Gepubliceerd: 31-05-2011
Persbericht van: Winvision
Nieuwegein, 31 mei 2011 - Windesheim Flevoland, de nieuwe hogeschool in Almere en Lelystad, start het nieuwe studiejaar in september 2011 als eerste onderwijsinstelling in Nederland met Newsgator, een social media-toepassing binnen de SharePoint2010-omgeving van de instelling. Winvision, ICT-dienstverlener gespecialiseerd in Microsoft Technologie, is bij Windesheim Flevoland samen met de hogeschool verantwoordelijk voor de implementatie van dit interactieve leer- en samenwerkplatform.
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Thursday, May 19, 2011
The “Post-PC” Era: It’s Real, But It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Does
Computing is changing. The news last week showed that loud and clear, as Microsoft bet big on Skype’s voice and video technology and Google announced partnerships with Samsung and Acer to build laptops running its Chrome operating system. These developments point to a future where computing form factors, interfaces, and operating systems diversify beyond even what we have today. The “Post-PC Era” is underway, but its definition is not self-evident.
First, some history. “Post-PC” has been a buzzword in the past few months, since Steve Jobs announced at the iPad 2 launch event that Apple now gets a majority of its revenue from “post-PC devices,” including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—a major milestone for a company that was originally named “Apple Computer.” The phrase was also part of the public discourse in 2004, when IBM sold its PC unit and former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz told The New York Timesthat “We've been in the post-PC era for four years now,” noting that wireless mobile handset sales had already far surpassed PC sales around the world. In fact, the “post-PC” concept is more than a decade old: In 1999, MIT research scientist David Clark gave a talk called “The Post PC Internet,” describing a future point at which objects like wristwatches and eyeglasses would be Internet-connected computing devices.
So what does “post-PC” mean, anyway? It doesn’t mean that the PC is dead: Forrester Research forecasts that even in the US, a mature market, consumer laptop sales will grow at a CAGR of 8% between 2010 and 2015, and desktop sales will decline only slightly. Even in 2015, when 82 million US consumers will own a tablet, more US consumers will own laptops (140 million). But, as Forrester explains in a new report out today, it does mean that computing is shifting from:
•Stationary to ubiquitous. Contrast the experience of computing on a desktop PC, in one place with a clear start and finish time, to that of the anytime/anywhere computing done on a smartphone or tablet. Ubiquitous computing is also more context-aware computing, aided by sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, and geolocators in smartphones and tablets.
•Formal to casual. In contrast to PC interactions with a formal start and finish time marked by booting up and shutting down, instant-on/always-on computing on smartphones and tablets fills in-between moments like standing in line or watching TV.
•Arms-length to intimate. With desktops, computing is literally an arms-length activity. With portable form factors like laptops, netbooks, and tablets, computers become something consumers keep close to their body, and they use them in intimate places: The No. 1 place all three devices are used in the home is the living room, followed by an adult’s bedroom.
•Abstracted to physical. The mouse/keyboard paradigm relies on an abstracted interaction with content. Touchscreens like those on smartphones and tablets enable direct physical manipulation of content in two-dimensional space. Cameras with facial recognition, voice sensors, and motion sensors like those on the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 permit an even wider range of physical interaction with devices, where a user’s body and voice become the controller.
There are a host of technological innovations that make the post-PC era possible. Form-factor diversity enables computing in more contexts. Flash memory eliminates computing downtime. Wi-Fi and mobile broadband networks permit continuous connectivity. And cloud services support computing across multiple devices.
These technological innovations fuel social change, and vice versa. As people conduct more of their lives online—shopping, banking, entertainment—we require more computing in more places. The rise of social networking requires real-time connectivity to manage our relationships. And eroding work-life boundaries means that consumers demand devices that can do double-duty in their work and personal lives.
So where is this all going? In the post-PC era, the “PC” is alive and well, but it morphs to support computing experiences that are increasingly ubiquitous, casual, intimate, and physical. The new MacBook Air and Samsung Series 9 demonstrate PCs going in this direction. In the post-PC era, PCs are joined by smartphones and tablets, as well as future devices like wearables and surfaces. Imagine computing via a heads-up display embedded in your eyeglasses or contact lenses or learning about breaking news updates from a change in your electronics-embedded clothing. The products that will win have yet to be determined, but the underlying technological and social changes that will drive the post-PC forward are already here.
Recommend this post
Add a new comment
Related Forrester Research
What The Post-PC Era Really Means
Sarah Rotman Epps' Recent Tweets
An unimpressive launch for much-hyped Next Issue Media: apps on a device few people own, hidden in the VCAST store http://t.co/sn2bBVX — 15 hours 58 min agofrom Tweet Button@kyledaustin they'd be ill advised to do so :)
— 8:45 PM May 17from Twitter for iPadMy take on HP's Earnings And The Post-PC Era | Forrester Blogs http://bit.ly/mLMcvo — 2:01 PM May 17from TweetMemeSee all
First, some history. “Post-PC” has been a buzzword in the past few months, since Steve Jobs announced at the iPad 2 launch event that Apple now gets a majority of its revenue from “post-PC devices,” including the iPod, iPhone, and iPad—a major milestone for a company that was originally named “Apple Computer.” The phrase was also part of the public discourse in 2004, when IBM sold its PC unit and former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz told The New York Timesthat “We've been in the post-PC era for four years now,” noting that wireless mobile handset sales had already far surpassed PC sales around the world. In fact, the “post-PC” concept is more than a decade old: In 1999, MIT research scientist David Clark gave a talk called “The Post PC Internet,” describing a future point at which objects like wristwatches and eyeglasses would be Internet-connected computing devices.
So what does “post-PC” mean, anyway? It doesn’t mean that the PC is dead: Forrester Research forecasts that even in the US, a mature market, consumer laptop sales will grow at a CAGR of 8% between 2010 and 2015, and desktop sales will decline only slightly. Even in 2015, when 82 million US consumers will own a tablet, more US consumers will own laptops (140 million). But, as Forrester explains in a new report out today, it does mean that computing is shifting from:
•Stationary to ubiquitous. Contrast the experience of computing on a desktop PC, in one place with a clear start and finish time, to that of the anytime/anywhere computing done on a smartphone or tablet. Ubiquitous computing is also more context-aware computing, aided by sensors like accelerometers, gyroscopes, and geolocators in smartphones and tablets.
•Formal to casual. In contrast to PC interactions with a formal start and finish time marked by booting up and shutting down, instant-on/always-on computing on smartphones and tablets fills in-between moments like standing in line or watching TV.
•Arms-length to intimate. With desktops, computing is literally an arms-length activity. With portable form factors like laptops, netbooks, and tablets, computers become something consumers keep close to their body, and they use them in intimate places: The No. 1 place all three devices are used in the home is the living room, followed by an adult’s bedroom.
•Abstracted to physical. The mouse/keyboard paradigm relies on an abstracted interaction with content. Touchscreens like those on smartphones and tablets enable direct physical manipulation of content in two-dimensional space. Cameras with facial recognition, voice sensors, and motion sensors like those on the Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 permit an even wider range of physical interaction with devices, where a user’s body and voice become the controller.
There are a host of technological innovations that make the post-PC era possible. Form-factor diversity enables computing in more contexts. Flash memory eliminates computing downtime. Wi-Fi and mobile broadband networks permit continuous connectivity. And cloud services support computing across multiple devices.
These technological innovations fuel social change, and vice versa. As people conduct more of their lives online—shopping, banking, entertainment—we require more computing in more places. The rise of social networking requires real-time connectivity to manage our relationships. And eroding work-life boundaries means that consumers demand devices that can do double-duty in their work and personal lives.
So where is this all going? In the post-PC era, the “PC” is alive and well, but it morphs to support computing experiences that are increasingly ubiquitous, casual, intimate, and physical. The new MacBook Air and Samsung Series 9 demonstrate PCs going in this direction. In the post-PC era, PCs are joined by smartphones and tablets, as well as future devices like wearables and surfaces. Imagine computing via a heads-up display embedded in your eyeglasses or contact lenses or learning about breaking news updates from a change in your electronics-embedded clothing. The products that will win have yet to be determined, but the underlying technological and social changes that will drive the post-PC forward are already here.
Recommend this post
Add a new comment
Related Forrester Research
What The Post-PC Era Really Means
Sarah Rotman Epps' Recent Tweets
An unimpressive launch for much-hyped Next Issue Media: apps on a device few people own, hidden in the VCAST store http://t.co/sn2bBVX — 15 hours 58 min agofrom Tweet Button@kyledaustin they'd be ill advised to do so :)
— 8:45 PM May 17from Twitter for iPadMy take on HP's Earnings And The Post-PC Era | Forrester Blogs http://bit.ly/mLMcvo — 2:01 PM May 17from TweetMemeSee all
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
10 More Things You Never Knew You Could Do On LinkedIn
There's a lot of buzz surrounding LinkedIn's IPO this week.
And with good reason. LinkedIn isn't just incredibly valuable on paper. There are also a ton of great features that users can take advantage of.
We put together 10 more of our favorite tips and tricks for LinkedIn. Give them a shot.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/more-ways-to-make-the-most-out-of-linkedin-2011-5##ixzz1MmrNUDsY
And with good reason. LinkedIn isn't just incredibly valuable on paper. There are also a ton of great features that users can take advantage of.
We put together 10 more of our favorite tips and tricks for LinkedIn. Give them a shot.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/more-ways-to-make-the-most-out-of-linkedin-2011-5##ixzz1MmrNUDsY
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
In the clouds with Office 365
Posted by John Stokdyk on Mon, 16/05/2011 - 12:27
Microsoft Office 365 is an evolution of Office 2010 Web Apps that makes four key Office products available via the net: Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus access to the Microsoft SharePoint web portal system and Exchange.
Where Office Live was more of a personal Cloud that gave you access to the Office tools, Office 365 is a corporate environment that, within the beta system at least, will let you cater for and collaborate with up to 25 colleagues.
The Exchange option is particularly interesting if you’re a small company using a standard POP internet service. Exchange gives you the ability to administer and archive all company email in one place and to synchronise diaries and tasks between team members. This is a boon if you haven’t got it, but will require much more careful management if you’ve already made the move to Microsoft Exchange, but want to link into Office 365 too. For example, will you have to decide which acts as the “master” system, and which the slave that synchs into it?
With so many facilities on offer, Office 365 looks like it might be capable of supporting an entire company’s administrative technology needs. However, our IT support crew might get a little touchy about some of the things it lets you do. For their sake, I won’t try to take over administration of our email system. Instead this introductory article will explore what exactly is available and how it works during the initial encounters to give members an idea about whether it’s worth exploring for their own uses.
More coverage on detailed projects and processes you can achieve with Office 365 will follow in the coming months.
As I mentioned to FirstTab, we’ve been keeping a close eye on Windows Live developments in recent years. But I came up against a technical roadblock in Windows Live when I tried to share my hefty Fantasy Football player analyser with colleagues; it was too big to display in a browser Window.
The big test for Office 365 would be to see whether it could cope with this real-world scenario, and if it could support cross-platform access from my partner’s Mac, or from BlackBerry and iPhone devices. It was brilliant to be able to log in from a Mac (using Apple's Safari browser, even) and create a Word document. Unfortunately, when it came to the 33Mb football KPI dashboard, the Office 365 Web App was just as uncomfortable handling it as Office Live.
My first encounter was fraught with a few other frustrations. After going through all the hoops to get a WindowsLive ID and access Windows Office Live in the past, the universal passport doesn’t work with the Office 365, so there’s a new ID and password to remember, plus a new domain the system creates for you @onmicrosoft.com.
What it offers
Home: a base for uploading and sharing documents with up to 25 colleagues; this page is also where they will need to connect their desktop apps to Office 365.
Access to Office Web Apps, including Outlook to manage your email and calendar.
Team Site: a website hosted by Microsoft SharePoint, but incorporating similar design and management tools as the Windows Live web-hosting service.
Lync Online, a unified communciations environment that lets you send and receive instant messages (IM), run peer-to-peer audio and video sessions, and display presence information about team members.
Admin section: for adding and managing users, and accessing Microsoft support resources when you need them.
The Web Apps have fewer menu tabs and options tha the usual desktop Office programs. Excel just has File, Home, and Insert tabs, so there is no access to pivot table tools or macros. If you want full access, there is an "Open in Office" option for each application.
To get full integration with your desktop apps, you need to download and run an Office 365 set up program. If you already have the Office suite installed, this step adds a minor element of duplication but once you have configured the SharePoint component to work with Office 365 it will let you access and work on the documents in your shared web portal.
However, after agreeing to the licence terms, the first stage of the installation started to upgrade my desktop version of Office. Remembering Simon Hurst’s experiences with the beta version of Office 2007, which wiped out his existing Outlook in-tray when he installed it, I decided this was as far as I could take my test drive without consulting the IT support team and the Office 365 user forums.
If you do want your on-premise and on-line Exchange email systems to co-exist, Office 365 has a Custom Plan wizard to help create a custom pilot scenario and deployment plan, so you can test your deployment strategy with a small number of users before rolling it out fully.
My intitial experiences confirmed something that was evident from the outset: if you’re setting out to build an IT infrastructure for your organisation from scratch, Office 365 has a lot going for it. While it will also provide the means to integrate your existing desktop Office programs, documents and email into a Cloud environment, you’ll need to do some careful research and planning to manage the process smoothly.
The Cloud movement has revved up significantly in the past few months, particularly with Google threatening to unleash its operating system-free Chromebook machine, which dispenses with all the administrative overheads. Microsoft has got a stranglehold on desktop users, and Office 365 is designed to keep things that way. If you’re comfortable with the Microsoft conventions, processes and interfaces, it’s a very generously featured suite that should make you more productive on the move, but it remains a monolith that demands your undivided attention.
The nature of fast moving Cloud developments is that there’s always an even better, cleverer and faster solution just around the corner. To put it in the terms we used to use for business and practice applications, Office 365 is very much an “suite” that promises to take care of everything for you. But it’s going against the emerging trend for users to opt for “best of breed” Cloud applications.
Find out more about Office 365 yourself - sign up for the beta test version here.
Microsoft Office 365 is an evolution of Office 2010 Web Apps that makes four key Office products available via the net: Excel, Word, PowerPoint and OneNote, plus access to the Microsoft SharePoint web portal system and Exchange.
Where Office Live was more of a personal Cloud that gave you access to the Office tools, Office 365 is a corporate environment that, within the beta system at least, will let you cater for and collaborate with up to 25 colleagues.
The Exchange option is particularly interesting if you’re a small company using a standard POP internet service. Exchange gives you the ability to administer and archive all company email in one place and to synchronise diaries and tasks between team members. This is a boon if you haven’t got it, but will require much more careful management if you’ve already made the move to Microsoft Exchange, but want to link into Office 365 too. For example, will you have to decide which acts as the “master” system, and which the slave that synchs into it?
With so many facilities on offer, Office 365 looks like it might be capable of supporting an entire company’s administrative technology needs. However, our IT support crew might get a little touchy about some of the things it lets you do. For their sake, I won’t try to take over administration of our email system. Instead this introductory article will explore what exactly is available and how it works during the initial encounters to give members an idea about whether it’s worth exploring for their own uses.
More coverage on detailed projects and processes you can achieve with Office 365 will follow in the coming months.
As I mentioned to FirstTab, we’ve been keeping a close eye on Windows Live developments in recent years. But I came up against a technical roadblock in Windows Live when I tried to share my hefty Fantasy Football player analyser with colleagues; it was too big to display in a browser Window.
The big test for Office 365 would be to see whether it could cope with this real-world scenario, and if it could support cross-platform access from my partner’s Mac, or from BlackBerry and iPhone devices. It was brilliant to be able to log in from a Mac (using Apple's Safari browser, even) and create a Word document. Unfortunately, when it came to the 33Mb football KPI dashboard, the Office 365 Web App was just as uncomfortable handling it as Office Live.
My first encounter was fraught with a few other frustrations. After going through all the hoops to get a WindowsLive ID and access Windows Office Live in the past, the universal passport doesn’t work with the Office 365, so there’s a new ID and password to remember, plus a new domain the system creates for you @onmicrosoft.com.
What it offers
Home: a base for uploading and sharing documents with up to 25 colleagues; this page is also where they will need to connect their desktop apps to Office 365.
Access to Office Web Apps, including Outlook to manage your email and calendar.
Team Site: a website hosted by Microsoft SharePoint, but incorporating similar design and management tools as the Windows Live web-hosting service.
Lync Online, a unified communciations environment that lets you send and receive instant messages (IM), run peer-to-peer audio and video sessions, and display presence information about team members.
Admin section: for adding and managing users, and accessing Microsoft support resources when you need them.
The Web Apps have fewer menu tabs and options tha the usual desktop Office programs. Excel just has File, Home, and Insert tabs, so there is no access to pivot table tools or macros. If you want full access, there is an "Open in Office" option for each application.
To get full integration with your desktop apps, you need to download and run an Office 365 set up program. If you already have the Office suite installed, this step adds a minor element of duplication but once you have configured the SharePoint component to work with Office 365 it will let you access and work on the documents in your shared web portal.
However, after agreeing to the licence terms, the first stage of the installation started to upgrade my desktop version of Office. Remembering Simon Hurst’s experiences with the beta version of Office 2007, which wiped out his existing Outlook in-tray when he installed it, I decided this was as far as I could take my test drive without consulting the IT support team and the Office 365 user forums.
If you do want your on-premise and on-line Exchange email systems to co-exist, Office 365 has a Custom Plan wizard to help create a custom pilot scenario and deployment plan, so you can test your deployment strategy with a small number of users before rolling it out fully.
My intitial experiences confirmed something that was evident from the outset: if you’re setting out to build an IT infrastructure for your organisation from scratch, Office 365 has a lot going for it. While it will also provide the means to integrate your existing desktop Office programs, documents and email into a Cloud environment, you’ll need to do some careful research and planning to manage the process smoothly.
The Cloud movement has revved up significantly in the past few months, particularly with Google threatening to unleash its operating system-free Chromebook machine, which dispenses with all the administrative overheads. Microsoft has got a stranglehold on desktop users, and Office 365 is designed to keep things that way. If you’re comfortable with the Microsoft conventions, processes and interfaces, it’s a very generously featured suite that should make you more productive on the move, but it remains a monolith that demands your undivided attention.
The nature of fast moving Cloud developments is that there’s always an even better, cleverer and faster solution just around the corner. To put it in the terms we used to use for business and practice applications, Office 365 is very much an “suite” that promises to take care of everything for you. But it’s going against the emerging trend for users to opt for “best of breed” Cloud applications.
Find out more about Office 365 yourself - sign up for the beta test version here.
Social By Design
Social By Design
By David A. Kelly
Businesses make social computing work with Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g.
For world-class companies, social networking and enterprise social computing aren’t a diversion. They are now part of the fabric of enterprise computing enabling the new social enterprise.
Take the case of London, England-based infrastructure group Balfour Beatty, with 50,000 employees in more than 1,200 different locations across 80 countries. For Balfour Beatty, social computing and Enterprise 2.0 technologies aren’t about the latest tabloid gossip; they’re about connecting employees, partners, customers, and projects more effectively, efficiently, and productively.
“Social computing services with Oracle WebCenter are all about being able to service the client more effectively by better coordinating our divisions and our people,” says Lee Wheelhouse, knowledge sharing and collaboration solution manager at Balfour Beatty. “Oracle WebCenter isn’t just a technology project for us. It’s a key strategic initiative for our company.”
Not surprisingly, Balfour Beatty isn’t the only company taking a second look at how to integrate social media into the enterprise.
“Enterprise 2.0 is really focused on the idea of taking all the tools that were developed for consumers, such as blogs, wikis, and so on, and using them in an enterprise environment,” says Brad Shimmin, principal analyst for collaboration platforms at Current Analysis, an analyst firm based in Sterling, Virginia.
“It’s not just about repeating the social networking functionality that exists in the consumer space with sites like Twitter and Facebook,” says Shimmin. “It’s about creating similar opportunities for collaboration and engagement within the context of an enterprise application. The new social computing capabilities of Oracle WebCenter Suite allow the platform to behave less like a one-way street where you’re an ERP [enterprise resource planning] user merely gathering data, and more like a conversation with your peers or other people in the context of a business process.”
In effect, the social enterprise is about engaging customers, users, and partners in two-way communications.
“There’s really a shift from the traditional portal market, where users were accessing multiple applications through multiple interfaces, to one that’s more of a rich Web experience—providing a modern, common user interface with Web 2.0 and social capabilities and richer integrations to back-office applications—that’s all seamless and transparent inside the application,” says Andy MacMillan, vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle. “That’s exactly what the latest release of Oracle WebCenter Suite provides.”
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Updates
The latest release of Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g provides a range of new capabilities focused on enabling organizations to leverage and seamlessly integrate social computing and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into a converged platform for internal and external applications and services. A few of the key enhancements to Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g are
Enterprise mashups. Enhanced user interface options allow developers to use development tools such as Oracle JDeveloper to create applications and data controls and allow business users to employ Oracle Composer to assemble and leverage them.
Content management. The new release provides new levels of security for content as well as workflow capabilities and direct access to Oracle Universal Content Management.
Personalization. Users can now leverage the WebCenter Personalization Server feature in Oracle WebCenter Suite to control dynamic delivery of content, information, and experience through personalized views.
Search and discovery. Oracle WebCenter Suite now provides direct Oracle Secure Enterprise Search crawlers for all Oracle WebCenter Suite content.
Analytics and management. New Web analytics services and dashboards allow users fine-grained visibility into processes and data. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g also now supports direct integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.
Over the past few years, Shimmin has watched how these traditionally consumer-oriented technologies have affected portal and collaborative solutions such as Oracle WebCenter Suite.
An Integrated Approach to Enabling the Social Enterprise: Oracle WebCenter Suite
Oracle WebCenter Suite is the modern user experience platform for the enterprise and the Web, enabling organizations to evolve portals, composite applications, extranet sites, and more by delivering a dynamic, seamless user experience.
“Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a user experience that’s really the blending of traditional Web applications with social computing capabilities,” says MacMillan. “We have customers that want to engage their customers and partners by combining traditional application data with things like wikis, blogs, and activity streams. So now we provide those social components as part of Oracle WebCenter Suite.”
Oracle WebCenter Suite’s user interface is based on the common user experience architecture that’s shared across Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware products, and more. “If developers are using Oracle Application Development Framework, then they’re automatically using the common user experience architecture, which means that any components they’re developing can be brought natively into Oracle WebCenter Suite,” says MacMillan.
Shimmin considers Oracle WebCenter Suite as something like a Swiss Army knife—it has all different types of tools and technologies built in to handle all different types of social enterprise scenarios.
Snapshots
Balfour Beatty
Location: London, England
Revenue: £10 billion in 2010
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g, Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Application Development Framework, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle Identity Management
“Oracle WebCenter is the type of solution that, whatever needs you have, whether it’s internal or external facing, whether it’s fairly basic like content management or something that requires custom development, [Oracle] WebCenter has the required technology built into it,” says Shimmin. “Oracle WebCenter has always been good at enabling organizations to make portals and expose information in a secure and governable way. But over the past few versions, Oracle’s been able to take the best technologies from its Sun and BEA acquisitions and draw them together to make Oracle WebCenter more flexible and better suited for external- as well as internal-facing scenarios such as customer relationship management and call center applications.”
Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0 Solution
Balfour Beatty is putting Oracle WebCenter Suite’s combination of traditional IT capabilities and new Web-focused features to good use.
“One of the reasons why Oracle WebCenter and our Enterprise 2.0 strategy are so important to us is because of the size and scale of Balfour Beatty and the depth and breadth of our expertise,” says Wheelhouse. “Our customers have an expectation that we can share our in-depth knowledge seamlessly across our business and around the world. Oracle WebCenter is beginning to help us do that more effectively.”
From an IT perspective, Balfour Beatty is composed of federated and very autonomous business units around the world, each with its own IT capability for things such as infrastructure and desktop support. Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0, social media-enabled Oracle WebCenter Suite portal has been designed to securely connect its employees across geographic and operating company boundaries and will allow them to collaborate, search, and share best practices in a business-oriented environment. It’s a good example of how and why organizations are adding social media to their mix of enterprise solutions.
“The challenge for us was to provide a platform that can span all our business units,” says Wheelhouse. “We needed a scalable, user-friendly solution that could interface with local systems to share information, while enabling greater collaboration and information sharing across geographic and operational boundaries. That’s where Oracle WebCenter comes in. Oracle WebCenter will be our global, scalable Enterprise 2.0 solution.”
Enterprise Requirements
Integration with back-office solutions was critical for Balfour Beatty’s global portal. Back-office systems are great at handling and supporting clearly defined business processes like procurements and HR processes, but social applications are something more creative and somewhat less predictable.
“We see Oracle WebCenter eventually giving us the best of both worlds in that we can support core business processes and functionality from back-office systems, and at the same time we can implement collaboration and social media interaction,” says Wheelhouse. “As a company that’s founded on expertise, we need to enable our people to reach out to knowledge experts, and that’s a creative process that requires the right type of social networks. The power of Enterprise 2.0 is connecting people that wouldn’t normally find each other.”
A key reason Balfour Beatty chose Oracle WebCenter Suite as its Enterprise 2.0 solution was the product’s ability to integrate traditional applications and business processes with social media, social computing, and Web-oriented requirements.
“The vision for us is to be able to break out of traditional business processes and into a collaborative, social environment to solve problems, and then go back into the business process with the results,” says Wheelhouse. “But it needs to be done in a seamless way.”
Another important aspect to integrating social media capabilities is ensuring that they meet enterprise standards for security and compliance. “For our purposes, the social media content created in Oracle WebCenter could be just as important as the corporate records, so it is subject to the same security policies, retention policies, and management policies,” says Wheelhouse.
User experience and the user interface were also critical to Balfour Beatty. “We wanted to create something that didn’t involve lots of training, wasn’t complex, and was effective,” says Wheelhouse. “What’s good about Oracle WebCenter is its flexibility and its ability to let us create a compelling, intuitive user interface for our solution.”
Next Steps
LEARN more about Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Webcast
Oracle Portal, User Experience, and Enterprise 2.0 Resource Library
But Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0 solution isn’t just about social connections and business processes. It’s also an effective way to reduce costs and increase productivity.
“Social media portals are a great way of communicating group and divisional initiatives and news, and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities are a great way of filtering all that information,” says Wheelhouse. “There are a lot of ways in which social media can make communications a lot more targeted and enable us to share technical expertise and innovation.”
The Dawn of the Social Enterprise
When it comes to portals and connecting with customers, the future doesn’t look like the past.
“It’s a very different landscape than it was just a couple years ago,” says Current Analysis’ Shimmin.
And although many things will change in the technology landscape over the next few years, one thing is certain: most companies will integrate social networking and social computing capabilities into their enterprise IT strategy.
“In the last two years, we’ve seen the reshaping of portals to be much more capable, much more social, and much more collaborative environments for serving enterprise IT,” says Shimmin. “They’re no longer simply a space where you have pull-down menus to access HR documents. They still do that, but now they also have integrated, collaborative, social networking functions that allow companies to develop stronger customer relationships, optimize employee interactions, and gain greater insight into market trends.”
Systems of Engagement
Organizations have had transactional systems of record for decades. From accounting to sales to human resources, enterprise applications that can keep detailed records of transactions have been refined and perfected.
But business—especially today’s business—isn’t just about individual purchases or transactions. It’s not just about what’s being sold to customers. Today’s business is about the people doing business, how they communicate, and what they need next to do their jobs.
That’s where enterprise social computing and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities come in, along with solutions like Oracle WebCenter Suite.
“It’s really about connecting the people aspect and the engagement aspect of what organizations are already doing in their transactional systems,” says Andy MacMillan, vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle. “I think with enterprise social media, that there’s an opportunity to drive both business productivity and business innovation.”
In effect, organizations are moving beyond their traditional systems of record to systems of engagement. These systems not only keep track of what’s purchased and when but also where the customer came from and why, and what else—or who else—in the organization should be connected with him to derive the maximal value.
“There’s a convergence of transactional systems and systems of engagement that can help organizations have a complete view of the customer and their points of interaction with an organization,” says MacMillan.
“There’s a strong benefit to line-of-business and process owners engaging people beyond the process and beyond the individual application transactions,” says MacMillan. “And that’s what Oracle WebCenter Suite is really designed to do.”
David A. Kelly (davidakelly.com) is a business, technology, and travel writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.
By David A. Kelly
Businesses make social computing work with Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g.
For world-class companies, social networking and enterprise social computing aren’t a diversion. They are now part of the fabric of enterprise computing enabling the new social enterprise.
Take the case of London, England-based infrastructure group Balfour Beatty, with 50,000 employees in more than 1,200 different locations across 80 countries. For Balfour Beatty, social computing and Enterprise 2.0 technologies aren’t about the latest tabloid gossip; they’re about connecting employees, partners, customers, and projects more effectively, efficiently, and productively.
“Social computing services with Oracle WebCenter are all about being able to service the client more effectively by better coordinating our divisions and our people,” says Lee Wheelhouse, knowledge sharing and collaboration solution manager at Balfour Beatty. “Oracle WebCenter isn’t just a technology project for us. It’s a key strategic initiative for our company.”
Not surprisingly, Balfour Beatty isn’t the only company taking a second look at how to integrate social media into the enterprise.
“Enterprise 2.0 is really focused on the idea of taking all the tools that were developed for consumers, such as blogs, wikis, and so on, and using them in an enterprise environment,” says Brad Shimmin, principal analyst for collaboration platforms at Current Analysis, an analyst firm based in Sterling, Virginia.
“It’s not just about repeating the social networking functionality that exists in the consumer space with sites like Twitter and Facebook,” says Shimmin. “It’s about creating similar opportunities for collaboration and engagement within the context of an enterprise application. The new social computing capabilities of Oracle WebCenter Suite allow the platform to behave less like a one-way street where you’re an ERP [enterprise resource planning] user merely gathering data, and more like a conversation with your peers or other people in the context of a business process.”
In effect, the social enterprise is about engaging customers, users, and partners in two-way communications.
“There’s really a shift from the traditional portal market, where users were accessing multiple applications through multiple interfaces, to one that’s more of a rich Web experience—providing a modern, common user interface with Web 2.0 and social capabilities and richer integrations to back-office applications—that’s all seamless and transparent inside the application,” says Andy MacMillan, vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle. “That’s exactly what the latest release of Oracle WebCenter Suite provides.”
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Updates
The latest release of Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g provides a range of new capabilities focused on enabling organizations to leverage and seamlessly integrate social computing and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into a converged platform for internal and external applications and services. A few of the key enhancements to Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g are
Enterprise mashups. Enhanced user interface options allow developers to use development tools such as Oracle JDeveloper to create applications and data controls and allow business users to employ Oracle Composer to assemble and leverage them.
Content management. The new release provides new levels of security for content as well as workflow capabilities and direct access to Oracle Universal Content Management.
Personalization. Users can now leverage the WebCenter Personalization Server feature in Oracle WebCenter Suite to control dynamic delivery of content, information, and experience through personalized views.
Search and discovery. Oracle WebCenter Suite now provides direct Oracle Secure Enterprise Search crawlers for all Oracle WebCenter Suite content.
Analytics and management. New Web analytics services and dashboards allow users fine-grained visibility into processes and data. Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g also now supports direct integration with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g.
Over the past few years, Shimmin has watched how these traditionally consumer-oriented technologies have affected portal and collaborative solutions such as Oracle WebCenter Suite.
An Integrated Approach to Enabling the Social Enterprise: Oracle WebCenter Suite
Oracle WebCenter Suite is the modern user experience platform for the enterprise and the Web, enabling organizations to evolve portals, composite applications, extranet sites, and more by delivering a dynamic, seamless user experience.
“Oracle WebCenter Suite provides a user experience that’s really the blending of traditional Web applications with social computing capabilities,” says MacMillan. “We have customers that want to engage their customers and partners by combining traditional application data with things like wikis, blogs, and activity streams. So now we provide those social components as part of Oracle WebCenter Suite.”
Oracle WebCenter Suite’s user interface is based on the common user experience architecture that’s shared across Oracle Fusion Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware products, and more. “If developers are using Oracle Application Development Framework, then they’re automatically using the common user experience architecture, which means that any components they’re developing can be brought natively into Oracle WebCenter Suite,” says MacMillan.
Shimmin considers Oracle WebCenter Suite as something like a Swiss Army knife—it has all different types of tools and technologies built in to handle all different types of social enterprise scenarios.
Snapshots
Balfour Beatty
Location: London, England
Revenue: £10 billion in 2010
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g, Oracle Universal Content Management, Oracle Database 11g, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle JDeveloper, Oracle Application Development Framework, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle Identity Management
“Oracle WebCenter is the type of solution that, whatever needs you have, whether it’s internal or external facing, whether it’s fairly basic like content management or something that requires custom development, [Oracle] WebCenter has the required technology built into it,” says Shimmin. “Oracle WebCenter has always been good at enabling organizations to make portals and expose information in a secure and governable way. But over the past few versions, Oracle’s been able to take the best technologies from its Sun and BEA acquisitions and draw them together to make Oracle WebCenter more flexible and better suited for external- as well as internal-facing scenarios such as customer relationship management and call center applications.”
Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0 Solution
Balfour Beatty is putting Oracle WebCenter Suite’s combination of traditional IT capabilities and new Web-focused features to good use.
“One of the reasons why Oracle WebCenter and our Enterprise 2.0 strategy are so important to us is because of the size and scale of Balfour Beatty and the depth and breadth of our expertise,” says Wheelhouse. “Our customers have an expectation that we can share our in-depth knowledge seamlessly across our business and around the world. Oracle WebCenter is beginning to help us do that more effectively.”
From an IT perspective, Balfour Beatty is composed of federated and very autonomous business units around the world, each with its own IT capability for things such as infrastructure and desktop support. Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0, social media-enabled Oracle WebCenter Suite portal has been designed to securely connect its employees across geographic and operating company boundaries and will allow them to collaborate, search, and share best practices in a business-oriented environment. It’s a good example of how and why organizations are adding social media to their mix of enterprise solutions.
“The challenge for us was to provide a platform that can span all our business units,” says Wheelhouse. “We needed a scalable, user-friendly solution that could interface with local systems to share information, while enabling greater collaboration and information sharing across geographic and operational boundaries. That’s where Oracle WebCenter comes in. Oracle WebCenter will be our global, scalable Enterprise 2.0 solution.”
Enterprise Requirements
Integration with back-office solutions was critical for Balfour Beatty’s global portal. Back-office systems are great at handling and supporting clearly defined business processes like procurements and HR processes, but social applications are something more creative and somewhat less predictable.
“We see Oracle WebCenter eventually giving us the best of both worlds in that we can support core business processes and functionality from back-office systems, and at the same time we can implement collaboration and social media interaction,” says Wheelhouse. “As a company that’s founded on expertise, we need to enable our people to reach out to knowledge experts, and that’s a creative process that requires the right type of social networks. The power of Enterprise 2.0 is connecting people that wouldn’t normally find each other.”
A key reason Balfour Beatty chose Oracle WebCenter Suite as its Enterprise 2.0 solution was the product’s ability to integrate traditional applications and business processes with social media, social computing, and Web-oriented requirements.
“The vision for us is to be able to break out of traditional business processes and into a collaborative, social environment to solve problems, and then go back into the business process with the results,” says Wheelhouse. “But it needs to be done in a seamless way.”
Another important aspect to integrating social media capabilities is ensuring that they meet enterprise standards for security and compliance. “For our purposes, the social media content created in Oracle WebCenter could be just as important as the corporate records, so it is subject to the same security policies, retention policies, and management policies,” says Wheelhouse.
User experience and the user interface were also critical to Balfour Beatty. “We wanted to create something that didn’t involve lots of training, wasn’t complex, and was effective,” says Wheelhouse. “What’s good about Oracle WebCenter is its flexibility and its ability to let us create a compelling, intuitive user interface for our solution.”
Next Steps
LEARN more about Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g
Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g Webcast
Oracle Portal, User Experience, and Enterprise 2.0 Resource Library
But Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0 solution isn’t just about social connections and business processes. It’s also an effective way to reduce costs and increase productivity.
“Social media portals are a great way of communicating group and divisional initiatives and news, and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities are a great way of filtering all that information,” says Wheelhouse. “There are a lot of ways in which social media can make communications a lot more targeted and enable us to share technical expertise and innovation.”
The Dawn of the Social Enterprise
When it comes to portals and connecting with customers, the future doesn’t look like the past.
“It’s a very different landscape than it was just a couple years ago,” says Current Analysis’ Shimmin.
And although many things will change in the technology landscape over the next few years, one thing is certain: most companies will integrate social networking and social computing capabilities into their enterprise IT strategy.
“In the last two years, we’ve seen the reshaping of portals to be much more capable, much more social, and much more collaborative environments for serving enterprise IT,” says Shimmin. “They’re no longer simply a space where you have pull-down menus to access HR documents. They still do that, but now they also have integrated, collaborative, social networking functions that allow companies to develop stronger customer relationships, optimize employee interactions, and gain greater insight into market trends.”
Systems of Engagement
Organizations have had transactional systems of record for decades. From accounting to sales to human resources, enterprise applications that can keep detailed records of transactions have been refined and perfected.
But business—especially today’s business—isn’t just about individual purchases or transactions. It’s not just about what’s being sold to customers. Today’s business is about the people doing business, how they communicate, and what they need next to do their jobs.
That’s where enterprise social computing and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities come in, along with solutions like Oracle WebCenter Suite.
“It’s really about connecting the people aspect and the engagement aspect of what organizations are already doing in their transactional systems,” says Andy MacMillan, vice president of product management for Enterprise 2.0 at Oracle. “I think with enterprise social media, that there’s an opportunity to drive both business productivity and business innovation.”
In effect, organizations are moving beyond their traditional systems of record to systems of engagement. These systems not only keep track of what’s purchased and when but also where the customer came from and why, and what else—or who else—in the organization should be connected with him to derive the maximal value.
“There’s a convergence of transactional systems and systems of engagement that can help organizations have a complete view of the customer and their points of interaction with an organization,” says MacMillan.
“There’s a strong benefit to line-of-business and process owners engaging people beyond the process and beyond the individual application transactions,” says MacMillan. “And that’s what Oracle WebCenter Suite is really designed to do.”
David A. Kelly (davidakelly.com) is a business, technology, and travel writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
Social media: The personal at work can be a disruptive mix
Social media: The personal at work can be a disruptive mix
By David Gelles
Published: April 20 2011 10:07 | Last updated: April 20 2011 10:07
There are some companies that encourage employees to have a healthy work-life balance. A happy worker, so goes the thinking, is a productive worker.
Yet, with the rise of social media, there is more personal information about individuals available on the web than ever before.
As a result, the lines between work, and the rest of life have never been more blurred.
This muddling of professional and personal identities can be disruptive in the workplace.
“Social media have had an enormous impact on businesses, from a product perspective and also, in some cases, from a performance management perspective,” says Sue Murphy, association manager, of the US National Human Resources Association.
At the most basic level, the HR department needs to make sure employees are not spending all day on social networking sites and frittering their work hours away tweeting and playing games.
“The amount of time people are spending on the internet at work has increased, so from a performance management perspective we need to be more diligent,” says Ms Murphy.
Even if social media facilities are not being abused in their overuse at work, there is a question over when and whether even sparing use could be deemed inappropriate.
Stories of employees and managers misusing social media on the job have become common.
But for the first time, authorities are getting involved in deciding whether workers or bosses are in the right. Last month, the US National Labor Relations Board weighed in after an employee was fired for a Facebook posting deemed tasteless by management.
Michael Patrick O’Brien, an employment attorney with law firm Jones Waldo, says this incident was a wake-up call for employers.
“Get legal advice before you fire someone because he or she has posted comments online or communicated with co-workers about working conditions,” he says, adding it was important for companies to “update social media policies”.
Social media can also prove an asset, and a liability for recruitment. Increasingly, says Ms Murphy, companies are posting job listings on social sites such as LinkedIn, instead of on job sites such as Monster.com.
“It’s helping to cut their recruiting costs, and to find more suitable candidates,” says Ms Murphy, adding that Craigslist, the online classified advertising site, is not an ideal recruiting venue. “There are some negative sides with some of the Craigslist postings.”
But encouraging employees to use social media to share a job listing among friends and social networks can be useful. “It helps you get your message out,” she says.
“There are millions of people on Facebook and Twitter every day. When I started in HR, you would place an ad on Wednesday, it would be in the paper on Thursday, and it would be a week before you had CVs,” says Ms Murphy. “Now it only takes seconds.”
But again, with so much data publicly available, there is a risk employers will focus on personal information when they make hiring decisions, whether it is relevant to work or not.
“The downside of using social media from a networking perspective is that we don’t have guidelines for regulating what employers are getting from these social sites,” says Ms Murphy.
“If there are photos of them partying, or if they see people that seem to be obese, they are making decisions based on what they see on these sites, which leaves the door open to discriminatory practices.”
Even after employees leave the organisation, social media can be integral to an ongoing relationship with the company.
“Employers use it to track their alumni in the press,” says Martin Murtland, managing director at for PR and Corporate Communications at Dow Jones, speaking about proprietary software that monitors mentions of individuals and companies across media channels.
“If there’s someone you’re particularly interested in, this is a way to see what they’re saying about the company.”
Yet, without guidelines, social media in the workplace can go awry. “You have to be careful about maintaining ... neutrality,” says Ms Murphy.
She recounts an incident where a supervisor went on to Facebook, downloaded a picture of a male employee who was out with a friend, then sent it out to colleagues saying “look at these two gay boys”.
Nothing was done to the supervisor, much to the chagrin of the employee. “His supervisor created a hostile work environment,” she says.
The use of common sense is important in HR policies on social media.
“Be smart with what you’re saying, be aware of who you’re reaching, and if you’re going to go looking, be prepared for what you’re going to find,” says Ms Murphy.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
.."FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times. Privacy policy | Terms
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2011.
By David Gelles
Published: April 20 2011 10:07 | Last updated: April 20 2011 10:07
There are some companies that encourage employees to have a healthy work-life balance. A happy worker, so goes the thinking, is a productive worker.
Yet, with the rise of social media, there is more personal information about individuals available on the web than ever before.
As a result, the lines between work, and the rest of life have never been more blurred.
This muddling of professional and personal identities can be disruptive in the workplace.
“Social media have had an enormous impact on businesses, from a product perspective and also, in some cases, from a performance management perspective,” says Sue Murphy, association manager, of the US National Human Resources Association.
At the most basic level, the HR department needs to make sure employees are not spending all day on social networking sites and frittering their work hours away tweeting and playing games.
“The amount of time people are spending on the internet at work has increased, so from a performance management perspective we need to be more diligent,” says Ms Murphy.
Even if social media facilities are not being abused in their overuse at work, there is a question over when and whether even sparing use could be deemed inappropriate.
Stories of employees and managers misusing social media on the job have become common.
But for the first time, authorities are getting involved in deciding whether workers or bosses are in the right. Last month, the US National Labor Relations Board weighed in after an employee was fired for a Facebook posting deemed tasteless by management.
Michael Patrick O’Brien, an employment attorney with law firm Jones Waldo, says this incident was a wake-up call for employers.
“Get legal advice before you fire someone because he or she has posted comments online or communicated with co-workers about working conditions,” he says, adding it was important for companies to “update social media policies”.
Social media can also prove an asset, and a liability for recruitment. Increasingly, says Ms Murphy, companies are posting job listings on social sites such as LinkedIn, instead of on job sites such as Monster.com.
“It’s helping to cut their recruiting costs, and to find more suitable candidates,” says Ms Murphy, adding that Craigslist, the online classified advertising site, is not an ideal recruiting venue. “There are some negative sides with some of the Craigslist postings.”
But encouraging employees to use social media to share a job listing among friends and social networks can be useful. “It helps you get your message out,” she says.
“There are millions of people on Facebook and Twitter every day. When I started in HR, you would place an ad on Wednesday, it would be in the paper on Thursday, and it would be a week before you had CVs,” says Ms Murphy. “Now it only takes seconds.”
But again, with so much data publicly available, there is a risk employers will focus on personal information when they make hiring decisions, whether it is relevant to work or not.
“The downside of using social media from a networking perspective is that we don’t have guidelines for regulating what employers are getting from these social sites,” says Ms Murphy.
“If there are photos of them partying, or if they see people that seem to be obese, they are making decisions based on what they see on these sites, which leaves the door open to discriminatory practices.”
Even after employees leave the organisation, social media can be integral to an ongoing relationship with the company.
“Employers use it to track their alumni in the press,” says Martin Murtland, managing director at for PR and Corporate Communications at Dow Jones, speaking about proprietary software that monitors mentions of individuals and companies across media channels.
“If there’s someone you’re particularly interested in, this is a way to see what they’re saying about the company.”
Yet, without guidelines, social media in the workplace can go awry. “You have to be careful about maintaining ... neutrality,” says Ms Murphy.
She recounts an incident where a supervisor went on to Facebook, downloaded a picture of a male employee who was out with a friend, then sent it out to colleagues saying “look at these two gay boys”.
Nothing was done to the supervisor, much to the chagrin of the employee. “His supervisor created a hostile work environment,” she says.
The use of common sense is important in HR policies on social media.
“Be smart with what you’re saying, be aware of who you’re reaching, and if you’re going to go looking, be prepared for what you’re going to find,” says Ms Murphy.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
.."FT" and "Financial Times" are trademarks of the Financial Times. Privacy policy | Terms
© Copyright The Financial Times Ltd 2011.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Google to go plus-one better than Facebook
Google to go plus-one better than Facebook
By Richard Waters
Published: April 13 2011 21:05 | Last updated: April 13 2011 21:05
Five years ago, Yahoo! had a plan for beating Google at its own game. It would encourage members of its huge online audience to vote for web pages they liked by “tagging” them. Out of this outpouring would come a more personal and social web, one that was filtered by Yahoo’s users rather than Google’s algorithms.
Fast forward to the present, and there’s a distinctly similar echo in what Google has come up with in its own latest attempt to counter a certain fast-growing social networking site.
Facebook’s “Like” buttons may have sprouted across the web over the past year, but if Google has its way we will all soon be “plus-one-ing” – the inelegant new phrase that describes its move into social, whereby we can click on the “+1” buttons due to appear on its search results and, eventually, other web pages.
The comparison with the now-struggling Yahoo, and the sight of Google copying one of Facebook’s more successful moves, raises the uncomfortable feeling that the search group is running out of ideas.
When Larry Page marked his elevation to chief executive this month with the blunt message to Googlers that a large part of their bonuses will be tied to the company’s success in social, it only added to a sense that urgency is turning to panic.
But it would be a mistake to write Google off. It has some prime assets already in place for its social push and it undeniably has the staying power. Also, it has more in common with Facebook than the usual “search algorithm v social network” contrast suggests. Both see themselves as utilities on the web, with a mission to help a large slice of the world’s population communicate and connect with things they’re interested in.
If Facebook’s key asset is its “social graph” – the web of its users’ personal connections – then Google has its own, implicit networks of relationships to mine. By tapping your most frequent Gmail connections, your list of friends on its Chat service and your phonebook on one of its Android devices, it has plenty of ways to divine your social relationships. It can supplement that by drawing on connections from services like Twitter.
Until now, Google’s main problem has been that it just hasn’t found anything very compelling to do with this information.
That’s where the “+1” voting system comes in. Smartly, it got a low-key launch (lessons learnt here from the debacle around Buzz, the rudimentary social networking service that attracted criticism last year over its handling of privacy). Websites will have good reasons to display the +1 buttons: votes will feed into Google’s search system and could help their rankings.
More of an issue is what users will get out of clicking those buttons – there is no social networking site to collect all those preferences and display them to friends. But as Google starts to show what your contacts have “plus-owned” in the search results you see, the draw could strengthen.
There are other pieces that need to fall into place. Google needs more users to set up profiles and add personal information about themselves, as they do on Facebook. Then, the value of having a Google profile should start to become more apparent.
To feed this virtuous circle, Google needs to find many more things for users to share. Inevitably, that will mean finding a way to draw in an equivalent of the Facebook status update – something that Buzz has so far failed to do.
An acquisition of Twitter still makes sense, which would bring a new brand and an extra dimension in much the way YouTube did. It would have the added benefit of marrying a company which has become a byword for the failure to find an effective business model, with one that is sitting on a geyser of cash.
Larry Page’s “social bonus” kicks in for Googlers in the final quarter of this year. That might be a little early to see real results from the latest social push, but the message he has sent is not unreasonable: Google does not need to build a new social network from scratch and is closer than it may look to seeing some results.
None of this is to belittle the severity of the challenge. Simply welding social behaviour on to an existing web service – as Apple has proved by trying to attach its Ping music network to iTunes – does not work unless users see some compelling benefits.
Google has plenty of ways to make that mistake. Properties like YouTube, Android and the Chrome browser could become powerful platforms for promoting and spreading its social services. But force-feeding users with Facebook alternatives they don’t want or need is a recipe for disaster – as seen with the privacy row around Buzz.
The question is not whether Google “gets” social – it is whether it is as attuned to, and respectful of, its users’ interests as it claims.
Richard Waters is the FT’s West Coast managing editor
richard.waters@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
By Richard Waters
Published: April 13 2011 21:05 | Last updated: April 13 2011 21:05
Five years ago, Yahoo! had a plan for beating Google at its own game. It would encourage members of its huge online audience to vote for web pages they liked by “tagging” them. Out of this outpouring would come a more personal and social web, one that was filtered by Yahoo’s users rather than Google’s algorithms.
Fast forward to the present, and there’s a distinctly similar echo in what Google has come up with in its own latest attempt to counter a certain fast-growing social networking site.
Facebook’s “Like” buttons may have sprouted across the web over the past year, but if Google has its way we will all soon be “plus-one-ing” – the inelegant new phrase that describes its move into social, whereby we can click on the “+1” buttons due to appear on its search results and, eventually, other web pages.
The comparison with the now-struggling Yahoo, and the sight of Google copying one of Facebook’s more successful moves, raises the uncomfortable feeling that the search group is running out of ideas.
When Larry Page marked his elevation to chief executive this month with the blunt message to Googlers that a large part of their bonuses will be tied to the company’s success in social, it only added to a sense that urgency is turning to panic.
But it would be a mistake to write Google off. It has some prime assets already in place for its social push and it undeniably has the staying power. Also, it has more in common with Facebook than the usual “search algorithm v social network” contrast suggests. Both see themselves as utilities on the web, with a mission to help a large slice of the world’s population communicate and connect with things they’re interested in.
If Facebook’s key asset is its “social graph” – the web of its users’ personal connections – then Google has its own, implicit networks of relationships to mine. By tapping your most frequent Gmail connections, your list of friends on its Chat service and your phonebook on one of its Android devices, it has plenty of ways to divine your social relationships. It can supplement that by drawing on connections from services like Twitter.
Until now, Google’s main problem has been that it just hasn’t found anything very compelling to do with this information.
That’s where the “+1” voting system comes in. Smartly, it got a low-key launch (lessons learnt here from the debacle around Buzz, the rudimentary social networking service that attracted criticism last year over its handling of privacy). Websites will have good reasons to display the +1 buttons: votes will feed into Google’s search system and could help their rankings.
More of an issue is what users will get out of clicking those buttons – there is no social networking site to collect all those preferences and display them to friends. But as Google starts to show what your contacts have “plus-owned” in the search results you see, the draw could strengthen.
There are other pieces that need to fall into place. Google needs more users to set up profiles and add personal information about themselves, as they do on Facebook. Then, the value of having a Google profile should start to become more apparent.
To feed this virtuous circle, Google needs to find many more things for users to share. Inevitably, that will mean finding a way to draw in an equivalent of the Facebook status update – something that Buzz has so far failed to do.
An acquisition of Twitter still makes sense, which would bring a new brand and an extra dimension in much the way YouTube did. It would have the added benefit of marrying a company which has become a byword for the failure to find an effective business model, with one that is sitting on a geyser of cash.
Larry Page’s “social bonus” kicks in for Googlers in the final quarter of this year. That might be a little early to see real results from the latest social push, but the message he has sent is not unreasonable: Google does not need to build a new social network from scratch and is closer than it may look to seeing some results.
None of this is to belittle the severity of the challenge. Simply welding social behaviour on to an existing web service – as Apple has proved by trying to attach its Ping music network to iTunes – does not work unless users see some compelling benefits.
Google has plenty of ways to make that mistake. Properties like YouTube, Android and the Chrome browser could become powerful platforms for promoting and spreading its social services. But force-feeding users with Facebook alternatives they don’t want or need is a recipe for disaster – as seen with the privacy row around Buzz.
The question is not whether Google “gets” social – it is whether it is as attuned to, and respectful of, its users’ interests as it claims.
Richard Waters is the FT’s West Coast managing editor
richard.waters@ft.com
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
‘It is a service, not a technology’
‘It is a service, not a technology’
By Charles Batchelor
Published: March 15 2011 16:22 | Last updated: March 15 2011 16:22
Chief executives and finance directors are understandably cautious when the IT industry waxes enthusiastic about the next “breakthrough”.
What are they to make of cloud computing, the latest big technology idea to come to mainstream business attention?
Simply put, cloud computing is the use of off-site servers, routers and databases that are not “owned” by the business, to handle all, or large parts, of a company’s computing needs.
Instead of managing requirements in-house, with all the costs and hassle involved, a company will outsource operations such as e-mails, enterprise resource planning and data storage.
Factories used to generate their own power on-site, but now routinely buy in electricity and gas.
Cloud enthusiasts believe that, in future, companies will buy computer capacity in the same way.
Executives may be unfamiliar with the cloud but many will have been using it for years without realising it.
E-mail providers such as Google, social networking sites including Facebook, and Flickr, an online photo and video-sharing service, are all run from global data centres, many of which are owned by companies such as Amazon and Microsoft.
The e-mails or photographs that appear to be stored on your desk- or laptop are actually held remotely.
The term “cloud” comes from the technical diagrams used to represent telecommunications and computer systems, which traditionally enclosed networks within cloud shapes.
Cloud computing represents a development of previous arrangements such as “managed services”, where a company handed the operation of its IT network to an outside supplier.
It also piggybacks on “virtualisation” technology, which allows users to get more out of their network by squeezing several applications on to a single server.
“Research has shown that [in-house] data centres do not use more than 20 per cent of their capacity,” says Michael Kogeler, director of cloud strategy at Microsoft International.
It was the idea of putting all that unused capacity to work and the growth of the internet that led to the birth of cloud computing.
“The cloud is a service, not a technology,” explains Rupert Chapman, a cloud specialist at PA Consulting. “You only pay for what you use” and access the computer power over the internet.
Cloud computing is sometimes seen as of particular benefit to small and medium-sized businesses that lack the resources to set up their own IT departments but it is also used by large companies.
It allows businesses of all sizes to acquire computer capacity to launch products and services quickly.
There is little or no capital expenditure involved and costs are based on transactions completed or volume of data stored and should be lower than if managed in-house.
Because the capacity of the cloud is, in theory, unlimited, companies can store far more data and handle far more transactions than might be possible on their in-house system.
They can also back up data on a remote site for security. Because data are not kept in house, they can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, so are available to executives on the move.
Going to the cloud for capacity also means the IT department is not constantly updating servers and software to keep up with technology.
A large cloud provider can also devote more resources to maintaining the security of the network.
“From customers’ perspective there are three ways to use the cloud,” says Mr Chapman.
“They can use it to dip their toe in the water to test an application. If it meets their needs, they can bring it in-house and run it on their own machines. The test environment has traditionally been expensive but one client achieved an 80 per cent cost saving.
“Alternatively, customers can use the cloud on a selective basis for particular services. A market information organisation used a customer relationship management system to suck in just the customer information they needed.”
Finally, companies can take a “transformational” approach, opting to use the cloud for most of their applications, retaining direct control only of those that make a real difference to their organisation. Relatively few companies do this as yet, says Mr Chapman, because they often have a big investment in their legacy systems or are tied into managed service contracts.
Problems companies should watch out for include legal ownership of data, security and the risk of getting locked in to a service provider.
An appropriate contract should resolve ownership issues. Security should be better at a dedicated cloud provider, but hackers have attacked networks and sensitive data should be encrypted in transit and storage. The contract should also allow a customer to change providers easily.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
By Charles Batchelor
Published: March 15 2011 16:22 | Last updated: March 15 2011 16:22
Chief executives and finance directors are understandably cautious when the IT industry waxes enthusiastic about the next “breakthrough”.
What are they to make of cloud computing, the latest big technology idea to come to mainstream business attention?
Simply put, cloud computing is the use of off-site servers, routers and databases that are not “owned” by the business, to handle all, or large parts, of a company’s computing needs.
Instead of managing requirements in-house, with all the costs and hassle involved, a company will outsource operations such as e-mails, enterprise resource planning and data storage.
Factories used to generate their own power on-site, but now routinely buy in electricity and gas.
Cloud enthusiasts believe that, in future, companies will buy computer capacity in the same way.
Executives may be unfamiliar with the cloud but many will have been using it for years without realising it.
E-mail providers such as Google, social networking sites including Facebook, and Flickr, an online photo and video-sharing service, are all run from global data centres, many of which are owned by companies such as Amazon and Microsoft.
The e-mails or photographs that appear to be stored on your desk- or laptop are actually held remotely.
The term “cloud” comes from the technical diagrams used to represent telecommunications and computer systems, which traditionally enclosed networks within cloud shapes.
Cloud computing represents a development of previous arrangements such as “managed services”, where a company handed the operation of its IT network to an outside supplier.
It also piggybacks on “virtualisation” technology, which allows users to get more out of their network by squeezing several applications on to a single server.
“Research has shown that [in-house] data centres do not use more than 20 per cent of their capacity,” says Michael Kogeler, director of cloud strategy at Microsoft International.
It was the idea of putting all that unused capacity to work and the growth of the internet that led to the birth of cloud computing.
“The cloud is a service, not a technology,” explains Rupert Chapman, a cloud specialist at PA Consulting. “You only pay for what you use” and access the computer power over the internet.
Cloud computing is sometimes seen as of particular benefit to small and medium-sized businesses that lack the resources to set up their own IT departments but it is also used by large companies.
It allows businesses of all sizes to acquire computer capacity to launch products and services quickly.
There is little or no capital expenditure involved and costs are based on transactions completed or volume of data stored and should be lower than if managed in-house.
Because the capacity of the cloud is, in theory, unlimited, companies can store far more data and handle far more transactions than might be possible on their in-house system.
They can also back up data on a remote site for security. Because data are not kept in house, they can be accessed from anywhere with an internet connection, so are available to executives on the move.
Going to the cloud for capacity also means the IT department is not constantly updating servers and software to keep up with technology.
A large cloud provider can also devote more resources to maintaining the security of the network.
“From customers’ perspective there are three ways to use the cloud,” says Mr Chapman.
“They can use it to dip their toe in the water to test an application. If it meets their needs, they can bring it in-house and run it on their own machines. The test environment has traditionally been expensive but one client achieved an 80 per cent cost saving.
“Alternatively, customers can use the cloud on a selective basis for particular services. A market information organisation used a customer relationship management system to suck in just the customer information they needed.”
Finally, companies can take a “transformational” approach, opting to use the cloud for most of their applications, retaining direct control only of those that make a real difference to their organisation. Relatively few companies do this as yet, says Mr Chapman, because they often have a big investment in their legacy systems or are tied into managed service contracts.
Problems companies should watch out for include legal ownership of data, security and the risk of getting locked in to a service provider.
An appropriate contract should resolve ownership issues. Security should be better at a dedicated cloud provider, but hackers have attacked networks and sensitive data should be encrypted in transit and storage. The contract should also allow a customer to change providers easily.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
Social media: The worst thing is to ignore your customers
Social media: The worst thing is to ignore your customers
By Jane Bird
Published: March 15 2011 16:22 | Last updated: March 15 2011 16:22
Comment on a product or service using Twitter or Facebook and within minutes your words could have been read by thousands.
This benefits business when the comment is favourable, but customer complaints can rapidly acquire huge momentum.
Many companies are using social networks, blogs and other online forums both to keep in touch with customers and as a vehicle for sales and marketing.
The challenge is to handle the vast volume of messages that can result.
When you start to participate in social networks, you open the floodgates to what your customers want to say, says Graham Murphy, senior community developer at Grooveshark, an online music service. “It can be a blessing or a curse.”
Grooveshark has benefited from networks, which have helped build registered users to almost 8m with negligible advertising.
It is certainly a disadvantage that people can so loudly voice a negative opinion, says Mr Murphy.
“But there’s the opportunity to flip it in our favour. If we solve a billing issue in 20 minutes, they’ll post something great about us. Suddenly we look better than we did before.”
When Grooveshark has server problems, it is alerted in minutes by its followers – 200,000 on Facebook and 50,000 on Twitter.
“Their voice gives valuable insight into our website.”
The company uses software from California-based Assistly to aggregate all messages it receives into one inbox, where they can be prioritised and acted on swiftly, generating a “virtuous circle” of positive comments.
Alex Bard, Assistly’s chief executive, says the aim is to help companies turn customer service into sales and marketing. “If customers are going to gang up on you, they’ll do it anyway,” he says.
“Customers are a core asset that you can learn from, creating a better relationship. The worst thing you can do is ignore them, and the best is to respond.”
Mr Bard encourages companies using Assistly software to let a broad range of employees participate in customer dialogues, rather than just the service team. “This gives engineers or product developers insights that help them make better decisions.”
The real prize is to get customers to recommend you to their friends, says Gail Goodman, chief executive of Massachusetts-based Constant Contact.
It provides polling, monitoring and tracking tools that help companies set up surveys on social networks and understand which postings generate most discussions and traffic.
Dingo, a pet food distributor, used the software to extend its fan base from 350 to a target 5,000 in three days last August, by asking fans to get their friends to sign up. It offered a $20 coupon for everyone if the target could be reached. A further promotion brought fan numbers to 25,000 by the end of February.
“Forty per cent of US households have dogs, so we knew we had a big opportunity, and dog-owners often know other dog-owners,” says Mike Halloran, online marketing manager. “We wanted existing fans to tell their friends about us.”
Brands are working out rules about how far they can go, because people do not want to be advertised to, says Ms Goodman. “Your page will be dormant and deserted very fast if you do this. You need to be engaging, fun and provocative – create a destination for conversation, not a push-marketing venue.”
This is no small challenge, because consumers are busy and there is huge competition for their time online, she says.
Grooveshark’s Mr Murphy sees social media as a way to “personify” the company.
Its Facebook and Twitter postings tend to focus on third-party products, service updates, or blog posts, for example, about the company’s presence at a festival. “We did a post on our campaign to help victims of the BP oil spill in the Gulf, and one to promote an artist we are interested in,” he says.
His company won’t take payment for a posting. “We want to be objective and informative rather than self-promoting, so that people have a positive feeling about us and tell their friends,” he says.
One problem with using social networks for sales and marketing messages is that they accumulate quickly and are often ignored. More than three items posted a day could be seen as a “spam blast”, says Mr Murphy, and will drive followers away.
Mr Halloran favours e-mail for sales and marketing promotions, but says Twitter is ideal when you want things to be instant.
“The nice thing about Twitter is that messages tend to be looked at a bit more quickly and regularly and in-boxes are less cluttered.”
Dingo plans to use Twitter for customer service, so people can send questions and receive rapid replies.
“A dog might have just stained a carpet and the customer wants to know how to remove the mark,” says Mr Halloran.
“If we post a solution to this on Twitter it will be seen by many people and picked up in search engines such as Google and Bing long afterwards.
“We are looking at anything where posting answers creates ‘breadcrumb trails’ that link back to us.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
By Jane Bird
Published: March 15 2011 16:22 | Last updated: March 15 2011 16:22
Comment on a product or service using Twitter or Facebook and within minutes your words could have been read by thousands.
This benefits business when the comment is favourable, but customer complaints can rapidly acquire huge momentum.
Many companies are using social networks, blogs and other online forums both to keep in touch with customers and as a vehicle for sales and marketing.
The challenge is to handle the vast volume of messages that can result.
When you start to participate in social networks, you open the floodgates to what your customers want to say, says Graham Murphy, senior community developer at Grooveshark, an online music service. “It can be a blessing or a curse.”
Grooveshark has benefited from networks, which have helped build registered users to almost 8m with negligible advertising.
It is certainly a disadvantage that people can so loudly voice a negative opinion, says Mr Murphy.
“But there’s the opportunity to flip it in our favour. If we solve a billing issue in 20 minutes, they’ll post something great about us. Suddenly we look better than we did before.”
When Grooveshark has server problems, it is alerted in minutes by its followers – 200,000 on Facebook and 50,000 on Twitter.
“Their voice gives valuable insight into our website.”
The company uses software from California-based Assistly to aggregate all messages it receives into one inbox, where they can be prioritised and acted on swiftly, generating a “virtuous circle” of positive comments.
Alex Bard, Assistly’s chief executive, says the aim is to help companies turn customer service into sales and marketing. “If customers are going to gang up on you, they’ll do it anyway,” he says.
“Customers are a core asset that you can learn from, creating a better relationship. The worst thing you can do is ignore them, and the best is to respond.”
Mr Bard encourages companies using Assistly software to let a broad range of employees participate in customer dialogues, rather than just the service team. “This gives engineers or product developers insights that help them make better decisions.”
The real prize is to get customers to recommend you to their friends, says Gail Goodman, chief executive of Massachusetts-based Constant Contact.
It provides polling, monitoring and tracking tools that help companies set up surveys on social networks and understand which postings generate most discussions and traffic.
Dingo, a pet food distributor, used the software to extend its fan base from 350 to a target 5,000 in three days last August, by asking fans to get their friends to sign up. It offered a $20 coupon for everyone if the target could be reached. A further promotion brought fan numbers to 25,000 by the end of February.
“Forty per cent of US households have dogs, so we knew we had a big opportunity, and dog-owners often know other dog-owners,” says Mike Halloran, online marketing manager. “We wanted existing fans to tell their friends about us.”
Brands are working out rules about how far they can go, because people do not want to be advertised to, says Ms Goodman. “Your page will be dormant and deserted very fast if you do this. You need to be engaging, fun and provocative – create a destination for conversation, not a push-marketing venue.”
This is no small challenge, because consumers are busy and there is huge competition for their time online, she says.
Grooveshark’s Mr Murphy sees social media as a way to “personify” the company.
Its Facebook and Twitter postings tend to focus on third-party products, service updates, or blog posts, for example, about the company’s presence at a festival. “We did a post on our campaign to help victims of the BP oil spill in the Gulf, and one to promote an artist we are interested in,” he says.
His company won’t take payment for a posting. “We want to be objective and informative rather than self-promoting, so that people have a positive feeling about us and tell their friends,” he says.
One problem with using social networks for sales and marketing messages is that they accumulate quickly and are often ignored. More than three items posted a day could be seen as a “spam blast”, says Mr Murphy, and will drive followers away.
Mr Halloran favours e-mail for sales and marketing promotions, but says Twitter is ideal when you want things to be instant.
“The nice thing about Twitter is that messages tend to be looked at a bit more quickly and regularly and in-boxes are less cluttered.”
Dingo plans to use Twitter for customer service, so people can send questions and receive rapid replies.
“A dog might have just stained a carpet and the customer wants to know how to remove the mark,” says Mr Halloran.
“If we post a solution to this on Twitter it will be seen by many people and picked up in search engines such as Google and Bing long afterwards.
“We are looking at anything where posting answers creates ‘breadcrumb trails’ that link back to us.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
Sales moves from art to science
Sales moves from art to science
By Paul Taylor
Published: March 15 2011 16:22 | Last updated: March 15 2011 16:22
For years, sales and marketing was a pretty haphazard affair in most companies, more art than science.
Sales directors kept contacts in a Rolodex file or on their computer and sales staff worked the phones or hit the road with samples in a suitcase.
Marketing usually meant commissioning an advertisement in newspapers, magazines or broadcast media and perhaps organising a direct mailing campaign.
IT began to change corporate sales and chief marketing officer (CMO) roles in the 1990s with the introduction of more sophisticated contact management and customer relationship management (CRM) systems and salesforce automation tools.
CRM software, in particular, has become a key IT tool to improve efficiency and customer focus.
Harris Products, the metal working products company, chose the CRM suite of SAP, the German software company, to improve control over sales processes and give a more accurate view of prospects.
Lincoln Electric, Harris’s parent company, was able to build a common customer database, establish a standard sales methodology to provide greater accountability, eliminate duplication in reporting and provide better information about sales opportunities.
“We needed one complete version of the truth about our customers, as we couldn't manage what we couldn’t measure,” says Greg Langston, vice-president of sales at Harris.
“[It] changed the way our sales reps sell and we are collectively now more in control of revenue and forecasts. It is also helping us to focus on our customers, and invest in the aspects of the business that directly impact our success.
“It’s all about results and accountability driven by superior information and process.”
Harris reps, who sell a lot of welding equipment, can now see full details of contacts and previous dealings with customers in one place, instead of having to look in various files and databases.
Companies, particularly those in customer-facing industries such as retail and entertainment, and their CMOs are also having to adapt to fundamental changes in media consumption, the rising power of the consumer and the growth of social networking.
Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the California-based CMO Council, says globalisation of markets and digital channels mean that senior corporate marketers are having to develop new skills and redirect marketing spending.
New software tools are helping. “Sales and marketing campaigns haven't historically always been that easy to monitor or measure,” says Bill Ogle, Motorola Mobility’s CMO, who is in charge of building the smartphone maker’s brand.
“However, new tools – most noticeably salesforce automation and CRM – as well as search marketing measurement, together with the emergence of social network channels, have had a huge positive impact in terms of campaign return on investment, ” he says.
Like other companies, Motorola can now much more accurately measure the effectiveness of its marketing.
Many of the technology tools used by marketing and sales professionals are also moving rapidly online and into “the cloud”, where software and IT services are provided over the internet rather than in-house.
Traditional CRM software packages have helped companies manage their interactions with customers and sales prospects by co-ordinating business processes – including marketing, sales activities, customer service and technical support.
But some packages earned a reputation for being difficult to implement and use and for being expensive. These concerns have been a driving force behind the success of cloud-based CRM offerings, pioneered by Salesforce.com.
“The problem with traditional sales and marketing apps was actually getting sales and marketing people to use them,” says Alex Dayon, executive vice-president of CRM at Salesforce.
“That’s because the apps were cumbersome and didn’t always share data across departments, making it difficult for managers to have insight into business performance. Traditional sales and marketing apps were also incredibly expensive and difficult to install.”
By contrast, cloud-based packages promise fast implementation, do not require hardware investment and can be automatically updated. “With a cloud app, you just open a browser, log in and start using it,” says Mr Dayton.
Recent converts include NBC Universal, the media and entertainment company, which wanted to change its advertising sales business.
The company went for Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM service. “Four weeks later, we had 75 per cent user adoption [among the sales team]. That is unheard of,” says John Sabino, senior vice-president of commercial operations at NBC.
Instead of grappling with software, reps can look at all relevant information in one place and have time to focus on clients and identify opportunities. “It gives us a competitive advantage,” says Mr Sabino.
Other companies have found innovative ways to speed up the sales closing process.
Groupon, the deal-of-the-day website that offers local discounts to online consumers, discovered that its sales teams were spending up to 25 per cent of their time chasing and signing contracts. The company turned to AppExchange – an online marketplace for cloud computing applications – and found a digital signature app, EchoSign.
“The normal process for our sales force across the UK and the world, was to get the Groupon contracts signed in person or follow the tedious process of scanning, mailing or posting the contract,” says Ash Mahmud, head of CRM at Groupon UK.
“It wasn’t unusual for a rep to visit a client two or three times to negotiate all the details.”
The sales reps have managed to cut the time taken to close deals to just under three hours.
Businesses are also learning how to tap into social networking and use the online customer relationships they can create for commercial gain.
“Social networks promise to be the next generation of e-commerce engines,” says Matt Anderson, a partner at Booz & Company.
While commerce mediated by social networks is still nascent, some companies are already testing the waters.
For example, 1-800 Flowers, the online florist, has a fully functioning Facebook store where customers can buy and pay for flowers to be delivered.
CMOs are also beginning to tap into social networks to guide product development, attract customers and boost sales.
Dell, the computer company, is using Twitter, to offer customers Twitter-only deals on equipment.
In December, the company also launched a social monitoring centre, Ground Control, designed to track and analyse the more than 22,000 daily topic posts related to Dell, as well as any mentions on Twitter.
“Digital channels have transformed the way customer interactions are recorded and reported back,” says Patrick James, head of marketing, sales and service at Capgemini Consulting.
He says: “We can track when, how and where customers enter digital channels as well as what they do, when they exit and where they go next.”
With sophisticated IT, including superfast memory-based databases, companies can now mine that data in near real time to detect trends and adapt their marketing strategies accordingly.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
By Paul Taylor
Published: March 15 2011 16:22 | Last updated: March 15 2011 16:22
For years, sales and marketing was a pretty haphazard affair in most companies, more art than science.
Sales directors kept contacts in a Rolodex file or on their computer and sales staff worked the phones or hit the road with samples in a suitcase.
Marketing usually meant commissioning an advertisement in newspapers, magazines or broadcast media and perhaps organising a direct mailing campaign.
IT began to change corporate sales and chief marketing officer (CMO) roles in the 1990s with the introduction of more sophisticated contact management and customer relationship management (CRM) systems and salesforce automation tools.
CRM software, in particular, has become a key IT tool to improve efficiency and customer focus.
Harris Products, the metal working products company, chose the CRM suite of SAP, the German software company, to improve control over sales processes and give a more accurate view of prospects.
Lincoln Electric, Harris’s parent company, was able to build a common customer database, establish a standard sales methodology to provide greater accountability, eliminate duplication in reporting and provide better information about sales opportunities.
“We needed one complete version of the truth about our customers, as we couldn't manage what we couldn’t measure,” says Greg Langston, vice-president of sales at Harris.
“[It] changed the way our sales reps sell and we are collectively now more in control of revenue and forecasts. It is also helping us to focus on our customers, and invest in the aspects of the business that directly impact our success.
“It’s all about results and accountability driven by superior information and process.”
Harris reps, who sell a lot of welding equipment, can now see full details of contacts and previous dealings with customers in one place, instead of having to look in various files and databases.
Companies, particularly those in customer-facing industries such as retail and entertainment, and their CMOs are also having to adapt to fundamental changes in media consumption, the rising power of the consumer and the growth of social networking.
Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the California-based CMO Council, says globalisation of markets and digital channels mean that senior corporate marketers are having to develop new skills and redirect marketing spending.
New software tools are helping. “Sales and marketing campaigns haven't historically always been that easy to monitor or measure,” says Bill Ogle, Motorola Mobility’s CMO, who is in charge of building the smartphone maker’s brand.
“However, new tools – most noticeably salesforce automation and CRM – as well as search marketing measurement, together with the emergence of social network channels, have had a huge positive impact in terms of campaign return on investment, ” he says.
Like other companies, Motorola can now much more accurately measure the effectiveness of its marketing.
Many of the technology tools used by marketing and sales professionals are also moving rapidly online and into “the cloud”, where software and IT services are provided over the internet rather than in-house.
Traditional CRM software packages have helped companies manage their interactions with customers and sales prospects by co-ordinating business processes – including marketing, sales activities, customer service and technical support.
But some packages earned a reputation for being difficult to implement and use and for being expensive. These concerns have been a driving force behind the success of cloud-based CRM offerings, pioneered by Salesforce.com.
“The problem with traditional sales and marketing apps was actually getting sales and marketing people to use them,” says Alex Dayon, executive vice-president of CRM at Salesforce.
“That’s because the apps were cumbersome and didn’t always share data across departments, making it difficult for managers to have insight into business performance. Traditional sales and marketing apps were also incredibly expensive and difficult to install.”
By contrast, cloud-based packages promise fast implementation, do not require hardware investment and can be automatically updated. “With a cloud app, you just open a browser, log in and start using it,” says Mr Dayton.
Recent converts include NBC Universal, the media and entertainment company, which wanted to change its advertising sales business.
The company went for Salesforce’s cloud-based CRM service. “Four weeks later, we had 75 per cent user adoption [among the sales team]. That is unheard of,” says John Sabino, senior vice-president of commercial operations at NBC.
Instead of grappling with software, reps can look at all relevant information in one place and have time to focus on clients and identify opportunities. “It gives us a competitive advantage,” says Mr Sabino.
Other companies have found innovative ways to speed up the sales closing process.
Groupon, the deal-of-the-day website that offers local discounts to online consumers, discovered that its sales teams were spending up to 25 per cent of their time chasing and signing contracts. The company turned to AppExchange – an online marketplace for cloud computing applications – and found a digital signature app, EchoSign.
“The normal process for our sales force across the UK and the world, was to get the Groupon contracts signed in person or follow the tedious process of scanning, mailing or posting the contract,” says Ash Mahmud, head of CRM at Groupon UK.
“It wasn’t unusual for a rep to visit a client two or three times to negotiate all the details.”
The sales reps have managed to cut the time taken to close deals to just under three hours.
Businesses are also learning how to tap into social networking and use the online customer relationships they can create for commercial gain.
“Social networks promise to be the next generation of e-commerce engines,” says Matt Anderson, a partner at Booz & Company.
While commerce mediated by social networks is still nascent, some companies are already testing the waters.
For example, 1-800 Flowers, the online florist, has a fully functioning Facebook store where customers can buy and pay for flowers to be delivered.
CMOs are also beginning to tap into social networks to guide product development, attract customers and boost sales.
Dell, the computer company, is using Twitter, to offer customers Twitter-only deals on equipment.
In December, the company also launched a social monitoring centre, Ground Control, designed to track and analyse the more than 22,000 daily topic posts related to Dell, as well as any mentions on Twitter.
“Digital channels have transformed the way customer interactions are recorded and reported back,” says Patrick James, head of marketing, sales and service at Capgemini Consulting.
He says: “We can track when, how and where customers enter digital channels as well as what they do, when they exit and where they go next.”
With sophisticated IT, including superfast memory-based databases, companies can now mine that data in near real time to detect trends and adapt their marketing strategies accordingly.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
Do you know your SaaS from your PaaS?
Do you know your SaaS from your PaaS?
By Charles Batchelor
Published: March 16 2011 17:29 | Last updated: March 16 2011 17:29
The “cloud,” as a term, has the virtue of simplicity. But burrow into the different types of cloud computing service on offer and you realise the techies have got hold of the dictionary. Infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service are terms frequently used to describe the shapes the cloud can take.
“There are real differences, but there is also a degree of marketing spin,” says Rupert Chapman, a cloud specialist at PA Consulting. “They describe the levels of service on offer.”
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) involves the customer paying for off-site use of basic hardware and equipment – servers, network equipment, database storage from the provider. “I get access to very cheap shared machines and can put my own operating system and applications on top, so I have a degree of control,” says Mr Chapman.
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is the next level, with the customer renting both the machines and the operating systems that do the job. The customer does not need to understand the architecture of the platform or to carry out upgrades. At this level, customers can also develop and test their own applications.
Staff who are not programmers can try out applications to see how they work and if they are of value to customers and users. A credit-checking database could, for example, be used as a building block to construct a customer management application.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the third layer in the cloud. Customers rent whatever applications they require – enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and human resources are common business applications – and have only to log in to be able to use them.
“All I need is an internet browser and I can log in from home, the office or the coffee shop,” says Mr Chapman. “Everything is looked after by the cloud provider.”
SaaS is sometimes used as a catch-all phrase to mean “cloud computing”, but the purists insist the two terms are different. Cloud computing is the more general term used to cover the different levels of service available.
“Clients tend to forget about the labels,” says Mr Chapman. “These are terms that will stay in the IT world. Most business users don’t care and are probably turned off by them.”
“We prefer to call it IT-as-a-service,” says Michael Kogeler, director of cloud strategy at Microsoft International, which has launched Windows Azure as a cloud computing platform. “That’s more understandable.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
By Charles Batchelor
Published: March 16 2011 17:29 | Last updated: March 16 2011 17:29
The “cloud,” as a term, has the virtue of simplicity. But burrow into the different types of cloud computing service on offer and you realise the techies have got hold of the dictionary. Infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service and software-as-a-service are terms frequently used to describe the shapes the cloud can take.
“There are real differences, but there is also a degree of marketing spin,” says Rupert Chapman, a cloud specialist at PA Consulting. “They describe the levels of service on offer.”
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) involves the customer paying for off-site use of basic hardware and equipment – servers, network equipment, database storage from the provider. “I get access to very cheap shared machines and can put my own operating system and applications on top, so I have a degree of control,” says Mr Chapman.
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) is the next level, with the customer renting both the machines and the operating systems that do the job. The customer does not need to understand the architecture of the platform or to carry out upgrades. At this level, customers can also develop and test their own applications.
Staff who are not programmers can try out applications to see how they work and if they are of value to customers and users. A credit-checking database could, for example, be used as a building block to construct a customer management application.
Software-as-a-service (SaaS) is the third layer in the cloud. Customers rent whatever applications they require – enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and human resources are common business applications – and have only to log in to be able to use them.
“All I need is an internet browser and I can log in from home, the office or the coffee shop,” says Mr Chapman. “Everything is looked after by the cloud provider.”
SaaS is sometimes used as a catch-all phrase to mean “cloud computing”, but the purists insist the two terms are different. Cloud computing is the more general term used to cover the different levels of service available.
“Clients tend to forget about the labels,” says Mr Chapman. “These are terms that will stay in the IT world. Most business users don’t care and are probably turned off by them.”
“We prefer to call it IT-as-a-service,” says Michael Kogeler, director of cloud strategy at Microsoft International, which has launched Windows Azure as a cloud computing platform. “That’s more understandable.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
..
The Economics of the Cloud
Computing is undergoing a seismic shift from client/server to the cloud, a shift similar in importance and impact to the transition from mainframe to client/server. Speculation abounds on how this new era will evolve in the coming years, and IT leaders have a critical need for a clear vision of where the industry is heading. We believe the best way to form this vision is to understand the underlying economics driving the long-term trend. In this paper, we will assess the economics of the cloud by using in-depth modeling. We then use this framework to better understand the long-term IT landscape.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
LinkedIn launches social news platform
LinkedIn, the professional networking site with 90 million users, announced a new product today that aims to transform the site from an occasional directory into a daily social destination.
LinkedIn Today is a new platform that aggregates news stories by industry based on what people are sharing on the network. Users can see what their contacts are reading and what other people in their industry are reading and saying about different articles. They can choose from 22 industries, including banking, entertainment and nonprofits, and sort by geography and job title.
“What are CEOs reading? What are health care professionals in India reading?” said Liz Walker, LinkedIn’s product manager. “We think that can deliver relevant content to people.”
Facebook and Twitter garner huge traffic from people sharing news. And other aggregators that filter news according to specific industries, like TechMeme or MediaGazer, have proven themselves to be quite successful. LinkedIn Today puts the business spin on news sharing, and the social spin on business news aggregation. As former LinkedIn employee Mrinal Desai put it, the network wants to become the Wall Street Journal of social news.
Though LinkedIn has 90 million registered users as of January 2011, the site has struggled to get them to visit regularly, instead getting most of its traffic from recruiters looking for prospects. While other recent products like InMaps, a visualization of each user’s professional network, and Skills, a search function that illustrates popular skills in particular industries and companies, seem most helpful to recruiters, LinkedIn is indicating that its social news filter is just one of many efforts to come geared toward building relationships among everyday users.
LinkedIn Today is a new platform that aggregates news stories by industry based on what people are sharing on the network. Users can see what their contacts are reading and what other people in their industry are reading and saying about different articles. They can choose from 22 industries, including banking, entertainment and nonprofits, and sort by geography and job title.
“What are CEOs reading? What are health care professionals in India reading?” said Liz Walker, LinkedIn’s product manager. “We think that can deliver relevant content to people.”
Facebook and Twitter garner huge traffic from people sharing news. And other aggregators that filter news according to specific industries, like TechMeme or MediaGazer, have proven themselves to be quite successful. LinkedIn Today puts the business spin on news sharing, and the social spin on business news aggregation. As former LinkedIn employee Mrinal Desai put it, the network wants to become the Wall Street Journal of social news.
Though LinkedIn has 90 million registered users as of January 2011, the site has struggled to get them to visit regularly, instead getting most of its traffic from recruiters looking for prospects. While other recent products like InMaps, a visualization of each user’s professional network, and Skills, a search function that illustrates popular skills in particular industries and companies, seem most helpful to recruiters, LinkedIn is indicating that its social news filter is just one of many efforts to come geared toward building relationships among everyday users.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Misconceptions about cloud computing
Misconceptions about cloud computing
By Chris Burn and Conrad Thompson
Published: March 3 2011 17:53 | Last updated: March 3 2011 17:53
As the market for cloud computing matures, there is growing awareness of its potential among chief executives and finance directors. However, that awareness tends to be based on three misconceptions: firstly, that the CIO should lead the organisation’s approach to cloud; secondly, that there will be significant legal, security and regulatory obstacles; and thirdly, that the cloud is only about IT cost savings. Each of these is wrong.
First, CIOs cannot give impartial advice on cloud. A business that transfers its IT to the cloud will receive those services in a very different way, and that will almost certainly require a smaller IT department. Speaking recently at the London School of Economics, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggested that increased use of cloud services could lead to job losses of 10 to15 per cent across the worldwide IT industry.
The shift towards cloud is also creating concern for traditional enterprise IT hardware vendors. Big players are hearing some of their clients talk about adoption of cloud-based IT services at a pace that would devastate their existing hardware revenue streams.
They are responding by offering ‘private cloud’ solutions that play perfectly to typical CIO sensitivities. These private clouds, or pre-integrated units of hardware and software from the same vendor, are very attractive at first glance as they address perceived security and confidentiality risks by keeping the hardware and its management on site. This approach creates the illusion to casual observers that cloud is being adopted but preserves the complexity, and size, of the in-house IT organisation.
Ultimately, however, private cloud deployments do not make any significant impact on how IT services are delivered. These rebranded legacy vendor services only lock the organisation further into proprietary standards and expensive service contracts.
This means CIOs need help to challenge the status quo if they are to secure the full benefits of cloud for their organisations. Unfortunately, that support is unlikely to be provided by the leaders of the security, legal and regulatory departments. These groups will find many reasons why cloud is unlikely to be suitable for their particular needs. Here again the problem is that they cannot give an unbiased perspective. They will know that handing over compliance monitoring or regulatory liaison to an external provider risks their own jobs.
Indeed, solutions based on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as salesforce.com, are already eliminating some in-house assurance processes as they are automatically pre-approved. This reflects the efforts of SaaS vendors to acquire independently audited third-party certifications, such as ISO27001, as well as increasing customer maturity and willingness to focus on the particular needs of their business rather than the routine mechanics of information systems.
This does not mean that vendors have all the answers yet. Organisations need to secure assurances about the ability of their cloud suppliers to meet standards and remedy failures but also seek expert guidance to understand the laws and regulations that apply to any service moved to the cloud. This is particularly important for multinationals, those working in regulated industries and those dealing with sensitive data. A careful examination of these requirements will highlight the genuinely difficult areas which may need to be dealt with separately from the main cloud provision.
However, the evidence is that obstacles in these areas can be overcome cost effectively, either by providing a mix of services at different price points or by deferring transfers until vendors and regulatory bodies develop ways of managing the issue.
Having challenged that misconception, business leaders considering moving to the cloud need to challenge the view that it is just about IT cost savings. As Peter Coffee, Head of Platform Research at salesforce.com, said at a recent IT professional cloud computing conference: “If we talk about cost reduction, the most I can do for you is cut your IT spending by 100 per cent. Then we’re done. If we talk about value creation, I can keep on delivering value with no upper bound. That’s a much more interesting conversation.”
The key strategic driver for cloud cannot be cost alone. Like all IT initiatives, the success of cloud depends not only on getting the technical aspects right, though that is important, it lies in securing the engagement from the business. Cloud can transform the way a business operates, it can stimulate innovation and provide a real competitive edge – but it can only do this if everyone is willing and able to use IT in a different way.
This requires business leaders to reconsider what they need to deliver improvements for their customers. That means going beyond generalities such as greater flexibility or lower cost services. The business needs to focus on more specific requirements, such as how to provide self service customer access to processes buried within complex legacy applications, or how to improve the management of customer relationships through more joined-up access to data that is spread across existing systems.
Companies such as Starbucks have taken this approach and used cloud to drive transformation in customer engagement. They built an online platform in six weeks to facilitate conversations with customers and to generate ‘crowd-sourced’ ideas as to how they could improve services. They received 77,000 ideas and 150,000 comments and are now implementing those with the most votes, including new smoothie flavours and the reintroduction of old biscotti favourites, with the confidence that they have the support of their most loyal customers. A traditional IT-driven approach for a worldwide customer collaboration website would undoubtedly have failed at the business case stage by being prohibitively expensive. However, by leveraging the power of the cloud they enabled a successful, cost effective engagement with their customers.
So it is clear that cloud computing is here to stay and that it can deliver significant IT cost savings and improve the efficiency of IT operations. In order to realise those benefits CIOs will need to go beyond the status-quo and understand their IT organisation will be smaller and more focused. Yet cloud’s true potential lies in its capacity to transform business models and help companies respond to an ever more competitive, fast moving world. It will only do this if business leaders understand that cloud is too important to be left to IT and that it has to excite and engage everyone across the organisation.
Chris Burn is an expert in cloud computing, PA Consulting Group and Conrad Thompson is an expert in IT enabled business change, PA Consulting Group.
For more information visit www.paconsulting.com/smart
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
By Chris Burn and Conrad Thompson
Published: March 3 2011 17:53 | Last updated: March 3 2011 17:53
As the market for cloud computing matures, there is growing awareness of its potential among chief executives and finance directors. However, that awareness tends to be based on three misconceptions: firstly, that the CIO should lead the organisation’s approach to cloud; secondly, that there will be significant legal, security and regulatory obstacles; and thirdly, that the cloud is only about IT cost savings. Each of these is wrong.
First, CIOs cannot give impartial advice on cloud. A business that transfers its IT to the cloud will receive those services in a very different way, and that will almost certainly require a smaller IT department. Speaking recently at the London School of Economics, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer suggested that increased use of cloud services could lead to job losses of 10 to15 per cent across the worldwide IT industry.
The shift towards cloud is also creating concern for traditional enterprise IT hardware vendors. Big players are hearing some of their clients talk about adoption of cloud-based IT services at a pace that would devastate their existing hardware revenue streams.
They are responding by offering ‘private cloud’ solutions that play perfectly to typical CIO sensitivities. These private clouds, or pre-integrated units of hardware and software from the same vendor, are very attractive at first glance as they address perceived security and confidentiality risks by keeping the hardware and its management on site. This approach creates the illusion to casual observers that cloud is being adopted but preserves the complexity, and size, of the in-house IT organisation.
Ultimately, however, private cloud deployments do not make any significant impact on how IT services are delivered. These rebranded legacy vendor services only lock the organisation further into proprietary standards and expensive service contracts.
This means CIOs need help to challenge the status quo if they are to secure the full benefits of cloud for their organisations. Unfortunately, that support is unlikely to be provided by the leaders of the security, legal and regulatory departments. These groups will find many reasons why cloud is unlikely to be suitable for their particular needs. Here again the problem is that they cannot give an unbiased perspective. They will know that handing over compliance monitoring or regulatory liaison to an external provider risks their own jobs.
Indeed, solutions based on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers such as salesforce.com, are already eliminating some in-house assurance processes as they are automatically pre-approved. This reflects the efforts of SaaS vendors to acquire independently audited third-party certifications, such as ISO27001, as well as increasing customer maturity and willingness to focus on the particular needs of their business rather than the routine mechanics of information systems.
This does not mean that vendors have all the answers yet. Organisations need to secure assurances about the ability of their cloud suppliers to meet standards and remedy failures but also seek expert guidance to understand the laws and regulations that apply to any service moved to the cloud. This is particularly important for multinationals, those working in regulated industries and those dealing with sensitive data. A careful examination of these requirements will highlight the genuinely difficult areas which may need to be dealt with separately from the main cloud provision.
However, the evidence is that obstacles in these areas can be overcome cost effectively, either by providing a mix of services at different price points or by deferring transfers until vendors and regulatory bodies develop ways of managing the issue.
Having challenged that misconception, business leaders considering moving to the cloud need to challenge the view that it is just about IT cost savings. As Peter Coffee, Head of Platform Research at salesforce.com, said at a recent IT professional cloud computing conference: “If we talk about cost reduction, the most I can do for you is cut your IT spending by 100 per cent. Then we’re done. If we talk about value creation, I can keep on delivering value with no upper bound. That’s a much more interesting conversation.”
The key strategic driver for cloud cannot be cost alone. Like all IT initiatives, the success of cloud depends not only on getting the technical aspects right, though that is important, it lies in securing the engagement from the business. Cloud can transform the way a business operates, it can stimulate innovation and provide a real competitive edge – but it can only do this if everyone is willing and able to use IT in a different way.
This requires business leaders to reconsider what they need to deliver improvements for their customers. That means going beyond generalities such as greater flexibility or lower cost services. The business needs to focus on more specific requirements, such as how to provide self service customer access to processes buried within complex legacy applications, or how to improve the management of customer relationships through more joined-up access to data that is spread across existing systems.
Companies such as Starbucks have taken this approach and used cloud to drive transformation in customer engagement. They built an online platform in six weeks to facilitate conversations with customers and to generate ‘crowd-sourced’ ideas as to how they could improve services. They received 77,000 ideas and 150,000 comments and are now implementing those with the most votes, including new smoothie flavours and the reintroduction of old biscotti favourites, with the confidence that they have the support of their most loyal customers. A traditional IT-driven approach for a worldwide customer collaboration website would undoubtedly have failed at the business case stage by being prohibitively expensive. However, by leveraging the power of the cloud they enabled a successful, cost effective engagement with their customers.
So it is clear that cloud computing is here to stay and that it can deliver significant IT cost savings and improve the efficiency of IT operations. In order to realise those benefits CIOs will need to go beyond the status-quo and understand their IT organisation will be smaller and more focused. Yet cloud’s true potential lies in its capacity to transform business models and help companies respond to an ever more competitive, fast moving world. It will only do this if business leaders understand that cloud is too important to be left to IT and that it has to excite and engage everyone across the organisation.
Chris Burn is an expert in cloud computing, PA Consulting Group and Conrad Thompson is an expert in IT enabled business change, PA Consulting Group.
For more information visit www.paconsulting.com/smart
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Tuesday, March 01, 2011
Guest column: Top issues related to cloud
By Tom DeGarmo
Published: March 1 2011 15:55 | Last updated: March 1 2011 15:55
All the hype that cloud computing has got over the past few years tends to push business leaders into one of two camps: those who love the simplicity and convenience of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, like those supporting sales force automation (let’s put everything in the cloud!) and those who do not believe the false promises from vendors and think cloud computing is not ready for enterprise-class security and business continuity requirements.
The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between, and the most rewarding adoption patterns will vary considerably depending on the market and competitive situation individual enterprises are dealing with.
The list below offers a set of issues many enterprises are discovering as they engage with cloud computing. We recommend senior leaders spend a little time “in front of the mirror” and make sure they have not fallen prey to them.
1) Thinking cloud computing is only about public cloud services, or only about transforming internal IT into private clouds.
All the great stories about companies taking advantage of public cloud services leads some enterprises to think the cloud computing opportunity is only about external service providers. But much of the medium term value to be harvested from clouds will come from transforming internal IT by emulating the style of computing defined by these types of external services. This requires a deep appreciation for their differences in architecture, technologies, processes, and differentiating roles for IT staff. In other words, by creating private clouds. But putting all your efforts into private clouds ignores the real value that can be found from the on-demand, limitless capacity of public cloud services and the instant-on availability of applications. The best use of cloud computing is derived by adopting an integrated model, one that transforms internal data centers into private clouds and makes use of external clouds where their value proposition is distinctive.
2) Not anticipating the new challenges created by integrated clouds.
Acknowledging the disruptive opportunity of the integrated cloud model is only the start. Companies that adopt the technologies and external cloud services willy nilly end up recreating a complexity and maintenance challenge that defeats two of the biggest paybacks from cloud investments: business agility and business alignment.
Virtualisation technologies, for example, have already recreated “server sprawl” in its virtual form in situations where staff are able to request new instances of virtual servers without guidance from IT policies or “cleanup” systems in place. Enterprises also need to anticipate the scalability and security challenges of systems integration in cloud environments and the impact that rapid introduction of new metadata from SaaS vendors will have on data management in integrated cloud computing environments.
3) Moving forward without a strategy.
Many companies already have elements of this emerging integrated cloud model in place; they use server and storage virtualisation, they have partially automated the management of the data centre and they use SaaS offerings. Few companies have laid out a vision and strategy for moving to a defined future of integrated clouds. A leading practice is to use a cloud maturity framework so you can proceed logically from assessment of current state to realisation of desired future state. This includes important delineations of the core component parts of this future state. PwC has established a conceptual model of exactly this architecture comprising 7 categories of technology types. By establishing this reference architecture it is possible to define your road map, avoid wasteful spending on solutions that promise “instant clouds” but introduce proprietary technologies that will not fit into the architecture, and establish an order for what comes first. Without a strategic plan of this type it is not obvious whether an individual decision to use a service or technology will get you closer to real benefits of cloud computing — agility and business alignment.
4) Failure to recognise the transformative value of cloud to the business — cloud computing is not just a better way to deliver IT.
The openness and architecture of cloud infrastructure establishes a disruptively powerful business collaboration platform that empowers companies to deeply integrate their business processes with partners. We see this already with Web-centric businesses, such as those in retail and hospitality industries. Without leaving, say, a convention Website, customers can make restaurant reservations or purchase tickets to events. The user has an integrated experience even though the convention, restaurant, and ticket service providers are separate companies. And traditional “bricks and mortar” companies, such as those in financial services, are unbundling functions like risk exposure management that were formerly parts of an integrated offerings and making them available in the cloud as “e-services.” As a result cloud is positioned to transform how we integrate and communicate between businesses. However cloud puts new demands on strategy and governance with its agile applications and infrastructure, far more so than previous generations of IT. Although ERP and CRM have had major impacts on the enterprise the focus has been almost entirely on internal processes. Cloud moves that focus to external business collaboration and integration.
Tom DeGarmo is a principal in PwC’s Advisory Practice and leader of the firm’s U.S. Technology Consulting Solutions Practice
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Published: March 1 2011 15:55 | Last updated: March 1 2011 15:55
All the hype that cloud computing has got over the past few years tends to push business leaders into one of two camps: those who love the simplicity and convenience of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings, like those supporting sales force automation (let’s put everything in the cloud!) and those who do not believe the false promises from vendors and think cloud computing is not ready for enterprise-class security and business continuity requirements.
The truth, as usual, is somewhere in between, and the most rewarding adoption patterns will vary considerably depending on the market and competitive situation individual enterprises are dealing with.
The list below offers a set of issues many enterprises are discovering as they engage with cloud computing. We recommend senior leaders spend a little time “in front of the mirror” and make sure they have not fallen prey to them.
1) Thinking cloud computing is only about public cloud services, or only about transforming internal IT into private clouds.
All the great stories about companies taking advantage of public cloud services leads some enterprises to think the cloud computing opportunity is only about external service providers. But much of the medium term value to be harvested from clouds will come from transforming internal IT by emulating the style of computing defined by these types of external services. This requires a deep appreciation for their differences in architecture, technologies, processes, and differentiating roles for IT staff. In other words, by creating private clouds. But putting all your efforts into private clouds ignores the real value that can be found from the on-demand, limitless capacity of public cloud services and the instant-on availability of applications. The best use of cloud computing is derived by adopting an integrated model, one that transforms internal data centers into private clouds and makes use of external clouds where their value proposition is distinctive.
2) Not anticipating the new challenges created by integrated clouds.
Acknowledging the disruptive opportunity of the integrated cloud model is only the start. Companies that adopt the technologies and external cloud services willy nilly end up recreating a complexity and maintenance challenge that defeats two of the biggest paybacks from cloud investments: business agility and business alignment.
Virtualisation technologies, for example, have already recreated “server sprawl” in its virtual form in situations where staff are able to request new instances of virtual servers without guidance from IT policies or “cleanup” systems in place. Enterprises also need to anticipate the scalability and security challenges of systems integration in cloud environments and the impact that rapid introduction of new metadata from SaaS vendors will have on data management in integrated cloud computing environments.
3) Moving forward without a strategy.
Many companies already have elements of this emerging integrated cloud model in place; they use server and storage virtualisation, they have partially automated the management of the data centre and they use SaaS offerings. Few companies have laid out a vision and strategy for moving to a defined future of integrated clouds. A leading practice is to use a cloud maturity framework so you can proceed logically from assessment of current state to realisation of desired future state. This includes important delineations of the core component parts of this future state. PwC has established a conceptual model of exactly this architecture comprising 7 categories of technology types. By establishing this reference architecture it is possible to define your road map, avoid wasteful spending on solutions that promise “instant clouds” but introduce proprietary technologies that will not fit into the architecture, and establish an order for what comes first. Without a strategic plan of this type it is not obvious whether an individual decision to use a service or technology will get you closer to real benefits of cloud computing — agility and business alignment.
4) Failure to recognise the transformative value of cloud to the business — cloud computing is not just a better way to deliver IT.
The openness and architecture of cloud infrastructure establishes a disruptively powerful business collaboration platform that empowers companies to deeply integrate their business processes with partners. We see this already with Web-centric businesses, such as those in retail and hospitality industries. Without leaving, say, a convention Website, customers can make restaurant reservations or purchase tickets to events. The user has an integrated experience even though the convention, restaurant, and ticket service providers are separate companies. And traditional “bricks and mortar” companies, such as those in financial services, are unbundling functions like risk exposure management that were formerly parts of an integrated offerings and making them available in the cloud as “e-services.” As a result cloud is positioned to transform how we integrate and communicate between businesses. However cloud puts new demands on strategy and governance with its agile applications and infrastructure, far more so than previous generations of IT. Although ERP and CRM have had major impacts on the enterprise the focus has been almost entirely on internal processes. Cloud moves that focus to external business collaboration and integration.
Tom DeGarmo is a principal in PwC’s Advisory Practice and leader of the firm’s U.S. Technology Consulting Solutions Practice
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
5 Tips voor beleid in SharePoint
SharePoint en vooral de hoeveelheid content op het platform neemt de laatste jaren een enorme vlucht. IT moet zowel het delen van content als collaboration faciliteren als strikte policies handhaven om te voorkomen dat documenten in verkeerde handen vallen. Deze vijf vuistregels helpen je bij het afschermen van SharePoint.
Het begon ooit als een intranetbak voor Office-documenten, maar het is inmiddels het belangrijkste enterprise informatieportal geworden. Hoe je het wendt of keert, SharePoint heeft altijd al om de content gedraaid.
SharePoint’s functionaliteit bevat tegenwoordig enterprise content management, search, social networking, blogs en wiki’s, collaboration en business process management (BPM). Maar al deze onderdelen van de machine leunen op content, of het nu gaat om trainingvideo’s, financiële rapportages of vertrouwelijke beleidsdocumenten. De machine kan vastlopen als SharePoint niet goed door IT wordt beheerd.
Het opslaan van content in SharePoint is onderdeel van de uitdaging; bij het beveiligen ervan lopen organisaties tegen problemen aan wanneer er geen heldere policies bestaan en er niet nagedacht is over het toegangsbeheer.
De risico’s van onveilige SharePoint content beperken zich niet tot aanvallen van hackers of ontevreden medewerkers die vertrouwelijke informatie lekken, zegt Larry Concannon, VP product marketing bij compliance software leverancier HiSoftware.
“De meest voorkomende inbreuken op privacy zijn onbedoeld”, legt hij uit. “Vaak gaat het om slordigheid of onachtzaamheid van werknemers.”
De beste content security strategie voor SharePoint laat werknemers vrijelijk content toevoegen en delen, maar past policies toe zodra vertrouwelijke documenten naar andere afdelingen verdwijnen of zelfs buiten het bedrijf dreigen te belanden.
HiSoftware definieert vijf vuistregels voor het beschermen van content in SharePoint.
1. Maak duidelijk welke content is toegestaan
Organisaties moeten heldere, gedocumenteerde beleidsregels opstellen als onderdeel van hun SharePoint implementatie, zegt Concannon. Dat betekent ook dat je duidelijk maakt welk type content toegestaan is.
Iedere organisatie zal zijn eigen definitie hebben van welke content toegestaan is. Veilige SharePoint implementaties houden er rekening mee wie content mag bekijken en publiceren en welke content opgeslagen mag worden binnen de omgeving.
2. Leid je medewerkers op
Een ander belangrijk punt van een veilige SharePoint implementatie is dat je gebruikers op de hoogte brengt van de privacy- en vertrouwelijkheidsregels die IT heeft opgezet om zowel werknemers als de organisatie te beschermen.
“Op een bepaald niveau betekent dit simpele gebruikerstraining”, zegt Concannon. “Maar het kan ook inhouden dat je een scherm met gebruiksvoorwaarden maakt wanneer mensen bijvoorbeeld hun eigen Mijn Site toevoegen.”
3. Gebruik classificatie om gedrag in goede banen te leiden
Je kunt in SharePoint content beveiligen door bij elke keer dat een document wordt toegevoegd om een classificatie te vragen. Deze optie kan IT voor verschillende categorieën content opstellen om duidelijker te maken wat wel en niet binnen het systeem thuishoort. “Classificatieschermen laten je weten of een document wel of niet binnen een van de beschikbare categorieën past”, zegt Concannon. “Als dit niet zo is, hoeft het niet op SharePoint gepubliceerd te worden.”
4. Vergeet je beleid niet te handhaven
Zodra de regels gemaakt zijn, moet IT ze strikt handhaven en gebruikers laten weten wanneer er overtreding plaatsvindt. Een manier is om gebruikers de mogelijkheid te geven content te taggen waarvan ze denken dat deze ongepast is.
Complianceleveranciers bieden geautomatiseerde software die content vooraf checkt op policies voordat deze op SharePoint gepubliceerd kan worden. Functionaliteit als content scanning kan gebruikt worden om bepaalde regels te valideren en kan voorkomen dat vertrouwelijke content uitlekt.
5. Vind de balans in sociale tools
Iets waar je binnen SharePoint goed op dient te letten is social networking, zegt Concannon. Sociale features zoals blogs, wiki’s, communities en Mijn Site profielpagina’s en forums hebben in SharePoint 2010 een veel prominentere plek gekregen. Hoewel deze tools communicatie en productiviteit bevorderen, kunnen ze je compliant omgeving ten gronde richten.
Om een balans te zoeken tussen Web 2.0 content en ‘ouderwetse’ documenten, raadt HiSoftware een aanpak aan waarin het delen van informatie wordt aangemoedigd, maar waar elke afdeling bepaalde beleidsregels kent waardoor een bijvoorbeeld een juridische tekst over een fusie niet door verkeerde personen kan worden ingelezen.
Het begon ooit als een intranetbak voor Office-documenten, maar het is inmiddels het belangrijkste enterprise informatieportal geworden. Hoe je het wendt of keert, SharePoint heeft altijd al om de content gedraaid.
SharePoint’s functionaliteit bevat tegenwoordig enterprise content management, search, social networking, blogs en wiki’s, collaboration en business process management (BPM). Maar al deze onderdelen van de machine leunen op content, of het nu gaat om trainingvideo’s, financiële rapportages of vertrouwelijke beleidsdocumenten. De machine kan vastlopen als SharePoint niet goed door IT wordt beheerd.
Het opslaan van content in SharePoint is onderdeel van de uitdaging; bij het beveiligen ervan lopen organisaties tegen problemen aan wanneer er geen heldere policies bestaan en er niet nagedacht is over het toegangsbeheer.
De risico’s van onveilige SharePoint content beperken zich niet tot aanvallen van hackers of ontevreden medewerkers die vertrouwelijke informatie lekken, zegt Larry Concannon, VP product marketing bij compliance software leverancier HiSoftware.
“De meest voorkomende inbreuken op privacy zijn onbedoeld”, legt hij uit. “Vaak gaat het om slordigheid of onachtzaamheid van werknemers.”
De beste content security strategie voor SharePoint laat werknemers vrijelijk content toevoegen en delen, maar past policies toe zodra vertrouwelijke documenten naar andere afdelingen verdwijnen of zelfs buiten het bedrijf dreigen te belanden.
HiSoftware definieert vijf vuistregels voor het beschermen van content in SharePoint.
1. Maak duidelijk welke content is toegestaan
Organisaties moeten heldere, gedocumenteerde beleidsregels opstellen als onderdeel van hun SharePoint implementatie, zegt Concannon. Dat betekent ook dat je duidelijk maakt welk type content toegestaan is.
Iedere organisatie zal zijn eigen definitie hebben van welke content toegestaan is. Veilige SharePoint implementaties houden er rekening mee wie content mag bekijken en publiceren en welke content opgeslagen mag worden binnen de omgeving.
2. Leid je medewerkers op
Een ander belangrijk punt van een veilige SharePoint implementatie is dat je gebruikers op de hoogte brengt van de privacy- en vertrouwelijkheidsregels die IT heeft opgezet om zowel werknemers als de organisatie te beschermen.
“Op een bepaald niveau betekent dit simpele gebruikerstraining”, zegt Concannon. “Maar het kan ook inhouden dat je een scherm met gebruiksvoorwaarden maakt wanneer mensen bijvoorbeeld hun eigen Mijn Site toevoegen.”
3. Gebruik classificatie om gedrag in goede banen te leiden
Je kunt in SharePoint content beveiligen door bij elke keer dat een document wordt toegevoegd om een classificatie te vragen. Deze optie kan IT voor verschillende categorieën content opstellen om duidelijker te maken wat wel en niet binnen het systeem thuishoort. “Classificatieschermen laten je weten of een document wel of niet binnen een van de beschikbare categorieën past”, zegt Concannon. “Als dit niet zo is, hoeft het niet op SharePoint gepubliceerd te worden.”
4. Vergeet je beleid niet te handhaven
Zodra de regels gemaakt zijn, moet IT ze strikt handhaven en gebruikers laten weten wanneer er overtreding plaatsvindt. Een manier is om gebruikers de mogelijkheid te geven content te taggen waarvan ze denken dat deze ongepast is.
Complianceleveranciers bieden geautomatiseerde software die content vooraf checkt op policies voordat deze op SharePoint gepubliceerd kan worden. Functionaliteit als content scanning kan gebruikt worden om bepaalde regels te valideren en kan voorkomen dat vertrouwelijke content uitlekt.
5. Vind de balans in sociale tools
Iets waar je binnen SharePoint goed op dient te letten is social networking, zegt Concannon. Sociale features zoals blogs, wiki’s, communities en Mijn Site profielpagina’s en forums hebben in SharePoint 2010 een veel prominentere plek gekregen. Hoewel deze tools communicatie en productiviteit bevorderen, kunnen ze je compliant omgeving ten gronde richten.
Om een balans te zoeken tussen Web 2.0 content en ‘ouderwetse’ documenten, raadt HiSoftware een aanpak aan waarin het delen van informatie wordt aangemoedigd, maar waar elke afdeling bepaalde beleidsregels kent waardoor een bijvoorbeeld een juridische tekst over een fusie niet door verkeerde personen kan worden ingelezen.
Microsoft CRM 2011 speelt in op social media
Microsoft introduceert Dynamics CRM 2011 in Nederland in een on-premise en online versie. Het pakket is opgebouwd volgens een rolgebaseerd ontwerp. Gebruikers hebben aan de hand van hun functie bepaalde gebruikersprofielen en rechten. Voorbeelden van rollen zijn medewerker verkoop, marketing of klantenservice. Het nieuwe pakket speelt onder andere in op klanten die gebruikmaken van social media.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 werd onlangs op de Nederlandse markt geïntroduceerd. Dat gebeurde officieel in theater Het Spant! in Bussem, waar ongeveer vijfhonderd zakelijke en it-beslissers aanwezig waren. Annemarie Brandsen, product marketing manager Dynamics CRM bij Microsoft Nederland, zegt dat het nieuwe crm-pakket op drie peilers is gebouwd. ‘Ten eerste een Microsoft Outlook-omgeving die nauw geïntegreerd is met de nieuwe crm-software. Om de gebruiksvriendelijkheid van de software te verbeteren is het crm-programma volledig geïntegreerd in Outlook en werkt net zo makkelijk als e-mail. Ten tweede een intelligente omgeving, waarmee gebruikers onder andere zelf dashboards kunnen aanmaken. Ten derde is het crm-pakket geschikt voor koppelingen met andere software voor het uitwisselen van informatie. Zo werkt CRM 2011 nauw met Microsoft Sharepoint om documenten uit te wisselen met andere medewerkers.'
Grip op klanten
Een belangrijke ontwikkeling is de koppeling met sociale netwerken, aldus Brandsen. Het aantal communicatiekanalen neemt fors toe. Social media-platformen zoals Facebook, LinkedIn en Twitter spelen een belangrijke rol in de interactie tussen bedrijven en klanten. Daarom is CRM 2011 gekoppeld aan sociale netwerken om grip op klanten te houden.
Microsoft spreekt hierbij van een ‘nieuwe klant die overal is maar toch lastig is om te grijpen'. Klantloyaliteit is tegenwoordig niet langer meer vanzelfsprekend, aldus Brandsen. ‘De nieuwe klant wil zelf kunnen bepalen hoe het contact wordt gelegd met een organisatie. De klant rekent erop dat alle gegevens voortdurend up-to-date zijn en het systeem te allen tijde functioneert en bereikbaar is.'
Partners
Tijdens de introductie van de nieuwe Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 demonstreerden een aantal partners van Microsoft aanvullende software voor verticale marktsegmenten. Zo heeft Avanade een oplossing ontwikkeld voor marketingmanagement met Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Dat kan worden ingezet voor cross- en up-selling en klantensegmentatie.
Ciber liet een branche-oplossing voor verzekeringen zien, dat beschikbaar is op Microsoft CRM 2011 en geïntegreerd is met Microsoft Office en Sharepoint. CRM Resultants demonstreerde CRM2011 for Finance. Dit is een oplossing voor verzekeraars, intermediairs, vermogensbeheerders en private banken, die bestaat uit een reeks van elf geïntegreerde modules. CRM2011 for Finance biedt financiële instellingen verkoop, customer service en marketing functies, ondersteuning van diverse distributiemodellen. Het accent van de oplossing ligt op 'customer due dilligence', centraal klantbeeld en klantbedienmodel.
Steve Ballmer
Op 17 januari 2011 introduceerde Microsoft-directeur Steve Ballmer Dynamics CRM 2011. Bij die lancering werd eerst de online-versie beschikbaar gesteld.
bekijk reacties (1) print stuur door
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Read more: http://www.computable.nl/artikel/ict_topics/crm/3787731/2333360/microsoft-crm-2011-speelt-in-op-social-media.html#ixzz1Eqj1ojv8
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 werd onlangs op de Nederlandse markt geïntroduceerd. Dat gebeurde officieel in theater Het Spant! in Bussem, waar ongeveer vijfhonderd zakelijke en it-beslissers aanwezig waren. Annemarie Brandsen, product marketing manager Dynamics CRM bij Microsoft Nederland, zegt dat het nieuwe crm-pakket op drie peilers is gebouwd. ‘Ten eerste een Microsoft Outlook-omgeving die nauw geïntegreerd is met de nieuwe crm-software. Om de gebruiksvriendelijkheid van de software te verbeteren is het crm-programma volledig geïntegreerd in Outlook en werkt net zo makkelijk als e-mail. Ten tweede een intelligente omgeving, waarmee gebruikers onder andere zelf dashboards kunnen aanmaken. Ten derde is het crm-pakket geschikt voor koppelingen met andere software voor het uitwisselen van informatie. Zo werkt CRM 2011 nauw met Microsoft Sharepoint om documenten uit te wisselen met andere medewerkers.'
Grip op klanten
Een belangrijke ontwikkeling is de koppeling met sociale netwerken, aldus Brandsen. Het aantal communicatiekanalen neemt fors toe. Social media-platformen zoals Facebook, LinkedIn en Twitter spelen een belangrijke rol in de interactie tussen bedrijven en klanten. Daarom is CRM 2011 gekoppeld aan sociale netwerken om grip op klanten te houden.
Microsoft spreekt hierbij van een ‘nieuwe klant die overal is maar toch lastig is om te grijpen'. Klantloyaliteit is tegenwoordig niet langer meer vanzelfsprekend, aldus Brandsen. ‘De nieuwe klant wil zelf kunnen bepalen hoe het contact wordt gelegd met een organisatie. De klant rekent erop dat alle gegevens voortdurend up-to-date zijn en het systeem te allen tijde functioneert en bereikbaar is.'
Partners
Tijdens de introductie van de nieuwe Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 demonstreerden een aantal partners van Microsoft aanvullende software voor verticale marktsegmenten. Zo heeft Avanade een oplossing ontwikkeld voor marketingmanagement met Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. Dat kan worden ingezet voor cross- en up-selling en klantensegmentatie.
Ciber liet een branche-oplossing voor verzekeringen zien, dat beschikbaar is op Microsoft CRM 2011 en geïntegreerd is met Microsoft Office en Sharepoint. CRM Resultants demonstreerde CRM2011 for Finance. Dit is een oplossing voor verzekeraars, intermediairs, vermogensbeheerders en private banken, die bestaat uit een reeks van elf geïntegreerde modules. CRM2011 for Finance biedt financiële instellingen verkoop, customer service en marketing functies, ondersteuning van diverse distributiemodellen. Het accent van de oplossing ligt op 'customer due dilligence', centraal klantbeeld en klantbedienmodel.
Steve Ballmer
Op 17 januari 2011 introduceerde Microsoft-directeur Steve Ballmer Dynamics CRM 2011. Bij die lancering werd eerst de online-versie beschikbaar gesteld.
bekijk reacties (1) print stuur door
GERELATEERDE ARTIKELEN
31-01-2011 IBM en SugarCRM sluiten samenwerking
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17-01-2011 Microsoft levert CRM-pakket eerst online
15-12-2010 Microsoft koppelt eindelijk CRM aan ERP
13-09-2010 Microsoft geeft bèta Dynamics CRM 2011 vrij
Read more: http://www.computable.nl/artikel/ict_topics/crm/3787731/2333360/microsoft-crm-2011-speelt-in-op-social-media.html#ixzz1Eqj1ojv8
Vereniging Eigen Huis integreert contract in Sharepoint
Vereniging Eigen Huis heeft inzicht gekregen in meer dan vijftien verschillende soorten contracten. Zij hebben een intranetsite op basis van Sharepoint 2007 en beschikken ook over kennis van Sharepoint zodat zij zelf onderdelen kunnen ontwikkelen en beheren in het programma. Voor contractbeheer heeft Vereniging Eigen Huis aanvullende software ingezet, die 100 procent is geïntegreerd met de bestaande Sharepoint-omgeving.
De hoogste prioriteit kreeg de oplossing voor contractmanagement. Het project bestond uit het inrichten van vijftien contractsoorten met behulp van ecspand. Het doel is om meer inzicht te krijgen in de lopende contracten, de looptijden bij te houden en de betrokken personen te informeren over de status wanneer bijvoorbeeld een opzegtermijn nadert. Vereniging Eigen Huis wenste contracten snel en makkelijk terug te vinden en wilde geen lades meer doorzoeken.
Door consultants van Docdynamic zijn vijftien verschillende contractsoorten ingericht, elk met eigen specifieke kenmerken. Tot op heden werd van elk contract een papieren versie bewaard en gearchiveerd in ladekasten. Een aantal afdelingen hield een Excel-sheet bij. Het was lastig om de looptijden bij te houden en de betrokken personen op tijd te informeren over opzegtermijnen, omdat deze alleen op de papieren versie stond vermeld. Een consultant van Docdynamic regelde uiteindelijk alles en implementeerde ecspand bij Vereniging Eigen Huis.
Fase 2: Inkoopfacturen digitaal archiveren
Nadat het contractmanagement was geïmplementeerd bij Vereniging Eigen Huis is het vervolg ingezet met de implementatie van inkoopfactuurverwerking met ecspand. De software is ingericht om facturen te scannen en te koppelen aan leveranciersnummer en deze zo op te zoeken in het contractbeheersysteem. De toegevoegde waarde hiervan werd onvoldoende prioriteit toegekend door de afdeling inkoop en F&C, waardoor is besloten hier nog niet mee te gaan werken.
De inkoopfacturen scannen met ecspand, al dan niet voorzien van een barcode en vervolgens digitaal archiveren. De barcode bevat het boekstuknummer uit Navision. Hiermee worden alle kopgegevens van de inkoopfactuur uit Navision opgehaald.
Toekomstplannen
Het proces van beoordelen en goedkeuren van facturen kan in veel organisaties versneld en verbeterd worden. Door de workflow van ecspand in te zetten voor het digitaal beoordelen en het versnellen van het goedkeuringsproces van inkoopfacturen wordt een enorme efficiencyslag gemaakt. Hiervan wordt de toegevoegde waarde wel erkend door de afdeling inkoop en F&C. Deze afdelingen zullen samen alle mogelijkheden inventariseren en de uitbreidingen van ecspand in de toekomst invullen.
OPDRACHTGEVER: VERENIGING EIGEN HUIS
Vereniging Eigen Huis behartigt de belangen van de eigenwoningbezitter. Dit uit zich op drie vlakken: diensten en producten, informatie en advies en collectief ledenbelang. De ontwikkeling van de diverse diensten en de partijen waarmee ze als vereniging samenwerken, worden zorgvuldig geselecteerd. Eigen huis behartigt de belangen van ruim 680.000 eigenwoningbezitters. Er werken ruim tweehonderd medewerkers.
REDENEN VOOR ECSPAND VOLGENS VERENIGING EIGEN HUIS
- Perfecte aansluiting op MS SharePoint Server
- Snel de gewenste informatie beschikbaar.
- Overzicht van alle contracten.
- Makkelijk en snel zoeken naar bijbehorende documenten.
- Gemakkelijk lopende contracten inzien.
- Tijdig de juiste persoon informeren over contractstatus.
- Digitaal notities toevoegen aan documenten.
- Webgebaseerde oplossing.
- Gebruiksvriendelijk.
- Snelle implementatie.
- Onderhoud in eigen beheer.
Voordelen contractmanagement:
- Tijdbesparing door snel terugvinden van contracten op leveranciersnummer, boeknummer, datum bereik etc.).
- Kostenbesparing door inzicht in alle lopende contracten en (opzeg-)termijnen voor de betrokken personen.
- Tijdig per e-mail informeren over de status van een contract.
- Snel en op elk gewenst tijdstip contracten inzien.
- Databeveiliging, toekenning gebruikersrechten op contractniveau.
- Kostenbesparing: geen papieren archief meer nodig.
- Overzichtelijke administratie per leverancier.
- Volledigheid, alle documenten zijn per leverancier in één digitaal dossier revisiezeker opgeslagen.
DOELGROEP
ecspand is bestemd voor middelgrote tot grote (inter-)nationale bedrijven die Sharepoint hebben ingezet en dit wensen uit te breiden naar een bedrijfsbreed informatieplatform. Ecspand is een 100 procent geïntegreerde dms/ecm-oplossing met Sharepoint 2007/2010.
Read more: http://www.computable.nl/artikel/ict_topics/erp/3791074/1276992/vereniging-eigen-huis-integreert-contract-in-sharepoint.html#ixzz1EqhovxRN
De hoogste prioriteit kreeg de oplossing voor contractmanagement. Het project bestond uit het inrichten van vijftien contractsoorten met behulp van ecspand. Het doel is om meer inzicht te krijgen in de lopende contracten, de looptijden bij te houden en de betrokken personen te informeren over de status wanneer bijvoorbeeld een opzegtermijn nadert. Vereniging Eigen Huis wenste contracten snel en makkelijk terug te vinden en wilde geen lades meer doorzoeken.
Door consultants van Docdynamic zijn vijftien verschillende contractsoorten ingericht, elk met eigen specifieke kenmerken. Tot op heden werd van elk contract een papieren versie bewaard en gearchiveerd in ladekasten. Een aantal afdelingen hield een Excel-sheet bij. Het was lastig om de looptijden bij te houden en de betrokken personen op tijd te informeren over opzegtermijnen, omdat deze alleen op de papieren versie stond vermeld. Een consultant van Docdynamic regelde uiteindelijk alles en implementeerde ecspand bij Vereniging Eigen Huis.
Fase 2: Inkoopfacturen digitaal archiveren
Nadat het contractmanagement was geïmplementeerd bij Vereniging Eigen Huis is het vervolg ingezet met de implementatie van inkoopfactuurverwerking met ecspand. De software is ingericht om facturen te scannen en te koppelen aan leveranciersnummer en deze zo op te zoeken in het contractbeheersysteem. De toegevoegde waarde hiervan werd onvoldoende prioriteit toegekend door de afdeling inkoop en F&C, waardoor is besloten hier nog niet mee te gaan werken.
De inkoopfacturen scannen met ecspand, al dan niet voorzien van een barcode en vervolgens digitaal archiveren. De barcode bevat het boekstuknummer uit Navision. Hiermee worden alle kopgegevens van de inkoopfactuur uit Navision opgehaald.
Toekomstplannen
Het proces van beoordelen en goedkeuren van facturen kan in veel organisaties versneld en verbeterd worden. Door de workflow van ecspand in te zetten voor het digitaal beoordelen en het versnellen van het goedkeuringsproces van inkoopfacturen wordt een enorme efficiencyslag gemaakt. Hiervan wordt de toegevoegde waarde wel erkend door de afdeling inkoop en F&C. Deze afdelingen zullen samen alle mogelijkheden inventariseren en de uitbreidingen van ecspand in de toekomst invullen.
OPDRACHTGEVER: VERENIGING EIGEN HUIS
Vereniging Eigen Huis behartigt de belangen van de eigenwoningbezitter. Dit uit zich op drie vlakken: diensten en producten, informatie en advies en collectief ledenbelang. De ontwikkeling van de diverse diensten en de partijen waarmee ze als vereniging samenwerken, worden zorgvuldig geselecteerd. Eigen huis behartigt de belangen van ruim 680.000 eigenwoningbezitters. Er werken ruim tweehonderd medewerkers.
REDENEN VOOR ECSPAND VOLGENS VERENIGING EIGEN HUIS
- Perfecte aansluiting op MS SharePoint Server
- Snel de gewenste informatie beschikbaar.
- Overzicht van alle contracten.
- Makkelijk en snel zoeken naar bijbehorende documenten.
- Gemakkelijk lopende contracten inzien.
- Tijdig de juiste persoon informeren over contractstatus.
- Digitaal notities toevoegen aan documenten.
- Webgebaseerde oplossing.
- Gebruiksvriendelijk.
- Snelle implementatie.
- Onderhoud in eigen beheer.
Voordelen contractmanagement:
- Tijdbesparing door snel terugvinden van contracten op leveranciersnummer, boeknummer, datum bereik etc.).
- Kostenbesparing door inzicht in alle lopende contracten en (opzeg-)termijnen voor de betrokken personen.
- Tijdig per e-mail informeren over de status van een contract.
- Snel en op elk gewenst tijdstip contracten inzien.
- Databeveiliging, toekenning gebruikersrechten op contractniveau.
- Kostenbesparing: geen papieren archief meer nodig.
- Overzichtelijke administratie per leverancier.
- Volledigheid, alle documenten zijn per leverancier in één digitaal dossier revisiezeker opgeslagen.
DOELGROEP
ecspand is bestemd voor middelgrote tot grote (inter-)nationale bedrijven die Sharepoint hebben ingezet en dit wensen uit te breiden naar een bedrijfsbreed informatieplatform. Ecspand is een 100 procent geïntegreerde dms/ecm-oplossing met Sharepoint 2007/2010.
Read more: http://www.computable.nl/artikel/ict_topics/erp/3791074/1276992/vereniging-eigen-huis-integreert-contract-in-sharepoint.html#ixzz1EqhovxRN
T-Systems helpt Shell aan Sharepoint
Olieconcern Shell heeft Microsoft en T-Systems de opdracht gegeven om een op maat gesneden Sharepoint-oplossing te leveren. Beide ict-leveranciers hebben voor die opdracht de bestaande samenwerkingsbanden aangehaald. Voor april 2011 moeten de eerste medewerkers van Shell bestanden uitwisselen via Sharepoint.
Het is niet bekendgemaakt om hoeveel accounts het gaat. T-Systems schrijft in een persbericht dat op termijn alle Shell-medewerkers wereldwijd kunnen samenwerken en informatie uitwisselen via het gestandaardiseerde platform op basis van Microsoft Sharepoint. Shell heeft wereldwijd bijna honderdduizend medewerkers.
Medewerkers krijgen via cloud computing toegang tot de software voor gegevensuitwisseling. Het gaat om een zogenoemde hybride oplossing. Dat betekent dat informatie zowel lokaal als in datacenters verspreid over verschillende vestigingen wereldwijd is opgeslagen. Het prijsmodel is op basis van gebruik.
Cloud computing
T-Systems en Microsoft werken al sinds 2004 samen. In 2009 kondigden de bedrijven gezamenlijke plannen op het gebied van cloud computing aan. Daarbij bieden de ict-dienstverlener en de sofwareleverancier werkplekken aan via het bedrijfsnetwerk.
Door de opdracht verbreedt T-Systems zijn hosting en opslagactiviteiten naar applicatiebeheer en collaboration.
Ontevreden
Eerder meldde de Duitse zakenkrant Handelsblatt dat Shell en Philips ontevereden zouden zijn over de prestaties van T-Systems.
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Read more: http://www.computable.nl/artikel/ict_topics/ecm/3791472/1277020/tsystems-helpt-shell-aan-sharepoint.html#ixzz1EqhCFCuC
Het is niet bekendgemaakt om hoeveel accounts het gaat. T-Systems schrijft in een persbericht dat op termijn alle Shell-medewerkers wereldwijd kunnen samenwerken en informatie uitwisselen via het gestandaardiseerde platform op basis van Microsoft Sharepoint. Shell heeft wereldwijd bijna honderdduizend medewerkers.
Medewerkers krijgen via cloud computing toegang tot de software voor gegevensuitwisseling. Het gaat om een zogenoemde hybride oplossing. Dat betekent dat informatie zowel lokaal als in datacenters verspreid over verschillende vestigingen wereldwijd is opgeslagen. Het prijsmodel is op basis van gebruik.
Cloud computing
T-Systems en Microsoft werken al sinds 2004 samen. In 2009 kondigden de bedrijven gezamenlijke plannen op het gebied van cloud computing aan. Daarbij bieden de ict-dienstverlener en de sofwareleverancier werkplekken aan via het bedrijfsnetwerk.
Door de opdracht verbreedt T-Systems zijn hosting en opslagactiviteiten naar applicatiebeheer en collaboration.
Ontevreden
Eerder meldde de Duitse zakenkrant Handelsblatt dat Shell en Philips ontevereden zouden zijn over de prestaties van T-Systems.
reageer print stuur door
GERELATEERDE ARTIKELEN
18-02-2011 Logica participeert in Shell-deal van 300 miljoen
03-01-2011 'Shell en Philips ontevreden over T-Systems'
09-12-2010 AT&T en Cisco bekijken energieverbruik Shell
18-05-2010 AT&T helpt Shell aan Unified Communications
01-03-2010 IBM helpt Shell bij rekenwerk olieproductie
29-10-2009 Shell: Ook ICT’er moet vrezen voor baan
09-07-2009 Shell vraagt lager tarief van ingehuurde ICT'ers
09-02-2009 EDS: meer dan on-site werkplekbeheer bij Shell
02-02-2009 Getronics beheert alle 90.000 Shell-werkplekken
29-01-2009 Getronics helpt EDS bij uitbesteding Shell
31-10-2008 Shell niet langer de populairste werkgever
18-09-2008 Migratieklus Shell door T-Systems duurt jaren
07-04-2008 Dienstverleners pronken met Shell-contract
Read more: http://www.computable.nl/artikel/ict_topics/ecm/3791472/1277020/tsystems-helpt-shell-aan-sharepoint.html#ixzz1EqhCFCuC
Monday, February 07, 2011
CRM Next-Level: Waarom eCRM net zo normaal wordt als Search of Banners
Vreemd genoeg worden veel online bureaus door haar adverteerders nog gebrieft met de boodschap veel respons, clicks of leads te verzorgen. Heel vreemd. Een bedrijf ontleent meer toegevoegde waarde door te sturen op de herkomst van klantwaarde. Met name in de UK en Amerika gaan die ontwikkelingen iets sneller. Het systeem wat bedrijven helpt te sturen op klantwaarde wordt in generieke termen eCRM genoemd. eCRM en Digitale Media zullen binnen elke jaren dicht naar elkaar toe groeien. Dus geen clicks of leads meer, maar klantwaarde en de herkomst ervan.
Keurige dahboards
Toen ik mijn loopbaan bij Andersen Consulting (nu Accenture) begon, inmiddels alweer giga lang geleden, waren ERP en CRM ‘hot’ bij alle Multinationals. Kosten noch moeite werden gespaard om de hele supply chain (SD), material management (MM) en financieel management (FI/CO) in kaart te brengen en terug te koppelen aan het management in keurige dashboards. Bij die visie hoorde het natuurlijk ook om zoiets dergelijks te doen met Marketing & Sales. Feitelijk het CRM gebied. Wat beide systemen met elkaar gemeen hadden is dat de primaire focus het registeren en rapporteren betrof, en die gegevens zoveel mogelijk werden toegepast om ontwikkelingen (lees: tekorten of overschot) te kunnen voorspellen. Mede geboren uit de wens om ‘ook’ een gave Just-in-Time organisatie te zijn.
Tweede leven
We zijn nu ruim 15 jaar verder, en er kan worden gesteld dat met name CRM toe is aan een tweede leven. Alhoewel veel trajecten, zeker de early adopters op CRM-gebied, vaak weinig ROI konden laten zien uit hun ontwikkelingen en enorme investeringen, zie je anno 2011 dat succesvolle toepassing van CRM nu een bizar hevige vlucht neemt. Oorzaak nummer 1: integratie tussen CRM en Digitale Media en Marketing. Digitale Media maakt het mogelijk om CRM systemen te verrijken met online gedrag. Hierdoor kan het eindelijk haar belofte inlossen, namelijk die van een echt actief retentie en/of sales instrument. Tegelijkertijd zijn de wat onhandige systemen van toen veranderd in in-the-cloud toepassingen van nu. Niet meer voor tonnen of miljoenen, met een leger consultants en opeenvolgende change-requests op de koop toe, maar voor een paar tientjes per user (Salesforce/Dynamics etc.) redelijk complete en easy to use systemen. Ingericht om online gedrag te koppelen.
Toegevoegde waarde
Weloverwogen integratie van Digitale Media en Marketing met CRM biedt veel toegevoegde waarde. De belangrijkste is dat online gedrag, als vertaald in relevante implicaties zoals ontevredenheid, potentiële leads, upselling mogelijkheden, identificatie beste klanten etc. direct kan worden omgezet in programma’s die duidelijke ondernemingsdoelstellingen ondersteunen. Programma’s die online in te vullen zijn. Bovendien kunnen digitale Marketeers dan beter sturen op het maximaliseren van Beste en Meest Winstgevende klanten, in plaats van leads en clicks wat resulteert in sub-optimalisatie.
eCRM
Tegelijkertijd vinden veel Nederlandse bedrijven het lastig om die voor de hand liggende toepassingen te laten plaatsvinden. Dat komt enerzijds door de Chinese walls tussen digitale media en marketing (als dat al niet grotendeels is uitbesteed aan allerlei online bureaus) en crm-verantwoordelijken, anderzijds door teleurstelling vanuit het verleden en onduidelijkheid over juridische kaders. Bovendien loopt Nederland zelden voorop waar het gaat om marketing & media Innovatie. Wellicht ook omdat veel marketeers minder affiniteit hebben met techniek en internet. Dat zal vanzelf veranderen. eCRM systemen zullen ook in Nederland aansluiting gaan vinden. En sterker nog, dergelijke systemen worden zo standaard als Search, Display, Mobiel, Social en straks IP-TV.
Voor de Nederlandse Marketing Pioniers die deze ontwikkeling volgen zou ik graag willen verwijzen naar het gratis event dat Microsoft Dynamics op 16 februari organiseert. Het programma kun je HIER vinden en tevens kan daar worden ingeschreven. Inschrijven kan ook door een mail te sturen naar annemarie.brandsen@microsoft.com Heel CRM Nederland zal er zijn. Nu online media nog ;-)
Keurige dahboards
Toen ik mijn loopbaan bij Andersen Consulting (nu Accenture) begon, inmiddels alweer giga lang geleden, waren ERP en CRM ‘hot’ bij alle Multinationals. Kosten noch moeite werden gespaard om de hele supply chain (SD), material management (MM) en financieel management (FI/CO) in kaart te brengen en terug te koppelen aan het management in keurige dashboards. Bij die visie hoorde het natuurlijk ook om zoiets dergelijks te doen met Marketing & Sales. Feitelijk het CRM gebied. Wat beide systemen met elkaar gemeen hadden is dat de primaire focus het registeren en rapporteren betrof, en die gegevens zoveel mogelijk werden toegepast om ontwikkelingen (lees: tekorten of overschot) te kunnen voorspellen. Mede geboren uit de wens om ‘ook’ een gave Just-in-Time organisatie te zijn.
Tweede leven
We zijn nu ruim 15 jaar verder, en er kan worden gesteld dat met name CRM toe is aan een tweede leven. Alhoewel veel trajecten, zeker de early adopters op CRM-gebied, vaak weinig ROI konden laten zien uit hun ontwikkelingen en enorme investeringen, zie je anno 2011 dat succesvolle toepassing van CRM nu een bizar hevige vlucht neemt. Oorzaak nummer 1: integratie tussen CRM en Digitale Media en Marketing. Digitale Media maakt het mogelijk om CRM systemen te verrijken met online gedrag. Hierdoor kan het eindelijk haar belofte inlossen, namelijk die van een echt actief retentie en/of sales instrument. Tegelijkertijd zijn de wat onhandige systemen van toen veranderd in in-the-cloud toepassingen van nu. Niet meer voor tonnen of miljoenen, met een leger consultants en opeenvolgende change-requests op de koop toe, maar voor een paar tientjes per user (Salesforce/Dynamics etc.) redelijk complete en easy to use systemen. Ingericht om online gedrag te koppelen.
Toegevoegde waarde
Weloverwogen integratie van Digitale Media en Marketing met CRM biedt veel toegevoegde waarde. De belangrijkste is dat online gedrag, als vertaald in relevante implicaties zoals ontevredenheid, potentiële leads, upselling mogelijkheden, identificatie beste klanten etc. direct kan worden omgezet in programma’s die duidelijke ondernemingsdoelstellingen ondersteunen. Programma’s die online in te vullen zijn. Bovendien kunnen digitale Marketeers dan beter sturen op het maximaliseren van Beste en Meest Winstgevende klanten, in plaats van leads en clicks wat resulteert in sub-optimalisatie.
eCRM
Tegelijkertijd vinden veel Nederlandse bedrijven het lastig om die voor de hand liggende toepassingen te laten plaatsvinden. Dat komt enerzijds door de Chinese walls tussen digitale media en marketing (als dat al niet grotendeels is uitbesteed aan allerlei online bureaus) en crm-verantwoordelijken, anderzijds door teleurstelling vanuit het verleden en onduidelijkheid over juridische kaders. Bovendien loopt Nederland zelden voorop waar het gaat om marketing & media Innovatie. Wellicht ook omdat veel marketeers minder affiniteit hebben met techniek en internet. Dat zal vanzelf veranderen. eCRM systemen zullen ook in Nederland aansluiting gaan vinden. En sterker nog, dergelijke systemen worden zo standaard als Search, Display, Mobiel, Social en straks IP-TV.
Voor de Nederlandse Marketing Pioniers die deze ontwikkeling volgen zou ik graag willen verwijzen naar het gratis event dat Microsoft Dynamics op 16 februari organiseert. Het programma kun je HIER vinden en tevens kan daar worden ingeschreven. Inschrijven kan ook door een mail te sturen naar annemarie.brandsen@microsoft.com Heel CRM Nederland zal er zijn. Nu online media nog ;-)
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