{"id":12286,"date":"2012-12-07T14:26:20","date_gmt":"2012-12-07T13:26:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/?p=4457"},"modified":"2012-12-07T14:26:20","modified_gmt":"2012-12-07T13:26:20","slug":"making-enterprise-social-work-with-sap-jam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timoelliott.com\/blog\/2012\/12\/making-enterprise-social-work-with-sap-jam.html","title":{"rendered":"Making Enterprise Social Work, With SAP Jam"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sapjam<\/p>\n

To take enterprise social software to the next level, SAP is proposing a new approach that integrates social and collaboration technology tightly into business applications.<\/p>\n

Enterprise Social Software: Growing, But Facing Adoption Problems<\/h3>\n

Enterprise social software has been around for around six years, and recent research shows that it continues to be a fast-growing market. According to a recent Forrester Research study, 52% of organizations\u00a0 will make an investment in enterprise social this year.<\/p>\n

But as Dion Hinchcliffe<\/a> points out<\/a>, enterprises face much higher adoption \u201cheadwinds\u201d for social software than consumers:<\/p>\n

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The latest research shows that It\u2019s been difficult to get meaningful enterprise social adoption because the applications don\u2019t have a business context. With \u201cnon-contextual\u201d social software, the \u2018ah-ha\u2019 moment has not happened for a lot of the users, who struggle to understand how social technology impacts the work they do.<\/p>\n

For example, Dachis Group<\/a>\u2019s\u00a0 Social Business Council<\/a> carried out a study on the Current State of Social Engagement inside the Large Enterprise<\/a> and found that :<\/p>\n

More than half, 57%, of the survey respondents pegged a mere 10-20% of their eligible workforce as active. There were no members who indicated 100% of their eligible employees were active on the platform.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 <\/p>\n

Executives and vendors have found it hard to justify investments on social software. Unlike business applications such as Customer Relationship Management, there\u2019s no obvious direct link between social software and tangible business benefits. As Mark McDonald of Gartner puts it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

For many executives, social media \u201cappears to be a distraction drawing people away from meaningful work\u201d\u2026 \u201cfrequently executives ask about the productivity impact of social media and see it as a reason to reinforce control rather than reinvest in collaboration. A social organization means business<\/a>, so the real question for social media advocates and executives is not \u2018to be or not to be social\u2019 but rather \u2018What are the right structures for social media in the organization?\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today, enterprise social software is often deployed as a silo, separate from where business people do their work. It has been a \u201cwhite canvas\u201d where proponents have had to \u201cmanufacture\u201d the use cases, for example: \u201ca wiki could help you in these six ways and a blog could help you in these three ways\u201d and the business case has had to be built on indirect values.<\/p>\n

This lack of alignment with the business has resulted in catch-22 situations: if there isn\u2019t an obvious business use case, then there\u2019s no adoption, and if there\u2019s no adoption, there\u2019s no content being generated, so there\u2019s no real reason for people to go there \u2013 and the whole thing breaks down, resulting in \u201csocial ghost towns\u201d<\/p>\n

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Forrester Research<\/a>\u00a0also indicates that the biggest barriers to social media adoption are to do with links to the business:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn environments where social business solutions have been deployed and there have been issues with adoption, survey data demonstrates perceived lack of business value (46%) and lack of integration with workflow and business
\napplications (50%) as critical roadblocks\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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So what new approaches can be tried to increase the value of social technology in organizations?<\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n

SAP Jam \u2013 Putting Enterprise Social to Work<\/h3>\n

Earlier this year, Sameer Patel joined SAP as GM and Global VP Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software. Sameer is a well-known social enterprise analyst and member of the Enterprise Irregulars<\/a> \u2013 \u201ca diverse group of practitioners, consultants, investors, journalists, analysts and full time bloggers who share a common passion – enterprise technology and its application to business in the 21st century\u201d. He explained his reasons for joining in a post on his Pretzel Logic blog<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For the last six months, he has been working with teams from SAP and SuccessFactors on the social strategy of the company. To combat the problems with existing enterprise social software, the strategy is based on four key design principles.<\/p>\n

\"image1[5]\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Social Seamlessly Integrated with Work<\/h3>\n

SAP started from the principle that social software should be something that \u201cshows up when you need it, and it enables and enhances something that you\u2019re already doing\u201d.<\/p>\n

Instead of talking about how organizations \u201chave to be a social enterprise,\u201d SAP wanted to look at discrete problems that organizations have today and align social with the core performance metrics that organizations already have. Rather than social success being about \u201ckilling email\u201d, it\u2019s about about making what business people do more effective.<\/p>\n

To achieve this, SAP brought together a co-innovation council of 20 customers from different industries, who worked together to understand what it means when you say \u2018social needs to turn up in the context of work\u2019. The company\u2019s deep experience in applications meant that it was possible to get in touch with the right contacts to think about \u201cday of the life\u201d scenarios for many different roles: sales people, suppliers, HR, finance, etc.<\/p>\n

SAP used this feedback to understand where collaboration makes sense in business processes, and what types of collaboration are required \u2013 where social and collaboration can and can\u2019t \u201cmove the needle\u201d. The company then used this knowledge to embed social into business applications such as customer relationship management, sales force automation, finance applications, and talent management.<\/p>\n

\"image18[3]\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Instead of starting with a blank social network, where people don\u2019t know where to start or what to do, users are given social in a business context: collaboration is directly tied to making existing work more effective. It\u2019s an embedded, native experience, so that, for example, somebody who is used to using CRM every day can start from that environment rather than having to switch over to something different.<\/p>\n

Forrester outlined the value of this type of collaborative business integration in a recent study, Social Business: Delivering Critical Business Value<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A potential scenario that illustrates this type of integration could involve a salesperson reacting to an opportunity. As information comes into an activity stream from a customer relationship management (CRM) system, it can be critical to activities to drive an opportunity. A high-severity incident with a current client could change the approach to a sales opportunity. A social business layer that is connected to a CRM system could be a perfect mechanism for providing the information to the salesperson in time to drive the right decisions regarding the approach. Additionally, the approach and response to the incident could be refined by collective input from the broader community. Another example would be adding social capabilities to a document-centric collaboration system to allow collective input to content creation and management.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

SAP has already integrated SAP Jam into its applications, concentrating on the key areas where collaboration can add value, such as CRM on-premise and on-demand, learning management, and finance on-demand. More applications, including supply chain collaboration inside and outside the organization, and ties to recently-acquired Ariba<\/a>, will be a focus in 2013.<\/p>\n

\"image27[4]\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Right Social Tools For The Right Situations<\/h3>\n

So far, most social software has either been \u201cFacebook for the enterprise,\u201d sitting separately from where work is getting done, or \u201csocial feeds\u201d inside applications. But the universal answer to every business problem is not always an \u201cinch-deep mile-wide\u201d collaboration tool such as a feed, forum, blog, or wiki.<\/p>\n

If a business person has a question that they want to broadcast it to lots of people, these social networking tools provide an excellent solution \u2013 for example, if I\u2019m in marketing, and I\u2019m looking for information about a reference customer. But what happens when I receive dozens of replies? I then need to find the two or three people have the best answer, and then I would like to collaborate with them and work to create a document or gather data, make a decision, and rank different possibilities.<\/p>\n

These types of collaboration require different \u201ccollaborative constructs\u201d that are more adapted to narrower, more work-focused tasks. SAP Jam proposes all the best-of-breed social networking tools that organizations have come to expect from enterprise social software, but also adds a series of more structured collaborative tools, such as dynamic agendas and pro\/con tables:<\/p>\n

\"image24[3]\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In addition, people can share and annotate documents without having to leave the application or collaboration home screen, including tight integration with Microsoft SharePoint. And there are powerful video tools that help social learning. Anybody can easily capture video, using an iPhone, a webcam, or screen recording, and share it with others in the organization. This is perfect for informal learning situations.<\/p>\n

These different tools are then embedded into applications, to provide collaboration along more traditional work processes. This makes it much easier to establish the value of collaboration \u2013 instead of talking generically about the \u2018value of being a social enterprise\u2019, a VP of sales can see how collaboration can help speed up the lifecycle of onboarding a new sales representative.\u00a0 Social becomes \u201cjust\u201d one of an arsenal of tools making sales more effective.<\/p>\n

\"image33[4]\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Finance \u2013 perhaps surprisingly \u2013 is another area where there are very strong use cases for integrated collaboration. One example is invoice exception handling. Every day in organizations around the world there are invoices that \u201clook strange\u201d \u2013 maybe there are data points missing or the organization doesn\u2019t know why the invoice has been received. Finance needs to be able to quickly and easily bring people together to solve the mystery, in an auditable environment. In addition, there are many financial processes such as budgeting that are inherently cross-functional, requiring collaboration with many people across production,\u00a0 inventory, sales, etc . Using collaborative tools for tasks like this isn\u2019t \u201csocial enterprise\u201d as much as just \u201cbetter finance\u201d.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a demonstration of SAP Jam embedded into the SAP Financials OnDemand application:<\/p>\n