Highly Competitive - software industry insights

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    

 

Avoiding Chaos, Losing Serendipity?

 

From earliest times, humans, as social animals, have continuously faced decisions about “who to let in”. Motivations for doing so are varied. Hierarchies of social, economic and political ranking, closed groups and cults, exclusivity, outcasts – all of these social artifacts are still present in all aspects of human societies, work, play, and so on. With the growth of the Internet and social venues, it’s now somewhat becoming: “who do I let in” and “what do I let in”.

For those who are active on the Internet, for business or personal reasons, there can be a constant drumming of feeling bombarded and overwhelmed: information overload, ‘big data’, content popping up everywhere, social data explosion, too much noise. From time to time, we each might run an internal monologue such as this:

If I let everything in will I go crazy? Should I start limiting information that I encounter – then: what and how to filter things out? Am I filtering out thoughts, opinions, information that I need to hear, even if they are uncomfortable? Am I filtering so much that I’m only hearing what I already accept and think? Who am I filtering out that I should be hearing?

 

Alvin Toffler in “Future Shock” (1970) is usually credited for bringing the term “information overload” into everyday use. According to Toffler, people will experience future shock due to accelerated and ever-increasing proliferations and changes in technology, information, social interaction -- which results in “shattering stress and disorientation”. Toffler equated information overload to “sensory overload” that impeded understanding and decision-making. Obviously we continue to use the phrase “information overload” in our current era of “all things Internet”: 

Commentators have coined a profusion of phrases to describe the anxiety and anomie caused by too much information: “data asphyxiation” (William van Winkle), “data smog” (David Shenk), “information fatigue syndrome” (David Lewis), “cognitive overload” (Eric Schmidt) and “time famine” (Leslie Perlow).

Johann Hari, a British journalist, notes that there is a good reason why “wired” means both “connected to the internet” and “high, frantic, unable to concentrate”.

 

Signal to Noise – Or the Noise is the Signal?

Audio engineering terminology has achieved popularity with some who seek ways to “manage the cacophony” of information, conversations and content on the Internet in various venues. This term is used even more by solution vendors, services and consultants who want to “solve the problem of too much noise” for individuals and organizations: Finding the signal in the noise and fine-tuning the signal-to-noise ratio.

Signal-to-noise ratio (often abbreviated SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. It is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power. A ratio higher than 1:1 indicates more signal than noise. While SNR is commonly quoted for electrical signals, it can be applied to any form of signal (such as isotope levels in an ice core or biochemical signaling between cells).

As an engineering concept, identifying a legitimate signal in the noise is pretty much a black and white event, a measurable result from a standardized formula. But this is not as easily accomplished when applying the same notion to the wide variety of information, content, conversations, forums on the internet and elsewhere. While there is popular use of these phrases, is there truly anything gained from using them?

While it sounds clever, applying an engineering construct to a collection of different types of information and data that have highly qualitative attributes can be a trap. Co-opting the engineering terminology makes many people think that there’s a way to quantitatively sort out what matters, forgetting that many qualitative and even fanciful factors can be equally important. One person’s bunch of noise is another’s treasure trove of signals – so even the concept of signal to noise is highly subjective when alluding to content and information. When it comes to qualitative content, conversations, information -- the noise may be the signal.

The questions may now become:  How do I determine what is noise – or is that even useful? When does noise become what I need to hear? When does filtering out the noise become awareness-censorship and deprivation of the very diversity of ideas that I seek and need?

  

Filter and Unfiltering

With this very real and constant bombardment of information, content, conversations, and social connections, yes, using filtering, classifications, lists, personalized search, and other devices can frequently be useful. But too much filtering can also be harmful, stifling, empty. Any kind of filtering has impact (positive, negative) on controlling (limiting) the human connections that could make a huge difference in our daily endeavors – and particularly, on thinking in new ways, innovation and creativity. Rules, filters, selection – all fine, as long as it is understood what might be excluded, as well as included.

Venturing out on a Google search to look for the “two faces of filtering”, most of what turned up was “how-to” advice that was mainly about filtering. Very little turned up to enlighten me on how filtering impedes better understanding or the dangers of filtering out the unexpected. (The ultimate irony here is speculating how much Google was filtering/personalizing my search in the first place.)

With the large amount of “stuff” that is communicated on Twitter, lists and hashtags have become filtering devices that many use, with mixed results. Some find the right mix in their lists, sometimes a refuge; some realize that they are missing out on new conversations and connections because of their lists. Others dance a fine jig between their lists and the general tweetstream.

Some want Twitter to provide the barometer for determining what may be valid and valuable to Me, relative to particular individual perspectives and sets of interests:

I want Twitter to figure out how to present that stream in a way that adds value to my life. It's about the visual display of information, sure, but it's more than that. It requires some Really F*ing Hard Math, crossed with some Really Really Hard Semantic Search, mixed with more Super Ridiculous Difficult Math. Because we're talking about some super big numbers here: 200 million tweets a day across hundreds of millions of accounts. And that's growing bigger by the hour.

  

First, twitter “content” is not just information, or content pure and simple. It’s also social activity. So, multiple algorithms would be required to extract relevance from tweets.

It strikes me that these algorithms might fall into two broad categories: content relevance and social relevance. Content is relevant on twitter generically, as trending news and information, often cited, agreed with, and linked to.

 

But the Twitter firehose, fully open, is quite friendly to Serendipity – as well as to Chaos. Twitter, full on, epitomizes communication almost completely unfiltered. Most activities, information, knowledge, content, opinions are generally open to anyone. Twitter can facilitate meeting people you’d never otherwise meet. New ideas smack you in the face to make you uneasy in ways that call for reexamining your own thought processes and contentions, whether for work or personal life. Comforting birds-of-a-feather are also present to reassure ideas already held.

Connections and brainstorms spring up where impromptu conversations are usually open to all, with an almost stream-of-consciousness flow. Unexpected new relationships develop. When disparate worlds willingly collide, it can enable the emergence of new ideas, perspectives, unexpected slants on topics and problems. 

 

If you are participating in social venues like Twitter, consider this: let them kick you out of your comfort zone – expose your thoughts to the unwelcoming and find out other POVs – listen, think, process, learn, achieve something new. How else do new thoughts, creativity, innovation find life? How else do seemingly unrelated points take creative thinkers to new places? Colliding with seemingly disparate pieces of information, making unexpected connections, looking through the eyes of others. These acts may be ‘unfiltering’ – or a massively different kind of ‘filter’.

 

Ulrich Kraft, in “Unleashing Creativity”, writes about the processes that can lead to creative thinking and those that can inhibit:

Latent inhibition has a corollary: too much specialized knowledge can stand in the way of creative thinking. Experts in a field will often internalize “accepted” thought processes, so that they become automatic. Intellectual flexibility is lost. For example, a mathematician will very likely tackle a difficult problem in an analytical way common to her professional training. But if the problem resists solution by this method, she may well find herself at a mental dead end. She has to let go of the unsuitable approach.

 Creative revelations come to most people when their minds are involved in an unrelated activity. That is because the brain continues to work on a problem once it has been supplied with the necessary raw materials. Some psychologists call this mental fermentation or incubation. They surmise that associative connections between ideas and imagination that already exist in the mind become weaker and are transformed by new information.

This change of perspective allows for alternative insights and creates the preconditions for a fresh, and perhaps more creative, approach.

 

Context for the ‘Chaos’

In his “Servant of Chaos” blog, Gavin Heaton discusses the work of Steven Johnson:

Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” reminds us that innovation, invention – or what he calls “the slow hunch” – require the time and space to collide with other ideas.

What if social networks reach a certain point and then begin to shrink? What if the noise to signal ratio becomes so large that we begin to partition ourselves and our interactions to those of “like mind”. Steven Johnson says “Chance favours the connected mind” – which I love. But what if those ideas swim around in ever shrinking ponds starved of oxygen by the blue-green algae of group think?

But now I feel we need to increasingly push ourselves outside of our internet comfort zones. We need to click those links randomly. We need to visit, search and read sites that are outside our narrow focused expertise. 

The “slow hunch” needs serendipity, to allow the opportunity for a particular “hunch” to collide with other hunches, other ideas, contradictory positions, radical thinking – whatever will serve to extend and grow the original germinating hunch into full-blown innovation that matters.

 

More from Steven Johnson:

Secondly we must diversify the inputs in our lives and institutions. This means surrounding ourselves (and filling our institutions) with individuals who have diverse sets of hobbies and interests, and fostering diverse social networks, where friends, peers and colleagues stretch a wide variety of vocations.

“By diversifying the inputs in your life, you create the possibilities for new connections to take root, and diverse multidisciplinary environments generate good ideas,” Johnson said. A virtuous circle is formed when such individuals converge, and where the coming together of intellectual and social diversity sparks creative and otherwise unconnected thoughts and perspectives

Johnson reminded the audience that innovation is not simply technology at work. It’s about openness. 

 

 

Stay Curious, My Friend

It’s important to remind ourselves to stay curious about the world around us, if we want to innovate, explore new ideas, be open to the unexpected in ways that could significantly change our lives and the work we do. The internet, including social venues, helps us to do that if we have the courage to tear down mental preconceptions (filters).

Try to indulge in the necessary lack of inhibition to allow creativity and innovation to emerge. It takes intellectual courage to think outside accepted principles and habitual perspectives such as “We’ve always done it that way,” or “My group wouldn’t want me to think that”. Try to retain a spirit of discovery, a childlike curiosity about the world. And question the ‘understandings’ that others consider obvious or de rigueur. Solve problems creatively, not “correctly”.

Surprisingly, distraction can be good – it can take you to fortuitous, unplanned places and people. For some, the Twitter firehose, the information overload, the cacophony of social conversations seems too fragmented to bear. But fragmentation of attention also takes the willing to exceptional experiences, to the missing pieces of a project or solution.  Adhering to too much filtering or sticking to familiar ‘expertise’ can lead to too much focus on one component, which can limit or block open and diverse thinking and experience, and inhibit innovation.

 

 

Related Links

A Smarter Edgier Collective: Business Technology Professionals on Twitter

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

 

  

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

 

Internal Disruption – No Longer Business As Usual

Tapping into periodic business model renovation to refresh competitiveness

 

Not too long ago, a tweet from Hutch Carpenter @bhc3 caught my eye:

First step in disrupting an industry: identify the "business clichés"

The tweet linked to an article by Luke Williams, known for his work on ‘disruptive thinking’ for transforming businesses through seeking the unexpected and through adopting proactive disruptive behavior and strategies. The article elaborates on what is meant by business clichés:

In other words, what are the clichés - the widespread, hackneyed beliefs that govern the way people think about and do business in a particular space… inverting or denying industry clichés can often lead to significant business breakthroughs

Williams’ notions of ‘business clichés led to a couple of tweets from me that boil down to:

…apply internally to tech co’s biz model > question assumptions, status quo, disrupt business as usual…to move to new possibilities, competitiveness, new solutions & markets

As with the Social Business, starting internally with change frequently is a better route for companies when faced with the need to disrupt current business models for survival and success purposes. Software companies are especially prone to stand on old business models well past the expiration date. And many software companies are surprised when strong competitors emerge, based on fresh business models.

  

What is a Business Model?

Business models focus software companies on target markets, customers, the solution space and, somewhat indirectly, the competitive landscape, the same matrix that underpins market intelligence. When companies seriously embrace the selection of a business model, the process introduces good and rigorous strategic thinking into decisions about company direction, as well as definition of company scope. Through the business model, the focus is holistic and interactive in terms of how the company will proceed to achieve success.

Of course there are many definitions and concepts about what comprises a business model. A lot of MBA school, entrepreneurial, and VC hours have been spent on not only deciding what is the optimal business model for a particular undertaking but on the strategies to carry out its intentions.

  

The shortest definition that I’ve come across is in a post by Tim Berry: A business model is a description of how your business intends to operate and make money. Berry then goes to the next level:   

But innovative business models go beyond this simple formula to create customer loyalty, make value in unusual ways, and define new products or services that people didn’t know they needed.  

This dovetails somewhat with a business model definition put together by IBM:

• What value is delivered to customers: Customer segments, the value proposition, the specific “job to be done,” what is sold and how it is sold

• How revenue is generated: the pricing model and forms of monetization

• How the company positions itself in the industry: the company’s role and relationships across the value chain

• How the value is delivered: Key internal resources and processes as well as external partnerships.

There is lots of disagreement, lots of vague notions regarding whether business models matter or not.  Some consider the business model almost a sacred object, carved in stone. More and more, many see each iteration of the business model as disposable. A new class of thinking sees the business model not as an end but an ever-evolving means to success as a company.

 

Articulating New Direction - Most Companies Not Very Good At Doing This

Intriguing idea: the disposable business model. But how many companies pull off such an approach?

From my experience in the software industry, not many. Particularly bad at changing direction are mid-sized software vendors that are publicly traded. While being a smaller company would suggest agility for change, often these companies are ham-strung by boards of directors who seem to want growth without risk. There is no growth without risk for most companies. One piece of advice to mid-sized software vendors is to never go public and thus retain a healthy ability to reinvent the company without the inertia of boards of directors and Wall Street expectations. Another piece of advice: learn to embrace risk: that is, the good kind that can lead to growth and new success.

But no matter the size of the company, many software vendors usually wait too long before assessing the health of the current business model and even then, are slow to articulate change, even slower to act effectively. As a result, core markets increasingly stagnate, management still tries to work with the old way of doing things, and fails to work genuinely on a new business model, or as Williams advises, to identify and then deny the business clichés that are dragging down the company.

In 2008 Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, and Henning Kagermann published the article “Reinventing Your Business Model” in the Harvard Business Review, an article that went on to receive second-place honors for the 2008 McKinsey Award. The article culminates research into the difficulties many companies have with pulling off success through business model innovation. The authors contend that these companies have such poor understanding of the current business model (really disturbing! but explains a lot…) that they can’t relate the current model to new opportunities, nor can they be confident about ejecting the current model for something new.

(Clay Christensen) also underscores the fatal flaw that managers make when trying to reinvent their business in the face of a disruptive competitor. Their solution is often to leverage what the company already has in place at marginal cost rather build an entirely new business model with heavy investment.

If you are trying to create a new business model because the world is changing, then you don’t want to leverage what is already in place. An entrant doesn’t have anything to leverage, so just creates what needs to be created.

 

When It’s Time For Reinvention

A 2005 survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit reported that over 50% of executives believe business model innovation will become even more important for success than product or service innovation. A 2008 IBM survey of corporate CEOs echoed these results. Nearly all of the CEOs polled reported the need to adapt their business models; more than two-thirds said that extensive changes were required. And in these tough economic times, some CEOs are already looking to business model innovation to address permanent shifts in their market landscapes.

 

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results 

-- Albert Einstein

  

Of course, there’s no point to changing the business model if the company isn’t innovating its software offerings, which must come about by “disrupting business as usual” internal to the company. Not all product innovation demands a reinvention of the business model. Perhaps the salient question is: how does this new innovation impact the proposition articulated for customer value? Companies that find success with business model reinvention also possess clear understanding of their customers and the value to those customers that comes from innovations.

Identify When A New Model May Be Needed:

An opportunity to...           

• Address needs of large groups who find existing solutions too expensive or complicated
• Capitalize on new technology, or leverage existing technologies in new markets
• Bring a job-to-be-done focus where it doesn’t exist

 A need to . . .

• Fend off low-end disruptors.
• Respond to shifts in competition

 

To determine whether a firm should seek to reinvent its business model, Johnson, Christensen and Kagermann advise these steps:

• Articulate what makes your existing model successful. For example, what customer problem does it solve? How does it make money for your firm?
• Watch for signals that your model needs changing, such as tough new competitors on the horizon.
• Decide whether reinventing your model is worth the effort. The answer is yes only if the new model changes the industry or market. 

So the new proposition for staying competitive may be that many companies will need to adopt the strategy of continuous business model reinvention. But to do this, tremendous internal change will have to happen, particularly around the management of the company. Reinvention, new directions, continuous competitiveness -- all are only possible in companies that embrace change and innovation in the corporate cultural DNA.

 

             
                              Source: IBM CEO study – Capitalizing on Complexity

 

Comprehensive Market Intelligence is Key to Business Model Disruption

A lot of what can make a software company more competitive – and can contribute to innovation of business models, markets and products – comes from well-executed Market Intelligence activities and processes. Excellent Market Intelligence is essential if business model reinvention will be an on-going initiative. Understanding customers, markets, channels and competitors is based on better information to create advantage in new and unique ways:

• New opportunities – identify new trends that will matter to target markets and customers; how to get there before the competition (whenever possible)
• Early warning of industry, market and/or competitor changes – take advantage of opportunities and leverage/deal with threats and risk, and always look over your shoulder…
• Enhanced customer interaction – understand customer POV, goals, needs, strategic direction
• Stronger target market selection & positioning – research, validate go-to-market and positioning; locate under-served markets for target customers and solution space; guide how to articulate positioning well for customers, analysts, industry
• Strategic view of competitive landscape – figure out true differentiation, figure out where competitors are not operating; understand the issues that matter to customers and the solutions they seek from competitors

 

 

Reinvention: Brand Equity / Brand Perception

I want to open up the question of how business model reinvention impacts Brand, both in terms of brand equity (value and general recognition built from the former business model) and brand perception (how current and potential customers – plus media, competitors, analysts, etc. – view the company). In the not-so-distant past, it had been considered near suicide to make business model changes that could negatively impact Brand. But in the digital age, when information is quickly disseminated through endless media, most people are easily educated about changes in a company. The Internet itself is all about constant change, and many have grown up in that environment.

I’m not going to explore the Brand aspect in this article but it is an issue that must be considered when reinventing business models and enacting innovation that impacts customer perception and receptivity to the company’s offerings.

  

Smaller Companies With Disruptive Genes – Better At Business Model Reinvention?

>> JackBe – Customer-Driven Disruption

JackBe started off as an Ajax tools vendor in 2001. After a while the company began targeting enterprises with a mashup platform that connects to all sorts of data sources. Responding to what JackBe customers wanted, the next development was to provide capabilities for ad hoc data integration mashups by end users.

Recently JackBe has been calling itself ‘the Real-Time Intelligence Company’, specializing in situational awareness, and is promoting the idea that the company may have a new way to provide business intelligence for enterprise end users. Real-Time intelligence for JackBe first of all means self-service BI, extrapolating its mashup services for end users. Real-Time also means fast, easy access to existing data sources, without concern about the freshness of the data. Essentially, the JackBe approach supports instant decision-making in certain scenarios.

A significant challenge entails the validation of data sources and value of the resulting mash-ups: do the end users understand what they are doing and are they intelligently combining the appropriate data? Is the intelligence that is pulled together relevant and accurate, and how do end users know or test the intelligence to provide validation?

By stepping into the larger arena of BI, JackBe now has invited in scrutiny from a well-established solution space. However, traditional BI is not without its problems and has suffered low adoption and success rates over time. It may be that JackBe is pioneering a new approach that could make a significant change to how BI is practiced or even what constitutes “business intelligence”.

JackBe has found itself moving into a new business model, seemingly a case where business model reinvention continues to be customer-driven, and where a company listens well to its customers and acts on their needs and wishes, to achieve competitive positioning and success. But with the new business model comes new challenges to ensure the validity and accuracy of its product directions.

  

>> NewsGator – One Business Model Dies Out, Another Adopted to Thrive

Starting in 2003, Newsgator focused on developing RSS usage for information and content consumption.  A business model shift occurred when NewsGator changed from a consumer focus to targeting enterprises. Even though NewsGator still provides RSS, access is now free.

In 2007, NewsGator reinvented its business model by launching Social Sites, community / collaboration software that also provides tight integration with Microsoft SharePoint. NewsGator was already a SharePoint partner for its RSS capabilities, so its business model shift pivoted on a strategic, and rather significant, partnership already in place. NewsGator acquired Tomoye community software in 2010, mainly to enter new markets. Tomoye also had the SharePoint connection.

The move to a communities / collaboration platform that extends SharePoint has proven to be successful to date. The new business model includes a deep commitment to Microsoft and SharePoint – and active cultivation of an ecosystem of Microsoft partners around “making SharePoint social”. Social Sites is built directly on the SharePoint platform, is SharePoint cloud certified, supports multiple versions of SharePoint, including mobile and Office 365.

NewsGator has selected a niche for its social solutions in that it is dedicated to complementing the SharePoint platform and to making the experience of using Social Sites with SharePoint a seamless and smooth experience for end users. With this business model, NewsGator success is highly dependent on continued SharePoint success. The up side is that Microsoft makes available an extensive ecosystem that can greatly benefit NewsGator.

One aspect of business model reinvention for NewsGator tracks back to the impact of reinvention on Brand. Does the company name still make sense, shifting from RSS/aggregation services to social media platform? Or does the brand recognition of NewsGator’s name trump any confusion about what the company now does? Frankly, considering that a good many software company names are obscure, this really shouldn’t be an obstacle for NewsGator, particularly with such a targeted solution in conjunction with SharePoint.

  

>> Stone Bond – From Services to Software Vendor

There are many cases where professional services providers for IT solutions will either productize services work into a software offering or purposefully create new software solutions that eventually evolve into a packaged software business for the services company. A key change in business model comes when the company must decide if it is to be a dedicated software vendor or a services company – or even, perhaps, the company decides to split into two organizations.

Stone Bond’s consulting services began in 1993, providing IT solutions for the worldwide oil and gas industry. Among the services was data modeling projects, working with oil company engineers as end users. Many in the oil and gas industry have long understood that their data is a very valuable asset.

In 2002 Stone Bond Technologies launched a software solution called Enterprise Enabler for data and business integration projects. Enterprise Enabler presents as a single environment for EAI and ETL capabilities and is somewhat geared towards end users / business users through out-of-the-box “codeless” data integration capabilities. Stone Bond has developed several technologies such as AppComs (for connectivity) to innovate how integration projects are created and executed. BPM and workflow based on SOA utilize end-to-end shared metadata.

While Stone Bond still targets the oil and gas industry, and obviously has a great deal of expertise for that industry, the company has already taken Enterprise Enabler into other markets, such as financial services and government. The solution also straddles target customers by offering a solution that can appeal to business users and/or IT teams. Enterprise Enabler may be blazing a trail for bringing together IT and business to better execute data integration projects as collaborative partners.

The company is now working on showcasing Enterprise Enabler as a software product independent of the original consulting business, with work going into raising brand awareness. Enterprise Enabler already has a solid customer base, but also seems like a “best-kept secret” in the data integration vendor space. In some ways, Stone Bond has an interesting clean slate when it comes to marketing to and educating the world on what this solution has to offer.

 

Related Links

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

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

Provocation-based Market Intelligence in a Market-Driven world

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

B2B WEM / WCM Software Vendors Targeting Mid-Market customers: stay where you are!  

 

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

 

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

 

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

“Intelligence” is a word much bandied about in enterprises. Frankly few enterprises use it properly to denote what constitutes authentic intelligence.

"Intelligence is nothing if not an institutionalized black market in perishable commodities"

Master spy novelist John LeCarré

While the above notion is intended to refer to information gathered by spies regarding enemies, this sort of thinking has colored how enterprises view intelligence: the secret information that will solve all problems and kill all enemies. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking business intelligence or market / competitive intelligence. The apparent allure of the military and spy industries for enterprises has badly skewed how many companies view intelligence.

The kind of intelligence that truly benefits enterprises derives from classic definitions of the word: learning, understanding, applying knowledge and experience to new situations to make better decisions. For both business intelligence and market/competitive intelligence, the frequent catchphrase is “making better business decisions”. Both involve data, analysis, recommendations. Both can have strategic and tactical applications. Both benefit from qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions. And both should strive for authentic INTELLIGENCE, not just resultant collections of information.

Business Intelligence methodologies and tech solutions have been used to generate actionable views of a company, frequently rooted in business operations. Until recently, BI outputs have been primarily reports – some might say too many non-contextual reports, many of which may be trivial, pointless, or worse, misleading. The BI world includes analytics, data mining, text mining and predictive analytics.

And sometimes BI is considered to be ‘competitive intelligence’, hence my references to market intelligence. Market/competitive intelligence and business intelligence should be complementary, but are not the same thing. In my view, a certain amount of BI output contributes ‘intelligent data’ for market intelligence initiatives. Overall, market intelligence gleans from many ‘data’ sources from many disparate sources inside and outside the firewall, both qualitative and quantitative, while filtered by specific strategic contexts. Until recently, BI has mostly derived from practices and technology that address structured data and business processes inside the firewall. BI will now have to include unstructured or content sources in analytics, to add in missing subtleties, context, and insight that cannot be pulled from structured data sources.

Analytics Everywhere

In addition to overt BI-style analytics, many other analytics solutions have been proliferating to help make better business decisions. Web analytics were silo’d for a while as relevant only to website usages. But web analytics now have many forms and have become very sophisticated. Data captured by web analytics is now important to many teams across the enterprise and is now becoming more integrated into other “business intelligence” endeavors.

With fast-growing social media applications, SM analytics are now emerging – again the data generated is essential and must be integrated into the overall intelligence base of the enterprise. Content analytics have become even more important as unstructured content proliferates from many sources.

These seemingly diverse analytics cannot be confined to individual silos in enterprises. “Intelligence for the Business” that results from all analytics is needed at LOB / department levels, as well as at the über-enterprise level. And mid-market enterprises need such business intelligence capabilities as well. So all kinds of analytic tools need to become more accessible to many roles and organizational segments that have not necessarily been targets of such solutions before.

Unfortunately, keeping pace with the enormous proliferation of data, and even with the various analytical outputs, is overwhelming many enterprises. More integration between what began as silos of analytics must now happen. Enterprises have to get better at the behind-the-scenes / get-your-hands-dirty work that is essential to make realistic and effective use of all the data (structured and unstructured) pouring in from so many sources. The Semantic Web will likely contribute overall to the integration of structured and unstructured data to add to intelligence relevance.

Predictive Analytics – The Bold New LOB Tool

Considered a subset of BI, but also present in other categories of analytics solutions, predictive analytics may become much more in demand than traditional BI solutions, especially with the new directions of innovative predictive analytics solution vendors.

Eric Segal of Information Management on predictive analytics – citing a marketing use case:

Predictive analytics is data mining technology that uses your customer data to build a predictive model specialized for your business. …The real trick is to find the best predictive model.

…a careful combination of predictors perform better customer prediction by considering multiple aspects of your customers and their behaviors. Predictive analytics finds the right way to combine predictors by building a model optimized according to your customer data.

Predictive analytics builds models automatically, but the overall business process to direct and integrate predictive analytics is by no means automatic - it truly needs your marketing expertise.

Predictive analytics can be part of “traditional” BI offerings – it’s also part of the web analytics world. Baynote provides ‘Adaptive Web’ solutions that include analytics, personalization and social search for customer-focused relevance on websites, to help optimize engagement and retention. Baynote’s Collective Intelligence Platform provides companies with predictive analytics based on the implicit patterns of customers visiting their websites. Omniture, WebTrends and other web analytics solutions also provide capabilities for predictive analytics.

Content Analytics, Content Intelligence

Enterprises have been challenged for years on the content intelligence front – it has been very difficult and very messy to extract meaning (and thus retaining context) from unstructured content to be used as “data”. The amount of enterprise content is enormous, with geometric expansion in play. For enterprises that publish content on the web, content analytics also offer the means to better connect with target markets and customers:

"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.

For content publishers, analytics drives better targeted content delivery, expanded audiences, and secondary uses and new distribution channels. These outcomes add up to profit. On the flip side, they are matched by reduced risk and cost avoidance given possibilities for more complete, more accurate compliance screening, e-discovery, and storage management.

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."

Seth Grimes on Content Analytics

 

“Intelligence” Hits The Wall

Stephen Few’s graphic for “BI Has Hit the Wall” is quite expressive of where BI – and all analytics - need to head to deliver evolving value to enterprises. Stephen Few is a leading expert in creating effective data visualizations that communicate real intelligence and don’t just function as “eye candy”:

Contained in these early definitions was the seed of an inspiring vision that caused people like me to imagine a better world, but the business intelligence industry has done little to help us achieve the vision of the people who coined the term. When Thornton May was interviewing people for his book “The New Know”, he asked a prominent venture capitalist known for his 360-degree view of the technology industry what he thought of when he heard the phrase business intelligence. His response was “big software, little analysis.”

For information to be useful, we must explore it, analyze it, communicate it, and monitor it, but the BI industry’s attempts to support these activities with few exceptions have been tragically comical. The technology-centric, engineering-oriented perspective and skill set that has allowed the industry to build an information infrastructure is not what’s needed to support data sense-making. To use the data that we’ve amassed, a human-centric, design-oriented perspective and skill set is needed.

New World Focus on BI and Predictive Analytics

Some of the significant changes to analytics solutions relate to how final artifacts are “formatted”. There has been a growing transition from traditional report formats to interactive visualization tools, and to collaborative processes that enhance the final artifacts. More companies want BI to help with current and future needs and goals, rather than measuring the past. And these companies should be inviting in more and more individuals (via collaboration) to help refine the accuracy and contributions of analytics outputs. Newer on-demand BI / analytics solutions are providing “right now” intelligence, though still these are still works-in-progress, for the most part.

A number of articles lately have made the point that BI initiatives have not been highly successful for many customers, while making another important point: that “failure” actually is part of the BI refinement cycle. But for costly enterprise-style BI solutions, “failure” can be quite expensive. Gerry Brown of Bloor comments:

However, there is little doubt that the number of BI users overall is increasing. With low-cost operators such as QlikTech, Tableau, LogiXML, Pentaho and Jaspersoft you get an awful lot of BI software for $25,000. Conversely, most enterprise BI vendors don't traditionally get out of bed for deals of less than $50,000. Low cost (or 'free') BI software encourages trial and experimentation with little risk, and this is what most enterprises prefer. After all, BI project 'failures' are common.

Referring again to the graphic for “BI Has Hit the Wall”, Stephen Few sees that “the traditional BI software vendors and most of the industry’s thought leaders are stuck on the left side of the wall” – while the future of BI will come from more non-traditional BI solutions:

The software vendors that are providing effective data sense-making solutions—those that make it possible to work in the realm of analytics on the right side of the wall—have come from outside the traditional BI marketplace. Vendors like Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, Panopticon, Advisor Solutions, and SAS tend to either be spin-offs of university research or companies that have ventured into the BI marketplace from a long history of work in statistics.

In a very interesting and thought-provoking Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI platforms, the analysts see significant changes in the solutions sought by enterprises:

…there is significant, if not euphoric, satisfaction with, and accelerated interest in, pure-play BI platforms. This is particularly true for smaller, innovative vendors filling needs left unmet by the larger vendors. To understand this paradox, it is necessary to consider a number of factors that are driving the BI platform buying decision today.

Other vendors to watch for new ways to perform and use BI / analytics include Lyzasoft, Predixion Software and GoodData. Lyzasoft and Predixion recently became partners for cloud to cloud analytics-as-a-service. GoodData provides BI PaaS to help speed up solution deployments.

BI SaaS adoption, while very low today, will grow steadily as maturing BI SaaS solutions are delivered in private and public clouds and in on-premises and off-premises configurations by trusted vendors. …innovative, pure-play vendors offering highly interactive and graphical user interfaces built on alternative in-memory architectures to address their unmet ease-of-use and rapid deployment needs. The perceived benefit is so compelling that business users are making this choice, despite the risk of creating fragmented silos of applications and tools.

Business users in particular showed a growing impatience with the time to deploy and complexity of traditional enterprise tools, which led to a rise in departmental buying of alternatives.

Collaboration and the Human Element

One newer area of interest for BI / analytics solutions is the inclusion of collaborative activities to add contextual and qualitative layers to the output of BI processes. To achieve authentic intelligence, contextual / qualitative layers can provide strong basis to test, fine tune and filter the artifacts of analytics. Analytics can benefit greatly from human filters that bring experience, knowledge, creative thinking. Context has a big role here: context for sources, context for outcomes, context for usage with other data points to achieve the best Intelligence for “making better business decisions”.

Collaboration is far more than distributing and sharing documents. It is interactive, inclusive, cross-enterprise. If collaboration is to be part of analytics, then iterative collaborative processes should be established throughout analytics cycles. Collaboration for analytics means bringing in disparate people to test assumptions, validity of data sources, accuracy and relevance of the outputs. These additional participants should provide a wealth of experience, complementary concepts and other essential data and perspectives. Having to prove the relevance and accuracy of analytics results to sympathetic as well as less sympathetic individuals should strengthen BI / analytic processes and projects.

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.

Vendors embracing collaboration as an essential part of BI / analytics include Lyzasoft, Predixion and Tibco Spotfire. Keep in mind that these vendors are all in early stages of building in collaboration as a significant aspect of their analytics solutions.

Analytics Aren’t Always Fun and Games

While there are very interesting analytics solutions that are “friendly” to business users, it is essential that safeguards are in place to ensure that business users understand what they are doing with analytic models and whether the resulting “intelligence” artifacts are correct, meaningful and useful. Collaboration with others who know the data, understand analytics, visualize the big picture, and so on, is one safeguard to ensure reliable analytics outcomes and correct usages.

In a particular enterprise, do enough people know what to do with analytics, both to start processes in meaningful ways and to audit outcomes to validate accuracy and relevance? Are users chasing the right problems or questions, providing the right data sources, including enough pieces? Do they have the understanding to work in a “big-picture” sense? Yes, analytics vendors should build in methods for validation, testing, guidance, but is that enough? Bob Warfield addresses this concern:

Few enterprises have the right analytical talent.

I was musing not long ago with VC and fellow EI Evangelos Simoudis that very few people actually know how to ask questions in a way that solves problems. It is something of a Sherlock Holmes conundrum. All the data is available. It is shatteringly obvious once someone connects the dots. Yet, very few know how to step across the stones that peek above the raging torrent of data to get to the other side where the answer lies without falling in and getting wet.

“You see Watson, but you do not observe.”

Beyond the traditional users of BI / analytics, there is an additional “challenge” to vendors to reach potential users who “need predictive analytics but don’t know it”. The challenge comes in two parts: first to find them and connect meaningfully with them; and then to provide guidance for every step of using the analytics solution to ensure proper outcomes. To connect with these “new” analytics users, vendors have to help them understand why they need analytics and how to use it. Self-serve training modules must be available for using the solution but also for understanding what analytics mean to the user’s role, industry and business needs. Detailed templates and best practices organized by industry scenarios are also important for success. It will be interesting to see how successful various vendors are for empowering such non-traditional users.

The Elephant in the Room: Reliable Structured Data

Although I’m not addressing data warehousing in this article, I do want to point out the need for basing any data-driven intelligence / analytics processes on reliable data. While it’s the right direction to provide analytics tools that work well for business users and increase ease-of-implementation and ease-of-use, diligence must be exercised to guarantee that data sources fed into analytic processes are trustworthy. Otherwise GIGO.

Teams comprised of IT and business must collaborate to create and maintain excellent processes for data profiling, data cleansing / quality, and data integration. The business users know how source data is used and the context for analytic processes. IT is the partner to help with the data profiling, data quality and integration steps. Data profiling tools can be used by business users to audit data sources, test for errors and/or for the lack of the right data, and to understand different data sources.

"Intelligence is nothing if not an institutionalized black market in perishable commodities"

A lot of data and content that matter for better “Intelligence for the Business” come with a short shelf life of significance. The new direction for many analytics solutions should bring this information more quickly into intelligence processes. When enterprises succeed in achieving richly integrated knowledge and context, authentic INTELLIGENCE is likely to result for “making better business decisions”.

Related Links

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

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

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

Content Marketing Strategy for B2B Software Vendors: Starring the ‘New’ White Paper

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

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

Future of tools for managing web content and web presence anywhere

 

 

Recently a colleague was exploring options for improving the web marketing capabilities of the company that he works for. He started his efforts by looking at “traditional” Web Content Management (WCM) software, with an eye to Web Experience (Engagement) Management platforms. But since his company is itself a mid-market-sized company, he was very uncomfortable with the options – and not just because of cost and time to implement. As conversations with his company management evolved, my colleague realized that he was not satisfied with a WCM / WEM solution because it didn’t seem to be the right platform for their web marketing strategy and business goals.

 

These days, companies of all sizes have tired of the expense and complexity of many WCM / WEM solutions, and would dearly love agile alternatives. And, yes, there are lesser expensive options. But what may be the most important factor for a lot of companies, is a strong emphasis on the customer-focused web presence for the company. And this may mean that company web presence will show up on other websites, instead of on the corporate website -- which leads to the notion of whether or not the “corporate website” is becoming obsolete for many types of companies.

 

Web marketing and customer relationship strategies are changing (and improving) – companies need new solutions and practices to manage the new world. More companies have come to understand that first they must build the web marketing / presence strategy that will accomplish their goals. Then they have to figure out how to achieve the goals of the marketing strategy, which will involve preferred practices and processes, as well as technology.  With web presence evolution, marketing strategies should include orchestration of web presence via other sites, and how to integrate with conversations and content from those external sites.

 

 

B2C or B2B – Which Organization Needs A Corporate Website?

Whether or not a company should have a corporate website can depend on many factors. For both B2C and B2B companies, content still matters and has to be located somewhere. The B2B company has the greater need for a corporate website, but must now evolve the corporate website to a social / customer hub. B2C sales and marketing goals might be less about content per se and much more about customer conversations and brand awareness that take place anywhere on the web. Jeremiah Owyang points out that the corporate website is less and less the most likely place to connect with customers.

 

 

B2C – Time to Get Rid of the Monolithic Corporate Website?

Is the corporate website obsolete? Most corporate websites do not work well for customers. The sites are designed from the corporate POV, with too much useless content that is hard to find anyway. Frequently corporate websites become money pits, requiring too many resources over time compared to the benefits received.

 

Particularly for B2C businesses, new thinking is that the corporate website might be completely unnecessary for customer interactions and brand promotion.  Going where the customers are, i.e. social sites, seems to be an effective way to better connect. Monitoring web presence and participating in conversations on other sites help companies reach out to current and new customers in ways that matter to these customers and can bring effective results to companies.

 

Current thinking is that social sites are taking sales endeavors to a new place since customers can now participate in spreading the word to potential customers through forums, communities, ratings, reviews. On the flip side, corporations have the responsibility of finding and responding to concerns, complaints, feedback, and requests posted on social sites, hopefully to resolve problems, to engage and attract customers through answers, and to learn from customer POVs.

 

 

B2B Companies Still Benefit from Corporate Websites, With Social Improvements

One approach to introducing more web presence into corporate websites is to add improved social capabilities that interact well with customers and potential buyers. This approach appeals to companies that want a measure of control over customer “conversations” and also makes sense if the company is using social capabilities as part of a customer relationship and support strategy. Content still matters for B2B websites – B2B are customers still looking for a lot of different kinds of content that they want to easily find on the corporate website.  However, many potential B2B customers are also influenced by interactions and content on external social sites – the savvy B2B company had better understand the importance of such sites.  Integration with and monitoring of social sites are key.

 

Hubspot - inbound marketing and social media advisors::

Your website may very well be the most powerful tool in your marketing kit. Not only is it the place prospects and clients go to learn more about you and your services, but it has a huge impact on their ultimate purchase decision.

The Hubspot post goes on to discuss a survey conducted by RainToday.com that looked at buyers of professional services and the amount of influence that corporate websites exerted on the purchase decision:

According to the survey, 74% of buyers report the service provider's website holds at least "some influence" over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider. This is 23 percentage points higher than in 2005 and represents a significant increase in the importance of websites.

 

B2B corporate websites need web management solutions not only for creating and maintaining more social and interactive experiences for customers visiting the site, but to monitor and participate in the conversations that take place on other sites. Other sorts of off-site social-related analytics need to take place, such as sentiment analysis. The results of monitoring and analytics must be used to fine-tune product and marketing strategies, and to help corporations better serve customers.

 

 

Jeremiah Owyang on the Future of Corporate Web Presence

Owyang throws out some compelling assertions: In the not-so-distant future, he states that there will be no “old school” corporate sites. There will only be sites assembled on the fly based on social data, a sort of dynamic personalization mashup of content and social engagement.

 

 Today, I’m pleased to see that the thinking –and technology, has emerged, where we’re finding a variety of companies that are integrating social technologies right into the corporate website, bringing the trusted discussions closer to the corporate site.

 

Although the highest state of nirvana (seamless integration) doesn’t yet exist, we should expect there to be very little difference between social technologies and corporate websites as content will assemble on the fly.  I predict URLs won’t matter, as content will be dynamically assembled around the buyer and their context in a variety of devices.  Sure, that’s far out thinking now, but that’s why we have several other stage gates that companies must first go through.

 

Owyang continues on the new social web presence:

1. Although it’s a new and experimental medium, brands should plan a roadmap.

2. The future of web experiences will be based around people – not products. 

3. Take inventory of all corporate web assets and identify where they are in the framework.

4. Next, identify the desired state, and then build a plan against it. Start small and slow, and be sure to have a strategy.

5. Don’t arbitrarily jump into the social marketing space without measurable KPIs. Be deliberate in your actions.

 

Owyang’s thinking is important especially for vendors of WCM / WEM software solutions since he may be pointing the way to future web presence solutions (a future that is not that distant). 

 

 

Should WCM / WEM Software be The Hub -- or one of the components?

Some vendors of “traditional” web content management solutions have been transitioning their offerings to WEM platforms where managing and enhancing the web experience or engagement of the customer is the central purpose. The current WEM platforms focus mainly on customer and social capabilities existing in the corporate website, and are in very early stages of supporting integrations with external social sites.

 

Those supporting the notion that WCM/WEM Platforms should manage web presence and continuation of corporate websites include:

Brice Dunwoodie of CMSWire is What is Web Engagement Management:

It's how you create and manage content, including primary web content, multi-device content, blogs, forums and wikis. Your WCM platform is also the hub of your social media integrations and increasingly the dashboard by which you view your brand's conversational world.

 

Further expansion on the WEM platform from Barb Mosher, CMSWire: The 5 Pillars of Web Engagement Management

1. Content Optimization: analytics, content and experience personalization, multi-variate testing, optimization and SEO.

2. Multi-channel Management:  delivering same message/experience to customers across devices and channels both online and offline – new mobile web

3. Conversational Engagement:  corporate website-based communities, UGC, commenting, trackbacks, micro-blogging, social media integration, analytics, social media monitoring and sentiment analysis.

4. Demand Generation:  customer engagement/experience through targeted marketing - increasing the number and quality of relationships, through need recognition, relevancy enhancements and engagement triggers.

5. Sales Automation: two-way CRM integration, social CRM; e-mail or other campaign integration with the content platform.

 

As described by CMSWire, WEM platforms would provide capabilities and monitoring of brand and customer conversations on corporate websites, as well as bi-directional communication extensions to external social sites.

 

On the other hand:

If the customer experience of a particular brand is taking place on external social sites, then there is now a distributed model for managing a brand’s web presence; the web experience/engagement for the customer is now remote from the corporate website.  So there is even more need for tools/solutions to monitor, listen, act, engage…for customer-focused purposes, as well as for corporate business goals (which should lean heavily towards the customer).

 

A WCM/WEM platform may not be the hub for the overall solution, but instead one of the components of a new management framework for all web presence (management of web content is still important but may not be tied to a specific website anymore).  But content is also integral to a lot of web marketing plans and strategies, and content is the meat of most social sites, whether it is a conversation thread, a video, a blog post, and so on. So look for WCM/WEM solutions themselves to continue to evolve as the means of managing and delivering any kind of content for sites anywhere on the web, through any channel.

  

 

Future Web Presence Management Solutions – What Could They Look Like?

A Web Presence Management Framework may be the best approach for monitoring and supporting a distributed web presence. With an emphasis on Management: the orchestration of all pertinent activities on social sites external to a corporate site. And the management of: marketing to / connecting with customers, monitoring and listening, responding, acting, analyzing, more acting. The Management Framework would be agile, timely, dynamic, flexible, open.

 

A starter list (high level) of potential capabilities and attributes for a Distributed Web Presence Management Framework:

· Sophisticated, agile management / orchestration capabilities

· Web presence “mashups”: dynamically creating personalized sites for each customer

· An evolved WCM/WEM component: delivery to external sites, advanced support of corporate site if still in play, handling of relevant content/conversations published on external sites

· Support / interoperability for content curation as well as content management

· Management of all types of “conversations”: Auditing - Listening - Capturing - Integrating

· Multiple kinds of analytics, including convergence with “traditional” data analytics

· Dashboards for different internal roles

· Agile, context-sensitive Search / recommendations-like technology to contextually filter content/search

· Integration is big (lots of API support)

· Orchestration and Integration with multiple kinds of “external solutions” that are in play for distributed web presence

· Usability for business as well as tech teams

· Workflow and automated processes for WCM, CRM, SCRM practices, other corporate systems

 

· Company roles will also evolve:  we’ll see new marketing technology roles, product marketing and product management roles for “caretakers” of company web presence on external social sites, among the possibilities

 

· Segmented customer advisory groups will also play much more interactive roles with management of distributed web presence

 

· Eventual alignment with semantic web, link management – for reach throughout the web. Here is a current view of opening up content to anywhere on the web:

Forget the fancy names of "semantic web" or "linked data." Associating structured data with your content assets lets you take advantage of Open Graph, Google RichSnippets, Yahoo Search Monkey, and a new generation of agents such as Siri. Disseminating your content with metadata through APIs enables developers to spread the seeds of your brand in a variety of mash-ups and apps. Sharing your data sets in collaborative venues such as Factual and Infochimps helps build relationships with the world of analytic power users, improve your data quality, and turn those dusty data silos into tools for advocating ideas and brands. (from Chief Marketing Technologist blog)

 

 

 

OK, WCM / WEM vendors of all sizes: should your current plans for your solution for corporate websites go forward unchanged, or should you start now to create a Management Framework for distributed web presence?

 

 

 

Related Posts:

SMB / Mid-Market B2B Software vendors - Findability + web presence + social: attracting the “customer as buyer”

 

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

 

Moving beyond WCM - Web Experience Management software solutions and markets

 

 

 

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

 

Disclosure: From time to time, I contribute articles to CMSWire.

 

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid

B2B Software Vendors: Hybrid Roles for Business Technology

 

  

 

 

Like many other companies, software companies have allowed silos of work activity and responsibility to proliferate with adverse effects. There are now increased efforts to improve collaboration and cross-team project work to bring best efforts into play for company competitiveness. The ever-increasing presence of social collaboration practices and social media applications are driving changes to corporate collaboration cultures.

  

 

The demands of innovation, meeting customer needs, and rapidly changing solution markets are challenging software companies to work much more quickly and collaboratively than ever before. SW companies need to innovate: job roles, how work is done, better collaboration practices. Software companies are showing increasing need for “hybrid” roles even though few software companies are actively encouraging an evolution in how work roles are defined. 

  

 

Hybrid roles are intersection points for cross-team expertise, collaboration and communication. People in hybrid roles understand many different perspectives both internal and external to the company. The hybrid professional works to integrate multiple perspectives in work being done with multiple teams. Hybrids have real potential for broadly connecting the dots in new ways, to help company innovation and competitiveness. For software companies, what hybrids can do somewhat parallels the “good kind” of integration and convergence of solution spaces, and even of the companies themselves, into new entities.

  

 

To be able to communicate across many teams, hybrid roles must be “multi-lingual”: techie talk, customer speak, product management/product marketing lingo, as well as the lingua franca of reality checks. Creative thinking, new directions, new ways of looking  at the business of the company not only contribute to the positive direction of the company but also are effective for catching problems with current initiatives and strategies.

  

 

 

  

Different Hybrid Roles Are Popping Up in Many Companies

Common denominators for hybrid roles in different disciplines and industries seem to include: specific deep knowledge in multiple subject matter areas, technology astuteness, the understanding of business needs that cross traditional boundaries, belief in collaboration, even the use of social capabilities to support work processes and better communication.  Hybrid roles are frequently focused on crossing silos to achieve better results and to see bigger pictures.

 

  

CIO Hybrids

With the need to better align IT responsibilities with corporate business, many CIO positions are evolving into hybrid roles. There is strong strategic reasoning behind CIOs taking on cross-team and cross-functional positions. By placing CIOs in hybrid roles, they have more power and visibility to be able to improve enterprise-wide processes, to have real impact on business goals, and to better tie technology to the business. In the companies that have migrated CIOs to hybrid roles, the CIOs have more opportunity and punch to influence how technology and the business can work together for the overall good of the company.

  

  

 

Theses hybrid roles are very demanding for both the CIO and the IT group. As with all other technology-related hybrid roles, there is a risky side, particularly with the CIO stepping into areas not traditionally the usual tech turf.  But for the CIO to better support the business of the business, she/he must have real participation in business and overall strategic decisions for the enterprise.

  

 

Indeed, CIOs who have taken on additional business are better positioned to deliver improved processes and business results. "I am both the customer and provider of a solution. There are people on my team that are using technology to generate revenue, and there are people on my team who are delivering technology"

 

 

  

Marketing Technology Hybrid

Scott Brinker published an extensive and well-crafted piece on the rise of the marketing technologist, which describes yet another hybrid role. He thoroughly considers the future of “technology-powered marketing” where “Marketing must take ownership of the technology in its domain”. I highly recommend reading the entire article. 

 

 

  

Some of Scott’s observations on the marketing technologist hybrid:

As marketers, you're already responsible for the outcomes based on such technology. The accountability so widely promoted in digital marketing has you in the hot seat for results. It's only sensible that you should have full control over the means and mechanisms to deliver those results.

 

 

  

You must be the driver of marketing technology, not merely a concerned passenger. But if you don't have technical depth, who can help you navigate? …I propose a new role in the marketing department: a marketing CTO or chief marketing technologist. The mission of the marketing CTO is to provide that technology navigation.

 

 

  

I believe that digital marketing is more like product development than IT because it is:

· More front-office than back-office

· Experienced directly by customers

· An engine for new revenue

· Integral to the brand

· Visible in competitive positioning

· A creative endeavor

 

 

  

Financial expert / Business Analyst / Software Developer

Rummaging around the ‘net I found this recent job posting for “Business Analyst - Financial Accounting - Developer Role”

So if you are an accounting/finance professional who also has a technology background, apply!
* Background in accounting and general knowledge of GAAP
* Excellent communications skills
* Bachelors Degree in Accounting, Finance or related
* 5+ years working in technology as an (systems) analyst or developer

 

  

  

So What Makes Me a Hybrid?

Being a hybrid is risky business – I know from personal and professional experience. But it is also extremely rewarding, where the unexpected is just around the corner. My particular hybrid perspective draws on down-in-the-trenches experience in the technology, business, and people-oriented aspects of creating, marketing and selling software. My other hybrid bits include product/solution strategy, market and competitive intelligence, GTM strategy.  

  

 

A hybrid perspective comes in very handy for constructing relevant strategic market and competitive intelligence, recommendations for company competitiveness and innovations, and understanding whether a company’s software technology can map to new customer solution scenarios. I can bring a perspective of understanding how all the pieces fit and inter-relate, when working with different teams.  Such a perspective also helps with “seeing outside oneself” to visualize how a company is positioned in the larger worlds of solution spaces, markets and the overall software industry.

  

 

 

   
    

  

Overcoming Problems - Achieving Wider Acceptance

For hybrid roles to become part of strategic staffing in software companies, cultural and organizational change will have to take place, particularly in upper management and HR groups. Management-engendered cultural change should lead to company teams better accepting the value of hybrid professionals. Collaborative thinking in software companies will need to stretch out of traditional silos. Also needed is a much better understanding of what hybrids can accomplish for business and project goals, and the value of such accomplishments to the company.

  

Another impediment to accepting and understanding hybrid roles is the issue of job titles.  Most existing titles don’t adequately express what a hybrid really embodies and is capable of doing.  When trying to “identify” an employee as a hybrid, titles often deteriorate into dreadful, overly long hyphenated messes, or worse, opaque “vanity” titles. Along with an evolution in the types of positions and work done for software companies, there is a need to create more meaningful titles for many positions.

  

 

HR department gatekeepers likely will not understand these hybrid roles and their value to software companies: hybrids don’t fit the pre-built HR system job definitions that harken from the late ‘90’s. Upper management and HR must update approaches to filling key positions by enabling inclusion of new breeds of professionals that companies need to attain more innovative thinking and change how work is done.

 

  

In writing about “Social Is A Hybrid” Rich Nadworny - @rnadworny – makes these important points:

I've spoken to a few hybrids who, while providing invaluable services to their companies, lost their jobs when new bosses couldn't understand their function or value.

 

 

  

The challenge for most businesses is that people don't operate as hybrids. They operate within silos, with clear role definitions and even clearer budgets.

 

 

  

The bigger question for businesses today is whether they accept hybrid structures and if they support the growth of hybrid individuals

 

  

  

Hybrid Roles Matter for Software Companies to be Competitive

It may well be time for software companies to give way to evolution for how work is done, where work is done, and how workers connect with one another to achieve business goals. Hybrid roles have the potential to facilitate some of the evolution:

· Help show the way to redefine key roles – time to abandon traditional roles to achieve better results and truly tap into experience and knowledge needed across multiple teams

· Provide new thinking to assist with eliminating more silos that inhibit better cross-team collaboration, big picture perspective and faster results

· Improve cross-team communication by seeing the big picture from multiple POVs and speaking multiple “languages”

· Fuel much-needed innovation and new solution direction – connecting the unexpected dots and knowing why the connection matters

· Hybrids are more likely to feel at home with social media, social CRM and collaboration practices, and usually make excellent advocates for the use of social in software companies

 

  

The increasing proliferation of social capabilities and practices in many companies will lead to more hybrids, particularly as companies transition to becoming “social businesses”. Social business will require new roles to bridge gaps, improve communication, weigh the relevance of new ideas, and better understand customer perspectives. However, a hybrid role is not a position of omniscience – continuous and healthy cross-team collaboration (including customer relationships) is extremely important for best results.

 

  

Companies lose out when they do not recognize, employ and nurture hybrid professionals who will contribute a great deal to the business. Considering the lack of acceptance and recognition by most software companies, it’s little wonder that so many hybrids become independent consultants. Unfortunately for these companies, these hybrids take with them the broad and deep team-spanning IP that so many software companies seriously need.

  

 

  

Related posts:

 Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

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

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

  

 

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  

 

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

 

 

Data Integration software solutions have been in the spotlight these past few years as the explosion of BI and data-driven businesses processes push through companies of all sorts.  It has become clearer how essential trustworthy and timely data is to business, and how important it is for Business users as well as IT teams to participate in decisions regarding data-driven processes, data access, data integration, and overall data quality. Equally important is the collaboration between IT and Business teams as part of the process to select the right data integration software solutions. Business users of applications, and the underlying data, understand the business context and utilization for that data in different systems, and can help decide advantageous ways to manage access and integration strategies.

 

Until very recently, data integration activities belonged almost exclusively to the IT domain. And for some time, data integration has become much more than moving data between disparate systems. While there are many DI software offerings for many different kinds of projects, IT groups have frequently used custom code instead of purchasing DI tools.

 

When focusing on DI software offerings versus custom code, a deeper, important issue for many enterprises comes forward: the need to align IT and Business teams to work on data initiatives from strategic business perspectives, not just from technology infrastructure perspectives. Many line-of-business (LOB) managers are taking on more responsibility for IT projects, setting goals, outlining requirements, providing insight from the business POV, and providing cost justification for projects. These recent changes add momentum to using technology more strategically -- but must involve IT as the key partner in running business processes. Data integration projects can benefit greatly from this sort of dynamic shared ownership.

 

Strategic collaborations between Business and IT for DI initiatives tie directly to the 80/20 IT spend “paradigm”: companies continue to report a problematic metric where 80% of annual IT spend/resources are dedicated to the maintenance of the status quo, while only 20% has been ponied up to drive tech innovations that would likely benefit the competitiveness of the business. With the fast pace of business change and disruption, agility and efficiency in tech utilization are key to building long term success and sustainability. 

 

Transitioning data integration projects from custom code to implementing more DI software tools that provide the majority of the solution - with much less coding – lends significant momentum to help swing IT resource allocation towards innovation rather than maintenance. The reusability aspects and other value points of DI tools add weight to this shift.

 

IT Culture of Custom Code for DI Projects – Tactical status quo?

In a 2008 interview with Philip Russom, TDWI, Lorraine Lawson for IT Business Edge, Russom indicated that at least 50% of DI projects are still hand coded, even though IT managers understand the clear, and frequently significant, savings that usually result from implementing DI software solutions:

“Whenever he explains his case, people tell him: Wow, I get the economics. Wow, thank you for enlightening me. BUT we still have this culture of hand-coding.”

 

Lorraine Lawson followed with additional posts in 2009 – here summarizing the comments generated by the discussion of custom code for data integration projects:

“Last week, I wrote a post on Why Companies Still Hand Code, But Don't Have To, despite the numerous data-integration tools of all price ranges available on the market. In the piece, I summed up the reasons cited by Rick Sherman, founder of Athena IT Solutions, which included ignorance of market costs, a lack of resources and a misplaced adherence to corporate standards.

“Several readers commented on the post, adding that Sherman overlooked one critical reason why so many data-integration projects are hand coded: The human factor.

“When it comes to data integration, the missing human factor is simply that developers like to code. They're comfortable with the tools and, in that moment, it's easier to hand code than evaluate, choose, buy, install, learn and use a new tool – even if that tool might shave months off projects on down the line.”

 

The seeming preference for custom code does point to a weakness in the differentiation of certain DI software offerings:  these tools are still designed to be used as “developer tools”, and indeed involve an amount (sometimes a lot) of coding themselves. Why would developers adopt a DI solution platform that on the surface looks quite a bit like something else that they are already using? Obviously most DI software tools offer a lot more than a “code platform” -- but to have clear differentiation, DI software vendors need to offer more focused solutions that solve specific business problems for specific customer scenarios.  DI tools need to become faster to learn, easier to use, with ready-to-go components, instead of providing general platforms. For better adoption, DI software offerings should be tools that any team will want to use over and over. 

 

The very important functions of data profiling and data quality are significant components of data integration software solutions that cannot be emulated very well by custom code.  DP and DQ processes help derive more value from data and to help render data more trustworthy and usable. Data profiling tools in particular provide a platform for both Business and IT usage and collaboration. DP and DQ capabilities have become important differentiators for DI software offerings, provided they are cost-effective and lean towards ease-of-use.

 

Vendors: Market DI software offerings to be “more findable”

There are DI software tools aplenty for any sort of company initiative – and any sort of company.  They can be on-premise licensed, SaaS subscription, cloud-based metering, open source.  They may manifest as platforms, appliances, mashups, dashboards, APIs, templates, pre-packaged industry-specific solutions, and so on.

 

Since major analyst publications primarily cover only a select group of high-end DI / ETL tools, the notion that companies and their IT and Business teams are not aware of the many options available has validity. However this is really an opportunity for DI software vendors to do more to make their solutions much more “findable” for their target markets and customers. With the upsurge of interactive marketing and social media for B2B selling, “findability” provides software vendors methods to improve the ability of the right customers to connect with the vendor.

 

Competitive advantage can be gained for vendors who do a better job of marketing and connecting what the tools offer to customer business problems. So it’s not just a matter of being findable as a “brand” or category of DI software, but findable as the right fit for a specific DI / business problem, and for a specific customer segment (a segment that could be Business and/or IT). DI software vendors also own the ability to do a better job of providing good solutions that are ready-to-go, to handle specific industry scenarios. No more one-size fits all type of DI platforms – instead, differentiate from developer code platforms by offering focused tools that solve pre-defined problems, solutions that target specific markets/industries/scenarios.

 

When DI software vendors have done a good job of revealing solutions that matter to their markets while showing that these solutions truly solve important problems, the intrinsic value of those DI software offerings should be a “slap in the face” for targeted Business and IT users. The value should be so apparent that IT will rarely want to hand code DI projects again – at least not the important ones.

 

Clear strategic purpose, distinct solution context, and a customer-centric orientation can take DI software further into helping IT change the usual 80% allocation for the tactical-for-status-quo – on to achieving the goal of a larger chunk of resources dedicated to competitive innovation. For DI projects, connecting IT to Business users of company data empowers everyone to work smarter. Savvy companies want to get more from their IT investments and want to rely on their data assets for competitive advantage. Through collaboration the company benefits: Business users know what they need from data and understand the context for data; IT provides the know-how to implement the DI processes to make it all happen. 

 

 

 

Flipping the 80/20 IT spend paradigm – understanding the TCO of custom code for DI

  

Talend Open Source DI Looks at ROI of Custom Code

Whether you agree with all of the Talend conclusions, this study introduces concrete parameters and data about the real cost of custom-coded DI projects.  One valuable takeaway is that this study shows the need to evaluate custom code on the same basis as any software offerings – and why. I find the Talend data believable, since most IT groups overlook lots of hidden costs related to custom coded projects when conducting comparisons to acquiring DI software tools.  Talend is at least opening the door on points that should be considered when selecting the right DI solution. 

 

Further details can be found in the complete report, The Return on Investment of Open Source Data Integration, 2008.

 

Talend ROI Project Category:  Large project: real-time enterprise data integration

· The "Large" project is a complete (large) enterprise data integration project.

· Twelve different databases, two packaged applications (one ERP and one SCM), an application from a partner (accessed through Web Services), a LDAP directory, and a Software-as-a-service CRM all need to be kept synchronized in real-time.

· This project involves 200 complex data flows.

  

Cost to complete this project using custom code:

 

 

Summary of 3 approaches to completing the “large DI project”

 

 

And finally:

 

 

 

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  

 

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

 

 

MI Programs for Software Industry Distinct from MI Programs for Other Industries

Implementations of market and competitive intelligence for software companies are quite different from the corresponding programs in other industries.  For one thing, the software industry is very fast-paced and does not have the luxury of lengthy timeframes for building complex market intelligence processes of the sort that are usually promoted for other industries.  MI for the software industry must be agile and frequent. It requires not only 360° experience in software from the technical to sales & marketing, but also requires a distinctive creative streak and the ability to view things “differently”. 

 

Through a program of deep research and analysis, filtered by subject matter expertise, a top notch Market Intelligence program can bring significant value to a software company. Essential attributes include qualitative and intuitive insight, and a fearlessness to look beyond the obvious to connect the unexpected dots. A channeled passion for software technology drives many right-on-target projects and initiatives.

 

To build innovative competitive recommendations, market intelligence has to question other people’s assumptions about the industry, even if those people are prominent in the company. The incumbent company consensus view should not be taken at face value by the market intelligence professional.  Instead, the MI program should examine such strategic assumptions, and then should be able to provide the data to support either the incumbent view or to delineate a different direction, or even a hybrid alternative.

 

MI makes a significant difference for the competitiveness of software companies: 

· New opportunities – identify new trends that will matter to target markets and customers; how to get there before the competition (whenever possible)

· Early warning of industry and/or competitor changes – take advantage of opportunities and leverage/deal with threats and risk

· Enhanced customer interaction – understand customer POV, goals, needs, strategic direction

· Stronger target market selection & positioning – research, validate go-to-market and positioning; locate under-served markets for target customers and solution space; guide how to articulate positioning well for customers, analysts, industry

· Strategic view of competitive landscape – figure out true differentiation, figure out where competitors are not operating; understand the issues that matter to customers and the solutions they seek from competitors

· Comprehensive development of MI deliverables – publish to multiple parties; consolidate cross-functional needs to produce more; ensure top quality and relevance

 

Where Software Companies Take Wrong Turns with MI/CI Programs

Many software companies continue to think of market and competitive intelligence as tactical methods to attack competitors, to convince a customer not to buy from a competitor, instead of: developing their own strategic solution offerings, building strategic relationships with customers, and understanding how to help customers really solve their problems and support their business initiatives with reliable solutions.

 

Competitive Intelligence programs are frequently tightly aligned with Sales groups. Sales Management often demands that MI teams focus on “feature-function” product comparisons with competitors, harkening back to old school sales techniques that focused only on “my product is better than the other guy’s product”. Today’s software target markets are for the most part commoditized, so feature/function comparisons don’t win business.  Commoditization also makes impossible the old school notions of “silver bullets” and “setting landmines” for competitors.  Even years ago, such tactics were usually a waste of time for many customer engagements.

 

However feature-function analyses do have value when they belong to product management groups, and are done to understand how a company’s solutions measure up against competitor offerings, and how all solutions measure up to meet expectations of target markets and customers.  These analyses are to be used internally by the products teams to improve their company solutions and go-to-market strategies.  To maintain credibility and thoroughness, such feature-function analyses are best done by third-party firms. 

  

Sales teams can be tempted to use feature-function comparisons to competitors as “customer leave-behinds”.  Feature-function analyses should never be handed out to customers for a number of reasons: 

· Introducing details that have nothing to do with customer needs and therefore detouring focused conversations with customers

· “One-size-fits-all” customer “leave-behinds” are weak tools when it comes to engaging customers

· Aiding competitors in winning the business by pointing out what they do better

· Opening the door for potential litigation from either the customer or competitors

 

Market and competitive intelligence is best used by sales teams to understand proactive strategic solution positioning that is stronger and more likely to connect to the customer’s mindset and desires. It can be used to prepare solid refutations of competitor objections.  The inclusion of competitive intelligence in a sales plan should be early in the strategic planning.

 

Tactical demands can overwhelm opportunities for delivering strategic insight.

Market Intelligence teams in many software companies walk a tightrope between the overwhelming number of daily requests (many of which have to be fulfilled within 24-48 hours), and more strategic research/analysis. Market Intelligence teams deserve more time to deliver the “wow factor” to corporate strategies derived from deeper insight about the intelligence that affects the business. Most MI professionals constantly “battle” to extract themselves from “today” research, to be able to dig deeper into future trends and customer desires, to help predict where the company should seed innovation and find new markets.

 

Additionally, MI/CI teams in many software companies frequently consist of a single person who is required to support several teams with disparate needs. The result is that a valuable strategic resource is spread too thin.  On a daily basis there are too many “fire-fighting” requests instead of large blocks of time dedicated to strategic and market-driven work.  Granted that a certain number of tactical projects are needed to bring reality into the MI program; but very quickly the program must shift a majority of effort to the strategic, especially if there is only one MI professional.

 

Projects for Market Intelligence programs should be handled like good software requirements management:  weigh each request and corresponding benefit against the strategic goals of the company, the likelihood of success, the sustainability of each project for long-term gains.  Give the MI team the authority to say “no”, and don’t put the team in the position of having to accept every tactical request.   

 

More Effective Positioning of Market Intelligence

For a software company to derive full value from a market and competitive intelligence program, it has to start with the executive level making a strong commitment to the program.  Many software industry MI programs fall short because the executive level does not position the MI program as a key stakeholder in strategic decision-making processes, nor does the executive include the MI professional in key meetings. 

 

It would be greatly beneficial if executives would direct more attention to the MI work accomplished for strategic decision-making, even when the recommendations make them uncomfortable.  This is particularly relevant in the software industry where far too many companies set “me too” goals, chasing what competitors have already done, instead of finding the more innovative path.

 

The power of a market intelligence professional lies in advanced expertise, both for subject matter and for effective implementations of market and competitive intelligence programs.  Impactful insight and perspective that bring competitive advantage to an enterprise are best achieved when the MI program approximates an “entrepreneurial” center, where innovative thinking sets the tone.  Frequently, each problem or situation requiring market intelligence is different from previous problems and usually requires a whole new solution and form of deliverable to be effective, relevant and timely.

 

While directly benefiting multiple teams in different ways, all strategic work done by the Market Intelligence team will ultimately benefit sales teams and successful deals:

· Product Management – Enable market-driven solution decisions, identify opportunities and threats, better understand target markets and customers,

· Product Marketing – Contribute to positioning, review messaging in marketing materials, generation of competitive studies, overcoming objections, make sure the actual technology maps to planned solutions

· Senior Management -  Trends, strategic views of competitors, decision-making support

· Sales – Competitiveness as a strategic process rather than a reactive one-off

 

Intrinsic Value of Market Intelligence for the Software Industry

Market Intelligence for the software industry has a unique value that might even be called Solutions Intelligence.  Market Intelligence has a significant role for go-to-market plans and sales models.  For software companies, Market Intelligence is an important conduit for deep understanding of market-driven and customer-centric orientations that are essential for competitive advantage and sustainability.

 

What it all boils down to is this: will your software company be able to efficiently, quickly and completely understand market opportunities or threats, and then react effectively to create maximum business impact?  Then empower your market intelligence professional to do the right kind of timely and strategic work that makes a big difference.

 

 

 

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