Constellation Orbits Constellation Research, Inc.

Elizabeth is a well-recognized industry-leading analyst. She was previously Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.  Prior to Constellation, Elizabeth spent eleven years at Forrester Research as vice president and principal analyst.  She has managed large consulting projects for business and government organizations and provides technical insight and guidance to business and government organizations on their communication issues. Prior to her role as an industry analyst with Communication Initiatives and Forrester Research, Elizabeth held senior management positions with IBM, ROLM and Siemens ICN where she was a senior manager for strategic planning and alliances. Expertise Elizabeth’s expertise includes in-depth knowledge of unified communications,… Read more

John Chambers, Cisco CEO, kicked off Cisco Live 2011, the company’s annual IT conference and discussed the priorities for the coming year. Key focus areas include continuing leadership in routing and switching, driving business productivity with its collaboration products, supporting virtualization and cloud for data centers, improving core architecture and security features and expanding video throughout the enterprise. Chambers described video as becoming the primary form of IT with pervasive video dominating how companies will communicate with employees and partners. To achieve these goals, Chambers announced plan to grow through faster innovation and simplification of its business processes. The overall takeaway is Cisco is becoming leaner and more focused to manage the rapid change taking place in today’s workforce and to drive business productivity through its primary technology areas.

Collaboration is a major direction for Cisco and speakers identified four areas of importance- virtual, visual, mobile and social- to enable collaboration from any workspace with premise and cloud solutions. Its collaboration suite encompasses multiple products in customer care, conferencing, social software, messaging, IP communications and mobile applications. Cisco’s new Cius tablet in early pilots has received positive reviews from users who deployed the virtual desktop device. Cisco also announced several improvements for mobile users with multi-platform capability.

Throughout the conference, Cisco stressed their commitment to listening to its customers and delivering innovative solutions to meet future workplace requirements. They have delivered on the product roadmap commitments made last year, which indicate tangible results of R&D efforts across multiple product categories. As a $40 billion company, Cisco has established strong business partners, such as British Telecom, Dimension Data, IBM Business Services and Orange to deploy its solutions globally. Importantly, they recognize the need to transform their business model with innovation and execution to continue to achieve its business goals and provide a collaborative customer experience in the post PC world.

The latest half-yearly edition of IHRIM’s Workforce Solutions Review delves into the technology challenges and opportunities facing HR, IT, and business leaders today.  Suzanne Rumsey and Brett Addis of Knowledge Infusion reveal the five key “change drivers” in successful technology deployments, culminating in an adaptation of routine behaviors.  Naomi Bloom and Jim Holincheck hit point and counterpoint on the definition of SaaS.   Michael Krupa, technical director at Charles Schwab, advises his peers to put customizations to rest and turn to next generation HR systems instead.  And, I describe the success elements in getting the agility and innovation value promised from those next generation systems.  It’s a good read and just a small fee if you’re not already an IHRIM member.

In the meantime, here are some highlights from my article:

Disruptive Technologies Move to the Core with Next-Generation Platforms

Agility and innovation on the agenda for IT’s next big shift

Introduction

Today’s IT leaders are under pressure to deliver value quickly while keeping costs to a minimum. But, most IT leaders cannot meet the demands because legacy platforms are holding them back. Next-generation platforms beckon and promise to deliver extraordinary results. With these platforms, IT leaders can turn their attention to business value and innovation rather than customization and maintenance.  Meanwhile, consumer-oriented technology advancements have leaked into enterprises as a result of department- or employee-driven value-seeking. Though these technologies are considered disruptive in today’s ecosystem, they will soon become standard in core platforms. As IT leaders look to deliver sustained innovation and business value with a next-generation platform change, they should focus on the nuances of these four technology enablers:

• Cloud
• Mobile
• Embedded Analytics
• Social

Cloud

Cloud encompasses 3 major components: SaaS, DaaS, and PaaS.

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms provide a baseline set of components along with highly tuned configuration options. By staying in the delivered “box,” IT organizations can uptake new features immediately without costly maintenance cycles.
• Development-as-a-Service (DaaS) is the delivery of development tools for making application extensions, as well as UI mashups that go beyond delivered configuration capabilities. Such tools enable IT organizations to go “outside the box,” but in an agile, upgrade-safe way.
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) is the delivery of platform integration and orchestration tools, easing the way in which new integrations are brought in and folded into key business processes.

Cloud Computing includes SaaS, DaaS, and PaaS

With their next generation platform choice, IT leaders should ensure that it provides the highest level of agility and a level of discipline that matches their own strategy.  Information technology leaders are best positioned to drive sustained innovation with a SaaS platform that does not allow for code customization. Such platforms are often referred to as “true SaaS,” in which all customers are on the same code line.  Still, pressures from the business to deliver just the right functionality can be hard to fend off.  PaaS and DaaS will provide the ultimate answer for those IT organizations that feel constrained by SaaS yet seek the benefits of rapid updates and deployment.

Embedded Analytics

Legacy systems delivered business intelligence (BI) separate from applications.  Such a separation meant a disconnect between decisions and actions – rendering both tools less useful and powerful than they could be.

With next-generation platforms, IT leaders should look to bring value to business users by tying decisions and actions together within applications. Embedding analytics in applications can come in the form of role-based dashboards, formal and informal process insight and/or transaction support.

• In the case of role-based dashboards, the individual can see the big picture, but also has direct access to the underlying data and can initiate changes or change requests.
• Within processes, comparative insight can lead an individual to a clear decision point or down a better path.
• While completing a transaction, individuals can see the impact of their changes and fine-tune their entry.

Next-generation Analytics Enable Control and Embedded Delivery

With embedded analytics, decision support must be thought about up-front in the implementation cycle. At the same time, it’s important to recognize the changing requirements and new information that will be gained as these tools are put into practice. The IT leader should make sure that the analytics platform is easy to configure, change, and roll out across the various application touch points.

Mobile

With more than 74 percent of the world owning mobile phones plus smartphones changing expectations of what can be accomplished with such devices, IT leaders will need a sound and easily adaptable mobile delivery strategy.

Part of this strategy includes how to convert or build applications for mobile devices.  A key decision point is whether to build native applications or Web-based applications.

• Native applications are optimized for a particular device environment – including user interface, speed of use, and interoperability with other native applications. Native applications are ideal if you can narrow down the mobile OS platforms to one or two.
• Web-based applications can scale to all operating systems with one development effort. This is often a more practical path given there are currently more than five active operating systems and the market is changing rapidly.

Both Native and Web-based Mobile Delivery Have Benefits

Though application providers are busy building out mobile applications, it’s not likely
they can keep up with IT’s array of mobile demands in the coming decade.  It will be important for IT leaders to understand the vendor’s own mobile development platform and how this can be leveraged by the IT organization. Is the mobile development platform part of the Platform-as-a-Service capability?  Will it be?  In the meantime, IT will need to make sure to deliver mobile applications that address the most critical and appropriate business needs – and to waitlist the rest.

Social

Enterprises have seen the proliferation of social network tools in pockets of the business; Microsoft Sharepoint, alone, can be found in 78 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Unlike consumer tools such as Facebook, Yelp, and Foursquare, these tools are secured and focused on the sharing of work materials, updates and decisions. However, the stand-alone enterprise social network has its limitations – limitations that can be overcome by incorporating this new way of working into next-generation platforms.

• Stand-alone networks are disconnected from people systems. Though people-centric, the standalone tool misses out on key data housed in HR records –such as work history and organizational connections. Likewise, the people (HR) system misses out on rich information shared about expertise and work completion.
• Stand-alone networks are disconnected from business systems. Though the stand-alone system supports informal decision-making, the formal decisions, transactions and process updates are missing – causing a disconnect in the way people can perform their work. Likewise, the business system lacks the important insights gained from the network when individuals initiate transactions or complete processes.

Next-Generation Platforms incorporate and interoperate with Social Tools

As IT leaders evaluate next-generation platforms, they will want to make sure social tools are embedded in the business and people systems for maximum value. At the same time, new consumer and stand-alone social tools will continue to emerge and provide new value to the workplace. To get the most from emerging technology, IT leaders will need to make sure that the social network tools baked into the application platform will also provide interoperability with “the next big thing.”

Summary

Next-generation platform shifts will provide an exciting opportunity for IT to deliver value to the business rapidly, but with significantly lower costs.  IT leaders should position themselves to get the most from disruptive technology advancements built into the platform by:

• Running a pilot in a specific department or for a specific problem. Choose a group that champions technology adoption, but is able to adapt if the technology is not selected.
• Getting comfortable with the level of control over the technology.  Simulate change requirements – new business rules, bringing on a new organization or region – within the pilot phase.  Measure the flexibility and costs; determine if the platform requires improvement or if expectations need to be lowered.
• Experimenting with innovative ideas. Where are social, mobile, and analytics most impactful? Get early feedback on usefulness from pilot groups. Adjust, eliminate or strengthen.
• Leveraging small wins to get early buy-in and executive support. Use information learned early and apply that knowledge to more areas, building up more support as you go.

Your POV: Are you currently evaluating a next-generation platform?  What are your drivers?  Your key criteria?  What do you need help with?

The People Impact Technology Race is On!

The HR vendor landscape is changing rapidly as we have seen with recent consolidations by Infor (Lawson), Peoplefluent (Aquire), and SuccessFactors (Plateau) as well as SumTotal’s announcement today to buy Accero and CyberShift.  One way to look at this consolidation is that there are too many vendors and not enough differentiation for them all to survive.  Though this is true, I believe there is a larger force at play here -  now, more than ever before, businesses need to get business results from their people-based systems.

In my soon-to-be-released report, “People Impact Technology Framework,” I describe the forces at play in moving from HR-centric technology to Business-centric technology.  New applications that are designed specifically for business users, with the goal of improving their work and planning capabilities, are emerging and getting the attention of executives. However, this new category of applications – those that deliver direct value to business – put even more pressure on underlying foundational architectures.  These “platforms” must be agile, complete, and inter-operable within the stack.  Only with integrated data and transactions can business leaders gain proper insight for planning decisions.  Meanwhile, the results from those decisions are only as nimble as the foundation allows for new data collection, changed processes, updated organization models, and follow through of strategic talent programs.

In the new vendor landscape, there will be just two types of providers: platform vendors and innovation vendors.  Platform vendors will have invested in the agile supporting architecture, unified the framework layers and created strong integration plug-ins for add-on capabilities.  Innovation vendors will have invested in the “business”  layer along with the ability to plug their solution into strong platforms.

So, it is not surprising that SumTotal – up until yesterday, a Talent Management Suite provider – has made a move to become a platform vendor by adding core HR, Benefits and Payroll via Accero and Time & Attendance, Labor Costing, and Workforce Management via CyberShift.  This is a strong move in the right direction, but as with many of the other vendors making this play, there is much work to bring the pieces together and build out an agile, unified foundation to support the goal of delivering value to the business.

Bottom line: To meet the future demands of business, the stakes are rising for HR vendors.  An integrated talent suite will not be sufficient, on its own, to deliver the business results expected from people technology.  SumTotal has made a strong play in the right direction.

Your POV: What is your experience with these vendors? Do you see an advantage by bringing these pieces together in your business?  What are your concerns?

Constellation Orbits Constellation Research, Inc.

Elizabeth is a well-recognized industry-leading analyst. She was previously Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.  Prior to Constellation, Elizabeth spent eleven years at Forrester Research as vice president and principal analyst.  She has managed large consulting projects for business and government organizations and provides technical insight and guidance to business and government organizations on their communication issues. Prior to her role as an industry analyst with Communication Initiatives and Forrester Research, Elizabeth held senior management positions with IBM, ROLM and Siemens ICN where she was a senior manager for strategic planning and alliances. Expertise Elizabeth’s expertise includes in-depth knowledge of unified communications,… Read more

Today’s customers frequently use two or three communication channels, such as phone, email, social, mobile applications and Web, when engaging with businesses. However, the failure by companies to combine customer insight across all customer channels results in missed opportunities to improve business performance and gain competitive information. Although social channels are newer and contain a wealth of customer insight, they are often not integrated with other customer data sources. Due to this lack of comprehensive multichannel customer reporting companies often duplicate support processes and fail to take advantage of their existing workflows established with their traditional contact center operations. Lack of a holistic customer view affects marketing, sales, and service departments and may delay critical decisions regarding product positioning and service offerings.

Companies need a single dashboard of their customer that draws data from all channels for valuable customer insight and to understand the total customers experience. It is important to consider that today’s customer is more knowledgeable and relies heavily on social media communities when seeking out information. Because they are more demanding, customers expect consistent information, timely response to their social comments and personalized support regardless of channel.

Comprehensive customer insight supports better decisions for marketing, sales and service. Marketing departments have a major opportunity to quickly identify which products and services generate the most attention and evaluate how well their ad campaigns trigger the anticipated response. Sales organizations use cross channel information to identify competitive issues and measure customers’ sentiment. Service departments have a means to spot issues early and take steps to mitigate problems.

There are several vendors that offer applications for market analysis and reporting of social media behaviors. Most applications report only on social site activities and need to be combined with data from other channels to create an integrated customer view. When considering aggregating customer data look for products that will facilitate a real time and near real time collection of data across all communication channels. Vendors with notable multiple channel products for combining social media with web analytics include Attensity and Radian6.

Constellation Orbits Constellation Research, Inc.

Elizabeth is a well-recognized industry-leading analyst. She was previously Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.  Prior to Constellation, Elizabeth spent eleven years at Forrester Research as vice president and principal analyst.  She has managed large consulting projects for business and government organizations and provides technical insight and guidance to business and government organizations on their communication issues. Prior to her role as an industry analyst with Communication Initiatives and Forrester Research, Elizabeth held senior management positions with IBM, ROLM and Siemens ICN where she was a senior manager for strategic planning and alliances. Expertise Elizabeth’s expertise includes in-depth knowledge of unified communications,… Read more

Many IT execs that I meet are actively considering deploying Unified Communications (UC) Cloud solutions for voice, video, conferencing, messaging, and collaboration services. Virtualizing your UC communication infrastructure provides an affordable option for upgrades and frees your IT staff to focus their attention on other critical areas. While Cloud UC benefits, such as cost saving, convenience and faster deployment, are attractive alternatives for premise UC solutions, not all service providers are equal in their service delivery. Before you move ahead with a vendor’s UC cloud proposal, it is important to fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of their cloud platform.
Although the final decision should be made by evaluating comprehensive RFP responses, some initial probing may help you shorten your list of potential providers. Key questions for potential cloud service providers include:

• Network interoperability. Ask the vendor to what degree its network can interoperate and integrate with other network services across multiple UC technologies.

• Database support. What level of database integration support is provided by the vendor? Does it meet your specific requirements and what are the connectivity costs?

• Survivability. What level of redundancy can the provider deliver, such as 4 9’s, 5 9’s etc. Determine the platform’s fault tolerance and its ability to instantaneously failover in the case of a disaster? Also, ask for the geographical distance between data centers that provide redundancy. Nearby redundant back up from the main center is not sufficient due to potential severe weather disruptions.

• Security. This is a major issue for many and involves several components to meet your company’s requirements. For example, has the vendor established secure encrypted SSL or dedicated network connections and how often are applications reviewed for security compliance? There are multiple types and layers of security and all need to be formally addressed in an RFP.

• Latency issues for voice and video. Without low latency the quality of voice and video diminish quickly. Determine the latency for voice calls and video sent over the network. Use industry standards to evaluate the vendor’s capability in this area. For example a one way VoIP voice connections needs to be <200 milliseconds to be acceptable.

• Hidden costs. Be sure you fully calculate all vendor fees that are addition to core services. Additional fees typically include all premise based hardware, such as telephones, headsets, mobile devices, recorders, etc. Added services may also incur extra charges, such as Direct in Dial or mobile integration. Vendors’ fees vary for professional services such as design, configuration and implementation.

Cloud UC solutions hold much promise but are relatively new compared to more mature cloud services for data connectivity. Voice and video are real time and have additional requirements to ensure quality of services. As you delineate your service requirements create a service level agreement (SLA) that is realistic and well-defined and reflects the more stringent requirements for real time UC.

Constellation Orbits Constellation Research, Inc.

Elizabeth is a well-recognized industry-leading analyst. She was previously Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.&nbsp; Prior to Constellation, Elizabeth spent eleven years at Forrester Research as vice president and principal analyst.&nbsp; She has managed large consulting projects for business and government organizations and provides technical insight and guidance to business and government organizations on their communication issues. Prior to her role as an industry analyst with Communication Initiatives and Forrester Research, Elizabeth held senior management positions with IBM, ROLM and Siemens ICN where she was a senior manager for strategic planning and alliances. Expertise Elizabeth’s expertise includes in-depth knowledge of unified communications,… Read more

Siemens Enterprise Communications announced a new global distribution agreement with inContact, a cloud-based call center software provider to privately label, resell and support inContact solutions with a $24M equity investment. Siemens has also committed to pay a minimum of $15M in net software revenue to inContact over the next 2 years.

This partnership adds an important component to Siemens’ OpenScape Cloud, which delivers a comprehensive suite of Unified Communications (UC) applications. In February 2011 Siemens introduced its OpenScape Cloud offering that expanded its UC and collaborative applications solutions to the cloud. The partnership with inContact broadens its offerings with a feature-rich SaaS contact center cloud offering. It also enables Siemens to enter new accounts by selling specific contact center or communication applications without requiring the customer upgrade its existing communications or contact center infrastructure. During the last year UC vendors have been adding more cloud services to their portfolio and offering a hybrid mix of cloud and premise solutions.

Siemens has taken a lead relative to other UC vendors by having its entire UC product portfolio including contact center applications available in the cloud today. Siemens also will continue its support for the Genesys contact center software solution, which is highly regarded among large enterprises and believes its inContact solution will attract those customers that want a simpler and less complex call center solution. Although more than 90% of companies have premise based solutions for their contact centers, the robust double digit growth in contact center cloud services is notable.

Cloud based offerings are becoming more in demand, as vendors address security and reliability concerns and deliver new services with cost-effective subscription based pricing. Siemens expands its ability to reach its global customer base with a more complete cloud offering and bolster it managed services opportunities with this announcement. It remains an important communication market leader with an extensive global reach, despite its lack of stellar performance in North America (NA). For inContact, a leading cloud based provider in NA, this partnership extends its global coverage and market presence. Siemens recognizes the cloud market potential and has chosen a good partner to grow its revenues in this area. The announcement lacked specifics on the timing of the full integration but sales for the combined cloud portfolio begin immediately.

Constellation Orbits Constellation Research, Inc.

Elizabeth is a well-recognized industry-leading analyst. She was previously Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research.&nbsp; Prior to Constellation, Elizabeth spent eleven years at Forrester Research as vice president and principal analyst.&nbsp; She has managed large consulting projects for business and government organizations and provides technical insight and guidance to business and government organizations on their communication issues. Prior to her role as an industry analyst with Communication Initiatives and Forrester Research, Elizabeth held senior management positions with IBM, ROLM and Siemens ICN where she was a senior manager for strategic planning and alliances. Expertise Elizabeth’s expertise includes in-depth knowledge of unified communications,… Read more

Customer support rules are rapidly changing, as unprecedented numbers of customers use social media channels to express options, seek assistance and purchase products. Customers have quickly adopted Facebook, Twitter and Google, as their primary means for gathering information regarding a company’s products and services. In many cases social media customers receive support from multiple departments within a company but are isolated from the contact center. This is because the traditional contact center is generally not ready for reaching out to the social customer or will only provide secondary support when its telephone agents are free. Regardless of how companies choose to market and support their social media customers, they should apply the same basic procedures found in contact centers to positively engage their customers.

Contact centers operations basically engage in the similar processes to ensure their customers receive the support needed. These tasks can be readily applied to customers who choose social media sites as their first choice to contact a company. Examples of these processes include:
• Identify the customer and request. With telephone interactions this may be done via an IVR that asks customers to identify themselves and reason for the call. On social channels, it requires a company to proactive monitor Facebook, Twitter and other sites and to sort and classify comments and queue for a response.
• Prioritize customers. Phone channels often use customer data bases to prioritize important customers and route requests to the appropriate party for handling. Social media requires access to the same customer profiles to classify and prioritize customer requests and ensure these requests are directed to the suitable resource for response.
• Solve issue. Traditional phone channels support their agents with knowledge bases and product information to quickly respond to the caller within a single session. Resources engaged to answer customer requests from a social site need the same access to product and customer information to deliver the same information as telephone agents.
• Provide adequate staffing. Phone and email channels typically use scheduling tools to ensure that the right amount of agents are available during busy times. Social channels must also respond back quickly to posted comments and not be delayed due to inadequate number of resources. Information posted on these sites goes viral quickly and require companies respond quickly to all relevant postings.
• Monitor and measure. Contact centers have numerous reporting tools that monitor and measure how well agents handle contacts and engage with customers. These tools form the foundation for efficient operations. Social media channels require the same attention to measurements. This includes metrics on the number of conversations on social media sites, transaction recordings, average handle times and accuracy.

Bottom line is that companies cannot afford to support social media customers with any less care than they do with traditional channel customers. Importantly, most companies already have the structural support tools in place and need to extend their core functions with some modifications to social sites. Although there are a few good examples of companies who understand this and are successfully supporting their social media customers, there are even more examples of major corporations who saw their brand badly tarnished by not paying attention to what was occurring over social media sites.