Personal Log: Upgrade Time! Inside The New Software Insider Blog V4

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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Unveiling The New Software Insider Blog

As many of you know, the old blog was just old.  Dubbed as “The Ugliest Tech Blog In The World”, I hoped that good content would make up for the lack of design sense, functionality, and well, very old WordPress template (See Figure 1).   The good news, most of you just took the RSS feed, retweeted the links, and avoided telling me how dated the site was.  I did find out who my real friends were when they pulled me aside to say, “Ray, it’s time for a blog refresh!” Your real friends are the ones who tell you the unvarnished truth, especially in passive aggressive Silicon Valley.

Figure 1. The Software Insider Blog From July 13th, 2014

Blog Refreshes Provide Opportunities To Refresh The Brand Promise

In building the new blog, I took a step back to think about  the design challenges and opportunities.  It had been quite some time since I had looked at the blog.  At first, the goal was to modernize the experience.  After looking at over 100 other influencer sites, I realized that I had to answer a few questions on my own:

• How would I not only keep my brand promise but also improve on it?
• How could I improve the overall visitor experience?
• How do you simplify content delivery. Could I filter and present massive amounts of content in a pleasing way?
• What were the top visited content of visitors? Were there any key patterns? How could I improve the experience?
• What new visual techniques and technologies should I adopt?

The result was a new blog that addressed the design challenges in a unique manner (See Figure 2).

Figure 2. The New Software Insider V4 Blog

Keeping The Brand Promise In A Digital World

Form does follow function in the new blog.  Here are design elements used to address the challenges of the previous blog

Flickr slide show

This captures the latest images from the Flickr stream. It’s tagged and the first 20 images rotate through as well as a few billboards that can be added.  The rich images reinforce the brand of extreme engagement, unique events, global coverage, and breathtaking experiences.

Curated tabs

The goal was to take the top content requested and make it easy to access. The top categories searched included Posts, MyPOV (Twitter Stream), Trending, Monday’s Musings, News Analysis, Event Reports, and Disrupting Digital.  Those were quickly made into tabs that visitors could quickly filter against.

Content tiles

The tiles visually present information and enable social actions.  While they take a bit longer to load, the tiles bring the content to life.  This does require better images with each post, but tiles with images tend to receive four times more click through.

Featured reports

Featured reports drive interest in the overall coverage areas of Constellation Research. The reports also reflect important content viewers may want to go deep into.

Rotating quotes

The quotes highlight key sound bites over the years.  They also provide an easy place to reference quotes that are often “stolen” without attribution.  This is a common occurrence in the valley.

Responsive design and mobile

The site traditionally sucked on mobile.   Now with a responsive design, the design point should go from the smallest iPhone to the largest screens.

Disqus implementation

While comments have gone down in general in all blogs, I felt it was important to standardize on a commenting platform that would make it convenient for power commentators.  I truly value the dialog in the comments of my most loyal visitors.

Videos page

With over 50 paid keynotes and speaking engagements a year, visitors often sough videos or interviews.  The dedicated video page addresses the need to cover this important medium.

Ideas page

Arguably the heart of the blog, the ideas bring together the concepts that drive my research.  The objective was to distill the top ideas and concepts in each of the key business themes.

Bottom Line: Take The Time To Refresh Your Blog Often, Don’t Wait Too Long

When you start your own company and attempt to write a business book, there’s really no time to sit back and think.  Yet, the blog is so critical to your personal brand.  A refresh to the blog should reflect the design point for a refresh on your personal brand.  Neglecting the blog for over five years is two years too long.  As I enter a new chapter in my journey of life, I hope this blog reflects the refreshed brand.  While I haven’t lost business, I have learned to improve how often I update my blog as it will improve business in general.

More importantly, I want to thank you, the visitors and readers for all your loyal support over the past fourteen years.  You’ve put up with the design despite the content. I hope now the design matches the quality of the content and the personal brand.

Your POV.

What do you think of the new blog? Anything else you’d improve?  Thanks in advance for your feedback. Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

The post Personal Log: Upgrade Time! Inside The New Software Insider Blog V4 appeared first on A Software Insider's Point of View.

 

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First Take - Ceridian INSIGHTS Day 1 Keynote - Top 3 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 had the opportunity to attend the Ceridian INSIGHTS conference in Las Vegas, held at the Bellagio hotel. The conference is seeing record attendance with over 1500 participants. 
 

Overall the keynote showed that Ceridian delivers on what it says it will deliver, in this case we had the insight into the product plans from the earlier analyst meetings this year – and the team around Ossip delivered what they previewed back then in March. Overall the largest impact for Dayforce customers will be the new Employee Self Service user interfaces, which looks modern and easy to use. 

Ceridian new ESS User Interface Screenshot from keynote.

Here are my other top takeaways from the Day 1 keynote:

• Ceridian continues to complete Talent Management - Ceridian keeps completing its Talent Management roadmap with Succession Management being the last member of the Talent Management family coming in 2016. In the meantime I see the offering being pretty competitive with good and solid Recruiting and Performance Management capabilities.

Ceridian Talent Management Roadmap. Screenshot from keynote.

• Payroll Innovation - Ceridian does not forget about its roots and one of the few innovations in Payroll has been to move away from large schedules Payroll runs, but to ad hoc, single employee centric payroll runs. These are key both for employees and managers to see work’s direct impact on the take home pay of an employees. Ossip showed that with an employee being scheduled for overtime and then previewing the employee’s paycheck.

Direct Payroll Impact of possible, planned overtime. Screenshot from keynote.

• Document Management – One of the dirty little secrets of day to day HR practice is that there are way too many documents with personal employee information – outside of the systems of record. And with that they are in most cases not stored, handled and accessed with the latest PII regulations. Seeing a HCM vendor like Ceridian taking care of it – with the HCM system being the system of record anyway for who can and should have access to employee information – is a very good innovative step in the industry. 

MyPOV

A very good start of the Ceridian INSIGHTS 2014 user conference. Customers and prospects are excited about the vision on one integrated HR core, Payroll, Talent Management and Workforce Management system. 

Now it is time to learn more in depth about the views of customers and prospects and to feel the pulse from the ecosystem. Stay tuned.

Also on Ceridian

• 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

 

Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Data to Decisions Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Marketing Transformation Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Tech Optimization ADP SuccessFactors SAP Oracle AI Analytics Automation CX EX Employee Experience HCM Machine Learning ML SaaS PaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Enterprise Software Enterprise IT Leadership HR Chief People Officer Chief Customer Officer Chief Human Resources Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer

Translation Service Broker for Translating Global Marketing Content

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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If you run a global company and are wondering how the heck do I take all my assests and may sure that they get properly translated, I want you to know (if you don’t already know) about Cloudwords. There’s lots of translation service – meaning the ones that do the actual translation. But how much time and money is your organization spending on looking and comparing translation services — comparing prices and then getting the content to them – getting it back and then being able to upload it quickly for a new marketing initiative or release? For many organizations, it can be quite an ordeal.

I recently had a briefing on Cloudwords, a new enterprise-ready solution. It’s newest feature is globalization content management capabilities so that marketers can easily orchestrate localized, multi-channel campaigns at scale from a single dashboard. With the Cloudwords capabilities marketers can, with a single strategic lens into all elements of multi-channel, multi-system, multilingual campaigns, programs and initiatives, allowing marketers to effectively plan, execute and track the localization of all marketing content required for successful global launches. By delivering a comprehensive view of all localization assets within one overarching campaign across geographies, departments, and customer touch-points, Campaign Manager helps marketers optimize efficiencies and maximize global returns for their organizations.

How Does a Broker For Content Translation Services Affect the Bottom-line?

To get to that answer quickly – here’s the scoop: Cloudwords, by enabling marketers to wholly execute global campaigns more efficiently and in multiple languages concurrently, Campaign Manager increases productivity, decreases risks of project delays, and speeds time to market internationally.

For maximum engagement and revenue impact, marketers are developing personalized marketing experiences to better target their audiences. To engage consumers in global markets, content must also be localized in the audience’s native language and be culturally relevant for the region. Marketers at enterprise organizations are challenged to localize all campaign content efficiently and effectively across communication channels and internal silos to fully take advantage of global revenue opportunities for their companies. With Cloudwords’ cloud-based Campaign Manager, global marketers are able to strategically manage the entire localization process of all assets and channels concurrently across all departments and regions, and quickly view the information needed in one snapshot to ensure projects are progressing on time and on budget.

What Does This Matter to the CMO?

More CEO’s Are Holding Their CMO’s to Deliver Real Top-Bottomline Results

“Marketers are on the frontline of revenue generation in today’s enterprise organizations. They’re increasingly responsible for generating the demand that ultimately translates into revenue, and if they’re unable to market efficiently on a global scale, they’re not capturing all of the revenue opportunities available to them,” said Scott Yancey, CEO and Co-founder of Cloudwords. “Cloudwords’ Campaign Manager was developed with the global enterprise marketer in mind. Campaign Manager is a one-of-a-kind solution that enables marketers to optimize their campaign globalization strategies to reach target audiences with localized messaging more quickly and in every market at the same time.”

As marketers, digital folks, agencies and the like probably had no idea as they entered this digital, social, online presence world that they would essentially become content producers and distributers, it seems like a service like this makes even more sense than ever. That’s true especially if you are a global brand. The ROI? Check out the costs and process, (FTEs) you are using to vet translators and the process and time it takes to get to market and compare what a vendor like this can do. Love to hear from some people that did that analysis! And that’s how I see it!

P.S. If you have a case study on this or other topics related to Marketing, Customer Experience and Customer Service, don’t forget to apply for a SuperNova Award! Click here to apply. 

@drnatalie

How to work with Dr. Natalie — VP & Principal Analyst | Constellation Research, Inc.

SAVE THE DATE!
Constellation’s 4th Annual Connected Enterprise 
The Executive Innovation Conference | October 29th-31st 
Half Moon Bay, CA | Ritz Carlton
Submit a Case Study for CCE

Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth AR Executive Events Chief Customer Officer

Is Your Job a Drug Addiction?

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You know the danger and risks of an addiction, but the feeling is so good or good enough you convince yourself to engage in the danger and the risk to continue taking/using the drug.

In a conversation with a good friend Rakesh Nigam this morning, we were discussing his pivot away from executive role in large enterprises, and into startups.

Rakesh left his job as a senior Managing Director at an Investment Bank earlier this year and has two entrepreneurial endeavors. He has become a Partner in a niche global consulting firm, Crossbridge whilst also pursuing his dream of a start-up; he co-founded the movie trailer app, which will help you remember the movies you want to watch, recognizing them using sound patented technology. The iOS app comes out this summer.

In discussing his role transition he shared, "The thing about an executive job in a large enterprise is that it is like a drug, it is good enough for you to do it over and over, and not bad enough for you to leave it and go start something of your own."

The reality is if the pay is good (and for many years, it was), the challenges/learnings are good, and the benefits are good it is difficult to leave a "cushy" executive job, and live the life of an entrepreneur.

This calculation cheats many brilliant professionals from the opportunity to go seek their dreams. The calculation sounds like this:
 

• I am making a six-figure salary in total today

• In ten or twenty years I can make a seven-figure salary, and even if I only make that for the last five years of my career I am set

• I have expenses I need to cover, and I can't take the loss of income for more than two years

• Plus I go in when I want, I leave when I want, and I am heavily employable

• Oh, and over 2/3 of startups fail

• Let me help ...

I am making a six-figure salary in total today - while many times your first startup fails, the second and third startup is where the value is. Your six-figure salary pales in comparison to the hundreds of millions, and in some cases billions (recently) that you can make. The trick is to keep doing the startups; the learning from one to another increases the likelihood that you succeed eventually.

In ten or twenty years I can make a seven-figure salary, and even if I only make that for the last five years of my career I am set - this could not be more of a myth. Most of the "Managing Directors" or "Global Vice Presidents" of companies never really make millions. The reason they are wealthy, is because they invest those high six-figure salaries well. The amount of executives that make seven-figured salaries is a very low percentage; I believe a lower percentage of executives get to seven-figures than the percentage of entrepreneurs that succeed.

I have expenses I need to cover, and I can't take the loss of income for more than two years - the assumption is that when you leave the cushy executive job, and you start a company you earn zero on day one. This is not the case; many folks still consult, speak, write and find "transient" sources of income until the startup begins to drive margins. In addition, you should start your company before you quit, this shortens your runway between quitting and being funded so you can draw a salary!

Plus I go in when I want, I leave when I want, and I am heavily employable - this is the most poignant part of the addiction. There is tremendous freedom in startups. More importantly, no one is ever that employable. You can always find work, but the bet that you can always find good work is as good as betting that you are special and will not get lung cancer from smoking a pack of cigarettes a day.

Oh, and over 2/3 of startups fail - not completely true, a large amount of startups that consist of folks who have never successfully started a company fail. Buy once you have partners that have BTDT "Been There & Done That" the probability of failure gets lower and lower. If you surround yourself with a management team, board of advisors and board of directors that have BTDT you may find that you have a much higher likelihood of success than you think!

So the question is, are you staying with that job because it is a good decision, or are you addicted to it?

I write as a labor of love, in exchange I ask that you share this writing if you think others may find value.

 

Data to Decisions Future of Work Matrix Commerce New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth Chief Customer Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Procurement Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer

Work Design For All of Us: Knowledge to do the Work

Terri Griffith

Professor/Author/Speaker
Simon Fraser University

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

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If more work is being done with fewer jobs (I’ll review one source for this claim, The Second Machine Age, soon), the remaining jobs, and work in general, must be being done differently. What are the levers we can pull as we do this redesign? Who should be doing this redesign? These are the questions that everyone, from CEO to the newest freelancer, are -- or need to be -- grappling with.

Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth Chief Executive Officer

Seeing The Full Picture On Hybrid Cloud

X1

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

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If it seems that a lot has been written about hybrid cloud lately, that’s because there has – it is one of the hottest topics in the technology world, if not the hottest.  The hybrid cloud is a combination of a private IT infrastructure and a public cloud.  The public and private cloud infrastructures then communicate over an encrypted connection and can port data and applications back and forth.  Hybrid cloud is hot because it delivers real benefits:  increased speed of access time and reduced latency because of an on-premise, private infrastructure that is accessible directly as opposed to through the internet; more flexibility to have on-premises infrastructure that can support the average workload and to leverage the public cloud when the workload exceeds the power of the private cloud component; and more flexibility in server designs that can lower the costs of storage.

These benefits (there are many more, but the list would be too long) have IT departments excited to leverage hybrid cloud.  As organizations gain experience with hybrid cloud, we are seeing more and more written about it.  Most of what is written focuses on the hard-core IT issues.  Industry blogs often dig deep in the ability to port applications from on-premise to the cloud and back without requiring re-architecting the apps or hitting major bumps in the workload function.  Or, they might be about the ability to migrate server workloads to the cloud.  This is clearly important stuff, but it is only painting half the picture.   No one is talking much about where the information feeding these applications lives, or about how to ensure the information is accessible as needed.

This is why we need to see the full picture on hybrid cloud.  The reality is the information will live all over the place and business workers will need unified access to it, without having to know the location.   We should be talking about hybrid search equally as much as we talk about the other issues related to hybrid cloud. This is because end-user search experience is extremely important to executing successful IT projects.  We have seen this up-close-and-in-person in the VDI market.  Many organizations rolled out virtual desktops to employees and followed the best practice of turning off Windows indexing.  When users went to search for their information, they were unable to do so and revolted.  That is a lose-lose scenario.  The solution, in that case, is X1 Search Virtual Edition – the only search solution that is architected specifically for VDI environments.

The lesson from VDI is simple:  do not forget the business workers that will need to do their jobs (which tends to require finding their important emails and files quickly and efficiently).   Products like X1 Rapid Discovery enable hybrid search that lets IT glean all the benefits of hybrid cloud while ensuring end-users are happy with their ability to find information.  If we learn from that lesson as we venture into the hybrid cloud, we can avoid the nightmares that come when users are less than thrilled with the solutions IT rolls out to them.  If we think about hybrid search now, IT departments embracing hybrid cloud can be heroes to the C-Level executives tracking performance and to the business workers they serve.

 

New C-Suite Data to Decisions Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Future of Work SaaS PaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Financial Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Executive Officer

Time For Tiedosta: To Know About Knowledge

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In the late 1999 and into early 2000 I was the CTO for a startup.

The product was ahead of its time (“can you put it in an email?” it the comment from a VC that still haunts me to this day — as if) and it was a platform play.  Inconsequential to this post.

The reason I bring this up is because when we set out to settle the name of the company one of my co-founders (a truly amazing person by the name of Mike Harris – with whom I lost contact unfortunately) suggested we use the word Tiedosta.

Turns out he had spent some time in Finland and he learned that the word Tiedosta in Finnish means “about knowledge”.

It is not knowledge, or to know – it is about knowledge (which, was a very important part of our product).

It is about the knowledge that surrounds the actual knowledge, about the processes and methods by which we obtain that knowledge, and grow it, and how the knowledge we use is merely a piece of a larger puzzle.

Tiedosta – about knowledge.

If you follow my writings and my research you know that knowledge is one of the things that intrigues me the most.  I have spent hours and hours reading and researching it, putting together new thinking and models about it, documenting what others are doing, and writing about it when I have time.

Which, coincidentally, is usually in the second half of the year… namely, now.

I am launching the first of a few research projects I am conducting this year on knowledge.  You know my sponsored research model where I do the research I would normally conduct with clients sponsoring parts of it.  I get to remain impartial, and they get much needed data and analysis – and I pay the bills.  Win, win, win.

In this case, I am working with IntelliResponse to find out as much as we can about knowledge management and web self-service for customer service.

We just published a survey on those topics and we would love your help.  I have embedded the survey down here

 

or you can click this link and take the survey in a full tab if you prefer.

Rather lengthy (32 questions total, divided in two topics, and need to qualify to respond to each topic) but clocks in at 20-25 minutes for most people who tested it.

Help us, please, find out more about knowledge management and web self-service for customer service.  As usual, for your participation you will get an exclusive report to be published at the end of September with all the answers and the analysis of the survey.

We are closing this survey at the end of the month – we want to accommodate vacationers, or we may extend it if the summer plays with our response rate… but we prefer to get more answers early.

You can stop and come back anytime, you can answer one or two questions a day, or all at once – your choice.  Either way, we will be very grateful and you get to find out what others are doing with knowledge management and web self- service for customer service.

Take the survey, please.

Questions? email me.

Comments? enter them below.

THANK YOU, truly.

Next-Generation Customer Experience Data to Decisions Future of Work Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Marketing Transformation Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer

Event Report - Social Business Forum - Social Business is alive and well

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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The Social Business Forum took place in Milan on July 1st and 2nd and we had the chance attend the event and the opportunity to present our thoughts on how the cloud will change social business systems.

 

Here are my Top 3 takeaways from the event:

• The OpenKnowledge teams keeps pushing forward the social business agenda, with Rosario Sica and Emanuele Scotti at the help as invigorated as ever, having the Social Business Forum for the 7th time this year. What started as a humble university annex is now an event in its own right, with international speakers, an expo hall, different tracks and the largest audience ever. It is interesting to see an event experimenting successfully with a public freemium track and paid premium track. The good news for the freemium attendees was that all keynotes and many presentations were – free.
  
  And OpenKnowledge is following a similar path with its research. For instance the 59 thesis that form the Social Business Toolkit are free to use and were widely presented on banners at the conference. And the company will also provide an app for that – which will likely change the dynamics of filling out the questionnaires. We are very curious to hear about the first results in late fall.

Scotti opens Social Business Forum 2014

• Esteban Kolsky and Ray Wang came back for a continuation of the CMO versus CIO debate that was very popular in 2013. But who was lucking for new arguments in this ongoing debate was disappointed. Both (in their fictitious roles) got headhunted away from their jobs and are filling roles as CDO (you guessed it Chief Digital Officer). As such they did not have to debate each other, but could share the challenges CDOs face – with a perspective of the ex CMO and ex CIO. The real value was a set of 7 recommendations for practitioners in regards of putting in place digital processes.

Esteban and Ray think smartwatches were a bad idea - their (fake) careers have moved on, they are CDOs now.

• The state of social business is good. With attendees mostly from Italy, but also from North of the Alps and as far as Israel – it is clear that social business has arrived and is here to stay. Even though an ironic Scotti could not miss to state how it all got relabelled from Web 2.0 all the way to digital transformation.

MyPOV

A good event, which showed the ‘labor of love’ that is needed to put up such conference. With a rich set of topics and diverse speakers it is certainly an event I would recommend for any practitioner involved in the digital transformation maelstrom. 

As with many enterprise software projects, the ROI case remains a challenge. Simple putting social business as a necessity and not questioning the ROI will not stop the (valid) questions. It comes back to the industry’s thought leaders and vendors to come up with better tools to justify the not insignificant investments required to gear up and maintain social business systems.

 

Marketing Transformation Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Innovation & Product-led Growth New C-Suite Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Tech Optimization Data to Decisions meta IBM SAP Oracle Marketing B2B B2C CX Customer Experience EX Employee Experience AI ML Generative AI Analytics Automation Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Growth eCommerce Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps Social Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI HR HCM business SaaS PaaS IaaS Supply Chain Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration IoT Blockchain CRM ERP Leadership finance M&A Enterprise Service Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Human Resources Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Operating Officer

Why the “Google Paradigm” Has Damaged Enterprise Search

X1

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

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by Barry Murphy

In last week’s post about what we are looking for with enterprise search, I mentioned what we call the Google paradigm.  A reader asked me to be more specific about what the Google paradigm actually is and it’s a worthy request.  The Google paradigm is actually a summation of the resulting perceptions based on the popularity of Google; those perceptions are that enterprise search is as easy as Google web search, and that a central index of an enterprise is the right way to do enterprise search.  The result of these perceptions is an approach to enterprise search that has not solved the problem of allowing business workers to easily and quickly find the information they are looking for.

It is important to note that web search is not the same as enterprise search, and therein lies the major problem with the perceptions caused by the Google paradigm.  Google is an excellent tool for informational web search – I use it frequently when researching various topics that I need to learn more about.  The point is that Google is for Web search, which uses organic linking (looking at the number of sites that link to a particular page) to determine the rank order of results.  That approach provides zero value in the enterprise because the users typically have more than an inkling of what they are looking for, and perhaps have specific criteria they know are relevant, and thus require an interface that allows them to quickly filter the result down to a manageable number.

But, in reality, enterprise search is often synonymous with Google – the web search paradigm.  There is a tendency to think of search as easy.  After all, Google completes search queries for users; it is easy to assume that technology will eventually just know what users are looking for and offer it up to them.  This message is reinforced in the age of Big Data and business intelligence.  There is a fascination with the stunning dashboards we see in CRM and SFA applications.  There is a belief that analytics will replace any need to search and find information.

While analytics will certainly help many business processes, its biggest impacts will be in feeding structured data into business processes and informing those responsible for the process of performance.    There is much value to be had in that and the Big Data market prospers as a result.  Despite the availability of advanced business intelligence tools, though, business workers still struggle to find the one email or document necessary to complete the next urgent task.  People waste hours looking for it, only to most likely recreate all that work when they can’t find what they need.  Organizations lose millions of dollars per year to this lost productivity and typically don’t even know it.  Companies implement traditional enterprise search to help employees, but only make searching more frustrating because those solutions do not leverage the power of the business worker’s brain.

Web search – the Google paradigm – has allowed us to take search for granted.  When doing a web search, however, users are typically searching for something authored by someone else and the system is using programmatic analysis to conduct the query.  For a business worker, though, search is very different.  The worker has a sense of what they are looking for because it is very specific to them – the method of analysis is personal, not programmatic.  Web search is inquisitive in nature.  But, the web search approach – which has been pushed on users by IT for years – does not work well for business workers looking for the information needed to do their jobs.

The Google paradigm also ignores the challenge of scalability.  Indexing the enterprise for a centralized enterprise search capability requires major investment.  In addition, centralization runs counter to the realities of the working world where information must be distributed globally across a variety of devices and applications.  The amount of information we create is overwhelming and the velocity with which that information moves increases daily.

 

 

The image above is of a Google Data Center (one of more than several dozen that power the internet).  Look at the sheer magnitude of just what it takes to power those Web searches we are all so used to.  This illustrates exactly why it is so hard to “Google the enterprise.” And yet many people, and even CIOs, think doing so should be easy.  Such has been the approach to scaling traditional enterprise search solutions in the enterprise.  And while Google obviously has solid software to drive its web search, hardware and sheer computing power on a massive scale are essential components of Google’s success.

The only “successful” enterprise search deployments – as judged by customer references – tend to exist only in a very specific type of organization: highly regulated, with deep pockets.  These organizations can make enterprise search work because, due to regulatory and Legal drivers, they have unlimited budget for hardware to make the solution scale.  They are also able to invest in double digit FTE’s to implement and maintain the system over time.  But, these organizations represent “the 1%.”  Most organizations do not have the budget or human resources needed to make traditional enterprise search work.

There will always be hardware investments required to make productivity search work, but such investments do not need to be heavy in the way that traditional solutions have been.  Rather, organizations should look at more flexible options that mirror the realistic IT environment they live in.  That environment typically includes a hybrid of on-premise, virtual, and cloud-based infrastructure and content spread across multiple repositories.  Rarely – if every – is content centralized.  As such, a good productivity search solution will allow access to the content that business workers need the most while leaving as little footprint with IT as possible.

New C-Suite Google

Monday's Musings: The Seven Rules For Digital Business And Digital Transformation

R "Ray" Wang

Principal Analyst and Founder
Constellation Research

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

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Lesson Learned From Early Digital Transformation Projects Show New Rules For Digital Business

Digital business transformation is one of the hottest board room topics in this year’s strategy planning cycles.  Organizations around the world believe that they must begin the transformation process but many remain uncertain how or where to begin.  Early efforts to create a Chief Digital Officer role works for media, advertising, and entertainment.  Inside other industries, early findings show Chief Information Officers and Chief Technology Officers assuming this role.  Regardless of role, digital business transformation requires a broad bench of digitally proficient leaders. 

Seven rules emerge from Constellation’s latest engagements and interactions with the Digital CXO Research Board members. Lessons learned should serve as a catalyst to move from the discussion phase to the planning phase.

• Rule 1: Digital disruption is more than just a technology shift.  It’s about transforming business models and how organizations engage. Early leaders keep sight on the prize – business model transformation through disruptive technologies.   The goal is to create transformational business models.
• Rule 2: We move from selling products and services to keeping brand promises. Time to market, pricing, and product differentiation are not enough in a digital world.  The high margins will come from delivering, elevating, and reinforcing brand promises. 
• Rule 3: We serve 5 generations of customers & workers, by digital proficiency, not by age. Forget millenials, Gen-X, Gen-Y, baby bomers and others.  How we communicate, the values we share, and how we interact with technology stem from our digital proficiency, not our age.
• Rule 4: Data is the foundation of digital business. Every touch point, every click, every digital exhaust is relevant insight. The backbone of digital comes from the broad array of data that moves into information. This information surfaces up patterns that drive insight.  Insight drives the ability to take action.  The data to decisions cycle provides the foundation for digital.
• Rule 5: If 20 % of your revenue is not an insight stream by 2020, you won’t have a digital biz model. Expect the insights stream to provide a source of revenue.  What data can create differentiated customer experiences?  What data can be brokered?  How will you use insight to build new business models.
• Rule 6: You need more than a Chief Digital Officer to infuse digital into your organization. You need a broad bench of Digital CXO’s. While a Chief Digital Officer can lead the charge, a broader bench of Digital CXO’s must arise. 
• Rule 7: We must invest in digital artisans. Short of having every leader emerge as the Chief Digital Officer, the new war for talent will focus on attracting, developing, and retaining digital artisans.  Concurrently, a market will develop for  those who can spread the digital business gospel and infuse digital artistry into organizations. 

Figure 1. Seven Rules For Digital Business And Digital Transformation

The existing leadership structure in most organizations is ill-equipped to drive the change required for dominating digital disruption. Here are some lessons learned:

1. Culture proved to be the biggest challenge. Building the right team, leadership, and values for success is not easy.
2. Journey maps proved to be unwieldly. Prepare for everything to be contextual.  Lifecycles cease to exist.  Think in continuums.  Expect composability to address mass personalization.
3. Technology is moving way too fast. Pace of change is fierce. Always something faster, better, and cheaper ahead.  Design for access not ownership in order to survive
4. Budgets are all over the place. Realize there’s never enough money, but prove ROI and you’ll be funded.  Budgets are growing on the business side and IT has all the pain and compliance.

Join us October 29th to 31st for Constellation’s Connected Enterprise: The Executive Innovation Conference For Digital CXO’s and Leaders. These leaders convene to discover, share, and inspire each other on how digital business can realize brand promises, transform business models, increase revenues, reduce costs, and improve compliance.

The 3-day executive retreat will include mind expanding keynotes from visionaries and futurists, interactive best practices panels, deep 1:1 20 minute interviews with market makers, rapid fire high-energy new technology demos, The Constellation SuperNova Awards event, a golf outing, and an immersive networking event.

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Have a disruptive technology implementation story? Get recognized for your leadership. Apply for the SuperNova Awards for leaders in disruptive technology.

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Additional Resources

 Constellation's 2014 Outlook on Dominating Digital Disruption 

The Case for the Chief Digital Officer

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Your POV.

Ready to begin your digital transformation? Still looking for a CDO? Let us know how you are getting there and what first steps have worked.  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.

 

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