The Promise of the Real Time Web for the Enterprise

Real Time Web is the latest trend to capture the media's attention over the past few months and indeed seems to encapsulate well the effect that Twitter and the social networks are having on the flow of information. The ability to get up to the second information about people, news and activities around the world is a foundation for a new wave of startups and services and is being integrated into search and other services.

As many users of the real time web will attest, its constant stream of information can be overwhelming and disjointed but at its best, it allows awareness and insight to emerge as the confluence of information takes a clearer shape.

Can this be useful in the enterprise? (I'll be careful from using the term Real Term Enterprise that Gartner coined a few years ago and means something else)

Companies generate huge amounts of data that rarely sees the light of day. Let's consider the following scenario – you are an account manager for several key accounts in a particular vertical. What information are you getting? Most likely direct and indirect emails consist of 90% of the information while the rest is verbal, non documented conversations. But what if you could get ream time updates on the following:

• Client specific news
  
• Client brand related blog posts, discussions, videos and tweets in real time
  
• Vertical news
  
• Client services updates about milestones reached
  
• Customer Support alerts about open service tickets and their resolution status
  
• Internal discussions and email regarding the client
  
• External email communications with the client by different team members
  
• Etc..
  

Not all of these would constitute information that someone will send a specific email on. Being aware to the stream of news, discussions and information can be invaluable for agile and responsive approach.

Our current document and email centric information systems are not built to provide this level of constant details. Using the new generation of web mashups and aggregation tools are beginning to offer reasonable solutions.

As Jennifer Martinez had recently observed in GigaOm, there is a huge potential for tools that will help sift the provide context for all these huge streams of data.

What surprises me is that most of the discussion looks at this as a new phenomena while there is an industry that has been using this method very successfully for a long time. The Bloomberg (and other) terminals provide bite size financial information in a continual stream that can be filtered, sorted and analyzed. It combines company news, industry news, transactions, price changes etc in a way that for a novice seems indecipherable but for the experience broker is a goldmine.

Providing the right tools are put in place the potential business value seem significant:

• Accelerating cycles of decision making
  
• Pushing all relevant information to you rather than pulling from multiple sources is a great time saver
  
• Decrease the unbearable email load
  
• Increase and broaden awareness to domain knowledge
  

For more information on the real time web and the type of tools that exist around it, ReadWriteWeb has compiled a great list of top 50 real time web companies and services.

The current state of Enterprise 2.0

It was interesting to visit the Web 2.0 conference last week and see the progress and trends compared to my last year impressions.

Here are some of my thoughts:

• SharePoint is the de-facto standard for Enterprise 2.0 While other vendors have compelling products and features, a CIO that is looking for an internal, comprehensive, secure and maintainable solution has almost only one choice (unless you are on an IBM stack..). Other tools focus on providing point solutions, hosted environments, plugging current SharePoint holes and extending functionality. Microsoft had the biggest and most impressive presence and were heavily promoting the next version SharePoint 2010 that will be launched in the SharePoint conference in October. (Some preliminary details here).
  


• The field has definitely matured over the last year. There are more case studies and research about usage, benefits and trends although most companies are not sharing explicit ROI numbers. Some vendors have disappeared while others are growing and establishing themselves at a level where they may be considered long term players and safe for the enterprise.
  


• The experts are still frustrated with the slow rate of adoption and the seeming growing gap between the prevalence of social tools and technologies used by marketing and sales to communicate externally Vs. they almost complete absence internally. The rapid adoption of tools like Facebook and Twitter for customer communication not just in retail but in Healthcare and other industries creates glaring discrepancies where the same companies have no tools internally and sometimes even block their own marketing teams from external use of these tools under some outdated IT policy.
  


• IT is still not part of the discussion. That is unfortunate because as Steve Wylie, the conference director expressed in a guest post at ZDNET last week, large scale adoptions will not happen without IT.
  
  
  

  "While we could argue that this is a very new market and that businesses take time to change, I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be challenged by large-scale adoption until corporate IT is fully on board. Early adoption has been largely driven by business users and department-level managers. They had a problem to solve and were fed up waiting for IT to provide the solutions they needed. They took matters into their own hands by finding workable, web-based solutions and even celebrated this new found freedom from IT. With a few exceptions, IT took a reactive posture to Enterprise 2.0 and viewed it as a threat to be managed, secured and even blocked in some cases."
  



• Tactical view. One of the most frequently asked questions was "what is the best way to get started?". The pretty universal answer for vendors and corporate users was to approach it in a tactical manner and find a specific business problem you can solve using collaboration tools. Be it an HR portal to boost morale, tools to help virtual project teams work more efficiently, sales best practices portal or any of many other ideas. Define a narrow business case and implement. So far, trying to approach this in a strategic manner makes finding ROI a herculean task and as noted above, puts IT on the defensive. I hope that this trend will start to change as these tactical solutions rarely provide long term sustainable benefits.
  


• Rise of the Community Manager. The most active forum was the one where the newly created function – community managers shared their challenges and tricks for getting people to take part in the social activity. First, It is great to see that many leading organizations have realized the importance of such a task although many had it as a secondary responsibility they volunteered to do rather than a full time position. Creating and maintaining a vibrant and active internal community requires skill, passion and process and the focus should rightfully be as much on that as on the tools that enable the community.
  

Additional impressions:

Enterprise 2.0 2009 Conference: Aggregate and Organize

Enterprise 2.0 as Business Strategy

One of the strongest and most misguided arguments expressed online and in many companies we speak with about Enterprise 2.0 is that it is not strategic.

That this collection of tools, technologies and ideas is not yet mature enough, lacks proven ROI, introduces a myriad of security and governance issues and even if successful is not a priority in today's soft economy. It is too often delegated to IT managers to experiment with and report back in a few years.

Here's where the difference is: Enterprise 2.0 is not a technology. It represents first and foremost a new way of thinking, interacting and communicating that includes attitude and cultural changes, empowered by IT. Is there anything more strategic than that and more important to a business future success?

It is arguably the biggest opportunity for IT driven cultural change facing organizations since the introduction of PC networks more than 2 decades ago.

One of the C suite most important tasks is to shape an organizational culture that will make their company innovative, competitive, efficient and successful not just now but in the future. Embracing Enterprise 2.0 now and guiding their employees through this transitional period should be one of their top priorities.

While in a few cases adoption started from the bottom up, a change of this magnitude usually needs to come from the top accompanied by the matching set of values and actions that prove the seriousness and commitment to change.

It requires leadership that is able to see that transparency and increased visibility into activities throughout the company will finally enable them to know what is really happening and will create a culture of trust. That openness and exchange of ideas will lead to innovation and efficiency. That collaboration will enable a diverse workforce to work together in emergent ways while being physically and geographically dispersed.

In short, it requires vision that will set a future path and will ask managers to overcome the obstacles in the way. The type of vision CEO's need to provide and not delegate to IT managers.

The challenge and opportunity is that not many chief executives have realized yet that embracing Enterprise 2.0 is a strategic imperative and are focusing the discussion around short term ROI.

Dion Hinchcliffe at ZDNET provides a comprehensive review of the evidence and opinions regarding ROI and adoption challenges, and adds his own interesting model of collaboration cause and effect chains that while clearly provide benefits, make them harder to pinpoint and measure.


He also concludes that

"… an accumulating body of knowledge is pointing to potentially dramatic business returns with Enterprise 2.0. If these continue to be borne out, it will affect the competitive and financial positions of the companies that are proactive and therefore their long-term marketplace success"


And wonders what it will take to break the current status quo?

His colleague Dennis Howlett on the other end thinks the ROI is still years off and concludes

"As always, the secret to long term success depends on management's ability to maintain a sustained commitment and all that goes with it. The difficulty today is that same management is wondering where the next sale comes from or how cash will be generated."


The good news is that Enterprise 2.0 does not require large capital expenditures but mostly thorough organizational commitment. There has rarely been an opportunity for businesses to gain so much competitive edge by investing so little.

As in many cultural revolutions, by the time Enterprise 2.0 related changes start translating into business differentiators, organizations that have not made the transition will look as outdated as an organization resisting getting these useless PC boxes or adopting email.

Can Hospitals use Web 2.0?

As organizations with a strong social purpose and educational / outreach focus, how can Hospitals remake themselves and their services to provide innovative and effective web-based information and health?

Hospitals can be seen as the center of regional health, building a community of patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals that work online and offline providing care, support and prevention.

It is an overall shift in strategy that transforms the organization to be more Open, Collaborative, Transparent, Interactive, and Social. Organizations that have successfully executed Web 2.0 initiatives: share data and information securely and seamlessly with their health care partners, provide platforms for patients, doctors, and hospitals to collaborate on improving the effectiveness of services and communications, foster community patient support networks, and empower patients to gain access to the best health care services and providers.

There have been some interesting efforts but most providers are just in the initial experimentation mode. Ed Bennett maintains a great list on his blog of all the hospitals and their social activities. According to his findings, Twitter has just become the most popular social media channel among hospitals


Paul Levy, Beth Israel Deaconess CEO has been a trail blazer in his blog, sharing thoughts, ideals, goals, results and experiences, promoting true transparency. The hospital has recently launched the first web 2.0 oriented site with a special section dedicated to interactive features such as blogs, videos, podcasts chat etc.

St. Jude Children Research Hospital has close to 35,000 fans in their facebook group and have extensive social media program on their site. Cedars Sinai in LA is using YouTube for staff recruitment purposes.

These are great examples for a few health providers that seem to have a cohesive strategy for this new interactive age. For most hospitals, just being on facebook or Twitter without setting measurable goals and defining a strategy will not yield the anticipated results.

The following diagram shows the different areas where hospitals can consider collaboration and use of social media and interactivity:





Some of the interesting opportunities for hospitals:

• Use of social media and communities to create an active health community around their health facilities that will involve patients, physicians and hospitals


• Enhance educational activities to include online courses and support groups


• Use blogs and actual access to quality and performance data to promote transparency and trust with the community


• Use advanced web analytics to capture interests and trends and improve content and services accordingly


• Build a stronger relationship with Affiliated Health Professionals and allow them to collaborate and exchange knowledge


• Reduce the customer support functions by moving self service functions to the web

Making the web global and local

Many companies that sell products or services internationally are finding themselves in a familiar dilemma, should their web presence be global or local?

While a global site is easy to control and maintain and can ensure consistency in branding and content quality, it can not address local culture, interests and variation.

I've come across an interesting view on the site of the Localization Industry Standards Association http://www.lisa.org/

They see Globalization as a process with 2 parts

• Internationalization which is the process for defining applications and sites to work in every market


• Localization which is the adaptation of the International framework to local needs and

And the process as:



I agree that the best approach in most cases is to plan for the site and application to work anywhere and then build in enough flexibility for local control and adjustments.

The challenge in this approach is that defining international requirements and anticipating all local variations is very expensive and time consuming. So what should a company that is expanding internationally do? Here are a few questions and guidelines to consider:

• Scope of localization: how are you products or services different around the world? Is it exactly the same product (jewelry tableware for example) or does a local audience may have preferences that will impact selection and availability of products (fashion and cosmetics). If the products need to meet local regulations, standards or laws (220V or 110V for consumer electronics, Material Safety or FDA approvals for Chemicals and Drugs) or if products include attributes like language that will make them market specific (Books and CD's). In each case, a single catalog for all products will provide the easiest way to maintain master product data but sites level of granularity may be determined by the variance in offering. It may be truly global, regional, country or language specific.


• Centralized or Distributed management. Who will maintain content, details, specs etc. in local languages? Do you assume that a product is not released until all languages have been updated? Do you allow a default language to remain until a local language become available? Is this the responsibility of a central translation group of does it goes downstream to the local group to translate? (If you are thinking about machine translation, don't. This technology is still not ready for prime time and will drive off disappointed customers)


• How local should you go? to create a true sense of local site and service, certain adjustments may be needed to the site so it does not look like the translated version of the global template. Does the site has local news and events? Is there editorial content from local sources? Are reviews and communities local? Does the interface adapt to local language without cutting words or providing headers in English? Are local conventions like time format, date format, calendar, currency, address, name formats etc. are specific or generic?


• Build from scratch or retrofit? While substantial amounts have been invested in current web and e-commerce infrastructure, allowing for globalization and localization is not an easy retrofit and in many cases it will be faster and cheaper in the long term to build a technology foundation that is designed to support these issues. Technology issues to consider:
  
  
  
  • Separation of content from the display. There should be no text or images in pages and no parameters in queries. Many CMS systems support localization and handle pages this way by default but custom build CMS systems rarely do.
  
  
  • Support for UTF-8: databases and management tools as well as search engines must support UTF-8
  
  
  • Caching and Performance: a system must be designed with advanced caching to avoid extensive load on the database for rendering local editions
  
  
  • Support for variable length and right to left interfaces. Different languages have very different word length and even orientation. How will interfaces that were designed for exact size look?
  
  
  
  

While these are not simple questions to answer and resolve, creating a global experience with local flavors and details can substantially impact the ability of a company to succeed internationally.

Can in-store e-commerce save retailers?

Image Source: "Are you being served" British sitcom

We tried to buy new Dinnerware last weekend after the cats decided collectively that they are tired of the old set and began systematically decimating it.

It became an interesting case study in the epic battle between brick and mortar and e-commerce.
Both have been slumping lately. Retailers have been hit hard and e-commerce spending last holiday season was down for the first time ever. All the more reason for retailers to try harder, right?

We went to the Bloomingdale’s home store to browse (E-commerce sites are still miles away from presenting products in a way that will compete with the in-store experience) and actually found a set we were willing to buy. A few minutes on our mobile devices confirmed that the store price was comparable to the one offered by e-tailers and we were ready to lock and load.

Not so fast.

• Only a portion of the sets were in stock. The rest would need to be delivered.
• They wanted to charge us for the delivery. Only after we mentioned that online the delivery is free, and following a comical chase throughout the store for the manager that took 15 minutes we got the shipping fee waived.
• Then we got to the soup bowls. Their exact color was not in the system. Products in the in-store green screen system have no pictures. How can I be sure then that the item with the long number but no color code will be the right one?

After waiting at the register for 45 minutes we gave up, went home and would order on-line.

There seem to be very few things left that are worth the hassle and bad service, lines and cost of retail.

Retailers need to create an in-store experience that has the best of both worlds. The actual products you can touch feel or put on, and the information, reviews, competitive prices and even ordering for items that are not currently available in the store.

Since the sales assistants in these department stores can barely answer questions as they struggle to service customers, why not provide information kiosks that explain the difference between bone china and ceramics, help guide you to the most appropriate set based on price, quality or brand and allow you to place an order with in-store pickup or delivery.

On the link between Usability and ROI

A just released survey of the top 40 e-commerce sites asked users to rate their satisfaction with the buying experience. In the results, the survey director notes "higher customer satisfaction ratings often translate into loyalty and purchase intent".

It is amazing that we still need surveys to tell us that. Web usability started as an art and is now an established science that uses audience personas, usage stories and needs mapping to optimize site flow, calls to action and creating an engaging yet efficient experience tailored to each visitor.

Jacob Nielsen in recent studies found an improvement of 83% to 138% in KPI's resulting from a web usability redesign. In about 12% of the cases, the increase was tenfold.

With every web initiative need to provide Return On Investment (ROI) justification, most sites and applications have huge potential for improvement and can easily justify usability upgrades.

How to build a strong ROI case


The common formula for the commerce site business potential is based on the simple concept of getting as many visitors as possible and converting them into paying customers.

Business = Visits x Conversion Rate X Average purchase amount (For each revenue stream on the site)

Let's look at each of these 3 components that largely determine site performance: volume, conversion and purchase size and see where the usability comes in.

Volume: traffic is comprised of new traffic and repeat traffic (V = Vnew + Vrepeat). Attracting new visitors to the site can be expensive and the acquisition cost is often reduced from the total revenue generated. Repeat and loyal visitors are essential to profitability and any improvement in the repeat visitor rate has significant impact on the bottom line. Good user experience that contributes to customer satisfaction will increase the number of repeat visits and add traffic without the acquisition cost.

Conversion Rate: The other critical role of usability is to make sure each visitor is provided with their specific needs which are not always a direct purchase. In a previous post I looked at the new e-commerce paradigm that acknowledges the multiphase shopping experience and provides information, interaction and solutions for visitor in every phase of their purchasing decisions. User experience optimization can have a dramatic effect on converting a visitor to a customer.

Purchase Size: Amazon started product merchandizing, upsells and recommendations more than a decade ago but many companies still are not perfect at providing users with additional options and suggestions throughout the checkout process.

Therefore the impact of usability on the Business consists of the increase in repeat traffic (∆Vrepeat), the increase in conversion rate ∆CR and the increase in purchase size ∆PA or in a formula: B = (Vnew + (Vr + ∆Vr)) x (CR + ∆CR) x (PA + ∆PA)

Usability contributions to cost reduction and savings:

• Reduction in marketing spend for new customer acquisition. The same traffic goals can be achieved with more repeat traffic reducing marketing expenses for new traffic generation.


• Reduction in calls to phone support

Other factors to consider:

• The cost of doing nothing. Not improving usability can actually hurt the factors listed above as the market is not static. The overall web usability standards have increased with rich interfaces and Ajax style functionality. Sites that have not caught up, look dated and clumsy. The competition is not static either. If your site's experience is inferior to the competition, traffic will move there.


• Social media and word of mouth quickly spread good experiences and bad one to an extremely wide audience.

And lastly, without good web analytics program and measurements, you may not know to identify the challenges of poor usability or the contributions of improvements so consider setting an analytics baseline prior to any substantial improvements.