Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

April marks my one-year anniversary at SAP.

It’s been an incredible ride to say the least. I’m a lucky guy – I came to SAP to help build out its products and go-to-market in the social and collaborative software category. But what I really I got was a chance to get in on the ground floor of a unique opportunity to participate in shaping SAPs place in the larger software category with SAP Cloud.

Our mantra has always been clear that social is not a destination but a critical enabler to established performance KPIs and that’s what driven our product strategy and our value proposition to customers. We started not with social but with the state of our customers businesses – both challenges and opportunities to drive revenue, lower cost and mitigate risk. And then identified the needed dance between data, business process, content and people. And executed like mad against that strategy culminating in a re-launch in last year.

Thanks to the efforts of an incredible cross-functional team we doubled our growth in 2012. The sheer tenacity and close partnership between SAPs amazing cloud and on premise application development teams has been something to write home about. I was warned numerous times about how impractical cross-functional collaboration can be. But the lines between transactions, process and collaboration have been blurred forever and the customer demands a default process + social experience, now. And the teams made it happen.

I’ve always been straight forward with respect to my opinion about the various strands of “social business”, here. But the role of social and collaborative constructs to truly accelerate performance in the enterprise has never been more critical. I’ve covered this on this blog for 4 years now and in my past roles but after working closely with customers and with numerous internal industry and products groups at SAP, you truly get an appreciation for the role that systems of record play every day but also the gaps that remain in day to day work for your customers, your employees and your partners.

The power of connected networks, the availability of business and process context in the cloud or on premise or both is extremely powerful. This is why I was attracted to a company rooted in business process. As an industry, we’re just starting to understand how to leverage this. SAP has given me the opportunity to go really deep on this subject – understanding how for instance, thousands of contingent retail employees, or floor staff at casinos need to be on boarded and enabled at scale, or the costs of ramping up sales teams, the power of customer networks thanks to SAP SCN community efforts, or how the white spaces in tight fraud management processes or in transportation and logistics can expose unmitigated risk. And against that backdrop, where social collaboration can move the needle and where it can’t and with cloud economics in mind. I could go on and on.

I’m really privileged to be able to do what I do and especially at a time when the re-wiring of enterprise software to focus on getting work done (as opposed to a list of features) is only now underway.

A big thanks to our team and the teams we work with across SAP, every day.

Phase 1: Check.

Last week I had the privilege of keynoting CeBIT in Hanover. The theme was “Shareconomy“. From the CeBIT website:

“Shareconomy” describes the societal shift from owning to sharing. According to Pörschmann, this is evident in several dimensions: “First, Shareconomy is profoundly influencing enterprise processes, because social media tools will become more and more popular. Second, the Internet is the place for teamwork, both in and outside the company. Partners, consultants, suppliers and customers will be more closely integrated as part of a networked process. The borders separating companies and organizations will become ever more transparent. Therefore, employees and managers must rethink and be prepared to share know-how, contacts and assets.”

My presentation was on the commercial value and benefit of the Shareconomy for the Enterprise. And if you have read this blog before, you know that I took the idea of “Facebooking of the global economy” to task somewhat. -). But in all seriousness, the theme was fantastic and the questions after were very engaging.

When I find a link to all of the keynote presentations I will update it here but I highly recommend giving them a quick look. Really excellent content from a great group of industry doers and thinkers.

Here are my slides on SlideShare:

This snippet by way of Stowe Boyd really struck a chord with me with respect to the difference between social networks and enterprise social networks. Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook got called out by Maureen Dowd in this New York TImes article:

“Sandberg may mean well, and she may be setting up a run for national office. But she doesn’t understand the difference between a social movement and a social network marketing campaign. Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching people”

I’m not going to debate Sandbergs motives in the context of Maureen’s article – not my bag. But as I spend my time thinking about product vs real established customer needs at work, this last statement about connecting vs reaching exposes the stark difference between consumer social networking and what happens in the world of work.

Enterprise social networking as we’ve known it thus far has had the exact opposite problem:  Just because digital technology makes reaching possible doesn’t mean you’re actually connecting.

Reaching people is accounted for. It’s called Email. In the world of work, connecting doesn’t come from just bringing people together. Really really connecting to impact performance and execution comes from surrounding real purpose and context such as a sales forecast data point, a problematic travel expense statement, a curve ball customer request, a need for supplier arbitration, with your network of people. You can reach people all day long but to get the network to truly galvanize around a problem, you need to infuse smart expertise identification and social or collaboration at the point where problems and opportunities emerge.

This is the expectation of “social”, in the enterprise.

The Kill Email meme never really dies. Ever since the dawn of enterprise social computing circa 2006, the value proposition has been waffling between being a process killer to a portal killer and my favorite, an email killer. Stare Email in the face all you want. She’s looking back and laughing at you.

Then I saw this by Stowe Boyd over at GigaOm Pro. Stowe cites some insightful findings in Nassim Tableb’s book “The Surprising Truth: Technology Is Aging in Reverse“;

“We’re living in a Black Swan world, but what does this mean for the future of technology? My new book Antifragile argues that technologies, ideas, and theories – anything informational or cultural, as opposed to physical – age in reverse.

We may be trained to think that the new is about to overcome the old, but that’s just an optical illusion. Because the failure rate of the new is much, much higher than the failure rate of the old. When you see a young child and an old adult, you can be confident that the younger will likely survive the elder.

Yet with something nonperishable like a technology, that’s not the case.

There are two possibilities: Either both are expected to have the same additional life expectancy, or the old is expected to have a longer expectancy than the young. In this situation, if the old is 80 and the young is 10, the elder is expected to live eight times as long as the younger one.”

Stowe ends with:

“So, applying Taleb’s reasoning and Benoit Mandelbrot’s version of the Lindy effect, our modern social technologies — most of which haven’t been with us more than five years — can be guaranteed to be with us only an addition five years or so. And those pre- or proto-social technologies — like instant messaging and email — may be with us 50 years or more, even if the social tools don’t fall into disuse.”

Here’s the thing about reducing email with social networking: if you hate email because a good chunk of it is a irrelevant stream of information someone pushed at you without your consent, you aint seen nothing yet. Silo’d enterprise social networking can be way worse – not only do you have people pushing stuff at you, you have system notifications coming from applications drowning out even the few golden nuggets. As Constellation Research’s Alan Lepofsky wrote:

“Any reduction in the number of emails is a good thing. OMG I hate this one. Now instead of checking my inbox I have to check Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Yammer, LinkedIn, etc. Uggghhhh. Bifurcation of information is a real problem. Yes all these tools can send email notifications, but isn’t the point to reduce email? Yes many streams can aggregate information from multiple sources, but that just leads to a lot of noise, so how is that different than an inbox?”

Look, information overload is absolutely a huge problem. But enterprise social networking isn’t the obvious solution. What’s needed is what Stowe describes as “new communication technologies have to be a full order of magnitude better that those that came earlier”. That full order of magnitude won’t come from just shifting notifications from Outlook to SocialNetwork feeds. Rather, it will come from making it exponentially more efficient to message, to collaborate and to share in radically different ways where the outcome is 5-10-50 times better. And one of those ways is to infuse: a) Comprehensive people discovery based on new identity paradigms, and b) Collaboration into core business activities and tasks and in a way that implicitly shows how collaboration capabilities available at whatever point of action – a business event like discussing an invoice exception, or facilitating sales budgeting within your Finance ERP application, or dispute resolution with a supplier – making it far more effective to drive execution and decisions than anything that your zero-IQ email inbox can even dream of handling.

Nassim points a new headache: regardless of your good intentions to kill email, the odd are against you. Moving from one dumb messaging paradigm like email to another dumb messaging paradigm like stand alone social networking won’t cut it.

But in actuality, the stakes are really high. On one hand, most core business activities have a huge unstructured component that happens outside transaction systems such as CRM, Talent Management or Supply Chain. But we have a ways to go when it comes to leveraging social tools to facilitate this change. On the other hand, none of us need statistics to really convince ourselves that email bankruptcy is a fact of working life for almost all of us. So clearly the opportunity to show a better approach is ripe.

There’s some amazing innovation out there to super charge email. Simple tools such as Rapportive, Boomerang, and this very nifty tool from AOL called Alto (Hat Tip, Jeff Nolan). Whilst I can’t live without some of these, in the large scheme of things these are short-term Tylenol tablets to a tenacious problem that’s going to keep getting worse.

The answer won’t come from these sophisticated email tools but rather, from re-thinking business applications which is clearly underway and subsumes a lot of my time as I think about our product. And as CIO’s, it’s time to reconsider messaging as infrastructure and business software as applications. Rather, these teams need to collectively think about what combination of technology can re-cast the very essence of digital messaging by making it smart, in context of work that you are doing, and available at the point of action and decision making.

Comments also rolling in on Google Plus, here.

Image Credit: ClearContext.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

;

Brilliant New York Times UX designer and author Alex Wright, someone I’ve had the privilege to work closely with, said to me a decade ago that “Tags are the new Mullet”. Back in the mid 2000′s, those garish word-clouds made popular by Delicious showed up everywhere and only those of us geekily-inclined really employed them in any consistent way.

Today’s mullet is the Activity Feed in Enterprise Social Networking applications. Don’t get me wrong – feeds have their purpose and their place. But as the pendulum swings carelessly from people to people, to machine to people and back, somehow, someone decided that the answer to enterprise social network ghost towns was to pipe transactional data into activity feeds and that would make it all all right. It helps for certain use cases but the behavioral change required to get consistent value from this can be herculean. And who asked for this massive work shift to begin with?

The next generation of successful social business programs won’t come from just cramming more information and data into social metaphors that no one asked for. It will come from bringing social metaphors right to the point of business context: be that an enterprise social network, an application, a location, an API or a Internet enabled device or machine.

Bit of a tactical post for a change but its something I’ve observed along the way and in the context of maturation of our industry, it’s important. And talk to Line Of Business or CIOs that have these running in their orgs for 6+ months – you’ll get a feel for this.

We did a dis-service to the promise of social business by just expecting that Facebook for the Enterprise would gather steam. It didn’t. Now lets really ask our selves how repeatable and practical it really is to assume massive behavior change on the end users part  as we expect that they will sit in front of a feed waiting for transactional pings.

It sounds geekily correct. Even technically awesome. But there’s more to social business than this.

When asked to review tent.io, a new protocol for, in their words, open, decentralized, social networking, Dave Winer writes:

Kinda reminds me of enterprise social networking in some ways. We say its about the people but thats just not enough in the business world. Facebook is about people and content, and in the consumer context, that works. You’re motivated to stay connected to friends and share. And as Instagram proved, there are 1.2 bilion reasons why Facebook wanted to own one of the most important contextual social object for sharing on the social web. Hell, Pinterest is all about pinning pictures.

Dave’s closer applies perfectly to many examples of how Enterprise Social Networking is used.

Think of a protocol like a road. You could have a wonderful road. Well paved. Wide lanes. Great rest areas. But if it goes from nowhere to nowhere, it’s not going to be very popular, no matter how nice it is.

Enterprise Social Networking can have all the bells and whistles: Feeds, Blogs, Screen Sharing, Presence and on and on. Many of these are absolutely critical. And you can’t put a price on well connected enterprises. But if simple engagement metaphors, borne out of contextual applicability is missing, Enterprise Social programs also risk becoming a beautiful road to nowhere.