IBMConnect (Lotusphere) 2013 Highlights: Product Updates, Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce

A couple of weeks ago, IBM had two analyst calls about the announcements this week at IBM Connect 2013; since I’m not at the conference, I wrote most of this at that time but only published today due to embargo restrictions. It’s the 20th anniversary of Lotusphere, although the conference is no longer branded as Lotusphere since the “smarter workforce” and “smarter commerce” streams are beyond just products with a Lotus heritage or brand.

The first briefing featured Jeff Schick, who heads up social software at IBM. He discussed new software and cloud services to put social business capabilities in the hands of C-level executives in HR and marketing, covering the dual goals of managing corporate intranets and talent, and managing external marketing campaigns. The catchphrases are “Activate the Workforce” and “Delight Customers”, enabled by IBM social business solutions for Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce, built on the social integration capabilities of IBM WebSphere Portal.

Specific product releases coming up in the next several weeks:

  • IBM Connections v4.5, with FileNet ECM now available as a native service: documents and their processes (processes within FileNet, I assume, not within IBM BPM) can be integrated into a Connections community, exposing FileNet functionality such as metadata and foldering through Connections, and providing fully integrated social capabilities such as tagging, commenting and liking, making content a first-class social citizen. This is hot. It will not include records management or Case Manager: it appears that these functions would be available on the FileNet side, but not exposed (at this time) through Connections. Quickr customers are being offered a migration path to IBM Connections Content Manager, which is a bundled FileNet repository that can be upgraded to the full ECM suite if you wanted to use it outside the Connections context. Connections can also integrate with SharePoint and Outlook, so is an option even if you’re a Microsoft customer in those areas.
  • IBM Notes 9 Social Edition, competing against Outlook 2013 with social-enabled email, activity Streams and other social capabilities.
  • IBM Docs for web-based collaboration, now available on-premise as well as in the cloud. This competes against Office 365 and Google Docs, but offers better collaboration than O365 (which requires passing control of a document between collaborators) and better rendering/conversion of Office documents than GDocs. IBM Docs is integrated with Connections for social features and sharing, in the same sort of way as Content Manager.
  • IBM Sametime replaces their existing meeting service in the cloud, including iOS and Android support. It uses the Polycom framework for video and audio support.
  • Deployment of all of this can be public cloud, private cloud, on-premise (not really sure of the distinction there) or a hybrid of these. Their SmartCloud for Social Business provides for the cloud deployment and adds wiki, blogs and other social authoring functionality. SmartCloud has Safe Harbor certification, making it a bit mire immune to government snooping, and can be private-labeled, with two telelcom companies already using this to provide these capabilities to their customers.

Everything is focused on mobile: mobile meetings, chat, Connections including Content Manager access, Docs and more.

Jonathan Ferrar, who heads up strategy for the Smarter Workforce business area, gave us an update on what they’re providing to support attracting, empowering and motivating employees. They have just completed their acquisition of Kenexa, and offer a portfolio of HR and workforce management products that includes behavioral sciences plus the entire platform for social business that Schick talked about, including analytics, collaboration and content management.

There are three main functional areas related to workforce management: attract (including recruitment, hiring, onboarding), empower (including learning and intranet content such as benefits and procedures), and motivate (including surveys, assessments and talent management). An integrated employee and HR portal uses existing IBM portal technology to expose Kennexa functionality and social features. There are also workforce analytics to monitor, provide insight and predict based on demographic, qualitative and social data, using both Cognos for dashboards and SPSS for analysis. There’s also some features related to outsourcing but not a lot of details; I was left with the impression that this was a strong capability of Kennexa prior to the acquisition.

I don’t know a lot about HR systems, although I’m seeing a huge potential to integrate this with operational systems such as BPM to drive analytics from the operational systems to the HR systems (e.g., employee performance measures), and even some from HR to the operational systems (e.g., learning management to push training to people at the point in their work when they need the training).

In the second briefing, we heard from Larry Bowden, VP of Web Experience software at IBM, covering the website building and user experience sides of Smarter Commerce and Social Business. He started out the the same “smarter workforce/exceptional customer experience” catchphrases as we heard on the earlier call, then went on to highlight some of their customers recognized for exceptional web experience awards in 2012. Web experience includes the smarter workforce (employee engagement, workplace social portal) and smarter commerce (web presence and brand marketing, buy, sell, market) areas, but also can include direct business uses (e.g., online banking, claims), engaging a broad variety of constituents (e.g., e-government), and customer self-service. The core of the IBM customer experience suite, however, is on the buy, market, sell  and service capabilities under their Smarter Commerce umbrella. They are working at putting the web marketing/commerce capabilities directly into the hands of business users (although if this is anything similar to how most vendors put BPMS capabilities directly into the hands of business users, I wouldn’t be too worried if I were a web developer), including both web content management/analytics and campaign management.

The Smarter Workforce and Smarter Commerce solutions are built on the IBM Social Business Platform, as we heard from Schick earlier, which includes WebSphere Portal, Web Content Manager, Connections, Notes & Domino Social Edition, Sametime, Social Analytics Suite, ECM, Web Experience Factory and Forms. That’s nine products just in the platform, then the Customer Experience Suite and Employee Experience Suite solutions built on top of that. Whew. There are other products that come in at the higher level, such as Worklight for mobile enablement.

There’s been a refresh on all of their web experience capabilities, resulting in a new IBM Web Experience “Next”, providing for faster content creation, social content rendering and multi-channel publishing. This is not so much a product as the list of everything across their product base that is being updated, and a more consistent user interface.

There’s a new digital asset management system for rich media management (part of a WCM Rich Media Edition?), although that’s currently in tech preview rather than released.

They’ve also done some PureSystems updates that make it faster to deploy and optimized complex configurations of the multiple IBM products required to support these capabilities – arguably, they should have spent some time on refactoring and reducing the number of products, rather than working out how to make bigger and better hardware to support these patterns.

As always after an IBM briefing, I’m left with a sense of almost overwhelming complexity in the number — and possible combinations — of products that make up these integrated solutions. Powerful: yes. But expect some rough edges in the integration.

Having A Spammy Time

This blog has been inundated with comment spam lately: yesterday, I deleted over 4,600 spam comments that had accumulated in the spam folder in the past two weeks, which is about 100x the usual volume. Akismet is doing a great job of trapping it, since I’m only seeing one or two per week pass through to the moderation queue, and none have been auto-published. However, that means that I can’t manually check the spam queue and fish out legitimate comments, so if you make a comment and it doesn’t show up, let me know and I’ll try to find it.

Wanted: UK/European Customer Case Studies For IRM BPM London, June 2013

Each year for the past few years, I’ve been a speaker at the IRM BPM conference in London; this year, it’s June 11-13 at the Radisson Blu Portman Square, and is co-located with the Enterprise Architecture conference. There’s always a good lineup of speakers, including half-day workshops, keynotes and breakout sessions on a variety of tracks.

This year, they’re looking for a few more UK and European customer case study presentations at the conference. If you have an interesting BPM initiative going on in your organization that you’d like to present, or if you’re a vendor and have a customer who might fit the bill, contact conference co-chair Roger Burlton, rburlton (at) bptrendsassociates.com. The call for speakers ended in December, but I know that they have some spots available for customer case studies.

New Mobile Theme

Since the Jetpack plugin is now available on self-hosted WordPress sites, I’m gradually rolling out more of its features. Today, I enabled its mobile theme (disabling the previous MobilePress plugin, which hasn’t been updated in over two years), please let me know if you experience any problems with it. Note that it only changes the theme for smartphones, not for tablets, which is the same behavior as MobilePress.

I’m also using Jetpack for site stats (replacing StatCounter code, although I still use Google Analytics), sharing (for the buttons at the bottom of each post, replacing the WP Tweet Button plugin) and a few other functions. If you’re running WordPress, definitely worth checking out what’s in Jetpack.

IBM On Business Analytics In Banking With @LaurenceTrigwel

I was on an IBM analyst call this morning on analytics in banking, featuring Laurence Trigwell, who is responsible for IBM’s business analytics strategy for the Financial Services industry.

In response to a number of challenges that banks (and other financial institutions) are facing, he identified three key initiatives for these companies:

  • Creating a customer-focused enterprise
  • Optimize risk and compliance
  • Increase flexibility and streamline operations

Obviously, analytics are pretty important to all of this, and IBM continues to focus on building their analytics portfolio with acquisitions such as Algorithmics and capabilities such as Watson. As with all of their portfolios, the IBM analytics portfolio contains a number of different products, making it a bit difficult for customers (and probably IBM sales reps) to wade through the potential solutions; however, for the purposes of this presentation, Trigwell has organized them around the three key initiatives listed above.

  • For creating a customer-focused enterprise, you need performance management, business intelligence and predictive analytics in order to gain insights from customer data to “provide the most profitable offer to the right customer at the right time”. Although this sort of “next best action” view of analytics for customer focus is part of the picture, I think that it misses the point completely: the stated goal (in quotes above) is really focused on the enterprise, not the customer, since it has enterprise profitability at the core. Not that profitability isn’t important, but if you’re going to be truly customer-focused, you need to have some goals stated as actual direct customer benefits. It might be the same thing, since providing an offer that is best suited to a customer’s needs means that they are more likely to accept it, which in turn results in great profitability in a probabilistic sense, but using language that is actually customer-focused when you’re talking about becoming a customer-focused enterprise is important to shift corporate culture.
  • For optimizing risk and compliance, you will need risk management, governance, performance management, compliance and business intelligence capabilities. I don’t disagree with this, and analytics (as well as other things, such as BPM) can definitely turn risk management and compliance from just overhead to a competitive advantage, if you do it well.
  • For increasing flexibility and streamlining operations, you will need performance management, predictive analytics and business intelligence capabilities for identifying process bottlenecks and operational inefficiencies. This is really about displaying and reporting on what’s happening, not fixing the problems, so not a sense-and-respond view of analytics or how it fits into process management in general.

In each of these three scenarios, the capabilities that he is suggesting that you need are actually IBM products: from three to five products for each scenario if you want to go all out. They have bundled some of these into industry solutions, but it’s not clear what the level of integration between the products is to create a seamless solution, or if they’re only integrated on the PO. Clearly, IBM needs to do some rationalization of their analytics portfolio to reduce the number of products (as they need to do in some of their other portfolios), although their usual strategy is to allow acquired companies to run pretty much untouched for quite a long time before starting to merge products. That strategy is good for the sales teams and the executives of the acquired company, but not necessary good for customers who have to deal with an increasingly large and bewildering array of products that overlap in functionality. The case studies that he discussed typically used only one product, either Algorithmics or Cognos, although one used both Cognos and SPSS, so I’m not sure that there’s much of an appetite for multiple analytics products applied to the same initiative.

In all cases, he talks about analytics as identifying/reporting on issues/situations, but not much on how analytics need to fit together with other systems to make it all happen. He touches on a bit of this with some of his case studies, but it would be great to see the analytics for banking shown in the context of other IBM products that can really make the three initiatives real, such as CRM, BPM and ECM.

Since banks and other financial institutions are my main customer base for consulting, and they’re all IBM customers, it will be interesting to see how they roll out some of the newer IBM products and solutions, especially in combination, in the years to come.

Reorganization Underway

In the anticipation of ramping back up with blogging this year, I’m doing a bit of housekeeping. I’ve been getting the urge to write things longer than 140 characters at a time, and to keep my content someplace where I have better control over it, prompted in part by this article.

First of all, I’m converting all of my conference subcategories to tags, since they have got a bit out of control with the number of conferences that I attend. I’m using a redirect so that if you had a link to the conference category page before, it should redirect to the tag page, but let me know if that’s not happening. If you follow the comments feed, you will see a flurry of activity, since updating a post causes any trackbacks to be refreshed, which appear in the comments feed.

Second, I’ll likely be changing the theme fairly soon to something that allows (at the very least) nested comments. Last time I tried this, I had complaints from a few people on IE6 saying that their browser didn’t support some of the feature properly, but the percentage of IE6 readers has dropped to 0.1% so likely no longer an issue. Again, if you see a problem with the new theme, let me know.

Third, I’ve trimmed out a number of unused plugins and some widgets from the sidebar, which may improve speed somewhat.

Fourth, I’ve added more sharing options at the end of each post – Twitter, Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn – to replace the Twitter share button that used to be at the beginning of each post.

Update: Fifth, I’m replacing some of the little-used or old categories with tags, but without a redirect since I don’t think that there’s much linking to them. If you have a link to a category that no longer works, either check for the same name in a /tag/ URL rather than a /category/ URL, or let me know and I’ll add an explicit redirect.

Going Paperless On A Small Scale

Earlier this week, I linked to the Paperless 2013 website, a vendor-sponsored initiative that encourages businesses to cut paper, ostensibly for environmental reasons. The products featured by the sponsor vendors – Google Drive, HelloFax, Manilla, HelloSign, Expensify, Xero and Fujitsu ScanSnap – can certainly assist with this, although I run a completely paperless office using only one of those (Google Drive), and that one only in a secondary role. The interesting part was a conversation that ensued with another small business owner, although she was primarily interested in going paperless with personal documents (which I have also done), which made me realize that most small businesses are a bit clueless about how to go about this in a secure and legal fashion. I’ve been involved in large-scale document scanning projects since the 1980s, and I’ve gathered a lot of ideas about how to do this on a scale suitable for organizations of any size, so I thought that I’d lay out a plan suitable for small businesses.

Keep in mind that although I run a single person business, it’s incorporated, so I have the same paperwork requirements as any other private company: invoicing, payroll, government filings, income tax and all. I also do some amount of document collaboration with other small businesses, as well as for some non-profits with which I’m involved.

Here’s how I keep paperless:

  1. If I receive a document in electronic form, I leave it in electronic form unless I absolutely need to print it.
  2. If I generate a document, I leave it in electronic form unless I need to physically sign it (such as a contract) or take it to a client meeting (since many of my clients have not embraced the paperless way). This is not just Microsoft Office documents, but any document including things such as invoices, which I generate from my accounting software (QuickBooks) directly as a PDF and email to clients: I keep a copy of the PDF invoice, but it is never in paper form in my office. Services such as Freshbooks pride themselves on offering electronic invoicing, but you don’t need to switch if you’re happy with what you have, just install a good PDF generator and send it via email.
  3. If something is in paper form but I can get the electronic version instead, I do. Although my bank doesn’t provide electronic bank statements for commercial accounts, many other banks and service providers do. Most of my monthly expenses receipts, including travel and telecommunications, arrive in PDF, since most airlines, hotels and car rentals will email a receipt to you if you ask. My most common question at a client site when they hand me a huge printed document or presentation is “can I get that in electronic form”?”
  4. As a last resort, if I receive something in paper form (or have to print it in order to sign it), I scan it and shred the paper as soon as possible. This is the crux of most document imaging projects, but in reality is a fairly minor part these days if you do most of your communication electronically and can keep paper out of the mix altogether. Yes, it’s legal (more on that below). Since my volume is very low, I use an inexpensive Epson scanner that I picked up at Costco, and the software that came with it. That’s fine for a few pages a day, but anything more than 10 pages at a time gets tedious because it doesn’t have a sheet feeder. I would highly recommend a sheet feeder if you have a backlog of paper to convert, or if you regularly receive large paper documents. For smaller receipts when I’m travelling, I snap a photo with my iPhone, back it up to the cloud, then destroy the paper document.
  5. I use automated backup to replicate everything offsite. This eliminates the risk of losing documents, and allows me to access documents from my netbook when I’m travelling.
  6. I use online backup/sync services for shared content management when I collaborate on a project with other small firms and independents. Even if I were working with people in the same office, I would use the same methods since there’s no need to own your own servers.
  7. I manually maintain retention policies on the electronic documents, and delete them appropriately. In Canada, that means I need to keep all corporate and tax-related documents for six years past the end of the fiscal year: I just deleted my 2006 files and shredded the paper files, since that was the last year that I kept any paper records. For any files with a retention policy, I keep them in dated folders so that I can quickly purge them without having to search through files; this means a bit of electronic reorganization at the year end, but it takes only a few minutes.

The result: I have no paper files in my office, except for a small pile in my in-tray waiting to be scanned. No filing cabinets, no boxes of documents in storage. As an added bonus, I have offsite backup, which most people with paper files don’t.

Quelling the nay-sayers:

  • “I don’t like to read on a screen”. Get a bigger/better screen, or dual monitors, and a tablet for taking it with you. Cheaper in the long run.
  • “It’s not secure”. Back everything up offsite, not just locally, in case of a physical disaster (fire/flood/theft). I use Jungle Disk (a division of RackSpace), which encrypts my data on the desktop, then uploads it to an encrypted Amazon S3 bucket. I hold the key, not them, so they can’t decrypt my data. My backup runs automatically, so I don’t need to do anything to make this happen.
  • “It’s too hard to create electronic documents”. Get a good PDF printer/document assembly application. I use CutePDF Pro, which allows me not only to generate PDFs from any application that can print, but also to assemble multiple PDFs into a single document, rearrange pages and other functions. This is useful when I need to append a timesheet to an invoice before sending to a client, or to concatenate all of my expense receipts to attach to a monthly expense report.
  • “I can find things easier in my filing system”. Easier than searching through full-text documents? I don’t think so, unless you have a really trivial number of files. Learn how to use search capabilities of your desktop environment (built into Windows, for example), install a third-party search utility, or (if your company is large enough) use a shared content management system.
  • “I need to keep these paper documents for legal/regulatory reasons”. Probably not. Most government taxation bodies have long accepted digital copies (scans of paper, or original digital documentation such as an invoice received as a PDF) in place of paper – what they refer to as “electronic record keeping”. You can see the Canada Revenue Agency’s take on this at http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tx/bsnss/tpcs/kprc/menu-eng.html, and similar policies exist for the IRS and other agencies. The Canada Labour Code has similar requirements for human resources records. You may need to research for your type of documents in your jurisdiction, but electronic record-keeping is most likely allowed.

If you’re starting from ground zero of a paper explosion, this might seem a bit daunting. Keep in mind that you can do this on a day-forward basis, since many of your old paper files can be shredded as they pass their 6th birthday: just go paperless starting today (or from the beginning of your fiscal year) and let the old paper cycle out over time. If you really love it and want to get ambitious, you can start doing some back scanning, but it may not be worth it. When I started in 2007, I was already keeping everything electronically that originated that way, but added in scanning of expense receipts (my biggest single paper volume) and government documents, which was not a big change. I still didn’t start scanning contracts for another few years, since they’re big and I don’t have a sheet feeder, but eventually went back and scanned all of the old ones just to clean out the last of the paper files.

A lot of these ideas, of course, are not limited to small business, but form the core of any ECM initiative. Things get more complex when you add in automated business processes to move those documents around between people, but the basic concepts, motivations and nay-saying are the same.

New Toys

For those of you who see me at conferences occasionally, you may see a new (and even smaller) setup in front of me next time: my Google Nexus 7 tablet (which I carry with me anyway as an ebook reader and general media device) and a new Logitech Tablet Keyboard for Android, plus the WordPress Android app for offline (or online) composition. Although the combined weight of the keyboard, case and tablet is probably about the same as the netbook, I am currently carrying both the netbook and the tablet when I travel, so this will lighten things up slightly. Also, it’s less bulky, and the keyboard can be tucked into my suitcase with the tablet in my handbag, meaning less weight over my arm rather than rolling along behind. One question is whether I will have to pull out the keyboard for separate security scanning at airports, where I currently have to take out my netbook but not my tablet.

The keyboard is really good: the keys have plenty of space — at least as big as my netbook, I think — and good feel and travel, so I can touch-type without a problem. The keyboard case, which protects it during travel, props up and doubles as a tablet stand. There are a few things I haven’t figured out how to do yet, such as moving forward/back by a word at a time rather than a character (shift+left/right arrow on a regular Windows keyboard), but everything else is in just the right place. Obviously, I can also just touch the screen to reposition the cursor.

The remaining challenge is what to do when I have to give a presentation, since I usually present from my own device to include any last-minute edits. Kingsoft Office (a free Android app for viewing and editing Office documents) seems to work fine for my travel writing needs including lightweight PowerPoint editing, with the added bonus that it integrates seamlessly with documents on Dropbox, where I keep my travelling files, but there’s no way to hook this baby up to a projector, as far as I know.

Case Management Webinar Tomorrow

I’m speaking about case management on a webinar tomorrow at 2pm Eastern; you can sign up to attend here. It’s sponsored by IBM, but there will be no IBM speaker on the webinar, just me and some time for Q&A. Although titled as “Adaptive Advanced Case Management”, IBM’s case management (and most of what I’m discussing) is more about what is becoming known as “Production Case Management”, where work has a great deal of predictability and variability but there is value in having some pre-defined templates to structure the work.

From the abstract:

When a company is processing a customer order, claim, loan, contract, audit, or benefit, exceptions happen. How companies deal with those exceptions can mean the difference between a happy customer or employee or one that walks away – and tells other friends and business associates about their negative experience. In fact, with the speed and reach of social media, it is imperative that all exceptions are escalated and resolved as quickly and as simply as possible. Putting the process into the end users’ hands via an automated case management solution such as IBM Software’s Advanced Case Management (ACM) can help companies not only improve customer service but gain other benefits such as increased sales, reducing customer churn, and a reduction of fraud.

However, adopting a formal, automated approach takes real change – both on the business side as well as in IT. However, once it is implemented in conjunction with proven best practices, organizations are equipped to handle practically any case management scenario in nearly any domain. Learn more about how IBM’s ACM solution can help your organization.

By attending this webcast you will learn:

  • About the many case management challenges that companies face today
  • Why today’s businesses require more insight, responsiveness and collaboration when it comes to handling exceptions than they ever did
  • Best practices to help you close cases efficiently and with better results
  • Ways that you can extract more value out of case management data to create a better outcome and avoid having the same issues crop up in the future
  • How an advanced case management solution can help an organization be more responsive, closing cases faster and with fewer resources.
  • How ACM support all information sources to provide a 360-degree view of the case – while at the same time support consistent, multi-channel output including correspondence, email, web, call center, text and others as customers demand

In spite of the direct mention of IBM’s Case Manager in the abstract, I won’t be talking about it or any other product specifically. I’ll be discussing the challenges for knowledge workers and how case management can assist them, with some examples.

Legalizing Equity Crowdfunding In Ontario: A Panel

Following Darren Westlake’s keynote on equity crowdfunding in the UK, Cindy Gordon of Helix Commerce moderated a panel on whether equity crowdfunding should be legal in Ontario, with panelists Peter Aceto (CEO of ING Direct Canada), Brian Koscak (Chairman of the Exempt Market Dealers Association of Canada and a partner at Cassels Brock & Blackwell), Richard Reiner (partner at CC Stratus Capital), Adam Spence (Founder of Social Venture Exchange) and Darren Westlake (CEO of CrowdCube).

Blogging panels is always difficult, and I won’t try to attribute comments to specific people, but here are some of the points covered [my comments in brackets]:

  • Crowdfunding isn’t just for startups; it can also provide significant benefits to small businesses looking to expand or take on new initiatives.
  • Crowdfunding works well as seed funding to get a startup to the stage where it can be considered for larger funding sources such as venture capital.
  • The share structure will need to be considered fair to the early crowdfunding investors and to the later venture investors, in terms of control, returns and liquidity. [This is a major issue.]
  • Social and environmental companies have difficulties with access to capital, and may benefit greatly from crowdfunding. [Many small investors will follow their conscience in crowdfunding investments, as has been seen with Kiva microfinancing.]
  • Canadians are early adopters of financial technology (ATMs, web banking, internet-only banks) and are likely to accept equity crowdfunding quickly.
  • Social media, including some aspects of crowdfunding, encourage/reward transparency. [If you’re going to be successful in raising funds through crowdfunding, be prepared to willingly expose the inner workings of your company.]
  • Crowdfunding would make it feel normal to invest in startups, and tax incentives for small business crowdfunding would support this significantly.

There are some crowdfunding approaches already being tried out in Canada, including debt/bond/co-op structures such as with ZooShare, which provides co-operative investment into a plant that turns Toronto Zoo poo into biogas. ZooShare’s scheme requires that you join the co-op as a member, then can buy community bonds that pay interest over seven years. Obviously, allowing for equity crowdfunding will greatly expand the opportunities for investment, since not everyone want to join a co-op to buy bonds in order to invest in interesting opportunities.

We’re going to be doing a table exercise on benefits and concerns of crowdfunding, then the conference wrapup, so this will probably be the last post from this Technicity conference on crowdfunding. I’m not really an entrepreneur any more – I’ve done two startups in the past, but currently just operate as an independent – but I have a lot of friends with Canadian startups that could benefit from crowdfunding, and I’m fascinated by any intersection of social and business.