Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Content Marketing Strategies for Midsized Companies

  

Content marketing isn't anything new but it has proven to be an effective marketing strategy for companies of all sizes. For 2014 the Content Marketing Institute reports that overall amounts spent on content marketing is segmented by B2B companies allocating 30% of their marketing budgets, while B2C companies earmark 24% of their marketing budgets. In 2012, midsized organizations spent 22% of their marketing budgets on content marketing.

 

Midsized organizations are using content marketing to support multiple objectives:

• Brand awareness – thought leadership and trusted source of quality information
• Customer retention and loyalty – nurturing ongoing relationships
• Lead management activities (lead gen, nurturing, presales buyer journey touchpoints)
• New customer acquisition
• Improving website traffic and eCommerce activity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

        Image source: Post+Beam

 

 

 We see a lot of articles about how organizations go wrong when it comes to content marketing.And most of what's called out is not surprising: failure to write properly on topics that customers prefer or to even find out what customers want to read; poor writing quality and non-engaging material; promoting marketing brochure-ware instead of useful, thought-provoking material. Organizations can fail to understand how to match the right content to the right channel, or lack the knowledge as to which channels different customer segments prefer for various kinds of content. These organizations may not even have clear customer segmentation for their products.

The existence of these missteps usually indicates the lack of a cohesive long-term strategy for content marketing. And it's just as likely that there is no overarching marketing strategy that ties into corporate goals and objectives. This may mean that not only does content marketing lack executive backing, but the overall marketing function is suffering the same fate.

 

Well-Crafted Strategies

So before an organization can create a well-crafted content marketing strategy, upper management must make the commitment to be customer-focused and marketing savvy. The value of content marketing to reach the customer-as-buyer must be given credence, support and enablement. Content marketing is not a short term campaign or project; it's a strategic commitment that impacts the entire enterprise.

Content marketing (if done well) keeps the company focused on understanding and meeting the needs of customers – something companies should be doing anyway. Align the business with the customer, align content with the customer. Content marketing is a natural progression from recognizing that the customer-as-buyer drives more of how, when or even if sales happen. The work to be done to understand how to deliver the right content to customers and prospects is the same work that organizations should be doing to deliver the products and services that customers and prospects want and need.

Strategic decisions need to be made regarding the technology tools to assist content marketing initiatives. For well-targeted content, marketing teams need sophisticated analytics for customer segmentation and behavioral insight to create the right content for the right customer segment, delivered where the customer wants to find it. Digital marketing technologies interoperate with content marketing initiatives, including marketing automation and omnichannel experience management platforms.

 

A comprehensive content marketing strategy provides a wellspring for all company content so that organizations connect with customers consistently and clearly. The content marketing strategy pulls together individual marketing programs and initiatives resulting in a more seamless transition for the customer from channel to channel. Connecting the tactics of marketing to a content strategy makes it more possible to construct metrics that track the effectiveness of quality content, that then can be mapped to functions such as lead gen, sales funnel and overall marketing ROI.

 

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic, visit  IBM's Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

 

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of 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

 

 

The Learning Organization as Social Business

 

                            Originally published on CMSWire

 

McKinsey has repeatedly published very aggressive outlooks for the value that could be created from companies progressing to the social business. In a 2012 report, the research firm estimated that social business technologies could improve productivity across the value chain as much as $1.3 trillion annually, just for the enterprise sectors of professional services, CPG, advanced manufacturing, and retail financial services. According to McKinsey, two-thirds of that forecast value aligns with improving collaboration and communication within and across enterprises.

But for such value to be achieved from transformative collaboration, enterprises must change culturally, operationally and strategically to accommodate new ways of learning, sharing and applying knowledge that benefit individual and organizational performance. Only through cultures conducive to wide-spread collaboration and knowledge sharing can enterprises find their way to the competitive strength of the Learning Organization.

Such strategic changes impact how the organization operates internally, and how it does business externally – essentially how the organization engages and inspires the human ecosystem that is truly needed for the company to survive as a successful business.

 

The Learning Organization as Social Business

When learning organizations work well, collaborative learning connects disparate groups in the enterprise, resulting in highly effective cross-functional learning networks. Communities of practice can promote knowledge sharing as an integral part of business activities, which in turn propagates a pivotal facet of competitive advantage.

Many of the capabilities that enable social business are also the transforming enablers of agile corporate learning: social networks and communities, wikis and forums, collaborative processes, gamification, mobile apps, video and audio. The Consumerization of IT has dramatically changed the enterprise, impacted the social business, and has paved the way for mobile learning to become the preferred channel for just-in-time learning and knowledge sharing.

But organizations are still wrestling with how to find the path to becoming a social business, especially with a focus on what will bring the most value to the company. When it becomes clear that the learning organization is a large part of a social business, companies should quickly understand how the value accrues. Learning contributes to social business value through:

• Planned, well-organized learning programs that align with how employees work
• Learning strategically connected to corporate goals at all levels
• Quickly locating the right people or content for the expertise needed to solve problems
• Agile cross-functional communication and collaboration
• Continuous learning available 'anytime anywhere'
• Connecting corporate learning to performance improvement
• Continuous metrics to gauge improvements to: achievement of company goals; agile responsiveness to change; innovation; all customer and partner interactions

 

Learning: A Top Partner for Business

Corporate learning must perpetually evolve as enterprises change, to remain relevant to business needs and requirements. The transition from training to learning emphasizes the change in mindset about the best environments for faster learning that can immediately be used on the job.

The overarching driver for corporate learning should not be cutting costs but the need to relentlessly transform the way organizations empower and engage employees. Agile learning brings valuable new benefits in terms of being able to work in ways that weren't possible before, leading to continuous organizational improvement. Learning is now about investing in the organization in every way possible.

Social sites and technologies have exposed many people to new ways to work, communicate, collaborate and learn. Younger employees have positive experiences with eLearning from different levels of education. Knowledge and learning networks are growing, both as support for corporate learning initiatives and on-the-job support. So high expectations for new ways to learn continue to impact more organizations. Motivated organizations make sure employees connect to communities of practice and value-add information that will ensure that the development of skills is aligned with business goals and objectives.

90% of 500 global L&D (learning and development) professionals in our study felt it was either critical or important for learning to be integrated with work.

Towards Maturity: Aligning Learning to Business - 2013

 

Driving Business Results

Learning programs cannot persist as yet another silo. They must be deeply integrated into the 'business' of the organization.The learning organization connects learning to business goals, and establishes the basis for metrics to measure progress, changes to productivity, and contribution to desired business outcomes. While it's good to measure learning programs in terms of the quality and effectiveness for end users (employees, partners, even customers), organizations also have to focus on how learning contributes to the achievement of strategic objectives, growth and continuous improvement.

Organizations should be able to answer these sorts of questions regarding the effectiveness of their learning programs:

Have innovation and idea generation improved for our business? Are we more in tune with and responsive to our customers? Is everyone quickly finding the information and experts that they need to do their jobs more effectively? Are we ready for anything that the business environment is going to throw at us?

The most important make-or-break point for learning happens when employees leave training sessions and go back on the job. If the organization has provided an environment that enables the use of learning on the job and methods for reinforcing what was learned, the business impact from learning increases dramatically, with lasting effect. However, the only way this will happen is if upper management is on board with learning as a strategic driver for the organization.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: epiclearninggroup.com

 

 

Business Value for the Learning Organization

Learning is clearly a strategic investment for building an organization of individuals who are prepared to sustain the business and drive forward into the future. The potential of learning organizations is to transform learning into a proactive catalyst for change and growth. For this to happen, upper management must include learning strategies in the corporate DNA and as a constant in all strategic thinking and decision making.

A study from T+D Magazine focused on the opinions held by CXO and CLO positions regarding the key indicators that signal real integration of learning with strategic business objectives and needs. These indicators fell into three main categories:

• Integration indicators monitor how well the learning function is integrated with the business goals and work processes

• Operation indicators monitor how proactive and responsive the learning function is in meeting business needs, the level of learning access and usage ,and the talent within the function itself

• Perception indicators monitor executive, business unit leader, and employee and learner satisfaction

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: The Best of Measuring & Evaluating Learning – 2010

 

 

And What About Learning from Mistakes?

Critical facets of a Learning Organization culture are first, the leeway to make mistakes, and then, responsive learning processes to help employees rectify missteps – and learn from them. The "learning from mistakes" process also includes sharing the experience: the problem, the misstep trying to solve it, what it took to turn the situation around and move to the next step. This sort of knowledge sharing is invaluable. The 24/7 availability of eLearning and mobile learning apps to help employees go through the process from diagnosis to remedy, and then sharing, is a smart competitive move.

And of course, the effective Learning Organization only thrives when upper management is on board with support, both culturally and in practice, across every group of the enterprise. When the strategy is to nurture a work environment where employees have the room to think through work activities, reflect on mistakes and figure out what should have been done, and then develop and share expertise and knowledge, the results add greatly to competitive advantage and sustained corporate health. A highly skilled workforce achieves continuous performance improvement and productivity, innovation, and the ability to roll with the constant change in strategy and new challenges that many enterprises must address to stay competitive, relevant and fresh.

 

 

Learning Network Image: Neil Rubens

 

About the author: Julie is an independent consultant and industry analyst for B2B software solutions, providing services to vendors to improve strategies for customers and target markets, products and solutions, and future direction. Julie has expertise in several solution spaces including: data integration and data quality; analytics and BI; business process, workflow and collaboration; digital marketing, WCM and social media; and the pivotal importance of user and customer experiences. 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

 

The Learning Organization Goes Mobile

                                                                                                                Originally published on CMSWire

 

Many organizations overlook one of the most significant ways to improve competitiveness, ramp up performance and sustain growth: continuous, varied and dynamic learning programs for their employees and leadership teams. As mobile has become an important channel for many business activities, it is emerging as a preferred platform for just-in-time learning and knowledge sharing. Mobile platforms are disrupting all kinds of activities and processes, and putting a whole new twist on employee productivity, customer interactions and partner collaborations.

Ubiquitous mobile access in this interconnected world means instant collaboration for company employees anytime anywhere -- but only if companies reduce the obstacles for such collaboration to take place both on mobile and social platforms. Organizations have to make significant internal changes to take advantage of social technologies, collaboration and mobile learning. Policies, processes and "culture" must engender an open environment where employee contributions to knowledge sharing are encouraged and where employees have the tools to quickly find the knowledge they need.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Cisco Consulting Services, 2013

 

mLearning – The New Kind of eLearning

Most articles that mention eLearning as an aspect of knowledge management, social business, or collaboration usually only show eLearning as a 'check list item', rather than exploring how eLearning can enhance overall corporate collaborative strength and performance improvement for employees. Like other disruptive mobile apps, mLearning has hurled corporate eLearning onto a whole new trajectory.

The mobile ecosystem – devices, carriers, app markets – has become one of the fastest growing technology industries, which means great opportunities for learning accessed through mobile devices. Wearable mobile devices will likely become more prevalent for mLearning, particularly for on-the-spot interactions and collaboration, environmentally interactive sessions, and knowledge searches.

 

Learning goes mobile (2013)

 Mobile devices are being used to:

62%  - access learning content to reinforce formal learning

54%  - support communication and collaboration

53%  - provide an alternative mode of delivery to PC-based learning content

43%  - support application of learning back in the workplace

37%  - access performance support at the point of need

27%  - support generation and sharing of user generated content

 

Mobile learning isn't just learning dumped into a mobile device. It has become a new world of possibilities for at-your-fingertips knowledge. mLearning usually targets situational or contextual learning, which means the content has to be an exact fit for what is needed in the moment. Experiential m-learning leverages the environment in which the learner exists. mLearning augments employee performance and productivity in very real ways. It is continuous learning that is patterned on the way people work.

 

Brandon Hall Group's 2013 Mobile Learning Survey

The study found that those organizations that are higher performers—defined as companies that increased revenues and improved a majority of their key performance indicators over the previous year—are doing more with mobile learning than organizations in general.

89 percent of (all) respondents whose organizations have been delivering mobile learning for more than two years say mobile video is either very or extremely effective.

 

Mobile learning can complement more "mainstream" learning services, but also provides an opportunity to transform how learning is done on the job. mLearning has been a major force for breaking learning into bite-size but meaty pieces that can be consumed in 10 minutes or less. Information design for mobile access is the focus, instead of formal course design.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    Source: Mobile Learning: Driving Business Results by Empowering Employees in the Moment

 

Continuous Learning: Transforming Employee Performance Management

Just as companies must become agile and dynamic in response to constant change – they have to include employees in the preparations as well. To meet ever-present change, continuous learning is essential. The tenets of such continuous learning also must change frequently to stay relevant. Mobile becomes a transformative technology to keep learning relevant and to help employees apply learning and knowledge to daily work.

Traditional employee "performance management" has been broken for some time. This approach has been responsible for driving away employees, stalling contributions to company success, and frequent failures to identify true top performing and innovative employees. Performance appraisal processes have deteriorated into ridiculous busy work that mostly angers and bewilders everyone involved, from employees to managers.

The focus must turn to enabling pathways to improved employee performance through education, development, and mentoring or coaching. This is not a new approach, but an old one that harkens back to when many companies became directly involved in career development for all employees who were willing to do the work for advancement and improvement.

In some ways, employee performance management is akin to customer experience management: companies can't manage the experiences of their customers – but they can manage how they interact with customers in a consistent way with up-to-date intelligence in order to help customers, not hinder them. There's a similar conundrum for "employee performance management". For employees to perform well, companies need to "get out of the way" and provide an environment that encourages career growth and the tools to help employees perform well. This calls for new ways to develop, grow, and proliferate the capabilities of employees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: m-Learning: Mobile Learning Is Finally Going Mainstream – And It Is Bigger Than You Might Think

 

 

Empowering Employees with Interconnected Learning Tools

The always-on mobile world of interconnectedness can invigorate opportunities for social collaboration and informal learning. These forms of learning can build up smarter workforces to respond to changing business needs and unexpected circumstances. Mobile enables new modes for searching and collecting information related to job needs. People-to-people communication and sharing improve, which yield upticks in performance and attainment of goals.

 

Next-Generation Knowledge Workers - Accelerating the Disruption in Business Mobility

Workers are becoming more comfortable with the value of constant collaboration. Currently, 24 percent use mobile collaboration, and an additional 31 percent are interested in adopting it. Some forthcoming mobile enhancements could drive further interest in constant collaboration. These include touching mobile devices to share information (51 percent were interested); finding and connecting relevant subject-matter experts (48 percent); and wirelessly sharing a presentation via a virtual whiteboard (48 percent).

In addition, there is interest in location/recognition-based enhancements, such as GPS navigation and maps for indoor locations (53 percent); having a device provide relevant location-based information (49 percent); and having a device notify a user when an important person enters a location (48 percent).

 

Winning Companies are Learning Organizations

There are many articles and reports that make clear that the very real value of 'Learning Organizations" results from companies improving employee knowledge and skill expansion, to take on more challenges and proceed successfully through their careers. With mLearning, employees can directly apply knowledge and training to their jobs every day, quickly and effectively.

Learning Organizations are those companies that repeatedly outperform other vendors because of investments made in deep skills and knowledge for employees and leadership. Continuous investment is made in developing staff abilities and knowledge, no matter the economic conditions. As a result, these companies have a more developed level of effective innovation, and are more agile when responding to new opportunities and challenges. Not surprisingly, employee loyalty is much higher because these companies make clear that they believe in their employees and want to help them make a difference for the company.

Customers are the eventual big winners when dealing with Learning Organizations. All company employees are well prepared to take customer interactions to higher levels, as well as provide high quality products and services. Better prepared, engaged and committed employees are invaluable catalysts for propagating exceptional customer experiences.

 

 

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

Social Re-Connects Enterprise Search

                                                            Originally published in CMSWire October 23, 2012

 

Enterprise Search continues to go through transformations to improve its usefulness for all employees, since information is common currency for practically everyone in every organization. To be able to agilely collect and reconcile information across disparate repositories and formats, unified search platforms will have to combine multiple search capabilities from enterprise and internet search technologies, as well as BI search and other kinds of analytics. And for it to work well, people need to be able to make use of these layers of disparate search technologies through a single point of access.

It is critical that all employees have the ability to find and analyze information and data across the enterprise. Search is not a separate technology or program – it must integrate with business processes and corporate initiatives as vital infrastructure. Search for all employees aligns with communication, connectedness and collaboration – bringing us into Social constructs.

 

Social Search Tuning for Enterprise Search

Many attributes of Social Search can help Enterprise Search work better – but Social Search alone isn't enough to replace Enterprise Search. Too many capabilities are needed to deliver what employees need from comprehensive search inside the firewall. But Social can serve to fine-tune or filter search by leveraging additional information about the Searcher, as a valuable enhancement.

Social also aligns well with one of the key success factors for Enterprise Search: Context. Many have advocated role-based context as a particularly powerful filter for effective search results. Contextual factors are usually the over-arching driver for a particular search by a particular person. As such, search needs to engender the right user experience to return the best results.

Enterprise search can tap into employee profiles, internal networks, other work-related interactions, and systems usage to personalize search and extend context in order to return the most relevant results. Beyond the usual 'systems of record', social networks and activities provide a great deal of contextual information, especially in terms of topics. The composite of all of these attributes can indicate each person's professional purview and work focus, which can better connect that person to the right information.

Social helps Enterprise Search through:

• Social Networks – people who know stuff, connections to other people who know stuff
• Social Artifacts – opinions about information, expressed through ratings / rankings, reviews / comments, tagging

 

Social Learning

Concepts from Harold Jarche for Network Learning provide lessons for the social aspects of enterprise search, both through inter-dependent connections and collaboration, and through independent pathways via technology (tools) and the information itself:

One way to look at network learning is as a continuous process of seeking, sensing and sharing.

• Seeking is finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard—it not only allows us to "pull" information, but also have it "pushed" to us by trusted sources.
• Sensing is how we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.
• Sharing includes exchanging resources, ideas and experiences with our networks and collaborating with our colleagues.

 

Also of importance is the serendipitous or accidental acquisition of information or knowledge, very much an affect of social interactions.

 

Social Networks: Information Acquisition

Software vendor IBM Vivismo (the Velocity Information Optimization Platform) provides an interesting story from 2009 describing how the U.S. Air Force has used social capabilities to improve enterprise search. The USAF information system is called Air Force Knowledge Now (AFKN) and has been around for several years in various iterations.

Organized into thousands of "Communities of Practice", Airmen share their expertise in postings that range from F-16 tactics to procurement regulations.  AFKN was launched in 2002 and now rivals the largest corporate intranets.  Open to anyone with a .mil email address, AFKN has nearly 300,000 registered users who view 10 million pages per month.  AFKN supports about 170,000 searches a month, but Adkins expects that to double with implementation of the new features (based on Vivisimo's platform).

"We want the tags and ratings to make the system smarter as a result of hundreds of thousands of people interacting," says Adkins. "The secret to success is it has to be easy for folks to use, or they won't use it."

AFKN aims to provide quick, easy access to millions of pages of content.  Social search adds two elements that improve relevancy of results.  First, keyword tags, ratings and comments add new navigation aids to AFKN users, speeding access to results they need. Second, social search tools make it easy for users to contribute their insights and experience to AFKN.  When these insights become part of the search index, search relevancy is improved for the next user.

 

Social Networks: Relationships as Search Filters

Sociology in the workplace provides insight into the value of social networks for improving enterprise search. In environments where collaboration is encouraged and communication across the enterprise is effective, the natural way to search is to ask colleagues for ideas on how to find what's needed, to share information, to brainstorm on how to refine search results, and to figure what's missing (leading to more searches). Obviously search relative to social networks is collaborative.

The social network as a construct doesn't engender successful search activities. It's how individuals connect to and work with people in the network for finding information that make social networks useful for search. Gartner's Larry Cannell examines "the synergy between search and enterprise social network sites":

As enterprise social network sites integrate with more business applications, the similarities between enterprise social network sites and search will become evident from two perspectives. First, from the point of view of how workers will expect to interact with business application information via a social network site. Second, there are significant similarities between how business application information is aggregated into a social network site with how the same is done with search-based applications.

In addition, these integrations (business applications and social networks) offer longer-term opportunities to build the enterprise social network into a powerful knowledgebase that consolidates information across business applications; much like the role enterprise search can play today.

 

There are also obstacles to finding the right information through social networks:

As multiple business applications become integrated with a social network site, a significant challenge will be the normalization of business entities across applications. For example, aligning a customer record in a CRM system with the same customer record in a warranty claims system. Without this alignment, cross-business application relationships cannot be captured within the site's social graph and workers participating in the network will see duplicate customer profiles (one from the CRM system, the other from the warranty claims system).

 

Social networks and collaborative processes are growing in many enterprises, as effective conduits for helping employees work better and more efficiently. It's now falling to the enterprise search platform to orchestrate alignment of the knowledge held by social networks with current information repositories. Part of that integration is to incorporate search capabilities already provided by social applications into the enterprise search platform. Since social venues enable real-time collaboration, enterprise search may need to change from displaying results to becoming a sort of a command center that allows actions to take place directly from search results, such as adding a comment to a blog post.

 

Activity Streams: Topics as Filters

Activity streams are another social venue that has been gaining increased enterprise adoption. Streams can be personalized for individual need, subscribing to an array of topics that tie to work activities. These streams are more about real-time information as it is created and shared, but are rapidly becoming large information archives as real-time continuously becomes 'yesterday'. And a new challenge, and opportunity, emerges for enterprise search bolstered by analytics, since most of the information resides in multi-structured content.

While it is not meant to be an enterprise search tool, Tibco's tibbr offers activity stream collaboration driven by a topic-oriented approach that is designed to find the people who need particular information items. The focus on topics is meant to cull out irrelevant information – employees subscribe to the topics that matter to them. Topics can be information, colleagues, software systems, and business processes. The business process is of particular importance, since the tibbr approach, coupled with Tibco technology, ties information acquisition to the work being done by employees.

In activity streams, topics are context and the streams capture continuous collaborative 'conversations'. In the Forrester Wave for Activities Streams, Rob Koplowitz comments:

Social activities streams are a bridge to this enterprise social vision. They connect workers to each other and to information. On its own, the information workplace lacks a mechanism that pulls together events, along with their context, background, and required actors, in a manner that is attractive and easily consumable for knowledge workers.

 

The Evolving Workplace

There is quite a bit of research on the significant value of making the right information available to the right person at the right time – and quite a bit of research shows clearly that Enterprise Search has a direct impact on the success of organizations. So enterprise search platforms must include social capabilities to tap into powerful ways to find the information that employees need more quickly and accurately. This calls for integration into a single platform that continuously evolves as the workplace changes.

 

 

Related Links

Enterprise Search: Un-Cool and Mission Critical

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

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

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

The Ever-Expanding Importance of Analytics–True Intelligence for 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 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

 

 

Enterprise Search: Un-Cool and Mission Critical

  

Here we go again: another significant enterprise problem that isn't being solved, a problem that has been around for most of the digital era. Is it because the problem isn't cool enough to capture the attention of upper management? -- so it's seen as 'somebody' else's problem, instead of recognizing that real costs, productivity and value are being squandered because this problem isn't being solved

There are good technologies that could help with the problem now. But strategies are missing regarding how these technologies should be used. Newer technologies are coming along that will make the job easier, but there are no strategies for adopting them either.

 The problem? Enterprise Search and Findability

Obviously an enormous amount of digital items are created every day – but inexplicably there is an equally enormous vacuum for how to find the right stuff. There is a debilitating disconnect between the proliferation of electronic information and the constant need to quickly and accurately find all of the information and expertise that is essential for work every day. From top to bottom, enterprises have failed to take seriously the high cost of being grossly inadequate at finding information, data, documents, experts. Instead they have settled for low performance, low-return techniques to… sort of handle Search.

  

Surprise! Lack of Strategies

There is quite a bit of research on the significant value of making the right information available to the right person at the right time – and quite a bit of research shows clearly that enterprise search and findability have direct impact on the success of organizations:

The growth of information and data makes findability increasingly more critical in order to get the right information to the right person at the right time.

Gartner states that "by 2015 organizations integrating high-value, diverse, new information types and sources into a coherent information management infrastructure will outperform their industry peers financially by more than 20%".¹

(But) solving the problem of finding the right information is not a priority according to this survey (The Enterprise Search and Findability Report 2012):

Most organisations do not have a strategy for search, neither a budget, nor any resources.

 ¹ A Framework for Creating Value From Information Assets: The Key to Information Management Success", Gartner Symposium Nov 2011, Ted Friedman and Regina Casonato

 

But enterprise search continues to elude C-level managers as a strategic imperative for building a "culture of success" within the enterprise. The multitude of studies that have been done to show the high cost of manual processes for locating the right information seems to have made no impact on upper management when it comes to creating a strategic approach and implementing right-fit search technologies and practices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: IDC report – Information Access in Tomorrow's Enterprise - 2009

 

Undoubtedly upper management at most companies view enterprise search as an IT project, as a nice-to-have, as something so unglamorous that it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the competitive DNA of the company, let alone innovation and responsive change. Upper management is failing to lead the enterprise into the 21^st century by building strategies, engendering culture and selecting technologies to energize how information can be continuously found by everyone in the enterprise.

Here's the flaw that plague most organizations when introducing enterprise search: a search technology is established within a silo – a business unit, group or function – without a strategic plan in place, without a view to fanning out the particular search technology for the entire enterprise. Meanwhile, other business units may bring in silo'd search functions. A loosely stitched patchwork emerges. No focus, no big picture, no notion of a search platform that governs one or more approaches to search, as needed by the enterprise. Instead search is implemented as too tactical, too dependent on IT as the driving force.

For search to be strategic, the push must come from upper management with purposeful collaboration with end users (who understand the business needs). Search must be tied to real outcomes and impact on the business, to help the enterprise leverage insight to best advantage.

 

Hierarchy of strategies

Too often organizations don't understand that centralized functions that impact most of the enterprise can only succeed based on a hierarchy of strategies. There has to be than an over-arching C-Level strategy, not just a silo'd "strategy" that only benefits a small group. Strategies for Search have to include more than "information and knowledge management pros". Collaboration with all users must occur – strategy cannot be something dictated without understanding how people in the enterprise work (this parallels the failures when IT only decides on the selection of software systems – of course, with the approval of upper management).

A hierarchy of strategies means that lower level strategy has to meet the needs at the business unit or group level -- but also align with desired business outcomes. Lower levels map back into the over-arching corporate strategy that is tied to high level goals and objectives. The result is an approach to search and findability that makes sense, can be measured and is an essential platform that is greater than the sum of the parts.

As with many other strategic initiatives, those enterprises that purposefully dedicate time, money and people to supporting enterprise search find the best results and real impact on the business:

Thus addressing those deficiencies in how an organisation manages search can deliver great returns for a relatively small investment, preferably in personnel. The survey reveals that:

Amongst the organisations that are very satisfied with their search, they have a (larger) budget, more resources and systematically work with analysing search.  

Search is not a separate technology or program – it must integrate with business processes and corporate initiatives as vital infrastructure. Search for all employees aligns with communication, connectedness and collaboration

 

Quantitative and Qualitative Value Metrics

For Search technology and processes, qualitative value is as equally important as looking for quantifiable returns. Each enterprise will need to select the attributes to be measured, hard and soft, and how they will be measured. For each enterprise, the "right" metrics are the ones that measure the actions and outcomes that relate to key business context and goals. Once a matrix of metrics has been selected, it's likely that each organization will need to constantly assess that set of metrics for validity and effectiveness.  

A leading Canadian IT consulting firm, NLC, recently tackled the (metrics) question head on in their 'Building the Business Case for Enterprise Search' whitepaper last week. While maintaining that a formal analysis 'misses' the real value of Enterprise Search, the paper does go on to provide a formal approach based on the IDC report, The Hidden Costs of Information Work (May 2009).  

The proposed formula boils down to measuring:

Search Cost Today = # of knowledge workers X avg. salary (incl. benefits) X % of time spent searching

Potential Annual Benefit = Search Cost Today X The Search Lift Ratio (%)  

Once deployed, estimates around 'The Search Lift Ratio' can easily be quantified through a combination of A/B testing…'accurate' time-on-page measurements and traditional survey/feedback polls.

 

For many enterprises the qualitative value of search may be the more significant set of metrics for determining what has been gained:

With enterprise search capabilities expanding and more companies looking to how search can help their business, the question now is what the true benefits of enterprise search are. According to Glotzbach, the biggest opportunity offered by a good enterprise search tool is a phrase he calls "information velocity", which basically refers to the notion of businesses trying to move faster and more efficiently. It means different things to different businesses. For a business with a large customer support team, being able to find the right answer for a customer faster would translate to hard-dollar benefits around operational efficiency, shorter call times, etc., and then soft-dollar benefits around improved customer experience. For a technology or engineering-driven company, it means being able to quickly assemble a team's collective wisdom for improved decision-making.

Another overarching benefit of enterprise search that applies to all companies is improved collaboration. “We see search as a key component of collaboration, especially in today’s global economy,” Glotzbach says. “It’s not uncommon for even midsize companies to have offices located throughout the world. Unfortunately, with that geographic dispersion, the left hand doesn’t necessarily know what the right hand is doing.” Search can thus become the glue that helps to connect teams with all the same information, so everyone is working on the same page and sharing the same insights.

 

Qualitative benefits of enterprise search and findability can contribute a significant financial punch:

• Continuity – knowledge available after employees leave
• Productivity – working smarter, more efficiently, less "reinventing of the wheel"
• Consistency – similar practices and processes to make sure all employees benefit from optimal search guidelines for faster and more successful results
• Reducing Risk – this has big impact: ensuring that the right information is being used for all sorts of work needs, including decision-making, innovation, customer service, risk management

 

Obstacles to Finding the Right Information

In too many enterprises, people at all levels spend too much time in manual processes and poor search techniques to acquire information, usually stored in multiple repositories and in disparate formats.

Organizations encounter the same issues over and over for enterprise search:

• Trying to find all of the right information quickly
• Implementing meaning-based search: Ensuring relevance and context as essential attributes of the right information
• Requirements for tagging and taxonomy in traditional document and content management systems are unrealistic for most enterprises – these processes are hard to implement and are usually abandoned – most employees don't have the mindset, nor the time, for this type of classification
• Extensive variety of information and content types, extensive array of locations >> need for multiple search approaches – how to manage this and make it easy for most people in the enterprise

Further hampering enterprise search strategies is the employee desire for the experience to be just like using Google. But there are vast differences between Internet search and internal enterprise search – this 'conflict of interest' must be reconciled to choose the right search / findability technologies, and for how employees view search itself.

Google-type search requires knowledge of keywords for the topic in question. The searches cover web content that has been optimized to be found. Google results are ranked by popularity and somewhat by relevancy to keywords and to who you are as a searcher. Now false expectations have been created that the 'Google way' applied to the internal enterprise will yield everything that is needed.

Enterprise search is more complex and subtle. It requires multiple distinct search technologies to cover all use cases. Within the enterprise, different groups and software systems are creating digital items within silos that are frequently searched solely with proprietary technologies. Enterprise Search needs to take place across multiple disparate repositories, navigating security and permissions – where none of the content has been optimized to be found, except in instances where taxonomies have been created (which is often not done). Often the goal for enterprise search is to uncover an array of data and information that then has to be read and analyzed to determine relevancy to projects and decision making. So "popularity" of content is rarely the right attribute for determining meaningful information for enterprise tasks.

 

                 

  Source: The Future of Enterprise Search and Information Access

 

Determining the Platform Mix

It is critical that enterprise staff have the ability to find and analyze information and data across the enterprise. At this point for any enterprise, search and findability should be considered mission critical, especially with the continuous creation of digital items, now at critical mass.

A well-structured approach to determining the right search platform should include:

• Thorough analysis and understanding of all search requirements and needs, from simple to complex – aligned with enterprise groups and business activities  
• Segmentation of information, data and content types
• Segmented user roles - analyze the kind of user experience expected by different enterprise roles – impacts the kind of UI needed to improve search productivity  
• Mapping search requirements to different kinds of search capabilities and solutions: full-text, structured data, e-discovery and so on  
• Setting right expectations for employees to understand why enterprise search is different – why this is better for what employees need (not popular pages à la Google, but the right information contextual to the needs and objectives of the organization…)

Include processes to evaluate and analyze the effectiveness of different search solutions – then act on results to continuously improve, plus recommend changes for how information is stored, what business needs are not being met, and so on.

To be able to agilely collect and reconcile information across disparate repositories and formats, unified search platforms will have to combine multiple search capabilities from enterprise and internet search technologies, as well as BI search and several kinds of analytics. Analytics right now can be limited by 'artificial' filters that may lead to failures to include or even recognize the right data. A lot of enterprise information is in content / document form, but content, text and semantic analytics are still not where they should be and can be quite pricey. Parallel efforts in BI search may end up the Next Gen findability intelligence tool that enterprises need.

 

One More Processing Tool

Too often upper management fails to understand that the means to competitiveness, innovation, and agile change exists within the organization with the right processes and technologies – and enterprise search can be one such means. The right search platform can be fully available to the enterprise, if upper management understands the strategic importance of connecting everyone in the enterprise to the information that is so important to key decision-making, project work, customer support, and for moving the organization forward.

Enterprise search is more than search or findability – it is a conduit for bringing together seemingly disparate items of information and knowledge to be analyzed by one of the best tools people have – the human brain. Frequently the human brain can identify salient points in unlikely places, consider and weigh the importance or non-usefulness of all kinds of information, intuitively discerning significant patterns that may not be entirely logical but nonetheless important for arriving at insight and intelligence.

 

Related Links

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

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

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Ungoverned Spaces: Innovating Information Flow

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

 

   

About the author: Julie Hunt understands and sees 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

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

 

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

The story still is this:

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

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

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

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

 

Symptoms, Root Causes and Steps in the Right Direction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 Content Marketing: What It Takes to Execute Well

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

 

Content for the Customer-as-Buyer

 è Content Value is strictly from the Customer POV

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

 è Insights, critical thinking and expert knowledge-sharing

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

 è Diversity of content

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

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

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

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

è People, money, time

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

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

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

 

Content for the Customer Journey

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

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

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

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

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

 

  

 

 Source: Content Marketing Institute

 

  

Delivering What Customers Need

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

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

  

Related Links:

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

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

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

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

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

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

Perception: The Customer Journey and Business Success

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Source: Customer Experience Marketing for Real People 

 

Wrong Turns?

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 Adobe-Forrester study, 2010 

 

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

 

Perceptions Are Reality

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

 

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

 

 

 Source: IBM

 

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

 

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

 

 

The Customer Journey - Orchestrating Touchpoints

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

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

Forrester: Emergence of Customer Experience Management Solutions

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

More Wrong Turns

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source: Global Crossing

 

Effectiveness

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

Final Destination

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

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

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

 

 

Related Links

Symbiosis: Customer Experience and Business Process

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

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

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

  

 

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

 

 

 

Platform is in the Eye of the Beholder

 

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

  

Exploring on the Edge of Innovation

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Platforms require it.

 

 

The Age of the Platform

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

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

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

 

  

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

 

  

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

 

Related Links

A Review of “The New Small”

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

‘Big Data’, Intelligence and Multi-faceted Innovation

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

Avoiding Chaos, Losing Serendipity?

A Smarter Edgier Collective: Business Technology Professionals on Twitter 

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid

 

  

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

 

 

‘Big Data’, Intelligence and Multi-faceted Innovation

 

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

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

 

 

IBM: Enabling Multifaceted Innovation 

 

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

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

 

Business and InformationTechnology

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

Information Technology Underpins Multi-faceted Innovation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

  

Related Links:

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

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

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

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

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

Levels of Social – and Integration – Cut Across Enterprises 

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

Shallow Thinking Ensures Bad Business Decisions

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

Connecting Data Governance to Business Outcomes That Matter

Data Management: Reaching into the Cloud

 

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

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