Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

Information Week contributing editor Lenny Liebmann and I had a chat at IBM’s Lotusphere 2012 / IBMConnect event in Orlando last week.

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.

Seems like I just got off a plane from this summer’s Boston Enterprise 2.0 Conference. But here we are again — the Santa Clara edition of Enterprise 2.0 is around the corner, from the 14th — 17th of November. The event has a good keynote line up that includes the likes of Sandy Carter of IBM, Rachel Happe, Founder of The Community Roundtable, Don Tapscott of Macrowikinomics fame, Aaron Levie of Box, Tim Young of VMware, and others. Some of these folks I know well and others I’ve read often. Expect a range of perspectives on social and collaborative approaches to working effectively.

The tracks represent the big issues facing organizations today and in the very near future: People Culture and Communications (HR), Sales and Marketing, Social Apps and Platforms, Architecture, SharePoint Strategies, Mobile, Video and UC, Risk and Governance, and Internal/External Communities.

In the summer, I keynoted the Boston event on the topic of “Putting back the R in CRM“. This time, we have an entire track on the topic of sales and marketing that I am privileged to chair. And so I wanted to introduce the track and speaker line up, and more importantly, showcase the real progress we have made as an industry towards delivering meaningful business outcomes.

We kick off with Social Channels Engagement, Integration and Response. Increasingly, the customer doesn’t really care which twitter handle is your official support or marketing channel or where the appropriate place on Facebook is to engage with you. This puts serious strain on organizations that have traditionally broken out functions by sales, marketing, support and the like. Social Channels require that we rethink how we engage and route the right discussions to people with the best answers – be those in traditional customer touch point roles or experts hidden inside organizations in product development, or design, or even the extended supply chain. As important, we still need to have a process and the needed technology to move social media discussions into traditional process that’s often powered by CRM, Call Center or other programs and applications. We have a panel of experienced practitioners from well known organizations that are tackling this problem day in and day out:  Peter Simonsen, Sr. Director, Web & Community, QlikTech International AB, Daniel Zucker, Social Media Manager, Autodesk and Franck Ardourel, Sr. Director, Online Marketing, 24 Hour Fitness. Each of them offers deep expertise in not only shielding the prospect or customer from silo’d organization designs but have also been instrumental in helping re-cast how organizations rally around customer needs in the 21st century. John Ragsdale will be moderating this session.

Then we move on to how collaboration is critical to Sales Operation and Multi Channel Distribution. First, an in-depth case study from one of my new favorite examples of enterprise collaboration in the last few months: SuperVALU -  the grocery store conglomerate that owns household brands such as Albertsons, Shaws, Shop ‘N Save and other retail chains. At SuperVALU, the leadership has chosen to follow a hyper-local strategy to cater to the unique needs of each community they serve. With hyper local comes a natural decentralization model that still needs a level of cohesiveness. A central collaborative fabric has been put in place to enable store managers across brands to share tactics on hyper-local design and service.  I’m looking forward to listening to Erin Grotts as she presents the SuperVALU story.

On to channel strategy. I’ve long believed that partner collaboration is a gaping hole in the social and collaborative ‘stack’. Steve Bamberger from Toshiba is going to talk about the challenges of a multi channel sale that requires coordination between third party vendors and service providers to truly put your best foot forward. If your organization sells its wares with the help of partners, come listen to Steve illustrate how “Toshiba has improved the transparency of vendor sales support and fostered more unified collaboration and communication with their strategic partners within their dealer and direct sales channels.”

Moving on from Sales Collaboration, we’re going to deal with the elephant in the room that social media idealists often tend to stay away from: if Social Media customer engagement is all that, why hasn’t it invaded the traditional marketing mix in a consistent way? Kelly Ripley Feller, Director at Citrix System wants to lay out the big road blocks and collaborate with the audience to find realistic pathways for social media marketing and measurement. If you want to add your two cents on why the problem exists and what we as a community can do about it, come on by.

And finally, B2B customer engagement is a beast in and of itself.  Lauren Vargas of Aetna will talk about how regulated industries engage with prospects and customers on social media. In her words “Discover the right blend of art and science your organization needs to execute to get people excited about doing business with your company.” In turn, Michael Procopio from HP will discuss how customer engagement works at scale. HP sells personal and enterprise hardware, software, services and more and has a market cap of over $50 billion dollars. It’s a treat to have Michael share how large companies can keep their head above the social media marketing waters. Esteban Kolsky, a very well-known name in the customer service world, will moderate this session.

If you would like to learn more about the event and register, here’s the link to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

I’m really happy with how the track has come together. Broad insights, deep case studies focused on solving gnarly performance challenges that big business faces today with decisive uses of social and collaborative approaches.

And, if it didn’t come through, this sales and marketing track has only end customers speaking. 100% pundit-free practitioner insight.  -)

See you in Santa Clara.

UPDATE: Just when this track looked like it couldn’t get stronger, we now have Ted Saptountzis, SAPs Vice President for Audience Marketing joining us. Ted will join Kelly Ripley Feller at 2:30 pm to talk about post-hype use of social and what it looks like when its embedded into core marketing and sales processes.

UPDATE 2: Killer conversation going on on Google Plus about “Why does Marketing STILL not get social?” – one of the big topics were going to discuss this week at the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

(Disclaimer: I’m on the advisory board of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference)

Next week brings the annual KMWorld Conference in Washington DC. Jane Dysart and Hugh McKellar - the conference chairs have a stellar line up of speakers including household names in Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business such as Stan Garfield of Deloitte, Bill Ives of Darwin Ecosystem, Rob Koplowitz of Forrester Research, Claude Malaison of Emergence Web and Thomas Vanderwal of InfoCloud Solutions.

The topics include Socializing Knowledge Management, KM Metrics, Beyond Enterprise 2.0 and more.

For my part, I will be talking about the business case for 21st Century Collaborative Enterprises and why its critical to how we market, sell, support and innovate for today’s increasingly social and vocal prospect and customer. This is a keynote I did early on to US and European audiences that were focused on Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business. Jane Dysart, the conference co-chair at KMWord was kind enough to ask me to bring this discussion to the Knowledge Management Community.

Here is the presentation:

If you are at the event, come say hi.

As a follow up to this post commenting on PriceWaterHouse Coopers (PwC) extensive report on Social and Collaborative Business, PwC just published the conversation we had a few months ago. We talked about the following:

• 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.

Towards the end of my keynote on Putting the Relationship Back in Customer Relationship Management at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this past week, I made a statement that, 2 years ago, would have got my throat slit. Stated as a wake up call plea to focus on metrics that matter, I said:

"For five years we’ve been engrossed in one giant collaborate group hug, measuring things that don’t keep executives up at night"

Unscientifically judging from reactions on Twitter, this sentiment I expressed got me the equivalent of a vigorous virtual head nod, pretty much across the board. And not for some genius insight put forth by me, but because seasoned practitioners know this already. This, and from what I heard about other tracks, summed up a big part of the general mood and current state of practitioner mindset at the conference. For those who know this community, you will appreciate how significant it is that enterprise social and collaboration practitioners have started to either realize that they need to move beyond measuring nebulous stuff like engagement, "getting social", productivity and adoption.

The market is moving forward. Enterprise 2.0 and Social Business practitioners are no doubt getting more strategic at the outset or along the way, but as important, we’re at the early stages of understanding both the challenges and opportunities that will come from the emergence of an increasingly connected and vocal customer and as a result, the changing contract between her and organizations she choose to do business with. Most critical, the ramifications of this on how we need to be wired internally to meet her expectations of meaningful engagement, expert insight, minimal latency and localized relevancy. The most trusted voices, in my opinion, echo this in their own unique way. I’ll talk separately about the sales and marketing track in another post, but its important in this context to call out impressions from those previously considered outsiders to our work of internal collaboration. Folks who have a clear view of tomorrows expectation of customer service, of co-creation and feedback management, of authentic customer advocacy than most, provide their insight into how the internal and external business worlds can come together: Brent Leary, Esteban Kolsky, Brian Vellmure, Mitch Lieberman the man himself, Paul Greenberg, and many others.

Paul Greenberg had a great comment that sums it up:

What makes social business greater than the sum of its part is also why it needs both parts to work seamlessly inside out and outside in.  Customers and the need to acquire and retain customers are driving it. It is being driven by the same imperative of business that has driven business since its inception, But it is being driven by the changed expectations of those customers.

What that means is that not only do we now need not just an enterprise value chain, but a collaborative value chain that engages customers who we know enough about to keep engaged, but that the employees of the companies that are trying to reform and restructure what they do are empowered to act both internally and externally to do something about it.

There’s no question were slowly starting to embrace critical performance acceleration opportunities that existed long before social x showed up and that’s evident.

The Beef

Some highlights of the event that represent the state of the state with respect to all things Enterprise Social and Collaboration:

More Customers at the forefront: Bert Sandie (Electronic Arts), John Stepper (Deutche Bank), Bryce Williams (Eli Lily), Kristen Hersant (Strong Mail), Tyler Knowlten (Dept of Foreign Affairs, Canada), Tony Martins (TEVA Pharmaceuticals), and scores more. These are the types of companies we all do business with or have heard of. Bill Ives and Emanuele Quintarelli have the goods on customer keynote sessions.

More Business and Infrastructure Focus: A Sales and Marketing Track and HR Track, Supply Chain Collaboration Case Studies and various IT Tracks (Mobile, UC, Integration and Apps) moved the discussion from ‘this is everyone’s problem’ (read: it’s no ones problem) to a mature discussion on how social and collaborative concepts can be a serious weapon in the arsenal of execution initiatives that help drive customer, partner and employee performance. Folks like John Stepper even dedicated a keynote on why not to get caught up in social for social’s sake.

More Depth: Dedicated how-to discussions on how to grow and sustain meaningful communities beyond launch for advanced practitioners that need to take it to the next level. Many of the sessions show where social and collaborative efforts fit in the larger organizational fabric.

Broader Vendor Representation: The Social software tapestry is being yanked from four different ends: Pure-play upstarts, ERP, Unified Communications and Specialty Application Vendors (e.g. HRIS, CMS). Besides the usual suspects, we had folks from Oracle, SAP, Salesforce.com, Avaya, Cisco and others. Clearly, a plethora of supply-side folks are seeing the value of folding in collaboration offerings.

All in all, the surgical use of social and collaborative concepts to drive performance is finally here. And the event provided that platform to ascertain progress and identify what else we need to do to get it right.

I had a chance to speak with the very smart Jon Reed about my overall take on the state of “Enterprise 2.0”. Jon is an Enterprise 2.0 curmudgeon who spends his time working on gnarly enterprise integration problems that make transactions work. He’s great at holding our feet to the fire when it comes to the finding the tangible value of collaboration:

Some changes we need to consider though.

First, the event itself:

• More Marketing Cowbell: We’ve now got functional tracks – we’re not talking social ‘X’ but sales, marketing, HR, supply chain, service, and so on. The conference needs a far stronger effort around attracting functional and IT decision makers who may or may not care about social but really the larger challenge of connected ecosystems to meet functional objectives that they are goaled on. The content is here; now we need the awareness that goes with it.
• We’ve moved from vendors talking to practitioners leading the discussion. I concur with Megan Murray when she says that we need end users to talk about benefits in their own words.
• Don’t forget middle managers: We had great broad coverage on the future of business. We also saw excellent tactical how-to content for practitioners. We need to start to talk to another really important constituency that’s missing – those that get sandwiched between strategy and delivery – the middle managers. They need all the help as its their next on the line when it comes to turning strategy into execution plans.

Second, as an industry:

No doubt we’re talking business problems now but we’re still far too hypnotized by that group collaboration/social/engagement group hug. There’s still a sizable (and in some ways growing) ‘movement’ feel that we need to shed, which understandably so, appears as a very self-congratulatory when seen from the outside. I say this not based on just lobby talk but based on what many Sovos customers tell us and who will not come to Enterprise 2.0. Granted, we deal with some of the most conservative industries and organizations in the world but that’s a big chunk of the market that we need to address. Threatening executives with hyperbole around bottom-up ground swells and flattening designs that defy org chart physics, all said in many different ways, takes away from the true promise of collaboration as a business performance accelerator. Don’t get me wrong, we all need an enthusiastic pat on the back that our efforts are worth it and there’s no question that many practitioners and pundits have the chops to tackle real business objectives, head-on (I know most of them personally). But if you superimpose some of the current rah rah uprising rhetoric (and in and of them selves, nebulous end results such as more engagement, more productivity and more social) in the face of stark revenue increase, competitive, cost reduction and risk mitigation objectives that most of our businesses struggle with, we come off the camp that’s doing ‘stuff’ that will not really satiate wall street or our shareholders with any certainty.

The reality is that line, staff and executive HR, Customer Service, Marketing professionals and others have established problems to solve – changing customer expectations, prospecting demands, employee turnover, dismal on boarding and missing WD-40 that results in lethargic and expensive supply chains. That’s the stuff that needs fixing.

The intent behind our work as an industry is solid. And we will have in fact changed how organizations will ultimately well….organize. But to earn the currency to engineer that change, we need respect the transactional and connectivity challenges of 9 to 5 (for employees) and quarterly heartburn (for managers) and do our part to fix these, alongside painting that picture of a possible future, three-five-ten years out. Again, it’s the messaging, design and execution planning that needs to be decisive, not the cause.

We’ve come a LONG way and we have so much experience built in thanks to those pioneering the way forward over the last three-five.  And as we saw at the event, business managers are in fact injecting social in decisive ways. But we need to push harder at embracing the problems and opportunities that keep our executives and shareholders up at night and become indispensable weapons that deliver tangible results. The good news is that it’s really within striking distance – we saw many examples at this event already.

Lets just make sure we don’t find our selves revving in neutral.

(Hat tip to Tony Martins for that great line).

Thanks

To close, an expression of deep gratitude from my end:

• - To the TechWeb team for pulling together a great event and for inviting me to keynote. I know there are a ton of folks who do stuff behind the scenes but I want to especially thank Manuela Farrell, Colleen Kraskiewicz, Natalia Wodecki and of course Steve Wylie for making my life as a track chair as painless as possible. Its really an amazing operations team that exceeds its own high bar at every subsequent event.

- To panel moderators who I consider leading lights and consummate professionals and who I have the privilege to call peers and colleagues. They put together amazing panels, recovered from last minute panelist conflicts and yet, brought it home: Paul Greenberg, Brent Leary, Esteban Kolsky and Mike Fauscette.

- To a few in the vendor community who really worked hard with their customers to create great presentations for sessions I managed: Jeff Nolan (getsatisfaction), Karen To (Jive Software), Sara Campbell (Appirio) and Mitch Lieberman (Sword-Ciboodle). Paul, Esteban and Brent have done the same for their panelists in the blog posts above.

- To all of you who took the time to comment during my keynote as well as our track sessions.

Next up: A wrap up on the Sales and Marketing Track, Interview highlights and notes on some of the Tracks I attended.

If you want more, Jim Worth has a wicked wiki up that collates all press and writing on the event here.

Supply Chain efficiency is a big big deal. More over, this area of the enterprise technology stack and associated strategy has seen little to no innovation for well over a decade. Years ago, Dennis Howlett wrote:

In my argument, breakthrough ROI comes from seeing these technology through the lens of collaboration, which in turn implies process and context. I am mindful that huge amounts of value continue to be locked up in supply chains. AMR quoted a number of $3 trillion in 2005. Has that materially changed? Simply being able to communicate across supply chains in a meaningful manner could do wonders to lubricate those rusty wheels.

Back in the summer of 2009 I wrote about taming the supply chain beast with Enterprise 2.0 approaches and technology. On the value of connecting suppliers to not just each other and to the procurement department, but to other organizational facets generally quarantined from suppliers, I wrote:

First, no one knows the true power, limitations and opportunities for each component of a product better than the very folks who build them. Second, component manufacturing is largely a commodity business.  As a supplier, I need to differentiate myself from competitors who are waiting for me to falter or cut me on price. I need to be a strategic partner to be somewhat indispensible. Social Software can open up the lines of interaction beyond R&D, Procurement and Product Development, allowing suppliers to learn, first hand,  any pain felt by the end customer. Or help marketing really understand the deep competencies of each component of the end product. Or provide new insight to R&D on early technology innovation at the component level. And on and on.

That’s purpose built collaboration (a.k.a business case) with dead clear incentives for suppliers to participate (a.k.a adoption) and play a role in the success of an end product in the market place.

It took a while but I’m thrilled that for the first time were going to see a supply chain case study at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, next week. Tony Martins, VP of Supply Chain at TEVA Pharmaceutical will talk about how TEVA is leveraging collaboration to improve supply chain performance. Tony is definitely is one of the pioneers in re-shaping what supply chain efficiency can mean.

The session description is here:

———-

Thanks to decades of supply chain optimization solutions, today’s leading organizations have mature transaction-oriented supply chain designs.
However, managers spend over half of their time dealing with unexpected events that can’t be addressed with structured processes. To maintain a competitive edge, companies need to embrace new ways that enable spontaneous association. Social Enterprise and Open Collaboration provides a more effective way to address the volatile world and gain significant improvement in operational efficiencies.

———–

Tony will present a case study at 3:45 on Wednesday the 22nd of June followed by a Q&A session. Tony will also share the keynote stage with Tom Kelly of Moxie Software on Wednesday at 9am.

If you’re looking to frame the business value of social and collaborative business to line of business leaders or to IT, this session is sure to provide you with the needed ammunition to make your case.

I’m looking forward to participating in my second Social Business Forum in Milan next month.

Last year I keynoted on the topic of 21st Century Collaborative Enterprises: The Customer Case. This year I’ll be talking about The Connected Enterprise – the business case, and people, process and technology ramifications as we connect the best brains spread across our customers, employees and partner base. This theme is central to the work we do at Sovos.

This year, the event boasts the following themes:

• Employee Empowerment
• Customer Engagement
• Open Innovation

Topics include:

• Open organizational and leadership models
• Defining the business case and getting top management commitment
• Framing social media into the broader company strategy
• Nurturing adoption, cultural change and people engagement
• Defining ROIs, metrics and business drivers
• Frameworks to cultivate successful internal and external communities
• Policies, guidelines and governance approaches
• The why’s and how’s of socializing business processes
• Best practices and lessons learned to mitigate risks and overcome stumbling blocks
• Choosing and integrating best of breed social software and collaborative platforms

I’m joined by a number of very bright folks who have devoted a lot of brain cells to improving employee productivity, customer feedback, contact center, customer service and as important, how these experiences are blending. They include the ever inspiring Luis Suarez, Mark Tamis, Andrew Gilboy, Esteban Kolsky, Keith Swenson, Bertrand Duperrin, Mitch Lieberman, Patrick Brandt, amongst others.

Solid customer case studies as well from the likes of Dell, Giffgaff, WeBank, BASF, Fujitsu. The event is put on by the good folks at Open Knowledge, a leading Milan based Social Business Consultancy.

To get a feel for the kinds of topics being covered at the event, check out a series of blog interviews conducted by Alberto Beccaris with Keith Swenson, Mark Tamis, Stefano Vitta, myself and others. Luis also has a great post up on his blog, here.

Here’s where you can register. Look forward to seeing you at the event.