Oct 5th, turned out to become an extremely eventful day at San Francisco’s Oracle Open World.

It started with quite an ugly twitter battle fueled by the incident by Oracle’s Larry J Elison, cancelling Mark Benioff’s (SFDC) Keynote address. Whatever, be the reason, it certainly ended to be an ugly incident, with counter punches from Benioff and plenty of punches from Larry during his keynote. Added to this, Benioff, decided to address the delegates inviting them to a nearby hotel – St Regis Ame – to the convention.

Ofcourse, Benioff’s session, ran to packed houses, and those who could not make it were well compensated with a Ipod shuffle voucher from Salesforce. Ofcourse, one cannot forget the huge traffic this incident gennerated through the Twitter pipe.

All in all, I think it took away precious time from focusing on the key purpose of these conventions – Technology and how it can help business.

Then ofcourse as Larry was giving a very boring demo of his newly announced Oracle Social Network, and as people were walking out of the auditorium in swarms, we got the first whiff of the sad and bad news of the passing away of Steve Jobs.

To me personally, it meant that we lost the finest true innovator of this century, and we won’t possibly see one for atleast another 20 years to come. He was a legend in making things simple, especially from the user perspective. Yes, indeed… we lost a great man. A man who will be remembered as someone who was daring enough to make changes, for he believed in them.

All the twitter streams that was highlighting Larry’s digs at SFDC, stopped and was replaced by tweets of reverence of the Apple visionary Steve. I am sure Apple, will never be the same again, as I truly believe the loss is profound.

But in all this sadness, earlier to this, at the Oracle Open World event we did have some good keynotes and some interesting perspectives. Cisco’s John Chambers gave quite a visionary speech, even though the story was woven around Cisco.

John talked about 4 foundational priorities;

1. Leadership in core business of routing,
2. Collaboration,
3. Data center/virtualization, and
4. Video.

Certainly a great speaker.

Other Highlights;

Larry: Oracle cloud is based on open standards and Fusion apps will be available on cloud

Larry: Oracle cloud is interoperable with on premise and other clouds

Larry: Announced Oracle Public Cloud with CRM, HCM, ERP also covering a standards -based Platform as a service that included Data, Database etc.

Nordstrom: talked about 3 elements of Demand – Create Demand, Influence Demand & Fulfill demand. Thats what they seem to be focusing on.

Infosys demoed Mobility Use Cases in the areas of Healthcare, Banking,Cable TV on Ipad and mBrochure

Nordstrom: Talked about an application they use that makes reccomendations on complimentary items to customers who try on garments in a dressing room. the idea, is matching accessories to dress, an Upsell Strategy.

To summarize Social & Digital is now mainstream.

To conclude, a very eventful day here at the Bay area. started with speculation and war of words between two IT industry Titans and ended with a loss of the greatest innovator of our times.

Those who watched the Marc Benioff keynote today, I am sure came out with some important learnings. At least I did, and will try to list them for you.

1. Reinvent Yourself Always

I think when you attend #Dreamforce, year after year, you begin to understand and respect great visionary leaders like Marc #Benioff. You see how they don’t sit on their laurels but constantly reinvent themselves.

Marc grew his company as a cloud company. He was possibly at that time far ahead of anyone else in thinking of models that focus on simplification, pay as you use and scalable models.

Today, cloud is a phenomena, a business model that’s changing both the private, public and government enterprises.

So, did he sit on his laurels. Certainly not, if you see Dreamforce 2011 was all about reinvention of not just all enterprises, but included his too. He talked about companies like his bridging the social divide by creating a Social Enterprise, far beyond being just a cloud company.

Indeed, with great leaders, come the ability to administer great changes.

2. Evaluate new platforms

The acquisition of #Radian6 in the social space, #Heroku in the platform space all provides the future of how sales, marketing and service will embed complete sociability, collaboration and real time mobile connectivity.

This will redefine the business models many enterprises will seek to implement using these technologies.

3. Develop a Digital Agenda

Listening to speakers like #Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts, the VP of European Commision Neelie Kroes, you can see that the next critical task in every enterprise #CEO / #CIO agenda will be the development of the enterprise #Digital #Agenda.

Does your company have one? No, well get back to your planning boards and create one for the coming 2012, or you could be left behind.

4. Adopt the Future Of Work framework

Lastly, all the messages points out to something we at Cognizant believe has already happened – the future of work is NOW.

Future of Work is all about adopting #Cloud platforms, #Virtualization of people, processes, technology and the way work will be performed through #collaboration, #sharing and #globalization. It’s all about getting work done where skills exist, in places around the world that are more cost effective and at the time needed?

This is the formula to adopt to make your enterprises agile and ensure it’s success in the future.

#Cognizant’s, Future of Work framework and models, along with Salesforce cloud based technology and platforms can accelerate this change and adoption across the enterprise.

Certainly, the takeaways were plenty, listening to the two keynotes of today.

If you follow the twitters #DF11 it seems that Dreamforce will break not only its own record but also the record of Oracle in attracting the biggest draw of attendees with over 42000 registered. Even though Salesforce has moved beyond CRM with its Force.com platform, Jigsaw product and the acquisition of Radian6, I think it is now truly engaging itself into becoming a full fledged enterprise play.

I see from the agenda that there is lots of importance given to other areas that are criical to defining Customer Experience using Cloud.

For one, I will be representing Cognizant and speaking to introduce the first truly cloud solution for Master Data Management (MDM) or the Customer Cloud to be more specific. I also see many sessions relating to Data Management and am sure Salesforce products like Jigsaw will have lots more to add this year.

Digital Marketing in the form of Mobility, Social Media, and even Gamification, seems to have taken a big part in this years Cloud event, judging by the number of sponsors, sessions and chatters touting products and services in these areas.

It will be interesting to see the adoption of cloud by the enterprises though. One analysis I see is that the growth of SFDC being in the percentile range of 30′s, does not seem proportional to the hype it seems to have created over the adoption of cloud solutions. There is no doubt that cloud solutions provide greater simplification, faster adoption and quicker ROI, due to its pay per use scale up or down models, but where is the large scale migration to the cloud?

I don’t believe that there will be large scale migration. I expect enterprises to cautiously adopt cloud solutions on a piece meal basis, starting small, and scaling as they get comfortable with te model.

So, it will be interesting to see what the Dreamforce show brings out this year, am certainly looking forward to meet many of my industry friends and network.

In fact, I have started a group for registered users in the ares of Master Data and Social Media ( Digital Channels and Social CRM) to facilitate collaboration and sharing.

I will likely summarize the key events or products that triggered my interest. Foe starters, I am keenly interested in the following areas;

1. The direction taken by Salesforce.com towards its newly acquired Social CRM platform – Radian6
2. Bunchball’s gamification product announcement on Salesforce platform
3. Eric Schmidt – Google’s Executive Chairman’s keynote speech, and not to forget
4. Opening Keynote by Marc Benioff’s keynote

Will report back soon.

David Brendan is a Sr Contributing Editor on TMC net.

http://bit.ly/fKOTe0

I am happy to see that this had a very good response and I thank my friends, readers and supportes who responded to me after reading this interview.

This blog provides a simple 6 step process that organisations can adopt, in order to harness the benefits of the various communities and becoming social.

Step 1: Identify the communities you wish to target initially

Choosing which community an enterprise wants to target first, would realy depend on the type of the enterprise. For example a large insurance firm with thousands of agents employed, or a large retail bank with thousands of employees in their branches would greatly benefit if their employees are social. Companies more focused on customers, with much fewer employees should focus on the customer community, while marketing organizations, and companies who are wanting brand visibility should target consumers and external communities initially.

Step 2: Define the Social Intent also known as Social Objectives

Unlike traditional enterprise initiatives (such as ERP or CRM), when you implement programs relating to social communities it is important to understand that Intent/Objective precedes strategy.

For example for the customer community, one may have ‘Increasing Revenue’ as the Social Intent. Similarly if you are focusing on the employee community, ‘Collaboration’ or ‘Innovation’ could be the Social Intent. Most organizations that are targeting external communities and consumers have ‘Brand Management’ as the Social Intent

Step 3: Identify Social Use Cases

Before we get into this, lets understand or define what are Social Use Cases. For simplicity, lets define these as elements that help meeting the identified Social Intent.

For ex: If we are targeting the customer for becoming social, and our Social Intent was ‘Product Innovation’, then you can attain insights relating to what features your customer base wants from the community through a number of smaller projects or initiatives. In this case a partial list would comprise of;

- Blogs

- Forums

- Listening to conversations & text mining

Each of these can constitute a Social Use Case that ensures that the Social intent for Customer Product Innovation is supported.

Step 4: Build your Social CRM strategy and road map

Having clearly defined the social use cases, you are now in a position to map out your Social CRM strategy and build your road map.  The Social CRM Strategy defines the social organization structure, the channels you will engage,the hardware and software platforms you will use, risk mitigation plan and metrics to measure the effectiveness of your strategy. In many cases it will also map out your integration plan to existing back end systems.

Step 5: Communicate, train your team and implement the strategy

Obviously, this is the most critical element to being successful in becoming a social enterprise. It is important to build up the hype as you implement your plan. Communicate aggressively the benefits, create an aura of excitement around this program, have senior executives participate and lead these initiatives, by blogging or emailing the importance. Do not underestimate the importance of training your team and anyone who will come into contact due to this social program being implemented.

Identify all members, which could include, CSR’s from your contact center, legal, HR any and everyone who could be remotely connected with this program and have them trained.

Start with a pilot set of users. This will help streamline communications, resolve user adoption issues, and overall health-check your initiative, before it gets widespread.

Finally communicate your successes, however small they may be. Keep the excitement going.

Step 6: Expand

Once this initiative is operational expand to adding additional social use cases and/or expand to add other community groups mentioned in step 1.

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This blog was first published at this site wwwdileepsri.com and at syndicated at www.customethink.com, where it was rated amongst the top posts for that week.

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Social Media is changing the very fabric of organizations, their communications and the way their consumers interact with them. Enterprise sociability is today an important criteria for job satisfaction amongst the current generation of job seekers. To add to this customers and consumers are seeking and making decisions through communities.

For an enterprise to be social they need to take a 360 degree view to being social. This means one can create social objectives to reach out to 3 categories that constitute their universe.

Employee Community – enterprises need to encourage employee communities to meet social objectives that relate to collaboration, innovation, training and knowledge management.

Customer Community – where enterprises can listen to conversations and get ideas for improvement along with the ability to increase sales, improve service and cross sell / up sell to their customer base.

Consumers and External Communities – These are prospects and users who have needs for products or services that are being produced, but are not being serviced by competitive brands. Similarly external communities exist where conversations are taking place on their competitors products alongside theirs.

So, the first step is for organizations to decide on the Social Intent. This should be followed with a plan and  roadmap for being social across all these three categories of communities.