Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hubris around Social Business is scaling new heights these days, and yet in many ways the concept seems to be redlining to nowhere.  As an example, take a look at this thread on Google Plus by Francine Hardaway. 133 comments later, there’s little agreement on what all of this really is, who the experts are, what it entails and who the buyer is. Foundational elements of anything that you would characterize as a market. With marketers, PR leaders and collaboration specialists racing to lay claim to the movement from their own comfort zone / vantage point, I can only imagine executives getting very confused about what exactly all of this means to their business and if the needed upheaval is even warranted.

In the context of internal collaboration specifically, this report from Charlene Li at The Altimeter Group illustrates just how insufficient the progress has been for general purpose social business in the enterprise. And when you benchmark the technology category of social business software (that includes employee, customer and partner engagement) against say CRM, or BI or ERP, its even more striking how nascent the sector is compared to its predecessors. Yes, I get its about people before technology but tech spend is a good indicator of rubber-meets-the-road market uptake, when it’s all said and done.

I recommend you give the data a good look to see what’s working and what’s not. Some big takeaways for me:

1. We’re still miss firing on what should be big wins, if social business is all that:

The report shows that table-stakes benefits of “social” such as expertise finding and the like are not showing up as runaway successes. To be fair, there is realized benefit but given all the options in Fig 5, you would expect to see at least some categories get a “significant impact” rating, six years after Professor Andrew McAfee coined the term Enterprise 2.0 which laid the groundwork for new approaches to connect enterprises.

2. We’re still asking the wrong questions: Casting Social Business as everyones problem makes it no ones problem. There isn’t a single CEO I’ve spoken with (or that you can speak with – I bet you) who would argue that his/her organization should not be collaborative or should not be innovative. But that nebulous intention is really hard to crystalize and delegate without baselining established strategic goals as yardsticks of success when it comes to becoming collaborative or innovative. Promises made to Wall Street come in the form of revenue, earnings and predictability of forward success. Yet we’re still looking at things such as “Encourage Sharing”, “Enable Action”, “Knowledge Capture” and “Empowerment” as end value points via social business. The report does a good job of highlighting what the typical organization considers to be value drivers of “social business” but I think thats exactly the issue here.  If practitioners can’t draw connectors between strategic and tactical objectives and how social networks facilitate execution, end users and executives won’t get experience the needed aha moment.

3. No Context? No Collaboration: The thing that nags me the most about this is that we have an incomplete skill set involved in defining, evangelizing and executing what “social business” (or what ever term you use), entails. No question that we need solid practitioners and community managers to tie it all together and we have some amazing folks in the community without whom all of this would be a non starter. But context points that spark collaboration in the first place lie deep inside functional units – the folks that bring revenue in, ship products, serve customers, build components, close the books. The messaging and potential sources of value presented just won’t keep these people up at night. Those getting work done need to be involved in crafting the value proposition as much as we need “social experts” in the mix so we force the topic of context at the outset and then understand how people, data and process come together.

4. Tactical Measurement:

Altimeter Group Social Business Research

Look, there have been changes in the public social landscape and we need to change what we measure to some degree when it comesto catering to this new social, vocal customer. But beyond that, performance metrics are in place for managers and business units and we need to support those. Figure 6.1 presents a host of tactical metrics that managers are subsumed in that the business just doesn’t care about, in and of themselves. Each of these programatic health measures need to be casted as ways to meet metrics that have been promised to the market. “More and faster collaboration across the company, frequency of use, lowering reliance on email” are hardly things you’re going to hear at your annual shareholders meeting.

This blog is precicely about the value of connecting our emplotees, customers and partners. Obviously, I’m a believer. But lets call a spade a spade if we want to get this right.

I hope this report will serve as a wake up call to many. The first innings of social in the enterprise is over. Those organizations that like to experiment have done so. Beyond those, a small number of executives who innately believe that collaboration is absolutely critical to execution have put their weight behind these programs. Industry colleague Dion Hinchcliffe has been documenting examples of both kinds. But there’s massive untapped opportunity out there to revise the value proposition for those numbers-driven businesses who will want to understand how all of this enhances what they’ve invested in for the last decade. Until then, this massive bucket of executives will treat “social business” as another Mickey Mouse program until they see how it matters to revenue increase, cost reduction and risk mitigation.

On a related note, ZDNet’s Dion Hinchcliffe and Dennis Howlett are going to go to battle on this very topic of value realization tomorrow (Tuesday).

Eric Norlin, organizer of Defrag, Blur and Glue Conferences and seed investor, has a good post up today about what enterprise development means in the age of big data, mobile and cloud and the coming age of convergence of these big innovation spurts.

I really recommend that you take 3 minutes to read his post for proper context but here’s the quote that summarizes his stance:

Amidst these three mega-trends [Mobile, Cloud, Big Data] sits a lynchpin. The developers know it because they’re building. The buzzword maniacs haven’t caught it yet, and they may never (we can only hope), but it’s there. That lynchpin: APIs. APIs tie together the mega-trends in a fundamental and unalterable way. APIs are the lingua franca of the new wave of enterprise development.

So, as these three mega trends (and our super top-secret, don’t tell the marketers, lynchpin) converge, we’re seeing one overriding trend: the opportunity, means and necessity for the developer (engineer, architect) to play the central role in building and rolling out new enterprise IT capabilities.

He’s right. I wanted to build on two specific repercussions or elephants in the room in this discussion around what convergence means for the enterprise developer community:

• Changing Customer Expectations: Cloud and SaaS have once again started to move the buying pendulum to a decentralized model and towards the Line of Business buyer. And whilst its way early in the enterprise setting, mobile is threatening to move the buying power even further way towards the end participant. Enterprise developers need to understand what selling and supporting into the Line of Business and appealing to the end participant means. Whilst IT might have hired a traditional analyst firm to do a feature shoot out or looked at a Quadrant, the Line Of Business will want an integrated result of cloud, big data and mobile that speaks to specific business scenarios and use cases. So if enterprise software developers were to build competing products, feature parity is price of entry. You can’t shy away from really really understanding usage models and design thresholds. That’s a big cultural shift at least for those developers who’ve been supporting IT – which includes most on and offshore SIs.
• Monetization: In my mind, each of these three technology trends (on their own) will be on the fast track to commoditization and will risk facing the same fate as did most social business software plays. The magic and the premiums will come from contextual application of this innovation and as Eric says, smart integration. Take storage for example: Dropbox as storage without document and device sync is commodity. Box.net as storage without document and device sync and collaboration is commodity. Apple’s iCloud as storage without ubiquitous local and iTunes media sync across devices is commodity. And Google Drive (as discussed here in Ben Kepes’ CloudU community) is also a commodity business not worth getting into had it not been for Google’s services such as Google Apps, Piccasa, and its media and unified communication capabilities under the Google Plus brand. The premiums from big data, mobile access and cloud comes from  a) dynamically assembled media and content, and interpreted data in the cloud, b) available wherever you need to consume and / or collaborate and c) insanely focused and simple interfaces to complex backends. That’s what enterprise developers are looking at if they really want to be on the money making side of these innovations.

These are the elephants as I see it.

Side Note/Disclaimer: Eric puts on mind-bending summits (he calls them conferences but I keep telling him that that doesn’t do justice to the content he produces). I’ve been an advisor to Defrag and  I’ve been privileged to keynote Defrag before and will be doing so again, later this year. But this is about Glue.

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.

Chalk this up to another example of why Marketing STILL doesn’t get social.

Social Times reports that the way to get more “Likes” on Facebook is to offer coupons to satiate the what’s-in-it-for-me hunger of an increasingly discriminating social networker.

This might well be that moment in social media marketing history when we look back and say – “what were we thinking??”

I quote:

A recent survey conducted by Ad Age/Ipsos Observer finds that coupons are the number one reason consumers “like” brands on Facebook.

We’ve all seen the popularity of daily deal sites like Groupon, but it turns out that good ol’ retail coupons are a great incentive for Faebook users to “like” a business page. The findings of the survey make sense: Facebook users are not typically willing to share their information and their network with just anyone, but it seems they’re more willing to do so if they get something in return

Basically, entice your visitors to ‘Like’ your business page by throwing them a discount coupon.

Look, I’m a big believer in in-bound marketing on the social web, done right. I’ve gained tremendously from it in my own work. It’s opened gigantic doors for me to communicate and sell the promise of social and collaborative business as a way to accelerate performance. But increasingly there’s data emerging about the hype that is social media marketing from a lead generation standpoint. And this kind of stuff just adds to the exuberance.

I never thought I would do a whole post on a single social networking gesture but this is about the larger issue of not getting sucked into the social vortex without careful thought and resource implications.

A ‘Like’, simply, is designed to imply that I like your product. In marketing lingo, that is supposed to mean that I’m at minimum an unqualified interested party, and sends a message back that I might be a candidate to move up the engagement funnel or spiral or what have you. And ultimately towards a pre-defined call-to-action.

Throw in a coupon and you’re playing with allegiances now. Sure, your ‘Likes’ will go up but does that really translate to likes? Or was it just for the coupon? Seems like nothing’s lost but is it worth the time of your marketing and sales teams to deal with the scores of follow-ups? This looks like a knock off of trade show marketing where we are duped into believing that 1000 interested prospects came to our booth where in reality 700 just wanted to drop their business card in the till for a chance to win an iPad2.

In traditional marketing this may fly as the cost and effort to send out a 1000 follow up emails is minimal. To do in-bound marketing right, you need to engage and the manual nature of this gets really expensive when you do more enticing to attract unqualified buyers. That ends up in your organization topping off marketing with even more marketing.

Get off the treadmill. Make sure you’re not marketing your marketing.

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.