Is Reddit’s Controversy About the Content or the Digital Revenue Model?

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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Reddit’s forums are famous for hosting some of the most vibrant and some of the most disturbing (my personal opinion) discussions on the Web. The New York Times article by Jason Henry stated, “Mr. Huffman reappeared last Friday as chief executive to pull off a turnaround of the online message board, which has grappled with a series of missteps and is embroiled in a battle to win back the confidence of its users.” The San Francisco Chronicle reporter, Greta Kaul wrote, The new CEO of Reddit hosted an “Ask Me Anything” forum to clarify its content policies, which have been debated by free speech advocates and an antiharassment contingent for weeks. The site, known for everything from elevated conversations about political philosophy to photo collections of dead children, rolled out rules designed to curb harassment.

There were more than 40,000 Reddit users tuned in to Thursday’s forum at various times and generated 9,000 comments ~an hour. CEO Steve Huffman wrote, “We’ll consider banning subreddits (forums) that clearly violate the guidelines in my post — the ones that are illegal or cause harm to others. “There are many subreddits whose contents I and many others find offensive, but that alone is not justification for banning.”

While most of the controversy is about Reddit administrator’s who have drawn both praise and criticism for their hands-off approach to regulating what could be said on the site and, which leaves many decisions up to volunteer moderators, there is an all together additional issue that not only Reddit has to face, but so do many other brands in this Age of Digital Disruption. In Ray Wang’s book: Disrupting Digital Business: Create An Authentic Experience in A Peer-to-Peer Economy says Digital Darwinism is not kind to those who wait to understand the transformation and choices business have to make, and make now.

The author’s of the book The ClueTrain Manifesto wrote back in 1999 “Through the Internet, the people in your markets are discovering and inventing new ways to converse. They’re talking about your business. They’re telling one another the truth, in very human voices. You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind the facile corporate words and happy talk brochures. Or you can join the conversation.”

Perhaps an addendum to that today is – “You can join the conversation, but have to decide on your digital business revenue model, which will determine how completely unedited, authentic, genuine and honest your conversations are going to be.”

The Bottom-line: For those that are not clear, the digital disruption means that we are having to change our business models. We can no longer operate business the way we used to. And we have to consider how far is to far and how far is far enough to maintain what the author’s of the ClueTrain spoke about – which is the idea that one can step outside the typical, sterile, overstarched blandness of the old days of brands and just be human. But how far does one go, still be human, and not be offensive? How does one decide where the boundary lines are drawn? That is up to each and every individual and each and every brand.

And as I talk to CMOs, Customer Experience Professionals, Customer Care and Customer Service Professionals and IOT experts, these are the questions brands and those that spend money to sponsor those brands will have to decide. We are over the hype-cycle that the Internet is the place to be totally honest. We are now in a new era where we have to get serious about how brands are going to make money and what are the limits to what a brand can and can not do or will not do. Interesting times we live in.

What’s your take on what is on or over the edge in the area of Internet content and the editing or moderating of it?
@drnatalie VP and Principle Analyst Covering The Digital Disruption and All It’s Consequences

Infographic Friday: FIFA Women’s World Cup

Russell Scibetti

Founding Editor, The Business of Sports
The Business of Sports

My name is Russell Scibetti and I have an extensive background in sports business, including CRM and database marketing, interactive and digital marketing, social media, corporate sponsorships and activation, and applied market research. From 2007 to 2014, I worked for Arizona State Athletics, Comcast-Spectacor (Philadelphia Flyers) and the New York Jets to manage and implement CRM, database marketing, market research and other technology-based sales and marketing initiatives. In 2014, I joined KORE Software as their VP of Product Strategy, where I am responsible for the strategic vision, planning and development of the KORE ProSports Ticketing, Sponsorship and Suites/Premium software products. I earned my MBA in Sports Business from the W.P. Carey…...

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It’s time for another edition of Infographic Friday. Today’s content comes to us from Genesco Sports Enterprises (@GSE_Sports) and it includes some great statistics from this year’s FIFA Women’s World Cup, including:

• Tournament viewership and associated ad revenue
• Social media impressions and buzz
• U.S. Soccer fan demographics

Check out the full infographic below and click here to see the original version at the Genesco Sports Enterprises Facebook page.

Breaking down digital identity

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

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Identity online is a vexed problem. The majority of Internet fraud today can be related to weaknesses in the way we authenticate people electronically. Internet identity is terribly awkward too. Unfortunately today we still use password techniques dating back to 1960s mainframes that were designed for technicians, by technicians.

Our identity management problems also stem from over-reach. For one thing, the information era heralded new ways to reach and connect with people, with almost no friction. We may have taken too literally the old saw "information wants to be free." Further, traditional ways of telling who people are, through documents and "old boys networks" creates barriers, which are anathema to new school Internet thinkers.

For the past 10-to-15 years, a heady mix of ambitions has informed identity management theory and practice: improve usability, improve security and improve "trust." Without ever pausing to unravel the rainbow, the identity and access management industry has created grandiose visions of global "trust frameworks" to underpin a utopia of seamless stranger-to-stranger business and life online.

Why is identity online so strangely resistant to these well-meaning efforts to fix it? In particular, why is federated identity so dramatically easier said than done?

Well-resourced industry consortia and private-public partnerships have come and gone over the past decade or more. Numerous "trust" start-up businesses have launched and failed. Countless new identity gadgets, cryptographic algorithms and payment schemes have been tried.

And yet the identity problem is still with us. Why is identity online so strangely resistant to these well-meaning efforts to fix it? In particular, why is federated identity so dramatically easier said than done?

Identification is a part of risk management. In business, service providers use identity to manage the risk that they might be dealing with the wrong person. Different transactions carry different risks, and identification standards are varied accordingly. Conversely, if a provider cannot be sure enough who someone is, they now have the tools to withhold or limit their services. For example, when an Internet customer signs in from an unusual location, payment processors can put a cap on the dollar amounts they will authorize.

Across our social and business walks of life, we have distinct ways of knowing people, which yields a rich array of identities by which we know and show who we are to others. These Identities have evolved over time to suit different purposes. Different relationships rest on different particulars, and so identities naturally become specific not general.

The human experience of identity is one of ambiguity and contradictions. Each of us simultaneously holds a weird and wonderful ensemble of personal, family, professional and social identities. Each is different, sometimes radically so. Some of us lead quite secret lives, and I'm not thinking of anything salacious, but maybe just the role-playing games that provide important escapes from the humdrum.

Most of us know how it feels when identities collide. There's no better example than what I call the High School Reunion Effect: that strange dislocation you feel when you see acquaintances for the first time in decades. You've all moved on, you've adopted new personae in new contexts - not the least of which is the one defined by a spouse and your own new family. Yet you find yourself re-winding past identities, relating to your past contemporaries as you all once were, because it was those school relationships, now fossilised, that defined you.

Frankly, we've made a mess of the pivotal analogue-to-digital conversion of identity. In real life we know identity is malleable and relative, yet online we've rendered it crystalline and fragile.
We've come close to the necessary conceptual clarity. Some 10 years ago a network of "identerati" led by Kim Cameron of Microsoft composed the "Laws of Identity," which contained a powerful formulation of the problem to be addressed. The Laws defined Digital Identity as "a set of claims made [about] a digital subject."

Your Digital Identity is a proxy for a relationship, pointing to a suite of particulars that matter about you in a certain context. When you apply for a bank account, when you subsequently log on to Internet banking, when you log on to your work extranet, or to Amazon or PayPal or Twitter, or if you want to access your electronic health record, the relevant personal details are different each time.
The flip side of identity management is privacy. If authentication concerns what a Relying Party needs to know about you, then privacy is all about what they don't need to know. Privacy amounts to information minimization; security professionals know this all too well as the "Need to Know" principle.

All attempts at grand global identities to date have failed. The Big Certification Authorities of the 1990s reckoned a single, all-purpose digital certificate would meet the needs of all business, but they were wrong. Ever more sophisticated efforts since then have also failed, such as the Infocard Foundation, Liberty Alliance and the Australian banking sector's Trust Centre.

Significantly, federation for non-trivial identities only works within regulatory monocultures - for example the US Federal Bridge CA, or the Scandinavian BankID network - where special legislation authorises banks and governments to identify customers by the one credential. The current National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace has pondered legislation to manage liability but has balked. The regulatory elephant remains in the room.

As an aside, obviously social identities like Facebook and Twitter handles federate very nicely, but these are issued by organisations that don't really know who we are, and they're used by web sites that don't really care who we are; social identity federation is a poor model for serious identity management.

A promising identity development today is the Open Identity Foundation's Attribute Exchange Network, a new architecture seeking to organise how identity claims may be traded. The Attribute Exchange Network resonates with a growing realization that, in the words of Andrew Nash, a past identity lead at Google and at PayPal, "attributes are at least as interesting as identities - if not more so."

If we drop down a level and deal with concrete attribute data instead of abstract identities, we will start to make progress on the practical challenges in authentication: better resistance to fraud and account takeover, easier account origination and better privacy.

My vision is that by 2019 we will have a fresh marketplace of Attribute Providers. The notion of "Identity Provider" should die off, for identity is always in the eye of the Relying Party. What we need online is an array of respected authorities and agents that can vouch for our particulars. Banks can provide reliable electronic proof of our payment card numbers; government agencies can attest to our age and biographical details; and a range of private businesses can stand behind attributes like customer IDs, membership numbers and our retail reputations.

In five years time I expect we will adopt a much more precise language to describe how to deal with people online, and it will reflect more faithfully how we've transacted throughout history. As the old Italian proverb goes: It is nice to "trust" but it's better not to.

This article first appeared as "Abandoning identity in favor of attributes" in Secure ID News, 2 December, 2014.

Event Report - Ceridian Insights

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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We had the opportunity to attend the Ceridian user Conference Insights in Las Vegas at the beautiful Aria hotel. The event had record attendance with over 2000 customers, partners and employees participating. Ceridian also got a very good showing from the analyst community, despite the summer time and related Las Vegas heat.

 

 

Always tough to pick the Top 3 from a multiday event – but here you go:

Ceridian is going ‘soft’(and it is good) – As blogged earlier, Ceridian is one of the HCM software vendors that are doing the ‘hard’ stuff, and with that I refer to software that needs constant updates because of legislative changes, is by itself an architectural challenge to run and has major repercussions when it fails. Or in other words Payroll, Workforce Management and Benefits. The more remarkable was that CEO Ossip did not refer to any of the above in the Day 1 keynote – but choose a softer route with core values, employee engagement and Talent Management. Bolstered also by the recent hire of industry veteran Sperling, Ceridian seems to be committed to move out of the ‘compliance’ corner – at least for the opportunity to upsell Talent Management to its customer base. It was interesting that the audience – that is primarily also doing the ‘hard stuff’ at their employer – was quite open for the more ‘soft’ positioning that bides well for the future upsell efforts by Ceridian. But let’s be clear, Ceridian will not abandon any compliance work, it is even doubling down more in the area e.g. referring multiple times to the San Francisco Retail Worker Bill of Rights, that the vendor will be one of the first to endorse (it has taken effect July 3rd, more e.g. here). Nonetheless a very different key message compared to previous Insight editions.

It also looks to us that Ceridian has earned back a lot of trust from the customer base, something that was in a sour state even two years ago. But Ceridian did what software vendors need to do – issue a (realistic) roadmap and deliver to it. Be transparent on challenges and changes, communicate and deliver to it. In previous years there was a lot of conversations amongst the attendees on where to trust the roadmap or not – that was absent in 2015. Even more, the attendees did not even miss that a roadmap wasn’t offered in the keynote. It is possible that the 20+ customer advisory boards that met before the event took the edge off the topic, but a remarkable change of attitudes and relation towards Ceridian.
 

Talent Managemen Sperling addressed the Insights audience

Much improved user experience – An area where Ceridian has been lacking in the past had been user experience. Two years ago the vendor tried to emulate Microsoft Office, and approach that had some valid arguments on the familiarity side, but would have been disastrous if followed through, given the everlasting permutations the Microsoft Office user interface is going through. The good news was (like overall) that Ceridian has been listening to customers (and influencers) and has been working at innovating on the user experience side. It is also remarkable that the vendor went back to the drawing board when the first effort fell short of industry standards, a decision that takes guts and nerves for an executive team. From what we saw and was demoed at Insights, the decision was the right one, the newest version of the user interface is modern, easy to use and even ahead of the fast moving industry benchmark. The main innovations are a reduction in navigation needs, less screens, less pop ups, more consistency and some innovative overloading of UI elements, e.g. the employee picture with information from TeamRelate and actions pertaining the employee. As with all software innovation does not happen overnight and Ceridian will gradually roll out the new user interface in the coming fall and spring releases. As with all gradual user interface rollouts, making smart decisions on how to split uptake across release matters, it looks like with focusing on ESS and MSS Ceridian is making the sensible decision. The good news for customers is that in case they do not want to operate with two different UI paradigms, they can keep working with the old user interface. From my impressions that would be short changing their employee base, but each project and enterprise is unique and needs to make their own decision. It is good to see that Ceridian offers choice. 

 

 

 

New Dayforce Employee Profile inside of MSS

On the flipside the early Dayforce adopters have been through the ‘innovation rollercoaster’ and are showing some tiring. E.g. we heard some concerns, on the main navigation moving from left to top back to left. But having to deal with more innovation than less is probably the better problem for enterprises to have. And on that point attendees emphatically agreed.

 

TeamRelate Screenshots

TeamRelate is major differentiator – We predicted already for 2014 that the ‘P’ (psychographic and psychologic) information would make its course to mainstream HR systems. Turns out we have been a little too optimistic on vendor innovation pace, but in 2015 Ceridian was one of the (few) vendors coming through on this prediction with the acquisition of TeamRelate. TeamRelate finds out how well two people relate to each other, which means how well they could work with each other. It also makes assumptions on roles, and which roles people can have and which roles are needed to staff teams and projects successfully. As such TeamRelate makes a key contribution to discover new working relationships beyond the experience and gut feel factor of managers, but discovers valuable potential work relationships beyond a manager’s perception and knowledge horizon. Ceridian has been aggressive at adding TeamRelate information to many areas of Dayforce – e.g. the employee profile, team composition, Recruiting (there for the applicants) and Performance Management. It is good to see the speed of the uptake – as the consistent application of the ‘P’ information is key for moving an organization’s performance.

On the concern side, TeamRelate really needs to work, similar to the ‘true’ analytics scenarios. People need to use TeamRelate, and start trusting TeamRelate to make proper prediction on relatability. We spoke to some early prospects and they were encouraged by what they saw. Good news – but an area Ceridian (and we) will watch.


 

Analyst Tidbits

• ACA the gift that keeps giving – We saw renewed interest and much more urgency around the ACA topic. Practitioners now know that any hope of the law not making it in its full extent into daily practice (from an avoiding the work perspective) is mute, and they better get on top of it. That is good news for Ceridian, who has been preparing and building functionality to make the adoption and compliance with ACA easy for enterprises. 

• Dashboarding – A year ago Ceridian showed natural language based search for insights, and the system works, but the results were visually less appealing. As part of the new user interface effort Ceridian has gone back and revisited the dashboards usability, and (apart maybe from the color palette, that matched the Aria’s earthy tones) it has become a much more polished experience. What a year ago was likely a backdoor tools for HR professionals, could now become (what it should be) an exploratory tool in the search of insights from the personal to the boardroom setting. 

• Documents – Also a year ago Ceridian launched Documents, a Dayforce based document management system that is following the required compliance and statutory regulations. Uptake has been well, and customers are adding more information and documents to the system. To a certain point of course Ceridian has been ‘greasing’ the system by automatically moving paychecks, performance management and recruiting documents to the Documents system. But when you have it, you should use it, a good move to force adoption of new product functionality. Licensing is not a concern as we heard, which is a critical feedback from attendees is. 

• Lifeworks – Ceridian has a sizeable employee assistance program, Lifeworks, that goes beyond the basic blocking and tackling and also supports wellness and lifestyle choices. In the UK it has found recognition and rewards vendor WorkAngel (more here) and plans to partner more with the vendor. WorkAngel has key experience in mobile platform, user interface and retailer gift card / payment management that are attractive for Ceridian. More will come here, watch the space. 

MyPOV

A very good event for Ceridian. User conferences with a growing user base and a growing customer base are easy setups from a motivational perspective. Attendees seeing more attendees, larger and better keynotes, nice show floors etc. get a basic positive vibe. When vendors get the messaging right, they turn out to be good events, like this Insights conference.

It is good to see that Ceridian is finding more of Talent Management value propositions, which makes the vendor more complete in regards of competition in the market place. But even more important is that Ceridian stays true of its DNA of solving tough compliance problems for its customers, as mentioned above the ‘hard stuff’. There was a number of very good data points in regards of implementation and operation ROI. Ceridian keeps converting legacy customers at a quick pace and seems to have upgraded approximately a third of the legacy customers with Dayforce now. That by itself is remarkable, and by itself probably the fastest and most active old to new conversion in the marketplace.

On the concern side Ceridian is growing fast and needs to scale beyond the product – on the sales, implementation and support side. As of July it looks like the sales side is in good shape, Ceridian even shared that it is now giving existing customers the choice to stay on the legacy product or move to Dayforce, something vendors pressed for revenue won’t do. But it also needs to make sure skills on the implementation side are growing. The partner ecosystem on the implementation side is the same ‘usual’ suspects (that are all growing), but as mentioned in our Progress Report from the analyst day of March (see below), Ceridian needs more partner implementation resources. On the support side it looks like Ceridian has been able to add and train resources faster and with that again gaining the upper hand in the support quality conversation. All good problem to have as they result from growth, but they need to be successfully addressed.

Overall a very good user conference for Ceridian that is building momentum on all aspects, and even more importantly is actively working on differentiating itself from the other vendors. Ossip’s vision of Ceridian becoming a ‘brand’ that employees will ask after when changing employers is an ambitious one, but Ceridian is working towards it. We will be watching and analyzing, stay tuned.



More on Ceridian

 

• First Take - Ceridian Insights Day #1 Keynote Takeaways - off to a good start - read here
• Progress Report – Ceridian executes on product, next challenge – implementation capacity, then sales … Read here
• Event Report - CeridianINSIGHTS 2014 - Ceridian innovates and adds key functionality - read here
• First Take - Ceridian INSIGHTS Day 1 Keynote - Top 3 Takeaways - read here
• Progress Report - Ceridian makes a lot of progress - but the road(map) is long - read here
• Ceridian transforming itself and with that the game – read here

And unrelated to Ceridian - but how important payroll can be for HCM innovation:

 

• Could the paycheck reinvent HCM - yes it can - read here
• And suddenly... payroll matters again - read here

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard.

2012, 2013, 2014 & 2015 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved

Scanning the Future: 21st Century Management

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…...

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Is your organization ready for the 21st Century? Do you understand the increasing pressures on organizational structure and management? Is your organization’s design and leadership approach ready to face these demands? These are the questions twenty-eight senior executives from the U.S., Colombia, India, Oman, and Thailand addressed as we worked together to leverage old and new strategies for their organizations and careers. The occasion was Northwestern University’s 21st Century Management executive program. The phrase, “scanning the future” is drawn from the last segment of my sessions.

I promised the participants additional readings (building on my earlier, Summer Reading List), and hope others will add to what I have here via the comments. I’ll also include the pre-readings we used to prepare for each segment.

The Demands on 21st Century Organization

In this segment we worked through the pressures on organizations today and in the future. These included (vast simplification): globalization, artificial intelligence, disintermediation, freelancing, and education. Earlier in the week the group had discussed the pace of marketing and strategy change, the value of mindfulness, our networked society, and multi-generational workforces.

We started with Leadership Is More Than Interpersonal Skills, a short Harvard Business Review blog post focused on what I mean by demands on the 21st century organization and how this puts pressure on you to lead with all your resources -- not just your interpersonal skills -- all of your human, technical, and organizational resources.

Additional Reading:

• Thriving in an Increasingly Digital Ecosystem (Weill & Woener)
• In the Future, Employees Won’t Exist (Milbourn; Note: I’m an investor in Milbourn’s company). The extensive comments to the article will provide a starting point for future sessions.
• Hacking Education for our Future of Work: A Grand Challenge (Griffith; link to come as soon as I get it posted)
• The STAR model (Galbraith). I hope to have a Griffith STAR description up soon and will update this post then.

Designing the Agile, Connected Organization

We used the case, WL Gore: Culture of Innovation (makers of Gore-Tex), to take on the questions of organizational design and control in the 21st Century. Slide-deck version. Note that WL Gore (and Nucor Steel) are famous examples of light-weight management -- in companies designed in the 50s & 60s. Zappos’ work with holacracy is just a current visible version.

Additional Reading:

• What's Happening at Zappos May Be All About the School Bus Test (Collings)
• The Big Idea: The Age of Hyperspecialization (Malone, et al.) goes into some of the opportunities of slicing work into smaller pieces and loosening the boundaries of the organization to enable others to participate.

From the hyperspecialization article:

This ability to distribute computer-based jobs to a vast army of workers doesn’t only make old tasks go faster; it enables the completion of a whole new class of time-critical tasks. Consider the search for Jim Gray, a well-known computer scientist who disappeared at sea in his small sailboat in 2007 and was never found. When the news of his disappearance reached his colleagues, they realized it would not be impossible to search the 30,000-square-mile patch of ocean in which Gray’s boat just might still be afloat. Over the next few days near-real-time satellite images were relayed to thousands of Mechanical Turk workers and volunteers for close examination. Such an effort could not previously have been imagined—and suggests many other possibilities, from scanning for suspicious activity in an office building’s overnight video feeds, to translating headquarters communications simultaneously into many languages, to responding quickly to a potential client’s complicated request for proposal.

We see this approach now in the vast application of volunteers to natural disasters, solving complex business analytics problems, and more. The freelance marketplace continues to diversify even as heavy weights Elance and oDesk join to form UpWork. The “gig economy” is in the news this week in the US presidential campaigns.

Leading the Agile, Connected Organization -- Execution on 21st Century Practices

In this segment I had the opportunity to share some of my current work on Lead by Letting Go. We started with a case on LinkedIn, looking to gain value from whatever LinkedIn does -- for example, with their recent purchase of online education company, lynda.com, rather than solving the typical case. We looked to let go of 20th century boundaries and processes, while holding tight to our performance standards, relationships, the value of education, and the laws of our particular organization’s “physics.”

Staying with the ideas of leveraging modern technologies and organizational relationships, we looked at the article The Third Wave of Virtual Work, before reading the case -- LiveOps: The Contact Centre Reinvented. The case follows the American Red Cross as they dealt with over one million people displaced by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Whether or not your industry works with call or contact centers, it’s interesting to consider how to work with “instant on” capabilities. LiveOps is just one example of 21st century organizational forms built on a freelance economy. Uber, Lyft, Mozilla (Firefox), Freelance Physicians, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and many many others, offer options to traditional “balancesheet” employees.

We used light-weight experiments as a key tool in this segment. Tom Chi’s “doing is the best kind of thinking” video was a great opener and we followed it with examples from Intuit.

Additional Reading

• Connecting talent with opportunity in the digital age (Manyika, et al.)
• Intuit’s resources for innovation catalysts
• The Lean Startup (Ries)

Scanning the Future

Our last segment was short, but critical. We discussed execution and especially the role of data-driven processes. We focused on iterative change throughout the session (the world moves too fast for long periods of planning in many settings, note the Tom Chi quote above) - but here we applied it toward scanning the future. Marissa Mayer’s “Data is apolitical,” video as well as Scott Cook on Intuit’s global expansion, emphasized the role that evidence-based management plays.

The task for the participants was to design a scanning process for themselves or their organization. Whether personal, team, or organizational, we all need a process for staying aware of our challenges and opportunities. One of them was wise enough apply the technique, “leverage your network,” to turn the first step of their process on me, asking for additional readings -- and thus this post. I’ll now do the same with you: What have we missed? What readings, videos, and links should I be using to prepare for future sessions? What other materials would be excellent follow-ons to the material here?

Our Future Together

Join us for a future session of 21st Century Management. Dates are available in December 2015 and May 2016. The focus on agile, connected, execution makes it especially powerful if more than one member of an organization attends. We had several groups with three or more members and it felt like they had unique opportunities for leveraging their experience.

Couchbase Unveils SQL Extension N1QL at Couchbase Connect

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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We had the opportunity to attend the Couchbase user conference in San Jose back in June. The event had record attendance and was held in an usual setting, the 49ers new Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara. Despite being a stadium, the event was well accommodated very well in the facility, which caters well to similar events of the size. 

 

So here are my Top 3 takeaways of the event:

N1QL – Couchbase unveiled N1QL, an extension to the SQL query language. Usually I am concerned about new programming languages / syntax, as my general position is that ‘the world does not need another programming language’. But as I learnt at the conference, N1QL is different as it is only an extension to SQL and it passes my general hurdle for creating a new programming language (or new commands in this case) – it makes developers more productive.

Traversing document structures before the addition of N1QL was cumbersome and error prone. Now with the addition of commands like NEXT, UNNEST, WITHIN and more, it is easier for developers to work with information inside of documents.

Finally a smart move by Couchbase to partner with UC San Diego, there the Database Group, which gives the whole extension more credibility and gravitas (more here). And it is good that the Couchbase remains open for more academic institutions and other standard bodies to join. 

Couchbase CEO Wiederhold opens Couchbase Connect

Customer Momentum – As Couchbase sees more developer uptake – it also sees more customers going live. I had the chance to speak to travel start up Roomlia and well established data vendor Nielsen. Both catered to unique strong points of Couchbase in terms of ease of use, productivity to build applications and cater for simplification of complex structures for relational databases in the form of XML, document formats. Informally I spoke to close a dozen other attendees, and all echoed similar advantages – performances in design, development and operation as well as enablement of new applications that were not able to be built before, with other database technologies.

Presenters in costumes!

Performance Wars – In the same week we learned about performance statements from NoSQL vendors – not surprisingly both claiming leadership. It would be good to change the conversation away from the pure performance wars and look at architecture and resulting benefits. In this area Couchbase has done some good work, separating server loads in the previous release of Couchbase and now pushing performance critical processes into the query / storage layer. All good moves to make sure a database keeps performing well and scaling well. Let’s leave it there.
 

MyPOV

A very good event for Couchbase, which showed that it is getting more and more traction in the heart of Silicon Valley. It keeps innovating and expanding the use cases, developer productivity of Couchbase, while doing all the key housekeeping activities that may not be flashy at first sight, but pay off in the longer run. Intuitively developers and customer know that, and the strategy will help Couchbase going forward.

On the concern side, Couchbase has the good problem to have to a manage growth, in product, sales go to market on a global scale. Competition for developers and talent is global, and Couchbase is competing needs to keep competing on a global level for both customers and developers.

But overall good progress and traction for Couchbase. We will be analyzing, stay tuned.
 

A few good tweets: 

 

 

Microsoft Acquires FieldOne Systems LLC To Create Better Customer Service Experiences Via IOT and Analytics

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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How many of you have waited for the “cable guy” or “phone person” or experienced customer service that just wasn’t close to being the experience you wish the brands you do business with would provide? Most people have had at least one, and in many instances, many experiences that were not up to par and in some cases that poor experience created a distrust of the brand. People don’t expect companies to be perfect. But they do expect companies to care. One way to show they care is by providing better customer care. The value great customer service and customer experience has long been an underestimated value proposition in companies- even though people like me have created dozens of customer service and customer experience / social and digital media ROI models. That there is a huge ROI and enhanced customer engagement, trust and customer lifetime value are possible, especially when analytics and IOT are combined, these are some of the reasons why the announcement by Microsoft  and FieldOne Systems LLC is so important.

What this Means to Customers: It’s true in today’s connected world, customers expect to engage and be engaged by brand in ways that are most convenient for them. One of the ways companies can be more responsive is to look at how they are providing customer service and depending on the product or service, how they are approaching field service capabilities. Field service management is often what distinguishes say, one cable company from another. When the service is not working and a service truck needs to be rolled, it is often an necessary, but expensive endeavor. I’ve heard countless stories about “that technician” that shows up without the right parts, didn’t realize what the real issue was, was over scheduled and running late and didn’t communicate that to the customer…  What this type of new customer service and field service offering means is that the customer experience can be greatly improved.

What this Means to Companies: This combination of Microsoft and FieldOne LLC offers enhanced and improved critically important customer service capabilities by providing companies with the ability to deliver end-to-end field service. It is a very important point in time for technology companies to provide brands with ways to truly improve their responsiveness to customers, especially with service in the field.

FieldOne has the baseline functionality that organizations need to drive a more effective field service operation. As a leading provider of end-to-end solutions that enables businesses to drive revenue, reduce costs and deliver great customer service, FieldOne specializes in delivering a full set of capabilities that include work order management, automated scheduling, asset contract, inventory and procurement management, workflow capabilities and mobile collaboration – providing enterprises with a comprehensive modern field service solution.

With these capabilities a brand would be able to do things like adjusting routing on the fly and delivering service arrival estimate times within a smaller window, which is essential for more personal customer engagement. Net-net – the cable guy will show up with the right parts, be on time or communicate to the customer that they need to adjust their arrival time. That really helps – especially if you are a customer that stayed home from work or needs to leave work to get home to be there when the cable guy comes. (Note: I’m not picking on the cable companies – it is just an easy scenario to visualize how this announcement can improve customer experiences that most people have experienced at least once in their life.)

What it Means for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, FieldOne and the Parature Solution Offering for Companies: Microsoft Dynamics CRM provides customers with extensive customer service capabilities, including chat, knowledge management and self-service functionality which came from the acquisition of Parature in January of 2014. FieldOne, offered to customers as a cloud service, is built on Microsoft technology for fast integration. This means it already works great with other Microsoft productivity offerings like Office 365 and SharePoint, and has cross-platform capabilities meaning it can work on different devices enhancing the mobile experience — all of which are so critically important in field service management. FieldOne was built from the ground up to leverage Dynamics CRM. This means that brands can take advantage of its capabilities right away. Field Service can be difficult because there are so many things that have to be balanced:

Source: FieldOne.com

Customer Service, Customer Experience, Analytics and IOT: To change the game in customer service, not only do brands need to upgrade or change the technology they are using to provide customer experiences, but also they need to do something with all the data and analytics they are gathering, especially with what is possible through sensor and other technologies that make up the Internet of Things (IOT.) It’s critically important for companies to deliver systems of intelligence so that the company has better insights and as a result, they can provide better customer experiences.

The combination of Dynamics CRM and FieldOne provides this critically needed offering along with predictive learning and analytics. It is able to deliver an intelligent, proactive customer engagement solution. Part of the reason this is significant is that field service departments need to quickly move away from a reactive, break-fix model to a predictive service-based model. The acquisition of FieldOne allows Microsoft to offer companies the ability to tap the potential of predictive service by bringing together the powerful combination of FieldOne, Azure IoT and Cortana Analytics. This combination means that organizations can use insights that effectively provide servicing proactively while streamlining the provisioning of service to significantly reduce costs.

The Bottom-Line: I’d like to see the day that Customer Service reports directly to the CEO and the CFO. (It may in some companies today, but I’d like to see it happen all over the world as a standard practice. CEOs need to be paying attention to customer service. It is a game changer and a bottomline and topline issue that CFOs should be all over.) I’d like to hear from customer service professionals that they no longer feel that they suffer from the “Rodney Dangerfield Affect” — i.e., that they don’t get enough respect. Perhaps with the evolving customer service, care and experience offerings now available, the tide will shift and customer service will become recognized as the game changer it’s always been — only now it will more visible to executives through IOT and analytics.

What’s your thoughts on what needs to change in customer service and customer experience?

@drnatalie

VP and Principal Analyst, Covering IOT, Analytics and Customer-facing Applications that Deliver Enhanced, Trust-building Customer Experiences via Customer Service, Sales and Marketing

Registration Now Open for Constellation’s Connected Enterprise 2015 (#CCE2015)

Save $1400 by registering before July 31, 2015

Register now for Constellation’s Connected Enterprise. Constellation’s Connected Enterprise is an immersive innovation summit for executives using digital technologies to transform their organizations. This three-day executive retreat features mind-expanding keynotes, early adopter panel discussions, and 1:1 interviews with the biggest names in disruptive tech. The Connected Enterprise mission: identify the technology trends that will enable executives dominate digital business.

Connected Enterprise Details (#CCE2015)

• When: November 4-6, 2015
• Where: The Ritz Carlton, Half Moon Bay, San Francisco Bay Area
• Who: Innovators, Thinkers, Catalysts. All innovation-minded executives welcome.
• Watch videos from Connected Enterprise 2014: Rachel Botsman on the sharing economy, David Pogue on the digital marketplace, Mark Hurd on the future of ENSW. 
• All-inclusive admission includes three meals daily, entertainment, SuperNova Award Gala Dinner, Cosmic Feast, and golf tournament or spa package. 
• Price: full access tickets are $3,000. Get yours for only $1,600 by registering before July 31, 2015. 

Featured Speakers - Connected Enterprise 2015 

Ben Canosha, Author, influencer, entrepreneur
Award-winning entrepreneur and author from Silicon Valley. He is coauthor with Linkedin founder/chairman Reid Hoffman of the #1 New York Times bestselling book “The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career”.

Don Tapscott, author, professor
Don Tapscott is one of the world’s leading authorities on innovation, media, and the economic impact of technology. He has authored or co-authored 15 widely read books including his most recent work, the 20th Anniversary Edition of The Digital Economy. In 2013, Thinkers50 listed Don as the 4th most influential management thinker. 

Ram Charan, Business Adviser, Author
Ram Charan is a world-renowned business advisor, author and speaker who has spent the past 35 years advising executives at top companies including GE, MeadWestvaco, Bank of America, DuPont, Novartis, EMC, 3M, Verizon.

Blake Cahill, Global Head Digital and Social Marketing, Philips
Blake Cahill is a senior executive who now leads Philips international rebranding and expansion into new technologies and markets.

View full speaker list here: http://www.constellationevents.com/event/constellations-connected-enterprise-2015-3/

Check back soon--we’ll be frequently updating the speaker list.

Sponsorship Information:  Contact us to secure your sponsorship package. [email protected]

#CeridianInsights Keynote Takeaways

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

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I'm attending the Ceridian user conference, Insights, this week in Las Vegas. The event is well attended with a record 2000+ attendees. 

Let’s look at the top 3 takeaways from the keynote today:

3 Success Factors – Ceridian CEO David Ossip shared his three success factors for Ceridian to be successful and they formed the base of the structure of the keynote:

• Employee Engagement – Kudos to Ossip to openly address that employee engagement was challenging at Ceridian two years ago, even showing the GlassDoor scores as part of the keynote.

• Community – Good to see both vendors and employees engaging in community support, adding the United Way as a charity.

• Product leadership – Is key in Ossip’s view (no surprise) – and Ceridian invests into product as we saw later with both basic tackling and some good differentiation. One area is significant user interface improvements that 

David Ossip talks about Ceridian key Values

 

Compliance Leadership is the leitmotiv – It is clear that the Ceridian credo is to bring better HR practices together in a single application across HR, Payroll, Talent and Workforce Management. We saw numerous examples, like instant benefits eligibility assessment, paycheck calculation and more. Watch for this in more detail in the upcoming event report. 

TeamRelate is pervasive across the Dayforce product

TeamRelate – The acquisition of TeamRelate is giving Ceridian a great differentiator, giving users an understanding how well they can work with and more importantly how the can improve relations with their co-workers. And Ceridian understands the value of the asset, as it has very quickly uptaken the TeamRelate functionality across the product. Not only in performance management, but also in employee profiles, the org chart and many more locations, the TeamRelate information is now surfaced and available for Dayforce users.


MyPOV – A very good start to the Ceridian Insights conference, which keeps innovating with panache around the integrated vision of HCM, Payroll, Talent and Workforce Management. Stay tuned for the event report later this week.


More on Ceridian

• Progress Report – Ceridian executes on product, next challenge – implementation capacity, then sales … Read here
• Event Report - CeridianINSIGHTS 2014 - Ceridian innovates and adds key functionality - read here
• First Take - Ceridian INSIGHTS Day 1 Keynote - Top 3 Takeaways - read here
• Progress Report - Ceridian makes a lot of progress - but the road(map) is long - read here
• Ceridian transforming itself and with that the game – read here

And unrelated to Ceridian - but how important payroll can be for HCM innovation:

• Could the paycheck reinvent HCM - yes it can - read here
• And suddenly... payroll matters again - read here

 

Find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here.

2012, 2013, 2014 & 2015 (C) Holger Mueller - All Rights Reserved