It’s now official: SAP has released its brand-new Web 2.0 product called StreamWork. The project was initially called “Constellation” within SAP, and was first exposed to beta customers on the web site 12sprints.com, as covered in earlier postings on this site.

Why the name? It’s a variant on “workstream”, which according to Wikipedia is:

“A flow of output, the activities and transactions, that a worker produces as they go about their daily work activities. Workstreams are flows of largely unstructured data that workstreaming technologies seek to capture, document and repackage in more intelligent ways benefiting individual workers, managers and corporations.”

And the article goes on to say:

“…tapping into and mining these workstreams presents tremendous opportunities to companies in terms of collaboration, agility and collective intelligence.”

Other research seems to back this up. According to a study by Frost & Sullivan, 36% of company performance is determined by organizations’ “collaborative index”:

“This is more than twice the impact of a company’s strategic orientation (16%) and more than five times the impact of market and technological turbulence influences (7%). This is a key finding because it empirically demonstrates that increased high-quality collaboration can improve business performance.“

The Power of Collaborative Decisions

Every person in every organization makes many decisions every day. Many of these are so small that we don’t even recognize them as decisions. Every time a sales person calls a customer, she is “deciding” to prioritizing that activity over everything else she could be doing. Of course, a sub-optimal decision may not make much difference. But over time, and across a large organization, these small decisions pile up and have a huge influence to corporate performance.

Of course, computer systems have been promising Improved business decision-making since at least the 1950s, by providing more information about company operations. And they have largely delivered, enabling corporations of breath-taking complexity. But you can give everybody the same facts, and still end up with completely different views about what the data means, and what should be done about it (just look at any group of rival politicians!).

Decision-making is a core business function of every organization, and has been extensively studied by scientists and management theorists. But despite all the advances in theory, real-life decision-making is still dominated by people, personalities, and endless emails and meetings.

Decisions still tend to be made in messy, non-repeatable, “are-we-really-sure-about-this?” ways, relying heavily on “gut feel”. People often spend more time and effort making decisions as they do on actually trying to execute them, and reviewing / reversing decisions that have already been made (every new politician and executive feels honor-bound to reverse the decisions of their predecessors).

Collaboration or “Enterprise 2.0” platforms, including Jive and Cubetree and Google Wave have helped, by letting employees work together on projects, but they typically don’t directly support goal-oriented decision-making.

Introducing SAP StreamWork

StreamWork helps you bring together:

• All the right people needed to make a good decision (executives, influencers, experts), across different corporate functions and geographies
• All the information relevant to the decision, from inside or outside the organization, both qualitative and quantitative, objective and subjective (and reformat it, if necessary). Integration with Evernote and Scribd makes it easy to upload and share documents.
• All the right methods that should be brought to bear in order to consider all the aspects of the decision (cost/benefit analysis, SWOT analysis, Pro/Con charts, responsibility matrices, etc.)

See this link for a summary of StreamWork features and view the StreamWork YouTube Channel for an extensive set of how-to videos.

By putting all this in one environment, and letting people collaborate and comment and add data and add documents, and explain their reasoning, organizations get:

• More clarity about why decisions are being made
• More engagement from employees, who can see a direct link between their suggestions and the final result
• More commitment to decisions (research shows that we care more about fair process than we do with final decisions. If we feel our voice has been heard, we’re far more likely to comply with the final choice, even if we didn’t agree with it)
• Better results. Measurement and tracking of the decision-making process, allowing you to optimize the process over time (faster decision cycles, better outcomes)

On-Demand, Extensible Architecture

StreamWork uses an on-demand architecture, so you can be productive immediately without any software installs, and you can easily invite people from inside or outside the organization without having to worry about access problems. And it provides an open REST API, making it easy to extend StreamWork functionality and integrate with other systems.

Here’s a look at some of the add-ons that have already been built, including integration with InfoView, Text-to-query, Android, YouTube, and others.

Here’s a great example of the integration possibilities from OffiSync:

And SAP is busy integrating other prototypes such as Gravity, covered in an earlier post, with StreamWork.

Pricing

The basic edition is free, with up to five activities, 250Mb of storage, and the unlimited ability to collaborate in others’ activities. The Professional Edition costs $9/month for up to 100 activities, 5Gb of storage, and more control over user security. An Enterprise Edition is in the works, with more details to be announced later this year.

Sign up Now!

Signing up for StreamWork is easy and free — click here.

Other Coverage and Links

• Alex Williams, ReadWriteWeb: Does StreamWork Give a Picture of SAP’s Future?
• Bob Thompson, Customer Think: Will StreamWork get SAP out of its Innovation Funk?
• Chris Kanaracus, IDG News: SAP’s ‘Virtual War Room’ Tool Gets a Name: StreamWork
• Jon Brodkin, Network World: SAP Targets Online Collaboration Market with StreamWork
• Larry Barrett, Datamation: SAP Debuts Cloud-Based Collaboration Apps
• Xavier Lanier, GottaBeMobile.com: Evernote’s Incorporated in SAP Collaboration Tool
• B-Eye-Network: Formerly Known as 12sprints, SAP StreamWork is now Generally Available
• Rich Hoeg: 12Sprints Tutorial

The panelists were all members of the 2.0 Adoption Council (from left to right in the photo above) Greg Lowe of Alcatel-Lucent, Megan Murray of Booz Allen Hamilton, Bryce Williams of Eli-Lilley, Jamie Pappas of EMC, Bruce Galinsky of MetLife, and Claire Flanagan of CSC.

Here’s a resume of the panel’s responses to David’s questions (captured on the fly, so typically not verbatim quotes)

David: How has Enterprise 2.0 been transforming your organizations?

Greg: We’re in the process of changing from a waterfall organization to something more agile. But right now, we don’t have the processes and tools in place to support that. Our work in the enterprise 2.0 space is to break down the silos and let people come up with new ways of working, and reducing duplicate efforts.

David: But shouldn’t you have done this before anyway? What’s different?

Greg: It’s true that change agency is nothing new – but now we have tools and technologies to support these people. We’re a 70,000 person organization, and it’s now easier to find and work with other change agents.

Claire: These tools are making it easier to solve the business problems.

Bruce: At Met-Life, it’s an enabling set of technologies. It allows people to allow new things and work in different areas. We couldn’t do that before, we were pigeon-holed, and we couldn’t share what we were doing.

Claire: It’s not an incremental technology. I came from knowledge management, and you used to have to go to those tools. These new technologies are letting people do something directly in their workstream, which I think is much more important.

David: How does the technology transform the workforce? What does that even mean?

Megan: The workforce is already being transformed. We expect more as employees: more input, and more recognition, and we want to collaborate. That’s already happening — these technologies are just allowing us to do these things better, faster. As organizations, we’re trying to be as open and agile as possible about what these technologies can do.

David: Doesn’t a big cultural shift have to take place to use these tools?

Bryce: At Eli Lilley, we were interested in working more closely with our customers, using Web 2.0 technology, but there was a lot of trepidation and regulatory concerns. So we’re building our social competencies internally, using Enterprise 2.0 to lead to web 2.0 and more engagement with our customers.

David: Should it be top-down, or bottom-up?

Jamie: At EMC, we started bottom-up, with folks that wanted to start evangelism. But we also needed to find executive sponsors. One of the fallacies we see is that it’s a cure-all, fix-all type of transformation. It’s just an enabler, but you need advocates across the organization.

Bruce: It’s a tool like any other. We need to do our jobs quicker, and we can’t do that unless we’re collaborating more quickly.

David: How does it relate to business process?

Claire: I think it’s about business process and the changing nature of our workforce. We have lots of people who are working in home offices and client offices across the globe. It’s hard for them to get the answers they need. These tools are like a virtual office for them. The technology is an enabler for collapsing time-zone and distance problems.

David: How does it relate to people?

Megan: Regardless of the technology, there’s always people involved. The wide variety of tools we have can be used smartly – surveys instead of somebody hosting a forum, etc.

David: Does E2.0 bring anything other than community? Have we hit the wall?

Megan: I think it’s baby steps. Compared to 2006, it’s leaps and bounds. Many more opportunities now.

David: What about governance and compliance?

Bryce: We can’t not do it – we’re such a group of ambitious knowledge workers. There are some employees who say “I can do this in the external world, and I’m creative, so I’m going to find a way to do it”. The danger is that company data goes outside the fire wall. We need to herd the cats and help provide people with the right tools.

David: It’s about opening things up, but that works against governance, lots of information has to remain private – how do you handle that?

Megan: We’re working on participatory governance. We have all the basic stuff in place. But in addition to that, we’re talking about getting participation from the groups that have skin in the game. So if we have an HR problem, there’s an HR community that can handle it.

Jamie: I think organizations have to stop not trusting their employees. You can take two approaches – you can lock everything down, or we can say “your responsible people, here are the policies”, and approach things as they happen.

Bruce: If people are malicious, they will do something no matter what. We should watch and look.

David: But there’s a real material risk!

Bruce and Jamie: But there is that same risk right now…

David: But the tools make it easier, harder to lock down…

Jamie: People have common sense, they really do.

Megan: It’s about accountability and visibility. “I can’t stop you from being stupid, but I can highlight it when you are stupid.’” There’s a lot of power in empowering people.

David: What about technology “religious wars?”

Jamie: It’s not about the technology, it’s about the people. We use the 80/20 rule – is it intuitive and easy to use? If so, we can springboard off of that.

Greg: The European view very different from the US view. They’re ahead in open source. That kind of creates a different market.

David: But this isn’t new?

Greg: No, but the conversations are a lot more open now.

Megan: There’s a generational bias. Some people are naturally “revolutionary”, and scare the people in charge – and we get caught in the crossfire.

Bruce: We have some areas that use Microsoft, some that use IBM, and some areas that are going to do their own thing no matter what. If there happen to be two tools, oh well – there are certain things you can fight, and other things you can’t.

David: What about ROI?

Greg: How do you tie better collaboration to the bottom line? We can save time finding answers, etc. and you can do some correlation, and that’s your cost savings or productivity increase.

Megan: We use one story: we had many huge email threads, with everybody on copy. Somebody took the longest thread, put in some values for how long it would take to pay attention to each email compared to a wiki, etc. and worked out that it “cost” up to $250,000… And if something as small and insignificant as a “reply all” can have a big dollar amount, what about the big stuff?

Audience question: I think one of the opportunities is “better decisions”. They can be made in lots of different ways — through consensus, etc. and this technology can help do it better – any thoughts?

Jamie: We’ve been doing some cost-cutting at EMC, and that’s always very painful if it’s top-down. So our management asked “what would you do?”. We had lots of suggestions: sensors in conference rooms, changes to cell phone policies, etc. And when these things come from employee suggestions, people are a lot more vested. And we’ve had other changes that weren’t popular, but now there’s at least a forum for people to communicate their reactions. In some cases, the executives have said “yes, that was a bad move, next time we’re going to do it differently” – and that’s very empowering.

David: Within TechWeb, we had a public conversation about how to improve our virtual events. We have tons of groups running their own events. We’ve been able to prevent the wrong decisions – repeating the mistakes that others have already made.

Audience question – You’re clearly not IT people — you’re too enlightened! I think Enterprise 2.0 has its roots in the new interfaces of Web 2.0. I know lots of “real” IT people would say the interface is not the important part, it’s the underlying systems. How important is user interface, do you think?

Bryce: The power comes from the critical mass of participation, and if what we’re trying to do is in lots of different locations, or hard to use, people just go back to their overflowing inbox. So yes, the user interface is very important.

Claire: I think you hit on something very important. If you don’t select the right tool, something that’s easy to get started with, the users are going to vote with their feet and do something else. Our job, when we look at these tools, is to keep this in mind. There are lots of factors: technical, compliance, cost factors, but usability is very important. One of the things we wanted to try in our pilot was whether or not the technology was “addictive”

David: So should the users help choose?

Megan: We’re using a scrum methodology, and we’re actively involving the users, so yes!

Bruce: We have an innovation center, and the employees help us make the deployments better. We started with the IT department, in fact.

Greg: It’s a little like having an internet startup. You need to engage people, make it “sticky”

Claire: We started with a wiki a few years ago. It was a great first step, but people had to use wiki notation, etc – so this actually became a barrier to full-scale collaboration. So we wanted something that made this easier. We could only get so far with the previous tool, because it was too hard to use.

Jamie: It’s not about “IT push”. It has to have the users invested in it.

Question from audience: You said managers have to trust employees more – any practical suggestions on how to do this?

Jamie: We deliberately didn’t “over engineer” – we opened things up internally, and nothing bad has happened, no users or content had needed to be removed. We tend to assume that you have to lock it down before bad things happen. But you can educate instead of prohibit.

Bruce: And you get more trust if you show trust

Bryce: There was lots of talk about different approaches to this at the beginning. One person ended up setting up his own microblogging platform on a server under his desk, and had thousands of users. It made it’s own business case, and he’s been able to show that there was no problem with content.

David: Web 2.0  is also about machine interfaces, mash-ups etc. Are you seeing that?

Megan: In our environment, not a lot, yet. All the information we use coming from our systems.

Question from the audience: Referring to the original article that generated this discussion, I think the author wasn’t impressed with the soft process improvements. His point was that at a macro business level, they’re just incremental. Can I take up his question: Is anyone able to share any real hard business process changes? product development, innovation, etc?

Claire: As a consulting organization, we’ve been able to document how our proposal processes have changed, to find experts and close deals much faster.

Jamie: Our competitive group has adopted our tool as the one place that they communicate everything, so that has transformed how our sales force gets information – that’s the first place they go now. Also, we have an annual innovation conference, and we’ve been able to open up submissions to the whole organization, which has been a huge win, both for content and engagement.

Bruce: We have to create an IT factbook on a regular basis, and it was a painful manual process. Now we have a wiki and letting the relevant people fill it out.

Claire: We have a group set up for excel tips and tricks – and this was very successful, an incredible network of people, and that translates into an everyday process. When you think about hard dollars, they’re there.

Megan: It’s speed to resolution. We’re expanding, and we want to become a more dispersed company, and we need the tools to support that.

Other articles:

• http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/11/is-enterprise-20-a-crock.php

At the Enterprise 2.0 conference in San Francisco, Andrew McAfee just opened the magic envelope and revealed that the winner of the first Enterprise 2.0 “Internal Evangelist of the Year” award is Claire Flanagan for her work on CSC’s “C3: Connect | Communicate | Collaborate” environment.

For more information about the project, see Claire’s Blog. In summary “CSC is a going to be a very different company because of Claire’s work”. The award was organized by Susan Scrupski of the 2.0 Adoption Council.

The other finalists were Megan Murray of Booz Allen and Greg Lowe of Alcatel-Lucent.

It’s a sunny Fall morning in San Francisco, and Steve Wylie of TechWeb kicked off the first San Francisco version of the E2.0 event, talking about the changes he’s seen over the last few years. In particular, he pointed to the the rich case studies, larger vendors, and dedicated service providers that are present at today’s event as evidence of the industry’s increasing maturity.

Tammy Erickson, President of nGenera Innovation, started her keynote with a prediction that this year will be seen as the “ah-ha” year, when organizations really started implementing Enterprise 2.0 technology. She explained that, as with every new technology, the early focus is on the technology itself, but it will ultimately lead to big changes in the the way organizations work. For example, the invention of the telephone enabled management at a distance, and the creation of head offices far from the plants and factories.

She went on to outline the changes she sees in the future:

Over the last 100 years, we’ve developed organizations perfectly adapted to prior challenges – but not the challenges of the future. The icons of the future will be those organizations that have harnessed the power of Enterprise 2.0 technology in organizations, bringing information together in powerful new ways.

The organizational structures of today’s organizations are not adapted to the new methods. We need more flexible team structures that have ability to effect change. And beyond the structures, there are a series of deeply-embedded assumptions that need to be surfaced and addressed.

For example, there’s assumed to be a tradeoff between loyalty, and protection and care. Most corporate policies – such as pension plans and promotions – are based on this. But we know as employees that we can no longer companies to protect us – but as yet, there’s no replacement pact yet to take its place. Another assumption has been about individual autonomy – the notion that “you do your job, I do mind”, and that peers don’t have any right or ability to comment on my work.

Today, almost all the unwritten rules in our organizations actually discourage collaborative behavior, and this has to change. The future will see a move to more of a “Plug and Pay” structure, where employees can come in for specific roles for which they are best qualified.

nGenera’s research shows there are ten behaviors that enable collaborative capacity:

• Highly engaged, committed participants
• Trust-based relationships
• Networking opportunities
• Selection, promotion and training practices based on collaboration
• Organizational philosophy supporting a “community of adults”
• Executives who create a “gift culture”
• Leaders with both task- and relationship-management skills
• Productive and efficient behaviors and processes
• Clearly defined individual roles and responsibilities
• Important, challenging tasks

Executive concerns about Enterprise 2.0 are clearly diminishing – fewer people consider it a luxury, or simply a sop to Gen-Y employees. Organizations are realizing that these are business tools that have substantial implications for the way we carry out activities.

But there’s still confusion – we lump together a very wide range of different activities and technologies under the “Enterprise 2.0” banner. The reality is that Enterprise 2.0 can take many forms – and it’s not always worth it.

So what do people mean? There are typically “ten collaborative intents”:

1. Connect previously-unrelated ideas
2. Access untapped people or expertise
3. Distribute work or risk
4. Co-create
5. Detect emerging patterns or trends
6. Pool judgments
7. Determine group-wide preferences
8. Air and debate multiple views
9. Influence views or norms
10. Coordinate in time and space

One of the biggest future challenges is engagement: you can’t make anyone collaborate. You don’t really know if I’m really putting forth my “best effort”. So the way we’ve learned to manage, by setting directions and controls, and monitoring success – has to change. The new management challenge will be engagement: the job of a manager is to help employees want to share, to collaborate. This requires a very “authentic” organization – one that is true to “what it means to work here”

Tammy outlined four common corporate positions today:

• Technology-led
• Culture-based
• Executive-led
• Skunk works

In each of these cases, the approach isn’t yet balanced – one of the elements dominates over the others (strategy, structure, culture, technology, or engagement) – or, in the skunkworks case, there’s only some development in each area..

Microsoft’s presentation featured a mock “social speed date”  between Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management at Microsoft, and Alina Fu, SharePoint product manager.

Andrew McAfee, first coined the term Enterprise 2.0 in an article in 2006, and literally wrote the book about the subject.

He agreed with Tammy that there’s been a sea-change in interest in Enterprise 2.0, and that executives have moved from skepticism to awareness, or resignation, or even some enthusiasm. But there are also some danger signs – hence the title of his presentation: “We have the opportunity to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory""

First, the evidence that Enterprise 2.0 is thriving. Andrew’s favorite case study comes from the intelligence community: “if they can do it – with a strong “need to know” tradition of information sharing – then anybody can.” When he asked a member of that community what had changed, they said:

“Philosophy used to be that if we shared information too much, people would die. But after 9/11, we realized that if we DON’T share information enough, people could die.”

Andrew pointed to the growth of case studies and organizations such as the Enterprise 2.0 adoption council as an example of the increasing maturity of the industry (plus, they have great swag!)

Andrew quoted from various studies including one from McKinsey called “how companies are benefiting from Web 2.0”, which showed big increases in access to knowledge, to internal experts, employee satisfaction, increasing innovation, and customer satisfaction.

What are the dangers? What could we do to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? Here are some common mistakes Andrew sees:

Declaring war on the enterprise. As Andrew points out, this is a really bad sales pitch – if the goal is to make the executives go away, they are unlikely to sign up for the plan. Plus, and more importantly, it’s flat-out empirically wrong – there’s still need for some hierarchy, there’s still need for management. To illustrate the point, Andrew pointed to a news story from the satirical journal, the Onion — “Marrxist’s apartment a microscosm of why Marxism doesn’t work”.

Allow walled gardens to flourish. Create mutually inaccessible silos of information. The web works because there’s “a” web, not lots of different webs. He illustrated this with a picture of walled fields from Normandy France.

Accentuate the negative. The risks are manageable, and shouldn’t be ignored, but shouldn’t stop things going forward. For example, one organization implemented a “flag” that could be set to show a potential problem – but so far it’s never been used.

Try to replace email. We’re not going to replace email any time soon. It works well for a lot of people, and in particular, senior decision-makers are happy with it, especially the “one stop shop” aspect of the inbox.

Fall in love with features. Users don’t want more bells and whistles. We have a tendency to cram in more features – but this doesn’t make it any easier to use. The phrase to retain is “what’s the simplest thing that could possibly work?”

Overuse the word “social”. The word is technically accurate, but “I’ve rarely come across a work that has so many negative associations for managers” – it sounds like “technology to organize social hour” (cue picture of Woodstock: chaos, despair, etc.)

In the final keynote of the morning, Rob Tarkoff, VP and General Manager, Business Productivity Solutions for Adobe explained that enterprise software is failing because of the lack of attractive interfaces, and showed an example of healthcare workflow using Adobe’s solutions.

As part of my role helping evangelize the use of social media within SAP , I am a proud member of the 2.0 Adoption Council, a group devoted to creating and sharing best practices in Enterprise 2.0 adoption (see the “Web 2.0 in SAP” section of this site for more information about internal Web 2.0 deployments at SAP).

As explained on the council website at www.20adoptioncouncil.com, the council members are:

…a collection of managers in large enterprises that are charting the course for 2.0 adoption.  Although we may use different platforms and tools, we all share a common enthusiasm for bringing a new way of working to our representative companies.  We call ourselves “internal evangelists” and some say we have one of the most difficult, yet exciting jobs in the global marketplace.

And the member welcome explains that:

The 2.0 Adoption Council is a peer-based, information-sharing group interested in the latest thinking, best practices, case studies, and helpful tips associated with executing socio-collaborative strategies and projects in the large enterprise.

There are very few opportunities for customers to connect with each other and share their specific interests, ask questions, and help solve problems others are facing while playing the role of “internal evangelist” at their day job. It is sometimes a frustrating and thankless job!

The 2.0 Adoption Council was formed in June of 2009 by Susan Scrupski, Founder of SoCo Partners, alias ITSinsider on Twitter (Photo by Michael Krigsman of the IT Project Failures Blog — and excellent amateur photographer!).

The Council will be conducting research and publishing white papers culled from the collective intelligence of contributing members. It will be a major participant in the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (November 2-5), where the Internal Evangelist of the Year will be announced. If you’d like to nominate a member to be Internal Evangelist of the Year, please fill out this form – and if you’re attending to the show, we look forward to meeting you!

Membership of the council is invitation-only and restricted to individuals that are actively involved in a 2.0 adoption effort in large organizations (generally more than 10,000 employees). Each company can have two individuals on the council (Craig Cmehil is the other SAP representative), and each person is expected to devote each time to helping the council community. (Susan, does this count?

The council has a Facebook Page open to anybody who’s interested in 2.0 best practice, but the main work of the council happens in a collaborative workspace kindly provided by Jive Software (although the council does not recommend any particular platform to its members) and regular conference calls between members.

A presentation by Susan on slideshare.net below outlines the goals and organization of the Council.

The topic threads of the council have been both useful and fascinating – it’s great to swap stories and tips with people that understand exactly the environment we’re working in, and it has already started gathering useful facts and figures, e.g. this post from Susan:

Finally, most important of all — there’s 2.0 adoption council swag!

Now that the Google Wave “sandbox” environment is widely available (see Starting with Google Wave if you need more background information), we’re starting to see some great examples of integrations between Google Wave and SAP systems.

DJ Adams’ great post on SDN shows how he built a robot to intercept SAP-specific references in a Google Wave conversation, and use that information to automatically augment the conversation. In this case, the robot automatically adds longer descriptions to standard SAP request codes.

Daniel Graversen shows how a Google robot can be used to get more information about a particular customer using SAP enterprise services:

And he shows how a bank-loan-application robot can use a form in the Google conversation to create a basic workflow that could then be linked to standard SAP enterprise services.

These examples are fairly rudimentary, but it’s easy to see how these could be augmented with other powerful technology, such as text analytics to get deeper understanding of the Google conversation, integration with metadata repositories to spot key terms like “revenue” or “sales”, and graphics and analytics engines to provide actionable information.

To get an idea of how far this technology can go in the future, take a look at the Text-to-Query prototype Powerpoint add-in from the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center.

The prototype uses text analytics to interpret what you are writing in a slide, and then “automagically” propose appropriate charts and graphs, based on the metadata already stored in your BI systems. It’s easy to imaging extending this to Google Wave and other conversation environments such as Twitter, Facebook, and internal Enterprise 2.0 systems.

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These are all examples of elements that will provide a platform for future “business user applications.” These flexible applications will be created by business people in the course of their daily work, applying the vast amounts of information and metadata stored in corporate systems to provide contextual information without the user having to go to explicitly search for it. Today, over 90% of the effort to create new information-focused applications goes to aligning the right data, with the required quality, and storing it appropriately.

By tying together conversations, context, information, and operational systems, we’re getting closer to the goals of the semantically-enabled “Web 3.0”, where diverse pieces of information can be integrated together (and acted upon) with less painful effort.

SAP has been a long-time user of Jive Software’s forum and workspace technology (formerly called ClearSpace, now SBS for “Social Business Software”), and there are close commercial ties between the two companies. Notably, Jive’s platform is used to power the SAP Collaboration Workspace area that is used for both external collaboration with customers as well as internal collaboration – including the main internal “SAP 2.0” forum for discussing SAP’s own adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technology.

But as discussed in a previous post, Social Networking @ SAP, and like most large organizations, a variety of other platforms are also used inside the organization including Atlassian’s Confluence and an internal development, Harmony.

In addition to these existing deployments, late last year, a small workgroup of SAP BusinessObjects employees based in Palo Alto, California, began beta-testing a new, on-demand enterprise collaboration suite called CubeTree.

The initial installation was focused mainly on twitter-like status feeds, functionality that wasn’t easily available from the other platforms. It rapidly went viral within the company, with employees able to invite other employees. I personally started using the site in November last year.

During the initial beta phase, CubeTree was used widely across different SAP departments, and I personally found it very useful to get insights into the activities of other teams working on related projects – especially SAP’s own web 2.0 technology plans.

One of the key advantages of the CubeTree on-demand architecture is the ability to rapidly add new features as they are demanded by users. There’s a weekly software update, and new features are explained on the company’s blog. To help encourage a variety of opinions and focus feedback, CubeTree uses functionality from User Voice. Participants are given “votes” they can use when making requests and comments to developers.

CubeTree launched their production platform in May of this year, and it now provides the full suite of typical features offered on today’s consumer social networking sites: user profiles, follow/follower news feeds, micro-blogging, along with enterprise collaboration tools including wikis, file sharing, and polls.

Here’s a list of features, and the feature tour video from the CubeTree web site, below.

David Meyer, VP Product Management for Emerging Technologies for SAP BusinessObjects was the main sponsor of the CubeTree project, and participated in the CubeTree launch video below, talking about the promise of the social enterprise and how CubeTree helps him achieve his goals.

Transcript of the video:

Voice-over: SAP BusinessObjects has employees and offices around the world, designing and developing the world’s leading business intelligence solutions. Managing product lifecycles throughout multiple offices and time zones has its challenges, so they turned to CubeTree to facilitate collaboration and to open up channels of communication between stakeholders.

David Meyer: CubeTree helps ideas flow like water and I think that everybody in the enterprise is incredibly thirsty these days, because they’re captured in these silos and stuck in meetings and we need to bring back that human element. And people often don’t equate technology, the social technology, with the human element, and they think it’s de-humanizing. I think that people that are immersed in these systems see it as the exact opposite. They re-humanize within the confines and the constraints of how we’re forced to live our enterprise days.

Voice-over: Casual conversations and impromptu meetings are commonplace. But collaboration within the enterprise can be limited to one office or one team. By using CubeTree, development is more agile and collaboration is made easier.

David: CubeTree meets some of the needs — the very real needs — we have in the enterprise by making us simply move faster. Somebody says something in CubeTree. Somebody else says something from a different walk of life. A few minutes later, and by the end of the day, there’s a brand-new idea. It didn’t exist in the morning. It’s the composite idea, the best, the 1+1+1=8 within these dialogs with people from diverse viewpoints. And those are the things that are very exciting, that I think everybody is starting to feel the acceleration that these tools can provide.

Voice-over: CubeTree has already impacted the way people work at SAP BusinessObjects.

David: The other day I was remarking on a little company that TechCrunch covered. Within three hours, somebody from the ecosystem team saw that I had a point of view on it, looked at it themselves, realized where it fit in into our product strategy, and that same day had signed an NDA with that company, and was talking to them the next day. That’s remarkable!

David also explained his motivations for using CubeTree in the launch press release:

“The market looks to SAP as an innovator and thought leader in driving business transformation through technology. Social networks are transforming how people communicate in their personal lives. We adopted CubeTree’s enterprise social software to bring the same network effect into the enterprise, connecting people and ideas across the company to accelerate our business.”

The internal deployment has not been without its wrinkles, however. Legal and IT security objections to the use of a hosted environment (rather than the in-house deployment of the Jive platform) had to be overcome, and deployment had to be briefly interrupted for non-US employees while European data confidentiality concerns were addressed. In some countries such as Germany, the employee worker council had to be consulted, and has not yet given its go-ahead, barring that country from the deployment. And, of course, the functionality overlaps with existing platforms were examined, and a business case required for the costs and overhead of a new solution.

Unlike the Jive collaboration platform that is available to all SAP staff, CubeTree deployment is currently only available for employees of one of the product divisions of SAP Business Objects, but the deployment may be (re)extended in the future.

Links

• TechCrunch: CubeTree Launches As A Facebook + FriendFeed + Twitter For Enterprise
• Bill Ives: CubeTree Releases Innovative Enterprise Collaboration Platform
• “Buzz” Area of CubeTree web site: http://www.cubetree.com/site/buzz
• Official CubeTree Twitter Channel: http://twitter.com/cubetree
• Ross Fubini, CTO and Co-founder of CubeTree on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fubini

We’re used to seeing IT industry megavendors such as SAP augment their solutions with web 2.0 technology from smaller vendors, but now one of the leading enterprise 2.0 companies is turning to SAP for a cloud computing offers to extend new capabilities to customers.

At the Enterprise 2.0 2009 event in Boston, Jive and SAP announced that Jive is going to be a reseller of SAP’s on-demand BI solutions, providing “social BI” to their customers.

SAP has long been a customer of Jive Software’s Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform, notably to power the forums on the SAP Development Network, and SAP’s Collaboration Workspace, and a few years ago SAP signed an OEM agreement to include Jive Forums as a standard part of the SAP NetWeaver portal application.

This announcement is a clear sign of the growing maturity of the enterprise 2.0 market, in two different ways.

First, it’s the first concrete results of SAP’s increased focus on the web 2.0 market, and in particular the investment in the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio of products, designed to transform the work of “business users” in the same way that ERP has transformed operational processes.

SAP BusinessObjects was one of the early pioneers in the on-demand business intelligence market, with a flexible platform that provides the best of both worlds: customers can use the same technology platform in a mix of on-demand or on-premise configurations, and move smoothly between the two. SAP’s agreement to partner with Jive is non-exclusive: the on-demand BI software is already used within other partner solutions including Oco.

Second, it shows that enterprise 2.0 solutions are real, and providing value in organizations. Jive’s 3,000 customers include many large organizations, that have been gathering valuable data about how companies collaborate internally and engage with customers and partners externally. As with any successful business process, they now want to examine and optimize that process, and mine that data with best-of-breed business intelligence tools.

These two trends were echoed by Susan Scrupski of ITSInsider, in her post And They’re Off. A Postcard From Enterprise 2.0 Event:

“This new venture, however, marks a clear initiative by SAP to (finally) take social software seriously, and likewise, it provides a grownup capability for a social software platform like Jive to deliver some clear business benefit.”

I believe business intelligence is an essential part of any successful enterprise 2.0 initiative, in order to:

Provide statistics on usage trends. Business intelligence helps proactively identify any technical or social roadblocks to effective deployment of collaboration tools, answering questions such as:

• When are the peaks and troughs of user activity? What causes them?
• Who has access to the system but is not using it?
• Which users have recently stopped using the system? Do they share any common characteristics?
• Are there any regular occasions where particular groups don’t use the system? Why?

Prove the ROI. Business intelligence functionality will help provide the data required to prove to skeptics of the value of collaboration and social computing inside organizations.

• Are users of the system more likely to get better (or worse) employee evaluations or bonuses?
• What’s the correlation between any groups of identified “top performers” and system usage?
• Do sales people who use the system achieve quota faster than sales people that do not?
• Does using the system replace other types of internal information dissemination, such as attending internal web seminars, or does it complement it?
• Is there any correlation between system use and employee or customer satisfaction?
• Are customers that engage in collaboration more or less profitable?

Optimize social relationships. If enterprise 2.0 software generates return on investment, it follows that it makes sense to try and optimize its use. Business intelligence systems can help decide where the network of relationships between employees, customers, and partners can be improved:

• Are there certain key “connectors” that provide a valuable service, but are not being recognized as such within the organization?
• Are there any groups of people that collaborate among themselves, but not with the rest of the organization? (e.g. bosses that frown on “their team” working with other departments)
• Do similar groups (such as regional sales offices) have different patterns of relationships? Why?
• Are there people that seem to be a negative influence on relationships within the organization? (e.g. detecting “bad bosses”
• Did the new bonus or incentive system we just introduced stop people collaborating?

Analyzing sentiments. Collaboration technology generates a lot of textual information that can be analyzed using technology such as SAP BusinessObjects’ Text Analytics, for analyzing the sentiment of customers, partners, and employees, about products, processes, or the collaboration system itself.

Note that in every case, it’s not enough to have information just from the collaboration system – it must be combined with information from other key financial and HR systems in order to get a full view of what is happening. This means that organizations must have a strategic approach to implementing business intelligence across the organization.

You can download Jive Software’s “Social Business Imperative Manifesto” here. And any organizations interested in trying out the SAP BusinessObjects ondemand solutions can click here to sign up for a Starter edition account.

Links and Other Analysis

Mary Hayes Weier of Information Week: Enterprise 2.0: SAP, Jive Combining BI With Wikis

Chris Kanaracus of IDG News Service: Jive, SAP Partner on ‘social BI’

Alex Goldman, InternetNews.com, SAP BusinessObjects integrates into Jive

Barb Mosher, CMS Wire, Jive Integrates SAP’s onDemand Business Intelligence Offerings

Oliver Marks, ZDNet Blogs: Jive & Telligent Get More Analytical

Susan Scrupski,  ITSInsider: And They’re Off. A Postcard From Enterprise 2.0 Event

BlueKiwi was created in 2006, and is already the leading European provider of enterprise social software, with an on-demand platform that allows organizations to create secured social networks among employees, partners, and customers, integrating all the standard Web 2.0 services such as wikis, blogs, forums, and tags.

Dassault Systems is one of France’s largest independent software company, and a worldwide leader in product lifecycle management and 3D software (notably CATIA used by Boeing and Airbus to create their airplanes).

The presentation by Carlos Diaz, CEO of blueKiwi, explained that enterprise social software is the fastest-growing software market (24.4% growth according to Gartner), but that alignment with business process is essential for Enterprise 2.0 success:

“Enterprise 2.0 only works if it is part of a business process. It’s great to work in new ways, but it’s not enough. To make it real, it has to be very practical.”

To enable this, the partners are creating a social-enabled, “PLM 2.0” product to help enhance the product innovation cycle:

“Social enterprise software helps the conversations that are an essential part of product innovation. There’s a virtuous circle: a conversation turns into an idea; an idea turns into a product; and when products are used, they start new conversations, that lead to new innovation and new products.”

Dassault CEO Bernard Charlès explained that Dassault will be distributing the product through their sales force worldwide, and is entering into the capital of blueKiwi.

“We’re a satisfied customer of blueKiwi. We have 1,000 users today, and this will be rising to 8 to 10,000 by the end of the year. It’s much more than a tool – the conversation approach has changed the way our salesforce and partners work together”

“We also want to help French startups to be successful, and do everything we can to help them have a worldwide presence.”

In part to help support the new relationship, Diaz also announced that blueKiwi will be opening two offices in the US, in San Francisco, and next to Dassault’s US headquarters in Boston.

The two companies emphasized that blueKiwi would maintain its existing relationships with companies like Microsoft, providing focused social enterprise functionality that can easily be embedded and integrated with other solutions.

What This Means to the Bigger Market

Up until now, the markets for traditional business applications and enterprise 2.0 software have remained largely separate. But if enterprise 2.0 initiatives have to be aligned with business process to be successful, we can expect to see tighter integration and market interaction between existing business application platforms such as SAP’s Netweaver and the vendors of enterprise social software.

SAP is a Gold Sponsor of this year’s Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston. Unfortunately, I’m not able to attend this year – here’s what I’ll be missing (least until the online versions are available):

Connect. Collaborate. Transform Your Business. Forward looking businesses are using web 2.0 and social tools to achieve new levels of productivity and efficiency in a tough economy. Attend the leading event for business and IT professionals challenging the status quo and leading the charge to Enterprise 2.0.

Over forty sessions across six conference tracks cover the latest trends in Enterprise 2.0 technology innovation and organization-wide change:

• Enterprise 2.0 in Action
• Social Tools for the Enterprise
• Foundations for Enterprise 2.0
• New Ways to Work: Organization 2.0
• Community Engagement Through Social Media
• Executive

There will be a host of Enterprise 2.0 experts from SAP attending the conference, including Beth Beld, Vice President Emerging Technology Strategy. They will be networking with customers, analysts, and partners, and the SAP booth in the Expo Pavillion will be open Tuesday and Wednesday, 11:30 am – 6 pm. Don’t forget to visit to get the latest on SAP’s cloud computing directions, on-demand strategy, and the latest Web 2.0 prototypes from the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center.

Mani Gill, Vice President, OnDemand, SAP will be presenting in the panel on Privacy, Data Ownership and Identity in an Increasingly Social World, 3:30 pm–4:30 pm on Wednesday, June 24:

"It’s IM all over again!" as public services such as Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace increasingly cross from consumer into enterprise. As these tools become legitimate business services for marketing and collaboration, IT must determine how to move from blocking to supporting their use in a manner that’s consistent with requirements for data loss prevention, security, compliance, and management. During this session we’ll explore the challenges in bridging private and public worlds, as well as mitigation strategies to enable use of public services while minimizing potential threats.