Michael Fauscette

Enterprise Social Networks, Building the Collaborative Enterprise

Tools that support social business initiatives fit into several different  software categories / markets. Social business is a very broad term that includes all the enterprise social activities, internal and external. I find that often people understand a single perspective on social, often based on their role or personal experience with some of the tools. A customer support manager thinks of social in the context of customers while others might immediately think of collaboration or ideasourcing. We published an IDC social taxonomy last year to try and capture all of the different social markets, mostly so we could count revenue (it is what we do after all), but also to try and make it easier to communicate about social in the enterprise. I was thinking about this taxonomy after having a particularly difficult time explaining social business to someone the other day. It's detailed and fairly complex, which is necessary, but it makes it hard sometimes to help people see the different opportunities in their own businesses. We also have published some specific business processes that can be "socialized", which seems to help make it clearer. I just recently finished a white paper for VMware (Socialcast) on enterprise social networks (ESN) that stimulated some thinking about social business and particularly around the tools that are emerging to support the collaborative enterprise. I'm starting to see some broader patterns that associate different social business processes into a few categories like ESN. For this post though, I think it might be useful to talk more about the idea of an ESN and how it can be used to support key business processes.

ESN's form the core of the enterprise social backbone and are essential for connecting the inside to the inside and the outside (employees to employees, partners, suppliers, and customers). What makes up an ESN and how is it used to support the collaborative enterprise? ESN's can include these features and applications:

• Activity stream / microblog / unified UX for sharing and communication
• Profile
• Mobile across all major OS's
• Blogs
• Wiki's
• File sharing
• Intelligent information filtering
• Task management / execution
• Decision support (including socialytics)
• Integration (both to the other components and to other enterprise systems)
• Ability to embed in other enterprise applications

There is no need for all components to source from a single vendor, by the way, as long as the integration capabilities are present and components are built to open standards. In fact there's some argument that at least some companies are better served if key components are "best of breed" to meet a greater percentage of business requirements. This componentized approach is much more prevalent and IMO part of the way that the next generation of enterprise platforms come together. The core of the ESN though, forms a critical piece of the enterprise system of relationship and would often include the new communication tools like activity streams / microblogs and profile. It's also likely that businesses will want this part of the system integrated to other enterprise communication assets like email, IM, video conferencing and voice to provide a better user experience. It's also essential that the core ESN support ad hoc work by bringing together people, data, content and supporting systems in real time and in a work context.

From the task execution perspective some of the core ESN systems provide basic task management, which could be sufficient for some businesses. Most businesses though, will recognize that projects are really the core of their operations and will need more feature rich task management and execution systems. Also likely that these capabilities are or could be part of a enterprise project management system. I like to use the phrase task execution though, to separate the new social project execution functions from traditional project management tools which most often did a great job of tracking projects but did little to enable work to actually get done. Tying the core ESN to the task execution system is business critical as more companies realize that these tools can greatly improve project success and form an important part of supporting ad hoc work.

I also think it very important for companies to connect the ESN to other social systems like social support (part of the Customer Experience Management / SCRM applications), customer communities, innovation management, supplier networks, partner networks or in other words, connected to all systems of relationship across the enterprise. Analytics in the form of embedded systems of decision and including socialytics, should also be an essential part of the ESN. Overall the ESN should bridge systems of relationships to systems of decision. A lot of the benefits that social systems bring beyond connectivity are tied to bringing the right assets together in a work context and in real time to deal with issues, problems and opportunities.

Lastly the ESN is the new age replacement for the outdated static (or nearly so anyway) Intranet. The ESN is dynamic, real time connectivity across the business to support knowledge sharing and filtering, critical business decisions and work execution. It's no surprise that companies in our bi-annual social business surveys are seeing strong increases (in the range of 11-30%) in productivity associated with social software solutions, and no surprise that the overall social software market grew almost 40% from 2010 to 2011.

Tags: socbiz, social business, ESN, SCRM, CEM, collaboration, communication, decision support, systems, enterprise

Social Dynamx, Scaling Social Customer Support

Companies are learning that today customer service is a big part of effective marketing strategy. The concept that customers decide how, when and where they interact with a company could be an opportunity but for many companies it is challenging and stretches systems and processes. At least part of that challenge comes from the proliferation of communication / interaction channels and methods. Current customer service systems, for the most part, were deigned to interact in a few specific ways including voice, online chat, email and web forms, all communication channels that the company can control. More people are turning to trust filtered online sources that are outside of the companies control though. Networks like facebook, Twitter and Pinterest offer relationship based, trusted sources for information and assistance. Rather than researching products on brand controlled web sites, prospects as for recommendations on social networks and read reviews on commerce sites and blogs. If there are problems with items purchased they ask for help on those same sites and complain on all sorts of public forums from Twitter to YouTube.

So what's a company to do? It's clear that just throwing employees at the problem is not a scalable solution. The old systems and process of react and respond now have to be accompanied by sense and respond based systems. It's questionable whether current systems and processes alone can be stretched to handle the new channels and the new types of interaction. Some customer service systems are now integrated to various consumer social networks, which is at least part of the solution, but many companies are finding that they need more specialized functionality.

There are a few systems that are trying to address this issue, social customer support, and recently I took a look at one of them, Social Dynamx. Social Dynamx is designed to manage all of a companies' social customer support interactions and then integrate into the overall IT infrastructure including existing CRM/customer support system, knowledge base, social media monitoring tool, etc. The software is cloud based and has a role based user interface that has 3 views, agent, supervisor and manager. The compelling part of the solution for me though, is in the systems ability to filter out noise, something that is a serious problem in delivering social customer support, and surfacing real issues. The algorithms are designed to score incoming posts in real time based on relevance and ability to take action, then route automatically to the most qualified agent based on the type of action required. The system has machine learning capabilities built in, so gets "smarter" with use as well.

Any system that is used to manage social customer support must be scalable and be "enterprise ready". Social Dynamx has complete enterprise workflow and embedded analytics to help monitor key metrics and provide essential reports. Social customer support is more than surfacing issues and taking action though, it is also about having conversations with customers. Social Dynamx provides tools to help facilitate the conversation including threading of conversations and the capability to de-dupe and/or unify threads to assist agents in scaling conversations while keeping up their "end". 

Social Dynamx has a lot of potential in my opinion, particularly around the ability to scale through intelligent filtering and machine learning. Companies need to find ways to scale social interaction in customer support, customers are insisting on it and support has become a key component of an overall marketing strategy. The conversations may be happening on consumer social network but the tools for business need to scale and provide enterprise class capabilities.

Tags: SCRM, customer, CEM, support, service 

Cloud Wars 2012 Continues, SAP buys Ariba

Yesterday's announcement from SAP ended months of discussion on who will buy cloud collaborative commerce vendor Ariba. As I've said a few times, most of the larger pure-play cloud vendors are getting a look by traditional large software application vendors, who need to quickly build out a cloud application portfolio. The offer, $4.3B, represents a significant premium of 106X trailing 12 month Ebitda, dwarfing the industry median for software acquisitions from 2002 to today of 16X. The price represents a 20% premium on Ariba's closing price on 5/21 but is considerably less than the 52% premium it paid for SuccessFactors last Fall.

Even though SAP executives have consistently derided Oracle over it's acquisition spree over the last 7 years, it is now clear that SAP is trying to follow the same strategy to buy its way into the cloud. SAP did make an attempt at building its own offering of course, but the efforts were arduous, proving that it's not easy to change from an on premise mindset to a cloud mindset, and are only now starting to provide some cloud assets that can be used to take SAP forward. The SuccessFactors acquisition offered the most compelling addition to SAP's cloud efforts, bringing both product and expertise, acquiring Ariba should accelerate this.

Ariba brings several important things to SAP and is an excellent addition to its cloud portfolio. From a product perspective Ariba has a mature and feature rich set of cloud based procurement, sourcing and contract management tools that, if integrated into the SAP business suite and sold by the much larger SAP sales force, could prove to be a significant money maker for SAP. Ariba also brings cloud expertise in the form of developers, support agents, sales personnel and executives that is badly needed in the SAP stable. Lastly, what might be the most important asset in the deal, Ariba brings a large and well developed supplier network / B2B community that is the most mature and respected community of this type. This asset isn't something that any other company could easily duplicate, although it will be a challenge for SAP to ensure that it continues to be managed effectively.

From a customer perspective there is some benefit on both sides of the deal. SAP provides access to resources that are far beyond what Ariba could have done on its own, so there is a strong likelihood that future releases will benefit. SAP customers, many of whom are already Ariba customers, get what should presumably be a much more tightly integrated solution and access to more cloud assets in the growing SAP cloud portfolio. Overall this deal should be positive for both companies and both customer bases.

Tags: sourcing, procurement, community, cloud, SAP, Oracle, supplier, network, acquisition 

 

Social, Mobile, Cloud...Table Stakes for Today's ERP?

I spent the past week in San Francisco attending Netsuite's annual user conference, SuiteWorld. As with most software conferences there was the usual barrage of announcements including new features, new partners and refined strategies. Of course SAP also held its Sapphire conference at the same time, so you may have had a hard time making it through all the announcement noise to see what was important from Netsuite (I'll leave the SAP Sapphire commentary at this point to my colleagues).

In the Cloud ERP arena Netsuite, the first full SaaS ERP system, continues to raise the competitive bar and deliver key functionality to its rapidly growing customer base. Last year at its first SuiteWorld conference Netsuite articulated a strategy that focused on several vertical variants and started to move up market from its lower mid-market roots. The move up market involved a repositioning of the suite for the upper mid and lower enterprise combined with a two tier strategy for the largest enterprise prospects. All of these strategic moves are paying off but the two tier strategy is proving to be of particular interest and is an area of significant growth. This approach supports the concept of keeping the current core ERP systems intact, a choice that most large companies have made, and giving departments / divisions / operating units more modern, flexible, and feature rich systems through the use of cloud based ERP that operates the local unit and consolidates up to the "main" corporate system. This is one obvious way to "fix" the aging and unpopular user experience of the aging core ERP systems while minimizing the overall cost structure and leveraging past capital investments. As an example of this approach Land O'Lakes announced that it is implementing Netsuite OncWorld in this two tier model.

On the mobile front Netsuite has taken a very realistic attitude that is focused on providing the complete user experience on any device. According to Netsuite CEO Zach Nelson mobile support is "table stakes" for modern ERP systems with customers demanding access from any device at any time. This includes tables and smartphones across the major OS variants.  Currently Netsuite offers a wide range of mobile functionality and supports IOS, Windows Phone and Blackberry.  

One of the most interesting announcements during the week was around a new product offering called SuiteCommerce. Netsuite has long offered a strong set of eCommerce features that are popular with its customers.  Commerce and the underlying platforms are under pressure to provide new capabilities that help companies deal with customers that are increasingly mobile, involved in the social web and increasingly insist on a consolidated experience that pans all interaction points. This customer revolution is not just about business to consumer (B2C) either, business to business (B2B) is feeling the same types of pressure. In the past systems were built to support cross channel commerce, that is, interacting with customers in many different siloed channels. The problem of course, is the silo approach. Customers are expecting an integrated experience that spans all channels, something that some have called multi-channel commerce. That doesn't go far enough though, IMO, because its really about eliminating the concept of channels and interacting with the customers across any/all touch points, B2C and B2B. In our predictions this year we included one about the growth of digital commerce, something that we started tracking over the last few years.

Netsuite's new commerce platform, SuiteCommerce, moves from its eCommerce roots and into the next generation of commerce solutions that work to provide this integrated commerce experience across any touch point on any device. Its important to note that Netsuite's approach is completely integrated across its entire ERP system and not just focused on the customer experience (CX) front end. Not to minimize the importance of CX, but frankly if a business can't fulfill an order it doesn't really matter how good the experience of interacting with the business was, it is still a failure. The combination of a solid commerce "back-end" with a flexible CX offering, referred to as commerce as a service (CaaS) by Netsuite, can provide significant value to Netsuite customers. SuiteCommerce is available now in two editions, one for mid-market and one for enterprise. Among early adopters the Girl Scouts of USA announced that it is moving its commerce operations to the new Netsuite platform. From a competitive view, there aren't really any strong contenders except in the large enterprise where both IBM and Oracle are making strong moves into this next generation of commerce platform.

At SuiteWorld last year, Netsuite announced its approach to socializing its applications would be through partnering with best of breed solutions and integrating through a social API rather than building its own social offering. Some of my colleagues have criticized Netsuite's social story, but in my opinion this was a smart move. It is critical to provide a system of relationship across the enterprise, something that Netsuite does effectively through its partnership with enterprise social network provider Yammer. Netsuite expanded it's social footprint last week by adding Box to its list of partners. The addition and what looks to be deep integration of the two products, provides Netsuite customers with  a strong collaboration and file sharing solution that complements the social and collaborative features of Yammer.

Today's ERP then is social, mobile and in the cloud. It also extends into a full feature commerce platform that can help companies retool and move away from cross and multi channel commerce, and start to provide an integrated commerce experience whether they are B2C or B2B.

Tags: Netsuite, SuiteWorld, ERP, SaaS, cloud, CaaS, commerce, Yammer, Box

From Big Data to Smart Data: Supporting Critical Business Decisions

Last week at Lithium's LiNC event I did a session on big data with Lithium Principal Scientist Dr Michael Wu. It's always a pleasure working with Michael, the session was well attended and the audience was very engaged. Since then I have been thinking about what we presented and I think there were a few key points that are very important in understanding how businesses can start to make use of data to support business decisions.

First I should bring back out a system model that I'm using to represent the three basic systems that we need in the enterprise today; systems of transaction, systems of decision and systems of relationship. It's important to understand the three systems, how they're different and more importantly how they are interrelated.

Systems of transaction are the application foundation for the modern enterprise. They are designed to automate routine business processes and support business transactions. They are also the source for most of the structured enterprise data. Systems of relationship are the new social solutions that enable peer to peer collaboration, content sharing, and community. The systems are used to connect employees, customers, partners and other stakeholders together and to content, data and other enterprise systems.

The third system, decision, represents the evolution of analytics and business intelligence from specialty tools that could only be used by specially trained analysts, to a system that puts analytics into the workflow, in context and as an end user tool. This concept is very important, the move from a system used by a few to look at history, to a system that is integral to the decision process. Systems of decision move information to the "right" person, at the time of need and in a work context.

So how does big data play into this decision system concept? Big data is a hot topic and according to IDC last year alone the world created ~1.8 zettabytes of new data growing by a factor of 9 over the next 5 years. The other part of that story is that much of the data is unstructured, which creates its own set of issues. Now on the face of it, it does seem that with the mountain of new data growing at a staggering pace that businesses must need to "do" something with it. The problem though, is exactly what to do? Just because the data's out there, and no doubt it's big, doesn't make it relevant, consumable or more importantly actionable. Data minus context can't be turned into usable information. There's also the problem with redundancy, a lot of data is redundant, and therefore isn't important even if you can add context and relevance.

Data is useful and actionable only if it's of interest to me (relevant) at the specific place and time (contextual) of use. The rest of the pile of "big data" is then, not of interest to me at all. The usefulness of big data is individual to a specific place / time, in the context of a specific issue or problem; or in other words, one person's signal (actionable data) is noise to someone else. Some of the data then is useful and of interest but you must know what questions to ask, for whom, and when and where it will be of use to solve a specific problem or issue, otherwise, big data is just dumb data.

So the real challenge for systems of decision is to turn the dumb data into smart data, or maybe more accurately, information. Systems of decision have to provide relevant, useful, actionable, intuitive, digestible and interactive information to the right person at the right time. The next generation of analytics are systems of decision that can provide the relevant information to every system user, in work context, to make smart business decisions. Here's a socialytics concept from Michael that fits this smart data / system of decision model:

Tags: big data, smart data, lithium, LiNC, socbiz, community, SCRM

Connecting the Enterprise: The VMware - Lithium Technologies Partnership

Companies today are under increasing pressure to change the way they interact with customers and community management platforms like the one provided by Lithium Technologies can be an important part of that initiative. With customers insisting that companies interact "when, where and how" the customer chooses and not, as in the past, only where the company chooses, customer support is more important than ever. Because of this, many companies are opening up social channels to their customers. Now these Social CRM efforts are definitely business critical, but in my opinion there's an associated issue that some companies are overlooking, their own siloed organizations. As I often tell audiences, just opening up channels to the customers without making sure their own employees can actually collaborate with each other is a recipe for disaster. I'm not saying one initiative is more important than the other, but they are in fact halves of the same process. Building a collaborative and connected business is more than opening up the conversation with the customer.

Last week during Lithium Technologies' Annual Conference LiNC a partnership with VMware's Socialcast was announced. Socialcast, an enterprise social network product I've written about a few times (here and here), provides the platform for connecting employees. Using Socialcast's Reach integration platform customer conversations and interactions from Lithium communities can be brought inside the Socialcast network, allowing employees to interact with customer ideas and feedback. Combining the enterprise social graph with the external customer social graph brings customer insights to internal experts to drive real time business decisions. This starts to move systems of relationship together with systems of decision to elevate the ability to make critical business decisions. Since Lithium communities connect out to public social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the enterprise network that is created by the two integrated graphs has very broad reach and is one step closer to becoming a networked business.

Tying companies together inside-out and outside-in is a key part of becoming a social business. Integrating the two platforms is a good step forward to doing just that, and should provide considerable business value. Socialcast enterprise social networks bring employees together with content, data and enterprise systems, Lithium communities bring customers together and open up a real time conversation. Bringing the customer conversation into the enterprise social network provides critical information that can lead to better and more timely business decisions and a more effective and innovative business strategy.

Tags: SCRM, enterprise social network, socbiz, customer, employee, decision, social