Facebook AND Google. Not Facebook v/s Google!

Google and Facebook are arguably two of the world’s most influential web companies. Per Alexia’s traffic ranking, Google.com comes first followed by Facebook. Both companies also seem to have similar manifestoes and vision. Per Facebook’, it empowers people to share and make the world a more open and connected place. On the other hand, Google’s founders have always maintained that Google’s philosophy was to make the world’s information more accessible and better organized so that users could get exactly what they searched for. Unfortunately, both these web giants don’t seem to be playing well to each other and for whatever it’s worth, millions of consumers like you and I lose out the most. I mean if Facebook and Google were really true to both their philosophies, wouldn’t they have found a way to co-operate with each other to make the search for and the access to information more effective and better?

Google and Facebook weren’t always at war with one another. Most company insiders claim that Google’s launch of OpenSocial and getting other social networks committed to it in 2007 was the trigger point. Facebook also spurned an investment offer from Google also in 2007 about a week before the OpenSocial announcement and went ahead with a Microsoft investment in it for USD 240 million (technically speaking Microsoft may have actually outbid Google). And then of course everything went downhill from there on. 

It’s unfortunate because I see so many areas where Facebook and Google could have co-operated better to the benefit of its consumers. For one, Facebook’s integration into the Android platform is much below par if compared with its integration into the Apple iPhone platform. In fact, if you went back 3 years, Facebook had decided on not dedicating even a single resource for working on an application for the Android platform despite Google offering to loan a programmer to Facebook for this very purpose.  Another area where I would have loved to see
more collaboration is on my ability to see, track and interact with my Gmail contacts on Facebook and vice-versa without requiring the export of contacts from one platform to another. That way I could get to leverage the power of both platforms while using only of them. And that’s true for most of Google’s other platforms such as Youtube, Picassa and more importantly Google documents. Also I would have liked for Google maps integration with Facebook places. Upon posting a location update on Facebook, I would like for it to tell me what places my friends have found interesting in this location before and use Google maps to help me navigate to these places of possible interest. 

There’s a lot that’s also possible between these two players as far as social search is concerned. Google Plus already incorporates search results from my friend’s blogs. If we could also incorporate results from my friend’s Facebook content onto here then I could actually find out more information that may be actually relevant to me. Today about 150 million people visit a Facebook page from a Google search result. But the search on and indexing of Facebook pages is restricted to only a small set of pages. 

In summary, I feel that this isn’t a winner takes all game like its being made out to be. Facebook is great at social and Google is great at search. If we can see some more collaboration between the two, we would be substantially increasing the value of the pie for everyone and the end consumers like you and I would be greatest winners.

Social CRM - Analyst Studies

This is the first in a 2-part series on social CRM. These discourses (if I may dare to call them that) mirror the presentations I have been making at my workplace on this topic. In this part, I will focus on defining it, elaborating its importance, how it fits into an organization’s overall CRM roadmap strategy, its related industry trends and the key issues & challenges faced during social CRM adoption. In part 2, I will attempt to do a product and talk in detail on various use cases that have been successfully implemented by the industry in general in this area.

Social CRM has become such a popular buzzword today and in a way its popularity has lead to an overall misunderstanding and misuse of the concept. Various definitions of the concept exist. Forrester and Gartner have simply expanded the traditional definition of CRM (business processes supporting sales, marketing and customer service) to include the concepts of collaboration and communities to come up with their definitions on the social CRM. The one that is most popular and most commonly referred to today is the one by Paul Greenberg: social CRM is the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.

This graphic by the Chess Media Group nicely represents the circle of social CRM evolution (though it has more detail on the listening aspect than on targeting and analysis aspects).

The importance of social CRM is often highlighted using the following: improved customer service, new market segment exploration, improved communication efficiency, improved customer targeting, decreased sales & service cost and increased R&D and innovation. Various statistics have been citied to draw attention to this concept:

1. 30% of Google search results on the world's top 20 brands provide links to Social Media on the 1st page*
2. The internet accounts for only 10% of total sales, but Social Networks influence > 40% of all offline sales*
3. 85% of the students currently enrolled in U.S. colleges and universities have profile pages on Facebook*
4. By 2012, spending on social software to help sales, marketing and customer service processes will exceed $1 billion worldwide**

References: *HBS Social Media Report, Edelman Customer Index Report
                      **Gartner - Social CRM: The Next Generation of Customer Innovation. March 30-April 1, 2011

Strengthening relationships with customers, enhancing brand awareness and establishing interactive relationships with customers were given as the top 3 reasons by CxOs for investing in social media in Gartner survey conducted this year.

If one were to study the use of social CRM within the larger CRM operating framework, then there has been various innovation use cases put to good use. Within marketing, Ford Fiesta has my top vote (see http://media.ford.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=30158) and the MyStarbucks idea finishes as a close second (http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/). Drugstore.com has won several awards for its use of social media towards delivering customer service (http://www.rightnow.com/blog/client-success/taking-home-the-gold). As a social CRM, e-commerce social shopping application Groupon is an easy winner and doesn’t even need explaining. There are many other examples of companies having deployed social media successfully. A bigger list is here, courtesy a Gartner study (Google them to find out more):

Social CRM is not without its list of challenges. Most organizations do not have a social CRM strategy or definition in place and nor have they defined the metrics about current social CRM capabilities that would service as a baseline for improvement. Secondly, there is inherent difficulty in establishing a social CRM strategy in the face of fierce hype from industry magazines and software and service vendors. Expectations for social CRM today clearly exceed the measurable benefits. In Gartner’s technology hype cycle report last year (for sales force automation), social CRM is expected at least 5-10 years away from mainstream adoption and per their study is in a phase of inflated expectations. Thirdly, poor organizational readiness for self-service has emerged as the biggest stumbling block in the increasing drive toward a more cost-effective self-service offering. While there are those who are ready to use social media as a business strategy, they have simply not changed enough themselves to be actually in a position to best use it. Fourthly, most organizations have 3 or more social CRM initiatives running in parallel, often only loosely coordinated. There is no dominant trend as to which department within an enterprise will eventually run a social CRM program. Today that department is definitely for sure not the IT department. There are other technological limitations as well. For one, language complexity and content sources can be an obstacle. Social conversations are often unstructured and include text, images, videos, emails, blogs, tweets and other types of data types that are not part of a database. Separating noise from an authentic social signal, a critical aspect to helping a company better understand their clients is also a challenge today and this can get past the listening tools as well. Seamlessness is yet another issue. Social consumers channel hop during conversations, and companies need to be able to efficiently and effectively follow their conversation and pick up where they left off. Deep integration with the web and with contact center experiences is required to pull this off.

Despite all the challenges and issues around it, social CRM is here to stay. Large investments are unneeded to begin social CRM unlike its enterprise CRM counterpart; social CRM applications are installed and used by organizations of all sizes, including companies with only five employees, though social CRM by itself can’t be a company’s entire CRM strategy. A huge adoption has already taken place these industries: high tech, media, consumer goods and retail. This is particularly true for the NA geography. The next wave is in the telecommunications, education, banking, insurance, pharmaceuticals and automotive industries.

More on the products and use cases in the next fortnight's blog.

An Introduction to Business Transformation

Management and technology’s tools and techniques are only a means to achieve a higher goal of business success and competitive positioning. These tools keep changing over time, but the end results must be achieved successfully all the times. Business Transformation fits exactly there. It’s a management sponsored (or at least a closely-backed by management) activity to do with aligning of an organization’s programs relating to people, process and technology more directly with its business strategy and vision. This initiative moves towards an outcome-based end-state such as a dramatic improvement in customer services or a drastic increase in company profits.

The focus in Business Transformation is on discovering new ways to perform business innovatively and not on finding ways to refining or automating existing business processes.  Therefore this is a more radical re-thinking initiative than a mere business improvising exercise.  Business Transformation assessments therefore start with answering the most fundamental questions:  “Is our mission relevant in today’s world? Are business benefits of our programs aligned with that of the company’s strategy and vision?”

Business Transformation as earlier mentioned has 3 aspects to it: people, processes and technology. Leavitt's famous diamond actually went to refine this and a modified version of it actually goes on to add a 4th aspect which is strategy. The key-takeaway to this framework is that every element in each of these aspects affects every other. Business strategy is the primary driver in this framework and the other 3 aspects are governed by this 4th aspect’s encompassing role. Processes represent the mechanics of the organization, its structure and the governing systems.  The people dimension deals with elements such as organizational culture, education, training, motivation and reward systems. The third aspect, technology is to do with the use of computer systems and other forms of communication technology in the business.

The use of information technology is a major contributing factor towards achieving Business Transformation objectives. It helps enable all the other aspects of a Business Transformation initiative. In fact, several disruptive technologies are actually changing the way work is being performed. Social media, cloud computing and Web 2.0 are today’s examples and ERP systems and wireless communication were major disruptive forces of yester years.

The two biggest hurdles to executing a Business Transformation program effectively are:
1. Lack of/No Change Management: Poor setting and handling of expectations. No support from the senior management for such exercises.
2. Executing it as one-off project: No strategy alignment or long-term perspective planning and execution. No change in management thinking.

Business Transformation was an extremely popular initiative around the mid-nineties. The majority of Fortune 500 companies were then either doing a Business Transformation program or in the process of initiating one. However, it become apparent very soon that the programs executed were much less radical in nature than what was originally proposed for in the framework and that more often than not, Business Transformation became a mere way of justifying downsizing and increase managerial control. The interest in Business Transformation began to wane then and then started giving way to Business Process Management (BPM), an initiative more to do with process optimization.

Business Transformation is still a huge market today, somewhat fragmented with multiple players and growing at a fast pace. Accenture leads the pack in terms of market share and the other consulting biggies have a considerable large footprint in this space. India’s large services players are trying very hard to get into this space (as well as into products and platforms) given that shrinking margins and rising costs is killing the cost arbitrage advantages that they had. They now need to understand how to get into value arbitrage model.

Agile Debates: On Distributed Development, Talent And Metrics & Measurements

I attended the 2011 NCR Agile conference a few weeks ago. This was the second such Agile conference I was attending within an year's time and what brought me back weren't the speakers or the interactive sessions alone. It was largely the debate & discussions on different ways of getting software done right and the networking sessions where you could actually discuss potential challenges & issues on your software development techniques with others in the practicing community.

There was one such discussion I got into with one of the speakers at the conference that was to do with distributed software development. In my 8 years at Tata Consultancy Services, I had mostly worked on a distributed offshore/onsite or a multi-shore model but always using the traditional waterfall method. In my 2 years at a product startup, we used agile and always worked out of the same floor and so we never had to face the challenges of distributed agile or scrum. However, from my TCS days, I recalled that the biggest challenges we had were to do with communicating enough, communicating correctly and ensuring enough visibility for all teams across locations. And we used different techniques to make this work. For starters, we tried to enforce an onsite/offshore rotation policy so that everyone on the team is acquainted with one another as much as possible. We also tried ensuring that all victories even the small ones are celebrated and that any sincere effort never went unnoticed. However, most importantly, what really made distributed software development successful were our onsite & offshore coordinators. These 2 people could make or break the projects and in no uncertain terms were their jobs the 8-hour-a-day type. These were almost cross-functional specialists in a sense and their skill-sets spanned across ensuring operational excellence and managing client relationships and team members. I found the ones who were more good with people to be much more successful than the ones who were simple more good technically. The gentlemen I were discussing this with didn't take it too kindly. For one they were both these coordinators on a not-so-successful distributed scrum project and they were both technical leads on the project. However, more importantly, they didn't think that specialists such as people managers or project coordinators had any place on teams practicing Agile software development where the emphasis was on everyone doing everything.

I could actually relate this to 2 other speakers at the conference where while one mentioned that one of the dangers of agile was that everyone seemed to be focusing on generalists and trivializing the importance of specialists and the other mentioned that agile is simply another process of getting software done and that the process is irrelevant given that it was the outcome that eventually mattered.

The other debate I got into was to do with if developers in product companies were better at their jobs than those at service companies. This is largely true at least from what I have observed. However, the real question  to ask is if product companies are as effective as service companies. I know a zillion more failed product companies than I do service companies. If we are really smarter than our counterparts in service companies, then we should be doing much better than them at making profits. I know that this could be an apple-to-oranges comparison and that the balance sheet isn't everything but the cash reserve our top 5 India-based service companies have could put some of the most famous global product companies to shame.

There was yet another interesting discussion on metrics and measure of performance of projects doing agile. For one, collecting even simple metrics takes effort and given that the real value is in the delivery of software, should one be spending time on data collection at all? I believe that it is worth the time and that it is also best kept simple and easy to measure. They have many advantages: they help us know where we are, on what we can make further continuous improvements and help promote this transition.

This has been a long post. At the end of it all, I just want to say that continuous improvement is at the core of all this and that the process isn't everything. The process is just an enabler and we should just keep it that way. From that perspective perhaps the philosophies across most software development methodologies aren't that different after all. Its just that some have more boxes and arrows on their diagrams than the others.

On Alliances

The traditional definition of an alliance has been the following: the pooling of resources and effort across multiple entities with the objective to achieve a competitive advantage in the marketplace. However, the ability of an alliance goes much beyond that. It is to do more with the the creation and the integration of new competencies out of the already existing stocks of prior competencies held by the organizations in question.

You could forge an alliance for a variety of reasons such as for marketing, R&D, technology. design and more popularly to create distribution channels. If one looks purely at brands and marketing, forging alliances have become critical because of changing trends. There are technological changes taking place at a rapid place with increasing globalization and constantly evolving consumer needs. In today's era of globalization, partnership with local firms to distribute and sell products under the local brand name achieves gaining a foothold in the market. In the case of evolving consumer needs, an important part of marketing then becomes identifying new consumer trends and the creation of products. Partnering therefore can not only reduce time to market but also make up for the lack of innovation focus within the company.

The most commonly cited example on alliances in classroom and various case studies is that between Microsoft, Intel IBM and Apple. When the PC industry began, competition existed between Apple and the IBM-Microsoft standard. IBM created and set out an open architecture standard that allowed any other computer manufacturer to build a clone of the IBM 'PC' itself and other software manufactures to deploy software to the IBM platform. This marginalized the Macintosh platform completely and the IBM PC became the de-facto standard. However, IBM and Microsoft fell into a dispute on operating system adoption where IBM was more interested in pushing OS/2 while Microsoft wanted to launch Windows. Microsoft then formed an alliance with Intel and launched Windows. Other PC manufacturers adopted this making Wintel the dominant standard thereby marginalizing IBM completely. IBM's open standard actually then worked against IBM's favor. IBM then went into an agreement with Apple to develop its new line of chip architectural design. Eventually, Apple realized that IBM support for it wasn't as good as they would have like it to be and adopted an Intel standard. The eventual implications of this are actually yet to be seen. It may be that the Mactel standards will be more aggressively pushed out by Intel in an attempt to marginalize the Wintel standard!

Alliances are about increasing the size of the pie rather than increasing one's share in the existing pie itself but they are not without challenges. What gets in the way more often than usual in establishing successful partnerships is to do with overcoming the 'proprietary mindset'. Partnerships require one to be willing to give something in order to get something and that requires a more 'collaborative mindset' than anything else. Also over 50% of all alliances have been failures. However, the average Fortune 100 company has over 60 alliances and given that these are Fortune 500 companies that we speak of, they must be doing something right.