Companies today are under increasing pressure to change the way they interact with customers and community management platforms like the one provided by Lithium Technologies can be an important part of that initiative. With customers insisting that companies interact "when, where and how" the customer chooses and not, as in the past, only where the company chooses, customer support is more important than ever. Because of this, many companies are opening up social channels to their customers. Now these Social CRM efforts are definitely business critical, but in my opinion there's an associated issue that some companies are overlooking, their own siloed organizations. As I often tell audiences, just opening up channels to the customers without making sure their own employees can actually collaborate with ... Read the article

I managed a few minutes out of my schedule last week to stop by the Yammer Tour event in San Francisco. I was in San Francisco doing a keynote for sugarCRM's user event and luckily the events overlapped. As I was listening to Yammer CEO David Sacks talk about some of the new Yammer features and interview some customers, I was struck by how much social tools like Yammer are changing businesses. Yes, I know that's almost all I've talked about for the last 4-5 years, changing businesses with social technologies and driving real cultural changes, but seeing that transformation really makes an impression. It's easy to get lost in all of the forward looking research and discussion on technology when in fact, what really matters is what businesses are actually doing with the tools to get some real business benefits. Does using social tools for business really make any difference? There are all sorts of ways to measure value when it comes to technology, we wrote a whitepaper on the ROI of social that has some ideas. Social business impacts business processes across the company and is having some interesting and very positive returns. Not all are as obvious as others though, and some of the less obvious are perhaps the most transformative.

First I should say that for me, social initiatives need to be clearly tied to increasing revenue, increasing margin, fostering innovation and/or increasing ... Read the article

It's a statement that I hear often lately, as more traditional software vendors start to invest in cloud computing, that they're "late to the cloud". Of course many of those who are saying it are "pure play" SaaS vendors that are no doubt starting to feel some competitive pressure as more vendors start selling SaaS applications. I also hear it from colleagues and I suppose that it is a true statement of fact but to me there's a little more to the story than that. I think the bigger question might be whether being late to the cloud is "bad".

The general perception is that being early to market with a product gives the vendor first mover advantage and lets them capture market share and mind share before any competitors get into the game. There's certainly a lot of ... Read the article

When we talk about the impact of the social web, social business, social CRM, consumerization of IT...almost anything that has to do with the changing business environment, the topic that universally comes up is the change in people's expectations. This applies to employees, who want a user experience for the enterprise that is as "good" as their personal web experience and who want devices that provide the best and most modern functionality. For collaboration they are either provided modern people-centric tools by their company or they work around IT and use consumer tools that more completely meet their needs (although arguably not always the needs of the company when it comes to security and IP protection). The list goes on, and on and is both a great opportunity for business and a challenge for IT and older paradigms of "control" ... Read the article

Last week Yammer and Ultimate Software announced a partnership that combines the Yammer enterprise social network with Ultimate's UltiPro HCM. Combining the deep employee profile from the corporate HCM system with a real time social collaboration tool is an important step in building out a complete enterprise social network, connecting employees to each other and to partners and customers. A modern HCM system contains critical workforce intelligence that starts with recruitment and includes job history, compensation and payroll, performance, skills / talent and career development data...all the relevant employee transaction data (system of transaction). The system of ... Read the article

There's a lot of pressure for change in the world of enterprise software, and many would argue that it's much needed change. The growing availability of everything "as-a-service" is changing the way companies buy and consume software. In fact the Internet has impacted the way almost everything is distributed in some way. The more everything is connected the easier distribution becomes. Underneath this distribution shift though, several other things are also changing about the way software is being implemented or upgraded and the way it is being designed and built. I noticed a trend a few years ago,  just before the ... Read the article

I was recently approached by IBM to me write a white paperdiscussing the future of email. They came to me, in part because of my work with social business software but also because of this post from last April, where I talked about the current problems with email, the proliferation of social tools and how using the "right" tool for the job it was designed for could go a long way towards getting email under control. The premise is fairly simple, email is out of control and is becoming a less effective communication tool because its use has expanded far outside the limits of its designed use. Frankly I often go on a rant about email, which for me has exploded to the point that I have a serious issue getting to the things I actually need because of ... Read the article

The other day I was pointed to an interesting post on the Software Advice web site called CRM's Next 5 in 5, 5 technologies that will change CRM over the next 5 years. The post was written by CRM analyst Lauren Carlson, and was based on a format that IBM uses for predictions each year. In addition to Lauren's 5 in 5 predictions, she arranged to have a few of my analyst colleagues,  Paul Greenberg, Ray Wang, Brent Leary, Esteban Kolsky, Denis Pombriant and  Brian Solisadd their comments.  I like the format and of course I found it hard not to add my opinion as well, so here are a few comments on ... Read the article

A couple of recent events and some commentary around them got me thinking about the current state of business, the pressure to change and how companies respond to the need to change. Change impacts people and organizations in many different ways, depending on how the person or organization is "wired". Some resistance is natural but sometimes, at least at the strategic level, companies have to face the fact that they must change to stay healthy. That applies to people too I guess, but that's altogether  a different subject.

If you've heard me speak on social business you probably...

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Last Summer I published a Social Business Maturity Model that we developed to help companies understand their level of adoption of social business. The idea is that you can identify a set of criteria to use to evaluate the progress a company is making on it's rollout and adoption of social tools and the accompanying process and culture change that enable the business transformation. Companies could then take that criteria and use it to benchmark their own progress and also plan out a strategy to accelerate adoption and build more momentum. We looked at culture, organization, technology and barriers to change across five maturity... Read the article