Posts tagged ‘enterprise social software’

The Social Layer Needs Both Line of Business and IT

By Christopher Lynch | July 19, 2010, 6:53 pm | 0 Comments

If you want to understand just how social technologies will increase in their pervasiveness across the modern workplace, then you should read Lee Bryant’s post on social layering today. Lee works for Headshift, a consultancy in the Dachis Group focused on social business design.

The idea behind the social layer is simple: Just like any piece of technology, social software should be a layer in your enterprise architecture that surfaces the events of a company’s systems of record — and enable employees to collaborate and take action on information (be it human or machine generated) in real-time. It was the premise behind the launch of Socialtext Connect, our offering that lets companies build their own social layer.

Here’s one excerpt from Lee’s post I especially liked:

At the base of the enterprise IT stack, we have expensive, slow-moving technology such as document management systems, ERP systems, databases and so on, which we might change every 3-5 years, if at all. They are good at the heavy lifting and underlying processes that many businesses need, but often very poor at user experience. Assuming these systems expose APIs and data sharing, which most these days do, we can layer on a slightly lighter, slightly faster moving layer of social sharing capabilities such as social networking, collaboration, micro-blogging, wiki engines, etc.

What Lee describes here as the social layer represents a far different approach than tacking social features onto each of those traditional systems of record and the select employees who have access to them, which would further reinforce the idea of walling employees off from people and information across their company that could help them do their jobs better.

Just as importantly, Lee’s post appeals to those of us who want to see better alignment between line of business and IT concerning the implementation, adoption and achievable business value of social software.

If IT departments can continue to own and manage underlying enterprise IT platforms, but expose APIs and data, then business users can define, provision and run their own social applications at the top of the stack without having to defer to IT for every decision they make, or work at a slower pace and in a more constrained way than they need. Based on our experience of the difficulties of implementing social business tools within existing IT department frameworks and culture, this would be a huge win for all concerned, and where we are using this approach, we find it solves a lot of issues and concerns on both sides.

Line of business of people are critical to the success of social software because they can identify specific pain points that can be remedied by social technologies. IT plays a critical role around areas of security, compliance and architecture, and you must work with them to make social a layer, not just a feature in the enterprise architecture.

On Wednesday, our lead developer Luke Closs will be leading a webinar that will detail the inner-workings of Socialtext Connect. We hope to see as many of you there as possible.

enterprise architecture, enterprise social software, social business design, social layer, Socialtext Connect

Making The Case for Enterprise Activity Streams (And Why It’s Not Just “Another Tool”)

By Christopher Lynch | July 7, 2010, 8:46 pm | 8 Comments

Whenever people ask me about my job, I tell them what you’d probably expect: I work for a company that takes technologies with social dynamics that you enjoy on the consumer Web, like Facebook and Twitter, and adapt them to the way we work inside companies. And lately, I’ve called upon activity streams to help communicate the value, focusing on Facebook’s News Feed as the best possible analogy.

Instead of interacting with the pictures you took during the weekend, I explain, you share what document you edited or a transaction you took in your sales system. This gives you and your colleagues the ability to take action on that information in real-time.

But even if the conversation progresses to that level of granularity, and the person I’m talking to agrees that activity streams represent a better way to consume business information and connect with colleagues, I’ve been often dogged by one important question, “Well, what you’re saying might be true. But in the end, how isn’t this just another tool for me to deal with at work? As it is today, I can barely get through my e-mail, which, as you point out, stinks.”

Overall, it’s a question that the Enterprise 2.0 industry — software companies that sell social technologies to businesses — has handled poorly. Even today, we still see blog posts that call for the end of e-mail or bombastic presentations that call upon companies to cast the “dusty” systems of record that they invested millions on into the corner.

We need a more pragmatic approach that tackles the “why isn’t this just another tool?” question more substantively. The phrases like “this is like Facebook for your company” or the “why aren’t your tools at work like the ones you have home?” are tired, old and not good enough. They especially don’t work in communicating the value of enterprise activity streams.

Ultimately, the real value with activity streams will be to provide a social layer on top of your current business systems. Before many companies get there, however, they need some more practical reasons why they need activity streams in the first place.

So let’s get a few things straight:

1. Admit Activity Streams Are Another Tool (It’s OK That It Is)

From a purely practical standpoint, various activity streams, and social software in general, are extra tools layered on top of the current systems a worker has in place.
This is inherently true because we’re not replacing systems of record; social software should be designed to complement them and make them more useful. Activity streams don’t replace your e-mails; it makes the e-mails you receive more relevant. As system updates flow to you and pass downstream more efficiently, and you put filters in place to catch what you want to examine later, your communications (including e-mail) can be for more focused and relevant.

2. When Done Right, Activity Streams Quell, Not Add To, Information Overload

The New York Times has been running an interesting series called “Your Brain on Computers.” In a recent article that detailed how much we tether ourselves to the devices and systems around us, we saw just how acute the information overload problem is at work.

In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows.

Activity streams take information overload by the horns and pare it down to size by putting your employees in control of the information they consume. Rather than tab toggle to various applications all day, you can select what information from those systems you wanted pulled to you. You can check on it at your convenience, and it’s not pushed to you against your will like e-mail.

Filtering by tags, groups and transaction types from a system will create control that e-mail notifications (a popular refrain for Activity Stream skeptics) only does minimally, and badly.

3. You don’t have to stare at activity streams all day

Geeks stare at activity streams all day, but normal people don’t. Too often, we try to push the value of Activity Streams (and to a degree microblogging) by presuming in our argument that things would be better if people watched the stream all day. This is simply not realistic.

Someone who isn’t on Facebook all day still gets immense value from it, and the same is true with enterprise activity streams, mainly because:

Activity streams encourage relevance. Today, if you went on vacation, you can return to work and go through all the e-mails you missed, but you’ll be limited to what information you were addressed on, and a good portion of those messages will be largely irrelevant. With Activity Streams and microblogging, you can seek out keywords and tags relevant to your job, and find out what happened while you were away that really mattered (you can also look at ranked content).
Activity streams aggregate information from systems. Similarly, you don’t need to go to each system of record to see what you missed while you were away. Instead, you set up filters and aggregate the specific information you want from each of these systems, as well as the information generated by colleagues that matter to you.
Activity streams and microblogging are reply-optional. The reply expectation we have with e-mail doesn’t apply. Although Activity Streams are persistent in their real-time nature, you can passively examine the information that’s relevant to you as many times a day as you find valuable. This, again, speaks to the power of pull (versus push).

4. They’re Cheaper and Easier

Some of the biggest winners in the move to enterprise activity streams are casual (or non) users of traditional enterprise systems. Today, to get information locked in an ERP or CRM system, you must be a licensed user of that system or be on an e-mail list that pulls certain information from them (that, most likely, someone other than you decided might be relevant).

Now, since companies have the ability to utilize open web standards to pull vital information into an enterprise activity stream, a company’s employees can get more from their systems of record, without having to be trained on one of these complicated systems.

activity streams, enterprise social software

Case Study: In Disrupted Media Industry, Meredith Drives Profitability with Enterprise Social Software

By Christopher Lynch | June 8, 2010, 12:24 pm | 0 Comments

If you follow the media industry, you know how much it has struggled to adapt its business model to the Web. But what’s not written about as frequently is how some media and publishing companies are using social software — one of the very technologies that disrupted the industry — to pursue new business opportunities and grow revenue.

That’s been the case at Meredith Corporation (here is our full case study we published today). Meredith counts 23 subscription-based publications in its portfolio, including Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal. With its various properties, Meredith serves a readership of nearly 75 million women.

Meredith has been using Socialtext to manage subscriber campaigns, respond to market changes, and ultimately drive profitability in its circulation. Meredith utilizes Socialtext Signals for microblogging to share and discuss new ideas, SocialCalc (a social spreadsheet) to manage subscriber campaign reports and online workspaces to collaborate more deeply on strategic marketing projects.

At Socialtext, we focus very heavily on the business value that social tools can generate for companies internally. As someone who cheerleads for media companies who work hard to adapt to market changes (I used to work for one), I was encouraged by Meredith’s strong results during the course of my research.

“Since Meredith began using Socialtext in the fall of 2008, its subscriber numbers bettered an industry that was in decline. According to the most recent State of the News Media report, the magazine industry’s paid subscriptions, which make up nearly 90 percent of magazines sold, declined 1.12 percent overall. Meredith, meanwhile, in the second quarter of fiscal 2010, increased its circulation revenue by nearly half a million dollars from the same period a year before.
In a disrupted industry where flat revenue or even light losses are viewed as an accomplishment, the increase wasn’t lost on Meredith’s investors when the company reported its financial results. In fact, the company reported that the “revenues, profit and related margin in Meredith’s circulation activities (that) increased in the second quarter of fiscal 2010 compared to the prior year (were) driven in part by efficiencies in subscription operations.”

business value, case study, enterprise social software, media industry, social media, social networking

Socialtext Teams Up with Cloud Computing Vendors to Promote Benefits of SaaS

By Christopher Lynch | May 11, 2010, 11:46 am | 0 Comments

Last week, Socialtext CEO Eugene Lee teamed up with our friends at Box.net and other cloud computing vendors to promote the benefits of Software as a Service (SaaS). The video — entitled “Will You Choose the Cloud?” — highlights the many advantages of SaaS that we hear from our customers everyday, including:

Fast innovation cycles; upgrades to software happen in days or weeks — not years
Accessing your business applications on any device
Reducing friction to collaborate with customers and partners

At Socialtext, we look at “the cloud” rather pragmatically. While we have a hosted service that runs Socialtext in our data centers for many of our customers, we also offer a SaaS appliance that can be deployed either behind a customer’s firewall or in our data center. The Socialtext appliance provides all the benefits of SaaS because we patch upgrades remotely, but customers get the added security of having everything located inside their own corporate firewalls. Regardless of the deployment option customers choose, they pay for the software on a subscription basis.

From our perspective, SaaS encourages strong alignment between vendors and their customers. Since we have to earn our customers’ business fresh every year, we must ensure that we’re delivering software that helps them solve critical business challenges and respond to new opportunities. With modular software, customers have the option to introduce (and pay for) one capability at a time. For example, many customers choose to deploy microblogging first, then introduce the deeper value of other social software products later.

We encourage you to watch the video and check out the website ichoosethecloud.com to see the benefits companies get when they embrace SaaS.

cloud computing, enterprise social software, SaaS

Socialtext VP of Products Adina Levin To Speak at Social Business Edge on Monday

By Christopher Lynch | April 16, 2010, 3:19 pm | 0 Comments

On Monday, Socialtext’s VP of Products and co-founder Adina Levin (@alevin) will be speaking at the Social Business Edge event in New York City. The topic of her talk will be “Open For Business: Privacy in an Open World,” and you can watch it live on the conference website.

The event begins at 9:30 a.m. eastern, and we expect Adina’s talk to occur sometime shortly after 12 p.m. eastern, so be sure to stay tuned online and follow the Socialtext twitter handle throughout the day.

Adina’s talk should serve as nice follow up to a post written this week by our CEO, Eugene Lee (@eugenelee), about the complex and sophisticated privacy model we have baked into our products. From an architectural perspective, Adina and her team think very deeply about how the power to share information using social tools must be countered with businesses unique privacy needs. In her talk Monday, Adina plans to discuss how privacy is still very much alive in the age of social tools. She’ll also highlight the importance of context in sharing information with social technologies.

This will be the inaugural year for the Social Business Edge event, which will be hosted by Stowe Boyd (@stoweboyd), a widely recognized expert on social tools and their effect on business, media and society. While the room will be packed with luminaries and practitioners in the enterprise social software world, you can watch it at home. We encourage you to watch it live. The Twitter hashtag for the event will be #sbenyc.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for Eugene’s upcoming keynote at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston in June, where the topic will center around the business value of social software.

/cgl

enterprise social software, privacy, social business edge

In Challenging Media Landscape, Meredith Publishing Stays Ahead with Enterprise Microblogging

By Christopher Lynch | April 16, 2010, 12:57 pm | 0 Comments

As the media industry reinvents its business model to contend with the disruptive effects of the Web, I wanted to highlight a Socialtext customer, Meredith Publishing, that’s continuing to thrive by making sure its employees seize on new opportunities and react to change faster than competitors. One tool that aides Meredith employees in that effort is Socialtext Signals, our enterprise microblogging tool, which allows them to share information openly.

Today’s Harvard Business Review article highlights how Meredith employees use microblogging to track competition and move faster on ongoing projects.

At Meredith Corporation, the publisher of Ladies Home Journal and Better Homes & Gardens, microblogging tool Socialtext Signals is the platform of choice. Using Signals, the marketing function can post alerts to employees and partners on a wide range of marketing issues, such as researching competitors, brainstorming new ideas for a direct marketing campaign, or analyzing the outcomes of current campaigns.

Says Dave Ball, Vice President of Consumer Marketing for Meredith, “Signals allows us to break down the silos and easily share information with each other internally. We also use Signals to communicate with groups of external vendors, so we can brainstorm current campaigns with them, propose new ideas and share best practices. It is amazing how much we have cut down on email traffic while increasing our productivity.”

While the companies that benefit from Socialtext hail from a variety of industries, media companies have embraced enterprise social software more urgently than their counterparts in some other verticals. At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, our co-founder and president Ross Mayfield held a panel with two clients, McGraw-Hill and The Washington Post, to highlight their use of enterprise social software to drive business value inside their companies. We also wrote a case study to highlight how St. Louis Public Radio utilizes Signals to improve collaboration across departments.

Meredith’s use of microblogging also highlights the strength of our Signals product in comparison to our competitors: It’s integrated with other critical tools employees use to get their work done. For example, Meredith also uses SocialCalc, our social spreadsheet, to track the progress of their direct mail and subscriber campaigns. With Signals, employees can Signal links to each other, which brings those numbers — and the people and context behind those numbers — into the flow of work.

case study, enterprise microblogging, enterprise social software

Customer SuccessEnterprise 2.0

SaaS Forces Alignment between Customers’ Success and Socialtext’s Success

By Eugene Lee | February 24, 2010, 1:35 pm | 0 Comments

During the past month, I’ve spoken with a lot of analysts, journalists, bloggers, customers, and prospects about the great momentum in our business and explaining the underlying reasons for our success. One topic I always emphasize is Socialtext’s business model, which is all SaaS (Software as a Service). In the software industry, the term SaaS can mean many different things. To me, it means that all our contracts with customers are on a subscription (usually 12 month term) basis.

Many folks (investors especially) like the SaaS model — and its “gift that keeps on giving” annuity feature, but that’s only true when renewal and retention rates are sufficiently high to cover the costs of customer acquisition and support. For Socialtext, the good news is that we’ve been in business long enough to be in what I call the “SaaS economic leverage zone.” What I mean by that is our renewal revenues are a healthy chunk of our ongoing business, and our renewal rates have increased by an order of magnitude during the past two years. I’m really proud of this achievement. It can be attributed to the combination of major product enhancements, coupled with more pedestrian operational improvements, including faster contract-to-launch times , improved coordination with customers pre-launch (often pre-contract), and more intimate partnerships with our customers throughout their lifecycle.

Adhering to this this SaaS model has great benefits for us and our customers. Here are some of the benefits we have seen and what about the Socialtext offering that’s different than other vendors out there:

SaaS forces alignment

What I love the most about this business model is that it completely aligns my team with the goals of our customers. If our customers don’t realize the value from our platform that they were expecting, then they just won’t renew. If they do find value, they renew. If they achieve results beyond their expectations, they’ll increase their Socialtext footprint. The best testament to our progress on this front is that our business from customer expansions tripled in Q3 and Q4 of 2009 vs. our previous average.

Socialtext’s appliance is secure on-premise SaaS

For Socialtext, “SaaS” does not have to mean “cloud-based solution.” While we offer a shared hosted service like other SaaS vendors, we also provide our customers the option of deploying via an on-premises Socialtext appliance. This secure, behind-the-firewall, 1U rackable box is easily integrated into the customer’s existing datacenter (and enterprise directories, backup, etc.). It comes pre-configured, so there is nothing to download, install, or configure. Our Services team works with the customer to schedule monthly updates which are pushed down to the appliance, requiring no time or cost of administration on the customer side. Finally, for those customers who want the privacy of a single-tenant service, but don’t (yet) have a datacenter of their own, we also offer a “hosted appliance” option. It provides all the benefits of the appliance model combined with the convenience of having the server hosted by Socialtext.

It’s all about customer success and business value

The official job titles for our team members that work with customers during their deployment is “Customer Success Manage.” This isn’t just fancy business card blather – these people are measured and goaled on pretty much the same metrics that our customers use to measure their deployment success – timeframes, usage metrics, and most importantly, business value. Our software is fully instrumented to measure a wide range of user activity, and these reports are shared (assuming the customer gives us access) between the customer team and our team during our periodic scheduled update calls.

By contrast, vendors who continue to follow the perpetual license sales model will continue to be motivated to sell you as many seats as possible up front, which I believe is why there are so many Enterprise 2.0 Adoption “support groups” out there, and why that topic dominates many of the industry conferences and forums.

Customer-Driven Innovation

I’ve often used the line “the best ideas come from your smartest customers – are you organized to listen?” A great deal of our product enhancements and innovations have come from feedback and suggestions from our customers – not just in the form of feature requests on a one-off basis, but rather in the context of an ongoing relationship we are proud to build with them. One example is the way Socialtext’s new groups capability works the same way whether you are using groups defined in your corporate LDAP/Active Directory or setting up ad hoc groups for cross-functional teams.

We only succeed if you do

An amazing amount has been written about the SaaS model and why it’s good for customers. These include lower up front costs, better matching your expenses with adoption and deployment, reduced risk, less capital needs to self-host software, and lower IT headcount requirements (to name a few). But I think the biggest advantage is that your vendor only succeeds if you do.