Riveting article on Bloomberg / Businessweek about how leaders really don’t want employees to innovate. Rather: “Businesses need most of their workers to carry out their primary duties with enthusiasm and consistency,” writes Pat Lencioni”

As to how organizations should lead and execute, the article opines in two seperate areas:

“What should leaders do? Be more open to new ideas from employees? Probably not. Better yet, they should stop overhyping innovation to the masses and come to the realization that only a limited number of people in any company really needs to be innovative

As heretical as that may seem to those who want to believe that “innovation is everyone’s business,” consider that even the most innovative and creative organizations need far more people to be dutiful, enthusiastic, and consistent in their work than innovative or creative.”

If you’ve read this blog before, you’ll know that I’m all for respecting the realities of how organizations operate today and finding a more decisive and surgical approach to leveraging the benefits of open collaborative and flatter organizational structures based on performance acceleration opportunities for client organizations. So I’m not opposed to Pats overarching message that managers need to ensure focus in innovation when it comes to meeting performance goals that have been promised to shareholders.

But here’s where this thinking goes off the rails and conforms hopelessly to the status quo (or Innovation 1.0):

Innovators vs. Innovation Cultures

There’s a difference. By organizations embracing and encouraging innovation, that really doesn’t equate to every factory worker walking off the line and putting on a lab coat. That would no doubt be asinine. Building Innovation cultures come in many flavors (see this by Hutch Carpenter on the many incarnations). It really means opening up the participatory funnel on not only suggesting but more importantly, refining the good ideas and getting the kinks out. In practical terms this means getting the big brains hidden in the corners of your enterprise to contribute unique data points (validation, rebuttals, refinement, oversight) to remove risk and enrichen outcomes. Far away from the lab or mahogany row where ideas have traditionally been hatched lies two complementary flavors of talent: practical front line customer centric views (customers, support, sales, partners, marketing) as well as deep deep component level knowledge (product developers, suppliers). Both these camps bring a heavy dose of insight that can shape execution outcomes.

Balancing The bird in hand vs. Two in a Bush

Other than that visionary CEO, when’s the last time you’ve heard leaders tout their innovation wins? They generally talk about operational and revenue wins because they manage people and products (development or sales). The problem with mahogany row innovation is that those same management realities of preferred top down innovation that Pat touts, bring along another, ugly, truth. Management systems of the last 4 decades have rewarded people managers more than subject matter experts. If you manage large numbers of people you get rewarded. If you continue to remain an individual contributor that wants to contribute deep deep subject matter expertise, theses very little room for you in the leadership ranks at most organizations. The fact is that beyond long range directional moves and high level innovation requirements to get there, operational leaders often can’t sweat the details of what might be, at the cost of managing where the dollars and cents come from today. They need the best minds across the organization to come together and execute on business innovation, whilst they keep Wall Street satiated during the next earnings call.

Ideation vs. Idea Execution

Innovation cultures support execution. The germination of innovation can often be really top down directional in many cases but with the best of the best when it comes to sourcing talent across the ecosystem (customers, employees, partners and suppliers). Citing one of our own examples, were working with one of the world best known traditional software companies facing what looks like a very dark cloud computing overcast on their core bread and butter business landscape. The realization to innovate comes decisively from the top yet together were leveraging those very core assets in place today (product know how, market positioning, incumbent customer segment needs) to innovate a shift in service delivery model, market engagement and value proposition to embrace the new opportunity.

In line with what our work covers (and the byline of this blog), I was naturally drawn to this Economist book review of “The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge” by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. The book offers a reasonable approach to executing innovation that would in fact be embraced by many many leaders. This snippet of examples gets to the crux of the issue:

Nucor Corporation, a steelmaker, gives its workers bonuses if they can produce steel more efficiently. Deere & Company, a maker of farm machinery, has produced a detailed playbook on how to design new tractors.

These are distinct execution outcomes of an innovation culture – different from some notional wild west format. And I believe in sharp contrast to recent concentrated innovation efforts that were high profile failures. And beyond the few forward thinking organizations who can let innovation run loose but still reel in the big fish (for the record, I don’t have a problem with this and we work with partners and customers that live this management theory), the flavor of innovation sold by many theorists offer this often impractical mode of innovation design:

Many would-be innovators deal with the trade-off between efficiency and innovation by rejecting traditional management entirely. They repeat mantras about “breaking all the rules” and “asking for forgiveness rather than permission”. They set up skunk works (small, autonomous units with a remit to innovate) and mock the boring corporate types who write their pay-cheques. But again this is counter-productive. Mocking the corporate establishment only encourages it to starve you of resources.

In the Power of Pull by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown and Lang Davidson, we see definite data how our efforts to date (which includes how we have innovated to-date) is keeping us on track to approaching a big zero when it comes to return on assets. So I would suggest that we rethink unnecessarily top loading our ideation and as important, feasibility and execution. We need all big brains on deck to collaborate in more agile ways (read: wrap around new concepts more fluidly) and this book gives data on why it needs to be done ASAP. And if its decisive innovation examples you are looking for when success would have been a pipe dream without a well orchestrated concert of surgical business decisions, supplemented by a coalition of the brightest, there’s plenty in The New Polymath by Vinnie Mirchandani on both do’s and don’ts referencing the Telco, Healthcare, CleanTech and other business sectors.

In my assessment, in practical terms, many oftoday’s leaders have little choice but to encourage some degree of an innovation culture that allows them to test, validate, dispute and confirm large scale directional changes with a broader set of talent that transcends hierarchy. Customer and market expectations and the effects of globalization are more dynamic than ever these days and the ability to see the best innovation come through whilst still delivering results today will in fact require all hands on deck. So, as leaders, before you unleash the Kidons of innovation, make sure your differentiating between decisive innovation execution and wild west idea festivals. That disciplined approach to seeing ideas through will in big part dictate the odds of long term viability.

The innovation zealot in me felt instant disappointment today upon reading that Google Wave is no longer. The official word from Google:

The use cases we’ve seen show the power of this technology: sharing images and other media in real time; improving spell-checking by understanding not just an individual word, but also the context of each word; and enabling third-party developers to build new tools like consumer gadgets for travel, or robots to check code.

But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product, but we will maintain the site at least through the end of the year and extend the technology for use in other Google projects.

One one hand, its startling when a behemoth such as Google cannot use its deep tentacles in the developer and user community to shepherd a product to critical mass. That’s a lesson for many others that think they can win just on sheer scale and marketing wallet. It doesn’t matter if you are a Cisco or Microsoft –  today’s end user in the enterprise has more ability to vote with their clicks than they ever did.

Mike Arrington at TechCrunch suspects: “Maybe it was just ahead of its time. Or maybe there were just too many features to ever allow it to be defined properly.” That’s definitely part of it – I personally felt there was way too much happening in Wave to encourage a wholesale leap off of the email cliff.

But there’s a more important issue at play here. My sense is that the primary culprit here is lack of context.  No matter how sexy, the use case for silo’ed, dumb “un-smart” collaboration still generally goes like this:

• Think up/get notified of a process problem or event
• Remember that a bunch of tools and metaphors (email, phone, the conf room or water cooler, software) exists that can help decision facilitation and brainstorming
• Group/find the right people to collaborate
• Pick a collaboration metaphor that works for everyone
• Solve the problem
• Go back to the system of record or powers that be (a boss, a customer, a supplier etc), to deliver the outcomes.

That’s a lot of steps and frankly a lot to expect from the average business user. If you want to hear more voices on this, the comments on Lifehacker are especially enlightening. And there’s parallels to be drawn from the consumer world as well: Think about the scores of of tools and nifty web apps introduced by Robert Scoble. We rush to try them, fall in love instantly, and then proceed to forget about them, pronto. Why? Because most of them require stepping out of our daily routines or are predicated on pre built, evergreen network effects to see value.

This is a conversation I’ve had with more vendors and customers than I care to remember but its working and many of them are understanding the value of associating collaboration with performance drivers (more in a subsequent post). Organizations still need to understand how to design work processes that blend optimal process and collaboration but its a hell of a lot easier when the software choose to plays nice.

On the other hand, far too many product teams continue to pile on whiz-bang collaboration features when end users are still struggling to understand the basic applicability of these new tools to meeting their performance requirements in a better/faster/simpler way. Organizations on the other hand often have a huge gap between declaring big picture strategic collaborative intent and tool selection. It’s in that gap where the “why” and “how” gets figured out and where the magic truly happens.  Putting the onus on the user to decipher when to use enterprise 2.0 or collaboration will almost never lead to business results.

You have to give Google credit for trying and failing fast though. I had high hopes. The good news is that Google promises to inject some of Waves core technology into its other products. That hopefully will provide the necessary context that will celebrate some of the most amazing innovation that the core Wave team developed.

Ive always said that this wall between customer interaction and service, and internal collaboration is largely artificial. Though if you’ve read this blog before, you know I’m  the last one to suggest we rush to blindly institute social across the organization and barf on all things process. That simply doesn’t reflect the reality and problem sets that we seen on the ground in our consulting work with larger organizations. That said, there’s a mature, performance centric discussion that needs to happen where organizations can understand the relevancy of this shift in the customers access to information (regardless of whether they actively partake in social network activity) to your business,  and evaluate how your internal processes are wired to deal with changing  competitive dynamics in your business. Surgical and decisive. Not spray and pray.

Comments welcome, as always.

The Keynote video here:

Kunur Patel of Advertising Age covers a Forrester report that advises businesses to hang back on investing in location based social network marketing. The report says:

In a study out today, Forrester finds that only 4% of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt. Only 1% update these services more than once per week. What’s more, 84% of respondents said they are not familiar with such apps, leaving the vast majority of Americans online still in the dark about location-based apps, which have had the marketing world obsessing over them in recent months.

I’m not a user of location based networks (a great primer by Marshall Kirkpatrick if your new to this topic). So far, I haven’t seen a personal use case emerge that compels me to stop what I’m doing and declare which restaurant, gym, amusement part I’m entering. And I’ll go as far as saying that when people auto publish their location on Twitter without adding meta data (i.e. something valuable/funny about what your doing at a location), it just clutters my tweet stream.

All that said, whilst the proof is in the quantitative data, I think the resulting recommendation in this report may be short sighted. The big value driver of location based networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla is geographic density. To each user, the breadth of the service and total number of subscribers matters relatively less. What’s more important is usage in each locale by both constituencies – my social network as well as local businesses. That makes it more interesting to the user as well as to businesses aspiring to open up new marketing channels via location based networks. San Francisco and New York seem to be hot. Airports at major cities also seem to be popular locations. Concerts and other events featuring well known performers again seem to be got. So it boils down to location and good old segmentation, like any other marketing program.

Take for instance, the restaurant or most hospitality based business. The big costs are generally fixed. You’ve already bought a days worth of perishable salmon, turned on all the ovens, and secured 8 waiters for the night shift, regardless of how many patrons show up. On the flip side, the good news is that you have a finite number of seats to fill up for each dinner service.

Most consumer tools in the restaurant business, notably OpenTable, are great as a central reservation nervous system but they do little to close the gap between capacity and demand, beyond the segment of customers that plan early. That’s where location based networks can come to the rescue by attracting new customers that happen to be in the area with deals or drive repeat visits based on loyalty. If I can get deals pushed to my phone as I enter University Avenue in Palo Alto at 6pm, there’s value there. For the restaurateur, it gets her closer to covering those every hefty fixed costs.

I get that ultimately, to scale up and improve offers, total number of users matters. But to suggest that most marketers should wait is a bit too categorical for me. I suspect macro marketing principles are being applied to what is an extremely hyper local marketing value proposition. A category of marketing that’s extremely difficult and expensive and one where location based networks offer a ray of hope. Big brands such as restaurants and retail that rely on local foot traffic could really use new approaches to attract customers. And for now performance based marketing offered by location based networks might well be the a promising, economically lucrative option.

Back to that restaurant example, if your brand participates in an area where there’s high geo graphic density of location based social network users and all you need is 200 warmed seats every night, suddenly, ‘only’ a few million users on these services looks like a goldmine.

Hat tip to David Armano for the link

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Ever-Present Debate Goes On: Is Location A Business Or Feature? (networksolutions.com)
• 3 Ways to Market Your Business on Foursquare (thesearchagents.com)
• App Lets You Know When Friends Are Nearby (technologyreview.in)
• Paul Frank and Element Tap Loopt for Location-Based Incentive Programs (mashable.com)

Next week the GigaOM network hosts yet another addition of its clandestine famous Bunker Sessions. This event brings together a select group of industry thought leaders to discuss the business ramifications of a given emerging technology topic. The setting resembles a town hall format, inviting everyone to participate and share experiences. This time around the topic is ‘Future of Work: Crowd sourcing, Cloud Computing and Mobility.

I have the privilege of participating and moderating parts of the half day event. One of my sessions covers how advancements in web connectivity is mediating work and labor access. The second focuses on effects of SaaS and connectivity, particularly in the context of the application layer.

Here is a description of the event from the Bunker Sessions website:

How many times have you worked from a coffee shop or from home? Ten years ago that would have been unimaginable, technically and culturally. The easy access to broadband, mobile computing and cloud based software services is impacting the way we think about building companies. It affects the way we employ people, the meaning of talent and how employees will think about employers. The aim of this session will be to lay a groundwork for debate about the changes coming up.

Every employer institutes some element of a work life balance program as a strategic talent retention weapon or morale booster. Whilst these programs will always have a place as HR charts strategy, we’re at the start of a shift in employee expectations around mobility, workspaces and collaborative tools and technologies. This shift will trigger a change from what’s been considered point programs, to price of entry organizational capabilities that attract and energize the best talent.

Depending on your industry, some of this is happening now whilst some of it is still conceptual. But these new modes of work have business benefits as well – they’re not just a reactionary HR strategy to Gen Y expectations. Regardless of the catalyst, these changes will have an impact on operational design, HR and of course, IT.

The event is sponsored by Accenture and Orange. Speakers and panelists include:

• Fabio Rosati, CEO of Elance
• John Hagel, Chairman, Center for the Edge and Author of “The Power of Pull”
• Vinnie Mirchandani, CEO of Deal Architect Inc. and Author of “The New Polymath”
• Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower
• Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net
• Tim Young, CEO of Socialcast
• Evy Wilkins – Curator of HR & Tech SF and COO of DoYouBuzz
• Mary Hamilton – Global Lead, Workforce Technologies, Accenture Technology Labs

A few-first-come-first-serve (free) tickets are also available and I encourage you to request a pass. Email bunker@gigaom.com to make it happen.

More information on the event in this post on the GigaOM blog. See you there!

I’ve been buying computing hardware as a business customer from Dell for over 7 years now. All of our infrastructure technology as well as desktop equipment almost exclusively came from them. Servers, Printers, Laptops etc.

My experience, averaged out over this period with Dell has been a net positive. Their stuff works, the service and follow up has generally been good. A few issues such as a customer satisfaction calls at 6:30am (!?!), too many requests for equipment identification numbers after I’ve entered it into the touch tone system as I get volleyed from support rep to support rep. I can live with some of this as we don’t have reasons to call that often. And as a person, I’m generally not one to dwell unless you really get my goat.

Then a serious problem hit a few days ago where I really needed Dell to come through for me. My under-warranty hard drive was about to fail which would mean all my purchased software was about to be wiped out. So I asked Dell for replacement copies of software and the “its Microsoft’s problem” syndrome kicked in. So I went back and forth between these two ‘partners’ who’s reps had expert reasons for why the problem wasn’t theirs to solve.

During this, all I could think of is that the Dell has all the data concerning my purchase and loyalty history for seven straight years and yet, they wouldn’t budge to make this as simple as possible for me. When I mentioned to the these vendors that I have registered the software when I made the purchase (incase, the issue here was verification that I was the lawful owner), I was told, this information is captured only for future marketing purposes and that  customer support doesn’t get access to this data. Wait, my taking the time to register my software is to serve you and not me?

Please note my first comment: My experience with Dell is a net positive in spite of this. And as much as its unpopular in many circles to say you like Microsoft products, except for Vista, I really do like their stuff, personally. So this is not about these providers in particular.

The point is, CRM is a mess. Internal departments are not sharing my customer profile to appreciate my historical allegiance to the organization. OEM partners who had to collaborate to have the slightest chance at winning my business are not sharing data amongst themselves. Even when they know that keeping me as a long term customer is predicated on them both serving me equally well. As organizations, we just don’t have a handle on how to use what we already know about the customer.

As tempting it is to add to the chorus of many altruistic “CRM got it all wrong and Social CRM is here to reinvent customer interaction” or for that matter, “SCRM is strategy and not technology” (is it? or is it an execution path to established business strategy?) blog posts, Social CRM is going to accentuate the problems of CRM. The thing with SocialCRM is that it adds more customer data to CRM records when many organizations have not learnt how to act on existing data. Whist a quick look at my Twitter usage can give Dell an idea of my profile, what good will that do if organizations are not going to act on hard data they have today: How much I’ve spent with them over the years, my active registrations of software I’ve purchased, my loyalty based on the fact that I religiously buy new equipment from them every year.

So whilst we look at newly minted Gartner Magic Quadrants on Social CRM providers (Jive Software offers a copy here with registration), organizations need to understand how much house cleaning they need to do first. And unless that happens, SocialCRM only gives organizations a data migraine – more info that they don’t know what to do with.

Paul Greenberg, who sits at the pinnacle of the ‘whose who’ digerati when it comes to CRM and Social CRM has an excellent write up today about Gartner’s Magic Quadrant and the Gartner Event on Social CRM. A central point of this post is that whilst community and engagement are important and vendors to date have made solid progress, Social CRM integration with CRM to truly improve customer relationships is critical. And that nut has not been cracked yet. When the report was released a few days ago, I said to Mitch Lieberman, another SCRM thought leader on twitter:

“@mjayliebs those in the Gartner MQ #SCRM leader quadrant better have figured out lead gen in a meaningful, budget shifting way. think not”

My larger point (140 characters don’t often lend well to making larger points) was that this needs to move from community to supporting business tasks and an overall CRM initiative whether that is lead gen, or in my case, customer service and the like. In the case of my issue with Dell, everyone needed access to the same hard data (my company profile, purchase history), my probability of remaining a Dell/Microsoft customer based on my social graph , my in-warranty status on hardware and all OEM software (see that I was the legitimate owner of the software and simply wanted a replacement copy and only thanks to an in warranty failed hard drive).

We tend to think that using social media monitoring and listening systems reduces noise and lets us focus on things that matter in our customer relationships. I respectfully disagree. Until its surgically helping you execute business and process objectives more effectively, its still noise. Just squeaky clean. I asked Esteban Kolsky, a respected CRM analyst to chime in:

We have seen the positive effects that monitoring social media and acting on it in real time can have in an organization.  Even Dell, mentioned in this example, managed to earn some money in social media be leveraging real-time, social marketing.  However, that is not SCRM.  Social CRM is where the social data and the transactional data are analyzed together to create deeper insights that ever before.  Using Social data we can amplify what we know about customers by adding a sentimental, emotional layer to what we know — and that helps smart companies drive sales cycles and create better revenue models.  Are we there yet? not even close, we first need to figure out a way to integrate the socially-collected data with stored transactional data, then how to create better insights, and finally how to to act on them. Yes, it is a lot of work — but the rewards far surpass any amount of work you have to put into it.

Failing house cleaning on existing CRM design and decisive use of Social data as part of that revamp, we’ll just have glorified community forums that no doubt look far more sexier than forums of yore, but don’t mean much when it comes to tacking large scale operating and growth objectives of organizations.

The McKinsey Quarterly has this excellent (and sobering) piece on how a financial crisis can accelerate global economic activity. A central point of the article is that whilst commodities and foreign exchange are truly globalized by Adam Smith’s definition (the Law of One Price which states that when markets are fully formed, all customers can get the same item at the same price, regardless of location), labor continues to offer significant arbitrage in different parts of the world primarily due to exchange rate restrictions that don’t let true currency value adjust naturally. I quote:

But it’s also important to understand that emerging-market economies have a structural advantage that is grounded in the operation of the global economy. Saber-rattling Western trade negotiators frequently focus their attention on the “unnaturally” depressed exchange rates of countries such as China, and this is a component of the structural advantage to which I refer. But its roots run far deeper—all the way down to the fundamental issue that labor can’t be freely traded on a single global market, while capital and commodities can. Any company sourcing its production or service operations in a lower-wage emerging-market country therefore can save enormously on labor costs. That’s painful for displaced Western workers, but it’s good for the company’s profits, good for consumers in developed markets, and good for the newly minted citizens of the global economy who are working in emerging-market factories and call centers. This is a dynamic we take so much for granted that it’s easy to imagine it as a semi permanent condition that will underpin global economic development for the foreseeable future.

Lowell Bryan, the author, opens with the a sharp wake up call:

This article explains why we should consider that seeming improbability and examines the possibility that financial crises may accelerate the transition to a global economy with more balanced trade, capital flows, and consumption.

The write-up is just superb and every CEO whose senses a complacent reliance on current labor arbitrage in her organization (read: her profit estimates depend on it), should think again.

A financial crisis may well accelerate the transition towards a global economy with balanced labor costs, but there are two other factors that are in play here. I briefly covered both these during my keynote at the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Milan, earlier this month. Here goes…

First, it’s the developed nations that created the proverbial monster. As the western world sends work offshore, the standard of living and by extension cost of living in emerging markets are rising dramatically. More job opportunities means employees have negotiating power when it comes to wage increases. With rising wages we get shrinking labor arbitrage. So this can’t go on for ever. Labor prices will rise slowly but surely, at least in countries that are both quality labor pools as well as hot emerging markets.

Second, what needs to be taken into account is a phenomena that has far more immediate consequences that we work closely with our customers on, and that all leaders need to consider. In addition to balanced trade and perfect capital flows, we’re moving towards perfect engagement flows. And this will have a profound effect on globalization, financial crisis or not.

The web and now social network connectivity transcends geography and that’s obvious. From a business stand point, this means prospects and customers everywhere are fully aware of the global competencies of your organization (and that of your competitors) when it comes to innovation, product expertise, support and satisfaction.  If your Westin Hotels entering China, Yelp has already informed guests about the heavenly bed you offer in the U.S. If you’re Comcast and you’re entering Malaysia, new customers may want to get support from Frank’s superb team @Comcastcares and not the call center in Bangalore. That’s because the social web is putting fluid and deep engagement flows in place between markets, and possibly long before you even reached/scaled operations in some of these locales.

With emerging markets opening up, most organizations rushed to build locally relevant products and that was a great start. With open connectivity comes engagement and with that, comes knowledge sharing. Buyers today are much more aware of your global portfolio capabilities. So products will need to reflect not only local relevancy, but also global competency.

Customers expect the brightest customer support reps, product innovators, and subject matter experts to wrap around their innovation and support needs. Not where its the most cost effective for you, but where the best answers and experts reside across the globe. And so with or without a financial crisis and with or without your attention, engagement flows will accelerate global economic activity because the customer expects it.

How do you get there? You plan and design scalable 21st century collaborative enterprises that expose the talent and passion of:

• happy customers who can be objectives advocates of your expertise and your integrity
• sales and distribution partners who know the intimate needs of customers
• employees and suppliers who know the true power of your products…

…..where ever they might be.

Are you ready?

The flagship Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Massachusetts ended last week. I’m going to pen two posts to cover my thoughts on the achievements and challenges in the Enterprise 2.0 sector based on observations at the conference. This post covers the big (positive) shifts and the conference itself.

A quick disclaimer first: I’m on the advisory board of the Enterprise 2.0 conference.

The conference attracted a gaggle of practitioners, leading enterprise analysts and bloggers, and vendors who opined about latest techniques in collaborative approaches and technologies to improve engagement and relationships between employees, partners and customers.

(Image: JP Rangaswami / Credit: Alex Dunne)

For my part, along with colleague Oliver Marks, I co-chair the strategy and execution planning track which , like our work, is focused on identifying where collaborative approaches can accelerate workplace and process performance and on how to plan, sell, design and execute programs.

Every year the conference pushes management and engagement boundaries by introducing newer concepts, often in the face of lava-like progress on the ground. In its 4th year, my sense is that we can definitively see a tiny white light at the end of the tunnel with respect to the ultimate stamp of legitimacy – the eventual emergence of a capital and operational budget line item to build and support 21st century collaborative enterprises.

Thanks to the work of some very dedicated practitioners (there’s scores more), there’s no  doubt that the Enterprise 2.0 case studies of tomorrow are now being written. It’s a long road but these will eventually showcase more agile and fluid collaborative approaches that leverage existing process and collaborative systems and initiatives which will surface the best minds across the enterprise ecosystem to solve tough business challenges and enable effective competition.

A few large themes, and in particular order……

The Tide’s About to Rise

Tools won’t drive but they will enable. The entry of established vendors and a maturation of pure play positioning signals a decisive shift from feel-good to problem solving and growth focus.

• First, the traditional pillars of the Enterprise Software business attended and showed off their Enterprise 2.0 wares, en masse. We had platform offerings and extensions from the likes of SAP (Streamwork and Elements), Cisco (Quad), Microsoft (SharePoint 2010) and Novell (Pulse) and IBM (Lotus Connections).
• Second, proven vertical specialists such as Saba Software (Saba Live) and Success Factors (Cubetree) talked about collaborative offerings weaved into traditional talent management and workplace performance constructs.
• Third, the case for connected threads between employees, partners and customers gets stronger. Vendors such as Jive Software, Telligent and BlueKiwi offer strong platforms for customers ready to tackle multi-pronged solutions, whole hog.
• Fourth, a few horizontal platform providers woke up to the fact that they need to shove a foot into the door that leads to the process side of the house if they want to be taken seriously. Beyond experimental or tactical applications of collaborative constructs that are often void of purpose, they are moving from carpet bombing Enterprise 2.0 to launching surgical strikes. PBworks for instance announced strong collaborative wrappers to traditional CRM processes. CrowdCast latched on its predictive smarts to a known problem at every enterprise – how to turn today’s often dormant, “for the executive-brass-only” business intelligence capabilities into for-the-masses decision facilitation that helps any employee estimate the consequences of their decisions before they take action. And Socialtext introduced a beta release of what looked to be a social middleware layer that adds engagement to process.
• Fifth, those that are unapologetic about their approach to doing one thing and one thing only – simpler and better than anyone else, stuck to their story. Providers such as Socialcast and ThougtFarmer. The former continues to proudly call itself a light weight activity stream that adds much needed engagement to large, complex environments. The latter continues to innovate to gives you a far better intranet that replaces your asynchronous portal design, circa 1991.

Content, engagement and process – all in context. From a vendor offering perspective, that’s a first and must be celebrated.

Closely tied to this is another trend. Seasoned enterprise sales and marketing executives are being successfully lured to Enterprise 2.0 vendors. I spent a lot of time with them and one thing is clear: They are not adopting the party line. Rather they are channeling the passion and energy of cause driven entrepreneurs towards practical value propositions that customers will possibly care about. 

The reason I’ve led with vendor innovation here is that historically speaking, there’s a significant, practical take away from the entry of established players. The ramifications of platform and vertical process specialists betting on collaborative enterprises, means this: We’re about to see hundreds of millions of marketing dollars put to work to drive awareness and education around Enterprise 2.0, Social, Collaborative (or your jargon of fancy) forms of engagement in the workplace. Add to that, the network effect about to ensue when new and existing ecosystems around these vendors (Strategy Consultants, SI’s, ISVs, Resellers) start to articulate solutions to business problems for their customers based on these innovations.

This rising tide will lift all boats and likely cement a stable foothold for Enterprise 2.0 in the application stack (a big caveat to this that I will cover in a subsequent post). The technology may come from your process vendor, or from a pure play. Regardless the programmatic spend to realize business value will need its own budget.

None of this means that customers will be guaranteed performance acceleration or that smaller vendors will achieve instant stardom. This level of exposure may well highlight some of the rudderless propositions afforded around the altruistic value of E 2.0 that seasoned customer executives will instantly balk at. Dennis Howlett covers this with great insight on his ZDNet blog. And I’ve written before about the risk of the E2.0 marketplace facing the same fate as portal vendors. That continues to be a genuine possibility.

But one thing is certain: the Enterprise 2.0 message will now have far, far deeper tentacles into mahogany row. That’s good for big platform players as well as their pure play counterparts that don’t have the budgets to educate as many buyers as they would like to, on the value and promise of Enterprise 2.0. Many large buyers don’t allow single source deals and so, RFPs will often have to cast a wider net and as a consequence, expose pure play innovation in the marketplace

Distributed Customer Stories Beyond the Obvious

Most of the case studies to date have been skewed towards either Hi-Tech or Professional Services (consultants, agencies, etc) organizations. What’s unsettling about this to me is that neither are strong sample sets to extrapolate a credible assessment of wide scale acceptance across other industry sectors. I’m not in any way suggesting that it’s been easy going for orgs in hi-tech or services, but relatively speaking, hi-tech is traditionally an early adopter of technology enabled innovation and so its natural that a lot of Silicon Valley-esque organizations have jumped in first. In the case of Professional Services, knowledge and expertise is itself the end product. And so making the case that finding better ways to surface and reuse knowledge can more directly improve margins, if done correctly. Two very strong drivers to give E2.0 a shot. Again, some of these are my customers, and at others, I personally know internal champions who are banging their heads against the wall with adoption and cultural issues.

All that said, relatively speaking, what we’ve been missing all along are strong, tangible case studies from other sectors that are not early adopters or don’t naturally see a direct link to the bottom line. Many of these are extremely successful organizations in their markets but from a collaboration standpoint, some are still evaluating SharePoint 2007.  But that’s begun to change. We see it in our work and we finally saw a respectable number of case studies and customer stories from companies in other sections. Examples are YUM! Brands (restaurants), Harvard Business Review (publishing), NASA (government), Thomson Reuters (financial media), Vanguard (financial services) and Abbot Labs (life sciences) that made great presentations on their strategic uptake on open, collaborative constructs to drive performance.

Articulating the Business Case

A seemingly less critical point but one that I think is extremely important. This time around, customers were far more articulate when describing the inefficiency or limitations of existing processes and transactive designs before jumping into the promise of collaborative constructs. Enterprise 2.0 is often labeled as a solution looking for a problem and for good reason. In two customer panels that I moderated on Customer Networks and HR and Workplace performance, practitioners stated succinct, large scale business inefficiencies and competitive and market economics factors that have compelled their organizations to consider new ways of conducting business. These practitioners have been rooted in a structured process laden world over the last decade or two and spoke with authority when it comes to articulating what’s wrong first before gushing at what can be so right with Enterprise 2.0.

Where some organizations/departments have the luxury of being led by the likes of John Chambers (Cisco), Lem Lasher (CSC) and Brad Smith (Intuit) who naturally consider collaborative enterprises to be a necessarily utility to compete effectively and often without ROI prerequisites, most look for far stronger, tangible business case justifications from the get go. I’ve seen my customers in both camps, but there’s more customers who look for a strong articulation of what’s wrong with how things are done today and a seasoned justification to try a new approach. And we saw this maturity of critical business justification at least to the extent that an executive can’t afford to not listen to cause and effect arguments. That’s a huge step forward. 

The Definitive Watering Hole for the 21st Century Enterprise

The point that often gets lost in the midst of constructive criticism is that we have a strong physical platform with the Enterprise 2.0 conference to compliment digital and often disconnected conversations on Twitter and the blogs to help each other. As important, the conference offers a vehicle for attendees to share suggestions and for organizers to respond with solutions the next time around. There’s always a yearning from attendees to see more case studies, to see less vendors and consultants on stage and I think that’s legitimate.

Honestly, I don’t personally have a categorical objection to vendors presenting on the keynote stage. The reality is that vendors are no different from the rest of us in one particular aspect: They also share a passion and vision for a better way to conduct business and are putting their money where their mouth is, every day. Unfortunately one too many vendor keynote speakers launched demos where they should have taken the allocated 20 minutes to share industry vision and big market and customer problems that need tackling. It’s implied that their offerings address these challenges. What we largely got was 1.0 marketing to a 2.0 crowd. A big opportunity was lost to level with the rest of the community by offering new pathways to value and by inspiring the collective. These were in sharp contrast to keynotes from the likes of JP Rangaswami, Professor Andrew McAfee, Vinnie Mirchandani and others.

But we also saw more senior executives and mangers from the buy side present or join panels, this time around. I evaluated last year’s event by looking at the degree of practitioner focus and gave it a thumbs up. This year, the conference offered an all day Adoption track chaired by the able Susan Scrupski that gave practitioners significant leeway to design their own day long workshop, panels and sessions. So the conference built on last years practitioner centric efforts.

The conference is now in the early stages of catering to the entire Enterprise 2.0 life cycle: Credibly articulating the business case for layering in a collaborative backbone to enrichen process, understanding the tools, applications and platforms, getting adoption and tactical planning right, and holistically looking at interaction between customers and employees. With the help of a strong cadre of instructors and track chairs including Mike Gotta, Irwin Lazar, Tony Byrne, Oliver Marks, Susan Scrupski, Rachel Happe , Dion Hinchcliffe, Alistair Croll and Larry Cannell.

Whilst still consultant/analyst heavy, the conference is also become a clearing house for not only customer success stories but about the journey, as was made evident by over 30 customer stories presented on the keynote stage, in panels as well as in session talks.  Kudos to TechWeb and in particular the management, sales, marketing and operational teams for their flawless organization of the event itself.

Some Must Read Posts on the Event

There’s a lot of blog posts and media coverage offering up excellent opinion on the conference and state of Enterprise 2.0 from the likes of Oliver Marks, Thomas Vander Wal, Bertrand Duperrin and Nigel Fenwick.  I’m still digesting and will expand on these in my next post. But if your looking for the best blow by blow coverage, that comes from V Mary Abraham, Bill Ives and Patti Anklam. (please comment if I missed anyone and I’ll update)

What Comes Next:

It wasn’t all peachy. In a subsequent post, I’ll try and cover some of the following items that I suggest we deal with, pronto.

• We’re still lacking adequate operational metrics alignment to be taken more seriously.
• Addressing cultural nuances is certainly an important success factor. But we’re hiding behind cultural arguments as the universal culprit, far more than we rightfully should.
• The millennial discussion is mostly without substantial evidence and downright asinine.
• There’s a giant disconnect between today’s customer expectations and the ability of employees to fulfill these expectations. I covered this in my keynote at the International Forum in Milan week before last, and Ill try to add insights from others, based on my discussions.
• Unnecessary complexity added to design frameworks and to toolsets which, will only overwhelm potential customers.

On a personal note, this is the one event in the year that I look forward to most. And it did not disappoint. I chatted with lots of old pals into the wee hours of the morning, and had the good fortune to meet people who visit this blog and to thank them for taking the time to read and engage. Some in the community use this platform to genuinely bond once a year and to graciously share experiences, lessons learned and to celebrate the work of everyone involved. And you can’t put a price on that.

I almost missed 2 very important social events when I was in Bombay earlier this year. One of these with my childhood pals that I don’t get to meet unless I’m visiting. Boy would that have sucked.

Why? Because I don’t carry a Blackberry. And by extension, don’t use BBM – RIMs Instant Messaging Service for its Blackberry Phones. (great primer here on BBM, btw)

What is BBM?

For those of you (like me) who live on the iPhone and are not BBM users, its Blackberry’s IM client that lets you engage with other BBM users on Blackberry devices. You can friend one another, create groups and share pictures and videos. There’s millions out there that don’t exchange Skype and Gtalk handles. They exchange their BBM handle.

What gained traction as a way to bypass costly SMS, BBM is now the preferred mode of text based communications amongst GenY-ers, team members and groups of friends. That’s how you arrange drinks at the local pub, partake in American Idol gossip and collaborate with teams at work. Think of it as Twitter with group functionality + a (very) light weight Yammer / SocialCast for business interaction. But all mobile, no character limits,  always on and in real time.

Here’s a short Video

Apple recently filed a patent for messaging called iGroup that enables Apple to command control over specific social networking metaphors. Here’s a short summary from the AppleBlog:

An interesting patent of Apple’s relating to a social networking app surfaced recently. Dubbed iGroups, the app aims to solve the pitfalls of traditional social networks, like Facebook, that require users be a member before being able to participate. Instead, iGroups creates a virtual social network based on proximity.

The thing is while Apple’s focus, for the most part, has been on hardware + data / applications RIM is quietly giving the rest of the world hardware + participation.

Threat: Mobile only folks

Granted that the Blackberry is no iPhone when it comes to overall experience but Apple faces the threat of being beaten at a game it invented: couple hardware with seriously useful software software to create simple, unmatched experiences.

Whilst the webs proliferation in the west started on a PC, there’s tens of millions of people out there outside the western world that skipped the web on a PC for the most part and went straight to a phone. Wireless access in these highly mobile parts of the world meant get a more powerful smart phone as opposed to a PC. These folks are not tethered to iTunes on their laptops, and use SMS as a primary form of text based interaction. Facebook, if at all, is experienced over the mobile phone but the primary interaction is conversations (as opposed to data access and even sharing). Conversations around where to hang out tonight, or debriefing after a sales pitch – all done via BBM and on their mobile device.

This group of people also have little appreciation for the App Store and all that it has to offer. Communicating with people they know takes precedence over consuming data and applications on a mobile device. And so iPhone apps that the rest of us are so very mesmerized by take a back seat. The network wins.

Apple needs to stem this land grab and stem it fast. Communication networks built off of Blackberry to Blackberry interaction are super sticky – as sticky as the networks many of us have created on Facebook. And that’s hard to replicate.

Opportunity: The gaping hole that Facebook leaves

Many digital socializers, especially GenY-ers using the desktop web are either just baffled by Facebooks shifting privacy policies, get disapproving stares at the office when they fire up Facebook or couldn’t turn down mom when she be-friended them.  Also there’s nothing instant about Facebook. Its far too asynchronous, party because the metaphor still very much looks like this: post > wait > receive > wait > react. And its not set up to create quick groups that can converse on a social or business topic and disband.  That’s the missing metaphor that represents a very common interaction amongst a lot of people. Whilst Twitter works well to consume broadcast from magazines and Aston Kutcher, it remains gobbldygook for those newbies looking to converse. BBM in contrast, has this interaction metaphor locked up, for now.

Business Implications

Most of us use one mobile device for both personal and business communication and that’s a Blackberry for many many users. Whilst a plethora of Enterprise microblogging vendors duke it out to become the ‘engagement system of record’ with features on their desktop, web based apps and lighter weight mobile siblings, BBM may well be the most convenient and killer Enterprise 2.0 app for the mobile masses. Ofcourse there’s a lot more to business collaboration than engagement, but for many, this might be just the missing component that compliments their existing process and document collaboration investments.

Enterprises don’t buy what’s best. They buy what’s good enough. BBM is a perfect example of light weight collaboration that’s always on, always with you, designed for mobile, wired into your company contacts folder, and with groups functionality to host private conversations.

Ofcourse, Apple is Apple and its highly likely that when they do come out with an alternative to BBM it will re-define messaging in some way or another. And that might well be the basis for the iGroup patent. That said, we’ve entered a world where The Network is the ultimate resource. And that can well be a powerful powerful antidote to any remarkable design Apple comes up with.

Related Posts:

Lee Provoost: Generation Y and the iPhone-Blackberry dilemma  http://ow.ly/1S9wY

Next month I travel to Milan to speak at the 3rd International Forum on Enterprise 2.0.  A premier event on next generation enterprises and the processes and technologies that will power them, this event attracts business and technology executives across Europe and respected thinkers, advisors and practitioners that play a role driving business performance at leading organizations.

There’s some excellent content on tap at this event. The agenda is packed with purpose driven sessions around Marketing, HR and Innovation showcasing real world, practical experiences on applying new, more current techniques to performance.

Keynote

The conference has a great line up of keynotes and speakers including Andrew Gilboy – Oracle and Emanuele Scotti – Open Knowledge, Hutch Carpenter – Spigit and Verna Allee of Value Networks.

I will be keynoting the conference on the implications of the social customer on today’s organizational design and infrastructure. As important, the need for collaborative enterprise design to engage customers, partners and employees, to cater to this new customer dynamic.  I hope to help frame the discussion for executives as they prepare to respond to these changes in customer dynamics.

Workshop

In addition, I’ll do a workshop on the first day that provides a primer on the process from Idea to Launch. This 4 hour workshop will include instructional content, do’s and don’ts, pitfalls to avoid, and how to align the promise of open, collaborative constructs with discrete performance goals. One particular area where we will go deep is the pitch – in addition to instructional content, we’ll moderate a panel of vendor CEOs that pitch the most skeptical customers on a daily basis on how newer collaborative approaches can move the needle. We’re thrilled to have leaders at Telligent, Broadvision and Blue Kiwi join the panel. A special thank you to them for giving back to the larger Enterprise 2.0 community by sharing insights and practical knowledge. Finally, we will also involve practitioners that will tell their story on how they launched Enterprise 2.0 initiatives at their organizations.

More about the conference

The conference has three primary themes as stated on the website:

• Inside the organization: Intranet 2.0, Community Management, Human Resources 2.0, Social Learning, Organizational Network Analysis, IT Governance

• Outside the organizations: Social CRM, Sales Communities, Social Media Marketing, Social Media Monitoring

• Innovation: Idea and Innovation Management, Crowdsourcing and Idea generation, Prediction markets

An excerpt from an interview conducted by ComputerWorld (translated from Italian) with Emanuele Quintarelli, one of the organizers of the event:

Among the more than 40 actions to point out the contribution of Hutch Carpenter on 3C innovation to Sameer Patel on the use of collaborative approaches to improve business performance and ultimately the joint submission by Mark Tamis and Esteban Kolsky on how to compete by building a business client-centered. In addition to experts and also indicate that twelve managers of major Italian companies will go up on stage to confront so candid and transparent about the real risks and opportunities of the introduction of similar approaches in business.

More on the conference, the esteemed list of speakers, and agenda here. 

Hope to see you there!