It’s a natural tendency for this to often be an antagonistic relationship But where this gets productive is when IT starts to understand the larger trends in changing expectations of prospects and customers and the LoB is often dealing with especially with the advent of the public social web. As you start to peel those layers away, one by one, you start to see how IT can not only support but lead on the task of supporting and serving today’s increasingly social, sometimes vocal but definitely informed prospect and customer.

We will probably ruffle some feathers but I think we’ll leave attendees with a few new ideas about how to play this out. I’ll update this post with details of the push back I receive and what the audience teaches me.

Oh, off topic but if you’re attending SAPPHIRE, come ask me about “Project Robus”.

You want to take massive causes or opportunities and humanize them down to a single unit of “Human Computational Threshold” (which I think should be a standard hi-tech marketing measure in this current climate of buzzword bingo, BTW), that’s how you do it.

You can keep going on about the impact of climate change and the virtues of sustainability, but nothing’s more effective than winnowing it down to a tiny digestible unit – a burrito in this case, to get you to understand what you can do about it as an individual.

Cloud has it – its called SaaS apps for the enterprise that touches users. Or simple elegant tools such as Dropbox and Expensify and Foodspotting that distill the essence of cloud computing down to 2-3 simple  but ridiculously useful capabilities. These apps humanize the cloud and get us to appreciate the value of this massive opportunity that otherwise would only appeal to CFOs lured by Opex benefit.

Social Business doesn’t. But I wrote a whole post about it.

You know who else needs its burrito? Big Data, that’s who.

The opportunity from Big Data (of which social data is a part) is gigantic. Even that doesn’t do it justice. But Big Data needs its unit of human computational threshold so it appeals to the billions that can benefit from it.

Me? I’m waiting for Big Data to become Tiny Insights. Tangible bites of intelligence that help me make better decisions and improve outcomes. Make no mistake: Tiny Insights doesn’t mean tiny value. Tiny insights inform massive decisions for business or important decisions for individuals.  Alert me when I walk into a restaurant that just got panned consistently across many social networks, or an employee I follow on my enterprise social network who might be able to help with my presentation for next week, or a real time reset of which component supplier is best suited  the minute my production requirements or S&OP assumptions change. There’s very little of this discussion and too much chest thumping.  We need to make billions of consumers, and end users of enterprise wares give a hoot.

Constellation Research Analyst Neil Raden made a similar, hilarious point on Twitter about the careless use of Big Data, saying: “I heard #Bigdata found Jimmy Hoffa”. That sums up the hubris.

Big Data provides the source to be processed. But until we start talking about tiny hidden insights delivered fast (in-memory), in context (apps), where I need it (device agnostic/mobility) with my social/enterprise network to help me parse it , and in a way that shields me from the enormity of the data size and complex behind the scenes computational effort, Big Data as its currently touted may well be one gigantic opportunity that progress left behind.

So to those of you on the Big Data wagon I say, órale vato. Find Big Data’s beef burrito.

Speaking at a bunch of events this year. Here’s my calendar as it stands right now.

• Panel: El Dorado Ventures Portfolio CEO Summit, Cordevalle, CA. April 27th.
• Keynote: Social Business Summit, London. 31st May.
• Keynote and Closing FireSide Chat: WebCOM Montreal. 16th May.
• Social Business Forum, Milan: 4th June.
• Keynote: Defrag, Boulder. Nov 14-15.

And of course, I’ll be doing something at SAPPHIRE NOW / ASUG Annual Conference 2012.

There’s a few more in the works and I’ll update as they firm up.

So looking forward to charting how we put the business back in Social Business along with a number of industry colleagues at each of these events. It’s time.

Come say hi if you’re attending!

I’ve accepted the role at SAP for Global Vice President, Enterprise Collaboration and Social Software Solutions.

In the fall of 2011 I began to chart the next chapter of my career. I’ve had an amazing run over the last 10 years. Since 2002, well before the dawn of social networking, I’ve had the chance to lead teams that managed large scale transformation initiatives for some of the most well known organizations to blend process, intelligence and collaborative approaches and technology, to accelerate performance. As we saw the entry of new social and collaborative technologies in 2006 and the advent of the social customer, an opportunity arose to help articulate why connected enterprises matter, why it’s finally within reach and how to get the Business part right in Social Business. Along with my colleague, the super smart Oliver Marks, I got to help organizations execute on their business objectives under the Sovos brand.

Now it’s time for me to get in front of what I think the next incarnation of people-centric customer, partner and employee experiences will entail.

Many of you are familiar with my strand of social in the enterprise, as seen on this blog, client work and on stage at industry events. As I wrote last week, the first innings of social in the enterprise is over. Those organizations that are pre-disposed to experimentation have done so. And a good many have seen the light through the work of some amazing practitioners and leaders who have given social and collaborative constructs a shot. Yet at a majority of organizations, executives who generally invest in concepts and technology only when they easily see direct and obvious impact on performance objectives haven’t yet had their “aha” moment. And if they were tempted by the promise around social business, many are still looking for that bridge that practically takes them from a world designed around structured process to one that gets them to blend collaboration at every step of business tasks and processes and in a way that drives revenue and margin, lowers cost and mitigates risk.

Why SAP

My assessment of what it would take to execute this – specifically, aligning core business activity, data, process and exceptions with the right people and insights at the right places, quickly winnowed down the list of organizations that could most logically make this transition a reality for customers. With a pedigree in core business process, business intelligence and industry solutions, and a decisive go forward strategy that now includes real time processing, cloud and mobility, SAP’s product and solution portfolio is one of the few that affords the needed canvas to improve how we engage with customers and partners and how work really gets done internally. The right design will come from the proper infusion of collaborative constructs right where business context emerges for individual users at every customer – a) not just inside or along side but across applications that power complete each business activity, b) when and where real time business intelligence emerges, and finally, 3) at the right (device agnostic) points of consumption. Each of these contextual elements are core to SAP’s portfolio of offerings today – both directly and via its partners.

My work in this market over the years has given me a clear sense of what a product portfolio needs to offer to deliver what I describe above. And as important, the kind of program design follow-through to make sure customers can truly change how they connect employees with each other and to customers and partners. I’ve got a superb team that I’ve already started to get to know over the last few days. I’ll say more about our plans over the weeks and months to come.

Thank You

Over the last 6 months, I’ve made some big bets personally on what I think the future of social in the enterprise will really entail and I discussed this with a range of folks. Some helped validate my thinking on the overall software market at the early stages and others when it came time to pull to trigger. You know who you are. I can’t thank them enough for taking the time. I will post separately on this in the next few days.

Finally, I want to thank John Schweitzer, SVP, SAP, Sanjay Poonen, President, SAP and Chakib Boudhary, SAP’s Chief Strategy Officer. Each created a very open environment that allowed for both radical and practical thinking with respect to what can be, as we talked about my potential role and SAPs ambitions.

The enterprise software business is witnessing formulaic changes that will play out over the next decade and beyond. Today’s hot topics may well be SaaS, (big) data, social, mobile and whatever’s next. But fundamentally, it boils down to this: Employees, Partners and end Customers of software buyers are looking for a more meaningful, networked experience that positively impacts their 9-5 work day. Traditional measures of per seat and per user subscription will remain but what’s really underway in both the consumer and enterprise world is a race to power every hour of the end participant in a way that resembles how they want to work or play, yet ensuring meaningful outcomes. Looked at this way, you can easily see how traditional enterprise software caters to a fraction of the end users interaction needs between 9-5. The rest of that 9-5 time often involves substandard and fragmented engagement to meet stated goals. All of this means that the total addressable market for software is far larger that previously imagined and more importantly, those of us focused on purpose-driven systems of engagement will end up powering the majority of our customers, employees and partners time online.  It’s this coming change that really excites me to get to work.

The formal announcement from SAP is here.

News articles by Dennis Howlett, Paul Greenberg, Vijay Vijayasankar and Alan Lepofsky on the announcement.

On to the next chapter. I’m so, so stoked.

————————————————————————

P.S Going forward, the content here won’t change all that much. I actually plan to write even less about technology and more about what made this blog popular in the first place – how social and collaborative concepts can accelerate operational and financial performance.

P.P.S I’m a cook and white asparagus is a Walldorf specialty. -)

In the context of internal collaboration specifically, this report from Charlene Li at The Altimeter Group illustrates just how insufficient the progress has been for general purpose social business in the enterprise. And when you benchmark the technology category of social business software (that includes employee, customer and partner engagement) against say CRM, or BI or ERP, its even more striking how nascent the sector is compared to its predecessors. Yes, I get its about people before technology but tech spend is a good indicator of rubber-meets-the-road market uptake, when it’s all said and done.

I recommend you give the data a good look to see what’s working and what’s not. Some big takeaways for me:

1. We’re still miss firing on what should be big wins, if social business is all that:

The report shows that table-stakes benefits of “social” such as expertise finding and the like are not showing up as runaway successes. To be fair, there is realized benefit but given all the options in Fig 5, you would expect to see at least some categories get a “significant impact” rating, six years after Professor Andrew McAfee coined the term Enterprise 2.0 which laid the groundwork for new approaches to connect enterprises.

2. We’re still asking the wrong questions: Casting Social Business as everyones problem makes it no ones problem. There isn’t a single CEO I’ve spoken with (or that you can speak with – I bet you) who would argue that his/her organization should not be collaborative or should not be innovative. But that nebulous intention is really hard to crystalize and delegate without baselining established strategic goals as yardsticks of success when it comes to becoming collaborative or innovative. Promises made to Wall Street come in the form of revenue, earnings and predictability of forward success. Yet we’re still looking at things such as “Encourage Sharing”, “Enable Action”, “Knowledge Capture” and “Empowerment” as end value points via social business. The report does a good job of highlighting what the typical organization considers to be value drivers of “social business” but I think thats exactly the issue here.  If practitioners can’t draw connectors between strategic and tactical objectives and how social networks facilitate execution, end users and executives won’t get experience the needed aha moment.

3. No Context? No Collaboration: The thing that nags me the most about this is that we have an incomplete skill set involved in defining, evangelizing and executing what “social business” (or what ever term you use), entails. No question that we need solid practitioners and community managers to tie it all together and we have some amazing folks in the community without whom all of this would be a non starter. But context points that spark collaboration in the first place lie deep inside functional units – the folks that bring revenue in, ship products, serve customers, build components, close the books. The messaging and potential sources of value presented just won’t keep these people up at night. Those getting work done need to be involved in crafting the value proposition as much as we need “social experts” in the mix so we force the topic of context at the outset and then understand how people, data and process come together.

4. Tactical Measurement:

Altimeter Group Social Business Research

Look, there have been changes in the public social landscape and we need to change what we measure to some degree when it comesto catering to this new social, vocal customer. But beyond that, performance metrics are in place for managers and business units and we need to support those. Figure 6.1 presents a host of tactical metrics that managers are subsumed in that the business just doesn’t care about, in and of themselves. Each of these programatic health measures need to be casted as ways to meet metrics that have been promised to the market. “More and faster collaboration across the company, frequency of use, lowering reliance on email” are hardly things you’re going to hear at your annual shareholders meeting.

This blog is precicely about the value of connecting our emplotees, customers and partners. Obviously, I’m a believer. But lets call a spade a spade if we want to get this right.

I hope this report will serve as a wake up call to many. The first innings of social in the enterprise is over. Those organizations that like to experiment have done so. Beyond those, a small number of executives who innately believe that collaboration is absolutely critical to execution have put their weight behind these programs. Industry colleague Dion Hinchcliffe has been documenting examples of both kinds. But there’s massive untapped opportunity out there to revise the value proposition for those numbers-driven businesses who will want to understand how all of this enhances what they’ve invested in for the last decade. Until then, this massive bucket of executives will treat “social business” as another Mickey Mouse program until they see how it matters to revenue increase, cost reduction and risk mitigation.

On a related note, ZDNet’s Dion Hinchcliffe and Dennis Howlett are going to go to battle on this very topic of value realization tomorrow (Tuesday).

I really recommend that you take 3 minutes to read his post for proper context but here’s the quote that summarizes his stance:

Amidst these three mega-trends [Mobile, Cloud, Big Data] sits a lynchpin. The developers know it because they’re building. The buzzword maniacs haven’t caught it yet, and they may never (we can only hope), but it’s there. That lynchpin: APIs. APIs tie together the mega-trends in a fundamental and unalterable way. APIs are the lingua franca of the new wave of enterprise development.

So, as these three mega trends (and our super top-secret, don’t tell the marketers, lynchpin) converge, we’re seeing one overriding trend: the opportunity, means and necessity for the developer (engineer, architect) to play the central role in building and rolling out new enterprise IT capabilities.

He’s right. I wanted to build on two specific repercussions or elephants in the room in this discussion around what convergence means for the enterprise developer community:

• Changing Customer Expectations: Cloud and SaaS have once again started to move the buying pendulum to a decentralized model and towards the Line of Business buyer. And whilst its way early in the enterprise setting, mobile is threatening to move the buying power even further way towards the end participant. Enterprise developers need to understand what selling and supporting into the Line of Business and appealing to the end participant means. Whilst IT might have hired a traditional analyst firm to do a feature shoot out or looked at a Quadrant, the Line Of Business will want an integrated result of cloud, big data and mobile that speaks to specific business scenarios and use cases. So if enterprise software developers were to build competing products, feature parity is price of entry. You can’t shy away from really really understanding usage models and design thresholds. That’s a big cultural shift at least for those developers who’ve been supporting IT – which includes most on and offshore SIs.
• Monetization: In my mind, each of these three technology trends (on their own) will be on the fast track to commoditization and will risk facing the same fate as did most social business software plays. The magic and the premiums will come from contextual application of this innovation and as Eric says, smart integration. Take storage for example: Dropbox as storage without document and device sync is commodity. Box.net as storage without document and device sync and collaboration is commodity. Apple’s iCloud as storage without ubiquitous local and iTunes media sync across devices is commodity. And Google Drive (as discussed here in Ben Kepes’ CloudU community) is also a commodity business not worth getting into had it not been for Google’s services such as Google Apps, Piccasa, and its media and unified communication capabilities under the Google Plus brand. The premiums from big data, mobile access and cloud comes from  a) dynamically assembled media and content, and interpreted data in the cloud, b) available wherever you need to consume and / or collaborate and c) insanely focused and simple interfaces to complex backends. That’s what enterprise developers are looking at if they really want to be on the money making side of these innovations.

These are the elephants as I see it.

Side Note/Disclaimer: Eric puts on mind-bending summits (he calls them conferences but I keep telling him that that doesn’t do justice to the content he produces). I’ve been an advisor to Defrag and  I’ve been privileged to keynote Defrag before and will be doing so again, later this year. But this is about Glue.

The days of leading countries or companies via a one-way conversation are over,” says Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN and the author of the book “How.” “The old system of ‘command and control’ — using carrots and sticks — to exert power over people is fast being replaced by ‘connect and collaborate’ — to generate power through people.” Leaders and managers cannot just impose their will, adds Seidman. “Now you have to have a two-way conversation that connects deeply with your citizens or customers or employees.

Netflix had a one-way conversation about raising prices with its customers, who instantly self-organized; some 800,000 bolted, and the stock plunged. Bank of America had a one-way conversation about charging a $5 fee on debit cards, and its customers forced the global bank to reverse itself and apologize. Putin thought he had power over his people and could impose whatever he wanted and is now being forced into a conversation to justify staying in power. Coca-Cola repackaged its flagship soft drink in white cans for the holidays. But an outcry of “blasphemy” from consumers forced Coke to switch back from white cans to red cans in a week. Last year, Gap ditched its new logo after a week of online backlash by customers.

Tom calls it a problem of one way conversations. He’s spot on. And he cites kerfuffles that many of us are all too familiar with.

This morning, I dipped into the Social Business Atlanta Summit twitter stream, organized by the super smart Brent Leary. I encourage you to take a look at the hashtag on Twitter but this comment made by GetSatisfaction Executive Jeff Nolan and syndicated by Paul Greenberg (both fellow Enterprise Irregulars), stuck with me:

@pgreenbe: #socialbizatl @jeffnolan in last 30 yrs, customers were tangential to the process; now they are at the core of it all”

So how do you have a two way conversation as Tom suggests and move customers to the core, as Jeff says?

You do it by being connected to your customers in the public forum and on your customer communities, of course. But also making sure that your employees and partners are as wired internally to collaborate across the entire engagement chain. The kinds of pickles that Tom describes above emanated from different spark points across the organization. Sometimes the root cause is in marketing, other times its a product design issue and other times it could be a logistics problems. All these constituencies need to be connected to the customer and to each other if were going to get anywhere close to a two way conversational model and putting their needs “at the core of it all”.

Neither that two way conversation nor customer centricity will come from your traditional ERP or HR or CRM systems, alone. It comes from having a collaborative fabric (and social software) that transcends the work done in your process systems and data served by your performance and analytics systems by connecting people who are silo’d by a functional organizational design. Today’s customer expects us to break old notions of front and back office, or primary and support activities made famous by Michael Porter’s value chain framework that most large organizations subscribe to. SuperVALU is doing it, Toshiba is doing it, Target is doing it, Spotify and WebTrends are doing it. The list goes on.

To be clear, I’m not advocating that you throw these process systems out. They are your systems of record. I’m saying you need to cut through them with people engagement layers.

Coca Cola didn’t turn the cans from red to white because they were bored – they thought the customer would like it. But they didn’t tap the network effectively to test their hypothesis. Similarly, Bank of America probably thought that 5 bucks, the price of a morning venti Mocha, won’t matter. It did and the jokes on them for not testing the idea first which is dead simple in todays socially networked customer world.

As executives trying to understand what information flow and people connectivity in the 21st century means means to you and your organizational performance objectives, its the very concepts around social and collaborative approaches that become the central design theme for such-directional connectivity to keep your employees, customers and partners in synchronicity.

I’m not a fan of overtly revolutionary / FUD’ish tones on why you will be forced to embrace social and collaborative ways of work. True – it sometimes takes catastrophes to give us the needed kick in the rear to change how we organize and share.  9/11 was one such catastrophe that made governments re-think how they share intelligence. And for many Heads of State and politicians, WikiLeaks was another that also led to design change. But it doesn’t have to be so. Get ahead of it and start understanding how traditional process technology has shackled knowledge, data and content into silos and how simple engagement platforms can free the best talent up, to rally around business objectives and customer needs.

The snafus that Tom describes occurred not because of the social web. But Tom’s post supports the notion that the customer / purveyor contract has changed thanks to the social web which gives prospects and customers organized power to voice opinion and that we need to adapt accordingly.

His list of public, and even market-moving failures above, will sadly remain a dynamic one. So enhance your process-laden one way communication at customers, with conversation synchronicity across customers, partners and employees so you’re not in his sequel post any time soon.

Comments rolling in on Google Plus, here.

Update: This post was referenced in Harvard Business Review by N ilofer Merchant who re-visits the relevancy of Porter’s model, given today’s emerging need to create connected enterprises.

Lenny wanted to dig deeper into Social Business and get into the ‘why’s’ and ‘how’s’. We talked about a decisive approach to connecting customers, employees and partners and covered a number of topics including:

• The implications of todays increasingly social, vocal social customer on business and why Social CRM matters to customers and to the sales enablement process.
• Why building and connecting vibrant employee and partner engagement networks is imperative to get customer relationship management in the 21st century, right.
• How analytics will play a role.
• And finally, how organizations can get started.

Conversations with Industry Innovators Series with Lenny Liebmann.

6000+ faithful Lotus attendees and 100s of Lotus Partners got fed IBM’s ebusiness equivalent play for the 21st century. Simply put, that they are betting their entire portfolio of collaboration solutions, both old and new on Social Business.

One fat caveat before I put my thoughts here. Connections Next, IBM’s enterprise social software offering that was the star of its presentation won’t be here until later this summer. But given the play it got at Lotusphere 2012 and IBMConnect, it’s too large a bet on IBM’s Collaboration portfolio to not consider seriously.

I was kindly invited to IBMConnect, the section of this conference for IBM’s business customers, to speak about what customer relationship building truly entails in the 21st century. It was great speaking to an outside-the-beltway audience about tectonic changes in customer expectations thanks to the social web and how we need to wire our customers, employees and partners together to deliver on these new expectations. In insider baseball lingo – how Social CRM and Employee Collaboration are interdependent. The deck is here on Slideshare.

There are some great posts out there that have that covered feature rundowns very well. Take a look at excellent reviews by Mike Fauscette,  Daryl K Taft, David Carr and Steve Lohr for starters. And Luis Benitez has a comprehensive list, here.

These are my key takeaways on the business viability of IBM’s social and collaborative offerings.

Connections Next embraces the “me-web”: Fundamentally, it all boils down to this: IBM in my opinion has made great strides towards understanding access to and the interplay between content, data, process and human connection that gets us on the path of social finally meaning business. The workplace has long been imprisoned in a systems-web where you have to work separately with a bunch of disconnected data, process, content and interaction platforms and to top it off, no clear way of assessing the knowledge depth and breadth of an organization. The significant overhead that comes from orchestrating these disparate value points into even a rudimentary symphony would make Zubin Mehta‘s job look like a walk in the park. That’s the world or work we’ve lived in thus far and IBM is proposing to change that. The demos of Connections Next illustrated read-write capabilities with a set of native and external sources of content and documents and business intelligence – be that finding and editing documents, consuming and contributing to workflow from ERP, social and private interactions with people, and finally basic unified communications capabilities. Arguably this is one of the more comprehensive offerings in the social software space.

Contextual Collaboration: Connections Next isn’t just another grab bag of social networking features. Instead, IBM has done a commendable job of rationalizing native assets and ISV relationships to foster contextual collaboration that’s missing in many social business programs and a design that doesn’t impedes process and task facilitation. Whether that’s email and calendaring or content management, Connections pulls in relevant IBM technology assets to provide a more comprehensive collaboration suite, as opposed to just social networking. In addition, long standing relationships with technology providers such as SAP promise to bring read-write capabilities to and from business systems, ultimately casting ‘social’ as a pivotal enabler of get-work-done systems.

Finding needles in the social haystack: Moving conversations from email to a social network doesn’t really do much when it comes to reducing information overload or making you more efficient necessarily. In fact it just amplifies the problem as we listen to what everyone has to say.

Credit: Brendan Farnand

Add customer conversations to the mix and you really have a headache on your hands. Many social business software powered programs today suffer from this today and I suspect 2012 will find many organizations looking for good standalone filtering and analytics technology or an outright replacement of the social platform in favor of one that enables meaningful discovery, business and event context, consumption and participation. With a comprehensive analytics offering that spans customer and employee conversations and combines both Cognos based analytics and Social insight from the Lotus environment, IBM becomes one of the few serious providers (not the only one to be clear) that can help discover people, content and data, all in context of the specific job at hand. IBM’s Brendan Fernand has more, here.

Research: When you have a $6 billion dollar research budget and the smarts of people like Marie Wallace and others on the research team pushing the limits of how to marry process and social data, it’s a very powerful differentiator. With its new Social Business focus (and an outright name change for the research group to reflect this), we saw a good chunk of the lab efforts now focused on making social networking more meaningful — both by making sense of shared data and conversations, and also by surfacing social insight right inside system of record applications. For instance, Marie demoed how social network analysis could recommend the most qualified sales rep for a new lead that just dropped into SugarCRMs CRM application. I introduced a concept I’ve been spending time on recently called Network Attached Value in my presentation at IBMConnect that basically aims to identify how process and task activity is accelerated when you can attached the value of your business network to workflow. Coincidently, Marie presented a sandbox version of this and it was great to see how the work of structured process can be enriched by analyzed employee data. It’s clear that IBM can cement its competitive position with this sort of leadership, as opposed to a social networking feature shoot out.

A few things that IBM needs to pay attention to, in my opinion:

Brand: IBM needs to brutally assess the future of the Lotus brand. For better or for worse, there are a lot of passionate feelings in the market for Lotus as a brand and as long as it’s alive, even disconnected collaboration offerings such as Connections will get lumped into the same basket. You saw early signs of the Lotus brand taking a back seat at the event. For instance, Lotus Live has already become IBM Smart Cloud for Social Business.

Distribution: Lots and lots of attention played to the Partner landscape at Lotusphere. The good news is that thousands of IBM Lotus and UC partners now get to play in the social business game. But when you look at the comprehensive offering that is Connections Next, with tie-ins into content management, messaging, and business process, I wonder if the typical Lotus and other  CMS partner base can immediately deliver on the needed business transformation. I suspect IBM Global Business Services (GBS) will have to lead the way for sometime until a more mature market of partners surface who know as much about messaging, collaboration, process and industry knowledge. And it seems like a slam dunk to me to leverage people such as Luis Suarez and Rawn Shah to communicate the nitty gritty benefits and value points of using social software to customers once the air cover marketing on social business has run its course for a prospect and when its time to convert. And I wrote last year about where the hidden domain smarts around communicating and executing social business lies inside IBM. After attending IBMConnect, things are no doubt moving in the right direction, but I still stand by that line of thinking.

Can it Rip and Replace? I asked why IBM thinks it can replace incumbent (free, cheap, open source) social offerings that have penetrated organizations thus far in one of the briefing sessions. The answer I got was IBM has better security. Ah – I expected to be treated to a slew of answers such as distribution strength, product superiority, industry focus, research commitment, process knowledge and the like. Connections Next has the goods to replace many sub optimal offerings in the market but organizations don’t buy best; they buy good enough. And so it’s going to take a lot more than security to unhinge a social business program that already has momentum.

Closing thoughts:

All up, IBM’s advancements with Connections is fantastic and given the play it got on the main stage, it would be shocking if the application doesn’t deliver as advertised later this year. The disciplined approach to rationalizing its technology assets, providing a bridge between the old and new by folding in email and calendaring and a concerted effort to provide one dashboard where collaboration can happen with people around unstructured and structured events is really good. And at an infrastructure level, Project Vulcan promises to help customers make a move from their existing systems to more efficient innovation at a palatable pace. And the customers such as TD Canada Trust who spoke at the event were solving gnarly business problems with collaboration. Whilst I think there are multiple pathways to infusing social software into the enterprise stack, ”IBM shops” out there will be pleased to see that they don’t have to endure more spaghetti integration between disparate systems as Connections offers a serious platform. Huge kudos to Alistair Rennie and team for making this a CIO-friendly solution.

The event itself was executed very well and the events team brought heavy weights to the keynote stage with Alistair, Mike Rhodin, Jeff Schick, Bridget van Kralingen, Sandy Carter and others to enforce that. The one thing that did strike me was that given the massive pivot push around Social Business and the expected impact on the IBM mothership, it would have been a nice touch if CEO Ginni Rometty made a surprise appearance, even if for just 60 seconds via telepresence. Not that they needed any more muscle but that would have put a bow on it.

There’s no doubt that its game on from IBMs perspective and any older perceptions of Lotus is a thing of the past. Given my strand of collaboration and social business (as illustrated on this blog), I feel that this is one incarnation of social business that has a shot at making social, truly mean business.

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