From the category archives:

Living Enterprise

Online Communities & The Living Enterprise

June 22, 2010 · 2 comments in Living Enterprise,Social Media,tech business

I spent a good part of the last year researching books that I've decided not to write. One of them had more titles than Lady Gaga has controversial moves. But I kind of liked "The Living Enterprise."

The Living Enterprise looked at really big companies like IBM, SAP, Intuit, Microsoft and Oracle to see how these companies are using social media, and how they are integrating, measuring and scaling social media programs into their everyday businesses.

Most of my research centered on IBM, SAP and Intuit and what I saw at each of these large and established companies surprised and impressed me. While each of these very large entities are highly active on the public platforms that get so much attention: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and so on, the really big action takes place in their hosted online communities.

Each of these three companies began by building communities for the most technical of their employees, partners and customers. It began small scale and the focus was on the customer's needs rather than the hosting enterprise's agenda. Each became the living heart of the conversation, of ideas, of news of resolving support issues. Te value to the company is that they were hosts to a place their customers increasingly could not live without.

The companies set rules of conduct, invested in hosting and community platforms. Each company soon discovered that the conversation had moved beyond their tech sectors, spilling in every possible direction, so they each built another community, and another, and another and they made it easy for members of one community to talk with another.

They became massive in memberships. IBM's developerWorks is probably the grand daddy of all enterprise social networks. It has eight million members and is growing at the rate of 1000 per day. In all IBM has 20 million community network users.

These communities look and feel very much like the tools that you use and popular end user venues. But the talk is more seriously focused on the business at hand. You're unlikely to every see a report of a celebrity sighting or a review of what was had for lunch.

But if you have a problem with a product, you're likely to get accurate help in minutes rather than days. If you have an idea of how to make a product better, you can chat in public with a product developer. If you are a second tier player, competing with a Tier One, you can get recognition of your abilties on a community network faster than you could on, say Facebook.

Each of these companies have no problems measuring the return on their investments. Each says they are making revenue and profits, perhaps not a lot right now, but it is growing.

More than that, these communities are at the very heart of what is emerging as a new kind of corporation, one who uses community collaboration to blur the boundaries that have traditionally constrained companies, customers and partners.

The three groups are discovering they are on the same side, sharing the same goals and needs. When one member profits, so do others. When one is suffering so are others.

I see the new enterprise as a living enterprise and I see these communities as the pumping heart that has put life where it did not previously exist.

TLE Notebook: Intuit’s Scott Gulbransen

February 1, 2010 · 1 comment in Living Enterprise,Social Media,tech business,userville

Intuit is one of at least five companies that I plan to profile in depth for my new--still nameless--book. The others are essentially big business-to-big business players.

But Intuit is business-to-small business and consumer. My particular interest is the small business side an area generally considered to be too fragmented, limited in budget and late to adopt to be a profitable area to serve.

Yet, every small  business needs to manage its books and tax records and Intuit is the overwhelming supplier of automated products in this area.

Scott said Intuit has 50 million individual and small business users. It started its online communities about three years ago and today has 3.5 million active users. About 400,000 are small business users. Both numbers are growing.

Last week, I talked with Scott Gulbransen, a senior PR/Social media manager for Intuit's TurboTax group. It was an overview, the first of what will be a series of talks with Intuit, its customers and third-party developers.

Like other companies, Intuit did not wake up one morning and devise a grand strategy for online communities. In fact, it was more an outgrowth of issues that would keep company officials awake at night: how to migrate from a company whose products sold off retail shelves to one whose products are downloaded from the internet.

Scott didn't say it, but in the early-to-middle 2000s, Intuit lost luster as an innovator and some wondered if the company would remain as an independent entity. The company started to fumble with an online strategy and as it did, Scott told me,  "a sense of community was woven into corporate DNA."

Like SAP, the communities are part of a larger something that both companies call "ecosystems." Both companies see the ecosystem as core to corporate strategy, but they've structured them differently.  SAP has folded its network of communities into an Ecosystem and Partners Group, Intuit's communities are assigned to product groups and operated separately from each other.

Still, it assembles into an ecosystem strategy. At Intuit, developers collaborate at the back end, telling each other how to make applications succeed. And the strategy makes traditional command and control approaches obsolete.

“An ecosystem makes you get out of the way. You build a platform and enable. At the end of the day everybody benefits. Your marketplace becomes a living breathing thing,” he said.

Despite these different approaches, the outcome seems to be the same. The lines between company, customers and third-party vendors and partners get blurred as products, services, policies are developed, delivered and refined in transparent, collaborative style, somewhat ad hoc style. While marketing may be responsible for communities, these communities have diminished the importance of traditional marketing tactics of drum rolls announcing releases and updates. Stealth modes make no sense in collaborative environments where companies ask customers how to make the products better.

While the company built these communities, and they host them on company space,  Intuit does not presume to run these communities from what Scott told me.

The lines between customers and the company have became less clearly defined. Third-party vendors who might previously have been regarded as competitors or irrelevant, became partners.

The key issue in the communities "is no longer what's good for Intuit," Scott said, but "what's best for the customer." Coincidentally, it turns out that what's best for the customer is almost always best for Intuit in the long run.

To understand the core benefit to Intuit, Scott quoted Scott Cook, Intuit founder and chairman “In the moment feedback is a huge gift to companies. You want to do everything you can to foster more and more. This was not possible 30 years ago.”

The communities created a partnering process for product development and for helping each other, sometimes without an Intuit representative being involved at all.  The communities become a "connection platform," one where ideas and information are shared and spread faster than was previously possible.

Scott feels that the social networks have a special value for small business practitioners. "Running a small business can be lonely. The biggest obstacle is to connect with others like yourself."

Intuit can help proprietors find others like themselves and because its online, they do not need to take time away from their operations to attend a workshop or events.

The social networks also serve as development platforms, giving independent software developers unprecedented access to a community of millions of small business operators and you can affordably address them as property owners, or dry cleaners or coffee shop proprietors.

"If you can build for QuickBooks, then you have a massive market opportunity," Scott told me.

One such example is Propertyware.com which helps smaller property owners and operators to manage cost and flow of rental properties. It lets small landlords better manage their properties, understand profits, cash flows. The company has no brick and mortar, but exists exclusively in the cloud.

Through a variety of services including Intuit Marketplace and old-fashioned email newsletter, Intuit has given this small virtual company the ability to speak to Intuit's customer base.  When Propertyware acquires a new customer, that customer can go directly to Propertyware to purchase additional products. Intuit is fine with that. The customer benefits and Intuit's value to that customer goes up.

One other place that SAP and Intuit seem to agree. Online communities do not reduce the need for face-to-face meetings between people who primarily know each other through online communities. They increase it.

Both companies host a series of social events for their most passionate community members. It seems there still is a business value to handshakes, smiles and occasional hugs.

[NOTE: Do you have a story about Intuit or any other enterprise social network? Please let me know. This book is in the early phases of development. And I can use the wisdom of this crowd. Leave a comment or send me an email.]


Changing direction on the new book

January 26, 2010 · 2 comments in Living Enterprise,Social Media,tech business,userville

As you may know, I’ve been working on a new book called, “The Living Enterprise,” in collaboration with Mark Yolton, head of SAP’s community networks and Zia Yusuf, formerly EVP of SAP’s Ecosystem and Partner Group.

The original direction was to explore the SAP ecosystem and the role that its online communities play in making it work so well.  It's a good story, but as I dug in I became increasingly aware that there are other good stories at other companies that I really want to cover as well. These include IBM, Intuit, Microsoft and Oracle as well as other companies and communities you may already know about that I want to learn about.

I have decided to write this new book independently of my co-authors. I continue to respect them and wish them well, but I am at my most comfortable as an independent writer and that is the course that I will pursue moving forward.

My new focus will be from an independent perspective, comparing and contrasting different communities and strategies; giving you ideas of options that may be useful to understand wherever it is that you work.

I will almost entirely talk about large companies and business-to-business strategies, perhaps as a contrast to Twitterville, which covered more small operations than large. Hopefully, it will give readers of the breadth and diversity of social media in business.

Mostly, as always, I will try to assemble some really useful and interesting stories. I remain convinced that the best way to tell business stories is not by putting a white paper between book covers, but by telling you about people; their struggles and dreams and how it impacts their work.

SAP will most certainly be part of my new book. It's a great story that tells you how one of the world's largest companies has figured out how to integrate social media into a modern enterprise to the benefit of its customers and partners as well as itself.

As always, I will crowd source as much of this book as I can. If you have a good story about an enterprise community, please share it with me. It can be favorable or unfavorable. What I am looking for is content that is will be useful or interesting to business readers.

If you have a good story lead, please leave a comment here or email me.


TLE Notebook: Mark Finnern, the SAP Mentor’s mentor

January 18, 2010 · 3 comments in Living Enterprise,Social Media,tech business,userville


[SAP's Mark Finnern. Photo by Shel Israel]

It seems to me that SAP's 75 mentors are the fire starters for much of what happens in SAP's two-million member community network and I told you a little about why in my previous post. And further, they have influence on programs, policies, product and ideas that often spread throughout SAP global infrastructure

For that reason, I'm giving a good deal of attention to the mentors while researching The Living Enterprise. My previous post told you a bit about the organization and today's post looks at the program's founder and leader.

Mark Finnern, is SAP's chief community evangelist. He created, named and orchestrates the SAP Mentor group. It would not be accurate to say he runs the mentors, because they in fact, run themselves. He is more like a spiritual vortex for them. His role is not part of any company devised grand strategy. Rather, his job has sort of evolved as so many social media positions have done in the past few years. In some ways, social media professionals in established businesses are still making it up as they go along.

It started in 2003, when Mark became part of a small handful of SAP professionals assigned to develop a developer outreach program for NetWeaver, then a new software platform that needed to open the company up to a larger number of software developers that had been previously necessary.

This became the Software Developers Network [SDN] SAP's first online social network. Sinc then there have been several new social networks created, all under the SAP Communities Network [SCN] umbrella. Like other enterprises, these communities are public in that anyone can visit them, but they are private in that only community members with a designated userID and password can post content. Free thought and speech is encouraged, but inappropriate content is promptly taken down and repeat offenders can be banned.

Mark was the non-technical member of the technical team that started SDN. "I brought the passion," he told me. He also brought a series of new ideas and played a key role in stitching together a series of communities that meander seemlessly from online to off and from company representative to partner or customer and back again.

SDN's first module was an old-fashioned forum, which pretty much looks and feels like any forum that you may have seen in the last 20 years or so. Mark's first significant improvement was to add blogs to the forums. Blogs were still relatively new, outside of the development community. There were less than 50 of them among Fortune 100 companies in 2004, when these started.

Tim O'Reilly, CEO of O'Reilly Media, an open source champion,publisher and event producer consulted SAP on how to get started and social media and provided the company with it's first online community platform. [As the communities and users grew, with thousands of posts per day, the company would eventually migrate to Jive Software.]

Blogs move faster than forums and the comment structure is more conversational. After Mark and others injected them into SDN, the conversations became a lot more interesting.

But they also raised issues that have been a pain points for most businesses related to social media.  SDN, is an official SAP site. Companies are accustomed to being in command and control of what is said on their own turf. And when you think about it, why shouldn't the company, have the power to review, revision, polishing and filtering.

Blogs just don't work well that way. And on SDN customers were encouraged to post blogs side-by-side with those from SAP employees. This changed the perspective from company to community.

Company concerns probably reached a crescendo when an outside developer posted a blog calling a particular SAP product a failure. Mark's phone started ringing a few minutes later, a higher up ordered Mark to take the post down.

Mark resisted. Deleting it would cost the company credibility. While the internal offline debate continued, something started happening at SDN itself. Other community members began chiming, posting defenses for the product and pointing to several mistruths in the original post.

The result strengthened the product's position as well as SAP's credibility in the developer community. When customers defend a company, it has greater influence than anything a company spokesperson could hope to accomplish.

But it was a two-way street. The community had revealed itself to be credible to the company. If some officials had feared that blogging would allow an unruly mob to light torches, it turned out that those torches would illuminate the truth about a company and its products. It meant that praise could protect SAP and the criticism that did come in would be mostly constructive, helping the company to adjust course when it was wise to do so.

The incident helped SAP to gain credibility with some of the hardest-to-impress people inside SAP. Senior technologists generally speaking tend to be viewed as hard nosed and cynical to any form of hype and SAP's are no different. SAP's Horst Keller, an internationally known German physicist and author was one such senior technologist. After the incident, he posted a blog describing what had happened as  very cool. Mark encouraged him to post more content and Horst complied, opening the door for some of SAP's most respected technology voices to join the conversation.

Mark kept helping to evolve functionality. he encouraged the team to add wikis, which seem to keep better focus than others I've seen. he adapted a system from Reilly media that allowed the company to reward contributions with points based on frequency and quality of contribution.

Perhaps most significantly, was that Mark realized that while online communities may reduce barriers of time and geography, it misses one of the magic points of human interaction: the face-to-face meeting.

He started developing events in cooperation with the mentors. It began with  "unconferences," where attendees set the agenda and schedule. These have evolved into what is now called SDN Meets Labs, day-long sessions, usually produced by SAP mentors held all over the world. He added Tee-shirts that often touted community boosting slogans.

When O'Reilly keynoted to 5000 SAP customers at  Tech Ed 2007, he walked onto the dais wearing a tee shirt he had received at a smaller, more intimate Community Day for 350 the day before.

Paraphrasing a famous Clint Eastwood line, it declared, "Go ahead. Make my community day. "O'Reilly looked down at his shirt and commented, Any company that puts this on their tee-shirts, gets it."

Another face-to-face event produced by Mark and the mentors is the SDN Clubhouse. When attendees of Tech Ed or SAPphire, the huge annual conferences conference sessions get bored they can wander into the clubhouse for coffee and conversation. Mark makes having the best coffee at each event a major priority.

Mark told me he doubts the mentors would not have emerged into either so tight-knit or as influential of a community without the face-to-face get togethers.

"The experience of being in a room with people who share the passion, to work together and to solve problems is what gives the mentors their magic," he told me.

It seems to me that Mark's personality, a mixture of passion, intensity and dry humor has much to do with the personality adopted by the mentor organization of 75 people and because of their collective position of influence over both SAP and its community this small group is contributing to the texture, personality, products and policies of a global community of millions of millions of people.

One aspect of the mentors is a common thread of music loving. Mark, for example plays several instruments including the accordion and harmonica. At an event in 2007, attendees were given harmonicas as they filed in. mark entered, playing one, and then the audience joined in which may be the only harmonica-fest in tech sector history.

Keynote speakers for the main Tech Ed speak the day before at the smaller, more intimate Community Day. They are asked to play a musical instrument to precede the main event and set the tone for the gathering.

Over the coming days I will be speaking with additional members of the Mentor group and sharing notes here. They will certainly be included in the book that comes from this effort.

Powered by Qumana

TLE Notebook: SAP’s Band of Mentors

January 16, 2010 · 2 comments in Living Enterprise,Social Media,tech business

We* see SAP's ecosystem as a living thing. To understand it, think of the biological kind rather than the org chart or PowerPoint slide that some companies use to represent their ecosystems. Think of people and places and how they interconnect and interdepend on each other.

In Earth's ecosystem, there are land masses. Some are huge and divided into different sectors. While people in each share a great deal in common, they sometimes don't speak the same language and have cultural differences. This sometimes leads to misunderstandings, which can be costly to all parties involved.

In the earth's ecosystem, oceans and waterways connect all the land masses. Increasing the same can be said for SAP's network of online communities. But there's two million users of these networks. Some are occasional visitors some merely use it to get fast answers to tough technical questions.

But there are others who have for varying reasons, chosen to immerse themselves into the community. They have demonstrated expertise. They have helped others and contributed to the community by organizing events, writing white papers, advising newcomers, advising and sometimes pressuring SAP to adjust course.

They are also good communicators and you find their contributions are almost omnipresent wherever you look across the SAP Community Network [SCN]. They are  hand-holders, advocates and occasional antagonists; the defend the company against false accusations and tell the company when they think the company is making a mistake in product, service or policy.

They produce local face-to-face events and travel to regional and national ones sponsored by or related to SAP. A mentor gets an annual performance review. She or he can be fired for poor performance and in return for all this time and effort, they are rewarded with tee shirts, recognition and points.

A mentor is an unpaid volunteer who needs to keep his or her day job. There are 75 of them and they reside all over the world. Most work for SAP customers or partners. A few are employed by SAP.

Obviously, the recognition makes them influential in the overall enterprise technology communities, but from those I've talked to, that is not what makes them spend all this time and energy as mentors. They seem to me to be motivated by passion more than professional creds.

which are almost deeply technical. But they simply would not have been selected; nor would they have wanted to be, if each of them was not passionate about SAP and the issues impacting company, customers and partners.

Mentors are similar in many ways to Microsoft's better-known Most Valuable Professional (MVP) program. But the significant difference in perspective is in the name. "MVP, is a sports term. It's for the stars in the field. "Mentor," refers to a wise and trusted counselor or teacher. It's not about being a star. It's about giving.

One other aspect that has impressed me and the reason for this post's title. The mentors self organize into teams. The membership is determined by what needs to be accomplished, rather than who wants some glory. So far, despite some attempts to get them to behave otherwise, each of them speaks and acts in support of the other. It seems to be part of their culture.

Mark Finnern, who will be the subject of my next TLE-related post, runs the program. When I spoke with him, he emphasized that the group was called SAP Mentors, not community mentors. This was because they are influencing and changing all of SAP. Not just the social networks.

More on Mark in my next report.

*When I say "we" I mean my co-authors Mark Yolton, Zia Yusuf and me. I do not presume to speak for SAP and I often bring a different perspective to this story.

TLE Notebook: What Threadless.com & SAP have in Common

January 11, 2010 · 5 comments in Living Enterprise,Social Media,tech business

My friend, Beth Kanter* pointed recently to a Forbes.com piece by Laurie Burkitt about Threadless.com, the Chicago-based tee-shirt company. The author says that the dotcom, consumer retailer sprang to life from the idea that  "employees and customers don't have to be two distinct groups."

It's a good thought, one that I think captures one of the fundamental changes being brought on by social media's emerging role in business.

What surprises me is that the thought seems to have a lot to do with The Living Enterprise, the book I'm writing with Mark Yolton and Zia Yusuf about SAP's ecosystem.

SAP is no consumer marketing company. It is big, technical and it's customers are big and the people they talk with are most often technical.

Yet the thought that customers and companies and the third-party consultants that are involved are all part of the same community. If one party benefits, so do the others. If one becomes unhealthy so do the others.

Now the Threadless concept is about the customer doing the design work and being rewarded accordingly. That's not how it works exactly at SAP. But SAP does let its customers mess around with SAP product source code to customize software to their respective needs.

It also has inserted a several online communities into its company infrastructure, where customers, partners and SAP share ideas and information. There are two million unique visits to these social networks each month; 6,000 posts-per-day. In the course of 2008, 70,000 individuals in over 200 countries contributed to more than a million topics.

Because these conversations are in blogs, forums and wikis, the answers to questions are easy and fast to find. A developer can usually get the answer to a question in less than 20 minutes. All sorts of SAP people, from its myriad locations, workgroups and perspectives participate

At the end of the day, it can be hard to determine whether an idea or suggestions, or useful tidbit was generated by a customer, a partner or SAP itself.

It is far more complex than Threadless. But the concept is the same. There is a shared interest and a common need.

In the Conversation Age, employees and customers are no longer two distinct groups. They have a common need. They swim in the same waters. They flourish or flounder together.

This has probably always been true for marketplaces. But it has become a lot more clear to a lot more businesses since social media opened up businesses, than it ever was before.

*Today is Beth's 53rd birthday. You should go wish her the happiness she deserves.

Powered by Qumana

TLE Notebook: SAP’s Orchestra Conductor Metaphor

January 8, 2010 · 8 comments in Living Enterprise,Social Media,tech business


My previous post announced The Living Enterprise, [TLE] a book I'm writing with Mark Yolton and Zia Yusuf about how SAP has created an ecosystem valued at about $80 billion and why what they've learned can help your business as well.

I talked mostly about SAP regards their enterprise ecosystem as a living, moving shapeless entity, more like a biologic ecosystem than the traditional customer networks that other companies call ecosystems.

Near the bottom of the piece, I briefly mentioned that SAP has adopted a new position for itself in its own ecosystem,  one modeled after a symphony orchestra conductor. This was intended to be a teaser, something that made readers hungry for this next installment.

It seemed to work. Rebecca Krause-Hardie left a comment saying, "I'm looking forward to hearing more. But putting on my orchestral musician hat I can't quite get the conductor metaphor."

That comment turned out to be one of those Marshall McLuhan moments you may recall from the movie  Annie Hall. Rebecca it seems, know all about orchestra conductors.

A graduate of Juilliard, she played second horn in the Phoenix Symphony for a while then went on to serve as orchestra manager for the Detroit symphony. She has emerged as a pioneer in integrating new media into orchestras. Among her achievements was creating Playmusic.org, the first interactive music website for kids and an extremely interesting project.

While I was learning this, my co-author Zia Yusuf jumped in with a comment for Conductor 2 Rebecca, which made sense. As head of the SAP's Ecosystem group at the time, he was the guy who brought the orchestra metaphor into SAP to begin with.

I thought he gave a pretty good answer. In part this is what he said:

"The success of an orchestra rests on various
instruments working in harmony, under the direction of the conductor,
making beautiful music.

In a similar way the ecosystem consists of a variety of players: customers, software vendors, service providers,
individuals etc."

If you think about it, the symphony conductor is almost always the most prominent person in the hall and very often the lionshare recipient of recognition and revenue. But the conductor depends upon each of the 80 or so musicians as much as the musicians depend upon him--and if you think about it--each other.

A conductor by himself is some guy with a baton. He's as capable of making memorable music as is a teenager with an air guitar. Conversely, if the talented, creative, passionate musicians assembled together on stage without a conductor, you'd end up with a jam session at best and a headache at worse.

The conductor and these individuals interdepend on each other. The musicians count on him to bring the group together, to set tempo and mood; to spotlight individuals when it makes sense, and entire sections when the moment calls for it. Everyone assembled gets to contribute and benefit.

This is a very far cry from so many of the military analogies that so many large companies use to describe their positions and strategies. And this is how SAP is approaching it's ecosystems. You cannot make an ecosystem work by trying to organize it in battalions, divisions and squadrons. The best you can get is a marching band which lacks the elegance, diversity, subtlety and talent of most symphony orchestras.

I just noticed that Erin Liman,SAP's director of social business innovation
has just added a comment in reply to Rebecca as well. Erin is playing a highly contributive role in this project. Among the most valuable was her indepth interview with Dorcas McCall, a career orchestra viola player who we will talk about in TLE.

In my view, the Orchestra Conductor metaphor is worth all these words. I think the book will hinge, in part, on our explaining it properly. If I were to boil the entire 80,000 words down to three bullets on a PowerPoint slide, they would be:

  • Think of an enterprise ecosystem as something that is really alive and not an org chart thingee with a bunch of dotted lines attached to various boxes.
  • The role of the founding community is more like that of a conductor and a general.
  • If you do the first two right, your enterprise is going to create a wealth-filled marketplace. Your company, customers and partners will all share the wealth.


Announcing: ‘The Living Enterprise,’ my new book project.

January 6, 2010 · 17 comments in Living Enterprise,Social Media,tech business

I am very pleased to announce my next book project:

The Living Enterprise: How SAP built a multibillion dollar ecosystem; what it
learned and why your business should care.” This is a working title and may be tweaked, so let me know what you think.

I have two co-authors: Zia Yusuf who was EVP of SAP's Global Ecosystem and Partner Group until November and Mark Yolton, SVP responsible for SAP's online communities. I'm just the writer/researcher. This is really more their story and the story of the ecosystem group.

But much more than SAP itself, The Living Enterprise [TLE] is the story of how SAP's 7000 partners and 86,000 corporate customers benefit from SAP's integration of social networks with a traditional partner program into an enterprise ecosystem.

The result has been an answer to social media's most persistent business question: "Where's the money?"  SAP's ecosystem according to independent analysts has a marketplace value of $70 billion to $90 billion for the companies represented by two million users of the company's social networks.

There's the money.

When I started talking with Mark and Zia last September, I was concerned with the term enterprise ecosystem. It sounded to me like the sort of "corpspeak" that Scoble and I admonished in Naked Conversations. At first it seemed to me, the term is a cliche designed by marketers to modernize an old-fashioned large company networks.

That may be true elsewhere, but not so at SAP I have learned. SAP looks at its enterprise ecosystem through the same prism as you would look at a biological ecosystem, where objects and living things interact and depend on each other to survive or thrive. Even a tiny change in an obscure part of an ecosystem can have the same impact on larger participants as a polar bear slipping off a sheet of melting ice has on eventual water level in New York City.

Except with the internet as the ocean, it all happens much, much faster when online social networks bloodlines dynamically circulation information and ideas throughout the enterprise ecosystem with great speed. 

Before all this happened, SAP felt many of the dilemmas that most modern companies are experiencing. If social media champions are shouting that the company should not be in command and control of it's own ecosystem, just who should be. And for that matter, if SAP was not to dominate, just what was it's new role?

It took a lot of time and effort to find its own series of answers. The first was replace itself at the center of its own ecosystem with its customers. This was not altruism, it was the realization that the health of SAP and its business partners depended on the health of its customers at least as much as the reverse.

As to the question of what role SAP should assume once it stepped out of the center, Zia Yusuf came up with a new metaphor, that of the symphony orchestra conductor.

But first, I am looking for your help. I like to think that my books are different from other business books because I take the story-teller's perspective and because I use my blog and Twitter for a good deal of crowd sourcing.

Later, of course, I'll use my social media tools to ask your help in promoting the book. But right now, I'm looking for juicy stories about SAP and for that matter other enterprise social networks and ecosystems.

If you are among SAP's two million social network users, please share your experience with me--whether it was wonderful or awful. My books come alive with the user stories much more than the company stories that provide the framework.

If you have an experience in social nets at Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Oracle or any other enterprise inside or out of the tech sector please let me know.

Because of my co-authors and SAP's commitment to the project, TLE has a solid foundation, but it will be the stories that come from elsewhere that will make this book as special as we hope it will be.

Also, please keep in mind that I appreciate tough love. If you think this idea is brilliant, that inflates my ego. If you think we are on the wrong track, then we will be greatly appreciative of you setting us straight.

Please tell us what you think in the comments below or on Twitter or even good, old-fashioned, archivable email.