What is IBM’s Project Northstar?

I attended a session by Larry Bowden, VP of their exceptional web experience effort and the guy who is key behind IBM’s whole vision for Northstar.  That vision is slowly taking shape and coalescing into specific plans that will result in product enhancements to meet that vision.  Here’s a synopsis of what he said:

Key Drivers

The focus is on the customer because the customer is key to the bottom line.  There’s a lot of potential here. Only 6% of major brands garner an excellent rating.  29% garner poor or very poor.  Given certain assumptions, just a 2% increase in customer retention translates to a 10% decrease in costs.  You could use a lot of other examples but the key is that the customer (and I would say partner) facing market is growing and maturing.

What is Northstar

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IBM’s vision is to align IBM’s actions and the customer input and put together a vision to generate the most exceptional web experience possible.  It’s centered on the understanding that people are at the center of the customer experience. It means that IBM needs to bring a suite of products to enhance the experience.  The elements include:  (IBM related products in parentheses although in some cases like search and analytics, we see a lot of other vendors coming into play)

• Web Content Management (IBM Web Content Manager)
• Portal (WebSphere Portal)
• Social Tools (Lotus Connections OR the various social tools built into Portal)
• Personalization (The personalization engine built into WebSphere Portal)
• Marketing Tools (Unica or other tools that IBM recently acquired)
• Search (Omnifind, WebSphere Portal out of the box search)
• Analytics (CoreMetrics)
• Instant Messaging
• Mobile capabilities
• Rich media
• Mashups
• Rich Internet app tools

While the above items are specifically part of the customer experience suite, there exist other tools that are nominally part of it. IBM refers to these products as value add:

• Commerce (WebSphere Commerce)
• Forms (Lotus Forms and Lotus Workflow Server)
• Mobile (WebSphere Portal Mobile Accelerator)
• Predictive Analtyics (CoreMetrics has some tools here)
• Business Intelligence (Cognos)

So what this means is that IBM intends to follow a set of themes based specifically on those constituents who are revenue producing or who greatly influence revenue. (I include partners and partner portals in this whole thing).  Using the experience suite, you should be able to target your customers, create a rich experience, create a social experience, Optimize the experience as you gain information on how it’s used, and reach customers through multiple channels.

2011 Focus

Based on the themes already mentioned, Larry Bowden gave us an idea of the development direction for these products in 2011.

1. Social becomes key.  You can expect core products like WebSphere Portal to incorporate more social capabilities and to better integrate social tools like Lotus Connections. You can also expect a deeper integration with IBM’s recently announced Social Business Framework
2. Mobile. You can expect more and better tooling.  For example, Portlet Factory is working steadily on creating not only portlets but allowing you to create a portlet that can then be ported as an app on Android, Iphone, various tablets, etc.  If you are from the Domino world, you can expect similar functionality from XPages.  I’ll personally be interested to see if WebSphere Portal gains functionality to more easily optimize the mobile experience.  Yes, they have the mobile accelerator but that’s a separate product focused on different form factors.
3. Business Driven.  So portal customer now demand a lot more information and more capability to easily change the experience based on how customers are using the site.  I’m starting to here A/B testing here where before it was common to here that only in the commerce world.
4. Chunks of function.  IBM will continue to push out value add portlets to the business solutions catalog.   Frankly, I’ve been pleased with the Enterprise Tasks, checklist, new WCM, and other portlets.  They recently released account registration and self-care portlets.   IBM intends to continue to build this out.

So there you have it. Larry Bowden’s explanation of Northstar.