Anthony Bradley

Back in 2007 and early 2008 I anticipated a rapid rate of enterprise mashup adoption. Just about everyone, including me was talking about enterprise mashups as a new paradigm for end user computing where business users would rapidly assemble and reassemble applications in a highly dynamic fashion. Users can “create applications as fast as the situation changes” was one of the lines I used. I talked about The MacGyver Principle and Tom Cruise’s character in the movie Minority Report. This was a truly revolutionary vision and the tremendous power of mashups to drive change.

Then the economic downturn hit us hard. Many enterprises curtailed investment in new systems to instead focus on how to get the most out of their current IT investments. The financial industry, an early adopter of mashups was obviously hit the hardest. Gartner client interest in mashups waned slightly but I was anticipating a significant escalation prior to the downturn. You may have noticed that enterprise mashups is not on Gartner’s top ten technologies to watch anymore.

Then a shift in the need began. Instead of asking about end user empowerment, clients began inquiring about how to reduce integration costs with mashups. Some organizations were trying to use mashups to clear out their application integration backlog more quickly and at less cost. Others were facing new integration challenges due to mostly unexpected mergers and acquisitions.

This new use case is now rippling through the enterprise mashup technology sector. Many mashup vendors were direct selling an end user based solution to business unit leaders. Now the main buyer is in the IT shop. several mashup vendors are now adapting their value proposition and marketing messaging to this new audience. Additionally, there is a movement to an indirect sales model that has mashup players working hard to establish relationships with systems integrators. All this takes time to build traction. 

I still believe that end user empowerment is the nirvana for enterprise mashups. It seems we will just need to wait a while before the “MacGyver principle of applications” is a mainstream reality. In the meantime we will just have to settle for a better way to address some application integration challenges

I have created many successful software application pilots in my day. But these were more traditional process based applications that didn’t hinge on community adoption and participation. Pilot’s are intended to mitigate risk by basically validating that the process and software supporting that process will serve the needs of a “system actor.” This made sense because the process and software was usually complex and the user was mostly acting on that process-software independently.

This practice is not prudent for social media where the software complexity should be minimal and the primary goal is to get people interacting. Community participants are fickle and unforgiving (especially external communities). You may only get one shot at catalyzing community formulation. Don’t pilot, test, prototype, or experiment on the community. Don’t artificially restrict participation. The law of numbers is a critical factor in building a thriving and productive community. Why would you only go after a small subset of a target audience when mass adoption is a critical success factor? You will handicap success from the start. I have spoken with numerous organizations that failed to gain adoption only to find out that they restricted membership as part of a “pilot.” Others, “half bake” the social media environment functionality because it is a “pilot” and they are basically only experimenting. This is a great recipe for a poor user experience that can not only turn off a potential community participant for that pilot but also significantly impede any other social media efforts targeted at that audience.

Often, enterprises don’t execute on the rigor required for social media success under the moniker of a “pilot.” The most successful implementations I’ve seen don’t “pilot,” they execute on a planned increment. When you go to the community with a social media solution, go for real. So how do you mitigate risk? Mitigate risk with a carefully scoped purpose. Minimize the initial business purpose pursued but pursue that purpose with all the execution discipline it requires. Instead of deploying a social network for all your employees to collaborate more effectively (but only starting with a pilot for the “western region”) build a social media solution for your sales people to network specifically on how to successfully identify and overcome the top three sales objections.

I have spent the past few years researching and publishing on best practices (such as “Don’t Pilot”). But unfortunately I still see social media pilot efforts out there, that ironically, create rather than mitigate failure risk. Here are a few of the key reports (available to clients or for a fee).

• Seven Key Characteristics of a Good Purpose for Social Software 
• Toolkit: Planning for Social Software Applications Using a Purpose Road Map
• Ten Primary Design Considerations for Delivering Social Software Solutions: The PLANT SEEDS Framework 
• Use a Gartner Governance Model to More Safely Empower Grassroots Social Media Efforts 

 

There have been a slew of surveys and press recently that have indicated that social media is a security threat and a productivity drain and that many, if not most, enterprises are “banning” social media (examples; Half Survey, BBC, survey, Marines, Hollywood, WSJ, and NFL).

This may lead people to believe that enterprises are not pursuing social media. This is not the case. Although many organizations challenge the business value of the social Web, the vast majority are exploring social media. Social Web is a term that has evolved to include the social sites on the world wide web that are open to the general public. These are the sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Wikipedia. Enterprises are prudent to think hard about how to use these public sites for business value. But the social Web is also evolving to encompass specific community environments as well. See my blog post on the social Web and health care. Enterprises can’t ignore these sites.

However, social media is the broader term that covers just about any use of social software including workforce facing implementations (often called Enterprise 2.0) and more controlled communities. There exists a large set of social software technologies that are targeted at non-social Web implementations of social media. Gartner just last week published the 2009 Magic Quadrant for Social Software (available to clients or for a fee).

There are several social media options to explore including:

• Personal use of the social Web
• Business use of the social Web
• Internally facing (workforce) enterprise use of social software
• Open or closed community
• On-premises or SaaS
• Externally facing (e.g., social CRM) enterprise use of social software 
• Open or closed community
• On-premises or SaaS

Like much of life, social media is not as simple as “do” or “don’t do” but is a strategic examination of when the business value justifies the risks. Enterprises need to examine all these possibilities for their business value and potential need for governance.

Some Gartner research to help you includes (available to clients or for a fee):

• Establishing Policies for Social Application Participation
• Seven Key Characteristics of a Good Purpose for Social Software
• Ten Primary Design Considerations for Delivering Social Software Solutions: The PLANT SEEDS Framework

In response to a Computerworld citing a study finding that “54% of U.S. companies say that they have banned workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while on the job, I did a little survey of my own with these results. I left the survey up to possibly collect more responses (only 22 people took the survey the first time). Now there are 40 responses. Still not exactly statistically relevant numbers but here are the new results:

Q1. Does your employer leave the decision on social media access up to you (i.e., there is no policy)? Yes. 59% No: 43%

Q2. Does your employer encourage the productive use of social media Web sites? Yes: 46% No: 54%

Q3. Does your employer restrict access to specific social media Web sites such as facebook and YouTube? Yes: 49% No: 51%

4. Does your employer restrict all access to the Web from work devices? Yes: 5% No: 95%

Though responses almost doubled, the numbers didn’t change dramatically. But they did get slightly more conservative across all questions. Some people left comments. Here are some interesting ones:

• documents are published presenting Social Networks ( without clear distinction ) as dangerous system both for preserving information asset and as place where virus could infect your PC
• No encouragement or discouragement [of social media], but because the company has fairly conservative culture, most are choosing not use social computing just to be on the safe side.
• Hasn’t been encouraging it [social media] but that’s because they didn’t really understand it. Part of my job (I’m new) is to start it going
• [Access restrictions] done under the guise of bandwidth management, but it’s really an attempt to control the message.

Thanks to those who participated in the survey.

I just finished publishing a research note set on mobilizing the grassroots with social media initiatives to help our clients gain the benefits of grassroots while mitigating risks.

Enterprises are struggling to capitalize on social media and deliver collaborative solutions with high business value. Because there are so many ways to improve enterprise collaboration (among employees, partners, customers, prospects and so on) and a myriad of available social technologies, the path of least resistance is to simply provide a social technology in the hope that a grassroots effort will take hold and deliver business value. Unfortunately, this approach rarely succeeds. Enterprise IT organizations must determine when a grassroots movement has a high chance of success or when a more top-down approach is required. This involves building a decision model as part of the social media governance program that enables the enterprise (all levels) to understand the nature of the social media purpose in terms of its ability to succeed as a grassroots driven effort or where top-down involvement is required. Done correctly this can empower grassroots social media movements without undue risk. I have assembled the No-Go-Grow decision model to serve this purpose. No is, well, when you say no to a grassroots movement, go is when grassroots success is more probable, and grow is when the enterprise need to get involved (top-down) to nurture the solution. See “Use a Gartner Governance Model to More Safely Empower Grassroots Social Media Efforts” for detail on the No-Go-Grow decision model (available to clients or for a fee).

As part of the “No” analysis enterprises must determine whether social media is actually suitable for the collaboration need. Enterprises looking to capitalize on mass collaboration and the power of the community must understand the nature of community interactions and their affinity for social media. I have identified 18 collaboration scenario characteristics organized in nine-pair endpoints across a spectrum from highly authoritative to highly collective (such as Deep Analysis Versus Broad Observation and Ascertaining Facts Versus Ascertaining Perception). This provides a framework for assessing an enterprise collaboration need according to its affinity for a social media-type solution. This enhances the understanding of the core collaborative challenge, so enterprises can make better decisions on when and how to pursue a social media solution. See “How to Assess the Suitability of Social Media for Enterprise Collaboration Scenarios” for details on the framework (available to clients or for a fee).

Understanding and capitalizing on the grassroots is critical for both bottom-up- and top-down-driven social media efforts. Generally, the enterprise leadership forms a team to lead a top-down social media effort, while members of a potential social-media-based community drive a bottom-up approach. The need for grassroots is obvious for bottom-up success, but many enterprises fail to see the importance of grassroots mobilization in top-down social media solution initiatives. Regardless of how the initiative is driven, the enterprise needs to help activate and guide a grassroots movement. Because the potential is less obvious with a top-down effort, enterprises must take extra care to mobilize a grassroots movement. With a bottom-up approach, enterprises can experience a more natural grassroots movement, while a top-down effort can require proactive behaviors to encourage participation.

I have pulled together 12 key criteria (such as security, seeding, and integration) for assessing any potential social solution initiative’s affinity for grassroots success and how enterprises can use them to capitalize on grassroots mobilization without undue risk. Enterprises can use these criteria to determine if a bottom-up approach can succeed, or where grassroots efforts can support a top-down approach. See “12 Criteria to Assess Grassroots Risk and Potential in Social Media Solutions” for details (available to clients or for a fee).

Do you take a calculated approach to mobilizing the grassroots when you pursue a social media solution?

p.s. this seems like a good place for another survey

Indulge me a moment to set the storyline. The San Antonio International Piano Competition was last week. My wife and I had the pleasure of hosting one of the competing pianists Weiwen Ma. For five days she practiced on my piano from about 9:00 AM to Midnight with an amazing display of prowess and dedication interrupted only by periodic bio breaks. My Mother-in-law also hosted an Italian competitor named Angelo Arciglione. See him here playing a Chopin piece that he played for us on my piano. I am a huge Chopin fan and if you watch this video you may be able to imagine my awe and gratitude at the opportunity to sit three feet from these incredible artists. On top of it all they both were wonderful people. As great as the piano competition was, it can’t compare with the experience of forming relationships with these two beautiful artists. I will follow both their careers from this day forward.

The point here is the tremendous power of relationships.

Two weeks prior I attended the San Antonio Symphony performance of Beethoven’s 7th. I was struck, as I always am, by the advanced age of the audience and it makes me fear for the future of classical music. I have no relationship with the Symphony just the usual boring transactional interactions where they mail me their season’s programs and ask me to buy. Bottom line, the classical music performance business just like the music recording business is terrible at building relationships. They are squandering a great opportunity. In fact, I had a conversation with a former President of the San Antonio Symphony about their current “I’m with the Band” ad campaign (billboards and posters) and complimented the attempt to highlight the artists. He told me that he didn’t like the campaign because it “brought the Symphony down a level.” What, huh, did I misunderstand you? Unfortunately I didn’t.

In an even worse attitude, the music recording industry is threatening to and taking legal action against large portions of their customers and prospects. Who thinks this is a good idea? How would your business do with this approach? Again, the problem is lack of relationships. The record label and the Symphony are corporate organizations. The people don’t care about them and many don’t care about stealing from them. The people certainly don’t feel like these organizations care about them. People probably don’t want a relationship with the corporate organizations. So what can they do?

The answer is really simple. Record labels and Symphonies and the like need to get into the relationship building business. They need to become relationship enablers. Record labels should be developing a core competency in building community around their artists. Social media can help them do this. They need to connect with the audience through the artists. People are much less likely to steal from the artist than the corporation. Labels can drive music sales through these “artist communities”.

This represents a fundamental business shift from “distribution to collective.” The music business has historically been all about distributing music to the people (recorded or live) and it needs to shift to the collective approach of bringing people to the artists and music. Rallying the people around what they care about and then mining those relationships for mutual value is the future of business.

Hopefully at this point you have realized that this shift isn’t just about the music industry. This is about your industry, and mine. Most industries are all about distribution. Gartner is in the research distribution business. Months ago when pitching to Gartner executive leadership about this shift I talked about moving from distributing research to clients to collecting all IT professionals around our research and analysts. I stated that “every IT professional in the world should have a relationship with Gartner.” Notice I didn’t say “should be a paying client.” Gartner then can mine these relationships for mutual value (btw, I’m not saying that Gartner needs to give away all its research).

Earlier I blogged about IT shifting from providing collaboration platforms to delivering social solutions. This is a subset of the overall business shift from distribution to collective.

Right now the transactional interaction of moving someone from prospect to customer is the primary and dominant business interaction. In the years to come, collaborative interactions will dominate with transactional interactions as derivative behaviors.      

As always, I request your feedback.

Last week I blogged on a recent article out of Computerworld citing a study finding that “54% of U.S. companies say that they have banned workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while on the job. This seems very high so I conducted my own survey via this blog (the first time I tried it) and promised to publish the results today. One finding is that my readers are lazy or maybe apathetic Over 500 people read the blog but only 22 people took the survey. Not exactly statistically relevant numbers but here are the results:

Q1. Does your employer leave the decision on social media access up to you (i.e., there is no policy)? Yes. 60% No: 40%

Q2. Does your employer encourage the productive use of social media Web sites? Yes: 50% No: 50%

Q3. Does your employer restrict access to specific social media Web sites such as facebook and YouTube? Yes: 36.4% No: 63.6%

4. Does your employer restrict all access to the Web from work devices? Yes: 4.5% No: 95.5%

As I already mentioned, these numbers are not large enough to be statistically valid but let’s do some analysis anyway just for fun. These numbers are actually more in line with what I’ve seen in my dealings with clients. Q1 has 60% where there is no explicit policy on social media. This seems like it might even be a little low. I am really just starting to see enterprises taking a hard look at good social media policy. My survey paints a better picture for social media than the Half survey cited in Computerworld but even my rosier survey results leave a great deal of room for improvement. Some people left comments. Here are some interesting ones:

• Our employer even discourages use of social media tools (wiki’s, discussion forums, even Sharepoint Sites) internally, by placing barriers to entry (massive approval chains, undersized infrastructure)
• [Access is restricted ] Frequently under the guise of “network performance” or “virus protection.” I actually think the business side would like to be more open, but we do have a strong engineering background that gives us nerds in I/T (and particularly info security) too much control. I give this company some credit for trying, but the initial reaction of most I/T gatekeepers is NO – which I attribute to being 1)troglodytes, and 2)too lazy to make it work in a secure manner and 3)to lawyers who are too scared to let people speak up.
• [About access restrictions] No, not yet. Some employees “sense” that it’s coming, though.

I’m going to leave the survey up for a little while longer and I’ll publish again if responses pick up.

A recent article out of Computerworld cites a study commissioned by Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing firm finding that “54% of U.S. companies say that they have banned workers from using social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace while on the job. The study, released today, also found that 19% of companies allow social networking use only for business purposes, while 16% allow limited personal use. Only 10% of the 1,400 CIOs interviewed said that their companies allow employees full access to social networks during work hours.”

These numbers are not consistent with my client interactions, other numbers I’ve read, and the trend I see towards more liberalization in policy on social media at work (with appropriate governance). I believe it is important to specifically watch these “attitude towards access” numbers as they are indicative of leadership’s receptiveness to social media as a whole.

I have presented and published on the potential for a social media divide between enterprises with a heavy legacy collaborative culture and those with a “clean slate” culture. I talk to clients about looking out for “clean slate” competitors who can take advantage of the Web 2.0 (cloud, social, etc.) to compete more quickly than in the past.

Let’s do our own survey. I have set up a quick survey that is only 4 (Yes or No) questions. Please take it and I will publish the results on Monday.

Here is some related Gartner research (available to clients or for a fee) 
Establishing Policies for Social Application Participation

2008 U.S. Symposium ITxpo Emerging Trends Keynote

Danger Lurks When Enterprise 2.0 and Organizational Cultures Do Not Match

Last week JackBe announced the formation of the Open Mashup Alliance to support an XML-extension specification called EMML (Enterprise Mashup Markup Language). JackBe is a leading boutique mashup platform vendor and EMML is their mashup language. They are the only ones using it now but they have “donated” it to the cause of mashup executable standards. A nice post by Dion Hinchcliffe gives a great summary of the OMA effort. It should be noted that, as of yet, there is no open spec alternative to OMA/EMML for mashup portability.

OMA is a noble effort. The primary benefit to enterprises if EMML gains support comes in the form of mashup portability. This means that if I build a mashup or mashable using EMML then I can run it more easily in any other mashup vendor technology environment that supports EMML. Currently, if you build a mashable using Serena it won’t run in a JackBe environment and vice versa. This creates vendor lock-in which, as you can imagine, vendors don’t mind so much. But especially in an emerging technology market like mashups, it can scare buyers off the effort. And it definitely makes them think twice about a smaller boutique vendor like JackBe. If EMML adoption takes off it will be good for buyers and good for boutiques.

It should come as no surprise that the megavendors (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle) are not members of OMA. What does this mean? It definitely makes adoption more challenging. It also puts the onus on you, the mashup technology buyer. Is mashup portability important to you? OMA/EMML gives buyers a good opportunity to ask vendors about their mashup standards strategy. If not EMML, then what?

Gartner just published a report on this topic entitled “Open Mashup Alliance Needs More Support to Create Standardization” (available to the general public).

In a client conversation yesterday I was going through my now standard monologue on purpose, purpose, purpose as the three most important criteria for social media success (playing off the 3 most important principles for success in real estate…location, location, location). And I brought up the high failure rate of the “provide and pray” practice which hovers somewhere around 90%.

He had a very simple yet profound question, “Is this unique to social media?” A great question that is actually very illuminating. If you think of non-collaborative solutions, a 90% failure rate for simply providing a technology seems pretty low. Imagine installing an Oracle database and expecting a business intelligence solution to just emerge. We recognize that you need to deliver application solutions (solution here defined as a solution to a stated business challenge rather than a general activity).

However, traditionally, IT doesn’t generally think of collaboration in terms of delivering a solution. IT doesn’t deliver an e-mail solution. Same for KM, IM and Web conferencing. IT basically delivers a platform for general collaborative interactions. Social media is different in that the vast majority of successes are solutions to specific business needs. The crux of the challenge with social media is that IT is used to providing collaboration tools rather than delivering a collaboration solution.

I believe it is this tendency of IT to think of providing a collaboration platform rather than a collaboration solution that leads to the prevalent “provide and pray” bad practice.

Until IT makes the “platform to solution” shift, the failure rate for social media initiatives will remain very high.