Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

I just saw something go by by my tweet stream that brought back some old memories (thanks @rpolom) – the 2009 Gartner report on the horizontal Portal Vendor landscape. Here’s the Magic Quadrant:

Around 2001, I led a strategy and execution planning engagement for a then F500 Hi tech firm looking to recast how its 9,000 strong global sales force collaborated with the rest of the ~40,000 person organization. My teams charter was to identify breaks in the interaction process with sales engineers, global field marketing and sales operation and devise a plan to improve the ‘contact to revenue cycle’ for sales reps via new collaborative constructs and sales intelligence access.

As part of this we were also on the hook to put an execution and operational plan in place. That ended up including a technology solution from the portal marketplace – the sizzling hot technology that promised to provide a single homepage to data and information from scores of traditional ERP and custom built systems. My team looked at 27 vendors. Yes 27!  Here’s the list from one of the drafts that I dug up:

Thats a snapshot of where this Portal Market started. And look whats left based on the Gartner MQ above.

On to the Enterprise social software landscape:

Dion Hinchcliffe’s lays out the market in this vendor landscape diagram in this post “Assessing the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace” below thats a prettier E2.0 software equivalent to my table above.

The Enterprise 2.0 solution landscape may well track the portal market evolution. To be fair, Enterprise 2.0 software does a lot more than portals but there’s some parallels to be drawn. Portals brought it all together with personalization around data and unified system access. But no cognizance of context or behavioral design for each participant type. A good chunk of Enterprise 2.0 software also promises people interaction and activity stream access as a better option to static portals. But for the most part, out of the box, it’s still general purpose ‘build it and they will come’.

That said, there’s a difference this time around. I’m seeing more and more instances of process centric business challenges where social software can help tremendously. As a consulting practice, our focus is enterprise performance acceleration and so that’s validation. The good news is that customers seem to be pushing social software/ E2.0 technology vendors to fix business processes relatively early in the lifecycle of this technology category compared to portals. That’s great news for both technology and services vendors that have a solution set and credible experience to help customers respond to real business problems. In other words, sensible applicable of social constructs as opposed to social as the cure all.

As for the E2.0 upstart vendor and services marketplace, I expect that a handful of vendors will do very well based on a “replace your intranet” value proposition. Even out of the box, the social software stack is far better than static intranets but its becoming a commoditized business. The rest better start focusing on line of business performance if they don’t want to get left by the wayside. In fact, as I’ve stated earlier, I think the market is far larger for that anyway.

Using Dion’s diagram as the E2.0 equivalent of my portal landscape cut out, any bets on what which names we should expect to see on the Garter MQ for Social Software in 2-3 years?

I stumbled on this gem from Euan Semple labeled: The secret to success with Enterprise 2.0 …

Euan comments:

Don’t try to get your powerful people to behave differently – they have everything to lose. Don’t try to improve your existing processes – you will be seen to be breaking something.

He does a far more succinct job of making a point about behavior and change than I did in this recent post about:  Social Web Design: Respond to human behavior. Don’t fight it.

Whether you’re a practitioner or a consultant, ‘Change’ is a word that should be treated as scarce currency when approaching business transformation. In my work on performance acceleration in the context of employees and business partners (pre and post social), I’ve seen that you get to change very few things, the least of which is basic human behavior. Nor should you want to shove ‘change’ down everyone’s throats. And the successful execution of any transformation effort will have had considered this very carefully and with discipline.

Update: Stowe Boyd has a good take on this on the Enterprise 2.0 conference blog.

If you’re a large organization using enterprise content management systems (ECM), chances are that its powering images, documents and records management, and web content. These systems enforce roles, workflows, access control and versioning to enable the creation, management and dissemination of media assets.

What this means is that from the very beginning of a given business activity, a few people control the creation of information that employees, customers, partners and suppliers rely on to move your business forward. Like it or not, this puts the responsibility/power to influence business performance in the hands of a few, with little input from other unknown experts, or consumers of this data. You only find out how effective the content turned out to be once its consumed (and long after you can optimize).

I’ve spent a decade working with business units at large organizations designing global communication and collaborative initiatives in the areas of sales and marketing, employee comms, channel collaboration and brand management. But I wanted an outside perspective. So i reached out to Billy Cripe, co-author of Reshaping your Business with Web 2.0 and Director of Product Management in Oracle’s Enterprise Content Management Group. An Enterprise 2.0 advocate himself, Billy brings a unique perspective given that he focuses on understanding how social computing blends with existing enterprise content management – something that many medium to large organizations are going to have to deal with if they buy into the design and promise of Enterprise 2.0. All control is not good but all social is certainly not always optimal. That’s an important part of any E2.0 execution plan.

Achieving a state of Enterprise 2.0 requires surgically moving the nucleus of a business activity from process driven systems to people centric environments. I asked Billy to identify 3 inefficiencies in traditional content management processes that impede business performance, where social computing can help:

Wrapping the best brains around the problem

Billy and I also talked about how Enterprise 2.0 enabled organizations will blend social computing and structured process by turning siloed unstructured content into ‘social objects’ early on in the process. For instance, instead of using traditional access control-heavy CMS workflow when working on early drafts of marketing collateral for a product launch, or market projections for a new line of business, a wiki – style environment opens up discussions around early drafts to more constituencies before the owner moves this into formal production. Social networking features enable you do discover ‘experts’ and invite them to contribute. Micro blogging concepts make your business activity noticeable across the organization so others can be aware of where they can help. In addition to refining the end product, think of the risk you can mitigate by having the right voices pipe in, early on. Examples of early collaboration include:

• Early feedback on product specs from loyal customers before you lock feature sets.
• Deeper understanding of product strengths from supply chain partners that intimately know the power of each component in your product.
• Feedback from channel partners that might be critical to meaningful distribution and adoption, post launch.
• Getting previously unknown subject matter experts in distributed organizations to provide insight on an RFP response.
• Leveraging the signals: A contact center rep gets to peer into community content or find experts to support sometimes bland one-dimensional answers coming from the knowledge base or ERP system.

When you layer in social computing concepts at the early stages of content creation, you have the ability to encourage such uses of raw ingredients (or social objects). These social objects, previously hidden in an access controlled CMS environment are now unlocked via social computing concepts and tools. The beauty is that they can now be work in progress for some, finished product for others that participate or discover it, or can be interpreted in totally different ways, never intended by the original participants.

Does Your Content have legs?

Analytics gained via social computing architectures fold in accountability and measurement at the social object level as well as the meta-data (rankings, ratings, tags etc) on each content type. This enables you to learn if/how content is being used to truly accelerate business performance. What types of content are highly rated or most re-used, what business activity was most impacted by specific social objects? The business of creating and managing content (and budget) is often a “black hole” at large organizations. Social computing analytics let you measure the value of each building block (and the programs that create them) so you know which horse(s) to back, going forward.

Important Execution Elements to Consider

In no way do I want to imply that just throwing in a social suite will make this work model a reality. It won’t. A couple of important considerations:

• This is not about a more effective content management process. Its got to do with strategically using social concepts to change how your organization collectively creates, vets and leverages content.
• Design processes and select applications that can accelerate business activity. If you start with “I need a new content management strategy”, you’re likely off to a wrong start. If your thinking about say how to improve sales close rates by better alignment between sales and marketing content, you’re approaching the problem correctly.
• Make participation available but surgically enforce controls where needed.
• To ensure adoption and mitigate risk, check whether you’ve answered the “what’s in it for me” question before you expect partners, employees, organizational departments or customers to jump in and play.
• Vendors may call their offerings platforms, solutions, whatever. At the end of the day these are tools. Lead with the inherent business performance goals that should govern any potential Enterprise 2.0 organizational design and work backwards to figure out the right platform or best of breed solutions architecture.

Vendors Moves

ECM technology offerings are going to morph at a phenomenal rate over the next 6 months. Some will bring social computing to ECM. Others will wrap Social Computing and ECM around ERP. Oracle is making very commendable moves by fusing its ECM, Portal and Social Offerings. OpenText is also going back to the drawing board (interview by Cheryl McKinnon) on what content management means in the socially connected enterprise. And Acquia is bringing an industrial strength offering to businesses, based on its hugely successful Drupal open source CMS offering. More on OpenText and Acquia in subsequent posts.

I’d like to close with a special thanks to Billy for taking the time to chat.  He was very careful to disclaim that his lens might be slanted towards incumbent content management processes.  In fact that’s exactly what I was looking for, so we could provide value to thousands of large organizations that have heavily invested in some formal content management process.

Simple: Delete all emails and attachments from the server after 45 days.

Everyone flocked to the wiki for fear of loosing access to valuable discussions and attachments in the future. That’s what a friend who works there told me over 4th of July BBQ.

Sounds a bit brute force-ish no? It does but its an easy way to get a lot of people to really immerse themselves in a better approach to collaboration. And should anarchy ensue for some reason, it’s a policy that’s easily reversible.

Is it a strategy? No. Can it be a tactic that’s part of a larger revenue generating or cost saving plan? Totally.

Low risk approach with lots and lots of potential gain and cost savings if it sticks.

Oh..and in the case of this un-named company, it worked like a charm for all of its 4000+ employees.

Earlier this week, a post by Thomas Vanderwal on Microsoft SharePoint 2007 caught fire on Twitter and a few blogs. What started as a spirited discussion on whether Sharepoint is a respectable Enterprise 2.0 offering or not, quickly turned into a debate on Enterprise 2.0 definitions. Mike Gotta masterfully jumped in front of  the parade and steered it hard right, questioning whether Enterprise 2.0 is even a category or a rather, a philosophy around the use of social computing within existing business processes. With due respect to Forrester, I’m convinced it’s the latter.

In preparation for a meeting with an old client next week about social computing and the opportunities it presents for lead generation and sales operations, this discussion could not have been more timely for me. Here’s how I see it:

These are social computing concepts. Not Enterprise 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0 is a state that Enterprises achieve by employing an appropriate set of social computing concepts.

The promise of transforming to a next generation enterprise (2.0) involves enhancing or even ripping apart traditional processes by leveraging social concepts, to accelerate performance. Organizations do that by starting simple and applying social computing concepts carefully on a process by process basis. As basic as this message is, it’s clear that it bears repeating given the lengths Mike had to go to, to make his point.

To me, the unsung heroes of Enterprise 2.0 are the vertical offerings providers that eat/drink/sleep solutions to specific business problems, everyday. These solution providers get plenty of coverage but surprisingly, almost zero credit for the role they play in transforming their customers into Enterprise 2.0 structures. This is hardly exhaustive but here are some examples:

Lead Management: InsideView helps sales reps qualify and accelerate the sales cycle by folding in relevant structured social data from LinkedIn and Facebook, based on leads in Salesforce. The service helps you call the right lead at the right time and accelerate the sales cycle. That’s it.

Viral Marketing: Appirio‘s referral management solution helps you find leads by connecting campaigns entered in Salesforce to connections on your organizations Facebook fan pages and with employees friends and contacts. Appirio brings more qualified leads using Facebook user profile data to campaigns.

Product Development: UserVoice, and Salesforce Ideas remove risk from product development processes and drive innovation by enabling you to ‘crowd source’ features and product designs before you spend gazillions designing and developing solutions.  One objective – innovate via social leverage.

Customer Service: GetSatisfaction improves the quality of customer service and cuts costs by letting users help each other.

Brand Management: Radian6 and Visible Technologies keep brand marketers informed about market sentiment regarding their products and organization.

I could go on and on.

It would be unfair to imply that so called Enterprise 2.0 vendors are doing nothing in this area.  For instance, Telligent, Jive Software, Lithum and others have customer facing offerings designed to help enterprises generate brand awareness, engage with prospects and customers and surface important analytical data. Newsgator offers social widgets help distribute and monetize content for media companies.

Does that mean horizontal platform solutions, especially those that are behind the firewall are a lost cause? Absolutely not. There’s ‘massive’ opportunity for these solutions to rally around specific business processes and design versions of their products to accelerate and transform specific internal tasks. There’s billions locked up in Supply Chain, Product Development, Retail/POS etc., that represent a mammoth opportunity for social computing technologies. Emulating the portal business of the 90s and sticking to a horizontal solution would be tragic, in my opnion.

The truth is that IBM, Oracle, SAP, et al dominate systems that enable business activity. That said, in my opinion, social computing concepts represent the first opportunity in two decades to successfully move the nucleus of business process management from structured, data centric ERP systems, over to people centric platforms that break silos and artificial firewalls in the enterprise. That entails strategically unleashing social computing on each of these processes and owning the environment where significant improvements in business performance are realized.

Irwin Lazar has a new post up on the Enterprise 2.0 Blog labeled “Where are Enterprise 2.0 Dashboards” where he makes some good points about the need for Dashboards in the social enterprise. Having had scoped and planned many sales and marketing portals and intranets for large organizations, my first reaction is one of panic and visions of stale, over produced interfaces that eventually become more a repository and view into mandated inputs, as opposed to business process centric output. Mandating the use of Salesforce.com so management can do effective reporting is one example that’s played out over and over again.

Irwin quickly allays these fears by talking about dynamic inputs and life streams, with the user in control of what he or she sees or who they follow. For instance:

“Unify my view into social networks, allowing me to combine updates from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, FriendFeed and other social networks. I should be able to add RSS feeds, and ideally, this would also serve as the home for my mailbox.”

“Finally, dashboards should incorporate presence from IM services, or perhaps even from enterprise IM systems, perhaps via the ability to set up XMPP presence propagation/importation.”

Irwin is spot on but there’s more that needs to be done to build this perfect communications hub. As I commented on Irwins post, presence and filtering needs to be in early versions of this dashboard. Unlike KM systems and other CMS derivatives, this dynamically fed dashboard will fill up quickly and if you are a believer in “first impressions are lasting impressions”, enterprise users will get overwhelmed and shy away if their dashboards look anything like Friendfeed.

I’ll go further and say that presence needs to be extended beyond presenting a persons online status to include content consumption. RSS doesn’t really scale as nicely, requiring serious effort on the part of IT or technical staff to constantly create narrow topics, not to mention its tech gobbledygook for a mainstream user. If a topic, conversation or a voice is urgent, let me filter for those at the source or from within a dashboard and use a notification platform that can come find me via IM, Email, RSS or my phone when the content surfaces. If it can wait, the dashboard or an email digest is just fine.

Media watching is not a sport for enterprise employees, prospects or customers and the expectation that someone is going to check in into their personalized dashboard regularly is not practical design. Moreover, user driven portal or dashboard customization beyond the first time set up almost never happens and so provide all the content access tools (presence and filtering) upfront before the fire hose emerges.

Update: Michael Krigsman who writes the must-read blog ‘IT Project Failures’ on ZDNet has another take on the pittfals and opportunities for Enterprise Dashboards, here.