Archive for August, 2011
by Bill Ives
August 26, 2011 at 3:09 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
I received a review copy of the new The Forrester Wave™: Mobile Collaboration, Q3 2011 by Ted Schadler for Content & Collaboration Professionals. In this research, Forrester evaluated the mobility strengths and weaknesses of 13 vendors in four collaboration categories – document-based collaboration, webconferencing, videoconferencing, and activity streams. Forrester limited the vendors to those with native apps on more than one mobile operating system with a cloud solution and market experience, which means vendors such as Apple, Microsoft, and RIM were not included.
Forrester identified:
Box, IBM, and Yammer as leaders in current offering, determined by how many smartphone and tablet platforms the product runs on and by scores for security, administration, and user reviews.
These criteria include: smartphone and tablet platforms as well as the desktop and browser support. Additional criteria were security and administration features. They also relied on a neutral data source — Apple App Store reviews — to evaluate the user experience and popularity of the offerings. Good choice.
Skype, Box, Yammer, and Cisco as leaders in mobile strategy, determined largely by the vendor’s strategy for cloud reach and the mobile app architecture (the balance between native apps and cloud services) as well as by the number of years with a mobile solution and the organizational commitment. This category included questions such as: “Does the company have a mobile app Internet architecture with the right balance between cloud services and local apps? Does the mobile development team report to a senior executive? How long has the company had a mobile solution?”
Skype, Cisco, and Google as leaders in mobile market presence scores, determined by the number of paying mobile customers, paying users, and downloads.
They evaluated only the mobile characteristics, not the collaboration category features. The main features were: funding status, enterprise readiness, platform support, and cloud reach. Forrester noted that email has been a “killer” mobile collaboration app since 1998 when RIM first launched BlackBerry. This remains the case as 87% percent of smartphone workers use email on their devices, and collectively they do 32% of their email on a smartphone. There is much more in the report on this fats growing market and I recommend it.
by Bill Ives
August 22, 2011 at 3:06 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
I was pleased to receive a review copy of We First: How Brands & Consumers Use Social Media to Build a Better World by Simon Mainwaring. It covers the rise in consumer power brought on by social media and how brands can best respond. He goes on the add that this rise in consumer power can be good for society and not simply the brands who recognize and act on it in the appropriate ways. The book goes beyond the topic of social media marketing to provide a new look at capitalism. While Simon is supportive of free markets, he wants to make them better with more direct consumer participation.
Simon uses the book title, We First, to discuss a new twist on capitalism – We First Capitalism rather than the Me First. He states that looking for the greater good will actually help the individual. It makes sense because healthy markets and consumers with jobs are necessary to buy the goods and services that create corporate profits and drive more jobs.
The Internet began the rise of consumer power and now smart phones and other mobile devices are accelerating it. He argues that there is a growing interest in doing business with socially responsible corporations and that now consumers have more power to push firms in this direction. I hope he is right on both counts.
Simon argues that the social technology is enabling us to be more human as we can establish greater connections to discover shared concerns. The values of We First capitalism are; sustainability, fairness of reward, fiscal responsibility, accountability, purposefulness, dialogue, and global citizenship. Sounds good to me.
He goes on to argue that a better world and market will occur when consumers and brands work together, A number of companies have recognized this and created online communities for consumer feedback, both private and public. There is also a rise in crowd sourcing. Simon writes that consumers are now in a better position through social media to help co-create a better world that more closely reflects their interests.
I recently saw a study by Communispace, a company that builds and maintains online consumer communities for brands. It founds that the vast majority of respondent sat all levels of technology adoption saw technology as a positive force in their lives (84%) with the more advance adopters (tech fast forward) slightly ahead (87%) on this measure. In a related question: Will technology make of break us? All segments respond make 72% of the time and 85% of the fast forward said make. When asked if technology better connect or creates more distance, 72% of all segments said better connect and 80% of the tech fast forward sided with this view. This is an overall quite positive view and one that I share. The tech fast forward group is also more optimistic about the future. Let’s hope that they and Simon are right. We First contains a useful premise that can serve as a good grounding for social media efforts by both consumers and brands.
by Bill Ives
August 18, 2011 at 3:31 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Over 15 million iPads have been sold. I have seen many in action and my wife now has one. Perhaps I will get inspired also. This is not all. Competitive products from Google and others are out or on the horizon. People want to replace bulky binders with sleek tablets. That is my wife’s goal. Even more replace carrying laptops to events such as my friends Thierry Hubert and Luis Suarez. Tablets’ portability, convenience, connectedness and application portfolio make them very attractive. Now they are being used beyond the office in fields including construction, manufacturing, and retail as they offer more than smart phones in many ways.
This raises a new support requirement for enterprise IT departments, as well as business units. An enterprise tablet strategy is in order and that is the task addressed by Forrester’s Ted Schadler with his report, Tablets in the Enterprise in 2011. In most cases, tablets.serve as a third device for most employees who still need the productivity tools of a computer. In 2011, IT must work with other business units to determine what employees will use tablets for tasks and what they can do to help workers get the most from the investment in these devices.
The reports mentions that at the beginning of 2010, 56% of North American and European enterprises already supported personal mobile devices, and this will likely hold for tablets over the next three years. Many of the tablets are purchased by employees but for them to be aligned to work tasks, IT must plan on how best to set up work data and applications.
One issue is adapting thousands of business applications to run well on tablets and smart phones. Ted notes that desktop virtualization may be the answer. By running client applications on a server or an employee’s PC, you can make them available safely through a virtual desktop. He adds that tablets may be the killer motivator to embrace desktop virtualization.
There is more in the report that addresses an emerging issue of importance.
by Bill Ives
August 15, 2011 at 3:58 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Recently I looked at a useful new book, The Social Marketing Funnel: Driving Business Value with Social Marketing. It is sponsored by Awareness and available as a free download. The book begins with some interesting stats. Inc. reported in a 2009 study that 91% of Inc. 500 companies use social media as part of their marketing mix1. A second study found that 72% of marketers reported closing more business as a result of social media efforts and 52% reported lead generation benefits with social media.
At the same time, they note that, “measuring and tying social media efforts to true benefits and ROI continues to elude many marketers…Most marketers struggle to identify, capture, and leverage the myriad social conversations related to their brands.” The sets up the purpose of the book: to “help CMOs and social media strategists think about organizing and optimizing social marketing in the context of building a Social Funnel” and provide the steps and best practices to get the most value from social media investments. They define a Social Funnel as “a dynamic collection of consumer activity across social media channels, which sits on top of the traditional marketing and sales funnel.” To provide context to this effort, Awareness looked at close of 100 businesses of all sizes from multiple industries (some managed by the brands themselves and some by agencies). They also talked with some industry experts.
To create your Social Funnel you need to first identify and capture consumer conversation across a variety of social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Then you need a CRM tool that handles social media (aka SCRM) to aggregate the data and mine it for insights. This effort needs to be integrates with your traditional marketing and sales efforts and your CRM tool. This makes a lot of sense but the book notes that only 6% of companies report doing this integration. The report predicts a growth in this integration and I would agree.
They offer five steps to building and managing your social funnel. You first manage and grow your social reach. This is defined as “the total number of social profiles a brand has collected across all social media platforms with brand presence.” Then you monitor the relevant social conversations and manage your social content as a result of this monitoring. You also practice good SEO as part of this management and measure and analyze the relevant social activity around your brand. There are useful tips for each step.
In a related 2010 study Awareness asked over 300 companies about what they did with their social media monitoring. The results: 78% – Identify and respond to customer service issues, 64% – Identify individuals looking for my product or service, 38% – Identify individuals who influence sales of my product/service, and 17% – Identify behaviors associated with people who are likely to buy our product or service. However, this was mostly informal as only 18% had a formal tracking process. Cleary there is a need for more effort here.
There is much more in the book as I have just skimmed over the headlines and I recommend it to anyone interesting in making their social media marketing more effective. They conclude: “Remember, your Social Funnel is a strategic business investment – treat it with the same rigor, dedication, and governance you treat your other strategic investments.” This is good advice for any initiative and one that is most often ignored when the effort is around a hot new topic such as social media.
by Bill Ives
August 8, 2011 at 5:10 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Interact transformed from a development firm to a software provider as they learned the needs of their clients. I recently spoke with Nigel Danson about the evolution of their firm and their comprehensive software offering. They started in 1999 in the UK. In 2002 they developed an intranet for the UK operations of Pfizer. During this effort they saw the effectiveness of de-centralizing the management of content to have it more closely align with the specific needs of individual business units. They also saw the need for ease of use by business users. These two principles became important components of the software offering they developed.
The people who are closest to the business are the ones who can provide the most useful and most accurate content. Business users also want to reduce the involvement of IT. Interact targeted firms in the 500 to 5,000 employee range. These firms are large enough to need a comprehensive platform for content and collaboration. At the same time they are not so large as to look for multiple solutions and will benefit from a single integrated platform. This makes sense to me. They started in the UK but have now expanded globally and have a sales office in the US. There are over 500,000 users with average customer having 1,500 employees.
Part of the ease of use lies in both ease of content access but also developing a way for the right content to proactively find the right people. One means for this is the feature, Interact Recommends. When you add a new document it adds additional metadata to support this purpose. It also looks for related content and recommends it to you. Related people are also uncovered and recommended. I like this feature. It can lead to a lot of useful unexpected discovery.
Another support for ease of use is the intuitive interface. You can see a sample home page screen below. There is a range of functionality that can be configured by the user and the administrator without any IT knowledge or skill. Features are added through widgets.
The tag cloud in the screen above is generated in several ways that can be configured. For example, you can display the most popular documents. You can see what has been searched for in the last three months. You can limit it to a specific topic or area. I like this customization capability.
There are also blogs and micro-blogs. The micro-blog entries can be auto-generated by user actions, as well as manually by user input. Another useful tool is @tagging of content – allowing the user to easily link to intranet content including documents, events and people. There is a robust search feature that allows for filtering by a number of parameters. You can see a sample search screen below. Filters include: documents, people, forums, calendars posts and questions. You can ask Interact questions and it takes the question to people who mostly likely have the answers. You can then tag the answer you like the best and it gets elevated in the search results. The search function can also be configured by such aspects as: ratings from users and how often the item was searched for.
You can also create forms such as PO requests and attach workflow to them. One of the features I especially liked was the statistics. You can see a sample screen below. Since an intranet is more about the people, that is the focus of the analytics. Like many other aspects of Interact, you can configure the analytics. You can also get user feedback in order to make changes to better meet user needs. There is even a Find the Treasure tab that is used for system training purposes. You can create a pirate and then require people to go to certain places to look for him. They also have an open API and mobile support.
Interact is sponsoring an intranet event in London in October. It looks interesting with well-known speakers I have heard such as James Robertson. I really like what they have accomplished. It seems to be a very useful system for the mid-size market and I can see why Interact has achieved significant customer growth.
by Bill Ives
August 3, 2011 at 3:21 am · Filed under
Web 2.0
Big data is a hot topic. While the volume and variety within big data are a significant issues, Gartner, among others, notes that the real issue is making sense of big data and finding patterns in it that help organizations make better business decisions. I could not agree more and this is where BI tools come into play. Gartner also predicts that the global market for BI software will grow by 9.7% in 2011. The worldwide market will reach $10.8 billion by the end of the year, with further growth expected all the way through until 2014.
One of the issues I have with many BI tools is that you have to set up what you are looking for before you start and thus miss the opportunity to find relationships beyond the anticipated. Endeca is tackling this issue in several ways. First, it allows for a greater dialog between business analysts and IT as BI applications are set up so that a more iterative process can occur and unanticipated questions can emerge through this dialog. Second, the actual applications can supply suggestions to the user through unanticipated facets to further explore their topics of interest. I recently spoke with Endeca’s Chief Strategist, Paul Sonderegger, to understand what they are offering and will cover these issues and others in more detail here.
Endeca offers two main product lines, Endeca InFront™ for customer experience management and Endeca Latitude®, for enterprise BI use. Both are built on their MDEX Engine® technology, a patented hybrid search analytical database. InFront allows for more sophisticated customer explorations in Web sites. For example, if you are looking for a faucet at the Home Depot site, it will ask you key questions about what type you need going beyond your input. This can save you a lot of frustration when you later go to install the facet and reduce the number of returns that Home Depot has to contend with. The same technology powers Latitude and we spent most of our time discussing this enterprise BI platform.
Paul said that they refer to Latitude as agile BI using the traditional sense of the word. Although, as he describes the Latitude development process, it also seems to be in the spirit of agile software development. It enables rapid iterations and better collaboration between IT and the business user. Paul gave an example from a Fortune 100 aerospace manufacturer. They created an application that provides answers for aircraft technicians. The application pulls together content from a vast diversity of sources to answer questions that cannot be anticipated in advance.
This application was developed in eight weeks with business and IT working closely together. The process trigged many new ideas from the business side as they saw possibilities unfold. They estimated that the application ended up about 90% different from the original vision.
Endeca operates in three steps. First diverse data is brought together. Then it is made available to people with business expertise and not simply the technical experts. Finally, the tool is made to adapt to a constantly changing set of requirements. You can create comprehensive data visualizations such as the one shown below.
Latitude is based on a three-tier architecture as show below. The foundation for data retrieval is provided through the Latitude Information Integration Suite. It can make use of many third party tools to connect with both structured and unstructured data. The middle layer is the MDEX Engine. It is a patented hybrid search analytical database that can let the incoming data drive the identification of facets. This allows for the avoidance of pre-determined data fields as I mentioned up front. The top layer is the Latitude Studio that allows for drag and drop application creation.
Paul talked about how their client, Toyota Motor Sales (MTS), USA, was able to use Latitude to better respond to their crisis over the massive product recall. They could find where the pedal assemblies were installed, a data point they had not known in advance needed tracking, and tie together such critical data sources such as customer claims and government agency reports. They were better able to answer the many customer questions that continued to arise as the situation unfolded.
Paul said Endeca operates on three principles. First no data is left behind. Second guidance is offered to the user in turning data into decisions. Third, the agile development that brings IT and the business users closer.
Paul gave me an example of how the data-generated facets can provide useful guidance to the business user. A home goods manufacturer had been purchasing about 130,000 kinds of commodities for $8 billion a year. They felt they were buying too many different kinds of items as the engineers, and not purchasing, control the ordering process. So they added a new facet, preferred suppliers where they got better deals. The engineers were still in charge but now they were armed with ways to both save money and consolidate suppliers. The company saved $300 million in direct costs the first year and decreased suppliers by 30%. This allowed for more concentrated purchasing and the ability to negotiate better deals.
This makes a lot of sense to me and it is useful to see the tangible benefits from allowing for the unanticipated in business intelligence. Gartner also likes them and Toyota’s use of Endeca Latitude made the automaker a semifinalist in Gartner’s BI Excellence Awards.
Thought...
