Auto Groups Make New Hires Feel At Home On Day One

In my third year in college I was elected as the general secretary of the creative activities club. Once i was elected, I automatically was included in multiple student committees, invited to the director's annual dinner, the deans monthly meetings and so on. I was instantly part of all the right groups, met the right people and had a clear idea what is expected of me. All this happened without any specific effort from my part and without any significant effort from the President of the student's union. My university had a well oiled policy of introducing the new student secretaries to the right people and the right activities at the right time. I guess Universities have a lot of experience in welcoming new people and making them feel at home.

Unfortunately most business organizations today lack even the very basic policies and tools to on-board new employees, transferred employees and relocated employees. It is particularly pathetic when there is a merger or an acquisition.

SAP Jam has a seldom discussed feature called Auto Groups. This simple, yet powerful feature in the Enterprise edition of SAP Jam automatically adds employees old and new to select groups based on policies set by company administrators.

Auto Groups automatically adds new hires and transferred employees to select groups and makes them feel at home

The moment I say policy you may think that this is a cumbersome activity that will take a long time to implement and will cost a lot in consulting fees. That is not the case. I am one of the several company administrators of Jam at SAP. I have done this myself. It is a point and click activity that takes less than 5 minutes to complete. Administrators can test the waters with a few auto groups to check how it works for them before adding more groups.

For example a company administrator can create a group for people who were hired in the past 90 days in Palo Alto. Administrators can create any number of groups. The policies can be as open or as regulated as an organization wants it to be. I believe this is a very powerful feature that CIOs and HR leaders are going to love. It is going to empower people and make organizations more effective. 

After I posted this my colleague @jameslkelley shared his thoughts about how auto groups helped him when he came on board.

Recommendations Feature in SAP Jam Makes Us Productive

One of the questions that I always get asked by people who come to SAP HCM Exchange, the internal SAP Jam Group for HCM colleagues, is how will people know what content to look at first and whom to follow to get information on specific topics.

Since the release of SAP Jam internally for SAP and SuccessFactors Employees, I have been exploring it pretty closely to see how some of the new features can solve these real world problems that we were facing.

The recommendations feature in Jam has addressed this problem we were facing to a great extend. The algorithm acts a bit like a news paper editorial team that picks the most important and most popular news and puts it on the front page. However unlike the new paper editor, the importance of the content is determined by the popularity of the content and the relevance of the content to a particular individual.

Figure : Recommendations of people and content is posted on the top of the Feeds page.

Users can also go and see more recommendations where they can filter content by day, week and month.

Figure 2 : Recommendations page where the content can be filtered by day, week and month.

The SAP Jam team has taken a good first step towards making social media updates more manageable for users, particularly the new ones. I am sure that this feature is going to speedup Jam adoption and usage inside SAP.

You can read about all the features in the latest release of SAP Jam in Keith Hamrick's blog post.

Jam Can Engage People Across Multiple Legal Entities

SAP and SuccessFactors organizations function as two separate legal entities, even though people from both organizations work together closely. This has its pluses and minuses. On the plus side SuccessFactors retains its cloud DNA without a larger organization influencing the way it does businesses. On the downside, this keeps organizational systems including HR systems separate, which makes it difficult for people from each organization to quickly look up each other.

The SAP Jam team and the SAP IT team got together and brought both organizations together in SAP Jam. Today, even though the organizations run two different HR systems, we are able to look up each other and understand where the other person works, who they work with and what they do. This is not a hypothetical situation that Jam could be used for. This is a real world problem that Jam is solving for SAP and Successfactors today. Imagine this. The shared organizational information in Jam alone saves every SAP and Successfactors employee who works with each other about 15 minutes a day. Apart from the time savings, it also speeds up business execution and decision making.

It got me thinking that SAP Jam can play a very important role in companies that have multiple legal entities or country subsidiaries running multiple HR systems. The SAP Jam and IT teams even know how to bring this data together, how long it will take, how much will it cost to implement and what the Dos and Don't are. I am sure that our customers will find this useful.

SAP Jam Combines The Best Of Jam and Streamwork

SAP jam combines the best parts of SuccessFactors Jam for enterprise social networking, the SAP StreamWork application for social workflow and problem-solving as well as new capabilities. I am personally very thrilled about two of my favorite teams coming together. I got to see and use the new product in our internal production instance.

Today while I was working on one of my projects, I saw the link to a video where our Co-CEOs video talked about 2012 Q3 results. It was interesting to learn about the details without leaving the online workplace where I collaborate with most of my colleagues.

Here is another screenshot of how the updates page looks.
Apart from the standard updates, I also get nudged to look at popular content that is relevant for me, colleagues that I should follow and content that I might be interested in. Jam has been a smashing success for us internally at SAP and it is getting better by the day. Some of our best designers and engineering minds are behind the product.

SuccessFactors Jam Played an Important Role During The Merger

During SAP TechEd last week, I was invited to an analysts and influencers meeting with SAP's Co-CEO Bill McDermott. Vijay Vijayasankar, Associate partner from IBM and SAP Mentor asked Bill about the use of SuccessFactors applications inside SAP. I was not surprised when Bill singled out SuccessFactors Jam as the product that created the most impact inside SAP.

I had a ring side view of this unfolding in the weeks and months after SuccessFactors became an SAP Company. Email systems were not unified. We did not have access to each others networks. But every team inside the company, every individual for that matter, had the right to create a Jam group and invite anyone from either company to collaborate  share, create and decide. We took full advantage of that and executed with remarkable agility.

Two factors were key to the success of Jam usage inside SAP. The first one was that the product was in the cloud and was used without IT support. Second reason is the video creation and sharing tool in Jam.

I will recommend SuccessFactors Jam for this particular use case for all SAP Customers. I think every organization in the world will face M&A scenarios more often that before.

Here are some M&A statistics. Mergers and acquisitions increased 12 fold between 1985 and 2012. The total value of mergers and acquisitions in 2011 is $ 5 trillion.

A total of 43,000 M&A deals were announced in 2011. Although mergers and acquisitions slowed a bit in 2012, they remain a preferred way for organizations to attain growth.

Collaboration In Context Can Do Wonders To Your Life and Work

Texting is useful. In older model phones one always needs to set the context first. This is because older model phones do not present the message in context for the receiver. The message is simply presented in the order it was received and it was assumed that the receiver will know the context or figure out the context. This is inefficient and cumbersome.

Texting on the iPhone, on the other hand, is very simple, fast and fun. The iPhone makes people more efficient by organizing their messages as a conversation with a person rather than a series of random messages. In other words, the iPhone presents the context for both parties, so that simple text messages accomplish more than long conversations.

This is the case with any collaboration tool. When you provide collaboration tools in the context of a specific goal or activity, the tool makes collaboration not only efficient but also fun. This is what we have done with SAP Career OnDemand. We put the right collaboration tool at the hands of the right people in the context of their goals and activities.

Rather than present a blank collaboration space, where a person has to work hard to set the context, we present the context for all the right people so that a simple short conversation can accomplish much more that an elaborate process.

I explain this to every customer who asks me why they should use SAP Career OnDemand rather than a stand alone collaboration tool.

Enterprise Software Tools For People Should Focus On Connections, Sharing and Conversations

When I attended Columbia Business School in New York, my strategy professor, Bruce Greenwald, gave a reading assignment that was more than 500 pages long. My classmates and I wondered how he expects us to read everything overnight. Reading our mind, he explained that the purpose of overloading us with the reading assignment is to make everyone realize that no matter how smart and productive one is, he cannot finish the assignment with out working together with others, exchanging ideas and combining insight. He said that beyond a point, intelligence and personal productivity does not matter. What matters is one's ability to work with others to share knowledge, exchange ideas, combine insight and deliver results. This was an important lesson for me. I see a lot of parallels in the business world today. Technology has enabled a great amount of process efficiency and personal productivity. The next stage of competitive advantage is going to come from the ability of an organization's workers to share ideas, exchange knowledge and build things together to accomplish their common goals.

While designing Career OnDemand, my colleagues and I debated several features suggested by our co-innovation customers. We concluded that the primary purpose of Career OnDemand is not process automation or personal productivity. The primary purpose is to connect people and enable them to have a conversation in the context of their work. This understanding provided us with a framework to debate the design and defend the priority of features. 

Sometimes Efficiency Can Be Counterproductive

A few years back, I read about an Indian retail entrepreneur who wanted to bring western style shopping experience to the 350 million strong Indian middle class consumers. He put wide aisles in the store, arranged everything on shelves and labelled them clearly for people to shop efficiently and leave. His shop was a failure. People came for the novelty and left without buying much. So he invited a local retail expert and asked for help. The expert advised him to narrow the aisles, create artificial congestion in certain areas and, put items on the floor deliberately without labeling them. The entrepreneur followed the advise and his sales went up. His business thrived.

He was puzzled but learned an important lesson. Efficiency is not everything. Some times you have to slow things down, let people stumble into each other, create an opportunity for them to connect, have a conversation, exchange ideas and thoughts and enjoy being part of a community.

We followed some of these principles while designing Career OnDemand. Early on, @enricgili and I realized that we are not building a personal productivity tool for individuals. We were not automating a process that is inefficient. Instead we are building a tool to enable people connect with each other and have a conversation about the things that matter to them at work.

User Attrition: Another Reason Why Collaboration Should Be At The Core Of Business Software

A few months back I argued that collaboration should be at the core of enterprise software, not at the periphery.

Today I had dinner with a friend who runs a enterprise software consulting company. He mentioned that, less than 40% of people who are required to use the Supply Chain Management software actually use it. The remaining 60% simple make up their won processes using various collaboration tools such as excel and email conversations.

He mentioned that if only the software were a bit flexible and allowed people to have a short conversation or share a document in the context of their current task, the usage will be significantly high. This is another reason why collaboration should be at the core of every business application.

People Centric, Collaboration In Context and Mobile First

I am working with several brilliant colleagues on the next generation of people management applications at SAP. After talking to hundreds of people, and tens of thought leaders and customers we have distilled out principles for the next generation of people managements apps to three things.

• People Centric
• Networking and Collaboration in context
• Insight Everywhere
• Mobile First

People centric thinking puts the person first and process next. We realized that, but for some special cases, meeting the needs of a person and providing instant value for a person is more important than ensuring the integrity of a process. While we will strive to ensure the integrity of all processes, we will address the needs of the person first and make our tools useful for the person and make it work the way they work, when they want it and where they want it.

Collaboration In Context brings collaboration to the context of the person rather than ask the person to take the context to a separate collaboration space. We decided to bring the most appropriate collaboration tools to the context of the work as and when required.

Mobile first: As part of our research we learned than it is matter of a couple of years before majority of access to business software will be from mobile devices. So we start our design process now-a-days by thinking mobile first. 

If you like our thinking and would like to join us in Palo Alto, please let us know. We are looking for people like you. Let's build disruptive people management tools for the idea driven economy.

My First Thoughts On Salesforce Chatter

I just signed up for Chatter, the collaboration tool from Salesforce.com. It looks simple and neat.

Sign Up Process
I like the simplicity of the signup process. Like Yammer, Chatter requires you to signup with your work email address. There is hardly any hurdle for anyone to create an account with Chatter.

Building The Network
Inviting colleagues to join is easy. Click on the "Invite Coworkers" button and type the email of the person you want to invite. The network is everyone in your company. That might not be true. Everyone in my company is not my network. My network is the people I work with and trust. I wonder how that will be addressed.

Groups Feature
I can create a group. I wonder how this might work on a day-to-day basis. Will I end up creating groups for each and everything I do or will I just create a few groups. Time will tell.

Main Features
The main areas of Chatter are Updates, Profile, People, Groups and Files.

Updates: All the updates from things and people you follow.
Profile: Just my name and email for now.
People: everyone one who shares the same company email.
Groups: I have to start a group
Files: All my files

I noticed that Chatter is giving documents the same level of importance as people. I wonder why. These are my first observations. I plan to expand this post as and when I explore more.

SAP Streamwork Enterprise Edition Team

My employer SAP, rolled out SAP Streamwork Enterprise Edition internally. We are the first customers of our own product. I am writing this post, not to talk about the features of the product but to tell everyone about the team that builds the product.

The Streamwork team is one of the most agile teams I have seen in my career. I have admired what they do from a distance for many months now. Last week I got to experience their skill and customer orientation first hand.

I liked Streamwork so much that I purchased Streamwork last year as an individual by paying my own money before the enterprise roll out. When the enterprise edition was rolled out, I faced some issues with the conversion and David Brockington and Ingrid Duquenoy-Bernaudin, from the product team helped me resolve it efficiently, even though it was a sticky problem that only one user faced.

The Streamwork team is also releasing mobile versions for the iPhone, Blackberry and Android. They asked me for my feedback and I have shared my thoughts about thinking-mobile-first with them.

Analysts and current users may have their own thoughts about the product and its adoption. Since I am an SAP employee, I am not going to comment on that.

But the most important thing is that you will be in good hands when you use Streamwork. Since it is an OnDemand product built by a very capable, knowledgeable, customer-oriented and agile team, I am confident that the product will evolve quickly in response to customer feedback and become integral to your collaboration infrastructure.

Build 8, Building 18 and The People Centric SAP OnDemand Team

When I started managing SAP Enterprise Learning, I used to work out of building 8 in Walldorf, which is a bit like the Escher stairs painting. When you walk to a meeting, you could easily get lost and spend a good 15 minutes finding the room. Corridors will suddenly go down for no apparent reason, doors will open to unexpected places and confuse you. The building is so because that is where SAP started small in Walldorf more than 35 years ago. The building was expanded slowly as the company became big.

On the other hand, the new buildings in Walldorf are star shaped. All the necessary amenities such as coffee, restrooms, water, stairs, elevators, and smoking rooms are in the middle of the building. This architecture ensures that people run into each other unplanned, several times a day. When my colleagues walk into the center of the building they can even glance up or down and see colleagues working in other floors.

Building 18, where the SAP OnDemand team works, enables chance encounters and exchange of ideas

Last week I worked from both buildings and I could not help but notice the difference in work atmosphere. I almost felt like it reflected the realization that products today are a collection of ideas and not a result of material processing on an assembly line.

The SAP OnDemand team of product managers, developers and co-innovation people work from building 18. The building enables, and I hope nurtures, the people centric design thinking of the SAP OnDemand team.

Like the architects of building 18, the product design and development teams at SAP are putting people and collaboration at the core of business applications. These are interesting and changing times. Stay tuned.

The Architecture Of Your Product Needs To Enable The Movement Of Ideas, Not The Movement Of Documents

When I work with my colleagues in Walldorf, Germany, I work from Building 18, which is called the star building, because of its shape. The building is relatively new. Its star shaped architecture enables many chance encounters and micro discussions, which is where many meaningful decisions are taken at SAP.

The bathrooms, coffee, water, discussion tables, smoking room and meeting rooms are all in the middle of the star. So those who need to use the bathroom, drink coffee or water, need a table to chat or smoke must walk to the center of the star. When we we do this we invariably run into a few colleagues with whom we need to talk. There are many tables and chairs nearby to facilitate a quick conversation where ideas are exchanged and decisions are taken.

This change in office architecture has happened in recognition of the fact that most products today are an assembly of individual ideas. The more the interactions, the better the ideas get. The goal of most workplaces in the developed world today is not to move material from one workstation to another workstation as quickly as possible. Instead the goal is to move ideas from one person to another as efficiently as possible.

Designers of enterprise software need to recognize this change in the nature of work. Let us design enterprise software that is a virtual version of the star building at SAP and enable chance encounters of people as many times as possible in a day. Let's build collaboration into the core architecture of the products we design. Let us move ideas from person to person rather than documents from server to server.

Collaboration, Like Spices, Is Worthless When It Stands Alone

More than a decade ago, Lotus and SharePoint pioneered content centric collaboration.  IBM describes Lotus Notes software as an "integrated desktop client option for accessing business e-mail, calendars and applications. Microsoft SharePoint is a family of software products developed by Microsoft for collaboration, file sharing and web publishing. Microsoft SharePoint on its own was a little more than a visual FTP site, unless it was integrated with other business applications using considerable custom development.

Since then, we have moved away from a web of pages to a web of people. Collaboration is moving from being document centric to being people centric.

However, even today, several providers are selling collaboration tools by saying that they have all the right Web 2.0 ingredients such as a wiki, a blogging tool, a discussion tool, a micro-blogging tool, tagging of documents, RSS feeds, profile and the ability to friend or follow people. They also add take pains to point out that they have a feature like twitter, feature like Wikipedia, feature like Linked In, feature like Digg, a feature like Facebook and a feature like Stumbled Upon.

If something else becomes popular tomorrow, the race will be on to add that feature as well, so that they can check off the box with analysts and customer RFPs, which the vendors themselves helped to write. Such providers are selling these tools to IT departments saying that these tools will somehow improve collaboration within the company. Even top software analysts are getting carried away by the available ingredients rather then the overall ability of the software to make a person perform better. 

I think makers, analysts and buyers of such standalone collaboration software are missing the point. Collaboration, like spices used to add flavor to food, must be used to enhance the value of day-to-day work, and even make the work interesting. Collaboration tools without context is a bit like households buying a lot of spices, keeping them in the pantry and hoping that somehow those spices will enhance the flavor of the food they are cooking in the kitchen. If, all it take it takes to serve lip smacking food is to get a bunch of spices and dump them together, every Indian restaurant in the US and Europe should be serving very tasty food. You and I know that, it is not so. So why do you think, this approach is going to work for collaboration.

Look for software and solutions that put people and collaboration at the core, not at the periphery of work. If you do not find such tools today, insist on them. It is worth the wait.

Business Apps Need Names And Faces. Not More Buttons and Text Fields

A few months back, I was interviewed by my company's magazine and I spoke to them about my thoughts on the mobile industry and how it is changing the world in profound ways. I am very sure that hardly anyone read  what I had to say. I rarely pick up the inhouse company magazine and read it. However, when the magazine was published, I went and picked up a copy and turned the pages to look for the article and my picture in the article.

If you think this is odd, I have another story for you. About 19 years back I won a product design award from the LG Group of Korea and they invited me over to Seoul for the award ceremony. A local Korean magazine interviewed me and put my picture on page 75 of the magazine. I have no idea what they wrote because I do not know Korean. But I still have a copy of that magazine with me at home.

This is human nature. We like to see our names and pictures on print or online. We also like to see the names and pictures of people around us and find out what they are up to. This human behavior is exploited successfully by local newspapers such as the Daily Record published out of Dunn, North Carolina. I read, in the book Made to Stick, about the strategy of the publisher of Dunn Daily Record. He insists on having enough names and photographs of local people published in the paper everyday to ensure that people buy the paper and read about themselves and people they know. The circulation of The daily Record is 110% in Dunn. In fact, the publisher argues that if he prints the entire town's telephone directory in the paper, everyone in town will buy and read the paper to ensure that their name and number is printed right.

This was an Aha! moment for my enterprise-software-designer-brain.  I understood why everyone I interviewed in the past two years asks me for a facebook-like interface for their, otherwise mundane, applications. If their names and faces are in the page, they will go there, even if the information on the page is as boring as a telephone directory listing.

I suspect that putting names and faces in every possible, and appropriate, context is an effective way to put collaboration at the core of enterprise business applications and encourage participation. What do you think?  Let me know.

Now-A-Days, We Live In Isolation and Socialize At Work

Decades ago during the advent of the industrial age, we lived in close quarters and socialized with people in our community. We were forced to, because we had to walk out to buy things, do the laundry, get the kids, have a coffee, shop etc.

At work, we did our part in the assembly line, did not talk to anyone much during work hours and went home. Our bosses kept an eye on us to ensure that we did not engage in unnecessary chatter.

Now-a-days, we live in isolation in assembly line houses, drive straight out of our garages. We have scheduled time everday with family members. We politely nod at our neighbours because we forget their names. 

At work, we collaborate with others to satisfy our need to socialize. We demand open offices, arrange off-sites to get to know each other, have workshops to generate ideas, go for community service together, set up war rooms to deliver products faster, spend days together at conferences, hours together at airports and planes and call each other to handle exceptions.

Are you still not convinced that people and collaboration should be at the core of business software?

If You Want To Blog And Have Starting Trouble, Try Quora

My friend and colleague @Chirag_Mehta introduced Quora to me and explained that it is reverse blogging. I asked him what that means and he explained that rather than pick topics to write on, a person can look at the questions people are asking and write detailed answers, almost like a blog post, in areas where they have expertise and credibility. For example, Reed hastings the CEO of NetFlix answers questions about NetFlix strategy and financials. He is  obviously a credible source and people pay attention.

Since then I have suggested Quora to some colleagues who wanted to start writing on the topics where they have expertise. They like it. Give it a try. Quora.com

People I Follow To Keep Up With The Bleeding Edge Of Enterprise Collaboration

Josh Bernoff @JBernoff
Why: Josh always gives examples and talks about real world examples, and even mentions the failure of his earlier case studies. He co-authored two of the seminal books. Groundswell and Empowered. Josh also has deep insight into mobile strategy for businesses. He believes that all employee needs to be empowered with Web 2.0 technologies as well. Not just select customer facing folks.

Andrew McAfee @amcafee
Why? He coined the term Enterprise 2.0. Although some thought leaders have stopped using the word Enterprise 2.0.

Jeremiah Oywang @jowyang
Why? He is a doer. He shares his learnings at customer meetings like a fire hose and has a blog on web strategy where he posts his thoughts routinely. I subscribe to his blog. Not every post is useful for people focused on enterprise collaboration. But most are.

Charlene Li @charleneli
Why? She coauthored Groundswell and authored Open Leadership. Charlene does not share via blog and twitter as much as Jeremiah. May be because she is busy building a business.

Am I missing someone obvious. Any more suggestions?

I did not include the magazines and organizations I follow.

Like Exercise In Daily Life, Collaboration Tools Should Be Embedded Into the Work Day

The Enterprise 2.0 conference is going on in San Jose and twitter is thick with talk about collaboration. I read about and saw the demos of several very well done collaboration tools that enable people-to-people conversation and document centric collaboration. Many of them claim to have one or more integration points with other business tools. This is very good and I am sure they worked hard to design and build these tools.

But this seems like how we treat exercise in our life. We are very busy with our work and life. So much so that our cholesterol and blood sugar levels have affected out ability to work. Our doctor advises us to exercise for 30 minutes a day. So we drive to the closest 24 hour fitness center, use the escalator to get to our tread mill fast and spend 30 minutes on the tread mill.  Some day we miss it or are too tired to do it, because we treat it like one more necessary evil.


We clearly know that there is something wrong with the picture above. Many communities and workplaces in the world such as my office are encouraging people to take the stairs, and build exercise into the fabric of their daily life.

Let me compare collaboration with exercise. As i pointed out in a previous post, collaboration had become the main framework of how we work today. Collaboration is not a necessary evil. It is not just what the Facebook generation does. It is how people from all generations get work done today.

Collaboration tools should enable people to embrace this fundamental shift in the work place. Collaboration tools should be embedded in the fabric of every day work.  The next generation systems must start with people-to-people collaboration tools and build business apps around them. The approach should not be to build stand-alone collaboration tools and boast about one or more integration points.