Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

Lots of pontification today on whether the iPad will become that third device that removes the claustrophobia of surfing the web on a mobile device, yet takes some of the clunk away from a regular laptop.

Om Malik on GigaOm has one of the best analysis on this, saying:

Despite their evolution, laptops and desktop computers as we know them are essentially work tools. They’re designed for content creation — be that of writing blog posts (or a book), editing photos or creating videos. On the iPhone, we create content of another kind — personal, communication-centric content.

The consumer web is slowing moving away from ‘Read and Write’ mode, back to ’Read More, Write Little’ status as I tweeted earlier today. But not as we saw in the pre-social days before blogs and wikis.

We’re going to be writing more than we ever did, just a lot less every time we do. Tweets are 140 characters, the Re-Tweet is the new gesture to simply express acknowledgement or endorsement, LinkedIn imposes character limits on some of the fields in Groups, Yelp Reviews are a paragraph or so. And auto posts from Tumblr and Posterous to Facebook are primarily visual media uploads with a few lines of description. Lots of limits on each gesture. But many many more of them.

That’s just touching on the writing elements of our web experience. Gaming, enjoying videos with your family at the dinner table,  and other visual consumption models are overdue for some fresh blood as well. 

And so the iPad will sell and will sell big. Save a few really ridiculous omissions (seriously? no webcam?) it’s the perfect device for the type of text based communication that’s becoming more and more prevalent. And sadly its the optimal device for the attention deficit online world we’re participating in, every day.

I recently contributed a report on the concept of Real Time in the Enterprise, published by my friends at GigaOM Pro – the research arm of the wildly popular GigaOM Blog Network.

The concept of the real time enterprise is going to be top of mind for many organizations over the next 24 months. Amongst other things, one primary driver will be organizations waking up to the fact that their customers and prospects expect to engage in real time, whether on public social networks such as Twitter and Facebook, or on company managed community forums. As a result, critical processes within enterprises need to be re-wired to be able to respond to real time customer inquiries whether that be order status, product knowhow or access to experts. Supporting the end customer is now everyone’s job and so-called “enterprise 2.0” solutions have the ability to let key people rally around the customer in more efficient ways.

We’re seeing it in our work already where this is not just some data problem that IT is interested in solving. Line of business executives are looking to understand the optimal information flow design in the context of discrete performance acceleration opportunities in the areas of customer service, channel distribution, sales and marketing collaboration and the supply chain. Whether its revenue or cost efficiency, all these executives all have a number on their head and are increasingly convinced that latency means cash left on the table.

Feel free to drop me a line if you’d like to learn more about the topic or the report, or if you’re interested in learning about what this means for your enterprise.

——————————————————————————————————————————-

The report is for GigaOm Pro subscribers but here’s the Executive Summary:

Real-time communication and collaboration in the enterprise represents a significant shift in how employees, partners and customers interact and collaborate to drive organizational performance. The growth and acceptance of so-called “Enterprise 2.0” platforms and applications promise to break down closed communication and collaboration loops by moving discussions and data access from email, content management and rigid process applications to activity streams, wikis and API-based data access.

Together, these new interaction formats enable real-time communication and access to information emanating from within these new collaboration suites as well as from external systems. The result is a real-time flow of information from the people and systems that are critical to business functions for each employee, all accessible from a central dashboard.

The widespread proliferation of real-time tools in the enterprise will, however, require concerted analysis of what process and information flows truly warrant real time access. The notion of “right time” vs. “real time” will become more important as organizations decide what consumption models work best for individual users and the tasks they are responsible for. The speed of “real time” also will be limited by how fast traditional applications in the enterprise are able to process and publish information. However, the existence of extensible APIs now make it easier than ever to tap into multiple systems to extract information as soon as it’s made available.

While the concept of real time has existed for more than a decade, a new crop of collaborative suites from vendors such as Jive Software, Socialtext and Socialcast provide this facility out-of-the-box. Traditional enterprise software vendors have also announced their intention to provide real time collaborative and data access capabilities. Notable mentions include Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010, Salesforce Chatter, Google Wave and IBM’s Lotus Connections.

In 2010, expect to see the concept of the real time enterprise ascend the hype cycle. Enterprises will begin to analyze how real-time access can help discrete business processes such as customer interaction, sales intelligence, lead generation, partner interaction and employee project collaboration, and they’ll begin to evaluate the switching cost of moving their systems and data to platforms that have real-time as part of their solution sets. Customers and prospects are interacting with each other and with enterprises in real-time making it imperative for the enterprise to structure its own internal and external processes to respond to customers as fast as possible. Expect this shift to be one of the primary drivers for considering a real-time architecture.

Read more: http://pro.gigaom.com/2010/01/report-the-real-time-enterprise/#ixzz0cJXzIFXn

Update: Reviews of the Report on:

• GigaOM (Startups Fight Giants for the Real-time Enterprise http://ow.ly/ViWw) 
• WebWorkerDaily (The Real-time Enterprise http://ow.ly/ViXU)

These were the most visited posts from December 1, 2008 to December 1,2009, per Google Analytics.

I just realized that this blog is only little over a year old. Feels like I’ve been writing for much longer.

A sincere thank you for reading, commenting, referencing and re-tweeting my posts. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it and how much I’ve learned from the debates and exchanges we’ve had here and on Twitter.

Ok, back to the topic of this post. Top posts here, as follows:

Friendfeed: Inspiration for Sales Intelligence in an Enterprise 2.0 world?

This post took the top spot. It did well on its own but some of the popularity was thanks to a link in the New York Times via ReadWriteWeb.

Summary: How to approach sales performance acceleration using Enterprise 2.0 constructs and account for interaction and data preferences of the typical sales rep.

Enterprise 2.0 Software: Commoditization before Monetization

Summary: A software market perspective on where we’ve been and where the category may end up given the entry of free and open source alternatives. This post could use an update given the entry/imminent entry of Microsoft, Salesforce, TIBCO and SAP – all of whom have chosen to build and not buy.

Why Process Barfs on Social

Summary: Taking the battle to the enemies turf. This is in response to “Enterprise 2.0: What a Crock” by Dennis Howlett, addressing what I hope is a balanced view on where process pundits are wrong about Enterprise 2.0 2.0 and the value of ERP that they closely guard. As well, it shows tangible examples of where social computing has in fact accelerated performance and suggests what we in the E2.0 community can reduce this friction between process and social. Dennis comes around with his balanced opinion as well.

Don’t Confuse Enterprise 2.0 with Social Computing Concepts

Summary: An early post – one of my last on definitions and naming – a topic that I generally stay away from. This post suggests focusing Enterprise 2.0 as a state the enterprise achieves via strategic use of social computing.

Why Unlocking ECM is critical to your Enterprise 2.0 Execution Plan

Summary: How you can leverage existing ECM/CMS investments and Social Computing to drive better outcomes for your marketing investments. Also included was a conversation with Billy Cripe, then Director of ECM at Oracle.

Happy New Year. See you on the other side. I’m pumped about 2010.

This has little to do with Enterprise 2.0. But its a celebration of open constructs and transparency around a topic that’s significantly larger than the business of social computing – how we vote.

I’m thrilled to see this report in Wired Magazine that OSDV – the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation, has officially released the source code for its prototype election system. And the pseudo geek in me is especially tickled to see this make it to Techmeme and Digg.

A little about OSDV from the Wired article:

The OSDV, co-founded by Gregory Miller and John Sebes, launched its Trust the Vote Project in 2006 and has an eight-year roadmap to produce a comprehensive, publicly owned, open source electronic election system. The system would be available for licensing to manufacturers or election districts, and would include a voter registration component; firmware for casting ballots on voting devices (either touch-screen systems with a paper trail, optical-scan machines or ballot-marking devices); and an election management system for creating ballots, administering elections and counting votes.

A few years ago when Gregory and John started chatting with me about this project, the single data point that got my antenna up was the fact that 80% of the Vote is impacted by 2 vendors. And yes, lets not forget the issue of hanging chads. I’m big on capitalism and I’m all for ‘may the best man/woman win and win big”. But in this case, the ramifications of closed systems that ultimately decides who has the finger on the economic/ healthcare/ nuclear flip switch or state level welfare begged for a broader, open system to ensure that each of us is heard.

OSDV promised to create an open spec, reference architecture and sample stack of software and hardware for all election system vendors to license. This way, we the public, have an open lens into the design and security of the vote counting and documentation process yet still allowing for the free market system to offer up competitive system and services providers to state and federal governments.  

Today OSDV includes other well known advisors such as Mitch Kapor and technology leaders such as Oracle, Sun and IBM are also looking to get involved. Trust the Vote is the flagship project and works closely with MTVs Rock the Vote initiative.

Photo (left to right): Dean Logan, Mitch Kapor, Heather Smith, Debra Bowen, Greg Miller. Courtesy Luke Wooden

I have served as an advisor to OSDV for over 3 years now and our firm, chipped in services to the foundation around business development and experience design. Its so nice to see this all come to fruition. Huge props to Gregory and John and my colleague Jane for helping with the initial identity work. I remember when the idea of OSDV was little more than a placeholder website and a back of a napkin concept and its awesome to see it all come together. Here’s to more wins in the near future.

For the geeks out there, here’s a link to the first chunk of code thats been released (online voter registration and tracking). For the rest of us, here’s how you can get involved with your wallet or your time.

Other coverage on Slashdot, WhyTuesday.org and RockTheVote

A quick shout out to my friends Oliver Marks, Dennis Howlett and Vinnie Mirchandani, and to R Ray Wang and Frank Scavo on the launch Enterprise Advocates.

This signals a new trend in the consulting and analyst landscape, characterized by loose federations of both independent consultants and firms that collaborate as advocates for the end customer.

Dennis talks about the need for agile advisory:

One of the main reasons we formed this group is because we believe there is a need for agile, flexible teams capable of rapidly responding to client needs. The big analyst/consulting firms struggle with that. We also see the problems companies face as global albeit with local nuance. That means as opportunities emerge, some or all of us will be involved with projects, drafting in appropriate specialists on an as needed basis from our extensive network of contacts. Our offer is based on solid practical help backed by more than 100 years combined experience with companies both large and small.

The money quote from Vinnie for the need for customer advocacy:

We think the time is right. Technology vendors spend 20 to 50% of their revenues in sales and marketing. Give or take that is a trillion dollars a year. The buyer’s voice is often drowned in that roar.

And Oliver, who like me, comes from the social computing and collaborative design view point, says:

My involvement in enterprise advocates is also two fold: to help the buyer get a good deal on technology which will help them be more efficient and make more money, and to address the increasing friction between the office and infrastructure areas, and help design greater interoperability for buyers.

I’m actually surprised that we haven’t see a federation like this pop up earlier. That said, I can’t think of a more experienced team of individuals in the Enterprise arena that can credibly have the customers back.

The technology industry is seeing tectonic shifts right now with the advent of Cloud Computing alternatives, a heightened awareness of maintenance costs for on-premise software and the (somewhat yet to be realized) promise of social computing constructs at a large scale. And so its more important than ever to have a customer advocacy group that can navigate vendor marketing hoopla, putting the customers needs and interests at the nucleus of the discussion.

To kick things off, the group will host its’ first webinar:

The inaugural one-hour webinar is planned for 22nd October ( 9:00 am PDT/ 12:00 pm EDT/ 4:00 pm GMT / and 5:00 pm CET) and will focus on helping SAP customers understand what they are dealing with, how maintenance can be managed, what alternatives are available, how to build a long-term contract negotiations strategy aligned with the organization’s applications strategy, and why buyers must act now. Time is set aside for Q&A and, should the session run out of time before all questions are answered, then full answers will be offered at the website following the webinar. Interested individuals may register at the following link: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/435331515.

Best wishes to all of the folks in the Enterprise Advocates. The official site, here. And, on Twitter.

Vinnie Mirchandani of deal architect fame graciously invited me to contribute to his guest column ‘Technology and Hobby’ on his New Florence New Renaissance Blog. This very popular column covers the hobbies of some of the heavy hitters in the technology business with a focus on the role of tech.

Some of folks who write about Social Computing / Enterprise 2.0 that you might recognize are Oliver Marks (Restoring Cars),  Ray Wang (Vinyl DJ), Dennis Howlett (Home Brewing), Michael Krigsman (Photography) and Bob Warfield (Hot-Rodding, etc).

No surprise to most who know me that I chose to write about the culinary craft. For me, there’s always been a parallel to be drawn between crafting strategy and execution plans, and the constructing of a perfect dish.

The photo above is my very amateur photography attempt at capturing a pic of Chili and Fermented Black Bean Prawns that I made last week, for my visiting parents.

I had a blast writing it up. Here’s the full post to see another side of me on Vinnie’s blog. -)

In response to my post on Five ways to Avoid Enterprise 2.0 Failure, the very clever Martin Koser led a hilarious discussion on “why not to get on the Enterprise 2.0 Journey.”

Some gems:

#7 who needs to attract new employees anyway?

#10 We are running on Windows NT (alternative: AS/40)

#10b Who needs E20 if he can have IE7?

#15 As long as SAP doesn’t offer it it’s not relevant

#24 We have never work beyond carrots & sticks

Skim through the comments on this posterous blog, for the other 29.

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.

Earlier this week I wrote about the Google ChromeOS announcement and its impact on the Enterprise. Disqus, one of my all-time favorite blog tools, dutifully posted Social Media reactions across Twitter and Friendfeed. However, the most spirited debate sparked by this post happened not in my blog comments or on Twitter. It happening on Facebook as I write this. Here’s what’s there, so far.

(sorry for the low res pic. Ill update with another one as soon as I can)

Want to know who these very smart folks are? Too bad.

The irony here is that Facebook and LinkedIn do allow my friends, who have never heard of each other, to have a discussion. And Facebook is happy to make it very easy to pull in my blog RSS feed to spark that discussion. So why not let Disqus expose this to all my friends on other networks. If you must, insist that a participant sign in or sign up to your network to add to the discussion, but expose the damn conversation, will ya?

I get that LinkedIn and Facebook sprouted back when it was all about creating closed networks and these platforms have adapted since then but the willingness to let specific conversations seep out is woefully tepid. Had you let MY social network (of which any one platform controls but a small fraction) see the discussion ensuing on YOUR service, between very smart people in YOUR network , my guess is that more people would be inclined to engage on your platform. And maybe others would be compelled to sign-up if they haven’t already done so.

But no – you’re so hell bent on keeping Google’s crawler in the dark that you’re willing to prevent plenty of super smart people on my other networks from participating in a great conversation that you facilitated.

User engagement on a blog post or other social objects (photos, videos etc) that I syndicate into Facebook is a true showcase of intent, and that’s gotta mean higher CPMs for you. That’s much better than silly defensive tactics such as copying FriendFeed/Twitters UI that early adopters like me might appreciate but alienate your mainstream users.

You’re just cutting your nose to spite your face.

End of rant.

Update: After writing this it got me thinking about the TechCrunch Real Time Crunch Up that’s underway right now.  Its great that were discussing this topic but really, what’s the point of real-time anything in the context of the social web, when two of the largest social networks throttle output to any real time engine.

I’m headed over there this afternoon. Lets see if this topic comes up.

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: