Gartner’s AADI Conference kicked off this morning at the Park Plaza in London with the keynote Gartner Keynote: Integrate the Past. Embrace the Present. Shape the Future delivered by Gartner’s Andy Kyte and David Mitchell Smith. Kyte and Smith talked about the Nexus of Forces (cloud, mobile, social and information) that is driving both change and uncertainty. They framed their conversation against the skills and assets that organizations bring from their past, but also about the technology and process “baggage.” To move forward, they said, “…organizations must not just integrate legacy but also do so in a way that minimizes dependencies on legacy thinking.”
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In Business and Love – Opposites Attract: Social BPM and Collaboration
May 5, 2013 by 1 Comment
In more than one instance, opposite poles attract each other, from marriages to difficult colleagues at work. One person is usually organized, predictable and manageable, and the other one can turn out to be lazy, moody, or totally unpredictable, but these parings often end up being the best matches. The same is true between the marriage of something standardized and automated like BPM and something as messy as social media. The knot to tie them together is people. Engaging people to collaborate and be a part of the process is the secret to the happy marriage.
Sometimes businesses fail to recognize that one of their most important processes is in the crowd of all its messiness. The only way to get the process right is not asking just one person, but to let the crowd decide what’s right. Twitter and Facebook are just one part of it because to harness employees, the most efficient businesses listen to what they are saying. This does not just impact the operational processes, but also the management processes. [Read more...]
Why Do Companies Find it So Hard to Get Social Media Right?
March 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment
In May 2003, LinkedIn was launched, and in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook. In March 2006, Jack Dorsey famously sent the first Twitter message into the electronic ether. These are perhaps our most influential and real-time informational tools, and Twitter has been dubbed the “the pulse of the planet.”
As we reach a decade of using social networks and social media as personal and professional tools, companies are still getting even the basics so wrong.
Consider the UK retail chain HMV’s rogue employee live tweeting a mass layoff, or when Burger King was famously hacked and their social media team was inactive for hours. Social media is an incredible way to connect to your customer base, but only if you’re willing to use it as such, and for that to happen, you have to treat it as more than a simplified and cheap customer face of your brand.
Yes, brands need to interact with fans through social media, but they also need to integrate their automated social media tracking system with their back-end systems like loyalty, transaction, and billing to make personalized offers and gain a more complete view of each customer’s wants and needs. In this new social era, customer profiles shouldn’t just have loyalty point totals and past purchase history, but also likes, retweets, check-ins, and shares in context with every other system. [Read more...]
Super Bowl-bound 49ers Make Game-time Decisions On and Off the Field
January 31, 2013 by 1 Comment
Three-time 49ers Super Bowl champion, four-time Pro Bowl player, First-Team All-Pro and NFL’s Offensive Player of the Year in 1988 – running back Roger Craig knows the importance of being able to make real-time decisions on and off the field. In that 1988 season, he rushed for a career-high 1,502 yards, made 76 receptions and scored double-digit touchdowns.
Three years earlier, in 1985, he led the NFL in receptions, a feat that had never been accomplished before by a running back. That same year he was also the first player in league history to record 1,000 rushing and 1,000 receiving yards in the same season. How did he do it? By understanding, anticipating, and acting on plays and events just moments before they occurred – to score the winning touchdown.
“My belief in the two-second advantage grows constantly stronger because I witness its success, both on and off the field. Training HARD in the off-season gave me my two-second advantage with the 49ers. When my opponents got weaker as the game and the season wore on, I just got stronger. My body wouldn’t get tired because my mind was strong. This strength was stored in my mental database and was impossible to erase. The team this year will have success if they believe in the Harbaugh system. They need to study the Ravens, know their assignment, know their alignment and execute. That will be their two-second advantage. It’s going to be a great game.”
- Roger Craig, Three-time Super Bowl Champion, and TIBCO VP of Business Development [Read more...]
Social Grows Up In The Workplace
January 26, 2013 by Leave a Comment
There’s a party happening today on more than 1.5 million PCs, laptops and mobile devices worldwide as tibbr celebrates its second birthday. No, that wasn’t a typo — tibbr is the name of a social networking platform for enterprises — think of it as an internal, secure, company-wide Facebook for the enterprise. With 1.5 million paid users in more than 104 countries, it’s been cited as the industry’s fastest growing collaborative technology with the broadest scope of functionality at work in enterprises today.
To put this in perspective, think back to the early days of the Internet, when the term “Web Years” was a common term. It meant the length of time it takes for Internet technology to evolve as much as non-web technology develops in a calendar year, commonly thought to be about two months, thus equating a Web year to six standard years.
Fast forward two decades later and we find the meteoric rise of new Web-based developments make Web Years as relevant as ever. Witness how the Internet of Things, 4GL mobile Web apps, GPS-enabled everything, and social computing for the workplace are transforming markets, politics and global social movements at incredible speeds.
So tibbr and its enterprise social siblings are really reaching adolescence in Web Years. And just as some early teenagers sprout up and mature much faster than others into productive members of society, only a few of these social platforms are truly mature and enterprise-ready, delivering solid returns on investment for their users and companies. [Read more...]
Visibility in Healthcare – A Personal Perspective
January 10, 2013 by 3 Comments
Just before the holidays, I went in for a minor medical procedure. No biggie, just something to get taken care of – and what better time to recuperate than a time when work slows down, right?
My experience as a patient and customer of the healthcare industry has underscored the need for the industry to transform through the help of real-time visibility and communication.
Don’t you know who I am?
Upon arrival at the hospital, I was pleased to see all the paperwork was ready for me to review and sign. Only problem was their system had me listed as a female.
We shared a chuckle, but in reality this is indicative of systems not talking to one another, and the introduction of simple human error to the equation.
Shouldn’t my record within the systems of my insurance company, doctor and hospital, all be based on the same, single source of data? I mean, if a simple fat-finger data entry mistake can turn me into a woman… [Read more...]
How Co-workers Used Private Social Networking to Provide Aid for Sandy Relief Efforts
December 3, 2012 by 1 Comment
New York- based TIBCO co-worker Mark Elder shares his story:
In a matter of days, we saw buildings under water, houses contaminated by overflowing sewers, ground floors that needed to be sterilized, heaters that needed to be replaced, people without power and temperatures that were dropping. It wasn’t just on the news. We were hearing stories from our friends, family, and co-workers. Martin, Tom, Dara and others had no power for 10 days, no internet, and no heat. Fortunately, none of them had been injured.
For me, New York had been my home for many years, and TIBCO, the company I worked for, had a long history in New York, starting on Wall Street. It seemed appropriate that we needed to do something to help with the hurricane Sandy relief effort.
I created a subject called “Operation Sandy” on our company’s private social network, and posted a message asking for donations to aid the Sandy relief effort. Employees started following the subject and asking how they could contribute. Once the campaign took off, donations started to stream in and within about five days, we had raised approximately $8,000, on top of the $5,000 TIBCO had already authorized for me to spend on supplies. [Read more...]
The Magic of Social
November 1, 2012 by 1 Comment
I was sitting with my two children watching the latest Harry Potter film and my mind began to wander. Maybe because I had lost track of the plot, the multiple characters or the bizarre twists of the storyline. Or maybe I was just marveling at the animated effects. Either way, I started to think about Harry Potter, The Money Machine.
When Harry Potter was a character in a book the scenes and situations could be literally magical. The only limitation was the imagination of J.K. Rowling and her ability to put it into words. Harry Potter floats above a table supported only by two blades of grass – no problem. Professor Dumbledore evaporates with a gigantic flash of sparks and fireworks – certainly. Conduct a game of Quidditch on broomsticks above the school ramparts – absolutely.
Now, when Warner Bros. initially looked at the first Harry Potter book and considered turning it into a full-length film, how scared were they of the potential cost? The cost of building the set, finding a school above a lake, and making the fantastic magical effects come to life…
What was the budget? How successful would it be? Or, more importantly, how did they build some form of Return on Investment? Maybe the answer is that they could never have imagined how successful the first film, or in fact the entire series, was going to be. The Harry Potter film franchise is the highest grossing film series of all time.
Evangelists about to implement a social media application, like tibbr, inside an organisation must feel the same. [Read more...]
Closing the Big Data Loop
October 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment
It has been two weeks since TUCON 2012, the TIBCO user conference held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. TIBCO is well-known as an integration company but used the event to demonstrate its broad platform approach to the biggest challenges of today, like digital customer experience, loyalty, and the topic of this article, Big Data.
The TIBCO CTO, Matt Quinn spoke about the patterns hiding within the rapidly increasing amounts of data flowing across the enterprise. Quinn made an important distinction between data at rest, information sitting in databases or flat files waiting to be queried, and data in motion, which includes streaming data and data stored in-memory (also known as cache).
Quinn made the point that it takes analytics like those offered within TIBCO’s Spotfire product to be able to see what would be invisible to people trying to keep up with the increasing deluge of information. To Quinn, the smart enterprise finds patterns in historical and machine data (log files that up until recently weren’t mined for patterns) that provide insight that can be applied to data that’s coming at today’s “full speed.” [Read more...]
Personal. Connected. Social.
October 11, 2012 by 1 Comment
A recent blog talked about Generation C, also known as our time’s Digital Natives. These are the folks who wouldn’t think twice about trying out a new social platform or using a mobile device as their first choice when deciding where to go, what to buy, and what’s happening in their world.
They are the leading edge of the next great technology wave, the move to a digital customer experience that is personal, connected and social. Sports fans were already social long before now, as tailgate parties, fantasy leagues and sports bars attest. That’s why a digitally native sports fan is the leading edge of the leading edge… a great place to showcase the future.
The app
At TUCON 2012, the Main Stage gave us that showcase. Presenters included Rick Welts, President and COO of the Golden State Warriors. Rick is a passionate basketball fan and was ahead of most of the NBA in moving forward with creation of a mobile app to connect fans with the team.
Rick worked with Vivek Ranadivé, part owner of the Warriors and CEO of TIBCO, to develop the Golden State Warriors app, chosen by TechNow! as the App of the Week a few months ago.
The app provides fans with news, stats, video and offers that are unique to using their mobile device. Even more clever, it embeds the tibbr social platform that allows posting and taking feeds from Facebook and Twitter, as well as connection to the Fan Zone, the Warriors loyalty program.
It becomes very easy to see what comes next as apps like this can be used to provide arena information, take feedback on services, suggestions for improved experiences, buying concessions courtside and a host of other capabilities that allow the fan and the team to become more connected. The road forward is pretty clear.
Beyond the NBA
While basketball may be the easiest place to find fans, this highlights a trend that will continue across other industries as enterprises wake up to the potential that social, mobile and loyalty bring in combination. [Read more...]
