Effective CRM » Prem Kumar Aparanji

Rethinking “Social” in 2012

Prem Kumar Aparanji — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:49:00 +0000

I am passionate. Passionate in all things that allow us all, the humanity, to make the world a better place. But since that's kind of a tall order and a huge field to work in, I chose Customer Relationship Management back in 2000; don't ask me why. It was a visceral pull, not something that I thought through much. I really believed in the R for relationship. But soon, as I began getting involved in real world projects I got to see that R stood little more than Revenue, for the most part.

And then came along Social Media, with its promise of being able to get the customer into not only the conversation but also in almost all aspects of a business - building customer relationships, developing new products and services, and producing and distributing them.

But the frenzy around social media by the so called gurus, the hype from the marketers and the buzz from many well meaning yet misguided analysts meant that "social" has been relegated to either a feature that you add to your apps or a layer that you drape over your platforms. And thus I think, time has come to rethink "social".
My team works at building and delivering solutions and services around social enablement (for the most part using online social/community platforms), social analytics (think social listening and command centers powered by dashboards and reports), gamification (reputation, influencing behaviors, those kind of things), enterprise social, etc. A little plug, here is where I have say I feel pretty bullish about the strategy workshop workbench we created this year that allows the various groups in an organization to look at the whole big picture and create a strategic intent for the organization. That is their focus for 2012.

I want to look beyond, not beyond 2012, but beyond these concepts. I am looking at two major themes, and both of them needs us to rethink "social":

social design, social modeling, that is thought up front, at the strategy level, rather than as a feature or a layer, post facto
social that incorporates the meaning of societal - values, humanity - into the vision of the organization

Social Design
Evan Doll, cofounder of Flipboard, the hugely successful iPad app, says it pretty succinctly:

"Every industry, every type of business we think about needs to be fundamentally reinvented in the face of social. Social isn't a type of layer you slap on after the fact--it needs to be part of the product at the point of inception."

In his post titled "Stop talking about Social", Paul Adams, the man who came up with the concept of facets, which we see as circles in Google+, criticizes George Colony, the CEO Forrester for having got "social" wrong:

"George misunderstands the shift with the social web. ... Social is not a feature. Social is not an application. Social is a deep human motivation that drives our behaviour almost every second that we’re awake. It doesn’t matter if we’re online or offline, on a browser or using an app. Humans are social creatures."

Which is why we need to think beyond social enablement, analytics dashboards, gamification, enterprise social features and layers, and get into Social Design & Modeling.

Source: i* wiki

No, I am not talking about mere Social Design Patterns for designing social interfaces or participation design, though they are important and necessary too, I am talking about how the whole requirements gathering and designing process needs rethinking. Where, in addition to static models of Entity Relationship diagrams and dynamic models of process workflows, swimlanes & BPMN, we also need to think about social & value networks, strategic dependency between the various actors and strategic rationale behind these dependencies. Where we not only look at systems of record, but also look at systems of engagement.

I have been talking about these in 2011, but I was merely learning the basics. I hope that I can put them to use in 2012. And get my team to learn them too.

Social as in Societal
Early this year Michael Porter and Mark Kramer taught us about "Creating Shared Value" in HBR where they talk about the blurring profit/non profit boundary as well as a shift from CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to CSV (Creating Shared Value):

"The concept rests on the premise that both economic and social progress must be addressed using value principles. ... businesses have rarely approached societal issues from a value perspective but have treated them as peripheral matters. This has obscured the connections between economic and social concerns."

Source: HBR Big Idea - Creating Shared Value

While Porter and Kramer talk about Value, last year (2010) in his book, Marketing 3.0, Philip Kotler says now is the time when we need to look beyond Customers into values (not mere value). The book says Marketing 1.0 was product centric, Marketing 2.0 is customer oriented and Marketing 3.0 should be values driven, with an objective of making the world a better place. And you know what I think about such objectives. :)

Of course, Kotler has been talking about Social Marketing since 1971, but now is a time when we can no longer ignore it. Not only is the trust in businesses dwindling in the recent years and viewed as a major cause of social, environmental, and economic problems, customers are demanding businesses to consider making the world a better place. And that is the crux of his Marketing 3.0.

This needs some deep thinking and research before we can even attempt incorporating into our current strategy workbench. Again, some work for me in 2012.

Epilogue

I never felt comfortable with the moniker given to me by my boss: "Evangelist - Social CRM". Yes, I do talk a lot about Social CRM in various fora, but I am much more. I am a tinkerer, thinker and connector. Though I started as a tinkerer, of late, I am becoming more of a thinker. And a bit of connector, of ideas, of people, of resources, of markets. I learn and work by tinkering, thinking and connecting; and thus I innovate.

I also look ahead into the far future, much like a science fiction writer, maybe because I am in love with those books since a very young age. But I am not alone or without precedent. In fact, Intel Futurist Brian Johnson does just that! That's someone who I can aim to be, a Futurist.

So what are your ideas for 2012? What are you working on? What else do you think I should be looking into? How can I help you in 2012?

What is the Social CRM interface of the future?

Prem Kumar Aparanji — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 04:35:00 +0000

I am following the #scrm11 hashtag on Twitter to be informed about the Social CRM event in Paris, France and then I see this tweet (being reported from the event, not the person's question, I presume):

It seemed to me from the tweets (please correct me if I am wrong, I had limited visibility) that SugarCRM wanted to share a vision where the social networking site would be of the user's choice and the CRM system would be able to connect to any of them, as opposed to what happens currently.

Lofty goal, pretty cumbersome. And the only way currently possible is very inefficient, thanks to the absence of any widespread usage of common open standards, open protocols, open formats, interoperability, data porting, etc., etc. To provide the choice & flexibility to the customer, the CRM vendor (or their ecosystem) needs to build connectors for each one of the social media/networking site in existence. *gulp* (Hey team, what are you waiting for? Get started on building them. I'd like a status report on them in our next meeting. Thank you. ;)

But I have an even more bizarre dream of the future interface. One where there will be bionic lenses (you know, contact lenses that can show information) projecting data as if a few feet away from your eyes. Where there will also be in-ear headsets, taking a cue from the hearing aid industry and combining that with the Bluetooth headset industry's tech (great for the hearing aids industry too IMHO, imagine the cheap availability of such devices).

And there will be mics (some advanced form of throat mics) that can capture, and may be even recognize, subvocal speech. Meaning, you need not speak aloud that which you want the other party on the phone to hear. You think what you want to say, your brain asks your vocal chords to speak, but they stop a bit before actually speaking aloud. So the people in your immediate vicinity cannot hear what you are talking with the other person on the phone. ;)

All these devices on your body would be connected by a body area network and powered by energy harvesting, probably by your fabrics & shoes or even your body heat.

The customer service rep at the other end will not only have a social media command center that gets info from enterprise systems too and is powered by a robust social analytics that does text mining, natural language processing, social network analysis, collaborative filtering, predictive analytics, but will also work like Tom Cruise in the movie Minority Report (Microsoft is funding various startups working on Kinect tech, so you can bet there will be some good use for it) while talking to the customer on a holovid, you know the star wars kind of video conferencing system that Cisco demo'd from Bangalore.

Well, at least one benefit of all these rich media would be that it would be more difficult for people to lie than on emails or phones (did you know people lie more on email than face to face?). Which means there will be a better environment of trust between the customer and the company.

But what it means in terms of security and privacy and how would society evolve in the face of such technological advances I will leave it for sci-fi writers. Would it be something radical like the Arab Spring & #Occupy which were mediated by social media or give rise to something like the missed call social dynamics (and marketing tools too, like ZipDial) in India and other emerging nations in Asia and Africa?

So what do you think is the Social CRM interface of the future?

Is the identity of the Social Customer at risk?

Prem Kumar Aparanji — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:18:00 +0000

Assange vs Zuckerberg

Paul Greenberg posited well over two years ago (and more than those many years in the making) that the social customer had taken control over the conversation and that the businesses needed to respond to that. Businesses did respond and how! Not only the businesses, but also the politicians. And if the current state of affairs continue, there would be no Arab Spring ever. Let me try to explain.

We are all very well aware of the spate of uprisings in various countries across the globe (not just the Arab world) that has been catalysed (if not 'fueled') by social media. This is a communication tool that is bringing together the forces of people spread geographically and doing it faster and vaster thanks to networks and not dyadic communication.

Paul Greenberg would talk about how the customers' trust in the businesses dropped as per the Trust barometer of Edelman and hence the taking control of the conversation by the customer. In the various uprisings & protests this year that have been catalysed by social media, the reasons varied from despotic rulers, some who outlived their benevolence (somebody said Gaddafi should have died young like Che Guevara to be remembered fondly by his people), to anger against 'the greedy 1%' to frustration over corruption.

Internet, aided by social media & online social networks as well as mobiles, the crucial communication tool that is impacting the 21st century in a very profound way is already under threat from governments and businesses (especially the Media industry which did not exist until about a century ago). Fred Wilson brings to our notice about two new bills that have been forged in the US Congress - one in the Senate called Protect IP and one in the House called E-Parasites. Watch the 4 minute video below to get an idea of what these bills mean.

If passed, these bills will do irreparable damage to the Internet, entrepreneurship, free speech, and job creation as a result of the continued entrepreneurial activity around the Internet. Arab spring? No way. Sites like youtube, flickr, etc. where people shared video footage to counter the government propaganda could be shutdown.

Yet another threat is surreptitiously creeping up on us - identity. And of course privacy, but I will delve more on identity here since privacy is already on the minds of most people, including the businesses who are trying to leverage social media.

Some businesses (including my clients) have a big headache when presented with the data from the social media since its means an MDM issue in addition to text mining, sentiment analysis, parsing & routing, workflow automation, analytics and other integration headaches. This is predominantly due to the usage of pseudonyms (nyms) by people on the internet and is being countered by the use of features like 'Login with Facebook' or 'Login with Twitter' (which might be dangerous since we are surrendering control of our identity to the identity providers and apparently Facebook sees nearly 600,000 accounts compromised per day). Some recent controversies (called the nym wars) are interesting to follow, especially since Google Plus banned quite a few people who use pseudonyms as per their real names policy.

Source: scorpfromhell

In my 'industry first' vision for a social CRM IT landscape (above) I had a separate section called user components, which directly corresponds to "user centric identity", which is the focus of Internet Identity Workshop. As you can see from the topics for the October 2011 workshop (anybody has any updates from there as yet?), its more than just identity:

Open Standards that have been born and developed at IIW – OpenID, OAuth, Activity Streams, Portable Contacts, Salmon Protocol, SCIM, UMA ….
The Federated Social Web
Vendor Relationship Management
Personal Data Services - collection, storage and value generation
Anonymity Pseudonymity and Reputation Online (think google+ controversy)
Legal Innovation including, Information Sharing Agreements, Data Ownership Agreements and the development of “trust” frameworks.
NSTIC – the National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (it uses the term “user-centric identity” 4 times & “citizen-centric identity” once)
Cloud Identity and the intersection of enterprise ID and people (consumer) ID.

I wasn't aware of the IIW until today when I came across this blog post on my twitter search stream for social CRM where the author says:

A huge part of identity on the web is controlling who can see what: think about the Google+ Project’s approach, where your identity consists of a series of data objects (posts, photos, status updates, etc), each having its own set of access controls. Controlling access to items requires that you have people to restrict access with. Therefore, contact and relationship management is integral to digital identity.

While it definitely helps to control who do I share with, I would also add the ability of controlling who do I share as. Prem Kumar Aparanji or scorpfromhell. My choice.

If you as a business are bothered by it, earn my trust. As Venessa Meimis said at #CCE2011 today: Trust and Identify are the future of money. While her context was slightly different it is not completely unrelated to the future I envision.

From a technology standpoint, "verifiable but unlinkable data can be provided by users via anonymous digital credentials. The subtleties of building up trust in situations of less than perfect knowledge, which are intuitively understood in the physical world, are investigated by trust negotiation".

This will not only put the user in command but also bring the aspects of trust & identity into the digital systems that the social media are. The businesses that hope to be social (utilise social computing, including social media), if not become social (social business as defined by Md. Yunus), would be then able to co-create value with their customers.

Consider a website or application that wants not only your credentials from Facebook but also information about your profile, your friends, your photos, shares, etc. There are umpteen such sites/apps that try to gather far more information from your Facebook account than they need to know. This is why I prefer Pseudo-authentication using OAuth rather than OpenID.

Source: Wikipedia

So what do you think? Is the identity of the social customer worth saving? Would you as a business want to invest more into building value & trust or just want to harvest the identities of your customers?

Social CRM: Hiring the right definition

Prem Kumar Aparanji — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 17:49:00 +0000

There is a huge discussion going on over at thebrandbuilder blog & on twitter too over the definition of social CRM, especially the Paul Greenberg version as adapted by Esteban Kolsky. There is a nice effort at wordsmithing the definition and this is what Oliver Blanchard concludes with in that blog post:

[Social] CRM is a business function supported by a system and technologies whose aims are to improve a company’s ability to derive insights into customer needs and behaviors by adding to their transaction data the lifestyle data they share online.

Definition discussions, yet again? :)

I laud the efforts at trying to wordsmith the definition to make it simpler for the audience in question, but the simplicity is too limiting IMHO & proposes that a (social) CRM doesn't do anything, just gains insights. Please do not mistake my words to be condescending, but I wonder what good is an insight if it will not be acted upon. Granted you do not say that the organization will not act upon the insight, but I fail to understand who then does anything with those insights? Do you propose that marketing, sales, service do not fall under the umbrella of CRM? Maybe this newly wordsmithed definition is thus unintentionally misleading?

May be this is a chance for me to relook at my understanding of the stuff after understanding, observing, thinking, conceptualizing, designing, architecting, deploying social computing platforms & tools that were hired for various jobs to be done by my organization as well as clients over these past 3-4 years. So I will take an implied liberty of a blog and posit some of my views to help wordsmith the definition again. :)

If I were to take a systems view, I would see them as systems of record, engagement & awareness. My idea of Systems of awareness consists of Living Anlytics Adaptive Learning loop and Reality Mining too in addition to all the other BI/social analytics, etc. I am still building on a line of thought that started off with something I call the 4p Steradian view thats absolutely necessary in an increasingly multi-channel world. So please excuse me if I am not so clear in articulating it properly. My point being, lifestyle data shared online by people themselves is just scratching the surface.

But are we right in taking a systems view or should we consider a social computing or complex adaptive system view? Listen to this podcast to understand this question better.

BTW, why are we limiting our models to systems and other computational technologies? Didn't the first contention center around a strategy & function? So how about considering this field from an organizational perspective?

Taking an economics view at why companies/firms form (The Nature of the Firm by Ronald Coase), social (or should we call digital) technologies and container ships are wearning down the very reasons why they exist (market friction, efficiencies, etc.). Flat world & power of pull talk about these at length of course; my point here is that social networks at play via digital technologies are bringing about disruptions in business models, a level above even business strategies, no?

Organizations are structured into departments & teams (predominantly around functions, right?). And they predominantly act as silos, especially in large organizations, no? Ranjay Gulati in his book Restructuring for resilience talks about the reasons why these silos got formed in the first place (efficiencies) and why they need breaking (innovation, responsiveness, effectiveness). Even amongst the social media gurus it is well recognized/agreed upon that social media response teams need to be cross functional.

Taking a slight diversion, social network analysis (SNA) applied in the context of organizations brought about organizational network analysis (ONA) to better understand the informal structures in organizations. However Value Network Analysis offers a better option to bring better collaboration amongst the silos that Ranjay suggests.

Even if we are to consider the customer relationship management as practiced in the past 40-50 years, they have evolved from a transaction based view to one-to-one to network based views. Social media, online communities and the rise of the 'social customer' has only reinforced the need for increased focus on networked relationships. Add to this the realisation about value co-creation and service dominant logic being the need of the hour as against the value exchange and product dominant logic of businesses. There is a heavy tilt in focus towards "jobs-to-be-done" framework.

Definitions will be unique to each individual, organization. They will be the axis around which they will seal their fate, since by nature definitions are limiting in their own quirky way. These organizations might hire us to help them come up with the correct definition conducive to their fate. In which case let us provide them enough data points for them to understand the cosmic relevance and then help them formulate a tightly wordsmithed definiton for themselves.

Free online courses from Stanford useful for Social Analytics

Prem Kumar Aparanji — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 12:37:00 +0000

AI Class by Stanford

Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning form a crucial aspect of Social Analytics and is the kernel in many a 'social media listening' solution. And not just in social media marketing, it is emerging as a key skillset of demand in various fields.

Stanford has a set of free online courses that goes in tandem with the actual class room based courses. The Fall class for introduction to Artificial Intelligence (under which NLP & ML fall) starts October 10.

If you are interested please do attend these courses:

Introduction to AI (CS221): http://www.ai-class.com/ << This is a prerquisite for the NLP course
Natural Language Processing (CS224N): http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=63480b48-8819-4efd-8412-263f1a472f5a
Machine Learning (CS229): http://see.stanford.edu/see/courseinfo.aspx?coll=348ca38a-3a6d-4052-937d-cb017338d7b1

Adoption of social tools for collaboration requires sharing

Prem Kumar Aparanji — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 21:28:00 +0000

"Sharing" by ryancr, on Flickr

I have been busy the past three to four months shifting my base and settling in the suburb of Bangalore (technically a different state altogether) and this has taken a toll on my work as well as my social media engagement. Nevertheless, I am slowly getting back on track with quite a truck load of stuff to be done and trust to be regained at the workplace. The task of highest & immediate priority is helping in resubmitting a year 2015 plan for our group, incorporating the 1st round of review comments. And one of the key components is - justifying the further investments into 'social' by providing, among other things, estimated market size.

Which means I have to provide numbers from expert predictions, which is typically a Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. although it’s been well documented that expert predictions are quite poor. ;) In the Social CRM space even Gartner has had to revise its predictions for the size of the market (their Magic Quadrants for the same have been criticized too). I am yet to take a dive into market size for social tools in the internal collaboration arena (Enterprise 2.0), which is actually a bit more mature market than the Social CRM one.

All in all, sales forecasting closely follows market adoption of the new technology and the speed of adoption is said to be an S-curve. And since we are in the cusp of two such S curves, one finishing (systems design view) and one beginning (social computing view), it is not possible to predict the future. However, as per research literature, the speed of adoption of a new product has been shown to be a function of several factors including:

The product's relative advantage over existing products
The degree to which the new product is compatible with existing operations and attitudes
The degree to which the new product is simple (rather than complex)
The degree to which the new product can be tried on a limited basis
The degree to which the product is observable.

Hold your thoughts on this one.

Coincidentally PwC has just come out with a new report called "Transforming collaboration with social tools" (you can read a review along with excerpts by Sameer Patel) where they have this great picture:

It puts a few stuff in perspective for me. But what helped me more is a reminder from Graham Hill in the back channel that "just banging on collaboration technology will NOT result in an uncollabrative organisation becoming one iota more collaborative than before. Just more expensive. People make organisations collaborative not technology." While I wholeheartedly agree to his old saw that "Old Organization + New Technology = Expensive Old Organization" or "OO+NT=EOO", I have a bit of optimism for social computing that hasn't diminished over the years. Social Computing for the first time has the potential to break out of the mould because they are a kind of self feeding engine when it comes to adoption.

The way to avert the OO+NT=EOO scenario is to actually look at the way the organization needs to be changed, roll them out and ensure adoption happens. And the technology is to be used to support these organizational changes.

Now coming to social tools, they have various advantages over traditional enterprise software tools which I am not detailing out but just pointing out a few (am assuming that the social tools have been deployed in context of work, not as stand alone 'corporate facebooks'):

help in exception handling & sense making by allowing users to do ad-hoc work, especially when used in conjunction with the tools that support predictable execution like ERP or CRM (refer picture above from PwC report)
help in building social capital via both network closure (social capital is created by a network of strongly interconnected elements) as well as structural holes (social capital is created by a network in which people can broker connections between otherwise disconnected segments) arguments
in large organizations, help in expert discovery not just because of rich user profiles in the 'corporate facebooks', but also because openly sharing on these systems of engagement allows new random connections to form between the clusters inside the organization and thus reducing the number of hops required to reach a particular person within the organization with whom we are not connected or are even aware of (am assuming organization head count is large enough & geographically distributed enough to behave approximately like a scale free network)
help in content filtering via algorithms as well as by the community (too much of communication is an issue otherwise when social tools are deployed)

Point 1 in the speed of adoption is covered. And yet, the tools themselves lend to certain people changes if a few assumptions are met. This is where organizational changes might definitely be required, and if an organization has not been open within itself it definitely needs very senior management adoption as well as encouragement for the enthusiastic early adopters (champions). Our CEO stopped sending out emails to the organization to encourage blogs usage; now there are employees who have read only his blog posts, but as such the number of people posting/commenting/reading blogs is very high too.

By the same token, social tools do not require the organization to change much. It is compatible with existing operations & attitudes. People are hardwired in their brains to collaborate. That is how we evolved, it is the corporate culture that makes us hide stuff.

"... we're reluctant to share private information, so we aggregate information poorly. In one study the researchers gave team members shared information about the same three candidates, but also gave each member a unique piece of information about one candidate. If the team members shared all the unique information, they would choose the best-qualified candidate. If they used only the information common to all of them, they would pick the wrong candidate. A vast majority of the time, they selected a suboptimum candidate. Why? Because they chose to talk about the shared information and to reserve the unique information. Committees are not optimized to share private information. So even in organizations where the information exists, it's not being surfaced."

Unfortunately what people forget is that we did not go the way of our cousins the neanderthals especially because we shared with others, not just family members (and language was our first social tool that enabled it).

Additionally, social tools have the capability to blend with all the tools supporting the formal (predictable) processes as well as the hitherto not much supported (by IT) aspect: work-culture (behaviours & attitudes). This covers point 2 in the speed of adoption factors.

Social tools for the enterprise are simple & easy from the word go because they have been heavily inspired by the familiar consumer products outside of the organization (you know, facebook, twitter, blogs, wikis, etc.). Covers point 3 by default.

Social tools are increasingly available on the cloud in pay as you go models or for free/freemium. Hence it is possible for people to try it out on a limited basis. Covers point 4.

Social tools, if made available to everybody, features like the notifications, news/activity streams, et al. make it easier to observe what others are doing in the system & how ... not the case in your traditional enterprise software ... and thus the product & product usage is observable. This covers point 5 of the factors for speed of adoption. This aspect helps with social learning too, thus leading to more stickier adoption if not faster.

Also, social tools lend themselves to all three forms of viral adoption of any behavioral change -

contagion: users adopt when they come in touch with someone who has adopted
social influence: users adopt when they see many people have adopted
social learning: users adopt when they see how others are using and benefiting

So, to cut a long story short - sharing is essential to success of social tools for collaboration in an enterprise.

Quick review on Google+

Prem Kumar Aparanji — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 14:14:00 +0000

Well, since everybody & their ~~dog~~ friend seems to be getting onto Google+ today ... and since in spite of the heavy supply of accounts there seems to be an even greater demand as evidenced by people selling invites to Google+ on ebay ... may be because someone joked (I think) that having a Google+ account increases your chances of getting laid by 30% ... I am writing my own initial thoughts about it.

(No, I don't think @madmanweb was right ... actually @beastoftraal was probably more closer to reality!)

So, what are my initial thoughts? Google is trying to stay in the game, not beat/kill/depose/extinguish/squash/frag Facebook by doing (attempting?) somethings right for a change. Somebody already wrote what Google+ learnt from Wave and Buzz. Google+ might actually be a great platform for the internal social networking needs of organizations. If they have it on Google Apps.

On a personal level, I got all excited after I got an invite (thanks Manu Prasad) and could finally get in after a harrowing commute to the office between the time I got the invite and the time I created my account ... I clicked around, added friends to circles upon circles, fooled around with settings, etc. for about 45 minutes and I lost steam a bit.

After adding 45 people to various circles I definitely got tired! And only 8 people had added me to their circles. So evidently my network of friends (both IRL & online ones) had not yet gotten into Google+. Not so cool until the network is in there. So I have to wait till more people join in. And I have yet another set of friends data.

I sent a feedback, which is refreshingly via a form that is different from the ugly bug reporting tools developers & testers use. Well, if you want to know, I want to be able to mute/mute a person, so I don't see their updates on my timeline temporarily. That's the feedback I sent.

What I liked though is that I can export all my data on Google+ to a zip file and have it with me. Unlike Facebook.

Now the wait for Google+ to open up for developers.

Listening vs Hearing: Its not mere semantics

Prem Kumar Aparanji — Sun, 08 May 2011 21:40:00 +0000

Hope the deck is self explanatory. It contains only a few very simple aspects I wanted to highlight, the nuances are far more varied.

Listening vs Hearing

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P.S.: Please forgive me for the title of slide 4. If you can suggest me a more appropriate title, I would be grateful & update the deck with full credits to you. :)

P.P.S: Mitch had a blog post with some lively discussions long ago about this same topic, be sure to read it here: http://mjayliebs.wordpress.com/2010/07/18/social-hearing-versus-social-listening-there-is-a-difference/

Coordination, cooperation or collaboration?

Prem Kumar Aparanji — Sat, 07 May 2011 05:16:00 +0000

The nuances between coordination, cooperation & collaboration is more than mere semantics for me. Mitch Lieberman presented at the Social CRM 2011 event in London yesterday about cooperation & collaboration across various business silos in an organization.

Social crm 2011 final

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We at Cognizant are growing very fast. We officially entered the Fortune 500 this year, mere 17 years since inception and three years since our entry into Fortune 1000. Not resting on our laurels, we are setting ourselves higher goals. Cognizant 2015 is our five-year strategic plan to move from being a Tier One offshore services provider to being universally recognized as a Tier One global services provider.

Another important factor for us is the changing business landscape for our customers. For us to be able to service our clients better, we ourselves need to undergo certain changes too. At 100K+ employee strength, organizational changes are not easy. We relentlessly strive nonetheless, though not merely mulishly. :)

It is in this context of our customers' reality and our own visions that we have 'social collaboration' as one of our key strategic themes in preparation for 2015. We are looking at various internal processes to be converted into collaborative ones so that we can scale better, faster without losing any of the nimbleness.

Lot of Cognizant's processes currently require either cooperation or coordination, not collaboration. Collaboration by definition means that the common outcomes are being negotiated (social or stigmeric) by the constituents.

In a project the outcomes are already defined by the SoW/MSA/etc. Project Management is mostly coordination (within the team), depends a bit on cooperation (external groups for one-off requests, like getting a few hours of an SME to solve a problem or get expert opinion, etc.).

Having said that, the project team members almost always collaborate among themselves, especially those that have stronger relationship than being mere team mates, put together by the vagaries of global workforce management teams & resource availability. Hence you will find freshers (typically also college batch mates) helping out each other even if they are not in the same project/account/vertical; sometimes, even across organizations.

This "helping out each other" requires an environment of trust & sense of familiarity, because the act of helping inherently relies on reciprocity. When one helps their 'friend' they know they will receive the 'help' at a later time from the 'friend'.

These kinds of collaboration are socially negotiated and these are things that we are very well aware of in our bones. With the phenomenal growth of Cognizant though, the current bother is about the collaboration at an organization level, and here we begin thinking about stigmergy.

Wikis are a perfect example of stigmergic collaboration. Open source development is another. People who are not familiar with each other are still collaborating on creating the documents. Hence providing an environment of trust is of paramount importance. Reciprocity is not the prime factor either, since usually the benefactor is unknown. It's not quite altruism either. It's all about the egos. And in enters Gamification. But that's much later, after the community has been established (and am not talking about the software platform, but the sense of community amongst the people) and we need to get more people to contribute rather than been mute spectators or mere consumers.

This is where I hope my Framework for a Collaborative Enterprise helps.

Collaboration framework

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Social Actors

Prem Kumar Aparanji — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 19:07:00 +0000

Source: Affective Design

Theres a flurry of social this & social that in the IT market space and marketing machines are running over speed. So much so that Geoffrey Moore & Stowe Boyd too debate on what to call the term Social Business Systems - Systems of Engagement or Work Media. I guess the marketeers would like Work Media while the technologists might love the Systems of Engagement. Either one works for me, but I have been struggling with yet another term - Social BPM.

In a previous post I have already mentioned about the collaboration aspect in modeling & execution of the business processes under this term. Let me share the working definition I have in my mind when I think about what could be called social BPM:

SBPM enables social actors to collaborate on modeling, executing & optimizing structured and unstructured business processes.

And I am now left with the unenviable task of explaining the concept of "social actors", a term borrowed by systems folks from sociology, and both the uses of which are equally oblivious to the technologists, especially the BPMS configurators. Social actors are intentional actors with their own individual wants and desires; they also have relationship with other social actors. Thus though they have freedom to choose their own actions they are bound by these relationships. In most systems design which take a mechanistic view, actors are not intentional & nobody looks at how are they embedded in relationships with the other actors.

In sociology, social action refers to an act which takes into account the actions and reactions of individuals (or 'agents'). According to Max Weber, "an Action is 'social' if the acting individual takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course" (Secher 1962). A social actor, in basic terms, is a conscious, thinking, individual who has the capacity to shape their world in a variety of ways by reflecting on their situation and the choices available to them at any given time.

And this is a huge head shift. Not easy to convince the BPMS configurators, near darn impossible to explain to the compliance & regulations folks. But hopefully easier to get across the point to those that deal with situations requiring decision making at the front line in the face of ambiguity, like say underwriting or handling payment exceptions (or any other kind of dispute resolution) or project management.

You can even consider the social customer as much a social actor as the employee facing that social customer. At least the employee better behave as a social actor for faster & more satisfactory response to the social customer. If the front line person facing the customer has certain decision making rights (within their ambit of responsibilities) this definitely could help resolving issues to the satisfaction of both the customer & the organization. Just like the Systems of Record allowed the centralization of business decisions (global view to the higher above from the central offices), Systems of Engagement can allow decentralization of decision making by taking it to the front line. Consistency & flexibility, both together. Paradoxical yet possible. (May be I have had too much of Situational Leadership model).

So, does it compute for you? How can I better explain this concept?