GigaOM » social-enterprise

Welcome to the post-normal age of work

Tue, 14 May 2013 17:00:07 +0000

It’s a now-prevalent notion that companies can advance by simply adding a social layer on top of existing business processes, integrating social tools with existing functional tools such as ERP, CRM, and HR solutions. The idea goes that this will make companies more social and therefore more productive.

That idea isn’t going to work.

Why? In a nutshell, social network-based communication is primarily organized around the concept of a “pull” medium — that is, a medium where individuals subscribe to whichever information sources they prefer and find useful. Traditional business processes, on the other hand, use “push” communications, where whoever created the information gets to decide whom it’s most important to. Simply put, the two parties don’t gibe.

Perhaps more importantly, the nature of work in our era has changed. Most people now have jobs based on non-routine work, where the predefined and fixed roles of business process do not reach.

I recently wrote a report as part of my activities in GigaOM Research, entitled “Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them” (subscription required). In the report, I argue that we are drifting away from a business-process defined culture and towards a social network-shaped, cooperative one.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Above we see the variance between process-oriented organizational cultures and network-oriented ones. I consider this part of the transition from post-modern (1970-2005) to what I’ll call post-normal (2005-present and beyond) economic eras. These cultures also differ in the nature of social affiliation, with a loosening of the bonds that tie people together in cooperative cultures contrasted with collaborative ones. People in cooperative organizations will have a higher number on connections, but the proportion of those that are strong ties decreases relative to collaborative cultures.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

Some corporate cultures are stuck even farther back in time because they are based on competition. I don’t mean competing with others in the marketplace, like Toyota competing with BMW. I am talking about a corporate culture based on zero-sum competition among workers, where one person’s advancement is someone else’s demotion. These are cultures strongly based on authority-based decision-making, and really are a holdover from the late modern era: the late industrial era.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

In the report, I discuss the “fit” of different psychological profiles, or archetypes, in these cultures. For example, the Entrepreneur archetype (see above) fits well in collaborative and competitive cultures, and fits the entrepreneurial culture perfectly. But Entrepreneurs won’t like working in a purely traditional, “cooperative” culture, because they like to lead collectives that are managed through consensus. A cooperative organization is too loose for them: It’s a connective, and is based on laissez-faire decision making.

Source: Stowe Boyd/GigaOM Research

This is the debut of the 3C model — competitive, collaborative, and cooperative. It’s a psychosocial model of organizational culture, and I hope it helps address some key issues in organizational dynamics in organizations today as social technologies and practices are being adopted. Marshal McLuhan said, “we make our tools, and they shape us.” Keeping that in mind, we see the change that social network-based communication is causing.

Businesses are not making these changes on a whim or because individuals are made happier by cooperative work relationships. The fast-and-loose business is most in sync with the digital realities of today’s world, although most companies are still operating principally in a more traditional mode, and may even have a healthy dose of the “frozen-and-immobile” at the core. Nonetheless, businesses must move towards a more cooperative work environment because in doing so they will successfully compete in today’s fast-paced, digitally focused world. Older cultures that cling to traditional business processes will not.

To read the full report, click here (subscription required).

Thumbnail image courtesy of flickr user ShellVacationsHospitality.

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Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them

stoweboyd — Thu, 09 May 2013 06:55:09 +0000

“Socialized business process” — the idea of adding social tools to traditional business processes — is unlikely to work in the long term. The enterprise is now transitioning to social network–based communication as introduced by social tools, and there is a fundamental conflict in communication models with business-process-centric business. In order to better explore these rapidly changing dynamics, this report presents a new cultural model for doing business in the 21st century.

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Social first-quarter 2013: analysis and outlook

stoweboyd — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 21:14:19 +0000

Social business technologies remain in the foreground of discussions about business transformation, but the events of the first quarter of 2013 raised as many questions as they answered, or more.

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What every enterprise should know about social-business tools

Jenn Marston — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 20:30:24 +0000

Social-business tools are everyone in today’s enterprise, integrated into not just employee communication tools but also integrated into HR departments, finance departments, and other areas of day-to-day business. In the latest GigaOM Research podcast we hear from collaboration experts Stowe Boyd and David Coleman on the latest tools disrupting the enterprise and how to best integrate social tools into your business.

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SHOW NOTES
Host: Adam Lesser
Speakers: Stowe Boyd and David Coleman

Social business software: The integrated approach
Social business software: Small and simple
LinkedIn gets pushed into social
How do you measure the value of social tools in the enterprise?
Disruption in the collaborative tools world
A “no fire” corporate policy: Could it change the business world?

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Holiday Gadget Gift Guide

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Election Dissection, Ditching DSL and Dumping the iPad

Sandy’s Social, Infrastructure Impact and Forstall

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Commutist podcast: Patent trolls, Costco ban and Passbook’s home run

Commutist, meet Nerdist, and interview with Chris Hardwick

T-Metro, Broadband Caps, Remembering Steve Jobs

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Survey: Which social-technology tools and trends will disrupt the enterprise most?

David Card — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 16:00:08 +0000

Social technologies are working their way into business IT on a deeper level simply by being front ends for communication and collaboration. They are now evolving into core enterprise functions like ERP, customer service, accounting and finance, and HR. GigaOM Research is conducting a series of analysis reports on different market sectors to gauge the importance of social technologies in the enterprise and to assess tech vendor opportunities.

With that in mind, we invite GigaOM readers to share their thoughts on which of the key social-technology and business-culture forces will be most disruptive in the enterprise. Fill out the survey below to let us know which trends smart vendors can best harness to gain revenue and market share.

Want to read the reports? Fill out your email in the provided field, and we will send copies once they are published.

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IBM pays $1.3B for HR software provider Kenexa

Ryan Kim — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 15:07:29 +0000

IBM is acquiring recruiting and talent software management provider Kenexa for $1.3 billion or $46 a share in a bid to bolster its social business capabilities and build out its HR services. IBM is following in the footsteps of Oracle and SAP, which bought Kenexa competitors Taleo and SuccessFactors respectively in the last year.

IBM plans to use Kenexa’s HR management software and combine it with its consulting and social tools to create a “smarter workforce.” The goal is to apply IBM’s focus on big data and social technologies to Kenexa’s HR and talent management software, helping companies extract more relevant insights and help them put together the right teams for the projects they’re working on.

The company is paying a 42.5 percent premium over Kenexa’s closing price on Friday. The deal highlights IBM’s push to meld social technologies with its business offerings.

“Every company, across every business operation, is looking to tap into the power of social networking to transform the way they work, collaborate and out innovate their competitors,” said Alistair Rennie, general manager, social business, IBM. “IBM is uniquely positioned to help clients generate real returns from their social business investments, while helping them gain intelligence into the data being generated in these networks to be more competitive in their markets.”

IBM’s acquisition also highlights the growing consolidation in the HR software market. In December SAP paid $3.4 billion for SuccessFactors. Oracle followed up in February, buying Taleo for $1.9 billion. Workday, an HR startup created by former PeopleSoft leaders, has been growing quickly and has helped throw more attention on this market.

Kenexa has about 9,000 customers, including half of the Fortune 500, who use its cloud-based software tools for recruitment, assessment, learning and performance management. The Wayne, PA-company, founded in 1987, has 2,800 employees. The deal is expected to close in the fourth quarter pending shareholder approval and regulatory reviews.

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Salesforce’s Do takes on Asana with new deal flow, contacts features

Ki Mae Heussner — Thu, 02 Aug 2012 04:08:36 +0000

Plenty of task apps out there want to help you get your “to dos” done. But Salesforce.com’s is hoping you don’t mistake their Do for one of them.

After acquiring the productivity app Manymoon and relaunching it as Do last year, the enterprise giant is set to announce Thursday that it is rolling out new contacts and deal flow management features that it believes will make Do more of work collaboration platform for everyone from individual consumers to small businesses to teams within big corporations. While Do will remain a free service for unlimited users, Salesforce plans to charge people for the new deal flow and contacts management features.

“One of the challenges we’ve had at Do is that people think it’s a tasks app – and there are hundreds and hundreds of them. But, really, what we’re doing is preparing for something a bit bigger – we call [Do] a social productivity platform,” said Sean Whiteley, Salesforce’s SVP and general manager of Do.com.

With the app, users can not only manage their own tasks, but assign tasks to others, as well as share relevant materials and communicate about a project as the individual tasks are completed. With the new deal flow and contacts management features, which are launching in private beta Thursday, Do is making a bigger social play for enterprise and business clients that might otherwise use Excel sheets, deal flow management software like Pipeline Deals or Asana, the workplace collaboration tool from Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz that last week raised $28 million.

Through the new contacts management feature, which integrates with Facebook, Twitter, Gmail and other platforms, users can see the entire universe of all of the people they might collaborate with, as well as set alerts that remind them to reach out to specific people periodically or on certain dates. The new deal flow tool helps relevant team members monitor all the deals in a pipeline, as well as the movement of specific deals. It lets users customize the layout, set alerts to call customers, assign tasks to other co-workers and more.

Whitely acknowledged that Do and Asana take similar approaches in providing software that helps groups of people collaborate and execute projects, but emphasized the differences.

While Asana takes a “workplace” approach that organizes the platform around projects, he said that Do scrapped that strategy for “groups”-centered approach that is more similar to Facebook in that it organizes the platform around the people involved in a project. He also said that Do integrates with multiple social platforms and email systems, so that users can collaborate with others on the platform even if they only have their Facebook information, Twitter handle or Gmail address. Additionally, Whitely said that Do supports mobile workers with an iPhone app, html5 version and an Android app on the way. (Asana’s site says it is available as an iPhone app and mobile-optimized site.)

While Do plans to let any number of people on a team use the site for free and charge for increased usage of the deal and contacts features, as well as some admin features, Asana charges clients based on the number of work members they have using the platform.

In addition to Asana, companies like Basecamp and startups like Producteev help businesses with work flow management, and Microsoft’s Yammer also provides a collaboration tool for businesses (although it doesn’t include the task management component). But the fact that Do has been rebuilt on Salesforce’s enterprise-grade platform and can integrate with the company’s social service Chatter will likely be selling points for the expanding platform.

For readers interested in checking out Do’s new features, Salesforce.com is offering priority beta access to those who click here.

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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:39:31 +0000

The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Beyond social: the crowd-based enterprise

hpscm — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:01:21 +0000

The next big thing in collaboration is crowds, not social. We still struggle with silos of collaboration in most enterprises today. By adding social tools we have accelerated communication but not necessarily increased the overall level of collaboration and action in the enterprise. That’s where crowds — defined here as a network that drives a task or goal that has business value — come in. This piece aims to demonstrate how crowds will add value to your business and shows some examples of what work in the future might look like using this largely untapped resource. Companies mentioned in this research note include Amazon, Geek Squad and Skype. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Badgeville looks beyond gamification, launches a behavior platform

Ryan Kim — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 13:00:33 +0000

Badgeville has been synonymous with gamification, the idea of incorporating game mechanics to motivate employees and consumers to do specific tasks. But the company says it’s not stopping with gamification; it sees a future in shaping behavior through a combination of game mechanics, private social networks and reputation and rank.

It has bundled its services into what it calls a behavior platform, building off its Social Fabric technology that allows any website to build a social network out of its community using a new behavior graph. The behavior graph helps track a user’s interaction within a social context on any site, application or product.

The idea is to provide corporate clients with a suite of services that can help them apply “behavior management” to their own employees or consumers. Kris Duggan, the CEO of Badgeville, said the company has evolved beyond just gamification to social, reputation and analytics, which can all work together to influence and manage behavior. Said Duggan:

We think there’s a new category called behavior management. Individual things such as analytics, social, gamification, private label social networks. It’s all scratching this issue. We focus on how to turn it all into a platform that allows any type of company, anyone with an audience, to use these techniques for user behavior.

Deloitte Digital, PayPal and eBay’s X.Commerce, CA Technologies, Samsung, and Rogers Communications are among the dozens of Fortune 1000 companies who have signed on to use Badgeville’s behavior platform. Some are implementing specific pieces while others are deploying the full suite.

The new behavior platform will potentially pit Badgeville against some enterprise social networking tools like Chatter, Yammer and others. But Duggan said it’s also working to integrate with those services so the behavior platform can incorporate actions on these channels into its larger reputation and rank system.

Badgeville is now up to 50 employees, and it counts more than 100 customers, who pay a few thousand dollars per month to use its products. The company, which launched a year ago, raised $12 million in July. I think this is a logical step for Badgeville, which is not simply playing in the gamification space. It’s about working on loyalty, behavior and engagement, and gamification is just one tool for that. By combining game mechanics with other tools, it can try to be a go-to behavior engine for enterprise clients. I still have to see how this plays out, but it makes sense. And it shows that gamification, with the right collection of other behavior tools, can be useful to corporations.

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