Michael Fauscette

Unpredictable Problems, Flexible Applications?

"A chain of events"...an interconnected series of phenomenon that  lead to some outcome... enterprise applications are changing and both businesses and vendors are starting to see the series of changes in motion. I don't believe though, that we know yet what the "end game" is really. This past year or so I started trying to understand what the next generation enterprise platforms might look like and have some ideas. There are a few things that seem obvious to me at this point. For example next generation EA platforms must have embedded social (or relationship) capabilities as systems of relationship drive new ways for employees to collaborate. The same is true of analytics, which need to exist in the context of business decision processes.

As a part of the next generation it's possible that the definition of applications is also changing. Over the past 10 years vendors have broken apps down into smaller and smaller modules. In fact, as the apps get more modular it's possible to think of the underlying services as the apps themselves. This modularization, which I've written about before, is an important change in how apps are sold  and consumed. Breaking apps down to the services and consuming the service (or maybe the process), particularly when we're looking at SaaS apps, has some advantages. In that scenario businesses could more easily assemble services into broader processes that were a much closer fit to the specific business need. The opposite could also be true though, the business could use specific services to solve an emerging need, and then discontinue its use when the situation is resolved.  

One of the most significant challenges that businesses face today is dealing with issues that fall outside of current processes and systems. These ad hoc problems happen much more frequently than one might imagine and require human intervention to resolve. As such they take an inordinate amount of company resources to deal with. Systems of relationship are part of the solution to handling ad hoc issue resolution, facilitating identifying and assembling the "right" team of employees with the necessary skills to most effectively find a resolution. Systems of relationship can  also help identify information and data that can support the resolution process. What's missing though, is the ability to bring specific systems into play to support the team in its efforts. These supporting systems could be systems of decision or systems of transactions, depending on the specific issue. If a business employs the sense and respond business model, this need is even more acute. S&R is built on the concept of flexibility of input, analysis and response or output.

The need for apps that can support ad hoc problem solving and S&R models then, is for small, "bite size" apps that are flexible enough to be end user defined and configured. That sounds simple, but has not proven so in the past. Most enterprise apps are designed to support a predefined process and to do so for the foreseeable future. In other words they are not designed with a high degree of flexibility as a design principal. Changing them is difficult and costly. This is very true of on premise apps, but in truth SaaS apps are not really much more flexible by design. The other legacy design issue is complexity. Again, most enterprise apps today are not designed with simplicity in mind, instead they are designed to automate work and hold to a process. Both of these design principals presuppose that the inputs, process and desired outcomes are understood up front. As you can see, this is a problem when dealing with an ad hoc problem or issue, it's not something that can necessarily be predicted with any accuracy so how does one build a system to help with it's resolution?

To meet this need, several concepts have to come together. There is a need for an apps platform that allows employees / teams to rapidly define a new app, configure it and use it to solve a problem or series of problems, then dispose of it and move on to the next issue. To some extent some business process management (BPM) platforms have this capability, but it's limited to processes or workflows. BPM platforms can't provide a disposable, ad hoc system of decision, as they are not built on an analytics platform. Most ad hoc issues are not tied to a need for a new or different business process, instead they are the core of the sense and respond process.

New platforms are evolving and will continue to do so over the next few years as more businesses need systems that can support S&R models and the ability to deal with ad hoc issues. Salesforce Force platform supports rapid app development, which is at least part of the solution. VMware is also making progress from a platform approach. Citrix recently bough Podio, which provides a very interesting platform for providing a system of relationship with the ability to build ad hoc apps. The product is still fairly new but it does have a lot of promise. Oracle's new cloud platform offering could also be a potential solution, but it's perhaps to early to say. The other interesting platform that I have looked at recently is a new analytics platform from Unit4. The platform provides the capability to built hoc analytic apps quickly and easily, and operates in a business model that supports the concept of flexible, disposable analytic apps.

A lot of change is underway in the apps business, change that is necessary to provide more effective tools for managing and optimizing businesses in the new information driven business environment. Change is hard, and there are still a lot of open questions. The need for providing a set of completely flexible, end user definable and configurable, and disposable apps to support ad hoc problem solving will help define the next generation of enterprise apps.

Tags: EA, enterprise, applications, apps, ad hoc, business models, socbiz, sense and respond, S&R

Why Companies are Using Social Software

Twice a year, for over three years now, we have conducted a social business survey to look at adoption and usage trends in the enterprise. We recently completed this years survey and are now busy analyzing the data. There are a core set of questions that we ask on each survey and the trends  in several of these core questions is interesting to track. Over the 4-5 years that I've researched social in the enterprise we've seen massive amounts of change in use cases, adoption, technology and attitudes toward the potential for social for business. Five years ago social was centered in marketing, where social media with it's meteoric rise in influence and popularity was "all the rage". In the early surveys this was reflected in many of the answers, particularly why use social for business and in the areas in the business that provided social strategy. For social business to really take off though, the use cases had to move beyond marketing and get out into many parts of the organization. I won't rehash use cases, I've done that often enough here anyway, but it's important to note that those use cases are growing and generally fit into these broad categories:

• Enterprise social network
• Customer experience
• Innovation management
• Sales enablement
• Digital commerce
• Socialytics

Anyway, on to the data. This slide shows the latest response to the question of why companies are using social software.

Now I've come to expect changes year over year, but I have to say that this year, I'm very surprised by the dramatic shift in a few of the responses. First note that the #1 reason for using social for business last year, acquire knowledge/ask questions, is now #14, or next to last. Last year over 50% of the respondents answered acquire knowledge, yet this year, not even 10% ranked it. In fact the entire top 5 is different this year.

So let's look at the top five and see if we can understand the change in less than a year. The first thing that jumps out at me is that the number one answer, gather feedback on company product or service, leverages the power of engaging customers, partners and employees in building a better product or service...or in other words bringing all the constituents into the innovation process. For me, this has always seemed like one of the most compelling use cases for social tools. Last year I added coverage on a new market called innovation management mostly because of the need for businesses to innovate and manage innovation in a new way, and the opportunity that social technologies create to add value in the innovation process. So number one is about building better products or services, and the definition of better is tied to feedback from all constituents.

I've written and talked about the elevated importance of customer service in the era of the social customer for awhile. It appears from the #2 answer in the survey that companies are adopting social customer service as a critical use case. Actually #2 and #5 are related to the use of social for communicating, supporting and engaging customers. More and more I'm talking to companies about customer experience, social tools and processes are an important part of the strategy. Meeting customers when, where and how the customer chooses is not optional.

The area that is a little surprising to me is how fast businesses seem to be looking at the potential to use social tools to engage partners and suppliers. I do think there's a lot of potential, but it certainly has moved up the ladder of importance faster than I would have guessed. On the supplier side, it's clear that supplier networks are a powerful tool, and considering Ariba was founded in the late 1990's, I guess they're some of the oldest business social networks. 

Considering the rapid growth and adoption of social tools it's interesting to see the shift in attitude as companies start to see the use of social as a competitive advantage. With "keeping up with the competition" as the #3 reason for adopting social tools, that's quite a change for this year and will drive spending in a market that is already seeing near 50% year over year growth.

For the first time last year companies started to talk about social tools, particularly socialytics, as decision support aids. I think this a sign of maturity and of the increasing importance of social systems to businesses. Make decisions moved up from #10 to #7 in this years survey. That's less progress than some reasons, but still a significant reflection of the increasing importance of social data to decision makers.

Perhaps the area that will surprise many is the fall of the internal communication type use cases in the overall set of responses. Again, I think this is a maturing of the space as companies are learning and incorporating other use cases. Employee collaboration is still an important issue and provides opportunity for productivity gains, but some other uses have started to gain more as their value is becoming more apparent. The one internal use case that is gaining from last year is social leaning. "Conduct employee training" moved from next to last to #8 this year.

Some very telling shifts in responses this year. What do you think, does your business use of social tools resemble the survey?

Tags: socbiz, social, e2.0, survey, innovation management, collaboration, knowledge, SCRM, support, customer