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Digital Transformation

IBM Connect Keynote Part 2: Smarter Commerce & Web Experience

We are here at IBM’s Connect Conference and IBM has a lot to announce and very specific focus on taking both the Customer Web Experience and the Smarter workforce to the next level.  Here’s part two.

First, some stats:

  • Attendance up 10%
  • More than twice the number from Marketing and Communications
  • 57% of CEO believe the future is social

Alistair gave the example of Straeva which is a cyclist community. Everyone uploads the data from their climb.   They can see who did what route and what they did.  That information helped push his team to do more and do it better.

Talent is all around.  Can you find it, put it to work, and build a winning team?  The winners in social are getting smarter.  Smarter being the theme for this.

In December, IBM close the $1.3 billion acquisition of Kenexa.  IBM’s perspective is Cognitive capability can change it. (A la Watson)

Demo Time

  • McKinsey, 90% of companies that gain value from social gain an average of 25% return
  • Announcing a best practice adoption model.  It’s the top ten best practices for social adoption

IBM Connections, Sametime, and Notes Next

  • The Activity Stream gives a single place to see everything he needs to do
    • Now has inline previews of content
    • Connections analyzes the stream to highlight what’s important
    • Other analytics finds recommendations of content and people
    • Trending shows what’s popular
    • Filters allow you to focus on what you want.
    • Community has more flexibility in creating the look and feel you want.
      • You can customize the layout
      • Add apps from the app catalog
      • You can connect to legacy systems like “SharePoint”
      • Files in Connections now adds workflow to it
      • Microblogging allows @ mentions and this goes to the activity stream
      • Can incorporate a twitter app
      • Can add a mini-room to integrate people, events, and files and start a whiteboarding session.  The session can even use some apps to incorporate video
        • Polycom lets you do the video from mobile
  • Foresee created a multi-touch user interface in the form of a table.
    • It’s a new interface to Connections
    • The table acts as the main area to collaborate.
    • Bring communities and content to the table
    • Use gestures to make it bigger, comment on it, etc.
    • Includes a people panel which you can drag to the table
      • Look at someone’s activity stream to choose who to drag to the table
      • Bottom line, one table interface can be used by multiple people to view data, content, etc.  It’s pretty cool so you should go see a demo.
  • Social
    • You can comment on emails and use @mentions
    • Now includes filesync capability like dropbox.
      • Works on max and pc
      • Integrates with the apple notification system
      • Native Connections app can sync files.
        • It’s configurable so you can choose what files to bring to iOS or Android device
        • Supports remote wipe
        • Future mobile release will support IBM Docs with the ability to co-edit
        • Supports off-line changes
      • The mobile app allow for workflow approval as well.
      • What does this translate to
        • Note 9.0 with the email integration
        • Will ship IBM Connections Content Manager in March
        • Did 60 mobile releases last year and more coming
        • Shipped IBM Docs in December
        • Sametime Next will go mobile with richer audio and video
        • Everything  will go “Cloud First”

Announcing adoption services

  • New adoption model
  • Holding a social business adoption exhibition
  • Creating a new set of customer councils to help share adoption insights

Bosch Story

Bosch works in Automotive technology, industrial technology, energy and building technology, and consumer goods. They are a 51.5 billion Euro company.

They face many challenges

  • Globalization. Workforce and production are spread around the globe
  • Collaboration
  • Speed and Efficiency: Change comes faster than expected
  • Diversity: integrate different cultures

Decided to take a holistic approach and empower social networks across the company.  Their approach focused on technology and consulting, guidelines to build the framework, leadership and change, Organization.

They started with just 26 lite use cases and plan to move from there.

Number and Experience

  • 26 use cases
  • 7,000 users to start
  • 3 months
  • 9 divisions
  • reduce cycle time for product development

Best practices

  • Community management: Get good community managers who are committed
  • Change managements is important

Trends

Trends can be captured by monitoring the stream of data.  Started with SteamPunk as an up and coming fashion trend.

Exception Customer Experience treats a customer well and tells the customer you know them.  Collaboration through a variety of people and groups create an exceptional customer experience

What?

  • Supply chain prepared for change
  • Marketing targets customers personally
  • Sell for customers wherever they are, online or in the store
  • Knows what the customer wants before they do. (Predictive analytics)
  • Exceptional customer experience at every touch point

Demo:

  • Showed a demo of IBM’s Customer Experience Suite.  This is actually a composite of many products to create one solution
    • WebSphere Portal
    • IBM WCM
    • IBM Connections
    • Unica
    • Coremetrics
    • IBM Worklight for mobile apps
    • Social analytics goes beyond sentiment analysis
    • Showed a targeted content area with A/B testing
    • Showed Unica to segment users. In this case, customers who like extreme supports and who live in the west of the US
      • Joint engineering teams between WebSphere Portal and Unica are working on true integration.  (Thanks to Gary Dolsen for the info)
      • Web Analytics lets you measure the results of the campaign and feeds it back to the segmentation engine
      • Online communities build a place for customers to share their adventures
        • Easy to add the community with the Community Page support between Portal and Connections
        • Media Beacon offers inline editing of video within the community
        • IBM showed the same site and community in tablets format. This hearkens to the responsive design approach that’s huge right now with WebSphere Portal
          • Includes the ability to easily view videos and other content
          • The mobile app built in Worklight easily incorporates native capability like GPS location
          • Bottom line: Marketing can use the various tools to let Marketing create the experience without a huge amount of IT development (Once the foundation is in place)

Examples of true costomer experience

  • ING detects when a customer abandons at a step and gets CSR’s to call and offer help.
  • Insight from Analytics at Expedia found one field in the user profile that caused shopping cart abandonment, “Company Name” The cut the field and cut down abandonment significantly.

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Michael Porter

Mike Porter leads the Strategic Advisors team for Perficient. He has more than 21 years of experience helping organizations with technology and digital transformation, specifically around solving business problems related to CRM and data.

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