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.

Facebook announced Graph Search yesterday. From Meghan Kelly at VentureBeat:

When you start typing your questions, Facebook will suggest search queries and clean up your question. You might ask, “Which of my friends like The White House?” and it will simplify and suggest “My friends who like The White House.”

The search could be most useful for situations like finding friends in a specific city you plan on visiting or finding people who like a band you’ve got an extra ticket to see. You can also use it to search for things “nearby.” If you’re looking for friends who live near your current location, you can look for “friends nearby.” If you need a hospital, you should call 911, but you could also search on Facebook, and it shows you the hospitals in your area  (while you’re bleeding out, of course).

There’s plenty of other analysis. See this by Danny Sullivan on how it works and just so you’re not getting too carried away, Om Malik does what he does best by digging into practical feasibility of getting this right  But lets assume that Facebook does pull it off for a min. In that case….

This is massive for Facebook and Google’s never seen any competition like this. Simply put, being able to choose people as filters to your search is extremely powerful.

That said, two things come to mind as I read this:

First, this is far from a Google killer.

Google still has a lot of runway to get this right. Ultimately we are talking about the war on owning Purchasing Intent. Facebook might have a stronger hold on consumer or B2C products (e.g. “I like this new Viking Stove”), but it’s far from perfect. Personally, I’m really suspect about any search algorithm that puts too much emphasis on “Like”. It has to be the most abused social metaphor of all time – first, we barely think twice before “liking” something. Second, given all the marketing gimmicks to get you to Like stuff, it’s hardly an objective filter. And third, even it they manage to get it right, the whole world of B2B just isn’t part of the conversation on Facebook in any meaningful way. Those conversations are still happening outside Facebook’s walled garden on branded communities. This game is far from over.

The real winner is vertical social networking.

Most significant in my mind though is that the real winner here is vertical social networking. Facebook just bifurcated search forever. They now propose to own the “Here’s what my friends think” segment. The other major segment is “What do the experts think?” And that data is neatly indexed on vertical and topical social networks. Think Yelp, think ChowHound, think WebMD, thin TripAdvisor and the biggest, Amazon Recommendations. The reality is that our friends can often be terrible references. If I’m looking for a great kitchen knife, I want advice from a chef or a seasoned cook. Not just my best pals. And that’s still the work of other topical sites. I use experts lightly but when it comes to serious purchases, you will want to rely as much on unknown strangers who are qualified on a subject as much as you will your friends. And those “unknown experts” passionately opine not on Facebook but on these vertical social networks. Their relevance just went up 100 fold.

As the social web confuses most of us on where to find what and the sources increase by the day, Facebook just added an intense level of clarity by letting you toggle between people you know and people you trust on a topic. And this level of clarity is THE single most risky thing to happen to established web search. Feeding on the ambiguity of sources is what search engines thrive on. If Facebook gets this right, this ambiguity has now been seriously eroded and between what our friends think and what the experts say, we might just have all the information we need to make the purchase.

As I plan to spend a day at my first HRTech Conference in Chicago next week, it got me thinking about how far along we are towards getting the people part right in HCM. Or as my industry colleague and Head of Learning at TELUS, Dan Pontefract, aptly calls, the “Wesources” part.

There are some excellent application and application delivery questions to be answered at this event that helped me a lot. My fellow Enterprise Irregulars colleagues are in top form here: Naomi Bloom has put together her now famous HRTech Conference Pre-Read on what she’s looking for . Thomas Otter is looking at SaaS pricing and what he’s looking for at the event, here. And there’s plenty of other extremely thought provoking content from the likes of Jason Averbook and Josh Bersin.

Like many others, I’m coming from the people performance side of the HCM equation. As Social in the enterprise matures from nebulous “Facebook for the Enterprise” efforts that haven’t lead to meaningful results, towards surgical usage to accelerate performance, having the discipline to really focus on people AND business execution becomes ever more important.

Social is a massive topic at the the event this year. But these are the simple foundational advancements Im looking for:

1. Identity: Identity comes from systems of record for sure but also based on my social footprint – what I think of my self, what my colleagues think of me and how well my work is accepted by my peers. Don’t get identity right and you can forget about the rest that comes after – finding people, sharing, collaborating and improving output. Social technology capabilities have forgotten about this first step for the most part. Are we starting to get it right?

2. More H and less M, in HCM: To truly enable execution, it’s about how we’re both managing but its also about finding and federating talent across the organization. HR has traditionally been many many degrees away from core Line of Business (sales, service, marketing, production, etc) inefficiencies, yet it’s charged with managing and nurturing talent centrally. That’s woefully impractical. Social technologies,when designed and employed right, can massively shrink the distance between core customer, employee and partner problems and opportunities and your talent pool. How well is HR leveraging technology solve this problem?

3. Informal Peer Learning: Many business activities powered by transactional or structured systems have an informal/unstructured cousin. Take learning for example. You may have the best LMS system in the world but if you’re say, trying to teach a factory worker how to wear a glove properly to reduce injury (and your Workers Comp outlay), endless PowerPoints are hopeless. I’m sure you can think of a 100 other such examples in your organization. Social Learning capabilities, rich media on a mobile device is hugely powerful to dramatically improve on the job learning. Beyond Learning, most structured talent management process have similar informal cousins. Are we beyond transactions and moving to execution, yet?

4. Where’s the proverbial puck? Are we tracking at least somewhat close to the adoption appetite of the average employee when it comes to behavior change or are we designing new fangled systems for a world thats 10 years out? Don’t get me wrong, I like aspirational design and innovation as much as the next guy but this was an expensive lesson learnt in the enterprise social networking world where we kept piling on more technology in the hopes that social networks will finally get adopted. All that happened is that the technology got quickly commoditzed as the business value wasn’t apparent. Lets see if all we see is just a whole lot of shiny or if practical execution focused design is emerging.

HRTech is of course about a lot more than this. But we tend to often think that the answer to complex business problems is complex technology. I think there are a host of very simple ways to provide massive performance acceleration benefit, if and only if you have an innate understanding of business execution problems on the ground. Im looking forward to seeing how were tacking this in the HR world next week.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the area of human capital performance (vs management). But since I joined SAP, I’ve gotten a deeper understanding of some of the big deficiencies in this area where social can move the needle. Thanks to colleagues such as David Ludlow, Dmitri Krakovsky and Aaron Au. HRTech I expect will be a great place to see where the industry is, as a whole.

Last year I wrote this in a previous blog post about collaborative HR performance and its something I still believe, infact with even more conviction:

“Bill Kutik of HRTech fame aptly characterized HR as the ‘Rodney Dangerfield’ of the Executive Suite. I couldn’t have said it better. As I discussed with the esteemed group of CHROs and executives at the retreat, in my estimation, HR as a function has been beaten down (emotionally) to a pulp over the last decade. This function has had the ugly pleasure of, one one hand, getting near zero credit for those very rock stars they sourced who were responsible for blazing performance in good times, but yet were handed the dirty job of laying off thousands in bad times. Now is their time to design for and to transition into the ultimate brokers of real people intelligence. And to then trade on that indispensable currency as the rest of the leadership sizes up what effectively competing and winning in the 21st century will entail.”

Looking forward to learning a lot in the day and a half that I’m there. Tons for good friends are in attendance. If you’d like to say hi, come by an event that SAP and SuccessFactors is hosting on Monday at the House of Blues.

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I’m on a flight to Boston to dip into TechWeb’s Flagship Enterprise 2.0 Conference – the definitive watering hole for all enterprise social enthusiasts. Every year we look for both practical insights so practitioners can advance their effort on the ground, but as important this event is where one gets a sense of potential forward movement of the industry as a whole.

The movement if you will, started in 2006, then got tucked under the Social Business moniker, and found itself being tugged sideways, towards the Social Enterprise brand. How meaningful any of these shifts have been towards performance acceleraton is still being assessed. No question about one fact though –  its been a great effort to lift all boats as we look to unlock hidden talents of our customers and employees.

But fundamental questions remain that no amount of marketing air cover can hide:

1. I wrote about the state of the state a few months ago as I saw it, and many of you commented. Now, are we still talking about just sharing, connecting, flows and streams or is there an innate understanding of what meaningful collaboration really entails.

2. Your business, if its global, is facing massive volatility these days. For instance, regardless of whether you build or sell or even do nothing in Europe, the Euro is a global problem and requires more agility and nimbleness in how we organize, how we react and keep charging forward as business whilst still managing operational and financial risk. In principle, connected organizations can help a lot here – connections not just internally but with partners and with respect to keeping your customers close to you in these turbulent times. But that takes far more than people to people connections and even general purpose collaboration. It’s about proximity to core process, real time analytics and data access and to content to have all inputs you need to collaborate and execute. Where are we aligning the value of what we do, to such real problems?

3. Blurring lines between the front and back office. Michael Porters model, based on primary and support activities as he called it, nicely broke this out at a time when we were busy moving from paper to technology. But in a socially connected world, informed customers could care less about this. If your prospect wants an expert answer found deep in the bowels of your supply chain, you need to extract that and get it to them so they can make a purchase decision. Are we still abstractly talking about fluid connections between customers, employees and partners or are we coming closer to providing smarter connections that can expertly find the right brains but also enable audit trails and necessary workflows to augment socializing?

4. Is social tech still hiding in Venus and process tech on Mars? Our industry colleague Dion Hinchcliffe does a super job illustrating how the technology is consolidating or as he says, collapsing into the grip of large vendors. But are we getting closer to making technology confirm to how we work or are we still forcing an unnatural way of work. For instance, are activity streams still just so cool that its ok for important notifications to fall off the front page just because I was out to lunch? Lets see about that.

I’ve bet my current career on this market category so I’m as vested as anyone attending in getting real answers to such questions. I consider these unemotional questions that I know many of you are also thinking about.

My role has changed in the past couple of months as I joined SAP and I’ve largely gone underground, both for personal reasons and for what we’re building at SAP. Other than the occasional visit to the #socbiz hashtag on Twitter on the weekend, an unintended benefit of this is that its forced me to step almost completely out of our echo chamber. Many of you like me don’t drink too much of the kool-aid and SAP has exposed me further to gnarly customer problems and extremely practical buyers and so it puts a lot of social business banter in even sharper contrast. Not implying that the process laden world is better – but it further highlights the need to be mercilessly practical about the value of social.

This conference is familiar ground to me. I’ve been privileged to serve on the advisory board and as track chair for the Strategy and the Sales and Marketing tracks over the years. The organizers and the content strategy is always top notch and this years line up of analysts, consultants, and doers is even broader than years past. They do all they can do. Now lets see if the stories deliver in a way that aligns to the larger problem set faced by typical buyers and instantly hits home for those executives up at night trying to execute day in and day out.

All that said, one thing is for sure: This is, by far,  THE best group of people who attend this event and they share selflessly. I hope to have some time to meet up with some of my close friends and industry colleagues in attendance.

I’m privileged to be doing a keynote discussion with ZDNet columnist and Asuret CEO Michael Krigsman at a pre-conference event at ASUG / SAP SAPPHIRE event tomorrow (Sunday).  The larger topic is consumerization of IT and the move to the Cloud, but in many ways, the idea is to talk about the reset of the relationship between IT and the LoB as purchase patterns move towards the latter.

It’s a natural tendency for this to often be an antagonistic relationship But where this gets productive is when IT starts to understand the larger trends in changing expectations of prospects and customers and the LoB is often dealing with especially with the advent of the public social web. As you start to peel those layers away, one by one, you start to see how IT can not only support but lead on the task of supporting and serving today’s increasingly social, sometimes vocal but definitely informed prospect and customer.

We will probably ruffle some feathers but I think we’ll leave attendees with a few new ideas about how to play this out. I’ll update this post with details of the push back I receive and what the audience teaches me.

Oh, off topic but if you’re attending SAPPHIRE, come ask me about “Project Robus”.

Seems like I just got off a plane from this summer’s Boston Enterprise 2.0 Conference. But here we are again — the Santa Clara edition of Enterprise 2.0 is around the corner, from the 14th — 17th of November. The event has a good keynote line up that includes the likes of Sandy Carter of IBM, Rachel Happe, Founder of The Community Roundtable, Don Tapscott of Macrowikinomics fame, Aaron Levie of Box, Tim Young of VMware, and others. Some of these folks I know well and others I’ve read often. Expect a range of perspectives on social and collaborative approaches to working effectively.

The tracks represent the big issues facing organizations today and in the very near future: People Culture and Communications (HR), Sales and Marketing, Social Apps and Platforms, Architecture, SharePoint Strategies, Mobile, Video and UC, Risk and Governance, and Internal/External Communities.

In the summer, I keynoted the Boston event on the topic of “Putting back the R in CRM“. This time, we have an entire track on the topic of sales and marketing that I am privileged to chair. And so I wanted to introduce the track and speaker line up, and more importantly, showcase the real progress we have made as an industry towards delivering meaningful business outcomes.

We kick off with Social Channels Engagement, Integration and Response. Increasingly, the customer doesn’t really care which twitter handle is your official support or marketing channel or where the appropriate place on Facebook is to engage with you. This puts serious strain on organizations that have traditionally broken out functions by sales, marketing, support and the like. Social Channels require that we rethink how we engage and route the right discussions to people with the best answers – be those in traditional customer touch point roles or experts hidden inside organizations in product development, or design, or even the extended supply chain. As important, we still need to have a process and the needed technology to move social media discussions into traditional process that’s often powered by CRM, Call Center or other programs and applications. We have a panel of experienced practitioners from well known organizations that are tackling this problem day in and day out:  Peter Simonsen, Sr. Director, Web & Community, QlikTech International AB, Daniel Zucker, Social Media Manager, Autodesk and Franck Ardourel, Sr. Director, Online Marketing, 24 Hour Fitness. Each of them offers deep expertise in not only shielding the prospect or customer from silo’d organization designs but have also been instrumental in helping re-cast how organizations rally around customer needs in the 21st century. John Ragsdale will be moderating this session.

Then we move on to how collaboration is critical to Sales Operation and Multi Channel Distribution. First, an in-depth case study from one of my new favorite examples of enterprise collaboration in the last few months: SuperVALU -  the grocery store conglomerate that owns household brands such as Albertsons, Shaws, Shop ‘N Save and other retail chains. At SuperVALU, the leadership has chosen to follow a hyper-local strategy to cater to the unique needs of each community they serve. With hyper local comes a natural decentralization model that still needs a level of cohesiveness. A central collaborative fabric has been put in place to enable store managers across brands to share tactics on hyper-local design and service.  I’m looking forward to listening to Erin Grotts as she presents the SuperVALU story.

On to channel strategy. I’ve long believed that partner collaboration is a gaping hole in the social and collaborative ‘stack’. Steve Bamberger from Toshiba is going to talk about the challenges of a multi channel sale that requires coordination between third party vendors and service providers to truly put your best foot forward. If your organization sells its wares with the help of partners, come listen to Steve illustrate how “Toshiba has improved the transparency of vendor sales support and fostered more unified collaboration and communication with their strategic partners within their dealer and direct sales channels.”

Moving on from Sales Collaboration, we’re going to deal with the elephant in the room that social media idealists often tend to stay away from: if Social Media customer engagement is all that, why hasn’t it invaded the traditional marketing mix in a consistent way? Kelly Ripley Feller, Director at Citrix System wants to lay out the big road blocks and collaborate with the audience to find realistic pathways for social media marketing and measurement. If you want to add your two cents on why the problem exists and what we as a community can do about it, come on by.

And finally, B2B customer engagement is a beast in and of itself.  Lauren Vargas of Aetna will talk about how regulated industries engage with prospects and customers on social media. In her words “Discover the right blend of art and science your organization needs to execute to get people excited about doing business with your company.” In turn, Michael Procopio from HP will discuss how customer engagement works at scale. HP sells personal and enterprise hardware, software, services and more and has a market cap of over $50 billion dollars. It’s a treat to have Michael share how large companies can keep their head above the social media marketing waters. Esteban Kolsky, a very well-known name in the customer service world, will moderate this session.

If you would like to learn more about the event and register, here’s the link to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

I’m really happy with how the track has come together. Broad insights, deep case studies focused on solving gnarly performance challenges that big business faces today with decisive uses of social and collaborative approaches.

And, if it didn’t come through, this sales and marketing track has only end customers speaking. 100% pundit-free practitioner insight.  -)

See you in Santa Clara.

UPDATE: Just when this track looked like it couldn’t get stronger, we now have Ted Saptountzis, SAPs Vice President for Audience Marketing joining us. Ted will join Kelly Ripley Feller at 2:30 pm to talk about post-hype use of social and what it looks like when its embedded into core marketing and sales processes.

UPDATE 2: Killer conversation going on on Google Plus about “Why does Marketing STILL not get social?” – one of the big topics were going to discuss this week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

(Disclaimer: I’m on the advisory board of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference)

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