Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

The innovation zealot in me felt instant disappointment today upon reading that Google Wave is no longer. The official word from Google:

The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

One one hand, its startling when a behemoth such as Google cannot use its deep tentacles in the developer and user community to shepherd a product to critical mass. That’s a lesson for many others that think they can win just on sheer scale and marketing wallet. It doesn’t matter if you are a Cisco or Microsoft –  today’s end user in the enterprise has more ability to vote with their clicks than they ever did.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch suspects: “Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly.” That’s definitely part of it – I personally felt there was way too much happening in Wave to encourage a wholesale leap off of the email cliff.

But there’s a more important issue at play here. My sense is that the primary culprit here is lack of context.  No matter how sexy, the use case for silo’ed, dumb “un-smart” collaboration still generally goes like this:

• Think up/get notified of a process problem or event
• Remember that a bunch of tools and metaphors (email, phone, the conf room or water cooler, software) exists that can help decision facilitation and brainstorming
• Group/find the right people to collaborate
• Pick a collaboration metaphor that works for everyone
• Solve the problem
• Go back to the system of record or powers that be (a boss, a customer, a supplier etc), to deliver the outcomes.

That’s a lot of steps and frankly a lot to expect from the average business user. If you want to hear more voices on this, the comments on Lifehacker are especially enlightening. And there’s parallels to be drawn from the consumer world as well: Think about the scores of of tools and nifty web apps introduced by Robert Scoble. We rush to try them, fall in love instantly, and then proceed to forget about them, pronto. Why? Because most of them require stepping out of our daily routines or are predicated on pre built, evergreen network effects to see value.

This is a conversation I’ve had with more vendors and customers than I care to remember but its working and many of them are understanding the value of associating collaboration with performance drivers (more in a subsequent post). Organizations still need to understand how to design work processes that blend optimal process and collaboration but its a hell of a lot easier when the software choose to plays nice.

On the other hand, far too many product teams continue to pile on whiz-bang collaboration features when end users are still struggling to understand the basic applicability of these new tools to meeting their performance requirements in a better/faster/simpler way. Organizations on the other hand often have a huge gap between declaring big picture strategic collaborative intent and tool selection. It’s in that gap where the “why” and “how” gets figured out and where the magic truly happens.  Putting the onus on the user to decipher when to use enterprise 2.0 or collaboration will almost never lead to business results.

You have to give Google credit for trying and failing fast though. I had high hopes. The good news is that Google promises to inject some of Waves core technology into its other products. That hopefully will provide the necessary context that will celebrate some of the most amazing innovation that the core Wave team developed.

Ive always said that this wall between customer interaction and service, and internal collaboration is largely artificial. Though if you’ve read this blog before, you know I’m  the last one to suggest we rush to blindly institute social across the organization and barf on all things process. That simply doesn’t reflect the reality and problem sets that we seen on the ground in our consulting work with larger organizations. That said, there’s a mature, performance centric discussion that needs to happen where organizations can understand the relevancy of this shift in the customers access to information (regardless of whether they actively partake in social network activity) to your business,  and evaluate how your internal processes are wired to deal with changing  competitive dynamics in your business. Surgical and decisive. Not spray and pray.

Comments welcome, as always.

The Keynote video here:

The McKinsey Quarterly has this excellent (and sobering) piece on how a financial crisis can accelerate global economic activity. A central point of the article is that whilst commodities and foreign exchange are truly globalized by Adam Smith’s definition (the Law of One Price which states that when markets are fully formed, all customers can get the same item at the same price, regardless of location), labor continues to offer significant arbitrage in different parts of the world primarily due to exchange rate restrictions that don’t let true currency value adjust naturally. I quote:

But it’s also important to understand that emerging-market economies have a structural advantage that is grounded in the operation of the global economy. Saber-rattling Western trade negotiators frequently focus their attention on the “unnaturally” depressed exchange rates of countries such as China, and this is a component of the structural advantage to which I refer. But its roots run far deeper—all the way down to the fundamental issue that labor can’t be freely traded on a single global market, while capital and commodities can. Any company sourcing its production or service operations in a lower-wage emerging-market country therefore can save enormously on labor costs. That’s painful for displaced Western workers, but it’s good for the company’s profits, good for consumers in developed markets, and good for the newly minted citizens of the global economy who are working in emerging-market factories and call centers. This is a dynamic we take so much for granted that it’s easy to imagine it as a semi permanent condition that will underpin global economic development for the foreseeable future.

Lowell Bryan, the author, opens with the a sharp wake up call:

This article explains why we should consider that seeming improbability and examines the possibility that financial crises may accelerate the transition to a global economy with more balanced trade, capital flows, and consumption.

The write-up is just superb and every CEO whose senses a complacent reliance on current labor arbitrage in her organization (read: her profit estimates depend on it), should think again.

A financial crisis may well accelerate the transition towards a global economy with balanced labor costs, but there are two other factors that are in play here. I briefly covered both these during my keynote at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Milan, earlier this month. Here goes…

First, it’s the developed nations that created the proverbial monster. As the western world sends work offshore, the standard of living and by extension cost of living in emerging markets are rising dramatically. More job opportunities means employees have negotiating power when it comes to wage increases. With rising wages we get shrinking labor arbitrage. So this can’t go on for ever. Labor prices will rise slowly but surely, at least in countries that are both quality labor pools as well as hot emerging markets.

Second, what needs to be taken into account is a phenomena that has far more immediate consequences that we work closely with our customers on, and that all leaders need to consider. In addition to balanced trade and perfect capital flows, we’re moving towards perfect engagement flows. And this will have a profound effect on globalization, financial crisis or not.

The web and now social network connectivity transcends geography and that’s obvious. From a business stand point, this means prospects and customers everywhere are fully aware of the global competencies of your organization (and that of your competitors) when it comes to innovation, product expertise, support and satisfaction.  If your Westin Hotels entering China, Yelp has already informed guests about the heavenly bed you offer in the U.S. If you’re Comcast and you’re entering Malaysia, new customers may want to get support from Frank’s superb team @Comcastcares and not the call center in Bangalore. That’s because the social web is putting fluid and deep engagement flows in place between markets, and possibly long before you even reached/scaled operations in some of these locales.

With emerging markets opening up, most organizations rushed to build locally relevant products and that was a great start. With open connectivity comes engagement and with that, comes knowledge sharing. Buyers today are much more aware of your global portfolio capabilities. So products will need to reflect not only local relevancy, but also global competency.

Customers expect the brightest customer support reps, product innovators, and subject matter experts to wrap around their innovation and support needs. Not where its the most cost effective for you, but where the best answers and experts reside across the globe. And so with or without a financial crisis and with or without your attention, engagement flows will accelerate global economic activity because the customer expects it.

How do you get there? You plan and design scalable 21st century collaborative enterprises that expose the talent and passion of:

• happy customers who can be objectives advocates of your expertise and your integrity
• sales and distribution partners who know the intimate needs of customers
• employees and suppliers who know the true power of your products…

…..where ever they might be.

Are you ready?

The flagship Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts ended last week. I’m going to pen two posts to cover my thoughts on the achievements and challenges in the Enterprise 2.0 sector based on observations at the conference. This post covers the big (positive) shifts and the conference itself.

A quick disclaimer first: I’m on the advisory board of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

The conference attracted a gaggle of practitioners, leading enterprise analysts and bloggers, and vendors who opined about latest techniques in collaborative approaches and technologies to improve engagement and relationships between employees, partners and customers.

(Image: JP Rangaswami / Credit: Alex Dunne)

For my part, along with colleague Oliver Marks, I co-chair the strategy and execution planning track which , like our work, is focused on identifying where collaborative approaches can accelerate workplace and process performance and on how to plan, sell, design and execute programs.

Every year the conference pushes management and engagement boundaries by introducing newer concepts, often in the face of lava-like progress on the ground. In its 4th year, my sense is that we can definitively see a tiny white light at the end of the tunnel with respect to the ultimate stamp of legitimacy – the eventual emergence of a capital and operational budget line item to build and support 21st century collaborative enterprises.

Thanks to the work of some very dedicated practitioners (there’s scores more), there’s no  doubt that the Enterprise 2.0 case studies of tomorrow are now being written. It’s a long road but these will eventually showcase more agile and fluid collaborative approaches that leverage existing process and collaborative systems and initiatives which will surface the best minds across the enterprise ecosystem to solve tough business challenges and enable effective competition.

A few large themes, and in particular order……

The Tide’s About to Rise

Tools won’t drive but they will enable. The entry of established vendors and a maturation of pure play positioning signals a decisive shift from feel-good to problem solving and growth focus.

• First, the traditional pillars of the Enterprise Software business attended and showed off their Enterprise 2.0 wares, en masse. We had platform offerings and extensions from the likes of SAP (Streamwork and Elements), Cisco (Quad), Microsoft (SharePoint 2010) and Novell (Pulse) and IBM (Lotus Connections).
• Second, proven vertical specialists such as Saba Software (Saba Live) and Success Factors (Cubetree) talked about collaborative offerings weaved into traditional talent management and workplace performance constructs.
• Third, the case for connected threads between employees, partners and customers gets stronger. Vendors such as Jive Software, Telligent and BlueKiwi offer strong platforms for customers ready to tackle multi-pronged solutions, whole hog.
• Fourth, a few horizontal platform providers woke up to the fact that they need to shove a foot into the door that leads to the process side of the house if they want to be taken seriously. Beyond experimental or tactical applications of collaborative constructs that are often void of purpose, they are moving from carpet bombing Enterprise 2.0 to launching surgical strikes. PBworks for instance announced strong collaborative wrappers to traditional CRM processes. CrowdCast latched on its predictive smarts to a known problem at every enterprise – how to turn today’s often dormant, “for the executive-brass-only” business intelligence capabilities into for-the-masses decision facilitation that helps any employee estimate the consequences of their decisions before they take action. And Socialtext introduced a beta release of what looked to be a social middleware layer that adds engagement to process.
• Fifth, those that are unapologetic about their approach to doing one thing and one thing only – simpler and better than anyone else, stuck to their story. Providers such as Socialcast and ThougtFarmer. The former continues to proudly call itself a light weight activity stream that adds much needed engagement to large, complex environments. The latter continues to innovate to gives you a far better intranet that replaces your asynchronous portal design, circa 1991.

Content, engagement and process – all in context. From a vendor offering perspective, that’s a first and must be celebrated.

Closely tied to this is another trend. Seasoned enterprise sales and marketing executives are being successfully lured to Enterprise 2.0 vendors. I spent a lot of time with them and one thing is clear: They are not adopting the party line. Rather they are channeling the passion and energy of cause driven entrepreneurs towards practical value propositions that customers will possibly care about. 

The reason I’ve led with vendor innovation here is that historically speaking, there’s a significant, practical take away from the entry of established players. The ramifications of platform and vertical process specialists betting on collaborative enterprises, means this: We’re about to see hundreds of millions of marketing dollars put to work to drive awareness and education around Enterprise 2.0, Social, Collaborative (or your jargon of fancy) forms of engagement in the workplace. Add to that, the network effect about to ensue when new and existing ecosystems around these vendors (Strategy Consultants, SI’s, ISVs, Resellers) start to articulate solutions to business problems for their customers based on these innovations.

This rising tide will lift all boats and likely cement a stable foothold for Enterprise 2.0 in the application stack (a big caveat to this that I will cover in a subsequent post). The technology may come from your process vendor, or from a pure play. Regardless the programmatic spend to realize business value will need its own budget.

None of this means that customers will be guaranteed performance acceleration or that smaller vendors will achieve instant stardom. This level of exposure may well highlight some of the rudderless propositions afforded around the altruistic value of E 2.0 that seasoned customer executives will instantly balk at. Dennis Howlett covers this with great insight on his ZDNet blog. And I’ve written before about the risk of the E2.0 marketplace facing the same fate as portal vendors. That continues to be a genuine possibility.

But one thing is certain: the Enterprise 2.0 message will now have far, far deeper tentacles into mahogany row. That’s good for big platform players as well as their pure play counterparts that don’t have the budgets to educate as many buyers as they would like to, on the value and promise of Enterprise 2.0. Many large buyers don’t allow single source deals and so, RFPs will often have to cast a wider net and as a consequence, expose pure play innovation in the marketplace

Distributed Customer Stories Beyond the Obvious

Most of the case studies to date have been skewed towards either Hi-Tech or Professional Services (consultants, agencies, etc) organizations. What’s unsettling about this to me is that neither are strong sample sets to extrapolate a credible assessment of wide scale acceptance across other industry sectors. I’m not in any way suggesting that it’s been easy going for orgs in hi-tech or services, but relatively speaking, hi-tech is traditionally an early adopter of technology enabled innovation and so its natural that a lot of Silicon Valley-esque organizations have jumped in first. In the case of Professional Services, knowledge and expertise is itself the end product. And so making the case that finding better ways to surface and reuse knowledge can more directly improve margins, if done correctly. Two very strong drivers to give E2.0 a shot. Again, some of these are my customers, and at others, I personally know internal champions who are banging their heads against the wall with adoption and cultural issues.

All that said, relatively speaking, what we’ve been missing all along are strong, tangible case studies from other sectors that are not early adopters or don’t naturally see a direct link to the bottom line. Many of these are extremely successful organizations in their markets but from a collaboration standpoint, some are still evaluating SharePoint 2007.  But that’s begun to change. We see it in our work and we finally saw a respectable number of case studies and customer stories from companies in other sections. Examples are YUM! Brands (restaurants), Harvard Business Review (publishing), NASA (government), Thomson Reuters (financial media), Vanguard (financial services) and Abbot Labs (life sciences) that made great presentations on their strategic uptake on open, collaborative constructs to drive performance.

Articulating the Business Case

A seemingly less critical point but one that I think is extremely important. This time around, customers were far more articulate when describing the inefficiency or limitations of existing processes and transactive designs before jumping into the promise of collaborative constructs. Enterprise 2.0 is often labeled as a solution looking for a problem and for good reason. In two customer panels that I moderated on Customer Networks and HR and Workplace performance, practitioners stated succinct, large scale business inefficiencies and competitive and market economics factors that have compelled their organizations to consider new ways of conducting business. These practitioners have been rooted in a structured process laden world over the last decade or two and spoke with authority when it comes to articulating what’s wrong first before gushing at what can be so right with Enterprise 2.0.

Where some organizations/departments have the luxury of being led by the likes of John Chambers (Cisco), Lem Lasher (CSC) and Brad Smith (Intuit) who naturally consider collaborative enterprises to be a necessarily utility to compete effectively and often without ROI prerequisites, most look for far stronger, tangible business case justifications from the get go. I’ve seen my customers in both camps, but there’s more customers who look for a strong articulation of what’s wrong with how things are done today and a seasoned justification to try a new approach. And we saw this maturity of critical business justification at least to the extent that an executive can’t afford to not listen to cause and effect arguments. That’s a huge step forward. 

The Definitive Watering Hole for the 21st Century Enterprise

The point that often gets lost in the midst of constructive criticism is that we have a strong physical platform with the Enterprise 2.0 conference to compliment digital and often disconnected conversations on Twitter and the blogs to help each other. As important, the conference offers a vehicle for attendees to share suggestions and for organizers to respond with solutions the next time around. There’s always a yearning from attendees to see more case studies, to see less vendors and consultants on stage and I think that’s legitimate.

Honestly, I don’t personally have a categorical objection to vendors presenting on the keynote stage. The reality is that vendors are no different from the rest of us in one particular aspect: They also share a passion and vision for a better way to conduct business and are putting their money where their mouth is, every day. Unfortunately one too many vendor keynote speakers launched demos where they should have taken the allocated 20 minutes to share industry vision and big market and customer problems that need tackling. It’s implied that their offerings address these challenges. What we largely got was 1.0 marketing to a 2.0 crowd. A big opportunity was lost to level with the rest of the community by offering new pathways to value and by inspiring the collective. These were in sharp contrast to keynotes from the likes of JP Rangaswami, Professor Andrew McAfee, Vinnie Mirchandani and others.

But we also saw more senior executives and mangers from the buy side present or join panels, this time around. I evaluated last year’s event by looking at the degree of practitioner focus and gave it a thumbs up. This year, the conference offered an all day Adoption track chaired by the able Susan Scrupski that gave practitioners significant leeway to design their own day long workshop, panels and sessions. So the conference built on last years practitioner centric efforts.

The conference is now in the early stages of catering to the entire Enterprise 2.0 life cycle: Credibly articulating the business case for layering in a collaborative backbone to enrichen process, understanding the tools, applications and platforms, getting adoption and tactical planning right, and holistically looking at interaction between customers and employees. With the help of a strong cadre of instructors and track chairs including Mike Gotta, Irwin Lazar, Tony Byrne, Oliver Marks, Susan Scrupski, Rachel Happe , Dion Hinchcliffe, Alistair Croll and Larry Cannell.

Whilst still consultant/analyst heavy, the conference is also become a clearing house for not only customer success stories but about the journey, as was made evident by over 30 customer stories presented on the keynote stage, in panels as well as in session talks.  Kudos to TechWeb and in particular the management, sales, marketing and operational teams for their flawless organization of the event itself.

Some Must Read Posts on the Event

There’s a lot of blog posts and media coverage offering up excellent opinion on the conference and state of Enterprise 2.0 from the likes of Oliver Marks, Thomas Vander Wal, Bertrand Duperrin and Nigel Fenwick.  I’m still digesting and will expand on these in my next post. But if your looking for the best blow by blow coverage, that comes from V Mary Abraham, Bill Ives and Patti Anklam. (please comment if I missed anyone and I’ll update)

What Comes Next:

It wasn’t all peachy. In a subsequent post, I’ll try and cover some of the following items that I suggest we deal with, pronto.

• We’re still lacking adequate operational metrics alignment to be taken more seriously.
• Addressing cultural nuances is certainly an important success factor. But we’re hiding behind cultural arguments as the universal culprit, far more than we rightfully should.
• The millennial discussion is mostly without substantial evidence and downright asinine.
• There’s a giant disconnect between today’s customer expectations and the ability of employees to fulfill these expectations. I covered this in my keynote at the International Forum in Milan week before last, and Ill try to add insights from others, based on my discussions.
• Unnecessary complexity added to design frameworks and to toolsets which, will only overwhelm potential customers.

On a personal note, this is the one event in the year that I look forward to most. And it did not disappoint. I chatted with lots of old pals into the wee hours of the morning, and had the good fortune to meet people who visit this blog and to thank them for taking the time to read and engage. Some in the community use this platform to genuinely bond once a year and to graciously share experiences, lessons learned and to celebrate the work of everyone involved. And you can’t put a price on that.

I almost missed 2 very important social events when I was in Bombay earlier this year. One of these with my childhood pals that I don’t get to meet unless I’m visiting. Boy would that have sucked.

Why? Because I don’t carry a Blackberry. And by extension, don’t use BBM – RIMs Instant Messaging Service for its Blackberry Phones. (great primer here on BBM, btw)

What is BBM?

For those of you (like me) who live on the iPhone and are not BBM users, its Blackberry’s IM client that lets you engage with other BBM users on Blackberry devices. You can friend one another, create groups and share pictures and videos. There’s millions out there that don’t exchange Skype and Gtalk handles. They exchange their BBM handle.

What gained traction as a way to bypass costly SMS, BBM is now the preferred mode of text based communications amongst GenY-ers, team members and groups of friends. That’s how you arrange drinks at the local pub, partake in American Idol gossip and collaborate with teams at work. Think of it as Twitter with group functionality + a (very) light weight Yammer / SocialCast for business interaction. But all mobile, no character limits,  always on and in real time.

Here’s a short Video

Apple recently filed a patent for messaging called iGroup that enables Apple to command control over specific social networking metaphors. Here’s a short summary from the AppleBlog:

An interesting patent of Apple’s relating to a social networking app surfaced recently. Dubbed iGroups, the app aims to solve the pitfalls of traditional social networks, like Facebook, that require users be a member before being able to participate. Instead, iGroups creates a virtual social network based on proximity.

The thing is while Apple’s focus, for the most part, has been on hardware + data / applications RIM is quietly giving the rest of the world hardware + participation.

Threat: Mobile only folks

Granted that the Blackberry is no iPhone when it comes to overall experience but Apple faces the threat of being beaten at a game it invented: couple hardware with seriously useful software software to create simple, unmatched experiences.

Whilst the webs proliferation in the west started on a PC, there’s tens of millions of people out there outside the western world that skipped the web on a PC for the most part and went straight to a phone. Wireless access in these highly mobile parts of the world meant get a more powerful smart phone as opposed to a PC. These folks are not tethered to iTunes on their laptops, and use SMS as a primary form of text based interaction. Facebook, if at all, is experienced over the mobile phone but the primary interaction is conversations (as opposed to data access and even sharing). Conversations around where to hang out tonight, or debriefing after a sales pitch – all done via BBM and on their mobile device.

This group of people also have little appreciation for the App Store and all that it has to offer. Communicating with people they know takes precedence over consuming data and applications on a mobile device. And so iPhone apps that the rest of us are so very mesmerized by take a back seat. The network wins.

Apple needs to stem this land grab and stem it fast. Communication networks built off of Blackberry to Blackberry interaction are super sticky – as sticky as the networks many of us have created on Facebook. And that’s hard to replicate.

Opportunity: The gaping hole that Facebook leaves

Many digital socializers, especially GenY-ers using the desktop web are either just baffled by Facebooks shifting privacy policies, get disapproving stares at the office when they fire up Facebook or couldn’t turn down mom when she be-friended them.  Also there’s nothing instant about Facebook. Its far too asynchronous, party because the metaphor still very much looks like this: post > wait > receive > wait > react. And its not set up to create quick groups that can converse on a social or business topic and disband.  That’s the missing metaphor that represents a very common interaction amongst a lot of people. Whilst Twitter works well to consume broadcast from magazines and Aston Kutcher, it remains gobbldygook for those newbies looking to converse. BBM in contrast, has this interaction metaphor locked up, for now.

Business Implications

Most of us use one mobile device for both personal and business communication and that’s a Blackberry for many many users. Whilst a plethora of Enterprise microblogging vendors duke it out to become the ‘engagement system of record’ with features on their desktop, web based apps and lighter weight mobile siblings, BBM may well be the most convenient and killer Enterprise 2.0 app for the mobile masses. Ofcourse there’s a lot more to business collaboration than engagement, but for many, this might be just the missing component that compliments their existing process and document collaboration investments.

Enterprises don’t buy what’s best. They buy what’s good enough. BBM is a perfect example of light weight collaboration that’s always on, always with you, designed for mobile, wired into your company contacts folder, and with groups functionality to host private conversations.

Ofcourse, Apple is Apple and its highly likely that when they do come out with an alternative to BBM it will re-define messaging in some way or another. And that might well be the basis for the iGroup patent. That said, we’ve entered a world where The Network is the ultimate resource. And that can well be a powerful powerful antidote to any remarkable design Apple comes up with.

Related Posts:

Lee Provoost: Generation Y and the iPhone-Blackberry dilemma  http://ow.ly/1S9wY

Next month I travel to Milan to speak at the 3rd International Forum on Enterprise 2.0.  A premier event on next generation enterprises and the processes and technologies that will power them, this event attracts business and technology executives across Europe and respected thinkers, advisors and practitioners that play a role driving business performance at leading organizations.

There’s some excellent content on tap at this event. The agenda is packed with purpose driven sessions around Marketing, HR and Innovation showcasing real world, practical experiences on applying new, more current techniques to performance.

Keynote

The conference has a great line up of keynotes and speakers including Andrew Gilboy – Oracle and Emanuele Scotti – Open Knowledge, Hutch Carpenter – Spigit and Verna Allee of Value Networks.

I will be keynoting the conference on the implications of the social customer on today’s organizational design and infrastructure. As important, the need for collaborative enterprise design to engage customers, partners and employees, to cater to this new customer dynamic.  I hope to help frame the discussion for executives as they prepare to respond to these changes in customer dynamics.

Workshop

In addition, I’ll do a workshop on the first day that provides a primer on the process from Idea to Launch. This 4 hour workshop will include instructional content, do’s and don’ts, pitfalls to avoid, and how to align the promise of open, collaborative constructs with discrete performance goals. One particular area where we will go deep is the pitch – in addition to instructional content, we’ll moderate a panel of vendor CEOs that pitch the most skeptical customers on a daily basis on how newer collaborative approaches can move the needle. We’re thrilled to have leaders at Telligent, Broadvision and Blue Kiwi join the panel. A special thank you to them for giving back to the larger Enterprise 2.0 community by sharing insights and practical knowledge. Finally, we will also involve practitioners that will tell their story on how they launched Enterprise 2.0 initiatives at their organizations.

More about the conference

The conference has three primary themes as stated on the website:

• Inside the organization: Intranet 2.0, Community Management, Human Resources 2.0, Social Learning, Organizational Network Analysis, IT Governance

• Outside the organizations: Social CRM, Sales Communities, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Monitoring

• Innovation: Idea and Innovation Management, Crowdsourcing and Idea generation, Prediction markets

An excerpt from an interview conducted by ComputerWorld (translated from Italian) with Emanuele Quintarelli, one of the organizers of the event:

Among the more than 40 actions to point out the contribution of Hutch Carpenter on 3C innovation to Sameer Patel on the use of collaborative approaches to improve business performance and ultimately the joint submission by Mark Tamis and Esteban Kolsky on how to compete by building a business client-centered. In addition to experts and also indicate that twelve managers of major Italian companies will go up on stage to confront so candid and transparent about the real risks and opportunities of the introduction of similar approaches in business.

More on the conference, the esteemed list of speakers, and agenda here. 

Hope to see you there!

That’s a quote from Bill McDermott, Co-CEO of SAP on the keynote stage. A message from SAP’s leadership to over 50,000 customers, employees and partners worldwide.

As I travelled back to Palo Alto last night from SAPPHIRE 2010, the central theme came clear to me: SAPs re-focus centers on leveraging people and relationships to redesign 1) its operations and technology strategy, and 2) its product design.

Operational and Technology Strategy

To net it out, there’s no question that this process enforcing company has gone back to the drawing board and come back with a singular focus: build together with people centric ecosystems. Partners, Customers and Employees. You sense clarity on a number of fronts -  sizing up the opportunity and execution path, frank recognition of its challenges in front of partners, bloggers and media and customers, it’s commitment to collaborative innovation, and more agility with respect to how it develops it’s products.

Most significant for me, was instilling a renewed sense of purpose for its employees. SAPPHIRE ‘veterans’ such as Vinnie Mirchandani had high praise for the event. In the context of fresh promise and tangible steps to move SAP forward, Dennis Howlett considered the content at this SAPPHIRE to be the best in 14 years (review here). The new leadership also embraced skeptical, critical feedback, extending a hand to those who have taken the time to express tough love.

In terms of technology strategy that will permeate most of its products and how SAP does business, global CIOs the world over will be hopeful of the commitments made here around technology excellence – in-memory and real time, virtualization, separation of user experience and business logic (more below) and a gradual move toward iterative design and innovation to replace outdated sequential multi year release cycles. Consider CTO, Vishal Sikka’s explanation of how SAP got a bunch of developers to build hundreds of mobile apps in just under 6 weeks. That’s agile from any company, let alone a global 50,000 employee, multi-national organization such as SAP.

Moving on to Products

Particularly striking to me was how SAP is now separating business logic from user experience, as described by Co-CEO, Jim Hagemann Snabe. They understand that end customers expect new, engaging ways to work as we move from the data centric web to the interaction web. As James Thomas, an executive in the BI group, summed up the experience design principle:

The devil is certainly in the (execution) details but the idea that enterprise software can offer hip-huggingly modernized experience design we see in consumer software, is extremely compelling.

As we described in our Enterprise 2.0 Whitepaper (summary post by Oliver Marks)  on Performance Acceleration, the consumer web and broadband have led to the ‘me” web in our consumer lives where data, engagements and content converge around the participant. It’s refreshing to see the enterprise understand the implications of this shift and begin the transition, away from the application centered user experience.

As you consider the strategic implications and enabling technology infrastructure that will power people centered, collaborative 21st century enterprises, SAP realizes that its core asset is being an enabler of critical customer, employee, partner and supplier processes for its customers. In principle, that positions the company extremely well to power in-context collaboration around business events.

Unfortunately, that’s where SAP missed the real opportunity to truly revolutionize business process facilitation in this first iteration of Business By Design. In speaking with customers and SAP executives the sense I got was that Business ByDesign (ByD) is a lighter weight rendition of SAP’s on premise suite. I sought comments from Paul Greenberg, ZDNet blogger and author, and someone who intimately understands process:

ByD enters a market that has already seen in-memory, lighter weight ERP offerings designed for the mid market and SMB.

The missed opportunity for me is this: Business Process Automation has not really seen “back to the drawing board” re-thinking in well over two decades. Since the early iterations of process automation, we’ve seen very useful but incremental improvement in how we transact and enforce process. But somewhere along the road we began to interchange business activity loops with how our ERP laden software enforced process completion. The reality is that in this day and age, customer expectations around engagement, and the opportunity to extract more from partner and supplier relationships have changed a lot since that original process automation design. And without question, at an accelerated pace in the last 36 months with the advent of new collaborative concepts and expectations on how people can work together to enrich business outcomes.

SAP has the chance to re-think how discrete business activities need to be conducted in the 21st century and what the optimal blend of process, engagement and content access truly supports today’s business needs. Customers opine openly on the consumer web and are looking for expert advice, beyond marketing, when they engage with businesses. Channel Partners want to do business with manufacturers who don’t just build good products, but those that make it easy to administer, sell and service the end customer. Suppliers who are getting commoditized, in reality, have critical component-level / raw material knowhow that can help them differentiate themselves as strategic partners to their customers. All of these examples require injecting some level of engagement and collaboration, alongside today’s largely ‘transactive’ and asynchronous data sharing enterprise process design.

Whilst I clearly heard a focused interest in adding collaboration to process, my fear is that collaboration and people engagement is being treated as a bolt on to age old process automation software. We see a glimmer of hope in StreamWork (which I think is a superb start towards collaboration in context), but it remains to be seen whether SAP has the chutzpah to truly ‘untether’ itself from a process first, engagement second mindset.

Relationships bring Agility

The good news is that its commitment to a people centric operational design and agile development processes can overcome this. As I said earlier, the most important objective at this time was to re-vitalize its relationships and sense of shared purpose with employees, customers, partners and community participants. And the company achieved this in spades. This new operational design, if executed correctly, will earn the markets patience as SAP tries to methodically expresses these new people centric, collaborative qualities in its products.

p.s. there’s a lot of  awesome content out there and I’ll do another post summarizing what I liked best. But for starters, check out Tom Raftery’s Photos on Flickr, here.

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that the central theme here as well as in my work is centered around performance acceleration and so I love seeing quality stuff on this topic. Dion Hinchcliffe has a super post up on ZDNet addressing the topic of performance in the context of Enterprise 2.0.

Dion provides a very balanced score card on the results to date as far as Enterprise 2.0 is concerned:

In fact, I would propose that most of the theoretical discussion around the benefits and returns of enterprise social software is largely out of context. We still focus too much on the tools themselves (which are exciting), the potential for radical organizational change and/or transformation of traditional hierarchies (also very interesting, yet it unnerves those trying to run a business even though such transformation takes a time), and a focus on new collaborative approaches instead of looking for the best way to solve business problems. What is often lost when the primary focus is on Enterprise 2.0 — defined here as freeform social tools in the workplace, or the “Facebook imperative” — is a concentration on developing solutions to achieve specific business objectives. When you have tool myopia, it sometimes seems like every business problem looks like a nail for your particular software hammer.

Amen.

The topic of performance and alignment around business objectives has been covered by a number of thinkers and doers in the space, including Hutch Carpenter, Bertrand Duperrin and Oscar Berg. Over a year ago, I proposed a simple illustration for practitioners to consider, that differentiates between the notion of social computing (concepts and tools) and Enterprise 2.0 (a state the enterprise achieves), depicted by this diagram from a much older post:

Similar messages have come from a number of folks, calling feverishly for business justification and performance alignment. Some great examples from Bertrand, Oscar and Hutch here. That’s a sampler but these and other thinkers have contributed excellent thought leadership and grounded ideas on this topic.

Dion brings up a good point that there’s too much focus on tools. No question about that. But his second point about radical transformation is far more important:

There’s still plenty of theorizing and even calcified views around the promise of social for social’s sake where making the business social from the core out is just the right thing to do. I’ve firmly believed and consequently advised clients to look at it differently. At a time when organizations are looking to pull themselves up from a near death spiral by surgically focusing on set of needed business fixes, instead of providing the necessary depth to articulate what’s structurally wrong with a given mode of conducting a business activity and how enterprise 2.0 could be a possible performance enabler, the focus often is on the benefits of social towards more nebulous outcomes such as openness, information and email overload, sharing, and productivity. All of these are important but addressing these benefits need to be a means to some measurable business end.

Where it can get even more dangerous is proposing decentralized DNA changing models to move to social from structured and process, again with an under appreciation for business context, decision facilitation structures and other political and incumbent design realities on the ground. Not to mention, proposed decentralized governance models as amuse-bouche. To be clear, I’m not against proposing DNA changing business designs in principle, but boy you better be able to back up the justification behind that 24 month turnaround plan your suggesting that’s more substantive than the revolution that is socialized work without a cause. Right about that time, the CIO sitting in the room is quietly thinking, “I have a worldwide SAP upgrade to worry about, thank you”.

The notion of emergence where adoption of these E2.0 concepts and tools comes from the bottom up just never sat well with me. But, ironically, if there’s one place where I consider emergence to be totally applicable is in fact the DNA change process, built off of the success of discrete business outcomes and subsequently federated across the enterprise. That’s a topic that I deal with all the time, but I won’t get into it here.

And culture, whilst certainly a common adoption barrier, is often cited as a huge deterrent to adoption, when in actuality, the required business alignment was missing in the early stages resulting in fuzzy understanding around participation incentives by end users to give enterprise 2.0 a real chance of success to begin with. Practitioners are beginning to see that culture and behavior can actually be harnessed to drive adoption and ultimately performance. Change is scarce currency in any enterprise context.

Not that it matters too much, but the process pundits will continue to barf on social as long as these altruistic benefits of the enterprise social web command the airwaves. To their credit they have a point in that its going to take a lot more to unlock those business initiatives (and budgets) that are enabled by structured ERP systems or Microsoft SharePoint that conveniently shows up with Windows Server on every Sys. Admins desk.

Ultimately, a central problem lies is measuring or estimating performance for Enterprise 2.0. As Dion says it is in fact notoriously difficult.  But it shouldn’t be done in the first place. Performance or return needs to be calculated and measured at the programmatic level around business solutions your trying to affect. Enterprise 2.0 approaches and technology are but one part of the overall strategy, investment, return and risk model.

Social because its better than anti social is hard to argue with, but it just won’t cut the mustard in the long run, especially on Mahogany Row. Focusing on business performance, and a credible, honest assessment of where social and collaborative concepts actually can in fact move the needle, will.

Talking about honest assessments, here’s a quote from Chris Yeh, a vendor and investor in Enterprise 2.0 software that speaks volumes:

Customers who buy PBworks as an experiment in “social software” tend to see an initial spike in activity, but disengage over time.

On the heels of SalesForce.com’s announcement of ChatterExchange this morning, FinancialForce releases Chatterbox – a rules based overlay on Chatter that allows businesses to associate the use of collaborative constructs with discrete business activity. For those of you not familiar with Salesforce.com’s Chatter, I covered the initial release, here.

For all the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 software, the biggest stumbling block has been this lingering feeling that its a solution looking for a problem to solve. And so even if you got past the skeptic managers and secured the green light to give it a shot, come adoption time, the use case for collaborating and socializing business conversations in the open via a microblogging application in favor of email just never came naturally. And at that point starts the real scramble: backfill use cases that might appeal to certain users, conduct training programs, institute herculean behavioral change management processes and devise incentive plans to get active usage up to a respectable level.

Welcome to the Enterprise Context Web.

FinancialForce, traditionally in the business of bringing Finance and Sales together on the force.com platform has built a rules and workflow facility to incorporate those very important social and collaborative elements and data triggers that make a given business activity whole. All on top of Chatter. Here’s how the finance and accounting community can collaborate over bean counting topics, using micriblogging constructs:

• When an outstanding credit on a customer account goes over 90 days – finance and sales professionals linked to that account can be immediately alerted, then they can quickly identify the reasons for non-payment and act to try and solve the problem to help cash flow and prevent further sales to that client being held up.
• When a specific supplier has been paid or a new supplier engaged – to help procurement and marketing departments better manage their suppliers and improve relationships.
• Customer accounts that show no activity for a specified length of time – may indicate service deficiencies and help ensure customers are contacted regularly.
• New sales over a specific size or won against a key competitor – to keep management and marketing abreast of sales trends.

Where unstructured and, really, knowledge access and sharing was conducted directly in email, via Chatterbox,  now accountants and finance professionals can now tap into the larger community for expertise and critical customer knowledge to understand exceptions in a process (say, an overdue invoice from an otherwise timely customer). If Chatter is adopted as the central collaborative backbone at the organization, it can now becomes the common watercooler to show up at with specific business data and context and where collaboration happens. Far beyond the out of the box process integration with Salesforces’ CRM application.

I still don’t believe that this eradicates adoption planning and more importantly incentive structures that encourage wide scale usage, out of the box. As I discussed with the FinancialForce folks, with respect to finance and accounting professionals, making it second nature to use a microblogging format to notify people over email needs to be preceded by showing the value of ambient outcomes. Accountants by the nature of their job do in fact need to conduct a lot of business in private and so subconsciously knowing when to going private vs. open might be a bit of a struggle. Add to that, most finance and accounting folks especially at smaller companies already know the 5 people at the company that might have the best answer for what generally are very specific questions. And on the topic of receiving data alerts in the microblogging stream, well, native enterprise apps have had email alerts per se for decades. Where process knowhow and training comes is to show communities wrap around critical alerts to respond to an event, thereby enrichening the outcome. Data events bring context out of the gate and that makes adoption and showing business benefit far more straight forward.

One smart thing that FinancialForce has done is to not limit the use of Chatterbox to its core financial product. By offering Chatterbox as the rules engine for any application on the Force.com platform, it limits its reliance on the financial and accounting user and that’s a really smart move.

Microblogging and data access is not new to the Enterprise Social Web. Pure play Enterprise 2.0 providers such as Socialcast and Socialtext both offer similar features and the upcoming release of Tibbr from TIBCO boasts this as a central theme to its own microblogging offering. But it’s all about distribution. And force.com brings awareness and distribution. And the rules engine offered by Chatterbox brings needed context to enterprise 2.0 constructs that’s been missing for far too long. As my friend Megan Murray commented to me, that’s Peanut Butter and Jelly or Carrots and Peas. Finally.

Dennis Howlett, an accountant by trade originally is optimistic, saying:

One off surgical help is useful, but the larger opportunity comes in activity pattern discovery where what� Sigurd Rinde might call Barely Repeatable Processes are captured and become actionable in the context of business processes that matter. Does this excite you or is it a huge yawn? I know where I am placing my bets

Some links on Chatter Exchange here as well and Paul Greenberg puts it all in context on his Social CRM ZDNet blog

Will it make it? I think so. Is there still a need for proper strategic planning and follow through for large scale uptake? No question about it. But that’s no different from any other enterprise software category. One things for sure – having the software make it simpler to illustrate business cases out of the box makes it a hell of a lot easier to pass the initial litmus test.

Finally, social starts to embrace process.

I don’t focus on product launches or ‘breaking news’ here on Pretzel Logic. I have a full plate on the work front.

The two exceptions when I not only cover but downright celebrate product innovation are:

• If I see traditional application or enterprise 2.0/social software vendors having the chutzpah to even attempt performance acceleration via the combination of process + social. You still need a strategy and plan but it makes execution a hell of a lot easier if the software is designed to account for context. See this on Chatter, for size.
• When enterprise 2.0 products take existing business functions in the enterprise and improve insight and diagnostics for managers to improve decision making and reduce business risk. See this on new opportunities that social software bring to improve Employee Performance Management.

That said, I’m fortunate to see plenty of demos and hear how the product does in fact accelerate organizational performance and why my readers or clients should care.

I’ve only recently taken to getting briefed by vendors but I spent many years in technology sourcing starting with my days as the practice lead of west coast tech strategy consulting group at marchFIRST (USWeb/CKS) and that continues until today. And our firm(s) remained retained through system deployment so we couldn’t skip town after presenting a vendor recommendation in a pretty PowerPoint to the customer. As a result, separating wheat from chaff when a vendor is presenting is second nature to me.

After sitting through presentations and demo after demo here’s one situation that I see over and over again. To the degree that you are doing this, I hope you consider this as constructive feedback. Here goes…

Stop raving about your product in the context of it’s last incarnation.

Over exuberant product managers, often weighed down by the baggage of the last version get very excited about why this version is better. And how it does so much that the previous version did not do. And quickly proceed to declare it as ‘game changing’.

If it’s game changing, it better be game changing in the context of:

• first, performance objectives that are keeping customers in your target market up at night
• second, the competitive landscape and installed base at the customer and in that context, how compelling your offering is to successfully overcome the switching cost of moving to your application. Hard cost as well as soft costs (culture & change management)

Your last release or update is already obsolete in technology years and for the most part, its a pretty weak baseline to benchmark against. Whilst its tempting and human nature to realize “how far you’ve come”, customers don’t buy based on that. They might appreciate the progress. But its not enough to cut the check. Same goes for influencers and analysts that can spread the word for you.

What’s ironic is that good product managers in fact start with market and competitive research to build a business case. Then move on to understanding how new features and capabilities change the existing release. But when they present and showcase, they forget all that hard work done to assess the opportunity and gaps in the market. And proceed to do a feature shoot out with their previous version.

After a decade of buying big ticket software and not necessarily seeing the ROI, buyers are more sensitive to ensuring stringent vendor evaluations than ever. This is one simple but very rectifiable measure.