I recently heard that Xerox just rebranded their whole company and launched an online community so I went to take a look. What I found made me feel sorry for whoever tried to champion the project. Most companies think that you just turn the community software on and it will somehow, magically create a community. Many of those companies marginalize the effort as some sort of "feel good" check-box they know they need but aren't sure why.  Worst case, they really just want another place to Market their stuff. In these situations, the initiative is never connected to their business strategy or seen as core. These community managers (and their bossess bosses boss) can learn a little from our beefy friends at Orange County Chopper. That in mind, consider these five suggestions:

1. Geek out on your products in public

I don't own a motorcycle. I'm not even close to being mechanically-oriented. But getting close to the product process and having the opportunity to see behind the scenes totally grabs my interest. Especially since it feels like reality even though I know it's produced. Ironically, I talked to someone today who just left Xerox. She told me that Xerox's culture is super product-centric and there are fanatical product people there. Oh really? Well let's see that! Give those people an ok place to geek out and make me care. It will be great for the public and help the product group engage more directly with customers. Then the community becomes less "feel good" and more important.

2. Be real

Reality television humanizes the story. It shows us-- in this case-- a garage filled with people making mistakes, decisions and connections. Sometimes the interactions are ugly. It's ok. Show us that. Involve us in it. Yes, I realize you have to control certain things. But so does reality tv.

3. If it doesn't work, build something else

Those guys have to ditch their plans all the time. They tinker on a bike, back up and talk about it, then throw out what doesn't work. Changing directions publicly is ok. Especially if you involve the rest of us along the way.

4. Show us what's cool

There's no doubt that everyone on American Chopper loves what they do. It makes me love it, too. Find the passionate people in your company and bring them to the forefront. If  you're not into it, how can we be? Show us, don't tell us.

5. Trust people who don't work at your company

Those Chopper guys always have crazy deadlines. They collaborate closely with the paint, chrome, and parts vendors they work with. It's one team even though they don't all work at Orange County Chopper. There's no reason you can't involve interested stakeholders in your ideas and make them part of your process, too. If you're worried about doing it publicly, set up a private place to invite them. Give other people a wrench, too.

I'm sure there's more ideas but I wanted to throw these out. Chime in if you have some.

We had built this really nice entry-level mail reader in Netscape 2.0, and it was a smashing success. Our punishment for that success was that management saw this general-purpose mail reader and said, "since this mail reader is popular with normal people, we must now pimp it out to `The Enterprise', call it Groupware, and try to compete with Lotus Notes!" ...

 

Now the problem here is that the product's direction changed utterly. Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

 

"Groupware" is all about things like "workflow", which means, "the chairman of the committee has emailed me this checklist, and I'm done with item 3, so I want to check off item 3, so this document must be sent back to my supervisor to approve the fact that item 3 is changing from `unchecked' to `checked', and once he does that, it can be directed back to committee for review."

 

Nobody cares about that shit. Nobody you'd want to talk to, anyway. ...

 

If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

 

When words like "groupware" and "enterprise" start getting tossed around, you're doing the latter. You start adding features to satisfy line-items on some checklist that was constructed by interminable committee meetings among bureaucrats, and you're coding toward an externally-dictated product specification that maybe some company will want to buy a hundred "seats" of, but that nobody will ever love. With that kind of motivation, nobody will ever find it sexy. It won't make anyone happy.There were probably lots of reasons that the Netscape releases failed, but losing focus on building software that people love had to be a major factor. Fast forward to  an example from today -- have you ever met someone that actually likes using Sharepoint?

Another one of my favorite takes on this issue was Eddie Herrmann's discussion of the Enterprise Tyranny of the OR:

The enterprise question is not whether to choose between either process over people OR people over process. The answer is to be the genius that realizes that it can be both people AND process. Without this realization, you will see a change of heart in SAP's users of tomorrow that Dan talks about. If you leave people out of your priorities and omit them from your equation, they will find better tools to get their jobs done, even at the cost of your money saving, business process integration.Enterprise collaboration software has ignored the people part of collaboration for too long (which is pretty stupid isn't it?). In fact, it was an AND proposition that has made Clearspace 1.x so successful:

• Its software that users love to use with features like wiki documents, blogs, and discussions, AND

• It's software that works for the enterprise by combining all the next-gen tools in one product, providing integration with back-end systems, and by being available as on-premise software

Going forward, we're going to keep building out aggressively in both areas. But, it's people that have been most neglected by collaboration products in the past and we're out to prove there's a better way, which we illustrate with our positioning graph below. Look for an update from Bill next week with some hints about how Clearspace 2.0 will bring sexy back to enterprise software.

Does this sound familiar?

<div class="jive-quote">

• "The line between departments will disappear"

• "There's a lack of established success metrics"

• "Too much IT involvement"

• "Companies with point solutions have difficulty integrating those to look at the entire solution"

</div>

It should. They could be quotes about our industry but are actually CRM industry quotes from nearly a decade ago. So, if history repeats itself it might be helpful for the “Web 2.0,” “Enterprise 2.0” and “Social Networking” players to take a quick look back at how other industries have evolved as we speculate our future. For example, quite recently, the term Customer Relationship Management (CRM) didn’t exist. That industry evolved over 20 years from “database marketing” to “relationship marketing” and settled on CRM around the year 2000. That&rsquo;s when the market became energized by intensified competition and easier to use, more cost effective and valuable software solutions.

Houston, we have a framing problem

Similar to our current market, the CRM industry started out very fragmented with lots of players focused on many component parts. These pieces ultimately connected--both in terms of the software solutions and with respect to the concept and value in business people’s minds. Now, CRM is a multi-billion dollar, growing industry with a few big players and innovative challengers. As soon as the CRM market started to frame the problem and solution in a holistic way, and accompanied it with solutions that tied the pieces together and connected them to business value, CRM finally began to make sense for businesses.

Larva, cocoon or butterfly?

I’d argue that our multi-monikered industry is 20 years old. It began with “personal productivity software” and then “groupware,” and “knowledge management.” It now searches for a salient concept and a higher value for connecting the pieces into a networked whole. We refer to this next evolution as “Social Productivity” and frame the opportunity as the next evolution of productivity software. But that concept will take time to grow. As an example of where we are now, today I had a conversation at the Web 2.0 Berlin conference with a multinational company that told me that their executive management resisted their “collaboration project” until they reframed it as simply “an Intranet solution.”

Seeing past the 2.0 hype

CRM had its own hype cycle, too. It was going to “forever change the way businesses connected with their customers.” The reality is that it provided positive, but incremental improvement in efficiency and visibility. CRM is now a required element to be competitive with the top players in a market. Social Productivity is also part of the “2.0” hype cycle. A lot of our industry’s messaging is focused on social technology forever changing cultures and the way people work together. I think that promise is similarly over-inflated but I can understand why presenting this polar extreme is important in the short term. Longer term, Social Productivity Systems, will be a required element and part the set of mission critical systems like CRM, ERP, and PLM.

Navel contemplation vs the windshield

As our industry’s echo-chamber continues to examine the Petri dish of alternative technology tools, potential customers wait for us to start making sense. If we can’t look down the road and make sense of how we’re adding value, how can the rest of the market? They simply want to know, “what can I do with this stuff I couldn’t do before?” and “how can this add enough business value that it becomes a need-to-have?” The CRM market used to suffer the same malady. Those industry discussions were focused on “the power of contact optimizers” or “which campaign-management player was going to win.” Pushing toolboxes at companies gets us nowhere.

Bursting the bubble

Another problem that plagued the CRM industry in the beginning was that all the assets were being stored in lots of solutions all over the company. Newer CRM solutions only added to the problem. Although they may have been easier to use or more powerful, they still became CRM asset bubbles disconnected to the rest of the company and their systems. As long as the customer market sees what we do as “aliens from another planet,” we won’t be able to gain serious traction. Our solutions must connect in smart ways with our customer’s asset and technology investments.

IT needs viable alternatives, not blame

Yes, there is friction between lines of business, executive management and IT. This isn’t new. IT has been living with this type of friction for decades. It was true for the CRM market, too. Sales and Marketing did what they wanted because IT wouldn’t help or IT forced a solution on Sales and Marketing they wouldn’t use. It’s always easy to paint IT as the bad guys. I do agree that IT has the opportunity to reshape their value but they need viable options, first. Right now, there’s not much choice for IT to help beyond solutions that are either too small or ones that lines of business don’t want. This will change soon.

The potential industry impact

It’s interesting to chart the revenue opportunity and market size if you believe there is a relational pattern between the last 20 years of CRM and the last 20 years of productivity software. When you look at the market growth of CRM, you can clearly see the value of connecting the dots. I couldn't find Gartner's database or relationship marketing market size for the 1980s-1990s but did find nearly 10 years of Gartner predictive market sizing starting in the optimistic .com mania in 1999 (hopefully we don't have a similar bubble). CRM is now a $7.4 billion sized market growing at 13% a year. When you think about a value that’s realized across all departments within companies, my sense is that the Social Productivity market can be even bigger.

If your current productivity software was a candidate applying for a job, I'd imagine you'd describe the applicant as frustrating, time-consuming, rigid, antisocial, and maybe "old-school." Definitely, too expensive for what they're really doing. Not exactly a flock of adjectives that would indicate a good fit.

Shouldn't we apply most of the same criteria for hiring employees that we use for productivity software?  Certainly, productivity software's job expectations have changed so it's at least time for a new job description. Personality-wise, I might look for a candidate that's easy to work with, social, quick, and can jump into any situation and help. Not to mention energetic and (dare I say) fun to work with.

One prospective customer of ours is a 15,000 employee health care company. They're making their decision about which software to choose by putting different choices in front of a lot of different cross-functional employees and scoring based on a number of use criteria--including how easy the software is to use and how much the employees liked to use it. The IT department stripped several applications of their branding so they could perform this as a "blind taste test." Since everyone was going to use the software daily, they saw this process as critical. They also strongly felt like the software's values needed to reflect their culture, since culture was a key ingredient to this company's success. 

Ultimately, it's time for a whole new set of productivity metrics as we move from personal productivity to social productivity. Isn't it time to take a good, hard look at your existing "productivity software" and think about having an intervention?