Michael Fauscette

Enterprise Social Network - 2013 Part Two

In part one of this series we looked at the ESN vendors and how they are evolving to help companies increase productivity and facilitate new ways of working. For this post we'll focus on how the ESN's are being used and in part three we'll look at enterprise adoption and some of the results of successfully implementing and using the network.

Implementing ESN's, at least from a technical standpoint, is a fairly simple exercise. The process of getting people to use the ESN though, is not as simple as turning on the software. Getting employees to use an ESN involves changing company culture and individual behavior, so as such, requires a fair bit of change management along with the technical installation. From a best practices standpoint, it's critical to provide specific use cases to employees to get them to try the ESN. Without these specific use cases many employees will be hard pressed to justify adding yet another "collaboration" tool to their daily routine. In other words if you don't identify the benefit to the user there's little chance that the employee will even try the new tool. You have to answer the more than the "how" question, instead focus on the "what", "why" and "when" of using the ESN. Use cases answer these questions.

The possible use cases are quite diverse but tend to fall into these categories:

• Profile master: provide a single enterprise social profile for all employees.
• Strategic planning: Strategic planning requires a diverse set of business collaborators and the ESN is the perfect vehicle to underpin the planning process.
• Talent and expertise ID: Finding the right person or people to deal with an issue, answer key questions, etc.
• Marketing planning and execution coordination: The ESN can be the vehicle to tie the marketing organization together, both corporate and in the field. It is also the right tool to connect the marketing organization to it's other stakeholders from other executives to the sales and service organizations.
• Innovation management: See this post for more on the innovation process. The ESN is a great way to pull the voice of the customer out of your customer community and make it visible across the company.
• Product design and development: There are several use cases around product or service design and manufacture, including innovation management listed above. Other use cases can include co-innovation with partners or customers, collaboration across design, engineering and manufacture and tapping into a broader population of employees to include their collective expertise in the process.
• Sales Intelligence: Provide a conduit for providing a wide variety of sales tools, including access to  expertise that is scattered across a company.
• Recruiting management / coordination, new employee onboarding, and talent and performance management
• Tasks coordination and project management: Projects are inherently social and often get into trouble over lack of coordination and collaboration between team members, the ESN can alleviate many of these problems.
• Decision support: Maybe the strongest use case, bringing together the "correct" person / people and data in real time around a decision and/or issue is critical for a sense and respond business model (see this post) and the ESN is an important part of this new generation decision support system.

This figure takes a slightly different approach to laying out the use cases:

Those are the basic use cases we're seeing as we talk to clients and look at survey results. I'm sure there are others of course, the ESN products are very flexible and adaptable. If you have some other interesting use cases please share in the comments.

Tags: ESN, network, enterprise, social, socbiz, social business, use case

Salesforce Fills Out the "Marketing Cloud"

Salesforce.com announced its intent to acquire email marketing and marketing automation vendor ExactTarget for ~$2,5B or $33.75/share, ending a few years worth of speculation as to which marketing automation vendor it would eventually acquire. The leading contender up to last December was marketing automation heavyweight Eloqua, but Oracle ended that line of thinking by acquiring it for $871M or $23.50/share. The field was still fairly ripe with candidates including the other market leader, Marketo, which just went public last month. Other contenders could have included Responsys, Silverpop, and Yesmail. While Marketo might have seemed the most obvious target after Eloqua was swept off the table, there's a sense that it would have always been expensive and particularly now after the very successful IPO. Among the other contenders though, ExactTarget had something that the others were lacking, strong marketing automation capabilities from a product that was acquired last October, Pardot. Although only slightly under $100M acquisition, Pardot is a big part of the whole deal in my opinion.  

Make no bones about it, the price is high; and that makes one wonder if there was, as Salesforce hinted yesterday, another bidder? Who that bidder might have been though, is a little perplexing. Both SAP and IBM need a marketing automation solution, but neither seemed very interested in ExactTarget, although what happens behind closed doors is anyone's guess. In SAP's case I admit that I've though for a while that Marketo might be its target acquisition, particularly after Oracle bought Eloqua. I suppose the other bidder could also have been Microsoft, but again, that's blind guessing.

So why all the interest in marketing automation software all of a sudden? It's what I'd call the CMO opportunity. The leading enterprise trend today is focused on customer experience (CX), and the CMO is emerging as the key executive in most company's CX strategy. And the CMO role is in flux, requiring many CMO's to work way out of their comfort zone with lot's of new digital marketing technology. In fact in many companies the CMO is starting to feel like the Chief Digital Officer. Many CMO's are now managing quite large technology budgets and struggling to solve a deluge of new marketing and CX problems. Today, there are few "complete" solutions available for CMOs that are integrated and flexible to fit a changing / evolving CX strategy. This has led many marketing executives to end up with a fragmented and complex environment of disparate technology that does not solve their problem. CRM vendors are starting to respond and put together solutions and the battle ground is heating up significantly.

Salesforce had moved over the past couple of years to add social marketing capabilities by buying social media monitoring / analytics vendor Radian6 and Buddy Media but this still left a large hole in the middle of the marketing cloud. This deal is designed to strengthen the marketing cloud around the social assets by adding strong lead management, email marketing and marketing automation. Salesforce needs to broaden it's offering in the marketing cloud, which it had not really addressed in a comprehensive manner in the past. Its SFA offering is seen as very strong, after all it started with this pillar and in recent years it has added significant capabilities to its Service Cloud, but core marketing remained a question that now has an answer.

The addition of core marketing automation, lead management, etc. to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud should help position it more effectively against some of its key competitors, most specifically against Oracle, which has acquired several cloud assets for marketing over the past 18 months and has assembled a very strong set of capabilities, although it is still in the process of integrating some of the solution. The acquisition should also put pressure on SAP and IBM to add to their cloud marketing portfolios, which may lead to more acquisitions shortly. The big question will be how tightly Salesforce decides to integrate ExactTarget into the rest of the Salesforce platform, something that for now is an open question especially since it was indicated that ExactTarget will continue to operate as a stand-a-lone entity. Still, I expect to see some aggressive moves by Salesforce to go after its own customer base and compete more directly with Marketo and Oracle in marketing.

Tags: marketing, cloud, salesforce, oracle, SAP, exacttarget, email, digital marketing, CMO, CX, strategy, CRM

Enterprise Social Networks - 2013 Part 1

Enterprise social networks (ESN) are one of the oldest enterprise social technologies and have evolved into an important backbone of enterprise social activities. While some of the current ESN vendors, generally ones that started in some adjacent markets like blogs and wikis, have been around for over 10 years, the current set of key functions happened in the past 5 years. What started in much the same way as all innovative enterprise software, as a movement of small startups with some basic premise that work was changing and that business people were looking for new ways to work together that emulated the user experience of the public social tools like Facebook, and Twitter, but with enterprise grade security, scalability, administration, and manageability. In fact this market is a prime example of the effect of the consumerization of IT trend that you hear so much about. We've moved out of the startup phase though, and probably almost out of the consolidation phase. Over the past 3 years many of these smaller startups were acquired by the enterprise SW giants like Microsoft, SAP, VMware, etc. As this market matures it's time to take a look at the driving trends and the current vendor / technology landscape.

From a solution perspective ESN solutions are falling out into three categories, stand-a-lone ESN platform, embedded ESN solution and specialty ESN.  Stand-a-lone ESN platforms take the original "social layer" type approach by forming a new collaborative structure outside of the current enterprise applications. They can, of course, be integrated to other systems, but they don't take the approach of operating inside the current enterprise applications. The integration takes the form of pulling information / data and events into the activity stream out of other apps. In this case the activity stream of the ESN forms a soft of new UI across the other apps and data sources to which it is integrated. The two largest vendors in the market today, IBM and Jive are both stand-a-lone.

The second category, embedded ESN solutions, are the most recent developments and to me, offer the most interesting evolution of how employees are using the tools to change they way they work. These tools seem to be taking a few different courses. The simplest is to provide an embeddable "widget" that allows the company to place a connection to the ESN activity stream inside any other UI / application. SocialCast VMware was an early developer of this approach with SocialCast Reach. The second approach is to integrate the ESN into the vendors other enterprise applications, straight into the workflow at the obvious points where using an ESN adds value to the process or requires heavy people to people interaction as a part of the role's daily function. This would vary by role and application and need a certain amount of flexibility in the way it's executed. Vendors / solutions taking this approach include SAP Jam, Microsoft Yammer and Oracle Social Network (OSN). The final approach is to embed the ESN into the middleware platform that sits under the applications, allowing the solution to be exposed inside apps in the same way as the 2nd embedded type. In fact the two are very similar with one important exception, if the ESN is inside the platform, then anything built on top of the platform can be socialized, even partner and customer custom applications. Vendors taking this approach include salesforce.com Chatter and Infor Ming.le. All three approaches work and have good points and limitations. The important thing is to get the access to the ESN at the point it is most needed inside the work, not outside as another disconnected tool. This opens up a much richer business context for the interactions / collaborations, something I think is absolutely critical for long term adoption and significant productivity increases. It should be noted that all of these embedded solutions can also function as stand-a-lone ESNs, that important too, as some roles generally work most of the time in some communication / collaboration tool, sales personnel for example, who are used to working in email will easily transition to a stand-a-lone ESN, as that fits the roles work needs and style.

The third type of ESN is what I call the specialty ESN, that is it has some specific set of functions or deeper feature sets in a specific work activity like task execution. There are many examples of these types of network that are either stand-a-lone or embedded inside another set of apps. This would include solutions like Deltek Kona, which is social task execution / project execution solution or Workday.

Here's a chart that shows some more examples in each of the three categories, and although not meant to be an exhaustive list, does include quite a few vendors:

Also remember that this is a snapshot and that the vendors continue to evolve over time.

So that's it for part one of the series. In part two I'll look at the most common use cases and current adoption trends and statistics.

Tags: ESN, network, social, socbiz, enterprise, applications, EA, software, collaboration

SAP and the Cloud

Earlier this month SAP hosted the 2013 version of it's user conference, Sapphire. I spent three days taking a look at how much progress SAP has made in adapting and changing its business to meet the shifting landscape in enterprise software. Now I could spend a lot of time in this post going through every announcement and updating every area of SAP's' business, but honestly so many of my colleagues have already published that sort of post that it would be redundant to join them. So instead let's focus on the overarching change that is core to SAP's future growth, its move to the cloud.

Every traditional enterprise software vendor is dealing with the need to maintain its current (mostly on premises and hosted) customers while building out a cloud portfolio of offerings, and a strategy for transitioning its business and current customers. I've written about this quite a lot, recently here, so I won't go through all the issues but instead, spend this post looking at what SAP is doing and how far it has progressed.

SAP has gone through several iterations of its cloud strategy over the past 3-4 years. The "original" strategy, or at least the earliest one that I know, was to build out a mid-market SaaS platform and ERP suite, then over time, use what they learn with that platform to move the whole Business Suite to the cloud. It's a bit fuzzy actually how that would have happened, but since it's not a relevant strategy at this point, conjecture would only be an exercise in irreverent conjecture. That suite is called BusinessByDesign. It originally had some issues and was not aggressively sold, but once those were resolved, it has stayed in the product portfolio as the mid-market SaaS ERP offering, although in reality, you hear very little about it these days.

With the BbyD platform strategy focused on mid-market, SAP then went in a few directions, building / buying cloud line of business apps that could be sold around core enterprise ERP, and a platform strategy that involved a few platforms built and bought. Again, not much point in going through all the platform iterations, because except for River (more on this later), none of those seem to fit into the current strategy.

Two unrelated "events" refocused these efforts, the purchase of SuccessFactors in December 2011 (and subsequent appointment of former SuccessFactors CEO Lars Dalgaard to the executive board with responsibility for SAP cloud) and the development of the HANA in-memory technology. Most of 2012 was spent sorting out the strategy, with one significant acquisition, Ariba. As of Sapphire this year though, with credit to Lars and the team he built, that strategy is very clear. Here are the details:

• The first and most recent development is a shift in leadership for the overall SAP cloud initiative. As was announced last week, Lars Dalgaard is leaving SAP to join the VC community. As a result several staff changes were made. There is no direct equivalent to the position that Lars held, executive board and in charge of all things cloud. Instead Bob Calderoni, CEO of Ariba, is now responsible for cloud go-to-market (except sales remains under Bob Enslin) and continues on the management board (but not the executive board). All development has been consolidated under CTO Vishal Sikka. Bernd Leukert, formerly EVP of Apps Innovation, is nominated to the executive board responsible for cloud innovation and reports directly to Sikka. Gerhard Oswald assumes responsibility for the HANA Enterprise Cloud platform, in addition to his current responsibilities for support, SAP Labs, and solution and knowledge packaging. And lastly cloud, as regards the executive board anyway, is now jointly sponsored by the Co-CEO's. Lars Dalgaard leaves a strong cloud management team and a strategy that is much better articulated than ever before.
• From a cloud platform perspective this has been, in my opinion, the most confusing message for SAP in the past, mostly due to the multiple platforms. With the emergence of the HANA technology, SAP had a chance to sort out the platform story and that's actually what happened. Recently SAP announced two HANA based platforms, HANA Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. I'll talk more about the HANA Enterprise Cloud later in the post. The HANA Cloud platform is a full public cloud PaaS for app development and deployment. As such it is native multi-tenant and HANA that has embedded analytics, mobility services is self provisioning and provides an open dev environment that comes from the use of the River Java platform. This is the SAP public cloud platform going forward. There was also discussion that the platform might be made portable in the future to support private cloud installations, although when that would happen has not been discussed.
• The SAP line of business apps (LOB apps) is a growing portfolio of services that provide functionality that, for the most part, is adds on to the core SAP Business Suite or, in some cases replaces older on premises products. Here's a list of all the products. From an ERP perspective though, there is an offering for the small business, Business Cloud One, and one for mid-market in the BbyD offering. There is not, however a full ERP suite for the large enterprise in the cloud. According to Bernd Leukert, who I met with at Sapphire, there will be a re-platforming effort for these apps on the HANA Cloud Platform, starting with SuccessFactors and then Ariba. The HANA Cloud Platform is the SAP public cloud platform.
• The HANA Enterprise Cloud is the SAP private cloud offering. It allows SAP customers to move any on premises app to the SAP hosting environment. The service is sold as a subscription but the customer must bring their own perpetual licenses (or buy new ones from SAP of course). The solution includes managed services, customization and custom apps as well.
• The SAP Business Suite still provides the core functionality for the enterprise. It is available only in a perpetual license and can be deployed on premises, hosted by a partner or now, hosted on the HANA Enterprise Cloud. SAP has no plans to provide a public cloud version of the Business Suite or in other words, there are no plans to rebuild the Business Suite on the HANA Cloud Platform. The Business Suite does work on HANA with Netweaver, as was announced earlier this year, which includes a basis layer that works with HANA and optimized certain business processes to utilize the HANA capabilities (26 processes today with plans to end up with approximately 10% of the total number of business processes.
• SAP is making good progress on the cloud enterprise social network (ESN) front with Jam, which grew over 800% year over year. The key long term to ESN, I believe is to get them embedded inside all of the enterprise apps so that social collaboration becomes an integrated part of everyone's work flow. SAP is one of the vendors that has real opportunity to do that across the enterprise.
• User experience (UX) and mobile applications are both very important topics and SAP has made some progress there as well. To provide mobile access to important and frequently used features through a product called Fiori. Fiori is HTML5 based so is device agnostic. So far there are 25 new mobile, cloud apps available.
• For cloud analytics SAP launched Lumira Cloud, a rename of project Photon as a cloud based extension of the SAP Visual Intelligence, which is now called Lumira. It supports HANA and multiple file types like MS Excel, Crystal Reports and BusinessObjects Design Studio. BusinessObjects On-demand continues as another cloud based analytics offering as well.

SAP is making progress in executing on its cloud strategy. The concept of focusing on higher value LOB apps seems to be paying off and finally having a single cloud platform story should prove to be a great decision. The one whole still remains though, what's the next generation of the Business Suite that gets it to the public cloud? As with any transition, it's about execution in the end, so the story will play out over the next few years.

Tags: SAP, ERP, cloud, sapphire, HANA, analytics, businessobjects, social, ESN, CX, applications

Building a Customer Experience Strategy

This sounds like an ambitious post and I guess it is, but let me say up front that there is no "one size fits all" answer to how to build a customer experience strategy. There are though, some things that you should consider and some tips that are working for some of my clients.

What is customer experience? I'm not going to spend pages trying to define it here, but basically CX is your company strategy that is built to create a company environment that is focused on understanding and meeting customer expectations. A "good" customer experience occurs when expectations are aligned with experience to create satisfaction. CX then,  is built on a comprehensive strategy or game plan that is defined by your brand attributes and by customer expectations. The strategy defines the intended experience from the customers perspective. Once you've defined the experience then create it, align culture, organization, processes, technology and products / services to the strategy.

The first step in building any CX strategy is understanding your customer; who are they, what do they expect, how do they expect you to act and when do they want interaction. In this data collection exercise, which by the way, is on going to support a flexible strategy and proper execution, you're looking for actionable, data driven insights that can be used to build a customer experience roadmap. Roadmap and strategy in hand, then here are a few tips that have helped companies work through the complex steps to support ongoing execution of the strategy:

1. Organizational model: If you believe that only employees that are considered "customer facing" are involved in CX, you need to step back and rework your strategy. Everyone in your company is involved in CX. Delivering the "right" experience with the "right" product or service at the "right time" to the "right" customer, requires the alignment of actions from every department. Think about it, if the wrong product is shipped, or the product quality is low, or the bill is wrong the customers' expectations are not met and their experience has suffered. If your organizational model is sound and you have built a culture focused on solving the customers problems though, you might be able to recover if quick and correct action is taken. In general organizational silos are the enemy, and a collaborative and empowered workforce can go a long way towards solving your CX issues. And don't forget about incentives, make sure that you are paying people to collaborate and rewarding them for the behavior your customer wants.
2. Culture: Culture goes hand-in-hand with the organizational model. Aligning culture to the strategy is the start of changing behavior to deliver the desired customer experience. Changing culture is not a simple or fast process, but there are solid change management technique that will work if you focus your efforts.

3. Listen - understand (expectations) - focus (employees and processes) - act: You are building the "I own your problem" mentality in your employee population. Build awareness that it is every employees' role to prevent friction points for the customer and that they are empowered to make decisions.

4. Sales Model: Don't focus on building your sales model, instead first learn how people buy / want to buy your products / services. The connected world has changed and often your customer knows a lot about your product before they interact with you. Instead of selling, they want information to support an informed buying decision. Understand how the customer wants to buy and then match that to your sales model.

5. Influence: In the past, when we segmented customers, we often identified a VIP group of customers, mostly based on how much the customer is buying or has the potential to buy. In the new information based economy influence is the new VIP. Instead of just focusing on the customer that are spending the most money, identify and treat your influencers like the special customers that they are. Influencers reach many more customers and prospects and drive a lot more business. Through analytic tools you can find and nurture your influencers and, in some cases even identify them before they reach influencer status.

6. Proactive: A CX strategy needs to be proactive, not just reactive. Build tactics that help you reach out to your customers and especially your influencers. Conversations are good and asking for feedback then using it to improve your CX execution is invaluable.

7. Delivery: Don't forget delivery as a key element of the CX process. Delivery is often the point where the experience has the highest potential to break down, so it is a critical component of the ongoing customer experience.

8. Mobile experience: Don't forget mobile! Now I sort of feel silly for saying something that I think should be very obvious, people use smart phones at a rapidly growing pace and will interact with your brand from mobile devices. I can't tell you how often I try to look up something from a company site only to find that the site provides a terrible mobile experience. I can tell you, that makes a big impression on what people think of your brand.

9. 1:1 feel: Notice I said 1:1 "feel" not 1:1 experience. I'm not suggesting that you need to always interact 1:1 with your customers, but what I do believe is that with the amount of data available you can scale the 1:1 feel and create mass individualization. Customers expect to be treated as an individual, not as a faceless entity. Now I understand that this leads to the discussion of knowing your customer at every interaction, a data problem for most companies but...

10. Identify your customer: Identify your customer at every touch point. this might be the most difficult technical issue that you face but it's absolutely critical. We all have multiple identities online and in person, tying those together is no small task. I believe though, that effective use of customer communities can give you the means to connect all those identities and is a critical part of any CX strategy. See this post for more on this subject.

11. Measure: You are trying to create a consistent experience quality across all interactions. You have to measure and act to effectively manage an ongoing CX program. Embedding analytics into all business processes is essential, but even more so is the culture that uses the data to take action.

12. Technology: This is a tough topic, there's so much that you need to do. I'd say the real underlying concept though, is integration to eliminate technology silos. CX touches tech across all your systems, and includes CRM, but doesn't stop there. You need a community platform, listening tools (social media monitoring and response), and the back office aligned to the CX strategy. The supply chain, financials, product development and design, manufacturing, etc. all have impact on your CX strategy.

13. Removing barriers: It's not enough to build a strategy, you have to create a culture of doing. Empowered employees solve problems and remove barriers. There are other barriers to consider, organization, incentives, collaborative environment, management alignment... I can keep going but the point is to spend time identifying barriers and then building a plan to remove them.

14. Listen - understand - focus - act: Okay, I listed this one twice, but it's just that important.

Hopefully this list is useful. CX is not a simple topic, but there are lot's of good examples and case studies that can help you see what other companies have done successfully. Having the mind set to listen, learn and take action though, is your responsibility.

Tags: CX, customer experience, CRM, technology, culture, customer, prospect, CMO, service, community

Recasting "Traditional" Enterprise Software

I spend a lot of time talking about change; business is changing, the way we work is changing, our expectations around technology and about the way we interact is changing (or has changed) ...I can keep going, but you get the point. We're in a time of near constant change. So what are the technology companies that have been around for 20+ years doing to stay current with today's business technology needs if anything, or are they riding past successes and surviving on their large install base footprints? History tells us that innovative companies that don't keep up with change eventually become like dinosaurs, extinct. This is true across all industries, when disruptive change hits often the largest incumbents are the last to adopt, if they do at all. It seems like there can be a built in latency or resistance to change that comes with success in some market segments. It makes sense, if you have significant market share why would you risk it on radical new ideas? The risk is, of course, that a company waits too long before shifting and cannot recover from the momentum that other, new companies gain with the new idea.

So is there a way to balance the two issues, maintaining a large customer base that often wants, at least for some length of time, to see incremental product improvement but avoid disruption; and prevent new innovators from rendering the vendor and its products obsolete.  You can't really talk about this much in a generic discussion, the specific industry twists impact it too much. So let's look at this in the enterprise software context. No one would deny that we're in the middle of several shifts that have to some extent, disrupted the enterprise software markets. The overall market has been consolidating for 7-8 years anyway, so the landscape is mostly a few very large vendors, a few successful mid-size companies with momentum in the new technologies or in some highly specialized niche, and then a bunch of start ups driving disruption, but most often being bought up by the large and medium vendors when they prove out the new technology.

Last week I attended two different vendor events, and what I learned at those events started me thinking about this topic again. While there are many new technologies that are tied to the changing nature of enterprise software, there really are four major technology shifts (social, mobile, big data and cloud) and a massive business and cultural shift brought about mostly because of the impact of the Internet on business and the personal use of technology. How vendors are dealing with the four tech shifts is I think, a decent indicator of their overall ability to adapt and continue to be successful. The two events that triggered this post; Infor's 2013 customer conference, Inforum; and Oracle's annual analyst summit. Let's look at these two vendors and see how they're dealing with the change.

Infor, while not so old itself (it was spun out of SCT in 2002 as Agilisys); is made up of a series of acquired products from much older technology companies. Before its current management team, many had written Infor off as a company where old enterprise software goes to die. That all changed two years ago with some fresh investments and a new executive team led by ex-Oracle President Charles Phillips. The Infor I saw last week is a very different company than it was 2 years ago, with some very fresh ideas and products.

The overall approach that Infor is taking to modernize its portfolio is somewhat different from what we're seeing from other traditional software companies. Rewriting each of the underlying products on a new platform, or consolidating them on a single platform, would take many years. It took Oracle 7 years to write Fusion Apps, based on the best business processes from PeopleSoft, EBS, JDE, Siebel, etc. If Infor took that approach today, the product would be ready by maybe 2019-2020. Instead Infor needed a way to provide a new user experience, easily integrate across all the portfolio, support platform agnostic mobile, support cloud, more easily support a hybrid IT environment and provide embedded social. They have done this through a new middleware product called ION (Intelligent Open Network). ION takes XML outputs (all events and transactions) from any application and uses that format to integrate Infor apps as well as other 3rd party or in house built apps. ION also includes workflow, business process management, decision support and even data warehousing of all of the XML docs created (now available in the cloud as well). 

One of the biggest complaints from customers relates to the dated and unpleasant user experience (UX) of many traditional enterprise systems. To overcome this issue Infor built an internal creative development organization called Hook and Loop, responsible for "creating experiences people love". The group is made up of ~82 designers, writers, developers, filmmakers and other creative individuals and is mostly focusing on UI design at present. The examples of the new UI that I saw at Inforum are very modern, clean and usable.

Infor is trying to approach the enterprise apps market with a deep vertical lens. This is, I suppose not surprising for a couple of reasons. First, I think that more companies are insisting that their enterprise apps be a a better fit to business requirements and industry vertical focus is important in that respect. The other reason it makes sense for Infor is the broad portfolio of products. Each of the acquired products and suites have specific vertical strengths that Infor can leverage as it builds out deeper micro-vertical functionality, much like Oracle in that respect.

In addressing the technology shifts, particularly around mobile, social and cloud, Infor made several relevant announcements. From a mobile perspective it is taking a device agnostic approach by using HTML5 to provide mobile "anywhere". Infor's social product is called Ming.le and follows the concept of providing social capabilities inside the enterprise workflow by embedding the ESN into the apps. This is key for getting broad adoption and IMO, the most effective long term strategy. Most traditional EA vendors are taking an approach to cloud that provides customers the choice and flexibility to choose the deployment and licensing methods they prefer. This hybrid offering model seems to be the most logical way for traditional EA vendors to compete in the short to mid term. Most of the apps are single tenant and are offered in the SaaS subscription model, outsourced, and on premises. There is also an IaaS offering to help with the hybrid deployments.

Oracle is taking a somewhat different approach that combines organically developed products on the Fusion platform with acquired apps. The next generation of Oracle apps, particularly in the public cloud portfolio is a mixture of Oracle Fusion applications and acquired apps and services. From a deployment model perspective it too is taking the hybrid approach, with the continuation of the Apps Unlimited products with the new Fusion apps plus the Social Relationship Management (SRM) and the Customer Experience (CX) solutions. Oracle of course, has the luxury of having a next generation apps suite in the Fusion product line that it started developing 7+ years ago to use as a foundation for its new cloud portfolio. In addition to this, Oracle has a broad set of vertical offerings built out of both acquired products and organic solutions, mostly on premises today.

To address the changing technology Oracle has developed a mobile development platform that can standardize mobile across all products. On the social front I already mentioned the SRM solutions, which are cloud based and include the Oracle Social Engagement and Monitoring Cloud Service (social media monitoring and response), Oracle Social Marketing Cloud and Oracle Social Network (OSN). The OSN product is Oracle's ESN and is becoming more embedded inside the Fusion Cloud apps workflow with each release. The SRM solutions are tied closely with the CX solutions, since social business and customer experience, as strategies and technologies, overlap significantly and are critically connected. I won't list all the CX products, but you can find them here.

From a go-to-market perspective Oracle is focused on continuing to offer hybrid solutions and customer choice for licensing and deployment models. That said, the company is really putting a lot of effort in building out a broad public cloud portfolio. The overall market is moving there, but honestly I'm not sure how fast that movement is happening, especially in core apps like financials that most enterprise companies have on premises and don't want to replace anytime soon. Investments are being funneled to solutions that offer quicker and higher return like ESN's and CX. Oracle has built and acquired quite a broad set of services, now it must move quickly to complete integrating those acquisitions and in simplifying its messages so that businesses can understand the Oracle Cloud. I heard Oracle start talking about solution sets more at the recent event, something I think is critical for the future. CMO's, for example, really need help sorting out a complete marketing cloud portfolio, something that Oracle is positioned to do.

Both Infor and Oracle are "work's in progress", but they both are making aggressive moves to meet the changing technology and business environments. Their approaches and how well they execute them will prove out over the next few years, along with several competitors.

Tags: cloud, CX, SRM, customer, social, mobile, big data, Oracle, Infor, change, enterprise, software

Is there value in enterprise gamification? Part Three

In part one of this series we looked at gamification and built some understanding on what it is, and is not. In part two we look at the areas of business that could benefit from using gamification and now, in part three we'll look at a few customer stories to get a better understanding of how these techniques and technologies can be used. I have to give a shout out to the folks at Badgeville for sharing some of their case studies with me for use on this post.

The first use case we'll look at is increasing employee performance by leveraging game mechanics. The organization for this example is Deloitte, or more specifically Deloitte Learning Academy (DLA). The DLA provides digital executive development education programs through a variety of content types. Their challenge though, was to get busy executives to actually take advantage of the content for professional development. With lots of competing priorities personal training and development investments often fell of the to-do list. DLA implemented a solution that utilized the concepts of points, achievements and missions to draw executives into learning activities. As the executives interact with content they receive points and achievements that are displayed on the users profile. A series of missions were created to provide a guided learning path and a leaderboard is used to create competition for expertise in several key areas.

As a result of the gamification efforts DLA saw solid results in only 3 months, including increased user retention and ongoing engagement as well as rapid adoption. Return rates increased to >46% daily and >36% weekly. Active users unlocked an average of 3 achievements and some of the top users exceeded 30 achievements. Within 6 months a user had unlocked the top achievement, a milestone that DLA thought would take twice that amount of time and users were using words like addicting and fun to describe using the training content.

The next example is using gamification techniques to increase external community engagement and use. The company is Engine Yard, a platform as a service (PaaS) provider. Engine Yard provides subscription based access to it's platform tools to a community of ISVs which includes active support and training for the developers. In what is becoming a common approach to support, Engine Yard wanted to build a customer community that would enhance their customer's experiences while reducing the support burden somewhat. They also saw opportunities to leverage a community for greater innovation and product feedback and improvement, as well as provide a vehicle for recognizing active contributions. Engine Yard wanted to encourage and reward specific behaviors including engaging with content, utilizing the knowledge base, complete surveys and participate in forums, report bugs and submit feature requests by using reputation mechanics. The solution included achievements to reward the valued behaviors and missions to draw customers into completing surveys and providing feedback. As a result of this gamified community environment Engine Yard saw a 20% reduction in support tickets, 40% increase in forum and knowledge base use and 40% reduction in ticket response time by its own support team.

In these two examples you can see good returns and results in customer community engagement (business process optimization) (Engine Yard) and improved employee performance (DLA). These aren't the only use cases of course. Internal communities, or enterprise social networks (ESNs) can benefit from gamification, for example EMC used gamification to increase employee collaboration measured as a 41% increase in employee activity in its employee community. Here are links to some additional case studies from Badgeville and Bunchball.

Tags: gamification, engagement, community, bunchball, badgeville, game mechanics, reputation mechanics 

Is there value in enterprise gamification? - Part Two

In part one of this post we looked at what enterprise gamification is and some of the methods and techniques that can be used. In this post I am focusing on what types of things you can actually do with enterprise gamification. There are many business processes that can be strengthened using a gamification strategy. It's probably easiest to break them down into two larger groups focused on employee engagement and customer engagement.

For employee engagement gamification is an excellent tools to increase engagement, modify behavior and create a more motivated workforce. Some of the areas and processes that can be impacted include:

• Sales productivity
• Performance and learning
• Participation / collaboration
• Increase usage of technology
• Product input and feedback

For customer engagement gamification again provides the capability to draw customers into activities, increase loyalty and encourage behavior that creates a more active customer / company relationship. These processes include:

• Loyalty
• Participation and community management
• Increasing engagement
• Product input and feedback
• Commerce
• Lead generation

Beyond employees and customers, there could be opportunities to use gamification with partners. I haven't seen specific examples of this kind of application yet, but I'd think that partner engagement and motivation would be relatively similar to the other uses I've mentioned. In particular using gamified processes to increase sales, drive greater partner participation in activities like product input (ideasourcing), marketing programs, training, use of new technology and lead management seem like natural fits for the technology.

In part 3 of this post, which will be out shortly, I'll look at some specific case studies and examples that more clearly demonstrate how to use gamification on some of the listed processes.

Tags: gamification, motivation, engagement, customer, employee, performance, sales, collaboration, loyalty

Is There Value in Enterprise Gamification? - Part One

Over the next few posts I'll explore the growing use of enterprise gamification. I became interested in the topic after an interesting keynote at IBM Connect this year by Jane McGonagal, author of the book 'Reality is Broken: Why games make us better and how they can change the world". I have to admit that while I "get" the concept of using game theory to shape behavior I was skeptical about how useful it really was in an enterprise context. I've spent some time over the past few weeks researching the topic and at this point my attitude has shifted quite a bit. When used correctly I now believe that gamification can provide a powerful tool to help companies encourage behaviors that they define as desirable.

First though let's make sure that we all understand exactly what gamification is and is not. Gamification is a business strategy that applies game mechanics to a non-game situation to drive or change some behavior. You will notice that nowhere in that definition did I mention technology. Gamification is not technology, it is underpinned or enabled by technology, but that's not the point. The point is that its a business strategy and as such must be defined clearly to lay out what behavior you're trying to change, why changing that behavior is important from a business strategy standpoint and then, how will game theory be applied to bring about this change. Gamification is about experiences; employee experience, customer experience, partner experience; creating fun and engaging experiences that ultimately results in a behavioral modification.

To understand how gamification is used it's probably useful to understand game mechanics and some of the techniques used in enterprise gamification, First though, remember the origins of gamification, it came out of the computer / video game industry so some of the fundamentals are closely tied to techniques in use there. I won't spend time talking about some of the research I found on the impact of gaming on consumers, although it's really worth reading McGonagal's book. 

 Game mechanics are the building blocks of a game experience. They are the basic rule frameworks and feedback processes that produce an engaging game. These are fairly well documented online, but it's useful to at least list them here (at least the ones I know, I'm sure there are some others):

• Achievements - physical or virtual representation of accomplishment
• Appointment dynamics - using a predetermined time and place to set the expectation of play for positive effect
• Behavioral momentum - tendency of players to continue to do what they're been doing
• Blissful productivity - the phenomenon that playing the game in conjunction with hard work makes you happier than relaxing
• Bonuses - rewards for completions
• Cascading information theory - the concept that its easier for players to gain understanding of information if it is broken into smaller pieces that are provided when needed
• Challenges - (sometimes called quests) a journey of obstacles that players must overcome to be successful in the game
• Community collaboration - the viral rallying of a group of players to solve a common problem or obstacle
• Countdown dynamics - limiting time to accomplish certain tasks or challenges
• Epic meaning - a higher purpose that provides motivation for the player to continue
• Exploration - a dynamic that plays off players curiosity and desire to discover new things
• Free lunch dynamic - creating the perception of getting something for nothing
• Infinite game play - games that don't have an explicit end defined
• Levels - a method to measure progression in a game
• Loss aversion dynamic - the tendency of players to avoid scenarios that create some loss of status
• Lottery dynamic - a situation where the winner is determined by some chance driven method
• Ownership - creates connections, desire and loyalty
• Points - continuing numerical value to measure progress in a game
• Progression dynamic - a public measurement of progress through a set list of tasks
• Reward schedules - predefined delivery mechanism for rewards in a game
• Status - level, rank, accomplishment
• Urgent optimism - compelling desire of a player to tackle an obstacle quickly and with some reasonable expectation of success
• Virality - a method of spreading engagement and game play among a group

And then there are game techniques that support game mechanics, and can be applied to game projects. These techniques include:

• Activity streams (or tie in to existing enterprise social network activity stream)
• Advancing game levels that help keep players interested and challenged
• Avatars (a way to give individuals unique, recognizable profiles)
• Badges (or other ways to publicly reward behavior)
• Challenges or "quests"
• Embedded games (inside other enterprise processes)
• Gifting (some way for individuals to reward each other)
• Leaderboards / progress bar / visual indication of progress
• Real-time feedback
• Virtual currency

So that's your introduction to gamification. In the next post I'll show some specific examples of how companies are using the techniques to influence employees, customers and partners in positive ways.

Tags: gamification, experience, behavior, game mechanics, game theory

Technology and the Effective Marketer (Part 3)

In part three of this series I'll focus on customer intelligence driven marketing and the proper use of data. In the "information economy," data is created at an unbelievable pace, but to make some reasonable business use of that data is challenging. The concept of being a data driven business isn't new, but  there are a lot of barriers that must be overcome, both technical and cultural. In other words businesses need to systematically move from "big data", which is just a large pile of useless "stuff", to "smart data", or data in the right business context, delivered to the right person at the time of need. 

Analytics and business intelligence are evolving from the days of historical reporting to a dynamic approach to providing real time usable insights. From a system standpoint, I've written about this idea before, moving to systems of decision. I won't go back through the 3 systems, transaction, decision and relationship again here, but you can refer to several other posts including this recent one on productivity.

The purpose of this series and this post is to talk about these systems of decision in the context of customer intelligence driven marketing and the data value chain. This application of data in the marketing context is a very important transition for marketing and requires a more coordinated and integrated approach both from the necessary technology and from the marketing employees themselves. Focusing on the data value chain it looks something like this:

Customer Data Value Chain:

• Collection - The collection and storage process isn't something new really although it must involve more data sources, many of which are unstructured and will require new ways of storing and processing. Traditional data like customer information, transactions, service issues, etc. are a part of the mix of course (which presupposes that the company has a basic CRM system in place). The newer sources of data, which can come from social media monitoring tools, customer communities or even smart sensor data (think smart electrical meters for example), can prove a rich source of additional customer insights when processed and mapped with the traditional data sources.
• Optimization - Once data is collected various types of analytic software can be used to make the data useful. The data is often integrated, processed and turned into various visualizations that could range from reports to dashboards. Optimized data is referenced to some business context that is the key to making the data into usable information.
• Trend - Once data is processed and visualized in some way it can be used to establish historical trends that can be useful across many marketing activities. Trend data is used to refine targeting of campaigns, find cross sell opportunities, support dynamic web content, define and refine loyalty programs and a variety of other functions.
• Predictive - Taking publically available social web data, which represents attitudes, opinions, needs, etc. of customers as well as transaction data and applying behavioral models can yield analysis that can with reasonable accuracy, predict customer and prospect behavior. There are a lot of uses of this model driven approach across marketing and sales. In the customer community context, for example, these behavioral models could be used to identify future influencers or find influencers that were starting to cool off on your brand. In sales the same techniques could predict buying signals to optimize sales efforts.
• Decisions - The top of the chain is providing data in the correct business context and in real time to the right employee or group of employees to support effective business decisions. This move from backward facing historical data to forward facing real time decision support is the building block of the data driven enterprise. The systems of decision integrate with systems of relationship to help identify and bring together the optimized set of employees or other constituents in the business context of the issue, decision, problem, etc. to facilitate fast, efficient real time business issue resolution, strategy optimization and more accurate, iterative actions.

Just one additional thought about this data value chain, it does not and can not, in any way, risk customer / prospect privacy. This point is critical and a privacy breech is one of the fastest ways to tarnish a brand. The social data collected and analyzed must all be from public sources and any confidential customer data around transactions and other activities with the company must be protected. I hope this is just me being over careful with all the discussions and focus online over privacy, but I guess you never know.

Tags: marketing, data, big data, smart data, customer, CRM, SCRM, socbiz, sales, real time, context, business, decisions, transactions