Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

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.

ZDNet Blogger and eternal pragmatist, Dennis Howlett is at it again. As a follow up to his original “Enterprise 2.0: What a Crock” post and an attempt by a panel at the Enterprise 2.0 conference to respond to his contention, he validates his original argument, saying:

What I find staggering is that despite the panel’s general acknowledgment that ‘it is early days’ they have no clear answers for solving the problems that Enterprise 2.0 evokes. If this is the best that industry can put forward then forget it. There are far bigger problems to solve like correctly managing the workforce in times of economic crisis, smoothing out lumpy supply chains, beating down on data center costs or just getting ERP to deliver the benefits that were intended and which have consumed billions of IT spend dollars.

Given how the discussion on Enterprise 2.0 plays out on the blogosphere as well as at conferences, you really can’t objectively argue with this statement. In fact, Ill go further: The ‘Its the early days’ argument just doesn’t stand up. No different from the plethora of consumer services that we all use (Twitter et al), first impressions are lasting impressions in the enterprise setting as well. As participants, we make up our minds very early about the usefulness of a program, technology or service. And so if intent, incentive, context and usability are not hard coded into the effort from the get go, its never going to have the required street credibility, no matter how much time and money you throw at adoption.

And if you can’t shake fact that Dennis often sports an ERP-colored lens, a fresh eye provided by Venturebeat reporter Anthony Ha also results in a similar conclusion.

The Colossal Enterprise 2.0 Short Sell

The problem is that, in the context of E2.0, there’s little discussion around performance objectives where social computing constructs and technologies can move the needle on discrete but large scale business solutions. Equally bad is that there’s little thought and discussion around the optimal solutions architecture and combination of process + social that can solve large scale problems that keeps the c-suite awake at night. Instead, the discussion is dominated by suites vs. platform debates, more technical gobbldygook (to an executive at least) about feature superiority, endless back-to-the-drawing-board definition debates, and post deployment adoption difficulties that in actuality might not have been so bad had the requisite execution planning been considered in the first place. I’m not pointing fingers, by the way. I also engage in some of these when prodded.

In actuality, Dennis’ assessment is not entirely correct. It’s just that the Enterprise 2.0 airwaves (and conferences) are subsumed by weak business benefit alignment exacerbated by tactical discussion around ‘strategy’ (NOT) that centers around suite implementation, why no one stuck around after launch, and how email sucks.  All that achieves is driving the promise of social computing constructs further and further down the food chain – to a place that few executives really care to hang out at. And the process performance practitioners and pundits have a field day with all of this.

The Beef is, In Fact, Here

My colleague Oliver Marks (who also takes on this issue) and I co-chaired the strategy and execution planning track (review by Ben Kepes | CloudAve) at the Enterprise 2.0 conference where we ran a 3 hour workshop on how to get executives to understand the business value of social computing in the context of performance goals that keep them up at night. Following that we ran sessions that addressed delivering tangible value in the context of known functions and processes in the enterprise: purpose driven collaboration, reducing customer support costs via social concepts and improving product innovation via social concepts. No tools, no features and frankly no adoption. Just performance acceleration via strategic process and performance alignment – topics that are central to the consulting work that Oliver and I are involved in and frankly those that need to dominate the discussion around Enterprise 2.0 (detailed below).

How would the skeptics respond if they heard GetSatisfaction CEO Wendy Lea explain how Nike centrally manages its offsite community discussions for a whopping $8,000/ year? Or Altimeter Group Partner, R Ray Wang’s estimate that social computing concepts, when injected into process, actually reduces costs 2 to 4 X times over those very ERP-esq call center/CRM technology driven programs that Dennis and other skeptics are all too familiar with? Contrast that with the fact that traditional CRM systems on their own are often nothing more than glorified reporting systems that sales reps are mandated to use, in exchange for their commission check. Building on Rays assertion, now, with the strategic use of social computing concepts and technologies in context, these new approaches help nip customer support problems early and at a significantly reduced cost. As important, they inject qualified leads into traditional CRM systems finally giving them a real performance acceleration purpose, beyond bean counting by a Sales Operations Manager. That’s process + social, exponentially improving performance.

Want more? Take the case of how an extremely conservative organization such as Chevron  significant improved safety risk and improved performance:

• Chevron used social computing (in this case to generate ideas) constructs and technologies to find new applications for patented processes created at one of its oil refineries. These processes, powered by ERP inventory management as well as other systems that manage chemical mixes, fume levels and repair management were limited to one process and one physical location. Idea management via social software enabled Chevron to find and select 6 out of 115 re-application candidates globally where existing patents were reused or extended as new patents, to also improve similar processes on aboard ships, offshore refineries, energy exploration efforts and other “dangerous monitoring environments”. Federated risk management programs and more patents – thanks to the power of social computing that brought the right minds together to ideate and collaborate.
• Second, reducing safety risks at residential and commercial communities that sit above oil pipelines is obviously critical to Chevron. They used social computing constructs  to get its IT department, ERP inventory management provider and GPS system vendor to generate ideas and to collaborate on a new approach to removing process breaks and paper based processes that impede timely community notification when pipelines break. Social computing was central to this effort to speed up communication to folks that lived close to pipelines and to reduce the time from problem notification to repair.

In all of these cases, data, and intelligence normally buried in closed process centric activity and systems were pushed into people centric social realms for improvement, only then to be put back into process systems in their newer highly optimized forms. If these are not clear examples of how process and so called enterprise 2.0 social concepts came to together to accelerate performance, I don’t know what is. And I’m willing to bet that if the naysayers saw more of these examples, they would pontificate based on a different set of facts.

I suspect this is what SAP EVP, Zia Yusuf might be thinking when he tweeted

@dahowlett blog and wikis will not drive value alone, I think the trick here is to connect "crowd insight" directly into specific bizprocess

…and what ex-SAPer and author of Driven to Perform, Nenshad Bardolliwala credibly elaborates on in his architectural illustration of where social computing can co-exist traditional process based activity.

Whilst we are on the subject of SAP, think those ERP laden processes are all that?  Lets see how Tony Hsieh feels about not using community constructs during, say, the order to cash (and refund) process to provide the same insane level of customer service that Zappos offers during the pre sales process. Sure, you need to have compliance and governance covered, but social constructs injected strategically drastically improves the quality of output in a world where customer centricity is inevitability becoming front and center.

But truthfully, in the defense of the Process advocates, what else can they benchmark against? Certainly not the prevalent E2.0 discourse that’s focused on unseating Knowledge Management, Email, Intranets and Portals to drive nebulous benefits such as productivity, time savings, and worse, the rudderless catch all – workplace transformation.  All in all, these older technologies and programs have shown little to no large scale performance acceleration and the C-Suite is acutely aware of that. If for nothing else, at least SAP helps to keep the SEC, Justice System, FDA and IRS off your back.

The Moment of Truth

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of real work required in the area of adoption that dominates the airwaves and I don’t mean to discount these efforts of some very hard working folks. And even ERP, CRM etc have their own share of usage problems, giving birth to a sizable industry that just focuses just on ERP/CRM training to drive proper adoption. The difference is that intent and the business case for using these technologies are dead clear. Something that’s just missing in the Enterprise 2.0 discussion and stated promise.

The moment of truth is about to hit this category over the next 12 months where executives are going to ask the hard questions about the applicability of these constructs and technologies to performance acceleration and to alignment with discrete business goals. Anything but a succinct answer that involves the right balance social + process and the estimated switching cost will result in E2.0 being tragically (and wrongly) regarded as yet another example of Micky Mouse technology that belongs on a server under someone desk, if at all.

The choice is clear.

Update: More from Dennis on ZDNet commenting on this and some other very good posts on this topic.

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.

A significant portion of my work over the last decade (both as part of the marchFIRST/ Mitchell Madison team and later, my own practice) has been in the area of accelerating performance for business partner networks at large organizations.

As is always the case, one of the outcomes of this economic downturn is going to be massive M&A activity and industry restructuring. Just in the last week, we saw Dell and Perot Systems, and now Xerox and ACS tying the knot. My own experience with this was my consulting work during McKesson + HBOC, Sun + StorageTek mergers and recently, a $1B+ communications service provider entering the SMB market via acquisition, amongst others.

The Effect on Traditional Partnerships

One of the most prominent pressure points in the midst of such consolidation is the partner ecosystem. New partners get added, existing partners face conflicts of interest and a sudden expertise/knowhow gap vis a vie the new combined offering. In the case of the channel in particular, the end customer (really the partners customer) looks to the partner for clarity on the manufacturing organizations new standing in the market.

Add to this some of the timeless struggles in this ecosystem that are prevalent in any economy. As a manufacturer of physical or soft goods (say Insurance), you’re always trying to attract the top 20% of your channels sales reps as a way to get the largest share of wallet of that partner. But so are your competitors. So the onus is on you to make it dead simple for your channel to understand and communicate the benefits of your products to the end customer. As important, the ease of doing business with you (which includes partner on-boarding, provisioning, co-marketing, white labeling, first line of support etc) is a big factor for channel sales reps that are going to represent you in the market. I’ve even seen first hand in the SMB channel for large organizations that partners will even give up as much as 10% of margin in exchange for low frictional end customer management and ongoing administration. The difference is more than made up by freed up time to drive up sales volume. All up, simplicity of doing business is paramount.

Organizations are But a Matrix of Internal Partnerships Too

Then there’s another side to this: My work experience has proven that organizations that do well understand that even internally they are really orchestrating a matrix of complex partnerships. Sales with Marketing; Product Development with Marketing, R&D with engineering etc., where each of these tend to work in extremely different ways. To be successful, you need to understand the unique dynamics of this relationship that make for a solid partnership that can ultimately drive the business forward. Outside of internal team collaboration (say, a group of marketers, a group of engineers, etc.), no spray & pray / general purpose employee collaborative strategy (or tool application) is going to really show sustainable impact for every tribe or collective. And just like traditional business ecosystem partnerships (customers, suppliers, channel), these internal partnerships also get significantly rattled in the face of industry consolidation.

Critical Considerations for Social Computing

In principle, social computing constructs afford a significant opportunity to first bring back normalcy to these partnerships at a rapid pace and then accelerate performance well beyond the original baseline – by driving simplicity. Basic constructs such as people and data findability and crossing siloed org designs are important first steps. And these can be made possible with a deliberate strategy and today’s “e2.0’ tools.

Its critical to note though, that these efforts alone likely won’t account for context, incentive and performance driven collaboration preferences – elements that generate tangible business value and participation. And so the true promise from social computing constructs and investment to cultivate these partnerships will be eventually be questioned if the following are not dealt with, head on:

• First, existing structural inefficiencies in how internal or external partners liaise as a result of little adherence to basic human interaction constructs and incentive structures, and unnecessary process centric technology that restricts human capital flow. Examples: Restrictive ECM processes that bring massive risk to business execution or latency and artificial walls in the communication process with supply partners that result in massive lost opportunity to recast the concept of collaboration across the extended business ecosystem.
• Second, neglect of critical early programmatic design considerations that truly accelerate performance via social computing or ‘Enterprise 2.0’ concepts. The results of this will manifest itself during the hangover period following pre-mature/euphoric technology-led change initiation in the enterprise. Examples of “fall outs” will be misconstrued outcomes from Attention optimization (see v. good post by Jevon MacDonald on this), a rudderless rush towards the ‘real time enterprise’ vs. ‘right time’ considerations, mis-alignment between strategy and ‘enterprise 2.0’ deployments. Or the side effects of heightened transparency as a result of open knowledge models (As Oliver Marks eloquently opines).

The business case of socially networked business ecosystems must include solutions and antidotes to these two fundamental issues to gain long term value – whether that’s competitive advantage, cost savings or revenue enhancement. Smart line of business executives will demand it upfront, catch on early post kick off or worse, just ignore the initiative whole hog. They are acutely aware of the failed promise of portals and extranets as the one size fits partnership facilitation solutions to large scale ecosystem integration. So this time around they will want to be convinced that you can bring simplicity, contextual interaction, design around standard performance metrics – yet shield participants from the needed complex technology that’s behind the scenes.

Got Tech?

One thing’s for sure: The socially powered business partner ecosystem will not emerge from what we know of to be the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ technology stack, as it stands today. No doubt that the current tools will play a significant role towards simplifying these relationships. But to accelerate business performance via social computing constructs, lots of design work is needed along with the filling of critical technology gaps to truly account for context, cognizance of both process and social at the business activity level, and a deep understanding of and response to individual incentive that makes participation a natural instinct.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Oliver Marks and I will be running a new track called “Selling the Business Case for Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration and 2.0 Technologies”. Via a combination of instructional and practitioner panel discussions, we’re going to tackle how known functions in the organization such as Customer Support, Purpose Driven Employee Collaboration and Supplier Networks can leverage social computing constructs to accelerate performance. There’s a need for a unified social fabric across business ecosystems, yet a deliberate focus on the unique motivations for each business interaction is vital. We aim to bring it all together at the conference. More details about the track from Oliver and from E2.0 Conference Chair, Steve Wylie.

Quick post to tell you that I’m very happy to be appointed to TechWebs Enterprise 2.0 conference advisory board.

Last week conference Chair Steve Wylie and I got together in San Francisco to chat about what social business ecosystems will look like as we move past this early stage of defining and justifying open collaborative environments between employees, partners, customers and suppliers. As important, what it’s going to take to truly accelerate business performance via social computing constructs and technologies.

It quickly became clear that the time to start talking about this, is now. Joining the advisory board allows me to participate with some very smart folks on addressing these issues.

Thanks again to Steve for the invite. And thanks to everyone in the E 2.0 community for their good wishes and support.

About the Conference:

Enterprise 2.0 Conference takes a strategic perspective, emphasizing the bigger picture implications of the technology and the exploration of what is at stake for organizations trying to change not only tools, but also culture and process.

Beyond discussion of the “why”, there will also be in-depth opportunities for learning the “how” that will help you bring Enterprise 2.0 to your business.

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference Advisory Board is comprised of leading experts in the fields of technology for business, collaboration, culture change and collective intelligence.

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference last month, I met with a few interesting companies that I wasn’t familiar with, prior to the event. I thought I was “plugged in”. Clearly, not enough. The next few posts uncover how some of these companies hope to move the needle on Enterprise 2.0 enablement. First up: Supply Chain Management.

McLean, VA based SIM (Supplier Information Mgmt) provider, Rollstream was one of the more impressive but lesser-known-companies (to me) that I had the chance to meet with. If you read this blog often, you’ll get why I instantly liked their business. RollStream fixes specific problems – inefficiencies in the supply chain via Private Supplier Social Networks. Counting well known companies such as Walgreens, Owens & Minor, Johnson & Johnson and Tesco as customers, their SaaS solution services the partner relationship lifecycle for retailers, manufacturers and distributors. Business activity-focused capabilities cover partner on-boarding, compliance, performance management and dispute resolution.

Founder Nick Parnaby and CEO Kristin Muhlner discussed existing bottlenecks and cliffs in the supply chain mgmt process and how Rollstream hopes to open up the lines of communication, add visibility, and remove unnecessary interaction toll gates enforced by decades old SCM and ERP influenced work models. Also, today’s resource heavy supply chain management interaction models force relationship managers to pick specific partners to deal with. RollStream offers social software to reduce manual intervention during on-boarding and to help organizations more easily identify high performing partners in the network.

Re-casting the supplier relationship via Enterprise 2.0 enablement.

RollStream considers its’ primary value to be in the area of efficient partner management. They know their business of course and it’s early pickings, but to me, one of the biggest opportunities to enterprises using such social computing technology is be able to to pry open the gates that lock out supply chain access to core processes such as product management, R&D, marketing, end customer support, etc. And conversely – giving these business units access to knowledgeable supply chain partners as well. That’s where SIM providers can really help.

Why? First, no one knows the true power, limitations and opportunities for each component of a product better than the very folks who build them. Second, component manufacturing is largely a commodity business.  As a supplier, I need to differentiate myself from competitors who are waiting for me to falter or cut me on price. I need to be a strategic partner to be somewhat indispensible. Social Software can open up the lines of interaction beyond R&D, Procurement and Product Development, allowing suppliers to learn, first hand,  any pain felt by the end customer. Or help marketing really understand the deep competencies of each component of the end product. Or provide new insight to R&D on early technology innovation at the component level. And on and on.

That’s purpose built collaboration (a.k.a business case) with dead clear incentives for suppliers to participate (a.k.a adoption) and play a role in the success of an end product in the market place.

There’s sizable opportunity here, however, solutions such as RollStream may not be for everyone. And I suspect that gaining sustainable adoption across hundreds of suppliers for each customer can sometimes be culturally and programmatically daunting.  I’ve seen one too many partner extranets that eventually turned into ghost towns thanks to re-orgs, shifting priorities and erratic shepherding.

All that said, the use of collaborative software in this context can bring massive, measurable business benefit if its treated as a strategic initiative by enterprises. Pulling in a snippet from an older post….

ZDNet blogger and eternal pragmatist, Dennis Howlett says:

In my argument, breakthrough ROI comes from seeing these technology through the lens of collaboration, which in turn implies process and context. I am mindful that huge amounts of value continue to be locked up in supply chains. AMR quoted a number of $3 trillion in 2005. Has that materially changed? Simply being able to communicate across supply chains in a meaningful manner could do wonders to lubricate those rusty wheels.

Have other ideas about how an Enterprise 2.0 design can improve supply chain processes? Chime in.

This is the second of a series of posts on my take aways from the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.

My customers and I debate the applicability of SaaS to their operation on a regular basis, using garden variety criteria such as process alignment, cost, ease, integration, security and the like.

A new dynamic hit me after chatting with multiple SaaS providers at the E2.0 conference:

A good number of E2.0 SaaS solutions unfortunately had little to do with the customer. The decision to go SaaS was largely an inward convenience.

The SaaS Foundation

During 2007-2008, many Venture Capitalists bet on the model that Salesforce has proven out, hoping to emulate it in the E2.0 category. Compared to traditional on premise software, SaaS organizations proposed a reduced operational capital outlay thanks to write once, publish everywhere code, low or no-touch sales via online purchase & provisioning, and flattened marketing costs via free-mium models & platform ecosystem distribution (e.g. AppExchange). And so we see this foundation in many E2.0 providers today.

Enterprise 2.0 Market Reality

Now, superimpose this SaaS operational design on some of the current realities in the Enterprise 2.0 space. Note: I’m talking about larger customers.

• Not one vendor with whom I spoke, on-premise or SaaS, was ready to declare wide scale adoption. It’s tough stuff. And it’s clear that it requires expensive headcount to effectively drive awareness and usage, post deployment.
• Annuity pricing seems to be most palatable for the buyer whether its SaaS or On Premise. So if adoption/applicability starts to wane, don’t expect a check next year.
• Integration is not optional. Whether light weight directory integration or deep application level integration, it’s become the price of entry.
• Integration is not enough. You’re still risking contributing to a silo’d organization and that runs counter to the principles of collaborative environments that E2.0 promises. Unless greenfield, what’s needed is deep association with incumbent ERP /ECM driven activity.
• The most striking lesson from last week’s shocking demise of on-demand BI vendor LucidEra (Hat Tip: Dave Rosenberg | cnet) is this: Customers do not necessarily want simple solutions – in fact, they often need ridiculously complex, often personalized systems to effectively drive business acceleration. What they’re really asking for is simplified experiences that mask them from behind-the-scenes voodoo. Many SaaS vendors seemed to confuse these two distinct requirements.

Salesforce had 2 significantly distinct characteristics going for it that led to critical mass. An individual could drop a credit card and start using the service. Enterprise 2.0 on the other hand is predicated on network effects. Second, Salesforce is used as a standalone application in many use cases. But true Enterprise 2.0 enabled transformation without cognizance of other applications? Not very effective for many organizations.

Now, is all of this pertinent only to E2.0 SaaS providers? Nope. On premise providers need to deal with the realities stated above as well. However, from a organizational design perspective, SaaS only offerings are financed and built to do business with very few marketing, consulting and sales resources and with a one size fits all offering.

On-premise solutions on the other hand are funded like old school enterprise software companies and their financials account for head count to be successful. And so, whist they are also facing tight budgets in this economic climate, they may still be better suited to offer internal integration and adoption services. Or a financially attractive VAR/SI offering.

Product Development Motivators

I couldn’t shake off the nagging feeling that many newer SaaS vendors were more excited about the ease of SaaS being a way to reduce their own acid reflux problems. Sure, agile, iterative development is good for the customer as well. But these benefits need to be weighed against the goal of creating silo busting, well adopted, real time enterprises for customers. And that requires labor intensive adoption and clever integration assistance.

Many SaaS vendors (focused on all market segments) also seemed to be clearly seduced by the ease of integration with other cloud solutions, void of relevance to the target customers incumbent technology footprint. Google Apps before SharePoint. Wikis over ECM. More Salesforce, little to no SAP/Oracle. Again, convenient for the provider, not always relevant to a lot of customers.

Closing Thoughts

I’m in no way asserting that SaaS is a bad idea across the board. I absolutely believe that there is a model somewhere out there for cloud and SaaS offerings for large customers, despite recent high profile hiccups from Amazon and Google.

However, SaaS is not an optimal solution for every business problem and every customer. Providers need to look in the mirror and be brutally honest with themselves about the motivations around their SaaS strategy and its relevancy to the customer. I’ve already heard of instances of business changing hands between E2.0 vendors at this early stage in the game, for these very reasons.

Having had led over scores of sizable strategy and technology sourcing engagements, there’s no debate in my mind about one thing: In a bake off, a vendors true motivations become very transparent to smart executives involved in the selection process. Once you get past emergent Enterprise 2.0 embracing and it’s time for the big leagues, this stuff matters.

Bernard Lunn at ReadWriteWeb writes an excellent post (link below), asking “Why Enterprises Don’t like SaaS”. I think it’s because subconsciously Enterprises sense that SaaS purveyors are saving all the fun for themselves.  -)

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The Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston ended earlier this week. This post covers my overall impressions about the conference material. Apologies in advance for a longish post.

Overall Thoughts

Given my insane meeting schedule and my objectives for the conference, I used 3 criteria to pick sessions. Here’s what I was looking for:

a) Practitioners before cheerleaders, skeptics and early adopters. Were there enough practitioners in attendance?

b) Did the event generate adequate tangible advice to show practitioners what works and what doesn’t, how to sell this internally, and finally, how to drive adoption?

c) Did the environment encourage their participation?

Two Thumbs Up to the first 2 questions. As to C, so, so. There were a good number of practitioners from companies such as BoA, Raytheon, Alcatel-Lucent, Allstate, Humana, M&M Mars & Eli Lilly. And a good number of tactical sessions. So in my book, all up, I think the conference was a success for those who wanted to be able to put learning to work.

On the other hand, the conference was a bit too Vendor centric – not in terms of attendance necessarily but in terms of who had a louder voice. There were in fact a lot of practitioners in the audience. I just wish their stories could have been heard.

A quick disclaimer: This re-cap reflects my favorites from sessions I attended; not across all available sessions. I missed some superb stuff but I’m sure others will speak to those.

The Good Stuff

Looking at it from a practitioners standpoint, what impressed me most was heavy weighting towards content on tactical insights that practitioners can use when they get to work, tomorrow. Sessions covered some long range thinking but plenty of actionable tricks and how tos that can let implementers and program managers sleep well at night.

Mike Gotta moderated Community & Social Network Sites: Think Adoption, Not Deployment. Dan McCall, Kishan Mallur and Erik Johnson cited specific examples how they generated buzz on the cheap, got influencers to become evangelists, and created a sense of ownership. The session was peppered with clever, even quirky tips such as a button called “shady” for questionable content that needed moderation, to creating stickers as invite codes that a user can distribute at their discretion. Genentech for instance, calls their social network GenePool and they tell their users “don’t pee in the pool”, as a way to encourage clean, relevant interaction. Again, not brain surgery but tactical marketing ideas that generate buzz. Ben Kepes of Cloud Ave was nice enough to live blog the session, here.

Another favorite session was Lee Bryant’s Transition Strategies for Enterprise 2.0 Adoption, that showcased specific details on how to manage separation anxiety when transitioning from 1.0 to social computing environments.  For instance, Lee described methods to illustrate the similarities between an RSS Reader and Email on a Blackberry. How to highlight the customizable nature of a social network over a static phone book. Or how to gently transition from a stogy old one way Intranet to a by-directional collaboration platform. All in all, tricks that a practitioner can act on soon after returning from the conference. For a more detailed analysis, Sandy Kemsley has a great write up, here.

I’m a little biased here because I read or listen to pretty much anything Marc Smith and Kate Niederhoffer say or write and because I believe that Analytics/Intelligence is going to be a huge differentiator in this space. So it was a treat to attend Metrics in the Hands of Users. Marc, Kate and Daniel Debow kindled a great discussion on how to drive, visualize and measure performance via less geeky constructs. I’m convinced that articulating the sociological and psychological (respectively) considerations as a catalyst for Enterprise 2.0 transformation can play a big role towards both executive buy in and successful execution. Moreover, my sense is that correlating the use of social computing as a way to respond to (not change) basic human nature can make it all seem achievable and less daunting. Contrast that with sermons on the glories of wiki based collaboration or the promise of orgasmic levels of workforce liberation via the use of a Twitter-like public status update. I wish this session was not at the tail end of the conference. We need more of this, up front.

Reality 2.0: Getting Started with Enterprise Social Networking by Mike Gotta was possibly one of the best research efforts I’ve seen on the topic of Enterprise Social Networking. Mike does a superb job of objectively “telling it like it is” whether its vendor capabilities/holes or inherent execution considerations such as the focus on deployment when it should be on adoption, or the threat to middle management and the curse of social caste systems. Lots of lessons not only for adoption but also excellent material to set expectations with LOB executives on risks that need to be mitigated, upfront. Bill Ives has an excellent post on this session, here.

Again, there were others that also had good insights. And I think the baseline research done for Open Enterprise is a treasure chest.

On to the sub optimal stuff.

Conference Format – Get Micro: Some of the most repeatable ideas and common problem sets I heard surfaced in conversations over dinner and in the reception area. Many from senior program managers, architects, and even executives who were ridiculously smart but not necessarily the kind that want to walk up to a microphone in a 300 seat auditorium.  Early lifecycle categories such as E2.0 need more casual break out sessions to foster discussions where repeatable problems, ideas and insights emerge. These off hand discussions I had included insight such as the limitations and possibilities of leveraging social computing tools on the BlackBerry. Which vendor apps really afford a customer centric mobile interaction model vs. those that are simply riding the polish and hype that comes with the iPhone developer platform. What’s particularly working for sales reps in their orgs? And on and on. My sense is that a lot of good insight was left of the table and we need a format that brings these topics to the surface.

Objectivity: This certainly wasn’t germane to most sessions but in some cases, there needed to be a clear distinction between research findings and objectivity on behalf of the speaker. When it’s research, it needs to be presented as findings, not tilted towards the preferences or enthusiasm of the speaker. And when an expert, who happens to be a vendor, is invited to a topical panel, little less product highlighting and more industry based knowledge sharing needs to be enforced. If I feel like I need to hire you (as a consultant) or buy your product (as a vendor) to really get the benefit of your opinion, then something’s lost.

Closing

So, as a practitioner, I think the conference brought a lot of actionable learning to the table and that’s a big win.

Personally, I can’t put a price on what I got out of these 4 days. I got to meet and thank a ton of folks who comment here on Pretzel Logic. I met folks whose stuff I read and learn from, every day. We exchanged a lot of ideas, opined on what’s hot and what doesn’t have legs in the space. We closed down bars.

This is the first of a series of posts on the conference. Next up are take aways on the space, distribution models and what customers should be asking of service providers.

Finally, a big thanks to Susan Scrupski – I might not have made the trip out but I did, and for that I’m grateful to her.

Other posts on the Conference: