Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

At its’ annual Dreamforce conference, Salesforce.com announced a version of Chatter, its collaboration application as a free utility. There’s lots of opining on Twitter and the blogs about how enterprise 2.0 start ups are going to be in serious trouble as Chatter steam rolls into their markets. There’s no question that Chatter is going to have a ridiculously big impact and they have a killer go to market strategy. But before we start writing obituary notes forcollaboration startups, lets really understand the world outside of Salesforce.coms existing customer base, the nascent state of social technology innovation today and the fact that – gasp – CIOs might just have a range of opinions on what’s optimal for their organizations. 

I’ll do a separate wrap up post on Dreamforce but here’s some thoughts on this peculiar particular discussion….

Chatter Sales Model

For starters, Free Chatter is for organizations that have salesforce.com accounts and from a go to market perspective, I’d take a somewhat similar route if I ran the business. The existing Salesforce.com account holders offer a very qualified pool of prospects for Chatter given its native out of the box integration with other salesforce.com and app exchange modules. As important, straight up fremium models to everyone can quickly create a cesspool of unqualified leads that are really expensive to convert to paying customers and require a very different sales model from what salesforce.com is used to. Execute closer to where the puck is – that’s what anyone who is injected with Oracle serum Benioff does.  Simple.

That said, Salesforce has roughly 90,000 customers that include a ton of small businesses and large enterprises. That’s a drop in the bucket in terms of TAM (totally addressable market) leaving lots of room for other vendors that are either not salesforce.com customers today or those that have seeded enterprise social computing and collaborative initiatives in pockets, other than sales, support and marketing.

Empty Social Spaces In Functional Process

The center of gravity of the salesforce relationship is in sales, support and marketing for the most part and their current integration points for Chatter reflects this. Sure, Free Chatter can work for all employees but in terms of meaningful process execution across enterprise functions, Chatter is still very closely tied to the CRM object model (opportunities, leads, customer and the like). What about product, bug, SKU, supplier component and other objects that the rest of the organization cares about? Free Chatter integration not really an option here from what I heard. So there’s plenty of open spaces where collaboration needs to still come to the rescue.

I’ve been calling from process alignment for over a year now and with respect, cautioned against what I’ve called “rudderless social”. And a set of enterprise 2.0 vendors have swiftly moved towards a model where they embed collaboration and social into process context across ERP enabled processes, beyond CRM. Klint Finley and Alex Williams at ReadWriteWeb have done a good job following this advancement.

Gaping Technology Leadership Holes

The social software space has spent the last 3 years on the consumerization of IT, and emulating and re-thinking elements of Twitter, Facebook and Wikipedia metaphors that are relevant to the enterprise context. There’s some value to this but its also a) distracting from the task of process improvement to impact operational and financial metrics, b) a fast path to commoditization, and c) been a catapult to entering price wars.

Chatter offers some very good process context this year with Cloud 2 but for the most part, winning via real IP creation still remains anyone’s game. Identity management is grasping for a overhaul, analytics have yet to embrace social data to facilitate decisions and finding the right people, conversations and process intelligence in real time at the right time is still no where near acceptable. Social done right can remove noise but social done wrong can horribly increase the volume of useless banter for individual usage scenarios. And so there’s plenty of room to define the future of work. In some ways start ups that are not anchored to the sea bed with the challenge of cannibalizing existing lines of revenue and can move more swiftly in these areas.

CIOs are from Mars AND Venus

One one hand, on the buy side, the needs of organizations outside of Hi-Tech silicon valley adopters are very very different and the need of a range of solutions will always have a place. I’ll cover this separately but on the the sell side, the lines are being re-drawn in the social software place as mature software organizations enter the field. And no, its not about the largely religious, sell-side messaging between Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business. Its got to do with how CIOs work social and collaboration into their enterprise stack and re-assess the different forces that brings these capabilities – Collaboration, UC, Content Management, Engagement, and ERP/CRM. Some will want to make the deep change in their collaborative fabric with the likes of Cisco Quad and Moxie Software. Others won’t want to ruffle too many features and will choose to go with simple, easy to procure engagement layering on top of collaborative stacks such as Microsoft SharePoint.  Chatter is closer to the latter but its certainly not the only game in town. The Yammers and Socialcasts make it just as easy to procure, are also in the cloud, and arguably with a Switzerland model – equally impactful to all business processes.

Closing thoughts….

As I leave Dreamforce and settle in at GigaOMs Net:Work conference (live feed here) right now, these and other opportunities start to become clear for the rest of the software market. And based on our work every day with some of the leading organizations in the world that are looking to use collaboration to improve employee, partner and customer performance, I’ll re-iterate what I’ve said before: Chatter is going to be big and in a year it’s made commendable in-roads already, masterfully leveraging its distribution reach. I loved some of the process thinking announced here at Dreamforce and how app exchange partners that I spoke with are leveraging Chatter to enrichen their process applications. And I’ve always thought coming at social computing from a sales, support and marketing angle is extremely palatable to certain types of orgs as its close to revenue and customer satisfaction.

This release re-enforces all these elements. But no, that doesn’t mean it botches all other options and current and future innovation opportunities that the market hasn’t seen and will come to expect in the years to come.

- Sameer | @sameerpatel

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Social Business

Image Design Credit: My sister, Zia.

A few months ago I opined on the difference between Innovation and Innovation Cultures here, on this blog. It was a riff inspired by a post by Pat Lencioni on Bloomberg/Businessweek that largely dismissed Innovation programs, saying":

As heretical as that may seem to those who want to believe that “innovation is everyone’s business,” consider that even the most innovative and creative organizations need far more people to be dutiful, enthusiastic, and consistent in their work than innovative or creative.”

Whilst the general theme of bringing a huge dose of practical appeals to my thinking on management and next generation enterprises, the article takes an almost lazy swipe at all things innovation that led me to distinguish between everyone becoming full time innovators vs. fostering innovative cultures.

But it’s important to note that this line of thinking offered in BusinessWeek joins a host of voices that are questioning the basic value of innovation programs from a cost/benefit and quality perspective. I’ve seen this first hand with leadership teams we engage with: Where executives hobnobbing on golf courses originally heard about ideation programs and isolated success stories of how others found diamonds in the rough, they are also now hearing about how many of these efforts created a cesspool of ideas that have little to do with operating and financial metrics that shareholders care about.  And often, ideologists of all things “open” have fueled the fire with statements such as “there’s no such thing as a bad idea.”. The reality is that orgs continue to have a limited appetite to experiment in these recessionary times and so the pundits have a field day with pushing pessimistic and myopic strands of innovation management.

Next week I’m going to be part of the keynote line up at the Defrag Conference and will expand on this topic. There are a few important considerations for both practitioners looking to infuse innovative thinking into their organizations as well as for vendors that are pushing innovation platforms or features as part of the enterprise social software bag of tricks. Like every other area of performance acceleration via social and collaborative constructs, Innovation needs to step up, pronto. And I hope to spark a discussion on making a case for a more practical justification for infusing innovative instincts into the enterprise fabric.

This year, Defrag offers a slightly altered agenda – showcasing start up driven disruption as it has always done but also providing a cold shower balancing that with leading large enterprise thinking from the bunch of smarty pants that call themselves the Enterprise Irregulars. Many of these folks are people I consider friends or I highly respect. And I know they will kill it. In addition, look for some really smart keynotes from the likes of my former colleague, Alex Wright, Maggie Fox, Jeff Dachis, Dion Hinchcliffe, Professor Vivek Wadhwa and others.

At almost any other conference, it would be sacrilege to have so many vendors on stage. But Defrag is different. Since the topic is about disrupting the status quo of today with what can look like abstract ideas that will only gestate in the near future, it’s almost impossible to have a discussion about future trends in the absence of raw passion that only entrepreneurs can exhibit. And Defrag provides the venue for this.

When you look at the agenda at Defrag (20% discount code “spkrmagic1” here) from a birds eye view, you see a pack of hyenas (READ: a bunch of startups) hard at work, poking and prodding the Googles, Amazons, Microsofts, and Facebooks of today with radically new approaches that could disrupt service provisioning as we know it today. This is how I recently described Defrag to a customer.

Themes include:

Apps, Marketplaces and Platforms, Analytics, Crowds and Innovation, Big Data and Collaboration

So even if Innovation is not your bag, you will learn other stuff that makes you more smarter about where the proverbial puck will be. And hopefully get you thinking about how you can capitalize on these new opportunities.

See you in Colorado.

A few weeks ago I did a video cast hosted by IBM on the “Social Workplace”.   We talked about what tomorrows workplace will look like, discussed what is a red hot issue these days – preparing for millennials and their expectations for the workplace, and finally, the challenges and the opportunities for HR and performance acceleration in the enterprise in general. IBM released an excellent  report on Working beyond Borders that sparked this conversation. Link to the report, here.

Included in the video are some really sharp folks: Jennifer Okimoto from IBM Global  Services, Dr. Jennifer Beal from the Center of Creative Leadership and  Josip Petrusa, a Gen Y/millennial blogger.

Organizations are increasingly re-thinking the design of their collaborative fabric in the face of market consolidation, globalization and of course, the increasingly social prospect and customer. This has a big impact on how they engage with customers, how they innovate, how they reduce risk and build products. Workplace performance constructs become an important consideration and one that puts IT and HR in pole position to help business groups break down walls between customers, employees and partners in a mature and practical  way.   This stands in sharp contrast to a spray and pray social strategy where meaningful execution components can get lost in the hype.

Each of the panelists articulated decisive value propositions for adopting more fluid ways of work via new social and collaborative constructs, based on grounded business need.

Here is a video of just the highlights.

If you like, an archive of the whole show can also be found here.

IBM has recently completed a study on the Social Workplace, based on conversations with over 700 Chief Human Resource Officers worldwide. The study is focused on the following:

• Cultivating creative leaders — who can more nimbly lead in complex,
  global environments
• Mobilizing for greater speed and flexibility — producing significantly greater
  capability to adjust underlying costs and faster ways to allocate talent
• Capitalizing on collective intelligence — through much more effective
  collaboration across increasingly global teams.

Heres a summary of what IBM researchers found:

We surveyed more than 700 Chief Human Resource Officers (CHROs) in 61 countries around the world, from companies large to small, and in both mature and growth markets. From in-depth conversations with hundreds of HR leaders, we found that numerous boundaries are restricting the ability of organizations to effectively match resources with opportunities. CHROs told us key gaps exist in the ability of their companies to develop future leaders, rapidly develop workforce skills and capabilities, and effectively collaborate and share knowledge.

IBM has been kind enough to ask me to join the Live Stream Panel to talk about the findings and comment based on what we are seeing in our customer work and experience.

The timing is great since I just spent 3 days in Monterrey with HR leaders from some of the largest organizations in the world discussing and debating what the five year outlook for HR and Collaboration looks like and how it supports burning talent acquisition and performance issues.

Here is some information on the event:

Panelists
Jennifer Okimoto, IBM Global Business Services, Strategy & Transformation, Organization & People
Dr. Jennifer Deal, research scientist, Center for Creative Leadership
Sameer Patel, partner, the Sovos Group, Enterprise 2.0, Organizational Leadership & Collaboration strategist

Video Cast: Here’s where you can chime in to the video cast tomorrow – http://bit.ly/vPanel2

Link to the Report: IBM | The 2010 IBM Global Chief Human Resource Officer Study

Next week, The Future of Talent Institute will be hosting its monthly webinar on talent performance. The good folks at the institute were kind enough to ask me to speak about why HR should care about Enterprise 2.0.

I’m going to keep it pretty high level – talk about where we’ve been as organizations over the last decade, the changing nature of tomorrows customer and of course, and why its imperative that we become 21st collaborative enterprises. Most important, how HR can play a pivotal role in leading this transition.

The Webinar is for HR leaders to get high level insights into the following:

• Understand the value of collaboration to responding to current opportunities as well as challenges of today’s business environment;

• Why HR is in pole position to lead the way;

• Provide an overview of the benefits of layering in new collaborative constructs and social software at large enterprises; and,

• Provide a framework for understanding how to look at potential technology offerings.

• Sharpen your questions and get a clearer perspective about what is ahead.

Sincere thanks to Susan Burns and Kevin Wheeler of the Institute for having me on.

About the Institute:

The Future of Talent Institute is a consortium of organizations and individuals who explore emerging issues in talent management, staffing, recruiting, employee development, retention and leadership development. Our members comprise a wide range of sizes, industries and locations.  We have members from Europe, Australia, and Asia as well as North America. We have Fortune 500 organizations and many that are start-ups or very small.

We focus on providing early insights into what is about to happen in the talent world. We look at employment and demographics trends as well as the differences between generations and changing workforce attitudes.  While it is not hard to find facts related to talent, it is much harder to make sense of them.  And that is what we specialize in – making sense and providing a context for the many perspectives that exist regarding the talent market.

Our surveys, white papers, webinars, on-line chat forums, and face-to-face meet-ups give you information and advice to help you chart a more successful talent strategy.

Event Details:

The event is  on Tuesday, October 5th at 2pm PST and is free to attend. Click here to Register.  More details on the event here.

Look forward to engaging with you on the call.

Ever since I started blogging about the work we do around collaboration and strategic use of enterprise social software, I’ve long advocated for purpose built, in context use of social constructs to make a meaningful impact on business performance. One one hand, Enterprise 2.0 – the value proposition and enabling software began its journey as a stand alone solution trying to unseat Microsoft SharePoint. Most vendors have begun to focus on contextual use cases centered on business process or via ERP and CRM process integration, to surgically enhance specific outcomes. Be those CRM via PBWorks, Crowdsourced Innovation via Spigit, Supplier Management Via RollStream, and the like.

Coming at it from the other end, Enterprise Resource Planning Applications, Supply Chain Optimization Apps or Customer Relationship Management Apps – the BIG systems of record at larger enterprises, have seen little business process innovation in the last decade. Most of the innovation has been on the infrastructure and delivery end of the stack or feature updates. On Premise to Cloud based services, Feature Release X to Release Y, In Memory Databases and Applications for faster throughput and access. Significant benefits to IT and to the end user from this, no doubt, but more to do with convenience and evolutionary improvement, as opposed to objective re-thinking on how to best execute a given business activity, today.

Injecting Social at the Source with Fusion

What we haven’t really seen is back to the drawing board innovation on business process design. Over the last decade we’ve mistakenly begun to believe that the best way to execute a given business activity is synonymous with how our ERP systems enforced our way of work. Ever since the wide scale adoption of ERP applications, largely thanks to the Y2K hoax, we’ve been judiciously streamlining process in black and white. Ensuring that every application has a Submit and a Cancel Button. Commit your decision now, or roll back. Choose now and forever hold your peace.

Decisions are not always black and white in the Enterprise context. To me, the ultimate promise of social computing lies in improved process execution outcomes. What I’ve been looking for is an in-context and even onscreen utility inside enterprise process apps that helps you answer: “I’m not sure” OR “What’s the best selection from that dropdown menu” OR “Who knows more about this than I?” OR “Can I first take a vote from a few smarty pants before I commit, please?

Oracles ECM, HCM Fusion and OnTrack applications offer a sneak peak into how this might work in the future. The core of the application centers on 4 questions, as seen in the screenshot above. And in a visually appealing way.

I spent hours away from the pitches and deep in the demo pits working through a ton of applications from Fusion HCM to CRM to SCM and on and on. I’m not going to go into the details here but in a nutshell – your social network is one click away. Whilst I would hardly call this deep collaboration in its’ truest sense, there’s built-in rich profiles inside ERP apps tied to Roles and Identity Management. Enabling me to find expertise and people based on skills and interests, click a button to chat, add people to my contacts or my social network and even initiate a VOIP call.

In general, engagement metaphors are applied with different doses across the Fusion portfolio. The Fusion HCM  and CRM applications have more of what most would consider collaboration but most of the other apps have in context social networking. The purist Enterprise 2.0 or Social CRM thinker would balk such minimal functionality and I think they would be correct. In fact, al lot of it isn’t even new. But the kicker is that it’s in context, at the source of the problem, at the fork in the road. And that’s what makes it valuable. The chances of you needing to talk to someone or get answers quickly makes Unified Communications – type functionality + rich profiles more of a priority than the whole enterprise 2.0 stack (wikis, communities, document access etc). The key word is priority though – there’s lots here that is missing and needs to be dealt with – supplier and partner communities, document collaboration, for starters.

Why No Balloons and Confetti?

What was puzzling to many was that Larry Ellison did not come out thumping his chest when introducing Fusion. Using phrases such as “God Bless You if you do so” doesn’t exactly inspire confidence.

I suspect it’s a combination of things:

• First, as people like Dennis Howlett suspect, it’s not ready for large scale adoption; just for a controlled GA for now.
• Second, Oracle is facing heat in the market. When the keynote names names – Workday, SuccessFactors, Taleo, you know something’s up. For relevancy sake, it needs to tout innovation at the same pace as the rest of the market.
• Third, and most likely in my mind though not mutually exclusive: Fusion can truly be an enormous undertaking for any enterprise. Oracle is legendary for executing for where the proverbial puck is and surgically moving to where it will be closer to mainstream acceptance. Either by buying its way there and sometimes by innovation. But never at the cost of revenues the next few quarters out. I suspect its pipeline is looking fine for now and there’s no financial reason to fall for the innovators dilemma and confuse the market.

Oracle ECM

On the ECM side, there’s extensive use of SOA that allows pulling in analytical and other data as social objects from business applications to comment and collaborate on. Oracles view of Enterprise 2.0 seems to be closer to traditional ECM + Activity Streams + SOA based access to structured data. Very different from the traditional wiki + social network + micro blogging combo that’s come to be known as a complete Enterprise 2.0 suite.

In his keynote, Larry talked about how different middle ware groups at Oracle had to shed their differences and collaborate on a single middleware offering. I strongly suggest the same happen in on the ECM and Enterprise Social Networking side of the house. It’s going to get really confusing really fast for customers when they see social capabilities peppered across ECM, UC inside ERP apps and standalone products such as OnTrack (more below). Whilst they seem to be serving different purposes, organizations still need a single collaborative backbone for all its interactions. The Spaces product seems to be a great foundational home for these solutions as long as they can be offered in a modular way.

Talking about Spaces, the product has good social networking capabilities inside the ECM suite and good extensibility, out of the box. For instance, integration with Microsoft outlook to take long threaded email conversations and turn it into message boards instantly in nifty, good collaboration on documents inside the CMS system, and social networking hooks to other non Oracle collaboration systems.

On Track:

It’s still in the oven, but OnTrack looks to be pretty slick and was without a doubt my favorite ‘enterprise gadget’ demo at the event. As much as we hate to use the Facebook for the Enterprise metaphor, its just that – a simple to understand connection and conversation facilitation hub, with enterprise context built in. To draw comparisons, it reminds me more of a purpose built GoogleWave (RIP) and StreamWorks from SAP than it does mature activity stream offerings from Socialcast, Socialtext or Newsgator. Designed to be purpose built around ‘conversations’ as the primary social object, it works as a central engagement utility in the enterprise that can be triggered from anywhere – natively or (soon) from other applications. With light collaboration features such as annotation on digital assets, business intelligence integration, support for voice and video, and integration into various Oracle Apps it offers a solid 2010 design for unified communications. I’d love to know if it comes with an API so if anyone from Oracle knows, please chime in.

Closing Thoughts:

All up, the event was a good one. There was too much lots of focus on the Cloud. In a box. But taller than a Human. The depth in the sessions made up for the sometimes rocky keynotes, with folks such as Steve Miranda doing a solid job balancing pitch and customer analogies when giving an overview on Fusion. For my part, the demos by knowledgeable product mangers gave me deep, marketing-free, insight into many products.

Was this breakthrough innovation on the Enterprise 2.0 front? Not by a long shot. But its engagement in context and that’s a huge leap forward in the ERP space. As I’ve said before, the thing we often forget when pontificating about enterprise software innovation is that buyers don’t buy best, they buy ‘good enough’. And so whilst the race is partly about out innovating the competition, it has as much to do with execution. And part of that depends on who has the deepest tentacles inside the customer base, whether directly or via a channel ecosystem.

Whilst Oracle is late to the enterprise social party when compared to stand alone Enterprise 2.0 and Social CRM vendors, it pacing very well when compared to other ERP vendors. With that in mind, a lot of the social and collaboration innovation seen here will ultimately get into the hands of it’s large installed base.

In addition to the posts I’ve linked to here, here are other must read articles that I’ve seen thus far:

Thomas Wailgum: Oracle OpenWorld 2010: 10 Buzzwords to Know, Love and Hate

Brandon Bailey – Ellison closes Oracle OpenWorld: ‘More new technology’

Robert Falerta – What’s Larry Ellison Thinking About The Indirect Sales Channel?

Mike Fauscette – Oracle OpenWorld 2010 – The Recap (good screenshots)

Next Up – what this all means for the rest of the Enterprise 2.0 landscape.