The Social Network Discussion Space

Confirmation of Social Software's Enterprise Offensive

As a short, follow-on note to my last post on the "Two Sides to the Social Enterprise Coin" - I thought I'd quickly recap a note put out by Mary Wardley with IDC last week.

In her research note "Social Conventions Infiltrating Enterprise Applications...", Mary details the potential social networking capabilities offer Enterprise CRM applications which "...in particular stand to expand their customer experience capabilities by tying together (CRM's) transactional aspects...with the full relationship color that comes from social media sources."

Mary truly strikes an insightful chord in her assessment of the growing impetus enterprise application vendors will have to address in their future solution roadmaps.  As most of us "...spend more and more of (our) time operating in the world of the Internet (we'll) increasingly expect the rest of (our) interaction environments to embody the same levels of ease...collaboration and communication...Web 2.0 technologies enable."

I completely agree.  We only need to look at Amazon's recent announcement, profiled by Jonathan Birchall in last week's Financial Times, on its Facebook applications capitalizing on social networking's ecommerce potential to see validation of Mary's predict.

Two Sides to the Social Enterprise Coin

Much of the current press fodder on Social Networking in the enterprise focuses on how companies are leveraging Facebook, or "white-label Facebook-like" platforms, to make it easier for their employees to network, communicate and collaborate in the 2.0 world.

Serena Software, uses Facebook to help its employees get to know one another on a more personal level so that they'll work better together.  As Serena grew and became more distributed, its employees began to "...feel disconnected from one another...(and) social networking tools, like Facebook...(helped) us get to know each other as people...understand our business and products, and...serve our customers—on demand," according to CEO Jeremy Burton.

But, to look at Serena's use of its "Facebook Fridays" events as communal, end-of-week-twitterestorama's belies the real innovation at play.  In a conversation with Rene Bonvanie, Serena's head Marketing veep, Bill Ives shed light on how they're using Facebook on top of a simple, content management system to connect employees & customers with content & expertise through trusted relationships.  Social network software, in this case, facilitates relationship connections to accelerate access to information and expertise, at the time of need.

Bill Roberts writes how Dow Chemical uses social networking tools for similar benefit in meeting its talent management & recruiting needs.  Opting for a "white-label" social software suite from SelectMinds, Dow launched its own social network in late-December, with "...the idea of an alumni network (as) the original vision," according to Julie Sasone Holder, Dow's corporate VP for HR, marketing and public affairs.  After 30 days -- 3,000 of its 22,000 US employees had already posted profiles, started network referrals and helped Dow recoup its investment with scant internal promotion.

While companies like Serena and Dow are launching specific initiatives to capitalize on social enterprise networking benefits -- through public and private social software platforms -- some of the larger enterprise vendors have finally gotten religion and are directly embedding social networking capability within their existing applications.

Last week for example, OpenText announced the addition of social networking capabilities as a native part of its "LiveLink" enterprise content management (ECM) solution.  Collaborative and community-oriented tools are now packaged to co-exist with content and encourage people to work together, while capturing critical project information in an underlying ECM framework.

Oracle has also jumped into the fray.  Phil Wainright wrote yesterday about how they're "skinning their latest CRM offering with social networking capability".  Jim Finkle also covered Oracle's new social computing capabilities highlighting features which  "...alert workers when colleagues have ties to a sales prospect, or help them identify experts who might be able to help close a deal."

IBM has even upped the anty by adding a set of professional services to its own existing "white-label" social software suite.

It's natural that the larger software vendors are finally taking cues from their younger "white-label" siblings and adding social-networking arrows to their application quiver.  And, we can expect to see more of this in the month's ahead, as we paddle forward in this nascent evolution of "social enterprise network" capability.

But the real adoption for social software in the enterprise will begin when the "two sides of the social enterprise network coin" become one and we see a convergence of platforms and tools for specific business needs embedded "directly within the application's business process".

When it is just as natural to expect our CRM systems to notify us who in the company was a recent hire from a competitor in an SFA deal we're working on...as it is for a software marketeer to verify product claims from the actual developer writing the code (in real-time) -- the social network train will have truly left the station for a city near you.

The Social Software Wave

This week has seen some interesting threads that relate to my last post and tangentially reference some of the themes in Richard Water's Financial Times article "World-Wise Web?", as well.

Dan Farber, with CNET, wrote in his Monday column about Charlene Li's, one of Forrester's experts on social networks, keynote at the "Graphing Social Patterns" conference held in San Diego this week.

Charlene predicted that social networks will be open and ubiquitous by 2013 primarily, in part, because of the prevailing usage they'll have in the mainstream.  "No matter what you do, your social networks will be there. The social graph and your identity will be at your fingertips," she said, noting that a large part of their utility would be because of the benefits we'll realize by harnessing the "social graph".

In other words, when companies understand how and why their customers interact, they can leverage that insight to build better relationships, offer better service and (hopefully) create better products.  Who wouldn't want that?

The same is true for the demand we, as individuals, will eventually place on the companies we work for to build better tools to help us work together.  And, structured "social enterprise networks", or at least the capabilities they'll enable, will play a big part.

Charlene isn't alone in this opinion.  David Needle and Clement Jones both covered a similar assessment this week by one of her fellow cohorts in the analyst industry, Anthony Bradley with Gartner.  Anthony's mid-February report, Five Major Challenges Organizations Face Regarding Social Software, suggests that "all organizations should at least be in this investigative stage" for their social software exploration.

And, in a larger report on the Hype Cycle for the High Performance Workplace, 2007, Fellow Gartner peers Niko Drakos, Whit Andrews and Rita Knox, join Anthony in his predict that "enterprise social software" and "social network analysis" will each see mainstream adoption within the next 2-5 years.  Charlene and team concur in their January report, Top Social Computing Predictions for 2008, "...corporate participation will bring social applications to the mainstream."

Clement captures the predict for the rest of us quite well in quoting Anthony that, "the demand from workers is escalating and they are turning to the consumer internet if their corporate technology provider is not offering a solution.  Organizations need to exploit this growing consumer literacy for business purposes and prepare a social software strategy..."

So, it seems that the chorus is all singing to the same tune, and we can expect to see more "enterprise-social-networking" solutions beyond our Facebook and Linked-In worlds -- as more firms and vendors start to ride the enterprise social software wave this year.  Automated social network analysis, embedded within the social networking applications we use, will be a hot area in the months to come and help realize the "social graph" benefits discussed this week in San Diego.

It will be interesting to see who, within the enterprise software community, will jump in to join the foot-race we've apparently already begun to run...

So What Does a Social Network for the Enterprise Look Like Anyway?

Today, I joined my fellow cohorts (or "meine Liebe Kolleginnen und Kollegen," as we often say at the office) in my fourth, company-related social network.

Three are on Linked-In and another is on Facebook -- where, with my membership this morning, we now stand arm-in-arm 4,385 strong.  (My company also offers, I should say, a great social networking platform visa vis our own intranet -- but I'll save discussion on portals, collaboration and social networks for another post.)

I'm sure there are many other work-related, social networks I don't even know about yet -- but will soon discover courtesy of the friendly invitations that saunter in fairly regularly now.  With all of the invites we receive and press to be read, it makes you wonder...just what does a good "social network for the enterprise" look like anyway?  To be honest, I'm not sure we really know the answer yet.  A few folks, though, are pointing us in the right direction.

Dennis McDonald gives a good framework for ensuring that our social network strategy is structured to  support business need.  And, Jeremiah Owyang, with Forrester, builds upon Dennis' work with sound recommendations for how social networks should be managed.  Joel Postman also chimes in on the intrinsic value social networks, within the enterprise, can deliver in our day-to-day.

And we can see the benefit Joel describes in practice with the work Leverage Software and Jive Software are doing to help SalesForce and RedHat become more accessible to their customers.  Accessibility "when we need it" to others with information or expertise we "need but don't have" really is what we selfishly want from our social networks, when dealing with the 11th hour Gordian Knots we've all faced in the wee hours.

But I think Bill Taylor hints at the real intrinsic benefit social networks offer (and that would be be adopted) within the enterprise, in his example of how Umpqua Bank empowers its customers -- we are the "centers of our worlds," after all.

Social networks that not only make insight accessible -- in the form of our access to peer relationships -- but guide and encourage connections based on specific business needs (in real-time) are the networks that will find business adoption.

This nascent concept is getting more traction among the many white-label, social networking firms trying to carve-out their niche offerings.  And the technology that will power this "semantic web capability" is being written about more and more.

Companies that decide to begin integrating software solutions to support networking amongst their employees often begin with internal "communal hubs" with "Facebook-like functionality" (i.e., employee profiles, calendaring, blog or chat capability, forums or message boards and a method for group identification).  And this "1st stage" is a great place for most organizations to start when introducing the concept of a community enabling social-networking inside the company.

Some firms even take this a step further by bundling this activity around a specific purpose relevant to the firm -- such as employee retention or recruitment.  These initiatives are usually mandated and managed at the "corporate-level" with little capability by individuals and/or teams to organically manage their own communal-hubs.

Companies that begin to enable, and support, individuals and teams to organically organize and maintain project-specific, communal hubs have transitioned to the 2nd-stage in their social-network lifecycle.

Most white-label, social-networking firms are servicing in the market today are servicing corporate customers either entering the 1st stage or experimenting with the 2nd.

The 3rd stage, that has yet to materialize, of social-networking in the enterprise will arrive when firms not only support communal-hubs at the organization, team and individual level -- but also build social-networking capability directly into "every" software solution supporting a business process.

To realize this, however, more enterprise software vendors will have to catch religion and begin architecting their solutions with this capability.

The enterprise market is definitely in its early stage.  While we're still sketching the shape that "social enterprise networks" will take later this year...it's hard to not get excited by the vision for what they could eventually become.

What's All the Fuss About...?

The fact that we are seeing tremendous initial valuations for the current crop of consumer-oriented, social networking sites comes as no surprise to many who've followed the 2.0 side of the enterprise web.  Since the mid-nineties, many firms have proffered individual solutions and nascent suites promising users a greater sense of "online community".  I should know -- I worked for one of them.  It seems, though, that it's taken a critical mass of "social users" to really give social networking the gravitas it needed to be relevant in the enterprise.

In the early days of structured social networking (i.e., 8-10 years ago when it was called "online community" or "eCommunity") firms like Participate, eGroups, eCircles, Prospero and PeopleLink all offered businesses the capability to build tools that would allow their employees and customers to connect around common interests when they wanted to.  Many of these companies failed in their initial aspirations during the late-nineties and post-dotcom period.  But it wasn't because their core value proposition was flawed...it was simply ahead of its time and ahead of the mainstream adoption curve in the customers it sought to serve.

Today's current crop of new firms offering social networking solutions to the enterprise (i.e., Selectminds, Jive Software, Leverage Software, Communispace) are also joined, this time, by their larger siblings (i.e., IBM, Intel, Salesforce, Oracle-Siebel, Oracle-BEA) in taking a lap around the "community playing field" to better connect employees and customers so that we can all "do our jobs", "buy things" and "get help when we need it" a little easier.

But will they succeed this time?  In a recent blog post, Josh Bernoff at Forrester seems to think so.  And, although Josh speaks to social applications more from a marketing slant, I agree with him.  The timing is right for "social networking", "social computing", "corporate social software" (or whatever else you'd like to call it) to take root in the enterprise and truly drive front-office adoption of many other business solutions that have been around a lot longer.  You could even argue that some vendors and customers are already diving in -- even Microsoft has jumped into the fray!

The prediction that we'll see much more "social networking" capabilities directly embedded in business software applications over the next 1-2 years isn't far-fetched.  If anything, it's inevitable.  Facebook and Linked-In are part of daily life for many of us and have already accelerated the "old-fashioned" networking many of us do when we pick up the phone or send an email.  The difference this time is that it fulfills the need for convenience in a manner for which we're now "conditioned".

Social Networking (i.e., "community of old") isn't an online experience relegated to the socially-inept on Saturday nights at places like "ChickClick".  It's a mainstream expectation for connecting and collaborating we now have -- if not demand -- from the corporate intranets we use during our day-to-day and the solutions we purchase from today's software vendors.

Over my next several posts, I'll begin to talk about how Social Networking is (and could be) used as an embedded component within business applications -- we'll also hear from others in the field for what they see on the horizon.

The Social Network Discussion Space

Welcome to my blog "The Social Network Discussion Space" where I'll discuss the evolution and convergence of social computing applications within enterprise business software.  We'll cover the growth of corporate social software from its early "online community" days to its current forms for collaboration, communities of practice and social networking within the enterprise.  In this blog, I'll address who the current players are; discuss analyst and fellow blogger "points-of-view" and invite select guest speakers from the industry to share their opinions and vision.  Thanks for visiting, commenting and debating...!