Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

Seriously. Nothing trumps practitioner speak. Mirror in hand, I feel like pundits, gurus, thought leaders, consultants can step aside this week.

Two spectacular posts that I’d like to draw your attention to that I consider must reads. Of course, if we engage on Twitter or Google+, or you follow the #e20 or #socbiz hash tags, you’ve seen these already. But I want to make sure that those subscribing to my blog via RSS, Email, and ways-I-don’t-know, don’t miss out on these two posts.

First, this post from Laurie Buczek titled “The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business” that provides an honest assessment on what works and what doesn’t. Laurie takes on must-have and must-have nots when executing social in the enterprise.

Must haves include workflow integration, customer integration into collaboration, ubiquitous access and the like. Must have-nots include dropping the email-is-going-away argument and many others. You simply won’t get such an honest brutal assessment on what works and what doesn’t. Laurie went all the way to ZDNet with this post. Laurie is @lauriegbuczek on Twitter if you would like to follow her.

Second, John Stepper takes on the fallacy of re purposing aspirational-only content widely available on the web and turning it into an executive pitch (my words, not his). Again, John also illustrates how his first stab was met with deer-in-headlights reaction. And how he got back in the ring to take another swing.

John describes how his firm started to show discrete value points and then used those to catapult benefit to other corners of the organizaiton. John is @johnstepper on Twitter if you would like to follow him.

I’m not going to elaborate any more. I can’t add anything of value that makes either of those posts better. Just go read them.

PwC (PriceWaterhouseCoopers just released its quarterly forecast that’s 68 pages of collaboration goodness. The report is edited and produced by Bo Barker, Vinod Baya and Alan Morrison.

The document covers three broad themes as summarized in the opening:

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The collaboration paradox: More social information helps the workforce find what it’s looking for. First we had communication silos inside organizations. Now with e-mail and the Web, we’re all dealing with communications chaos. Paradoxically, the metadata—the context around the communications which new social technologies are now surfacing—offers the secret to eliminating communications chaos, moving enterprises closer to fully shared knowledge. Analytics that take advantage of this metadata are the first step.

Enterprise success with emerging social technology: Innovators are learning to build graphs to help users find the information they need—and each other. One thing enterprise have learned is that siloed, standalone consumer Web-style microblogging or social networking tools rarely work well inside an enterprise. Social technology that’s embedded in the enterprise application environment to offer collaborative support to specific business processes, or explicitly targeted at unifying all communications and collaboration, can be much more useful.

The CIO’s role in social enterprise strategy: Transforming collaboration demands an evolutionary approach. Before trying to add to the mix, take stock of how your workforce is collaborating to begin with. What’s the appropriate rationale for adopting a new tool in this case? By formulating an adoption process with goal setting and incentives appropriate to the business, CIOs can help business units position themselves for the collaboration and filtering potential of emerging social networking platforms.

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If you’ve read this blog before, you can appreciate why this strand of all things enterprise social instantly appeals to me. Cut right over here to the report if you like.

Tom DeGarmo, Principal and Technology Partner at PwC sums up both the opportunity and problem well, using great analogies to living in Carmel-by-the-sea, saying:

The reality today is that we receive far more invitations to interact in the electronic domain than we ever did in the world of physical mail. Most of us already ignore many of them, leaving unread—and even unseen—vast  numbers of electronic communications directed at us. But our approaches are inefficient and inaccurate—we often miss important messages while deleting low-value ones. We’re like the poor express mail delivery people trying to figure out which house a package should go to in Carmel.

A number of in depth interviews were conducted as well, including:

• Education: Building a new learning environment - Tony O’Driscoll, Duke University.
• Adding Social Networking to Business flow – Tim Young, Ex-CEO of Socialcast, now VP at VMWare.
• Harnessing the power of the graph – Keith Griffen, Cisco Systems.
• Why collaboration hasn’t changed much, yet – Sheldon Laube, PwC.
• I was privileged to chat with the PwC team on the topic of How Identity and Context become Productivity Drivers, inhibitors to successful uptake and the forces of social software proliferation that I break out into four camps: Pure play, ERP, HR and UC.

Couple of my favorite pieces from the repot:

1. I recently wrote a post about “Why Exception Handling should be the rule.” So, I was especially happy to see this report have good commentary on the topic.

2. Vendor diagrams are always subjective and can sometimes be of limited value when we try to force such horizontal technology offering into seemingly easy to consume grids/quadrants/tidal waves,etc. Coming from the execution consulting side of the house, I’m partial to analysis that does no more that provide a simple capability run down. Proper technology shortlisting can only come from really understanding process redesign by balancing traditional and social ways of work. This report doesn’t attempt to do any more than what’s reasonably practical to illustrate without access to each buyers market, business and process realities.

3. Tim Young, VP at VMWare and most recently, CEO at Socialcast prior to the VMWare purchase provides meaningful insight about the benefit to executives:

From an executive level, I think many companies don’t understand what is going on all the way down to the individual contributor level, and it’s because there just haven’t been tools that allow them to do that, especially qualitative tools. You can do surveys and polls, but you don’t get the ability for consistent real-time feedback from everyone in the organization—and that feedback is necessary to harness the collective human capital of the organization.

4. I love how Bill Hopkins at EZI (Egon Zehnder International), a well known executive search firm, simplifies the problem:

Bill Hopkins, EZI’s director of operations, discerned a gap between the two main processes that needed to be filled with something less structured than a database, more structured than a huddle, and not as overwhelming as e-mail. And something over which users would take ownership. “I wanted to eliminate IT as the middleman so the content would be the responsibility of the user community,” Hopkins says.

Finally, a far cry from all things social business muddy-yet-shiny, the report addresses how CIOs can start to approach 21st century collaboration in a performance centric way from the get go and provides a helping hand as they move from the inspiration to the perspiration phase of execution:

All up, it’s extremely refreshing to see analysis from the lens of an established consulting firm that needs to appeal to the broadest, most skeptical and most prestigious set of end customers out there who don’t quickly get inebriated on hype.

And the timing couldn’t be better: At this time, every Fortune 2000 CXO has been pitched by at least three social software vendors or has sanctioned/unsanctioned initiatives well under way at their organizations. The report also doesn’t try to jam jargon-y stuff down the readers throat (social business, enterprise 2.0 etc.) nor does it attempt to backfill social use cases into the business environment (in other words, the solution looking for a problem syndrome).

I really think it’s going to offer a palatable, marketing-free approach to many seasoned leaders genuinely looking to understand the value proposition of collaboration, 2011 style.

Sincere thanks to PwC for reaching out to me for comment. A link to the report, here.

This is what we needs to be banished from enterprise software, forever. I’m not naive enough to think that some level of on boarding and systems training isn’t needed. But if out of the box technology can lead to “confusion, headaches and sluggish performance”, thats just not acceptable in 2011.

And this certainly isn’t just true of SAP and its OnDemand line has ease of use factored in. And as @smartsoftmarket pointed out, SAPExperts is not SAP. But thats not the point. Lack of usability is rampant in the industry. And really, SAP SDN and Asug- its amazing community and mentor program should be the solution to any potential ‘confusion and headache’.
One more data point to look for as we kick off the industry conference season in a few weeks.

Just a personal update to tell you that I’ve decided to relinquish my membership with Constellation Research Group, Inc.

Late last year, Oliver Marks and I became members of Constellation with the intention of complementing consulting on enterprise social and collaboration business, with wider research.

Given my focus on longer form planning and follow through work, and the growing need for ecosystem collaboration by organizations, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to successfully wear two hats and do justice to the analyst side of the house. And to be fair to Constellation, it’s best that Ray and the team find full time research analysts for this work.

I’ve met some really smart folks over at Constellation and I have huge respect for the individuals who make up the team. Ray’s pulling together a growing line up of new analysts and has an array of initiatives under way including The SuperNova Awards and new geographical market entries.

As far as this blog and my other extracurricular activities are concerned (event/conference speaking, etc.), nothing changes. Since 2009, I’ve blogged and spoken about the promise and impact of social and collaborative business based on what we see in the trenches at end customers, and innovation in enterprise software. That continues….

I have a few commitments that I’m wrapping up before I set sail but it’s been a lot of fun getting to know and hang out with the team. Ray and I depart as friends and we’ve agreed to look out for each other.

Update: Ray’s post, here.

If you have any questions about this or Constellation Research, drop me an email.

Device ubiquity across home and work is the new item on the CIO’s to do list.

Interesting stat in The Telegraph about how employees are more productive if they use their own gadgets:

According to a YouGov survey, businesses who let employees use their own technology see productivity increases of up to 30 per cent.

That makes it more important than ever that technology is as good for the home as it is for the office – with 45 per cent of businesses already allowing employees to use their own computer equipment, the number of reasons to put up with poor kit are diminishing. […] in 50 per cent of cases, a personal device offers greater functionality or flexibility than the one provided by the employer.

Single-purpose devices are looking a lot less attractive. In the consumer space:

• iPads for educational games are more practical than say a LeapFrog device.
• Tablets serve as dual purpose in-car entertainment consoles.
• Less proven but iPad Kindle app vs. the Kindle itself. Personally, I wont carry 2 devices and would ‘deal’ with the sub optimal experience for convenience sake.

It’s important to baseline todays consumer experience that we’ve all come to expect. Think Amazon’s mobile barcode scanner for a price check when you’re in a retail store. Or Evernote’s voice transcriber. Or using your iPhone as a tile rack when you play Scrabble on an iPad. Or Plants vs. Zombies, the tablet game my kid is hooked on to (damn you, thank you Josh Moore).  The Jetsons have in fact arrived.

On to the Enterprise….

Single purpose devices for work vs. play are starting to make less sense as well.  But for CIOs, deciding whether to relinquish control of devices has more to it than just ignoring Dell or Apple’s sales call.

Beyond governance (see Maribel Lopez’ post) and structural/economic issues (see Dennis Howlett’s post) with the enterprise mobile subset, we risk tripping over the following two cinderblocks:

Klunk

Consumer device proliferation has far exceeded the pace of enterprise software design for the most part and so, expect the opposite problem where its our software that can’t handle our hardware. Using our personal hardware is really going to expose how terrible our interfaces are in the enterprise. Just think about the devices you use in your personal lives and imagine double clicking on the iPad button to toggle between say Evernote and your kludgy ERP Expense Workflow. The contrast is blinding.   And because the presentation layer is still so deeply hard wired into the back end with limited OR nonexistent access to a presentation layer APIs (think Twitter.com vs. Seesmic or Hootsuite), I shudder to think of trying to maneuver most ERP financials or even a tangled SharePoint web part on a 2011 era device.

Getting Work Done

This is far more critical. Historically, enterprise software has focused on a) Executive benefit and b) Manager benefit. This translated to: Get the right input forms and workflows in place with a database at the backend so you can control execution and monitor progress.

But we’ve ignored a third wheel and that’s helping employees, customers and partners get-work-done, by focusing on their needs.

No doubt there’s newer, approachable technology being built these days, often powered by cloud computing. But we’re getting somewhat hypnotized by this elegantly designed enterprise software just because it looks and feels warmer than the klunkware we’ve been subjected to over the years.  And there’s a good chance were forgetting to consider whether the same degree of end user utility we’ve come to expect from our consumer software is in fact available in our work software.

As you look deeper, its pretty easy to spot enterprise software that has gone so far as to provide compelling interfaces but only far enough to get you to do more of what traditional software did – fill form based screens for executives and middle managers. Contrast that with those who truly re-think the business activity instead of, say, just force fitting a web app to a mobile browser. In many cases, the get-work-done factor for employee/customer/partner hasn’t really been addressed in a meaningful way. That comes from a) re-thinking the process or activity from the end users perspective, b) a more balanced approach to catering to the needs of managers, executives and end users and c) leveraging state of the art hardware and software design innovation to make it happen.

The business of collaboration and at a meta level, “the future of work”, often puts us squarely in the midst of these discussions as collaboration and systems of engagement are often seen as but one important way to deliver technology and working environments that account for the “get work done” factor for end users. But consider the broader innovation kitchen sink that impacts people centric software design: device capabilities, open APIs, app stores, in-memory processing, location awareness and browser technology advancements.  Get-work-done capabilities emanates from carefully combining these advancements for the benefit of the end user. In the enterprise context, that’s the employee, the customer and the partner. All in an effort to do more and with better accuracy and at faster throughput.

We often take it for granted but it is this culminated magic that we experience when we fire up our personal devices and use software designed for them. And that’s a high bar to keep front and center, as we start to use work software on our own devices.

A great example of get-work-done software is Expensify, an app that ties mobile photos of receipts to line items on your credit card statement to generate expense reports in minutes (H/T Jeff Nolan). Echosign for speedy contract execution is yet another. And DoubleDutch is coming at the mobile enterprise with a suite of get-work-done’ offerings. And on and on.

Whats important to note is that increasingly, customers expect get-work-done facilities not only from stand alone social software vendors or start ups. But because the benefit comes from so much more than just collaboration or ‘social’, customers expect to see it from their CRM and HR and even ERP vendors.

The technology vendor conference/summit season kicks off in a few weeks and around this time of the year, I have software on my mind. I’ve already had the chance to see how Oracle and many of the social software vendors are treating this. More such opportunities to come in the next few weeks, starting with Workday and Salesforce.com.  I’ll follow up on this post with what I’ve learnt in early September.

This third wheel in the enterprise software stack that delivers on the get-work-done promise is going to be the most compelling benefit that your organizations realize as you democratize the value of your technology investments beyond just the bean counters, LOB heads and line managers, and on to the do-ers.  Re-balancing the value of enterprise software amongst all three constituencies will not only improve uptake of your purchased technology (a chronic problem in many organizations ) but will also significantly improve accuracy of numbers reported upstream.  And so I’ll reluctantly extend my least favorite phrase in the world and call this a ‘win/win/win’ for all stakeholders concerned.

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