Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

The carbon footprint of a beef burrito is 5 times that of a chicken burrito. That’s per Eugene Cordero, Professor at San Jose State University, and came my way via my pal, Frank Scavo, a few weeks ago.

You want to take massive causes or opportunities and humanize them down to a single unit of “Human Computational Threshold” (which I think should be a standard hi-tech marketing measure in this current climate of buzzword bingo, BTW), that’s how you do it.

You can keep going on about the impact of climate change and the virtues of sustainability, but nothing’s more effective than winnowing it down to a tiny digestible unit – a burrito in this case, to get you to understand what you can do about it as an individual.

Cloud has it – its called SaaS apps for the enterprise that touches users. Or simple elegant tools such as Dropbox and Expensify and Foodspotting that distill the essence of cloud computing down to 2-3 simple  but ridiculously useful capabilities. These apps humanize the cloud and get us to appreciate the value of this massive opportunity that otherwise would only appeal to CFOs lured by Opex benefit.

Social Business doesn’t. But I wrote a whole post about it.

You know who else needs its burrito? Big Data, that’s who.

The opportunity from Big Data (of which social data is a part) is gigantic. Even that doesn’t do it justice. But Big Data needs its unit of human computational threshold so it appeals to the billions that can benefit from it.

Me? I’m waiting for Big Data to become Tiny Insights. Tangible bites of intelligence that help me make better decisions and improve outcomes. Make no mistake: Tiny Insights doesn’t mean tiny value. Tiny insights inform massive decisions for business or important decisions for individuals.  Alert me when I walk into a restaurant that just got panned consistently across many social networks, or an employee I follow on my enterprise social network who might be able to help with my presentation for next week, or a real time reset of which component supplier is best suited  the minute my production requirements or S&OP assumptions change. There’s very little of this discussion and too much chest thumping.  We need to make billions of consumers, and end users of enterprise wares give a hoot.

Constellation Research Analyst Neil Raden made a similar, hilarious point on Twitter about the careless use of Big Data, saying: “I heard #Bigdata found Jimmy Hoffa”. That sums up the hubris.

Big Data provides the source to be processed. But until we start talking about tiny hidden insights delivered fast (in-memory), in context (apps), where I need it (device agnostic/mobility) with my social/enterprise network to help me parse it , and in a way that shields me from the enormity of the data size and complex behind the scenes computational effort, Big Data as its currently touted may well be one gigantic opportunity that progress left behind.

So to those of you on the Big Data wagon I say, órale vato. Find Big Data’s beef burrito.

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To me, this is more about strengthening SFs ownership of the professional social graph first and foremost. Radian6 gave Salesforce.com more intelligence into the prospect and customer social graph and the ability to infuse said insight into their front line apps such as Sales and Service Cloud. This purchase, along with Chatter and Chatterlytics strengthens SFs control over exactly who is good at what inside the organization and allows them to federate this information into SF apps today and into AppExchange apps in the near future. That moves this intelligence data set to the front office and right at the point of employee decision making, as opposed to just HCM insight for HR professionals.

TechCrunch quotes a warning of sorts by Venture Capitalist Josh Kopelman who basically says 2012 will be more like a correcting 2008, as opposed to a euphoric 2011. Lots of good for and against arguments on the VC investing front by the likes of Dave McClure and others in the comments on TC.

Regardless of who is right, I’m optimistic on the enterprise front.

In 2003, in the midst of the dot bust, I founded a consulting firm that had a singular value proposition. Work with CIOs and LOB leaders at large organizations to help them with a specific strand of operational efficiency. The idea was to capitalize on two realities:

1) Whilst budgets were nose diving, the long list of performance objectives that kept executives up at night showed no signed of dissipating.

2) The blank checks during the preceding dot com boom days meant lots of purchased technology was now sporting cobwebs on CDs in a drawer under a sys admins desk or in data centers.

So we set out to do two things: 1) Bring in the right business and technology strategy muscle that could help sales and marketing, HR leaders and CIOs understand how to do more with less and 2) once operational efficiency and performance objects were set, scour the basements and attics for procured technology that could best facilitate realizing critical revenue and optimizing objectives.

Customers got to do more with less and without antagonizing the CAPEX Gestapo, in exchange for a reasonable services spend. And our lean structure consisting of very available strategists, marketeers, designers and technology architects meant we made out like bandits.

But it was much harder then. Systems didn’t talk to each other easily, data came from a plethora of external and internal systems and immature offshore development was the only way to afford execution skills. You had to prioritize what you could afford and given the cost and difficulty you could only take on a few things. And by the time portals, customer support and channel extranets went live, the requirements changed. But you did the best with what you had. And smart customer executives always find a way to ‘make it happen’ come hell or high water.

If 2012 looks more like 2008 for executives looking for opportunities to get operationally efficient, I’m even more optimistic than I was in 2003. I’ll cover this in my year end post in detail but a couple of quick reasons why:

• The plethora of cloud based systems means you don’t have to make incumbent technology do unnatural things. Chances are very good that there’s a OpEx-enabled technology solution that’s designed to solve precisely the problem you have. Every single system of record has either a cloud based forklift solution available, or a powerful add-on that helps you to keep the ball moving forward at a palatable cost. Even on-premise purveyors such as Oracle and SAP are going to offer cloud based off-shoots.
• APIs for most systems were dismal back then. More systems are built with integration in mind from the get go than ever before. And the likes of SolutionSet or Appirio would be happy to integrate your gnarly on premise File Management system with say Jive or Tibbr or Chatter in the cloud.
• Sources of competitive, customer and market intelligence is much less intermediated, now. Back then, we had to go to brokers (HarteHanks, Factiva, etc) to get lead, customer, competitive insight. Today that data sits at the edge, either available directly via the firehouse from say Yelp or Twitter, crowd sourced from a band of enthusiastic customers by say Spigit, aggregated and process-ized by GetSatisfaction or Assistly, or crunched by the likes of InsideView, The Dachis Group Social Business Index Service or Radian6 (based on the use case).

There’s many many more but you get the idea.  Fundamentally, this adds up to radically more approachable access to both sources of insight and the platforms that enable them.

It’s also important to note that the stakes are higher this time. In the 2003 post-crash world, relatively speaking, we were still serving the same pre-crash customer persona. Sure, we saw the likes of Amazon eat into brick and mortar commerce. But not at the scale that were witnessing at this time. Whether 2012 looks like 2008 or 2011, this market has some unique characteristics that demand that organizations can’t sit it out when it comes to specific trends that will impact who wins and who loses in the next few decades. Broadly speaking:

1. The customer contract has changed, forever. A prospect or customer’s expectations of how we engage and service her is now wildly different thanks to the social web. This requires a change in not just how we work at the edges (sales, marketing, support) but also depends on how nimble we are as organizations to rally employees, partners and suppliers around the prospects cause at hand.

2. I still remember the CEO of one of the largest spirits distributors sitting across the table and literally shaking at the idea this his business could get easily “Amazoned”. If Amazon was a threat to Barnes and Noble in 2000, imagine what the world looks like when I can walk into a BestBuy, scan a bar code on a SKU, have Amazon send me the best price online and proceed towards the exit. That’s a frightfully more radical scenario in any economy, good or bad. Service starts to become much more important if price arbitrage starts to become a thing of the past. Coined by Get Satisfaction, “Customer Service is the new Marketing” starts to become more of a striking reality.

3. Building on the Amazon / Best Buy example, a location aware mobile-first interaction with your business means that the lines are blurred between brick and mortar and digital for the foreseeable future. Fry’s Electronics here in Palo Alto gave me a discount when I showed them a lower price at Amazon on my mobile device. If the market is going to take a step back, you need to understand these dynamics so you can widen your customer footprint as much as you can. That means both find prospects wherever they are hiding but also have access to your best talent at all times to service this more demanding potential buyer.

This might sound like FUD but it’s not. Its an opportunity to understand and then react to a changing market. Same thing you’ve done as executives in down turns and customer shifts in the past. But more practical to do this time and in a way that won’t make your CFO reach for the antacid.

All of this makes me optimistic for the near term future of our industry. On one hand, it’s going to be more important to keep moving the ball foreword in 2012. But the mechanisms to do that thanks to easier interoperability, comprehensive availability of cloud based application services that looks like the longest Chinese restaurant menu you’ve ever seen, and finally, unfiltered visibility into what a prospect and customer expects from us has never been clearer. This results in a much more efficient approach to deciding where to spend dollars that really really matter. Note, I didn’t say easy. I’m saying necessary yet, much easier.

That to me is optimism not only to keep the lights on in a presumably tough 2012 but also to set the foundation for what competing means way beyond the living embers from this coming forest fire.

Lets cut to the chase: The business intelligence we rely on as enterprises to perform better can suck at times. I remember a famous dot com era business systems accomplishment that was touted up and down silicon valley. I paraphrase but it went something like this: “Cisco has the ability to do a virtual close on its books every night. That’s real time IT enabled management”. Well, fat lot of good that did with respect to anticipating the coming economic nosedive and preparing accordingly. Just like everyone else, Cisco stock fell from a high of about $80/share to under 20 bucks. This isn’t a ding against Cisco. Many organizations did the best they could to be operationally efficient with the tools and process thinking available at the time.

Our ability to track, forecast, measure, analyze and then tune or change course has been a wild west effort for a long time. For a number of primary reasons:

1. The intelligence we need is often in the wrong hands. By being top loaded primarily for the management ranks, we still faced the same down stream do-something-about-it execution risk.

2. Rolex watch style exclusivity for the chosen few that monitor as opposed to those that have the skill and responsibility to act and course-correct.

3. Almost zero ability to federate tough problems and let the best minds even get wind of the problem, let alone contribute to solving it.

4. And finally, business at the speed of PC access that just doesn’t cut it, especially today.

It’s as much a people and a design problem as it is a technology feat. But as I’ve said numerous times, it’s a hellava lot easier when the technology plays nice. Last week I had the opportunity to see some new enterprise performance management technology from TideMark that brings a fresh approach to an age old business problem: Really complex and expensive technology that produces reports and charts that few and sometimes the wrong people inside organizations read and react to.

Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz (investors in TideMark) characterizes the problem in a different way but it captures the essence of the fundamental change in how we need to look at the health of our businesses:

“Beyond these platform advantages, Tidemark changes the nature of data analytics by ditching the two fundamental and problematic questions on which the existing industry is based:

• What data do I have?
• What reports do I want?

The trouble with these questions is that a) it is highly unlikely that you’ve gathered all of the relevant data in the right schema and format prior to needing it, b) businesses are not best represented in reports and c) the reports generally say very little that’s interesting about the future. “

I dont cover software releases often here but this one is different. Why? Because it speaks to what you’ve read here since 2009: How performance acceleration comes from leveraging the best of structured data and insight on one had, and manipulation smarts of our employees, our customers and our partners. All in the context of a business problem or an opportunity.  TideMark strives to do just this. By leveraging the efficiency and agility of the cloud and contextual collaboration, and in harmony with more current data sets that include not just critical internal data in your business systems but also pubic and public social data, they want to give you a more holistic answer to critical business questions. Not after the fact but when there is time to course correct.

TideMark seems to come at the problem with very promising elements. See what Dennis Howlett has to say about the state of financial insight, and Larry Dignan‘s take on the intricacies of Enterprise Performance Management. I distill down the value that TideMark brings, to three big elements:

1. Analytics in the hands of those that can DO something about the insight.

TideMark is designed as much for mahogany row as it is for those on the line managing critical execution and decision-making tasks. A huge distinction as compared to traditional reporting and metrics data which is limited to more senior people. Ultimately, its the store manager at Starbucks, the Factory Planner in the warehouse, and the UPS driver that can tell you how likely you are to meeting business objectives. And more important, fix the problems that can derail a business plan.

2. Collaboration at the point of context.

It fascinates me how we’ve lived such unnecessarily risky lives as business managers by limiting entire processes to a few chosen few that we think are the best people for the job, from concept to finish. The marketing expert can’t easily reach out to a product manager, the sales rep doesn’t even know who designed the products they sell. By enabling collaboration between anointed experts and the rest of the organization, we can plan and predict far more effectively. To do that we need to enable collaboration at the right points in our data consoles and our workflows. Its early days and TideMark has ways to go to enable silo-free collaboration but what is important is that they recognize the pivotal role of collaboration, enough to include it in version one. This how enterprise systems need to be built in my opinion and they have so, from the get go.

3. Designing for today’s dataset.

The public web gives you more unfiltered data on what your customers really think than we’ve ever had in the history of marketing. But to date, our collection and understanding of this data has been through brokers and manipulators of this information, and at latency levels that would just never work today (e.g. 4 months for a competitive assessment from your favorite management consultancy). Any business intelligence and performance management tool today needs to be able to take in first hand data and create insight that sits alongside what our ERP applications can tell us. That’s a true amalgamation of not just what we think about our businesses but what our customers and partners objectively think as well. Tidemark proposes to account for this holistic view.

Beyond this, they have the other elements of what makes a 21st century business application relevant, let alone useful.  Device-first design to get you analytics and performance data that cannot wait till you get back to your desktop. And native integration into existing systems such as SAP and Oracle that house underlying data.

The devil is in the details but this is clear: This fight is going to be one that’s fought with knuckle-dusters. Incumbent providers such as SAP, Oracle and others have cloud based BI and EPM solutions, complete with tablet consumption abilities and an established distribution channel to boot. And we’ve already seen cloud based BI such as Lucid Era fail to get off the ground indicating that this isn’t simple. But TideMark seems to have thought through the simple elements of what makes performance management well…perform: be available where decisions need to be optimized and committed, understand the needs of public and private raw intelligence, and finally – democratize collaborative decision facilitation to get the best possible insight.

Dennis has this right. It’s early days but TideMark has the opportunity to fill the glaring void in the emerging ‘Cloud Cabal’. Salesforce.com offers CRM, the underlying force.com platform and the social layer in Chatter; Workday currently offers HCM and Financials and pipes data into and out of Chatter; Kenandy brings Supply Chain/MRP to Force.com subscribers. And now TideMark offers EPM with ready hooks into Workday.

This is one to watch.