by Meghan Scott (Senior Manager, Yum! Know-How & Innovation Center, Yum Brands)

For my slot, I’m going to talk about the customer case for collaborative enterprises. This is a theme and presentation I’m revisiting – something I’ve covered in Europe as well as behind closed doors a few times over the course of the last six months. I thought it would be a good time to do this in an open format at this event.

Some of the folks in the E2.0 community have seen me cover this topic so it wont be new to you but I hope it provides a refresher if you are in the midst of making the business case for your leadership at your organization. As important, the collaboration and social business space is on fire at the moment and my hope is that we can frame this for those on the side lines or others only now dipping their toes in the enterprise social computing waters. Were seeing a far more mature set of questions in our work as businesses are looking to solve tough performance challenges and assess their own market opportunity, as the economy gets back on the rails .

Here are themes I’ll cover:

• lay out changes in the global customers access to information
• how Google is flattening access to social vs. traditional web content
• how they expect marketing to get out of the way and become facilitators and brokers of expert information
• how  new customers in emerging markets expect  global competency but local relevancy when it comes to innovation
• why the revered Value Chain that we’ve been optimizing for over the last 2 decades has created walls that prevents fluid collaboration
• how Collaborative enterprises foster trusted relevant engagement mediums and bring more elastic and cost effective relationship models that can outlast individual transactions.

Look forward to seeing you and engaging with you at the event.

The event is on Wednesday the 16th of Feb and its free to attend. Here’s where you can register and find a link to the agenda.

Thanks to Ross Mayfield I stumbled on this HBR article on “How Social Networking Has Changed Business”. The central point is how work has changed thanks to social networking.

Fascinating view points. And, incomprehensible parallels between consumer social networks and enterprise social networks, no matter how you look at it. I suggest you read it in its entirely.

Its these kinds of posts that really get my goat. On one hand, it trivializes the effort required to really solve business problems and casts enterprise social networking as some one size fits all model that can magically address challenges and opportunities that matter most to executives. On the other hand, it does little justice to the promise of enterprise social computing by equating it with Twitter and Facebook usage scenarios when in fact were just starting to see pointed benefit in Customer, Partner and Employee performance.

Lets break it down…..

All thanks to Facebook

“During the year, social networking morphed from a personal communications tool for young people into a new vehicle that business leaders are using to transform communications with their employees and customers, as it shifts from one-way transmission of information to two-way interaction. That’s one reason Time magazine just named Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year.”

Um…no. I don’t think young Zuckerbergs bestowed adulation has any thing to do with how we communicate with employees.  Yes a lot of inspiration came from consumer social networks but that’s where the world of business takes a sharp right turn to fix gnarly performance problems. Interaction with customers, maybe. Though even there, the numbers are hardly proven.

On Authentic Executive Communications

“Leaders like IBM’s Sam Palmisano, PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, Carlson’s Marilyn Nelson, and Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria are all active social network users. Why? Because these social networks are a unique way of broadly communicating real-time messages to the audiences they want to reach. They can write a message anywhere, anytime, and share it with interested parties without any public relations meddling, speech writers, airplane travel, canned videos, or voicemail messages. Now their words are much more authentic and can be remarkably empowering.”

Yes, there’s far more authenticity but to drive messages through the appropriate channels, where’s the proof that there’s been a whole scale shift in PR, Lead Gen and Call Center budgets from traditional channels? Channel augmentation, sure, but not really in terms of displacement value. And that’s what matters. Also, “broadly communicating real time messages” is a kinder way to describe “broadcast” – something that’s existed forever. We just have more efficient mechanisms for broadcast in Twitter. Twitter itself admits that it’s not a social network.

On the evaporating need for Middle Managers

“The biggest threat presented by social networks is to middle managers, who may become obsolete when they are no longer needed to convey messages up and down the organization. The key to success in the social networking era is to empower the people who do the actual work — designing products, manufacturing them, creating marketing innovations, or selling services — to step up and lead without a hierarchy.”

Possibly, the most promising benefit of enterprise social networking is in fact for middle managers. Middle managers get to stay intimately involved with remote and matrixed teams, report more meaningful metrics to management based not on some stale performance report or estimate but based on live, in the flow progress as seen and facilitated by enterprise social networking. Middle managers get a clearer idea on employee performance by seeing work happen, instead of guessing who did what. I can go on and on with other benefits but you get my point.

And my absolute favorite on ‘Flattening Organizations’

This put me over the edge when I considered breaking for 15 minutes to write this up…

“Social networking is also flattening organizations by distributing access to information. Everyone is equal on the social network. No hierarchies need get involved.”

On which planet? Professor, this translates to what our customers in the business world call “rogue”. Social Networking in the enterprise when done right, actually gets more work done – by flattening access to both those up the food chain as well as the best experts in the trenches. But if “no hierarchies get involved”, it remains a mickey mouse effort that never becomes part of the arsenal of tools and utilities that help get serious work done. In the real world, the hierarchy will remain. Michael Dell remains CEO of Dell Inc. Its just that now he’s involved at every level where he chooses to participate.

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I’m just not sure which planet offers such a distorted view of the benefit of enterprise social computing. The article starts off with a claim that Social Networking is the most significant development of 2010 and rivals the revival of the auto industry. I wish the author had stuck to a more scientific view of the impact on consumer networking instead of carelessly jumping the electric fence into the office park.

<end of rant>

Vinnie Mirchandani, in his patented ‘what’s really happening’ style of analysis pens an insightful post on his impressions of Lotusphere 2011.

“Doug did not use the word “Grand Challenges”  but he might as well have because in IBM’s vision a “social business” rethinks traditional CRM, HRM, PLM, SCM – almost every area of business where in Doug’s view you can “optimize workforce efficiency”. Indeed, IBM in another session identified it as its “$100B social business marketplace” opportunity. It calls it the “fifth shift in business technology”  – from the Mainframe to Departmental computing to the PC to the Internet and now to Social Business.

If the vision was Grand, the event seemed too tactical for it. In the Monday keynote, the audience increasingly grew restless with the concepts, and wanted to see product demos. During a customer panel, someone from the audience tweeted.

“Wish the panelists were being asked how IBM/Lotus software was helping them, rather than vague #socbiz questions”

Elsewhere on the left coast, I stopped by IBMs 100 year celebratory event last night in San Francisco for an hour. I had a chance to spend time with Craig Stevenson – Global Portfolio Leader for Consumer Experience. In plain English, that means Craig runs the retail portfolio of products and services at IBM. We spent a good 20 minutes talking about his impressions of the retail business in general and how technology investment has been back loaded on supply chain and operational efficiency side. Specifically we exchanged views on a number of things: a) less emphasis to date on the consumer experience in the store and the tie in of that valuable data into traditional customer experience management, b) fluid point of sales (not at the counter but on the customers phone when they are in the store), and c) the power of real-time customer intelligence. Net net, the front office has really been ignored and there’s lots of untapped value there to tie in people interaction into stogy data crunching of yore, to come up with better customer experience optimization.

Contrast this with Vinnie’s points as well as the comments made by my dear friend Paul Greenberg who was at Lotusphere:

“But even if Lotus had been vibrant, the move to social CRM, HRM, SCM, PLM etc. will need substantially more extensions, new types of services and partnerships. Paul Greenberg, who knows a thing or two about SCRM, told me at lunch and later tweeted

“They are still weak in #scrm. Haven’t figured that out & though its right in front of them w/their entry points.”

Ditto for social HRM, PLM, SCM.

To be fair, in this post by Dennis Howlett, Paul Greenberg was impressed by a particular case study on “how the government of Trinidad spends about $10 per head with IBM to deliver government outreach services to all its citizens. He thinks this was the best social use case he had heard.”

I don’t mean to take away from the tons of value for existing information management customers of IBM. And to some, the layering in of Social Business as the new hipper incarnation of information management will be a welcome injection of energy and hope. The banter on Twitter and overall excitement from employees confirms this. Something that’s invaluable as the organization gets behind what they consider to be a $100B market.

But based on what were seeing in our work and other executive I engage with, the opportunity lost in my opinion was that those very folks at IBM who are dealing with gnarly business problems with customers in retail, in health care or financial services should have been framing the value proposition for IBMs social business focus. These folks don’t have the luxury of using a glossy to market a new way of work – they need to provide proof points along the way before they earn the currency to even suggest large scale transformation to the end customer that buys IBM products and services.

I realize that the event is called “Lotusphere” for a reason. Its about Lotus products. But lets get one thing straight: Looking at social business, the theme of this event, as a fix to knowledge management, collaboration, portals, document management alone will be a colossal undersell of the overall promise of enterprise social computing. The problems that need fixing lie at the points of revenue (sales), operational efficiency (margins), innovation (the offer) and of course, risk management (predictability). And that’s the framework needed to realize business potential from the promise of social business.

Vinnie ends with a strong assessment, not requiring me to come up with a punchy closer to this post:

“And therein lie IBM’s Grand Challenges. Talk to customers about impact on their industries and their processes. And don’t just talk “vision” – bring the solutions to facilitate their becoming Social Businesses. “

I’ve stuck to this particular point as opposed to trying to review an event that I did not attend. For more overarching accounts from folks that were on the ground, take a look at what Bill Ives and Alex Williams have to say.