Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Social Business.? The interviews? provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.? A full list of interviewees can be found here.
Daniel Debow, Co-CEO,? Rypple Software
Biography
Daniel is co-founder and co-CEO of Rypple, a social performance management platform that helps Facebook, Gilt Groupe, and other innovative companies recognize great work, run fast, efficient feedback loops, and coach employees to achieve their goals. A sought after speaker on how social media is changing the workplace, Daniel is a regular contributor to Fortune.com and the Huffington Post. He?s been widely quoted in Wired, the Financial Times, the Economist and Bloomberg Businessweek. He holds a JD/MBA from the University of Toronto and an LLM in Law, Science and Technology from Stanford University.
The Interview
1.? Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Social Computing is changing the world for your customers.
Daniel Debow (DB): Ray, at the heart of all this, we are people.? While it may seem like an oversimplification, large corporations have focused on delivering products and services so we can scale in a quick way.?? Unfortunately, we?ve seen a dramatic increase in the alienation of people from their work.? In order to get people to the next level, we have to bring the human back into the work place.? If you think about it, the era of process automation brought great hope. We wanted everyone to adhere to those processes to achieve efficiencies.? This worked for sometime when work fit into neat processes. However, we can no longer stop work from happening outside of the process.
Social reflects how people are talking to each other. How do we automate this and achieve faster flowing information?? Processes should be designed and improved around how people talk and communicate.? How do we achieve more? productive outcomes in the business?? Can we get the benefits in large scale environments?? The solution ? keep people more engaged and more accurately modeled around the reality of the company.? Software is about taking the metaphor, modelling the reality, and moving faster.
Over the past 40 years, we felt we could model reality of an org chart via process flows.? However this is not the best model as see the company as a social network not an org chart.? Organizations move things such as notes and processes and complex interactions into the cloud to improve efficiency. This is the high level of why and how we approach social.
The processes related to human performance and getting the most out of people are absolutely social.? They involve software and human things.??? Social software helps amplify things. You learn more about what happens with your friends and you can share faster.? For example, the things that drive business performance come back to people.? People management science is more than carrot and stick.? It?s about meaning and autonomy. It?s about mystery and candid thinking that involve people.? How do we recognize them?? How do we interact?? How do we get one-on-one?s with the boss.? What coaching and feedback is provided?? Do we have goals and not the archaic ones?? Are there real goals based on movement of people in real time?
This is the essence of social business processes.
2. What makes social computing disruptive?
DB: As with all disruptive technologies it meets three key criteria:
- It attacks a problem in an orthogonal way.? Almost all social technology appears at first to be a toy.? Customers don?t asking for them, yet they spread into companies like wild fire.? Users say, ?I?d never do this in the enterprise.?
- It breaks the price-performance curve on a different scale. In many cases, Rypple included, we make it cheaper to deploy than existing technology.
- It appears as an incomplete solution from the perspective of incumbents.? Incumbents will state you don?t have the 1000 features they have.
The telegraph, the phone, and email all changed the number of nodes of communication and improved the flow of information between people. Social technologies take communication to the next level. This isn?t just a technological shift; it?s a societal one. We are taking the same metaphors of openness and transparency that have been used to describe the web and applying them to organizations.
When you value results above internal politics and velocity over caution, you create a more innovative, less hierarchical?and ultimately disruptive?organization.
3.? What is the next big thing in Social Business software?
DB: Recently I was on a panel on the future of the workforce, where I talked about two huge developments on the horizon. The first is the shift from an economy of companies to an economy of individuals, as everyone?s reputation and personal brand moves to the cloud. It will be interesting to see what this means for consumer brands like Nike and Pepsi, and how people interact with them.
The second big shift is the ability of social media to create more meritocratic systems for rating true influence and power within organizations. Cloud-based social applications are asking people to rate one another and provide opinions based on far more objective data than the vague subjective impressions that often determine influence.
As that data migrates to the cloud and becomes portable, it will have profound changes on the labor market. It will transform how we look for talent, where the power resides, and potentially the very nature of the corporation.
As reputation becomes a more objective measure, it will force companies to become more fluid in their hiring practices and their operations.
4.? What are you doing that?s disruptive for Social Computing?
DB: Rypple is trying to live by the values we?ve been talking about?the values that our service provides to customers: transparency and visibility. We sell and market the product in a disrupitve way. You can try our product for free and decide on your own whether it has value. Our approach to marketing is to be as human and authentic as we can. We are helpful to people instead of being shills.? Without faking, we want you to buy our product.? We work hard to pull in all the key data people need to complete their jobs.
Just as important, we want to make the way people communicate at work more seamless and efficient?to surface all the data currently living in CRM, support, and product development and bring it into people?s daily work flow. This will lead to improved communication, collaboration, and ultimately business performance.
We are reinventing the way people manage their performance at work. The world has changed in the past 50 years,taking advantage of new technologies to bring a more efficient, just-in-time philosophy to so many parts of the organization. Yet performance management remains the same.? For the most part, it is conducted on pieces of paper?forms that may or may not have been automated for the desktop. We want to help companies deliver that? feedback immediately, when it can impact performance, rather than six months from now, when it?s too late. And we are changing the paradigm to consider how to make this process more social, more natural, and more relevant to business leaders, HR professionals, managers, and individual employees.
We don?t pretend to be creating Utopia. Organizations still need to implement and follow the best practices of engaging, coaching, and motivating their employees. We?ve just made that process far more efficient, intuitive, and fun.
You?ll see more announcements in the next few months.
5.? Where do you see technology convergence with Social?
DB: Today, we have many outside repositories such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter that work in concert with inside repositories. You no longer have to own the platform to create value. In our case, we?ll follow the Zynga strategy.? Find the platform people are using to interact at work?and build on top of it where there?s value.
We expect to move further in that direction with the information and knowledge contained in workforce process flows, such as support tickets and supply chain management. Beyond a simple automation of existing processes, we see a real opportunity to incorporate these sources of information into performance.
6. If you weren?t focused on Social Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?
DB: Personally, it?d be music.? I?m passionate about music.? Can we find a way for students to learn faster, better, and share?? We need new learning mechanisms to help people accomplish this.? Can we create the right feedback loops? Part of what makes social software better is that it makes social feedback loops more effective.
Transparent decision making ties back to learning.? Take how John Boyd changed the effectiveness of fighter jets and military strategy through decision loops.? The team with the fastest decision making loops wins.
7.??? What?s your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?
DB: If I had to pick one gadget, it would be the time machine. The classic HG Wells type. I?ll need one that works and I?d just want to ensure I could get back to our time.
Your POV
What do you think? Got a question for Daniel?? Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) com.
Additional interviews will be added and updated!? To be considered for the series, please reach out to Elaine (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.
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Copyright ? 2011 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.
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(Cross-posted @ A Software Insider's Point of View)
Enterprise Strategist and Disruptive Technologies Expert
R "Ray" Wang currently is a Principal Analyst and CEO at Constellation Research Group and the author of the popular enterprise software blog "A Software Insider?s Point of View". He previously was a founding partner and research analyst for enterprise strategy at Altimeter Group With viewership in the millions of page views a year, his blog provides insight into how disruptive technologies and new business models impact the enterprise. A background in emerging business and technology trends, enterprise apps strategy, technology selection, and contract negotiations enables Ray to provide clients and readers with the bridge between business leadership and technology adoption.
Buyers seek Ray?s research in disruptive technologies and their impact on business processes, business models, and organizational design. Business topics focus on harnessing innovation, creating next-generation business and IT leadership, and applying the new rules of business. Technology topics include SaaS/Cloud solutions, Social CRM, Next Gen ERP and apps, business process transformation, Project Based Solutions, Order Management, Master Data Management, and middleware technologies.
For technology sellers, Ray provides strategic guidance in go-to-market strategies; reviews and designs software licensing, pricing, support, and maintenance policies; delivers competitive assessments; evaluates software partner ecosystems, and researches business processes such as the perfect order and customer experience for the enterprise and SMB markets.
Media Influence
Ray blogs at Forbes CIO Central and for Harvard Business Review. News organizations such as The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Business Week, Fortune, Inc., The Associated Press, CIO Magazine, Information Week, ComputerWorld, Financial Times, eWeek, CRM Magazine, IDG News, ZDNet, TechTarget, and Managing Automation frequently seek his point of view. : Ray is an energetic and passionate keynote speaker, and has also been featured on major TV news outlets such as CNBC./>
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Industry Recognition
In both 2008 and 2009, Ray was recognized by the prestigious Institute of Industry Analyst Relations (IIAR) as the Analyst of the Year, and in 2009 he was recognized as one of the most important analysts for Enterprise, SMB, and Software. In 2009, A Software Insider?s POV was listed in the top 20 of Jonny Bentwood?s Technobabble 2.0 Top Industry Analyst Blogs. In 2010, Ray was listed as one of the Top 5 Analyst Tweeters in Edelman?s TweetLevel Index, recorded as part of the ARInsights Power 100 List Of Industry Analysts, and named one of the top Influential Leaders in the CRM Magazine 2010 Market Awards.
Business And Technology Experience
Ray brings enterprise experiences honed from two decades of product management, management consulting, and technology marketing roles. Prior to serving as a VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester for enterprise apps strategy and contract negotiations, he headed up the customer relationship management (CRM) analyst relations program for PeopleSoft. At Oracle, Ray served senior product management roles in the E-Business Suite. While at Personify, Ray was the marketing chief for a Web analytics startup valued at $500 million.
Before working for packaged application vendors, Ray developed his management consulting and business strategy experience at Capgemini Ernst & Young, Deloitte Consulting, Detroit Medical Center, and the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He specialized in business transformation at the executive level, general strategy, program management, change management, mergers and acquisitions, SAP/ERP implementations, and healthcare operations.
Education
Ray graduated from the Johns Hopkins University with a B.A. in natural sciences and public health. His graduate training includes a master?s degree from the Johns Hopkins University in health policy and management; and health finance and management. He is also certified in SAP FI/CO modules, facilitation, and program management office.
Ray currently serves on the Board of Advisors for the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management's Centre For CRM Excellence.
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Source: http://www.constellationrg.com/22683/executive-profiles-disruptive-tech-leaders-in-social-business-%E2%80%93-daniel-debow-rypple-software/
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