Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

I read, with great interest, an interview with Jeff Clavier of SoftTechVC in Network World. Jeff’s had notable successes in the consumer world (Mint, MyBlogLog, and Userplane). I’ve never interacted with Jeff (other than recommending a Dim Sum Restaurant on Twitter) but I’ve always had respect for him – unlike many others, he’s adequately self deprecating when it comes to his passing on an opportunity to invest in LinkedIn. : -)

On the topic of Enterprise Software, Jeff says:

Most of SoftTech’s investments have so far been in the consumer space. “Innovation is slower on the enterprise side,” Clavier claims, and “beset by security issues.” “It’s a mature market with only a few acquirers; sales are more difficult and investors have little leverage when there are so few buyers. Low cost, consumer applications that leverage the Web offer capital efficiencies not matched on the enterprise side – and they are fun to work with.”

I’ve had conversations with scores of CEOs of traditional and Enterprise 2.0 companies on this topic. I’m still sticking with my analysis of over a year ago about Commoditization that’s partly due to a lack of focus on process and context, too much reliance on nebulous measures such as productivity and little alignment with tasks at hand. That’s played out with CubeTree’s purchase for $20 million. Anemic by Enterprise standards.

But leverage is coming. I’ve been reading a galley copy of The New Polymath by Vinnie Mirchandani, due out later this summer, and its clear how enterprise application infrastructure, based on customer expectations is ripe for a re-haul. It’s not just about the cloud and its also not just about SaaS vs On Premise business apps. Simpler, better, faster-to-update ways of GTD in context, and in a way that connects people, are about to hit. And that opens up organic as well as M&A opportunities on the technology supply side.

There’s quite a few opportunities’ that are large enough to have significant impact, but I’m going to touch on a few areas I see when talking to end customers, discounted by the pace of innovation, to date.

• Decision Facilitation: Yes, in-person meetings and email are time consuming, expensive and often un productive. The answer is not to simply move those to digital interactions powered by Enterprise 2.0. That’s a first step. But that can also mean moving the same unproductive discussions to a digital platform and arguably more of them since its less time consuming. We still need to wrap a decision facilitation layer around it to drive better results. OpenAPIs, activity streams, data and document access all in context is where its at.
• Exception Handling: Somewhere between your Enterprise 2.0 platform and your structured employee, partner and supplier processes, lies a wide open gap. It’s a myth that we can get by with process laden technology since it solves 70%, 80& 90% of repeatable process tasks. The other 10%, 20%, 30% is where things can go horribly wrong and cost millions. Weaving in a social fabric to deal with those exceptions to standard process outcomes is barely tapped today.
• CRM 2.0 (or socialCRM) is DOA with Enterprise 1.0. You can have the most sophisticated customer community but remember, prospects and customers are looking to bypass marketing and talk to experts deep inside your org and partner ecosystem. You cant have a vibrant and successful community if you’re rely on a 1990s style latency riddled, portal/intranet/extranet inside the firm. Even a “facebook for the enterprise” that cant methodically wrap around real time customer interaction demands is but a first step.
• Performance: I joined a panel on SugarCRM’s SugarCon event last month with Esteban Kolsky, Jeremiah Owyang and Diogo Rebelo where we discussed who owns Social  Data in the enterprise. Traditional BI tools extract results from structured data systems. New performance applications will blend social and analytical data to improve discrete business performance outcomes  – HR and Talent, Spend Management, Communication Performance. Etc. Ultimately moving from “here’s the report” to “here’s what to do about the data”.

Each of these can spawn vastly different value propositions for end customers.

Jeff’s spot on when he talks about simple consumer constructs starting to influence how Enterprise users interact with people and data. And all of the opportunities, above, will expect this as a price of entry. The big consideration though for large mature enterprises will be to avoid siloed efforts and the need to form a central collaborative back bone that’s still flexible enough to show concrete improvement around specific business tasks (sales, marketing, innovation, etc). Last month, Oliver Marks and I  presented at Interop on Performance Acceleration via Enterprise 2.0 and this was further validated by a very mature audience of technology managers and executives.

I’m expecting to have a lot of interesting conversations on this topic over the next few weeks. Tomorrow I head to SAP SAPPHIRE, then to the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Milan where I’ll be talking about 21st Century Enterprises and the Role of Social, and finally at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston where were going to be focusing on business value of E2.0.

I’ll update this post after I’ve processed what I learn.

As some of you heard (many thanks for the notes), I’ve joined the Defrag Conference Advisory Board.

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:

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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.

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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 -)

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse."  – Henry Ford.

Somewhere there’s got to be a similar line from Steve Jobs as well.  And both have successfully belted out product after product that changed the automotive, mobile and media business, forever. All without involving the customer in a meaningful way.

So why are customer and employee led innovation programs all the rage at organizations today? Idea Management Platforms such as Bright Idea, Spigit and others are selling like hotcakes. And  Enterprise 2.0 platforms such as Jive Software and Newsgator single out this one purpose driven component and offer it as well.

Chevrons doing it, SAP’s doing it, Intuit’s doing it and lots and lots of others. And they are all involving customers, partners and employees to help them find and refine the next big idea or ways to streamline operations within organizations as a way to reduce cost and mitigate risk. And they’re saving or making millions doing so.

Come find out what the hoopla is all about at the Innovation Meetup in Mountain View this Tuesday, the 23rd of March at 6:30 pm. I’m moderating an awesome panel with Susie Wee, CTO of Client Cloud Services at HP, Tad Milbourn of Intuit and Marco ten Vaanholt, VP of SAP’s Community Network.

At Sovos, were also working on some high profile innovation programs with clients right now so it should be a lively discussion. We’re going to discuss the drivers, challenges and as important execution and follow through of successful innovation programs. Collecting ideas is one thing. Doing something about it is another. We’ll find out how the experts do it.

The event is hosted by Tatyana Kanzavelli whose now legendary in Silicon Valley for producing intimate, high quality events.

More about the event from the Meet Up website:

Innovation has been dubbed as one of the more promising purpose-driven applications of social and collaborative technology in the enterprises. Whether as a way to encourage customers or internal employees, Innovation Programs in enterprises have unlocked critical ideas at well known enterprises that has ultimately led to the conception of new product ideas, significant cost savings internally and finally, operational efficiency. Sameer Patel, founding partner at the Sovos Group will moderate a session to highlight the opportunity and challenges that organizations face as they seek to unlock critical insight coming from customers, partners and employees.

Learn more about the panelists and the event and register on the Meet Up site here. It’s $20 online and $30 at the door. Food and wine included.

Hope to see you there.

Sovos will be presenting on Accelerating Performance via Social and Enterprise 2.0 technology at a webinar hosted by Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) this week, Thursday.

Oliver Marks and I will both be on deck engaging with the audience on how to approach social computing in the context of organizational, customer and partner performance.

Here’s an excerpt:

This session aims to demystify Enterprise 2.0 benefits and to focus on pragmatic strategy by providing real world experience on viable tactics for budgeting, definining your value proposition and measuring your desired results.
Fresh from their presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Oliver Marks & Sameer Patel of the Sovos Group aim to help you unlock the value of these rapidly maturing and increasingly important social constructs to meet your specific business needs. And we’ll address how they can significantly augment the value you get from your current technology investments with greater employee and partner performance.

If you’d like to attend, here’s a promo code that gets you a discount: PRMSOVOS. You can register here. Hope to see you there.

Earlier this month I did a presentation with my Sovos colleague, Oliver Marks, at the Enterprise 2.0 virtual conference. The focus of our keynote was to  frame the discussion around social and collaborative concepts in the context of business value and performance. We coverd critical issues that are on the minds of executives at large enterprises that are grappling with the tanglble value of social computing in the context of the enterprise.

The slide deck is pasted below.

Oliver Marks and I are co-chairing the Enterprise 2.0 Strategy and Execution Planning Track at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco next week. Details on each session can be found here. The premise of this track is two-fold:

- help folks understand the conceiving, selling and planning phases of a transformation to social constructs in the context of enterprise performance.

- learn how to make the business case for using social constructs to improve specific line of business performance. For the San Francisco Event, we will focus on: Purpose Driven Collaboration and how to plan for Scale, Customer Support and Product Innovation.

Here’s a line up of our sessions.

Monday – Selling the Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration and 2.0 Technologies #e2conf-3

~60% instructional led by Oliver and me. We will walk you through the process of getting the raw ingredients together, framing the discussion for executives, the pitch and finally the execution plan.

To add other credible voices to the conversation we have 2 panels built into the session. First, to help you be prepared for just about any question that can be thrown at you by the most skeptical executive, we’ve asked a few folks from the vendor community to join us and give us a taste of what they hear every day, out in the market. We’re thrilled to have the following folks join us:

Chris McGrath, ThoughtFarmer

Scott Schnaars, Socialtext

Tom Kuegler, PBWORKS

To help you with planning a successful launch, Bevin Hernandez from Penn State University will show us how they generated buzz and got folks jazzed about the launch of their collaborative intranet.

Tuesday: Collaboration at Scale

Alan Cohen, Vice President, Enterprise, Cisco Systems

Jon Pyke, Chief Strategy Officer, Cordys

Wednesday: Lowering Customer Support Costs via Social Tools

Lois Townsend, Director, Social Media Strategy and Operations, Hewlett Packard

R Wang, Partner, Altimeter Group

Steve Woods, Eloqua, CTO

Todd Shimizu, Director Communities, Juniper Networks

Treb Ryan, CEO, Opsource

Thursday: Launching winning products in the marketplace. How Social Software Improves your odds

Bill Truettner, Implementation Consultant, Imaginatik (Note: Bill will talk about his experiences in his previous role as an Innovation Manager for Hewlett Packard)

Jack Anderson, Innovation Specialist, Chevron

Patrick Asher, Innovation Leader, AT&T

This track is all about where the rubber meets the road. Our goal is to begin to move to discussion from tools and tactics, to accelerating performance via social computing constructs and software. Every one of these sessions focuses on practical approaches to social transformation in the enterprise. In turn, the esteemed group of folks that have been kind enough to join us have either (as executives themselves) led the charge to moving to social computing platforms to accelerate performance them selves, or as managers, have made convincing arguments to executives on the opportunity that social computing presents in the context of discrete business process.

We look forward to seeing you next week.

Yet again, thanks to Eric Norlin, a bunch of us get the opportunity to escape to Denver next month to talk about what’s next in social software. At the Defrag conference next month on November 11th and 12th.

I’m going to spare you a diatribe about 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.

I’m going to be facilitating a discussion on ‘Communication Metaphors’ with Tim Young, Alexander Moore, Michael Cerda, and Matt Brezina.

Hope to see you there!