Michael Fauscette

The Future of Email is Social

I was recently approached by IBM to me write a white paper discussing the future of email. They came to me, in part because of my work with social business software but also because of this post from last April, where I talked about the current problems with email, the proliferation of social tools and how using the "right" tool for the job it was designed for could go a long way towards getting email under control. The premise is fairly simple, email is out of control and is becoming a less effective communication tool because its use has expanded far outside the limits of its designed use. Frankly I often go on a rant about email, which for me has exploded to the point that I have a serious issue getting to the things I actually need because of the never ending clutter of CYA cc's, reply all's, endless conversation chains and lame attempts to do collaborative file sharing and editing. I suspect that many if not most of you are having the same problems. In fact there's a growing backlash against email, with companies actually trying to eliminate its use entirely through company-wide bans.

Email, which is now over 40 years old, was designed to accomplish a few very simple things, primarily one to one or one to few secure communications. For that task, email is uniquely excellent, particularly because of its wide spread adoption and interoperability capabilities. Through standards anyone can send anyone else a reasonably secure communication, across firewalls from company to company. Email has near universal acceptance, is simple to use (maybe that's part of the problem though) and, with only a simple address, can connect anyone to anyone else. The problem though, is that we're using email, which is a communication tool, for all sorts of other collaborative tasks that are outside of its capabilities. That, coupled with the shear volume, is causing the current email fatigue.

So what's a person to do? Ruling out the somewhat overzealous idea of banning it entirely, are there reasonable solutions to get email under control and get other tools in place to facilitate the tasks that email is not equipped to do, while keeping it in place for the things it does well? The answer, I believe, is forming around the emerging social collaborative tools. These tools, ranging from activity streams to effective collaborative task execution (file sharing), can relieve the burden of using email for other than its sweet spot. But, is just rolling out new tools enough? I don't think so, in fact I think that we have to see some convergence of tools to really get to the point of overcoming the current obstacles to collaborative work.

The solution, I believe, lies in building a system that federates these new and traditional functions into the most usable UI. There are two paths then, one of pulling everything, including email into a new "activity stream" or moving in the opposite direction, and pulling all of the new social capabilities into the current email environment. Each approach has its advantages and I can see a justification for either. I do think that adoption of social tools would be much higher if the capability to continue in a familiar environment but have the new capabilities available was available and might just be the more effective approach for many. Anyway, you can read the white paper for yourself, it's available from IBM for free (well, you do have to register), so I won't recap all of it here.

Tags: email, ibm, social, socbiz, collaboration, file sharing, IM

Twitter, Politics, and Sentiment Analysis

I had an interesting conversation with a journalist recently that made me think a bit more on the use of social data for decision support, the accuracy of socially generated big data and the ability to apply current technologies to turn that data into useful information. The topic was the potential to use socialytics in the current US Presidential race, specifically the Twitter stream, but the concepts apply much more broadly. The 2008 presidential race was the first time that US candidates used social networks and social media in a campaign, and that practice has expanded quite a bit in the current campaign efforts. Twitter, in particular, has gotten a lot of attention as both a medium for creating constituent engagement and also as a way for candidates to get a real time look at public opinion on any given issue or candidate. In some ways, Twitter is like a real time version of an exit poll with a massive increase in sample size.

There seems to be some doubt around the value of analyzing the Twitter data stream and over what specifically that analysis has the capability to show. I'm a little surprised by this, since the technology, text analytics, and the validity of applying analysis to massive data sets, is advanced and widely accepted. It seems to me that there are several use cases for Twitter in the context of a political campaign, including real time feedback on public sentiment on an issue or candidate, a measure of sentiment around a specific debate and even a predictor of outcomes. The questions seem to be: 1. does the measure of sentiment on Twitter accurately reflect the sentiment of the broader population when politics is the subject, 2. is Twitter used to discuss political issues or is it simply a vehicle to spread opinions, 3. can Twitter be used to accurately predict the outcome of an election?

There are several studies that have examined Twitter's effectiveness as a tool in a political campaign and often the questions raised above were a basis for conducting the research. In a 2010, for example, a study conducted by the Technical University of Munich and presented at the AAAI conference, looked at Twitter as a predictive tool for election outcomes. The study used the tweets leading up to the federal election of the national parliament (Sept 27th, 2009) and used a form of the three questions I raised above to see if there was a correlation between the sentiment analysis of the tweet stream and the election outcomes. The study concluded:

1. Twitter is used as a platform for political deliberation
2. The sentiment profiles of candidates and parties reflected in the tweet stream accurately represented the actual sentiment of the population at large.
3. The number of tweets reflected the election results and was comparable to traditional election polls. 

In another study, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University analyzed the tweet stream from 2008-2009 and compared them to surveys on political issues and consumer confidence and found a similar correlation to the German study. There are a few other studies with similar conclusions, but I think you get the point, Twitter does reflect the broader political sentiment, it is used to discuss politics, not just broadcast opinion and it can be used to predict election outcomes...at least according to the body of research so far. 

So from a political campaign perspective how can candidates use Twitter, and can those uses be applied to business? Here are a few use cases that I think fit both politics and business use:

• Real time sentiment analysis around public issues. For politicians this is a powerful tool that reaches far beyond traditional polls and surveys, which have a lag (sometime significant lag) in response time. This means that a politician could measure sentiment around any public statement or issue and adjust messaging in real time. Leaving the ethical judgment aside for now, this would mean that a candidate could tweak messages in fine detail all through a campaign (I'll just chalk this up to communication clarity, not to pandering). For a business, this could be used for brand sentiment, particularly around a crisis where clarity of message is business critical. By monitoring sentiment a company could adjust PR / communications to more effectively defuse a situation or adjust marketing / communications to provide a clearer message.
• Twitter is not only a broadcast channel but it can also foster discussion around an issue. For a candidate this could be used to clarify public opinion on an issue, collect feedback and even crowdsource some potential solutions. For businesses Twitter can serve as one channel for collecting customer feedback, ideas and even support.
• Twitter can, with reasonable accuracy, predict the outcomes of elections. I do think that this is a little less useful than the real time use a sentiment analysis tool, but still, it has proven reasonably accurate. I also don't want to infer that normal statistical principals don't apply, they do, this is just one more method to find useful information. There will be inaccuracies and bias, just like any other survey, sample, etc. That said, predictive capabilities could be applied to any public issue that has fairly widespread appeal. Twitter's accuracy, at least in part, is related to the shear volume of information that can be pushed through an analysis engine. This is tied to one of the key factors around the value of big data, large data sets with a broad representation.

There are issues with any type of analysis of course, but from what we've seen so far, there are opportunities to apply sentiment analysis to social channels like Twitter to gain insight. It's not the only data source, but it is one interesting point in making / supporting decisions. What do you think, how could analysis of large social data sets be used to support business?

Tags: big data, sentiment, twitter, social, socbiz, social enterprise, social web, analytics, politics

Top Ten Predictions for 2012

Every year IDC has a widespread top ten predictions program that starts in November with worldwide top level firm predictions generated from a group of us, and is then followed by a series from across many groups. My group always contributes our enterprise application focused predictions. The document is now available on IDC.com (#233104, subscription required to access). I will summarize the predictions for you though, since many of you can't access the actual document. In addition to me, the document was authored by: Mary Wardley, Robert Mahowald, Amy Konary and Scott Guinn.

2012, at least for software applications, should continue to see good growth across a variety of markets. Technology, particularly software, is seen as a competitive equalizer and automation is increasing productivity in an environment of scarcity. Companies continue to invest in edge applications that increase customer touch and facilitate a more collaborative business environment. The four major trends, cloud, big data, social and mobile continue to have far reaching impacts for businesses and for the technology that supports them. With this in mind we offer the following predictions:

1. Demand for Digital Commerce Will Outpace Other Enterprise Software Markets as Traditional Retailers Search for an Equilibrium Between Brick-and-Mortar, Online, Mobile, and Social Commerce Channels, with Digital Commerce Growing Beyond Retail.

2. Cloud Monetization Will Become More Sophisticated (Beyond Per User Per Month) as Cloud Applications Mature

3. This Year, Businesses Will Move a Portion of Enterprise Application Seats to Public Cloud Infrastructure, Accelerating the Wholesale Model and Growing the Percentage of Applications Seats Deployed on Public Cloud IaaS to About 2.4%

4. 2012 Will Be the Year of "Putting the Pieces Together" for Effective Customer Engagement

5. Context Awareness for Personalization (Not Customization) Will Be the "New Black": The Ability to Customize Is Still Critical, But That Signals Time and Effort

6. Innovation Management Will Become a Focus for Business as a Key Element of Competitive Advantage in a Tough Economy

7. Cloud Apps M&A Will Be Led by Big Names: 2012 Will See Significant Buying as Major ISVs, Late to the Cloud Game, Fill Out Their Functional Portfolios

8. As Social Business Gains Momentum, Panic Will Set in Across the Applications Market as Vendors Fear Losing Their Legacy Footprint to Vendors Offering New Models of Interaction with "Just Enough Support" for Core Enterprise Functionality

9. As More and More Components of the ERP Suite Prove Out Their Viability in the Cloud, the Gravitational Pull of Vendors Around Platforms Will Accelerate

10. As Heterogeneous Deployments Become the Norm, Cloud Infrastructure Hardware and Management Software Sales Will Grow by More than 100% in 2012 as Private Cloud Moves into the Mainstream and Service Providers Look to Accelerate Deployments

There you have it for this year, what do you think?

Tags: predictions, 2012, cloud, mobile, social, big data, digital commerce, socbiz

Cloud Wars Heating Up: Oracle : Taleo, Dassault Systemes : Netvibes

This past week virtually no one in the software world was surprised by Oracle's announcement of intent to acquire cloud talent management vendor Taleo. The acquisition that was something of a surprise, and maybe you even missed, was the much smaller move by Dassault Systemes to acquire Netvibes. The dollar values were quite disparate, Oracle paid $1.9B for Taleo, Dassault only a fraction of that at $26M for Netvibes. I wanted to take a deeper look at both, but I will say that while the Taleo acquisition certainly reinforces Oracle's commitment to rapidly expand its public cloud offering, the Netvibes acquisition may prove to be the more interesting discussion.

The Taleo acquisition does what I believe will become a common statement this year, it broadens Oracle's cloud portfolio and brings another group of customers into the Oracle fold. There are two major factors to look at here, 1. the major software vendors, particularly Oracle and SAP, are playing catch up to broaden cloud offerings and customers quickly and 2. the HCM market is seeing increasing competition from upstart Workday and others. From an Oracle perspective SAP's acquisition of SuccessFactors served as the catalyst to move this deal forward, but I don't think that was the only factor. Unlike SAP, Oracle does have credible talent and learning offerings already, but the lead product there, Fusion HCM, is still very new and just starting to gain traction (some analysts are using this acquisition as an indictment against Oracle Fusion Apps, but I don't agree). Adding Taleo to the Oracle Public Cloud portfolio, just like its other recent cloud acquisition of RightNow, which also had overlap with existing Oracle products, brings cloud expertise, additional credibility and additional customer relationships to exploit for cross sell / up sell from other Oracle products. Oracle has lot's of overlapping product lines, that never stopped them before, and certainly won't in the growing feeding frenzy around cloud products. I think there's a bit of "if we don't buy them, who else might" sentiment involved in this decision as well. And don't underestimate the Workday factor either, it is having impact on both SAP and Oracle, although I think SAP might be feeling the pressure a bit more. From an Oracle perspective its important to have a robust set of cloud HCM apps as the PeopleSoft base moves into a refresh cycle. 

Taleo customers get benefits out of the deal as well, as you might infer from the diagram above. From a social collaboration perspective the addition of Oracle Social Network (OSN) to the Taleo product should be very attractive to the Taleo customers. Also look for Oracle to build tight integration between Taleo and the Fusion HCM suite, making that full cloud-based solution set more attractive. Taleo customers will get the stability provided by one of the largest software vendors and easier access to a broad portfolio of products including engineered solutions, database service and Fusion Middleware. Sorting out Taleo's architecture will likely be high on Oracle's work list post-acquisition, as Taleo, which is built on an older cloud infrastructure and isn't multi-tenant, could use a bit of modernization.

Now on the the second announcement, Dassault Systemes and Netvibes. On the outside this may seem like an odd match, a PLM / CAD vendor and a cloud socialytics vendor. I think this acquisition is an interesting tell to a strategic move by Dassault to reposition as a broader innovation platform. Today Dassault is securely positioned in the product engineering and manufacturing world, but product development is under pressure to become more social and to drive more innovation. In this highly connected and hyper-competitive business environment product / service innovation is even more critical to a business's survival. A disconnected or isolated product design process is something that has to change as companies need to leverage and include both a broader set of employees through better collaboration and outside constituents including customers and partners. The social customer, as I've written many times here, cannot be ignored and will engage with brands if given the opportunity and the right motivation. This isn't a discussion of SCRM though, although the lines between systems and processes like CRM and PLM / product design, need to and are getting much more blurry. Today companies need to listen to customers and then take action on the feedback. What better way to do that than through an integrated social listing and analytics offering like Netvibes.

The product lifecycle today is decidedly social and has to incorporate online conversations into the product process. Its a natural extension of PLM to embed socialytics into the design process and is an important first step to building out a full innovation management offering as I've outlined here. With the Netvibes acquisition, Dassault adds social monitoring, analytics and decision support capabilities into its leading PLM platform, moving to socialize the design process. This leaves Dassault with one gap though, that is a tool with the capability to manage the ideation process from capture (which it could do with Netvibes, although there are perhaps better purpose built tools available) through the entire process. Next I'd look for Dassault to acquire an ideation / innovation management vendor to add the overarching idea management process to the rest of its suite of innovation tools. There are a number of those vendors that could be potential targets including: Spigit, BrightIdea, BrainBank, Hype Softwaretechnik, IdeaScale, Imiginatik, MindMatters, Innocentive, and Uservoice. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what direction Dassault moves next.

 Tags: PLM, HCM, Talent Management, HR, Oracle, Taleo, Dassault, Netvibes, innovation