A Mosaic of Education

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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I'm just back from the Mazatlán Forum, “Technology and the Future(s) of Education: U.S. and Mexican Perspectives.” For three days and a couple of wonderful extra meals, leaders from education, industry, and academia worked to find a more effective future for students in the United States, Mexico, and the world.

"Education Will Be Cloud Based"

Howard Charney, Senior Vice President, Office of the Chairman and CEO, Cisco Systems, gave a clear message to all of us during the closing keynote: Education will be cloud based — the cloud becomes the repository and the structure of education changes. More broadly he noted, "If you think your area of expertise is going to stay unchanged, you're mistaken and you're going to be out of a job.”

We needed to hear this from someone as well versed in both technology and higher education as Mr. Charney. No one in the room denied that most educational institutions have been static for centuries -- San Jose State being an interesting exception, as per its President's, Mo Qayoumi, opening keynote. We were not as unanimous on universities’ need to change, though that was the argument I made in the first of the faculty presentations. I called for us to lead with a lighter touch (my full presentation is below).

"Lead With a Lighter Touch"

Specifically, I said we need to loosen our grip on our:

• Degrees: Move to smaller modules that are available when a student needs the knowledge
• Walls: Offer our modules freely to the world (sometimes free as in "free beer;" but always free as in "free speech")
• Faculty: It is a rare faculty member who is the best presenter across all the topics in a course. Instead, “faculty” for a course or module should be the best on the topic — just as we select readings written by others, we should select presentations done by others if they will do a better job with the material. This assumes share and share alike in that I need to offer my presentations to others (thus, why we must loosen our grip on our walls first).
• Assessments: Faculty-given grades are proxies for student capabilities and not necessarily tied to capabilities organizations are looking for. While we should certainly arrange feedback, organizations or down-stream consumers of student work may be in a better position to assess quality and fit. Educators need to work in partnership with organizations to provide relevant education.

To this last point, one of my colleagues noted that I had a “functional view of education.” To that I replied, "guilty as charged," but that perhaps my view of functional is not as siloed as might be expected. Ethics, self-understanding, critical-thinking, etc. are things organizations want as well.

Don't Let Learning Flatline

Rather than offering lumpy four and two year degrees (for that approach I showed two heartbeats and then a flat-line), we should find ways to provide knowledge when a person needs it (depicted by an on-going heartbeat). The cloud lets the material be always accessible, and then frees faculty to prepare other material rather than repetitively teaching the same topics. More topics go into the cloud and educators spend their non-authoring time coaching, responding, and challenging.

Mosaics are More Nuanced

This last is how I brought us back to the idea of a mosaic of education. Mosaics are not linear, but rather filled in by small pieces (in some cases as small as 5000 piece per square inch). If we think of capabilities being gained over the course of a lifetime — especially if today’s new employees will have 20+ different jobs in their careers — the mosaic form of education allows us to respond to changing needs.

This is a message I’ve shared before, but rarely in a room with so many in positions to take action. I look forward to what the future brings.

Perficient Acquires BioPharm

Constellation Research

J. Bruce Daley is a former vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, Inc.  , Title: Big Ideas Age Before Beauty Before there can be a wholesale conversion to the Cloud legacy applications must be converted. This will take decades and not every vendor has taken this obstacle into account when projecting growth. Professional Services Firms Need a Recurring Revenue Model The services business has a lot of advantages but one big disadvantage in that you are always going out of business. Some organizations are using the Cloud to offer clients new ways to spend money than just time-and-materials or fixed price projects. ...

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Perficient, Inc. (NASDAQ: PRFT) has acquired  BioPharm Systems, a consulting firm specializing on the life sciences industry including Siebel.

“With the addition of BioPharm Systems, Perficient has strengthened our consulting offerings  to healthcare and life sciences ,” said Jeffrey Davis, Perficient’s chief executive officer and president.  "Furthermore, BioPharm Systems brings impressive bill rates and margins, important intellectual property assets and a proven track record.”

The acquisition of BioPharm Systems: 

• Strengthens Perficient’s overall Oracle partnership and capabilities by bringing extensive experience in the implementation, integration, migration, and hosting of Oracle's Health Sciences applications;
• Adds more than 50 consulting, technology, sales and support professionals; and
• Adds client relationships with leading life sciences enterprise customers including Bayer, CR Bard, Halozyme Therapeutics, Ikaria, Johnson & Johnson, Medtronic, Pfizer, St. Jude Medical, Stryker, and Sunovion, among others.

BioPharm Systems President Alex Sefanov will stay on with the firm.

The closing consideration paid in the transaction is approximately $17.6 million and includes approximately $11.4 million in cash and approximately $6.2 million worth of Perficient common stock. BioPharm System's $15 million annual revenues will be added to Perficient’s annualized revenues which are now approaching $450 million, and the transaction is expected to be accretive.

Is It All About Mobile?

Mobile First.

Mobile Only.

Mobile seems to be in everybody’s minds these days, no? I mean, name one person in #EnSw that has not added mobile to their credentials in the past 12-18 months.

(BTW, I was one of the originators of m-CRM while I was at Gartner back in the early 2000s – we pioneered this stuff; needless to say, I know more about for far longer than most of these new “experts”… sorry, where was I?)

There are  many, many, many issues with the way we are approaching mobile – from pretending it is a new way to work in the cloud (calling it Salesforce 1 mobile development client – or something like that), to making it a new channel for communication, to thinking it is a complete different way to do things.

If we did not learn the lesson with the recent Social debacle (seriously, try to get funding for a new social X application or project at any VC or organization today) and the end result (it was, is, and will continue to be part of the infrastructure, and only the outcomes matter – in the case of Social is collaboration), let me try to address it now in a simple manner.

Mobile is an interface, nothing more.

Anything you do via mobile (interface) leverages the device it is riding on (usually a smartphone or table, even a laptop or a kiosk in some cases), bur the device is not the solution (it cannot be, there are many, many more models of iOS and Android and Windows and even RIM based devices that you can ever plan for).  If it was, your testing would be in each device to make sure (for example) that the camera works equally well.

You don’t test in each device, because you don’t need to.  You are not developing for the device (with some exceptions) but for the interface.  You make sure that the display fits the information, you make sure that the information flows you need are available in your infrastructure (including, sometimes, social channels) and that your cloud architecture will support it (if not today, in the near future – trust me on this).

If you do all that, you can master the art of mobile.  Of course, there is a lot more to come – but understanding it is an interface it is the first step.

I have been doing a lot of work with mobile over the years (I was a pioneer, remember?) and I have compiled the lessons learned in a few pieces.

I did a session with Salesforce.com at Dreamforce last year (video included – well, more like audio over slides – below).

I am chairing an event on mobile commerce in Las Vegas today and tomorrow (link, but not sure if there is availability as it is by invitation only).

I wrote a white paper on how to master mobile customer service (an extension of the work done with Salesforce last year) with Bright Pattern.

You can download the white paper (I think you need to register for it) here.  The statement above is one of the three steps you I highlight in that white paper that will make you succeed at mobile.

Check it out, would love your comments as always – anywhere you want to provide them.

When it comes to mobile though, we are not even cracking the coconut — there is a lot more to come!

disclaimer: Salesforce is a retainer client (and it was last year as well, when I was paid to produce the content and present it).  Bright Pattern is a sponsored research client, where they subscribe to different topics and help me defray the costs of research for those topics and in exchange get content to use for their purposes.  I have no clients that produce mobile OS (mentioned above) nor do I expect to have any.  The research presented in this white paper would’ve happen anyways — but it is nice to know that I have nice clients willing to help me pay for my vices: my worst vice is research.  thanks for reading the research that I produce under that model. It is not pay for play research as, as you would see when you read it, I don’t endorse a vendor or technology – I simply present my research for free to the world thanks to my sponsors.

Take the Australian Social Business Survey 2014

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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To call out the term “social business” seems almost anachronistic in 2014. After all, aren’t we all now working in “social businesses”? Haven’t we all been part of the digital transformation sweeping every business?

Well, yes and no.

When I ran my first social business survey back in 2011, I was interested to gather some data on Australian-based businesses. After all, there was plenty of information available about the US – but anecdotal evidence suggested that we were behind that curve. Way behind. And again, in 2012, the survey revealed that there was a gap – not only between Australia and the US – but between businesses and the customers they served. It was what IBM called a “perception gap”.

These days, despite what we hear at conferences and read on news sites and blogs, it seems that social business, digital transformation and (dare I say it) innovation continues to struggle. Sure there are pockets of connectedness. Campaigns for transformation and change. And even some success stories. But what is the true picture?

Participate in the survey and receive the report for free

When you participate, you not only have the chance to share your perspective on the state of social business / digital transformation in Australia. You will also receive a copy of the report when it is complete. This will allow you to get a sense of where you and your business stand in relation to others.

Please take a few minutes to complete the survey. And if you already happen to have AskU on your smartphone, simply enter the Private Code social2014. And be sure to share it with others. The more responses we get, the better the report will be.

Event Report: #AdobeSummit Celebrates Digital Marketing From Creative To Commerce

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

R “Ray” Wang is the CEO of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He co-hosts DisrupTV, a weekly enterprise tech and leadership webcast that averages 50,000 views per episode and blogs at www.raywang.org. His ground-breaking best-selling book on digital transformation, Disrupting Digital Business, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in 2015. Ray's new book about Digital Giants and the future of business, titled, Everybody Wants to Rule The World was released in July 2021. Wang is well-quoted and frequently interviewed by media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Cheddar, and Bloomberg. Short Bio R “Ray” Wang (pronounced WAHNG) is the Founder, Chairman, and Principal Analyst of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research Inc. He…...

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Market Leaders And Fast Followers Celebrate Over A Decade Of Digital Marketing Vision

In 2004, Omniture founder Josh James, an avid skier, held the first Summit atop the Snowbird Ski Resort for 270 early adopters and converted. Fast forward eleven years to 2014, an estimated 5600+ customers, partners, influencers, and prospects gathered at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah, March 25th to March 28th, 2014, in search of reinvention in digital marketing (see Figure 1). Since that time, Adobe Summit has emerged as a must attend event for those looking at the entire digital experience from creative to commerce. Despite the size, this year's event remained equally intimate. At almost every venue, restaurant, or session, attendees remarked on how easy it was to meet people and discover, connect, and engage on the future of digital marketing.

Figure 1. Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen Opening The General Session on the Need for Reinvention In Marketing

Source: Adobe

Adobe Summit 2014 Announcements Focus On Needs Versus Wants New product enhancements, a new release, and a few key partnerships highlight advancements in Marketing Cloud which includes a number of organically developed products and acquisitions of Omniture, Day Software, Efficient Frontier, and Neolane. Today, the Adobe Marketing Cloud includes Adobe Social, Adobe Analytics, Adobe Target, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Media Optimizer, and Adobe Campaign (see Figure 2). This year's announcements reflect a need to improve integration among the acquisitions and deliver core needs versus nice to have capabilities. Main announcements from this year's summit include:

Figure 2. The Six Components Of The Adobe Marketing Cloud

Source: Adobe

• Adobe Marketing Cloud Core Services Improve Suite Value .  Adobe announced new cores services for Marketing Cloud.  These services include a key master marketing profile, shared assets, marketing mix planning, identity, contextual activation, tag management,  integration, and collaboration.
  
  Point of view (POV): The core marketing services are much needed to bring not only the acquisitions together, but also future partner integrations.   The Master Marketing Profile allows marketers to aggregate profiles information from multiple sources.  Shared assets put the power of the Adobe Creative Suite to work allowing marketers to create once use everywhere.  Marketing mix planning enables marketers to tie together attribution, analytics, media planning and execution to analytics and campaign activation.  The new identity capabilities are a good start, but much more will be required to support commerce apps entering a digital business world where trust is the new currency and transparency must balance privacy.

• Adobe Target Aims For Mass Personalization At Scale .  A new offering of Adobe Target premium provides advanced testing and targeting capabilities.  Key enhancements include automated decisions, deeper audience targeting, improved reporting, mobile support, and visual workflows.  The new best practices and expert onboarding helps customers access services from industry experts.
  
  (POV): Automated decisions provide a basic but easy to use self-learning algorithm.  At the demo booth, it became apparent how a marketer could quickly scale content to the right person at the right time with the right content.  Audience targeting is a noble effort but requires some work in integration master marketing profile to existing sources. Early view of reporting show improved integration to Adobe Analytics for source data.  Customers will love the visual workflow which brings the customer journey to life.  The new Adobe Target Premium automates many of the tedious tasks and allows digital marketers to focus on more strategic elements of mass personalization at scale, a key Constellation 2014 trend.

• Adobe Launches New Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).  The new AEM6 release adds improvements to sites, assets, apps, community, and forms.  Sites adds a touch enabled interface and easier to use templates.  AEM benefits from the shared assets in Adobe Marketing Cloud Core Services.  Apps allows integration with phone gap assets to enable create once deploy everywhere.  Communities gain a much needed machine translation for globalization. Forms provide a tie in to workflows which are much needed in regulated commerce.
  
  (POV): Integration with commerce engines in sites is a key time saver for brands and enterprises delivering on creative to commerce. A demo of AEM6 on the demo grounds show how new enhancements improve faster go live.  New assets capabilities make it easy to go from photoshoot to delivery with videos.  While the community features could use more advanced features, unified moderation with Adobe Social improves basic community management.   Customer facing mobile apps should prove to be a hit with brands.

• Mobile Enhancements Go Beyond PhoneGap Enterprise. The new mobile app development solutions take into account the entire digital marketing life cycle.  Adobe Mobile Services 2.0 provides measurement at key mobile apps stores such as Apple App Store and Google Play. Other features include Apple iBeacon support and re-engagement notification via the Adobe Campaign UI.
  
  (POV): The ability to create, edit, and modify content in real-time then publish across all development platforms in the Audi demo was a keynote highlight.  Support for Apple iBeacon provides a key component in location context that will prove important for ad networks and matrix commerce offerings.  These bluetooth low energy beacons will enable payments as well as content delivery.  Users will want to take advantage of the Adobe Campaign UI to track credit balances, share breaking news, find flight departure details, notify users of friends in proximity, and other right time data across all devices.

• Epsilon Provides Loyalty Platform To Adobe. The Epsilon Agility platform integrates with Adobe Marketing Cloud to deliver data, insights, analytics and transactional rules-based functionality.  Epsilon provides a loyalty platform that follows a loyalty lifecycle of identify, acquire, inspire, engage, award, and refine.  Adobe Marketing Cloud's Experience Manager and other solutions will organize, create, optimize, and manage delivery of creative assets across all digital channels.
  
  (POV): Epsilon has made some key partnerships with digital marketing leaders such as Acxiom, Facebook, Twitter, and now Adobe.  The partnership provides mass personalization at scale for loyalty programs using Adobe Experience Manager as the origin of assets and an important relationship for both Epsilon and Adobe.  Over time, expect the Epsilon Agility Loyalty offering to include Adobe Analytics, Adobe Campaign, Adobe Media Optimizer, Adobe Social, and Adobe Target.

Market Leaders And Fast Followers Focus On Completing The Digital Marketing Journey With Commerce

In speaking with over 100 attendees, matrix commerce has emerged as a key requirement. Just putting a site up, a mobile app, or even kicking a campaign is not good enough. The fusing of demand signals and supply chains creates a need for solutions that can deliver from creative production to commerce completion. The new customer centric world is agnostic to channels, demand signals, supply chains, payment options, enablers, and big data. This world of matrix commerce is an emerging frontier for brands and enterprises. Three partnership solutions play a key role in delivering creative to commerce:

1. Elastic Path. The Elastic Path Edition For Adobe Experience Manager received much fan fare from partners and customers at Adobe Summit. Attendees were drawn to the integrated CMS with AEM, advanced product/service bundling, personalized merchandizing, dynamic pricing, order experience, and trade promotion management capabilities out of the box. The recent partnership with MRM/McCann also adds credibility and momentum to Elastic Path's vision and strategy.
2. Intershop. The Intershop integration with Adobe Experience Manager drove massive interest on the show floor at Adobe Summit. A key draw to Intershop is the ability to drive both B2B and B2C commerce experiences on the same platform. Integration with call center channels was important to many attendees.
3. SAP hybris. SAP announced a partnership with Adobe to deliver on hybris Omni Channel Commerce and customer insights from SAP HANA. SAP will resell Adobe's Marketing Cloud and both vendors will invest in joint integration research and development. Conversations with many line of business customers exposed private concerns in adding to their SAP investment with SAP HANA. Why? Most marketing leaders seek to escape their SAP investment and have done so by moving to other products in CRM and customer experience. In speaking with an SAP hybris sales person, the intent is to reach out to marketing professionals and change their mind. Given the buzz on Elastic Path and Intershop, the real test will be licenses sold.

Figure 2. Flickr Photostream From #AdobeSummit

Source: © 2010 - 2014 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC. All Rights Reserved

The Bottom Line: Adobe Marketing Cloud Has Evolved Into A Major Contender For Marketing Suite Short Lists

The Adobe journey to enter into the enterprise software business began in September 15, 2009 when Adobe acquired Omniture, an online marketing and web analytics provider for $1.8 billion. Followed by the acquisition of Day Software, Efficient Frontier, and Neolane, the company has built and acquired a suite of marketing cloud solutions. Renamed Adobe Marketing Cloud in 2012, Adobe is the only provider to tackle the entire creative creation and commerce delivery market. As with any post merger integration effort, much work lies ahead in unifying identity, common objects, workflow, context engines, business processes, and other common components. This year's Adobe Summit highlighted the integration work required to complete the vision as well as reaffirmed the research and development investments committed to bring a unified offering. So far, much progress has been made. However, much work lies ahead in creating a platform for partners to expand upon. While Adobe's competitors also face massive integration work ahead, the good news for customers - individual components compete well against other best of breed offerings in their respective categories. Despite the work and challenges ahead, Adobe's Marketing Cloud should be considered in short lists with mega platforms such as IBM, Oracle, and Salesforce.com.

Your POV.

Ready for digital disruption? Are you an Adobe shop? Will you add additional modules of Adobe? How did you like Adobe Summit? Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

The Future of Marketing – and Next Generation Social Science: a Visit to the Center for Advanced Modeling

Chris Meyer

Chris Meyer is a thought leader focusing on the information economy, globalization and business innovation. His latest book is "Standing on the Sun".
Got Nerve

Chris's mission is to anticipate and shape the future of business. He has pursued this goal as an entrepreneur, executive, consultant, author, and the leader of a think tank.

 Based on the ideas in his 2002 book Future Wealth, Chris developed a plan for a business based on a network of thought leaders. He joined The Monitor Group in 2006 to develop this idea as Monitor Networks, where he was Chief Executive from 2004 to 2009. In 2006, he co-founded Monitor Talent, to take these ideas forward operationally. Prior to joining Monitor Group, he was the Director of the Center for Business Innovation at Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, from 1995 until its closing in December 2002. The Center fostered the conversation of leading issues among the business community, developed public conferences,…...

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1. Consumers had begun to continually describe their own behavior in media observable to marketers.
2. Additional information about them was being ubiquitously through their  clickstreams, cellphones and credit cards (now we can add FitBits and Nests), and the technology to fuse these data was developing quickly. Together, these trends implied that robust characterizations of large numbers of consumers would become inexpensive, and would be continually updated.
3. Advances in cognitive science were providing insights into how the mind makes the choices it does, and
4. Behavioral scientists (including behavioral economists) were able to test these insights experimentally. Because of trends #1 and #2, the hypotheses could be tested beyond experimental settings like FMRI machines (cognitive scientists) and rooms full of starving students (behavioral economists).
5. Finally, through the use of agent-based modeling, it was becoming possible to  simulate the interaction of heterogeneous individuals in the real world to validate these hypotheses—and test marketing programs.

In it, Epstein demonstrates that the 2009 prophecy has been fulfilled.  He is building neurologically validated models of behavior into his agent-based simulations.

Enough of the Cloud Already, What Is Next for Enterprise Technology?

the cloud" as a noun and start thinking about "clouding" as a verb.

When we talk about cloud computing in general, we're describing a set of efficiency principles only applied to once stateful compute and storage resources that are now stateless and liquid. We do not automatically think about resources other than storage, compute (and recently network) being stateless as well.

Clouding is not new, and compute, storage and network are not the only things that can be clouded.

Although the cloud concept has taken hold in enterprise technology, it's not entirely new to other parts of life. One could argue, for example, that condominiums and hotels were early multitenant housing clouds. Airbnb are modern versions of housing clouds delivering housing as a service, and similarly, Zipcar and Uber are car clouds, offering consumers transportation as a service.

Anything can be clouded, if we put our minds to it. The clouding of compute resources gave rise to infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS). To make clouding meaningful, we can't stop there, and we have not, we are clouding storage quickly and successfully. This explains the success of Box, DropBox, Apple's iCloud, Google Drive and others.

There are other, unconventional opportunities for clouding to drive innovation, and advanced thinkers are gravitating to the notion of anything as a service, or heck everything as a service (EvaaS).

A modern enterprise with everything as a service.



In the new world of leading enterprises leveraging EvaaS, workspace can be a service (WsaaS); expertise can be a service (ExaaS); and business processes can be services (BPaaS). We can roll all three into an overarching industry as a service (InaaS) capability eventually delivering on the age old promise of standing up "XYZ in a Box" type businesses. When everything is a stateless and a liquid service, entire environments can be orchestrated for specific jobs, demands, roles or expertise, creating the opportunity to eventually leverage humans as a service (HuaaS). HuaaS would be game changing to how companies procure, leverage, and strategically execute on their most valuable and expensive resource, human capacity.

Think about this as TaskRabbit, meet eLance, meet TopCoder, meet your human resources department.

Employees working in enterprises are currently stateful reservations of human capacity, assigned to tasks needing their primary expertise and controlled by a single manager. Many times if an employee possess expertise outside her primary area of business, she is unable to contribute in other areas where that expertise may be needed shackled by a stateful role, manager, and job description. Today's employment model only takes into account the primary talents of an individual and ignores the reality that humans are generally multidimensional and useful outside the scope of their stateful roles.

This means valuable human capacity is often wasted corollary to historic pre-cloud wasting of valuable compute and storage resources before clouding was introduced. If human capacity were aggregated into a liquid pool of stateless supply as enterprise TaskRabbits, or eLances, or TopCoders, it would allow companies to spin up and tear down human capacity to meet the human resource demand of projects all on the fly. Much like enterprises now spin up and tear down compute and storage resources needed.

We may not move clouding all the way up the enterprise resource stack right away to humans as a service, but companies that move furthest and fastest into clouding up the stack will engineer the agility and on-demand operating models they need to win. In other words if you aim for human as a service and a cloud of human talent, you will find it easy to think past only compute and storage clouds.

To get started, simply replace cloud as a noun and use clouding as a verb to drive discussions around everything as a service, both inside and outside of technology.

Consider this scenario: My connected car needs a new alternator, but instead of my car accessing my calendar and making an appointment with the service center (which would be cool), it broadcasts its alternator replacement demand to a supply of local clouded mechanics possessing the necessary expertise (ExaaS) to change said alternator on said model of car. Those with the ability to accept my warranty (BPaaS) would bid on the demand/job, and then work with a supply of mechanic shops to find an available automotive hydraulic bay (WsaaS) and tools to work on my car on a time we agree on. What would this scenario mean to an automobile manufacturer's need to have stateful/dedicated service centers and dedicated/fulltime auto technicians on staff?

When everything is a service, it's easy for enterprises to achieve efficiencies that we now only dream of. Imagining an EvaaS future is thrilling. I predict that by 2020, global enterprises with large allocations of knowledge workers will have commercial grade, human-capacity clouds leveraging ExaaS, WsaaS and BPaaS.

To do so, we have to collectively get over the hoopla of only the compute and storage clouds, and starting thinking about clouding everything else.

Adobe: It's time to reinvent marketing [again]

Briefings this week: March 31 - April 4

What (Some, if Not Most) CMOs Don’t See

Two things to start:

1. I have no qualms with CMOs and their responsibilities – it is a critical job in most organizations and hard to do as any other one.
2. I was not going to caveat the title and say ALL CMOs, but am trying to avoid being singled out as ignorant (yeah, new thing for me – I know)

OK, now that I put on the first layer of asbestos, let’s begin.

The job of a marketer is hard.

According to fellow barb-trader (blog post) Scott Brinker (@ChiefMarTech) as stated during his CxOTalk appearance on 03/21/2014, there are over 1,100 tools that a marketer could use to do their job.  And most of them use more of one of each type (here is a link to his website where he stored the infographic about it).

If I triple count and am generous in giving credit to vendors that are not really in the market but say they are I cannot get to 1,100 tools in Customer Service – nor in Sales, or in most any other discipline I can think of.  That is a challenge to begin.

If you talk to any marketer in the trenches they will tell you their job involves navigating between applications, pulling data from different places to use in others, and constantly struggle to make sure their campaigns and actions reflect ROI.

And this was before the “customer revolution” that turned the entire world from outbound to inbound – and is transforming the world of marketers into a “digital marketing” place – in the process virtually destroying the traditional role of Marketing.

No longer is about finding the people to receive the message, but it is now more focused on influencing others to shape the conversations so the brand remains relevant.  While having no control of the process for the most part.

Talk about challenging.

However, this change brought with it more problems that seen at first light, and this is what some, if not most, of the CMOs I talk to don’t see – yet.

• Tools are no longer useful as before.  This was made evident at the Adobe Summit that finished last week in Salt Lake City (not singling out Adobe, merely using them as a data point).  I did not attend in person, to be honest, but I watched some of the streamed sessions, talked to many people who were there, read their reports (good job by Dan Lyons here) and “saw the tweets go by“.  The entire event was about a collection of tools (great tools, nothing bad about them) and the people who use them.  There was virtually nothing about strategy, about aligning with business objectives or even about corresponding to KPIs.  It was about getting the job done.  And getting the job done for a business is more than tools.  If CMOs moved to the forefront of the “customer revolution” as they say, then they need to realize it is not about tactics but strategies.  Even the data Adobe presented talked to tools (and lack of understanding – see below)

— Adobe (@Adobe) March 30, 2014

• The role of marketing (and virtually all functions in the organization) has changed.  And will continue to change.  I have talked about Digital Transformation before (here is my “manifesto” about it – 4,500 words, and below is a tweet about a two-part interview I did with Jon Reed @Diginomica recently.  Good stuff) and this is a critical paradigm shift in our lives.  Everything in the organization is changing (unfortunately we are adding digital to the front of things now, like we did with Social and e- and i- everything before instead of really changing it – #LeSigh) and will continue to do so.  These changes require more – much more – than tools, and Marketing is lagging on the strategic aspects of this shift.

bud @jonerp and I had a great chat on #DigitalTransformation. Part 1: http://t.co/CYDfp9pLoq ; Part 2: http://t.co/5mPcdJmiwL @diginomica

— Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky) March 27, 2014

• Strategy is more than saying we are going to do something – even if you put numbers to that something.  The use of ROI to justify everything they do talks to a tactical approach to the world.  In a strategic world ROI does not matter as much (there are other metrics that do, don’t get me wrong – but the investment is usually too big to be justified in an ROI calculation only).  Half-jokingly I tell people that ROI is more like CYA when management does not understand what you are doing and want to make sure they are not help responsible for “wasting money”.  Marketing needs to get past this, even if they have more data to make the calculations work to the point of measuring each single interaction.  ROI is no their justification, the digital transformation paradigm shift is – and that requires a strategic, not tactical approach.

#DigitalTranformation IS an enterprise topic because if U think its simple steps youll miss the opportunity and lag competition @chiefmartec

— Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky) March 25, 2014

did the same w/ CRM, HCM, ERP, etc: focus on little steps & simple tools ; miss the early opportunities #DigitalTransformation @chiefmartec

— Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky) March 25, 2014

btw, last 2 tweets were about #CxOTalk show with @chiefmartec @ValaAfshar and @mkrigsman — #DigitalTransformation is a Paradigm Shift dudes

— Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky) March 25, 2014

This is not meant to attack CMOs or marketers. In spite of my early lack of understanding on the value of Marketing in my career (which I might’ve stated publicly – just in case you run a search on the terms) I have learned since a lot about it and the value it brings to the organization.  No group in the organizations is as talented as they are at crafting and managing a message.  Messages are incredibly valuable in this new world, as are tools and methods to manage them. The CMO and their organization, if they become more strategic, are critical.

Alas, (some, if not most) they are not getting the radical change that is happening.

That — needs to change.

What do you think? Am i missing the point entirely? Am i being unfair?

Would love your thoughts…