Pretzel Logic – Enterprise 2.0

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 offerings 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.

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)

Tom Davenport (who holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, my alma mater) has a post on Harvard Business Review where he makes the case that Knowledge Management may well have been the most palatable solution to preventing Underwear Bomber security breach that look the peace and joy out of Christmas Day, 2009.

Professor Davenport concludes:

There are, of course, some remedies to this problem. One would be a really nasty police state, with a lot of false positive detentions. Another would be an international data management agency. A third would be lots more money and intrusiveness spent on airport searches, behavioral screening, etc., a la Israel and El Al. All seem somewhat unlikely.

Perhaps the only palatable remedy would be an intelligence community that views high-quality information and knowledge management as its primary job. If I were Barack Obama, that’s the approach I would be viewing as the real solution to the "connect the dots" problem.

I’d contend that, in this case, knowledge was too managed. And that’s the crux of the problem – too much general purpose management of data, silos, content artifacts. And too little context around discrete tasks that in actuality is what should have been manage -Where data, content and people would wrap around the task to solve it.

There’s plenty of analysis on how the billions spent on information sharing post 9/11 failed. The New York Times writes:

Some government officials blamed the National Counterterrorism Center, created in 2004 to foster intelligence sharing and to serve as a clearinghouse for terrorism threats, as failing to piece together information about an impending attack.

Others defended the center, saying that analysts there did not have enough information at their disposal to prompt a broad investigation into Mr. Abdulmutallab. They pointed the finger at the C.I.A., which in November compiled biographical data about Mr. Abdulmutallab — including his plans to study Islamic law in Yemen — but did not broadly share the information with other security agencies.

KM is hardly the place to start to wrestle this challenge. The problem with KM is that it’s often (not always) measured by somewhat nebulous yardsticks such as amount of shared and reusable content, amount of contribution, lowered email use and number of docs stored on the network. All of this is done in closed networks. As a result, just like we see in the enterprise and its use of Content Management Systems, the government also suffers from ‘silo-ization’, poor findability, and poor analytics.  The fact is, no amount of closed loop information sharing is enough of an air tight strategy to prevent intelligence from falling through the cracks. There’s too many systems in place to let computer based intelligence automatically throw up red flags every single time.

The solution lies in putting people at the core of this difficult problem. The Social Computing Frameworks that we use, in contrast, consider the concept of ‘closed’ to be an exception rather than the rule. This allows those responsible to take ownership of the task but other unknown “experts” get to watch the flow and participate where they can enrichen the quality of the outcome or even better, as in this case, raise a big red flag. Once clear unified objectives are set across agencies, open up the execution so that the best known and unknown minds can chime in.

Whether Social Computing or traditional KM, the larger problem is with lack of objective setting to getting the right information to the right people. It’s about setting the right objectives upfront at the highest levels and identifying which of these objectives can in fact be addressed by information management solutions and frankly, which can’t. And whether the right incentive structures are in place for individuals and groups to collaborate towards a common goal. I’m willing to bet that the strategic and execution objectives laid out by the chiefs of each agency don’t line up in a way that can practically lead to a unified collaboration and intelligence discovery execution plan.

I’m afraid the crotch bomber event will result in hundreds of millions being thrown at "information/knowledge management” solutions that centers on better sharing, transparency as a strategy in and of itself,  as opposed to as an execution path towards defined strategic goals that everyone is firmly behind.

I hope I’m wrong.

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.

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.

Marc Benioff unveiled what he described as Salesforces’ “biggest breakthrough” – an enterprise social networking platform dubbed Chatter.

Here’s a video interview, courtesy of Dennis Howlett, that provides insight into the drivers, challenges and opportunities for moving to more open constructs in the workplace, as Salesforce sees it:

VentureBeat has a straightforward run down of the proposed feature list. Some other good commentary as well:

Jeremiah Owyang chimes in with what, I sense, is on the minds of many right now:

Trying to grapple with understanding Salesforce’s Chatter, is it something *new* or just a *me too*? #DF09

I’ve seen all of these Chatter features (at least in parts) from Jive, Telligent, Lithium(client), Socialtext(client), Yammer, #DF09

Dennis Howlett’s skeptical:

Salesforce.com may well be the poster child for hip and cool apps that bring the consumer experience to the enterprise but it will likely find CXO’s baulk at the idea of Chatter as a useful addition to their Salesforce.com environment. Only time will tell whether Salesforce.com marketers have judged this correctly.

And Michael Krigsman concludes:

Regardless of where Salesforce decides to take Chatter, the announcement demonstrates that social computing space is reaching a tipping point, which I think is great.

I’m baffled by the name of this service but on the whole, my sense is that this is a huge development for the enterprise software business, as well as a definitive stamp of validation for Enterprise 2.0 constructs and technologies. Assuming of course that Salesforce.com gets this to market as promised.

Context Built In

Chatter is different. Its got the one thing baked in that other applications don’t – context. Built in from the ground up.

Back in February of this year, I wrote about how social computing constructs can make a difference to enterprise sales organizations. Based on our work with sales and marketing organizations at leading enterprise and voice of customer (sales reps) interviews with over 900 sales reps, I laid out a simplistic illustration of what makes a sales rep tick:

• Media watching is not a sport for sales reps. Feed them the good stuff and they’ll consume it.
• Data/Intelligence extraction over collaboration. “Give to Get” doesn’t fly with most sales reps.
• Good reps know exactly which 8.75 data types help them bust quotas. No more, no less.
• In spite of the above, don’t expect them to dig for it. They’d rather use the time to cold call a lead.
• Sales reps often ignore a lot of what marketing might offer or recommend.
• They don’t personalize portals & intranets.
• They rather search than browse; they want answers, not search results. (ok, who doesn’t!)
• CRM apps often morph into reporting mechanisms that sales reps are mandated to use.
• Pre-sales engineers (in the case of High Tech) often do most of labor intensive tasks in the sales cycle (assembling proposal components, finding SMEs and references, etc).

Super impose these characteristics on the features presented in the Chatter demo and I say we have a solid start. Chatter’s got context and intent built in for the sales organization given its close out of the box linkages to Salesforce.com’s flagship CRM application. Next, the activity stream/ feed metaphor was made for the sales rep: Why? Given how they prefer to work, it 1) enables them to pluck important nuggets out of the stream that support the sales process and 2) lets the best minds wrap around a task at hand (RFP, prospect inquiry, customer support issue and the like). It won’t all just happen out of the box but the application has the potential to make it a hell of a lot easier.

Process + Social

Last week I wrote a post called “Why Process Barfs on Social”. My central point was that unless we see a social + process in context, Enterprise 2.0 won’t realize its full potential. Whilst tools certainly won’t provide the solution alone, Chatter has the capability of being the first integrated showcase where social concepts are unleashed to enrichen discrete processes (in this case, closing and keeping customers) towards established performance goals.

There’s no question that some of the most important data that sales reps need reside outside of the confines of traditional CEM and sales applications. They sit in home grown contract registries, support agreement databases, 3rd part news and social media platforms, ERP systems and very important – the minds of known and unknown colleagues. Chatters’ platform capabilities enable access to these data sources and people. This, along with the ability to collaborate around an object ( a lead, a competitor, a customer, a topic) brings process + social closer than ever before.

One Part Offence, Two Parts Defense

Despite the very convincing assault on Microsoft SharePoint by Marc, my sense is that this is more defense than offence on Salesforces.com’s part. Taking on the installed base of SharePoint may be a longer term goal but for now SalesForce needs to make its existing applications useful to sales reps and move away from being a glorified reporting application for operational bean counters or (as Scott Schnaars suggests), a contact management system. Not to mention the rising interest in so-called “social CRM” services. Chatter gives reps a reason to stay within Salesforce.com a little while longer and amps up the sustained utility of the service.

Distribution

Whilst this is validation around the concept of social computing in the enterprise and pureplay vendors will see a rising tide effect, there’s a downside as well. Its tempting to say that pureplay vendors had these capabilities for a while and can hold their own. The reality is that feature shoot outs play but one role in enterprise purchase decision making. Salesforce brings its powerful distribution channel, out of the box process integration, and a now social marketplace in AppExchange – together providing a very compelling reason for enterprises to consider this as a company-wide social networking platform.

Customer Centricity

This, in my opinion, was the biggest lost opportunity in the launch of this service.

One of the reasons for Bloomberg LPs ungodly success is that every single employee’s bonus is tied to new sales and renewals. IT, Product, Marketing, Support, everyone. That means everyone prioritizes their work around revenue. That’s extremely difficult to do especially since only a chosen few at most companies have any control or even insight into the sales process. Now, with Chatter being seeded in the nucleus of managing customer relationships in the enterprise (i.e. CRM), there’s the opportunity, for the first time, to provide a universal lens into the process of courting, converting and servicing a customer. Everyone can see the sales and support process live and chime in with expertise, helping cradle the process to revenue and customer satisfaction. The big value proposition of the enterprise social web is improved customer centricity and there’s a unique opportunity for Chatter to make this a reality. I wish Salesforce had seized this opportunity to present a model that can transform how organizations and their partner ecosystems can be structured around the customer.

$50 bucks a user per month? Ouch!

Yes it’s a lot. But what strikes me as odd was that Salesforce did not offer some sort of basic/read-only access to Chatter for non Salesforce users at a given customer. What better way for others to see where their input is crucial to an ongoing project, RFP, discussion etc and make the case for purchasing that additional seat? That’s free marketing and a straight forward conversion strategy for Salesforce to move laterally, out side of sales and marketing. It’s still early so I won’t be surprised to see something similar to this.

Closing Thoughts

All up, this is excellent news for the Enterprise 2.0 space and I’m thrilled that a process facilitator such as Salesforce has dipped its toes in the social computing arena. Its about time Enterprise 2.0 grew up and started talking business. And Salesforce is one of the few companies that can lead that charge. It’s a separate post but pure plays will gain more than they will loose with increased awareness of the business association of social computing concepts. Good for the entire ecosystem.

For a detailed look at Chatter, see Marc Benioffs (very long) interview at TechCrunch’s Realtime Crunch Up Event.

I’m bullish.

Update: Great analysis on the infrastructure view point by Esteban Kolsky.

I’m at the KMWorld Conference in San Jose for a couple of hours this afternoon, sitting in on the Intranet 2.0 session with Toby Ward. Toby’s got some good pointers on the value and current state of Intranet 2.0. Many findings from his firms Intranet 2.0 research report as well.

I’ve tried to capture some of these here for your reading pleasure:

• 2.0 brings structure to informal conversations
• Nearly 70% of all internet users use social networks
• 30% of employees under the age of 25 would leave their job if the company banned tools such as Facebook
• British Telecom has 900,000+ Wiki Pages
• Reason for using Enterprise 2.0 tools: 77% for collaboration; 49% for knowledge management, only 19% for cost savings
• Satisfaction levels are low in the Exec Suite for (38% are not satisfied)
• Barriers to success: Minimal Exec Support (33%), Lack of a Business Case (30%), No IT Support (31%)
• Sabre’s Intranet Social Network is built on Ruby on Rails for less than $10k

    – 60% of questions answered within one hour of posting

    – Each question posted received an average of 9 answers

    – 65% of employees joined within the first 2 months

    – More than 90% participation rate after 1 year

    – Estimated $500K savings in year one

• Verizon using Present.ly, has activity feeds internally, alerts
• 1/3 of IT projects exceed budgets and schedules by almost 100% in SMB companies (Gartner)
• “Intranet will always be the poor cousin of external facing properties”

Toby showcased some solid intranet examples from leading organizations such as Verizon, Sabre and Coca Cola using everything from homegrown tools built on Ruby and Websphere to SharePoint. No usual suspects from the Enterprise 2.0 software category came up.

I just saw something go by by my tweet stream that brought back some old memories (thanks @rpolom) – the 2009 Gartner report on the horizontal Portal Vendor landscape. Here’s the Magic Quadrant:

Around 2001, I led a strategy and execution planning engagement for a then F500 Hi tech firm looking to recast how its 9,000 strong global sales force collaborated with the rest of the ~40,000 person organization. My teams charter was to identify breaks in the interaction process with sales engineers, global field marketing and sales operation and devise a plan to improve the ‘contact to revenue cycle’ for sales reps via new collaborative constructs and sales intelligence access.

As part of this we were also on the hook to put an execution and operational plan in place. That ended up including a technology solution from the portal marketplace – the sizzling hot technology that promised to provide a single homepage to data and information from scores of traditional ERP and custom built systems. My team looked at 27 vendors. Yes 27!  Here’s the list from one of the drafts that I dug up:

Thats a snapshot of where this Portal Market started. And look whats left based on the Gartner MQ above.

On to the Enterprise social software landscape:

Dion Hinchcliffe’s lays out the market in this vendor landscape diagram in this post “Assessing the Enterprise 2.0 marketplace” below thats a prettier E2.0 software equivalent to my table above.

The Enterprise 2.0 solution landscape may well track the portal market evolution. To be fair, Enterprise 2.0 software does a lot more than portals but there’s some parallels to be drawn. Portals brought it all together with personalization around data and unified system access. But no cognizance of context or behavioral design for each participant type. A good chunk of Enterprise 2.0 software also promises people interaction and activity stream access as a better option to static portals. But for the most part, out of the box, it’s still general purpose ‘build it and they will come’.

That said, there’s a difference this time around. I’m seeing more and more instances of process centric business challenges where social software can help tremendously. As a consulting practice, our focus is enterprise performance acceleration and so that’s validation. The good news is that customers seem to be pushing social software/ E2.0 technology vendors to fix business processes relatively early in the lifecycle of this technology category compared to portals. That’s great news for both technology and services vendors that have a solution set and credible experience to help customers respond to real business problems. In other words, sensible applicable of social constructs as opposed to social as the cure all.

As for the E2.0 upstart vendor and services marketplace, I expect that a handful of vendors will do very well based on a “replace your intranet” value proposition. Even out of the box, the social software stack is far better than static intranets but its becoming a commoditized business. The rest better start focusing on line of business performance if they don’t want to get left by the wayside. In fact, as I’ve stated earlier, I think the market is far larger for that anyway.

Using Dion’s diagram as the E2.0 equivalent of my portal landscape cut out, any bets on what which names we should expect to see on the Garter MQ for Social Software in 2-3 years?

Two interesting news items over the past week – one consumer related and the other, enterprise social computing.

First: this article on eMarketer titled: “Behavioral Targeting Misses Mark” quotes a study by  researchers at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of California Berkeley School of Law and the Annenberg Public Policy Center:

“Contrary to what many marketers claim, most adult Americans (66%) do not want marketers to tailor advertisements to their interests,” according to the paper. “Moreover, when Americans are informed of three common ways that marketers gather data about people in order to tailor ads, even higher percentages— between 73% and 86%—say they would not want such advertising.”

As important, the article goes on to show that close to 50% might be ok if behavioral targeting its used to surface deal and promotions. Take away: sort out the “what’s in it for me” incentive and you have a better chance at earning my permission to monitor my movements.

Second: SocialCast, a leading micro blogging and collaboration platform for the enterprise announced a user interface refresh and its new Social Business Intelligence Premium service offering that in their own words, helps organizations with “real-time feedback and actionable insights into the employees, topics and conversations that users are finding important and that spur active participation.” A detailed review by Alex Williams, the new ReadWriteWeb Enterprise blogger, here.

The Case for Enterprise Social Behavioral Analytics:

Enterprise Social Analytics can bring significant benefit towards performance acceleration through a better understanding of how individuals and groups behave in the context of business process. Some examples….

HR Performance

If you’ve moved up the ladder at work, you’re aware of 2 things: 1) Manager/Skip Level/ Peer Performance reviews drive progression BUT 2) Soft Metrics (i.e. how your boss and peers generally feel about you) often trump hard documented goals.

Enter Social Analytics. You now have the opportunity to fold in important behavioral data such as degree of sharing, helping, engaging, contribution and involvement, giving HR a broader set of data points about the employees allegiance to the firm and dare I say, employee lifetime (with the company at least) value. These important data points complement tradition performance metrics giving you a sense of how critical each employee might be to a business unit, a product line, a geographic territory and ultimately to the company as a whole.

Communications Performance

Moving beyond people monitoring, the organization gets a clear sense of what’s top of mind for employees based on participation as well as lurking trends, how well a news announcement is being received by employees in near real time or bubbling issues that they need to nip before they take a life of their own. And on and on.

I’ve yet to come by a large organization where executive communications pushed out via email and intranets gets acceptable readership rates. Thus, millions are spent getting people to listen and engage in a typical large enterprise. With social computing constructs, we have the opportunity to carefully fold in emergent structures to compliment traditional top down communications designs. Employees now can become crucial information brokers for these communications and social analytics gives exec comms a good idea of which pockets of influence to tap into to spread specific messages.

Line of Business Performance

Where this really starts to get interesting in terms of business objectives alignment is learning how the organization interacts in the context of known functions such as field marketing, product launches, customer pitches and support inquiries. Social analytics show how the teams as well as unsuspecting groups in the organization came together (or not) to drive performance at the activity or process level. There’s crucial lessons to be learned here in terms of not only identifying who the rock stars were, but also how to institutionalize well performing processes, simple hacks and interaction models going forward.

Its Not All Rosy Though….

Transparency is a two way street

Whilst employees are clamoring for more transparency and open work constructs, that really applies primarily to inbound transparency – seeing what management and peers are doing. The other form – outbound transparency, where the enterprise monitors their every move, might be another story. And the skeptics will consider that to be a form of behavioral monitoring. Design and communication is key.

Incentive

Similar to consumer behavioral targeting, if the what’s-in-it-for-me incentive is not clear, the naysayers will come out of the woodwork. Analytics need to be returned back to individuals so they can use it to perform better. Help individuals work faster/better by leveraging network relationship and usage insights beyond management insight.

Policy

Policy will cut both ways. First, there’s a whole slew of enterprises that won’t have any of this for policy and legal reasons. For those, social analytics will have a place but its going to be more about ‘what’ and not the ‘who’. For others, they will need insist on paper trail into every discussion.

Shedding the Perception of Behavioral Targeting in favor for Performance Acceleration

There’s a boat load of insight to be had from social constructs in the enterprise and the Socialcast release is a really commendable version one of where social analytics need to start. And its only a first release. But I hope Enterprise 2.0 vendors consider these older reporting- style BI constructs that were designed only for management, to be ground zero.

Mike Gotta of the Burton Group suggests that “Analytics may be the key to the long-term success of the company as well – social messaging is something that will become a feature within larger platforms from IBM and Microsoft.” I agree in general, though what we’ve traditionally known to be ‘BI’ is in for a serious revamping in preparation for the coming of the socially networked enterprise. True to the dynamic, in-the-flow nature of social computing constructs and tools, analytics need to unlatch themselves from line items in reports that no one reads, and re-appear as nuggets of decision facilitation data points that support individual and organizational performance objectives. If I’m a Financial Analyst writing a report about Pork Belly Futures, the analytics should be the plumbing that suggests who else I should be talking to and what documents I should be looking at for reference, across the network. Now that’s enabling performance acceleration.

The net net is that if enterprise social analytics are going to look like behavioral analytics on the consumer web, they’ll be likened to targeting engines. In the case of the consumer web, that means more ads or some yet-to-be-determined interpretation of my interests in the future. In the context of the enterprise, it means possibly targeting my career progression or paycheck. Contrast that with a model where its a balance between both organizational wide insight, plus in the flow, contextual insight for individuals and groups. Now you have the “what’s in it for me” data point covered and you might have secured some currency to gather organizational wide analytics as well. All up, extremely important considerations for overall programmatic design in the context of accelerating performance via social computing concepts.

This represents a sliver of the types of customer discussions I’m seeing around the larger issue of actionable insight. I expect more and more vendors to be announcing analytics in the near future and there’s no question about how valuable management level sight can be (as I lay out above). Though, I for one hope that analytics/BI is re-casted as raw ingredients to individual decision support for better product output, beyond pie charts.