Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Strategies from Top to Bottom - Content Marketing for B2B Software Vendors

 

I last wrote about content marketing for B2B software vendors in 2010 – since then some enterprises have made good progress with strategic use of content marketing. Unfortunately, many enterprises still don't understand why content marketing has value, and haven't figured out what to do.

The story still is this:

• B2B software Customers are becoming more proactive Buyers and have taken the driver's seat in buying decisions
• These customers want relevant, quality content to learn more about problems that matter to their companies and potential solutions to those problems, which may include the offerings of a particular B2B software company
• And they'd like to learn about vendor solutions through honest, well-written content – instead of brochure-ware filled with "marketing" hype  
• But many B2B software companies are not providing the content that customers want

 A lot of data points show that for all types of companies there is tremendous content marketing activity going on now, as well as strong future growth potential:

• A recent report notes that U.S. content marketing now comprises a $40 billion industry
• About a quarter of worldwide marketing budgets are committed to content marketing efforts
• 60% of companies forecast increases for content marketing budgets by mid-2012
• According to Outsell, companies spend $67 billion annually on their websites, where a lot of B2B content marketing takes place right now
• A HiveFire study found that 82% of B2B companies were using content marketing – and the longer the sales cycle, the more use of content marketing

So why do so many B2B software companies struggle with execution and achieving beneficial results?

 

Symptoms, Root Causes and Steps in the Right Direction

There are many marketing-oriented posts about how B2B vendors are going wrong when it comes to content marketing. Most of what's called out is not surprising: failure to write properly on topics that customers prefer - added to failure to even find out what customers want to read; poor writing quality; non-engaging material; promoting brochure-ware instead of useful, thought-provoking material. There is also failure to understand how to match the right content to the right channel, and lack of knowledge regarding the channels that customer segments prefer for various kinds of content.

But these are mostly symptoms -- not root causes for the disconnect between B2B companies and the execution of a content marketing strategy for successful outcomes. One root cause: many companies have no cohesive long-term strategy for content marketing.

First, let's take a couple of steps back: if there's no strategy for content marketing, then it's likely that marketing is not positioned strategically in the enterprise with upper management backing. So it's not just content marketing that may be lacking executive buy-in at the top, but the overall marketing function. Unfortunately many technology companies continue to treat Marketing as an add-on silo'd function, or worse, as voodoo magic that can miraculously fix whatever is lacking from company offerings or hoodwink potential customers into buying the product, whether it's any good or not. In this ridiculous second situation (it happens more than we'd like to think), Marketing is of course the culprit to be punished if the "voodoo magic" fails to save the day.

Marketers were asked to explain what particular challenges they face within their own organizations. We noticed a number of themes running throughout their comments:

 Getting buy-in: "Management patience - mgt needs to understand that in today's B2B environment it takes time to engage prospects. The prospect has a lot more power than they did in the 90's and 2000's."

Now, a couple more steps back and we're looking at: enterprises that are also lacking in integrated systems and processes for internal and external customer interactions; employees who have not been empowered/enabled to interact with customers; poor understanding of target markets and target customer roles; silo'd business functions; poor use of data assets. So before we can make the journey to a well-crafted content marketing strategy, upper management must make the commitment to the integrated enterprise that is customer-focused, market-driven, and process and data savvy. Overall strategies must reflect these tenets. Marketing must be included as part of overall strategy, and the value of content marketing to reach the customer-as-buyer must be given credence, support and enablement. Now we can set about creating an excellent content marketing strategy.

Bottom line: content marketing is not a short term campaign or project; it is a strategic commitment that impacts most of the enterprise.

 

 Content Marketing: What It Takes to Execute Well

Why does it matter that technology companies implement content marketing? Software vendors should be neck-deep in content marketing if they are willing to take the right steps forward with the right strategic decisions in place. Content marketing (if done well) keeps the company focused on understanding and meeting the needs of customers – something these companies should be doing anyway, in every aspect of business. Align the business with Customer, align content with Customer. Content marketing is a natural progression from the recognition that the customer-as-buyer is more and more driving how and if sales happen; content marketing provides a dynamic way to connect to those customers. At a higher level, strategic content marketing is an affect of the enterprise becoming integrated and agile – hopefully of the enterprise becoming a "social business".

It strikes me that a strategic commitment to content marketing parallels the kind of strategy required to successfully implement and sustain good community management: dedicated team and participation of other enterprise teams, strategic backing from the top down, long-term commitment to the success of the community, allocation of healthy resources to ensure community success, strong integration with multi-channel customer service, and dynamic business processes. A vibrant community can also be seen as a stellar artifact of healthy content marketing.

An integrated content marketing strategy provides a single home base for all content so that real sense is made of how an enterprise is connecting with prospects and customers. The strategy for content marketing pulls together individual marketing programs and initiatives so there is potentially seamless transition for the customer from channel to channel. Connecting the tactics of marketing to a content strategy also makes it more possible to construct metrics that track the effectiveness of insightful content that can be tied to functions such as lead gen and sales funnel.

Customers know that B2B software vendors are in the business to sell products – customers want resources to figure out if a vendor's offering will answer their needs. And customers want to know if vendors understand their business problems, if vendors are thinking into the future. But the bottom line still is: the software vendor better have products worth buying and using.

 All marketers have the opportunity to increase effectiveness, and they all can learn from the "best in class." Just as was the case last year, effective marketers spend more and are more strategic in their approach:

• They allocate 31% of their budget to content marketing, compared to less effective marketers who invest 18%
• They are 50% more likely to consider the "stage in the buying cycle" when developing content, whereas less effective marketers are less likely to tailor content in any way.
• They benefit from substantially more buy-in from senior members of the organization. Only 8% of effective marketers complain about lack of buy-in from higher-ups, versus 17% of those who rate themselves as less effective (though, on a positive note, this number has declined, dropping down from last year's rate of 24% for less effective marketers).

 

 

                                          Source: Greg De Tisi (with my "strategic" addition)  

 

Content for the Customer-as-Buyer

 è Content Value is strictly from the Customer POV

Just as the customer alone owns the customer experience, the perceived value of content solely rests with the customer. Learning customer desires for content is where a lot of time should be spent. Just like software solutions must be right-fit for customers needs, the same goes for content. Just as vendors should be segmenting target markets and target customer roles for being able to connect their solutions to customer needs, the same segmentation should be used for content. Decisions are then made: who are the key customer roles that are most interested in content at different stages of the buying cycle, what topics matter to them, what kind of content, where do they prefer to consume it.

 è Insights, critical thinking and expert knowledge-sharing

Software vendors need to provide content about current problems and future directions for topics that matter to customers. With so much content available on the internet, writing about yesterday's issues is not engaging to most customers, unless yesterday's issues address problems still plaguing customers. Then the content should look at what might be done to solve those problems. Customers realize that technology is in constant flux, in good and bad ways. Helping customers to see into future trends that could benefit their businesses, and the potential gotchas of new technology, is likely to provide valuable content from the customer POV.

 è Diversity of content

Content can be expressed in many forms, multiplied by many channels – which means companies really must understand for each target customer role what are the preferred content types and preferred channel for each content type. A matrix is now coming together for understanding and managing optimal communication with different customer roles. Mobile platforms present good but difficult channels that must be understood and handled well. Opportunities are increasing for more interactive components related to content. Creative, sophisticated approaches to most content should be considered – simplicity and clarity are other constructs to consider.

 è Quality over quantity – and reliable continuity of quality content is vital

Customers and prospects don't want to waste their time on junk content or thinly disguised brochure-ware. Imperatives for effective content marketing artifacts are quality, creativity, hot topics, deep insights – essentially respecting the target audience by producing excellent work. Constant and reliable content creation is important, but what this means will vary by content type and channel.

There are a lot of reasons why content marketing doesn't work for some companies…But the biggest culprit (and it's not even close) is a lack of consistency, and, in some cases, a content stoppage. Research from IBM in 2010 stated that about 80 percent of corporate blogs never post more than five entries (hat tip to Rebecca Lieb). That is a truly unbelievable stat…

è People, money, time

Content marketing is sustained only by realistic allocations of resources: people, money and time in particular. B2B software companies should be tapping internal subject matter experts (SMEs), as well as external ones, to deliver the kind of content that customers want. Internal tech experts are also needed as reviewers and editors to ensure that content is accurate. Strategic-thinking enterprises cannot expect their employees to participate in content marketing on their own time or to work it into already busy work schedules, as a "sideline". Upper management has to make sure that content marketing participation for an employee is a recognized part of regular compensated responsibilities.

 Strategy and planning to execute, and the responsibilities of creating relevant content must come from company staff:

 Content marketing is brand marketing, cubed, and as such requires the full attention and supervision of your team. Prospects and customers now expect to engage with you— and by engage with you we mean get to know your brand—through your content. Creating content assets to support content marketing is a centralized strategy that relies on a consistent brand voice and vision to work. It's a bad habit left over from legacy thinking to allow your marketing organization to create content as one-off campaign or program assets without thinking of the broader implications.

 

Content for the Customer Journey

The customer journey consists of multiple touchpoints, which are all interactions with any and all enterprise functions, employees, and marketing / digital channels. They all matter – they are the milestones of the customer journey. Touchpoints are also components of multi-channel marketing, including content marketing, which has the challenge of nurturing and sustaining a unified customer experience across all channels, during the customer journey.

The hard work is taking what frequently is a collective of separate touchpoints and harmonizing the collective to enable excellent customer experiences. Orchestration and integration are key aspects of approaching a seamless experience across touchpoints – again this only works if the customer truly perceives such a unified experience.

The buying process for B2B software can be complex and involves multiple steps for the customer, both for arriving at a decision and for making the purchase itself. The "customer" frequently consists of multiple roles: techies (IT), line-of-business decision-makers, financial and budget managers, executives, and sometimes the actual users of the technology. (One of the flaws on the buyer side of the equation is too often the "end" user is left out of the decision-making process.) Content marketing has a fantastic opportunity to help potential buyer roles with the decision steps and foster positive experiences as part of the customer journey.

Work done for target customer segmentation and for mapping the customer journey is very useful for organizing types of content, and how and when content is made available to various customer roles and needs. Some content will be tagged to certain steps in the buying process. Some content will help existing customers use technology solutions for greater benefit and find out more that the vendor can do to help with business success. Some content is meant to pique interest for anyone unfamiliar with the vendor.

Developing several related pieces of content for a particular topic can enrich how content marketing aligns with the customer journey. People come back for the next installments, and the vendor can develop more in-depth coverage via different media and different channels.

 

  

 

 Source: Content Marketing Institute

 

  

Delivering What Customers Need

The work to be done to understand how to deliver the right content to customers and prospects is the same work that B2B software vendors should be doing to deliver the products and services that customers and prospects want and need. The work being done to identify optimal target markets and customer roles for products should be extended to segmentation for content marketing purposes. In all of these cases the ultimate "product" for the customer should be high quality, reliable, useful, easy to put to work.

Content marketing cannot survive as a strategy in a vacuum. Nor can it have any impact if it is treated as a short-term project or campaign. Strategic content marketing is long-term, with continual development and evolution that parallels the changes that occur for the company, its target markets and customers, and other factors that impact software vendors. Orchestration and implementation of content marketing impact many groups in the enterprise, not just Marketing. The strategies for content marketing should be part of overall corporate and marketing strategies. Similarly metrics for content marketing should fold back into hierarchies of metrics for marketing and overall corporate measurements for achieving goals.

  

Related Links:

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

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid -- Hybrid Roles for Business Technology

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

Business Priorities Point the Way for MDM

 

Originally published on Hub Designs Magazine March 2012

  

Like data integration processes, MDM solutions can be seen at times as 'plumbing', but in both cases the work to be done has strategic, business-critical purpose. Master Data is meant to be at the heart of most business transactions, applications and decisions that occur in an enterprise. In today's volatile business world, it is important to focus MDM on what matters most for the goals of the business to ensure reliable, unified and timely data for key systems and processes. Such data must conform to how information is used by the business. So while it is tempting for enterprises to think of MDM as a technical or IT initiative, MDM is far more about business purpose and business problems to be solved.  

 

To solve the problem of ensuring high quality 'cleansed' and unified master data, interest in MDM practices and solutions is increasing. But in many ways MDM implementations are still immature and the solution space is still evolving. William McKnight notes that often MDM solutions are focused on "simple" issues, rather than on larger, more strategic value, but that he is "starting to see some pioneer MDM implementations explore the full range of benefits". Among the benefits are data governance practices that elevate data to strategic positioning in the enterprise in support of: operational and productivity improvements, reliability of BI and analytics results, timely customer insights, and ultimately, better decision-making.

 

          
        

  

Understand Business Processes to Understand Data Priorities

First it is imperative to understand how the business operates: how the business uses key data and processes, how processes interact with data, and which business processes matter to strategic focal points. From an understanding of business processes, the best approach or approaches can be determined for implementing a master data solution that not only creates trustworthy, consistent master data but is responsive to changes in the business and to new data that continues to be collected / generated by business processes.

Data quality plays such an important part in the MDM solution. Analysis must be done to determine overall quality, where the weak links are, and the impacts on business processes and operations from inadequate data quality. But data quality is a subjective measurement – part of the process and data assessment will be the setting of requirements for acceptable data quality for individual data elements to provide the level of quality needed by the selected business processes. Some thought should also be given to future needs, whenever possible. The potential "trap" is that data that is "good enough" for one business process may be inadequate for another, particularly when considering future direction.

Data derives its real value from its usability in significant business processes, including those that drive and benefit from analytics, intelligence and decision-making processes. And value attaches to data when it positively impacts business outcomes. Unified, quality data attained through MDM solutions must also be integrated into business processes, which is not an easy task. Such integration is not only at the technology and systems levels, but involves the synchronization of people, practices and 'super' processes across the enterprise to reflect how work is accomplished.

 

          

 

 

Extreme Information Management aka 'Big Data'

All data management solutions are now challenged by the proliferation of data, content and information in sites that are not owned by the enterprise, such as cloud and mobile services, social sites and partner repositories. It has become clear that such data can be valuable to enterprises, particularly for insights into customers, future trends and markets, and directions for innovation. MDM solutions are also challenged to now pull in and harmonize some very unwieldy data with existing master data repositories.

In particular, integrating customer master data with customer-related content in social media will likely lead MDM solutions into new territory. The difficulty of content from social media is capturing the data 'clues' to be passed to analytics for accurately determining sentiment and context. So-called 'big data' needs to be aligned with reliable enterprise master data to properly correlate social content in decision-making processes. How the MDM solution maintains an overall master customer 'profile' will include continuous integration processes for targeted social media sites.

Enterprises continue to experience massive increases in data assets. Beyond social content, enterprises encounter data explosions from business activities such as constant M&A, outsourcing initiatives, and highly diversified partner and supply chain channels. Industries such as Telecom have enormous stores of machine-generated data related to customer activities as well as operational performance and 'product' pricing. GPS data relates more and more to customer and market insights for certain industries.

Achieving consistent master data with such disparate, sometimes unwieldy and complex, data sources will continue to be difficult, but will likely lead MDM practices and solutions to new levels of value to the enterprise and vital business process. Again the focus will have to be on the key business processes that need these new data sources integrated with existing master data.

 

Related Links

Connecting Data Governance to Business Outcomes That Matter

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

'Big Data', Intelligence and Multi-faceted Innovation

Data Management: Reaching into the Cloud

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

 

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

 

 

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

 

The customer life cycle consists of every experience with an organization – taking place as interactions with staff, systems and sites, inside and outside the firewall. It would make a big difference if enterprises would understand that each customer experience is actually a customer service opportunity. The customer experience should always be about customer service, no matter what it is or where it takes place in the customer journey. High quality customer experiences, like high quality and reliable customer service, are competitive differentiators – and they are becoming competitive imperatives. And yet, many companies still fail to provide top-notch customer experiences and excellent customer service.

 

From the company perspective enabling excellent (or even good) customer experiences can seem complicated, even ephemeral. Some marketing programs are trying to make the “customer experience” quite intricate, perhaps overly convoluted. Software solutions are being developed around marketing processes for “customer experience management”, where too much emphasis may be on the “management” part, and too little on what are positive or desirable experiences from the customer perspective.

 

Further complications can come from the hard work of orchestrating all customer touchpoints. Customer experiences are occurring as events, related to cross-functional and cross-channel processes that need to be merged into a “single experience” for the customer, as well as integrated in terms of data, process, people, and practices within the enterprise. And this is tricky and complicated, even when the best of intentions are in play.

 

But from the customer’s perspective, it’s simple: did I get what I wanted or needed -- or not? Guess which perspective matters more to company success.

 

Source: Customer Experience Marketing for Real People 

 

Wrong Turns?

If you google customer experience management (CEM), a flood of marketing plans, tips, guidelines, and technology solutions comes pouring out. Many have overtones of manipulation and control, reminiscent of the “command and control” executive management in many companies. To sell the idea of “customer experience management” to enterprises, some consultants and vendors resort to inside-out thinking, where it’s all about what the company gains, instead of what value accrues to the customer:

 …it’s the grand design to find customers, gain their business, and bring them back...it will help to own the customer and the rewards are building loyalty and increasing profits…

 

There are also many consultants and vendors who are offering on-target assistance and useful software tools. But it’s essential always to keep in mind that the customer experience is outside-in: focus on the customer perception of the experiences and on the value that should be gained by the customer. I sometimes wonder if companies are taking the notion of “customer experience management” to mean literally managing customers into outcomes that the companies want, without really understanding or caring about the experience part. The key phrase is customer experience: the customer’s experience.

 

The reality of customer experiences and customer service at many companies is still not-so-great – but improving customer experiences overall holds great potential for the company side of the story:

 

Satisfaction at all stages across the customer life cycle is low. While conventional wisdom focuses on customer service as the pivot point for customer satisfaction, only 32% of consumers and a paltry 11% of business buyers feel satisfied with the online research process. Similarly, fewer than half of consumers and just 17% of business buyers feel satisfied with the online purchase process. This unhappiness negatively impacts customers’ likelihood to purchase again or recommend the company to friends or colleagues.

 

Fixing the research and purchase process represents a big opportunity for vendors. A basic model for looking at the financial implications of improving online customer experience shows that a company could increase revenues by over $12 million annually in the research and sales process, while the cost savings for improving service could reach $2 million.

 Adobe-Forrester study, 2010 

 

The value that customers would receive from improving customer service and all other interactions with an enterprise is obvious.

 

Perceptions Are Reality

In most cases, companies cannot truly manipulate what customers actually experience, but companies have ownership of providing consistent high quality interactions in many channels, and making sure that the same positive interaction carries over from one channel to another. Companies can engender an internal “culture” where customer service is high priority and employees are enabled and empowered to provide it. Customer is the focus, the starting point, the point-of-view – actually the whole point, so again outside-in should be the over-arching mindset.

 

But it looks like too many organizations and enterprise teams are tripping over themselves with inside-out strategies that define their staffing roles, technology, marketing, and enterprise business processes. This approach will fall short, even fail.

 

 

 Source: IBM

 

The customer perception of interactions with a company is often the guts of the customer experience. For a company to “manage” customer experience at all, it should turn most of the management on itself: well-integrated processes plus excellent products, pricing, engagement – all oriented to serving customers well and meeting their real needs and desires. Companies have the power to very thoroughly own that sort of management and should exploit it to its fullest. Then it’s likely that the customer will have a good experience with the company, which generally leads to companies meeting their goals.

 

Not only do customers have no interest in being “managed” by a company, it’s really not possible. But solutions and practices for customer-focused touchpoints that occur through websites, social media, CRM, CEM, and product fulfillment can and should make it easier for customers to acquire products and services in ways that can also meet company goals. If dropping the notion of customer “command and control” in favor of recognizing that considerable power belongs to the customer proves to be more effective for gaining and retaining customers, then solutions for the above systems should facilitate customer-enabling functions. Customer experience management in particular should be about the ‘power of pull’ – a concept well-known from the work of John Hagel and John Seely Brown.

 

 

The Customer Journey - Orchestrating Touchpoints

In a way, what is being called customer experience management might be designated as “customer interaction touchpoints and business process orchestration” – but it’s highly doubtful that such a name would catch on. Orchestration is about multiple components working together in harmony. Touchpoints are all interactions with any and all enterprise functions, employees, and marketing / digital channels. They all matter – they are the milestones of the customer journey, some more important than others at times. Touchpoints are also components of multi-channel marketing, which has the challenge of nurturing and sustaining a unified customer experience across all channels, during the customer journey. 

The hard work is taking what frequently is a collective of separate touchpoints and harmonizing the collective to enable the potential of excellent customer experiences. Orchestration and integration are key aspects of approaching a seamless experience across touchpoints – again this only works if the customer truly perceives the unified experience.

Forrester: Emergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions

 

Certain significant touchpoints can be overlooked when considering how to engender positive customer experiences:

 

Think the only impressions your company makes are through branding, sales calls, and customer service? Think again. Mishandling interactions like reference management and billing can cause customer defection as quickly as a poor contact center experience

 

In fact, organizations of all sizes and levels of CRM sophistication often overlook six primary customer touch points: Reference management, Field service intelligence, Workflow management, Sales quoting, Customer segmentation, and Billing

 

More Wrong Turns

Bruce Temkin has a thorough series on mistakes companies make in their customer experience management efforts including Mapping Your Internal Touchpoints where “Companies often confuse internally-focused touchpoint mapping with externally-focused customer journey mapping”. Some of the mistakes made include:

 

Rely on internal analysis… examining internal processes (without) the context of how customers view their interactions with the organization.

 Lack emotional design components Touchpoint mapping efforts often lead to redesigning of internal processes. But these changes are based on efficiency goals, not customers’ emotional needs.

 Temkin shares this advice to change the company perspective to the customer POV:

 Assume that customers view their journey differently than you do. This will force you to do the research to understand how customers perceive their entire relationship…reframe the objective in customer terms. For instance, find out how “customers want to buy” not “how we can sell.”

 Uncover differences across customer segments. It’s unusual for all customers to share the identical journeys.

Answer three questions. Push hard to answer these three questions: 1) What are the most important touchpoints; 2) How are we doing in those key touchpoints; 3) What can we do to improve the customers’ perception of those touchpoints.

Source: Global Crossing

 

Effectiveness

One of the biggest opportunities and challenges for enterprises who want to nurture excellent customer interactions is to implement high quality, in-depth customer analytics. In the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study, 88 percent of CEOs said “getting closer to customers” was the top priority for their business over the next five years. Many company leaders see opportunities through the right analytics to understand customer needs, desires and behaviors, to improve customer attraction and retention, and to ultimately drive revenue and growth.

 

Company goals will evolve with customer experience and engagement initiatives, both at tactical and strategic levels. As a result, metrics for successful customer interactions will also evolve. It’s likely that a hybrid of quantitative and qualitative metrics will become more pronounced, to reflect increased focus on high quality customer experiences, communications and outcomes when interacting with the company. Companies also want to measure the effectiveness of different engagement channels, cross-channel activities, touchpoints for the customer journey -- but measurement is now more complex due to the qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of customer engagement.

 

Bruce Temkin discusses the traps of applying metrics to company efforts when building out culture, initiatives and opportunities for positive customer experiences:

 

Companies often get enamored with a metric like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and lose sight of what’s really important: making improvement...the true power comes when (a metric) provides insight into where and how to make improvements.

Can’t answer “why.” Reporting on a metric can highlight strengths and weaknesses of a company’s overall customer experience…But if the company does not understand “why” customers are either happy or unhappy, then they can’t systematically improve customer experience and positively affect the metric.

Overuse a metric. Understanding if a customer is happy overall with an organization is quite different than understanding if her needs were met during a specific service call. But some companies blindly use the same metrics for each of those areas. A metric like NPS, for example, may be appropriate for examining relationship strength, but it’s not necessarily good for evaluating interactions.

 

Here is some of Temkin’s advice for deriving the right value from metrics:

 

Treat relationships and interactions differently. The questions you ask a customer about how they view your company can (and often should) be quite different than those that you ask about an interaction. Think about different questions and methods for five different types of insights: Relationship tracking, interaction monitoring, continuous listening, project infusion, and periodic immersion.

Measure relevant attitudes and behaviors. Businesses aren’t in the business of getting random people to recommend them. They hope to get that type of loyalty from successfully executing their mission. Develop measurements that test the attitudes and behaviors of target customer segments, making sure they line up with your specific business and brand strategy.

Build a robust voice of the customer (VoC) program. Creating isolated metrics will not drive change in an organization; especially when people don’t understand what drives the metric. Companies need to develop a voice of the customer (VoC) program that continuously shares actionable customer insights across the organization.

 

Final Destination

The Customer’s Experience and Customer Experience Management may not always be about the same thing, depending on how an enterprise goes after a customer-focused strategy that is not only tied to corporate goals, but to providing excellent customer service for every interaction on the customer journey.

 My concern is not about turning a cultural construct into a technology solution, with the notion that this is the way to provide and control Customer Experiences. My concern is for the mindset that ‘customer experience’ can be owned and manipulated by companies through an ever-growing proliferation of digital marketing and technology platforms that give companies the illusion that they can “solve the problem of the customer experience”. First, customer experience is not a problem. Second, The customer experience is owned by the customer where the experience with a company is totally dependent on the customer’s perception regarding company interactions, both individually and as a harmonized collective.

 People, processes, and practices, supported by the right technologies and a customer-focused strategy, all have a part in orchestrating the channels, the touchpoints, the interactions that comprise the customer journey. Excellent customer experiences really come from enterprise commitment, from top to bottom, to make sure customers are successful in every interaction and every experience with company products and services. 

 

 

Related Links

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Customer Buying Criteria - Applying customer & competitive intelligence to selling tools leads to strategic internal benefits

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

  

 

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

 

 

 

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

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

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

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

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

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

 

Symbiosis, Integration

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

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

 

Data Fuels Process and the Customer Experience

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

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

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

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

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

 

Business Process Management Meets Customer

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

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

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

 

Business Process and Customer Experience Management Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Source: BP Trends

 

 

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

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

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

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

 

Source: BP Trends

 

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

 

Symbiosis at the Heart of the Enterprise

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

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

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

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

 

 

Related Links:

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

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

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

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

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

 

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

Platform is in the Eye of the Beholder

 

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

  

Exploring on the Edge of Innovation

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Platforms require it.

 

 

The Age of the Platform

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

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

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

 

  

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

 

  

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

 

Related Links

A Review of “The New Small”

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

‘Big Data’, Intelligence and Multi-faceted Innovation

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Avoiding Chaos, Losing Serendipity?

A Smarter Edgier Collective: Business Technology Professionals on Twitter 

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid

 

  

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

 

 

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

 Agile Governance to Ensure that Reliable Information is Available Anywhere Anytime

 

                  Originally published in CMSWire November 28, 2011

 

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    

 

Connecting Data Governance to Business Outcomes That Matter

Originally published on Hub Designs Magazine September 2011

 

Process-centric initiatives are often optimal approaches for the things that companies want to accomplish. Business processes make it possible to directly connect work to business outcomes that lend themselves to various metrics that provide clarity for business performance. On the other hand, data and data-oriented solutions, by themselves, don’t usually map directly to business outcomes, and as such, usually can’t be measured by value contributed to desired outcomes and achievement of key corporate goals. But -- business processes and data are inextricably bound together. Processes create, modify and consume data – one might even say processes live and breathe data. It is through business processes that data can be mapped to business value.

Companies generally have not taken a holistic view of business information, technologies to improve it, or its impacts across end-to-end processes or businesses, instead treating data as information islands within specific system silos.

Kalido, The State of Data Governance Maturity 2011   

 

Notions like “Big Data” and “Information as an Asset” have stimulated thinking in many enterprises about extracting more value from the data already in enterprise repositories to benefit the business and its goals. But to extract that value from data, it’s not about the data nor is it about data governance. The key focus should be the business processes that impact revenue, business agility, competitiveness, and overall positive performance. However:  both reliable data and effective data governance are key enablers of gaining value from business processes.

Data governance is an important strategy both to maintain data in its most usable condition and to ensure consistency in how processes work effectively across the enterprise, by sustaining the quality, accessibility and relevance of data used by processes. Instead of many silo’d processes working on silo’d data, data governance contributes greatly to connecting essential pieces to synch significant business processes to the bigger enterprise strategic picture.

Martin Atherton on data governance as an enabler of business value:   

For many companies, it is common to focus on the minimum standards required to achieve compliance, instead of seeking to incrementally expand the effort and reap the benefits of being compliant more broadly across the business. In a previous research note, we used the phrase ‘value driven compliance’ to highlight the difference between approaching regulatory compliance as a chore versus seeing it as a business enabler.

 

Some of the difficulty of transitioning how enterprises derive value from business processes (and the data running through them) is the fact that most data-related initiatives have been driven by IT instead of by more business-oriented roles. To enable better business outcomes, data governance needs to bring business roles and IT teams together, as well as incorporating the support of various levels of management and strategic decision-makers. Too many times, data governance has not been implemented strategically. Instead it has been marooned by ad hoc decisions and “policies” tied more to daily operational situations. Without involving data governance in key corporate strategies, enterprises are not in good position to handle internal data issues, let alone address the ever-growing proliferation data from many new sources inside and outside the enterprise.

Ross Dawson expands on the notion of “governance as an enabler”: 

Governance should focus as much on enabling innovation and taking useful risks as about managing and mitigating risk...What needs to happen is that governance, risk, and compliance become part of the process of creating business value...More generally, I think it is important to note that IT governance and corporate governance have long been treated as separate. As I pointed out in my keynote this morning, technology – including in data management – is increasingly central to corporate strategy.

 

With good commitment from management, business units and IT teams alike, data governance initiatives are a very good way to manage data more effectively for greatly improved use in business processes. Data governance should provide the means to coordinate efficient and non-redundant business processes, along with the necessary data assets, across the enterprise, between lines of business. From data governance coordination, standards for reliable data and optimized business processes can be implemented, maintained and changed as needed. Data governance is also an enabler of acquiring important insights into both data and business processes.

 In my interactions with Forrester clients, I get the sense that data governance is receiving the most senior-management-level attention today than I've seen throughout my 18+ year data management career.

Rob Karel, Forrester

 

Tangible Value

Data alone carries no value. Unusable and poorly managed data carries no value. Real cost savings obviously result when data sources are streamlined and cleaned up, when processes are more responsive to business needs. Great value can result when business intelligence and other processes are based on the right data that can be trusted to lead to decisions that are more accurate and timely. The tangible benefits and value of data governance and data are further revealed through their connections to business processes and the desired outcomes from those processes that connect to corporate strategies and goals.

  

Related Links

Data Management: Reaching into the Cloud

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 

 

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

 

 

 

Data Management: Reaching into the Cloud

Originally published on Hub Designs Magazine August 2011

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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