However it was the last presenter of the day, Matt Macgregor from Blue State Digital – Director for the digital rapid response team for President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign – who in my opinion, delivered some of the most compelling content of the conference. His thought-provoking presentation provided an insightful overview into how digital was an influential and integral marketing communication channel for the presidential campaign, in particular for incentivising voter registration, corralling people in fundraising efforts, activating supporters and engaging with voters.

Social and mobile raise your game but don’t forget email

There were a number of interesting takeaways from Matt’s talk. Firstly, and perhaps not surprisingly, social played a big part in campaigning in terms of a medium for sharing voter stories and leveraging its connectedness to make it easier for advocates to share those with other ‘persuadable’ voters. Secondly, Matt revealed that around 25% of the Obama’s campaign’s website traffic came from mobile devices, so as a result the team invested in a responsive site design to maximise conversions and content consumption. Similarly the Quick Donate program allowed supporters to donate easily via SMS, mobile, email or the site and was responsible for raising a staggering $75 million for the campaign.

But while social and mobile – not surprisingly – featured highly in Matt’s presentation, it was a response to a question from the audience that provided an equally revealing insight. When asked what the top 3 digital channels were in the Obama campaign, he replied “email, email, email”. This will no doubt resonate with the conference organiser, Teradata, whose eCircle group is also a provider of email marketing solutions. But it also anecdotally highlights how email still has an important role to play and shouldn’t necessarily be regarded as the poor relation in the digital marketing family.

A/B testing proves its worth

Although it isn’t necessarily new and sexy like social media, email still remains one of the most straightforward and effective ways of communicating with an audience. But more importantly when used in conjunction with analytics it can form a highly persuasive and targeted form of personal communication. During the 2012 campaign for example the campaign team used A/B testing to underpin its email campaigning to understand the impact of different subject lines, different senders and formatting on response and fundraising rates. As can be seen in this article here, the  email campaign was highly successful in raising most of the of the $690 million Obama accumulated online, but interestingly it also highlighted how most people have a nearly limitless capacity for e-mail and often don’t unsubscribe no matter how many they’re sent – a resilience that can’t always be said for other types of online communication channels such as Twitter.

The good news for Teradata, however, is that the company is well placed to take advantage of the interest in email marketing generated from the presentations at Connect 2013. When it acquired eCircle about a year ago it got its hands on a robust email messaging platform and a European-centric customer base. But equally the company has the potential to utilise its background in data warehousing to marry these capabilities with the detailed analytics to help organisations build out sophisticated, highly segmented and targeted email campaigns. If all of its customers saw the same levels of results as Obama 2012, mixing email marketing and analytics will seem like a no-brainer.

BPM in some form has been a significant feature of the previous two IMPACT events, and this year its position was elevated even further – although IBM is now using a different term to describe it. As Bruce notes, the term ‘BPM’ was very rarely heard.

Very briefly, and in my own words rather than IBM’s, the Smarter Process setup goes a bit like this: Mobile, Social, Cloud and Big Data trends are changing the art of the possible in business, as well as changing the expectations that customers have. Globalisation means it’s very hard to compete purely on the basis of efficiency. Mix this in with changes in customer expectations, and you get a situation where any forward-looking enterprise needs to be looking at ways of focusing on customer experience excellence (as well as continuing to focus on efficiency). Business Processes need to be Smarter – and for IBM that means “instant, seamless and insightful”. It’s not enough to try to improve processes by mapping or modeling alone; you need systems in place that can operationalise improvements at scale and with intelligence. These processes need to bridge organisational gaps between marketing, sales, operations and their value chains, and customer service silos – because customer centricity can’t be just about delivering more tailored promises; it has to be able delivering on or exceeding delivery against those promises.

For anyone interested in how the market for business process management tools and systems is evolving, it’s worthwhile quickly exploring why IBM has changed the way it tells its story and sets out its stall. The change is very deliberate.

Partly the shift to ‘Smarter Process’ is a result of IBM being a victim of its own success regarding its use of the term BPM. IBM is hardly alone in this as a technology vendor, but it’s spent a lot of time conflating the discipline of Business Process Management with BPMS technology (as delivered by what’s known as IBM Business Process Manager).

As its engagements with its customer base have matured and as industry expectations have changed, it needs a way to get out of the corner it’s painted itself into – because the answer can’t be about just continuing to add new capabilities into whatever it sells as a ‘BPMS’ (although some analyst firms might like it that way ;-). It needs a way to show how lots of different technology capabilities – not only those provided by core BPMS functionality but also business rules and event processing, content and document management and business analytics, to name a few – can be brought to bear to address the big business challenges of the day. The Smarter Process marketecture overview encompasses IBM BPM, ODM (Operational Decision Management, which combines business rules and event processing) and Case Manager; an embryonic Operational Intelligence offering being built on Business Monitor; together with business intelligence, predictive analytics, ECM and MDM capabilities… and quite a lot more besides.

However this isn’t the whole story – Smarter Process isn’t a ‘BPM++’ product bundling initiative. There’s a clue in the name: Smarter.

For the past couple of years IBM has been completely rebuilding the way it creates and executes marketing initiatives, and the majority of its marketing resources are now directed towards a relatively small number of cross-IBM programs that are judged as having the potential to add billions of dollars to IBM’s top line every year – stuff that will really move the needle. In the main, these programs are labelled ‘Smarter XYZ’.

Over the past couple of years we’ve had Smarter Analytics, Smarter Commerce and more; now we also have Smarter Process (and others, like Smarter Computing). Smarter Process is a signal from IBM that it sees a very significant revenue opportunity in helping companies reinvent their business processes with technology. It’s trying to tell a story that shows how technology can help improve customer-centricity while also delivering on operational expectations; it’s pitching this story not only to CIOs and line-of-business heads, but also to COOs. It expects that this initiative will move the revenue needle, against a backdrop annual revenue haul of over $100bn.

IBM more serious than ever about BPM in its broad sense, even though it uses a different term.

As we have spoken or blogged about before, the use cases for HANA have evolved gradually since it was first released around two years ago. As a reminder, it initially started out as an operational reporting accelerator, before its use case widened to incorporate SAP BW (its data warehousing platform), and then earlier this year the company announced SAP HANA would underpin the entire SAP Business Suite. In our view this announcement isn’t in as big or disruptive as these previous developments; instead we believe it’s more about getting HANA and the applications that run on top of it, recognised as a cloud-based (as well as on-premise) offering. The longer term aim, we believe, is to use HANA as the underpinning in-memory platform for all of the company applications – both SaaS and on-premise – enabling it to compete more effectively with the likes of Salesforce and Oracle, who both have cloud versions of their enterprise applications.

For customers, HANA Enterprise Cloud provides more flexibility in how they deploy the in-memory platform. Being in the cloud means, for example, that customers can hand over some of the more mundane tasks associated with HANA’s set up and configuration such as provisioning hardware and disaster recovery whilst also being able to utilise the cloud’s elasticity to scale up resources as needed. In other words it has the potential to speed up the time to value of a HANA implementation.

That said (according to what I’ve read) customers still need to go through some sort of assessment service with SAP Services to determine which of their applications would benefit most from the HANA cloud deployment option. Similarly, whether this cloud deployment model is more cost effective for customers – compared with an on-premise installation – is unknown at this stage since SAP hasn’t released any detailed licensing information. Whatever the pricing arrangements turn out to be, customers will still need to factor in the time, effort and the cost of migrating and on-boarding SAP HANA to the enterprise cloud since SAP is employing a bring your own license model. This means that customers really need to have a license for HANA already (as well as for Business Suite and Business Warehouse) before considering Enterprise Cloud. Once in the cloud, however, customers will pay a monthly subscription for SAP HANA that is priced according to the size, scale of data and applications used.

In terms of how this impacts SAP’s Big Data strategy, it doesn’t radically change things; instead it simply adds to the deployment options available for SAP HANA. That said, this announcement does re-emphasise SAP’s resolute focus on managing real-time data as opposed to processing data in batch like other Big Data technologies such as Hadoop. The platform has been designed with this function in mind as it blends together an in-memory processing engine, data replication, and compression algorithms in a scalable and parallelised multi-core architecture. The benefit for customers here is that they can turbo-charge their SAP Business Suite applications and data warehouses by processing and querying data in real time, enabling them to react and respond to operations and changing business conditions in faster and faster timescales.

SAP is due to release more details of SAP Enterprise Cloud at next week’s Sapphire conference in Orlando.

Social dominates as a theme

Most notable was the shift this year from emphasising the opportunities that social provides to organisations to the importance of building more connected relationships with your customers. This was very well presented, with astutely targeted marketing videos that built on people’s greater sense of power and control over their product and service providers in this new social and mobile environment. It’s a message that fits well with the company’s suite of products and capabilities, although there was still a little too much “buy our products – it will change your world” rather than acknowledging the help that organisations need – both practically and culturally – to shift to this new perspective.

We also saw more evidence of the importance of being able to connect not just your customers, employees, partners, but also your products, through enabling them to post data and information into your Chatter environment, for example. Both GE and Philips provided examples of this, with the Philips demo showing how sales staff can see which devices a customer has, and even check the usage of those devices from within the customer record in their CRM system in order to inform account decisions and strategies. One thing that was highlighted in COO George Hu’s keynote was the importance of trust in this new world; where you have connected products and devices continuing to provide data back to their manufacturers even after you have bought them, there is a new need to ensure customers have trust in you to use that data in a responsible and respectful way. I suspect we will see many negative stories in this area before organisations truly recognise the importance of this, but it was good to see Salesforce drawing it to people’s attention.

Salesforce communities bridges the gap between internal and external stakeholders

From a collaboration perspective, the big announcement was the official launch of Salesforce Communities – the application of Chatter’s social collaboration capabilities in an externally-facing online community setting. Of course this wasn’t entirely new news, as we’ve been hearing about it for a good year now, but the product has now been fully incorporated into the overall company positioning and marketing, and in fact is a major thread in the new “Customer Company” focus. In terms of the Communities product itself, while it’s a logical next step for Salesforce.com, it has to be said that it is (indeed as Chatter did, very successfully) entering an already very competitive market, and one where differentiating yourself can be challenging, particularly if (like Salesforce.com) you don’t have much of a professional services model to help organisations with the more challenging adoption aspects of building communities. However, Salesforce.com has identified a really strong differentiator through its integration of the internal and external communities. In the Rossignol demo, we saw a workflow process pass seamlessly between the company’s partner community and their internal Chatter deployment, highlighting the ability to combine sensitive partner-specific information and interactions with more general open community capabilities. This will be received well, particularly by organisations already heavily dependent on Salesforce’s sales, customer service or marketing offerings.

Social.com launches, providing a more compelling integration story

From a marketing cloud perspective, one of the major news points centred on the announcement of Social.com. Although officially launched prior to last week’s event, Social.com is a cloud-based offering that allows organisations to manage social media advertising across Facebook and Twitter platforms. In particular it allows advertisers to create and test social campaigns, monitor the social conversation in real time and track metrics to see how effective their posts and keywords are.

Despite first appearances, this is not a new offering but represents a melding together of capabilities already present within Buddy Media and Radian6 – in particular the monitoring and ad placement components of Radian6 and Buddy Media respectively. Splitting out the ad management side from other parts of the marketing cloud offering does make sense since it’s often handled by a different user constituency or third-party ad agency in many cases, compared with other components of the offering.

Interestingly though, the launch of Social.com provides some much needed evidence from Salesforce.com of how it intends to integrate and blend technology from both its Buddy Media and Radian6 acquisitions, but similarly tie it back to its CRM system. Bringing these capabilities together does, for example, enable advertisers to create a Facebook campaign, and target it to different customer groups by importing data from Salesforce;  something that has in the last year been allowed by Facebook. Similarly this level of integration allows ad targeting to be based dynamically on CRM data, so as you capture more information about your customers or prospects your ad targeting can change to incorporate this data. In this respect Social.com represents a more convincing way for Salesforce users to connect the dots between social and customer profiles that in turn can be used to target people more effectively.

If Social.com proves successful on both Twitter and Facebook, we imagine the company will look to extend support to other social networking platforms such as LinkedIn (and possibly Pinterest) in the near future.

So all in all, the Customer Company Tour’s visit to London proved to be an interesting event that provided a snapshot of Salesforce’s evolving strategy and the way it presents its overall portfolio to customers and prospects, with CRM bubbling to the fore once more.

Behind the scenes the new enhancements use sentiment analysis and predictive text mining algorithms to analyse the types of words, images, links and ad formats that work best with an audience and uses them to build a model that predicts the estimated range for the amount of likes, comments and shares a post will receive. This rather helpful feature will make it easier for marketers to optimise their content since many fly blind when trying to assess how impactful a post may be. Having visibility into the predicted ‘performance’ of a post adds some much needed visibility, as it enables social marketers to tweak, adjust and hopefully optimise their social marketing content before it goes live.

In addition the tool feature can track and predict other marketing metrics if instructed to, as well as give recommendations about the time of a post, for example by shifting the scheduled slot if for instance a similar post has just been published. Similarly the tool includes a degree of self-learning since it can learn from previous actions and refine its predicted recommendations based on the results of previous posts.

In our view social publishing is becoming a necessary discipline for many marketers as they grapple with creating and automating the delivery of content across multiple social networks sites such as Facebook and Twitter at a time when usage continues to rise. As we all know, social remains a key channel for marketers in support of activities such as creating brand awareness, generating demand, increasing engagement, improving targeting and building advocacy. And while Adobe Social isn’t a one-stop-shop for social marketing – it hasn’t for instance got an all-round social campaign management component – its ability to steer marketers towards publishing the right social content at the right time nonetheless helps streamline part of this social marketing process.

The new Facebook predictive publishing enhancements are in beta and are due to be released later this summer as part of Adobe Social; other social platforms will follow in due course.

It’s a logical next step for Intralinks, which has for the last 16 years provided hosted solutions to support specific secure document sharing scenarios, such as deal rooms for mergers and acquisitions (Intralinks Dealspace), and loan syndication platforms (Intralinks Debtspace). Sophisticated digital rights management (DRM), encryption and security has been at the heart of its offerings, giving the company a strong if narrow foothold in industries such as life sciences, financial services and legal. However in the last couple of years the company has been trying to figure out how to expand this footprint, supporting the broader enterprise collaboration needs of its customers, as well as growing its own business opportunity too. The result is Intralinks VIA, which has already been the focus of a significant amount of investment by the company, involving major restructuring of the sales organisation as well as a full corporate rebranding in addition to the product development itself.

The VIA offering brings a new, more intuitive and end-user-focused user experience which aims to meet the needs of every individual across a business to support document sharing and collaboration with people both inside and outside the organisation, built on top of Intralinks’ well-established secure collaboration platform. Differentiating oneself in this market is challenging, but Intralinks’ ability to let users “unshare” information – by revoking access to documents, even when they have been downloaded – is an interesting feature which will undoubtedly get the attention of organisations struggling to keep a hold on their IP.

The product itself is still very new – it has been in beta since January – and perhaps not surprisingly there are some functional areas that are still missing or rather limited at the moment, including mobile support, social collaboration capabilities and even simple task management. But the company is being very open about its strategy and roadmap for the product, and it would seem that investment is continuing apace with many of the most significant gaps starting to close as we progress through 2013.

It is still too early to tell whether Intralinks will succeed in its plans to capture a significant share of this market; certainly it has a lot to do to build its profile alongside more established brands such as Box and Huddle. While the market opportunity is only just emerging, I can’t help thinking that this is something of a new wave of what we used to refer to as “team workspace” vendors – an area that has now pretty much been absorbed into the social collaboration space. In the short term these point solutions are new and exciting, but in the longer term, I think organisations are still going to want to bring together these technologies with their social collaboration (and possibly their enterprise content management) strategies. The question is whether this can happen without over-complicating the user experience to the point where business users again start casting around for an alternative.

For more analysis of collaboration technologies and best practice guidance, visit our Collaboration home page.

**Note – updated following feedback from Intralinks**

All three reports are available to download free of charge from the MWD Advisors website.

Part 1: Discover the building blocks for success
Find out what it really means to be collaborative: the four reasons your organisation needs to get better at collaboration, the three most common characteristics of organisations that do collaboration well, and the two main categories of blockers you’ll need to eliminate if you want to set things up for success in your own organisation.

Part 2: Your path to success
Once you have recognised the potential benefits that a more collaborative culture can bring to your organisation, how do you go about becoming more collaborative? Now discover the key steps you need to take in your own organisation to build towards a successful collaborative culture. Not quite ready for an enterprise-wide strategy? You’ll find a Quick-Start Guide in this report too.

Part 3: 6 top tips for implementing social collaboration software
There’s no escaping the fact that in the globally distributed environments where we live and work today, collaboration technologies provide a backbone for communication and connectivity. In this report we examine the role of software more closely, and provide some valuable tips for you to consider as you select and implement technology to support your initiative.

So discover the six tips by downloading the reports now. They’re free – you’ll need to register, but that’s free too. Bargain.

Business Process Management itself is an odd beast with three legs. One leg is an approach to managing a business – by using systems business processes as the linkage between strategy to operations, as the framework for how you look for opportunities and challenges. The second leg is about using specialised modeling tools and platforms, principally, to support this ‘management system’. The third leg is about using a broader set of development and analytics tools and platforms to create operational ‘process applications’ that distribute, co-ordinate and monitor work in line with the intent of your management system.

Case Management is a different kind of beast. It has just one leg, really – which looks a little bit like BPM’s third leg. From a distance. But when you get up close you see that Case Management’s one leg has a few more joints, and the leg moves about in quite odd ways (if you’re used to seeing very solid, structured legs anyway).

But enough of this talk about legs.

What I’m trying to say is that when we try to explain the current shifts in how work is being supported with technology by immediately launching into labels like ‘Case Management’ (whether Adaptive, Advanced, Dynamic, Production, or perhaps mint-choc-chip) and ‘Business Process Management’, it’s confusing. This is not least because Case Management, at least in the way that the term is most often used, is principally a style of model-driven application implementation supported by specialised tools. Case Management doesn’t have anything direct to say about business management systems, by and large, and there’s no modeling or improvement Body of Knowledge in the same way that we have a BoK around techniques like Lean and Six Sigma.

Some of the more recent discourse around distinguishing Case Management from BPM has been framed by contrasting ‘structured’ and ‘unstructured’ work, and I think this is a bit better – because at least it attempts to get away from product category labels and distinguish approaches more according to the kind of thing that you might want to achieve.

But I still think – and this is really where my niggle persisted – that this is a bit too architect-y, a bit too techie. We’re distinguishing types of work in terms of how that work is arranged in a very static, diagram-drawn-on-a-napkin kind of way.

I believe it pays to try and take this a bit further and use terms that describe how different types of work actually feel – to people participating in the work and to people on the ‘receiving end’. So when asked to explain what all the fuss is about re: Case Management and BPM, I talk first about transactional work and contrast that with exploratory work.

Transactional work is work in which the inputs are well-understood, the outputs are well-understood, and there’s a strong correlation between carrying out a very clear, particular set of actions and consistent transformation of those inputs into those outputs. Transactional work is not necessarily simple; it can be complicated and involve many teams of people, and might need to be done at massive scope and scale. Some discretion will be required to resolve unexpected challenges along the way.

Exploratory work is very different in the way that it feels. Exploratory work is often what lurks underneath verbs like “resolve”, “diagnose”, “fix”, “co-ordinate”, “solve”, “determine”, “arbitrate” and so on. The inputs to exploratory work may be broadly categorisable, but are probably not completely predictable. The outputs are likely to be well-understood in terms of high-level goals (see the verbs above), but probably but not in terms of tight specifications. And most importantly, the set and sequence of actions needing to be performed, and the people or roles needing to perform them, are very unlikely to be known ahead of time. There may be some high-level waypoints or milestones that are common to a particular type of exploratory work (perhaps to ensure consistent quality control, or resolution approval, or archiving) but they provide a very loose, rather than tight, structure. In exploratory work, as the label suggests, the overall experience for both the work participants and the customer is that of a set of possibilities being explored rather than a recipe being followed.

Exploratory work is often the natural work form in key parts of a business that touch customers – but many corporations have tried to engineer out the variances, eradicate the exceptions and force-fit natural interactions into transactional boxes. In the age of the customer and as we witness a shift towards truly Digital Enterprises, we can’t afford to ignore the potential upside of supporting exploratory work with specialised tools that make it more effective, more efficient, less error-prone and more improvable without reducing its nature. This is where good Case Management technology comes in. Cases are management structures for exploratory work.

What I’m finding is that by focusing first on helping people think about the richer nature of different styles of work for different situations, and not just focusing on labels like structured and unstructured work, it makes the explanation of Case Management much easier.

I’d love to know your thoughts on this. Does it make sense? Do you use this kind of explanation?

I’ve written up my thoughts in a new In Brief report which is free to download from our online library. In it I put forward the view that while the move to regroup its IMM portfolio under Teradata Apps is an important one especially from an organisational and product marketing perspective we believe the company still needs to be clearer about its longer term product strategy. And in particular by outlining its plans in the campaign management space, for example will the company adopt a database agnostic strategy or become more integrated with the Teradata database and similarly will it  continue to maintain two campaign management tools in the longer term?  As a relatively cautious and measured company Teradata is taking its time to articulate and communicate its future plans but we’re sure when it’s ready it will outline these in full.

Interestingly all this activity comes at a busy time in the IMM space, with competitors such as Oracle and IBM actively acquiring and integrating product suites that similarly target the marketing department with analytically infused marketing applications for marketing automation. Differentiating its data driven marketing approach and convincing the CMO to spend their marketing dollars with Teradata has no doubt just got a lot more interesting for the company. Anyway to find out more,  have a read and let me know what you think in the comments.