Michael Fauscette

Yammer and Ultimate Software: Building out the Enterprise Social Network

Last week Yammer and Ultimate Software announced a partnership that combines the Yammer enterprise social network with Ultimate's UltiPro HCM. Combining the deep employee profile from the corporate HCM system with a real time social collaboration tool is an important step in building out a complete enterprise social network, connecting employees to each other and to partners and customers. A modern HCM system contains critical workforce intelligence that starts with recruitment and includes job history, compensation and payroll, performance, skills / talent and career development data...all the relevant employee transaction data (system of transaction). The system of relationship, or social network, has connection data, interaction data, important clues to interests, skills and competencies, as well as organic performance data. The integration and interaction of the two systems forms the core of the complete corporate network.

Specifically in this case the two companies are starting by releasing the first phase of the integration this Spring and continuing to iterate and increase functionality with subsequent releases. In 2012 the roadmap includes:

• Single sign-on from UltiPro to Yammer
• Cross-posting and messaging between the two systems to include auto posting job openings and administrative alerts and actions into the Yammer activity stream
• Work milestones: the ability to tag accomplishments relating to individual, team or company goals in Yammer and have that accomplishment captured in UltiPro's goal management module.
• Capturing recognition from the Yammer stream into the UltiPro Performance Management
• Team collaboration: provides managers a filtered view of their team's collaborative actions and activities from Yammer in UltiPro Talent Gateway 

 The overall concept, tying together the collaboration and communication activities with the performance management system and the employee data seems like a natural extension of both systems as companies become more open, collaborative and more people-centric in the way that work gets done. The systems of relationship have to be integral to the systems of transaction and systems of decision as the enterprise matures.

Today we're seeing social collaboration tools, and the subsequent networks that are created by the tools coming from several different directions. Some systems of transaction are building networking into the fabric of each system, a trend that will no doubt accelerate as companies learn that collaboration happens at the point of work, not off in a different system. Collaborative work is about getting the right people, data, content and systems together at the right time, in the work context. The systems have to facilitate that to be relevant. What's happening is that different networks are growing up around different types of systems and tasks. At some point these different networks have to be tied together into one broader system of networks. The systems of relationship can form the link between the networks, both internal and external. In the new networked business model that is evolving there really are a series of interconnected networks that interact in different ways depending on the work context. This Ultimate - Yammer partnership is a great example of the movement towards this new network of networks.

This is starting to happen around several vendor systems. Yammer's partnership last year with Netsuite is another example of the evolution and connection between transactions and relationships. Salesforce.com has similar partnerships that use Chatter as the connecting network, including Workday, FinancialForce and Infor as well as all of the other Force ISV's, who get access to Chatter through the platform. Oracle is doing something similar with its new Oracle Social Network (OSN) product and the network at work in the Fusion HCM modules. OSN could be the system of relationship across all of Oracle's product portfolio. Another example is IBM's partnership with SugarCRM, which ties IBM Connections (the system of relationship) to the CRM / SCRM suite.

To me this move toward integration is the next step in the maturity of social enterprise solutions. While functionality to facilitate relationships are critical, they really only start to provide their true value when they are tied directly to the systems of transaction and systems of decision. This blending is the start of the move to the next generation of enterprise platforms, which are inherently social and support real time decision processes in the work context.

Tags: ocial business, SCRM, socbiz, social enterprise, Yammer, Ultimate, HCM, Oracle, IBM, Salesforce. Chatter, OSN, SugarCRM, collaboration

Social Government?

I spent time last week at an IBM / Federal Computer Week Social Business event for the Federal Government. I tend to focus most of my time researching commercial uses of social tools, not public sector, so I was very interested to hear what government agencies were doing. In addition I hoped to get a better idea of cloud adoption among federal agencies, particularly since there is a mandate for agencies to make greater use of cloud computing both to save money and to close the technology gap with private sector. I have to say, particularly around the use of social tools, that I was surprised how far some agencies have advanced. There's still a long way to go of course, but I did see some novel and creative use cases during the day. I'm sure that the Obama administration, by setting a strong example of technology adoption and use, has a lot to do with the rapid change in some agencies through adoption of social tools and concepts.

After an opening keynote from IBM Social Business GM Alistair Rennie, the agenda moved to some examples of what agencies have actually done with social tools. Malcolm Jackson, Assistant Administrator and CIO of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), presented on designing an effective collaborative environment in a government agency. The EPA is embracing social in both internal and external use cases and is particularly active on public social networks as a means of constituent outreach. Culturally the EPA is building on the concept of knowledge sharing and collaboration as a means to become more transparent and more effective. The EPA started actively blogging in 2007 with Greenversations and now has five active blogs and seven discussion forums where it actively engages its different constituents. On the EPA web site there are podcasts, RSS feeds, widgets and links to social bookmarking sites throughout the site for content sharing. On public social networks the EPA is active on Twitter (the EPA Administrator, Lisa P. Jackson, @lisapjackson, is participating with the White House in a Tweetup about women and the environment on 3/26 - #SheGoesGreen) with 23 official handles, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Challenge.gov. 2012 is the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act and to raise awareness on water conservation the EPA is running a campaign all year that is centered on a Facebook page. As an interesting side note, Jackson also shared that he had just issued a directive that all software tools developed for the EPA must be developed for mobile first.

As I was researching for this post, I can across this timeline of the US governments use of social media:

U.S. Government use of Social Media on Dipity.

  

In fact there's a whole web site of resources to help agencies with their use of social tools to engage constituents, HowTo.Gov.

Another example comes from a much maligned agency that definitely needed a way to change its public brand, the Veterans Administration (VA). As a veteran myself I can tell you that the VA has a lot of bad "press" to try and overcome but happily it is embracing social tools to help with this battle. Joining the summit to talk about what the VA is doing with social collaboration was Brandon Friedman, Director of Online Communication, Department of Veterans Affairs. Mr Friedman tells a story that is growing more common among public and private sector of how social tools can help drive culture change and influence public opinion. On June 28, 2011 the VA issued Directive 6515 on the USE of Web-Based Collaboration Technologies. With this directive all VA employees are strongly encouraged to use social tools for information sharing inside and outside the VA and to facilitate collaboration, outreach, and communication at the VA. According to the directive these collaborative tools include social media such as wikis, blogs, mashups, folksonomies, Web feeds (such as RSS feeds), and forums (such as Facebook), and other collaborative tools (enterprise social software like IBM Connections, Yammer, VMWare SocialCast, Salesforce Chatter, etc.). The VA started using social media in 2009 and now has all 152 medical centers with an active Facebook page and Twitter feed, two blogs (VAntage Point), a YouTube channel and a Flickr page. Over 300K VA employees are using social tools to reach out to veterans and communicate about VA services. The VA also created Web communications offices, content managers and collaboration service coordinators at all VA facilities and organizations. According to Freidman 40% of the veterans who use the VA's Facebook pages are over 45 and only 9% are younger than 25.

In a very high profile way in 2009, the US Marines banned the use of all public social networking sites for all active duty Marines unless a mission-critical need exists (I wrote about it here). According to Gunnery Sgt. Robert Piper of the DoD's USMC/Defense Media Activity, the Marines learned a lesson that many businesses are also learning, you can ban social networks but that ban does not stop their use. In fact if you think about it, a deployed Marine is a natural user of social networks to stay connected to family and friends. The Marine Corps has now lifted the ban and is embracing the use of social tools by its soldiers. With a policy in place and all Marines trained on the proper use and operational security issues, the Marine Corps is finding that the social tools have improved morale and greatly enhanced the ability to communicate both for official and personal reasons. Gunny Piper said that Google+ is very popular among Marines, particularly the hangout feature. One program that the Marines put in place using social tools sets aside time for a deployed soldier to video chat with their young children every week on a Marine sponsored device.

On the cloud front, it seems that more and more agencies are deploying applications in the cloud both in government data centers and in data centers from companies like IBM and Amazon Web Services. Security is of course a big concern for government agencies but a new regulation, the Federal Risk and Authorizations Management Program or  FedRAMP, is in place to deal with the issues. FedRAMP is a government-wide initiative to provide joint authorizations and continuous security monitoring services for all federal agencies with a focus on cloud computing.  By providing a unified government-wide risk management for enterprise level IT systems, FedRAMP allows agencies to either use or leverage authorizations with: 1. Vetted interagency approach, 2. Consistent application of Federal security requirements, 3. Improved community-wide risk management posture, and 4. Increased effectiveness and management cost savings. There are three components to FedRAMP:

1. Security Requirement Authorities which sets government-wide baseline security requirements that are interagency developed and approved.
2. The FedRAMP Office which coordinates authorization packages, manage authorized system list, and provide continuous monitoring oversight. This will be managed by GSA.
3. A Joint Authorization Board which performs authorizations and on-going risk determinations government-wide. The board consists of representatives from GSA, DoD, DHS and the sponsoring agency of the authorized system.

A few vendors, like IBM, have data centers that are set aside for the Federal Government agencies and are FedRAMP authorized.

The IBM summit was well attended but not everyone in attendance was a convert to social business (or I guess we could call it social government, although that does get dangerously close to the term socialism, which is definitely not what is intended). There was a gentleman at my table who in very many ways fit some old stereotypes of the government bureaucrat who clearly was not interested in anything that was being said (why he came I'm not really sure, unless it was a way to get a day off and a free lunch). At one break he was loudly sharing his studied opinion on just how dangerous all this social media stuff really is. According to him, the NSA (the whole agency I guess) had told him that you'd have to be crazy to use a public social network, and if you do, just be prepared...hackers will steal all your personal information and even steal your money right out of your bank account! (Frankly at times, I've been more worried about what Zukerberg was doing with my personal data than hackers...but you never know I guess). At least I was well entertained at the breaks...

So with all this government activity around social business what can we learn from the agencies? Here are a few best practices that I took away from the day:

• Provide clear policies for the use of social tools, particularly public social networks. This isn't a new idea of course, but it definitely reinforced just how important having a clear, concise policy is for a business. And don't forget that once you have a policy you have to provide ongoing training for everyone on the policy.
• Provide best practices training for employees to ensure you get the results you want.
• Having dedicated staffing with clear responsibilities for social activities goes a long way to make a program successful. If the use of social tools and building a social business culture is important to your business then invest in resources and expertise to drive that success.
• Just because the outreach social programs seem the most obvious and important don't forget to work on the internal collaboration issues as well. A silo'ed organization cannot effectively engage its customers / constituents.
• Building a collaborative, knowledge sharing culture is powerful and returns significant value to employees, customers, partners and to the overall business. Social tools are an important part of any social business initiative but without the right culture they will not deliver a successful social program.

All in all it was a fun event and I left feeling even more convinced that social business initiatives are delivering real value to businesses and agencies.

Tags: social, socbiz, government, social media, social networks, VA, EPA, USMC

Emerging and Changing Employment Models

The recession and its aftermath created a business and social change wave that we're still struggling to understand. One area in particular, work or employment, both the way people are employed and the way companies and individuals get at least some of the required work done is changing. New models of employment, some an extension of shrinking corporate budgets and realities of how an individual can make a living, and other models enabled because of growing connectivity created by the Internet, are popping up everywhere. We know and I've discussed here many times, that the Internet is enabling all sorts of business model innovations and some of those new models are directly related to employment.

As more and more people were forced out of traditional jobs and as more companies looked for creative ways to get peak load capacity without hiring more direct employees, contract work has rapidly expanded. Not that independent contracting itself is new, it's not, but the number of people who are working in that model, and the number of companies that are using it has grown rapidly with no decline in sight. Many individuals forced out of corporate jobs have found that freedom and flexibility as well as the ability to maintain a decent standard of living has made working as an independent more than a desperate fall back plan, but in fact can be a desirable lifestyle change. And in a connected, information based, mobile and cloud enabled business world many types of roles are easily executed in a contract / task / project model. In fact for many it has turned into a win-win, companies get access to great talent when needed but don't have to bare the ongoing expense and people get compensated for what they know and can do yet maintain independence and flexibility while doing interesting, stimulating work. Don't get me wrong though, I certainly do realize that many have suffered greatly in a very tough economic environment, but at the same time I know many who have found life changing or at least acceptable new ways to earn a living.

Because of the growing population of available independent workers, many new businesses have grown up to help both individuals find and do contract work, and also help businesses find, manage and pay qualified contract workers. The increasing number of technology based contract positions, particularly coding, fueled the growth of two start ups in the contractor "matchmaking" market, oDesk and Elance, which I've written about a few times including this post on the Human Cloud so I won't spend much time in this post on that part of the new economy.

Technology skills, coding in particular, are in high demand both in direct employment models and in contract models. I've read several articles this year on the idea that every new college student (or unemployed recent grad) should learn to code to make themselves more employable. In fact in the realm of developing independent skills, coding is solid gold it seems. One start up that leverages this trend is Codeacademy, an online coding learning environment that is sponsoring Code Year 2012 for people to learn coding skills this year...and so far 415,953 people seem to have taken that challenge to heart.

Among the new employment models that are related to the increasing availability of independents is a trend that some have labeled micro-employment. This is a very interesting new area that is enabled by the Internet and leverages peer to peer connectivity as a part of the model. The idea is that companies and individuals can outsource tasks using an online matchmaking service. These tasks could be anything and in some models the work is based on projects that can be broken down to very granular micro-tasks. The process is facilitated by an online marketplace environment where employers (individual and companies) can post tasks and potential candidates can bid on the work. Posting is free as is job searching, the fee is based on the transaction and is paid by the employer when a match is made and executed. The best know of these services is Amazon Mechanical Turk, but the competition is heating up in this market with two newer competitors Zaarly and TaskRabbit. While each company has some unique components they all leverage the Internet and rely on a community paradigm to establish and maintain credibility of both parties. Leveraging the social network effect for establishing and maintaining trust is a key component to the success of this model. The type of tasks are very diverse ranging from highly skilled to unpleasant (at least in my opinion) manual tasks and the pay rates are just as diverse. These three sites alone represent hundreds of thousands of employment opportunities.

From the human cloud to micro-employment for many at least, the nature of employment is changing, and the opportunity for getting work done is facilitated in new ways because of the Internet and the social web. The new economy is still being defined but these new employment models are an important part of it.

Tags: employment, work, micro-employement, new economy, human cloud, code year

An Update on the Infor - Salesforce Partnership

Last Fall at Salesforce.com's annual customer conference Dreamforce, I witnessed a somewhat surprising announcement from Infor CEO Charles Phillips and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff of a partnership between the two companies. I say surprising because I don't think many people expected Infor, which is a rollup of several traditional 90's era software systems, to be on the list of main stage guest and certainly not a partner target for cloud apps leader (and the poster child for the cloud computing era) Salesforce.com. On the surface you might even say that the two companies are as different as the gasoline engine powered motorcar was from the horse and buggy. Infor though, has made some serious efforts to modernize its offerings and to harmonize the products on a modern UI. You might even have noticed that they've grown much more aggressive over the last few years, particularly under the leadership of ex-Oracle President Charles Phillips with new releases, new executive hires, acquisitions and a much higher profile marketing campaign.

Many tech "partnerships" are high on hype and low on substance but this week's announcement of Inforce Everywhere signals true depth and real commitment by both companies to build something meaningful between them. The more I've thought about the partnership and the announcements the more I have started to see just what this might mean in the marketplace for customers, for competitors and for each company. Before we dive into the announcement it's probably useful to review the details of the partnership itself. There are three major components to the partnership agreement: 1. Salesforce.com took an equity stake in Infor, 2. Infor became one of only three Salesforce CRM resellers (Intuit and Dell are the other two) and 3. Infor became a Salesforce ISV partner.

Salesforce using an equity stake approach to a partnership is not a new tactic for the company, it did the same thing in a partnership with Unit4 that co-funded the spin off company FinancialForce a few years ago. The arrangement is beneficial to both companies, Infor gets an infusion of needed capital (Infor is a private company, owned mostly by Golden Gate Capital) to continue its product modernization efforts, and Salesforce.com gets some royalties (like an appExchange partner, although this is maybe actually tied to the ISV portion of the agreement) and potentially some influence over future product direction (although as far as I know, that influence has not been exercised).

As a Salesforce.com CRM reseller Infor gets a strong CRM product in its sales portfolio and of course Salesforce.com gets one more distribution channel. In addition Salesforce CRM becomes part of another complete business solution which increases its market reach and Infor, which really doesn't have a strong CRM offering, rounds out its solutions as well. Lastly Infor gains access to the Force cloud platform for developing native cloud solutions, which is the part of the agreement that is directly related to this week's announcement, and is important to Infor directly because of the potential new products as well as indirectly to Infor by providing cloud credibility to its product story.

The announcement itself is the availability of the first of three products that Infor agreed to develop on the Force.com platform, Inforce Everywhere. Inforce Everywhere is the integration that enables Infor's back office solutions to share data and stay in sync with Salesforce CRM front end, and is the key to creating an end-to-end business solution offering from the two companies. Also because the product is built on Force it gains social capabilities through Salesforce Chatter and is mobile. The other two products, which are in development now, are 1. Inforce Ordering, which will provide the ability to create quotes and orders in Salesforce Sales cloud and pass them to Infor for synchronization and order fulfillment, and 2. Inforce Marketing, which uses the assets from Epiphany to provide an expanded set of B2B marketing capabilities that are complimentary to Salesforce's current limited marketing feature set.

Based on the plans and the progress so far I'd say that the partnership offers both companies significant benefit and should provide value to both Salesforce.com's and Infor's customer base. In this case the devil's not in the details, which are well defined and clearly could benefit both companies, but instead in the execution, which involve a lot of moving parts and could prove challenging. In the end though this partnership may prove to be the most aggressive and productive move of all of Infor's moves under the new regimen.

Tags: CRM, ERP, Infor, Salesforce.com, partnership, ISV, Force

Componentizing Software

There's a lot of pressure for change in the world of enterprise software, and many would argue that it's much needed change. The growing availability of everything "as-a-service" is changing the way companies buy and consume software. In fact the Internet has impacted the way almost everything is distributed in some way. The more everything is connected the easier distribution becomes. Underneath this distribution shift though, several other things are also changing about the way software is being implemented or upgraded and the way it is being designed and built. I noticed a trend a few years ago,  just before the great recession. The trend, what I call modular consumption, accelerated during the recession as well.

So what do I mean by modular consumption? In the old days, you know, back in the 1990's, most companies bought and deployed a full range of software products for running the business, including financials, human resources, supply chain, manufacturing, etc., mostly from a single vendor in a pre-integrated ERP suite.  In some cases best of breed or new and innovative software was added to the ERP suite, and in many cases that software was from a different vendor, but in general, the 1990's were the days of the one vendor suite deployments. This happened for many reasons, most IT departments had operated in single vendor environments in the pre-client / server days and frankly, integration in the early client / server days was hard (actually I suppose integration is still hard, although much less difficult with the current crop of SOA-based apps). To get the advantages derived from integrated business processes it was necessary to get large, siloed applications to work together, and this was most easily accomplished by a single vendor suite. These full enterprise suites were / are by design behemoths with millions of lines of code and lots of process complexity developed in the waterfall methodology with a release cycle of years at best. They do after all, have to accommodate a broad swath of industries, at least coming reasonably close to providing an operating base for each company. On top of that base of course, most companies added customizations, extensions, and custom apps to meet the specific business needs. The whole mess (and I use that term with the greatest affection) was large, difficult to maintain and even more difficult to change. Flexibility, if attempted at all, was mostly a long and expensive process of modifying / customizing the existing suite and maybe adding / integrating a new application with some new required features and functions.

Software as a service, which is now a dozen or so years mature, has pushed on many of these paradigms, changing release cycles to weeks instead of years and offering pre-packaged integrations that could allow cloud based apps to work with traditional suites. The original SaaS apps were very feature focused around a single business area (sales force automation, talent management, travel and expense management, etc.). To meet these new, faster incremental release cycles many of the SaaS vendors have moved to an agile development model build around collaboration, iteration, process adaptability and team work.

As the economy has remained unpredictable and the depth of the recession combined with many other factors have taught IT organizations new behavior patterns. In the past IT projects were often broad and deep, with long time lines and broad changes. Companies are simply not changing out suites in broad rip and replace projects anymore, it's not an affordable model. Instead, more and more, we see companies adding modules of functionality around the edges of existing systems to get greater flexibility and add new innovative functionality to meet changing business requirements. This new approach is modular consumption. As a service has spread outside of apps as well, and more and more, companies have the option of adding more granular modules of services as needed, including storage, security, development platforms, and even compute power. Up and down the software stack we see more and more granular modules or components that can be assembled to give greater flexibility while more rapidly addressing changing business needs. Business strategy, once a process that might be adjusted every few years is becoming operationalized and is driving the need for system and organizational flexibility. To meet this new level of nimble business strategy, software must become infinitely more flexible.

This brings me to this idea of componentization of software. Modules of functionality must be more granular and integration more "plug and play" to give businesses the ability to modify business strategies in near real time as competition drives this new level of flexibility. The Internet, global connectivity and changing expectations on the part of customers, partners and employees add fuel to this need. The days of the development project to accomplish what now needs to be ad hoc configuration have to change. Businesses can't afford this approach and must have the capability to adjust strategy in an ongoing way. Information work is about ad hoc processes and teams, and the flexibility to adjust to this ad hoc approach has to extend to the underlying systems. The platform of the future must accommodate plug and play components that can, in lego-like fashion, be snapped together in a near infinite number of different configurations. We're starting to see this type of approach, particularly below the apps layer in the stack, but also in application components sitting on an underlying platform that facilitates this new requirement of flexibility. No change in enterprise software will happen overnight, there simply is too much invested in legacy systems that are good enough to see a broad rip and replace approach. The componentization process though, will open up more opportunity to leverage the existing, aging core of functionality in new ways by adding the new capabilities around the edges. Eventually this will lead to new platforms and those new platforms will accelerate the changes, replacing the old suites with a new modular, flexible as a service infrastructure and SaaS process components that allow for the needs of flexible business strategies.

Tags: platform, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, cloud, ERP, enterprise, software, change, modular consumption, componentization

The Future of Email is Social

I was recently approached by IBM to me write a white paper discussing the future of email. They came to me, in part because of my work with social business software but also because of this post from last April, where I talked about the current problems with email, the proliferation of social tools and how using the "right" tool for the job it was designed for could go a long way towards getting email under control. The premise is fairly simple, email is out of control and is becoming a less effective communication tool because its use has expanded far outside the limits of its designed use. Frankly I often go on a rant about email, which for me has exploded to the point that I have a serious issue getting to the things I actually need because of the never ending clutter of CYA cc's, reply all's, endless conversation chains and lame attempts to do collaborative file sharing and editing. I suspect that many if not most of you are having the same problems. In fact there's a growing backlash against email, with companies actually trying to eliminate its use entirely through company-wide bans.

Email, which is now over 40 years old, was designed to accomplish a few very simple things, primarily one to one or one to few secure communications. For that task, email is uniquely excellent, particularly because of its wide spread adoption and interoperability capabilities. Through standards anyone can send anyone else a reasonably secure communication, across firewalls from company to company. Email has near universal acceptance, is simple to use (maybe that's part of the problem though) and, with only a simple address, can connect anyone to anyone else. The problem though, is that we're using email, which is a communication tool, for all sorts of other collaborative tasks that are outside of its capabilities. That, coupled with the shear volume, is causing the current email fatigue.

So what's a person to do? Ruling out the somewhat overzealous idea of banning it entirely, are there reasonable solutions to get email under control and get other tools in place to facilitate the tasks that email is not equipped to do, while keeping it in place for the things it does well? The answer, I believe, is forming around the emerging social collaborative tools. These tools, ranging from activity streams to effective collaborative task execution (file sharing), can relieve the burden of using email for other than its sweet spot. But, is just rolling out new tools enough? I don't think so, in fact I think that we have to see some convergence of tools to really get to the point of overcoming the current obstacles to collaborative work.

The solution, I believe, lies in building a system that federates these new and traditional functions into the most usable UI. There are two paths then, one of pulling everything, including email into a new "activity stream" or moving in the opposite direction, and pulling all of the new social capabilities into the current email environment. Each approach has its advantages and I can see a justification for either. I do think that adoption of social tools would be much higher if the capability to continue in a familiar environment but have the new capabilities available was available and might just be the more effective approach for many. Anyway, you can read the white paper for yourself, it's available from IBM for free (well, you do have to register), so I won't recap all of it here.

Tags: email, ibm, social, socbiz, collaboration, file sharing, IM

Twitter, Politics, and Sentiment Analysis

I had an interesting conversation with a journalist recently that made me think a bit more on the use of social data for decision support, the accuracy of socially generated big data and the ability to apply current technologies to turn that data into useful information. The topic was the potential to use socialytics in the current US Presidential race, specifically the Twitter stream, but the concepts apply much more broadly. The 2008 presidential race was the first time that US candidates used social networks and social media in a campaign, and that practice has expanded quite a bit in the current campaign efforts. Twitter, in particular, has gotten a lot of attention as both a medium for creating constituent engagement and also as a way for candidates to get a real time look at public opinion on any given issue or candidate. In some ways, Twitter is like a real time version of an exit poll with a massive increase in sample size.

There seems to be some doubt around the value of analyzing the Twitter data stream and over what specifically that analysis has the capability to show. I'm a little surprised by this, since the technology, text analytics, and the validity of applying analysis to massive data sets, is advanced and widely accepted. It seems to me that there are several use cases for Twitter in the context of a political campaign, including real time feedback on public sentiment on an issue or candidate, a measure of sentiment around a specific debate and even a predictor of outcomes. The questions seem to be: 1. does the measure of sentiment on Twitter accurately reflect the sentiment of the broader population when politics is the subject, 2. is Twitter used to discuss political issues or is it simply a vehicle to spread opinions, 3. can Twitter be used to accurately predict the outcome of an election?

There are several studies that have examined Twitter's effectiveness as a tool in a political campaign and often the questions raised above were a basis for conducting the research. In a 2010, for example, a study conducted by the Technical University of Munich and presented at the AAAI conference, looked at Twitter as a predictive tool for election outcomes. The study used the tweets leading up to the federal election of the national parliament (Sept 27th, 2009) and used a form of the three questions I raised above to see if there was a correlation between the sentiment analysis of the tweet stream and the election outcomes. The study concluded:

1. Twitter is used as a platform for political deliberation
2. The sentiment profiles of candidates and parties reflected in the tweet stream accurately represented the actual sentiment of the population at large.
3. The number of tweets reflected the election results and was comparable to traditional election polls. 

In another study, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University analyzed the tweet stream from 2008-2009 and compared them to surveys on political issues and consumer confidence and found a similar correlation to the German study. There are a few other studies with similar conclusions, but I think you get the point, Twitter does reflect the broader political sentiment, it is used to discuss politics, not just broadcast opinion and it can be used to predict election outcomes...at least according to the body of research so far. 

So from a political campaign perspective how can candidates use Twitter, and can those uses be applied to business? Here are a few use cases that I think fit both politics and business use:

• Real time sentiment analysis around public issues. For politicians this is a powerful tool that reaches far beyond traditional polls and surveys, which have a lag (sometime significant lag) in response time. This means that a politician could measure sentiment around any public statement or issue and adjust messaging in real time. Leaving the ethical judgment aside for now, this would mean that a candidate could tweak messages in fine detail all through a campaign (I'll just chalk this up to communication clarity, not to pandering). For a business, this could be used for brand sentiment, particularly around a crisis where clarity of message is business critical. By monitoring sentiment a company could adjust PR / communications to more effectively defuse a situation or adjust marketing / communications to provide a clearer message.
• Twitter is not only a broadcast channel but it can also foster discussion around an issue. For a candidate this could be used to clarify public opinion on an issue, collect feedback and even crowdsource some potential solutions. For businesses Twitter can serve as one channel for collecting customer feedback, ideas and even support.
• Twitter can, with reasonable accuracy, predict the outcomes of elections. I do think that this is a little less useful than the real time use a sentiment analysis tool, but still, it has proven reasonably accurate. I also don't want to infer that normal statistical principals don't apply, they do, this is just one more method to find useful information. There will be inaccuracies and bias, just like any other survey, sample, etc. That said, predictive capabilities could be applied to any public issue that has fairly widespread appeal. Twitter's accuracy, at least in part, is related to the shear volume of information that can be pushed through an analysis engine. This is tied to one of the key factors around the value of big data, large data sets with a broad representation.

There are issues with any type of analysis of course, but from what we've seen so far, there are opportunities to apply sentiment analysis to social channels like Twitter to gain insight. It's not the only data source, but it is one interesting point in making / supporting decisions. What do you think, how could analysis of large social data sets be used to support business?

Tags: big data, sentiment, twitter, social, socbiz, social enterprise, social web, analytics, politics

Top Ten Predictions for 2012

Every year IDC has a widespread top ten predictions program that starts in November with worldwide top level firm predictions generated from a group of us, and is then followed by a series from across many groups. My group always contributes our enterprise application focused predictions. The document is now available on IDC.com (#233104, subscription required to access). I will summarize the predictions for you though, since many of you can't access the actual document. In addition to me, the document was authored by: Mary Wardley, Robert Mahowald, Amy Konary and Scott Guinn.

2012, at least for software applications, should continue to see good growth across a variety of markets. Technology, particularly software, is seen as a competitive equalizer and automation is increasing productivity in an environment of scarcity. Companies continue to invest in edge applications that increase customer touch and facilitate a more collaborative business environment. The four major trends, cloud, big data, social and mobile continue to have far reaching impacts for businesses and for the technology that supports them. With this in mind we offer the following predictions:

1. Demand for Digital Commerce Will Outpace Other Enterprise Software Markets as Traditional Retailers Search for an Equilibrium Between Brick-and-Mortar, Online, Mobile, and Social Commerce Channels, with Digital Commerce Growing Beyond Retail.

2. Cloud Monetization Will Become More Sophisticated (Beyond Per User Per Month) as Cloud Applications Mature

3. This Year, Businesses Will Move a Portion of Enterprise Application Seats to Public Cloud Infrastructure, Accelerating the Wholesale Model and Growing the Percentage of Applications Seats Deployed on Public Cloud IaaS to About 2.4%

4. 2012 Will Be the Year of "Putting the Pieces Together" for Effective Customer Engagement

5. Context Awareness for Personalization (Not Customization) Will Be the "New Black": The Ability to Customize Is Still Critical, But That Signals Time and Effort

6. Innovation Management Will Become a Focus for Business as a Key Element of Competitive Advantage in a Tough Economy

7. Cloud Apps M&A Will Be Led by Big Names: 2012 Will See Significant Buying as Major ISVs, Late to the Cloud Game, Fill Out Their Functional Portfolios

8. As Social Business Gains Momentum, Panic Will Set in Across the Applications Market as Vendors Fear Losing Their Legacy Footprint to Vendors Offering New Models of Interaction with "Just Enough Support" for Core Enterprise Functionality

9. As More and More Components of the ERP Suite Prove Out Their Viability in the Cloud, the Gravitational Pull of Vendors Around Platforms Will Accelerate

10. As Heterogeneous Deployments Become the Norm, Cloud Infrastructure Hardware and Management Software Sales Will Grow by More than 100% in 2012 as Private Cloud Moves into the Mainstream and Service Providers Look to Accelerate Deployments

There you have it for this year, what do you think?

Tags: predictions, 2012, cloud, mobile, social, big data, digital commerce, socbiz

Cloud Wars Heating Up: Oracle : Taleo, Dassault Systemes : Netvibes

This past week virtually no one in the software world was surprised by Oracle's announcement of intent to acquire cloud talent management vendor Taleo. The acquisition that was something of a surprise, and maybe you even missed, was the much smaller move by Dassault Systemes to acquire Netvibes. The dollar values were quite disparate, Oracle paid $1.9B for Taleo, Dassault only a fraction of that at $26M for Netvibes. I wanted to take a deeper look at both, but I will say that while the Taleo acquisition certainly reinforces Oracle's commitment to rapidly expand its public cloud offering, the Netvibes acquisition may prove to be the more interesting discussion.

The Taleo acquisition does what I believe will become a common statement this year, it broadens Oracle's cloud portfolio and brings another group of customers into the Oracle fold. There are two major factors to look at here, 1. the major software vendors, particularly Oracle and SAP, are playing catch up to broaden cloud offerings and customers quickly and 2. the HCM market is seeing increasing competition from upstart Workday and others. From an Oracle perspective SAP's acquisition of SuccessFactors served as the catalyst to move this deal forward, but I don't think that was the only factor. Unlike SAP, Oracle does have credible talent and learning offerings already, but the lead product there, Fusion HCM, is still very new and just starting to gain traction (some analysts are using this acquisition as an indictment against Oracle Fusion Apps, but I don't agree). Adding Taleo to the Oracle Public Cloud portfolio, just like its other recent cloud acquisition of RightNow, which also had overlap with existing Oracle products, brings cloud expertise, additional credibility and additional customer relationships to exploit for cross sell / up sell from other Oracle products. Oracle has lot's of overlapping product lines, that never stopped them before, and certainly won't in the growing feeding frenzy around cloud products. I think there's a bit of "if we don't buy them, who else might" sentiment involved in this decision as well. And don't underestimate the Workday factor either, it is having impact on both SAP and Oracle, although I think SAP might be feeling the pressure a bit more. From an Oracle perspective its important to have a robust set of cloud HCM apps as the PeopleSoft base moves into a refresh cycle. 

Taleo customers get benefits out of the deal as well, as you might infer from the diagram above. From a social collaboration perspective the addition of Oracle Social Network (OSN) to the Taleo product should be very attractive to the Taleo customers. Also look for Oracle to build tight integration between Taleo and the Fusion HCM suite, making that full cloud-based solution set more attractive. Taleo customers will get the stability provided by one of the largest software vendors and easier access to a broad portfolio of products including engineered solutions, database service and Fusion Middleware. Sorting out Taleo's architecture will likely be high on Oracle's work list post-acquisition, as Taleo, which is built on an older cloud infrastructure and isn't multi-tenant, could use a bit of modernization.

Now on the the second announcement, Dassault Systemes and Netvibes. On the outside this may seem like an odd match, a PLM / CAD vendor and a cloud socialytics vendor. I think this acquisition is an interesting tell to a strategic move by Dassault to reposition as a broader innovation platform. Today Dassault is securely positioned in the product engineering and manufacturing world, but product development is under pressure to become more social and to drive more innovation. In this highly connected and hyper-competitive business environment product / service innovation is even more critical to a business's survival. A disconnected or isolated product design process is something that has to change as companies need to leverage and include both a broader set of employees through better collaboration and outside constituents including customers and partners. The social customer, as I've written many times here, cannot be ignored and will engage with brands if given the opportunity and the right motivation. This isn't a discussion of SCRM though, although the lines between systems and processes like CRM and PLM / product design, need to and are getting much more blurry. Today companies need to listen to customers and then take action on the feedback. What better way to do that than through an integrated social listing and analytics offering like Netvibes.

The product lifecycle today is decidedly social and has to incorporate online conversations into the product process. Its a natural extension of PLM to embed socialytics into the design process and is an important first step to building out a full innovation management offering as I've outlined here. With the Netvibes acquisition, Dassault adds social monitoring, analytics and decision support capabilities into its leading PLM platform, moving to socialize the design process. This leaves Dassault with one gap though, that is a tool with the capability to manage the ideation process from capture (which it could do with Netvibes, although there are perhaps better purpose built tools available) through the entire process. Next I'd look for Dassault to acquire an ideation / innovation management vendor to add the overarching idea management process to the rest of its suite of innovation tools. There are a number of those vendors that could be potential targets including: Spigit, BrightIdea, BrainBank, Hype Softwaretechnik, IdeaScale, Imiginatik, MindMatters, Innocentive, and Uservoice. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what direction Dassault moves next.

 Tags: PLM, HCM, Talent Management, HR, Oracle, Taleo, Dassault, Netvibes, innovation   

Five Technologies that are Changing CRM, Comments on CRM's Next 5 in 5

The other day I was pointed to an interesting post on the Software Advice web site called CRM's Next 5 in 5, 5 technologies that will change CRM over the next 5 years. The post was written by CRM analyst Lauren Carlson, and was based on a format that IBM uses for predictions each year. In addition to Lauren's 5 in 5 predictions, she arranged to have a few of my analyst colleagues,  Paul Greenberg, Ray Wang, Brent Leary, Esteban Kolsky, Denis Pombriant and  Brian Solis add their comments.  I like the format and of course I found it hard not to add my opinion as well, so here are a few comments on Lauren's predictions:

1. Context services will provide a clearer picture of customers - Context is an extremely important concept across many areas in software and customer insight is no exception. The customer profile continues to be the center piece of businesses' CRM efforts, and the addition of location data, behavioral data and a view of a customers' social graph can enrich that profile significantly. Context services are a key input to the emerging category of applications we call socialytics as well. The richer the social profile of a customer the greater the insight and the more likely that the profile will yield data that can turn reactive efforts into efforts based on behavioral models and predictive insights. Mobile of course is adding a rich set of context data, particularly when combined with social data and with transaction historical data.

There are also other ways that I see context becoming important, taking more of a work / system view. Applications in general must become context aware. This is particularly true of systems that provide data for decision support. The next generation of software will be process aware and provide the right information at the time of need, including bringing the "right" experts together in the work context. This is one of the key productivity enhancements that I see evolving in the next generation of enterprise applications.

2. Real time customer intelligence becomes a reality - There's a lot of discussion over big data and the rapidly growing mountain of data that's created every year. IDC estimates that 1.8 zettabytes of data were created in 2011 and that data volume doubles ~every 2 years. There is work at every level to figure out how to manage and use this data. Today the problem is getting business value out of the data, and this is particularly true around customer data. While I see significant progress we're still in the early days of building systems that can provide real time, actionable customer insight. It's important to think of moving from systems of  analysis to systems of decision. Analysis is something that happens among a few highly trained people, using highly specialized systems. Systems that enable data driven decisions that are embedded in every business process are the future. The road from data to insight is one that is, today anyway, difficult to travel. There is some new thought emerging around insight as a service, here's a post from Evanlegos Simoudis that talks about this concept.

3. TV will become the next big channel in customer engagement - TVs seem like a logical extension to current channels, especially as they get more connected first through smart set top add-ons and eventually through a new generation of connected device. It seem to me though, that the evolution of the connected TV could actually converge with other devices so that there would be a seamless experience across devices from smartphone, notebook, desktop and tablet to TV or even auto. All of these channels need to be activated in the CRM system on the backend, I think, which would start to create this consistent customer experience that is device agnostic. Identity, presence, and context all interact in a way that opens up many new opportunities for providing exceptional customer experience across all connected devices. We're already seeing the evolution of the connected device expand to TV and auto, the next step is to link the experience across devices and them connect the channels to the CRM solutions.

4. Virtual meetings will change the way people do business - The tough economy has accelerated the business trend of reducing travel and interacting in virtual meetings powered by technologies that have improved significantly over the last few years. Connectivity in general is rapidly changing the way we interact online and providing ever richer experiences in both consumer tools like Skype, Facetime, ooVoo and in business tools like Webex, Go-to-Meeting and LotusLive. Mobile is also changing virtual meetings by becoming a viable alternative to desktop and laptop. I often participate in online meetings on my iPad or iPhone with Go-to-Meeting and Webex with excellent results.  The addition of mobile clients to the connection options is increasing the rate of adoption. In addition there seems to be a new (or renewed I guess) focus on UC which should provide the development of better virtual enterprise tools and thus aid adoption.

5. Gamification will go from buzz to business strategy - Gamification is already turning into a useful and effective marketing tool on the consumer side. There are some good examples of networks like Foursquare that embedded games as a part of its basic business strategy. In BtoB and the enterprise in general there has been much less "buzz" and more of an attitude of wait and see, but that should start to change. Interestingly enough the place I'm starting to see the use of gamification in business is internally in some supporting HR systems, for things like motivation and reward and recognition, and also in decision support with the use of predictive market techniques. I'd think that communities, both internal networks and external customer networks would see a growth in use cases particularly to drive engagement.

That's my take on CRM's next 5 in 5, what do you think?

Tags: CRM, socbiz, social, mobile, gamification, collaboration, context