Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

2013 SAPPHIRE NOW / ASUG , SAPs flagship user conference was a big one for me and our Enterprise Social Software team at SAP. Exactly a year ago at this very event we unveiled SAPs strategy for social and collaborative software. In Madrid at the European version of this event later in the Fall, we showed real product. This year we showed more integrated social collaboration with business applications, analytics and as a service in the SAP HANA Cloud Platform, and shared some statistics on our business. Here’s a nice quote about the product from IDC’s Mike Fauscette’s blog post about the event:

SAP is making good progress on the cloud enterprise social network (ESN) front with Jam, which grew over 800% year over year. The key long term to ESN, I believe is to get them embedded inside all of the enterprise apps so that social collaboration becomes an integrated part of everyone’s work flow. SAP is one of the vendors that has real opportunity to do that across the enterprise.

(Thank you, Mike.)

A businesses ability to bring its expert networks of employees, customers and partners to collaborate around business processes, around real time data and analytics and content is what will drive not just the future of social software but how enterprise software will be built. I spoke to John Furrier of Silicon Angle about this at the event, here.

April marks my one-year anniversary at SAP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phase 1: Check.

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

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

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

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

Here are my slides on SlideShare:

SAPPHIRE NOW and SAP TechEd, the European version of SAPs flagship customer event starts tomorrow in Madrid. It’s my first time here since joining SAP this summer and I’m really looking forward to it.

From my (social and collaborative) vantage point, European Events are very special. I’ve spoken at many of them over the last three years and there’s something very unique about engaging with customers and industry observers in Europe on the topic of social in the enterprise. Whilst this gap is rapidly closing, the one big distinction between North American and European conversations has been the scrutiny that social and collaborative constructs face with respect to its applicability to real business problems.

I’m generalizing here, but customers in North America are often more pre-disposed to experimenting with new technology. The situation in Europe has always been different and European customers have a way of rapidly re-calibrating you down to reality when you start playing buzzword-bingo by using terms such as “social business”. These don’t mean much to them. European companies are staring a tenacious recession, unemployment, macro re-skilling requirements and industry-specific challenges and opportunities. Regardless of the promise of any new shiny technology innovation, they always force you to winnow down the value of new technology to 2-3 simple benefits that apply directly to established hardships and opportunities. And they glaze over solutions to problems they don’t have.

As I said, this characterization is changing in North America rapidly. Last week I had the opportunity to speak with 70 odd CHROs and CFOs about the value of social and collaborative technology to human capital and talent management. Most were from industries that are not what you called early adopters of bleeding edge technology. Utilities, Energy, Component Manufacturers, Insurers. But each of them face massive change – 35% of the employee base retiring in 3 years, de-regulation of monopolistic industry design, rapid commoditization and the need for both mentoring and reverse mentoring between Gen X and Gen Y. And then there’s industry specific demands: For instance, I spoke with a CHRO who is dealing with deregulation of the energy business in the state of Texas where for the first time in the US, you can now buy home energy on a debit card-like model, turn your usage on and off remotely via wi-fi gadgets and iPhone apps, and get discounts for pre-paid contracts. Sounds more like how we buy mobile phone service vs. utilities. But these “real” issues and the need for creative thinking have been standard fare in Europe for a long time. This summer I presented at the Deutsche Bank investor conference in London with industry colleagues from IBM and other technology providers and there’s no question that even this audience continues to seek higher purpose for social software in the enterprise, given this bleak economic backdrop.

When social ways of work and technology can solve some of these specific industry and market challenges and complement existing process technology investment to close the loop, its starts to get in line with how organizations expect to measure value. To this end, SAPPHIRE NOW is an intellectual windfall for me and my team that’s representing SAPs Enterprise Social Software business unit here at the event. We launched SAP Jam, our enterprise social software, last week and I look forward to sharing more with SAPs customer, analyst and investor community at the event. But what I’m most interested in what we can learn from them. We’ve taken a first cut at this view of purpose built collaboration with the recent release and we’ll have even more to show and say next quarter but the opportunity to design around core line of business and industry challenges that take center stage at this event is an absolute treat.

Along with many esteemed industry colleagues, I’ve written a lot about the need for a grown up version of “social business” here on this blog. Over the next few days we have exactly the kind of audience that will demand a similar line of discussion.

Look forward to seeing everyone at the event tomorrow.

As the market for social software evolves, I’m convinced that if we want to enable social in a meaningful way, we have to inject business context to where we socialize. And in turn we need to invoke social where ever people need it the most – in their applications, on their devices and anywhere else where they need the best minds to wrap around gnarly business problems. That’s the kind of social we’re building here at SAP.  And we’re hiring product managers who have the ambition to own and execute this promise we have made to our customers.

Here’s a synopsis of how were thinking of social, by Alex Williams at Techcrunch. I encourage you to read the entire article but some excerpts for you:

Article excerpts:

“Instead of Jam’s collaboration tools existing in a silo, SAP is instead focusing on integrating them into a suite of business apps through what it calls “social glue” designed to bind social networking with its CRM, HCM, Finance, and other apps.”

“If SAP pulls this off, then it will have cracked the nut on what is missing at the moment with social networking offerings in the enterprise space. It’s not about social for the sake of social. It’s instead about decreasing the friction so people can simply do a better job in getting their work done.”

“The next step is to make social something that is invisible. Something that is not even noticed. And that’s what I like about Jam. It is not social for the sake of social. It just helps people get the job done.”

 

If you subscribe to a similar view that social in the enterprise can be much more than what we’ve seen to date, and you know how to build products that radically enhance how people work, we’d love to hear from you. Take a look at the job req here and consider applying. Look forward to hearing from you.