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.