Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

The Kill Email meme never really dies. Ever since the dawn of enterprise social computing circa 2006, the value proposition has been waffling between being a process killer to a portal killer and my favorite, an email killer. Stare Email in the face all you want. She’s looking back and laughing at you.

Then I saw this by Stowe Boyd over at GigaOm Pro. Stowe cites some insightful findings in Nassim Tableb’s book “The Surprising Truth: Technology Is Aging in Reverse“;

“We’re living in a Black Swan world, but what does this mean for the future of technology? My new book Antifragile argues that technologies, ideas, and theories – anything informational or cultural, as opposed to physical – age in reverse.

We may be trained to think that the new is about to overcome the old, but that’s just an optical illusion. Because the failure rate of the new is much, much higher than the failure rate of the old. When you see a young child and an old adult, you can be confident that the younger will likely survive the elder.

Yet with something nonperishable like a technology, that’s not the case.

There are two possibilities: Either both are expected to have the same additional life expectancy, or the old is expected to have a longer expectancy than the young. In this situation, if the old is 80 and the young is 10, the elder is expected to live eight times as long as the younger one.”

Stowe ends with:

“So, applying Taleb’s reasoning and Benoit Mandelbrot’s version of the Lindy effect, our modern social technologies — most of which haven’t been with us more than five years — can be guaranteed to be with us only an addition five years or so. And those pre- or proto-social technologies — like instant messaging and email — may be with us 50 years or more, even if the social tools don’t fall into disuse.”

Here’s the thing about reducing email with social networking: if you hate email because a good chunk of it is a irrelevant stream of information someone pushed at you without your consent, you aint seen nothing yet. Silo’d enterprise social networking can be way worse – not only do you have people pushing stuff at you, you have system notifications coming from applications drowning out even the few golden nuggets. As Constellation Research’s Alan Lepofsky wrote:

“Any reduction in the number of emails is a good thing. OMG I hate this one. Now instead of checking my inbox I have to check Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Yammer, LinkedIn, etc. Uggghhhh. Bifurcation of information is a real problem. Yes all these tools can send email notifications, but isn’t the point to reduce email? Yes many streams can aggregate information from multiple sources, but that just leads to a lot of noise, so how is that different than an inbox?”

Look, information overload is absolutely a huge problem. But enterprise social networking isn’t the obvious solution. What’s needed is what Stowe describes as “new communication technologies have to be a full order of magnitude better that those that came earlier”. That full order of magnitude won’t come from just shifting notifications from Outlook to SocialNetwork feeds. Rather, it will come from making it exponentially more efficient to message, to collaborate and to share in radically different ways where the outcome is 5-10-50 times better. And one of those ways is to infuse: a) Comprehensive people discovery based on new identity paradigms, and b) Collaboration into core business activities and tasks and in a way that implicitly shows how collaboration capabilities available at whatever point of action – a business event like discussing an invoice exception, or facilitating sales budgeting within your Finance ERP application, or dispute resolution with a supplier – making it far more effective to drive execution and decisions than anything that your zero-IQ email inbox can even dream of handling.

Nassim points a new headache: regardless of your good intentions to kill email, the odd are against you. Moving from one dumb messaging paradigm like email to another dumb messaging paradigm like stand alone social networking won’t cut it.

But in actuality, the stakes are really high. On one hand, most core business activities have a huge unstructured component that happens outside transaction systems such as CRM, Talent Management or Supply Chain. But we have a ways to go when it comes to leveraging social tools to facilitate this change. On the other hand, none of us need statistics to really convince ourselves that email bankruptcy is a fact of working life for almost all of us. So clearly the opportunity to show a better approach is ripe.

There’s some amazing innovation out there to super charge email. Simple tools such as Rapportive, Boomerang, and this very nifty tool from AOL called Alto (Hat Tip, Jeff Nolan). Whilst I can’t live without some of these, in the large scheme of things these are short-term Tylenol tablets to a tenacious problem that’s going to keep getting worse.

The answer won’t come from these sophisticated email tools but rather, from re-thinking business applications which is clearly underway and subsumes a lot of my time as I think about our product. And as CIO’s, it’s time to reconsider messaging as infrastructure and business software as applications. Rather, these teams need to collectively think about what combination of technology can re-cast the very essence of digital messaging by making it smart, in context of work that you are doing, and available at the point of action and decision making.

Comments also rolling in on Google Plus, here.

Image Credit: ClearContext.

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SAPPHIRE NOW and SAP TechEd, the European version of SAPs flagship customer event starts tomorrow in Madrid. It’s my first time here since joining SAP this summer and I’m really looking forward to it.

From my (social and collaborative) vantage point, European Events are very special. I’ve spoken at many of them over the last three years and there’s something very unique about engaging with customers and industry observers in Europe on the topic of social in the enterprise. Whilst this gap is rapidly closing, the one big distinction between North American and European conversations has been the scrutiny that social and collaborative constructs face with respect to its applicability to real business problems.

I’m generalizing here, but customers in North America are often more pre-disposed to experimenting with new technology. The situation in Europe has always been different and European customers have a way of rapidly re-calibrating you down to reality when you start playing buzzword-bingo by using terms such as “social business”. These don’t mean much to them. European companies are staring a tenacious recession, unemployment, macro re-skilling requirements and industry-specific challenges and opportunities. Regardless of the promise of any new shiny technology innovation, they always force you to winnow down the value of new technology to 2-3 simple benefits that apply directly to established hardships and opportunities. And they glaze over solutions to problems they don’t have.

As I said, this characterization is changing in North America rapidly. Last week I had the opportunity to speak with 70 odd CHROs and CFOs about the value of social and collaborative technology to human capital and talent management. Most were from industries that are not what you called early adopters of bleeding edge technology. Utilities, Energy, Component Manufacturers, Insurers. But each of them face massive change – 35% of the employee base retiring in 3 years, de-regulation of monopolistic industry design, rapid commoditization and the need for both mentoring and reverse mentoring between Gen X and Gen Y. And then there’s industry specific demands: For instance, I spoke with a CHRO who is dealing with deregulation of the energy business in the state of Texas where for the first time in the US, you can now buy home energy on a debit card-like model, turn your usage on and off remotely via wi-fi gadgets and iPhone apps, and get discounts for pre-paid contracts. Sounds more like how we buy mobile phone service vs. utilities. But these “real” issues and the need for creative thinking have been standard fare in Europe for a long time. This summer I presented at the Deutsche Bank investor conference in London with industry colleagues from IBM and other technology providers and there’s no question that even this audience continues to seek higher purpose for social software in the enterprise, given this bleak economic backdrop.

When social ways of work and technology can solve some of these specific industry and market challenges and complement existing process technology investment to close the loop, its starts to get in line with how organizations expect to measure value. To this end, SAPPHIRE NOW is an intellectual windfall for me and my team that’s representing SAPs Enterprise Social Software business unit here at the event. We launched SAP Jam, our enterprise social software, last week and I look forward to sharing more with SAPs customer, analyst and investor community at the event. But what I’m most interested in what we can learn from them. We’ve taken a first cut at this view of purpose built collaboration with the recent release and we’ll have even more to show and say next quarter but the opportunity to design around core line of business and industry challenges that take center stage at this event is an absolute treat.

Along with many esteemed industry colleagues, I’ve written a lot about the need for a grown up version of “social business” here on this blog. Over the next few days we have exactly the kind of audience that will demand a similar line of discussion.

Look forward to seeing everyone at the event tomorrow.

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As the market for social software evolves, I’m convinced that if we want to enable social in a meaningful way, we have to inject business context to where we socialize. And in turn we need to invoke social where ever people need it the most – in their applications, on their devices and anywhere else where they need the best minds to wrap around gnarly business problems. That’s the kind of social we’re building here at SAP.  And we’re hiring product managers who have the ambition to own and execute this promise we have made to our customers.

Here’s a synopsis of how were thinking of social, by Alex Williams at Techcrunch. I encourage you to read the entire article but some excerpts for you:

Article excerpts:

“Instead of Jam’s collaboration tools existing in a silo, SAP is instead focusing on integrating them into a suite of business apps through what it calls “social glue” designed to bind social networking with its CRM, HCM, Finance, and other apps.”

“If SAP pulls this off, then it will have cracked the nut on what is missing at the moment with social networking offerings in the enterprise space. It’s not about social for the sake of social. It’s instead about decreasing the friction so people can simply do a better job in getting their work done.”

“The next step is to make social something that is invisible. Something that is not even noticed. And that’s what I like about Jam. It is not social for the sake of social. It just helps people get the job done.”

 

If you subscribe to a similar view that social in the enterprise can be much more than what we’ve seen to date, and you know how to build products that radically enhance how people work, we’d love to hear from you. Take a look at the job req here and consider applying. Look forward to hearing from you.

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As I plan to spend a day at my first HRTech Conference in Chicago next week, it got me thinking about how far along we are towards getting the people part right in HCM. Or as my industry colleague and Head of Learning at TELUS, Dan Pontefract, aptly calls, the “Wesources” part.

There are some excellent application and application delivery questions to be answered at this event that helped me a lot. My fellow Enterprise Irregulars colleagues are in top form here: Naomi Bloom has put together her now famous HRTech Conference Pre-Read on what she’s looking for . Thomas Otter is looking at SaaS pricing and what he’s looking for at the event, here. And there’s plenty of other extremely thought provoking content from the likes of Jason Averbook and Josh Bersin.

Like many others, I’m coming from the people performance side of the HCM equation. As Social in the enterprise matures from nebulous “Facebook for the Enterprise” efforts that haven’t lead to meaningful results, towards surgical usage to accelerate performance, having the discipline to really focus on people AND business execution becomes ever more important.

Social is a massive topic at the the event this year. But these are the simple foundational advancements Im looking for:

1. Identity: Identity comes from systems of record for sure but also based on my social footprint – what I think of my self, what my colleagues think of me and how well my work is accepted by my peers. Don’t get identity right and you can forget about the rest that comes after – finding people, sharing, collaborating and improving output. Social technology capabilities have forgotten about this first step for the most part. Are we starting to get it right?

2. More H and less M, in HCM: To truly enable execution, it’s about how we’re both managing but its also about finding and federating talent across the organization. HR has traditionally been many many degrees away from core Line of Business (sales, service, marketing, production, etc) inefficiencies, yet it’s charged with managing and nurturing talent centrally. That’s woefully impractical. Social technologies,when designed and employed right, can massively shrink the distance between core customer, employee and partner problems and opportunities and your talent pool. How well is HR leveraging technology solve this problem?

3. Informal Peer Learning: Many business activities powered by transactional or structured systems have an informal/unstructured cousin. Take learning for example. You may have the best LMS system in the world but if you’re say, trying to teach a factory worker how to wear a glove properly to reduce injury (and your Workers Comp outlay), endless PowerPoints are hopeless. I’m sure you can think of a 100 other such examples in your organization. Social Learning capabilities, rich media on a mobile device is hugely powerful to dramatically improve on the job learning. Beyond Learning, most structured talent management process have similar informal cousins. Are we beyond transactions and moving to execution, yet?

4. Where’s the proverbial puck? Are we tracking at least somewhat close to the adoption appetite of the average employee when it comes to behavior change or are we designing new fangled systems for a world thats 10 years out? Don’t get me wrong, I like aspirational design and innovation as much as the next guy but this was an expensive lesson learnt in the enterprise social networking world where we kept piling on more technology in the hopes that social networks will finally get adopted. All that happened is that the technology got quickly commoditzed as the business value wasn’t apparent. Lets see if all we see is just a whole lot of shiny or if practical execution focused design is emerging.

HRTech is of course about a lot more than this. But we tend to often think that the answer to complex business problems is complex technology. I think there are a host of very simple ways to provide massive performance acceleration benefit, if and only if you have an innate understanding of business execution problems on the ground. Im looking forward to seeing how were tacking this in the HR world next week.

I’ve spent a lot of time on the area of human capital performance (vs management). But since I joined SAP, I’ve gotten a deeper understanding of some of the big deficiencies in this area where social can move the needle. Thanks to colleagues such as David Ludlow, Dmitri Krakovsky and Aaron Au. HRTech I expect will be a great place to see where the industry is, as a whole.

Last year I wrote this in a previous blog post about collaborative HR performance and its something I still believe, infact with even more conviction:

“Bill Kutik of HRTech fame aptly characterized HR as the ‘Rodney Dangerfield’ of the Executive Suite. I couldn’t have said it better. As I discussed with the esteemed group of CHROs and executives at the retreat, in my estimation, HR as a function has been beaten down (emotionally) to a pulp over the last decade. This function has had the ugly pleasure of, one one hand, getting near zero credit for those very rock stars they sourced who were responsible for blazing performance in good times, but yet were handed the dirty job of laying off thousands in bad times. Now is their time to design for and to transition into the ultimate brokers of real people intelligence. And to then trade on that indispensable currency as the rest of the leadership sizes up what effectively competing and winning in the 21st century will entail.”

Looking forward to learning a lot in the day and a half that I’m there. Tons for good friends are in attendance. If you’d like to say hi, come by an event that SAP and SuccessFactors is hosting on Monday at the House of Blues.

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Brilliant New York Times UX designer and author Alex Wright, someone I’ve had the privilege to work closely with, said to me a decade ago that “Tags are the new Mullet”. Back in the mid 2000′s, those garish word-clouds made popular by Delicious showed up everywhere and only those of us geekily-inclined really employed them in any consistent way.

Today’s mullet is the Activity Feed in Enterprise Social Networking applications. Don’t get me wrong – feeds have their purpose and their place. But as the pendulum swings carelessly from people to people, to machine to people and back, somehow, someone decided that the answer to enterprise social network ghost towns was to pipe transactional data into activity feeds and that would make it all all right. It helps for certain use cases but the behavioral change required to get consistent value from this can be herculean. And who asked for this massive work shift to begin with?

The next generation of successful social business programs won’t come from just cramming more information and data into social metaphors that no one asked for. It will come from bringing social metaphors right to the point of business context: be that an enterprise social network, an application, a location, an API or a Internet enabled device or machine.

Bit of a tactical post for a change but its something I’ve observed along the way and in the context of maturation of our industry, it’s important. And talk to Line Of Business or CIOs that have these running in their orgs for 6+ months – you’ll get a feel for this.

We did a dis-service to the promise of social business by just expecting that Facebook for the Enterprise would gather steam. It didn’t. Now lets really ask our selves how repeatable and practical it really is to assume massive behavior change on the end users part  as we expect that they will sit in front of a feed waiting for transactional pings.

It sounds geekily correct. Even technically awesome. But there’s more to social business than this.

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When asked to review tent.io, a new protocol for, in their words, open, decentralized, social networking, Dave Winer writes:

Kinda reminds me of enterprise social networking in some ways. We say its about the people but thats just not enough in the business world. Facebook is about people and content, and in the consumer context, that works. You’re motivated to stay connected to friends and share. And as Instagram proved, there are 1.2 bilion reasons why Facebook wanted to own one of the most important contextual social object for sharing on the social web. Hell, Pinterest is all about pinning pictures.

Dave’s closer applies perfectly to many examples of how Enterprise Social Networking is used.

Think of a protocol like a road. You could have a wonderful road. Well paved. Wide lanes. Great rest areas. But if it goes from nowhere to nowhere, it’s not going to be very popular, no matter how nice it is.

Enterprise Social Networking can have all the bells and whistles: Feeds, Blogs, Screen Sharing, Presence and on and on. Many of these are absolutely critical. And you can’t put a price on well connected enterprises. But if simple engagement metaphors, borne out of contextual applicability is missing, Enterprise Social programs also risk becoming a beautiful road to nowhere.

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The Nest thermometer is by far my favorite gadget purchase of 2012. Its spendy at $250 but if you consider that a 1% +/- change in your heating/cooling setting can tilt your yearly bill by 5%, accuracy and smart meters are valuable. You’ll make up the cost in savings in due time.

Wi-fi connectivity means I can turn it on 10 min before I get home from the iPhone app, it learns my habits as time goes by, the sensors make sure it doesn’t heat or cool when no one is at home, and finally it quickly adjusts to energy saving mode which has now adjusted to a comfortable setting in the house. Oh and for the coolness factor – it sends me atta boy emails with a green gamified badge for good energy conservation last month. Its jargon compliant too!

What does all this boil down to? The Nest is an amazing device because it closes the loop on what I set really out to do which is (a) at a basic level, seek optimal temperature and (b) avoid unruly utility bills. Most traditional thermostats do (a) explicitly and leave it to us to worry about how to optimize for (b). They don’t close the loop. Nest does.

Enterprise software can learn a lot from this. Traditional process software also focuses on only part of the objective. Some examples:

1. Governance, Risk and Compliance Software helps you assess risk effectively. But risk management as an objective expects that you can contain, reduce or make a call on taking on, said risk. In built collaboration to rope in those who create the risk does that. That’s closing the loop.

2. CRM Software helps you manage customer records. But customer relationship management expects that you build and retain authentic relationships with customers. Collaborating with customers to solve problems, to build products they want to and coming through for them when they are in a bind is what its really all about. That’s closing the loop.

3. Learning Management Software gets you course work. But outside of regulatory / mandated training, the point is not to take a structured course, its to learn/get up to speed / become smarter, faster. That comes also from learning on the job, from your peers who can offer practical insight. Learning comes from structured and unstructured study. That’s closing the loop.

4. Supply Chain management software really isn’t about managing a supply chain, taken literally. Its part of the larger business objective of getting products out the door at a stated cost and quality threshold. To do so, you need to ensure that your suppliers work well with you and with each other to get to those stated objectives. That’s closing the loop.

5. Sales and Operations Planning Software is great for crunching numbers by functional groups across the demand and supply chain in your organization. But the point of the exercise is to have these teams collaborate to work through scenarios and come up with optimal estimates on demand and stocked shelves. That’s closing the loop.

I’ve got 20 other examples but you get my drift.

Social and collaborative technology has a significant role to play in closing the loop. Not by itself in a vacuum as we’ve seen time and time again with even the most well intentioned or designed social software, or even without the help of good process systems and analytics. But in almost all cases, to close the loop it depends on how well you can contextually bring social and process together in near real time, to complete business activity.

The Nest doesn’t let you collaborate (thank heavens). And collaboration or social business isn’t the solution to every work problem either. But both, in their own way, close the loop on mission critical processes in our personal and work lives, respectively.

As you’re looking to understand the value of business software to meet your business goals, make sure you demand that it closes the loop.

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