SFH Blog

Rethinking "Social" in 2012

2011-12-19T01:19:00.000+05:30

I am passionate. Passionate in all things that allow us all, the humanity, to make the world a better place. But since that's kind of a tall order and a huge field to work in, I chose Customer Relationship Management back in 2000; don't ask me why. It was a visceral pull, not something that I thought through much. I really believed in the R for relationship. But soon, as I began getting involved in real world projects I got to see that R stood little more than Revenue, for the most part.

And then came along Social Media, with its promise of being able to get the customer into not only the conversation but also in almost all aspects of a business - building customer relationships, developing new products and services, and producing and distributing them.

But the frenzy around social media by the so called gurus, the hype from the marketers and the buzz from many well meaning yet misguided analysts meant that "social" has been relegated to either a feature that you add to your apps or a layer that you drape over your platforms. And thus I think, time has come to rethink "social".
My team works at building and delivering solutions and services around social enablement (for the most part using online social/community platforms), social analytics (think social listening and command centers powered by dashboards and reports), gamification (reputation, influencing behaviors, those kind of things), enterprise social, etc. A little plug, here is where I have say I feel pretty bullish about the strategy workshop workbench we created this year that allows the various groups in an organization to look at the whole big picture and create a strategic intent for the organization. That is their focus for 2012.

I want to look beyond, not beyond 2012, but beyond these concepts. I am looking at two major themes, and both of them needs us to rethink "social":

social design, social modeling, that is thought up front, at the strategy level, rather than as a feature or a layer, post facto
social that incorporates the meaning of societal - values, humanity - into the vision of the organization

Social Design
Evan Doll, cofounder of Flipboard, the hugely successful iPad app, says it pretty succinctly:

"Every industry, every type of business we think about needs to be fundamentally reinvented in the face of social. Social isn't a type of layer you slap on after the fact--it needs to be part of the product at the point of inception."

In his post titled "Stop talking about Social", Paul Adams, the man who came up with the concept of facets, which we see as circles in Google+, criticizes George Colony, the CEO Forrester for having got "social" wrong:

"George misunderstands the shift with the social web. ... Social is not a feature. Social is not an application. Social is a deep human motivation that drives our behaviour almost every second that we’re awake. It doesn’t matter if we’re online or offline, on a browser or using an app. Humans are social creatures."

Which is why we need to think beyond social enablement, analytics dashboards, gamification, enterprise social features and layers, and get into Social Design & Modeling.

Source: i* wiki

No, I am not talking about mere Social Design Patterns for designing social interfaces or participation design, though they are important and necessary too, I am talking about how the whole requirements gathering and designing process needs rethinking. Where, in addition to static models of Entity Relationship diagrams and dynamic models of process workflows, swimlanes & BPMN, we also need to think about social & value networks, strategic dependency between the various actors and strategic rationale behind these dependencies. Where we not only look at systems of record, but also look at systems of engagement.

I have been talking about these in 2011, but I was merely learning the basics. I hope that I can put them to use in 2012. And get my team to learn them too.

Social as in Societal
Early this year Michael Porter and Mark Kramer taught us about "Creating Shared Value" in HBR where they talk about the blurring profit/non profit boundary as well as a shift from CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to CSV (Creating Shared Value):

"The concept rests on the premise that both economic and social progress must be addressed using value principles. ... businesses have rarely approached societal issues from a value perspective but have treated them as peripheral matters. This has obscured the connections between economic and social concerns."

Source: HBR Big Idea - Creating Shared Value

While Porter and Kramer talk about Value, last year (2010) in his book, Marketing 3.0, Philip Kotler says now is the time when we need to look beyond Customers into values (not mere value). The book says Marketing 1.0 was product centric, Marketing 2.0 is customer oriented and Marketing 3.0 should be values driven, with an objective of making the world a better place. And you know what I think about such objectives. :)

Of course, Kotler has been talking about Social Marketing since 1971, but now is a time when we can no longer ignore it. Not only is the trust in businesses dwindling in the recent years and viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems, customers are demanding businesses to consider making the world a better place. And that is the crux of his Marketing 3.0.

This needs some deep thinking and research before we can even attempt incorporating into our current strategy workbench. Again, some work for me in 2012.

Epilogue

I never felt comfortable with the moniker given to me by my boss: "Evangelist - Social CRM". Yes, I do talk a lot about Social CRM in various fora, but I am much more. I am a tinkerer, thinker and connector. Though I started as a tinkerer, of late, I am becoming more of a thinker. And a bit of connector, of ideas, of people, of resources, of markets. I learn and work by tinkering, thinking and connecting; and thus I innovate.

I also look ahead into the far future, much like a science fiction writer, maybe because I am in love with those books since a very young age. But I am not alone or without precedent. In fact, Intel Futurist Brian Johnson does just that! That's someone who I can aim to be, a Futurist.

So what are your ideas for 2012? What are you working on? What else do you think I should be looking into? How can I help you in 2012?

What is the Social CRM interface of the future?

2011-11-23T10:05:00.001+05:30

I am following the #scrm11 hashtag on Twitter to be informed about the Social CRM event in Paris, France and then I see this tweet (being reported from the event, not the person's question, I presume):

It seemed to me from the tweets (please correct me if I am wrong, I had limited visibility) that SugarCRM wanted to share a vision where the social networking site would be of the user's choice and the CRM system would be able to connect to any of them, as opposed to what happens currently.

Lofty goal, pretty cumbersome. And the only way currently possible is very inefficient, thanks to the absence of any widespread usage of common open standards, open protocols, open formats, interoperability, data porting, etc., etc. To provide the choice & flexibility to the customer, the CRM vendor (or their ecosystem) needs to build connectors for each one of the social media/networking site in existence. *gulp* (Hey team, what are you waiting for? Get started on building them. I'd like a status report on them in our next meeting. Thank you. ;)

But I have an even more bizarre dream of the future interface. One where there will be bionic lenses (you know, contact lenses that can show information) projecting data as if a few feet away from your eyes. Where there will also be in-ear headsets, taking a cue from the hearing aid industry and combining that with the Bluetooth headset industry's tech (great for the hearing aids industry too IMHO, imagine the cheap availability of such devices).

And there will be mics (some advanced form of throat mics) that can capture, and may be even recognize, subvocal speech. Meaning, you need not speak aloud that which you want the other party on the phone to hear. You think what you want to say, your brain asks your vocal chords to speak, but they stop a bit before actually speaking aloud. So the people in your immediate vicinity cannot hear what you are talking with the other person on the phone. ;)

All these devices on your body would be connected by a body area network and powered by energy harvesting, probably by your fabrics & shoes or even your body heat.

The customer service rep at the other end will not only have a social media command center that gets info from enterprise systems too and is powered by a robust social analytics that does text mining, natural language processing, social network analysis, collaborative filtering, predictive analytics, but will also work like Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report (Microsoft is funding various startups working on Kinect tech, so you can bet there will be some good use for it) while talking to the customer on a holovid, you know the star wars kind of video conferencing system that Cisco demo'd from Bangalore.

Well, at least one benefit of all these rich media would be that it would be more difficult for people to lie than on emails or phones (did you know people lie more on email than face to face?). Which means there will be a better environment of trust between the customer and the company.

But what it means in terms of security and privacy and how would society evolve in the face of such technological advances I will leave it for sci-fi writers. Would it be something radical like the Arab Spring & #Occupy which were mediated by social media or give rise to something like the missed call social dynamics (and marketing tools too, like ZipDial) in India and other emerging nations in Asia and Africa?

So what do you think is the Social CRM interface of the future?

Is the identity of the Social Customer at risk?

2011-10-31T02:48:00.000+05:30

Assange vs Zuckerberg

Paul Greenberg posited well over two years ago (and more than those many years in the making) that the social customer had taken control over the conversation and that the businesses needed to respond to that. Businesses did respond and how! Not only the businesses, but also the politicians. And if the current state of affairs continue, there would be no Arab Spring ever. Let me try to explain.

We are all very well aware of the spate of uprisings in various countries across the globe (not just the Arab world) that has been catalysed (if not 'fueled') by social media. This is a communication tool that is bringing together the forces of people spread geographically and doing it faster and vaster thanks to networks and not dyadic communication.

Paul Greenberg would talk about how the customers' trust in the businesses dropped as per the Trust barometer of Edelman and hence the taking control of the conversation by the customer. In the various uprisings & protests this year that have been catalysed by social media, the reasons varied from despotic rulers, some who outlived their benevolence (somebody said Gaddafi should have died young like Che Guevara to be remembered fondly by his people), to anger against 'the greedy 1%' to frustration over corruption.

Internet, aided by social media & online social networks as well as mobiles, the crucial communication tool that is impacting the 21st century in a very profound way is already under threat from governments and businesses (especially the Media industry which did not exist until about a century ago). Fred Wilson brings to our notice about two new bills that have been forged in the US Congress - one in the Senate called Protect IP and one in the House called E-Parasites. Watch the 4 minute video below to get an idea of what these bills mean.

If passed, these bills will do irreparable damage to the Internet, entrepreneurship, free speech, and job creation as a result of the continued entrepreneurial activity around the Internet. Arab spring? No way. Sites like youtube, flickr, etc. where people shared video footage to counter the government propaganda could be shutdown.

Yet another threat is surreptitiously creeping up on us - identity. And of course privacy, but I will delve more on identity here since privacy is already on the minds of most people, including the businesses who are trying to leverage social media.

Some businesses (including my clients) have a big headache when presented with the data from the social media since its means an MDM issue in addition to text mining, sentiment analysis, parsing & routing, workflow automation, analytics and other integration headaches. This is predominantly due to the usage of pseudonyms (nyms) by people on the internet and is being countered by the use of features like 'Login with Facebook' or 'Login with Twitter' (which might be dangerous since we are surrendering control of our identity to the identity providers and apparently Facebook sees nearly 600,000 accounts compromised per day). Some recent controversies (called the nym wars) are interesting to follow, especially since Google Plus banned quite a few people who use pseudonyms as per their real names policy.

Source: scorpfromhell

In my 'industry first' vision for a social CRM IT landscape (above) I had a separate section called user components, which directly corresponds to "user centric identity", which is the focus of Internet Identity Workshop. As you can see from the topics for the October 2011 workshop (anybody has any updates from there as yet?), its more than just identity:

Open Standards that have been born and developed at IIW – OpenID, OAuth, Activity Streams, Portable Contacts, Salmon Protocol, SCIM, UMA ….
The Federated Social Web
Vendor Relationship Management
Personal Data Services - collection, storage and value generation
Anonymity Pseudonymity and Reputation Online (think google+ controversy)
Legal Innovation including, Information Sharing Agreements, Data Ownership Agreements and the development of “trust” frameworks.
NSTIC – the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (it uses the term “user-centric identity” 4 times & “citizen-centric identity” once)
Cloud Identity and the intersection of enterprise ID and people (consumer) ID.

I wasn't aware of the IIW until today when I came across this blog post on my twitter search stream for social CRM where the author says:

A huge part of identity on the web is controlling who can see what: think about the Google+ Project’s approach, where your identity consists of a series of data objects (posts, photos, status updates, etc), each having its own set of access controls. Controlling access to items requires that you have people to restrict access with. Therefore, contact and relationship management is integral to digital identity.

While it definitely helps to control who do I share with, I would also add the ability of controlling who do I share as. Prem Kumar Aparanji or scorpfromhell. My choice.

If you as a business are bothered by it, earn my trust. As Venessa Meimis said at #CCE2011 today: Trust and Identify are the future of money. While her context was slightly different it is not completely unrelated to the future I envision.

From a technology standpoint, "verifiable but unlinkable data can be provided by users via anonymous digital credentials. The subtleties of building up trust in situations of less than perfect knowledge, which are intuitively understood in the physical world, are investigated by trust negotiation".

This will not only put the user in command but also bring the aspects of trust & identity into the digital systems that the social media are. The businesses that hope to be social (utilise social computing, including social media), if not become social (social business as defined by Md. Yunus), would be then able to co-create value with their customers.

Consider a website or application that wants not only your credentials from Facebook but also information about your profile, your friends, your photos, shares, etc. There are umpteen such sites/apps that try to gather far more information from your Facebook account than they need to know. This is why I prefer Pseudo-authentication using OAuth rather than OpenID.

Source: Wikipedia

So what do you think? Is the identity of the social customer worth saving? Would you as a business want to invest more into building value & trust or just want to harvest the identities of your customers?

Social CRM: Hiring the right definition

2011-09-03T23:19:00.000+05:30

There is a huge discussion going on over at thebrandbuilder blog & on twitter too over the definition of social CRM, especially the Paul Greenberg version as adapted by Esteban Kolsky. There is a nice effort at wordsmithing the definition and this is what Oliver Blanchard concludes with in that blog post:

[Social] CRM is a business function supported by a system and technologies whose aims are to improve a company’s ability to derive insights into customer needs and behaviors by adding to their transaction data the lifestyle data they share online.

Definition discussions, yet again? :)

I laud the efforts at trying to wordsmith the definition to make it simpler for the audience in question, but the simplicity is too limiting IMHO & proposes that a (social) CRM doesn't do anything, just gains insights. Please do not mistake my words to be condescending, but I wonder what good is an insight if it will not be acted upon. Granted you do not say that the organization will not act upon the insight, but I fail to understand who then does anything with those insights? Do you propose that marketing, sales, service do not fall under the umbrella of CRM? Maybe this newly wordsmithed definition is thus unintentionally misleading?

May be this is a chance for me to relook at my understanding of the stuff after understanding, observing, thinking, conceptualizing, designing, architecting, deploying social computing platforms & tools that were hired for various jobs to be done by my organization as well as clients over these past 3-4 years. So I will take an implied liberty of a blog and posit some of my views to help wordsmith the definition again. :)

If I were to take a systems view, I would see them as systems of record, engagement & awareness. My idea of Systems of awareness consists of Living Anlytics Adaptive Learning loop and Reality Mining too in addition to all the other BI/social analytics, etc. I am still building on a line of thought that started off with something I call the 4p Steradian view thats absolutely necessary in an increasingly multi-channel world. So please excuse me if I am not so clear in articulating it properly. My point being, lifestyle data shared online by people themselves is just scratching the surface.

But are we right in taking a systems view or should we consider a social computing or complex adaptive system view? Listen to this podcast to understand this question better.

BTW, why are we limiting our models to systems and other computational technologies? Didn't the first contention center around a strategy & function? So how about considering this field from an organizational perspective?

Taking an economics view at why companies/firms form (The Nature of the Firm by Ronald Coase), social (or should we call digital) technologies and container ships are wearning down the very reasons why they exist (market friction, efficiencies, etc.). Flat world & power of pull talk about these at length of course; my point here is that social networks at play via digital technologies are bringing about disruptions in business models, a level above even business strategies, no?

Organizations are structured into departments & teams (predominantly around functions, right?). And they predominantly act as silos, especially in large organizations, no? Ranjay Gulati in his book Restructuring for resilience talks about the reasons why these silos got formed in the first place (efficiencies) and why they need breaking (innovation, responsiveness, effectiveness). Even amongst the social media gurus it is well recognized/agreed upon that social media response teams need to be cross functional.

Taking a slight diversion, social network analysis (SNA) applied in the context of organizations brought about organizational network analysis (ONA) to better understand the informal structures in organizations. However Value Network Analysis offers a better option to bring better collaboration amongst the silos that Ranjay suggests.

Even if we are to consider the customer relationship management as practiced in the past 40-50 years, they have evolved from a transaction based view to one-to-one to network based views. Social media, online communities and the rise of the 'social customer' has only reinforced the need for increased focus on networked relationships. Add to this the realisation about value co-creation and service dominant logic being the need of the hour as against the value exchange and product dominant logic of businesses. There is a heavy tilt in focus towards "jobs-to-be-done" framework.

Definitions will be unique to each individual, organization. They will be the axis around which they will seal their fate, since by nature definitions are limiting in their own quirky way. These organizations might hire us to help them come up with the correct definition conducive to their fate. In which case let us provide them enough data points for them to understand the cosmic relevance and then help them formulate a tightly wordsmithed definiton for themselves.

Free online courses from Stanford useful for Social Analytics

2011-09-01T18:07:00.000+05:30

AI Class by Stanford

Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning form a crucial aspect of Social Analytics and is the kernel in many a 'social media listening' solution. And not just in social media marketing, it is emerging as a key skillset of demand in various fields.

Stanford has a set of free online courses that goes in tandem with the actual class room based courses. The Fall class for introduction to Artificial Intelligence (under which NLP & ML fall) starts October 10.

If you are interested please do attend these courses:

Introduction to AI (CS221): http://www.ai-class.com/ << This is a prerquisite for the NLP course
Natural Language Processing (CS224N): http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=63480b48-8819-4efd-8412-263f1a472f5a
Machine Learning (CS229): http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3a6d-4052-937d-cb017338d7b1

Adoption of social tools for collaboration requires sharing

2011-08-29T02:58:00.001+05:30

"Sharing" by ryancr, on Flickr

I have been busy the past three to four months shifting my base and settling in the suburb of Bangalore (technically a different state altogether) and this has taken a toll on my work as well as my social media engagement. Nevertheless, I am slowly getting back on track with quite a truck load of stuff to be done and trust to be regained at the workplace. The task of highest & immediate priority is helping in resubmitting a year 2015 plan for our group, incorporating the 1st round of review comments. And one of the key components is - justifying the further investments into 'social' by providing, among other things, estimated market size.

Which means I have to provide numbers from expert predictions, which is typically a Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. although it’s been well documented that expert predictions are quite poor. ;) In the Social CRM space even Gartner has had to revise its predictions for the size of the market (their Magic Quadrants for the same have been criticized too). I am yet to take a dive into market size for social tools in the internal collaboration arena (Enterprise 2.0), which is actually a bit more mature market than the Social CRM one.

All in all, sales forecasting closely follows market adoption of the new technology and the speed of adoption is said to be an S-curve. And since we are in the cusp of two such S curves, one finishing (systems design view) and one beginning (social computing view), it is not possible to predict the future. However, as per research literature, the speed of adoption of a new product has been shown to be a function of several factors including:

The product's relative advantage over existing products
The degree to which the new product is compatible with existing operations and attitudes
The degree to which the new product is simple (rather than complex)
The degree to which the new product can be tried on a limited basis
The degree to which the product is observable.

Hold your thoughts on this one.

Coincidentally PwC has just come out with a new report called "Transforming collaboration with social tools" (you can read a review along with excerpts by Sameer Patel) where they have this great picture:

It puts a few stuff in perspective for me. But what helped me more is a reminder from Graham Hill in the back channel that "just banging on collaboration technology will NOT result in an uncollabrative organisation becoming one iota more collaborative than before. Just more expensive. People make organisations collaborative not technology." While I wholeheartedly agree to his old saw that "Old Organization + New Technology = Expensive Old Organization" or "OO+NT=EOO", I have a bit of optimism for social computing that hasn't diminished over the years. Social Computing for the first time has the potential to break out of the mould because they are a kind of self feeding engine when it comes to adoption.

The way to avert the OO+NT=EOO scenario is to actually look at the way the organization needs to be changed, roll them out and ensure adoption happens. And the technology is to be used to support these organizational changes.

Now coming to social tools, they have various advantages over traditional enterprise software tools which I am not detailing out but just pointing out a few (am assuming that the social tools have been deployed in context of work, not as stand alone 'corporate facebooks'):

help in exception handling & sense making by allowing users to do ad-hoc work, especially when used in conjunction with the tools that support predictable execution like ERP or CRM (refer picture above from PwC report)
help in building social capital via both network closure (social capital is created by a network of strongly interconnected elements) as well as structural holes (social capital is created by a network in which people can broker connections between otherwise disconnected segments) arguments
in large organizations, help in expert discovery not just because of rich user profiles in the 'corporate facebooks', but also because openly sharing on these systems of engagement allows new random connections to form between the clusters inside the organization and thus reducing the number of hops required to reach a particular person within the organization with whom we are not connected or are even aware of (am assuming organization head count is large enough & geographically distributed enough to behave approximately like a scale free network)
help in content filtering via algorithms as well as by the community (too much of communication is an issue otherwise when social tools are deployed)

Point 1 in the speed of adoption is covered. And yet, the tools themselves lend to certain people changes if a few assumptions are met. This is where organizational changes might definitely be required, and if an organization has not been open within itself it definitely needs very senior management adoption as well as encouragement for the enthusiastic early adopters (champions). Our CEO stopped sending out emails to the organization to encourage blogs usage; now there are employees who have read only his blog posts, but as such the number of people posting/commenting/reading blogs is very high too.

By the same token, social tools do not require the organization to change much. It is compatible with existing operations & attitudes. People are hardwired in their brains to collaborate. That is how we evolved, it is the corporate culture that makes us hide stuff.

"... we're reluctant to share private information, so we aggregate information poorly. In one study the researchers gave team members shared information about the same three candidates, but also gave each member a unique piece of information about one candidate. If the team members shared all the unique information, they would choose the best-qualified candidate. If they used only the information common to all of them, they would pick the wrong candidate. A vast majority of the time, they selected a suboptimum candidate. Why? Because they chose to talk about the shared information and to reserve the unique information. Committees are not optimized to share private information. So even in organizations where the information exists, it's not being surfaced."

Unfortunately what people forget is that we did not go the way of our cousins the neanderthals especially because we shared with others, not just family members (and language was our first social tool that enabled it).

Additionally, social tools have the capability to blend with all the tools supporting the formal (predictable) processes as well as the hitherto not much supported (by IT) aspect: work-culture (behaviours & attitudes). This covers point 2 in the speed of adoption factors.

Social tools for the enterprise are simple & easy from the word go because they have been heavily inspired by the familiar consumer products outside of the organization (you know, facebook, twitter, blogs, wikis, etc.). Covers point 3 by default.

Social tools are increasingly available on the cloud in pay as you go models or for free/freemium. Hence it is possible for people to try it out on a limited basis. Covers point 4.

Social tools, if made available to everybody, features like the notifications, news/activity streams, et al. make it easier to observe what others are doing in the system & how ... not the case in your traditional enterprise software ... and thus the product & product usage is observable. This covers point 5 of the factors for speed of adoption. This aspect helps with social learning too, thus leading to more stickier adoption if not faster.

Also, social tools lend themselves to all three forms of viral adoption of any behavioral change -

contagion: users adopt when they come in touch with someone who has adopted
social influence: users adopt when they see many people have adopted
social learning: users adopt when they see how others are using and benefiting

So, to cut a long story short - sharing is essential to success of social tools for collaboration in an enterprise.

TED talks on listening, smiling & a social technology called language

2011-08-09T02:01:00.001+05:30

These are some recent TED talks that I found to be very relevant to my interests in online communities, social computing & remote collaboration.

Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better

Ron Gutman: The hidden power of smiling

Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity

Digital Evangelism & Blogger Marketing in India

2011-07-23T09:34:00.002+05:30

ET Now, a national news channel in India, ran a short piece on the increasing influence of social media in the Indian market space with more & more people getting onto the internet and the emergence of digital influencer marketing practice among the Indian brands.

Nothing much new in terms of concepts if you are a social media marketer already or not much news if you are an avid Indian tweeter who knows about the Pinstrom India Influencers list (a mix of klout & peer index scores) where I make a cameo in the Top 100 (am fast falling off the list of late, thanks to Google+ maybe).

The video also touches briefly upon the ethical issues surrounding sponsored blogging & sponsored tweets that has led to a few regulations in the US & S. Korea as a cautionary note.

I make a cameo in the video at 1:05 min. I am there & gone within a second and you could miss me out very easily. :D But am there. ;) My one second of fame on national television. Yay! :D

Quick review on Google+

2011-06-30T19:44:00.002+05:30

Well, since everybody & their ~~dog~~ friend seems to be getting onto Google+ today ... and since in spite of the heavy supply of accounts there seems to be an even greater demand as evidenced by people selling invites to Google+ on ebay ... may be because someone joked (I think) that having a Google+ account increases your chances of getting laid by 30% ... I am writing my own initial thoughts about it.

(No, I don't think @madmanweb was right ... actually @beastoftraal was probably more closer to reality!)

So, what are my initial thoughts? Google is trying to stay in the game, not beat/kill/depose/extinguish/squash/frag Facebook by doing (attempting?) somethings right for a change. Somebody already wrote what Google+ learnt from Wave and Buzz. Google+ might actually be a great platform for the internal social networking needs of organizations. If they have it on Google Apps.

On a personal level, I got all excited after I got an invite (thanks Manu Prasad) and could finally get in after a harrowing commute to the office between the time I got the invite and the time I created my account ... I clicked around, added friends to circles upon circles, fooled around with settings, etc. for about 45 minutes and I lost steam a bit.

After adding 45 people to various circles I definitely got tired! And only 8 people had added me to their circles. So evidently my network of friends (both IRL & online ones) had not yet gotten into Google+. Not so cool until the network is in there. So I have to wait till more people join in. And I have yet another set of friends data.

I sent a feedback, which is refreshingly via a form that is different from the ugly bug reporting tools developers & testers use. Well, if you want to know, I want to be able to mute/mute a person, so I don't see their updates on my timeline temporarily. That's the feedback I sent.

What I liked though is that I can export all my data on Google+ to a zip file and have it with me. Unlike Facebook.

Now the wait for Google+ to open up for developers.

Social CRM is dead, long live Social CRM?

2011-06-22T21:55:00.000+05:30

The King is dead, long live the King!

Bob Thompson, Editor of CustomerThink.com and a friend who graciously threw a dinner party for me at a fabulous Italian Restaurant last year when I was in San Francisco area for the first time ever, has a very intriguing post that has got the knickers of many in knots. Well, it is titillatingly titled

"Social CRM" is Dead, Long Live the Social Customer Experience

where Bob definitely does a great job figuring out a pattern from a spate of events that have happened in the recent past in the product vendor market around Social CRM - they are all moving crabwise around the term Social CRM.

And yet something stuck me odd about getting into the nomenclature/definition/classification debates all over again. I mean, we are no longer fumbling in utter darkness, we are all fumbling around with a matchbox each in utter darkness. And by we I mean the early adopters, the people who are now considered the thought leaders and market leaders in the Social CRM space. What we need now is a breed of early adapters who will use the disruptive forces (social computing & other non technological ones) to provide value not just to their businesses but also their business ecosystems. And thus I wrote the following comment on Bob's post:

Nice post Bob. A keen eye on the state of affairs I must exclaim in joy! :) Most flew past me though I came by them; but now that you have connected the dots I cant un-see the picture now. :D
However, I wonder why do you limit your pattern sensing to vendors, technology vendors at that?
Like Bill we too are seeing an increase in interest from our clients to know about Social CRM; but its mostly about their own sense making journey. Thus after the free insights they get from us we are seeing very elongated sales cycles. But luckily they turn out to be business consulting opportunities. We do see systems integration & custom IT related opportunities too.
People are still fumbling around with all the disruption the boom in social computing has enabled, both on the internet as well as within the enterprise firewalls.
We (you, me and the multitude others who have been disputing about the nomenclature, definition and classification of all things "social" for the past few years) are the early adopters of these disruptive technologies; the real practitioners with the kind of case studies we early adopters will all feel proud will be the early adapters, not adopters.
These early adapters (as opposed to adopters) will figure out how exactly can they muzzle the disruption effectively to put them to work not just for their business, but also their business ecosystem (this is because of the nature of the disruptive technologies).
Knowledge Management, Learning, Collaboration, Employee recruiting/onboarding/retaining, Rewards & Recognition, Partner/Distributor/Channel management, Customer XYZ (relationship management, marketing, sales, service, experience management, engagement, etc.) ... everything needs to be relooked.
Rather than merely looking at the tech disruptions that Harish seems to have caught up with (since we are the early adopters, remember?), we need to look at Graham's pet topics like Customer Co-Creation, Service Dominant Logic, Jobs to be done, Value Networks to help the breed of early adapters we are all eagerly waiting for.
In the meantime, all we have is posturing by every kind of vendor (product, service, analyst or publication) to promote a particular nomenclature/definition/classification to claim either "market leadership" or "thought leadership". And you know I am included in that above list as well because of my employment status, if not personal posturing. :)
I have begun my journey to be an early adapter too (in addition to being an early adopter) in parallel to being a co-traveler for the early adapters in my clientele. Hope you embark on such a similar journey too. All the best! :)

Of Pigs, Elephants & Hives - Social CRM and Big Data

2011-06-01T01:37:00.000+05:30

Source: siliconangle.com

After a long gap I make a comeback into pure play technobabble. But I promise I will try to keep it as simple as possible.

In a post titled “Social CRM – ETL of Social & CRM data?” I had posited over two years ago that semantic, sentiment analysis & other NLP techniques and data mapping would all be required to varying degrees for data integration in a Social CRM system. What I had missed mentioning back then was what is now being hyped as Big Data.

Social CRM from an IT perspective needs to deal with lots of data (petabytes) because it has to deal with data coming in from social media, online community platforms, various new enterprise systems (especially given the rise of enterprise 2.0, social collaboration, activity streams and what not where employees are creating a lot of data too). And not to forget traditional data. As my friend Esteban Kolsky likes to remind me everytime, Sears had a terabyte of customer data a decade back and apparently did not know what to do with it.

Another aspect I missed out stating back then was that data is typically collected, prepared and then finally presented and that ETL is just the preparation part of it.

Data in social media can be collected in various ways – RSS feeds, APIs (Twitter & Facebook firehoses) or just plain scrapping them from the various sites by crawling & spidering. Radian6 and Attensity360 do a great job of data collection. Both tools provide realtime capabilities for response/action however very little is analysed at this stage in these tools. Thus a lot depends upon the ability of the end users of these tools when responding in realtime is concerned.
Data preparation or ETL typically deals with bringing in the raw data and loading, cleaning and conforming it to selected data model; joining with other data sources and producing data sets ready for data users to consume. Data Preparation is not so realtime because of the huge amounts of data involved, but in-memory analytics seems to be getting hotter by the day. Recently SAP integrated its HANA (High Performace Analytic Appliance) with IBM’s DB2 database increasing its alignment against rival Oracle’s Exadata platform.
Data presentation is typically taken care of by data warehouses in IT architecture. Here the data is presented to the consuming applications like CRM/BPM systems or BI reports. BI reports can be realtime or not, depending upon the amount of analysis that takes place. CRM/BPM systems route the massaged data into the various business processes and is acted upon by pre-configured rules or by humans manning these systems (ACM, Social BPM can be leveraged here).

So what do all these things that I forgot in my long lost post have to do with the title of this post? It has to do with open source actually (yes, I had bring them in). :)

Apache Hadoop is a well known (in IT, especially distributed & cloud computing, and open source circles) software framework that supports data intensive distributed applications built using the Java language. And Hadoop is the name of the toy elephant of the creator’s (Doug Cutting’s) son. Apache Pig is a platform for analyzing large datasets. And Apache Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop.

And here is a project that uses Hadoop, Pig and NLP for mining Wikipedia: http://blogs.nuxeo.com/dev/2011/01/mining-wikipedia-with-hadoop-and-pig-for-natural-language-processing.html. Very geeky and cool, if you share my likes. Now to see if this can be leveraged for social CRM by someone. :)

Listening vs Hearing: Its not mere semantics

2011-05-09T03:10:00.001+05:30

Hope the deck is self explanatory. It contains only a few very simple aspects I wanted to highlight, the nuances are far more varied.

Listening vs Hearing

View more presentations from Prem Kumar Aparanji.

P.S.: Please forgive me for the title of slide 4. If you can suggest me a more appropriate title, I would be grateful & update the deck with full credits to you. :)

P.P.S: Mitch had a blog post with some lively discussions long ago about this same topic, be sure to read it here: http://mjayliebs.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/social-hearing-versus-social-listening-there-is-a-difference/

Coordination, cooperation or collaboration?

2011-05-07T10:46:00.001+05:30

The nuances between coordination, cooperation & collaboration is more than mere semantics for me. Mitch Lieberman presented at the Social CRM 2011 event in London yesterday about cooperation & collaboration across various business silos in an organization.

Social crm 2011 final

View more presentations from Mitch Lieberman

We at Cognizant are growing very fast. We officially entered the Fortune 500 this year, mere 17 years since inception and three years since our entry into Fortune 1000. Not resting on our laurels, we are setting ourselves higher goals. Cognizant 2015 is our five-year strategic plan to move from being a Tier One offshore services provider to being universally recognized as a Tier One global services provider.

Another important factor for us is the changing business landscape for our customers. For us to be able to service our clients better, we ourselves need to undergo certain changes too. At 100K+ employee strength, organizational changes are not easy. We relentlessly strive nonetheless, though not merely mulishly. :)

It is in this context of our customers' reality and our own visions that we have 'social collaboration' as one of our key strategic themes in preparation for 2015. We are looking at various internal processes to be converted into collaborative ones so that we can scale better, faster without losing any of the nimbleness.

Lot of Cognizant's processes currently require either cooperation or coordination, not collaboration. Collaboration by definition means that the common outcomes are being negotiated (social or stigmeric) by the constituents.

In a project the outcomes are already defined by the SoW/MSA/etc. Project Management is mostly coordination (within the team), depends a bit on cooperation (external groups for one-off requests, like getting a few hours of an SME to solve a problem or get expert opinion, etc.).

Having said that, the project team members almost always collaborate among themselves, especially those that have stronger relationship than being mere team mates, put together by the vagaries of global workforce management teams & resource availability. Hence you will find freshers (typically also college batch mates) helping out each other even if they are not in the same project/account/vertical; sometimes, even across organizations.

This "helping out each other" requires an environment of trust & sense of familiarity, because the act of helping inherently relies on reciprocity. When one helps their 'friend' they know they will receive the 'help' at a later time from the 'friend'.

These kinds of collaboration are socially negotiated and these are things that we are very well aware of in our bones. With the phenomenal growth of Cognizant though, the current bother is about the collaboration at an organization level, and here we begin thinking about stigmergy.

Wikis are a perfect example of stigmergic collaboration. Open source development is another. People who are not familiar with each other are still collaborating on creating the documents. Hence providing an environment of trust is of paramount importance. Reciprocity is not the prime factor either, since usually the benefactor is unknown. It's not quite altruism either. It's all about the egos. And in enters Gamification. But that's much later, after the community has been established (and am not talking about the software platform, but the sense of community amongst the people) and we need to get more people to contribute rather than been mute spectators or mere consumers.

This is where I hope my Framework for a Collaborative Enterprise helps.

Collaboration framework

View more presentations from Prem Kumar Aparanji

Social Actors

2011-04-16T00:37:00.002+05:30

Source: Affective Design

Theres a flurry of social this & social that in the IT market space and marketing machines are running over speed. So much so that Geoffrey Moore & Stowe Boyd too debate on what to call the term Social Business Systems - Systems of Engagement or Work Media. I guess the marketeers would like Work Media while the technologists might love the Systems of Engagement. Either one works for me, but I have been struggling with yet another term - Social BPM.

In a previous post I have already mentioned about the collaboration aspect in modeling & execution of the business processes under this term. Let me share the working definition I have in my mind when I think about what could be called social BPM:

SBPM enables social actors to collaborate on modeling, executing & optimizing structured and unstructured business processes.

And I am now left with the unenviable task of explaining the concept of "social actors", a term borrowed by systems folks from sociology, and both the uses of which are equally oblivious to the technologists, especially the BPMS configurators. Social actors are intentional actors with their own individual wants and desires; they also have relationship with other social actors. Thus though they have freedom to choose their own actions they are bound by these relationships. In most systems design which take a mechanistic view, actors are not intentional & nobody looks at how are they embedded in relationships with the other actors.

In sociology, social action refers to an act which takes into account the actions and reactions of individuals (or 'agents'). According to Max Weber, "an Action is 'social' if the acting individual takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course" (Secher 1962). A social actor, in basic terms, is a conscious, thinking, individual who has the capacity to shape their world in a variety of ways by reflecting on their situation and the choices available to them at any given time.

And this is a huge head shift. Not easy to convince the BPMS configurators, near darn impossible to explain to the compliance & regulations folks. But hopefully easier to get across the point to those that deal with situations requiring decision making at the front line in the face of ambiguity, like say underwriting or handling payment exceptions (or any other kind of dispute resolution) or project management.

You can even consider the social customer as much a social actor as the employee facing that social customer. At least the employee better behave as a social actor for faster & more satisfactory response to the social customer. If the front line person facing the customer has certain decision making rights (within their ambit of responsibilities) this definitely could help resolving issues to the satisfaction of both the customer & the organization. Just like the Systems of Record allowed the centralization of business decisions (global view to the higher above from the central offices), Systems of Engagement can allow decentralization of decision making by taking it to the front line. Consistency & flexibility, both together. Paradoxical yet possible. (May be I have had too much of Situational Leadership model).

So, does it compute for you? How can I better explain this concept?

Social Collaboration?

2011-04-10T19:44:00.004+05:30

Honey bees are Eusocial organisms, always collaborating.
Source: Fotopedia

Theres a new term doing the rounds in the IT vendor market - social collaboration. Nobody gave me an exact meaning to that, either the IT vendors or the sociologists / anthropologists / sociobiologists. Wikipedia too is pretty cryptic and unclear about it. So much for social collaboration being helpful in defining social collaboration! And I am loath to decipher the hidden insinuations of that taxonomy in the IT space. Almost like doing taxidermy to myself.

Collaboration by definition means working together towards a common goal:

Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.

Now this implies that a set of common goals has been reached - this requires not just communication but also negotiation. This negotiation is also required to figure out who does what and by when. And once the work towards to the common goals is underway we need to keep a track on the work output. Now that sounds so much like project management, only there are no clear organization structures always. Projects are most often than not, matrix organizations.

The role power in a matrix organization is vastly diminished. Expertise power helps to a certain extent, but then in high performance/stakes teams everybody is going to be an expert of something or the other. The only other power left is relationship power. One negotiates using the relationship power to get things done. Reciprocity is a bigger coin than orders. No more command and control.

Having worked in a matrix organization all my life (and a pretty huge & complex one let me assure you) I perfectly understand the role of relationships in the organization. Many people think schmoozing helps build relationship power, they could not be wronger than that! A huge organization is bound to have some bit of that schmoozing too, but its not what matters to the success of the organization.

Ok, so collaboration is inherently a social activity since it requires communication and that people can negotiate (which is dependent on relationships) so that a work output is obtained. Hence, to my mind the phrase 'social collaboration' seems to be resplendent with redundant words, redolently demonstrated by this very statement. Also, a 'social collaboration' means there is an asocial collaboration, and perhaps an eusocial collaboration too?

People might retaliate back asking me so why do I use the term 'social CRM'? Well, the term relationship in CRM is perforce focused on the contractual relationship of the firm with the customer. But humans are not rational (ask the behavioral economists) and don't always work within the boundaries of the contractual obligations, increasingly so, and hence a lot of emphasis on Trust these days. And hence my temporary siding with the term 'social CRM'.

Given this logic, what does 'social collaboration' mean? Where people collaborate outside of the contractual obligations? Which means outside of the role structures & job descriptions in the organization? Typical of a matrix organization, no?

What do you think? What are your views on 'social collaboration' and 'role power' in a collaborative enterprise (a bit more complex than a matrix organization)?

Is this social modeling?

2011-03-25T23:01:00.001+05:30

Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering

I have been reading Verna Allee's work on Value Network Analysis and recently, upon Graham Hill's suggestions, the i-star framework. I have even ordered the book "Social Modeling for Requirements Engineering" to learn how to apply the i* to requirements gathering. I am really looking forward to that book, but it wont be in my hands since it has to be imported from the US. But that's fine since it will allow me time to digest what I have read about it so far and think about it in context of some of the systems at various stages of development that I am aware of.

Now I am sure you are familiar with this scenario, especially if you work at a large organization, when you want to book rooms for meetings and the booking system says that its already booked by someone else? But then in reality its not being used? Well, to solve this issue, the current line of thought is a new meeting concierge application was to be to figure out who has been missing out on using their booked rooms for 2-3 times in a row and then 'reprimand' them with a message or some other manner. When the people designing the system told me about how they were trying to figure out how to ascertain if someone was indeed using the systems, something struck my mind.

How do the people who are stuck with the current systems work around the system? If we know the person who has blocked the room, we go over to the other person's desk and check with them and negotiate if we can get the room. Or we directly go and have a peep into the room to see if its indeed being used. Or we check with reception or who ever handles the room bookings. Then this idea came to me as a brainwave, out of nowhere since I had never thought about this problem before. What if we can allow the user to be able to communicate from within the system with the person who has pre-booked the room? What if there were an integration with OCS (or whatever IM is deployed) that allowed the user to chat with this other person? Or how about there is a 'button' there that lets the user to ask the other person if he would like to reassign the booking to him? They system could send an email to the other person and he could reply with a simple yes or no and the system would act accordingly?

Where the current approach is one of process & compliance, the later is one of enabling communication, especially with others in the organization whom you might not know because its a huge company? Well, we ourselves at Cognizant do have more than 100,000 employees worldwide and most of our buildings house thousands of employees. So it is not a remote possibility that the two users would not know each other.

So what was different in my approach to the problem? In real life the Actors of the system do not use the system to get this done. They interact with each other to negotiate. In traditional requirements gathering, we only try to figure out what the system should do, not what the actors do to get the job done. We cannot capture that as use cases or in UML. However, in an i* framework we really do try to figure out how the Actors interact with each other, what are their motivations, etc. Could i* framework have come up with what I got as a brainwave? I still do not understand i* properly, so hope to revisit the above scenario later and answer you.

That thing about culture & strategy in 'social'

2011-03-23T02:55:00.002+05:30

Source: Flickr

Theres been an interesting discussion happening in many disjointed places today around culture & strategy in terms of Social CRM or Social Business or whatever is your favorite poison. It all started for me in the #SCRMSummit twitter hashtag discussions associated with the BPT Partners' SCRM certification summit that happened on 21st & 22nd March in Madrid, Spain.

Somebody said culture eats strategy for lunch and that to successfully implement social CRM the organization's culture needs to change. And then I got this interesting definition for culture: "What happens in an organisation when no one is looking" from Debabrat Mishra on twitter.

A few minutes back I got another nice definition from this HBS blog post titled "Culture trumps strategy, every time" shared by my good friend Brian Vellmure: "Culture's all that invisible stuff that glues organizations together".

And then I got to know of a different definition that presumably paraphrased Gil Yehuda: "Observable behaviors". This is in stark contrast to what the other two perceive about culture in an organization. There was even a healthy discussion yesterday on the #scrmsummit hashtag around the clichéd Zappos culture, how it was costing Amazon in goodwill dollars and that it needs to be scalable too.

For me culture has been about behaviors in the organization that manifests due to beliefs. Having worked in the same organization as it grew from ~3,500 to ~100,000 or ~30x in 10 years I have seen how culture varies in the organization with the number of years a person has spent in the organization as well as whether the person joined the organization fresh out of the campus or from other organizations.

As I grapple with the dichotomy of the customers' & businesses' priorities on social media as Mitch Liberman, VP Marketing at Sword Ciboodle, shares this interesting graph from IBM in his latest post highlighting the "Perception gap in Social", what are your thoughts on this 'culture' puzzle? How do you tackle it in your organization?

The importance of Influence in the digital/social world

2011-03-02T15:36:00.001+05:30

Souce: Shooting a clout at Agincourt

Clout \ˈklau̇t\

Definition of CLOUT

dialect chiefly British : a piece of cloth or leather : rag

: a blow especially with the hand; also : a hard hit in baseball

: a white cloth on a stake or frame used as a target in archery

: pull, influence <political clout>

It used to be that the folks with the broadcast medium (TV, print, etc. traditional media) and high connections (socialites) used to be considered 'influential' because they could either make an opinion popular and thus gain clout or they could make decision makers sway towards their view point. Hollywood (or their Indian counterparts), sports & other celebrities would ride on their popularity and they would be considered 'influential' too.

However, now with the proliferation of social media where everybody has access to broadcast media, the influence of hetherto unknown people has gained attention of brand marketers and PR agencies; and to some extent the customer service/suppot groups manning the social channels.

These people are popular because of their huge fan followings - be they be twitter follower count, facebook fan page count, youtube/blog subscriptions, slideshare views/downloads or linkedin connections - they could be anyone from a moonlighting agency person creating extremely viral youtube ads in response to contests from brands to a teenager writing vampire romance in episodes & self publishing on sites like Wattpad.

And the need to figure out the influence of a person on social media has been addressed (how adequately/accurately is a different matter) by some of the new startups like Klout.com and PeerIndex.com which have debatable (and indeed debated) algorithms for measuring the 'influence' score of people on twitter, facebook, etc.

I am as yet undecided on the accuracy/adequacy of these scores. However I think there might be a need for such services, albeit peculiar in approach to each industry. And also that the algorithms might have to be treated differently.

What are your thoughts regarding such 'influence' metrics? Have you tried these new scores for your business? How do these scores impact your business? Would you be interested to mix them with the traditional customer metrics?

Airtel makes a sham about Unsolicited calls - 1909 cant take complaints

2011-02-25T16:36:00.001+05:30

Source: Designer in Pajamas

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has issued "The Telecom Commercial Communications Customer Preference Regulations, 2010" on 1st December 2010. As per that regulation:

“unsolicited commercial communication” means any commercial communication which a subscriber opts not to receive but does not include , ----
(i) any transactional message; or
(ii) any message transmitted on the directions of central Government or State Government or agencies authorized by it;

Also, as per the FAQs document from TRAI:

A subscriber who is already registered in the National Do Not Call Registry (NDNC) is not required to re-register and his said registration will be valid under the 'fully blocked' category.

I have been registered with the NDNC since 27th August 2007 with a registration number of F1001616897. And yet now when I called up 1909 on Airtel today and checked my status, it says I am not registered!

Why did I happen to check my status today? Because I could not register a complaint against an UCC either on 1909 (there is in fact no option either by calling or via SMS) nor from their web application form at http://www.airtel.in/wps/wcm/connect/airtel.in/airtel.in/home/do+not+disturb+registry/. Infact when I tried to register a complaint on their website I kept receiving a javascript alert message stating that the date should be current or in the past, though I had chosen properly. A very cheap technique by which an end user is never able to submit the details & thus register a complaint about UCC.

Actual screen capture from my attempts.

TRAI has very clearly stated how customers can register complaints in this document available on their site. And it is via 1909, not a web application form.

Chapter IV of the TRAI's recent regulations state:

(1) Every Access Provider shall set up a facility for registration of the complaint of the customer regarding receipt of unsolicited commercial communications.
(2) The facility set up under sub+regulation (1) shall have short code 1909; Provided that the Authority may specify any other short code, which is assigned by the licensor, from time to time;
(3) The customer complaint registration facility shall be toll free and shall have adequate telecom resources for receipt of customer complaints by way of a voice call or SMS.
(4) In case any subscriber receives unsolicited commercial communication after expiry of seven days from the date of his registration in the Provider Customer Preference Register under sub+regulation (1) of regulation 7, he may make a complaint to his Access Provider, through voice call or SMS, mentioning therein the particulars of telemarketer, the telephone number from which the unsolicited commercial communication originated, the date, time and brief description of such unsolicited commercial communication as specified in Schedule VI to these regulations: Provided that every such complaint shall be made by a subscriber within three days of receipt of the unsolicited commercial communication.

I tried calling up 1909 to register a complaint, there was no IVR option for that nor to talk to a customer care executive. Next I tried registering the complaint via SMS to 1909 as per the format prescribed by TRAI:

You may register a complaint regarding receipt of unsolicited commercial communications by sending SMS to 1909 in the specified format given below:
“COMP TEL NO XXXXXXXXXX, dd/mm/yy, Time hh:mm”
Where XXXXXXXXXX – is the telephone number or header of the SMS, as the case may be, from which the unsolicited commercial communication has originated.

I received an SMS in response from 1909 stating: "NO keyword found". Evidently they did not take in complaint registrations via SMS.

So why did I want to register a complaint? Because I received an unsolicited commercial communication from Airtel claiming to be a service call. The caller said that it is a service call from Airtel and that it was to inform me that Airtel's new 3G service has been enabled for my number but I need to enable a rate plan to start using it. (Eh?) Let me clarify that this was not a transactional message and I said that this was not a service call, rather it is a solicitation call. The caller claimed that he was reading from a script and I was handed off to a supervisor who then explained me that since many customers are not aware of their new services in spite of communicating on various channels they call them up to inquire if they would like to avail of the services.

I had in fact opted for Airtel 3G some 3-4 weeks back & because it was not available in my area I discontinued it the same day. On that day I was so pleased with the service I was provided by Airtel.

The caller & the supervisor both were clueless about that episode. So Airtel is siloed, but who isn't, right?

So, to sum up:

Airtel called me unsolicited to make a commercial offer under a disguise of a "service call". It was neither a transactional message nor a directive of state/central Government or their agencies; rather asked me to opt for a rate plan, hence an unsolicited commercial communication.
Airtel did not transfer me from NDNC to NCPR automatically as per the recent TRAI regulations.
Airtel does not provide options to register a complaint on 1909 either by calling or sending an SMS.
Airtel's web application form does not allow a person to register a complaint. The web application form is in itself a violation since the complaint has to be registered from the same telephone number on which unsolicited commercial communication has been received.

Social BPM - mere hype or ... ?

2011-02-23T19:44:00.002+05:30

Deconstruct

I have tried to capture some of my top of mind thoughts around the new hyperbole around Social BPM. But before I delve further, let us try & de-construct the term "social" a bit before we get into the crux of the problem here. The dictionary meaning of "Social" itself is myriad and can be used in multiple contexts and connotations.

But the recent hype around "social xyz" is in one of two respects - either Marketing/PR induced hallucinations around integration with social media or the new incumbents & startups in the enterprise software space trying to make a living amongst the established enterprise software biggies by harping on one of the most hyped out terms.

Social CRM purists would like to clarify, that in spite of the hyperbole from the marketing/PR agencies, its not limited to only the social media/networks aspect but a lot of other stuff too. A post is not enough to explain them all; http://j.mp/whysocial, http://j.mp/whysocial1, http://j.mp/scrmsmm, http://j.mp/scrmdef are a few places where these are already explained. There are many more at http://j.mp/scrmjumps.

Similarly, merely integrating an application built upon a BPM platform with social media/networking sites like Facebook/Twitter does not make it Social BPM.

As people in BPM (presumably the primary audience here) are aware the platforms can be used to automate workflows in various business functions, out of which they could even be related to marketing, sales or customer service/support/care. In which case, the BPM platform is being used to build a CRM application. And if that process somehow involves integrating with facebook/twitter/other social media/networking site, this would be a clear case of an intersection with Social CRM.

The very same "tussle" exists right now wrt CRM vs BPM systems in various situations for us consultants & systems integrators. Having worked in both the worlds I can safely state that what matters is primarily is the thought process behind the strategy & then the feature set of the tool.

SCRM is a strategy and business processes are a crucial part of that strategy. (S)CRM / BPM systems on the other hand need to be chosen depending upon the right fit. Most traditional CRM systems have a lot of "best practices" pre-configured and most of the business processes already automated. When there is a high level of intersection between the CRM processes required as per the CRM strategy and those provided by the CRM system, with only less than 40-30% customization, it is a good choice to go with CRM systems like Siebel, SFDC, MS Dynamics, etc. or even Pega CPM.

However in cases where there is not such a high convergence between the strategy & the out of box features of a CRM system, it might be worthwhile to go for a mishmash of integrated products with a BPM thrown in.

The other aspect most talked about in Social BPM is collaboration - in both the modeling as well as the processes at run time (by the end users). There is more meat here.

There are a few things we need to consider about collaboration though. Collaboration consists primarily of, among other things, communication & a work output. And it is not difficult to notice that this has always been happening in almost all kinds of systems under whatever kind of strategies. What might be considered new are a few properties of a networked system like emergence, complexity, stigmergy, etc. that are being considered under the strategies.

I have written about the complex adaptive systems, leveraging biomimicry for "social business" as well as a collaboration framework and am sure it helps you get some ideas too. You already might have come across Max Pucher's Adaptive Case Management related blog. Theres a lot in there which explains how / why the leading BPM systems fail when it comes to the earlier mentioned network characteristics during run time.

Spray-On solar-power cells + E-Ink = Giant Noteslates

2011-02-23T04:34:00.000+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

A non 'social' post after a long time in this blog, though I have kept at them on my tumblr. Even this post has been posted there first and then cross posted here. This post is about ideas and how they collide. And there still is a connection with 'social' in this, because the idea came from the back channel of the Social CRM Accidental Community. ;)

E-ink technology is known to my geek audience, they are now found in Amazon Kindle and many other products. My first brush was via Motorola F3, still used by my dad. More interestingly, Toppan Printing has created huge 1 x 3.2 meters posters made with E-ink technology. If I could get a wall converted into e-ink, or all, I could change the wall paper ever so often as well as watch TV right on the wall (when the fast refresh does come to happen with e-ink).

On the other hand, Spray-On Solar-Power Cells are true breakthrough; using nanotechnology you can now paint it on any surface & when it dries becomes plastic and generates electricity. And can be used even under cloudy weather conditions.

Add an Adruino somewhere and you have a perfect geek wall painting! :D Or may be something like the Noteslate, only a very large one! :)

BTW, I am eagerly waiting for the Noteslate to graduate from the echelons of vaporware to reality. I have been enamored by the idea ever since I saw theBoogie Board at a Brookstone last year, no not the surfing kind, an LCD based chalk board kind of tool that does not store the stuff drawn on it.

h/t to Lisbeth Shaw for triggering the e-ink idea when she suggested me to paint the walls of my new villa with it. ;)

Evolving your organization for the multi-channel customer

2011-02-18T05:37:00.004+05:30

As I sit confined in my hotel room today (after three very hectic 11 hour days at office) thinking over the various new things happening with me & around (exciting sure, but new things bring a sense of fear too, no matter how much on the edge you live) I cannot stop thinking that the weather here in San Ramon, CA, is kind of ominous. Overcast, sunny, rainy, windy - all changing every few minutes - the weather can't seem to make its mind. And as my good friend Graham Hill says, no matter what you wear, it is not the right one. But this post is not about the moodiness of the weather; rather its the moodiness of the customer. Or as my another good friend Mitch Lieberman paraphrases: "Customers are fickle". One such recent customer behavior has been diagnosed as Channel Multiplicity.

Channel Multiplicity is the emerging phenomenon of customers' seeking information and demanding products and services from an ever-increasing range of sources and is characterized by at least two distinguishing features:

the reliance by customers on multiple sources of information, and on multiple sales and support outlets making available the sought after products and related post-purchase services. Product information and its availability are facilitated by third parties other than the manufacturer or traditional channel intermediary.
Customers’ increasing demands for, and expectations of seamless transitions from information provision to transaction fulfillment to post-purchase service provision, across these multiple channel providers

What it all means is that its no longer merely enough to have a 360 degree view of the customer (which is a tough nut in itself that most have not yet cracked) but its also increasingly important that you provide a seamless experience to the customers across all the channels that they are in, not where you are.

360vr view of Grand Central Terminal, NYC

Human beings are unique in the animal kingdom, among other things, because of their ability to be self aware as well as be aware of how others perceive them. It is only expected that organizations mirror that too, right? A good reason why we need to have a 4π Steradian view of our ecosystem within which our organization operates & exists. This means that everything in all directions is visible to the observer: front to back and straight up and down. (The term Steradian is the “Standard International Unit” of solid angular measure. Just as there are 360 degrees or 2pi radians in a circle, there are 4pi Steradians in a sphere.)

However, mere self awareness is not enough. We should also respond to the changing behavior of the customers. But hold on! I am not asking you to give in to the hype and start creating a twitter, Facebook, blah blah account and add to your woes of being "unable to scale your social media". I am in fact asking you to think through the implications of these new market realities and understand how it affects your business - if it affects it at all. Only after that should you experiment with your responses. Laurence Buchanan, another good friend of mine (when we are not donning our corporate hats) reminds us that solid foundations are as important as cool innovations, or may be more so.

There are more insights in that paper on Channel Multiplicity from the Journal of Service Research on what is required to plan for responding to the channel multiplicity of the customers:

a broadened view of products and services
channel leadership challenges
alterations in channel structure, and
an expanded view of distribution intensity

Hope it is a good place to ignite your thinking while I try to get a grip on the flux capacitor for social business that my geeky good friend Esteban Kolsky put in my mind and has been whirring around in my head this whole week. He has already told you why Whatson pw0ning humans in Jeopardy! is a good thing for customer service (though he did miss out on informing you that now scientists have figured out that we have stored more than 295 exabytes since 1980).

If you are in a hurry, the "Unbundling the corporation" [PDF] as proposed by John Hagel III & Marc Singer a decade back should give you some insights. I came across this in the excellent book Business Model Generation suggested to me last year by yet another good friend Wim Rampen (who BTW reminds us that Customer Service is serious business). Another older model that could fit in the flux capacitor would be the Value Disciplines [PDF] suggested by Treacy and Wiersema but Graham asks me to trash it.

Finally, I am not a person who is complimented for being lucid in my articulation. Lucidity requires deeper understanding. And to get that I need to work, do the stuff that I have been thinking up. 2010 was a good year for me to do the stuff, hoping to doing even more in 2011. So am all set to hit 88mph on my DeLorean. Are you strapped in? ;)

If you don't want to wait till I can write lucidly, you might want to attend SugarCon and listen to many of my friends there, Brian Vellmure has put together a GREAT list of speakers. Worth the money!

Q for Quandary: Did you ask who is leading social CRM?

2011-02-11T13:52:00.001+05:30

From: The Last Word

As I prepare myself for the long haul flight from BLR to SFO via DXB tonight & procrastinate on the packing I am catching up on a few 'news' articles rather than 'blog' posts on Social CRM from my usual firehose consisting of RSS feeds of known sources, twitter mentions & google alerts. As I keep reading them I cannot help going back to my own interactions with various VPs from Fortune 500 companies around the globe w.r.t. "using social media for their business" and correlating what I am reading from the firehose.

The biggest news is that Gartner predicts that Social CRM will be a $1 billion market by 2013. IIRC, thats a revision of their earlier stand of the market achieving that size by 2011. Can't be sure, drinking a lot from the digital firehose can make you delusional.

OTOH the zeitgeist of the blogosphere is asking existential questions about the 'Social CRM' tools. Ranging from it does not exist but a need does to calling it an oxymoron, the discussions on the blog IMHO provide a fair picture of the frustrations with the current crop of tools emerging in the marketplace claiming to be Social CRM.

And then the claims of certain Fortune 500 doing a great job at social CRM. Incidentally the Global IT heads of those same companies are in the process of consolidating various tools that the different brands & functions within these organizations are using on their own - thanks to the SaaS based applications that they have been using for quite some considerable time now without the involvement of the IT.

These Social CRM poster child practitioner companies are the case studies that act as the justification/corraboration for many other social CRM enthusiasts in other practitioner companies; but these poster children have created a different set of problems for themselves - creating yet another set of data silos.

They use predominantly these categories of social software - social media listening tools (monitoring + analytics + response/workflow), community platforms, twitter/facebook/linkedin dashboards. A few of them integrate with existing CRM systems like the Salesforce.com, MS Dynamics, SugarCRM using their integrators to social media/networking sites, but the majority of them do not integrate at all.

Yes, there is a need for social CRM solution, but none exists though the components are available. I drew a high level architecture diagram a little less than two years ago with what was potentially possible back then with the various components available. Its still valid, may be lacks a few components. But it doesn't exist as the integrated solution I thought it would be.

From: Social CRM Set

So, social CRM is an oxymoron if you consider the tools that claim to be so. None of the tools are there yet. But social CRM the concept, thats not an oxymoron. The name given might be different, the definitions used might vary, but the core philosophy is still valid yet rarely existent.

One positive trend I see from the buy side of this market is worth leapfrogging by other practitioners who want to get started: business groups have been using social software without involving the central IT (thanks to availability as web applications) & now IT is being asked to address the potential issues surrounding data integration, security, scalability, privacy, compliance, etc.

There are two corollaries IMHO - consolidation in the vendor space is inevitable; consulting & systems integration firms have a low hanging fruit of being able to integrate the various components. From the C&SI perspective (I am one), it is beneficial to build integrators & solution accelerators; but could lead to, as I keep reminding my team members, conflicts of interest while suggesting solutions to the practitioners. This is pretty daunting scenario for the buy side - how do I know if this company will stay afloat (so I will get longer usage time & support for the tool) and how do I decide on how to integrate the components (until a time a suite is available)?

As ever, understanding the vision of the software vendors and the C&SI is important - not the stated ones, but the real ones. Difficult to get to that, but with almost everybody engaging on the social media & putting out their thoughts out, it would give you a glimpse of their belief system, which would potentially help you understand their behaviors.

Whether you are a buyer, product vendor, service provider (C&SI) or analyst - a quandary exists for each one of you but its not "Who is leading Social CRM?" (a great post by the way, though the title did put me off; but thats just me).

Now let me decide if I should pack those home made heat & eat stuff in my luggage & check the bags in or avoid the long wait at the baggage carousel & the customs questions about the agricultural products - a very existential quandary for me when I have to go to the US; having lived on mostly vegetarian fare, I cant digest very well the grease in the food there. Mea Culpa!

Participation Design

2011-02-05T12:24:00.002+05:30

Participation Design
Originally uploaded by ScorpFromHell

This is a short post going back to something that I share from my experiences working with various clients as well as within my own organization. This is a graphic I created to understand the bare minimum participation dynamics that need to be taken care of when setting up a community platform, whether as part of your internal employee collaboration plans or external customer engagement ones. The idea is simple:

People need to post stuff - so you need to be able to create, rename, update & delete stuff - called CRUD in software development circles.

People need to read whats been posted but then not everything can be made readable. The content in the various groups or communities created can be open or closed for consumption by non-members. These groups/communities can be listed or unlisted too. A non-listed closed community is probably that place where your top management is storing some of the sensitive stuff. Or just a small project team working in a stealth mode.

Well, the above two are basics of most web software. Where a bit more of Web 2.0 behavior shines through is in the annotations that people do on the stuff thats been posted. Comments can be considered a post or an annotation, depending upon your own personal philosophy. I have been jumping from one camp to the other for quite a long time. My current thinking is this: It definitely contributes to the UGC (user generated content) in text form, and that is a very important aspect to be considered from an analytics stand point. But from actions standpoint, while designing the platform you might want to consider them as an annotation.

The last bit is Curation, and this is a very recent behavior in terms of gaining prominence in the context of community platforms. Curation helps finding the relevant stuff amongst all the conversations. To take a phrase from telecommunications, Signal to Noise Ratio (S/N or SNR) is a very major concern when the community become large & lively. Only here it is not about the noise in the electrical signals but rather referred to the conversations that are not relevant to an individual.

The way I think this happens (I still haven't grasped it completely) is that people aggregate content from all the relevant places (these are the knowns) and then filter on them. Collation happens when the filtered stuff from different people is added up. Like the paper.li stuff.

As always, I would definitely like to hear any inputs/feedback from you. :)

BTW, to understand why you need to setup a community platform for your customers, do read this excellent post "Torching a straw man"[1] that very lucidly breaks down the last few vestigial remnants of an opposition towards the community platforms.

An good piece from GetSatisfaction. Even if they are providers of hosted community platforms. Don't miss the discussion in the comments though!

[1] http://blog.getsatisfaction.com/2011/02/02/torching-a-straw-man/

LSD for the Social Business

2011-01-07T15:37:00.003+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

JP Rangaswami, Chief Scientist at Salesforce.com, quotes his friend Prof. N. Venkatraman in his latest blog (emphasis mine):

"... businesses used to be hierarchies of business units whose assets were called customers and products; that they are changing into networks of business units whose assets were called relationships and capabilities."

Also, Verna Allee talks about Value Networks instead of Value Chains as the next gen of business visualization & analytics.

These are fundamental changes in the beliefs in Business, not just behaviors. One that I am happy about since I can relate to them instinctively, thanks to my heritage.

This instinctive understanding of Human & Social Capital as well as Value Networks (though I cannot measure them as the scientists do) stems from the concept of the three Goddesses for Kalvi, Selvam, Veeram (I use the Tamil words instead of Sanskrit for a reason that will be evident later in this post):

Kalvi means Knowledge,

Selvam means Wealth &

Veeram means Courage.

I did not realise it until I heard Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik talk about the three Indian Currencies - LSD or Lakshmi, Saraswati, Durga.

Lakshmi is the Goddess of Wealth, Saraswati is the Goddess of Knowledge & Durga (a form of Shakti, another Goddess) is the Goddess of Power (may be Courage is a better equivalent, will be evident later below).

I guess you all are aware of the role of wealth for business & now increasingly about the role of knowledge in organizations, cue in Knowledge Management here. Very recently there are talks about Emotions and especially Empathy in the customer facing aspects of the business.

N.B.: By Customer I mean both internal & external, I always do.

This third aspect of Power in the LSD framework of Dr. Pattanaik is what he relates to as Emotional Power, rather than Physical Power. He says that by being kind I can empower anybody and my being mean I can dis-empower the same person. If I say to you in a party, "Oh my! You have gained a lot of weight since we last met!", you would (most probably) feel drained of energy, become depressed. But if I were to tell you, "Nice shirt!" (as Esteban did once to me last year) you would feel a boost in energy. There is an emotional transaction taking place here. And thus Durga is a form of currency too. (So can we say Emotional power = Courage?).

To understand how the three currencies personified by LSD you need to consider how they are ordered in Tamil - Kalvi, Selvam, Veeram. But its not a one leads to the other kind of relationship. Let me take the help of Dr. Pattanaik again:

The wise say that if you want Lakshmi to come into your life, you must never chase her. She must chase you. Otherwise she will come into your life with her twin sister, Alakshmi, goddess of quarrels. A house filled with wealth as well as strife is a house inhabited by both Lakshmi and Alakshmi.

... Lakshmi without Saraswati, invites Alakshmi. And that is not a good thing. And Saraswati without Lakshmi invites Daridra, goddess of poverty, which is not a good thing either.

Neither financial security nor knowledge can guarantee emotional security ... To get Durga into our lives, we have to give Durga. To feel secure and included, we have to make others feel secure and included. This will never happen if we are not sensitive and we differentiate between what is ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’. To break this divide, we once again need Saraswati.

So if you consider the Indian belief, Saraswati is kind of first among the equals that the Tridevi (Three Goddesses) are. And this is because knowledge makes us not only wealthy but also sensitive, or in other words, makes us empathetic.

Emotions & Empathy have suddenly become important. Humanizing the brand is a hot topic - a buzz word for most in PR, Marketing & Advertising. Relationships, Networks; Connections.

Connection is nothing but a meaningful, authentic relationship with other people. It is the essence of human experience. And Empathy is what allows us to connect with others.

As per Psychology, at the other end of spectrum of Empathy is Shame. Empathy moves us toward deep, meaningful relationships. Shame on the other hand unravels our relationships & connections with other people. It breeds Fear, Blame & Disconnection. Have you seen these at your workplace? I bet you did.

The pointer that moves between Empathy & Shame in the spectrum is called Vulnerability. Interestingly, we are at our Empathetic best when we are most vulnerable - willing to share not only our strengths but also our struggles. To understand others' vulnerability, we need to be vulnerable ourselves.

To get Durga, give Durga.

Courage, or what the Psychologists would call Ordinary Courage, is being able to speak about yourselves as is, tell our stories. But unfortunately, Culture has changed. Though people have not (their psychology). People are hard wired in their brains to share their stories but culture makes them afraid of not fitting in, comply to the Social Norm.

What could help here is Compassion - being able to hear & listen to others' stories. But since Durga is reciprocal, listening to shame can be shameful for us. Which again means, we need to have the courage to listen to others' stories in addition to compassion. And thus I feel Durga is about Courage.

To understand more about Shame & Empathy, please do listen to Dr. Brené Brown:

So what is the ROI of social media again? Try using LSD as the currencies rather than mere monetary currencies. A Balanced Score card might be closest to it. Got any other framework/methodology/model? Please do let us know. :)

The what & why of Business - East vis-a-vis West

2011-01-07T00:38:00.003+05:30

Alexander & the Gymnosophists of India

In my last post titled Business Sutra for the Future of Work, where I announced this series, I forewarned you that I'll henceforth try to blend my Indian heritage with the western learnings in my quest to understand how things are evolving with respect to social in particular & what needs to be the strategies. Thusly, you might find stuff that you are not familiar with. Though I'll try and give some 101 as & when required, I think it is good if we understand the difference in Indian & Western beliefs (& thus behaviors). In this post I introduce you to the differences between the two thoughts - Western & Eastern.

I grew up reading & listening to the various stories from across the world. But my Indian upbringing did have a bigger impact on my beliefs. And I did read more of the Indian Mythologies than most of my friends & relatives who were introduced to them, but were made to read more of the western stories thanks to our education system. If you are convent educated (yes, we have lots of them in India), am sure you are aware of numerous Biblical stories. More than Indian stories (well, I know you are aware of Ramayana & Mahabharata, but most probably not the rest).

The western thought is predominantly influenced by the Greek & Roman mythologies and the tales from the two testaments of the Bible. And then there are Nordic & Celtic influences too and a lot many more. And if you look at them all, they all say that you have one life to live and that you need to achieve / enjoy what you can in this one life. The judgement will be at apocalypse/Armageddon/2012 AD/whatever.

The Indian thought on the other hand is shaped by the belief in rebirth, that there are infinite lives to live. And you are constantly being judged and bear the consequences, either in this life or the future lives - Karma.

So the Western people have this one life as the denominator of whatever they do in their one life and the Indians have infinite lives as the denominator of whatever they do in this one life. Which means, to the Western people, they are the sum total of their achievements in this one life. To the Indians, whatever they do amounts to nil, zero.

Eh?

So do I mean to say we Indians are not driven because we are not fired with the ambition to achieve everything in this one life?

No, absolutely not. What it means is that for us, the purpose of life is introspection. Figuring it out. Because we believe we have infinite lives to do it all.

Westerners do business to do it, achieve. They concentrate on the how. Indians do business to figure it out, find the meaning. They concentrate on the why.

If all this went over the top, may be I can get Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik to explain this to you better with a story.

So what does this difference in belief translate into, as behaviors? Let me take Dr. Pattanaik's help again and show you this slide from his TED India talk:

So while I leave you to mull over this, I will be back with another post. Hope I could set the stage for us to proceed further? Please leave your comments here or email me @ naasat.in.

Business Sutra for the Future of Work

2011-01-05T16:02:00.000+05:30

A very happy new year to you all!

If you did not notice, I now have a new domain name. After nearly a decade & a half of having a presence on the internet. The name reflects my quest to marry the Indian Introspective methods with the Western Skepticism to figure out answers to many worldly things - not the non-existent (ná ásat) - that dog me. I think I'll give it a couple of decades before I graduate to thinking about the non-existent. :) So don't be surprised if I bring in some heavy doses of Indian philosophies, mythologies, folklores, etc. in the coming posts.

Though I have always believed that there is a lot to be learnt from my own heritage wrt business & its management, I was unable to find much literature or people who had made the connect. Until I stumbled upon Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik recently when I came across a recommendation for his book Myth = Mithya A Handbook of Hindu Mythology on my Facebook stream.

Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik is the Chief Belief Officer at Future Group, one of the largest large format store chains in India.

Wait, what? Belief?

Yes, that's what I thought too when I heard it the first time. But it makes perfect sense. Business is after all the sum total of human behaviors & behaviors are most often than not influence by beliefs. And while behavior is increasingly measurable (and thus manageable) belief is not, and thus has not been managed or even considered in business management/administration.

Sounds logical enough to me. Though I would welcome your views if you do not subscribe to it. You can leave a comment here or mail me at naasat.in (any thing is ok in front of the @, they will all come to me).

To know more about Dr. Devdutt's views on the Indian way of doing business (which we have ourselves forgotten thanks to the westernised education), you can listen to him in this excellent series on CNBC TV18 called Business Sutra.

I hope to take up the concepts of Karma, Kama & Dharma and Lakshmi, Saraswati & Durga in my next posts and relate them to business in general and wrt Customers (internal & external) too.

I am aware that my audience is predominantly from outside of India, so I will take care to describe key aspects of the various Indian Philosophical concepts as well as the Mythological characters & the Hindu Pantheon (there are 33 Million gods & goddesses, many demons but no devil) so that you can understand me better, where I come from.

And finally, the reason why I am writing these: that I can understand these concepts better myself! And I am encouraged in this by what Peter Senge, author of the seminal work "Fifth Discipline", states in an interview:

“My intuition is they (India and China) will move somewhat together but in very distinctive ways. But I think the thing that will be really common to both of them will be the fact that they won’t be able to do this without reconnecting their heritage. They will have to develop a confidence that they can do this as Indians and they can do this as Chinese. They have learnt a lot from the West but they don’t have to copy, they cannot create a Chinese or Indian version of a Western model. The Western model itself is basically bankrupt. It does not give enough attention to the human side of development.”

Cloud vs Distributed computing and the Social Customer aka the Global Citizen

2010-12-13T00:18:00.000+05:30

Clouds in the Eagle Nebula where stars are born. Source: Wikipedia

The past few weeks have been all about cloud computing. Be it the wikileaks and Amazon standoff or the Dreamforce 2010 event unveiling 7 'Clouds'. Lots have been talked about both. One is a political discussion, the other an enterprise discussion. And I got torn between the new patterns of behaviors arising around cloud. Let me explain a bit more so you help me out.

The promise of cloud computing is the abstraction of the unnderlying complexities of the technology from the users, and their plug & play as well as on demand supply - much like electricity.

For businesses, now they can have IT as an operational expenditure rather than capital. Thus the plethora of XYZ as a Service. Purists would like to make a distinction between Infrastructure, Platform and Software as a Service. Now add the new & upcoming Business Process as a Service to the hype.

Another confusion to all this is public vs private cloud. Some say Private cloud is merely glorified data center server racks, some say its bullshit.

All said and done, cloud is about consolidating your computing stacks & sharing it with various users for their computational tasks.

Distributed computing, for me, is the exact opposite. Take a huge computational task, break it into various mini/micro/nano tasks and distribute them across various systems. Like the SETI@Home program which lets u donate some of your computers' idle time in the hopes of finding aliens so that you have enough time to reach out for a towel.

Aspects like reliability, scalability, redundancy, security, etc. are built into cloud computing, but it is a single point of failure for your business irrespective of all the redundancy & reliability built into the cloud. This was what happened when Amazon pulled the plug for Wikileaks quoting violation of its terms & conditions. Quoting The Guardian:

"It's clear," pontificated Amazon, "that WikiLeaks doesn't own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren't putting innocent people in jeopardy."

To which they also say bunkum:

... any work "prepared by an officer or employee of the US government as part of that person's official duties" is not entitled to domestic copyright protection under US law. So, in the US at least, the leaked cables are not protected by copyright and it doesn't matter whether WikiLeaks owns the rights or not.

Irrespective of the politics involved, here is a balanced view from the crusader against IT #FAIL, and a good friend, Michael Krigsman:

Cloud computing suffers from the weakness of central point of failure. For example, when a cloud owner, such as a particular vendor, suffers an outage all customers could potentially go down. In contrast, distributing Internet-based data among numerous outlets creates redundancy and lowers the risk of catastrophic disruption.

Regardless of one’s political view of Wikileaks, for instance, the organization brilliantly anticipated service disruptions caused by political pressure. As a result, they distributed their materials on servers owned by different companies throughout the world. When Wikileak’s storage provider, Amazon, pulled the plug, data mirrored elsewhere kept the site accessible.

Cloud computing combined with distributed mirroring offers a robust means to share information on the Internet.

Star analyst & great friend Esteban Kolsky goes a step further wrt Cloud vs Distributed and changes my fundamentals. He opines that cloud & distributed computing are not much apart in real life. He explains that cloud was built to leverage distributed computing and says that there is not just a single point of failure in a cloud but also not a single provider. Stuff at all the layers of the cloud would be interchangeable & inter-operable. (Amen!) And thus:

without going into the politics of it, the ability of wikileaks to continue to flourish after being officially "shut down" in their main place proves the value of the cloud as a continuously growing and evolving platform where content and applications can live forever.

Internet is a great platform that enables both cloud & distributed computing. All said & done, Internet is a tool. From an anthropology view, apparently,tools came before bigger brains in the human evolution. And internet is a very BIG tool that is changing human behavior. The rise of the social customer is one manifestation. The global citizen is yet another aspect of this social customer. May be it will pave way for the fall of the nations? Sorry, let me not start gathering wool.

But for the internet to become more useful, it will have to evolve a lot more, in terms of how we consume it. There might be some parallels with how electricity was adopted at a time when steam, wind or water were the major sources of energy. How the power generation was centralized and the distribution grids were built. How various providers had to inter-operate & were interchangeable too.

And then people could also generate power at home using solar/wind/bio/etc. and get credits for that. Which would be something like me providing my extra/idle CPU & storage space to the cloud providers and thus getting extra credits. Now that would be a true innovation in cloud & distributed computing, isn't it? More power & flexibility to the social customer aka the global citizen.

A lot of things to wrap my thoughts around and too early stages to say how the human behavior is evolving wrt cloud & distributed computing. Whats your say?

Digital Customer vs Social Customer - what GetSatisfaction.com got wrong

2010-12-07T07:40:00.001+05:30

Source: GetSatisfaction.com

I woke up to find a new infographic on Social CRM being tweeted about. Curious, I clicked on it and found myself on GetSatisfaction.com's blog with great hopes since they had featured on Esteban's blog. And was ... disappointed. So I left them a comment ... and it went into moderation. And thus I am reproducing my comment here.

Andy,

I am utterly disappointed in this infographic. I would rather call this a hypegraphic.

How is this an infographic on the "Evolution" of Social CRM? All I can see depicted is how it is different from CRM.

You missed out a crucial aspect about the Social Customer - the communities they form, interact with, and the collective clout (no, not Klout) these communities have over the businesses. How they help each other out.

Irony, no? I guess that's what GetSatisfaction tries to do as a business, right? Allowing customers to create communities where they would help each others out and thus strong arm the businesses into providing service in the GS communities? And you missed that VERY VERY key aspect.

Social is not just the technology alone. What you have depicted as the Social Customer is actually, merely a Digital Customer, a Customer who wields the Digital Technologies (including the internet and the various paraphernalia on top of it) very well. The Digital Customer does NOT become a Social Customer unless they gang up together to help each other out, and if need be, use their collective voice as a major influence over the businesses.

And you also missed out the part about how the Social Customer wants to co-create, the experiences as well as the products/services.

Social is a behavioral characteristic & Co-Creation is a key aspect of this social behavior of the customer in conjunction with the business.

And PR is going to drive the change? All the best. And right after that you mention everybody in the company does/is responsible for SCRM. Not to forget your own business model. Mixed signals?

The sole section where you do try to chart out the evolution, its about what should be & what is. Nothing about how to go/it got from from the here to the there. BTW, the concept comes from Mitch Lieberman, while the design of the graphic came from Chess Media in a jointly published whitepaper. Since you have used your own graphic, I would presume the credit should go to him predominantly?

Sorry if I came out pretty hard on you, but you are a trusted source and you have an obligation towards yourselves, your customers & the community at large.

I do not know if this comment will be approved or not, but being the social customer myself, I felt obligated to share this with my community and thus I have reproduced it here irrespective of whether my comment gets approved or not.

Please do let me know what you think of the infographic & my views. :)

Primal needs in a digital world

2010-12-05T00:11:00.000+05:30

A Dai Pai Dong in Causeway Bay, Hong Kong. Source: Me.

After my half baked ideas & notes on a collaboration framework in my previous post I published while in a jiffy to get to Hong Kong, I write yet another visceral post that I could not hold in my mind for further contemplation. This one while I am in Hong Kong.

India & China are emerging nations/developing countries that most of the western, educated, industrialised, rich & democratic (WEIRD) countries would have found to be stupid sloths 2 decades back. (I really recommend you read that article I have hyperlinked).

Developing countries like China & India (disclaimer: I am from India & writing this while I am in Hong Kong - which is part of China) have one huge advantage over the developed countries, other than the ever growing educated population that is hell bent on becoming the new middle class (India has none according to some reports, as a matter of fact).

Newer Infrastructure - faster & vaster.

On the other hand (OTOH as internet afficianados would like it), scientists say there is now proof that though city living is great in terms of easy accessibility to stuff we need, it puts a LOT of strain on our minds due to the deluge of inputs our senses receive. The easy way out was to look at greenery & thus they observed that every city needed a green preserve. Like the hill outside of Tokyo. And this means only one thing to me.

Ancient Habitats - green & serene.

(Much like why we find beauty in certain things as per this Darwinian view.)

Ok, so much for the tangential stuff. What relevance to the social customer or business or the relationship between the two does this have?

Simple.

We now, thanks to the advancements in digital technology (computing, internet, mobility, cloud, etc. for consumption AND production) have much better infrastructure at our disposal. Let it not go unutilized.

Where do you think are the better airports? Newark or Dubai? Ok, La Guardia or Hyderabad?
Where do you think are faster trains? NYC-Boston Acela express or Beijing-Shanghai PDL?
Where do you think are better systems? Intranet or Internet?
Which do you think are fastest growing communication mediums? Telephone, Email or Social Media/Networks?

Newer Infrastructure - a convergence of social, cloud & mobile that is more relevant & easier to use. Faster & Vaster.

Does this mean you have to give in to the hype & bow down to the social media marketing/monitoring gurus? I ask you a few questions in return.

Has human nature to feel connected ever changed? If you are not sure, please do read the New York Times best seller, Social Intelligence by Daniel Goelman - author of Emotional Intelligence.
Has the meaning of business ever changed? If you cannot represent your business in a single diagram, I would suggest you read Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder. That would be the least yet best investment for 2011 or even a great Christmas self gift.
Which do you think are the growing trends in customer satisfaction? Customer service or Customer servitude? People can talk all they like about service design, but the nature of servitude, voluntary ones that is, comes by habit &/or culture, from empathy, by awaking our primal instincts to feel part of the tribe, not by design (Design is the next best option though). But then even the understanding of servitude has been clouded by all the emancipation related palpitations. I need to specify that I do not mean involuntary servitude to the customer. If nothing else, please do consider reading this post on the Taj Hotel's gesture towards its customers, employees & the community during & after the terrorist attacks in Mumbai two years back on what I mean by servitude. Employees laid down their lives to save guests - otherwise known as customers. Will yours? Managers considered the welfare of their guests & staff paramount even in the face of massacre of their family.

Ancient habits & instincts if not the habitats - empathy & the resulting servitude. Green & serene.

So are you ready to embrace the new & yet relearn the ancient, primal nature of humans?

Framework for a Collaborative Enterprise

2010-11-30T16:21:00.001+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

While I wait with baited breath if I will be able to jump through all the hoops in time to get all the approvals required for an international travel at short notice and thus be able to board the flight to Hong Kong in less than 11 hours now, I created a short deck on my notes about various collaborative aspects needed in an organization. As I have been stating for sometime now, collaboration is needed not only both inside and outside an organization, but also between inside and outside. (Which has been immortalized by the infinity continuum of Esteban Kolsky.) But how do you become collaborative? And how much do you collaborate? (This 2nd question was asked by Graham Hill who has always provoked me think even further, thank you Sir.)

In this deck I have captured some of the salient points in various journals I went through and try to provide an answer to what types of collaborations are needed. How much of a collaboration is needed is dependent, among other things, on the situation too. You certainly can't wait for a collaborative response to a crisis. A leader is required to take decisions, for the good or bad, under those circumstances. But that's for later, at more saner times when am not on the verge of a nervous breakdown thanks to the rigid processes of a large organization.

Do let me know your thoughts on the notes in this deck as well as the rudimentary maturity model I have drawn up at the end.

Collaboration framework

View more presentations from Prem Kumar Aparanji.

Its about the Streams, but which one? Where's the time to think?

2010-11-10T14:35:00.003+05:30

First Images of the Ion Collision in LHC. Gizmodo

This is yet another post that combobulates more than brings clarity. But I had to post this to straighten the thoughts in my mind. Some might find it thought leading, as in leading your thoughts to somewhere they did not go. But no guarantee of what that direction holds. Its just a Stream of thoughts. So here goes.

If you have read anything from the Big Shift Index, or Edge Thinking or the book Power of Pull, you would realize that it is no longer about Knowledge Stocks but rather the Knowledge Flows that the world is requiring you, your business to shift towards. Flows, streams. Related, no?

Next up is Activity Streams, the term du jour in the Enterprise 2.0 circles. Now this is no longer about Knowledge but about Information flows. Ray Wang wrote about using it to reduce information clutter not adding to it, this summer & Prof. McAfee (Not this) followed it up this fall in a post on ReadWriteWeb about the three issues dogging Enerprise 2.0 currently.

If you are an enterprise architect (IT, not buildings) like Martijn Linssen, you might be interested in http://ActivityStrea.ms, an open standard to build activity streams into your systems. As per the claims on the home page for the standard, its been adopted by most big names, so it would seem that it does not suffer the fate of XHTML from W3C vs HTML5 from the browser makers. A standard is good enough only if people stick to those standards while using/building, not if it is good in documentation.

But some other stories have begun to emerge. Seems not everything is hunky dory. In an effort to claim the biggest chunk of users, vendors are using their own proprietary standards. Hopefully we will see a standard emerging, else its all lost for the users. Back to the days when CompuServe people could not mail AOL users.

Now we are also seeing talks of marriage between Enterprise 2.0 & Social CRM at the E2.0 Conference in Santa Clara happening now. Most people think about the conversation streams on the social web when told about Social CRM. Social Media Montitoring (which is nothing but figuring out who said something about you, your company, brand but not discern anything from it), Social Media Listening (which is about discerning the sentiments or mood), Social Insights (which is figuring out with tools what the people are saying on the social web) - all of them need those Conversation Streams. Insights necessitates a BI tool & not to be left behind there is much talk about in memory BI systems. Data crunching on the fly. Real time is fast enough, remember?

But most interestingly, Graham Hill asks us to ponder about the value streams. Value stream mapping stems from the lean thinking at Toyota with whom Graham has had an association. And the term value streams would have been lost on me had not Graham been a good guy and helped me with a few PDFs about them. (I need to get that $139 Kindle to read all those PDFs, but the shipping costs are 50% of the kindle itself, not counting the customs tax!) Wikipedia's definition of value stream mapping:

"Value stream mapping is a lean manufacturing technique used to analyze the flow of materials and information currently required to bring a product or service to a consumer. At Toyota, where the technique originated, it is known as "material and information flow mapping". It can be used in any process that needs an improvement."

Due to the way the value streams are mapped, while observing the target systems & processes in situation, it usually drawn in hand, though the usual crop of diagramming software tools could be used too.

But then, to think about something totally different because am too deep into all things social, business, innovation, I took up a couple of my wife's books and they are about child development.

Humans, when we are growing after birth, develop our senses independent of each other. So you can see a lot of uncoordinated movements in the children below 3 years of age. At around 3 years of age, there is unity and children now start learning. But this learning, until the age of 6, is predominantly sensorial. Meaning, the children try to sense everything with their hands, eyes, ears, etc. And they want to sense the real life items, not the toys. And yet we spend a fortune on the toys where a miniature kitchen set is more than enough for the children to play with, actually making the dough, cutting vegetables, washing tables, etc.

They are using their senses to learn. The senses are in the here & now. Instant Karma. Children do not have a deep cognitive ability. The tendency to ponder, contemplate, think through. Combine past, present & future. Cognitive thinking is what we grown ups do. And it is through this cognitive thinking that we build new ideas, keep forming new synapses in our brain. Innovate.

There are now cries to find answers to what happens to the neural wirings in children who are exposed to so much of social & digital technologies that keeps them glued to the screens. Even claiming that the IT industry is like the Tobacco industry in the 1950s - denial of the dangers.

Considering that we are yet to find value in the various Streams we are all wading in, time to sit back, relax, take some time out & contemplate? Create that deep thinking & sacred space?

From Could to Should. Or how to rethink #scrm or even your business?

2010-10-25T02:13:00.002+05:30

Logo of the Dutch East India Company from Wikipedia

In my last hurried post titled "What led us to Social CRM? Or why you should be serious about #scrm?" I jotted down a few points on how the customers have been given a rough hand since Industrial revolution and how they are trying to hit back in the information age with the various digital technologies at their disposal.

In this post I try to jot down a few thoughts on how the business needs to rethink itself and this is not an easy task. Its a hurried post again.

From Could to Should

I ended my previous post thusly:

"It should always have been about the customer, but thanks to the industrial revolution, it was about the capabilities of the organization rather than the needs of the customer ... and this led to transactions being paramount to relationships (how else would you get better capabilities than competition?)."

And I left it hanging there.

What I meant to say was that businesses have always been doling out products/services (offerings) based on what they could, given the limited resources and capabilities. The more innovative of them would look for procuring newer resources & acquiring newer capabilities so that they could differentiate themselves from the competition. But never was a offering built to help customers accomplish whatever jobs they had to get done. Since businesses exist to provide service to the customers this is what they should have been doing all along.

Jobs

Say Christensen, Anthony, Berstell & Nitterhouse in MIT Sloan Management Review Spring 2007 issue:

"Most companies segment their markets by customer demographics or product characteristics and differentiate their offerings by adding features and functions. But the consumer has a different view of the marketplace. He simply has a job to be done and is seeking to "hire" the best product or service to do it. Marketers must adopt that perspective."

And in the Spring 2008 issue say Ulwick and Bettencourt:

With a clear definition of what a customer need is, companies are able to get the inputs that are required to succeed at innovation.

Bettencourt shares the following four questions in HBR Blogs:

Out of the many different jobs that our customers are trying to get done, which offer the ripest opportunities for service innovation?
If we mapped out the job the customer is trying to get done, where would we see the biggest points of inconvenience, frustration, and poor results?
What is our customer's experience of doing business with us, and what aspects of it could be better?
As a seller of products, what services could we also provide to help customers get their jobs done well?

Once you have a grasp on the customer jobs to be accomplished and have an offering to help achieve them, the next should be to provide a great end-to-end experience to the customer at all stages of the customer's buying process and not the company's sales cycle. Businesses should also take into consideration Customer engagement, which is defined as "the behavioural manifestation from a customer toward a brand or firm which goes beyond purchase behavior".

Customer Experience

As I mentioned in my previous post, value is realized by the customer across multiple touch points. But value is both in use as well as other aspects. A good understanding of the customer jobs would help you deliver value in use. Choose customer moments of truth if you will or Voice of Customer or both to help you figure out these 'other' aspects.

In his clear and simple post on Focus.com Paul Greenberg posits Voice of Customer as the first component of Social CRM to help in Customer Experience Mapping.

Only after you have a grapple on the jobs customers are trying to accomplish (and what offering you would provide to help them accomplish those jobs) and ensure a great end-to-end customer experience (considering VOC, MoT, Customer Engagement, etc.) should you look at the resources at your disposal and your current capabilities, which I am guessing most businesses reading this post are already good at.

Resources and Capabilities

When it comes to resources and capabilities, consider your complete business ecosystem, not just yourselves (and your partners). Ecosystems are complex adaptive systems, as I have explained it before and working with the business ecosystem requires communication & collaboration. This is where social computing (social media, social networking sites, enterprise social software) comes into picture along with social network analysis.

Social and Collaboration

I wrote a post about collaboration and biomimicry recently where I put forth these key aspects:

collaboration in the user tasks as part of various business processes (Social CRM/ERP/BPM, ACM, etc.),
learning inherent in the system/platform (Social Learning) in conjunction with the corporate training goals & systems and
finally the epitome of connected individuals - innovation - both democratized sourcing/filtering/execution as well as beuracratic sponsoring.

Remember, communication and work output both are key components of collaboration, without either of which the later is not possible.

Social Media, Social Networking Sites and Firm Hosted Online Communities are all crucial components of customer channels as well as the business ecosystem whereas Enterprise Social Software (online communities, intranet, portals, other enterprise systems, analytics, etc.) forms the key component for employee (and maybe partners too) collaboration.

This is where all your social media marketing, social media monitoring, social media policy, PR & IR on social media, crowdsourced customer service, etc. come into picture. But understand that the social channel needs to be integrated with the other traditional channels of communication, transaction as well as engagement with customers. And merely a multichannel approach wouldn't do, you need a proper cross-channel approach, which then means a 360 view of the customer by the business and a unified face of the business to the customer (Facilitated by what I like to call as the 4π view of what the customers perceive about the business).

Acknowledgement

This post has been structured loosely around Graham Hill's Seven Step Framework on Customer Collaboration that he described to me via tweets:

Jobs > Customer Jobs > Resources > Capabilities > Collaboration > Social Media > Customer Development

Hope I have been a bit more lucid in this post than in the previous one. Please do let me know your feedback/inputs.

What led us to Social CRM? Or why should you be serious about #SCRM?

2010-10-21T01:03:00.003+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Though I have been tinkering with or thinking about Social Media/Networing/CRM/Business for more than three to four years now, I never got a complete hang of why I felt it was the right thing to do. I have been reading &/or talking to a lot of others who feel the same and I have managed to collate a few salient points here. This is a very hurried post. So please excuse me for my 'brevity'. :)

A few trends lead to SCRM:

Social media is a communication revolution, especially for its users (customers & employees of an organization)

Digital - meaning next to nill cost of production/distribution & no gatekeepers
Proactive - articulation & co-creation
Networks - explicit & implicit
Visible - UGC is visible to all, including ur location thanks to LBS
Real-time yet persistent (thanks to falling costs of broadband & memory)
Ubiquitous - mobiles & internet of things

Customers transformed from being exogenous to value creation to endogenous to it, from a firm's perspective
Since Industrial revolution things progressed so:

Supply-Demand economy or Mass production - top brass decided what to produce & limited by availability of raw materials, human resources & supply chain - customer not considered at all - customer a passive receipient
Service economy or differentiation - matrix organizations created to enable innovation & thus differentiation - customer needs guessed by secondary means, rarely via direct VOC - customer gets taste of what she can demand for, still passive receipient but post purchase behavior begins to matter - value exchange still happens at single point
Behavioral economy or Pull platforms - open collaboration, innovation, co-creation, customer centricity raise their head from obscurity, thanks to a more aware customer enbaled by social media - customer demands, dictates & tests (co-creates) products/services & helps other customers - customer is integral to value creation - value exchange happens at multiple points - customer engagement goes beyond transaction into WOM, co-creation & complaining behavior

It should always have been about the customer, but thanks to the industrial revolution, it was about the capabilities of the organization rather than the needs of the customer ... and this led to transactions being paramount to relationships (how else would you get better capabilities than competition?).

Biomimicry and the Future of "Social" Business Software

2010-10-11T17:14:00.003+05:30

Credit: Benedict Campbell

As I stated in my previous post (Complex Adaptive System and the "please adjust" culture of India), I am getting back to my first love, BPM, as part of the bigger picture view I want to take on how 'social' is going to affect businesses. No, am not abandoning Social CRM, just trying to figure out an integrated approach that would include BPM, Learning & Innovation. CRM is just one of the many business processes in an organization, and thus, I look at CRM as a subset of BPM. However, that is not what the market believes in I guess. [Update: I am considering CRM as a subset of BPM solely from a business processes perspective, as in, when a BPM consultant would model the processes. CRM is a business strategy, since customers are core to the business, and building & maintaining relationship with them is paramount to the existence of the business.]

As far as personal experience goes, BPM for me started out as a set of either workflow automation tools or middleware tools and merged sometime back. And then as an afterthought lessons from BPR where incorporated and BPMN was created to keep everybody happy. But thats just my understanding of the way things developed and am bound to get hit on that take. :) (I was not into reading analyst reports or attending conferences back then, definitely not into blogs.) So, to keep things on a safer ground, in this post I will just consider how the use of social technologies are going to affect the way business processes are handled.

Collaboration
The main theme emerging out of the noise of social computing in business terms is collaboration - within, outside & across the organizational boundaries. And this when collaboration is in reality a fundamental biological behaviour which takes place anywhere humans work together. Collaboration cannot happen in the absence of communication, but the only means of communication available in an enterprise are private channels. Even emails, though can happen among a group of people, is not public. Nobody outside the group is free to view the email, let alone participate in the conversation. If help is needed from someone outside the existing group, they need to be included by the existing members. Collaboration under such circumstances becomes all about social negotiation and not about the creative output.

What social technologies offer is a way to communicate in public, attracting people who might be of help or value, allow people to discover newer things they might not have known. And since they are transparent and in the open, it lends to increased trust among the members and thus a tighter group thats goes out of the way to help each other.

Thankfully thought leaders in collaborative/social BPM have been considering the impact of the above aspect both for process modelling as well as execution.

Emergence
The other theme emerging is that of emergence itself. Though it is not of surprise to those who are innovative or creative, it certainly is a big deal for the traditional command & control style businesses entrenched in the "push" market/economy. Luck & serendipity are two other closely related aspects to that of emergence. As opposed to determining what the outcomes will be everytime, we need to let things emerge out of the seeming anarchy/chaos that is social media. In business context, employees already follow certain rules & regulations of the company as well as have a certain organizational culture and individual work habits. By letting employees communicate & collaborate with each other across departmental/functional/informational/other silos we are not only letting serendipity to happen but by allowing them to share & build upon/use knowledge & ideas of other employees, are also letting solutions & innovations emerge.

But today's enterprise systems do not allow serendipity to happen emergence in business, if any, is outside the system. ERP, CRM, BPM, HRM, etc. are all modeled top down and allow for only certain information to be processed, a work to be done. Communication, if any, in these systems are limited to that which is obligated by regulation/process. There is no scope for new patterns to emerge since every outcome is predetermined. That which is not, is an exception. Ask an average BPM consultant and chances are that she/he will prattle that the increasing number of new situations we infrequently face in the fast changing world it is today are an exception and needs to be handled as such by the system. Number of times a situation is faced may be too few to warrant for incorporating it into the system, but number of such situations is increasing. Kind of a long tail of business processes in the enterprise.

Biomimicry
Wikipedia defines Biomimicry or biomimetics as:

"examination of nature, its models, systems, processes, and elements to emulate or take inspiration from in order to solve human problems."

I have been interested in Biology since very young. Though I did not like the prospect of having to read for so many years to become a doctor & thus gave that profession a pass, Biology has always been a close second to my love for computers. And no wonder that I look for inspiration from it when I have to think through the various aspects of leveraging social computing in a business context. Thankfully I am not alone in this and am discovering more people as with each day I spend looking for inspiration from nature.

A living system is defined as a network of processes that simultaneously produce and realize that same network as a unity.

I consider a parallel between living systems and a group of people collaborating/working together. The above definition hopefully provides you insights into why I consider biology for inspiration wrt social computing in general. And in particular, where it comes to business innovation, I can't help considering about the brain.

Synapses
In neurology, a synapse is a junction that permits a neuron to pass an electrical or chemical signal to another cell. An electrical synapse is between two neurons & has been associated with memory storage in the cerebellum. A chemical synapse is between a neuron & a non-neuronal cell, like those in a muscle or glands and thus producing a direct action (muscle) or a directive (hormones from glands). As this MIT Technology Review article states about a research on Memristors by HP labs:

One of the defining features of the connections between neurons is that they become stronger when neurons fire together; hence the phrase "neurons that fire together, wire together", a phenomenon otherwise known as Hebbian learning. Various experiments have shown that this effect is most pronounced early in the learning process, when the increase in connection strength is greatest. Later learning merely reinforces the links.

And this is exactly why I have chosen the word Synapse to name a framework I & my team (they are right now being convinced to get a complete buy-in) are trying to come up with for leveraging social technologies for business.

Synapses 2.0, as I call it, aims at bringing value to the business in terms of addressing

collaboration in the user tasks as part of various business processes (Social CRM/ERP/BPM, etc.),
learning inherent in the system/platform (Social Learning) in conjunction with the corporate training goals & systems and
finally the epitome of connected individuals - innovation - both democratized sourcing/filtering/execution as well as beuracratic sponsoring.

To know more about my inspirations from Biology, do read the following posts:

As a bonus, do read this post on the Eight Metaphors of an Organization, that tries to capture the essence of the complex & expensive book, Images of Organization: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/13/the-eight-metaphors-of-organization/

So, are you convinced that emergence needs to be included when considering BPM in the light of social software for business? I would love to have your feedback/inputs/brickbats. And I hope I can cover more ground in the next few weeks.

CAS & the 'please adjust' culture of India

2010-10-05T20:55:00.002+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

I have been interested in Complex Adaptive Systems (the concept, not the details & the mathematics!) ever since I read Sukumar's tweets from a KM meet in Chennai where Dave Snowden talked about it and then I listened to the recordings of Dave's speech at the event. As is my wont, I Googled about it, got a Wikipedia article about it, went deeper thanks to the various hyperlinks and also read some of the PDFs that Google scholar threw up in addition to looking at some of what the Google image searches threw up. Here is a great 101 on CAS: http://www.trojanmice.com/articles/complexadaptivesystems.htm. As Wikipedia puts it:

Complex adaptive systems are special cases of complex systems. They are complex in that they are diverse and made up of multiple interconnected elements (and so a part of network science) and adaptive in that they have the capacity to change and learn from experience.

Since then it has given me insights, by drawing analogies with CAS, into many of the mundane stuff I never paid attention to before, like why is the traffic so chaotic in India and yet we survive?

Traffic rules are easy or complicated depending on the local rules & their interpretations and implementations. But navigating a heavy traffic is complex, especially so in India. This is so because nobody follows much of the rules, except for driving on the left side of the road, but theres no guarantee on that either. And so you see chaos like the one depicted in the infamous video below.

But do you see patterns emerging in this video? If you haven't watched it yet or it was long since you watched it for a chuckle, please do so now, I'll wait for you to answer. Did any mishap happen? While most of the western world laughed at it & most of the Indians just shrugged it as yet another day, what struck me interesting when I saw that was the patterns I could see in it.

I have driven in many cities & small towns in India, and recently in the US too. Dreaded road traffic of Kolkata, Bangalore & Chennai, though congested, have an identity of their own. You can even feel the difference in the driving pattern in different parts of the cities. Or the marked difference when you drive on the highway & then enter one of these cities, or vice versa. I could see that in the US too. Though I did not drive myself on the highways, Mitch Lieberman, a very good friend and great thought leader in Social CRM, recently took me on a road drive from Boston to NYC, via the quaint Mystic where we stopped for lunch. And we passed through various states and I could feel the difference in the driving patterns.

There may be some other reason to all this that I am unaware of but it did strike me that may be this is all because we drivers learn & adapt on the fly and though some generic rules are followed, thus constrained into a system, patterns emerge.

In India we call this the "please adjust" culture. That is, adapt to the environment and the other actors in the system. There is a funny ad that captures the culture perfectly, no adjustment needed (pun intended).

And another key aspect is that the actors in the system 'learn'. Sure, some like to call this a Complex Evolving System, but thats getting too academic I guess. For simplicity lets just stick with CAS as the common term.

Business processes needs to be considered as CAS, as Max brings to our attention in his latest post on why BPMN & Flowcharts are insufficient. Or as mentioned here, not a CAS rather an analogy of CAS.

Whichever it is, I am decided that I will need to look at emerging patterns thanks to the use of 'social' platforms in the business ecosystem (both inside & outside the organization) as John Hagel put it at the #e20conf:

"Social softtware adoption starts with tasks (problem solving) and moves to social learning & innovation."

So expect more from me in terms of BPM, Learning (training) & Innovation that are modeled taking into consideration the fact that business is a CAS and not merely a complicated system that can be explained/modeled with reductionist methods. Top-down modeling though good for strategy & business goal setting, bottom-up emergence needs to be leveraged for implementing them.

If it gains attention if I call them Social BPM, Social Learning (which is an old pedagogical term and not yet another new term) or Open Innovation then so be it. I am not one to fight over nomenclature beyond a certain point. Granted names & definitions are important, but I do not want to spend my time & effort in their nuances.

I strictly believe we need to look at an integrated approach to these three things for maximum leverage. When I say we might be able to use a social software, like say Jive or SocialText or Drupal Commons, to perform certain business activities, like say processing claims, I do not think it is unattainable. We can give a general construct and then allow the users to tweak their business processes by using folksonomies, activity streams, etc. and even learn from each other while doing their work. KM & Learning objectives too met on the job. And when they are tweaking their own processes, of course they are innovating, but we could also consider open innovation as a dedicated process in itself.

What do you think? Am I daft? Think this won't work? Is it Sci-fi? Pipe dream? Might be achievable? Someone needs to show it in action? Need case studies to prove they are worth looking into?

Please do let me know.

Tooling for the future business

2010-09-28T11:29:00.001+05:30

Source: Flickr

As per Epsilon Industries' Glossary: "Tooling is another name for both the process of creating the molds and other tools necessary for producing parts and the actual molds". And this is exactly what I am trying to do right now, tooling to prepare our clients for the future of business.

I have been looking out for and/or working on the various edge systems that are not yet mainstream in Business IT but will eventually be. I have seen many of them work for my employer and there are many others that I wish they would. But implementation is a pain. I need my patience.

However I was working with very many disparate pieces of the puzzles in different synapses in my brain and they are not yet completely patched up. But I think I have come a long way in the past couple of months than in the past three years to grasping much of what will be required.

These learnings, insights & inspirations have come to me from very different sources, proving to me at a very personal level that The Power of Pull is right, I did stumble upon how to mold Serendipity.

So without much ado let me come to the crux of this post. I shared some of my learnings with the technologists in Bangalore, one of the three geographic spikes for IT technologists along with Bay Area in the US and Tel Aviv in Israel. We had all gotten together at a barcamp, an unconference, mid of this month and shared many insights with each other. These are the kinds of places where serendipity happens and I wanted people to have that from my session too. And this is what I presented at the session:

Institutional & business model innovation for the technologists

View more presentations from Prem Kumar Aparanji.

Each slide in it is worth a post, but the time I had was mere 45 minutes. I could barely touch upon them all. But these are actually to rejig your brain, not to teach you. Hope it gives you serendipity too. Let me know. :)

Future of Work?

2010-09-11T01:15:00.000+05:30

Source: Flickr

Millenials, or rather any generation, are a product of their era - especially the one they witnessed/endured during their teens. And this then manifests itself back on the world when they enter the work world.

Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com joked earlier this week that Lotus Notes was conceived before Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook. :)

In a similar vein, 21 year old CEO of scvngr.com, a social/location based gaming & gaming platform start-up, who bets the future on game mechanics, stated he has never known a world without social media.

But the Millennials the world over are not the same, though much more similar than the earlier generations, thanks to digital communications that they were born into.

Sharing, at least the water cooler variety, has been a cultural edifice in the west. Not so in India. The age old Hitopadesha's claim that the wealth of knowledge is the only one that grows when spent notwithstanding the equivalent of boomer generation in India abhorred sharing. Especially the bad news. Ditto with the elder Gen X too. The Millennials are much more prone to sharing, may be way too much. Much to the chagrin of the CIOs.

So IT managers used to not hearing upfront about the bad news from their offshore vendors and acclimatized to it might have a pleasant surprise when they start hearing more news of all kinds from the millennials getting into the team lead roles at offshore. Also, brace yourselves for some 'no's and challenges sent back your way. And it is not a bad thing. :)

Add to these the fact that as knowledge workers we are all now arriving at the gates of a post scarcity economy. Information is just a click away. Experience curve (as defined by Boston Consulting Group) tapers off pretty fast too. Collaboration, which can help beat the tapering experience curve, is second nature to the Millennials. Company boundaries can't stop them from reaching out to their networks & communities that extend well beyond those corporate figments of imagination called firewalls.

Sorry to jot down some random thoughts and add to the confusion. But I recommend The Power of Pull by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison if you want to discombobulate and look at what the future might hold and how we can be prepared for it.

Of Gurus, Pundits, Mantras and Social CRM

2010-09-07T20:37:00.000+05:30

From Darkness to Light. Source: Flickr

Jacob Morgan, Principal of Chess Media Group who taught me to eat with chop sticks and introduced me to Sushi, has a personal rant about social CRM gurus & guidance out there on CMS Wire. I tried posting a comment but it went into moderation. Don't know when & if it will be approved. Either ways I wanted to share my thoughts and troubles here too.

Every time someone uses the term Guru I am sure a billion people die a bit.

FWIW:

Guru comes from two words in Sanskrit - Gu & Ru ... quoting from Advayataraka Upanishad 14—18, verse 5

The syllable gu means shadows
The syllable ru, he who disperses them,
Because of the power to disperse darkness
the guru is thus named.

Generally speaking, it is used to refer to a person who guides you, a teacher.

A Pundit OTOH means a learned man, a scholar.

HTH.

As for your points about lofty phrases like “well you can’t be social externally until you are social internally,” or “you have to change your corporate culture first,” or “we need to spend a few months researching and developing a long term strategy before we can do anything”, these are phrases taken out of context. Mere chants of sound bites without understanding the meaning of the 'mantra'.

BTW, 'mantra' comes from Sanskrit root words Man & Tra which loosely translates to 'mind tool'. Though a heavy emphasis is laid on the sounds (vibrations), the meaning is equally important. But again, as with the word Guru, the meaning is lost in translation and people just concentrate on the mindless (& mind numbing) chanting.

The phrases you quote are very god examples of sound bites which have been chanted endlessly without understanding their true meaning/worth.

Go not to the person who merely uses the right sound bites, go to the person who explains you the meaning behind them, paints the complete picture, who can take from the 'here' to the 'there'.

Leading in an increasingly networked world, personal notes

2010-09-02T11:51:00.002+05:30

Source: Flickr

There are a lot of books and research studies coming up about leading in the new reality & future. The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion by John Hagel & co, Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business by Ranjay Gulati, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead by Charlene Li, The Hyper-Social Organization: Eclipse Your Competition by Leveraging Social Media by Francois Gossieaux & Ed Moran are a few examples. Thought I would share some of my own thoughts from my experiences, observations, readings & learnings.

Within a traditional organization with hierarchies, many (most?) managers tend to use their positional power to get things done from others rather than influence/motivate/collaborate with them to get the tasks done. Did you just say "What? Collaborate with my subordinates? They better do what is assigned to them.", welcome to the flux! :)

The later becomes more pronounced in matrix organizations where a person could be reporting into multiple people. Matrix organizations were built to break the silos & be able to be more innovative & responsive to the market.

Futurists keep talking about flat organizations - an hierarchy-less anarchy for the traditionalists. Most of the discussions I have come across about a flat organization is built around two loci:

better collaboration within the organization to be more response & innovative - ever heard the "real time is not fast enough" mantra, its in vogue of late?
because the millennials cannot be bothered with hierarchy

I do not think we will see the breakdown of hierarchies en masse automagically in the next 5-10 years nor will the silos dissolve away completely, the jingoism & rhetorics of the hyperbole spewers not withstanding. Examples like Zappos will crop up now and then, but we need to understand, realize & accept that some modicum of hierarchy & silos will always be required. Zappos does have a CEO in Tony Hsieh.

Hierarchies & silos feed on expertise and specialization (respectively?), both of which are not stuff we can do away with. At least as long as humans cannot become jack of all trades and master of them too. However the times are a-changing.

The kind of rigid hierarchies & silos we see / have seen in the past two centuries were formed because of the coming of the new mega enterprises that was focused on mass production and mass marketing and pushing merchandise & services on to the consumers at very low costs. Need for innovation and staying ahead of the competition, etc. needed the creation of matrix organizations where specialists & experts from across the organizations came together for the duration of the projects they were entrusted. These teams would disband & regroup with a different set of people & a different set of goals/objectives & time lines.

Project Management became the need of the hour. So we saw general/departmental managers as well as project managers in organizations. These matrix structures are seen in the most feverishly innovating industries like the hi-tech, electronics & software. Or even the pharma industries where they are in an endless pursuit of the discovery of ever new molecules for fighting diseases which we did not even know existed a century ago.

However, the management style of the individuals - the general/departmental manager or the project manager - still belongs, for the most part, to the two categories I stated at the beginning of the post - positional, influential/motivational. Or a combination of the two, which might mean situational leadership qualities.

With the increase in the number of generation Y/millenials/digital natives (as opposed to digital migrants) people in the workforce and the virtualization of the workplace due to trends like work from home or outsourcing & offshoring, etc. the ability to leverage ones positional power diminishes. Positional power decreases as is in a matrix organization, outsourcing diminishes it even further. But enter crowdsourcing or open innovation, the positional power is for all practical purposes zero.

Linus Torvalds holds no positional power in the development of Linux kernel like the product managers at most software product companies like Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Oracle or any of the umpteen other software companies would. Linus influences the development heavily & motivates the developers. He is a god for most aspiring code contributors and many would gladly die on his behalf in the notorious flame wars rampant in the open source communities where fights (debates) erupt around very technical nitty-gritties. But then again, even Linus would have to convince everybody of the technical soundness of his approach/thoughts to muster support.

Take heart, this is not going to be the immediate future for all of you. Generally speaking, the more innovative you are or want to be, the more matrix or flatter your organization is or going to be.

There are a few skills that you could leverage irrespective of whether you are going to end up in a matrix or flat organization:

Share your knowledge. And not just you, encourage your teams & networks to do so too. Knowledge is the only wealth that grows when you distribute it, both for the provider as well as the receiver. Think about it. Its an age old saying in India, but true nonetheless.
Resuse. Do not fall into the "not invented here" syndrome or be delusional in thinking you will get more brownie points, from whoever you long to get them, if you are able to build stuff from the ground up. Its inefficient, wastes time and money. Surely you have heard about not having to reinvent the wheel? Well of course we are assuming here that people have been encouraged to share and thus a body of work & knowledge is already available for you to tap into.
Mentor and reverse mentor. Coach your subordinates or people in your network who are not at the same expertise level as you. It need not be a specialty, which might actually require training not mere coaching. At the same time, be open to newer ideas and ways of working. Learn from the others in your team or network. They might be younger to you or lower in the corporate rungs. But they might still have expertise on some aspect that you might not, say effectively using the social media / social networking sites. Of course it presupposes the fact that you have surrounded yourself with people who have diverse expertise if not specialties as well as different way of looking at things than yours.

Are there any other traits you have found useful, effective or efficient? Please do share with us in the comments. :)

Social Media vs Social Customer Relationship

2010-08-21T05:22:00.002+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Notice that I have not used the words marketing or management in the title of this post? This post is just some notes I wanted to take (& thus share) based on what I am reading in the marvelous book called "Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers", which was recommended to me by equally awesome friend & co-conspirator, innovator, agent provocateur in #scrm circles - Wim Rampen. ;)

The book itself has been co-created with contributions from 470 practitioners from 45 countries. And is backed by both academic & real world research. The business model canvas is built up of 9 building blocks of a business.

Customer Segments
Value Propositions
Channels
Customer Relationships (Yay! That’s my topic!)
Revenue Streams
Key Resources
Key Activities
Key Partnerships
Cost Structure

Without getting into too much details about all the blocks, I would like to draw your attention to only three blocks - Channels, Customer Relationships & Key Activities.

Channels are used to describe how a company communicates with and reaches its customer segments to deliver a value proposition (products/services/offerings). So communication, distribution and sales, or in general, the customer touch points are considered under the Channels block.

With me so far?

So tell me, isn't social media a Channel in this perspective? There would be others obviously and social media is just another channel. Right? Ok, now that we are agreed on this, lets proceed further.

Customer Relationships block describes the types of relationships that the company would have with the specific customer segments, ranging from personal to automated, depending upon the customer segment.

Simple? No brouhaha about databases, command & control, management is evil, software, ugly UI, IT project failures, vendors, etc.?

So when you consider this, CRM has just another extra word in it - management. And this is supposed to help the company manage its Customer Relationships. It thus means the philosophy, culture, processes, tools, etc. needed to help achieve the goal of whatever kind of relationship the company wants to establish with the customer.

CRM-ers will tell you that CRM consists of Marketing, Sales & Customer Service. I guess you could park them under the Key Activities block of the business model canvas. These three activities help us achieve the types of Customer Relationship that the company wants to establish with its Customer Segment. Hope we are now agreed on that aspect as well?

So now, what exactly does then Social Customer Relationship mean, if we are to get back to the title of this post?

You could look at that two ways -

Social + Customer Relationship

or

Social Customer + Relationship

The first has 'social' as a qualifier and is usually defined by many as adding of the new social media channel for communicating with the customers. Which looking at how the building bock of a business model are defined doesn't make proper sense at all. You should be calling it a social channel. And what differentiates the social media from the tradition means of communication? Well, it makes the communication be many to many, public, not private.

What about the second combination? What does a social customer mean? Haven't people always been 'social'? After all, man is a social animal!

Does it mean a customer using the social media to communicate? That doesn't make proper sense, we are still looking at a 'social channel' then. So who is a 'social customer'? I am still trying to grasp this in a manner I can convey it properly. And since there is no academic research (that I know of) to prove that there is indeed a breed that is different from a traditional customer, it is mostly a proposition, based on some trends noticed in customer behavior. May or may not be due to social media. What are these trends?

First is increased possibility to receive information & suggestions from other customers about offerings from various vendors. Though this is how it has always been, newer communication channels are allowing people from near & far share their views & suggestions to one and all across the globe. It takes 300 million tons of CO2 per year just to transmit bits – upload photos, share video, etc. - so we are pretty busy on the Internet. But also look beyond them at mobiles. There are ~4.6 Billion mobile phones in the world today. That's far bigger than any other social network on the Internet. Conversations have increased a lot and people needn't be at a single physical location to have the conversation. The epistolary culture is back. So this collaboration & co-operation between the customers has magnified manifold in terms of both reach & speed.

That brings us to the Second trend which is the implications of this increased propensity to collaborate with people across the globe, due to not only communication channels but also because of the changes in the political situations & the trade / commerce agreements, fall of iron curtains, dethroning of despots, etc. We are now looking at a global scale of collaboration & co-operation in addition to mere communication. Call it Social Capital maybe, this co-operation & collaboration?

So, social in 'social customer' is in a sense just a matter of scale - increased reach & speed of communication, collaboration & co-operation among the customers across the globe. But there is also another aspect in this scale - mass - as in individuals vs communities. Consumer communities have existed since long. But the impromptu gather of customers to communicate, collaborate, co-operate, creating flash communities is yet another scale!

So, its a vaster, faster and heavier customer we are looking at when we talk about a social customer.

And so, the type of customer relationships you want changes when you consider the mass of the customer (individual/community), its the strategies that change when you look at the reach & speed, which means your key activities need tweaking to scale.

And thus, when you look at Social Customer Relationship Management, companies need to consider the mass of the customer for the type of relationship and companies need to consider the reach & speed of the customer for the type of Key Activities needed to achieve the customer relationships.

Summary
Customer Relationships - Mass of the customer (individual vs communities)
Key Activities - Reach & Speed of the customer (real time social media monitoring & response/customer service; word of mouth/viral marketing; customer referrals in sales; etc.)

[Updated: 21st Aug 2010, 1:21 AM EST] I realised I was wrong above. So below is my newer understanding.

Customer Segment - Mass of the customer (individual vs communities)
Channel - Reach of the customer is increased by the channels (social media, social networking sites, mobiles, txt/sms, etc.)
Key Activities - Speed of customer communications means the company has to respond appropriately too & thus tweak its Key Activities to match.

Clear?

Thanks, those were just my notes. Not preachings. So please feel free to let me know if I have erred.

Knowledge stocks vs Knowledge flows

2010-08-11T19:35:00.003+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Traditional IT has been about facilitating the creation & maintenance of Information flows & Data bases. A step ahead of data bases were the knowledge bases, like the intranet which is currently in use. Information flows are seen in the various workflows built within various systems as well as traditional collaboration tools like email & chat.

Social software have generally proven to be a good fit for knowledge flows. This also tends to bring people on the edges together and thus allowing for greater chances of cross pollination of knowledge/ideas. This could lead to increased serendipity as well as employee engagement too.

Another aspect lending to employee engagement could be the conversational approach the top management could adopt to convey their messages to the employees. Though a comment to comment response is not advisable for the top executives, the fact that employees can leave comments on the communication from the top management would provide them with a sense of deeper engagement.

Tacit knowledge is not something that can be captured in knowledge bases and can never really be transmitted to others. Even an apprentice does not learn everything the master knows, even though its the best way for passing on the knowledge from one person to another and thus ensure its longevity.

How do I capture these themes of tacit knowledge, serendipity, employee engagement, etc. as use cases or storyboards?

Social Software for the Enterprise - revisiting the FLOSS options

2010-08-09T06:33:00.000+05:30

Candy floss tree. Source: Flickr

I got to know of a new entrant into the confused enterprise 2.0 space which has been open sourced and seems to be funded by the tax payers money of US. Lockheed Martin's new Eureka Streams. Being a FLOSS junkie and somewhat involved in social software for the enterprise use ;) I had to look into it.

And then I noticed in the new stats feature of the blogger platform that the third most read post in my blog between May 2010 & now is an old post where I review some options for Social CRM apps. So I had to write this post to include two new entrants from the FLOSS side.

I was first surprised that there was no mention of Eureka Streams in the twitter broadcasts though it is old news as per twitter speeds. I actually got to know of it from my geeky source Slashdot where Wired's story of a CIA Software developer going open source was discussed. And so I tweeted it out & it got picked up by the enterprise 2.0 and social CRM folks.

Here are a few takes I have on this whole FLOSS based Enterprise Social Networking software thing bubbling up.

Intention

Since the White House has committed itself to open source, many of its vendors are showing a penchant for open sourcing their offerings, though not always using the existing body of work, and thus not really saving the tax payers money. Because money is being spent on writing code all over again. Because the open source communities are being forked. They are unable to figure out the real intent behind the open sourcing of the software from these vendors and are hesitant to put in their effort into these software.

FLOSS developers are not "open up the code & they will come" kind of folks. They are a very hardy community and you need to be a part of that community and gain their trust to be able to get their help. If you need to understand the FLOSS communities better, you need to read Jono Bacon's book Art of Community.

So understandably, there are some apprehensions & possibly aspersions about Lockheed Martin opening up its Enterprise 2.0 code.

Follow Through

Next is the adoption of FLOSS in enterprises. The biggest issue with FLOSS adoption in enterprises, as I also pointed out in my older post is the absence of a neck to strangle when things go wrong. Whom do you call up when theres something wrong with the system? FLOSS is typically supported by a community of developers who are contributing their free time to the development and maintenance of the software. So if you are in a hurry, you need to pay up. This is usually not a problem for enterprises since they are ready to pay up (and if the FLOSS is good, you hardly need to call up someone for help). But the real problem is whom to pay? Companies like RedHat have teams to provide service & support based on SLAs.

Is Lockheed Martin ready to provide such an SLA based support service? Well, since social software is not considered to be business critical, you might now require strict SLAs like that for a Linux server, but that might change too (am looking into a far future where social software is as ubiquitous as email is now).

Integrations

Social software in general has a hurdle in enterprise adoption - integration with existing enterprise systems. And the list includes:

email (Exchange & Notes)
IM (Sametime & OCS)
file sharing (Sharepoint, Alfresco)
static Knowledge Bases/Intranets built using CMS (no option for commenting/rating/social sharing are the biggest draw backs)
HRMS/ERP (SAP, Peoplesoft)
CRMS (Siebel, SFDC, MS Dynamics)
portlets/widgets/mashups for any other enterprise apps (WebSphere, jBoss Portals, Corizon, open social)
SSO (AD, LDAP)
backup & archiving.

Provide out of the box integration capabilities for the leading vendors and separate integrators for the less popular or more arcane/obscure systems and I guess you are golden with the enterprises. Of course these integrators need to be maintained & supported too. I am guess enterprises would be ready to pay a premium here for the more obscure ones.

Enterprise Social Network (ESN) - software framework

The way I have been looking at this space, all enterprise social software require a few major social features:

content/conversations(wikis, blogs, forums, comments)
networking (profiles, friends, hierarchy/org chart)
annotations (tagging, rating, likes, sharing/notifying)
collaboration (groups, communities, workspaces, calendar, events, todos, tasks)
activity streams (facebook like streams of what everybody in your network & communities have been doing)

Elaboration of the above list might require a separate post if you are not aware of it already. ;) In which case you better hire me. :D

Since these are required in an enterprise, granular access controls & security are important aspects along with the integrations & support aspects I detailed above.

BTW, the only manner in which the various offerings (both proprietary & FLOSS) differ technically are the underlying architectures, UI & terminology.

New FLOSS entrants

Interestingly there are two new entrants in the FLOSS Social Apps category this past few months: Acquia's Drupal Commons & LM's Eureka Streams.

Drupal Commons
Drupal Commons is the good old LAMP based robust CMS Drupal and a few modules that make it a ESN software as described in the above section. The company founded by Drupal founders to address the support issues as highlighted in the Follow Through section above, called Acquia, integrated the Drupal core and the social modules, QAs it and publishes it as an integrated product called Drupal Commons and provides professional services too.

I had the good fortune of getting a demonstration of Drupal Commons from Acquia's CEO Jay Baston, right after the day it's 1.0 version was released (you could say it took ten years to come out, which is good for ya! ;) ). And I must say that I was might impressed with what came out of the box. They got the ESN framework as I understand it quite right, but they do not (yet) have out of the box integrations to the legacy enterprise apps as I point out above. Some are available, some not. But at least the majority of the modules exist already. Its only a matter of incorporating them into the Drupal Commons out of the box. I am hoping their release cycles would be faster initially, to get it all stable and robust soon.

For someone with a greenfield, this seems to be a nice option though. If you do not have a CMS or if you already have a Drupal based CMS (or if you want to migrate to a more 'social' CMS) this can be a strong contender.

If LAMP is not a problem for your IT/architecture department and you are ok with some code customizations, I think Acquia's Drupal Commons is a very inclusion in your list of vendors you are analyzing. Even against the established Enterprise 2.0 products. I hope Acquia makes it to the Gartner MQ. For that they would have to get bigger revenues. And thats a business execution rather than the software.

If you want to know why the Drupal guys came out with this after nearly ten years of building them in a fashion, read this post by Drupal creator Dries Buytaert where he fires a salvo back at some FUD from another leading vendor.

Eureka Streams
Lockheed Martin earlier struggled with user adoption for nearly four years when they implemented a project called Unity that integrated Google Enterprise Search Appliance (GSA), Microsoft’s Windows Sharepoint Servicess (WSS) and NewsGator’s Enterprise Server. That's when they figured out that conversations around the content was the missing aspect. And thus was born Eureka Streams, which basically covers the Networking (profiles, friends) and Activity streams from my ESN software framework.

I looked at their Github page, and for an open source project its a pretty lonely project. It builds on various Apache projects and the code itself is available under Apache 2.0 license, meaning you could white label it! Another aspect is, if you are a Java shop, you can get this into your enterprise without much heartburn as a LAMP based solution would. But then, you would still have to rely on other systems to provide the other aspects from my ESN framework - blogs, wikis, forums, communities, etc.

Summary

The enterprise social networking software space is heating up thanks to their predominant advantages in Knowledge Management, Collaboration & employee engagement as well as social CRM. This is becoming an interesting area since many FLOSS projects have had a lot of time to grow in this space without being considered at an enterprise level before. There are also incumbents thanks to White House's commitment to FLOSS, and these need to provide a support system to get FLOSS community's trust as well as enterprise adoption. You need to map out your organization's business cases & use cases as well as IT considerations before you chose on a vendor. Not an easy task like the vendors might want you to believe.

Interesting times indeed. All the best!

N.B.: All the above are my personal opinions and are not to be utilized for your decision making. You need to indemnify me of any adverse outcomes. I do not have any relationship with either Acquia or Lockheed Martin. Though I was in a demo from Acquia, they did not expect me to write anything about them.

The new epistolary culture

2010-08-07T23:11:00.000+05:30

Image via Wikipedia

Anybody here read Jane Austen's novels? You know the woman who wrote novels that inspired movies like Bride & Prejudice that Aishwarya Rai acted in? You haven't seen the movie? I haven't either. But you surely have read those novesl? No? Please go over to gutenberg.org and download the free etext/audio books and read/listen to them or buy the books from anywhere, Landmark/Crossword/favorite bookstore/footpath. Its all public domain and you can download them with impunity, if you had any. Without fearing any piracy implications. Her books are more than 70 years old and/or she died 60 years ago or any other such law of a country that provides them copyrights.

But wait, this post is not about public domain books, though I would like to ramble on about Project Gutenberg that contains more than 33,000 free ebooks (you got to go there to read all public domain books, meaning all the classics).

This post is about the epistolary culture.

Did you just go, "Eh? Whats an epistolary culture?" like me when I first came across that in this brilliantly written post, though quite misleadingly titled "Intimacy as text, Twitter as tongue"?

The word "Epistolary" comes from the Spanish word "Epistola" which means a letter. So an Epistolary culture means a culture that relied heavily on letters. Like the ones depicted in Jane Austen's novels. Where the characters would write very intimate letters with extreme emotion to each other but would find it very awkward when meeting in real life (as we geeks like to say, IRL) in social settings thanks to the etiquettes of 18th/19th century.

So why am I, a FLOSS/social CRM geek writing about literature all of a sudden? And an epistolary culture?

Because, my friends, I loved classical literature during my early teens. But no, wait. Thats nearly 20 years ago. Why am I writing about them now?

Ok. Seriously (& truthfully) how many of you have had pen friends? You know who pen friends are? They are friends from distant places whom we have not met (nor could you dream of meeting for the most part) but with whom we correspond via letters.

I had one, though it did not blossom well, thanks to the break up of the USSR. I had found my pen friend there thanks to a children's magazine from the erstwhile USSR many of you would not even know - Misha (if you are aware of it, you get a brownie point, but if you actually are a fan of it even now, I will friend you without a blink).

Pen friends are cherished memories of a bygone era. We lament its loss thanks to the technologies taking over and the permeance of the rat race in our lives. We do not write letters to our grandparents, cousins, etc. We don't anxiously wait for the postman any more. Do you even know who the postman is for your area?

This Op-Ed column in New York Times called "Tweet less, Kiss more" asks you to be more physically grounded and enjoy the trip rather than talking on the cellphone while driving.

But did we really lose the epistolary culture? Keeping in touch with friends and relatives far away? Or the other related literary habit of writing daily diaries, usually confessional?

The post I refered to earlier has this to say:

For all the internet’s much-noted permissiveness and available pornography, the increasing presence of computers in our private lives enables a new, overwhelming prudishness — something akin to a second age of letters.

Internet socialization is far closer to a 19th century mode of intimacy than to a dystopian future of tragically disconnected robot prostitutes. There’s a Jane Austen-ish quality to online social life. The written word gains unmatched power and inarguable primacy.

So is it a horrible thing? Losing physical relationship to the power of the written word? Should I just come and shake your hands and talk to you rather than write this blog post? Would I have had the opportunity of knowing so many of you so intimately if I did it all in the physical world?

Well, if you must give up technology, please, by all means use a paper and pen to write out your tweets. Wall Street Journal has written an article on how you could do that! ;)

And may be kissing is not always a good idea either as these girls in this TV ad from an online dating service tell you!

Blog, tweet or kiss - its all about the social animal's need to be in touch with the others of the species.

No man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main.

-- John Donne, Devotions (1624)

So how do you look at it? Personally and from a business perspective? Do let us know in the comments.

Social Media Channel for Regulated Industries

2010-07-30T00:55:00.003+05:30

I can't listen, even if I want to! Source: Flickr

Pfizer tomtomed about what they call as the first slideshare channel from a regulated industry player and many social media pundits have taken up arms against this claim & termed the channel as not social at all since Pfizer is not interacting, but rather only using it again as a channel to publish its materials - a very one way communication.

I thought it would be prudent to make it plain about some of the aspects of social media that is not conducive to the regulated industry, especially Pharma. Of course there are far better informed people than me in this area, but this is just for my audience. Also, these are only my limited understanding, what I have gained by working with clients in these industries as well as attending seminars & being a panelist in their industry meetings.

Importantly, I am not a lawyer or an expert in these areas. You should not hold me responsible for anything that you do with the information I write in this post, if you are ok with that, please continue reading more after the jump. (If anybody from Pharma industry gets to read this & there are any factual mistakes, please do leave a comment & I will make the corrections).

First of all, we need to understand that before a Pharma can publish any material about its products, whether promotional or educational, it has to adhere to some stipulations from the FDA which fall under DDMAC, for example they cannot just mention about the benefits but also have to explicitly mention about the risks of their drug. Well there are far more, but its all about the content, not the channel. So as a simple thumb rule, if you are a Pharma marketer, just be aware of the FDA/DDMAC rules that apply to your traditional promotional/education content, be it text or video or audio. Similar rules apply to the content of the video irrespective of whether that gets aired on TV or gets published on youtube.

So we have some clarity on the content creation part. If not, go on, hit this link and listen into the podcast with an FDA official to hear about it. And do you realize that FDA is a regulator only for the USA & that in the EU Pharma companies cannot do promotions about their prescription medicines? The rules are stricter there.

So, it is no wonder that Pfizer's SlideShare channel has so less about its products and has more about its corporate functions &/or performance.

Ok, now we all know that social media is not only about publishing content but also about listening & responding/engaging with the audiences/community. Heres the issue for Pharma (and I believe for Financial too, not too sure) - if ever a pharma employee gets to hear about an adverse event about a drug their employer produces (comments like, you know I used XYZ for my headache & I think my mouth was going dry) they have to immediately get more information about that adverse event & file it with FDA (similar rule exists for Europe too).

And the FDA guidelines (or are they rules?) for Adverse Event reporting state that you have to get the patient details, the doctor details, the ailment details, the drug & the adverse event details before you can even submit them to FDA. Thanks to countless lawsuits & fines, etc. the Pharma companies typically have it like a code of conduct that they should follow up on the conversation or whatever & dig out the information if they come across adverse events. Anywhere. Including social media.

So if there is somebody writing on the Pfizer Viagra website using Google Sidewiki that their arm fell off after taking their medication, what is Pfizer to do?

It is an adverse event, not spam! Sorry, you and me can argue about it until the cows come home, but that's the Pharma industry for you Mr. Social Media Guru/Pundit (whatever other term you use to blaspheme these exalted roles).

I am given to believe that in the financial industry, if you hear about a complaint you are bound to service it. I am not too sure about it & its all hearsay.

The point I am trying to make is listening (& engaging) in social media is not an easy job for the regulated industry. There are various factors in play that can help them, mainly technology, but also importantly educating its employees about these aspects as well as getting clarity from the regulatory bodies about the implications of this new channel that can talk back on the existing policies.

These are just a few of the pains of the regulated industry. I have already blogged about the social media archival requirements in the financial industry. If you are aware of any more such issues, please do share it with us via the comments. :)

Update: John Mack (@pharmaguy) points us to this report on how Pharma can overcome the listening problems and also shares why Pfizer would win his "Close, but no Cigar Award".

Is @oldspice engaging with the social customer - PR or SCRM?

2010-07-26T04:38:00.001+05:30

Flintlock pistol flashes. Source: Denver Direct

If you are from the US & watch TV or follow twitter, facebook and/or youtube closely to catch the fleeting memes as they unfold, you must have obviously noted the exalted buzz around the recent ad campaign to revive P&G's Old Spice brand, first on TV and then on the aforementioned social media channels.

Its been a hugely successful PR/Marketing campaign and I hear it to have proven ROI too already! I will not get too much into the details of the campaign & what worked and if it can be replicated or not, etc. You can get those from other sites far better suited to the purpose than mine. (some links provided below). I did not get into the discussions initiated by Jacob Morgan either (who initiated me to Sushi when I was in SF in May 2010 & is an up & coming Gen Y dude in the Social CRM arena).

What prompted to post me this commentary on that awesomely brilliant & tough campaign (Imagine 200+ videos within 2 days, can you script it all? Or even act in those many short clips?) is the editorial pick by CustomerThink.com of a post by old colleague Harish Kotadia (and currently an independent consultant) claiming this to be the best ever Social CRM campaign.

I was intrigued & confounded. I believed that this ad campaign was a brilliant stroke of genius & hard work that leveraged the power of social media & networking sites to make a marketing campaign viral. I however did not think of the campaign as a holistic Social CRM campaign. Many people claimed that the brilliance was in the engagement that the campaigners had with the social media users (lets call them social customers here because they are social media users who are potential customers of Old Spice).

I am a huge proponent of businesses listening & engaging on social media (in addition to influencing, measuring, analysing) and this should have stoked me. But it put me into deeper confusions! So I asked on twitter:

"So the ad agency did the listening, corresponding, engaging act on behalf of @oldspice. Did P&G or its LOB engage w/ customers?"

To which good friend & star analyst exemplar Esteban Kolsky responded:

"why does it matter who did it? somebody did. customers got what they wanted / needed. outsourcing is not bad just because"

And then added:

"however, that may just be the difference between SCRM and PR/Marketing efforts"

And thats exactly I had wanted to know from the cacophonous cognoscenti (again thanks to Esteban for this term, I think its brilliant!) that interacts on twitter, just to check if I was the lone person with those thoughts.

For me Social CRM is a step ahead (above?) Social Media Marketing (read this post for more) and SCRM entails the involvement the whole organization, not just Marketing/PR. The feedback loop did not encroach much within the organization (check out Esteban's experience continuum).

So when its merely the Marketing/PR that listens & engages on the social media, for me, its just the mouth piece talking. Its not a visceral response. How many other departments within the Old Spice brand/LOB (whatever they call it) of P&G get involved in this? The campaign itself was scripted & executed by an ad agency Wieden & Kennedy.

Another friend, ex analyst, currently head of social channel at huge PR agency, Natalie Petouhoff said that the campaign made big ROI & why would I not consider it Social CRM? To which I responded "high ROI for the company & flash in the pan entertainment for the customers."

Meaning, that there is nothing with a staying power in it for either the organization or the customers. Its something that kick started the brand again for Old Spice and brought it back into the current psyche of the social customer. And thats a great thing to do!

Did this campaign in any way lend to autopoiesis between the externally & internally facing teams of Old Spice &/or P&G?

So, end of long rant & bottom line: IMHO, this is an example of a brilliant social media marketing campaign, just not social CRM.

Social Media Archiving

2010-07-14T17:45:00.001+05:30

Pain in the neck? Source: Flickr

“Every firm that intends to communicate, or permit its associated persons to communicate through social media sites must first ensure that it can retain records of those communications.”

– FINRA Regulatory Notice (January 2010)

I cannot comment on a regulatory policy of USA, IANAL and I am an alien to boot. But this sure adds a layer in the social media communications that makes the businesses slightly slower to adopt/use. What the above means is that we have been ignoring the specific needs of the various regulated industries in Social CRM, Social Media Marketing, etc.

We now need to not only monitor the social media or have CoTweet/Hootsuite kind of tools, but also be able to provide archiving solutions for the communications happening via social media. Audit Trails from a programmatic perspective & archiving from a infrastructure perspective. Kind of makes sense why Dell claims that 90% of data saved by enterprises are not read again! ;)

However, we do not need to archive each & every tweet or friending happening on the social web, just those that emanate from the company & its people as its employees (am still not clear if an employee can use their personal account for personal reasons without having to archive).

Some vendors have cropped up to take advantage of this situation and the ensuing FUD:

Social Media Archiving is not an optional need in BFS, yet the current options (AFAIK) are cloud based (SaaS) offerings and BFS might not be ready for it yet. I am not aware of the complete industry, but the few biggies that I do know of, would not like to put such communications data into the cloud.

You can listen in to this podcast on guidance on the use of blogs and social networking sites for business communications.

From Team work to Autopoiesis in the Social Firm

2010-07-11T15:04:00.000+05:30

Drawing Hands by M.C. Escher. Source: Wikipedia

Humans have always been social & until they were in villages, everyone knew everyone in their communities. With the growth of cities, and the rat race, a lot of that social aspect of humans is left underutilized. You know what happens to your muscles when you don't any longer use them as you used to? Yeah. But thanks to the Internet & especially whats now called the Web2.0 tech, which gave rise to social media & social networking sites, and the ever increasing computing capabilities in the mobile phones, people can find some help in re-exercising their social 'muscles'.

But this post is not about that. I wanted to talk about the Social Firm or the Social Business or the Social Enterprise (some call it the socialprise) and what potentials I see in them (mostly at a very high level, so high that its more like wishful thinking / philosophical).

Ever since I came across this wikipedia article on Autopoiesis (don't remember how) I have been fascinated by the concept & have wished it w.r.t. the internal & external use of social technologies by a business/enterprise/firm.

Many organizations have now warmed up to the idea of leveraging the social media to reach out to ever growing number of people on the Internet and is mostly driven by either the marketing or customer service departments. Whats also interesting in this increasing adoption is that the tools required are mostly available in the cloud (or as SaaS if you prefer that term) and that means that the CMO (or whoever funds it) gets the subscription directly from the vendors and do not have to go to IT (CIO/CTO, whoever manages the enterprise IT) for help. This leaves the IT in the blind and they are not at all aware of the use of these tools by the business teams. Many a times, these tools are used more as an experiment - to dip the toes in the social media water, so to say. These pet projects are easy to sponsor since the subscription costs are usually within the budgets of many people in the business teams. Thus you might even see multiple teams using social media in the organization for different purposes! (This leads to a whole range of issues, lets not get into them now).

Many enterprises, the large ones especially (and per my own experience, mainly from the regulated industries) are increasingly interested in the role of social technologies inside the organization's firewall. Well, for one, they are realizing its great potential in improved collaboration across the organization (and these are usually large in head count as well as geographically dispersed ones) and for another, they are channelizing the employees need to use social tech by providing a platform within the safe confines of the organization's firewall. More use inside is correlated to less use outside (in public social media) and thus lesser risk. (Risk is lessened/mitigated in many number of ways, but lets not get into the details right away). Bottom line, these collaborative social technologies are finding increasing interest from an organizational initiative perspective. Since these are organizational initiatives and its IT, the initiative is driven by the IT department with heavy integration with all the business units.

And from my own experience in the last quarter of the first decade of this new millennium (the past 2-3 years) I can say that most clients who come to us seeking help with this internal use of social technologies they are aware that something is being done from a Social Media Marketing &/or Social CRM perspective but they are not interested in that and they don't see it of being any relevance to the collaborative social technologies (also limitingly called as Enterprise 2.0).

I started my time with social technologies by implementing them for internal use, back in 2005-2006 and then slowly but surely covered ground with social media and eventually social CRM too. So I am very comfortable with which ever aspect you are looking at, technically speaking.

And I am worried about this cognizant (excuse my use of the word) avoidance of each other by the teams working on the external & internal use of social technologies in an organization.

Make no mistake, they both will have to integrate pretty soon in the game (say next 5-10 years, but thats just wishful thinking on my part, not any stab at predicting the future) but most probably they will end being like this:

Some might go to this stage:

But you know, the goal is Autopoiesis, the canocial example of which is the biological cell. :) As wikipedia puts it:

The eukaryotic cell, for example, is made of various biochemical components such as nucleic acids and proteins, and is organized into bounded structures such as the cell nucleus, various organelles, a cell membrane and cytoskeleton. These structures, based on an external flow of molecules and energy, produce the components which, in turn, continue to maintain the organized bounded structure that gives rise to these components.

So how do we get from the current state of cognizant avoidance to an autopoietic system? Thoughts?

Tale of an Old business and a Social Customer

2010-05-27T08:01:00.001+05:30

Old Punk

I went to BSNL, a traditional, state owned national telephony provider here in India, yesterday to get a new EV-DO connection (we will talk about it a bit later). Folks working there are quaint & older than those in the private service providers. Clean, but not necessarily well groomed. The lady at the customer service booth does not even use a mobile phone. She has a landline at home and at office. So per her admission she doesn't need one. And her employer hasn't given her one anyway. The exchange is in an old buliding, with overgrown grasses & shrubs, etc. and just an old man for 'security'.

People who have not had the experience of dealing with BSNL, can take a look at their corporate website & certainly get a feel of what they are offline too. Informational in parts, functional, not really usable, not much support. Pretty inside-out as some of my friends would say. Its actually a big change in BSNL that they have the most up to date information on plans, tariffs, etc. on their website. You can even quote it when you are dealing with the customer service folks!

And most people dread its customer service. I will reserve my judgment on that. As for me, I have been their customer for the past five years & my dad has been for far longer. I have been a customer of Airtel too - one of the leading telecom brands in India (which is actually a big thing globally speaking too, in sheer numbers, India has vast number of phones & mobiles). Without saying good or bad, I'll say that relatively speaking, Airtel customer service is not credible & BSNL's is not humble.

BSNL is however undergoing a marked change of late. It is providing some options that we savvy folks have taken for granted. Stuff like being able to change ones rate plan by calling up a call center rather than submitting a written application! Yes, BSNL until recently need you to submit a written application! Like the letter to the principal kind of stuff we were taught to write as kids.

And theres one hitch to this new change though.

Yesterday we wanted to change our broadband plan & when we asked the lady at the customer service center who should it be addressed to & what should we write, she said a written application will not be accepted & it has to be done via the phone. We were happy to know that. No more hassles of making a visit to the exchange/service center and thus face the traffic of Bangalore!

Then came an elderly lady asking abt the same (BTW, broadband does seem to be getting mainstream! There was another middle aged lady inquiring abt a new broadband connection. You can get one within a week even if you don't have a landline!). When she was told that she had to call a particular number, tell her consumer number (which can be found in her monthly bill) and then the plan she wants to change to, she was mortified! She faced a very daunting task! She told the customer service lady with a pleading voice that there was nobody at home to do it. The customer service lady, unable to help due to new processes, just tried to explain the old lady by repeating what she spoke earlier about the new steps to do the plan change.

As I said earlier in the post, I had gone shopping for an EV-DO card for my laptop. Let me take you through my buying process. I had a need arousal since I am traveling a lot these days as well as getting wire faults frequently. I needed an failover option for my wired broadband connection at home as well as be able to go roaming. Ofcourse I had seen so many people talk about their Tata Photon+ and Reliance Netconnect options on twitter. I also saw how handy were the AT&T data cards & MiFi cards (not available in India) when I traveled in the US at various events this year. So it was both an intrinsic need as well as influenced by external factors.

I then got into the information gathering phase to know my options. I found BSNL 3G, EV-DO, Tata Photon+ & Reliance Netconnect of course and checked out their tariffs on their respective sites after googling them. Google actually gave me links to sites that discussed about these products too like mouthshut.com & consumercomplaints.in. I turned to my online social networks too for more information on their performance, costs, etc.

Now armed with a lot of information, I zeroed in on BSNL EV-DO option since it had the least monthly charges - Rs. 750 for unlimited usage, whereas others gave you only 2 GB per month for that amount! That was the decision process

Next was the purchasing phase. I had to go to the customer service center & fill out a form and pay the amount. I couldn't get a demo, since the demo piece was given to someone. Not sure if it was sold off or given away. The customer service lady was livid. Not sure if it was real or made up, but she went on about how its a malpractice (durabhyasa) and should not be encouraged. I then asked her about the procedure to deactivate the connection. She was aghast & asked me why am I asking about disconnecting even before getting it. Seems there is a three month lock-in period before you can surrender your connection. But you still cant return the data card itself. Well, anyway, I paid the money, waited for a few minutes. She activated the card & gave it to me. I got back home.

Now begins my post purchase behavior. I tried plugging it into my laptop that runs Ubuntu. Ubuntu usually picks up most mobile broadband devices by default & usually doesn't require any driver download, etc. But I was in for a surprise. After inserting the sleek little glossy (with lots of our fingerprints) EV-DO card into the USB port, I could see a CDROM icon on the desktop!

Googling around I eventually found a fresh blog post with a detailed step by step instructions to get it working on Ubuntu 10.04. Both the data card & the OS are pretty new, only available in the past month or so and the combination is very minuscule. So this was quite unexpected but very welcome! Incidentally, I did not try the BSNL call centers for support!

I now only have to figure out where I can get those small cross headed screw drivers nearby so that I can open the EV-DO card & insert the R-UIM card to be able to connect. I have to get out into the real world for that & can't expect to find a solution from the social web! ;)

Update: Against all odds, I got a resolution to that issue about the screws too, on the same blog post, in the comments!

Millenials seek Meaning. Are they in your Social CRM strategy?

2010-05-18T04:11:00.000+05:30

Source: Flickr

On my flight from Dubai to Atlanta aboard DL 007, I read a short piece in the Delta in flight magazine on the Millenials. Given my interest in all things affecting Social CRM (hope its not news to you) I read it & found it interesting.
The article was written as a blurb for a newly released book called The M Factor, which is based on an extensive research done on the Gen Y or Millenials or Digital Natives or just about anybody born after 1980.

The article goes into a lot of details about the earlier generations, the differences in outlooks, etc. There are supposedly (I haven't read the book) a lot of case studies in the book. You could read the book [The M-Factor: How the Millennial Generation Is Rocking the Workplace] or the article. But heres what I found very interesting for me:

Millenials want to know how they are making a difference, both at their companies and in the world. Millenials want to feel they are contributing. Millenials want to innovate.

There are some insights on how to keep them motivated in that article too- its not all about money. Just give them a Meaning, a Purpose in what they do.

Club that with this piece from FastCompany about what the boffins figured out about our brains and our motivations:

Rewards for top performers lead them to worse performance. And if you want to foster innovation, bonuses won't work either. Rather, it's all about letting people slip from under line management and strike out on their own, on projects they care about.

So how are you addressing the Millenials as part of your Social CRM/Social Business/Collaborative Business/whatever business strategy?

XAuth & the Social CRM IT Landscape

2010-04-21T13:00:00.000+05:30

I believe that my year old IT Landscape diagram is up for a few updates now. Predominantly in the Analysis side of things as well as in the examples for each of the components in it. There is however one tech that is muddling my thoughts. XAuth.

XAuth is a new initiative from Google, Yahoo!, Meebo, etc. - an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web. It could help as a bridge between 'individual' & 'community' social channels as per our SCRM vision diagram & in the User Components section of the SCRM IT Landscape diagram.

It is still not clear to me how much of a value it provides in terms of the functionality that it believes it provides to the end users. One clear value is that it will make the existing Open ID, OAuth, etc. very usable for the end users & thus could get wider usage. Businesses need to use it if they want to provide a good user experience, but wonder if it would be easier or tougher to get profile information into the enterprise systems. Because XAuth is supposed to be very good with Privacy implementation. The users' id even is not shared with anybody, just that the user is logged into some site that uses XAuth.

Links for further reading:

What: http://xauth.org/info/
Why: http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2010/04/simplifying-social-web-with-xauth.html
http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2010/04/xauth_oauth_and_yahoo_openid.html
http://www.fastcompany.com/1621779/xauth-explained-solving-a-real-social-net-problem-you-may-never-know-you-had
How: http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-xauth-to-simplify-social-web.html

How is Social CRM different from Social Media Marketing?

2010-03-27T05:41:00.001+05:30

Source: Flickr

There is a great discussion going on in Frederique Garzon's (@lalachad) blog post titled "Just what is Social CRM anyway?".

I am merely reprinting what I posted there (with a few minor fixes), and thus what follows would seem a bit out of place/context. I strongly recommend that you first read her questions & then continue further. In fact, you must also go through all the awesome comments in the post.

Businesses, especially large ones, those that call themselves enterprises, formed after the industrialization of manufacturing. When they were formed, they modeled themselves from what inspirations they could get from the other two huge organizations in existence then – government & military. So there is a heavy emphasis on command & control.

The advent of mass media enabled people with big bucks to go broadcast their messages. The common man had no choice but to listen to them because these ads subsidized their viewing costs. As a medium, these did not render to a way discussion (I like Mitch’s way of putting it – dialog, not two one-way communication). Businesses excelled in broadcasting. Since customers voice was not much heard they were thought to be dumb. Any negative messages were squashed by the PR machines with their heavy clout/lobbies with the media houses.

The relationship with the customer weaned to a mere transactional one.

But then comes a great improvement in the computing power, miniaturization, advances in communications, reduction in costs due to outsourcing, globalization, etc. and suddenly there is a big availability of cheap yet power & fast tools that allows people to both create & share content as well as connections at unimaginable speeds & to far reaching audiences.

Unfortunately though, at around the same time that these developments were happening in technology, which is early turn of this millennium, the CTO/CIOs were busy making their systems – into which heavy CapEx was invested – secure, robust, scalable, provide the maximum ROI by extending the life of the systems (hardware & software) as much as possible.

This meant that people had at home far more powerful, cheaper & usable technology than in the workplace.

Obviously the common man was better equipped & also had the lead in learning the new tools & thus become empowered as an individual as well as become powerful as part of communities. These communities began by being an extension of the offline communities (Facebook was available to dorm mates). They soon started following the geeks & nerds and started forming communities around common interests too, not just their real life acquaintances. So you now have very powerful communities where each individual is empowered more than the enterprises.

What happens?

Humans being humans, the new empowered individual, & thus the communities, doing unto the enterprises what they could not before – talk back. They are ready to take vengeance. Just look at what happens with instances like the Nestle affair.

So, is it the business’ imperative to offer the olive branch & start building the relationship from the ground up.

Merely listening to the social media & engaging through a community manager does not make a social media marketing what it can really be. The listening is still about the two one-way communication and the engaging is about the control/moderation. IMHO, that is not a new beginning to the relationship with the customer. Its still the same old story, but with a new way of imposing yourself onto the customer.

Not sure if I have answered any of the questions like Wim did – by “cutting to the chase”. But these are some fundamental philosophical stuff that the businesses need to realize. If they do, its Social CRM. If they don’t, its Social Media Marketing or Social Support Communities. Social CRM is when the C-level/boardroom are looking at it as a strategy that cuts across various business functions & not restricting it to marketing / support / sales / other.

Social CRM & the 3 Idiots

2010-03-21T21:41:00.002+05:30

Source: Flickr

Update: I just realised that this is my 400th post in this blog. :)

My friends who do not watch Bollywood movies might not be aware of the recent phenomenon called 3 Idiots in the Indian movie scene. The rest must know the iconoclast Rancho's world view & many would have nodded their heads with the iconodule Chatur's world view.

So what does this movie have anything to do with Social CRM? No, am not talking about the movie as a case study in how they used social media to sell more.

I do not know if the Chetan Bhagat & 3 Idiots fiasco can be termed as a social media campaign, in spite of the fact that both Chetan Bhagat (on who's book Five Point Someone the movie is supposedly based) & Aamir Khan (plays the main protagonist, Rancho) have blogs & are there was a twitter hullabaloo some weeks back.

The reason I bring up 3 Idiots is because of the incessant & unending fight about the definition of the term Social CRM.

Theres a scene in the movie where two freshers (freshmen) are asked by their professor to define a machine. The iconoclaust (Rancho, played by Aamir Khan) defines machine as something that makes our work easier. The professor is not impressed & Chatur, our iconodule (a caricature of the bookish toppers?), prattles this definition:

The scene ends with Rancho getting dispelled from the class, but returning to get back his "instruments that record analyse summarize organize debate and explain information which are illustrative non-illustrative hardbound paperback jacketed non-jacketed with forward, introduction, table of contents, index that are indented for the englightnment, understanding enrichment enhancement and education of the human brain thru sensory root of vision... sometimes touch". His books.

My learning from this scene is that there are academic definitions (mostly encompassing the characteristics) and then there are simplistic definitions (mostly stating the ramifications) that help one grasp the crux of the idea.

And also that definitions differ from person to person.

Everybody perceives everything in a different way. A simple question "Define yourselves" can perplex most people. And then theres no right or wrong answer again. But without getting into the philosophical or the metaphysical, what am trying to drive at is that it doesn't matter how we word the definition, just how effectively we convey the idea.

Paul Greenberg gives both an academic sounding definition of Social CRM as well as a simplistic one.

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment.

It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

The definition encompasses a lot of underlying concepts in it. You must read the full post where Paul puts his stake in the ground to grasp some of them or to understand more deeply, read his book - CRM @ The Speed of Light, 4th Ed. Open Disclosure: I haven't read that book yet, but have the great fortune of actually interacting with Paul both in cyberspace as well as realspace. And I have heard from people who have read the book & I trust them, as I trust Paul. And no, I did not get any money from Paul for recommending his books.

If its all still a pain to understand whats Social CRM, then you need to wait a bit more until you get more literature about how to do it or how it works or examples of it. The area is still nascent & am not sure if the market has yet been created.

I would like to conclude this post with a request: Please lets not fight about what to name it or how to word the definition.

If you want, you can get a very comprehensive list of definitions for Social CRM here. Hope we can agree to disagree on the term/definition and move ahead? Lets help people understand how to do it.

Social Customer, Online Communities, Social CRM and Social Business

2010-03-19T12:47:00.000+05:30

Source: Flickr

Good friend, professor, thought leader, VP at SugarCRM and great guy to hang out with, Mitch Lieberman has put together a slick presentation using the awesome Prezi.com as only a professor with real world business experience can do.

His post gives some background on the presentation and provides context too. So please ensure you go through it.

His prezi helps you get your bearings if your thoughts center around:

whats new with the customer (what does a Social Customer mean?)
why is the power of communities increasingly important (what's new with online communities?)
how are they affecting Business As Usual (is it all a risk or an opportunity or just a new way of life?)

Social Business through Social CRM on Prezi

Why the need to add "Social" to the term "CRM"?

2010-03-09T11:29:00.003+05:30

Source: Flickr

This is an interesting question that I see cropping up of late, since the news about the arrival of the new kid on the block - Social CRM - is reaching new ears. Is it just old wine in a new bottle or is it something more disruptive? I have been asked this when I meet people & strike a conversation around Social CRM, mostly from the CRM folks, who have just heard about it. The technologists are fine with it, its just another channel to be integrated to CRM, like an email or a call center, and they are happy if you give them the specifics on the integration modules.

But then people who are not too deep in CRM technology or who are involved with CRM from a business perspective (the later I have been interacting more only in the past couple of years), are not too happy with yet another prefix to CRM - it brings to them memories of the previous attempts like eCRM & mCRM.

In a recent post by John Bell of Ogilvy titled "What Defines Social CRM?", Tim Sanchez, General Manager of ABIS Consulting Group, asks in the comments section:

"The more I hear it, the more I don't like it. If there's such a thing as "Social" CRM, then shouldn't there be "Non-Social" CRM? Isn't CRM all-encompassing of the relationship with the CUSTOMER? ... There's no doubt that CRM has many different facets, but I'd rather refine the definition of CRM instead of sticking another fork in the road."

Thus I figured I might as well put my thoughts around that here. :)

Yes, it is always about the customer & they have always been social. But unfortunately, the businesses haven't been. Its always been increasingly inside-out ever since the advent of industrial revolution, the firm / the company and mass media. These advances made the businesses product centric & company centric. The conversation has ever since been around the product or the company.

Will my message better my brand or not. Send a message out & see if it sticks & we get in some money. Or listen in to what they are saying & figure out if they might be interested in our products & then send them targeted messages. Yes, these are important, but not all or the most efficient or effective.

Social CRM is not out there to replace CRM. As a philosophy, it extends it, as a technology, well, it extends it. But if you follow me, both the 'extends' have different connotations.

As a philosophy, it now goads the businesses to consider getting 'social', not merely transactional. If you are still not clear about the 'social' bit, consider not measure everything with money. For example, Social Capital is something to consider too, though you cannot relate to it in terms of getting revenues out of it, like you would calculate for your human capital or infrastructural capital. Being social means being part of the community, embedding your value into your relationships. Make yourself indispensable to the community not by being monopolistic but being the enabler/catalyst who helps the community to increase its potential/worth/utility.

Graham Hill's manifesto for a social business might give you more thinking points.

To muddle things further, may be ask the businesses to consider it from the customer's buying process instead of the company's sales process/funnel?

As a technology, its a bit complicated if not convoluted, as the above philosophy might seem to many. The advances in online social networking & communities, social media and other advances like miniaturization & increased mobility (flipcam, iPhone/Android, etc.) or democratization of product design (tabletop 3D printer, threadless.com), has allowed the people be able to create and share both content & connections at very high speeds and with very little transaction costs means that the very nature & essence of the Firms are being shifted.

Still don't get it? Well, then consider this Forbes.com piece titled CIOs in a Virtual World which talks about the changing role of the CIO from that of a code developement organization to that of a procurement & delivery organization. (Full disclosure: Malcom Frank is SVP of Strategy at Cognizant, where I work).

"There is suddenly a credibility crisis that wasn't necessarily of the current CIOs' making. Over the last 10 years they were told to keep it cheap, keep it secure and keep it stable. They did that. What happened is corporate IT became pretty boring, while for the past 10 years there has been an explosion on the consumer technology side. People have a fabulous experience at home on a Sunday night for an $800 investment, and then they get to work and are faced with old technology and a bill for $20 million."

So now, tell me, do these change the philosophy that the businesses need to adopt towards their customer-centricity or not? Are the technologies a mere strap on of a new channel to CRM, even though they can be depicted as such, as was in the case of eCRM & mCRM, which was nothing but merely delivering the CRM app on a new platform - web instead of client/server and mobile devices rather than desktops - at the core (or some might argue that it was also about integrating newer channels)?

CRM 2.0 - Understanding the Social CRM Landscape

View more presentations from Prem Kumar Aparanji.

So, though it has always been about the customer, there is a huge shift happening. This huge change might not have a big impact on the businesses if we do not treat it a bit differently. Social CRM is not here to replace CRM, it is to get businesses to consider it from the new perspective of having to respond to the social customer who is now armed with technologies that the businesses have been ignoring for the past 10 years or so. As well as overcoming the practices that were impressed upon us by the industrial revolution & mass media.

Whuffie, Social Capital, the Firm and the Enterprise

2010-03-07T12:07:00.001+05:30

Source: Flickr

Theres a great debate/discussion going on about Whuffie & Social Capital and how it applies to the social media & online networks/communities on blogs & twitter.

It all started with a post by Brian Solis, a very well reputed leader in the PR world & social media, titled Social Capital: The Currency of the Social Economy. He deeply derives on the book called The Whuffie Factor by Tara "missrogue" Hunt.

Venessa Miemis kicked off an animated conversation on twitter around the difference of Social Capital (as suggested by socio-politico-economists) & Reputation economy (as suggested by Whuffie). She topped it off with an excellent post titled: Social Capital is not the same as Whuffie that I highly recommend everyone to read before proceeding further. Worth every minute you spend reading & digesting it.

In the language of game theory, social capital is the excess propensity to play cooperative solutions in prisoner's dilemma games. Venessa deliberates in detail about the concept of Social Capital, so I will not write redundant stuff. Instead lets consider what's Whuffie.

The term Whuffie comes from Cory Doctorow's sci-fi novel Down and Out in the Magical Kingdom, which is set in a post-scarcity economy. As per the novel, Whuffie is an ephemeral, reputation based token for trading.

"Whuffie recaptured the true essence of money: in the old days, if you were broke but respected, you wouldn't starve; contrariwise, if you were rich and hated, no sum could buy you security and peace. By measuring the thing that money really represented — your personal capital with your friends and neighbors — you more accurately gauged your success"

Whuffie represents the reputation economy, an individual's personal capital; not the social capital that is inherent in the networks, built with trust, that eases cooperation among the individuals.

Source: Emergent by Design

Venessa's map above depicts very clearly the key concepts of Social Capital - relationships, trust, norms, ethics, morality, reciprocity. This is much more than mere reputation alone.

Ok, I think we have flogged the dead horse enough to drive home the point - Whuffie is reputation, not social capital. Now lets proceed further & see how it is relevant to Social CRM, especially to the firm & the enterprise. I will not pose to be an expert in economics, political science or sociology. I am merely a student trying to think through this all.

First lets consider the firm & the enterprise. The Firm, by some definitions, exists to maximize utility. And since the concept of utility is a bit philosophical, as in it is not always observable and thus cannot be measured people resort to using proxies. Hence, in common understanding, or lets say in a pragmatic manner, the firm exists to maximize wealth, revenue or profit.

As per the seminal work of Coase [1937. The nature of the firm. Economica 4 (November): 386-405.], the firm exists separate from a market because of the transaction costs.

"Coase noted that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something with a market. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally and somehow avoid these costs."

Coase does not consider non-contractual relationships, as between friends or family members. Thus he inherently leaves out the Social Capital out of the equation. Also, considering the reducing costs of transactions, thanks to the advances & reach of the digital & internet technologies, the existence of the firm, as defined by Coase, is beginning to be challenged.

On the other hand in the art & science of enterprise design Giachetti [Design of Enterprise Systems, Theory, Architecture, and Methods, CRC Press, Boca Raton, FL, 2010.] defines enterprise as below:

"The term enterprise refers to a complex, socio-technical system that comprises interdependent resources of people, information, and technology that must interact with each other and their environment in support of a common mission."

The enterprise as you can see, consists of a network & its environment, that must collaborate to maximize utility.

Ok, so how does the enterprise now calculate Social Capital? Paldam [Social Capital: One or Many? - Issues in New Political Economy, 2001] tries to meld three different concepts of Social Capital to come with different methods & measures.

Source: Google Books

He argues that

"There is far more theory and speculation than measurement: Social capital is a new field, suffering from a great lack of good, reliable data. Both time series and cross-country evidence are missing. In the meantime much speculation is going on."

After a lengthy discussion on the various concepts, Paldam concludes that "the two most promising avenues to measurement are Putnam’s Instrument and generalized trust on the one side and network/trust payoffs on the other side". To know more about the two methods, you need to go through the 22 page article. ;)

Further Reading:

The Social CRM Zeitgeist

2010-03-06T11:19:00.002+05:30

Image Source: Flickr

I woke up this Saturday morning, yet again, to an important announcement that was made the evening of the US' Friday. And I find the world changed yet again. :)

I am of course talking about the humongous report on what consists of Social CRM at the moment that the Altimeter group has come out with - "Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management".

Put together by Ray Wang & Jeremiah Owyang after talking to a huge cross section of the influencers & vendors in Social CRM and a hundred pioneers, the report captures the zeitgeist of the Social CRM landscape and provides the 18 use cases that they recognized! The talking alone would have drained me, but these guys talked & even made sense out of it all! And to top it all, they make it very easy to understand. :)

Image Source: Flickr

The 18 use cases is a good starting point & helps businesses to figure out where they could get started with Social CRM, if they already do not know. Most businesses that I had talked to do have a clue where it could possibly help their business, but not sure how to do it as part of a business strategy. So they are left to resort to some patch work of tactics. The 18 use cases list would help the businesses have an epiphany.

But the report doesn't stop there. It also gives you the state of the IT enablers as of today.

Don't get me wrong. IT has been sullied a lot in the previous round of CRM buzz due to the various failed projects, and then finally it dawned on the business world that CRM is not about the software as the vendors led them to believe, but CRM is a business philosophy.

This does not change with Social CRM - its also about the business philosophy, about being customer centric. However, this round its been forced upon the businesses because of the advances in the social web - or rather the adoption of the advances in technologies by the customers. So it is imperative that IT gets into the equation, however they cannot dictate how to do it. IT's role is to help the business with the infrastructure. And so why IT is part of the decision making process, it does not drive it.

Ok, getting down from my soapbox, lets see why the Altimeter report is important from an IT perspective.

Image Source: Flickr

They actually talked to the vendors in the fray to provide Social CRM solutions (even if they do not claim or realize to be in the fray) and rated their wares. The matrix they have created (Magic Quadrant?) is very good in stating which are the technologies that the businesses can have right now as well as which are the technologies that businesses are willing to buy, by when. A great tool for both vendors as well as businesses [very similar to a MQ I had in our innovations team to help figure out which are the ideas we should invest in to convert them into Innovations].

This is a very key babystep in furthering the field of Social CRM. Comes right next to the stake in the ground on the definition of Social CRM by Paul Greenberg, which I see as an academic definition that most practitioners derive from to fit their purposes, including myself and our team. There is no one present who can cater to the whole gamut that Paul's definition encompasses.

The use cases are a key intermediary step in furthering the understanding of the field and convert into an application in the business.

Businesses need to then figure out how to implement it - whats the methodology, what frameworks are available, whats the governance model. This is what keeps me busy right now. :)

Social CRM: The New Rules of Relationship Management

View more documents from Jeremiah Owyang.

P.S.: I am very glad that Altimeter decided to release this report under the Creative Commons license! So please feel free to reuse it, but don't you try to sell it off as yours & cheat Altimeter. Always attribute it to them and don't take money for the report.

Pardon me for crying out loud, am not a Social CRM vendor.

2010-03-04T09:12:00.002+05:30

Image Source: Flickr

During my discussions around Social CRM in the past couple of years in the social media/networks and realspace too, I have had to face some prejudice from various people that was directed towards me as though I were a software vendor with the best interests of my products' revenues in mind and not my customers.

Their prejudice is not without reason nor without basis. There has been a long history of vendors trying to skew the message & brainwash the market into believing that the software is the panacea to all their business ills.

Well, am no software vendor - I work for an organization that is into Consulting & Systems Integration (along with market research, BPO, etc. among other things).

As a policy we are vendor agnostic & have the best interests of our customers & their customers in our mind when we suggest any software over the other. A very substantial amount of our business is from existing customers. We have shown solidarity with our customers during the recession since we are their partners more than vendors. Our metrics are not so that the employees stand to gain by prolonging the projects, but rather our metrics and our culture insist us to be focused on Quality & deadlines. It all about the internal norms. The managers are provided incentives on their "Business Effectiveness Scores" which is focused on customer satisfaction, not milking the customers. Well, there are many more & not all are unique to my employer. You can find variations of these in the other big Indian IT offshorers too.

And to do justice to our customers, we do partner with software vendors to get trained on their products, build POCs/joint solutions, map our customers to bring the best of both worlds to our customer base, etc. But we do not accept any percentages or commissions for the software sale. This is to keep us straight and not have the wrong incentives in place.

And finally, w.r.t. Social CRM, it is all about the 'social' - the community. Community is people, not software. And that is the reason I actually am deep rooted into the online communities. I interact with the community with no other reason than to enrich myself & the community. And I cannot just leech, I have to contribute back too. So you find me blogging (allowing their syndication too) & tweeting (especially on the #scrm tag) and curating for the social CRM community.

I cannot just build my own personal brand and thus leverage it for business, I have to consider the growth of the community itself. Its about increase the size of the pie rather than garnering a bigger share of the pie. People consider me to be a connector in the communities and thus term me as influential. For me, its about increasing the size of the k shell of the people in the communities - meaning, that it is important to have others to be connected to more people too, not just myself.

"a k-shell is simply a network pruned down to the nodes with more than k neighbours. Individuals in the highest k-shells are the most influential spreaders."

And finally, without getting involved in the community, how can I claim to understand it? And without 'getting' an online community, how can I 'consult' my customers about the best way to get involved with the communities? Mere integration of systems cannot do much. If CRM software installation projects failed it was because they were looked at as IT projects, not business projects enabled by IT/software. The same holds good for online communities, only more so.

Merely aggregating the research from others as well as the concepts and wrap it to prove it as their own will not take me far. It will bring me business and it will set me up for good, but not something that I can live with.

My video interview with Lithium Tech - all about Social CRM

2010-02-20T21:07:00.001+05:30

As an innovations manager at the Customer Solutions Practice of Cognizant, I had been enabling the teams to come up with new ideas, build on them, provide support to develop them into offerings, market them, the whole shebang.

We even built a system that allowed people to submit ideas, comment on them, rate them, categorize them, allow the management to evaluate them (Neuron Magic Quadrant), provided a hosted project environment for collaborating on the building and an application exchange for the finished offerings.

Thats how the whole idea of integrating social technologies with CRM systems came up. I took a personal interest in it & started looking into it in full earnest & over time with passion and increasing conviction & commitment.

Lithium is one such organization that has the conviction, commitment & passion in leveraging the power of the communities for business.

I had been to their offices during my San Francisco visit earlier this week to discuss on our new partnership & chalk out joint strategies to help our customers dig into the whole social thing.

I met with a lot of people there with whom I have been conversing over twitter, mails, etc. and it was all a new kind of deja vu. Meeting people in the flesh after long interactions over the digital medium is not new to me (thanks to the onsite/offshore model at Cognizant) but the interactions that we have over twitter is not really a "professional" relationship.

And I am glad to say that this new way of communicating brings in that extra social touch that sometimes is lacking in the professional email interactions.

Paul Gilliham, Lithium's Director of Customer Marketing interviewed me when I visited their Emeryville offices. It was fun (lots of passersby interrupting the interview for one) and revealing to me. The setup was all so very simple - just a camcorder, a flip cam, a lapel mic and two tripods - and yet am impressed with the quality of the video. Take a look for yourself:

Thank you Paul for the honor! :) (And thanks for introducing me to a new term - whistlestop tour!)

Dumbing down Social CRM

2010-02-15T02:54:00.000+05:30

White House after the blizzard (pic by mkrigsman)

I have been in the US this past week. The journey from Bangalore to Washington DC in itself was quite interesting. A three hop flight journey (BLR-DBX-ATL-IAD) that took away ~32 hours of my life, but since I traveled west (& I gained time) I lost only about 21 hours. Yeah, I know, convoluted. (This is similar to that guy Louis Wu in the Ringworld series who kept traveling west to extend his 200th birthday celebrations!)

The reason I am here in the US is to 'evangelize' Social CRM. But before I got to tell parables of the 'Customer' gospels to the flock I went for my baptism by the Pope of Social CRM - Paul Greenberg. :)

Ok, enough with cliche and cryptic ranting.

I came to US to attend what is now being called the #SCRMSummit and follow it up with meetings with my peers, clients & partners to discuss & get things done around Social CRM.

I got caught in the worst blizzard in more than a century at Washington DC, cooped up with other thought leaders, analysts, consultants, systems integrators, vendors & practitioners of Social CRM. We were 68 of us and if you hate Social CRM, this was the place to obliterate it. Sorry, you missed the chance though we have been talking about it for weeks now.

The blizzard was actually something that happened ultimately for the good (baring some set backs, like the absence of Esteban Kolksy). The original venue was closed because Federal was closed. And thus we had the venue shifted to the hotel itself where most of us were put up. That gave us all a LOT of time to catch up after the classroom sessions too. Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner ... all were in the company of these brilliant brains & great friends.

I will only say that it was AWESOME to finally get to meet all the folks with whom I had been conversing all these months on the social space & it was really really great to meet Paul Greenberg in real space! And we were all acting like a bunch of school kids meeting after the summer break. Only regret, we didn't have a group photo & I didn't get autographs of all these folks! :(

Read more about the event, our learnings & our feelings from Brian, Brent & Kathy.

So from this highly intellectual dosage of futuristic concepts around Social CRM, I had to shift my focus to the realities of life and actually think about getting a few wins around Social CRM. Social Media is easy, but maturing that to Social CRM is tougher. When you look at the whole "social" thing with a SCRM lens you need to consider organizational vision, mission, goals, objectives, etc. Aligning the org structure to these (that might mean restructuring), changing the org culture. Developing new metrics/KPIs based on the goals (not the other way round please, always have the goals in mind first). Figure out the channels (Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, Youtube, etc.) where one needs to concentrate on. Figure out what to do in those channels - listen, engage, influence? Get newer systems setup, get things integrated (multi channel, cross channel, closed loop, etc.). Set governance in place, build policies for the employees. Educate them. Synergize with the ecosystem (only the business getting social doesn't bring the best benefit, partners, vendors, distributors, etc. need to too).

But how to put the above in a structured way? So that enterprises can lap it up easily? Thats my next challenge.

As Mike Boysen says, and Esteban too, I need to dumb them down, make them simpler. (I still get questions if it is ok to get the tweets & other user generated content from the social web into the enterprise, considering the privacy issues, etc.) Or if it were Graham Hill, I would have to learn Cognitive Fluency. ;)

SFH Blog

Rethinking "Social" in 2012

What is the Social CRM interface of the future?

Is the identity of the Social Customer at risk?

Social CRM: Hiring the right definition

Free online courses from Stanford useful for Social Analytics

Adoption of social tools for collaboration requires sharing

TED talks on listening, smiling & a social technology called language

Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better

Ron Gutman: The hidden power of smiling

Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity

Digital Evangelism & Blogger Marketing in India

Quick review on Google+

Social CRM is dead, long live Social CRM?

Of Pigs, Elephants & Hives - Social CRM and Big Data

Listening vs Hearing: Its not mere semantics

Coordination, cooperation or collaboration?

Social Actors

Social Collaboration?

Is this social modeling?

That thing about culture & strategy in 'social'

The importance of Influence in the digital/social world

Definition of CLOUT

Airtel makes a sham about Unsolicited calls - 1909 cant take complaints

Social BPM - mere hype or ... ?

Spray-On solar-power cells + E-Ink = Giant Noteslates

Evolving your organization for the multi-channel customer

Q for Quandary: Did you ask who is leading social CRM?

Participation Design

LSD for the Social Business

The what & why of Business - East vis-a-vis West

Business Sutra for the Future of Work

Cloud vs Distributed computing and the Social Customer aka the Global Citizen

Digital Customer vs Social Customer - what GetSatisfaction.com got wrong

Primal needs in a digital world

Framework for a Collaborative Enterprise

Its about the Streams, but which one? Where's the time to think?

From Could to Should. Or how to rethink #scrm or even your business?

From Could to Should

Jobs

Customer Experience

Resources and Capabilities

Social and Collaboration

Acknowledgement

What led us to Social CRM? Or why should you be serious about #SCRM?

Biomimicry and the Future of "Social" Business Software

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