Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

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:

This morning here in London brings the first Social Business Strategy Summit, courtesy Sift Media.

The event has a solid agenda touching on important internal and external collaboration topics and a host of excellent speakers.

I’m looking forward to talking about the topic of convergence between whats generally known as Social CRM and Enterprise 2.0. In plan english: how collaboration between customers and employees is starting to change thanks to the social web, whats hype and whats not. IBM’s Sandy Carter will keynote about Social Business trends. Paul Greenberg and I will keynote the event with a 50 min discussion around what this means, why its important to todays prospects and customers and how organizations need to go about executing. The excerpt:

This session brings together the internal and external worlds of the social business, with social CRM expert Paul Greenberg and Enterprise 2.0 guru Sameer Patel explaining how these fields dovetail to create the social business.

• Paul Greenberg, the56 Group, author ‘CRM at the Speed of Light’
• Sameer Patel, Global VP & GM, SAP Enterprise Social & Collaborative Software, SAP

Paul Greenberg, the leading international figure in CRM, provides a potted history of social CRM. Sameer Patel, leading in enterprise social and collaborative strategy, outlines the development of Enterprise 2.0. Together, Sameer and Paul demonstrate how the overlapping of SCRM and E2.0 has produced a compelling case for the social business model.

In addition, I’m looking forward to engaging with the who’s who in the Social Business Industry in the panel discussions. Folks such as Luis Suarez, Esteban Kolsky, Lee Bryant, Emanuele Quintarelli, Mark Tamis, Bertrand Duperrin, Laurence Buchanan, Megan Murray and others will share trends and ideas from both influencer and vendor view point.

The hashtag for the event on Twitter is #sbss12.

Really looking forward to it. Thanks to the team at Sift Media for having us.

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”.

Speaking at a bunch of events this year. Here’s my calendar as it stands right now.

• Panel: El Dorado Ventures Portfolio CEO Summit, Cordevalle, CA. April 27th.
• Keynote: Social Business Summit, London. 31st May.
• Keynote and Closing FireSide Chat: WebCOM Montreal. 16th May.
• Social Business Forum, Milan: 4th June.
• Keynote: Defrag, Boulder. Nov 14-15.

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.

Come say hi if you’re attending!

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.

Here is the presentation:

If you are at the event, come say hi.