Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Managed Services -- Building Real Customer Experiences and Relationships

 

Just like any other business, Managed Services Providers have an important path to follow, to distinctly set their services apart from other MSPs. This path pivots on the commitment to ensuring continuously improved customer and user experiences. High quality experiences for clients comprise a great differentiator in the ever-growing world of new managed services firms and cloud solution vendors. Many services can quickly become commoditized, and too often MSPs resort to "differentiating" on price, a dangerous path that can lead to failure.

As customer and user expectations rise, putting strong focus on their experiences with the MSP organization and its services is a must-have. Customer and user experiences are made up of all interactions across all channels during the entire lifecycle of the client company as an MSP customer, which introduces numerous opportunities to better engage and serve clients.

 

Experiences across the Customer Organization

There are often multiple roles in a single organization that make up the 'customers' and 'users' for technology services. This means very different experiences take place from role to role.

The customer experience frequently aligns with the buyer journey, and post-sale account management for a particular client company. The customer-as-buyer often is a composite of roles: mid-level managers who choose services and technology, VPs who approve purchases, CEOs and CFOs who influence or dictate purchase decisions, and even accounting staff who enact purchase transactions. Defining and engendering excellent experiences for a customer or buyer journey comprised of all of these roles usually requires a lot of work. But this is work that should be done for MSPs to better understand their "customers".

The user experience is much more than utilizing technology services – it's all the interactions that occur during the life cycle of services for a particular set of end users and customers. The term user journey may be the best for describing the ongoing relationship between users and MSPs and the services they provide, including customer support.

Within client organizations, communication disconnects often occur between the customer-as-buyer and end users that can jeopardize the customer relationships that MSPs need to build.

 

Customer Relationships Suffer when Communication Breaks Down

Customer Centricity has taken a look at the communication gaps that can adversely affect customer experiences. The quadrant diagram below spans both the client and MSP organizations to depict how collaboration and communication can fall apart due to disconnects between MSP roles and client roles. Enhanced awareness of these roles should help MSPs consciously improve communications and processes between their organizational roles and client roles, ultimately to ensure positive long-term relationships.

 

            Customer Centricity - Communication Disconnects

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image & explanation: Customer Centricity

 

Quadrant 1: The (customer) business manager doesn't truly understand the value that is being delivered by the MSP. They only hear reference to the MSP when there is a service problem. When it comes time to reduce expenses, they are hard pressed to justify the line item representing the cost of the MSP.

Quadrant 2: The (MSP) Sales Representative has little to no insight into how the (client) company is "truly" leveraging the product, the benefits that are being realized, the issues being experienced by those using the product and the value being delivered by the "service organization."

Quadrant 3: The customer's end-users and technical contacts play a key role in the effective use and performance of the MSP's service. They are also key in shaping the business manager's perception of the MSP. However, the only time that they discuss the MSP is when there is a problem. They don't discuss all the great things that the MSP has done on a day-in / day-out basis.

Quadrant 4: (MSP) Customer Service / Technical Support typically observe that "all things are well with the customer." This impression, which can often be false, is created because the customer's end-users maintain a courteous working relationship with the MSP's service personnel, to make sure that they can continue to "get things done" when they really need to.

Problems Impact All Quadrants: When a significant business disrupting problem occurs (which it WILL), the customer's end-user remains calm, cool and collected when speaking with the MSP's service team. The service team doesn't find it necessary to escalate awareness of the "incident" to the MSP's Sales Representative or Senior Management because they don't understand the level of impact

 

Building Real Customer Relationships

Many of the "business-as-usual" activities for MSPs are rich opportunities to enhance customer experiences and build long-term relationships. Important areas that make a difference are already in play: basics like consistently meeting or exceeding SLAs, delivering on all promises, usability and ease-of-use, high performance, and so on. This is how trust is built for real relationships.

MSPs can make sure that new client relationships are built on great customer experiences by starting with onboarding processes and/or service activation. MSPs should allocate strong resources that will make these introductory functions engaging, effective and worthwhile. Obviously when done well, a positive tone has been set for ongoing business.

While MSP ecosystems of complementary service providers are extremely beneficial, in most cases one major function should remain under the control of each individual MSP organization: help desk and customer support. Customer support interactions are critical for growing customer relationships and to expand knowledge about different kinds of customers. It's also an opportunity to thoroughly document customer environments and conversations about business needs, to help these customers better utilize all MSP services now and in the future.

The information and data gained from all interactions with customers and users become the fuel for customer-focused analytics that help MSPs learn more about current and potential customers and the sorts of services that they want and need. Such detailed customer intelligence is an invaluable competitive edge.

 

But Who Owns the Customer Experience?

As illustrated by the Customer Centricity communication quadrant, MSPs would be smart to facilitate better communication with – and within – their client companies, to make sure the value of their services is obvious to the relevant customer and user roles.

MSPs must work to improve their own internal collaborations across functions to engender continuous high quality customer and user experiences. MSPs also need to implement ongoing analytics processes to generate and share customer insights across the organization.

Within the MSP organization, the responsibility for nurturing and shepherding ongoing customer experiences belongs to all teams that impact customers. At the core, much of the work should be accomplished by strong, continuously evolving collaborations between functional teams. To keep an agile customer focus, MSPs cannot afford to allow functional silos to exist within their organizations.

In the end, only the customer can own the customer experience – but MSPs have a great deal of power to enhance all customer interactions and the quality of services provided to clients.

 

Customer Image source: hudsonvalleynewsnetwork.com

 

 

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 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

 

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

 

Competitive Fitness: Becoming Learning Organizations

       

Tech-savvy companies continue to reap serious benefits from eLearning initiatives, particularly as the variety of development and management tools and services expand, and the costs of eLearning decrease. With many more SaaS options in the mix, midsized companies can now more easily set up and manage eLearning programs.

If done well, eLearning becomes an agile productivity tool and aligns with overall business needs.eLearning is not just about on-ramping employees or compliance and regulatory training. eLearning supports what employees need to know to do their jobs, and to increase their skills and effectiveness. All sizes of organizations now have employees who "grew up" on eLearning and blended learning programs, and who have expectations of more of the same for their professional careers.

eLearning must center on device-defined learning, since there are significant differences between providing training on laptops / tablets, and on smartphones. Mobile learning (mLearning) for smartphones focuses more on just-in-time knowledge while on the job -- so the learning experience has to be specifically designed for smartphone access. Somewhat due to increased tablet and smartphone usage, corporate learning is becoming more 'bite-sized' -- to take less time to set up courses and to fit more easily into the schedules of busy employees.

Many companies realize that they should develop the skills of their current employee base, rather constantly trying to hire in new talent, to remain competitive and meet new business demands. Across most industries, learning / training functions are tasked with finding ways to provide relevant, cost-effective education services – while exploring new ways to speed up training, and build in more tactics to ensure that employees retain and utilize what was learned. Companies can also work with outsourced learning services, tapping into many different subject matter experts to provide timely training for employees, without the overhead of trying to create and maintain the courses themselves.

 

Jack Welch: An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

 

Companies that create and maintain dynamic eLearning initiatives for the entire organization are making the move to becoming Learning Organizations. Common traits of Learning Organizations include:

• Continuous learning opportunities, with 'anytime anywhere' access
• Upper management support for all employee learning
• Planned, well-organized learning programs that align with how employees work
• eLearning strategically connected to corporate goals at all levels
• Commitment to the value of learning and knowledge sharing
• Cross-organizational communication and collaboration
• Continually measuring the improvements to: all customer interactions; innovation; achievement of company goals; agile responsiveness to change

 

Peter Senge: The only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition.

 

 

Image Source: designingdigitally.com

 

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

 

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

 

Bridging the Divide Between Marketing and IT

 

 

 

For many companies, customers are now buyers, many of whom are clearly driving the buying process, no matter if the purchases are personal or business-related. As a result, the on-going customer experience with the enterprise has gained importance. Both Marketing and IT have substantial roles in customer engagement, with marketing technology growing in sophistication and variety. But in many companies IT and Marketing are not working as partners to help nurture the high quality customer interactions that are essential for successful outcomes to buying processes.

 

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

   

 

Source: http://blog.procurify.com  

 

The marketing technologist is a growing role that is helping to bridge marketing and IT, and help the enterprise become more strategic about marketing and its technologies. Scott Brinker has published an extensive and well-crafted piece on the rise of the marketing technologist, describing "technology-powered marketing" where "Marketing must take ownership of the technology in its domain". Brinker also makes the case for highly functional collaborations between IT and Marketing:

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

 

Indeed, marketing has become increasingly technology-driven, relying on marketing management platforms, analytics (multiple), various software systems for content (WCM, WEM, DAM), BPM, VMS (vertical marketing system), social media, lead gen, mobile / multichannel management. We should also throw in master data management, CRM, data/application integration processes, and various intelligence and reporting platforms. Marketing alone cannot and should not be in charge of all of these systems; conversely IT has to step up and support cross-enterprise integrations and the availability of many kinds of data to marketing functions.

 

A better approach is the enablement and empowerment of IT and Marketing working as true collaborative partners, with integrated goals and metrics. Upper management must fully support the elimination of silos, and free up IT to work on strategic initiatives. The enterprise can grow and thrive through innovating how it works in cross-functional teams with common purpose. A collaboration culture can lead to and encourage a healthy innovation culture, both of which often lead to business success and competitive agility.

 

 

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 Collaboration and the Social Business

..

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

Avoiding Chaos, Losing Serendipity?

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

Signal to Noise – Or the Noise is the Signal?

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

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

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

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

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

  

Filter and Unfiltering

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

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

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

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

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

  

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

Context for the ‘Chaos’

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

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

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

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

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

 

More from Steven Johnson:

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

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

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

 

 

Stay Curious, My Friend

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

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

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

 

 

Related Links

A Smarter Edgier Collective: Business Technology Professionals on Twitter

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid

Internal Disruption–No Longer Business As Usual

 

  

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

 

Virtual Community: The New Home of Customer Service?

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Effective Customer Service Communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Customer Experience

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

 

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

 - Extend the life of the customer

 - Develop a proactive advocate for their products and services

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

- Reduce transactional support costs by developing more educated users

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

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

 

 

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

 

Bi-Directional Value of the Virtual Community  

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

- increase in first-contact resolution

- boost in relevant Web-site content

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

 

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

 

  

Related Links

Goodbye Corporate Website – Hello Web Presence Management Framework?

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

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

In Pursuit of Customer Experience Excellence

Achieving the Social Business, Inside and Out

The Effective Intranet – Engaging the Employee as Customer

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knocking down the Silos

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

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

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

Rajan Chandras, Data Gaps Plague Process Initiatives:

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

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

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

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

From Forrester study, September 2010

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

Intelligence, People and Process

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Convergence Clarifies Benefits and Value

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Related Links

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

Goals and Metrics – Measuring Customer Engagement on the Web

I have a confession to make: I am a Hybrid

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

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