Cloud Powered Business Blog

Reimagine Hiring – Aqui-Hiring, Lift-Outs and Purple Squirrels

2013-05-16T10:23:00.000-07:00

by Michael George (@ReimagineHR)

I’ll bet many of you reading this have a vision of companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple and Twitter – just to name a few – as talent magnets. Organizations, unlike yours, that don’t have to fight very hard to attract their industry’s top talent. With brands so synonymous with innovation and “cool,” the best and brightest naturally flock there, right? Well, maybe to some degree, but even those organization are in a war for talent so intense they are doing some interesting things in hiring that you are probably not (but may want to consider).

One of the things many of these companies to do is called acqui-hiring. This shouldn’t be confused with aqua-hiring, which is the practice of letting the new hires sink or swim. Acqui-hiring involves established organizations acquiring startups, not for their products, but to bring on entire teams of talented workers all at once. Most companies aren’t open about the practice, but Facebook and Yahoo! are less secretive about their acqui-hiring strategies.

Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer doesn’t try to hide the fact that she believes in using an aqcui-hiring strategy. In fact, her first acquisition after becoming CEO was of a company called Stamped, where the entire nine-person team (5 of which were ex-Google employees) were snatched up and incorporated into Yahoo’s New York mobile product team.

And Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been quoted as saying, “Facebook has not once bought a company for the company itself. We buy companies to get excellent people.”

Why do these companies move away from traditional hiring strategies when looking to bring on innovators? The out-of-the-box thinkers these big companies need are often only found in small packs known as startups. It isn’t likely given the choice between the freedom of a startup and the constraints of a large company that innovators would chose the latter. And the irony is in some of these large organizations up to 90% of those who apply will be rejected because they are found not to be a “corporate fit.”

And while it is true that this kind of hiring strategy originated with large, financially advantaged tech firms looking to skirt the restrictions of “non-poach” agreements, with today’s cloud technologies, accessing global talent is within the reach of nearly every organization. In fact, many startups are themselves virtual teams who have thrown off the brick-and-mortar shackles in favor of working in the cloud, eliminating the need to invest in things like relocating employees or technology infrastructure to tap into a global community of skills.

This kind of hiring strategy is not for faint of heart, but if you’ve developed a solid strategic talent acquisition strategy, your organization could see a number of advantages, including:

You get an intact, functioning team with a proven track record of successfully working together, reducing the need to invest in developing team collaboration and cooperation. Your job is simply to keep the team humming.
You get innovators and outside-the-box thinkers who not only understand today’s new ideas, but also bring their abilities to continually generate new ones.
You get the CEO who is most likely behind many of the startup’s entrepreneurial thinking and innovations.

The Role for Talent Acquisition Leaders

Because the acqui-hire strategy involves buying companies, business leaders must be sold on the ROI of such an approach. If you are unable to demonstrate that you have a solid talent acquisition strategy based on the long-term talent supply and demand of the business, you’re unlikely to sway executive leadership on investing in talent this way.

Often painting a picture of lost opportunity due to your firm’s inability to attract talent critical to executing the corporate business plan may help demonstrate how acqui-hiring is more effective and less expensive than the traditional approach of simply hiring individuals one by one. The catch is, you must understand your company’s business plan and the talent needed to execute it.

Slightly less aggressive than acqui-hiring is the practice of “lift outs.” Rather than acquiring the whole organization, a lift-out strategy seeks to recruit an intact team. This strategy has the potential to deliver all of the benefits of an acqui-hire without the expense and intensity of an acquisition.

Won’t poaching get me in hot water?

Dr. John Sullivan, author and internationally known HR thought-leader who specializes in providing bold and high business impact strategic solutions had this to say about lift-outs on ere.net.

“If your initial thought is that this is large-scale “stealing,” you are simply out of touch. In recruiting, it is not illegal or even unethical to offer individuals new and more exciting employment opportunities. In fact, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission recently ruled that companies like Google and Apple that put together secret agreements restricting the free movement of employees between companies were unfairly restricting worker freedom. Since employees are not owned, you are free to make them offers and they are free to accept or reject them. It is also true that in a global marketplace, many countries (for example India) have no restrictions on the practice.”

Once again the idea that access to global talent means rethinking many of the traditional talent acquisition and talent management practices.

Purple Squirrels

On the other end of the spectrum from acqui-hiring or lift-outs is the idea of going after “Purple Squirrels.” These are the game-changers, the outside-the-box thinkers, the 24x7 innovators that come up with the next big ideas and have the potential to change the course of the organization.

There are a number of reasons why companies target Purple Squirrels including:

Financial impact – Apple has calculated their performance at 25 times and Google 300 times the performance level of an average hire.

Innovation impact – Today, increasing innovation is having a greater impact on the business than upping worker productivity in many organizations.

Technology superiority is becoming essential in almost every industry – No longer just an advantage for tech companies, technology superiority is proving to deliver competitive advantages in nearly every industry, and many Purple Squirrels are technologists.

Impact on employment brand – Purple Squirrels can dramatically improve your employer brand image and hiring clout, adding to your ability to attract other top talent.

Drivers of culture — Just a few Purple Squirrels can shift your culture to where things like serial innovation becomes commonplace.

How to Bag a Purple Squirrel

Using traditional recruiting tactics won’t net you a Purple Squirrels because they are different from your average employee. Not only are they “super passive,” meaning they will most likely never apply for an open position, you have almost no chance of contacting them through traditional methods, and they are probably sitting on a dozen “anytime you’re ready to jump” offers right now.

This is what makes the Purple Squirrel so hard to attract. The good news is they are easy to find (even though they make up less than 1% of the workforce). You’ve seen them receiving awards, leading seminars, giving the keynote at industry conferences, leading online forums and social community discussions, and being quoted in trade magazines.

You aren’t likely to lure them with money or perks because they aren’t motivated by such trappings; they are only motivated by the work they do – the more challenging, the more attractive. If you’re offering mundane or average work, what makes you think you’ll attract exceptional workers?

What Does the Squirrel Want?

As a recruiter, your job is to offer the most compelling, life changing, one-of-a-kind dream job specifically tailored to the Squirrel’s career interest. You’ll need to be uber-flexible, possibly allowing them to work when and where they like, often on just the projects they like.

Tips to Bag a Purple Squirrel:

Get your CEO involved - The CEOs of Apple, Facebook, Starbucks, and Google all get directly involved in recruiting.

Challenge their work on their social media - Not public humiliation, but thoughtful counterpoints and arguments to their positions.

Monitor their social sites and blow their mind - Follow your Squirrel on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn to uncover something they are passionate about (favorite sports team, wine, local restaurant, rock climbing) and send them tickets to root for their favorite team, or the best vintage of their favorite cabernet out of the blue.

Get them involved in what you’re working on right now - Use social media to ask for their advice, input, and criticism of what your company is working on.

Prove your hiring process is different - Tools like HireVue, InterviewStream, and Hyier offer online video interviewing, and newcomer Good.co claims to have decoded the science behind happy workplaces and can show your Squirrel how their unique strenghts fit with your culture.

Acqui-hiring, lift-outs, and stalking Purple Squirrels may seem like recruiting strategies that are out of reach for your organization. However, as cloud, mobile and social technologies continue to level the playing field by reducing costs and providing access to a global talent pool, those winning the war for talent aren’t doing so by outspending their competitors, they are outwitting them.

Taking the Next Step Toward Strategic Talent Acquisition

Appirio has partnered with the Human Capital Institute (hci.org) and Cornerstone OnDemand to deliver a free webcast called Reimagine Talent Acquisition: 6 Essential Building Blocks to Make the Move from Order Taking to Strategic Sourcing.

We invite you to join Mike Brennan, Appirio’s Cornerstone OnDemand Deployment Practice Lead and Jason Corsello, Vice President of Corporate Development & Strategy at Cornerstone OnDemand, as they share how leading organizations are assessing and continually improving their talent sourcing models

The live webcast will be presented on Tuesday, Jun 18 2013 12:00pm EDT, with replays available through HCI. Register here. Hope to see you on the webcast.

Cloud Metrics Launches on AppExchange

2013-05-15T09:00:00.000-07:00

by Naoki Tsukamoto (@nikes63)

Source: www.ebbinteractive.com

We are excited to announce that after being run hundreds of times, Appirio Cloud Metrics is now available on Salesforce.com’s AppExchange! Since its debut at Dreamforce 2012, Appirio’s Cloud Metrics has already made a great impact on companies ranging from lean start-ups to global multi-nationals with multiple orgs. Cloud Metrics is a FREE one time snapshot report of key metrics from your Salesforce org that helps you easily identify areas such as Configuration, Code, Administration, and User Adoption that may need optimization.

Cloud Metrics has become an indispensable tool for Salesforce Administrators and Architects who want a better level of awareness about what is in their Salesforce environment, especially those that have:

recently inherited a new org
managed the same org for years
become responsible for multiple orgs across multiple countries

How does this help an Administrator manage his or her Salesforce org? As described in the Cloud Metrics for Everyone blog, Cloud Metrics has provided insights to solve suspected problems such as:

Need for stricter governance and change control processes - Benchmarks helped convince reluctant business stakeholders that their change requests were far above the norm. This led to discussions on how to keep limited resources focused on the highest priorities.
Excessive testing and support with each new release - High levels of custom code with low validation and workflow rules, triggered a discussion about opportunities to reduce custom code with configuration options.
High maintenance effort required for every profile related change - Report indicated a large number of profiles but no permission sets which led to consultation of how to better leverage permission sets.

You may identify with some of these challenges or may have a different set of challenges. You may even share some of these challenges, but can justify the decision for heavy custom code to meet unique business needs or accelerate user adoption. The point of Cloud Metrics is not that there is a right and wrong set of metrics for your org, but to promote the need to measure in order to improve your org. It’s like when I get on the scale every morning, I have to keep telling myself a quote from management consultant Peter Drucker, “what’s measured, improves.” Or more topically, as Phil Wainwright captured in this blog, it’s about tallying the technical debt in your Salesforce org before you lose the agility you love so much. The act of measuring will start a conversation which will lead to insight and opportunities to improve your org.

But don’t take our word for it - run Cloud Metrics today and let us know how it helps you manage your Salesforce org more effectively by leaving comments on this blog post or posting a review on AppExchange.

4 Steps to Accurate Sales Forecasts

2013-05-14T09:51:00.000-07:00

By Tom Saracene

Salesforce has become one of the fastest growing enterprise technology companies based largely on the strength of their core CRM solution. Companies are replacing their legacy CRM systems in droves for many reasons including improving sales effectiveness and better servicing customers. But, one of the biggest reasons for replacing legacy systems with Salesforce is to drive better CRM adoption and therefore get better visibility into the pipeline. Accurately forecasting not just pipeline and bookings, but revenue and profit, is increasingly important in today’s volatile business environment.

Systems like Salesforce have a significant advantage over legacy systems when it comes to forecasting. Salesforce is easy-to-use, has great mobile capabilities, and even provides social collaboration with Chatter. This means that reps have many more reasons to use Salesforce than traditional CRM systems. We find that Salesforce adoption is orders of magnitude higher than with traditional CRM systems. But, sales rep adoption is only part of the puzzle when it comes to accurate forecasting.

Step 1: Define the Terms

The foundation for any successful CRM deployment and a critical prerequisite for accurate forecasts is a well-defined and well-understood sales process. This starts with defining the elements of the forecast including terms like:

Pipeline: Opportunities by stage and total bookings or revenue based on probability
Activity: New Opportunities, Biggest Wins, Stalled Opportunities, Average Stage Duration, etc.
Forecast: “Where will we (or I) finish this month / quarter / year”
Schedule: Line Item detail describing the flight date and all incremental installments

We’re always amazed by the variety of ways that customers define these common terms. Often times, even from department to department, the definitions will vary. So, start by getting a consistent understanding of these terms.

Step 2: Clarify and Communicate Your Sales Stages

The next foundational step is defining the sales stages and articulating what it takes to get from one stage to the next. For example, at Appirio, our stages are prospecting, qualification, proposal, contracts, closing and won/lost. Each stage has a probability (adjustable by sales) and a clearly defined set of exit criteria and system artifacts. Defining your sales stages to reflect your process and clearly communicating your sales process to each sales rep is critical to getting to an accurate forecast. Unless all reps and sales management are speaking the same language, you might as well not invest in a shiny new CRM system. This means not only defining the stages but training each rep during on-boarding and even building contextual help in CRM to reinforce the stages. For example, we’ve helped companies build checklists or validation into Salesforce to ensure that exit criteria are met before an opportunity can be advanced to the next stage. As with all aspects of CRM, it’s always a balance between what you want to enforce through the system vs through incentives and other means.

Step 3: Make Sure CRM is THE Only Source for the Forecast

Once the foundational elements are in place, it’s all about driving and modeling the right behaviors. For example, It’s critical to run forecast calls and sales meetings using CRM. Resorting to spreadsheets and other tools for these meetings will just weaken CRM adoption so it’s critical to make the CRM system the source of truth for forecasts. In many cases, this may mean adding manual adjustments for probabilities or opportunity amounts because forecasting is just as much an art as it is a science. With Chatter, Salesforce provides an easy way to have discussions about these adjustments right in the context of the opportunity. For example, rather than send a rep an email about a probability that’s outside the regular range, a sales manager or executive can ask for the rationale right on the opportunity. This reinforces the system as the source for opportunity information and maintains the context for other executives who may look at the opportunity.

Step 4: Go Beyond Pipeline and Bookings

With well-defined terms, a clear sales process and consistent usage of the system, you should be in position to deliver a solid pipeline and bookings forecast. But pipeline and bookings are only part of the picture. The next stage is tying these forecasts into revenue and demand planning. The more integrated CRM is to the revenue system, the more complete the picture is that you can paint. Many companies can get this picture via a Business Intelligence (BI) solution, however, if you can get this level of visibility into the hands of the reps and their immediate managers, they are then able to collaborate on opportunities that affect the forecast, and do so with a concrete understanding of how their actions will affect the outcome. This is when forecasting becomes truly collaborative.

Ultimately, the goal is to get to forecasting process that enables you to do the following:

Accurately forecast bookings, revenue and profit for not just this quarter but next quarter
Provide leaderboards that show pipeline, best case and closed-won status
Trackback actuals to orders and bookings by integrating order management and invoicing with CRM
Use sales forecasts to drive demand planning and forecasting

This is what we call collaborative forecasting. If you’re interested in learning how your organization can get started, join us for our free upcoming Webinar, “Make Accurate Forecasting a Reality in Your Business” on Thursday, May 23 at 10:00am PST. Hope to see you there!

Tom Saracene is a CRM Strategy Practice Lead at Appirio and has a 17 year track record of completing successful CRM & ERP implementations on a variety of client/server and hosted platforms across a wide variety of business processes. Most significantly dedicated to Cloud Computing and helping business move their processes and infrastructure into the Cloud with the help of platforms such as salesforce.com, Workday, Google Apps and others.

Jeff Epstein on Board at Appirio

2013-05-09T06:00:00.001-07:00

By Chris Barbin

Today, Appirio announced that Jeff Epstein has joined our Board of Directors as Chair of our Audit Committee. Jeff’s financial leadership, industry contacts, and deep expertise in technology will be a tremendous asset to Appirio as we continue to grow.

Jeff is a natural fit for our Board of Directors - his personality is complementary to our already energetic group - and he boasts one of the most dynamic backgrounds of the group. From priceline.com, Kaiser Permanente and Shutterstock, Jeff has lent his financial expertise and leadership to the boards of some of the world’s most loved brands.

I could continue talk about why Jeff is joining Appirio and how he expects to complement Appirio’s leadership team, but think it is more interesting for him to tell you.

Having worked with both legacy and cloud technology providers, why did you decide to make a bet on a company that is all in with cloud?

Bessemer Venture Partners, where I am an operating partner, has invested very successfully in cloud computing companies for more than a decade. Bessemer’s 10 Laws of Cloud Computing is a core resource for the industry. Most organizations use cloud computing to lower costs and increase agility, just as, for example, they rent office space instead of owning office buildings.

Appirio has been growing by at least 50 percent year-over-year. What is most exciting to you about joining Appirio during this stage of growth?

I saw the Internet advertising market grow from less than $2 billion in 1998, when I was CFO of DoubleClick, to more than $37 billion in 2012. It’s exciting to be part of a company leading the way to the future, as Appirio is leading the way in cloud computing.

CloudSpokes is changing the way that Appirio approaches development and delivery. Based on what you know about our crowdsourcing community, how do you think its success will impact the wider services industry?

World-class engineers live all over the world. Appirio’s powerful CloudSpokes community gives Appirio’s customers access to this talent to build the best products, in the fastest time, and at the lowest cost. And the competitive barriers to entry are significant.

As someone that has sat on a lot of highly visible boards, what background or lessons learned are you most excited to bring to Appirio’s board?

The ideas behind the best technology companies like Appirio are simple: recruit & train the most talented engineers and teams, build the best technology, and provide the best service to customers. The execution is hard. Appirio has proven it’s among the best cloud service providers in the world. I look forward to working with Appirio as we provide even better service, for more customers, across more technology platforms -- and as we treat each customer as if it is the most important customer in the world.

Reimagine Employee Referrals

2013-05-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

Source: recruiter.com

By Michael George (@ReimagineHR)

In our last “Reimagine HR” post we discussed ways to reimagine your talent sourcing effort so that recruiters not only understand your organization’s current talent supply and future demand, but are also actively using cloud, mobile and social technologies in ways to uncover hidden sources of top talent and/or networks of job candidate referrers.

This week, we are going to dig a little deeper into some emerging science around the value of sourcing talent through employee referrals. That’s right, science.

It has long been accepted that hiring a new worker who is recommended by a current employee ups the chances of a good hire over a non-referred candidate. It isn’t difficult to understand why this is the case. Conventional wisdom tells us that current employees understand the company, culture and most likely the nature of the job, and often have direct work experience with the person they are recommending. This allows them to see a “fit” based on a number of factors that go beyond what’s on the job requisition or candidate resume – those intangibles that are hard to quantify but make someone successful in your company.

Equally important is the psychology behind the referral, as both the current employee and new hire have a stake in being right about that fit (even when it turns out to be a mismatch), and will often try to make things workout, where a non-referred candidate is more likely to leave (or be let go) on first sign of trouble.

And, in fact it is true that employee referral programs pay off in a number of key metrics, including reduced time-to-fill, reduced cost-to-fill, improved applicant-to-hire ratio, increased length of employment (retention), and overall profitability (revenue per employee) over any other source.

So naturally, as mentioned in the last post, you’ll want to expand your employee referral program to tap into your current employees’ social networks, right?

Well, here’s where the science may have you rethinking the traditional approach. It turns out the referral payoff comes almost entirely from the company’s top performers. In other words, a recommendation from an average performer doesn’t lead to a more profitable hire and getting a referral from a below average worker can actually be worse than hiring with no referral at all!

In their new research paper, “The Value of Hiring Through Referrals,” authors Stephen Burks, Bo Cowgill, Mitchell Hoffman and Michael Housman suggest companies may want to trade in some of that “conventional wisdom” for some hard-core Big Data analysis.

Steve Lohr wrote a great column in the Sunday New York Times, entitled Big Data, Trying to Build Better Workers, and a great follow up blog post on the topic which he called Scientific Management Redux: The Difference Is in the Data, both worth a read.

In his blog post Mr. Lohr quotes one of the paper’s authors, Stephen Burks, an economist at the University of Minnesota as saying, “The previous work on worker referrals has been mostly anecdotal and impressionistic. It hasn’t been quantified in this way before, the way you can with these rich data sets.”

These “rich data sets” refer to what can be gleaned from an emerging discipline some are calling “workforce science.” Workforce science can be best described as bringing big analysis to Big Data in the field of HR, creating discipline around hiring, promoting, and career planning, which has traditionally relied on managers’ gut feelings about their employees.

In his Sunday Times article, Lohr quotes Peter Cappelli, director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania as saying, “This is absolutely the way forward, most companies have been flying completely blind.”

Analyzing workforce data is nothing new, nor is looking for correlations in worker behavior or measuring key performance indicators to build a profile of what a top performer looks like in a given environment. What has changed is the amount of data available to analyze both inside and outside of the organization. Every online interaction including email, chat, status updates – virtually every mouse click – leaves a digital trail.

In the past, organizations were limited to the number of interactions they could analyze by their own employee population, resulting in more guesswork than science. However, with today’s cloud- and mobile-based HCM technologies, hundreds of thousands of employee interactions can be mined for patterns and behaviors in detail not previously imagined in an aggregated way that doesn’t compromise employee privacy. And as any statistician will tell you – sample size matters.

Companies like Evolv and Knack are beginning to tap into the power of workforce science.

Evolv helps organizations tap into, and use, real time performance and attrition data measured across millions of workers to find the skills, attributes and dispositions that make hourly employees succeed. And Palo Alto based Knack uses a combination of online and mobile games, and massive amounts of data to help users discover their unique combination of strengths, talents and personality traits, which in turn is helping some of the world’s leading companies unlock their own “knack” for success and innovation.

This brings us back to improving your referral program. If your top performers are your best source for referral candidates, you may want to rethink (and expand) exactly what kind of information goes into building comprehensive profiles of your organization's top performers. With new Big Data tools, and a workforce science approach, you may just discover things like an employees’ number of friends at work, frequency of online social interactions, or the types of blogs read provide far more predictability of top performance and success than one’s skills, competencies or work-related experience.

Workforce science is in its early stages, but Big Data is here today. You are creating some by accessing this blog post right now. Clearly it says you are a thought leader! Begin thinking of ways to use all of the interactive data being generated by your workforce, even if you aren’t collecting and storing it today. As Lori Asburry previously blogged about, Big Data Analytics for Workday is closer than you think.

At Appirio, we help organizations reimagine what’s possible in their business with emerging technology, then help them make it a reality. If you’re reimagining ways to use HR Big Data, let us know by giving us some feedback in the comment section below. If we’ve learned one thing it’s that our customers have big imaginations, and no idea is too crazy - share yours!

Customers Speak Out About “Going Google”

2013-04-29T06:00:00.000-07:00

By David Salyers (@davesalyers)

What does real estate, modern furniture, movies and CRM software have in common? They’re all in a better place because of Google Enterprise.

Last week Appirio sponsored and helped lead the first Going Google Roadshow of the season, an invite-only event where enterprises can learn more about Google’s vision for the enterprise, including SaaS, big data analytics, cloud storage, Chrome devices and mobility. The event, held at Google’s striking San Francisco office, was in high demand, drawing more than 400 registrants from some of the biggest companies in the Bay Area.

There were a number of great speakers, but as expected, some of the most interesting insights came from the users themselves during a customer panel I was lucky enough to moderate entitled “The Visionaries”. Representing a wide range of industries and serving collectively almost 15,000 employees, they were:

Chris Barry, SVP of Transformation and Planning at Salesforce.com
Mike Kail, VP of IT Operations at NetFlix
Bethany Kemp, VP of Information Systems at Design Within Reach
Jeff McConathy, VP of Engineering, Consumer Services at Trulia

Customer Panel at Going Google Roadshow - San Francisco

While every customer on this panel moved to Google Enterprise for slightly different reasons, they all have since become passionate advocates of the Google Platform. For some, it’s about the small things. For Bethany at Design Within Reach, they love using Google Hangouts to communicate and meet across different sites and tap into Google Forms (surveys) to quickly gather information from their designers in the field. For Mike at NetFlix, he was happy to finally rid himself of the need to do “Enterprise License Calculus” to true up their Microsoft licenses. This not only freed his team from a two-day process every quarter but also improved their budgeting and forecasting ability. Mike also talked about the benefits of easily syncing calendars on the employees devices which are 90% Mac and 10% iOS.

But it’s about the big items too. For Chris at Salesforce.com, who is rolling out Google Apps to 10,000+ employees globally, it was the “trust factor” and being 100% confident that their partner shared their same paranoia to protect customer data as they did. For Jeff at Trulia, it was the ability to create a richer experience for house hunters who want to better understand the neighborhoods where they’re looking for homes. The openness, community and tools around Google Maps lets Trulia pull everything from crime data, school information and Yelp reviews into their offering.

That’s the magic of Google and why they are making such inroads into the enterprise. Google, like many other cloud vendors, gets that it’s the combination of both big and small things that makes people want to use the products and, more importantly, keep using them. Yes, Google’s platform can help reduce data center costs and improve business agility, but it’s sometimes those little features and side benefits add up in a big way to make employees more productive and improve a customer’s experience.

David Salyers plays a key role in helping customers maximize the impact of Google technologies in their business. He is based in Chicago and has more than 20 years of experience in the IT industry.

Who Wins In The New C-Suite?: A Debate with Ray Wang and Narinder Singh

2013-04-25T13:01:00.000-07:00

It’s no secret that we, at Appirio, have a lot of opinions about cloud computing and the future of technology in business. To engage supporters and skeptics alike we blog, tweet, write papers and do any number of things but sometimes there is no substitute for an in-person face off.

In an effort to take our opinions out of silent comment boxes and tweets, we’re setting-up a series of live debates with opinionated people who hold different, educated views and aren’t afraid to share them. We know, it’s a little old school, but oh so necessary in a world of “like” buttons and faceless avatars.

To kick off our live debate series, we asked Ray Wang, principal analyst and CEO at Constellation Research, and our own Chief Strategy Officer, Narinder Singh, to debate the evolving role of the CMO and where the CIO fits in. Digital media and data analytics are playing an increasingly important role in marketing strategies and there’s been much discussion about CMO budgets overtaking those of IT.

If you are in San Francisco this Monday, April 29, join us at Jillian’s at 5:30 p.m. PT. to watch Ray and Narinder face off on this subject. eWEEK editor, Chris Preimesberger, has been selected to moderate the debate and declare a winner but he just may be swayed by audience applause.

Leading up to this debate, we are looking for your questions and thoughts on the topic. Feel free to post your ideas on Twitter using the hashtag #clouddebate.

To stay up-to-date on news about the debate beforehand, be sure to follow Ray (@rwang0), Narinder (@singhns), Chris (@editingwhiz) and Appirio (@appirio). Appirio will also be live tweeting and taking questions from the event for those of you that are unable to make it in-person.

Complimentary appetizers and drinks will be served. Check out details below.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

WHO

Ray Wang, Constellation Research
Narinder Singh, Appirio
Chris Preimesberger, eWEEK (moderator)

WHERE

Jillian's
175 Fourth Street (Fourth and Howard)
San Francisco, CA

WHEN

Monday, 4/29 from 5 – 6:30 p.m. PT

Cloud Thought Leader Web Series - Eric Dirst, CIO, DeVry Inc.

2013-04-23T06:00:00.000-07:00

By Glenn Weinstein, CIO, Appirio (@GlennWeinstein)

We kicked off our 2013 Cloud Thought Leader web series this week with a conversation between me and Eric Dirst, SVP and CIO at DeVry Inc.

These webinars are intended to share real-life stories from executives who, as Appirio customers, have overseen real business transformation using public cloud technologies. It’s one thing to talk in terms of general principles - and I do think the intellectual argument for widely adopting cloud platforms is solid - but it’s even more impactful to hear it straight from the source.

We’ll ask each of the executives we interview in this series to tell us how it went - from their initial decision to adopt a cloud-first IT procurement philosophy, to winning over IT and business teams and overcoming objections, to delivering the first project, to living with and maintaining public cloud-based systems in production for the long haul.

Eric got us off to a great start. Since joining DeVry as CIO in 2008, he’s led a number of high-profile cloud-based initiatives, most notably rebuilding DeVry’s applications systems to dramatically improve the speed and quality of response to prospective students. Cloud technologies now run deep at DeVry, integrating both cloud and on-premise data stores, and pushing platforms like Salesforce.com to their limits.

During our question-and-answer period, Eric shared a number of very interesting observations, and I’d encourage you to watch our recording to hear it from him directly. Among my key takeaways:

Focus on people, not just technology. Project leadership was the most important factor in their successful initial deployment.
Small, frequent releases actually enhance user adoption, because users can consume change more easily when it comes in small doses.
Challenging business counterparts to develop end-to-end services, and own all aspects of those services, has changed how IT is perceived internally for the better, by bringing together developers, solution architects, and others to set and meet goals as a team.
Technically minded CIOs (like me and Eric!) tend to underestimate the long-term maintenance costs of customization. Challenge your teams when they suggest non-standard approaches.
Build reports and dashboards early in the development process, and iterate on them just as much as you’d iterate on functional user stories.

In the course of our conversation, Eric mentioned a few topics that are covered in columns he’s written for CIO Talk Radio:

Eric helped our listeners visualize how they can transform the role of IT in their organizations. Join us for future webinars with like-minded CIOs!

A Mobile App as an Employee Benefit?

2013-04-18T10:08:00.000-07:00

by Michael George (@ReimagineHR)

One of the tried and true ways companies entice new employees is with a generous benefit package. Often things like employee stock options, 401(k) matching, or time off for philanthropy can sway a job candidate to accept a position over a competing suitor only offering the basics like medical and dental insurance. Some organizations promote more creative perks like “free massage Thursdays,” or “bagel bite Wednesdays” to curry favor with potential recruits.

As a tool to attract talent, employee benefit packages play a key role. However, in the employee engagement and retention game - not so much. Employee separation data consistently shows workers quit their jobs over things like poor communication with their manager, limited career opportunities, feeling disrespected, or lack of leadership well ahead of things like pay and benefits.

The irony is that one of the main parts of the job offer that tips the candidate to accept is rarely a factor in retaining that same employee. This may be due in part to employee benefits not being all that visible on a day-to-day basis, but also important to understand is that these perks are just not that valuable in forming the employee experience. In short, things like open communication, visibility into company strategy and goals, access to career opportunities and having the right tools to collaborate and get work done have a far greater impact on the employee experience than do benefits, or even the size of one’s paycheck.

When I was considering coming aboard with Appirio, I naturally checked out the benefits package (it is very generous, Appirio is a company that really takes care of its employees). Along with things like flexible work location and paid time off to do volunteer work, one of the items listed under employee perks was “biweekly all hands team meeting.” This isn’t my first job and like most of you, I can tell you I’ve never once thought of the company meeting as a “perk.” But here, it is. The meetings religiously start and stop on time, are crisp, well run and give every one of Appirio’s nearly 700 global employees the kind of key information and open dialog needed to understand where we are, where we are going, and what we need to do to get there. In one hour, every two weeks, the entire organization comes together, creating a pretty cool employee experience (at least for me anyway) that has real value.

But what if your organization isn’t able to do that, then what? Do you just hope the workforce is getting the kind of regular feedback, open dialog, and access to company resources and each other that is needed to ensure a rich and rewarding employee experience? Perhaps you rely on your managers to generate that experience.

Today, employees come to the job with new expectations around things like accessing organizational data, collaborating with colleagues, or managing their career. These expectations are brought from their personal lives where they use mobile and social applications to carefully craft their experience by controlling every aspect of when and how they do business and interact socially with everyone from their bank to their best friend.

One example of a company that really understands this is Virgin America, an airline with about 2,700 employees serving more than 20 domestic locations. In a recent article that appeared in The Financial Times, Charles Batchelor quotes Ben Eye, manager of teammate engagement and communication for Virgin America as saying, “We had had an intranet platform for several years but we knew we had to revamp the way we communicated. We had to deal with the 90 per cent of teammates (pilots, flight attendants, etc.) who are remote, so we designed something to foster involvement.”

What they designed was a mobile app that addressed the problems of their previous intranet platform which contained a lot of company information, but was nearly impossible to maintain, lacked two-way communication, and definitely did not reflect Sir Richard Branson’s style.

Working with Appirio, Virgin America customized their Salesforce “Chatter” platform to merge their social media experience with their business processes. The result was something they call VXConnect. On VXConnect, Virgin America employees are able to do things like enroll in the company’s pension plan, apply for leave and more. More importantly, they are able to interact in near real-time with Virgin’s HR team.

Because HR is able to monitor questions as they come in from employees in real time they are able to respond quickly. In his Financial Times article, Charles Batchelor goes on to quote Ben Eye as saying, “This is broader than just benefits: it stimulates the level of engagement. We have a very open environment and we see that as our differentiator in the airline industry.”

As Matt Weinberger points out in his article, “Virgin America used Salesforce Chatter to revamp its ancient intranet, and employees love it,” appearing on CiteWorld.com:

“Above all, this new employee portal makes what's in essence a huge corporation that mainly consists of many small branch offices across the country feel like a cohesive whole in a way it never had before.

The new, Chatter-powered portal has already supplanted (the old CMS) as the touch point of choice. Even the older segment of Virgin America's workforce was "shocked" at how easy they found VXConnect to use.

And while mobility may have been the driver for this project, Cisneroz (Amy Cisneroz, Program Manager at Virgin America) says that the social features have been a huge hit with unanticipated benefits. What would be long e-mail threads are supplanted by a short @reply conversation to the right person.”

For Virgin America employees who rarely spend time at a corporate office, they now have a mobile app that delivers a personalized experience, keeps them connected to the company and each other in ways they couldn’t before, and is a constant reminder of just how much the company cares about them. Because when it comes to employee engagement, out of sight can’t mean out of mind.

And if you don’t think offering your employees a mobile app can be a real “benefit” just ask 1-800-FLOWERS.com’s Maureen Paradine her thoughts. Paradine is the company’s SVP of HR who was recently quoted by Michael Hickins in the Wall Street Journal as saying, “People are thinking about the technology philosophy of the company before they join it.” Ms. Paradine goes on to say that whereas in the past, job applicants were asking about issues like flexible work arrangements or benefits for spouses, today they are asking whether the company allows employees to bring their own devices to the office, and whether it offers stipends to pay for data plans.

For Appirio, working with 1-800-FLOWERS.com was not only a great opportunity for us to help a client operationalize an exciting new way of collaborating, but to work closely with their team to ensure the excitement of the initial launch carried over to organization-wide adoption. By developing training for Google+ Profiles, Circles, Posting and Hangouts and establishing key the roles of Community Managers and Google Guides (internal champions, active on social media), Appirio was able to help ensure Ms. Paradine’s strategy of creating a more connected workforce became a reality.

Using Google+, 1-800-FLOWERS.com’s 23 Community Managers were able to train 110 Google Guides who in turn were able to ready over 1,400 employees for go-live, all in about 30 days. Appirio helped the team drive early adoption and engagement by setting up contests with rewards for the most +1s, best team name, or content with them most comments. When the switch was made from the legacy intranet, Google Guides had already become well versed in using Google+ to build circles, create, and curate content, meaning the new collaboration platform was filled with interesting content and ready-made connections on day one.

1-800-FLOWERS.com even goes so far as to use a prospective job candidate’s ability to use Google+ as a pre-employment screening tool. The company encourages employees to use Hangouts (video chat) to collaborate and Paradine figures if an applicant can’t figure out how to utilize the technology for an interview, it’s probably a good indicator they won’t fit into the company’s culture.

And what is that culture? It is the culture of connection. “Meatball Mondays” and ping-pong tournaments in the warehouse can be great additions to your culture. This kind of organic, fun, cool stuff is what makes work less like work and more like family and team, and it is important. But it is not your culture, and it isn’t a substitute for an employee experience built on an enduring foundation of open communication, trust and connection.

Can a mobile app really do all that? Considering that today, access to global talent is a reality for every sized business, and as the workforce becomes more dispersed over time and distance, the importance of staying connected with employees becomes paramount, we think so.

If you’re an HR leader, now is the time to reimagine ways social, mobile and cloud technologies can deliver a world-class employee experience for your people. You can begin by listening to the recorded webinar, Reimagine Your Employee Portal and watching the video below.

Appirio Customer Highlight Corner - Virgin America

If your organization has created a great mobile app or built an awesome employee portal that delivers a “connected” experience for your people, share your experience in the comment section below.

The Next Phase of Enterprise Mobility: From Productivity to Customer Engagement

2013-04-12T09:31:00.002-07:00

By Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

This week, Gartner released three stunning pieces of data that demonstrate that enterprise IT is going through another dramatic shift (via @alexwilliams). First, Gartner reported that PC shipments were down 11% since the same quarter in 2012. We knew we were moving into the post-PC era, but the speed with which the shift is happening is surprising. Second, Gartner reported that in 2012, 39% of all CRM was delivered through SaaS and that Salesforce was the leading CRM vendor overall. Third, they projected that mobile CRM apps are set to explode from about 200 apps today to 1200 apps by 2014.

Put all that together and there are three clear implications:

Customer information increasingly lives in the cloud, mostly within Salesforce
Most business’ internal and external customers will access customer information on mobile devices
People much prefer task-specific mobile apps rather than all-purpose desktop-style apps

Salesforce as the Customer Interaction Hub
Salesforce has made mobility a key part of their CRM application over the past few years. In fact, one could even argue that Salesforce’s enthusiastic embrace of Chatter was in fact driven by the need for a feed-centric and mobile-friendly way of interacting with their applications. The release of the new Chatter mobile apps and Marc Benioff’s recent announcement that Chatter will become the primary interface for Salesforce bear out this line of thinking.

While the Salesforce and Chatter mobile apps address the needs of many sales and customer service users, there’s a much larger opportunity for Salesforce to become the hub for all customer interactions (internal and external). But realizing this vision means making it much easier to create both internal and customer-facing mobile apps that can consume information stored in Salesforce. No coincidence then that this week Salesforce announced a new version of their Mobile SDK and Mobile Packs that support popular JavaScript development frameworks to address this growing need (via @dhenschen).

Academy of Art University: Using Mobility to Reimagine the Student Experience
Institutions are already taking advantage of some of these capabilities to change the way they engage with customers. For instance, Appirio has been working with the Academy of Art University in San Francisco to use the student information they have in Salesforce/Force.com to reimagine the student experience with mobility. The University uses Salesforce to store student information including classes, activities and location. Appirio helped AAU create a mobile app that brings personalized information to each student that helps them do everything they need to do on a daily basis - from finding out what their class schedule is for the day, to where their next class is, and how to get there using AAU’s extensive bus network. The app seamlessly brings together class and schedule information from Salesforce and a real-time GPS system that tracks bus locations.

AAU's Campus Application

Speaking to CITEWorld this week, Academy of Art CIO Erik Viens said that since the app launched in September, it has had 9,100 unique visitors, 120,000 page views, and 92 percent of traffic from returning users. Impressive results considering that this represents the vast majority of the University’s 12,000 San Francisco-based students!

The Next Phase of Mobility: Mobile Customer Engagement
When companies first started with enterprise mobility, mobile apps were scaled-down versions of desktop enterprise applications. Now, mobile SaaS apps are much more specialized and contextual. For example, the Workday mobile app focuses on key elements that are relevant in a mobile context such as approvals, time off and org charts. But most enterprise mobile apps are still siloed within one application area or another. The Academy of Art University application is a new type of app that uses a cloud platform, Salesforce, to aggregate information from multiple sources and then creates a unified and contextually relevant mobile experience for the customer. The tools are now in place for every organization to create a similarly differentiated customer experience. The question is how.

Getting Started
There are 5 steps to creating a differentiated and unified mobile customer experience:

Start by identifying a few customer segments that would benefit the most from mobility.
Do some research (either direct with customers or with your field teams) to clarify and articulate customer pain points that could be addressed with a mobile solution.
Inventory the information/transactions you have in various systems that could be brought together to solve targeted use cases.
Decide how you want to architect your solution (native, hybrid or web), depending on the desired user experience and develop your application. If you don’t have mobile developers or UX experts in-house, consider communities like CloudSpokes and utest.
Stay laser-focused on customer use cases and the user experience throughout the entire process. Keep paring back rather than adding functionality!

Good luck reimagining your customer experience with mobility. Let us know in comments or tweet @appirio if you have any questions!

Reimagine Talent Sourcing

2013-04-11T09:59:00.000-07:00

by Michael George (@ReimagineHR)

In our last HCM post, we talked about the importance of building and executing strategic talent plans using an iterative approach that helps the organization identify and fill gaps in their talent supply and demand as business plans change throughout the year. A big part of determining exactly who is able fill those gaps is identifying the best source(s) of suitable talent.

Source: www.lancesoft.com

For many managers, going to HR to fill an open position can be a frustrating, and often protracted endeavor. Putting aside whatever process is required - be it simple or complex - the main issue for most hiring managers isn’t the technology or inadequate response from recruiters, it is poor candidate quality. The key to providing hiring managers with quality candidates often comes down to the source of the applicant. Today’s Applicant Tracking System have improved the recruiter’s ability to track referrals, evaluate specific job board performance and adjust sourcing spend to better identify and utilize top-performing sources of qualified candidates.

But there is a flaw in limiting your “5-star” sources to only those that are feeding active candidates (that lead to hires) into your ATS. Passive candidates (better known as the talent you really want) are almost never going to be reached through these channels.

A reimagined Talent Sourcing effort means recruiters not only intimately understand the organization’s current talent supply and future demand, but are actively using social, mobile and cloud technologies in ways to uncover hidden sources of top talent and/or networks of referrers.

And if you’re thinking it’s finally time to open a Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn account, you’ve got some catching up to do. Every one of your competitors is furiously tweeting, regularly status-updating, and constantly scouring LinkedIn. So definitely utilize these platforms, but to win in the war for talent you’ve got to be more creative.

To find untapped sources of qualified candidates, recruiters must go beyond broadcasting job openings and target specific groups like trade associations, user groups, regional and local user groups to reach the right audience (particular skill, interest, etc.) with the type of social media they prefer. In short, employers who want to outwit their competitors and acquire top talent must understand what is possible with emerging social and mobile technologies to infuse new thinking into their sourcing strategies.

So here are a few social and mobile sourcing tools that may help you reimagine what’s possible.

RemarkableHire (Social)
Not that a resume would ever embellish one’s skills, employers often find it difficult to separate the average from the exceptional until well into the hiring process (or in the worse case, post-hire), wasting time and resources.

RemarkableHire is a tool that analyzes a job seeker’s contributions to online communities, allowing recruiters to validate proficiency of a particular set of skills. In this case, RemarkableHire tracks tech professional contributions to online communities like GitHub, Dribble and StackOverflow, for example. Each of these disparate social communities allow peers to endorse the quality of their work through “likes,” or votes of approval, or “follows” and RemarkableHire scans these communities to collate an unbiased, collective view of the contributor’s abilities based on peer review.

Used one way, sites like RemarkableHire can validate the claims made on a resume, but they can also be a place to uncover the kind of skilled experts and industry influencers your organization is looking for.

Unrabble (Social)
If you do discover hidden sources of talent, chances are you’re not alone, which means you need to be more agile when the situation demands it. The ability to quickly collaborate with colleagues about a potential candidate and expedite the process when you find exceptionally talented people may make the difference between winning and losing. Along with tools to rank candidates, Unrabble offers a social component that makes it easy to collaborate with colleagues as well as quickly see how the potential candidate is connected to you in your LinkedIn network. This gives recruiters the ability to reach out through a trusted colleague, rather than a cold call.

Instagram (Mobile)
You probably aren’t thinking of a photo-sharing site as a talent sourcing platform, but this relatively new social media platform that has quickly become a giant, surpassing 80 million registered users earlier this year. Facebook purchased the mobile sharing app in early 2012 allowing users to snap, transform and share photos via Instagram, Twitter, email and Flickr, at the touch of a button. This makes it a great tool for engaging a diverse audience with photos that can tell the story of your employment brand.

Companies like Starbucks are using Instagram as part of their overall employer branding efforts, as well as a place to source job candidates. Using hashtags, employers can tag (and users can search for) things like #dayinthelife, or #storemangerfun to show what life would be like as an employee, or showcase other cool brand assets of the company. As users follow, a potential candidate pool is built.

Foursquare (Mobile)
You probably know Foursquare as a mobile app that allows you to “check-in” to places you visit, and over time receive personalized recommendations and deals based on where you, your friends, and people with similar tastes have been. This type of “location-based” marketing has grown in popularity as evidenced by Foursquare’s 30 million user global community, generating millions of check-ins a day. Now imagine you’re a retailer using the Foursquare Merchant Platform and you’re looking for retail salespeople who are passionate about your brand. You identify a customer who has shopped in your story several times in the past few months, has recommended you to her friends, and has even posted positive details about her shopping experience – in short, she is already a brand ambassador. The next time she comes into the store, her Foursquare app checks her in and on her mobile device instead of a 20% off coupon she has a message from the CEO of the company telling her what a perfect fit she would be and inviting her to please go meet the store manager who is waiting with job application in hand.

SwoopTalent (Social)
If you’re like most organizations you’re managing an internal employee referral program that has little or nothing to do with your online sourcing initiatives. SwoopTalent brings those two efforts together to dramatically improve the quality of referrals received. SwoopTalent matches their database of millions of potential candidates to your jobs and automatically finds a three way match between your jobs, the best candidates and your employee base to make sure that top talent is linked to you in the best possible way – through an existing employee.

Crowdsourcing (WaaS)
Yes, you read that correctly… WaaS. Worker as a Service, and it is the next big thing in talent sourcing. Companies like oDesk are bringing the job to the worker rather than the worker to the job across nearly every business function. With over 500K clients and more than 2.7M on-demand workers, oDesk is proving that an on-demand workforce is a reality.

We’ve written quite a bit on the value of finding the right worker to do the right work at the right time, which you can find here, or listen to this recorded webcast: The Future of Work - Crowdsourcing Your Talent.

A few things to consider before jumping into the world of Social & Mobile sourcing

This can make or break your employment brand. Whether you’re selling soap or job openings, in the world of online social, the consumer is king – and your brand reputation means everything. Your company’s brand strength can be one of your biggest advantages (or disadvantages) in the online world and showcasing key element of your brand can make all the difference in attracting great talent. Here, something like an employee blog can allow passive candidates to imagine themselves working in a cool place, with smart and talented people.

Keep in mind this kind of workplace transparency works both ways. Sites like Glassdoor and CareerBliss give prospective job seekers an unfiltered (oh, is it unfiltered) look inside your organization through employee generated reviews of the business, executive team, managers, compensation, and more.

Your potential candidate pool is everyone, and everyone that everyone knows. If LinkedIn has taught us anything it is that, given the chance (and a good set of tools), most folks will build and elevate their own brand and market exposure. This means that when someone with the right set of skills and experience unexpectedly shows up in your network you don’t put them in your “pipeline” because there isn’t an open job requisition to put them on. You connect with them, today (right now) and begin treating them like an active candidate. Odds are if they aren’t interested in working for you, they know someone who is.

To that point, if you “discovered” this industry hot shot, so did your competitors so be sure to check back next week for tips and tools to help you reimagine recruiting. In the meantime, if you have social or mobile tools you use, or advice on ways to leverage emerging technology to reimagine talent sourcing, please share them in the comment section below, we’d love to hear from you.

7 Ways to Use CRM to Enable Your Sales Team

2013-04-09T09:08:00.001-07:00

by Tom Saracene

Sales organizations can succeed solely with good sales reps and solid leadership driving them in a focused way. However, with a little thought given to tools and processes, those facets of the job that are sometimes the least rewarding, or let’s be honest, the most frustrating, to reps and their managers can become valuable and efficient components that enable the entire organization to reach greater heights.

Below is my list of the top considerations for any Sales Ops group that aspires to truly enable the sales team. Here are 7 simple concepts that will enable greater success, predictability, and control:

1. Make Core CRM Useful to Reps to Drive Adoption
Nothing good can come out of a CRM system until the sales teams put information into it. You can’t expect good account plans, quotes, or pipeline forecasts from a system with spotty or poor information. However, in trying to drive adoption, too often we emphasize the tracking and accountability elements of CRM rather than the benefit to the rep him/her self. Equipping reps with tools and data that benefit them in the field (or on the phones), and doing this through the CRM system, is the key to driving adoption.

The benefits start with information at the right time and place. Nobody wants to approach a customer only to find out that that customer expects information from you that you don’t have. This does little to advance any sales cycle, not to mention the uncomfortable or even confrontational nature of these situations. The good news is that this problem is easy to fix (at least in concept) by ensuring that all customer, sales, support and billing information is available to the rep via CRM. Pricing lookups/calculators, automated quote or contract generation, product data and literature libraries and even easy case entry all become valuable tools that the rep can use when in front of a customer. When used this way, CRM becomes a tool for real-time use as opposed to a “big brother” system that sales reps are obligated to fill out at the end of a long day (or week).

2. Enable Sales Team Mobility
Letting reps work where and how they want is another way to meet them halfway and get them to use your systems for their own benefit. This can really be a modern-day extension of the previous point. We now have the technology to put real-time data in the hands of reps and on a device that is easy to use while in conversation with the customer. In fact, organizations that are truly embracing the mobile platforms such as tablets are designing interfaces that allow reps to use their CRM system to facilitate customer conversations, rather than merely record them. Gone are the days of retreating into a closed office to “check with my manager”, sales reps want to show customers on their device how they’ve arrived at a price and how it is justified.

To that end, companies like Salesforce and Workday are making significant investments in extending their core products to be more mobile friendly. Just today, salesforce.com announced Salesforce Platform Mobile Services to extend the the company’s core platform to accelerate mobile app development and deliver new tools and programs to support mobile capabilities.

3. Bring Social Collaboration and Files into CRM
If you ask most sales reps which applications they use the most, they'd tell you it's email, calendar and documents/presentations. Sales reps are constantly on the go and are always trying to get the best people and information in front of their customers. Whether on the desktop or on mobile devices, these collaboration applications are usually disconnected from CRM. There's a huge value both for the rep and for sales ops in bringing collaboration into CRM. With applications such as Salesforce Chatter, sales reps and teams can collaborate right in the context of a contact, account or opportunity AND they can even follow files, leads, cases, etc. and get alerted when anything changes. Perhaps the biggest benefit of social collaboration platforms is the ability to form virtual account teams with experts from across the company, even experts that the sales rep may not know directly. Being able to access the right people and information on a mobile device right from CRM can be a game-changer for CRM adoption and usage.

4. Integrate Configure Price Quote (CPQ) with CRM
Another way to empower reps and drive adoption is to equip them with the data and tools to configure their own product solutions for customers, price those solutions, and then produce an accurate and attractive proposal to convey that information. Accomplishing this always starts with a clean and easy-to-navigate price list. It is amazing how many companies allow their Item Masters to become overly complicated, which has a disastrous effect on margins.

Once the price lists are cleaned up, you may or may not need some type of configuration depending on the complexity of your product or service. Use your engineering team to design the configuration models and then let the sales team run the program. Companies that still engineer each and every quote are quickly becoming unprofitable.

Lastly, forever eliminate the need for reps to manage document creation. They may not like giving up the ability to drop custom messages on each quote, but I can promise you that they will warm quickly to the speed and efficiency of push-button quoting. Accomplishing this is easier than you think. All elements of a quote or contract that are boilerplate can get baked into a template, while other data points that are negotiable or variable can be fields in the CRM. A simple mail-merge tool then allows reps to define the deal in the system and instantly create a proposal when they need one. If you must, you can even give them a big text box where they can write that custom message!

5. Implement Pipeline/Forecasting Best Practices
Knowing where the numbers come from, and understanding what they are telling you is the key to getting the data you need without asking for too much. I am always amazed by the variety of ways that customers define these common terms. Often times, even from department to department, the definitions will vary.

Pipeline: Opportunities by stage and total bookings or revenue based on probability
Activity: New Opportunities, Biggest Wins, Stalled Opportunities, Average Stage Duration, etc.
Forecast: “Where will we (or I) finish this month / quarter / year”
Schedule: Line Item detail describing the flight date and all incremental installments

Once these terms are defined consistently, the next step is figuring out how to produce them. Simply put, all of these reports are an “Output” not an “Input”. Pipeline and Bookings are a function of Opportunity Management whereas Revenue Forecasts are a function of Order Management. In either case, what we want is for our reps to manage their opportunities and orders so that we can extract this data. We never want to ask a rep to “document the pipeline” or “turn in a forecast”. As managers, we should be looking at this data at all times and approach the rep with these reports in hand (or live on the screen).

The more integrated CRM is to the revenue system, the more complete the picture is that we can paint. Many companies can get this picture via a BI solution, however, if we can get this level of visibility into the hands of the reps and their immediate managers, then we are able to collaborate on opportunities that affect the forecast, and do so with a concrete understanding of how our actions will affect the outcome. This is when forecasting becomes truly collaborative.

6. Use CRM to Drive Sales Strategy and Account Planning
Whether you operate a highly transactional business or a very consultative, relationship based business, the idea of planning is a key use of the information stored in CRM. Build reports that highlight how activities and trends tend to be predictors of future patterns. Doing this will help reps draw correlations between the objective milestones in the sales process and the likelihood of winning that deal. This is when behaviors start to change, and that is what we are after.

As for more strategic selling, most of the attributes of an Account Plan are already in your CRM system. Therefore it’s only logical to build plans inside the system and relate those plans to the people, opportunities and product records you are already maintaining. After all, what is a plan other than a link between these pieces of data that results in highlighting a particular approach to maximizing the revenue from each client. This is another opportunity to minimize redundant work (in the form of data entry) from sales reps and provide more insight and value with the CRM application.

7. Recognize Process Issues vs Technology Issues
The last topic, and perhaps the most difficult one to wrap your head around, is understanding the difference between a process issue and a technology issue. For example, sales reps poaching opportunities from each other is a problem. However, too many companies react to this problem by tightening security and limiting visibility of accounts, contacts and opportunities between reps. What they’ve done however, is address a process problem, with a technology fix. In doing so they have removed the ability for the organization to be collaborative and hidden the data that should be used to find cross-sell and upsell opportunities. They have also created an environment where the customer could potentially pit one rep against another without them knowing (you’d be surprised how often I see this).

The right thing to do is to understand what is driving the behavior, then address the root causes. In this case, perhaps the offending rep is not getting a sufficient number of qualified leads or is not a good prospector. However, they may be a good closer who is under-performing because of these other issues. Fixing the root causes of these problems, and then defining rules-of-engagement and consequences for breaking those rules, provides the reps with a structured environment where they feel safe and empowered.

These are all concepts we have seen and heard before, but they are the fundamental building blocks of a healthy sales organization. Far too many companies have glossed over these fundamentals in favor of just latching on to a top performer and attempting to clone that behavior. That is a hit or miss approach, whereas focusing on these fundamentals can help you build an entire team of top performers!

Tom Saracene is a CRM Strategy Practice Lead at Appirio and has a 17 year track record of completing successful CRM & ERP implementations on a variety of client/server and hosted platforms across a wide variety of business processes. Most significantly dedicated to Cloud Computing and helping business move their processes and infrastructure into the Cloud with the help of platforms such as salesforce.com, Workday, Google Apps and others.

Cloud, Technical Debt, and the Quantified Self

2013-04-02T10:43:00.000-07:00

by Nick Hamm (@hammnick)

I’ll admit it - I didn’t do a very good job keeping up with my eating habits and personal fitness routine last year. I could blame it on work, travel, small children or probably several other “justifiable” excuses, but the only thing I know for sure is the number that pops up on the scale every morning when I step on it - and it has been increasing at a steady rate.

I recently read this fascinating discussion on technical debt with thought-leaders Ward Cunningham and Capers Jones. This is a must-read for anyone who develops software or manages a technology program. It’s full of some very interesting stats and metaphors that will make you think about how you manage your projects. Yeah, it’s long, but it’s worth your time.

Today many enterprises are working to pay off their legacy technical debt by moving to cloud platforms like Salesforce, Google, Workday, and AWS. It’s a great feeling to end of life a hairball entanglement of systems and consolidate on a common platform with no hardware or software. One of the great benefits of cloud is that you already start much lower on the technical debt scale because you have no hardware or software to manage.

But buyer beware. Even though you may be starting lower on the overall scale, cloud is not immune to the build-up of technical debt. In fact because of the ease of customization and the ability for your team to focus on value-add requirements instead of platform-related minutia, technical debt can actually grow at an accelerated pace in the cloud as opposed to older, less flexible solutions. And without proper measures in place, before you know it you’ve marginalized the benefits of moving to a cloud platform by stuffing it full of every backlog item from the past 3 years.

Unchecked, cloud can be like putting a starving business in front of an all you can eat buffet. Without the right discipline it takes very little effort to consume thousands of calories very quickly. And before you know it you’re 10 pounds overweight and can’t run as quickly or jump as high as you thought you could.

In life and in business, what gets measured gets managed. The quantified self movement has changed the way we behave by giving us a new way to hold ourselves accountable. It’s also allowed us to have deeper insight into our actions and performance. At the core of quantified self is self-tracking and self-knowledge, which gives us the data to make better decisions about our diet, exercise, sleep, and other factors that affect our health and performance. These same principles apply to enterprises implementing cloud solutions.

The two key ingredients in any successful technical measurement program are content and context. Having the data is the first key element. How many lines of code do we have in our environment? At what rate are we adding code to the environment? How are we doing in our balance between configuration and customization? These are just a few of the questions that you need to be able to answer. But it’s only half of story. Which business processes have you implemented? How rapidly is your industry changing? What percentage of your staff is dedicated to building and maintaining your environment? Contextually understanding the factors specific to your implementation as well as how your data points compare to benchmarks from companies similar to yours gives you the intelligence to make trade-offs, push ahead, bolster your team, or step back and refactor.

Appirio has been collecting Cloud Metrics with the most advanced enterprises for last several years. The insights on the health and performance of these orgs have been tremendous and have helped us better serve the interests of our clients. Historically this has been part of how we manage programs at Appirio, but today we are encouraging enterprises to take the initiative to monitor and manage these metrics as a part of their own cloud program management whether or not you already work with Appirio in any other capacity.

For example, the range for lines of code in one cloud application for our top 10 benchmark accounts is 92,000 - 231,000, while the median sits at about 15,000. In the case of this single metric, bigger is not necessarily worse - it’s the context that explains the significance of the data. What the data can tell you though is that you need the resources to support that amount of code. It tells you that you have a certain level of complexity at which you are operating that may have unforeseen side effects. And as that number grows or shrinks, so should your operating assumptions. Without this data you’re only guessing, which can be like flying a plane through heavy fog without instruments.

I’ve started measuring and paying down my health debt this year, and I’ve noticed a positive difference already. It feels good to look back and see the improvements that can be made in even a short timeframe. I’d encourage you to do start doing the same for your enterprise’s technical debt before it’s too late.

Nick Hamm is member of Appirio's Technology team and is responsible for Appirio's Cloud Asset Library. He is a Salesforce MVP and has helped over 200 companies across a wide variety of industries transform the way they do business by implementing cloud solutions.

Reimagine Talent Planning

2013-03-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

by Michael George (@ReimagineHR)

In a recent post we talked about the importance of creating an agile talent management strategy in a new global talent age. The ever-shrinking cost of cloud, mobile and social technologies, and access to a global pool of skills is quickly shifting the game from outspending competitors, to outmaneuvering them - and an agile talent management strategy is key putting the right talent in the right place at the right time.

However, even the most agile talent strategy needs an action plan (or a set of plans) in order to prioritize activities, define the blocking and tackling initiatives, and track effectiveness. To create talent plans that can respond to an agile talent strategy, the notion of annual workforce planning must be replaced by a more iterative approach that helps the organization identify and fill gaps in their talent supply and demand, as business plans change throughout the year.

By most accounts, traditional workforce planning is viewed a rudimentary process, typically owned by HR or Finance, whereby headcount and compensation & benefits data (e.g., turnover, loaded salary costs, etc.) is utilized to plan for future labor expenditures. While this has been an adequate exercise to meet the baseline skill needs of the organization, the main value of traditional workforce planning is cost control. Managers know they must operate within the constraints of their headcount budget, regardless of shifting business need, and it isn’t likely company policy encourages replacing employees based on changes in business priorities.

As an HR leader, your challenge is to anticipate changes in the business and respond by delivering the right skills in the shortest time possible. This requires new levels of collaboration with business leaders and a new approach to creating a strategic “talent plan.”

Creating a talent plan is not just an exercise for HR. It is an undertaking that reaches across the entire business, and like other multi-disciplinary programs it needs direction and support from senior leadership to drive enterprise-wide adoption and participation. A successful talent planning effort is often co-sponsored, co-developed and executed by HR, IT and business leaders working together.

However, the ability to manage such a wide-reaching program is not typically in the sweet spot of the average HR practitioner. Creating a holistic talent plan requires someone who is highly analytical, yet understands the functional aspects of HR and possesses a deep understanding of today’s technology capabilities, along with what it will take to fundamentally change the way people work. If that sounds like an impossible role for any one person to play, it is. This is why collaboration between HR, IT and business leaders is critical in order to create and execute a highly responsive talent plan.

Creating your talent plan means taking an approach that focuses on the organizational goals as the primary driver, and then developing actionable talent management roadmaps and HCM technology blueprints that account for both available talent supply and future talent demand. Finally, to ensure your plan doesn’t fall out of alignment with the business, it is critical that talent planning become an integral part of agile business planning, and that revised talent plans are created quarterly, at a minimum.

Step 1: Assess Talent Demand

The first step is to meet with senior business leaders to understand the organization’s short- and long-term business plans and objectives. As an HR leader, the outcome of these engagements should be a clear understanding of the goals of the business, and what talent will be needed to meet those objectives (e.g., workforce drivers, KPI’s, job profiles, etc.).

Understanding exactly how each job/role contributes to the defined business objectives allows HR to identify the most strategic and critical roles in driving success.

These roles can then be segmented, or categorized in ways that help prioritize functional action plans. For example:

Pivotal Roles

Create competitive advantage
Related to generation of sales, revenue, product development and/or service delivery
Significant organizational risk to top-line performance if not filled with top talent

Core Roles

Directly related to operational excellence
Related to fulfillment, purchasing, and/or customer support
Some organizational risk in terms of top- or bottom-line performance if not filled with the right talent

Supporting Roles

Valuable and required to sustain day-to-day operations
Focused on transactional, process, and/or administrative support work
Short-term and/or isolated organizational risk if not filled with right talent

Misaligned Roles

Limited or low value to the organization’s operations
Jobs can be easily redeployed or outsourced; people should be retrained, reassigned, or eliminated
No organizational risk if not fulfilled with the right talent

Step 2: Assess Talent Supply

Assessing talent supply starts with environmental scanning to understand both the internal and external talent supply. Internal talent supply refers to the organization’s own capabilities, while external supply refers to full-time workers, part-time workers, and contingent staff available outside the organization. Keep in mind, talent can now be crowdsourced from places like CloudSpokes or BarrelofJobs for example. Many organizations are also beginning to leverage their employees’ vast personal networks to identify possible candidates, as well.

External data can often come from candidate databases, as well as information gathered on the competition’s workforce (LinkedIn, for example), labor reports & forecasts, graduation trends, and even monitoring social networks for clues about an individual’s interests, skills and expertise.

Once you have a firm understanding of what talent you need (demand) and what talent is available to you both inside and outside the organization (supply) you’re ready to begin building your talent plan.

Step 3: Build the Talent Plan

Through analysis, a clear picture of the gap between the organizational demand and required supply of talent should emerge. By evaluating this gap, you can begin to formulate and develop future state models that predict the various options available to address, and ultimately close, the gap.

This part of the process is all about predicting the future direction of the organization. As such, it should involve key stakeholders in the development, review, and validation of the plan. Developing these future state models can be accomplished by employing different planning approaches, including; Predicting, Scenario Planning, No Change Future State, and Targeted Future.

Predicting is a method of determining the organization’s desired future state. This by no means is an exact science; however, it is critical that predictions align with the strategic direction of the organization.

Predictive Modeling uses quantitative and qualitative data to help develop ‘what-if’ scenarios to predict possible outcomes. For example, if we were to invest $1 million more in performance-based incentives and new hire training, what might our gains in productivity be?

Scenario Planning can be more easily defined as “being a head of the curve.” This technique is used to determine what will happen next. The focus of scenario planning is to provide time for an organization to react, change and adjust its workforce in order to be prepared for possible “what-if” futures.

No Change Future State is an approach used to highlight certain workforce risks, (e.g. aging workforce, competency gaps, lack of specific skilled employee, etc.). The goal of the No Change Future State is to “predict” the impact on the organization’s ability to execute it business strategy if changes do not occur.

Targeted Future State is simply the selection of the desired future state based on the scenario plan. However, prior to selecting this targeted future state, ensure that is aligns with the organizational strategy and direction.

Step 4: Create Functional Talent Management Action Plans

The creation or iteration of your talent plan does not mark the end of the process. In many ways, it is just the beginning. Once the strategic talent plan has been developed, HR is responsible for making the plan actionable. Specifically, Centers of Excellence in Talent Management (e.g., Staffing, Learning & Development, and Compensation) must get involved at this stage to develop integrated talent management action plans for their respective functions that meet the workforce demands of the organization by ensuring the right supply of talent (through acquisition, development, crowdsourcing, etc).

How You Will Know When You’ve Gotten it Right

Strategic talent planning doesn’t end when a binder with a “plan” in it gets put on the shelf. The specific achievements and outcomes of the plan, not the plan itself, drive transactional HR activities. Examples of this include:

Determining how, where, when recruiting is done
Migrating away from limiting legacy technology
Changing organizational structures based on future business needs
Modifying leadership development and top talent programs

Ultimately your talent plan must deliver top- and bottom-line results that demonstrate the impact and effectiveness of the organization’s investments in HR and HCM technology, as well as justify why YOU should fill that “seat at the table.”

In the weeks ahead we’ll be addressing each area of the employee lifecycle, offering strategic advice and highlighting the latest in cloud, mobile and social technology to help you to reimagine ways to do just that!

Thriving After Your Cloud App Goes Live: Q&A with Apria

2013-03-26T06:00:00.000-07:00

by Naoki Tsukamoto

Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with JP Villanueva, Administrator of Referral Process Management at Coram, an Apria healthcare company, about effectively managing their cloud application after go-live. Coram is a national provider of home infusion services and specialty pharmacy distribution with more than 85 branch locations across the country. Coram has over 700 users using Salesforce.com’s Service Cloud to drive operational efficiencies that will allow for quick patient acceptance of referral requests.

Q: How long have you been live with your cloud? And what was the biggest surprise in managing your cloud after going live?
JPV: We’ve been live on Service Cloud for referral process management for just over a year and been using Cloud Management since it’s gone live. The biggest surprise has been the capability of the Cloud Management team. Their ability to rapidly develop and deploy solutions into production was key to the success of our rollout.

Q: What aspects of post go live support do you use Cloud Management for? And what were the benefits?
JPV: We mainly use Cloud Management for enhancements to the referral process management application that Appirio built for us. They are an extension to our application support team.

With Cloud Management, we are able to respond much faster to business needs. We can have an idea for an enhancement and the development team can have a working solution or offer multiple solutions usually within 1-2 business days. We can even identify and resolve issues before the business reports them.

Q: What kind of advice and best practices recommendations have you received from the Cloud Management team? And how have they benefited your org?
JPV: The best advice I’ve received from our Cloud Management partners is to simplify and leverage standard Salesforce functionality! The benefits are time-savings for everyone involved and tighter, more impactful releases. It’s challenging to push back sometimes on your business partners who insist that they need enhancements done in a specific way, so it’s helpful to have a sanity check with experienced cloud professionals that the standard functionality was more than sufficient for other businesses.

Q: Has having Cloud Management enabled your internal teams to get more value from upcoming releases?
JPV: Without a doubt. The successful deployment of our application is all about internal team communication during the referral process. We couldn’t have made the leaps in our own internal communication without the release management discipline developed through Cloud Management. For example, better case queue management and detailed email notifications out to the field. I have very little to worry about when it comes to new releases. There have been very few surprises when working with Cloud Management. I am still astounded at how few helpdesk tickets I get in regards to Salesforce relative to our other applications. From a support perspective, I can support 700+ users pretty much by myself, allowing me to focus on delivering higher value benefits to the business.

Q: Can you provide examples of how you have been able to deliver value to users after go-live using Cloud Management?
JPV: One of the top enhancements over the past year has been updating the sales email notifications to make them more user-friendly, which got tremendous kudos. It got the sales team the right information at the right time. Another benefit was making it easier for users to traverse related lists, which has been a huge time saver for them. And Cloud Management has made it easier to manage our backlog queue, which has been a time saver for me and has enabled our teams to deliver value faster to end users.

Q: What advice would you give to your peers who are considering to extend their teams with post go-live support?
JPV: This may sound odd, but have good requirements. What you get will only be as good as the effort you put into detailing out what the business needs and why. Then you can let the development team have the freedom to come up with creative solutions that will astound your business.

Q: How would you like to see Cloud Management improved?
JPV: It’s tough to say at this point. Cloud Management service has listened and taken action on my feedback from all the weekly surveys that I filled out. And my Cloud Management lead has taken immediate action on everything I’ve asked for in the past year like additional support, more detailed developer feedback, etc. The Cloud Management team is extremely efficient and easy to work with. I wish all of our vendors were as professional and speedy in delivering application enhancements.

Reimagine Your Employee Portal to Create a More Engaged & Effective Workforce

2013-03-21T07:00:00.000-07:00

by Michael George (@ReimagineHR)

Source: www.northtampaoutpatient.com

When properly designed and executed, employee portals enable HR and IT to be more strategic, improve productivity and increase employee satisfaction.

The Problem with Today's Employee Portals
Corporate web servers around the globe are littered with the remains of a once-painstaking effort by HR to improve service delivery. We called them Intranets. The idea was to create a single online destination that could meet the information, transaction, and collaboration needs of the workforce, while delivering real-time business and talent intelligence to executives, all in a brilliant dashboard.

These first-generation intranets didn’t fail because they were a bad idea; they failed because HR and IT didn’t understand the need to create a compelling and valuable user experience - which was never really the goal. The goal was to make things easier for content providers — in this case HR — not the consumers. The objective of these “sites” was to centrally manage information, content and access to transactional tools with the hopes that employees, managers, and executives would visit and consume all that HR had created (or linked to).

What resulted was stale and outdated information, links to nowhere, and redundant or confusing processes. Today, many are still using their company’s first-generation Intranet because it is the only way they know how to access certain talent management functions or workplace information, like opening a job requisition, accessing the performance review system, reading the Employee Policy Handbook, or looking up details on their benefits plan.

Others have abandoned the idea of self-service altogether in favor of direct contact with the HR department. Not only does this perpetuate HR’s role as an administrator - limiting opportunities to provide more strategic value - employees are often run through a maze of corporate, field and other contacts before getting what they need.

Cloud, Mobile, Social are Catalysts to Rethink the Portal
Today’s cloud, mobile and social technologies offer a way to expand on the idea of delivering HR information to employees with a set of robust tools that offer anytime, anywhere access to organizational information, knowledge, expertise and tools - all designed with the employee experience in mind. It is this critical shift in providing a compelling employee experience that is allowing portals to have not only a dramatic impact on productivity and efficiency, but employee engagement as well.

What is important to understand here is that a “compelling employee experience” doesn’t mean your portal has to be a multi-media extravaganza - it simply means it needs to serve each individual in a personalized and relevant way. This means bringing some intelligence to the party.

Next-generation portals can be tailored to deliver relevant content to specific users and user types with integrated search functionality providing instant access to relevant transactional data from across HR and business applications, all with security and role-based permission managed through single sign-on. When employees, managers or executives log in, the portal must know who they are, their role, location, and function in order to deliver a highly personalized, consumer-grade experience much like they are accustomed to when accessing personal portals like their retirement planning website, or their insurance provider’s policy management page.

For HR, this translates into fewer phone calls and emails from employees, quicker answers to frequently asked questions and the ability to manage the level, frequency and relevance of information consumed. This reduces the cost of HR service delivery while dramatically improving service levels and employee satisfaction.

In addition, today’s employee portal technologies ease the burden of content management by allowing HR and other departments to create and curate content with easy-to-use publishing tools that don’t rely on IT or outside vendors, which often slow the frequency of updates, and delay access to new applications, functions and modules.

Today’s employee portals are fast becoming more than simply efficient repositories of content. They are the nerve center of the employee experience — the jumping off point for everything from requesting personal time off to starting a performance review, as well as the place business leaders can quickly access business and talent metrics and intelligence to support better decision making. The employee portal is becoming the face of HR reimagined.

An Example of What's Possible: Virgin America's Mobile and Social Employee Portal
As inspiration, check out this video demonstrating how Virgin America’s new mobile friendly, easy-to-use employee portal, called VX Connect, is helping their 2,500 on-the-go pilots, flight attendants, and team members stay connected with each other and the company as they travel.

How You Can Get Started

Define your goals in an employee-centric way: As you begin to think about ways to reimagine your employee portal (or create one), keep in mind who, and what, you are building for. If the first thought is, “make it easier for HR to inform the workforce of policies and procedures” or “reduce cost of HR service delivery,” think bigger and more employee-centric. Your employee portal initiative’s prime objective must be to better meet the needs of your workforce, followed by a set of defined business goals. Meeting the needs of HR — such as reducing service delivery cost or easing the burden of content management — is a product of a well-executed deployment, not a strategic objective. To truly meet the needs of the workforce, HR must have a reliable way to uncover those needs and ensure the portal can adequately address them, while accounting for differences across business units, global geographies and employee populations.
Look beyond just current employees: It’s also important to understand the reach of the portal beyond current full-time employees. Organizations must think about how the portal can serve employees’ spouses or dependents, retirees, and other contingent groups outside of the organization. Access, content and data filtering and delivery decisions must be made for each of these groups to ensure high value and a consumer-grade user experience for all.
Determine content/tool elements and owners: To create such a useful and compelling environment, an upfront effort must be made to determine what content, applications and dashboard metrics will be included, as well as how those elements will be filtered and targeted. Further, determining ownership and governance will be critical to long term success of the portal. HR, IT and business leaders should seek to answer these types of questions before settling on a specific technology solution, but technology parameters should absolutely be a part of this strategic discussion. For example, it might be important to establish technology requirements such as:

Ability to personalize with links, tools, content and services based on role
Flawless search capabilities that make things easy to find
Robust, easy-to-use content management tools
Consumer-grade interface - modern and engaging
Collaborative capability to connect users, share information
Bug-free, technically reliable

Don't forget that you need an adoption plan: Delivering a great employee portal, however, doesn’t mean the workforce will show up. There must be an ongoing internal PR and marketing campaign to communicate the benefits. Too often, a big splash is made at the initial launch or roll out with no follow up, ensuring enthusiasm and useage fizzles. HR and IT leaders must plan on a consistent, long-term marketing effort to address new employees and constantly re-engage existing employees with compelling reasons to make visiting the portal part of their daily routine.

With today’s cloud, mobile and social technologies a world class employee portal is within reach of every organization. If you’re interested in learning how your organization can get started, download our whitepaper "Make Your Employee Portal Habit-Forming: Reimagine Your Company Intranet to Create a More Engaged and Effective Workforce".

How an Energy Firm is Blazing Trails for the Future with Salesforce.com

2013-03-19T09:00:00.000-07:00

By Sara Campbell

Source: www.cartech.com

Recently, we were fortunate to have a visit from one of our customers in the UK, Wood Mackenzie. Headquartered in Scotland, Wood Mackenzie is the leading source of knowledge about the world’s energy, mining and metals industries. With more than 850 employees in 23 offices worldwide, Wood Mackenzie experienced a major disconnect between regions and business units that needed to be solved for the company to continue its steady year on year growth. During our visit, I spoke with Stuart Mills, head of strategic operations, and Philip Boyle, IT strategy and enterprise architecture manager, about how Wood Mackenzie is transforming the way they do business with the power of the cloud.

Q: Can you tell me a little about Wood Mackenzie’s business?

Stuart Mills (SM): Wood Mackenzie is a specialist research and consulting provider that gives deep insight into the commercial nature of the energy, mining and metals industries and produces subscription products. Our history goes back to when the business was a stock broking firm, but the business as we know it started in the 1970 when we started reviewing the North Sea oilfields and soon evolved to become a global analyst for the energy industry.

Q: What business challenges were you facing when you looked to Salesforce and Appirio?

SM: Wood Mackenzie’s growth has come from working in a successful product area with valued information that customers both want and need, which had driven us very well in the first phases of growth. For many years, we were growing 15-20 percent year-over-year. As we started to look at the next phases of that growth however, it became more granular in some senses. We got to a phase in our growth where we needed to understand our customer base in more detail and our systems at that stage were hindering us from doing some detailed analytics. We decided to invest in understanding the 360 degree view of our customers--their subscription with us, how much they spend, other potential needs they may have.

Phil Boyle (PB): Specifically, our research and consulting businesses were managing their customer pursuits and pipelines in isolation. We wanted to get a single view of business and pipeline together across the entire enterprise, not within silos. The key challenge was bringing together the different operating practices of two business units in order to better serve our customers and grow our business.

Q: What was the solution?

SM: We looked at all the big players--Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, SAP On Demand--all those that are in the top right of Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the CRM space. Ultimately, there were 50 Wood Mackenzie representatives from both IT and the business that made the decision to go with Salesforce. I think our CFO said it best, we should be bold and choose a company that was going to help us blaze trails for our future. That was Salesforce.

PB: We first went live after a 10-week deployment in December of 2011. We began using contacts and case management with Chatter as a collaboration tool, and after just a few weeks we were already getting the benefits of collaboration and visibility. It was the first time that we could talk about contacts and clients with other parts of the business in a collaborative way. We then rolled-out campaign management in March of 2012 and the marketing team has since been using Salesforce to run their campaigns with more transparency.

SM: It was our third release in October of 2012, involving the business pipeline, that was the most complex. There was a lack of detailed understanding of existing contacts, a challenge which Appirio was able to support. The business had been run very successfully on its own , but we were able to get a refreshed and more efficient method in place using Salesforce that allowed for more in depth insight into client purchasing and needs through Opportunities and Products. The impact has been very positive in how we build deals and go about the process of selling our research and consulting. And because the platform is so agile and flexible, we’ll continue to roll-out new features and make enhancements to support the business.

Q: You’ve already talked a little about business benefits. What other benefits have end-users seen?

PB: All 850+ of our employees have access to Salesforce and they are very positive about the transparency of data. I have heard a lot from end-users regarding new connections and information that they didn’t know existed. Before Salesforce, it was nearly impossible to know if a colleague had a relationship or contact with one of your prospects or accounts or even what other products we might have sold them. Now, we have that visibility and the power to make better decisions based on it. Externally, our customers are seeing the value and power, as well, as we are able to respond to clients more quickly and with a higher quality.

SM: A good example of where Salesforce has already brought value occurred while we were working with a publication, The Financial Times. A Case came in from a journalist looking for some information around a core customer group of ours. Rather than it coming in via email to only one or a few folks, it started life as a Case managed by our press team. Everyone in the company was able to view it and in just more than 24 hours a group of subject matter experts located all over the world had responded individually via Chatter, creating a team that couldn’t have possibly been made otherwise. Because of the openness of Chatter’s collaboration platform, we were able to tap the appropriate experts, collaborate on a response and reply to the reporter’s inquiry in a much faster and more informed manner, ultimately creating a better news piece for Wood Mackenzie.

Check out what Stuart Mills has to say about working with Appirio.

Reimagine Your Talent Management Strategy - Agile HR in the Global Talent Era

2013-03-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

By Michael George (@ReimagineHR)

In our last HCM post, we talked about what it will take to reimagine HR to create a “talent organization,” built to engage and inspire the workforce in meaningful ways each and every day, across the employee lifecycle. Before we jump into the employee lifecycle, we first need to address a familiar topic: talent management strategy.

Today, the business landscape is changing faster than ever and with it, new demands are being placed on HR to respond with greater agility to drive new levels of organizational performance. HR and IT leaders are being challenged to deploy technology solutions to ensure the workforce is able to quickly react to shifting priorities, while creating a collaborative, engaging employee experience.

However, to deploy HCM solutions that will truly meet the needs of the business, HR leaders must first build an agile talent management and HR technology strategy in order to begin transforming the way people work. The key word is “agile.” If you haven’t listened to the recorded webinar, Building an Agile HR Strategy in 2013, it is worth hearing Heidi Spirgi and Neil Jensen discuss what HR and IT leaders need to do in 2013 to get the business involved in delivering meaningful outcomes, and how teams should be structured to achieve everything that's possible with today’s technology.

The important thing here is not just creating a talent management, or HCM strategy, but creating an “agile” strategy. The primary goal of an agile strategy is to quickly respond to the rapidly changing needs of the business with the right people, processes and technology.

What is interesting is that we asked two separate webinar audiences whether their organization had a talent management strategy, and an agile talent management strategy respectively. When asked if their organization had a talent management strategy, 65% said yes, compared with only 16% who believed they had an agile strategy in place.

An historic look at how companies think about talent can provide some perspective on why now is the time for an agile strategy.

The Industrial Age was largely focused on manufacturing, where the employer/employee relationship could best be described as command and control, with a strong centralized authority. The organizations’ workforce was seen as a cost, as the Industrial Revolution had brought about new thinking in terms of efficiency and productivity. The business operation changed little over time, meaning the talent management strategy of the day was likely to focus on attracting and retaining workers who could produce at high levels, and at low cost.

The Knowledge Age introduced the idea of a service-oriented business where people became an asset of the organization. Decision-making began to be decentralized as line mangers were given more authority to bring in the right kind of talent to build their own teams. While business improved its ability to respond to market need, talent strategies focused on growing and developing existing talent to “leverage” people investments that had already been made. The overriding HR philosophy became, “don’t let good people go,” even if the business demanded new or different skills to successfully respond to changing conditions.

Now, we are moving into a Global Talent Age, where winning organizations are not those that outspend, but rather those that outmaneuver their competitors. With equal access to global talent and cloud, mobile, and social technologies, the cost and access barriers to finding and utilizing the best talent in the world have been removed, leaving agility as the difference-maker. The new, agile talent management strategy is focused on delivering innovation, responsiveness and creativity. Organizations now create value through the collaboration and interaction between employees, customers, and partners. To thrive now, HR must respond - in near real-time - to a constant rewiring of those connections by putting the right talent in the right place at the right time.

In each age, HR puts structures, governance, and roles in place to optimally balance what employees want and what the business needs. Traditionally, these have been issues like job security (employees want) versus employee loyalty (businesses need), or production levels versus work/life balance. Striking a proper balance on these issues has given us the now-common practices of offering employees health care benefits and a 40 hour work week.

This is important to understand because it is a shift in this relationship balance - giving more power to the workforce – that is adding to HR’s need to reimagine a more agile talent management strategy. Meeting the ever-changing needs of the business is compounded by HR’s need to meet the ever-changing needs of the modern workforce. Today’s employees have better technology at home than they do a work, are always connected, deeply collaborative and show up to work with greater expectations from their employer than ever before.

In a recent HCI Webcast, The Future of Work - Crowdsourcing Your Talent (access the OnDemand replay), Mike Morris of CloudSpokes did an excellent job explaining how organizations can use an agile talent strategy to re-establish the employee/employer balance (or win-win) in this new Global Talent age.

Morris explains that an agile talent management strategy recognizes what today’s workers really want, and how that can serve what today’s employers really need. For example, an employer in the Knowledge Age would frown on an employee who was constantly asking to do new and different work. Today, that same employee might be a perfect fit for a rapidly growing organization with limited access to specialized skills. The organization needs new skills, and the employee needs to feel he or she is doing interesting and challenging work. Balance. Some of the other examples from the webcast are listed below.

However, creating this kind of agile strategy takes an approach that recognizes that the primary goal should be to first meet the needs of the business, then the needs of the employees and then the needs of HR. In addition it takes HR and business leaders who are open to reimagining what’s possible and fundamentally transforming the way people work.

Next up, we will Reimagine Talent Acquisition with new strategies for Talent Planning along with next-generation Talent Sourcing tools.

3 Ways to Ensure CRM is More than an Expensive Address Book

2013-03-12T10:57:00.002-07:00

Source: mulibraries.missouri.edu

by Tom Saracene

After all these years, we’ve managed to convince organizations that Customer Relationship Management, is about more than a better address book. However, even to many who understand this, CRM is still just a sales tool. Furthermore, even as a sales tool, traditional CRM is often not getting the job done. Why is this? It’s often because taking too narrow of a view of CRM leads to implementations that don’t impact the business as much as they could. The task of opening up the minds of managers and users alike to a broader view of CRM is something we at Appirio take on almost every day. Hopefully, this post will get you thinking about not only how you are using your CRM today, but also how you define it now and in the future.

1. Think About the Customer Relationship, Not Just the Sales Process

Where do your customers come from?
What do they look like?
How do you effectively communicate with them?
Once you have their attention, what can you provide them?
What are the tools and steps necessary to get the win?
What happens after you win?
What happens after that...

This line of questioning could continue through the fulfillment process, to the billing process and on into customer service and support. And then for most businesses we want that to start over so that we can sell more. You can see that it is more than just prospect and opportunity data. We have planning, communication, activity, documents, and even internal operational details like time and expense logs, resource requests, reference and referral management, and so on. This entire lifecycle is your relationship with your customer and your CRM tool is almost certainly up the challenge of supporting, automating and tracking each and every step of it.

With their growing product portfolio including the Sales, Service, Marketing Cloud and platforms, and their “customer company” positioning, salesforce.com clearly supports this broad view of CRM. In addition, they’ve recognized from the start that there are a multitude of steps that an individual company goes through between and around these top-level processes, and designed their platform to support unique workflows and processes to the degree that each company requires. In fact, one of the things that makes Salesforce uniquely powerful is their very metadata-based customization approach enabling companies to adapt the application to their needs without affecting the base application. However, far too many companies fail to take advantage of the power of the Salesforce platform for CRM.

In any organization, you’ll find a significant number of ad-hoc tools and data sources used to track and support customer-facing processes outside the core CRM system. I am not talking about large enterprise systems, I’m talking about small databases and the plethora of spreadsheets we’ve all gotten used to dealing with in order to keep track of the information we need to sell and service customers. These tools always seem faster and cheaper when you create them instead of extending your CRM system, but before most of us realize it, these band-aids accumulate, creating significant bottlenecks and crippling inefficiencies.

2. Bring As Much of the Customer Relationship into Your CRM Platform as Possible

The case I am making isn’t just about getting more value from your CRM licenses, although this is certainly one facet. For me, all roads lead back to user adoption. When we consider all of the typical marketing, sales and service metrics we use on a day-to-day basis, we can’t get around the fact that just about every piece of information in those reports is driven by the actions and data surrounding customer-facing interactions. We need customer-facing employees to embrace CRM, to truly manage not only their pipeline, but their Relationships in the system. One of the most effective ways of driving that kind of holistic adoption is to put more and more of the customer relationship into the CRM system. If you ask any rep (sales or service) if they need additional information or tools, most all will tell you that they need more information, but they want fewer tools.

3. Maintain/Integrate Disparate Data Sources Only if Absolutely Necessary

Now that I’ve laid out the argument for what’s near and dear to my heart, adoption, let’s look at this from a completely different perspective. What I’m talking about is something every company I’ve worked with grapples with constantly, data quality. The single biggest obstacle to data quality is duplication, and we combat this with the somewhat complicated and expensive concept of integration. Sometimes, that is necessary. For example, rarely will the Customer account record in CRM also be used as the Accounts Receivable account record in Finance. The solution here is to link CRM to Accounting via integration. However, most other use cases are not this clear cut. Rather than asking if a piece of data should be integrated to the CRM, we should start by asking if it should live in the CRM.

So what can you do to eliminate spreadsheets, small databases and maybe even software packages that serve a single purpose, provide limited access and are a hindrance to your company's ability to run effectively and efficiently? The first step is to find them. You'll be surprised just how many of these you have when you go looking for them. You can then categorize them by the function they serve and then one-by-one add that functionality into your CRM platform. You may even find bolt-on tools in the ecosystems such as salesforce.com’s AppExchange that would make this almost effortless. All that is left then is to move over the data and then throw away the old tool.

This should be a no-brainer, right? Better CRM adoption, more effective users, better data quality and reporting, and you get to throw away a tool. Have fun with this. I wouldn’t have to go too far out on a limb to say that once you get started making these kinds of changes, you’ll start finding more and more opportunities. One day, you may even get to the point where spreadsheets no longer house data because they are relegated back to just being tools instead of databases. Imagine that!

Tom Saracene is a CRM Strategy Practice Lead at Appirio and has a 17 year track record of completing successful CRM & ERP implementations on a variety of client/server and hosted platforms across a wide variety of business processes. Most significantly dedicated to Cloud Computing and helping business move their processes and infrastructure into the Cloud with the help of platforms such as salesforce.com, Workday, Google Apps and others.

Building Applications for the New Kid

2013-03-07T09:00:00.000-08:00

By John Gorup (@appiriojohn)

I remember being the “New Kid” in school. I was nervous and awkward, clutching my new Trapper Keeper, but excited by the opportunity and new start. I am reminded of this scene every time I help an organization architect a new IT system. Inevitably, at some point I ask myself, “Is this system being built for the ‘’New Kid’?”

The typical approach when gathering needs and requirements for a new system is to talk to the most seasoned veterans - the ones that have been working with the legacy system for years. The veterans are a great resource because they have managed to keep the ship afloat. But to really make a system into a difference-maker, you need to build it for the “New Kid.” To do this, an organization mainly needs three ingredients: simplicity, embedded learning, and the ability to listen to the “New Kid.”

Simplicity

Many times I look at a legacy system and wonder “where would I even begin?” In some ways, the complexity I see in legacy systems is a memorial to the success of the firm. As firms grow and expand, increasing complexity is inevitable. The fact that firms stay in business despite their confusing and labyrinthine IT systems is a testimony to the tenacity of their employees and attractiveness of their products. Veterans can navigate these systems simply because of time; but pity the poor “New Kid” who steps into the middle of this controlled chaos.

While increasing complexity will never go away, the new generation of technology gives us some tools to architect systems to impose simplicity.

Start with an investment in some serious business process analysis. Get to know how the company runs, and get business units talking to each other.
Experiment with user interfaces that are closer to the consumer-applications people are now used to in their everyday life.
Keep the fields on the page to the bare minimum, and put meaningful text in the field help text.
Keep security as open as possible - and question every reason given for closing the data sharing model.
Most importantly, set up a governance model with a mandate to impose simplicity on the system going forward with regular releases.

Embedded Learning

Many organizations still use a training plan that consists of sticking a group of “New Kids” in a conference room for a day (with bad coffee), and leaving them with a 30-page user guide. While “formal learning” has its place, systems need to be created in a way that provides constant learning in a convenient manner.

Set up a internal collaboration group for “New Kids,” where they are encouraged to ask questions without the fear of looking stupid.
Make readily available 3-5 minute “how to” videos, and keep them fresh, updated, and fun.
Create a place in the application dedicated to learning, and include in it FAQs, links, important documents - basically anything that can be used to increase knowledge and adoption.

Listening to the “New Kid”

Listening to a “New Kid” is not only basic hospitality, it is a strategic tool for improving your systems and processes.

Encourage the use of an ideation tool like Salesforce Ideas, and create a program to quickly evaluate and implement good ideas.
Survey your new users at regular intervals (1 month in, 3 months, 6 months, for example) with pointed questions on how they rate the system’s usability. This data should give your developers and administrators a baseline to continually improve usability.
If your user adoption plan includes instructor-lead training, create a mechanism to capture what parts of the system are the most confusing, and use frequently-asked questions as pointers to usability trouble spots.

Life and business are complicated. Your IT systems should not add to the complication. When users log into their system, it should feed them actionable information in an easy-to-use manner. Your applications should foster collaboration. They should be updated with releases on a regular basis, with a constant eye on simplicity. The result should be happier “New Kids” (and happier seasoned veterans), unleashing their creativity and productivity to increase your organization’s competitive advantage.

John Gorup is a solutions architect at Appirio. He has been helping organizations implement CRM, e-learning, and custom business IT solutions for more than 15 years. John has an MBA from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business.

Reimagine HR – Creating “Talent Companies”

2013-03-05T09:02:00.002-08:00

By Michael George (@ReimagineHR)

Recently, Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff delivered the company’s new message that refocuses Salesforce from its mission of enabling the “social enterprise,” to that of helping organizations create “customer companies.”

Using emerging technologies like cloud, mobile, social, touch, identity and communities, customer companies develop deep (and many) connections to their customers, employees, partners and products. This means that today’s businesses are no longer simply managing customers, or employees, or partners or products. They are managing relationships and improving connections, and to win, the customer must be placed at the center of every one of those connections.

Salesforce’s shift in message is a recognition that consumers have more power than ever before in a connected world. No longer are they at the mercy of companies that treat them poorly; they have a loud, far-reaching voice with real power in the marketplace.

The idea of putting the consumer at the center of the business is not a new idea. Successful companies have, for years, recognized the importance of “customer-first” thinking in everything from product development to customer service. As consumers, we have all experienced businesses that meet and even exceed our expectations, as well as those that fail miserably when it comes to serving the customer. Most often, the difference maker is not the website, or the mobile app (although important), or even the product itself, it is the employee(s) with whom we interact.

In a recent video interview, Vineet Nayar, author of the book, Employees First, Customers Second, points out that the core business of any organization should be to create differentiated value for its customers. This unique value, according to Nayar, is created in the interface between employees and customers. Thus, the sole purpose of managing the workforce should be to enthuse and encourage employees so they can create this value. In other words, enabling employees is the critical first step in creating a customer company.

But in order for any business to truly become a customer company, it must first become a “talent company,” and all of the same arguments (made by Salesforce) for becoming a customer company apply.

A talent company goes beyond the obligatory, “Our people are our greatest asset,” inscription on the Annual Report and is able to reimagine the HR function to engage and inspire the workforce in meaningful ways each and every day, across the employee lifecycle. And just like the world of the connected consumer, the world of the connected employee requires HR leaders to understand what is possible with today’s technology in order to create and manage robust and significant employee connections. This understanding gives HR leaders the ability to create strategies and deploy technologies that allow them to outwit their competitors for the best talent, rapidly onboard and engage new workers, quickly identify and train on needed skills, collaboratively measure performance and develop new leaders, retain the best and brightest, and create a work experience that puts the employee at the center of it all - the fundamentals of creating a talent company.

In the weeks and months to follow, we will be discussing ways to reimagine HR throughout the employee lifecycle that we hope you will find interesting, informative and inspirational, including ways to reimagine:

Workforce Planning
Talent Acquisition
Onboarding
Goals & Performance Management
Employee Training & Development
Succession Planning
Offboarding/Contingent Workforce
Crowdsourcing

Our goal is to connect with you, start a conversation, and offer insights and tools to help you reimagine HR in your organization to help create a talent company. We would love to get your thoughts and comments below on which areas in HR you’d like us to cover, or feel need to be improved, as well as share with readers ways you have already begun to use new technologies like cloud, mobile, social, and communities to reimagine the HR function in your organization.

Becoming a Customer Company: Why and How?

2013-02-26T10:52:00.000-08:00

By Balakrishna Narasimhan (@bnara75)

Today, Salesforce unveiled the next phase in their evolution as a company. Over the past few years, they have been the most vocal evangelists of the “social enterprise,” or the idea that businesses need to become social if they want to stay competitive. Initially, the message was focused around internal collaboration and making enterprise applications as powerful, simple and collaborative as Facebook. Over time, Salesforce’s notion of social business grew to include building a social profile of a customer, marketing and engaging with customers on social networks, selling and servicing them using social networks and making products social.

The idea of social has been a great unifying theme for Salesforce and has been one that has clearly differentiated them from other enterprise software companies. However, it took some storytelling panache (think Marc Benioff on stage) and the right audience to really connect the social enterprise concept to business outcomes. The other issue with the focus on social business was that it was not as closely tied to sales and customer service, which are still Salesforce’s core business areas.

So, it makes perfect sense that Salesforce is reorienting themselves around the idea of helping enterprises become “customer companies.” Salesforce’s definition of a customer company is one that has connected customers, connected employees, connected partners and connected products. Customer companies use the latest technology trends - social, local, touch, big data, identity, ecosystems and communities - to better connect their customers, employees, partners and products. It may sound like a lot of buzzwords at first, but it’s truly a compelling vision. In a world where customers are no longer at the mercy of corporations, have more choices than ever and have loud voices with which to proclaim their satisfaction (or not), companies have to put customers at the center of everything they do. Salesforce has assembled and will continue to build out a set of platforms and assets that help companies achieve this vision. The advantage of this positioning is that it immediately links social, local, touch, big data, etc., to a business objective that is indisputable. Second, the idea of being customer-centric is very closely tied to sales and customer service, while still having a much broader frame.

So what does all this mean for Salesforce customers and prospects?

There will be a renewed focus on the core, as the recent Spring ‘13 release shows. Social and Touch aren’t going anywhere, but it’s clear now that Salesforce recognizes that core Sales and Service are just as critical to helping their customers become customer companies.
Salesforce Touch and mobile are going to grow up fast as mobile devices become the main ways end users access Salesforce. Today’s Service Cloud Mobile announcement and the Touch features in Spring ‘13 are just the start.
The Chatter feed will become the primary interface to Salesforce (and other enterprise apps) going forward. We’ll start to see more and more of the things we do in Salesforce through menus move to the feed. This also means that the feed will have to become much more contextual and intelligent.
Salesforce will integrate with and acquire employee-facing applications to build out a full employee engagement lifecycle. Salesforce has already acquired Work.com, and integrated with Google, Workday and Cornerstone OnDemand. There's more to come as these innovators create a new employee experience for truly engaged company evangelists.
Salesforce’s portfolio of offerings is likely to expand to include a big data offering. We also expect new products to enable a next-gen ecosystem beyond portals and communities.
Connected products and big data will come together for game-changing use cases only hinted at by GE’s connected products. Think medical devices or other mission-critical systems that can detect when they’re close to failing and notifying the manufacturer (using Chatter, of course).

Ok, all the technology stuff sounds great, but how does one actually become a customer company?
Now comes the hard part. While Salesforce, Workday, Cornerstone, Google and others provide a great technology foundation for interacting with customers, partners and employees, there’s a lot more work to do to actually realize the vision of becoming a customer company. The biggest thing to do to become a customer company is to align all of a company’s employees around this vision. This means not only great technology to find the right employees, engage and inspire them, help them collaborate and reward them for the right behaviors, but also the workforce and talent strategies to actually turn the right customer-centric behaviors into a reality. These strategies could take the form of truly innovative ideas like Zappo’s bonus for new hires who want to quit, to less mind-bending but equally innovative ideas like replacing employee satisfaction surveys with employee net promoter scores (something Appirio is doing in 2013). We live in a great time for enterprise technology where it’s possible to build a truly customer-centric technology foundation. But, without the right people, culture, processes and metrics, your business will be just as inward-looking as it was before, even if you can now access your business applications from an iPad using a feed. More to come about how to become a customer company over the coming weeks!

Cloud for Cloud's Sake

2013-02-21T09:00:00.000-08:00

By Glenn Weinstein (@glennweinstein)
CIO, Appirio

Source: SearchCloudComputing.com

It’s popular in consulting circles to reframe technology questions in business terms. Often, after a few minutes of good deep technical conversation, someone will chime in with something like “well, what’s really important is improving business outcomes” or “it’s not just the technology, it’s about the people and the process.”

All true, of course. It’s a variant on another common theme in the software industry, “don’t sell features, sell value.” I admit I quickly get bored, and lose context, when a vendor comes in spouting features before telling me why they are important, or what problem they solve.

All that said, though, the technology is important, and it’s important for its own sake. I see this as a “necessary but not sufficient” scenario, with emphasis on the “necessary” part - the right technology is definitely necessary, even if it’s not sufficient by itself to prove business value.

So I want to focus on the technology for a moment. There is an irreducible benefit to the cloud computing model (my definition: multi-tenant and vendor-hosted) that sets the foundation for all you build on top. Start with the wrong foundation, and you’re building a house of cards.

But start with the right foundation, and all kinds of goodness comes your way. Without even trying, you’ll be more likely to achieve the kinds of business outcomes for which we all ultimately invest in IT. A CIO that communicates, and bases decisions on, a “cloud first” procurement policy will create an IT environment where 6 good things happen:

IT managers will tend towards saying “yes” (or “maybe”) rather than “no” to business requests, because the level of friction involved in spinning up new development environments is so low.
Developers will be more inclined to experiment with different approaches
IT staff will focus creative energies on solving business problems, not obsessing over hardware, networks, and infrastructure.
Customers (business users) will trust that IT will supply frequent iterative releases, so they’re not so inclined to insist on lengthy analysis-by-paralysis requirements processes that cover every imaginable scenario.
Users will get used to best-in-class reliability and scalability, and credit IT with providing such a high-performance set of tools.
Managers will be inclined to try to expand successful programs quickly, knowing that the cost of doing so is limited merely to purchasing additional seats, not scaling up data centers and servers and potentially pushing homegrown applications beyond their designed capacity.

Cloud is good for its own sake. As a CIO, I’d make it the entering argument. Explicitly choosing a non-cloud alternative means you’re willing to buck the trend and try to achieve the above dynamics in your IT shop by yourself.

As a consultant myself, I’ll be the first one to make the argument that technology must be connected to business benefits in order to be worth the investment. That said, once that connection is made, the technology selection itself is critically important to the kind of IT department, and the kind of CIO, you want to be.

7 Things CXO's Can Do to Ensure Success with Social

2013-02-19T06:00:00.000-08:00

by Charlie Cowan (@iamcharliecowan)

Source: University of Luxembourg

The World is going social. The analysts have social as one of their key trends to watch. Facebook had their multi-billion dollar IPO in 2012. New networks like Pinterest, Instagram and Path command mega-valuations. Everyone is sharing, sharing, sharing.

And then you see an amazing Chatter demo at Dreamforce and you say to your fellow Execs “We’ve got to deploy Social in our company right now!” But wait – being a social business is much more than technology – it’s about your people, it’s about your culture.

Before you press “Go!” on your social revolution here are a few things you should do to prepare.

If you are going to actively sponsor social activity in your company then it makes sense that you are social yourself. One of the common misconceptions with deploying social is that if we train employees how to use the tools then they will use the tools.

But if you take a look at Facebook or Twitter user statistics you will see that only a small percentage of users are content creators – actively sharing and writing original content. The majority of users are lurkers or voyeurs – logging in to see what others are saying but not comfortable enough to add to the conversation.

What % of Your Employees are Creators? (source: Wikipedia)

Across the internet this is known as the 1% rule , or the 90-9-1 principle (1% create, 9% contribute by liking and commenting, and 90% view with no participation). Your enterprise social community will remove some of the friction by comprising people that should already know each other and by not requiring additional login details, so you could assume that between 2-5% of your employees will be content creators – the majority will have limited interest in posting, no matter how cool your new social tool is. So what can you do to make sure that the social tool your company invests in and rolls out is actually used?

Here are 7 Things You Can Do to Ensure Social Success:

1. Set yourself up a Twitter account
If you don’t have a Twitter account, set one up, add a photo and profile and follow some great people. Vala Afshar, CMO at Enterasys has put together this list of 100 great leadership, business and technology Twitter accounts to follow. If you do nothing else, just learning from these tweeters will give you great value.

2. Listen first
A common objection I hear is “I don’t want to be on Twitter having to hear what some person that I don’t know had for lunch!” Rest assured – the people on Vala’s list are not telling you what they had for lunch! To put Twitter in context – I learn more from Twitter than I have ever done from any other source (university included).

Instead of using your new Twitter account to talk, spend time listening. Download the Twitter app to your smartphone or tablet and take 20 minutes in the morning or evening and just scroll through – see what thought-leaders in your industry or function are saying, how they are saying it and the great articles they are sharing.

3. Start sharing yourself
I’m very confident that quickly you’ll read a tweet relevant to your role or industry that you want to share, and that’s great – retweet it to your followers. Stay consistent so that people that follow you understand that you are focused on product development, or finance, or global trade. Feel free to add a bit of personal life in – you want your followers to feel that you are real – but remember no-one wants to know what you had for lunch!

Aim to share 10 pieces of content (retweeting or tweeting someone else’s article) for every 1 tweet that talks about your own business – this isn’t a PR operation. Remember the guy in the bar that talks about himself non-stop - don’t be that guy!

Social is about being social! Don’t fall into the trap of talking at people. Ask questions, gather opinions, get answers, make connections. Add value.

4. Be patient
For me, my Twitter ramp up probably took 6 months. During that time I had plenty of times when I just didn’t get it and felt like giving up on the platform. It took that amount of time to find accounts that I had an interest in following (you can fast track with Vala’s Top 100!), to understand how to engage with the community and get the most from it. Today I see it as a learning platform, not the broadcast platform I thought it was.

Back to Social in Your Business
As you now go back to considering rolling out a social technology like Salesforce Chatter across your business, consider what you have learned through being on Twitter. If we just turn Chatter on, will they come? They might – but more than likely you will have the majority of your employees at the same stage you were pre-Twitter – What should I write, let’s talk about me, who should I follow, why is no-one else saying anything. So, what can you do to apply what you learned on Twitter to the context of your company?

5. Assemble a group of "reverse mentors"
The rest of your Exec team may not have had the Twitter epiphany you have experienced – so we need to fast track them. Look out into your employee base for keen social networkers and set up a reverse mentoring programme whereby they assist a named Exec with their social journey. Perhaps set up an hour every Friday morning when they can help them by drafting some posts or getting involved in conversations that have developed that week. Reinforce to your fellow Execs that there are no silly questions - “@mentions, hashtags - what are these exactly?”

6. Make it a learning platform
Make Chatter a learning platform by sharing relevant content to your employees. Perhaps go back over your Twitter feed and pull out a link per day to share. Provide regular, consistent insight on your industry, on career development, on competitors, on new technology. Make sure that when your first employees venture on to Chatter they find great content that they too want to share.

7. Ask questions
What is the best way to get someone to speak in real life? Ask them a question! So encourage the rest of your Exec team to use Chatter as a question platform.

1. “What’s happening with this customer?”
2. “Why was this campaign so successful?”
3. “What could we do to accelerate this plan?”
4. “Who should get recognised at the annual awards?”

Remember your Twitter journey and remember how hard those first few tweets were. Help your employees to make that first step and you’ll be ahead of most companies when it comes to turning your organisation social!

I hope these tips will help you in your social journey. For more detail, take a look at this McKinsey article, Six social media skills every leader needs. If you have any questions then feel free to tweet us @appirio or @iamcharliecowan.

Charlie Cowan is part of the Appirio team in London helping large enterprises achieve rapid business value by transforming their businesses with public cloud technologies. You can follow Charlie on Twitter or connect with him on LinkedIn.

CloudSpokes - The World’s Largest & Most Productive Cloud Computing Workforce

2013-02-14T10:47:00.001-08:00

Happy Two Year Anniversary … Looking Forward to Changing the Industry By Our 20th Year

By Chris Barbin (@c_barbin)

Two years ago today on Valentine’s Day, Appirio set the world up on a date with CloudSpokes - the first crowdsourcing platform and community focused purely on public cloud application and platform development. This news was met with both excitement and, not surprisingly, a fair bit of skepticism.

Since that day, CloudSpokes has turned even some of the biggest skeptics into believers. Today CloudSpokes has more than 70,000 developers and design specialists across 100+ countries. Some of the leading pure-play cloud providers - from Salesforce.com and Amazon, to Box and Docusign - are already using CloudSpokes in some way.

When we started Appirio, we knew with cloud services, the services industry was ripe for disruption. In our original thesis, Services 2.0 in April 2007 we actually stated:

“In Services 2.0, micro-projects and use of extensive social networks such as open source communities...dramatically shortens cycle times and increases the reach for talent outside a single GSI.”

So when we created CloudSpokes, we knew it had the potential to be disruptive. Disruptive to the traditional systems integration firms that have to hire, train and ultimately bill their clients for the hundreds of consultants it takes to deliver on large projects. Disruptive to the vendors who until now had to spend extensive time and money to build out their own developer ecosystems. And even disruptive to our own team and business model. Just like SaaS solutions themselves, we believe the cost and value of our services should get better every year.

Today, a large number of our consultants are using CloudSpokes day in and day out to deliver innovative solutions to our customers - as proof of concepts in the sales process, to find specialized talent that may not be immediately available, or to simply find creative solutions to tough problems. Enterprises and ISVs are using CloudSpokes to extend their own internal teams, deliver results faster and for a fraction of the cost. It’s become routine to see cases where a project has been delivered 3x as fast for half the cost that a previous project was delivered.

The CloudSpokes community has created 500+ assets, mobile applications, components and even delivered entire projects on behalf of some of the most demanding customers in the world. It has been a huge differentiator for Appirio and is creating an even bigger impact as an independent community. Universities, ISVs and some of the largest companies in the world are using CloudSpokes to find and train talent, build products and solutions, and more.

Developers are benefiting too - I love hearing stories from individuals who are using the platform to learn new skills or escape the boredom of traditional enterprise development. Those who are using their winning to buy a new car or start their own dream business. There are some we’ve heard from who have turned down jobs at some very well known brands to focus on their participation in CloudSpokes.

Crowdsourcing and platforms like CloudSpokes are the ‘multi-tenancy ‘ of consulting services and will be for the coming decades. Traditional GSI’s like Accenture, Deloitte, and even IBM have 200,000+ employees and I believe will struggle under their own weight to add an equivalent number in order to grow. Their attachment to their current business model is no different than on-premise software companies’ attachment to license revenue.

The freelance workforce, enabled by the internet, open source and the readily available tools and APIs that every up-and-coming SaaS, PaaS and IaaS provider delivers ‘out of the box’, is changing consulting and development forever.

While there may be many skeptics out there questioning things like quality, capacity, security and the like – these are the same skeptics that close to 20 years ago doubted offshoring …. what some consider a $300B market opportunity today. Twenty years from now, crowdsourcing will be as common a word, but instead of it being just developers in India and China, it will also be your kids, and their kids, delivering innovation and applications in the comfort of their own homes – and vacation homes – from around the world.