Software strategies and more…

Today I attended Jive Software’s Get Social tour stop in Toronto and left impressed not only with the company’s software and strategy, but with the quality of attendance at the event. The event featured a hour and a bit of keynotes including a look at how Canada’s RIM has used Jive’s SBS to deploy mybackberry.com. What impressed me the most was the level of interest and activity from Canada’s largest companies. In the breakout I attended there was representation from 4 of the 6 largest banks, well known national law firms, ad agencies and professional services companies.

Personally, my interest in attending came from discovering significant interest in the integration of social software tools within business processes. In fact I have touched on this in several blogs already (here, here and here) and have found myself spending an increasing amount of time fielding questions from financial professionals on the topic of how their investments in tools like SAP or Microsoft Dynamics along with SharePoint can be further leveraged to move people from communal watering holes of information (ala SharePoint, Stellent (now part of Oracle), OpenText, etc.) to proactive, automated community distribution networks. All the while business execs these social services/tools to be part of existing business processes and applications from ERP to CRM to BI – and not to have to rip and replace investments they’ve already made.

To address this need Jive has developed its Social Business Software platform. This platform is based on a addressing a need to leverage existing technology investments – both on-premise and software as a service – made by organizations and intertwine social tools which are quickly maturing from the consumer technology world (Facebook, twitter, DIGG, etc.) into the business arena.

The Jive SBS solution should be very interesting to companies who’ve found themselves sinking in email, departmental collaboration websites, individual shared drives with unique folder structures, client-based office productivity tools, or aging client server business applications with little web extensibility. Their idea is to offer software solutions to organizations seeking to bring current consumer focused social features into the context of a secure, robust business processes and integrate these into the existing information and presentation layers used by their employees. Think ‘facebook’ that allows individual users to create ‘friends’ of co-workers, partners, suppliers and also applications – ERP, data repositories, content management systems, etc.

An interesting quote from the Jive Software presenter was that one of their goals is “…to enable the solutions from being ‘place-centric’ (e.g. a data or content repository) to ‘you-centric’.” The promise of this approach is to enable content relevance to the job you and/or your employees are doing – further amplifying the time to value that the business or community can benefit from. This can be achieved by using technology to enable systems to constantly seek information based on your criteria and deliver internal and external content in a timely fashion to the end-user.

I’ll be writing more on this topic, but for now my advice (based on what I have seen so far) for organizations  looking at social technology solutions that can fit into existing business processes is to:

• Plan – Look at (audit) how your employees are communicating in the office versus outside the office. Determine how this may or may not fit into different aspects of your business process and technologies.
• Promote – Promote activities which promote collaboration that benefits the organization, team and individual. Begin to recognize good ideas from individuals and identify who might be a super user by department and even age group (e.g. don’t have a 20 something trying to sell social tools to a 50 something CEO)
• Execute – Pick a part of the business that demand business process rigor, but also has an affinity for new technologies. Obtain the buy-in and support from the executive in charge and pilot a solution that brings together social technologies with financial, customer and partner data. Observe its usage, recognize individual contribution and learn from the effects this has on average and advanced users.
• Deliver – Realize this is a game changer. IT must be involved, but the business user will in some cases control the success of the project based on how they adopt and use the technology in conjunction with their specific needs. Don’t bury the data in a common format you make them adhere to – rather encourage them to rank and promote what they find valuable. Deliver an experience rather than a product.
• Hand over control – The hive of users will self organize around value and efficiencies. This is seen in nature and technology and is paramount to successful social software. In your planning you should have covered the governance and controls needed that are required by your business and ensured these are documented for your users. Now let them drive the interest and improvements of the software going forward.

The last part (IMHO) is the innovation aspect that is key to socializing your business.

Late in 2009 both SalesForce.com and SAP began beta testing social applications that proposed businesses could use social tools within their walls to address a variety of needs from financial management and sales tracking to impromptu group collaboration. Since then both of these solutions have gone live and are beginning to garner much interest in the Enterprise 2.0 communities.

The applications are Chatter and StreamWork, respectively. I blogged about StreamWork before as it occurred how in the business environment we use word processing tools less and less and depend more and more on our email to communicate ideas across departments, teams and amongst individuals.

I have also touched on the incorporation of business intelligence and search (here) and how these could automate the presentation of information in the context of what an individual, team or department is doing at any given time. I talked in my blog about how I saw the trifecta of business intelligence, search and collaboration tools adding previously untapped insight, thus value, to employees in a highly tailored, yet automated way.

Now I am seeing the productization of this in both Chatter (and Chatterbox by Financial Force.com) and StreamWork. Salesforce’s Chatter, “…which has been described by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff as a way to make the cloud more collaborative and social.”  adds another dimension to the companies AppExchange so much that the company created ChatterExchange a one stop shop for business grade collaborative tools that can plug-in to the many services and products that businesses are subscribing to from Salesforce.com.

SAP has positioned its self as a thought leader here by doing something completely un-SAP like. By first introducing StreamWork (nee 12Sprints) as a tool to aid in cross organization discussions, decision making and delivery toolkit for organization it took the emerging trends in social collaboration being tackled by the likes of Google Wave and Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 and packaged them in context of a business application with integration into business processes.

While there are differences between the products, SAP stays closer to a collaboration tool that connects to popular email, content management and unified communications solutions while Saleforce.com’s Chatter leverages what it has learned from relationships with social media tools like Facebook and twitter. Both address the needs for robust, business grade solutions for collaboration, messaging and workflows. They both advance the enterprise from treating communications as transactional and promote relationships that unleash a community’s ability to work together in real time on topics of interest to bring business and customer value.

The exciting part is both of these tools are open to others to develop on top of and thus create a social network of their own for improvement in a very dynamic fashion. While is is not necessarily new of Salesforce.com, it certainly is not the business norm for SAP.

The potential value for using these applications may be tremendous for their customers who can now stay on top of internal and external events, opportunities and tipping points so that they can participate in conversations that previously they may have not even known were happening. Further by offering social tools in the context of the business they have potentially set their customers up to take advantage of that next big leap in productivity making them more competitive and more agile than other organizations.

I recently read a blog entitled “Why we cannot get CRM (and SCRM) right” that triggered several thoughts; not as much on CRM but with regards to a challenge I used to face when ‘us’ marketeers wanted to try something drastically new. The more I thought I realized the problem (that I’ll try to illustrate below) is often the result of a company attempting to adopt a technology without having clearly understood the challenges that their users might face when using this technology, its limitations, and/or the process/guidelines that already existing in their environment.

In the following, I’ll share a bit about my experiences trying new things, having access to technology that can (and in some cases cannot) help me, but most importantly finding out (often in midstream) that there are junctures in making the idea become reality that conflict directly with existing business operation procedures.

Before striking out on my own, and during two years of emerging ’social’ trends, great ideas would emerge on how to use social channels to reach our clients, partners and prospects. We’d engage in lively discussions with our ad co.s, PR teams (internal and external) and others across the organization. We’d mock up how we could be truly creative and daring and use both our co.s technology and emerging ’social’ web-tools (Facebook, Twitter, Live.com, etc.) to raise awareness, start discussions and (hopefully) engage the community and have some fun while doing so.

Then when we went to turn ideas to actions we found ourselves caught in a quagmire of many of the business operations procedures. Part of the business like legal, privacy, finance, etc that had to be consulted would have lists of objection that would be counter to our business plans. Here is a hypothetical project example.

One of the first we’d run into was our legal dept., and they’d raise concerns about who’d have access to the data, what contributors across the business, partner community and customer (and prospects) might share with regards to personal, business or product information. Whether this was good, bad, risky, etc. Who owned this (the concept of community ownership doesn’t sit well with LCA folks). And of course could we (the co.) be sued b/c of any, some or all of these. Did any notice, competition, brand usage comply with the companies rules and regulations… the list went on and the quagmire of being daring became a real tough uphill battle.

Heck here is what a tweet (with feedback from LCA) would have looked like:

#nopurchaseneccessary #viewsarenotthatofXXXXXXXXX #plsreadprivacystmt http://ow.ly/1vabA – that is 88 of 140 characters used for compliance & regs — we have not even begun to tweet a simple message and action…

Further there are privacy and financial regulations about who we could use for these types of campaigns – even if we could get through LCA the more creative upstarts (for social media marketing) where typically not on the “approved vendor list”. Not that a large multinational 1980s advertising company couldn’t come up with something new and innovative, after all they did get billg to ‘wiggle his butt’, but the time and costs involved often created their own challenges.

Then there is the technology component. A well executed marketing campaign must have measurable results. Thus even if you got all the ducks in a row you still had to often figure out how to get the information, contacts, leads that you gathered and nurtured into the companies systems. Data pull, old CRM systems and processes, individual spreadsheets all would do their best to thwart these efforts. Then how do you disseminate the data to your partners and sales teams…

In the end, too many ideas were lost to the roadblocks I’ve mentioned above.

This brings me back to the post I mentioned at the title of the article and to quote the blog I mentioned, “The bottom line is that CRM is about companies engaging in relationships with customers.” However, I would like to add that relationships are very complicated these days with many moving parts. Whereas, start-ups and small companies, like mine, can be more flexible here – larger companies can but have many hurdles they must overcome in order to do so. There are good reasons for this, but complying with these may result in large companies continuing to seem more and more stodgy, slow and boring. None of these terms is often used in corp branding – wonder why?

I’d therefore like to offer my experiences (hopefully this post wasn’t too much of a rant) so that midsize and large companies who are looking to update their CRM solutions will think abut involving more of their business in the selection of CRM tools, but most importantly in the pre-implementation discussion about what they are trying to do when it comes to customer engagement for the long term. How do trends and new technology impact this and how does the business work together to overcome from the beginning rather then midstream.

Further, consider how you’d like to deliver your message given the changing marketing and sales channels. e.g. what conversation(s) do you want to start and by whom. Use input from legal, privacy, and the data analysis teams on how they can support the marketing, sales and customer service efforts and then develop  plans of what CRM means to the business rather than investing in a good tool, but limited in the ways you may be able to use it.

Face it. How many of us use Word anymore?

We still use Excel and PowerPoint, but writing is seldom done in Word anymore. It’s done in email and on the web. We write, more often than not, to share ideas. Word has evolved into Outlook – or more realistically – the multitude of email applications and text editing software products have come crashing together. Combine this with the plethora of ‘free’ text editors, both on and off-line that do all the things we need to post (blog, publish and email) and share (email, tweet, and instant messaging) information in a one to many format, and the drive to use a text editor isolated from the web just doesn’t make sense.

What has sparked this change? After a bit of web research, it seems the amount of reading has continues to decrease while the amount we are exposed to increases. An interesting write up (but not the only one) on this can be found here . To summarize, people are addicted to information – the more the better. At the same time we have become woefully impatient readers and want ideas encapsulated into snippets we can re-tweet’ at will. We constantly search for a grand idea that adds value or validates our own and with any luck may help yet another person make a decision that creates more information (adding to the global conversation) for us to access and share in a never ending cycle.

But I digress, my point is that we write (via email, messenger, tweets, blogs, etc.) to share our ideas with others and solicit feedback. And technology is evolving to meet our needs. The rise in social media based is based partially on inability of email to keep up with how we communicate to larger and larger audiences. Micro-blogging services combined with social media (Facebook, Twitter, instant messenger clients, etc.) are supplanting our use of emails to communicate with friends, family and co-workers. Furthermore what writing we do is being augmented by multimedia (pictures, audio, and video) to become more interactive resulting in conversations that are more compelling to our audience.  As such, this decade promises to take the preferred mode of communication in the digital age to the next level.

We have started to see products like Google’s Wave, IBM’s Lotus Live and Microsoft’s Office Live take form in an effort to make the sharing and collaborating of information and people more real-time. SAP, a world leader in structured business applications, seems to see an opportunity to provide its customers and the market with a solution for visually and graphically sharing what the other person is seeing, reading and conversing about. Nurturing the ability of many folks to generate and exchange ideas on a subject based on the information they are exposed to and expressing this to others in a means that are easier to follow.

SAP’s response to this model is interesting as they are the first large company that hails from a structured, data-centric world to offer a collaborative tool that is inherently based on the unstructured world of digital conversations.  Their product, tentatively called StreamWork (nee 12 Sprints) , is very un-SAP in that 1) its free and 2) its build to be used across web-platforms like Evernote, Discussit, and more products without the use of propriety code or back office development.

In my opinion, the up-side for SAP and StreamWOrk is huge. First, people can start seeing SAP as more than just a company that provides core business applications, but also a partner that facilitates the conversations between employees, customers and partners. Second, StreamWork can bring value from the wealth of business and customer data locked in business applications, databases, and the web by creating a simple form factor for sharing ideas. Finally, by allowing people across an organization or ecosystem to collectively share their opinions new products and services can be brought to market and change/customer benefits accelerated.

Much like my experience trying Google’s Wave I am still waiting for people to ‘wave back’, yet given my experiences with other social tools (twitter, facebook, blogs, etc) I have no doubt that one day I will wonder why we had email (in much the same way I wonder why we ever used Fax machines). While I don’t think that alone SAP will make Word irrelevant, it is now part of a pack that together quickly is changing the way we communicate with one another. And it’s my opinion it’s better to be on that bus than not.

In closing, SAP is taking a big gamble on how its brand and services are perceived by the market in an effort to gain share in the collaborative market. But with great risks comes great reward.

Note: Updated 12Sprints to SAP’s official name “StreamWork” on March 23, 2010.

Resources:

http://sapstreamwork.com/

http://12sprints.com/

http://www.youtube.com/12sprints#p/

Http://www.google.com/wave

http://www.officelive.com/en-us/

http://www.evernote.com/

http://www.google.com/buzz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_software

http://www.hyperoffice.com/index.php

http://www.google.com/apps/

http://www.sap.com

https://www.lotuslive.com/en/