Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

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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.

As a follow up to this post commenting on PriceWaterHouse Coopers (PwC) extensive report on Social and Collaborative Business, PwC just published the conversation we had a few months ago. We talked about the following:

• Recent challenges companies have been facing on the collaboration front
• The current generation of tools and how they’re moving toward that goal and advantages/ disadvantages / inhibitors of different approaches
• Systemic inefficiencies
• And in the midst of all of this, the changing role of Identity (more on this subject, here)

You can find the whole interview on PwC.com, here.

I spent fifteen minutes with Oracle’s President, Mark Hurd, along with Sudhir Chowdhary from the Financial Express yesterday at Oracle OpenWorld 2011.  These were the big take aways from our conversation:

1. Collaboration Moving Front and Center

Oracle seems to have rationalized its’ investments in the areas of content and collaboration technology and has come to terms with the idea that collaboration needs to be front and center in its’ portfolio offering. I asked Mark how he rationalized not catering to the other 80 odd percent of the average employees’ daily time that isn’t spent in one of Oracles’ ERP/CRM and other process apps in any integrated way. At a previous meeting with Oracle’s executive team earlier this year, it was clear that customers do have collaboration on their minds. And earlier yesterday, Anthony Lye, SVP, CRM, also confirmed that the subject of activity streams will be broached during the CRM keynotes. Mark responded with “I absolutely agree and stay tuned – there’s an announcement coming over the next 48 hours on collaboration”. Across these conversations what’s clear to me is this: Oracle will be declaring its intentions in both traditional collaboration and also some of the newer flavors characterized by enterprise social networking and activity streams.

We’r seeing a growing need for this in the market as collaboration needs mature and become more sophisticated beyond general purpose sharing. And so I have high hopes for a fitting response to collaboration that’s cognizant of process. Oracle is also one of the few companies that can, in principle, get this right. Given what I saw of Fusion’s Rich Identity features last year, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to expect that Oracle will infuse findability and collaboration into its overall business systems offering. So consider this a heads up for you fellow Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business gear heads out there. Fingers crossed that it isn’t just silo’d collaboration that ignores the needed context hidden inside the various business systems it offers.

2. Catering to the Exa-customer’s Cloud vs On-premise Needs.

Exalogic, Exadata, Exalytics. It’s all about the mammoth and gynormous here. Mark’s assessment is that Oracles’ primary customer base will look for a staged move to the cloud, if at all. In the way that it was described by Mark, the logic was this: large companies expanding to new regional markets may choose to go cloud and leave the mother ship on-premise. They may change that configuration at a later time and go all cloud, or extend cloud solutions to front end back end installations.   Oracle proposes to offer the needed flexibility using one code base as customers move to all cloud or partial cloud…or never cloud.

The message was that from a customer stand point, Oracle is ready if and when the customer is. An alternate interpretation of this would be the following: stretch out the license and maintenance revenue model of on-premise software for as long as the customer is willing / needs to keep an on premise foot print. Be ready with a plan B if the customer decides to shop its technology needs and considers cloud based systems a viable option.

3. On the new crop of Competition:

It seems as if Oracle finally has a game plan to play both offense and defense with cloud based providers. To be clear, no names were named but its easy to connect the dots and see that companies such as Workday and Salesforce.com were reference points. The market view presented by Mark was this:

• Newer cloud based offerings already have an older code base compared to Oracles’ OnDemand line.
• They don’t currently have the vertical specialty that Oracle’s customers look for.
• They don’t have the safe pair of hands /maturity of Oracle.
• They don’t have the integrated suite of all ERP applications.
• And finally, Oracle has the kind of scale of operations that’s needed to carpet bomb the large company buyer landscape with an OnDemand value proposition.

Looked at in totality, this a very different message from the previous points of view that went from the cloud isn’t new to the cloud exists but it’s best in a box. Clearly there was a recognition that Oracle’s market is in fact considering alternate solutions that don’t only come from the likes of SAP. And so it’s game on, from Oracle’s stand-point.

So there you go. I’m looking forward to seeing how this all comes to fruition over the next couple of days….

Comments rolling in on Google Plus, here.

Image Credit: Mike Maloney

Few organizations providing enterprise social software have a process and integration DNA, as does TIBCO Software. The last of the independents in the enterprise integration game, TIBCO supports some of the most gnarly systems integration efforts at some of the best known organizations in the world. For these reasons, I went to TUCON 2011, TIBCO’s Annual Customer Conference to see what customers have to say about Tibbr, TIBCOs enterprise social software offering.

For starters, if you need a primer on what Tibbr set out to do, the best place to start is this post by my esteemed industry colleague, Ross Dawson.

My main take aways….

Injecting Context into the Collaboration workflow: First off, I do have a bias when it comes to different strands of collaboration and I lean towards the kind the calls for injecting the needed business context that makes collaboration purposeful. I’ve been writing about this since 2009 and increasingly, scores of examples exist that show tepid or even failed social/collaboration uptake at large organizations due to the fact that context around collaboration was just not apparent.

Tibbr has drawn on its integration heritage to ensure that meaningful events can be drawn in from an organizations BI, CRM and other Business Applications that provide the needed context that often invokes collaboration in the first place. As much as we might tend to think that the business systems market has consolidated around SAP and Oracle, any one that has worked in large organizations knows that scores of other third party and custom tools also hold critical data and content. When you consider customer and partner systems that you don’t control, this gets even more complex. TIBCO provides integration points to well over 140 apps as Ross alludes to in his post and so the context pool that Tibbr has to draw from is a mammoth kitchen sink of apps that big industry relies on, today. That, along with its ability to let end users follow people and subjects is powerful in theory and if messaged and executed correctly, powerful in practice as well.  The product design and road-map reflects this in spades.

Customer Traction: MGM, KPMG and Macy’s, amongst others, is a solid list of reference-able client names that any social software company would grab with two hands. What’s particularity impressive to me is that these customers trusted a plumber with the interior design of their living room. Honestly, I would have a hard time doing that, unless the story convincingly re-set my expectations on why the underlying infrastructure and the collaboration experience complement each other. And TIBCO seem to be convincing customers that this trifecta of people, applications and subjects, matters. KPMG, the giant services firm is looking to connect SharePoint, Work-flow Applications, SAP Practice Management and Outlook in a way where Tibbr provides the single command and control center. CargoSmart, a shipping concern that helps over 22,000 customers streamline its shipping operations and lower costs uses Tibbr to manage thousands of exceptions by invoking collaboration between the best minds. My kind of social business, if you know what I mean.

Net, net, the product itself is drawing on TIBCOs overall strengths to differentiate its offering in a very crowded enterprise social software market, and big customers are giving them a shot at powering their collaborative needs.

More needs to be done…

To be honest, I hold TIBCO to a high standard when it comes to an enterprise social offering because I believe the opportunity for them can be unique. A few reasons why:

- TIBCO knows more about the intricacies of getting the right information to the right people at the right time, and from the right systems, than most technology providers.

- Every conceivable business activity of an organization is completed by some combination of right process on one hand, and unstructured conversation, knowledge leverage and content access on the other. Via its integration and BPM products, TIBCO also has a clear appreciation for how much time the average employee spends in structured work-flow and process activities. By extension, it also aware of the white spaces that exist outside of that workflow, and the daily scramble to find people and information outside of those work-flows to effectively complete the a given business activity.

- At a holistic, market level, a clear appreciation of the needs and expectations of those organizations that decide on technology investment based on hard numbers and who wouldn’t be likely consider ‘becoming social,…..just ’cause’.

- And finally, at a industry level, TIBCO has a firm understanding of the market pressures faced in massive industries such as Financial Services, Telco and Healthcare – some of its largest verticals.

Against this backdrop, I was hoping to see more contextual collaboration customer examples and market messaging at a product level that was tied to better business outcomes that TIBCO knows so much about.  My sense was that there was heavier focus on some of the more general purpose productivity metrics that we’ve seen for years and that ultimately will be hard to use as proof points that a larger target market will be willing to bite into.

As Dennis Howlett and I discussed in this JD-OD.com video, the vision as laid out by Vivek is solid and the product itself has the goods. Together this reflects TIBCOs legacy in solving the most gnarly business problems for some of the most mission critical systems on the planet. TIBCO just needs to ensure that on the ground, they stay focused on solving business tasks with the careful injection of collaboration where it makes sense. That is the language the even the most pig headed social software skeptic will at least understand. And given its legacy and what Tibbr can deliver, TIBCO has the currency to credibly spark this conversation.

Collaboration isn’t all about process of course and the team has a solid focus (and a growing stable of experts) on community building to help customers get off the ground. But between product vision and associated product chops at one end, and community uptake at the last mile of execution sits the translation of the business benefit of collaboration that TIBCO needs to communicate and help its customers succeed with. Those business problems that live across squeaky supply chains, daily customer exception handling, not so repeatable order to cash processes, cobwebbed BI data that mostly goes unused, and the like. That’s where a significantly large untapped market sits that includes both organizations that attempted collaboration at a grass roots level but never took it seriously, or the uninitiated that never got the a-ha moment to begin with.

Closing thoughts….

One of the things I’ve repeatedly said in the context of why we need engagement platform layered across our silo’d organizations goes something like this:

For the last 2 decades we’ve spent ungodly amounts of time and even more money trying to integrate systems. Its expensive in a time when we don’t have discretionary dollars. It can be slow in the face of changing latency expectations of our customers on how we engage and collaborate to build products and service them. And it’s rigid in that its an absolute design in a world where our information, exceptions, data and content consumption needs are becoming extremely fluid and unpredictable. And it certainly shows its age in a world that’s going to look a lot more like the Two Second Advantage that CEO Vivek Ranadive describes.

Why do I hold TIBCO to a higher standard? Its because I truly believe that the world of integration, as we’ve known it, is going to be turned on its head over the next decade. It’s going to slowly move from today’s hard coded systems integration down in the bowels of the enterprise stack, to also include people integration at the last mile where instead of relying only on IT to perfectly integrate systems, we’re going to find that integrating and connecting people can be a more practical, cost efficient and fluid design. One where answers can flow from a) peoples brains and b) their knowledge of where critical data and insight lies across our fragmented global systems footprint. And few organizations can agnostically appreciate how big this problem and opportunity is as TIBCO can. And so the opportunity to lead this coming business design change is their’s to lose.

Its important to keep in mind that Tibbr in its current incarnation is barely 9 months young. But first impressions are lasting impressions and I hope that TIBCO gets this right as customers experience the product for the first time. The corporate vision is on point. Unlike many we’ve seen, Tibbr the product isn’t another example of vaporware that’s miles away from growing into its stated vision. Now they need to get the follow-through right so customers understand where Tibbr is a slam dunk enabler of hard business efficiency. Most social software vendors have caught on to this en masse – many of the big platforms are melding process, data, third party information and even bi-directional updates into and out of their social streams via connectors, APIs and AppStores.

So the time is now to communicate the business activity benefit of collaboration and compete on that distinct yet for-a-limited-time-only advantage.

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For some of the best content on the event, take a look at what Sandy Kemsley, Vinnie Mirchandani and this discussion between Vivek Ranadive, Dennis Howlett and Vinnie.