EVOLUTION OF BPR

New partnership in “Socialprise” neighborhood

Posted on the July 28th, 2008 under Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Software, SaaS, Sales Force Automation by Gregory Yankelovich

The IT industry is notorious for it’s love of jargon. There are so many terms flying around that most people cannot keep up with their meaning. Enterprise 2.0 is one of those terms.
This definition comes from the second source of all truth, Wikipedia

Enterprise social software, also known as Enterprise 2.0, is a term describing social software used in "enterprise" (business) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to company intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, this generation of software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure.

The new term, coined by Marc Perramond of InsideView, is rapidly gaining popularity

Socialprise applications are a natural convergence of social media and enterprise applications, and emerge as a mash-up of both the information and user experience of these previously separate universes.

Socialprise applications enable organizations to discover and distill highly relevant information from an expanding sea of structured and unstructured data sources and present it in the meaningful context of specific business processes.I wrote before about SalesView, one of the first "socialprise" applications I have encountered. The product is a "mashup" of Contact centric information, available in multiple Web sites, with popular SFA Enterprise applications, such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, and others.

I wrote before about SalesView, one of the first "socialprise" applications I have encountered. The product is a "mashup" of Contact centric information, available in multiple Web sites, with popular SFA Enterprise applications, such as Salesforce, SugarCRM, and others.

 

Well, today the InsideView announced their first strategic partnership with Landslide Technologies, the company that provides "work style management" software "for salespeople, not their managers".

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. -July 28, 2008-InsideView today released SalesView for LandslideTM, a fully bundled business search and intelligence application available to all Landslide Technologies customers. InsideView and Landslide share a singular focus on generating sales results from the ground up by helping individual salespeople.

The Landslide will develop their own "mashup" to the SalesView platform and will market it to their existing and new customers.

It’s all about a change

Posted on the May 20th, 2008 under BPM, Business Risk, Change Management, Organizational Transformation, Value of BPR by Gregory Yankelovich

Why is it so easy to forget that IT technology exist to leverage an organizational change? I just read a blog post “IT to Business: I won’t read your mind” describing “successful” implementation of technology for nor particular reason. Why are stories like that so common?

Nothing improved because no one had tried to improve anything.  The direction had been “throw technology at problems and they go away,” but they don’t.  You cannot solve a problem by introducing technology by itself.  You have to understand the problem first.  The technology was not wrong.  The systems worked great, but they didn’t solve measurable business problems.

One reason I can think of is that IT is miscast to lead Organizational Transformation initiatives. I suppose if you hire an architect to help you with a problem, likelihood is you will end up with a house. Or a court case if you hire a lawyer. Do I need any more analogies to make my point?

The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.

  - George Bernard Shaw

I would state that many IT initiatives could possibly produce better results without technology being involved at all.

Let’s challenge this truthiness

Posted on the April 29th, 2008 under Business Risk, Change Management, Enterprise Software, Organizational Transformation by Gregory Yankelovich

Michael Krigsman, who’s blog I subscribe to, posted an interview with the SAP CTO, Vishal Sikka who is quoted:

Lines of business know the what and IT knows the how.

Mr. Sikka does not stop there and proceeds to talk about how this relationship should be managed. However this thought is very commonly used as a dogma which I would like to challenge.

If this is true, how can we explain all the projects delivered out of time and budget constrains, all the unsatisfied business communities, and low rates of adoption we read about in Michael’s blog? Perhaps these lines of business do not tell what they need? Or perhaps IT doesn’t have the know-how to install enterprise software or to maintain infrastructure?Â

I would like to propose that the above mentioned wisdom falls into a category of truthiness and the lines of business do not know exactly what their requirements are, as well as IT often does not have the know-how and political clout to provide thought leadership required to articulate and negotiate these requirements. The what is often in a realm of notions and wishes, which are impossible to act upon. The requirements are expressed in a form of functions and features which have very remote connections to the economic reasoning for the project. The lack of this knowledge is greatly discounted and misunderstood. The "what" needs to be figured out, challenged and probed until a set of specific business requirements is distilled which communicates why it is economically necessary to invest and how the change adoption will be managed. Perhaps lines of business have to accept ownership, responsibility and leadership for success or failure of the organizational transformation initiatives rather than "outsourcing" this responsibility to IT.