Integration of Social Software and Content Management Systems: The Big Picture

Jive Software’s announcement last week of the Jive SharePoint Connector was met with a “so what” reaction by many people. They criticized Jive for not waiting to make the announcement until the SharePoint Connector is actually available later this quarter (even though pre-announcing product is now a fairly common practice in the industry.) Many also viewed this as a late effort by Jive to match existing SharePoint content connectivity found in competitor’s offerings, most notably those of NewsGator, Telligent, Tomoye, Atlassian, Socialtext, and Connectbeam.

Those critics missed the historical context of Jive’s announcement and, therefore, failed to understand its ramifications. Jive’s SharePoint integration announcement is very important because it:

• underscores the dominance of SharePoint in the marketplace, in terms of deployments as a central content store, forcing all competitors to acknowledge that fact and play nice (provide integration)
• reinforces the commonly-held opinion that SharePoint’s current social and collaboration tools are too difficult and expensive to deploy, causing organizations to layer third-party solution on top of existing SharePoint deployments
• is the first of several planned connections from Jive Social Business Software (SBS) to third-party content management systems, meaning that SBS users will eventually be able to find and interact with enterprise content without regard for where it is stored
• signals Jive’s desire to become the de facto user interface for all knowledge workers in organizations using SBS

The last point is the most important. Jive’s ambition is bigger than just out-selling other social software vendors. The company intends to compete with other enterprise software vendors, particularly with platform players (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP), to be the primary productivity system choice of large organizations. Jive wants to position SBS as the knowledge workers’ desktop, and their ability to integrate bi-directionally with third-party enterprise applications will be key to attaining that goal.

Jive’s corporate strategy was revealed in March, when they decreed a new category of enterprise software — Social Business Software. Last week’s announcement of an ECM connector strategy reaffirms that Jive will not be satisfied by merely increasing its Social Media or Enterprise 2.0 software market share. Instead, Jive will seek to dominate its own category that bleeds customers from other enterprise software market spaces.

Video Conferencing Uptake Is Really About Changing Role of Organizations

I was interviewed last week for an article on how companies are using collaboration technologies to reduce operating costs during the current economic downturn. The article, entitled Virtual Conference Victory for Cisco Systems, was published in the Technology section of the Financial Times today.

When I spoke with the author, Joseph Menn, I tried to make it clear that using Web-based collaboration technologies like video conferencing to avoid travel costs was simply a baseline management activity. The most effective organizations use these technologies in bad and good times to not only minimize operating costs, but also to maximize productivity. After reading the FT article today, it was clear to me that Joe had indeed understood my point.

There is a larger story here though. The quote from me that was actually published,

“There’s a real, fundamental change going on in the way we work, both as companies and as individuals.”

is a c. 5 second sound-bite of a much longer conversation, in which Joe and I discussed how enterprise collaboration and social software are changing the way organizations are structured and how work gets done. Most of that didn’t make it into the article, but that’s OK. We can discuss it here.

Increasingly, organizations exist to provide specific assets and services to employees, including:

• a clearly defined and shared business mission and strategy
• a favorably recognized brand
• marketing and sales
• project management
• bookkeeping and accounting
• legal services
• organizational knowledge networks and repositories

Individual employees can provide pretty much everything else they need to work efficiently and effectively themselves.

The role that corporate IT departments play has evolved markedly over the last decade. Ten years ago, IT departments laid infrastructure, built and deployed applications, and managed both as their primary function. The focus was not on the end user. Today, the IT function is viewed as providing assets and support services that enable workers to do their jobs in a productive manner. A huge and important change in perspective has occurred.

I believe we are nearing the time when entire organizations will make that same shift of perspective. Hierarchical command and control structures already have (mostly) given way to matrixed organizations. The next step in organizational evolution will be the formation of networks of individuals who work together to solve a specific business challenge, and then disband. The organization will support their endeavors by providing the assets and services listed above. Organizations will endure only as long as they can continue to form networks of knowledge workers and supply the assets and services those workers need.

How do I know this? I already work for such an organization!

A New Proxy for ROI in Collaboration and KM?

I had an interesting conversation this morning with a leader of internal collaboration and knowledge management (KM) services inside one of the large audit/consulting firms.  We were discussing alternatives to demonstrating hard, currency-based ROI in KM and collaboration efforts.  He was experimenting with alternative valuation methods because calculating credible ROI is always extremely difficult, if not completely impossible, in the “prove it conclusively” culture of an audit firm.

His organization is experimenting with ways to assign value to KM and collaboration projects by proxy.  My conversation partner described one such proxy as follows (in my words, not a quotation of his):

What if the KM and collaboration functions could be outsourced?  How much would it cost our firm to have someone else manage those activities?

The idea is that by calculating a hypothetical, but provable, cost for how much a third party would charge to manage your organization’s KM and collaboration infrastructure, applications, and activities, you can determine a proxy, expressed as currency, for how valuable those assets are to your company.  Hosting charges for infrastructure and applications can easily be determined by floating an RFP for those services to potential providers.  Much of the cost of KM and collaboration management activities are bundled in the salaries of staff assigned to lead and support those functions.  So, yes, it is possible to come up with a hypothetical cost to outsource these support processes.

But is it desirable?  I don’t think so.

First, discussing a hypothetical outsourcing of collaboration and KM functions sends the wrong message to the organization.  It says that these things are not very important to success; they are commodities that provide relatively little value, no matter in what terms that value is expressed.  It also ignores that these functions are embedded in an organization’s culture, which is impossible to value definitively, but undeniably important to the long-term success of the company.

Additionally there are a couple of mathematical problems with the approach.  The proxy doesn’t include the cost of contributing and reusing knowledge, or of collaborating, accrued by each and every employee of the firm; only the avoided costs of staff managing those functions is recognized.  Even worse, potential bottom-line benefits (or penalties) resulting from conducting effective (or ineffective) KM and collaboration activities are not recognized.  This is the return, whereas the proxy described above only determines the (avoided) investment, and only partially does that.

So, as I see it, this proposed valuation method sends a death-wish message to the organization, understates actual incurred costs, and fails to recognize performance benefits (or penalties) to the organization.  Is that right?  Have I missed anything else?

To be fair to the individual who shared this approach with me, he’s no dummy.  In fact he has great experience and understands KM, collaboration, and ROI better than most practitioners.  I’m sure he realizes all  of the limitations that I’ve stated.  What is interesting to me is that we’ve reached a point in the ROI debate where someone of his stature  would be suggesting such an approach to proxy valuation for KM and collaboration in the first place.

Please let me know how you feel about the use of a hypothetical outsourcing cost as a proxy for value added to a company by it’s KM and collaboration programs.