Social business networks should be able to connect with other networks. Not only are businesses at risk of creating silos within their own ecosystems. They are at risk of developing networks that are not discoverable by other companies. The solution is to invest in a world that is open, discoverable, and navigable.

Social business networks succeed by making it easier for members to communicate with each other and work together. They also provide people a single destination through which they can receive information from their entire network of contacts. Yet, if their contacts are fragmented across a wide range of unconnected and incompatible networks, the value of all these networks is diminished. The more separate destinations someone has to visit, the less the benefit of a social business ecosystem.

As discussed in social ecosystems, it is therefore important for companies to plan their entire social footprint in advance, considering how employee, customer and partner networks interact. But how does one company’s social ecosystem interact with that of another company?

One could argue that Facebook’s explosive growth has been caused not by any specific feature or function, but because a critical mass of membership was reached. It became essential for most people to join, because the majority of their friends were already there. Once everyone is on the same network, it is easy to interact.

Yet no such destination exists for businesses. LinkedIn, the closest parallel that can be drawn, is really a network of individual professionals, rather than a network of companies. It is not a platform through which separate businesses can work together effectively.

So someone working in one organization is likely to need to join each of the customer networks provided by their suppliers, and continually check on these to stay engaged. Far better, of course, would be to interact with each of the suppliers from a single place, uniting activity from all networks the user is a member of.

With so many organizations taking their first steps into social business, it would appear to be a great time to make sure that this sort of interoperability between social ecosystems is built in from the ground up. But there are many competing vendors, and few relevant standards to enable this.

This is perhaps inevitable in such a nascent market, and it remains to be seen whether this is addressed through common protocols implemented by all leading social business providers, or the emergence of a central hub for social business between companies. But the sooner we establish the standards, the easier it will be for businesses to work together, and the greater the benefit that social business will deliver.

Social business should not create silos. Instead it should help you manage your entire business ecosystem. In the offline world, most businesses operate in complex ecosystems of discrete networks of employees, partners, and customers. Ask whether your social business platform enables you to stitch those networks together and manage them for even greater effectiveness and efficiency.

Many companies have taken their first steps towards using social business tools to engage better with their employees. Some have created customers communities or social CRM networks. Others have created social networks to communicate more effectively with their suppliers and partners. And some companies have looked at all of these scenarios. But surprisingly little attention has been paid to the question of how all these social networks relate to each other.

Many of the employees on the internal company social network are also likely to want to interact with customers on an external network. Others will need to communicate with partners and suppliers. Some of the content created on one network is likely to need to be posted on at least one of the others. So building each of these networks in isolation will only perpetuate the barriers that many organisations have between their internal and external communication.

Some business relationships between two companies are so extensive that they may require a dedicated social network purely for private collaboration between the two parties. This might apply between a company and its customer, or a company and its supplier. Each of these private networks also form part of the social ecosystem.

So the complete ecosystem is a series of connected networks, with overlaps of members and content, as illustrated in the graphic below.

But why is it important to construct the ecosystem in this way? Why not have one network for all users? Or entirely separate networks for each audience?

A single network addressing employees, customers, partners and suppliers sounds attractive due to the efficiency costs of managing a single network. However, this compromises the ability to serve each audience well, as the network needs to address each type of user equally. In contrast, a dedicated customer network is able to adopt the tone and format most appropriate for supplier-to-customer relationship; an employee network can take a quite different format. It is also likely that employees who are members of more than one network will want to have a slightly different user profile in each network – they are likely to reveal more information about themselves on an employee network than an external-facing network.

Entirely separate networks for each audience is an equally poor solution. Yes, it allows the most appropriate format to be chosen for each network, and for members to fine-tune their profiles separately for each audience. But it makes sharing of content between networks difficult and error-prone. Yes, a file could be downloaded from one network and uploaded to another, or a discussion could be cut from one and pasted to the other. However, this results in a lack of version control of content – when updates are made on one network, they are not reflected on the others unless there is a concept of cross-network content sharing.

Not only does the ecosystem need to allow overlapping, connected networks, it needs the tools to:

• allow networks to be quickly added and removed
• manage user membership of ecosystem networks, potentially with different access rights on each network
• share content between networks

In an ideal world, there would be standards in place for social networks to integrate to each other and exchange member and content data to enable this. But enterprise social networking is a youthful market and these standards do not exist yet. So it is important to choose a social platform which enables ecosystems to be constructed in this way.

Therefore, before starting to build a first enterprise social network, it is important to consider how this will relate to future plans for additional networks. Establishing the ecosystem at the start will save redesign and rework later on.

Social business needs to be priced according to the growth of the network. The old enterprise software licensing model will not work.  Nor will the simple SaaS model work.  Both are based on presumed usage.  Better to charge customers on a pay-per-use model — one what they use.  That more accurately reflects the realities of growing a social network.

One of the major components of social business that most needs to be updated is pricing. While companies are learning to expect certain things from enterprise social networks, such as cloud-based personalization and functionality, all too often the method with which they pay for these services is antiquated. Traditionally, for an organization to use enterprise software, it has paid a fee that is determined by presumed usage. However, whether that organization’s usage was higher or lower, or if a higher or lower number of individuals than was predetermined use the software, the price remained the same. This appears to be unfair, both to the organization and the software provider. Also, it’s totally unrealistic to assume how much an organization plans on using enterprise software before that software is even implemented.

There’s a much better way: pay-per-use. Cloud-based service providers should work with a realistic pricing model, one that better fits the reality of “cloud economics.” Rather than assuming that a set number of individuals within the company will utilize the network, it makes much more sense to work from a pricing plan that is based on the actual number of users who sign-in to the network and use it regularly. Even if the network is built for a specific number of users, it should be flexible enough to easily accommodate new users. The cost of doing so is then worked seamlessly into the pricing plan.

It might be a difficult truth to endure, but if enterprise software is valuable, if it does what the software provider says it can do, then people will want to use it. The pay-per-use model is essentially a claim that the software provider stands by their product and believes that given the opportunity, people will not only use it, but encourage others both inside and outside of the organization, to use it as well. As the network grows, so does its value, which should be reflected in the cost of using the software.

The social business platform can be the system of engagement for any system of record. It would be wrong to think of your social business platform in isolation of other enterprise systems. Ask whether your social business platform can easily integrate with these systems and add a social layer.

In his book Dealing With Darwin, Geoffrey Moore suggests that most enterprise IT effort over the last decade has concerned “systems of record” which may provide an authoritative source of an organization’s data, but do little to enable employee interaction to create and use this data. Therefore, these need to evolve into “systems of engagement” to enable enterprises to communicate and collaborate better and use this data to make more effective business decisions.

For example, consider an HR system. This typically holds definitive data on employees, performance reviews, training classes attended, vacancies, benefits, etc. However, it provides little opportunity for discussion and collaboration around these records. For example:

• The HR system holds details of training and benefit providers. A social layer on top of this allows employees to discuss their experiences of these providers, enabling HR administrators to assess whether alternative providers should be sought.
• An employee performance review would be greatly enhanced by a social layer which allows a manager to seek feedback from people both inside and outside the organization who have worked with the employee.

Similarly, product, customer and order details held in an ERP system would also benefit from greater ability for employee collaboration, as would sales and customer service data in a CRM system.

To turn these into systems of engagement, they need to be supplemented by an enterprise social network which provides integration points for both reading and writing of social data. The social network needs to:

• Enable the system of record to request social data (discussions, blogs, user profile & social graph)
• Enable the system of record to report events to the social network, as these may form the basis of discussion.
• Connect in this way to multiple systems of record, to allow the social network to facilitate the free flow of data around the organisation.

Of course, many vendors of these systems of record will claim they are adding social features to their products. But can these truly claim to be social networks if they are tied to one particular system? Can a CRM system really provide collaboration capability for the whole company, not just users of the CRM? We have been here before. When portal software came to prominence in the early 2000s, many ERP, CRM and even business intelligence vendors claimed they had added portal capabilities to their products. But the very nature of a portal is to provide access to a wide range of systems through a single interface. If a portal only provides access to a single vendor’s system, it probably isn’t really a portal. And so it is with social layers on systems of record. If all this does is connect existing users of that system, it is not a true enterprise social network; it merely perpetuates the content- and process-centric nature of these systems, whereas our aim is a people-centric system.

This is perhaps best illustrated with an example from the world of consumer social networking. If someone posts a photo on Flickr, their friends can go to Flickr and post a comment. Similarly, a video on YouTube or a blog on WordPress. Each site hosts the content, and users have to go to each site to view and discuss the content, and need to establish networks of friends on each. While each has social features, it is still fundamentally a content-centric model.

Contrast this with Facebook. Users can post links to their Flickr photos, YouTube videos and WordPress blogs, but the discussion all takes place on Facebook with the same network of friends. This is people-centric model – it really doesn’t matter where the content is, as long as it can be discussed in the place where the people are.

Similarly, an enterprise people-centric model will represent all relationships between employees in a single social network which can connected to many systems of record.

Systems of record need to add a social layer to empower users to make best use of the investment made in these systems. But adding social features to each system of record independently merely perpetuates the data silos that enterprise social networking aims to break down. A system of engagement needs to span multiple systems of record to allow the free flow of information around the organization.

Social business needs to be DIY. Starting an enterprise social network should be as simple as starting a simple blog.

“We’d love to start using enterprise social networking… but our IT department just doesn’t have the time or budget to support us”. Unfortunately, this is a common refrain. It’s well documented that IT departments spend around 80% of their budgets merely “keeping the lights on” – keeping existing systems such as email, CRM and ERP operational, and making sure everyone’s PC is working. This leaves very little time or money to explore new initiatives such as social business.

But why do you need IT? Social business is about people – there shouldn’t be technical obstacles to enabling better communication between employees or with customers. Nor should a lack of IT budget be used as an excuse for inertia.

There really isn’t any need for IT to be an obstacle or an excuse. Millions of people around the world have established their own blogs using web-based services. Many of them have set up their own fully-fledged social networks, and this hasn’t required IT support. So why should it be any different for business? Quite simply, it isn’t.

When we say, “social business needs to be DIY”, there are two aspects to this:

• Establishing the social business network
• Ongoing administration, adoption and regulation of the network

As we wrote in Choose The Cloud, the setting up of a social business network need not involve costly and time-consuming server installation and configuration; many social business services are provided as Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions which can create a social network for you in under a minute.

But equally important is empowering users of the network to be able to administer and regulate that network themselves.

Network administrators need to be able to:

• Invite members to join the network
• Remove members from the network
• Control the basic content security and sharing settings of the network
• Remove inappropriate content

Ordinary members of the network need the ability to:

• Create content
• View and comment on other network members’ content
• Form communities of interest, and decide whether these are open to the entire network or restricted to selected members
• Take part discussions with other members

…all without calling IT.

It is the lack of this user empowerment that led many intranet initiatives from the last decade to stall. Not only did they require significant IT effort for setup, they gave little power to individual users of the intranet to keep the content fresh and compelling. Social business applications will only succeed if they learn the lessons of these stalled intranets and directly empower users.

Aside from the obvious “get-things-done” benefits of that empowerment delivers, there is also an important psychological advantage. Empowered users will feel a much greater emotional tie to a network that they are directly involved in creating and maintaining. They will be far more motivated to participate in community discussions to shape how the network is used and to ensure that other members behave in a responsible manner. This makes one of the goals of every social network, self-governance, a far more attainable target.

However, the “do it yourself” mantra should not be seen as inciting insurgency against IT departments, or inviting chaotic adoption of whatever web-based solution each employee likes the look of this week. It’s great that so many business-focused products are available to try without any setup cost, but that doesn’t mean that companies should embrace an “anything goes” culture. That path leads to so-called “shadow IT”, where there is a loss of control of where company information is stored. Any coherent and successful enterprise social networking strategy requires careful consideration of which tools should be used, and a mandate from management. This is equally true whether the system was selected by IT or another department.

Some IT departments may be reluctant to relinquish control of which web solutions are used by the company. This is understandable, but increasingly unsustainable. Forward-looking IT departments will position themselves not as the gatekeepers whose approval is necessary before any technology-based service can be used, but as the enablers who help businesses navigate the many opportunities that web-based SaaS solutions provide. Rather than saying, “here is the social business solution we approve”, wouldn’t it be great to hear an IT department say “here are three we think you should look at – let us know which one you like the most”. Of course, this sort of IT department does exist, although not everyone is lucky enough to work in a company that has one. Social business is often described as cultural transformation – it is just as much a transformation for IT as it is for business.

“Do it yourself” both presents opportunities and carries responsibilities. Enabling the creation of social business networks without any dependency on over-stretched IT departments is a hugely liberating opportunity for organizations. But care must be taken in selecting the right tools for the job to avoid descent into the world of “shadow IT”.

Social business networks should provide developers with an open, holistic platform to integrate any number of useful tools.

In BroadVision’s 17 years as an enterprise web application vendor, there have been two recurring questions that many of our customers have asked themselves.

• “Build or buy?”

• “Integrated suite or point solutions?”

The first of these, whether to create a custom solution with an internal development team is one that, thankfully, has little relevance to social business applications; we have yet to hear of an IT department advocating the creation of their own proprietary social network.

However, the second question lingers. Should organisations buy an integrated suite covering all their functional requirements, or a collection of point solutions, each perceived as “best of breed” in its own, narrowly defined, scope? I have heard many respected thought leaders advocate the latter approach. We disagree.

BroadVision have always passionately believed that an integrated suite is the best approach, first with our eCommerce and Portal solutions, and now with Clearvale, our enterprise social networking suite.

We do understand why the best of breed approach may initially seem appealing. It gives companies the perception they have the best of every world. So in the social business world, that might mean taking Yammer’s microblogging, Atlassian’s Wiki, box.net’s document sharing, and integrating them all together.

But the reality is that the result is far less than the sum of the parts. The integration is costly to perform and maintain, and the user experience is compromised, because standards allowing the point solutions to work together seamlessly simply don’t exist.

A suite, on the other hand, is more than the sum of its parts. Maybe it doesn’t have the top-rated solution for each individual functional point – this is perhaps inevitable when looking for a broad overall solution rather than a single functional capability. But it does result in a collection of features that are designed to work together. A few functional compromises result in a better overall experience.

Therefore we do not believe that the point solutions we see today will continue to exist in isolation; they will either be expanded or acquired into large suites.

Critics of integrates suites argue that they always lead to “bloatware”, where more and more features are forced into the suite in a bid to become all things to all men. A suite only becomes bloatware when it starts including features that only appeal to a minority of users. Despite Apple’s unquestionable prowess in user experience, iTunes is probably the most prominent example of bloatware at the moment. A lot of users just want a good music player, separate from the management of iOS devices, apps, books, etc. But if you have an iPad and an iPhone, buy your music and books from the iTunes store, you might like having everything all in one application. The challenge with a suite is knowing where to draw the line.

In the world of social business, the biggest question this leads to is whether the enterprise social network and intranet should form part of the same suite. Intellectually, yes, perhaps it should. But from a practical point of view that means either discarding the investment you’ve made in your intranet in favour of a new social intranet, or taking the social functionality provided by your existing intranet. Neither is appealing, although Microsoft & Lotus will obviously want to push companies towards the latter. But these intranets are fundamentally content- and process-centric, whereas social suites need to be people-centric. So merely extending your intranet compromises your social implementation.

Right now, we don’t believe that the social business network and the intranet belong in the same suite. Over time this may change, but for the moment, they need to coexist, and the social business suite needs to be open enough to allow this.

However, it would be unforgivably arrogant for any vendor to suggest that they can deliver all the social business functionality that any organisation will need in a single suite. Therefore, any suite needs to enable extension through the creation of additional functionality that individual businesses need. The immense success of Facebook’s developer platform has demonstrated that development from outside a network provider’s own team can dramatically increase the value of the platform because of the additional time, inspiration and ingenuity that motivated independent developers can deliver.

This idea is really only starting to emerge in social business networks. The only meaningful standard in social network development platforms, OpenSocial, is yet to be proven in a business context. It may yet establish itself here, or may be surpassed by some other framework yet to emerge.

In the meantime, social business suites need to provide the wide range of social features in a coherent user experience, and remain open to extension as standards gain acceptance.

If your social network is to be truly social – enabling you to connect with anyone, anywhere, on any device – it needs to live in the cloud.

Before going any further, it’s worth defining what we mean by “the cloud”. The technology industry is notoriously bad at assuming everyone else understands the terminology it uses, but experience shows that this is often not the case.

Wikipedia defines Cloud Computing as:

Web-based processing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices (such as smartphones) on demand over the Internet. ….. it typically involves over-the-Internet provision of dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources

Traditionally, an organisation’s IT systems are locked behind a corporate firewall, making it difficult for them to be accessed externally. For ERP, CRM, HR and other systems of record, this is often perfectly OK. But for a social network, it represents an obstacle to engaging members of the network. Mobile access has grown massively over the last few years, and it would feel bizarre to only allow employees to connect to their enterprise social network while inside the firewall or from a VPN-enabled device.

And it is also wrong to think of enterprise social networks as being purely for collaboration between employees. External communities where customers and partners interact with employees need to live outside the firewall in order to be accessible to all.

Of course, self-hosted external-facing systems are possible. But these typically lack the on-demand dynamic scalability that a social network requires. It is often difficult to predict exactly how much usage such a network will receive initially, or the rate at which it will grow. Limiting this growth with the need for IT departments to acquire and install new servers is clearly not acceptable to a dynamically-growing community.

But the benefits of cloud computing are not purely infrastructural. Applications delivered via the cloud as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) have significant advantages over traditional on-premise installations. The most notable of these is the upgrade cycle. Whereas enterprise software installations typically have upgrade cycles of a year or more due to the IT effort and cost associated, SaaS installations usually have a much more rapid cycle, often as little as one month. This is possible because the software installation is typically managed by the vendor themselves, and therefore has fewer unexpected customizations and configurations than an on-premise installation would typically have. This makes the upgrade process far safer, and therefore more practical to perform frequently. In an emerging area such as enterprise social networking, this rapid rate of application upgrade is essential; waiting a year between updates would simply be unacceptable.

However, not all SaaS installations are equal. We must distinguish between “single-tenant” and “multi-tenant” architectures. In a single-tenant architecture, each customer has their own dedicated infrastructure, whereas in multi-tenant, many customers share the same infrastructure. It could be argued therefore that single-tenant applications are not true cloud solutions. Whether they are or not is merely a matter of terminology, but what does matter is that single-tenant solutions lack the benefits of scale that multi-tenant architectures offer. Vendors need to dedicate separate infrastructure and software installations to each customer, and need to upgrade each customer independently. This inevitably is more expensive and time-consuming, and that cost is ultimately passed on to the customer. While a customer may not need to know or care about how an application is designed internally, they will certainly care if this causes the cost of the service to be higher than it should be, or if it means new features are delayed.

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to companies embracing cloud computing is fears about security. “How secure is our corporate data in the cloud?” is a frequently asked question. But it could be argued that data is far more secure in the hands of cloud providers who employ full-time security professionals, rather than internal IT departments who sometimes lack the same experience and procedures. Because of the scrutiny that cloud infrastructure providers face from their customers, it is essential that they provide excellent procedures and policies for security, privacy and backup. Despite the understandable concerns about trusting corporate data to a third party, the reality is that many companies will find their data security is actually enhanced by moving it to the cloud.

So cloud-based social networking services offer wide range of benefits over traditional on-premise installations, better accessibility, better functionality and lower cost.

People have been talkin jive, at least that long.

If you’re a technology provider in the enterprise 2.0 market, it’s not enough to talk the talk

I’ve been in the software business for more than two decades.  I have started companies.  Sold companies.  Took one public, and advised many more.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned is that if you want to survive in this business, you must evolve.  And that’s a principle that applies not only to my company — BroadVision, now entering its 18^th year – but to anyone who wants to compete in our market.  Because the business of enterprise computing has truly changed.   It’s no time for half measures.

Early today, we announced a new iteration of BroadVision Clearvale, our cloud-based enterprise collaboration platform that we first introduced in May.  In the short time that has passed since that launch, we have learned a lot.  We learned what our customers – now in the thousands – see is unique in our platform.  We have learned about some of the amazing things companies can do because of those unique differences (our latest offering, Clearvale PaasPort, is just one example).   But most of all we learned that if we are going to continue to compete in this market, we are going to need to remain true to the fundamental tenets of social business, and not fall to the temptation of reverting to the ideas, business models, and words that controlled in the age of enterprise software.

I know about these temptations.  I come from that age, and know just how easy it would be to package social business into an old enterprise software model.   I call the temptation to fool ourselves — and to fool our customers — “jive talkin’.”  Not just because we believe that one of our chief competitors has been talking that way; others have been talking that way, as well.  Mostly, we call it jive talkin’ to see if we can start a conversation of a different character.  A conversation about what social business really ought to be, starting with the most basic requirements.

(1) Social business needs to live in the cloud … natively. “Social business software” is an oxymoron.   If it’s truly social – enabling you to connect with anyone, anywhere, on any device – it needs to live in the cloud.

(2) Social business needs to be DIY. The business world has already learned this from the world of blogging, microblogging, and consumer social networks.  Starting an enterprise social network should be as simple as starting a simple blog.
(3) Social business needs to be priced according to the growth of the network. The old enterprise software licensing model will not work.  Nor will the simple SaaS model work.  Both are based on presumed usage.  Better to charge customers on a pay-per-use model — one what they use.  That more accurately reflects the realities of growing a social network.
(4) The social business platform can be the system of engagement for any system of record. It would be wrong to think of your social business platform in isolation of other enterprise systems.  Ask whether your social business platform can easily integrate with these systems and add a social layer.
(5) Social business should not create silos.  Instead they should help you manage your entire business ecosystem. In the offline world, most businesses operate in complex ecosystems of discrete networks of employees, partners, and customers.   Ask whether your social business platform enables you to stitch those networks together and manage them for even greater effectiveness and efficiency.
(6) Social business networks should be able to connect with other networks. Not only are businesses at risk of creating silos within their own ecosystems.  They are at risk of developing networks that are not discoverable by other companies. The solution is to invest in a world that is open, discoverable, and navigable.
(7) Social business networks should provide developers with an open, holistic platform to integrate any number of useful tools. The way we see it, the social network is the new UI, and the ever-expanding world of communication and collaboration tools have a home on the network.

We can’t pretend to have perfected an approach to each of these tenets.  Nor can say that this is a final list.  But let us know what you think, and we promise we will continue the conversation, and no jive talkin’.