CIO On Demand

The Trouble with Requirements

Working in the world of Salesforce.com and the Cloud, Agile Development is the standard approach.  This allows businesses to quickly and more loosely define what is needed - dare I say focussing on outcomes first and specific functional requirements as a secondary consideration.   Before I get an avalanche of acromony from the IT Business Analyst community, bear with me. Agile allows for smaller, faster iterations.

Over the course of my 25 years, I've often met with looks of confusion as IT teams dug deeply into the requirements of a project, when the question of business outcomes was raised.  Projects were monolithic, expensive and took a long time.  So the focus on requirements was both necessary and prudent.  Today, rapid development and agile project managmeent lend themselves to staying focussed on the business outcomes and doing rapid iterations (sprints) based on requirements that could be more fluid (or not).  This also allows applications to role out in stages, getting to market faster, responding to changes in the business as the project progresses.

There is often a tendency for both customers and vendors to focus on requirements and features once a project is launched. That same thinking might also tend to put cost savings as the primary driver for adopting the Cloud, when considerations like time to market, application agility, ongoing costs and, in the case of platforms like Salesforce.com, better security than most organizations could hope to have.  That sounds like a much more compelling value proposition than just being cheaper.

To truly leverage the Cloud, be agile - in your thinking, software development, project management and approach to the market.  Then the focus can be outsmarting the competition and making a profit - however you define it.

Cloud Computing on Ice

Sitting at home working in the midst of our semi-annual icestorm, provides me with a little quiet time to reflect on the impact of technology on the way we do business.  As a pause from my ongoing obsession about disintegrated (disintegrating?) IT systems, I thought I'd share a couple of related things that occurred to me as I opened my curtains on the frozen wonderland that lies outside my door.

First, no panic.  As a business owner for the past 20 years, I can say from much experience that having your business disrupted en masse for any reason represents a significant cost that is directly reflected on the bottom line immediately.  While the kids love snow days (or a good ice storm like we're currently experiencing), for business owners it's the opposite.  In the past, If I awoke to this kind of weather, I'd immediately think about the safety of my team as they navigated treacherous roads to get to the office, the drop in customer service with all of us trapped in our cars instead of being online, and the resulting impact on the business.  After all, there's no ice where most of our customers were so it was our problem, not theirs.

Second, no loss. Per the first, no one has to jump on a treacherous road to get to work. No customer in Australia, where it's current 25+ degrees C (don't rub it in you guys/gals!), has to be impacted by what's happening here, and no loss/cost to the business.  Just a physical shift from office to home. John Gage, Sun's Chief Scientist once said, "The Internet is a topology, not a topography." Today, the topography where we live is in tough shape. The topology is unaffected. Our operating model is a topology, not a topography.

One Simple Reason

Everything we do is in the Cloud.  Our IT, our telephony, our ability to communicate and collaborate.  Everything.  Logging in from home, or anywhere there is an Internet connection is exactly the same as anywhere else for all aspects of our work.  While there is no shortage of press on technology features, and debates on which platform/technology is better etc., the fact is that our world has changed dramatically in this area and there's no downside in this context. My team are safe, our customers are served, the business is humming, uninterupted.  Now that's a great feature set.

Disrupting Content Management - OrchestraCMS at 2 Years

OrchestraCMS was launched two years ago with a simple strategy we thought of as a three legged stool:

1. Make OrchestraCMS easy to use for those people who actually create the content - business and marketing professionals - and connect them with a robust publishing approval process that includes everyone needed in the process, not just the content creators and publishers.

2. Make OrchestraCMS easy to learn for web developers by leveraging the technologies they know and love - html, CSS, JQuery, JavaScript etc - without the design restrictions imposed by many traditional CMS platforms.

3. Create OrchestraCMS as a content management platform, natively implemented and integrated on a business platform - Salesforce.com. No more APIs, middleware or IT needed to create great content and manage a website.  And make the site respond to the information stored on the business platform and within the CMS to create customer engagement taylored to each customer.

Perhaps most importantly, we saw Content Management as something that should *never* be standalone.  By building OrchestraCMS natively on Salesforce.com, we have full access to the world's leading, next generation business platform and all of the applications, data and business processes that organizations have painstakingly created, captured and automated to enhance their customer relationships, transactional efficiency and operational excellence.

Today, almost two years later, organizations worldwide are delivering some of the most innovative, integrated client experiences available.  Rapidly deployed with real time content delivery and full business process integration - customer portals, supply chain management, intranets and public sites with hundreds of pages of dynamic customer-driven content, produced in some cases by over 100 content authors in a single organization.

With the buzz in the CMS market all about integrating CMS' with each other (CMIS) and driving great customer engagement, we have to wonder how you achieve that when you're not natively integrated with relevant customer information?  And how do you easily integrate content publishing with the rest of your internal business processes when your publishing workflow is stuck inside a CMS, rather than a business system.  Publishing is a business process, not a CMS process. If legal or compliance needs to provide final approval on new web content, how do you easily integrate them into your publishing workflow?

Customers like, ANZ Banking Group, American Express, Den-Mat LLC, Janssen-Cilag, Menttium, Empire Life, Lend Lease, Ricoh, RISO and many other organizations have discovered the power of a fully integrated, enterprise class CMS - OrchestraCMS. WIth the combined power of OrchestraCMS and Salesforce.com, our customers are inventing entirely new approaches to their public websites, secure portals and intranets.

Being social means engaging. Engaging is a two way street - face to face, or on the web.

2012 - The Year of the Customer Engagement on the Web

Reading the tea leaves, delivered through a myriad blogs and officially sanctioned pundits, 2012 looks to be the year we engage with our customers through CXM - Customer Engagement (Experience?) Management - with lots of mobile apps.  While CXM seems like a fairly prescriptive and parochial term, smacking of mass manipulation with a Matrix-like quality, we're still left to ask a few simple questions with complex implications.

What is the basis of determining great customer experience in the context of the web?  How do we know what customers are interested in when they visit us on the web?  How do we put our best foot forward by putting the best content in front of our customers?  What does 'best content' mean?  

In a traditional content management environment, how would you even begin to know what that looks like?  After all, traditional Content Management Systems sit outside of all of the valuable customer centric information as a standalone application.  Unless one has the myopic view that CXM is a one way street - the vendor's - there is little chance a traditional CMS platform can deliver CXM.

Most of the CXM articles and white papers I read relate to manipulating the customer interactions on a flat, two-dimensional basis of customer preference, as defined in their profile, and the vendor preference, as defined by the content presented.  Most often, vendor preference trumps customer preference.

Our view of CXM is multi-dimensional, much like the relationships we have with our customers, partners and broader community. There are many factors in play in terms of customer interactions.  Some are explicit - "I'm interested in 'X'" - as provided by a customer in their profile. Some are implicit, as provided by their actual movements through your site and content they visit. As we do want to enhance our customer relationships or even sell them something, the vendor preference is also obvious.  

One of the most important ways people and organizations make buying decisions is based on recommendation or 'by association' - "they purchased it so it would probably work well for us". This is used by both consumers and organizations.  Some use it as a risk mitigation strategy, others for affirmation of the wisdom of their decision.  In either case, trends and market position are important inputs into our preferences on the web.  To deny this is to deny the impact Facebook is having on the consumer web.

From the simple Venn diagram above, we can see the opportunity and the complexity of attempting to engage customers and partners with a rich, authentic approach.

This is what we believe to be a more comprehensive customer and partner engagement strategy - One that delivers value to all parties by leveraging the knowledge we have of each other (preference and behaviours), what we've done together in the past (transactions/interactions), what we'd like to do in the future (new product and idea based content) and what the related market is thinking about now (trends).

Salesforce.com has a powerful platform to capture and organize much of this information (past transactions/interactions in CRM), trends (Radian6) and customer preference (profile).  With OrchestraCMS we add analytics to capture actual behaviour.  Because OrchestraCMS is installed directly (natively) into the Salesforce platform, we have access to all of this information and can add to it with powerful analytics. Sales, Marketing, Finance and Operations can all benefit from knowing your customers better. 

With OrchestraCMS, we use all of this information to generate a truly personalized, rich visitor experience that builds on customer and partner relationships. The web channel doesn't have to be one way, boring or prescribed.  It can be rich, dynamic and social.

With OrchestraCMS on Salesforce, the future of true customer and partner engagement has arrived.

Dismantling the Cloud Reliability Myth

The only thing scaling faster than the Cloud might be the rhetoric of the old line vendors against it or the product renaming schemes designed to give the impression that they're into it.  They cry that the Cloud is not relaible and in particular pick on security - that abstract area that is so poorly understood in many organizations.

In a recent study the Radicati Group, a California based technology analyst firm, estimated that GoogleApps, and Gmail in particular, is 32 times more reliable than the average on-premise corporate email system.  Let's say that they're off by 75% in their assertion.  It's still 8x more reliable.  And the cost, about that much less.  If you showed an investor those kinds of numbers on a stock, they would put all of their money on it!

With all of the ink spilled around security concerns in the Cloud, it's interesting that most of the major Cloud vendors are ISO and/or SAS certified for security, while the vast majority of corporate systems aren't.  I'd also argue that the calibre of the folks designing, implementing and managing Gmail would not be available to the average corporate IT department.
Those two points alone, provide some insight into the 32x reliability delta.  The other might be that the much of the ink being spilled is driven by old line IT companies with a strong interest in the on-premise status quo.  

The challenge ahead is to ensure that the opportunity presented by the Cloud is not squandered by the mindset of the old guard - both inside and outside of our organizations. So far the results are mixed.  We've always known that, in the context of implementing IT projects, technology is easy and people are hard.  The hard part now is for all of us to embrace a completely new way of thinking about implementing applications, that includes rational thought about security.

Beware Islands in the Cloud

Perhaps I'm getting old in this business, but I'm starting to see an old familiar pattern emerging.  In the 'old' days, we called them silos or islands of automation.  IT's relentless pursuit of 'best of breed' created incredible complexity as systems became more diverse and disparate.  Middleware became the fastest growing software category in IT and the big Systems Integrators made billions integrating those systems and their middleware together. Sprawling farms of underutilized servers spawned the PC virtualization market as strapped IT departments pushed to get better return on hardware capital.

Eventually, companies like IBM and Oracle got rich - 70-80% of IT budgets were consumed just keeping things running, and analysts began to lament the end of IT as a competitve weapon. Then along came the Cloud, lead by visionaries like Salesforce.com.

The Cloud, and Force.com in particular, promised an end to silos, sprawl and the endless consumption of IT resources and budgets spent on non-valued added operational cost.  In fact, IDC reported that developing on Force.com was up to 5x more efficient than traditional environments like Java.  Big vendors like IBM and Oracle were thrown on the defensive, inventing fictional marketing concepts like 'Private Clouds' to diffuse the onslaught.

Then it happened.  Cloud vendors began to shift the message from evangelizing the new (now validated) more productive and integrated platforms, to "we can run anything including Java, Ruby, C++, (Cobol?)" et al on their platforms.  History is often ignored in our industry as we seek to innovate and differentiate at warp speed.  While there is some good short term benefit that *could* be derived from bringing legacy applications to a new platform, there is a danger of us migrating the hand crank used to start that old Model T, to that new Tesla we just bought.

The promise of the Cloud is many things - seamless integration, rapid/agile development, infinite scale, minimal systems management overhead, lower over cost etc.  Let's make sure we don't saddle the Cloud with hand cranks. It tooks us 40 years to create the on-premise 'hair-balls' that many IT shops manage today. Let's think differently to ensure we have 10-20 years of better thinking.

Of course, 20 years from now we'll 'discover' that this wasn't the right way to do it either... :)

How Social Is Your Website?

It's interesting to consider the idea of 'Social Websites'. From what we've seen in the marketplace, they're pretty one way - inbound. Putting a badge or a form or a 'social widget' on a website is one thing. Using the information captured in your business and CRM systems to drive a more intimate, personalized web experience for each customer, is what we think is more social. Those interactions on the web, posted back into your CRM system to further customize your customer's web experience, makes it completely social.

After all, a one way conversation is called a lecture. A two-way conversation is social. OrchestraCMS on Salesforce.com. Completely Social.

Completing the Salesforce.com Social Enterprise Vision

It started at Dreamforce 2011 and crystallized while watching the Cloudforce NYC event this week. The Salesforce.com vision of the Social Enterprise is both terrific and missing a key piece. The customer web experience.  Websites and web apps are great, but they usually require lots of IT to develop, integrate and manage.  In addition, content isn't created by IT or Developers. It's created by business and marketing users.  So why can't they compose, publish and manage that content directly within the CMS?  We'll save the answer to that question for our next post...

Tremendous time, cost and effort is applied to capture information about customers. Salesforce.com does that better than any other system on the market today, which explains part of their success. The recent addition of the Social Profile to Salesforce's Winter 12 release, allows incredible amounts of new information from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms, to be aggregated into the personal and transactional information housed in Salesforce's CRM. Chatter has been extended beyond an internal tool, to allow for Chatter groups across Salesforce organizations, extended the social collaboration between organizations.  Yet most of that information is only selectively used by a relatively few number of people (your employees and partners) to enhance customer relationships.

Something big is still missing from this picture.  The customer web experience.  Traditional Web Content Management Systems (WCMS) are standalone from all of this valuable (and expensive to collect) information about our customers.  At best, they integrate through APIs that represent a sub-set of the functionality of each system - Salesforce and the WCMS - and are expensive to maintain.

When we made the decision to build OrchestraCMS natively on Salesforce.com, it was to ensure that we were 100% integrated, with 100% of the power for Salesforce available to our customers, in addition to the innovation we delivered within OrchestraCMS.  

The Customer Driven Web Experience

OrchestraCMS delivers a completely customized and dynamic web experience for each of your customers. Driven by the information you've captured in Salesforce, the preferences your customers have created in their profile and the related products, services and support you would like to present to them, OrchestraCMS drives unique content, navigation and interaction with each customer. In any combination - no IT required - this rich information can be presented, interacted with and tracked within an OrchestraCMS portal, running 100% natively on Salesforce.com.

The reverse is also true.  All of the interactions that occur with your customers in the portal, can be captured back into Salesforce to further create a more intimate customer experience, provide relevant content suggestions and allow your sales and marketing teams to determine the best approach to markets and customers.  Because OrchestraCMS is native, all of the information captured is accessible with Salesforce's powerful analytics. 

In short, OrchestraCMS takes the Social Enterprise to an entirely new level. Leveraging the rich information and business processes you've captured in Salesforce, your customers and partners will never look at a web site in the same way again.  OrchestraCMS can host and manage your public sites. We also build robust, native Intranets on OrchestraCMS as well. And we implement about 70% faster than traditional systems, getting you to market faster and at lower cost.

But nothing can create the intimate customer experience like a portal, built on OrchestraCMS.  To find out why American Express, ANZ Banking Group, Den-Mat LLC,Dental Corp, Janssen-Cilag, Lend Lease, NCM Group and many others have built industry leading customer web experiences on OrchestraCMS, connect with us and we'll show you how.

Don't keep all of that 'social', bottled up inside your enterprise.  Set it free to delight your customers and partners with OrchestraCMS!

It's been a crazy 2011 at Stantive with explosive growth for OrchestraCMS and our crack team of Professional Services folks. It's kept us busy and away from the blog...until now. We're back and will be posting a series of thoughts and customer successes using OrchestraCMS on Salesforce.com. We hope that the creativity of our customers and the innovative customer experiences delivered with OrchestraCMS will be inspiring to you and look forward to your comments!

The Best Technology is Virtually Invisible

In a TED Talk in June 2009, Clay Shirky described the three key conditions for mass adoption of any technology - the technology must be easy to use, ubiquitous and cheap.  If there is value in the technology, I would argue that 'cheap' is not a always the top requirement for Enterprises.  But his point is well taken. When these conditions are met, technology moves from object of interest for early adopters to enabler for virtually everyone. It disappears into the fabric of everyday life.

Which brings us to my favourite topic, Information Technology (IT) solutions. Why are they so complicated?  Why is software middleware - the stuff that knits together all of those applications across your organization - the number one selling software category in enterprise software?  Why is it so hard to get useful information out of our IT systems?  We had to create another expensive software category - Business Intelligence - and all of the expense and complexity of building data warehouses.   In the end, these applications are the exact opposite of ubiquitous, easy and cheap.  And when one analyzes why over 50% of IT projects fail, a lot of roads lead back to lack of end user adoption of the new application or service.  IT can be an early adopter, but the business users need to get their work done.

Meanwhile those same users are adopting other technologies at an incredible rate.  One of the most stark examples of this is a comparison of the trajectory of Apple and Microsoft.  Windows and Office are many things, but 'easy to use' isn't one quality you hear often from users.  A quick look and many of the top selling applications on Windows reveals that many are utilities designed to fix issues with Windows.

Jumping to a topic near and dear to our hearts at Stantive, Web Content (CMS) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).  To read the  popular CMS literature, analysts and websites, one quickly realizes that most of these systems were designed by developers for developers - or at least IT folks.  The are typically large and complex and, like the legacy weighing on all of IT today, are standalone.  That is, the CMS applications and computer systems on which they reside, are separate and apart from the CRM systems and backend business systems, unless additional cost and complexity are added to integrate them.

With today's Cloud Computing platforms, this is no longer required.  In fact, I'd venture it's insane. Applications automatically integrated when analytics, business process automation and and multiple access methods - mobile, web, API, portal(s) - are built into the platform. With OrchestraCMS, Stantive is taking the idea of disappearing technology to Web Content Management software.  OrchestraCMS is 100% native to the Salesforce.com platform.  So what you ask?  Why do I care?  Here are several reasons:

1. We didn't need to design, and you don't need to pay for, all of the attributes of a standalone system.  No hardware, hosting, database, workflow, analytics or middleware needed to be built into the CMS, because it resides in the platform.  The flip side of that is that OrchestraCMS sees all of those platform functions and integrates, natively.

2. It runs in a browser, meaning no software to install on your computer, no software to update. Just run any modern browser and see full CMS functionality

3. No system administration required. Because it's running on Salesforce.com, it's always available, always fast and upgrades don't require downtime.  Just click the 'yes' button when you're notified of an update and it happens on the fly, while your websites, portals and intranet keep functioning normally.

4. Cost. We didn't have to create all of that complexity so you don't pay for it.  Why pay for a database when you already have one? A web server? Check. How about hosting, back ups, disaster recovery, upgrades as IT projects?  Middleware to connect back to the business? Don't need those, don't pay for those.

The result? OrchestraCMS 'disappears' into the Salesforce.com platform, becoming part of the functionality, discovering any new data or application automatically and integrating seamlessly.

With all of the talk these days about customer engagement, we might want to start by integrating our web presence with the rest of our business, including all of that information we keep on our customers. At least we think that's a reasonable place to start.  If any of this makes sense to you, and you'd like to know how we helped American Express, Autodesk, Ricoh Australia, Den-Mat Holdings and others, drop me a note.  If you think we're crazy or would like to share any war stories about your CMS, please leave a comment below.  We'd love to hear from you either way!