comma-group
maandag 21 oktober 2013
Why the ideal intranet is a search box
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
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.
zondag 9 juni 2013
The digital enterprise is agile
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.
maandag 3 juni 2013
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.
zaterdag 25 mei 2013
In the center of Google's universe
donderdag 23 mei 2013
What's wrong with being asocial ?
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.
woensdag 22 mei 2013
A needle in a haystack
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...