Enterprise social is less about "social" and more about collaborative problem solving

The Social Lair team had a fairly busy two days at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. A lot of work went into the preparation for the conference. It also required a lot of energy to keep up with the visitors in our booth and discuss our approach and the solution stack with them. So I want to first thank our team that made it successful.

I have been preaching the "un-socialness" of enterprise social software for some time now and the message was validated by the majority of people that I met at the conference. When you think about Enterprise Social  Software, you think about socializing the way people do on Facebook, only this time it is inside an organization. People tend to forget a key difference between enterprise social and consumer social. Facebook or Farmville do not care how you spend your time on their platform/app as long as you spend enough of it and help pull your friends in the conversations so that their reach continues to expand. In the enterprise world, we primarily care about "quality" of conversations not really its volume.

At Social Lair, we are building a platform that enables organizations to "collaborate" not just "socialize". We have created a platform that facilitates solving business problems and making better decisions by leveraging the wisdom of crowds; unlike many other players in this area that just pay lip service, we really do it. Our analytics and gamification engine helps significantly reduce the cost of social transactions. The conversational constructs embedded in user's activity stream provide quantitative aggregation that can be used for predictions, preference ranking, resource allocation, etc.

Overall we had a very positive reaction to our overall message. A lot of people were complaining about how noisy some of the other platform are and the challenges encountered in making them sticky. Most people liked the term "Collective Business Intelligence" platform. We found some like-minded partners that will soon join our ecosystem.

Enterprise social tools must help people collaborate not just communicate

I recently came across a post by New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman titled "Facebook no match for old-style politics". The story begins with an incident related to Egyptian elections. The election choice is between Mohamed Morsai, the candidate of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and Ahmed Shafik, a retired general who also served as Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister. The article talks about how the inner workings of the society hasn't really changed even though information sharing via Twitter and Facebook may have been responsible for the democratic revolution. He goes on to mention a comment from an egyptian friend "Facebook really helped people to communicate, but not collaborate". That's exactly how I feel about may of today's enterprise Social platforms.

We have been dealing with the information explosion problem for over a decade and many of today's enterprise social tools are making it worse by throwing even more information in users' activity stream. I have talked to many enterprise users and they have invariably complained about how noisy these systems become and how he/she has stopped using it.

At Social Lair, we have a fundamentally different outlook towards building an enterprise social platform. Socializing without purpose cannot give organizations the ROI they need from these systems. We certainly support information sharing, but we have created several conversational constructs that promote purposeful interactions. Our primary goal is to allow our users to get their work done faster, better, and cheaper by leveraging the energy of their co-workers, partners, and customers. For us, sharing is just the tip of the iceberg; we "socialize" many other business functions including innovation, forecasting, coordination, and strategy management.

Introducing Social Lair

In my last blog post, I described some of the lessons I have learned in creating and deploying social innovation communities. I have created a new platform that builds upon the lessons learned for our new company Social Lair (http://sociallair.com). In this blog post I want to outline the solution strategy adopted by Social Lair that really "puts social to work".

Getting work done is at the core of all our offerings. A good enterprise social platform will get the work done faster, better, and cheaper by  reaping the benefits of collective wisdom of crowds. We believe that every business process, from innovation and idea management to HR, Product Management, can benefit from becoming more open and democratic. In fact, the enterprise social software will become mission-critical only when we achieve this goal.

At the conceptual level, our solution can be viewed in terms of three main layers (depicted in the figure below):

• Blended Social Analytics - Analytics is the core foundation of our solution stack and consists of Information Network Analysis (reputations, connector rating, conversational levels), Natural Language Processing (purpose-based routing, expert identification), Quantitative Aggregation Models (prediction markets, rank aggregation), and Gamification (currency management). Analytics piece is instrumental in optimizing cost of social transactions and adding relevance to search and ranking.
• Purposeful Conversations – We model community interactions as a series of structured conversations focused on a business purpose (market forecasting, choice resolution, ideation, etc). Each conversation type has an unstructured component, a quantitative component, and an aggregation and analytics engine for providing actionable intelligence to the conversation sponsor.
• Community Archetypes – Based on our past experience, we have realized that different business contexts require different styles of community design. For example, Idea campaign communities would just not work effectively for daily collaboration.  At the same time, we did not want to create a system that is TOO flexible and requires greater knowledge and effort for set up and configuration. Our approach is to capture well-established collaboration patterns in the form of community archetype. Each archetype is defined in terms of the included conversation types, navigational scheme, terminology, and access control.

Our strategy in realizing this vision is to create minimalistic experience that reflects our approach and iterate on it based on the feedback received by our end users. We are already having some interesting conversations with end users in this space who are getting quite excited about the potential of our technology. I will off course keep you updated in the new venture as we continue our journey in this space.

Lessons learned in developing social innovation communities

About five years ago, I started building a social innovation platform that has now been successfully deployed by several Fortune 500 companies. These communities have yielded great results: new products, improved process efficiency, greater customer satisfaction; just to name a few. Those successes were also accompanied by realization that these communities are extremely hard to sustain. Ironically, the two most important factors were top leadership support and a passionate individual/team whose sole job was to run innovation (Sorry Gamification!). Moreover, this individual or the team needed to constantly care and feed the community to keep it going.
I have also been watching a slew of “enterprise social” software companies entering the market. We tried to use some of these products ourselves and came to the same realization I had five years ago: socializing without purpose isn’t going to stick; it ends up producing more noise driving away serious users.
As I digested this information and observations, I came up with a few things that have to be done differently to address the adoption malaise in the enterprise social arena:
Focus on “Collaboration” not “Socialization” – Business leaders, quite justifiably, frown upon employees using Facebook or Twitter at work. Simply bringing these technologies inside your organization will not be productive. Although there is a need to facilitate undirected, water cooler conversations, you have to put “business” before “social” to create “business social” solutions.
Create a “Funnel of Funnels” – The “Idea Funnel” model of user engagement is easy to understand and works for one or two campaign but ultimately requires enormous effort from the single sponsor to keep it going. The engagement platform needs to make it easy for a broader cross section of participants to create their own funnels. Campaign style communities democratize idea generation part, but fail to do the same to funnel creation.
Judicious Use of Gamification – Applying game design techniques to improve user engagement levels is tricky. Unlike game designers, enterprise community managers are interested, not in raw user activity, but in meaningful participation that produces results consistent with sponsor objectives. I have seen virtual currency awards leading to spamming behavior by users simply trying to earn that $10 gift card. Conversely, I have seen instances of self-motivated community members contribute great ideas without needing leaderboards or badges.
More Efficient Social Transactions – The ROI associated with enterprise social deployments comes from two sources: cost savings and revenues associated with business transactions, and efficiencies in establishing “social transactions”. The former is well understood and can be easily quantified, so I won’t go into that here. A social transaction is an interaction between two or more stakeholders associated with a business objective. An effective enterprise social platform would minimize the time and costs associated with social transactions, especially in case of weak or non-existent ties within transacting parties.

Now that's what you call "innovation"!

I don't usually engage in propagating oddball email chains but I couldn't resist publishing these images recently forwarded to me by a friend of mine. These are not so called "breakthrough" innovations, but clearly represent out of the box thinking and a value for the inventors :-)

Theft Deterrent Device

Wine Cooler

Kitchen Accessories

Hands Free Calling for California Drivers

Recycle, Reuse, Reduce

What's the similarity between crowdsourcing and IBM's DeepQA design strategies

I attended TieCon 2011 conference last week and got to hear a fascinating keynote given by Dr. David Ferrucci on IBM's DeepQA project. IBM's "Watson" recently beat human competitors in Jeopardy, a prospect much harder than beating a human at Chess since it involves reasoning over unstructured information. 

The lecture had its lighter moments including this incident narrated by Dr. Ferrucci that illustrates how social networking has become ingrained in the psyche of the younger generation. Apparently he asked a jeopardy question to a bunch of middle-schoolers as part of his presentation. The question under the category "Licoln Logs" was:

"Treasury Secy. Chase just submitted this to me for the third time - guess what pal this time I am accepting it." The answer off course is "resignation". 

Answer from the seventh grader?  

"A friend Request".

Other than such incidents and some of the hilarious answers given by Watson in early stages of development, there were a couple of slides that really caught my attention. The first one was about what drove the DeepQA team to success in this challenging task. Three simple things:

1. Irresistible Vision - A vision of the future you know in your gut must happen.
2. A bit of wisdom - It can be now.
3. A lot of mettle - It will be us.

The second interesting part of the presentation was the core set of strategies adopted in this work:

• Rejection of complex hard coded models - The team did not rely on hand-coded ontologies representing formal models about the world. They found them to be too narrow, slow, and really not up to the challenge.
• Intelligence from many shallow methods - The decision of whether to answer a question and what that answer would be was derived by combining multiple reasoning methods many of them shallow.
• Massive parallelism - Original version of Watson would take a couple of hours to come up with a decision and it needed to be within 3 seconds. Answer: parallel explorations of the answer space

If you think about these strategies, you will realize that these are pretty much the reasons for solving problems through social input a.k.a crowd-sourcing. Experts (hard coded knowledge representations) must realize they don't know everything. Amalgamation of many view points spanning the entire information space produces better results (provided certain conditions are met) that individual data points. Turning loose thousands of minds on a problem gets it solved much quicker.

My three principles of new product development

Spigit recently released a Facebook application that exposes Spigit's social innovation management functionality on the platform. It is always thrilling when something you help create sees the light of the day. In this case it was particularly satisfying because we followed my three principles of new product development with a great degree of success (thanks to FacebookEngage product manager Nina Chai and Pratim Mukharjee, the lead developer on the project).

Simple but not Simpler
I have lead the evolution of the Spigit platform from an abstract concept to the leading social innovation platform used by over 100 organizations all over the world. Initially we had to take a leap of faith in creating the first version of the product. Combining idea management with social networking was a new concept for a lot of our prospective users. We certainly made a lot of untested assumptions to create that first version. We did strive, however, to minimize the number of assumptions and create something that was simple (with a minimal feature set) but not simpler, i.e. it provided unprecedented benefit to the end users. We have started Spigit's Facebook application development much the same way. The initial version exposes minimal functionality. It's a proposal to our customer base which they use, review, and evaluate.The rest of the course will be charted by combining customer feedback with our own intuition and understanding of the marketplace.

Native Experience
There are some products that are so revolutionary that they change existing interaction paradigms, processes, or even the way of thinking. Most others need to seamlessly fit into existing  lifestyles and usage conventions. They must blend with established usage patterns and feel completely native to the user. We had to be very careful about this blend for the facebook application. A large portion of Spigit's user base is in the enterprise space. Facebook users are significantly different in their expectations, attention spans, and motivation to participate. Spigit's Facebook application deliberately sports a non-enterprise, lightweight look. The primary motivation of Facebook users is keep in touch with their social circle. The Spigit apps plays into that by making the user aware of ideas posted by your friends and how many of them made into the top ranking list.The ideas are displayed very much in a wall-style format. When a user posts an idea, posting that on the wall or sending message can be done with minimal effort. In general, we have made every effort to introduce Spigit functionality in a way that is consistent with ethos of Facebook community.

The Wow Factor
A new product should have at least one or two features that make a user go "Wow that's useful!" when s/he uses the product. When I started using iPhone, I had that reaction when I realized that unlike my previous mobile windows-based phone, the screen goes dark when I put it to my ear but it comes alive when I hold it in front of me. With Spigit's facebook launch we did not have a problem introducing the Wow factor. We pulled in some of Spigit's key features deemed relevant to Facebook. We included idea theme clusters that allows administrators to get a sense of emerging trends and topics. Reputation scores identify key contributors in the community. Spigit's social analytics is available to the administrators via Spigit's regular user interface. Subsequent versions of the app will track user feedback and will build upon the initial feature set to make it even better.