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Posts Tagged ‘Chief Information Officer’

Trends: Seven Priorities In The Shift From CMO to Chief Digital Officer

Published on March 6, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Shift From CMO to CDO Is In Progress

Today’s marketing strategies increasingly depend more on digital and on data than in the past. With more data, marketers can measure against a new set of metrics that matter including:

calculating return on promotional investment (ROPI),
performing multivariable testing (beyond A/b)
driving conversion rates and optimizing efforts,
fine tuning customer segmentation, and
managing omni-channel diversity

Unfortunately the shift to digital requires a greater reliance on technology. Historically, CMOs relied on IT for help on the database or CRM system or even the website. However consumerization of technology and the cloud have now given marketers more control on their technology destiny. In fact, a recent post by fellow analyst Gavin Heaton on “CMO to CIO, It’s time we talked” highlights many of these new challenges.

Expect Seven Strategies To Emerge In The Shift To CDO

Consequently, many marketing leaders are making the shift from CMO type roles to Chief Digital Officers as marketing leaders align technology closer with strategy. This shift from analog marketer to a Chief Digital Officer role will result in seven trends for 2013 (see Figure 1.)

Figure 1. 2013 Trends Signal Shift From Classical CMO to Digital CMOs or Chief Digital Officers

Drive relevancy with context not content. Context trumps content as relevancy required to break channel fatigue. Relevancy will improves engagement metrics.
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Tuesday’s Tip: It’s Time To Consolidate Social Business Platforms

Published on March 5, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

Greater Adoption In Social Business Signifies A Move To Consolidate Platforms

Constellation’s buy-side clients tend to fit in the market leader or fast follower categories when it comes to organizational personas of disruptive technology adoption. Since 2010, respondents have progressed through the DEEPR framework and the latest results from 2012 indicate that most survey respondents have moved to Level 3 (see Figure 1). Changes between 2010 and 2012 show the following top three priority shifts as users move from Level 2 (Experimentation) to Level 3 (Evangelization):

The top challenge among respondents is choosing the right platform (63.8%) among the many inside an organization.
Over half (56.8%) of the respondents have incorporated social into business models.
Respondents fostering internal collaboration (53.5%) now must worry about adoption challenges.

Figure 1. Respondents Shift to Level 3 in DEEPR Framework for Social Business Adoption

The Bottom Line. Its Time To Scale The Technology While Pushing Ahead On Innovation

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Tuesday’s Tip: Focus On The Business Outcomes, Not Technology With Big Data

Published on February 26, 2013 by R "Ray" Wang

The Why Behind Big Data Starts By Asking What’s The Business Outcome

So organizations have lots of data. New techniques have emerged to correlate big data. Enamored by the potential of big data, leaders are now reinvesting in technologies to find hidden nuggets of insights with the business goals of:

Mitigating regulatory risks
Identifying operational efficiencies
Improving revenue growth
Creating market differentiation
Expanding the brand presence

These big data use cases often follow the business hierarchy of needs, which are based on concepts pioneered by Maslow (see Figure 1). More importantly, a key question in big data has been to ask the right question.

Figure 1. The Business Hierarchy of Needs Drives Many Big Data Use Cases

An Information Flow Approach Moves The Discussion From Data To Decisions

Unfortunately, the problem is most organizations start by talking about outcomes and then get mired in the technologies to achieve these outcomes. Big data technologies include advanced business analytics, application of existing technologies such as data warehousing and business intelligence. In many cases, application of decision automation, semantic technology and collaborative tools are also needed. Yet, from Data to Decisions requires the integration of quite a few disciplines.

Data to decisions is about taking data sources, transforming them into useful information, gathering key insights, and then making the right decisions (see Figure 2). Data sources, information, and orchestration belong in the realm of IT and hopefully will be delivered via the cloud. Insight, decisions, and actions are line of business driven areas which deliver the most value add:

Data sources. Expect a mix of structured, semi-structured, and lots of unstructured.
Information and orchestration. The mix of information types include physical, virtual, machine, and contextual.
Insight. Information translated to insight considers performance, deduction, inference, and prediction.
Decisions and actions. The outcomes are driven from next best action, prevention, suggestion, and even no action.

Figure 2. The Flow From Data To Decisions

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Market Maker 1:1: Steve Miranda, Oracle Fusion Applications Update – The Inside Story

Published on December 31, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

The Inside Story On Oracle Fusion Apps At The End of 2012

Constellation sat down with Steve Miranda, Oracle’s Executive Vice President of Oracle Applications Product Development to discuss the state of Oracle Fusion Apps in a no-holds barred honest conversation about what’s working, what’s not, and what to look forward to in 2013.

R “Ray” Wang (RW): Steve Miranda is Executive Vice President of Oracle Applications Product Development. He is responsible for leading all aspects of product strategy, product development, and product delivery for Oracle’s applications and related cloud services. This includes Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle’s newest products for customer service and support, commerce, and talent management.

Mr. Miranda joined Oracle in 1992 and has held a variety of leadership positions within the development organization. In 2007 he was asked to lead the engineering of Oracle’s next-generation suite of software applications, Oracle Fusion Applications. Under Mr. Miranda’s leadership, Oracle has continually delivered on its promise to help its applications customers innovate and remain competitive while leveraging their existing IT investments and increasing the value of those investments with new Oracle products and services.

Prior to Oracle, Mr. Miranda worked at GE Aerospace. He holds degrees in mathematics and computational sciences from Stanford University.

CATCHING UP ON ORACLE FUSION APPLICATIONS TRACTION

(RW): As 2012 is coming to an end it is a good time to reflect on how Oracle Fusion Applications has been doing this year. It would seem that Oracle’s been quite quiet about Oracle Fusion Applications throughout the year. Is the product selling? What’s the state of the Oracle Fusion Applications product lines?

Steve Miranda(SM): Oracle Fusion Applications is doing very well. We’re actively selling the product. In fact, we already have over 400 customers on Oracle Fusion Applications. We’re doing better than Salesforce.com when they started. Keep in mind, we have a rich customer base looking for innovation.

RW: When you say “Oracle Fusion Applications is selling well”, is that the whole suite or components of Oracle Fusion Applications?

SM: We are actively selling the product. More than 400 customers are on Oracle Fusion Applications, that’s any part of Oracle Fusion Applications, not including RightNow, Taleo, Oracle Business Analytics, or Oracle Fusion Middleware. Two thirds of the customers have chosen to deploy in a SaaS model. Then the second largest deployment model but far below are on-premise and the rest are hosted in our managed services.

RW: Does “managed services” means they own their own license, right?

SM: That’s correct. What’s powerful about these deployments patterns is that customers are accessing innovation faster than before. We are at over 100 live customers and are averaging one go-live a day right now.

RW: I understand that Oracle deployed Oracle Fusion Applications internally? How was that experience in “drinking your own champagne”?

SM: Ray, that’s correct. We did drink our own champagne and we are now using Oracle Fusion CRM internally instead of Siebel.. We have a global single instance for the business. When we deployed, we started out with 2 instances to show case a co-existence approach and an end-to-end Oracle Fusion Applications approach. As of June 1, 2012, Oracle Fusion CRM was up around the world. All the territories, forecasting, quotas, sales force automation, and contacts are in Oracle Fusion CRM globally.

RW: Is it one instance now?

SM: Yes. We also went live w/ Oracle Fusion Financials Accounting Hub on the back end. We replaced Hyperion and Oracle E-Business Suite GL and also went live June 1, 2012. We’ve already done several month-end closes and we also have Oracle Fusion Talent Performance Management up live. Employees and managers are now doing goal setting and appraisals.

RW: To be honest with you Steve, we aren’t seeing Oracle much in head to head competitive new deals. We don’t see big press releases about new wins. Where are the customers? Who’s buying what and why?

SM: Well, first of all, many of our existing customers are coming to us about Oracle Fusion Applications. Second of all, and you may not believe this, we’re not focused on publicity, but rather we want to ensure customer success.. Each go-live is very important to us. In our first set of go-lives, we have 10,000 customers who want to talk to the first 10 go lives. We also don’t want to overwhelm our initial customers.

Let me give you some details and examples so you understand the breadth and depth of what the Fusion Apps base looks like and so there’s no confusion. Here’s a selected slice:

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Event Report: IFS World Conference 2012 – Innovations Abound Beyond ERP (#IFSWoCo2012)

Published on October 15, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Key Themes Include Mobility, User Experience, and Innovation

Over 1100 IFS customers convened October 15th to 17th, 2012 in Gothenburg Sweden for the IFS World Conference. The conference brought together the world of projects, service and asset, manufacturing, and supply chain. The conference highlighted the:

Massive move to mobile. IFS continued their push into their mobile apps portfolio with seven touch apps. Martin Gunnarsson director of research and development, discussed how the mobile solution addresses three personas: casual, professional, and transactional. IFS Time Tracker addresses project time and attendance reporting, confirmation, etc. IFS Trip Tracker simplifies travel expense reporting. IFS Sales Companion helps sales professionals manage their accounts, tasks and opportunities. IFS Quick Reports provide the ability to create and view ad-hoc reports on a mobile device. IFS Quick Facts enables fast keyword search of any object in IFS Applications. IFS Flight Log allows the management of platform operational data in the aerospace and defense industry. IFS Support Companion delivers interaction with IFS support centers.

Point of view (POV): The move to mobile continues the user experience emphasis of IFS. These new Touch Apps address specific work processes and allow for quick to complete tasks. By calling on services running inside IFS Cloud, users gain direct access without having to talk to the ERP back end. IFS should be lauded for support of the three key mobile apps ecosystems: Google Play Store, Apple App Store and Windows Marketplace. pushing out to public apps stores provides customers with an easy and frictionless experience. Customers and prospects can expect more touch apps to address areas in CRM, HR, reporting, search, and projects in 2013.

Launch customers on IFS Applications 8. Customers on hand at the conference provided upfront honesty of the migration to IFS Applications 8Early adopters, Remmele Engineering, Portsmouth Aviation, VBG Group, Bright Point, and Teracom shared insights on their move to IFS Applications 8. Some customers moved from IFS 2003, others from IFS 7.5. Right now 40% of the customer base has made the move to 7.5 or 8. IFS has 34000 users are live or implementing and expect 25 customers by year end to be live on IFS applications 8.

(POV): The different release paths, industries, and use cases reinforced the marketing messages that the move to IFS Applications 8 was worth the trouble. Customers cite the user experience, business intelligence, and the move to mobility as the key reasons for the shift. Regulatory compliance and new industry specific features also played a significant role. More…

Event Report: Dreamforce X (#DF12) Emerges As The South By Southwest (#SXSW) For The Enterprise

Published on September 23, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Dreamforce Represents The Mecca For The “Art Of The Possible” In The Enterprise

Whether Salesforce.com’s flagship conference at Moscone Center was the most attended conference (~48,000) or the most registered for event (~90,000), matters not. When examined in context of the magnitude of what was accomplished, the impact of this 10th annual event transcends attendance numbers. Business folks and the converted IT brethren converged on the week of September 18th, 2012, to see what the future could be inside the enterprise. They left with inspiration and the gospel of what was possible, as told by those before them. The event represented the intersection of where aspiration meets innovation for the enterprise.

Key takeaways from interviews with over 100 attendees reflect the following trends:

Attendee sentiment signals the return of the front office. Prior to the coining of the CRM term, front office was the term which defined marketing, service, eCommerce, and sales force automation. The move back to integrated customer experiences reflects a renewed interest in all the front office touch points and all the support in the back office required to support the customer experience. Attendees walked in with questions about how to integrate their legacy ERP and expose their transactional systems into the front office.
Customers seek knowledge and case studies on business transformation. Delegations arrived to see how they could change their business. Most came with both business and IT to learn from the best practices of others. Almost every customer case study session was packed and common questions revolved around, “How did you do that?”
Product announcements and pre-announcements bring the enterprise closer to the consumer experience. Pre-announcement of Salesforce Identity for Winter 2013 will provide users with Facebook-like single sign on and identity management services. The availability of the Touch Platform services will provide a write once, deploy anywhere touch based mobile UI Experience. The pre-announcement of the Force.com Canvas provides a UI layer to run any other application within the Salesforce.com environment. The App Exchange Checkout delivers out of the box billing for developers and improves the users app store experience. Geolocation capabilities in the pilot of database.com in the Winter 2013 release will improve mobile experiences. Chatter communities pilot in Fall of 2012 and pre-announcement addresses the issue of multiple group management.
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Monday’s Musings: The New Engagement Platform Drives The Shift From Transactions

Published on August 27, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

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:

Figure 1. Technologies Will Evolve From Transactions to P2P

The Engagement Platform Requires Nine Main Technology Components

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Tuesday’s Tip: Act Now To Leave The Door Open For SAP Third Party Maintenance Options

Published on August 21, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

The Real Deadline To Consider Third Party SAP Maintenance Is September 30th

In conversations with hundreds of SAP customers, many have not realized that they must act now in the next 30 to 45 days if they want to move off of SAP customer specific maintenance from extended maintenance for older products. Despite the support window ending in March 2013 for extended maintenance, SAP is requiring organizations to serve notice by September 30th, 2012 (see Figure 1). Key products impacted by this deadline include:

SAP ERP 2004 (ECC 5.0)
SAP NetWeaver 7.0
SAP CRM 6.0
SAP SCM 5.1
SAP SRM 6.0
SAP SRM 5.0
SAP CRM 5.0
SAP SCM 5.0
SAP Netweaver 2004
SAP SRM 4.0
SAP SCM 4.1
SAP R/3 Enterprise (4.7)
SAP R/3 4.6C

In past experiences, SAP has taken a hard line on the notification date and customers need to immediately take action should they wish to have the maximum support options available to them.

To be clear, those on SAP’s Business Suite 7 have a longer maintenance support window (see Figure 2.) Those products will be supported with mainstream maintenance until 2020.

Figure 1. SAP Maintenance Strategy and Support Time Lines For Older Releases ~~(2010)~~ Revised With 2012 Version

Figure 2. SAP Business Suite 7 Innovation Road Map Provides Longer Maintenance Until 2020

Customer Specific Maintenance Comes With Many Disadvantages

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Market Maker 1:1: #HRTechConf Preview w/ Bill Kutik

Published on August 7, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

15 Years of HR Technology At The Industry’s Premier Event

The fifteenth annual HR Technology Conference and Exposition returns to McCormick Place in Chicago October 8th to 10th, 2012. HR Tech is the industry’s longest running event looking at technologies that influence the Future of Work.

The Inside View With Bill Kutik – Future of Work Pioneer And Co-Chairman of HR Tech

Since 1990, Bill Kutik has been a Technology Columnist for Human Resource Executive® (and for HREOnline™ since 2006,), also serving as co-chairman of the magazine’s famous annual conference, HR Technology® Conference & Exhibition, since it began in 1998. In 2008, he started The Bill Kutik Radio Show®, a bi-weekly online talk show with industry leaders.

HR World named him one of “The Top 25 HR Influencers of 2007.” More recently, he was named a “Top 25 HR Digital Influencer 2009″ and a “Top 100 Influencer.”

For 20 years, he was consulting editor for Esther Dyson’s leading computer industry newsletter, Release 1.0. Previously he was the founding editor of the monthly magazine, Computers in HR Management; managing editor of Ziff-Davis’ Computer Industry Daily; and a reporter for The New York Times and The New York Daily News. He has also published articles in Newsweek, Washington Post, Institutional Investor, New York Magazine, Business Month, IHRIM Journal, Cruising World and Backpacker (where he was the founding editor).

We sat down with industry pioneer Bill Kutik for a preview of this year’s event:

1. Where do you see the new trends in HR tech going? What’s changed since last year? (Have we moved beyond Cloud, is everything social?)

Bill Kutik (BK): This year marks an inflection point in HR technology – perhaps in all of IT – the end of one era and the beginning of another, a generational shift in computing.

It happens every 10 – 15 years and remarkably HR has often been at the leading edge of change, either because corporations thought it didn’t matter if IT experiments failed there or because it’s the only department that touches every employee in the company.

Remember, PeopleSoft released the first packaged client/server application (for HR but the first for any function) in 1989, which started the death of the mainframe. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff’s claims aside, HR has been using hosted applications (perhaps not anyone’s version of true SaaS) for recruiting since 1998 and major web-based applications since 2000.

Now the combination of SaaS (Cloud Computing) plus Social in the Enterprise – companies using private collaborative software to get real work done – are marking a new era in computing.

These will be among the major topics this year at the HR Technology® Conference in Chicago, October 8-10.

2. Why the continued interest and investment by organizations in HR and related technologies?

BK: The main reason is the 50-year-long lie in large type in corporate annual reports is finally seen as true: “People are our most important asset.” People costs, even in manufacturing firms with huge capital investments, are more than 50 percent of the annual run-rate. Obviously closer to 90 percent in knowledge-based firms like consulting, law, accounting and software.

To succeed in 2012, organizations must have an effective people strategy aligned with their goals. They must identify the best players, assign them to the right work and keep them engaged. Technology doesn’t create this strategy – executives do – but they can’t properly execute their strategy without the right technology to enable it.

HR technology isn’t for HR anymore. The latest applications reaching mass adoption – such as the Talent Management suite – are now used almost exclusively by line managers and employees after HR has purchased the software and configured it properly.

3. Are 2012 HR technology budgets increasing compared to prior years?

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Trends: The Battle For CMO Mind Share

Published on August 2, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Marketing and Advertising Budgets Are The New Land Grab

Constellation Research, Inc. predicts that the global advertising market (paid search, display, and classified) will hit $125B by 2015. While IT budgets continue to stay flat, marketing budgets are up. Warc’s recent Global Marketing Index (GMI) entered positive territory in March 2012. Consequently, the heat up in marketing and advertising market attracts not only start-ups, but also tech vendors looking to enter this lucrative market.

Solution Providers Rediscover The CMO Budget

In just less than 28 months, enterprise software vendors have bolstered their presence with Chief Marketing Officers mostly through acquisitions and partnerships. The goal – capture budgets allocated for digital creation, marketing automation and revenue optimization, advertising, CRM and customer experience, analytics, and information brokering (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The Battle For The CMO Budget Comes From Six Fronts

Why the change? Marketing sits at the cross roads between the old analog world and the new shift to digital transformation. With each big shift, organizations will change what technologies they invest in, who they decide to partner with, and how quickly they will make the shift. This new battle for CMO mind share started when IBM purchased Unica for $480M in August 13, 2010 (Figure 2). The frenzied activity by Adobe, Dell, Eloqua, Google, Hubspot, Kana, Marketo, Oracle, Salesforce.com, and SAS Institute reflect the desire to be top of mind among CMO budgets.

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