Why the ideal intranet is a search box

Very simple. Where does the customer journey start on the internet ? Yes, google. Thus, why do we still think that the employee journey starts with a portal ? Because we want to push information ? Probably. But, the internet has changed and so did the intranet. There are other tools to communicate and push information. There are twitter-like solutions to push short messages across an organisation. There are linkedin-like solutions to create communities and search for knowledge within a company.

So, do we still need a portal to present all this information ?
I am convinced we don't need this. The trouble with portals, is that everyone wants one. If you create a portal for an organisation, it doesn't take long before the it-departments wants it's own, then HR, etc... And the original portal transforms into a meta-portal that no one uses except if they want to search information in one of the other departments. Guess what, just change the meta portal into a single search box and you have the ideal start of an employee journey into the corporate world. From there the employee can search for documents, sub-intranets, knowledge and even data from business applications.

At Comma Group, Questio focusses on bringing the right Enterprise Search solution to it's customers. It has implemented many enterprise search solutions as part of an organisation's intranet. Questio is also the only google certified parted for Google Search Appliance in Belgium.

The future of Big Data is Open Data

The buzz surrounding big data has been going on for over a year and it took me a while to realise that the "big data" that marketeers talked about wasn't the same as the "big data" IT people mentioned. The only similarity between the two big data's was and still is the amount of "hypeness". Both IT and marketing embraced a new concept with open arms and give it their own vision. Technical people were tempted to create high-tech solutions crunching large amounts of data in real-time. Marketing people were thrilled at the idea to collect all possible data of customers into a single large repository and draw conclusions out of all the aggregated data. As usual the two worlds didn't meet each other, but here's an idea how it could work, open data.

Open source has been around for decades and is well accepted by business, IT and marketing. The idea of opening data is an idea that grew from governments and other institutions in the idea of transparency in decision making. But, what if we used the open data to aggregate data and use it to increase customer experience. Services like siri, google now and others increase the experience because it uses "common knowledge" and make better suggestions to the user. Traffic info, public transport schedules, demographic info and location based information are all information sources that are becoming more and more "open" and ready-to-use for everybody. Let's take for instance the case of the fire department of Amsterdam that used Linked Open Data to give the fire department one single view on roads, water ways, chemical storage and housing info to create a better solution to make the right decision in the short timeframe firefighters have.

To be able to combine all this info you need a big data solution. All data needs to be aggregated and processed in real-time.  Therefore the future of big data relies in the use of open data to support decisions, make predictive analysis and make suggestions to customers.

At Commagroup, Appreciate is specialised in bringing open data solutions to it's customers. Not only do they help organisations in "opening up" their data, they also build websites, apps and other open data consumers.

The digital enterprise is agile

We are talking about agile methodologies in IT projects for over a decade now, but agility in the enterprise hasn't seen the same popularity as scrum in the IT world. This is about to change.
With nearly all customer touchpoints going digital, the link organisations have with their customers is very close. And, above all, the link is bidirectional. Customers have an impact on the service or product companies are delivering. When you add to this the speed at which young start-ups are coming and disrupting existing business models. This all requires companies to be much more flexible and agile than a couple of years ago.
So how do you compete in such a world ?
How do you anticipate such a fast-changing marketplace ?

One of the key factors in creating an agile organisation is a strong it backbone that can help implement agile processes. This would also mean getting rid of information silo's and share all posible information across departments and processes. Systems supporting Dynamic Case Management are just intended to do that. By placing processes, documents and users in the center of a solution, this enables to organise work around cases instead of rigid business processes. There is another advantage to these kind of systems, it's flexibility. Flexibility to work where people want with the team that is the most efficient for this specific case.

In a recent white paper Forrester defined the Smart Process Application, a new software solution for collaborative processes. The true novelty in this type of application are the collaborative processes. Instead of doing collaboration for the sake of collaboration, like we've been doing the last 10 years with sharepoint and other solutions, the employees of the Y generation are expecting true "collaborative processes" which are less rigid than business processes.
But, even for the Y generation, performance on the job still matters, so analytics provide a comprehensive overview of all the work that has been done on processes.

At Commagroup we are working on creating the backbones of the next Digital Enterprises together with our partners, OpenText, EMC Documentum and Alfresco.

Content is king (again)

After hearing Christian Van Thillo's speech last week, I kept asking myself what was wrong with his conclusions on the disruption in the media industry. At the start of the internet (the previous century) I worked for a publishing house and I've seen the fear it created right from the trenches. Guess what, the internet didn't change that much for the publishing industry. The publishing industry changed a lot, but this has nothing to do with the internet. But one thing was sure, people were prepared to pay for content, that never changed. Only the distribution mechanisms changed. Professional publishing used to be on paper only, and with looseleaf publications, that evolved towards electronic publishing with the internet as a primary publication channel.
When you look at the tornado that is raging through the media industry, you can only conclude that we are right in the middle of it and that we'll only see the damage after the storm has passed. One thing is sure you can't turn it back. But something puzzles me, although the facts are there and ad spending is diminishing and subscriptions for paper magazines are evaporating, everyone is talking about content marketing. So, content didn't loose any of it's value.
The only conclusion I can make is that with new technologies coming in, it changes the way people experience ads. Timeshifting let people take control over the linear broadcasting and fastforward through the collection of 30 second spots. This leaves a broadcaster with the problem that his business model is hacked. But the trouble is not that you give the consumer a technology that enables him to bypass mediocre content, what's wrong with that. Advertisers have always been looking for the eyeballs, and without the content that generates the eyeballs, people won't pay attention. If you look at P&G's social media strategy (old spice for instance) it has always been about creating great content and distributing it through different channels.
This brings me back to content marketing. On the one hand you have content producers that are unhappy because they catch the attention of the audience, but can't seem to get a grip on their audience and advertisers, on the other hand you have advertisers that are looking for great content and are playing with it on different channels. Why can't they both work out a new business model ? This would imply that publisher would concentrate on creating content instead of the publishing process. This would also mean that brands should acknowledge the fact that they need quality content to have the eyeballs. Of course, amazon,  Google, apple and linkedin are the publishers of the future, but they are there to link the content to the brand.

In the center of Google's universe

After seeing Google's new product this week, Universal Analytics, I realised what the center of Google's universe is. It's data. If you look at Google since it's start, they were always interested in data. At the start their search was faster and had more pages indexed than any other search engine; their gmail was all about getting Gigabytes of data for free; they bought youtube, a service that absorbed more petabytes than we've ever seen before and with Google Universal Analytics they have the intention of inventing their own Internet of Things.  What Google is trying to achieve with Universal Analytics is bringing their analytic tool to the offline world. Analytics has evolved of being a simple view of the number of visits to a website/webpage to a more complex web intelligence tool where the behavior of a customer is analysed. To be able to do that one must check what a customer does on the web, on mobile devices and in the real world. That's were Google Universal Analytics comes in, you can send information from any device with a unique customer id to Google Universal Analytics. This is cool, and a bit scary too, but like Ajaz put it in his book velocity :"By contrast, many organisations view data as something you take. If they were to view data as something entrusted to them by people to refine and return something better, we'd see much stronger value creation for both sides."

Google Now is one of my favorite Google apps. It notifies my of everything I need to now, just in time. people's birthday based on Google+ data, traveltime to my next meeting based on my agenda, etc...

Imagine Google Now being fed by my unique customer id shopping behavior. This would be awesome, no thinking when shopping, Google does it all for you. Can you imagine what a richness of data this would be, and what it would mean to adWords customers of Google ? This goes way beyond Google Glasses, it's a very smart and intelligent use of all data that is collected by Google. I've always admired Google for implementing smart business models behind free services.

The next step is the context. Based on all the behavioral data that Google could collect online and offline, you could add the context to that. People use sites, apps and other services differently depending on the device and the context, context being location, environment, timing. This would create extreme interesting scenario's where a banking site could behave differently depending on the fact that you visit it in the evening from an ipad or a reatil app on an iphone in a shop. There's been a lot of talk about big data, but if there's one company in the world who knows what big data really is, it's Google.

What's wrong with being asocial ?

What's wrong with the world today ? Why do every single piece of software be social these days ? I can't think of one product release where the term social isn't mentioned. Of course social media is responsible for generating all of the changes in software engineering the last 5 years, at least in web-related stuff. But there are limits. It's not by copying functionality in software that you create a business value, it's most of the time the other way around. We've seen this with the first version of sharepoint where IT generated the demand for collaboration and not the business departments, that didn't really worked out well. It's only a couple of years later when business decided that they did want to collaborate in an electronic way that we've started to see successful sharepoint projects. The same goes for the social enterprise or Enterprise Social Networks. It's not because people use this kind of functionality in their free time that it's useful in the enterprise. Where's the business need for all of this ?

Ok, seriously, there is a need for working differently than a few years ago. People are working at flexible locations and are connected all of the time. Surely, that thrives a need for tools to better communicate with each other in the form of projects, topics, workgroups, ....
Organisations are growing every day and the current knowledge worker has more specialties than we've ever seen before. This generates a need for an "internal linkedin", where people can update their own curriculum, making it easier for coworkers to go and search for specific knowledge within the organisation.
Information feeds like twitter are a huge source of knowledge, why not use as an internal feed for people working in one organisation in search of similar cases, knowledge, experiences.
But is it al worth a new software tool ? Why not integrate it in the current sharepoint ? And how to finance all of this ?
What we see at our customers' sites is that budgets for intranets are limited. HR, which is responsible for an intranet most of the time, isn't that fond of spending all that much money on technology. According to the
Altimiter Group, average corporate spending on social business was $833,000 in 2010. That number includes 12 expenses, only one of which is technology. And as we've seen with the introduction of collaborative portals, it's not only about technology. You need a philosophy, community managers and some change management to make an Enterprise Social Network work.

When you put all those things together you can only conclude that the introduction of an Enterprise Social Network is a gradual introduction in an organisation. Start small, with a limited budget to create some first seeds. This is a scenario where Acquia Commons fits perfectly.

• There are no license for Acquia Commons.
• It's an open source software driven by a large community, which makes innovation reality (Within two days of Google+ launching in limited test mode, the Drupal community had developed an integration module for Acquia Commons).
• Acquia Commons is  a content management framework, which alows you to integrate it in the existing environment and to let it evolve together with the adoption of an Enterprise Social Network in the organisation
• With the new Acquia Commons 3, the usability has improved and it let's you add users and departments as you go, without the need of training all new users of your ESN.

A needle in a haystack

Sitecore7, the new version of sitecore's flagship product is called a game changer because the architecture is based on search technology. Using search technology as an information access layer has been done before and is not entirely new. Faceted search was just that and giving a faceted search as a navigation structure is still a good way of presenting information. What makes Sitecore7 interesting is the fact that they are giving the power to the marketeers to tweak and tune the search results. That was a functionality reserved for pure-play search engines in the past. The fact that search engines and Web Content Management solutions are coming together into a single platform is an interesting evolution.

Sitecore says that from a marketer’s perspective, a customer’s search query is an opportunity to present information that triggers a conversion and drives revenue. That's entirely true and that is the essence of customer engagement. How can you guide a visitor/prospect into a journey that leads to buying a product ? This hard questions isn't answered with a good navigation only. To tackle this a web engagement platform needs first of all a strong analytics part where you can view and analyse all actions taken by a visitor on a website. Ideally, this analytics engine should drive a targeting engine (the second part needed in a WEM platform) which serves the right content to the right visitor at the right moment. And last but not least a WEM platform should have a great Experience Delivery system. Customer Engagement is driven by creativity and creativity must be captured in a system that understands the art of turning this creativity into a true experience. This experience is not only html on a website, or ink on paper, this is a cross-device, omnichannel experience that makes a customer go from an advertisement in a brick-and-mortar store to a facebook fanpage, to an online webshop.

Since creating true omnichannel experiences is the new holy grail for marketeers, it is obvious that modern content management systems must be able to go away from a single-repository vision. The way that sitecore is moving into could be the right direction. Content is published on different channels and resides in different repositories and what could be better than a search engines to bring those together. The next step could be (or rather should be) to add intelligence to the search engine. In order to be able to search for a needle in a haystack search engines need to explore ways to add more intelligence to their engine. And maybe, this will lead to the long awaited semantic web. Who would have thought that modern marketeers would drive the way to the semantic web...

All things digital

Two important things happened today. Bnp Paribas fortis launched hello bank and one of our customers, the province of flemish brabant approved their daisy project. What's the relationship between these two and digital ? Read further, I'll make my point.

First of all, I'm very proud of the team of developers, administrators, business analysts and search experts that worked at a tremendous pace to launch Hello bank! today. It's the first mobile first bank in Europe ! This proves that bank2.0, social banking and mobile banking is not something for the future, not even the near future, but it's happening today.
On the other hand I want to congratulate Bnp Paribas Fortis, and no not because it's politically correct to congratulate a customer (let's face it's not politacally correct anymore to talk highly of banks). They did it ! They dared to innovate, they dared to start something they already had, a bank, a mobile banking app. They chose to disrupt.

Back to the other part of my story, daisy. Daisy is a project we are starting for the province of flemish brabant. It's intended to get the decision making process in the province more digital. You can't imagine how complex a decision making process can be in such an institution where elected people get to present new projects for the province and vote on them. But, the evolution there is get rid of all paper and evolve towards a digital local government.

This can only mean one thing ! The world is changing, the world is going digital ! Let's face it, if banks and governments are changing, surely the world must be changing.
Customers are embracing the digital reality much faster than any of us expected. Tablets are responsible for a huge earthquake in the analog world. Tablets (and not laptop's a couple of years ago) let all people access the information they want when they want.
I'm sure we haven't seen the end of this. Google glasses, Apple TV, 3D printing, NFC, it's all having a high impact on our daily lives.

Welcome to the future.

the trouble with portals...

The trouble with portals is that everyone seems to have forgotten what the purpose of a portal is. They used to be called Enterprise Information Portals or Knowledge portals. To me portals are entry-points to other information sources. It's up to the organisation to decide whether they want to represent these aggregated sources as a portal or a plain search result (hey, why not). To be able to do this portal need a number of technical capabilities :

• first they need to visualize the information
   (a portal with portlets)
• next, you need a security infrastructure to connect to all information sources with the same credentials (single sign-on and identity management)
• of course, you would need some social capabilities (who doesn't nowadays)
• fourth, a portal is the starting point for business processes, so connections to bpm and erp with task lists would be appropriate
• and last but not least, some content management functionality

Does this mean a portal can replace a WCM, I don't think so. Could it replace a DMS, no, not really

So, why is it then, that customers are talking about portal software when they really need a good wcm. It's not because a website should have a concept of a portal (e.g. entry point towards all info on gov in belgium) that it should be made with portal software. Personalisation used to be an argument for looking at portal software, but that's not the case anymore. There's good Web Engagement Software in the market that solves the problem of personalisation without the need for a portal software

When is a good time to look at portal software ? If you're looking at integrating applications, giving a front-end for your BPM solution to your users or simply create an intra/extranet. When looking at  the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Horizontal Portals (what a name) we can see that IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft are leading together with Liferay which is an opensource Portal software. To my knowledge one of the few Quadrants where an Open Source Software is leading.

A content management platform for digital campaigns

Back in the early years of 2000 we believed content to be king. A content management platform needed to be a central repository where all content resided in. It had to be one single platform where you had assets, HTML content, word documents, you name it. I don't think any of our customers realized this tour de force.

5 years ago people realized you needed different systems to do this. That's where dam, wcm and ecm began to live a seperate live within organisations. It was obvious that your intranet had not the same needs as your website and it all was different from managing scanned documents.

Now, in 2013, we live in an age where it's not about content but about the customer, the employee, the visitor. Sure, content is still king, but this phrase got a new meaning. Content became a way to attract people, to interact with people. Content changed it's face, it's no longer that long piece of html text. It changed in video, tweets, posts and still large chunks of html text. But compared to the early days, it's not relevant anymore to have it in one single repository. Today it's important to attract, engage and measure. 

Is it really important to have a tweet from two years ago ?

Do you really need a website with thousands of pages of text ?

No, I don't think so. What you need is to be on different channels, you need to be present on twitter, facebook, linkedin and everything else. You need to have content on all of this places. But the time-to-live of this content is short, fractions of what it used to be.

Therefore you need a separate platform for your digital campaigns. A platform that can engage with your customers. A platform that can measure what the impact is of content on your visitors, followers, etc...

And maybe a platform that is loosely coupled with your web content management system for your website. We see customers struggling with their WCM that is linked to their transactional systems (e-commerce, homebanking, ...). These are business-critical systems. And the agility of these systems is way below zero, which is normal. But CMO's and CDO's need a system next to that where they can interact with their customer or prospect. They need ways to publish content and track content on mobile, social and other platforms. The time to market here is of huge importance. So don't try to have it all in one system. Let them go in seperate directions and maybe, in the near future, it will all come together, because you would like to know what the impact is of a tweet on your e-commerce revenue.