I’m privileged to be doing a keynote discussion with ZDNet columnist and Asuret CEO Michael Krigsman at a pre-conference event at ASUG / SAP SAPPHIRE event tomorrow (Sunday). The larger topic is consumerization of IT and the move to the Cloud, but in many ways, the idea is to talk about the reset of the relationship between IT and the LoB as purchase patterns move towards the latter.
It’s a natural tendency for this to often be an antagonistic relationship But where this gets productive is when IT starts to understand the larger trends in changing expectations of prospects and customers and the LoB is often dealing with especially with the advent of the public social web. As you start to peel those layers away, one by one, you start to see how IT can not only support but lead on the task of supporting and serving today’s increasingly social, sometimes vocal but definitely informed prospect and customer.
We will probably ruffle some feathers but I think we’ll leave attendees with a few new ideas about how to play this out. I’ll update this post with details of the push back I receive and what the audience teaches me.
Oh, off topic but if you’re attending SAPPHIRE, come ask me about “Project Robus”.
And of course, I’ll be doing something at SAPPHIRE NOW / ASUG Annual Conference 2012.
There’s a few more in the works and I’ll update as they firm up.
So looking forward to charting how we put the business back in Social Business along with a number of industry colleagues at each of these events. It’s time.
Eric Norlin, organizer of Defrag, Blur and Glue Conferences and seed investor, has a good post up today about what enterprise development means in the age of big data, mobile and cloud and the coming age of convergence of these big innovation spurts.
I really recommend that you take 3 minutes to read his post for proper context but here’s the quote that summarizes his stance:
Amidst these three mega-trends [Mobile, Cloud, Big Data] sits a lynchpin. The developers know it because they’re building. The buzzword maniacs haven’t caught it yet, and they may never (we can only hope), but it’s there. That lynchpin: APIs. APIs tie together the mega-trends in a fundamental and unalterable way. APIs are the lingua franca of the new wave of enterprise development.
So, as these three mega trends (and our super top-secret, don’t tell the marketers, lynchpin) converge, we’re seeing one overriding trend: the opportunity, means and necessity for the developer (engineer, architect) to play the central role in building and rolling out new enterprise IT capabilities.
He’s right. I wanted to build on two specific repercussions or elephants in the room in this discussion around what convergence means for the enterprise developer community:
Changing Customer Expectations: Cloud and SaaS have once again started to move the buying pendulum to a decentralized model and towards the Line of Business buyer. And whilst its way early in the enterprise setting, mobile is threatening to move the buying power even further way towards the end participant. Enterprise developers need to understand what selling and supporting into the Line of Business and appealing to the end participant means. Whilst IT might have hired a traditional analyst firm to do a feature shoot out or looked at a Quadrant, the Line Of Business will want an integrated result of cloud, big data and mobile that speaks to specific business scenarios and use cases. So if enterprise software developers were to build competing products, feature parity is price of entry. You can’t shy away from really really understanding usage models and design thresholds. That’s a big cultural shift at least for those developers who’ve been supporting IT – which includes most on and offshore SIs.
Monetization: In my mind, each of these three technology trends (on their own) will be on the fast track to commoditization and will risk facing the same fate as did most social business software plays. The magic and the premiums will come from contextual application of this innovation and as Eric says, smart integration. Take storage for example: Dropbox as storage without document and device sync is commodity. Box.net as storage without document and device sync and collaboration is commodity. Apple’s iCloud as storage without ubiquitous local and iTunes media sync across devices is commodity. And Google Drive (as discussed here in Ben Kepes’ CloudU community) is also a commodity business not worth getting into had it not been for Google’s services such as Google Apps, Piccasa, and its media and unified communication capabilities under the Google Plus brand. The premiums from big data, mobile access and cloud comes from a) dynamically assembled media and content, and interpreted data in the cloud, b) available wherever you need to consume and / or collaborate and c) insanely focused and simple interfaces to complex backends. That’s what enterprise developers are looking at if they really want to be on the money making side of these innovations.
These are the elephants as I see it.
Side Note/Disclaimer:Eric puts on mind-bending summits (he calls them conferences but I keep telling him that that doesn’t do justice to the content he produces). I’ve been an advisor to Defrag and I’ve been privileged to keynote Defrag before and will be doing so again, later this year. But this is about Glue.
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.
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.
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.
My name is Sameer Patel. These are my thoughts on performance acceleration via Enterprise Social and Collaborative Technology About / Contact / Speaking
It’s a natural tendency for this to often be an antagonistic relationship But where this gets productive is when IT starts to understand the larger trends in changing expectations of prospects and customers and the LoB is often dealing with especially with the advent of the public social web. As you start to peel those layers away, one by one, you start to see how IT can not only support but lead on the task of supporting and serving today’s increasingly social, sometimes vocal but definitely informed prospect and customer.
As a follow up to 
