Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

Over a year ago I wrote about Why ECM is critical to your Enterprise 2.0 Execution Plan. I wrote then about the pitfalls of closed content management processes:

If you’re a large organization using enterprise content management systems (ECM), chances are that its powering images, documents and records management, and web content. These systems enforce roles, workflows, access control and versioning to enable the creation, management and dissemination of media assets.

What this means is that from the very beginning of a given business activity, a few people control the creation of information that employees, customers, partners and suppliers rely on to move your business forward. Like it or not, this puts the responsibility/power to influence business performance in the hands of a few, with little input from other unknown experts, or consumers of this data. You only find out how effective the content turned out to be once its consumed (and long after you can optimize).

I had also reached out to Billy Cripe, then a Director in Oracles Enterprise 2.0 group and now a VP at Fishbowl Solutions. We identified overarching inefficiencies in Content Management where social and collaborative concepts can help:

Now its 2011 and as we see more business challenges emerge, there’s more to be said about the inefficiency of excessively locking down the creation, management and dissemination of content. To summarize:

Context: “One man’s food is another man’s poison”. A central taxonomy can never account for varied and dynamic usage scenarios of each digital asset. Every asset has a different purpose for, say, a sales, marketing, product management and service professional. When you let content flow through social and collaborative metaphors, its amazing how each of us can fulfill our unique consumption use cases.

Data Association: Systems Integration to associate events and data from ERP/CRM/SCM systems to ECM content is extremely expensive and static. You get IT to make a customization and then go back to the end of the line when you need another one. As a result we have limited system scaling to meet evolving business requirements. In contrast, integrating people does bring scale and can serve as a far more effective glue between events that need action and content/documents/digital assets that can help you take an optimal course of action.

Enterprise Search: Know anyone working at a large company that loves their enterprise search functionality? Yeah, me neither. It’s time we give people a shot at recommending the right content and documents. For that we need a social layer that sits atop enterprise content management to offer contextual meta data.

The solution still remains the same: Infuse Content and Document Management with Social and Collaborative approaches to get the best minds to contribute, vet, validate and recommend digital assets in the context of varied business activities.

Microsoft SharePoint has seen a majority of the social platform integration effort, thus far. Oracle has its own content, portal and collaboration components systematically meshed together. And I have other examples in my previous post.

This morning Jive Software, Alfresco Software, and SolutionSet announced that they have collaborated to turn content, documents and digital assets into social objects. Jive offers the social components, Alfresco does the Content Management heavy lifting, and SolutionSet, (the most experienced social software SI you’ve likely never heard of) engineered the connecter that makes this happen. This integration enables bi-directional content creation, editing and management. Per Matt Tucker, CTO and founder of Jive:

“Alfresco provides a proven enterprise content management system. Jive taps into the Alfresco system to ‘socialize’ the content, facilitate collaboration, and make it available in the activity stream. Access and interaction with Alfresco content becomes seamless in Jive. This makes content management more searchable, ratable, likable, commentable, and most importantly, more social.”

I don’t generally cover software announcements on this blog but when I see an attempt to combine content, process and people in an effort to contextualize work (as opposed to social for social’s sake), I consider it a meaningful effort towards performance acceleration – something I do write a lot about.

The devil is in the details when it comes to making two systems talk to each other. But what’s neat is that this connector is not about just adding comments and ratings to documents. It proposes to enable broad collaboration when it comes to the creation, validation or approval of content and digital assets.

We see a growing need for this in our work: Talk to most executives at large organizations and they will quietly admit that content creation budgets have become a “black hole” over the last decade. What’s worse, it’s extremely challenging to find a way to get off the spending treadmill or know which efforts truly provide value. Such integration can now federate the creation and uses of content to reduce significant risk, give you crowd sourced insight into top performing assets, and promote new applicability for a very expensive line item in the operating budget of many many large organizations.

For more, see this post by Barb Mosher on CMS Wire and from Tim Ross, GM at SolutionSet Digital.

Kudos to all involved.

This morning I was reading some stuff from SAP StreamWork that provided a rundown of integration partners that its chosen to work with: Doodle, MindMeister, CS Odessa, Evernote, Altassian. And others such as Google Apps and Scribd.

I wonder if ~80% of the Fortune 500, SAPs customer base, will get these relationships.

I said to Todd Morrison at Tech Target a few weeks ago:

“I’ve always wondered why Streamworks is focused on seemingly lightweight offerings that most of its large enterprise customers don’t generally adopt,” said Sameer Patel, an analyst with The Sovos Group who follows social media applications.

Still, Patel credited SAP for its decision to incorporate Atlassian, which he said has “deep tentacles” inside many large software organizations. Activities like brainstorming and collaboration are important parts of decision making, he added.

Net net: Trying to be relevant / hip / cool, SAP is looking to get its mojo back in its old age.

Contrast this with what start up/ pure play social software vendors such as Jive, SocialText, NewsGator, Moxie, etc., often see:

As they get beyond the initial deployments that are general purpose in nature, their customers (and ours) are increasingly asking for a plethora of integration points for all sorts of data sources sitting inside mammoth ECM, ERP, BI and CRM systems. All in an effort to make social interaction, be that inside communities or on an activity stream, contextually richer.

Some social and collaboration vendors such as Socialcast, Qontext, SimplyBox (and others quietly in beta) are even creating engagement modules that sit right inside the system of record where critical processes are completed. Others provide the conversational glue between traditional call centers that deals with the external world and static employee intranets.

Net Net: The smaller guys are working on growing up.

I’m not criticizing either move. To be fair, SAP announced support for OpenSocial which re-affirms its commitment to nurturing the developer ecosystem and by all respected accounts, the (quite social) Sales On Demand product is the bees knees. In turn, the younger/startup software vendors have some work do to to blend process and social together – a fact that most will readily admit as they work very hard to make happen.

But I couldn’t help feel like we have one camp that’s having a mid life crisis and another that’s trying to muscle in on an adult conversation.

I found it entertaining. Life in the enterprise world would be a tad bit boring without either of these cases. That’s all there is to it : – )

Every organization has a nucleus. The single core competency around which the ecosystem revolves. Often tied to an organizations mission statement, this is the one area of the organization that everyone rallies around, that is the first line item in the ops review, and where the beefiest budgets exist. The spotlight shines here.

Some examples….

• Intel is known for engineering complex chips – its R&D and Supplier Management that keeps its ahead of its competitors
• At Bloomberg, every single employee is compensated on sales. Every sales reps progress to quota is openly published
• At Walmart, its cost cutting to improve operational efficiency and pass savings to customers
• Nike is all about R&D and Brand
• Zappos rules its market via insane customer service.
• Even Cisco, a networking gear manufacturer, believes that it’s the connections it makes that’s more powerful than the software and hardware that enables it.

You get my point.

Enterprise Social initiatives are a tough one because they often get forced fit to problems. The business and technology landscape for most functional areas are clear: Sales and Marketing look to the best thinking in CRM, Procurement looks to understand how to optimize with supply chain management solutions. Even e-commerce, the love child of broadband and the dot com boom landed in the hands of revenue generating functions.

Not the case when it comes to enterprise social and collaborative efforts. We often tend to think that HR or Employee Comms or IT needs to control this if we want the maximum number of users to be well…..social. Or because they have a birds eye view of the employee base.

Hardly a good business objective if you think about it. All you often get are more people who don’t know why they should leave their ERP, CRM, CMS, BI screens to come to the shiny new digital water cooler.

Yes, the more people on your enterprise social network, the better. That’s how you get the best minds who know the end customers needs (customers themselves, service agents, partners and sales and marketing) to talk to those who know all the ingredients that go into your products (employees, suppliers, logistics). And multiple constituencies need to be involved, kept abreast, asked for communication assist and of course active participation.

But those areas, whilst critical to success over time, may not represent where the energy of the organization lies during the 9-5 hustle.

No refuting the fact that the more people participating the better, and that you need a business roadmap and a platform that goes wide and can accommodate planned and unplanned network effects. And no doubt, IT, HR and Employee comms can be instrumental in the eventual execution. If done correctly, these programs will become utilities, ultimately.

But know whether that’s where you really need to start to build a healthy, purpose driven collaborative fabric. Avoid hype around nebulous end goals such as engagement and productivity and you’ll ensure that you don’t fall on the wrong side of this argument.

Instead, identify the set of activities (and surround your self with the people and expertise that know enough to enrichen the business activity) that are most central to keeping your competitors at bay and will make sure you’re thumping your chest during the next earnings call. And build from there.

Know your nucleus.