However, in reality these relatively minor tweaks are just the proverbial paving of the cowpath through the addition of limited social features such as collaborative sharing, persistent chat, and perhaps some deeper integration with activity streams. Unfortunately, these actions easily fail the imagination test, which is essentially this:

If you could completely rethink your work in a social business world, what would it look like? How would it be better?

To me, this is the fundamental question that organizations must be asking themselves today. Yet, I also think they should do this while going about the aforementioned incremental improvements such as adding basic social layers to their IT landscape. One reason is that this will happen inevitably as more and more enterprise applications and platforms add social computing features and companies proceed along that vendor’s upgrade path. So, while social impinging around the edges of enterprise applications is worth dealing with from a strategic perspective, it’s going to happen largely whether organizations plan for it or not. As such, it’s not likely to make a huge competitive or qualitative difference in the way most businesses perform. That is, unless they start the process of deliberate and strategic social business transformation, such as what IBM and a few other large organizations have begun.

This process of social business transformation will require both advances in social technology — such as the innovations below — as well as changes to the way we do business. Fortunately, one of the great attributes of the larger social business community is that it generally focuses as much on the business and cultural changes as it does the enabling technology. Some of the best discussions I’ve seen on the people aspect of the transition to the social enterprise are from folks like Luis Suarez, Sameer Patel, Stowe Boyd, and JP Rangaswami, who are just part of a much larger conversation about how we remake our organizations for the 21st century.

So, while there are certainly some companies not tracking the sea changes in the world right now in terms of the way we are globally transforming the way we live and work, we’re also continuing to see fascinating next-generation innovations in social business. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Rethinking Workflow, Manufacturing, and Money in Social Business Terms

In just the last week I’ve encountered several fascinating offshoots of the mainstream social business thread. Social business frequently focuses either on social engagement externally or internally on collaboration and social interaction between workers. This is a limiting view, but it’s also where most of the activity and uptake is today. However, as more and more business leaders and entrepreneurs become digital natives, I’ve theorized that the power laws and principles of social business will encourage them to rethink their traditional modes of business. At the same time, Web startups and large software vendors often put themselves out 2-3 years ahead of the market by predicting where their customers will arrive once current trends reach a mainstream tipping point. Then they adjust their product roadmaps to align with this schedule. The combination of these two trends is starting to give us some interesting new possibilities.

I say possibilities, because unlike social collaboration or Social CRM, the outlook and growth potential for these innovation is still unknown. However, it does give us a sense of what’s coming next in social business.

Social BPM

Last week while I was speaking at Sibos, I had the pleasure of speaking on the phone with Sandra Moran from OpenText Metastorm, a leading workflow/BPM product that recently announced the addition of social computing features to its capabilities. Metastorm now enables workers to engage in real collaborative process design, takes advantage of social profiles to locate needed expertise to plug workers into processes in essentially real-time, and has matching dashboards to provide BPM and social analytics. OpenText had this to say about the new social capabilities, which Sandra told me is now available to over a thousand major customers as a standard part of the Metastorm suite:

These new product enhancements help organizations successfully implement business process improvement initiatives by empowering users to become more engaged and productive. Metastorm’s social collaboration tools provide businesses with a highly personalized workspace and unparalleled access to top contributors, enabling them to drive innovation and increase collaboration and improve efficiency among employees. These tools help employees find other people within their organization with specific skill sets required to help them complete their work. Companies can also route work to the most appropriate employee based on individual skills and workload – ensuring the most cost-effective strategy for work allocation.

I think this is significant for a few reasons. For one, I find that there’s often not enough focus in social tools in collapsing the walls between business processes and social conversations. They often run in parallel, side-by-side, even when they are being used simultaneously for the same piece of work. Putting social in the flow of work in highly process-intensive environments should lead to some interesting outcomes. I pressed Sandra on if there was leverage in Metastorm of existing social graphs and networks, and she indicated there was. What remains to be seen is how easy it will be to integrate the resulting BPM environment with an enterprise’s other social business efforts.

I’ll be exploring the social features of Metastorm in more detail soon on ZDNet, but I think the combination of social computing and BPM has genuine potential. This isn’t the first time social and workflow have been connected but I think it’ll be impactful given their large customer base and how central and useful the features are to the product. I’m hoping to revisit how their customers are faring in a year or so to see what the result has been. I currently believe social BPM technology, combined with the right business and cultural changes, will help companies attain a higher than average level of social business transformation.

Social On The Shop Floor

Earlier this month Derek Singleton over at the Software Advice blog wrote about social manufacturing, what you could call a new subfield of social business that’s focused on improving how companies turn raw materials into finished goods. Discussing Kenandy’s new announcement for improving the efficiency and productivity of supply chain manufacturing, Derek wrote:

Creating accessible and actionable inter-shop floor communication can only work if an entire supply chain and other manufacturers are members of, and logged into, Chatter. In short, it requires organizational change for effective use. While manufacturers using Kenandy wait for that changeover, Chatter can be a useful tool for project management.

For instance, the engineer of an aerospace job shop could notify shop labor that they’ve just finished designing the wing component of an aircraft. The job shop could then begin building the wing while the engineer finishes designing the other components they’ve been contracted to build. This has great implications for just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing – as it frees up labor to work on more value-added activities rather than waiting for the completion of another phase of the production.

In my workshops at Enterprise 2.0 Conference in years past, I’ve had manufacturers and assembly line managers come up to me to say that social tools have been moving into their area of the business, but it’s mostly been horizontal tools or very focused niche solutions. We’re now seeing broader and more strategic use of social tools with the arrival of solutions such as the Kenandy social manufacturing platform, which has garnered attention in the New York Times. I’ll be exploring this further in coming months to see whether social manufacturing leads to tactical or substantive social business transformation.

The Rise of Social Currency

Finally, at Sibos itself last week, I participated in Innotribe, a social media event inside the main financial services conference that explored various aspects of social media in financial services. For a more in-depth look, I wrote up a detailed exploration of the event on ZDNet on Friday. One of the more interesting and visionary topics at the conference was the subject of social currency, the transformation of the very concept of money in social world where reputation, trust, and openness are prized much more than information control, the latter which is how the financial industry is mostly structured to leverage for gain today.

As an experiment, a social currency called Reputone was actually in use at Innotribe, see picture right. In fact, peer-to-peer monetary systems such as Bitcoin were a hot topic at Innotribe and for good reason, it represents a major shift of control in how banking, money transfer, and investment will work in the future. If Paypal was the first generation of digital money, then Bitcoin is the Web 2.0 version. From their Web site:

Bitcoin is a new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world. Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority: managing transactions and issuing money are carried out collectively by the network.

Mark Shead recently provided a good overview to Bitcoin concepts and is worth taking a look at. In the final analysis, Bitcoin falls a bit short of being a true social currency, in that it doesn’t have an explicit capital mechanism based on social graphs or other means that leverages the intrinsic worth of social status and reputation. That doesn’t mean it should be watched closely as money and social reputation appear ready to get deeply intertwined and Bitcoin is at the leading edge of digital currency at the moment. This is a subject that warrants a lot more exploration as companies such as Facebook look at making their global platforms far more relevant from an economic perspective. For additional insight, David Armano posted some useful insights on social currency recently on his Harvard Business blog.

I’ll be exploring all of these concepts in more detail in coming months as social business continues to evolve. I would love your questions and feedback on this emerging social business topics below.

Note: This blog entry was cross-posted from On Web Strategy.

I don’t know ANYBODY that takes the public transport for 25 years just to wait for the moment that he/she can buy that car. Why? Well you do need to go from point A to point B, so you just need something that does that job if your budget is bit limited. You settle for a solution that works NOW, something that does the job, gives you value for money and you settle with the fact that it is a little less glamorous than the Ferrari…

Over time, when you start to settle down and kids come there is a chance that you value other things in life, like a big house with a garden. The Ferrari is off the plan.

Sounds simple?

It sure does, so why don’t we take this very simple life approach and apply it to adopting Enterprise 2.0 systems in large global corporations then?

Awaiting the Walhalla

I’ve seen large global corporations not having a business collaboration platform because they have a hard time aligning all their business units who are each using their own tools. Or there are so many different views of what needs to happen that it takes ages to reach consensus. The larger the company, the more widespread and the more independent the different business units, the more likely this will happen.

What would you prefer?

1. Not having a business collaboration platform at all for three years, with the risk that after three years you get something that only partially fits your needs, or
2. having a business collaboration platform now, that has a high value add to your particular business unit, with the risk that in three years there will be 6 to 8 different platforms in your 100 000-people company?

Or let me rephrase it: do you want to drive a Fiat now, or don’t drive a car at all and wait several years for a Ferrari that might never come?

Gimme a Fiat please

“All good and well, but Lee, didn’t you say earlier that we should also focus on platform consolidation as a good manager?” – I hear you rightfully saying. Yes, my suggestion to go for the Fiat, does have the implication that over a couple of year’s time we might end up with several platforms. From a pure IT cost point of view a dreadful option because it will cost much more to keep eight different platforms up and running instead of one to rule them all.

But how much business value does it bring you? Or rather, how much do you lose each day by not having a proper collaboration, communication and knowledge platform? I’d say that in most cases the business benefit of having multiple platforms that work, outweighs the higher IT cost.

It’s only a problem if you let it be one

And there is even better news: multiple knowledge repositories/silos don’t necessarily need to be a problem. What do you think that Google is doing? They are indexing a gazillion knowledge repositories all over the web and trying to make sense out of it. In my previous post I’ve argued that we should start to rely on smarter software and better hardware, well here’s exactly why. With the proper software from vendors like System One, Inquira, Autonomy and some others, we can index those knowledge silos and take it to a whole new level.

These search++ (++ because it is SO much more than just search) solutions index everything and cross-link all the data in your organisation and do tons of voodoo things: entity recognition (it recognises dog, but also that Labrador is a dog), similar content (ideal for searching for instance similar contracts or project initiation documents), enriching content (mashing different internal and external data sources), translations, etc

So, shall we just give up?

Does that mean that we can happily give up the ideal world scenario? Not at all! Keep in mind that I urge you to strive for Walhalla, however in my posts I try to point you to some (temporary?) solutions that will help you bridge the time needed to reach Walhalla. Solutions that might sound inefficient or weird at first sight, but that will give you direct business value.

An approach you could take is to identify which ones of those 6 or 8 platforms are really successful, identify the usage patterns and user stories. Run some workshops and do some stakeholder interviews. Genuinely understand what our business users need and want. Then see if you can consolidate systems, move communities to other platforms, migrate data, etc.

Be careful with this: pick the right battles, on the right moment. It makes sense that if you have an extremely successful platform and community, that you don’t just migrate them away for the sake of migrating. Also, focus on good opportunities like when you need to upgrade to a newer version of the particular platform.

It’s a never-ending story

So when is your job finished? Most likely if you are working in a large knowledge-intensive organisation, I’d say: never. Nowadays, everything changes at such a rapid speed, that also the needs of the people in your organisation and the organisation itself changes at a rapid speed. The perfect solution you are adopting today might not fit your needs anymore in two years.

Knowledge management, collaboration and communication are not an end-goal. They are just supporting you in doing your business more efficient and effective. Your business changes over time, and so do your Enterprise 2.0 systems.

Need some help in a pragmatic approach in starting with business collaboration or Enterprise 2.0 solutions in your organisation? Drop me a mail at lee.provoost@headshift.com.

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

Why is that? Well it does make it easer for us mortals to grasp the vast amount of data that is around us. Think about the early days of Yahoo! that used a directory approach and manual work to build a whole categorised database of web links.

But then cracks start appearing in our approach. Familiar with the “in which folder am I going to put this email?”-problem? First of all you start to have a gazillion folders and then the problem pops up that an email can belong to two different folders. After a while you start to wonder “where the hell is that message that I filed?”.

Social Networks and Cloud driving the change

As a technologist, I also understand the underlying technical reasons why we want to normalise and categorise data. You first start with “objectifying” your view of the world in an object-oriented language like Java so it is easier to program and maintain those systems. This is persisted in classic row-column structure in a database where you create different tables for different data concepts. You have the student object with its properties stored in the Student table and course object with its properties in the Course table. Now you can create meaningful relations between the two and develop your software accordingly.

When your application starts to get a huge load, you will either spend an awful lot of money on expensive Oracle cluster software or you will use concepts like sharding to split databases to keep it performing. But still, you stick to your normalized Student and Course table structures.

An approach that started to get traction in some of the successful internet startups was the concept of key/value pairs. While not a novel concept at all, it got more popular because we started to get more and more websites that couldn’t cope with the amount of users. The idea is that you don’t normalise data in Course and Student tables, but you just have a key and an associated value combination in one huge table. This approach scales extremely well because it can be easily spread over a cluster of machines. Google’s BigTable uses this as well as Facebook’s Cassandra. It became more “mainstream” with Amazon’s introduction of their SimpleDB that has this key/value concept, as well as Microsoft’s key/value storage in Azure.

SSD discs to the rescue!

The only problem is… that developers have been so brainwashed with the relational row/column concept that the average corporate developer had a hard time grasping this key/value concept and building meaningful apps on top of it.

Both Amazon and Microsoft have realized that and have added a relational layer on top of their key/value data storage engine. This means that the vendors can use key/value for achieving extreme scalability, but they let developers interact through a relational model interface. (It does create a performance penalty, but negligible for most users I think).

But still, even this key/value approach requires that you are modelling your apps and data in a particular way. What if we didn’t have to do ANY effort at all? What if we could just take the vast amount of data we have in our company, dump it on a disc and just being able to find meaningful information AS IS? Yes, we do have the Google Appliance for that, or Microsoft Enterprise Search, but they are merely indexing in a batch process and storing the results in a cache. What if we want a real-time extremely fast search that gives you on the spot information regardless of the data structures?

That’s exactly the gap Oracle wants to fill with their Exadata v2 server. Consider it as a beast of a server, crammed with more than a terabyte of Solid-State Drive (flash) discs that has your data fully stored, it’s fairly comparable with having ALL your data hot in memory, ready to be queried.

Can you grasp the opportunity this presents us? We can achieve real-time search inside our enterprise on vast amounts of unstructured data!

Be like the kitteh

This is again an example that we shouldn’t limit ourselves by the current state of technology. In the past 10 years I’ve seen again and again that eventually, technology will catch up to make things possible that we couldn’t do before.

Most people will quote Einstein and say “imagination is more important than knowledge”, I’d rather tell you to be more like the kitteh at the right. I’m pretty sure that one day, he/she will be able to fax itself to the Burger King to get some delicious “cheezburgerz“.

Impact on Enterprise 2.0

So how does this relate to Enterprise 2.0 I hear you asking. Well, I argue that we shouldn’t lose too much time and effort on meticulously categorising and tagging information and knowledge across all the different systems we have. This is because I believe that it is almost a lost cause anyway: it doesn’t scale and it’s often not the quality you want.

My point is that the tools and technology we get to our disposal are advancing at such a rapid speed, that we slowly start to reach the point where we can rely on software and hardware to do this boring heavy lifting for us.

I shared my view in a previous blog post that knowledge should be a happy by-product of your daily work, however this creates such a vast amount of information that this overload creates a problem on itself. Having intelligent software that can make sense of this, automatically tag it and categorise it, automatically make relationships and assumptions, would dramatically increase our efficiency.

At Headshift we’re doing a lot of research on helping companies staying ahead of the pack and we’ve been looking at software solutions to more intelligently and automatically manage your knowledge as described. It seems that now we finally have the right hardware innovations to make it even juicier…

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.

http://softwarewiki.dachisgroup.com/

A big part of our work here at Dachis Group is to maintain an understanding of what sort of tools and platforms are available to our customers that can support their Social Business Design initiatives.

We provide a comprehensive set of technology research services including: software landscape mapping, feature analysis, security analysis, vendor analysis and tool selection.  We also develop alliances with vendors who we find we are recommending regularly, and finally, we are often engaged to manage the implementation of these tools directly.

Through all of this, we have assembled a list of tools that we believe are relevant to Social Business Design initiatives.

We thought it would be a good idea to share some high level results in the Dachis Group Social Software Resource Wiki to provide a resource for those exploring social technology tools and to ask for help in making it a better resource.

If you are considering deploying collaboration, community, listening, or other social tools inside your organization, we have several hundred companies and products listed.  We’d appreciate your help in curating this list by providing more details and submitting additional cases.

For more resources: Stay on top of the most current thinking on Social Business Design and subscribe to our Collaboratory feed.  To learn more about Social Business Design, download our Social Business Design white paper free of charge.

Find out how Dachis Group can help your business worldwide send email to moc.puorgsihcad@seiriuqni, or download our fact sheet and contact us.

“Why are those IT guys spending three years on an SAP roll out? I want them to focus on projects that has a direct value for my sales and marketing! Who cares about that ugly ERP system that everybody hates?”

Chances are that if you are working for a large company, this will sound very familiar. I have to admit that it is hard to understand why the IT department is focused on a multi-million ERP consolidation project that doesn’t seem to help you at all in winning more deals. Even more, due to this “beast” of a project they don’t have time to help you in your Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0 endeavors. Double #FAIL.

Does that mean that IT departments are not with the times anymore? Are CEOs doing the wrong things? Is Enterprise 2.0 the big savior that will guide us through the economic difficult times?

Before jumping to any conclusions, let’s backtrack a bit to the root of the problem. The big disconnect between IT and business that you see in many companies can be explained by what you could call “the gap between IT stability and business agility”. IT has always been seen as a cost for a company, and especially in these economic times, that means that companies are trying to squeeze their IT budgets. The role of CIO or head of IT is one of the more difficult positions to be in: you get less and less budget, but somehow you need to deliver more and faster to the business units. (And let’s not forget that almost everyone in the company is putting you under pressure.)

So, there lies one of the roots of the problem: if you are an experienced IT head, you will be tempted to consolidate your systems and platforms. Kick back the plethora of small niche vendors and products and settle with one or two vendors. Most obvious choices are for instance to have an “SAP and Microsoft”-only (or IBM-only for that matter) policy. That means that in the former case you would have your ERP, CRM, KM, HR, BI, Portal from SAP and Office suite, server OS and database from Microsoft (just an example setup).

As you can see on the diagram, the price you pay for consolidating and reducing your IT platforms is that with a higher (IT) stability, the trade off is a lower (business) agility.

Does that mean that we should stop consolidating and reducing our IT systems and platforms? Not necessarily.. Remember that although you might never really “see” your ERP system, it does control the majority of the core processes of your company. Furthermore, it does not make sense for a company to have three different large ERP systems running, resulting in a situation where one business unit being unable to gain insight into other’s. Also, it’s pretty hard (and very expensive) for a company to hire an army of Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and IBM experts just to keep your systems up and running (in the assumption that you’re lucky enough to get hold of that expertise of course).

What you get is the realization that your IT department is running at a different speed than your business. IT is focused on the platforms and core systems with a long-term vision and planning, while the business wants to be able to adapt, on a day-by-day basis, to changing market conditions.

So, how can we approach this disconnection? Well, as a starter I believe we need to redefine what is expected from the IT department. As I posted earlier on a different blog the IT department should be transformed from a solutions provider to a solutions enabler. It is unrealistic to expect the IT department in a large organization to be as agile as an internet start-up or a cloud services provider.  Corporate IT should focus on the core processes, the large back-end ERP systems, big desktop roll-outs, governance, compliance, etc. Instead of expecting them to deliver you every single piece of skunkworks project, small web application or social collaboration tool; take that power into your own hands. Hire external experts to help you with collaboration processes and tools, rent some services in the cloud for fast go-to-market. The IT department will help you with plugging your new system into the backed system by providing APIs and will help you integrate into the user directory or do security assessments upon your requests.

Does that sound scary? It does. But let’s look at the division of responsibilities:

IT department:

• Focus on systems supporting core processes (ERP, CRM, etc.)
• Consolidating and rationalising the IT landscape
• Focus on security and compliance in the corporate IT landscape
• Open up parts of the back-end systems through APIs

Business:

• Focus on processes and applications that add direct business value
• Hire external expertise or rent cloud services to get the job done (regardless of the vendor policy of the IT department)
• Plug these applications into the company’s back-end systems by the APIs that have been provided by the IT department

So, the irony of being able to better align the goals of your business and IT lies in the fact that you actually have to completely disconnect the two.

Now the inevitable question is: “How are we going to reconnect Business with IT, considering the above mentioned challenges?” My next blog posts will introduce Social Business Design as a strategic framework for analysis and future implementation. It allows the traditional-IT-as-we-know to focus on its core function, whilst providing an evolutionary roadmap for satisfying the emergent needs of business and users whose expectations for IT service provisioning are increasingly informed by the consumer-facing social web.

That said, this is also my inaugural blog post for the Headshift blog. I recently joined the team in London and one of my roles will be to focus on helping our clients to solve this IT-business disconnect/reconnect problem. Previously, I worked for a global IT consulting firm / system’s integrator where I helped out IT departments to integrate their disconnected systems and advised business units on the disruptive change that new emerging technologies can bring. Follow my stream of thoughts on Twitter or drop me a mail for any questions

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.