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(originally published in www.nojivetalkin.com)

If you’re a technology provider in the enterprise 2.0 market, it’s not enough to talk the talk

I’ve been in the software business for more than two decades.  I have started companies.  Sold companies.  Took one public, and advised many more.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned is that if you want to survive in this business, you must evolve.  And that’s a principle that applies not only to my company — BroadVision, now entering its 18^th year – but to anyone who wants to compete in our market.  Because the business of enterprise computing has truly changed.   It’s no time for half measures.

Early today, we announced a new iteration of BroadVision Clearvale, our cloud-based enterprise collaboration platform that we first introduced in May.  In the short time that has passed since that launch, we have learned a lot.  We learned what our customers – now in the thousands – see is unique in our platform.  We have learned about some of the amazing things companies can do because of those unique differences (our latest offering, Clearvale PaasPort, is just one example).   But most of all we learned that if we are going to continue to compete in this market, we are going to need to remain true to the fundamental tenets of social business, and not fall to the temptation of reverting to the ideas, business models, and words that controlled in the age of enterprise software.

I know about these temptations.  I come from that age, and know just how easy it would be to package social business into an old enterprise software model.   I call the temptation to fool ourselves — and to fool our customers — “jive talkin’.”  Not just because we believe that one of our chief competitors has been talking that way; others have been talking that way, as well.  Mostly, we call it jive talkin’ to see if we can start a conversation of a different character.  A conversation about what social business really ought to be, starting with the most basic requirements.

(1) Social business needs to live in the cloud … natively. “Social business software” is an oxymoron.   If it’s truly social – enabling you to connect with anyone, anywhere, on any device – it needs to live in the cloud.

(2) Social business needs to be DIY. The business world has already learned this from the world of blogging, microblogging, and consumer social networks.  Starting an enterprise social network should be as simple as starting a simple blog.

(3) Social business needs to be priced according to the growth of the network. The old enterprise software licensing model will not work.  Nor will the simple SaaS model work.  Both are based on presumed usage.  Better to charge customers on a pay-per-use model — one what they use.  That more accurately reflects the realities of growing a social network.

(4) The social business platform can be the system of engagement for any system of record. It would be wrong to think of your social business platform in isolation of other enterprise systems.  Ask whether your social business platform can easily integrate with these systems and add a social layer.

(5) Social business should not create silos.  Instead they should help you manage your entire business ecosystem. In the offline world, most businesses operate in complex ecosystems of discrete networks of employees, partners, and customers.   Ask whether your social business platform enables you to stitch those networks together and manage them for even greater effectiveness and efficiency.

(6) Social business networks should be able to connect with other networks. Not only are businesses at risk of creating silos within their own ecosystems.  They are at risk of developing networks that are not discoverable by other companies. The solution is to invest in a world that is open, discoverable, and navigable.

(7) Social business networks should provide developers with an open, holistic platform to integrate any number of useful tools. The way we see it, the social network is the new UI, and the ever-expanding world of communication and collaboration tools have a home on the network.

We can’t pretend to have perfected an approach to each of these tenets.  Nor can say that this is a final list.  But let us know what you think, and we promise we will continue the conversation, and no jive talkin’.

We kicked off our inaugural Clearvale SecondFloor (CSF) Seminar Series last week, featuring Charlene Li and her new book "Open Leadership" (see Giovanni's blog for some addtional insight).  It was truly refreshing to be chatting with someone as insightful about ESN as Charlene.

I'd like to thank those who attended (over 120 of you!) and provide the transcript below (inlcuding both my "Jay Leno" monologue and Q&A) for those who missed it.  The event video will soon be posted on the CSF network -- please register to become a member there.

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Q & A WITH CHARLENE LI

Pehong Chen
August 18, 2010

A little over a year ago, on June 10, 2009, the English language reached an important milestone and incorporated its 1,000,000^th word — “Web 2.0”, which, of course, implies both Consumer 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

To say that there has been an explosion in Consumer 2.0 would be an understatement.  Take, for example, Sina’s own microblog, the Chinese version of Twitter.  Launched less than 12 months ago, it’s already exceeded 20 million registered users.  But the more impressive thing is its growth — adding more than 200,000 new users per day.  At that rate, it would double itself every 100 days.

Both California’s gubernatorial candidates — Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman — are hoping that Facebook will soon file its IPO AFTER the November Election, so that the State’s financial crisis can be solved by its employee stock option exercises in one fell swoop, much like Google’s IPO did for the State back in 2004.

Talking about Facebook, it is blocked in China, not because of the country’s strict content censorship or national security concerns, as is commonly believed, but because, in my opinion at least, that even without any meaningful participation from China, it’s already exceeded 500 million registered users last month.  Can you imagine had it had Chinese participation, it would have surpassed the 1.3 billion magic number and become the world’s most populous nation almost overnight — and that, obviously, would not bode very well for the Chinese psychic or its national pride.   And if that were to happen, President Hu Jintao would have to invite Mark Zuckerberg to become a Politbureau Standing Committee member of the CCP.

Our kids now exchange Facebook contacts — no more email addresses — because to them, email is too one-dimensional, too 1.0; it’s passé, old school, and not very cool.  The entire freshman class at Stanford, according to Sociology Professor BJ Fogg, arrived last year already connected on Facebook.  Most classes now use Facebook in more than one way — students are effectively learning as much from each other as they do from teachers.

If you don’t recognize that all this new Consumer 2.0 stuff is causing a sea change in every aspect of our lives, you’ve been living in a cave somewhere.

Of course, our focus for the Clearvale SecondFloor (CSF) Seminar Series is Enterprise 2.0.  I don’t know about you.  But I find it ironic that as professional workers we seem to be more connected with our high school classmates over Facebook, with whom we now share very little in common, than we do with our own colleagues and customers, who, after all, are the people helping us getting our work done and, ultimately, our bills paid.  I recently heard a frustrated F500 CHO (Chief HR Officer) complaining that she had to go to LinkedIn to find out her own employees’ competences and what they’re thinking about, as opposed to via a more private and secure internal social network.

Many of us believe a social platform can and should be adopted by the enterprise, which can stimulate the same profound sea change in every aspect of our business in a world that’s gone flat and virtual, requiring us to be more flexible, agile, and innovative in order to compete and succeed.  Enterprise 1.0 is one-to-many — it’s a linear function of N.  Enterprise 2.0, in contrast, is many-to-many —hence a geometric function of N².  Clearly, N² is much more powerful than N.

Much like “stock option” is for our people to have an ownership stake in the company, Enterprise 2.0 is about a new “speak option”, empowering all our constituencies (management, employees, partners, customers, even the public) to have a voice, so as to fully participate and collaborate with each other to facilitate better decision making, faster problem solving, etc.

In the final analysis, the critical success factor here boils down to a corporate culture of openness, as it’s masterfully explained in Charlene’s new book — “Open Leadership”.  So it is with tremendous pleasure that we kickoff today’s CSF inaugural event with a “fireside chat” with the inspiring author herself.

Let us welcome our guest today.  Charlene, could you come to the podium, please.

1. Before we get started – “Charlene Li.”   Tell us a bit about yourself and your Chinese American background, especially since we’ve got a big online audience for this program in China who’d be very interested in that.
2. Many of our online audiences viewing this video are overseas where enterprise social networking (ESN) or so-called “enterprise 2.0” remains a very unfamiliar concept.   Could you first help us define what it means for social media in general and enterprise social networking in particular?
3. For years, you worked as a senior analyst at Forrester.  How did you become an analyst and when and how you turned your interest to social media?   What was enterprise social networking like when you first started studying the phenomenon?  How far have we come?
4. In your new book, you identify the inevitable loss of control as perhaps the biggest issues that executives are facing today.  Why is that?  Is that the biggest fear that executives have about opening up and going “social”, whether internally or externally?
5. I found one of the more interesting passages of your book is where you run the reader through an “openness audit,” and you then observe, “now that you know how open you are, let’s look at how open you need to be.”  What do you mean by that?
6. In fact, being open doesn’t mean you’re inviting anarchy.  So you boarded an aircraft carrier in action — the USS Nimitz — that must have been quite an experience!  As you mentioned in your book, the US Navy encourages very open communication amongst the rank and file, but when it comes to running the ship, they maintain supreme order and discipline.  Do you see that as a model for social networking would work for enterprises?  Please tell us more.
7. It’s a little-known truism in the business world that social media is not at least as much about the rules, as it is about the tools (the technology).  And if there is any one challenge for businesses trying out social media, it’s “adoption” – designing and nurturing the social media program so that it works.  Let’s spend a few minutes looking at the rules.  One thing you ask your readers to do is to establish “covenants” with their various constituencies.  Can you remind us why you use the word “covenant” and not “contract,” and can you give us some real-world examples of how such covenants have helped businesses?
8. Another really interesting section of your book looks at how smart organizations design their social media programs by first analyzing workflows.  You have this great chart illustrating how the US Air Force handles blog comments.   In your opinion, how well are businesses designing around workflows, and do you see any innovation here.  In other words, how does the 2.0 type of semi-structured or unstructured processes mash with the much more procedural and structured 1.0 workflow?
9. Until recently, if you uttered the phrase “social media” to a CEO, he or she would have thought you are talking about external use cases that leverage consumer social media such Facebook or LinkedIn.  How much are businesses today embracing the internal use of social media, and what exactly are they doing?
10. In addition to a Social Intranet, there is the Social Extranet/Internet, or Social CRM in short — applying a social platform to customer engagement and self-service.   You mentioned a number of examples in your book in this area as well, such as someone’s painful experience with United Airlines.  Could you elaborate a bit more why it’s important for companies to be more proactive in social CRM?
11. Let’s talk briefly about the “M” word – measurement.  There’s a great quote in your book, attributed to John Hayes, the CMO of American Express.  He says, “We tend to overvalue the things we can measure, and undervalue the things we cannot.”  That is SO true.  Still, there is no way for an ambitious social media program to get sold within an enterprise WITHOUT a fair notion of how success will be measured.  What are some of the best practices here?
12. Perhaps the most inspiring part of your book – at least for me – was the final chapter, where you look at specific leaders – real people in high places – that shook of the shackles of control, and helped guide their organizations through massive transformations.  We’re talking about organizations like Best Buy, Cisco, P&G, the State Bank of India, and the US Department of State.   Can you pick on of these and tell us what was so special about what they did, and how social media helped them do it?
13. Many enterprises worldwide are now intrigued by 2.0 and ESN, partly due to an unbelievable consumer phenomenon called Facebook.  CEOs are all wondering: what does this all means to me as a business.  As a summary for our program today, what’s your advice for them if they are still not sure whether adopting a more open management style by empowering all their constituents to engage and collaborate via social networking is a good idea?

Thank you so much, Charlene.  I learned so much from you today, gaining a lot more insight beyond what I’ve read from the book.

I believe the beauty of open leadership is that when there is a shared vision with open communication, everybody can lead in an incremental way, contributing to an extremely compelling N² effect.  That would make the job of the Board of Directors or the CEO very easy.  Like the famous Chinese philosopher Laozi’s said “A leader is best when people barely even know he exists…  When the work is done and all goals achieved, people would simply say ‘it’s so natural — that’s the way it’s supposed to be!’”

How about another round of applause for Charlene?

Now let’s open up for your questions.

Just when we all thought that socialism has been swept away by capitalism in every respect — even its shadows long buried alongside the bodies of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Chairman Mao — recently reincarnated as Socialism 2.0, it has been mounting an impressive comeback with a vengeance, in cyberspace

A whole host of consumer social media (CSM) have become the hottest Web destinations in the past few years.  Facebook now boasts nearly 500 million registered users — propelling it to become the 3^rd most populous “nation” in the world, next to China and India.  As we watch our kids exchanging their Facebook contacts with each other, as opposed to our “old school” email addresses that my generation has grown accustomed to do, plus the non-stop daily bombardment of various CSM invites — be it Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn — we begin to appreciate CSM’s compelling “long tail” effect and the true power of the “networked economy”.

If you are a C-level executive in a company of any size and do not recognize that a new revolution called Enterprise 2.0 is right around the corner, caused by the same Socialism 2.0 forces sweeping through cyberspace, you need to wake up and take some action immediately.  It is now 10 years after the original Internet bubble, and as all of us have grown older and wiser, this time we all feel, with a much higher degree of confidence, that it’s for real.

What does Socialism 2.0 mean for the enterprise?  What can a company expect when committed to enterprise social networks (ESN)?

I believe ESN will have as profound an impact on how business is done for this decade and beyond as desktop publishing did since the 1980s.  The reason is simple.  Having automated just about everything that can be “proceduralized” in business over the past 30+ years, what is left for the enterprise to address are issues all around the edges — interrupts, exceptions, corporate culture, employee morale, customer satisfaction, public perception, etc..  All such business processes, if there ever were one, share some common traits — random, ad-hoc, tacit, distributed, diverse, etc.  In short, these are age-old people collaboration issues.

People collaboration issues are N² issues, where N is the number of people populated across and beyond an enterprise.  In Enterprise 1.0, we either ignored these issues, pretending as if they never existed, or tried to solve it with either an O(K) (constant), or at best, an O(N) (order of N; i.e.,  “linear”) procedure.  This typically wound up being a complicated and expensive enterprise application designed to be operated by only a small number of highly trained professionals, with the rest of the people simply being passive onlookers.

Web 1.0 is no exception.  For the past 10+ years, we’ve spent huge sums of time and money building web sites and portals, be they inside or outside facing.  Yet, most of them are rarely utilized by the people we intend to serve.  Why?  It’s the same onlooker attitude — most of us feel that those are the company’s business; not my business.

Enterprises can change all that with Clearvale, which empowers everyone to take on the responsibility of running the business via ESNs of any size, and in doing so, becoming more accountable to each other and to the company.  This way, you get an O(N²) solution for people collaboration that’s geometrically scalable in nature.  Bottom line: in Clearvale, setting up and operating ESNs to collaborate work is DIY (do-it-yourself), as easily as creating files, sending emails, and desktop publishing.

However, putting technical barrier and IT cost to bed is only part of the equation.  In ESN adoption, the bigger challenge tends to be cultural — it’s about a management paradigm shift, in every true sense of these words.  If you are not committed to doing the “people business” differently, you will not be able to harvest the huge upside potential afforded to you through the power of N².

Last year, after 9 months into our own Enterprise 2.0 transformation, I wrote a white paper entitled “Socializing Across the Enterprise — Seven Habits for ESN Adoption” (or SATE for short) to highlight this cultural shift and all the lessons and best practices we learned from that experience.  We are still going strong in continuing that journey.

As we formally commence the Clearvale global launch, I thought I’d start a new blog topic on the vision behind Clearvale, under the working title of “CEO’s Survival Guide to Socialism 2.0”.  Consider this as a sequel to SATE, focusing on some of the higher level goals and the ROI model by which these goals can be measured.  We are obviously interested in encouraging everyone to immigrate into Clearvale so that their businesses can thrive, but we want to do it not by “gut feeling” or “blind trust”, but with eyes wide open — use cases, best practices, key performance indices, and ROI dashboard.

I will start by laying some groundwork for your ESN goals.  First and foremost: the 80-20 rule.  Since nothing is 100% black-and-white, we could and should target a reversal from 80-20 to 20-80 in favor of some key areas of improvements.  In the table below, we’ve listed 10 key such dimensions, from IT infrastructure to management philosophy across your entire enterprise, and how you should endeavor to make the change.  I will expand on each of these in future blogs, together with my thoughts on how they could be measured for ROI, to convince you that not only do you need to do it now, most importantly, you need to immigrate and settle into Clearvale, for it’s the most cost-effective way, and place, to get it done.

Before we close on this blog, let me just say that ROI can typically be measured along three axes — cost efficiency, incremental business, and innovation velocity.  With Clearvale, we’ve been able to observe all three in a very short period time.  It’s truly cool stuff.  So stay tuned!