Archive for the ‘MDM’ Category

Tuesday’s Tip: 10 Cloud and SaaS Apps Strategies For 2010

Keep In Mind Basic Rules Still Apply Regardless Of Deployment Option

The proliferation of SaaS solutions provides organizations with a myriad of sorely needed point and disruptive solutions.  Good news – business users can rapidly procure and deploy, while innovating with minimal budget and IT team constraints.  Bad news – users must depend more on their SLA guarantees and deal with a potential integration nightmare of hundreds if not thousands of potential SaaS apps.  Though the 7 key benefits of SaaS outweigh most downside risks, organizations must design their SaaS apps strategies with the same rigor as any apps strategy.  Just because deployment options have changed, this does not mean basic apps strategy is thrown out the window.  Concepts such as SOA, business process orchestration, and enterprise architecture will be more important than ever.  Here are 10 strategies to consider as organizations take SaaS mainstream:

  1. Begin with the business process and desired business value. Understand the desired business value and outcome.  Map back the key performance indicators (KPI’s) to the business processes. Identify what processes will be covered by the SaaS solution.  Determine overlaps and hand-offs between on-premise and SaaS to SaaS that are required to measure the desired KPI’s.
  2. Engage stakeholders early and often. Today’s apps strategies must constantly evolve. Change is happening so fast that line of business leads and IT leaders must collaborate in real time.  The result – an ever changing list of requirements.  While SaaS allows business leaders to make go-it-alone decisions, success will require close collaboration on short term and long term requirements, dependencies, and strategy.
  3. Bet on future suites, SaaS platforms or PaaS (Platform-as-a-service). Winners and losers will emerge in this wave of Cloud computing.  Vendors such as Netsuite, Workday, Zoho, Epicor, and SAP have built or will be building suites.  They provide safe bets as more and more functionality will be rolled into their offerings. Concurrently, organizations should also choose vendors who bring a vibrant and rich ecosystem to the table because those vendors will win in the market.  Salesforce.com and NetSuite already provide users with a platform to build on apps.  Other vendors such as as Google Apps Engine, Microsoft Azure, IBM, and Zoho provide rich developer communities.  Partner and customers will drive innovation which is why platform adoption (i.e. today’s middleware) makes a difference.
  4. Augment with best of breeds, but avoid best of breed hell. No one platform can provide every solution, but choose wisely.  Best of breeds provide deep vertical capabilities and rich last mile solutions.  However, no one wants to manage hundreds of vendor relationships.  Create frameworks that allow business users to work with vendors which support open standards, integrate well with your existing integration strategies, and follow the bill of rights.   Reduction in the number of vendors will become a priority in 2010 going on into 2011.
  5. Assume hybrid will be the rule not the exception. Prepare for hybrid deployments throughout the decade.  Despite the benefits of SaaS and broad adoption in 2010, legacy apps will not go away.  Just count the number of mainframe and client-server apps still in use today.  Many on-premise apps will take time to migrate to SaaS. In some cases, legal requirements will prevent data from being stored off-site.  Software plus services offerings from companies such as Infor, Lawson, Microsoft Dynamics, and SAP may become the norm in 2010 as companies seek private and public cloud solutions.
  6. Design with good architecture. Keep your enterprise architects (EA’s) or hire some more.  Inevitably, more and more SaaS solutions will enter the organization.  EA’s will proactively plan for new scenarios and account for future business requirements.  Organizations should keep some rigor in terms of standards for solution adoption while accounting for the need to rapidly innovate.  Business leaders will need some frameworks on which solutions to adopt.
  7. Choose the right integration strategy for the right time. SaaS integration strategies will evolve based on the organization’s SaaS adoption maturity.  The first set of solutions will probably require point to point integration of data.  Over time, users often migrate to centralized integration services that account for process.  Some will go full enterprise service bus (ESB) and look at business process orchestration as well.  Consider solutions from CastIron, Boomi, Pervasive Software, Informatica, and SnapLogic.  Going forward customer data integration and master data management will be more important than ever.
  8. Minimize long-term storage costs with archiving. Storage represents a significant long term SaaS cost.  Savvy clients can reduce the cost of SaaS storage with a myriad of technologies such as EMC, IBM Optim, and RainStor.  By archiving, organizations will experience faster transaction times, maintain compliance, and reduce storage fees.
  9. Hedge risk with SaaS escrows. Most SaaS vendors will require 5 to 7 years to achieve profitability.  End users often demand software escrows in the on-premise world when they are concerned about vendor viability, takeover threats, and other related breaches to performance or service level agreements.  Software escrows vendors serve as the trusted third party independent organization which holds a copy of the software code.  This often includes user data, source code, documentation and any application executables. SaaS escrows work in a similar way.  Vendors such as EscrowTech, InnovaSafe, Iron Mountain, NCC Group. and OpSource can provide such services.
  10. Protect your rights. Client – vendor relationships in SaaS are perpetual.  Organizations have one shot to get the contract right and begin the relationship with the right tenor.  Apply best practices from The Customer Bill of Rights: SaaS. Work with vendors to find the right balance in approach.

The Bottom Line For Customers – Build Frameworks That Support Easy Line Of Business Adoption

The broad adoption and trajectory of SaaS solutions requires organizations to rapidly replace edicts and 5 year plans with guidelines and policy frameworks.  The goal – enable anyone in the organization to procure a SaaS solution that meets key guidelines and standards.  The result – flexibility, security, and scalability that allows solutions to be used on-demand and in concert with existing applications.

Your POV.

As you work out your SaaS apps strategies, drop us a line and let us know how you are deploying, what challenges you’ve faced, and what successes have you achieved.  We’re happy to weigh in.  Feel free to post your comments here or send me an email at rwang0 at gmail dot com or r at softwareinsider dot org.

Copyright © 2009 R Wang and Insider Associates, LLC. All rights reserved.

Trends: Master Data Management 2010 – Focus On Outcomes Drives Push For Value

Market pressures and organizational maturity drives new master data management (MDM) trends

Conversations with 31 leading edge organizations seeking business transformation highlight shifts in the MDM trends of the past.  Organizations awash in data need to move beyond the clutter and get to the information.  More data does not equate to more information.  In order to make sense, MDM initiatives now move to align with a new set of focus – business transformation and optimization.  Seven key trends now drive the new world of MDM as we enter a new decade.

  1. Master data management must go vertical to succeed in business. Customers no longer want horizontal solutions.  MDM must tailor to industry specific requirements.  Results must be relevant to how an industry works.
  2. Structured and unstructured content will evolve into the MDM ecosystem. Customers seek tools to tie hierarchies and relationships back to unstructured data in the effort to achieve value in information.
  3. Data in the cloud and SaaS will force hybrid approaches. Cloud based and SaaS models change where and how data becomes augmented.  MDM systems must support hybrid models in real-time.  Proven data integration must be a given not an afterthought.  Data integration must be event driven.
  4. Master data management styles no longer matter, just the results. Issue of styles get relegated to the IT owner. Business users seek results and actionable insights.
  5. Data governance and stewardship more important than ever. Processes must align with use cases.  Data hygiene needs to be omnipresent but not cumbersome
  6. Social CRM creates demand for trusted profiles. Organizations now need to understand their advocates and detractors  Today’s social and connected world requires more targeted marketing, sales, and service/support programs.
  7. Business optimization and transformation will require MDM to cover more data types. MDM moves beyond customer, product, accounts, and employees.  New forms of content such as location, images, video, and tweet streams will enter the equation.

Expect to see more details on each one of these trends in the coming year.

Your POV

Where are you with your MDM strategy?  Have you deployed?  Are you redeploying?  Do these trends resonate with you ?  Let us know how we can assist or please post or send on your comments to rwang0 (at) gmail (dot) com or r (at) altimetergroup (dot) com and we’ll keep your anonymity.

Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Friday’s Feature: D&B Purisma Launches First Step To Hosted MDM Solution

Complete Customer Addresses Today’s Market Conditions

On October 5th, D&B Purisma Solutions group announced its first hosted business data management app.  When generally available in November 2009, Complete Customer will deliver a customer database that will be self managed by organizations departments.  Organizations and their departments will take ownership of their data in a hosted offering.  The solution provides much needed relief because customers must:

  • Reduce the time to market of deployments. Customers can no longer afford years let alone months for deployment.  They seek impactful solutions with little deployment risk.
  • Leverage existing investments. Customers own a patch work of CRM, trusted information, BI, legacy ERP, and other solutions.  If they can consolidate their solutions, they save money on integration costs and potentially reduce long term ownership costs.
  • Acquire solutions at lower price points. Solutions must past through more rigor in the budget approval process.  Line of business executives seek swipe and buy solutions, OpEx over CapEx, and minimal commitments in contracts.

Complete Customer Provides Hosted Offering

D&B’s Complete Customer solution delivers three key features (see Figure 1):

  • Data management – D&B data enrichment, double-byte fuzz match, master record construction, and custom hierarchies.
  • Data maintenance – data stewardship, source system, syncing, data purification at entry, customer life cycle management.
  • Hosting services subscription pricing model – online secure access, hosted, D&B data and subscription pricing.

Figure 1.  Complete Customer Data Steward Screen Shots

(Source: D&B )

The Bottom Line – MDM And CDI Solutions Will Move To The Cloud

D&B’s hosted offering will help existing D&B users leverage their current investments without making significant upfront investments in traditional on-premise customer data integration (CDI) and master data management (MDM) solution offerings.  While this solution only addresses a small footprint of a traditional CDI or MDM solution and focuses on B2B, these first steps towards a toolkit will provide immediate benefits such as:

  • Improving lead management
  • Targeting cross sell and up sell opportunities
  • Monitoring credit exposure
  • Maintaining accurate sales account credit

Customers must move to hybrid models as today’s innovative solutions live beyond the on-premise world.  Today the focus will be on faster results and leveraging reference data.  Tomorrow, the issues will focus on managing the proliferation of channels and entities.  Concepts such as B2B or B2C will no longer matter as we move to P2P. Organizations will need to resolve identity in order to deliver the critical insight required for social businesses.

Your POV.

Are you looking for bite sized MDM/CDI?  Are you currently a D&B customer?  Did you know you can augment your D&B data?  Feel free to post your comments here or send me an email at rwang0 at gmail dot com if you need assistance with your MDM project or other topic areas.

Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.

News Analysis: Jive and Radian6 Partner – Great For Business, But Could Fragment IT Systems

This post was collaboratively written on a wiki with my colleague Jeremiah Owyang whose focus is on customer strategy which encompasses social technologies. Together, we’re covering convergence of the emerging and incumbent technology system.  This entry is also cross-posted on his blog.

Jive Offers Brand Monitoring Using Radian 6 -Empowering Companies To Quickly Respond
Jive Software made an announcement that they’re now incorporating listening service Radian 6 into their community platform suite, they dub it Jive Market Engagement. This gives internal teams that manage brands, topics, or influencers to discuss, manage, and assign tasks to follow up with real world -and real-time market events. An example? A company selling headache relief medicine can quickly be alerted to conversations with mommy bloggers in the social sphere, discuss in an internal, private community powered by Jive, then decide on how to quickly take action before it escalates.

Currently, companies are doing this in a mish-mash of manual efforts using scraped together RSS feeds, Google alerts, and Twitter clients. The benefits of this partnership? Companies can now become more organized around the real-time web, develop a process to quickly respond and therefore be more reactive to customers. Yet, despite the automation upside to brand and customer management, this causes yet another disparate pool of customer data that IT departments will have to splice together -potentially giving customers a fragmented view. Companies should nod to this latest trend of social business software converging with existing company systems and develop an information strategy (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Companies can monitor and manage the discussions in their marketplace in Jive Market Engagement

Screenshot: Jive Market Engagement

(Source: Jive)

Macro Market Forces Foster New Trends In Adoption And Risk
Despite this announcement, there are greater trends at play that impact both business and IT side, be aware that:

  1. Diverse systems converging, resulting in greater speed but more complexity
    The push to improve customer intimacy, move to a proactive customer experience, and convergence of Web 2.0 with enterprise class social business apps, drives new models and solutions. We’re tracking this living breathing reef and see social software, CRM, brand monitoring, email, and mobile quickly converging.
  2. More “CRM” features being deployed, without involving the CIO
    Jive’s offering is really a customer relationship module in disguise, yet because of the web based offering, marketing can implement this pseudo-CRM solution without involving IT. We continue to see technology adopted from business units -often at the frustration of not getting on the IT road map during budget tightening times.
  3. Greater exposure to risk, as more siloed customer information fragments enterprise systems
    Being responsive to customers is ideal, but in the long run, it’s not truly effective if you can’t integrate it with your sales, service, or marketing systems. In the end, fragmenting customer data will result in disjointed user experiences for customers as separate departments will have disparate data for each customer.

Recommendations
Jeremiah (business side) and Ray (IT side) come from completely two different worlds’ speaking two different languages. Yet they both know that these new technologies are going to force IT and Marketing to quickly come together. Expect to see more joint-blog posts merging these two groups together, because customers don’t care what department you’re in -they just want their problems solved.

The Bottom Line – Ray’s Take For The CIO
Expect a proliferation of social media monitoring solutions to emerge with a tie back to CRM, eCommerce, project based solutions, and collaboration software. Disparate sources will create fractured customer experiences.  The single 360 degree view wil be assembled and reassembled.

  1. Find tools to aggregate these new channels and sources. Consider how these new social business software platforms will integrate back into data warehouses or customer interaction histories.
  2. Focus on data integration skill sets as process, data,meta data across hybrid deployment models. Data will be coming from a greater number of sources.  Data integration and master data management will play a role here.

The Bottom Line – Jeremiah’s Take For The CMO
Marketers should continue to be responsive to the real-time web, but quickly develop processes that involve other customer touchpoints such as support, service, and product development into the mix

  1. Don’t limit your responses to the corporate communication team and brand monitoring team -cascade this information quickly. While the discussions that will be had in Jive’s community platform will help to aid the customer triage problem, be sure to tie the process and data back to other customer facing teams. Remember, customers don’t care which department you are in.
  2. Use imported social data to create topic based aggregations. Looking forward, use the data that brand monitoring companies are unearthing and turn your product pages into trusted aggregations of conversations -not just static product pitches. Learn how future webpages will be more like collections of customer conversations.

Your POV

How are marketing teams and enterprise strategy teams working with each other to coordinate these investments?  Have you experienced this convergence?  What are your lessons learned?   Do you need help with choosing the right tools?  Post your comment here or reach me direct at r at altimetergroup dot com or r at softwareinsider dot org.  Put the power of expert apps strategy and vendor selection advice to work or just drop us a line.

Related Resources

  • Jive has a slide show with details on the announcement, we’ve uploaded it here.
  • Salesforce.com CRM launches social features (we also collaborated on that piece)
  • Lithium also launched features into it’s platform that allow workflow of social content -similar concepts
  • We like Oliver Mark’s take on how this makes true impacts to business and the real world, he cites how media events can now be tracked -and managed from the toolset.
  • Read Write Web gives more color to the story and gives examples of how other companies are managing this.
  • This conceptual slideshow demonstrates how the emerging and incumbent systems are quickly merging on the “Reef”. (a more Web 2.0 emerging tech view)

Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Event Report: Salesforce.com Pushes Social CRM Technology — But Don’t Expect Companies To Be Successful With Tools Alone

This post was co-written with Jeremiah Owyang, Partner and Colleague at Altimeter Group

Mark Benioff and Jason from TwitterWonder what your high school mascot guy did when he grew up? He went to enterprise software.Salesforce Demo AreaMarc Benioff of SalesForce

Service Cloud 2 Answers IntegrationService Cloud 2 InStranet Knowledge IntegrationService Cloud 2 Google IntegrationService Cloud 2 Twitter Integration

Above: Pictures from Salesforce’s event

Salesforce.com launches a new set of social apps that make CRM connected to the social web. So what does it mean?

Salesforce.com’s Twitter integration and application launch helps brands monitor what’s being said. Yet despite the fanfare, the application lacks a pre-determined way to identify the profiles of Twitter profiles and primary keys within the CRM database. Secondly, the system doesn’t provide a default setting to prioritize the influence (such as more followers) vs a profile with few followers -limiting the ability for brands to prioritize their support offerings.

Salesforce.com’s “Answers” product is a threat to community platforms that offer support-heavy features. Vendors like Lithium (although a SF partner) Jive, Telligent, Awareness, and Mzinga are impacted. Brands that have a strong Salesforce.com implementation will first look to their CRM vendor for social support offerings -reducing the pipeline for community platform new comers. The newly minted “Knowledge” product, which harvests the IP from customer service reps, and customers themselves is also a direct threat to wiki creators such as SocialText, Atlasian. Those vendors should quickly bolster their marketing efforts to demonstrate how they are differentiated. Client server based contact center products such as Amdocs, Cisco, and Genesys, will face increased competition as business users choose to move to platforms that deliver provide greater social aspects tied to user generated content.

Despite Salesforce.com’s technical announcement, this doesn’t mean success for their customers. Technology is only 20% of any enterprise change, the other 80% is culture, process, roles, and strategy change -key requirements that Salesforce.com is not equipped to provide. As a result, don’t expect customers that don’t have the right program in place to take advantage of these technology offerings -instead expect vendors with a heavy professional service offering to empower a company to truly embrace customers in the social web.

Overall, Salesforce.com is above and beyond other CRM vendors in terms of connecting to the social web. Yet despite their ability to connect with new channels, they lack a full solution to empower brands to make the cultural changes within their organizations. Expect other CRM vendors such as Oracle’s Social CRM offerings and Microsoft Dynamics CRM to do a “me too” in coming months as others jump on the social CRM bandwagon.

For the CIO: Ray’s Take: The coming wave of social CRM initiatives and cloud based service solutions require CIO’s to rethink about their overall apps strategies to support hybrid deployment options. Rapid proliferation of SaaS solutions inside the organization requires strong CIO leadership in coordinating data, business process, and meta data integration strategies. Moreover, now will be the time to begin master data management activities that will support social CRM initiatives and resolve profile identification and entity resolution issues. Take control now or lose control forever.

For the CMO: Jeremiah’s Take: Marketing has spread beyond awareness and lead generation -support IS marketing. Yet to be successful, your internal processes must quickly meld PR and support to provide a seamless experience to the customer. Be proactive, not reactive: Use brand monitoring technologies to head off issues before they volcano into PR disasters.

Your POV

Ready to put your service strategy to the test with Salesforce.com’s Answers product or another social CRM tool? Where are you today in your efforts?  Post your comment here or reach me direct at r at altimetergroup dot com or r at softwareinsider dot org.

Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Monday’s Musings: Why Every Social CRM Initiative Needs An MDM Backbone

Proliferation and access to new social tools creates significant challenges for organizations

Organizations engaged in Social CRM initiatives often start out by monitoring the chatter and conversation across a few platforms and channels such as Facebook and Twitter.  As these organizations increase their savviness, they quickly realize the enormity of the challenge.  The exponential number of touch points and algorithmic channel complexity puts to shame yesterday’s eCommerce strategy and the dated tools designed to address multi-channel.  In order to cut through the high noise to signal ratio, organizations must determine how best to manage the complexity and scale of data being generated, amidst a transforming landscape where:

  • CIO’s no longer determine technology adoption – business leaders and individuals initiate a groundswell.
  • Consumer technologies provide more innovation, usability, and reliability than what’s available to the enterprise.
  • Disparate systems results in fragmentation of key information despite new deployment options.

Basic business questions must be addressed in every Social CRM initiative

Despite the massive scale of collected, fragmented data, Social CRM initiatives complement other relationship management initiatives in asking and answering key questions such as:

  • Do we know the identity of the individual?
  • Can we tell if there are any apparent and potential relationships?
  • Are they advocates or detractors? (added 8/31 07:25 am PT)
  • How do we know whether or not we have a false positive?
  • What products and services have been purchased in the past?
  • Have we assessed how much credit risk we can be exposed to
  • What pricing and entitlements are customers eligible for?

Organizations seek automation technologies to resolve master data issues.

Master data management (MDM) provides a set of technologies that address the acquisition, cleansing, enrichment, and distribution of data.  With so many channels and so many sources, Social CRM initiatives require MDM technologies that (See Figure 1):

  • Resolve matching of a broad range of data types. Organizations will want to associate individuals to products, services, orders, contracts, incidents, location, etc.
  • Deliver consistent and accurate enrichment of data.  Organizations will want to append trusted data sources, hierarchies, and relationship information to cleansed information.
  • Provide timely synchronization in federated environments. Organizations can expect their data to be federated as social media tools and SaaS deployments push data beyond centralized repositories.

Figure 1. Consistent Information In Social CRM Requires A MDM Backbone

20090831-ccm2

Figure 1. Consistent Information In Social CRM Requires A MDM Backbone Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Recommendations – apply continuous customer management (CCM) processes before implementing MDM technologies

Form follows function. MDM technologies should not be implemented without a clear understanding of how customer management and data governance processes will be adopted.  Five hallmarks of CCM include (see Figure 2):

  • Proactive sourcing of data. How can data be kept up to date at every touch point.
  • Right time delivery of information. What should be delivered when, where, why, and to whom?
  • Links to action. What can be done to create actionable insight?
  • Assessment of results. What metrics help paint the overall picture?
  • Refinement of process.  What lessons learned can be applied to future initiatives?

Figure 2.   Continuous Customer Management (CCM) delivers 5 unique stages

20090831-ccm

Your POV

Have you begun your Social CRM strategy without MDM?  What MDM issues do you face?  If you have put MDM to use in Social CRM, let us know any lessons learned.  Post your comment here or reach me direct at r at altimetergroup dot com or r at softwareinsider dot org.

Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.

Monday’s Musings: Master Data Management – Do Styles of MDM Matter Anymore?

Three Architectural Styles Represent Different Technologies To Build MDM

In 2003, customer data hub (CDI), product information management, and master data management (MDM) vendors strived to differentiate themselves by architectural style.  Each approach had its advantages and disadvantages.  A religion about styles emerged overnight along with a hard core following.  Here’s a quick recap (see Figure 1):

Figure 1.  The Three Architectural Styles of Master Data Management

Three Common Styles Of Master Data Management

The bottom line – choose a style that aligns with your project’s business driver
While these approaches still exist, leading vendors such as D&B Purisma, IBM, Initiate Systems, Oracle, Oracle-Siebel, SAS DataFlux, and Siperian now have offerings in more than one style. This may make the question seem less relevant, however, its still important to understand the trade-offs while beginning your MDM journey.  In fact, it’s best to align the style and approach based on your business driver.  Here’s a high level summary:

  • Cross-referenced registry delivers rapid results for operational efficiency business drivers. This approach is best suited for rapid implementation scenarios such as POC’s that prove the value of master data.  Also valuable when data can not be stored on-site.
    Pro’s: Rapid implementation without having to agree on a common enterprise data model.  Utilize existing source systems.
    Con’s: Deduplication of source systems not addressed.  Data quality must be solved in each independent source system.
  • Hybrid harmonized reference enables compliance and regulatory business drivers. This approach allows the best of both worlds, especially when moving to a transactional operational data store is not politically feasible and data governance and stewardship activities are just starting up.
    Pro’s: Single master copy of reference data.  Uses links to access source system records.  Model allows data quality efforts to be applied to shared master  reference data.
    Con’s: Synchronization with source systems can create some complexity if changes are not made in the hub.
  • Transactional operational data store supports strategic business drivers.  This approach provides a long term path for how legacy applications utilize data.
    Pro’s: Single master copy of data.  No fussing with latency or synchronization issues.  Minimal mapping issues.
    Con’s: Requires an agreed upon common enterprise data model to be used by all applications.  History must be harmonized and requires extensive key mapping.  Assumes homogeneity and requires tons of ETL and dedupe.

Your POV.

Which MDM style are you deploying? What successes have you seen?  Post your thoughts or send me a private email to rwang0@gmail.com.

Which one MDM style are you currently using or considering?

  • Hybrid harmonized reference (44%, 46 Votes)
  • Cross-referenced registry (35%, 36 Votes)
  • Transactional operational data store (21%, 22 Votes)

Total Voters: 104

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Copyright © 2009 R Wang. All rights reserved.