I’ve been a little slow in blogging about what I learned at IBM IMPACT (#ibmimpact) this year… apologies if you’ve been waiting for pearls of wisdom from me! ;-) I blame a big client workload. Damn those clients.

So it’s a couple of weeks now since IMPACT (at least for me – I was only there for 48 hours) and the second day was when things got interesting. Whereas Day 1 ranged across a variety of topics – even featuring the unveiling of a PureApplication System box on stage (I can’t remember if dry ice was involved, but for the full ’80s effect there should certainly have been) – Day 2′s keynote focused exclusively on ‘Process Innovation’.

‘Process Innovation’ is shorthand for how IBM is pitching its portfolio of tools and capabilities related to BPM and Operational Decision Management (a unification of the WebSphere event processing and rules technologies). This past year IBM’s Phil Gilbert has been focused on further simplifying and integrating IBM’s portfolio here, and his keynote (and other sessions at IMPACT) showcased the work that’s been done – largely in v8 of Business Process Manager, but also in version 8 of WebSphere Operational Decision Management.

We’ll be publishing an updated in-depth assessment of IBM’s BPM technology offering before the end of June, so here I’ll just point out what I think are the main highlights.

In Business Process Manager v8:

• Simplified design tools. It’s now much easier to build more sophisticated ‘coaches’ (what IBM calls task user interfaces) that exhibit dynamic behaviours and include rich content, using much less hand coding.
• Better support for document management. Decent CMIS support means building processes where participants need to retrieve, manage and update documents requires much less work.
• Bringing more work context and assistance to participants. There are two key things here. First, in the context of completing a task, coaches are augmented with what I’ll call a ‘work context panel’ (not sure what the official name is, if there is one). As a participant is working on a task using a coach, Business Process Manager shows (a) the history of what’s happened prior to this task, and who’s worked on the process to this point; (b) recommends other participants who would be well-placed to assist in completion of the task; (c) enables a participant to collaborate in real time with another participant in completing the task (using real-time sharing functionality reused from Blueworks Live). Second, in the context of presenting processes and tasks to participants, in v8 the standard worklist UI metaphor is sidelined in favour of a metaphor based around rich search, filtering and lists (borrowing from popular social applications and also echoing Appian’s Tempo).
• Better support for large-scale efforts. It’s possible to federate content across multiple instances of the Process Center repository, and also possible to link Process Center instances with other enterprise repositories containing upstream and downstream assets (think requirements docs, architecture blueprints, test case definitions and so on) via OSLC support.
• Foundation for mobile process work. A published REST API for the BPM runtime environment makes it relatively straightforward to create custom native mobile applications for carrying out tasks in the context of processes.

In Operational Decision Management v8: borrowing UX and design-time concepts from Blueworks Live and BPM and going further. The Decision Center now comes with a business-facing Business Console that presents updates through an activity stream and faceted and free-text search, and a significantly more friendly rules editor. A Facebook-like ‘timeline view’ of rule versions is also provided to help people visualise change histories, which I suspect will also turn up in a future version of Business Process Manager too.

In Blueworks Live: the ability to model process decisions through in-place creation of decision tables, and the ability to model enterprise policies and relate them to processes.

So in summary: from a user perspective the industry-wide themes of mobile and social are writ large; it’s good to see IBM in particular thinking deeply about how social collaboration can be truly woven into work, rather than just bolted on. From a design-time perspective the main thrust is around simplification and integration, which is just as it should be.

Of course there’s room for improvement: the elephant in the room (it’s been there for a while, and is probably now sitting against a wall throwing a ball) is Case Manager. There’s some foundational integration points in place, but a clear roadmap would be very welcome. It’s also unclear to what extent IBM is interested in capturing more ‘upstream’ process improvement activity through process discovery and mining tools.

Still, IBM continues to show that overall it takes BPM very seriously, and it’s serious about taking a market-leading position as a technology provider.

Last week I took part in #SWCHAT – a weekly tweetchat session focused on the social workplace, and run by David Christopher of Stop! Think Social. The topic of the session was “Building a collaborative culture”, the subject of my presentation at the Social Workplace conference to be held in London on 24th May. This being the first #SWCHAT I’ve been involved with, I was staggered by the sheer scale of participation – we had 143 contributors and 1,600 tweets in the space of an hour, which made for a fast and frantic experience! In fact it was so manic that I am very grateful that a transcript of the session is available (here), enabling me to look back on the discussion and properly read many of the comments that simply passed me by on the night. In this post, I’m going to highlight the major themes in the discussion, the issues where there was general agreement, and those where there was more debate. Feel free to share your own perspective!

Q 1 – “Why is a collaborative culture so important in business today?”

We collectively highlighted many issues, such as the need to do more with less, to share costs and commitment across increasingly dispersed organisations, in order to maintain the flexibility and agility to compete effectively, particularly in these tough economic conditions. There was also discussion about the added value gained by tapping into the knowledge and skills of a larger set of people, enabling the optimisation of processes through weaknesses or gaps which can be highlighted earlier if there is greater transparency and sharing of information. An interesting observation by Colin Hope-Murray noted that old, hierarchical organisation structures typically stereotype individuals into roles, whereas an open, collaborative approach allows an individual’s broader set of skills to surface, creating a much richer organisation. Similarly, while several people pointed out that collaboration is not a new concept, even for business, Chris Gibbons commented that until now the emphasis has been more on co-operating, rather than collaborating.

Q 2 – “People can be trained on tools, but how can a collaborative culture be taught?”

Here there was generally a consensus that it’s not about “teaching” collaboration, but more about leading by example; ensuring business leaders don’t just support the initiative but actively encourage participation by collaborating themselves. Instead of it being about “teaching” collaboration, many other words were suggested, such as “developed”, “supported”, “inspired”, “encouraged”, “nurtured”. What all of these words imply is the need for ongoing investment and commitment in the initiative – this type of business change won’t happen overnight, and it’s also not something you can just throw money at.

Q3 – “Not everyone readily embraces collaboration. How can these people’s fear be overcome?”

I found this a particularly interesting discussion, as it really separated the enthusiasts from the pragmatists. While some felt that it was best to take the sink-or-swim approach, others favoured engaging with those people and talking with them to understand why they may be reticent, and basing a strategy on that (yes, I was in the latter group). An interesting side discussion which came out here was whether it is necessary for *everyone* to collaborate all of the time. On the one hand, there may be a place for lone geniuses. On the other hand, “collaboration” can prolong decision-making processes, and not always for the better. Lesley Price‘s comment made me chuckle “there are times when collaboration leads to confusion….I watched the #apprentice last night”. Another point that got traction was that even introverts collaborate – “but [only] once their thinking has been done” (@insight72).  It’s certainly true that it can be more valuable to put a little more thought into an idea before throwing it into the arena. We also considered the role of incentives here, both in terms of financial or other rewards, and in terms of the value of senior (and middle) management leading by example.

Q4 – Why are companies paying more attention to internal collaboration amongst their own employees?

By this stage in the discussion, some common themes were emerging. Comments included the need to do more with less, better sharing of knowledge, creating competitive advantage, better employee retention. I think there is also a misplaced view among business leaders that this is a relatively cheap way of achieving these benefits – many still believe too strongly in the power of viral adoption of social tools, and this combined with the availability of free SaaS-based tools gives some the wrong impression. This is slowly changing, but even so, there is insufficient thought given to the long-term investment and commitment to this type of initiative.

Q5 – What impact can a collaborative culture have on innovation?

As innovation had already been highlighted throughout the discussion, there was more  consensus on this question. Fundamentally, by creating a less hierarchical, more collaborative culture, more ideas are able to come to the surface, often from discussions that cross department boundaries and ranks. Collaboration also enables these ideas to be developed using collective knowledge, and enabling flawed ideas to be exposed or refined earlier in the process.

Q7 (we skipped Q6 due to lack of time) – Email is where conversations go to die. How do you convince a company so entrenched in email to change?

By this stage we only had 7 minutes left, so discussion became even more frantic. However, we still had some excellent comments. For example, @SonicSEO tweeted “Stop answering email. ;) “. While arguably flippant, this has actually worked for some organisations, when senior sponsors actively drive staff to a collaborative platform by responding to emails there rather than via email.  It reinforces the lead-by-example message perfectly. In my opinion, it doesn’t necessarily need to be an email-or-no-email issue; we are already seeing email vendors building social features or integrations into email clients, helping to transition users to a world where email is not the only option. After all, it’s not going away any time soon.

And so there you have it – the world put to rights in an hour. ;-)

Do you agree/disagree? Did we miss anything?

*OK so maybe it’s not so easy. But it was a nice title anyway… @JulesHewett ;-)

Yesterday I took part in an “IBM Social Business Briefing“, a roundtable event in London run by IBM partner Collaboration Matters (who also ran  the Collaboration Diner session at UCExpo I blogged about a few weeks back). The event, which is becoming a regular session, is designed to be an opportunity for business leaders to explore this new disruptive trend and what it means for their businesses. Yesterday the topic of discussion was the role of the community manager – what they should do, what their skill set needs to be, and who they should report to within the organisation.

This is a widely debated topic, and so not surprisingly it was not hard to keep the discussion active for the two-hour session. It was a good reminder for me that businesses are approaching this challenge from many different perspectives, and that there is no simple solution to the problem. By the end there was a sense that we had asked more questions than we had answered, and I think that demonstrates the scale of the challenge.

A key issue for the group related to defining the skillset required for a community manager, to enable organisations to create a job specification that will allow them to recruit an external individual. (Note that we talked about this mainly in the context of an internal online community to support knowledge sharing etc.) My view on this is that there is a particular type of person who is suited to the role, and their skills are innate, not learned. The individual is typically someone who already has a very large network of colleagues and friends both inside and outside the organisation, someone who naturally engages other people, who is liked by many, and is often very charismatic. Interestingly this type of person is often found in the role of programme management; they are good at organising others to get a job done, at getting to know others’ strengths and weaknesses, and how to get the best out of people.

To some extent they are a corporate version of a charity worker – someone who is enthusiastic about the initiative, who might give up their spare time to achieve the desired result, and – most importantly of all – is selfless about doing so. Beware those who are too keen to be seen to be carrying out this role, as typically they will be more interested in broadcasting their own view, whereas they need to be encouraging participation by others if the community is to succeed. The word “nurture” is appropriate here – it’s about sowing the seeds and encouraging others to take small steps, a little at a time. Over time, momentum grows, and the community manager’s role changes, or at least decreases in terms of involvement needed. However, it doesn’t disappear completely; there may still be a need to manage the scope of the community, and suggest potential off-shoots as required.

This post has got quite long, so I want to just mention one more thing for now: what we should call these people. “Community Manager” is the mot de jour, but some have questioned the “manager” aspect, concerned that it implies some sense of leadership or hierarchy, which is absolutely against the principle of social business. For me, “facilitator” is better, as it suggests a more back seat role, guiding rather than controlling. However, even this has issues – it suggests that the individual is to an extent an outsider, without the relevant topic knowledge, and I believe an understanding of the purpose and context of the community is vital if you are to effectively encourage participation. Without the respect of your peers in the community, it will be very hard to get people involved.

So that’s my (rather long) two penneth. Do you agree, or do you think I’ve missed anything? All comments welcome!

blueKiwi, the small French provider of SaaS-based online community solutions, has been acquired by Atos for a reported 20 million Euros (ex-blueKiwi CEO Carlos Diaz confirmed the acquisition via Twitter). Having tracked bluekiwi for several years now (we published this On The Radar report on blueKiwi back in 2008), I think this is good news for the company, which has struggled to gain profile and market share in this highly competitive area. The company has made several efforts to grow its presence outside France – firstly in the UK  in early 2008 and then in 2011, and then in the US in early 2010 – but none of these have been particularly effective. It has/had some high profile backers – investors included Sofinnova partners and Dassault Systemes through funding rounds as far back as 2007 – but with little significant growth in the last few years, I imagine the investors were keen to sell. It’s interesting that Dassault has apparently stepped aside, having had a strong role in the company’s strategy and direction until now.

So what is Atos getting here? Well, blueKiwi’s technology is designed to support online communities both inside and outside the organisation, though most of the company’s customers use it mainly for internal collaboration.  The existing client base is mainly European, with some strong traction in government and manufacturing in addition to the Dassault-led professional services connection. I see the technology’s main strengths being in the area of social analytics, with strong capabilities around people and content recommendations, and reputation systems (i.e. gamification). Atos has already declared its own position on the future of internal collaboration (late last year the company’s CEO Thierry Breton made various tech and non-tech news headlines with his plan for an end to internal email at ATOS by 2014) and this software would fit neatly as part of a services offering targeting this same goal.

For blueKiwi customers, I don’t see that there is any immediate need for concern – Atos will be keen to build upon blueKiwi’s existing relationships, and I wouldn’t expect the company to stop supporting them. Furthermore, having Atos’ financial strength behind them will be more reassuring than was the case when blueKiwi was independent. What remains to be seen is what happens to blueKiwi’s partnerships – while the company had a handful of more established or closer partnerships (notably with Microsoft and Dassault), as part of a broader Atos offering there is potential for much more investment in partnerships, both for the channel and for technology integrations.

This is definitely good news for blueKiwi, and I can’t help thinking it may be a win-win all round. Do you agree? What would you like to see Atos do with blueKiwi?

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to attend the Unified Communications Expo at Olympia in London, and to take part in the “Collaboration Diner“, which was sponsored by IBM, and hosted by IBM partner Collaboration Matters. It was an unusual session, not least because of the setting, which was a mocked-up 1940′s style diner – complete with bar, neon sign and actors  in character – in a modern twist on Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks painting. The format was similar to a roundtable, with participants including thought leaders, practitioners and conference delegates discussing a range of social-related issues inspired by the Cluetrain Manifesto, a set of theses that was presented back in 1999 by Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Rick Levine (and which proved to be an astonishingly accurate vision of the way companies have to engage with customers, employees and partners – even though it was perhaps a decade early).

Both sessions I attended (one in person and one as an external tweeter) were lively discussions, with plenty of provocative questions and challenging responses. The most talked-about topic was the role of marketing in this new, connected world, and the way organisations need to approach social media predominantly as a way to listen to customers and in turn engage with them better, rather than to see it as a new way to push messages and branding into the market. We looked at the MacDonalds Twitter disaster which saw the company’s attempt to “spin” some good PR using the #mcdstories hashtag get completely out of (their) control with consumers taking the concept and running with it – except in the opposite direction, sharing plenty of terrible experiences at the fast food retailer’s outlets. We also talked about the way social can impact an organisation’s culture, and how trust is central to this. Overall, I thought the Collaboration Diner worked well as a format, and the diner setting certainly helped get people’s attention, even if there were plenty of confused delegates who came looking to buy coffee, and I think probably a number of others who were put off by the staged nature of  the set and the actors.

In the broader conference, there was a noticeable split between the sessions and the exhibition floor, with the speaker sessions largely focused on collaboration/social and the exhibitors largely unified communications oriented. But it was well-attended and generally well-managed, and I think we can expect to see this event getting much larger over the next couple of years. I’ll certainly be going back next year.

This week, I attended IBM’s Lotusphere 2012, IBM’s annual customer and partner event which showcases the latest products and strategy in the area of collaboration. Like last year, “social business” was squarely at the centre of things, although there was a marked difference between the way the company positioned its social message this time when compared to last year. While Lotusphere 2011′s “Get Social. Do Business.” strapline and general sentiment was very much a call to action, this year I felt an interesting undercurrent of confidence and a sense of “fait accompli” in IBM’s message, reinforced by its new 2012 strapline “Business. Made Social.”

In parallel with the Lotusphere event, IBM hosted IBM Connect 2012, which comprised of a wealth of social business case studies, and was positioned as the event for the senior execs who wanted both ideas for how to take advantage of social business, and tips on best approaches. My personal favourite was Asian Paints, which has leveraged IBM Connections to support both internal collaboration and external customer engagement. Frankly, I was astonished by the sheer number of customers who stood up to share their experiences, although I do think that IBM missed an opportunity by not building in some sort of workshop element to the program to help attendees talk through their ideas and plans in a more structured way than simply over coffee at the event.

As usual, IBM used the Lotusphere platform to announce a number of new product capabilities and offerings, the most notable being these:

• IBM SmartCloud for Social Business – in line with other branding changes, IBM announced that their cloud-based collaboration offering, LotusLive, is being rebranded as IBM SmartCloud for Social Business, leaving  Notes/Domino as the only product retaining the Lotus branding. I think the rebranding is a sensible decision; despite efforts to expand the Lotus brand to include IBM’s other collaboration solutions, it is still limited to Notes/Domino in the minds of the majority. That said, the new name doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, and is likely to be abbreviated in some way which will inherently remove the value of it as a name anyway.
• Connections Mail – a relatively small feature which has had a significant reaction already, Connections Mail allows Connections users to access their Notes or Exchange mail and calendar directly from within Connections. At present, the functionality is deliberately limited, allowing viewing and searching of the inbox, as well as the ability to compose messages. There are no mail handling features (apart from the star or flag feature), but IBM figures that users who leverage the more advanced capabilities of Notes or Exchange will continue to use their mail client for that purpose anyway. I think there is room for a little more functionality than is currently provided though, such as assigning folders to a message and providing access to messages in folders, but to be fair IBM is waiting to see how people use this feature rather than trying to second guess its use. The purpose of Connections Mail is more about enabling Connections to be a hub for accessing all your information, be that mail, social or documents. Kinda in the same way that the Notes client is getting activity streams in its next version (oh yes, that was another announcement – it will be called Notes Social Edition, and is expected later this year).
• IBM Docs - also this week we saw the launch of the public beta of IBM’s cloud-based collaborative editing tool, IBM Docs. The tool, which was previously called LotusLive Symphony and codenamed Project Concorde, is now available through IBM’s hosted trial platform, Lotus Greenhouse, and is expected to finally become generally available later in 2012.

Aside from the key product announcements, what was particularly noticeable this year was the omnipresence of analytics. First introduced at last year’s Lotusphere through the integration of Cognos with Connections, this year pretty much every session referenced analytics in some way or another, emphasizing its important role in deriving ROI from these types of social investments. (While we’re on the topic of analytics, don’t forget to visit our online event focused on social analytics which launched this week – it’s free with no registration required, and it’s on-demand so you can dip in and out as you want.)

All in all, it’s fair to say that Lotusphere has come a long way in just a couple of years: what was once an intensely techy event, focused on product demos and unquestionably the territory of developers, has in the space of a couple of years transformed smoothly into a business-focused event, aimed at engaging with customers and partners at a strategic, enterprise-wide level, to help and support them in bringing about business change enabled by the social revolution. This is a very different approach to IBM’s biggest competitors in this space – Microsoft and Google – which both continue to position at a more technical level. There is still work to be done to tie up IBM’s top level social strategy with its product portfolio, but the company is investing significant resources in this strategy, and is benefiting from its incredible traction with IBM Connections.  Big ambitions, but IBM’s looking in good shape to succeed here.

Advisory clients can read our recently published Email strategy profile of IBM here.

Today we launched a new online, on-demand event focused on social analytics. As MWD’s Communications Director with responsibility for our online marketing and social media activities, this is a topic close to my heart. So it was with much interest that I listened to what my colleagues Angela Ashenden and Helena Schwenk had to say…

There are four webcasts to listen to, and we’ve purposefully made them short and sweet – long enough to give you some useful information and food for thought, but not so long to put you off even getting started. Time is money, right? Watch them at your leisure, skip about through the presentations using the interactive console and come back anytime you’ve got a few minutes to spare – they’ll be available to watch for a year. I’m confident though that what Angela and Helena have got to share will keep you there once you’ve started listening – it’s interesting stuff. By the way, the webcasts are free to watch, and you don’t need to register.

Click here to visit the event site to start each webcast. For now, here’s an introduction to each one:

1. Do you need social analytics? Here Angela provides an overview of the emerging trend of social analytics, comparing it with similar trends such as social media monitoring, and examining how it can help organisations derive value from its different social channels.

2. Enabling an integrated marketing strategy. In this presentation, Helena examines why marketing has become the focal point for many social analytic efforts and outlines the opportunities and challenges that may arise from its integration across marketing.

3. Alternative scenarios for social analytics. Angela outlines a variety of different contexts in which social analytics may be applied, contrasting public social media scenarios with those of more targeted internal or external social software implementations, and illustrating the role social analytics can play in delivering value from both investment areas.

4. Preparing your social analytics strategy. Helena outlines some vital next steps for any organisation looking to capitalise on its social media investment using social analytics, identifying potential pitfalls to be avoided and challenges which need to be overcome.

I was particularly taken with what Helena talks about in this slide:

I won’t spoil it for you and do a full recap here – you can listen to Helena here – but suffice it to say that this model certainly resonated with me. There’s certainly no shortage of tools available to help me count the impact of what we’re doing as a company… What’s fascinating me at the moment is how to take this to the next level and really make connections between social media and our other marketing activities as a springboard to better understanding our community and striking relationships and engagements with individuals. Sometimes that’s seemed a pretty big chasm to cross, and so far we’ve made some headway using a mix of advanced tools and some good old-fashioned, shirt-sleeves-rolled-up manpower to find our way forward (and for us, compelling content and advice is key of course – no tools can make up for a poor business proposition). But will there ever be a “silver bullet” social analytics engagement tool that will do the job of connecting all the dots at the press of a button? I’m not so sure. But I’ll leave it to Angela and Helena to let me know… If you’re a vendor of such technology, I’m sure you’ll be wanting to let them know.

To finish, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that this event is brought to you free of charge thanks to the generous support of our sponsor*: SAS. After you’ve listened to the webcasts, why not check out the SAS ‘exhibitor booth’ page in our virtual exhibition hall? There you’ll find an overview of their social analytics offerings, as well as a wealth of other free resources, including a video and some report downloads.

So get started now and check out the event site. As always, let us know what you think. Use the feedback link on the event site and you’ll receive 10% off a selection of premium advisory reports.

* A note about sponsoring a MWD Advisors event: We’re grateful to our sponsors for their support. But just so you know, we designed and created the event content ourselves – it’s a completely independent and unbiased piece of work. We hope you find it useful. Do let us know.

Ever since I read Geoffrey Moore’s Future of IT paper introducing the concept of systems of engagement (published last year), I’ve had a slight uneasiness about the ongoing discourse. For a long time it was nothing I could put my finger on, but in some recent conversations about how technology can improve business agility, I finally realised what had been niggling me. In this blog I’m going to explain what I think is missing.

Systems of engagement vs. systems of record: a summary

If you’re not familiar with the narrative around systems of engagement, in brief it goes like this:

‘Systems of record’ – systems which manage core business information types and provide facilities for processing the information in place (think financial management, logistics, billing, CRM, and so on) – are no longer a source of competitive differentiation: they are a necessary condition of doing business, but because their capabilities are so commonplace their presence is merely table stakes. Increasingly, globalisation is forcing companies to focus more strongly on their core capabilities, and work more broadly and deeply with other companies and agencies to deliver value to customers. This means that communication and collaboration are more important than ever before. And this is where the concept of ‘systems of engagement’ comes in: the idea is that in this more distributed and  collaborative business environment, the ability to adopt the advanced communication and collaboration tools that people are familiar with in their home lives will become the new focus for competitive differentiation through technology in business environments.

Something’s missing

Before I go any further, I should be clear: I have nothing at all against the assertion that the business value of technology is shifting away from how well information is managed in place (by ‘systems of record’), towards how well information is communicated – between systems, people and organisations. I’m also absolutely in agreement with the assertion that social collaboration technologies have some really exciting roles to play in driving business improvement.

But based on my research and industry experience I think there’s something really important that’s omitted from the narrative that I’ve seen: and that’s to do with how the changing nature of value chains, combined with changing customer expectations, regulatory pressures and so on, is forcing a new kind of appraisal of how work needs to be supported by technology. Specifically, the key part of the ‘how’ here that we need to concentrate on is to do with the co-ordination of work.

It’s no longer enough (and in fact it hasn’t been enough for some years) to give people standalone tools (including those ‘systems of record’) and expect them to just get on with it and produce great work. The pressures highlighted above mean that to deliver great business performance, optimising work at the level of an individual’s contribution is a long way from enough; businesses need to be able to optimise how work gets done at a much larger scale.

However I’m not talking here about changes like the outcomes of the BPR programmes of the 1980s and 1990s – rigid process ‘improvements’ that ushered in massive changes to administration and operations through top-down diktat and only offered crude transactional ‘solutions’ that attempted to control information, the focus of work and change in a highly centralised fashion.

Instead we need to invest in systems and cultures that allow technology to be woven more closely into a broad range of types of work, where that work naturally happens, to help actively coordinate how work gets done between people, departments, and companies – and also, crucially, to gather intelligence and metrics that organisations can use to improve coordination and drive better business results.

Introducing ‘systems of co-ordination‘

Of course, anyone who’s been following my ramblings for a while will know that what I’m talking about is the application of Business Process Management (BPM) technologies and techniques*. These technologies and techniques, when used properly, create systems of co-ordination that enable businesses to systematically manage and improve their knowledge about ‘what works in work’ for them, and apply that knowledge directly in an operational context across people, departments and even corporate boundaries.

In his Future of IT analysis, Moore mentions co-ordination as a responsibility of systems engagement in passing, but I think that a mention in passing just isn’t enough. Given the length of time I’ve spent talking to companies that have implemented process improvement programmes and projects I might have too much bias colouring my view, but I think the value of these systems of co-ordination is just as crucial an element of business-technology strategy and investment as are systems of record and systems of engagement.

In an enterprise people don’t collaborate just for the fun of it – people collaborate to “get work done”. But how does knowledge about the best way to do work, and get the best results from work, get encoded, applied, managed and improved? Neither systems of record nor systems of engagement (at least, in terms of how the latter are painted in the discourse I’ve seen so far) have anything to offer in this respect.

Greasing the wheels between systems of engagement and systems of record

To my mind, then, the narrative needs to be refined. Businesses need to start to figure about the roles that systems of engagement should play in helping them maximise the effectiveness of business interactions, and consider how systems of engagement should play alongside systems of record: but crucially, the interface between systems of engagement and systems of record should not be a direct one. Between these two system layers – the grease between the wheels – should be systems of co-ordination.

What do you think? Am I the only one who thinks we need to look at this more closely? I’d love to hear your comments.

*There’s been a lot of debate about the limits of the applicability of some BPM technology in the face of different types of work – structured vs. unstructured, planned vs. unplanned, goal-oriented, collaborative, and so on – but I’m explicitly avoiding those details here and talking at a general level for the purposes of this piece.

Just before Christmas, TIBCO released its fourth-quarter and full-year financial results for 2011 (the intervening holiday is why I haven’t blogged about it until now).

While companies like Oracle struggle to deliver performance, TIBCO continues to march relentlessly on. And although it’s perhaps tempting (certainly in comparison to behemoths like Oracle) to paint TIBCO as a small player, its full-year revenue for 2011 was only a step away from the $1bn mark (at $920.2m). That’s 22% growth over 2010′s headline number: an impressive performance.

I mentioned back in early October that TIBCO has begun to extend its business way beyond that of its core enterprise middleware heritage, into new segments that are more line-of-business focused and which enable it to sell much more widely than its financial-services historical heartland. This seems to be continuing apace: a glance at the list of big customer wins sees a much more balanced list with significant contributions from telecoms, government, energy, manufacturing, life sciences and transport/logistics.

TIBCO’s tibbr enterprise social software platform was also called out explicitly in discussion of the results: it seems that this product – built in TIBCO’s labs rather than being acquired – is turning out to be one of the key levers that the company can use to get it into new conversations and relationships. TIBCO’s Spotfire analytics and visualisation technology is also responsible for a big chunk of the growth – as well as helping the company get into more and more deals outside of its historical industry base.

When it comes to BPM technology, ActiveMatrix BPM continues to grow but overall license sales here are a small contributor to TIBCO’s numbers. That’s also currently the case for Nimbus Partners’ business (acquired in August 2011). However BPM technology is actually core to many of TIBCO’s propositions – so over the coming year we’ll be looking for signs that this part of TIBCO’s portfolio is pulling its weight.

It’ll be really interesting to see where the company takes its business in 2012 as moves beyond the magic $1bn to the next step up in size. More acquisitions are on the horizon, I expect – both in core technology and also in industry-specific application and process areas. What do you think?

On Monday, Dallas-based online communities vendor Telligent announced its acquisition of Leverage Software in a move designed to bolster Telligent’s opportunity in this fiercely competitive market. The acquisition, which brings together two companies which both provide online communities solutions, follows quick on the heels of competitor Jive Software’s highly anticipated IPO last week, and highlights the need for the larger pure play vendors such as Telligent to capitalise on the interest around this market and stake out a more significant position for themselves in its future. In addition to the customer base Telligent is acquiring – Leverage Software powers over 250 communities serving more than a million users, with high profile customers including The Home Depot, Stanford University, HP and Hilton Hotels – the company has cited the Leverage team’s development expertise in SaaS-based solutions, user-centric design and mobile apps as significant factors in its decision. This appears to be a smart move for Telligent, feeding well into the company’s forward strategy, and reinforcing its position in the market. For Leverage Software customers, there is no immediate impact, with the new combined company pledging to continue their support, although in the longer term it is expected that the two community platforms will come together.

Clients can read our profile of Telligent’s online communities solution here.