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Preventing Digital Disruption with Workflows

Preventing Digital Disruption with Workflows

New research report, Nintex: Creating Workflows that Enable Digital Transformation, provides a vendor profile and buyer's guide of Nintex

Disruption surrounds the marketplace. As companies face disruption in their industry, the race to stay ahead of or beat the competition is quickening. Software is one of the ways companies competitively automate, manage and analyze business processes, data and content and scale operations. And to successfully compete in this increasingly digital world, enterprises need to transform slow, error-prone operations from manual, analog processes to automated digital workflows and document generation.

However, as various departments in companies buy software applications, often the lines of business are choosing the best of breed solutions and platforms which don’t necessarily easily integrate with each other or the main IT systems. This results in companies having many separate software systems. With people distributed over large geographies, it can be difficult to coordinate work across the business and thus defend against competitors.

While obtaining the right software for each department and use case is important, this often leaves the organization without a way to easily connect the work flows across departments and lines of business to get the return on investment. What is the key to winning the digital transformation race? A digital business process flow platform.

Businesses that drive process efficiency and effectiveness across desperate software solutions and across every aspect of their business will be uniquely qualified to position themselves to exceed and excel. To do this, companies need a platform to digitally integrate, sync and create sophisticated business processes independent of the variety of different software solutions throughout the various departments in a company.

The issue is however, not just to connect SaaS applications, but to also provide process automation to make sure the processes from each of those applications work together well. Without a digital workflow and content automation (WCA) platform and corresponding analytics, it can be very difficult to make sure the investments the organization has made in separate software solutions are actually returning the investment. Nintex does just that.

Competitive Positioning

Nintex’s key differentiator is they offer a digital transformation platform comprised of Nintex Workflow Cloud and Nintex Hawkeye. The host of Nintex’s digital SaaS connectors allows clients to rapidly build and deploy a digital workflow and content automation (WCA) and cloud transformation platform without having to write code. The business result is the ability to acquire customers faster, increase the pace of innovation, as well as control and management expenses. The platform allows organizations to automate their business processes quickly and easily. And the drag and drop interface encourages quicker adoption of the Nintex solution. Importantly, any workflow automated with Nintex Workflow can be deployed to native mobile platforms (Android, iOS and Windows) in a rapid and simple manner.

The Nintex platform automates processes on and between enterprise content management systems and collaboration platforms, connecting on-premises, cloud workflows and mobile users. Two hundred of the Fortune 500 companies use Nintex, including more than 7,000 public and private organizations in 90 countries, running millions of workflows daily.

For companies that are not ready to move everything to the cloud, Nintex also allows companies to create workflows that stretch across both cloud-based and on-premises systems and services, to distribute work to multiple sites for multiple purposes and move data and workflows to the cloud when they are ready.

Nintex’s overall power is as a Digital Business Platform (DBP). Nintex combines powerful Workflow and Content Automation (WCA) capabilities in one platform. (Editor’s Note: WCA is an emerging technology category that consolidates the legacy technology markets of Business Process Management (BPM) and Customer Communications Management (CCM).) Nintex offers advanced WCA for its easy-to-use workflow and document generation capabilities and workflow analytics (workflow process intelligence).

Target Markets and Industry Vertical Solutions

Target markets include Communications and Media, Education, Financial Services, Government, Healthcare and Life Sciences, Legal, Manufacturing, Professionals Services, Retail Services and Technology industries. Nintex solutions are designed for a range of lines of business within organizations, including Sales and Marketing, Finance, Human Resources, IT and Administration, Customer Service, Field Service and Safety.

High-payback document processes that are faster to implement with a system like Nintex include those in Table 1, customer-facing processes as well as back-office processes (see Table 2b and 2b.) What’s important to note is that the implementation timeframe and costs are fractions of a traditional enterprise-level IT system and instead of using a single, formal, top-down development effort, they are evolved with rapid iterations. This takes a page out of the lean-process, design-thinking community, where rapid iterations and pivoting is key to success and gives large organizations not used to the start-up mentality the edge to be more competitive, quicker.

Nintex capabilities table 1

Nintex back office capabilities

Customer References

In speaking to Nintex customers our research found that many of the gains came from having an easy process to execute on their digital transformation. This might include moving to the cloud, reducing the number and complexity of workflows like creating and approving a press release, signing and approving contracts, reducing resources and reassigning them to more important jobs as well as reducing the number of software applications used by the company.

The savings in time for enhanced workflows advanced the company’s position in the marketplace, get to market faster and beat the competition. In addition, IT departments were able to be more focused on the needs of the business versus being taxed with the maintenance of many separate software applications. This took their time and focus away from the direct needs of the business. By implementing Nintex, the relationship between the lines of business and IT were greatly improved. With the ever changing dynamics in IT, the IT department needs to be highly agile and flexible in the solutions they provide for the business. Nintex provides IT with what they need to deliver the business what they need. This makes IT more relevant than ever, which is especially key when many lines of business are buying their own software. IT can play a key role in the success of the business.

Are you looking to digitally transform your business? Have you determined which processes are slowing the digital transformation of your business? And do you have a solution to take those manual, error-prone processes and digitally enable them? This report will help you in choosing a vendor that can help you with just that.

Have a few minutes to spare? Take Constellation's 2017 Digital Transformation SurveyConstellation will send you a summary of the results. 

Marketing Transformation Chief Marketing Officer

Oracle Preps AI Apps, Next Steps for Data Cloud

Oracle Preps AI Apps, Next Steps for Data Cloud

Oracle will launch the first of its machine-learning powered Adaptive Intelligent Apps this spring, but what’s next for Oracle Data Cloud? Here’s a look at promised and possible use cases.

The first of five promised Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Application (AI Apps) will be generally available this spring. As for next steps for the petabyte-scale treasure trove known as the Oracle Data Cloud, we’ll have to wait and see.

The AI App plans emerged at the January 17 Oracle Cloud Analyst Summit in New York. The event also saw Oracle’s President, Thomas Kurian, repeat a year-old promise that the Oracle Data Cloud will see use in Oracle applications outside of the marketing domain. Oracle AI Apps are, in fact, part of the story of what’s next for Oracle Data Cloud, as I’ll explain, but first let’s review each offering.

Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Applications

The first of five planned Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Applications is expected to
launch this spring.

Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Applications are the vendor’s entry into the hot, fast-growing category of “smart” applications variously associated with artificial intelligence, cognitive computing and (usually most accurately) machine learning. AI Apps will be optional (extra-cost) applications complementing Oracle’s customer experience, human capital management, supply chain management and ERP software as a service (SaaS) clouds.

Announced last September at Oracle Open World, AI Apps will be adaptive in that they will continually capture and learn from new data as it is generated. They’ll be intelligent in that they will make recommendations or take actions based on transactional and behavioral histories as well as real-time interactions and conditions, including time, weather and location. Here are the five apps and associated SaaS clouds:

  • CX Cloud: Adaptive Intelligent Offers and Adaptive Intelligent Actions
  • HCM Cloud: Adaptive Intelligent Candidate Experience
  • SCM Cloud: Adaptive Intelligent Planning &Bidding
  • ERP Cloud: Adaptive Intelligent Discounts

The new news at the Oracle Cloud Analyst Summit was that the first AI App, Adaptive Intelligent Offers, will launch this spring. Clive Swan, senior VP, applications development, said that two to three additional AI Apps will be available later this year.

Swan also briefly described the machine learning service that will power the AI Apps, explaining that it will automate personalization for each customer through auto feature selection, auto feature engineering and auto hyperparameter tuning. “This lets us scale operationally without data science intervention on a per-customer basis,” he said.

MyPOV on Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps

As I detail in my in-depth report, Inside Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps, it takes Web-scale data, massive compute capacity, advanced data science capabilities and lots of time to develop machine-learning driven applications that can deliver smart recommendations or, even-better, automated actions. Oracle has the data it needs, starting with aggregated and customer-specific histories from its respective SaaS clouds. But this is also where the Oracle Data Cloud comes in, with its petabytes of data, billions of consumer profiles, 400 million professional profiles and 100 million business profiles. The data is already modeled and ready for use in supporting sales, marketing and service decisions. Oracle also has vast and growing cloud compute capacity, with 19 data centers around the globe and counting.

Data science and time seem to be the only holdups on AI Apps. Oracle’s official announcement at Oracle Open World noted that it would take 12 to 18 months to deliver AI Apps. The spring release now expected would be six to eight months after the announcement. As Swan explained it, time was needed to develop and test the automated machine learning capabilities.

Among the vendors exploring AI, Oracle’s app-centric strategy mostly closely matches that of Salesforce. The latter says it spent more than two years developing the automated machine learning behind the Salesforce Einstein apps announced last fall. Salesforce also spent more than $4 billion on AI-related acquisitions last year. This has contributing to the company’s head start. As I detail in this blog, Salesforce has 11 Einstein apps that are generally available, six more due in February and an 15 additional apps expected before the end of the year.

Oracle contrasts its strategy with that of Salesforce noting that it’s apps will include supervisory controls that will enable business users to boost, constrain or even override machine-generated results to fine-tune results and meet specific business objectives. Oracle also says its apps won’t be limited to the sales, service and marketing domains, although it, too, is starting with customer-experience related applications.

Oracle says it will eventually have many more than five AI Apps, but for now, Salesforce has the advantage in terms of availability and diversity of AI apps.

Oracle Data Cloud

Oracle ID Graph is a feature of Oracle Data Cloud that enables tracking of unique
consumer behaviors and, thus, targeted marketing across channels.

It’s no coincidence that the next step for Oracle AI Apps – into the HCM, SCM and ERP domains – are also the next frontier for Oracle Data Cloud. Built on the acquisitions of Blue Kai, DataLogix, Add This and Crosswise, Oracle Data Cloud has heretofore been all about powering data-driven campaigns and marketing data enrichment. With the Oracle ID Graph capability, Data Cloud also helps marketers better recognize, understand and target consumers and business professionals across devices (desktop, tablet, mobile) and across channels (web sites, email, mobile apps, social networks).

It was at last year’s Cloud Analyst Summit that Kurian first vowed that Oracle Data Cloud enrichment opportunities would extend beyond marketing and into HCM, SCM, ERP and other areas. At last week’s event Kurian was asked about progress, and he reiterated that more is to come.

“We didn’t just get into the data business; we wanted to solve a high-value problem,” Kurian said, talking at length about the value of Oracle ID Graph. “Oracle Data Cloud lets us drive differentiated business process outcomes… [and] they’re not just marketing centric.” He cited procurement, replenishment and HR as potential use cases for ID Graph.

MyPOV on Expanding the Footprint of Oracle Data Cloud

Whether it’s Oracle AI Apps or the Oracle Data Cloud, applications outside of the marketing and sales domains are going to take longer for Oracle to develop. Oracle added business-to-business data to Oracle Data Cloud late last summer, and the associated business and professional profiles would presumably help drive SCM, ERP and, possibly, HCM use cases. Oracle also expects to exploit aggregated data from its various SaaS applications, but that may require new data agreements before the company can tap yet more data to bring context and insight to smart applications.

For now, Oracle Data Cloud is an incredibly powerful and unique resource for marketers, but its potential as an engine for AI Apps and conventional apps outside of the CRM realm has yet to be realized. I have no doubt that Oracle will get there, but it’s an objective that remains on the horizon.

Have a few minutes to spare? Take Constellation's 2017 Digital Transformation SurveyConstellation will send you a copy of the results. 

 
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Zoom Video Conferencing Raises $100M

Zoom Video Conferencing Raises $100M

Media Name: zoom-sequoia.png

On Jan 17, web-conferencing vendor Zoom raised $100M  (series D) from Sequoia capital. I spoke to Zoom's CEO Eric Yuan about this new funding, about the integration of AI into conferencing and more.

Have a few minutes to spare? Take Constellation's 2017 Digital Transformation SurveyConstellation will send you a summary of the results. 

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2017; Industrial Technology vendors v the IT Technology vendors in the competition for the Enterprise IoT Market

2017; Industrial Technology vendors v the IT Technology vendors in the competition for the Enterprise IoT Market

Five years ago it was difficult to foresee that the well-established IT vendors would find themselves competing for the Enterprise Technology expenditure against a group of similar sized Global Industrial Technology companies. This was the time when conventional IT expenditure was threatened by ‘Digital’ marketing expenditure under the control of Chief Digital Officers.  What do the buyers want out of this new competitive landscape in 2017?

What Technology an Enterprise requires, the method by which it is purchased and operated has been subtly changing over that five-year period. Business models are slowly, but relentlessly moving from being assisted by technology, through being enabled by Technology into a combined and fused entity of Digital Business.

Increasing exposure to Digital Business and Markets is driving a shift towards Line of Business, LoB, management assuming the role of defining how Digital Technology will deliver their part of the operations. A combination of factors has made this possible, from the generic familiarity with Digital Technology, through to simplification in delivery from the mix of Clouds and Services.

Note the use of the term Digital Technology in connection with LoB managed operations, and not the usual terminology of IT. The difference is crucial; IT departments have a range of technologies, integrated and operated to deliver a myriad of Applications requiring a huge amount of specialized knowledge. Though CIOs and IT departments have worked hard to reduce the cost/complexity by adopting Clouds and Services where possible Enterprise IT operation will remain a specialized task within the Enterprise for the foreseeable future.

Digital Technology places the emphasis on knowing how to gain innovative business deployment with the technology element greatly simplified and delivered as a ‘Service’. To compete in the Digital Economy means creating Services around the Enterprise’s traditional products; to gain the elusive ‘agility’ to win, requires the LoB managers to follow the same course of action in their acquisition of their technology element.

Digital Services using Cloud Service providers doesn’t seem to add anything new, or disruptive, as this has been the premise for the appointment of CDOs. Nor explain why Industrial Technology vendors are now competing for Enterprise expenditure.

The first three of the following statements concerning the role of IOT are universally applicable to any Enterprise competing in the Digital Economy based on Services. The Fourth statement defines the reason why Industrial Technology companies are competing to sell their products into Industrial Enterprise.

  1. IoT is a key enabler in the creation of the Digital Services economy as it connects, integrates and supports huge Business to Business, or Business to Consumer networks with few limitations as to the richness of the Services that it makes possible.
  2. IoT Sensors and Sensing turn the ‘Analogue’ world of machines and events into the ‘Digital’ world to provide the necessary data inputs for the new generation of dynamically optimized of Business Services.
  3. The resulting dynamic Digital Economy Business model built of competitively optimized Services requires Operational Expenditure, OpEx driven accounting. This in turn uses IoT Sensors and Sensing to provide ‘real time’ inputs of the utilization, and costs, of Enterprise Assets.
  4. The USA driven Industrial Internet of Things, IIoT and the German driven Industrie 4.0 initiatives both recognize the above, and the need to adopt IoT on existing and new build Industrial Machinery.

NB; For more detail on the Digital Services manufacturing company and its use of IoT see the blog ‘The Middle Office – example Manufacturing Enterprise’. To understand how new industrial machinery will be built incorporating IoT see the blog ‘Digital Twins bring the physical and digital together’

Deploying Industrial Automation to gain operational improvement in manufacturing has a long history, the addition of IoT capabilities adds new dimensions in connectivity and analytics. The Industrial Technology vendors bring to the market their experience in manufacturing and machinery, whilst the IT vendors have data and analytics experience. Both sides have global installed customer bases supported by strong sales and service teams.

Will the result be a new top tier of market place winners drawn from both sides, or will the result be stronger collaboration and partnering? The most likely answer as to who will be the winners lies in which companies manage to change their own operating model towards supporting the new generation of LoB Managers by making their own products and expertise available as easy to consume Digital Technology Services.

Have a few minutes to spare? Take Constellation's 2017 Digital Transformation SurveyConstellation will send you a summary of the results. 

Appendix;

List of Enterprise members of the Industrial Internet Consortium

Alphabetical listing of a selection of major Industrial Technology IoT vendors, together with a similar listing for major IT Technology vendors for comparison;

Footnote; Constellation Research is not making a recommendation for any of the listed vendors whose inclusion is purely illustrative of the point being made in the blog;- 2017; Industrial Technology vendors v the IT Technology vendors in the competition for the Enterprise IoT Market

http://m.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2457089/it-decision-makers-undecided-on-who-should-lead-internet-of-things-initiatives-research

New C-Suite Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization

Planview Acquired by Thoma Bravo

Planview Acquired by Thoma Bravo

The social task management market is hot! Last week Atlassian purchased Trello for $425M, and today private equity firm Thoma Bravo acquired Planview, maker of Trello competitor ProjectPlace. (their product portfolio also includes Innotas, Troux and Planview Enterprise)

I discussed today's news and future plans with Planview's Chief Product Officer, Patrick Tickle.

I first wrote about this market in 2012 in the Constellation Research report: Getting Work Done With Social Task Management. More recently we've published two Constellation ShortLists™  Social Task Management: Enterprise Suites With Project Features and Social Task Management: Stand-alone vendors that highlight the key vendors in this space. These recent acquisitions validate the importance of social task management as one of the critical tools employees should be using to organize, prioritize, and collaborate on their work.

Today's acquisition gives Planview a huge boost to drive their next major stage of growth.  Constellation Research will be monitoring their progress in both new product innovation and customer success.

 

Future of Work

Wordfence Launches Cyber Attack Activity Report

Wordfence Launches Cyber Attack Activity Report

1
No matter whether you run a personal blog or a professional website, you will find yourself at some stage, the victim of a cyber attack. These cyber attacks, often referred to incorrectly in the mainstream media as “hacking” can take a variety of forms including:
  • DDOS – distributed denial of service attacks engage networks of computers to bombard your server with requests
  • Brute force attacks – where the attacker attempts to guess your login details usually using an automated system that can send hundreds if not thousands of requests very quickly
  • Malware / spyware – where a piece of malicious code is inserted into your system which allows another person (or a program) to take over your computer
  • Ransomware – where a small program activates on your computer, encrypting all your data requiring the payment of ransom before you are sent a key to unlock your own machine.

Despite the relative openness and transparency on the web, few people or firms openly talk about cyber attack. This means it is difficult to gauge just how widespread these cyber attacks actually are and whether we should be personally or professionally concerned about this phenomenon.
Now, each month, creator of the WordPress firewall plugin, WordFence, have begun producing a regular report on cyber attacks. This report collates attack information based on the plugin’s install base (WordPress powered websites and blogs all around the world). And while this is just a subset of websites and platforms that live on the internet, it provides a great insight into cyber attacks, including:

  • The IP address from which the attack originated
  • Country of origination
  • Number of attacks launched
  • Types of attacks.
This first report reveals that 13 out of the top 25 IP addresses originate in the Ukraine. France comes in second with 7. As the report explains:
Most of these originate from Iliad Enterprises. Iliad is a large organization with many subsidiaries and over 4000 employees. They tried to buy T-Mobile in the USA 2 years ago. The netblock for these IPs is registered to Iliad, but the attacks may originate from one of many subsidiaries of Iliad, like the ISP ‘Free’ in France.
So, how many attacks are we seeing? The report states that there were:
  • 63 million complex attacks – attempts to exploit weaknesses in your website code, plugins or database
  • 67 million brute force attacks – attempts to guess your passwords and user IDs.
What can you do about your WordPress / web security?
One of the biggest holes in your website / WordPress security will be patches. Make sure you are:
  • Regularly patching your site – updating it with the latest changes
  • Regularly updating your plugins – turn off the plugins and functionality that you don’t use, and update the ones you do.
There are also some basic security approaches that you should implement, including:
  • Complex user passwords – require that your users all have complex passwords that consist of upper and lower case characters, numbers and symbols and have a substantial length (more than 8 characters)
  • Put in place a mechanism that blocks users after a small number of unsuccessful login attempts
  • Add a web firewall to monitor and protect your code from unauthorised updates.

Why should you care?

Even if you are running a small business, cyber security is an issue for you and your brand. Sites that are affected by malware, for example, will find themselves blacklisted by Google. That means that every time someone searches for your business or tries to visit your webpage, Google will step in and ask you whether you want to proceed to an “insecure” website. And then, of course, there are other issues – from loss of files, customer data and more.
 
Quite simply, these days, brands simply cannot afford to be lax. The good thing is, that there are a growing number of integrated solutions and plugins for most platforms. Take the time to secure your site and hopefully you won’t have to make the time to clean up a problem down the track.
 

Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer Chief Marketing Officer

Virginia Tech Fights Zika With High-Performance Prediction

Virginia Tech Fights Zika With High-Performance Prediction

Here’s how Persistent Systems aided the Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Tech in using analytics to predict and help prevent the spread of infectious diseases.

What’s the best weapon to fight the spread of infectious disease? For the epidemiologists at The Biocomplexity Institute of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (BI-VT), it’s data.

BI-VT helps U.S. government agencies such as the Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, and Center for Disease Control to predict, prepare for, and prevent the spread of infectious diseases such as Ebola and Zika. With help from Persistent Systems (Persistent), BI-VT has dramatically increased the speed, scalability and accuracy of its analytical modeling and simulation environment.

@PersistentSys, #Anaytics, #HPC, @BiocomplexityVT, @virginia_tech

The Biocomplexity Institute’s EpiCaster app, which was co-developed by Persistent
Systems, is an intuitive, public website for tracking flu and other diseases.

The collaboration between BI-VT and Persistent is the topic of my latest case study research, Persistent Systems Helps Virginia Tech Accelerate Predictive Simulation. This 14-page case study should be of interest to any analytics professional interested in using high-performance computing, speeding time to analysis, tapping new data types, or opening up analysis capabilities to non-technical users. With help from Persistent, BI-VT achieved all of the above.

With leadership from Professor Madhav Marathe, Director of the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL) at the Biocomplexity Institute, BI-VT has pioneered graph simulation techniques that have vastly improved the prediction and prevention of disease outbreaks. But you don’t have to be an epidemiologist to appreciate the obstacles BI-VT had to overcome. For example, the simulations initially required complex, manual coding for each one of scores of high-performance computing jobs. What’s more, iterative analyses took a day or more to run, and the analytical tools were usable only by the few experts. Sound familiar?

The first step to addressing these challenges was creating a middleware layer that abstracted and automated the coding and iterative complexities of BI-VT’s data-analysis environment. The software engineers at Persistent helped turn a slow, manual workflow into a streamlined, reliable and resilient production system. Persistent also developed graphical user interface applications (such as the EpiCaster app seen above) that have made the system accessible to non-technical analyst and even the general public.

Over more than a decade of tracking diseases ranging from H1N1 and SARS to, more recently, Ebola and Zika, BI-VT has been able to simulate and recommend data-supported interventions and containment steps, many of which have been implemented by government agencies. Examples include administering antiviral drugs to emergency personnel, inoculating the young and aged, spraying pesticides to curb mosquito populations, and encouraging the public to stay indoors.

To find out more about BI-VT, winner of the Constellation Research 2016 SuperNova Award in the Data-to-Decisions category, click on the "download excerpt" button on this page. The excerpt includes the table of contents, executive summary and introductory section of the case study.

RELATED READING:
Cloud BI and Analytics Options Aren’t Just for Cloud Data
Salesforce Takes Apps-First Approach with Einstein AI

NRF Big Show 2017 Spotlights Data-Driven Imperatives

Have a few minutes to spare? Take Constellation's 2017 Digital Transformation SurveyConstellation will send you a summary of the results. 

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Slack Adds Threaded Conversations

Slack Adds Threaded Conversations

Today team collaboration vendor Slack announced the addition of threaded conversations to their group messaging application. Slack customers will be very happy to see this addition, as this has been one of the most requested features  since the product's original launch. What is a threaded conversation? It's when a message has replies directly linked to it, rather than each reply just being posted on it's own in a "flat" chronological order. Think of it this way, instead of having a dozen people in a room all talking over each other at the same time making conversations nearly impossible to follow, people tend to discuss one topic, then move on the next, etc. If you want to go back to an older topic, people say "Remember when we were talking about so and so?" Structure is important in conversations, as it helps reduce the clutter and the chaos that can occur in a channel when there is no organization. 

You start a thread by hovering over a message, and clicking the new "Start a thread" icon. Given Slack's focus on user design, friendliness and fun, I'm a bit I'm surprised by the choice of the rather technical term "thread" versus something more natural like conversation, reply or comment, but naming aside, threads are a very welcome addition.

This opens the message on the right hand side of the screen, which Slack calls the Flexpane. There you can read the entire conversation and add new replies.

After you send the reply, the original message is updated indicating the number of replies. 

Better Late Than Never

You may wonder why it's taken Slack a while to add threaded conversations. Slack spent almost 2 years working on several designs, testing both internally and with a few customers to make sure they released a design that is both simple and effective. There were many design elements to consider, including:

  • How many levels of nested replies should they allow? Meaning should there just be replies to the initial message, or should you be able to reply to a reply? 
  • How should threads be displayed in the main stream? Should they be expanded or collapsed by default?
  • Should posts with new responses be bubbled up to the top of the stream, or just kept in line with when they were originally created?
  • When and how should people be notified about replies?

It's interesting to note, there is very little consistency in the answers to these questions across the various enterprise software vendors. Threaded conversations are handled differently in Facebook, IBM Connections, Salesforce Chatter, Microsoft Teams, etc. So far there does not appear to be a specific "right answer". For Slack's part, rather than cluttering up the main stream with replies, they allow people to open the conversations they want on the right. This is similar to scanning through a long list of email subject lines, then opening the email you want to read in a preview pane on the right. Slack's approach here is similar to IBM Connections, which also shows conversations on the right instead of inline in the stream like Facebook and many others. Time will tell how Slack's customers react to this.

One of the things I like the most about Slack's threaded conversations is the addition of the "All Threads" view.  This view allows you to easily see all the conversations (sorry, threads) that you started, replied to, or you've been mentioned in - across all your channels in one place. You can also manually choose to follow threads that don't automatically meet one of those 3 criteria. The All Threads view enables you to easily keep up with the threads you're engaged in, without having to jump between several screens of information.  

Slack All Threads View

A Crowded Space

The group messaging market is very competitive, with offerings coming from several directions including:

  • standalone vendors like Glip, HiBox and HipChat (see the Constellation ShortListâ„¢ Enterprise Group Messaging: Standalone)
  • traditional UCC/PBX vendors like Cisco Spark and Unify Circuit (see the Constellation ShortListâ„¢ Enterprise Group Messaging: Unified Communication)
  • enterprise collaboration/social networking vendors like Microsoft (Yammer and their new Teams product), Salesforce Chatter, IBM (the upcoming Watson Workspace) as well as Workplace by Facebook

Slack's addition of thread conversations eliminates one of the talking points these competitors have been using when selling against Slack.

It's clear Slack put a great deal of thought and testing into this feature, and Constellation Research looks forward to speaking with customers about how they are using it.

 

 

Future of Work

NRF Big Show 2017 Spotlights Data-Driven Imperatives

NRF Big Show 2017 Spotlights Data-Driven Imperatives

The National Retail Federation Big Show 2017 underscored the importance of better, data-driven understanding of customers to fend off competition from Amazon.

Retailers don’t just want to survive in the age of Amazon; they want to thrive. That much was clear at the super-busy January 15-17 National Retail Federation Big Show 2017 in New York.

Throngs of retail executives gathered at this year’s Big Show in search of emerging trends, tactics, technologies and related advice on how to innovate, compete and win in a challenging environment. Invariably, better, data-driven knowledge of customers is the key to competitive advantage, whether it’s through predictive marketing or smart, personalized recommendations driven by machine learning. Here’s my video takeaway from the latest installment of NRF’s annual Big Show.

NRF Big Show Spotlights Data-Driven Imperatives from Constellation Research on Vimeo.


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ADP Acquires The Marcus Buckingham Company to Expand Talent Portfolio

ADP Acquires The Marcus Buckingham Company to Expand Talent Portfolio

Earlier this week ADP shared that it acquired The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC), a player in the Talent Management space.
 
 

Worth to dissect the press release in our custom approach - it can be found here:
 
ROSELAND, NJ 01/17/17 -- ADP has acquired The Marcus Buckingham Company (TMBC), an innovator in human capital management (HCM), to bring to ADP clients a more scientific approach to employee engagement and performance. TMBC, and its founder Marcus Buckingham, are pioneers in using data and research to drive talent management practices that help managers build engagement and increase performance in their teams. Their unique approach empowers managers to coach employees based on their strengths and custom-design teams based on those strengths.
MyPOV – Good summary on what ADP will get with TMBC.

TMBC's cloud-based performance and talent management solution, StandOut, couples applications with coaching and education to give team leaders the tools, insights and data needed to turn talent into better employee performance. Built on decades of groundbreaking research that has uncovered the factors that differentiate high-performing teams, this solution will now be offered as ADP StandOut. TMBC has a global client roster that spans a broad range of industries from professional services to hospitality and includes many companies in the Fortune 100.
MyPOV – So it is not about consulting / services – but about IP / product assets, too as TMBC StandOut gets a paragraph here. Bringing data together with tools to help companies manage talent better is an interesting combination. The question will be if ADP can keep getting the same quality and amounts of data that an independent TMBC used to get.
"At its core, the strength and differentiation of any company lies in its talent," said Carlos Rodriguez, president and CEO, ADP. "That is why we are continuing to invest in data-driven talent management solutions with the acquisition of TMBC. The company's technology and renowned research will add to our existing talent portfolio and puts ADP in a position to better serve the growing number of innovative organizations who are thinking differently about how they manage and engage their talent. We are thrilled to welcome both TMBC's associates and Marcus into the ADP family."
MyPOV – Good quote by Rodriguez. ADP has huge upsell potential in its install base – that is mainly using HR Core and Payroll products from ADP. Now ADP has data and tool to continue the upsell as well as a chance to sell to the few hundred existing ADP Talent Management customers. Plenty of ways to monetize TMBC assets, know-how and services.
According to the Deloitte Global Human Capital Management Trends 2016 report1, 77 percent of executives say that people analytics are a priority, but only 29 percent think that they are successfully using outside data to predict workforce trends and target the right talent to meet those trends. With that in mind, the acquisition of TMBC helps ADP further deliver on its talent management strategy of helping companies build better workforces through the strategic use of data and research.
MyPOV – All about how ADP tries to position Talent Management. When you come late to the ‘party’ you better have some differentiators and ADP is using a data / research approach to Talent Management to differentiate the offering.
Marcus Buckingham is a noted author and speaker and has been featured as a thought leader on talent management and leadership trends in a range of outlets that span The Harvard Business Review and Forbes to Oprah and Larry King.

MyPOV – Indeed ADP gets a thought leader on Talent Management, it will be interesting to see how Buckingham’s ideas and concepts will be received by the ADP customer base. It’s not only ideas that are needed by ADP, ADP also needs to connect with a different buyer. But with TMBC in the pocket, doors may open more easily than ever before. Lastly an interesting culture mix, TMBC was all centered around the 'star' CEO - vs. ADP is all about the 'machine team'. Will be interesting to watch.
"In the world of people-at-work, everyone trusts ADP data, so I leapt at the chance to bring to the ADP ecosystem StandOut's data-based insights and tools on people's talents, engagement and performance," said Marcus Buckingham, co-head, the ADP Research Institute. "At a time when so many companies are clamoring for real-time and reliable people data, when they crave tools that leaders and team members actually want to use, the combination of ADP's scale, security and data-integrity with StandOut's focus on real-world teams, is unique and powerful. I'm so excited to see how many companies and people we can serve."
MyPOV – Good quote by Buckingham, we also learn about his new ‘home’ with the co-head position at the ADP Research Institute. And indeed, we know getting the ‘hard’ compensation data is always a challenge for talent management related engagement. So, this is a win / win for ADP customers.
ADP has helped organizations of all types and sizes for more than 60 years unlock the potential of their workforces. ADP's cloud-based talent portfolio -- which includes recruiting, recruiter training, outsourcing, screening and selection, onboarding, learning, goals, performance, data analytics, succession and compensation -- is expanded in breadth and depth with TMBC's technology, consulting and research.
MyPOV – Good summary of what customers can now expect from ADP + TMBC in Talent Management.

Overall MyPOV

ADP customers have for a long time looked beyond ADP for Talent Management. First because of a lack of ADP offering, then because of lack of competitiveness of the ADP Talent Management capabilities. That has changed since approximately two years (read more here) and ADP is showing success in selling Talent Management into its install base, with increasing momentum. The acquisition of TMBC should help this development, as ADP has more talking points and value drivers to start a conversation with Talent Management.

On the concern side, ADP will have to open doors that have not been open or have been shut for the vendor. Never an easy re-targeting effort. But a saturated install base on the Payroll / HR Core side forces the ADP go to market machine to focus on upsell and cross-sell anyway and the success rate of that market effort overall will determine much of ADP’s future success. And after install base - there is always the green field - a very different challenge for any vendor and here for ADP.

Overall a good move by ADP, good news for ADP customers, too – as we know that in the long run – suites always win. HR practitioners dread nothing more than integration issues, getting more automation from a single vendor is good for businesses, as suite level benefits come to play, and possible differentiators that matter (see e.g. ADP’s ‘data driven angle). We will be there to watch, stay tuned.

 
Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth ADP Chief People Officer