[UPDATE: Here's a link to the recorded panel session of Social+Products=Better Products on Wednesday, February 15th, from 3pm to  4.30pm PST, as part of Social Media Day at SAP Palo Alto. See this post on  Products+Social=Better Products for more details of the topics discussed. ]

Panel Session Outline

Here’s the outline of the panel session:

• 3:00-3:15 Key themes and Introductions:
• 3:15-3:35 Improving products through social techniques:
• 3:35-3:55 Creating social-enabled products:
• 3:55-4:15 Creating new products on top of social networks:
• 4:15-4:30 Wrap-up and final thoughts

These times are just a guideline – we’ll go where the conversation takes us. We will be encouraging the audience (both local and online) to tweet questions and comments, and I will pass them on to the panelists.

Here are some more details about the panelists and the show:

Meet the Panelists

In alphabetic order, here are the participants of the panel – click on their name to see their profile on twitter.

	David Brockington is a solution manager responsible for SAP’s new collaboration solution, SAP StreamWork. He has been an evangelist and thought leader within SAP on social business topics. Previously, he spent 10 years in various product management roles helping grow SAP Business Objects Enterprise from its very first iteration to the number one market leading business intelligence solution.
	Timo Elliott is a 20-year veteran of SAP BusinessObjects, and has spent the last quarter-century working with customers around the world on information strategy. He works closely with SAP research and innovation centers around the world to evangelize new technology prototypes.His popular Business Analyticsblog tracks innovation in analytics and social media, including topics such as augmented corporate reality, collaborative decision-making, and social network analysis.His PowerPoint Twitter Tools lets presenters see and react to tweets in real time, embedded directly within their slides. Elliott presents regularly to IT and business audiences at international conferences, on subjects such as why BI projects fail and what to do about it, and the intersection of BI and enterprise 2.0
	Ross Mayfield is the Vice President of Business Development at SlideShare, developing strategic partnerships and helping organizations engage with the world’s largest professional sharing community.He is also currently Chairman & Co-founder of Socialtext, the Enterprise Social Software pioneer, and was the founding CEO. Previously, Mayfield Co-founded and served as President of RateXchange, a publicly traded B2B commodity exchange for telecommunications.Mayfield is a former advisor to the Office of the President of Estonia and began his career in the non-profit sector. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of California at Los Angeles and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneurs (MDE) program of the Anderson School of Business
	Kuhan Milroy is Director of Social Business Innovation, SAP Community Network at SAP. By bringing the social element to innovation at SAP, Kuhan is responsible for transforming the way SAP and customers, partners, and consumers innovate together to help shape the future of SAP’s products and solutions and more importantly the businesses, industries and markets the products serve. He manages initiatives surrounding the community and bringing a social approach to how SAP innovates, and researches how SAP can expand beyond small group to mass users for ideas and innovation.
	Lisa Joy Rosner is the Chief Marketing Officer at NetBase, where she works with the largest brands in the world—including Coca-Cola, Kraft and HP—as they change their approach to understanding consumers’ desires.Ms. Rosner is a tenured marketing executive in Silicon Valley, who is known for her creative and educational marketing approach. Before joining NetBase, she was an e-commerce expert, having served as vice president of Worldwide Marketing at BroadVision Inc. and vice president of Marketing at MyBuys, where she worked with such companies as Sears, Wal-Mart and Circuit City.Prior to that, Ms. Rosner worked in the data warehouse market at Brio, DecisionPoint and Oracle. Lisa Joy has served on the marketing advisory board for the Silicon Valley Red Cross and the Content Committee of Shop.org, the AMA and Benchmark.She was named the Gold winner of the Great Minds Award by the ARF in 2011. Ms. Rosner received a bachelor’s degree (sum cum laude) in English literature from the University of Maryland. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa
	Nicholas Webb is one of the countries top thought leaders in the area of innovation. His books include The Innovation Playbook, The Digital Innovation Playbook, and The Innovation Superstar Workbook.As a Senior Partner at Lassen Innovation he helps some of the best companies in the world drive innovation through improved customer insights and true innovation best practice.

SAP Social Intelligence, born as the social network analytics prototype from the SAP BusinessObjects innovation center (now SAP Research Prototypes), is now fully launched and available as an integral part of the SAP StreamWork collaborative decision solution.

With so much going on with various launches including BusinessObjects version 4.0 and HANA, you may have missed the launch of the Enterprise Edition of StreamWork, but it was a key step for integration with the rest of enterprise information infrastructure, and SAP has announced that StreamWork is a central part of the ongoing collaboration strategy — not just of business analytics, but also SAP’s core applications like CRM and PLM.

The project manager, Sharon Haver, has just posted a brand-new video that explains social intelligence using funky blue people (including the key employees that work on the StreamWork product) tied together with rope – it looks like they had a lot of fun making it…

Enjoy.

SAP’s decision-focused collaboration project, 12sprints, is now in “open beta”, so that anybody can sign up. Here’s the blurb from the web site explaining what it is:

Bring order to chaos and transform teamwork into results quickly. Collaborative decision-making brings together:

• People – Get everyone on the same page
• Information – Share documents and data all in plain view
• Methods – Provide structure with business tools for brainstorming, strategizing, and decision-making

And it’s built for speed – use for free and be up and running in minutes!  Learn more

For an introduction to a typical activity structure, and a real-life example, please visit this post on TimoElliott.com

France has a plan to put the latest 2.0 technology at the service of its citizens called Le France Numérique 2012. It outlines how the government intends to:

• Provide everybody access to digital networks and services
• Develop and provide new digital services
• Grow the number and usage of digital services by companies, government departments, and individuals
• Modernize the governance of the digital economy

As part of the plan, Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the French Deputy Minister for the Development of the Digital Economy launched a call last spring for innovative web initiatives. One of the selected projects, led by SAP Research, is called ARSA (“Analyse des Réseaux Sociaux pour les Administrations”, social network analysis for government authorities).

The project uses the Social Network Analyzer (SNA) technology from the SAP Business Objects Innovation Center to improve collaboration and government transparency in the public sector, laying the foundations for “Administration 2.0”.

A press conference this morning in SAP’s Paris headquarters hosted by Vincent de Poret outlined the project’s goals. Gilles Logeais, the Research Director for SAP Research France, explained that the two-year, €1.3M project will be carried out in partnership with the town of Antibes on the French Riviera, chosen as a representative mid-sized French town, with around 75,000 inhabitants and a wide variety of public services.

With help from students of the prestigious Ecole Centrale Paris engineering school, and a local cloud computing platform partner, Euclyde, the team will research how best to use social network analysis technology for government departments and local authorities, in order to:

• Optimize collaboration within public-sector organizations
• Improve transparency and convenience for citizens accessing services (who does what)
• Improve the ability of public-sector organizations to understand and react to the needs of citizens (who needs what)

Vincent de Poret, Cedric Ulmer, Alexis Naibo, and Gilles Logeais of SAP

Alexis Naibo of the SAP BusinessObjects Innovation Center gave a demonstration of the SNA technology, explaining how it can import data from a wide variety of sources including internal business applications, corporate databases, and external interfaces. Once the data has been gathered, people can search for experts and discover relationships using an intuitive interface.

Today’s organizations are increasingly complex, with frequent reorganizations and many cross-functional teams and initiatives. The result is that the standard corporate hierarchy, which is often the only relationship information available, rarely reflects how people really work together. Many people today are active members of professional social networks such as LinkedIn or Viadeo, and want it to be as easy to find an internal contact as it is externally.

SNA has the potential to gives a more complete, 360 degree view of collaboration in the organization, leveraging the knowledge already embedded in corporate applications such as human capital management, customer relationship management, and project management systems.

The prototype makes it easy to understand existing relationships between people in much the same way that traditional business intelligence systems help organizations understand data stored in their corporate systems.

Unlike consumer-oriented social network tools that only support one type of relationship between individuals (“I know X”) and a limited, predefined collection of data attributes, SNA supports multiple different types of relationships between both individuals and groups, and organizations can easily adapt and extend the information and links contained in each individual’s profile.

Anything technology that touches on relationships between people requires sensitive handling, and SNA is designed to meet all the technical, legal, and organizational requirements for data security and governance, by incorporating fine-grained control over information access. In addition, the platform is designed to fit seamlessly into existing environments, supporting standards such LDAP and Google’s OpenSocial, and with integration to mobile devices and corporate email accounts.

Alexis explained that the prototype has been implemented as a beta project within SAP and has proved very popular with employees. As a standard part of the internal company portal, all SAP’s approximately 50,000 staff have access to the solution, and it is used thousands of times each week.

An open SNA demonstration is available online for anybody would like to understand the technology, at http://sna-demo.ondemand.com

SAP is still investigating how best to package and commercialize the SNA prototype, but there has been considerable interest from potential customers, notably as a seamless part of specific SAP business vertical and functional applications.

Cedric Ulmer, the research project lead for SAP, explained that town of Antibes, like any other organization, needs to work as efficiently as possible, but as a public organizations must also be as transparent as possible with its citizen customers. The first phase of the project will be to adapt the SNA technology to the town’s particular needs. Cedric cited some applications that might be of interest, such as:

• Understanding the complex links between the local authority and the many different suppliers that compete for public contracts, and the relationship between those different suppliers
• How the local authority can best collaborate with the wide range of different local associations (sporting associations, business groups, etc.) to meet the broader needs of local citizens

Other articles:

• A social network for the French Administration, by SAP (in French) (Google Translate version)
• SAP wants to build a social network for the French Administration (in French) (Google Translate version)
• SAP and Antibes implement social networking (in French) (Google Translate version)

Antibes image adapted from original photo by Valeria Cerutti

As part of my role helping evangelize the use of social media within SAP , I am a proud member of the 2.0 Adoption Council, a group devoted to creating and sharing best practices in Enterprise 2.0 adoption (see the “Web 2.0 in SAP” section of this site for more information about internal Web 2.0 deployments at SAP).

As explained on the council website at www.20adoptioncouncil.com, the council members are:

…a collection of managers in large enterprises that are charting the course for 2.0 adoption.  Although we may use different platforms and tools, we all share a common enthusiasm for bringing a new way of working to our representative companies.  We call ourselves “internal evangelists” and some say we have one of the most difficult, yet exciting jobs in the global marketplace.

And the member welcome explains that:

The 2.0 Adoption Council is a peer-based, information-sharing group interested in the latest thinking, best practices, case studies, and helpful tips associated with executing socio-collaborative strategies and projects in the large enterprise.

There are very few opportunities for customers to connect with each other and share their specific interests, ask questions, and help solve problems others are facing while playing the role of “internal evangelist” at their day job. It is sometimes a frustrating and thankless job!

The 2.0 Adoption Council was formed in June of 2009 by Susan Scrupski, Founder of SoCo Partners, alias ITSinsider on Twitter (Photo by Michael Krigsman of the IT Project Failures Blog — and excellent amateur photographer!).

The Council will be conducting research and publishing white papers culled from the collective intelligence of contributing members. It will be a major participant in the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco (November 2-5), where the Internal Evangelist of the Year will be announced. If you’d like to nominate a member to be Internal Evangelist of the Year, please fill out this form – and if you’re attending to the show, we look forward to meeting you!

Membership of the council is invitation-only and restricted to individuals that are actively involved in a 2.0 adoption effort in large organizations (generally more than 10,000 employees). Each company can have two individuals on the council (Craig Cmehil is the other SAP representative), and each person is expected to devote each time to helping the council community. (Susan, does this count?

The council has a Facebook Page open to anybody who’s interested in 2.0 best practice, but the main work of the council happens in a collaborative workspace kindly provided by Jive Software (although the council does not recommend any particular platform to its members) and regular conference calls between members.

A presentation by Susan on slideshare.net below outlines the goals and organization of the Council.

The topic threads of the council have been both useful and fascinating – it’s great to swap stories and tips with people that understand exactly the environment we’re working in, and it has already started gathering useful facts and figures, e.g. this post from Susan:

Finally, most important of all — there’s 2.0 adoption council swag!

The last few months has seen a lot of coverage of SAP’s directions on Web 2.0 technology including on-demand applications, social networking, and cloud computing. Here are some highlights, in the words of the leaders of these initiatives at SAP.

On-Demand

Phil Wainewright reported on SAP executive VP John Wookey’s presentation at the OnDemand Europe Conference in June:

“On demand is the next stage in the evolution of application development … It is absolutely essential from SAP’s perspective that we embrace this change,” he said. “On-demand is what our customers are looking to invest in. If we do our job well and listen to our customers, these are the applications we have to be delivering. We have to drive to leadership in on-demand applications.”

Here’s a video of John Wookey and Mani Gil, Vice President of OnDemand at SAP BusinessObjects, discussing the conference:

Here’s a copy of John’s presentation:

Links

• Wall Street Journal: SAP to Make Online Software Push
• Financial Times: SAP reshapes strategy for online software
• Mary Hayes Weier of Information Week: SAP Unveils SaaS Strategy
• Dennis Howlett: SAP’s John Wookey: the task ahead

Social Networking

A podcast from SearchSAP.com on how SAP’s Web 2.0 strategy makes way for social networking in business apps

“In that light, SearchSAP.com sat down with Zia Yusuf, executive vice president of SAP’s global ecosystem and partner group, and Mark Yolton, senior vice president of SAP community networks. In addition to managing strategy for SAP’s social networking sites like the SAP Developer Network (SDN), the two men play a role in what social networking tools may be integrated into SAP’s own software.

In this podcast, Yusuf and Yolton talk about SAP’s internal Web 2.0 strategy, including why sites like SDN have been successful and how SAP’s employees are using tools like Jive and CubeTree in their daily tasks. In turn, they discuss possible business scenarios in which tools like Twitter and LinkedIn could be integrated into SAP software.”

Cloud Computing

Information Week: SAP Sheds Light On Cloud Computing Plans

“In a keynote address and interview at the Interop Conference and Expo in Las Vegas on Tuesday, [SAP CTO Vishal Sikka] broadly outlined SAP’s cloud computing strategy and discussed the technical and business challenges the company needs to solve before doing things like ramping up the number of customers served by Business ByDesign.

SAP sees its opportunities in the cloud — which it seems to define very broadly as all Internet-based services — as threefold for now: enabling “business network service clouds” like iTunes that are powered by SAP Business Suite and Business Objects, complementary and integrated cloud-based services from SAP likeCRM On-Demand, and a mission-critical business application suite in Business ByDesign.”

Vishal’s slides:

Videos of Vishal talking about on current SAP strategy and technology trends:

Also see Vishal’s Timeless Software Blog.

Mark talks about how to create a feeling of community, how SAP leverages technology like Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, and what his team does to measure the success of their initiatives.

SDN – SAP Developer Network – http://sdn.sap.com
BPX – Business Process Expert Community – http://bpx.sap.com
BOC – Business Objects Community – http://boc.sap.com
SAP EcoHub – http://ecohub.sap.com
UAC – University Alliances Community – http://uac.sap.com
SAP TechEd & SAP Tech Tour – http://sapteched.com
SCN – SAP Community Network – http://scn.sap.com

SAP has been a long-time user of Jive Software’s forum and workspace technology (formerly called ClearSpace, now SBS for “Social Business Software”), and there are close commercial ties between the two companies. Notably, Jive’s platform is used to power the SAP Collaboration Workspace area that is used for both external collaboration with customers as well as internal collaboration – including the main internal “SAP 2.0” forum for discussing SAP’s own adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technology.

But as discussed in a previous post, Social Networking @ SAP, and like most large organizations, a variety of other platforms are also used inside the organization including Atlassian’s Confluence and an internal development, Harmony.

In addition to these existing deployments, late last year, a small workgroup of SAP BusinessObjects employees based in Palo Alto, California, began beta-testing a new, on-demand enterprise collaboration suite called CubeTree.

The initial installation was focused mainly on twitter-like status feeds, functionality that wasn’t easily available from the other platforms. It rapidly went viral within the company, with employees able to invite other employees. I personally started using the site in November last year.

During the initial beta phase, CubeTree was used widely across different SAP departments, and I personally found it very useful to get insights into the activities of other teams working on related projects – especially SAP’s own web 2.0 technology plans.

One of the key advantages of the CubeTree on-demand architecture is the ability to rapidly add new features as they are demanded by users. There’s a weekly software update, and new features are explained on the company’s blog. To help encourage a variety of opinions and focus feedback, CubeTree uses functionality from User Voice. Participants are given “votes” they can use when making requests and comments to developers.

CubeTree launched their production platform in May of this year, and it now provides the full suite of typical features offered on today’s consumer social networking sites: user profiles, follow/follower news feeds, micro-blogging, along with enterprise collaboration tools including wikis, file sharing, and polls.

Here’s a list of features, and the feature tour video from the CubeTree web site, below.

David Meyer, VP Product Management for Emerging Technologies for SAP BusinessObjects was the main sponsor of the CubeTree project, and participated in the CubeTree launch video below, talking about the promise of the social enterprise and how CubeTree helps him achieve his goals.

Transcript of the video:

Voice-over: SAP BusinessObjects has employees and offices around the world, designing and developing the world’s leading business intelligence solutions. Managing product lifecycles throughout multiple offices and time zones has its challenges, so they turned to CubeTree to facilitate collaboration and to open up channels of communication between stakeholders.

David Meyer: CubeTree helps ideas flow like water and I think that everybody in the enterprise is incredibly thirsty these days, because they’re captured in these silos and stuck in meetings and we need to bring back that human element. And people often don’t equate technology, the social technology, with the human element, and they think it’s de-humanizing. I think that people that are immersed in these systems see it as the exact opposite. They re-humanize within the confines and the constraints of how we’re forced to live our enterprise days.

Voice-over: Casual conversations and impromptu meetings are commonplace. But collaboration within the enterprise can be limited to one office or one team. By using CubeTree, development is more agile and collaboration is made easier.

David: CubeTree meets some of the needs — the very real needs — we have in the enterprise by making us simply move faster. Somebody says something in CubeTree. Somebody else says something from a different walk of life. A few minutes later, and by the end of the day, there’s a brand-new idea. It didn’t exist in the morning. It’s the composite idea, the best, the 1+1+1=8 within these dialogs with people from diverse viewpoints. And those are the things that are very exciting, that I think everybody is starting to feel the acceleration that these tools can provide.

Voice-over: CubeTree has already impacted the way people work at SAP BusinessObjects.

David: The other day I was remarking on a little company that TechCrunch covered. Within three hours, somebody from the ecosystem team saw that I had a point of view on it, looked at it themselves, realized where it fit in into our product strategy, and that same day had signed an NDA with that company, and was talking to them the next day. That’s remarkable!

David also explained his motivations for using CubeTree in the launch press release:

“The market looks to SAP as an innovator and thought leader in driving business transformation through technology. Social networks are transforming how people communicate in their personal lives. We adopted CubeTree’s enterp
rise social software to bring the same network effect into the enterprise, connecting people and ideas across the company to accelerate our business.”

The internal deployment has not been without its wrinkles, however. Legal and IT security objections to the use of a hosted environment (rather than the in-house deployment of the Jive platform) had to be overcome, and deployment had to be briefly interrupted for non-US employees while European data confidentiality concerns were addressed. In some countries such as Germany, the employee worker council had to be consulted, and has not yet given its go-ahead, barring that country from the deployment. And, of course, the functionality overlaps with existing platforms were examined, and a business case required for the costs and overhead of a new solution.

Unlike the Jive collaboration platform that is available to all SAP staff, CubeTree deployment is currently only available for employees of one of the product divisions of SAP Business Objects, but the deployment may be (re)extended in the future.

Links

• TechCrunch: CubeTree Launches As A Facebook + FriendFeed + Twitter For Enterprise
• Bill Ives: CubeTree Releases Innovative Enterprise Collaboration Platform
• “Buzz” Area of CubeTree web site: http://www.cubetree.com/site/buzz
• Official CubeTree Twitter Channel: http://twitter.com/cubetree
• Ross Fubini, CTO and Co-founder of CubeTree on Twitter: http://twitter.com/fubini

SAP recently announced a new set of Social Media Participation Guidelines and an internal forum to help employees make the most of new social media channels such as Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the spirit of Web 2.0, and like other organizations such as Intel and IBM, we would like to share our guidelines with the community.

SAP Social Media Participation Guidelines 2009

SAP Global Communications, SAP Global Marketing
June 2009

This document reflects the current guidelines as determined by SAP Global Communications, SAP Global Marketing and SAP Legal in collaboration with employees. This document is subject to modifications and amendments from time to time as required.

SOCIAL MEDIA PARTICIPATION GUIDELINES
The following guidelines describe private, individual participation in social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, personal blogs, forums, YouTube, Flickr etc. for SAP employees. If your job requires you to be an SAP evangelist in social media channels and you have questions, or you want to establish social media channels on behalf of SAP or an SAP group, contact the SAP Social Media Group by sending a mail to [redacted]. For any other questions about social media at SAP, please visit the SAP-internal SAP 2.0 Community.

These guidelines are intended to assist you in your use of social media tools as an individual. Please be aware that nothing in the use of these tools changes your responsibilities and obligations as an employee of SAP. SAP and its employees are required to act ethically, and it is every employee’s obligation to review and understand SAP’s Code of Business Conduct, our communications policy, and their confidentiality obligations in other policies, such as the Security Policy.

Social media channels such as (micro) blogging, video and photo sharing, forums, virtual worlds, opinion markets and collaboration environments represent an opportunity to facilitate conversation with all of our constituents regarding the enterprise software industry and our place in it. SAP provides these social media guidelines to help employees participate within social media channels safely, and with minimum personal liability.

The SAP employee community collaborated in writing these guidelines. Specifically, a draft set of guidelines was posted on an internal SAP Wiki and SAP employees from divisions throughout the organization were invited to make comments and suggestions aimed at developing an appropriate set of guidelines.

These guidelines reflect the principles that SAP employees should follow when engaging in online communication. They are intended to provide you with an understanding of both the proper and improper uses of social computing in an effort to make your conversations and interactions as rich as possible. At all times, SAP employees must obey their local laws and adhere to local legal and ethical regulations. Nevertheless, as online communication is global in nature, other laws and regulations may also be applicable to your communication.

Please note that any direct communication to analysts, the financial market and/or members of the media must be conducted only through SAP Global Communications. The following set of guidelines only pertains to your personal statements in any online media. Please be aware that, although SAP is providing you with these guidelines, the overall and final legal responsibility for any statement made by you will reside with you personally. Therefore, you should exercise caution and thoughtfulness to statements you make online.

Setting up personal spaces in social media channels – You are free to set up any blog, space or other area within the given framework of the terms provided by the host of such spaces (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc). Please contact the SAP Social Media Group whenever you intend to use “SAP” as any part of the name or URL to avoid confusion with official SAP communication. Any personal space should have a clear disclaimer that it is not an official space of SAP. The following template may be used for this purpose:

“This [Choose. Blog, Space ...] is the personal [Blog, Space …] of [Name] and only contains my personal views, thoughts and opinions. It is not endorsed by SAP nor does it constitute any official communication of SAP.”

Managers and executives take note: This standard disclaimer does not by itself exempt SAP managers and executives from a special responsibility when blogging or otherwise communicating online. By virtue of their position, managers and executives must consider whether personal thoughts they publish may be misunderstood as expressing SAP positions, and a manager should assume that his or her team will read what is written. A public blog is not the appropriate medium for many types of communications, including, but not limited to: communicating SAP policies to SAP employees; negotiating with third parties; making disparaging remarks about any third party; or other communications, etc.

Write in the first person – When you contribute commentary about SAP or SAP-related matters to an external audience, it is vital that you make it clear that you are speaking only for yourself (i.e. use the first-person singular, such as “I believe…” and not “We at SAP believe…”). There are different ways to do this. A simple and accepted approach is to include a disclaimer at the very beginning of your blog. If the blog is lengthy or long-standing, you should consider repeating the disclaimer inside the message. The disclaimer should state at a minimum that your point of view is personal, and it is not an official SAP point of view. Make it simple. Make it clear.

Identify yourself – The value of social computing is diminished when people hide behind a pseudonym or an anonymous post. Trust is hard enough to establish and maintain over the Internet, and if you do not identify yourself, then do not be surprised if your well-considered contributions are brushed aside. Therefore, please identify yourself to provide additional authenticity to your online contributions.

Be Honest – Tell the truth and if you find you have made a mistake, issue a clarification or a withdrawal or whatever may suit the circumstance and make it abundantly clear that you have done so. Social computing is a tolerant neighborhood – mistakes and errors will not make you a social outcast if you take responsibility. Rather than editing your content once it has been published, find ways to make your corrections transparent.

Be Respectful – simply carry the professionalism norms and standards of any SAP office onto the social computing platforms.

Separate Opinions from Facts – and make sure your audience can see the difference.

Add Value – be informative and interesting. Contribute your thoughts, experiences, observations, and opinions regarding issues you know and care about, but make sure to check your facts and figures – if you don’t, someone else probably will.

Be Engaged and Be Informed – Read the contributions of others. Know what the current conversations are and what people are saying in order to see if, and how, you may be able to contribute a new perspective. Participation is the fuel of social computing. And remember…

Aim for Quality, not Quantity – Offer your contribution with context whenever you can. Provide links to other blogs, media articles or whatever sources you think are necessary. Make your content rich and interesting for others to read. Consider attaching documents when necessary (but not SAP internal documents, confidential or not, of course!). And in every case, keep the language simple and flowing. If you start a blog, encourage feedback and conversation – make sure your readers can add feedback to your blog and respond in a timely manner. A two-way communication exchange allows for a more meaningful conversation.

Don’t Pick Fights – When you see misrepresentations or patently false statements about SAP by bloggers, the media, analysts or anyone else for that matter, you may certainly address these misrepresentations, even by joining someone else’s conversation. But stick to the facts and make sure the facts you rely on are publicly available.

Protect Your Privacy – Never disclose personal information.

Remember that you are still an SAP employee – do not make false, misleading or detrimental statements about SAP or SAP products. Consider that, although you are writing a personal blog, your statements will be considered an indication of the internal proceedings in SAP and how the company and our products are seen internally.

How to Handle Media Inquiries – Your contributions to social computing and the online conversations around SAP products, solutions, and practices will help advance dialogue, maybe solve some problems, create awareness and possibly attract attention of all kinds, including the media. If a member of the media contacts you, simply notify the Media Relations team in Global Communications via press@sap.com. They will determine the best way to handle the inquiry.

Legal Considerations – Yes, you have legal responsibilities and they need to be considered. You must respect copyrights and other intellectual property, fair use and financial disclosure laws, and SAP deals in general. Remember the following – do NOT talk about: perceived product defects or deficits; revenue projections; future product launch details; acquisition targets yet to be defined, or disclose corporate topics, product roadmaps, customer wins, our relationship to customers or partners or any other material SAP internal information. Do not post materials from SAP partners or customers in your communication (whether marked as confidential or not) or otherwise make information public that you have received through interaction with customers or partners. Use your common sense, and when in doubt contact the SAP Social Media Group.

Social Computing and Your Primary Role – Active contribution to social computing in its many forms can be time-consuming, so it is important that this does not interfere with your role at SAP. If you find that your social computing activity interferes with your role at SAP, please speak with your manager to determine if your personal contributions can become official SAP communications in alignment with SAP Global Communications as part of your job. If your manager and SAP Global Communication determines that it is not possible to incorporate your social computing activity into your role at SAP, you should reduce your involvement in social computing and consider posting a statement that explains why you are reducing your online activity.

We’re used to seeing IT industry megavendors such as SAP augment their solutions with web 2.0 technology from smaller vendors, but now one of the leading enterprise 2.0 companies is turning to SAP for a cloud computing offers to extend new capabilities to customers.

At the Enterprise 2.0 2009 event in Boston, Jive and SAP announced that Jive is going to be a reseller of SAP’s on-demand BI solutions, providing “social BI” to their customers.

SAP has long been a customer of Jive Software’s Enterprise 2.0 collaboration platform, notably to power the forums on the SAP Development Network, and SAP’s Collaboration Workspace, and a few years ago SAP signed an OEM agreement to include Jive Forums as a standard part of the SAP NetWeaver portal application.

This announcement is a clear sign of the growing maturity of the enterprise 2.0 market, in two different ways.

First, it’s the first concrete results of SAP’s increased focus on the web 2.0 market, and in particular the investment in the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio of products, designed to transform the work of “business users” in the same way that ERP has transformed operational processes.

SAP BusinessObjects was one of the early pioneers in the on-demand business intelligence market, with a flexible platform that provides the best of both worlds: customers can use the same technology platform in a mix of on-demand or on-premise configurations, and move smoothly between the two. SAP’s agreement to partner with Jive is non-exclusive: the on-demand BI software is already used within other partner solutions including Oco.

Second, it shows that enterprise 2.0 solutions are real, and providing value in organizations. Jive’s 3,000 customers include many large organizations, that have been gathering valuable data about how companies collaborate internally and engage with customers and partners externally. As with any successful business process, they now want to examine and optimize that process, and mine that data with best-of-breed business intelligence tools.

These two trends were echoed by Susan Scrupski of ITSInsider, in her post And They’re Off. A Postcard From Enterprise 2.0 Event:

“This new venture, however, marks a clear initiative by SAP to (finally) take social software seriously, and likewise, it provides a grownup capability for a social software platform like Jive to deliver some clear business benefit.”

I believe business intelligence is an essential part of any successful enterprise 2.0 initiative, in order to:

Provide statistics on usage trends. Business intelligence helps proactively identify any technical or social roadblocks to effective deployment of collaboration tools, answering questions such as:

• When are the peaks and troughs of user activity? What causes them?
• Who has access to the system but is not using it?
• Which users have recently stopped using the system? Do they share any common characteristics?
• Are there any regular occasions where particular groups don’t use the system? Why?

Prove the ROI. Business intelligence functionality will help provide the data required to prove to skeptics of the value of collaboration and social computing inside organizations.

• Are users of the system more likely to get better (or worse) employee evaluations or bonuses?
• What’s the correlation between any groups of identified “top performers” and system usage?
• Do sales people who use the system achieve quota faster than sales people that do not?
• Does using the system replace other types of internal information dissemination, such as attending internal web seminars, or does it complement it?
• Is there any correlation between system use and employee or customer satisfaction?
• Are customers that engage in collaboration more or less profitable?

Optimize social relationships. If enterprise 2.0 software generates return on investment, it follows that it makes sense to try and optimize its use. Business intelligence systems can help decide where the network of relationships between employees, customers, and partners can be improved:

• Are there certain key “connectors” that provide a valuable service, but are not being recognized as such within the organization?
• Are there any groups of people that collaborate among themselves, but not with the rest of the organization? (e.g. bosses that frown on “their team” working with other departments)
• Do similar groups (such as regional sales offices) have different patterns of relationships? Why?
• Are there people that seem to be a negative influence on relationships within the organization? (e.g. detecting “bad bosses”
• Did the new bonus or incentive system we just introduced stop people collaborating?

Analyzing sentiments. Collaboration technology generates a lot of textual information that can be analyzed using technology such as SAP BusinessObjects’ Text Analytics, for analyzing the sentiment of customers, partners, and employees, about products, processes, or the collaboration system itself.

Note that in every case, it’s not enough to have information just from the collaboration system – it must be combined with information from other key financial and HR systems in order to get a full view of what is happening. This means that organizations must have a strategic approach to implementing business intelligence across the organization.

You can download Jive Software’s “Social Business Imperative Manifesto” here. And any organizations interested in trying out the SAP BusinessObjects ondemand solutions can click here to sign up for a Starter edition account.

Links and Other Analysis

Mary Hayes Weier of Information Week: Enterprise 2.0: SAP, Jive Combining BI With Wikis

Chris Kanaracus of IDG News Service: Jive, SAP Partner on ‘social BI’

Alex Goldman, InternetNews.com, SAP BusinessObjects integrates into Jive

Barb Mosher, CMS Wire, Jive Integrates SAP’s onDemand Business Intelligence Offerings

Oliver Marks, ZDNet Blogs: Jive & Telligent Get More Analytical

Susan Scrupski,  ITSInsider: And They’re Off. A Postcard From Enterprise 2.0 Event