Highly Competitive - software industry insights: Social Collaboration

Social Collaboration

08/31/2011

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.

06/28/2011

Virtual Community: The New Home of Customer Service?

Companies have begun to extend customer service functions into the external online communities and forums that they sponsor. Communities offer a dynamic opportunity for collaborative support of customers to answer their questions, to give them guidelines and ideas for solving problems, to discuss new ideas and critiques for the company’s offerings.

However “Community” isn’t just one destination – it’s not limited to venues sponsored by individual organizations. Community is in every social venue that touches the customer and the company: other forums and social media sites offer support and sounding boards for customers of that company. Companies should understand that an overall Virtual Community can come into play for providing customer service “anywhere anytime”.

Listening to these other social venues or communications channels has become very important to achieving highly responsive customer service/support. Listening may spur the company to join in on the discussion to offer answers and assistance. Or listening may be about clearly hearing what customers are saying and then acting on that feedback by making changes and improvements to offerings, support, marketing, and even strategic company direction.

According to Mark Studness, Director of eCommerce at Verizon, the Community Forums have been well-received since rolling out last July, generating more than 10 million page views.

"The Community Forums have spurred interaction among customers because people today expect to be able to find answers to their technical questions online," said Studness. "The feedback we've already received shows that our customers value the personalized peer-to-peer advice and feedback they receive from fellow users."

To achieve effective customer service in the Virtual Community, there’s plenty of work to do. It takes quite a bit of management, new processes, new culture and attitude adjustments, to communicate with and support customers, to glean feedback, and to add value to the customer experience, no matter where the conversation is taking place. Customer interactions on the Virtual Community plane must be synchronized with CRM and customer service practices and processes to ensure that all of the appropriate teams are tapped to participate. Strategy, goals and metrics also have important roles.

http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/enterprise/2010/03/community_management_the_strat.php

Effective Customer Service Communities

It’s pretty obvious that traditional customer service practices are broken for a lot of companies. Companies are making investments in social connections to customers often with the intent of doing a better job of providing answers and support, and to learn from the conversations customers are having in a variety of social venues. The Virtual Community is taking shape as it encompasses social sites external to the company as well as company-sponsored communities, both for customers and for employees.

Companies wanting to set up their own communities with customer service orientations must first engender an internal community and collaboration culture for employees and partners. Part of the collaborative activities are the empowerment and enablement of most or all employees to be customer advocates, and when appropriate, provide direct customer support. Communities can be silo-busters for enterprises where cross-departmental communication and cooperation are important.

When creating company-sponsored communities with a mind to customer service, Esteban Kolsky provides these guidelines:

“Treat communities as the most important link between you and your customers since there is nothing that can replace the direct link you can have with them – and the free flow of information both ways...So, how do you make the move? Three things to get started”:

1. Make sure your customers want it – Quite simple, there ain’t no community without people. If your customers are not going to participate, nor do they feel they can get value out of it then the community will not succeed. …Best way to start? start a community alongside the rest of your support structure...Commit time and resources to grow it. then you start shifting people over slowly, finally make it the channel of choice. Sounds simple; it is simple.

2. Make sure your company can support it – Despite claims to the contrary, the most successful examples of community service are those where the company commits time, resources, knowledge and participants to them. If your experts are involved in the community, take interest in it, answer questions and receive feedback from customers the community will grow and become useful to you. If no one from your company ever enters the community, and it builds with its own content and resources, if you seem not to care about the feedback and knowledge built in it, then it will be a failure.

3. Let it be – I know this is hard to understand, but you have to let the content be free. Monitoring content, censoring entries, and controlling what goes where and how it flows through your community is not the way to go…It is likely that you will have to do some policing to get it started, but go lightly and err on the side of freedom. Once the community is up and running, make sure you use reputation tools built into them so the people that matter the most (engineers and outside experts as an example) can be recognized. Communities center around self-elected leaders and they are the ones that will control the content and quality of the community. Feel free to court them – but try not to control them.

The Customer Experience

The number one imperative for working with Community venues for customer service activities is to understand that the Customer Experience with the company is the real focus. Most customer service initiatives and practices have been pointed towards increasing agent and process efficiencies, while reducing costs, which benefits the company in the short term while offering limited benefits to customers. Changing the imperative to the Customer Experience does much more to lead companies to real customer relationship management and retention, as well as nurturing customer success, in a more scalable fashion.

The emerging view is to create a customer experience strategy focused on the business success of the customer. By being a vehicle for the customer’s success, companies expect to:

- Extend the life of the customer

- Develop a proactive advocate for their products and services

- Extract usable value from the customer’s experience that can be repurposed

- Reduce transactional support costs by developing more educated users

- Increase the value of the customer through additional product and service revenue

There is considerable evidence pointing to the success of this approach. A study by Booz Allen found that customer-centric organizations outperformed their industry peers 2:1 in revenue growth and generated profit margins five to 10 percent above their competitors. However, to deliver these results, organizations have to walk their talk. If a company wants to evolve from pushing product to delivering customer advocacy-level value, a shift in thinking and attitude is required.

The Customer Experience is only as good as what a company offers for its customer focus: customer-centric processes, reliable quality products, partnerships with customers for customer benefit. The entire company is responsible for positive customer experiences. The entire company can only provide effective customer focus if the internal company culture maps directly to the success and satisfaction of its customers. Again, the Virtual Community that benefits customers transcends delineations internal and external to the company. A major challenge for companies is to provide a consistent customer experience throughout the Virtual Community.

Bi-Directional Value of the Virtual Community

The Virtual Community of interactions with customers provides many ways to enhance and grow positive customer experiences on a continuous basis. These interactions can be quite subtle and frequently can’t be easily measured using metrics that tie to company goals. For example, through the Virtual Community, new customer advocates arise bringing influence from their individual social networks. Tracking such influence is complex and, at times, elusive. However, significant new business for the company may result.

Dion Hinchcliffe writes extensively on the “Social Business” examining both technology and human implications, as in Social Business and Next-Generation CIOs - The Business Models:

Customer engagement on a whole new level. Leading enterprises are now finding that holding customers at arm’s length out of concern for cost is no longer necessary. Better customer service, higher satisfaction levels, and better retention are possible by employing techniques and platforms such as social CRM, online communities, and social media marketing that are especially high value. For example, financial services leader Intuit has been offering co-created customer support via Live Community to millions of customers for years, driving down costs and supporting customers much better than traditional non-social methods.

An article on DestinationCRM details the benefits identified by Dr. Natalie Petouhoff in her Forrester study, The ROI of Customer Service Communities:

While Petouhoff says she expected cost savings, the rise in product ideation was a surprise. In the study, she writes that customer service departments are rarely responsible for product ideation, but the nature of leaving commentary in the online community lends itself well to the process -- and can lead to other benefits.

"You wouldn't think 'customer service' when we went down this path," she says. "But because the ideas are in the community, interdepartmental collaboration can take place with them. As a result, customer service has an opportunity to step up to the plate and be an extremely valuable executive player."

In the study, Petouhoff notes several benefits that positively impact company customer service operations. Customers share the “win” from these benefits:

- increase in first-contact resolution

- boost in relevant Web-site content

Two more benefits listed in the Petouhoff study stand out as very important for customers: the already-mentioned new idea co-creation, and this one: improved customer retention and customer lifetime value. If customers are sticking around, it usually means that they are finding what they need and that they are satisfied well enough to continue dealing with the company. It likely means that customer frustrations have been reduced and confidence in the company has grown. Taking improved customer relationships one step further, communities for customer service help customers become more successful with the company’s products and services.

Often in the Virtual Community, problems, questions and requests are resolved faster and more accurately for the customer, by fellow customers, company employees, SMEs, and other community participants. When active on the Virtual Community, companies should be attuned to what each customer needs, and then take the appropriate action, which might be proactive, responsive, or passive. Many times listening to and understanding the customer is the best “action”. The next step is to translate that understanding into a significant component of the strategy and direction of the company to further meet customer needs and sustain competitiveness.

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

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

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

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

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

Posted by Julie Hunt on 06/28/2011 at 09:32 PM in Analytics, Customer Engagement, Customer Service, Customer-centric, Enterprise Community, Findability, Social Business, Social Collaboration, Social CRM, Strategy, WEM | Permalink | Comments (0)

06/08/2011

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

Originally published as a 4-part series on Hub Designs Magazine May 2011

Data governance can be seen as formalized policies, practices and processes set up to manage voluminous data assets across enterprises. Data governance also sits on an important growing convergence that encompasses multiple, and frequently separate, disciplines: data quality / data integration, master data management (MDM), business process management (BPM), business intelligence (BI) and analytics. The solutions surrounding the management of information, data and intelligence are emerging from artificial silos to acknowledge the greater overlap and interrelationships of these technologies and practices. Deliberate initiatives to tighten up the convergence of these solution spaces will not only improve the better overall functioning of all of these solutions but will help both IT and Business users see how it all works together. A greatly beneficial result should be the elimination of duplicate demands on business users and IT for implementing and managing these systems.

Forrester’s Rob Karel on aligning Business Process and Data Governance Initiatives:

Data governance is not – and should never have been – about the data.

High-quality and trustworthy data sitting in some repository somewhere does not in fact increase revenue, reduce risk, improve operational efficiencies, or strategically differentiate any organization from its competitors. It’s only when this trusted data can be delivered and consumed within the most critical business processes and decisions that run your business that these business outcomes can become reality.

So what is data governance all about? It’s all about business process, of course.

Let’s add this note to Karel’s assessment: business process is about optimizing the Business.

The current state of the increasing interrelationships between Data Governance, MDM, BPM, BI / Analytics (as well as DQ, DI) is also the story of the teaming up of Business users and IT as collaborative partners in doing the work that help businesses meet strategic goals, bring value to company customers, add to competitiveness. Both sides of the story must start with the business problems and the jobs to be done, plus the desired outcomes and benefits. Then decisions must be made regarding the role to be played by the software solutions to be implemented. Starting with the business also encourages the exploration and creation of the specific business cases that reflect needs and requirements. With such business cases defined, monitoring outcomes of data governance, BPM, BI, etc., should have clear basis.

While business processes are a major focus for strategies around data governance, BI and BPM, data still retains a significant role as a strategic asset that enterprises can use to differentiate themselves. These two entities (process and data) must be accorded respect when developing interrelated approaches that incorporate all of these solutions. Just as these solutions are best in synch with one another, so must the enterprise itself work with these solutions across departments and diverse teams. For business and intelligence processes to yield useful, timely and accurate results, the underlying data must be trustworthy.

Knocking down the Silos

Data, information and content permeate most enterprises where business users must become much more directly involved in creating the overall solution for handling these vital resources. Business users usually hold the key to the context for data and processes, as well as future usage considerations. The integrated components of MDM / data governance, BI / analytics, and BPM need to deliver real results to business users but are also highly dependent on participation of business users to reflect reality and provide on-target solutions. True collaboration between Business and IT teams starts with requirements, results, procedures, and then leads to collaborative work on joint projects. Such collaboration fosters reuse, reduces duplication of effort and processes, and builds a network of Business and IT staff that is aligned with how systems support key business objectives, initiatives and future direction.

Commonality also crosses the business drivers for data governance, MDM, BI, and BPM where key benefit areas consist of growing revenue, cost efficiency, different levels of agility, and compliance. Efforts should provide improvements for:

Faster, more accurate decision-making - real-time intelligence
Identifying and engendering new markets, new products, new customers
Enhancing and supporting customer relationships / customer service
Operational procedures
Customer cross-selling / up-selling
Ease of compliance, audits, risk management

Rajan Chandras, Data Gaps Plague Process Initiatives:

For one, the genesis of these types of initiatives is often very different. BPM is undertaken when organizations find themselves beset with process shortcomings, and with the primary purpose of better understanding, improving and integrating business processes. Data governance initiatives, on the other hand, are usually justified by shortcomings in data quality, consistency and integrity.

Then, data governance is often closely intertwined with master data management, and thus organized alongside important "master" business data entities -- customer, product, organization and such.

That said, Rob Karel, Forrester analyst and lead author of the report, suggests that IT must learn how to better educate and evangelize data issues in a language and a context that matters to the business -- a responsibility that Karel puts squarely on IT, "because IT often has a more cross-enterprise view than siloed business units and functions."

For data governance and process governance efforts to be successful, they both (business and IT) must frame their priorities and business value in the context of which business processes they are aiming to improve, transform and optimize, says Karel.

From Forrester study, September 2010

Source:http://alteryx.com/How-Alteryx-Performs/Pages/White-Papers/Forrester-Report-on-BI-Platform-Requirements.aspx

Intelligence, People and Process

MDM is a reflection of how an enterprise uses data, information – and content - for business purposes. The creation and management of master data touches more than the information itself. By creating data repositories and processes that reflect business functions, enterprises should develop access to the information that is so necessary to effectively and efficiently achieve business goals. It’s extremely important to analyze, manage and provide access to all forms of information – structured and semi-structured data, as well as “unstructured” content.

For BI and analytics solutions to provide real intelligence, they must be based on accurate and timely data sources. BI outputs are based on data aggregations, until recently, from structured data in data warehouses, with delivery in report or dashboard form to enterprise users. Analytics add the dimension of mathematics and formulas, with variants addressing forecasting and prediction.

Neil Raden responds to the ebizQ question: How does master data management change BI?:

…to describe how organizations collect data as part of a process, but manage to make it infinitely more valuable by using it for other purposes.

What does this have to do with BI and MDM? In our research, we have found that most knowledge workers shun BI for two reasons (not performance or ease-of-use): relevance and understanding. MDM adds nothing to address these concerns because its representational framework, a relational schema, is inadequate. It's a representation of a model. An ontology is a model. Until MDM rejects the relational model as its underlying schema, it will be unable to add the rich meaning, relationships and even reasoning that an ontology can do.

So, the point is, if you're going to go to the massive effort and expense of an MDM solution, take some advice from 21 years ago…Make the data useful for people, not just governors and black belts.

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

The possibilities for new applications of analytics increase with collaboration. Inviting in many-to-many interactions also opens up processes to new ideas from participants. Gartner found that social venues and collaboration help to track and capture outcomes of the decisions made based on BI / analytics:

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

With convergence, employees in the enterprise should operate more effectively, where improved data governance/MDM lead to better BI, where collaborative processes also enhance and validate BI, where a collaboration setting for BPM works to deliver more of the information that the enterprise needs. A possible approach to marrying collaboration, data and intelligence to business processes, and, more importantly, to the way people work, can be seen in Tibco’s re-work of tibbr. Dennis Howlett provides this description of tibbr:

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

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

Convergence Clarifies Benefits and Value

In a recent Gartner report covering predictions for data integration and MDM:

Through 2015, 66% of organizations that initiate an MDM program will struggle to demonstrate the business value of it.

It’s probably not a stretch to extend this “struggle for value” to BPM and BI / analytics. But through the convergence of MDM with BI / analytics and BPM, an analyst like Sandy Kemsley sees increased business value, in this Loraine Lawson interview:

Lawson: It's become more important with MDM to identify pain points and a real business case. Yet MDM is still pretty IT-centered. Does connecting it to BPM allow it to be more business-focused as a project?

Kemsley: Absolutely – connecting it to BPM, and also connecting it to business intelligence and analytics, because that's one of the things that many business users are interacting directly with analytics, whether it's just simple reporting or dashboards or a more complex, drill-down. You can get better analytics if you have consistent data models and those consistent data models are going to be helped by MDM, that's one of the key business benefits. When you want to have a report that gathers data from a number of different systems, it's not going to be some huge, big, long project because somebody has to figure out what data maps onto what other data. It's going to be a much more straightforward thing because while the data may not all be in one place, at least it will be in a consistent format so that you can easily bring it together.

Individually these solutions can achieve some value and success for an enterprise, but at the cost of much duplicated effort and resources. In convergence, with initiatives for business improvement and better decision-making, an integration of BI/analytics, BPM, data governance and MDM has definite synergistic outcomes that can greatly increase business value and reduce wasted effort. Integrating business insights into process execution will significantly improve the quality of decisions and lead to continuous process optimization. And process events kicking off BI and analytics for real-time decision-making increases beneficial outcomes.

All of these solutions should be about solving frequently complex business problems and supporting the work to be done in the enterprise. Each solution brings a significant piece of the “big picture”: better decisions for the business with reliable data feeding both intelligence and process. Ultimately the biggest payoff is how this convergence feeds directly into business agility and continuous change to constantly fine tune sustainable competitiveness.

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid

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

Posted by Julie Hunt on 06/08/2011 at 05:41 PM in Analytics, BI - Business Intelligence, BPM, Data Governance, Data Integration, Data Management, Data Quality, IT, MDM, Social Collaboration, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (0)

05/31/2011

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Competitiveness for many companies is often translated into external activities over which they have little or no control, such as focusing on tactical methods to attack competitors, to convince a customer not to buy from a competitor. These same companies overlook many activities that are completely in their control such as greatly improving and innovating product quality and reliability. Another area that can significantly enhance company competitiveness is working towards customer service excellence. Customer service excellence can produce a blatant ROI: Happy Successful Customers. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com makes a strong case for focusing on customers, rather than competitors:

When asked what competitors he worries about, Bezos replied that Amazon decided early on that it would be "competitor alert, but not competitor obsessed," Instead, his company is customer obsessed.

"The best customer service means the customer doesn't need to call you," Bezos says... That fixation on customer service appears to have paid off, Bezos says: The company has some of the highest customer service ratings in the retail industry.

Swinging in the other direction, it’s fairly easy to dig up lots of horror stories and statistics on the high cost (quantitative and qualitative) of poorly executed customer service. For example, Genesys came out with a study, The Cost of Poor Customer Service, where consumers were surveyed globally:

Nearly 70% of consumers said they had ended a relationship due to poor customer service alone. Consumers feel the most significant root causes of poor service are:

• Being trapped in automated self-service

• Being forced to wait too long for service

• Repeating themselves

• Representatives that lack the skills to answer their inquiry

On average, consumers in virtually every country walk away from a relationship due to poor service. Overall, consumers end more than 1.4 relationships each year on average due to a poor customer service experience.

The approach to customer service has been changing for many companies, and it clearly needs to change. Companies are facing not only the need to ramp up positive customer experiences whenever customers interact with the company, but now must understand and construct strategies for providing a seamless customer experience over multiple channels of communication. Many new customer communication channels are not even provided by the company. ‘Anywhere-anytime’ customer interactions, frequently driven by the customer, are happening now, and are likely to grow in diversity and occurrence over time.

But companies are not helpless in this “new world” of customer engagement. Companies have full power to create a consistent and differentiated service experience for their customers, across any and all channels. Making this happen is not an easy task, but making it happen can be a solid path to sustained competitiveness, and to providing continuous real value to customers.

A Continuum of Customer Engagement

Industry analyst Esteban Kolsky has been writing about the transition of customer communication channels from ones under company management to a proliferation of new modes of interaction, often pushed by customers. Kolsky considers customer-driven communication channels part of a continuum that is currently evolving:

This new continuum arose from the Social Customer becoming demanding, and expecting the interactions to happen on their own terms. No longer do customers want to be transferred from department to department – they want quick resolution by whomever they happen to interact with. They expect to get access to the relevant data regarding their transactions virtually anywhere, in any format. They want to dictate the terms of the relationship as they deem relevant…

…we see organizations today ill prepared across all channels to deal with it. Their people are not prepared to deal with customers and communities accessing all relevant information, their processes are not sophisticated enough to accommodate these dynamic demands for information and data, and the technology behind them definitely is not up to par to support flexible exchanges of information as determined by the customer – not the organization.

From Customer Lifecycle Transactions to Socially-Augmented Relationship Continuums

Beyond a continuum of communication channels, the path to improved customer interactions must focus on people, practices, processes, and technologies, with technologies subservient to the first three components. New accomplishments for engaging experiences with customer service functions can include knowledge co-creation that will benefit many, collecting customer intelligence to underpin ever-improving service, and highly relevant personalized exchanges that speed up acquisition of answers for customer questions and needs.

Source: From Customer Lifecycle Transactions to Socially-Augmented Relationship Continuums

One Customer Experience Across Multiple Channels, Old and New

Guy Stephens writes in a recent post about the influence of social media on customer relationships with companies. Stephens’ wonderfully detailed post is a response to a report from the Institute of Customer Service, Return on investment in customer service: the bottom line report. A few of his observations:

The report points out:

- customer service is moving towards a fundamental shift away from a largely transaction–based cost center to a strategic driver that helps generate value for the organisation

- calculating the ROI in customer service is complex

- a profound change for the customer service world is taking place

(but) the preoccupation remains firmly on the channel, or the mechanics of the channels. The modern day contact centre has been built on the pursuit of tactical efficiencies and expediencies, but its future lies in a far more expansive, challenging and less familiar landscape.…although technology has created many new channels that affect customer behaviour, the traditional channels don’t disappear.

To succeed with all customers, creating and maintaining consistency of experience across and between channels of communication, through many interactions, is the priority. This goes beyond listening well to the customer -- this is about action, enablement and empowerment.

Developing Solutions for the Customer Experience Continuum

Recently I worked with software company Sword Ciboodle, collaborating with Mitch Lieberman (VP Marketing Americas and well-known SME for Social / CRM) and several others to co-create a thought piece on the current state and future direction of quality customer service experiences, including the evolving customer engagement continuum, – and the impacts on company success and on the value created for customers.

Sword Ciboodle, based in Scotland, has been growing its presence in the Americas. The Ciboodle software solutions are all about helping companies provide improved customer interactions and the many ways that this can be accomplished, including traditional customer service. Ciboodle technology powers a customer engagement platform that includes capabilities for CRM, customer intelligence, dynamic process management, and a good start on tapping into multi-channel communication interfaces. Ciboodle also gets into interfaces with social apps, plus sentiment analysis, a built-in community platform, and self-service portals. Ciboodle has a view in mind for the future of customer service and is exploring the customer engagement continuum as the ‘anywhere anytime’ customer interaction venue that is likely to become more important for many companies.

Collaborating with a Company That Believes In People-Centric Businesses

Collaborative projects are frequently distinct from one another, so “rules of engagement” should reflect the goals and needs unique to each project. “Rules of engagement” may be explicit or just informally understood. Collaborative communication is best when open and responsive, at a frequency that moves the work along. And companies that believe in collaboration and in connecting people for mutual benefit also end up creating solutions and deliverables that work well for what people want to get done and how they want to do it. All of the above notions have been part of the collaborative experience to create the white paper with the Ciboodle team.

The content of the white paper that we co-created is much richer for having the participation of multiple strong team members. The full team includes these experts who have been with Ciboodle for several years: Clare Dorrian (VP Marketing EMEA), Ian Henderson (VP Presales / Strategic Consulting), Rachel Tait (Marketing Manager Americas), and Lisa Goodwin (Design & Marketing Americas). I greatly appreciate all of the knowledge and insight that they have shared with me, and the great enthusiasm that this team brings to the work that Ciboodle does. Towards the end of the project, newcomer John Merritt (Product Marketing Manager Americas) jumped right in to shepherd the white paper through final production and publication. Then there’s Mitch, whose vision, drive and commitment contributed so much to the content and direction of the white paper.

If you are interested in reading the white paper Focusing on the Total Customer Experience (and I highly recommend that you do…), send an email request to: whitepaper@sword-ciboodle.com And then please come back to my blog or to Mitch’s blog to let us know your thoughts, reactions, new ideas, and suggestions for improving customer interactions, achieving customer service excellence, and the evolution of the customer engagement continuum.

Mitch has been turning out posts on the white paper topics, including:

The Importance of Positive Customer Service Experiences

Coordination, Collaboration and Co-operation; An Approach to Service Excellence

Creating Graceful and Rewarding Customer Service Experiences

The Dynamic Customer Service Experience Framework

My Related Links

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

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

Disclosure: Sword Ciboodle sponsored and compensated me for the white paper that I wrote with Mitch Lieberman.

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

Posted by Julie Hunt on 05/31/2011 at 07:27 PM in Customer Engagement, Customer Service, Customer-centric, Innovation, Social Collaboration, Social CRM, White Papers | Permalink | Comments (0)

03/31/2011

IT + Marketing: Innovation Through Collaboration in B2B Software Companies

I’ve read a lot of articles and posts that have discussed various aspects of the uneasy relationship (in many cases) between IT groups and Marketing groups. The people and process side of this ongoing situation puts me in mind of the obstacles and needs for the adoption of a collaboration culture in software companies. For the purpose of this article, collaboration means: talking to each other, listening to each other, analyzing and planning in concert, presence of mutual respect – no silos, no turf wars. Good intent, good communication -- bi-directional and legitimate. The kind of enterprise collaboration where teams work together for common cause: business success, growth, innovation, getting the work done well.

Whether it’s dubbed “IT working with Marketing”, or “Enterprise Collaboration”, upper management has the same responsibility to encourage and sponsor all types of necessary and differentiating collaboration to achieve business goals in ways that are better, faster, and smoother. Unfortunately for many software companies, upper management is not stepping up to enable and empower useful collaborations, particularly cross-departmental. Upper management in this context means CEO, CFO, COO -- all too often, the CIO and the CMO are not accorded power over the decisions coming from these other roles.

Ben Horowitz on the ‘Innovation Business’:

The technology business is fundamentally the innovation business. Etymologically, the word technology means “a better way of doing things.” As a result, innovation is the core competency for technology companies. Technology companies are born because they create a better way of doing things. Eventually, someone else will come up with a better way. Therefore, if a technology company ceases to innovate, it will die.

Collaboration frequently is a very good way for software company teams to not only work for company success, but to better innovate. Innovation in software companies should not only be about products and solutions; it should be about how the company itself works as a thriving and growing organism, how it empowers staff to be successful on the company’s behalf.

Neither IT Nor Marketing Is A Monolithic Being Calling Its Own Shots…

Contrary to popular belief, the “modern” IT group did not spring up fully formed as an autonomous entity that makes decisions in a vacuum. Obviously an exaggeration, but I think a lot of people have this notion in the back of their minds when considering the role of IT. With a startup, the IT team may be more focused on digital infrastructure: hardware, telephony, internet, internal systems. As the company grows and different kinds of employees are added, IT grows too. If the software company IPOs, then the IT group is heavily involved in compliance, security, ensuring always-on performance, and so on. Internal systems may become more complex and numerous, employees more virtual, hardware and infrastructure demands more sophisticated.

Frequently the result is that IT groups become silo’d, but usually not by their own design. Upper management sets the agenda for IT groups and usually holds responsibility for the positioning of IT as separate from the rest of the company. In recent years, most IT groups have suffered through significant staff cuts while more has been piled on the remaining staff. Upper management then expects instant change from IT to better support the business -- without sufficient resources – and particularly without a strong collaboration culture in place.

Marketing groups are in the same boat as IT regarding who decides their destinies. Software companies in startup mode have a history of adding Marketing functions in haphazard fashion. Many startups still look at “marketing” as something to slap on when the sales team needs more help finding buyers. The reality is that for most software companies, Marketing is an important component of the Business, just as IT is. But too often, upper management misses the strategic opportunities to do it right – to build teams working together, instead of separately and frequently in conflict.

Strategy, Business and Tech

IT has been the target over past several years in companies that rightfully want IT to be more aligned with the strategic needs of the business. IT has received black marks for not moving quickly, not feeding innovation, and so on. Balance this criticism of IT with the reality that upper management usually has a big hand in the current state of IT affairs.

Eric Brown frequently addresses the future of IT with a strong dose of reality:

What’s missing in most of the articles I’ve run across about reinventing IT or changing IT is the effect the Business has had on IT. You can’t really reinvent or change something unless you know the how and why behind the creation of that entity in the first place.

…at the end of the year, the grades are handed out. Sometimes IT fails. Sometimes IT over-achieves. …most times, IT gets a barely passing grade.

Is this barely passing grade (or failing grade) due to incompetence or mismanagement? Most times it’s not…most times it’s due to changing priorities that aren’t clearly thought through and/or communicated throughout the organization

And who creates the constantly changing priorities? Upper management.

Harvard Business Review also weighs in on the future of IT:

The authority and responsibility for IT-enabled business outcomes needs to be aligned. The CIO's dilemma…is the challenge of promoting innovation while increasing efficiency. IT is in the untenable position of being held responsible for this even though their business partners control the decisions that impact their ability to do so.

IT governance is really business governance. In many organizations, IT has led the way in implementing governance over critical decisions related to strategy, business architecture, investments, change, programs, risk and sourcing. Over time, organizations have realized that decisions in these areas need to be coordinated across the enterprise and have elevated and consolidated these activities outside and above IT.

This isn't your grandmother's technology. "Technologies for collaboration, business intelligence, and customer interface all require experimentation and iteration" and a hands-on relationship between workers and their technology. Increasingly, the technology necessary to assemble, deploy and operate technology will be provisioned by external providers freeing up internal IT resources to focus on the meaty issues of coaching users on how to exploit the technology and ensure horizontal integration, security, continuity, and performance across the extended enterprise.

Marketing + IT <> Business + Tech

For many B2B software companies, Customers are now Buyers, many of whom want to drive the relationship and buying cycle, moving sharply away from the former sales-team-focused cycles. The customer experience with the company has gained importance; many company-centric processes must give over to processes with a strong customer focus. Both Marketing and IT have important roles in customer engagement, with marketing technology growing in sophistication and variety. But in most companies the IT group carries the additional responsibility of working with multiple disparate internal constituencies, with priorities determined by project portfolio management, internal politics, and by decisions from upper management.

When IT resources are not easily available to support time-sensitive initiatives, marketing groups have frequently implemented their own technology solutions as a form of Shadow IT. New approaches to effective customer engagement lean heavily on cloud/SaaS based technologies that are fast to set up and use by non-IT staff. Unfortunately a significant side effect of not including the IT group has led to problems: new data silos, separate operations and analytics – lack of integration with other systems in the company.

As cited in a recent post by Cheryl Burgess, the current and frequent state of finger-pointing and lack of mutual respect between IT and Marketing is summed up by Chris Murphy of InformationWeek:

IT sees marketing as looking for shortcuts, shortcuts that will come back to bite the organization. Marketing, meanwhile, sees IT slowing them down, not delivering on the operational basics, and not understanding marketing needs.

Burgess also points to an Accenture-sponsored study involving over 300 CMO’s and 300 CIO’s that presented this view of Marketing + IT:

The CMO Council believes there is a global imperative for marketing and IT organizations, which too often have been polarized and adversarial, to find common ground around the business of innovating more efficient, effective and measurable ways to target, acquire and stay intimately connected to customers. The need for greater synchronization, partnership and collaboration between these two groups has never been more critical to their mutual success.

The Marketing Technologist: Success More Likely With IT and Marketing In Collaboration

Frequently, companies gain better paths to innovation, collaboration and competitiveness with the presence of business-technology hybrids who span departments and leverage cross-team expertise. The demands of innovation, meeting customer needs, and rapidly changing solution markets are challenging software companies to work much more quickly and collaboratively than ever before.

An important hybrid is the marketing technologist. Scott Brinker has published an extensive and well-crafted piece on the rise of the marketing technologist, describing “technology-powered marketing” where “Marketing must take ownership of the technology in its domain”. Some of Brinker’s observations on the marketing technologist hybrid:

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

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

Brinker makes the case for highly functional collaborations between IT and Marketing:

..technology decisions and marketing strategy are intertwined. You can't address one without impacting the other.

Brinker also profiles the ‘3 Spheres of Marketing Technology’: “All these technologies — the ones we buy, the ones we build upon — can be categorized into three overlapping spheres”:

3 spheres of marketing tech

Customer-Focused / Technology-Driven Marketing: Attract More Buyers

In 2008, Booz & Company published its view of the growing integration of marketing strategies with technology, “Not Your Typical Marketing Campaign – The Next Wave of Technology-Driven Marketing”:

Next-generation direct marketing demands a front-to-back rethink of the overall IT architecture, with the ultimate goal of better understanding the customer... In the past, each channel would feed customer information individually into the back-end customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that processed transactions and held much of the customer data. Using the new architecture, all of those channels now connect to a central integrated engine. This engine, available throughout the network, mediates between channels and the customer data and back-end processing. The central campaign engine also contains the business rules that govern every interaction with every customer.

The single most critical innovation, however, lies in doing away with the typical siloed, channel-specific architecture on which most current direct marketing and campaigning technology depends. No customer-centric marketing effort can be truly successful if the technology is still organized around interaction channels, rather than those all-important customers who naturally interact with the business through multiple channels.

Each step of the way will require the willingness to rethink your overall marketing strategy, the tactical processes by which you plan and carry out each campaign, and the IT tools you need. You must develop the skills required to design and execute analytic campaigns and, of course, you will need to build the technologies to enable those campaigns.

Most important, from beginning to end, the CIO and the CMO must work together as partners to design, build, and test the necessary infrastructure, and to expand it, step by step, throughout your company.

Marketing Technology + IT: Marketing ERP?

Looking at the transition from channel silos to a more integrated marketing technology platform brings up the notion of Marketing “ERP” to provision, manage and analyze initiatives supported by marketing tech. Egbert Hendriks @ephendriks introduces this notion (whether seriously or tongue-in-cheek) in a recent exchange on Twitter with Kevin Cochrane @kevinc2003:

@ephendriks RT @niels_goossen: Why Marketing Should Run Its Own Technology -- InformationWeek http://bit.ly/dRaLSs

@phendriks: I agree- marketing is becoming a technology-driven discipline. #wcm #dam #vms #bpms integrate in a marketing "ERP"!

@kevinc2003: @ephendriks what do you see as being a marketing "ERP"? Interested in your perspective / insights

From the Booz & Company paper: the diagram to the right below could suggest a path to a Marketing ERP platform. Also be sure to note the transition from channel silos on left, to a more integrated marketing technology platform on right.

http://www.booz.com/global/home/what_we_think/reports_and_white_papers/ic-display/47189813

Indeed, marketing has been increasingly technology-driven, relying on marketing management platforms, analytics (multiple), various software systems for content (WCM, WEM, DAM), BPM, VMS (vertical marketing system), social media, lead gen, mobile/multichannel management. We could also throw in MDM, CRM, data/application integration processes, other reporting.

BUT – at this point, the answer to building out highly effective marketing technology systems incorporating the best of Marketing and IT is not found in throwing more tech at the situation. Nor is creating a new software category going to help.

A better approach is the enablement and empowerment of IT and Marketing working as true collaborative partners, where upper management fully supports the elimination of silos and frees up IT to work on strategic initiatives. Software companies still have lots of people and process matters to figure out first. Innovate how the company works together as teams with common purpose. Collaboration culture can lead to and encourage innovation culture, both of which can lead to business success and competitive agility.

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

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

Posted by Julie Hunt on 03/31/2011 at 08:32 PM in Analytics, BI - Business Intelligence, Customer-centric, Innovation, Interactive Marketing, IT, Marketing Technology, Selling Software, Social Collaboration, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (2)

02/14/2011

A Review of “The New Small”

The subtitle for “The New Small” is: how a new breed of small businesses is harnessing the power of emerging technologies. So first it is important to understand which sorts of companies have become “The New Small” – to be able to appreciate the lessons and guidance provided by Phil Simon in his new book. The New Small 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.

The New Small companies do a better job of understanding needs and goals of their businesses – and their customers – before bringing in technology. These New Small-ers want to use tech when it makes sense for their businesses but want to find tech that can provide what they need on an out-of-the-box basis. Then the New Small spend their extra time on customizations – not for the technology – but for the experiences that their customers have with their products and services.

And so in defining the characteristics of companies that adhere to the New Small, Phil also has had the smarts to let the customer stories educate his readers on how the New Small works. Extensive detail is provided in each story to show the business context, how each company embodies the New Small, as well as what worked, what didn’t work – and very importantly, why for each. These real world examples serve to inspire other potential New Small-ers while providing the how-tos.

Phil presents in each story all the salient points to consider when looking at technology as an enabler of the “business of the business”. Risks, rewards, trade-offs are considered, and the questions to ask for decision-making. “One size does not fit all” when it comes to tech and the New Small – Phil very wisely shows possibilities without proselytizing a sole path to success.

In some ways The New Small is also a very useful compendium of recent publications that cover biz + tech since Phil makes rich use of material from these publications, in context with the different sections of the book. The structure of the book lends itself to a workbook use – in fact I’d love to see Phil add a companion workbook to The New Small, to further aid business innovation through the smart use of tech.

Phil Simon’s third book has a special place in my world since I helped bring it into “being”, along with many of Phil’s friends and colleagues. Phil chose to completely own the publishing process and started that process by raising money on Kickstarter to help fund the publication. Phil also had a direct role in the design of the book, and is now busy promoting, which undoubtedly has presented many adventures in further exploring the potential of companies that want to embrace New Small-ism.

Selling Software Solutions to SMB Markets – Who and How To Target

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

Posted by Julie Hunt on 02/14/2011 at 08:35 PM in Customer-centric, SMB Markets, Social Business, Social Collaboration, Social CRM, Social Selling, Strategy, Technology | Permalink | Comments (0)

12/31/2010

A Smarter Edgier Collective: Business Technology Professionals on Twitter

As a departure from my usual in-depth article I’m sharing my somewhat ‘social-logical’ thoughts on the community of business technology professionals on Twitter.

Twitter has many faces for its users. There is one Twitter where masses of people tweet about pop culture and everyday life. There are also the Twitter worlds of brand promotions and consumers. And then there are Twitter “collectives”, floating through the Twittersphere with distinct flavor and vigor, where certain “birds of a feather” come together.

One particularly strong “collective” swirls around business technology professionals. These tech professionals work with hardware and/or software, as: users, vendors, analysts, consultants, marketers, product managers, practitioners, writers, developers, critics, innovators. And most of these seemingly disparate professionals are continuously and serendipitously crossing paths on Twitter, in a way that was never possible before.

Of course, this tech professionals’ collective on Twitter is not formally organized nor does it need to be to result in effective communication and interaction. I like to think that the some of the propensity for technology folks to interact on Twitter has origins in software / hardware in “old school” developer communities, BBSs, and forums. “Special interest groups” within the tech professionals collective exist on Twitter (frequently marked by hashtags) – but mixing and interaction amongst all such groups are continuous and fruitful.

In mixing it up, software analysts are talking to social media agencies and practitioners, marketers to systems analysts and developers, big fish talking with not-so-big fish. Silos are being evaporated, as individuals are walking a bit in another professional’s shoes and seeing from another’s perspective. Twitter has been an extended and natural collaboration experience with open communicators, willing listeners, change agents and change acceptors. For these tech professionals, is Twitter becoming “collaboration as business process” that is essential to their professional endeavors?

As a collective, technology professionals take advantage of many activities, both organized and impromptu, that are possible on Twitter. Many lead and/or participate in chats or tweetjams via organized events, or jump in on lively exchanges that start with a couple of people. 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.

Interactive Social Caretakers

On Twitter, each tech professional might be considered individual social caretakers or personal “community managers”. David Armano articulates how effectively trained community managers should posses the following seven qualities:

Articulate: Able to communicate effectively in a variety of media

Social: Engages in authentic conversations and interactions

Professional: Acts as a responsible ambassador of brand/org

Adaptable: Can make decisions quickly, handle crisis situations

Enthusiastic: Energetic, passionate and engaged in relevant topics

Connected: Has ties to the right people within the community

Organized: Can keep track of data, relationships, content calendars, and a variety of assets essential to maintaining community

I find that this list captures the traits embodied by many of the tech professionals interacting on Twitter. The “communities” they manage permeate the collective.

Twitter as Social Intranet for Tech Professionals?

Looking at this loosely-organized Twitter collaboration phenomenon for tech professionals, is it reasonable to think of Twitter as an über Social Intranet for such professionals? This would be a very public intranet but this Twitter intranet has much in common with the current fledgling social intranets behind the firewall.

Toby Ward describes a social intranet as:

An intranet that features multiple social media tools for most or all employees to use as collaboration vehicles for sharing knowledge with other employees. A social intranet may feature blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, or a combination of these or any other Web 2.0 (intranet 2.0) tool with at least some or limited exposure (optional) from the main intranet or portal home page.

Intranets are places where an organization goes to find knowledge, experts, documents, discussions. If we consider the intermingled tweetstreams of the tech professionals collective as the “home page” or the gateway to the treasures of this “social intranet”, then a smörgåsbord of blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networks, and so on are available to all of the collective. Indeed Twitter itself may be the ultimate open forum. The Twitter “social intranet” also reflects continuous change: unpredictable, dynamic, significant, evolving – allowing exchanges of unexpected information and opinion.

In his presentation on Social Intranets, Oscar Berg sees a shift to Value Creation, emphasizing Collaboration – Learning – Innovation – Relationships. Twitter interaction experiences encompass the tenets of Berg’s Value Creation as well as these points called out by Berg regarding the greater expectations people have for organizations:

Fast response
Accessibility
Simplicity
Freedom of choice
Transparency & influence
Need-driven

Holism through social networks and cultural change

If each tech professional on Twitter is their own community manager (and brand manager), and is participating in a social intranet super-structure, what sort of “social organization” describes the overall collective?

In the work that Jeremiah Owyang is doing on social businesses, he maintains that companies organize social in 5 ways: Centralized, Distributed, Coordinated, Multiple Hub-and-Spoke, and finally Holistic. Holistic is the least frequent in organizations where everyone uses social media equally and consistently across all organizations, somewhat as “social masters”, with the essential qualities of community managers.

The central notion of holism is that the whole ends up greater than the sum of the parts, meaning that something organically greater emerges. The tech professionals’ collective derives its organic strength from such parts as mutual respect, active listening, cross-culture, cross-geo, cross-functional to achieve a collaboration that is alive and kicking.

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

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

Posted by Julie Hunt on 12/31/2010 at 05:59 PM in B2B, Enterprise Community, Enterprise Intranet, Innovation, Social Business, Social Collaboration, Technology Hybrid Professionals, Twitter | Permalink | Comments (6)

11/28/2010

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

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

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

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

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

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

Value of Social Business - Inside

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Value of Social Business - Outside

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

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

Maria Ogneva comments on the social customer and social CRM:

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

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

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

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

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

Social Business Equation: Inside + Outside = Eliminate silos

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

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

Here are the big questions:

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

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

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

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

<<<<< >>>>>

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

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

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

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

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

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

Posted by Julie Hunt on 11/28/2010 at 07:35 PM in Analytics, B2B, BI - Business Intelligence, Customer-centric, Enterprise Applications, Enterprise Community, Enterprise Intranet, Influence, Interactive Marketing, Social Business, Social Collaboration, Social CRM, Strategy | Permalink | Comments (8)

10/24/2010

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

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

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

Master spy novelist John LeCarré

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

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

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

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

Analytics Everywhere

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

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

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

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

Predictive Analytics – The Bold New LOB Tool

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

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

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

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

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

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

Content Analytics, Content Intelligence

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

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

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

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

Seth Grimes on Content Analytics

“Intelligence” Hits The Wall

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

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

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

New World Focus on BI and Predictive Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collaboration and the Human Element

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

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

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

Analytics Aren’t Always Fun and Games

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

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

Few enterprises have the right analytical talent.

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

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

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

The Elephant in the Room: Reliable Structured Data

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

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

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

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

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

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

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Julie Hunt on 10/24/2010 at 09:58 PM in Analytics, BI - Business Intelligence, Data Integration, Data Quality, Future of Software, Market & Competitive Intelligence, Predictive Analytics, Social Business, Social Collaboration | Permalink | Comments (4)

08/10/2010

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

WEM technology can make enterprise collaboration more effective

Enterprise intranets are usually created to act as the main conduits for internal collaboration, including content creation / acquisition. But, to-date, most are failing to engage their internal customers: the employees of corporations. According to a 2009 report by Watson Wyatt, only 50% of employees accessed the intranet on a daily basis; 80% said their company’s system needed improvement; and 50% said searching on their intranet was too difficult. Instead of functioning as a framework to access self-service portals and the apps/tools needed to be more productive, intranets are often difficult to navigate, out-of-date, non-intuitive, and bulky.

Bill Ives notes in his review of the Global Intranet Trends 2010 Report:

The intranet is starting to become the entry point into the “workplace web” – the collection of resources and information needed by staff. This includes applications, intranet sites, specialized portals, team spaces, collaboration spaces and so on. This was the original vision for many intranets but rarely realized.

To improve intranets to act as effective “gateways” for collaboration, intranets would likely benefit from many capabilities incorporated into Web Experience Management (WEM) for external-facing websites, including the use of social apps. In this case, a company’s employees are the customers to be engaged and converted.

Processes, Tools, Interconnected Employees

Community and collaboration in business enterprises are about people working together more effectively, quickly, and proactively – to achieve the goals of the business in dynamic fashion. This definition of collaboration seems to be eluding many companies that have enterprise intranets and are adopting social media tools. It’s not about tools adoption, but about interconnected employees working together more often, reducing silos of knowledge and expertise, and sharing relevant insight as quickly as possible.

The intranet can utilize approaches “borrowed” from WEM-oriented external websites to improve usability and engagement, but intranets must also integrate with business processes that are part of individual employee workflows. The intranet can become a personalized focus for an employee’s essential information flow related to the business operations that the employee ties into. The context for collaboration on intranets is connectivity to business processes and work. To increase employee use of intranets requires that intranets embody the employee’s "way of working".

Sameer Patel makes this observation in his post on the Google Wave discontinuation:

Organizations still need to understand how to design work processes that blend optimal process and collaboration but its hell of a lot easier when the software plays nice…end users are still struggling to understand the basic applicability of these new tools to meeting their performance requirements better/faster/simpler. Organizations on the other hand often have a huge gap between declaring big picture strategic collaborative intent and tool selection.

WEM for Intranets

For intranets built as “engaging” sites, several WEM capabilities work well:

· End-to-end software solution, with excellent usability both for business users and IT personnel (includes behind-the-scenes document and content management, workflow, design tools, and so on)

· Recommendations-like technology for social search and personalization (as well as enterprise search)

· Analytics – for usage and performance stats and improvements

· Rich media and video capabilities

· Social collaboration / communication capabilities

· Mobile access / multi-channel

· Extensive integration / interoperability capabilities at several levels of the enterprise infrastructure

Like external-facing websites, usable and relevant intranets must be designed from employee POVs, but with this difference: the larger the organization, the more diverse the employee perspectives and needs. External-facing websites usually have much more focused target markets. To deliver effective intranet experiences to all employees, it may take a composite of applications, not just one main platform, to achieve all of the necessary services. Beyond tools for overt collaboration, communication and user-generated content, there are needs for more “formal” services for document management, forms management, legal and HR processes, and so on.

Personalization and Customization

Personalization is one of the main keys for the engagement and enablement of employees using intranets more effectively, while also greatly aiding the work employees do each day. Personalization is becoming increasingly sophisticated, which helps the customization of intranets to have more impact. There are technologies available for social search, federated search results, self-adaptive UIs, recommendations, bookmarks, “my links”, “my sites”, and so on. Even basic customization can often lead to decent productivity gains for employees. Role-based personalization has great potential for connecting employees much more tightly to the content, social media and business apps that matter most for their jobs. Personalization / customization advances should lead to aligning intranet usage to the business processes of daily work.

Search and Relevance

Search is the other essential key; unfortunately intranet / enterprise search is still far from the Google-quality search employees would like for fast, efficient acquisition of relevant information. Intranet solutions will have to continue to focus on improving search, including highly customizable approaches to advanced search. For collaboration purposes, “people search” has become more important to locate experts and project resources. Recommendations technology can also play a part here.

Interactive Collaboration and Content-Creation Through Social Apps

Social media content resources include the usual roll call of blogs, wikis, forums, KB, etc. Ease of use, acquisition and curation for all social venues will make a big difference for aiding employees in work. Wikis in particular need excellent oversight to remain current, relevant and usable. Social media can also provide a wide range of communication venues between employees and teams. Intranets are becoming more real-time through chat, micro-blogging, and other tools, especially useful for the growing prevalence of virtual teams. As with all intranet capabilities, social apps require frequent and energetic tending.

Intranet Content Management / Document Management

Social apps can enhance how intranets are used, but do not cover all that the intranet should offer. Other services include sophisticated content management, document management, and access to more formal content from HR / legal departments. In the realm of content management, many different kinds of content live on intranets. Mark Morrell, in his post All intranet content is not the same lists four types: Formal, Team, Crowd, and Personal. “A fifth category covers services, which are online processes where people do tasks to fulfil their roles.” In many cases, it will take composite technologies to meet all intranet content needs.

Multi-channel Management - Mobile Access to Intranets

With the wider distribution of employees and growth of virtual teams, mobile access to intranets must evolve and improve. The ever-improving sophistication of mobile devices is increasingly making it easier for employees to use mobile access to perform work tasks via intranets, especially with tablet devices now in the mix. It is likely that the intranet design for mobile users should be separate from the traditional enterprise network-based intranet, but should also include the WEM approach to provide better usability and engagement. In fact, with the proliferation of customer-centric apps for mobile, there are even greater expectations for what enterprise intranets should provide for the employee experience.

The Human Side of Intranets for Enterprise Collaboration

There are multiple obstacles to achieving effective intranets that engage and convert employees, including the failure to allocate sufficient money and permanent staffing to build and maintain high-quality sites. After the intranet is in place, enterprises must next create and sustain processes to continually improve and innovate intranet applications and services. But the biggest obstacle comes from the “human side” of intranets.

Ironically, for many companies, implementation efforts for collaboration technology, such as intranets and social apps, will be doomed to failure for one simple reason: most enterprises have failed to engender a “collaboration culture” based on real human interaction. Enterprise collaboration as a practice requires true top-down corporate commitment to a collaboration culture that is strategic to business goals and is an important component of internal business processes. While employing a WEM approach to create more effective intranets is an excellent idea, it is still essential that companies grow and nurture live collaboration cultures, where collaboration is a natural response for business activities, for any departments in the enterprise. Planning a healthy collaboration culture also requires a dynamic plan for the role that WEM and social technology will play to bring the people in the company together for productive interaction and interconnectedness.

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

Posted by Julie Hunt on 08/10/2010 at 04:14 PM in Enterprise Community, Enterprise Intranet, Social Collaboration, Strategy, Web Experience Management | Permalink | Comments (0)

Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Julie Hunt Consulting: Software Industry Analyst - Business Technology Strategist - Market Intelligence

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11/28/2010

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

10/24/2010

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

08/10/2010

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

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