Business Intelligence is a thing of the past. Companies used to look at their past performance and understand their mistakes or achievements. In today’s world of tweets and posts, even news agencies can’t keep up with the speed at which information is traveling across the world. Enterprises need to be extremely proactive rather than being reactive. So, a few years ago, the concept of Social Business Intelligence was introduced. There is abundant information available in all the petabytes and zetabytes of social feeds across all social networks. The ability to single out the right channel, to kill unnecessary noise and to make sense of the remaining social information into actionable metrics is called Social Business Intelligence. For example, a retail company monitoring specific social feeds of its consumers can understand that they actually prefer its newly introduced product in red more than blue. Using this data, it can instantaneously prepare its supply chain to ship its next batch of products in red rather than blue.

However, there are inherent challenges with gathering such social data. To start with, social data is not structured. Consider a tweet such as this – “Love the fit of #Gap’s new #slimfit #jeans. Zipper not smooth”. How do you associate a metric with such a tweet? Is it a positive tweet or a negative tweet? How do we classify this tweet to make predictive intelligence from this? To address this, we have many tools out there that perform “Sentiment Analysis” on such social data. This type of analysis assigns weights and scores to social data and makes the data more meaningful for Social Business Intelligence dashboards.

There has also been another trend in the last couple of years – an increase in adoption of social media platforms within enterprises. This can span just within employees or even with customers and partners. These tools help in keeping collaborative teams closer and well-informed. And, this is where I will introduce Social Business Intelligence 2.0. The social feeds have grown to gargantuan proportions that they have created silos of Big Data by themselves. Next, the information in such social data is not useful freestanding on its own. They need to be cross-referenced with other data stores in the enterprise such as Product Master, Customer Master, Pricing database, Support Center application etc. This is the way that coherent information is created from such chaos.

Let me give you an example of such a Social Business Intelligence 2.0 scenario. Customer X logs in a support ticket about a system failure in one of their servers. The support system instantly posts a note about that ticket into the corporate social feed under the support channel. Since a few stakeholders such as the Account Manager, Systems Engineer and on-site consultant have subscribed to this specific customer’s posts, they get notifications about the post and are aware that the customer has an issue. They can immediately call up the customer expressing their interest in addressing the issue ASAP. This increases the level of customer satisfaction as well. But, what has also happened behind the scenes is that there were three other similar issues (with the same component) raised by three different customers in the past 1 week. But, those were not trouble tickets but just social posts in support forums. The correlation is made between the various social posts and a social notification is sent out to the relevant R&D team automatically. Members of that team see that post, understand the problem and release a fix immediately addressing the issue. Next, an automatic notification goes to each of those affected customers’ technical contacts indicating the availability of this fix, which addresses their problem.

Yes, I know that sounds like a fairy tale and hardly ever happens that way in any company. But, that is not wholly true. There are quite a lot of companies that are leading the charge on such initiatives and making great strides in bringing such solutions to reality. What I want you to focus on is the underlying technology to make this happen. First, yes, you need a social platform that can primarily connect everyone together. Also, the APIs of this social platform should be open enough that it can be called from other applications or from the integration platform. Second, you will need a correlation engine or a Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine that can associate disjoint data and identify patterns in them. The third most critical thing you need in such an environment is an integration backbone or an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). This will be the glue that connects all of the moving parts in this environment together.

An ESB within a collaborative enterprise helps in enabling Social Business Intelligence 2.0 by –

• Understand and parse structured / unstructured data from various social sources
• Integrate social data from various sources into a correlation engine or a sentiment analysis engine
• Connect up with various Master data sources and lookup databases within the enterprise. This will help in classifying social data into relevant taxonomies.
• Integrate support systems, R&D systems etc with social data streams so that automatic posts can be sent into appropriate channels based on incoming / inferred data
• Pump all metrics and social analytics data into dashboards to create real-time actionable views for relevant stakeholders

An ESB can also leverage complementary technology such as in-memory management solutions to process Big Data effectively. Social Business Intelligence 2.0 is already here. I urge you to start considering your integration backbone / ESB as an effective platform to launch it within your enterprise today.

Until next time, Ciao!

The post Social Business Intelligence 2.0: Driven by Integration appeared first on Reality Check.

Regardless of the industry, size or company, the “four forces” are enabling businesses to transform processes and technology platforms in fundamental ways. These forces are driving new business models, new sales channels, and new ways to attract and engage with customers. By leveraging these technology trends, organizations can provide better insight into the business to plan more effectively and better predict everything from demand to the delivery of goods and services.

But the question is, how do you adopt the latest technology trends to innovate quickly, while limiting the impact on your existing investments and IT infrastructure?

Integration is key.

Why Integration? Because the best approach for adopting new technology trends is to leverage your existing business logic, IT systems and services. And integration makes it possible to leverage these investments while allowing  you to adopt new technology trends quickly, with less risk and reduced redundancy in data and logic. Businesses have made tremendous investments in their current IT infrastructure and want to protect and maintain these investments by limiting potentially disruptive or risky initiatives in order to adopt the latest trends.

Register for one or all of a series of webinars that explore this topic. Whether your organization is adopting one or all of the 4 forces or developing new technologies for mobile applications, public APIs, enterprise social collaboration, big data analytics or addressing data quality, partner onboarding, or process automation, this series of webinars will provide insight into how you can drive “Innovation through Integration.”

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According to IDC, for “the past several years, the IT industry’s transition to the 3rd Platform, built on mobile computing, cloud services, social networking, and big data analytics technologies, has dominated the annual Predictions… For 2013, IDC predicts the transition to the 3rd Platform will shift into high gear as the industry accelerates past the exploration phase and into full-blown, high stakes competition.”

Yes folks, the time is now. Gartner echoes the same beliefs. “Mr. Cearley said these strategic technologies are emerging amidst a nexus of converging forces – social, mobile, cloud and information. Although these forces are innovative and disruptive on their own, together they are revolutionizing business and society, disrupting old business models and creating new leaders. As such, the Nexus of Forces is the basis of the technology platform of the future.”

And our customers are ready for change too. We recently polled over 800 ProcessWorld attendees and the survey confirms that Big Data, Cloud, Mobile and Collaborative technologies will show adoption rates of over 20% in the next 24 months. The simultaneous adoption of these technologies is significantly changing the way enterprises do business and accelerating the reaction of enterprises to changing customer and market behavior. Asked to identify technologies that will open major business opportunities, over 20% of responders see the management of Big Data and collaborative work practices as important technologies, over 30% see Cloud and mobile applications driving new business and over 40% see BPM as the key technology in the digital enterprise.

At ProcessWorld 2012 Software AG announced a major update to its webMethods and ARIS business process product suites focusing on integrating Big Data with Business Processes and the Cloud. The validity of this strategy has been fully confirmed by this survey. “Driving the adoption of these technologies is the need for faster, better informed business decisions”, stated Software AG CTO, Wolfram Jost. “But the real-time data, rapid scalability and fast decision making enabled by these technologies are of little use if companies still take months or years to implement business process change. The market will not wait, By integrating business processes with Big Data, the Cloud and both Mobile and Collaborative applications we are giving enterprises an uninterrupted rapid response service to changing market conditions”.

ProcessWorld attendees primarily saw the integration of on and off premise application integration as the main driver for Cloud adoption. “Rapid scalability is key in the light of the survey’s findings”, said Wolfram Jost. “And rapid integration of existing on-premise infrastructure with Cloud based applications is a significant feature of webMethods 9.0. We developed both webMethods 9.0 and ARIS 9.0 in close cooperation with major customers and this survey shows that we are right on track”.

The impact of these technologies is huge. Organizations can save billions of dollars a year and dramatically increase their operating profit by adopting and implementing these strategic technologies. Is your enterprise ready for the new wave of cloud, mobile, social and big data? Where does your organization see the most value in the 4 forces?

The post Big Data, Cloud, and Process Management Are Driving the Digital Enterprise appeared first on Reality Check.

1. Big Data has to be fast data. Enterprises will profit from Big Data intelligence in proportion to how quickly they can act on it.
2. Rise of the hybrid cloud. It’s no longer about building your own platform; it’s more efficient to play in ecosystems.
3. CIOs and CMOs get a lot closer. Marketing spend on technology is about to eclipse IT spend on technology.
4. The Internet of things crosses the chasm. In just a few years, over 25 billion data-producing devices will be connected.
5. Social becomes part of life’s fabric. Remember e-business departments? Social will permeate in the same way.

Where do you see Big Data heading in 2013?

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What I found interesting about this study done by Forrester, Research Now and Linkedin was that it proves IT decision makers are influenced by social media and peer networks when it comes to making real buying decisions. Something we’ve believed in for years at Software AG, which is why we’ve created 100+ social channels and new innovative social media programs for you to learn from. Here are a just few ways our social channels are valuable for IT decision makers.

• 58% of IT decision makers leverage social networks to learn from peers. We recognize it’s not always us you want to hear from. Which is why the ‘you’ in youtube allows you to share a technical tip or talk about a Software AG project you’re proud of and win $500. Peers want to hear from peers so share a story with others and get rewarded.
• 40% of technology professionals use social networks to connect with vendors and learn from industry experts. Whether you’re looking to learn about customer case studies, best practices or the latest industry innovations and trends be sure to bookmark Reality Check as a social destination for knowledge gold.
• 40% of technology professionals use social media to quickly find relevant information. And who wouldn’t. Don’t be the person who misses out on the latest infographics like ‘Innovation Sucks’ or ‘The True Cost of Bad Data’. Valuable statistics are only a click away with social media.

And if you’re really just trying to find out if this social stuff works for you, than start by following some of our social channels and see if the content meets your needs. My guess is, it will. Good luck getting social in 2013!

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Gartner’s Nexus of Forces

What we are seeing among our customer base is that breakthrough innovation happens when applications tap into the synergy created by at least two (not just one) of these computing models and are tied back into their core enterprise systems. For instance –

• Echo Entertainment, which is in the hospitality and gaming industry, combined the power of Big Data and Mobile to increase the quality of its loyalty program signups. It identified ‘high rollers’ playing in the casino to its floor staff in real time using a mobile app that combined live data from the gaming systems with large amounts of historical data in backend databases to perform in-flight analytics.
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) maintains vast datasets of highly distributed information around water, air, waste, and natural resources. It combined the power of Big Data and Cloud by creating and hosting a publicly accessible API that made the data accessible to not only its partner state agencies but also external developers.
• Nemours Children’s hospital a leader in pediatric care combined the power of Social and Information to create ‘smart’ patient rooms. A patient’s arrival triggers an event that enables the system to automatically provision the room with the child’s favorite video games and other electronic entertainment. When a caregiver walks into the patient’s room, another event is triggered enabling the system to retrieve their information from the hospital’s HR system and display it on the room’s TV for immediate identification.

The key point and underpinning of these innovative applications is an event enabled service-oriented architecture. It makes sense, if you think about it. To be truly useful, mobile apps require access to the backend systems via a layer of services. Big Data needs services to deliver relevant and timely business data in order to perform useful analytics. Social applications require combining enterprise events with enterprise data and activity streams where data is delivered by data services. And Cloud requires strong service-oriented governance infrastructure both as a provider as well as consumer of services. Monolithic, client-server, 3-tier architectures cannot provide the extensibility, scalability and agility needed for such innovation.

*Source: Gartner, Inc., The Nexus of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information, Chris Howard, et al., June, 2012.

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• Stay laser focused: Focus on people-centric processes and the benefits they deliver.
• Make it a group effort: Ensure your project includes mass collaboration across departments and roles.
• Connect the dots: Join together social initiatives. Extend what’s already working.
• Socialize the benefits: Show people the value of being social and why it improves processes.
• Define the ecosystem: Delegate the roles and responsibilities. Use Wikipedia’s collaboration and governance model as an example.

And most importantly, if you’re driving a social initiative you need to be social yourself. Collaborate with peers, share ideas on the job and have a little fun. Want to start getting social today? Check out the BPM ecard design contest the ARIS Community is running until December 14th. Draft an ecard and win one of five magnetic ARIS symbol sets. Let your imagination run wild and come up with a design idea, no matter if its a photo, graphic, text or an ARIS Express Model. Details here.

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And it seemed creating a ProcessWorld Linkedin was the answer. In just a couple of weeks, with a few Software AG content experts and a plug or two in our existing ProcessWorld communication efforts, we were able to start connecting our customers together. Being ‘social’ is in our Software AG DNA, in fact it is a huge part of our webMethods 9.0 release, recently featured at ProcessWorld. “Your employees and processes will be empowered to react faster based on real-time events from IT systems. Consider it social media tailored to business demands. That’s the reality of our new webMethods 9.0 social innovations.” More information here.

Our customers showed us they had a lot of questions to ask and our product marketers were eager to engage with our customers as well. Here are just a few things we learned from our customers about the importance of mobile access, the impact of social media, concerns deploying to the cloud and how organizations are leveraging big data solutions:

‘extending business processes to mobile devices’ is the most important feature to organizations polled

‘security seems to be one of the biggest concerns in dealing with cloud based software’ compared to service availability, product support and user adoption

‘how and why BigMemory is proving to be a competitive advantage’ for organizations keeping terabytes of data in-memory

‘how organizations enabled social collaboration for BPM’ through focusing on people centric processes and gamification techniques.

And the conversations aren’t over yet. Customers are sharing ideas on how to model KPIs in ARIS as well as discuss scenarios where my-channels and broker co-exist. We don’t want to limit this learning experience and idea exchange to ProcessWorld so join the discussions now and keep the conversations going. It’s been seen, we all have a lot to learn from each other and being social helps drive peer connections and better product solutions.

The post How Being ‘Social’ Helps Customers Connect, Network and Learn appeared first on Reality Check.

Mobile is bigger than I realized. A lot bigger.

Yet, integration companies are focused on cloud, big data, and even social. Not one is positioning as the “mobile first integration stack suite”.

Companies are deploying mobile and “consumer” devices in a big way. It’s opening up interesting innovation opportunities because it’s enabling employees to have the right information to do their jobs, collaborate in real-time, and get things done more effectively. Their interaction with technology becomes better integrated with their job-behaviors when implemented well.

Think about the mobile inspectors that any retail store uses to inspect stores. In the past, someone would go inspect a store and fill out an inspection report. They’d then go back to the office, enter the report, ask questions, do followup, etc. Now, all the report entering and followup happens while they’re doing the inspection. Inspectors can collaborate (socially) with their peers (who they never see in person) to share best practices. All of this results in much better store consistency, compliance with laws (OSHA or food preparation standards), and faster repairs than otherwise possible.

Another benefit to social collaboration of mobile workers is the ability for activity streams to be shared, searched, and monitored. Management can participate and have a much better clue, at least if they’re willing. I can’t help but think of LIPA and the Red Cross and their response to Sandy. Management thinks their responses have been “nearly flawless“, yet we see people still living on the streets, or living without heat and electricity as winter falls. Fortunately, the news has shared the reality of the situation. Exposing reality vs management’s perceptions is not always that easy, but it is extremely valuable.

I for one am glad that transparency will align accountability to reality.

Think about this a different way. For a long time, there was a focus to capture data around a process at the first touch point. We thought of this in terms of warehouse management, cash registers, order entry – essentially, anything in the “goods supply chain” where data would enhance our ability to maximize the process. We can all agree as to the value of those efforts.

Social collaboration of mobile workers is the same thing as capturing data at the point of entry, but for knowledge workers instead of materials (or supply chain) management.

Here’s the kicker. Seeing what’s happening, hearing the customer stories, I can’t help but think that mobile is actually how social, cloud, big-data, and process are expressed. All these other trends are serving to accelerate the value companies are getting from mobile investments.

Mobile is what makes these other technologies compelling.

The change to mobile is as big as the change from mainframe to PC.

Mobile is the hidden disruptive force in the integration space. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Will one integration vendor step up and claim mobile first integration? What do you think?

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