As Forces Collide, IT Disruption (and Content) Will Soar

Forces are colliding to make 2016 an interesting year for those trying to manage information with technology that touches end users. The traditional IT role, as we know it, is undergoing disruption. As I survey the macro trends impacting Enterprise ContentManagement (ECM) and cloud, I am ready to bet that radical change will be the IT norm next year and in the foreseeable future. Based on my years in enterprise IT and my on-going customer interactions, I thought I’d share my own thoughts about the coming year ahead and the sea of change that will be fast upon us, at least the way I see it.

My first prediction?

Power to the People

We are experiencing a major shift in who has control over application choice, and that control will readily land with end users, placing the heaviest pressure yet on internal IT departments. We are seeing a rapid wave of change that won’t stop anytime soon, arming end users with even more choices in tools they can procure—and procure them they will.

With the advent of IoT and exponential growth of practically everything internet-related, end users are becoming more and more empowered. They curate their own content, self-publish in multiple content formats including unstructured data (e.g. images and videos), and consume from their device of choice (or multiple devices simultaneously).

Shadow IT already has savvy end users self-selecting the IT tools and apps they want, even in the workplace. Further abandonment of sanctioned in-house tools will leave IT seriously rethinking how to change their ways and live up to the new user expectations.

In the ECM space, success will be measured by how many end users are productive and empowered, not by “go-live” milestones. The need for content management will continue to soar, just like content volume itself and the number of individuals creating it.

Software in Slivers

This leads to my second prediction – a shift in how software is designed, both to speed up functionality to these empowered end users, and to provide more technical flexibility. Business requirements from technology will continue to ebb and tide as companies keep up with the rapidly changing dynamics and stay one step ahead. Agility and flexibility will be pushed ahead of other requirements.

These business demands will force IT to rethink their standards on application development and how they leverage software to deliver specific solutions for groups of users. A “Lego” approach will become that standard, allowing for even more rapid development on top of existing software development frameworks currently in place. The list of approaches is also growing — agile, waterfall, iterative, scrum, etc.. Slivers of software functionality, widget-like, coupled with discrete services will be snapped together to deliver specific solutions for groups of users.

These purpose-built blocks in the ECM world will deliver individual capabilities, such as “capture” or “esignatures”. Snapped together, these blocks will quickly deliver a full, rich solution like claims processing, for example. Less and less will vendors design monolithic code sets packed with comprehensive functionality, but instead offer a plethora of blocks that IT organizations can pick and choose from, resulting in a well-tailored solution.

The open source movement originally ushered in the building block model for software development. Moving forward, more of the industry will turn to the speed and nimbleness that these use case-driven development models can offer. It won’t be overnight – there is too much investment in existing IT infrastructure. But just as the IT role will look vastly different in the future, so too will the software IT needs to service end users.

Hybrid Cloud Front and Center

What will happen quickly and take off is the shift to cloud, and more specifically, hybrid cloud in the ECM space. That’s my third and last prediction (at least for this blog!).

IDC already predicts that half of IT spend will go to cloud infrastructure and cloud-based solutions in just a few years. The appeal of hybrid will fill the mix and match approach many businesses need. For example, highly regulated industries may place certain functionality in a private cloud on premise, while other functionalities sourced from a public cloud, and still, other functionalities may continue to reside in traditional on premise environments.

In my experience, every customer has a unique situation, set of users, and specific use case. There is no right or wrong cloud answer — they need cloud options to suit their IT requirements placed on them by quick changing business demands. Hybrid cloud will deliver the flexibility to create environments that fit and meet their needs. Companies will master their cloud formulas and hybrid cloud will become front and center.

It’s obvious the IT world has started to change dramatically. More upheaval is still yet to come, but those who foresee the shift will move quickly to develop new skills and innovate, to deliver to new demands.

SOURCE: EMC SPARK

How Bad Data Management Kills Revenue

I'm not one to normally publicly gripe on a vendor, but a recent customer experience with an online purchase is a great example of why organizations can't ignore data management investments.

I have been a regular user of a note-taking app for several years. All my discussions with clients, vendors, and even notes from conferences wind up here. I put in pictures, screen shots, upload presentations, and capture web pages. So it isn't a surprise that this note-taking vendor wants to move me up into a premium version. And for $50 a year, it's not a big deal for me to do even if it just means I'm paying for more space rather than using all the features in the premium package.

So, this morning, I click the upgrade button and voila! My order is taken and shows up in my iTunes account order history.

As this app is web-, desktop-, and device-based and the vendor is born out of the app age, the expectation is that my account status should just automatically convert. I mean, every other business app I have does this. Why shouldn't this one?

As it turns out, my purchased premium service is nowhere to be found. To get immediate support, as only offered in premium service, you need to be able to log in as a premium customer. So instead of an easy and quick fix, I spend over an hour trying to get answers through a support site that shows the issue but an answer that doesn't work. I also see that this is an issue going back for over a year. I try entering in my issue through "contact us" only to find that I get routed back to the support forum and can't even log a ticket. I find an obscure post where the vendor's Twitter handle for support is listed and fire off a frustrated tweet (which goes out to my followers as well, which I'm assuming is not something this vendor would prefer).

So let's break down the data management issue:

1) Data from the purchase fails to trigger the appropriate setting updates.

2) Data (communications) can't be collected from challenged customers.

3) Data (information) is not available in the support forum.

4) Data to create a support ticket for a new premium customer is caught outside the paywall.

5) Dissatisfaction data is broadcast across the Twittersphere due to lack of capture and poor support processes.

Let's put this into revenue terms.

In the first 60 minutes, $50 per user is in jeopardy. Let's assume that there are 750K converters, 25% experience issues, and that 30% of those are individual account holders (noncorporate accounts). That equates to 56,250 high-abandonment users (and premium users at that) representing about $2.8M in potential revenue loss.

Put this in the context of a new revenue stream that in the past year generated about $10M (impressive), and you realize how much more impressive this could have been. Also, take into account the negative force of user frustration that could even lead to switching, and what are you doing to continued revenue growth?

Great products get you into the market. Execution is what makes and breaks success. Bad customer experience due to data management failures can be the hidden poison pill in your operations.

SOURCE: Forrester

TechnoVision 2016 - Process Is The New App

The next-generation of Business Process Management and Business Rules Management Tools is so powerful that it actually can be seen as the successor to custom-built applications. Being able to define detailed process flows and decision trees enables both business and IT to create powerful, differentiating solutions that would have required extensive custom coding in the past. Now, much of the definition can be done on the fly, using visual models and (semi) natural language in the nearest proximity to the business.

Process On The Fly #2 – Process Is The New App

inside-out of the enterprise (i.e improving the agility for their knowledge users), and from theoutside-in for improving the customers experience across multiples channels.  

Inside-out Over the years, ERP systems have been extensively customized to address organization-specific requirements. This arguably leads to tailored support for the business in a siloed manner, but at the same time, involves mounting costs for maintenance, high dependency on the personnel involved in the customization, long timelines to deliver change, and increased risks in upgrading the ERP system. The situation is certainly not better with bespoke software — often based on complex or aged programming languages — which makes it all the more difficult to maintain or extend the code. So the way the enterprise address their customers/partner demands is costly and not efficient.  

Outside-in In the current situation most communication with customers and business partners is done in the old-fashioned way of phone, email, externalised websites and sometimes still even with fax. Externalised websites deliver the closest to what is required for digital interaction, but acts more on an atomic one-way communication channel, a customer orders a product, raises a complaint or requests a quote. On a more sophisticated Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) level, such as approval flows, quote discussions, product complaints interactions a more direct interaction with the business partner or customer is required. In the digital space – customers and business partners want to engage seamlessly thru any channels and expected a personalized response.  

The process application in the cloud  The best of both worlds can be created by bringing back the business functionality to out-of-the-box usage of the ERP system (or simply leave the custom code alone, in the case of bespoke software) and at the same time introducing a high level of agility, by means of externalized ‘process apps’. All without customization or coding. The ERP system is used as originally intended and designed, resulting in more predictable behavior of the system related to usage and performance, maintained in a more standardized and cost-effective way. The process app externalizes the needed functionality into highly customizable solutions outside the core applications. They’re supported by rules engines and task inboxes and can be delivered to different channels, including — notably — mobile devices.  

Platform as a Service (PaaS) cloud applications enable flexibility on top of the application landscape while minimizing the effort required by IT. PaaS application support business functionality such as process execution, integration, mobility and business data/intelligence. With PaaS we are now able to weave business partner communications into the company internal application landscape. Proces Cloud apps, such as the Oracle Process Cloud, are part of a PaaS solution that interact on the one end as an interaction channel with customers and business partners and on the other end as a proxy to all internal applications. The communication between the PaaS solution and the internal systems is based upon a fixed integration channel that is both well secured and ensures that on the one end the required performance is provided for the interaction and on the other end is not disrupting the internal application landscape.  

Expert: Leon Smiers 

SOURCE: content-loop

If you thought you could count Oracle out of the cloud-first world, you best think again.

Larry Ellison, the legendary founder of the world’s second largest software maker, isn’t talking about keeping his head above water at his company’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) event at the Oracle Conference Center on Oracle Parkway in Redwood Shores, Calif. (couldn’t he change the town’s name?).

“We are now able to call our cloud apps and platform technologies 'complete,'” he said.

And “complete” is a pretty dense word in Ellison-speak.

In this case it means that Oracle’s public cloud will host Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions ranging from data services to app dev services, analytics services, integration, content and collaboration services, compute and storage services …

There’s also a new suite of 24 enterprise applications that are available via SaaS and geared toward giving the likes of Salesforce and Workday a run for the money. 

SAP, Microsoft and Adobe should be forewarned as well, though Ellison questioned their cloud appeal.

Amazon, Azure, Google and anyone who wants to host applications or platforms in the cloud might want to throw in the white towel and utter “it was good while it lasted.” Ellison has a plan to dull their appeal too.

'Cozy and Covered'

This announcement speaks to two things, according to analyst Tim Crawford. “Enterprise comfort and a suites of apps,” he said.

To CIOs and business process owners, that translates to “You don’t have to leave Oracle to get the benefits of the cloud. We’ve got you cozy and covered.”

This news comes perhaps a little late, but still at a good time because some enterprises have had trouble moving their OLTP applications skyward.

If Oracle can deliver on its promise, it has solved that problem and then some. “We're the only ones who can move from on premise data processing and cloud data processing" using the same technology, Ellison said

“This is a big deal. This is big," he went on explaining that Oracle Cloud SaaS and PaaS are 100 percent compatible. "You can go both ways," he said … something that can’t happen with Amazon.

But capability isn’t the only place where Ellison is willing to go toe-to-toe. "We will compete against Amazon on price," he said.

Where archiving is concerned, Oracle’s services were built to melt Amazon’s Glacier. They’re 10x cheaper to use. EMC and Microsoft’s are comparatively more expensive, too. Not only that, but Ellison also insisted that “we’re high quality, safe, reliable," suggesting that the competition is not.

Big data and analytics couldn’t be left out of the announcement, of course.

Ellison’s deputy Thomas Kurian introduced a Data Discovery Cloud Service, which promises that business users can look at data in Hadoop through a visual, intuitive UI. We’ve heard this from other vendors. It will be interesting to see if Oracle’s plays out differently.

Someone could have asked Ellison the question, of course, but he virtually dropped the mike and walked off stage.

This is Larry’s world, mind you. Today he put the competition on notice, in case they forgot.

SOURCE: CMSWiRE

The Road Half-Traveled: Attaining Mobile Success

"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost describes the conundrum of choosing between two paths. And while literary experts argue that it wasn't Frost's point at all, the poem is commonly used to reinforce the idea that there is merit in taking the harder, less-traveled option. 

It’s worth a read whenever you’re struggling with a tough project. Many companies would consider enterprise mobility one of those tough projects.

But looking at a lot of enterprises today, they seem to be declaring mobile success when they're only halfway down the road. They haven’t chosen one path or another — they’ve simply reached the fork in the road and said, “That’s far enough.”

Understanding Leads the Way

To understand how this can happen, let’s take a couple of steps down memory lane. 

Before the era of the iPhone, BlackBerry was the dominant enterprise mobile solution. Executives and sales people got used to the idea of having email and calendar available on a mobile device. 

In many organizations, these same two groups were the first users of iPhones and iPads. Suddenly, IT departments faced the challenge of providing secure access to email and calendars on consumer devices.

This, in turn, created an entire market for Mobile Device Management (MDM) and the follow-on technologies. For many companies, implementing MDM required significant effort. Correspondingly, a fairly significant number of enterprises seem to have reached this point along the mobility road and stopped to catch their breath.

Based on many conversations with prospects, customers and analysts, the image below gives a graphical view of this half-traveled road.

Some companies really haven’t even started the journey. 

They forbid mobile device use for business, typically because of security concerns. It’s quite rare to encounter such companies, but some still exist. 

By far, the biggest portion of the market is at the stage where email and calendar have been enabled but nothing beyond this is supported. This includes both companies that have stayed with BlackBerry devices and those companies that have made some kind of MDM investment to allow email and calendar on Android, iOS and Microsoft mobile devices.

A growing percentage of companies have moved beyond the email and calendar stage to allow employees to install the standard vendor-built apps for the enterprise software used in those companies, including clients for things like file sharing, social, CRM and HR platforms. 

In many of these cases, businesses have implemented MAM (Mobile Application Management) platforms to provide a certain amount of control and security around these apps. This, in turn, takes an investment of effort and explains why the graph drops even further at the next stage.

And That Has Made All the Difference

The custom app development stage is really where the fork in the road occurs. It’s at this point that companies must decide what technologies to use, what skills to develop, and what problems to solve. Some paths are easier than others. 

In many cases, taking the harder path results in valuable lessons being learned, but also large amounts of time and money being expended. This explains the continued reduction in the number of companies that pursue the journey to the point where they need many custom apps to solve problems for their users — and don’t know where to turn for help.

The specific percentages may vary by industry and geography, but the journey has been very similar for most enterprises. 

Today, however, many are looking for ways to get down the road faster. In some cases, the move to custom apps happens in parallel with or even ahead of the other steps.

But no matter which path is taken, one thing is clear: Email and calendars do not define the successful end of an enterprise mobility journey. To achieve real success, enterprises cannot stop at the fork in the road.

SOURCE: CMSWire

Will Generation M usher in wearables in the workplace?

In part one of this blog post, Gartner analyst and mobile expert Ken Dulaney discussed why the label Generation Mobile is unnecessary and whether he believes U.S. mobile workers indeed feel guilty for mixing work and personal activities. Read part two to get his opinion on wearables in the workplace and whether the emergence of Gen M calls for new mobility-focused policies.

One of the major findings from a study conducted by mobile security provider MobileIron, which surveyed 3,500 full- and part-time professionals across six countries (including the U.S.), is that there is a new sub-demographic of mobile workers the company is calling Generation Mobile (Gen M) — a group that’s increasingly reliant on mobile for both work and play, and made up of men ages 18 to 24 and parents of children ages 18 and under.

Another interesting finding the report highlighted: A good chunk of Gen M (42%) plan to or already own a wearable device such as an Apple Watch; furthermore, 95% of that group plan to use wearables for work tasks, which include taking phone calls (58%), reading and writing emails (56% and 45%, respectively), and getting alerts such as meeting reminders (44%).

Dulaney thinks that wearables, like mobile devices, have the potential to further expand mobile workers’ connectedness. However, for wearables to gain traction in the workplace, wearable device manufacturers must overcome the current inconvenience of these devices needing to be tethered to smartphones so they can function independently through communications networks.

Source: Wikimedia

“Once we see medical [wearable] devices that communicate directly with medical services, we will see results,” he wrote in an email.

The MobileIron study also found that the rise of the Gen M demographic, many of whom reported feeling guilty when doing personal activities during work hours and vice versa, requires companies to create new policies that support Gen M’s new work style “without guilt and with high standards of quality and fairness.”

The study offered the following principles on which to base Gen M-catered policies:

• Accept shifting working styles and understand employees’ actions in detail
• Establish clear goals with employees
• Set top-down boundaries (e.g., CEO should set an example by not sending work emails at 2 a.m.)
• Offer reimbursement stipends for personal mobile technology
• Secure data selectively

While he didn’t exactly disagree with these policies (in part one, he urged companies to embrace BYOA to promote employee satisfaction and innovation), Dulaney warned about the legal problems that could arise from offering stipends for personal devices (although he granted reimbursing for phone services and plans is OK).

“If the phone is owned partially by the employer and the employee gets in trouble on the weekend using that phone, then it’s the employer who gets sued,” he said. He compared the situation to companies paying employees for mileage traveled, but not for the vehicles themselves.

SOURCE: Techtarget

Generation Mobile: A new breed of workers or unnecessary label?

Perhaps more than how seemingly clueless they are toward politics and economics, Millennials are often characterized by how much they live on their smartphones. What’s more, a growing number of Millennials and the general population are increasingly mixing work and play on smartphones and other mobile devices — at a rate that’s, arguably, enough to warrant shining the spotlight on them as a new, emerging demographic, called Generation Mobile, or Generation M.

MobileIron, a mobile device management provider, surveyed 3,400 full- and part-time professionals in six countries, including the U.S., who use a mobile device for work, and discovered that the group it calls Generation M is best represented by men ages 18 to 34 and people with children ages 18 and under in their households. The study found that this demographic is more reliant on mobile technology in general to mix their work and personal activities: For example, 60% of Gen M check or send personal emails at least once a day during work hours, and 51% check or send work emails at least once a day during personal hours.

Source: Wikimedia

The study further found that 42% of Gen M plan to either own or buy a wearable device such as the Apple Watch, and the overwhelming majority of that group (95%) plan to use it for work as well as personal tasks.

Why is it so important to home in on Gen M’s mobile habits, and more particularly their attitude toward wearables? Because, said Bob Tinker, MobileIron’s CEO, the new devices “will increase our connectedness and, possibly, our guilt about mixing our work and personal lives.” The MobileIron survey found that 58% of Gen M workers suffer from “mobile guilt” when receiving personal messages during work hours (compared with 46% of non-Gen M workers); moreover, 61% of Gen M workers feel guilty when receiving work communication during personal hours (compared with 47% of non-Gen M workers).

But one mobile expert, Ken Dulaney, begs to differ — first on whether the label Generation M itself is necessary.

Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner, said it’s hard to argue the obvious – Millennials are already a mobile generation. “Sure, they are mobile. … Many of them were given phones at age 7 or so,” he wrote in an email. But, he added, this group also has varying tastes when it comes to art, fashion, music, movies and more — just like any generation before the Millennials. “Aligning them with one aspect of culture doesn’t mean that much to me,” he said. “You could just as easily brand them the ‘Old Navy generation.'”

Second, Dulaney said it’s hardly surprising that a large proportion of Gen M uses their devices for work. “We bring who we are to work,” he said. What isnoteworthy about consumerization in the enterprise, he added, is how unprepared the IT department was and how “it took them a number of years” to accommodate both enterprise and consumer needs. “Hopefully, future changes won’t be so cathartic,” he said.

How about the guilt MobileIron measured among mobile workers?

Not a thing, at least not in the U.S., according to Dulaney.

“Maybe it’s a European thing, but I don’t see many guilty employees, and use of personal technology does nothing but increase,” he said.

Instead, he said that what enterprises should focus on is how to embrace the bring your own apps phenomenon so that employees remain satisfied and motivated.

SOURCE: TechTarget

Industry Watch: Apps are the key to BPM

Here’s a statement I never thought I’d hear: “In the past, [Business Process Management] has been too much focused on process.”

But that’s exactly how Miguel Valdes Faura, CEO and cofounder of Bonitasoft, views the market today: less talk about process and more about applications. After all, it is applications that use these business processes, and if the apps aren’t engaging, it will be difficult to get folks to use them.

There are three components to applications: business logic, the user interface, and business data. Today’s applications are being built in a faster, more efficient way. But, Valdes Faura noted, “It’s hard to maintain [an app] and make changes” as quickly as business would like. “Let’s say you want to change the process, or add a menu to the UI, or change the business data model, or simply add a field to a form. All of this affects the application. An app is more than a process; it’s the data model and the UI.”

But certain business processes do different things. Some are back-end, like human resources or business administration. Those processes do not need to be changed often. Other processes, though, are connected to customer-facing applications, which introduces new challenges.

“For back-office operations, the focus remains on cost optimization and resource and asset utilization,” explained Comindware’s Maria Kozlova. “For customer-facing business processes, such as lead management, customer request management, customer trouble ticketing and such, the priority is on a consistent customer experience, eliminating data loss or data duplications, enabling multi-channel operations and availability on mobile devices.”

Part of the dynamic, Kozlova said, is in application development. “Back-office operations are normally well defined and do not require constant change. The virtue is stability, compliance and control. In contrast, front-office processes are the core of the competitive advantage. This is where businesses fight over every inch to survive. Such processes are very dynamic and require extremely high flexibility and configurability of the supporting systems.”

Bonitasoft is actually targeting developers with its newest release, Bonita BPM 7, which was made public on June 18. The company is exposing its BPM services as REST services, and it is embracing the new generation of developers with the JavaScript library Angular.

“These developers already get HTML, JavaScript and REST. We want to make it easier for them” to create process-driven applications, said Valdes Faura. The new platform has a tool to build the process, which business analysts would use, and a tool for developers to build the user interface. The platform provides visibility across the whole process, he said.

A drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create processes in the applications, but the platform also gives developers a way to expand their applications by adding their own components, Valdes Faura said.

Comindware’s Kozlova agreed that “The more that can be outsourced to business users for them to configure, run and change, the better. The renowned ‘gap between business and IT’ is a significant showstopper for many businesses and remains so at present.”

The company believes that the work items underlying processes, projects and cases are the same: tasks, documents and discussions. So, Kozlova said, whether your priority is forecasting project completion dates or costs, or routing multiple documents along a loosely defined task flow as in case management, or mandating a fixed sequence of actions for the sake of process visibility and control, the atomic work items are the same. “Having them managed and tracked in separate systems—while they are an integral part of every work management scenario in almost any mid-sized to large business—is disruptive and counter-productive,” she said.

Comindware’s platform is a fully integrated work-management solution that covers projects, processes and cases, and adds social collaboration that enables quick business application building by business users.

So, creating ironclad business processes behind today’s applications can doom businesses to being locked in to those processes, and make them miss opportunities as they arise because they are glued to their processes. As businesses today realize they are digital companies that need to respond quickly to changes in their markets, they need a new approach to creating their projects and processes. Platforms such as those discussed here can provide the agility that allows the business to keep pace with the speed of development and change.

SOURCE: SD Times