October 6th, 2008
The Secrets of CEOs
I just finished reading an advance US manuscript of ‘The Secrets of CEOs - 150 Global Chief Executives lift the lid on business, life and leadership’ by Steve Tappin, who is a managing partner in the global CEO & board practice of Heidrick & Struggles, and Andrew Cave, a leading English financial journalist.
The book has a definite English slant despite being very much about the global economy, and provides fascinating insight through extensive interviews of the large enterprise CEO lifestyle.
Some of the core focuses of the book are around globalization strategies, effective sustainability, the next generation web, waging ‘the first world war for talent’ and of course coping with the credit crunch.
While the book is all about what it takes to be a relevant and effective leader of a 21st century enterprise, some of the most fascinating areas of a very thought provoking book for me were around the demise of command and control as a viable management style and widespread enthusiasm for modern collaborative techniques.
…Leading CEO’s believe that the 200 year old Western manufacturing derived model of efficiency driving businesses will be inadequate in coming years and will need to be rethought. They also recognize that the Western command and control style of management is out of date in most situations. Command and control is characterized by issues being funneled to the top and then decisions being passed back down from on high - but they’re often the wrong decisions taken by managers who who are removed from customers and the day to day reality…
…Above all, such businesses are not appropriate settings in which to take long term decisions that require multi constituency decisions that are as yet hard to quantify in financial terms - the kind of decisions that companies will increasingly have to take…
…Our research found that top chief executives believe that they must organize their businesses more organically. In the next decade many successful companies will replace command and control with more fluid and fast-moving cell-like organizations. We describe how a chief executive provides business leadership at the nucleus of the cell by giving greater freedom to act to much more decentralized operations, while still policing performance…
It’s hugely encouraging to read about the challenges of real C level strategy and oversight in a federated business world recognizing the issues around collaboration stratefy.
…”I think command and control is dead,” states Ben Verwaayen (former CEO of British Telecom). “Location and time is dead. It has to be on different notions. That will be appealing to many people but also …very scary for boards”.
The central problem with command and control is its failure to engage people by offering them meaningful work and freedom to innovate. John Weston, former CEO of BAE Systems , says “Throwing tablets of stone from the top just does not work. But getting people fired up about what they can achieve and giving them the freedom to be masters of their own destiny is a better way - and they appreciate it”. Great businesses will provide employees with a place to think and a global meritocracy to grow within.
‘Secrets of the CEO’s’ is primarily around leadership styles, defining CEO’s as commercial executors, financial value drivers, corporate entrepreneurs, corporate ambassadors or global missionaries (or a combination of the above). Section III, ‘leading into the future’, provides a intriguing consensus of CEO collaboration tactics.
In my opinion, just as imperiously ‘Throwing tablets of stone from the top just does not work’, strategic planning and thinking also needs careful follow through to execute collaboration tactics effectively across enterprises and groups. The hard work of flushing out unscrupulous middle management self preservation strategies, such as revolving door hiring, stealing of ideas from the innovators they manage and transferring credit to themselves or new favorites, cliquey management styles and their associated cold shoulder techniques are equally important.
A combination of high level strategic planning and tactical follow through is critical to effective transparent collaboration execution, with people and their processes the driver for appropriate technology adoption. Identifying opaque mid level management bottlenecks is an important facet of planning effective strategy.
The Secrets of CEOs is published by Nicholas Brealey, is available now in the UK and will be published in November 2008 in the USA. I found it a fascinating, thought provoking read.
October 1st, 2008
The ‘Social Media’ Conundrum
I’m fascinated by ’30’s depression era attempts to foster business innovation, not least because of the financial challenges that seem likely to dominate our coming years. Surprisingly I’ve found The Rotary International Club is in many ways a precursor to the looser social media movement which has been a feature of Web 2.0 thinking.
The ‘Rotarian four Way Test’ was developed by Rotary club member and entrepreneur Herbert J. Taylor during the Great Depression as a set of guidelines to help restore faltering businesses, and is still a hallmark of a movement originally set up in 1905.
The Rotary International ethos by which ventures are judged:
* Is it the truth?
* Is it fair to all concerned?
* Will it build goodwill and better friendships?
* Will it be beneficial to all concerned?
There are many echoes of current social media messaging in the post 1929 wall street meltdown business climate which spawned this ethical set of values.
Brian Solis, a deep thinker around social media who regularly produces excellent blog posts and graphical depictions of the associated tech venture topography, runs FutureWorks, ‘an award-winning PR and New Media agency in Silicon Valley.’
The PR profession struggle to gain traction in successfully peddling influence is well known through marketing history, and the Rotary International principles above don’t immediately resonate with the cocktail swigging PR person cliche.
Brian’s latest post ‘The State of Social Media 2008‘ is a good call for transparency and honesty (obviously it really helps if the products FutureWorks are pushing are reputable, ethical and have utility). There are echoes of the ”Rotarian four Way Test’ in some of Brian’s long post:
…There’s a bigger, more significant opportunity to make a true impact within an organization. It all starts with a deep commitment to the brand you’re representing, its culture and personality, overall potential, and the people who define the organization, otherwise, you’re pushing training workshops on how to use new social tools, which really doesn’t help you achieve your potential nor the true capabilities of you and your team.
While we all push transparency, we must also swallow the “red pill†to help us find truth and free us from complacency. Whether or not you’re a fan of The Matrix, the red pill symbolizes risk, doubt and questioning, while the “blue pill†represents normalcy, comfort, and routines. Basically, we’re committing to renewal, self-discovery and an openness to change and learn. It’s finding comfort outside of our comfort zones.
It’s one thing to be genuine, but it’s altogether different to translate and effectively communicate what you epitomize to the various markets and what they’re seeking.
Being human is far easier than humanizing your story.
It’s a customer service mentality as opposed to one of customer empathy.
Feel it.
Live it.
Breathe it.
Be it.
Clearly as a marketer the goal of finding where the conversation is and joining in is a great one, context and relevance is king in the PR space if you are to be noticed in a good way. This craft is not new and successful practitioners such as FutureWorks are adept at this.
The challenge for the social media movement as it matures is the ‘all things to all people’ problem. Manipulating media with marketing messaging is an aspect of ‘Social Media’ but there is a dangerous blurring which extends this thinking to internal enterprise collaboration.
Fashionable books such as ‘Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies ‘ promote the benefits of social media around successfully communicating marketing messaging to customers and partners, and various vendors are pitching in with step-by-step guides on how to implement social media strategies plus ROI tools to help them sell the business case for social media inside their prospect company.
The blur is in the crossover of this outbound marketing thinking to attempt to proscribe it to internal communities, which are a very different animal to fostering conversation with customers and partners around product. The internal mechanisms of corporations are typically rife with secrecy and rivalries as the workforce expands and contracts. IT departments rule the roost running user controls, workflow and support, audits, backup, security, reporting and email. The battle for innovation vs conformity inside businesses is a totally different world to getting marketing messaging out to communities.
While Brian Solis is doing a sterling job of helping define the marketing aspects of social media, the breathless ‘discovery’ of new web 2.0 tools by other social media mavens and propagation to their echo chamber on blogs and Twitter is what really seems to rub IT people up the wrong way.
Shadow IT is as stressful to IT departments as the shadow banking system has been to the world economy.
Naive proponents of social media as the solution to management handling of internal hierarchy and collaboration are doing the more positive aspects of the movement no good at all. Fashionable lightweight panaceas to difficult problems can give a bad name to other worthy ’shadow IT’ enterprise 2.0 tools with genuine practical utility.
September 26th, 2008
The productivity dilemma
Jennifer Leggio asked the question ‘Did Oracle burst the enterprise 2.0 startup bubble?’ in her post here on ZDNet this week.
I think Jennifer is absolutely right that inevitably many of the ‘enterprise 2.0′ experiments will burn off as they attempt to enter the real world business atmosphere, and that some are plain embarrassing in their lack of understanding of the realities of the commercial world.
It’s important to remember that these brave entrepreneurs are being watched very closely by the deep pocketed titans of global IT - Oracle, IBM, MSFT, SAP et al, and that any successful forward thinking is subsumed into future offerings from the big players.
In this context there is a cynicism by those who can afford to go last with presenting their offerings in rolling up anything with a buzz around it into their next generation product lines. Many ‘Enterprise 2.0′ company exit strategies are to be bought up of course…but it’s easy to forget that most innovation comes from the edgier entrepreneurs rather than the big fish. In the worst case scenario in business ideas are simply stolen, as the new Hollywood film ‘Flash of Genius‘ painfully dramatizes.
Last night with David Coleman I did a presentation to the TechCoire community in Sacramento California - far away enough from the bay area bubble community to get an intriguing perspective from a good cross section of attendees.
We made the meeting as collaborative as possible with our audience/group (of mainly technologists) and many of the recurring big themes which triggered the Enterprise 2.0 movement kept reappearing: frustration with monolithic infrastructure, revelations about the power of the open source support model - ‘Googling your question and finding the answer from dozens of sources’, and of course the cost factor.
There’s no question the work done by the big players in rolling up collaboration solutions is powerful and in may instances are taking advantage of the 2.0 wave in innovative ways. Compliance to for example hipaa, Sox, and other internal security metrics governance (such as email discovery) is critical to many businesses and central to IT decision making for the underlying infrastructure that is the backbone of internal communication.
The burning issues in this era however are cost and time. As David Coleman pointed out, getting a project underpinned with appropriate technology can take months of approval process from IT and then a lengthy delay while the technology is acquired and implemented. One of the reasons for informal enterprise 2.0 tool usage is because people can literally buy a few software as a service seat licenses and be up and running that same day with flexible technology that meets project needs.
There is an uneasy balance between productivity and compliance which is different in every case, and here budget plays a huge role. Many companies are several iterations back in their installed versions of for example Lotus Notes, and have constructs built around domino databases that make it difficult and time consuming to upgrade. The collaboration offerings we are seeing unveiled today may not hit many enterprises for three or four years, yet many staff are crying out for tools and utilities to collaborate and communicate more effectively today in order to compete with better equipped competitors.
In the current unstable financial climate tools that can get the job done today at negligible cost look extremely attractive…
September 24th, 2008
Budget season: shiny new collaboration models for 2009!
The large IT vendors have really latched onto the collaboration buzz created by enterprise 2.0 and are rolling out their offerings for the 2009 budgeting season in large enterprises.
Oracle’s Beehive launched this week at Oracle OpenWorld, and Cisco also launched their new ‘collaboration portfolio‘.
Budget Bingo
This is the season many IT departments are working up their proposed budgets for the coming financial year, and anything which ‘checks all the boxes’ of the business requirements units and partners have been asking for will receive close scrutiny and then matched to these offerings.
The overarching benefits of greater productivity, communication and innovation are extolled, the big question is how much does it cost? Cisco have a shiny unified model for 2009, bringing their components into one Cisco Unified Communications System Release 7.0 offering.
This is wrapped up to appeal to people cutting the financial cloth for next season: touting significant improvements in total cost of ownership, ease of use, and interoperability with business applications.
Similarly at Oracle OpenWorld this week are pushing Social CRM hard, as excellently summarized by Christopher Carfi here.
Both Cisco on their website and Oracle at OpenWorld this week have been rolling out examples and case histories but as Christopher Carfi put it, with Oracle he was not able to get any details of how ‘real’ the applications were - the demonstrations were very scripted and quite a bit of the demo ‘required the suspension of belief once you started to delve into the details’.
Cisco have great case histories for specific communications products but combining them all into a unified one stop solution is a stretch for many people. These unified systems are only as good as their weakest link, as the people who actually have to try and use them will start raising a ruckus about when the budget season gifts are unwrapped and put into action.
Ironically the main reason enterprise 2.0 has gained such traction is because of the inadequacies of institutional IT infrastructure: employees have been picking up on freely available web 2.0 tools in order to get their job done.
Clearly Cisco and Oracle are moving in the right direction with these offerings - and firing a shot across the bows of the Microsoft Sharepoint juggernaut - but any smoke and mirrors gets exposed very quickly once the real utility of the offerings is exposed. A test drive of any expensive purchase by the people who are going to have to drive it is always a good idea.
Buying an eighteen wheel truck and then realizing you needed three sportscars is an analogy, but despite this no one ever got fired for buying Sharepoint…
September 23rd, 2008
Oracle’s Mix Network, thoughts on remote conferencing
A couple of thoughts on the large scale Oracle OpenWorld Conference, which has a downtown San Francisco street closed, over 40,000 people in attendance and 1,700+ sessions.
The logistics of catering to this number of people is huge, and so is the associated airlift.
I wrote about the blurring of lines between ‘live’ conferences and the online back channels, video feeds and associated external conversations in Twitter, blogs and of course journalism back in June, musing on the old gigantic Comdex conference in Vegas.
Channel negotiations and business deals aside, many conferences are attractive for gathering consensus in vertical industry spaces, an important form of collective collaboration. The web 2.0 movement is a good example of this, but some would say conferences in this space are more an opportunity to congregate and take a snapshot of a moment in time in a rapidly changing world, rather than to formulate new thoughts.
What’s intriguing to me is that increasingly the online conference community back channel, Twitter and blogs are as important as the live presentations at conferences. Frequently the discussion is more lively online than onstage even as a session is running, and sometimes online and live merge with questions posed electronically being discussed on stage.
Given how tec-savvy the average Oracler is, regular online sessions delivered monthly might be more digestible than picking your bets from 1,700 live sessions in one huge binge. I’ll be asking people this question at the conference…
Capturing insights before the conference
Oracle have done a great job of starting to make this shift - before the conference the front page of oracle.com looked like this:
Oracle openly solicited ideas which were captured in their ‘Mix’ Network, which appears to be a very solid community environment. I think it’s genius to capture ideas and insights before a huge conference like OpenWorld, and from the conversations I had with Oracle folks yesterday uptake was great. This is clearly a popular idea based on my my straw poll chatting with attendees - I can see this environment really taking off for Oracle.
Having an ‘Ideas’ UI button and section in a social media application is a terrific idea, and could be a powerful tool for many other businesses - and for companies exploring innovation within organizations such as Imaginatik to incorporate into their discovery processes.
The Mix network appears to be essentially ThoughtWorks with some tweaks/integration by Oracle AppsLab.
A combination of this and the recently announced Beehive would be really something…in fact I think a lot of people were expecting Beehive to be more like the Mix Network…
The live conference
Although I’m in San Francisco events have unexpectedly conspired to prevent me spending as much time physically at the conference as I’d like. It’s fascinating to follow events on live blogs such as developer Eddie Awad’s site, watch video feeds and follow the twitter stream (which is how I found Eddie).
The differentiator to physically being at the conference is getting context, nevertheless it’s amazing how much you can get from paying attention remotely. It also sets you up well for when you arrive at the live event, which I am now going to get back to.
September 22nd, 2008
Oracle’s Beehive: integrated large scale, secure collaboration
Although Oracle’s Beehive (the successor to ‘Oracle Collaboration Suite‘ launched on May the 8th of this year it officially launched at Oracle OpenWorld today. At a price of $120 per user seat this is not a system for most small or medium sized businesses but rather a secure solution that can be integrated with existing enterprise infrastructure.
Obviously integration is seamless with Oracle, who claim the system was designed as a result of clients asking for ‘collaboration that works within the structure of our existing business’.
The new openness allows integration with SAP or other competitors, and a set of web services that will run on different server platforms - Solaris, Linux, Microsoft.
Oracle take great pains to point out that they are addressing existing customer needs in providing a system that reinforces regulatory needs. Mark Brown, Senior Director of Beehive Business Strategy, cited the recent leak of politician Sara Palin’s private email and increasing regulatory compliance of the financial industry as examples of the need for tighter infrastructure oversight.
Beehive, which many have commented is arriving on the scene very late in the wake of Lotus Connections and Sharepoint, is essentially an open-standards based platform which aims to integrate team workspaces, calendar, instant messaging, and e-mail. All these utilities come with tightly tracked date stamped logging.
From the briefing today plus a tire kicking session on the expo floor with the actual application (which intriguingly was hidden in a corner of a large hall at a small booth), the primary focus appears to be email regulatory compliance.
Historically lawyers get into a frenzy of activity around email and document discovery in their many legal challenges: my take is Oracle Beehive, which essentially runs inside Microsoft Outlook, Zimbra, Novell or other email clients, is primarily designed to facilitate this process.
There is clearly a value to this and combined with a unified API, (historically Oracle Collaboration Suite and open source collaboration environments can be a labor intensive ‘get the APIis talking to each other’ exercise) for strictly process driven businesses this could be a useful addition in specific sectors.
Oracle’s claim this is ‘enterprise collaboration’ is a stretch however. Although the roadmap (which I have heard about but not seen) plans to include for example video conferencing in the future, at present the focus appears to be on secure communications. It will be interesting to see how this platform matures.
September 22nd, 2008
Evaluating Zoho at GE
Since Dr Sukh Grewal was kind enough to speak at the Office 2.0 conference earlier this month there has been much discussion of the mature large scale GE collaboration environment ‘supportcentral‘.
I follow GE closely: as an enterprise collaboration consultant any information they share with me is valuable to help me better advise my clients to build large scale environments. GE should be congratulated for publicly lifting the veil on a strategically important part of their business and revealing what makes them tick.
By pure coincidence after I posted my previous piece about misinformation travelling fast this morning I was going through my RSS reader catching up on stories prior to heading off to Oracle OpenWorld.
Last week Bernard Lunn of Read Write Web picked up the Office 2.0 GE video and presumably read my previous GE blogposts to write a mostly reasonable piece about Zoho’s relationship with GE.
A much wilder, presumably third hand story has appeared this morning over at webguild claiming GE has ‘dropped Google’ citing ‘an unknown GE spokesperson who does not want to be identified’.
For the record and as Dr Sukh Grewal has clearly outlined, no decision has been made on Google Docs, Zoho or any other vendor at this time, but a rigorous evaluation is taking place.
Speaking as someone who has previously been in Dr Sukh Grewals role (albeit on a smaller scale) of managing a global collaboration environment at Sony PlayStation, I know first hand how tough it can be to deal with this type of overreach.
By its nature managing collaboration environments means you are at the epicenter of company politics, users who love or hate you, and keeping accurate information flowing is key.
The webguild story is wildly inaccurate and is a classic example of how misinformation if not corrected can propagate.
It is also a good argument for internal - and external publicly available where appropriate - roadmaps so there can be no excuse for embroidery and exaggeration by interested parties. Again, transparency simplifies and solves problems…
September 22nd, 2008
Misinformation travels fast
One of the amazing things about the age we live in is the speed at which information propagates, whether correct or not. Matthew Brown of Forrester Research touched on this recently on September 11th (an infamous date of course, which seven years ago had everyone clamoring for information to find out what had really happened).
Matthew blogged on ZDNet that a story with the headline “UAL Files for Bankruptcy†appeared in the early hours of Sunday September 7 on the “most popular†list of the Florida Sun Sentinel newspaper Web site.
It then got picked up by Google News, summarized by a securities analyst, and United Airlines stock proceeded to tank by 75%. The problem: the story was from 2002.
Matthew asked ‘what, in an age of broadband at home, iPhones, Blackberries, and more can IT leaders do to help balance technology control and chaos?’
Clearly this is not fundamentally an IT technology control issue, but one of information management. From a corporate perspective United presumably have mechanisms in place such as public relations monitoring to prevent stock price manipulation by rumor.
The amplification effect of the internet is staggering, but what isn’t new is the way rumors spread if not publicly disproved.
The key to clarity inside an organization is transparency. An enterprise where the workforce is well informed with up to date, accurate information is far more likely to pick up a rumor like this early and get it corrected. Information opaqueness breeds the ambiguity which leads to erroneous information not being challenged - accuracy is the first casualty.
A parallel analyst angle, this time a Gartner release on ‘webwire‘, opines that ‘Many Social Software Projects Fail Due to IT Managers Not Having a Well-Defined Purpose to Succeed’
Many social software projects fail because IT managers wrongly believe that successful communities form spontaneously after social software tools are installed, according to Gartner Inc. IT and business managers in charge of deploying social software need to choose a core purpose for the community and arrange implementation to achieve that purpose.
“Contrary to the common perception that vibrant communities arise spontaneously, starting with a carefully chosen purpose does not limit participants. It gives them the direction they need to form a productive community” said Anthony Bradley, managing vice president at Gartner. “As those initial communities gain momentum, other groups will use the social application to build their own communities, and this is how social applications achieve widespread adoption across the enterprise”
Mr. Bradley said that many IT organizations fall into the trap of following “worst practice” installing social software in the expectation that productive communities will emerge spontaneously. Gartner’s discussions with clients suggest that the “install and they will come” practice rarely succeeds; about 70 percent of the community typically fails to coalesce. Furthermore, of the 30 percent of the communities that do emerge, many revolve around interactions that planners didn’t envision, that don’t provide business value and that may even be counterproductive.
The perception that communities on the public Internet appear to arise overnight and quickly grow to encompass millions of participants has led many organizations to assume that social software does not require the system-building rigor typical of many deployments. However, most successful social sites start with a defined purpose and a limited scope.
It can be terribly unfair to burden IT departments, already struggling to keep legacy systems fully tuned for efficiency to keep enterprise divisions up and running, with essentially organizing modern enterprise business practice.
Engineers are generally not noted for their abilities in social engineering and people skills (with some exceptions of course) yet astonishingly in some companies it often falls to a team of technicians to get a collaboration system up, running and presented as a fait accompli to the proposed end users.
Inevitably the path of least engineering integration pain, often regardless of end user practicality, is taken in the absence of any additional management input or guidance in order to get the tasks checked off the IT ‘to do’ list.
An internal collaboration system that keeps users informed and connected requires careful planning and user workflow path consideration. This allows the organic growth that often appears to magically happen from ‘the grassroots’ to scale in a usable way. In reality large scale connected collaboration is the result of careful shaping and ‘gardening’ of cellular growth to homogenize and standardize the greater entity so everyone understands it and can find the information they need.
It is much easier to identify information which should be secret in an enterprise, and lock it away from all but a defined set of users, if you are mapping it to a clear information strategy and associated system design.
As the United Airlines news story example clearly indicates, information transparency needs a powerful communication system to work, particularly between the federated departments of large global enterprises, in order to promote clarity internally and externally. This in turn enables users to fact check internally and externally, quickly pick up on misinformation and correct it.
September 17th, 2008
Profiting from Contagion
With the global financial contagion continuing to spread today, forcing the ‘invisible hand of the market’ to roll up multiple titans of industry into single defensive units against the credit crunch, the frothier end of the tech scene parties on.
The fall tech conference season is in full swing, with Interop and Web 2.0 Expo happening today in New York City amongst other events - even as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman compared the financial situation to the sinking Titanic in his blog:
…flooding from the initial hole tipped the ship, and the compartments were open at the top, so that compartments that hadn’t been ripped open by the impact of the iceberg started filling up, tipping the ship even more, flooding more compartments … Remind you of anything in the news lately?
Dennis Howlett intimates in his ‘Irregular Enterprise’ blog today that there are opportunities in the inevitable coming tech fall out despite the backwash from sinking financial entities.
There is no question the big players - SAP, Oracle, IBM, MSFT - have been watching the x2.0 movement like hawks and will be picking off successful vendors in a rapidly maturing market, keen to roll them up into their upsellable offerings, much as the bankers are doing with their mergers.
As I wrote on Monday, and Dennis amplifies today, there are great opportunities in the SaaS and open source spaces for those companies who can stay ahead of the pack and remain successfully independent.
Sam Lawrence, Chief Marketing Officer of Jive Software wrote on his personal blog this morning about enterprises being ‘execution machines’:
Remember when you got your first job? You were hell-bent on making a difference and changing the way things got done. You were filled with ideas. Problem was, the minute you looked for a place to deliver that value, you were shown your box and your crank. You probably thought you’d be given a chance later on but then found out that the higher up you go, the bigger your crank. There are generations worth of “keep the trains on time†DNA in place in the Enterprise. No time to change things, those trains have been running like that for years.
So long, in fact, that Enterprises are experts at execution. Everyone has their cog in that machine. Given the legacy in place, it’s no wonder that there are a ton of execution resources and expertise in place. But to unlock innovation, there’d have to be a way to deliver conceptualization and strategic value as part of everyday work, not to mention persistent expertise on how to do it.
Pete Fields, an SVP at Wachovia - a bank which may merge with Morgan Stanley in the coming hours - has discussed his experience around this most eloquently: he talks of employees arriving at their first job at a brand name company with enthusiasm through the roof. A year later many of these same people, having experienced the limitations of cranking to ‘keep the trains running on time’ lose enthusiasm and are just going through the motions of working.
Keep the fires burning
The conceptual constraints of cranking ‘trains’ through a timetable dulls the sharpest minds, who can often clearly see much better ways of doing things and wind up frustrated. To a vendor like Sam Lawrence’s Jive software, the solution is their Clearspace Social computing environment. This infrastructure is one enabling dimension of a bigger process issue in many companies however.
The other critical dimension of enabling innovation must come from the organizational structure of a business entity. You can install a wonderful tech infrastructure that supports and enables collaboration, but without transparency and the type of management that encourages and rewards innovation, it is hard to kindle the fires of participation and enthusiasm.
The coming internal battleground for budget constrained companies looking for ROI justifications for infrastructure spend will be around looking closely, regardless of vendor size, at how quickly they can derive genuine value from proposed integration.
Processes and insights to tap into the collective genius of collaborative innovation and problem solving will often be the driver of these decisions.
Technology, whether a standalone environment or an integration of multiple components, will be judged on the ability to support innovation that delivers in a difficult economy, and not on the x2.0 or other buzzword wow factor.
September 16th, 2008
Sophisticated Customer Relationship Collaboration with MindTouch & SnapLogic
In another sign of the continuing maturity of Enterprise 2.0 technologies, open source social enterprise collaboration vendor MindTouch and open source data integration framework company SnapLogic announce a new partnership today.
SnapLogic have a terrific reputation in the open source data integration world, linking (with ‘pipelines‘) the RESTful foundational building blocks that enable enterprise scale connections between ’software as a service’ (saas) applications.
MindTouch have grown historically from being an enterprise wiki provider. ‘Deki Wiki’ was their original product which was completely rewritten last year to make their wiki solution a facet of a powerful enterprise web services engine.
Today’s announcement enables powerful Customer Relationship Management (CRM) support through MindTouch Deki Enterprise Server with SnapLogic Solution Packs for SugarCRM and Salesforce.com. MindTouch claim this approach will work with virtually any CRM system.
In plain English this enables greater team intelligence sharing around an enterprise’s CRM system though MindTouch’s collaborative interface. The above video demonstrates powerful use case, and illustrates the rapidly increasing power and credibility the SaaS space brings to the enterprise as I alluded to in yesterdays post.
CRM is at the heart of revenue generation and therefore at the sharp end of any business: enhancing the value of leading customer intelligence applications through increased contextual collaboration is a hugely attractive proposition for anyone interested in maximizing the effectiveness of their customer intelligence, which lives as much in employees heads as in a CRM system.
By facilitating the power of collaboration around the data in the CRM, MindTouch effectively supercharge an already powerful asset.
This type of development, with reasonably low adoption cost and relatively rocket science free deployment complexity, allows an enterprise to get up and running quickly - and mining their prospect’s data with maximum efficiency.
A drawback of open source stack update planning can be dependence on engineers who have created arcane connections between applications: only they know where the crumbly mortar between the bricks is, and what has been cobbled together and compromised to keep the systems running.
SnapLogic claim to have brought ‘Really Simple Integration to the enterprise’. for IT professionals this translates to fewer headaches with intransigent engineers ignoring needed changes to technology because they have painted themselves into a technological corner.
The more modular SaaS service becomes, and the easier it is to snap together the components, the greater the dual impact of powerful solutions and cost efficiencies will be.
This powerful open source alliance to provide enterprise class CRM and associated collaboration is a terrific example of this.
Oliver Marks provides seasoned independent consulting guidance to companies on the effective planning of 'Enterprise 2.0' strategy, tactics, technology decisions and roll out. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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