Cisco Needs To Broaden Their Definition Of Collaboration

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

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As I watched the CiscoLive! keynote titled Exceptional Collaboration Experiences in the Age of the Connected User, a line from one of my favourite movies The Princess Bride kept going through my head: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." In this case it's collaboration, as Cisco and I clearly have a vastly different definition of the word.

We all know WebEx web-conferencing. Similar to Microsoft Office, it's one of those tools that is almost always part of the standard business toolset. Over the years Cisco has tried to leverage its leadership in web-conferencing to expand into the new world of social networking. At first they had Cisco Quad which did not gain much traction. They then added new features and rebranded to WebEx Social, alas it still did not make a big impact in the enterprise social networking market. I won't get into details here about why I think it failed, but the short version is that collaboration was never integrated into the workflow of the standard WebEx meetings that everyone participates in. For example, when a meeting ends, there are no task assignments or follow-up items created. So I was excited back in Dec 2013 when Cisco acquired Collaborate, a nice social task management vendor. I thought "Hey, they may start to solve on eof the fundamental problems with meetings". Unfortunately Cisco seems to have shutdown Collaborate and says the team has been retasked to work on other areas. So did they buy it just to own the collaborate.com URL? Similarly way back in 2011 Cisco acquired Versly and were going to provide a file-sharing and document editing product yet that never saw the light of day. Then last month another bit of news came along, Cisco was discontinuing WebEx Social and was going to partner with Jive Software to deliver an integrated collaboration and unified communication experience. You can read my thoughts on that here.

So that brings me to the CiscoLive keynotes. I was excited. I had high hopes. I thought "Ok, it's their 3rd attempt at the collaboration market, but maybe they will do better this time." Then CEO John Chambers opening keynote came and went without a single peep about collaboration. He focused on the company's grand vision of the "Internet of Everything", to which I say people need to be one of those "things." Still I remained optimistic, as the main "exceptional collaboration experiences" keynote was the next day, so surely they would demonstrate and amazing vision of how employees and customers can work together to get their jobs done, right?

Well, Rowan Trollope, SVP and GM of Collaboration Technology Group delivered a very passionate keynote... about web-conferencing... on a dedicated machine. Again, nothing about people really working together around a business process. At a time when social network and sharing are part of our everyday lives, and mobile computing is skyrocketing causing CxOs to struggle with the "Bring Your Own Device" movement, Cisco highlights a brand new $2000 desktop unit!

Yes, the DX80 is a really nice device, no question there. It does remove the desktop clutter of speakers, microsophones, headsets, etc. But is web-conferencing really Cisco's vision for expectional collaboration experiences and the Future of Work?

The demos went well, but they were circa 2000. Seriously. A decade ago when I helped run the keynotes for IBM, we showed n-way video chats in Sametime and told the story of how much more productive meetings were going to become. Sure, the DX80 is A LOT nicer what we used back then, but guess what, the demo was essentially the same: Presenter stands on stage, connects with a few people backstage or in another building, they all wave hi to each other to show it's live. Come on!!! Where is the business value story?

Well, it turns out the did have some good business value stories. Rowan was joined on stage by Hans Hwang - VP Advanced Services who talked about how MissionPoint Health Partners is using Cisco to create better patient care.  


Similar stories were told about how Coca-Cola is training their sales staff remotely instead of requiring travel; and how the oil and gas industry (I apologize, I forget which company) is increasing safety on deep sea oil rigs.  So why were these slideware and not demos?

Picture This

Image if they had set-up a mock hospital room on stage and actually acted out a scenario where doctors collaborated to help a patient. The demo could have had a DX80 in one office and another doctor running around with their iPad. The two could have been members of a Jive Community where they share medical best practices, discovered the experts they needed for a specific case, launched a n-way video conversation, gotten the answers they needed in real time, posted some comments and praise in the social network and bam... everyone in the audience and watching online would have thought... we could really use a tool like that at our organization. Instead, they showed people waving at each other in a web-conference.


It's A War Out There

Cisco is facing fierce competition coming at them from many fronts.




The other large web-conferencing vendors have far more compelling collaboration stories, including social networking, task management, document authoring and editing, file sharing and more.
- IBM has IBM Connections, IBM Sametime and IBM Docs
- Microsoft has Office365, Yammer, OneDrive and Lync
- Citrix has GoToMeeting, Podio and ShareFile
- Unify (formerly Siemens Enterprise) has Ansible

On the startup front, an entire new breed of web-conferencing tools is chomping away at the web-conferencing market, including: Blue Jeans, Fuze, Join.Me and recently launched SlingShot.

Even consumer tools, like Google Hangouts, Apple Facetime, Microsoft Skype and Logitech LifeSize are replacing the old standard of using WebEx.


Where Is the Innovation?

Do you want to see the future of web-conferencing, take a look at companies like DVE Telepresence who are creating mind-blowing holographic offerings for meetings and even live presentations.

DVE Telepresence Powered by Microsoft Solutions from Rigel Productions on Vimeo.

Next Batter

This was Cisco's 3rd chance to show they understand collaboration. You know what they say about 3 strikes...

As a company, Cisco is in a great position to be part of the new world of the "Internet of Everything" as they call it. I'm just disappointed that they did not hit the ball out of the park showing how Cisco, along with their new partner Jive Software can deliver compelling collaboration experiences that include both social networking and communication features. Since they missed the opportunity, here I'll do it for them.

Crimson Hexagon ForSight™ Platform Joins Forces With Hootsuite’s Engagement Platform for Better Customer Engagement & Business Insights

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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Crimson Hexagon, is a provider of software for social intelligence is announcing a new app integration with HootSuite, a social relationship platform. The new integration powers social engagement for enterprises, allowing customers to gain valuable business insights and competitive analysis from online conversations.

MY POV: There’s so much data out there. And data alone is not helpful unless it can provide insights. And insights and actionable decision intelligence take the right combo of technology as well as people with the right skills to truly understand how to use these applications and tools. What’s really missing is educational systems in place to increase people’s skill sets. Hootsuite has done a great job with their University, but universities and colleges are still completely behind the 8 ball. I’m fortunate that UCLA Extension and the Summer Institute for the Center of Media, Entertainment and Sports at UCLA Anderson allow me to teach digital and social media strategy and the use of technology to scale it. But most schools don’t have real digital and social programs– yet. Business schools are way behind. There’s not a job application – even those jobs that are not directly related to digital and social — want candidates to understand and know how businesses are using social and digital.

So What’s New About This Announcement Between Crimson Hexagon and Hootsuite?

Clients who are using Crimson Hexagon’s ForSight™ platform can stream social media posts directly into HootSuite. How does this help marketers and customer service professionals? To start with they can use it to engage with consumers and take action based on deep social media analysis. The integration combining Crimson Hexagon’s monitoring technologies with HootSuite’s publishing capabilities offers an opportunity to streamline workflow and increases efficiency in social monitoring and customer outreach within organizations. In addition, the application offers customizable keyword filtering and monitoring of any brand, competitor set, or topic, lending context and improved flexibility to social media analysis.

What Is the Key Difference to Crimson Hexagon Now That It’s Connected with Hootsuite?

The key difference is Crimson Hexagon is now entering into the engagement space and enhancing what their customers see and can analyze in the feed with their advanced text and audience analytics. Crimson Hexagon customers can plug their analytics directly into HootSuite streams for real-time engagement with customers and turn social data into immediate engagement. And HootSuite’s custom filters and keyword streams empower organizations to easily identify key insights in analytics for multiple business uses whether it be in social selling, customer service or marketing.

Some of the benefits of the combined Crimson Hexagon-HootSuite app integration are the ability to:

• Access a world-class social media data library of over 450 billion posts for real-time and historical analysis of social data
• Engage with customers and prospects in real-time through HootSuite, add data streams to gain insights on your customers, prospects and competitors
• Apply custom filters and analytics to your data streams, including sentiment, opinion category, gender, geography and influence score
• Enable dynamic filtering of streams within HootSuite to view posts by keyword, handles, hashtags, date range and content sources providing the most in-depth intelligence on brand sentiment and customer opinion
• Enable location-based customer service initiatives for targeted campaigns and engagement
• Drive efficiency and time savings associated with post tagging and post re-categorization as part of HootSuite engagement workflow
• Discover and compare brand and topic influencers with author scoring within HootSuite

It’s an interesting new combination of technology. The real question is — do you have the strategy and the skill sets to implement it and get a business result? Technology alone is never the answer.

Lithium Launches Study: Americans Torn Between Good Internet and Sex: Are Our Values Out of Wack?

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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Lithium Launches Inaugural Customer Expectations Survey. This study shows how online experiences are essential to American life.  Americans evenly split on whether to give up good sex or good Internet if forced to choose.

My POV: Are you kidding me? What happened to being human? Have we lost our way? Or is this the right way to go? The studies show that multi-tasking actually makes your brain overworked and foggy. Yet every single day we – I – do it. And this study is showing how we are valuing being connected online versus doing something that is so essential as part of basic life as we know the human experience. I’ve been part of the digital world for a long time, joining LinkedIn and YouTube in about 2006. I have been writing about the online customer experience for years. So I am as guilty and responsible as anyone as part of this evolution. But I wonder for my own personal life as well as those of my friends, family and colleagues — if we have gone too far and whether we are over connected?

There’s really no going back, but perhaps there is a balance. We got here, now. And so what are the next steps and where will this all take us? I think balance is key. But who decides what that balance is. If online customer experiences were more effective and efficient, perhaps we’d have more time to do basic human things- like relax, talk to people in person, enjoy a good afternoon at the pool, go on vacation and not look at email… But we have to be mindful about our choices. We have to wake-up and look at our lives and choices. And then make very, very important decisions as consumers / customers. We – customers – need to vote with our feet – and only buy from companies that provided a shared-value customer experience - which is being talked about at #LiNc conference #LiNc2014. That means an experience that provides value for both the customer and the company.

I know what you are thinking. Natalie, you’ve been writing about that very thing for 20 years. I guess I need to keep writing about it until more and more companies actually deliver on it. 

Brands needs to be aware that consumers are getting weary. How can they make the experience better so that they become a preferred destination and provider? If the customer gets too tired and weary, they won’t buy. They will put it off. So its never been more important to look at the online customer experience as a key to whether customers choose your business to interact with – and that will determine the customer lifetime value. And brands need to make sure that whatever PR and Marketing is promising, that Customer Service can deliver it. That is what Customer Experience is – that full customer lifecycle – that should be driving a continuos circle, repeated over and over and over… awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, loyalty, advocacy and referral and repeat continuously… 

The technology is now there that can deliver more than we have ever been able to provide. But does your company have the skills and human capital and leadership to deliver great next generation customer experiences? Here’s more on the study. I think you will find the results fascinating…

THE STUDY

The study has data from a survey conducted online on their behalf by Harris Poll in April among over 2,100 American adults who are online that sheds light on how the Internet may be changing the country’s expectations and behaviors. The survey covered a broad spectrum of online behaviors and attitudes, exposing what Americans want from their online experiences and the brands with which they do business online.

Tealium Announces Data Connectors to Major Marketing Clouds: Oracle Responsys, Silverpop and StrongView

Vice President and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research
Constellation Research

Role: Vice President and Principal Analyst focusing on the IOT of Customer Experience and how the cloud is driving more flexible, agile, and robust customer service and customer experiences. In-app or in device customer service is the future. Coverage Areas: Next Generation Customer, Digital Marketing Transformation Bio: As a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, Inc, Petouhoff works with Fortune 100 and 500’s Senior Leadership teams to create strategic customer experience (marketing, sales and service) solutions which engage customers, build brands and grow businesses. Combining her experience as a former Forrester software analyst, PWC systems integrator and change management consultant, Petouhoff leads executive workshops to discuss to not only…...

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Tealium is currently known as a market leader in enterprise tag management and solutions. Today Tealium announced new data connectors that allow enterprises to integrate rich audience profile data into leading marketing clouds, including Oracle Responsys, Silverpop (recently acquired by IBM) and StrongView. Tealium also announced today an email integration with the Salesforce ExactTargetMarketing Cloud.

My POV: What seems most significant about this that most Marketers probably have a number of different types of marketing applications, from different vendors. Often one vendor does not provide all the capabilities that a brand would want, so they end up having to buy several different vendors. Before this Tealium’s connector, it was more difficult to be able to integrate audience profile data into ALL of the separate applications. The connector now makes it possible to connect all the best in breed software solutions and maximize the value of their marketing cloud investments and launch more profitable and relevant remarketing campaigns.

AudienceStream is a complementary service for Tealium iQ, the company’s market-leading tag management solution, which provides a foundational data layer to sync all cloud-based marketing applications and make them more actionable.

How does this work? Tealium provides a foundation platform that enables enterprises to build their own marketing cloud, and with Tealium they can enable these best-of-breed point solutions to share data for the first time to drive more personalized and impactful marketing campaigns across channels. The new email connectors, which are built into Tealium AudienceStream, the company’s award-winning audience segmentation and action engine, provide for deeper integration with leading marketing cloud vendors, including the ability to trigger real-time marketing interactions based on cross-channel behavior and visitor personas.

Here’s Some Highlights:

• The new connectors are part of an action-focused integration marketplace within AudienceStream that includes email, CRM and retargeting vendors. Tealium will soon be announcing additional integrations with key vendors spanning content management, site optimization, and more.
• With AudienceStream, marketers can create on-the-fly segments around their most actionable triggers and events, and then distribute that information to email vendors in real time via the connectors. This enables users to set up timely email interactions based on any combination of visitor behavior or achievement, such as cart abandonment, product interest, lifetime value and much more.
• Combined with AudienceStream, the new connectors enable marketers to bring fragmented data together in real-time, as opposed to the 24-48 hour delay that most marketers face due to traditional, resource-heavy data integration approaches. This empowers marketers to drive immediate action and superior results.

Wondering What Customers Are Saying About Using the Tealium Connectors?

Ancestry.com: “With StrongView and AudienceStream, we can target and take action on our visitors within seconds, across channels, instead of having to chug through terabytes of data via traditional data processing methods,” said Jer Tippets, analytics implementation specialist at www.Ancestry.com. “This is a powerful technology integration that will help us better engage our customers, and ultimately drive more subscriptions and revenue.”

Wondering What Vendors Are Saying About Using the Tealium Connectors?

Silverpop: “Our customers want to deepen brand loyalty, deliver more meaningful experiences, and take action in real time,” said Will Schnabel, senior vice president of business development for Silverpop. “Timely insight into customer behavior is the key to successful re-marketing campaigns. By joining forces with Tealium we ensure that our customers are receiving rich, real-time, cross-channel customer data that that can be used to trigger high-value marketing interactions.”

StrongView: “Contextual marketing is the bold new frontier for email marketing, but it does require marketers to find a better way to understand and leverage cross-channel interaction data in real-time,” said Shawn Myers, vice president of marketing at StrongView. “Empowering marketers with the rich customer data available through Tealium is just another way StrongView is helping marketers understand customer context and embrace its vision of Present Tense Marketing.”

*********************

Tealium: Ali Behnam, president and co-founder at Tealium said, “The release of these integrations is a milestone in Tealium’s mission to provide enterprise customers with the ability to unify all of their marketing efforts, and maximize the value of their marketing investments.  Tealium is helping marketers to close the ‘action gap’ by providing them a platform to send the right message to the right person at the right time. We are proud to partner with these leading email marketing vendors in the space.”

If you want to follow more about what Tealium is doing, you can check out their social communities:

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tealium
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tealium
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tealium

If You Want Some Basic Details About Tealium, Here You Go:
Tealium helps savvy brands bring order to marketing chaos and engage customers in innovative ways. Using Tealium as the foundation for their digital marketing operations, smart marketers can fuel real-time unified marketing initiatives and drive more profitable customer interactions across all digital touch points. Tealium is the recognized leader in enterprise tag management, and was recently named one of Forbes’ Most Promising Companies in America for 2014. Each quarter, Tealium serves 1.2 trillion tags on behalf of its global clients, representing an estimated $75B in annual online transactions. For more information, please visit http://www.tealium.com.

SharePoint Search: Beyond eDiscovery

X1

Barry Murphy is the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategy at X1.  In this role, Barry leads X1's product marketing function, aligning X1's offerings to market needs for search and information access, eDiscovery, cloud and virtual search, and social discovery. Barry joins X1 from eDJ Group, where he was an analyst and thought leader in information governance, eDiscovery, records management, and content archiving. Previously, Barry was Director of Product Marketing at Mimosa Systems, a leading content archiving and eDiscovery software provider. He joined Mimosa after a highly successful stint as Principal Analyst for eDiscovery, records management, and content archiving at Forrester Research. Barry received a B.S. from the State University of New York at…...

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I had the pleasure of conducting a SharePoint eDiscovery webinar with Patrick Burke of Reed Smith for the OLP last week.  The subject is fascinating because finding, preserving, and reviewing SharePoint content in the litigation/investigation context can be so challenging.  The metadata users add to content (e.g. workflow tasks), the web page interface that creates more native ESI than just a document, and the decentralization of SharePoint deployments make eDiscovery for SharePoint a topic unto itself.  Often lost in this topic is the issue of end-user search of SharePoint.

When I talk about end-user search in SharePoint, most people just assume that the search functionality baked in to the product (Microsoft acquired FAST Search & Transfer several years back) is enough.  In some cases, that will be correct, but in others it does not work to give business users efficient access to information.  Some companies have standardized on SharePoint as an enterprise content management (ECM) platform while others have some departments that use SharePoint for sharing files and managing specific business processes.  In either situation, the reality is that business workers store information in multiple places – SharePoint, email, network file shares, etc.  To find that information is often a frustrating task of switching from application to application only to have a subpar search experience.

Consider the screenshot below of a search experience in SharePoint:

Click to enlarge

The experience leaves something to be desired in that I have to execute several more clicks on the left to do any kind of filtering and, in the result set itself, it is very difficult to know if any of these are the document I am looking for because I can’t see the document itself.  I would need to open it first.  In addition, as a business worker, I probably don’t know if I should be looking in email, file shares, or SharePoint for the document I need.  I know I saw it somewhere, but can’t remember where.  In this search experience, if I don’t find what I am looking for in SharePoint, I now have to go search my email and then my file system.  It adds up to a waste of time.

Now, consider a unified, single-pane-of-glass approach:

Click to enlarge

In this user interface, I can search across email, files, and SharePoint.  I can see a full-fidelity preview of the attachment.  I can refine on any kind of metadata.  It is a positive search experience that is helpful and allows me to be efficient.  More and more people realize now that this unified access to information is critically important. That may be why SharePoint guru Joel Oleson said, after a X1 Search 8 product demo, “the great news is seeing unified search across the variety of platforms [email, file shares, SharePoint] in a single powerful desktop product priced very reasonably.”  It’s because business workers really do need that unified interface across all information.  To be forced to move from email to SharePoint just to run a search can be frustrating and time consuming.  For SharePoint administrators, not having to worry about a user’s search experience in SharePoint is liberating.  When business workers and IT administrators are both happy, the world is a better place.

Read Joel Oleson’s complete review of X1 Search 8 here >

The Twitter Mirror Reveals All at Vibewire fastBREAK

Gavin Heaton

Founder
Disruptors Co

Gavin is the Founder of Disruptors Co, one of Australia’s leading independent strategy and innovation companies. Gavin advises firms on strategy, marketing, product development and innovation. He is also a member of the Orbits program, the influencer network of award winning analyst and advisory firm, Constellation Research. Gavin advises boards and leadership on innovation strategy, marketing, data-driven product development and corporate venturing. Gavin is on the board of Vibewire, a youth-led social enterprise based in Sydney, Australia and on the Technology Advisory Group for Good2Give – the workplace giving platform. ...

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Capturing all the behind the scenes action, the official Twitter Mirror allows the fastBREAK speakers to take a quick selfie or short format video Vine before and after taking the stage. These intimate shots will be pumped out through the fastBREAK hashtag and @vibewire Twitter account.

It’s yet another way to bring a different view of innovation – all thanks to the folks at Twitter Australia.

Remember to book your tickets before they are sold out.

Infor Ming.le Provides Purposeful Collaboration

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

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New York based Infor may not be a household name the way IBM or Microsoft is, but the tech giant has close to 13,000 employees, 70,000 customers and $3B in annual revenue. Infor's main business comes from providing business applications (such as CRM, ERP, HR) to specific industries such as pharmaceutical, aerospace, automotive and healthcare. Leveraging their expertise in these "vertical solutions", they then then develop more granular applications, or micro-verticals. For example, for heathcare they provide solutions in areas like fleet (ambulance) maintenance or nurse scheduling.

My interest in Infor is in the excellent way they have integrated collaboration capabilities directly into their business applications. Rather than just providing an enterprise social network, Infor developed Infor Ming.le, which runs seamlessly across their vertical solutions providing collaboration features directly in the context of where people are working. For example, below you can how an employee can start a conversation directly from within a Sales Order. The post will link back not only to this order, but also to the customer record in CRM and the part number in ERP.

Infor has put a great deal of work into making Infor Ming.le attractive and easy to use. In fact, they created their own in-house design firm named Hook & Loop that is responsible for the overall user experience of Infor Ming.le. 

Currently Infor Ming.le is only available on-premises, but a cloud version is planned for Q3 of this year. 

Customer Considerations 

It is clear that Infor Ming.le has been designed from the ground up to be deeply integrated not just into the look of Infor's business applications, but into the workflow of the way people use them. Existing Infor customers should certainly look at adding Infor Ming.le to the products they currently use, thus enabling employes to stop just working and start working together. 

For company's choosing a vendor, Infor is not alone at delivering collaboration capabilities within enterprise applications. Other options include SAP JAM, Oracle Social Network, Salesforce Chatter and Microsoft is starting to provide Yammer integration with Dynamics. When evaluating, look very closely at the level of integration each vendor offers with business applications, the deployment/hosting options, mobile access and extensibility for 3rd party add-on. During your technical evaluation, make sure to read about Infor ION, the architecture behind Infor's business applications and Infor Ming.le collaboration platform.   

First the Internet of Dumb Things and only then the Internet of Smart Things

We are going to quickly connect lots of things that were never intended to be connected to the Internet, to the Internet.

In essence, the phrase “Internet of Things” essentially describes a network of connected objects other than computers, tablets, and mobile devices that for the most part were never designed for the Internet.

As I furthered my studies and experiments with the Internet of Things writing “A Framework to Humanize the Internet of Things through Verbs” I landed on the question of “so what if we connected all of these things to the Internet?

Initially I was elated with excitement, and the excitement stemmed from the incorrect assumption based on my experiences of computers. I somehow automatically assumed that once we connected “things” to the Internet, these things will be smart as heck, heck they will be as smart as the things that are currently connected to the Internet, computers, tables, and mobile phones.

Well not so fast, and as I continued to study and experiment in the phenomenon designing mentally for the maturity model, the business models that will emerge, and the design of the industry that will ensue, I landed on the following two constructs.

1. There is a difference between the Internet of things already built, and things that will be built. We are going to connect things to the internet that are dumb, framing the “Internet of Dumb Things” #IoDT? and it will be a journey to the Internet of Smart Things #IoST?. Let’s not assume that because a “thing” is connected to the Internet, it will be as smart as computers.
2. There will be categories of things already built or to be built clustered by the intelligence of said things. Once connected, some things will do more than others and the level of “smartness” will vary widely. Some of the categories I am thinking through are:
   1. The Internet of DUMB Things.
   2. The Internet of CHATTY Things.
   3. The Internet of OBEDIENT Things.
   4. The Internet of USEFUL Things.
   5. The Internet of SMART Things.

And so I continue to foster the vision arriving at conclusions. Here is where my last bout of indulgence left me.

1. The Internet of Things will depend more on GE, Siemens and similar “thing manufacturers” than it will ever depend on Cisco.
2. When all things are connected, broadband will feel like my 14.4 Kbs modem from college as the pipes are simply not big enough for things, and suddenly the copper or fiber rush will be sexy again.

I write as a labor of love, in exchange I ask for comments that challenge my thinking

-Richie

Lead Like a Pro

Terri Griffith

Professor/Author/Speaker
Simon Fraser University

Terri Griffith holds the Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. She spent two decades in the Silicon Valley and, in 2012 was honored as a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Terri helps her students and their organizations accelerate performance and prepare for the futures of work. Through her speaking, writing, teaching, and research, she brings evidence-based leadership and innovation to high-tech, education, and global agribusiness organizations. She inspires and coaches groups on negotiating change and uniquely mixing existing and new capabilities. Her most recent work uses a “bottom-up” approach to automation, including artificial intelligence. Her award-winning book, The Plugged-In Manager:…...

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Light Touch for A Long Drive

Why?

What?