social | Kevin's Barnhouse

While to some the acronym, ‘GGW’ might conjure up beautiful visions of fancy tour buses traveling the country capturing everything in sight on video for the whole world to see (as long as you pay the $9.99 per DVD, or opt for the $19.99 for full-DVD collection, or get their online subscription for $9.95 per month — or whatever it costs), I have just witnessed a different version of ‘GGW’ that is anything but beautiful. In fact, ‘Governance Gone! Wild!’ is down-right scary!

I just attended several days of the Dreamforce 2012 conference in San Francisco and, as always, I was impressed with the innovation, which is clearly evident at these events. I was impressed with the creativity of all the Software as a Service (SaaS) applications available built upon the Force.com, heroku and/or other Salesforce platform services. There were apps for this, and apps for that, and apps that work with other apps, and integrated apps. In fact I’m on “app-overload” right now and tonight, instead of sweet sugar plums dancing through my head, I will most likely have a nightmare about all the possible lack of governance issues that are not being addressed in this quickly-evolving ‘cloud’ environment. It’s truly like the Wild West!

This is not to say that these SaaS application vendors have overlooked governance issues completely. In fact I suspect many of them take these items seriously and have built their respective solutions accordingly. However, I can tell you what is an obvious generalization is the main pitch-points in these solutions is (1) easy user experience with a simple, familiar web-interface and (2) ability for organizations to self-manage or re-configure solutions without the need for costly professional services or software development. These are not bad pitch-points in the least but what I must say is that conversations seem to rarely dig too much deeper than the surface of some point-and-click functionality and a demonstration or two. I admire these vendors for their passion to solve very specific needs for enterprise customers and I’m invigorated with their energy to quickly have their Killer SaaS app deployed and being utilized by their customers to improve operational efficiency.

Yet, as I put myself in the shoes of the SaaS vendor the last thing I would want to do is possibly slow down the sales cycle by bringing up governance and organizational readiness topics such as policies, processes or people that wasn’t directly related to my particular technology. These topics are somewhat related to the technology but it’s more about the organizational readiness by the customers themselves. We must remember that these applications are promoting their solutions to enterprise organizations, not consumer. Therefore, I would like to give one specific example of what caused my “Governance Gone!” nightmare.

Wild!
As seen below in the photo below (not to the left), Salesforce.com introduced their new “marketing cloud”. At the Dreamforce conference they setup an example of the ‘Dreamforce Social Media Command Center’. They had a full-time agent at each of several work stations. Each of these work stations was monitoring a different social media feed. One each for Facebook, Chatter, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and maybe even a few other social networks to provide an example of a Social Media Command Center and how this could be a reality within your particular organization. As I saw this incredible activity of feeds, tweets, #hashtags, likes, posts and other real-time social interaction – this is where it really struck me about Governance (or lack thereof in this scenario). It was Wild!

These are the types of things I was thinking to myself, not from a technology perspective itself, but rather ‘are these people considering the following types of items’ before going buck-wild to immediately implement this type of Command Center within their own organizations:

People:
- Since these are mostly real-time conversations and, naturally, the business wants to represent themselves professionally, what type of special training will be required for this new type of social media command center operator?

Policy:
- As we all know, social networks are filled with people that sometimes spew nasty, disgusting or plain hateful messages because they think they are completely anonymous to the world. In these cases what is the organizations policy about any responses, deletion of messages or any other action?

Process:
- With this gluttony of electronic information overload from such a wide ranging variety of sources, in different formats and with such a diverse contextually meaning, what is the process to accurately analyze the data? After all, I would imagine that video-’gamers’ are quite active on these types of social networks and “rad”, “bad” or “bitchin’” don’t quite translate into the true meaning if you just consider the official dictionary definition of a word or phrase.

In summary, in our zeal to innovate and offer powerful, useful, as well as, truly remarkable technology, which is going to revolutionize the way we do business, we should not be in such a rush to not consider and overlook an organizations preparedness from a governance standpoint. Great technology is not always good enough. If your organization decides to not consider well-thought out governance plans then the “Governance Gone! Wild!” bus may be paying you a visit sooner than expected!

I just finished watching the movie “The Social Network”. Not sure how much is fact or how much is fiction but nevertheless I found it entertaining.

The movie was a good dose of the entrepreneurial spirit, a slice of the harshness that is the business world and a great life lesson on being honest and true to your friendships. It’s hard to believe that the phenomenon known as “facebook” is basically only 7 years old. According to the movie, facebook was incorporated in 2004. It started as nothing more than a simple web site in an already crowded field of similar “social” sites all of which were vying for more and more users.

If you believe the film you are led to believe that Mark Zuckerberg adamantly resisted the temptation to start selling advertisements on the site once they had achieved modest success. I have not researched, nor paid much attention to how Zuckerberg ran the company at the time, but as a facebook member for quite a while now and seeing how the site has evolved over time it’s not hard to believe that this is true of his philosophy. From a business perspective, and especially for a web site business, I have personally witnessed what once started as a good social site become quickly overran with obnoxious advertisements, non-stop pop-up banners and/or infested with viruses/Trojans or spyware. Anyone remember the likes of Geocities, Limewire or even, dare I say, MySpace? All of which are gone or soon to-be gone.

While I do recall some frustration with facebook outages a few years ago when they were growing and adding so many users very quickly, the truth is that the service has been extremely reliable to my standards which are pretty high when it comes to service availability. Also, facebook does serve advertisements but I think they are subtle enough that it’s not annoying and the ads are not all x-rated like so many other web sites these days. This shows some level of responsibility and decorum on the part of facebook to keep their community clean and fun for everyone. I’m sure porn sponsors would love nothing more than to pay big money to serve stupid ads that have the potential to be seen by more than 500 million users!

Overall I think the movie had a good moral story. You almost can’t blame a young successful kid for making silly mistakes. For example (warning: spoiler-alert if you haven’t seen the movie), Zuckerberg allowed himself to get caught up in the fast-paced, party lifestyle that was introduced to him by the founder of Napster, Sean Parker. This mentorship by Sean Parker was both a blessing as well as a curse. This ‘friendship’ and the business connections that Sean Parker had allowed facebook to get the venture capital investment that allowed them to become legitimate and ultimately become the company they are to this very day. At the end of the movie, which is already a bit dated (released in 2010) they said the net worth of facebook was $25 billion dollars. I’ve heard estimations as high as a $50 billion dollar net worth and I know for a fact that they just raised $1.5 billion in additional investment so it’s clear in the business community that there is serious value here and well worth investing. Just a random Kevin Neal thought here but the real challenge with all these cool web based ideas is how to monetize a cool idea.

Anyhow, the curse of the ‘friendship’ with Sean Parker was that apparently his personal character was shady and unprofessional at times. Sure, he had the business connections to get facebook the financial investments they needed to succeed but his personal conduct could have nearly ruined the business as well.

I got the feeling at the end of the movie that writers portrayed Zuckerberg as missing something emotionally in spite of his success. He missed his ex-girlfriend as well as his original business partner.

Some interesting items I found from the movie:

• I love analogies and this was a good one from Sean Parker’s character. “Will you be known for fishing the 3000 pound marlin or 14 trout?”
• Simple ideas can truly be magical with a little common sense and a lot of hard work
• Be true to your friends and don’t trust posers

It will be interesting for me to finally now do some research on the ‘real’ story and see how much of the movie was reality versus fiction. I give The Social Network a eight out of ten Steeler-star rating.