Michael Fauscette

Social business is not "just" about communicating better!

2010-03-08T17:52:14-08:00

I heard this statement recently from an analyst, "social media for business is really just about communicating better". Huh? Traditional collaboration was about communicating better and you see where that took us...email inboxes overflowing and almost useless, team workspaces that support silo'ed work, IM sucking productivity as bad a phone calls (why does a ringing phone appear to be urgent even when you don't know who it is?)... No sir, social media for business is NOT just about communicating better. Of course part of the problem is trying to use the social media term for what is a much bigger "thing", the social web and all the constructs it has created. I use the term social business to cover the holistic look at social for business, which to me seems like a much better fit. Now if the claim was that social in business is about connecting with people or engaging people more effectively, maybe I'd buy that but not just communicating.

Applying social concepts to business has wide applicability and could touch almost every area in an enterprise. When I think of social business and how we're using the concepts (or could use) in business I see the following:

Social CRM: the application of social concepts to engage customers more effectively in sales, marketing and customer service. (I could break each area out more, social sales, social marketing, social PR, social customer service, but you get the point).
Social product design / development: using social concepts to design products that are based on customer needs, wants and desires (ideasourcing) and vetted through the collective knowledge and expertise of a companies' employee resources in a closed loop system that runs from customer input to customer feedback.
Social employee enablement: enabling a cultural shift in the overall employee community by applying social concepts to employee policies, processes and tools. This could include: a) socialytic apps, b) enhanced user experience for enterprise apps, c) user generated content for employee, customer, and partner training, d) enterprise "YouTube", e) internal microblogging, f) employee network, g) ad hoc process enablement, h) open access to, search to find and tools to update, rate and contribute to enterprise content (with tagging, folksnomy, etc), i) social human resources (at some point I'll expand on this, but at a minimum self-managed profiles but could go as far as socially managed compensation)...
Social partner management: I suppose we'd call this social PRM, applying social concepts to partner programs and changing the way we interact with the partner ecosystem. This could start with partner communities but could extend to self-managed programs, open content development, etc.
Social supply chain: Supplier networks, as a concept are not new but through the application of social concepts we could extend that and create supplier communities as well as tie the supplier into the social product design / development process.

I've purposefully tried to stay away from vendors and specific tools as much as possible. Focus needs to be on the business transformation not on the technology. What do you think, are there other areas in business where social concepts can be effectively applied?

Impossibilities

2010-03-08T16:07:21-08:00

Yesterday I joined a large portion of the movie going population and took my daughters to see the new Tim Burton "Alice in Wonderland" movie just released (and helped it set several opening weekend records) in 3D. It is really excellent, great cast, excellent acting, cinematography and effects but that's not why I'm talking about it. You most certainly don't look to me for movie reviews and recommendations and with my "odd" tastes in movies that's probably advisable, even though I'd be happy to share them if you want. The reason I bring it up is this, there is a quote from Alice's father, "I imagine 6 impossible things everyday before breakfast", that has me thinking. In fact I haven't been able to shake the line since I first heard it yesterday.

I've believed for some time that the real underlying factor for developing a social business is a major culture change for a company. At the same time this key factor is the largest barrier to accomplishing this transformation. Last week there were some good conversations around the topic of cultural change and the difficulty that change engenders. Check out this post from SugarCRM's Mitch Lieberman to get the gist of the discussions. Change is hard, there's no argument there and frankly, changing company culture is probably one of the hardest evolutions a business faces. This is amplified when we understand that most of the change is starting from the bottom up, not the top down in this instance (not that top down culture change is easy of course). What I mean is that bottom up culture change accompanied by top down resistance or even blockage is, well, almost impossible, right?

If you read my post on moving beyond the industrial societal models of the past you know I think the move to social business is very very disruptive, transformative and unavoidable. The issue is how painful will the transformation be and how long will it take. When you disrupt accepted social norms, or accepted business norms, resistance will come, especially from those most threatened. I think this is one of the reasons we're still mostly talking about the consumer social web or maybe of the most obvious business changes. The business case around transforming your relationship with your customer, for example, is difficult to resist, even for the most threatened managers. The internal business transformation though is finding stronger opposition. I submit though, that the external transformation can only go so far without the internal culture to support it. To me saying "we're engaging our customers" when we don't engage our employees, partners or suppliers in the same manner is ludicrous.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying we can only transform a business holistically. Traditional change management teaches us to move slowly and build on success and I believe this is essential here. We have to build credibility and support at every level and with every stakeholder. I get very excited when I think of the possibilities and the power of the social concepts we're starting to apply to business. Engagement, shared control, transparency, trust, shared problem solving, opened silo's; all of these things will change the face of business. So I don't know about you, but I'm going to go on imagining 6 impossible things everyday before breakfast.

Redefining the enterprise user experience

2010-03-01T12:51:43-08:00

I wrote recently about the growing phenomenon of employees circumventing corporate policy and tools to solve business problems using their on tools, both hardware and software and even process. This "BYO" culture, I believe, is partially fueled with the increasing desire to mimic the web 2.0 user experience that we're growing accustomed to in our "personal" online lives. It's also fueled by a change to a culture of individual empowerment that has accompanied adoption of the social web. I also want to emphasize that I don't think this change is generational, but is in fact cross-generational, what I like to call Gen"S" (that's Gen social in case that wasn't obvious). Most of the recent survey data supports that concept, that social adoption is crossing all generational boundaries and creating a group that has some similarities beyond generation. One of those similarities seems to be an aversion to "traditional" enterprise software and its somewhat dated user interfaces (UI). The traditional UI tends to be complex, often difficult to navigate, hard to learn, a challenge to remember procedures for processes that are not done routinely like exception processing and unsupportive of ad hoc processes and collaboration. Portals don't help that experience, by the way...opening a window to multiple systems in one place still uses the original UI in the end, even if you can arrange the widgets on the portal however you choose. The traditional enterprise UI is in stark contrast to the UI of familiar web 2.0 tools that we are growing accustom to using on a frequent basis.

There's another underlying issue around the current user experience that, although it may seem disconnected, is not. The last couple of years has seen some shift in enterprise IT behavior that I think may be a new pattern. Budgetary constraints have forced companies to focus IT spending on the highest return SW which often has led them to put a hold on changes to the core ERP systems. Enterprise companies continued to invest in SW but that investment was often in deep vertical applications that offer the highest competitive advantage. The concept of maintaining core ERP systems basically without upgrade for a longer period of time is of course counter to the behavior that vendors preach but I wonder if this behavior might not be a part of the "new normal"...maintain the core ERP, spend and expand on high value items like vertical apps, social collaboration tools, social CRM and social platforms. I'm talking specifically about enterprise by the way, this does not apply to the SMB market in the same way. SMB buying behavior is different and I believe they are actually in the opposite part of the ERP cycle, currently investing in full systems to replace disparate and incomplete systems, especially cloud-based ERP (although I do think SMB's will also invest in social solutions over the next few years). My point with this is that in a time when employees / users are looking for a different user experience companies (at least enterprises) are not changing core systems at near the pace they did before 2008 so even if there was a new UI and experience available from ERP vendors (which there isn't), the chances of it getting implemented are very low if it is a part of the core system.

What do employees want from their enterprise SW user experience? Here are a few of the things that come to mind in no particular order:

A way to connect with, work with and share with other employees
A better way to find out who does what inside the enterprise
A UI for enterprise SW systems that looks and works more like facebook, Google Wave, or some other simplified but powerful web 2.0 tools. The UI should be able to aggregate information from and interact with people (employees, customers, partners, suppliers, etc.), enterprise SW systems and public social channels in a user configurable and selectable way.
A way to contribute content easily to various projects and systems ranging from employee training to product manuals.
A simple way to form group mashups or ad hoc workgroups.
Presence in a simple, manageable method
Content sharing not content management
A simple way to execute project tasks and understand work interdependencies while reporting status to a configurable group of interested and involved individuals
A system / method to integrate and utilize various communication channels ranging from (and as diverse as) telephone to Twitter
A simple way to find "things" in the enterprise, people, content, data, information...search
A way to aggregate and use social data (socialytics) and combine that data with other enterprise data to form analysis in a social context.

I'm sure there are a bunch of other things to add so feel free to do so in the comments please. So what's the real challenge then? To do both "fix" or better yet build a new enterprise user experience AND maintain the core systems in a somewhat static state. It strikes me that there are a couple of ways to approach this. One would be to sort of decouple the UI from the systems through some sort of mashup platform that could be used to build and deploy a new UI across the enterprise (I suppose that also includes the capability for UI level integrations). There are a few of these types of mashup platforms emerging but I haven't seen anything so far that is complete enough to do what I am suggesting. Another approach is to provide an application that sits on top of the enterprise (or maybe that's in between the enterprise systems, people and the outside world) that provides features and functions that provide the new and desired user experience. I have seen two applications that I think are version 1's of this concept, salesforce Chatter and Novell Pulse (it also seems like IBM's Lotus Connections is moving in this direction but I'm not as familiar with it as the other two). And of course in new enterprise systems we have to take these new requirements and needs to heart and significantly change our current user experience going forward.

Moving beyond the industrial society

2010-02-25T14:21:35-08:00

Noted psychiatrist R. D. Laing said "we live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing." We live in a world that is on the leading edge of a major business (or maybe that's societal) transformation, but like any widespread change, the shift away from the industrial model will take time. The change to social business is cultural and as such, threatens a great many concepts that we were brought up believing. It's ingrained in our education system, our organizations and our businesses. As Seth Godin points out "our entire education system is designed to prepare people to work in factories, consume stuff, and believe this makes us happy."

Without turning this blog into a history lesson I do think we need to do a quick refresher on the Industrial Revolution. There's some disagreement on when it started but the transformation from an agrarian society generally ran from the 18th century to the 19th century and started in the United Kingdom, eventually spreading across the world. As farming became more efficient people had to look for other ways to earn a living and turned at first to cottage industries and eventually to organized factories, mines, and support businesses around those activities. The change was enabled by the technological advances in machines and manufacturing process. If you want to read more, try this Wikipedia article. So my point is this, the industrial revolution happened because several factors aligned at the same time. Old ways of working became outdated or unavailable at the same time that technology shifted to provide alternatives that were not just appealing but met a growing basic need. Culturally as people moved from one lifestyle to another and congregated around industrial centers for work, society changed. The support systems of a society shifted to support the new economy and the new way of living. Education modeled and taught how to function effectively in the industrial environment. Societal norms shifted from supporting the feudal and disbursed agrarian culture to supporting a centralized, crowed factory centered environment in cities. As the industrial society grew up we began to create a self perpetuating model of produce / consume / produce. There are of course, all sorts of nasty repercussions to this social model from environmental to behavioral but for this post, I'll stay focused on the topic at hand.

So we're an industrial society with all of the supporting educational, economic and social structures in place and ingrained, except once again, as they did at the beginning of the industrial revolution, many factors are shifting. In North America particularly, but not limited there by any means, we have become a service based and information based economy. The majority of the population does not produce "stuff" anymore. Factory automation, off shoring, outsourcing all have reduced the need for widespread participation in the direct production of "stuff". Rampant consumerism is also starting to shift. Once it was believed that the "boomers" would retire with wealth to spare and would continue to or maybe even increase their consumption of goods. The economic crisis / recession of 2008/9 have pretty much taken care of that idea, wealth across the population has been significantly reduced. Across all generations we're starting to hear the words "downsize" rather than "buy". The workforce is disrupted, unemployment is extremely high and more and more people are choosing to (or for many its the only choice available) work for themselves and downsize to make that possible.

The social web has changed interaction models and the expectations of employees and customers. Customers are learning that they don't have to accept the old models of company controlled interactions, they control their relationship. Employees are learning new tools, have new and better user experiences and are starting to approach work like they do their personal lives by choosing to "bring their own" tools when the company provided tools do not provide the experience they want. Control and management models are starting to be questioned as employees look for more opportunity to participate and share control. There's still a lot of resistance to change of course, especially among the groups most threatened, middle and upper management for example. We still see over half of the companies in the US "blocking" social tools (or at least living under the delusion that they can block them). The threat to hierarchy and control models are probably the most acute as shared control and transparency gain momentum. The cultural shift in many organizations starts from the bottom up and many companies that believe they are not participating in the use of social tools are in fact "unconsciously social" already.

The technology is in play, there is significant pressure from a wide set of the population (employee and customer), business has changed from industrial without changing it's management models, we're seeing more and more negative outcomes from the consumerism of the past, everybody and everything is more and more connected...all of these changes seem to point to a major shift in business and society that rivals the industrial revolution in its magnitude. When? Well, the time cycles driven by technology are more compressed than ever but there is and will continue to be great resistance to this deep of a cultural shift. I see a small number of companies starting to make conscious decisions to move down the path to social business, but that is evolving slowly. There are lot's a barriers, management, legacy technology, infrastructure, education, etc. and we're only just starting to understand what the changes might mean when implemented. As Arnold Bennett said, "Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts."

Guest Post: Some predictions for the 2010 PLM Market

2010-02-20T16:18:11-08:00

This is a guest post from Sanjeev Pal, Research Manager for IDC's Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) programs in my SBS Group.

Each year many programs at IDC publish Top Ten Predictions for the coming year. The following is a summary of the PLM Top Ten Predictions for 2010. The domino effect of financial crises that led to the global economic recession in 2009 has altered the worldwide economic landscape and has slowed down the growth of PLM applications market. IDC's PLM applications market includes functional markets like MCAD/MCAM/CAE, cPDM, NPDI, Manufacturing and Other Engineering segment that excludes EDA. Since these functional markets cover numerous industry verticals under manufacturing and non manufacturing sector, they are directly influenced by macro economic trends and the trends of the overall software markets that were mentioned in this post. Here are my predictions:

PLM Solutions That Are Tailored Specifically for Industry Verticals Will Drive Market Growth with Contrasting Demand for Solutions in Emerging and Industrialized Regions
The "New Normal" Will Give Rise to Increased End-User Buying Power Causing Extreme Pressures on the Existing PLM Vendors to Mold Their Offerings and Also Increasing Opportunity for Aggressive PLM Applications Supplier.
Convergence of PLM and Business Intelligence Solutions Will Gain Popularity to Provide Product, Process, and Project Intelligence
Slow Adoption of PLM in Cloud Will Continue
Sustainability in Design Authoring and cPDM Software Will Remain Important and Gain Regional Momentum
The Use of Social Product Life-Cycle Management Applications Supported by Open Online Communities Will Increase
Productivity Enhancement Applications such as Asset Management and Simulation Tools (CAE) That Address the Entire Life Cycle of Products and Processes Will Be in Demand
There Will Be an Evolution of SmartCAD Tools That Offer Design, Material, and Process Choices in the Initial Design Phase
The Confluence of PLM and Gaming Technology Will Provide Real Lifelike Experience in the Media and Entrainment, AEC, Mechatronics, and High-End Simulation Domains
Lightweight 3D Viewers for Collaboration, Documentation, and so Forth Will Become a Requirement for the PLM Portfolio Rather Than a Competitive Advantage

What do you think?

It's all about the experience

2010-02-20T16:04:54-08:00

I'm writing this while sitting at a table at Philz Coffee in my neighborhood sipping on a Tantalizing Turkish coffee. Now if you know me you might think that's a little odd since I rarely drink coffee (mostly tea for quite a few years) but for those of you who don't know Philz, let me tell you about the experience. When you enter Philz you're greeted by aromas of exotic coffee blends, a cross between a cafe and your living room comfortable feel, a somewhat confusing list of coffee blends, a row of fedora's hung on the wall and 3-4 smiling faces behind the counter. Coffee you want, well you won't find any triple grande soy carmel macchiato light foam extra hot drinks here. Philz is all about hand blended, hand ground, hand made coffee. Want something dark and rich, try "Tantalizing Turkish Brew", something light roasted, "Canopy of Heaven", medium more your thing, how about "Ambrosia: Coffee of God"...there's a detailed write up on each ("under the canopy of heaven is likely where you will discover the collection of beans for this glorious cup of coffee. This signature blend is bursting with lively complex flavors and sweet beans from across the globe to produce a delicious caffeinated blend.") that is tantalizing enough to make the coffee lover's palms sweaty and their heart beat just a little faster. Don't know what you want, just ask one of the bartender (they call themselves that here), they can match the coffee to your taste buds. Once you choose, the cup is made to your specifications (want cream, how much, want it sweet, light, medium, very...) individually, fresh ground for your cup, fresh blended exactly as requested. At Philz its all about the coffee experience...you can even become a Philevangelist with Philz iPhone app, Facebook fan page, blog, Twitter handle (@philz_coffee) and web site.

So why does a mostly non-coffee drinker stop at Philz a few times a week and drink coffee. When I go to Starbucks to work I drink tea, Peet's Coffee the same, but at Philz I have to have a coffee...it's simple really, I buy the experience of drinking Philz coffee. I'm engaged, but more than that, I'm an advocate for Philz Coffee (you can order the blends online, by the way, check it out). Someone wants coffee in my neighborhood, I'm sending them to Philz, not Starbucks or Peet's. At the SCRM Summit a couple weeks ago, Paul Greenberg led a discussion on engagement and selling an "experience". As an example he used a brand that really hits home for me (if you have daughters you'll probably get this one), AmericanGirls. They sell the experience. When my daughters were young I used to read them the books. When they were old enough they saw the dolls and all the accessories and had to have several (no, not just 1 doll, no way...lucky they have grandmothers who are easily, ah, convinced). Their dolls are about $100, then you add the clothes, furniture and accessories...it gets pricey fast! They even sell matching clothes for the doll / owner. Eventually my daughters had to have the ultimate AmericanGirl experience, they had to make the pilgrimage to the NYC store for the "experience" (yes, they actually call them experiences). There's dining, tea, salons for the doll, photo studio and of course all manners of parties to be had. Talk about engaging your customers and creating advocates!

There's a lesson here for brands big and small. We used to teach that brands need only ask 1 question (the Net Promoter question) as a measure of loyalty and engagement (the "would you recommend" question). Now we know that the 1 question metric isn't enough. There are actually a series of questions that provide insight into loyalty: 1. would you recommend, 2. "did you" recommend, 3. did the referred person / company actually buy and 4. were they a profitable customer. In social CRM we talk about engaging the customer or creating an engaging environment for the customer. Underneath that "engagement theory" though is something else, I think...the power of the experience. A brand that creates an experience for its customers creates engagement through that experience. Now here's the hard part, there's no "creating an experience" handbook out there. Each brand would have to answer that question for its specific product set, and frankly, the only way to create an experience for your customers is to KNOW YOUR CUSTOMERS intimately. That's where social CRM comes in and its a cycle...the better you know your customer and what they want, the easier it is to create an experience that will create engagement and the better the experience the more engaged the customer the greater chance you will / have created an advocate. And in the end, isn't that what we're really about, creating brand advocates?

The New "BYO" workforce

2010-02-17T17:34:10-08:00

No I'm not suggesting that you run out and buy a six pack (although if you want to go crack one open while you read this, feel free). It strikes me that on top of the behavioral changes and new habits of interaction that the social web has created there is another more fundamental change in behavior...we're simply just not as tolerant as we used to be when it comes to technology. Maybe a big part of this is the effect of the empowerment that comes to the individual through the social web. As we have become more focused on the people and less on the technology (people as the platform) the tools have grown more user friendly and powerful in their simplicity. We're used to this in all of our non-work online experiences and even carry it over to our devices (iPhones, MacBooks, etc.).

There are so many useful tools available online for free or almost free these days and they are all built with this new simple user experience paradigm in mind. Somewhere along the way employees started their own silent revolt at work. Instead of obeying the IT corporate rules they started going around IT to solve their business problems in the most expeditious and effective way when the corporate standard wasn't up to their expectations and needs. Need to collaborate on a doc, spreadsheet or presentation, there's Google Doc's, Zoho, etc. Need a private team room that is accessible from any internet connected device (read no VPN, firewall, etc.) to share files and have discussions, there's Google Groups, LinkedIn Groups, etc. Want to form an open community around a topic, again Google Groups, Yahoo Groups, LinkedIn Groups...lot's of choices. Don't like the corporate issues Blackberry, buy your own iPhone (of course no guarantee you'll be able to get corp email on it, some companies allow, some don't...which is sadly why I'm still carrying 2 devices). I see this happening in other ways as well, I don't like the laptop the company provides, I use my own; I don't like Powerpoint I use Keynote or Prezi...the list is endless. The issue is probably more obvious in social tools, the enterprise doesn't provide a way to network and communicate in other-than-email ways (or corporate IM) so the employees connect on Facebook, use Twitter, IM on Facebook or gchat, post videos on YouTube and pictures on Flickr...you get the point.

It would be interesting to see just how much corporate IP that the companies think are securely tucked away behind the firewall are actually in Google Docs (not to pick on google). I often refer to the three types of social models I see in businesses today: 1. the social denyer,2. the accidental socialite and 3. the socially aware. According to a recent IDC survey 57% of the respondents use social media for business purposes at least once a week, 37% use both corporate and consumer tools for business and 15% reported (read that as admitted) using a consumer social tool instead of the corporate sponsored tool because of ease of use (simple user interface), familiarity from personal use, and low cost. The accidental socialite group of businesses are growing based on everything I'm seeing and is being fueled by this "BYO" culture. And interestingly enough this is not a generation movement. I hear this a lot," oh it's just the kids that get and use social media"...that's simply not true. In fact in our social business survey referenced above IT/Ops and Executives were by far the most likely to use social tools (both consumer and corporate sponsored). In other data I reviewed, the largest age group across all social sites was the 35-44 year olds (25%) with the next closest group the 45-54 (19%). We have to come up with new corporate policies, new social policies and even new ways to interact with traditional enterprise systems if we are going to bring the BYO culture back into the fold...if that's even what we want to do. IT wants control but the more control that is exercised the more likely the BYO workforce will work around the controls. The happy medium in social business, I think, will come as we see more enterprise grade social tools that can meet corporate objectives (although we probably need to think about these objectives in light of what we have learned about the social web) and at the same time enable the experience that the employees are getting from the social tools they use in their personal lives.

#scrmsummit

2010-02-15T18:20:31-08:00

Last week in I joined a group of social CRM experts and representatives from 14 software vendors for a 2 day social CRM summit. The event, led by noted CRM author, blogger and consultant Paul Greenberg and BPT Partners, was held in Herndon, VA (see the pic above, taken from the Westin Dulles during the snow storm that kept most of us there an extra day or so). The event generated some great discussions and networking opportunities. One of the biggest take aways for me is that SCRM is still on the bleeding edge new zone and there are some really smart people that are defining and refining it on an almost daily basis. I also believe that it's on the edge of trendy and is starting to attract some people around the edges that are trying to jump on the band wagon and yet, are not "experts" in CRM at all. I won't go through my whole social business speech again, but I do want to emphasize again that social business and SCRM are not social media or social networking. They are not defined by the consumer tools like Twitter and Facebook either. Social Biz and SCRM are about changing corporate culture and about relationships, IMHO. I also am joining Paul in the decision to stop trying to define and debate the definition of SCRM...it's time to do. OK, enough of that, on with today's point. There are some excellent write ups already published (CRM Strategies Blog and Brent's Social CRM Blog) on the summit so I won't try to recount the whole event, but instead I think I'll just hit on a few points that I think are worth repeating:

CRM taught companies how to "manage" customer relationships, SCRM admits that companies cannot manage customer relationships...customers own their relationship with the company
Web 2.0 empowered the individual. The world is becoming individual / customer centric and this often breaks current business logic.
Web 2.0 has taught us very different behaviors, expectations and ways of interacting. Customer's translate these new behaviors into the expectation of near real-time interactions with companies. They want the experience to mimic other online interactions and want the experience to be personalized and delivered up "when, where and how" they want.
The social customer wants a "self-managed' experience and expects the company to provide the plumbing.
Customer centricity: the conversation is controlled by the customer.
SCRM moves the point from management to engagement.
The old saying of "like me good" not like me bad" is even more important in today's online world. Trust filtering is an important key to building trust. Video could add quite a bit to the "trust factor", visual cues are still very powerful
SCRM is an extension of traditional CRM not a replacement. The underlying data is important, especially when tied to new sources of social data and coupled with socialytics.
People are the new platform (yes, I've written about it before, but it applies to all people in a social biz, customers, employees, partners, suppliers...) The focus is not on technology or process anymore, it's on people.
Make the customer a part of your business (duh). Think "mom and pop" business from main street USA only at scale.
The goal is customer engagement and engagement comes from providing experiences to the customer. Create an experience for your customer, don't just "sell" them something...the strength is in emotions and emotional ties.
Social business is a new business model that incorporates a company philosophy and culture of transparency and honest relationships with employees, customers and partners.
Stop focusing inward... our web sites are designed for us, customer service is designed for the company (it is CUSTOMER service after all), we sell what we have not what the customer wants... focus on the people.

This is only a small list of the excellent topics we discussed last week, take a look at the other posts to see more details. Here's another post that incorporates some of the topics from last week from Mitch Lieberman. You might also want to check out Michael Krigsman's ZDNet blog that incorporates a video interview that Michael conducted with me and Forrester analyst Dr Natalie Petouhoff talking about SCRM and social business that we recorded last week at the summit.

Novell Pulse: Real-time Enterprise Collaboration?

2010-02-14T18:06:30-08:00

I had the opportunity to spend some time with the Novell Pulse team and take a deep look at their new social software solution. Announced during the e2.0 conference in San Francisco last Fall, Pulse is being positioned as a real-time enterprise collaboration platform. Novel, no stranger to the traditional collaboration space, just may have something unique and compelling in Pulse.

Many traditional collaboration tools have fallen far short of their promise and have not really enabled cross enterprise cooperation. I suppose that at some level they have facilitated specific functions, like team workspaces or document sharing but beyond that, not really. For many employees email ends up as the collaboration tool of choice and frankly, without going on another email rant, it is extremely inadequate. In many ways the underlying concepts of traditional collaboration tools don't seem to hold up in the world of the social web. This goes back to the an idea I've held for some time, software that is designed to "manage" often does not encourage individuals and teams to "use" the managed "thing". Content management systems, for example, do a great job of controlling document access and versions but I'd question whether the same system helps people use the content that it manages. Project management systems do a great job of tracking work, but do they really help individuals get work done on the project they track? A lot of enterprise software was built with management and/or IT in mind and not the rank and file.

Enter the social web and all of its ways of encouraging individuals to interact. The concepts of the social web have changed both how we interact and our expectations of interaction. It's a common topic today to talk about the consumerization of enterprise IT and most of that talk is fueled from the social web as it invades the enterprise from the bottom up. In this "bring you own" workforce employees are "voting" for web 2.0 type tools over traditional IT provided tools, especially when it comes to collaboration. Employees use Google Docs for group work, Twitter and Facebook to communicate and share, etc. IT of course has many concerns over security, lack of enterprise control, and non-standaridization of use and usage policies.

I think that for the social business movement to really gain CXO level support and widespread adoption a new type of enterprise software tool is necessary. We have to provide the same user experience and outcomes of the consumer social tools but also provide a way to make it "enterprise class" (secure, safe, standardized, etc.) without pushing old user experience paradigms on the employees. This is a massive challenge, especially in a post-recession world where companies are mostly keeping core systems stable and not replacing them. I want to explore this idea more, but I'll save it for another post, suffice it to say that the enterprise is ready for a new approach to collaboration and a new type of enterprise tool.

That's where Pulse comes in, it sits at this intersection of secure enterprise class software (built with Novell's extensive knowledge of enterprise architecture and systems) and yet with the user experience, flexibility and functionality of a web 2.0 tool. I reviewed Google Wave some time ago and while it's not an enterprise tool, there are many good things about Wave. One of the strongest design concepts that Wave incorporates is the idea of "designed for the web" instead of designed to copy something that existed off line in the past (email : snail mail, computer desktop : desktop). Pulse uses the Google Wave Federation Protocol and incorporates some of the basic design concepts, although Pulse goes much further in meeting enterprise needs. From an IT perspective Pulse supports enterprise security, access control and management standards. Here are a few of the features that I think users will find most compelling:

Interoperability with Google Wave, Twitter and other consumer social tools.
User controllable / configurable stream of personal and professional information that is managed with the familiar follow paradigm.
Unified in-box that includes social sites, email, IM/chat, Wave, etc.
Presence / availability
Real-time collaboration including team document creation / editing and sharing.
Social blog / microblogging that allows users to create content and conversations as well as comment on content created by other users.
Swarming (this is one of my favorite features!), a feature that lets users form ad hoc groups / conversations around an emerging topic.
User controlled / configured groups.

There are a lot of other features and functions but you get the idea, Pulse is a very powerful and flexible enterprise social tool. Pulse will be available in a cloud model the first half of 2010 and on premise at some point in the future.

SAP Leadership Shakeup: Leo Apotheker out, return to Co-CEO Structure

2010-02-07T12:22:17-08:00

In a not so surprising announcement today SAP CEO Leo Apotheker has stepped down effectively immediately. For a few months now senior software analysts have somewhat quietly predicted just such a move, especially on the heels of a very poor performing year. The timing seems predictable too, as SAP just reported Q4 earnings. Announcing this now also gives the new management team time to get a coherent message together prior to Sapphire, SAP's user conference which will be held May 16-19 in Orlando, FL.

The new leadership team, headed by Co-CEO's Jim Hagemann Snabe, former head of product development, and Bill McDermott, former head of the field organization, both already executive board members. In addition Vishal Sikka, Chief Technology Officer joins the executive board and Hasso Plattner, Co-Founder of SAP and Chairman of the SAP Supervisory Board, will continue to play a role in advising the new leaders on technology and product development. There had been quite a bit of guessing / predicting as to what SAP might do to replace Leo; a company that has been criticized for some major points of its strategy over the last few years. One camp believed that SAP needed an infusion of "new" blood and would bring in someone from the outside while another held fast to the idea that what SAP needs is leaders with established organizational clout so that they could quickly get the SAP ship back on course. The choice is a reasonable one and brings together a strong engineering leader needed to get the R&D teams (SAP has always been seen as an engineering led company) quickly re-focused on moving forward (something Leo had been criticized for disrupting recently) and a customer / sales focused leader to keep the company focused on results. The changes come at a critical time for SAP as they finally bring out a new release of BusinessbyDesign that has been promised as ready for general consumption and as they release a series of enterprise cloud apps (here's my recent post on its cloud strategy). Both moves are promised this year and are seen as critical to get SAP back on track with its cloud initiative.

SAP and its new Co-CEO's face some difficult times as they try to get the company back on track and moving in some important new directions. By Sapphire they will need to make some definitive moves to show that company strategy is aligned, clear and making progress toward stated goals.