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).

The days of leading countries or companies via a one-way conversation are over,” says Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN and the author of the book “How.” “The old system of ‘command and control’ — using carrots and sticks — to exert power over people is fast being replaced by ‘connect and collaborate’ — to generate power through people.” Leaders and managers cannot just impose their will, adds Seidman. “Now you have to have a two-way conversation that connects deeply with your citizens or customers or employees.

Netflix had a one-way conversation about raising prices with its customers, who instantly self-organized; some 800,000 bolted, and the stock plunged. Bank of America had a one-way conversation about charging a $5 fee on debit cards, and its customers forced the global bank to reverse itself and apologize. Putin thought he had power over his people and could impose whatever he wanted and is now being forced into a conversation to justify staying in power. Coca-Cola repackaged its flagship soft drink in white cans for the holidays. But an outcry of “blasphemy” from consumers forced Coke to switch back from white cans to red cans in a week. Last year, Gap ditched its new logo after a week of online backlash by customers.

Tom calls it a problem of one way conversations. He’s spot on. And he cites kerfuffles that many of us are all too familiar with.

This morning, I dipped into the Social Business Atlanta Summit twitter stream, organized by the super smart Brent Leary. I encourage you to take a look at the hashtag on Twitter but this comment made by GetSatisfaction Executive Jeff Nolan and syndicated by Paul Greenberg (both fellow Enterprise Irregulars), stuck with me:

@pgreenbe: #socialbizatl @jeffnolan in last 30 yrs, customers were tangential to the process; now they are at the core of it all”

So how do you have a two way conversation as Tom suggests and move customers to the core, as Jeff says?

You do it by being connected to your customers in the public forum and on your customer communities, of course. But also making sure that your employees and partners are as wired internally to collaborate across the entire engagement chain. The kinds of pickles that Tom describes above emanated from different spark points across the organization. Sometimes the root cause is in marketing, other times its a product design issue and other times it could be a logistics problems. All these constituencies need to be connected to the customer and to each other if were going to get anywhere close to a two way conversational model and putting their needs “at the core of it all”.

Neither that two way conversation nor customer centricity will come from your traditional ERP or HR or CRM systems, alone. It comes from having a collaborative fabric (and social software) that transcends the work done in your process systems and data served by your performance and analytics systems by connecting people who are silo’d by a functional organizational design. Today’s customer expects us to break old notions of front and back office, or primary and support activities made famous by Michael Porter’s value chain framework that most large organizations subscribe to. SuperVALU is doing it, Toshiba is doing it, Target is doing it, Spotify and WebTrends are doing it. The list goes on.

To be clear, I’m not advocating that you throw these process systems out. They are your systems of record. I’m saying you need to cut through them with people engagement layers.

Coca Cola didn’t turn the cans from red to white because they were bored – they thought the customer would like it. But they didn’t tap the network effectively to test their hypothesis. Similarly, Bank of America probably thought that 5 bucks, the price of a morning venti Mocha, won’t matter. It did and the jokes on them for not testing the idea first which is dead simple in todays socially networked customer world.

As executives trying to understand what information flow and people connectivity in the 21st century means means to you and your organizational performance objectives, its the very concepts around social and collaborative approaches that become the central design theme for such-directional connectivity to keep your employees, customers and partners in synchronicity.

I’m not a fan of overtly revolutionary / FUD’ish tones on why you will be forced to embrace social and collaborative ways of work. True – it sometimes takes catastrophes to give us the needed kick in the rear to change how we organize and share.  9/11 was one such catastrophe that made governments re-think how they share intelligence. And for many Heads of State and politicians, WikiLeaks was another that also led to design change. But it doesn’t have to be so. Get ahead of it and start understanding how traditional process technology has shackled knowledge, data and content into silos and how simple engagement platforms can free the best talent up, to rally around business objectives and customer needs.

The snafus that Tom describes occurred not because of the social web. But Tom’s post supports the notion that the customer / purveyor contract has changed thanks to the social web which gives prospects and customers organized power to voice opinion and that we need to adapt accordingly.

His list of public, and even market-moving failures above, will sadly remain a dynamic one. So enhance your process-laden one way communication at customers, with conversation synchronicity across customers, partners and employees so you’re not in his sequel post any time soon.

Comments rolling in on Google Plus, here.

Update: This post was referenced in Harvard Business Review by N ilofer Merchant who re-visits the relevancy of Porter’s model, given today’s emerging need to create connected enterprises.

Lenny wanted to dig deeper into Social Business and get into the ‘why’s’ and ‘how’s’. We talked about a decisive approach to connecting customers, employees and partners and covered a number of topics including:

• The implications of todays increasingly social, vocal social customer on business and why Social CRM matters to customers and to the sales enablement process.
• Why building and connecting vibrant employee and partner engagement networks is imperative to get customer relationship management in the 21st century, right.
• How analytics will play a role.
• And finally, how organizations can get started.

Conversations with Industry Innovators Series with Lenny Liebmann.

“Live Richly”, the tag line adopted by Citi years ago was always one my favorites. More so than even Apple’s “Think Different”. Within seconds, Live Richly made you re-think personal money management from one of a die-rich strategy to one that suggested an enjoyable journey might be entirely possible.

Live Richly also led me to think about how employees would like to spend their 9-5 workday. Dying richly equates to just the paycheck that comes at the end, which of course is important. But living richly comes from richness in terms of peer, partner and customer interactions, in terms of richer quality of insight, richer intellectual stimulation, richer idea creation and ultimately, richer output with respect to the stated business goal.

Traditional structured enterprise software that binds participants to a forced sequence of steps is far more restraining and claustrophobic than the highest walls of any office cubicle. It insists that work gets done from start to finish in a certain way, limited to only what you think/guess to be the best answer, and with little maneuverability until well after the outcome and when its often too late to course correct. In and of itself, there’s no richness of anything in that. We might as well sit robots down at the keyboard, like we do on the factory floor.

Structured process software such as ERP, CRM, ECM, SCM and the like, you absolutely need. It closes the books, keeps the various authorities happy and offers an audit trail.  And some jobs are in fact robotic in nature. But for the rest, well designed collaborative approaches to work and effective use of social software reduces risk and improves output by enabling you to bring your rich network along with you to every blind corner, to every fork in the road and to every dart game presented by structured process. That’s improved outcomes for the business. And for employees, Working Richly day in and day out.

Gartner Research says a total of $3.8 Trillion will be spent on IT in 2012 by you and your peers. As buyers, before you start to spend your 2012 budgets on more of the same old, same old, take a deep breadth and envision how rich your working environment will be when its all said and done.

That’s all I’m saying.

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.

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.

1. Collaboration Moving Front and Center

Oracle seems to have rationalized its’ investments in the areas of content and collaboration technology and has come to terms with the idea that collaboration needs to be front and center in its’ portfolio offering. I asked Mark how he rationalized not catering to the other 80 odd percent of the average employees’ daily time that isn’t spent in one of Oracles’ ERP/CRM and other process apps in any integrated way. At a previous meeting with Oracle’s executive team earlier this year, it was clear that customers do have collaboration on their minds. And earlier yesterday, Anthony Lye, SVP, CRM, also confirmed that the subject of activity streams will be broached during the CRM keynotes. Mark responded with “I absolutely agree and stay tuned – there’s an announcement coming over the next 48 hours on collaboration”. Across these conversations what’s clear to me is this: Oracle will be declaring its intentions in both traditional collaboration and also some of the newer flavors characterized by enterprise social networking and activity streams.

We’r seeing a growing need for this in the market as collaboration needs mature and become more sophisticated beyond general purpose sharing. And so I have high hopes for a fitting response to collaboration that’s cognizant of process. Oracle is also one of the few companies that can, in principle, get this right. Given what I saw of Fusion’s Rich Identity features last year, it doesn’t seem like a stretch to expect that Oracle will infuse findability and collaboration into its overall business systems offering. So consider this a heads up for you fellow Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business gear heads out there. Fingers crossed that it isn’t just silo’d collaboration that ignores the needed context hidden inside the various business systems it offers.

2. Catering to the Exa-customer’s Cloud vs On-premise Needs.

Exalogic, Exadata, Exalytics. It’s all about the mammoth and gynormous here. Mark’s assessment is that Oracles’ primary customer base will look for a staged move to the cloud, if at all. In the way that it was described by Mark, the logic was this: large companies expanding to new regional markets may choose to go cloud and leave the mother ship on-premise. They may change that configuration at a later time and go all cloud, or extend cloud solutions to front end back end installations.   Oracle proposes to offer the needed flexibility using one code base as customers move to all cloud or partial cloud…or never cloud.

The message was that from a customer stand point, Oracle is ready if and when the customer is. An alternate interpretation of this would be the following: stretch out the license and maintenance revenue model of on-premise software for as long as the customer is willing / needs to keep an on premise foot print. Be ready with a plan B if the customer decides to shop its technology needs and considers cloud based systems a viable option.

3. On the new crop of Competition:

It seems as if Oracle finally has a game plan to play both offense and defense with cloud based providers. To be clear, no names were named but its easy to connect the dots and see that companies such as Workday and Salesforce.com were reference points. The market view presented by Mark was this:

• Newer cloud based offerings already have an older code base compared to Oracles’ OnDemand line.
• They don’t currently have the vertical specialty that Oracle’s customers look for.
• They don’t have the safe pair of hands /maturity of Oracle.
• They don’t have the integrated suite of all ERP applications.
• And finally, Oracle has the kind of scale of operations that’s needed to carpet bomb the large company buyer landscape with an OnDemand value proposition.

Looked at in totality, this a very different message from the previous points of view that went from the cloud isn’t new to the cloud exists but it’s best in a box. Clearly there was a recognition that Oracle’s market is in fact considering alternate solutions that don’t only come from the likes of SAP. And so it’s game on, from Oracle’s stand-point.

So there you go. I’m looking forward to seeing how this all comes to fruition over the next couple of days….

Comments rolling in on Google Plus, here.

Image Credit: Mike Maloney

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.

Professor McAfee pulled together some great posts (as well as my Dreamforce 11 wrap up post) that support a central work-centric collaboration theme, encapsulated by this:

Succeeding ‘unignorably’ here means generating tangible business value for the enterprise: raising revenue or profit, cutting cost or time. It doesn’t just mean making the business more social, humane, people-centric, and so on.

For those of you regular readers of this blog, you know thats music to my ears. And as I said to Professor McAfee privately, I’m grateful for his continued call to support a pragmatic version of what we call social computing. And I dig his characterization of this as succeeding unignorably which in my mind doesn’t translate to lack of passion, hope or excitement in any way, but first and foremost, it has a sense of purpose behind yet.

To be fair, he also doesn’t discount the value of ambient discovery and connections – something I absolutely believe to be true:

For some purposes, this is OK. Narrating your work via blogs or microblogs so that others can find you and access your expertise is a great standalone use case, as is narrating your ignorance —   asking questions to the enterprise as a whole without guessing in advance who will know the answer.

I’ve intentionally stayed out of naming debate on whether this is Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business.  I’ve never believed that customers come looking for either one of those. For horizontal propositions such as employee/customer/partner wide solutions, they try to make sense of whats being sold behind shiny monikers.

Theres a lot of FUD floating around these days on the pitfalls of not becoming ‘social’ that’s unfortunate and unnecessary. No need for that – the state of the markets today and the shifting global competitive landscape offers real, substantiated FUD already. In reality, organizations are looking to optimize their 9-5 in the face of market chaos, globalization, seriously inefficient demand and supply chains, and yes, the changing dynamic of the prospect and customer, thanks to the social web. I’ve covered all these topics here on this blog and so have others. Amongst other execution pathways such has hiring appropriately, leading effectively and training, they seek to also do this by the decisive use of new technology – be that extracting more umph from their existing investments or new advancements such as in-memory computing, the promise of the cloud, social, devices, internet-of-things or what ever comes next.

Attempts to ring fence the best of the Enterprise 2.0 thought leadership as Social Business is also unfortunate and hasn’t led to any additional progress. Salesforce.com, the topic of my initial post, has chosen to use yet another term in Social Enterprise. Whilst I also don’t believe that the majority of the market will buy into what this company sells just because they adopted Social Enterprise as a name, what I’m appreciative of is that the messaging doesn’t attempt to kidnap the historical thinking on this topic. And by that same measure, I hope that the real customer proposition behind ‘Social Enterprise’, as characterized by these ISV endorsements and other platform announcements doesn’t get hijacked by the social business catch-all thats now increasngly adopted by marketing / communications agencies and consultancies.

In reality, those ISVs that have signed up to build or integrate with Force.com and Chatter will hear a call for collaboration and will subsequently supply their integrated technology to customers to meet that demand. I just don’t see Workday or Kenandy or Concur getting too many customer calls demanding that they deliver a social business, pronto. What they will be asked for are effective, scalable and decision-driving ways to collaborate on events generated by their business systems, to enrichen business output.

Even salesforce.com recognizes where the real value of this is. If you looked up at the various billboards hanging off the ceiling on the expo floor at Dreamforce, guess what you saw above the Chatter booths? Not Social Enterprise, definitely not Social Business or Enterprise 2.0…. but simply, Collaborate. And on the ground at the demo booths you saw example after example of meaningful use cases around contextual collaboration.

Even Jive Software’s website messaging these days leads with the more palatable  ”The new way to business”. I suspect as more organizations join their new App Store, we’ll see another strong example of context injected into the central collaborative fabric that Jive provides. Gia Lyons said on Twitter yesterday that Accenture will be speaking about process integration with collaboration at a Jive Event. Cool.

I don’t particularly mind what name is used. I just think that to gain credibility, its really important not to be presumptive about the outcome. ERP financials software and associated services was sold as just that. Not a ‘Have a blow-out earnings quarter’ solution. That just sounds hokey.

When we look back in 5-10 years, will we have successfully made enterprises more ‘social’? No question about it. But to get there, as practitioners working hard on this every day and executives betting political currency on these programs, I suggest embracing practical ways to collaborate to show the true power of people centric enterprises. It works for our line of work but don’t take my word for it – listen to two seasoned practitioners on this subject.

Sincere thanks to Professor McAfee for chiming in.