Pretzel Logic – Social and Collaborative Business

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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On Thursday, July 12th, I’m looking forward to chatting with the super smart Brent Leary, Natalie Petouhoff, and Heather Davis about Social/Collaboration and the Cloud. We put out positioning statements to kick off the discussion, as follows:

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That’s what you get when you have Enterprise Software, Social Business/Enterprise, HR Tech, Cloud, CRM and SocialCRM peeps at a backyard BBQ. More strikingly, the lines are blurring so fast between these market acronyms – no one had any difficulty understanding each others “specialties” or how they matter to each others market focus.

Great to get together with my Enterprise Irregulars colleagues yesterday at R “Ray” Wang’s place.  In attendance were Jeff Nolan, Sadagopan Singam, Anshu Sharma, Esteban Kolsky, John Taschek, Naomi Bloom, Nenshad Bardoliwalla, Zoli Erdos, Dennis Moore, and spouses, dates and kids. Vinnie Mirchandani riffed on the event from afar and has the menu.

Thanks to Naomi for organizing and to Ray for hosting.

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I’m on a flight to Boston to dip into TechWeb’s Flagship Enterprise 2.0 Conference – the definitive watering hole for all enterprise social enthusiasts. Every year we look for both practical insights so practitioners can advance their effort on the ground, but as important this event is where one gets a sense of potential forward movement of the industry as a whole.

The movement if you will, started in 2006, then got tucked under the Social Business moniker, and found itself being tugged sideways, towards the Social Enterprise brand. How meaningful any of these shifts have been towards performance acceleraton is still being assessed. No question about one fact though –  its been a great effort to lift all boats as we look to unlock hidden talents of our customers and employees.

But fundamental questions remain that no amount of marketing air cover can hide:

1. I wrote about the state of the state a few months ago as I saw it, and many of you commented. Now, are we still talking about just sharing, connecting, flows and streams or is there an innate understanding of what meaningful collaboration really entails.

2. Your business, if its global, is facing massive volatility these days. For instance, regardless of whether you build or sell or even do nothing in Europe, the Euro is a global problem and requires more agility and nimbleness in how we organize, how we react and keep charging forward as business whilst still managing operational and financial risk. In principle, connected organizations can help a lot here – connections not just internally but with partners and with respect to keeping your customers close to you in these turbulent times. But that takes far more than people to people connections and even general purpose collaboration. It’s about proximity to core process, real time analytics and data access and to content to have all inputs you need to collaborate and execute. Where are we aligning the value of what we do, to such real problems?

3. Blurring lines between the front and back office. Michael Porters model, based on primary and support activities as he called it, nicely broke this out at a time when we were busy moving from paper to technology. But in a socially connected world, informed customers could care less about this. If your prospect wants an expert answer found deep in the bowels of your supply chain, you need to extract that and get it to them so they can make a purchase decision. Are we still abstractly talking about fluid connections between customers, employees and partners or are we coming closer to providing smarter connections that can expertly find the right brains but also enable audit trails and necessary workflows to augment socializing?

4. Is social tech still hiding in Venus and process tech on Mars? Our industry colleague Dion Hinchcliffe does a super job illustrating how the technology is consolidating or as he says, collapsing into the grip of large vendors. But are we getting closer to making technology confirm to how we work or are we still forcing an unnatural way of work. For instance, are activity streams still just so cool that its ok for important notifications to fall off the front page just because I was out to lunch? Lets see about that.

I’ve bet my current career on this market category so I’m as vested as anyone attending in getting real answers to such questions. I consider these unemotional questions that I know many of you are also thinking about.

My role has changed in the past couple of months as I joined SAP and I’ve largely gone underground, both for personal reasons and for what we’re building at SAP. Other than the occasional visit to the #socbiz hashtag on Twitter on the weekend, an unintended benefit of this is that its forced me to step almost completely out of our echo chamber. Many of you like me don’t drink too much of the kool-aid and SAP has exposed me further to gnarly customer problems and extremely practical buyers and so it puts a lot of social business banter in even sharper contrast. Not implying that the process laden world is better – but it further highlights the need to be mercilessly practical about the value of social.

This conference is familiar ground to me. I’ve been privileged to serve on the advisory board and as track chair for the Strategy and the Sales and Marketing tracks over the years. The organizers and the content strategy is always top notch and this years line up of analysts, consultants, and doers is even broader than years past. They do all they can do. Now lets see if the stories deliver in a way that aligns to the larger problem set faced by typical buyers and instantly hits home for those executives up at night trying to execute day in and day out.

All that said, one thing is for sure: This is, by far,  THE best group of people who attend this event and they share selflessly. I hope to have some time to meet up with some of my close friends and industry colleagues in attendance.

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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.

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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”.

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