On the topic of Enterprise Software, Jeff says:

Most of SoftTech’s investments have so far been in the consumer space. “Innovation is slower on the enterprise side,” Clavier claims, and “beset by security issues.” “It’s a mature market with only a few acquirers; sales are more difficult and investors have little leverage when there are so few buyers. Low cost, consumer applications that leverage the Web offer capital efficiencies not matched on the enterprise side – and they are fun to work with.”

I’ve had conversations with scores of CEOs of traditional and Enterprise 2.0 companies on this topic. I’m still sticking with my analysis of over a year ago about Commoditization that’s partly due to a lack of focus on process and context, too much reliance on nebulous measures such as productivity and little alignment with tasks at hand. That’s played out with CubeTree’s purchase for $20 million. Anemic by Enterprise standards.

But leverage is coming. I’ve been reading a galley copy of The New Polymath by Vinnie Mirchandani, due out later this summer, and its clear how enterprise application infrastructure, based on customer expectations is ripe for a re-haul. It’s not just about the cloud and its also not just about SaaS vs On Premise business apps. Simpler, better, faster-to-update ways of GTD in context, and in a way that connects people, are about to hit. And that opens up organic as well as M&A opportunities on the technology supply side.

There’s quite a few opportunities’ that are large enough to have significant impact, but I’m going to touch on a few areas I see when talking to end customers, discounted by the pace of innovation, to date.

• Decision Facilitation: Yes, in-person meetings and email are time consuming, expensive and often un productive. The answer is not to simply move those to digital interactions powered by Enterprise 2.0. That’s a first step. But that can also mean moving the same unproductive discussions to a digital platform and arguably more of them since its less time consuming. We still need to wrap a decision facilitation layer around it to drive better results. OpenAPIs, activity streams, data and document access all in context is where its at.
• Exception Handling: Somewhere between your Enterprise 2.0 platform and your structured employee, partner and supplier processes, lies a wide open gap. It’s a myth that we can get by with process laden technology since it solves 70%, 80& 90% of repeatable process tasks. The other 10%, 20%, 30% is where things can go horribly wrong and cost millions. Weaving in a social fabric to deal with those exceptions to standard process outcomes is barely tapped today.
• CRM 2.0 (or socialCRM) is DOA with Enterprise 1.0. You can have the most sophisticated customer community but remember, prospects and customers are looking to bypass marketing and talk to experts deep inside your org and partner ecosystem. You cant have a vibrant and successful community if you’re rely on a 1990s style latency riddled, portal/intranet/extranet inside the firm. Even a “facebook for the enterprise” that cant methodically wrap around real time customer interaction demands is but a first step.
• Performance: I joined a panel on SugarCRM’s SugarCon event last month with Esteban Kolsky, Jeremiah Owyang and Diogo Rebelo where we discussed who owns Social  Data in the enterprise. Traditional BI tools extract results from structured data systems. New performance applications will blend social and analytical data to improve discrete business performance outcomes  – HR and Talent, Spend Management, Communication Performance. Etc. Ultimately moving from “here’s the report” to “here’s what to do about the data”.

Each of these can spawn vastly different value propositions for end customers.

Jeff’s spot on when he talks about simple consumer constructs starting to influence how Enterprise users interact with people and data. And all of the opportunities, above, will expect this as a price of entry. The big consideration though for large mature enterprises will be to avoid siloed efforts and the need to form a central collaborative back bone that’s still flexible enough to show concrete improvement around specific business tasks (sales, marketing, innovation, etc). Last month, Oliver Marks and I  presented at Interop on Performance Acceleration via Enterprise 2.0 and this was further validated by a very mature audience of technology managers and executives.

I’m expecting to have a lot of interesting conversations on this topic over the next few weeks. Tomorrow I head to SAP SAPPHIRE, then to the International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 in Milan where I’ll be talking about 21st Century Enterprises and the Role of Social, and finally at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston where were going to be focusing on business value of E2.0.

I’ll update this post after I’ve processed what I learn.

Cross Posted from Pretzel Logic

‘Enterprise 2.0: Accelerating Business Performance’, available for free download on the conference website, discusses understanding how you can orchestrate greater value and flexibility from large enterprise backbone applications in conjunction with newer, more agile Enterprise 2.0 processes and technologies in order to effectively support critical business functions.

The ‘1.0’ enterprise software market that powers larger enterprises today has very deep origins and roots in historical core business processes, whose foundations significantly predate computer technologies.

The ‘Enterprise 2.0’ movement in business breaks out of the restrictive document, postal and telephone workflow paradigms that are now over a century old and emulated digitally to model ‘1.0’ communications and application technology platforms.

Some of the shortcomings of 1.0 enterprise software and the concepts they were informed by include:

Applications

Access to data and information remains largely fragmented across systems of record:  context and engagement that ties data and collaboration together to support discrete business activities is missing.

Infrastructure:

Enterprise data is historically centralized in silos,  while contemporary broadband, mobile and ‘Web 2.0’ concepts put consumers in the center of their own ‘data stream’.

Operations:

Current organizational design and infrastructures are not optimized to leverage the best resources: organizations need to leverage the best minds to serve customers and other end users.

Business Process:

‘1.0’ Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) processes enforce process and compliance but require creative problem solving to address unique, non-repeatable requests and don’t enable flexible collaboration.

Revenue:

Customers increasingly use participatory media (communities, social networks etc) to rely on each others judgment and to engage with businesses. Building genuine relationships to augment pushed marketing information is necessary.

Collaboration:

The intranets, extranets and portals used to communicate between groups inside organizations can be effective transactional & data exchange platforms, but are typically ill equipped ad hoc support and collaboration.

Businesses that have cumulatively built their collaborative and transactional infrastructure on these technologies have reached a crisis point in information ‘findability’ and process context, and the Sovos Group is seeing strong demand for experienced application of experienced, pragmatic ways to drive performance.

The next wave of Enterprise 2.0 will drive large-scale workplace performance as well as discrete process performance in order to improve relationships between employees, customers and partners.

The Sovos Group helps companies execute business objectives by strategically leveraging collaborative, Enterprise 2.0 approaches, where appropriate.. This is of paramount importance if your goal is to achieve inter-connectivity and efficiency at scale, avoiding and minimizing the performance loss created by friction between fragmented units.

We are helping some of the world’s most well known organizations across many industries move from closed linear processes to a conscious collaborative approach, both from a people and process perspective and of course by augmenting existing technology investments with appropriate Enterprise 2.0 solutions to realize agreed business performance goals.

Folding in lighter weight Enterprise 2.0 concepts, strategy and execution planning around preexisting limiting structures makes it possible to provide a balance between traditional process concepts and their associated technologies and flexible new exceptions handling.

In some cases this means process plays a dominant role. In other cases open, unstructured constructs are at the center, with process at the edges conforming to policy and governance requirements.

Realizing tangible performance enhancement opportunities for enterprises and institutions requires seasoned experience rather than ‘of the moment’ theories and ideas. The Sovos Group and our appropriate partners and associates have the expertise to craft, design and develop well fitted solutions to your specific problems that will have an enduring impact on performance at a pace and scale that will fit your needs.

Here’s how we can help:

• Develop a collaborative strategy and a roadmap across your workplace or for discrete functional areas of the business
• Identify the optimal blend of structured, data centric processes with more agile collaborative workflows
• Plan for program and operational design and participation
• Leverage your existing technologies for re-use
• Help you select the right collaborative (Enterprise 2.0) technologies
• Share Best Practices and Market Assessments

Get in touch

Here goes…

Transparent:

Transparent just got elevated to the top of the list. Most executives love the idea, just not the potential fall out that can come from transparency. As we saw with President Obama’s I’ll-broadcast-the-healthcare-debate-on-CSPAN unfulfilled promise, when you get into the politics at many large organizations, its as much about the lateral competition (in the case of the government, how the right and right wing media would interpret the open discussion) in the executive suite that worries more people about bringing transparency to their enterprises, as it is about top down / bottom up / emergent transparency.

Consider the recent fall out from Google Buzz. Personally I think its an excellent start to something very useful and promising. As I commented in a postby Alex Williams on  ReadWriteWeb:

The best thing about all of this for me is that Google has recognized and capitalized on the fact that email is the ultimate social network and they are aggregating- which is what they do best,” said Sameer Patel, a founding partner with the Sovos Group that consults about integrating social Web applications and collaborative technologies into the enterprise.

However, Google stepped on a banana peel when they misjuded the level of transparency that the general public would be ok with then it comes to sharing our email contacts.

Its clear that we as social networkers seem to be perfectly fine with transparency when its looking at someone else’s data and gestures. Just not when it comes to exposing our own.

Social <insert enterprise context here>

Clearly the most hotly debated moniker in the enterprise context. A President (not CIO) of one of the largest healthcare organizations that I met with threw me a new curveball a few weeks ago.  As prepared as I was to address the ‘Facebook is too social for us” argument with solid business context, the new one thrown my way was “my kids are leaving Facebook because of the new privacy concerns. If social networks are not good enough for them when all they do there is socialize, how can I bring this interaction metaphor to the office?”

Socialized <insert process context here> with the emphasis on business outcomes or activities seems to be far more palatable but to each his own.

Customer Community

Less contested depending on who you speak with. The problem is that the discussion around community and marketing is often short sold due to lack of depth and process knowledge around core marketing performance.  As I wrote a few months ago in a guest post:

Finally, with respect to marketing, most of the community focus today (especially B2B) is on brand awareness and engagement. Certainly, there’s value to be gained there, however, lead generation is the elephant in the room most don’t want to tackle or acknowledge. Regardless of the economic times, the closer your marketing activity is to generating revenue, the more strategic your program remains to your organization. That’s where customer communities need to go – fast.

Of course there are a few seasoned marketers that can take this on. Not to mention, community as an approach to effective awareness and engagement has benefit. But when it comes to community based marketing, few in the “social media consulting space” want to or even have the credentials to tackle the moolah question.

Second, very few are prepared to objectively say when Community is flat out the wrong approach to accelerating performance for your specific business objective. Here are 2 excellent posts by Gil Yehuda and Rachel Happe about not lazily intermingling different concepts that seem similar when in reality, are very different.

Real Time

Though I wrote a report on this topic, the idea of ‘real time’ is a meaningless discussion in and of itself without core performance context. Worse, it scares the living bejesus out of the seasoned CIO who still sport scars from the millions and millions sunk into integration to come anywhere close to near real time, a decade ago. It’s far cheaper and simpler now but real time for the sake of real time invokes instant eye rolling.

However, customers are intermingling in real time and they increasingly expect feedback in near real time. The reality is that the organization (not just support and marketing) need to have that infrastructure to be able to respond as fast as possible. That’s a very different approach than trying to rudderlessly tune the enterprise for real time and then chase/manufacture use cases to back fill value from the investment.

Enterprise 2.0

And finally, yes, Enterprise 2.0. I could leave you with a link to a Google Search Result to Dennis Hewlett’s Posts (its here by the way), but frankly, too often Enterprise 2.0 gets casted as a solution to a problem that doesn’t give the customer adequate heart burn to become a top priority. Until we see a Chief Sharing / Social / Email-sucks, Productivity Officer emerge (NOT!), lets focus on discrete objectives around leads, sales, innovation, product development and the like. It’s awesome to see a few vendors starting to come around to this in their marketing not just in the context of selling the benefit but also adoption and participation. See this excellent post by the very sharp Michael Idinopulos.

In closing, as I said above, I’m not hoping to start a war on whether we should or shouldn’t use this terms.  Transparency, social, open, relationships, collaborative IS the future of work.

If you have opinions on these or other monikers, chime away, below. But they need to know their place and the context.

Excerpt: No one knows the true power, limitations and opportunities for each component of a product better than the very folks who build them. Second, component manufacturing is largely a commodity business.  As a supplier, I need to differentiate myself from competitors who are waiting for me to falter or cut me on price. I need to be a strategic partner to be somewhat indispensible. Social Software can open up the lines of interaction beyond R&D, Procurement and Product Development, allowing suppliers to learn, first hand,  any pain felt by the end customer. Or help marketing really understand the deep competencies of each component of the end product. Or provide new insight to R&D on early technology innovation at the component level. And on and on.

That’s purpose built collaboration (a.k.a business case) with dead clear incentives for suppliers to participate (a.k.a adoption) and play a role in the success of an end product in the market place.

Read the Full Post here

Social Media a Time Waster for Sales Reps? Not until YouTwitFace shows up!

Social media for Selling pays huge dividends 1) as a lead qualifier and 2) as an engagement platform, after you have established a requisite qualification level.  Start with a qualified list from your existing funnel and using Social Media to connect, network, nurture and enrichen your prospect intelligence, as you begin the close.

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Enterprise 2.0 and the Paradigm of Social Partnerships:

Excerpt: Then there’s another side to this: My work experience has proven that organizations that do well understand that even internally they are really orchestrating a matrix of complex partnerships. Sales with Marketing; Product Development with Marketing, R&D with engineering etc., where each of these tend to work in extremely different ways. To be successful, you need to understand the unique dynamics of this relationship that make for a solid partnership that can ultimately drive the business forward. Outside of internal team collaboration (say, a group of marketers, a group of engineers, etc.), no spray & pray / general purpose employee collaborative strategy (or tool application) is going to really show sustainable impact for every tribe or collective. And just like traditional business ecosystem partnerships (customers, suppliers, channel), these internal partnerships also get significantly rattled in the face of industry consolidation.

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Sales Intelligence in an Enterprise 2.0 World

Excerpt: Given the unique characteristics of a typical sales rep (more on that below), common participatory models that epitomize social networks (i.e. the stuff that has to do with sharing) would run counter intuitive to how a sales rep operates. That said, there’s plenty of good stuff bundled in the E2.0 moniker that absolutely can make a significant impact. I’m hoping to start a discussion of what those elements are with this post.

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Understanding the Business Value of Unstructured Environments

Excerpt: Business collaboration should be all about facilitating communication, streamlining processes and providing valuable contextual information to coworkers, against which business value can be measured as increased efficiency and awareness.  Often due to lack of clarity about how to interact as a team, sometimes providing modern web technologies to employees enables selfish, entitled behavior which is the exact opposite of the desired outcome. Like the weeds disrupting structure in the image above, opportunistic roots can quickly take hold for negative as well as positive discourse within the enabling environment.

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Extraordinary Collaboration Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

As is so often the case with IT projects, installing and integrating tools is not the same thing as having a plan for how to use them: buying and setting up is the easy part, utility and uptake the critical factors, and it’s easy to miss the obvious problems forming by your actions. Your plan may be flawed and allow unintended consequences, however enthusiastic and bullish you are.

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When Internal Collaboration Is Bad for Your Company…

What can go wrong is as interesting to those with their necks on the line organizing collaboration and associated infrastructure as the success stories. This piece is a useful reality check for those who have been drinking too much kool-aid about grass roots adoption, crowd sourcing, the wisdom of the crowd or following some of the wackier social media marketing memes…

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Collaborative Networks vs. Social Networks

Tools and technologies are often budgeted for at a departmental level rather than being designed to interoperate between departments, which provides better financial and organizational value. The ability to scale the entire company instead of grappllng with disparate next-generation toolsets in each department that don’t work well with other parts of the business is the way to multiple 2.0 silos in the future.

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Burnouts – the Dangers of Remote Work Forces

It’s not just modern collaboration technology which is increasing the challenges of sharing tasks equally – unified and mobile communications and time zone shifts can have a devastating impact on morale in a new twist on an old problem.

Email is frequently the delivery mechanism of communication which raises the blood pressure, and is rooted in the old form postal letter, but now on steroids. In a tightly hierarchical organization, unrealistic orders can be delivered by email which can be time consuming to tactfully challenge and triage.

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Is Behavioral Targeting coming to the Social Enterprise?

Excerpt: The net net is that if enterprise social analytics are going to look like behavioral analytics on the consumer web, they’ll be likened to targeting engines. In the case of the consumer web, that means more ads or some yet-to-be-determined interpretation of my interests in the future. In the context of the enterprise, it means possibly targeting my career progression or paycheck. Contrast that with a model where its a balance between both organizational wide insight, plus in the flow, contextual insight for individuals and groups. Now you have the “what’s in it for me” data point covered and you might have secured some currency to gather organizational wide analytics as well. All up, extremely important considerations for overall programmatic design in the context of accelerating performance via social computing concepts.

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The Social Enterprise begets the Ultimate Meritocracy

Excerpt: Via the strategic use of social and collaborative tools, what SunGard has fostered is a more transparent, open enterprise where you move to a passive model of continuously allowing talent identification to happen in the flow of work, and in a way that fellow employees can identify, leverage and learn from the best. In turn, recognition, whether from fellow colleagues, industry peers and managers happens in the open and over and above subjective evaluation by managers. And there’s a lot more that comes with such collaborative and transparent structures in the areas of HR performance, Communications Performance and Line of Business Performance that I’ve written about in the past.

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Excerpt: When you layer in social computing concepts at the early stages of content creation, you have the ability to encourage such uses of raw ingredients (or social objects). These social objects, previously hidden in an access controlled CMS environment are now unlocked via social computing concepts and tools. The beauty is that they can now be work in progress for some, finished product for others that participate or discover it, or can be interpreted in totally different ways, never intended by the original participants.

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Understanding Enterprise 2.0- Tolerances and Scale

Excerpt: The collaboration challenges of a small sized business are likely to be fundamentally different to the needs of an enterprise division: some of the homogenizing evangelistic E2.0 enthusiast language encouraging adoption can be dangerously misleading. Successful collaboration by definition touches most parts of a company or unit – that’s the whole point – but tailoring a perfect fit for needs is vital. Loose off the shelf framework application or emulation of something that seems to have worked in another company fails to understand the tight tolerances required in any high performance machine operating efficiently, to use an engineering analogy.

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Excerpt: With Wave, Google is offering a real time messaging and activity stream platform that developers can use to create applications or amp up existing offerings. Its still early and unproven and will probably only work for SaaS offerings. But if it delivers on its promise, its a ridiculously more sophisticated incarnation of what Enterprise 2.0 vendors have spent a huge portion of their development budget on, for the last 12 months. Thanks to Google, it’s now available as a platform technology, for anyone to leverage. Ouch.

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The Real Time Enterprise: A Report for GigaOM Pro

Excerpt: Real-time communication and collaboration in the enterprise represents a significant shift in how employees, partners and customers interact and collaborate to drive organizational performance. The growth and acceptance of so-called “Enterprise 2.0” platforms and applications promise to break down closed communication and collaboration loops by moving discussions and data access from email, content management and rigid process applications to activity streams, wikis and API-based data access.

Read the Full Report here

Excerpt: Some key findings from this research: the primary audiences that organizations are trying to reach focus on user communities (80%) and customers (50%)

– Social networks (75%) and micro-blogging (50%) are the primary tools to reach these audiences
– Blogs were also being leveraged by close to half of the respondent base- Marketing and communications make up the majority of initiatives
- Some activity is also being seen within HR and customer service departments
- Many small and medium businesses (SMBs) are actively using social networking channels for lead generation

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The Groundswell of Social Media Backlash

Excerpt: The awkward ‘brought to you by‘ conversational tone of past generations of TV is increasingly being mirrored by ‘trying too hard’ social media mavens butting into conversations within social media technologies. I’m not even going to address the nonsense being peddled under the rubric ‘branding’ recently.

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The ‘Social Media’ Quality Problem: What a Racket

Excerpt: The problem of clutter is well known to anyone using email: in the early days that messaging medium was effective, but its immediacy rapidly got wiped out by spam and sloppy usage. One of the reasons for the rapid growth of Twitter has been brevity and effective connectivity by early adopters. That platform is now struggling with the network effect of celebrity follower races and clever ‘below the line‘ promotional uptake of tweetups and contextual connectivity with consumers.

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Shock Horror ’Social Media’: Who will save/train the Children?

The huge productivity and cost savings of collaboration networks, the use of enterprise 2.0 technology within and between companies is reaching critical mass in many companies: the more savvy users of these relatively lightweight tools understand the power of sharing information and working together.
The out of focus enthusiasms and fears around ’social media’ – the personal use of online shared spaces to socialize, interact and be word of mouth marketed to – are a significant barrier to the understanding and adoption of similar technologies for business organizational use.

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Future Differentiation of ‘Social Media’ from Collaboration

‘Social Media’ is essentially of the moment online marketing thinking to encourage and enable ‘conversation’ with customers by any means possible – just like Radio and TV commercials stimulate you to think about products, discuss and build a propensity for them.

Applying 2.0 agile web technologies to streamline business performance use some similar underlying technologies to the social media ‘word of mouth’ marketing efforts but are an entirely different proposition, and have very different foundations.

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