
#SAPPHIRENOW – What Business does Social have?
SAPPHIRE NOW and SAP TechEd, the European version of SAPs flagship customer event starts tomorrow in Madrid. It’s my first time here since joining SAP this summer and I’m really looking forward to it. From my (social and collaborative) vantage point, European Events are very special. I’ve spoken at many of them over the last three […]

Feeds and Mullets #socbiz #ensw
Brilliant New York Times UX designer and author Alex Wright, someone I’ve had the privilege to work closely with, said to me a decade ago that “Tags are the new Mullet”. Back in the mid 2000′s, those garish word-clouds made popular by Delicious showed up everywhere and only those of us geekily-inclined really employed them in […]

Enterprise Social Road to Nowhere. #socbiz
When asked to review tent.io, a new protocol for, in their words, open, decentralized, social networking, Dave Winer writes: I don’t understand what I’m supposed to weigh in on. Anyone can write a spec. What matters is what software is supporting the protocol, what content is available through it and how compelling is the content. […]

Closing the Loop #ensw
The Nest thermometer is by far my favorite gadget purchase of 2012. Its spendy at $250 but if you consider that a 1% +/- change in your heating/cooling setting can tilt your yearly bill by 5%, accuracy and smart meters are valuable. You’ll make up the cost in savings in due time. Wi-fi connectivity means […]

Rypple and Salesforce.com: It’s about Identity.
Salesforce.com announced that it has acquired Toronto-based Rypple – a social performance management provider. Given my preference for fix-a-problem social software, I’ve always appreciated that Rypple injected the needed context to illustrate why collaborative approaches and in turn, social software mattered to core enterprise process. No head scratching on use cases when you saw the […]

Why I’m Optimistic about 2012
TechCrunch quotes a warning of sorts by Venture Capitalist Josh Kopelman who basically says 2012 will be more like a correcting 2008, as opposed to a euphoric 2011. Lots of good for and against arguments on the VC investing front by the likes of Dave McClure and others in the comments on TC. Regardless of […]

TideMark: Bringing Collaborative Performance to an EPM Problem near you.
Lets cut to the chase: The business intelligence we rely on as enterprises to perform better can suck at times. I remember a famous dot com era business systems accomplishment that was touted up and down silicon valley. I paraphrase but it went something like this: “Cisco has the ability to do a virtual close on […]

Oracle OpenWorld: Fifteen Minutes with Mark Hurd.
I spent fifteen minutes with Oracle’s President, Mark Hurd, along with Sudhir Chowdhary from the Financial Express yesterday at Oracle OpenWorld 2011. These were the big take aways from our conversation: 1. Collaboration Moving Front and Center Oracle seems to have rationalized its’ investments in the areas of content and collaboration technology and has come […]

TIBCO’s Tibbr: Inching Towards Great.
Few organizations providing enterprise social software have a process and integration DNA, as does TIBCO Software. The last of the independents in the enterprise integration game, TIBCO supports some of the most gnarly systems integration efforts at some of the best known organizations in the world. For these reasons, I went to TUCON 2011, TIBCO’s Annual Customer […]

Assessing the Real Value of ‘Me’
Last year, I had the opportunity to spend a day in Monterey, California with CHROs and HR executives from some of the largest organizations in the world. My charter was to suggest a practical pathway for how HR can become a critical weapon in the arsenal of ‘compete to win in the 21st century’ planning and how the connected […]