Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

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 -)

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“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.

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This morning my favorite business journal, the Economist, has a good article on how the recession has had an impact on productivity and the differences in fall out in the United States vs. the European Union.

First an extremely interesting and arguably polarizing difference in how productivity is defined. The economist says:

Producing more by working less is the key to rising living standards, but in the short term there is a tension between efficiency and jobs.

Whether right or wrong, I don’t believe organizations at least in the United States consider this the goal. Here, its generally about get people to cram more work per hour so we can get more out of their eight hour day. Contrast that objective with them being able to go home early and have a life. But I digress.

On to the the central theme of the article:

Analysis by the Conference Board, a research firm, shows just how different the recession was on either side of the Atlantic. America’s economy shrank by around 2.5% last year but hours worked fell at twice that rate, so productivity (GDP per hour) rose by 2.5%. The average drop in GDP in the 15 countries that made up the European Union before its expansion in 2004 was larger, at 4.2%. But hours worked fell less sharply than in America and, as a result, EU productivity fell by 1.1% (see table). Workers that held on to jobs in America and Europe had their hours cut by similar amounts. The reason total hours worked fell by more in America was that there were more job losses there: employment fell by 3.6% last year, compared with a 1.9% fall in the EU.

Productivity has generally been one of the central themes when it comes to showing benefit from social and Enterprise 2.0 concepts. Often adopted from Knowledge Management. If you’ve read this blog since its inception about 15 months ago or you’re one of my clients, you’ll know that I have a fever-invoking aversion to casting productivity as goal of Enterprise 2.0 design (as opposed to an enabler). This, IMO, results in the colossal short sell of the promise of Enterprise 2.0. Its always been about performance acceleration here, where enterprise 2.0 concepts we know of today are enablers toward established performance goals.

Sticking with the productivity benefit argument since it is used a lot in the context of Enterprise 2.0, is it the case that Europe is seeing slower adoption of Enterprise 2.0 concepts because of the sheer people capacity that still exists in organizations? In other words, the need to do more with less is not as strong in Europe as compared to what’s seen in the United States? If people are the ultimate producers and you have an abundance of labor, being productive by finding experts faster, searching for data and content less, reducing time consuming meetings and email, etc etc don’t seem to be strong, budget-shifting value propositions.

What do our European management thinkers and product vendors think about this and what are you seeing on the ground?

Moving on to a stinging conclusion that should be a wake up call for us all in the Enterprise 2.0 space, whether in the United States or Europe, the Economist says:

Much of the expected slowdown reflects changes in technology, says Mr Jorgenson. The burst of strong growth in American productivity after 1995 was spurred by advances in the semiconductor industry, which led to sharp falls in the price of computing power. The technology is still improving but at a slower pace, and productivity trends will soon reflect that. The global outlook is brighter, because the benefits of IT are far from exhausted in big emerging economies, such as China and India. But that is no longer the case in America, says Robert Gordon of Northwestern University. “We’ve already picked the low-hanging fruit,” he says.

Wow. The benefits of IT are exhausted in America? I don’t buy the conclusion that we’ve wrung all the possible value out of productivity angle in the west. But being objective, if this is what the market perceives as the state of affairs with respect to productivity, those that continue to beat the productivity drum as end value better step up their game. Alternatively, lets stop playing defense, go after those fenced in processes policed by rigid ERP systems for decades and focus on how to accelerate performance by reducing cost, driving revenue and mitigating risk.

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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.

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Enterprise 2.0 has a parallel universe.

The first one that gets a lot of the press – product suites that offer Facebook like enterprise social networking, Blogs, Wikis, Activity Streams etc.

The second is what’s been traditionally called Unified Communications – led by companies such as IBM and Cisco that are making a strong showing in the social and collaborative category. Depending on their pedigree, the concept of enterprise 2.0 or the new enterprise collaborative and social backbone goes beyond what we have come to know as the enterprise 2.0 toolkit. Voice, Video, Conferencing, Virtual Meetings are front and center to how these companies look at collaboration and enterprise 2.0.  Stuff that’s somewhat conveniently left out of the first enterprise 2.0 bucket because its not simple for upstarts to offer these heavy weight capabilities. Yet, if you can be objective, these capabilities absolutely make sense in an integrated fashion as we move to a new working model.

And so I was really pleased to see the news that PBworks is now offering Click to call capabilities within its platform. That’s an early example of a solid use of traditional communication metaphors to augment and improve the social and collaborative experience.

As Leena Rao on Techcrunch says:

The beauty of the integration is that the conference calling feature is an extension of the collaboration platform. Users can call anyone with a single click who already has a PBworks profile or manually dial in any number. PBworks Voice runs on the open source FreeSWITCH telephony platform and phone systems are hosted in PBworks’ own datacenter.

Is PBworks now a IBM or Cisco competitor? Hardly. Those companies have a far more robust offering and deal with far more complex headaches that very large organizations have. But  PBworks approach and philosophy of customer centricity that brings strip down versions of heavy weight features will make them extremely compelling to many customers that want a miniature, light weight version of what an IBM can offer. No bloated software – just the good stuff and at a price they’re target market can stomach. It’s awesome to see them not get caught up in some altruistic version of ‘out with the old and in with the new approach’ to enterprise social computing.

They are not the only ones doing looking at traditional and new  (see Jive Software and Business Objects, for example) but I hope we see even more examples of this. In other words, Enterprise 2.0 steps out of the box, focus on what the customer really needs to be effective, objectively offer newer AND traditional forms of communication  and interaction metaphors in context. Whether that means folding in voice and meetings, or an embracing the role that structured systems will always play in the enterprise.

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Not the IT case, the Business Case – for sales reps, product managers, marketers, support and service teams considering and debating the virtues of a SaaS enabled business platform.

Obviously it won’t make up for an allegedly ill-conceived product and Google Buzz is getting a lot of heat for being excessively social without consent.

That said, whether it’s a mode of operating your business or a way to sell software, THIS is agility.

DAY 1: Google Buzz is Announced (Feb 9th)

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DAY 2: Ferocious Customer and Media Backlash (Feb 10th)

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**DAY 5** Immediate Problems Addressed (Feb 13th)

‘nuff said.

p.s if you want the case study on how Google operational-zed this, Nicholas Carlson on Silicon Alley Insider has the lead story.

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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.

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