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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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Monday’s Musings: Understand The Four Organizational Personas Of Disruptive Tech Adoption

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

Pace of Innovation Exceeds Ability To Consume

Rapid innovation, flexible deployment options, and easy consumption models create favorable conditions for the proliferation of disruptive technology. In fact, convergence in the five pillars of enterprise disruption (i.e. social, mobile, cloud, big data, and unified communications), has led to new innovations and opportunities to apply disruptive technologies to new business models. New business models abound at the intersection of cloud and big data, social and mobile, social and unified communications, and cloud and mobile.

Unfortunately, most organizations are awash with discovering, evaluating, and consuming disruptive technologies. Despite IT budgets going down from 3 to 5% year over year, technology spending is up 18 to 20%. Why? Amidst constrained budgets, resources, and time limits, executives are willing to invest in disruptive technology to improve business outcomes. Consequently, successful adoption is the key challenge in consuming this torrent of innovation. This rapid pace of change and inability to consume innovation detract organizations from the realization of business value.

Organizations Fall Into Four Personas Of Disruptive Technology Adoption

A common truism in the industry is “Culture trumps technology”. As organizations apply methodologies such as Constellation’s DEEPR Framework in improving adoption, leaders must first determine which of the four personas best fits their organization’s appetite for consuming and innovating with disruptive technologies.

The personas of disruptive technology adoption assess organizational culture in two key axes (see Figure 1). The first is how incremental or transformational an organization looks at applying disruptive technology to business models. The second assesses how proactive or reactive an organization is in carrying out new initiatives. Based on these dimensions, the four personas include:

Market leaders. Market leaders prefer to drive transformational innovation. They look at technologies as enablers in disrupting business models. They see competitive differentiation in delivering outcomes to customers. Market leaders accept failure as part of the innovation process. They fail fast and move on.
Fast followers. Fast followers prefer to react to the success of market leaders and their experiments. When they sense success, they tend to jump in. Fast followers do not like to fail and rapidly apply lessons learned from market leaders into their road maps. Fast followers tend to deliver scale in the markets as a counter balance to arriving later in the market.
Cautious adopters. Cautious adopters proactively deliver incremental innovation. They tend to take a more measured approach and spend more time studying how they can improve an existing success than creating a transformational change. Cautious adopters often come from regulated industries where security and safety are paramount objectives.
Laggards. Laggards tend to procrastinate on applying innovations to their business models. They prefer not be bothered by trends and will only react when the trends have moved beyond mainstream. They see value in waiting as prices will drop over time as success rates increase over time. Laggards enjoy waiting.

During the interviews and discussions with the 2012 Constellation SuperNova award participants, key questions emerged in the decision process on whether to adopt or pass on a disruptive technologies. These questions aligned well with the four personas of disruptive technology adoption.

Figure 1. Organizations Should Understand Which Persona Of Disruptive Tech Adoption Describes Them Best

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Press Release: Gavin Heaton Joins Constellation Research to Provide Digital Marketing Research and Advisory Services

Published on September 6, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Digital Media Luminary to Launch Constellation’s Newest Research Theme, Digital Marketing Transformation

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – Constellation Research, Inc., the award-winning research and advisory firm focused on helping clients navigate emerging and disruptive technologies announced today the addition of esteemed digital media pioneer, Gavin Heaton to the research team as Vice President and Principal Analyst. Heaton will lead Constellation’s latest business-focused research theme, Digital Marketing Transformation. Heaton’s research, which focuses on the changing role and expectations of CMOs, the fusion of marketing channels and change-driven marketing innovation, expands Constellation’s ability to provide digital marketing research and advisory services to its early adopter clients worldwide.

Heaton’sresearch and advisory will enable clients to take advantage of the convergence of media, technology, brands, and business. Specifically:

Understanding where social media fits within the business landscape
Aligning business and online engagement strategies
Channeling the passion of employees toward the achievement of business goals

Heaton commented: “We are seeing a dramatic shift in the role of marketing. Advertising is under pressure, social is changing our customer relationships and the Consumerization of IT is changing the way we do our work. There has never been so much change or opportunity. I’m excited to help chart the course between marketing, technology, customers and vendors.”

Heaton has been at the forefront of technology driven marketing innovation for the past 20 years. Recently Heaton served as Social Media Director for SAP’s Premier Customer Network. He is also the co-instigator of the ground-breaking crowdsourced marketing book series The Age of Conversation.

“The move to digital changes how quickly, effectively, and relevantly we listen, test, engage, and anticipate,” says Constellation CEO, R “Ray” Wang. “Gavin is among a handful of people who not only understands this shift to digital marketing, but also brings a converged experience from agency, enterprise, and client side. Our clients expect an experienced and trusted advisor who can speak their language and translate to the IT folks. In fact, our clients seek outcomes, not technologies. Consequently, Gavin’s experiences take them one step further towards this objective. As Constellation builds out our business themed research, expect us to serving more and more of the C-Suite.”

DIGITAL MARKETING TRANSFORMATION

Digital Marketing Transformation is the newest business-focused research theme at Constellation Research, Inc. The C-suite is realizing the futility of remaining analog in a digital world. CMOs can no longer live in the campaign to lead process – CMOs must also involve themselves in big data and analytics, social and community building, reputation, and loyalty. The future is real time convergence and its name is digital.

COORDINATES

Twitter: @servantofchaos

Website: www.servantofchaos.com

Linkedin: au.linkedin.com/in/servantofchaos

Geo: Sydney, Australia

ABOUT CONSTELLATION RESEARCH

Constellation Research is a research and advisory firm focused on disruptive and emerging technologies. This renowned group of experienced analysts, led by R “Ray” Wang, focuses on business themed research including the Future of Work; Next Generation Customer Experience; From Data to Decisions; Matrix Commerce; Technology Optimization and Innovation; and Consumerization of IT and the New C-Suite.

Constellation’s collection of prestigious analysts bring real world experience, independence, and objectivity to client solutions that span cross-role, cross-functional, and cross-industry points of view. Clients join Constellation Research for a fresh and business focused perspective.

Unlike the legacy analyst firms, Constellation Research is disrupting how research is accessed, what topics are covered, and how clients can partner with a research firm to achieve success. Over 100 clients have joined from an ecosystem of buyers, partners, solution providers, c-suite, board of directors and vendor clients.

For more information about Constellation Research, visit www.ConstellationRG.com

***

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

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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Tuesday’s Tip: Why Context Matters – Forget Real-Time, Achieve Right-Time

Published on July 24, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

The Real-Time Hype Is Filled With Flaws

The hype around big data, social media, and mobility has many folks imagining the real-time enterprise in the future of work, next generation customer experiences, matrix commerce, or the data to decisions journey. While real-time theoretically leads to quicker information and faster response times, the reality requires closer examination for three reasons:

Customers and employees only want engagement aligned with self interest. Relevancy of information is required for customers and employees to respond. Real-time interactions quickly evolve into noise. Signal to noise ratios must be improved as garbage in will lead to massive garbage out. In some cases, customers don’t want engagement. They just want the experience.
No human can truly handle the volume and flow of real-time interactions. The proliferation of channels and data sources creates a data deluge. Filtering is required in order to handle real-time. Workers already inundated with email, sms, and chats, really just want to get work done, they don’t want to be bogged down with more interactions.
Real time is not fast enough. Real-time is reactive not proactive. Anticipation and prediction emerge as key requirements. Reaction does not lead to a better customer experience or employee interaction. Some customers want options to make the right decision. The same customers may expect a system to remember a preference based on many factors including repetitive behavior.

Delivering Context Is The Secret To Right Time Success

Context provides the key ingredient in improving outcomes. Why? Context provides the relevancy required for not only anticipation, but also prediction. For example, offering a premium channel upsell to an upset cable customer when their cable is down, may not be the wisest idea. Unfortunately, this happens too often. The customer is already upset that the issues have not been resolved and yet the company is still trying to sell instead of resolve an issue. However, offering a free appetizer triggered by a location based service during the morning commute, may lead to higher sales as this is a right time anticipation of a dinner time offer .

The Bottom Line: Start With Seven Dimensions of Context Drivers.

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Tuesday’s Tip: Dealing With The Real Problem In Social Business Adoption – The People!

Published on June 12, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Social Business Adoption Dependent On Employee Adoption

Social business is more than a technology decision. Many eager early adopters face challenges in adoption past the initial core team. As we move from eager early adopters to ubiquitous usage, an examination of some organizations who have failed at internal social business reveals five common barriers to adoption:

Poorly defined incentives. In the rush to convince everyone to work with each other, most organizations fail to design meaningful incentives for adoption. The reality – most folks collaborate only when they need to, not when they are told to.
Increase in actual effort. For many in the workforce, collaboration often means more work, not less work. Connectedness results in more interactions, some less meaningful than others. Increase in effort often shifts the status quo resulting in internal resistance.
Lack of choice in user experience. Time and time, people want to use the tool they are most comfortable with. For example, activity streams make sense for some folks who are used to high frequency, always on, information flows. However, those accustomed to using email as a task list and structured approach to filing information will find discomfort with activity streams.
Indifference to change. Inertia to do nothing often outweighs the calls for change. The workforce often prefers to do things the way they always have been. The workforce has seen many changes and at this point face change fatigue.
Failure to communicate the urgency. Business model shifts are not easy to communicate to the workforce. Veteran employees often develop coping mechanisms that define the new change as a reincarnation of the old change without understanding the nuance or urgency.

Overcoming Barriers Of Adoption Require A Mix of New and Classical Change Management Techniques

Despite compelling benefits to achieve better collaboration among teams, improved engagement among the workforce, and faster speed of internal communication, adoption efforts require careful design. As with any organizational change, it’s the people, stupid! The five barriers can be countered with the following five strategies (see Figure 1.): More…

Monday’s Musing: Avoiding Social Media Fatigue Through Engagement

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

Social Media Moves From Ubiquitous Usage To Relevant Rationalization

Have we hit a social media plateau? In recent client conversations on usage of social media, the trendsetters appear to be “socialed out”. Most early adopters seem to be overwhelmed with their personal (Facebook, Google+), corporate (Yammer, Jive, Chatter, SharePoint), and professional (LinkedIn) social networks. In fact, respondents feel that adding any additional network for anything social is quite overwhelming. While early adopters are moving from ubiquitous usage to relevant rationalization, the majority remains in ubiquitous usage (see Figure 1). Recent data on number of users at the Big 4 of social media show that we are in the middle of ubiquitous usage:

Facebook (901M users as of Feb 2012)
Twitter (500M users as of March 2012)
LinkedIn (161M users as of March 2012)
Google+ (100M users as of Feb 2012)

Early Adopters Facing Social Media Fatigue

As early adopters start rationalizing their networks, some are even pulling out. From loss of interest in Google+, Empire Avenue, to even FaceBook, people have started to selectively choose networks to combat overload and social media fatigue. The common theme – relevant rationalization by self-interest. These trends parallel those for mail, phone, email, web and other disruptive technologies. Going forward, users will move towards desensitization when the advertisers and companies abuse the channel by spamming users with an unwanted deluge of irrelevant offers.

The Bottom Line: Engage Users To Combat Fatal Fatigue In The Disruptive Tech Adoption Life Cycle

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News Analysis: Informatica Launches MDM 9.5

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

New Product Addresses The Social, Mobile, Cloud, and Big Data World

The convergence of social, mobile, cloud, big data (analytics), and video/unified comms changes the playing field from transactional applications to engagement applications. The result – a sea change of new data types from structured and unstructured sources. With greater volumes of data, demand for information shifts from real time to right time inside and outside the enterprise. Context by process, by roles, by location, and by any other segmentation requires a robust MDM solution to improve the return on #bigdata. Unfortunately, many master data management solutions have not been designed to handle this new world of business led requirements.

Enter Informatica’s MDM 9.5 product launched May 15th, 2012 at Informatica World (#IW2012). Some key features in 9.5 highlight the move to social, mobile, cloud, and industries:

Versioning – effective dates deliver timelines. The new product delivers effective dating to define and manage past, current, and future versions of a record. Delivered at the base object level, relationships are automatically version-enabled.

Point of View (POV): Future analysis of social and mobile data will require the ability to segment and correlate by time. The solution can model hierarchies and entities by past, present and future. More importantly, versioning provides rich compliance information that will serve as a backbone for information governance of a wide variety of data types and sources..

Social MDM – Facebook apps connect to customer profiles. The new Facebook and MDM connectivity provides a social graph of the customer and friends of the customer. Users gain bi-directional connectivity.

Point of View (POV): Connection to Facebook not only brings rich profile information, but also delivers key multichannel connections. This linkage exposes and identifies common interests and relationships which build richer customer profiles. Customers should work hard to drive data out of Facebook and not into Facebook, reducing the trading of privacy for convenience.

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Quark Summary: What CFOs Need to Know About SaaS and Cloud Integration

Published on April 30, 2012 by R "Ray" Wang

Forward And Commentary

This document addresses many questions asked by CFO’s about cloud deployments and the top integration questions often asked by CFO’s responsible for key business initiatives that involve technology.

A. Executive Summary

Organizations have escalated their adoption of cloud computing and SaaS applications in the past 3 years. As part of the broader trend in consumerization of IT (CoIT), business leaders have slowly tipped the balance of power in determining technology acquisition. However, the proliferation of adoption has led to organizational chaos in data, process and meta data integration as users adopt and deploy the cloud in silos without considering the implications of organizational silos and services oriented architecture (SOA). As cloud integration emerges as an enterprise-wide issue, CFOs must get acquainted with the cost-value equation of cloud and SaaS applications. Why? Cloud integration emerges as a key competency for successful organizations seeking to innovate while maximizing returns on investment. Consequently, CFOs should understand ten key points on why they must master cloud integration.

B. Research Findings

The rapid adoption of cloud computing by business leaders unfortunately creates a bespoke environment technically known as “best of breed cloud hell.” With so many disparate systems in a loosely federated model, data rapidly becomes siloed, business processes easily become fragmented, and coordination across functional fiefdoms quickly becomes difficult. Consequently, cloud integration emerges as a key enabler in reducing the costs and improving the benefits of cloud computing. Recent conversations with 22 CFOs addressed these ten key questions: