Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

Software used to ship on CDs and came with static how-to manuals. As someone whose led over 50 RFP exercises, the documentation piece was always one that led to some tenuous conversations on how much the vendor was willing to hand hold, once the check was signed.

Fast forward to the 21st century where we’re looking to create more fluid organizations. Cloud computing based solutions means no CDs, less lag time and minimal disruption between updates. But what about the how-to insight that comes with it? If the software is going to change on a dime, the associated know-how needs to keep that same pace. That’s where vibrant customer communities come into play. Communities where you can have live discussions with peers in your industry, and with solution experts who have answers to the broadest or most deepest topics on how to make software work. In turn, the hosting vendor gets to build ongoing relationships with customers and guide them to success, show a commitment to support not just on a paper contract but in action. And yes to find up-sell or cross-sell opportunities for them and their partners. If done in an authentic way, good for both sides.

In the software industry you can’t really have a discussion about communities without referencing the SAP Community Network. No other vendor has had the ability to manage a community at this scale, (2+ million strong)  and as seen at TechEd last week and every other SAP conference, the needed offline/online balance to keep it vibrant. The community is not just a rudderless forum. It;s topical, it has reputation standards for participants and lead gen and commerce abilities.

SAP has had a lot of false starts and lost the compass a number of times over the last few years. In my opinion, had they not had this community (and its influencer engagement efforts led my Mike Prosceno) to have authentic discussions with customer and partner stakeholders, they would have bled customers at a faster clip. In good times, the customer got a helping hand. In bad times, an authentic forum such as this bought them a lot of patience as they worked to get the train back on the rails.

At the Enterprise 2.o conference in Boston this summer, Jon Reed, (a mentor him self and one of the most well known and respected faces in the SAP Community Network) and I sat down to talk about the value of collaboration – be those with customers, employees or partners. At minute 14 of this video, I asked Jon what value he got out of the SAP community. He characterizes the value by saying  “I can’t imagine not having this community”.

And last week at SAP TechEd, Jon sat down with Mark Yolton, SVP at SAP, who provides an in-depth perspective on what the community has achieved and why its the much needed bling that goes along with the software sale.

There’s a saying that goes something like this: “Be nice to people on your way up. They’ll help you when you’re on your way down.”

There’s obviously value to get from communities in good times as well, as Mark lays out for SAP. I’ve written about it a lot, here and my pal Rachel Happe works tirelessly with community managers every day to get this right. But if the day to day benefits described in Mark’s interview doesn’t give you the ‘aha moment’ right away, consider what it can do for you when times get tough.

Kudos to the SAP leadership for continual investment in this program.

Almost two and a half years ago in March of 2009, I suggested the following:

“Don’t confuse Enterprise 2.0 with social computing concepts”.

Ignoring the dated terminology for a second, my premise was that social in the enterprise doesn’t mean throwing all sorts of features at the end user in an attempt to get them to emulate some combination of Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia for the enterprise. Rather, its the decisive use of social and collaborative concepts to get work done.

If there is one single take away from Dreamforce, its that enterprises are systemically closer to this reality than ever before. Not that we needed the declaration of the social enterprise for this to kick off or that Salesforce.com is the only option. We’ve been seeing users of social platforms find their own ways to self organize and improve business activity, but in many cases, in a silo’d fashion and one devoid of context: join a community on your social platform to have un structured conversations on a business activity. Then head over to your CEM/CRM/ERP/Call Center/system to make updates. Sounds fine in theory but the reality is the system of record remained your primary residence and the new collaboration system, your second home that you visit when you have time.  Salesforce.com is now also playing a pivotal role in leading the cut over to contextual collaboration.

Dreamforce conveyed that Salesforce.com has been immersed in twelve months of integration and investment rationalization. Only a few of the product related announcements really blew me away but that’s fine. Putting your investments and technology advancements to work is arguably as important as filling the top of the idea funnel. Even with respect to Chatter, the new functional additions were par for the course stuff. IM and presence, customer and product networks are really not that new and are available in the market. And like every other collaboration software, Chatter has its fair share of ‘can do better’s’. The three-part story on customer, employee and product networks is no doubt a step forward towards illustrating tangible use. But for those of us in the trenches with clients trying to make this work (and I strongly suspect Salesforce.com knows this as Marc Benioff alluded to it in the Q&A session), it takes a lot more of cultural, political and change management will to make this a reality.

But in the spirit of contextual collaboration, the implications of some of the ISV announcements at Dreamforce are just huge and amount to this:

• A social service layer now powers process centric collaboration for critical business processes in the enterprise.
• The Enterprise partner announcements include cloud based leaders who have their sights on the large enterprise market.
• Most of the ISVs offer a forklift solution and can make a go at it, alone. In other words they don’t ‘need’ Salesforce.com to build a successful business. So its a balanced partnership where both sides have as much to gain. If you’ve ever run biz dev, you know that’s generally the most healthy and practical way to truly get results from any tie-up.

Here’s a taste:

• HR: Workday will integrate core HR processes such as approval requests, payroll, budgeting and spend with Chatter.  See Larry Dignan’s post on this. I’ll post separately about Workdays Technology Summit.
• Quote and Proposal, and Marketing Automation: Infor, the third largest ERP vendor after SAP and Oracle will offer a 360-degree view of key processes and data such as invoice, contacts, quotes, shipments, receivables, orders, and RMAs across the enterprise. Chatter will turn these into social objects to foster collaboration.
• Travel and Expense Management: Concur Technologies will pipe both Concur and TripIt data into Chatter for both updates and collaboration/coordination between teams on the same trip. Brian Jackson at PC Advisor has the details.
• Supply Chain: Kenandy, the new startup shepherd by Sandra Kurtzig and backed by Ray Lane, will build a collaborative supply chain on the force.com platform and use Chatter to inject collaboration. I’m really big on this topic. Dean Takahashi at Venture Beat had more and Frank Scavo shares seasoned insight, here.
• Finally, Marc Benioff touched on two announcements that have really big implications on gaining traction. First, the Data Residency Option (DRO) connects the cloud to data centers behind the fire wall. Second, Chatter not only integrates with SharePoint but also allows a feed to even live on MOSS. This hybrid connectivity makes the cloud far more palatable for a lot of companies who want to selectively leverage the cloud. Our work on the ground on blending process and collaboration absolutely confirms this need.

The interesting thing is Salesforce.com calls all of this “Social Enterprise” which can sound just as evangelical and nebulous as a good chunk of enterprise 2.0 and social business fare. But beyond marketing air cover, this is a move towards offering get work done systems that can enhance the quality of repeatable process on one hand and on the other, rescue the wild west world of exception handing that plagues our daily work. Chatter now stands to offer one of the most compelling pathways to 21st century collaboration.

From my vantage point, Salesforce.com will still need to keep an eye on the following:

• Salesforce.com will have to live up to this gigantic endorsement it just received from the ISV community. As these partners work on client deployments, the level of required handholding on getting collaboration right will be significant. As important, there is zero room for error with Chatter’s usability, its ability to scale collaboration (very different from registered users), its functional offering, security, and its filtering capabilities. Failing this, these self sufficient ISVs can easily jump ship (this is the cloud, after all).
• For me, the most critical missing element in the Chatter discussion was that Chatter usage was largely uni directional. In other words, pipe data and events into the stream. Chatter needs to showcase the writing back to systems of record to close the activity loop if it wants to truly become the workbench.  And from a managerial stand point, social analytics need to flow back to BI systems as well.
• Whilst the keynote stage showed forward thinking executives from Burberry and BMC talking about the social enterprise, there are as many CEOs who will find the social enterprise message a tad bit racy. To his credit, Marc Benioff did recognize in later meetings that this can’t be overlooked. The Sales teams will have to make this translation from hope to the needed elbow grease, effectively.
• Last year’s message was of the inspirational kind. This year could have been more of the perspiration variety that illustrates operational and financial results from successfully embracing collaborative ways of work. I wished we had some hard hitting facts on the keynote stage that showed hard results: more wining products in the market, lower support costs, agility, etc.).
• I was really glad to see Radian6 and Jigsaw data inside CRM. Speaking with folks such as Tristan Bishop from Symantec and Chris James from GNC, it was clear that R6 is being used to solve big call center and product development challenges. But the Radian6 magic could have been far more central to responding to the larger challenge of unified customer touch point integration.
• Salesforce.com is certainly not the only one to bring process collaboration to organizations. Jive Software has proven to be a juggernaut in the space and its Appstore offers an ecosystem as well. Yammer has a deal with NetSuite and integrates with Salesforce.com. Newcomer Tibbr from TIBCO offers by-directional interaction between activity streams and ERP Systems that is really promising. And many more, including Oracle who is working on socializing BPM and CMS content. The customer still has choice.

To summarize….

All up – if you’ve read this blog before, you know why this is closer to my strand of collaboration. The giant discuss button that should have always been sandwiched between the submit and cancel buttons in enterprise systems is finally looking like its going to go mainstream. That will have a profound impact on our ability to source the best insight at every stage of a process or activity. And if done right, will significantly improve the accuracy of what we eventually input into our systems of record. Better data quality for those managers relying on inputs and better analytics for those trying to make sense of data to steer the business.

ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett made the money shot on Twitter (presumably after digesting the ERP cloud announcements of the week) which I think encapsulates the opportunity for Salesforce.com:

@dahowlett: Anyone who writes off ANY business app in the cloud as ‘not happening’ is plain <expletive> mad.

To every enterprise CEO and those forward thinking CIO’s, Dreamforce and the associated ISV announcements illustrated a beautiful future that’s not so distant for those organizations who want to play, and is characterized by this:

• All your systems of record apps can in principle live in the cloud, if it makes sense for your business.
• The pipes are being laid to enable process and decisive collaboration in cloud based systems from the get go. So if employees are getting trained on Infor or Workday when their CIO makes the switch, collaboration know-how on how to improve business activity will be an integrated part of this cut over.
• With native BRO and SharePoint connectors and a significant investment in systems integrator Appirio, a hybrid connectivity world is most certainly needed and available to hand hold those not fully converted.
• And finally, that competitive advantage will not come from customizing commodity business processes apps or from, in my mind, questionable claims of better economics from cloud based solutions. Rather, it will come from superior user experiences, a balance between structured and collaborative work, device ubiquity, and significantly better speed of business execution that cloud based systems are extremely well positioned to accommodate.

Comments rolling in on Google Plus as well, here.

Towards the end of my keynote on Putting the Relationship Back in Customer Relationship Management at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this past week, I made a statement that, 2 years ago, would have got my throat slit. Stated as a wake up call plea to focus on metrics that matter, I said:

"For five years we’ve been engrossed in one giant collaborate group hug, measuring things that don’t keep executives up at night"

Unscientifically judging from reactions on Twitter, this sentiment I expressed got me the equivalent of a vigorous virtual head nod, pretty much across the board. And not for some genius insight put forth by me, but because seasoned practitioners know this already. This, and from what I heard about other tracks, summed up a big part of the general mood and current state of practitioner mindset at the conference. For those who know this community, you will appreciate how significant it is that enterprise social and collaboration practitioners have started to either realize that they need to move beyond measuring nebulous stuff like engagement, "getting social", productivity and adoption.

The market is moving forward. Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business practitioners are no doubt getting more strategic at the outset or along the way, but as important, we’re at the early stages of understanding both the challenges and opportunities that will come from the emergence of an increasingly connected and vocal customer and as a result, the changing contract between her and organizations she choose to do business with. Most critical, the ramifications of this on how we need to be wired internally to meet her expectations of meaningful engagement, expert insight, minimal latency and localized relevancy. The most trusted voices, in my opinion, echo this in their own unique way. I’ll talk separately about the sales and marketing track in another post, but its important in this context to call out impressions from those previously considered outsiders to our work of internal collaboration. Folks who have a clear view of tomorrows expectation of customer service, of co-creation and feedback management, of authentic customer advocacy than most, provide their insight into how the internal and external business worlds can come together: Brent Leary, Esteban Kolsky, Brian Vellmure, Mitch Lieberman the man himself, Paul Greenberg, and many others.

Paul Greenberg had a great comment that sums it up:

What makes social business greater than the sum of its part is also why it needs both parts to work seamlessly inside out and outside in.  Customers and the need to acquire and retain customers are driving it. It is being driven by the same imperative of business that has driven business since its inception, But it is being driven by the changed expectations of those customers.

What that means is that not only do we now need not just an enterprise value chain, but a collaborative value chain that engages customers who we know enough about to keep engaged, but that the employees of the companies that are trying to reform and restructure what they do are empowered to act both internally and externally to do something about it.

There’s no question were slowly starting to embrace critical performance acceleration opportunities that existed long before social x showed up and that’s evident.

The Beef

Some highlights of the event that represent the state of the state with respect to all things Enterprise Social and Collaboration:

More Customers at the forefront: Bert Sandie (Electronic Arts), John Stepper (Deutche Bank), Bryce Williams (Eli Lily), Kristen Hersant (Strong Mail), Tyler Knowlten (Dept of Foreign Affairs, Canada), Tony Martins (TEVA Pharmaceuticals), and scores more. These are the types of companies we all do business with or have heard of. Bill Ives and Emanuele Quintarelli have the goods on customer keynote sessions.

More Business and Infrastructure Focus: A Sales and Marketing Track and HR Track, Supply Chain Collaboration Case Studies and various IT Tracks (Mobile, UC, Integration and Apps) moved the discussion from ‘this is everyone’s problem’ (read: it’s no ones problem) to a mature discussion on how social and collaborative concepts can be a serious weapon in the arsenal of execution initiatives that help drive customer, partner and employee performance. Folks like John Stepper even dedicated a keynote on why not to get caught up in social for social’s sake.

More Depth: Dedicated how-to discussions on how to grow and sustain meaningful communities beyond launch for advanced practitioners that need to take it to the next level. Many of the sessions show where social and collaborative efforts fit in the larger organizational fabric.

Broader Vendor Representation: The Social software tapestry is being yanked from four different ends: Pure-play upstarts, ERP, Unified Communications and Specialty Application Vendors (e.g. HRIS, CMS). Besides the usual suspects, we had folks from Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, Avaya, Cisco and others. Clearly, a plethora of supply-side folks are seeing the value of folding in collaboration offerings.

All in all, the surgical use of social and collaborative concepts to drive performance is finally here. And the event provided that platform to ascertain progress and identify what else we need to do to get it right.

I had a chance to speak with the very smart Jon Reed about my overall take on the state of “Enterprise 2.0”. Jon is an Enterprise 2.0 curmudgeon who spends his time working on gnarly enterprise integration problems that make transactions work. He’s great at holding our feet to the fire when it comes to the finding the tangible value of collaboration:

Some changes we need to consider though.

First, the event itself:

• More Marketing Cowbell: We’ve now got functional tracks – we’re not talking social ‘X’ but sales, marketing, HR, supply chain, service, and so on. The conference needs a far stronger effort around attracting functional and IT decision makers who may or may not care about social but really the larger challenge of connected ecosystems to meet functional objectives that they are goaled on. The content is here; now we need the awareness that goes with it.
• We’ve moved from vendors talking to practitioners leading the discussion. I concur with Megan Murray when she says that we need end users to talk about benefits in their own words.
• Don’t forget middle managers: We had great broad coverage on the future of business. We also saw excellent tactical how-to content for practitioners. We need to start to talk to another really important constituency that’s missing – those that get sandwiched between strategy and delivery – the middle managers. They need all the help as its their next on the line when it comes to turning strategy into execution plans.

Second, as an industry:

No doubt we’re talking business problems now but we’re still far too hypnotized by that group collaboration/social/engagement group hug. There’s still a sizable (and in some ways growing) ‘movement’ feel that we need to shed, which understandably so, appears as a very self-congratulatory when seen from the outside. I say this not based on just lobby talk but based on what many Sovos customers tell us and who will not come to Enterprise 2.0. Granted, we deal with some of the most conservative industries and organizations in the world but that’s a big chunk of the market that we need to address. Threatening executives with hyperbole around bottom-up ground swells and flattening designs that defy org chart physics, all said in many different ways, takes away from the true promise of collaboration as a business performance accelerator. Don’t get me wrong, we all need an enthusiastic pat on the back that our efforts are worth it and there’s no question that many practitioners and pundits have the chops to tackle real business objectives, head-on (I know most of them personally). But if you superimpose some of the current rah rah uprising rhetoric (and in and of them selves, nebulous end results such as more engagement, more productivity and more social) in the face of stark revenue increase, competitive, cost reduction and risk mitigation objectives that most of our businesses struggle with, we come off the camp that’s doing ‘stuff’ that will not really satiate wall street or our shareholders with any certainty.

The reality is that line, staff and executive HR, Customer Service, Marketing professionals and others have established problems to solve – changing customer expectations, prospecting demands, employee turnover, dismal on boarding and missing WD-40 that results in lethargic and expensive supply chains. That’s the stuff that needs fixing.

The intent behind our work as an industry is solid. And we will have in fact changed how organizations will ultimately well….organize. But to earn the currency to engineer that change, we need respect the transactional and connectivity challenges of 9 to 5 (for employees) and quarterly heartburn (for managers) and do our part to fix these, alongside painting that picture of a possible future, three-five-ten years out. Again, it’s the messaging, design and execution planning that needs to be decisive, not the cause.

We’ve come a LONG way and we have so much experience built in thanks to those pioneering the way forward over the last three-five.  And as we saw at the event, business managers are in fact injecting social in decisive ways. But we need to push harder at embracing the problems and opportunities that keep our executives and shareholders up at night and become indispensable weapons that deliver tangible results. The good news is that it’s really within striking distance – we saw many examples at this event already.

Lets just make sure we don’t find our selves revving in neutral.

(Hat tip to Tony Martins for that great line).

Thanks

To close, an expression of deep gratitude from my end:

• - To the TechWeb team for pulling together a great event and for inviting me to keynote. I know there are a ton of folks who do stuff behind the scenes but I want to especially thank Manuela Farrell, Colleen Kraskiewicz, Natalia Wodecki and of course Steve Wylie for making my life as a track chair as painless as possible. Its really an amazing operations team that exceeds its own high bar at every subsequent event.

- To panel moderators who I consider leading lights and consummate professionals and who I have the privilege to call peers and colleagues. They put together amazing panels, recovered from last minute panelist conflicts and yet, brought it home: Paul Greenberg, Brent Leary, Esteban Kolsky and Mike Fauscette.

- To a few in the vendor community who really worked hard with their customers to create great presentations for sessions I managed: Jeff Nolan (getsatisfaction), Karen To (Jive Software), Sara Campbell (Appirio) and Mitch Lieberman (Sword-Ciboodle). Paul, Esteban and Brent have done the same for their panelists in the blog posts above.

- To all of you who took the time to comment during my keynote as well as our track sessions.

Next up: A wrap up on the Sales and Marketing Track, Interview highlights and notes on some of the Tracks I attended.

If you want more, Jim Worth has a wicked wiki up that collates all press and writing on the event here.

Supply Chain efficiency is a big big deal. More over, this area of the enterprise technology stack and associated strategy has seen little to no innovation for well over a decade. Years ago, Dennis Howlett wrote:

In my argument, breakthrough ROI comes from seeing these technology through the lens of collaboration, which in turn implies process and context. I am mindful that huge amounts of value continue to be locked up in supply chains. AMR quoted a number of $3 trillion in 2005. Has that materially changed? Simply being able to communicate across supply chains in a meaningful manner could do wonders to lubricate those rusty wheels.

Back in the summer of 2009 I wrote about taming the supply chain beast with Enterprise 2.0 approaches and technology. On the value of connecting suppliers to not just each other and to the procurement department, but to other organizational facets generally quarantined from suppliers, I wrote:

First, no one knows the true power, limitations and opportunities for each component of a product better than the very folks who build them. Second, component manufacturing is largely a commodity business.  As a supplier, I need to differentiate myself from competitors who are waiting for me to falter or cut me on price. I need to be a strategic partner to be somewhat indispensible. Social Software can open up the lines of interaction beyond R&D, Procurement and Product Development, allowing suppliers to learn, first hand,  any pain felt by the end customer. Or help marketing really understand the deep competencies of each component of the end product. Or provide new insight to R&D on early technology innovation at the component level. And on and on.

That’s purpose built collaboration (a.k.a business case) with dead clear incentives for suppliers to participate (a.k.a adoption) and play a role in the success of an end product in the market place.

It took a while but I’m thrilled that for the first time were going to see a supply chain case study at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, next week. Tony Martins, VP of Supply Chain at TEVA Pharmaceutical will talk about how TEVA is leveraging collaboration to improve supply chain performance. Tony is definitely is one of the pioneers in re-shaping what supply chain efficiency can mean.

The session description is here:

———-

Thanks to decades of supply chain optimization solutions, today’s leading organizations have mature transaction-oriented supply chain designs.
However, managers spend over half of their time dealing with unexpected events that can’t be addressed with structured processes. To maintain a competitive edge, companies need to embrace new ways that enable spontaneous association. Social Enterprise and Open Collaboration provides a more effective way to address the volatile world and gain significant improvement in operational efficiencies.

———–

Tony will present a case study at 3:45 on Wednesday the 22nd of June followed by a Q&A session. Tony will also share the keynote stage with Tom Kelly of Moxie Software on Wednesday at 9am.

If you’re looking to frame the business value of social and collaborative business to line of business leaders or to IT, this session is sure to provide you with the needed ammunition to make your case.

I’m looking forward to participating in my second Social Business Forum in Milan next month.

Last year I keynoted on the topic of 21st Century Collaborative Enterprises: The Customer Case. This year I’ll be talking about The Connected Enterprise – the business case, and people, process and technology ramifications as we connect the best brains spread across our customers, employees and partner base. This theme is central to the work we do at Sovos.

This year, the event boasts the following themes:

• Employee Empowerment
• Customer Engagement
• Open Innovation

Topics include:

• Open organizational and leadership models
• Defining the business case and getting top management commitment
• Framing social media into the broader company strategy
• Nurturing adoption, cultural change and people engagement
• Defining ROIs, metrics and business drivers
• Frameworks to cultivate successful internal and external communities
• Policies, guidelines and governance approaches
• The why’s and how’s of socializing business processes
• Best practices and lessons learned to mitigate risks and overcome stumbling blocks
• Choosing and integrating best of breed social software and collaborative platforms

I’m joined by a number of very bright folks who have devoted a lot of brain cells to improving employee productivity, customer feedback, contact center, customer service and as important, how these experiences are blending. They include the ever inspiring Luis Suarez, Mark Tamis, Andrew Gilboy, Esteban Kolsky, Keith Swenson, Bertrand Duperrin, Mitch Lieberman, Patrick Brandt, amongst others.

Solid customer case studies as well from the likes of Dell, Giffgaff, WeBank, BASF, Fujitsu. The event is put on by the good folks at Open Knowledge, a leading Milan based Social Business Consultancy.

To get a feel for the kinds of topics being covered at the event, check out a series of blog interviews conducted by Alberto Beccaris with Keith Swenson, Mark Tamis, Stefano Vitta, myself and others. Luis also has a great post up on his blog, here.

Here’s where you can register. Look forward to seeing you at the event.

As I flew into Orlando for SAP Sapphire 2011, I revisited a bunch of review posts from last years Sapphire Event to see what was promised. In my post last year, I summarized SAP Sapphire 2010 themes:

• In-Memory / Hana
• Cloud and Devices
• “People – Centric”

To cut to the chase, Sapphire 2011 came back strong on 1) and 2) and has its work cut out on 3).

I’m going to quickly summarize developments on In-Memory / HANA and Mobility but point you to other posts on the topic for more detail. I’ll spend my time on the areas that promise to blend the best of people and process to improve business outcomes.

In-Memory

The keynote message was dominated by infrastructure progress to date. Speed was the single most important Co-CEO message at the event and as you would expect, Hana was all  the rage. I’m a sucker for business execution and the customer case studies were really good. Colgate-Palmolive, Lenovo, Medtronics and many more. One striking example was that of Infosys: The global services firm uses Hana to get real time updates on margins, down to the individual project level. If you stop to think about that for a second – across thousands of projects underway – to be able to get roll up data as well as identify precise trouble spots at a unit level in near real time so you can course correct. That’s pretty incredible. More on Hana from Mike Vizard at ITBusiness Edge.

Mobile

The acquisition of Sybase is coming to fruition and a number of apps were available for viewing on the show floor. There’s no question that SAP has extended its process tentacles to be available where ever the end user might be.  Frank Scavo has a post and a video, and ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett has a somewhat measured view on uptake and operational details.

Netweaver Gateway

By far, the most promising news that broke at the event, in my opinion. This piece of technology connects SAP back end applications to other apps and services at the edge. Think third party business applications, tiny and large mobile apps, Twitter, Linked and Facebook data, and more. Says customer Manish Choksi, CIO of Asian Paints:

"The pilot using SAP NetWeaver Gateway allows us to leverage the power of social media sites along with our SAP applications and create enhanced customer engagement, while deriving immediate business benefits. Insights from these social media interactions are captured through SAP NetWeaver Gateway in SAP Business Suite and are used by our product and marketing teams, providing them a true customer ‘pulsecheck.’

There’s plenty of applications for such technology, not the least of which is giving end users extensibility to marry apps and data they like at the edge with critical ERP process and data. I saw this Asian Paints demo in-person. Whilst I think those of us close to social data aggregation /sense making of said data would find the first deployment to be primitive (e.g. connecting the raw twitter fire hose to CRM and Call Center), it’s good to see SAP begin to go down this road. When it comes to customer and prospect data in particular, this move will also provide SAP with good customer feedback on the kinds of semantic and filtering technology it needs to procure/OEM/ build to really scale and meaningfully apply social ‘big’ data to improve process performance.

This technology is also the basis for Duet Enterprise – the connector that enables sharing and socializing of SAP data and workflow inside SharePoint 2010. More on Duet and the Microsoft partnership by Mary Jo Foley.

‘People Centricity’

This is where things fell off the rails for me. Last year, CEO Bill McDermott said the following:“This is an era of people empowerment”. In turn, Dr. Hasso Plattner had a huge slide behind him on the podium labeled “The real Enterprise 2.0”.

But a year later, the effort to leverage social and collaborative constructs to augment transactive and workflow process with Hana providing the jet fuel, was tepid at best. To me, these three elements, combined with new extensibility offered by Netweaver Gateway is an honking opportunity for SAP to redefine how work gets done in the year 2011. Whilst I get that for many customers speed of transaction is sufficient, I was a little disappointed that the focus was solely on using Hana to do what SAP currently does, just faster. Back to the drawing board business activity redesign that blends the best of process, data and people was missing and could go a long way towards filling in those white spaces in ERP enabled process where end users scramble every day to find reliable experts, content and answers to get the job done.

Talking about back to the drawing board, Sales OnDemand  is an exception and was, far and away, the best example of innovative task facilitation thinking at SAP. It shows that the company has the guts to re-think a foundational enterprise application, strip out bloat, and understand where collaboration accelerates business process (more on this topic in this older post). That’s what Sales On Demand does and here’s Paul Greenberg and Jon Reed on the topic.

However, to truly leverage the best brains to get the job done, business networking and collaboration can’t work in a silo (in this case sales) and shut others out. It needs to be cognizant of people who otherwise were considered outside the traditional loop, to truly get the best insight. And so, a sequential roll out of social capabilities ERP application by ERP application can complicate participatory patterns at execution time and seriously discount the value of a connected enterprise. SAP’s efforts to get ‘people centric’ needs to happen across traditional functional areas, in tandem.

Next up was SAP StreamWork which is yet to find its footing as a social software system of record, in spite of SAPs envious rolodex of incumbent customer. I’ve spoken to SIs implementing StreamWork and on a case by case basis there certainly is value, but from a go to market stand point, repeatability of use cases across SAP customers needs work. The good news is that SAP announced the availability of StreamWork across SAP business apps (Kathleen Lau has more, here) and to me that’s promising. With Jack Miller just recently taking over the reigns at StreamWork and along with Holly Simmons, we can expect some fresh thinking on how this product will stick its neck out in the very crowded social software market. 

So stuffs happening on the people centric apps side of the house, albeit slowly and in pockets. But given the rapid pace of innovation in this area, SAP really needs to step on it and in a cohesive manner if it wants to be a contender for purpose driven collaboration. Chatter + Radian6 + Salesforce CRM and Service Cloud, Socialcast Reach, Yammer + NetSuite and others, Jive Apps Market,  Saba People Systems and even early whiffs of social and unified collaboration across Oracle Fusion Apps clearly shows a trend towards social and collaboration, coming to a process near you. At Sovos, we’re working with a number of clients who are increasingly executing their social and collaborative strategy in harmony with process, and some of the combinations allow customers to concentrate on strategy and execution when the software plays nice. Once implemented, collaborative systems that power a vibrant maze of relationships and conversations are extremely difficult to rip and replace (imagine trying to even re-build your LinkedIn or Facebook network on a new platform). So if they want to play, SAP really needs to get in on the land grab, pronto.

Closing thoughts on Sapphire Now 2011

Net net, SAP customers looking to do ERP faster, and where ever they want, be that in the cloud or on a tablet, will like a lot of what they saw at the event. Those customers looking for fresh ideas to improve employee/ partner/ customer activity and engagement, will want more.

The event itself was near flawless from an organizational stand point and thanks to the Global Communications Team, the influencer / blogger cadre continued to get direct feedback from the right folks – be those partners, customers or SAP leadership. SAPs social media relations team, led my Mike Prosceno and ably executed by Stacey Fish, Andrea Kaufmann and Craig Mehil, and Amisha Gandhi is, without question, the gold standard in the tech industry. They make it look easy which it certainly is not.

I’ll leave you with a killer video of Hana + Microsoft Kinnect (xBox 360) that captivated the gadget lover in me. We truly live in amazing times…  – )

(Hana image, courtesy Tom Raftery; Sales On Demand image, courtesy Jon Reed)