Portals and KM

Newsgator Integrates Social Software into Core Work Process

I have written about NewsGator on a number of occasions (see for example: NewsGator Enhances its Social Sites 2010 Platform for SharePoint). I recently spoke with their new CEO, Daniel Kraft, as well as Stefanie Lightman who runs marketing and corporate strategy. NewsGator is a long time Microsoft partner for enterprise social on SharePoint with millions of active users of its Social Sites offering. Now it is moving beyond SharePoint to reach other work processes. To set the foundation for this new strategy they interviewed hundreds of customers and dozens of senior execs.

When asked how can NewsGator make social more useful, they were told to integrate it into work processes. This was already happening for some work with their SharePoint integration. SharePoint is not really social software but a system of record, in this case, documents. NewsGator provides a system of engagement to go with this system of record and make it really social.

Now they are expanding beyond SharePoint to other systems of record that tie in with an expanded sets of business process. NewsGator is preparing to create an even more robust social platform that taps the entire Microsoft ecosystem, as well as other enterprise-spanning applications. So they are now connected with such systems as: CRM, ERP, and HR through such products as SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and MS Dynamics.  This is a wise move and one I have written about before (see for example: Putting Social Media to Work and Giving Social Media a Good Job). Here is a sample Social Sites interface.

Daniel mentioned that transactions systems such as SAP work fine as long as the answer to a process action is: yes or no. It is the exception handling that can bring productivity to its knees. This is where social can provide a huge productivity boast. If you take an exception into the social space, collaboration can be more efficient. More importantly, you have a record of the issue and the solution. This can be both reused to reduce the pain next time. More Importantly, it also serves as a diagnostic for where changes need to be made in work processes or peak demands anticipated. Below you can see a sample workflow request.

 

Social Sites can work with the enterprise apps in two ways. First, you can bring a transaction into Social Sites and work in this environment. You can also have a Social Sites activity stream appear as a notification bar within an enterprise app such as SAP.

Social Sites also works to support the individual worker who faces the huge increase in incoming content. They offer intelligent filters to help determine what is really important.  People have different personas depending on which projects they are working on or even the where they are in a business quarter. For example, as Daniel mentioned, a sales person will be taking a board view of the market for potential prospects at the beginning of the quarter and then zero in on a few highly qualified prospects as the quarter comes to a close. Here is a sample sale enablement screen.

NewsGator has also greatly expanded their mobile offerings to bring in all the social capabilities. Now an employee can do all their processing on their smart phone or tablet and not even have to deal with a traditional computer. See below for a sample mobile screen shot.

Getting employees to make productive use of the social capabilities requires more than installing software. The real benefits come when it impacts work processes. This requires changes in the way work is done. NewsGator also worked with their customers to create an adoption framework that they offer on an Open Source basis. It covers people engagement, business alignment and technology enablement.  

These are all great moves and I can certainly see why Social Sites is meeting new success. McKinsey has predicted huge productivity boosts from the connected enterprise. Social Sites is certainly a way to realize these projected gains.

 

Social Business Has More Work to Gain Real Satisfaction

Prescient Digital Media has released its latest useful report, Social Intranet Study. They interviewed participants in 651 organizations. Social media is becoming widely adopted as they found that most organizations (71%) have at least one social media tool available to some or all employees. The most popular social media tools are instant messaging, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and user commenting. Here is my post on their excellent 2011 study.

However, the average respondent organization gives their internal social media efforts a failing grade.  This can be a result of insufficient investments in both tools and adoption efforts. Prescient Digital Media found that failing grades show a direct correlation to investment where the average company spends about $10,000 or less on their internal social media (intranet 2.0).

To be specific, the five most popular social media tools are instant messaging, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and user commenting:

• 76% of organizations have instant messaging.
• 75% of organizations have blogs.
• 70% of organizations have discussion forums.
• 67% of organizations have wikis.
• 67% of organizations have user commenting.

The investments have been very modest. Most organizations spend little or nothing on their enterprise social media tools. This may explain the lack of satisfaction. Many organizations that implement social media tools spend less than US$10,000:

• 47% have spent less than US$10,000.
• 30% have spent between US$10,000 and US$99,999.
• 23% have spent US$100,000 or more.

Prescient Digital Media found that executives and employees alike are less than thrilled with their enterprise social media. To be specific:

• The average rating of internal social media by their host organization is 4.5 out of 10
• Only 22% of organizations rate employees' satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good.
• Only 17% of organizations rate executives' satisfaction with Intranet 2.0 tools as good or very good.

I do not see this as an failing of social business but a failure in how it has been used in most organizations. As I have written many times, for social business to succeed it need to be integrated into work processes (see for example: Putting Social Media to Work and Giving Social Media a Good Job. That is not going to happen on these limited budgets.

 

Governments are Leading Many IT Innovations

This week I am back to covering emerging technologies and their practical uses. I have been seeing some innovative social business efforts from government for some time so this post, Governments Are Out Front in IT Innovation, was not a surprise. It mentions President Obama’s campaign to see innovation in IT, ranging from its use of big data to open source technologies. On his first day in office, the President also pledged to make the federal government a model for open data. It will take time but there is progress. The use of big data by his re-election campaign to target get out the vote efforts  remains a model for this space.

Innovation is also happening at the city level. New York has its own chief digital officer.  The article writes, “cities and states are not only making use of open source tools, they’re also walking the open source walk by participating in open source communities and contributing their work back to open source repositories such as GitHub.”

It goes on to add that, “in addition to releasing data that citizens can use, governments are increasingly making themselves more available electronically to help them fight crime, by predicting where crime is likely to occur.” I have seen the IBM ads on this type of effort. It makes a lot of sense. Below is an excerpt from a post I wrote after attending Lotusphere 2011. I t shows another innovative effort by government.

Tracy Hackshaw, is the Chief Solution Architect for iGov for the government of Trinidad and Tobago. Tracy discussed how the government is using social business for more effective e-government efforts. There are 1.3 million people in Trinidad and Tobago. A main goal is to increase the engagement of these people with their government and have them more satisfied with what the government is doing. They often look for what the people want and more interaction was a request.  Another was the simplification of information, which became another goal.

Within the country there is a high percentage of access to mobile phones so this was one channel they focused on. They wanted the user experience to be similar to what was offered on computers. One popular example was maps with the location of government offices and transit information on to reach them. Another was the reporting of such things as broken street lights or potholes in the roads. They have reduced the time that these issues are reported.

The different government agencies were each providing their own siloed source of information. So they consolidated this to offer a single, consistent point of access.  Different agencies could collectively created content that they shared with the residents. They also built in more interactivity to get greater feedback. They wanted the government to be more accessible so they created interactive town hall sessions.  They have achieved a 90% satisfaction rating from the residents and this is remarkable for government services. As you will see, each of these cases in their own way demonstrates the value of social business but, of course, I was already convinced. It is nice to see these tangible examples. 

Moxie Software and Microsoft Partner to Enhance Customer Service Capabilities

In November, Moxie and Microsoft announced a partnership to pursue a joint go-to-market strategy to offer Spaces by Moxie within MSFT Dynamics CRM. (See – Moxie Integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM).  In March, Moxie announced full integration with MSFT Lync to further strengthen their contact center capabilities. I recently spoke with Tara Sporer, VP of Marketing at Moxie software and Nikhil Govindaraj, VP of Products, to discuss the significance of these moves.

As part of the partnership, Moxie Software will provide Microsoft Dynamics CRM with comprehensive, multi-channel and knowledge base solutions for delivering superior customer experiences. Offered on premises or in the cloud, Moxie Software’s Knowledge Spaces™, Email Spaces™, Chat Spaces™, Web Self-Service Spaces™, CoBrowse Spaces™ and Social Media Spaces™ are now available to work with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Below is a sample screen of Dynamics with email.

Spaces by Moxie enables Microsoft Dynamics CRM customers to provide differentiated and personalized customer experiences at scale. The combined solution allows customers to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM as the single source of truth for all customer and interaction data.  This ensures accurate data by allowing agents to update Microsoft Dynamics CRM while on their Moxie desktop. Moxie becomes the translation layer and Dynamics serves as the layer of record.

Microsoft Lync is their unified communications offering. It currently does not connect to Microsoft Dynamics, but now it can through Moxie so this is a very helpful addition. Lync provides integrated voice, IM, screen sharing chat, and more. Lync currently cannot do intelligent call routing, but Moxie can. Moxie can intercept the call, evaluate the needs and route the call to the person with the most related experience. This person then will have multi-channel response options. Below is a sample screen of Dynamics with chat.

 

Contact center agents can now have a single agent desktop that seamlessly works with multi-channel interactions to contact and case records within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This ensures accurate data by allowing agents to update Microsoft Dynamics CRM while on their Moxie desktop. They can now automatically search the knowledge base from within the case record for faster case resolution. 

Agents can also publish information from the case record into the knowledge base as knowledge articles to improve effectiveness of the knowledge base. This is a critical capability as it allows an easy way to keep content current without placing a heavy demand on agents.  I am sure it must increase compliance with putting upgraded content into the knowledge base.  I have seen the benefit of a god knowledge base on call center agent performance many times, accelerating performance on a variety of measures such a first time call resolution and cross-selling.

The integration of Moxie with these two Microsoft products rests on a shared foundation as .net apps. Moxie can leverage a company’s existing Microsoft infrastructure and reduce the need to purchase high-end call center services. As a result, Moxie is targeted at the mid-market and this makes sense.

The resulting integrated customer response system provides control over customer experiences regardless of what channel they engage the company. It also providers multiple self-service options and has complete mobile integration. This is a good move, as customer connections will increasingly occur through mobile channels.

This move also takes the call center out of the silos than many operate within. Now Moxie’s collaboration capabilities can be engaged to handle escalations. It puts Moxie in the center of connection between Microsoft Dynamic and Lync. This is a nice place to be and I can understand the positive customer response to this move. 

Data is Made to be Shared

As reported in Information Week, a survey, Fostering a Data-Driven Culture, by the Economist Intelligence Unit indicates that executives who feel their organizations handle data collection, analysis and sharing well are also more likely to feel that their companies outperform their industry peers.

Specifically, 75.5% of those who indicated their organizations were "substantially ahead of peers" financially also said data collection was "very important/essential" in their organizations. In contrast, half of the executives who ranked their companies as "substantially" behind peers in data collection also indicated their organizations were "somewhat" behind financially.

I think that is it not just collecting the data but sharing it is key here. The report noted some interesting results in this issue. There is a double curve as smaller organizations believe in wide sharing, but sharing tends to tighten as companies grow and data-governance rules are applied. However, with really big companies data sharing opens up again.  The new digital workplace allows this sharing to occur, even in the largest organizations making them in some ways as nimble as the small ones.

In general there is a positive feeling for data usage on the job as 84% said "most to all" employees should work this way. Data is an asset that grows in value as it is used. The more people who see it the more valuable it becomes and more ideas can be generated from it.  You also need to educate workers to get the most from the available data. The research indicates that companies that invest in training for data skills perform better than their peers. Now that is a good finding that makes sense. 

Bloomfire Provides Comprehensive Knowledge Connections

Bloomfire is a relatively new offering in the knowledge management space, founded in 2010, that is meeting a need that has remained with us for some time: how do you connect people with the knowledge they need to accomplish their work tasks? This need has been made more acute with the advent of easy-to-use knowledge tools on the consumer Web. For the past few years, workers have become accustomed to accessing better knowledge tools in their personal life than in their work life. The goal of Bloomfire is to provide tools to close that gap. I spoke with Craig Malloy, CEO of Bloomfire, to get an overview of their offering.

Craig provided some stats on the knowledge-sharing problem. Knowledge workers spend up to 30% of their working day looking for data and only 44% of corporate users can find the (internal) file they’re looking for compared to 86% of similar internet users. I can relate to this as I have often asked audiences at knowledge talks to raise their hands if they can find content easier on their enterprise systems than on the Web. No one has ever raised their hand.

There are also issues with enterprise learning systems. Craig showed data that said more than 70% of important job-related knowledge comes from other workers or learning on their own rather than employment-related courses. I have seen more extreme stats that showed that 90% of knowledge came from informal sources. Bloomfire, unlike many social business systems, combines learning capabilities with social networking, content management, and cloud-based file sharing. I like this move.

There is great opportunity here as McKinsey has projected nearly a trillion-dollar market opportunity around creating better-connected enterprises. The convergence of social features, mobile capabilities, cloud storage, and new content tools, creates a compelling stage from which to address these benefits, which is where Bloomfire plays. Their mission is to “help businesses create, capture, display, save, and share information, connecting people who have knowledge with those who need it.” Through application integration, Bloomfire wants to be the “primary location to access relevant content, and the primary communication channel for noticing, collaborating, deciding and acting on information and knowledge.”

Bloomfire has successfully acquired more than 220 active customers to-date and raised $18 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures and Austin Ventures. Their two main use cases are social knowledge creation and sharing, as well as delivering social capabilities to enhance sales enablement. They integrate with popular CRM systems, such as Salesforce, to address the latter and have designed an easy to use a system designed for individual work groups, rather than enterprise wide implementation. This simplifies the adoption process and enables business users to gain quick access to Bloomfire’s capabilities. You can see a sample of their home page below.

The essential elements of the newest release of Bloomfire include a multimedia content engine, a social engagement system, an analytics dashboard, and enhanced iOS app and new Android support. The content generation includes co-authoring, drag and drop file management, and intelligent search. The social engagement features include Integration with LinkedIn so users can bring in their profile and not have to re-create profile information. There is also recognizing and mining expertise and recommendations. 

I was impressed by the comprehensive nature of Bloomfire’s analytics feature, including the ability to indentify content that provides the most benefit, as well as the content related activities of community members; there is also a “hands on the buzzer” measure that tracks the average time it takes to get an answer to a question. Craig said that their current time for internal use is two hours. Here are some sample analytics screens.

With the new mobile capabilities you can stash content on your smart phone by storing what you would like to read later and save it locally to your iOS device to  retrieve and view anytime, anywhere, regardless of connectivity options. Bloomfire will also release a full-featured mobile app for Android devices in Q2 2013. You can see a sample mobile interface below.

Bloomfire focuses on content management and knowledge sharing, rather than activity streams. There are notifications of several types and a notifications tab within the interface.  It also has strong capabilities for handling video as the team has deep experience in this space. You can see a sample video handling screen below.

I like the combination of features and the clarity of their goals and messaging. I can see why Bloomfire has attracted strong attention in a short time. I wish had these capabilities within a tool when I was implementing knowledge management systems a few years back. 

Wrike Provides Mobile Visualization of Project Schedules on an Interactive Timeline

Wrike offers on-demand, online project management and collaboration solution that helps both co-located and distributed teams work together in real time.  I have written about it several times before (see Wrike Provides Mobile Project Management). Here is Wrike’s Andrew Filev presenting a demo at IBM Connect 2013. Wrike integrates with IBM Connections to become more social.

Wrike's product vision is based on the innovative "work graph" model, connecting all work in one central hub that is comfortable to manage and navigate. Adopting the features of the "social graph" to the project collaboration space, Wrike allows users to bring together as many projects as they need and work on them in a scalable environment.

Wrike is now offering a dynamic Gantt chart as part of the latest version of its mobile apps for iPhone and Android smartphones.The mobile interactive timeline, one of the core planning tools that project managers rely on, inherits the key functions from Wrike's web app. Even when they are in the field, users can easily browse project plans from a bird's-eye view or in more detail, and quickly adjust them with a few taps. Just like on the Gantt chart in Wrike's web app, mobile users can reschedule tasks by dragging and dropping them, convert them to milestones, and change other details, for example, assignees.

Ready for installation from the App Store and Google Play, users can also, in three easy steps, configure Wrike's free mobile app to receive push notifications of project updates. As with the software's web-based version, schedule changes are readily visible in real-time to all team members.

 

Do You Know Outstanding Social Business Leaders for 2013?

The Brainyard is seeking Outstanding Social Business Leaders For 2013. They are looking for introductions to the best of the best, a new set of Social Business Leaders to be announced at June's E2 Conference in Boston. In 2012, they honored Bonobos, Cemex, Ford Motor Co., McKesson, Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, TD Bank and Unisys. Chris Laping, the Red Robin CIO we named our 2012 Social Business Leader of the Year, joined me for an onstage interview at E2, and it wound up being one of the top-rated events at the conference.

I think this is a very useful effort as the conference could use more business cases and fewer consultant sessions. This is not a criticism of past conferences. When enterprise 2.0 was new there was a real need for thought leaders to provide a vision. Now that it has been around a while, we need to hear more from organizations on their successes, challenges, and lessons learned.

As Jane McConnell reported in Digital Workplace Trends 2013, adoption and deployment remains a challenge. She found in early adopters resistance tends to come from middle managers while in the majority it comes from senior management. I think this is because in the early adopters the senior managers have bought in so things are starting to change and hitting the middle management resistance. In the majority things have not progressed far enough for middle managers to really worry. Jane also found that, “adoption lags far behind deployment for the social capabilities that empower individuals and self-organizing communities and challenge traditional hierarchies and roles within organizations.”

Let’s get more organizations on the stage to share what they have learned to help the rest of us. 

 

JackBe Enables Business Intelligence to be More Accessible and Robust with Recent Moves

I have covered JackBe for a number of years and like their evolution from a mashup engine to making use of this capability for bringing business intelligence to the average business user (see for example, JackBe Expands Real-Time Operational Intelligence with its New Offering and JackBe Presto Provides Self-Service Business Intelligence on a Mobile Basis). I spoke with John Crupi, their CTO, and Sandra Hamorsky, Director, Product Marketing about their latest moves.

Presto 3.5, their latest release, provides business users with direct access to real-time KPIs and analytics through ease of use features, allowing them to move quickly without the need for IT support. This enables users to assess the business impact of changing conditions as they happen. Sandra gave a great example, a dashboard for hardware stores to best serve their customers during a storm situation. In this case it was Hurricane Sandy. Sandra had recently joined JackBe and saw the need to help hardware stores as she was having trouble getting the right tools in preparation for the storm.

This is a good example of a highly important support tool that is urgently needed quickly but will only be used for a short period. It is not a good candidate for a long wait for IT to produce something. So Sandra developed a dashboard in 45 minutes to help stores track the storm using the new DIY features of Presto 3.5. You can see the results below.

There are inventory checklists, along with the probable impact on supplies for each store, weather forecasts, a Twitter feed on the storm and other relevant data sources. This was all very useful as Sandy brought rain to the East and snow to the Midwest. I know these transitions from personal experience as I drove through the entire length of Sandy moving my belongings from Cambridge MA to New Orleans (see Driving Through Hurricane Sandy To New Orleans).

With Presto 3.5, business users can easily create real-time operational and key performance indicator (KPI)-driven apps and dashboards such as the one above that combine data from many live enterprise and social media information sources. John said that they had learned from customers that their IT departments were often not able to keep up with the demands of business users. Once the IT security, governance and protocols are in place - users can take advantage of Presto's self-service capabilities without having to go back to IT every time  they want to create new real-time apps and dashboards.

Presto 3.5 extends its user-friendly interface to include new options to create dashboards through drag-and-drop, to add custom visualizations as easily as plugging in the view, and to customize Presto with a customer’s own logo and colors. There are also pre-built KPIs.

Once created, all Presto dashboards are portable with HTML5 apps that run anywhere, including SharePoint, portals, websites, tablets and mobile phones with the same look-and-feel of the native device. Presto 3.5 also has enhanced security for mobile devices and a more secure single-sign-on experience for social media sites. This includes support for OAuth, used by many social media sites, including Twitter and Facebook. It allows you to combine social media with your enterprise data securely. The interface adapts to multiple devices. You can see the tablet and smart phone interfaces below.

John also covered their latest news, the collaboration with Terracotta to provide better support for the use of Big Data using the Terracotta BigMemory, capability. Big Data is an in-memory solution that delivers performance at any scale. The JackBe-Terracotta collaboration provides compatible tools and a platform for real-time Big Data analytics with:

• Real-time Big Data visual exploration, using in-memory analytics
• Analytic snapshots for instant visual trending and KPI insights
• Apps that visualize live and historical enterprise data mashed with Big Data
• Dashboards that business users can easily assemble quickly and share, with no programming

John said that Presto 3.5 with Terracotta BigMemory can make use of input from Hadoop, as well as other data sources including, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and Windows Azure. Users are able to construct and make use of data directly from multiple sources without having to set up and feed a data warehouse. This is a huge time and cost saver.

John feels that analytics are the killer app for both social media and Big Data and I would agree. Putting the creation and use of business intelligence apps under the control of those who understand and need them is the key for adoption. JackBe is making great moves in this direction. 

eXo Announces Plans for eXo Release 4.0 and Codenvy

I have written about eXo, the user experience platform-as-a-service (UXPaaS) company that supports developers, several times before (for example see: Benjamin Mestrallet, eXo CEO, Looks at the Social Enterprise and eXo Expands its Cloud IDE Cloud-based Development Platform).  Recently I spoke with Patrice, Lamarque, VP of Products, to catch up on their latest moves. We discussed two main things: the release of Codenvy and eXo 4.0.

We started with eXo 4.0. It is an open source, enterprise-class, social collaboration platform. There are several goals with this release. First, eXo want sot make social collaboration a utility so IT can easily embrace all collaboration within a single platform. They want it to be simple and affordable, as well as business centric. These means there are application connectors in place through APIs to make it enterprise ready so the total cost of ownership remains low. Standard APIs such as JCR or CMIS are complemented by a set of APIs to program against your organization model, spaces, activity streams, polls, posts, wikis and more. For example, you can access Sugar CRM content within eXo. In addition, Sugar CRM activity can show up in the eXo activity stream and acted upon without leaving eXo.. Finally, they want it to be user oriented with an intuitive interface to foster engagement and adoption. The home page is seen below.

Features include: document management, portal, calendar, mobile capability, forums, answers, dashboards, wiki, spaces, tasks, and social networks in a cloud-based offering. The social features include: user profiles, connections, and activity streams. The Spaces feature allows you to create collaboration workspaces for teams or projects where you can share documents, tasks, events, wikis and more. Spaces can be open or closed, private or public and space administrators can manage members and the applications that are available. You can see a sample Spaces screen below.

The Dashboard feature allows each user to create their own customizable dashboard. Gadgets help to track metrics, feeds, status and analytics. The product has a large set of gadgets but you can also install any open social gadget. A large set of gadgets are also available online. The dashboard is available through the mobile applications. The Tasks feature allows you to capture work items super easily as tasks. Tasks can be created from anywhere, anytime. They can be scheduled in your calendar and reminders will be sent to you. You can also track other people’s tasks via activity streams. You can develop gadgets and REST services and deploy them in the platform.

With the Documents feature you can upload files easily, preview them, share them and edit them remotely via WEBDAV. Advanced document management capabilities are available such as versioning, metadata, advanced search and digital asset management. You can also build accessible websites with different content types and site structure. A powerful back office lets you classify, search and publish content very easily. A sample document management screen is seen below.

 

Based on the open source GateIn portal framework, eXo Platform has all the flexibility of an enterprise portal framework: portlets (JSR 286, WSRP), gadgets (OpenSocial) and content can be aggregated in a secured and customizable way.  A powerful graphical user interface composer that requires no technical skills allows you to compose portal pages by picking up a layout and pulling in apps and content.

There is also Unified Search coming soon. It will allow you to search any type of content using a single interface, including documents, events, tasks, posts and articles. Any content can be found with the clear and powerful search application. A quick search-ahead helper field shows the most relevant results and a more advanced search with advanced filtering lets you go further.

If you already manage user accounts in an enterprise directory such as Active Directory or Open LDAP, eXo Platform can integrate with it for authentication or user profile attributes. Advanced capabilities even let you use groups in eXo or leverage several directories at the same time. The eXo Platform works with your single sign-on system thank to its support of solutions like CAS, JOSSO and OpenSSO, and its support of standards like SAML. The eXo Platform is built using enterprise-standard tools such as Java EE, WEBDAV, CalDAV, JCR and CMIS to maximize its interoperability within the applications already available within the information system.

There is strong mobility support with native iPhone, iPad, and Android apps integrate easily and securely with your eXo instance. Below are some sample mobile interfaces.

 

There are a variety of pricing options including a freemium option. I think that eXo has put together a compelling offering for enterprises of all sizes to engagement in social business. The eXo 4.0 platform will be released at the end of April.

We also discussed Codenvy, a spin off from eXo that has received $9M in funding. Codenvy was announced on February 26 and it is the business now handling their eXo Cloud IDE offering. It was started with the objective to make developers more productive in building and deploying cloud-based apps. It targeted the Java environment and has support for a wide range of PaaS environments, including Red Hat OpenShift, Salesforce Heroku, CloudBees, and VMware Cloud Foundry. eXo Cloud IDE has exceeded their expectations so they created this new business unit to handle its growth.

FileMaker Offers Database Development for iPad, iPhone, and More

FileMaker is a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple, Inc. It provides a comprehensive Platform used to design, build, deploy and manage data-driven business solutions for Mac, Windows, iPad and iPhone and the web. I spoke with Ryan Rosenberg, VP of Marketing, to get a better understanding of the FileMaker Platform. We also discussed how companies are using the Platform to create custom business solutions for iPad and iPhone and Ryan demonstrated some of the ease of use features of the environment.

Ryan said that FileMaker Pro is the number one database on the Mac OS and number two on Windows behind Access. They have shipped over 18 million copies of FileMaker Pro. In fact, the Windows market is their largest. FileMaker apps can be expanded to thousands of users. It is designed for business apps. FileMaker Go for iPad and FileMaker Go for iPhone, the leading iOS databases, are both free on the iTunes App store

They also develop Bento, an entry-level personal database software for solo businesses owners, which is available on the Apple App store and Bento 4 for iPad and Bento 4 for iPhone available in the productivity section of the iTunes App store.

Ryan said that over 500,000 copies of FileMaker Go have been downloaded so far and that most of these deployments are found within small, medium and large organizations. He gave the example of the Austin Texas Convention Center that I know well from last year’s SXSW. The crews that set up booths can make adjustments on their iPads by drawing the modifications and these changes are communicated automatically to the central admin people. I can see the benefit of this. Now they need to help with the registration process as it took several hours and long lines at the 2012 SXSW. Ryan also mentioned another great use case, the Benetton stores. Here clerks carry iPads running FileMaker Go for iPad and can check inventory without having to go to a backroom. I imagine this is a common use case inn many stores, or will become one.

Ryan showed me a coffee shop solution that allows you to create custom coffee grinds through a visual interface. He also showed me a driving test sample solution that allows the tester to check off an applicants progress and diagram incidents on a traffic grid. This latter one eliminates a lot of paper and makes record keeping much more efficient.

You can also integrate mobile solutions into existing enterprise and departmental systems and then make updates. Ryan showed me how you can make changes in the desktop version and have it immediately appear in the iPad version. Data updates can go in both directions back and forth from field sales people and the home office, for example. You can also manage and secure solutions using
 industry-standard authentication. There is no coding required for solution development so the business users can do self-service and not rely on programmers.

FileMaker is a complete Platform for creating, deploying, and managing data-driven business apps. Design is key for iPad and iPhone solutions, as the expectations are high. FileMaker includes flexible design tools that let developers take total control of the screen. You can create an attractive product configuration display, an inviting registration screen for an event, a useful executive dashboard, or a comprehensive facilities management App. FileMaker also features native iPad and iPhone clients so you can deliver the full native iOS experience.

On the business side, FileMaker has a powerful framework based on a full-featured relational database model, with integrated workflow, business logic, searching, sorting and data validation. The framework includes many features to take advantage of the iPad and iPhone such as on-device charting, report generation, PDF generation, email integration, printing support, signature capture, location support, camera support and more. Ryan showed me how to make an update where sales over a certain profit level appear in red. It was done in seconds and communicated to all connected devices immediately. You can see the process in the two screens below.

 

Ryan also showed me how to set up a signature capture field within an app. You can see the process in the two screens below.

If you need help, an extensive third party ecosystem has evolved with more than 1,100 consulting firms worldwide in FileMaker’s Business Alliance of independent FileMaker database developers offering customized database development and  training.  The company offers developers certified training. There are also hundreds of 3rd party tools and frameworks for the FileMaker Platform providing integration such as with popular accounting packages, enabling point-of-sale credit card transactions, delivering vertical application frameworks and more.

There is also the FileMaker Technical Network, with over 30,000 active members.

FileMaker products are available in 17 languages

I was very impressed with the capabilities, ease of use and support. I can see why FileMaker is so popular.

 

 

Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013: Part Three – Selected Details

As I wrote in the first part of this series, I recently received a review copy of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 by Jane McConnell. Jane has conducted the annual surveys since 2006 and published reports every year since 2007. My last post begin to look at some of the details in the report. The report is over 150 pages long so I will only scratch the surface. You can purchase the report through its web site, www.digital-workplace-trends.com. As I wrote, if you are serious about making the digital workplace happen in your organization, it is a good move to obtain a copy.

I was pleased to see a section on Process in the report. I think this is key to getting real value out of the digital workplace. As I wrote, it is integrating the interactions with the transactions and tying the social to business process where real change will occur. A post by Andy McAfee that made a similar point. He, in turn, quotes a post by Laurie Buczek, The Big Failure of Enterprise 2.0 Social Business. “Culture will change as a result of the pervasive use of social tools.  Lack of cultural change is not social business’s biggest failure.  The biggest failure is the lack of workflow integration to drive culture change.”

Jane found that there is much to do to solve this challenge. She reported that, “very few organizations have embedded social capabilities into enterprise processes. However anecdotal evidence suggests that social integrated into processes can successfully change the way people work.” She offers a lot of detail on to make this happen.

In the investment section, Jane reported that, “mobile is the priority area for investment for 2013-2014, with enterprise social networking and information architecture also at the top of the list.” I think that information architecture is a top priority. In addition to addressing the important people issues (so they are open to connecting and willing to step out of organizational silos), there are some essential technology ones, it is also necessary to get the applications connected so conversation do not occur in technical silos. As I wrote in Putting Social Media to Work, to be effective these systems that support interactions have to be integrated with the systems of record that support transactions. The social tools also need to be integrated with each other or companies are simply creating more silos of disconnection and benefits are not realized. Application connectors are a major key realizing the business benefits of the digital workplace.

Having said that technology is critical, so are people issues and Jane has a section on Change. She writes that, “resistance to social collaboration comes from perceptions about lack of business value and waste of time.” She also found in early adopters resistance tends to come from middle managers while in the majority it comes from senior management. I think this is because in the early adopters the senior managers have bought in so things are starting to change and hitting the middle management resistance. In the majority things have not progressed far enough for middle managers to really worry. Jane offers a lot of useful content and case examples on making change happen.

Jane appropriately concludes with a section on finding your direction.  She states that no journey is the same. However, there are some common directions to take. She encourages organizations to build a digital mindset and start with a big picture and use it to bring the diverse initiatives together. You need to focus on capabilities and not tools and define governance based on “freedom within a framework.” Always think integrated. There is much more. This is a very useful report.

 

 

Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013: Part Two – Selected Details

As I wrote in the first part of this series, I recently received a review copy of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 by Jane McConnell. Jane has conducted the annual surveys since 2006 and published reports every year since 2007. My last post provided an overview and this one dives into some of the detailed findings. The report is over 150 pages long so I will only scratch the surface. You can purchase the report through its web site, www.digital-workplace-trends.com. If you are serious about making the digital workplace happen in your organization, it is a good move to obtain a copy.

The report is organized into eight sections: transformation, mobile, social collaboration, process, experience, investment, change, and finding your direction. Transformation is going to happen and Jane found that most organizations are moving to the digital workplace concept but at different speeds – only 3% believe it does not concern them. I think this transformation will equal the significance of the industrial revolution and the related thinking of Fred Taylor but reverse many of its impacts. Collaboration tools can turn Taylorism on its head so learning goes up and down the enterprise and the whole structure is connected. The large can become nimble, as IBM has found out. Jane found that “early adopters differ from the majority of organizations in that their senior managers play an active role and are often the driving force behind the digital workplace.” Jane offers a number of excellent case examples in this and other sections.

Jane found that 2012 was the year mobile became a strategic priority for the digital workplace with 41% of organizations planning investment next year. The mobile initiatives tend to be focused on the needs of senior executives, those on the road and the field workers.  While this makes some sense, I think that everyone is a mobile worker now, even those with a desk. They often use their mobile device rather than their desktop one, even in the office. I imagine that there are few mobile workers without a mobile device. Jane did find that BYOD is widespread in the early adopters, with over 70% permitting or tolerating it. The others are catching up. However, as I mentioned in the last post, the mobile services offered today are limited in scope, with only 20% of organizations providing task-based or collaborative capabilities. The opportunity for value and competitive edge is very high here with these low numbers.

Jane found a wide range of social collaborative capabilities in place, with a high increase in interest in the past 12 months.  This corresponds to the work of Nora Barnes at the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts who has also been looking at the business use of social media over the past few years. For example, Nora found that now 92% of the Inc. 500 are using at least one of the social business tools she studied such as blogs, and networks.

Jane found that the transformative capabilities are those with the highest gap between deployment and adoption. These include commenting, user- generated content, crowd-sourcing and social networking. They are disruptive because they challenge traditional roles and hierarchies in organizations. Yet I would add they are exactly the initiatives that will provide the most value.  Like all of the sections, the one on social collaboration is full of useful details that I will let you find in the report. This disruption impacts all of the efforts as Jane found that while early adopters have significantly more deployment, they still struggle with adoption. In many cases, even where social networks are deployed, they are not yet actively and broadly used. I do not see this as a shortcoming of the digital workplace, and a call to return to the old ways, but rather a challenge that the winners will overcome.

Let me digress with a story. When my grandfather was a country doctor in Oklahoma before it was a state, he would drive his horse and buggy for hours doing rounds. When he was finished and exhausted, he would throw the reins over and the horses knew the way home. Then he bought the first car in the county. Part of the deal was that the salesman lived on the farm for two weeks teaching him how to run and maintain the new machine. However, he kept falling asleep at the wheel and the car did not know the way home. Fortunately the roads where still related to the old means of transportation and the car would just stall in the wagon runts. He was ready to go back to the horse when he got the idea to teach one of his daughters to drive the car. She cam along and took over when he got tired. We need to figure out how to get along with our new technology, because, like the horse and buggy, the old technologies days are numbered.

This is enough for one post. I will finish my coverage of the selected details in my next post.

 

Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013: Part One – Overview

I recently received a review copy of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 by Jane McConnell. I have seen prior reports and was very impressed so I was pleased to get this latest version. I am going to review it in several posts since the 150+ page report deserves this type of coverage. I met Jane at KM World. She has 14 years of extensive hands-on consulting experience with intranet and digital workplace strategy in large, global organizations.  Jane has conducted the annual surveys since 2006 and published reports every year since 2007. Data for this report was collected in the fourth quarter of 2012. The findings are based on an online survey of over 100 questions with participants from 362 organizations around the world, from a wide range of industries.

The report indicates that, “the top two goals of the digital workplace - rated equally important - are “organizational intelligence” and “efficiency and cost savings.”  This corresponds to McKinsey’s 2012 Projected Business Value of Social Business at a Trillion Annually. In 2010 they reported, Enterprise 2.0 finds Its Payday where they found significant quantified benefits from the business use of social media. Similar results were found in 2011.

Jane writes that the digital workplace is a work in progress with different dimensions, not all equally mature. They include managed information and processes, structured collaboration, social collaboration and a mobile dimension. She adds that it is transformative and I would certainly agree.

Jane makes several predictions. First, 2013 is the year where mobile takes off. She found that 60% of organizations consider mobile to be important and have already made “significant” or “some” investment. Last year the figure was just under 40%. There is still much to be done here as Jane found that 45% of organizations offer either no mobile or simply access to email. Only a third offer “basic services,” such as calendar, directory and news. An even smaller number, 20%, have provided mobile access to work tools for collaborative, HR and other task-related needs. This is where the real value that McKinsey talks about will occur.

Jane also found that, “adoption lags far behind deployment for the social capabilities that empower individuals and self-organizing communities and challenge traditional hierarchies and roles within organizations.”  She adds that enterprise social networking is deployed in 70% of the early adopters and 35% of the majority. However, it has not reached a critical mass of usage even for many of the early adopters.  I think realize that the change to social business is going to happen. As I saw recently at IBM Connect 2013, IBM is betting the company on it and I think that is a wise move.  But most organizations still do not really know how to do it.

Leading the resistance to change are the middle managers, not the senior officials but that has probably been the case since the Roman army. Jane found that the most effective change driver is “colleague and peer” behavior. At the same time many senior managers have embraced the reality of the digital workplace. I think one of the threatening aspects of the digital workplace to middle managers is that it shortens the distance between employees and senior management, taking out the gate keeper and filtering role that many middle managers play. However, companies are going to have to deal with this as middle managers are the backbone of the organization and change will generally not happen without their engagement.

The report is organized into eight sections: transformation, mobile, social collaboration, process, experience, investment, change, and finding your direction. I will cover some of the details in my next post, Review of Digital Workplace Trends 2013 – Selected Details. You can purchase the report through its web site, www.digital-workplace-trends.com. If you are serious about making the digital workplace happen in your organization, it is a good move to obtain a copy. 

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts by Catherine Shinners

My Merced Group business partner, Catherine Shinners, has published a useful series on Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts. As McKinsey has shown there is a lot of value to working with social tools and processes. Yet, as Catherine notes, according to a report released by Ovum last week, there's only about a ten percent (10%) adoption rate in organizations.  In the series she provides useful ways to make creative uses of social networking and increase adoption. I will let you read what she wrote and not repeat it here. Take a look.

Here is the list of posts in her series

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #1 - Think Community

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshfts  #2 - Why Community Matters

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #3 - Managing Social

Enterprise Social Networking Mindshifts #4 - Working Social

 

My IBM Connect 2013 Session Notes: Complete Listing

Here is the complete listing of my notes on IBM Connect 2013. I was very pleased to be back again after the last two years thanks to IBM’s support. Here are my notes from 2011 and 2012 

 IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Opening Session

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Monday Morning Press Q&A

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Four Major Trends Shaping Social Business in 2013

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Creating a Smarter Workforce – Panel

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Tuesday Opening Session

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Reinventing the Inbox – Ed Brill

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Wednesday Opening Session

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Getting Social in the Cloud – Rebecca Bulsan

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Social Business Goes to School

IBM Connect 2013 Notes: Innovation Lab

Here also are several recent posts on IBM.

IBM Global CMO Study: Highlights

Social Business – What Works and How: Highlights of IBM 2012 Social Technologies Study

IBM Connections 4.0 Expands Its Social, Integration, and Analytic Capabilities

 

IBM Connect 2013: Ed Brill on Reinventing the Inbox

This is another in a series of my notes on IBM Connect 2013. I am very pleased to be back again after the last two years thanks to IBM’s support. Here is a summary of my notes for 2012 and 2011. These notes cover the Monday Press Session: Reinventing the Inbox with Ed Brill, Director, Social Business & Collaboration, IBM.

I first meet Ed Brill in person at the 2011 Lotusphere. He remembered our phone interview six year earlier when I was collecting cases for blog book. Here is that interview: Blog Cases from 2005: Ed Brill on IBM, Collaboration, and More. Ed said he liked the case as it showed that he was talking about social before the term was commonly used. I would certainly agree that he was ahead of most people in using social apps.

Before I get into the session I want to mention, Ed’s excellent new book, Opting In: Lessons in Social Business from a Fortune 500 Product Manager. I had a chance to preview the first few chapters. As I wrote in response to this preview: Opting In is an important book that takes social business beyond external marketing to provide practical guidance on how to drive significant business value through enhancing human interactions within the enterprise. McKinsey's research has demonstrated many quantified benefits here and Ed shows you how to realize them. I look forward to reading the rest of the book.

Ed runs product management for messaging, collaboration, and unification. The two big new things this year are improvements to existing apps through Social Notes 9.0 and IBM docs.  Ed said that email has become dysfunctional and needs to be transformed. Adding social capabilities will greatly increase its efficiency and I would certainly agree. Some of the content that used to be in broadcast emails has already moved to social apps for good reason. But there needs to be changes to email itself. This is happening in several ways.

There is embedded experience so that email alerts can come into other apps you are working on. You can respond to the email without leaving the other app. Another major change that is coming is to use analytics to prioritize your mail so the most relevant messages come to the top of the email inbox, replacing the simple chronological order that has been standard for some time. There could be several different types of filters for this prioritization such as skills, team membership, location, or relevance to a project you are working on. Ed said that one challenge will be getting people to trust the prioritization.

Within IBM as an organization, Connections has replaced the portal as the first place people go. Now you can have mail within Connections so you do not have to leave it. There is also a discovery engine that teaches people how to use the new features. One capability I really like, is the ability to act on a message directly. For example, you might get a request from HR in an email that requires using an HR app. You can respond to the request directly in the email without having to go to the app.

We talked a bit about activity streams as they also have this embedded ability to respond to requests from apps. Email and activity streams are now two parallel communication channels. Activity streams are for public information, as many people can see them. Ed said they can be useful for discovering new information. Email remains the channel for private communication. It is still necessary but some of its uses have moved to better tools. Here is a list of features for Notes 9.0 from the IBM product page.

• Provides an easy-to-use, single point of access to everything you need to get your work done quickly, including business applications, email, calendars, feeds, and more.
• Lets you tailor your work environment with widgets that bring social communities that are important to your job, both within the enterprise and across the Internet, right into your peripheral view.
• Enables you to work with people right at the point of context with social tools weaved into the work experience, allowing you to pivot to the tool you need, such as business cards, presence awareness, instant messaging, and more.
• Helps you quickly locate the people and content you need through integrated access to social tools from IBM Connections and IBM Lotus Quickr® software, including profiles, activities, team places, and content libraries.
• Offers advanced replication technology to enable you to work with email and applications even when disconnected from the network.

Sometimes changes to becoming more social can have unintended consequences. For example, Ed mentioned a CEO who started a blog to more directly communicate with his workforce and allow for two-way exchanges that email messages did not promote.  Employees were so pleased to have a communication channel with the CEO that many comment threads got pushed into topics unrelated to his post. So he set up a second app, called the Speaker’s Corner, to allow for these comments. This allowed his first blog to stay more on topic.

Ed said that Notes use remains very active. In fact, many clients who let their Notes licenses expire are coming back. The added social features are one driver of this re-engagement.

IBM Docs also has integrated social features. You can open a document and invite others to collaborate on it in real time. In traditional word processing you designate a file name and place it in a file structure. It is document oriented. IBM Docs is more people oriented. You open a document and place in a location such as a team workspace within Connections, not an abstract file structure. Then others can be invited into this workspace. I see this people orientation as a great improvement and one of the shortcomings of MS Word and SharePoint. IBM Docs can work in the cloud as IBM SmartCloud Docs is a cloud-based office productivity suite, which allows users to simultaneously collaborate on word processing, spreadsheet and presentation documents. Here is a sample screen.

Notes can also be in the cloud. IBM recently did a study on the cloud and found that organizations – both big and small, across geographies and in virtually every industry – are embracing cloud as a way to reduce the complexity and costs associated with traditional IT approaches. Almost three-fourths of the leaders in their survey indicated their companies had piloted, adopted or substantially implemented cloud in their organizations – and 90 percent expect to have done so in three years. And the number of respondents whose companies have substantially implemented cloud is expected to grow from 13 percent today to 41 percent in three years.

There is also extensive mobile support including client and clientless (HTTP, browser based) access options and seamless network connectivity as you roam. There is optimized network utilization to reduce data transmission and connection costs. Notes Mobile Connect also supports a wide range of device types - mobile, desktop, laptop - for security-rich connection into business infrastructure. It is nice to see that Notes in alive and well and entering the social age. This move should ensure its longevity. 

IBM Connect 2013: Tuesday Opening Session Notes

This is another in a series of my notes on IBM Connect 2013. I am very pleased to be back again after the last two years. Here are my notes from 2011 and 2012. Bob Piccano, IBM General Manager led the opening session. The theme was the rise of social business - moving from liking to leading. These notes are real time so please forgive any typos. 

    
Bob Piccano opened the session. He mentioned that this was the 20^th year of this conference.   He has moved to a new post leading the big data efforts across IBM.  He introduced Adam Klaber, Managing Partner, New Markets, who is working on big data among other things. IBM is moving from systems of transaction to systems of engagement. This has major transformation implications. I have written about this concept a bit (see for example, Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions and Integrating Transactions and Interactions: A Fable).

Adam said that customers are leading the conversations that define brands. Partners are interacting to accelerate business value. Employees are using social media in all aspects of the their lives, including work. Organizations are crowdsourcing ideas to bring better solutions.

Adam mentioned the four Is: Interact, inform, integrate, and innovate. Each builds on the other. This shift is enabled by technology supported social interactions. They are releasing a study on how companies are moving forward in social. Over half of the organizations are shifting their investments to social technology. They are also looking at the cultural change. IBM is doing more than technology but also helping with the social change.

They have formed a cross-disciplinary group on front office transformation and a center of competence in this space. He moved to client examples in healthcare, retail, and government. He began with healthcare,

Dan Pelino came out to discuss healthcare. There is now a huge increase of people getting healthcare benefits in the US.  Thirty million new people are coming into the system. It is the largest single change for any industry. It will change everything including the use of technology.

Dan began with Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. I was a subscriber of this Blue Cross for years when I lived in Cambridge until I recently moved back to New Orleans. Bill Fandrich the CIO of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts spoke. They have been dealing with universal coverage since 2006 when Massachusetts passed the first laws in this area. When they started today’s smart phones were not in the market, yet these devices are now the primary ways members access their benefits.

There is now a new paradigm, out pacing Moore’s law on change with growth of over 45% per year. The real question is whether they are getting insights from the massive amounts of data or is this just an expense. There was now coverage for 411,000 uninsured residents and only 1.9% remain uninsured. They are the glue that connects members and providers. They look at all the touch points in the process.  They keep a 360 view of their members to provide better care at less cost. They want to provide more personalized health care. I have received calls on some of the issues he raised.

Next, Maree Foti, HR manager at David Jones, a department store in Australia, They have 36 stores with 8,000 employees. They are the older department store still on their original name.  They started a working group to have more two way communication with employees. They need a platform with two-communication, anywhere, anytime while complimenting existing infrastructure. They have started a pilot of IBM Connections with 1,000 employees. They have 65% take up in three months. There are also behavioral changes.

Usage is strong with 64% access the system several times a week. More than 55% believe it will enhance two-way communication. The top three benefits; Increased knowledge of the firm, more direct link to leadership team, and a greater sense of community and collaboration. Her three top tips: bring the platform to life for users, focus on content, content, content; and engage champions at all levels of the business.  Moving forward their focus in changing to find ways to obtain business benefits. They want to create platform for social business.

Dan next introduced the government example. Municipalities affect how we live so better participation in good for everyone. Jeff Rhoda, General Manager, IBM. We are all touched by government. The issues that have been discussed all apply to government: big data, collaboration, analytics, cloud, and mobile. For example, police can use analytics to predict where crimes will occur to prevent them before they happen. I have seen the TV commercial about this.

Dan introduced Mike Van Milligen from the city of Dubuque to discuss how they engaged citizens to help with local challenges. They have come back from population loss to create a growing community that is sustainable. They use smarter technologies to give new information to citizens and business to save money. If you give people the right information, they will make smarter decisions. Water was the first example. Thee hundred volunteer households were given a portal looking at water use. It resulted in a 7% reduction in water use and 800% increase in water leak detection. The also did a smarter electricity study with over 1,000 participants. They received a 4 - 7% cost savings in electricity. Over 70% took actions to converse electricity. The state officials in Iowa to look for sate wide use. Next they are wrapped a smarter travel study. They are developing better bus routes.

Mike said the lessons include:

• Incremental change is best
• Synthesize and analyze large amounts of data from unrelated and unstructured sources
• Reach people on through multiple channels

They are focused in creating sustainable model for cites under 200,000 where 40% of the US population lives. They revamped their riverfront. They have a population of 60,000 but 3 million live within a 100 miles.

Dan concluded the three part case examples and Bob came back to wrap up the morning session. He began an architectural discussion with systems of record. There are now machine-to-machine interactions. At the top end of the stack you have systems of engagement.  A big data platform links the two. Content is curated and made useful for analytics and subsequent decisions. They are releasing a new version of IBM social analytics, formerly known as Cognos. It will be available on a SaaS model. The platform allows big data can be used at the point of impact.  There is interaction data, attitudinal data, behavioral data, and more.  An airline manufacturer saved 36 million in shorter service calls, another client process 17 billion bits of data on a daily basis. They have now 300 business partners in this space and have released their Stored IQ product. 

IBM Connect 2013: My Monday Opening Session Notes

This is the first in a series of notes on IBM Connect 2013. I am very pleased to be back again after the last two years thanks to IBM’s support. Here are my notes from 2011 and 2012. These notes are real time so please forgive any typos. Alistair Rennie, IBM General Manager led the opening session which began with a very loud and good rock band. They said this was the earliest performance in 30 years. The band was They Might Be Giants.

Alistar asked if we were awake after the performance. This is the twentieth year of Lotusphere. In the next 20 years IBM is going to focus on how to empower people. I was at the 2000 Lotusphere with a client presenting one of the first SameTime and Quickplace implementations with Ryder.

He then introduced the actor, Joseph Gordon Levitt who started a web site, HitRecord.org, to promote creativity. You can upload music and videos. Then anyone can download it and build on the creation. This is to promote collaboration. One of the videos was “A man with a turnip for his head”. The moral was live with what you have and do not try to hide it. They have created a positive community around the site. This is counter to what happens sometimes in Hollywood. It was started by Joseph and his brother it started slow and positive. He rewarded good work, rather than trash stuff. It makes people feel good and willing to put their art on the site.

He also said much creativity is built on past work. So people need to let go of their sense of ownership, at HitRecord.org when you upload material, you give others the non-exclusive right to build on it. For example, “A man with a turnip for his head” was a poem. Gary Oldman read the poem and they took audio and put it on the site. Then he requested the community to make illustrations, then another request was made for an animated film based on the narrative and the winning illustration. Then he asked for music and that was added. 29 different people contributed and they contribute the profits to this group. They have about 150,000 members. At each step members vote on everything, including how much each contributor should get.

Alistair took a video of the crowd to contribute to HitRecord.org. He said “The site is a great living laboratory for collaboration”. He then talked about being a member of bike riding community. There is an online community to support their efforts and other riding groups. Looking at what others are doing, encouraging them to start performing better. Community plus competition can drive performance. Getting everyone involved is key. Connection is key. I would add that application integration is an important part of this connection.

The IBM Social Business Platform is now licensed by 60% of the Fortune 500. This platform was featured next. Sandy Carter and Jeff Schick demonstrated the social platform. Sandy said that social is a life style change. So IBM did both technology and a methodology. Now they have introduced a best practice adoption program.

Luis Benitez showed how a sales manager can be supported to run his team. He built a sales hub for his sales team community using out-of-the-box capabilities. Their content “gets social” to obtain the collective wisdom of their group. There is multi-way video for conversations available for laptops and tablets. Next, an interactive table top by Foresee, where you can see and manipulate the content through multiple means including drawing on the table. You can drag people into the team and then provide them with guidance. Luis next showed Notes 9.0 Social Edition that combines mail with social. Email messages can be made social. File Sync allows you to integrate with iPad, Mac, Windows, etc. IBM Docs will allow multiple users to edit docs at the same time.

Sandy said that an IBM study found 57% of CEOs believe social is a key driver. One senior exec said social revealed one company’s culture. Connections will have another release, as will SameTime. Everything will be available in the Cloud. They also have Adoption Services & Strategies along with Customer Council.

Bosch’s use of social was the next topic. Their CIO spoke. Bosch offers automotive, industrial, and consumer products. I had a Bosch dishwasher, washer, and dryer recently and they were the best examples of those appliances I have owned. They promote collaboration and diversity through a social business strategy. IBM Connections is their platform for this company wide collaboration. They started with pilots, but will open it to everyone soon. Community managers are key to success for this to work.

Craig Hayman next spoke about Steam-punk, a new trend. They found this using social analytics. Customer experience is more important than ever before. You need to turn them into advocates by listening for what they want and then acting on it. For example, 50% of customers are using mobile devices in stores.

Social analytics were demonstrated using a climbing gear company, Greenwell Sports, case example. I am very familiar with this space as my daughter is the Editor of Alpinist Magazine. There is a lot of gear talk in this space and much discussion on the Web. The firm using Facebook, Twitter, and other means to link back to the right gear on their site. It has resulted in huge increases in sales. They built a community around canyoneering with Connections.

ING is a company that looks at where abandonment occurs and built in remedies. Expedia and Shop.ca, did the same thing. Jeff Bowman from Caterpillar next spoke. Now customers often start online. This undermines their traditional face-to-face selling approach. So now they are adding social online to remain competitive.

Social recruiting was next covered to demonstrate some of the Kenexa capabilities. The applicant starts with an assessment. Then analytics are used to find the best match. Once selected an on-boarding portal streamlines the process. There are collaborative social learning experiences to share expertise. The many resources that are available are easy to find. Questions can have a video context to better explain what is needed and get better answers.

Mike Rhodin spoke next. He said it is the 11th time he has spoken here. Introducing Neil Armstrong was his best experience. IBM now works as social enterprise. I have interviewed Mike on a number of occasions and really appreciate his big picture thinking. He said that big data is allowing us to see patterns that were not thought of before. This is allowing businesses to transform and re-invent themselves. They can target individuals rather than simply segments. Mike said that analytics is key and I could not agree more. Social opens up content to be mined through analytics. Mike said analytics is the new language of business and IBM is investing heavily here.

Blog Cases from 2005: Ed Brill on IBM, Collaboration, and More

This is another in a series of case studies from people I interviewed in 2005 about their blogging efforts. Now as we move to 2013, I find it interesting to look back at the early days of business blogging. I will only include cases from people who are still blogging now. These cases have not appeared on this blog before.

I am pleased to be at IBM Connect 2013 today and thought Ed Brill’s blog would be an appropriate case to share. It is my third year attending the event formerly known as Lotusphere. Here are my notes from Lotusphere 2011 and Lotusphere 2012. I will be providing my notes from this year's session over the next weeks. 

I first meet Ed Brill in person at the 2011 session. He remembered our phone interview six year earlier. Before I get into the interview I want to mention, Ed’s excellent new book, Opting In: Lessons in Social Business from a Fortune 500 Product Manager. I had a chance to preview the first few chapters. As I wrote in response to this preview: Opting In is an important book that takes social business beyond external marketing to provide practical guidance on how to drive significant business value through enhancing human interactions within the enterprise. McKInsey's research has demonstrated many quantified benefits here and Ed shows you how to realize them. I look forward to reading the rest of the book.

When I spoke with Ed in 2005 he was the Business Unit Executive, Worldwide Notes/Domino Sales and had been with IBM Lotus for over ten years. He still has a senior leadership position at IBM and is now Director, Social Business and Collaboration Solutions, IBM. He is responsible for the product and market strategy for IBM's messaging, collaboration, communications, and productivity products, including Lotus Notes and Domino, IBM SmartCloud Notes, IBM Sametime, Lotus Symphony, IBM Docs, and other related social business solutions. Ed also continues to writes the blog, Ed Brill, Collaboration, technology, travel, and more.  The latest tagline also includes the word Chicago after travel.

Ed supplied an excellent summary of his blog experiences in a December 26, 2004 post, The blogging year in review. “When I started blogging a little over two years ago, I had little sense as to where the endeavor might lead.  I've enjoyed writing all my life, and initially, I thought that this would be little more than an online journal, gratifying to compose. In the first year in review posted in 2003, Ed said, “I didn't talk much about the professional aspects of blogging.  At the end of the second year, it is hard to consider much else.  For 2004 is when this blog turned a corner from outlet to focal point, from hobby to vocation, and from carefree to considered.”

Ed said in our 2005 interview, ”Some of that transition started the very week after I penned the 2003 retrospective, as I entered a time which was personally very intense, leading up to and beyond Lotusphere.  More of it happened during widely-watched blog world activities in the second half of 2004.  As I re-read all my 2004 blog entries over the last few days, it became clear that my blogging style has changed considerably in that time.”

This late 2004 post continues with an excellent summary of his activities. By then he had about 10,000 hits a day and was in the top 1% of Technorati ranked blogs. Ed reported that he initially began blogging, to have an outlet for writing about new products, market trends, competition, but also about general life -- travel, marketing, even family.  Ed felt that his original objectives for his blog have been met, as they were fairly narrow in scope. He added, “I've made blogging an integral part of my communications.” 

By the time we spoke Ed’s blogging objectives had evolved substantially.  His readership had become broad and diverse, but 90% composed of IBM customers/partners.  As such, Ed had to narrow the topical focus -- He mostly wrote about the collaboration software market the time, with occasional travel or other life tidbits thrown in.  The blog now had an impact on the market, so it was no longer simply a hobby for Ed.  Within that context, his revised objectives continued to be far exceeded -- reaching more customers than he thought possible, with more positive impact for IBM than expected.

Ed’s biggest challenge came when he went through a period of time that all bloggers do, where he felt like he was a slave to the blog.  Ed reported that he had the standard feeling that if he wasn't updating daily, he would lose the readership.  Ed had gone through "dry spells" where he didn't think he has enough interesting content.  

Ed found that his challenges were just a blogging maturity issue.  As the readership grew, and the technology used to read blogs (RSS) became mainstream, he didn't feel as much pressure from the blog.  He felt that, “RSS is a very "forgiving" technology -- gives readers more control over what they want to read, and gets me away from the "must blog to keep readership" mindset.”

Ed maintained good relationships with his communications and legal teams to ensure that any questionable content could be discussed openly.  Since Ed was, and still is, an official spokesperson for IBM, he has been "press trained" and is very aware of what is or is not appropriate to say in public.   

Ed advocated the need for companies to have some kind of open-yet-controlled policy towards blogging.  Ed commented, “Blogging is not a fad, and it can be incredibly advantageous to corporations.  There's a way to make it useful yet not porous.”

Whne we spoke in 2005 about half of Ed’s content was commentary on other web content -- usually press articles about IBM, Microsoft, and other major collaboration vendors.  Another 30% was original content about things going on within IBM or the market.  The remaining 20% was the human face -- travel adventures, new geek toys, people news.

Business owners can find a variety of useful information on Ed’s blog.  If they are a software consultancy, they might learn of new opportunities to leverage IBM software.  If they are more like a law firm or doctor's office, he believed his blog would be of less value.

Ed read the blogs of small or independent consultancies in his marketplace.  Ed found that their perspective wasn't always mainstream, but he usually learns of interesting projects.  He did find that in 2005 that too many of the small/solo consultancies in his field who blog, spend too much time straying off topic.  He felt that maybe that will change.

Ed enjoyed reading the blogs of his customers and business partners. Outside of that, he read a few blogs that are more general IT industry focused. During the 2004 election, Ed was quite addicted to some of the political blogs. In 2005 Ed also wrote for Chicago version of metblogs.com, a group blog about life in Chicago. I notice that the topic, Chicago, has been added to his own blog since the interview. Ed found this an interesting format, but he was not sure how broadly they were developing readership.

Ed offered the following advice to have for others in large organizations thinking about starting a personal blog?

1. Focus.  Make sure you have a topic or topics in mind and try to stick to them.  Stray too far a field and you'll lose readers.
2. Stay within the lines.  Blogging must still respect an organization's business conduct guidelines.  Don't disclose anything you wouldn't want to show up in the Wall Street Journal -- even un-attributed.
3. Remember that "lurkers" far outnumber those interacting with you on your blog.  What you write can echo far beyond who you think will see it, and lives forever in Google.
4. Watch for slang and colloquial expressions -- you are writing for an international audience.  
5. Measure the weight of your words.  I rarely make negative comments about my customers or partners, even when they do stupid things (and they -do-).  To say anything negative has a silencing effect on a much broader population.  Conversely, I have found that people take my recommendations more strongly than they deserve -- apparently a place on my "blogroll" is coveted, which I never expected when I started it.

I think his advice is still quite relevant. It is great to see that Ed continues to publish his blog despite what must be a very busy schedule. 

 

IBM Global CMO Study: Highlights

I am looking forward to attending IBM's Connect 2013 next week. Here is a relavnt post. In IBM's 2011 IBM CMO Study they interviewed more than 1,700 of the world’s most prominent Chief Marketing Officers – face to face – to find out what they feel is important for their success. These executives control many billions in marketing expenditures. IBM found that these CMOs “painted a picture of a marketing landscape in the midst of major changes.  At the same time that the average CMO is trying to figure out how the tsunami of social media – blogs, Twitter – is impacting the company brand, he or she is being asked by the boss – the CEO – to demonstrate the return on investment of marketing activities.”

IBM reported that while Investments in IT have long been the domain of the CIO, this is changing as CMOs increasingly impact IT investments in our changing social and digital world. For example IBM found that 82 percent of CMOs say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years. By 2017, the CMO will have greater control of the IT budget than the CIO, according to Gartner. Marketing budgets will grow 7-8 percent over the next 12 months, which is 2-3 times that of IT budgets. However, despite their growing reliance on technology and their soaring budgets, CMOs readily admit they lack the skills that IT requires.  According to the IBM CMO Study, while 79 percent of CMOs expect high levels of complexity in their job over the next five years, only 48 percent feel prepared to deal with it.  

They conclude that given the business realignment between marketing and technology, the CMO and CIO can no longer afford to operate on separate stages. To succeed, they'll have to forge a shared agenda to deliver business results through innovation and efficiency. Both sides need each other as never before. This alignment between business and IT has always been essential but it is even more so now.

There were fours key trends: data explosion, social platforms, channel and device choices, and shifting demographics. The world generates 2.5 quintrillon bytes of data daily. Over 90% of the world’s data has been generated in the past two years. CMOs struggle to get meaningful insights from all this data. Social platforms have put customers in the driver’s seat and require that marketing efforts become two-way communication.  The growing number of devices from smart phones to tablets is leading to the rise of mobile commerce. The revenue from this mobile commerce should rise to $31 billion by 2016. Finally, shifting demographics are occurring around the world from the expanding middle class in India to the rising proportion of Hispanics in the US. All four of the trends have a significant impact on the CMOs job.

To meet these changing demands, IBM has announced two web experience software suites, the IBM Customer Experience Suite and the IBM Intranet Experience Suite. The two software suites help CMOs and CIOs, respectively, better reach and engage with their audiences.

 The new IBM Customer Experience Suite provides CMOs with the ability to manage and integrate all types of data on their web sites and then analyze it for deeper insight into customer buying patterns and sentiment. Web data has evolved today to include social media, videos, and web-based forms, as well as traditional enterprise data such as financial, customer and order data, and transactions.  The software suite pulls together IBM's enterprise portal, web content management, forms, and enterprise social networking software into a single view.

The new IBM Intranet Experience software brings the power of social and analytics capabilities to CIOs and lines of business employees to help organizations innovate and evolve their internal operations and communications. This solution pulls together company information and data, personalized content and news, and social media and analytics, enabling employees to connect, collaborate and access information at anytime, from anywhere. This is essential as according to IDC, employees typically see up to a 30 percent increase in productivity using social tools internally to complete their work. With unlimited access to any type of information on the Web, consumers expect this same level of information availability in their professional lives.

I like IBM approach to social business as it includes both internal employee aspects and external customer aspects, as well as the integration of the two. In the changing digital world this integration is critical for success. 

Moxie Integrates with Microsoft Dynamics CRM

I have covered Moxie Software™, enterprise social software provider, before (see Moxie Provides Free Desktop Sync Capability with Moxie Spaces and Moxie Announces Spaces to Enhance Customer Engagement).  They now have announced a partnership with Microsoft Corp. to pursue a joint, go-to-market strategy offering Spaces by Moxie™ within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 

As part of the partnership, Moxie Software™ will provide Microsoft Dynamics CRM with comprehensive, multi-channel and knowledge base solutions for delivering superior customer experiences. Offered on premises or in the cloud, Moxie Software’s Knowledge Spaces™, Email Spaces™, Chat Spaces™, Web Self-Service Spaces™, CoBrowse Spaces™ and Social Media Spaces™ are immediately available to work with Microsoft Dynamics CRM. 
 Here is a sample screen of Moxie with Microsfot Dynamics.

The enhanced capability from this paring include:

• Single agent desktop that seamlessly works with multi-channel interactions to contact and case records within Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

• Automatic search of knowledge base from within the case record for faster resolution. 


• Ability to publish information from case record into knowledge base. 


• Proactive customer engagement on the website via rules driven chat and creation of lead/case records within Microsoft Dynamics CRM where appropriate. 
·         

• Accurate data ensured by allowing agents to update Microsoft Dynamics CRM from within the agent desktop. 

This seems a natural partnership. I have written about the need to combine the collaboration capabilities of the new social tools with the enterprise transaction and documentation apps such as CRM (see for example, Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions). The Moxie Microsoft CRM is a perfect example of this. I have seen a few other cases so far and think it will become a trend that others will follow.

Consistent with this trend, Yammer recently announced an integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM bringing internal collaboration to Dynamics. Moxie's partnership supports external/customer communications adding channels such as email, chat, co-browse, social media and also a knowledge platform to Microsoft Dynamics CRM.

BroadVision Offers Social Engagement Analysis Consulting Service

BroadVision has announced its new Clearvale Social Engagement Analysis Service. This service is designed to help Clearvale enterprise social networking customers better understand and measure how well the level and type of engagement occurring with employees, customers, and partners through the use of social analytics. I spoke with Richard Hughes, Director of Social Strategy at BroadVision to learn more about Clearvale’s social analytics offering. I always enjoy speaking with Richard. Here is one of our last conversations (BroadVision’s Clearvale Offers Integrated Enterprise Social Networking Platform).

Clearvale is an entirely new product built from the ground up with a focus on people. Richard began by going over the five main aspects of the Clearvale social business platform: fully featured enterprise social networking suite, a place for real work, a means to engage the whole organization, coverage for enterprise social ecosystem, and accessibility from any device and any time. 

I asked about how application integration is handled, as this is a topic of interest to me. It is also a capability that is essential to meet the middle three objectives above. Richard said that they have built widgets for immediate integration with Salesforce.com, SharePoint, and Outlook. They picked Salesforce because many of their use cases tie into an enterprise CRM system and this is the most prevalent CRM platform. They picked SharePoint because many firms want to keep SharePoint as their enterprise document management system and then have related conversations around these documents in Clearvale. They picked Outlook to allow people to shift conversations away from email and into a much better collaboration tool. These are three wise choices. They also allow for integrations with other apps through their open API so they have covered this requirement quite well.

Before we moved on to our main topic, Richard provided some context. Earlier this year they introduced Clearvale Social Enterprise Transformation (SET) methodology, a 90-day program for assessing readiness, planning, establishing, and refining a social enterprise ecosystem. The SET program is designed to help companies succeed with their social initiatives by combining social best practices, coaching, and a trial of the Clearvale platform.

One of the main benefits of social media is the transparency and subsequent data on employee behavior. However, it is often underutilized. BroadVision found that customers often needed more help in framing questions to take advantage of the analytic capabilities within Clearvale so at the 2012 E2 Innovate Conference in Santa Clara they launched their Clearvale Social Engagement Analysis Service. It is delivered as a stand-alone service or as a component service of the SET program.

This optional consulting service helps customers frame relevant questions and create reports to address the issues they are most concerned with. Here are some of the types of reports available.

• Social Reach - the breadth of interaction between members. Business social networks connect people but if members are not interacting with the content, they are not truly being social. Below is a sample social graph. Each person is represented by a dot. The size of the dot represents the level of activity. The lines show the paths of connection. In this case you can see a few central people and many unconnected ones. The data provides a road map for where interventions will be helpful.

• Participation Inequality - the extent to which levels of activity differ between different groups of members in the network. A successful business social network should encourage participation from as many people as possible so it’s important to know if a few very active users are compensating for a large number of inactive users.

• Inter-department Connectivity - the activity between different departments in the network. Good connectivity inside a team is important, however, high activity levels between other members outside their own department breaks down organizational silos for increased communication and collaboration. A sample screen is shown below

In addition to departments, these reports can be adjusted to show trends by other filters such as geographic locations as shown below.

 

I really like this capability as the reports go beyond simply counting contributions or comments to showing the relationships between participants within the enterprise. This gives a much clearer picture of the value received and where to focus further adoption efforts. Richard said that although this new service is delivered as a consulting engagement, the main objective to make Clearvale adoptions more successful, not simply to build consulting revenue. This is a good move for any firm offering social business capabilities as social platforms bring into play a new way of doing business. The tools are only the first step. The SET program and this new analytics consulting service will help firms take the remaining steps to succeed. 

Igloo Offers Comprehensive Platform for Social Business

Igloo provides a full featured SaaS solution for social business that bridges internal and external collaboration and networking. I recently spoke to Stephen Rahal on their latest moves.  They offer major product releases every 90 days and half of their new features are driven by customer input. Since they use the tool themselves, Stephen walked me through their own usage. 

Igloo strikes a balance between ease of use and configurability for the end user, while still meeting the requirements of IT.  Set up is easy as it integrates with Active Directory and provides a comprehensive means for application integration that I will cover later. It combines the file sharing capabilities of traditional intranets with the collaboration capabilities of a social business platform. There are activity streams, blogs, communities, events, wikis, polls, project workspaces, and discussion forums. Templates are available to use in configurations and the components are added through widgets so you can design your own system without any heavy IT lifting. There is also presence and profiles. Below is a sample home screen.

One of the features I like is the ability to separate activity streams from microblog chatter as you can see above. Many tools combine these two related capabilities and it can be confusing. In Igloo’s case activity streams are the auto-generated chronological records of activities around documents such as starting one, editing one, and commenting. Microblogging is the Twitter-like manual updates provided by users. Document sharing is enhanced by the activity stream notifications. Then anyone with access rights can see and comment on the document. This provides a much more efficient means than traditional email. You can see a document being shared and commented on below.

Project workspaces can have all the features of Igloo but they are devoted to a specific workgroup around an initiative. The leader can select the relevant components. One person can have multiple project workspaces to cover their different areas of responsibilities. You can see a sample project workspace below.

Application integration is key to making any social platform relevant to the business you need to be able to integrate the conversations with the transactions and incorporate these capabilities within workflow (see Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions). Igloo provides several means to this end. There are pre-packages integrations with widely used tools like Salesforce and SharePoint.

There is also an open API that can connect to tools like Microsoft Dynamics; Moodle, an open source learning management system; and other enterprise applications. You generally need IT support to enable these integrations but they are one-time tasks that take a few days or weeks in the most complex cases. To provide quicker integrations you can also embed a site within an I-frame but this is only useful when you simply want to present information without the interactions. The deeper integrations require the API.

There is a comprehensive widget library to help assemble the Igloo instance you want. Capabilities include blogs, search, RSS, calendars, forms, and wikis. They can be easily added or subtracted and arranged on the screen. Others can be reached through icons across the top of the screen. Some of the widget library is shown below.

Igloo has partnered with MicroStrategy for improved analytics. You can set up filters on factors such as time, projects, and people and then create reports. Analytics can look at activities, content, comments, and other factors. The next release will have even more filtering capability. The results can be made very granular and exported to Excel for further analysis. Below is a sample analytics screen.

There are gamification capabilities. You can also make comparisons between groups on metrics as shown below.

There is dynamic translation that currently works for English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. A participant who knows a language can confirm that they agree with the translation so others will know it is not simply a machine view. Mobile support includes cross-platform support for iOS, Android with future support for BlackBerry and Windows.

Igloo is being well received in the marketplace. The IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012 Vendor Analysis said that, “Igloo had the best overall solution capability rating from respondents.” It has also has appeared on the Magic Quadrant for the past 4 years. I like the ease of use, the flexibility, and I can why they are getting these ratings. 

The Joy of Getting Disconnected

Happy Holidays. Time to disconnect. There have been so many surveys about the addictive power of social media and the need to stay in touch with email.  For example a 2009 study found that It found that their sample used social media in the car (over 35 – 9%, under 35 – 40%), at work (over 35 – 29%, under 35  - 64%), on vacation (over 35 – 41%,  under 35 - 65%), on a date (over 35- 9%,  under 35 - 34%), and after sex (over 35 - 8%,  under 35 - 36%).  More recent studies find the numbers growing. With email it is even worse,

The New York Times addressed this issue recently with, The Workplace Benefits of Being Out of Touch. Sounds good to me. The problem is that most of us feel that if everyone else is available 24 hours, then we have to be, too. The article quotes, Dalton Conley, dean for the social services at New York University and author of “Elsewhere” (Pantheon, 2009), “Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy — if we’re always available, then we’re expected to always be available.”

However, the article goes on to say that companies are increasingly realizing that employees need to be disconnected from time to time and that “giving workers time to chill helps ultimate long-term productivity.” A survey of 1,600 managers and professionals and found that only 2 percent turned off their devices, even while on vacation.

There is a two-edge sword here. Having device to remote access allows for longer time spent away from your normal work place. I spent a month in Greece in April because I could be connected when I wanted to but I was disconnected for most of that time. Then I went to New Orleans for three weeks because of the same benefit. But you cannot stay connected the whole time or you might as well stay home. I also found that being disconnected for long periods of time opens me up to new ideas.

A few companies are recognizing this value as reported in the Times article. The Boston Consulting group is now giving team members a night off while others cover for him or her. You need to strike a balance here. The key is being in control. As someone who works part time, I now work online extensively for certain periods of time and then take whole days off and disconnected. While a full time worker may not be able to do this they can, and should take some nights and major portions of weekends away from electronic devices to participate in the real world.

Having written this post, I am going to reward myself with a long bike ride, but one enhanced by my iPod and leave my iPhone behind. 

 

Social Media and the Boardroom: Much Work Remains

Richard Levick recently wrote an interesting article in Fast Company, Social Media And The Boardroom: Critical Questions Directors Need To Ask. There is a convergence here of increasing responsibilities for boards of directors and the increasing power of social media. As Richard wrote, “from Sarbanes-Oxley to Dodd-Frank, directors have been subjected to new liabilities and new mandates for elevated levels of transparency and accountability.” At the same time social media has emerged from its niche marketing role to impact every company in many ways.

Richard writes, “Social networks are the venues where purchasing decisions are increasingly made, investment opportunities are increasingly weighed, and corporate adversaries--such as social activists and the plaintiffs’ bar--increasingly gain public support for their agendas.” Yet directors are often not looking at its impact. He reported on a study by Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance that asked 180 top CEOs, senior executives, and corporate directors how they approach social media’s opportunities and risks.

There is an awareness of what social media is and its potential impact but few pay attention to it as 90% report a basic understanding of this now established fact. However only 32% of their companies monitor social media to identify risks and only 14% measure social media sentiment about their organization. It gets worse, as only 24% of senior managers and 8% of directors actually request regular reports on their company’s social media engagement efforts and stakeholders’ social media sentiment. Then about half of the respondents do not even collect this information.

These are people who use social media as 65% of use social media for personal purposes and 63% utilize them for business purposes. Of that group that uses social media, 80% maintain a LinkedIn account and 68% are active on Facebook. It is surprising that they cannot connect the dots. This is not rocket science.

If they do manage to take their head out of the sand or off their own Facebook page (note 350 million suffer from Facebook addiction), Richard offers ten useful questions for them to ask gathered from three PWC audit people: Catherine Bromilow, Chris Wood, and Neil Manji. I will not steal their thunder or Richard’s as he lists them with commentary but they all make common sense.

Basically, boards need to take a comprehensive look at all aspects of usage within their organization, including how they, themselves, are using social media and its impact on their organization.  Otherwise they will get some personal surprises and their organizations will fail. 

CIO Job Requirements 2012

Rob Preston recently wrote about What CIOs Want In Their Successors in Information Week. Rob talked with four CIOs in the U.S. about the attributes they're looking for in a successor.  First, they want multidimensional leaders. This makes sense as the IT scene is getting increasingly complex with a number of transformative trends such as consumerization, the cloud, and mobile.

Dave Bent, CIO of United Stationers was quoted, "They may be brilliant technologists, but without the business engagement and leadership skills, they will not make it to the higher level." I would agree that it is increasingly hard to make it on tech skills alone.

Even within tech skills, you cannot be a specialist. Another CIO, Jerry Johnson, CIO of Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, emphasized the breadth of IT experience required: software development, infrastructure, operations, architecture, and project management. This implies that future CIOs need to move around their department and gather a variety of skills and perspectives.

Customer skills are particularly important for CIOs at technology companies, where the CIO is often asked to speak on the products use within the company. IBM is a big believer in testing inside first, then releasing a product to the public. Of course, not ever tech firm has over 300,000 enterprise users to serve as a means to test and refine products.

This need to speak to customers can extend beyond the tech sphere. For example, Rob writes about Kent Kushar, CIO of E. & J. Gallo Winery, who is comfortable at wine-tasting events discussing vintages and palate taste zones. Not a bad job to have.

Future CIOs also need to be team players. Then need to be able to stand up as peers to others in the C-suite and be respected for their leadership skills. They also need have brought home a number of projects successfully. In addition, they need to be self-starters and be willing to take a stand on an issue even it is counter to the prevailing views.

I would add that CIOs need to understand the rising ability of the business units to go around IT if they cannot get their needs met. They need to serve as a leader but not a dictator or they will lose quickly. They also need to understand the power of social busines

Results from 2012 SharePoint Study: Value is a Work in Progress

Vizit, maker of SharePoint collaboration and search tools, recently conducted a study: SharePoint Study: Insights into Content Use and Collaboration. There were 1100 participants who were responsible for SharePoint in their organizations. I thank my friend Marc Anderson for pointing it out. The key findings include the following.

Less than 50% of SharePoint content is actively used each month. Yet 41% of organizations store over 100,000 documents in SharePoint. At the same time many of these documents are not considered “corporate knowledge” as most organizations store 25% or less of this knowledge in SharePoint. Only 28% of SharePoint content is being authored or edited versus simply stored for reference.

Users are most often looking for specific content within a file and not an entire document. This makes the ability to access and share content via social tools critical for success. Over 60% of respondents said that users often email SharePoint files as attachments. Social tools would do a better job here and 71% say it is important to access SharePoint through social tools. However, few are offering this option as indicated below.

They also found that 31% of organizations have a social effort underway and 46% plan to deploy on with the next two years. Increased collaboration is a top goal for social initiatives and users frequently need to share content in social conversations. The majority of organizations deploying social initiatives use no success measures.

The key barriers to use include: lack of awareness that a document resides in SharePoint, search and navigation difficulties, and the time it takes to download and upload documents (see Overcoming the Potential Chaos in WAN SharePoint Deployments)

These findings are similar to other studies I have seen and make sense. It seems that SharePoint is often used as a dumping ground for documents of all types that are often not crucial to the organization. With the barriers to use mentioned above 41% of respondents said that content use is a disappointing number from an ROI perspective.

The study argues that to increase content use, administrators have to focus on these barriers they’ve identified—the first being simply making people aware that the content they need is in SharePoint. Administrators can use a combination of education and publicity. More importantly, they will need to change users habits so SharePoint becomes part of their work processes. However, only 21% of organizations currently integrate SharePoint into work processes. Much needs to be done here as this integration is critical for both SharePoint and for other social tools to provide real business value. 

They also found that 45% of organizations will upgrade to SharePoint 2013 within a year and an additional 23% will do it within two years. The main goal of this deployment is to support collaboration and 65% of organization use SharePoint alone as their collaboration platform. The most widely used additional tools are Yammer at 19%, Newsgator at 10% and Jive at 4%.  For those not planning to deployment SharePoint, lack of executive sponsorship and lack of perceived user demand are the top reasons.

This study shows that there is much work left to enable SharePoint to support the goal of the connected enterprise; the one that McKinsey has shown provides real value and predicts will provide even more value in the future if done right. 

harmon.ie Connect Integrates with SharePoint

I have covered harmon.ie before (see New harmon.ie for Office 2013 Simplifies SharePoint Access in the Cloud and Elsewhere and harmon.ie Mobile Brings SharePoint to the iPad). Now harmon.ie® has created a way to bridge the gap between Apple and Microsoft to create a unified social user experience for the enterprise across the iPad, iPhone and desktop with harmon.ie Connect™ for SharePoint. This new capability can unify the collaboration experience, wherever people spend their workday - on email and mobile devices.

Today workers often collaborate with colleagues in the office via email, which they can supplement with SharePoint, IM, unified communications and other social apps. This use of many disconnected apps can make the process difficult and unwieldy. Then, when employees leave the office, the experience can become even more messy and disorganized.

With harmon.ie Connect for SharePoint, document and social information from all sources appear in one window with a consistent user experience, in the office or on the road. For example, users can follow important documents directly from email or their mobile device. Any changes made on one platform immediately become visible on the other.

IDC MarketScape noted in its report, “Worldwide Enterprise Social Software 2012 Vendor Analysis,” that, "The ultimate goal of enterprise social software is to support a business' ability to surface information in real time and in context in a way that enables a broader business system of relationship. Customers will continue to demand broader and more specific collaboration scenarios that tie together internal and external constituents, deliver sophisticated insight into user behavior on the network, and extend seamlessly across mobile form factors."

To address this issue harmon.ie Connect for SharePoint has announced that they offer users the following capabilities: 

• Same Activity Stream across the Desktop and Mobile Devices – Any action performed through one harmon.ie interface is immediately reflected on the other ones, thus providing users with a consistent user experience. For example, simply connect to SharePoint sites or follow documents on the desktop and these become available on SharePoint for iPad. No setup or configuration is needed.

• Enterprise-ready iPad - harmon.ie makes the iPad enterprise-ready so users can securely edit and share documents directly from the iPad.

• SharePoint Mobile Enterprise Solution –harmon.ie offers at full SharePoint solution for mobile and desktop. Users can work in the office and on the road and not miss a beat.

• Distribute and Provision Apps – harmon.ie Connect support mobile device management (MDM) for distribution and provisioning of mobile users.

This integration makes a lot of sense to me and is consistent with the trends I am seeing across the social platforms. 

Wrike Provides Mobile Project Management

Many studies are showing the rise of mobile computing on both tablets and smart phones. For example, Forrester reports that by 2016, 375 million tablets will be sold globally and 760 million will be in use. In comparison it took PCs 20 years to reach that install base. Now 81 percent of firms expect to support tablets for employees. IBM projects that the revenue from this mobile commerce should rise to $31 billion by 2016. Wrike's own survey found that 80% of people work remotely at least a couple of hours per week.

To address this trend Wrike has launched brand new native apps for iPhone and Android to make quick and easy social project management available on the most popular smartphones. There is also a browser app for mobile platforms. The new mobile apps are free for all Wrike users.

These apps are more than personal productivity tools. They serve as a collaboration system to get members of distributed teams in sync. With the help of the new apps, iOS and Android users can access their tasks and projects on the go, monitor work progress, discuss issues in real time and accurately track working time. Wrike already had apps for iOS, but the new one provides much richer experience. They have designed the latest apps to look, feel and perform close to what their customers get when they use the full computer version of the project management software.

Among the most important features, Wrike's new mobile project management apps allow to view, schedule and share assignments on the go, create new tasks, check work updates in the Activity Stream, discuss work in real time and use the built-in time tracker. On top of this functionality, Wrike's native apps for iPhone and Android provide several handy mobile-specific features, including task reminders and push notifications.

This is a good move as tablets and smart phones sales now top PCs. I expect more software firms to make similar moves. 

Asynchronous Transparency Shifts Enterprise Conversations Away from the Oral Tradition

Each new advance in communication and learning technology has expanded the possibilities for communication, knowledge capture, and distribution. In each case it took a while to understand the possibilities and the implications. Much of sensitive communication with most enterprises occurs through direct person-to-person conversations, or at least through emails. Even users of email are becoming more aware of how public they can be. Now with the increasing use of social media, asynchronous transparent conversations are on the increase. What does this mean? The invention of the phonetic alphabet around 700 B.C. made enabled a number of unforeseen and unintended capabilities.

In the pre-writing oral tradition, the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic. To promote memory, instruction and knowledge preservation made use of verbal and musical rhythms; however, these rhythms placed severe limits on the verbal arrangement of what was said, as in Homer, and the need to memorize used up cognitive energy that otherwise could have been devoted to learning and innovation. Because of the heavy memory load, the epic poets did not actually memorize content verbatim; they created new versions from a set of possibilities as they went along.

The concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science, plays strong roles in many academic and legal matters, and is essential for many forms of instruction. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along and most likely keyed off their audience for direction and context. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. Greek thought changed and such works as Plato’s “Republic” are described by some scholars as an attack on the oral poetic tradition of knowledge distribution (see Eric Havelock’s “Origins of Western Literacy” or his better known “Preface to Plato”).

It you have an accessible visual record of thought it becomes transparent and can take on a life of its own, independent of your original thought. It needs to be carefully composed to convey your intended meaning to multiple audiences without you there to have a clarifying dialogue. If you are more skillful in the speaking, you can better spin your thoughts to fit your audience. You can look for reactions and make adjustments. If you converse better in writing you are composing thoughts that need to stand outside their immediate context and you have much less control over their interpretation.

I have seen a number of people within large enterprises showing great hesitation about the transparency that social media offer. When we hear privacy issues raised we should also look for concerns about being successful in literate communication.

 

Changing Minds Inside the Enterprise

There is a lot of talk about changing leadership styles in response to shift from tangible to intangibles assets becoming the most significant source of value to enterprises.  In addition, McKinsey has shown that the lower the decision making in an organization, the higher the operating margin. All of this calls for new leadership models where top down authority is no longer the best operating model.  

The balance of influence and power has long been a leadership issue. The most effective leaders have always led by influence and example and not by power. The social enterprise just makes this all more transparent. Research on leadership indicates that great leaders are those who share a vision that compels others to follow, rather than those who rule by power (Gardner & Laskin, – “Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership”). See also Howard Gardner’s more recent book on Changing Minds.

Here are some pointers from Changing Minds. This list can serve as a useful checklist of what to include, and be conscious of, in an attempt to change another’s mind (as opposed to simply doing a power play).

Reason – is there a logic employed, have the pros and cons been addressed?

Research – is there data to support the position?

Resonance – do we have a good feeling about the person attempting the mind change and/or does the new position feel right to us – can we connect emotionally with the mind changer?

Redescription – do we employ different ways to present the argument that build on each other?

Resources and Rewards – while rewards are useful, if only rewards are involved the result is more likely to be a temporary behavior change and we will revert to the prior position when the reward is withdrawn and not undergo a real mind change.

Real World Events – the context for considering the new position, such as the dot com boom and then the subsequent bust, can put it in a better or clearer perspective

Resistances – we need to be aware of, and address, possible obstacles to the mind change.

Real mind change is generally a slow process that involves all these factors, even when there is a sudden tipping point that takes us over to the new position. The tools for social business can accelerate things but also expose any attempted short cuts.

 

Social Business Advice from 1994

I am old enough to remember when 1984 was the distance future and now 1994 is the distant past. Here are some words of wisdom from Tom Davenport that certainly apply to social business in his 1994 HBR article, Saving IT’s Soul: Human-Centered Information Management. Here Tom presents a manifesto for building information systems that focus on how people use information, rather than machines. He suggests that human centered information management should:

1. Focus on broad information types

2. Emphasize information use and sharing

3. Assume transience of solutions

4. Assume multiple meanings of terms

5. Continue until desired behavior is achieved enterprise-wide

6. Build point-specific structures

7. Assume compliance is gained over time through influence

8. Let individuals design their own information environments

While these are general points that many of us might agree with today, they were more innovative at the time, the early days of knowledge management. They remain even more relevant today, especially the last three points. You need to focus on specific business problems. You need to gain engagement and compliance through influence rather than power and you need to have extensive user involvement in designing social business solutions.

 

harmon.ie for Office 2013 Enhances SharePoint Access in Cloud and Elsewhere

I have reported on harmon.ie before (see harmon.ie Mobile Brings SharePoint to the iPad and harmon.ie Provides Social Email to Help Drive Enterprise Collaboration Adoption), and they are building on this work to now offer version 1.0 of harmon.ie for SharePoint – Office 2013 Edition. It is one of the initial offerings in Microsoft’s new Office 2013 app store for Outlook. I spoke with David Lavenda of hamon.ie, who discussed this latest move.

According to Lavenda, the new plug-in for Office Web Apps (OWA) provides the same integration of SharePoint collaboration and social capabilities in the cloud-based email client as they do on the desktop. So harmon.ie’s newest product provides a user experience that is consistent across the Outlook desktop and Web clients, as well as on iPads and iPhones, enabling users to perform collaboration tasks such as uploading a document to SharePoint using drag-and-drop and replacing attachments in outgoing emails with SharePoint links with a single click.  Below is a sample desktop screen of harmon.ie for SharePoint.

Here is a sample screen for harmon.ie for Office 2013, v 1.0.

And here is iPad screen for harmon.ie Mobile.

I mentioned that integration is a recurring theme I have been hearing in the market for good reason. Social software does not realize its value unless it can integrate with traditional work apps like Office and SharePoint. Now harmon.ie offers the glue that connects SharePoint to these widely used Microsoft products, bringing collaboration to workers, where they work.

It takes about 30 seconds to download and install the desktop version from their Web site and the mobile version from the iTunes store. All of the integrations are then immediately put in placevia an automatic install. Once you register your SharePoint site and enter your credentials, you’re good to go.  Gone are the days of laborious systems integration efforts.

In addition to integrating SharePoint collaboration functions, harmon.ie adds social capabilities such as an activity stream from SharePoint to follow documents and people. This capability is not in SharePoint but is part of what harmon.ie brings. Its client-side analytics will also suggest new colleagues to connect with based on who you are working with, what documents you are sharing, and even your Outlook email activity.

This is a great move and I am sure it is welcomed in the SharePoint world. 

 

Presenting KM Vision Session at KM World 2012

I will be attending KM World again this October in Washington DC. I have made all the DC sessions and many of 16 other sessions, including the first three in Santa Clara. The 16th annual KMWorld Conference will be held on October 17 – 19, 2012 at the Renaissance Washington DC.

This year I am co-leading the session, What’s Your KM Vision?, on Wednesday at 10:15AM. It is part of a track that is designed to promote more conversation. They are discussion stream with a roomful of colleagues at roundtables that focus on a series of topics of interest to KM practitioners. My co-leaders are Stan Garfield, Community Evangelist, Consulting - Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited & Author, Implementing a Successful KM Programme and Kent A Greenes, Founder - Greenes Consulting GWU, CSUN, Army War College, KMPro, TCB.

Our session builds off a SI/KM Forum discussion on February 2012. Stan asked this question to the KM leaders community he leads: “If knowledge management is working really well for an organization, what does it look like, and how does it work? Please reply with your vision for the ideal state, with as much specific detail as possible to avoid high-level generalities.” A lively discussion ensued. This panel shares the highlights of that discussion and the views of each of the panelists and solicits the ideas of the session attendees.

I hope you can attend. I will also be reporting on many of the other sessions in this event with primary coverage appearing on the AppFusions blog, Connecting the Enterprise.   Here are my notes from KM World 2011 and KM World 2010. 

Why It is Critical to Overcome Failure in SharePoint WAN Deployments

This is the conclusion of a six part series, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon.  

Addressing responsiveness for collaboration applications like SharePoint is not an option. Business users have increasingly high expectations and expect IT to deliver. Realizing the benefits of the networked enterprise documented by McKinsey and others is now a competitive necessity and this effort cannot fail because of poor applications performance, especially when it affects so many people.

This potential for chaos will not go away: it will only get worse with the projected rise in SharePoint usage. According to Bill Gates, SharePoint is the fastest-growing server product in Microsoft’s experience, and his goal is to have SharePoint available to all workers in much the same way that Office is the standard personal productivity suite. Microsoft is well on the way to making this happen, currently adding some 20,000 SharePoint users a day.  IT departments need to prepare for this pervasive presence by making SharePoint WAN-worthy, or they will face a massive user revolt.

To exacerbate the situation, the dramatic rise of mobile communication for collaboration, as noted by Forrester and others, and the resultant further increase in WAN traffic, can make matters even worse for SharePoint performance. For example, Cisco forecasts that in the next five years, IP traffic generated by Wi-Fi and mobile devices will increase from 45% to 61%, exceeding wired IP-generated traffic. It is imperative to address and fix the SharePoint WAN performance issues now, to help make users more productive and thereby positively impact the enterprise top and bottom lines. 

This concludes my six part series on Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success. If you want to start at the beginning go to the first post, Overcoming the Potential for Chaos in WAN Sharepoint Deployments. 

How We Can Overcome Failure in SharePoint WAN Deployments

This is the fifth of a six part series, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon.  

There is an answer to the SharePoint WAN performance issue. Organizations can overcome WAN performance limitations and avoid major productivity losses, massive user revolt, and reactive unplanned investments to fix them. According to Gartner, adding a third party WAN Optimization Solution can improve SharePoint response times in a WAN environment by up to 10 times, and in some cases reduce bandwidth requirements by up to 95%.

Organizations must consider Wan Optimization/Application acceleration solutions that provide the following:

• Network Optimizations with traffic prioritization and link usage optimization

• Application/SharePoint-specific optimizations with object handling and page rendering acceleration

• Robust Data reduction through data compression and data deduplication

• Security through the ability to optimize SSL traffic

• A virtualized solution  with support for multiple hypervisors

• Support for smaller offices through virtualization or  Windows-based solution

• Management through centralized management and deployment wizards

Different paths lead toward success in different situations:

• For existing deployments: Try a pilot with a select group of users or a specific sub-application to get feedback on the user experience and measure the performance improvements. Roll out more widely if the pilot is successful.

• For new deployments: Include WAN Optimization/ Application Acceleration in the planning process.

There are a couple of categories of available solutions to address the WAN optimization/Sharepoint Acceleration issue:

Software-only, hardware and hypervisor agnostic solutions like those provided by Certeon.

or

Physical Appliance-based, proprietary software/hardware solutions like those provided by Riverbed.

In my next, and last, post in this series I cover: Why It is Critical to Overcome Failure in SharePoint WAN Deployments

 

 

Why We Often Overlook Application Performance During Deployment

This is the fourth of a six part series, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon.  

Why has application performance over Wide Area Networks been overlooked, when it is so critical for success? As we deploy enterprise applications, we generally look at issues like user friendliness, available features, and integration with business applications, along with the human issues associated with adoption. I have written about all of these factors on a number of occasions, but have been remiss in acknowledging the full range of user-experience attributes, especially in a distributed environment and specifically over the WAN.

One reason for overlooking performance issues is that these symptoms are only now emerging with the widespread increase in SharePoint deployment in distributed environments over WANs. It is always difficult to predict how patterns of SharePoint usage will evolve within organizations because the valid metrics that drive network decisions are rarely available. Too often SharePoint is simply added onto the existing network infrastructure without any serious analysis of the potential impacts. Then when problems arise, the wrong levers are pulled in an attempt to find solutions.

In addition to considering uptime or capacity issues, we need to concern ourselves with "click to work" application performance: the time it takes to open files and start using them. Application users, especially the new generation of users in the workforce, expect real-time performance. As we think about ways to increase adoption we need to consider this new generation of workers and look through a new lens.

In my next post on 10/1 I cover, How We Can Overcome Failure in SharePoint WAN Deployments.

Looming Danger: Failure of WAN SharePoint Deployments

This is the third of a six part series, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon. The remaining parts of my series will appear on this blog over the next two weeks.

The mix of SharePoint users’ requirement for instant access, coupled with the global distribution of the organization leads to a major  dependence on WANs and often leads to disastrous user experiences.. Effective collaboration can become the victim, and this can destroy the many benefits of the networked enterprise.

As previously noted, the potential for failure lies in the fact that many of today’s enterprise applications, including SharePoint, are built with a centralized architecture that performs much better in a LAN environment. Documents and pages can include Web Parts, style sheets and images that can slow down the downloadtimewhen accessed over a WAN, due to inherent WAN latency issues. A 10 to 20 minute document download , across multiple team members, leads to a huge amount of downtime . Downtime is unacceptable when seen on our tangible assets, so how can it be acceptable for the intangible asset that drives the value of the enterprise?

Downtime frustrates users and leads to a return to file sharing through email. Even more destructive, disappointed users may seek alternative solutions among the new breed of free content-sharing tools available on the Web. Employees can easily use alternatives solutions like Dropbox, Google Docs, Microsoft SkyDrive, and many other smaller, less well-known options. When use of non-sanctioned alternatives to SharePoint becomes widespread in an organization, serious issues such as duplication of effort, increased errors, inappropriate sharing of confidential documents, lack of version control, and lack of centralized backup and recovery can lead to severe security and control issues. This was already seen in mid-2012, when Dropbox admitted that hackers had compromised some of its user accounts. And security issues are by no means unique to Dropbox.

In addition, unsanctioned migration subverts standards for content management, creates a proliferation of content silos, and drives further enterprise content chaos. When users cannot get their job done efficiently using the tools provided, they seek alternative methods to help them work. It is virtually impossible for IT to stop the use of alternatives without addressing the core issues associated with inadequate user experience. System performance is a critical issue that must be addressed as part of the deployment. It may actually be more important than many of the features that currently have IT’s attention. 

In my next post I cover, Why We Often Overlook Application Performance During Deployment

SharePoint's Potential: Enabling the Networked Enterprise

This is the second of a six part series I wrote, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon. The remaining parts of my discussion will appear on this blog over the next two weeks.

McKinsey reports that creating a networked enterprise that effectively supports collaboration is both a significant opportunity and a competitive necessity in today’s business world. A myriad of benefits can be found in the connected enterprise that makes use of new tools (such as SharePoint). For example, from the results of a 2010 McKinsey survey, 77% of respondents said these new tools increase the speed of access to knowledge; 60% found reduced communication costs; 44% experienced reduced travel costs, and 40% achieved increased employee satisfaction. Similar findings were noted in McKinsey’s 2011 survey.

In addition, these surveys noted a correlation between higher operating margins and “a willingness to allow the formation of working teams comprising of both in-house employees and individuals outside the organization.” Effective distributed access to content needed for collaboration is key to facilitating this work and realizing the benefits.

These results are consistent with the rising percentage of business value derived from intangible assets, primarily people, as opposed to tangible assets such as equipment, buildings, etc., as reported by Juergen Daum. In 1982, 62% of enterprise value was found in tangible assets and 38% in intangible assets. In 1999, the enterprise value found in tangible assets had decreased to only 16%, with an increase to 84% in intangible assets. The increased value that intangible assets now provide to the enterprise underscores the conviction that productivity is driven by connecting people and information.  Freeing employees from restrictive information silos fuels the growth of wealth within organizations.

The shift to today’s more social enterprise requires a balance between control and collaboration. SharePoint is a tool that can meet this requirement.  As evidence, the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) reports that collaboration is the strongest driver of SharePoint adoption. This finding supports the view that SharePoint is primarily a user-oriented collaboration system with the included secondary value of providing document management. This differs from traditional systems that act as a vault to place files for a variety of compliance and process management use cases.

By supporting the growing need for content sharing and collaboration, the SharePoint platform is quickly becoming the heart of the enterprise. It has emerged as a market leader in the content and collaboration market and is on its way to becoming Microsoft’s first $2 billion business. Several factors drive this advance.

First, SharePoint is included in the Microsoft Office stack, and is available to IT organizations at a lower cost than many traditional content management tools.

Second, business users see incredibly robust capabilities on the Internet at large, and therefore continue to expect more and more from their internal, organizational systems. To succeed in today’s environment, businesses see the need to leverage their data. These businesses must effectively access, share, and centrally manage their data. They must collaborate and provide access to their data from an increased use of rich media. Users expect these baseline capabilities, and SharePoint is increasingly seen as the technology of choice by IT departments.

Third, enterprises are starting to move away from complex, rigid and difficult-to-implement document management systems, towards more flexible, user-controlled systems. SharePoint is a multipurpose platform backed by a common technical infrastructure that addresses this trend. It combines searchable document and file management resources ideal for collaboration and social networking. SharePoint’s functionality and resources also encourage the migration of collaboration away from the inefficient use of email systems overburdened with attachments to a central repository where all validated team members can easily find, view, and update and retrieve  the latest version at any time. This gives SharePoint an advantage over traditional IT and compliance-centric document management systems that require more technical development skills and support.

The increasingly distributed nature of today’s business world has created a highly decentralized work environment, with employees moving from large centralized facilities to remote, branch sites or even home offices. This also drives the need for enhanced support for collaboration. Forrester reports that only 45% of the US information workforce works solely from a corporate office, and anticipates that percentage to shrink. In a related study, Forrester also found that 66% of North American and European workers already operate remotely. Moreover, new policies are enabling many employees to work from their homes and accessing necessary applications over the Internet. Reuters reports that one in five workers worldwide telecommutes and this number is increasing. Forrester predicts that in 2016, 63 million US information workers will telecommute at least part-time.

This expansion of distributed work, coupled with increased collaboration requirements, drives the need for tools such as SharePoint, and an increased use of WANs to support them. Network usage, including WAN usage, has moved from a store-and-forward mode (typical of email systems) to real-time 24/7 direct access to content, data and applications.

However, the increased use of WANs raises potential obstacles to SharePoint success. I will cover, the Looming Danger: Failure of WAN SharePoint Deployments, in my next post. 

Overcoming the Potential Chaos in WAN SharePoint Deployments

This is the first of a six part series I created, Robust SharePoint Performance in the Emerging Distributed Enterprise: Turning the Potential for Chaos into the Means for Success, sponsored by Certeon. The remaining parts of the series will appear on this blog over the next two weeks.

The past 10 years have seen many changes that profoundly affect how businesses operate. A critical business necessity is now the ability to collaborate on an enterprise scale at the employee, business partner, and customer level. Supporting these interactions effectively is a competitive differentiator (see for example, McKinsey - The next revolution in interactions). At the same time, virtually every business and government organization has become distributed, stressing its ability to collaborate across different geographies, time zones, and even cultures.

These changes create extraordinary opportunities to increase productivity by  taking advantage of content, collaboration, and communication technologies. Recognizing this, Microsoft has made major investments in SharePoint, its content and collaboration platform. That platform has matured into an enterprise application that is currently experiencing rapid deployment (see, AIIM - The SharePoint Puzzle).

While SharePoint is fast achieving dominance, one major challenge stands in the way of it realizing its full potential: SharePoint’s centralized architecture often  results in long file and content transfer times for distributed organizations that depend on Wide Area Networks (WANs). 

This discussion covers these performance concerns, their origins and implications, and offers a potential path for success.

Although a deployed platform can meet users’ functional requirements and performance expectations, lack of application and system responsiveness can lead to chaos and  an ineffective workplace due to its negative impact on productivity and the resulting user complaints. All this can lead to a low platform adoption rate. This can cause chaos for enterprise IT – and potentially dangerous practices from a legal, regulatory and security perspective – as frustrated users take flight to the many alternative Web-based collaboration options now easily available.

Complaints from disappointed business units and users often lead to quick-reaction fixes that result in unplanned expenditures. Some companies increase bandwidth then and discover that the solution does not address the core problem.  Microsoft  recommends decentralizing application deployment, which creates a host of other management, administration, and usage issues.

This descent into chaos can be avoided. The solution is under IT’s control and can be managed by simply making improved user experiences (including those created by better system performance) a key part of the implementation plan. This series covers in part five a means to turn the looming potential for chaos into a path for success.

The next post in this series (9/24) covers: SharePoint's Potential: Enabling the Networked Enterprise. 

 

Spigit Provides ICON as a Free Crowdsourcing Platform

I have covered Spigit before (see Spigit Provides Version S3 as Market Matures for Idea and Innovation Management and Spigit – Enabling Enterprise 2.0 Innovation Through Market Games). I recently spoke with Shail Khiyara, Chief Marketing Officer, and Hutch Carpenter, VP of Product about the free ICON offering. Spigit’s overall company goal is to drive business growth and customer and employee engagement.  Spigit brings your community - employees, customers, vendors - together on a comprehensive social innovation platform, and connects people who have questions with people who have answers.

It is designed to make full use of the good ideas across an enterprise and help companies then implement those ideas by using traditional workflow to connect the right ideas to the right person at the right time. To do this it provides business context and relevance to the crowdsourcing concept.

This is an important concept as the value of companies is increasingly found in the good ideas of their employees. For example, in 1982 38% of the market value of S&P companies was within their intangible assets, the ideas of their people. By 1999 that number had grown to 84% and I am sure it is still growing. The key to creating wealth in today’s economy is tapping the expertise within enterprise, as well as getting ideas from partners and customers. This is the task that Spigit addresses and I have been a fan for several years.

Spigit allows companies to solve specific problems by tapping into the expertise of relevant groups in a focused manner. As Shail said, up to 70% of the cost of an organization is now its people. Organizations could maximize this investment and drive higher rates of engagement which would lead to business growth. At the same time much work needs to be done here as he also pointed out that up to 67% of employees are disengaged from their work. Engaging them in meaningful ways to contribute and become a part of the solution is an excellent way to improve engagement.  What once took managers and corporate hierarchy can now be done in the context of a community.

Spigit has launched ICON as a free service to promote the use of mass crowdsourcing with the purpose of innovation and growth. It combines best practices and knowledge gained from delivering Spigit’s solutions to the market. It lets employees connect with their entire organization by posing questions and challenges and getting immediate feedback from coworkers. They showed me a demo. Here is the home page.

Across the top of the screen is a serious of questions or challenges. You can decide which ones to take on. Contrary to typical voting mechanisms every idea in ICON gets equal assessment as coworkers and employees engage in a pair-wise comparison game of selecting this one or that one. The solutions the crowd finds valuable then bubble to the top of the leaderboard. There is room for comments and the forced choice method allows for more precise comparisons. Once you decide between one pair, a new one comes up to further refine your perspective. Over time you get a rank order of answers for an individual and for a group. Here is the question page.

There is also a gamification aspect as users can earn points and top leaderboard status by posting challenges, voting, commenting and “gifting.”  The screen also shows the top answers, the top experts (people most active), and the question activity. The latter is an activity stream for a question so you can track what is happening. The system is dynamic and is constantly being updated based on new input. As an idea moves to the top, an alert is sent to the activity stream. You can also see who is voting and when this occurs.

They have also announced a Yammer integration. For Yammer users looking to take advantage of ICON, Spigit utilized Yammer’s open APIs to build this integration, which publishes activity stories such as new ideas, challenges, votes and comments in Yammer’s Ticker in real-time. Yammer users can also log into ICON via the Yammer Connect button, using their Yammer credentials to bring their Yammer identity, profile information and corporate social graph with them. If a user has not yet created a Yammer account, it will prompt them to do so.

I think this is great idea to make crowdsourcing more accessible at a time when it is much needed. For now the free version is seen as a possible lead generator to their more comprehensive commercial offerings. They may add a premium version of ICON in the future. 

 

Good Advice on Content Marketing

I was pleased to be involved in the creation of a useful guide, How to Kick-Start Your Content Marketing - A Seven-Step Approach to Delivering Success, developed by Skyword. They engaged a number of experts in the effort including my Merced Group Partner, Catherine Shinners.

As the report notes, “content marketing is a more subtle approach than other, more traditional, marketing efforts. While the ultimate goal is to drive increased revenue for companies, content marketing is more focused on delivering information and advice that enrich people’s lives.” However getting people information that is useful to them can be complex.

This report outlines seven steps to make content marketing successful: define objectives, develop content strategy, establish process and technology, prepare site, cross promote POE, and measure, learn, optimize.  I was honored that they began the first step with some words from me. “You need to start with defining your business objectives and build your program and metrics around those goals. If you are not measuring against business goals, the whole effort is meaningless.”

This requirement applies to many initiatives, but it is also the one most often overlooked when we start to use a new technology or approach. We get focused on the new tools and forget why we want to use them. They define a common set of objectives for content marketing to get you thinking including: generating leads, increasing site ranking, increasing conversions, branding and engagement, and providing information.

The second step begins with sound useful words from Dave Kerpen, Co-founder and CEO at Likeable Media. “Think about the content that will be useful, valuable and/or entertaining to your customers and prospects. It’s not about you, it’s about them.” Know your audience is the first item on the strategy checklist. Then you determine the type of content, define and own your keywords, and more. There is useful detail around each item with best practices for each step.

There is an interesting graph comparing the number of views for news versus “evergreen” or non-time based content. They showed how the number of hits for news was significant the month it appeared and then dropped off sharply as to be expected. The amount of average hits for evergreen content builds over time. It passes the news in the third month and keeps growing. I have often found this to be the case. In most years on my blog, the majority of the top ten most visited posts are not from the current year, but prior years.

Content marketing is not for those do need a quick return. It requires patience and time. The report concludes that, “Companies that have launched the most successful content marketing programs understand the need for a systematic, long-term approach in order to provide relevant content consistently and efficiently.” I highly recommend this guide for those who want to undertake a content marketing effort. It is available as a free download. 

Garden of Good and Evil in the Cloud

The cloud is rising with the enterprise and the Forbes post, From Annoyance to Harmonizer: Cloud Computing's Maturity Curve, documents some of the issues in this rise. They reported on a new survey of 350 CIOs and IT managers, sponsored by Host Analytics.

On one hand, 37% of respondents reported they have been asked to take ownership of cloud solutions that were purchased by the business without IT’s input. In addition, data integration is a problem cited by 67%, and 39% have issues in locating where the data may reside. On the other hand, 92 % say adoption of the cloud is good for business and 67% agree that the cloud can help IT deliver better systems for less money. It turns that despite complaints, IT is the leading area of the business employing cloud computing.

They go on to note the selection by end users of their own cloud services can result in chaotic situations. Then IT has to clean things up. However, there is a realization that in the long run, it’s more productive to let users develop new ideas and innovations with this expanded control.  The longer an organization works with the cloud the fewer concerns it has about loss of IT control and security.

The business often starts off trying to work around IT, then the business urns the work over to them. The loss of visibility and control over applications is a problem that lasts for a while with 21% of the new sites running into this issue. It spikes for the next few years as 35% of companies with 1-5 years’ experience have this problem. However by the time the company has been wit the cloud for more than five years, these concerns drop back to 22%.

It seems that the answer is to get IT and business involved together from the start and not have these issues simmer and bubble up. 

 

eXo Extends Cloud IDE - Cloud-based Development Platform

I have covered eXo before (see Benjamin Mestrallet, eXo CEO, Looks at the Social Enterprise and eXo Offers Cloud Workspaces Enabling Flexible Social Intranets). eXo is a user experience platform-as-a-service (UXPaaS) company that supports developers. Recently, I had a chance to speak with Benjamin again about their latest offering.

Benjamin covered their new integration of Google App Engine with their eXo Cloud IDE.  He said that they started the eXo Cloud IDE project back over a year ago with the objective to make developers more productive in building and deploying cloud-based apps. It targeted the Java environment and has support for a wide range of PaaS environments, including Red Hat OpenShift, Salesforce Heroku, CloudBees, and VMware Cloud Foundry. eXo Cloud IDE has exceeded their expectations with over 20,000 enterprises with up to 5 developers each. You can develop a Java app online and deploy it as a PaaS. Here is a sample debug sequence. First, an inspect screen.

Then a debug screen.

The addition of support for the Google App Engine opens up a world with thousands of apps and hundreds of thousands of developers. Benjamin said that they picked the Google App Engine environment as it is the dominant platform and will drive significant traffic to their site. Google wants more people to use the Google App Engine, and eXo Cloud IDE makes it easier. Benjamin said that there has been a big increase in traffic with a number of developers spending five hours per day or more on the service. Prior to this, two hours a day was generally the high end of time spent on their service. Below is a sample Google Apps Engine support screen.

There is a strong trend to take apps from the desktop to the cloud. Benjamin said there is a corresponding trend to take app development to the cloud. This makes a lot of sense as it cuts off development time and costs. It also facilitates easier collaboration between developers. Linking a Google App Engine account to eXo Cloud IDE is a simple process that takes only seconds. There is no need to download and configure separate tools. In all, a developer new to eXo Cloud IDE can create a new project, connect to GitHub, debug and deploy an app directly to Google App Engine — without leaving the browser — in less than five minutes. Here is a five-minute video that shows how easy it is to deploy apps to Google App Engine. With every recent survey showing significant increases in movement to the cloud, this move makes a lot of sense. It is free.

 

Treating People as People, Not as Tasks

Here is another thoughtful article on what should be the top management theme of this decade. It is also a good follow on to my post on Labor Day. Hopefully it gets resolved in this decade. Louise Altman, Partner, Intentional Communication offers us - Humanizing Workplace Relationships – People Aren’t Tasks. The tag line is the most significant concept. I recently re-watched an excellent video produced by the BBC in 1997, Intellectual capital: The New Wealth of Nations. It made the same point. The film portrayed the industrial revolution as a plague on people where workers were treated as mere extensions of machines.

Now the percentage of tangible assets in the corporations in the S&P 500 has shifted from 66% in 1982 to 16% in 1999 and likely continues to fall (see Juergen Daum, Intangible Assets and Value Creation). In its place is the rise of intangible assets as the creators of wealth. These are mostly the ideas in people’s minds. Yet, as Louise points out many organizations are still managing people as though the wealth was created by tangible assets, machines, and people are just servants of these machines.  The wealth now comes from treating people as human assets and releasing their creativity to enable innovation and new wealth in organizations. McKinsey found in 2010 that the lower the decision level was in the organization, the higher operating margin. Top down authority is the enemy of profits.

Top down authority is also the enemy of employee engagement and so many studies show high levels of workplace disengagement. What would you want to disengage your most powerful creator of profits?  In the old days, no manger who think about turning off the production line machines and yet they often do this to today’s creators of wealth.

Many organizations still persist in old ways. Louise quotes, Tim Leberecht, “There appears to be a fundamental chasm between individual human behavior – which is expansive and multidimensional, ranging from the rational to the wildly irrational, sentimental and unpredictable – and the design of organizations, rational, practical, results oriented and engineered to perform consistently.” 

I hope this issue does get resolved in this decade for the sake of the emotional, physical, and financial health of the world.

 

 

My New Role with AppFusions

I am pleased to announce my new role working with the AppFusions team on the re-launch of their blog, Connecting the Enterprise --technologies and people daily. It is an “ongoing resource and viewpoint from AppFusions on the value of connecting business and engineering systems.”

AppFusions provides application integration connectors for a variety of vendors such as Atlassian, IBM, Jive, iRise, Box, GoogleDocs, Dropbox, UserVoice, Alfresco, and more in the hopper. They also closely collaborate with their partner Contegix for turnkey hosted and integrated deployments for their customers. AppFusions' connectors can play a major role in realizing the great cross-system efficiencies and potential when bringing engineering and business systems together (Enterprise 2.0).

Off-the-shelf integration solutions can enable serious breakthroughs in establishing essential Enterprise application connections quickly, and efficiently.

I am excited to be connected to AppFusions as I have great faith in both their mission and the industry potential to finally capture the opportunity of Enterprise 2.0. They believe, and I agree, that business information and process management should be handled by a collection of systems that make up an integrated whole.

To make this happen, connectivity is the key driver. It is the glue that makes real work happen. It brings the benefits of social systems to work processes, as I have covered a good bit on this blog (for example, Putting Social to Work, Integrating the Interactions with the Transactions, and Giving Social Media a Good Job).

Establishing modular system architectures in the Enterprise – from the same vendor or many vendors – from engineering to QA to marketing and the executive office – integrated systems provide greater flexibility, while also allowing an organization to pick and choose the best-of-breed systems for its purposes.

There are reasons for purpose-built systems, and a collection of many is stronger than a single-rigid system, especially if you can connect the strengths (data and workflows) of the different systems with common use case connectors vs. getting on an endless customization path.

AppFusions integration connectors bring together engineering and business systems. They bring together workflows, data files, and information between Enterprise systems for your collective purpose-built Enterprise 2.0 corporate solution of many systems. They allow companies to quickly and cost-effectively create the needed connectivity without going through the old-world pain of massive, costly, and time-consuming integration efforts.

The AppFusions blog will become the vehicle to tell this story and provide use cases demonstrating the essential nature of connectors. I will be doing interviews with many of the AppFusions partners, as well as providing industry commentary. Ellen Feaheny and others on the AppFusiosn team will also be providing a variety of posts. I invite you to check it out and look forward to my ongoing participation. Here is my post today, Doing Well by Doing Good, Humanizing the Enterprise. Here are some of the posts that I have provided so far:

The Business Value of Application Connectors

Summary of 2012 Boston Enterprise 2.0

Atlassian Makes Significant Moves into the Enterprise Market

Jive’s Platform Enables Comprehensive Enterprise Integration

Contegix Provides Total Cloud Care with Direct Managed Hosting

UserVoice Enables Customer Engagement through Online Support and Feedback

AppFusions’ Integrations of iRise® Visualization with Atlassian JIRA, Confluence

 

The Disconnect Between Management and Employees Runs Deep

Happy Labor Day. Here is a relevant message. I recently read an article, Are You Using Social Media as a Management Crutch?,  that focused on the different perceptions of Management and employees on how effective social media is. According to a survey conducted by Deloitte, 41% of the executives participating in the study believe social networking helps build and maintain workplace culture while only 21% of their employees agree.

It quoted Punit Renjen, Chairman of the Board of Deloitte. "Social media is a useful tool, but not when it's used as a crutch that allows leaders to appear to be accessible... when really, they are not." The survey goes on to report that 45% of executives feel social has a positive effect but only 27% of employees feel the same way. In addition, 38% of executives feel social media allows for increased management transparency; only 17% of employees agree. Some employees feel that face time is most important and some social media efforts by managers take away from this face time.

However, it you look further at the results you see some confounding trends. It adds that executives rank tangibles like competitive compensation (62%) and financial performance (65%) as the top factors that influence culture. While employees have a different view say intangibles such as regular and candid conversations (50%) and access to management (47%) rank higher than compensation (33%) and financial performance (24%).

So the firms surveyed have a basic and fundamental disconnect between managers and employees that may influence the social media results. If the employees already have a disconnect of such traditional issues as what supports a strong company culture and makes employees happy, then they are likely to see social media as just another way to distract they and paper over their discontent. I would not blame social media for this but the rotten preexisting culture of the companies surveyed. 

 

IBM Picks Up Kenexa To Enhance Social Business Initiatives

IBM has acquired Kenexa in a cash transaction for around $1.3 billion. I know about a bit about Kenexa as they acquired OutStart, a company that provides learning, mobile, and social media services. I helped Outstart with their blog for about a year prior to the Kenexa acquisition in January of this year

This move by IBM enhances its ability to support clients in adopting social business capabilities by gaining actionable insights from the enormous streams of information generated from social networks every day. This is one of the big opportunities that the transparency of social media provides. IBM has made a number of moves in this direction in the past (see IBM's Mike Rhodin on the Convergence of Social Business, Analytics and Commerce: Part One) and this latest effort is consistent with this direction.

Kenexa provides recruiting and talent management solutions through both Cloud-based technology and consulting services. It complements IBM's strategy of bringing relevant data and expertise into the hands of business leaders within every functional department, from sales and marketing to product development and human resources. As their announcement stated as a result of this synergy, “clients will be able to attract and develop the right skills to build the right teams, for the right projects, the first time.” IBM sees a big opportunity to apply advanced social business and analytics capabilities to front line business operations and I would agree.

Kenexa has approximately 2,800 employees and operations in 21 countries worldwide. The company will be integrated into IBM's Software and Services Groups. IBM has made more than 25 acquisitions the past three years, and closed eight acquisitions in 2012. Here is more on their adoptions strategy (see IBM's Mike Rhodin on the Convergence of Social Business, Analytics and Commerce: Part Two).

The adoption of social business technology is fueling the growth of big data and generating both the opportunity and the need for analytics in the enterprise. A recent global IBM study found that 57 percent of CEOs identified social business as a top priority and more than 73 percent are making significant investments to draw insights into available data. The survey also indicated that 70 percent of respondents cited human capital as the single biggest contributor to sustained economic value. This is consistent with the rise of intangible assets as a major portion of wealth within corporations.

 

JackBe Expands Real-Time Operational Intelligence with its New Offering

I have covered JackBe several times and watched their evolution from a mashup provider to using their technology to support a new wave of business intelligence (see JackBe Presto Takes Self-Service Business Intelligence Mobile and JackBe’s Presto provides Real-Time Intelligence with a Focus on the Business User). I recently spoke with Elizabeth Edwards, CMO, and John Crupi, CTO on what they are seeing now as they continue down the path of providing Real-Time Operational Intelligence.

John said that customers continue to want to have real-time dashboards that collect operational intelligence from multiple sources and bring it together for increased efficiency and effectiveness. Data center monitoring is one area where they are seeing real growth in their offering. You can see a sample data center monitoring screen below.

Data centers have become more core to organizations and maximizing efficiency is key to getting the investment returns that the shift to the cloud offers. In the past, data center mangers never had a holistic view of what was happening as the data was often all over the place. Here is another data center sample.

Another growth area is remote monitoring. This can be monitoring turbines, large engines, smart grids, data center storage, and even Twitter feeds. They used the term; M2M or machine-to-machine monitoring. The goal in their efforts is to provide more self-service for business users. JackBe Presto allows a tech savvy business person to create and set up dashboards that aggregate data from multiple sources. The goal is to allow the business side to do 80% of the work and leave the 20% of real tough stuff to the IT guys. Below is another ruse case – cyber risk threat monitoring.

They see their offering as part of the third wave of BI. The first was traditional data warehouses followed by a focus on data analytics. Now there is growing interest in real-time and big data. I asked John about big data as it is one of the buzz words de jure. He said that customers think of it as going beyond traditional data warehousing to look at the massive amounts of unstructured data. JackBe sees it as another data source they can aggregate. Most big data tools operate in batch mode but soon these sources can be connected to real-time data feeds to see new discoveries. The aim is to add a layer on top of existing tools, applications and information sources to bring the data together in interactive dashboards and deliver it where the user needs it – in SharePoint, portals or mobile devices, not replace these tools. JackBe adds the real-time operational component to existing organizational BI portfolios.

There will be a new release in the Fall with more self-services capabilities, more KPI builders, more attractive dashboard layouts, and increased ability to handle social data. The barriers between operational data and KPIs need to be reduced and that will be part of the next release. They have three big areas of focus: SharePoint, portals, and mobile. I look forward to seeing their next release.