SFH Blog

Good management can be better than new tools & inventions

2013-02-21T12:39:00.000+05:30

Sometimes all it takes is better management, not new tools/solutions. Management of oneself, one’s methods, thinking, practices, habits. However, that requires a shift in behaviour, and a bigger effort up front. Newer technologies most often than not are developed to give instant improvements in productivity, gratification, etc. without thought to or regard for overall sustainability or long term implications.

I remember in patches a conversation I had one evening with my father when I was a young teenager where he was at pains to defend the industry he had grown old in. A micro celebrity in the Indian fertilizer industry who brought in many commercially successful incremental innovations to the production process & technology of DAP, a kind of chemical fertilizer, my father had been motivated to enter the chemical industry thanks to Mr. M.S. Swaminathan’s evangelizing of the Green Revolution in India and the patriotic fervour that it triggered in the son of a freedom fighter.

After nearly two and a half decades in the industry believing that chemicals (fertilizers & pesticides) and hybrid seeds were crucial to solve India’s, and the world’s, growing hunger problems he was beginning to doubt the sustainability. Probably it was triggered by what the science text books where nudging me to ask my father that evening; that chemical run-offs were poisoning the ecosystem and making the soil unsustainable. Probably because he was hearing too, first hand, from his farmer brothers-in-law the problems with hybrid seeds and how these were drowning them deeper into debts.

And then cutting ahead a decade later, during the early days of Ch1blogs (our internal blogging platform), the then admin cum developer behind the platform, Senthil, shared a little known fact which had been found in the records of the East India Company, still available for research in the UK. Apparently, 200 years ago, Chengalpattu district of Tamil Nadu, just outside of Chennai, had more average yield of rice per hectare than even the highest yielding districts of Japan, etc. now. I did some further research and read some notes & journals but could not find anything other than references to farming practices and management principles. And I left it at that, dispirited that there was no magic technology from the past that could revive our current yields; like how Shruti Hassan rediscovers Damo’s genetic engineering technology and recreates it to awaken Suriya’s genetic memory in the Tamil sci-fi thriller movie “7-aam Arivu” aka 7th Sense.

Being a technologist & breakthrough/disruptive innovator I was looking for a technical solution. It went with my mind-frame then, to create new social technologies that would disrupt how business was done so that it would become more sustainable & beneficial to the society rather than merely leeching off it. I however became aware that social required nothing more than some practices from existing business management principles and technology was the last bit of it, if at all required. None of the nouveau solutions we built in the ensuing half a decade made much of a dent though the potential was high. And the maxim of “People -> Process -> Technology” was then no longer a sound bite for me. It dawned on me that this was the order in which things needed to be changed for lasting effects, not the other way round.

Many a times we are so caught up in creating a new app to solve a problem that we miss the easy solution existing that requires no investment other than the effort required to change the way people looked at things or did them. Probably because we are a group that is required to build them, probably because our goals are measured thus. And thus we probably miss the point that at the end of the day, we need to solve the problem, not build a new solution.

But there is hope yet for good management principles in increasing the average yield of many crops across the globe, especially in small farms, using a method called SRI (System of Rice/Root Intensification). Though denounced by western administration and foundations as well as scientists, it has been showing growing success in various Asian farms. And it requires no expensive chemicals or GM (Genetically Modified) seeds.

"If any scientist or a company came up with a technology that almost guaranteed a 50% increase in yields at no extra cost they would get a Nobel prize. But when young Biharian farmers do that they get nothing. I only want to see the poor farmers have enough to eat."

Read this excellent article that touches upon the story, the method and the debates about it, in Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/feb/16/india-rice-farmers-revolution

How is this relevant to us or what can we learn from this? Probably if we introspect & retrospect on what we do, how we do it, we may find some answers? Possibly if we can shift our focus from Customer Satisfaction to Customer Jobs, which apparently is "The secret to true service innovation" since “current approaches to service improvement constrain innovation by focusing on service as the unit of analysis, rather than on the fundamental needs of the customer”?

Can you think back a bit and share if you find any instances where you might not have to actually build a solution to solve a problem or get a job done?

Metaphors, Analogies, Narrative and SMAC

2013-01-08T11:53:00.004+05:30

Map of the Internet, like our brain.

I got an email over the weekend from a colleague asking if we could include Metaphors as a theme for 2013 under our organizational change management initiatives. And what do I find in my twitter time line on Monday morning? An article from MIT Sloan that talks about the research findings on the use of analogies and metaphors in innovation adoption & change management! Increasing your social surface area definitely increases serendipity. :-)

Analogies and metaphors help people understand newer concepts and ideas by relating them to something familiar. This helps in adoption of innovations, in change. In fact, how close a new technology is to the old one is an important factor determining the speed of adoption. On the face of disruptive innovations like SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud), which are very different from traditional enterprise systems, analogies and metaphors are pretty powerful.

The MIT Sloan article talks about how the Insurance Industry introduced various analogies at different stages of change (Assimilation, Analysis, Adaptation) to drive adoption of computers – as tabulation machines (data entry terminals) initially, then as brains (data storage as memory & data process as information management).

And this made me think what could be the analogies for the SMAC stack. A good friend of mine, Esteban Kolsky, once suggested that to make people understand Social, Mobile, Big Data and Cloud replace these terms with Channels, Devices, Analytics and Data Center and the understanding becomes a lot easier. Yes, that was very helpful to me initially. But the more I started analysing them and looked at adapting them to business needs this analogy failed me. It started limiting me.

And then today I got a ping on Facebook chat from someone whom I had friended long ago via twitter and then only interacted via Facebook news feeds. I was surprised to see him on my FB chat and out of the blue at that. He asked me to weigh in on a concept he is developing called the mind colonies. And he uses this metaphor to explain it:

“Imagine you are looking at Planet Earth from the Moon. Imagine nerves running all over spherical Earth. Notice human minds like dots pulsating and sending signals between them. Some nerve connections are bold , some are dotted. Some minds are emitting a lot, some nothing, some in-between. Some nerves have lots of noise/resistance/signal loss, some are flowing smoothly and rapidly like cholesterol-free arteries, some in-between.”

He then defines mind colonies thus: “Mind colonies are trust and spirit-rich, self-sustaining, blended-media networked mind exchanges for shared-ethos groups. Energetic full-time hosts catalyse minds in a mind grid to learn, work, play and complement each other. The catalysing currency is a colony equivalent of Diners Card (alternative currency).”

My initial fire-from-the-hip reaction was to exclaim that this can be helpful in the concept of co-creation. There's more detail in this page if you are interested, but for me, the image of mind colonies is now strong & indelible. That I believe is what SMAC can be. And that is what Howard Rheingold talks about in his great Kindle Single - "Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter?" - which I recommend to all of you.

Serendipity must definitely be thick around me - Kumar’s suggestion to include metaphors under OCM, closely followed by the MIT article and now this request to apply my mind to the concept of ‘mind colonies’. If I were SRK, I could definitely claim that the universe is conspiring for me. ;)

Retrospection and Introspection

2013-01-01T13:40:00.001+05:30

Sandhya - a Sanskrit word for dawn, dusk or joining. A time of change. (Shot by me at Mathigiri, Hosur)

What a special year 2012 was in retrospect!

We dived to the deepest trench and jumped from the highest platform. We probably discovered not one but two Higgs Boson particles and Voyager has almost crossed the boundary of the solar system. We saw a perfect landing of the rover Curiosity on Mars and landed up with a nobody in the Indian team during the Olympic games parade.

We thwarted attempts at the usurping of the freedom of the Internet by political and industrial bodies and yet we sent the first non-government space shuttle to the International Space Station. We saw the first billionth view of a youtube video and the removal of a billion bogus views from the youtube channels of the big music labels.

We saw people protesting against corruption in the system and we saw people protesting the derogatory treatment of women by the society in India. We saw the arrests of people posting about the politicians on social media, we brought to light the falsification of facts by the police in the Delhi protests via social media.

I am sure 2013 will be even more eventful and interesting. I believe it is a year for action, but let it be guided by introspection rather than jingoism and bravura. Let us be aware of our own feelings, emotions, thoughts, ideas, actions and their impact on our self, our friends and family, our society, our nation, our species, our planet. Let us learn to introspect, be mindful, self-reflect. Most importantly, let us teach our children the same. Let us teach them how all our thoughts and actions impact more than just us.

Yesterday my boss Sukumar reminded me of what Randy Pausch said in his book The Last Lecture on page 113:

“It is an accepted cliche in education that the number one goal of teachers should be to help students learn how to learn. I always saw value in that, sure. But in my mind the better number one goal was this: I wanted to help students learn to judge themselves.

Did they recognise their true abilities? Did they have a sense of their own flaws? Were they realistic about how others viewed them?

In the end, educators best serve students by helping them be more self-reflective. The only way any of us can improve – as Coach Graham taught me – is if we develop a real ability to assess ourselves. If we can’t accurately do that, how can we tell if we’re getting better or worse? ”

Indeed. Wish you a very happy new year!

Social Design, Empathy & Mindfulness

2012-11-20T01:20:00.000+05:30

Frederick Taylor, dubbed "the father of scientific management", gained repute for making steel manufacturing more productive in Pennsylvania by conducting time studies of labourers which involved measuring how much time they took to perform their tasks, which were usually repetitive and required low skills. Taylor faced his first major resistance from the moulders in the Army arsenal in Massachusetts (which are now the offices of Harvard Business Review), they resented being monitored by strangers with stopwatches. These studies had dehumanising and demeaning effect on the workers, who were considered no better than cogs in the machinery and thus have no say in how things should work. This has been my major gripe with business process management too.

As a developer some years ago, when I used to work on developing & implementing BPM & CRM systems, I would work on the business processes as defined by the managers, not based on how the work actually got done. In later years when I could actually go and observe how work was getting done and flowing, how people depended on each other to get things done, I understood how far the BPMS & CRMS I built were from the actual flow of work happening on the ground. No wonder most of the CRM & BPM implementations across the globe have adoption issues.

There were many criticisms against Taylor's methods, even while the notion of efficient process redeisgn itself morphed, first as business reengineering and now as Social Business (at least some variations of the definition of that term). Managers in the knowledge industry try every now and then (or at least think of trying) to surreptitiously monitor the work of their workers. And with the advent of computers as a main tool for the knowledge workers, it certainly has the wherewithal to help the managers achieve the time studies without letting the workers know they are being monitored. With the advent of smartphones managers can definitely go even further (consider what can be achieved by Reality Mining) and measure almost everything their workers do. And now with the launch of enterprise social networks (dubbed social business) it is possible to even measure the social interactions of the workers, not just their work related activities. (Orwellian!)

Certainly, the improvements in Analytics, DW/BI and Visualization software (including the much hyped Big Data & in-memory calculations) can probably help managers design much better and efficient systems that could then be rolled out to the knowledge workers. However, I think the knowledge workers would consider themselves to be even more skilled than the moulders of the Army arsenal in Massachusetts a century ago, and resent even more when they are considered incapable of telling how work can be organized.

Given this prelude now consider the unenviable task of having to show productivity improvements while achieving employee delight. And that's precisely where I am placed currently, because that's what our CIO has been charged with and thus his whole team. The crucial lever that our CIO has given for achieving this seemingly paradoxical goals is something he calls Social Design. And I am charged with evangelising it, which I assume includes expanding on his thoughts too, as only when the concept is made accessible to everybody (in terms of awareness, reach as well as understandability) can we figure out if the people are willing to make those tiny changes that could snowball into an organization wide change.

The key to understanding Social Design, if you ask me, is to understand people as individuals as well as a social being. And also the fact that by using technology we are Cyborgs, and we have been one ever since we used a thigh bone as a hammer (as shown in 2001: A Space Odyssey right after the first monolith makes an appearance on Earth some 4 million years ago). Technology might have advanced a lot since then and also since Taylor's time, especially Digital, to make things faster thus relieving even the Cognitive burden onto technology, not merely the physical burden. But what these mechano-cognitive technological advances have missed thus far is the fact that we humans are a social animal.

Physical & Cognitive technologies have not yet been leveraged to augment, amplify or extend our qualities like Empathy, Mindfulness or Compassion. We haven't yet developed a set of skills and social practices, called "cyborg literacy" for that. Howard Rheingold says this about Cyborg Literacy: "This not only includes an ability to enhance problem solving but also to incorporate a balance of individual autonomy and collective interdependence; networks of trust; and norms of reciprocity, empathy, compassion, and conviviality that are absent from strictly engineering-oriented or purely market-based approaches."

No amount of advances in Social or Collaborative Technologies can achieve their unsaid goal (productivity improvements) if they do not foment trust, reciprocity, empathy, compassion or conviviality in its users. And while it is pertinent that tools alone cannot achieve these and that people and processes also need to be conducive, I still like to explore what can be achieved by technology, since we know that tools indeed do have the capacity to change our behaviour. Actually, even buildings are capable of reshaping our brains, so why not attempt similarly with technology? And whereby I look at Empathy and Mindfulness from a technological slant.

In my previous post on the Thali versus Melting pot metaphors I mentioned about epistolary culture & literacy lending a hand to empathy and thus reduction in violence in the world. And long back I had also made observations about how we are in the second phase of an epistolary culture, with some key variations than before on the personal interactions front. However, at a humanity level, the effects seem to be the same. Sure, there are disturbances when differing view points clash on the social web that get reflected in the physical world too in addition to the digital; however we need to be aware of how culture is going across the borders. How humanity is collaborating within itself across the borders. All thanks to the technology that has helped bring more empathy to even more people. For with non textual content (pictures, music, videos, etc.) you do not even need to be literate to get to know the other people.

This leads us to the question, how can we achieve the same (increased empathy) in a corporate environment with these social technologies? As I have emphasised earlier, it is very important to be able to 'share'; and good or bad, we are stuck with corporate cultures were sharing is deemed detrimental. Sure, it is changing, but can we design systems that can increase sharing? Since sharing is a behaviour, let us consider the Fogg Behaviour Model (FBM) of B = MAT (Behaviour = Motivation, Ability, Trigger) and we find that there is actually demotivation in the corporate environment for sharing. People fear reprisals from supervisors and don't share. Collaborating outside the group can lead to social rejection within the group. As for ability, retweeting, reblogging, social share icons all make it so easy to share content in the internet, but not so much in the Intranet. Work systems help you only to get things done, not share. Emails allow you to share, but it is limited in reach. It is not broadcast and rarely does a work related email go viral.

I would like you to try ideating on how we can get people to share more by thinking of:

ways to motivate people to share (please/pain, hope/fear, social acceptance/rejection)
ways to make it simpler to share (time, money, physical effort, brain cycles, social deviance, non-routine)
different triggers to share (facilitator, spark, signal)

So while we consider 'sharing' as a means of enabling/amplifying Empathy, Mindfulness comes from what I call as the Systems of Awareness. Awareness of self, others, how others perceive self, interactions between others & self. Do read a short post where I introduce the concept of Systems of Awareness. In the ensuing months I forgot about it, only to be reminded of it again last week when I was getting an introduction to the systems our analytics team was building. And there-in I found some holes in my concept too.

In my introductory post on SoA (like SoR and SoE for Systems of Record and Systems of Engagement respectively; not to be confused with SOA, which stands for Service Oriented Architecture) I missed out on two key aspects:

the awareness a person can have about oneself from the data the systems capture these days, and also help them close the loop by seeing how the data moves by taking certain actions (actionable insights for the individual)
storytelling to go with the data, because people understand stories better than data (A good article on storytelling: http://www.wwtid.com/2012/11/18/the-big-pivot-part-3/)

The problem with the first point in a large enterprise is that while technology exists to capture, analyse and present the data about an individual, the DW/BI systems license costs are prohibitively expensive to provide to every employee of a large enterprise. And that is what has been overcome by our CIO organization using open source systems and custom built applications. And boy was I happy to note the heavy usage of free/open source software. But that is beside the point here. Point is, that we are attempting to provide analytical tools to everyone in our organization, not just the managers. And these tools will not only provide data about oneself but also help people take actions based on these data points and track if their actions had any impact - not just actionable insights, but actually closing the loop!

The second point that I had missed out was that I somehow restrained myself in defining SoA to only analytical systems. But not all are able to interpret data appropriately nor is data enough to convince people. However, stories strike deeper in our psyche. Storytelling has had us hooked for ages, across age groups. But can systems write stories out of data? I do not know. Surely they can plot charts and paint a picture. Hans Rosling even does moving pictures.

Do you think that we have the wherewithal to design systems that will cater to empathy & mindfulness? Do you think they are necessary at all?

Of melting pots and thalis of social business

2012-11-06T15:33:00.000+05:30

Thali

It's been a long time since my last post and there has been a lot of water under the bridge. Sandy & Nilam were a sort of double whammy to us since it affected NJ, USA & Chennai, India simultaneously. And I got on bench for the first time in 12.5 years before I move into our CIO organization. I was unnerved a bit since it was a career first for me, but I am finding my sea legs finally. ;) My situation is a bit symbolic for the fledgling field of social CRM and social business as a whole. While there are various advances being made by many practitioners in these fields these are baby steps and essentially repeating the mistakes of older such transitions. You can read what my good friend Dr. Graham Hill has to say about that over at MyCustomer.com.

The biggest challenge currently seems to be the need for changing mindsets rather than deploying tools/processes. Even the startups & VCs seem to think so too, especially w.r.t. social. Consider the 5th point in the 'surprising' insights from Harvard's Cyberposium.

And hence from defining, refining Social CRM/Business and developing & marketing frameworks, methodologies, processes, tools and technologies I make a move to organizational change management, to be an Evangelist of Social Design. I move from a world of implementation to that of adoption. And that means I need to look at psychology, human behaviour and sociology too in addition to Organization Management Theory, etc.

(I have a feeling there will be a change in the topics that I blog henceforth. :) )

Esko Kilpi states that thanks to Cartesian philosophy we have two different academic fields of psychology and sociology. And corporates too have been bothered mostly with psychology alone while sociology is just an after thought.

The basic premise of the Cartesian philosophy revolves around Rene Descartes' maxim, "Cogito, ergo sum". I think, therefore I am.

But recent advances in neuroscience, psychology & sociology have me convinced that the brain though is of the individual (albeit its true power resides in the myriad connections its neurons make) the mind is of the social connections that the person has.

As David Brooks puts it in his book "The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement" (you can watch his TED talk too) -

"... a brain is something that is contained within a single skull. A mind only exists within a network. It is the result of the interaction between brains, and it is important not to confuse brains with minds."

And while the brain & it's cognitive functions help us accomplish our work, achieve our corporate goals, it is the mind that directs our feelings and helps us cope with change. So it is imperative that change is looked at not from an individualistic perspective alone but also from the collective perspective too, especially the connections within the collective.

Esko uses the metaphor of billiard balls to explain how Cartesian/Newtonian thinking undermines the interactions between people. People are not like the billiard balls colliding with each other but not going into each other. Esko rather suggests we give heed to Kenneth Gregen who likens people coming together to baking, where the ingredients meld together to form a different whole. But I think that is not so in case of us Humans. We do not lose our self in the process of interacting/working with others.

And thus here I am reminded of what I read about the difference between India and Australia by Philip Malcolm Wollen in the Foreword to a book by Kenneth Anderson, "Jungle Tales for Children".

"My boyhood in India was an exquisite blend of contradictions. Schoolmates from several religious faiths, languages, ethnic backgrounds, socio-economic groups and cultures played together happily, enjoying each other’s festivals and food, revelling in their differences.

If my new home, Australia, can be described as a ‘melting pot’ of cultures, then my native land of India is best described as a ‘thali’. A large plate, served with a vast variety of delicious, different foods, different colours, textures, flavours, spices and temperatures — never to be mixed but savoured slowly and individually as part of a complete, satisfying and fulfilling feast."

And thus I am convinced that I need to be aware of a person as the individual as well as the connected & social animal in order to be better able to convince/persuade the person. What this actually transpires into as a framework/methodology I do not know as yet. I am more convinced about Fogg's Behavioral model the more I consider it. While it leans heavily on the psychology & behaviour of an individual, it does consider the individual as a part of the society and thus considers social acceptance/rejection as a motivational factor and social deviance as a simplicity factor.

Now cut back to corporate life which is all about meeting goals; achievements. And increasingly achievement is expected in a novel situation every time thanks to the growing fluidity in the world. Conditions are always changing. While change is a given, the rate of change has been increasing, accelerating. And thus achievements are now decreasingly personal since no one person is able to handle all the novelty. And this is where social software seems to be thriving; a place where knowledge, expertise, critical thinking and decision making come together. And since businesses have traditionally siloed each of these aspects to promote efficiencies there is a huge inertia to be overcome before openness, transparency, accountability, trust come in. But in the rat race of the corporate world achieving these is a tall order.

Territorial behaviour and aggression have an upper hand in many organization cultures. Outside of politics management is one place where it still holds a bastion in human culture. Trade, business, firm, company, management - these are the artefacts of human culture. And human culture exists in large measures to restrain the natural desires of the species. Had it not been for trade we would still be a blood thirsty warring species. Thankfully, contrary to common perception, Steven Pinker has compelling proof that we as a species are now less aggressive and warmongering than a few centuries ago and its apparently due to increase in trade (people are more valuable alive than dead), change in government (creating judiciary & police as separate entities) and cosmopolitanism (travel, literacy & epistolary culture allowed people to understand other cultures, build empathy).

This last bit is what I touched upon in a post on the new epistolary culture. And this is where the biggest impact of social tools in an organization will be. But while empathising is much needed, we should not lose focus on getting things done either, we are a business after all. And this is where there seems to be a gap currently. You have two different systems - one for getting work done, another for socialising - which do not integrate much with each other, if at all, and yet the ideal situation would be when both aspects are blended so as to make it difficult to tell one apart from the other. But these systems, processes and tools are just leveraged to support the culture of a social business. But to build a social business you must first humanize the organization; bring in a culture that will guarantee not just the survival of the fittest but also the meek, while not making the business bankrupt of course.

Organizational Silos were created to improve efficiencies, not promote territorial behaviour and aggressiveness. And tearing those walls down is not the panacea as many social media turned social business gurus will have you believe. You should at best perforate those walls allowing interactions and knowledge flows to make the organization resilient (not merely sustainable). Think of the Indian 'thali' not the 'melting pot'.

Social Construction: an aid for solution envisioning

2012-09-27T17:29:00.002+05:30

Barn raising, DeKalb County, Indiana, USA, about 1900

Of the new technologies that are defining the future of work and forward looking horizons of business the most buzzed about are the quartet of Social, Mobile, Cloud and Big Data. Some, as I have mentioned earlier, like to call it the SMAC stack, A being Analytics - to represent Big Data. I heard a new pronunciation for it, s-mac instead of smac(k) and I like it better now. ;) But I digress.

I would ideally add 3D printing to the list too, since I think that's going to be a far greater disruptor than any of these from the quartet. You can already print live cells to make tissues, print houses, print guns (oh horrors!), teach children to make 3D chocolates ... err ... make stuff, and we all know that the economy depends on the collective creative outputs of the humans. But that is disrupting the way you look at economies more than disrupting business. And maybe why people ignore it. But I digress, again.

Of the sMAC stack Social is the one element that is the toughest to convince the CXOs about. And that's what I want to talk about in this post.

Mobile is just a new interface; and they all love to use the iPads & iPhones. Big Data, or Analytics, they know its business value and its not hard to see that there is a huge influx in data. Cloud is predominantly a CapEx vs OpEx kind of argument; everybody needs the computing infrastructure one way or the other. But Social, its a bit dicey.

Some people vehemently believe its just another channel. Some say its about the collaboration. (Or its just the same people stating it at different stages of realization). Some say its about the behaviors (some look narrowly at Gamification), though limited only to user experience of the application interface. Even if they are correct about behaviors, that's not something enterprise IT has been bothered too much about before. Sociology doesn't make much sense to IT. They are more comfortable with change management: "Here, go attend this training about using your new CRM system and ensure you fill out your sales data diligently. I will run weekly team review meetings and if you fall behind in entering that data, I will have a one on one with you."

To me the word Social itself is about the human behavior, state of mind. We are hard wired to be social, to be mindful of oneself and our interconnectedness. Our ability to be collectively creative is unique amongst the various species and that is what lured me to Social in the first place, though I am a technologist. However the Adam Smiths and Taylors of the economics and business management world have made us all lay too great an importance on efficiencies alone and thus create silos of perfection. But I digress, yet again.

The result of this confusion about what Social entails has stymied many a progress in various big enterprises. And thus I have to time and again explain to my clients about the various benefits of Social to business, the various use cases where they can fit. And over these five years of tinkering, thinking, talking and connecting ideas about Social for building customer solutions I think I can see a pattern emerging in all my discussions off late when I am helping people envision solutions. I have come to thinking of this pattern as Social Construction.

Social Construction is a borrowed term from Sociology; actually there are two different terms - social constructivism and social constructionism - and they can be quite confusing by themselves, especially for technologists (but if you are still interested, please do read this primer: http://www.control-z.com/czp/pgs/soccon.html). And I liked this term because it also, to my mind, gels with the concept of Value Co-Creation.

To give you an easier to grasp example, consider Barn Raising. In the rural North America, until about a hundred odd years ago people in a village / community would all pour in their efforts and resources to raise a barn for a farmer. This seemingly altruistic deed depended upon generalized exchange or what is popularly known as pay it forward.

Telugu movie watchers, especially Chiranjeevi fans would remember the movie ~~Tagore~~ Stalin (Thanks Sadhu Srinivas Rao for the correction) where the protagonist does good deeds by helping total strangers and asks them not to thank him, rather help three other strangers and ask them to do the same. Languishing for a long time that his idea did not take off, in the climax of the movie it is shown how the whole state has benefited from this grass roots, anonymous, movement. But I digress, this is becoming an irritating habit.

Barn raising is still practiced by the Amish, but I am not asking you to eschew technology. To the contrary, I in fact want to help you figure out how these new technologies help you build new solutions leveraging the power of social - technologies as well as behaviors.

My current concept of Social Construction builds upon a few categories of solution ideas that leverage social computing:

Social Mimicry - take existing digital assets on own digital real estate to social sites
Social Layer - add elements of social computing to existing digital assets on own sites
Social Collaboration - harness the power of community and add workflow magic to it
Social Insights - harness insights by mashing up data from social and traditional channels
Social Modeling - build applications from the ground up by adding social modeling to SDLC

Social Mimicry is basically catering to the same old business needs but by leveraging the new capabilities. Which in simplest terms might mean taking your loan calculator from your own web site and providing it as a Facebook app. Or something similar. Or it could mean building newer interfaces to your older infrastructure so that people are able to access the behind the scenes power of mainframes over social sites.

Social Layer is about enabling social elements or features on your existing assets. Think products/services from vendors like AboutEcho.com or BazaarVoice.com. Or Cognizant's intranet unifying OneCognizant application's Social Layer that we have developed to enable even Peoplesoft's boring time sheet entry become a bit more social. You can like, add comment and recommend an app via the social layer that sits like a horizontal navigation menu on top of these traditional enterprise applications. You might want to call it widgetization.

Social Collaboration, though I am not a great fan of the redundant term, is a term I am prone to use to represent the difference between mere community/social platform and a platform where people can get social and yet get the job done. To get things done though you need to consider workflows, goals and objectives, todos and tasks, notes and ideas, assignments and deadlines, SLAs and triggers. Think along those lines for a bit more and suddenly you are talking about a Business Process Management or Case Management or Project Management system.

Most community installations, internal or external facing, are akin to a water cooler or office canteen or coffee shops. People socialise there, sure, but they are also able to serendipitously come out with creative solutions because they bumped into people. But they can't get their day to day work done there. It's far too noisy and distracting to get things done. For that they need to get back to their cubicles (unless their company believes in open spaces to foster creativity and collaboration in the offline world too). And the digital equivalent of the cubicle is your workstation and the various enterprise applications. But unlike your physical work place where you can still get to interact with the person across the cubicle, or just spend a moment to socialise through the walls, you cannot do those intermittent social interaction over an enterprise system of record. Thus you use different systems to work and to socialise in your intranet. That's not how you behave in the physical world, do you? The other important question in Social Collaboration is how do you reduce noise, or rather, to borrow a term from communications engineering, improve Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR)? How do you make it more relevant, more contextual, so that it helps in getting things done rather than distracting you from it? I digressed only a bit, I hope.

Social Insights refers to the mashing up of data from the social and traditional channels, analysing them and getting better answers to existing questions or being able to ask newer questions. Mash up web metrics with social data or sales data with social mentions and sentiments. Do a trend analysis. Figure out intentions too probably. You could also leverage Social Collaboration to collaboratively interpret newer sets of data/trends/analysis reports as well as initiate actions based on these insights. HR, Sales, Marketing, Product Development, just about everybody in the organization could benefit from these. And you don't necessarily need Hadoop instances to help you with the Social Insights. Social Data need not be Big Data to be useful.

Social Modeling brings in new perspectives in developing new enterprise applications and systems. When combined with the traditional use case, data flow and process modeling, social modeling can help applications and systems leverage the intrinsic motivational factors of the various actors, who are not only intentional but also social. This is still a pretty far out concept for most people and needs a whole new set of tools and practices to enter a typical SDLC. Actually, considering how Design Thinking, Value Network Mapping, Jobs To Be Done, Desire Engine, etc. seem to be more successful in catering to the individual goals as well as the interdependence of the users rather than what a few people think a system should be allowed to do (which is what is captured in a typical requirements gathering session) I think even the SDLC itself needs a relook. We need more Empathy in the application design & development process. And social collaboration platforms can themselves be used during SDLC, including for Social Modeling probably. But that's all in the future. I have not found many takers, yet.

Mindmap about Social Construction.

The above mind map captures my thought process on how I evolved the concept. This is no where complete or finished. This is merely the starting point. I hope there are further discussions in collaboratively defining and refining this concept. I welcome your inputs, feedback and insights.

CEOs, Social is not a Fad. It has economic value too, possibly $1.3 Trillion

2012-08-01T17:16:00.000+05:30

Earlier this year we heard from Gartner's survey that Social Media is not a high priority item for the CIOs in 2012 though it did seem that their high priorities were all affected by Social to a large extent. Top most priority was Collaboration / Workflow.

Late last month we heard via HBR that most organizations still fear Social Media. This was immediately followed by a post in HBR about results from a survey on why CEOs must use Social Media:

"Corporate leaders — and especially large company CEOs — are finally realizing what their employees and customers already know: That using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers, and even with their own employees enables their companies to be more adaptive and agile."

And now McKinsey tells us that there is in fact economic value in using social technologies in the organization and there is a number too: up to $1.3 Trillion.

Source: McKinsey Global Institute Report

No, they are not talking about the valuation of the various companies in the social technology industry, which is quite impressive in itself given the spate of acquisitions here (and smells of a bubble). Rather it is about the economic potential that lies in the productivity increase across the value chain.

"Two-thirds of this potential value lies in improving collaboration and communication within and across enterprises. The average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing e-mail and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks. But when companies use social media internally, messages become content; a searchable record of knowledge can reduce, by as much as 35 percent, the time employees spend searching for company information. Additional value can be realized through faster, more efficient, more effective collaboration, both within and between enterprises."

- The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies

Hotlinked from Brian Vellmure

But it is not something you achieve by merely deploying a social media platform, a Facebook for the intranet. While there are variations in the values realised by industry as well as sources of value, it is clear from the survey that to achieve the full potential there are other aspects the businesses must not forget.

"To reap the full benefit of social technologies, organizations must transform their structures, processes, and cultures: they will need to become more open and nonhierarchical and to create a culture of trust. Ultimately, the power of social technologies hinges on the full and enthusiastic participation of employees who are not afraid to share their thoughts and trust that their contributions will be respected. Creating these conditions will be far more challenging than implementing the technologies themselves."

I said last year, when my focus was on predicting spread of innovation, adoption of social tools for collaboration requires sharing. And now we see sharing is required to unleash the economic value too.

Also, it seems creating a Culture of Sharing is not the only change required in an organization:

Unfortunately, the social technologies themselves are at such an early stage that it is not possible to share across the platforms in a manner that facilitates conversations, like email does. Of course emails were pretty incompatible too when they started out. As I said in a post last year about the privacy of the social customer, there are a lot of technological advances that are yet to be made. Interoperability, data portability, personal information stores, open standards|protocols|formats, a lot is yet to be done in the social technology industry. And I don't see any vendor sweating about these yet.

The key change required to unleash this economic value of social technologies is Sharing. Wonder where will we see the next iteration? In the culture or in the technology? Whose turn is it now? What do you think?

Increasing your “social surface area”

2012-07-24T11:21:00.000+05:30

“Lucky people increase their odds of chance encounters or experiences by interacting with a large number of people”
— Peter Sims in Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries

In social media, you need to go out and read and post. They won't come to you. Its kind of like going back to the Pigeon Holes. And when you do go out, please ensure you keep your eyes and ears open. Don't restrict yourselves to your own interest areas/niches.

While it is the easy thing to do, to search about topics that interest us, and interact with the people who share those interests, probably as a response to the problem of ‘friending’ after you are 30, one should widen the scope. (Yeah, I know the proper grammar is ‘making friends’ but its the Facebook age! And you should really read that NYT article I have linked if you are above 30 years and find it difficult to make BFF, sorry, thick friends like how you could while in college/univ/school. I will wait for you to return back to my blog post.)

One reason why you should not limit your circles is because of the danger of group think, and in extreme cases, cultism. I had written about this three years ago but it still holds good. (Maybe it is a good time for you to read that old article. Sorry if you are being sent away again. But I am a patient blogger, I will wait for you to return.)

But the other advantage of widening your interactions is that increases your “social surface area”, and am sure most of you remember enough of your high school science to remember that chemical reactions happen better, faster when surface area is more. ;)

Social media lets you increase the number of people you are instantly connected with, build relationships, sustain them too. (But apparently still governed by Dunbar’s numbers – 150, 500 & 1500 corresponding to close friends/relations, acquaintances and people whose face we can recognize.) But mere numbers are not enough, the network structures matter too. And it is in this context that having connections with varied people is beneficial.

Call it luck or call it serendipity, as is in vogue now. Point is it helps you surface interesting information and resources that you might not have found otherwise, had you stayed within your niches.

Breaking out of our comfort zone is very important. But very difficult too. And being able to know what the 50 shades of grey are at the same time as grokking Great Gatsby is gross and yet allows you to hold wide ranging conversations.

When I gained notoriety in the world outside my workplace and gained visibility as a thought leader in the Social CRM and Social Business circles, I was helped by the fact that I was someone who was connected in the open source communities, with social media ‘gurus’, CRM experts, and many other groups. A few of them at loggerheads. This let me look at issues from multiple perspectives, and at the same time allowed me to be discovered by influential industry analysts.

I am connected to a few wildlife enthusiasts who go into the Melagiris Forests (Hosur Forest Division) to lay camera traps. I am getting initiated into these activities. I am connected to a few Montessorians, I attended many sessions by the Montessori trainers. I took active part in the formation of the villa owner’s association in the community I live in. I am a primary judge at the global event CRM Idol. I am connected to you all. I am of course connected to my immediate teams at work place. Do you think I have variety?

Similarly, being active in multiple social networks also helps you discover newer people.But most people tend to be in all your social networks. Thanks to the ease of adding friends from other services. This is understandable from the service provider's perspective since this sets in motion the Metcalf Law, also called the network effect; which is, the more people you are connected to via the service, the more useful the service becomes. But it only means that you are now porting your narrow network everywhere rather than finding new friends. And stopping serendipity to help you.

What does your social surface area look like? Do you believe you need to increase it or do you belong to those company executives who are afraid of Social Media?

Future: experts, predictions, soothsaying

2012-06-08T01:08:00.000+05:30

One of the new books on my shelf right now is "future babble: How to stop worrying and love the Unpredictable" by Dan Gardner. I have a few more like "Customer in the boardroom" by Bijapurkar, "The Magic of Reality" by Richard Dawkins, etc. You can find a better list at my Goodreads account. But I digress. I wanted your suggestions for a problem I face often while talking to clients. I will start by quoting some lines from that book by Dan Gardner.

"No matter how often expert predictions fail, we want more. ... So we look to experts. They must know. They have Ph.D.s, prizes, and offices in major universities. And thanks to the new media's preference for the simple and the dramatic, the sort of expert we are likely to hear from is confident and conclusive. They know what will happen; they are certain of it. We like that because that is how we want to feel. And so we convince ourselves that these wise men and women can do what wise men and women have never been able to do before. Fundamentally, we believe because we want to believe."

Beginning at about five years ago I was becoming increasingly certain of how social must be adopted into the business. (I was naive, I still am and I like to be that way, thank you.) And because I was certain, I was catapulted as the expert both within my organization and in the outside world. But I think my certainty exists only in my posts and my talks. When it comes to actual problem solving, real hard talk about social & the business, I waver. I am not certain. I am not sure, and thus I am cautious. I do not want to set up my clients for failure due to my cock sure attitude. Having convictions about the generic direction (which is what I mostly write about here) and being certain of the exact path are two different things. I seem to know more about how NOT to do things than how to. I am able to convince about the necessity to look at the direction I am pointing, but when I display my inability to chart down the exact path in the 30-45 minutes face time I get, I am unable to close.

And that is where I am stuck. How do you suggest I overcome this hurdle? Should I be prudent and explain why I am not so sure, what the risks are and how we could mitigate it, all in the 5-10 minutes of the face time that's left? Or should I just portray myself as if I know, be certain and close?

Innovating is tough. Marketing innovation is easy peasy. Selling innovation is a b*#$%. At least for me.

SMAC - Social, Mobile, Analysis (Big Data), Cloud

2012-05-31T21:12:00.001+05:30

Source: Oatmeal Shop

I am a pioneer of various initiatives in my organization that ranges across new technology, new business offerings, new geography expansion and have done stuff that probably are firsts in the Indian IT industry. I was the probably first to install a PegaSYSTEM platform in India in early 2001. I was probably the first to use open source test management & defect management tools and package them as part of a new services called CRM Testing & BPM Testing - independent validation services for the implementations done of CRM & BPM systems. I was a pioneer for our Switzerland expansion too. And most of you probably know about my pioneering work on social computing for business leverage. I have graduated from a Tinkerer to a Thinker to a Connector - of ideas & people.

Social in Cognizant has come a long way since my initial post in late 2007, nearly five years ago. Things are still playing out in the market and going as per the basic outlines of the plot I had written back then. And we now have a new team with a corporate wide focus that acts on a hub & spoke model so that all the existing BUs that have worked on social continue working on it, but in a coordinated manner. I was one of the very few, count them in one hand, people who were connected to all these BUs and facilitating cross pollination of ideas, leads, achievements & learnings. So with the things shaping up appropriately, mirroring the maturity in the market, and me being at the top of the game I think that it is time to move ahead.

But move where? I usually look at bleeding edge of technology and try to correlate with my experiences and expertise so that I can build upon what I know and would like to know. And thus when I look around me trying to figure out what's possibly the next big thing I am surrounded by talk about SMAC as the next cool thing in enterprise circles, apparantly because some analyst has predicted big money in there. Excuse me? A unified Social, Mobile, Analytics (Big Data predominantly) and Cloud based solutions are the 'next big thing'?

Whoa! Did I miss the memo in 2007 while considering SMAC (though not named thus) when I was in a situation similar to today and decided to focus on Social, the reasons for which I will come to in a moment?

Mobile & Cloud (at least the cloud as is being sold today, not what it should be, which I will come to later in the post too) are merely new delivery-consumption systems and Analytics or Big Data have always been part of technology stack. Numbers associated with them would indeed be big since you need to:

replace the huge IT infrastructure which was setup at the turn of the millennium, mostly to combat the Y2K scare. That's a decade old and bleh when compared to what you use at home.
build new enterprise applications that leverage the benefits of these newer systems but for the same old business needs, lets call it SMAC Mimicry (Inspired by this Gartner blog post about Feeling & Thinking Digital)?
build new consumer applications, this is like SMAC Mimicry above, but to try & lure customers to spend more, not to co-create value. Like iTunes for example, but only by leveraging the basal wirings of human brains, think gamification (questionably good for the person) or social media triggered release of hormone oxytocin (the moral molecule, probably good only for the in-group, not just about anybody belonging to the humanity). Both are not really required for the benefit of humanity or the consumer like for example Ushahidi, but that's yet to find an enterprise use though extremely useful for humanity. Lets say we call this SMACification?
or atleast modernize legacy applications, put client-server or web apps for desktops on cloud and build mobile interfaces ... say, SMACization?

The reason I focused on Social and not Cloud or Mobile, though I was working on them too, is because Social is so much more than mere new technology. It was about behavior unlike other technology yes, but it was more about getting businesses to be what they pay lip service to - having mutually beneficial existence alongside customers/consumers. It could give a new 'meaning' to CRM, Collaboration, Knowledge Management, Business, and so many others. It's not quite flying cars, but the 140 chars & its ilk that we got instead have a potential to make a new meaning which will is beyond the Mimicry, 'ification' & 'ization' I laid out above.

And then I realized that the new meaning would not come into existence if businesses still thought the old way. Service Dominant Logic, Value Co-creation, Value Network Analysis, Social Modeling, Design Driven Innovation, Design Thinking, Jobs To Be Done, Lean Startup. I hear very few people talking about these terms along side SMAC or its components.

I mentioned above about Cloud as it is sold now not being what it should be. Let me explain a bit. When it comes to innovations / technology adoption I love the stories behind the industrial & communications revolutions - steam, electricity, telephones, wireless & Internet. Electricity certainly had a colorful history thanks to the rivalry between Edison and Tesla (which Oatmeal caught pretty neatly recently).

It is basically to do with Direct Current and Alternating Current. Edison sided with Direct while Tesla sided with Alternating. Edison jolted various animals with AC to show how dangerous they were. But ultimately Tesla won out because AC can be transmitted over longer distances which meant that power production could be centralized and thus produced on a very large scale. And we all know about the economics of scale. It required standarization, which we haven't yet achieved (120/240 V, 50/60 Hz, multiple pin types - universal chargers, road warriors?), so that we could just plug in our machines and power them up.

Now if you look at the electrical power, it is predominantly derived from chemical (coal, gas, oil), solar, thermal, mechanical (hydro, wind, waves/currents) energy, transmitted to us and converted again to mechanical (machines) or chemical (TV) energy. But computers turn electrical power into computational power. What if you could generate computational power in one place and transmit them over the wires or wireless (Wifi, 3G, etc.)?

And what if this computational power is consumed not just by PCs, or to stay with the times and SMAC, Mobile devices, but just about any device that can interface with and consume the computational power? These mythical devices being the 'things' in Internet of Things? Analytics, especially unstructured and Big Data, is supposed to look at human to machine, human to human and machine to machine communications.

But as with Electricity, in Computing too we need standardization. And this is driven now by the big corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc. and not the engineering communities like the IETF, IEEE, W3C during the birth of the Internet and the Web. I do see the Courts playing a big role in keeping the 'Social' providers like Facebook, Google in check but the law makers and corporates want to have a strangle hold if the plethora of bills introduced in the parliaments of various countries are to be taken into account. I wonder how & when we will achieve Standardization in computing to allow interoperability & portability.

That is when we will have the true power of SMAC delivered to us - when we have wider adoption of Standards & Protocols. Can we have the Salmon on the double please?

Social CRM in Outsourcing

2012-05-25T13:10:00.000+05:30

Source: Waiting for the night shift

I was asked by our PR agency to provide "just a couple of lines on the importance of social CRM in outsourcing nowadays" to help a journalist ... here is what I gave them:

"Outsourcing is a risky business and finding a trust worthy vendor usually needs help from others who have worked with those vendors. It also helps if the vendors have built credibility at an industry level. Social Media is a valuable new way to find these credible vendors.

Whereas in the traditional approach industry analysts played a key role in vendor selection, social media is augmenting them with new sites like LinkedIn where professionals can reach out to their peers in the industry whom they might not even have known otherwise. New services like Ombud.com, which lets users create RFPs and vendors bid on, aims to challenge the established analyst firms when it comes to vendor evaluation guidance by leveraging crowdsourcing or the wisdom of the crowds.

These are early days yet and the time tested methods of building credibility via analyst relationships, authoring white papers, speaking at industry seminars, publishing case studies, etc. still hold good with social media forming yet another channel where these activities are extended to."

I didn't get into the aspect of "should you outsource your social CRM" given a limitation of 100 words, which I handsomely overshot anyways. I have already tackled the issue of outsourcing/offshoring social in a post nearly three years ago.

Social Media outsourcing doesn't readily belong in the direct customer interaction aspect of it, and certainly not for the real time/synchronous interactions with the customers - like on Twitter. Asynchronous interactions though could be considered. Most certainly the back end stuff.

...

Automation isn't sufficient yet & humans don't scale for cheap. Hence a mix of automation (sentiment analysis, routing, assignment) & offshoring could help.

Further, even if considered for interacting with customers on social media, the issues with "accent" pollution faced in call center offshoring need not enter the equation by restricting the responses from offshore teams to written & asynchrnous content which could go through reviews to reduce errors.

But the real deal with outsourcing &/or offshoring Social CRM is in consulting, redesigning the business processes to incorporate social media into the current customer centric processes (BPX), designing the IT infrastructre/architecture, developing, QA & implementing the various social apps as well as the integrations with the traditional CRM systems, training & documentation, support & maintenance of the apps - the whole bunch with the backend stuff.

What do you think? Did I do justice to the topic that the journalist asked for? Should I have added more? Changed it somehow?

N.B.: These views are my own and don’t necessarily represent Cognizant's positions, strategies or opinions.

Are you the next Zoho? #CRMIdol, now open for APAC too

2012-05-02T09:42:00.000+05:30

CRM Idol 2012

Yes, you read that right.

After a resounding success (in the contestants own words) CRM Idol, the contest that aims at bringing the spot light on small startups building CRM software (by extension means social too), now includes new geographies as it opens itself for registration for the 2012 season.

You can get more details from the contest's website: http://www.crmidol.com.

And if you were not aware, in addition to the visibility that it got the startups and small vendors, the contest's judges mentor the contestants too. And the judges (who don't get paid) are all industry veterans, and they have meaty dollops to offer (as a gratitude and a way of giving back to the industry that sustained them so long). And its not just the visibility or prizes to be won either, three of the last year's finalist got bought and their CRM Idol ranking mattered a lot in that decision making process!

India, and everybody else in APAC, here is your chance to shine and make your presence felt. We are searching for the next Zoho. Prove the pundits wrong and let them know that we don't just code, that we build great products too. Go forth and register yourself.

Here is a request for those who are not a startup / small company (less than 7 year old) and yet reading this. Please pass on this message to any such company if you know them. APAC is replete with vernacular and I would not be able to reach everybody with my English based channels. I would request for any and all the help you could extend to help these startups.

Social Media is CIO's least priority in 2012

2012-04-02T19:50:00.000+05:30

From Gartner's blogs

There is a great blog post around some interesting findings from a survey of CIOs by Gartner over on their site. And the most shocking (to some) finding is that Social Media/Web 2.0 comes in as the 11th priority this year (not shown in the above URLs owing to the fact that it did not make it to the Top 5th or even the Top 10th). In 2010 it had the 3rd highest priority amongst CIOs.

Well, my insightful friends in the Accidental Community and some of my colleagues at the business end were quick to reason out why and ready to point out that this is after all the CIOs priorities, not a CMO or a CEO; however this was a difficult fact for technologists. And hence there was this looming question:

"Might need to be prepared for queries or challenges around this if pushing offerings to [client relationship teams] and/or client ... Any thoughts or insight ... [to] align our messaging around [social] being low on the CIO radar"

The apprehension is quite palpable actually, since we are predominantly a technology company and most of our relationships with our clients is via the CIO side of their business. And this was my response:

While it might be just a guessing game without having access to details about the survey or the analysis, I would like to think (& project) that:

Speaking about technology, social media/web 2.0 is not really complex when considered as a mere additional channel (cross channel is a different ball game BTW). And thus it was easily implemented by 2010/2011 (3rd highest priority in 2010).

The real problem with ‘social’ comes when it has to be used in the context of work that happens in any organization as well as the deluge of data that we get from these channels

Hence leveraging ‘social’ in workflows as well as making collaboration more social will be of higher concern for people who already have implemented and want to derive business benefits (4th highest priority in 2012; highest in 5 years)
Hence, big data, HANA, BI/DW, etc. would be deeply impacted by the addition of this extra channel (which correlates with 1st & 3rd highest priority)

Companies have taken a plunge into social waters, and have been experimenting for the past 2-3 years. Now is the time to get serious and ask the adult questions of business benefits/impacts and returns. Lessons from the experimental usage must educate the process of drawing up a strategic intent, cutting across the organization. This is more a business/strategy process rather than technology implementation.

And thus my suggestion was to educate our client facing teams. And socialise with our clients about our strategy workshop offering for drawing up the strategic intent incorporating social.

What do you think? What advice would you give your technologists?

Systems of Awareness

2012-03-26T11:05:00.002+05:30

Last September, around the time when the brand marketers of the world renewed the discussions around the definition of Social CRM, I came up with a post titled "Social CRM: Hiring the right definition" in which I tried to look at Social CRM from many perspectives : Systems, Organization structure, Economics and Jobs views.

That was an important post for me, and seems it was useful to many more too, since it has fast become the top 5th post in my blog since blogger started tracking the views. It was very important to me because I finally brought together many of the concepts I had been reading & thinking about. It was also very important because I was building upon a new concept that I called the "Systems of Awareness". This concept builds upon another concept of mine called the "4π Steradian view" of the business ecosystem which combines how businesses look at their ecosystem as well as being aware of how their ecosystem looks at them.

Systems of Awareness: Helping humanity understand itself better, via computers.

Simplistically, the "4π Steradian view" or "4π view" or even "4pi view", is nothing but the combination of 360° view of customers, ERP, HRMS, etc. that lets us form a picture of our customers, resources, employees, etc., and social media monitoring, VoC, EFM, etc. by which we try to get insights into what others think about us (please see the mind map above). Nothing Earth shattering in this concept. All these systems exist already, and since I am an engineer who is beginning to grasp Psychology/Sociology, I wanted to come up with a term which would describe that key capabilities of humans that makes us separate from other animals - being able to understand how others perceive about us and thus change our behavior. Let us say, a sense of Morality?

So while "4pi view" is a combination of how we view others and how we think others view us, "Systems of Awareness" tries to encapsulate a few more that is developing in computer sciences. There are Self Awareness algorithms in Artificial Intelligence. And there are Context Aware & Location Aware systems too.

With the growing ubiquity of Smartphones (India is crouching right now, ready to leap and unleash cheap smartphones for its millions of mobile users) it is becoming easier to understand how people interact with each other in physical space, not just online. This is where Reality Mining comes in. If there were proper measures to take care of user privacy, this could help businesses understand their consumers and even employee behavior.

Talking of understanding human social behavior using digital technology, Living Analytics is another area which looks quite promising from a business stand point since it allows marketers and organization management people to observe, analyse, experiment and see how human interactions change when certain stimuli are given. Which means, that a marketer can pilot a campaign and immediately see if it impacts consumer behavior. And that a team manager can see if the changes suggested are positively impacting team dynamics.

So, we are now at a stage where computers are aware about themselves, but most importantly, help us be aware:

about others,
about how others perceive us and
about how others perceive/behave with each other.

And hence I term them all together as the "Systems of Awareness". And which eventually, I hope, I wish, would lead to "Systems of Morality". :)

What do you think? Am I hallucinating or am I talking sense?

P.S.: I am releasing these concepts and the mind map under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license which allows you to build upon these concepts, share them with others, but you must always give me credits as the originator and not use the post/image for commercial purposes.

Rethinking "Social" in 2012

2011-12-19T01:19:00.000+05:30

Source: Spiegel.de

I am passionate. Passionate in all things that allow us all, the humanity, to make the world a better place. But since that's kind of a tall order and a huge field to work in, I chose Customer Relationship Management back in 2000; don't ask me why. It was a visceral pull, not something that I thought through much. I really believed in the R for relationship. But soon, as I began getting involved in real world projects I got to see that R stood little more than Revenue, for the most part.

And then came along Social Media, with its promise of being able to get the customer into not only the conversation but also in almost all aspects of a business - building customer relationships, developing new products and services, and producing and distributing them.

But the frenzy around social media by the so called gurus, the hype from the marketers and the buzz from many well meaning yet misguided analysts meant that "social" has been relegated to either a feature that you add to your apps or a layer that you drape over your platforms. And thus I think, time has come to rethink "social".
My team works at building and delivering solutions and services around social enablement (for the most part using online social/community platforms), social analytics (think social listening and command centers powered by dashboards and reports), gamification (reputation, influencing behaviors, those kind of things), enterprise social, etc. A little plug, here is where I have say I feel pretty bullish about the strategy workshop workbench we created this year that allows the various groups in an organization to look at the whole big picture and create a strategic intent for the organization. That is their focus for 2012.

I want to look beyond, not beyond 2012, but beyond these concepts. I am looking at two major themes, and both of them needs us to rethink "social":

social design, social modeling, that is thought up front, at the strategy level, rather than as a feature or a layer, post facto
social that incorporates the meaning of societal - values, humanity - into the vision of the organization

Social Design
Evan Doll, cofounder of Flipboard, the hugely successful iPad app, says it pretty succinctly:

"Every industry, every type of business we think about needs to be fundamentally reinvented in the face of social. Social isn't a type of layer you slap on after the fact--it needs to be part of the product at the point of inception."

In his post titled "Stop talking about Social", Paul Adams, the man who came up with the concept of facets, which we see as circles in Google+, criticizes George Colony, the CEO Forrester for having got "social" wrong:

"George misunderstands the shift with the social web. ... Social is not a feature. Social is not an application. Social is a deep human motivation that drives our behaviour almost every second that we’re awake. It doesn’t matter if we’re online or offline, on a browser or using an app. Humans are social creatures."

Which is why we need to think beyond social enablement, analytics dashboards, gamification, enterprise social features and layers, and get into Social Design & Modeling.

Source: i* wiki

No, I am not talking about mere Social Design Patterns for designing social interfaces or participation design, though they are important and necessary too, I am talking about how the whole requirements gathering and designing process needs rethinking. Where, in addition to static models of Entity Relationship diagrams and dynamic models of process workflows, swimlanes & BPMN, we also need to think about social & value networks, strategic dependency between the various actors and strategic rationale behind these dependencies. Where we not only look at systems of record, but also look at systems of engagement.

I have been talking about these in 2011, but I was merely learning the basics. I hope that I can put them to use in 2012. And get my team to learn them too.

Social as in Societal
Early this year Michael Porter and Mark Kramer taught us about "Creating Shared Value" in HBR where they talk about the blurring profit/non profit boundary as well as a shift from CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to CSV (Creating Shared Value):

"The concept rests on the premise that both economic and social progress must be addressed using value principles. ... businesses have rarely approached societal issues from a value perspective but have treated them as peripheral matters. This has obscured the connections between economic and social concerns."

Source: HBR Big Idea - Creating Shared Value

While Porter and Kramer talk about Value, last year (2010) in his book, Marketing 3.0, Philip Kotler says now is the time when we need to look beyond Customers into values (not mere value). The book says Marketing 1.0 was product centric, Marketing 2.0 is customer oriented and Marketing 3.0 should be values driven, with an objective of making the world a better place. And you know what I think about such objectives. :)

Of course, Kotler has been talking about Social Marketing since 1971, but now is a time when we can no longer ignore it. Not only is the trust in businesses dwindling in the recent years and viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems, customers are demanding businesses to consider making the world a better place. And that is the crux of his Marketing 3.0.

This needs some deep thinking and research before we can even attempt incorporating into our current strategy workbench. Again, some work for me in 2012.

Epilogue

I never felt comfortable with the moniker given to me by my boss: "Evangelist - Social CRM". Yes, I do talk a lot about Social CRM in various fora, but I am much more. I am a tinkerer, thinker and connector. Though I started as a tinkerer, of late, I am becoming more of a thinker. And a bit of connector, of ideas, of people, of resources, of markets. I learn and work by tinkering, thinking and connecting; and thus I innovate.

I also look ahead into the far future, much like a science fiction writer, maybe because I am in love with those books since a very young age. But I am not alone or without precedent. In fact, Intel Futurist Brian Johnson does just that! That's someone who I can aim to be, a Futurist.

So what are your ideas for 2012? What are you working on? What else do you think I should be looking into? How can I help you in 2012?

What is the Social CRM interface of the future?

2011-11-23T10:05:00.001+05:30

I am following the #scrm11 hashtag on Twitter to be informed about the Social CRM event in Paris, France and then I see this tweet (being reported from the event, not the person's question, I presume):

It seemed to me from the tweets (please correct me if I am wrong, I had limited visibility) that SugarCRM wanted to share a vision where the social networking site would be of the user's choice and the CRM system would be able to connect to any of them, as opposed to what happens currently.

Lofty goal, pretty cumbersome. And the only way currently possible is very inefficient, thanks to the absence of any widespread usage of common open standards, open protocols, open formats, interoperability, data porting, etc., etc. To provide the choice & flexibility to the customer, the CRM vendor (or their ecosystem) needs to build connectors for each one of the social media/networking site in existence. *gulp* (Hey team, what are you waiting for? Get started on building them. I'd like a status report on them in our next meeting. Thank you. ;)

But I have an even more bizarre dream of the future interface. One where there will be bionic lenses (you know, contact lenses that can show information) projecting data as if a few feet away from your eyes. Where there will also be in-ear headsets, taking a cue from the hearing aid industry and combining that with the Bluetooth headset industry's tech (great for the hearing aids industry too IMHO, imagine the cheap availability of such devices).

And there will be mics (some advanced form of throat mics) that can capture, and may be even recognize, subvocal speech. Meaning, you need not speak aloud that which you want the other party on the phone to hear. You think what you want to say, your brain asks your vocal chords to speak, but they stop a bit before actually speaking aloud. So the people in your immediate vicinity cannot hear what you are talking with the other person on the phone. ;)

All these devices on your body would be connected by a body area network and powered by energy harvesting, probably by your fabrics & shoes or even your body heat.

The customer service rep at the other end will not only have a social media command center that gets info from enterprise systems too and is powered by a robust social analytics that does text mining, natural language processing, social network analysis, collaborative filtering, predictive analytics, but will also work like Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report (Microsoft is funding various startups working on Kinect tech, so you can bet there will be some good use for it) while talking to the customer on a holovid, you know the star wars kind of video conferencing system that Cisco demo'd from Bangalore.

Well, at least one benefit of all these rich media would be that it would be more difficult for people to lie than on emails or phones (did you know people lie more on email than face to face?). Which means there will be a better environment of trust between the customer and the company.

But what it means in terms of security and privacy and how would society evolve in the face of such technological advances I will leave it for sci-fi writers. Would it be something radical like the Arab Spring & #Occupy which were mediated by social media or give rise to something like the missed call social dynamics (and marketing tools too, like ZipDial) in India and other emerging nations in Asia and Africa?

So what do you think is the Social CRM interface of the future?

Is the identity of the Social Customer at risk?

2011-10-31T02:48:00.000+05:30

Assange vs Zuckerberg

Paul Greenberg posited well over two years ago (and more than those many years in the making) that the social customer had taken control over the conversation and that the businesses needed to respond to that. Businesses did respond and how! Not only the businesses, but also the politicians. And if the current state of affairs continue, there would be no Arab Spring ever. Let me try to explain.

We are all very well aware of the spate of uprisings in various countries across the globe (not just the Arab world) that has been catalysed (if not 'fueled') by social media. This is a communication tool that is bringing together the forces of people spread geographically and doing it faster and vaster thanks to networks and not dyadic communication.

Paul Greenberg would talk about how the customers' trust in the businesses dropped as per the Trust barometer of Edelman and hence the taking control of the conversation by the customer. In the various uprisings & protests this year that have been catalysed by social media, the reasons varied from despotic rulers, some who outlived their benevolence (somebody said Gaddafi should have died young like Che Guevara to be remembered fondly by his people), to anger against 'the greedy 1%' to frustration over corruption.

Internet, aided by social media & online social networks as well as mobiles, the crucial communication tool that is impacting the 21st century in a very profound way is already under threat from governments and businesses (especially the Media industry which did not exist until about a century ago). Fred Wilson brings to our notice about two new bills that have been forged in the US Congress - one in the Senate called Protect IP and one in the House called E-Parasites. Watch the 4 minute video below to get an idea of what these bills mean.

If passed, these bills will do irreparable damage to the Internet, entrepreneurship, free speech, and job creation as a result of the continued entrepreneurial activity around the Internet. Arab spring? No way. Sites like youtube, flickr, etc. where people shared video footage to counter the government propaganda could be shutdown.

Yet another threat is surreptitiously creeping up on us - identity. And of course privacy, but I will delve more on identity here since privacy is already on the minds of most people, including the businesses who are trying to leverage social media.

Some businesses (including my clients) have a big headache when presented with the data from the social media since its means an MDM issue in addition to text mining, sentiment analysis, parsing & routing, workflow automation, analytics and other integration headaches. This is predominantly due to the usage of pseudonyms (nyms) by people on the internet and is being countered by the use of features like 'Login with Facebook' or 'Login with Twitter' (which might be dangerous since we are surrendering control of our identity to the identity providers and apparently Facebook sees nearly 600,000 accounts compromised per day). Some recent controversies (called the nym wars) are interesting to follow, especially since Google Plus banned quite a few people who use pseudonyms as per their real names policy.

Source: scorpfromhell

In my 'industry first' vision for a social CRM IT landscape (above) I had a separate section called user components, which directly corresponds to "user centric identity", which is the focus of Internet Identity Workshop. As you can see from the topics for the October 2011 workshop (anybody has any updates from there as yet?), its more than just identity:

Open Standards that have been born and developed at IIW – OpenID, OAuth, Activity Streams, Portable Contacts, Salmon Protocol, SCIM, UMA ….
The Federated Social Web
Vendor Relationship Management
Personal Data Services - collection, storage and value generation
Anonymity Pseudonymity and Reputation Online (think google+ controversy)
Legal Innovation including, Information Sharing Agreements, Data Ownership Agreements and the development of “trust” frameworks.
NSTIC – the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (it uses the term “user-centric identity” 4 times & “citizen-centric identity” once)
Cloud Identity and the intersection of enterprise ID and people (consumer) ID.

I wasn't aware of the IIW until today when I came across this blog post on my twitter search stream for social CRM where the author says:

A huge part of identity on the web is controlling who can see what: think about the Google+ Project’s approach, where your identity consists of a series of data objects (posts, photos, status updates, etc), each having its own set of access controls. Controlling access to items requires that you have people to restrict access with. Therefore, contact and relationship management is integral to digital identity.

While it definitely helps to control who do I share with, I would also add the ability of controlling who do I share as. Prem Kumar Aparanji or scorpfromhell. My choice.

If you as a business are bothered by it, earn my trust. As Venessa Meimis said at #CCE2011 today: Trust and Identify are the future of money. While her context was slightly different it is not completely unrelated to the future I envision.

From a technology standpoint, "verifiable but unlinkable data can be provided by users via anonymous digital credentials. The subtleties of building up trust in situations of less than perfect knowledge, which are intuitively understood in the physical world, are investigated by trust negotiation".

This will not only put the user in command but also bring the aspects of trust & identity into the digital systems that the social media are. The businesses that hope to be social (utilise social computing, including social media), if not become social (social business as defined by Md. Yunus), would be then able to co-create value with their customers.

Consider a website or application that wants not only your credentials from Facebook but also information about your profile, your friends, your photos, shares, etc. There are umpteen such sites/apps that try to gather far more information from your Facebook account than they need to know. This is why I prefer Pseudo-authentication using OAuth rather than OpenID.

Source: Wikipedia

So what do you think? Is the identity of the social customer worth saving? Would you as a business want to invest more into building value & trust or just want to harvest the identities of your customers?

Social CRM: Hiring the right definition

2011-09-03T23:19:00.000+05:30

There is a huge discussion going on over at thebrandbuilder blog & on twitter too over the definition of social CRM, especially the Paul Greenberg version as adapted by Esteban Kolsky. There is a nice effort at wordsmithing the definition and this is what Oliver Blanchard concludes with in that blog post:

[Social] CRM is a business function supported by a system and technologies whose aims are to improve a company’s ability to derive insights into customer needs and behaviors by adding to their transaction data the lifestyle data they share online.

Definition discussions, yet again? :)

I laud the efforts at trying to wordsmith the definition to make it simpler for the audience in question, but the simplicity is too limiting IMHO & proposes that a (social) CRM doesn't do anything, just gains insights. Please do not mistake my words to be condescending, but I wonder what good is an insight if it will not be acted upon. Granted you do not say that the organization will not act upon the insight, but I fail to understand who then does anything with those insights? Do you propose that marketing, sales, service do not fall under the umbrella of CRM? Maybe this newly wordsmithed definition is thus unintentionally misleading?

May be this is a chance for me to relook at my understanding of the stuff after understanding, observing, thinking, conceptualizing, designing, architecting, deploying social computing platforms & tools that were hired for various jobs to be done by my organization as well as clients over these past 3-4 years. So I will take an implied liberty of a blog and posit some of my views to help wordsmith the definition again. :)

If I were to take a systems view, I would see them as systems of record, engagement & awareness. My idea of Systems of awareness consists of Living Anlytics Adaptive Learning loop and Reality Mining too in addition to all the other BI/social analytics, etc. I am still building on a line of thought that started off with something I call the 4p Steradian view thats absolutely necessary in an increasingly multi-channel world. So please excuse me if I am not so clear in articulating it properly. My point being, lifestyle data shared online by people themselves is just scratching the surface.

But are we right in taking a systems view or should we consider a social computing or complex adaptive system view? Listen to this podcast to understand this question better.

BTW, why are we limiting our models to systems and other computational technologies? Didn't the first contention center around a strategy & function? So how about considering this field from an organizational perspective?

Taking an economics view at why companies/firms form (The Nature of the Firm by Ronald Coase), social (or should we call digital) technologies and container ships are wearning down the very reasons why they exist (market friction, efficiencies, etc.). Flat world & power of pull talk about these at length of course; my point here is that social networks at play via digital technologies are bringing about disruptions in business models, a level above even business strategies, no?

Organizations are structured into departments & teams (predominantly around functions, right?). And they predominantly act as silos, especially in large organizations, no? Ranjay Gulati in his book Restructuring for resilience talks about the reasons why these silos got formed in the first place (efficiencies) and why they need breaking (innovation, responsiveness, effectiveness). Even amongst the social media gurus it is well recognized/agreed upon that social media response teams need to be cross functional.

Taking a slight diversion, social network analysis (SNA) applied in the context of organizations brought about organizational network analysis (ONA) to better understand the informal structures in organizations. However Value Network Analysis offers a better option to bring better collaboration amongst the silos that Ranjay suggests.

Even if we are to consider the customer relationship management as practiced in the past 40-50 years, they have evolved from a transaction based view to one-to-one to network based views. Social media, online communities and the rise of the 'social customer' has only reinforced the need for increased focus on networked relationships. Add to this the realisation about value co-creation and service dominant logic being the need of the hour as against the value exchange and product dominant logic of businesses. There is a heavy tilt in focus towards "jobs-to-be-done" framework.

Definitions will be unique to each individual, organization. They will be the axis around which they will seal their fate, since by nature definitions are limiting in their own quirky way. These organizations might hire us to help them come up with the correct definition conducive to their fate. In which case let us provide them enough data points for them to understand the cosmic relevance and then help them formulate a tightly wordsmithed definiton for themselves.

Free online courses from Stanford useful for Social Analytics

2011-09-01T18:07:00.000+05:30

AI Class by Stanford

Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning form a crucial aspect of Social Analytics and is the kernel in many a 'social media listening' solution. And not just in social media marketing, it is emerging as a key skillset of demand in various fields.

Stanford has a set of free online courses that goes in tandem with the actual class room based courses. The Fall class for introduction to Artificial Intelligence (under which NLP & ML fall) starts October 10.

If you are interested please do attend these courses:

Introduction to AI (CS221): http://www.ai-class.com/ << This is a prerquisite for the NLP course
Natural Language Processing (CS224N): http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=63480b48-8819-4efd-8412-263f1a472f5a
Machine Learning (CS229): http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3a6d-4052-937d-cb017338d7b1

Adoption of social tools for collaboration requires sharing

2011-08-29T02:58:00.001+05:30

"Sharing" by ryancr, on Flickr

I have been busy the past three to four months shifting my base and settling in the suburb of Bangalore (technically a different state altogether) and this has taken a toll on my work as well as my social media engagement. Nevertheless, I am slowly getting back on track with quite a truck load of stuff to be done and trust to be regained at the workplace. The task of highest & immediate priority is helping in resubmitting a year 2015 plan for our group, incorporating the 1st round of review comments. And one of the key components is - justifying the further investments into 'social' by providing, among other things, estimated market size.

Which means I have to provide numbers from expert predictions, which is typically a Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. although it’s been well documented that expert predictions are quite poor. ;) In the Social CRM space even Gartner has had to revise its predictions for the size of the market (their Magic Quadrants for the same have been criticized too). I am yet to take a dive into market size for social tools in the internal collaboration arena (Enterprise 2.0), which is actually a bit more mature market than the Social CRM one.

All in all, sales forecasting closely follows market adoption of the new technology and the speed of adoption is said to be an S-curve. And since we are in the cusp of two such S curves, one finishing (systems design view) and one beginning (social computing view), it is not possible to predict the future. However, as per research literature, the speed of adoption of a new product has been shown to be a function of several factors including:

The product's relative advantage over existing products
The degree to which the new product is compatible with existing operations and attitudes
The degree to which the new product is simple (rather than complex)
The degree to which the new product can be tried on a limited basis
The degree to which the product is observable.

Hold your thoughts on this one.

Coincidentally PwC has just come out with a new report called "Transforming collaboration with social tools" (you can read a review along with excerpts by Sameer Patel) where they have this great picture:

It puts a few stuff in perspective for me. But what helped me more is a reminder from Graham Hill in the back channel that "just banging on collaboration technology will NOT result in an uncollabrative organisation becoming one iota more collaborative than before. Just more expensive. People make organisations collaborative not technology." While I wholeheartedly agree to his old saw that "Old Organization + New Technology = Expensive Old Organization" or "OO+NT=EOO", I have a bit of optimism for social computing that hasn't diminished over the years. Social Computing for the first time has the potential to break out of the mould because they are a kind of self feeding engine when it comes to adoption.

The way to avert the OO+NT=EOO scenario is to actually look at the way the organization needs to be changed, roll them out and ensure adoption happens. And the technology is to be used to support these organizational changes.

Now coming to social tools, they have various advantages over traditional enterprise software tools which I am not detailing out but just pointing out a few (am assuming that the social tools have been deployed in context of work, not as stand alone 'corporate facebooks'):

help in exception handling & sense making by allowing users to do ad-hoc work, especially when used in conjunction with the tools that support predictable execution like ERP or CRM (refer picture above from PwC report)
help in building social capital via both network closure (social capital is created by a network of strongly interconnected elements) as well as structural holes (social capital is created by a network in which people can broker connections between otherwise disconnected segments) arguments
in large organizations, help in expert discovery not just because of rich user profiles in the 'corporate facebooks', but also because openly sharing on these systems of engagement allows new random connections to form between the clusters inside the organization and thus reducing the number of hops required to reach a particular person within the organization with whom we are not connected or are even aware of (am assuming organization head count is large enough & geographically distributed enough to behave approximately like a scale free network)
help in content filtering via algorithms as well as by the community (too much of communication is an issue otherwise when social tools are deployed)

Point 1 in the speed of adoption is covered. And yet, the tools themselves lend to certain people changes if a few assumptions are met. This is where organizational changes might definitely be required, and if an organization has not been open within itself it definitely needs very senior management adoption as well as encouragement for the enthusiastic early adopters (champions). Our CEO stopped sending out emails to the organization to encourage blogs usage; now there are employees who have read only his blog posts, but as such the number of people posting/commenting/reading blogs is very high too.

By the same token, social tools do not require the organization to change much. It is compatible with existing operations & attitudes. People are hardwired in their brains to collaborate. That is how we evolved, it is the corporate culture that makes us hide stuff.

"... we're reluctant to share private information, so we aggregate information poorly. In one study the researchers gave team members shared information about the same three candidates, but also gave each member a unique piece of information about one candidate. If the team members shared all the unique information, they would choose the best-qualified candidate. If they used only the information common to all of them, they would pick the wrong candidate. A vast majority of the time, they selected a suboptimum candidate. Why? Because they chose to talk about the shared information and to reserve the unique information. Committees are not optimized to share private information. So even in organizations where the information exists, it's not being surfaced."

Unfortunately what people forget is that we did not go the way of our cousins the neanderthals especially because we shared with others, not just family members (and language was our first social tool that enabled it).

Additionally, social tools have the capability to blend with all the tools supporting the formal (predictable) processes as well as the hitherto not much supported (by IT) aspect: work-culture (behaviours & attitudes). This covers point 2 in the speed of adoption factors.

Social tools for the enterprise are simple & easy from the word go because they have been heavily inspired by the familiar consumer products outside of the organization (you know, facebook, twitter, blogs, wikis, etc.). Covers point 3 by default.

Social tools are increasingly available on the cloud in pay as you go models or for free/freemium. Hence it is possible for people to try it out on a limited basis. Covers point 4.

Social tools, if made available to everybody, features like the notifications, news/activity streams, et al. make it easier to observe what others are doing in the system & how ... not the case in your traditional enterprise software ... and thus the product & product usage is observable. This covers point 5 of the factors for speed of adoption. This aspect helps with social learning too, thus leading to more stickier adoption if not faster.

Also, social tools lend themselves to all three forms of viral adoption of any behavioral change -

contagion: users adopt when they come in touch with someone who has adopted
social influence: users adopt when they see many people have adopted
social learning: users adopt when they see how others are using and benefiting

So, to cut a long story short - sharing is essential to success of social tools for collaboration in an enterprise.

TED talks on listening, smiling & a social technology called language

2011-08-09T02:01:00.001+05:30

These are some recent TED talks that I found to be very relevant to my interests in online communities, social computing & remote collaboration.

Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better

Ron Gutman: The hidden power of smiling

Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity

Digital Evangelism & Blogger Marketing in India

2011-07-23T09:34:00.002+05:30

ET Now, a national news channel in India, ran a short piece on the increasing influence of social media in the Indian market space with more & more people getting onto the internet and the emergence of digital influencer marketing practice among the Indian brands.

Nothing much new in terms of concepts if you are a social media marketer already or not much news if you are an avid Indian tweeter who knows about the Pinstrom India Influencers list (a mix of klout & peer index scores) where I make a cameo in the Top 100 (am fast falling off the list of late, thanks to Google+ maybe).

The video also touches briefly upon the ethical issues surrounding sponsored blogging & sponsored tweets that has led to a few regulations in the US & S. Korea as a cautionary note.

I make a cameo in the video at 1:05 min. I am there & gone within a second and you could miss me out very easily. :D But am there. ;) My one second of fame on national television. Yay! :D

Quick review on Google+

2011-06-30T19:44:00.002+05:30

Well, since everybody & their ~~dog~~ friend seems to be getting onto Google+ today ... and since in spite of the heavy supply of accounts there seems to be an even greater demand as evidenced by people selling invites to Google+ on ebay ... may be because someone joked (I think) that having a Google+ account increases your chances of getting laid by 30% ... I am writing my own initial thoughts about it.

(No, I don't think @madmanweb was right ... actually @beastoftraal was probably more closer to reality!)

So, what are my initial thoughts? Google is trying to stay in the game, not beat/kill/depose/extinguish/squash/frag Facebook by doing (attempting?) somethings right for a change. Somebody already wrote what Google+ learnt from Wave and Buzz. Google+ might actually be a great platform for the internal social networking needs of organizations. If they have it on Google Apps.

On a personal level, I got all excited after I got an invite (thanks Manu Prasad) and could finally get in after a harrowing commute to the office between the time I got the invite and the time I created my account ... I clicked around, added friends to circles upon circles, fooled around with settings, etc. for about 45 minutes and I lost steam a bit.

After adding 45 people to various circles I definitely got tired! And only 8 people had added me to their circles. So evidently my network of friends (both IRL & online ones) had not yet gotten into Google+. Not so cool until the network is in there. So I have to wait till more people join in. And I have yet another set of friends data.

I sent a feedback, which is refreshingly via a form that is different from the ugly bug reporting tools developers & testers use. Well, if you want to know, I want to be able to mute/mute a person, so I don't see their updates on my timeline temporarily. That's the feedback I sent.

What I liked though is that I can export all my data on Google+ to a zip file and have it with me. Unlike Facebook.

Now the wait for Google+ to open up for developers.

Social CRM is dead, long live Social CRM?

2011-06-22T21:55:00.000+05:30

The King is dead, long live the King!

Bob Thompson, Editor of CustomerThink.com and a friend who graciously threw a dinner party for me at a fabulous Italian Restaurant last year when I was in San Francisco area for the first time ever, has a very intriguing post that has got the knickers of many in knots. Well, it is titillatingly titled

"Social CRM" is Dead, Long Live the Social Customer Experience

where Bob definitely does a great job figuring out a pattern from a spate of events that have happened in the recent past in the product vendor market around Social CRM - they are all moving crabwise around the term Social CRM.

And yet something stuck me odd about getting into the nomenclature/definition/classification debates all over again. I mean, we are no longer fumbling in utter darkness, we are all fumbling around with a matchbox each in utter darkness. And by we I mean the early adopters, the people who are now considered the thought leaders and market leaders in the Social CRM space. What we need now is a breed of early adapters who will use the disruptive forces (social computing & other non technological ones) to provide value not just to their businesses but also their business ecosystems. And thus I wrote the following comment on Bob's post:

Nice post Bob. A keen eye on the state of affairs I must exclaim in joy! :) Most flew past me though I came by them; but now that you have connected the dots I cant un-see the picture now. :D
However, I wonder why do you limit your pattern sensing to vendors, technology vendors at that?
Like Bill we too are seeing an increase in interest from our clients to know about Social CRM; but its mostly about their own sense making journey. Thus after the free insights they get from us we are seeing very elongated sales cycles. But luckily they turn out to be business consulting opportunities. We do see systems integration & custom IT related opportunities too.
People are still fumbling around with all the disruption the boom in social computing has enabled, both on the internet as well as within the enterprise firewalls.
We (you, me and the multitude others who have been disputing about the nomenclature, definition and classification of all things "social" for the past few years) are the early adopters of these disruptive technologies; the real practitioners with the kind of case studies we early adopters will all feel proud will be the early adapters, not adopters.
These early adapters (as opposed to adopters) will figure out how exactly can they muzzle the disruption effectively to put them to work not just for their business, but also their business ecosystem (this is because of the nature of the disruptive technologies).
Knowledge Management, Learning, Collaboration, Employee recruiting/onboarding/retaining, Rewards & Recognition, Partner/Distributor/Channel management, Customer XYZ (relationship management, marketing, sales, service, experience management, engagement, etc.) ... everything needs to be relooked.
Rather than merely looking at the tech disruptions that Harish seems to have caught up with (since we are the early adopters, remember?), we need to look at Graham's pet topics like Customer Co-Creation, Service Dominant Logic, Jobs to be done, Value Networks to help the breed of early adapters we are all eagerly waiting for.
In the meantime, all we have is posturing by every kind of vendor (product, service, analyst or publication) to promote a particular nomenclature/definition/classification to claim either "market leadership" or "thought leadership". And you know I am included in that above list as well because of my employment status, if not personal posturing. :)
I have begun my journey to be an early adapter too (in addition to being an early adopter) in parallel to being a co-traveler for the early adapters in my clientele. Hope you embark on such a similar journey too. All the best! :)

Of Pigs, Elephants & Hives - Social CRM and Big Data

2011-06-01T01:37:00.000+05:30

Source: siliconangle.com

After a long gap I make a comeback into pure play technobabble. But I promise I will try to keep it as simple as possible.

In a post titled “Social CRM – ETL of Social & CRM data?” I had posited over two years ago that semantic, sentiment analysis & other NLP techniques and data mapping would all be required to varying degrees for data integration in a Social CRM system. What I had missed mentioning back then was what is now being hyped as Big Data.

Social CRM from an IT perspective needs to deal with lots of data (petabytes) because it has to deal with data coming in from social media, online community platforms, various new enterprise systems (especially given the rise of enterprise 2.0, social collaboration, activity streams and what not where employees are creating a lot of data too). And not to forget traditional data. As my friend Esteban Kolsky likes to remind me everytime, Sears had a terabyte of customer data a decade back and apparently did not know what to do with it.

Another aspect I missed out stating back then was that data is typically collected, prepared and then finally presented and that ETL is just the preparation part of it.

Data in social media can be collected in various ways – RSS feeds, APIs (Twitter & Facebook firehoses) or just plain scrapping them from the various sites by crawling & spidering. Radian6 and Attensity360 do a great job of data collection. Both tools provide realtime capabilities for response/action however very little is analysed at this stage in these tools. Thus a lot depends upon the ability of the end users of these tools when responding in realtime is concerned.
Data preparation or ETL typically deals with bringing in the raw data and loading, cleaning and conforming it to selected data model; joining with other data sources and producing data sets ready for data users to consume. Data Preparation is not so realtime because of the huge amounts of data involved, but in-memory analytics seems to be getting hotter by the day. Recently SAP integrated its HANA (High Performace Analytic Appliance) with IBM’s DB2 database increasing its alignment against rival Oracle’s Exadata platform.
Data presentation is typically taken care of by data warehouses in IT architecture. Here the data is presented to the consuming applications like CRM/BPM systems or BI reports. BI reports can be realtime or not, depending upon the amount of analysis that takes place. CRM/BPM systems route the massaged data into the various business processes and is acted upon by pre-configured rules or by humans manning these systems (ACM, Social BPM can be leveraged here).

So what do all these things that I forgot in my long lost post have to do with the title of this post? It has to do with open source actually (yes, I had bring them in). :)

Apache Hadoop is a well known (in IT, especially distributed & cloud computing, and open source circles) software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications built using the Java language. And Hadoop is the name of the toy elephant of the creator’s (Doug Cutting’s) son. Apache Pig is a platform for analyzing large datasets. And Apache Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop.

And here is a project that uses Hadoop, Pig and NLP for mining Wikipedia: http://blogs.nuxeo.com/dev/2011/01/mining-wikipedia-with-hadoop-and-pig-for-natural-language-processing.html. Very geeky and cool, if you share my likes. Now to see if this can be leveraged for social CRM by someone. :)