Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

I’m looking forward to participating in my second Social Business Forum in Milan next month.

Last year I keynoted on the topic of 21st Century Collaborative Enterprises: The Customer Case. This year I’ll be talking about The Connected Enterprise – the business case, and people, process and technology ramifications as we connect the best brains spread across our customers, employees and partner base. This theme is central to the work we do at Sovos.

This year, the event boasts the following themes:

• Employee Empowerment
• Customer Engagement
• Open Innovation

Topics include:

• Open organizational and leadership models
• Defining the business case and getting top management commitment
• Framing social media into the broader company strategy
• Nurturing adoption, cultural change and people engagement
• Defining ROIs, metrics and business drivers
• Frameworks to cultivate successful internal and external communities
• Policies, guidelines and governance approaches
• The why’s and how’s of socializing business processes
• Best practices and lessons learned to mitigate risks and overcome stumbling blocks
• Choosing and integrating best of breed social software and collaborative platforms

I’m joined by a number of very bright folks who have devoted a lot of brain cells to improving employee productivity, customer feedback, contact center, customer service and as important, how these experiences are blending. They include the ever inspiring Luis Suarez, Mark Tamis, Andrew Gilboy, Esteban Kolsky, Keith Swenson, Bertrand Duperrin, Mitch Lieberman, Patrick Brandt, amongst others.

Solid customer case studies as well from the likes of Dell, Giffgaff, WeBank, BASF, Fujitsu. The event is put on by the good folks at Open Knowledge, a leading Milan based Social Business Consultancy.

To get a feel for the kinds of topics being covered at the event, check out a series of blog interviews conducted by Alberto Beccaris with Keith Swenson, Mark Tamis, Stefano Vitta, myself and others. Luis also has a great post up on his blog, here.

Here’s where you can register. Look forward to seeing you at the event.

As I flew into Orlando for SAP Sapphire 2011, I revisited a bunch of review posts from last years Sapphire Event to see what was promised. In my post last year, I summarized SAP Sapphire 2010 themes:

• In-Memory / Hana
• Cloud and Devices
• “People – Centric”

To cut to the chase, Sapphire 2011 came back strong on 1) and 2) and has its work cut out on 3).

I’m going to quickly summarize developments on In-Memory / HANA and Mobility but point you to other posts on the topic for more detail. I’ll spend my time on the areas that promise to blend the best of people and process to improve business outcomes.

In-Memory

The keynote message was dominated by infrastructure progress to date. Speed was the single most important Co-CEO message at the event and as you would expect, Hana was all  the rage. I’m a sucker for business execution and the customer case studies were really good. Colgate-Palmolive, Lenovo, Medtronics and many more. One striking example was that of Infosys: The global services firm uses Hana to get real time updates on margins, down to the individual project level. If you stop to think about that for a second – across thousands of projects underway – to be able to get roll up data as well as identify precise trouble spots at a unit level in near real time so you can course correct. That’s pretty incredible. More on Hana from Mike Vizard at ITBusiness Edge.

Mobile

The acquisition of Sybase is coming to fruition and a number of apps were available for viewing on the show floor. There’s no question that SAP has extended its process tentacles to be available where ever the end user might be.  Frank Scavo has a post and a video, and ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett has a somewhat measured view on uptake and operational details.

Netweaver Gateway

By far, the most promising news that broke at the event, in my opinion. This piece of technology connects SAP back end applications to other apps and services at the edge. Think third party business applications, tiny and large mobile apps, Twitter, Linked and Facebook data, and more. Says customer Manish Choksi, CIO of Asian Paints:

"The pilot using SAP NetWeaver Gateway allows us to leverage the power of social media sites along with our SAP applications and create enhanced customer engagement, while deriving immediate business benefits. Insights from these social media interactions are captured through SAP NetWeaver Gateway in SAP Business Suite and are used by our product and marketing teams, providing them a true customer ‘pulsecheck.’

There’s plenty of applications for such technology, not the least of which is giving end users extensibility to marry apps and data they like at the edge with critical ERP process and data. I saw this Asian Paints demo in-person. Whilst I think those of us close to social data aggregation /sense making of said data would find the first deployment to be primitive (e.g. connecting the raw twitter fire hose to CRM and Call Center), it’s good to see SAP begin to go down this road. When it comes to customer and prospect data in particular, this move will also provide SAP with good customer feedback on the kinds of semantic and filtering technology it needs to procure/OEM/ build to really scale and meaningfully apply social ‘big’ data to improve process performance.

This technology is also the basis for Duet Enterprise – the connector that enables sharing and socializing of SAP data and workflow inside SharePoint 2010. More on Duet and the Microsoft partnership by Mary Jo Foley.

‘People Centricity’

This is where things fell off the rails for me. Last year, CEO Bill McDermott said the following:“This is an era of people empowerment”. In turn, Dr. Hasso Plattner had a huge slide behind him on the podium labeled “The real Enterprise 2.0”.

But a year later, the effort to leverage social and collaborative constructs to augment transactive and workflow process with Hana providing the jet fuel, was tepid at best. To me, these three elements, combined with new extensibility offered by Netweaver Gateway is an honking opportunity for SAP to redefine how work gets done in the year 2011. Whilst I get that for many customers speed of transaction is sufficient, I was a little disappointed that the focus was solely on using Hana to do what SAP currently does, just faster. Back to the drawing board business activity redesign that blends the best of process, data and people was missing and could go a long way towards filling in those white spaces in ERP enabled process where end users scramble every day to find reliable experts, content and answers to get the job done.

Talking about back to the drawing board, Sales OnDemand  is an exception and was, far and away, the best example of innovative task facilitation thinking at SAP. It shows that the company has the guts to re-think a foundational enterprise application, strip out bloat, and understand where collaboration accelerates business process (more on this topic in this older post). That’s what Sales On Demand does and here’s Paul Greenberg and Jon Reed on the topic.

However, to truly leverage the best brains to get the job done, business networking and collaboration can’t work in a silo (in this case sales) and shut others out. It needs to be cognizant of people who otherwise were considered outside the traditional loop, to truly get the best insight. And so, a sequential roll out of social capabilities ERP application by ERP application can complicate participatory patterns at execution time and seriously discount the value of a connected enterprise. SAP’s efforts to get ‘people centric’ needs to happen across traditional functional areas, in tandem.

Next up was SAP StreamWork which is yet to find its footing as a social software system of record, in spite of SAPs envious rolodex of incumbent customer. I’ve spoken to SIs implementing StreamWork and on a case by case basis there certainly is value, but from a go to market stand point, repeatability of use cases across SAP customers needs work. The good news is that SAP announced the availability of StreamWork across SAP business apps (Kathleen Lau has more, here) and to me that’s promising. With Jack Miller just recently taking over the reigns at StreamWork and along with Holly Simmons, we can expect some fresh thinking on how this product will stick its neck out in the very crowded social software market. 

So stuffs happening on the people centric apps side of the house, albeit slowly and in pockets. But given the rapid pace of innovation in this area, SAP really needs to step on it and in a cohesive manner if it wants to be a contender for purpose driven collaboration. Chatter + Radian6 + Salesforce CRM and Service Cloud, Socialcast Reach, Yammer + NetSuite and others, Jive Apps Market,  Saba People Systems and even early whiffs of social and unified collaboration across Oracle Fusion Apps clearly shows a trend towards social and collaboration, coming to a process near you. At Sovos, we’re working with a number of clients who are increasingly executing their social and collaborative strategy in harmony with process, and some of the combinations allow customers to concentrate on strategy and execution when the software plays nice. Once implemented, collaborative systems that power a vibrant maze of relationships and conversations are extremely difficult to rip and replace (imagine trying to even re-build your LinkedIn or Facebook network on a new platform). So if they want to play, SAP really needs to get in on the land grab, pronto.

Closing thoughts on Sapphire Now 2011

Net net, SAP customers looking to do ERP faster, and where ever they want, be that in the cloud or on a tablet, will like a lot of what they saw at the event. Those customers looking for fresh ideas to improve employee/ partner/ customer activity and engagement, will want more.

The event itself was near flawless from an organizational stand point and thanks to the Global Communications Team, the influencer / blogger cadre continued to get direct feedback from the right folks – be those partners, customers or SAP leadership. SAPs social media relations team, led my Mike Prosceno and ably executed by Stacey Fish, Andrea Kaufmann and Craig Mehil, and Amisha Gandhi is, without question, the gold standard in the tech industry. They make it look easy which it certainly is not.

I’ll leave you with a killer video of Hana + Microsoft Kinnect (xBox 360) that captivated the gadget lover in me. We truly live in amazing times…  – )

(Hana image, courtesy Tom Raftery; Sales On Demand image, courtesy Jon Reed)

A panel I sat on at the GigaOM Mobile Enterprise Summit a few weeks ago got me thinking a lot about how mobility is taking shape in the enterprise.

There’s little argument that Mobile is going to have a profound impact on how we work. Here’s my colleague Maribel Lopez, one of the sharpest minds on Enterprise Mobility, sizing up the opportunity:

Mobility represents one of the most fundamental changes in technology over the past two decades. Mobility will change business in three ways: 1) what we connect 2) How we connect and 3) how we interact with data and services. What we connect moves beyond smartphones to billions of devices including tablets, cars, equipment and sensors.  How we connect discusses the changes in operating systems and the move to the web. How we transact business also changes as mobile allows us to move to anytime, anyplace operation. It requires a company to rethink its computing and business process strategy.

She’s right. But as many of us partake in the great mobile enterprise land grab, a noticeable rift is emerging between process and data, and people connectivity where round one of mobile enablement strikingly resembles yesterday’s disconnected workplace. Todays enterprise mobile enablement strategy has three exciting but parallel streams:

• Mobile versions of our social and collaborative programs for the office worker.
• Mobile interfaces to systems of record (BI, CRM, ERP, SCM ECM, etc.).
• Remote worker-to-machine mobile solutions for those not traditionally at a desk.

On the collaboration front, the first wave of leveraging Mobile for collaboration and enterprise social networking has focused on emulating desktop functionality on a mobile device. And for good reason. Organizations are yearning for a mobile-ready experience of their internal and external social and collaboration efforts to fire up employee, customer and partner connectivity.  We see numerous instances of execution plans mandating something to the effect of “we need to mirror everything desktop web browser feature and capability on our mobile phones and tablets”.

Over on the data enablement end, two things are happening. First, real time access thanks to in-memory advancements (try this post for size), a new focus on attractive user interface design and cloud-enabled flexibility are leading to device agnostic ‘mobili-fication’ of ERP, CRM, CMS and BI, again to better arm desktop workers where ever they might be. Second, there’s (finally) been a recent surge in capabilities showing up for non desktop workforces today that leverage data and location in creative ways. For instance, Roto Rooter employees in the field use location aware apps on their phone that automatically time stamps the service and application POS capabilities to close out transactions. PRN Medical Services, uses bar code scanning apps on a mobile app to manage inventory management for home based health care equipment.

In totality, we’ve got some amazing capabilities that can significantly improve performance. Enterprise mobile social and collaboration gets us access to the best insight even when our rock stars are not tethered to their desks (dirty looks from our spouses, notwithstanding). On the other hand, as remote workers, as illustrated above get productivity bursts when location based data can now tango with back end systems, thereby removing time consuming and error prone manual input. Awesome.

But here’s the ‘but’. Once again remote workers who presumably know most about customer needs and our products are connected back to people and systems on a different radio frequency, leaving them out of our social and collaborative efforts for the most part. Why do we need them in the same connectivity loop? Some illustrations:

• The assembly line employee (or contractor) or component supplier knows more about the components that make up your product.
• The physician standing over you on an operating table wants to tap into private doctor networks about an ongoing procedure.
• Even customers who walk into your retail store armed with location-aware mobile apps can express preferences and trends by their gestures. Todays marketing campaigns only get them to the parking lot.

These are a but a few examples of where critical questions and answers lie a) at remote locations, b) between remote peers and c) experts back at HQ, partners or suppliers. Todays Enterprise Mobile business and technology strategy just doesn’t take this into consideration in any holistic way.

I asked noted ERP specialist Vijay Vijayasankar, an Associate Partner at IBM and good man all around on how these worlds might come together:

Remote workers are an often ignored part of enterprise collaboration story. Remote workers are usually the only face of the company that customers and partners see. They often have to be a sales person, marketing person, pricing expert etc., all turned into one. If these folks don’t get a chance to collaborate bi-directionally with rest of enterprise; more often than not – they will improvise in ways that don’t align with rest of the company. The cost to fix that might be higher than cost to prevent it.
If remote workers can collaborate freely, useful information on new trends in product demand, changes in customer buying behavior, etc can be identified a lot sooner, and acted up on.

The various technology options today shows tremendous promise to truly connect the enterprise, as presented by Maribel and Vijay. As you size up the prize and consider the plethora of mobile tools and applications that can help you get to the finish line, step back and think through the right combinations of process, people and data to leverage the collective brain in a way that can drive process / operating / financial performance. Make sure your strategy can leverage these trends in the right combinations, and that your application vendors have ready hooks and needed extensibility to help execute a more cohesive strategy. The good news is, relatively speaking, technology today is getting ever more cost effective and platforms offer simpler connectivity between each other. And Enterprise social and collaboration platforms are increasingly becoming layers that permeate systems of record that those very remote and desktop workers can use in context, if executed correctly.

The promise that is mobile is not just about mobile enabling existing unconnected parts of our organization or creating a tablet view of data and people. That’s how we did it decades ago (well before my time, I might add) when we went from paper to green screens. It’s about mobilizing the skills across your entire ecosystem of customers, partners and employees, in concert.

If you know of situations where this is starting to happen or have a view on what needs to be done to make it a reality, chime in.

Last month, I had the privilege of joining Mike Wolf and JP Finnell on the opening panel at the Mobile Enterprise Summit hosted by GigaOM and Appconomy. 

Mike Wolf is the super smart VP of Research at GigaOM Pro, who by the way so totally needs to sit on the interviewee side of panels more often. Also with us was JP Finnell of Mobility Partners, one of the deepest thinkers on mobility and devices as it relates to the enterprise.

We talked about topics ranging from the state of collaboration and mobile today, to device proliferation and where entrepreneurs should be looking for the next big thing.

Later this week I have a post coming that expands on this topic.

For now, here’s the video of the session, below. The Appconomy website has more details on the panel here.