Developing A Custom Social Enterprise Process

When I spoke with Sameer Patel, SVP/GM, Products & GTM Enterprise Social Software, at SAP  last year, we discussed SAP Jam Work Patterns, a first foray into formalizing social enterprise processes. What SAP had laid down was the first real glimpse into how social capabilities can accelerate critical processes in departments like field and back office sales operations.

SAP Jam Work Patterns are combinations of common processes such as customer research, lead management, proposal preparation or deal management, that each involve some degree of expertise location, sharing knowledge about the customer, or collaborating with internal resources. Most enterprise social software have been focusing on low-level social actions such as searching employees and contacts in employee directories, sharing and managing documents, tagging information, or enabling discussions.  What SAP did was to go beyond the simpler actions by mapping the process flow of managing complex customer engagements with the social aspect—the employee and customer interactions—in a logical commonly used manner. Take a look at the brief video in Figure 1 to see a quick scenario.

The challenge however is that while sales operations are similar across many organizations, they are not identical, and you don’t want them to be so in any case. Otherwise, it would mean that your sales operations lack a distinctive style and more importantly a competitive edge over other competitors and businesses. Furthermore, beyond sales strategy and seasonal sales plays, operations also do vary significantly by industry verticals, in the complexity of products, and in territory and cultural variances. Even more specific is the IT and data model within the organization of sources of information about the products and the sales pipeline.

Fig 1: A video introduction to SAP Jam Work Patterns

What becomes necessary is the ability to customize such work patterns from the generic into something that is distinct and fits the model in your organization. The announcement this month of the developer program for SAP Jam Work Patterns is welcome news in that respect. What is necessary, as mentioned, now becomes an opportunity for partners and systems integrators to jump in.

If you are still on the fence on what is the added value of social to enterprise processes, this customizability provides a distinct opportunity to test to your organization’s processes and IT environment. With SAP’s approach to process, the sales process information, for example, is brought into Work Patterns through integration points. The traditional (non-social) sales process can therefore still exist and operate as is. A customized Work Pattern creates the social process equivalent bringing in the addition of perspective and knowledge of the broader organization.

From an ROI perspective, you could compare the efficiency of the outcomes of sales processes from the traditional approach versus those using the social approach. Experimenting in this form, as a sales process innovation project, is a safe bet, but will take some time and level of participation to play out. You should first experiment on a subset of the process rather than end-to-end itself.

Rather than looking at it solely in terms of the sales KPIs on deal progression, acceleration or closings, also look for client satisfaction in specific areas (e.g., proposal quality, or access to expertise by the salesperson), and development of the sales team (re-use of sales enablement material, documenting & sharing customer pain points, broader collaboration and connection across internal expertise). In other words, you can discover much the social process improves in the classic sense, as well as in new areas over the traditional one.

What remains to be seen are the new Business Intelligence tools needed that gather information about your customized process. This again is an opportunity for SAP’s partners, to whom customization and integration is a standard aspect of deployment.

According to Mr. Patel, SAP is looking to two categories of developer partners. The first are the large scale IT systems integrators and business consulting groups such as the 60,000+ consultants of T-Systems Multimedia Solutions, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom . The second category is startups, such as social discovery and knowledge management developer, EnterpriseJungle.

I specifically asked Mr. Patel where SAP’s product development stops and where partners start. He responded, “I think we will actively continue to build Work Patterns. Our 60-member strong customer advisory group will guide us there. Our view is on what a typical persona requires. Partners can build the industry flavor…[and bring] domain expertise that SAP does not have. You will want to use Work Patterns, out of the box, as a springboard. This is where our partners then come in.”

As with much of social software, any organization will need to look at customizing it to their particular scenario. However, as Mr. Patel says, Work Patterns provides a springboard to launch ahead rather than starting your social processes from scratch. In addition, I look forward to seeing more focused versions and extensions from partners relevant to specific sectors and departmental functions.

Rawn Shah is an independent analyst and Chief Strategy Officer of Alynd, Inc., a social business startup, focused on re-envisioning how we manage our work commitments and processes.