Enterprise Social Networking

Enterprise Social Networks are identifiable by the fact that they integrate with existing platforms and applications and they appeal directly to end users. In effect, they bring the benefits of social media to the enterprise. So how would you recognize an Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) product? It would be something like Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive Software’s Jive, Salesforce’s Chatter, and IBM’s Connections. In fact, those are Gartner’s four leading products in the sector (Gartner Inc “Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace” by Nikos Drakos et al, September 2013).

Drakos and colleagues estimated the market will be worth $1.4 billion in revenue by 2016, and described it as “dynamic and highly competitive”. Gartner looked at the top 20 vendors in the sector. Apart from the top four mentioned above, Gartner’s Visionaries were: Google, Telligent (Zimbra), SAP, Cisco, and Acquia. The Niche players were: OpenText, Huddle, blueKiwi, Igloo, Novell, Liferay, and Zyncro. And the Challengers were: Tibco Software, VMware, NewsGator, and Atlassian.

According to Gartner, “Leaders are well-established vendors with widely used social software and collaboration offerings. They have established their leadership through early recognition of users’ needs, continuous innovation, overall market presence, and success in delivering user-friendly and solution-focused suites with broad capabilities”.

If you’re thinking of getting an Enterprise Social Network, what are you going to use it for? “S.O.C.I.A.L. – Emergent Enterprise Social Networking Use Cases: A Multi Case Study Comparison”, by Kai Riemer and Alexander Richter (2012), analysed nearly 7500 messages from across five mature networks and found that virtually all the messages could be grouped into one of eleven generic categories. They were:

• Problem solving – what can I do with x that I can’t do with y?
• Idea generation – how we can make this group more useful to its members?
• Status updates – I’m in my weekly meeting with customers
• Work coordination – @bob Can you raise tom’s permissions
• Information storage – checklist for H&S
• Discussion and opinions
• Input generation – #NHF recommends
• Meeting organization – I can’t make that time, can we shift to 4pm?
• Event notifications – 19 May for leaving drinks.
• Social praise – thanks for all your hard work on cut-over day.
• Informal talk – congratulations on your new baby.

Gartner has suggested that the business objectives of Enterprise Social Networking projects are to:

• Improve general communication and information sharing
• Boost team productivity and effectiveness with projects and business processes
• Support communities that stimulate learning and innovation, diffuse best practices, and encourage peer-to-peer networking that strengthens professional and interpersonal relationships.

So let’s take a brief look at those market leaders.

Yammer was launched in 2008 and was bought by Microsoft in 2012. The plans seem to be that it will tightly integrate with Office, SharePoint, and application programs running on Windows. Yammer lives in the cloud and looks pretty much like Facebook, so users can find their way round it fairly easily. With Office 365, sites can run their Microsoft infrastructure in the cloud too.

Jive Software’s Jive was previously known as Clearspace, then Jive SBS, then Jive Engage. Jive (the company) was founded in 2001. Salesforce.com was founded in 1999, and provides a variety of different services to its customer base. Both offer a Facebook-like product.

IBM’s product is IBM Connections. It was announced at Lotusphere in 2007, and is currently at Version 4.5. Its components include a homepage, microblogging, profiles, communities, ideation (the ability to crowdsource ideas), media gallery, blogs, bookmarks, activities (a tool for groups of people to work together on a specific project or task), files, wikis, forums, and a search facility.

The ten IBM Connections components are J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications that are hosted on IBM WebSphere Application Server. In this way, the components can be hosted independently of each other, and large-scale deployments can be supported.

Importantly, if this is going to get any take up outside of IBM-controlled environments, IBM Connections uses plug-ins to integrate into existing applications, including:

• IBM Notes
• IBM Sametime
• Microsoft Office
• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Windows Explorer
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• RIM BlackBerry
• Apple iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch
• Google Android Phones
• WebSphere Portal.

There’s also platform support for IBM WebSphere Application Server V8 and DB2 10, as well as support for the IBM i operating system.

It’s likely that once people start to use them, Enterprise Social Networks will take on a life of their own and new uses will be found for them. My feeling is that their use will continue to grow and you’ll begin to find them embedded in every organization that you visit – and you’ll find people checking them on their smartphones and tablets when they’re out and about.

Social businesses

What is a social business? Wikipedia tells me that a social business was first defined by Prof Muhammad Yunus as a non-loss, non-dividend company designed to address a social objective within the highly regulated marketplace of today. A wider definition includes any business having a social rather than financial objective. Or a social enterprise can be defined as a commercial activity by socially minded organizations. Perhaps a better definition these days is a business that has adopted social networking tools and practices for internal and external functions across their organization.

The IBM Web site tells us that: “Social business technologies help people connect, communicate, and share information. Becoming a leader in your marketplace means using social solutions to transform how business gets done – driving cost savings, increasing revenue, and cultivating competitive advantages.” That definitely sounds like a good thing.

In a report from Altimeter entitled The Evolution of Social Business: Six Stages of Social Business Transformation, it’s suggested that many social strategies are not linked to business goals, but are instead often driven by a “social for social’s sake” orientation. The report notes that, even when goals are aligned, social initiatives frequently must deal with a lack of defined strategy, governance, or funding. The report suggest six stages a company has to go through to become a social business:

• Planning – understand how customers use social channels and prioritize strategic goals where social can have the most impact.
• Presence – amplify existing marketing efforts and encourage sharing
• Engagement – drive considerations to purchase and provide direct support with internal employee engagement.
• Formalized – set governance for social, create discipline and process, and have strategic business goals.
• Strategic – scale across business units and move into HR, sales, finance, and supply chain.
• Converged – social drives transformation and integrates social philosophy into all aspects of the enterprise.

Becoming a social business is not something that can be left for tomorrow, organizations need to act now. They need to identify what it is they do well, and they need to get the message out there. And that last part comes with two health warnings! You need to be using the same social media as your clients and potential clients. If they don’t use the same media, they won’t see the message. Secondly, keep your eye on new media. Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, Google plus may not always be kings of the heap. Pinterest is currently very popular. Watch out for trends – so you don’t lose that link with clients and potential clients. Maybe you should be looking at smartphone apps that will make it easy for people to come to you for whatever it is you supply.

Interestingly, there are products like Yammer (www.yammer.com), which Microsoft bought last year, Chatter, and others, that offer private social networks for organizations.

IBM VPs Jeff Schick and Sandy Carter were on stage at IBM Connect 2013 showing off the capabilities in IBM’s social business platform. It seems that companies are combining social technologies, the cloud, mobile, and analytics to create a flexible, intelligent framework for making the most of social connections. In an IBM survey of CEOs, 57% picked social business as a top priority and nearly three quarters (73%) are making significant investments in analysing data.

According to Jeff Schick: “A disconnect between how we live our lives – through digital connections and sharing – and how we work isn’t sustainable. Particularly since the new generation of workers who will fill companies’ ranks don’t know any other way of interacting and working than social media. The rate of productivity, innovation, and employee retention will increasingly depend on who can master this coming age of social business.”

For an organization to just have a social media strategy isn’t enough. The organization must transform itself into a social business to ensure its continued success.

Mainframe chatter

Mark Lillycrop, Director of Arcati Ltd, and I were asked to take part in CA’s May Mainframe Madness. We were part of a ‘Scheduled Chat’ in their ‘House of Mainframe’ section on 5 May. It was enjoyable chatting to other mainframe professionals and it was very interesting the direction the conversation took.

Clearly, there were two main strands to the conversation. One was the difficulty of convincing (converting?) non-mainframers of the potential of the mainframe. The second was the success of z/Linux at installations.

Looking at z/Linux success first, Murray Theriault told us: “I think what sold it for me was the idea that I could put up 100 z/Linux machines on the same box and have a very small footprint, not to mention no power costs”. Similarly, Marie Kennard added: “Same here – the app we’re putting onto zLinux currently runs on dozens of boxes, most of which are reaching EOL and needed replacing”.  Someone else reminded the group about Aliantz in Australia, saying that they’d “flipped their whole farm to z/Linux in a weekend with little to no outtage”. This led CA’s Reg Harbeck to comment: “zLinux seems to be taking over a decade to become an overnight sucess...”

So it appears that z/Linux is making headway in those sites that already have a mainframe and Linux servers. And it’s definitely the case that the arguments for doing so are irrefutable. Moving some of the applications or even all of them from other Linux platforms is a positive step and the sites doing so are going to see huge benefits in terms of performance, reliability, and, of course, cost savings both in man-power and outages.

But even the success stories seem to be the result of a battle between mainframers and management whose model of computing and whose expectations are the result of using Microsoft Windows. A lot of the hour long discussion was spent on how to get managers in organizations that have mainframes to appreciate what they have, and to understand how to exploit the mainframes potential. The truth is that there’s an even bigger battle to be fought and that’s to get IT people and IT managers at non-mainframe sites to appreciate the opportunities that a mainframe brings.

During the discussion it was said that ‘good news’ mainframe stories don’t make much of an appearance in the IT press. If they did, that would be one way that people would get to hear about mainframes. Mark suggested that many people view mainframes as: “Old, expensive, and your dad’s technology”. And yet, anyone who takes money out of an ATM (hole-in-the-wall) machine is probably linking to IMS on a mainframe. They just don’t know it. The press were not only blamed for sins of omission, but also sins of commission – for printing the same old stories containing the same old wrong assumptions about mainframes.

I reminded the chat room about William Data Systems ZEN product family and how users can control their network from the latest iPad gizmo, or get reports on their smartphones about what’s going on on their network. And, obviously, there was a lot of talk about cloud computing and mainframes – and how they go together like “peas and carrots” (well Forest Gump would have said that if he’d been logged in!). The point is that mainframes aren’t “your dad’s technology”, they very much embrace the very latest technologies and do it in a way that is secure and comes with all the benefits of years of successful operation in banks and airlines, etc.

I did think to run a competition, at this point but I don’t have a prize to give out. However, I would be interested in hearing people’s ideas of how managers and staff at mainframe sites and the rest of the IT world who aren’t mainframers can be convinced of the importance and proven-reliability of mainframes. You can e-mail me at trevor@itech-ed.com with your comments and I’ll put them together in a future blog.

Other topics that we discussed during our hour included the importance of virtual meetings with the current financial constraints when organizations are less-and-less keen to fund travel/hotels/food etc for people to attend. We looked at green computing and how this issue will most-likely grow in importance with future regulation. The fact that the word ‘legacy’ is actually a compliment. (How many of you have printers that don’t work with Vista or Windows 7, and just have to live with it?) And we suggested names for the next version of z/OS including z/2020 and z/Cloud.

All-in-all it was an enjoyable ‘Scheduled Chat’ in the ‘House of Mainframe’. Good luck CA for the rest of the month of mainframe madness.