Posts

Showing posts from January, 2013

Mobile Devices, Management Structures and SMAC, Part 4

Image
Today Blackberry announced their new Blackberry 10 platform.  It sounds very interesting as it integrates social networking, enterprise security, dual personas, and more.  Here is an excerpt from an article written by Steve Costello, "At the heart of the new OS is the BlackBerry Hub, an integrated contacts and social networking app with support for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.   Messages and updates can be read and posted without the need to leave BlackBerry Hub, and contact information can be viewed regardless of the app in which it is stored." In a series of articles that I have written this week titled Mobile Devices, Management Structures and SMAC , I have shared my views that the SMAC stack (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) is a combination of technologies that as a combined foursome are transforming the world of business today.  You can download and read a great whitepaper on this subject here .  This announcement by Blackberry further solidifies my views.  M

The Pitfalls of Real-Time Mobile Commerce

Image
Today I bought my wife an iPad mini.  It was to be a surprise.  On an alleged trip to the grocery store, I instead drove to the Apple store at the mall.  I ran into the store, gave the specifications that I wanted, the bearded Apple sales guy swiped my credit card with his wireless iTouch, and handed me the iPad mini.  I thanked him and ran out to my car with the present. Moments later as I was leaving the mall parking lot my wife called.  She had just received an email, on her iPhone, with the receipt from the Apple store attached.  Hummm... I hadn't thought of that.  Seems we have a business account at the Apple store with her email address associated with it. Real-time mobile commerce removes friction from the business process.  Sometimes, however, a little friction is good. The geostrategists Paul Virilio studied Dromology - the science of speed.  He particularly studied the impact of speed on societies, processes, culture and people.  Today Apple's speed impacted m

Mobile Devices, Management Structures and SMAC, Part 3

Image
I just finished a book titled Social Business By Design by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim.  I recommend this book to anyone interested in the impact SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) is going to have on your industry, market and company.  Mobile devices have empowered social networking platforms for both consumers and the enterprise.  The SMAC stack is shaking up retailing, banking, healthcare, media, government, insurance, etc.  Industries that are primarily about information will experience the biggest initial impacts of this transformation. Figure 1. One of the insights I gained from this book is the impact social enterprise collaboration tools and internal social networking platforms can have on management structures.  In Figure 1, a typical hierarchical organizational chart is depicted.  Ideas and innovations that come from the people at the bottom of the chart, where most people are, have a great deal of trouble moving up and it can take a long time to move up.  A

Mobile Devices, Management Structures and SMAC, Part 2

Image
Last week a gentleman called asking my advice on mobile CRMs.  We discussed the size of his company and the specifics of his needs, but then he said something that was profound.  He said, "I don't think I need to collect and update a lot of contact information in the CRM these days, because it is all available online on social networking sites."  It is true!  I can track down just about anyone in seconds on my iPhone. Today, if someone gets a promotion or changes job status, we can see that instantly on LinkedIn.  We can stay connected no matter if his work phone number and email changes.  The social and mobile CRM is upon us. I was reading an Aberdeen report this week on SoMoCo (social, mobile, cloud) trends.  Here are the reasons companies said they are embracing the social CRM in particular: Converse with customers on channels preferred by them (66%) Provide information to groups of customers (54%) Monitor customer sentiment (47%) Collect customer feedback w

Mobile Devices, Management Structures and SMAC, Part 1

Image
One of the best whitepapers I have read in a long time is, Don't Get SMACked - How Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud are Reshaping the Enterprise .   What I particularly like about this paper is its courage in predicting the future and exposing trends that most people may not yet be tracking.  I am a mobile guy, and mobility is deeply integrated into all aspects of SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud).  Without mobility, many of the trends identified in this paper simply would not be happening. Here is an excerpt, "The vast majority of Global 2000 companies currently manage through a command-and-control hierarchy.  However, millenials prefer to work in heterarchies instead of hierarchies.  What is a heterarch or "wirearchy" as it is also called? It is a dynamic network of connected nodes (most often connected via mobile devices) without predefined priorities or ranks." ~ Don't Get SMACked , Future of Work, Cognizant, November 2012 If you work i

Mobility, Location, Speed and Refugees

Image
In today's world of fast paced project management, simply knowing a location on a map where something is supposed to happen is not good enough - we need to know a location-in-time, what is happening there (status), and who or what (resources) are present there and how this information is going to impact future plans.  This information is particularly important when you are managing projects, with time constraints, and organizing events and meetings across a wide geographical area. The key planning concept here is - location at a point-in-time.  If I ask, where was the bus located on the route? You would likely respond, "At what time?"  The same response could be used for the question, "Where will the bus be?"  Time and location are necessary for planning current and future events and activities. This week my family is experiencing and struggling with location and time.  Several families from our church have adopted a refugee family from the Congo and are hel

Soti, Enterprise Mobility and the Changing World of MDM

Image
I had the opportunity to be briefed by the MDM  (mobile device management) vendor Soti a couple of weeks ago.  The briefing gave me a glimpse into the changes happening in this space.  In days gone by when the mobility projects I was involved in were all about rugged handhelds and bar code scanners, MDM vendors like Soti were critical, not so much for mobile security, but for their ability to help debug mobile device problems in the field. In 2006 nearly all enterprise mobility apps were custom.  Every app deployment was complex and time consuming.  MDM vendors like Soti provided the remote access and monitoring of mobile devices that app developers needed to understand bugs.  Mobile devices had so little memory that running out of memory was a common problem.  In order to solve this problem, either the user would need to bring in the device, or software from companies like Soti would allow you to remotely access, control and debug the device.  This enabled the helpdesk to discove

Business Transformation Involving Mobile and Social Technologies

Image
Over the last few weeks I had a chance to read a number of interesting books and articles on transformative trends and technologies and wanted to share some of my notes.  I hope you find them useful and interesting as well. Mobile and Social Transforming Power Structures By 2010, 70 percent of all information generated every year in the world came from e-mails, online videos, and the World Wide Web. This dramatic change in the linked technologies of computing and communications is changing the nature of government and accelerating a diffusion of power.  ~ The Future of Power by Joseph Nye World politics is no longer the sole province of governments thanks to social media and mobile technologies. The real challenge is acting strategically enough to matter. ~ Social Business By Design As Facebook and Twitter become as central to workplace conversation as the company cafeteria, federal regulators are ordering employers to scale back policies that limit what

Mobile and Social Businesses are Changing Management

Image
In the picture to the right, would it really matter if you took one small step to the left or right, or even one step back?  Probably not.  You are squashed either way.  I found this quote in the book Social Business by Design , "The real challenge is acting strategically enough to matter." ~ Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim. That quote resonates with me.  I don't think many companies have yet to understand the enormity of change happening in our society right now.  Aberdeen Group calls it SoMoCo (social, mobile, cloud), Gartner calls it the "Nexus of Forces" (social, mobile, information and cloud), Cognizant calls it SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud).  The combination of these forces, all on your smartphone and tablet, are transforming entire industries and markets. I speak with companies on a regularly basis that have mobility strategies that look like this: Pilot mobile CRM apps Pilot mobile HR apps Pilot mobile BI reports for managers The

The Role of a Mobile Strategist

Image
Tomorrow, Wednesday January 16 at 2 PM EST, I will be discussing " 9 Reasons Every Business Needs a Mobile Strategist " on a live webinar with Jim Somers, Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer, with Antenna Software.  This is an interesting topic to me as nearly every executive team I meet is struggling with the development of a mobile strategy. I think the reason developing a mobile strategy is so difficult may be related to this excerpt I came across recently in the book Social Business By Design , " The real challenge is to act strategically enough to matter. "  Mobility matters, it really, really matters and this means uncomfortable change.  Let's think about this excerpt together, " The real challenge is to act strategically enough to matter. "  What does that mean to you?  I think about companies just slowly dipping their toe in the water of mobility and supporting simple HR apps on smartphones.  Is that strategic enough to matter? In the NFL

Mobile Strategies - Time, Place and Waste

Image
Wasted Food The economist, philosopher and theorist of markets Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) wrote, "The knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place - To know of and put to use a machine not fully employed, or somebody's skill which could be better utilized, or to be aware of a surplus stock which can be drawn upon during an interruption of supplies, is socially quite as useful as the knowledge of better alternative techniques." I love the way Hayek describes the value related to "the knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place," as being "socially useful."  It is also very useful for businesses and can deliver competitive advantages!  I, of course, read this as a call for mobile strategies, mobile technologies and location-based services to support the real-time exchange of information, even though Hayek may not have lived long enough to have used them himself. Hayek goes on to write, "And the

Aberdeen Group, SAP and Mobile, Social and Cloud

Image
" Over the previous 12-24 months the silos of social, mobile and cloud gradually began to overlap and converge with the use of cloud-enabled social technologies, or cloud-based mobility allowing enterprise workers to connect with one another across secure networks via their mobile devices. " ~  Service Organizations and SoMoClo  report, Aberdeen Group Over the past 12 weeks I have met with nearly 20 large companies across Asia, North America and Europe on the subject of mobile strategies.  In all cases social and analytics were also brought into the discussion.  I agree with Aberdeen Group's findings and their belief that SoMoClo (social, mobile and cloud) are converging technologies.  Here is another excerpt from Aberdeen Group's report, " the three disruptive technologies [social, mobile, cloud] act as a unified construct: cloud is the core, mobility its edge, and social the connection through the cloud between mobile endpoints. " Gartner expands thi

Twitter, Smartphones, TV and Real-Time Feedback

Image
There was an interesting article by John Letzing in the The Wall Street Journal on December 18, 2012, titled Twitter Creates New TV Metric.  It was about a new partnership between Twitter and the TV ratings giant Nielsen Co.  Apparently, Twitter becomes very active around different TV shows and Nielsen wants to be able to monitor and report on this activity. Letzing writes that the joint service called, Nielsen Twitter TV Rating, will develop a metric based on Twitter activity.  These days, TV viewers increasingly have one hand on the remote and the other on their smartphone tweeting.  The new service will gauge "the reach of the TV conversation on Twitter," and provide "TV networks and advertisers the real-time metrics required to understand TV audience social activity." This is a fascinating development to me.  It is a real-time-virtual-meets-human-meets-virtual-meets-bigdata (#VMHMVMBD) solution.  My apologies for the acronym.  It just seemed like a requireme

Measuring the Value of Social and Mobile Solutions in the Enterprise

Image
"The impact of new technologies is invariably misjudged because we measure the future with yardsticks from the past."   Stephen Baker How does one measure the value of mobilizing and socializing an enterprise?  In the book Social Business by Design: Transformative Social Media Strategies , written by Dion Hinchcliffe and Peter Kim, they report that in 2010, McKinsey and Company published survey results of companies engaged in social business activities that  showed firms engaged systematically in social business processes had 24 percent higher revenue.  Frost and Sullivan found similar results showing companies that deployed social tools saw improved performance in innovation (68 percent versus 39 percent that didn’t deploy), sales growth (76 percent versus 50 percent that didn’t deploy), and profit growth (71 percent versus 45 percent that didn’t deploy).  From those results it appears something good happens to companies when they embrace the social business