Unifying Online & Offline Customer Data for a Consistent Experience

Tags

Customer Data, Customer Experience, Ecosystem, Offline Data

Unify Data – Convergence Ahead

The challenge of creating meaningful relationships is complicated by an abundance of data from both online and offline sources, as well as a multitude of communication channels to contend with.

A big issue is how to consolidate customer information to drive consistent communications across channels. By taking a unified approach, marketers can better shape interactions with their organization to create outstanding customer experiences.

What should we think through?

1. How to collect and manage online and offline data in order to truly understand our customers
2. Why a unified experience is essential for growth
3. Common inconsistencies and gaps in the customer experience, and how to handle them
4. How to use data to track customer interactions, and use this information to improve communications across multiple channels

Here are the key ideas:

1. This is an ecosystem built for data, insight and action – Resist the temptation to focus and organize around silos. While silos can maximize a part of the system, they sub-optimize the whole. We are building a customer (digital) ecosystem.
2. What we should collect – We probably shouldn’t try to collect everything. We also should be collecting the “right” data. We should consider enhancing the data we collect to make it more valuable. Several suggested priorities are all online transaction detail and insight, most offline transaction detail and insight, social media data and insights and finally, call center transactions and insights.
3. The value of offline data – Not all data is as valuable as others. The human resources to manually enter offline data can be daunting and so many times it is the last priority. There are great services that automate the collection of offline data at a reasonable cost. The first step in the automation process is to create a data value strategy. That will help justify the cost of capturing the offline data and integrating it into your customer systems.
4. Understanding the customer – Data is very useful if it allows us to understand our customers better. Collecting data is of no value if it doesn’t lead to insight. Think data, insight and action.
5. Unifying the data – Even 2 pieces of unified data is more powerful than one. Having a plan for the most valuable sources and at least integrating some of the data will move insight ahead.
6. Unifying the experience – This is not all about data. At the end of the day, customers will expect a great (unified) experience across multiple channels.
7. Doing something about the gaps – Knowing you have a gap in the data and the experience is one thing. Doing something that improves the experience is another. Insight is very useful but it must lead to action.
8. Creating a value framework – Not all data is of equal value and not every customer is either. Part of the framework that leads from insight to action is understanding which customers are of more value and those that will lead to greater levels of renewal.
9. An “Omni-Channel” approach – Unified data and a unified experience is created by an Omni-Channel approach. Omni-Channel creates a unified approach seamlessly across channels. All channels need to be fused into a single approach.

Most CEOs Can’t Lead A Digital Transformation

Tags

CEO, Digital, Jim Collins, Transformation

I am a big fan of Jim Collins. It is nice to hear again about his influence.

It is also sad to hear about CEO’s that don’t seem “to get it” when it comes our new digital world. It is also sad for the stock holders.

It is not a question of “if they will get it” but when, if at all. The velocity of digital transformations is stunning.

Years ago, Jim Collins wrote the best-selling book, Good to Great, praised by business leaders and academics alike. Collins noted seven characteristics common to firms that go from “good to great,” one of which was their ability to get the right people “on the bus.” This obviously includes the bus driver as well—the executives who guide their organizations. Unfortunately, more and more companies are concluding that they don’t have the right leadership. Significant CEO departures like Jeffrey Immelt leaving General Electric and Mark Fields stepping down at Ford highlight the struggle many companies face to find the right leadership in the digital age. As Michael Useem, professor at the Wharton School, said to the NY Times, “Who ever thought Ford would be competing with Google? But they are, and Mark Fields wasn’t moving fast enough.”

Speed is a serious concern for incumbent organizations. While their leaders are “driving the bus,” Jeff Bezos is flying past in a Prime-branded rocket ship. What has changed in the past sixteen years? The evolution of new, more profitable business models using new technologies like social, mobile, cloud, analytics, and platforms. The underlying technologies and rapid speed of evolution required to succeed with newer business models are real challenges for the average executive. Incumbent companies and traditional boards need new thinking and skills to succeed.

Source: Most CEOs Can’t Lead A Digital Transformation

The US government’s requirements for passwords has changed

Tags

NIST, Passwords, Security

This makes sense. Password security needs an overhaul. Let’s see if this takes off.

It might be getting easier to remember all of your passwords. The standards organization of the United States, NIST, has concluded that many common requirements for passwords, like forcing you to use special characters, are misguided.

Instead, NIST recommends the use of lengthy passwords, and instructs administrators to allow passwords to run at least 64 characters long. It also says people should only be forced to change their passwords if there is evidence of tampering, rather than at an arbitrary interval.

Source: The US government’s requirements for passwords has changed — Quartz

The C-Suite and IT Need to Get on the Same Page on Cybersecurity

Tags

C-Suite, Cyber Security, Decision Makers, Security

A recently published global survey of C-Suite level executives and IT Decision Makers (ITDMs) revealed a large gap in assessments of cyber threats, costs and areas of responsibilities. Among the most significant disconnects:

• 80% of the executives surveyed in the U.S. believe cybersecurity to be a significant challenge facing their business, while only 50% of ITDMs agree.
• ITDMs estimated the average cost of a cyber breach at $27.2 million, much higher than the average $5.9 million cited by executives.
• 50% of the executives surveyed believe the reason why an attack on their organization would succeed would be due to human error of employees, compared to 31% of ITDMs.

The research shows there is a lack of understanding when it comes to the cost of a successful breach, which many underestimate. It isn’t just about what the thieves get away with. A successful cyber attack can have far reaching implications such as impacting share price, lost business, fines — even a failed strategic investment or merger.

Source: The C-Suite and IT Need to Get on the Same Page on Cybersecurity

Unifying the experience for the donor

Tags

Digital, Donor, Donor Experience, Insights, Journey Mapping

Donor Experience

This is not all about data. At the end of the day, donors will expect a great (unified) experience across multiple channels. While it takes data to know the donor and systems to remember them, only great experiences lead to amazing service.

If I call you, I reasonable expect you have a history of my transactions regardless of channel and how long I have been your donor. I also probable expect for you to remember other issues and challenges I’ve had and how they were resolved. A breakdown in that at any point creates painful experiences.

This speaks to having worked through the donor journey, what is working and what isn’t, and improving the experience for the donor. This journey should identify data that is useful to know and insights that can create for you in delivering stunning service.

While journey maps are about much more than data, it is important to look at what data you have, what data you could use and what insight that could create in improving the whole experience.

Pay particular attention to data (structure and unstructured) that you already have from donors via your call center, web site, social media comments and email responses. There is a richness here that can inform the donor journey and the data that can used to improve it.

Improving the experience for the donor by providing front line staff better insights is foundational to the digital executive obsessed with the donor.  Journey maps without great data and insight could just be someone’s opinion.

Staff who are closest to the donor usually have a handle on what data and insight would be most useful to the journey mapping process. Be sure to engage them regularly.

Journey maps can be tedious and budgets may be constrained to bring in external resources to help. Consider an investment in training at least one of your staff who be the subject matter expert and facilitate the process, even if it just part time.

Here are the key ideas:

1. Start with one segment or persona and develop a simple journey map.
2. Begin by identify data that you have or gaps that exist in providing great insight.
3. Encourage a focus on insight and improving the journey.
4. See this as a holistic process integral to your ecosystem.

Involve staff closest to the donor.

Unifying donor data and creating actionable insight

Tags

Donor Data, Insight, Integration, Strategy

Smart Data

Even 2 pieces of unified data is more powerful than one. Having a plan for the most valuable sources and at least integrating some of the data will move insight ahead.

Let’s be honest. This is just plain difficult. I’m a small business. I believe in the value of integrated data. But it is painful and difficult. I use one tool a lot. It is call email. I have another tool for managing Customer Relationships. If I send an email, I can also get it in the CRM tool just by sending it as a bcc. So far so good. But then I use a different tool for eMarketing. I then have to export it from CRM and import it to the eMarketing tool. And on and on it goes from there.

Imagine the challenge for a mid-size nonprofit. It gets worse for large corporations. It just isn’t easy.

That said, it is worth doing as best you can. So that is what I do. And you should consider the same.

First, we need a strategy. Pick at least two systems that will give you a better level of insight. Integrate the core data needed for that insight. Don’t get carried away. If it doesn’t give you insight and you can’t act on it to move the relationship ahead then it isn’t useful.

Second, we need to execute the strategy and evaluate its effectiveness. If it isn’t effective consider stopping. Why waste the energy and resources.

Third, while data integration is generally very complex and difficult, the focus needs to be on simplicity. If a business unit cannot make a case for the insight that the data will bring and the action / results that it will accomplish, I say “move on”. That takes courage and great support from the executive level.

Knowing more than one thing generally leads to greater insight. Our everyday experience teaches us that. The insight I gain by knowing a decision maker at a target nonprofit is opening my emails leads me to see if I can schedule a call to discover more about their challenges. Simply integrating CRM and eMarketing tools can lead to that insight.

As more data is integrated about donors, the biggest issue is data quality and duplicates. If left unchecked, the insights and action will be suspect. It is important to keep the data integrated as simple as possible and pay attention to “master data” and the “golden record” early on. Investing in some level of Master Data Management (MDM) will make sense. Better to make this decision early and enforce integrity to the data.

There are several ways to approach analytics. Simple and easy to use Excel spreadsheets is one level. Data warehouses and data marts takes it to another level. Within systems themselves (think CRM), dashboards are very powerful at providing insight and action (via workflow).

All of this leads to an issue of executive oversight. Someone needs to make the tough decisions in the best interest of the donor. The CEO needs to empower someone to make those decisions. Otherwise your technology team will be chasing its tail on a regular basis with unclear direction and expensive solutions to meet the great demand for integration.

There is clearly a role for oversight for this function. It should be led by a high level business executive who focuses on insight.

Many of the advanced solutions and systems can be very expensive. Senior executives will clearly experience sticker shock when looking at investment decisions. Out of many technology investments to be made, this is one that cries out for clear ROI and a total economic benefit to spell out.

Here are the key ideas:

1. Start with simple integrations that focus early on data quality.
2. Begin with integrations that lead to clear insight and action.
3. Encourage oversight and accountability for results.
4. Early on, default to system dashboards and workflow rather than other complicated systems.
5. Insights that lead to next steps along the donor journey will have high payoffs for renewal, cross-selling and up-selling.
6. Senior business executives must be engaged early and often.
7. Enforce clear budget boundaries with clear ROI.

What donor data should we collect?

Tags

Analytics, Donor Data, Insight, Offline Data, Online Data

Donor Relations

We probably shouldn’t try to collect everything. We also should be collecting the “right” donor data. We should consider enhancing the data we collect to make it more valuable. Several suggested priorities are all online transaction detail and insight, most offline transaction detail and insight, social media data and insights and finally, call center transactions and insights.

There has been a lot said and written about the 360 degree view of the donor. A quick Google search will bring up 13.7 million results. Many in favor and some questioning the strategy.

I believe donor data is important. One thing to think about, however, is how much data do you need to know to make actionable decisions? Perhaps more than you have and perhaps less than you plan to gather which could be holding you back from acting today.

Most of us have a ton of online data. It is easy to gather and relatively inexpensive to integrate. That said, many of us have no to very little offline data. Another gap can also be unstructured data.

A core question is how important is a 360 degree view anyway? No human can see 360 degrees. Here is something interesting to think about.

To draw an analogy from the physical realm, out of 360 potential degrees, what’s our actual field of vision? Approximately a 120-degree arc. But even most of that is peripheral. In fact, when it comes to seeing in high resolution — say for reading purposes — our actual field of view is only about 6 degrees.

What happens if something important happens in our peripheral vision? We move our eyes to look at it. In other words, we’re not primed to look at everything at once. Rather, we focus on the essentials and filter out the rest so we don’t experience information overload.

Source: The Cloud Sherpa

In thinking about data integration, it will be helpful to suspend any discussion of what data can we integrate. Any data can be integrated. The real issue is what results you want for your business and what data do you need to improve the donor experience. From a planning point of view it is helpful to start with the end in mind and not the details of how we integrate everything. It is critical to know what data will give you actionable insight.

Donors are using many channels to engage with your nonprofit. They expect a seamless experience across those channels. At a core level, that will involve collecting and integrating the data that donors expect to see across those channels. The important issue to think through is what does the donor expect you to know about what they have told on the mobile app and what you know about them when they make a purchase. It is all about the donor expectation.

If you ask for information from a donor and they are willing to give it to you, then they probably expect that you will use it across channels to create a seamless experience. Donors also expect that you remember them. They get very upset when you don’t. They love you when you do. Know and remember is key to service.

Alert!! Do you have a privacy policy? Is it up to date? How good is your data security? Has someone independent from your technical team assessed risks in your donor data security? Not having a budget to look at this is a high risk. The damage to your credibility is at stake.

Ask yourself:

1. Do you need a deeper understanding of donor sentiment from both internal and external sources?
2. Do you want to increase donor loyalty and satisfaction by understanding what meaningful actions are needed?
3. Are you challenged to get the right information to the right people to provide donors what they need to solve problems, cross-sell, and up-sell?

Here are the key ideas:

1. Start simple and don’t get carried away with all the possibilities.
2. Begin creating a strategy now.
3. Encourage collaboration and create a team to “oversee” your efforts.
4. Decide, up front, what data is worth
5. Commit to not collecting everything and be ok with that.
6. Focus on key channels like online, offline checks / credit card transactions, and direct response.
7. Create a data value framework to help set priorities.
8. Pay attention to privacy and security. Your reputation is at stake.

This is a donor ecosystem built for data, insight and action

Tags

Action, Big data, Data, Donor Experience, Ecosystem, Insight

Resist the temptation to focus and organize around silos. While silos can maximize a part of the system, they sub-optimize the whole. We are building a donor (digital) ecosystem.

There is something as “not seeing the forest for the trees”. In the case of donor data (including big data), that can certainly be the case. It is easy to get lost in the data. It is important to see data as a way to gain donor insight. Having gained insight, we must take action to improve results for our donors and business.

The digital executive needs to evaluate whether the department silos are structured properly as a part of the overall ecosystem. One area to look at is what is the overall level of accountability around supporting the total results (including renewal and upgrades) from donor experiences and relationships. Structural change may be needed to support optimal results.

In scientific terms, an ecosystem is formed by the interaction of a community of organisms with their environment. The ecosystem has multiple, interdependent components that function as a unit. Innovators have long envisioned a similar environment where data, technology, people, and business processes operate in synchronization to improve donor satisfaction and business performance. The key to achieving this vision is having the capacity to discern the true nature of donor relationships in an intuitive manner. This capacity is known as “donor insight.”

The concept of the donor data ecosystem can be further broken down into two key aspects: the Donor Lifecycle, and the Information Lifecycle.

Below is an example from Forrester Research of how an ecosystem could look.

In the donor ecosystem, there are several components that are important.

1. The value of data
   1. Donor interaction data
   2. Contact and account data
   3. Donor information files
   4. External data
2. Turning data into insight
3. Turning insight into action

Integrated donor data forms the cornerstone of the donor ecosystem. Organizations have rich sources of data including donor interaction data, account data, external data sources, and donor information files. This data must be cleaned and properly linked together as fast as the data becomes available.

Digital Business Ecosystem

Individual data elements provide undeniable value in the ecosystem. Integrated data provides even greater value. However, integrating donor data is far from an easy task. Disparate systems and errors in the data typically prevent all of the data from being used by analytical processes. To turn all of this data into insight, sophisticated technologies and techniques are needed to clean the data, discover hidden relationships, and integrate it. This integrated view must then be fed into analytical models to discover and predict patterns in donor behavior. This deep insight into a donor services help organizations fully understand donor profitability, attrition, and retention.

Providing insight, however, is only one part of the solution. This insight must be turned into action to achieve real benefits. Two best practices have emerged in a donor relations focus: dashboards and scorecards.

Dashboards provide a quick way to get an immediate picture of business processes. Similar to a dashboard in a car, data is displayed in an intuitive manner that allows employees to see how the processes that they are responsible for are working. In the donor ecosystem, a dashboard contains multiple information displays that show how donor processes are working.

Scorecards are a vital part of the dashboard display that show specific measurements, also known as key performance indicators (KPIs), for a specific employee role. Unlike financial condition ratios reported to the Board and the IRS, KPIs always reflect strategic value drivers. For example, Return on Investment or functional expenses are common metrics used to judge financial performance, but it doesn’t measure a specific driver of value.

For the donor ecosystem, a KPI measuring the average value of a new donor reflects a strategic objective of acquiring more profitable donors.

In order to drive the right behaviors in the ecosystem, these mechanisms must be part of the daily job role for donor-focused employees. That is, insight must be “in sight” of people in day-to-day operational roles. Therefore these capabilities must be quick and easy to use.

In the business world, there is an old saying that “what gets measured gets done.” Dashboards and scorecards also provide a strong way to clearly communicate business strategy and objectives across the enterprise.

When viewing a report, graph, or KPI, people often need to understand why a specific number is different from what they expect. For insight to be truly “actionable”, a user must be able to drill down into the details. This process is typically called “Root Cause Analysis” because the user must get to the “root” of the problem. For example, if the KPI Average Value of New Donors is lower than expected, the user needs to be able to look beyond the KPI to the underlying data.

Insight Ecosystem

Here are the key ideas:

1. Start with the view of “the forest”.
2. Begin with simple integrations of valuable data to create insight.
3. Encourage taking action on insights. Structure everything around actionable outcomes of data and the insights.

How do we know who the customer is behind all the devices connecting with us?

Tags

Customer Focus, Marc Benioff, Salesforce

How do we know who the customer is behind all the devices connecting with us?

We live a world of the connected customer. Can the “Internet of Customers” be fulfilled?

We all wish that it could be done easily.

Here are some thoughts from Forrester Research on Salesforce1 and it’s promise. For the digital business that is obsessed about it’s customers, this is a huge issue. 

After one of the biggest announcements in the marketing technology space of 2013 — Salesforce.com’s purchase of ExactTarget — few were surprised to see the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud feature prominently at Dreamforce in San Francisco. But the real headline grabber was the introduction of Salesforce1, a cloud-based platform for what the company calls the “Internet of customers.” We’ve got a deeper look into the implications of this for marketers for Forrester clients, but some of our key takeaways were that Salesforce:

• Gets the age of the customer and what it means for their products. CEO Marc Benioff spoke at length about the “customers behind the devices” and the importance of engaging with those individuals, rather than the things they use to connect to the Web. We are in what Forrester calls the age of the customer, where “the most successful enterprises reinvent themselves to systematically understand and serve increasingly powerful customers.” The Salesforce1 vision is to be the technology engine behind those firms — and the announcement takes a big step in that direction.
• Commits to an integrated future . . . at some point. Salesforce1 offers a slew of technical changes that make integration not only a priority but also a possibility. Marketers who increasingly need to deliver a consistent experience across all interactions over the course of the customer life cycle will find some of that need met in Salesforce1. The details around how the different clouds will connect remains vague, however. (For more about the technical elements of the integration, check out  John Rymer’s post.)
• Needs to answer questions about how marketers will unlock the benefits of Salesforce1. The vision and demos we saw at Dreamforce whet marketers’ appetites, but it remains unclear how they will tap Salesforce1’s potential without more information around pricing, inter-cloud connections, and ROI of a new approach. Without that clarity, it’s hard to call Salesforce1 a true marketing technology platform.

Source: For Marketers, Salesforce1 Aspires To Be The Platform Of Customer Obsession | Forrester Research

The Smartphone Platform War Is Over

Tags

Android, IOS, Smartphone

“While the global smartphone market is as competitive as ever in terms of manufacturers fighting for the consumers’ love (and money), the long-raging platform war appears to be over. According to a recent report by Gartner, Android and iOS now account for 99 percent of global smartphone sales, rendering every other platform irrelevant.

“As the chart below illustrates that hasn’t always been the case. Back in 2010, Android and iOS devices accounted for less than 40 percent of global smartphone sales. Back then, devices running Nokia’s Symbian and BlackBerry accounted for a significant portion of smartphone sales and Microsoft’s market share stood at 4.2 percent.

“While Symbian is long extinct and BlackBerry has started transitioning to Android devices, Microsoft has not yet given up on Windows 10 Mobile as a platform aimed at professional users. Whether Windows, or any other platform for that matter, stands a chance against the dominance of Android and iOS at this point seems highly doubtful though.”

Source: • Chart: The Smartphone Platform War Is Over | Statista

Fix Computer Security by Acting like Macy’s

Tags

Cyber Security, Technology

Cyber Security

Retail operations have very effective security. We should look at their approaches and design computer security in a similar fashion.

Computer systems, corporate and government, will continue to be breached at an alarming rate, which is of course much higher than is publicly disclosed. More money will be spent and people hired. More standards will be set, regulations promulgated and enforced. As should be obvious by now, most of the money will be wasted, most of the people will accomplish nothing, and the regulations will increase costs while making things worse. Unless something changes.

The problem of cybersecurity can be solved. But it can only be solved if: we acknowledge we’re at war and act accordingly; we apply within the guts of our systems common-sense methods whose principles are clear, obvious and proven in other domains; and we start acting as though we actually want to solve the problem, as opposed to the current strategy of denial, cover-up and blame-shifting.

Source: Fix Computer Security by Acting like Macy’s

 

What kind of business technology scorecard do you use?

Tags

Business Technology, CIO, Forrester Research

Do you have a scorecard that translates your key goals and strategies in a way that drives performance? Have you created a framework for what it looks like? Here is a framework for a balanced scorecard that is a little different from many I’ve seen. Do you have one you could share?

Metrics are very important to both lead and lag indicators. Being clear what what goals and strategies will make a difference is leadership’s responsibility.

I highly recommend the approach that Forrester is advocating for in this blog article. It has some great visuals in it as well.

It’s time to re-think the report card used by CIOs to report on BT performance – tomorrow’s BT CIOs must look beyond the traditional IT Balanced Scorecard (BSC).I realize this is sacred ground for many people in IT (and some of my colleagues here at Forrester), so let me explain myself before I receive a barrage of complaints. The philosophy behind Business Technology (BT) recognizes technology as integral to every facet of every organization – as such, IT is very much an integral part of the business; we can no longer talk about “business” and “IT” as if referring to two distinct things. I’m suggesting that in the age of BT, we need a new scorecard that better reflects the impact of BT on the business.

via Does BT Need A New Report Card? | Forrester Blogs.

Who Owns Enterprise Analytics and Data? How about the CEO?

Tags

Analytics, CEO, CFO, CIO, Data, Leadership

This is a very interesting suggestion that the CFO owns enterprise analytics and data. My sense, while it is well meaning, is that it is misplaced. Many will argue their function should own it. This article eventually argues it should be the CIO.

My suggestion?

How about the CEO?

Who else owns “the enterprise”?

My thought is that this is too important to delegate to a department and have one more siloed activity. Only the CEO can get everyone pulling in the same direction. Only the CEO can provide the leadership that is needed so desperately.

Rise of Digital Music Stops the Industry’s Decline

Tags

Digital, Music

“2015 was a pretty good year for the music industry. According to IFPI, worldwide recorded music revenues totaled $15 billion, up 3.2 percent from the previous year’s total of $14.5 billion. This marks the first significant uptick for the struggling industry after nearly two decades of gradual decline.

“Interestingly, it has been the transition to digital formats that has both fueled the decline and helped stop it. A 45 percent increase in streaming revenues propelled total digital music revenue to $6.7 billion in the past year, offsetting the ongoing decline in physical format sales and surpassing them for the first time.

“It appears as if the music industry has finally bottomed out as both consumers and the industry have come to accept that the future of music is digital. IFPI estimates that the number of paid streaming subscribers has grown from 20 to 68 million in the past three years. It will be interesting to observe if the industry can maintain its upward momentum going forward, now that it has successfully completed the transition to the digital age of music.”

Source: • Chart: Rise of Digital Music Stops the Industry’s Decline | Statista

How do consumers expect to connect with us?

Tags

Consumer Expectations, Customer Experience, Mobile, Multiple Devices

You know technology is moving fast. So are customer expectations. Adoption of multiple devices is now the norm. I connect from my work laptop, iPad, iPhone, and home iMac on any given day. Most of what I connect to is pervasive from device to device. Just today I have used a “to do” manager on the web via a laptop, my iPhone and my iPad. Everything I need to do is always synched and up to date. I love it. But that is also my expectation now for how things work. Many others, perhaps your customers, have the same expectation. So what experience are they getting from you?

The digital executive is focused on creating this kind of amazing customer experience. This is the essence of a digital business. Our customers expect no less than this. With this understand, we need to focus on customer expectations and technology that enables a seamless experience.

Consider this from Forrester Research:

Thirty-two percent of US online adults accessed the Internet from multiple physical locations using a PC only; for example, from home, work, and the sidelines of a son’s soccer game.

Forty-five percent of all US mobile subscribers owned a smartphone in 2011, slightly less than doubling from just two years before, when only 24% owned one. Forrester forecasts that more than half of US mobile subscribers will own smartphones by the end of 2012. And, in Western Europe, they expect smartphone penetration to jump from 34% in 2011 to 67% by 2016.

Thirty-six percent of US adults with a mobile phone access the mobile Internet at least monthly or more often. In 2010, only 23% engaged in this behavior. Western European adults with a mobile phone accessing the mobile Internet at least monthly or more often grew from 9% to 18% from 2009 to 2011.

We can all connect and interact from multiple devices all day long without missing a beat. What opportunities does this present for us to improve the customer experience?

Here are the key ideas:

• Customer expectations have changed to connect from multiple devices.
• Customers expect the experience to be amazing and consistent from device to device.
• Much of these interactions are moving to mobile devices. Mobile is a reality not a trend.

 

Salesforce.com Seeks Nonprofit Input on Specialized Software

Tags

CRM, Donor, Nonprofit, Salesforce

Cloud-computing company Salesforce.com is soliciting input from nonprofits on how to tailor its programs to meet charities’ needs, the San Francisco Chronicle writes. The firm has convened a series of events, called Community Sprints, at which nonprofit officials can suggest changes or even rewrite code to customize Salesforce services in areas such as tracking donors or analyzing giving data.

The Sprints, held to date in San Franscisco, Seattle, and Washington, aim to make such customization possible for smaller organizations that lack the resources to do it on their own. The events help “make Salesforce workable out of the box for nonprofits of all sizes,” said Rob Acker, CEO of Salesforce.org, the firm’s philanthropic arm, which provides cloud software at steep discounts to some 27,000 groups worldwide.

What is encryption and why is it important? This is not Apple vs. the FBI.

Tags

Encryption, Security

Encryption is important. Many companies and individuals take advantage of the benefits of encryption. No one has every suggested it is illegal and that the government has a right to nullify the advantages. Well, no one until now.

Simply understood encryption is the process of encoding messages or information in such a way that only authorized parties can read it. Encryption does not of itself prevent interception, but denies the message content to the interceptor. In an encryption scheme, the intended device, communication information or message, referred to as plaintext, is encrypted using an encryption algorithm, generating ciphertext that can only be read if decrypted. For technical reasons, an encryption scheme usually uses a pseudo-random encryption key generated by an algorithm. It is in principle possible to decrypt the message without possessing the key, but, for a well-designed encryption scheme, large computational resources and skill are required. An authorized recipient can easily decrypt the message with the key provided by the originator to recipients, but not to unauthorized interceptors. Hence, even the FBI is unable to unlock the information.

The purpose of encryption is, to ensure that only somebody who is qualified to access data (e.g. a text message or a file) will be able to read it, using the decryption key. Somebody who is not qualified to access the information can be excluded from doing that, because he does not have the required decryption key. Without it, it’s impossible to read the encrypted information. In that way, it’s possible to protect random people from reading private information.

Do I have a right to encrypt my devices? Well, it is legal and openly encouraged by device makers, including Microsoft. I own a Microsoft laptop known as the Surface Book. Microsoft provides me the ability to encrypt it. I do. I don’t want the contents usable if it is stolen or lost.

When I was CIO of a major corporation, I installed encryption on all our laptops. Our auditors essentially insisted on it. It was the right thing to do.

So, I don’t see this as a dispute between the FBI and Apple. The question is do I have the freedom and liberty to encrypt my devices? Do companies have that right?

The dispute between Apple and the FBI over Apple’s refusal to unlock an iPhone recovered from the alleged San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook marks another chapter in the ongoing battle between privacy and security in the internet age.

While the FBI wants Apple to circumvent the iPhone’s auto-erase mechanism after 10 failed login attempts and has a court order to strengthen its claim, Apple refuses to do so, claiming that such a software could serve as a master key to any iPhone should it fall into the wrong hands. Last week, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook addressed the public in an open letter defending his company’s stance on the matter, saying that following the government’s demands in this case would set a dangerous precedent with respect to the safety of personal data.

While tech companies such as Google and Facebook have voiced their support for Apple in the ongoing dispute, the American public is leaning towards the FBI on the issue. According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 51 percent of adults in the U.S. think that Apple should unlock the perpetrator’s phone while 38 percent think that Apple is right not to cooperate. Even among the company’s faithful, support is tepid at best: 47 percent of iPhone users think Apple should follow the FBI’s orders vs. 43 percent who don’t.

Source: • Chart: Where Americans Stand on the Apple-FBI Dispute | Statista

In the Internet of Things, are you ready to take control in your self driving car?

Tags

Automobiles, Google, Internet of Things

The Internet of Things is all the rage. Are you ready? My thermostat is one thing, my car is another?

Even though self-driving cars offer tremendous promise, the technology is still being perfected. Several companies recently filed reports with the California DMV, showing how often their drivers had to take control.Google’s autonomous vehicles had covered 1.3 million miles by November 2015 and 424,331 of them were on roads in California. The vehicles disengaged on 272 occasions due to failure of the autonomous technology. A further 69 events resulted in drivers taking control of the vehicle due to a possible safety threat.

Source: • Chart: Self Driving Cars: How Often Do Drivers Take Control? | Statista

Microsoft Is Pulling the Plug on Windows 8

Tags

Microsoft, Mobile device, Windows 10, Windows 8

I used Windows 8 but mainly stayed on the desktop side. Just bought a Surface Book running Windows 10 and generally like it. I was able to replace my old laptop and iPad.

Microsoft officially ended support for Windows 8. It was the final nail in the coffin of what was arguably the least successful Windows version of all time. After its highly anticipated release in October 2012, Windows 8 failed to make an impression with users as many found its radically new user interface confusing and counter-intuitive. Microsoft quickly backpedaled and rolled out Windows 8.1 which reversed many of the UI changes just one year after Windows 8’s initial release. Windows 10, released in July 2015, went one step further in returning to a more traditional desktop feel while building on some of the features introduced with Windows 8. It was received much more positively than its predecessor and quickly overtook Windows 8 in terms of market share.

Based on data from NetMarketShare, illustrates, Windows 8 failed to reach wide adoption during its lifetime. It never managed to pass Windows XP (released in 2001) let alone challenge its predecessor Windows 7 which remains the most widely used desktop operating system in the world.

Source: • Chart: Microsoft Is Pulling the Plug on Windows 8 | Statista

Tough Times Ahead for the Tech Industry? Are we over the shiny new object?

Tags

Accenture, Innovation, Internet of Things

Accenture conducted an international survey to take the pulse of today’s tech consumer. The results are sobering, as a decade of innovation and growth appears to be coming to an end. At least for now, we may be over the shiny new object.

According to Accenture’s findings, consumers are much less inclined to purchase new technology this year than they were 12 months ago. Not only have markets reached a certain level of saturation, but the pace of innovation has also slowed down a bit. Today’s new smartphones, while undisputedly better than they were two years ago, lack the killer features to convince the average consumer of the necessity to upgrade. 47 percent of those who don’t plan to buy a new smartphone this year stated that they are happy with their current device and see no need to upgrade.

As demand for the growth motors of the past few years slows down, it would be the time for a new generation of devices to take the stage. However, smartwatches, fitness trackers and other connected devices have yet failed to make an impression on the broad public. Less than 15 percent of those polled by Accenture plan to buy any of the aforementioned devices hailed as “the next big thing” this year.

Source: • Chart: Tough Times Ahead for the Tech Industry? | Statista

Microsoft Restyles Philanthropy Unit Under New Name and Leader

Tags

Microsoft, Nonprofit, Philanthropy

Nonprofits Matter

Now here is some good news for nonprofits. Microsoft has long been a friend of the nonprofit community.

Microsoft announced Tuesday that it will expand its charitable activities under a newly named division, Microsoft Philanthropies, The Seattle Times and CNET report.

The organization will oversee the Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant’s existing giving programs, including donations of money and software and employee volunteerism, while seeking new avenues to work with communities, Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post. The firm donated more than $1 billion in the most recent fiscal year.

Microsoft Philanthropies will be headed by Mary Snapp, a longtime company lawyer, and priority areas will include STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) education and bridging the global gap in access to technology, a cause other tech giants such as Facebook and Google have taken up.

Source: Microsoft Restyles Philanthropy Unit Under New Name and Leader – The Chronicle of Philanthropy

These Technologies Will Shape the Near Future

Tags

Cloud computing, IBM, Internet of Things, Mobile

“Over the past few years, we have witnessed a number of technological revolutions. First there was the rise of smartphones, than tablets came along and finally cloud services hit the mainstream. But what’s next? Which technologies will shape the near future, especially from a professional point of view? IBM asked more than 5,000 C-level executives from 70 countries which technologies they think will be particularly important in the next three to five years. Most CxOs agree that cloud computing and mobile solutions will continue to play a key role, while the Internet of Things is expected to make a big impact as well.

“This chart shows which technologies C-level executives from 70 countries expect to be particularly important in the next 3-5 years.”

Source: • Chart: These Technologies Will Shape the Near Future | Statista

The Global Tablet Market Is in Decline

Tags

Laptop, Microsoft, Phablet, Surface Book, Tablet

Who would have thought the tablet market wouldn’t continue growing? With the demise of laptop sales, this seemed a no-brainer a few years ago.

Well, then along came phablets. Also waiting to be seen, particularly in the corporate market, is the laptop/tablet combos like the new Microsoft Surface Book.

“When Apple reported its earnings earlier this week, there was one number that wasn’t in line with the positive overall results: iPad sales declined for the seventh consecutive quarter and reached their lowest level since Q3 2011, when the device was merely one year old.

“But it’s not just Apple that is having problems selling tablets, it’s the tablet market overall that is struggling. Global tablet shipments have declined in each of the past four quarters and the negative trend appears to be accelerating.

“As smartphones are becoming larger and more powerful, they are crowding tablets out of their own niche. Moreover, as tablets typically aren’t subsidized by carriers the way smartphones are, people tend to upgrade their devices less frequently. This explains why market saturation is setting in much quicker in the tablet market than it did for smartphones.”

Source: • Chart: The Global Tablet Market Is in Decline | Statista

The brave new world of marketing automation and why it is important to your strategy

Tags

Marketing automation

Marketing

Marketing automation is a category of technology that allows companies to streamline, automate, and measure marketing tasks and workflows, so they can increase operational efficiency and grow revenue faster. While it is a maturing segment of technology solutions, it is moving fast.

What can it do?

Guide customers on 1-to-1 journeys across sales, service, marketing, and beyond — uniting your brand’s voice and providing a seamless experience.

• Create personalized customer-focused experiences at scale.
• Map the customer journey and prioritize every step of your strategy.
• Spark conversations with customers based on real-time interactions.
• Test multiple variations of content, channel, timing, and frequency.
• Automatically monitor and respond to customers.
• Connect your apps, products, and spaces to customer journeys.
• Leverage data from any source.
• Automate internal journeys for your employees.
• Reach across the customer lifecycle creating contacts, leads, cases, and tasks.

Deliver smart and predictive content. Drag-and-drop content tools make it easy to create emails that capture your customers’ attention. With simple dynamic content blocks for personalization, integrated Predictive Intelligence, and pre-defined event triggers, marketing automation helps you to automate relevant messages throughout the customer lifecycle.

Web Personalization – The website remains a key point in the customer journey – often marking the first interaction with a brand. Web marketing tools make it easy to create beautiful, dynamic Web pages and personalized content, then track every action your customers take, in real time, to make the insights actionable.

Track and optimize email campaigns. Keep tabs on every email campaign and transactional send with real-time tracking and graphical reporting. Make the most of every email send — and boost ROI — with built-in A/B testing capabilities, integrated Predictive Intelligence, and leading email deliverability tools.

Scale capabilities. Whether you’re looking for standard email service provider features or need a sophisticated cross-channel marketing platform, you can send millions of emails in a few minutes to empowering users around the world, to adding new customer communication channels to your brand strategy,

Deliver personalized and predictive Web experiences. We know that creating a personal online experience has bottom-line benefits. Leverage Predictive Intelligence to turn static websites into dynamic experiences with personalized content and predictive recommendations tailored specifically to each customer, based on their behavior and preferences.

Connect with ease. Connect Marketing to Sales and Service to combine the best-of-bred email service provider, world-class digital marketing, and CRM technologies to empower your organization to build a single view of the customer and deliver more effective, personalized communications. The seamless connection allows organizations to create data-driven, 1-to-1 messages that move the customer journey forward. Now all areas of your organization can utilize data to optimize customer interactions, including sales, services, customer support, in-store, online, and beyond.

Predictive Intelligence – The world has become a “noisy” place. Predictive Intelligence gives marketers the power of data science to understand each customer’s preferences and automatically optimize every interaction, in any channel, across the customer journey. Drive more conversions, win loyal advocates, and cut through the noise every step of the way.

Infer preferences based on behavior. With every open, click, purchase or search, customers are giving you valuable insights into their preferences. Predictive Intelligence consumes both implicit and explicit customer behavior, in real time, in order to build a profile of preferences for every customer.

Make predictions and automate decisions. This profile of preferences is then paired with sophisticated algorithms and business rules to automatically, and in real time, predict the next best offer, content or product for each individual customer. Every minute, Predictive Intelligence makes hundreds of thousands of these decisions on behalf of the brands we serve.

Personalize every interaction. Predictive Intelligence is native in messaging platforms, meaning Predictive Content is seamlessly delivered across channels, personalizing every customer interaction. By tailoring the experience to every individual customer, marketers can crush KPIs like conversions, opens, clicks, downloads and incremental revenue, while building trust, loyalty and a lifetime customer relationship.

Streamline and send emails. Your customers interact with email all day, every day — and they expect real-time communications from you. Powerful email marketing platforms arms you with the segmentation and automation tools you need to move the customer journey forward and reach your always-connected customers, wherever they are.

Target your audiences. Relevant messaging isn’t an option — it’s a necessity. Easily filter your subscriber base to send targeted email messages based on any customer data, including all interactions with your brand.

Engage via mobile messages. Engage customers in the moment, send real-time alerts, and deliver transactional notifications with easy-to-use mobile messaging. Ready-made SMS and MMS templates and a drag-and-drop interfaces let you create any kind of mobile message — from mobile tickets and coupons to customer service updates and surveys.

Create 1-to-1 conversations on group messaging apps. Millions of consumers across the globe are engaging on group messaging apps, such as LINE and WeChat. Marketers not only need to be present on these new channels, but ready to engage in personal 1-to-1 conversations with their followers.

Drive mobile app engagement. Your customers have dozens of apps competing for their attention. Increase app engagement and drive mobile commerce with targeted push notifications and integration with other delivery channels.

Utilize geolocation technology. Trigger interactions at exactly the right time and place, enhancing the customer journey with personalized mobile experiences that engage when customers are within a targeted geographic range.

Connect devices. Behind every device is a customer. And with connected devices, lines between the physical and digital world intersect. Allows brands to power connected solutions that react to online and offline customer actions in real time, with the right message, in the right context.

Manage the mobile lifecycle. Run cross-channel mobile marketing campaigns and manage every aspect of the customer journey with a mobile-first mindset. Execute automated mobile campaigns with Journeys and segment your audience for highly relevant messages.

Build on powerful APIs. Create and automate custom mobile marketing solutions — such as personalized daily appointment alerts, order confirmations, and travel updates — with mobile APIs. Power real-time interactions with your customers by integrating CRM data, marketing analytics, and other business software with mobile campaigns.

In the area of social media, build more meaningful relationships with customers by tapping into the power of social media in your marketing, customer service, and sales organizations. Harness social conversations to listen, analyze, publish, and engage with your customers, on a 1-to-1 basis.

Listen and analyze. Analyze conversations from different sources across the globe. Discover what consumers are saying about your brand, your products, and your competitors. Understand which topics are generating interest and where the most influential conversations are happening — then use that information to inform your marketing decisions. Plus, with Social Studio you can monitor consumer sentiment to stay ahead of potential crises and evaluate new product and service offerings.

Plan and publish. Empower your team to plan, execute, and track compelling social media marketing campaigns. Source content from our ecosystem of partners or integrate with your own digital asset management system to seamlessly pull existing creative into social campaigns. Customize and craft your content while protecting your brand with configurable approval rules and a full audit trail. New tools help managing social strategy, tailoring social campaigns, and driving social awareness across distributed teams is easy — just identify the most engaging content and share it with different product, regional, or brand teams.

Engage and connect. Behind every tweet, Facebook post, or status update is a customer — and it’s your job to engage, in a timely, responsive manner with compelling content. Social tools gives you the ability to monitor what people are saying on your brand’s owned social channels and participate in conversations about any topic across the social Web. And with social automation engines, organizing discussions is easy. You can automatically label, classify, and assign posts in order to route and prioritize work across teams — connecting with social customers is easier than ever before.

Take your social strategy mobile. In today’s 24/7 mobile world, you can execute your entire social strategy from the palm of your hand — from analyzing the results of product launches to approving time-sensitive content to monitoring your social campaigns in real time. And you can easily coordinate strategy across regional, product, or brand teams.

Content and Messaging – Provides a single location for all your cross-channel content. Speak with one voice across all your digital channels for a consistent consumer experience throughout the 1-to-1 customer journey.

Manage content. Create, manage, and track content across all your digital channels from a single location to make searching, categorizing, and filtering your content easier than ever. You can even assign tags, campaign associations, and owners to your content, and then use quick search functionality to easily track it down.

Predict the next best content. With Predictive Intelligence, marketers can build profiles of their customers’ preferences, then leverage sophisticated algorithms to determine and deliver the next best content, offer, or product for every individual across channels, automatically and in real time. Predictive content exponentially increases conversion and engagement across the customer journey.

Easily create great content. Great content drives action — makes it easier than ever to create inspiring messages. With a user-friendly content editor, design and build intelligent content with drag-and-drop smart content blocks and mobile-optimized templates. Keep track of what you’re doing in real time with the persistent preview function. Create once and distribute everywhere with new tools that streamline the content generation process.

How do you combine technologies to innovate?

Tags

Business, Digital, Education, Harvard Business Review, IBM, Innovation

This makes so much sense. It is the combination of technology that becomes so powerful in this model.

Well worth reading and thinking through as an enabler of innovation. Adam really nails this one.

These technologies can be combined in numerous ways, and we are just starting to see companies really taking advantage of the possibilities. These four technologies will have a disruptive impact on your business, almost regardless of which industry you’re in. The question is whether you will choose to adopt them before a competitor does.

What are they?
1.  Microprocessors
2.  Sensors
3.  Wireless connectivity
4.  Databases

The Four Technologies You Need to Be Working With – Adam Richardson – Harvard Business Review

All Boards Need a Technology Expert

Tags

Board of Directors, CEO, CIO, Governance

It is striking that most Boards of Directors have little to no members who have expertise in technology. As technology and digital initiatives become more pervasive, this will continue to be a competitive disadvantage. Board governance and oversight for digital transformation is important.

“A few months ago I decided to look into the professional experience of non-executive directors at the major banks listed in Britain. Like almost every other major industry today, banking relies on hugely complex, enormously expensive technology. So I was curious as to whether the individuals charged with corporate governance would have any more than a layman’s knowledge of IT. I discovered that only one bank had a board member with some direct experience in technology and in that case it was as a sales executive.”

Source: All Boards Need a Technology Expert

Here are some great suggestions about Board of Director expertise from Jean-Louis Bravard:

• Hire a techie to your board. That is probably the most difficult task and it is very industry dependent but my recommendation would be to give priority to individuals with scars, with both successes and failures and who continue to be involved with technology. Technology moves too fast for “stale” talent, however well-regarded. In consumer industries I would give
  a huge premium to articulate young entrepreneurs who can rapidly educate the board. Be prepared to rotate this role at least every two years.
• Don’t rely entirely on advisers. Many boards rely on technical advisers and consultants to assess their firm’s technology needs. Too often the corporate advice these advisers offer is generic. It’s often focused on the competitive environment — used to reassure management that it is not falling behind rivals. This leads to the predominance of the lowest common denominator.
• Ask tough questions about technology spending. Using Moore’s Law, zero-based budgeting would call for technology spending to fall each year by about 30%; in most companies spending goes up by at least 5% each year. Part of the reason is that CIOs are not rewarded for taking out old code and old hardware; instead they “layer” old technology on top of ancient technology, bad on top of worse — which of course leaves their company vulnerable to new entrants that do not have any obsolete inheritances to deal with.
• Understand the cyber threat. Unfortunately, new technology opens up vulnerabilities even as it creates value. Total security is not possible, but understanding the risk-benefit trade-off is essential. A recent survey by the Ponemon Institute, sponsored by Raytheon, found that 80% of boards do not even receive briefings on their company’s cyber security strategy. That number should be zero — and briefings should happen periodically to remain
  up to date.

Should adoption of new technology be a top priority in digital business transformation?

Tags

Customer, Digital Business, Gartner

Digital Business

Are you leading the charge in digital business transformation?

Here are some things to focus on:

1. New technology to enable digital business
2. Create a collaborative work environment for employees and customers
3. Customer driven technology change that benefits the customer

Adopting new technology is the top priority for the businesses that are leading the pack when it comes to digital transformation, according to a Gartner survey.

Gartner surveyed 304 business leaders from organisations with revenue of US$250 million or more in Australia, US, UK and Germany. It found 70 per cent of those who are leading digital business transformation are making new technology a top priority, meaning CIOs and tech leaders are pivotal to making digital happen.

The next top priorities, the survey found, are creating a collaborative work environment, cited by 56 per cent of leaders, and supporting customer-driven technology change (cited by 53 per cent).

Source: Adoption of new technology top priority in digital business transformation: Gartner – CIO

Use your personal smartphone for work email? Your company might take it

Tags

Bring your own device, BYOD, Smartphone

Mobile Devices

If you use your personal smartphone or tablet to read work email, your company may have to seize the device some day, and you may not get it back for months. Employees armed with a battery of smartphones and other gadgets they own are casually connecting to work email and other employer servers. It’s a less-than-ideal security arrangement that technology pros call BYOD — bring your own device.

Now, lawyers are warning there’s an unforeseen consequence of BYOD. If a company is involved in litigation — civil or criminal — personal cellphones that were used for work email or other company activity are liable to be confiscated and examined for evidence during discovery or investigation.

More here: Use your personal smartphone for work email? Your company might take it – Red Tape.

Have we reached a digital tipping point?

Tags

Accountablility, Budget, Digital Business, People, Process, Strategy

Business Strategy

Is it about our digital budget or is it about having the right strategy, people and processes in place. It may not be “either/or” but it is clear that budget alone won’t get us there.

We need excellent strategies executive by outstanding people. That will with the way.

This year’s survey asked respondents how their companies spend on digital and organize their digital work, as well as the goals, challenges, and best practices they see across these initiatives. Many respondents agree that their companies’ digital programs are growth oriented, that future spending on digital will increase, and that a large portion of future company growth will be driven by digital efforts. But organizational challenges and a dearth of talent are common, significant hurdles that prevent companies from scaling up their digital efforts or seeing clear returns on their investments. So are limited accountability and a poor understanding of potential value. Less than 40 percent of executives say their companies have accountability measures in place, either through targets, incentives, or “owners” of digital programs, while only 7 percent say their organizations understand the exact value at stake from digital.

via The digital tipping point: McKinsey Global Survey results | McKinsey & Company.

What is the secret sauce for delivering in the new digital world and transform our businesses into digital businesses?

Tags

API, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation

API

In our new digital world, we know we know we need to be fast and agile. It also helps to be able to scale quickly and deliver the right customer experience at the right time. Of course, that may include multiple types of devices.

What is the secret sauce for delivering in the new digital world and transform our businesses into digital businesses?

Open API’s (Application Programming Interface) are the standard and foundation for building a digital business. All our systems moving forward should take advantage of this approach.

Not sure what that means? It is worth the time to invest in figuring it out. Do a simple search on YouTube for API’s. There are 1,700,000 videos on this.

Here is a great overview in 3 minutes.

As executives, we don’t need to know technically how it works. We do need to know that is our approach, strategically. We also need to know that when we are purchasing applications, that they are heavily invested in that approach.

How important does Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Apple and others think Open API’s are? Answer is Duh!! There whole revenue model is based on it.

Here are 5 reasons companies share their API’s.

1. It generates more revenue
2. Integration with other API’s is easier
3. We can reach more people with them
4. Others can help us innovate
5. Consumers are more engaged

Every business has the potential to be a digital business. More importantly, every business must become a digital business. As the number of smart, connected devices—from phones to cars to wearables—moves toward a tipping point where most work, play, and commerce will have a digital dimension, companies that quickly deliver digitally instrumented products or services, harvest data from market interactions, and use insights to rapidly iterate and optimize their value chain will gain a decisive competitive advantage.

Businesses that digitally transform will be able to connect more closely with customers, accelerate the pace of innovation and, as a result, claim a greater share of profit in their sectors. Today digitally transformed companies have an edge; tomorrow, only digital businesses will succeed. As per the Apigee Institute report “An Emerging Digital Divide.”

via The Secret Sauce for Digital Transformation.

On a personal level, we need to personally act like an open API.

Are there risks to mobile CRM?

Tags

CRM, Customer Experience, Cyber Security, Mobile, Software as a service

CRM

There’s no stopping the mobile CRM revolution, but those who rush into it headlong with an eye only to the many benefits may be in for an unpleasant shock. There is a significant security risk to managed. It is doable but needs to be well thought out.

As if we didn’t have enough to worry about, mobile CRM is laden with risks, too — from getting on the wrong side of the customer to getting on the wrong side of the federal government. Then there are the myriad security concerns that go along with making sensitive company data accessible on a device that may be woefully insecure.

More here: The Hidden Risks of Mobile CRM, Part 1 | Mobile CRM | CRM Buyer.

Do Mobile Phones Make Us More Productive?

Tags

Facebook, Mobile, Mobile Apps, Productivity

Productivity

We have that look. We are being productive.

Are we?

Not all the time. We are playing games. We are checking social media.

On the other side of the issue, we are available. We receive and respond to text messages. We read and respond to work email. We receive real time changes to our schedules. We connect by phone with a customer or work team member.

We go back to playing a game. We check out Facebook one more time.

Mobile tracking metrics show that consumers rarely ever conduct productivity-related tasks on their devices. In fact, the official US productivity rate has dropped to its lowest point in the past two decades.

via The Data Digest: Do Mobile Phones Make Us More Productive? | Forrester Blogs.

​OPM makes new promises to protect hacked employees. How confident are you that they can or will?

Tags

Cyber Security, Employee Engagement, FBI

If you work for the Federal government, this is your worst nightmare. Your social security number is no longer secure and is quite possibly in the hands of the Chinese.  It is likely to also be in the hands of criminals already who can make your life miserable for a very long time.

You can read details of the new plan to protect those affected by the hack here but it is not reassuring since you are already exposed.

Ensuring the integrity, privacy and security of employee data is key to a trusting and engaged workforce. Without that foundation, nothing else that is done will make a difference.

We’re moving into science-fiction disaster territory as the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) admits that more than 22 million employees personal records have been stolen. But, the OPM has a new, improved plan to protect their records.

This 22 million number is even higher than the FBI’s leaked 18 million figure. On an OPM site, the agency revealed the most likely victims are those who “underwent a background investigation through OPM in 2000 or afterwards.”

In short, if you filled out a form SF-86, Questionnaire for National Security Positions; SF-85, Questionnaire for Non-Sensitive Positions; or SF-85P, Questionnaire for Public Trust Positions, your records are toast. Or, as OPM put it, “it is highly likely that you are impacted by the incident involving background investigations. If you underwent a background investigation prior to 2000, you still may be impacted, but it is less likely.”

Before we get into the details of the plan that’s to make this all better, you should know what’s been revealed. These “records include identification details such as Social Security Numbers; residency and educational history; employment history; information about immediate family and other personal and business acquaintances; health, criminal and financial history; and other details.”

via ​OPM makes new promises to protect hacked employees | ZDNet.

There are calls for Katherine Archuleta, director of the federal Office of Personnel Management, to resign. She said she has no plans to step down and is committed to continuing her work for the agency. One day after saying that, she resigned.

But Archuleta has no background in tech or cyber-security. In the official White House press release on her first day, Archuleta was heralded as “the first Latina” to run the OPM and someone who “[w]ith her breadth of experience as an educator, public administrator, and community leader, Katherine Archuleta possesses an abundance of skills to bring talented people together with different ideas and fresh perspectives to strengthen our federal workforce.”

via http://dailycaller.com/2015/07/09/opm-head-has-no-tech-or-cyber-security-experience-wont-resign/#ixzz3fV3pq6y0

What is the real cost of email?

Tags

Digital, Education, Email, Harvard Business Review, Marketing, Social Media

Email

Tom Cochran  believes that email is the most abused method of communication in every office environment. And the widespread perception that it has no incremental cost is chronically damaging workplace efficiency. According to Tom, the challenge we are facing isn’t an aversion to technology, but change. I think that sums it up very well.

Tom suggests there is an entrenched level of comfort with email, making it habitual and a communications crutch. We have to take a holistic view and see email as one of many channels for collaboration. Adopt a breadth of tools to connect people, teach them the appropriate use of each and encourage smarter use of the right technology.

I also find that an open office environment creates less of a dependency on email as “literally” walls come down and teams naturally collaborate.

The good news is that tools exist to fix this mess — collaboration software, social communities, instant messenger, telepresence, all powered by the omnipresent cloud. A few months ago, we moved the entire company to Google Apps, improving mobility and collaboration. Immediately, there was a massive shift in communication culture. One employee summed it up best when she commented that a “collaboration bomb exploded” in the office. Walking around the office now, you can see everyone using instant messenger to communicate. There’s no need to email documents with collaborative editing in Google Docs. Early results are anecdotal, but initial data shows that it has been successful at decreasing our email abuse and increasing collaboration. My own email use has gone down by about 15%.

More here: Email Is Not Free – Tom Cochran – Harvard Business Review.

Digital Transformation and the CIO

Tags

Business Model, CIO, Customers, Digital Transformation, HBR

Transformation Approach

If you lead technology for your company, you know there are big changes in the business environment. Transformation is being demanded. It can’t be ignored.

CIO’s need to lead the charge or risk getting left behind.

Business leaders anticipate dramatic change in all aspects of their operations over the next three years, according to new research from Harvard Business Review Analytic Services. You can download a copy of the report, Business Transformation and the CIO Role, at the HBR website. Some companies are accelerating this change by committing to IT-enabled business innovation as a core strategy.

To understand just how massive the changes will be, consider this: 70 percent of these “innovation accelerators” about a third of respondents expect the ways in which they engage with customers to be transformed in three years, rating it eight or higher on a 10-point change scale. That’s right: 70 percent.  Sixty-four percent anticipate that same degree of change in their products and services, their business models and the ways employees work.

via Abbie Lundberg on Digital Transformation and the CIO.

Connected devices in 2017

Tags

Digital Devices, Mobile, Smartphones

Interesting take on where the mobile world is heading. Seems pretty clear.

The internet is steadily replacing and disrupting traditional media usage

Tags

Digital Disruption, Magazine, Media, Newspaper, Radio, TV

Disruption is on the move. Traditional media usage is on a steady decline. New media via the internet is replacing it. We are passed the tipping point. It will probably on accelerate.

What about your world? Are you beginning to see a shift to the digital? Are you ready?

According to data published by ZenithOptimedia this week, people around the world now spend more than eight hours a day consuming media, with the Internet taking up an increasingly large chunk of total media consumption.

In 2014, people spent 110 minutes a day online, up from just 60 minutes in 2010. Meanwhile traditional media usage, i.e. TV, newspapers, magazines, radio and cinema declined from 402 to 376 minutes a day.

While television consumption fell by just 6% between 2010 and 2014, the print industry is suffering most from the new digital competition. Newspaper and magazine consumption dropped by 26% and 19%, respectively, since 2010 and is expected to see further declines in the next few years.

via • Chart: The Internet Is Gradually Replacing Traditional Media | Statista.

Media Consumption Disruption

Customer Experience Trend: Software as an Experience

Tags

Behaviorism, Business, Cloud computing, Customer Experience, Customer relationship management, E-Commerce, Software as a service

Growth in Customer Experience (Forrester Research)

One of the big trends we are seeing in the world of customer experience is a focus on the experience of the software. The whole rise of Smart Phones is geared around this premise.

The software experience meets my needs or goals, is simple to use and is an enjoyable experience.

The initial rise of cloud-based software (a.k.a. SaaS, or software-as-a-service) focused on renting access to software instead of the historical approach of selling licenses. As cloud-based software expands, we’ll see these offerings cater more explicitly to the needs of customers.

How? More simple, highly-focused, specialized applications (like smartphone apps), more focus on quick initial usability, more sharing of best practices (usage, not technical), and customization based on behavioral analysis of users.

Tidbit: Net Promoter Scores for tech vendors are more correlated to customer experience than product performance.

The power of mobile and the digital world in our pockets

Tags

BYOD, Cloud computing, Consumerization, Mobile, Mobile computing, Mobile device, Wireless Data

It is hard to imagine a world without mobile computing. It’s funny to think back to when getting excited about technology was considered nerdy. These days, almost everyone is keen on the latest in devices particularly those of the mobile variety.

Problem is, now that we’ve got the digital world in our pockets, we’d like to keep it there. This makes things a little sticky for reluctant business leaders, as the consumerization of the enterprise continues to hit them on all sides.

 

Can you see your company through the eyes of a hacker?

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Cyber Security

It is time to see ourselves from the vantage point of our enemy. There may be a number of reasons someone may want to hack into our systems. Executive teams and leadership need a different view of the world.  What can we do?

1. Understand your major risks and how adversaries aim to exploit them
2. Take inventory of your assets and monitor them continuously
3. Make security a part of your mission
4. Be active, not passive, in hunting adversaries on your network and removing them

We can all prevent a disaster if we are diligent in taking responsibility for our own security.

Companies need to take a new approach. They can do so by looking at themselves through the eyes of their attackers. In the military this is called turning the map around. The point is to get inside the mind of the enemy, and to see the situation as they do, in order to anticipate and prepare for what’s to come.

Unfortunately, this mindset is still too rare. Despite spending billions of dollars every year on the latest security products and hiring the best security engineers and analysts, companies are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been. Two trends account for this: the rapid convergence of enterprise IT architectures, and the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated adversaries.

via See Your Company Through the Eyes of a Hacker – HBR.

Read more about a Perpetual Security Program here.

The bad news of digitization of data. Have you assessed your cyber security risk?

Tags

Collaboration, Customer Experience, Cyber Security, Digital Executive, Multichannel

Cyber Security

There are huge gains to be made from digitizing our business and data. We are all enjoying the benefits. Our customers are having better experiences.

Lots to be thankful about here for sure.

But …

There are some risks to be managed. Digital executives also need to make don’t damage our customer loyalty by allowing hackers easy access to our digital systems.

Digitization of data, products, and processes is an increasingly important driver of economic growth, but it also creates a host of cybersecurity challenges and vulnerabilities. The push toward greater multichannel integration, for instance, adds significantly to the customer experience but introduces many more interfaces that intruders can exploit. Likewise, companies’ closer colla­b­oration with business partners, customers, advisers, and other third parties can enrich everything from product development to recruiting but can also result in more complex, conjoined supply chains and information flows. Hybrid delivery models, in which some business services and processes are moved to the cloud and managed by external providers, extend the security perimeter and add to the sweep of activities that companies must monitor to detect attacks on their environments.

via Protecting the enterprise with cybersecure IT architecture | McKinsey & Company.

Want to learn more about digital cyber security?

 

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Apple and Google Lead Software Industry in Customer Experience

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Apple, Customer Experience Index, Effort, Emotion, Google, Success, Temkin

Customer Experience

The customer experience is gaining traction and measuring it has become critical. From a personal point of view, it isn’t surprising the Apple and Google lead the pack in the software industry. Why are their scores so high compared to others?

Apple earned the highest score for both the success and emotion components, scoring 72% and 60% respectively. Google, meanwhile, scored the highest for the effort component with 70%.

Apple and Google tied for the highest score in the software industry, each scoring 66% and ranking 136th overall. Apple’s score declined by two percentage-points from last year, while Google’s increased by one point.

via Apple and Google Lead Software Industry in Customer Experience | Customer Experience Matters.

Is your nonprofit CRM fund raising system broke or are you lacking a strategy that can be executed?

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CRM, Nonprofit, Strategy

This is definitely worth the read. Tough questions need to asked. Is technology the failure or is it a failure of a ill defined strategy coupled with bad processes that can’t be executed by staff and volunteers?

It is my position it is not about the technology. The technology will do what you want it to do. The question is do you know what you want it to do?

What if your donors have decided not to give anymore? What if you don’t know that and keep spending money hand over fist to renew their gift? Two very bad things come from that. First, you’ve wasted a ton of money. Second, you have irritated a former donor even more than they were before. If you do this enough, you will be swimming in a sea of red ink with lots of detractors in the market place.

The good news is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Start with a great strategy. Invest in your people to execute it. Create stunning business processes that wows you constituents. At the end of the day, it may not matter much about the technology if it can support these other 3 items.

Unfortunately, the Constituent Relationship Management promise has not been nearly as effective as promised. According to some estimates 50% to 70% of CRM initiatives fail to achieve their goals. Correspondingly, fundraising – which relies so heavily on a CRM and historical donor data – is stubbornly stalled. One could argue the weaknesses cited with CRM – namely very little “R” and not a lot of “C” either – apply equally to much of the fundraising done today.

Consider these other parallels:

CRM Fundraising is very good at receiving, but not very good at giving. Look no further than dreadful retention rates as proof. After all, if donors were getting what they came for when they walked in the front door, why do they leave so quickly out the back?

CRM Fundraising asks donors to provide access and information without adequately telling them what they will get in return. How often is gift impact and donor benefit talked about, but clearly (based on industry trends) not consistently or widely delivered?

CRM Fundraising pigeonhole donors based on past actions without informing them how to build a more advantageous profile. CRM and fundraising prompt donors to become more valuable to the charity without promising greater value from the organization.

CRM Fundraising is fairly effective at measuring its successes but provide little information about its failures. We faithfully record when donors respond positively to automated prompting and prodding but have no insight when donors do not respond in the predicted way.

CRM Fundraising is therefore, unable to determine whether failures are the result of faulty assumptions, incorrect information or poor execution.

CRM Fundraising is unable to tell how these “failed” interactions affect the donor relationship. It treats all failures as the same and all failures as neutral, when in fact the equity in the relationship may have been weakened or undermined by a poorly executed communications, “engagement” or service encounter.

The worst case scenario is the last interaction results in the donor’s decision, unbeknownst to the charity, to stop giving. This critical failure – that the charity is oblivious too – will be met with 2 to 3 years of organizational spend against this donor (and all others like them) and a sea of red-ink on the balance sheet.

via Why CRM Fundraising is broken and how to fix it. | Kevin Schulman | LinkedIn.

Has PC maker Lenovo committed the ultimate breach of customer security?

Tags

Cyber Security, Lenovo

Cyber Security

If you are focused on your customers, and you sell computers, you don’t want this said about you. Unfortunately, it is probably true. Trust is important. Clearly Lenovo doesn’t get that.

Quite possibly the single worst thing I have seen a manufacturer do to its customer base. ~Marc Rogers, Security Expert

In a blatant disregard for security, Lenovo did the unthinkable. It goes way beyond bad form to knowingly install malware on computers. If computer makers don’t take security seriously, what hope do we have as consumers?

Lenovo’s response to the uproar has been sluggish and for the most part inadequate. After the storm broke last week, the company said it would stop pre-installing the culprit software on its computers, and “spend the next few weeks digging in on this issue, learning what we can do better.” In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, its chief technical officer, Peter Hortensius, dismissed the “security guys'” concerns as “theoretical.” He said, “we have no insight that anything nefarious has occurred.

via Has PC maker Lenovo committed the ultimate breach of customer security? – LA Times.

Land lines are an endangered species

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Landline, Mobile, Telemarketing

We have now reached a clear tipping point in the mobile world. By the end of 2015, a majority of Americans will only have a cell phone. How is your mobile strategy coming along? What about your outbound telemarketing initiatives?

As smartphones have become constant companions for most people in the United States, landline phones are rapidly losing relevance. Ten years ago, 9 in 10 households used to have an operational landline phone – now it’s just every second household. That’s according to data provided by the Center of Disease Control and Prevention, which has been tracking phone ownership in the U.S. as a by-product of its biannual National Health Interview Survey since 2004.

Source: http://www.statista.com/chart/2072/landline-phones-in-the-united-states 

What is the strategic impact of mobile transformation on business value?

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Business Value, Constellation Research, Mobile, Strategy, Transformation

Mobile Devices

We know how our customers are interacting with is changing and changing fast. We may, however, be underestimating how fast it is really occurring. Constellation Research has some great information to consider. Now is the time to transform our interactions and the customer experience.

It all starts with a strategy that we can begin to execute with speed. Waiting will only make it worse. A lot is at stake here.

The rise of mobile and cloud computing is driving a cultural and technological transformation in which people expect anytime, anywhere access to colleagues, products and services. To react to this transformation, companies have to rethink the tools and business processes they provide to their employees, customers and partners.

Constellation surveyed more than 500 organizations in education, healthcare, high tech, and retail about the state of their mobile computing efforts. The analysis highlighted three major themes that are critical for success in mobile transformation:

• Mobile transformation is top of mind for most organizations. More than 80 percent of organizations recognize the impact of mobile transformation on internal and external stakeholders and have created dedicated teams to work on solutions. Education had the lowest percentage, with 68 percent having dedicated mobile teams in place while high tech organizations led the way with 91 percent.
• Mobile is not a device but an effective way of working. The term “mobile” is not limited just to devices such as phones and tablets. Rather, mobile describes how people work in motion and in short bursts of time. More than 50 percent of respondents reported switching between devices more than six times per day, and traditional desktop computers are only used one-third of the time.
• Mobile provides a starting point for digital transformation. Mobile transformation requires re-thinking and updating existing business processes or introducing new ones. While more than 80 percent of organizations polled have performed basic updates to their Internet and Intranet sites, less than 50 percent have changed an actual business process.

via The Strategic Impact of Mobile Transformation on Business Value | Constellation Research Inc..

What do you do when they don’t understand?

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Arts, Blog, Customer Experience, Ikea, Seth Godin, Wordpress

English: American entrepreneur, author and public speaker Seth Godin (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is a great point. And technology really helps solve the problem. My blog writing tool (WordPress) has plug ins that recommend links, tags, photos and related articles for me. It is improving my writing (I hope). What used to take a long time to do manually is now speeded up and I can focus on what I want to say.

Many sources, from textbooks to websites, take the position that if you don’t understand a concept or a nuance, it’s your loss. I think that’s an strategic failure on the part of the writer. (I’ll give scientists and other professional writers a pass.)Just recently (a decade or so) we opened two doors that change the way we communicate: we can link now, which means that any time you’re worried you’ve hit something too complex, you can easily link to more data and more explanation, and second, you can keep writing. Length (given appropriate organization) is no longer an issue.

At the same time, there’s an onus on the reader to look up words and references that are easily found in a search engine before giving up.

Ikea, then, should quit trying to jam nonsense instructions with no words on tiny sheets of paper and should instead post videos or detailed instructions in native languages online. Annual reports should get significantly longer (with better hyperlinked indexes), not shorter.

No one is going to read the whole thing, ever again. But we need to make it much easier to read the part of the thing that someone really cares about.

via Seth’s Blog: What do you do when they don’t understand?.

Obama signs executive order on sharing cybersecurity threat information

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Consumer Protection, Cyber Security, Privacy

Security

It will be interesting to see if this in fact helps anything or not. It could in fact hurt.

“Seventy to 80 percent of the user bases for a lot of these companies are the foreigners who get very little protection under our system,” explained Julian Sanchez, a senior fellow focused on technology and civil liberties at the Cato Institute. “If they don’t display some push back, they know they won’t do very well with those markets.”

Traditionally, the fundamental focus of the Enterprise has been to preserve and expand its value through “classic Assets” as reflected on the Balance Sheet. More recently, Information Assets have become an important new source of value, and are increasing at an appreciable rate in almost every industry. Today, these Information Assets are at risk as never before.

President Obama signed an executive order Friday that urges companies to share cybersecurity-threat information with one another and the federal government.

Obama signed the order, which is advisory in nature, at the first White House summit on Cybersecurity and Consumer Protection at Stanford University here. The summit, which focused on public-private partnerships and consumer protection, is part of a recent White House push to focus on cybersecurity.

Obama said the prospect of cyberattacks are one of the nation’s most pressing national security, economic and safety issues. The specter of a cyberattack crippling the nation’s air traffic control system or a city with a blackout is real, and hacks such as the one on Sony Pictures last year are “hurting America’s companies and costing American jobs.” He also said they are a threat to the security and well-being of children who are online.

via Obama signs executive order on sharing cybersecurity threat information – The Washington Post.

Crossing the Innovation Chasm. Does CIO stand for Chief Innovation Officer?

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Chief information officer, Chief marketing officer, Customer, Information technology, Social Media

This is a great question. What does CIO stand for?

Imagine a business world where the CIO stood for Chief Innovation Officer. That is the digital world.

Why does the Innovation Chasm exist? CIO’s, have been charged with protecting the organization’s valuable assets, and with providing a reliable and stable infrastructure. As a result, some have become the “CI-No”:

• “No, we can’t buy that application you saw in an airplane magazine.”
•  “No, we can’t have a new Web site built in two weeks.”
•  “No, we can’t do that because it will expose our customer data.”

You can say no when IT is the only game in town: if the business wanted access to technology, they had to come through IT. That’s not the case anymore. One of the byproducts of the perfect storm is that the business can now access technology directly from the Cloud without IT’s involvement, and without IT’s knowledge. It happens in companies of all sizes, in every industry, regardless of your IT or security stance. When business has access to that technology, it widens the chasm.

IT has to up its game, and smart CIOs are on a path to help the business use technology to innovate both what they do and how they do it.

Here is a great visual of how to align with the CEO.
via Crossing the Innovation Chasm.

Health insurer Anthem hit by massive cybersecurity breach

Tags

Cyber Security, Employee Engagement

Cyber Security

Lurking in our technology systems, many times for months on end, criminals are looking and finding ways to compromise our security.

Employee engagement in this case, becomes a huge issue. Employees want a safe place to work. Their engagement hinges on this core premise.

Health insurer Anthem Inc, which has nearly 40 million U.S. customers, said late on Wednesday that hackers had breached one of its IT systems and stolen personal information relating to current and former consumers and employees.

via Health insurer Anthem hit by massive cybersecurity breach | Reuters.