Core Edges - Latest Comments

Re: “Features” has now become a useless concept when evaluating IT projects

jnestour — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 08:39:16 -0000

Hi Lee -
Thanks for the kind words and for stopping by here ;)

IT departments have a long way to go before using ROA...

Re: “Features” has now become a useless concept when evaluating IT projects

Lee Bryant — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:58:09 -0000

Hi Julien,

I think this is a very good point, very well made.

Right now, most IT departments have only the feature comparison spreadsheet matrix (if anything at all!) to judge competing products, and I completely agree with you about ROA, usability, etc., and of course the point that obody has to train you how to use Facebook.

Good to see you blogging more - you really are very good value ;-)

Re: “Features” has now become a useless concept when evaluating IT projects

jnestour — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:37:09 -0000

Wow, Susan. Many thanks for the comments :-)

Re: “Features” has now become a useless concept when evaluating IT projects

itsinsider — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:19:15 -0000

Wow. Spot on. Do not force me into the embarrassing position of asking for your hand in marriage. :-)

Re: MP: Attention scarcity as one of the most important principle to apply

Jason (salespodder) — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 06:24:28 -0000

cool blog, Julien :-) I happened across your thoughts whilst searching for wisdom on crm adoption that helps explain why most projects, despite the best of intentions, fail to fully engage a salesteam The first time I came across this concept you describe well as Attention Scarcity was in around 2004. A person leading over 100 field-based salespeople realised his "struggle to capture screen real estate". I then worked with him to try and create what we termed 'tool dependency' for his systems, which meant that certain elements of their duties could only be discharged through the system. Our findings at that time were stark; you had to reduce input tasks to a bare minimum of literally just two or three items and build from there to gain any traction. This was because attention scarcity has another side in the sales domain, namely that a salesrep will always do any other task that crops up rather than fulfill their reporting requirements.

Re: User Adoption risks are growing rapidly for IT projects

itgevangelist — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:13:21 -0000

Great post. The concepts are a direct hit as to why so many projects fail - which I characterize as the inattention to business processes and the associated organizational changes to exploit those new business processes and the technologies that enable them.

I found it interesting that you suggested a third dimension of risk. The only reason I would add this third dimension is if I could not adequately manage the risk as a component of the other two dimensions - technical and business.

I would have a placeholder in every project charter for the technical risk associated with the lack of user adoption. I would have the same placeholder in every project charter for the business risk. The risk must be addressed in both dimensions to ensure it is appropriately managed.

I think this post gets to the bottom line that it is rarely addressed at all.

Steve Romero, IT Governance Evangelist
http://community.ca.com/blogs/theitgovernanceev...

Re: User Adoption risks are growing rapidly for IT projects

Julia Brown — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 06:13:41 -0000

Excellent piece, great advice :-)

Re: Consuprise: Consumer web startups should leverage the enterprise market

tutor1 — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:14:17 -0000

Have to say I do agree. Things like this just are what they are.

Re: MP: Pace of change is accelerating: what if there is no equilibrium?

Quotes — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 02:59:28 -0000

There has to be some equilibrium, I don't even want to imagine that what if there's no equilibrium!

Re: How to price Enterprise Social Computing offerings?

Sibs — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 08:51:40 -0000

Juliene,

Great article, thank you for sharing. I agree with your point of view 100%. The network effect of social computing in the enterprise is a great way of articulating the argument of volume increasing pricing. I think there are two barriers to address, however, by vendors and vendors in consultation with their clients. 1) Balancing those elements of a solution that may be construed by organizations as more social-social than social-work and 2) Ensuring that the client marketing/champion is doing a good enough job to drive adoption. From our experience deploying our next generation directory solution (http://gtec.innovapost.com/), these two issues are a challenge to a volume increasing pricing strategy.

For #1, with many social applications there are often features and functionality that don't have a hard link to business productivity. I'm an advocate of 2.0 in the workplace as I believe there are productivity (see my whitepaper Beyond Functional Contribution via the link above) and employee engagement benefits to be reaped, but we do have to be careful because some solution elements are, and will be, used for social-social purposes. If the solution has an abundance of features that drive social-social behaviour and attract users as a result, it's a tough pill to swallow for organizations to pay more because the organizational value proposition under these circumstances because more tenuous. Those of us in the Enterprise 2.0 space would still maintain there is value, and I am one of them, but not all of our customers will.

For #2, I think we all agree that enterprise 2.0 is largely a cultural paradigm shift about the nature of work and the view of employee behaviour. So deploying these solutions in the enterprise requires the enterprise to roll up its communications, culture change, and marketing sleeves and promote the internal solution like they would their latest product launch. As a vendor, we need to help guide these efforts as they will directly impact the use of the solution. If we don't provide clients with any help, but we want volume increasing pricing, we're not doing ourselves any favours.

Just a few rambling thoughts as I read your article.

Warm regards,

Re: A few thoughts on Yammer, a twitter-like for organizations

jnestour — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:31:43 -0000

Hi David -
Yes, I'm following up to get more details on the Active Directory
integration, looking forward to it.

The best model depends of the size and business of the company I think. For
large companies or companies in sensitive industries, the claiming model you
have and Present.ly adopted is a negative. For small and medium businesses,
it can be - wrongly in my opinion - appealing. So in the end, what matters
for the start-ups in this space are the respective market size of the 2
markets.

I actually agree 100% with your last point, especially for social enterprise
software. Without directory integration, my reasoning is: employees can't
talk about business critical issues and if Yammer just used for casual
points, not much more value than twitter.

We agree on the fact that employees should be the ones adopting an
application. IT functions need to give them the means to do it.

To facilitate this process, I think adopting the right pricing model is
critical. I have described one possible model here:
http://www.macroprinciples.com/2009/02/how-to-p...

I would be really interested in your feedback on this point...

Many thanks for the stimulating points!

Best regards,
- Julien

Re: A few thoughts on Yammer, a twitter-like for organizations

David Sacks — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:04:42 -0000

Julien-

Yammer now offers directory integration / SSO. We are piloting it with some early customers and then it will become part of our basic admin tools package on the website.

Since your original article, Present.ly copied our approach of letting employees sign up with a company email address first, before the company claims the network. Obviously they did not believe that their model was the superior one.

Seriously, what's the harm in letting employees test drive a product before the company buys it? Isn't that better than the alternative? How many times has IT purchased expensive software only to see no one adopt it? Yammer lets the employees prove the need before the company buys it.

Regards,

David

PS: I like your idea of an enterprise TweetDeck. We will support it.

Re: Enterprise Social Computing Pricing: continuing the discussion

Jon Husband — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 22:43:24 -0000

Whew .. hard to keep up with you guys. I am going to have to block if a say to just think harder about this.

But ... I am going to venture a small comment now. I started thinking about this early on when reading this post, and wondered if I would come across "it".

And I did ...

In case 1, you offer full control to the end-users to choose the tool they want, but this would inevitably result in a costly mess to maintain. In case 2, 95% of the control is given back, but the tool is standard. The ROI will of course differ widely in the two cases. Standardizing always brings cost-savings, and can more and more be done without impacting the returns on the applications.

Within the larger context you offer ... implementation and pricing on a large scale where value-added and value-obtained are movable targets (let's take as a given that the organization is reasonably serious about social computing and that crossing the basic ROI hurdle is taken for granted .. a large assumption, I know, but one I believe is appropriate), I keep wondering about the ongoing issue of the personalization of knowledge work tools, the "mass customisation of work" if you will.

I think it's basically an unknown, but maybe an even bet, that increasingly people will want to an organization to use systems and tools that let the users choose what and why they want to use certain tolls, and helps them adapt their own style(s) of working and yes, of collaborating to the objectives at hand.

Yes, there must be a common substrate for mission-critical information and knowledge (that's [probably the ERP + system in the guise of SAP etc.), but because of the influence of the consumer web 2.0 people are going to get fussy about tools and services, I suspect. And I think that massive personalisation is a long term, inescapable trend.

You state that it would be a "costly mess to maintain". I think that's probably true today, but I think there's a decent chance that needn't be the case in the relatively near-term future. What the implications for pricing models are I am not sure, but I think some of the advanced platforms from some of the leading smaller vendors are anticipating this eventuality.

But both of you guys know more about the technicalities of information systems than do I. It's fun just trying to think alongside you two.

Re: How to price Enterprise Social Computing offerings?

jnestour — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 16:55:20 -0000

Hi Jon, many thanks for the already insightful comment, eager to read more :-)

Yes, ROI is no longer a meaningful metric. What amazes me now is how many people are judging a tool based on its "features", which is an even less relevant concept to judge IT offerings.

Re: TweetDeck should sell licenses to enterprises (to reach consumers)

Jon Husband — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:20:30 -0000

I agree ...

Re: How to price Enterprise Social Computing offerings?

Jon Husband — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:16:04 -0000

I'll comment more later, but for now ...

In general, the argument you have set out has articulated en brouillon the thinking I have been doing about what I call ROII (Return on Investment in Interaction). For that I thank you.

Re: Adopt your client’s point of view: if your deployment is very successful, they will pay an expensive price but derive lots of value from it. Additionally, if the deployment needs to be phased to convince stakeholders of the value potential, they will also pay a matching price that will enable them to scale its use. Reversing the price structure lowers significantly the risk for the client, increasing the chances of a pilot happening.

A positive externality of such a pricing strategy, at its peak for Enterprise Social Computing offerings, is the credibility and confidence about their product projected by vendors. Nearly all are using arguments about how easy it is to engage employees, how they will want to use it, collaborate with each other, etc. So don’t limit yourself to the market pitch, embed this in your pricing and demonstrate your confidence.

I think that this is essentially the inverse of (for example) a $50 million dollar SAP implementation.

Which I think speaks to timing and attention scarcity. SAP for me is (still) an example of a transition technology, as the evolution of IT applied to business and work processes began the major move from paper to information systems in a real and pervasive sense. If you think about it, it wasn't really that complex .. take existing processes, align them horizontally instead of vertically, strip out obvious redundancies (everyone remember the "Spot the Waldo" reengineering stuff ?), and then pour electronic concrete (SAP system) over it.

Now we are moving into collaboration applications layered over a dense-and-deep IT infrastructure (let's leave ERP systems out of this aspect for now), applications that consist of stitching together various web tools and web services (as a generality) that lay on top of the denser, more "permanent" databases and engines. These applications ands services are becoming both more open and more integrated all the time, to the point where through "open" APIs people can plug the tools they like using into larger applications and systems. As the concept of "cloud computing" evolves, so too will the mix-and-match personalisation.

The former (and current) pricing models assumed amortization of investment over time in something more-or-less permanent (at least, assumed to be for the purposes of ROI hurdles).

With large-scale (and over time growing) participation and interactivity, the notion of value obtained and created changes, as you have pointed out.

I'll re-read and think, and come back when I feel I can talk cogently about ROII.

Re: Consuprise: Consumer web startups should leverage the enterprise market

izuka01 — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:21:26 -0000

So Web startups are having to do the unthinkable: come up with a business model that brings in real money while they’re still young.

Re: How to price Enterprise Social Computing offerings?

carlo — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 07:10:07 -0000

Hi Julien,

thanks for this excellent piece of analysis. At my company Qitera that offers a enterprise social search platform (http://www.qitera.com/enterprise) we are currently defining our new pricing shemes and your article brings in some very well-thought perspectives.

I am also senior advisor at IT-research firm Experton Group and recommended your post to the readers of our new blog. http://experton-group.blogspot.com/2009/02/ente...

regards et à bientôt
Carlo

Re: How to price Enterprise Social Computing offerings?

charlie — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 12:19:32 -0000

Julien, thanks for writing this. It summarizes nicely a critical strategic issue for both the enterprise customer and the vendor. As you point out finding this alignment is critical to successful relationships in the long term. Piloting social applications is and interesting exercise given the nature of the value curve. Articulating hard ROI from smaller pilots and then extrapolating that forward to bigger user populations is critical. Any further thoughts on this by you or your readers would be welcome.

Re: Consuprise 2: Combine consumer and entreprise markets to multiply network effects

jnestour — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 08:05:12 -0000

Hi Taylor -

Getting buy-in from the top is necessary, for sure. It's up to the CIO and her/his team to do this. The vendor can provide ammo, but the top is usually not able to spend enough time to actually understand the benefits of a new offering, so the IT function have to make the choice of what and when to present at the top to get buy-in.

Don't think selling at the top is even possible for companies in the consumer side as well.

And yes, I agree with you that it should be planned from the beginning. From my experience, consumer companies are not interested in the enterprise market until they run out of cash. And they usually can't rearchitect to support it in a cost-effective way.

Best regards,
- Julien

Re: How to price Enterprise Social Computing offerings?

jnestour — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:21:09 -0000

Hi Arnaud -

Thanks for your comments. I am not blogging as an employee here so I will be in touch privately. Don't want to create any ambiguity ;-)

Best regards,
- Julien

Re: A few thoughts on Yammer, a twitter-like for organizations

jnestour — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 06:26:09 -0000

Yes, it does.

I have sent them an email to get more details on the specifics, as they do have an history of inflating their claims, but it looks certainly much better than before.

Re: Consuprise 2: Combine consumer and entreprise markets to multiply network effects

tdavidson — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 02:54:45 -0000

Ah, selling to enterprises: is it easier / better / more valuable to sell to the top (company decision-makers) or the bottom (employees)?

I agree with the product development / adoption process you describe: the only addition would be to make sure the appropriate firewalls, privacy and data tags exist from day one to allow users to split out "personal" and "corporate" use. Too many companies create their entire product for consumer use from the beginning and find it difficult to build in the "enterprise" functionality, look and feel and aggregated "company views" for corporate management / IT / HR after-the-fact.

Re: A few thoughts on Yammer, a twitter-like for organizations

jiponet — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 17:22:57 -0000

Interesting article Julien

As Yammer announced that the Yammer software can be installed inside the company firewalls, does this change your views?
http://blog.yammer.com/blog/2009/02/yammer-exte...

Re: How to price Enterprise Social Computing offerings?

Arnaud Poujardieu — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 10:21:49 -0000

Bonjour Julien
I fully agree with your point of view related to ESN pricing model
Changing pricing model and habits is tough. Those who will succeed in this chalenge will get a more balanced relation between ESN provider and clients. This will create more Win win conditions which is mandatory for long term mutual valuable relations opportunity.
I am working at blueKiwi. Are you ready , for benchmarking this model together within Schlumberger?
Will be please talking with you