Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q4 2011 – Forrester

December 26, 2011 at 8:05 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Forrester has released, The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management Suites, Q4 2011, by Alan Weintraub with Stephen Powers and Anjali Yakkundi. It has the subtitle, EMC, IBM, OpenText, and Oracle Lead, with Microsoft Close Behind. The are doing this thorough enhanced ECM features in SharePoint. Forrester uses 66-criteria to evaluate enterprise content management (ECM) vendors. After those above came, Hyland Software, HP, Xerox, Allen Systems Group (ASG), and Alfresco.

The report notes that organizations are continuing to “grapple with an explosion of unstructured content.”1 There is also an expansion in the types of content: documents, scanned images, web content, rich media, email, corporate records, blogs, wikis, e-forms, audio, and video. They note that each content type brings its own editing and workflow requirements, and usually their own regulatory and compliance issues, making managing content increasingly complex and expensive. At the same time, information workers still want simple and easy-to-use content management tools.

This complexity means that for many organizations that cannot rely on a single platform even though that is the ideal. These organizations have are moving to a more content-centric approach with different solutions for specific types of content. Forrester now divides ECM products into four types: foundational, business, transactional, and persuasive.

The foundational ECM provides basic content management functionality including library services, basic workflow, search, and records management. The business ECM supports day-to-day workplace experience with compound document management, enterprise rights management, and team collaboration. Transactional ECM supports back-office processes with imaging, document output management, and business process management form the backbone of the transactional content technologies. Finally persuasive ECM supports content addressing external audience behavior through marketing, lead generation, and customer self-service. They note that examples of persuasive ECM include web content management, digital asset management, and document output for customer communications management. This all makes sense to me.

With this diverging field a number of role players are emerging that address specific niches. Add to this mix are open source, industry specific, and cloud solutions and the filed is becoming more complex rather than narrowing. Then there is whole issue of making content sharing and content workflow more social. The report goes into great detail on each of the vendors.

Enterprise 2.0 User Profile: What Users Say

December 20, 2011 at 3:06 am · Filed under Web 2.0

I generally review enterprise social media from a venders’ prospect. Here is a view form a set of users. Forrester has released a useful report, The Enterprise 2.0 User Profile: 2011, by TJ Keitt with Matthew Brown, Rob Koplowitz, and Heather Martyn. In their recent survey of 4,985 US information workers, they found that we’re still at a very stage in social software use in business. The employees currently using social business software are early adopters with high incomes and positive attitudes about technology. They are also mostly testing the waters at this point. This is certainly a different story than the vendors present.

Going back to 2004, I have heard many stories about what became to be known as enterprise 2.0. For example, see what Al Essa did at MIT – An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department). It was one of my awakenings to the power of social media in the enterprise. Granted he was an early adopter as the CIO at the Sloan School at MIT but the issues he faced and addressed through a blog was similar to that of many IT departments.

However, are these examples not spreading? Forrester found that currently, 28% of workers use social software at least monthly in their sample.  There workers have higher incomes, are more than likely to be optimistic about the role of technology in business. The results also indicate that 23% of enterprise social media users hold advanced degrees, and 49% are in management. They also found that their responsibilities “lengthen the workday, as social software users work, on average, 2.41 hours longer than other employees during the workweek. They also spend 1.95 more hours, on average, working outside business hours than the rest of the workforce.”

At the same time these enterprise social media users consider themselves more productive than non-users. They also “view enterprise 2.0 technologies as the most efficient means of doing certain things.” At the same time, just 22% of social software users tell us the technologies are vital to their jobs. Forrester concludes, “that despite the uptick in interest in and deployment of enterprise 2.0 tools, they remain on the periphery of an information worker’s workflow.” I have written about this before – see Putting Social Media to Work.. These results show that enterprise social media needs to ne further integrated into the workflow to be relevant and effective. It is not about Facebook for the enterprise but making business processes more social and collaborative.

TIBCO Spotfire Brings Self-Service Data Analysis to the Enterprise with a Social Twist

December 15, 2011 at 3:44 am · Filed under Web 2.0

TIBCO Spotfire puts data analytics capabilities directly into the hands of the average business by bringing data discovery to a broader audience. I recently spoke with Lou Bajuk-Yorgan about their Spotfire 4.0 release. Spotfire has provided a self-service data analysis tool for several years to enable business users to apply their own domain expertise that is not filtered through analytic tool experts. This enables them to more easily discover the unexpected. They now have direct control over the tool and the ability to decide what is relevant to them and explore areas of interest.

Now Spotfire 4.0 provides a greater ability to put structured data in context, offers increased social collaboration capabilities, and has enhanced data visualization features.  Lou mentioned that most of their users do not spend hours hunched over the analytics. Rather they are busy business people who want to be able to quickly get an overview of what is happening and then drill down to explore the anomalies. They have designed their dashboard accordingly. The interface designs and visualizations allow users to quickly see all relevant information in a single screen. Below is a sample dashboard.

The new visualization capabilities improve the user experience by allowing analysts to tailor interactive dashboards that replace dozens of static dashboards.  These smarter flexible dashboards allow users to determine what they feel is important and drill down as needed without leaving the page. The dashboards can be easily created without programming or IT support. Lou showed me how you can change the focus of data visualizations to look through different filters such as time or location. You can also change the data formats used to get a different perspective.  These drill down capabilities are available out-of-the-box and can be selected from drop down menus or right clicking on a visualization.

I have written elsewhere about the need to put tools within the context of work. This is what TIBCO has done with the integration of Spotfire 4.0 with SharePoint and tibbr, TIBCO’s own collaboration platform.  Below you can see Spotfire operating within SharePoint. Part of their new interface design was to make it look more compatible with SharePoint.

With Spotfire 4.0 users can also:

• Embed Web pages, such as wikis, within a Spotfire analysis to provide access to online information that relates to the analysis.
• Much more easily link to Spotfire analyses from other websites or blogs.

• Embed live, threaded discussions from social media, such as tibbr, within a Spotfire analysis, to provide contextual discussions relevant to the decision.

Below is a sample screen showing a tibbr activity stream connected to a Spotfire dashboard.

Spotfire 4.0 provides new social capabilities to allow collaboration around data analytics such as the tibbr connection shown above. Lou said they are enabling the tool to facilitate global discussions with both synchronous and asynchronous capabilities. With Spotfire 4.0 users can:

• Actively “follow” an analysis subject or author and spontaneously create a new discussion “workspace” around an insight or decision and invite others to join.

• Embed a discussion thread into an analysis, so users see the discussion that prompted the analysis directly within Spotfire. They can also save an analysis to a discussion thread where others can see and discuss it.  Discussion participants can simply click to open the analysis within a Web browser.

• Access the discussion around an analysis and be alerted to changes through each member’s preferred channel of choice including Web, text, or mobile (including iPhone, iPad, Android™ platform, and BlackBerry® devices).

• Initiate video conferencing or desktop sharing via a single click to initiate a live “Spotfire Meeting.”  Automatically record and repost discussions and presentations with accompanying analysis and resulting decisions.

I really like what they are doing by bringing data analytics directly to the business decision makers in an intuitive manner that allows for collaboration around the business decisions that are impacted by what the data provides. Taking out the middleman transforms the tool into a meaningful discovery vehicle. People are better than computers about deciding where to look next. Content experts are also better than tool experts about this same decision. Here is a tool that fits the needs of its audience.

Social Media Club of Boston: Evolution of Social Business Panel

December 12, 2011 at 3:31 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Last month I attended the Social Media Club of Boston 5^th Anniversary Celebration: The Evolution of Social Business. It featured a panel with Alistar Rennie, General Manager, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, IBM; Andy Carusone from Lowe’s Home Improvement; and Ric Fulop, North Bridge Venture Partners.

Alistar talked about how IBM got involved with social media. In 2004 they were working to become more integrated on a global basis.  They built some collaborative tools for their own use that become products for clients.  But it much more that tools. They used social tools to help define their values to better establish trust.

At the same time they found that their clients were experiencing the same issues.  Over the past several years the conversations have gone from tools to how to better organize the business. The discussion now is how to leverage the network of people. He mentioned CEMEX that wanted to integrate their people on a global basis. CEMEX wanted to reduce product introduction time by 50%. In a former life, I did some work for them in Mexico. They sell concrete and make a lot of money doing it through better use of technology. He said we will see a change in how organizations are structured. Command and control will be gone. The issue is now how to drive faster decision-making and innovation

Andy focused inside the firewall. He discussed what Lowe’s is doing for employee connections. Two years ago he got put into the social media effort. The history of Lowe’s is making home improvement simpler. This goal has guided all their efforts. Home improvement changed in the 80s to the big box store from small stores. Now people do not want to just experience home improvement at a store. They want to experience it at their homes on the Web. To make the home improvement experience simple when it is actually complex, Lowe’s needed to connect their enterprise.

The conversations on social media are now not about tools but performance. They needed to inspire their workforce to move their work out loud. They needed to create light-weight workflows. With social media, solutions are going viral. Instead of asking their supervisor, employees are asking the enterprise through social media.

Ric Fulop said he has been starting companies since he was 16. Now he is an investor after doing nine startups. His firm has funded over 100 companies. They are now focused on very early stage companies. They funded Acquia and helped it get started (see Acquia Provides Drupal Commons to Support Open Source Enterprise Collaboration.  He talked about three trends after looking at over 1,000 business plans every year: consumerization of the enterprise, conversational Web, and next generation optimization. Consumerization of the enterprise will mean information about companies will become more local and granular with more user-generated content.  The conversational Web means that if you put up information, there are many comments. Now there is much more attention to the comments. Next generation optimization means that you can bypass IT to upgrade or change things.

The questions started:

Lowe’s uses IBM Connections inside the firewall for their over 250,000 employees. They have over 6,000 communities.  Their CEO is the fourth largest blogger in the community. This is part of his strategy to better connect with employees.  Now you can go beyond awareness to commitment because of the better engagement.

Andy said that social media did not change their culture. It exposed it and this is what they needed. They needed to move away from control.  Hearing the complaints is even more helpful that the complements because then you can address them.  Some companies are not ready for this. The CEO recognizes this.

I asked Ric about startups that are looking at the Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Employee – monitoring what people are saying within the enterprise. Ric mentioned firms like Get Satisfaction for customer feedback, Shopify for social commerce, Otimizly, and other tools.  These were all Web focused tools.

Andy mentioned that they are listening to the voice of the employee. Their stores are quite different by location. In the past messages were delivered by top down. Now you needed to have networked conversations about initiative. They need dialogue, not feedback. Feedback is not interactive.  The do not use monitoring tools but they have tens of thousands of employees o monitoring what is being said and responding to it.

Someone asked about who is commenting on the Web. He does not do it. Ric said Google now indexes comments. There is very valuable information there. The tool, Discuss, said they have close to 50 million comments within 500 million readers. In Engadget some articles have over 5,000 comments to a short article.  Contenly helps companies generate content that generate comments. The commenters are the people who care about the product.

A question: How do you accommodate different cultures in social media?  Alistair said they are seeing more common behavior rather than differences and they have been studying this a lot. One issue to work through is getting language translation in place so people can speak in their natural language. They wil be more engaged this way. Ric mentioned Hyperlocal and Local Response that deal with these issues for companies. Local Response can tell you what everyone in Twitter said about your company.

To a question about IT, Andy said the Lowe’s IT group is one of the most progressive uses of social media. Alistair said some of the best companies are looking at how to take the information gained through social media and making actual changes.

Andy said the social media behind the firewall is not an application that people should be required to use such as a payroll system. You need an culture of opt in. He added that you cannot measure value of social media by counting stuff. ROI is not the issue. Make sure you are measuring the right thing. It is change in performance. Measure outcomes. They needed a difference type of performance at Lowe’s and social media enabled it. Companies who are successful will not look at social media as an IT project, but a business project. You will not get 100% engagement but they do have 90% participation at Lowe’s.

This was an entertaining and useful session.

Wrike Brings Collaboration to Project Management

December 6, 2011 at 3:12 am · Filed under Web 2.0

Wrike provides online project management. I have written about them before (see Wrike Adds New Features for Online Project Management). I recently spoke again with CEO Andrew Filev.  They are now positioning themselves as the project collaboration platform, bridging project management and collaboration. They also provide tools to manage project tasks in real-time. I think this is a smart move.

They offer an integrated solution that connects to other data sources such as email, Google apps, Outlook, and Jive. The goal is to provide one entry point and allow people to avoid having to deal with multiple siloed apps.  All of the data is organized by a common taxonomy that is created by the user using the well-known hierarchical folder format, just as you might organize your email. Then you can filter it by different facets within this taxonomy. Below is a sample Wrike workspace.

You can also view your work in different formats such as: tasks lists, activity streams, spreadsheets time lines interactive Gantt charts and prioritized backlogs. This data can come from many different sources. Andrew showed this to me and I think it is very useful. Below is a sample Gantt chart visualizing project plan.

Here is a sample cross-project activity stream with work updates and task discussions.

You can scale across large amounts of data and then focus on what is relevant. The higher you are in the organizational hierarchy, the large data sets you have access to but they are still organized through your own folder sets. So you see what is happening within your sphere of responsibility in real-time no matter how large it is.

Working with tasks in Wrike, you can easily drag and drop files into them from your desktop. Once tasks are in Wrike you can follow and unfollow them.

Wrike also offers extensive mobile support. Below are some sample mobile interfaces;

Wrike has both a free version and premium paid version. The free version includes real-time activity streams, advanced scheduling features and more, with an unlimited number of projects in one workspace and the ability to add an unlimited number of collaborators to the account. The premium version adds such features as interactive Gantt charts, a built-in time tracker and reports. They are now offering the free version in the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google’s online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services. Wrike integrates with Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar.  Below you can see Wrike’s presence in the Google Apps Marketplace.

Wrike wants to become the platform to connect all project related information. They want to be the single entry source to many tools and this has made integration one of the top priorities in their product strategy. I think this is a wise move. As I have written several times (for example see Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions) integration is key to success within enterprise 2.0.

Acquia Ads New Components to the Acquia Network for Drupal Users

December 1, 2011 at 3:52 am · Filed under Web 2.0

I have covered Acquia several times on this blog (for example, see Acquia Provides Drupal Commons to Support Open Source Enterprise Collaboration and Acquia Grows with Drupal and Introduces Drupal Gardens). It provides support, services, and enhancements to make your Drupal experience more productive. Recently, I spoke with Bryan House, VP of Marketing, about their latest moves. They include enhanced vision and proactive management of site configuration issues; self-guided training for Drupal concepts and best practices; site testing under a variety of traffic load conditions; and an internet marketing report specific to Drupal. These are all delivered through Acquia Network, a set of cloud services for Drupal developers and site managers.

We began with Acquia Insight. It provides Drupal site owners with a dynamic, real-time, at-a-glance view into their sites. It provides metrics for a wide variety of site elements to ensure they are up-to-date, secure, and performing well. Insight offers: identification and troubleshoots site problems in real time; audits of modules for code changes, and offers fixes; and recommendations for courses of action to address problems and resolve issues. It also instills Drupal best practices to reduce mistakes and eliminate errors.

Bryan showed me how it works. For example you can see an Insight rating of a Drupal site in the screen shot below. There are both issues that need fixes and suggestions on how to fix them, as well as resolved issues.

You also get popup alerts with suggestions for actions to resolve the issue. See screen shot below.

A dashboard can show you such metrics as your Insight score over time and scores on other issues such as the SEO Grader we will discuss next.

The SEO Grader was built with their business partner, Volacci. It provides an internet marketing review optimized for Drupal. SEO Grader capabilities include: confirmation of redirects and SEO-friendly URLs; analysis of page structure on such issues as “crawlability,” “findability,” and user experience, and best practices for SEO specific Drupal modules. You can see an SEO grader screen below with scores on five issues mentioned above. Iike Insight, the SEO Grader both indentifies problems and offers resolutions.

The Acquia Network also offers a number of third party tools in an aggregated basis. One is Blitz, powered by Mu Dynamics, a self-service load and performance-testing platform that enables developers to deploy high-performance websites with confidence. See my review of Blitiz – Mu Dynamics Brings Performance Testing to the Cloud and Mobile. Other tools include: Mollom spam blocking, New Relic performance optimization, Mobify mobile interface design suite, and Visual Website Optimizer A/B testing tool.

Acquia has also partnered with Drupalize.Me to offer their an extensive library of tutorial videos that speed the acquisition of Drupal skills. Drupalize.Me includes over 335 videos, totaling 149 hours of Drupal & jQuery training. In addition, Acquia is announcing the availability of the Acquia Apps Market in Q4, 2011, utilizing the Acquia Network API. The Acquia Apps Market allows software vendors and developers to offer their services and applications to the Drupal websites served by the Acquia Network.

This is quite a comprehensive array of services that addresses the needs of developers, site administrators, and business functions leaders. It nicely complements their other offerings in Drupal support and their Aquica library.