Alcuni giorni fa si è tenuto negli Stati Uniti il Gartner Customer 360 Summit, la conferenza in cui la nota società di ricerca ha anticipato i risultati del primo Magic Quadrant for Social CRM.

Prima ancora di riportare le indicazioni sulla reciproca posizione dei maggiori player presenti nel Magic Quadrant, vorrei provare a discutere ciò che nella ricerca non è scritto, lasciando alla fine alcune conclusioni.

La posizione di Gartner:

• Gartner (come Forrester) è arrivata tardi alla festa del Social CRM iniziato piuttosto dalla definizione e dal libro di Paul Greenberg, dai 18 use cases e dalle metriche di Altimeter, per essere ulteriormente sviluppato da personaggi quali Esteban Kolsky, Mitch Lieberman, Jacob Morgan. Gartner ha ora colmato il divario pubblicando il primo Social CRM Magic Quadrant
• Secondo Garter il Social CRM varrà già nel 2001 circa 1 Miliardo di dollari (8% del CRM tradizionale che vale 9.38 Miliardi di dollari) con un tasso di crescita più veloce di quello del CRM
• Anche per Gartner (dico anche perchè ormai tutti sono concordi su questa lettura e c’è addirittura chi ritiene che il Social CRM non abbia necessariamente bisogno di strumenti di community) il Social CRM non è destinato a rimpiazzare, ma a far evolvere il CRM tramite un utilizzo strategico dei canali sociali ed un ruolo centrale del cliente all’interno dei processi di creazione del valore dell’azienda
• Gartner è consapevole dell’estrema fluidità dell’intera discussione sul Social CRM e lo stesso Magic Quadrant è volutamente un primo tentativo (ma non l’ultima parola) di inquadramento dell’offerta oggi disponibile (si parla di circa 100 vendor che considerano il proprio un prodotto di Social CRM)

Andando dentro al report, per Social CRM Gartner intende:

le applicazioni pensate per supportare comunità di utenti interni, clienti e partner (ed altri attori) nel fornire assistenza relativamente ai processi di marketing, vendita e customer service a mutuo vantaggio dell’azienda e del suo pubblico

Gli scenari di utilizzo includono: condivisione di idee a supporto dell’innovazione, co-design di prodotti e servizi, l’auto supporto tra utenti, la brand awareness, le review ed il confronto tra prodotti, la raccolta di feedback da parte dei clienti, la condivisione di contatti.

Secondo Gartner questi bisogni possono essere affrontati tramite tecnologie appartenenti a 4 aree distinte:

• sistemi di community management privati (riservate ai dipendenti o ibride con partner e clienti)
• strumenti di social media monitoring
• community per la condivisione di contatti B2B e B2C
• community per la review dei prodotti in grado di facilitare la vendita

Gartner è convinta che entro il 2011 queste aree convergeranno definendo le suite del Social CRM e che entro il 2014 i leader del CRM tradizionale (SAP, Oracle, salesforce.com, Microsoft, ATG, SAS, IBM, RightNow) arricchiranno la propria offerta con le stesse funzionalità

Ancora più significativo è poi il modo in cui Gartner fissa i criteri di inclusione nel report (e di conseguenza i delinea i confini del Social CRM):

• Supporto per almeno un processo nelle aree marketing, vendite e customer care
• Un business case misurabile con tanto di KPI ed un workflow per ingaggiare iterativamente i clienti
• Uno spazio per l’interazione tra clienti, prospect e community manager con supporto a più moderatori tramite ruoli, reputation management, ricerca e meccanismo di filtering
• Una qualche integrazione delle soluzioni emerse nella community all’interno del CRM
• Almeno 8 clienti, 5M$ di revenue, cash per sostenersi ed essere stato nominato nel 25% delle shortlist dei clienti di Gartner

Questo è il Magic Quadrant che ne esce fuori:

Jive e Lithium sono molto chiaramente i leader, scelti per la capacità di gestire più processi del CRM, con una buona parte di revenue provenienti esplicitamente da questo dominio ed un forte focus su ROI e KPI per l’azienda:

• Jive (250 dipendenti) è uno dei vendor di social software più conosciuti, con revenue vicine ai $30M, una crescita dell’85% nel 2008 e 15 Milioni di utenti (tra applicazioni interne ed esterne). Particolarmente impressionanti sono sia la ricchezza che la velocità con cui le nuove funzionalità vengono rese disponibili con diversi annunci pesanti alla Enterprise 2.0 Conference di Boston relativi all’apertura di un mercato di applicazioni costruite su Jive, accesso totale ai tweet di Twitter, supporto allo standard OpenSocial, disponibilità di Jive nel cloud tramite Il Google Apps Marketplace oltre che le meno recenti possibilità di fare bridging tra conversazioni interne ed esterne, l’integrazione con Filtrbox per il social media monitoring e quella con il mondo Microsoft (Sharepoint ed Office). D’altro canto è evidente che Jive non sia un CRM e le potenzialità di integrazione con il CRM debbano essere costruite ad hoc
• Lithium fornisce community in hosting ed è cresciuto del 100% nel 2009 arrivando a revenue di circa $20M. Alle funzionalità di base sono state aggiunte recentemente l’innovation management (come anche per Jive), la moderazione delle community ed il social media monitoring tramite l’acquisizione di Scout Labs. I casi di studio di Lithium sono quelli che più mostrano ritorni misurabili, ma il processo di integrazione delle nuove funzionalità, con le community pubbliche (Twiter e Facebook in primis) e con il CRM tradizionale è ancora in corso
• Gli altri: dove sono quelli che vendono CRM? Salesforce, con il suo Chatter, è nell’area dei Visionari, ma gli altri come Oracle e RightNow sono nella parte dei venditori di nicchia (soluzioni buone ma solo per uno specifico problema). SAP e Microsoft sono invece del tutto assenti!
• La nicchia (ovvero il quadrante in basso a sinistra) è ancora molto affollato con un gran numero di prodotti totalmente differenti tra di loro. Ennesima dimostrazione di quanto poco coeso e maturo sia il gruppo selezionate da Gartner

Vi invito a scaricare e leggere l’intero report gratis dal sito di Jive, mentre qui sotto aggiungo un pò di mie conclusioni:

• Il messaggio: aldilà delle scelte e dei risultati, il primo Magic Quadrant for Social CRM sostanzialmente valida questo spazio agli occhi del mercato, spingendo molte aziende a rivalutare la propria strategia e dotazione tecnologica negli scenari di interazione con un cliente sempre più social. Il Social CRM è uscito dalla cerchia di blogger e visionari, per entrare nelle stanze (almeno alcune) dei decisori aziendali e dei vendor tradizionali di CRM
• Sui criteri di scelta: le categorie che Gartner sceglie sono piuttosto discutibili. Va bene il social media monitoring, vanno bene le community, ma la gestione dei contatti e le review sono davvero così importanti per il Social CRM? Io non credo. La definizione del mercato potrebbe e dovrebbe essere molto più stringente (ma forse non ci sarebbe nessun Magic Quadrant a quel punto..)
• Social vs CRM: leggendo il report diventa lampante come molti dei vendor analizzati, leader compresi, forniscano un supporto per niente completo al Social CRM. Si tratta piuttosto di una prima analisi di un mercato immaturo in cui i pezzi, anche quelli di base, sono tutt’altro che integrati. Ci vorrà ancora tempo prima che soluzioni vere di Social CRM (integrazione forte con il CRM e gli altri processi aziendali, forti funzionalità di monitoring, business rules per gestire sistematicamente le interazioni, community sia interne che esterne, etc) siano a disposizione dei clienti.
• Dov’è il CRM: i leader di fatto sono strumenti di community e monitoring (con questa ultima componente ancora poco integrata). Un pò pochino per un’offerta di Social CRM. Siamo sicuri siano realmente leader? Io credo di no, oggi non dovrebbero esserci ancora leader.
• Com’è il mercato: a mio avviso semplicemente ancora non esiste un solo mercato. Nonostante alcuni importanti segni di consolidamento (vedi le acquisizioni di Jive e Lithium, le partnership di Jive, i moduli per l’integrazione con i sistemi tradizionali) siamo al momento di fronte ad una quantità di vendor con offerte troppo frammentate e scollegate da fornire soluzioni complete al cliente, a meno di integrazioni costose e rischiose.
• La direzione: fermo restando quanto detto sopra, data la velocità con cui tecnologia e comprensione del Social CRM stanno andando, probabilmente già dalla fine del 2010 vedremo grandi novità e soluzioni quasi complete. Inoltre, anche senza integrazione, già ora con un pò di lavoro  e nella maggior parte degli scenari è possibile mettere insieme tutte le componenti indispensabili per migliorare drasticamente l’esperienza degli utenti con il brand. Dubito però che le future suite includano le 4 aree identificate da Gartner

Cosa pensate del report di Gartner e come vedete più in generale lo stato del Social CRM? Per coloro che volessero approfondire rimando ai video ed alle presentazioni delle sessioni sul Social CRM all’International Forum on Enterprise 2.0

Passato senza un momento di sosta dal nostro International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 alla Enterprise 2.0 Conference di Boston, non ho avuto un momento per fermarmi a riflettere sui segnali intercettati in quelli che al momento sembrano essere i due momenti di confronto più significativi a livello mondiale sui temi di cui questo blog si occupa.

Inizio a fare ordine ripartendo da quanto già riportato a riguardo del workshop del 2.0 Adoption Council, uno dei momenti più stimolanti e ricchi dell’intera conferenza di Boston. In particolare includo qui, in ordine cronologico, i link a tutte le slide del workshop ad integrazione dei miei appunti ed a benificio dei tanti che non sono riusciti ad essere con me dall’altra parte del globo.

Guardatevi bene il materiale perché è pieno zeppo di idee, suggerimenti e lezioni apprese dalle aziende più avanti nel cammino dell’Enterprise 2.0. Ancora più unica è la possibilità di affrontare in una sola occasione buona parte delle fasi e delle insidie nascoste dentro ad un progetto Enterprise 2.0 in modo concreto, robusto e maturo dal punto di vista dei protagonisti all’interno di alcune delle organizzazioni più grandi al mondo:

• L’introduzione di Susan Scrupski al 2.0 Adoption Council ed al workshop
• Business Case, Planning, and Adoption - Jamie Pappas (EMC2), Megan Murray (Booz Allen Hamilton), Rawn Shah (IBM)
• Community Roles & Adoption Planning – Stan Garfield (Deloitte Touche) e Luis Suarez (IBM)
• Measuring Success and Business Value – Ted Hopton (UBM), Donna Cuomo (The MITRE Corporation)
• Positioning Social Collaboration Tools in the Enterprise – Richard Rasty (Schneider Electric) e Bryce Williams (Eli Lilly)
• Mitigating Real or Perceived Risks – Bart Schutte (Saint-Gobain) e Kevin Jones (NASA)

Inutile dire, che da parte mia, l’aspetto più divertente, appagante e stimolante è stato poter conoscere e parlare con tutte queste persone dal vivo. Ringrazio in particolare Jamie, Luis, Megan, Rawn, Bryce, Claire, Simon. E’ grazie a loro se l’Enterprise 2.0 sta uscendo dalla sindrome di Peter Pan per diventare una realtà del business mondiale.

Per saperne di più e magari candidarvi al 2.0 Adoption Council seguite questo link e fate pure il mio nome a Susan.

• Stages of adoption: a winding roadp to enterprise adoption, frustrations and glories
• Business imperatives for smart work: productivity, finding the right information to do their job, restructure the way we work, being more efficient, building relationships with people
• Capitalizing on complexity (IBM Global Chief Ex Off 2010)
• IBM a globally integrated enterprise: 400K countries, 170 countries, 40% work away from traditional offices, 73% of managers have remote employees, 60+ sw acquisitions in 10 yrs, 50% of employees less than 5yrs in the company
• Enterprise collab contexts: intranet with other employees, internet world with customers and partners
• Social sw adoption: profiles 100% employees, 1m+ searches per week, 4.199 public and 7.410 private online communities with 222K members, 34K wikis with 471K unique readers, 70K blogs, etc
• BlueIQ team to raise collective intelligence of IBM through social software to achieve business vale (productivity, relationships, efficiency), most value of client-facing teams and implementation behind the firewall
• BlueIQ adoption methodology: look at the whitepaper http://drop.io/rawnshah
• BlueIQ throughout enterprise:1200 ambassadors working at different levels individual, team, community, executives
• What we’ve learned: It is a bad plan that admits of no modification (1st cent BC)
• Bringing people through conceptual stages of adoption: we see business need, articulate value, provide common tools, integrate with workflow, change the mindset accordingly . People are in different stages
• Stage 1 See value: opportunity (we see business need), objective (gain business value from social networking), biz drivers (this happening externally, driven as internally innovation). Glories: early success in marketing, research innovations gathering speed, proof of concepts for new product development. Frustrations: tools not ready for prime time, zealous affiliations to tools, early adopters easily dismissed, not valued.
• Stage 2 Recognize business use: opportunity (we need to articulate the value), objective (connect people to expertise), biz drivers (creating info sources and repositories, developing projects, tools and infrastructure). Glories: + connected people means new ideas, free exchange in more open networks, functions vetted by adoption. Frustrations: hard to differentiate the use and value of sometimes alternative tools, many streams of information, randomness (what if I’m missing something)
• Stage 3 All together now: opportunity (we need common tools), objective (simplify infrastructure, provide flexibility), biz drivers (clarify what tools to use for what task, integrate with existing workflows). Glories: faster execution among connected teams once common tools are in place, sanctioned tools environment brings stability and adoption. Frustrations: early adopters talk among themselves (so how to get broader adoptions), multiple tools for multiple task outside the normal workflow still exists, people still doing it in the old way. Transition is not complete. How do we integrate into enterprise processes. Broader participation across the organization would accelerate value.
• Stage 4 Integrate workflows (many still year): opportunity (we need better processes), objective (integrate social tools into business processes), biz drivers (gain adoption outside early adopters, streamline workflow). Glories: social tools fit into existing workflows and are standardized, faster to execute workflows that require social interactions, social tools reshape workflows. Frustrations: some workflows change completely and unpredictably, new business processes don’t necessarily mean new thought processes. Way of working needs to evolve as well removing old habits and culture of abundance drives need for new mindset
• Stage 5 Shift perspective: how to transform the way we think and act in order to take advantage from the new environment. opportunity (we need to change mindset), objective (change mental model to sharing and abundance), biz drivers (many channels and many trusted sources to find knowledge, multiple ways to find). It’s about the way to leverage the network, job profiles, how people differentiate and compare to each other. Glories: serendipity, social memory, stimulating knowledge flow high trust and confidence in peer capabilities but how to manage all this, how to train people to take advantage of this, trust is very difficult to build and yet needed to provide transparency (most organizations are not prepared for this). Frustrations: that’s a behavioral change. Keeping up with information flow, uneven participation in the network (that’s ok but you cannot have all the value), some people are not comfortable with this new model, with redundancy and you have to balance and coordinate online/offline to make everything accessible to other people that need information
• To move across stages you need guidelines and governance (from ad hoc to enterprise risk assessment and governance policy), support adoption (from ad hoc evangelism, to formal adoption program, to transformed processes), measure (from participation, to behavior and attitude), infrastructure (from experimentation to business agile hosting)

• Kathleen Culver, Greg Lowe (Alcatel Lucent)
• Promises of E20: increased productivity, anywhere/anytime access, better sense of connection, unlock hidden expertise especially in a fluid alive company, everyone can have a voice, acquiring the control about our data, community smarter than individuals, ultimately culture change
• How much of this is real? Is that totally right?
• Flexible access: we now have many tools in the enterprise and much more outside. You can get access to SMEs, get fast answers, connect BUT many more interruptions (presence, multiple sources, many windows), distraction and multitasking that may at the end reduce productivity for switching costs (that take time) and moving from task to task you never get anything accomplished, with multitasking you focus less on the deep meaning of things just touching upon the surface, there isn’t a single flow any longer (positive psychology) and this is impacting our happiness and wellbeing when you can follow and complete of a linear flow of tasks
• Always on: you can always been connected and work anywhere (even in bed!), questions are back in second that’s an instant gratification and you can feel other people around you BUT this flooding our free time. Big desire of being responsive or the sense of aggregation but these updates, needs of respond happens 24/7. Pressure to respond came be ridiculous, completely loosing our downtime invading our playtime (purposeless activities that we choose to do for pleasure) and removing the ability to look at problems from outside, from different perspectives actually impacting innovation and creativity. Another risk is damaging your personal tight connections being only partially there like if you were constantly drunk. Unpredictable call to actions are stressful situations that occur 24/7 (burnout). We are not computers, we cannot stay focus all the day or we are loosing performance
• Always virtual: we are checking emails and working also from the bath bringing you cultural and work perspectives we didn’t have before. Lower real estate and travel expenses, getting more imputes, improving our work/life balance BUT we loose face to face time, increasing the opportunity for misunderstandings, it is not easy to demonstrate emotions. Virtuality is not enough to exchange every kind of information and to create relationships, a sense of camaraderie.Mirror neurons are responsible for empathy, mimicking others, getting engaged in other’s life. Empathy is so important to establish rapport and rapport are fundamental for employees engagement ultimately affecting performance
• New 2.0 venues: you can have broader input and perspectives leveraging crowd-sourcing, pulling information out from boxes and reusing it in projects thus getting more productive, a new culture is emerging BUT all this can backfire exposing biases. Some people like these new venues more than others. Those people controlling the new venues are not necessarily the experts and quite ones risk to be crowded out. We are creating more and more noise affecting popularity and expertise. Certain contributions could be made just to improve your reputation and not to bring value to the discussion. The crowd or employees are very rarely statistical representative. Change doesn’t happen over night even for people with the best intentions
• Information candy store: you feel that more information allows you to take better decisions BUT you get overloaded and again this causes a loss of productivity, too many choices reduce confidence (Paradox of Choice) and increase anxiety. That brings us to analysis paralysis: you may want to consider every kind of information before taking any decision thus don’t taking decisions at all. It’s not easy to correct wrong information when it arise
• The dark side still can’t be quantified but we have to consider and mitigate all this
• Mitigation: avoid alert fatigue (avoiding too much emails from the system turning off notifications), unplug yourself (sometimes), make your smile count in person, when you ask e20 to take decisions carefully evaluate information (and contact owners where needed), filter out the noise (our priority and needs constantly change and we need to refine our filters constantly) BUT we are human animals, some of this stuff gives us some dopamine junkies and we may be worried to become disconnected, invisible, seeming uncommitted when you are not participating enough. It’s extremely hard to handle new channels especially under stress. It takes commitment, focus, effort
• Manage our attention as carefully as time and money

• If you build it, they will come? No
• How CSC built the field of dreams
• CSC 92K employees, 90 countries. Started with portals, wiki and finally C3
• Business problem: locating experts and assets, onboarding new hires, avoiding silos and barriers to innovation, avoid loosing intellectual properties, supporting thought leadership
• Not the Facebook for the Enterprise but connecting people to people, people to content and people to community
• They put together: business requirements, goals, sponsorship (IT, Security, Legal, etc), shortlist of products.
• They launched a pilot of adoption patterns and tools not limited in the number of people involved but on duration. The pilot has been so successful to become the end stage of the project
• C3 got internal and external recognition. Connect to connect time zones and overcome distance, communicate to share work and thoughts, collaborate to get the work done
• C3 got viral and Global during the pilot. Success was reached because CSC focused on people, use cases, adoption strategy. They plan for global scale from beginning
• C3 provides business value: collapsing time and distance barriers to leverage global expertise, reducing cycle time for proposal development to increase revenue, reduce customer acquisition costs, easier to locate and engage internal experts, improve employee onboarding, collaborating more to drive process efficiencies
• C3 Wins hearts and minds: people are proud to be in CSC, people converted to the new environment, adopted to reach business objectives, to leverage the power of the wider organization
• Plan for Success: Plan for the people and the business. You can’t go viral if you don’t plan viral. Adoption best practices: don’t overlook executives and find those who want to walk the talk. Taxonomy shouldn’t reflect organization chart but thought to allow patterns to emerge. Don’t ignore politics and culture but listen, learn and adapt. Give guidance about how to use new tools. Start with a small team but have a way to make it scale stuffing properly with community managers and locating advocates. Prepare use cases. 1 community manager, 12 champions and more than 100 advocates before launching and involved into strategy
• Adoption Planning model (look at the table)
• Some tactics. With advocates got access to a sandbox environment before everyone else knew. Identified meaningful use cases early in the pilot to demonstrate the business the value of collaboration
• Executives can be advocates as well. Executives were prepared to be actively involved. This is critical and to make it happen you have to prove them that they can extract some relevant personal value. Invited them to start their blog in their own voice, to promote c3 in team meetings or with email communication, asked resources to engaging their organization
• Seed use cases. Starting empty doesn’t make sense. Over 100 opinionated, active, passioned advocates to start conversations to make people feel welcomed at their first visit
• Watercooler. People work better together when they know each other on a personal level so trust people and encourage social conversation
• Feedback and transparency. Solicited feedback and passed back to the team to provide answers. There were discussions that simple had to left dying but keeping honest and transparent to build trust and credibility
• Roadmap: june 08 business case, may 2008 pilot, august 20K users, feb 10 SS0/Video, May 10 45 users, June 10 SBS V4. Proving to users that the project is constantly going on and bringing the sample principle external
• For advocates: career, exposure to the organization
• If you plan well the will come. Be credible to the company, leadership. Engage sponsors. Move quickly and showing value. Plan for Adoption

Keynote – JP Rangaswami, CIO and Chief Scientist, BT

Learning from the changes that happened in the last 6 yrs

• First change: we moved from hierarchies of products and customers, to networks of relationships and capabilities. From silos to networks to understand the move from stocks from flows (J.Hagel and J.Brown)
• Second change: People who managed this change are changed as well with a new role for millenials. New generation push the org to offer different services
• Third change: tools are changed with location based services, mobility
• Fourth change: Growth and advent of social networking

Starting from the changes in the last 6yr, let’s talk about the challenges for next seven yrs:

• Loss of control about data and device. The enterprise should learn to be designed for losing control. It happened for telcos and it is now happening with IT accelerated by the new generation and new devices. Not only decides, we also lost control of the data. The act to create control of something is abundant is going to produce a force that resource even more abundant. Connecting information to the net means you cannot control it. In the ocean of data you have to ask yourself about the time you need to protect your data
• Loss control on the boundary of the enterprise. We are investing both in technology to leave people out and bring people in
• Loss control of individual expertise and how it helps collective expertise. Are these tools making individual dumb and making corporation dumb. Are we supporting people in decision making with tools that push being superficial. Are we shifting from the individual to the collective? If that’s true, as we implement tools to serve enterprises in the future, we need to understand thad expertise sharing will be the norm in corporations

Keynote – The Human Network @ Work – Cisco

• The Human network using social network to bring people inside, enabling a dynamic organization powered by people, constantly evolving and enterprise wide, even spanning across the organization boundary
• They are demoing Cisco Quad with communities, calendar widgets, activity streams (also in the bottom), notifications, webex integration, presence, microblogging (integrated to twitter), chat, phone and voice mail integration, profiles with people activities, reporting chains, search on expertise, communities and filters, integrated with external search engines. Every community has videos, shared calendars, announcements, activities, members. Videos are automatically transcribed to be searchable and browsable!
• Cool but doing a keynote through a demo.. is this 2.0?

Keynote – Enterprise 2.0 – Are CIOs Ready to Bite?

• Panel moderated by Alex Wolfe InformationWeek.com with JP Rangaswami (BT), Murali Sitaram (Cisco), Ted Schadler (Forrester with new book Empowered coming out)
• How do you quantify business benefits: IT are simply caring about TCO and minimizing that (Forrester), It’s how to increase productivity (Cisco), It’s not about ROI but simply something that you need for the business and even if you still want to try evaluating an ROI you have to be very specific on the business scenario. People are creating new value in ways you couldn’t imagine before
• It took ibm 40 yrs to become evil; microsoft 20; google 10; facebook 5; twitter 2.5  Platforms and applications need to be open to avoid personal and corporate silos
• Will video and video conference take off? Yes video not only for real time communication but also in a collaborative experience (Cisco), That’s the way millenials are consuming information (Forrester), Video is not always the preferred channel for people. People will change the right modality and channel in context (BT)
• Are millenials accelerating the adoption? They are already doing. Tendency is using the web to share information (BT)
• Are these tools going to be integrated to business processes? They must be integrated with loosely coupled processes that can be changed and evolved (Cisco), hard processes have exceptions that you still have to integrate (Forrester), social networks are augmenting not substituting formal and real life exchanges (BT)
• 3 takeaways. Listening and talking to employees, do the math about business value, some layers are platform layers (Forrester). A platform is critical, we want to be viral other than integrating with processes (Cisco)

Keynote – The C-Level Perspective: Social Collaboration Fueling Innovation, Business Results and Competitive Advantage – CSC

• Csc was doing well but the recommendation from Bain suggested to create a corporate office for Innovation. They wanted to launch systematic, results driven innovation
• Very difficult to get any focus on innovation. Innovation have to be a balance between creativity and discipline to leverage on intellectual capital. Focusing on business problems they found
• 4 most important themes for the innovation agenda: leadership, process, governance, enablement
• Very good management minimize risk and focus on objectives. This kills innovation. You need to allow creativity
• The innovation metaphor: not focus on individual employee to make them more innovative but to get out the way and enable the conditions for people to free their creativity
• Look at innovation not as a point problem but as a system problem matching difference agendas for executives, employees, analysts
• From Nonaka & Takeuchi (tacit/explicit knowledge): we need to socialize, externalize, internalize, combine intellectual capital. Manage is out of question. Facilitation is the central topic
• Other than best practices CSC wanted to anticipate next practices. Characteristic of a practice are the uniqueness and applicability: exciting bad theory, boring bad practices, best practices (things are implemented well and frequently already), next practices are able to see the future and apply it
• Where do we get the ideas? Top down or bottom up? Today consumerization is becoming a bottom-up process
• Identified 6 areas of ditigal disruptions: new media, new reality, social power, information transparency, smarter world, platform makeover, new waves
• Let’s focus on the social power and social networking inside the enterprise
• What employees are saying: is CSC an innovative company? it is getting better. Innovation started to get traction from 2006-2009
• Collaboration Journey started from KM and brought by C3: Connect, Communicate, Collaborate through Jive
• What’s the business benefits: no ROI but transforming the organization to be more innovative: collapsing time and distance, onboarding, reducing cycle time, greater ease of location expertise. It took up in the entire company
• What’s next: video, office integration, mobility, market engagement, client/partner communication
• Claire Flanagan just get promoted as Director KM/Social Strategy for running the project

Keynote – Collaboration Within Context – Franz Aman (SAP)

• How to connect people and processes is a huge opportunity
• We are seeing the importance of information overload, context, process
• Demo of SAP StreamWork to make collaborative decision: creation of a new activity, inviting people, collaborate in the environment to understand how to spend marketing dollars, presence, you can structure collaboration adding tools that help you organize yourself like consensus tool to collect feedbacks, sales data from the enterprise (i.e BI), ranking table (to prioritize markets)
• Not typical collaboration, but a way to taking better decision together to reach results while recording the decision and creating corporate memory
• Decisions are some of the least digitized asset in the organization even if we are taking hundreds of decision daily
• Expectations is to use applications now, without training, having fun and now we have many new technologies
• Elements (another demo): search with text analysis capabilities that extracts sentiment and the meaning of content. Results include documents and people
• People want to work naturally, in the context, in their way and make confident decision
• Yet another demo as a keynote

Keynote – The State of Enterprise 2.0

• Andrew McAfee on the stage
• Wanted to start from screenshots about vendors announcements. Too many of them. Gartner, PwC, The Economist, McKinsey show E20 is taking up and heating
• 4 tensions going on about E2.0:
  • Goal: Cargo Cult or infrastructure? Enterprise 2.0 not as a separate island but integrated to a new infrastructure but it takes time
  • Target: Inner or Outer rings? Looking at the Bull’s Eye outer rings are incredibly valuable if you are not focusing only on being productive but also on innovation. Older technology addressing only the inner rings
  • Direction: Hippo or Superorganism? Does E20 come top-down (heavy guy) or bottom-up (ant colony)? A super organism shows emergent complex structure through very simple interactions
  • Assumption: Stability or Flux? In which environment are we working on? We are moving towards the organic side. From the assembly line to people working in a dynamic, reactive, quick, autonomous way but none of the extremes are working so we need to address this tradeoff

Keynote – Innovation Through Enterprise 2.0 – IDEO

• Talking about design thinking
• How relevant is technology to innovation? What else do you need to transform your organization?
• Three principles for driving innovation through technology:
  • Empower people not ideas. Ideas are cheap. You don’t need a process to innovate, you need people to innovate. It cannot be managed, it’s messy. Humans are able to see the future and take advantage of ideas. How to empower people to support innovation
  • Create platforms for coalescence. Magic happens when people share visions and work together. Walls are spaces for collaboration. You can use networks, platforms. They have social network with blogs, wikis, spaces organized on groups to share best practices and collaborate (nGenera)
  • Facilitate and reward participation: inverse relation between adoption and friction. Leave out any resistance, barrier, misalignment. Make it damn simple, put all the information together. 97% adoption rate in a few months
• Discussion with McAfee: to enable collaboration the organization have to be supportive and aligned. Easy to use tools that can compete with the web and right culture. Tools are acting as catalysts, as accelerators. Is E20 for everyone? Yes, most organization are waiting to show what they are able to do.

Here I start my coverage of the first day (workshops) from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference Boston with the E20 Black Belt Practictioner Workshop by the 2.0 Adoption Council run and cultivated by Susan Scrupski (now Dachis Group)

I’ll keep on publishing my notes for all the day.

Building the Business Case (Jamie Pappas, EMC2)

• Defining clear goals: how support the org, how they connect to biz process (that is the answer to get ROIs), measurable, realistic or too optimistic?
• Addressing Pain Points: challenges that can be mitigated through E20 (info silos, org silos, lack of expertise, redundancy), what are some tangible use cases, what’s all this going to cost?
• Executive Sponsors and Key Players: this is really critical, find anyone already using collab, find who’s asking for these tools, make people that supports collaboration your friends, do the same for people not supporting collab, be open to feedbacks and be flexible, build use cases together
• There are so many tools: find tools that meet the needs of the business and pains, avoid introducing too many tools to the mix
• Don’t underestimate education: most people don’t know how to use these tools, they don’t know what to expect from them (i.e people upset by other people changing their content on a wiki!), use variety while training to address different learning behaviors (online, podcasts, videos, face to face), don’t forget traditional corporate education programs (for new hires, sales orientation, etc)
• Pitching the Idea: how to introducing the idea and to whom, use all the people involved in previous steps (influencers, advocates, bill payers, pain points, back to the biz), practice the pitch. If that’s a pilot its much easier
• Common Objections: no time, waste of time, we are busy, are we expected to pay employees to socialize, this is not for business, I don’t have anything to say, my boss doesn’t support this, one more tool to keep track of, too much time to learn. You don’t need to write unique master pieces, just talk about things meaningful for our business
• Dealing with Critics: anticipate possible objections, acknowledge objections, do not be dismissive, create a friendly dialogue, respect critical feedback, educate people about the potential, the use and misconceptions, accept that’s not for everyone.
• It takes time: EMC2 65% participation in 3 yrs take it slowly and plan gradually
• Time for rollout: ask yourself if you want to soft launch vs highly marketed, pilot of full roll-out (create suspense, expectations, whom), choose right channels and use WOM, engage supporters, evangelists, champions, don’t oversell and seed the community with great content
• What is success: define success. Is it fundability, participation, sentiment?
• Some benefits: corporate memory, connect people to people and to information, professional growth,
• Lather, Rinse and Repeat: it is an iterative process

Planning (Megan Murray, Booz Allen Hamilton)

You don’t have the answer, we don’t have the answer. Best go about the solution finding and planning in a collaborative manner. Here are some of the most important steps:

• Structure: how does e20 relate to the organization (Is that more structured, emergent, both), be supportive but not reliant on the organization, use both automation and participation. Keep on the formal, build for grow and leave space for informal.
• Staffing and Sourcing: What are the roles and attributes (It depends from you organization structure and culture) and where are this roles living? It’s about community management, technology, evangelism, strategy, demonstrations, marketing, moderation, gardening, championing, change management. Set up a governance model for participation (who will participate and will they govern), an engagement model (who will engage, what are their limits, how will the stay tuned), education plan (will education be available, who will deliver it, how will users teach themselves). Stuff appropriately to be responsive and have the resources to cover these activities
• Policies: one of the most uneasy you have to go through but also an opportunity to address the limits of the initiative. There is no new risk just increased opportunity for risk. Ask yourself what are the policies and who will enforce them. If you start small you can make your legal team less nervous. That’s the easiest way to go to evaluate and mitigate risks
• Mitigation and response: figure out which are the worst things that can happen. Find the right answers to these events so that you’ll have a proper answer in place just in case. Come up with the basic response and think human
• The help stack: different levels of support using the community. Self help (through tutorials, strategies, examples, etc), community help (users helping others, user added help content, organic faqs, user examples, user success stories), community management (cm response, manage help content, highlight good user examples, highlight success stories), help desk (functional help, issue tracking, metrics).

The adoption dance (Rawn Shah, IBM)

• Start off describing the style not the steps of change: put together the bigger picture of what collaboration means for different people, addressing specific fears, pain points and speek plainly (not wikis, not blogs)
• Make it relevant to each person: it’s impossible to describe for each one but you have to make people understand thinking about collaboration context and focusing on main common themes and using different tactics to reach different people. So the adoption and cultivation strategy should be unified but diversified for diverse people. Frame collaboration in terms of business processes. Your core job is understanding people and detect the problems to focus on. It could be employees, business partners and customers but in a very different way
• Make success visible. When you discover great ideas, success stories save that stories. Show what was the win, what was the benefit. Collect over time stories that are meaningful to different context, job roles, scenarios. You can do that through word of mouth or surveys. Share old stories with new champions. Spark ideas about what’s working
• Engage the eager ones but not only them. Identify the most vocal ones to spread enthusiasm. They are your evangelist and volunteers doing that on passion. Remember every one of them has a different vision that you have to respect. Provide them information that can use and share. That’s the only way to scale and contaminate the entire organization
• Look under the leaves. You have to figure out those who produce results but are not vocals. You have to support them to make them your evangelists as well. Accept that not everyone will be eager to spread. Their visibility will force for you program
• Reward good behavior: some time some kind of reward is helpful. Reward is not money. Reward could be visibility, opportunity. Connect the reward to the effort and impact of the initiative
• Set guidelines and behaviors: examples are be who you are, don’t pick fights, use a disclaimer, add value, respect the audience, speak in first person, use your best judgement, be the first to respond to your own mistakes, don’t forget your day job. Set visible common expectations and hold people accountable for their behavior and respect different cultures. Guidelines are not governance points but user behaviors.
• Create practices areas: not everyone is comfortable with enterprise 2.0 and you have to provide safety zones (where errors are forgiven) where to figure out the tools and how to use them. That should be temporary anyway. Everyone will practice at his own pace. Pace cannot and shouldn’t be imposed
• Set a rhythm, practice often: set a pace of regular events early on both on the part of the user and the community management team
• Take it in stride: it will take effort, time, energy. Take time to learn and to understand different rates different teams will need to participate
• Examples of a success story have name/ID and your job area, impacts (job role, business process, project), blurb (2-3 sentences on why this is a winner), benefit (2-5 word phrase on key win), active words (keywords, tags, adjectives, verbs)

Community Roles and Adoption Planning (Stan Garfield – Deloitte, Luis Suarez – IBM)

• Stan is community evangelist for Consulting at Deloitte Touche where he leads the SIKM Leaders Community with over 400 members globally and Luis is Knowledge Manager, Community Builder and Social Computing Evangelist at IBM
• Communities behind the firewall are groups of people who share specialty, passion, interest, roles, concern, set of problems. Communities are living organisms so very difficult to manage
• Community members deepen their understanding of the topics by interacting, asking questions, sharing knowledge, reusing ideas, solving problems together, developing better ways to do things
• People join a community to share, innovate, reuse solutions, collaborate, learn from others
• Principle for successful communities (community manifesto):
  • they should be independent by the organization structure and should be based on topics and served by collaborative technology
  • communities are different from organizations and teams (good table to embed). Teams have a mission and put together by an organization
  • communities should span boundaries transcending organizational structured
  • communities need to be actively and constantly (every day, every hour of the day) nurtured. Implement the SCENT (site, calendar, events, news, thread) and perform the SHAPE (schedule, host, answer, post, expand) tasks
  • community circle of life: content is important but you need a constant nurturing focused on helping people to connect. Content comes out from relationships. Communities give people a reason to remain in the company
  • community roadmap: establish core team, complete startup questionnaire, identify content to provide, read documentation and participate in training, begin community site development, launch (announce, increase membership, review metrics, add content stimulate collaboration)
  • Primary community roles: executive sponsor (envision the value both to the members and the organization), community leader (most passionate and able to spread the energy about the community), community council (right hand of community leader driving interaction and content), community members
  • How to build a community: decide general topic many people will passionate about. Ask them relevant themes.
  • Review existing communities. If communities already exist in your org see if they can be expanded, cultivated, resurrected before creating a new one
  • Select a committed community moderator/facilitator. He should know the subject, have energy, have time
  • Build community membership and communicate about the community (publicize it externally, while recruiting new members and communicating internally about what’s happening)
  • Keep the community active

Metrics and Measurement (Ted Hopton – United Business Media)

• UBM has an initiative on Jive.
• They are using logging levels, daily contributors, page view, unique visitors, active members, consumers, contributors, page views per area, who’s creating and viewing content, active members by level of activity
• Annual user survey asking how much people have used the platform to do things (access information, communicate with colleagues, organize info, find people’s contact, get work done, helping colleagues), positive outcomes, why don’t you use it more (it’s hard to find things, it’s not integrated into work process, don’t have time, etc). Net Promoter Score = how likely are you to recommend using it to a colleague?
• UBM is sharing success stories
• Metrics will and should evolve together with the understanding of both technology and community’s dynamics
• There are no generally accepted benchmarks for E20 communities. Benchmark against yourself, culture, objectives

Metrics and Measurement (Donna Cuomo – The MITRE Corporation)

3 Case studies:

• Improving MITRE’s Research Program Selection Process: deployed an innovation management tool for research competition (Spigit), codified a research competition process encouraging broader participation both in submitting and commenting ideas and improving general user experience. 39% (2872 of 7278) employees voted. User experience assed through surveys.
• Social bookmarking to improve resource sharing, leveraging other research across teams, help with expertise finding, increase participation in knowledge sharing, more granular information management, ease refunding information, subscription topic areas (17% internal bookmarks, 83% external bookmarks, 27K bookmarks, 154K tags, 18K unique, average 56 bookmarks with 5.4 tags
• Social Networking Analysis (bill donaldson, sal parise, ball lyre) on social software and technology mediated networks to understand brokerage roles, the impact on personal innovativeness and personal connections (uniqueness)
• Measuring business value: articulate goals first and understand that end users are not only user group, increasing connections has value, you need to reach critical mass to really measure the value

Position Social Collaboration Tools in the Enterprise Richard Rashty (Schneider Electric), Bryces Write (Eli Lily)

• Companies have a lot of tools but users are not interested into tools for tools’ sake: “not another tool”
• How does this all fit together or better how this is all going to help me working better
• Understand business processes and how to use tools to eliminate complexities
• Analyze critical needs and current collaboration tools and understand if you need another tool. Integrate it just in case
• Critical factors to understand if you need another tool: impact on consumption, keeping users engaged, flexibility, ease of use, user perception, grassroots behaviors, do you need to extend collaboration to external actors, opportunity to convert potential and weak ties in strong ties across org structure, project teams and locations, aggregate and filter horizontal and vertical exchanges
• Tolerance levels of early adopters are higher so that’s a good idea integrating the adoption strategy to technological strategy
• Pilots to handle expectations and integration
• Deciding and educating about at which phases and in which scenarios to use different tools

Mitigating Real and Perceived Risks (Bart Schutte – Saint Gobain and Kevin Jones – NASA)

• There always going to be people resisting for real or fictional reasons. How to address these risks and fears?
• The more you talk about this the more you are turning skeptics into evangelists
• I don’t have time for this, what if people are publishing the wrong information, compliance, why using this if I’m already successful, more material for liability, saturation, too much info, need to be careful about what I say, don’t want negative comments, what I write can be used against me, personal data issues, middle managers resisting or loosing control, reputation and credibility issues, things other say about me, confidential info made visible
• Managers, employees and executives have different fears
• Real Issues: employee right issues, personal data protection issues, company liability, control challenge for managers, confidentiality concerns, workers’ council issues
• Perceived issues: no clear ROI/Business justification, waste of time, inappropriate content, accuracy of information, participant’s age or ability, unsupportive culture, controlling content, information overload, abuse
• It’s all about people. Most issues are emotional and none of them are new. Web 2.0 adds velocity
• On real issues go to talk to HR and Legal asap and bring them onboard
• On perceived issues go to talk to stakeholders asap, create policies and support, use senior champions to carry messages of openness, use the community to monitor and auto monitor, report on issues that are not sufficiently addressed by the community, trust users, evaluate real risk and potential impact, have prepared answers, refer to real experiences where possible

Chi legge questo blog sa bene, come domani a Milano prenda il via l’International Forum on Enterprise 2.0 organizzato per il terzo anno consecutivo da Open Knowledge. A partire dal 2007, l’evento è cresciuto costantemente portando in Italia un insieme significativo di esperti internazionali, casi di successo, riflessioni fino ad arrivare ai numeri di quest’anno:

• Più di 40 speaker provenienti da ogni parte del mondo
• 9 casi di successo presentati per esteso (Mota Engil, Intel, CSC, Barilla, Citroen, Telecom Italia, Centro Nazionale Trapianti, Dassault Systèmes)
• 3 panel in cui i clienti si confrontano liberamente (Technogym, Oracle, Webank, Meridiana, Saes Getters, Pirelli, Zegna, Carige, STMicroelectronics)
• 3 panel di esperti
• 3 track paralleli (HR, Marketing, Innovation) più un barcamp ed un expo pavillion

Io sarò personalmente coinvolto nella moderazione del percorso di Marketing insieme a tanti amici come Esteban Kolsky, Mark Tamis, Francois Gossieaux ed ai Marketing Manager di Oracle, Pirelli, Webank.

Di seguito vi anticipo allora alcune delle domande condivise con i partecipanti alle due tavole rotonde che concluderanno la mia sessione del 10 Giugno:

Panel “Voce al Marketing” con Paolo Furini (Oracle), Adriana Piazza (Webank), Francesco Pietrangeli (Pirelli):

• Alla luce di questa giornata e nella vostra specifica esperienza, quali sono le spinte che stanno mettendo in discussione l’attuale assetto della funzione Marketing?
• Come sta cambiando il lavoro di chi fa marketing per trarre vantaggio dai social media? Sono necessarie nuove competenze?
• E’ ancora possibile per il marketing affrontare queste sfide in modo autonomo o esiste un’esigenza di contaminazione e dialogo con le altre funzioni? In che modo?
• Quali iniziative di marketing 2.0 state portando avanti? Cosa avete appreso di inaspettato? Potete condividere con il pubblico la difficoltà ed il risultato più rilevante?
• E’ necessario o almeno possibile determinare un ritorno per queste iniziative? Di che tipo?

Il Social Business. Marte e Venere si confrontano verso la centralità del consumatore con Emanuele Quintarelli, Esteban Kolsky, Mark Tamis, Francois Gossieaux:

• Perché la centralità del cliente è così urgente proprio in questo momento? Quali sono i benefici che rendono il Social Business un must per le aziende?
• Qual è il migliore esempio di Social Business che ti viene in mente?
• Quali sono i fattori di successo necessari ad abilitare un’esperienza cliente unitaria, coerente, memorabile? Si tratta più di una questione interna all’azienda o di contatto con il cliente?
• Che tipo di struttura organizzativa deve essere predisposta per portare il cliente al centro del business? Come rendere scalabile questo approccio?
• A che punto è la tecnologia e come mettere tutti gli ingredienti al posto giusto?
• Con quali metriche è possibile misurare l’impatto delle social sale, social support, social innovation e social media marketing?
• Quali sono gli ostacoli più grandi e come affrontarli?

Come potete vedere gli argomenti sono tantissimi e da parte mia non voglio proprio farmi sfuggire l’occasione di raccogliere il parere di personaggi così in gamba. Cercheremo di tenere le risposte puntuali e specialmente di aprire le domande a tutti i presenti, per cui vi chiedo fin da ora quali sono i temi caldi, più controversi, più delicati, più rilevanti sui quali voi vorreste delle risposte?

Farò del mio meglio per integrarli nella discussione. Vi aspetto tutti domani e dopodomani!