Archive for December, 2011

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Tuesday’s Tip: Apply Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs To C-Level Business Strategy

Published on December 27, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs Provides Prioritization Of An Individual’s Needs

In 1943, Abraham Maslow put forward his paper A Theory of Human Motivation. Eleven years later in 1954, Maslow went into detail on his hierarchy of needs in his book titled Motivation and Personality. The framework outlined five needs from the most fundamental or “deficiency needs” at the bottom and ended in Meta motivational needs towards the top (see Figure 1.).  At the highest level – self-actualization, the individual would focus on the needs to better society.

Figure 1. Maslow’s Hierarchy Of Needs

Source: Wikipedia

A Business Hierarchy Of Needs Provides A Model To Prioritize Business Strategy

While Maslow’s research explained what would drive and motivate individuals, applying the model to organizations yields a powerful framework for business prioritization. Why? Today’s next gen C-level executives face an onslaught of business priorities that must address the organization’s basic needs from regulatory compliance to higher level needs that include the management of the brand.  The business hierarchy of needs uses an analogous framework to Maslow’s.  Using the framework, business priorities and related projects can be aligned with the five levels that include (see Figure 2):

  1. Brand. The brand describes a promise to stakeholders. The brand is more than the collection of products or services offered by the company.  The brand encompasses an emotional value, an aspiration, and the public face of a business strategy.  The brand can be viewed as a person, product, organization, and symbol for the company.
  2. Strategic differentiation. Organizations seek strategic differentiation to achieve a desired reputation, create a defensible competitive advantage, and influence preferential behaviors in the value chain.  Tools include positioning strategy, design thinking, and innovation programs.
  3. Revenue growth. Revenue growth reflects the initiatives used to drive new customers, revenues, and market share for the organization.  Revenue growth is also known as top line priorities.
  4. Operational efficiency Operational efficiency priorities focus on reducing costs, improving existing performance, and optimizing existing landscapes.  Operational efficiency is also know as bottom line priorities.
  5. Regulatory compliance.  Regulatory compliance is a base need.  Organizations must comply with legal requirements.  In addition, organizations may want to avoid legal suits, causing injury, or failing to meet a commitment.

Figure 2. Constellation’s Business Hierarchy Of Needs

More…

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Monday’s Musings: 10 Mega Business Trends To Watch For In 2012

Published on December 26, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

The Shift From Transaction To Engagement Ushers A New Era For Businesses.

As organizations enter the evolution from transactional systems to engagement systems, a shift is happening in business (see Figure 1).  Engagement requires a different design point and business model for success.  Engagement must account for sense and response, massive social scale, conversation, new user experiences, real-time, multichannel networks, and other factors.

Next generation C-suite leaders not only build for engagement, but also design for the next era of experiential systems which apply context to deliver agility and flexibility.  These shifts have massive impacts on the societal, technological, economical, environmental, and political landscapes.  In fact, these shifts to experiential systems drive the 10 mega business trends to watch for in 2012 and beyond (see Figure 2).  Of note, they can also be aligned with Constellation’s Business Hierarchy Of Needs prioritization framework (see Figure 3).

Figure 1. Move from Transaction To Personal Fulfillment Systems

  1. Regulation gets worse and more expensive. Public outrage at a slew of government policy failures, the public sector debt crises, and a global sentiment against big business around the world will drive an increase in regulations.  Despite promises by politicians around the world for less regulation, a barrage of hidden taxes continue to be imposed by government bodies around the world.  In fact, Americans pay up to $1 trillion every year in stealth regulatory taxes.  Regardless of political point of view, global adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and carbon trading proposals will also drive up costs.  Organizations must prepare for this continued regulatory assault as elected officials hope the passage of more regulations will result in their reelection.
    (Level 1: Regulatory Compliance – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
  2. Consumerization of IT must be enterprise class or businesses will fail. The recent Harvard Business Review post titled, “Coming to Terms with the Consumerization of IT” (CoIT), identifies six factors for the basis of balancing enterprise class requirements.  Businesses want IT to be simple, scalable, and sexy.  While the pendulum is definitively shifting towards business, Consumerization of IT requires enterprise class IT to ensure technologies to be safe, secure and sustainable. Success requires a natural equilibrium between business needs and IT requirements for key areas such as social, mobile, cloud, big data, and unified communications.  If IT is too strict, business fails. If business fails to have a level of discipline in technology adoption, IT can not keep up with the lack of standards and scale.
    (Level 2: Operational Efficiency – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
  3. Organizations who master data visualization gain the advantage of speed. New data visualization tools will improve internal and external communications.  The convergence of big data, unstructured social and mobile information, and machine to machine data will provide a treasure drove of data for business analytics.  However, the flood of data will result in poor signal to noise ratios.  Unfortunately, more data does not mean more information.  Consequently, data visualization will provide a key tool to efficiently communicate complex information to stakeholders such as employees, customers, partners and suppliers.  The systems change the future of work by allowing users to create, share, collaborate, and broadcast new visualizations models.  In this case, an image is worth an exabyte of data.
    (Level 2: Operational Efficiency – Business Hierarchy of Needs)
  4. More…

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Press Release: Constellation Research Appoints Sachin Gosavi As VP of India

Published on December 22, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Constellation Research Inc, an award winning, specialty research and advisory firm that serves business leaders who seek to unleash the power of emerging and disruptive technologies, today announced the appointment of Sachin Gosavi as Vice President (India). Sachin brings over 12 years of experience in marketing and strategy in India, and will focus on serving the growing demand for technology research services of large Indian firms and technology vendors.

Releasing the announcement, R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO, Constellation Research, Inc., said, “It’s great to have someone like Sachin on board in India. His proven track record in technology research business along with strong ‘C’ suite networking abilities will be valuable to our growth. In addition, his deep understanding of the independent technology research space will be help drive business value for our clients in India.”

Commenting on his appointment, Sachin Gosavi said, “Constellation Research has established itself as the true model of disruptive technology research, so am quite excited to join them. Most Constellation analysts bring over 2 decades of hands-on experience in working with senior leaders in enterprise organizations, and am looking forward to working with such stalwarts.”

In his previous role for a brief timeframe, Sachin was an independent marketing consultant advising technology start-ups. Prior to that, Sachin spent about six years with Forrester Research spearheading it’s marketing function in India. Through innovative methods, he not only helped establish the brand Forrester in India, but also significantly raised the marketing bar for it’s competitors in local markets.

Gosavi earned his Master’s in Economics from the University of Pune, and PGDMM from IMDR, Pune.

At Constellation, Sachin will engage with both (technology) buy side and sell side clients in India. His responsibilities include:

  • Business development in India
  • Establishing partnerships between Indian firms- industry bodies and Constellation’s expert knowledge base
  • Assisting buy side business leaders with insight into the future of work, next gen customer experience, cross channel commerce, big data and analytics, and technology adoption
  • Helping Indian firms accomplish their specific business objectives around enterprise software, ERP, Mobile, BI, SCM, PBS, CRM, Collaboration, Analytics, UC, Gov 2.0 and Social

COORDINATES

Twitter: @sachingo
Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/sachinvgosavi
Geographical Location: Pune, India
Email: sachin (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.
Mobile: +91.9822.555.012

Office:
A2/405, Mont-Vert Pristine, Off Aundh Road,
Pune 411020 (India)
Website: http://www.constellationrg.com

ABOUT CONSTELLATION RESEARCH, INC.*
Constellation Research is an award winning, specialty research and advisory firm that serves business leaders who seek to unleash the power of emerging and disruptive technologies.  Our analysts start by understanding the business objective, applying real world experience and insights, and then incorporating disruptive technologies and business models as appropriate.  We cater to board of directors and c-suite executives looking for an edge in business model and technology innovation.  Research outputs always provide an insightful buy-side point of view.

Why Your Mission Is Our Mission

In today’s business environment, the rate of change is not only constant, but also rapidly escalating.  New business models by upstarts disrupt competitors with increasing frequency in all industries and markets.  In just 10 years, even 5 years, or dare say 24 months, many established companies have been left vulnerable, beaten down, and toppled by new upstarts.  Why? Business leaders have been too slow to react to their customers and the changes happening in the societal, technological, environmental, economic, and political fronts.

In business models, products are now excuses to sell services.  Product innovation cycles have shortened from years to months to weeks.  On the work front, five generations in the workforce disagree on where to work, how to work, when to work, and why to work.  Add the current trend of consumerization of IT  to the pace of change and business leaders must strategically determine which new technologies should be considered.

Unfortunately, the legacy research analyst firms and advisory firms continue to fail their clients when faced with these new challenges. Why? Their myopic focus on an IT centric point of view ignores the realities of the market.  In fact, Constellation estimates that the average IT budget is down 5% year over year and at best up 2% among the most innovative companies.  However, tech spending is up on average 18 to 22% at the most innovative firms.  What’s happened? The buying power has shifted and business leaders increasingly take control of how they are applying technologies to their business while whittling down the corporate IT budget for operational efficiencies.

Why Your Success Is Our Objective

We’re business leader and business value focused. Constellation differentiates itself in the market in two ways by:

  1. Focusing on the board room and C-suite point of view. Constellation’s research addresses the needs of boards, CEOs, CFOs, CIOs, CMOs, CHROs, CPOs, CSCOs, and COOs.
  2. Addressing the business problem first.  Research starts by addressing business value and then applying where disruptive and emerging technologies may play a role.

The result – Constellation serves as a coach and advisor to senior business leaders working on tough business problems including:

  • The future of work
  • Next generation customer experience
  • Cross channel commerce across the supply and demand chain
  • Digital marketing transformation
  • New organizational models including People-to People Networks
  • The new C-suite
  • Big data, decision systems, and information management
  • Business value frameworks and metrics for success
  • Energy management and green tech
  • Legacy technology optimization

We look forward to serving you with Insight, Inspiration, and Impact.

*Constellation Research, Constellation SuperNova Awards and the Constellation Research logo are trademarks of Constellation Research, Inc. All other products and services listed herein are trademarks of their respective companies.

Press Contacts:

Contact the Media and Influencers relations team at Press (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com
for interviews with analysts.

Sales Contacts:

Here’s how to reach our sales team:

Alexandre Mesquita
Email: Alexandre (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com.
Phone: +1.786.564.4246
Twitter: @amesquit

David Stanley
Email:David (at) ConstellationRG (dot) com .
Office: +1.719.357.7826
Twitter: @kiwigate

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Research Summary: Demystifying Enterprise Gamification For Business

Published on December 7, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

Purpose and Intent

Much hype surrounds the topic of gamification. Often seen as a technique to add engagement to existing tasks, projects, marketing campaigns, and initiatives, the term gamification unfortunately lacks the seriousness it deserves. This report seeks to change the point of view and demonstrate where gamification plays a role in the enterprise. More importantly, executives will discover how gamification can drive behavior and outcomes through both monetary and non-monetary incentives in enterprise class settings.

Executive Summary

Gamification describes a series of design principles, processes and systems used to influence, engage and motivate individuals, groups and communities to drive behaviors and effect desired outcomes. Originating from the video game industry, many of these pioneering concepts now play a key role in driving incentive and behavior management for both brands in the consumer world and internal scenarios in the workplace. Enterprise gamification is a user experience (UX) and consumerization of IT (CoIT) trend that will take the market by storm in 2012. Constellation believes that by 2013, more than 50 percent of all social business initiatives will include an enterprise gamification component.

In interviews with 55 early adopters of enterprise gamification, Constellation identifies the three core pillars that include measurable action, reputation and incentives. By creating triggers through both monetary and non-monetary incentives among customers, employees, partners, suppliers and other interested parties, organizations can secure sustainable engagement and drive business outcomes such as improved marketing response from external communities, sustained long-term customer loyalty, increased collaboration among internal teams, or enriched onboarding, delivering success with new hires, partners, and customers.

Enterprise gamification requires an application of psychology and behavioral economics to incentivize outcomes. Because enterprise gamification maps closely to human behavior, organizations will want to follow Constellation’s best practices in appealing to the “Seven Deadly Sins” for gamification design.

Research report surfaces leading practices from 55 early adopters

Some highlights of the report include:

  • Details on who’s using gamification across the enterprise
  • The three pillars of enterprise gamification
  • The six elements of sustainable engagement
  • Sustainable behaviors to drive desired business outcomes
  • The Seven Deadly Sins to Optimize Gamification Design
  • The top gamified business processes for the enterprise (see Figure 1)

Figure 1. Marketing, Customer Service and HR Processes Lead in Gamified Processes

More…

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News Analysis: SAP Buys SuccessFactors for $3.4B Signals SAP’s Commitment To Cloud, HCM, and Social

Published on December 3, 2011 by R "Ray" Wang

SuccessFactors Acquisition Puts SAP In Direct Competition With Workday And Taleo

SAP (NYSE:SAP) announced its $3.4B acquisition of SuccessFactors (NYSE: SFSF) as it seeks to bolster its position in the Cloud and more importantly in the rapidly growing strategic HCM market.  Based in San Mateo, CA, USA, SuccessFactors brings over 15 million subscription users from 3,500 customers in 168 countries.  The company has 1450 employees and has been one of the SaaS/Cloud darlings of the industry.  When completed, SuccessFactors will remain an independent entity renamed, SuccessFactors, an SAP company.  Lars Dalgaard, Founder and CEO, SuccessFactors will lead the cloud business for SAP.  A quick analysis of the news reveals:

  • SAP seeking a comprehensive and complementary HCM solution. SAP believes the combination of SuccessFactors and SAP will create a comprehensive HCM solution, marrying strength in enterprise applications with people-focused cloud applications. Today, SAP serves the market with a comprehensive and international Core HR and payroll.  Other on-premise offerings include talent management, workforce analytics, and shared services delivery. Key offerings from SuccessFactors include areas such as talent management, recruiting management, goal management, performance reviews, and business execution.  Further, SAP believes the core SFSF offerings will be an attractive to more than 500 million employees of SAP customers .  SAP has 15,000 HCM deployments (not customers) that could benefit from one-stop shopping.

    Point of View (POV):     While the core offerings provided a solid approach, these applications remained in the systems of transaction world and lacked many of the newer requirements for systems of engagement.  In fact, many customers left SAP to go to SuccessFactors to accelerate innovation in the talent space. The rise of Taleo, Workday, and Ultimate Software comes from the lack of general innovation in the HCM space by legacy vendors such as Oracle, PeopleSoft, and SAP.  Cloud computing provided the opportunity to deliver rapid innovation to customers.  Consequently, existing customers will welcome the move while best of breed purists will have to overcome the surprise and determine how innovative they expect SAP to become in HCM.
  • SuccessFactors’ provides SAP with massive cross-sell opportunities. SAP believes the core SFSF offerings will be an attractive to more than 500 million employees of SAP customers .  SAP has 15,000 HCM deployments (not customers) that could potentially go for one-stop shopping from SAP.

    Point of View (POV):     SAP sees the acquisition as a great cross-sell opportunity for other cloud apps and analytics.  Other opportunities include CRM, Collaboration, Travel, and Procurement in the cloud.  In the past two years, Success Factors has made the shift to focus on business performance execution and provides a real time decision making platform.  While customers can acquire a solution from one vendor, the integration of the various cloud platforms may prove to be a challenge.  However, from a financial play, Co-CEO, Bill McDermott sees this as an easy way to meet his 2015 target of €20billion and move towards the 35% margin he seeks to bring shareholders.

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Vendor Event: Workday Predict And Prepare 2011

Published on by R "Ray" Wang

Title: Workday Predict And Prepare 2011
Start Date: 2011-12-07  11:00 am PST
End Date: 2011-12-07   12:00 pm PST
Location: Webinar Link

For the fourth year in a row, join the country’s top IT, HR and Talent Management analysts and consultants for their predictions of next year’s critical trends, plus their advice on how you should prepare for them.
Their predictions include

  • SaaS becomes mainstream, and IT’s job becomes integrations
  • Companies will “rip and replace” legacy systems even faster than before
  • Self-service will become social, mobile and more gamified
  • Talent Management as a separate software category will disappear
  • Mobile will soon become employees’ first contact with enterprise software
  • Companies will do Master Data clean up in order to do Analytics

    • Sponsored by Workday, Predict and Prepare features Knowledge Infusion CEO Jason Averbook, HR technology guru Naomi Lee Bloom, and R “Ray” Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO of Constellation Research.

    Their roundtable is moderated by Bill Kutik, host of The Bill Kutik Radio Show® and Firing Line with Bill Kutik, technology columnist for Human Resource Executive® and co-chair of the magazine’s 15th Annual HR Technology® Conference & Exposition.

    Your questions will be addressed throughout the discussion.

    Register here!

    Disclosure

    Although we work closely with many mega software vendors, we want you to trust us. For the full disclosure policy, stay tuned for the full client list on the Constellation Research website.

    Copyright © 2011 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC All rights reserved.

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    Executive Profiles: Disruptive Tech Leaders In Cloud Computing – Rick Nucci, Dell Boomi

    Published on by R "Ray" Wang

    Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Cloud Computing.  The interviews  provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective.  A full list of interviewees can be found here.

    Rick Nucci – Co-Founder & CTO, Dell Boomi

    Biography

    Rick is the founder and CTO of Dell Boomi, responsible for product management and engineering. He is considered an industry expert on SaaS & Cloud integration, multi-tenant architecture, and application programming interface (API) design and best practices. Boomi has a patent pending for its innovative Atom technology that powers Boomi AtomSphere, the company’s cloud integration platform. Rick constantly engages with customers and partners to align their business needs and Boomi’s product strategy.

    Rick frequently speaks on these topics at industry and business events nationwide including Gartner Application Architecture, Integration and Development (AADI) Summit, Dreamforce, Cloud Expo and SIIA All About the Cloud..

    The Interview

    1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Cloud Computing is changing the world for your customers?

    Rick Nucci (RN): Fundamentally, cloud changes the way a customer buys, builds, delivers, supports, maintains, and upgrades IT. Cloud is more than moving IT from the data center and scaling it into the cloud. Customers currently have an 80/20 paradox – 80% is maintaining the stuff you already have, 20% is getting to innovation. This paradox is a main driver for moving to the Cloud. Cloud provides the fundamentals (free trials, automatic upgrades, constant streams of innovation, reduced CapEx expenses) to flip flop the 80/20, so IT can deliver more innovation to their customers and focus less on maintenance.

    2. What makes cloud computing disruptive?

    (RN): Disruption is a choice word here. It really does pull the rug out from the norm as to how businesses do business today. Today, customers engage with IT vendors resulting in upfront capital expenditures followed by an army of consultants on site to make the thing work. From there, customers pay maintenance for the technology they bought. Unfortunately, most customers then customize. Once customized, customers become locked in and can’t upgrade to the next version despite paying for maintenance. Sadly, this is the norm and the biggest contributor to the 80/20 paradox.

    Cloud puts the customer first. With cloud’s instant access and availability, customers are deploying systems faster and gaining immediate access and availability. Projects that used to take years now take months. Customers can even try out and validate vendor claims before buying. When customers ask how Dell Boomi’s products are different, they can see it with their own eyes. We gain their trust immediately.

    Pricing transparency also improves. Customers pay for usage, not potential usage down the road. The bottom line, “Mr. Vendor if I don’t like what you are doing, I’ll leave,” means vendors must keep delivering value. It’s easier to for customers to move back from the cloud if they are not seeing the value vs. the on-premise tentacle into the enterprise. Cloud flips the customer/vendor relationship on its head and puts control back into the hands of the customer.

    3. What is the next big thing in Cloud Computing?

    (RN): The next big thing is standardization. Thought leaders, analysts, media, and standards bodies will culminate to drive core themes of architecture. Cloud vendors must have multi-tenancy or it won’t really work. When I upgrade, I’m upgrading my customer base, not one customer only. From your own SaaS Bill of Rights, there will be a standardization of the operational principles, how we maintenance windows; how we do SLA’s. This is the enterprise readiness of the public cloud providers. The environment is right to talk about public cloud standardization, the Bill of Rights, and getting customers comfortable with release cycles they aren’t controlling,

    The good news – we’ve hit a tipping point where industries are converging around cloud. No one is saying Cloud is a fad. We’re over the hype cycle and getting into the productivity plateau. This is the pragmatic view over the next 3 years.

    4. What are you doing that’s disruptive for Cloud Computing?

    More…

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