Content & Collaboration

MacBook Air: The Ultra Ultrabook And Business Windows, Too

Ted Schadler — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:27:54 +0000

I've been testing the MacBook Air for five months now. I use it for work and for home. At work, I run our corporate image Windows XP with the attendant applications and security software in a Parallels virtual machine. At home, I run the Mac side. After a few hiccups with the security software going haywire in our corporate image (thanks to the Parallels support team and to our own IT client and network security team for help), it's been a great experience.

I don't need to wax poetic about just how good the MacBook Air itself is. Plenty of testers have already explained just what makes the MacBook Air the ultra ultabook. See Engadget, CNET, Fortune. (And of course ultrabooks were all the rage at CES this year, see HP's showcased by Serena in Gossip Girl and Dell's XPS 13.)

But I do need to describe my experience with this travel-friendly, totally modern, and practical combination of hardware and software. I'll then also point out some things that are still challenging in using the MacBook Air in a Windows-centric business world. First, the experience in four bullets:

An Investment Strategy Checklist For RIM's New CEO, Thorsten Heins

Ted Schadler — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:35:30 +0000

RIM co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis have stepped aside to let a new leader pilot RIM through the straits. Thorsten Heins, a hardware executive from Siemens, has been COO for about a year now. Welcome, Mr. Heins, to a rough sea and dark night. But there is light in the depths of the hold. (Okay, enough ship references. Down to business.)

Here's the straight story: RIM has been focused on the wrong assets for the past three years, competing in a consumer market against the most powerful consumer brands in the world and suffering from tablet night terrors. It's not working. Forrester's data is clear: Based on a survey of 5,000 US information workers in May 2011, RIM's share of employee smartphones has dropped from around 90% to only 42% in the US in the past three years. Apple and Android together now have 48% of that installed base.

Stop fighting the consumerization battle. Fight a battle that takes advantage of what made RIM a fabulous company in the first place: its secure data delivery network. Here's the differentiated asset analysis:

With this analysis in hand, the challenge and the opportunity become clear. It's the business and government IT relationships and the RIM secure global data network that differentiate RIM products and services, not the consumer market demand. No other mobile supplier in the market has foreign governments asking for access to its data network in the interest of their national security. (That government interest is a good thing -- it signals just how potent RIM's network is.)

Based on that asset analysis, here is an investment checklist with a focus on differentiation and customer value. Thorsten and team should prioritize investments that answer yes to these questions. Does the investment:

Yes, Gamification Can Help Your Business Internally

TJ Keitt — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 15:06:50 +0000

Happy New Year, everyone. As I customarily do, I'm looking back on 2011 with an eye toward emerging trends that bear watching. In the latter half of last year, I started to receive a lot of questions from content & collaboration professionals and journalists regarding gamification. The fuel for this undoubtedly comes from businesses' burgeoning love affair with gaming dynamics in consumer web marketing efforts (chronicled by Forrester here, here, here, and here). The questions I get, though, are from individuals looking to understand if gamification has business uses outside of enticing consumers to engage more deeply with the company.

As an analyst who has covered serious gaming (the use of games and gaming dynamics to teach, change attitudes and behaviors, and inspire action) for five years, these inquiries bring a smile to my face. As you may guess, my answer to these interested parties is, "Of course you can use gamification to enhance other processes in your business." My confidence in gamification's utility to internal business processes comes from the fact that, at its core, this is an old idea in business. You might have just said "huh?" Permit me a moment to explain.

"iMessage Killed The SMS Star"

Ted Schadler — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 22:54:42 +0000

Yeah, the tune is playing in my head. Video Killed the Radio Star. But in this case, it's Apple's iMessage service that's killing the SMS cash cow. For those of you haven't experienced it yet, check out this picture.

It's my riding buddy Joe sending me a text message, or in this case, an iMessage. The blue box is the giveaway -- it came over Apple's texting service, not AT&T's SMS service. It's "free." That is, it travels over the Internet, not the SMS network, and it's free on Wi-Fi or included in my wireless data plan. And while I have unlimited texting, I do pay $30/month for the family plan, about $0.10/message last month. (I know, some of you text so much that it's probably a penny a message or less.)

So, let's do the math:

100 million iOS users.

Sending 50 messages a month to another iOS user. (iOS users move in packs.)

Each person pays for the SMS message, so that's 100 messages per person.

Each SMS message costs (let's say) $0.05.

So 100,000,000 iOS users x 100 iMessages/month x $0.05/message = $500,000,000/month.

Said another way, that's $6B taken out of the SMS value chain by the iOS iMessage service every year. Then there's the BlackBerry Messenger service for inter-BlackBerry messages. And the Magic SMS app for iPhone and Android. And probably a hundred other SMS alternatives that I'll never know about. Add it all up, and 10 billion dollars in SMS value (not revenue) could be siphoned off to the wireless data market in 2013.

FAUT Fights FAHQT In Battle To Beat Babel -- On Translation Services

Tim Walters — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 18:07:32 +0000

The first in a series on translation services.

The machines created this mess; let them clean it up.

On the one hand, enterprises need to make ever more content available in multiple languages. As I noted in my last post on translation, the drivers include the flood of content generated online (much of it created by consumers), the growing importance of business in emerging markets, and the desire to enable global collaboration among employees. On the other hand, advances in machine translation and new approaches such as crowdsourcing are making translation ever faster and less expensive. This is no fortunate coincidence: The very computing dynamics that enabled the Web and especially Web 2.0 -- rapid increases in processor speed, cheap storage, and high-speed networks, combined with social technologies -- also empower the latest technology-based solutions to translation and localization.

What it means (WIM): Computers have allowed us to create a problem that only computers can help solve.

This is the first of an irregular series of blog posts on how technical advances, new solution paradigms, and evolving client needs are changing translation services and providers (TSPs). I'll begin by offering a select glossary of some of the unfamiliar terms end users encounter when they begin to investigate translation services.

MT: Machine Translation, which simply means the use of computing technologies and software to assist with the translation of content (usually text, but voice recognition is of growing importance) from one language ("the source") to another ("the target"). Machine translation takes two primary forms, namely:

Email: Threat Or Menace?

Tim Walters — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 21:27:43 +0000

A specter is haunting the enterprise -- the specter of email. Where is the knowledge worker who has not felt the oppressive weight of email overload? Where is the business leader who has not complained bitterly of the wastefulness and productivity drain?

Two things result from this situation:

I. Email is depicted as a disease that must be eradicated, or a foe to be defeated.

II. Vendors and consultants offer fever reducers, defensive tactics, and visions of a utopian future free of email.

Last week the English language news sites were atwitter (in both senses) with the announcement by Atos CEO Thierry Breton that the French technology company intends to ban internal email usage among its 74,000 employees within 18 months. Perhaps thanks to my last blog post on email, The Independent called for an interview on "the death of email." The BBC did a radio debate, but obstinately refused to change their programming to accommodate my schedule.

(I say English language because Breton's announcement was duly covered in French and German when he first made it last February. So much for a flat world and instant global communications.)

Some Thoughts On Digital Strategy And The Four Technologies Driving It

Ted Schadler — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:06:17 +0000

I've been hearing a lot about digital strategy and digital transformation lately. (Is that what they call a tech meme?) To my ears, it sounds like a good way to get technology people and business people together to answer four important technology questions:

1. How do I serve customers and employees on the mobile device of their choice? This one becomes even more important as smartphone and tablet adoption soars. In the US, we at Forrester expect based on our surveys that over a third of smartphones are and will be used for work and over half of tablets will be, too. Consumerization rules this roost.

What it means: Mobile devices are yet another digital touchpoint for marketing, sales, service, and product teams to master. But of course multi-touchpoint means that things must work well on all digital devices and channels: mobile, Web, social, and video.

2. How do I harness social technology for the good of customers and business productivity? IBM and Salesforce.com are betting big that social business will drive technology investment. And of course it will, though not without a fair amount of soul searching into the real sources of value on the part of business and technology people.

Update On Cisco's Collaboration Strategy

Philipp Karcher — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:41:30 +0000

Special thanks to Art Schoeller, TJ Keitt, Henry Dewing, and Ted Schadler for their input

I went to Cisco's Collaboration Summit last week to hear the latest from the various product teams and some of their marquee customers. Much of the story remains the same: Cisco continues to dominate in video and web conferencing; it is taking strong steps in the right direction but still has a lot of work ahead to deliver a cohesive collaboration platform with the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and Google:

Check Out An Enterprise Architect's View Of Consumerization Technologies

Ted Schadler — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 20:30:40 +0000

My colleague Gene Leganza has pulled off a consumerization coup for enterprise architects (EAs) and those who work with them. EAs must wrestle with the best way to harness the innovation of HEROes -- highly empowered and resourceful operatives (the protagonist of our book Empowered) -- while protecting the long-term interests and technology strategy of your company. To do so, they need to assess and come up with a strategy for the major consumer technologies coming in through the employee door.

Gene has done a real service to categorize and deliver a strategic assessment on the most important consumerization technologies, including business collaboration, file sync, tablets, and self-service business intelligence. He did this using Forrester's TechRadar methodology in a report titled, "TechRadar For Enterprise Architect Professionals: Technologies For Empowered Employees: Q4 2011." For content & collaboration professionals, this TechRadar includes an assessment of business collaboration, a category fueled by employee-purchased technologies such as Google Docs, Smartsheets.com, and Huddle.

How To Avoid The Mobile Goat Rodeo

Ted Schadler — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 14:30:01 +0000

Mobility in the enterprise is a goat rodeo waiting to happen. Are any of these things going on in your company?

Building customer mobile apps that don't tie into the .com site.
Coding for iPhones while leaving Android phones unserved.
Forcing a session login to a mobile collaboration app that keeps employees from bothering.
Locking down employee devices when email is the only app on it.
Failing to have the network and hardware to handle an explosion in transaction volume.

If so, you're not alone. It's natural in a fast-moving environment to tackle things piecemeal in the hope that you can handle the problems later. But that approach leads to chaos and confusion and lack of coordination. And that can lead to huge problems that are happening already or are lurking just behind the goat rodeo gate.

It's time to take a deep breath, call an offsite meeting, and put a mobile strategy playbook together. In a recent report for Forrester customers, Building An Operations Stairway To The Mobile Future, my colleagues and I mashed together seven things that have to come together to make mobile operations work. It's not the full chapter list in the playbook, but it's a good operational start.

With Endeca, In Effect Oracle Gets Two Technologies For The Price Of One

Leslie Owens — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:38:15 +0000

In 2007 Larry Elison said: "We think the paradigm for doing business, how people do their daily jobs is changing and is moving to a search paradigm." For years Oracle has worked on weaving its search functionality into and across Oracle applications. It's called Secure Enterprise Search (SES) and it's invisible to Content & Collaboration (C&C) professionals because it's inside the Fusion platform, rarely sold as a standalone solution. With SES integrated in Oracle products, Oracle envisions "action-oriented" enterprise search. What does that look like? When workers don't just search for pending expense reports, they also can pay them from the search UI.

When search is an embeddable service, it makes it easier to use search to get tasks done. This is why I think infrastructure vendors (HP, Oracle, Microsoft, Dassault) acquiring specialized vendors (Autonomy, Endeca, Fast, and Exalead, respectively) is a good thing for C&C professionals. What's missing from these marriages? Semantic search capabilities -- where search surfaces unstated concepts and allows users to visualize the patterns and trends locked inside volumes of text. (IBM is one to watch for this vision -- a leader in BI, they have recently commingled their search and content analytics technology to create a new product.)

SlideShark Solves The Present PowerPoint-On-iPad Problem

Ted Schadler — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 11:27:23 +0000

I spend a lot of time delivering PowerPoint presentations, pitching ideas and data and hopefully some pizzazz and inspiration. And that means I'm lugging my 7-pound laptop and 1-pound charger around, projecting via a dodgy VGA cable with doubtful video qualities, and mouseclicking my way through the story. It's all good because it's all I've ever known. And it beats swapping foils on an overhead projectors. (Why do they call those transparencies foils??)

But, sometimes it would be so much more convenient for me to toss my 1.3-pound iPad2 sans charger into a small bag, hop on the US Airways Shuttle to New York, and pitch the deck while leaving the laptop and charger at home. And if it's true for me, then it has to be true for your iPad-totin' sales teams.

Until now, I've not found a decent PowerPoint solution on iPad. As much as I believe that Microsoft will eventually offer PowerPoint on iPad, I need an answer now. Apple's Keynote requires a big adjustment for me (and for the rest of my ecosystem), and PDF rendering kills the thrill of PowerPoint builds and messes up my storytelling punchlines.

Then along comes SlideShark from online presentation vendor Brainshark. It's animation-complete, hassle-free, PowerPoint-on-iPad (PoiP). So far it works like a champ.

Brainshark is known for its ability to host presentations with voiceover and other stuff as a way to train sales folks and others online and on mobile devices. The company has been around since 1999 and has won over many enterprise customers. Their favorite factoid is, and I quote, "A Brainshark is created every 3 minutes and viewed every 2.5 seconds, with over 1 million views/month."

Steve Jobs: The Accidental Architect Of Consumerization

Ted Schadler — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:39:36 +0000

Okay, so maybe it was Steve Jobs's plan all along. To make tools so profoundly useful and totemic that everybody wants one. But surely in the dark days of the 1990s and early 2000s, nobody could have seen that Steve Jobs and Apple would overtake the enterprise. But it happened.

First was iPod. After an enthusiastic start restricted to a few million Macintosh aficionados, Apple ported iTunes to Windows and suddenly 100 million people were using iPods. And a new gadget was weighting down the pockets of business travelers and everyday employees. And then it wasn't so heavy after all as Apple volume-priced the flash memory market and shank the gadget to nano size.

Consumerization whispered, "I'm coming." IT wasn't too worried, but it did scramble to keep iTunes off of corporate desktops. [It didn't matter. People have computers at home.]

Next was iPhone. In the winter of 2008 before there was even an App Store, the guy behind the pizza counter at The Upper Crust in Lexington was swiping at his iPhone revealing page after page of colorful icons. When I asked him what that little swipey motion was all about, he replied, "Oh, these are apps. Games and instant messaging and movies and stuff. I get 'em off the Internet. There are hundreds of them." And I (and Apple) knew that the world had changed. Steve Jobs and team launched the App Store so tens of thousands of developers could build hundreds of thousands of applications. And make billions of dollars selling their work.

Consumerization knocked on the door saying, "I'm here and I want to get email on my iPhone." IT said no way and kept buying BlackBerrys.

Oracle Makes Their Play For Social Enabled Business Processes

TJ Keitt — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 17:16:43 +0000

On Wednesday afternoon, Oracle's Larry Ellison unveiled the Oracle Social Network. The fact that he did so on the same stage Marc Benioff used in San Francisco's Moscone Center to announce Salesforce Chatter's centricity to the "social enterprise" won't go unnoticed, and not simply for all of the not-so-subtle shots Mr. Ellison took at his former colleague's outfit. For content & collaboration professionals, the thing to note about these dual announcements is they mark, along with IBM's "social business" strategy, an attempt by vendors to make social software relevant to the entire workforce by tying them into specific business processes.

Corporate IT Is Not Dead

Matthew Brown — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 03:30:41 +0000

Last week the New York Times Bits blog published an article with some recent Forrester data we published entitled "IT Departments Lose Their Clout Over Phone Choices" here. The article got all the data facts right about people provisioning their own technology, but I was kinda surprised by some of the virulent comments people posted about the article. The first commenter claimed: "This is the beginning of the end of the corporate IT department."

Really? I'm not sure why people jump to this conclusion when they hear the word "IT consumerization," but I've seen it more than once before. I think it's really naive. People typically support this "death of IT" viewpoint with assertions like: 1.) technology is getting easier to use; 2.) people are getting smarter about how to use tech; and 3.) IT people just get in the way. The first and second points are accurate: technology *is* getting easier to use and provision, and generally speaking, our data indicates every generation is getting more tech savvy. That's a good thing we should all celebrate because it likely means lower costs for low value stuff that IT people must do today (e.g. resetting passwords, installing software, distributing software patches, fixing machines, etc.). But to assume this is the only role of IT people shows profound ignorance. And considering consumerization (read the influence of Google, Apple, etc.) has been with us for at least five years and the corporate IT job market has fared better than most occupations, there seems to be no basis in fact that IT is growing less necessary as consumerization rises.

Content & Collaboration

MacBook Air: The Ultra Ultrabook And Business Windows, Too

An Investment Strategy Checklist For RIM's New CEO, Thorsten Heins

Categories:

Yes, Gamification Can Help Your Business Internally

"iMessage Killed The SMS Star"

FAUT Fights FAHQT In Battle To Beat Babel -- On Translation Services

Categories:

Email: Threat Or Menace?

Categories:

Some Thoughts On Digital Strategy And The Four Technologies Driving It

Update On Cisco's Collaboration Strategy

Check Out An Enterprise Architect's View Of Consumerization Technologies

How To Avoid The Mobile Goat Rodeo

With Endeca, In Effect Oracle Gets Two Technologies For The Price Of One

SlideShark Solves The Present PowerPoint-On-iPad Problem

Steve Jobs: The Accidental Architect Of Consumerization

Oracle Makes Their Play For Social Enabled Business Processes

Corporate IT Is Not Dead