HorizonWatching

HorizonWatching 2012 Trend Report: Mobile Computing

I’ve prepared another HorizonWatching Trend report…this one is on Mobile Computing.  I have posted a deck to Slideshare (see embedded deck at end of this post).

The slides provide an overview on the Mobile Computing trend.  In the deck you will find summary information about the Mobile Computing trend along with many links to additional resources.

The Mobile Computing gold rush is in full swing. The “train has left the station”. It's hard to talk to an enterprise customer these days without getting into a discussion about Mobile.

In 2012, the shipment of smartphones and tablets is expected to exceed that of traditional personal computers, including laptops. Enterprise CIOs want to use these personal mobile devices to give better access to their internal data and processes for executives and employees, as well as enabling better purchasing and support services for their customers.

Complicating the CIO’s life are a number of factors:

• employees who wish to use their own devices and applications at work,
• executives and board of directors who want to use their own devices and applications at work
• the wide variety of devices used,
• legacy applications written for a standard desktop screen,
• application level and device management,
• cost controls, and
• maintaining security across the infrastructure.

Some key technology subtrends to watch in 2012 include Voice search and voice assistants, Location Based Services, Gaming, Event-Based Marketing, and Augmented Reality.  On the horizon are applications like Mobile Video and 3D Mobile Internet.   All this has implications for business processes throughout the organization.   CIOs and IT leaders will want to understand how mobile fits into their organization’s unified communications strategy.

The slides provide an overview of the Mobile Computing trend.  Summary information about the Mobile Computing trend is provided along with many links to additional resources.   The slides are meant to be read/studied and the links are there for you to continue your learning.  You may want to view the slides in slideshow mode so you can easily follow the links.

Check out my other HorizonWatching Trend Reports…hope you enjoy them.

Mobile Computing: A HorizonWatching 2012 Trend Report

View more presentations from Bill Chamberlin

IDC Retail Insights: Predictions for 2012 for the Retail Industry

IDC has released its IDC Retail Insights' Predictions for 2012 via it’s annual predictions conference call.  This was a global predictions call and was focused broadly on all types of financial services.  There are also other calls coming up that focus on regional predictions in both Europe and Asia as well as calls specific to sub-industries within Financial Services.   

Leading this conference call was Bob Parker Group Vice President.  Other IDC Retail Insights team members on the call were

• Christine Bardwell   Research Manager
• Greg Girard   Program Director
• Leslie Hand   Research Director
• Ivano Ortis   Head – International, IDC Retail Insights

Summary

According to IDC Retail Insights, the economic indicators are strong going into 2012.  IDC believes that year to year spending growths for Retail Industry segments will range from a low of 3.9% for for Home Furnishing to a high of 5.6% for Drug Stores.  Spending will grow the fastest in the software at 5.8% year to year, while services growth will be lowest at 3.5%.  Asia Pacific is poised to grow the fastest at 4.8% while Western Europe will only row at 3.6%.

The IDC Retail Insights team also confirmed four major IT trends that are reshaping the industry:  Cloud Computing, Social Computing, Mobile Computing, and Analytics.

The Ten Predictions

The 2012 predictions list below was sourced from the conference call slides.

1. Growth Strategy. “Consumers, not products or channels, create the basis for growth strategies.”
2. New Retail IT Model. “The Omni-Channel Consumer directs a new Retail IT model for the industry – O3.” 
3. Innovative & Efficient. “Retailers will race to innovate and will operate more efficiently.”
4. Synchronicity. “Retailers will synchronize the supply chain with the clock speed of their customers.”
5. Brand Experiences. “Retailers will create great brand experiences by enabling engaged employee experiences.”
6. Customer Engagement. “Planning paradigms will begin to evolve to support genuine customer brand engagement strategies.”
7. Assortment Planning. “Continuous assortment planning (AP) orchestrated for space becomes the planning hub.”
8. Store Evolution. “The store evolves – welcome to the Omnichannel Store.”
9. Social Conversations. “Customer experience improvements that boost online conversion will go beyond the web store.”
10. Delivery Models. “eCommerce delivery models will fragment.” 

For More Information

• The full report will be posted at the IDC website sometime in the next month.
• Conference Call Replay (registration required): IDC Retail Insights Predictions 2012: Retail. Other webinars targeting EMEA and AP are also available at the IDC website
• Press Release:  IDC Retail Insights To Present Top 10 Predictions for 2012
• Community:  The IDC Retail Insights Community has blogs, videos, forums, resource library, events etc.
• IDC Retail Insights Newsletter: www.idc-ri.com/newsletter
• The IDC Retail Insights main page is at http://www.idc-ri.com
• The IDC 2012 Predictions portal is at http://www.idc.com/research/Predictions12/Main/index.jsp.  This page is being updated daily as new reports come out, webinars announced, etc.

IBM: 2011 Technology Trends Survey Results and Report

Last month, IBM released it’s 2011 IBM Tech Trends Report, which is one of the top reports I suggest you read about tech trends going into 2012.  It’s a great report because it’s developed from a survey of more than 4000 IT professionals from 93 countries and 25 different industries. 

Summary: 

The IT professionals surveyed identify adoption drivers and inhibitors around important emerging trends such as Analytics, Cloud Computing, Mobile, and Social Business. 

Key findings in the 2011 IBM Tech Trends Report include:

• Analytics:  Analytics was named as the most in demand area for software development in the future.
• Open Source:  87% of respondents believe open source and open standard technologies will play a key role in the future of application development.
• Cloud Computing:  During the next 2 years more than 75%  of organizations will engage in cloud computing.
• Mobile and Cloud.  Fifty-one percent of respondents cited the adoption of cloud technologies as part of their mobile strategy.
• Social Business.  Regional cultural differences impact social business adoption. India is highest with a 57% adoption rate, while US is at 45% and China’s at 44%. Russia shows the strongest resistance with a 19% adoption rate.

Top 8 Programming Skill Areas Identified

1. Application Development
2. Mobile
3. Cloud Computing
4. Database Management
5. Business Analytics
6. Security
7. Software/systems engineering
8. Business Process Management

For More Information: 

Report:  Get the report and share your thoughts at: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/techtrendsreport

Twitter:  Join the Twitter conversation: #TechTrends

Videos:

• Overview of IBMBM 2011 Tech Trends Report
• Mobile Computing insights from IBM 2011 Tech Trends Report
• Cloud Computing insights from IBM 2011 Tech Trends Report
• Social Business insights from IBM 2011 Tech Trends Report
• Business Analytic insights from IBM 2011 Tech Trends Report

Press Release:  IT Professionals Predict Watson Technology To Transform Education Industry

Culture Plays A Big Part In Social Business Adoption

A couple colleagues recently reached out to me on the topic of how best to implement social business within a mature company.  Some employees seem to flock to the latest collaboration and social technologies on their own.  Most employees seem unsure why they should be using these technologies and how to go about getting started.   Finally, some employees want to avoid social and collaboration technologies at all costs.

The fact is that emerging technologies do get a lot of hype and sometimes leaders decide to implement these new hyped technologies without the proper understanding of the change that will be required in business processes and what the impact that will have on employees.

The bottom line for me with any new emerging technology...whether it is is analytics, cloud computing, or social business is that successful implementations of new technologies must have three strategy elements integrated and in place 1) Technology Strategy (the new emerging applications and tools)  2) People Strategy (changes to skills, organization, and culture) 3)  Business Process Strategy (changes to tasks, activities, etc.). 

Too often I see a focus on the technology strategy too much without a focus on the other two.  It's like a three legged stool....if one or two legs are bad the stool falls down.   The business leader must focus on having the proper people and processes in place and that often depends on the culture that business leader develops and promotes within the organization.  Leaders who give the green light to implementing new technologies without understanding the impact on people and processes, will only see those technology initiatives fail.

So my message and advice is that culture does play a big part in implementing change within a mature corporation.  In my mind, culture change is the responsibility of our business leaders and therefore leaders should not implement new emerging technologies unless they understand the impact on people and processes.

Regarding the topic of implementing social business and the cultural implications of doing so, I’ve developed a list of links for those of you who would like to read up more on this topic.  Enjoy.

• IBM:  The New Collaboration:  Enabling innovation, changing the workplace
• IBM:  The Social Business:  Advent of a new age
• Book:  IBM Press Planning and Implementing Social Software for your Enterprise
• IDC:  Social Business Framework:  Using People as a Platform to Enable Transformation
• IDC:  Becoming a Social Business:  The IBM Story
• Dachis Group:  Social Business Design
• Case Study:   Alstom - People and Process First.  Technology Second
• Linkage White Paper:  Social Media:  Finding Its Way into Your Business Strategy and Culture
• Tieto White Paper:  Transforming in a social business
• Book Chapter:   Leader Does as Culture Is
• Book:  http://www.thecultureofcollaboration.com/ a book by Evan Rosen.  Evan blogs also at http://collaborationblog.typepad.com/
• Blog Post:  Social Business Impacts People, Process, & Technology

For more information on the Social Business trend itself, check out my other Social Business related blog posts

Gartner: 2012 Information Technology Predictions and Trends

Gartner, Inc. issued a press release announcing it’s 2012 list of top predictions and trends for IT organizations and users.  Highlighted are key trends like Cloud Computing, Social Business, Big Data, Security, and Mobile.  The predictions and trends made by Gartner align closely with the research I am conducting for my HorizonWatching 2012 Trends report due out in early January.

The eleven predictions from Gartner are as follows

1. Cloud Services:  By 2015, low-cost cloud services will cannibalize up to 15 percent of top outsourcing players' revenue.
2. Social & Collaboration Platforms.  In 2013, the investment bubble will burst for consumer social networks, and for enterprise social software companies in 2014.
3. Enterprise Email.  By 2016, at least 50 percent of enterprise email users will rely primarily on a browser, tablet or mobile client instead of a desktop client.
4. Mobile Apps.   By 2015, mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a ratio of 4-to-1.
5. Cloud Security.  By 2016, 40 percent of enterprises will make proof of independent security testing a precondition for using any type of cloud service.
6. Public Clouds.  At year-end 2016, more than 50 percent of Global 1000 companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud.
7. IT Budget Management.  By 2015, 35 percent of enterprise IT expenditures for most organizations will be managed outside the IT department's budget.
8. Asia Sourcing.  By 2014, 20 percent of Asia-sourced finished goods and assemblies consumed in the U.S. will shift to the Americas.
9. Cybercrime. Through 2016, the financial impact of cybercrime will grow 10 percent per year, due to the continuing discovery of new vulnerabilities.
10. Cloud & Sustainability.  By 2015, the prices for 80 percent of cloud services will include a global energy surcharge.
11. Big Data.  Through 2015, more than 85 percent of Fortune 500 organizations will fail to effectively exploit big data for competitive advantage.

Gartner has issued a full report titled "Gartner's Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2012 and Beyond: Control Slips Away," which is available on Gartner's website at www.gartner.com/predicts. The report apparently has links to more than 70 Gartner ‘predicts’ reports broken out by topics, industries and markets.

Gartner also announced an upcoming webinar, "Gartner Top Predictions for 2012 and Beyond," at 8 a.m. and 11 a.m. EST on December 21. To register for the webinar, go to  http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=202&mode=2&PageID=5553&resId=1842125&ref=Webinar-Calendar.

Gartner: Top 10 Business Apps for Tablets

Gartner says worldwide media tablet sales to end users will total 63.6 million units in 2011, a 261.4 percent increase from 2010 sales of 17.6 million units.  Yes…that says 261%!!.

As consumers increasingly buy these devices they inevitably start bringing them to work, pushing the adoption of business applications for tablets.   Gartner expects this adoption to increase substantially over the next few years as businesses start rolling out enterprise applications that support major business initiatives.

According to Gartner, the top 10 commercial business application categories for tablet devices are:

1. Sales Automation.  Sales automation systems for customer collateral, sales presentations, and ordering systems
2. Business intelligence.  Analytical and performance applications with management dashboards
3. Email.  Containerized email to separate corporate messaging environments from personal email
4. Collaboration.  Collaboration applications for meetings
5. File Utilities.  For sharing and document distribution
6. Business Processes.  General corporate/government enterprise applications for CRM, ERP, SCM and messaging
7. Healthcare.  Medical support systems for doctors, nurses, and physical therapists
8. Desktop Virtualization.  Hosted virtual desktop agents to provide secure remote operations of traditional desktop applications and environments
9. Social Media.  Social networking applications with intelligent business insight
10. Board Books.  For secure document and report distribution

For more detail on Gartner’s thoughts on this subject, see it’s press release “Gartner Identifies Top 10 Commercial Business Applications for Tablet Devices”

Top 25 Most Popular Consumer (B2C) Branded Facebook Pages

I’ve been busy doing lots of research into how social media is being used by corporations.  I thought I’d share with you one piece of analysis I’ve done on B2C Branded Facebook pages.

As I’ve discussed here before, social business is an important emerging trend for corporations.   Many companies are past the experimentation stage on Facebook and are utilizing that platform as a way to build communities of customers into fans and advocates.

This table below documents the most popular B2C Branded fan pages on Facebook.  The table provides the number of fans and the URL for the top 25 pages.   The information was collected in mid October 2011.

Top 25 Most Popular Consumer (B2C) Branded Facebook Pages

#.	Product/Brand	Fans	URL
1	Cocacola	34,643,972	https://www.facebook.com/cocacola
2	Oreo	23,142,657	https://www.facebook.com/oreo
3	Redbull	22,472,071	https://www.facebook.com/redbull
4	Skittles	19,382,918	https://www.facebook.com/skittles
5	Pringles	15,720,653	https://www.facebook.com/Pringles
6	Monster Energy	12,429,566	https://www.facebook.com/MonsterEnergy
7	Ferrero Rocher	12,252,965	https://www.facebook.com/FerreroRocher
8	Nutella	11,397,566	https://www.facebook.com/Nutella
9	Dr Pepper	10,631,556	https://www.facebook.com/DrPepper
10	Starburst	10,020,345	https://www.facebook.com/Starburst
11	Nike Football	8,969,053	http://www.facebook.com/nikefootball
12	Starbucks Frappuccino	7,744,417	https://www.facebook.com/Starburst
13	Mountain Dew	6,116,553	https://www.facebook.com/mountaindew
14	Pepsi	5,966,034	https://www.facebook.com/pepsi
15	5 Gum	5,412,955	https://www.facebook.com/5Gum
16	Sprite	4,584,408	https://www.facebook.com/Sprite
17	Kit Kat	4,508,596	https://www.facebook.com/kitkat
18	Gatorade	4,218,322	https://www.facebook.com/Gatorade
19	Slurpee	4,175,892	https://www.facebook.com/Slurpee
20	Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts	3,432,172	https://www.facebook.com/kelloggspoptarts
21	Kinder Surprise	3,299,680	https://www.facebook.com/kindersurprise
22	Nike Basketball	3,180,994	https://www.facebook.com/nikebasketball
23	Lay's	3,072,879	https://www.facebook.com/lays
24	Vitaminwater	2,913,825	https://www.facebook.com/vitaminwater
25	Wonka	2,870,596	https://www.facebook.com/wonka

 

Observations

• These brands invest time in developing an inviting Facebook experience.
• Many of them have built extra features into their Facebook pages, including contests, games, recipes, discussion forums, videos, pictures, etc.
• Most of these companies interact well with the fans, asking questions of them or providing posts that encourage the conversation.   This interaction keeps the fans coming back to the site and participating.

Learning about the Social Business trend: Three IBM White Papers

I’ve written before about the social business trend and it’s impact on businesses (see The Social Business Train Is Leaving The Station Are You On It? and A Social Business Strategy Can Make A Company More Responsive and Agile). 

I believe that the social business trend will have a profound impact on the architecture and design of future businesses.  Business processes will change and that will lead to required changes in application software.  Those businesses that make the successful transition will be more agile, more responsive, and more successful than others.

This post provides links to three white papers found on IBM’s Social Business website.  IBM has been on the forefront of the social collaboration and social media marketplace, learning how to leverage these technologies internally.  These white papers provide a great overview of social business, the potential value of the trend, and the challenges all businesses must overcome to become a true social business.

The Social Business: advent of a new age

(February 2011) This 10 page white paper written by the Lotus team at IBM Software Group defines what a social business is and what it takes to become one.  It puts forth the view that businesses are entering an inflection point where social computing and social media are about to be fully integrated into enterprise application design.  The table of contents are: 

• Introduction
• What does it mean to be a Social Business?
• What is the value of Social Business?
  • Deepen customer Relationships
  • Drive operational efficiencies
  • Optimize the workforce
• Preparing for the future
• The right partner for a changing world
• For more information

Becoming a Social Business: the IBM story

January 2011)  This IBM-sponsored 14 page white paper was written by IDC’s Erin Traudt and Richard Vancil.  In this paper, IDC provides three case studies that describe IBM's internal evolution to a social business.  The paper then uses the learnings from these case studies in order to provide guidance to other large organizations considering making the transformation to a social business.  

• IDC Opinion
• Methodology
• In This White Paper
• Situation Overview
• Case Studies
  • IBM DeveloperWorks
  • From Individual Contributor to Community Manager
  • BlueIQ
• Future Outlook
• Challenges / Opportunities
• Conclusion

 

Jamming on social business

(April 2011) Exploring new approaches for the next era of business.  This IBM white paper provides a review of the key findings from a 72-hour online brainstorming session held in February 2011 between over 2,700 participants from over 80 countries.  This report summarizes the key insights gathered from the all the conversations, comments, and tweets. 

The table of the contents of this report reads as follows:

• The Social Business Jam
• What is a Jam?
• Jam insights
  • Building the social business of the future
  • Building participatory organizations through social adoption
  • Using social media to understand and engage with customers
  • What social means for IT
  • Identifying risks and establishing governance
• Our jamming experience
• Next Steps

If you are tasked with learning about the social business trend, these three white papers are an excellent resource for you.  More information and case studies can be found at the IBM Social Business website.  For those of you who want to follow the discussion on Twitter, search on the hashtag #socbiz.

Slides: How IBM Enables A Social Workforce

This week I have been attending WOMMA’s School of WOM in Chicago.  The conference started on Monday and wraps up today.  There have some great keynotes, workshops, and breakout sessions.  I’d estimate roughly that there are about 300 attendees.

On Monday, Susan Emerick of IBM (@sfemerick), Chris Boudreaux of Converseon (@cboudreaux) and I presented during a breakout.  Our presentation, “Enabling the Social Workforce” discussed how IBM has been able to enable thousands of employees to participate in social media.  At IBM, employees are such an extension of our brand and it is important that IBMers represent our brand in the social media.

Most businesses are finding it challenging to mobilize employees in social media on behalf of the brand.  For years prior to the social media explosion, IBM had focused on enabling IBMers to collaborate internally via collaboration tools.  As social media took off on the public Internet, IBM has, in turn, successfully enabled thousands of employees to participate in the social media conversation. 

The presentation (loaded on slideshare and then embedded below) discusses how IBM advances the goals of the business while growing the professional influence of the employee. The key to enablement for IBM is focusing on empowering the workforce to communicate their strategic expertise socially.  Our presentation and the Q&A session afterwards covered important program elements like

• Developing the Digital Strategy Model
• Publishing and Communicating Social Media Guidelines
• Developing a Social Computing Curriculum that includes certification-based training
• An Expertise Locator system that helps aid in the search and discovery of IBM experts
• IBM’s Centennial Program that enables social conversations.

Enabling the-social-workforce 09-may2011

View more presentations from Bill Chamberlin

Leveraging Social Media and Communities for Foresight

Last Wednesday evening I delivered a keynote presentation at an end of the year student event at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendozza College of Business MBA program (http://business.nd.edu/). 

The students are all required to take a class in Futures Studies and this was their end of year event.  During the late afternoon Poster Session that was held in the atrium of the Mendozza building, they all assembled and displayed posters that communicated the results of their semester long projects.  The topics covered a wide variety of subjects, from the future of Electric Cars to Solar Technology, to how to solve water irrigation in Africa.   In all there were over 50 projects from teams of 4-5 students.   I was impressed with the students projects and the level of research, analysis and insight generation that went into the poster presentations.   I learned a lot just by walking from poster to poster.

After the poster session was done, we all assembled into the auditorium where I delivered my keynote to the students “Leveraging Social Media and Communities for Foresight”.  The deck has been uploaded to my HorizonWatching account on Slideshare and is also embedded below. 

During the keynote, I discussed how the emergence of online social media and communities is transforming communication around the world.  The shift from traditional institutional-led communications that is relatively controlled by a small number of companies to an era where any individual can create and publish content is a shift that is transforming the way individuals learn, collaborate, and create content.   This has a ripple effect across all business professionals and certainly is impacting the way we research, analyze and develop insights about emerging trends, technologies and issues impacting businesses and individual citizens.

I provide the students with my personal story of how I’ve led an internal IBM community called HorizonWatch since early 2001 and how I started blogging internally in 2006.  I also discussed my public social community effort called HorizonWatching.   Both efforts have helped me do a better job of scanning for emerging trends and then developing insights from those scanning activities.

I ended the talk with some advice to the students on how they could get started leveraging social media in their own careers.  My main advice was that they should all think about taking control of their personal online brand.  As they are soon to turn their attention to job searching, now is the time for them to think hard about what their digital brand looks like to recruiters and potential employers.  But after the job search is over, I believe those who will be successful in their careers are the ones that will figure out ways to leverage social media and communities to build their expertise.

As this was their last day of class, they were all eager to go out and celebrate, so the Q&A session was short and sweet.  However the 5-6 questions raised were smart and right on topic.  I wish all the students good luck and best wishes over the summer and challenge them to begin using social media and communities as a strategy to better understand the future(s).

My presentation is embedded below.

HorizonWatching: Leveraging Social Media and Communities for Foresight

View more presentations from Bill Chamberlin