Gartner Survey Highlights Consumer Fatigue with Social Media

There are signs of maturity in the social media market, as some users in certain segments are showing “social media fatigue”, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc. The survey reveals continued localization of usage, whereby certain country-specific social characteristics dictate preferences. However, large global brands such as Facebook are making headway in countries where they have not historically been strong.

Gartner surveyed 6,295 respondents, between the ages of 13 and 74, in 11 developed and developing markets in December 2010 and January 2011. Consumers were asked about their use of and opinions about social media sites with the aim of examining usage trends and how enthusiastic users were about social media in general across a range of countries.

Of the respondents, 24 percent said they use their favorite social media site less than when they first signed up. These respondents tended to be in segments that have a more practical view of technology. But 37 percent of respondents, particularly those in younger age groups and more tech-savvy segments, said they were using their favorite site more.

Gartner analysts also examined whether the type of social media site respondents used affected their enthusiasm. Given that 24 percent of respondents indicated that they were using their main social site “a little less” or “a lot less” than when they first started using it, respondents were asked what negative factors might be influencing their decision.
Although none of the options given to the respondents resonated extremely highly, 33 percent said they were concerned about online privacy. Attitudes to privacy were also age-related, with teenagers citing privacy concerns significantly less often than older respondents (22 percent of teenagers agreed or strongly agreed that privacy concerns were decreasing their enthusiasm, against an average of 33 percent).

From a geographical point of view, some of the more mature social media markets -- Japan, the UK and the US -- corresponded to the global average trend -- with roughly 40 percent of respondents using the site more than when they first started, 40 percent using it the same amount, and 20 percent using it less. Markets where enthusiasm was higher included South Korea and Italy, where nearly 50 percent of respondents said they used their social media sites more. At the other end of the spectrum, countries with the most respondents saying they used the site less included Brazil and Russia -- both with between 30 and 40 percent of respondents exhibiting less enthusiasm.

More information on CRM and Social Media can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Enterprises That Harness the Power of Collective Behaviors Will Be the Ultimate Winners With Social Media

Many social media efforts are failing, because some enterprises just don't understand how to employ social media to facilitate collective behaviors, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner conducted a 10 month effort collecting data and analyzing 200 successful social media implementations to identify how enabling collective human behaviors can lead to enterprise value.

Enterprises can employ these collective behaviors as the link between business value and social media technologies. They can use them to examine a target community and formulate new ways that people can interact to achieve enterprise value. By understanding the most prevalent technologies, collaborative behaviors, business use cases and business value for six collective behaviors, enterprises can more effectively plan for successful community-based social media initiatives. The six collective behaviors include:

Enable Collective Intelligence for Operational Effectiveness

Collective intelligence is the meaningful assembly of relatively small and incremental community contributions into a larger and coherent accumulation of knowledge. Enterprises looking to improve internal operational effectiveness through enhanced collaboration, especially around product delivery, customer service and creation of a corporate memory, should examine employing blogs and wikis.

Gartner's research indicates that pursuing collective intelligence to achieve operational effectiveness is one of the most successful social media adoption trends. Furthermore, collective intelligence is one of the earliest and most mature patterns, meaning that skills and tool capabilities are relatively widespread, and success in this pattern is proven.

Employ Expertise Location for Sales Effectiveness

Expertise location involves specific expertise from the masses of people and among the often staggering amount of available content. Enterprises seeking to improve sales effectiveness should examine the potential of social networking to enable expertise location behaviors associated with product delivery, product utilization and customer service.

Gartner's research shows a strong CRM-related social media adoption pattern in employing social networks for expertise locations. It often involves the enterprise identifying a small number of customers or prospects out of the masses in the market who can assist in enhancing a product or service or in improving the customer experience.

Unearth Emergent Structures for Operational Effectiveness

Emergent structures are structures that are unknown or unplanned prior to social interactions but emerge as activity progresses. The goal of emergent structures is to gain insight into the true "nature of things" to more effectively organize, manage or interact with a community. Enterprises advancing their use of social media should explore emergent structures as a means to better understand how organizations actually behave and accomplish work. Emergent structures is a more advanced collective behavior and is relatively less mature. Once enterprises understand the value of social media and experience some initial success, then emergent structures become more appealing, and the chances for success are higher.

Increase Sales Through Interest Cultivation

Interest cultivation is the collecting of people and content around a common interest, with the goal of growing the community of interested people and increasing their level of engagement. Enterprises pursuing social media for brand awareness and sales effectiveness should employ social media to foster mass interest cultivation. Gartner has found that enterprises that have successfully facilitated interest cultivation have experienced stronger customer loyalty and increased customer engagement, leading to better brand awareness, increased customer feedback and increased sales.

Engage in Mass Coordination for Rapid Response

Mass coordination involves rapidly organizing the activities of a large number of people through fast and short mass messaging that is often spread virally. Early adopters of social media should examine mass coordination for rapidly coordinating a mass response to a significant event. Emergency response, search and rescue, sense and respond, political activism, marketing campaigns, and management of large programs are some appropriate scenarios for mass coordination. Gartner believes that by effectively employing mass coordination, enterprises can more rapidly marshal a powerful response to an important occurrence. However, mass coordination is an emerging collective behavior and comes with the risks associated with immaturity.

Build Relationship Leverage for Brand Awareness

Relationship leverage is the seemingly contradictory practice of effectively managing and deriving value from a huge number of personal relationships. Enterprises pursuing social media for brand awareness and sales effectiveness should examine the potential of the relationship leverage collective behavior. Enterprises that have successfully facilitated relationship leverage experience benefits in brand awareness and customer engagement and relationship leverage is often a cost-effective and lower-risk social media effort.

More information on social media can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Survey Reveals Key Business Benefits from Social Business Adoption

A new survey by Jive Software revealed three key findings: 1) customers are deriving quantifiable business benefits from their Social Business investments, 2) 2011 is the year of accelerated enterprise-wide adoption across most industries; and 3) Social Business is a mission-critical application.

The survey was based on responses from 500 individuals, representing more than 300 companies worldwide. A large percentage of the participating companies have more than 10,000 employees.

Key Finding #1: Social Business Drives Breakthrough Business Results

The first key finding revealed that customers are adopting social in the enterprise to change the way they do business and generate material breakthroughs in revenue, cost-savings and innovation. The business benefits from Social Business adoption extend across three key audiences: employees, customers and the social web.

Top Employee Engagement Benefits:

-- 39 percent increase in employee connectedness;

-- 32 percent more ideas generated and captured;

-- 30 percent increase in employee satisfaction;

-- 27 percent less email;

-- 32 percent reduction in time to find answers; and

-- 37 percent increase in project collaboration and productivity.

Top Customer Engagement Benefits:

-- 42 percent more communication with customers;

-- 31 percent increase in customer retention;

-- 34 percent higher brand awareness;

-- 28 percent decrease in support call volume;

-- 34 percent more feedback and ideas from customers; and

-- 27 percent increase in new customer sales.

Key Finding #2: Social Business Software Adoption is Pervasive

The survey also found that Social Business software is being adopted at a large scale across a broad range of industries. Eighty-three percent of participants reported that they are implementing enterprise-wide Social Business initiatives. This is indicative of the pervasive use of Social Business software to fundamentally change different business processes, from the way employees collaborate to the way companies engage with their customers.

The survey further showed that Social Business is adopted across many industries. From the respondents surveyed, over 35 industries were represented. The top ten industries are:

1. High tech (software/hardware, computer services);

2. Financial services;

3. Communications / Telecommunications;

4. Healthcare;

5. Media / Marketing / Advertising;

6. Retail / Wholesale;

7. Education;

8. Consumer goods;

9. Government; and

10. Insurance.

Key Finding #3: Social Business is Mission-Critical

The last finding showed that Social Business is a mission-critical initiative that requires a tight partnership between IT and business to be successful. IT needs to be closely involved to ensure that the Social Business system has the right scalability, security and corporate governance standards required by the enterprise. 

More information on Social Media can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Survey Reveals CRM practitioners Have Been Slow to Embrace Social Networking

SugarCRM, a customer relationship management (CRM) company, announced the results of its 2010 Social CRM Survey. The poll’s results reinforced the notion that in the year 2010, CRM practitioners have been slow to embrace social. Those that have chosen to take advantage of this new technology have enjoyed a competitive advantage in the market and a considerable return on investment, placing them firmly ahead of their challengers.

Survey Results

-- 42 percent of respondents said LinkedIn is where they most often interact with or research customers and prospects, while 32 percent listed Facebook and 14 percent listed Twitter.

-- 50 percent of respondents said yes, social networks have helped their business become more successful in the last 12 months.

-- Only 26 percent of respondents said they currently integrate their customers’ social networking information with their existing CRM data.

-- 72 percent of respondents said they plan to integrate their customers’ social networking information into their existing CRM data within the next year.

After reviewing the results, the discrepancies among the responses become obvious. Over half of those polled indicated that social networks have helped their business become more successful, yet only 26 percent of respondents currently utilize this priceless social network information.

According to the survey, 2011 will bring much change to the CRM market; virtually all of the respondents agreed that over the course of the new year they planned to integrate their customers’ social networking information into their existing CRM data. While nearly half of all respondents stated that having social CRM capabilities would impact their decision-making when purchasing their company’s next CRM system, it’s clear that social CRM will become a staple in the market by 2012. 

More information on CRM can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

New Research Finds Nearly 90% of Companies Have Some Form of Social Networking in Place

InformationWeek Analytics, a service for peer-based IT research and analysis, announced the release of its latest research report; Socially Challenged? Make Your Enterprise Social Networking Efforts Pay Off explores why, at a time when everyone seems to be friending, tweeting and linking, the vast majority of the 700+ companies we polled can't get their employees to use social networking tools for the benefit of the business.

Nearly 90% of companies have some sort of social networking in place, according to InformationWeek Analytics' recent Social Networking in the Enterprise Survey, yet attempts to get employees to blog, use wikis, participate in discussion forums or take advantage of full-scale enterprise social networks largely fail. Lack of single sign-on, integration with e-mail, tracking of user activity and connection to external social nets are key factors that keep employees from embracing internal social nets.

Key findings include:

-- The most used function of enterprise social networking is the online directory with Facebook-style profiles (22% of survey respondents report heavy use), followed by team or company wikis (13%), company discussion forums (7%) and internal blogs (5%).

-- One-third of companies surveyed don't provide employees with single sign-on to their internal systems.

-- 39% of respondent don't offer any type of e-mail integration with their internal social networks.

-- Only 8% of companies approach their social networking initiatives with a coordinated team from multiple disciples; most efforts are led by marketing.

-- Microsoft's SharePoint is the leading enterprise social networking system, with 71% of the market; Google's sites and IBM's Lotus are the only other platforms with a sizable base.

More information on CRM and Social Networking can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Marketing Trends Survey Reveals Positive Economic Outlook for 2011

StrongMail a provider of marketing solutions for email marketing and social media, announced the results of its “2011 Marketing Trends” survey, which provides unique insight into how businesses plan to budget and prioritize marketing dollars in 2011.

According to the survey, half of businesses plan to increase their marketing budgets in 2011, and another 43% plan to maintain current levels. Only 7% of respondents plan to decrease marketing budgets, a significant improvement over the 11% reported in last year's survey. Despite budget increases, respondents indicated a lack of resources/staff to be the biggest email marketing challenge in 2011, representing a potential demand for outsourced marketing services. Integration with customer data and email deliverability rounded out the top three email marketing challenges for 2011.

Email and Social Media Lead the Pack; Direct Mail and Tradeshows Face Cuts

Email marketing (65%) and social media (57%) will be the top areas of investment in 2011, followed by Search (41%). Direct Mail (36%) and Tradeshows/Events (33%) are the top targets for decreased spend; however, this is a marked improvement over last year's survey, which found marketers reducing spend in these areas by 42% and 44% respectively.

Engagement and Segmentation Are Top Priorities; Facebook is King

The most important email marketing initiatives for 2011 are increasing subscriber engagement (52%), improving segmentation and targeting (49%), and integrating social media and email marketing (43%). On the latter point, a full 71% have already integrated email and social, or plan to 2011.

Among social media initiatives, Facebook is the biggest priority (35%), followed by viral/referral marketing programs (22%). Marketing via Twitter and implementing social media management technology tied for third place (21%). Awareness building (63%) is the primary goal for social media marketing initiatives, followed by loyalty acquisition (54%) and reaching new audiences (42%). As is the case with any new channel, social media marketing is seen as least effective at generating leads and revenue.

Survey Highlights

-- 93% of businesses plan to increase or maintain marketing spend in 2011

-- 44% of business cite lack of resources/staff as primary email marketing challenge in 2011; 41% data integration; 36% email deliverability

-- 52% of businesses cite increasing subscriber engagement as top 2011 email marketing initiative; 49% improving segmentation/targeting; 43% integrating email and social media

-- 65% of businesses plan to increase marketing budget for email; 57% social media; 41% search

-- 71% of businesses plan to integrate email and social media in 2011

More information on marketing trends can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Gartner Says Worldwide Enterprise Social Software Revenue to Surpass $769 Million in 2011

Worldwide enterprise social software revenue is on pace to total $664.4 million in 2010, a 14.9 percent increase from 2009 revenue of $578.2 million, according to Gartner, Inc. The market is poised for continued growth in 2011 when revenue is forecast to reach $769.2 million, up 15.7 percent from 2010.

Enterprise social software enables participation through formal and informal interactions and aggregates these interactions to reflect the collective attitudes, dispositions and knowledge of the participants. Technologies include blogs, communities, discussion forums, expertise location, feeds and syndication, social bookmarks, wikis, and integrated platforms/suites.

Social software technologies can create business value by: driving changes in interpersonal interactions; improving operational efficiency and effectiveness; raising organizational performance; and leveraging internal and external social networks.

Cloud-based and software as a service (SaaS) delivery continue to be key adoption factors, and of the more than 80 vendors that Gartner tracks for this marketplace, more than 50 provide social software through cloud-based and SaaS delivery. Cloud-based and SaaS models have many potential advantages for social software deployments as buyers of these services tend to be business executives with specific marketing, R&D or HR budgets. Cloud-based and SaaS offerings have also opened up access to collaboration and social software technology to small and midsize businesses that would not otherwise consider on-premises deployments.

Aligned to the technology maturation of the enterprise social software market is the relative business maturity and business benefits that organizations are now deriving. Features such as blogs, bookmarks, discussion forums, presence, profiles, rating engines, tagging and wikis are now being combined into applications designed for specific business outcomes, including product reviews and testing, brand marketing, community development and other purposes.

Some deployments are more focused on internal users, with an emphasis on integration with existing infrastructure, business applications and other enterprise requirements. Others target internal communities of interest, aiming to capture and diffuse organizational knowledge, while others focus on branded external customer communities with good support for large deployments, consumer engagement and management of user-generated content. In all scenarios, social software improves the connectedness of workers, promotes collaboration and helps capture informal knowledge.

More information on social media can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Use of Smartphones by Bargain-Hunting Consumers is Changing the Customer-Retailer Relationship

A global survey by Accenture on mobile devices and shopping shows that smartphone users would find it useful to download money-off coupons to their phones (79 percent), and receive instant money-off coupons as they pass by an item in a store (73 percent). Conversely, fewer than half (48 percent) of smartphone users have downloaded a coupon from their PCs. The survey results highlight how the growing use of smartphone technology and the economic downturn have encouraged cost-conscious consumers to explore alternative retail channels, such as online and smartphones, to secure bargains.

According to Accenture, the findings of its study of 1,000 consumers in 10 countries suggest that couponing could become a more important part of the retail experience as smartphone technology becomes more widespread, and if retailers are adept at using customer analytics to target messages and deals to consumers. Notably, 48 percent of conventional cell phone users plan to buy a smartphone in the next 12 months.

The results of the survey also indicate that smartphone technology is changing the relationship between customers and retailers. Many smartphone users said that they prefer using their mobile device rather than interacting with a store employee for simple tasks. According to the survey, 73 percent favor using their smartphone to handle simple tasks compared to 15 percent who favor interaction with an employee. Similarly, 71 percent favor using their smartphone to identify a store with a desired item in stock, while 17 percent would prefer to get that information by speaking to an employee.

Privacy, however, remains a key concern of consumers, and could have a negative impact on the growing use of smartphones for shopping. More than half of respondents (54 percent) worry that using smartphones will erode their privacy. Among the other smartphone shopping concerns voiced, 59 percent of respondents fear losing the personal touch from store employees, and 39 percent believe that products would get more expensive.

Among the additional survey findings:

--69 percent of smartphone users are aware of smartphone applications from large retailers and 48 percent have downloaded at least one application,

--90 percent of consumers who have downloaded an application from a large retailer found it “very useful” or “useful”,

--56 percent believe smartphones will make the shopping experience more enjoyable.

More information on Customer Relationship Management can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Cloud Services, Mobile Computing, and Social Networking to Mature and Coalesce in 2011, Creating a New Mainstream for the IT Industry

In 2011, and certainly beyond, IDC expects cloud services, mobile computing, and social networking to mature and coalesce into a new mainstream platform for both the IT industry and the industries it serves.

The platform transition will be fueled by another solid year of recovery in IT spending. IDC forecasts worldwide IT spending will be $1.6 trillion in 2011, an increase of 5.7% over 2010. While hardware spending will remain strong (7.8% year-over-year growth), the industry will depend to a larger extent on improvements in software spending (5.3% growth) and related project-based services spending (3.5% growth), as well as gains in outsourcing (4% growth). Worldwide IT spending will also benefit from the accelerated recovery in emerging markets, which will generate more than half of all net new IT spending worldwide in 2011.

Spending on public IT cloud services will grow at more than five times the rate of the IT industry in 2011, up 30% from 2010, as organizations move a wider range of business applications into the cloud. Small and medium-sized business cloud use will surge in 2011, with adoption of some cloud resources topping 33% among U.S. midsize firms by year's end. Meanwhile, the more nascent private cloud model will continue to evolve as infrastructure, software, and service providers collaborate on a range of new offerings and solutions. Meanwhile, the vendor battle for two cloud "power positions" will be joined to determine on whose cloud platform will solutions be deployed, and who will provide coherent IT management across multiple public clouds, customers' private clouds, and their legacy IT environments.

Mobile computing – on a variety of devices and through a range of new applications – will continue to explode in 2011, forming another critical plank in the new industry platform. IDC expects shipments of app-capable, non-PC mobile devices (smartphones, media tablets, etc.) will outnumber PC shipments within the next 18 months – and there will be no looking back. While vendors with a PC heritage will scramble to secure their position in this rapidly expanding market, another battle will be taking place for dominance in the mobile apps market. The level of activity in this market will be staggering, with IDC expecting nearly 25 billion mobile apps to be downloaded in 2011, up from just over 10 billion in 2010. Over time, the still-emerging apps ecosystems promise to fundamentally restructure the channels for all digital content and services to consumers.

Meanwhile, social business software has gained significant momentum in the enterprise over the past 18 months and this trend is expected to continue with IDC forecasting a compound annual growth rate of 38% through 2014. In a sure sign that social business has hit the mainstream, IDC expects 2011 to be a year of consolidation as the major software vendors acquire social software providers to jump-start or increase their social business footprint. Meanwhile, the use of social platforms by small and medium-sized businesses will accelerate, with more than 40% of SMBs using social networks for promotional purposes by the year's end.

As the new mainstream IT platform coalesces in the months ahead, IDC expects it to lay a foundation for IT vendors to support, and profit from, a variety of "intelligent industry" transformations. In retail, mobility and social networking are rapidly changing consumers' shopping experience as they bring their smartphones into the store for on-site price comparisons and product recommendations. In financial services, mobility and the cloud are bringing mobile banking and payments closer to reality. In the healthcare industry, IDC expects 14% of adult Americans to use a mobile health application in 2011.

More information on CRM can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

The top ten enterprise IT trends for 2011

Security, cloud services and sustainability will be three of the most important trends in enterprise IT in 2011, according to Ovum.

The independent technology analyst has named its top ten trends for the coming year, which also include mobility, data management and data centre transformation. Business analytics, collaboration, IT financial management and context-aware computing also make the list.

Security

Security continues to be high on the IT agenda as the number of threats to businesses increases rapidly.

Data management

Data management will be a key area due to the sheer volumes now passing through enterprises.

Business analytics

The technologies’ ability to improve decision-making, identify new business opportunities, maximize cost savings and detect inefficiencies is driving its importance for organizations.

Mobility

In IT management, the mobility challenge in 2011 will be to embrace the new technology while developing a strategy that maintains a balance between user preference and productivity and corporate security and compliance.

Data center transformation

The role of the data center is witnessing a dramatic shift as the cloud computing era heralds a new dawn in the delivery of IT services in 2011.

Cloud services

Cloud computing will continue to grow steadily in 2011. Ovum believes that it is no longer a question of whether or not enterprises will use cloud computing, they already are. However, it is still early days for both providers and CIOs, who will grapple to take advantage in 2011.

Collaboration

To cater for changes in work practices, an integrated approach to collaboration is needed which includes social networking and video conferencing.

Sustainability

New opportunities will continue to emerge in 2011 which allow organizations to work in a more environmentally-friendly way.

IT financial management

The CIO should talk the language of business and put in place better IT financial management in 2011.

Context-aware computing

In 2011, CIOs should be looking to instrumentation, metering and wireless technologies to play a significant role in providing the context which can lead to automated business processes and increased productivity. 

More information can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Study Finds Blind Spots in Go-To-Market Process Limit Demand Chain Performance and Revenue Optimization

A new study by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council reveals significant blind spots in the go-to-market process as marketers focus on strategy, creative development and campaign execution to the detriment of effective demand chain provisioning. The latter includes the efficient and timely delivery of marketing and merchandising materials to dealer, agent, franchise, retail and brand office locations, as well as the processing of customer requests for sales literature and samples through web, call center and email channels.

According to the report, entitled Competitive Gain in the Demand Chain, many marketing executives admit they have never assessed demand chain performance, nor given it high priority within the marketing operational mix. This may be contributing to the belief, expressed by 80 percent of respondents, that their organizations are not efficient or effective enough in provisioning all of the demand chain. A surprising 20 percent of more than 250 marketers audited by the CMO Council in the past three months admit their demand chain is under-performing or in need of improvement.

Marketers agree that demand chain provisioning is critical to business competitiveness and performance (38 percent of respondents), while an additional 31 percent believe it is important to sustaining sales and channel operations. Yet, only 25 percent of respondents are ensuring sales support materials and resources are delivered on-demand, which would improve sell-through and customer conversion. Only 15 percent are taking steps to audit and assess marketing supply chain effectiveness, indicating that there is little to no visibility into the demand chain provisioning process to truly gauge content, material or operational impact and performance.

While 56 percent of marketers are focused on campaign design, development and execution, only 16 percent are looking to production, warehousing, inventory management or delivery as critical elements in an effective demand chain. In addition, just two percent are looking to optimize the actual delivery, fulfillment or distribution of their critical marketing materials.

One area that potentially holds an immediate opportunity for improvement and value creation is specific to vendor selection or management. Nearly half of respondents view demand chain procurement and fulfillment as a compilation of individual vendors, asking each vendor to bid on individual elements of the demand chain. Only seven percent of marketers view the demand chain as an area for consolidation and rationalization to gain more control and efficiency. As nearly 60 percent of respondents plan on introducing a more disciplined approach to marketing execution systems, vendor visibility is likely an ideal place to begin demand chain transformation.

More information on CRM can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

New IDC Report Discusses Formula for Determining Social Business ROI

One of the top challenges associated with implementing enterprise social software is measuring the impact on business goals. A new International Data Corporation (IDC) study, Determining the Value of Social Business ROI: Myths, Facts, and Potentially High Returns, reveals that enterprise social software adoption still has room to grow, with 41% of respondents indicating that they have already implemented an enterprise social software solution -- leaving 59% who have yet to implement a solution. With this much adoption anticipated, IDC forecasts the emerging social platforms market will generate revenues of nearly $2 billion by 2014, experiencing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38.2% over the 2009-2014 forecast period.

When conducting ROI on social business initiatives, the rules of business still apply, regardless if a company deploys social business initiatives to assist customer service, marketing, public relations, product innovation, employee collaboration, or other functional areas of the organization. IDC believes business executives need to understand not only the traditional metrics and value calculations of ROI, but also the impact that social business initiatives have on these computations and their interrelatedness. 

More information on social media can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Global Survey Reveals Companies Are Addicted to "Big Data"; Executives Report Feeling Overwhelmed by Flood of Business Data but Still Seek More, Faster

Avanade, a business technology services provider, announced the results of its global survey, "The Business Impact of Big Data," which examines executive attitudes about how enterprises are managing the exponential growth of data.

The survey, conducted by Kelton Research, reveals that big data is creating very real business challenges for executives. In fact, more than half -- 56 percent -- of C-level executives, IT decision makers and business unit leaders report they are overwhelmed by the amount of data their company manages. Many also report they are often delayed in making important decisions as a result of too much information. Forty-six percent report they have made an inaccurate business decision as a result of bad or outdated data.

Data Addiction

Despite the challenges created by the proliferation of data, executives report they desire more data and they want it faster. One in three executives believe access to even more sources of data would enable them to do their job better, while 61 percent say they still want faster access to data. According to the survey, this desire for more data and need for speed is driven by the ability to keep up with customer service expectations.

Executives do recognize there is value in the data, from improved business forecasts to reduced uncertainty in decision-making and improved competitive positioning. Sixty-one percent of companies believe the flood of data entering the enterprise fundamentally changes the way their businesses operate.

CRM and Security

When it comes to the most important kinds of data, companies report that customer relationship and sales information are critical to their strategic decision-making process. They recognize the opportunity to grow their top line revenue by harnessing customer information, and this focus is driving additional technology investments in customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Sixty-seven percent of executives have invested or are seriously considering investing in CRM in the next 12 months.

With growing data, there is also a growing requirement for data security. Seventy-eight percent of companies report that they are investing in security solutions or will do so in the next 12 months. In the public sector, pressures are even greater with 74 percent of government organizations investing in CRM and 85 percent investing in security.

Struggle to Derive Business Value

The survey also reveals a big data disconnect. Despite the increasing volume of data, pressure to keep up with customer expectations and focus on technology investments, today's companies are still struggling to see big data as a driver of real business value. On the one hand, executives surveyed say there is value in the data. On the other hand, less than half of respondents -- 46 percent -- view the available sources of data as a strategic differentiator for their organization. Rather, the majority -- 54 percent -- consider data as a consequence of doing business.

The "Business Impact of Big Data" survey was conducted by Kelton Research, an independent research firm, in August 2010, and surveyed 543 C-level executives, IT decision makers and business unit leaders at top companies located in 17 countries across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. 

More information on CRM can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Social-Networking Services to Replace E-Mail as the Primary Vehicle for Interpersonal Communications for 20 Percent of Business Users by 2014

Greater availability of social-networking-services, coupled with changing demographics and work styles, will lead 20 percent of employees to use social networks as their business communications’ hub by 2014, according to Gartner, Inc. Analysts said that this is one of a wide range of capabilities that have emerged in communications, social Web and mobile, enabling richer interactions among people and expanding collaboration to a broader level.

While microblogging is reshaping enterprise communications, business communications are evolving. Newer employees will enter the workforce with a predisposition to communicate via a social network, but they will use e-mail in parallel -- optimizing the business need with the communication modality.

Vendors such as Microsoft and IBM will add links to internal and external social networks from within e-mail clients and servers, making services such as contacts, calendars and tasks shareable across e-mail and social networks. By 2012, Gartner said contact lists, calendars and messaging clients in any smartphones will be social-enabled applications.

Collaboration is slowly moving to the cloud, and Gartner analysts expect to see steep growth rates for sales of premises- and cloud-based social networking services. Organizations will deploy hybrid models where some services live on-premises and some are in the cloud. Gartner predicts that the percentage of e-mail accounts on cloud services will grow to 10 percent by year-end 2012, up 7 percent from 2009.

From a vendor’s perspective, the market is consolidating around Microsoft and Research In Motion (RIM), the two market leaders. Gartner forecasts that by 2012, RIM and Microsoft will own 80 percent of the enterprise wireless e-mail software market.

More information on social media can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

With Millions of Brands to Choose, New Media Users Follow Only Five

Even as new media adoption explodes – up 48 percent from 2009 – loyal followers can be hard to come by for companies trying to reach consumers online. With the world’s most loved brands a click of the mouse away, new media users still choose to demonstrate affinity (e.g., “like” on Facebook, “follow” on Twitter or subscribe to an RSS feed) for an average of only 4.6 companies online, making this club one of the most exclusive to which a company can hope to gain access. These are among the findings of Cone’s latest research, the 2010 Cone Consumer New Media Study.

Consumers are more open than ever to engaging with companies via new media (86 percent vs. 78 percent in 2009), but it still takes a big effort on the part of the company to reach the upper echelons of the consideration set. To stand out, companies need to incentivize new followers. Before deciding whether to engage with companies online, 77 percent of new media users look for free products, coupons or discounts. And they expect to find them in the following places:

Social networks – 48%

Mobile devices – 20%

Message boards – 20%

Blogs – 13%

Online games – 12%

It may be difficult for companies to get to the top, but it’s even harder to stay there. Nearly two-thirds (59%) of new media users say they are satisfied with their online experiences with companies, but that doesn’t mean they won’t hesitate to punish companies by disengaging. More than half of users will stop following a company if it acts irresponsibly toward its consumers (58%), over-communicates with them (58%) or provides irrelevant content (53%). Under-communicating (36%) or censoring user-generated content (28%) is also grounds for falling out of favor.

Companies that can deliver high-quality customer experiences are richly rewarded.

Users who engage with companies via new media are more likely to:

Share information about the company across their own social networks – 62%

Feel a stronger connection to the company – 61%

Feel better served by the company – 60%

Purchase the company’s products or services – 59%

As new media usage grows, so too do the myriad touch points. No longer satisfied to sit still, users are increasingly taking their online experiences on the go, as nearly one-in-five (18%, up from 13% in 2009) look to interact with companies via their mobile devices. Other touch points include social networks (38%), message boards (16%), online games (15%), blogs (13%), photo-, audio- or video-sharing sites (11%) and microblogs (3%).

More information on social media and customer service can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

CFOs Concerned About Time Waste but Also See Business Benefits in Social Media Use

As social media makes its way into the workplace, executives are weighing the potential risks and benefits. Approximately half (51 percent) of chief financial officers (CFOs) interviewed recently for an Accountemps survey said their greatest concern is that employees are wasting time during business hours using sites such as Facebook and Twitter. CFOs also expressed worries their staff may behave unprofessionally or post inappropriate information online. However, three in 10 financial executives (28 percent) said using these sites can improve customer service.

The survey was developed by Accountemps, a staffing services firm specializing in accounting and finance. It was conducted by an independent research firm and is based on interviews with responses from more than 1,400 CFOs from a stratified random sample of U.S. companies with 20 or more employees.

CFOs were asked, "What is your greatest concern for your company regarding employees using social media?" Their responses:

Wasting time at work - 51%

Behaving unprofessionally - 18%

Posting financial/confidential company information - 11%

Posting negative comments about company - 10%

No concerns - 10%

Don't know/no answer - 1%

CFOs were asked, "What is the greatest benefit to your company of employees using social media?" Their responses:

Provide better customer service - 28%

Enhance company's reputation - 22%

Expand networks of valuable contacts - 20%

Can secure new business - 18%

No benefits - 10%

Don't know/no answer - 2%

More information on CRM can be found at www.CRMindustry.com

Gartner Says Mobility will be a Trillion Dollar Business by 2014

Worldwide mobile voice and data revenue will exceed one trillion dollars a year by 2014, according to Gartner, Inc. Mobile will generate revenue from a wide range of additional services such as context, advertising, application and service sales, and so on. Each of these will be a significant business worth several tens of billions of dollars per year.

In mature markets, smartphones will dominate device sales for the foreseeable future. However, the dominant mobile device type shipped globally will be feature phones without an identifiable OS because emerging markets dominate handset demand. Organizations operating in emerging markets should assume smartphones will be a niche device beyond 2014.

Many new device types such as tablets and e-book readers will emerge through 2012 and some will find a role in corporations. However, none will achieve a market share comparable to smartphones or laptops, which will remain the dominant corporate mobile devices. Mobile knowledge workers will require both a PC and a smartphone through 2014.

The smartphone platform space is very competitive, and the leaders will change through 2014 with Symbian is losing share to Android and iPhone OS (iOS). Android is gaining ground fast and will appear on consumer electronics and non-handset devices such as tablets.

Gartner believes that context will be a defining principle of mobile business for the next decade. It will play a key role in many areas of mobile business, especially advertising and marketing.

More information can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Research Finds Nearly 90% of IT Organizations Lack a Collaborative Interdepartmental Web Strategy

InformationWeek Analytics announced the release of its latest research report, The Well-Integrated Web, which provides strategies and practices to create a cohesive customer-facing online presence.

The report, based on an analysis of 326 business technology professionals, shows that 44% of respondents run more than five distinct sites, and only 39% of those with consumer sites provide integrated cross-site search and navigation. The vast majority -- 89% -- lack a collaborative interdepartmental online approach.

Companies aiming to improve their business online must coordinate their Web efforts across departments and divisions; simplify access, navigation and search; and incorporate social networking—all without jeopardizing security. After years of scrambling to keep up with new Internet technology amid budget and staff cuts, it's time for IT, working collaboratively with the business office, sales, marketing and customer service, to guide this essential change.

Other Key Findings:

-- 44% of respondents rate their customer-facing Web setups average to poor.

-- Nearly 45% say they operate more than five distinct sites; 14% run more than 50 sites.

-- Only 39% offer consistent navigation and search across their customer-facing Web sites.

-- Just 56% provide customers with single sign-on access to their various sites.

-- Only 11% report a truly collaborative approach to their company Web strategy; 6% say their strategy "changes with the wind."

More information can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Most Executives See Their Organizations Moving To Cloud-Based Services Within Two Years

Business and government executives overwhelmingly expect their organizations to use Cloud computing within the next two years, according to results of a survey by KPMG LLP, the audit, tax, and advisory firm.

Taken at the recent Oracle OpenWorld 2010 trade show in San Francisco, the survey of 174 show attendees found that 90 percent of the executives and 68 percent of the middle managers said they are using or plan to use Cloud-based services within two years.

Specifically, 82 percent of all the respondents, which consisted of executives, middle managers and staff, said that migration to the Cloud raises a broad set of issues around business transformation that should be understood and managed across the entire organization.

When asked to rate the importance of four factors driving a company or organization to pursue Cloud-based activities, 84 percent of those surveyed rated "technical" (ie., scalability, security) as important or extremely important, while 78 percent viewed "economics" (cost savings, shifting capital expenditures to operational expenditures) as important or extremely important, and 76 percent placed "functional" (ie., capabilities, accessibility) in that category, with 66 percent rating "strategic" factors (ie., business process transformation, speed to market) as important or extremely important.

In addition, 79 percent of executives, middle managers and staff said that Cloud is a viable option for enterprises to be more agile and cost competitive and 74 percent said that organizations adopting Cloud can experience long-term competitive advantages. 

More information on Cloud Computing can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.

Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2011

Gartner, Inc. recently highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2011. Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses. It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. As such, these technologies impact the organization's long-term plans, programs and initiatives.

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2011 include:

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing services exist along a spectrum from open public to closed private. The next three years will see the delivery of a range of cloud service approaches that fall between these two extremes. Vendors will offer packaged private cloud implementations that deliver the vendor's public cloud service technologies (software and/or hardware) and methodologies (i.e., best practices to build and run the service) in a form that can be implemented inside the consumer's enterprise. Many will also offer management services to remotely manage the cloud service implementation. Gartner expects large enterprises to have a dynamic sourcing team in place by 2012 that is responsible for ongoing cloudsourcing decisions and management.

Mobile Applications and Media Tablets. Gartner estimates that by the end of 2010, 1.2 billion people will carry handsets capable of rich, mobile commerce providing an ideal environment for the convergence of mobility and the Web. Mobile devices are becoming computers in their own right, with an astounding amount of processing ability and bandwidth. There are already hundreds of thousands of applications for platforms like the Apple iPhone, in spite of the limited market (only for the one platform) and need for unique coding.

Social Communications and Collaboration. Social media can be divided into: (1) Social networking —social profile management products, such as MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Friendster as well as social networking analysis (SNA) technologies that employ algorithms to understand and utilize human relationships for the discovery of people and expertise. (2) Social collaboration —technologies, such as wikis, blogs, instant messaging, collaborative office, and crowdsourcing. (3) Social publishing —technologies that assist communities in pooling individual content into a usable and community accessible content repository such as YouTube and flickr. (4) Social feedback - gaining feedback and opinion from the community on specific items as witnessed on YouTube, flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Amazon. Gartner predicts that by 2016, social technologies will be integrated with most business applications. Companies should bring together their social CRM, internal communications and collaboration, and public social site initiatives into a coordinated strategy.

Video. Video is not a new media form, but its use as a standard media type used in non-media companies is expanding rapidly. Technology trends in digital photography, consumer electronics, the web, social software, unified communications, digital and Internet-based television and mobile computing are all reaching critical tipping points that bring video into the mainstream. Over the next three years Gartner believes that video will become a commonplace content type and interaction model for most users, and by 2013, more than 25 percent of the content that workers see in a day will be dominated by pictures, video or audio.

Next Generation Analytics. Increasing compute capabilities of computers including mobile devices along with improving connectivity are enabling a shift in how businesses support operational decisions. It is becoming possible to run simulations or models to predict the future outcome, rather than to simply provide backward looking data about past interactions, and to do these predictions in real-time to support each individual business action. While this may require significant changes to existing operational and business intelligence infrastructure, the potential exists to unlock significant improvements in business results and other success rates.

Social Analytics. Social analytics describes the process of measuring, analyzing and interpreting the results of interactions and associations among people, topics and ideas. These interactions may occur on social software applications used in the workplace, in internally or externally facing communities or on the social web. Social analytics is an umbrella term that includes a number of specialized analysis techniques such as social filtering, social-network analysis, sentiment analysis and social-media analytics. Social network analysis tools are useful for examining social structure and interdependencies as well as the work patterns of individuals, groups or organizations. Social network analysis involves collecting data from multiple sources, identifying relationships, and evaluating the impact, quality or effectiveness of a relationship.

Context-Aware Computing. Context-aware computing centers on the concept of using information about an end user or object’s environment, activities connections and preferences to improve the quality of interaction with that end user. The end user may be a customer, business partner or employee. A contextually aware system anticipates the user's needs and proactively serves up the most appropriate and customized content, product or service. Gartner predicts that by 2013, more than half of Fortune 500 companies will have context-aware computing initiatives and by 2016, one-third of worldwide mobile consumer marketing will be context-awareness-based.

Storage Class Memory. Gartner sees huge use of flash memory in consumer devices, entertainment equipment and other embedded IT systems. It also offers a new layer of the storage hierarchy in servers and client computers that has key advantages — space, heat, performance and ruggedness among them. Unlike RAM, the main memory in servers and PCs, flash memory is persistent even when power is removed. In that way, it looks more like disk drives where information is placed and must survive power-downs and reboots. Given the cost premium, simply building solid state disk drives from flash will tie up that valuable space on all the data in a file or entire volume, while a new explicitly addressed layer, not part of the file system, permits targeted placement of only the high-leverage items of information that need to experience the mix of performance and persistence available with flash memory.

Ubiquitous Computing. The work of Mark Weiser and other researchers at Xerox's PARC paints a picture of the coming third wave of computing where computers are invisibly embedded into the world. As computers proliferate and as everyday objects are given the ability to communicate with RFID tags and their successors, networks will approach and surpass the scale that can be managed in traditional centralized ways. This leads to the important trend of imbuing computing systems into operational technology, whether done as calming technology or explicitly managed and integrated with IT. In addition, it gives us important guidance on what to expect with proliferating personal devices, the effect of consumerization on IT decisions, and the necessary capabilities that will be driven by the pressure of rapid inflation in the number of computers for each person.

Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers. A fabric-based computer is a modular form of computing where a system can be aggregated from separate building-block modules connected over a fabric or switched backplane. In its basic form, a fabric-based computer comprises a separate processor, memory, I/O, and offload modules (GPU, NPU, etc.) that are connected to a switched interconnect and, importantly, the software required to configure and manage the resulting system(s). The fabric-based infrastructure (FBI) model abstracts physical resources — processor cores, network bandwidth and links and storage — into pools of resources that are managed by the Fabric Resource Pool Manager (FRPM), software functionality. The FRPM in turn is driven by the Real Time Infrastructure (RTI) Service Governor software component. An FBI can be supplied by a single vendor or by a group of vendors working closely together, or by an integrator — internal or external.

More information can be found at www.CRMindustry.com.