Confused?  Don’t worry if you are.  That’s why I’m writing this post.  Probably the best way to frame this is to give some examples.

The Trigger in the IFTTT recipe we create can be something happens on your phone for instance.  For example if you have the app on your Android phone or iPhone you can monitor input from the GPS.  So the IF This would be “If the GPS enters this area” where this area could be your office.   Now we need the Action and let’s for this example stick with your phone and make the Then That would be “Mute my Phone”.

Do you see what that recipe above will do.  When you reach your office your phone will automatically go on mute.

Let’s look at another example.  Because IFTTT isn’t just limited to devices, but also services (like Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, Instagram, Nest, Hue, Dropbox, Craigslist etc. etc) we can have an example like “If the GPS enters this area Then Email My Wife”  In this case the Trigger is the GPS arriving at work and the Action is using Gmail to send someone an email.

It’s the breadth of services available to connect that truly make this a unique and valuable tool.   Want to know when it’s going to rain?  That is the Trigger.  The action could be a text to you phone (SMS service), or flash your lights at home (the Hue service) or a post to your Facebook page.  Temperature drops below a certain level outside (Trigger) then adjust your Nest thermostat (Action).  Someone tags you in an Instagram photo (Trigger) save it to your Dropbox (Action).   Temperature on your Nest thermostat falls below freezing (Trigger) send me a text message (SMS).  How about on your iPhone if you are running the IFTTT app and select New Photo taken in an area, let’s say when you are on vacation, (Trigger) upload automatically to Facebook (Action).  

You get the idea, I hope.  It is hard to understand until you start playing with the service a bit.  Explore.  Check out the recipes that other people have created for ideas of your own.  It really becomes a powerful workflow, macro-like, service that begins to connect disparate services together.  And things will only continue to get more powerful as new services become available for you to leverage.   You can access the service via the web, but the mobile apps are excellent too, providing a simple visual interface that allows you to connect services/devices together based on simple Triggers and Actions.

If you have any great recipe ideas that are particularly useful, feel free to share in the comments below.

My Blackberry Passport sits in the middle between a Note 3 and Moto X.

So this past weekend marked a full month that I’ve been using the Blackberry Passport.  When I tweeted that I was putting away my other phone(s) and using the Blackberry Passport exclusively for business and pleasure, I wasn’t exactly sure how it would turn out. Today, I’d like to share a few thoughts on my experience, which, for the most part has been absolutely fantastic.  Nobody is more surprised then me at just how effective and progressive a device the Passport has turned out to be.  Perfect?  No, but then no smartphone ever is.

At its most basic level, (size, weight, build quality) the device was really pleasing.  I didn’t not find it hard to take around with me, whether it be in my suit jacket, pant pocket, briefcase.  The wider nature of the Passport wasn’t strange to me.  I liked it.  It also has a nice weight to it.  Again, I’m not one to be fussed with how thing and how light a phone is.  The build quality is terrific.  The weighty feel of the device gives it a premium feel and the build quality confirms this.  It just felt nice and solid to me.  But the physicality of a phone isn’t what determines its usefulness to me.  It’s all about functionality for me.  So let me spend a little time talking about how I found this unique smartphone and how it faired in heavy day to day use over the course of a month.  I will highlight the key functional things that jumped out at my while using the Passport.

What I Really Liked

There are a lot of things to like about the Passport.  The wide square screen provides some interesting interaction dynamics as I used it from day to day.  I admittedly missed the widgets from my Android phones (more on that later), but the Blackberry OS does a great job of using active frames.  For example, you can see in the photo to the right on the Passport I am looking at a weather app.  In this mode, the experience is the same (meaning good) as on any other device I use (iOS, Android, Windows Phone) – nice clean refined application that I downloaded from the Blackberry store.  What is nice about the using the Passport, is that with a simple swipe up from the keyboard, the weather app collapses to an active frame.  You can have six active frames on your Passport that remain full size.  The beauty is that if you go beyond six, the active frames get smaller and they adjust to display useful relevant information.  The photo to the right again below the weather app is showing you a series of active frames.  You can see the weather one has adjusted to show me some relevant information that makes sense to show the user in this view.  I like that.  Is it as robust as widgets on Android.  Not really.  Does it provide something useful that I wish Android could do?  You bet.  As for iOS, this active frame is way ahead of what Apple is currently doing.  Stuck in the “app grid” – the Apple interface is beginning to feel tired when it comes to being able to serve up information beyond the app name and maybe a small “count” notification.

You can see there are a number of active frames (click photo to enlarge) – the weather app, my WhatsApp showing the latest message, some headlines from the WSJ, a Twitter message.  You get the idea.  Little mini-widget-like versions of your apps.  I liked that a lot.

Another thing I really liked about the Passport was the capacitive keyboard.  As a keyboard itself, it is terrific.  This is Blackberry’s real strength and it shows in the Passport.  The keyboard is amazing.  I was able to type more accurately, if not exactly faster.  Tough to explain.  I adapted quickly, about 2-3 days of heavy use and I was leveraging the keyboard in such a way that I was having to make less corrections to my content.  Further, because the keyboard acts kind of like a like-trackpad, you can type, scroll, type, etc without taking your hands (thumbs) off the keyboard.  It was also terrific for scrolling while looking at a web page.  See the video for what I mean.

The other thing this super little keyboard allowed for was to quickly swipe up to select the predictive text.  I was literally flying when typing emails using this method.  As I typed a letter or two and the right word appeared, a simple subtle upward flick on the touch sensitive capacitive keyboard and the word went into my email.  In a single word – brilliant.

The Hub Excellent unified messaging.

I also really liked the way the Blackberry Hub worked.  I know that it was on some previous models, but it is worth mentioning here with regard to the Passport.  It was an intuitive way to get around the device and I especially liked that while I was working in one app I could easily peak at message notifications.  More importantly, it is a true integrated unified mailbox.  I liked that WhatsApp messages appeared along side emails and that I could see other notifications like calls, text messages and direct Twitter messages.  Of course you can have the Hub filter on just a single channel which was useful for when I wanted to see only work email for example.

There are numerous little subtle details that enhance the experience as well.  Things like when you are working in one app, say browsing the web, and a text message comes in and the notification peaks down from the top (as it does on other phones), you can quickly respond right from the notification at the top of the screen.  You never have to leave the application you are in.  That is terrific for workflow.  Other things like the seamless integration of WebEx in the screen where you create a new meeting.  I was able to schedule a meeting via the Calendar app, much like I am with other phones.  There was a little button that allows me to turn on WebEx and then when I press send to invite the participants to the meeting, a WebEx is setup in my account automatically and the people notified of the details.  This saved me time on more than one occasion while I used the phone.

The battery.  I can’t say enough about the fantastic battery life on this phone.  Apple? Google et al?  Are you listening?  I’ve become so use to not being able to get through a full day with most other phones I use that on the fourth day, when I was arriving home from the office and I glanced at my phone and saw the battery had 42% remaining I seriously did a double take.  I’d kept the brightness around 50% which is what I do with most of my phones.  It was a day of regular to heavy use; nothing out of the ordinary.  And yet, there is was, 42% battery remaining.  I was so happy to see that.  My ongoing usage through the month confirmed that the battery-life is terrific.  I went some days with the screen brightness turned up all the way and that did reduce my usage time, but still managed to easily get me through a regular work day.  I did notice two things (which I guess belong in the Don’t Like Section below): 1) the unit ran a bit hotter and used a bit more battery when I ran certain Android apps. 2) I wish the screen brightness would adjust on its own.  I had to manually tone I down in the evenings for example when I was in bed or manually increase brightness outside.  It would be great to see the device do this itself.

With the introduction of the Passport we also got Blackberry Blend.  It allowed a desktop client called Blend to run on my PC and my Mac and allow me to see and respond to messages as they came in.  So if I got a text while working on a Excel spreadsheet, I could quickly reply without taking my phone out of my pocket.  I liked the concept behind blend and see similarities to what Apple is doing.  What I would like to see improved or added so that it would be more useful to me, is to show me notifications for a broader set of apps.  For example, the brilliant Blackberry Hub shows me WhatsApp and Facebook messages, but sadly, Blend did not.  Allowing third party apps to also work through Blend would instantly increase it’s value to end users.

The Same Email Opened on A Note 3, Passport and Moto X

Same Email But Font Size On Passport Made Equal to Note 3 Email Font

Lastly (though I could go on) I wouldn’t be doing this review from my perspective justice if I didn’t talk a little about the square screen.  It seemed weird for all of about 5 minutes when I first picked up the device.  And then you get use to it.  There definitely some nice advantages to it – the “working wide” motto is accurate.  It is good in some scenarios.  Thought I did find though, it’s a bit over stated.  I did some comparatives with my Note 3 and initially it does seem that the Passport displays more info.  Of course when I adjusted the Passport font size in an email for comparison – the benefit wasn’t as pronounced.  Of course, as soon as you go to edit or type something on the Note 3 you obscure part of the screen.  So I think that the Passport with its square screen and three row keyboard is on to something.  It may not be as compelling as the Blackberry marketing would like us to believe but it was advantageous no doubt about it.

What I Didn’t Like

As I said at the onset, the Passport isn’t perfect, and there are a few areas that I didn’t like.  No many but a few that were important.

I said that they put the Amazon App store and that was good as it closed the “app gap”, but unfortunately, it didn’t close it enough for me.  That’s not to say that it wouldn’t work for everyone’s app needs, but for me there were a number of key apps missing.  I got personal favourites from the Android Amazon Store, like Zite for example, and it worked well.  But others like Starbucks app (I bought another 3rd party app which displayed my barcode for checkout…it wasn’t great but it worked), my app to interface with my car was missing in action, as was a good app to control the lights in my home.  There were a few key business apps as well missing that made for some frustration, namely OneNote which I use across all my devices and some business intelligence apps that I leverage regularly but weren’t available.  Since we are talking about apps, there were some very good apps (and app alternatives in the Blackberry World, but often they weren’t as polished (or what I was use to) or they seemed to be a version or two behind the Android or iOS app.  That get’s frustrating.  You can get by but there are compromises and workarounds needed.  I think quite honestly that if Blackberry wants to truly slam shut the “app gap” they should put the Google Play Store on the phone.  The Passport is in my opinion a premium device, offering a premium user experience, so it deserves a premium app store.

I had a family wedding in November and the Passport was my camera for the day (just as my Android or iPhone would normally be).  The camera on the Passport is ok.  I found it a bit slow compared to what I’m use to.  It has some great little software tricks that I love like the face detecting/time shift feature.  Overall the quality of the photos seemed less than what I’ve been use to.  It worked very well in a business setting, for example, in taking a shot of whiteboards to get notes from a meeting, but for personal use, it wasn’t as good.  I took about 100-150 photos over the course of the month using the phone and a few times I was wishing the photo from “an important moment” had come out better.

The voice assistance worked ok.  It wasn’t as strong as Google Now but it was useful for “doing things” like getting messages read, scheduling appoints, etc.  I am in the car often between client meetings and a strong virtual assistance is important.  It wasn’t bad, but not great.  And I wish I could have activated it with my voice rather than having to hold down the physical button.

Final Thoughts

All in all, I really do like the Passport.  It’s a shame this wasn’t the type of phone that Blackberry released 12-18 months ago.  Everyone that saw me using it asked me the same question: Will this save Blackberry?  In my opinion, one phone isn’t going to save a company.  It’s the strategy that’s important and I think that the Passport points to a new direction in strategy.  Further, the things that Blackberry is focusing on from a software perspective, like cross platform, business-class messaging in BBM, the enhanced BES server and its broader cross platform mobile device management, the partnership with Samsung to integrate Blackberry security into Samsung phones.  These things point to Blackberry recognizing that they need to bring their strengths to other platforms.  The Passport will be a good phone for a set group of users; business users.  I found it a delight to use and test over the course of a month and plan on continuing to use it a little while longer to continue to see how it performs and integrates into my every day activity.

If you have specific questions about my experience feel free to ask in the comments.  I’d be happy to share my thoughts on the use of this pleasantly unique smartphone.

Quick Summary

Pros:

• Incredible battery life
• Physical Keyboard is Great
• Capacitive Nature of Keyboard Useful
• Excellent display
• Workflow / Usability is tremendous
• Amazon app store closes the gap on needed apps
• Blackberry Blend is very useful on my PC and Mac

Cons:

• Blackberry Blend needs to allow other apps to pass info to the desktop
• Still missing a few key apps I required – needs the full Google Play
• Blackberry World apps are often not as polished or up to date as iOS and Android
• Camera Lacking
• Voice Assistant is ok, but not great

What struck me was where the author wrote:

The phrase “internet of things” has arisen to reflect the growing number of smart, connected products and highlight the new opportunities they can represent. Yet this phrase is not very helpful in understanding the phenomenon or its implications. The internet, whether involving people or things, is simply a mechanism for transmitting information. What makes smart, connected products fundamentally different is not the internet, but the changing nature of the “things.”

It gave me pause to reflect that it isn’t just the connectivity and added integrated functionality that is driving the change – it’s the data.  The data that comes from this machine-to-machine interaction, from sensors, from user locations, from conversations – it’s all big data and that can serve as an important input into the strategic planning process.  It comes though with its own set of catalysts that will force you to approach strategy a little different than when dealing with the traditional approach.  The reason is because, increasingly, we are seeing the creation of data products, and with the creation of data products, you have to consider the nature of what big data is.

Gartner defines big data as having characteristics of “the three V’s” : volume, velocity, and variety.  Recently a fourth V has been added, and that is veracity.  These four characteristics define what constitutes “big data” and they have a profound impact on how you approach the development of strategy.  The biggest factor is the speed at which things are occurring, and changing.  The classic approach to strategy is too slow.  Changes to your technology environment, or changes to your business understanding, happen far more quickly when dealing with data products involve big data.  Remember, business intelligence itself is a very exploratory process.  What you are doing could change based on what you find in exploring the data.  This nuance is amplified when dealing with big data, as teams of data scientists explore data, analyze data, seek out patterns and develop models, their understanding of “what’s true” or “where are we going with this” changes.

As a CIO or Director of IT, your ability to develop agile, flexible strategy is key.  In a sense, it forces us to adopt an exploratory and interactive approach to the development of good strategy.  As the Internet of Things continues to emerge, more and more data will be generated and become available to our businesses and it will be up to us to adapt so that we can strategically take advantage of the value that is waiting to be unlocked.

Exciting times!

I’ve had the pleasure over the last couple of years of working with several manufacturing companies that have undertaken various types of BI related initiatives ranging in scope and service.  Through this work, it’s given me the opportunity to assist manufacturing companies in creating dashboards to help visualize the data behind various Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and ultimately, gain some insight that they can then take action on (at the end of the day, we need to find meaning in the data so we can act on it, otherwise, there is no point in carrying out a BI exercise).  Most of these dashboards have been sales related, looking at revenue generated, quantities shipped, customer profitability, age of entered orders and other such metrics.  Of course these are all hugely important, and of course, there are many many more types of KPIs to be considered.  Perhaps in a future post I’ll write about various types of visualizations that are useful for manufacturers to consider.  But today, one thing struck me – what about operation dashboards?  Dashboards that aren’t necessarily being utilized by senior leadership, but rather, actively being used by frontline workers.

The first thing to consider in this scenario is how would the dashboards be accessed.  While executive level dashboards are being accessed from their computers and mobile devices, this scenario could benefit from leveraging digital TVs / screens that are in common areas.  Careful attention to the design of the dashboards will need to be considered since users would not be able to manipulate the data like a traditional dashboard.  Data would be aggregated and there would be no way to provide drilldown capabilities to granular data.  Dashboards would be designed to clearly communicate key data trends and/or exception-type reporting to alert users to action that might need to be taken.

Some examples that could be considered might be:

• Scrap Metrics:  provide a visualization so that people on the manufacturing floor can see in real time what the current defect rate for particular products might be.  This is especially useful because scrapped product has a material impact on the cost of manufactured goods and being able to deal with this as it happens rather than reflect on it well after the fact could be of great benefit to a manufacturing organization.  By visualizing the data in a BI dashboard that is being displayed on the manufacturing floor, workers can see the defect rate / trend and take action to correct it.
• Downtime Metrics: Another huge impact to manufacturing operations is downtime of equipment (and hence another cost to the organization). Whether it is planned downtime, unexpected equipment failure, or some other process related issue that halts equipment utilization, real time visualization of these KPI trends can be invaluable.  Operators who notice early warning signs can act on that information and proactively prevent lengthy down time periods.

The above are simply two examples that could then spark further ideas for leveraging dashboards in a non-traditional way.  With the increasing connectedness of manufacturing equipment, machine generated data will become ever more available to companies.  The key, as in any BI initiative, is to approach that data strategically, carry out some agile, short burst projects that you can learn from and develop dashboards that truly align to how your end-user works.

It’s been an incredibly busy couple of years, with most of my time being focused on client work and growing Insegni Centre Inc.  and working with outstanding people in the process.  Of course, I’ve been avidly sharing interesting items and short thoughts via Twitter, but over the last while, I’ve been itching to write, capturing thoughts in a variety of ways but not publishing (my bad).  In truth, we’ve been creating a lot of good published content, but it’s specifically for clients.  We’ve soft launched a paid service for clients as well, called Insegni Insights where we publish thought leadership and research pieces, which has been exciting.

With all that going on, however, I’ve missed the more casual opportunity to write, and so I’ve come back to my personal tech blog to express some ideas, formulate some thoughts, and strike up some interesting conversations like we’ve done in the past.

Stay tuned for some fun posts over the next few days and weeks to come.  And, as always, thanks for reading.

Unfortunately, for me, the list in the “Fell Short” column was a lot longer than the “Exceeded Expectations” column.

Pros

Let’s start of with the positives, of which there are some.  The release of OS 2.0 introduced onboard email, contacts and calendar.  This is a very welcomed addition to the Playbook.  The implementation is well done.  For the email, I really liked the ability to have a unified inbox that not only had your email accounts, but also messages from social accounts like Twitter and LinkedIn.  I received a fair bit of correspondance through direct messages in Twitter and having them show up in my “inbox” alongside email was excellent.  The calendar is fairly well done as well, I particularly liked when glancing at the month view how the numbers for the dates grew larger with the number of meetings on that day.  It allowed for a quick glance when trying to pick a future date and easily finding a day where you had a lot of availability.

The browsing experience was a good one for me.  Sites loaded quickly, pages rendered as they should.  I liked the tabbing approach they use for having more than one browser window – the use of the smart bezel (swipe down from top) to show the hidden menu items was intuitive and worked well.  I did have a couple of occurrences where the browser crashed.  For example, I wanted to use read.amazon.com so I could use the Kindle cloud-based reader since there is no Kindle app for Playbook.  Unfortunately, the browser kept throwing me errors and eventually would crash/quite.  Outside of these few issues, the browser was a real pleasure to use for browsing.

This version of the OS also introduced the ability to create folders which worked well in order to organize applications into groups that meshed with my workflow.  The mechanism for creating folders was similar to the way it’s done on an iPad and is a very welcomed addition to the Playbook OS.

Lastly, you can indeed run Android apps with the new OS.  I was excited by this, because the lack of apps doesn’t allow you to do much with a tablet.  For some reason, RIM has buried Android apps in the Blackberry App World – you can’t tell which is which just by looking through the apps.  I am not sure why they haven’t created an area that highlights the apps (more on this below under Cons).  I managed to find some apps and they run fairly well. They launch a kind of shell (see pic to the right) that acts as a container for Android apps.  I used the WordPress app (which is an Android app) and it worked well. You should note, however, that just because there might be an app in the Android market, it doesn’t mean you can necessarily run it on the Playbook.  Those Android apps need to be recompiled and placed in the Blackberry App World store.  There is a way of sideloading apps (a technical term for hacking an app onto the device) but most people aren’t going to do that – they want apps they can simply download from an app store-like environment.

Cons

To begin summarizing the drawbacks, you need only look at what framed the themes in the Pros section of this post.  It’s 2012.  If we’re talking about “there is now onboard email” or “you can now create folders” for any tablet today, then we are immediately drawn to part of the issue.  While done well, those features described above are 1st generation tablet functions.  Every other tablet has had these things from the start years ago.  The iPad and Android tablets are several generations ahead of the Playbook and the Windows 8 Consumer Preview I downloaded puts increased distance between what Playbook is doing and what modern tablets are doing.  The biggest drawback I kept thinking about while using the Playbook was that there was nothing new.

The lack of apps was undoubtedly still the biggest stumbling block for me.  I began keeping a list each time I needed an app that I normally use, but I abandoned that list because it was growing long.  Multiple times each day I’d need an app that I normally use on my iPad only to find that I couldn’t find it in the Blackberry App World.  In other instances, when I did find the apps, they were poorly done and not at all as refined as on the iPad.  Evernote is an example of this.  I use this app constantly throughout the day and I was pleased when I saw it was available.  Unfortunately, the Playbook version of Evernote is but a shadow of the iPad and Android applications.  In instances where I couldn’t find an app I needed, I had to forgo what I planning to do (very frustrating), revert to using the app on my iPhone or in some cases use the web version via the Playbook browser (which then necessitated the need for WiFi).  I listed above that the ability to run Android apps was a Pro (and it is!) but there was a real lack of apps from the Android ecosystem that were available.  I looked for no less than 15-20 specific apps I have on my Galaxy Tab but couldn’t find them in the Blackberry App World.

I was also surprised that there is a lack of messaging apps – like BBM! – which again hobbles the device.  I’ve become use to now using messaging tools to chat with family, friends and colleagues and the lack of them on the Playbook had me pulling my iPhone out of my holster more often rather than just flipping from what I was doing on the Playbook to an app, responding and then returning to my previous app.  How RIM could omit such an important and often used tablet tool is puzzling.

Lack of applications aside, another thing that I was hoping would be resolved, but was a persistant problem, was the touchscreen.  It just isn’t as responsive as to what I’ve gotten use to.  In many cases when wanting to type in a field for example, I’d need to tap that area two, three (four, five) times before the cursor appeared there and the pop-up keyboard showed up on screen.  In some cases, having to repeatedly tap something onscreen would “buffer” those taps and suddenly I was in some area I didn’t want to be because of mis-tapping something that appeared on screen after I tapped.  This was frustrating.  Any good tablet must have a screen that is responsive – delays in what you touch and what you see totally kill the user experience and seriously impact productivity.

Lastly, the 7″ screen was an issue for me.  I don’t want to consider this as purely a Con, which is why I listed the size also as a Pro.  The smaller size is convenient for taking the Playbook around, but that convenience evaporated for me when I needed to use the device  for certain tasks.  Screen size is a personal preference and in many ways, it’s benefit or drawback is based on the task you are trying to complete, but for me, more times than not it was a hinderance.  I prefer the larger screens on tablet (same was true for the Android Galaxy tab…I simply found the 10″ to be more usable than the 7″ when I tested those).

All in all, releasing OS 2 for the Playbook has made the device more usable and more valuable.  It is a shame that it took so long for RIM to get the update out – if it had arrived a year ago (or had been the initial OS upon launch) it would have made the Playbook a stronger contender in the tablet market.  You can see glimmers of potential when you use the Playbook in it’s current form – here’s hoping that RIM approaches the next version strategically, meaning a) shorter release cycle b) increased and new functionality and c) aims at developing an ecosystem that delivers value to end-users.

I am glad to have given the Playbook a real world test where it became my day-to-day tablet.  I’m even happier, however, to now have my iPad back out of the drawer – not having it as my tablet for just under two weeks made me realize just how versatile a device it is for me.

You can watch the video below or head over to the Insegni Centre video channel as well.

Presentation on Social Intelligence from Insegni Centre on Vimeo.

OneNote for the iPad lets you create a series of Notebooks, collections of information.  You can integrate all kinds of content into these notebooks, making them versatile for many different types of daily usage.  Within each notebook, you can create various sections to organize whatever content you are assembling.  It has some decent formatting tools so you can make notes look good while working on the iPad.  I also like the ability to email notes from the app on the iPad to another user.  The email recipient receives an embedded version of the formatted note.  It’s not a picture, which is good, because it means that the recipient can edit the content when they receive it (and they don’t need OneNote).

The app is free, and with that you can have up to 500 notes.  If you want to go beyond that, you can purchase the upgrade for $14.99

If your organization is progressive and using Office365 then you can further find advantage to using OneNote for iPad.  The cloud version of OneNote in Office365 gives you easy, secure access from anywhere.  If your organization doesn’t use Office365, you can still take advantage of a cloud-based version of OneNote through Microsoft Windows Live.

Let’s hope that Microsoft continues to bring iPad versions of Office to the iOS platform.  It would be a win for them and for consumers.  Here’s hoping the current batch of rumours is true! In the meantime, grab OneNote and experience this great application for yourself.

Social Intelligence you ask?  Think Social Media Data + Business Intelligence!

I look forward to sharing a more detailed post tomorrow with snippets from an upcoming presentation I am giving.

In the meantime, to read the press release, please click here or read below.

—————————————–

TORONTO, Feb. 15, 2012 /CNW/ – Project X Labs Ltd and Insegni Centre Inc. today announced a new solution that brings together Social Media Data and Business Intelligence (BI).  The solution, called LikeInsight^TM, aligns Social Media strategy, social data and a company’s existing data assets to increase the insights available to organizations.

As with all BI visualization solutions, richness of data and relevance is crucial.  Social data provides a level of relevance from some of the most active sources of data that enrich the sentiment analysis. Through this innovative solution, LikeInsight^TM allows organizations to segment their Facebook fans based on their interests and motivations, developing a never before available picture of their customers’ online sentiment.

Leveraging a jointly integrated process for business intelligence strategy and delivery, Project X Labs Ltd. and Insegni Centre Inc. have a solution to enable social insight for organizations in a way that has not been previously possible.

“Everyone is talking about Big Data. Working together we have built a solid framework to readily take advantage of some of the rich data that is available for our clients,” said Stephen Hayward, president of Project X Labs. “By partnering with Insegni Centre we’re able to take their proven strategic approach and Social understanding, combine it with our Rapid Results business intelligence visualization tools and create real results for current and new clients.”

“Social media usage by companies has been predominately a one-way marketing channel,” said Michael Ianni-Palarchio, Founder of Insegni Centre.  “The strategy of leveraging social media data has been an increasing business priority, and partnering with Project X Ltd and Project X Labs, a leader in business intelligence development and deployment, allows us to move clients from Social Media data strategy to Social Media Insight reality.”

For more information on LikeInsight^TM and how your organization can tap into the insight of your customers’ social media data, request a demonstration and an initial consultation.

About Project X Labs
Project X Labs combines innovative product development with rapid results thinking to bring global customers business intelligence and data visualization software products. Focused on breaking down the barriers around enterprise scale software and delivering solutions that show results in weeks, not months, Project X Labs is redefining access to business intelligence for every size company.   Project X Labs is a wholly owned subsidiary ofProject X Ltd. They can be found at www.pxlabs.ca.

About Insegni Centre Inc.
Insegni Centre is a strategy advisory firm that specializes in assisting organizations develop strategic positions across a wide variety of business technologies and solutions.  With a focus on understanding business objectives and ensuring that IT initiatives are strategically aligned to enable those goals, Insegni Centre utilizes an approach that focuses on rapid innovation to obtain strategic differentiation.  In the area of Business Intelligence (BI), Insegni Centre works to provide the strategic framework that allows companies to identify BI opportunities within their organization, develop their BI Vision & Objectives and define their BI Requirements.  To find out more visit us atwww.insegnicentre.com .

For further information:

Stephen Hayward – shayward@pxltd.ca  – 416.422.8900 ext 201
Michael Ianni-Palarchio – mip@insegnicentre.com – 416-900-1055 ext 100

I have often spoken, written and practice that for IT projects to be a success, they need to be rooted in strategy.  That being said, it’s imperative that change management is a part of that strategy.  Be sure to include a discussion on change management at the onset of your strategic planning exercise and ensure that it is embedded a process throughout implementation.

People often think that change management is something to be done at the end of a project, if it’s done at all.  This approach of tacking change management on at the end of an initiative is sure to cause bumps in your project deployment.  The technology is often the easy part of any implementation, with the people part and gaining acceptance being much more challenging.  While this is true, we often see the exact opposite in technology projects, where most of the attention is given to the technology, and the end-users are a secondary thought. On your next IT project, work to bring more balance to that effort and ensure that adequate attention and planning are given to managing the change that is being introduced to your organization.  After the initiative has been completed, be sure to go back and measure how well you did not only in the technical aspects of the project, but also in the areas of change.  If you do this, you will see the successes of your IT projects increase and that will make everyone in your organization happy.