Ian Gotts

VP TIBCO, thinker, speaker, tech evangelist. Ian’s first book “Common Approach, Uncommon Results” explains what really makes a difference when driving business transformation programmes. Since then he has written 6 books. He is currently writing a book which helps companies implement social applications inside their organisations. He is a serial entrepreneur having founded and invested in technology start-ups and he sat on the Microsoft SaaS Partner Advisory Council. He was recently identified as one of the Top 50 Influencers in Case Management, and is a regular conference speaker who entertains and challenges his audiences. He is a competitive dinghy sailor and sailed in the 1984 Olympic squad, and still represents Great Britain at international level. Ian lives in the UK and in a 747.

Loyalty 101: How Savvy Shoppers Get the Most Out of Loyalty Programs

May 12, 2013 by Ian Gotts Leave a Comment

For years I have collected miles with a few different airlines, but have managed to fly only twice using my miles. Here, in one sentence, you have the problem with airline loyalty programs, but also my loyalty strategy.

Airlines want you to fly with only them and collect miles. But they really don’t want you to use the miles to fly – or so it would seem from the way the programs are structured. It is a “game” and you need to understand how to play in order to win. In fact, modern loyalty programs are morphing based on gamification techniques. More on this later.

Flawed loyalty strategy

Having been treated to a Loyalty101 class by an American colleague, I’ve discovered I’m doing it wrong. First, you need to fly with just one carrier, no matter how inconvenient it may be in terms of routing, to make sure that you are at the highest level in the loyalty program. These high levels are the only place you get real benefits. My loyalty mentor has over 1 million miles on United and gets access to lounges, automatic upgrades, and priority access to seats. And on every upgraded flight, she collects miles at a higher rate – like compound interest. So she will happily take United flights which include a change rather than take a direct flight with an alternative carrier. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Loyalty, Retail, Transportation and Logistics Tagged With: airlines, gamification, loyalty, Loyalty Lab, loyalty program, North Face, retail, United Airlines, VIPeak program

56 Billion Reasons Why You Need the Two-Second Advantage

February 10, 2013 by Ian Gotts 16 Comments

The story goes that a motor bike roars up to a red traffic light in La Coruna in Northern Spain. It stops alongside a black town car. From inside, the passenger glances out and sees the young biker leaning over the handlebars. His jean jacket has appliqued patches… a throwback to the 1970s. The old man grabs his phone and calls an aide in the office. Without taking his eyes off the jacket, he describes the jacket’s stitching, its shape and color. He finished the call with a single instruction – ¡Hacedlo!“ – Make it.

40 years ago, Amancio Ortega founded Zara on two key principles: give the customers what they want and give it to them faster than anyone else. As the story illustrates even today, those two key principles are at the heart of Zara, the world’s biggest fashion retailer.

Zara stores refresh their stock twice a week and receive orders in 48 hours or less. That has required some key organizational and supply chain decisions. “We never go to fashion shows,” says Loreta Garcia, a 23-year Zara veteran who heads up Zara Woman’s trends department. “We track bloggers and listen to customers, but we change our opinions all the time,” she says. “What seems great today, in two weeks is the worst idea ever.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Loyalty, Retail, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: Amancio Ortega, loyalty, Loyalty Lab, retail, Spain, Two second advantage, Zara

Conflicting Data or the Data Divide?

December 18, 2012 by Ian Gotts Leave a Comment

This week there have been two reports released. One from Ofcom (independent regulator and competition authority for the UK communications industries), which has reported that the UK’s mobile users are consuming more data on their phones and tablets than any other leading nation for the first time. A second from the Office for National Statistics has reported that 7.63 million adults in the UK have never used the internet, which is 15% of the population. They have coined a moniker for these people – “The Internots.”

So are the reports wrong? Or is there something else happening?

Let’s explore the reports in a little more detail.

Ofcom’s report, which you can download here, shows that the UK has one of the highest levels of penetration of smartphones in the world at 58%of the population, while just fewer than one in five owns a tablet computer. As a result, British consumers are downloading the most data on mobiles and tablets. In December 2011, the average UK mobile connection used 424 megabytes of data, higher than any other leading country, pushing Japan into second place at 392 megabytes and the US into sixth at 319 megabytes.

One-sixth of all website traffic in the UK was on a mobile, tablet or other connected device, higher than any other country in Europe. James Thickett, Ofcom’s director of research, said: “Our research shows that UK consumers continue to benefit from one of the most advanced markets for communications products and services.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Complex Event Processing (CEP), Event Processing, Tech Trends Tagged With: CEP, complex event processing, event processing

Digital Disruption is Coming to Get You. Brace Yourself.

October 15, 2012 by Ian Gotts 1 Comment

Digital disruption is a concept highlighted in Forrester’s recent CIO Summit and UK Summit and is the subject of James L. McQuivey’s new book, which is due to be published in January 2013.

The key principles behind digital disruption are that it creates new business models, changes value streams, and is faster, more disruptive and more pervasive than any earlier change driver we have ever seen. Why? Because it is digital. And Forrester says, for those of you thinking of hunkering down and letting it blow past, like you did for previous trends – FORGET IT. This is not a trend. It is a permanent shift.

CEOs are scared, very scared

One good thing is that senior executives are aware of the challenge. 71% of global CEOs surveyed in IBM’s 2012 CEO Global Survey said the top external force of change is technology. Forrester CEO George Colony warned delegates at the CIO Summit: “There are many people now who want to disrupt your business. It does not cost much to disrupt business.” Business leaders are becoming more IT-savvy, according to Colony: “The average age of the CEO in the top 100 companies is 59. They went to college before computers. Most of the CEOs did not use computers. But today, we are seeing CEOs who had Apple II home computers or IBM PCs at school.”

Platforms make this possible

This fundamental issue is that the new platform providers, such as Apple, Amazon EC2 and Salesforce.com, are making it way faster and cheaper for new entrants to be disruptors and for them to get new ideas to market. Now it is possible to prototype not just new products and services but new businesses. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Tech Trends Tagged With: digital consumers, digital disruption

Standing in the Fire Hose of Data: Drowning or Refreshing?

October 3, 2012 by Ian Gotts Leave a Comment

Big Data is a great topic. Everyone recognizes the rise of the volumes of data being generated by individuals, systems and devices. There are some fabulous headline figures about data. It is the journalists’, analysts’ and bloggers’ dream.

IT vendors are jumping onto the bandwagon and any analysis and reporting capability they have is being rapidly re-architected to be able to cope with the dramatic increase in data volumes. Some of this is still marketing-ware. Others are already shipping, such as TIBCO Spotfire5, whose release was announced at TUCON, TIBCO’s annual user conference. But this is reactive… a cynical response to “sell more stuff.”

Big Data – So What?

What is far more interesting is the discussion that was a major part of the keynote at TUCON: “What opportunities does Big Data open up?”

The strapline of the conference was “Everything is different” and the walls of the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas were littered with some compelling statistics about the exponential rise in data volumes. The idea is “while you were sleeping,” but of course, we’re in Las Vegas, so sleep is a secondary item!!

However, some of the numbers are staggering. While you were sleeping…

294 billion emails were sent
35 million apps were downloaded
more iPhones were bought than babies born
250 million photos uploaded to Facebook
2 million blog posts were written
information consumed on the internet would fill 168 millions DVDs

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Tech Trends, Transform, Two-Second Advantage Tagged With: Big Data, TUCON

TUCON Can Help You Regain Your Cool – The Ultimate iPhone 5 Accessory

September 27, 2012 by Ian Gotts Leave a Comment

When you check out tomorrow, don’t throw away your keycard. It can solve one of the world’s greatest problems… well, maybe not, but certainly a source of huge frustration.

The problem

You get out your iPhone 5 to admiring and envious looks. You look cool and feel great. And then you get out your headphones, which have inexplicably tied themselves in a knot. Not good. You spend seconds, minutes untangling them. You are no longer cool. Just humdrum.

The solution

TUCON can help you regain your cool in three very easy steps:

Unravel your headphones (for the LAST time)
Cut two slots in the top left hand corner in your TUCON Aria hotel keycard
Wrap your headphones around the card

Now you will never need to waste valuable time un-knotting your headphones, with the added benefit of being reminded of the fantastic three days at TUCON with TIBCO.

Filed Under: Loyalty, Mobility, Tech Trends, Transform Tagged With: TUCON

TUCON 2012: Behind the Scenes

September 23, 2012 by Ian Gotts Leave a Comment

It is Sunday at the Aria Hotel in Las Vegas. Most people are heading to the pool or to the strip to take in the Las Vegas vibe. The hotel would prefer we were headed to the tables or slot machines.

But I’m here to look behind the scenes at TUCON, the annual TIBCO User Conference. It’s difficult not to get caught up in the frenzied activity which will climax when Vivek Ranadivé, TIBCO founder and CEO, takes to the stage at 8:30 on Tuesday morning.

He will be joined on stage by a number of senior executives from clients such as GE Energy, Citi, Hewlett Packard, PerkinElmer and the Golden State Warriors, but also some technology luminaries including Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and Thomas M. Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems.

Preparations began almost a year ago when the feedback from last year’s conference was analyzed and the key learnings taken on board. The effort has been focused on making TUCON the largest-ever gathering of TIBCO customers, partners, and experts. At this year’s conference, the delegates will get a taste of what an Event-Enabled Enterprise feels like and the transformation results that can be achieved. But this is not gradual evolution. The pace of business change is ramping up. The theme of the conference sums it up very neatly: “Everything is different.”

For the hotel staff, this is just another conference; Las Vegas is “conference central.” Last week in the Aria hotel it was iHeart Radio, next week it is Smokey Mountain and Matrix Design. But for TIBCO, it is the highlight of the year: 2,500 delegates, 52 client and analyst speakers, 20 sponsoring companies, press from all over the globe, days packed with exciting information and hundreds of networking connections to be made, all topped off with an awesome party taking over Haze nightclub with a top show called Legends.

Out on the sponsors show floor the Marquee sponsors, Accenture, HP, Infosys and Intel are getting their stands ready, alongside the Platinum, Gold, Silver and Technology partners. What is interesting is there are also frenemies (organisations who are both friends and enemies) here. IBM, a key competitor in many of the technology spaces, is also a sponsor.

Those registered for the Team TIBCO (North America’s #1 women’s cycling team) Bike Ride are getting some rest before joining Tara Whitten, 2012 Olympic bronze medalist, and others on an exciting morning ride through Red Rock Canyon.

Not every one of the millions of users touched by TIBCO’s software in over 4,000 customers can attend. While nothing beats the experience of being here, those who cannot make it can join the excitement through the The TIBCO Blog, Twitter (be sure to include #TUCON2012) and live streaming of the sessions.

Feel like you are missing out? You are!!!

The Toughest of Tests: What Businesses Can Learn from Olympians

September 14, 2012 by Ian Gotts Leave a Comment

To really excel and beat the competition, it requires more than a spark of inspiration and talent. It requires focused effort. The sporting world has shown that, and we’ve all been reminded of it hearing the personal stories of the medalists in the recent Olympic games.

Better practice = better performance

Coaching and training techniques have been refined and improved, which is part of the reason we’ve seen World and Olympic records shattered. And while advanced and novel training techniques are not limited to sports, they do have one common theme: they all make the activity more difficult than it is really is. Let me give you a couple of examples:

Football: one of the reasons that Brazilian footballers are so good, is not just natural talent or the poor economic conditions, but they all play futsal. It is played with a smaller, heavier ball and a smaller pitch. The maths tells the story. Futsal players touch the ball far more often than soccer players – six times more often per minute. The smaller, heavier ball demands and rewards more precise ball control. “No time plus no space equals better skills.”

Table tennis: multi-ball coaching techniques brought in by the Chinese. Simply put, multi-ball is the training technique that has coach use a number of balls to set up a training drill for the practicing player. Most players think of multi-ball almost as a torture technique, where the trainee is reduced to a small puddle of sweat as the feeder keeps him constantly moving all over the table chasing the ball and gasping for breath. And while using multi-ball to build fitness is one aspect of the technique, there are several other benefits: technique, footwork, decision making and psychological strength.

Better business practice

In business we do not “practice.” Every day we go to work we are “in the game,” rarely with a coach, a game plan or any time to reflect on our performance.

But business is not a zero-sum game. In sports, to win, your opponent needs to lose. In business, that is not the case. If an individual can raise their game, it can be replicated by other team members. The collective performance gains can be huge. So why are proven techniques from sports not used in business?

As one business expert put it, “Very few businesses have put the principles of ‘purposeful practice’ into the workplace. Sure, the hours may be long in some jobs, but the tasks are often repetitive and boring and fail to push employees to their creative limits beyond. There is little coaching and objective feedback is virtually non-existent, often compromising little more than a half-hearted annual review.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Automation, BPM, general, Nimbus Tagged With: BPM, Business Practice Management, Business Process Management, Nimbus

BPM – The Movie. Could Be a Blockbuster!

May 29, 2012 by Ian Gotts Leave a Comment

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 21^st 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: BPM

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