The TIBCO Blog

I Know What You Did and Which Aisle You Did It In

Jeanne Roué-Taylor — Sun, 19 May 2013 12:03:56 +0000

Loyalty in the Enterprise: This is Part Two of a series on loyalty best practices in the Enterprise. Read Part One and discover what are the Four Holy Grails of Marketing.

Indoor mapping of consumer location is the latest arrow in the quiver of the retail marketer. When marketers know where things are happening, they can develop interesting patterns for where to put resources like people, signage and information technology. Geolocation also provides the remarkable ability to spot the patterns that predict what to expect from consumers, and can be tested and continuously refined based on effectiveness and cost.

Marketers can also send messages directly to the consumer based on where they are in that very moment. They can say, “Hey, you were in Aisle 5 and showed interest in that new phone—here’s an offer for 10% off.”

Service versus stalking

But where does it start to look like stalking and less like helpful service? The difference between creepy and convenience is found in whether consumers are knowingly and willingly sharing details about their path through the store, mall or city, and how long they spend in any one spot. When they’re not agreeing to this level of data collection and use, the outcome looks much more like Big Brother.

Pretty soon, they’re not agreeing to share their location and turning off that app that tracks their location. Who wants that?

Loyalty to the rescue

There is a simple way to make the same information useful both for prediction and messaging. Loyalty programs are the permission that consumers give because they see the benefit of having a closer, more open relationship with the seller. Anyone considering geolocation software as a way to get closer to the shopping cart has to first take into consideration the permission required to stay above the creepy line.

It is that easy. Loyalty programs are the de-creeping of big data and the answer not just to today’s monitoring and analytics tools, like geolocation technology, but also to what’s certainly coming in the not-so-distant future.

Learn more about the tools and technologies that are helping to reimagine loyalty marketing in this webinar.

What are the Four Holy Grails of Marketing?

Jeanne Roué-Taylor — Sat, 18 May 2013 12:03:16 +0000

Loyalty in the Enterprise: This is Part One of a series on loyalty best practices in the Enterprise. Tune in tomorrow for the next part in the series.

The remarkable amount of change in the consumer world is ushering in a new definition of loyalty. What have long been static programs of points and plastic cards are becoming dynamic, individualized and much, much more engaging.

The old way of simple ledgers and confusing redemption schemes was a fundamentally flawed proposition. Customers were able to accumulate points but struggled to keep track of and gain real value in return. Something had to change.

Enter Customer Loyalty Management

Customer Loyalty Management is the new, holistic approach to driving higher levels of loyalty to brands. It puts a focus on what have emerged as the four “pillars” of loyalty:

Loyalty programs
Wider event streams
Marketer-driven relationship marketing
Test & learn

Each of these four is key to finding the “Holy Grail” of marketing: creating “fans”—people who think of a brand first and represent a much higher lifetime value. But today’s technology combines social, mobile and analytics to create new ways to drive another layer atop the four pillars, including higher trust, greater insight and relevance, and recognition leading to virtuous cycles of increasing value.

These are lofty goals that would be impossible without the new approach in technology and strategy offered by Customer Loyalty Management.

Aligning the Tools and Techniques

As consumers’ buying patterns change, the tools and techniques of loyalty need to change alongside them. There are four specific areas where the tools and techniques align with the four pillars and matter the most for the new Customer Loyalty Management:

Social
Mobile
In-store
On-line

Each of these areas is impacted by those changing buying patterns, and there’s an opportunity for brands to avoid disruption and benefit from the shift. These points of personal and digital engagement are the new realities of letting consumers engage in ways that increase their experience and create true fans.

Cloud Integration Needs to be Better, Faster and Cheaper

Chris Taylor — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:57:37 +0000

Gartner’s Massimo Pezzini spoke this morning at the AADI Conference in London on the topic of why integration is even more critical in the ever-expanding world of cloud computing. Pezzini started out by commenting that application integration was a science that we were finally beginning to master just as the game changed with the arrival of cloud computing. With this game change comes new realities and consequences for cloud services integration (CSI) that Pezzini laid out as follows:

Realities

Your organization plays in one or more “virtual enterprises”
Cloud services (e.g. SaaS) hold some of your data
Cloud services manage “chunks” of some of your business processes
Your application portfolio will include both on-premise and cloud apps

Consequences

You wil have to increasingly share data with your partners and participate in their business processes (and vice versa)
Your data will be fragmented across cloud and on-premise
Your end-to-end processes will span cloud and on-premise

He followed up this foundation for his discussion with what he described as the three key issues facing businesses looking to integrate cloud and on-premise applications:

Key Issue #1: Will cloud service integration affect integration competency centers’ established methodologies, organizational settings and governance models?

Pezzini talked about what hasn’t really changed about CSI integration. For starters, he is of the opinion that integration issues remain roughly the same. Companies still need to integrate processes, pay attention to time to market, ensure agility and perform data aggregation. As well, there’s still the challenge of data consistency, multi-step processes and managing composite applications. According to Pezzini, the core technologies required to support these things remain still mostly the same.

Where Pezzini felt that CSI changes the game involves new expectations coming from a new breed of buyer: “Business leaders expect to deliver functionality in a matter of hours or days.” He provided the following additional differences that indicate that the old methods need to be re-thought in a cloud environment:

CSI requirements can be more opportunistic and informal than traditional methods.
On the positive side, many SaaS applications provide end-user-oriented integration functionality.
SaaS projects manifest integration requirements incrementally rather than the more traditional longer release cycles and fewer phases.
SaaS APIs usually hide data schemas and semantics.
CSI security requirements are more demanding than traditional application to application. The security requirements, in fact, are more similar to B2B applications.
SaaS and external Web API’s life cycle are not subject to bilateral agreements. APIs can change at any time and what worked yesterday may not work today.

Key Issue #2: How will integration PaaS enable cloud service integration?

Pezzini said that most obvious answer is that cloud software is delivered as a service and comes without a significant IT operations burden. Beyond that, model-driven development tools, packaged integrations, self-service, crowd-sourcing tools, subscription-based pricing and elastic infrastructure are all powerful enabling features that can’t be ignored.

He laid out four specific use cases for iPaaS use as a cloud integration tool:

Cloud services integration (common)
E-commerce B2B integration (common)
Web API publishing (emerging)
Classic on-premise integration (emerging)

The last point may seem surprising but Pezzini provided that iPaaS is gradually evolving to allow companies to integration globally in circumstances where technical support isn’t feasible across in all locations. Once iPaaS tools become familiar, this use case will become more common.

Pezzini also reported that vendors are moving rapidly toward the iPaaS market as more companies recognize their customers’ needs to provide cloud integration. Likewise, SaaS vendors are beginning to embed iPaaS technologies in their platforms as a necessity that customers are demanding. Rather than build their own, many SaaS vendors are embedding 3^rd-party tools to provide this functionality.

Pezzini believes that by 2016, at least 35% of all large and mid-size organizations worldwide will be using one or more iPaaS offerings in some form. This will be driven by ease of use, embedding by SaaS vendors, classic vendors joining the market, and by mobile integration combined with the need for integration of the “Internet of Things.”

Key Issue #3: Which mix of iPaaS, traditional integration middleware and outsourcing services will best support your business?

Pezzini laid out four ways to integrate cloud, each offering benefits and risks:

Point-to-point – Often the least expensive on a project-by-project basis, but costly as complexity increases. This can easily lead to “spaghetti integration.”
On-premise integration platform – A familiar approach with known skills but complex and costly.
Integration PaaS – Great for rapid integration with low internal cost but suboptimal for demanding platforms (e.g. B2B). This is the best approach when integration is primarily for the cloud.
Integration brokerage – This approach takes advantage of the provider’s infrastructure, but there’s a risk of losing project control. This also brings the risk of loss of intellectual property and vendor lock-in.

Pezzini believes that within a few years, most enterprises will need to manage a hybrid of cloud and on-premise applications. This reality will force organizations to embrace CSI or be left behind by more efficient competitors that can rely on integrated systems. He concluded by urging organizations to clearly identify CSI requirements before choosing the best approach.

TIBCO is here at AADI and we encourage you to stop by our booth and talk about the future of cloud integration.

Gartner on Building Big Data Solutions

Chris Taylor — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:18:24 +0000

Gartner’s Ian Finley spoke this afternoon at the 2013 Gartner AADI Conference in London. In what was a primer on Big Data, Finley predicted that there will be 4.4 million jobs in Big Data by 2015, but only a third of those positions will be filled due to a lack of resources in the labor market. He used that prediction to emphasize the value of first understanding the business need for a Big Data solution and formulation of solid use cases.

Finley provided examples of common Big Data opportunities that Gartner is seeing:

Public sector: real-time monitoring of traffic flows, vehicle locations, resource use
Public safety: Forecasting the extend and impact of natural and man-made disasters as well as surveillance
Utilities: Understanding individual use patterns and improving demand management
Retail: Web and e-commerce by analysis of clickstream and customer feedback. Providing faster and more accurate customer responses.

Finley referred to retail as the most popular use case and said that it attracts the greatest number of resources and publicity.

Iterative experimentation

Finley brought up the need to experiment with technologies and analytics to find the right combination that works for the organization. As a relatively new technology for most companies, working with Big Data will likely be a very iterative project. Part of being successful is being able to recognize when an answer is valuable or not, and for that he recommends being skeptical of outcomes. Finley also said that being successful is very much a team effort that draws in multiple skills sets.

This iterative approach allows “tinkering” to happen at the data level that can be moved into production as it proves useful to the business. By keeping production and Big Data development separate, the flexibility required to find solutions can happen unhindered by the structure and security of business operations. In the same way, Big Data projects can happen in parallel by operating multiple data environments that take advantage of inexpensive storage and computing. Each project may have different data types and sources, meaning that flexibility is a key part of the development environment.

The data scientist

Finley touched on the skill sets necessary for Big Data projects. He said that a good data scientist needs to be able to understand the business, data and analytics in equal measure. While the business may create requirements, Finley said that a data scientist works as a consultant to the business while also being comfortable with the IT department and its language.

In wrapping up, Finley talked about NoSQL and unstructured data. he listed the biggest challenge to NoSQL as the need to code features of that we’ve come to expect from relational databases, like access control.

His advice for the near term was to inventory existing and potential sources of data and to review analytics and development capabilities. In the medium term, he recommended identification of ideas from outside one’s industry to drive an agile program that takes a new approach to data. Lastly, Finley recommended refocusing investment and resources away from BI report development and into diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics. And of course, his final point was to update organizational skills to be ready for the Big Data future.

Minding the talent gap

Catching up with Ian afterward, he said that organizations will need to cobble together the resources necessary to make up the shortfall in resources. He pointed out that there are over 50 degree programs around the world that are related to the data scientist role. Finley felt that smaller organizations will likely need to contract experts on a temporary basis as the training investment could be outsized.

Of course, underlying the need to have the right talent for Big Data is the need to be able to find, understand and act on the things that matter to the business. A common topic in Big Data discussions is the need to have strong data integration capabilities that feed these solutions.

Come see us at the Gartner AADI TIBCO booth for a continuing discussion of Big Data and integration.

Gartner AADI and Dragging Your Technology Past Into the Future

Chris Taylor — Thu, 16 May 2013 05:42:02 +0000

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.”

What to Do with Legacy Systems

The single biggest problem most organizations have today is exactly what to do with legacy systems that are crucial for the business as both systems of record and as business process support. David Mitchell Smith started off the conversation by saying that the key to embracing the future is making a choice to shape it and not be passive about the change that’s coming.

Shaping the future, Smith said, is about understanding what got us to today. That requires understanding the intersection points of the Nexus of Forces. He said that while each element of the Nexus is strongly disruptive, in combination they set the stage for innovation to happen.

Ripples on a Pond

Smith used the analogy of ripples on a pond, saying that the key for organizations is to understand the effect of the pond’s ripples, but to pay particular attention to the points where the ripples intersect. Smith gave the example of what he called the mobile imperative, where mobile needs to fit into IT, but where IT also needs to change and not treat mobility the same way as previous technology waves. Smith said that mobile strategies should not work in a vacuum and that mobility should be part of every other strategy, including security, integration and development. Don’t outsource mobility, he said, because the skills required are going to be more important in the future. His mobility points were as follows:

Mobile changes everything
Mobility is about people, not devices
No platform, vendor, device or form factor will win; many will co-exist
Mobile is a key enabler in the Nexus of Forces
Mobile strategies should not be in a vacuum
Leverage existing skills and assets is a key goal
Consumerization sets the agenda

Smith turned the stage over to Andy Kyte, who asked the audience to think about what’s happened in application development over the past five years and then compare that with expectation for the next five years. He offered three scenarios:

Demand for application capability is going to decline because the work has been mostly done
The level of demand will remain mostly the same, with organizations living with a backlog and working their way through it
The demand for application capability is going to grow because user expectation is going to grow dramatically, driven by the Nexus of Forces

Growth of Demand

Clearly, Kyte believes that demand will grow significantly and isn’t shy about it:

Growth in demand is going to be relentless. With IT budget cuts and with the huge amount of time and attention to managing the legacy systems, our ability to meet that growth in demand is extremely limited. There is a massive amount of unsatisfied demand.

Kyte said that even worse, technology vendors are coming to the business and saying, “We can satisfy your demand.” This is a problem, as the solutions being sold to the business complicate the job of IT, making life stressful for IT personnel.

Kyte said that the vast majority of organizations are struggling to cope with current demand and will be inundated by the demands that are coming down the road.

The Team, The Team, The Team

Kyte feels that IT is made up of warring teams that defend their applications and refuse to share artifacts across other teams. These teams see it as a battle for declining budget. On the opposite side, Kyte said that the most successful IT groups operate as a single team and share resources. The best IT is highly collaborative and open to external ideas. He challenged the audience to move from “toxic baronies” that exist in most organizations to teams of people who work cooperatively.

Right Things Right

The best organizations know what’s truly needed and can say, “This is what we should be working on now.” Kyte said that the challenged IT departments he sees are putting enormous effort into things that are “a great landing… wrong airport” because of siloed funding that goes to equally siloed business managers. The siloed managers are in competition for budget in a zero-sum game.

Respect

Kyte feels respect is usually delivered more often through very flat organizational structures. Organizational charts in the most challenged organizations read like “long scrolls,” with the people doing the actual work many levels down from the leadership. The smart and innovative people at the bottom aren’t listened to and have limited positive effect on the organization.

In the flat structured organizations, on the other hand, managers aren’t expected to deliver innovations and instead recognize the individuals who are thought leaders and structure teams around them. Time in grade has little to do with the influence and the organizations are true meritocracies.

Design for Life

The best organizations are focused on “design for life,” which is what Kyte calls the, “Shocking difference between the best and the rest.” Kyte said that, “Most IT organizations are ‘stuffed to the gunwales’ with project stuff,” and the culture is all about the success of the project alone. People in challenged organizations want to be attached to big projects that have longevity and less risk of near-term failure. Success in the poor environment is constituted by being on time, budget and quality, but each of those three “legs of the milking stool” is highly subjective and not necessarily aligned to the organization’s needs.

Designed for life, on the other hand, is focused on functionality, reliability, maintainability, usability and things that create systems for life rather than satisfying short-term need for “screens.” The ability to design for life satisfies the attributes for success today and into the future. The challenge? It takes greater design work done by “designers” and not necessarily by the ubiquitous architect.

Everything as a Service

These designers are focused on “everything as a service” rather than focusing on architectures that don’t satisfy future needs. Highly stable, highly predictable and persistent systems are developed within organizations that put capabilities under a layer of services. To do this, they’re using application architectures based on Greek mythology, and in particular, the Ship of Theseus. Without getting too historical, the Greeks had to constantly replace the planks of Theseus’ ship, a monument to his military victory. Eventually, the ship was no longer the original ship, but had been completely changed out.

For Kyte, the Ship of Theseus is a model for IT, where services can be constantly replaced and for transformation to take place constantly and gradually without having to bring in new architectures or throw away large portions of legacy systems.

Reuse

The best organizations are focused on reuse. Kyte expressed this as an IT maturity model that looks like this:

I reuse what I have written
We reuse within the team
Departmental reuse — we share between teams (advanced level)
We reuse within the company
We reuse what we find outside our organization

Traditional IT is stuck at levels 1 and 2, where the best IT organizations are able to consistently reuse at levels 3 and 4 while embracing the idea of level 5.

Selfish Software

Selfish software is about writing services that are designed defensively so that they can be used in environments that are unknown to the designer. These services must be self-testing, self-monitoring and “selfish” in a very positive way. Invocation of these services is safe in many environments, including with third parties that want to reuse this “paranoid” work. Kyte pointed out that it costs more upfront, but these services can be reused much more readily and will survive much longer.

Kyte summarized with, “Services should not trust their environment.”

Quality Embedded

Kyte noted that leading organizations invest a significant amount in quality assurance. They see QA not as something that happens at the end of the development process, but instead throughout delivery. Kyte described this practice as QA being done through design reviews before coding. In Kyte’s opinion, 60% of QA should be done in design review with only 20% coming at the end of development.

I’d love to have a conversation about the Keynote and information technology at the TIBCO Booth and hope to see you there.

Andy Kyte is a Vice President and Gartner Fellow in Gartner Research, and is a member of the Application Strategy and Governance team. With more than 30 years of experience in the applications arena, his research now concentrates on the challenges facing CIOs and business management teams in maximizing the return on assets for the application portfolio.

David Mitchell Smith is a Vice President and Gartner Fellow in Gartner Research, where he specializes in the impact of catalytic technologies such as the Internet, Web technologies (such as the mobile Web and HTML5), cloud computing and consumer technologies.

How One Company Uses Data Visualization To Enable Their Customers

Kevin Jordan — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:03:56 +0000

We all know becoming a real expert takes years of hard work and dedication. People say the ability to teach a subject leads to real mastery, yet although we value highly skilled teachers, businesses do not have time, resources or patience to pour into any one individual’s growth. We still demand the highest level of expertise in consultations, but faster and cheaper.

Data experts, “data scientists,” used to be hard to find because of the time it took to truly master the art of data analysis. Years of schooling and training in statistics are necessary to make full sense of complex and growing data. When a business asks for advice based on data, scientists must put learned information into context by taking into account industry, geography, and the specific market dynamics. With so many moving parts to consider, relying on only a few “experts” can be painstakingly time-consuming, and costly.

Help Yourself to Help Someone Else
A company like BUCS Analytics needs to provide companies with the right information needed without delay. BUCS Analytics is a performance management consulting firm that prides itself on improving its clients’ operations and service delivery. Customers that seek out BUCS’ services are looking for better ways to improve services for their customers and operations efficiency. Since BUCS was collecting so much data from their customers, they needed a tool to enable them to help their customers better, and more efficiently.

Spreadsheets weren’t cutting it anymore and BUCS needed to make sense of the data they were producing to help customers make actionable decisions. How can anyone expect to be an expert or a data scientist without the right tools to dive deeper into the information in front of him or her? BUCS knew that in order to stay competitive it needed visualization tools in order to handle the large volumes of custom-calculated data stored in their data warehouse including customers’ sales and performance history, information on products, vendors and customers.

Knowing You Better than You Know Yourself
BUCS must become a master of the business their customers are running to help them most efficiently. Taking all the data from different customers, with powerful in-memory analysis and predictive modeling via a visual interface, BUCS can create an analytic assessment and action plan more quickly than ever before. No time is wasted in delivering expertise in any field to those who need help. BUCS can assess performance and find improvement opportunities having the potential to analyze many different analytic processes from financial performance comparisons, to inventory planning, to supplier analysis.

BUCS needed to be able to ask the right questions of the data in front of them, and then relate the right answers to its customers. BUCS is able to give its clients a clear path to improve their businesses through information integration, visibility to performance, and speed to common understanding.

What Will Cloud Look Like When It Matures?

Sukki Sandhar — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:03:05 +0000

Cloud computing, especially Private PaaS is still maturing and going through its formative years, but it’s not so embryonic that you can’t have a good business conversation about it. You know any business proposition is maturing when you can have a conversation about return on investment, and customers can openly talk about their experience and benefits in the public domain.

Cloud Talk

Cloud computing and Private PaaS come into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Being able to make changes in the moment and have the agility to adjust to problems as they occur is why there shouldn’t just be conversations around cloud and Private PaaS, but also corporations trying to incorporate it into their business plan.

To give an example of how the private cloud can help improve a business, QUALCOMM recently said that they “Lowered Capital Costs by 50%,” reduced infrastructure requirements by optimizing the use of resources and eliminated the need for redundant systems to support high availability and disaster recovery requirements. Conversations about the cloud are not just for talk because companies can really benefit from what it has to offer.

Cloud Immaturity

Before that hard nose salesman comes to your office and starts to iterate over the 100-slide presentation, ask the hard questions up front: Which customers have improved their IT department? What benefits can you get out of it? Can you share with me their experiences using the technology? Questions like these will position a company in the right place to make a decision, and it will put the cloud in the right context for people to understand its importance and value.

Cloud computing especially Private PaaS is maturing, so we need to have a mature discussion. IT departments can finally join their line of business colleagues in realizing the benefits of cloud computing in their organization with the Private PasS.

Click here for more information on how to walk away with actionable strategies for your own organization.

Key to Better Cloud Development is More Communication

Steve Leung — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:03:51 +0000

We recently hosted a thought-provoking discussion about continuous delivery for DevOps with author Gene Kim; Senior Director of Engineering, John Skovron; and Tooling Chief Architect with HP, Steven Witkop.

Companies need this kind of collaboration and coming together in their IT departments so development and operations teams can make processes more efficient. Everyone thinks they have the answers, but it takes balance and listening to different viewpoints to make DevOps a great solution that will add value to an organization.

Ops is a constraint

When it comes to starting an IT project, there can be some large roadblocks to development and constraints to the value stream. People often think any improvement not made at the constraint is an illusion — not an actual solution to the problem. If a company fixes something before the constraint, they only create more work piled up before the actual constraint. If something is fixed after the constraint, the company will be starved for work.

Despite the misconceptions, according to Gene Kim, what actually impedes flow is operations. Often times, organizations have to wait months for test environments and because of distractions and delays, people test on year-old environments. This completely goes against the initial reasons for testing. The most powerful capability of DevOps is having the ability to enable environment testing when someone needs it. After that, it becomes easy to go into development, but making environments available when they are needed is essential to overcome constraints.

There’s a Need for PaaS

There are many problems a company might face, but when it comes to IT, organizations need to move in a better direction. As John Skovron stated, if deployment time is longer than deployment, if operations bottleneck, or if a company is restrained by manual processes, then they need to consider Platform as a Service (PaaS). Getting pressure from people high up in the organization means people should start reevaluating processes and methods. Sometimes it takes a little outside pressure for people to take action, but that also means overcoming roadblocks. Whoever or whatever is in the way of progress, it needs to be identified. If development, operations, or both are in the way, then having PaaS as an option enables companies to make needed changes.

If you missed the Google+ Hangout, but would still like to hear part of the conversation, you can hear it here.

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

Ian Gotts — Sun, 12 May 2013 12:03:42 +0000

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.

I probably have earned as many miles as her collectively and had 100,000s expire. But I am only Silver on British Airways, Silver on Virgin and nothing on United. And this is a flawed strategy on my part. Years of choosing based on price and route rather than being single-mindedly loyal has hurt me significantly.

Perhaps if they all merged, I would be able to consolidate my miles. However, there is more chance of me getting my own jet than Virgin merging with British Airways!

Let me use my miles. Reward me

A case in point is a recent flight from Washington DC to London. I was in Premium Economy on an overnight flight with a busy day ahead of me when I landed. I have a load of miles I would have happily traded for an upgrade and a flat bed. I even had the right class of seat that could be upgraded, but the only Business Class seats that were eligible for miles were booked by tourists probably 6 months earlier. I defy anyone to book a flight using miles less than 6 months ahead of the flight. But my work schedule does not allow me that level of planning. The few miles-related seats go instantly. British Airways is not alone in this either.

Back to my Washington DC – Heathrow flight. How galling was it to walk through Business Class and discover it was half empty. A truly proactive loyalty program would have offered me an upgrade which would have achieved 3 things:

used up my balance of miles without costing British Airways anything, as the seats were empty and once the plane took off would never be full
given me a taste of Business Class potentially getting me to upgrade with money next time
made me feel that the British Airways loyalty program was working for me, encouraging me to spend more time on British Airways

Instead, it was a negative experience full of wasted opportunity.

The technology is available to generate proactive decisions either at check-in or during boarding, but it seems that airline program has not moved on in the last 20 years. While all around them retailers have embraced gamification and created innovative programs which make the airlines look even more like luddites.

The future, now: The North Face

Look no further than The North Face, where the VIPeak program rewrites the way customers are engaged around their passions and not just their purchases. The North Face knew that staying competitive in the tough world of retailing required a new look at the customer and what creates a more enjoyable and meaningful experience. This was ultimately the only way to create a greater lifetime customer value for the brand.

As consumers experience programs like that of The North Face, the novelty of simply earning points based on purchases goes away. New and innovative programs are opening the customers’ eyes and setting new expectations. Loyalty is the new field of competition.

This means loyalty has become something much more dynamic than in the past. It has to evolve with the consumer and the competition. It stops being a hard-coded application, implemented and changed with teams of technology people, and becomes a platform that faces the business—flexible, nimble and cloud-based.

People, process, technology

Reinventing loyalty means more than a clever program. It requires changes to virtually all customer-facing processes and also some back-office processes. This also means many people in the organization will have their jobs tweaked or dramatically changed. Suprisingly, the easy bit is the technology. There are applications focused on loyalty such as Loyalty Lab which was recently acquired by TIBCO.

As part of that acquisition, TIBCO gained a team of consultants who have lived and breathed loyalty for years. If you want to gain insights into the changing world of loyalty, they have recorded a webinar called Customer Loyalty Management: Marrying the Art and Science of Loyalty. http://forms.loyaltylab.com/webinar_clm_access to listen to the recording.

Practical ideas

I have promised to give some practical ideas in my articles rather than just rant. Some of the benefits of the higher tiers of airline programs are when you are on the ground, but make a difference to your experience in the air: priority booking seats, buying seats with leg room, using the airport lounge, using the fast track security and immigration channel. I would happily use my miles to buy an upgrade from Red/Blue to Silver or Gold. The cost, or lost revenue, to the airline is minimal. It is easy to implement. And it will drive up loyalty – which is what the loyalty program is meant to do. There is a clue in the name.

Finally, a master class in loyalty from Ferrari

Ferrari has just released their latest supercar, the oddly named LaFerrari, at the Geneva motorshow. It is an arms race between them, Maclaren, Porsche and Lamborghini. LaFerrari has 963 bhp, approximately 4 times the power of your Golf GTi . But forget the stupid performance statistics. Instead ,lets examine the inspired sales strategy. There are some clever loyalty principles at play when you understand their strategy.

At a price of 1 mllion Euros and only 499 available it guarantees exclusivity and drives up demand. 350 have already been bought. But to buy one you have to have at least 5 Ferraris in your garage at the moment which means it is only being sold to collectors, not speculators, so there won’t be used models or pre-ordered cars hitting the second-hand market which hurts brand reputation. Inspired.

The Mobile Uprising is Anything But a Fad

Sukki Sandhar — Sat, 11 May 2013 12:03:37 +0000

Everything is changing in how companies must manage business operations in the context of the rise of mobile. The growth of mobility through demand from consumers themselves was one of those revolutions that never could have been predicted. It took 100 years to have a billion landlines, yet it only took 10 years to have a billion mobile phones, and it was only one year before we had one billion smart phones and smart devices used around the world.

Put Down Your Pitchforks

Teams within companies, departments, businesses, and whole industries cannot and should not try to control how people want to consume their services, whether it be executing live trades to buying an upgrade on an airline ticket. This has been a consumer-driven revolution or otherwise termed: the “Consumerization of IT.”

One of the critical ingredients to riding the wave of mobile user service consumption is to package and expose every customer service, as well as all of the data and information held by businesses. Exposure, of course, has to be controlled, policed, and secure, but regardless of where the service lies in an organization, it has to be wrapped-up nicely and reusable.

Find the Hidden Treasure

Before anyone starts to grab their muskets and jump into the revolution without a clear direction, companies have to know that the battle is not that difficult to win. All the value already exists in businesses and is available to them if they use mobility effectively and smartly. Companies just need to harness what is currently available there, as this is not a new feature, function or capability. Incorporating and taking advantage of mobility is about unshackling and re-using what is already there in inventive ways to stay ahead of the competition.

Many new and innovative ways of doing business will no doubt come over the next few years. There will for sure be many different devices as we have already embarked on wearable technology with Google Glass, so it is no time before there are smart watches and smart shoes. Each new device will make it easier to use the services when we need them at the time we need to use them, but we have to make sure they are de-coupled, split-up into consumable modules and exposed to the wider world.

For more on how to unlock the potential value of mobility with your business, watch this webinar featuring Forrester Research Senior Analyst Michael Facemire.