Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

2013 SAPPHIRE NOW / ASUG , SAPs flagship user conference was a big one for me and our Enterprise Social Software team at SAP. Exactly a year ago at this very event we unveiled SAPs strategy for social and collaborative software. In Madrid at the European version of this event later in the Fall, we showed real product. This year we showed more integrated social collaboration with business applications, analytics and as a service in the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, and shared some statistics on our business. Here’s a nice quote about the product from IDC’s Mike Fauscette’s blog post about the event:

SAP is making good progress on the cloud enterprise social network (ESN) front with Jam, which grew over 800% year over year. The key long term to ESN, I believe is to get them embedded inside all of the enterprise apps so that social collaboration becomes an integrated part of everyone’s work flow. SAP is one of the vendors that has real opportunity to do that across the enterprise.

(Thank you, Mike.)

A businesses ability to bring its expert networks of employees, customers and partners to collaborate around business processes, around real time data and analytics and content is what will drive not just the future of social software but how enterprise software will be built. I spoke to John Furrier of Silicon Angle about this at the event, here.

Nmachi Jidenma writes about the undue focus we put on the competition. This is written with individuals in mind but I think it matters to emerging software categories as well. My favorite lines:

“It only makes sense that competing with others distracts from the distinctiveness that makes our art special. By comparing ourselves with others, we lose the magic that developing our core art affords the world. Competition with others in a sense makes us ordinary. It encourages imitation and, if we are not careful, makes us lose our essence. How boring.”

and

“Perhaps the best illustration of the magic that competing with oneself can bring to our art is Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs’ maniacal obsession with his art was apparent to all in the careful attention to detail observed in most Apple products. This was clearly born out of his internal vision, which would not have seen the light of day if he did not stay committed to tapping into his inner creativity. We owe it to the world to bring our originality and insights to the work that we do.”

When it comes to emerging or low maturity categories,obsessing focusing too much on competitors can amount to at best, much ado about nothing and at worst, be down right dangerous. Not to mention really expensive when we can afford but a few marketing arrows. The reality is that in early stages of market maturity a good chunk of your competitors product and market strategy is experimental anyway. And the kicker is that even they don’t know which 50% will really work. And too often all it does is just distract product teams by putting a read view mirror in front of them and sucking every ounce of ingenuity out of their thinking about what can be. The wildly successful Tesla S, for instance, has redefined what a car should be and can be with a software-first ethos, yet with an appreciation for the basics. Can you imagine if Tesla had merely copied all the elements of the traditional car, save for the battery?

Software marketing has changed forever with the advent of cloud base delivery. The speed at which you need to move lets you define or re-define categories like never before. The very definition of what massive categories such as core HR, in-memory computing platforms, Collaboration, even CRM, is up for grabs, right now.

Sure, you need to have an understanding of where the competition is going, inform your play books and set your land mines. But too much focus on the competition just means you end up being reactive to a wobbly market definition instead of thinking about how to lift and shift the goal post.

About the only thing that is in fact constant is the ingenuity of your products your products innate understanding of the customers need and how well you communicate this.

Wrote a post about what today’s customer expects in terms of “relationships” on SAP’s Customer Edge Blog. Here is a snippet:

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Transactional CRM, the system of record technology that lets you manage a sales cycle, a customer service request and marketing activity, is critical to make official records of who did what.

But here’s what striking to me: Traditional CRM, which stands for customer relationship management is a transactional and operational technology that never really touched the customer.

That may have been OK in the past, but today’s customer who is extremely well connected and networked thanks to the social web has radically different expectations of the companies that they do business with.  Beyond socializing, the social web is where we seek to research and engage with both, like-minded buyers and with purveyors with whom we want to do business. In a 2011 IBM study on Social CRM⁽¹⁾, 42% of those polled use the social web to share opinions about products they use, 39% use it to access product reviews, 23% said they outright rely on the “social web to interact with brands”.  Yet another supporting point to CRM pundit Paul Greenberg’s assertion that “the customer is in control of the conversation.”

Let’s dispel three misconceptions about the social web first:

1. This isn’t about bleeding edge industries anymore. A 2009 business.com study⁽²⁾ showed Real Estate and Construction, Healthcare, Media and Entertainment as top contenders for social media.
2. Access to social and traditional web content is now equalized. Even if you believe that a majority of your customers don’t use social media, traditional web properties such as Google and LinkedIn index even the few conversations that might exist and make positive or negative opinions about our wares visible to everyone.
3. No, the social web isn’t just about Twitter and Facebook where you may argue that your prospects don’t really hang out. Amazon Reviews (Retail), Trip Advisor (Travel), FlyerTalk (Airlines), Yelp (Restaurants), AngiesList (Services) and literally a hundred other topical forums are all part of the social web or what Mike Fauscettecharacterized as “systems of relationships” that are dis-intermediating your controlled marketing every single day.

Five Design Considerations

So how do we prepare for this changing interaction dynamic? The needs of this new breed of customers centers on the following 5 design considerations:

I’ve broken down each of these Design Considerations on the Customer Edge Blog, here.

This snippet by way of Stowe Boyd really struck a chord with me with respect to the difference between social networks and enterprise social networks. Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook got called out by Maureen Dowd in this New York TImes article:

“Sandberg may mean well, and she may be setting up a run for national office. But she doesn’t understand the difference between a social movement and a social network marketing campaign. Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching people”

I’m not going to debate Sandbergs motives in the context of Maureen’s article – not my bag. But as I spend my time thinking about product vs real established customer needs at work, this last statement about connecting vs reaching exposes the stark difference between consumer social networking and what happens in the world of work.

Enterprise social networking as we’ve known it thus far has had the exact opposite problem:  Just because digital technology makes reaching possible doesn’t mean you’re actually connecting.

Reaching people is accounted for. It’s called Email. In the world of work, connecting doesn’t come from just bringing people together. Really really connecting to impact performance and execution comes from surrounding real purpose and context such as a sales forecast data point, a problematic travel expense statement, a curve ball customer request, a need for supplier arbitration, with your network of people. You can reach people all day long but to get the network to truly galvanize around a problem, you need to infuse smart expertise identification and social or collaboration at the point where problems and opportunities emerge.

This is the expectation of “social”, in the enterprise.

SAPPHIRE NOW and SAP TechEd, the European version of SAPs flagship customer event starts tomorrow in Madrid. It’s my first time here since joining SAP this summer and I’m really looking forward to it.

From my (social and collaborative) vantage point, European Events are very special. I’ve spoken at many of them over the last three years and there’s something very unique about engaging with customers and industry observers in Europe on the topic of social in the enterprise. Whilst this gap is rapidly closing, the one big distinction between North American and European conversations has been the scrutiny that social and collaborative constructs face with respect to its applicability to real business problems.

I’m generalizing here, but customers in North America are often more pre-disposed to experimenting with new technology. The situation in Europe has always been different and European customers have a way of rapidly re-calibrating you down to reality when you start playing buzzword-bingo by using terms such as “social business”. These don’t mean much to them. European companies are staring a tenacious recession, unemployment, macro re-skilling requirements and industry-specific challenges and opportunities. Regardless of the promise of any new shiny technology innovation, they always force you to winnow down the value of new technology to 2-3 simple benefits that apply directly to established hardships and opportunities. And they glaze over solutions to problems they don’t have.

As I said, this characterization is changing in North America rapidly. Last week I had the opportunity to speak with 70 odd CHROs and CFOs about the value of social and collaborative technology to human capital and talent management. Most were from industries that are not what you called early adopters of bleeding edge technology. Utilities, Energy, Component Manufacturers, Insurers. But each of them face massive change – 35% of the employee base retiring in 3 years, de-regulation of monopolistic industry design, rapid commoditization and the need for both mentoring and reverse mentoring between Gen X and Gen Y. And then there’s industry specific demands: For instance, I spoke with a CHRO who is dealing with deregulation of the energy business in the state of Texas where for the first time in the US, you can now buy home energy on a debit card-like model, turn your usage on and off remotely via wi-fi gadgets and iPhone apps, and get discounts for pre-paid contracts. Sounds more like how we buy mobile phone service vs. utilities. But these “real” issues and the need for creative thinking have been standard fare in Europe for a long time. This summer I presented at the Deutsche Bank investor conference in London with industry colleagues from IBM and other technology providers and there’s no question that even this audience continues to seek higher purpose for social software in the enterprise, given this bleak economic backdrop.

When social ways of work and technology can solve some of these specific industry and market challenges and complement existing process technology investment to close the loop, its starts to get in line with how organizations expect to measure value. To this end, SAPPHIRE NOW is an intellectual windfall for me and my team that’s representing SAPs Enterprise Social Software business unit here at the event. We launched SAP Jam, our enterprise social software, last week and I look forward to sharing more with SAPs customer, analyst and investor community at the event. But what I’m most interested in what we can learn from them. We’ve taken a first cut at this view of purpose built collaboration with the recent release and we’ll have even more to show and say next quarter but the opportunity to design around core line of business and industry challenges that take center stage at this event is an absolute treat.

Along with many esteemed industry colleagues, I’ve written a lot about the need for a grown up version of “social business” here on this blog. Over the next few days we have exactly the kind of audience that will demand a similar line of discussion.

Look forward to seeing everyone at the event tomorrow.

Brilliant New York Times UX designer and author Alex Wright, someone I’ve had the privilege to work closely with, said to me a decade ago that “Tags are the new Mullet”. Back in the mid 2000′s, those garish word-clouds made popular by Delicious showed up everywhere and only those of us geekily-inclined really employed them in any consistent way.

Today’s mullet is the Activity Feed in Enterprise Social Networking applications. Don’t get me wrong – feeds have their purpose and their place. But as the pendulum swings carelessly from people to people, to machine to people and back, somehow, someone decided that the answer to enterprise social network ghost towns was to pipe transactional data into activity feeds and that would make it all all right. It helps for certain use cases but the behavioral change required to get consistent value from this can be herculean. And who asked for this massive work shift to begin with?

The next generation of successful social business programs won’t come from just cramming more information and data into social metaphors that no one asked for. It will come from bringing social metaphors right to the point of business context: be that an enterprise social network, an application, a location, an API or a Internet enabled device or machine.

Bit of a tactical post for a change but its something I’ve observed along the way and in the context of maturation of our industry, it’s important. And talk to Line Of Business or CIOs that have these running in their orgs for 6+ months – you’ll get a feel for this.

We did a dis-service to the promise of social business by just expecting that Facebook for the Enterprise would gather steam. It didn’t. Now lets really ask our selves how repeatable and practical it really is to assume massive behavior change on the end users part  as we expect that they will sit in front of a feed waiting for transactional pings.

It sounds geekily correct. Even technically awesome. But there’s more to social business than this.

When asked to review tent.io, a new protocol for, in their words, open, decentralized, social networking, Dave Winer writes:

Kinda reminds me of enterprise social networking in some ways. We say its about the people but thats just not enough in the business world. Facebook is about people and content, and in the consumer context, that works. You’re motivated to stay connected to friends and share. And as Instagram proved, there are 1.2 bilion reasons why Facebook wanted to own one of the most important contextual social object for sharing on the social web. Hell, Pinterest is all about pinning pictures.

Dave’s closer applies perfectly to many examples of how Enterprise Social Networking is used.

Think of a protocol like a road. You could have a wonderful road. Well paved. Wide lanes. Great rest areas. But if it goes from nowhere to nowhere, it’s not going to be very popular, no matter how nice it is.

Enterprise Social Networking can have all the bells and whistles: Feeds, Blogs, Screen Sharing, Presence and on and on. Many of these are absolutely critical. And you can’t put a price on well connected enterprises. But if simple engagement metaphors, borne out of contextual applicability is missing, Enterprise Social programs also risk becoming a beautiful road to nowhere.