An uprising is spreading through the Fortune 500, as executives from around the globe are rallying around a common theme: "Social Business Sucks."

Over the last few months I've met with hundreds of Fortune 500 executives, helping them plan out their 2012-2015 IT strategies. Below are some of the findings and quotes that are part of an upcoming research report, Social Business Is Dead, which I'll be publishing very soon.

Another busy week, and it isn’t over yet, but I wanted to weigh in on a couple of meetings and what they mean.

SAP

I attended the analysts’ sessions at the Sap/Insider BI2012 conference in Las Vegas Monday evening trough Wednesday morning. Obviously. SAP has a huge portfolio of piece parts they assembled through acquisitions such as Business Objects (including their acquisitions too) such as Crystal, Cartesis, Outlooksoft, Success Factors, Sybase, Pilot, TopTier, Yasu and many others. The question on my mind was how well SAP was able to integrate these various technologies in order for them to operate as a single vendor offering and, more importantly, can be communicated to the clients in  way that doesn’t bend their brain.

And that doesn’t even touch HANA yet.

Thanks to Innovation Excellence for listing me in their Top 40 Innovation Bloggers of 2011 roundup!

I plan to keep the creative juices flowing throughout 2012 and beyond!

In my Predictions for 2012 blog post I wrote that one of the trends I'm seeing is a surge in new project/task/time management tools focused on Getting Work Done. My Constellation colleagues and I are working on a report that will cover this topic in more detail, but for now I wanted to share with you a few of the factors that I think are contributing to this occurrence and differentiate the new generation of tools from ones like Microsoft Project.

It's been about two months since I started my new job at Constellation Research. During that time I've travelled to Vegas, San Diego, Colorado Springs, Denver, Scottsdale, Santa Clara, San Francisco, New York, Boston and probably a few other places that I've already forgotten about. I've been to 6 conferences and have probably had 50+ product/vendor briefings. I've been fortunate to stay in some gorgeous hotels and also crashed on a few couches. I've had too little sleep & exercise and too much food & drink. I've also experienced the highs and lows of a wedding, a funeral, a Bar Mitzvah and a vaca day hiking in Sedona. It's been a whirlwind.

I've wanted to write detailed trip reports about the various conferences, but unfortunately I have not yet gotten around to it. So for now let me share a few of the gems from the last few weeks:

Here are some of the highlights of my day in Sedona, Arizona.

How It All Began (One Humble Analyst's POV)

Time flies when you are having fun.  One year ago, we launched at the E20 Conference in Santa Clara.  Our mission - focus on the disruptive technologies of social, mobile, cloud, unified communications, and Government 2.0.

Just had a lovely message from a friend and former client on LinkedIn, where I had congratulated them on their new job, which is around social innovation.  The position involves taking the firm’s innovations (a major MNE) and bringing them to address societal issues.  My friend finds this meaningful, exciting and rewarding.

The term “innovation” comes from the Latin innovātus which means to renew.  This is why we are putting major efforts into our work in innovation policy and supporting start-up firms, as to renew resources and possibilities is a very rewarding activity, not only monetarily but in terms of contribution to society.  Working on changing things (preferably for the better) shows  what possibilities exist going forward, and puts you in a positive frame of mind.

From the comments I see on innovation forums and collaboration spaces, many others agree with me.  Has work in innovation made a difference in your own career path?