In my previous post “Social CRM Is Only The First Half Of A Social Enterprise” I started the discussion on why social CRM is only the first half of a social enterprise and how we can go to the core and build a true social enterprise. Continuing the discussion on the missing half on a social enterprise this is the part 2.
Transform productivity silos into collaborative content curation:
The social software gets better as more people use it but we need more people to make it useful. There is no easy way out. As Andrew McAfee’s rightly put it Email is a 9x problem. There isn’t significant juice in standalone social software to gain broader adoption due to the endowment effect. There is a huge adoption barrier for standalone social software to be successful since it is not contextualized into a business process. The users simply see it as yet another tool that increases their cognitive overload.
I suggest don’t go after social software that is designed to create a parallel universe. Instead design solutions that are contextualized within existing business processes and makes it very easy for the end users to curate existing content from several structured, semi-structured, and unstructured sources e.g. Email, Wiki, PowerPoint, ERP, CRM, SharePoint etc. The nature of the content could be any artifacts such as an invoice, purchase order, strategy document, pipeline report, documentation etc. Describing what collaborative content curation can actually do for enterprise software would require a blog post by itself. I suggest you read democratised curation by JP and "The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators” by Scoble. But in nutshell if designed correctly it offers significant potential to help people find, nurture, and syndicate the enterprise content with collaboration on steroids. The users continue using the tools that they like. However suddenly these tools start feeling more and more social with collaborative on-ramps and off-ramps. Social media, cloud computing, and collaborative content curation will be peanut, butter, and jelly for a social enterprise.
Use social tools to challenge and rethink management practices:
Efficient tools are not a proxy for an efficient management. The tools of the past did bring the automation and productivity but did very little to influence the way the organizations are being managed. Adding social fabric to existing processes may bring in some additional benefits but a true social enterprise should thrive for the tools that completely make them rethink the management practices almost to the point to cause disruption.
How about opening up the cost structure to the entire organization, democratize the decision making process, run bottom-line based prediction markets – not how much we will sell it for but what will it cost us to build it. It’s an endless list. This will be unsettling in the beginning for some but it would eventually yield great results.
The generational shift is already ready for this disruption. The baby boomers are on their way out and the current mid-level and senior gen X managers will be replaced by the millennial very soon. Millennial is a born-social generation. As one millennial told my friend when asked what does career mean to him – “I want to have awareness of what’s going on around me, have micro-conversations on social tools, and create context. This context is my career”. Such philosophy will challenge the current management practices and put organizations in a difficult situation.
But this is an opportunity as well. The organizations can completely rethink the management practices as they start their journey to be a true social enterprise. This is not just about asking a CEO to use a blog to communicate with the employees but to have a social-first attitude at every single step of the management.
Earn your user base by leaning in with a consumer start-up mindset:
One of the biggest differences between the enterprise and the consumer software is that the user is not a buyer in the enterprise software. Enterprise software vendors don’t attempt to win the end users since they don’t have to. The end users have no choice. I suggest that if you are an enterprise software company that designs social solutions lean in with a consumer start-up mindset where you really have to earn your user base.
The cafeteria menu is my personal favorite example. One of my friends’ company spent $600k to redesign their intranet and the most popular page on the new Intranet is still the cafeteria menu that gets updated every week. Why not solve that problem? Provide cafeteria information that is fresh and accessible from mobile devices. Now, you have my attention. Add social and location-based functionality to help me find other employees to network and have lunch with. This is the new HCM. Well, not exactly, but you get the point.
If you attempt to design an IT-driven top-down solution to enforce “socialness” it simply won’t work. You need to win your users to use your solutions even if, in theory, they don’t have a choice.
Having fun and being productive should not be mutually exclusive.

I was a guest on Novell's radio/podcast series, the Cloud Chasers. The topic was "The Next Cloud: Emerging Business Models And Their Impact On The Enterprise". It was a great conversation! You can download the podcast here or tune in below:

Social CRM has arrived. My fellow bloggers and analysts friends Jeremiah Owyang, Ray Wang, Esteban Kolsky, Paul Greenberg, Sameer Patel, Oliver Marks, Jeff Nolan, and countless others have done a great job in defining the attributes, characteristics, and value proposition of social CRM. The recent acquisitions - Lithium acquiring Scout Labs, Attensity acquiring Biz360, and Jive acquiring Filtrbox - have clearly indicated the market interest in social CRM. There are also tons of emerging start-ups in this domain solving specific problems in niche sub-categories of social CRM.

However, social CRM is only the first half of a social enterprise.

Let me be that idiot for a minute who over-simplifies enterprise software and its evolution. The traditional ERP, MRP, and SCM software were designed for automation and productivity to improve the bottom-line, scale the business, and make informed decisions. The CRM was essentially designed to sell and market better and eventually to support the customers whom you sold to. Then comes the social CRM that is designed as an extension of CRM to help understand customers better, have rich conversations with the customers, increase the impact of the brand, prevent customer churn etc.

Unfortunately social CRM is only the half part of the equation primarily designed to influence the top-line of an organization. The other missing half is the social solutions that support the bottom-line of a company. Together they form a social enterprise. I don’t like the word “social business”. In case you didn’t get the memo, the business has always been social. What is not social is an enterprise. A combination of social CRM that supports the top-line and a set of solutions that supports the bottom-line can truly transform an enterprise into a social enterprise.

Some vendors have attempted to introduce “socialness” in some of the edge applications but I believe there is a need to go to the core and build a true social enterprise. In my two part series I would like to share my thoughts on how this could be accomplished. This is part one.

Focus on the means and not the end:

I can talk about plenty of ERP processes but let’s discuss a specific process that is perceived my many people as dry and not social. It’s the “closing the books” financial process. I would encourage the folks, who think that the financial processes are not social, to spend some time in a large organization to observe and shadow the controllers and a CFO in the last few days and the first few days of a quarter. The software that “closes the books” is the very last step in the process, the end, designed to keep the CEO and CFO out of the jail. Everything that leads up to closing the books, the means, comprise tacit social interactions such as calling cost center managers for their numbers, asking for clarifications, communicate not to do certain things etc. The list goes on. This social system certainly works. However there is one problem – it is highly inefficient.

This is where I see the opportunity to provide a social toolset designed for a specific process – a social vertical – to help all the stakeholders. The social tools should not be designed to replace the face-to-face interactions and should not just be limited to encode the interactions. Instead they should allow people to scale their social interactions, leverage discovery, and experience serendipity. The social tools become the context for the core processes.

Find an internal business process that is inherently social where employees spend most of their time outside of a destination tool. Run with it.

Don't fight the system, instead cater to emergent roles:

As the nature of business changes the great organizations that are on forefront of this change are good about creating new roles that never existed before. Some the examples are Chief Sustainability Officer, Chief Privacy Officer, Chief Customer Churn Officer etc. Enterprise software vendors are often criticized as “pouring concrete into existing business processes”. It’s not a surprise that existing processes are hard to change and existing human behavior is even harder to change but providing a “social-first” experience to these new emergent roles could potentially trigger a positive change in an organization. The people in these new roles don’t typically have a rigid set of pre-defined processes and tools. That’s good news. Work with these people to identify how social software can enable some of these new business processes and functions. As a vendor you are likely to get more traction working with them against working with a CFO or a purchase manager.

Turn involunteer collaboration into social interaction:

Let’s be very clear that being collaborative does not mean being social. Unfortunately the existing collaboration tools help people collaborate once they have decided to collaborate. Well, duh. But when you think about it, if people get along well before they decide to collaborate they have a higher chance of success while they collaborate. The problem is that people neither have motivation nor time to find and get to know the folks that they might be required to work with. This is where social enterprise can do wonders.

The solution that powers the social enterprise does not have to solve a specific business problem. Imagine an enterprise social network that has algorithms to find the like minded-people based on their skills, interest, extra curricular activities, the departments they work for, the cars they drive, the neighborhoods that they live in etc. The real advantage of using such a network is to bridge silos without having an explicit goal of collaboration. This is an antithesis of collaboration.

You don’t collaborate with your neighbors before you socialize with them. You greet them, go to the block party, and have beer and BBQ. And then if you need to collaborate on chopping that tree you do so. It isn’t very different when it comes to enterprises. End of the day the enterprises have human beings that behave like, well, human beings.

Coming up in the next post:

Social enterprise enablement through collaborative content curation, democratizing the management, and earning instead of buying adoption.

This is my second post on my impressions from the Under The Radar conference. Check out the first post on NoSQL.

Virtualization is not cloud computing. However virtualization has significant potential when it is used to achieve cloud-like characteristics such as elasticity, economies of scale, accessibility, simplicity to deploy etc. I have always believed that the next wave of cloud computing is going to be all about solving “special” problems on the cloud – I call it a vertical cloud. These vertical problems could be in any domain, technology stack, or industry. Raw computing has come long way. It is about the right time we do something more interesting with the raw cloud computing.

Delphix is attempting to solve a specific problem - database virtualization. I met the CEO Kaycee Lai and the VP of sales Jedidiah Yueh at Under The Radar reception the night before. They have great background in understanding the cost and flexibility issues around de-duplication from their days at EMC. They have assembled a great team including Alok Srivastava from Oracle who ran Oracle RAC engineering prior to joining Delphix. Most large database deployments have multiple copies of single database that customers use for purposes beyond production such as staging, testing, and troubleshooting. This replication is expensive from process, resources, and storage perspective and takes long time to provision instances. The founders saw this problem first hand at EMC and decided to solve it.

At the core their offering is a read-write snapshot of a database. That’s quite an achievement. The snapshots are, well, snapshots. You can’t modify them. When you make this compromise they occupy way less space. Delphix took the same concept but created the writable snapshots and a seemingly easy to use application (I haven’t used it) that allows quick de-duplication based on these snapshots. You can also go back in time and start your instance from there.

Delphix has great value proposition in the database virtualization - help the customers reduce their hardware and people – DBA and system administrators - cost at the same time accelerate the IT processes. I like their conscious decision not to go after the backup market. Sometimes you have a great product but if it is marketed in the wrong category with vendors fighting in the red ocean you could die before you can grow. They had the best pitch at the conference – very calm, explaining the problem, articulating the value proposition, emphasizing right people on the team, and identifying the target market. If you are an entrepreneur (or even if you are not) check out their pitch and Q&A. There is a lot you can learn from them.

It was great to be back at Under The Radar this year. I wrote about disruptive cloud computing start-ups that I saw at Under The Radar last year. Since then the cloud computing has gained significant momentum. This was evident from talking to the entrepreneurs who pitched their start-ups this year. At the conference there was no discussion on what is cloud computing and why anyone should use it. It was all about how and not why. We have crossed the chasm. The companies who presented want to solve the “cloud scale” problems as it relates to database, infrastructure, development, management etc. This year, I have decided to break down my impressions into more than one post.

NoSQL has seen staggering innovation in the last year. Here are the two companies in the NoSQL category that I liked at Under The Radar:

Northscale was in stealth mode for a while and officially launched four weeks back. Their product is essentially a commercial version of memcached that sits in front of an RDBMS to help customers deal with the scaling bottlenecks of a typical large RDBMS deployment. This is not a unique concept – the developers have been using memcached for a while for horizontal cloud-like scaling. However it is an interesting offering that attempts to productize an open source component. Cloudera has achieved a reasonable success with commercializing Hadoop. It is good to see more companies believing in open source business model. They have another product called membase, which is a replicated persistence store for memcached – yes, a persistence layer on top of a persistence layer. This is designed to provide eventual consistency with tunable blocking and non-blocking I/Os. Northscale has signed up Heroku and Zynga as customers and they are already making money.

As more and more deployments face the scaling issues, Northscale does have an interesting value proposition to help customers with their scaling pain by selling them an aspirin or vicodin. Northscale won the best in category award. Check out their pitch and the Q&A:




GenieDB is a UK-based start-up that offers a product, which allows the developers to use mySQL as a relational database as well as a key-value store. It has support for replication with immediate consistency. Few weeks back I wrote a post - NoSQL is not SQL and that’s a problem. GenieDB seems to solve that problem to some extent. Much of the transactional enterprise software still runs on an RDBMS and depends on the data being immediately consistent. The enterprise software can certainly leverage the key-value stores for certain features where RDBMS is simply an overhead. However using a key-value store that is not part of the same logical data source is an impediment in many different ways. The developers want to access data from single logical system. GenieDB allows table joins between SQL and NoSQL stores. I also like their vertical approach of targeting specific popular platforms on top of mySQL such as Wordpress and Drupal. They have plans to support Rails by supporting ActiveRecord natively on their platform. This is a vitamin, if sold well, has significant potential.

They didn’t win any prize at the conference. I believe it wasn't about not having a good product but they failed to convey the magnitude of the problem that they could help solve in their pitch. My advice to them would be to dial up their marketing, hone the value proposition, and set up the business development and operations in the US. On a side note the founder and the CEO Dr. Jack Kreindler is a “real” doctor. He is a physician who paid his way through the medical school by building healthcare IT systems. Way to go doc! Check out their pitch and the Q&A:

I have been following the Chirp conference today where Evan Williams, who goes by @ev, disclosed Twitter growth numbers in his keynote and shared their pains, gains, and priorities. We all know that Twitter is growing fast – very, very fast – but here is the summary of those numbers that tells us what that growth actually looks like:

• 105 million registered users and they add 300k uses every day
• 3 billion API request a day (equivalent to Yahoo traffic)
• 55 million new tweets every day
• 600 million search queries every day
• 175 employees
• 75% traffic comes from third party clients
• 60% tweets come from third party clients
• 100,000 registered apps
• 180 million unique visitors on Twitter.com (you don’t have to be a user)
• FlockDB, their social graph database that they just open sourced, stores 13 billion edges
• They started using “Murder” a new BitTorrent platform to transfer files during development. This reduced the transfer time from 40 minutes to 12 seconds
• Made deals with 65 (telco) carriers
• 37% of active users use Twitter on their phone (@ev wants this number to be 100%)