Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Connecting the Cyber-Threat Dots through Big Data

 

The managed security services market has been in play for more than a decade. Not surprisingly, it continues to show vibrant growth, fueled in part by cloud-related factors. Research and Markets, in a January 2015 report, estimated that market growth will run from $14.3 billion in 2014 to $31.9 billion by 2019 (with a CAGR of 17.3%). Growth for security services touches just about every industry, and all sizes of organizations.

Managed services providers are tasked with marrying expertise in cybersecurity and cloud with big data analytics to deliver comprehensive protection and proactive measures to their clients. Proactive cybersecurity services call for the implementation of far-reaching and sophisticated data and event management technologies and services, to improve the aggregation and analysis of security event big data. Managed security services should address the imperative for integrating many disparate sources, including big data sources, to derive event correlation that can be aligned with other analytics to continuously improve alerts, preemptive processes, and real-time reporting.

Today's cyber security threats frequently operate as patterns that usually deviate from the expected behavior for most authorized users or for activity on particular devices or IP addresses. To identify and fight such attacks, security teams need technology services that can find and analyze deviant trends. This is a natural fit for big data mining and analytics combined with state-of-the-art cybersecurity programs.

Machine-generated data provides fertile ground for using big data analytics to root out cyber security threats. Machine data lives in the IT infrastructure: network logs, event logs, firewall and security system data, web logs, email logs – anything and everything operating in the infrastructure. But machine-generated data can be quite problematic for aggregation, data mining and analytics. Such data must be processed very quickly, frequently in real-time and usually exists in large volumes that are continuously proliferating. Machine data sources are quite variable, many of which are multi-structured formats that further challenge data mining efforts.

Once data has been extracted from machine-generated sources it can be enriched with other kinds of data to establish context, and elicit patterns and trends related to cyber attacks. Managed analytics services can take on a forensics quality while searching through data for patterns of irregular or unexpected activity. For instance, realtime endpoint forensic data capture and analysis is on the rise to plug yet another hole in systems infrastructure, in order to block data breach entry points.

Situational awareness is another important aspect of fighting cyber attacks. The overarching value of situational awareness is continuously knowing what is going on around the organization, to "instantly" respond to certain events. Big data analytics strengthen situational awareness primarily through fast real-time assessments that can reduce time to decisions and actions in response to potential threats and certain anomalies. These sorts of analytics also require corroboration from subject matter experts, to help make the best decisions based on the data at hand. And this opens up yet another "cybersecurity frontier" for managed services providers where knowledge and expertise are just as important as optimally running technologies.

 

Image source: platfora.com

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for MSPs and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit IBM's PivotPoint. Dedicated to providing valuable insight from industry thought leaders, PivotPoint offers expertise to help you develop, differentiate and scale your business.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting

 

Riding the Mobile Data Highway

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image source:  cisco.com

 

Vendors and services providers for mobility management solutions can overly fixate on the vast array of software platforms and services for "corralling" mobile devices and ensuring secure computing. While these are vital areas, ultimately to enable successful organizations it can be far more important to provide services to amplify the value of what employees are doing with mobile devices. Particularly as businesses have become more mobile, the never-ending ebb and flow of data has made comprehensive data management a mission critical element both for business agility and for guaranteeing trustworthy, useable data.

Mobility adds a distinct flavor to real-time data management, particularly since mobile is a top source of big data. But data by itself – no matter the source – carries no value. Even worse, poorly managed data can cause real harm to organizations. Real value accrues when data sources are streamlined and cleaned up, when the processes that consume and create data are more responsive to business needs, and when business users trust the data they are using for decisions and work requirements.

Obviously business data is everywhere these days, as cloud services and mobile software offerings keep pace with worker preferences for tools. End-to-end task workflows may even take place on multiple platforms, off and on premises. The future of applications for mobile devices is ultimately about providing the workforce with the data they need, when they need it and where they need it. With a growing "mobile first" mindset for workers, organizations must enable as much functionality for their employees as possible while also ensuring data - and corporate - security.

One of the important changes for data management solutions is the demand for many different ways that integration processes can be created and used. Not only do data integration platforms need to be high performance, they must continue to innovate ways to connect to data where it lives, and then perform any number of actions to take data where it is needed. Added to integration and management imperatives is the ongoing battle to eliminate more data silos, to speed up access to the right data from mobile devices.

With 'speed to solution' as a crucial aspect of mobile data management, managed services can play an important role to provide what many organizations need, by applying expertise in mobility and cloud services to 'old school' data management processes and mindsets. True data mobility gives rise to data flows consistently and "effortlessly" (from the user perspective) between any points whether cloud or on premises.

Managed services have a natural fit with the management of the entire life cycle of mobile data and information. The objective is to keep up with changes regarding where data is created and stored, and where it needs to flow, to reach everyone in the organization who can benefit from such data. So mobile data management is as much about continuously creating and maintaining the right business processes as it is about data access and security.

Process-centric initiatives are often optimal approaches for the things that companies want to accomplish. Business processes make it possible to directly connect work to business outcomes that lend themselves to various metrics that provide clarity for business performance. It is through business processes that data can be mapped to business value.

Some of the difficulty for transitioning how enterprises derive value from business processes (and the data running through them) is the fact that most data-related initiatives have been driven by IT instead of by business-oriented roles. To enable better business outcomes, mobile data management initiatives need to bring business and IT teams together as symbiotic partners. Managed services providers can be the game-changing bridge to promote strong relationships between business and IT teams in order to best support a growing mobile workforce.

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for MSPs and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit IBM's PivotPoint. Dedicated to providing valuable insight from industry thought leaders, PivotPoint offers expertise to help you develop, differentiate and scale your business.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Transforming Fragmented Decision Making

 

Many midsized organizations are uncertain about how to proceed with business intelligence and analytics – or if they should even jump in. But if these organizations fail to include various data analytics as inputs to strategic and tactical decisions throughout the enterprise, they may be blocking their abilities to compete, grow and keep pace with dynamic market and economic changes. Key opportunities may be missed; detrimental risks may pop up without warning.

Like larger enterprises, midsized organizations have a lot of data from a large variety of sources. Most decision-making calls for more timely data that can be used to point the way for the future, not just looking at what happened in the past. Too often spreadsheets become the key data source – unfortunately spreadsheets may not yield the necessary analysis, particularly when the situation calls for data from multiple disparate sources.                

More software solutions are available that should work well for midsized organizations and are more cost-effective, including cloud services that offer analytics anywhere, anytime. But many midsized organizations have real hurdles to implementing agile analytics and decision-making processes. They may not have enough IT resources or analytics experts to effectively go from data to insights, and then on to decisions and actions. Data isn't the only resource that needs attention – business processes are data's partner in analytics that ultimately engender business improvement. And just like larger enterprises, midsized organizations may not have the essential alignment between Business and IT, working together to make sure analytics make sense for the business needs of the organization.       

Companies can benefit greatly from analytics that support initiatives that impact the entire organization and reveal solid business value. For instance, to learn more about customers, organizations need to analyze: whether products and services meet customer needs, how customers want to interact with the company for different activities, and how different segments of customers prefer to make purchases. An activity like customer segmentation doesn't just benefit marketing – it makes a significant difference for corporate customer strategies, innovation, product groups, and sales.

Centralizing analytics can eliminate redundant effort to glean intelligence from data sources, while reducing effort and cost. Often departments in midsized organizations rely too much on their own silos of data and don't include a wide variety of data sources. Centralizing advanced analytics should dynamically work to eliminate data silos in the organization and bring different perspective into the formulation of analytical models and a wider breadth of benefit to the overall organization. Midsized companies will find the best success when all functions across the enterprise work in harmony.

 

 

Source: decision-making-solutions.com

 

 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I've been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Customer Experience Innovation: Aligning Business with Customer

 

 

Responsive and accurate support for customer interactions points the way for the kind of management that organizations can apply to foster positive customer experiences, through the people, practices, and processes of the enterprise. But organizations must recognize that management doesn't mean attempting to control and dictate to the customer what the 'experience' will be. It does mean managing how well the enterprise provides a consistent experience across channels, how well it fulfills the needs and desires of customers based on customer terms, and even how well it delivers the right products and services.

Agile and effective business processes are instrumental to providing a sophisticated means to respond well to customer needs, while navigating many complex variables, moving from customer to customer. Well-designed and customer-oriented processes make a big difference when integrating multi-dimensional touch points for a harmonized view of customer interactions.

When measuring the effectiveness of business operations and initiatives, organizations usually derive success metrics from KPIs related only to internal business process performance and inward-focused business outcomes. Unfortunately these metrics are frequently out-of-synch with customer perceptions of how well the organization met customer expectations. Business and customer metrics can be mismatched in other aspects of the customer experience:

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

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

 

 

                

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Source: BP Trends

 

Aligning customer and business views of process, experience and success using customer journey / touchpoint diagrams can reveal the disconnects between the perceptions of the organization and what customers are likely experiencing. Organizations are still working on finding more ways to capture an understanding of the actual customer experience. Direct intelligence is not easily attained. Insight is pieced together with data from many sources including customer surveys, content from social sites, customer repeat business, customer transactions, and interactions with customer service.

The customer perception of interactions with an organization is often the heart of the customer experience. In most cases, companies cannot truly manipulate what customers actually experience, and really shouldn't be thinking that way. But companies do have control over providing high quality interactions in many channels, and making sure that a consistent positive experience carries over from one channel to another. Organizations have the power to overhaul their business focus and processes to engender an internal "culture" where the customer is the high priority for all functions, and where excellent customer service frames every interaction with the organization.

 

 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I've been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Inside-Out Change for an Outside-In Customer Focus

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Source: successwithcrm.com

 

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

For mutual benefit, the focus for all business processes has to shift to customers: to embrace what they want from companies, how they view companies and how they want to work with them. Agile business processes can connect all parts of the enterprise to the individual points and stages of the customer experience journey. Enterprise business processes also map directly to desired business outcomes – which now must align with customer desired outcomes.

Most internal systems in companies should incorporate factors like customerexperience and engagement, rather than functioning solely from a product, service or departmental perspective. Processes play a key role inbringing these factors together to achieve customer focus and relevance. Integration internal to the organization means cross-functional / cross-department teams to envision and implement customer strategies, translated into business processes that holistically connect the enterprise.

To harmonize a customer focus with business strategies and operations, there is serious work to be done:

• Aligning business process integration with the customer leads to creating consistent customer experiences across the enterprise and across communication channels.
• Integration of interaction data with operational data provides a more complete view of the customer in real time.
• Integration of channels leads to understanding of touch points in individual channels as well as cross-channel.
• Individual department and program goals across the enterprise must be also integrated and related to customer experience excellence.

Data, information and intelligence are the fuel for effective business processes that support and promote successful customer experiences and interactions. By considering business processes and business information in parallel to customer-focused strategies and initiatives, business outcomes are likely to improve. Data + process must reflect the customer perspective rather than the internal systems architecture. Data directly related to customer-focused processes is likely to get closer to providing the integrated multi-dimensional view of the customer that most companies seek.

A good many customer interactions or touch points are increasingly fleeting due to the proliferation of digital channels and their use by customers. The opportunity for organizations to meet customer desires and needs is becoming shorter-lived for each interaction, and increasingly difficult to capture, analyze and understand. To keep up, business processes must become a dynamic, intelligent and highly integrated interface for internal and external interactions.

 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I've been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Social Collaboration and the Social Business

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Source: forbes.com 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social media has become a valuable means for many organizations to better engage and retain customers, to attract prospects, make sales, and help customers solve problems. But it still seems to be much harder for organizations to understand social 'on the inside' and why it matters. Companies 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.

The internal social business interconnects with enterprise collaboration platforms and intranets, that are now taking a more social media kind of approach to better engage and support employees. Additionally, many diverse kinds of software solutions used by enterprises incorporate social capabilities as methods to improve solution usage and value, as well as do a better job of including that all important human factor. In enterprise activities such as knowledge management, BI and analytics, business process management, and adaptive case management, there is a significant role to be played by social / collaborative capabilities to improve how these activities provide relevance and effective results.

Social business initiatives, internal and external, pertain 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, whether internal or external, must be authentic -- employees, partners, and customers will quickly figure out if a company is trying to fake it. When an organization chooses to become a 'social business', the divide between social-inside and social-outside should blur as more and more silos within the organization hopefully disappear, and as bi-directional connections to customers and prospects, partners and suppliers become more natural and more immediate.

The decision to become a social business has to come from upper management and boards of directors – it has to be a key strategy of the organization – or it won't happen in any significant or sustained fashion. Understanding and nurturing the value of all the people in the enterprise impacts how the company operates internally, how it does business externally, and how the company will survive as a healthy, successful business. For those organizations that become social businesses come these rewards: drawing the best out of employees; healthy impact on continuous innovation and relevant business models; collaborating with customers and partners on future direction and products; and listening to all of the people of the enterprise ecosystem to draw on their experiences and expertise for building and sustaining competitive edge. 

 

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet. I've been compensated to contribute to this program, but the opinions expressed in this post are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies or opinions.

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

The Adaptive Enterprise: New Directions for MDM?

Originally published in Hub Designs Magazine, November 2012

 

As market forces continue to fluctuate, business leaders are searching for the best ways to work with uncertainty and still deliver improved performance. As a result, organizations are transforming into adaptive enterprises.

Performance for the adaptive enterprise means agile, dynamic, and responsive to continuous change. But this kind of performance requires enterprise data that is reliable, usable and timely, so that analytics and decision-making processes are quickly on target with relevant recommendations.

Information management has an important new challenge for provisioning right-time data to emerging adaptive enterprises. MDM is a reflection of how an enterprise uses data and information 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 now have access to the information that is so vital to effectively and agilely adapting to constant change.

 

 

Agile Processes, Agile Data

In 2011, Gartner surveyed 300 user organizations: 49 percent said process improvements are the key business priority driving interest in MDM. Gartner's Andrew White commented:

"MDM treats information as assets that indirectly contribute to enterprise performance by improving process execution via data consistency," White wrote in his presentation slides. "BPM is a management discipline that treats processes as assets that directly contribute to enterprise performance."

MDM has a clear role in improving business processes; both MDM and optimized processes contribute to better performance management. The increasing focus on master data in relation to business processes extends usage across the enterprise to more business roles and functions. For many enterprises, data governance policies are the means for the orchestration of master data management, practices, processes, and people, so that compliance with data governance policies assures that master data is available as a trusted and vital asset for the enterprise. A new direction and challenge for data governance will be creating policies that reflect the continuously changing needs of the adaptive enterprise.

 

Dynamic Business Processes: Adaptive Case Management

Adaptive case management is an interesting example of adaptive and responsive processes that depend on reliable data. Forrester Research defines adaptive case management (ACM) this way (Forrester calls it dynamic case management):

A highly structured but also collaborative, dynamic and information-intensive process that is driven by outside events and requires incremental and progressive responses from the business domain handling the case. Examples of a case folder include a patient record, a lawsuit, an insurance claim, or a contract, and a case folder would include all of the documents, data, collaboration artifacts, policies, rules analytics, and other information needed to process and manage the case.

Immediate access to the right information is essential to ACM due to the unpredictable nature of case management knowledge work. 'Unpredictable' is also a driving force of the adaptive enterprise, where there is increasing need for organizations to adapt to the volatile nature of business as it happens. ACM may evolve beyond its 'roots' in business process management to become a much-needed internal platform of process orchestration, practices and technology to more relevantly and quickly surface the most-needed information, content, and data, wherever they exist in the enterprise -- all in the context of situational business processes related to a particular employee's responsibilities.

Frequent mandates for ACM include managing risks and compliance, containing costs, applying a systems approach to non-conforming processes, and the ability to respond well to the unexpected. MDM parallels these mandates with a number of its value areas for enterprises:

• Compliance and risk management
• Revenue growth
• Customer interactions
• Cost and performance efficiency
• Business agility

Both MDM and ACM can contribute positively to customer-focused activities, along the lines of real-time analytics, decision-making, dynamic process, and timely responsiveness.

 

Performance, Outcomes, Metrics

Obviously, ineffective business processes and data bottlenecks are obstacles to the adaptive enterprise that needs to nimbly change in response to events and new insight, and to rapidly make decisions to make the most of new opportunities and challenges. Achieving performance improvements starts with identifying how data-fueled processes can be optimized, and how MDM and BPM can work together to do so. Well-functioning business processes, whether explicitly defined or adaptive (as in case management), are an essential contributor to agile business performance.

A classic example of setting an improvement objective aligned with MDM is the reconciliation of customer identity across systems of record and systems of engagement, since both domains must be integrated to support and capture customer interactions. Many business functions - and strategies - greatly benefit from a unified view of the customer. The organization can quickly and accurately interact with customers. Now metrics can be applied to measure outcomes and performance relative to customers, based on the organization's KPI preferences, and tied to corporate and line-of-business objectives.

Processes and performance improvement initiatives can be decomposed into master data elements that can be sorted and aggregated properly for metrics to quantify value. Focus is put on the data assets that are the most essential for overall business improvement. MDM makes such a focus repeatable across the enterprise to integrate business processes and metrics around the same master data elements

 

The Successful Adaptive Enterprise

Success factors for enterprises almost always include effective leaders, the right strategies, and high quality products and services that meet customer needs. But more and more demands are pushing enterprises to constantly monitor and respond to changes in markets, customers and competitors. These changes will then alter other success factors: strategies now have a shorter shelf life. Enterprises are challenged to:

• Transform to an organization comfortable with continuous adaptive behavior while relying on business processes and data systems to increase flexibility at tactical and strategic levels
• Make better use of data, processes, analytics to improve decisions, to predict future trends and markets, and to proactively manage change
• Develop responsive risk management and compliance processes that are ready for the uncertainties of business, both good and bad

Data analytics are seeing wider adoption as important tools throughout the enterprise, reflecting the convergence of BI, BPM and MDM. Analytics are also being used to evaluate enterprise data to improve both information management and business processes, more frequently in real time. Analytics-fueled data management capabilities bring improvements and evolution to data integration and data quality approaches. More enterprises are looking for analytics embedded in a wide variety of systems, including operational systems that now make use of real-time analytics and decision-making technology.

MDM initiatives have the right capabilities and strategic purpose to underpin business agility and the adaptive enterprise. Master data can be extended to provide improved use of information systems and repositories throughout the enterprise. MDM can stretch its data muscles to take on new business requirements and objectives where data and process are key components, and now venture into new categories that need MDM to better serve the enterprise. To achieve agile business actions takes highly disciplined approaches to MDM and data governance; and it takes flexibility bred into information management DNA to be able to quickly but reliably handle change.

 

Related Links

Business Priorities Point the Way for MDM

Connecting Data Governance to Business Outcomes That Matter

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

'Big Data', Intelligence and Multi-faceted Innovation

Data Management: Reaching into the Cloud

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

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

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

"Lean Is Not a Destination, It's a Journey": Lessons in Quality, Reliability, and Risk for MDM

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts both software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

  

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

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

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

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

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

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

 

Symbiosis, Integration

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

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

 

Data Fuels Process and the Customer Experience

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

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

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

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

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

 

Business Process Management Meets Customer

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

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

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

 

Business Process and Customer Experience Management Technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Source: BP Trends

 

 

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

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

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

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

 

Source: BP Trends

 

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

 

Symbiosis at the Heart of the Enterprise

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

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

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

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

 

 

Related Links:

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

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

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

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

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

 

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

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

 Agile Governance to Ensure that Reliable Information is Available Anywhere Anytime

 

                  Originally published in CMSWire November 28, 2011

 

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

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

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

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

  

Priming Information Flow – Anywhere Anytime

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

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

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

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

 

    Creating Information Advantage in a Cloudy World

 

Detours For Information Anywhere Anytime

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

 

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

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

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

 

            IBM: Enabling Multifaceted Innovation

 

Cloud Inspires Governance Innovation

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

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

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

  

Related Links:

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

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

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

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

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

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

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

Connecting Data Governance to Business Outcomes That Matter

Data Management: Reaching into the Cloud

 

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

 

 

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.

Related Links

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

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

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