Capture Market Share from Brand-Name Competitors by Betting on Your Customers

May 30, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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How does the sixth-largest mobile carrier compete with brand giants such as AT&T and Verizon? They come out swinging with a counter-intuitive stroke of brilliance by sticking to the belief that attrition is best fought by completely eliminating contracts for all existing customers. Think about it: a strategy to keep customers in contract by dropping the penalty for breaking out! It’s the perfect irony. Turns out, it is also perfect marketing.

The majority of Americans  in the mobile phone market already have a mobile device and contract so carriers are resorting to stealing customers from each other. 82% of American adults own a cell phone, Blackberry, iPhone or other smart phone. The customer’s question has evolved to: what can you do for me that my current provider doesn’t? The mobile market is changing drastically, leaving carriers scrambling for ways to stay ahead of one another. Many carriers are finding out how beneficial it can be to use loyalty programs to invigorate your network of customers and ultimately increase growth.

Teaming up with TIBCO Loyalty Lab, U.S. Cellular brought to fruition its visionary concept, called the “Belief Plan,” powered by enterprise functionality that orchestrates a complex landscape in which most users own multiple lines in different stages of contract cycles. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Loyalty, Mobility, Transform Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

BPM – The Movie. Could Be a Blockbuster!

May 29, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Stage plays entertained kings and queens throughout the ages – and anyone else wealthy enough. Think about the film “Shakespeare in Love.” Playwrights were impoverished artists who did it for the love and recognition. They were the ultimate story tellers.

Then came the film, with the first-ever public screening of a film in 1895. The early films were no more than capturing  a stage play onto celluloid, originally with subtitles. Roll the clock forward to 1927 and film The Jazz Singer. Suddenly, movies became very different from a stage play. They were set in real locations, with multiple cameras taking different perspectives. The cleverness of the words, the emotion of the storyline and the imagery were replaced with so-so dialogue and fantastic sets. Jump forward to today and a film is interactive. Don’t like the ending? Choose another. Take a look behind the scenes. See how it was made and what the director decided was suitable only for the cutting room floor.

Books (and magazines) are going through their own evolution. The first major breakthrough was the printing press, coupled with increasing literacy. eBooks are now making their way into the 21st century. Currently, most eBooks are simple electronic copies of paper books with a little reformatting to make them readable on the wide range of eBook readers. [Read more...]

Filed Under: BPM, Mobility, Nimbus, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With:

Zipcar Shifts into High Gear Using BI Tools

May 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Today, Business Intelligence (BI) tools mean much more than sifting through volumes of historical data to create reports for future planning and decision making. Businesses are moving away from after-the-fact analysis to real-time analysis of data in motion generated in the daily operations of a business. This transformation necessitates BI tools to be nimble and user friendly so that end users responsible for decision making have easy access to data and, more importantly, understanding. Data visualization designed to enable the non-technical to analyze information and quickly make business decisions like, offering a discount or approving a request, makes BI more relevant in the success of a business.

For Zipcar, a membership-based car sharing company for automobile reservations in North America, vehicle utilization is a key metric. To maximize utilization across their fleet, Zipcar must assess the performance of each car and its location individually to relocate underperforming vehicles. TIBCO Spotfire® provides Zipcar with a visual and interactive environment allowing business managers to gain greater insight into fleet utilization and member behavior.

Managers have been able to evaluate performance and set the optimal mix of pricing, membership, and fleet characteristics to extract the most value from Zipcar’s assets, which has increased Zipcar’s profit margins. Zipcar likes to say – “We are redefining the way people think about transportation.” TIBCO is happy to help Zipcar with the two-second advantage to dive into data at a moment’s notice to find and exploit new opportunities instantly.

“Spotfire brings our data to life – whether it’s finance, operations or marketing – and enables us to rapidly visualize information, draw insights and take action across our business.”- Ed Goldfinger, Zipcar CFO

Explore the full story here.

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Automation, MDM, Spotfire, Tech Trends, Transform, Transportation and Logistics, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Can You Trust Your Current Operating System to Protect You?

May 22, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Software, including operating systems, increases your level of assurance in the environment and can mitigate – if not remediate – most of the exposure from the personnel and physical environment your cloud is operated within.

On top of trustworthy (or sometimes untrustworthy) hardware, a multi-tenancy cloud center should use trusted operating systems like SE-Linux or Solaris 11 with trusted features to mitigate and isolate the information from unintended blending or internal exfiltration between competing organizations and trusted internal administrators (who may likely, as was the case in Wiki Leaks, be the largest threat). The government, academia, and software vendors spent far more money than you would ever want to know building, testing, and certifying trusted operating systems only to see them marginalized in utilization because of perceived issues of complexity and limited trained staffs to properly implement and configure them.

Why a trusted Operating System?

Your operating systems have access to every bit that is executed on or against them and in their memory space. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Cloud, Cloud, Cyber Security, Tech Trends, Two-Second Advantage

Intervention While the Patient Is Still Healthy

May 17, 2012 by 1 Comment
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New-to-healthcare technology brings significant disruption to the traditional healthcare technology market for one simple reason, laid out in a recent article in TechCrunch, Money Ball for Medicine – Business Models for Healthcare: “By definition, the legacy HealthIT vendors have optimized their solutions around the legacy reimbursement and delivery models that have created the hyperinflation in healthcare crushing family, business, and government budgets.”

Lean and Six Sigma techniques, data analytics, business events and process technology will be used to break the reimbursement model and its attendant software norms.

This is a veritable sea change. What was locked into paper records is now being captured for the first time in electronic medical records (EMRs). By itself, this is simply shifting from paper to an electronic record. That won’t be enough. Smart healthcare will go further and manage many data sources simultaneously. It will be able to sort through this new avalanche of data to find the information, often a combination of data from multiple systems, which can predict problems and allow for intervention before an expensive crisis occurs. This borrows from the way banks detect credit card fraud and is easily applied to avoiding healthcare mistakes and intervening early. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP), Healthcare, Industries, Social

Lowering the Total Cost of Ownership for IT Projects

May 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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At global, dynamic organizations, like commercial banks, IT undertakes large and small projects every week. This becomes increasingly more complex and increasingly more expensive for companies when implementing software solutions across regions and through language barriers. TIBCO lowers the costs for every new project by integrating diverse enterprise systems. Having a uniform, centralized dataflow allows IT to have greater access to the easy-to-utilize information they need to implement new software solutions.

Taiwan’s largest global bank, award-winning Chinatrust Commercial Bank, used TIBCO in their expansion to the huge financial markets of Singapore, New York, Hong Kong, Japan, and India. You can see how IT would have problems standardizing a single service like loans with such a diverse customer base. New projects at Chinatrust have cost savings as high as 30 to 40 percent for any given project, with a service re-use rate at 30 to 35 percent.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Financial Services, Industries, SOA, Tech Trends, Transform Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Political Loyalty: What Politicians Can Learn from Retailers (Part 2)

May 15, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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A SIDEBAR ON NEGATIVE CAMPAIGNING

What about negative campaigning: does it work? Yes… and no. It does improve differential performance of your candidate. However, it does so both by firing up your supporters (everybody instinctively understands this) and by depressing turnout in that moveable middle. This – aside from not being good for the cause of democracy overall – denies a true mandate to even the “winner.” The mathematicians out there will have rapidly worked out that 51% of the actual votes cast may not really be a majority. And the reality is that election turnout in the U.S., even in a presidential year is mid-50s of percentage points, with off-cycle years in the high 30s… some mandate! This exacerbates the challenge of the post-election environment for the not-so-lucky winner, but I will return to the topic of public policy management in a future post.

OK, SO WHAT NOW?

The prescriptions for campaigns are clear and there is a spectrum of commitment levels along this path to suit all types of candidates, as well as different electoral district demographics. These break down into two major areas: “front office” and “back office.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Government, Loyalty, Mobility, Retail, Social, Tech Trends, Two-Second Advantage

Political Loyalty: What Politicians Can Learn from Retailers (Part 1)

May 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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The recent elections in France and Greece have been watched with great interest by both politicos and investors. These choices resonate loudly across the oceans.  “Political Loyalty” may sound like an oxymoron, or the punchline to a joke, depending on your cynicism level and the news headlines today, but it is real and it could have a major impact on the next electoral cycle. Two huge factors will shape the next several elections in the U.S. and beyond:

  1. The application of technology is accelerating. After precious little innovation from the 15th century to the 20th, successive escalations – TV, robo-calling, etc. are leading to attempts to micro-target messages. Engaging the Millennial population among not just voters, but also party supporters and campaign staff will demand a comprehensive approach incorporating mobile and social capabilities. Otherwise, voter turnout rates are doomed to continue their long decline.
  2. The game is more and more about the “middle:” the candidates’ polarizing rhetoric and policy mixes across spheres of social/economic/foreign policy have led to a dramatic increase in independent voters (known to political science geeks as NPP or DTS voters). Even here in California, with a lot of opinions flying around, self-identified independent voters are now over 21% of the electorate…

With all that said, let’s take a look at the landscape, what retailers can teach politicians, and how to address the two big challenges mentioned above

THE LANDSCAPE

The mechanics of the political process may seem very foreign to many who have spent their career in the commercial world. I, too, pursued a career in business, but grew up in a political environment, so I see the parallels. A political campaign is, at some level, a conversion marketing program: you try and deal with people along the full spectrum from “don’t like” to “don’t know” to “like,” “support,” “advocate,, “organize” and “fundraise”…and of course the goal is to move them from the former categories to the latter. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Government, Loyalty, Mobility, Retail, Social, Tech Trends, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With:

Big Data Requires an Extreme Information Management Makeover

May 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Many companies have been struggling for years to stay afloat amidst the deluge of data created by internal systems.

But now, big data or extreme data is pouring into organizations in higher volumes, faster, from a wider variety of data sources, and in more formats than ever before.

Big data dangles a large expanse of promise, but it requires business analytics as the foundation of an extreme information makeover for organizations to exploit the potential it offers.

For example, companies that use predictive analytics achieve higher returns by tapping into big data, according to Nucleus Research. With an average ROI of 1,209%, companies achieve higher returns with projects such as web-based customer sentiment tracking and demand forecasting.

As the name implies, big data means a vast volume of structured and unstructured data that companies must decipher to bolster management decision making.

In a separate research report, Nucleus notes that expanding the volume of data that can be examined with analytics allows employees to detect conditions that impact a large number of transactions, but can’t be observed without automated analytics. For instance, an auto manufacturer could examine parts purchases in its servicing industry to detect flaws or quality problems before they escalate to a public relations or safety crisis, Nucleus notes.

In addition to volume, extreme data is characterized by velocity; it streams in as fast as a customer can Tweet a product complaint. By using analytics to quickly analyze large data sets, a company can uncover problems and get actionable insight while its employees can still do something to fix the problem.

“Many consumers are likely to Tweet or blog about a product long before they share their opinions with a call center representative,” Nucleus notes. “Customer churn prevention also requires timely reactions based on the accurate view of leading metrics.”

Research firm Gartner Inc. has described “extreme information management” as the concept that a company’s current information infrastructure needs to be managed, primarily because of the fast growth of data and the types of data that must be analyzed to fuel revenue and market share growth. By 2015, (continued…)

 

Filed Under: Analytics and Optimization, Spotfire, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: ,

Healthcare: You Can’t Improve What You Can’t Measure

May 8, 2012 by 8 Comments
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As shown in Healthcare Reform That Can’t Be Stopped, the Toyota Production System has found a home in healthcare. The Wisconsin-based TPS pioneer, ThedaCare, has been employing Toyota’s industrial efficiency principles in its hospitals to great effect for more than 10 years. Thedacare is now seeing great interest from other organizations, as the healthcare industry moves to reap the rewards of its move to digitize information. So much interest, in fact, that it has created the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value to help other organizations realize the promise of continuous performance improvement. Its head, former ThedaCare CEO Dr. John Toussaint, doesn’t mince words when he talks about what’s bringing all those organizations to his door — and it’s not federal legislation.

“Healthcare performance was and still is unreliable,” he says flatly. “Those who are honest about what they’re doing recognize that. Twelve years ago, ThedaCare compared manufacturing and healthcare quality and found healthcare to be far worse: 90,000 to 100,000 defects per million opportunities [versus the three defects per million norm in manufacturing]. That’s quite frankly still how U.S. healthcare performs. A 2010 HHS Study said we were killing 15,000 Medicare patients per month with medical errors. The NIH’s Crossing the Quality Chasm in 1999 showed the same thing. When you peel back the onion, we’re doing really lousy; maybe it has even gotten worse. Those of us who have been in the business of quality improvement have been trying to understand why that is and implement processes to change that.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Healthcare, Industries, Nimbus
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