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.

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.

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.

SuccessFactors, a very well known provider of business software, particularly with an HR and Workplace performance focus has acquired enterprise social business software provider, CubeTree.

The terms of the deal from the press release are as follows:

SAN MATEO, Calif. and REDWOOD CITY, Calif.  – May 3, 2010 – Today SuccessFactors, Inc. (Nasdaq: SFSF) announced a definitive agreement to acquire CubeTree, Inc. a visionary leader in the rapidly growing social business software category. SuccessFactors is acquiring the company for $20 million in SuccessFactors stock at closing plus a contingent cash payment three years from closing to bring the value of the total consideration to $50 million.  There is no contingent cash payment if the value of the stock issued exceeds $50 million at any point during the three year period and to the extent the holders have disposed or hedged their holdings.  The guarantee is considered contingent consideration and will be recorded at fair value and marked-to-market each quarter through the statement of operations.

 

Couple of thoughts:

• $50 million doesn’t seem like a whole lot when compared to your average enterprise software deal but there’s more to it. Whilst CubeTree counts SAP, Cisco, LG, and Adobe as customers, I’ve confirmed that at least 2 of these companies do not use CubeTree across all employees. So the pricing seems warranted.
• On the $50 million thing, another point to consider. Many founders/CEOs of E2.0 companies have been open about that fact that social software is not hard to build (form an IP stand point). So effectively the exit for most will end up being an execution play or a technology transfer. In that context, $50 million on the table looks pretty good.
• Based on my interaction/work with the space as a whole, HR or employee productivity focused offerings are very serious about adding social and collaborative features to process. It’s the most natural fit in the enterprise. SuccessFactors is ensuring that they have a forward looking solution. And the timing is perfect.
• Cash is king of course, but the $30 million payout may well be a good bet for the CubeTree team. And it also goes easy on SuccessFactors’ wallet. Following little or no innovation in the last decade with respect to Enterprise Software, we’re at the beginning of a new cycle of overhaul when it comes to enterprise systems of record. In some cases its due to the need for SaaS, in others, its the need for better engagement. And as we see here, you get both. The likely hood of upside for CubeTree and its investors is better now that its been for a while.
  • For that cross section of customers that use both SuccessFactors and Saleforce.com, they now have an alternative to SalesForce.com’s Chatter, should they choose to look for one. Ben Kepes covers this.
• For the Enterprise 2.0 segment, my sense is that this is actually very good news from a valuation stand point. There are a few players such as Jive Software, Socialcast and Socialtext that have been attracting somewhere between reasonably sized to very large customers for a long time. And the emerging Enterprise 2.0 services ecosystem (disclaimer: My firm is one of those) will only raise awareness for the applicability of these technologies to address business challenges. If CubeTree could secure $50 million after it’s relatively short life, the prospects look good for other prominent players in the space that have a marquee customer base and as important, highly engaged platforms.

About a year ago I sensed that standalone Enterprise 2.0 faced serious commoditization and the lack of process and context was going to be a big problem. I still consider these to be significant impediments to getting to IPO for most vendors. That said, Chatter and now CubeTree serve as excellent reference architectures for other traditional enterprise software companies to see how process injected with engagement can lead to accelerated business performance for end customers. And subsequently look to make a purchase or build their own.

Congrats to both companies.  I’ve heard nothing but good things about CubeTree when its come up in conversations and it’s great to see that they have found a good home.

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.

Enterprise 2.0 has a parallel universe.

The first one that gets a lot of the press – product suites that offer Facebook like enterprise social networking, Blogs, Wikis, Activity Streams etc.

The second is what’s been traditionally called Unified Communications – led by companies such as IBM and Cisco that are making a strong showing in the social and collaborative category. Depending on their pedigree, the concept of enterprise 2.0 or the new enterprise collaborative and social backbone goes beyond what we have come to know as the enterprise 2.0 toolkit. Voice, Video, Conferencing, Virtual Meetings are front and center to how these companies look at collaboration and enterprise 2.0.  Stuff that’s somewhat conveniently left out of the first enterprise 2.0 bucket because its not simple for upstarts to offer these heavy weight capabilities. Yet, if you can be objective, these capabilities absolutely make sense in an integrated fashion as we move to a new working model.

And so I was really pleased to see the news that PBworks is now offering Click to call capabilities within its platform. That’s an early example of a solid use of traditional communication metaphors to augment and improve the social and collaborative experience.

As Leena Rao on Techcrunch says:

The beauty of the integration is that the conference calling feature is an extension of the collaboration platform. Users can call anyone with a single click who already has a PBworks profile or manually dial in any number. PBworks Voice runs on the open source FreeSWITCH telephony platform and phone systems are hosted in PBworks’ own datacenter.

Is PBworks now a IBM or Cisco competitor? Hardly. Those companies have a far more robust offering and deal with far more complex headaches that very large organizations have. But  PBworks approach and philosophy of customer centricity that brings strip down versions of heavy weight features will make them extremely compelling to many customers that want a miniature, light weight version of what an IBM can offer. No bloated software – just the good stuff and at a price they’re target market can stomach. It’s awesome to see them not get caught up in some altruistic version of ‘out with the old and in with the new approach’ to enterprise social computing.

They are not the only ones doing looking at traditional and new  (see Jive Software and Business Objects, for example) but I hope we see even more examples of this. In other words, Enterprise 2.0 steps out of the box, focus on what the customer really needs to be effective, objectively offer newer AND traditional forms of communication  and interaction metaphors in context. Whether that means folding in voice and meetings, or an embracing the role that structured systems will always play in the enterprise.

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)

Telcos will start looking at picking up affordable SaaS Enterprise 2.0 suites. Why? As mindshare starts to get split between Email and Microblogging/Activity streams, telcos and CSPs that offer white label business email hosting for the SMB market will see these as a natural extension. In the SMB market, standalone solutions are key to allow for simple, cheap distribution directly as well as via small reseller partners that don’t want service and customization headaches. E2.0 SaaS offerings meet those criteria. In addition they offer ready plug ins into other popular SMB apps such as SalesForce for those that want integration.

That could mean a huge buyer market outside of the traditional enterprise players who seem to prefer build as opposed to buy scenarios (Salesforce Chatter, TIBCO Tibbr, SharePoint 2010, SAP Constellation, etc).

If I’m somewhat correct, expect the likes of British Telecom, Singtel and Comcast etc jump in. If I’m very right and my commoditization assessment from last year holds true, we’ll see more players such as RackSpace and XO communications start to pay attention as well.

Agree? Disagree? Fire away below. I’d love to hear other views and bets on which vendors might be juicy candidates if you agree with my swag.

I don’t do product announcement reviews here on Pretzel Logic. But since I do focus on how social computing/Enterprise 2.0 can accelerate process performance, this announcement by MindTouch and SnapLogic coming together to focus on process optimization is welcome news.

From the MindTouch website:

Organizations that have embraced the benefits of web-based applications are now able to to integrate applications across traditional boundaries and more effectively visualize data for better collaboration. This solution, offered at a sub – $5,000 price point, brings all of the benefits of an traditional EAI solution, without any of the cost, development or maintenance headaches.

Alex Williams at ReadWriteWeb concludes:

On the one hand it is affordable and simple to implement. But those factors may be a hindrance, too, as some companies are not quite accustomed to the lightweight systems that SnapLogic and MindTouch embrace.

I totally get where Alex is coming from but specifically in the context of the mid market buyer, I’m not so sure. There’s a resurgence in the BAI (business application integration) space and a lot of it is focused on lighter weight integration and often at the presentation layer. Moreover, expect Enterprise 2.0 / Social Software investments to fuel more of this in the coming years. Even TIBCO, the heavyweight EAI provider has embraced this approach with the upcoming release of Tibbr. And since this is being done in the context of a collaborative, social context (powered by MindTouch) it has the potential to go beyond simple asynchronous dash boarding capabilities by providing data access “in the flow” – of collaborative constructs. You still need to execute based on your performance objectives but this is potentially powerful from a platform perspective.

As I’ve said earlier, the holy grail of accelerating business performance via Enterprise 2.0 constructs is the marriage between process and social. That’s partly achieved by surgically folding in data with conversations and collaboration to support discrete business activities. We’re going to see a lot more of that and its great to see MindTouch be one of the companies that’s embracing this early.

Congratulations to all involved.

The official release here. More coverage from Oliver Marks, CMSWire and eWeek.