What Are Actionable Insights?

I was delighted when so many sites picked up this simple presentation I've put together to describe what Actionable Insights are.

I think there is a great deal of confusion at the moment around the entire technology space because people are hearing whispers of BIG DATA, CLOUD, PREDICTIVE AND SOCIAL BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE and the like...  and what they really want to know is what any or all of these technologies have to do with their business.

For Business Intelligence Software vendors, it's not always easy to answer the 'So What?' questions when it comes to applying their technology; particularly when the people making the introductions are enthusiasts of technology - and they generally are.  If you are passionate about technology like me, you just want to shout out to everyone in the world "Hey, give this a try!" but every business, and business user has a different perspective on 'what insights matter most to them'.  Failing to appreciate and land on the specific insights useful to buyers and instead making a general technology silver-bullet pitch is an all too familiar Lion Pit that Business Intelligence vendors fall into.

This presentation covers descriptions of types of Business Intelligence software and the key outcome areas that are driving demand for Actionable Insights.  I've covered a lot of the background and technology issues in this presentation that I think are most helpful in understanding the general topic area. What I haven't done is to even start to describe the road-blocks and organizational design issues that are probably going to make the biggest difference to the value of Actionable Insights to early adopters of the technologies designed to source them.

These are about:

• Changing attitudes and behaviors.
• Appreciating that IT systems have focused for years inwardly on processes that exist WITHIN AND ACROSS the enterprise but rarely beyond it.  That means to really get to grips with harvesting and assimilating actionable insights new technologies need to be introduced along with new thinking on security governance, data governance, scaling and analysis tooling.
• Accepting that some Actionable Insights that are most valuable to an enterprise aren't being captured today at all (such as 'soft-measures').
• Some Actionable Insights don't have any specific role in the enterprise responsible and accountable for making use of them. 

I.

Talent Leaders Can Learn From Customer Science - To Foster 'Loyalty Beyond Reason'

 

'Loyalty' by Sherry Ezhuthachan

Stepping across from the world of marketing and brands into talent management has helped me to appreciate there are more common areas than I'd previously realized.  To be high achievers in the talent industry, HR and talent leaders will need to learn the lessons of brand managers.

...

"Loyalty Beyond Reason? - That's a funny name for a blog.."

I often get funny looks when I tell people about my new blog title.

I came across Loyalty Beyond Reason when reading one of my favourite books for the second or possible third time and I was reminded how central it is to running business in the noughties.  The book,written by Kevin Roberts, then CEO Worldwide of Saatchi and Saatchi, is called Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands.  It's a slightly annoying book because it's better than the three books on business I've written myself.  Anyway, reading the book you realize Kevin is one of those guys that 'understands' how customers and markets work at an 'organic' rather than 'theoretical' level, a bit like Richard Branson.

The key argument introduced in the book is that industry and commerce has moved from a focus on products, to (but products have become very similar, companies need to protect their IP some how and therefore we have..) trademarks, to (but customers don't connect to trademarks so we have..) brands to (but now we even have too many brands to think about so we need to give customers reasons to grow 'loyalty beyond reason' so we're heading towards..) 'Lovemarks'.

It isn't difficult for me to buy into the idea that companies don't own their brands anymore and - if they want their brands to be successful - they need their customers to take them on, buy into them, promote them.  Just look at brands like Apple and the passion users have for their products.  This isn't just a cold, calculating buying decision at work here.  Nope. These boys and girls LOVE their brand.  No matter how many advertising dollars go into Microsoft I don't see the same thing happening with that brand.  Now I know some of the guys at Microsoft in the product marketing teams and I have to say they're an exceptional bunch of folk.  They know their stuff when it comes to Outcome Driven Innovation and all the latest thinking and approaches on Product Management and how to deliver world class products.  Recent launches show there's nothing wrong with their products.  Yet they don't engender the same passion and loyalty in their customers as Apple has managed to do.  They are failing to create Loyalty Without Reason.

Spending my time in the talent industry over the past few months I've learned that the need for Loyalty Beyond Reason is missing in many employer:employee relationships, let alone contractor:contracted relationships.  The relationship between a customer and and a supplier very often only becomes contractual when the customer chooses their brand.  Before that they can go anywhere.  Perhaps employers think that because they have an employment contract in place they can within reason 'do what they like' when it comes to their relationship with staff and contractors - but this is a pipe dream.  Even when there are contracts and agreements, these don't create great productivity and game-changing ideas.  Like any contract, it's only really there for when the relationship breaks down.  No, if talent leaders want high performing workforce and world class talent, they're going to have to forget about contracts and compliance, using performance appraisals as a way of formalizing how the carrot and stick are applied, they're going to have to find better ways of creating loyalty beyond reason.

The brand industry knows that you can't tell customers to buy your products,  you can't even ask them nicely.  You have to get customers to want to buy.  And the buying decision isn't all about facts, analysis and reason, the last 9-yards is pure emotion; how it makes you feel to own a product or use a service.  I fly Virgin Atlantic because they play T-Rex when you walk down that long isle on the plane past the nouveau riche to economy. Makes me feel good.

Talent leaders need to invest in their people 'in a certain way' - not the Microsoft way, the Apple way.  As with the Customer Science industry, the starting point is to invest time in understanding 'the individual' and applying actionable insights to draw out the things people care about emotionally, on the edge of reason.  Any business can do this - big or small, accountants or engineers.  You just have to start in the right place.

I.  

Benefits of Profiling Customers For Motor Dealers - And How To Do It

Customer Science - ...building deeper, richer, more personalized customer experiences by applying customer insights to better understand what customers care about, how they think and act, how they make buying decisions, how they want suppliers to communicate with them, how they want to be treated, what they expect from their suppliers... and more.  But does it work (is it working?) in  Motor Retail? Is it being used successfully to turn 'sleepy customer data' into a dynamo for new reasons to speak to customers, turning clicks and visits into cash?

...

Since the 1980's I've watched with interest as the methods adopted by marketers to engage customers and prospects have adapted as new technologies and created approaches have come of age.  More than in any era before, the noughties has required marketers to take on a cacophony of new techniques to engage customers that want the perfect mix of a personalized customer service experience and relevant, timely offers while not wanting to be barraged by suppliers with direct marketing and unwanted contact.  The growing impact of the Internet, mobile communications, social networking and a more techno savvy customer communities is changing the rules for marketers on how to get the biggest impact from their marketing spend.

By now, the marketing industry has worked out that it's vital to gather information on customers 'as part of the day job' to build up a profile and persona on each and every customer so the customer enjoys a personalized 'shopping' experience.  Companies like Tesco and Amazon have shown the way in exploiting customer data to sensitively give shoppers what they want rather than forcing them with a strong hand down paths they don't necessarily want to follow.

The type of relationship customers want - location-centric, timely, fine-grained, event-driven offers personalized to their particular wants and preferences - can only be achieved in my opinion by taking every opportunity to learn about customers through each and every interaction.  Customers don't want to be contacted out of the blue, or left standing in service receptions JUST SO THAT DEALER CAN CAPTURE DATA TO SELL TO THEM.  For Motor Dealerships that means not only investing time into collecting data 'as part of the day job' but also investing in the PROCESS of 'digital persona-lization'.

In an odd way, customers generally WANT suppliers to build and know their digital persona because they want that type of personalized experience (with the suppliers they want to buy from).  What they definitely DON'T WANT however are relationships with suppliers that abuse their trust or over-bite on the level of relationship they want.

Marketers in most industries profile their customers these days, but 'Customer Sciences' are only now appearing in the Motor Retail sector.  This is partly no doubt down to the fact that in certain countries and regions, dealerships with the right franchise have very little local competition for the brand they promote. While it's always silly to generalize, the feedback I get is that this is changing and levels of competition are growing in most geographies.

Understandably, dealer principles want to know:

• How does profiling help me to sell more?
• How do I build up profiles and personas from my data?
• How do I enrich my data when it's poor?
• How do I channel dialogue opportunities to encourage sales people to engage customers at the right time and for the right reasons?
• Where do I start?

So here I attempt to answer these questions:

How does profiling help me to sell more?
When dealers have a better idea of the sorts of customers they sell to they become more adept at appreciating the types of offers that work.  Knowing the affluence of customers on your database for example means that you can find out (from third party agencies like www.improvemydata.com) the addressable market in your locality by mapping these target customers against your existing database. Marketers and dealer execs can use the profiles they hold about their customers to understand how to maximize their revenue potential per customer - to then work out which customers are not achieving their anticipated life-time value. Sometimes enriching data can seem like a 'painting the Fourth Bridge'  experience where you need to start again every time you think you've finished.  Focusing on the most important customers first and devising marketing strategies to grow value in the customer segments that matter most allow marketers to drive optimal value from the smallest efforts.

How do I build up profiles and personas from my data?
There are many ways you can profile customers - the most obvious being:
(A) Life-time value - It's quite easy to derive a value for each customer based on assumptions of what they should spend over their lifetime.  Many motor manufacturers hold and share these insights for each model they sell.  Comparing your revenue per model against the forecasted return helps to qualify 'where things are going wrong or could be improved.  Seeing this data, dealerships can realize that some makes and models are more reliably generating the life-time revenues they should than others; perhaps because some makes and brands face more local aftersales competition than others.
(B Buyer behaviour - At NDMC we define the buyer behaviour of private vehicle buyers through fourn buying personas:

1.  Cherished Teddies > Loyal buyers that consistently reach within 20% of their future planned life-time value. Typically these customers will purchase service or loyalty plans (often with additional insurances or paint protection options) to make sure their dealership can look after their needs. For this group dealers should have a very complete picture of the customer profile.  Cherished Teddies need looking after because they are the group most likely to recommend others buy their vehicles from your dealership!
2. Loyal Dogs > Vehicle buyers that purchase after-sales products but don't achieve the future planned life-time value.  Understanding why this group doesn't achieve their future life-time spend is helpful because it can point to weaknesses in your offerings or aspects of local competition that you're not aware of.  At the same time, it pays to contrast buyer behaviour with affluence ratings given that it may well be that Loyal Dogs WANT to be Cherished Teddies - they just can't afford to be ;-)
3. Cats > Buyers that have purchased a vehicle from you but only come back for aftersales services when it suits them.  Just like cats you can't rely on their loyalty and you have to work harder to get their attention.  Cats are harder to love because they're not around as much. The obvious thought is 'What does it take to turn a Cat into a Loyal Dog?'
4. Neighbours' Cats > Buyers that haven't bought from your dealership but have bought services or parts. Perhaps these customers are 'sampling your dealership' to understand how well they get treated. If you pay them more attention, perhaps they will become your Cat in time.

(C) Affluence - How much money people earn is a good indication of how much disposable income they have to spend on a vehicle and indeed the sort of vehicle they might want to purchase.  Consumer data can tell you a great deal about who your current customers are and the target people in your area most likely to be willing and able to purchase a vehicle from you.
(D) Contact activity and preferences - It helps to understand these days 'HOW' customers want to communicate.  There is a significant shift to social media and mobile methods. Assumptions that 'mobile and Internet' tools are for the young are usually baseless. Many 'people that want to be young' are avid smartphone and Facebook users (My mum twitters all the time!).
(E) Location - Location awareness is a powerful market tool.  These days it's quite possible to focus events and campaigns to target specific geographies that have a proven bias towards your brand based on affluence or locality. Consumers can also be targeted 'on the hoof' if you have the means to engage them when mobile.
(F) Arbitrary Banding - Even when all of the above fail, marketers can start their entry into Customer Sciences by thinking about their own arbitrary bands based on a selection of customer metrics and see what falls out.  Dealer execs have a very good feel normally about their customers and what works and doesn't work.  Exploring these perceptions and seeing if the 'data' backs up the assumptions can be a good place to start for organizations that have never experimented with Customer Sciences before.

One other thought - unsurprisingly, when you compare these different aspects of profiling together it helps to build up a visual image of the 'persona' of the buyer and this can help to further develop the rapport with the customer through a 'deep support' understanding of their wants and needs.

Building up profiles is a question of understanding key data metrics and then validating where the data needs to be sourced from.  Sometimes data is already held in admin systems (like Dealer Management, Showroom or Service Management systems), while other times it will need to be captured by installing new systems or methods.  Not all methods require manual data entry.  These days, customers are often prepared to enter their own data provided there are rewards for doing so (such as gaining free access to an online portal that provides details on their vehicle valuation and the impact of their driving behaviour).

The life-cycle for Customer Science (i.e. creating and leveraging profiles) goes something like:
(1) Harvest - Gather and cleanse data from its various latent sources
(2) Make Connections - Build new connections between data items to produce new metrics
(3) Personalize - Apply the learning lessons to personalize the dialogue with customers and create new reasons to interaction with more relevant and timely offers
(4) Learn - Measure the effectiveness of personalized interactions and learn from them to source new ways of bringing value

Like most processes in business, the first job is to recognize that the process needs to exist and, having formalized it, it becomes something that can be measured and improved to become progressively more effective.

How do I enrich my data when it's poor?
In the motor dealership arena, the most frequent response I encounter is 'Sounds great but my customer data quality is so poor it wouldn't work for us."  Wrong, wrong, wrong.  It's not that difficult to improve the quality of data these days. The weapons marketers can use to enrich data include:
(1) Paying external agencies to manually enrich data (very expensive)
(2) Progressively improving the quality of data over time by becoming more robust in making sure members of staff complete records more consistently; some of which can be enforced with changes to software
(3) Exploiting 'big data' to cleanse your data by straining it through a source of 'good data' such as an industry database, consumer insights database or postcode database.

How do I channel dialogue opportunities to encourage sales people to engage customers at the right time and for the right reasons?
Systems like NDMC's LeadGenerator360 enable dealers to upload/mine their existing data from administrative systems and build up a pipeline of reasons to speak to customers when they want you to (I'm sure there are other systems that work in a similar way out there ;-).  Such systems generate a pipeline of reasons to engage customers 'one customer at a time' based on key events like vehicle birthdays, service plan expiries, warranty expiries, MOT reminders etc. that ensure every single worthwhile opportunity to engage customers is not overlooked.  At the same time, leads are allocated and load-balanced in a way that avoids sales people from becoming overburdened. Linking lead pipeline to customer profiling builds a virtuous circle of 'using insights to capture insights' that reduce the need for contact 'expressly to capture data we should already know about our customers' or spurious sales calls that customers hate because they feel they're being sold to.

Where do I start?

The best way to start the journey towards Customer Science based marketing methods like profile and persona building is to perform an audit of the 'net present state' of your customer insights and the extent to which your dealership is exploiting its dealer insights.

NDMC (www.ndmc.uk.com) ... and again, I'm sure there are other supplier companies out there... offer a 'CRM Diagnostic' service and system.  This is a one-time reporting cycle where key data is extracted from existing DMS and administrative systems to a secure space, where it is cleansed, normalized, analyzed, and then - from the connections made in the Customer Science Engine - out pops a series of online (still secure) 'drill-downable' reports and views.  This type of diagnostic service will qualify how complete and consistent the customer data is, and the number of 'meaningful reasons to engage customers' against what the dealership should be capable of based on the size and characteristics of their customer database.

- ends -

Cloud 9. Nine Reasons Why the Cloud is Worth Taking Seriously

For those business professionals who are keen to get a handle on what cloud computing is and why it might be relevant to their business I've put together a very crude list in this most basic of white papers produced for US Tech Solutions to help start the process of deciphering the business case for cloud computing.

For technologists please don't read it because the oversimplification of arguments will drive you crazy;-).

Ian.

Generation Y and the workplace

I'm busy writing a White Paper to explain to organizational change managers what a social office is and why it matters - so I was delighted to come across this research that's been published in May of this year that provides feedback on what matters most to Gen Y entering, or preparing to enter the workplace.

Gen Y is important to employers because, with the baby boomer generation racing towards retirement, this is the community charged with taking over the reigns. But with so many employers seeking such a small supply of brain-power, inevitably the voice of Gen Y matters. And Gen Y has a whole new set of employment expectations; one of which is the work environment. This article does well to capture the workplace environmental expectations of Gen Y workers.

Taking your first step onto the cloud

Why situational applications are the obvious first step into cloud computing for public sector organisations

Faced with depressing predictions of looming budget cuts cloud computing has come to the fore of discussions to uncover relatively short-term economies in IT functions within the public sector. But how much of the cloud story is hype? How different are cloud architectures to the web-server farms that organisations have had the means to access for well over a decade? And how realistic is it that core business systems will move out of the data centre into the cloudspace?

Most of the CIOs I speak to are sceptical of the real-world practicality of large-scale porting of business critical apps to the cloud. They site concerns over data security, business continuity, administration and the realistic challenges of running a relationship with a vendor that will need to provide robust administrative tools to manage day-to-day support activities. Even those CIOs who brush through all of these concerns with optimistic verve, there are still huge issues to take onboard about the scalability of databases and commercial structures supporting cloud platforms. And what about the proprietary nature of the various cloud platforms? It’s a very new industry and the entire market is experiencing a sharp learning curve.

What’s the difference between cloud computing and web hosting?

Experts of cloud computing will allude to a small number of very pointy differences between cloud computing and traditional web server hosting. The first clear difference is the potential for multi-tenancy – the ability for individuals and companies to buy into a share of a computing platform that has a seemingly endless supply of processor and storage capacity. They will site dramatic advances in technology that have made possible new levels of virtualization and scaling that is unprecedented in the industry. Other enthusiasts of cloud computing will point to a step-change in the possibilities of deploying virtualized applications made possible by the administrative tools and technologies that the competitive bun-fight for cloud computing has inspired by the major vendors. Whilst these advances in the framework of tools for applications design, deployment and administration might not be exclusively the domain of cloud computing, this is most definitely the ‘flag’ that these new innovations fly under.

Having stepped through the minutia of the cloud debate I conclude that it doesn’t really matter whether cloud architectures are fundamentally different; or whether the software tools that cloud computing has levered to the surface are part of the cloud computing story or not. What matters to hard-pressed IT leaders in the public sector is that – thanks to cloud computing - more opportunities exist for virtualizing server platforms, and achieving economies by adopting smarter means of running key processes including the design, deployment and operation of business applications than ever before. Cloud computing provides a greater ability to leverage the competencies and resources of third party vendors (with smarter technology) while organizations only pay for what they use.

But with so many concerns over the robustness, database scalability, administrative tools etc. of cloud computing, what is the first step that IT leaders should take on this journey?

Situational and departmental applications – the first step into the clouds

While some private sector organizations like easyJet are taking the lead in cloud computing by adopting policies whereby all future application should be considered for deployment on the cloud before any other justification is considered, the majority of public sector organisations are adopting a more cautious approach. The first applications most organisations are considering for cloud deployment are the departmental and so-called ‘situational applications’ that I describe below.
For departmental managers and executives, IT budgets have always been a bit of a lottery. There are so many business processes that occur in any public sector organization, and their operation is to tangentially different to the private sector, that most departments have to make do with the majority of users gaining access to a core administrative system while workers that need a bigger bag of different systems are required to make do with spreadsheets, PowerPoints and Access databases to fill in the cracks in their information management. The gap between information needs and information systems capability is forever growing while IT teams lack the resources or budgets to respond to every need with a shrink-wrapped software tool. Even today, most middle managers report they lack the information they need to discharge their roles and the information they do get is often not in the format (or completeness) to make it useful.

Developments in Rich Internet portals technology spearheaded by investments into cloud computing are now reaching the market. They provide users with the level of user interface experience and responsiveness to queries comparable (if not better) than the systems resident applications they’re used to using. Rich Internet portal platforms like Encanvas engineer a new marriage between data mashups technology, building block applications design and pain-free deployment and operation needed to support near infinite numbers of secure and live community spaces in the cloud.
Rich Internet portal solutions for the Microsoft Azure cloud like Encanvas Secure&Live™ are purposely designed to meet enterprise requirements for situational applications; described by thought-leader Luca Cherbakov of IBM as “applications developed by small teams in response to new business situations that possess the economics that mean once used they can be discarded”.

Experience gained in the last decade on the use and deployment of situational applications suggests that while situational applications start simply as a robust IT answer to a business problem, generally these solutions mature into business critical IT systems as users and stakeholders benefit from their use and start to mature their use cases. And many of these applications start within a department – to serve a departmental need – and grow because of their usefulness and practical rewards.

The way communities and teams tend to mature their situational applications takes on a common roadmap:
(1) Applications start with the need for ‘secure and live’ community spaces providing access to collaboration and participant interaction.
(2) Then the need to acquire data from different data sources emerges.
(3) Next, users call for more enquiry and analysis screens and capabilities.
(4) Then the need for more formalized business processes materialises.
(5) Finally, (and only in some cases) requirements for predictive engines emerge – providing the ability to anticipate the likelihood of events and impacting scenarios that might impact on the community.

While the majority of IT users are adequately supplied by a small number of systems (such as sales administrators that will spend all of their time on a CRM system, or an accounting clerk who will live in their SAP or Oracle portals) there are a smaller number of department managers, marketers, R&D and creatives that demand robust IT solutions to serve themselves with richer sources of insights and smarter tools to rationalise the information overload of the digital age.

Situational applications are seen as the remedy to the ‘long tail of demand’ for business applications coming from this very important minority community of IT users scattered across the enterprise that make innovation happen and spark competitive advantage. Unfortunately, at the outset of these departmental and situational software development projects, it’s often not clear what the return-on-investment might be for investing in the development of a robust IT solution. Equally, there can be relationship and organisational pressures surrounding a software development project that mean cooperation is not assured and data acquisition and aggregation may be prohibited by practical IT roadblocks or the unwillingness of parties to play ball.

It’s in this complex arena of information change management that the unique blend of economics and functionality manifested in cloud computing platforms like Encanvas comes to the fore; where the cloud represents a more neutral zone for cooperation (with each contributing party owning its own data and ability to regulate access permissions while sharing the same technology platform).

Why are situational applications the obvious start-point for cloud computing initiatives?

The main reasons are these:
• Most organisations have too many software products and supplier relationships. Reducing the number of discrete software applications through harmonisation offers a direct route to savings in IT expenditure while the ability to deliver more applications right first time through situational applications is assured.
• Cloud architectures provide a faster and more painless means of designing, deploying and operating custom built applications. They’re more economic and can scale to whatever size they need to grow so there’s no risk of outgrowing the hardware platform.
• The cloud is seen to be a secure and live ‘neutral territory’ for organisations seeking to share data and collaborate with their communities – there is less of an emotional issue towards where data resides.
• Making a start on the cloud journey with situational applications addresses the ‘long-tail of demand’ for business applications so IT teams can be seen to deliver responsive IT solutions to emergent business needs by serving up robust IT solutions at very low cost.
• While situational applications can grow to become business critical, there’s a big difference between starting from day one with new applications on the cloud and attempting to port the much less numerous core transactional platforms that are critical to business continuity.

Use case examples of situational applications

Here are three use case examples that show how situational applications can mature into best-fit business critical information systems; ideal early stage candidates for cloud computing.

1. Streetworks (local government department)

At the introduction of the Traffic Management Act in 2004, the Traffic Manager of West Sussex County Council identified that the current information management of the department was unworkable if all aspects of the new legislation (calling for improved cooperation with streetworks undertakers and demonstration of parity on planning decisions) were to be met. With the current IT systems, no mapping functionality existed that could provide a single page view of all planning aspects. Engineers were required to reference six different internal systems to build a clear picture of the planning considerations – and even then mistakes could be easily made. Another major challenge was the impact of TMA legislation on the administrative overheads of the department demanding that the Council input all of its own streetwork assets, activities and events in order to demonstrate parity with other streetworks undertakers (before TMA 2004 this information was not reported). An urgent solution was needed to comply with the TMA requirements – otherwise the Traffic Manager estimated that at least 2 additional FTEs would be required simply to keep up with the administrative overheads (at a time when skilled staff with appropriate qualifications were scarce due to demand driven by the new legislator framework). An interim situational application was developed by IS consultants NDMC and West Sussex County Council to provide a bridging solution to respond to the new information demands of the TMA 2004 legislation in advance of core business systems being brought up to date. The project team identified the sources of data from across the department and mapped out a requirements specification. Samples of each of the data sources were gathered and a ‘start-point’ proof of concept was developed. This application was presented to a workshop of users and stakeholders who spent a day discussing the format and operation of the system. By the end of this one-day workshop, the majority of the systems design was completed and a fully functioning test system was deployed onto the Encanvas system within 2 days. As the result of this project, the WSCC streetworks team was comfortably able to service the anticipated peak in demand for noticing of works without needing to create new posts and West Sussex County Council became the first local authority in the southeast, outside London, to operate and full EToN3 compliant system.

2. Credentials Management (professional services)

A global professional services organisation found that it was unable to satisfactorily provide credentials of past projects in support of new client engagement bids owing to the lack of retained information. While some detail of contact information was held on a Lotus Notes intranet, project information was either not captured or was to be found in different systems. The current situation meant that evidencing capabilities was proving to be difficult and was risking future business growth. In response to this business challenge, the organisation worked with IS consultants NDMC to create a situational application using Encanvas. The application was created during the course of six days with the project team working in a workshop environment. Data mashup technology, incumbent in the Encanvas platform, was used to acquire data from disparate sources – including the Lotus Notes Intranet, a third party database (held in .CSV format) and project systems. User search and enquiry forms were created that used drop-down filters and free-text weighted search to simplify the enquiry process. Once filtered queries were returned, the resulting records could be downloaded in a templated form for instant inclusion into bid documents and proposals. As the result of the situational applications deployment, senior partners were instantly able to harness the credentials of the global knowledge center operations in support of future bids. Whilst this system achieved an ROI within the first 6-weeks of use, it continued to be used on a daily basis for over three years before an integrated platform solution was developed to displace it.

3. Compliance Management (electronics sector)

A global electronics company found that in order to comply with new regulatory demands from its parent in Japan, it needed to install a license management and reporting solution. The European operation was given scant notice of this new requirement and were challenged to get a system in-place within 6-weeks! The project manager elected to work with IS consultants NDMC to design and deploy an interim situational application using the Encanvas Rich Internet platform. Through a one-day workshop the project team devised a data model and website design. Taking advantage of the data connectors provided by the Encanvas platform, the project team was able to import historical licensing data held in MS Access and spreadsheet files to deploy a working solution within five days. Following a period of user testing, a second workshop was initiated to recommend iterative changes that were subsequently implemented using the code-free design environment of Encanvas; changes that took only a ½ day to implement. Having the license management system on a web hosted environment meant that the Japanese parent company is now able to access report data for compliance purposes directly 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This interim solution has now been running since 2005 and continues to satisfactorily meet compliance reporting requirements.

In conclusion

The idea that IT functions will achieve step-change reductions in operational costs is unlikely to happen without a harmonisation agenda where the hundreds of software applications that organisations use are trimmed down to a manageable number – perhaps to less than 10 core applications platforms. Migrating the many homemade and discrete applications and spreadsheet systems to a common secure and live architecture present a real and immediate opportunity for short-term cashable economies.
Cloud-borne Rich Internet Portal architectures like Encanvas Secure&Live deployed on Microsoft Azure present IT leaders with the opportunity to not only ‘test’ the economics and viability of cloud computing as their first-step to cloud computing, solutions such as this also provide a mechanism to economically serve the long-tail of applications demand that exists within all organisations today (improving internal customer satisfaction towards IT).
So if you’re considering making the move to cloud computing, why not consider taking baby steps first with situational and departmental applications - and just make sure you’re able to reach the cloud before you leap.

Why Enterprise mashups are more than a 'nice to have' for business leaders

Today I’m re-authoring the Action Framework system. It reminded me that in 2002, the Action Framework was the reason why I started on the journey to producing a better way of working with data that has since become known as enterprise mashups.

Under any other description, an Action Framework is a performance management system but unlike traditional performance management systems that focus too much on strategies and plans and not enough on reality, the currency of an Action Framework are the actions that happen across an organization on a daily basis.

When I started NDMC I was keen to find a better way of managing organizations because I’ve seen so many good and enthusiastic people find themselves in middle-management positions, not knowing why they’re doing what they’ve been asked to do. All too often, enthusiasm and effort does not translate into results and rewards because of poor instruction or poor alignment between the actions of these key people and the required outcomes of the organization. Another issue that I was keen to resolve was how organizations listen to their customers and learn what matters most to them. Normally organizations get this wrong because they have sales people doing the asking or they rely on satisfaction surveys with their ‘yes’ and ‘no’ black and white responses. So it made sense to me that a performance management framework needed to have installed mechanisms to listen to the outside world and adjust plans based on its ability to learn.

From these fragments of logic, my colleagues at NDMC and I created the first Action Framework in 2004. Initially our first attempt was built on spreadsheets that I used to capture strategic plans, budgets and actions and insights. Aligning all of these elements was not easy on a spreadsheet (I wasn’t convinced we were helping anyone see the woods for the trees with such a complicated landscape of data) so a year on we turned to the use of an SQL relational database and built a series of data capture and analysis applications in dotnet.

But there was a fundamental problem. Whatever we did to create ‘the perfect system’ for every organization, there were too many variables and far too many repositories and sources of data. In consequence, the cost of ‘feeding’ the Action Framework with up-to-the-minute data proved too expensive. We had a good model but not a good ‘system’.

What we needed was a method of creating Action Frameworks that would be different for every organization; that could capture data from pretty much any data source from across the enterprise and present insights in new and useful ways without the traditional overheads and burdens of IT projects.

It was with this fragment of common sense that we embarked on the production of such a system. Initially we went to all of the major suspects to see if we could use an existing tool but it didn’t take long for us to realize that our vision was at odds with what the IT industry believed to be possible.

Enterprise mashups are a very different concept in IT that requires a fresh perspective in the way such a technology can be applied. Unfortunately, most people in business apply the role of enterprise mashups into the current ways of working and uses of IT. They try to fit Enterprise Mashups into the present day landscape of IT and ask the question ‘ so what does it replace?’

People that do this miss the point.

The envisioned role of Enterprise Mashups is to provide a system and mechanism for creating an information management that is always in consort with the information needs of the community they serve. Any effective Action Framework cannot be affordably deployed (and therefore can not exist) without this level of agility in IT systems.

Anyway, back to re-building that Action Framework;-)

Enterprise mashups and de-risking software development projects

One of the main uses of Encanvas and other enterprise mashup platforms is in custom software development.

Traditionally, business software applications have been purchased as shrink-wrapped products that serve a specific process or functional business area. The fundamental problem of this approach is there are so many processes in a business.  Attempting to purchase a shrink-wrapped solution for every one of them is hugely expensive. Another problem is there's no guarantee that each of the shrink-wrapped packages is architected to use the same building block components of technology - so organizations have to contend with supporting a variety of different database engines, workflow engines and reporting tools (that all work differently).

The alternative to buying read-made software solutions of course is to build your own. The problem in doing this is the high cost and risk of project failure. Developing bespoke software applications has traditionally been performed by programmers and IT professionals in back-rooms working on a common plan that's been drafted as the 'best guess' of what the outcome should look like. Programmers find themselves working in parallel on different parts of the same system. No surprise, when the project team tries to bring all of these development strands together and present it to the users and stakeholders, it's not uncommon for lots of re-working to be needed. Primarily for this reason, organizations make do with buying shrink-wrapped software and coping with the high expense of operating a plethora of different software applications that still don't really fit their business need or how they want to work.

Encanvas, and other composite applications design products, overcome these issues by providing IT leaders with a common toolkit of ready-to-use technology components so they can develop applications across the enterprise as the need arises. What makes Encanvas particularly unique is that it doesn't require coding or scripting skills. Its design environment is completely 'point-and-click'. Even its data integration and mashup features and logic building features are created using drag and drop methods. Another feature is that unlike other Enterprise Mashup products, Encanvas is supplied with ready-made design elements for mapping, forms capture, social networking, reporting, file transfer, dashboards etc. - so there's no need to rely on third party components. This is important for developers because they can see developoment projects all the way through to delivery of a robust and scalable system in the knowledge they have full control over design components and can modify every aspect of the user interface design and application functionality.

By removing the time and complexity of coding in development, Encanvas reduces project risk by enabling business analysts to develop their applications in real-time with stakeholders in workshop environments. With everyone on the same page, it's possible to architect right-first-time deployable solutions.

Time to value on Encanvas is greatly reduced by it use of existing data resources (with its ability to mashup data from existing IT systems) and its ready-made building blocks for complex technology components like geo-spatial mapping.  It means that IT leaders can embed IT-centric business analysts into process improvement teams and provide these individuals with a single design, deployment and operational environment with the dexterity to cope with all of their enterprise information management challenges.

Why CRM Systems Drive Sales People Crazy

When they first came on the scene with SIEBEL, Customer Relationship Management systems were supposed to grow your business 'one customer at a time'. Like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems they promised a rosy future for business people of being able to deliver a 'single view' of customers - so that all of the systems in an enterprise could work together to serve up a coherent appreciation of customer conversations, account history - and most importantly, what mattered most to them (to understand 'customer value').

After decades of CRM implementations, most sales and marketing people are left cold by the impact of CRM. It simply hasn't delivered on its promises.

An agile enterprise can only achieve greater customer value - and therefore more potential to grow - if it understands what customers actually want. This insight can not be gathered OFFLINE by market research because it creates a false picture of the real-world. The only way to really understand customers and their needs is to gather insights progressively through day-to-day interactions.

In most businesses, it is the CRM system that is meant to perform this role. And CRM systems are meant to increase revenues through higher sales. That means to get the right CRM solution, the stakeholders you need to convince first of its value are the sales people.

In this document I've summarized the main underperforming feature areas of CRM systems that drive sales people (and sales managers) crazy. Next to each subject I've crudely marked the performance of CRM systems today (out of 10 when 10 is high) to show where in my experience underperformance normally exists.

WHAT SALES PEOPLE WANT

Time. Sales people are short of it and they're keen to maximize it. That means not investing time on sales opportunities unlikely to close, not spending time on unnecessary travel and not keying data into databases without good reason. Sales people want to know how best to prioritize their time to get maximum return. They know that CRM software SHOULD help them to achieve this.

7 Recording contact activities

Sales people speak to a large number of people and they need help to remember and record the detail. They want to know who they spoke to, when and why so they can always find the contacts they've spoken to and they're armed with what was discussed and what outcomes were agreed. It's normally very difficult with CRM systems to obtain a timeline view of activities that brings together all of the actions and activities of the salesperson - which is extremely helpful for the salesperson to audit their personal productivity.

7 Scheduling and coordinating meetings and events

Sales people are normally responsible for managing events and meetings so they are big users of time management and calendaring tools. Having the ability to easily schedule meetings and add custom calendar items like events, tasks, to-dos, conferences etc. is very important to them.

6 Qualifying and grouping contacts

Every contact in a sales contact database is different: Different in terms of their potential as a prospect, their degree of influence on a sales process, the nature of the relationship with the sales person, the strength of the relationship with the salesperson, the reason why the relationship exists in the first place. These nuances of relationship ties means that sales people need to categorize contacts in ways that make sense to them (in addition to the typical demographic and industry sector views that marketing people want). Therefore, tagging systems are a useful vehicle to add richer context to contact records.

[Take a typical example of a salesperson wanting to select a group of contacts with common needs. Perhaps they want to send a quick email to this group - and afterwards, perhaps they want to follow-up the emails to progress discussions. With a typical CRM system that integrates with email, they can create a group of contacts as a category perhaps but all of the contact and progress information of this micro-canvassing activity is held on each of the contact records - so it doesn't provide any 'group' view of activities. Should the salesperson wish to report on these activities to a supervisor, a cut-and-paste activity is required, probably into a spreadsheet or word processor document.]

6 Notifications and alerts

Most CRM systems are good at alerting sales people to contact activities they should perform (this is after-all the main motivator for procuring most CRM systems).  The better systems will enable sales people to create customizable hotlists and custom flags. Even so, CRM systems aren't very good at altering sales people to what they don't already know. The notifications you receive as a user are normally those that you've created yourself.

5 Setting the right balance between minimal data entry with maximum productivity

Sales people want fast data entry of 'business card' information on the prospects and contacts they meet. They want a system that enables them to plan next actions and reminders to progress sales. Most CRM systems seem to demand a high level of effort to capture data and then fail to deliver the helpful 'prompts' and productivity enablers that sales people value. So, for a salesperson, the obvious question is "Does this CRM system make me more productive or less productive?" More advanced CRM systems require data about accounts, organizations groups etc. to be entered before contacts can be added to create relationships between the contacts, their organizations, organization groups and accounts - all very sensible, but all of this complexity can make it impossible for sales people to simply add a simple contact with the smallest effort. [Features like auto scanning of business cards are very helpful to minimize data entry overheads. It's also helpful that every salesperson is able to access and use a common database system and have the opportunity to check to see if a contact already exists before they add another one to avoid double-entry of contacts - or worst case two sales people contacting the same contact.]

5 Making the task of working with data easier

When salespeople are at their laptop calling and communicating, desk space comes at a premium. They need a 'cockpit' view of everything they need to see in a single view at any point in time. Very often an editable table view is preferred to lots of forms. Most sales people want a series of views at different stages of a sales engagement process - contact card, editable list view, filtered search views, contact record profile views.

4 Account management

There are different types of sales people. Some are responsible for only a handful of major accounts and need to know everything about the accounts they manage. Today there are some good sales methods for managing accounts but most systems fall short in providing a WORKSPACE that brings together all aspects of account information management into a single cockpit.

4 Pipeline management and forecasting

So many CRM systems are poor at pipeline management and forecasting that results in salespeople and sales managers reverting to spreadsheets to manage their pipeline the way they need to for their business. This is sometimes because the pipeline forecasting requirements of the business demand such a high level of customization that a spreadsheet becomes easier - but as soon as data is entered into a spreadsheet, this insight becomes hidden from the organization.

4 Mobility

Sales people are always on the move and they need to be able to update records and keep in touch no matter where they are. While most CRM solutions will provide the ability to update records locally and then synchronize with server management systems later, online browser based systems afford the possibilities of always on communications.

3 Social networking enablers

The world is moving towards social networking platforms and social operating systems but CRM systems are locked into a world where email is assumed to be the only conduit between salespeople and their contacts. New CRM systems need to harness data insights available from popular social networking systems and aggregate this content in ways that makes it easier for salespeople to harness it. Capturing conversations conducted via online web-chat is also useful in developing richer insights of contact activity without demanding re-keying of conversation content.

3 Access to communications and collaboration enablers

Salespeople are communicators and they want access to the best tools to share their thoughts and ideas from their desktop, to communicate with clients using a mix of communications vehicles - phone, email, SMS, VoIP, web-chat etc. - and all of these communications options need to be available. Sales people also want to make sure that THEY are available to BE contacted should customers or prospects want to make contact.

3 Sales people as 'micro-marketers'

Sales people today have to be micro-marketers. They typically hold the responsibility of organizing their own micro campaigns, managing their own contact lists and follow up their sales leads with sales literature and follow-up correspondence. This means sales people need access to simple campaign list creation, batch label printing, mail merge and email marketing features.

2 Managing tenders and quotation processes

When businesses need to produce tenders and quotations, often this work is done using word processor and spreadsheet systems that are completely offline to the CRM system. The best most CRM systems can offer is to provide a link to a document repository containing this information.

1 Telling sales people things they don't already know about their accounts/territories

Sales people want to know if a major news story breaks on one of their accounts (perhaps a new appointment or the announcement of a merger etc), or when a new company has been created in their designated sales territory.  This 'new news' is very helpful for sales people but today most salespeople have to source these insights themselves. Sales people often want to know when contracts are due for renewal or which products any new products are displacing. It's good to know when projects are behind schedule or accounts have a poor credit history or are on stop!  Given that much of this content is already known but exists on different systems it's normal for stand-alone CRM systems not to flag this REALLY IMPORTANT information.

In summary, for sales people CRM systems fall short in areas of:

* Time - Giving more sales time than they consume

* Serving up new insights about what customers want or might buy

* Providing the means to always be contactable through mobile connectivity

* Their level of customization and integration (to fit the business/integrate)

* Social networking enablement

* Micro-marketing tools

* Managing the sales lifecycle --> prospect - quote - sell - order process - account manage - new things to sell!

Just in case today is one of those days!

With sincere thanks to Julie Meyer, CEO of Ariadne Capital, for allowing me to use this thoughtful sound-bite for my book 'Agilization'. It has provided me with the necessary confidence to keep going on those days when you just feel like you're pushing elephants up the stairs!

[Entrepreneurialism]

“It’s about having the confidence to persist in a vision of the market and your contribution to it, which is not widely understood in the early stages. I have learned to trust my inner knowledge, but one must have patience and not be swayed by what others think.”