Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

I was very disturbed to learn about the passing of Professor C.K Prahalad this morning (hat tip to Shiv Singh).

There were a few books in the 90’s that had significant influence on shaping my personal thinking about how to accelerate performance in business. Three notable ones were The Ultimate Resource (Version One made the case for how entrepreneurship was the ultimate resource but that’s out of print now), Execution and Competing for the Future, by CK Pralahad and Gary Hamel.

About the professor, from Wikipedia:

Prahalad has been among top ten management thinkers in every major survey for over ten years. Business Week said of him: "a brilliant teacher at the University of Michigan, he may well be the most influential thinker on business strategy today." He was a member of the Blue Ribbon Commission of the United Nations on Private Sector and Development. He was the first recipient of the Lal Bahadur Shastri Award for contributions to Management and Public Administration presented by the President of India in 2000.

In this latest book, “The New Age of Innovation:

Professor Prahalad and M.S. Krishnan suggest an internal capacity to reconfigure resources in real time by focusing on clearly documented, transparent, and resilient business processes (the link between strategy, business models and operations) has become a strong differentiator.

As many of you know, I focus militantly on how the internal design of the enterprise need to be re-casted to meet the social customer’s demands and how to compete effectively. Technology differentiation as a competitive weapon played a central role in the last round of management thinking and strategy. Going forward its going to be about how effectively you can create and leverage people networks to solve business problems and get ahead by complimenting those discrete processes that have been unnecessarily fenced in by those very structured systems. Technology obviously has a critical role to play. But its a lot more than that.

Professor C.K. Prahalad was one of the few that not only pushed the boundaries on where organizations need to be interms of their thinking and wiring but he was one of the few that brought practical solutions that were cognizant of realities on the ground. More important he never lost sight of the “how” as he presented new thinking around the “what” and the “why”.

Here’s the professor on Innovation:

The Hindustan Times and Business.in have more details.

My deepest condolences to the Prahalad family and his loved ones during this difficult time. May he rest in peace.

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. 

As some of you heard (many thanks for the notes), I’ve joined the Defrag Conference Advisory Board.

For those of you who are not familiar with the conference, Defrag is a yearly event in Denver that’s focused on emerging tools and trends in technology and its’ impact on business.

The conference is organized by Phil Becker, Brad Feld and Eric Norlin and counts Roger Ehrenberg, Paul Kedrosky, Jerry Michalski and Chris Shipley as advisors.

Here’s how I described the conference in a recent post:

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The Five Fragments That Make Up Defrag:

I’m going to spare you a diatribe on why its a great event and distill it down to five reasons, (or fragments) that make me go back and why this an awesome event for the enterprise folks out there:

• Its about debating solutions to big big business and economic value challenges that will consume us all over the next 12-24 months. That applies to the buy-side as well as the sell side.
• Its about the ramifications of eventual large scale adoption of a lot of what a serious IT executive will deem to be well, “cutesy” ideas today (e.g. Real Time Enterprise).
• A cut to the chase discussion on which consumer trends we see and use today might one day be enterprise worthy. Remember when people laughed at the concept of ‘Facebook for the Enterprise’? Yep, that probably came up at Defrag two events ago.
• Little talk-to-the-crowd panels. Everyone is deemed to be intelligent and has an equal voice. You’ll spend more time talking to the person sitting next to you than you will listening to someone on stage. Guaranteed.
• Its frightfully practical stuff. No fluff. All actionable thinking that makes you look at work differently when you leave. And makes you want to come right back the next year.

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A little about the conference in the words of Eric Norlin, the organizer:

Defrag is the first conference focused solely on the tools and technologies that are leveraging the "social" aspect of software to accelerate the "aha" moment. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.

Thanks to Eric for reaching out. Looking forward to a great event!

P.S If you’re a fan of Sons of Anarchy on FX, you’ll get what that T-Shirt is all about -)

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.

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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.