Dennis Howlett & the end of Software

Dennis Howlett over at ZDNet has a well-thought out, and downright brilliant piece about two camps divided over social software in the enterprise, one camp represented by most monster software companies that enter the enterprise at that painful point known as IT. The other, from newer and more agile challengers is slipping in through marketing departments concerned with actually having relationships with customers.

One exception to the big guys, he mentions is SAP (sponsor of my Global Survey of Social Media), who he writes: "

I’m thinking that SAP is realizing that it could get much closer to the millions of people who use its software rather than the IT shops that buy their stuff. The challenge, which Merritt thinks doesn’t get solved for another 2-5 years, is how companies like SAP adapt their software design strategies to accommodate this new reality. Enter the startups."

I'll let Dennis sing the SAP praises. My focus is on that 2-5 years span. What enterprise decision makers need to understand is that when you are big and cumbersome, 2-5 years translates into tomorrow morning. What it means to small and agile challengers like Jive Software, is that the crack in the door where they have inserted a foot is likely to get wider sooner.

What Dennis overlooks is the number of younger people who will be taking over the decision maker seats in the world's enterprises over the next 2-5 years. The guy who was inclined to do it the way it was always done is going to be replaced by someone perhaps more inclined to speak to the more human-oriented Jive Software rep, than the more data-centric Sharepoint.

Perhaps it may be my perpetual Pollyanna view of a social media revolution, but Dennis' post makes me think that we are having the sort of little incidents in the enterprise that will make a big difference. I think the tipping point is coming in those next 2-5 years, for some companies, perhaps sooner.

Comments

[Dennis Howlett]

Thanks for the props Shel - I've not forgotten the demographics, I'm just wary of what they mean for decision taking where $$$ are involved. Remember that most of the big spend people are 40+ and that to make it, there's the slight problem of the greasy pole.

There's an alternative take that says the 'outside in' people win the kind of influence that allows them to move into traditional internal project positions (if they so choose) that changes things from the inside as well.

[shel israel]

Dennis,

Describe it anyway you like. When the young get older, they bring their habits with them. Insider, outsider time is on the side of a new generation taking the decision-making seats. I'm hoping 2-5 years, because that's aboput what I have left in my intended years of contribution.

[Sam Lawrence]

It's true, there are two camps.

* A sale to the Exec Team or a sale to IT.

* A decision between people or files.

* Between conversation or reports.

The word "social” can really throw people. People hear that word combined with the word "enterprise" and they immediately go to Facebook or friending--so, basically goofing off. That's why it can sound trivial.

The problem is, we've only had one option. A couple of decades living in the Microsoft world of personal inbox, personal calendar, and "where do I put my files," so it's hard to imagine another way. And of course, this is how Microsoft makes its money, so it's not like they're going to give that up.

But the real question is "where do I put my conversations?" CEOs care about the big conversations. The ones that stretch across P&Ls. They care about onboarding. They care about they're acquisitions assimilating. They want to know what's going on, where the duplication is, why things are stalled. They want the conversation to happen with all the stakeholders, that means people outside the company, too. There's no place to do that today and file-centric systems can never bolt on enough little wikis and widgets to ever get there. Goodbye Frankensuite, hello Visible Enterprise.

[Lawrence Liu]

I agree that (open) conversations and (contextual) awareness are necessary for organizations to become more agile and innovative, but the enabling technologies should not be implemented as information silos. How optimal is a social tagging system for blogs and forums if it does not work with the files that I've sync'd to my laptop from my collaborative server environment? How vulnerable is a company if it cannot enforce information management policies against its "digital social conversation" system like it can with its records management system?

And please stop trying to pigeonhole SharePoint as a file centric solution. It certainly wouldn't be such a market success if that was all it did. SharePoint is able to management all kinds of digital content that exist within the enterprise -- documents, blogs, wikis, discussions, HTML content, images, videos, e-mails, etc. And that's only one facet of SharePoint!

[Dennis McDonald]

Eventually someone is going to come up with a solution that allows users and managers to immediately switch their system perspective from people to files to relationships to transactions.

That's impossible now in the real world no matter what the big vendors say. It's also increasingly impossible in the "social media" world given continued and rapid evolution of different networking platforms, standards efforts notwithstanding.

I am getting tired of people beating up IT because they aren't agile enough, though. There's a reason for that, and continued refusal of business users to understand those reasons doesn't help matters.

[Rachel Happe]

One of my colleagues, Cushing Anderson, who covers HR and training pointed out yesterday on a panel I participated in that 20% of executives will retire in the next 5 years...which should be getting companies to stand up and say 'holy c*@p'

I think SharePoint is a great application...if a formal 'project' or 'team' has been identified...but what about all the conversations that fall through the gaps? That is the real opportunity for social media...and where most of opportunities within enterprises are identified and where training/mentoring happens.

It's an interesting problem but I think the appeal of social media for the end user is that it is conversational...and that is the way most people communicate most of the time - although I have tried PowerPoint with my husband...but it doesn't go over very well!

[Lawrence Liu]

Excellent points, Dennis! The context switching between this app to that app causes user fatigue, information silos, and lost of business productivity. Integration and interop will be key, and that's the unique value that an IT department can bring forward with the help of a software platform like SharePoint and a partner centric vendor like Microsoft.

[Lawrence Liu]

Rachel, the dialogue happening in the comments of this blog entry is a good example of the “conversations” you alluded to. But at some point for some people in those conversations, in order to be productive, all that talk will need to lead to some action. And that’s where collaboration begins and content is eventually generated, which may be published and lead to even more conversations, and the virtuous cycle continues. If “social media” applications don’t enable the user to easily transition to collaborative applications and back, then they are ultimately not much better than merely a public form of e-mail.

[Sam Lawrence]

@Lawrence,

Can you elaborate on why people need to switch around from application to application? How many applications are needed?

[Rachel Happe]

Lawrence (Liu) - I couldn't agree more but project collaboration only gets initiated after a lot of conversation has taken place.

I think we need applications that can transition from very open to semi-structured to very structured as a conversation grows and morphs into actionable plans (and at the participants discretion). I think we are going toward an environment where that can be one application...hopefully. But I don't think we are there yet.

[Stewart Mader]

A different perspective on Dennis' post - there's an Apple connection to all this. It's the iPhone. Apple has used the exact same approach Dennis describes - appeal to the everyday user, not the IT department.

Many industry observers said the iPhone wouldn’t be embraced by enterprises. That’s because they don’t understand this new approach that both the providers of the new generation of social media/collaboration tools - and Apple - are taking.

Stewart

[Steve Mann]

Intergenerational "theming" is now a must - it doesn't matter that once young, becomes old, because your habits stay with you. Companies are now faced with the dilemma of marketing to and conversing with individuals of 4 different generations, Senior Boomers, Late Stage Boomers, Gen Xers (1965-1976) and Millenials (born after 1977). Each of these generations rely more heavily on different media to consume information along a continuum and each has a different decision making style. And they want to be spoken to according to their consumption pipe and decision style. Companies like SAP will need to adjust its marketing not only on an Attitudinal segmentation (buying style, behavioral targeting perspective) axis but on the generational axis as well.

[Ria Kennedy]

I think this is the usual clash of David and Goliath.

If the little guy can get the edge, it could be a real upset that could change the future of doing things. You could see a large shake-up that goes through the economy and politics.

And I think the large guys will do everything in their power to stop that so they can hang on to what they have.

[/pd]

[OT] Shel, how come you are not on FriendFeed ? is that not where the new converstational zone ??

Having said that :)- With SaaS gaining traction based on ROI / TCO's based matrix, the Enterprise needs to rally behind IT peeps who are aligned with them technologies. The Walled Gardens of legacy IT is crumbling , its just a matter of time.

[Stewart Mader]

Ria,
I think it's bigger than that. The "davids" in this case are too numerous and new ones keep popping up. The bigger battle is between the goliaths - specifically between the ones that embrace the change and the ones that don't.

In some cases the goliaths that embrace change will gain credibility and recognition with the crowd that values the new tools, and 1) be seen as complementary with some of the davids, 2) acquire some of the davids to enhance their own offerings, 3)Partner with some of the davids to enhance offerings, choice, etc.

Thoughts?

Stewart

[shel israel]

To /pd. It's a non sequitur, Pete, but I am looking at friendfeed. I'm ambivalent about further sigmnenting the conversation and I would like to see better filtering. I'll let ou bleeding edge guys get enmeshed and will follow when enough of my friends are there.

[shel israel]

Stewart, I would be slow to discount the David's just because they are numerous. First, they have a way of self-organizing that can be devastating. Second, you never know which one is holding the slingshot.

[Stewart Mader]

Shel,
Alsolutely agree, and to clarify I'm not discounting the Davids - I think there are multiple battles going on. One battle is Davids trying to become a Goliath. Second battle is between Goliaths, and I was focusing on the second battle in my comment.

The kicker is the longer the Goliaths take to get it, the better chance the Davids have of overtaking the Goliaths!

Stewart

[Lawrence Liu]

@Stewart, how did you get ahold of my "SharePoint Strategy for Social Computing" deck? :-) Seriously, what you wrote -- "the goliaths that embrace change will gain credibility and recognition with the crowd that values the new tools, and 1) be seen as complementary with some of the davids, 2) acquire some of the davids to enhance their own offerings, 3)partner with some of the davids to enhance offerings, choice, etc" mirrors much of what we've been doing and will continue to do.

@Sam, the number of apps people need will vary depending 1) what (actions) they're trying to do, 2) who (internal vs. external) they're trying to do it with, 3) what (content/deliverables) they're trying to create, and most importantly, 4) how flexible and extensible the underlying platform is to support a multitude of apps. Simple example -- I wish that I can be notified via e-mail the next time someone adds a comment here instead of having to manually come back with my browser. Can Shel easily enable that on his blog? Another example -- in an external customer forum, someone reports a problem that other customers confirm, can the app (and underlying platform) be easily customized to integrate with a CRM or Call Center Support system?

[Susan Scrupski]

What we may be looking at here is a classic case of "technology adoption lifecycle." The innovators and early adopters are drawn to the startup tools, but by the time there is enough real, scalable demand for working 2.0, MISO will have developed it themselves, partnered, or purchased their way into offering enterprise 2.0 functionality to their enterprise clients. The one to watch in this space is SharePoint. I hope I'm wrong. :-)

[Sam Lawrence]

@Susan
Are they they ones to watch becuause they have the most resources? Perhaps, as Lawrence said on my blog, they're the *only* one who can do this. But here's the kicker, Enterprise 2.0 isn't functionality. It's not paprika you can pepper all over old stuff and magically make it new. That's what Sharepoint is trying to do by adding "newfangled" stuff (as Lawrence put it) here and there. And there will be a healthy market of people who don't want to think about this now, and they'll check those Sharepoint newfangled boxes.

But there's also a huge and equally growing market for companies who recognize that frankensuites are heavy, expensive, built for IT not users, and don't provide the gains they want. That those systems are still file systems dependent on a myriad of other applications and licenses and that they're not built around people and productivity at the core.

We talk to those companies everyday. They get that there are other choices that take a different approach and make more sense for them. These initiatives are driven by the management team, not IT.

So there's not one company to watch, there's a wholly new enterprise software market emerging. That was the point of Dennis and Shel's post.

[Aaron Strout]

Chiming in late here but I have to agree with @shelisrael, @samlawrence and @rhappe. Having worked at one of the 800 lb. gorilla financial service firms for 9 years, I can attest to the fact that "IT" has a hard time getting over the fact that community is not around "file sharing" but rather conversations. Collaboration tools are critical but without conversation and human interaction, the tools will sit fallow.

As long as the "Frankensuites" cater to the IT departments at the 800 lb. industry gorillas, they will have a VERY difficult time making the switch to nimble/conversational apps. and services.

@astrout

[Lionel Menchaca]

This is a great discussion here. We're currently working through a lot of these issues being discussed here.

@rachelhappe I agree with you. Between Dell Community Forum, IdeaStorm and Direct2Dell, we've got lots of conversations happening every day. All of us leading Dell's social media efforts know that the real key to being successful is to spend time taking action against the feedback that comes from our customers, whether that means fixing technical issues or implementing ideas they've shared to improve our products and services.

After living through trying to make sense of all of the customer input that's in front of us, it's clear that seamless collaboration between many different groups of people is required for us to make it work.

Figuring out how to enable that collaboration is key. We're trying to get our heads around that now...

[@olivermarks]

- Great thread to follow on from Dennis's excellent original blogpost...here's my view from the trenches in internationally evangelizing and implementing enterprise collaboration (or to put it another way, coalescing business process around a core set of reasonably agile apps within an extranet) inside a large Japanese computer game company.

In one corner we have IT: Oracle/SAP (depending which territory we are trying to connect together) Lotus Notes, Blackberry...
+ strong governance issues/responsibilities around security standards in a russian doll of multiple silos within a global IT infrastructure.

In the other corner we have multiple teams of agile developers and game business producers groaning at the constraints of working within IT's legacy behemoths.

Many of these people are competing with each other for budget, recognition and resources internally. They are desperate to use the modern tools they've used outside the corporate silos to get past work done, but are strictly limited to tools living behind IT's firewalls and password protection. They need consistent, centralized shared information in order to be more efficient.

This need for agility is arguably at the core of successful collaboration planning. Enabling transparency in the modern enterprise is a huge challenge politically (fiefdoms, silos, territories, emperors, pitch protection...); the benefits are starting to become apparent to visionary execs but execution is not easy to achieve at this point.

There is no question in my mind that the fractional progress made by the smaller more flexible players in this space trump the frankensuites, and my personal experience is that the smaller players are listening a lot more carefully to the focused needs of the marketplace than the catchall megasuites. A customizable foundation which plays nicely with other apps is highly attractive from my current perspective of the world...

[Lawrence Liu]

@Sam, SharePoint is the one to watch because it/we have the most customers and the most partners. By the way, please read the comments on your own blog more carefully. I followed up my comment that you quoted here out of context by saying that Microsoft is the *best* (rather than only) company in the world that can help organizations effectively integrate the future, present, and past IT capabilities to solve their business problems. My comment was in response to your “SharePoint Conference = past Microsoft, MIX08 = future Microsoft” post. My point is that there is *one* Microsoft – the R&D in areas like Xbox Live, Windows Live, Silverlight, dev tools, various research labs, etc. (all of the things that impressed you about “future Microsoft”) accrue and can be leveraged in future versions of SharePoint (and Office). Our customers/partners know that, and they’re happily working with us to optimize our plans.

I agree with your statement that “Enterprise 2.0” isn’t functionality. For me, it’s just a buzzword that means different things to different people, and the irony of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference folks planning to have us in a panel discussion (debate?) in June is certainly not lost on me. :-) And I’m definitely looking forward to it. Nevertheless, I’ll have to ask you again right now to stop pigeonholing SharePoint – this time as “old stuff” – because we designed SharePoint as a *platform* first and foremost. Neither we nor our customers/partners are “sprinkling social computing apps” on top of SharePoint. On the contrary, people are building, implementing, and integrating with social computing apps by leveraging the SharePoint platform. Examples include http://www.schoolnet.com, http://www.mytalk.com.au, and http://www.dadeschools.net, and there are many more. These sites aren’t just “social media” apps; they are full blown web sites with rich/flexible content publishing and management functionality working seamlessly alongside community areas with social features. It’s a combination of the SharePoint Platform and the ECM slice of the SharePoint “pie” that makes this integrated user experience possible.

Don’t get me wrong – I believe that there’s plenty of opportunity in this space for vendors, who choose not to partner with us. I welcome the competition. It keeps us on our toes, and customers ultimately benefit because they really do have a choice. Sam, from your blog’s title, I gather that your motto is “Go Big, Always.” Well, my motto in this case would be, “Bring It On.” :-)