Moreover, when asked, “How much revenue will come from your awareness campaign?” you struggle for an answer. That’s because it’s the wrong question. If this is a familar scenario, read on.

A survey conducted by Kellogg School’s Mark Jeffrey, reveals that leading CMOs spend twice as much on marketing (10% revenue) as laggards (who spend 4-5%). Leaders also consistently outspend laggards on awareness marketing. 

But what is really interesting are the next two data points from Jeffrey’s study:

1 – Marketers -  across the board – spend 50% marketing budgets on demand generation activities (true for both consumer and b2b).

2 – Laggards outspend leaders on demand generation yet underperform when it comes to growth, share and profitability. B2B demand generation campaigns, especially those preceded by no awareness marketing, are also well known for getting pitiful response rates (often in the 2-5% range).

Two things we can conclude:

> Laggards spend more on demand generation, but get less return, in the belief that they can magically omit the awareness phase of the buy cycle. However, it looks like their magic isn’t working.

> People won’t buy your product if they have no awareness of it; (ask your CEO the probability of buying a $100,000 automobile he/she knows nothing about). Products that have high top-of-mind recall outperform those that don’t. Recall of course, can’t happen without awareness marketing.

Two weeks after JC Penney lauched its now-famous awareness ad, “We Heard You, Now We’d Like to See You,” door swings (the predecessor to retail purchases) increased 30%. Conversation on the social web increased 414%. Both are good news:  You’ve got to get people talking about you if they’re going to come see you – and make a purchase. So while the JC Penney ad hasn’t been linked quite yet to revenue, it’s driven people into its stores. Revenue will likely follow.

The big challenge of course: measuring awareness. You can hire Interbrand (or any number of agencies) to conduct an expensive brand awareness survey or you can track some of the typical metrics used to assess awareness.

• Is the number of attendees at your events and webinars increasing?  If so, you’ve increased awareness.
• Are you generating more traffic to the web site?  If not, awareness could be stagnant or declining (check out the awareness campaigns of your primary competitor).
• Are you getting more inbound inquires?  Or are inbound inquires constant, in which case awareness is stagnant or you’re losing interest to a competitor that is rustling up awareness.
• Are visitors downloading your white paper at a constant or increasing rate? If the latter, you’ve likely increased awareness. Same with free trial downloads.
• Are web site visitors coming from blogs and discussion boards where you’re actively joining conversations? Is so, your awareness activities are working.

Another metric of course is the “test drive” which can be free product usage for a limited time (which is how Salesforce gained so much initial traction), or free downloads. Auto dealers for example know of (and track) the relationship between test drives and future sales.  All marketers can follow this practice and use awareness campaigns to drive prospects to test drives or trials (which is the next logical phase of the buy cycle, aka “Evaluation”).

The biggest challenge in measuring retun on campaigns specifically designed for awareness is the time delay between their launch – and their actual impact on revenue. It could be weeks, months or even years (Audi has started taking share from BMW, but it happened years after launching its multiple awareness campaigns).

Hence, financial metrics do not work particularly well when justifying awareness campaigns. So my final word of advice: use metrics cited above to measure indicators of future sales. Applying financial metrics like ROI, o awareness investments, will only get you in trouble.

Reference: Mark Jeffery (Kellogg School of Management) surveyed 254 mraketing executives with average marketing budgets of $222 million. You can see the results of his entire study in Data-Driven Marketing, John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

So does all this discussion of colour palettes and iconography point to an appreciation of UX design by IT’s digerati?

Nope! Not as I see it.

In fact, I’d argue the week’s icon madness indicates that too much of the IT world is still entrenched in the view that great UX is synonymous with great graphic design.

The man himself, Steve Jobs, once said, “Design is not just what it looks and feels like. Design is how it works.” Missing from most of the post-WWDC conversation has been much insight into the way these design changes fundamentally make individual apps, collection of apps, or the devices they operate on work better.

I’ve been spending a bit of time going through the presentations from the WWDC. I must say, there is some impressive stuff that Apple is doing for the design and developer community. The new system font is beautiful and the dynamic type capability in UIKit is some serious goodness. There’s the new App Switcher and it’s relationship with the improved multitasking capabilities. The motion effects, in my opinion, are a marvel of engineering.

What’s much less clear is how Apple’s new objectives of clarity, deference (which Microsoft describes with their Modern UI as “content over chrome”), and depth – design themes that the new UIKit is being engineered to support – enable a new style of app experience. Experience, mind you, in the how it works sense…not the look and feel sense.

When I search for clues in Apple’s own apps, the feeling I get is that the upholstery on the furniture has changed, but the room’s purpose and layout is the same as it always was. Adding depth as a new dimension to app design seems to me to have profound long term potential. But if it’s primarily demonstrated at the top level of the operating system by floating icons above your wallpaper, then we have something which will rapidly descend into ho-hum ornamentation. Maybe Calendar and Notes isn’t the right place to highlight this stuff…but surely there’s something that can.

My intention is not to be critical of Apple. After all, Microsoft is having the same issues with Windows 8.

Their Modern UI pre-dates Apple’s drive towards a typographic experience. It’s one thing to tell designers and developers to clear out the chrome. It’s another thing to articulate how content itself becomes the engaging, interactive raison d’être of an app. Here again, when we look to compelling examples from Microsoft’s own apps, we’re left wanting. Semantic zoom is a great UX innovation. But isolated in a handful of included apps it’s difficult to sense it’s potential.

As a result of all this, the conversation about Microsoft’s new design language has been derailed. Like Apple, it’s largely about icons, which in Microsoft’s case are their Live Tiles…along with how users must lurch back-and-forth between the new Start screen and old desktop.

The point is that UX is too easily seen as the look and feel stuff. And the more time we spend on colour palettes and icons the less nuanced our understanding of what these design languages can and should do to  software and services.  Ultimately, the onus is on all mobile operating platform providers to offer some steak along with the sizzle. They need to show us how their UX vision translates into a new experience with practical examples. In Microsoft’s case, they need a much bigger commitment by their own product groups outside the Windows team to embrace and deliver solutions that take full advantage of their Modern UI. In Apple’s case, I’d love it if they’d apply clarity, deference and depth as one part of a strategy to re-inflate their cloud service offerings.

Ultimately, I’m hoping that we can all shift gears and ignore the icons for a while and think about what will happen when we tap on them.

To paraphrase William Shakespeare, “what’s in an icon, that an app by any other should work as well.” Indeed!

Now, with the launch of Instart Logic, there’s a fourth technique, that I don’t yet have a name for. In spirit, it’s probably most similar to a SoftWOC, but in this case, the client endpoint is the browser, and the symmetric remote endpoint is the CDN server. The techniques are also different from typical SoftWOC techniques, as far as I know.

From the perspective of an Instart Logic customer, they’re getting a dynamic acceleration service that, from a deployment perspective, is much like a CDN. For most customers, it would entirely replace using a traditional CDN (rather than being additive) — i.e., they would buy this instead of buying Akamai DSA or a similar service. Note that this is a performance play, not a price play — Instart Logic expects that they’ll be in the ballpark of typical dynamic acceleration pricing, and that performance carries a market premium.

The techniques used in the service are intended to dramatically improve load times, especially on congested networks; this is particularly useful in mobile, but it is not mobile-specific. As with FEO, the goal is to allow the end-user to quickly see and interact with the content while the remainder of the page is still downloading.

On the client side, there’s what they call a “NanoVisor” — an HTML5-based thin virtualization layer that runs in the browser. If Instart Logic is full-proxying the customer’s site, the NanoVisor code can simply be injected; otherwise the customer can insert the code into their site. It requires no other changes to the customer’s site. The NanoVisor provides intelligence about the end-user and serves as the client endpoint for the optimization.

On the server side, the “AppSequencer” analyzes page content, and it fragments and orders objects that are then streamed to the NanoVisor. It does large-scale analysis of usage patterns, and it predictively sends things based on the responses that it’s seen before. There’s compression and network optimization techniques, as well as implicit caching.

Like other recent innovators in the CDN space, Instart Logic is predominantly a software company. Whlie they do have servers of their own, they are also using a variety of cloud IaaS providers for capacity. They’re also using Dyn for DNS.

Instart Logic has raised a significant amount of money, almost purely from top-tier VCs — $26 million to date. I think their technology is very promising, which probably means they’ll get a bit of time to prove themselves out and then they’ll get bought by one of the CDNs looking to get an edge on the competition, or maybe even an ADC or WOC vendor.

Instart Logic’s demos are impressive, and they’ve got paying customers at this point, although obviously they’re newly-launched. While it always takes time to build trust in this industry, at this point they’re worth checking out, and I’ve been referring Gartner clients to them ever since I was briefed by them while they were still in stealth mode, a few months back. They’re potentially an excellent fit for customers who are looking for something beyond what DSA-style network optimization offerings can do, but either do not want to do FEO, have reached the limits of what FEO can offer them, or simply want to explore alternatives.

This is a slightly longer book review than I normally do since the topic of the book is relevant to parts of my coverage area, and also a hot topic for many parts of Gartner.

If you are an avid reader of books touting how IT enables innovation, transformation, or paradigm shifts, you’ll probably put this on your shelf.  The CEO and CTO of Razorfish capture most of the current thinking around how technology is changing the face of marketing.  There is much to like in the book.  The authors rightly focus on trends related to “markets of one” (nod to Jeff Woods, formally of Gartner, now SAP) that imply a massive shift in approaches to brand management and marketing strategies.  There is also an effective dialog about agile, and how agile marketing is in fact the key point.  Long gone are static models and approaches; the call is for a more active, dynamic marketing strategy – across a collection of agencies and skill providers.  There is some good background on what holds many firms back (e.g. silos and the wrong metrics) but there are gaps that are not filled – a talk about single version of the customer but noting about how this is achieved (Master Data Management).  For IT geeks in marketing, the book includes a write up of all the latest concepts, from the South Korean “shopping wall” (versus shopping mall) to personal devices increasing the amount of data about us that marketers could use.

The sections on cloud overstep the mark.  The speed and benefit of attributed to “cloud” should properly be attributed to (commoditized) ubiquitous CPU and processing capability coupled with innovative, unique service concepts (what Razorfish seeks to add).  Cloud – whatever that is meant to mean, does not provide innovation on tap.  The section on agile methodology is excellent; and the section on change management is predictable.

Some other topics are not new at all – and better handled in other books.  Some of my favorites are:

• Brand management: Corporate Religion, Kunde, Prentice Hall, 2000
• Product platform strategy (over product strategy): The Power of Product Platforms: Building Value and Cost Leadership, Meyer & Lehnerd, Free Press, 1997; Product Strategy for High-Technology Companies, McGrath, McGraw Hill, 1995

There are also gaps in the book.  The topic covered is fast changing – at Gartner we strive to remain on top of all things IT so publishing a book (itself a legacy concept?) brings relevancy risks.  In the section on big data, there is no reference to the growing challenge of governance and the shift “from truth to trust”.  In the sections on ubiquitous computing and the quantified self (talk with my colleague Frank Buytendijk on this), there is too much hype about the fledgling tools and technologies mentioned– many of themhave numerous stability, maintenance and reliability issues in the field.  Just go to the vendor sites and read their community blogs.

Overall a good, reasonably up to date view on what the Chief Digital Officer should be thinking about.  But readers need to read this quick, keep it as a reference, and get onto the latest Gartner research on the topic.  My colleage Yvonne Genovese is leading uor thinking on this new role.  Recommended 8 out of 10.

http://ahmetalpbalkan.com/blog/8-months-microsoft/

Reaction to Mr. Balkan’s post usually ends up in one of two camps:

“Disgruntled Employee Land” – Can you believe this guy? He ain’t working at Microsoft much longer

-or -

“What’s News Here?” – Welcome to my world.   Sadly, nothing here is any different than my experience in any  large company…

I will not assess the accuracy or validity of his comments – much less whether it is even true at Microsoft.  But I will say that I have heard much of these complaints (or are they observations?) before.

Let me rephrase this in more common every-day F500 speak, focused mainly on IT:

Expect no documentation in corporations. Unfortunately, speed doesn’t kill, it sells.  And documentation is the first to go.  Sometimes this is euphemistically called “write code that documents itself”.

It is not what you do, it is what you sell.  Any first year hire will often complain that the first person promoted is not on merit (best coder, smartest, able to leap large Turing tests in a single bound), but the guy who shows well and has great convincing skills, no matter how wrong the thing he is selling.  Our research found this in context of the negativity by ITers towards the term “marketing”. .

Sure, some of that is lack of perspective. Some of it is sour grapes; some of it is true, too.

Not everybody is passionate for engineering. In a typical F500 IT shop that has 500 software engineers, I’d say the odds are pretty good that a certain percentage have 1) become jaded 2) have other outside interests in addition to their 9-5, 3) there are other pasisons that engineers can find: management, architecture, etc etc. and 4) understand the oft-repeated business euphemism “don’t let the excellent be the enemy of the good”.   All of that can be interpreted as a “lack of passion” – especially by the supposed passionate person on a fast track to disappointment.

2-3 hours of coding a day is great.  plus 2-3 hours of meetings, and then 2-3 hours of analysis/think time.  Add in email, HR duties, self appraisals, peer appraisals, company videos, benefits sign-ups, etc etc etc …Yeah, that’s about right, and a fairly universal complaint.   Just look at our research – projects don’t fail because of lack of technical skills – so 2-3 hours may, in fact, be just right…

Not giving back to the public domain is a norm.  Duh.  Time to market, IP, competitive pressure.  There is a reason copyright has been extended to 120 years from 75 years during our lifetime…

The world outside is not known here a lot.  Most corporations are so internally focused they limit “strategic thinking” to a select few.  It’s time that changed (see our research on becoming a contextual strategist).

It is all about getting s%*t done in corporations.   I have heard this every day my whole career.  And its true.

Copy-pasting code can be okay.   We in IT development call it “reusability”.  We even automate this in our code management systems.  The day of handmade, single use anything is long gone.

Code reviews can be skipped, for the sake of agility. Sad but true.  See #1 . The dark side of the misinterpretation of agility.  Even agile development, with scrums and sprints, has a very real potential to degenerate (Jack’s first law of management oversight: Orderly processes inexorably degenerate toward a greater state of disorder if you let them).

Latest software, meh. Dear reader, please check your version of Outlook or browser of choice.  In fact, we in Gartner have classified this into type A, B, C companies.  (it’s a bell curve).  By the way, B’s are not on the latest software, at least not first.

Your specialties usually do not matter.  Stock advice for end user IT organizations: The era of the generalist…or what we affectionately call versatilists….

At the end, you are working for your manager’s and their managers’ paychecks. I was not aware of this fact in college.   Welcome to capitalism.  Otherwise incentive programs would not be structured the way they are.  In the last 500 years, the only progress we have made here was the dissolution of the monarchy (sometimes by revolution, and still not everywhere).  The supposed alternative (communism) either died or is in hiding….

Our Professional Effectiveness research takes these observations (and reactions) into context.  Like the presentation:
“ Why your next IT job may not be in “IT”  ” – coming to our Catalyst conference in San Diego at the end of July…

Welcome the real world kid.  Now get back to work.

 We find that some organisations are not actually ready to optimise costs. They might have a lack of visibility into current costs across the enterprise or a lack of executive level support for the cost optimisation initiative. The organisation might have a high proportion of fixed costs in IT, which means that costs often do not go down when business volume is reduced. They might be facing extreme resistance on the part of IT users to change the way they consume IT, such as accepting lower service levels, keeping PCs for longer or getting rid of redundant systems. Change management is a critical part of any ‘cost optimisation’ program.

 Many IT organisations have reached their logical limits as to how much more they can save using traditional cost optimisation tactics. They’ve already been through at least one round of cost cuts. It’s no longer enough to tinker around the edges, but instead time to make hard decisions about business units/agencies, business processes and programs. Round two of IT cost optimization is a story of big changes, strategic shifts, improved IT management practices, rightsizing IT service levels, “doing less with less,” better IT demand management and taking advantage of what new IT services the marketplace has to offer.

 Gartner sees four areas of opportunity for cost optimisation, ranked by level of difficulty as well as their potential to deliver value:

 IT procurement – make sure you are getting the best pricing and terms. Use public cloud services, pursue crowdsourcing for selected projects, use open source, negotiate better contracts.

1. Cost savings within IT – identify and prioritise ways to reduce IT costs. Can you extend the life of systems, reduce power use or consolidate your portfolio? Reward your team for cost saving innovations.
2. Joint business and IT cost savings – implement cost saving initiatives and improve business processes. How can we do things better, faster, cheaper and where can IT help?
3. Business restructuring and innovation – this is often dubbed ‘transformation’. Should you shut down or add channels, cancel high-risk programs, aggressively implement teleworking or provide cloud-based services rather than just consume them?

 The bottom line is that cost optimisation cannot be just a one-time project. It should be an ongoing process and discipline that cuts across all domains of IT and the business. Leading organisations run continuous cost optimisation initiatives and use IT to drive growth and innovation in the business. Leading CIOs raise enterprise effectiveness by running IT like a business. They raise the bar for IT’s performance in terms of responsiveness and productivity, and demonstrate IT’s value contributions to the enterprise.

 If this is a focus for you this year, come along to one of Gartner’s briefings around the Asia Pacific region on cost optimisation strategies to be held in June in Australia (Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane) and in July/August in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Seoul, Beijing, Taipei and Hong Kong.

IT Compliance Doesn’t Exist!

IT clearly has a significant amount of compliance work that it performs – no doubt about it, especially in highly regulated industries. IT, of course, exists solely to support business objectives. The compliance requirements that IT fulfills are derived from those business objectives. Here are a few quick examples:

• PCI compliance results from a business desire to accept payment via credit cards.
• IT and Information Security have a role in achieving overall SOX compliance, which results from an organizations status as a US based public corporation (and desire to remain so).
• IT requirements for HIPAA result directly from an enterprise need to process confidential healthcare data.

Yet, it seems that in many enterprises IT compliance is seen as separate from and in conflict with “meeting business requirements”. This is in spite of the fact that none of the examples above can be achieved without significant efforts from business partners themselves.

So, why is this interesting? In a word: “Resources” – time and money. In most organizations, funding and prioritization of compliance activities is very hard to come by. Much of this may be a perspective problem, as IT organizations often do not include compliance efforts in project prioritization processes side-by-side with other initiatives – that may be a lost opportunity.

Compliance is Risk Management – Just NOT YOUR Risk Management!

Compliance is not a substitute for risk management. Compliance requirements are the result of an external group’s anxiety regarding risk. Usually the external group is either a government body or large commercial concern. Let’s take a second look at the three examples from above:

• SOX is the result of anxiety over the risks of financial reporting errors and a response to a number of major corporate accounting scandals.
• PCI is the result of the payment card industry’s desire to ensure minimum standards for the safeguarding of payment card information and transactions.
• The HIPAA Privacy Rule is a direct result of concerns regarding the use (or misuse) of individual healthcare records by the general public.

In all of these cases, the compliance requirements are designed to address issues to reduce risk to a level that is tolerable by the government or commercial group. The fact that compliance requirements are designed to provide broad and general coverage often results in cases where enterprises could more effectively manage the risk using controls specific to their environment and situation. The fact that this is often not acceptable to examiners is a significant source of frustration.

The last decade has seen compliance mandates become more risk oriented and begin to include risk assessments and control design as a part of the compliance process. Regrettably, all too often new compliance requirements continue to come in the form a checklist.

There are few options available to us to improve the situation. Participation in regulatory rule making is a time consuming process that rarely contributes to success in our “day jobs”. Improving compliance and regulatory rule making is a long game, and the best thing for many enterprises to do is to share their risk management and control design approaches with examiners. Educating the examiners who often have significant influence over the rule making process make be the most productive approach.

Cheers, Erik

I was fortunate to attend and speak at the Gartner IT Operations Management (IOM) summit in Berlin, Germany. The event was wonderfully coordinated and saw about 30-40% growth in attendance, which is great on it’s third year. Kudos to the conference chairs and the team that put it together. I spoke about software defined networking (SDN) and the evolution within this market in the past 18 months, there were a lot of questions after this presentation. This is a hot topic in Europe as well as North America. I also presented with my colleague Vivek Bhalla on the use of application performance monitoring (APM) and how that intersects with Network Performance Monitoring (NPM), we went into depth explaining the overlap and the differences between both of these monitoring technologies. Look for more research on NPM to be announced shortly. The vendors had a good presence, and there was a lot of attendees investigating the vendors.  My 1:1s were excellent, but generally found that APM adoption and sophistication in Europe is below that in North America, something I also find on client inquiry calls.

Next week I will be attending the excellent Velocity conference which O’Reilly puts on, it’s a progressive audience and has lots of great performance and operations content. The week after Velocity I will be at Cisco Live in Orlando.

Look for updates on these conferences and several new research items to hit the web in the coming weeks.

A few years ago, we had seriously entertained the idea of creating a sort of ‘IT Buzz Term Hype Cycle’, that would map overused prefixes across trigger, hype, disillusionment, and productivity. At the time, ‘I-‘ had reached the peak of hyperfication.  Its not hard to envision a future in which the prefix ‘cyber’ goes the way of the dodo, trapped forever in a linguistic graveyard with the suffix ‘dot com’.

In Gartner, we actually do have a concept of cybersecurity, incorporating operational technology into a broader concept of digital domain protection.  It is also fair to say that many uses of the term cybersecurity connote, if not denote, the concept of offensive digital warfare.  I want to go on the record right now and say that we specifically do NOT recommend that commercial and non-profit users of digital technology develop hackback capabilities.

We live in a constant state of verbal inflation. I started my career in computer security, lived through long painful discussions on whether or not information security was a valid term, and have watched, without actually encouraging, adjectival divergence into information assurance, cybersecurity, and cyberassurance. 

All of these terms originally arrived with the best of intentions, bringing new concepts and connotations to a complex and changing cyber world. They inevitably turn into positioning playthings, as commercial entities and government agencies use the latest buzzterms to position themselves as being leaders—in something. Its anybody’s guess whether these various terms will evolve into sharply defined meanings not just for small specialty domains, but for the IT world in general.  

For the time being, if you want to ask us about cybersecurity, we are going to ask you to provide more details.  Are you military? Are you considered critical infrastructure and are you responsible for OT?  What is it that you want to protect from whom? 

Fresh terminology doesn’t necessarily mean that the old concepts were stale.

Today, digital marketing seems to be reaching a similar turning point. The days of a thousand point-solution venture-backed vendors are giving way to a period of complex consolidations, in which providers from different regions of marketing are converging on a common terrain of integrated, multichannel, data-driven, cloud-based digital marketing solutions – tied together by a central digital marketing hub. But they are challenged by a diversity of divisional buying centers within organizations struggling to connect the many marketing silos they’ve built while preserving a common sense of brand.

My colleague Bill Gassman and I wrote in a recent report (subscription required):

“There are many worlds of marketing: from online to offline, from inbound to outbound, and from agency to indigenous. Each faction has a role to play in the overall marketing efforts of an organization, but often each works in an isolated world of business goals, functions, metrics, tools and cultures. Even the lingo is different, to the point that discussions are difficult when different constituencies try to communicate or compare performance metrics. This is particularly true of the divide between advertising and marketing operations.”

The ad tech world, which has enjoyed a long run of investment inspired by the lucre of media and the success of Google and Facebook, would now recast itself as marketing tech and apply its programmatic solutions for advertising to a broader range of communications and decision support. Consider this speech, given at AdExchanger’s Programmatic I/O conference in April by John Nardone, CEO of [X+1], titled “The Programmatic CMO,” in which he presents the case for why DMP-like tools will move beyond advertising to marketing.

On the other side of town, in the web ops region tag management has taken root as the natural heir to web analytics, and companies such as Tealium have announced their own Tealium Data Cloud and Tealium Digital Marketing Hub products. In the data ops world, cloud-based providers like Anametrix are challenging big data incumbents with solutions positioned as universal marketing data hubs. And from marketing ops, lead management providers such as Marketo and Neolane have also staked rich claims, launched marketing hubs, and found new homes with buyers such as IBM and Teradata. Finally, social marketing and email marketing players are the latest groups to find favor with large software incumbents like Oracle and Salesforce.com who see gold in the application of their big data to marketing.

All of which begs the question, how do the natives – that is, digital marketers – cope with this influx of gilded fortune-seekers? They need a guide – someone who knows the changing territory. And perhaps some sort of map.

Another funny similar post: http://blog.whatwoulddando.com/2012/02/22/how-to-fail-at-vdi/

Follow me on twitter: @gunnarwb

We just published a note entitled Exploit the Intersect of IBM’s Social Business and Solution Selling Strategies. 

A part of that note, probably one quarter, dives into what has been fascinating me for many, many years. There’s only so many features you can stick into an email program or a content editing tool. Particularly if you’re text-centric. Where do we go after the 177th version of a personal productivity tool suite? The 34th iteration of instant messaging? The 500th document database? So much of what we’re doing now is reinventing and refining what we were already doing in the pre-client-server era. Back in the late 80′s at Digital Equipment, we had a vision and architecture for compound documents in GUI environments…how many more iterations of that do we really need?

There’s more coming, very different. It’s not a new kerning tool. Or the next great slide transition mechanism. It’s about the rise of smart assistants. Natural language processing. Semantic analysis. Massive parallelization. Rule-based systems with machine learning. Pattern recognition and matching. Marry that to the scale of what Google can do and what IBM, with Watson and co-development partners can do.

Start with Google. Witness, for example: 

Where is the next generation of customer engagement software? Software that is not a pile of stored procedures and database triggers, but truly intelligent, looking for the nexus of customer location, social connections, sentiment, mobile device that they are carrying or the state of the object they are interacting with. Something that is highly contextual that matches the customer’s intent – now and in the near future: the knowable but perhaps currently unknown to you – with the intent of the enterprise to win them over and serve them profitably over the long haul?

If you are candid with yourself, this is not the software that your company has procured from any of the core business application vendors. They are largely data regurgitators. Even if they are serving it up faster, in more locations, on more devices, and from the Cloud, it is still clueless about any of the new fundamentals that will guide customer relationships over the next ten years.

What is wrong? I think the Kinks put it best in Give the People What they Want:

Well, it’s been said before, the world is a stage
A different performance with every age.
Open up the history book to any old page
Bring on the lions and open the cage.

Give the people what they want

When we stop buying or subscribing to the latest version of the same stuff with a prettier interface, something might improve. However, most of us are gutting our internal IT resources and looking to the skies for help. Or the Cloud.

One point to raise on the issue of current-generation sales and support systems is on the efficacy of outcome from the end-user perspective. Not from an IT perspective and not from the narrow definition of near term shift from Capex to Opex – but from the perspective of: have your employees become more effective and have your customers become more engaged with you and your brand?  In the end, would these not be the gating factors to measure software success? Versus: wow, I deployed a Cloud solution.

There is an entire new crop of small startups delivering amazing capabilities in understanding intent, connections, importance/value, location, contextual information needs – and we are writing about them. For now, spend some time imagining how things might be better and look for niche technologies that will be disruptive to something very small in the enterprise. Try lots of little innovation projects with advanced analytical bolt-ons and see the world of new possibilities in customer engagement.

Anyone tried any yet?

To carry this metaphor to software development I think that I have seen at least three horsemen of the apocalypse in the last year:

• The Microsoft VisualStudio 2012 launch event where Microsoft talked about agile as much as their products.
• Gartner publishes “The End of the Waterfall as We Know It” (subscription required) declaring that the long term waterfall project model does not work.
• IBM’s Innovate conference this month where the focus was on DevOps which they defined as continuous development and delivery.

Agile is now mainstream and it has shifted from a grassroots revolution of developers to a management driven push to make IT departments more responsive. Those of us who have been involved in agile for a while can be forgiven for wondering if agile can survive the shift.

The way forward is to leverage this high level attention to push for the changes outside of the development teams that agile requires. Businesses know that they need IT to change, now is the time to explain how small short projects and better engagement between development and their customers can enable the responsiveness that the business needs.

(This photo was sourced from an article in Pysychology Today, which talks about leveraging your emotions to think logically.)
 

A friend of mine, Amrita Chandra, wrote a great blog post recently, about the importance of talking to customers.     She uses the example of a guy who bought a $3,000 mattress despite protesting that he did not want or need a $3000 matress.  As it turns out, the experience–how he felt on the mattress-drove the purchase.

While facts, whether gleaned with digital marketing tools or in other ways, are important pieces of the sales and marketing puzzle, “just the facts” doesn’t cut it.  Buyers make decisions for emotional, non-rational reasons.  The facts are often irrelevant in the final purchase decision.  

Every salesman and every marketer can appeal to buyers on an emotional level, even in a B2B setting—creating feelings and preferences that “just don’t make sense.”

I often like to say that you don’t always want to give customers what they want, sell them what they need (another twist on the Apple adage mentioned in Amrita’s post)–but that is not enough either.  Sometimes its about selling what makes them feel.  Feel Good..Feel Safe…Feel Smart…Feel Unique, etc.  Customer-centric messaging that is outcome oriented can often be linked along these emotional lines.  And it is a great way to standout in the crowd.

This is not about you as a sales rep or marketer stretching the truth (I am a big believer in Authenticity).  Its about you working with buyers to show how the “truth” or your solutions addresses emotional needs.

Just to recap, facts are important as they are usually the guideposts along buying decisions, but relying only on facts may leave you in the losing spot when the final decision is made.  Engage deeper with your buyers to understand their emotional interests and create authentic stories that appeal to those interests and see if your success rate grows.

Implementing Supply Chain Segmentation

We begin the webinar with findings from our 2013 CEO study in which we asked 180 CEOs in supply chain related industries about key strategic challenges.  Some of the findings were quite compelling:

Based on these challenges, we then share how you can use the supply chain as a competitive advantage in addressing these issues by integrating these three areas:

• 
• Customer segmentation — Understanding the unique requirements of different customers. Identifying clusters of similar demand across all customers, products and services that will dictate requirements for value chain capability.
• Supply chain segmentation — The process and governance to create differentiated capability for end-to-end supply chains to support unique demand requirements. Moving from one-size-fits-all supply chain management to managing a portfolio of supply chains that delivers upon different value characteristics such as speed, cost, service and differentiation, among others.
• Cost to serve — The ability to broadly and deeply understand supply chain costs and their relationship with the activities and services that drive them. A fact-based method for determining the appropriate service mix and operational model for each customer or product. Analytical capability to calculate the historical and forward-looking profitability of products, customers and routes to market.

We go into detail on this “Yes, but…” Value Chain model in the webinar and explain how it can address these key challenges identified by our CEOs.  The webinar is live on demand… and reminder that I am now on Twitter @psumattdavis

Bartering is nothing new in Latin America and this story illustrates how the government is obligating providers to change their business model try to negotiate increasingly stringent government regulations. It also illustrates the profound regional differences in software markets. As the chart below shows, Latin America accounts for a fraction of global enterprise software spending, but in many ways it’s where all the action is. Growth in software is strong, as is growth in related markets like IT services. Currency issues aside, many markets in Latin America can only go one way – up – and the recent surge in popularity of the cloud means that we can expect lots of deployments in the next couple of years. Latin America is a subject I’ll come back to in a future post, so watch this space…

Source: Gartner estimates

Back to governments. Anything that happens in the U.S. and Western Europe is likely to have a big effect on the overall software market. And things aren’t exactly rosy in those particular gardens, partly because of government policy. The spectre of sequestration in the U.S. and continued austerity measures in Europe are making everyone jittery, and people are reluctant to spend on anything, software included. It’s worth saying as an aside that, with software, it’s all in the detail: CRM offerings are enjoying growth well above average, and social software is still a surefire way to make money. But the skewed nature of this market, coupled with political vagaries, could force companies to find new and elaborate ways to bend the rules. Today beans, tomorrow – who knows…?

Fascinating to me is the powerful shift toward openness:  open source, open data and open minds make society as a whole more open.  Apache Hadoop has emerged as the leading big data solution; more than 1,200 people across 80 companies have contributed since its beginning in 2005. My colleague Lyn Robison will give a talk about open minds “Smart Swarms and Brain Grids: Mobility for Real-Time Collective Intelligence” at the upcoming Catalyst conference in San Diego.  The news on open data sprout one bigger than another: the presidential order Making Open and Machine Readable the New Default for Government Information is out. Bill Gates invests $35M in ‘open source’ science.  

I am awed daily at the shift toward openness. Just today I spoke with a healthcare provider intended to share its anonymized data with other clinics and hospitals to get better insights at scale (40 million patients combined).

I spoke last week with the executive of a data-driven company, one of the first (if not the very first) in its industry to realize that information is the company’s business advantage. He told me that they made a decision to switch as much as they can to open source, which pushed engineers who were pretty unexcited about their jobs to the open source community.  The intellectual exchange inside the community, meeting likeminded people and the healthy challenges of implementing open source completely rejuvenated these people!

On 1st June,  10,000 people in 95 places participated in the first National Day of Civic Hacking to help local and federal governments cope with the data-driven economy.  Governments open up — citizens figure out how to make open data and open interfaces work.  I went to the City Camp of Palo Alto — that’s what I saw (and a lot more too):

In case you are wondering, it is power, waste, demographic, transportation and other Palo Alto data visualized (no kidding!) fresh from Hadoop.

Oahu bus routes, Austin bike share locations, unlocking prison phone data in Western Massachusetts, bringing in Oakland online answers to questions like How do I apply for a Business License?  are just random examples of opening the government data for civic coding.  This also illustrates the shift toward borderless organizations.

Companies choose open source as their business strategy.  One of the most impressive recent vendor briefings about a truly big idea was with OpenCoin, a company building an open currency system with the Ripple network, an open source, peer-to-peer payment network.

Finally, I’m attending two conferences this month: Cassandra Summit on open source Apache Cassandra (tomorrow) and Hadoop Summit in in the end of June.  See you there! And keep your mind open.

Follow Svetlana on Twitter @Sve_Sic

We identify a highly interesting technology to our clients, and go interviewing a number of early adopters worldwide. We anonymize, atomize, analyze, and re-aggregate information captured during the interviews in the attempt to extrapolate adoption trends, common challenges, and best practices.

In first quarter of this year, I had the privilege of leading a contextual research project on cloud orchestration. A very talented team of colleagues and I met 15 end user large organizations and cloud service providers across North America and Europe with significant experience in private and public cloud automation.

These organizations customize the self-service provisioning process offered out of the box by their cloud management platforms (CMPs) through automation workflows that cross multiple IT silos, orchestrating the deployment and configuration of infrastructure resources, VMs, guest operating systems, middleware and, in some cases, full applications.

Some of the organizations we interviewed stumbled along the way but ultimately succeded, others failed (an invaluable experience that gave us precious guidance) and are rethinking their original approach. In all cases, unsurprisingly, we found out that orchestrating a cloud environment beyond out of the box capabilities is extremely complex and is worth the effort only to a certain point for most organizations.
Here’s a quote from one of our participants highlighting how complex orchestrating a cloud can be:

In theory everything should work with everything. 
In practice, a backward compatibility issue on a component generates this domino effect where everything fails.

I will present our findings, including clients’ best practices, on stage at the Gartner Catalyst conference in late July in San Diego with the following presentation:

Cloud Orchestration: Client Insights and Best Practices

This session takes a deep look at lessons learned from enterprises and cloud service providers that participated in Gartner’s cloud orchestration contextual research project at the beginning of 2013. The session highlights the challenges participating organizations faced in their quest to orchestrate private and public cloud environments, which technical solutions they implemented, what they would have done differently, and what the real benefits and pitfalls are with respect to automation in a cloud world.

Now maybe I’m crazy. And even if I am, what of it? You, my dear reader, wouldn’t be the first not to buy into my particular brand of crazy. Nor will you be the last I am sure. Certainly, this concept hasn’t yet been embraced by my corporate overlords here at Gartner Towers as I had originally hoped. To be fair to them, they politely heard me out, they weren’t dismissive, but they weren’t overly enthusiastic or encouraging and defintely haven’t embraced the insanity just yet. Instead, they just smiled, nodded and gave me a metaphorical pat on the head before sending me on my way. I really don’t blame them for it. The blame, if blame applies, probably lies with me for not articulating the concept effectively or in a sufficiently compelling manner to convert them into raving advocates and evangelists. And yet here I am like the proverbial dog with the proverbial bone… Hoping to enlist some of you to help me champion the cause and bring gamification in its truest and purest sense into the realms of research content delivery.

So exactly what is it that you’re proposing?

Static research notes are just sooo 1980s. I mean, they just sit there waiting to be read. I ask you! Really? C’mon now! You expect me to actually do the “reading and understanding work” for you right? Interactive tools and guides are better but they still sometimes fail to connect with their intended audience fully. We need to engage more effectively… We need to become integral to your thinking… We need to get deep inside the heads of our customers… But how to do it without the need for life threatening invasive cranial surgery?? An interesting challenge indeed… Why not leverage the current Gamification Zeitgeist and make the research deliverable a game? Now first person shooters are probably not the perfect vehicle for this kind of thing but how about the retro gaming phenomena that is the text based adventure (or work of Interactive Fiction as it is now often known)? What if we embedded research themes and guidance into a text adventure and surrounded it with puzzles to intrigue and characters to interact with?

Ladies and gentlemen, It is my great pleasure and dubious honour to give you your first (and possibly last) glimpse of the soon to be industry phenomena that is “Service Value Quest!”

Consider this… You have been transported to an unknown and unfamiliar world. You are alone. You have nothing but your wits to survive. You have a mission, although you’re not 100% sure what it is at this point. Danger awaits you at every twist and turn. What will you do? What will you see? Who will you meet? What will you achieve? It is entirely and completely up to you! Wander where you will. Take the path of your choosing. Return as many times as you want and take an alternative path or strategy to see how it pans out.

Along the way you will meet an array of interesting and colorful characters. Some of them helpful, some of them less so. Some need to be worked with, some need to be worked around. Some are irrelevant, some will materially affect your future. How you interact with them will determine how they respond and behave. Can you afford to make an enemy of them? Can you afford to appease them? Can you ingratiate yourself and make them your friends? Do you even want to?

Who’d have imagined you’d ever see a cross-dressing nun in Gartner research??? In an interactive fiction world the normal rules simply don’t apply! It will allow the analyst to tell you what they’ve been trying to tell you for years in a direct and forceful manner. If they want to shake some sense into you they can. If they want to lambast you for a particular course of action, they can. If they want to give you a gentle (or less gentle) slap to emphasize a point, they can. The constraints of political correctness and acceptable business to business communications are loosened. What would they say to you if they were free to say what they really thought without fear of the consequences?

By poking fun at the world around us we are able to deal with real world issues that would otherwise be taboo. Down-sizing, proprietary lock-in, anti-competitive practices, price gouging, regional price discrimination… These issues are real. And yet we sometimes shy away from discussing them in the depth that we should for fear of causing offence. Hopefully we are all adults and can appreciate (if not agree with) multiple perspectives. Comedy has been used as a tool to make uncomfortable truths palatable for decades… Who says that research content cannot be fun? If Gartner were to adopt the BBC’s core mantra of “Educate. Inform. Entertain.” would it be such a bad thing? We’re all busy with our day to day lives, we all have challenges and issues to face. Why not face them with a smile on our faces? Laughter is the best medicine after all.

Now I’m not suggesting that all research should be delivered in this way. But perhaps some of it could or should be?

There will be some that ridicule the idea. There will be some that will decry the very concept. There will be some that just don’t “get” it. There will be others that smile and nod and just sit back and wait for it to fail. But perhaps there will be some that take a moment to think about it. It’s a little out there for sure. But is it too far out there? Is it somewhere that we should go (even if it is just for the occasional day trip)? And hence the purpose of this blog post… I am keenly interested to find out if this is something I should continue to pursue or should I walk away quietly? I know from my readership stats that more than a 1000 lovely people will read this post this month, hopefully some of you will feel strongly enough either way to play the demo and/or complete the feedback survey. Even if you don’t fancy it, why not tell your friends and colleagues? Perhaps they would like to challenge themselves to be the first to complete episode one of Service Value Quest!!!  Aren’t you curious? Not even a little bit?

Why not give it a go for yourself?  It won’t take long and it could even be interesting…

Play the first short episode of the world’s first ever immersive research experience here…

For those of you that complete the first episode there is a adventurer specific URL embedded into the game for you to tell me what you made of it. Alternatively, you can tell me what you think about the concept here…

All that remains is for me to thank you for reading this far and wish you well on your quest!  I hope to hear from you very soon…

TRKFAM

How, in the name of all that is good and pure, do we produce engaging, share-worthy content every single day? I mean, we’re a [insert vertical industry] company, not a publisher.

I generally respond by suggesting that the “Three Cs” of content marketing—creation, curation and cultivation—should be your best friend. Sometimes your brand’s best content is actually created by someone else.

Then I offer the reminder that content marketing, like any other strategic commitment, requires discipline and consistency. Just as the sun rises, you shall tell your story.

This is around the time I get the look—a smirk-grimace-eye-roll that says, “Easier said than done, my friend.”

Then I concede that a full-blown content marketing program may well be beyond the reach of your internal skills and capacity, which is a fact that has given rise to the content marketing agency—both as a boutique entity and as a booming practice area within many communications and digital agencies. You needn’t go it alone.

But whether or not you go it alone, it’s useful to understand what it takes to be a great content marketer, not only during those fleeting moments of inspiration when the spirit moves, but each and every day, even when it doesn’t. The best content marketers think like manufacturers.

No, really; stay with me here.

Manufacturing is actually an instructive example for what it takes to scale and sustain a content marketing program. Why? Because content marketing requires a replenishing pipeline of engaging content—a content supply chain—that helps feed the beast every day.

Think of it this way:

• Demand planning is how manufacturers align supply and demand. For content marketers, it’s driven by market and social signals and your overall corporate strategy.
• Master production schedules are used by both manufacturers and content marketers to keep the trains running on time. Think of it as the editorial calendar and project plan rolled into one.
• Blueprints are visual diagrams and specifications that manufacturers use to ensure what’s produced matches what’s designed and to understand the interdependencies between the piece parts. For content marketers, blueprints describe how content elements map to content assets map to distribution channels. Blueprints ensure orderly, efficient and leveraged content marketing efforts that, like the best manufacturers, take advantage of reuse opportunities in everything you produce. 
• Bills of material are the detailed parts lists that travel alongside a blueprint. For content marketers, these are the lists of content elements and artifacts and their various formats and renditions for publishing across channels.
• Production in manufacturing is the factory process that turns raw materials into finished goods. For content marketers, it’s sourcing, approval and distribution of content assets across paid, earned and owned channels.

Of course, you shouldn’t allow the process to get in the way of the practice. You also need to leave room for agility, allowing some creation and engagement to happen off to the side, in the moment. But, keep in mind that too much flexibility leads to chaos, and too much control leads to stasis. Combine the two and you get precisely what it takes to be a great content marketer: Agility.

(*) I was tempted to say that “content is king,” which it most certainly is. But the phrase is a tired cliché, worn thin by generations of breathless headlines and tradeshow presentations. So, here, it’s relegated to the footnotes, where it belongs, and replaced by a symbolic substitute.

As at this stage many things are unclear and some reports may be incorrect, I – for one – have not decided whether I will move my personal information from the many US based providers that I use in my personal live to local alternatives. But in this blog I do want to share my (strictly personal) views and thinking on the topic and explore potential alternatives. As usual I will stay far away from any politics in my blogs (something that must be doable given that the public reactions from different political sides are so varied and diverse).

Till today , individuals – like myself – often took a relaxed view towards protection of their privacy, using phrases like: “Well, nothing I do here is secret or illegal, so if they wanna peak, no problem”. But illegal in an international context is a relative term. Think of copyright law, where what is legal in one country (for example downloading copyrighted materials for personal use), leads to several year of incarceration in other countries, or think of controversies around travel of people carrying a certain disease or -maybe in the future – a certain gen, or of people of a certain origin. Currently the – already controversial – access to this data is only permitted for anti-terrorism and not for fraud-related or other criminal investigations. But we need to take into account that regimes may change and that as a result also this applicability can change (for example the detailed and accurate paper-based administration systems of  local government entities in my country lead to significant, unforeseen and unintended harm following the regime change during WWII).

The increase of control that comes with massive centralized data-processing always carries some drawbacks (as Nicholas Carr – again with remarkable timing – republished just prior to all this hitting the press) and use of alternatives may to some extend be similar to the now famous statement about Democracy: Democracy is far from ideal, but it sure is better than any of the alternatives tried so far. For those individuals who want to try an alternative, here are some thoughts on cloud services to replace the ones currently under scrutiny or discussion.

• Email: Most of the providers listed as part of the program deliver (free) email services. Many European individuals started using these because they delivered convenient webmail that did not tie email addresses to a particular ISP (and thus allowed changing internet provider without being locked in to their proprietary email domain name). Maybe it is time to reconsider ISP-provided email, but at the same time investigate the use of your own domain name (which makes your email a lot more portable). Make however sure that the mail provider your choose is not just owned by a European company , but that it runs under European jurisdiction (for example a European owned mail alternative I looked at turned out to be “a corporation organized and existing under the laws of the State of Delaware”).
• VoIP Calls: Although leading consumer VoIP provider Skype started from Luxembourg, it is now part of a US headquartered corporation. Also most alternative voice and video calling solutions come from US based companies (with some even limiting their services to US based consumers only). Although European Telco’s have been talking about offering VoiP based alternatives to their regular mobile and fixed voice services, only very few have gone to market yet (check you local providers for possibilities) and even fewer offer it as a cost effective alternative for international calling.
• Social Networks: Up to a few years ago most leading social networks in Europe were national providers, but today Facebook is very much the name of the game. If it was not for editorial independence a media corporation like the Telegraaf group might consider leveraging the current media driven FUD to drive local consumers back to the recently acquired (and formerly leading) social network Hyves. However, moving to a new social network all by yourself is not a very social thing to do (and kind of defeats the purpose of a social network) so some group orchestration may be required.
• Short Message Services: So far the reporting did not mention any short message services , such as WhatsApp, Instamessage, Viber etc. Nor did it include other new web destinations becoming popular with the under 20ties (as their parents took over on Facebook) . Many of those however, such as Instagram and Tumbler have been recently acquired by the named providers. Twitter is a chapter by itself as most activities on Twitter are  public by nature (and unlike some other providers they have put up a brave fight to keep their private services private).
• Professional Networks: Also professional networks, like LinkedIn have not been explicitly mentioned so far (likely because the job market for the type of activities under investigation does not rely on these types of services ), but here some local alternatives do still exist. Unfortunately the alternatives are often very local (limited to one language area) and do not help much in an increasingly pan-European or inter-continental job market.
• Dropbox: I could have used the more neutral term file replication here, but DropBox has – in a remarkably short time – pulled a Xerox on the market and made its brand name the generic name for these types of service. Alternatives do exist – from independent European companies as well as from Telco’s and ISPs and even from providers of networked hard disks. Maybe this is a good time for companies – who so far largely turned a blind eye towards the (shadow) use of such services, to offer internal – but just as convenient – alternatives to their employees.
• Cloud IaaS/PaaS Providers: Also these have not yet explicitly been mentioned. Maybe because the typical consumer does not use these providers to build their own personal photo of file storage and sharing facility (mainly because higher level alternatives like Flicker and DropBox are so much more convenient to achieve the same result). Also these lower level services offer a lot more options for the user to protect his own data (like using encryption). Regardless of these consideration, this area is a domain where several local alternatives do exist, both at a national and a pan-European level. Some of these providers are even global  offering services from facilities they run in “neutral” – but latency-wise quit closeby – locations like Canada or Switzerland.

So far most of the discussion has been about individuals and their data. The interesting thing is that the European Data Protection Directive has implemented the roles of Data Subject, Data Controller and Data Processor. For individuals (Data Subjects) the cloud service providers mentioned in the current media hype are in many cases both the Data Controller and Data Processor. For companies using these same cloud service provider firms, they themselves remain the Data Controller, while their customers and employees are the Data Subjects and the Cloud Service Providers are the Data Processors (which – according to my limited legal knowledge – can significantly change the applicable law and the entity held eventually responsible).

The first one emphasizes the benefits created by the mass availability of information though increasingly affordable devices and increasing communication bandwidth. This has evident impacts on the establishment and strengthening of democracies, it gives people the ability to be better informed about their rights, their health, their jobs. It makes education more affordable to families who can hardly afford expensive textbooks. And so forth.

The second one stresses the drawbacks, looking at the intentional and unintentional loss of privacy through the abuse of social networking tools as well as government eavesdropping, and highlighting that digital divides multiply rather than closing.

I took part in a recent conversation on Facebook, started from an article (in Italian) written by Italian writer Umberto Eco, who claims that e-books will not totally replace physical books when it comes to novels or poetry. Irrespective of whether he is right or wrong, it occurred to me that the replacement of physical books with e-books will eliminate bookshelves from our homes or offices. This is something we have seen with music already: disc collections are being replaced by music stored on a file server, so that people still have their earlier CDs or vinyl on their shelves, but there is little trace of what they have been listening more recently.

Undoubtedly looking at somebody’s library tells you something about him or her. Sure, some people use to consider books as a piece of furniture, and there is no guarantee that showing Joyce’s Ulysses or Dante’s Divine Comedy means they have ever opened them. Yet, in the vast majority of cases, the warmth of books that you can glance through to get a feel of a person’s taste can’t be matched or compensated even by the coolest technology toy.

And it goes further. Borrowing a used book from a relative or a friend, with their underlined or highlighted sentences and handwritten footnotes makes that object something alive, with its own story to tell beyond the one from the author. Actually the very experience of “borrowing” goes away, with digital rights management that will prevent any even temporary use by a different user, unless one hands over the e-book itself (which is clearly not possible, as it is your access to all your library).

Also, the amazing experience of visiting a bookstore, where your senses are captured by the view, the touch, the sound, the smell of thousands of books and their pages, will gradually vanish, as the disappearance of some major bookstore chains is witnessing. The same is happening, and much faster, with music stores.

And what about looking at people who read books on a train, a bus, a plane, and what those books tell us about them and how many times we have decided to read a book because somebody else was?

So, how will the future look like? Will reading lose its social dimension, or will technology help recover some of it? Maybe the cover page of the book we are reading will be shown on the oled screen on the cover of our e-book. Maybe our virtual bookshelves will appear on screens that cover our walls, pretty much like those – replacing windows – and will show us the landscape we fancy (watch the excellent movie Cloud Atlas for an example of this). Or we will see our guest’s virtual libraries projected on our glasses.

In the Facebook discussion above many people compare the defense of physical books to the defense of horse-powered cars or wooden-powered heaters, which have disappeared almost a century ago and none of us misses.

The difference though is that those innovations demonstrably improved our productivity and comfort: we could move faster and get warmer. E-books touch upon the emotional sphere. They are not uploading the content of the book into our brain in a matter of minutes. We are still supposed to hold an object in our hands. There is little we gain, moving from a three-.dimensional to a bi-dimensional experience, and from engaging at least four senses to engaging only one.

• “Long-Range Planning Guidance for Information Security and Risk Management: Gartner’s Security 2020 Scenario” (the overview of the entire research paper series about security in the world of 2020)
• “Security and Risk Management Scenario Planning, 2020”  (the description of forces affecting security and four future scenarios for the development of information security)
• “Prevention Is Futile in 2020: Protect Information Via Pervasive Monitoring and Collective Intelligence” (my favorite paper from this set, naturally!)
• “Four Strategies for Optimizing Your Security Controls in Future Scenarios” (a useful set of long-term security strategies for dealing with the world evolving based on the scenarios)
• “Expand Business Continuity Management Efforts to Deal With the ‘Coalition Rule’ Scenario”  (an interesting set of recommendation for a scenario where Internet is not government at all)
• "Meeting the Information Needs of the Chief Risk Officer in 2023”  (just a fun add-on to this list about the role of a CRO of 2023)

Finally, it needs to be said:

• Do we expect to be 100% correct in regards to all the details, while describing the world of 2020 from 2013? No, of course not.
• Do we expect these papers to be very useful? Yes, most definitely!!

(and, yes, this is available to Gartner client only, sorry!)

Much has been written about how to measure the effectiveness of marketing, but most of the current literature and research focus on measuring the success of tactical marketing activities or of individual marketing groups. Literally hundreds of measurements are available, but categorizing them in a way that’s meaningful to different stakeholders – that’s the hard part.  The metrics that are most often leveraged by marketing managers to track the health of their programs or campaigns will appear irrelevant to the CEO and executive management. That may not be fair, but it is realistic.

You won’t get as much help as you’d like from your agency or technology partners.  Marketing automation software has become big business, with many providers offering tools that often measure only tactical activities, with few ties to strategic objectives. Also, each provider offers differing recommendations for effective metrics based on their particular area of expertise, which leaves you responsible for choosing the set of metrics that best meets your unique needs. 

Companies are measuring themselves on strategic objectives, such as revenue growth, market share and profitability. Thus, marketing must develop ways to evaluate and communicate its effectiveness and contributions to corporate goals in terms that are compatible with corporate objectives and relevant to executive management. The goal is for CMOs to be able to communicate clearly what value marketing adds to the corporation and how it contributes to overall business success. In coming years, few marketers will rise to senior levels without deep fluency in marketing metrics and the ability to tell marketing’s story through numbers.

Gartner has noted that best-in-class marketing organizations measure around four layers of marketing investment:

• The first layer is your contribution to strategic planning and impact on offering development.
• The second layer is your brand promise, image and reputation.
• The third layer is your sales campaigns.
• The fourth layer is activities included in the marketing mix, either at a program or an individual activity level. For example, many providers have adopted a series of metrics targeted specifically to each marketing communications media or method in layer four.

Gartner conducted research with 383 marketing professionals in 2012 that asked how marketing is measured vs. should be measured. Although the results are specific to high-tech providers in the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific, the findings are generally applicable to marketers in all industries.  Here’s a sample of what we heard:

• The top three metrics that are used to measure the marketing function are increased profitability, improved market share, and positive movement in top-line revenue growth.
• When asked how the marketing function should be measured, respondents generally agreed with the three above.  They added customer retention and competitive strength.
• We also asked how marketing measures itself.  Revenue and market share were the top two; followed by customer retention and brand strength.

So the next time you review what you’re measuring, think about four layers of marketing metrics so you’ll be able to get others to “believe the simplest true things”.  Sure, you need metrics that let you measure performance, fine-tune your activities, and drive desired behavior within marketing. But your credibility – not to mention longevity in your position – is likely to improve when the top-level measurements you communicate match how your company measures success.

[Note:  This blog is based on work from my Gartner colleagues Bryan Britz, Dean Freeman and Bob Johnson.]

Ethnography can be used in a variety of ways (e.g., product and service design, user experience design, cultural assessments). People conducting ethnographic studies can have a variety of background (e.g., anthropology, sociology, human computer interaction) and titles. We are interested in talking to people who are performing ethnographic work, including field studies, whether they are internal employees or working as a contractor in an agency or consultancy.

If you are interested, please let me know in the comments below. We’d like to conduct the interviews over the next few months (June-August).

Thanks!

This year Simon is back with a new challenger – our very own Gunnar Berger. We also have VDI guru Ruben Spruijt onboard as the moderator.

The point of the debate is simple – should you even bother with VDI? Is it worth the expense and effort, or not? It’s a pressing question that many want answered and we aim to do it in what I hope will be an entertaining and informative way.

Here’s the full session description. We hope to see you there!

The Rumble in the Jungle — Debating the Necessity of Virtual Desktops

Organizations are transitioning to a Web and mobile world, yet many are investing in virtual desktop technology. Others question if the technology is worth the expense and effort. This hard-hitting debate aims to answer the question of whether or not organizations should invest in virtual desktops or if their IT dollars are better spent elsewhere. Key questions answered in the debate include:

• Are virtual desktops really worth the expense and effort?
• What use cases make sense for virtual desktops?
• If virtual desktops are not the answer, then what is?

Digital marketing continues to fuel the multichannel campaign management market. New approaches to campaigns such as real-time social and mobile offers as well as the rising need of content marketing to support interactions, will be aggressively driving this market forward.

Budgets for digital marketing are growing about twice as fast as the overall marketing budget and now represent about a quarter of total marketing spending. Gartner expects spending on CRM software to exceed $14 billion in 2013, with a growth rate of 7.5% — marketing automation will achieve 11% annual growth.

Digital marketing has sparked this growth because it enables new techniques that can grow revenue faster — for example, inbound marketing, real-time marketing and data-driven marketing. In addition, new technologies such as social and mobile open, not just new channels, but new ways of engaging customers. Marketers now have to coordinate more channels and more kinds of campaigns.

The pace of change challenges established MCCM vendors to keep up by adding new functions.

Vendors with new technologies will continue to enter the market, and these innovations, which are sorely needed, can often differentiate companies from their competition.

The multichannel campaign management market consists largely of established vendors that started by selling full-function, on-premise software (for connections to direct mail, call centers, and email), and of new vendors that offer cloud solutions with fewer functions (usually to the marketing organization), focused on digital marketing (such as email, social and mobile). Established players are re-architecting their solutions to accommodate digital marketing. The newer vendors are busy adding functions, including offline capabilities, via development and acquisitions. Both are adding advanced analytics to improve decision making around campaigns. This work lays the groundwork for more accelerated changes in the MCCM market in the future.
Thus, the MCCM market exhibits an fusing of offline and online channels driving change. MCCM vendors are beginning to responded not simply by enhancing the functions of their products but also by changing their approach to delivering value to customers:

Begin with fact that the technology needs of today’s marketing executives are increasing rapidly. Our recent survey of marketing executives indicates that 10.4% of revenue is budgeted for marketing, and is expected to grow 6% in 2013.  With projected technology investments a major part of marketing budget growth, Salesforce.com has been building out the “big rock” components of their marketing cloud since the acquisition of Radian6 in March 2011. The cloud got more crowded when BuddyMedia was acquired last year. With today’s announcement, Salesforce.com rounds out the components of their marketing story.

Is email a $2.5B part of the engagement story? Sure it is. Email communications remain a critical part of how organizations engage their audiences. Whether communications are transactional or marketing in nature, they reach consumers semi-seamlessly across devices, can leverage the big data companies are increasingly collecting and harnessing, link actions taken tightly back into the consumer record (feeding the grand insight loop), and meaningfully drive to other components of online and offline programs. Regardless of company size, audience, or industry, email is a hard-working vehicle that many companies are still working to perfect. In short, getting closer to a leading email company makes sense if you’re a company built on helping your customers engage their customers better.

Why ExactTarget?  With a marquis customer list, and the ability to support robust email marketing programs, they offer Salesforce.com and their customers the capabilities needed to build out the marketing cloud. In fact, when existing Salesforce.com customers were seeking support for complex email requirements, the folks in San Francisco would point customers east to the folks in Indianapolis…often enough that integration via the Salesforce.com APIs already exists.

It appears that the distance will shrink between the two companies, though there are still a lot of details to be worked out. There is overlapping functionality that must be reckoned with. There are ExactTarget customers who work with Salesforce.com’s competitors who are certainly pondering the impact on their current setup. There are two brands, rich with equity, that will live alongside one another…for now. All of this will need to be dealt with. BUT, there are also CMOs who are feeling increasing pressure to drive value into the organization, who are saddled with increasing influence over the business, and who are working hard to make sense out of the providers and solutions that support their digital marketing initiatives.  We at Gartner are watching this scene play out from the front row, and have even launched a new offering to help digital marketers navigate this new landscape. But this announcement will give them some additional food for thought. More will certainly come, along with our official position on the announcement. At the highest level, though, knowing the players involved and the market being served, this move is far from a head-scratcher.