I’ve accepted the role at SAP for Global Vice President, Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Solutions.

In the fall of 2011 I began to chart the next chapter of my career. I’ve had an amazing run over the last 10 years. Since 2002, well before the dawn of social networking, I’ve had the chance to lead teams that managed large scale transformation initiatives for some of the most well known organizations to blend process, intelligence and collaborative approaches and technology, to accelerate performance. As we saw the entry of new social and collaborative technologies in 2006 and the advent of the social customer, an opportunity arose to help articulate why connected enterprises matter, why it’s finally within reach and how to get the Business part right in Social Business. Along with my colleague, the super smart Oliver Marks, I got to help organizations execute on their business objectives under the Sovos brand.

Now it’s time for me to get in front of what I think the next incarnation of people-centric customer, partner and employee experiences will entail.

Many of you are familiar with my strand of social in the enterprise, as seen on this blog, client work and on stage at industry events. As I wrote last week, the first innings of social in the enterprise is over. Those organizations that are pre-disposed to experimentation have done so. And a good many have seen the light through the work of some amazing practitioners and leaders who have given social and collaborative constructs a shot. Yet at a majority of organizations, executives who generally invest in concepts and technology only when they easily see direct and obvious impact on performance objectives haven’t yet had their “aha” moment. And if they were tempted by the promise around social business, many are still looking for that bridge that practically takes them from a world designed around structured process to one that gets them to blend collaboration at every step of business tasks and processes and in a way that drives revenue and margin, lowers cost and mitigates risk.

Why SAP

My assessment of what it would take to execute this – specifically, aligning core business activity, data, process and exceptions with the right people and insights at the right places, quickly winnowed down the list of organizations that could most logically make this transition a reality for customers. With a pedigree in core business process, business intelligence and industry solutions, and a decisive go forward strategy that now includes real time processing, cloud and mobility, SAP’s product and solution portfolio is one of the few that affords the needed canvas to improve how we engage with customers and partners and how work really gets done internally. The right design will come from the proper infusion of collaborative constructs right where business context emerges for individual users at every customer – a) not just inside or along side but across applications that power complete each business activity, b) when and where real time business intelligence emerges, and finally, 3) at the right (device agnostic) points of consumption. Each of these contextual elements are core to SAP’s portfolio of offerings today – both directly and via its partners.

My work in this market over the years has given me a clear sense of what a product portfolio needs to offer to deliver what I describe above. And as important, the kind of program design follow-through to make sure customers can truly change how they connect employees with each other and to customers and partners. I’ve got a superb team that I’ve already started to get to know over the last few days. I’ll say more about our plans over the weeks and months to come.

Thank You

Over the last 6 months, I’ve made some big bets personally on what I think the future of social in the enterprise will really entail and I discussed this with a range of folks. Some helped validate my thinking on the overall software market at the early stages and others when it came time to pull to trigger. You know who you are. I can’t thank them enough for taking the time. I will post separately on this in the next few days.

Finally, I want to thank John Schweitzer, SVP, SAP, Sanjay Poonen, President, SAP and Chakib Boudhary, SAP’s Chief Strategy Officer. Each created a very open environment that allowed for both radical and practical thinking with respect to what can be, as we talked about my potential role and SAPs ambitions.

The enterprise software business is witnessing formulaic changes that will play out over the next decade and beyond. Today’s hot topics may well be SaaS, (big) data, social, mobile and whatever’s next. But fundamentally, it boils down to this: Employees, Partners and end Customers of software buyers are looking for a more meaningful, networked experience that positively impacts their 9-5 work day. Traditional measures of per seat and per user subscription will remain but what’s really underway in both the consumer and enterprise world is a race to power every hour of the end participant in a way that resembles how they want to work or play, yet ensuring meaningful outcomes. Looked at this way, you can easily see how traditional enterprise software caters to a fraction of the end users interaction needs between 9-5. The rest of that 9-5 time often involves substandard and fragmented engagement to meet stated goals. All of this means that the total addressable market for software is far larger that previously imagined and more importantly, those of us focused on purpose-driven systems of engagement will end up powering the majority of our customers, employees and partners time online.  It’s this coming change that really excites me to get to work.

The formal announcement from SAP is here.

News articles by Dennis Howlett, Paul Greenberg, Vijay Vijayasankar and Alan Lepofsky on the announcement.

On to the next chapter. I’m so, so stoked.

————————————————————————

P.S Going forward, the content here won’t change all that much. I actually plan to write even less about technology and more about what made this blog popular in the first place – how social and collaborative concepts can accelerate operational and financial performance.

P.P.S I’m a cook and white asparagus is a Walldorf specialty. -)

Late last year, Oliver Marks and I became members of Constellation with the intention of complementing consulting on enterprise social and collaboration business, with wider research.

Given my focus on longer form planning and follow through work, and the growing need for ecosystem collaboration by organizations, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to successfully wear two hats and do justice to the analyst side of the house. And to be fair to Constellation, it’s best that Ray and the team find full time research analysts for this work.

I’ve met some really smart folks over at Constellation and I have huge respect for the individuals who make up the team. Ray’s pulling together a growing line up of new analysts and has an array of initiatives under way including The SuperNova Awards and new geographical market entries.

As far as this blog and my other extracurricular activities are concerned (event/conference speaking, etc.), nothing changes. Since 2009, I’ve blogged and spoken about the promise and impact of social and collaborative business based on what we see in the trenches at end customers, and innovation in enterprise software. That continues….

I have a few commitments that I’m wrapping up before I set sail but it’s been a lot of fun getting to know and hang out with the team. Ray and I depart as friends and we’ve agreed to look out for each other.

Update: Ray’s post, here.

If you have any questions about this or Constellation Research, drop me an email.

- Sameer | @sameerpatel

Enterprise 2.0 vs. Social Business

Image Design Credit: My sister, Zia.

What I cherish most has been the relationships I have built over the last two years. Last week at a conference, I mentioned to a few folks that Twitter is “friendship lead gen”. That sounds crass but its not.  Twitter for me is a giant pool of potential relationships but more importantly, a self selecting qualifier of where meaningful relationships can be formed.  Relationships that are characterized by not only friendships but professional respect, inspiration and constant learning.

And as I think of that, I do believe that we all make interesting decisions about who to engage with and how. We all have our ways of vetting out where meaningful relationships can be established. At the speed of a Tweet, a DM or a group IM, I know where the best answers are, those I can call at 3 am if I’m in a pinch in many parts of the world, and yes, those that will smack me on the head if I ever veer off the practical pragmatic path in my analysis.

And so I give thanks here to those I have gotten to know but more importantly :

• Those who engage openly and who mercilessly qualify the data and thoughts they put into my social stream
• Those that really help others by explaining not just the ‘what’  in their analysis but the ‘why’ and sometimes, the ‘how’
• Those that don’t think they’re cats whiskers
• Those that have integrity and don’t lose their souls as career paths and allegiances morph
• Those that collectively and implicitly weed out the un-authentic drivel that is, thankfully, so easy to detect on the social web
• Those that don’t join the ranks of parties who sell 2.0 but themselves employ the very 1.0 tactics that we tell our customers will not work anymore

I’d like to believe that I do all of the above myself but I’ll let you judge.

When I was considering joining my father in his business years ago, he made a comment that I remember clearly (not sure but this may not be his phrase):

“If both of us always agree, one of us is unnecessary”

That pretty much sums up my relationship with those I’ve become closest to on the social web and where I’ve taken these relationships offline and even to the dinner table in my home. The deepest relationships have been formed because we agree and then unabashedly share and celebrate the best thinking but also because we don’t, yet seek the best alternatives to what we think is the best solution.

And with this post, I’ve now added a new tag called  “soppy” to my blog sidebar. : –)

Happy thanksgiving to you and yours.

Ragu is someone I’ve come to know recently and I keep in touch with some of my professors there and speak with them about research in the areas of Social Media, Knowledge Networks and Ecosystem Collaboration. So I’m thrilled to see an event of this caliber taking place here in the Bay Area.

Included in this research presentation is a detailed study of Cisco’s collaborative and social media efforts (embedded below) .

I’m really looking forward to the event and hope to see you there. More info here and registration details here.

Guinan Cisco (1)

There were a few books in the 90’s that had significant influence on shaping my personal thinking about how to accelerate performance in business. Three notable ones were The Ultimate Resource (Version One made the case for how entrepreneurship was the ultimate resource but that’s out of print now), Execution and Competing for the Future, by CK Pralahad and Gary Hamel.

About the professor, from Wikipedia:

Prahalad has been among top ten management thinkers in every major survey for over ten years. Business Week said of him: "a brilliant teacher at the University of Michigan, he may well be the most influential thinker on business strategy today." He was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission of the United Nations on Private Sector and Development. He was the first recipient of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award for contributions to Management and Public Administration presented by the President of India in 2000.

In this latest book, “The New Age of Innovation:

Professor Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan suggest an internal capacity to reconfigure resources in real time by focusing on clearly documented, transparent, and resilient business processes (the link between strategy, business models and operations) has become a strong differentiator.

As many of you know, I focus militantly on how the internal design of the enterprise need to be re-casted to meet the social customer’s demands and how to compete effectively. Technology differentiation as a competitive weapon played a central role in the last round of management thinking and strategy. Going forward its going to be about how effectively you can create and leverage people networks to solve business problems and get ahead by complimenting those discrete processes that have been unnecessarily fenced in by those very structured systems. Technology obviously has a critical role to play. But its a lot more than that.

Professor C.K. Prahalad was one of the few that not only pushed the boundaries on where organizations need to be interms of their thinking and wiring but he was one of the few that brought practical solutions that were cognizant of realities on the ground. More important he never lost sight of the “how” as he presented new thinking around the “what” and the “why”.

Here’s the professor on Innovation:

The Hindustan Times and Business.in have more details.

My deepest condolences to the Prahalad family and his loved ones during this difficult time. May he rest in peace.

For those of you who are not familiar with the conference, Defrag is a yearly event in Denver that’s focused on emerging tools and trends in technology and its’ impact on business.

The conference is organized by Phil Becker, Brad Feld and Eric Norlin and counts Roger Ehrenberg, Paul Kedrosky, Jerry Michalski and Chris Shipley as advisors.

Here’s how I described the conference in a recent post:

———————————————————————-

The Five Fragments That Make Up Defrag:

I’m going to spare you a diatribe on why its a great event and distill it down to five reasons, (or fragments) that make me go back and why this an awesome event for the enterprise folks out there:

• Its about debating solutions to big big business and economic value challenges that will consume us all over the next 12-24 months. That applies to the buy-side as well as the sell side.
• Its about the ramifications of eventual large scale adoption of a lot of what a serious IT executive will deem to be well, “cutesy” ideas today (e.g. Real Time Enterprise).
• A cut to the chase discussion on which consumer trends we see and use today might one day be enterprise worthy. Remember when people laughed at the concept of ‘Facebook for the Enterprise’? Yep, that probably came up at Defrag two events ago.
• Little talk-to-the-crowd panels. Everyone is deemed to be intelligent and has an equal voice. You’ll spend more time talking to the person sitting next to you than you will listening to someone on stage. Guaranteed.
• Its frightfully practical stuff. No fluff. All actionable thinking that makes you look at work differently when you leave. And makes you want to come right back the next year.

————————————————————————–

A little about the conference in the words of Eric Norlin, the organizer:

Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the tools and technologies that are leveraging the "social" aspect of software to accelerate the "aha" moment. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.

Thanks to Eric for reaching out. Looking forward to a great event!

P.S If you’re a fan of Sons of Anarchy on FX, you’ll get what that T-Shirt is all about -)

Credit: Inc Magazine

Lots of pontification today on whether the iPad will become that third device that removes the claustrophobia of surfing the web on a mobile device, yet takes some of the clunk away from a regular laptop.

Om Malik on GigaOm has one of the best analysis on this, saying:

Despite their evolution, laptops and desktop computers as we know them are essentially work tools. They’re designed for content creation — be that of writing blog posts (or a book), editing photos or creating videos. On the iPhone, we create content of another kind — personal, communication-centric content.

The consumer web is slowing moving away from ‘Read and Write’ mode, back to ’Read More, Write Little’ status as I tweeted earlier today. But not as we saw in the pre-social days before blogs and wikis.

We’re going to be writing more than we ever did, just a lot less every time we do. Tweets are 140 characters, the Re-Tweet is the new gesture to simply express acknowledgement or endorsement, LinkedIn imposes character limits on some of the fields in Groups, Yelp Reviews are a paragraph or so. And auto posts from Tumblr and Posterous to Facebook are primarily visual media uploads with a few lines of description. Lots of limits on each gesture. But many many more of them.

That’s just touching on the writing elements of our web experience. Gaming, enjoying videos with your family at the dinner table,  and other visual consumption models are overdue for some fresh blood as well.

And so the iPad will sell and will sell big. Save a few really ridiculous omissions (seriously? no webcam?) it’s the perfect device for the type of text based communication that’s becoming more and more prevalent. And sadly its the optimal device for the attention deficit online world we’re participating in, every day.

The concept of the real time enterprise is going to be top of mind for many organizations over the next 24 months. Amongst other things, one primary driver will be organizations waking up to the fact that their customers and prospects expect to engage in real time, whether on public social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, or on company managed community forums. As a result, critical processes within enterprises need to be re-wired to be able to respond to real time customer inquiries whether that be order status, product knowhow or access to experts. Supporting the end customer is now everyone’s job and so-called “enterprise 2.0” solutions have the ability to let key people rally around the customer in more efficient ways.

We’re seeing it in our work already where this is not just some data problem that IT is interested in solving. Line of business executives are looking to understand the optimal information flow design in the context of discrete performance acceleration opportunities in the areas of customer service, channel distribution, sales and marketing collaboration and the supply chain. Whether its revenue or cost efficiency, all these executives all have a number on their head and are increasingly convinced that latency means cash left on the table.

Feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to learn more about the topic or the report, or if you’re interested in learning about what this means for your enterprise.

——————————————————————————————————————————-

The report is for GigaOm Pro subscribers but here’s the Executive Summary:

Real-time communication and collaboration in the enterprise represents a significant shift in how employees, partners and customers interact and collaborate to drive organizational performance. The growth and acceptance of so-called “Enterprise 2.0” platforms and applications promise to break down closed communication and collaboration loops by moving discussions and data access from email, content management and rigid process applications to activity streams, wikis and API-based data access.

Together, these new interaction formats enable real-time communication and access to information emanating from within these new collaboration suites as well as from external systems. The result is a real-time flow of information from the people and systems that are critical to business functions for each employee, all accessible from a central dashboard.

The widespread proliferation of real-time tools in the enterprise will, however, require concerted analysis of what process and information flows truly warrant real time access. The notion of “right time” vs. “real time” will become more important as organizations decide what consumption models work best for individual users and the tasks they are responsible for. The speed of “real time” also will be limited by how fast traditional applications in the enterprise are able to process and publish information. However, the existence of extensible APIs now make it easier than ever to tap into multiple systems to extract information as soon as it’s made available.

While the concept of real time has existed for more than a decade, a new crop of collaborative suites from vendors such as Jive Software, Socialtext and Socialcast provide this facility out-of-the-box. Traditional enterprise software vendors have also announced their intention to provide real time collaborative and data access capabilities. Notable mentions include Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010, Salesforce Chatter, Google Wave and IBM’s Lotus Connections.

In 2010, expect to see the concept of the real time enterprise ascend the hype cycle. Enterprises will begin to analyze how real-time access can help discrete business processes such as customer interaction, sales intelligence, lead generation, partner interaction and employee project collaboration, and they’ll begin to evaluate the switching cost of moving their systems and data to platforms that have real-time as part of their solution sets. Customers and prospects are interacting with each other and with enterprises in real-time making it imperative for the enterprise to structure its own internal and external processes to respond to customers as fast as possible. Expect this shift to be one of the primary drivers for considering a real-time architecture.

Read more: http://pro.gigaom.com/2010/01/report-the-real-time-enterprise/#ixzz0cJXzIFXn

Update: Reviews of the Report on:

• GigaOM (Startups Fight Giants for the Real-time Enterprise http://ow.ly/ViWw) 
• WebWorkerDaily (The Real-time Enterprise http://ow.ly/ViXU)