VoloMetrix Knows What You’re Doing at Work

VoloMetrix_Screenshot_ITDashboard

There’s been a gaping hole in the enterprise market for someone to come along and start identifying what’s actually happening within the corporate “people” network.  Once the company can see its aggregate collaboration data, it can make intelligent tweaks to improve productivity and apply strategic management thinking on what to do – and more importantly – to stop doing.

At first blush, this product will freak you out a little with the “creepy” factor, but the more you know, the more you realize it’s harmless and can actually be supremely beneficial – for management and individuals alike.

I’ve written numerous times about how the answer isn’t blowing in the wind; the answer is in the network. Social network analysis is the next frontier in understanding how companies function, and how they suffer under dysfunction.  VoloMetrix is the first company I’ve come across that has a commercial offering for the enterprise that begins to get at this rich source of actionable data.

The company was launched in early 2011 by Ryan Fuller who spent time at Cognos and years as a management consultant at  Bain & Co.  He saw what was missing in the market was an easy way to look at the key relationships in the business (employees, customer, suppliers, etc.) and get a realtime view of collaboration and connections, so you could analyze patterns in a meaningful way. Once you have the data on what’s going on inside of the organization, it’s eye-opening. Fuller says one of his clients discovered 5 out of the top 20 meetings the company held involved a leading enterprise software vendor. Overall, the way the relationship was managed with the vendor cost the company about $20M per year.  Another client analyzed its conversations with one of its supply chain partners and found that over 1,200 different individuals in the company racked up over 25K hours/quarter dealing with the partner.

Today, VoloMetrix only analyzes corporate email, IM, and calendaring, but they’ve been in contact with social collaboration platform vendors, and incorporating internal social networks is on the roadmap for the platform. Fuller sees VoloMetrix as a good complement to social collaboration platform vendors because they can pin-point with accuracy an ROI for the vendor in “before and after” quantitative terms (new relationships, reduction in email, increased productivity, etc.).

So is this the NSA of the enterprise?  Maybe. Yet, truthfully, every corporate employer owns your data and has the right to track you on the job with very few exceptions (at least in the US).  But, like the NSA, VoloMetrix claims it’s only capturing header data or metadata (to/from, date) and aggregates it to look at larger trends for analysis.  “We’re not reading your email,” Fuller says.  The data is mapped to the org chart, but it’s anonymized to show activity and relationships.  He says one of his clients let the employees opt-out if they were uncomfortable, but only under 3% took them up on it.  On the flipside, the data works in an employee’s favor too when you’ve been telling your boss for weeks you’ve been spinning your wheels talking to department X and never making any progress.  Now you have evidence to back up your frustration.  No one wants to waste their time at work, and VoloMetrix is a time-waster’s best friend in that it will put dollars against that wasted time.

I’m keeping my eye on this startup.  They’re a SaaS-based enterprise play in a very hot space with virtually no competitors that I have seen.  If I’m wrong about that, let me know in the comments.  If I have any advice for the young company it would probably be this: borrow a binder and get a woman on your management team.

Update: Today, the VoloMetrix site  has two women directors on its about page.  My oversight.  This morning I was told I had made a mistake, that the women were on the page and I missed it.  I very rarely make mistakes like this, so my EI friend @jonerp ran a quick indexed cached page from July 21.  No women in sight.  Shame, shame, shame.  Something bad made worse. 

Come Shake your Cosmic Thing in Atlanta this Fall

Gandhi-quotes-In-a-gentle-way-you-can-shake-the-world.-300x300In my new role as social mercenary while I work on the startup, I’ve been doing some work for my good friend, Robin Carey, founder of Social Media Today (SMT).  Robin is one of the key influentials who served as an early catalyst to introduce the social phenomenon to the business world. SMT is a disruptive publishing and community hybrid that has delivered the right mix of thought leadership, exposure, brand value, and community engagement to thousands of early adopters worldwide.   SMT launched in 2007 and as chiefly a new media online enterprise, Robin has always avoided the temptation to get into the conference game.  That changed last fall when Blogworld approached her about doing a conference.  Blogworld’s New Media expo draws thousands to its flagship event in Las Vegas.

What I love about Robin is that she sees the whole market – the macro market – for social’s total potential for impact on a 21st-Century business.  Where she could easily be content to stay sequestered in the profitable social media marketing large chunk of the social pie, she has never lost sight of what social can do internally for an enterprise.  Robin credits her heroes as the inspiration for the conference, but she is a hero to many of us who are thankful she has never let go of that vision.

Robin chose another one of my good friends, Maggie Fox, to serve as MC and content producer for the event.  Maggie too has always been a champion for seeing the larger possibilities in the market beyond social media marketing and serves as a strategic advisor to large companies trying to navigate the social possibilities of a changing world.  She is focusing the conference agenda around issues that demonstrate how social is developing new models and changing traditional roles for individuals and brands.

So, when is this fabulous conference?  The Social Shake-up Conference will be held September 15-17 in Atlanta, GA.  The tracks are already established, and the sessions are getting filled in quickly.  Although you’ll see a lot of familiar faces in the speaker list for Shake-up, you’re going to be introduced to some new, dynamic speakers too.  The star opening keynote will be Porter Gale, who recently published, “Your Network is your Net Worth.”  I’ve heard she is a fantastic speaker.

In the back channels on the social web, I’ve been hearing a lot of grousing about how there is a hole in the market for a great conference. So many of us who’ve been at this for a while recall the magic that happened when people who knew each other really well online met for the first time in person at an industry conference.   It has always served as a good lesson behind the hoopla that powers the social web that real relationships are forged and forever grounded in the chemistry and bonding of a face-to-face encounter.  I’m looking forward to attending this conference and helping Maggie and Robin in every way I can.  BTW, this is not a conference where you will see a pathetic dearth of women speakers.  Women have been strong voices in the social revolution.  Come celebrate with us in Atlanta.

Early bird registration ends this week, July 5.  There are blogger press passes for influentials too, so just reach out, and I’ll make sure to hook you up.

Bonus question: who can identify the obscure B-52s reference in this post?  

 

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Mad Men and the UNIX Wars

Unix Wars

I’ve been cleaning out my closets and finding some real gems.  I came across my old ad portfolio a few days ago.

With all the increasing tension between transparency and privacy and the role of Internet freedoms, it’s hard to believe there was once a time not too long ago that computers didn’t “talk” to each other.  So-called “closed systems” enabled large manufacturers to secure unfair advantage in the market for hardware, software, and services.  Entire walled garden ecosystems surrounded the largest technology vendors in the world.  The UNIX operating system changed all that.  I remember when the  “UNIX Wars” cropped up when I was working with AT&T on the company’s (ill-fated) foray into the computer market.  I was the liaison between the client, our account team, and our creatives at Ogilvy & Mather to explain the significance of UNIX to, well, the world. (Lucky me!)  I recall we had about a million dollar media budget (in ’88 dollars) to brand AT&T’s special version of UNIX: System V.

These were the days pre-Internet where influence and power had to be levied with massive spend.  AT&T could afford it at the time.  We ran this 1988 full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and the Washington Post to flex muscle in the negotiations AT&T was having with its ecosystem and to position it against its rivals.  There’s a great narrative for all you deeply geeky readers on what happened behind the scenes by Christopher Kelty in his book, “Two Bigs – The Cultural Significance of Free Software.”

I’m an avid Mad Men fan.  As I watch the series, I wonder if it will approach the period of time I was in advertising (the 80s). When I joined the advertising world, computer advertising was the #3 spending category.  IBM launched the PC in 1981 and it created a bonanza of new media spend for large agencies, as well as publishing media empires that seized the opportunity to track the industry and attract the newly minted print dollars.

Who remembers the thump of PC Magazine in its heyday?

 

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“I just want to say one word to you. Just one word…” Elastics

nickMy daughter is graduating college next week, and I’ve been thinking about all the advice this next generation will get from relatives and friends.  In the 60s, Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate) received well-intentioned advice from Mr. McGuire, a family friend, to pursue the plastics industry.  Plastics and U.S. manufacturing conjure up an image of the industrial age economy we once knew.  Well, 45 years later, all that has changed.  Plastic is out and “elastic” is in.

I caught up with my former colleague Nick Vitalari yesterday at the third annual Austin IT Symposium.  Nick and Hadyn Shaughnessey who covers innovation for Forbes wrote, The Elastic Enterprise: the New Manifesto for Business Revolution.  The book is well-researched with conclusions drawn from over 80 interviews with leading companies practicing open, elastic strategies. Essentially, the books lays out how enterprises will have to re-conceive “how we scale and operate businesses in the 21st Century.”  Based on five core “dynamics,”  the book simplifies and makes crystal clear how large enterprises will need to transform.  The book is a quick read, highly accessible and chock full of great examples. Pick it up for a flight or download it to your favorite e-reader.

The Symposium agenda was centered around the issues CIOs need to understand to embrace the Elastic Enterprise. A special thanks to my friend Keri Pearlson and the Austin SIM chapter for an invite to the event.

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Crushpath Reboots the Pitch

I caught up with Sam Lawrence just before SXSW to hear about his latest milestone with the company he founded in 2011, Crushpath.  Readers of this blog will remember Sam as the first highly visible CMO for Jive Software.  Sam’s Go Big Always blog defined the category for social software back in ’09.  Sam’s contribution was always edgy, always provocative, and always right.  There were few in our space that had the voice, influence, and insight Sam had early on.  I’ve missed him over the years, and am really happy to see him back with this amazing new offering.  I told Sam on the phone I simply could not be objective about this product because I frigg’n love it.  Even though I was a Sam fan already, I’m an even bigger Crushpath fan.

What is Crushpath?  As usual, Sam says it best:

Crushpath gives people a way to pitch their product, service, idea, or event with a simple, one page website that grabs the attention and captures leads in a way that email can’t. Your pitch is searchable, shareable, and social, so you get tons of eyeballs on it and are notified every time someone is interested. Then, keep track of your business relationships with a chronological play by play of all activity as it’s happening.

Sam gave me a trial account to experiment with, so I’ve begun building a few pitch sites to see how it works.  The elegance of the user interface and drop-dead-simple design is what does it for me.  Until I spoke to Sam, I didn’t realize Matt Wilkinson was a co-founder.  Matt led product development for another product I absolutely love: Socialcast.  So, that the product is simple to use, looks great, and has a lag time of about 15 minutes to usefulness does not surprise me, considering Matt’s track record with building great software.

But, really, what makes Crushpath brilliant is what it does.  It’s built on the philosophy that “everyone pitches.”  And this is where the company taps into a wellspring of need that has previously gone unanswered in the market.  The plethora of junky email marketing, CRM systems, cold-calls – younameit – that clutters up today’s marketing outreach is sorely in need of a dramatic improvement.  Crushpath cuts to the chase. It sums up what you’re selling and let’s you do that in a straight-forward, no nonsense way.  In the company’s latest announcement, Crushpath reduced its pricing to $9/mo. for a limited time.  At that price,  it’s the best investment you can make on the social web to get your story out and connect directly to your market.   Definitely check it out.  I’m sure you’ll love it as much as I do.

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Business Process 21C: The Jackhammer Tales

suitOver the past few months I’ve begun to reflect upon how I arrived here at the intersection of process and innovation in the Enterprise.  It occurred to me that everything I learned as a researcher, a writer, and an industry observer in the services provider space  (my pre-Internet career) now had great bearing on what I was seeing in the Enterprise as a result of the pace of disruptive technologies impacting the market.  The question that kept re-emerging for me was: how are rigidly defined business processes that were hammered out in the 90s reconfiguring to adapt to better, faster, more efficient ways of meeting customer needs?  Even more puzzling is, if my friend Josh’s old joke is correct, “SAP is like pouring concrete into a company,” how are large enterprises dismantling foundational ERP systems to include disruptive technologies?  After all, no 21st Century business can stand to stay frozen in the past.  Even SAP itself is retooling to provide greater flexibility and real-time actions and insights with its HANA in-memory database and its JAM social platform.

This big question has been vexing me for a while, so I asked my friend and fellow Enterprise Irregular, Phil Fersht at HfS Research, if he’d be interested in an exploratory study to see how BPO providers and consultants are responding to new advances in mobile, social, the Internet of things– all new capabilities that were not present when the majority of institutional business processes were “cemented” into the Enterprise. I’ve seen evidence of several companies who’ve been introducing social, in particular, to provide greater value to customers.  Of course, some of the best examples are coming from platform vendors themselves such as this post, “Enterprise Social is about Business Process Redesign”  by CEO  at Socialtext.  But, I’ve seen other examples such as Deloitte’s work in this area explained in this post, “Social Reengineering by Design,” and even examples about how large consulting firms are changing their own internal processes as a result of new ways of working, as evidenced by this post, “Spark – taking Collaboration and Corporate Social Networking to a new Level at PwC.”   Luckily, Phil agreed this is an area definitely worth pursuing, so we’ve kicked the study off this week.  We’re compiling data and hope to publish results in the early May timeframe.

I’m really happy to be working in this area that combines my long history of covering the traditional outsourcing sector with my area of interest for this current iteration of my career in next generation technologies.  Phil has done an amazing job with HfS Research, too, so I’m proud to be contributing to their strong brand in the market.  HfS was recently named one of the leading analyst firms in a formidable field of competitors.  Last week, I paid a visit to my longtime business advisor Mort Meyersen, who is an icon in the outsourcing field having helped build EDS and then Perot Systems.  It feels good to be back among old friends, mashing up what I’ve been learning from new friends.

I will be working hard on this study for the next few months, but also working on the startup we announced a few weeks ago, Change Agents Worldwide.  So, busy, busy, but really having fun.  Hope to see some of you at SXSW, but I will be hunkered down and only getting out to a few of the evening events.  Please keep up with me on Foursquare if you’d like to connect while you’re here in Austin.