November 23rd, 2009

Social computing in the enterprise, part two

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:19 am

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, End-user impact, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, Salesforce.com

Tags: Social Computing, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Michael Krigsman

Salesforce.com’s new product, Chatter, sparked a conversation on what happens when social computing hits the enterprise.

This video, filmed by Forrester CRM and customer service analyst, Natalie Petouhoff discusses challenges associated with cultural change and knowledge management when an organization introduces social computing.

The video records a conversation on these issues between Natalie, fellow ZDNet blogger Dion Hinchcliffe, and me. We used Chatter as a starting point, but the topics we discuss are broadly applicable to social computing and collaboration projects.

November 23rd, 2009

Social computing and the enterprise, part one

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:03 am

Categories: CIO issues, Cultural issues, End-user impact, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, Salesforce.com

Tags: Social Computing, Social Networking, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion, Michael Krigsman

Salesforce.com’s new product, Chatter, raises a variety of questions about what happens when social computing hits the enterprise. In some organizations, the openness of social computing creates tension with established corporate cultures in which resistance to information sharing is a real fact.

This video, filmed by Forrester CRM and customer service analyst, Natalie Petouhoff covers key organizational issues associated with enterprise social networking. The video records a conversation on these issues between Natalie, fellow ZDNet blogger Dion Hinchcliffe, and me.

Although our focus point was Chatter, the topics and challenges we discuss are applicable to any Enterprise 2.0 project involving business or organizational transformation.

November 18th, 2009

Salesforce Chatter: Something to talk about

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 5:56 pm

Categories: CIO issues, CRM, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, Salesforce.com

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Social Computing, Chatter, PROJECT FAILURES ANALYSIS Salesforce, Sales Force Management, Social Networking, Sales, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

In a major update to its product set, Salesforce.com introduced an enterprise-level social networking platform, called Chatter, which was inspired by Twitter and Facebook. I think the announcement is exciting, but the picture is not entirely perfect.

Here are some first impressions, based on conversations with Salesforce executives, independent analysts, and bloggers. I plan to follow up with the company’s customers to gain a more complete view of this platform.

On the surface, Chatter seems rather unexciting. After all, enterprise social computing products aren’t new; for example, an enterprise Twitter-style application called ESME, which was created by developers connected with SAP, has been around for over a year.

Chatter sports some interesting features, such as the ability of Force.com applications to send status messages into the Twitter-like stream. (For an excellent breakdown of Chatter’s features, take a look at Dion Hinchcliffe’s ZDNet post on this topic.) However, the import of this announcement has nothing to do with features; it arises from Salesforce’s level of visibility and its commitment to social computing.

When a company of Salesforce’s size and stature seriously gets behind a particular technology or market, it brings credibility and a halo to everyone in that ecosystem. In this case, Salesforce appears to be making a substantive, long-term commitment of resources and marketing capital to the social computing and Enterprise 2.0 domains.

Of course, an announcement does not carry the weight of shipping real product to customer, so the jury of reality has yet to reach a verdict. With that in mind, I asked Brett Queener, Senior Vice President of products, to describe the company’s level of commitment to Chatter. His comments are unequivocal:

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November 18th, 2009

Dreamforce: Quick first impressions

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 10:48 am

Categories: CIO issues, CRM, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Salesforce.com

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Sales Force Management, Sales, Michael Krigsman

Sitting here in the audience at the annual Dreamforce conference of Salesforce.com, a couple of quick impressions come to mind. This post is mid-stream during the first keynote speech, so there will be more later.

A few observations:

• Salesforce.com is indeed a force to be reckoned with. One of the largest software vendors in the world, with an annualized run rate of $1.3 billion in revenue, no one can deny the inroads that cloud computing has made in the enterprise. 19,000 people registered for this conference, an obvious indicator that something serious is going on.
• The company has developed a vibrant ecosystem. Wandering through the expo hall to see the vendors and partners showing their wares, I was struck by diversity. Notably, I spoke with a system integrator implementing large (over 1000 seats) Salesforce projects. At that scale, there’s real complexity, especially around business process redesign and integration with existing systems. I intend to explore this topic further.
• CEO Marc Benioff emphasized “trust” as key theme. In a slide showing aspect of the Saleforce’s infrastructure, trust was right at the center. Here’s a photo:

The trust issue is big and there’s no surprise Benioff positioned it front and center of his first slide on product strategy. Trust, confidence, and reliability are among the key matters of concern to large enterprise buyers.

This post comes while the keynote is in-progress. More soon…

[Photo by Michael Krigsman.]

March 10th, 2009

Google Apps Status Dashboard: enterprise-friendly

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 6:43 am

Categories: Availability and reliability, Enterprise 2.0, Google, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Salesforce.com

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Dashboard, Status Dashboard, Cloud Computing, Michael Krigsman

Following a major Gmail outage, Google released a new, publicly available status dashboard showing system health for the company’s Apps products.

This release brings Google into the ranks of companies such as Salesforce.com and Amazon, which already have dashboards that accurately report system status to end-users.

The Google Enterprise Blog announced the news:

The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will be particularly useful for our business users, and it’s also relevant to users of our consumer products. The Status Dashboard is the best place to check for information on service availability for Google Apps anywhere in the world.

Here’s a screen capture of the dashboard:

And this screen shows the detail if you click one of the information icons in the dashboard:

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February 10th, 2009

Preventing dashboard lust

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:25 am

Categories: CIO issues, IT issues, Salesforce.com, Tools

Tags: Dashboard, JP Seabury, Michael Krigsman

Many IT projects place too much emphasis on tools and technology rather than meeting user needs. When ROI and business case take a backseat to blind technology love, problems are bound to arise. Excessive dashboard lust offers a concrete example of this common situation.

JP Seabury’s Force Monkey blog describes what happened in his company after downloading Salesforce.com’s AppExchange Dashboard Pack 1.0. Although these comments refer specifically to Salesforce, the issue is not vendor specific:

Soon after [downloading the tool],…[m]anagers and executives looked forward to their daily, weekly and/or monthly Dashboard emails, and talked animatedly about them in the halls or at company meetings.

Yet something was wrong. I couldn’t quite place my finger on what it was, but the monster was there, elusive. The users asked for more dashboards, more pretty graphs, charts, tables, and I appeased them. Today, we have more than 50 different dashboards and hundreds of reports feeding those dashboards. It’s an absolute glut of information. And this monster I created now has a name: Data Admiration.

They come to the CRM tool, very excited about the volumes of data and information captured in our Salesforce Dashboards. They drink deep from the kool-aid. But none of these dashboards seem to drive any real change in the organization.

One commenter to that blog post put JP’s dashboard numbers into context:

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January 19th, 2009

Salesforce.com Service Cloud integrates enterprise social media

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:28 am

Categories: CIO issues, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Salesforce.com

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Social Media, Sales Force Management, Sales, Michael Krigsman

Cloud computing vendor, Salesforce.com, has extended its service and support product line with Service Cloud, a set of technologies integrating community-generated knowledge with traditional call center data.

With this announcement, Salesforce establishes an important strategic push for the company, which Chairman and CEO, Marc Benioff, called a billion-dollar opportunity. Importantly, Service Cloud also demonstrates that social media can offer measurable ROI in the enterprise, which is a big deal.

Key components include:

• Customer communities for interaction not just posting. Salesforce.com wants to host corporate communities.
• Social networking connections. Salesforce.com said its Service Cloud will connect to Facebook, forums and blogs. The goal: Absorb information into a corporate knowledge base.
• Search ranking. Salesforce.com promises that Service Cloud results will be ranked near the top of Google results.
• Partner information sharing via the cloud.
• Multi-channel–phone, email and chat–support hosted in the cloud.

The most significant innovation is how Service Cloud parses social networking conversations to integrate that dispersed, user-generated data into existing call center knowledge bases and workflows. The other components are infrastructure and glue that enable Salesforce customers to collect, share, and work with community-generated data.

This diagram summarizes the components:

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November 3rd, 2008

Dreamforce: Salesforce and Facebook [podcast]

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:08 pm

Categories: CIO issues, Dreamforce 2008, End-user impact, Enterprise 2.0, IT issues, Oracle, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Salesforce.com

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Facebook, Sales Force Management, Podcasts, Business Structures, Sales, Internet, Finance, Michael Krigsman, Marc Benioff

Salesforce.com announced a platform partnership with Facebook today at Dreamforce, its annual user conference, that will enable Facebook developers to write and run their applications on the Force.com enterprise cloud.

During a press conference following the announcement, CEO Marc Benioff commented the partnership is intended to increase “stickiness and reduce customer attrition.” Strategically for Salesforce, this partnership is about extending its cloud in every direction, including to consumer-oriented social networking. Only time will reveal whether this combination is a marriage made in heaven or an example of what happens when worlds collide.

To learn more, I spoke with Saleforce.com’s Clara Shih, AppExchange Product Line Director, and Dave Morin, Facebook’s Senior Platform Manager. Steve Gillmor, from the Gillmor Gang and TechCrunchIT, joined me for this interview.

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November 3rd, 2008

Salesforce.com 'gets' enterprise blogging

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 9:49 am

Categories: CIO issues, Dreamforce 2008, IT issues, SaaS, PaaS, and SOA, Salesforce.com

Tags: Marc Benioff, Conference, Blogger, Blogging, Cloud Computing, Internet, Michael Krigsman

Salesforce.com’s annual conference, called Dreamforce, started on a great note for bloggers. Recognizing the growing importance of bloggers in the media ecosystem, the company positioned a blogger VIP section immediately in front of the stage.

If you’re interested in enterprise software blogging, this is positive news indeed. Fellow Enterprise Irregular, Vinnie Mirchandani, agrees.

CEO Marc Benioff, begin his introductory speech in pure messianic style:

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November 1st, 2008

Let's meet at Dreamforce in San Francisco

Posted by Michael Krigsman @ 7:27 pm

Categories: Blog annoucements, Salesforce.com

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Twitter, E-mail, Sales Force Management, Online Communications, Sales, Michael Krigsman, Blogging, Internet

I’ll be in San Francisco Monday and Tuesday attending Salesforce.com’s user conference, which is called Dreamforce.

If you’re around and want to meet, send me email or a Twitter tweet. There are few things I enjoy more than talking about IT failures with readers of this blog!

[Photo by Michael Krigsman]