I attended SAP’s Sapphire user conference this year to report on social business and collaboration technologies, which is a little like going to the World Series to report on the quality of hot dogs: not what everyone else was focused on.
The social business collaboration and intranet modernization story was there, but it was not part of the big stories this year about S/4HANA, the new CRM / e-commerce play C/4HANA, or grand plans for unified cloud architectures.
If you haven’t heard, SAP has a social intranet product to sell you, SAP JAM, but even SAP doesn’t sell it very hard. The SAP JAM customer reference I met with during the conference, Jeffery Stevens, EVP and CHRO at Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health, told me it was only “at the 11th hour” of the RFP process that his sales representative even mentioned the existence of JAM as something he ought to look at – even though he had been saying all along one of his goals was to offer employees a more interactive, connected experience.
This is the gap social intranets, or enterprise social networks, or whatever you want to call products in this category tend to fall into. With the notable exception (so far) of Slack, companies founded with interactive intranet platforms at their core have struggled to survive as independent companies. Yammer had a relatively successful exit, with its acquisition by Microsoft, while Jive Software got bought relatively cheap last year, with its staff hollowed out and its product line carved up for parts. When a platform for communities and collaboration gets swallowed by a large, enterprise software organization like Microsoft of SAP, it gets all the advantages of being part of a big, profitable organization but at the risk of getting lost in the shuffle or overtaken by other, competing products (Yammer versus Microsoft Teams).
Social technologies for the enterprise hit peak hype around 2010 to 2012, when vaguely Facebook-like comment boxes started popping up in all sorts of software. Reengineering intranets as social networks for the enterprise seemed like a logical evolution. I don’t think that was wrong, exactly, just hard to get right both in terms of the technological user experience and the human skills required to build successful online communities.
One of the key ingredients for success is someone like Thomas Jefferson University’s Stevens who has a vision for the kind of an interactive community he wants to build that matches what one of these tools can do. One of the most common success story patterns for social collaboration technologies is that they can help unite organizations formed through mergers or other combinations, and today’s Thomas Jefferson University includes what formerly was a separate institution, Philadelphia University, as well as the Jefferson Health network of 14 hospitals affiliated with the medical and nursing schools at those universities. Jefferson Health employs 6,600 physicians and 7,400 nurses (including part timers). To make JAM available to all employees, the university purchase 35,000 licenses.
When it comes to online engagement with employees, “this is how I’m going to draw them in,” Stevens says of the social portal, internally branded myJeffHub. “We present little pearls of information that pop forward into beautifully designed screens.” While today JAM is used to support collaboration spaces for specific communities within the university and health system, “to me, it’s a no brainer that the whole intranet should go away in favor of this form of engagement,” he says.
In addition to JAM groups for specific departments, the university has created them around topical areas like combatting the opioid crisis. With a social platform, leaders can communicate the organization’s mission but also “listen to people’s contributions from the ground up.”
That few SAP customers know about JAM – or license it but leave it sitting on the shelf – strikes Stevens as a shame.
Six years ago, when SAP acquired SuccessFactors, one of the ancillary products added to its portfolio was JAM, a social collaboration in the cloud platform that was particularly attuned to providing an interactive experience to accompany online training courses. SAP refined it to offer template collaboration for other sorts of business process, some aligned with the human capital management mission of SuccessFactors, such as employee onboarding, but also processes for sales, marketing, and other functions.
JAM also evolved from being just a social stream or feed to being an intranet replacement tool, with social publishing of home pages for departments or communities within an organization. Pages have a modular design, making them relatively easy to update and maintain. Features for collaboration and general interaction can then be embedded in those pages.
That appeals to IT managers who want to simplify management of their intranets, making them more useful with less labor involved. With that addition, JAM became a direct replacement for Jive as well as on-premises implementations of SharePoint, said Daisy Hernandez, Global VP, enterprise collaboration at SAP. “With Office365, it tends to be more of an AND story,” she added, with cloud-to-cloud integration.
This was my opportunity to get caught up on SAP’s progress with JAM, having not been briefed on it in a couple of years. As an aside, I should mention that SAP invited me to attend on a press pass because of my past and continuing interest in collaboration technology, even after I disclosed that I recently signed on as Editorial Director at Rimini Street, which competes with SAP for support contracts. Point being that there is still a constituency with SAP for telling its social intranet story, even if it’s not the main story they want to tell.
On the other hand, I heard some snarky comments from SAP employees about being compelled to use JAM when other options like Slack are available. I sat on a demo of a tool called SAP CoPilot, a digital assistant designed to talk to all the other bots in the organization, and one of the key integrations they were showing off was one with Slack. (JAM integration was also supposed to be on the roadmap, although farther down the list – and honestly wouldn’t have as impressive as an integration demo as integrating with another company’s products).
I think it’s beside the point to compare JAM with Slack and other chat-centered collaboration experiences (such as my old fave Glip). They get their momentum from simplicity, as ad hoc tools for team collaboration without a lot of overhead, but are not as good for the kind of curated social spaces as you can create with JAM or Jive.
Hernandez said the JAM team has done some work with another SAP bot technology project, SAP Conversational AI, but so far has not seen customers aggressively putting it to work. (CoPilot turns out to be an outgrowth of SAP’s Fiore user interface framework project for building apps on the SAP platform, whereas Conversational AI was created by the Leonardo product team).
As for internal use of JAM, Hernandez acknowledged SAP isn’t necessarily the platform’s best user. That’s the blessing and the curse of having the software rolled out as an IT project – everyone has an account and a license – without necessarily adopting it for a specific business purpose. “Many of our customers use it better,” she said.
Stevens, the Thomas Jefferson University JAM fan, said he sees AI informing how JAM and SuccessFactors together can guide employees to learning opportunities and career paths that make sense, based on what the system learns from interacting with them. “We ought to be able to show people what their next jobs might be or connect them with mentors who have a similar career path.”
At a more basic level, a social intranet that allow employees to choose the groups they join according to their needs and interests adds focus to a digital workplace that’s overwhelmed by noise. “It’s not the same for everyone. For each and every employee, the experience should be what’s important for you,” he said.
It’s a worthy goal, too rarely achieved.
