Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

Companies continue to struggle with prioritizing the Customer over their business-as-usual, ingrained product and self-focused strategies.  Upper management in many industries seem to be dragging their feet when challenged to quickly and energetically change business practices to better serve customers. These leaders seem to look at the “Customer” as if it were an abstract representation of a value on a spreadsheet -- instead of probably the single most important factor for most businesses.

Now from the customer perspective, which is what upper management should have as top priority, interactions with most companies are becoming more and more a multi-channel journey of multiple touch points that are used to communicate, gain information, compare vendor offerings, seek assistance, make purchases, register complaints, and so on. If companies meet the needs of customers, then those experience journeys will repeat over customer-preferred channels. Multi-channel strategies for customer engagement are imperative because customers are more and more the ones who choose how they will interact with companies and on which channels.

On the flip side, customers don’t see their interactions in terms of “channels” -- just like customers don’t care how or why a company’s business processes fail to provide an overall positive experience with the company. Customers see that they did or did not have a successful interaction and that they did or did not achieve what they wanted. The outcomes of these interactions influence how customers regard companies and whether they will continue doing business with them.

Once a company has made a commitment to becoming customer-focused for its business strategies and operations, there is work to be done:  integration of channels, integration of business processes, and integration of data from customer interactions all become imperative. Integration of channels leads to understanding of touch points in individual channels as well as cross-channel. Aligning business process integration with the customer leads to creating single customer experiences across the enterprise and across communication channels. Integration of interaction data with operational data provides a more complete view of the customer in real time. Individual department and program goals across the enterprise must be also integrated and related to customer experience excellence.

Business processes must become a dynamic, intelligent and highly integrated interface for company interactions internally and externally. Most internal systems in companies should incorporate factors like customer experience and engagement, rather than functioning solely from a product, service or departmental perspective. Processes play a key role in bringing these factors together to achieve customer focus and relevance. Integration internal to the organization means cross-functional / cross-department teams to envision and implement customer strategies, translated into business processes that holistically connect the enterprise.

 

Symbiosis, Integration

Like symbiotic relationships in nature, business-customer symbiosis is founded on the belief that customer goals and business goals can be aligned in ways advantageous to both parties. The relationship that a company has with its customers affects almost every area of the business and every point of interaction with the customer, internally and externally. That’s why effective business processes are so important to enable top-notch customer experiences.

For mutual benefit, the focus for all business processes shifts to customers to embrace what they want from companies, how they view companies and how they want to work with them. Agile business processes connect all parts of the enterprise to the individual points and stages of the customer experience journey. Business processes also encompass other enterprise practices and strategies. Business-customer symbiosis can ensure the integration of both perspectives to the benefit of both parties. Business process ties directly to desired business outcomes – which now must align with customer desired outcomes.

 

Data Fuels Process and the Customer Experience

Happily, companies have a lot of data sources to help them gain insights into their current and potential customers through analytics, real conversations, social media content, customer service interactions.

Data, information and intelligence are the fuel for effective business processes that support and promote successful customer experiences and interactions. By considering business processes and business information in parallel to customer-focused strategies and initiatives, business outcomes are likely to improve.

Customer interactions produce an escalating amount of data related to internal systems such as CRM and call center management, and related to external sites such as corporate websites and social venues. Significant issues impact the ability of enterprises to correlate all the data into the so-called “single view” of the customer:

• Social media data that is primarily content and crucially dependent on context for meaning
• Company-controlled data sources that do not easily reveal customer process or outcomes
• Complexity of integrations needed to bring all this disparate data together
• Pulling data together to reflect the customer perspective rather than the internal systems architecture

Data directly related to customer-focused processes is likely to get closer to providing the elusive customer “single view” where an integrated process spans multiple interactions, touch points, transactions, and systems. The right data fueling processes is an important part of designing innovative business strategies that truly focus on the customer. Deriving timely customer insights benefit the strategic and operational aspects of an enterprise. However, a good many customer interactions or touch points are increasingly shorter-lived due to the proliferation of digital channels and their use by customers. The opportunity for enterprises to meet customer desires and needs is becoming shorter for each interaction and increasingly difficult to capture, analyze and understand.

 

Business Process Management Meets Customer

 Business process management (BPM) can no longer be solely focused on achieving operational efficiency and optimizing the business. Business processes must become more responsive to a focus on the customer, and become well-integrated across multiple systems to do so. BPM is crucial to customer-oriented systems as well as operational systems, and actually provides an essential piece to integrating these systems in order to better serve customer needs. Business processes are key to an agile holistic business strategy that helps customers achieve success with the company’s products and services. An interesting development in BPM is adaptive case management (ACM) that may be leading the way to greater convergence with customer systems such as CRM and call center applications.

An important aspect of BPM is continuous improvement, something that must happen for enterprises to respond to ever-changing markets and customer desires. To bring about customer-focused continuous change, enterprises need to articulate vision for strategies and initiatives from the customer perspective; and then tie process improvement to the customer experience. Working with customer data and analyses, enterprises may benefit from analyzing the ‘reverse engineering’ of outcomes expected by different customer segments, and then use insights to define how the enterprise should operate across process, organization, and technology domains to deliver optimal customer experiences and success.

Enterprises that allow separate solution and process silos for each channel to persist will greatly impede responsiveness to customers and will add to customer frustration by failing to provide one experience across channels. These enterprises probably did not start with a customer experience strategy and likely developed and/or acquired solutions specific only to individual channels without heeding the need for seamless integration of processes.

 

Business Process and Customer Experience Management Technology

Responsive and accurate support for customer interactions through people, processes and practices is a cornerstone of the management that enterprises can apply to enabling positive customer experiences. Enterprises must recognize that ‘management’ doesn’t mean controlling and dictating to the customer what the ‘experience’ will be. It does mean managing how well the enterprise provides a single experience across channels, how well it fulfills the needs and desires of customers based on customer terms, and even how well it delivers high quality products and services.

BPM can be instrumental for designing and maintaining effective and agile processes that are a sophisticated means to respond well to customer needs, while navigating many complex variables moving from customer to customer. Well-designed and customer-oriented processes make a big difference when integrating touch points for a ‘single view’ of customer interactions.

In the 2011 Forrester Wave for Web Content Management for Online Customer Experience, Stephen Powers defines customer experience management (CXM or CEM) software solutions as:

A set of solutions which enable the management and delivery of dynamic, targeted, consistent content, offers, products, and service interactions across digitally enabled consumer touchpoints. Previously, organizations, processes, and technologies to serve the online channels were silo’d, resulting in overhead, inconsistent experiences, and inability to measure results. However, as online initiatives have evolved and matured, so have product offerings to support those initiatives.

Three categories of solutions comprise online CXM: those based on process, delivery, and measurement:

Process-based solutions enable business users to create experiences. Process-based solutions consist of tools that business users (as opposed to IT users) use to create and manage structured and unstructured content for customer experiences. This category includes WCM, digital asset management (DAM), eCommerce, customer relationship management (CRM), marketing campaign management, marketing resource management, desktop publishing tools (such as Microsoft Word), and interactive development environments (IDEs).

Delivery solutions bring interactive experiences to customers. Vendors often tightly couple both WCM and eCommerce solutions with native delivery tiers, enabling businesses to create content and design and deliver experiences in a single package. But other technologies enable experience delivery, including rules- or algorithm-based content targeting solutions like search, personalization, and recommendations engines; marketing automation solutions such as campaign management and offer management; and customer service interaction management solutions that support customer data and history, customer self-service, knowledge management, and customer feedback management.

Customer intelligence solutions enable businesses to gauge the success of experiences. A/B and multivariate testing enable marketers and business users to test out variations of experiences on certain demographics before rolling them out to a broader audience. Web analytics tools give insight into how consumers consume content and interact with experiences. Social analytics provide insight into how consumers engage with companies by monitoring social interactions. 

 

Source: BP Trends

 

 

Process Alignment: Voice of the Customer Meets Voice of the Business 

Enterprises are accustomed to setting success metrics through KPIs related only to internal business process performance and internally-defined business outcomes. Unfortunately these metrics are frequently out-of-synch with customer perceptions of how well the enterprise met their expectations. Enterprise and customer metrics can be mismatched in other aspects of the customer experience:

 For instance the business may define the process cycle time – the length of time the process takes to run – as measured from when the customer places the order to when the products are dispatched. The customer, on the other hand, may well perceive the time taken to be from when they first went on to the website to look for a product, to the point at which the product started working. Clearly there can be a substantial difference between the two measures. 

Ideally we want to ensure that our measures of process effectiveness (the Voice of the Process) are the same as the customer’s measures (the Voice of the Customer), albeit the customer’s measures are informal measures. 

 

Source: BP Trends

 

Juxtaposing customer and enterprise views of process, experience and success through customer journey diagrams will reveal the disconnects between enterprise perceptions and what customers are likely experiencing. Enterprises are still working on finding more ways to capture the actual customer experience since true direct insight is not easily attained. Insight is pieced together with data from many sources including customer surveys, content from social sites, repeat business with the same customer, customer transactions, and interactions with customer service.

 

Symbiosis at the Heart of the Enterprise

Enterprises continue to be challenged to deliver positive customer experiences that are mutually beneficial and crafted from the customer perspective. Instead of designing business processes integrated with a customer experience strategy, many companies just tack on aspects of monitoring customer interactions to existing processes. For many companies, the main focus is still on their own needs, their own problems to be solved by the business process. And frequently when enterprises say they are customer-focused, they really mean they are trying to engineer upsells and cross-sells for their own benefit, without necessarily delivering real value to the customer.

As I continue to emphasize in much that I write, technology alone is never sufficient: enterprises need integrated and agile processes that also recognize the importance of people and practices to achieve goals and positive business outcomes. To become a truly customer-focused organization that enables customer experience excellence, the entire enterprise must be part of the overall experience:

• Starting with Upper management: choose Customer as The strategic focus
• Enable and empower customer-focused people in every part of the enterprise
• Design processes that are flexible enough to change with dynamic markets and customer needs
• Draw on innovative information systems to fuel business processes and provide continuous customer insights for fostering customer experience excellence

Keeping the focus on customer outcomes will help align people, processes, practices, and technology to the continuous changes needed to facilitate optimal customer experiences over time. Neither customer experience excellence nor well-integrated business processes should be after- thoughts for business execution – they are the symbiotic heart of success.

 

 

Related Links:

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Information, Intelligence and Process:  Combining Forces to Better Answer Business Needs

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

Platform is in the Eye of the Beholder

 

My friend and colleague Phil Simon recently published a new book called The Age of the Platform. I know from conversations with Phil that his new book is a personal journey to explore a very large and significant topic for which Phil has a lot of passion:  how business technology must evolve to provide the value and functionality that businesses need to move successfully and agilely into the future.

  

Exploring on the Edge of Innovation

Like many of us, Phil is an explorer. And he decided to explore a large area of business and technology – the successes and failures of companies that are based on platforms that consist of multiple offerings, ecosystems of partners and customer communities, and cultures of innovation (driven both internally and externally).

He has taken the good kind of risk in putting together The Age of the Platform – he wants to move to somewhere new in his thinking and has shared the beginnings of that process in this book. Innovation comes from taking risks, taking leaps away from where one has been -- to find new places and ideas. Phil shows that his exploration of the Platform as business model also parallels his search for what he wants to do with his life in new phases of experience.

In his forward, Mitch Joel nails what Phil is doing with his own journey:

It’s tempting to stick with what has always worked best for you, but today it’s critical to explore new platforms – and to build your own. As obvious as this sounds, it’s amazing to see how many businesses refuse to experiment with new technologies and media. They’re afraid of new platforms.

 

And Phil, after running through key questions to consider in order to decide if a platform will lead to fertile business growth, has this to say:

If these questions make you feel uneasy, don’t worry. Embrace the uncertainty.

Platforms require it.

 

 

The Age of the Platform

I recommend that if you haven’t already read The New Small, go through it before reading The Age of the Platform. In The New Small Phil talks about businesses that are forward-moving, interested in varying degrees of business innovation, reasonably tech savvy, deeply interested in customer success with their services or products, and take the life of their businesses very personally since they are usually doing something they love. These “New Small-ers” understand that technology should only come into play if it clearly benefits the purpose of the business.

The Age of the Platform provides value to businesses of all sizes that either: do not fully understand certain technology changes that are occurring and how they might impact their organizations; or do not understand how to innovate their businesses to survive and be more competitive – or both.  Reflecting what The New Small revealed, Phil’s discussion of the “change-tolerant business” is quite significant. Phil provides a quote from Robert Charnette: “A highly change-tolerant business can both adapt to and cause market turbulence for its own benefit”. Phil then goes on to explore how “knowledge is power” for achieving the change-tolerant business, especially in these times of:  burgeoning data and content, many new technologies, and many new ways to bring data and technology into a business for its benefit.

While discussing ways that a “platform” mentality can be manifested in businesses of all sizes, Phil provides an excellent case in Hubspot. Hubspot is a source of internet marketing technologies and expertise for small businesses, particularly for inbound marketing and social media. The case was co-written by my friend and colleague Kirsten Knipp, now a VP at Hubspot, who shows that Hubspot is not only a technology platform that integrates with other platforms, but a platform of knowledge and innovation, thus becoming a “virtuous” platform of openness and sharing to benefit both Hubspot, and its customers and partners. I highly recommend a thorough read of the Hubspot case to understand how a “platform” can be put into play for companies, since most companies are not Amazons or Googles.

 

  

You may not agree with everything Phil says in The Age of the New Platform but it’s likely that the book has provoked new thinking about how business and technology must evolve, and also opened up an examination of ideas and functions that may no longer be relevant for businesses that want to sustain competitiveness and innovation. Phil has invited his readers to interact with him at www.theageoftheplatform.com to continue the conversation.

 

  

Disclosure: I’m a friend and colleague of Phil Simon, I’ve read all of his books, and intend to read any new books he writes.

 

Related Links

A Review of “The New Small”

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

‘Big Data’, Intelligence and Multi-faceted Innovation

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Avoiding Chaos, Losing Serendipity?

A Smarter Edgier Collective: Business Technology Professionals on Twitter 

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid

 

  

About the author: Julie Hunt is a software industry solution strategist and analyst, providing market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

 

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

 

Agile Governance to Ensure that Reliable Information is Available Anywhere Anytime

  

A good many companies now have Information functions in the Cloud, for a variety of reasons. There is the purposeful selection of cloud services for the usage and management of data, content, records and documents – in other words, Information – that supplements or replaces systems inside the firewall. There is also the proliferation of data and content – more Information – created in many cloud-based sites not under the control of companies. But companies want and need all of this Information -- and also need energetic ways to govern all of this Information as it flows in and out of the spaces used by enterprises.

Going with the notion that for most enterprises knowledge is power, information-led business innovation and competitiveness is becoming a recognized path for potential success. In parallel, services in the cloud are talked about more and more as enablers of innovation, as an agile, dynamic and cost-effective environment for new business direction and experimentation.

With so much information created anywhere-anytime, information governance has a vital purpose: ensuring the flow of reliable information to the right people at the right time. This can also mean reducing former barriers and changing processes, to make more of this information and data are available to more people in the enterprise, sometimes including partners and customers. What should be emphasized is governance that aligns with how information is used in the enterprise, so that governance also connects to business value and corporate strategic goals.

So when we’re talking about innovating information governance, we’re no longer in a vacuum or in a silo, off somewhere in that “information department” – we’re talking about the entire enterprise of integrated business processes and management infrastructure, running on-premises, in the Cloud, and in between. Everyone in the enterprise has to be on board, from top to bottom, across teams, internally and externally, working in concert to enact effective information governance.

  

Priming Information Flow – Anywhere Anytime

There is no doubt that most companies must extend their information strategies to capitalize on highly relevant information that is continuously created in the cloud.  Strong information governance policies and practices must realistically enable the flow of information to continuously bring information to the enterprise -- to improve decision-making, to better understand current and desired customers, improve competitiveness, and support all significant goals and strategies in the enterprise. Information Governance can be a vital part of the ‘framework’ for business agility, responsiveness to competitive pressures, support for new product and services directions, and innovation shepherding.

Enterprises need to break free of old perceptions and implementations of information governance where silos and disconnectedness dominate, and where governance has been viewed as difficult, esoteric, and somebody else’s problem. Companies generally have not taken a holistic view of business information governance, its impacts across end-to-end processes or business units, or the technologies to support it. Instead enterprises have treated information as islands within specific system silos, and have taken the same approach to its governance. Information Governance overwhelms many – many get lost in the details.

If information has become essential to corporate success, then Information Governance must become part of a company’s overall business strategy.  An upper management team, comprised of cross-departmental members, has to set the high level ‘culture’ to enable agile Information Governance:  a corporate ‘infrastructure’ of cross-team collaboration, an enterprise-wide commitment to levels of excellence when connecting with and serving customers, recognition that content from social sites matters, the dynamic means to process all potentially useful data and content no matter the source, and the ability to provide on-demand data and analytics ready for any device.

Individual responsibilities for different components of Information Governance can be segmented to include most groups in the enterprise and to enhance accountability. Services-oriented Information Governance may be an optimal approach with partnerships across teams to enable governance functions and processes. Legal and financial teams could take key responsibility for risk management and compliance, as well as retention policies and practices. IT teams can take on key responsibilities for security, storage, resource provisioning, and user access. It is also now the responsibility of enterprise users of information to understand, partake in and help enforce policies and practices for security, information quality, delegated access, sharing, and so on – these responsibilities are no longer “somebody else’s problem”.

 

    Creating Information Advantage in a Cloudy World

 

Detours For Information Anywhere Anytime

Not surprisingly, persistent issues for Information Governance and Management are mostly the same, whether the repositories are in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid flow based on the two:

 

• No clear holistic strategy for governance of distributed information sources
• Prolific growth of information sources and systems
• Need for extensive integration between information sources, often existing as silos
• Synchronizations to eliminate redundancies and to update with most current information
• Unreliable quality of information, content, data
• Timeliness of information
• Fragmentation that will block information flow and devalue assets

The creation of content and data in cloud repositories has added complexity to ownership and the chain of custody. Enterprises that strongly manage complex chains of information ownership and usage, both internally and externally, will help corporate goals and achieve advantage from all information assets.

Companies must take on the responsibility of monitoring vendors of cloud services to ensure that the vendor is meeting SLA provisions for security, privacy, backup and so on. This monitoring falls both to business users and IT groups. But companies must also develop comprehensive Information Governance plans to supplement what cloud service vendors provide. Companies are liable for proper information governance regardless of where the repositories sit. Business users as well as IT teams must understand the implications of “anywhere anytime” information flows.

 

            IBM: Enabling Multifaceted Innovation

 

Cloud Inspires Governance Innovation

Innovation often relates to finding new ideas and / or applying existing ideas in new ways to bring about beneficial change that affects many aspects of what an enterprise does. Innovation is not limited to the products and services in an enterprise, but also can be applied to business model and strategy, operations, employee and partner enablement.

Again, enterprises need to break out of seeing governance only in terms of risk containment and security (which are important) to also see how it can be a means to innovation. Governance is valuable for setting up policies and practices to guide information usage but it can also provide scope for experimentation and value creation through the orchestrated flow of information to and from many sources. Governance is evolving to handle the challenges of data in the cloud – extending information governance to cloud sources can also help innovate how governance is done. This is a new challenge for teams across the enterprise to work differently and creatively when governing vital information that must constantly flow, while ensuring that the enterprise meets reliability, compliance and risk requirements. Making accountability a distributed function across the enterprise extends the value of information governance and takes it out of its usual silo.

Timely, reliable information in the right hands is more essential as business cycles shorten and become more competitive, and as customer perspective and buy-in become more important. Information created in the cloud along with cloud services comprise a new platform for quickly sharing data and content that matters to the enterprise. “Working the problem” of information governance from the focus of ensuring the open flow of reliable information to be used by many teams in the enterprise anywhere-anytime is a positive move into innovation that will make a difference.

  

Related Links:

Information, Intelligence and Process:  Combining Forces to Better Answer Business Needs

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

The incongruous worlds of “data integration” – Making data accessible for any-size companies

Custom Code or Data Integration software tools: Strategic Use of Technology for Company Competitiveness

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

Connecting Data Governance to Business Outcomes That Matter

Data Management: Reaching into the Cloud

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is a software industry solution strategist and analyst, providing market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services    

 

 

‘Big Data’, Intelligence and Multi-faceted Innovation

 

I’m using this diagram (below) in two posts – this one and one to be published shortly. Why? The impact of what this diagram is communicating is big, and affects many aspects of enterprises that want to innovate, to be competitive, to grow, to stick around for a long while. So it deserves the extra exposure.

While the use case for this example of multi-faceted innovation is Consumer Products industry, all industries have a stake here, especially as more and more technology offerings are becoming “consumerized”, and as cloud services and mobile usage for business grow. Multi-faceted innovation has great potential to transform enterprises into agile social businesses.

 

 

IBM: Enabling Multifaceted Innovation 

 

More teams in enterprises need access to more data, information, content, and many kinds of analytics to better perform their functions, to find more ways for the business to deliver what customers want, to be more competitive, more responsive in volatile economic times and in dynamic markets. Reliable, relevant information delivered at the right time impacts how strategies and goals are realized, how innovative a company can be, or even how long a company will be around. Information does no good if it languishes in silos, whether in the cloud or behind the firewall. Sophisticated and business-oriented technologies are needed to process information from diverse distributed sources, to analyze it, and then share the results for further refinement or even disputation.

The enterprise that has truly implemented multi-faceted innovation in as many aspects of its business as is appropriate is more likely to understand how important it is to tap into as many information assets as possible, whether they are ‘owned’ by the enterprise or sitting in cloud repositories for social sites. Information-driven insights are a significant aspect of multi-faceted innovation in the enterprise.

 

Business and InformationTechnology

Early in October I had the opportunity to attend an event sponsored by the Teradata Partners User Group (TDPUG). Teradata Corp. is a global vendor of software solutions for data management and governance, data warehouse capabilities, and for a wide array of analytics offerings. Obviously user group presentations usually show the positives of using vendor offering. But beyond that, the presenters usually talk fairly honestly about how they accomplished work for their companies that made a difference. The presenters are usually the hands-on people who know the ins and outs of their projects, as well as the impact on the business.

Part of my focus at the TDPUG conference – or Partners, as many call it – was attending business-oriented sessions (rather than technical deep dives) that might help with the following: 

“Big Data’ is a major topic for Teradata, and for recent acquisition Aster Data (‘big data’ analytics).  So I wanted to see how end users are able to connect highly varied and frequently complex Data to business outcomes that matter and to innovation.

Looking at processes working with data and analytics: are enterprises combining Business, Technology, Analytical, Creative, Collaborative activities to lead to good results for the business? If yes, how are they doing this? 

New directions for Teradata: how is the company changing from promoting its offerings mostly to very tech infrastructure-oriented target markets to adding strategic focus on the impacts of BI and analytics on business goals and needs – and how is Teradata connecting to roles related to the purpose of the business itself?

From the user presentations and those from Teradata: what kinds of roles are emerging, in biz and tech, that will make a difference for enterprises when it comes to data / information and analytics? 

  

A Case in Point: Strategy, Innovation and ‘Big Data’

A few sessions showed how to connect a strategic competitive intelligence core to analytical processes. A session with Vodafone (España) revealed a model for deriving real value from ‘big data’ that feeds into processes for competitive strategies that lead to innovating consumer products and business outcomes.  Instead of falling into the trap of “battling” competitors in feature-function wars, Vodafone shows that companies should be on top of what their current and desired customers want and need.  Otherwise, the risk is falling hopelessly behind customer expectations for new and important changes in the market and products that address this market.

Vodafone bills itself as ‘customer-obsessed’ and in the highly competitive mobile phone business the company has to be. The strategic Competitive Intelligence (CI) group at Vodafone works with continuous analytical processes to feed intelligence into differentiation and competitive edge – from the customer perspective. Vodafone sees a lot of opportunity in understanding distinct customer segments and from quickly providing what each segment wants and needs. Many Vodafone target markets are highly volatile, so daily data updates and analyses are de rigueur to derive “next best actions” for Vodafone to take. Decision-making results from a convergence of analytics and intelligence in key areas: sales, marketing, competitive landscape – but revolving around deeply understanding each customer segment. This Vodafone CI approach illustrates the great payoff when business data silos are eliminated to achieve real integrated intelligence, leading to effective product and business innovation.

The Vodafone session also epitomizes many of the Partners stories: when considering ‘big data’ analytic processes, the focus is not just the data itself, but what it’s used for. The data must be reliable, timely, right sources and integrations. Vodafone ‘big data’ analysis means many sources, high volume, fast intelligence leading to fast actions, and a daily reiteration of it all. Complex EDW and analytics infrastructure are aligned to business strategy and important outcomes, with a twist: the game changes constantly.

An additional layer is the continuous re-analysis of methodologies for competitive and market intelligence processes, and of the validity of selected data sources, as well as context and the inclusion of new factors. To keep the intelligence efforts relevant, the dance steps are: change, iterate, stay agile (while knowing their competitors are likely taking similar actions as happens in highly commoditized markets).

What Vodafone is accomplishing with its market and competitive intelligence core is a move to derive from an “unexpected” and innovative use of analytics the sorts of offerings that should be made available to target customers.  A new perspective on what should be the significant issues for target customers is essential to capture customer interest.  Competitive and market intelligence can also be leveraged to ensure that the customer’s perspective is maintained as a “reality check”. It’s an ongoing sense of the impact of what could be uncovered, the ramifications of what even the smallest pieces of information could mean for the company.  It ensures that business decisions and product direction are market-driven, reality-based, and actionable.

  

Information Technology Underpins Multi-faceted Innovation

When people think about what Teradata offers, most think of a very intense technology infrastructure. But Teradata and its new acquisitions, Aster and Aprimo seem to be working hard to make clear to the business users of an enterprise how that tech infrastructure connects well to what the business needs to accomplish in every part of the enterprise. These ideas were found in many of the Partners sessions:   

Every business session that I attended continued to emphasize people (roles), process, practices -- and positioned tech in context of serving the first three – very focused on real business outcomes

Real collaboration permeated the projects described in the sessions – not called out as such but well exhibited in descriptions of what was done and why – shared passion for getting real things done in effective ways, teams working cross-departmentally

Natural collaboration happens mostly in enterprises where the company ‘culture’ is open to cross-team collaboration and working to effective goals

Purposeful and constant communication across teams is very important for the success of the projects presented

Sessions drove home that data is only valuable in context – context that is comprised of many aspects of the business and how the data is to be used

It is more and more essential for people to take time to understand their data sources and the data itself, before trying to use it, before integrating it and so on >> certainly before analyzing it and using it for decision-making

The need for excellent information flow, reliable data, accurate analytics permeates every group in the enterprise, and can help these groups find more ways to innovate internal activities, as well as innovating products and services, and relationships with customers and partners

  

Multi-faceted innovation is the basis for transforming companies into innovative, dynamic and social businesses. Most companies focus innovation activities on products and services, and on finding new markets. But to survive and thrive, companies need a strategic multi-faceted commitment to innovating throughout the enterprise, how it does business, and how it interacts with customers, employees and partners. Once such a commitment is in the works, enterprises then need to understand how information technologies play significant roles for the success of multi-faceted innovation.

  

Related Links:

Information, Intelligence and Process:  Combining Forces to Better Answer Business Needs

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

The incongruous worlds of “data integration” – Making data accessible for any-size companies

Custom Code or Data Integration software tools: Strategic Use of Technology for Company Competitiveness

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises 

Market Intelligence – Making Better Business Decisions at the Core of the Company

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

Software companies still fail to tap into top benefits from market & competitive intelligence programs

Connecting Data Governance to Business Outcomes That Matter

Data Management: Reaching into the Cloud

 

Disclaimer: Teradata Magazine sponsored my attendance at TDPUG, since I am doing some consulting with them.

About the author: Julie Hunt is a software industry solution strategist and analyst, providing market and competitive insights. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services    

 

Data Management: Reaching into the Cloud

Originally published on Hub Designs Magazine August 2011

 

In a form of “shadow IT”, Line-of-Business groups have been turning to cloud-based services to quickly set up technology solutions that support their business needs and objectives. IT teams are already carrying heavy workloads with ever-shrinking staffing levels, and frequently don’t have the resources to immediately respond to time-sensitive LOB needs. However without IT involvement, these LOB groups do not usually have the expertise to understand the implications of creating data in the cloud and its relationship not only to data in other SaaS / cloud offerings, but to on-premises systems as well. These business users need a partnership with IT to ensure that comprehensive data management processes are put into practice.

It’s clear that enterprises will continue to increase usage of cloud and SaaS offerings to find new ways to operate more competitively and efficiently. Unfortunately the rapid creation and adoption of cloud and SaaS services have led to increased data silos in the cloud. The same challenges that enterprises face for on-premises data management obviously apply to data repositories in the cloud: data quality and reliability, integration, governance, security and compliance, MDM, as well as improved data accessibility. There is now a bigger picture for data management, where all of these domains need governance as an interoperating whole.

If enterprises fail to address a rigorous data management strategy for cloud computing initiatives, deterioration in data quality and reliability of cloud data are likely to kick in quickly. Data that cannot be trusted nor aligned with enterprise datasets will destroy the value and cost savings that enterprises want from cloud services. One of the most important requirements of business data generated through cloud services is security for that data. Not all data created in the cloud requires security, but most of it does. Comprehensive data management policies are needed in the cloud as well as for on-premises data repositories to ensure secure data processes.

The concerns of both business users and IT regarding data in the cloud have been articulated in many surveys including one recently completed by IDC where issues that relate directly to data governance and MDM initiatives covered security, data integration, operational costs and compliance – all pretty much to be expected when considering management strategies for cloud data. The IDC study goes on to discuss an important point that again requires IT and LOB groups working together: Business Relevance.

The next two challenges – the perceived difficulty of cloud services integration, and the limited ability to customize – are both related to the important issue of business relevance.  While customers certainly enjoy the economic and operational benefits of the off-the-shelf, standardized nature of many cloud services, this survey shows they nonetheless want greater ability to “fit” cloud services more tightly into the context of their specific business.

MDM and data governance provide clear value when they reflect the actual activities and processes of the enterprise. This approach also makes it easier for corporate decision-makers to understand the role MDM and data governance play to support strategic goals and even how they might map (at the high level) to key business processes. Malcolm Chisholm and Fabio Corzo flesh out these ideas in The True Role of MDM: The importance of master data is not just data values or quality, but the real-life concepts they represent… We are looking for fundamental business transformation that will take the business into new ways of perceiving, understanding and developing customers, employees, suppliers, assets and securities. We are looking for business transformation that moves in line with the business goals. And though executives understand that data is at the heart of proper and well-executed business transformation, experience tells us that more often than not, the business transformation is limited to improved data quality side effects that fail to realize the true value of an MDM program. The above concepts become even more imperative when establishing management of data-driven business processes between the cloud and on-premises systems. There will need to be an evolution of data management and governance approaches to deal with new challenges that come from data in the cloud and from an integrated approach to managing data across disparate data domains, many of which are not owned by the enterprise. Cloud services have been very effective in converting (or commoditizing) IT practices through well-formed repeatable processes. To accommodate proper data management for cloud and on-premises solutions, IT and business users will need to work together to build out data management solutions through practices and technologies that support the creation, use and storage of data “anywhere anytime”. Both IT and Business are important to setting the right strategies, including the crafting of a data management architecture that will kick in before an enterprise’s cloud data becomes too distributed for thorough governance. While more and more data will be owned by non-enterprise entities in the cloud, the ownership of comprehensive data management processes and practices continues to fall squarely on the enterprise through business users and IT working to ensure reliable data availability.     Related Links The incongruous worlds of “data integration” – Making data accessible for any-size companies Custom Code or Data Integration software tools: Strategic Use of Technology for Company Competitiveness Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises  Information, Intelligence and Process:  Combining Forces to Better Answer Business Needs The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web     About the author: Julie Hunt is a software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for vendors and buyers. Her 25+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

Findability Inside The Firewall – Still Trying To Find The Information We Need

 

Google and Search are now infamously synonymous for successfully looking for almost anything out there on the worldwide web (regardless of recent speculation about Google Search losing some of its edge). Unfortunately, inside the firewall, it’s a different story. Many organizations have increasing explosions of content, intelligence sources, data, and internal collaboration sites: all of which contain information that the staff of these organizations need to do their jobs.

It’s very clear that there is an “information overload” and also quite clear that people in enterprises aren’t connecting to the information that they need. This is despite the advent of intranets with search built in, desktop search, cross-enterprise search, knowledge management initiatives, content and document management platforms, and other technologies.

One symptom of information overload is the inability to get the right information to workers at the right time; 40% of those surveyed said they had the information they needed less than 75% of the time.

Technology is seen as one clear way to address the information overload/clutter problem, with 35% of the total sample – and 70% at companies that manage their information well – rating technology as very helpful (8-10 on a 10 point scale).

                 Xerox study

 

There is a mismatch between the needs of the staffers of enterprises, and search methods and technologies to find relevant information quickly. Classic search and search optimization of information and content do not organize into role-based approaches to locating what workers are seeking. Enterprise staffers are rarely trained to be knowledge or information workers, both in terms of generating content that can be easily found by others and how to effectively find content, documents, data and information.

 

 
Source: Google

 

I’m not very fond of the terms ‘knowledge worker’ and ‘information worker’, as they seem to serve to reduce people to drones instead of recognizing that these enterprise workers are: thinkers, analyzers, innovators, problem-solvers, communicators – not repetitive ‘bots. Improving productivity means working smarter, not necessarily faster, and enterprises should be doing everything to remove obstacles for staff to work smarter. Besides, almost everyone is an ‘information worker’ anymore, regardless of profession or job title – we all have oodles to deal with in terms of data, content, information, intelligence reports, dashboards, mashups, ad infinitum. 

  

Conceptual Shift: From Search To Findability

The Internet search paradigm is predicated on already knowing which key words will likely produce relevant content/information results, and then hoping that everything that matters will show up in the returned results. Internet search has also been classically performed with a lack of context, where the search is independent of professional roles, work goals, context, or business processes relative to the content resources provided in results.

Inside the firewall, locating content and people with answers is better served by ‘findability’. A lot of definitions for ‘findability’ are rather circular; I think a good definition for enterprise findability comprises: ease in locating information and resources for specific worker needs while reflecting relevant aspects of content attributes, context, worker roles, people/social resources, and business processes.

I see findability for internal content and information akin to usability aspects of software solutions: it doesn’t matter how great the information or content is if the people who need it can’t figure out how to get to it. And findability can be the most useful if it functions the way people work in the enterprise.

 Workers need processes and technologies that … 

INCREASE

• collaboration with each other
• connections and relationships to get insight from others
• creative efficiency to produce new knowledge and product
• transparency of existing documents to build upon

DECREASE time spent:

• duplicating work
• searching for documents
• locating others they need to talk to
• finding knowledge that will help them
• re-building something when a template already exists

 

 Bob Mixon is a solution architect and Microsoft MVP techie for SharePoint solutions who writes and teaches extensively. In a seminar, Mixon discussed findability for intranets: 

Mixon defines findability as "the art and science of making information available to users," noting emphatically that this means "it's not just search."  In addition to search, the key components of findability were identified as being: governance, architecture, design, and navigation.  Mixon noted that most users tend to search on the internet, but resort to browsing (i.e., point and click) on intranets.  Once thousands of sites/documents exist within an intranet, however, search becomes essential in that environment as well.

  

Content Optimization -- Enterprise Search: Complex Solutions and Frameworks

Many enterprises have built out solutions based on enterprise content management, document and records management, enterprise search, with content lifecycle management and governance. Enterprises also adopt optimization initiatives using information architecture, as well as functional work with taxonomies, tagging/favorites, semantic search, text analytics, data dictionaries, and so on.

The various content-related solutions offer enterprises frameworks to create, store, publish, and archive content across all channels inside the firewall. And these enterprises can set up good processes and practices for the above activities. However, most content management solutions equate the ‘findability’ of content and information to Search. Unfortunately most search functions that are built into CM solutions are inadequate.

There are various approaches to making content management more effective for findability including combining knowledge management practices and processes with CM frameworks. But this introduces more implementation, maintenance and governance layers, as well as added costs and resource requirements.

A good many practitioners provide guidelines for optimizing content to be more findable: Bob Boeri of Guident presented on elements of findability at the Enterprise Search Summit May 2010 where he made this statement:

Documents constitutes 80% of our business knowledge assets.

Databases etc. the other 20%.

Boeri lays out a comprehensive program for enhancing content and information findability along with lifecycle management, and his presentation includes a number of useful data points on the huge proliferation of content in enterprises. Further ideas for making enterprise content findable come from the recommendations of Ephraim Julius Freed and Bas Zurburg in their respective blogs.

 

Other enterprise platforms and applications often have search functions, but again, the search usually does not work very well (compared to optimal Google standards). So not only are content and information spread across different silos, but search is also silo’d, since individual app-based search capabilities do not function across all enterprise repositories. Uber-search inside the firewall, dubbed ‘Enterprise Search”, does perform cross-silo functions but can be an expensive investment. And again, content and information must be optimized to support better results in enterprise search.

In a recent blog post, Coveo VP Diane Berry speaks about Enterprise Search 2.0:  

Enterprise Search has evolved from its repository-centric start to today’s ever-changing landscape where Enterprise Search 2.0 powers and supports critical business processes. In fact, often Enterprise Search 2.0 doesn’t even look much like search, because the search – of virtually any and all enterprise systems – is conducted in the background, the information is housed in an always-on index, and it is presented in composite information mashups for high value decision support.

 
Source: Coveo

  

Enterprise Findability 2.0 – Goal-, Role- and Process-Focused

We are already seeing traditional Enterprise Search evolving into the findability paradigm where enterprise information is more integrated with context and business processes.  There are other software technology solutions that are evolving to provide findability of information in new ways.

 

  >> Adaptive Content Delivery

Baynote has evolved its recommendations and personalization capabilities for websites to what the firm is calling ‘adaptive web experience’:

The Adaptive Web dynamically maps the user’s intent, then adapts in real-time – based on the engage­ment patterns of like-minded peers.

The Adaptive Web is intent-driven. It uses past histories, but isn’t beholden to them; what’s most important is what’s happening right now.

Since Baynote technology can be used on intranets, it is worthwhile to consider what Baynote-style technology might offer for improving findability across an enterprise, should that become an extension of adaptive content retrieval.

Real relevance requires knowing what your customers want (their intent), knowing which of your content best matches that intent (most engaging), and giving them that content in real-time (adapting)

 

>> Findability As ad hoc / Adaptive Process: Adaptive Case Management

Tangential to business process management (BPM), adaptive case management is an emerging solution that pulls together information in the context of ad hoc business processes while focusing on business goals, worker roles, and knowledge domain context. ACM also taps into the increased use of collaboration and social media to support unstructured business processes. So information is surfaced to workers when needed for particular situations. Behind the scenes, a great deal has been set up via ACM software and practices to sustain robust ad hoc business processes as they occur.

Although discussing the need for the Social Intranet, Oscar Berg could also be referencing ACM:

Knowledge work is about such things as solving problems, performing research and creative work, interacting and communicating with other people, and so on. Such work is by nature less predictable and repeatable than traditional industry work (transformational and transactional activities organized into repeatable processes). Both the inputs and outputs of knowledge work – which is information and knowledge – vary from time to time, from situation to situation. So does the purpose, activities, roles and resources involved in knowledge work. Knowledge work is also less structured and the structure of knowledge work typically emerges as the work proceeds.

The unpredictable nature of knowledge work is why we need to give knowledge workers access to all information that exists and that might be relevant. Since we don’t know what might be relevant until a certain need arises (which we never might be aware of until we discover certain information), we can’t really put the relevant information in one “for keeps” pile and all other information in another “to be trashed” pile. 

  

Max Pucher, Isis Papyrus Founder and Chief Architect:

ACM allows the business to empower selectively and securely all the people that do things and those for whom things are being done. ACM is about communication and process as ONE! ACM leaves the automation of the low-value, highly repetitive administration tasks to BPM, but it provides the platform for the high-value, unique and skill or knowledge intensive processes.

ACM may evolve beyond its ‘roots’ in business process management to become a much-needed internal platform of technology and practices to more relevantly and immediately surface the most-needed information, content, and data, wherever it exists in the enterprise, all in the context of immediate situational business process for a particular worker’s responsibilities.

  

>> Findability of Structured Data: BI and Analytics That Surface Data and “Intelligence”

In a previous article, I detailed a number of interesting trends for BI and Analytics that may result in better intelligence results for businesses. BI and Analytics present information in specialized formats in support of “knowledge workers” and to help businesses make better decisions. As collaboration processes are married to BI and analytics, unstructured content will have a place along with traditional structured data, contributing to the findability of a greater breadth of relevant information.

Enterprise search meets BI:  Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine is an example of unified information discovery and analysis across the enterprise. Somewhat like the ease-of-use of Google search combined with context-savvy and relevance-focused analytic technology to help find much more than non-contextual bits of information. BI Search also allows findability of unstructured content as well as the traditional BI sources in structured data repositories. Hopefully BI Search will help workers find related information and content, as well as unexpected but highly relevant information sources.

 

 

 

Information Mashups and Situational Awareness:  For information delivery primarily from structured data sources, software vendor JackBe can, on demand, pull data ‘as is’ to build out information mashups from multiple pre-prepped sources. Harkening back to the thinking behind ad hoc processes and ACM, JackBe’s Presto mashup platform has been drafted into providing intelligence for situational awareness needs, where there has been no specific anticipation of the situation, and where the situation may be gone after a day. For properly utilizing information revealed for situational awareness, it is essential that the users of the Presto platform possess significant subject matter expertise to understand whether the JackBe mashups are accurate, meaningful, and useful -- or not. However, again we have another approach to finding information needed by workers, somewhat in context to their roles and responsibilities.

 

Content analytics and Content Intelligence: Seth Grimes explains findability as it relates to analyzing content to bring its value into intelligence processes:

"Content analytics" can be seen as business intelligence (BI) for/from content, as text (rather than number) crunching that generates insights to improve business outcomes. The two practices, content analytics and BI, certainly share motivations. If you don't analyze your content/data, you may be missing opportunities and running risks.

Analytics also boosts value for users. Semantic search, faceted navigation, and content annotation/enrichment create findability and improve user experience and value for users. They also let users treat content like data. Call the goal "content intelligence," enabled by "smart content."

Although Grimes is talking about content for external-facing websites, the applicability to internal enterprise content is obvious.

  

>> ‘Now, The Information Finds You’

TIBCO Software recently announced a new release of tibbr with the above tag line, fully remade from its 2009 debut as an internal microblogging tool. In this new incarnation, tibbr still benefits from the TIBCO sophisticated backbone of enterprise infrastructure management, including data integration, messaging and process management, and, as such, is infrastructure-agnostic. Or as Ram Menon, TIBCO CMO, puts it:

We’re leveraging a billion dollars of integration technology investment to offer customers the ability to get at the information they need, in real time, if they choose

While tibbr is built more for real-time information streams than archives of content and information, tibbr and Tibco have created a platform with a lot of potential for improving overall information findability that adheres to context and worker roles.  It connects to process, people/workers, collaboration venues, data and information streams, centralizing all event streams into one dashboard. Information can be organized by subject or topic, rather than by people. tibbr enables users to create, contribute to, and subscribe to the real-time event streams that matter most to them.

Dennis Howlett provides this description of tibbr:

It intelligently marries people, process and context, delivering information the way people want to consume

tibbr provides flexibility in the delivery and consumption of information by allowing users to select the form, frequency and manner in which they want to receive updates. Updates are delivered at the requested time, to the device or interface of choice, with the appropriate context. With its integration capabilities and bi-directional feeds in and out of business applications from vendors like Oracle, SAP and Salesforce.com, Tibco connects tibbr to business processes and event-triggering that are then exposed in tibbr for taking action.

Since tibbr has a customizable subject / classification structure, companies can build an information model that works best for them. With that in mind, will tibbr also call for Information Architecture and governance capabilities to ensure the findability of information as it is handled by tibbr dashboards?

 

Convergence or Patchwork?

Lots of different technologies are available for both search and findability in the enterprise, and new ones are emerging. Right now, all of these technologies somewhat resemble a patchwork of possibilities, but with some very significant overlaps of capabilities and solution strategy. Realistically, for many enterprises, multiple options may be what are needed to achieve overall findability for all worker roles. And this a case where tech really matters to help enterprise workers find exactly the information and intelligence that they need as quickly as possible.

It is also likely that large enterprises will continue to benefit from rigorous content-generation strategies, Information Architecture, and governance systems to enhance whatever methods are used to find information in context. Sophisticated solutions for findability will require diligence and consistent oversight to ensure the best results for workers.

What interests me a great deal are a couple of things: how the newer solutions evolve, and what sort of convergence will occur from solution spaces that started off quite separate from one another.

 

Related Links

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

 

Disclaimer: Julie Hunt is not affiliated with any of the vendors in this article.

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

 

 

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

 

For the past few years, companies have been exploring initiatives internally and externally that dance around the notion of “social” methods for engaging all of the people in an enterprise ecosystem - to bring about better results for these companies. These social methods have been described with terminology such as “enterprise 2.0”, “social computing”, “web 2.0”, “social media”, and so on. The evolution of these social methods has led now to another term: the Social Business.

I find the term “Social Business” a necessary one:  to remind companies that people are very important to their success: customers, employees, partners, suppliers, and so on. I see the term “Social Business” encompassing what companies might become to engage people - inside and out – to achieve business goals, and frankly, to stay in business. Again looking at terms in common usage: Enterprise 2.0 has been concerned with the “inside” (I call it social collaboration) and social media / web 2.0 have been concerned with the “outside” (external-facing customer engagement). A blurring between Social Inside and Social Outside has begun, partly driven by the adoption of customer-facing social media tools by internal collaboration programs.   

A lot of the conversation for the ins and outs of social these days has focused on technology and practices - and even on “naming conventions” - but People as the focus is what really makes a difference for a business to achieve success. People participating in the “Social Business” are cross-generational: there are lots of people of all ages who are savvy about collaboration, communication, social media, respecting colleagues and customers – none of these activities are the sole turf of any generation. And I’ll repeat: the focus on the value of People and trust in what they can accomplish (not just on tech and practices or processes) is at the heart of healthy companies.

Why does a renewed - and authentic - interest in People matter to a business? From the customer perspective, much has been written about customers now driving relationships with businesses where businesses listen to what customers want, like and don’t like. From the perspective of employees and partners, a great deal of what companies need comes from people:  innovation, creativity, ideas for new directions, passion, enthusiasm, customer relationships, knowledge, experience, judicious consideration, and so on. 

The Human factor always has to be distinctly considered in anything called “social” -- otherwise it’s just a buzzword shell game. First there must be authentic respect for all the people in the enterprise ecosystem; then enterprises can work on building out social practices that consider the human element – afterwards, apply technology and processes where they make sense.

  

Value of Social Business - Inside

In enterprise activities such as collaboration, knowledge management, business intelligence, business process management, adaptive case management, there is a significant role to be played by social capabilities to improve how these activities perform and provide relevance and results. Social business on the inside is also rightfully tied to enterprise collaboration and intranets that are taking on more social media type capabilities. Many software solutions are including social capabilities as methods to improve solution usage and value, as well as do a better job of incorporating the importance of the human element.

For example, Business Process Management (BPM) solutions encompass practices and tools that are evolving and including more people-oriented methods in terms of social collaboration capabilities. Forrester’s Clay Richardson comments:

Enterprise social – and social BPM by extension – is seeing healthy adoption in industries and organizations that have open cultures and have a need to innovate and share ideas quickly. Although it might seem counterintuitive, we’re seeing the greatest adoption of social BPM patterns in the healthcare and public sector – specifically in defense.

Sandy Kemsley, independent analyst and systems architect for enterprise infrastructure, also understands well the people side of business:

Tom Davenport recently wrote about the need to add structure to social in order to bring enterprise value: Transaction systems like ERP and CRM, tools for workflow and document management, and project management systems all made it more clear to people what they need to do next in their jobs. That capability has undoubtedly led to productivity gains.

But work effectiveness also demands that people share their knowledge and expertise with each other. That’s where social media comes in. It makes it easy to reach out to others for help in making a decision or taking an action. And the transfer of knowledge through social media doesn’t require a lot of difficult knowledge management work in advance.

Business Intelligence is another software solution space that is looking at building in collaborative layers throughout the BI lifecycle. The possibilities for new applications of analytics increase with collaboration. Inviting in many-to-many interactions also opens up processes to new ideas from participants. Gartner found that social venues and collaboration help to track and capture outcomes of the decisions made based on BI / analytics:

Gartner's user surveys show that improved decision making is the key driver of BI purchases. However, most BI deployments emphasize information delivery and analysis to support fact-based decision making, but fail to link BI content with the decision itself, the decision outcome, or with the related collaboration and other decision inputs. This makes it impossible to capture decision-making best practices. Solutions are emerging that tie BI with social software and collaborative tools for higher-quality, more transparent decisions that will increase the value derived from BI applications.

Promoting social on the inside draws on the rich value that lies in the many people who populate the enterprise.

  

Value of Social Business - Outside

Social media and social CRM solutions and practices are gaining interest and usage as means to work with customers throughout the customer lifecycle with the company. Social media and social CRM also play important roles for connecting the Social Business-Inside with the Social Business-Outside.

Social media is not just the latest fad in marketing; and to really work, social media is not “one-size-fits-all”.  Enterprises must understand how a go-to-market strategy that includes social media will help with objectives and obligations; then enterprises must figure out which social media to use and why. Social media commitments require an authentic personal touch, both for how customers are communicating with the enterprise, and how the enterprise responds and sustains customer conversations.

Maria Ogneva comments on the social customer and social CRM:

The ability for everyone to engage and be in alignment: Social media is not a silo, and no one department owns it. There must be a process in place by which each message gets automatically routed to the right person, classifying it by type (question, complaint or compliment), content (what it actually said), sentiment, action needed, and influence. This helps automate the triage process, which until now has been mostly manual.

Jeremiah Owyang’s work with brands employing social media to better connect and support customers is extensive and well-known. In his presentation on “Three Trends Companies Must Invest in for Social Business”, Owyang introduces the notion of Rings of Social Influence which include employees as company ambassadors for communicating with customers, as well as these recommended best practices for such employees:   

• Establish guardrails to protect both employees and the company
• Offer internal training courses, (like Intel’s certification program) and recurring training
• Offer an internal water cooler where they can talk in a safe place and plan: Yammer, Socialcast, Community Platforms

And of course companies must recognize the power of the customer voice and consider Owyang’s recommended best practices for customers active in social media:

• For better or worse, customers are already talking about you – how can you aggregate their voices closer to your brand?
• Develop an advocacy program to recognize and reward your top customers.
• Change your mindset to understanding that critical feedback is an opportunity for product and service improvements – then use to increase loyalty and WOM.

 

Social Business Equation: Inside + Outside = Eliminate silos

Many enterprises are understanding the value of social media to better engage and retain customers, to attract prospects, make sales, help customers solve problems: Social Business - Outside. But it seems to be much harder for enterprises to understand social on the inside and why that matters. Enterprises must come to understand that social on the outside won’t be substantially achieved – let alone sustained - if social on the inside isn’t working.

Social on the inside pertains to all company teams that touch customers, prospects, partners, and suppliers – basically the vast majority of the company.  The commitment, usage and value of social on the inside and the outside must be real – employees, partners, customers will quickly figure out if a company is faking it.  With healthy social practices inside a company, the support and growth of social for any interactions involving the enterprise human ecosystem – inside and out – should then be a natural and vital part of overall company strategy.

Here are the big questions:

1. Can the enterprises that need to, change quickly enough to re-humanize?
2. More importantly, will enterprises even choose to change?

This change – understanding and nurturing the value of all the people in the enterprise ecosystem – impacts how the company operates internally, how it does business externally, how the company effectively engages the human ecosystem that is truly needed for the company to survive as a successful business – inside and out.

From this change comes these rewards:  big impact on continuous innovation / relevant product development, drawing the best out of employees, collaborating with customers and partners on future direction and products, listening to all of the people in the enterprise ecosystem to draw on their experiences and expertise for building and sustaining competitive edge >> all contributing to the success and relevance of company.

The strategic decision to become the social business has to come from upper management and boards of directors – it has to be a key aspect of the enterprise – or it won’t happen in any significant or sustained fashion. When an enterprise chooses to become a “social business”, the divide between social-inside and social-outside should blur as more and more as silos within the enterprise hopefully disappear, and as bi-directional connections to customers and prospects, partners and suppliers become more authentic and more immediate.

 

                                                                <<<<<              >>>>>

Jeremiah Owyang has produced a very good starting point for depicting the Social Business Stack, expressed in terms of technology. I’ve added a “reminder” element to his diagram:

 

 
 
 

 

Related Links

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for Business

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid – business technology hybrids bring real value to company competitiveness

  

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished software industry analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategic Product & Market Intelligence Services

 

Customer Buying Criteria: Applying customer and competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to real external benefits -- and strategic internal benefits

B2B Software vendors

 

Many software solutions will prevail if customer-centric, market-driven thinking permeates the company’s product development planning and execution, and go-to-market strategy.  Understanding customer buying criteria is essential in: solution markets crowded with many vendors, highly commoditized software markets, and/or markets for complex software solutions. Determining and using customer buying criteria will help teams in the company understand where each solution stands relative to the competitive landscape and the appeal of each solution as the right solution from the customer POV.

 

A tool configured as a Customer Buying Criteria (CBC) matrix can very helpful to sales teams to work effectively with customers-as-buyers. The CBC matrix can bring a lot of clarity to mapping a software solution to the wants and needs of a particular customer. This is a tool that relies not only on extensive customer and competitive intelligence, but on the cumulative wisdom and experience of multiple teams in the software company.

 

 

Cross-team Collaboration to Build the Best Sales Tools

Market and competitive intelligence for software companies is at its best when the results of analysis are used in applications that help and support many internal teams: sales, products teams, marketing, management. As a corollary, a lot of the best tools for sales teams require cross-team collaboration. This sort of collaborative effort is essential to create tools that are smart and thorough in every way possible. Contributing teams include:

· MI/CI for competitive landscape, market analysis, target customer analysis

· Product marketing / management for evaluations of software vendors own solution and understanding of customers, markets and competitors

· Sales, professional services, partners – feedback from customer engagements

· Reviews of the resulting tool by all for determining realistic values for ratings and relevancy of criteria and capabilities

 

Tools developed by cross-team efforts frequently reciprocate “paid back” value to collaboration participants by providing a new “benchmark” to use for strategic and tactical self-review and analysis for improvement. Most software companies are short on people and time, even when the economy is good.  As such, it is important to choose projects that yield both strategic and tactical benefits to many teams, and that have the depth to generate spin-off projects and tools.

 

 

Conceptual Overview of Customer Buying Criteria Sales Tool

The Customer Buying Criteria tool greatly enhances sales efforts by tapping into the understanding of what customers want.  The CBC tool dovetails well with consultative selling where the sales team (and the software company) becomes a “trusted advisor” helping the customer-as-buyer successfully solve business problems. With the CBC tool, sales teams have real talking points for the buying criteria that matter to customers, to be able to speak the same language. Instead of communicating with a customer by blathering on about product features/functions or “7 reasons to buy my product”, much more meaningful exchanges take place where the customer is driving the conversation based on what she/he wants to buy.

 

If a software vendor does not know what its customers want, the vendor will not be able to convince customers to buy its offerings. It’s not about “my product is better than competitor X” – it’s about “my product will give you what you need to be successful with your needs”. Most mid-market and enterprise software solution markets are more and more driven by expectations that are pre-defined by customers.

 

A clearly defined context for the software solution is essential for a customer buying criteria tool to be effective. The tool will comprise a single solution that the company is offering, that it does well and for which there is a strong market. Context also means that using the CBC tool well is highly dependent on fully understanding customer requirements for each individual sales opportunity (no one-size-fits-all).

Setting context is everything: 

· One single clearly defined solution per tool

· Identifies target market

· Why the customer should care

· Attributes that matter to the customer

· Spell out the product solution’s particular positioning in the larger solution market (ex.: web experience management for large global enterprise websites – external-facing sites – customer-engaging – within the high end WCM market)

 

How does a software vendor determine the customer buying criteria for a particular solution?  It’s all about what target customers want from the solution – in their words, from their POV. The key customer buying criteria (categories and capabilities) are developed based on industry expertise and customer engagements, and are not “traditional” feature comparisons. Sources for determining criteria include:

· Customer interviews and surveys

· Customer segmented market research

· Sales and partner feedback

· Industry writers and analysts

· Information from companies you would like to have as customers, potentially gained through partners (resellers, SIs, solution providers, etc.)

· Market and competitive intelligence analysis – particularly to validate future market directions and competitive landscape intentions

 

 

Practical Overview of Customer Buying Criteria Tool

The overall CBC tool comprises a superset of all relevant customer buying criteria in order of importance, based on what was determined through the research and analysis process.  Under each criterion are multiple solution capabilities that customers understand and need for meeting project requirement. These capabilities are not feature/function lists from the product POV, but higher level and expressed in customer terms.

 

Before the sales team uses the CBC tool for sales engagements, an excellent and thorough discovery with each customer must be conducted to understand the specific criteria that come into play (what matters, what doesn’t). If the sales team doesn’t understand what each customer-as-buyer needs, then the tool is of little use.

 

The CBC tool can never be left with customers. First of all, a lot of the software company’s competitive information exists in the tool.  Second, leaving this sort of tool does not adhere to consultative interaction and does not help the conversation with the customer. (More on these points: Software companies still fail to tap into top benefits from market and competitive intelligence programs)

 

 

Recommendations for building a CBC Tool

· Consider using Excel to take advantage of customizable viewing options

· Entries for key customer buying criteria

o    Several high level criteria categories - each with multiple capabilities

o    Criteria in order of customer priority

o    Criteria mapped to sales cycle phases

· Criteria aligned to primary & secondary target customer roles for discussing each buying criteria category

o    Many B2B customers-as-buyers are composites of multiple roles

o    Different phases of “sales cycle” will map to one or more roles, such as BU, IT

· For ease of viewing / using:

o    Collapsible / Expandable groups of rows customize view

o    Can hide unneeded competitor columns

o    URL links in cells, to navigate to supporting content in company’s internal archives

· Competitors: from left to right = most important to least important

· Can include more than one relevant current release of your company’s particular solution 

· Competitor versions should be most current – provide release #s

· Ratings are assigned based on an assessment of the support for each capability provided by each vendor (your software company and competitors)

o    Ratings will have a qualitative nature and could be:

§  Green – above average (better, best)

§  Yellow – average (adequate, so-so)

§  Red – below average (not good, missing)

· Data for deciding ratings for your solution come from all products teams, and participating sales and professional services

· Data for deciding each competitor rating comes primarily from third-party sources (links in cells) – preferably multiple third-party sources, and will reflect input from all other teams through review processes

 

There is definitely a qualitative aspect to the ratings in the CBC tool, but it is mitigated by the extensive research and analysis done for understanding and evaluating the competitive landscape. Further reviews by company teams and partners will bring the “wisdom of the crowd” (and the “wisdom of the gut”) to evaluating the overall accuracy of the ratings and of the resulting “big picture”. The company’s own ratings should follow an approach where the contributing teams are the harshest critics for how well the company’s solution delivers on capabilities for the customer buying criteria.

 

Fine-tuning on a continuous basis must happen to keep the tool fresh and responsive to customer and market changes, as well as new product/solution releases.  Maintenance of the tool will cover changes and corrections contributed by the company’s teams, feedback from customers and partners, and industry evolution. The tool is structured to enable ease of updating and publishing new versions quickly.

 

Setting up the Customer Buying Criteria tool as a superset of all relevant criteria makes it possible to generate subsets as smaller, focused versions. These permutations can be provided for niche/industry focus, particular customer subsets or solution scenarios, or views of particular competitors, whether for selling or for internal purposes.

 

 

Sample CBC Tool

Benefits of using Customer Buying Criteria Tools

 

Successful outcomes to engaging customers-as-buyers require all teams collaborating in many different ways – constructing a well-made CBC tool provides the collective expertise of multiple teams.  For sales teams, the tool is a source of many permutations of talking points. New hires for sales will find this tool especially helpful to ramp up more quickly.  The CBC tool aligns sales cycle strategy with the software offering, relative to individual customer requirements, needs, and desires. For each sales opportunity, the sales team can scan across the matrix of the company’s offering compared to competitors to get a quick sense of where strengths, weaknesses – and serious trouble – come into play in the context of each customer’s requirements. In a sense, the tool provides a huge and very useful Reality Check for every sales opportunity, even to the point of using the tool as part of the qualifying process:  is this opportunity really worth pursuing, is the deck stacked against us, what gaps will have to be filled to work well for the customer? 

 

Customer benefits from the CBC tool are indirect (since the tool is not shared with customer) but still important:

· Better basis for sales to talk with customer – conversation moves along more realistically while engaging customer with true customer needs and concerns, and in language of the customer

· Customer can decide earlier in sales cycle if solution really is a fit – from the start, the conversation has been from customer POV and relevant to customer needs, requirements and desires

· Better identify what criteria really matter for project, and which criteria are optional

· Customer can see that the software company thoroughly understands the solution space from the customer POV

 

For the products teams, including product marketing, the CBC tool can be a reality check on how well the company provides relevant customer-centric, market-driven solutions. Looking at capabilities / rankings of the company compared to competitors:

· Allows the teams to step outside the “day to day” and really look strategically at the offering and how it stacks up in the competitive landscape

· Evaluates how the company is / isn’t meeting customer expectations and requirements

· Provides close scrutiny of differentiation and whether the company is stuck in too much “me too” development

· Taps the tool as a metric for the software solution and for its competitiveness

· May lead to new thinking for creating new solutions,  better differentiation, more creative approach to solving customer problems, increased competitiveness, and better quality for the solution

 

Upper management now has a tool to help see and better understand the big picture, especially for complex software solutions selling into crowded markets.  Hopefully, the CBC tool will enable better dialogues between the executive and the products teams, working from common basis.

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services  

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

When I started writing articles for my blog Highly Competitive, I had in the back of my mind the “classic” advice for professional blogging: pick one main area to cover and as such, show my SME-ness for that area. So I should have selected a particular software solution space and stuck to it.

 

Well that doesn’t really work for me and isn’t even realistic for anyone analyzing today’s software infrastructures in most companies. As such, I find myself covering multiple software topics, largely due to my diverse software tech background, and it all makes sense as we see more and more overt overlap and interconnection between the different applications of any-size enterprises, and between the activities and processes of how enterprises do business. As enterprises become more customer-focused (outside-in), what has become especially interesting is the evolution of change that eventually will produce Social businesses.

 

Starting with systems infrastructure, many enterprises have multiple points of integration and interoperability. It is this interrelatedness of systems that increases the business value to the enterprise. Integrations and interconnections are happening at multiple levels in businesses: their IT/application infrastructures, the applications themselves, how teams function in the enterprise interacting with systems and people, and how companies are evolving for doing business and engaging buyers. To become an effective Social Business, enterprises will have to nurture integrated internal systems and processes, as well as social strategies and practices for external and internal collaboration and communication.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Enterprises Can’t be Built on Silos – First, a Look at Internal Interoperability

It has become more and more clear that enterprises work better with overtly interconnected systems and business processes. Silos within enterprises both for systems and internal processes have caused a lot of problems. Enterprises, no matter the size, cannot have teams, or systems, operating in vacuums. Where too many silos persist, businesses are doomed, whether the silos are technology or human based.

 

Understanding how to reduce duplication in systems infrastructure, business processes, team activities, and strategy implementation does much to improve the health of the enterprise. Enterprises want to achieve efficiencies of operation and want to do more with fewer resources, so the elimination of duplications in systems and teams, and the increase of integration (systems) and collaboration (people) is essential.

 

Since we’re talking about the integrated enterprise, I see enterprise data integration as an illustrative “metaphor”. In most cases data integration endeavors to cut through almost everything in systems infrastructure and involves multiple teams, both IT and Business. Building really good DI processes requires the involvement and collaboration of many teams. Data integration solutions cannot be built in a vacuum to be effective; DI initiatives embody a metaphoric sense of interrelationships and interoperability: process, collaboration, disparate data feeds (information sources) coming together, business rules, business needs. People, business process and technology have worked together to achieve the right results. 

 

 

Social Capabilities and Strategies Appearing in Many Enterprise Software Solutions

Increasingly, enterprises are introducing and integrating social media for internal and external applications.  And now many “traditional” enterprise solutions are adding / integrating social capabilities, to enhance the usability and relevance of these solutions.

 

Business cases for social media include: internal implementations for enhanced collaboration and communication purposes for employees; external initiatives for better engagement and support of customers/buyers. Many social media guidelines rightly advise that introducing social practices and technology into an enterprise should come after a thorough understanding of what is to be accomplished, and then after an articulation of the strategy. Additionally, businesses have to figure out what cultural changes need to take place internally, for social to make a big difference. Business social process is something that people have to do authentically. Technology and tools do matter as a means of enacting and managing social business processes, but they are no substitute for strategic planning, best practices, real goals, and serious consideration for the human participants.

 

Beyond the social media technology that is being adopted by enterprises, many “traditional” enterprise applications are becoming more “social”. This is reasonable considering that software solutions are for use by people, whether employees, customers/buyers, or partners. Most software solutions are components of people-oriented processes. These “socializing” solutions include: BPM, BI, CRM, ERP, internal collaboration / intranet, and content management.

 

Recently Forrester’s Connie Moore - @cmooreforrester - commented on Twitter: “social computing has become the tipping point for businesses and vendors finally marrying collaboration and process” and then “Collaboration between business and business and business and IT is core to any successful #bpm effort.” Connie Moore has extended her coverage of BPM to include social capabilities that will transform BPM solutions.

 

For many software industry analysts and writers, there are no longer clear demarcations between software solution spaces.  The “classic” approach of separate software solution categories being covered by SME writers is giving way to analysis that acknowledges the interdependencies of different kinds of software solutions.  We are seeing more collaborative work across solutions, with social computing as a common thread of discussion.  Analyst firms like Altimeter Group and Forrester are working with more collaborative efforts from their staff analysts across formerly separate software solution spaces to reflect the realities of how enterprises operate.

 

 

And People Complete the Integrated Social Business

My tech background has a markedly strong emphasis on people since software companies are very people-intensive enterprises.  Many teams need to collaborate to accomplish company goals and customer needs, with the result that most teams are customer-oriented. If you have a career in software technology, it is essential to recognize the value of people, especially customers. Not surprisingly, many customers of software technology are driving the change to Social Business where the focus is more on people and less on tech.

 

It’s not just about why people buy or make technology decisions but about respecting people who are trying to accomplish business tasks and solve real problems, and who just want their software to work as advertised without a lot of pain to get there. Software technology ultimately is a product to be sold, so the focus must be on the purpose and real value the technology provides customers.  

 

On the software vendor side, people collaboration should be a top priority: collaborations to sell solutions, collaborations to contribute to customer/buyer success, collaboration with partners and customers for success. Businesses can be very successful if they encourage and engender internal cross-team collaborations focused on customer needs. The growing interest in Social CRM addresses how businesses develop customer relationships to contribute to customer success.

 

Social is partly about tapping into the connectedness that people are building with the web as a platform.  Social Business adoption by software vendors must be based on the fact that people and relationships are what really drive success and longevity. The lesson to enterprise management: Social media adoption has been driven by the people who want to use it to communicate and work efficiently, no matter the purpose.  Social media invaded enterprises because people really want to use it – because it is effective for what they are tasked to accomplish. 

 

 

“Social Business” practices have been around for years  

The essentials of Social Business have been around for years in many software enterprises – frequently as a “shadow” culture. A lot of employees in the software industry have intuitively understood and practiced aspects of the “social business”, recognizing the importance of the customer and of collaboration.  The process of selling software solutions to enterprises involves a lot of people working with many other people, for internal and external purposes, no matter the sales model.

 

Ironically employees, customers, partners have been open to adopting social capabilities as part of doing business; the executive level, however, is the laggard for authentic adoption of social collaboration culture and processes. Upper management often has impeded real efforts for social business and has also contributed to creating silos within the company and chasms between teams. Many software companies have been poorly structured for many years to be able to nurture “social business”. Usually not enough people and not enough budget have been allocated for fully supporting strong customer-centric processes and initiatives. 

 

It’s very important that executive and other management levels formalize strategies for Social Business and better empower the many employees who already intuitively know how to find and keep customers/buyers through social relationships and support for customer success.

 

Fully empowered collaboration with customers and partners will improve sales, product offerings, long-lasting relationships, and will lead to fewer problems. Enterprise teams will be better connected to customers, and to one another. And upper management may finally get real perspective on employee motivations as well as customer desires.

 

 

 

Profile of a Software Aficionado

Indeed, my software technology background contributes to my SME “schizophrenia”: Extensive stints as enterprise and small business developer, SE, solutions consultant, market and competitive intelligence analyst. Plus time served in multiple software spaces:

· developer and systems analyst for materials management systems in semiconductor manufacturing; also small business software solutions developer

· very deep dive in data integration solutions, for many years

· whirlwind couple of years providing strategic analysis for WCM/web experience management, social collaboration, presentation portal, web 2.0 apps, and transactional content management

· continuous auditing and analysis of SaaS, OSS, cloud computing, Agile -- impacts on software industry and on vendor business goals

 

 

 

  

Related articles:

 

Social collaboration in enterprise:The heart–and goal–of Community is “collaborating people”, not collaboration tools

 

B2B Social CRM for Software Vendors and the Lifecycle of Customer Experience

 

The incongruous worlds of “data integration” – Making data accessible for any-size companies

 

 

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt is an accomplished market intelligence analyst, providing strategic market and competitive insights for the software industry. Her 20+ years as a software professional range from the very technical side  to customer-centric work in solutions consulting, sales and marketing.  Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt   For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Market & Competitive Intelligence Services