If you’re shallowly interested in watching beautiful women talking about BusinessObjects software, you may like this video:

Enterprise social network analysis is clearly an essential part of getting a real return on investment on Web 2.0 technologies within organizations — something that has so far proved difficult.

Today, the “way organizations work” typically has little to do with the official department structures. Organizations are becoming increasingly networked and collaborative, with flat hierarchies, multiple reporting relationships, and a focus on cross-functional initiatives.

Tools like the social network analyzer can help illuminate the “real” organizational structures that are driving the business — and this is essential if we’re to deliver on the promise of translating high-level strategy into low-level execution through aligned objectives.

My company, SAP, has been undergoing extensive reorganization over the last few years — partly because it’s simply the nature of the technology business, but also because of the large BusinessObjects acquistion, and as a reaction to the recent economic downturn.

We have implemented the social network analyzer prototype within our own organization, and users have reported that it’s an extremely valuable tool for discovering links with co-workers. If you find yourself on a call with someone you haven’t yet met, you can not only look up their traditional employee profile, but also find out what other links exist between you, such as the common contacts you both work with. 

As with any new technology, getting the full benefits will require changes to way companies work. In particular, there will have to clear ownership of “network relationshp management” within organizations: ensuring that all the right people in the right teams are working together as they should.

This is perhaps a great opportunity for the human resources role to be able to really show the value of people and their interactions to the overall functioning of the company.

Enterprise social network analytics is a step towards the future of “business user applications”, and we should expect to see variants of this type of functionality embedded in almost every corporate application.

When I was growing up, my father always insisted that “business was all about relationships” (I didn’t pay much attention, sadly). But relationships can be complicated, so if you want to have a head start figuring out how your company works, download the prototype and start giving us feedback on how to make it better!

(OK, so I know puns are the lowest form of wit… apologies)

Thanks to Michael Thompson for the (real) customer quote!

Anybody with a stock portfolio knows that you can’t ignore risk when trying to figure out how to increase your assets, and organizations are no different.

Do you, like me, wish you’d followed Nassim Nicholas Talib’s advice and kept all your money in treasury bonds? I read his books, believed every word, and encouraged others to read them — but still didn’t do anything about it.

Talib and others have used the analogy of “picking up dimes in front of a steam roller” — you make a living until one day the steam roller wins. Risk management gives you a chance to look around you while you’re picking up the dimes and see if you’re about to be flattened — or simply take the odds into account when you’re working on your revenue forecasts.

In a recent speech, Balanced Scorecard co-creater Robert Kaplan emphasized that today’s organizations need to include risk management among the key performance indicators that they measure:

“Financial performance is a lag indicator. … Now we’re seeing the consequences of not making risk management a strategic part of strategy”

Technology vendors are now offering increasingly integrated risk and business intelligence / performance management porfolios. As Madan Sheina of Ovum mentioned in a recent article, Risky business for SAP:

“SAP underscored its commitment to the governance, risk and compliance (GRC) market at its recent GRC Insider event in Las Vegas, Nevada by unveiling new software designed to link supply-chain risk, trade compliance and execution across various industry sectors. SAP wants companies to embed risk into their daily business processes to help them proactively manage risk by operational exception management – what it calls “risk-adjusted strategy management”

Screenshot of risk heat map embedded in SAP Strategy Management

Overall risk management can be integrated with operational processes such as Global Trade Services.

Global Trade Services and Risk Management

Another example of integration is risk-adjusted planning and budgeting – being able to easily create and compare budget scenarios that include expected average losses and risk mitigation expenses.

Finally, BI techniques are extremely useful for risk mitigation — especially fraud detection. In order to minimize fraud in your organization, you can use software to enforce separate of duties (i.e. making sure that the same person can’t both create companies in the system and pay invoices — it would be easy for them to create fictious companies and syphon off money). But you can also use analysis and reporting to spot any type of strange behavior.

For example, one software company I worked with put in place new sales compensation rules that were designed to make sure the direct and indirect sales teams worked closely together: both the direct sales person and the partner lead would receive credit for the deal. Unfortunately, some direct sales people pushed deals through a partner, even when they hadn’t been involved, and split the (higher) total commission under the table with the indirect rep. The company only spotted the behavior at the end of the year — using more proactive reporting and analysis, they might have noticed the sudden spike in double commissions.

I typically find that organizations that are implementing and managing BI systems have almost nothing to do with the teams that are concerned with risk (who are typically more in the finance area). But that’s no excuse for ignoring risk integration. If you’re in charge of a BI project, you’re responsible for optimizing information use, even if you don’t own a particular technology area.

If you haven’t yet looked at GRC as part of your BI implementation, you should ask yourself the question: “can my organization really risk NOT doing this?!”

Other posts on risk:

• BI and Société Générale

All those financial wizards were making a fortune based on the money they were “creating” — money that has since turned out to be largely fictitious. Top hedge fund managers were earning more in the time it took for an average New York City cab ride (8 minutes) than the average American made in a year.

As I said with a cartoon at the time: “who’s being taken for a ride?!”

Top hedge fund managers made over $657M in 2006. You can use this handy calculator to work out how long it took them to make more than you did all year — the time to brush their teeth? Take a shower? Commute?

(model below — you will probably have to connect directly to the site to see it)

Unbelievably, the financial industry apparently STILL thinks that million-dollar bonuses are perfectly reasonable for work they do (for example, it’s argued that it’s needed to retain the “best and brightest” at AIG).

Benchmarking is a great practice — but you have to know when to update your benchmarks!

Sources: Pay statistics, time usage stats, NY cab ride, commute, TV watching. Model built using Crystal Xcelsius.