Michael Fauscette

Some thoughts on mobile

It's the time of year when we at IDC start working on our Top Ten Predictions documents and, get some time to actually think about the future (well, at least the future for the next year or so). As I've started brainstorming for next year there are a few things that jump out as obvious shifts in technology use. I posted a while ago on the next-gen web and one of the trends I included there, mobile, seems to be even more obviously gaining momentum. Some of that momentum comes from the easy availability of true mobile computing platforms and some comes from an increasingly mobile work force. The iPhone deserves credit for setting a new standard for mobile computing platforms and IMHO was the first "real" mobile device to make mobile computing more than just quick checks for bits of information. Browsing the web on pre-iPhone smartphones was more of a nuisance than a help really. If you don't believe me try a Blackberry side-by-side to the iPhone for web browsing and I think you will quickly realize the difference. So with the iPhone and now with the addition of android-based platforms, mobile applications are taking off and they are very useful. Enterprise software vendors jumped on the trend over the last year and have released several iPhone / smartphone apps like Oracle Mobile Sales Assistant, Salesforce.com CRM Mobile for iPhone and Netsuite for iPhone. We're starting to see the 2nd generation of many of these tools and they are proving useful and popular.

My mobile prediction then is that mobile devices become the new enterprise desktop. That's not all though because there are a few other trends that seem to be converging around mobile. The first is context aware mobile applications (actually context aware apps in general but we're talking about them in a mobile context for now). This is most specifically about location aware apps for now but I think context aware apps will expand into more than location over time. Location aware apps are mostly targeted at consumers at this point but they do provide an interesting business proposition. Take FourSquare for example. FourSquare is set up like a game and you check in to different places and share that check-in with your network of friends. You get points for each check-in and unlock badges but the part that's really interesting is the suggestions. When you check-in somewhere if there's a special offer nearby you are alerted to that offer and can use the app like a coupon for a discount. FourSquare just recently announced an open API and 3rd party developers are starting to offer add-ons. SocialGreat for example takes the FourSquare feed of where people are checking in, combines that data with brightkite, Twitter and graffitiGeo to provide near real-time information on what's "hot". The power of stitching these various apps together greatly expands their usefulness. CitySense is another location aware app that provides a "hot" spot map or in their words "real-time nightlife" based on Microsense data analysis of historical geo data + real-time geo data from mobile phones and taxi cabs to find where people are congregating (integrated with Yelp data on the locations). In their next release they plan to add pattern data from where you go regularly to suggest places that you might find interesting with people of similar interests. So far CitySense is only available in San Francisco.

The next trend that is converging with mobile is related to location awareness as well. Several augmented reality apps have popped up lately. Augmented reality takes location data, camera feeds and layers information onto the "picture" about the locations that are around you. Cyclopedia is an example:

I've focused most of this around the iPhone but Google's Android software is also making some nice inroads and some of the 2nd generation devices like Motorola's Droid are quite good. I'm not really a fan of the other phone OS's at present, mostly due to the current devices but there is certainly room for one or more of them, Symbian, MS Windows Phone, RIM and Palm to catch up with a better device in the future. And to be fair I use both a Blackberry and an iPhone but I almost never use the Blackberry browser functions, they're just not as good an experience. Alright, my last prediction for this blog post, I believe that Android is the "next big thing" for Google and will quickly grow into a strong revenue source second only to their adwords / ad business.

Salesforce.com introduces the world to the Collaboration Cloud

Today at Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference CEO Marc Benioff announced a new "mystery" product called Salesforce Chatter. Calling the category "collaboration cloud" is technically accurate but frankly understates the product, which is in reality a very strong offering in the category of social software. Chatter, which will be available early next year, is a social platform that brings together content, apps and people. In other words this offering capitalizes on the concept of "people as the platform". Built on the Force.com platform, Chatter is of course integrated with / embedded into the Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. It goes much way beyond just a collaboration tool for CRM though.

Designed and built in a "Facebook"-like paradigm, the platform produces a "news" feed of enterprise information and other social information. Chatter is open with an open API, and can connect to Twitter, Facebook and other public social networks in real-time, but the platform also can connect to other apps and content. The apps and content can then interact with or update the news feed. So what's included in the Chatter social platform? There's a profile that users can build and update much like Facebook including status updates. The news feed is the core of the platform and all the status updates including the apps update there. A user can create ad hoc groups of people and apps as well. Content from any connected app can be shared in your feed or to a group. Because it's built on the Force.com platform, it has the same level of security, which is enterprise class of course. Chatter is also tightly integrated with Google Docs through the Google Data API's.

From a business model standpoint the current plan (which could change by the time of release) is to include Chatter for all CRM users no matter which edition they use for no additional fee, and to sell stand-a-lone Chatter for the same price as the current Force.com price, $50/user/month. There's also been some public discussion of the possibility of a freemium model but nothing concrete was announced.

So why do I think this announcement is important. Well, first, this is an example of a social enterprise app / platform (a very good example) and exemplifies what I posted here. I am convinced that what we need to enable the transformation to a social business is this type of embedded social platform that can openly connect the companies other apps with the people in a seamless fashion and in real-time. The focus with Chatter moves from the app itself (like most enterprise apps today) and instead focuses on the people...people become the platform of the new social business.

Cloudsourcing, new options in the cloud

As we go into the week of Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference I was thinking back to last year. I remember walking over to the conference center and feeling a little annoyed that there were "clouds" on almost everything, buildings, buses, cars, people, bus stops...you name it, it had a cloud stuck on it. Now that is good marketing hype I guess but at the time that was about all it was for me. I mean I did understand what the "new" words meant (actually nothing really new, just new ways of saying things). A year later there probably will still be a bunch of clouds on my walk over but I have to say I'm getting used to the term. Ther are finally some new things that I think we should talk about when it comes to "cloud" (and if you know me, you know that it is still a little hard to say the actual word).

Before continuing the discussion let's define a few things just so you know what I'm talking about (and that my definitions may not be exactly like some of the other ones you'll hear). First let's talk about what I use the word cloud to describe (when I'm not talking about something fluffy in the sky). For me, cloud is simply the computing infrastructure need to do some computing work (servers, storage, plumbing to connect to the Internet) but sitting somewhere in a data center. It's essentially computing power served up as a utility (think electricity or cable TV). From that simple thought then, there are 2 basic types of clouds (not cumulus & nimbus), I mean classified based on location: !. Public cloud and 2. Private cloud. The public cloud is, well public (duh), like Amazon Web Services or Salesforce.com Force.com platform. You can pay a fee and use the computing power offered by the public "utility" provider. Private clouds are restricted to some specific individual or group use, like GE's datacenters. You can't call GE up on the phone and buy computing power from them (well, at least not yet). The folks at Appirio put together a very cool interactive map of the Cloud Ecosystem today. They do break out 3 types of clouds, public, private and vendor but for me, I'd just call vendor the same as public (yes, I realize you're buying actual applications in the vendor segmentation but I just don't really see a fundamental difference, I'm still paying for the use of some computing resource AND the use of an app). In all these cases you are essentially using the cloud to deliver some cloud application or other cloud service (like storage or security). You might pay for the use of the cloud app + the computing power underneath but the concept is still the same. The real value to a business with this cloud concept is flexibility, adaptability and potentially cost savings. (there's a whole different line of thinking that I have around the effect of utility computing or perhaps I should say commodity computing on pricing. If it's a commodity and scalable then the pricing should be driven down...anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about today)

So the new thing that I'm starting to see, or perhaps it's not exactly new but actually the extension of a concept. The idea is something that I've heard called software in a service or cloudsourcing. Its really an extension of the business process outsourcing (BPO) business that exists today. There could be significant value generated to businesses by combining the two concepts, cloud computing and outcourcing a business process to a 3rd party. It takes cloud to the next step and offers the valuable combination for business of leveraging cloud computing + a cloud app (or cloud service) + business process execution in one bundle. The concept is still forming but I think it will be one of the big trends for the next few years as more offerings emerge and businesses look to offload non-core processes to less costly solutions.

From e2.0 to Social Business

We're in the early stages of a significant business transformation brought about by and through the social web. The change is being driven from several different converging factions, customers are demanding that companies interact with them in new and different ways and employees are frustrated by enterprise software and processes that are less than comparable to their personal online experiences. Web 2.0 started this change with new concepts like user generated content, wisdom of crowds, transparency, shared control, real time online conversations, etc. The recent economic downturn accelerated and added to the need for change. Companies are concerned with customer retention, increasing productivity or doing more with less, global competition, and in general challenges to their outdated industrial age processes and systems in an information driven reality.

Throughout the Internet age the concept of collaboration has haunted businesses. Tools to enable more or more effective communication has slowly gained adoption. Email, the grand online replacement of snail mail and once the golden way for people to share ideas and information has grown into an almost (and some would not add the almost) unmanageable tool. Spam chokes our inboxes with some studies placing spam at more than 80% of all email. Email marketing, once a great new way to reach prospects and customers is now mostly ineffective and is a big part of the noise that makes email so difficult to manage. IM, frankly isn't much better. Other team collab tools have made attempts at breaking down silos inside most businesses but to little effect.

All of these areas, web 2.0, collaboration, the social web, social networking, social media, social CRM and even areas like enterprise search and content management are converging into one significant business movement that is starting to drive real cultural change inside and outside of organization. This movement to social business is not about social media, social networking, collaboration, Web 2.0 or even Enterprise 2.0, although all of those have added to the knowledge base that can be leveraged to build out the social software that will be required to make the new social business function and scale. This whole movement is based on the fundamental cultural shift that leads to engaging customers, employees and partners in new and different ways. By leveraging the collective wisdom and power of shared control businesses engage stakeholders in their business processes, decisions, issues and outcomes. In this new era of information old restrictive hierarchies left over from the industrial age are flattened and silos of information are set free. This is people-centric business, or to say it another way, people become the business platform. This change impacts every area of the business, sales, marketing, product marketing / development, product design, customer service, operations, finance, human resources, management, etc. We're still defining and redefining "social business" but the basic concepts are finally in play and businesses are starting to make real attempts toward transformation. I've said this post but it needs repeating I think, as we come out of the current economic downturn it's not about recovery, we're not going back to where we were, it's about reinvention.

Social customer service

One of the more promising areas of focus for social business transformation is customer service. This week at e2.0 I attended a panel discussion of social customer service moderated by Clara Shih. It was an interesting discussion and I think there are some good solid practices growing up, enabled by some new tools. Since I've managed support organizations for a few software vendors in the past and I've done a lot of research on social business I started thinking about some of the possibilities for changing the way we think about customer service.

You will note in the simple diagram above that there's still an underlying customer service system, which is the key to enterprise level scaleability (although there are a few variations on this idea that could create a different type of backend system, I'll explain that later). There are essentially two "new" types of channels for the development of the conversation. The first steps outside the enterprise and into the social cloud to use rapidly growing social networks like Facebook and real time conversation vehicles like Twitter to interact with customers "when, where and how" they choose. As more and more customers become comfortable with these online public communities they grow in importance in reaching customers effectively. There's a secondary use case for real time conversation tools like Twitter that has emerged from Best Buys that uses Twitter, a broad group of employees and a backend system that aggregates the Tweets into a single web page, which helps the process scale and at the same time creates a way to leverage collective intelligence to get the best answers to customer questions. I wrote about it here. The point though is that even in the Best Buys example there is a "system" and a process for scaling the interaction. Some CRM companies are starting to provide a way to integrate the conversations into their customer service systems "out of the box", for example the salesforce.com Service Cloud offering.

The second channel is growing up around public or private customer communities. The concept is to create a customer community of mutual assistance that provides the first level of "support" for customer questions. The idea is actually similar to the social cloud concept but provides a concentrated group of brand / product focused customers in a network rather than a broad public social network. The concentration yields the opportunity for knowledgeable customers to share their expertise. A lot has been written on creating and managing effective online communities so I won't spend time on that now but you might check out this post from Dion Hinchcliffe for some best practices. So the process is pretty simple, customers ask and answer questions, when a question remains unanswered or not satisfactorily answered for some period of time it is escalated to the company's customer service reps for resolution. One additional concept can be used to enhance the community experience, creating a way to collect, vet and publish customer generated content adds to the available knowledge base. There are several companies that facilitate the creation and management of online customer communities and integrate to (or offer their own) customer service systems, for example Lithium, HelpStream and Get Satisfaction.

This is a rapidly evolving area of the new social business and one that can provide very high ROI. Are there other new social customer service practices that I've missed?

Social software adoption, how are we doing?

I was going through some IDC survey data that I got back recently and I think there's an interesting story to tell. My group does a regular survey 2-4 times a year on software applications, called Appstats. We have some fixed questions for trending and some questions that change out each time so that we can look at many different parts of the applications markets. this last survey I included some social software questions. One in particular is interesting: Which of the following Enterprise 2.0 technologies do you currently use now or plan to implement in the next 12 months? Here are the results from 503 senior business and IT personnel across businesses from mid-market to enterprise:

Some things of course are no surprise, like collaboration platforms are the most prevalent in current use (they have been around the longest after all). I was a little surprised that the use of web 2.0 tools like facebook and Twitter for customer service surveyed at 46.3% using or plan to use in the next 12 months. I suppose the current "over" hyping of success stories in the application of these tools to customer interactions has caused a bit of a bubble. As I look at each individual app I do have some reaction, blogs and wiki's are getting more main stream, Ideasourcing seems to have gained momentum this year...things like that. BUT the real story to me is the overall trend, no category is below 40% (using + intend to use) which is quite an increase from the survey's we did less than a year ago. To put it another way, at least half of the companies surveyed are using or plan to use social software tools in the next 12 months. Social software is gaining momentum and that momentum has seen a significant upsurge in only 12 months. Exciting...

Let's just face the truth, Comcast doesn't Care

There's been a lot of talk about @comcastcares and I've heard the case used as an example of the power of the social web, the power of Twitter for customer service, etc. for probably close to a year now but I've remained skeptical that this type of heroics was really a way to become a social business. Heroics are, well, heroic but are they really a scaleable approach to solving a serious business problem? The transformation to become a social business is a basic culture change that needs a lot of management support and a serious change management effort to reach all of the employees and create fundamental difference. That's the core roadblock to this transformation and is something that cannot be bypassed.

Comcast has an abysmal reputation for customer service and that doesn't change overnight. First you need a commitment to change, something I just don't see when I look at Comcast. This story of course has a personal example to support my theory and even though I'm not particularly happy about this example its not just sour grapes, there is a real lesson here.

OK, the story:

I moved into a new apartment last month (9/17). It's pre-wired for network with a junction box in my room. We had the choice of Comcast or AT&T for Internet service provider but chose Comcast because of the Extreme 50 offering (50 mbps download). I often work from a home office so the speed is important (I often get demos from software companies, download large files, etc.).

Here's the sequence of events:

1. soon after we moved in the tech came out to install the modem / set up (very fast response btw). I came home during the install. The tech set up the modem in my room but not in the patch panel (no problem I could move it, afterall I've worked in tech for, ah, well, a long time). The install went ok, but I didn't run a speed test. After he left I moved the modem to the patch panel and installed my Lynksys router / wireless access point. I patched in the wired network so there are 4 ports available. I use a wired connection in my office set up. A couple of days later I noticed that the network was very slow so ran a speed test and could only get up to maybe 2 mbps for download. I used a local test recommended by my roommates boyfriend who is a senior network engineer (he also checked the set up, tweaked it some but basically everything was correct).

2. My roommate called and reported the problem and they scheduled another tech to come out when I would be there. He brought a new modem and rechecked all the set up. We ran the speed test and could only get around 11 mbps for download. He checked all the way to the building junction box but could do nothing to fix it. He said someone could call to schedule a more senior person to follow up.

3. No one called and finally my roommate called and complained. They told her they would credit us $20 and that a person would call to set up an appointment.

4. Appointment set but unfortunately I was away on a business trip. The tech came out and was extremely rude to my roommate. He checked the set up and used a "special" site to test that did show 50 mbps at the modem (that is the only time we've seen a test work to that speed, by the way, interesting). She ran the test at one of the wired ports and it wouldn't get above 22-23 mbps. He told her that it was because of the wiring, it attenuated the signal by 50% (technically, horribly inaccurate and frankly ridiculous, that maybe 20-25' of cable could attenuate the signal by +50% in a new building). He also told her she didn't need 50 mbps so why was she complaining anyway (he didn't say you're just a dumb girl, but he implied it and in general was very insulting to her).

5. I got home, ran the speed tests from several sites and nothing gets above 25 mbps. Mostly it runs around 11 mbps. My roommates network engineer boyfriend come and check everything and it is correctly configured and set up. He believes that either there is a problem in the Comcast operations center or that Comcast knowingly throttles bandwidth. We've reported it but no one responds. We have been billed for the full price of the extreme service but we're not getting that service. No $20 credit was even issued.

6. I tweeted my displeasure with Comcast and one of the Comcastcares agents picked it up and did respond very quickly. She asked me to email the details and them promised that someone would call us on Monday...it's a Monday later, no call.

Here's a screenshot of a speedtest run on our network:

Oh, and the fine print, which I didn't notice before, hidden in a link on the offer and on another page: "Actual speeds vary and are not guaranteed. Speeds shown represent proportional download times and are not actual speeds. Speed comparison between Comcast 12 Mbps, 16 Mbps, 22 Mbps and 50 Mbps service and standard 1.5 and 3.0 DSL (downloads only). PowerBoost provides bursts of download and upload speeds for the first 10 MB and 5 MB of a file, respectively, for 12 Mbps service and for the first 20 MB and 10 MB of a file, respectively, for 16 Mbps and 22 Mbps service. Actual speeds vary and are not guaranteed"

What Frank and his team are trying to do is admirable, don't get me wrong. But as you can see the culture has not changed and there's no reason to think it will without management commitment and a real attempt to get the technician in the field to understand what is acceptable behavior and what is expected from a customer service perspective. The social business transformation is about culture change. I also wonder what would happen to the Comcastcares team if 50M customers started interacting with Comcast on Twitter tomorrow...scale is a real problem without an enterprise support tool behind the process. Also, charging almost twice as much for a premium service that you can't deliver (and maybe never had any intention to deliver?) is simply wrong.

****UPDATE 11/3/2009

Comcast, specifically Frank Eliason (@comcastcares) and some of his team, Steve and Bill, contacted me this morning and over the past hour or so have corrected my problem. I also got a call from Comcast Corp. apologizing, promising to look into the issues and offsetting some of the charges. I'm happily speeding along with much improved performance.

I'll rephrase some of what I said above. I do now believe that Comcast is trying to change it's corporate culture to one of good, responsive customer service. I also know how difficult that is to do. Change like this takes time and lot's of missteps and hard work to really see the changes throughout a very large organization. My experience is a perfect example of just how much work they have left. If they can continue to push this type of responsiveness and real focus on customers over time, it will make a huge difference. Bravo for the effort today!