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.

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.

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.

• 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.

Chris and I talked about how social and collaborative concepts can power real business challenges and opportunities, examples of strategic alignment, the value of social analytics towards employee performance / HR measurement and realizing benefit during and at point of scale.

Thanks to Aparna for inviting me and to Chris for a fun chat.

And here is the recording:

Good ole Brit humor.

Hat Tip: Oliver Marks. Via The Economist.

HANA is powered by in-memory computing – a way to store and process data in the main memory as opposed to disk storage . For a primer on In Memory, see this video of Hasso Plattner embedded in a post by ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett and this piece by CIO.com’s Chris Kanaracus.

Citing a use case, Oliver writes:

Here’s the problem many companies face today: global executive pipeline reports are at least a day old, making real-time decisions and tactical adjustments impossible. In-memory computing allows you to process huge amounts of real-time data in the main memory of a server to provide instantaneous results from analyses and transactions. By the time critical information or trends reach decision-makers, it could be too late. The benefits of in-memory computing are phenomenal – imagine being able to access real time operational information within seconds.

That’s a pretty amazing feat – surely to be appreciated by technologists who have lived through various generations of computing evolution as well as business struggling to make timely decisions.

But there’s a missing piece. I’m not belittling the value of in-memory in any way but Oliver’s post made me think hard about what’s needed for the benefits of  In-Memory processing to permeate business process in a scalable way. And my conclusion was this: unless the system is also going to magically make a decision or auto invoke an action (e.g. transact or place a stop order on a check) based on this real time insight , we have a universal bottleneck in that our decision makers who need to band together to use this data are woefully scattered (and worse, unknown) across most organizations today.

Of course, certain decisions are made by individuals and in those cases, there’s direct value from this technology. And if were recreating BI with these nifty advancements for the benefit of the executive brass all over again, that’s fine too. But the next wave of analytics needs to be pushed down into the hands of teams and line individuals to truly drive performance. And for that, we need a strategically designed collaborative fabric that can locate the right people to group together to leverage this real time data, facilitate the decision in an auditable fashion and update systems of record with better, more timely data, accordingly. Well designed collaborative plans will leverage dynamic rich identity profiles and and the appropriate collaboration metaphor (streams, project spaces, etc) to create that perfect compliment to real time data and intelligence access. Together, these two advancements comprehensively accelerate process performance.

Today’s often siloed ERP system-based designs stand in sharp contrast to a more people centric enterprise footprint that is needed to improve discrete non repeatable business output. In-Memory has tremendous promise and I loved the demos at SAP Sapphire. And I expect to see more at SAPTechEd next week. But I hope its’ wide scale adoption doesn’t stutter due to an acute case of technology innovation outpacing practical, scalable, real world applicability.

I remember how we used to admire Cisco’s ability to do a virtual close on its accounting books every day. That was a cool technology feat for its time. But it didn’t do much to help the company preemptively respond to the downward demand forecast thanks to the market crash of the dot com days or the recent recession. Analytics and Business Intelligence capabilities needs to leave the top floors and corner offices and become an active tool for all managers and workers in the enterprise. In-Memory brings that sophistication no doubt but collaboration federates the use of this amazingly accurate snapshot of progress-in-the- moment.

Over 60 Re-Tweets on Twitter as of April 19th resulting in god knows how many tens of thousands of impressions on Twitter. Yay for social media syndication.

There’s only one problem. That link hasn’t worked for three days.

So, basically, this link was never even clicked on before being re-tweeted.

Now these good intentioned folks may have well wanted to read the link later and I’m no one to judge how each of us as participants choose to use the medium. But if Re-Tweets are being considered an acknowledgment of quality content and subsequently relied upon as a metric by marketers, a Re-Tweet itself can clearly be a terrible measure.

I’m a huge advocate for social media engagement as an important component of marketing. It’s got mucho potential. That said, we complain about inaccurate open or click through rates with respect to email marketing but measuring the effectiveness and true reach of social media has a long long way to go as well.

So if a link drops on Twitter but there was nothing there to read, will it make a sound? You betcha. A really really loud, albeit hollow sound.

Hoping practical topics such as this come up at the 140 conference today.

First: this article on eMarketer titled: “Behavioral Targeting Misses Mark” quotes a study by  researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of California Berkeley School of Law and the Annenberg Public Policy Center:

“Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests,” according to the paper. “Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages— between 73% and 86%—say they would not want such advertising.”

As important, the article goes on to show that close to 50% might be ok if behavioral targeting its used to surface deal and promotions. Take away: sort out the “what’s in it for me” incentive and you have a better chance at earning my permission to monitor my movements.

Second: SocialCast, a leading micro blogging and collaboration platform for the enterprise announced a user interface refresh and its new Social Business Intelligence Premium service offering that in their own words, helps organizations with “real-time feedback and actionable insights into the employees, topics and conversations that users are finding important and that spur active participation.” A detailed review by Alex Williams, the new ReadWriteWeb Enterprise blogger, here.

The Case for Enterprise Social Behavioral Analytics:

Enterprise Social Analytics can bring significant benefit towards performance acceleration through a better understanding of how individuals and groups behave in the context of business process. Some examples….

HR Performance

If you’ve moved up the ladder at work, you’re aware of 2 things: 1) Manager/Skip Level/ Peer Performance reviews drive progression BUT 2) Soft Metrics (i.e. how your boss and peers generally feel about you) often trump hard documented goals.

Enter Social Analytics. You now have the opportunity to fold in important behavioral data such as degree of sharing, helping, engaging, contribution and involvement, giving HR a broader set of data points about the employees allegiance to the firm and dare I say, employee lifetime (with the company at least) value. These important data points complement tradition performance metrics giving you a sense of how critical each employee might be to a business unit, a product line, a geographic territory and ultimately to the company as a whole.

Communications Performance

Moving beyond people monitoring, the organization gets a clear sense of what’s top of mind for employees based on participation as well as lurking trends, how well a news announcement is being received by employees in near real time or bubbling issues that they need to nip before they take a life of their own. And on and on.

I’ve yet to come by a large organization where executive communications pushed out via email and intranets gets acceptable readership rates. Thus, millions are spent getting people to listen and engage in a typical large enterprise. With social computing constructs, we have the opportunity to carefully fold in emergent structures to compliment traditional top down communications designs. Employees now can become crucial information brokers for these communications and social analytics gives exec comms a good idea of which pockets of influence to tap into to spread specific messages.

Line of Business Performance

Where this really starts to get interesting in terms of business objectives alignment is learning how the organization interacts in the context of known functions such as field marketing, product launches, customer pitches and support inquiries. Social analytics show how the teams as well as unsuspecting groups in the organization came together (or not) to drive performance at the activity or process level. There’s crucial lessons to be learned here in terms of not only identifying who the rock stars were, but also how to institutionalize well performing processes, simple hacks and interaction models going forward.

Its Not All Rosy Though….

Transparency is a two way street

Whilst employees are clamoring for more transparency and open work constructs, that really applies primarily to inbound transparency – seeing what management and peers are doing. The other form – outbound transparency, where the enterprise monitors their every move, might be another story. And the skeptics will consider that to be a form of behavioral monitoring. Design and communication is key.

Incentive

Similar to consumer behavioral targeting, if the what’s-in-it-for-me incentive is not clear, the naysayers will come out of the woodwork. Analytics need to be returned back to individuals so they can use it to perform better. Help individuals work faster/better by leveraging network relationship and usage insights beyond management insight.

Policy

Policy will cut both ways. First, there’s a whole slew of enterprises that won’t have any of this for policy and legal reasons. For those, social analytics will have a place but its going to be more about ‘what’ and not the ‘who’. For others, they will need insist on paper trail into every discussion.

Shedding the Perception of Behavioral Targeting in favor for Performance Acceleration

There’s a boat load of insight to be had from social constructs in the enterprise and the Socialcast release is a really commendable version one of where social analytics need to start. And its only a first release. But I hope Enterprise 2.0 vendors consider these older reporting- style BI constructs that were designed only for management, to be ground zero.

Mike Gotta of the Burton Group suggests that “Analytics may be the key to the long-term success of the company as well – social messaging is something that will become a feature within larger platforms from IBM and Microsoft.” I agree in general, though what we’ve traditionally known to be ‘BI’ is in for a serious revamping in preparation for the coming of the socially networked enterprise. True to the dynamic, in-the-flow nature of social computing constructs and tools, analytics need to unlatch themselves from line items in reports that no one reads, and re-appear as nuggets of decision facilitation data points that support individual and organizational performance objectives. If I’m a Financial Analyst writing a report about Pork Belly Futures, the analytics should be the plumbing that suggests who else I should be talking to and what documents I should be looking at for reference, across the network. Now that’s enabling performance acceleration.

The net net is that if enterprise social analytics are going to look like behavioral analytics on the consumer web, they’ll be likened to targeting engines. In the case of the consumer web, that means more ads or some yet-to-be-determined interpretation of my interests in the future. In the context of the enterprise, it means possibly targeting my career progression or paycheck. Contrast that with a model where its a balance between both organizational wide insight, plus in the flow, contextual insight for individuals and groups. Now you have the “what’s in it for me” data point covered and you might have secured some currency to gather organizational wide analytics as well. All up, extremely important considerations for overall programmatic design in the context of accelerating performance via social computing concepts.

This represents a sliver of the types of customer discussions I’m seeing around the larger issue of actionable insight. I expect more and more vendors to be announcing analytics in the near future and there’s no question about how valuable management level sight can be (as I lay out above). Though, I for one hope that analytics/BI is re-casted as raw ingredients to individual decision support for better product output, beyond pie charts.