Social Operating Systems: The rise of social oriented architecture

As the term suggests, a social operating system is a computing platform that supports the formation, management and use of social relationship ties. In my opinion, social operating systems will have a fundamental impact on both society and business - but my interest is how they change the way people work and are empowered in their roles.

My next business book is due out in October 2010 and studies the growing influence of social operating systems in computing and considers their impact on the business world. I'm hoping to add a few early examples of how early adopter organizations are going about developing their social operating systems, the challenges they're encountering and the benefits they're seeing.

(So, to the big question!!!) Do you have a great example of an organization that has implemented (or is in the process of implementing) a social operating system. If you do, then I'd love to hear from you.

The more I get involved in IT modernization, the more I see a close relationship between the new 'social oriented architectures' on the technology horizon and the 'services oriented computing architectures' now in the throws of adoption by many corporations. In fact, social oriented computing and services oriented computing are two ends of the same subject.

Here's what I'm getting at:

There's a great deal written about Services Oriented Architecture (SOA). This term describes an approach to business information management and computing that opens up the 'information fibers' of  tightly matted corporate computing systems so that business people - and cross cutting processes - can serve themselves with applications that access the rich silos of data held within the enterprise (and also from public sites on the Web).

Sounds great doesn't it? Hmmm - but then I'm thinking, for me, when it comes to business value the point of emphasis in this IT architectural vision is on serving data rather than consuming it to bring real value to business people and the organizations they serve.

It is quite easy when working with IT to start with the answer rather than the question. People interested in IT are normallly pro-technology and want to find good reasons to do more with it. Sometimes this means doing 'clever stuff' in advance of any real demand for IT from consumers. But IT projects without strong sponsorship normally topple over at some point. Now, as I understand it, the idea of services-oriented computing is to serve up data from back office systems (and other such sources) in such a way that it can be made useful to lots of people (and processes) for many different reasons. If not properly thought through it's a bit like creating your own library of books without working out who wants to read them and why.

Social operating systems - on the other hand - start with 'what matters most' to the consumers of information, and giving these people the capability to form and support their social relationship ties, develop interest groups, share insights and applications - and one day I'm sure these workspaces will be sufficiently secure and trusted that organizations will run their business processes through them too.

If you're interested in social operating systems or social oriented architecture and have a story to tell, do please get in touch. I'd welcome your perspectives, thoughts, experiences and ideas! I'll even take predictions;-)

Why CRM Systems Drive Sales People Crazy

When they first came on the scene with SIEBEL, Customer Relationship Management systems were supposed to grow your business 'one customer at a time'. Like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems they promised a rosy future for business people of being able to deliver a 'single view' of customers - so that all of the systems in an enterprise could work together to serve up a coherent appreciation of customer conversations, account history - and most importantly, what mattered most to them (to understand 'customer value').

After decades of CRM implementations, most sales and marketing people are left cold by the impact of CRM. It simply hasn't delivered on its promises.

An agile enterprise can only achieve greater customer value - and therefore more potential to grow - if it understands what customers actually want. This insight can not be gathered OFFLINE by market research because it creates a false picture of the real-world. The only way to really understand customers and their needs is to gather insights progressively through day-to-day interactions.

In most businesses, it is the CRM system that is meant to perform this role. And CRM systems are meant to increase revenues through higher sales. That means to get the right CRM solution, the stakeholders you need to convince first of its value are the sales people.

In this document I've summarized the main underperforming feature areas of CRM systems that drive sales people (and sales managers) crazy. Next to each subject I've crudely marked the performance of CRM systems today (out of 10 when 10 is high) to show where in my experience underperformance normally exists.

WHAT SALES PEOPLE WANT

Time. Sales people are short of it and they're keen to maximize it. That means not investing time on sales opportunities unlikely to close, not spending time on unnecessary travel and not keying data into databases without good reason. Sales people want to know how best to prioritize their time to get maximum return. They know that CRM software SHOULD help them to achieve this.

7 Recording contact activities

Sales people speak to a large number of people and they need help to remember and record the detail. They want to know who they spoke to, when and why so they can always find the contacts they've spoken to and they're armed with what was discussed and what outcomes were agreed. It's normally very difficult with CRM systems to obtain a timeline view of activities that brings together all of the actions and activities of the salesperson - which is extremely helpful for the salesperson to audit their personal productivity.

7 Scheduling and coordinating meetings and events

Sales people are normally responsible for managing events and meetings so they are big users of time management and calendaring tools. Having the ability to easily schedule meetings and add custom calendar items like events, tasks, to-dos, conferences etc. is very important to them.

6 Qualifying and grouping contacts

Every contact in a sales contact database is different: Different in terms of their potential as a prospect, their degree of influence on a sales process, the nature of the relationship with the sales person, the strength of the relationship with the salesperson, the reason why the relationship exists in the first place. These nuances of relationship ties means that sales people need to categorize contacts in ways that make sense to them (in addition to the typical demographic and industry sector views that marketing people want). Therefore, tagging systems are a useful vehicle to add richer context to contact records.

[Take a typical example of a salesperson wanting to select a group of contacts with common needs. Perhaps they want to send a quick email to this group - and afterwards, perhaps they want to follow-up the emails to progress discussions. With a typical CRM system that integrates with email, they can create a group of contacts as a category perhaps but all of the contact and progress information of this micro-canvassing activity is held on each of the contact records - so it doesn't provide any 'group' view of activities. Should the salesperson wish to report on these activities to a supervisor, a cut-and-paste activity is required, probably into a spreadsheet or word processor document.]

6 Notifications and alerts

Most CRM systems are good at alerting sales people to contact activities they should perform (this is after-all the main motivator for procuring most CRM systems).  The better systems will enable sales people to create customizable hotlists and custom flags. Even so, CRM systems aren't very good at altering sales people to what they don't already know. The notifications you receive as a user are normally those that you've created yourself.

5 Setting the right balance between minimal data entry with maximum productivity

Sales people want fast data entry of 'business card' information on the prospects and contacts they meet. They want a system that enables them to plan next actions and reminders to progress sales. Most CRM systems seem to demand a high level of effort to capture data and then fail to deliver the helpful 'prompts' and productivity enablers that sales people value. So, for a salesperson, the obvious question is "Does this CRM system make me more productive or less productive?" More advanced CRM systems require data about accounts, organizations groups etc. to be entered before contacts can be added to create relationships between the contacts, their organizations, organization groups and accounts - all very sensible, but all of this complexity can make it impossible for sales people to simply add a simple contact with the smallest effort. [Features like auto scanning of business cards are very helpful to minimize data entry overheads. It's also helpful that every salesperson is able to access and use a common database system and have the opportunity to check to see if a contact already exists before they add another one to avoid double-entry of contacts - or worst case two sales people contacting the same contact.]

5 Making the task of working with data easier

When salespeople are at their laptop calling and communicating, desk space comes at a premium. They need a 'cockpit' view of everything they need to see in a single view at any point in time. Very often an editable table view is preferred to lots of forms. Most sales people want a series of views at different stages of a sales engagement process - contact card, editable list view, filtered search views, contact record profile views.

4 Account management

There are different types of sales people. Some are responsible for only a handful of major accounts and need to know everything about the accounts they manage. Today there are some good sales methods for managing accounts but most systems fall short in providing a WORKSPACE that brings together all aspects of account information management into a single cockpit.

4 Pipeline management and forecasting

So many CRM systems are poor at pipeline management and forecasting that results in salespeople and sales managers reverting to spreadsheets to manage their pipeline the way they need to for their business. This is sometimes because the pipeline forecasting requirements of the business demand such a high level of customization that a spreadsheet becomes easier - but as soon as data is entered into a spreadsheet, this insight becomes hidden from the organization.

4 Mobility

Sales people are always on the move and they need to be able to update records and keep in touch no matter where they are. While most CRM solutions will provide the ability to update records locally and then synchronize with server management systems later, online browser based systems afford the possibilities of always on communications.

3 Social networking enablers

The world is moving towards social networking platforms and social operating systems but CRM systems are locked into a world where email is assumed to be the only conduit between salespeople and their contacts. New CRM systems need to harness data insights available from popular social networking systems and aggregate this content in ways that makes it easier for salespeople to harness it. Capturing conversations conducted via online web-chat is also useful in developing richer insights of contact activity without demanding re-keying of conversation content.

3 Access to communications and collaboration enablers

Salespeople are communicators and they want access to the best tools to share their thoughts and ideas from their desktop, to communicate with clients using a mix of communications vehicles - phone, email, SMS, VoIP, web-chat etc. - and all of these communications options need to be available. Sales people also want to make sure that THEY are available to BE contacted should customers or prospects want to make contact.

3 Sales people as 'micro-marketers'

Sales people today have to be micro-marketers. They typically hold the responsibility of organizing their own micro campaigns, managing their own contact lists and follow up their sales leads with sales literature and follow-up correspondence. This means sales people need access to simple campaign list creation, batch label printing, mail merge and email marketing features.

2 Managing tenders and quotation processes

When businesses need to produce tenders and quotations, often this work is done using word processor and spreadsheet systems that are completely offline to the CRM system. The best most CRM systems can offer is to provide a link to a document repository containing this information.

1 Telling sales people things they don't already know about their accounts/territories

Sales people want to know if a major news story breaks on one of their accounts (perhaps a new appointment or the announcement of a merger etc), or when a new company has been created in their designated sales territory.  This 'new news' is very helpful for sales people but today most salespeople have to source these insights themselves. Sales people often want to know when contracts are due for renewal or which products any new products are displacing. It's good to know when projects are behind schedule or accounts have a poor credit history or are on stop!  Given that much of this content is already known but exists on different systems it's normal for stand-alone CRM systems not to flag this REALLY IMPORTANT information.

In summary, for sales people CRM systems fall short in areas of:

* Time - Giving more sales time than they consume

* Serving up new insights about what customers want or might buy

* Providing the means to always be contactable through mobile connectivity

* Their level of customization and integration (to fit the business/integrate)

* Social networking enablement

* Micro-marketing tools

* Managing the sales lifecycle --> prospect - quote - sell - order process - account manage - new things to sell!

2010 Tech Forecasts

2010 tech forecasts: What the accurate analysts predict ( - Telecommunication - Internet - Software - Hardware Systems - Security - Consumer Electronics - Virtualization )


I came across this blog that outlined the performance of IDC's predictions. Very interesting!. Ian

SOA, Security and Enterprise Mashups

I'd like to dispel a myth - that Enterprise Security is more likely to be compromised or weakened through the adoption of situational applications and enterprise data mashup technologies.  If IT leaders were to let users roam free on all of their data through a poorly thought through Enterprise Mashup Platform THEN MAYBE, but then, how likely is that to happen?

The logic behind the argument that 'mashups are a security threat' is usually this: that mashups are about empowering information workers to consume web services (sourced from back office systems and via online public sites) and, if you all this to happen, then several new potential threat areas emerge:

1. Poor security regimes mean that users usurp identity management and access control systems so either back-doors are created to data or administrative systems become more complicated with multiple user identity directories emerging that could create errors in monitoring user identities.
   
2. Users (knowingly or unknowingly) gain access to data that they shouldn't be seeing (or in the worst case editing) by giving power users the ability to create their own applications
   
3. Enterprise Mashup Architectures may not be as secure as traditional enterprise portal suites and so by adopting them organizations might be letting their guard down.

From the experiences I've seen so far of Enterprise Mashup deployments, the inverse of these arguments is actually true and the Enterprise is actually MORE SECURE and facing LOWER RISK when an Enterprise Mashup Portal Architecture is deployed. Here's why:

Firstly, it's important to remember that in most organizations today, the most widely adopted mashup application is Microsoft Excel. Business professionals use spreadsheets to capture data, gather data, analyze data and share data. The popularity of spreadsheets to still discharge all of these roles after 30 years of faithful service is testament to their invention.  But spreadsheet systems are a high risk option. They mean that most organizations have hidden pots of business critical data on laptop and PC hard drives that almost nobody is aware of that can disappear at any moment. They also mean that people can inadvertently add the wrong data to the wrong cell or change a formula that can instantly result in high threat compliance issues.

Secondly,  the Enterprise Mashup Platforms I've encountered so far integrate seamlessly with incumbent User Identity Management and Access Control systems like Active Directory used by corporations today. This isn't rocket science; most of these systems rely on a table of UserIDs, email addresses and passwords that are easily inherited by third party systems when properly designed.

Thirdly, it would be wrong to assume that incumbent Enterprise Portal Suites are more secure than the Rich Internet 'Enterprise Mashup' platforms displacing them. To my knowledge, none of the leading portal products can trace the movement of enterprise data from every single field of every single silo to every single portal and every single user - but platforms like Encanvas do.

Debates on the future of Enterprise security have moved away from the concept of protecting the enterprise by keeping everyone on the outside of the Firewall except 'trustworthy employees'. Organizations are slowly realizing that data breaches are most commonly the result of employees activities rather than unknown 'baddies'. It's also dawned on IT leaders that people in business expect to collaborate and share data - subcontractors, outsourcers, customers, channel partners all have very reasonable arguments for being able to access enterprise data.  So the future of Enterprise security is about protecting the data and the intellectual property rather than the container that houses it.

In 2010 we're going to see a big push towards the virtualization of enterprise systems and cloud computing. We're going to see lots of business social networking tools entering via the backdoor of organizations to serve 'departmental needs'. And security will become all about monitoring the activities of individuals (and the groups they belong to). What better system to do this than the enterprise mashups portal platform that serves them with the data?