Forrester’s TJ Keitt tackles this question with his report, Does Your IT Department Support The Needs Of The Mobile Workforce? The data suggests that IT still has a way to go to meet worker expectations. They asked 4,985 information workers as part of the research. They found that on one hand, that the efforts that IT departments are helping to outfit employees with laptops are paying off: 51 percent of US information workers report using one during a workday.

On the other hand, both those who primarily use laptops and those who don’t say that IT falls short in delivering computing and mobile device choices that best fit where and how they work. As part of this response while the majority of employees purchase the smartphone they use for work and foot the entire service bill, few are happy with this proposition. They would like for IT to providing a subsidy so they can acquire a device of their choice. I agree with this.

They also found that the workforce is becoming more mobile as only 45% of the US information workforce works solely from a corporate office. The provision of laptops has been significantly the past few years to accommodate these workers. Forrester divides the 55% who work outside the office into four groups: hypermobile professionals (29%) who have an office but work from anywhere, part-time telecommuter (11%), connected consultants (10%) and remote-based technicians (6%).

Currently these groups get different levels of support.  With Hypermobile professionals 69% use a smartphone at work and 36% have to pay for the phone and the service themselves.  With part-time telecommuter 29% use a smartphone at work and 49% have to pay for the phone and the service themselves.  With connected consultants 43% use a smartphone at work and 42% have to pay for the phone and the service themselves.  With remote-based technicians 37% use a smartphone at work and 59% have to pay for the phone and the service themselves.

While we are talking about smart phones rather than all mobile devices, it is still interesting to see how low these numbers are. It also seems that the higher paid employees are less likely to have to pay for their smart phone but then they are more likely to set or influence policies. I would guess that over 90% of these workers own some type of mobile phone.

Workers who have to pay for their smartphones themselves feel under supported and I can see why. I think that enterprise IT needs to read the papers, listen to TV, and understand the mobile revolution is only growing. There is much more in the report, including data on laptops and collaborative technologies.

Forrester writes that, “functionality to enable publishing to the Web — whether internally or externally — has become commoditized. Yet now, the WCM market is growing based on customer experience management (CXM) needs, including multichannel delivery, content targeting, analytics, and integration with other CXM technologies.” The group the vendors into four classifications: traditional ECM vendors (e.g., IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and OpenText); CXM stack players (e.g., IBM, Adobe, and Autonomy); Independents (e.g., Percussion and Clickability); and Open source (e.g., Alfresco, Drupal).

The major capabilities within the emerging CXM offerings include the following:

Process-based solutions enable business users to create experiences. These solutions include tools that business users (as opposed to IT users) use to create and manage structured and unstructured content for customer experiences. Ease of use is a feature here.

Delivery solutions bring interactive experiences to customers. Vendors often tightly couple both WCM and eCommerce solutions with native delivery tiers, enabling businesses to offer CXM through a single package. Other options include experience delivery with rules-based content targeting through search, personalization, and recommendations engines.

Customer intelligence solutions also enable businesses to gauge the success of experiences. Testing can enable marketers to test variations of experiences on demographic subsets before rolling them out to a broader audience. Web analytics tools can give insight into how consumers use content. Social analytics can provide insight into how consumers engage with companies.

Because most companies already have significant investments in WCM tools, it makes more sense to integrate the missing pieces that rip and replace everything. The top candidates to add to existing WCM tools are analytics and CRM capabilities. This makes sense given the rise of CXM as a value proposition for the tools. The top new capabilities for the next 12 months include mobile capabilities, targeting content based on used behavior, analytics, and distribution of content to social sites.

This is vibrant market that will only grow in capabilities. The report assesses a number of vendors on how they meet market needs looking at their current offering, strategy, and market presence.

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Monday Morning Press Q&A

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Mobile, Bring Your Own Device

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: IBM as a Social Business

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Customer Conversation – Russell’s

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session Tuesday

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Opening Session Wednesday

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Social Business for SMBs

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Innovation Lab Tour

Lotusphere 2012 Notes: Music Industry Social Evolution

Why Apple Needs to be More Like IBM

I was impressed by the extensive set of projects displayed. I have seen the innovation lab on several occasions on site and thought that was the strongest set so far. Here are some of the highlights. These are less than half of what I saw but these are the ones I had the most personal interest in.  I am going to do a longer follow up interview on the Social Intelligence dashboard and will have more on it here in a few weeks.

Much of the focus seems to be on analytics. Since I began my career as a research psychologist these apps really appeal to me. Here are a few.

SaND for Activity Stream Management and Analytics

First, I looked at SaND for Activity Stream Management and Analytics. I think that Activity Streams are one of the biggest opportunities in social business. I spoke earlier with Suzanne Livingston about the enhanced activity stream in Connections 4.0 so I was especially interested in how IBM could use analytics with it.

The IBM site described SaND as “an aggregation platform for information discovery and analysis. It leverages the complex relationships between content and people that surface through social applications. Its integrated index supports the combination of content-based analysis and people-based analysis over a rich data foundation… Through its aggregation model, SaND supports queries over any entity in the system, be it a textual term, a person, or a tag; it retrieves a ranked list of entities related to that entity. More specifically, it can find the social network of a person based on a flexible set of relationships. SaND supports a generic model that can easily be extended with new data sources, entity types, and relationships.”

In this case they were looking at a Connections activity stream. You can see the volume around discussion topics and there is some sentiment analysis. It helps you decide what you might want to explore further within an activity stream.It will learn how to be more helpful based on your actions. You can do searches and add filters to these searches. They hope to eventually make it part of the Connections product which I think is a great idea.

Community Insights

This is a tool to help community leaders better understand the people, content, and actions within their community. Then they can take action to enhance the community. It is still a work in progress but they plan to make it available to all internal IBM communities. Here is a sample screen shot.

It shows you lets you know who is on the community, what they do and who can you reach for expertise. It provides access to the characteristics of the knowledge base and shows what content is valued by the community. You can follow participation and better understand what actions you need to take to make the community better.

The IBM Gamification Engine

This one is not analytics but it is hot topic so I had to check it out. Gameification uses game thinking and mechanics to further engagement help solve problems. The IBM Gamification Engine is a set of widgets such as leader boards, badges and points that provide a gamified user experience. Here is a sample screen where an award message pops up.

The idea is to drive further involvement through fun competition. I guess it puts a positive spin on the concept of “gaming the system.”

Analytics Driven Social Q&A

This tool provides an enhanced social Q&A experience through intelligent question analysis and routing technologies than integrate with social apps. It works with Connections profiles to provide re-asking capabilities based on search results for similar questions and routes questions to the right experts base don past actions. It can also refine questions to improve the answer quality and synthesize questions and answers. It can route questions to both individuals and communities.  Like community insights, the plan is to eventually integrate it w into Connections.

REACH: Relationship Analytics for Connecting Humans

No, this is not a dating service. It does help people find someone in their social directory that they may have forgotten about or barely know. What happens next is up to them. It collects data about social interactions, extracts the contacts and uses multiple facets to characterize each contact. It then presents a ranked list of contacts based on what you are looking for.

There were many more. As I mentioned I am going to do a deeper dive into the Social Intelligence dashboard and will be reporting on it here in a few weeks.

Carol Sormilic, a VP in the CIO office at IBM spoke first. Carol is part of Business Transformation and It within IBM.  She is responsible for HR related tools and the tools for employees to do their jobs, such as collaboration tools. She lived in Southberry CT and worked there but now has been working in China for the past year.  The Connecticut location allowed for a lot of face-to-face meetings with colleagues. She said they saw good adoption of tools and retention in established markets but not in their growth markets.

So last year they picked her to go to China for couple of years to see if the new social tools can be used in emerging markets. IBM has over 500,000 employees in over 120 countries and 57% work remotely outside of a standard IBM office. They have the challenges that Carol set herself up to face as she looked at how they best use social tools.

She got to China on December 31, 2010 after a long flight. They got up to see the Chinese New Year and then shared again the New Year with her family on the east coast of the US a number of hours later. She and her family faced the challenges of not being able to get to standard sites such as Facebook and YouTube.  This especially affected her son. There was also very slow bandwidth and spent lots of time waiting things to download. So she has helped IBM try to overcome these.

She could not do video conferencing that was her favorite method. Also there is the time zone difference so there was a more limited set of time to be able to connect on a live basis. She looked to participate asynchronously.  Especially it was important to avoid the dinner time, as that was important in China.

Even the asynchronous communication presented problems as 12 hour delays often puts updates out of the current flow for receivers. So she timed things differently and also let people know the time at her location.  She also has blog posts on her personal site and has a wiki, as well. She has not sent her team an email in over a year, working through the site. It gives full transparency to what she is doing.

With the new social business strategy these are the results:

87% increase skills

84% access experts quicker

84% share knowledge with others

77% reuse assets

74% increase productivity

65% increase personal reputation

65% increase sense of belonging

59% increase sales

42% increases customer satisfaction

Carol mentioned how the new CEO posted a three-minute video blog to communication her initial vision to employees and within a few minutes over 1800 people had commented on it. This would never happen in email. She said instead of thinking in terms of ROI, think in terms of anew way to get work done.

Carol offered 5 keys to making social work.

1. Change behavior – you must nurture your community
2. Create a robust infrastructure – so things flow in a timely manner
3. Integrate the platform – this is a focus at IBM and a theme at this event
4. Integrate the business units – for a shared platform
5. Evaluate privacy issues – they differ from each countries

Mark Heid then talked about how they are using social analytics to listen to what their employees are doing. He showed a social intelligence dashboard for HR. This type of analytics is being used a lot on the s consumer Web but IBM is one of the first to do this extensively inside the enterprise.

The dashboard includes sentiment analysis. They pull in internal and external data from such sources as Facebook, Twittter, and LinkedIn. It is built of Cognos and can look inside, on the partner community, IBM Developer works, and on the Web. It uses algorithms to decide what is being said from a sentiment perspective. They fell that if they look at sentiment of employees who left to see who might be thinking about leaving and proactively try to keep the ones they want. Banks use the same technology to try to keep customers. They are very concerned about privacy.

They have a Chief Privacy Officer at IBM. They will be no individual outreach. IT just looks at aggregated data to see employee sentiment. They also take corrective actions in the aggregate, and do not undertake individual responses, as that would invade privacy.

They also look at health and wellness issues to help control the rising costs. Mark showed some sample dashboard screens that were pie charts and time lines.  In one example 44% of people felt positive and 14% felt negative. He also showed evolving topics to discover what they do not know. He also showed a table mapping sentiment with topics. There was a positive correlation between positive sentiment and opportunity. You can drill down to see examples of the actual conversation that was put into each bucket.

IBM has a Social Intelligence Competency Center that runs these tools. I am impressed with this look at the voice of the employee.  Here is a complete listing of my notes from last year’s Lotusphere 2011.

Chris talked about the rise of mobile in general and with business intelligence in particular. One analyst puts the current use of mobile for business intelligence at 8% of total use. Gartner now claims that by 2014 a third of business intelligence will be accessed through mobile devices. If they are including tablets in with mobile I can see this happening.  Chris said that this increased use can take two forms. It can be a new channel for current users and an opportunity to reach new users with new apps. He hopes that the latter occurs, as it is a great opportunity.

Chris gave me an example. A data center operation manager, who supports several centers and is constantly on the go, needs to be able to monitor what is happening at these centers without having to log into a desktop or even lap top computer. They need a mobile tablet to get alerts, check on performance levels and respond to calls for support. They need a mobile operations dashboard. There are many people who do have operational responsibilities who fall into this category of need.

GE Aviation is one of JackBe’s  clients using  Presto for data center monitoring. GE Aviation has been working with Presto over the past year and half and has been very successful. They attribute some of this success to being able to develop Apps at a much more rapid rate than with previous technology solutions. For example, “A request came in from senior management asking for an additional App to be developed after the majority of the solution was implemented, ‘the project sponsor was able to send a last minute requirement to their developer and the was App built and deployed in less than 24 hours’ Normally, this would have taken them several weeks due to all the politics and policies GE has in place for their BI environment.

Chris predicts that operational dashboards, in general, will be one of the killer business apps for tablet. Other examples include agencies within the US Dept of Defense that use Presto for situational awareness, Smartronix uses it for budget performance management within its government clients, and Qualcomm looks at real-time program management KPIs. This all makes sense to me. Here is a sample dashboard on an iPad.

Chris went on to say that business intelligence is under going a renaissance and taking new forms. I would agree and it is the new forms that are driving the resurgence. First there is big data as the volume of content expands. Part of this growth is driven by user-generated content through social media. There is also an increase in the quality of analytics and focus on predictive measures.

Looking at social media there is some structure present through metadata. For example, Twitter has hash tags and location. You can look at volumes and tagging to see where spikes occur around topics. This and other sources now allow for real-time intelligence so business users can get information while it is still relevant to their decisions.

So support this new wave of business intelligence software needs new capabilities. Chris outlined three components of these requirements. First there are live connections, second, self-service assembly, and third pervasive apps. You need to get information immediately from multiple sources. Users are increasingly expecting self-service in all that they do and finally, you need to be able to publish and use apps anywhere. This latter requirement is where mobile comes in.

Chris and John showed me some components of Presto that address these issues. One of the features that I especially liked is the ability to preview what an app looks like in desktop mode, smart phone portrait and landscape views and tablet portrait and landscape views. You can see a close up of screen that shows these options below.

Here is sample screen optimized for as smart phone in the landscape view.

Creating apps is done through visual mapping and making selections from drop downs. Below is you can see an app being developed. I really like their ease of development and ease of use.

Mobile users are starting out expecting self–service. Most of them go out and get their own devices and do not wait for their firm to supply them. These same people are not going to want to wait for IT to set up their business intelligence apps. I think that Jackbe is making some wise moves to not only go into mobile in a significant way, but also to enable self-service for users as part of this offering.

Roger said that they did a number of things to optimize SpringCM for the iPad. These features include a simplified screen that still provides the essential components. You can see a sample iPad screen below. They extended the simplification to provide an intuitive interface that does not require any significant training, similar to many consumer Web apps. There is some self-learning material to further support the self-service approach. They also made extensive use of the touch or gesture approach to navigation. The app is built in HTML 5 to take full advantage of mobile features. Finally, the self-service approach is brought to procurement. Once your company as set up things with SpringCM, individuals simply go to the SpringCM Web site and begin using the tool.

Next we covered the new free SpringCM solution to provide enhanced content management capabilities to Salesforce.com. I like their more to integrate with the most prevalent cloud based CRM system. I have written about how the newer systems of engagement need to integrate with the older systems of record for real progress to be made. This is a great example of these complimentary capabilities.

Spring CM began with some research into the needs of Salesforce users. Top issues cited by survey respondents include: 91% – having easier ways to add, access and edit documents within Sales Cloud Accounts, Opportunities and Campaigns; 83% – making documents easier to find and secure with folders; 81% – being able to search across all documents across Accounts and Opportunities using metadata. These request make sense when you look at how Salesforce works by itself.

Roger explained that there are now two main ways to load a document into Saleforce. One is to associate it directly to an account or opportunity. However, then it is not available for access through search across the system.  You can also put a document into the central repository and then it can be accessed through search. However, there are then multiple steps to associate it with a specific account or opportunity. There is also the ability to tag a document in Salsforce but this capability does not support a controlled vocabulary so people can put in any tag they want. This results in a more of folksnomy approach rather than a taxonomy and it makes systematic retrieval more difficult. Here is a sample screen showing Saleforce integration.

The free version of Spring CM for Salesforce takes care of these limitations. When you upload a document it can be automatically associated with an account or opportunity and be searchable at the same time. A controlled vocabulary is offered through drop down lists of possible tags. This allows Salesforce to go beyond CRM capabilities to also become a useful knowledge repository, but one that is part of the workflow and not a separate system. This is a crucial difference because it puts knowledge in the form of documents right in the middle of where work happens.

The content management capabilities in SpringCM can operate in the background. For example, you can click on a Word document in Salesforce that is being managed by SpringCM and it opens directly in Word. Then when you are done it is closed back into Salesforce with any related additional metadata added behind the scenes by SpringCM.

Since both Saleforce and SpringCM are cloud apps this integrated capability can be acquired through the Web in a few minutes, bypassing expensive system integration work. If you want more capabilities such as automated workflow with approvals for contracts, then you can upgrade to the commercial version of SpringCM.  SpringCM can also integrate with other systems of record such as SharePoint in the same way so that SpringCM works behind the scenes to bring greater capabilities to these systems.

Roger also mentioned that the latest integration with Salesforce involves Salesforce Chatter, their micro-blogging tool. Chatter allows for contextual activity streams within Salesforce, as well as standalone capabilities. You can now use the metadata that SpringCM creates to have more focused activity streams within Chatter related to documents. When a document is added or updated, an alert automatically goes out to the right people who are following the related account. Below is a sample screen showing Chatter integration.

These are two strong moves. The first move makes use of the new mobile devices to bring content to where you want it. The second move brings enhanced cloud-based content management capabilities to more traditional systems of record, especially Salesforce with the free version and also SharePoint with their commercial version.

The report notes that organizations are continuing to “grapple with an explosion of unstructured content.”1 There is also an expansion in the types of content: documents, scanned images, web content, rich media, email, corporate records, blogs, wikis, e-forms, audio, and video. They note that each content type brings its own editing and workflow requirements, and usually their own regulatory and compliance issues, making managing content increasingly complex and expensive. At the same time, information workers still want simple and easy-to-use content management tools.

This complexity means that for many organizations that cannot rely on a single platform even though that is the ideal. These organizations have are moving to a more content-centric approach with different solutions for specific types of content. Forrester now divides ECM products into four types: foundational, business, transactional, and persuasive.

The foundational ECM provides basic content management functionality including library services, basic workflow, search, and records management. The business ECM supports day-to-day workplace experience with compound document management, enterprise rights management, and team collaboration. Transactional ECM supports back-office processes with imaging, document output management, and business process management form the backbone of the transactional content technologies. Finally persuasive ECM supports content addressing external audience behavior through marketing, lead generation, and customer self-service. They note that examples of persuasive ECM include web content management, digital asset management, and document output for customer communications management. This all makes sense to me.

With this diverging field a number of role players are emerging that address specific niches. Add to this mix are open source, industry specific, and cloud solutions and the filed is becoming more complex rather than narrowing. Then there is whole issue of making content sharing and content workflow more social. The report goes into great detail on each of the vendors.

Going back to 2004, I have heard many stories about what became to be known as enterprise 2.0. For example, see what Al Essa did at MIT – An Enterprise 2.0 Poster Child in the IT Department). It was one of my awakenings to the power of social media in the enterprise. Granted he was an early adopter as the CIO at the Sloan School at MIT but the issues he faced and addressed through a blog was similar to that of many IT departments.

However, are these examples not spreading? Forrester found that currently, 28% of workers use social software at least monthly in their sample.  There workers have higher incomes, are more than likely to be optimistic about the role of technology in business. The results also indicate that 23% of enterprise social media users hold advanced degrees, and 49% are in management. They also found that their responsibilities “lengthen the workday, as social software users work, on average, 2.41 hours longer than other employees during the workweek. They also spend 1.95 more hours, on average, working outside business hours than the rest of the workforce.”

At the same time these enterprise social media users consider themselves more productive than non-users. They also “view enterprise 2.0 technologies as the most efficient means of doing certain things.” At the same time, just 22% of social software users tell us the technologies are vital to their jobs. Forrester concludes, “that despite the uptick in interest in and deployment of enterprise 2.0 tools, they remain on the periphery of an information worker’s workflow.” I have written about this before – see Putting Social Media to Work.. These results show that enterprise social media needs to ne further integrated into the workflow to be relevant and effective. It is not about Facebook for the enterprise but making business processes more social and collaborative.

Now Spotfire 4.0 provides a greater ability to put structured data in context, offers increased social collaboration capabilities, and has enhanced data visualization features.  Lou mentioned that most of their users do not spend hours hunched over the analytics. Rather they are busy business people who want to be able to quickly get an overview of what is happening and then drill down to explore the anomalies. They have designed their dashboard accordingly. The interface designs and visualizations allow users to quickly see all relevant information in a single screen. Below is a sample dashboard.

The new visualization capabilities improve the user experience by allowing analysts to tailor interactive dashboards that replace dozens of static dashboards.  These smarter flexible dashboards allow users to determine what they feel is important and drill down as needed without leaving the page. The dashboards can be easily created without programming or IT support. Lou showed me how you can change the focus of data visualizations to look through different filters such as time or location. You can also change the data formats used to get a different perspective.  These drill down capabilities are available out-of-the-box and can be selected from drop down menus or right clicking on a visualization.

I have written elsewhere about the need to put tools within the context of work. This is what TIBCO has done with the integration of Spotfire 4.0 with SharePoint and tibbr, TIBCO’s own collaboration platform.  Below you can see Spotfire operating within SharePoint. Part of their new interface design was to make it look more compatible with SharePoint.

With Spotfire 4.0 users can also:

• Embed Web pages, such as wikis, within a Spotfire analysis to provide access to online information that relates to the analysis.
• Much more easily link to Spotfire analyses from other websites or blogs.

• Embed live, threaded discussions from social media, such as tibbr, within a Spotfire analysis, to provide contextual discussions relevant to the decision.

Below is a sample screen showing a tibbr activity stream connected to a Spotfire dashboard.

Spotfire 4.0 provides new social capabilities to allow collaboration around data analytics such as the tibbr connection shown above. Lou said they are enabling the tool to facilitate global discussions with both synchronous and asynchronous capabilities. With Spotfire 4.0 users can:

• Actively “follow” an analysis subject or author and spontaneously create a new discussion “workspace” around an insight or decision and invite others to join.

• Embed a discussion thread into an analysis, so users see the discussion that prompted the analysis directly within Spotfire. They can also save an analysis to a discussion thread where others can see and discuss it.  Discussion participants can simply click to open the analysis within a Web browser.

• Access the discussion around an analysis and be alerted to changes through each member’s preferred channel of choice including Web, text, or mobile (including iPhone, iPad, Android™ platform, and BlackBerry® devices).

• Initiate video conferencing or desktop sharing via a single click to initiate a live “Spotfire Meeting.”  Automatically record and repost discussions and presentations with accompanying analysis and resulting decisions.

I really like what they are doing by bringing data analytics directly to the business decision makers in an intuitive manner that allows for collaboration around the business decisions that are impacted by what the data provides. Taking out the middleman transforms the tool into a meaningful discovery vehicle. People are better than computers about deciding where to look next. Content experts are also better than tool experts about this same decision. Here is a tool that fits the needs of its audience.