Convergence In The Five Forces Of Consumerization Of Technology Drives The Next Big Thing
Social has given us the tools to connect. Mobile has given us the ability to interact any time and anywhere. Cloud delivers access points to us with a rich array of content and information. Big data provides us with the context and information to make decisions. Unified communications and video transform how we share ideas. This convergence of the five forces of consumerization drives the next shifts in technology. The move from transaction to engagement and from engagement to experience is happening now. The era of transactional apps rapidly makes way for the era of engagement.
If Business Value And Outcomes Are The Goal, Then We Need An Engagement Platform For The Enterprise
The arrival of engagement platforms does not signify time to throw out the transactional systems. In fact, those systems provide the foundation required for engagement. The engagement layer exposes transactions and allow for deeper interaction and richer sources of information. However, the transactional systems lack the ability to support engagement.
In fact, organizations around the world struggle with building the right engagement strategy for their customers and employees. While crafting the right strategy should be designed prior to any technology selection, once completed, the technology to support the strategy does not exist out of the box from ANY solution provider. Unfortunately, the technologies to achieve engagement remain disparate and hodge podge. Many solution providers seek to achieve the engagement layer from different heritages:
- Pure play social solutions morph to engagement apps. Vendors such as Broadvision, Jive, Moxie, Lithium, Tibco, and Yammer have delivered many elements of the engagement layer. These horizontal offerings provide an opportunity to assimilate disparate offerings across multiple processes and roles. The challenge is finding the tools that support consistent integration at the process, meta data, and data layer. Gamification vendors such as Badgeville, Bunchball, BigDoor, Crowdtwist, and Gigya play a key role in delivering outcomes and influencing behavior through engagement. Platforms such as Atlasian, Box, GoodData, and Tidemark open the door to a new era of engagement apps.
- Legacy transactional systems in transition to engagement. Major ERP and CRM vendors seek to address engagement with “social” and “mobile” features. While many of the vendors have the components for engagement, the struggle will be to embed a sense and respond design point into both the interaction layer and process flows. Salesforce embraces the social enterprise and uses Chatter as its entry point in creating engagement. SAP attempts this with its CubeTree/SuccessFactors acquisition in Project Robus. Oracle attacks this problem through a customer experience suite. Microsoft acquired Yammer to create this layer inside Office and its Business Solutions portfolio. IBM embraces social business with a series of acquisitions and product enhancements to its IBM Connections product. More importantly, IBM has built and acquired a portfolio of software solutions that sit on top of the legacy transactional systems, delivering high value and high impact.
- Consumer offerings could enter the enterprise. With consumerization of IT increasing, platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter provide a rich engagement platform that could be adopted in the enterprise. Meanwhile, solutions providers such as Adobe blend consumer with enterprise as they provide the tools for engagement on the web and in mobile. The challenge is dealing with societal norms between work and personal information. The challenge is meeting enterprise class requirements for safety, security, and sustainability.
- Vertically integrated prosumer platforms already deliver engagement. Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft have the unique capability of delivering an end to end solution from hardware, consumer device, operating system, database, applications, and partner ecosystem. Engagement platforms form the basis of future business models as consumer and enterprise blend into prosumers. The challenge is meeting the disparate needs of enterprise and consumer.
- Marketing and advertising networks provide rich profiles and targeting. The ad networks are moving fast to shift engagement and offers. While daily deal sites play one role, companies like Glam Networks also now deliver key components for ad targeting and optimization that compete with Google, Apple, Yahoo, and other media properties. Marketing automation platforms such as
Eloqua, Hubspot, InfusionSoft, Marketo, NeoLane, Pardot, and Parature already have may key components. The challenge is engendering trust among the users or consumers to share more information in exchange for deemed value.
Figure 1. Technologies Will Evolve From Transactions to P2P
The Engagement Platform Requires Nine Main Technology Components
