Evolution, Enterprise 2.0 and Integrating Conversations with Processes

Enterprise 2.0 is spurring the evolution of us business professionals.   Its enabling employees, no matter their role in an organization to engage directly on behalf of their brand - to advocate for their brand, products and services.  We all know the market talks about our brands - with or without us being present.  By integrating conversations with business processes, brands can not only tell their story with convication and passion but they can act on those conversations.

          Now, the ZDnet crowd as well as many of the Enterprise Irregulars and many others have weighed in on the SAP Business Suite launch and the Enterprise 2.0 functionality now found in the Suite.   As I've been lucky enough to be included in some of the discussions around this type of integration, I thought it'd be helpful to share a bit more of our thinking and perspective as we approached this new wave of functionality.

Lets start with a couple of assumptions:

1. Social Media is a HOUSE OF CARDS

Easy to Build and Easy to fall apart unless you tie it directly to your business objectives and hence the processes of your organization and use it to enrich the experience ca customer has with your organization

 

2. Conversations Can Impact Top and Bottom line Revenue Growth

When a customer or prospect has an experience with your brand--  "marketing" in any form (product experience, service experience or Big M marketing, conversation begins.  Those conversations may be with the brand or with other customers.  If customers find value in those convesations, they begin to develop not only an affinity for those value driven exhanges but relationships develop.  Out of those relationships and value exchanges eventually the customer not only comes to appreciate the intrinsic value of the conversation but affinity for the brand develops.  At this point, a buying cycle is likely to proceed to everyone's satisfaction.

You can think about people engaged in conversations as a non-linear process.  In any conversational dynamic, individuals take away nuggets of information and pass that information onto other groups and other individuals.

    

 

What we've done is integrate conversations into enterprise processes so that they are actionable on behalf of the enterprise.  These take 2 forms.  Conversation -> Process integration and Process -> Conversation.

A good example of Conversation -> Process integration was demonstrated yesterday briefly but to elaborate, by pulling Tweets into the SAP Business Suite and applying a sentiment engine to those tweets, a customer service rep can make those conversations actionable by identifying and emerging customer or brand issue. Someone may be complaining about your product or service.  With Sentiment analysis not only can an organization proactively address a looming customer crisis but they can initate corporate processes such as raising a Customer Service Ticket to initiate a problem resolution process.

 

Once done, SAP can then issue the results of those trouble tickets on Twitter itself!

Going the other way, a super example of Process->conversation integration is the deployment of Marketing Campaigns using Social Channels.  Using Business Suite functionality,  users can now design and deploy marketing campaigns which can execute over a variety of social environments, including Twitter.

And there ya go...

 

Enterprise 2.0 is the latest evolutionary pressure on businesses.  Those of us that adapt will survive this pressure and thrive as the new ecosystem comes to dominate our business dealings.  Those that don't will find themselves facing extinction pressures that will be hard to avoid. 

Comments

[Oliver Marks]

Great post Steve!

[Steve Mann]

High Praise Oliver. Thank you.

[Sam Lawrence]

I like the experimentation between business process and social process, Steve.

For me, this relationship: How Social Business Software fits inside the enterprise and then reaches it's tendrils into the business processing layer it the most valuable Last Mile.

Can the big IT vendors add social features to their apps that logically fit in and can those features somehow work with the rest of the Social Business occurring in related, different places and applications across the enterprise?

Can the smaller vendors somehow solve this? Can they reach their applications into the relevant places and applications to make the hand-offs from socialization to decisions and contract?

I love the discussion and great job framing some of this up!

[Steve Mann]

@sam agree with your relationship issue. Can big vendors add social features? I don't know. Personally, I think SAP's strong point is in process... we're a process library and can provide virtually any process to any company that's needed. I don't view us in the same vein as Jive, who has deep expertise in creating social software. BUT, SAP is good at integration. If you look at what we've done, we've simply integrated a conversational dynamic into a process flow... that's what we're good at. And its what our customers need. I think the social innovations will come from smaller vendors but I dont think those innovations will reach the business process layer.

Thoughts?

[Sam Lawrence]

@steve I'd agree but I could imagine social software getting very close to the process layer and be able to transfer instructions or data in/out from it.

That said, I don't know a ton about the process layer to know what would really be needed for this to integrate in the most compelling way.

This Last Mile might end up to be the most interesting areas along the edges. It will be interesting to drive the two things to fruition.

[Steve Mann]

sounds like a business Sam!

[Dick Hirsch]

Great post.

Don't know whether you saw my latest SDN blog "The Role of Social Networks in Process Evolution" (https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/12942). Although I look more at internal social networks / microblogging, the process-centric focus is the same.

Irregardless, I'll be curious to see how this fusion develops over the next year or two.

If you look at ESME, we focus on this process integration and have always seen it as being critical in increasing the relevancy of social media in the enterprise.

Dick

[vinnie mirchandani]

Steve, good to see you in NYC...love the graphics on this post

[Chris Ramsey]

@steve - awesome post. In particular its nice to see you coming up with scenarios of how the conversation-process integration applies across the enterprise in areas such as customer service and marketing... looking forward to your next post. cheers.

[Steve Mann]

@Dick... yes, I think there's a lot of opportunity for SAP and Social Software providers in the next year or 2

@Vinnie... same here... let me know when you're back in town.

@Chris thanx! I hope there will be a next post :)

[howardgr]

Steve:
I think this is very powerful. The key will be both finding executives who see the direct value of this, and who will permit it. Once you're enabling this kind of information to be part of the executive dashboard, the ROI becomes very clear.
I hope the fact that a company like SAP is running with this will get execs looking at Social Media channels as an even more legitimate place to focus attention and find customers.
Thanks for this and to echo above - great graphics.

[Steve Mann]

@howard thank you! I hope so as well, which is why we are taking the strategy of building an infrastructure layer that will enable our clients to integrate conversations to processes wherever they may be happenging.

Be well!

[Andre Fonseca]

Hi Steve,

It is great to start seing concrete links between unstructured collaboration and structured processess.

We have heard ideas using ERP linking to warehouse operations and would love to hear more.

[Jason Finch]

Totally, I've long advocated social media as something to be integrated into the business process and throughout the business, rather than being seen as a marketing project.

The real key to heaven is in blended networking - combining not just online networking with offline real world networking, but blending social and business too.

As when the web was starting to get commercial back in the mid 90s, many marketers pushed it as purely a marketing issue... I was a proponent for the fundamental change of business processes around internet technology back then, and the same holds now - to really succeed businesses need to weave the principles of social media through their entire organisational structure and process hierarchy.

Blended networking woven throughout business - and life - is going to grow for sure.

[Buy Tamiflu]

The changes are occurring very very fast!

[JWilfong]

Steve,
I am glad you are focused on building conversations with Web 2.0. Much is being spoken about, but not necessarily focused on building relationships. Kudos.
Jeff