Workforce Analytics
Posted: March 30, 2012 Filed under: Management, Strategies, Technology, Trends | Tags: deloitte, SAP, successfactors, workforce analytics Leave a comment »Everyone knows what Business Analytics (BI) is, but do you know what Workforce Analytics is? The term is used on a Deloitte Human Capital Trends 2011 report, but even Wikipedia doesn’t define what it means. SuccessFactors, an SAP company, says: Drive fact-based business decisions with reliable workforce insights. Deloitte report states ‘moving from reactive to proactive’ as a driver. So in summary: using workforce generated data for proactive, rather than reactive, fact-based business decision making.
So where does this workforce data come from? Deloitte mentions ERP and HR systems having collected such data for a decade. Information security logs are a far more richer data source. Infosec logs will slice and dice every event from an application, client and network perspective. Most mature organizations also have decades of infosec logs that have a key stroke by key stroke record of every workforce action event from the data that recording started.
Business Analytics can be classified into the following categories of analytics:
- Marketing Research & Analytics
- Supply Chain Analytics
- Legal research and process analytics
- Services Operations Analytics
- Business and Technical Analysis
- Data Analytics
- Pharma and Healthcare Research
- Financial Services Research
- Human Resources Research
- Intellectual Property (IP) Research
In each case we are examining the business looking from outside within. Workforce analytics provides the same data, but looking outside from within. In the next years we will see a new breed of analytical platforms analyze and provide insights from workforce data. Eventually workforce and business analytics data warehouses will be linked to form a single comprehensive analytics view.
Social Analytics is neither from outside or from within. Social Analytics is a reflection of the companies actions outside their domain. As contextual search and social analytics develops, we will be able add this additional real time dimension to truly agile business decision making.
Business do not sell to businesses. People sell to people. Business is a human endeavor. This is why sentiment analysis adds an additional dimension to business decision making. From work force analytics we know what our people did. From Business Analytics we see how our business performed, as a result. From Social Analytics we see how the world around reacted. Sentiment analysis gives us an indication of why.
We already today have advanced data models for forecasting stock market behavior, weather patterns, etc. This is all statistical based on projecting from historical data points. If we what the people, how business performed, how the world reacted and how everyone felt about it contextually, then run quite advanced predictive models on pretty much any action. Its like being able to look two chess moves into the future. You still would not see the ultimate outcome, but you could predict immediate cause and effect. How will a customer react to this price point? How will consumers react to this marketing campaign? How will my staff react to firing of a certain individual? How would my team be impacted if the team leader switched companies? Which parts of my organization have the most impact on revenue generation and where the optimal resourcing thresholds are?
Where is cloud heading?
Posted: March 30, 2012 Filed under: Management, Strategies, Technology, Trends | Tags: amazon, Azure, box, heroku, iCloud, smart cloud, vcloud Leave a comment »The cloud market is changing at a very rapid pace… more so it seems than in the past 12 months. Market perception of Microsoft’s Azure is that it is an IaaS with software preinstalled. Microsoft’s messaging is not really helping to change that perception. Azure is seen to be direct competitor of Amazon EC2, which is all about commodity compute, and as such the battle boils purely down to price. We’ve seen two massive price cuts for Azure just in the last 4 months. The latest news is that Office 365 pricing is slashed to compete with Google’s offerings. I personally live and breath Microsoft, but I also have to be critical when I do not agree. Pure price cutting demonstrates a lack of vision and inability to articulate value… which most definitely is there. The commodity compute market is becoming really crowded with vCloud, Smart Cloud, Terramark, etc.
Box.net lately announced their One Cloud. If One Cloud only offered content sharing, it would be equivalent to iCloud and/or Sky Drive, with in my humble opinion are not clouds at all, but virtual storage. The fact that it offers cross platform syncing, cloud based services and a platform for ecosystem partners to develop services to enhance the document sharing/management experience makes it a true cloud ecosystem. Salesforce.com paved the way and Intuit with QuickBooks Online has become a cloud ecosystem without anyone really noticing.
Salesforce.com is appealing because of Heroku and the ease of development and deployment. Azure ecosystem also offers partner platforms to facilitate development and deployment, but none have really broken out of the pack to claim lead. I’ve spoken to many and asked what their differentiation is; mobility, object orientation, billing/licensing support, etc. What all are missing is strong integration libraries and APIs. A dev platform claiming to be the integrated ecosystem enabler, would be the leader straight out of the gates.
Circling back… I almost feel that Azure is universally misunderstood. I believe that Ray Ozzie had a revolutionary vision with Azure and Windows 8, but that vision has not been effectively communicated. I recently asked a good friend how he would describe Amazon, Microsoft, Salesforce.com, Intuit, Box, etc. if they were individuals? What would be their role description if they were working for you? Amazon is the quiet vanilla guy sitting in the corner that will do a repetitive task for you a million times, no questions asked. But the task needs to be specific, don’t ask Amazon to use initiative or be proactive in problem solving. Salesforce is naturally the loud socially savvy sales exec. Intuit is the outgoing business controller. Box is the facilitator that helps teams collaborate and projects run smoothly. How is Azure? Is Azure another quiet vanilla guy that will handle high volume tasks? The sales exec or controller? Or is Azure the networked individual that facilitates interactions between others, handling cross functional issues? Or is Azure the home maker, gamer, student, etc.? Or is Azure potentially all of the above?
Some of you may be BizSpark partners and some of you might be students in the DreamSpark program. Start ups and students both a like need to dream a bit about who Azure is or whom they would like Azure to be. The ‘spark’ is needed and that needs to come from Microsoft. A free Visual Studio license will not spark anything. Commodity compute at rock bottom prices doesn’t inspire anyone’s dreams.
I know who Azure is… do you?
Accenture Technology Vision 2012
Posted: February 27, 2012 Filed under: Management, Strategies, Technology, Trends | Tags: Azure, PaaS Leave a comment »Dr. Gavin Michael, Scott Kurth and Michael Biltz have written the Accenture 2012 Technology Vision statement. Typically these documents, in my opinion, are broad and obvious, but in this case I was positively surprised.
The highlights are:
- Context-based services
- Converging data architectures
- Industrialized data services
- Social driven IT
- PaaS-enabled agility
- Orchestrated analytical security
To me the above are all interconnected and parts of the same conversation…
Contextualization can be through aggregating multiple dimensions of data (such as the social driven dimension) and having the ability to data mine across the aggregated data set. Human analytics will be slowly automated using AI to empower the masses. Putting events in geo context is obvious. Having AI that understands sentiment and word associations is a bit less obvious. The futuristic goal would be AI that places events in conceptual context. This is only enabled if we collect and aggregate data on events from multiple perspectives. I’d claim that cloud and PaaS (Azure), to be specific, are driving integration and data aggregation. ‘A maturing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) market will shift the emphasis from cost-cutting to business innovation.’ In this sense I would have focused more on the ‘innovation’ potential in this report, rather than the deployment agility angle… but hey, I am not a doctor.
Converging data architectures is about mixing structured and unstructured data. In cloud environments data is split in structured relational data and unstructured blob data. Unstructured is much cheaper operationally and hybrid architecture optimization is key to minimizing operating costs. Distributed data from a cloud perspective means that we tap into data from multiple services and not just from the two structures.
The Azure Data Marketplace is a marketplace for industrialized data services. I ask all ISVs that I talk to what their data play is and to date I have not stumbled upon a single one with an aggregate data monetization plan. To me this means that a whole heck of a lot money is being left on the table.
Orchestrated analytical security is an interesting highlight at the end of the report. I have put a lot of thought in this and to me its is just one possible manifestation of innovation based on maturing PaaS. Devices do not cause data loss… people do. In this sense device management is always reactive. Enterprise network security has matured to the point where it is preventing security breaches in real-time against known attack profiles and possible permutations of those known attacks. I believe that the future is more a kin to the movie Minority Report. The more we are able to aggregate data on events from different perspectives and intelligently analyze that information the closer we are to being able to truly predict behavioral patterns and prevent data loss even before it occurs. Orchestrated analytical security is really a possible outcome of the other identified themes and as such sticks out in the report, but definitely a nice closer to the report that gets our imaginations turning.
In a past blog I used a macro economic study of the emerging markets to understand cloud ecosystem growth issues. According the macro economic study the reason why China is outpacing India is because China fully utilizes also the female population and has a higher general level of education. This applies to cloud vendors as well. Accenture’s vision is only possible if the whole partner ecosystem is educated on the ecosystem nature and innovation potential of PaaS. Would be interesting if Accenture would reach out to their clients to see if the clients understand and can envision the vision.
Business Reengineering
Posted: August 1, 2011 Filed under: Management, Strategies | Tags: Azure, business engineering, cloud Leave a comment »I have a back ground in business process reengineering and it came to me last week that companies going into the cloud need reengineer their business strategies. I binged business strategy reengineering and found a wiki for business engineering.
Here’s the definition according to Wikipedia:
Business engineering circumscribes the domain of designing new business fields. Unlike business development, business engineering does not only include marketing related tasks, but also most of the other business administration tasks. Financial and operational tasks are of equal importance, for example.
Business engineering includes all activities that are necessary to develop and maintain an independent line of business. It is comparable with starting a business, but includes the novel component. That means that there is no core market yet and market opportunities need to be created. Most likely, the output of business engineering substitutes known forms of supply, in existing markets.
Therefore business engineering aims to establish new, future oriented forms of businesses but with reference to existing or emerging needs. Business engineering is most likely related with the area of future technology. To abstract it, business engineering combines the establishment of a completely new business in a prospect business environment.
Business engineering is a holistic approach. My personal preference is to use the Business Model Canvas for a holistic approach to business modeling. Business engineering is likely related to an area of future technology. In my case I focus on cloud and social technologies.
Most of my clients are ISVs that have had an on-premise solution and they are facing a need to reengineer their business to meet the new reality. Hence, my niche is Business Reengineering.
Cloud Channels
Posted: August 1, 2011 Filed under: Management, Strategies | Tags: Azure, cloud channels Leave a comment »
I’ve added a couple of new dimensions to this image. Within an ecosystem and communities you also have vendor reseller channels and end customer value chains. On a personal level all of those entities are socially linked to one or many within an ecosystem and across multiple ecosystems.
How do you discover channel partners, end customer opportunities, P2P partnering opportunities, etc.? Who are the influencers and what are the multipliers within those ecosystems?
In reality we are looking at something more closer to this… multiplied by a thousand.
Source: GnuMap Project
Channels are no longer two dimensional and we need to re-engineer our approach to building and managing channels. Communication culture is also evolving at a fast pace. How do we communicate in a three dimensional ecosystem?
Already at the Houston WPC conference IDV announced a study that companies engaging in P2P practices generate stronger revenues than those that don’t. Within the cloud, due to the nature of the cloud, P2P will be even more prevalent and the number of connections between nodes in the above social network will increase in complexity. Complexity is good as it represents an infinite number of opportunities for partnering innovation.
Now imaging linking multiple social networks, as illustrated above with the GnuMap. Multiple interconnected meshed ecosystem networks. Another degree of partnering innovation potential.
When we think how are we ever going to manage this complexity we need only look to social media monitoring tools and how people are managing their social networks.How do we link social media monitoring to our CRM systems? How do we cultivate our social connections in a more systematic and professional way?
How did the marketing mix change with the emergence of the social media mega trend? I’d say most marketers are still adapting to the networked and social nature of social networking. The same challenge is a head for channel managers. Your channel recruitment/management mix is changing. Will you change with it?
Cloud Channel Re-engineering (CCR)
Posted: July 28, 2011 Filed under: Management, Strategies, Technology, Trends | Tags: cloud channel re-engineering Leave a comment »In the past I’ve written about the networked social nature of ecosystems and especially cloud ecosystems. I am writing a channel program development guideline for Azure based cloud offerings and it helps me do a first draft in blog format… so any feedback would be appreciated!
What is a cloud? A cloud is virtual framework with a unified operating system and database, with access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources. To use a construction analogy, Azure is like an upscale sub-division with basic infrastructure, utilities and plenty of empty lots to build your house on.
So what’s the difference between a private and a public cloud? Again let’s use a municipal planning analogy. A public cloud is like a planned community with the city running it. Home owners don’t actually own their land, but rather rent the land from the city, which in return collects a fee for the land use. A private cloud is more like a gated community with property management company from which the home owners rent their land. More importantly, both examples are communities of people. I would claim that it is not the homes that make a community, but the people that live in them.
Now what would be another word for a community of people? Let’s call it a social network of individuals and in the sense of a business community, through individuals, a network of companies (legal entities).
But couldn’t that same thought trail be used in the case of on-premise solutions? Yes, but social networks are stronger when it’s members share more attributes; they all share a passion/hobby or in the case of a cloud community a common platform.
Imagine looking a three dimensional illustration of a cloud community. The bottom layer is the infrastructure. Then you have the platform and database layers. On top of that we lay the core application layer, which would be Microsoft Online offerings. On top of that we lay layers of cross functional workflows and value adding partner applications. Now we can take one of two paths of examination: we can look at the users of the applications or we can look at the application vendors, their key personnel and relationships. I promise that I will take this analogy down the application user path, but for the purposes of this article I’ll focus on the application vendors.
So let’s drop a layer (almost a translucent skin) with vendor brand logos on top of the stack of layers. That is one side to the ecosystem. If we focus our attention only one application vendor we can lay on top a layer channel partners. On top of the channel partners a layer of end customers and their value chains. On top of the end customers and their value chains we could add a layer of application users and we’ve essentially moved past the fork after the application vendor layer onto the application user layer.
If you can visualize the above layered three dimensional cloud ecosystem model in your minds eye you can start to logically examine how to operationalize your vendor strategy in terms of segmentation, value propositioning, channels, technology partnering, etc. This is nothing new. Business consultants have used the same logical process in business process reengineering for decades. If you cannot visualize your processes and their interdependencies, then how can you hope to optimize it?
Cloud Channels
Posted: February 8, 2011 Filed under: Management, Strategies, Technology, Trends | Tags: Azure, channels, ingram micro Leave a comment »I’ve written a few articles about the changing role of the channel in the cloud era. The expressed outcomes are a bit too neat. The truth is that the next couple of years will be transitional from old channel conventions to the new status quo.
The Azure application marketplace is not an ecommerce platform yet and subscription management is mostly left to Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), integrators and third party vendors, such as Apprenda and Zoura. When the application market place if truly launched it will most likely not support enterprise licensing or cloud sourced subscription bundles. Value Addded Resellers/Integartors are still expected to put solution sets together facilitating the resulting subscriptions mess.
How will a distributor help a cloud ISV take product to market? ‘Ingram Micro’s Cloud Conduit program provides channel partners with a comprehensive portfolio of cloud-specific enablement resources and service offerings including Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), educational tools and resources such as face-to-face engagements, business development resources, sales training and webinars.’ Sounds like all that a growing ISV might need. The press release I copied the text from also mentions that ‘as part of the Cloud Conduit initiative, Ingram Micro is pursuing three distinct relationships with Amazon Web Services, Rackspace Hosting and salesforce.com. Amazon Web Services is working closely with Ingram Micro to bring the benefits of the AWS platform to Ingram Micro’s many channel partners.’ No mention of Microsoft Azure, even though Ingram Micro is also the largest Microsoft distributor in the world.
Pinpoint/application marketplace will already provide a comprehensive portfolio of cloud-specific application offerings. BizSpark and WebSpark programs have enablement services partner listings for start-up ISVs to engage for help; and honestly there are not that many that have the in depth skills-set to really add value on a strategic level. The Developer Evangelist Group and the ISV Incubation Centers are pushing educational tools, business development support, training and webinars. So I ask again, what is the role of distribution in the Azure ecosystem?
If I put my ISV hat on and what I think I would need. Well yes, I would like my solution listed in as many application marketplaces as possible. Depending on my target market I would put more emphasis on one marketplace over another. With volume enterprise solutions I would on the short term look at what the distributors are doing, until the Azure Application Marketplace is fully matured to handle enterprise volume subscriptions and subscription bundling. I would say that the majority of ISVs need help with strategic cloud planning, business development, architecture/migration support and general training. I would expect Microsoft to highlight a number of service provider options within their programs. I would be really helpful to have map of the Azure cloud ecosystem influencers, multipliers and integrators by vertical competency, so that I can effectively plan my branding and outreach. I would also like to see a ‘cloud alley’ in all of the major MS conferences in 2011, so that I can get a ‘helicopter perspective’ of what the ecosystem looks like and what people are doing.
Ecosystem mapping is something that I’ve been doing in the MS ecosystem since 2007. In 2009 I actually mapped the cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS communities globally. Now is the right time to focus on SaaS and the supporting channels for Microsoft Azure.
Azure Integrators
Posted: February 4, 2011 Filed under: Management, Strategies, Trends | Tags: Azure, cloud, cloud integrator Leave a comment »In my previous articles I’ve written about the changing channel roles. With application marketplaces taking over the reseller role for cloud subscriptions, traditional resellers need to build consultative competencies to provide more value to replace lost license revenues. Traditional integrators need to further differentiate by specializing in select verticals and/or domain areas. In either case the enterprise end user has made their infrastructure and platform decisions. The enterprise end user is interested in an integrated cloud sourced offering from their integrator partner.
In the Microsoft ecosystem the single most important rule for a partner is that a partner must be symbiotic and value adding to Microsoft. This means that a partner must either:
a) Drive Microsoft license revenue
b) Drive adoption of Microsoft technologies
c) Be a positive brand influence for Microsoft
…and in that order of significance.
So with that in mind, this article will focus on the concept of ‘industry solution maps’. By an industry solution map I mean a conceptualization of a portfolio of applications that an enterprise end user can cloud source. So if we fall back on the single most important rule we should start with building around Microsoft CRM, ERP, portal and business productivity applications. Microsoft offerings for the most part are vertical agnostic and the role of the partner community is to ‘mold’ them in a way that they become meaningful in a specific vertical or domain context. The role of the ISV community is to build additional applications and add on modules that integrate on a foundational level with the Microsoft core offerings using Microsoft technologies, building additional value on top of those core offerings and having positive brand influence for Microsoft.
During my management consulting career I’ve spoken to countless ISVs with CRM, document management and ERP solutions that are built on .NET and drive some SQL license sales, but for the most part compete against Dynamics and SharePoint. These partners do hit two out of three value adds as a Microsoft partner, but in all honesty are more challenging to position on an integrator’s solution map.
An integrator’s solution map is a strategic document that should be owned by the CEO or a Chief Strategy Officer. It is not owned by the CTO, because the partnering decision is not purely technical. The industry solution map needs to be further articulated as the company’s charter, unique point of differentiation and supported with researched argumentation.
I’ve written articles about communities and the formation of sub-groups within. An integrators’ solution mapsis essentially a sub-group within that cloud community… a ‘dream team’. I have also written about Microsoft’s need to transform their partner network from a hub and spoke Partner Account Manager (PAM) driven organization to a network based Partner Portfolio Manager (PPM) driven organization. My challenge to Microsoft integrators is the take the role of PPM in managing teams of ISVs around cloud sourced offering bundles.
Look out for my next article titled: Integrating for Azure.
Cloud ISV’s Partnering Strategy
Posted: January 28, 2011 Filed under: Management, Strategies, Technology, Trends | Tags: cloud integrator Leave a comment »When ISVs move their solutions in to the cloud, their overall business strategy is impacted. Channel and partnering strategies need to be re-evaluated.
The application market place will grow to be a foundational element within cloud ecosystems and will ultimate diminish the role of point solution resellers. Resellers are forced to evolve by strengthening their consulting practices to compensate for lost license revenues and specialize in select industry verticals or domain areas in order to differentiate as an integrator. As cloud integrators they integrate applications creating holistic offerings that enterprises can cloud source. It will be interesting to see how application marketplaces will support cloud integrators in selling solution bundles effectively.
ISVs need to position themselves in relation to leading core applications (Dynamics, Office, SharePoint, etc.). The ISV also needs to evolve and build a degree of vertical expertise, even with horizontal offerings, in order to be able to market their solutions to integrators that are specialized. Some integrators will maintain their neutrality and others will OEM ISV applications to build self branded bundles.
An integrator’s ability to integrate will be limited to workflows, dashboards and reporting. ISVs have the ability partner with other ISVs on a more foundational level creating higher added value, but ISVs are typically hesitant to partner with other ISVs. There is a false fear that sharing opportunities will negatively impact one’s own revenues. In the beginning that might be the case, but over time all the ISVs that team up should be winners. According to a 2008 IDC study ISVs that engaged in partner-to-partner (P2P) networking were 20% more profitable than those that did not and that was before cloud computing.
With the higher degree of interoperability between applications within a PaaS cloud and the related reduced technical/financial risk of P2P networking, ISVs will be more inclined to integrate and co-market their offerings. This will cause another shift in the cloud channel, as ISV are taking over the role of integrator. When this happens Systems Integrators will again have to evolve onto higher plain of abstraction… business consultants.
Creating a Cloud Brand
Posted: January 28, 2011 Filed under: Management, Strategies, Trends | Tags: conversational marketing Leave a comment »When marketing a product or a brand we always start with value articulation. Every value proposition should have a charter, unique point of differentiation and supporting argumentation. The charter should be simple in addressing the what, why, how and to whom. I personally believe that any message worth pushing should offer some unique reason, why someone should care, and that argument needs to be defendable.
In the cloud every solution is more scalable, deployable and has lower operating cost. There is nothing enduringly unique in arguing those points, because they are attributes of the cloud itself and not the solution. SaaS uniqueness derives from how an ISV uses those cloud value attributes to deliver a software service. The supporting argumentation should address not just the feature benefits, but also the business model itself.
The media mix, approach and tonality we use to deliver our message is a function of existing communication culture. It is hard to deny the impact that online marketing and social networking has had on communication culture in the last few years. As we embrace new technology and business models, we should also embrace a new marketing mix.
I have studied vendor communities for the past three years and the use of Facebook fan pages, Twitter followings and LinkedIn groups has been explosive. Sadly in most cases ISVs are performing poorly in this regards… misguided. The underlying problem is that ISV marketers for the most part, have failed to understand the true nature of social networking services and are using using this new technology in an outdated way. Before social networking services ISV marketers used to send out mailers, email blasts, and buy add space from web sites and industry publications. What is common to all these approaches is that they are about ‘push’ messaging. Let’s put it out there and they will find us. Well guess what, they are not finding you. This is why most ISVs have followings in the hundreds or low thousands. Those followings represent one degree of separation from the companies employees and nothing more.
Imagine a happy hour networking event. What would you do? Find an empty table, hoist a banner and start talking to yourself hoping that some one will stop and listen? Or… would you circulate listening in on conversations and maybe introducing yourself and commenting when you feel you have something value to add? In an online marketing context this would mean that you need to understand your target community and where conversations are naturally talking place. You need to monitor those discussions for topics of interest. People actually appreciate it when they are given VALUABLE advice unconditionally. Over time you will establish yourself as a ‘trust agent’ building positive brand notoriety within the community. This is where you would you hand out your business card or in the context of online marketing invite the other person to join your following to maintain contact. Remember that the person is following you because of the valuable insight that you have provided. Don’t let them down by reverting back to pushing generic marketing messages on your fan site.
When selecting a service provider make sure that they are a true digital marketing agency and not just fan page admins. The most difficult part of conversational marketing is the requirement that you must add value. Again makes sure that your service provider understands your offering and how that offering fits in to enterprise cloud sourced offerings at large, because they need to be able to converse about it.
