deal architect

Interview with Chip Coyle of Infor: High Touch in High Tech

In my role, I spent a fair amount of time with Chief Marketing Officers of technology companies. Much of the conversation is about their digital journeys - the growing sophistication of their lead generation engines and social marketing.

Every time I spend time with Chip Coyle, CMO of Infor, I get some of that, but I always walk away with a "human interest" angle - the creativity that still drives marketing, the human interaction with customers, etc.

In an interview I invited him to cover many of those angles

Chip, with Infor's broad product portfolio, I have heard you mention you handle almost 1,000 events a year. How in the world do you keep up with all of those events?

Our events range from very small, focused single-topic education sessions, to broader business-themed executive events, all the way to large industry shows and conferences.

I always say, in the age of high tech, you can't forget high touch. Events are one of the most critical customer touch-points. Even with all the information and interaction online, people still want to know, face-to-face, who they're doing business with, and to network and interact with their peers. Events fill that need and are an important tool to help educate customers and generate demand for our business.

Online engagement is great for tapping into pre-existing communities but we find that folks have a desire to get engaged with people outside of their traditional community. We see people in manufacturing wanting to understand the challenges faced by retailers, because they might be moving in that direction. Marketing folks want to better understand what sales people think about. In that context, events are a great medium because they bring together different communities to facilitate networking, brainstorming, and collaboration.

Chip, same with channels. Infor leverages airport marketing, billboards, digital marketing and so on. How do you manage such a broad range of channels and messaging?

From a brand perspective, we want to be available wherever, whenever, and however our audiences are gathering. We have tight governance over our investments to ensure our spending is balanced across traditional channels like events and trade shows and also newer channels like content syndication, online media, and social. Of course many of our sales and marketing people want to stick to tried-and-true channels, but we strive to innovate and analyze data to decide where and how to optimize for the highest yield.

Chip, your high-touch comments are fascinating, because we hear so much of the enterprise software buying process today is done online- doing research, gathering information etc.

That’s the reality; about 70% of the buying process happens online before any human is engaged. One way we can enable that is through storytelling, and having something interesting to say. We owe it to our customers and prospects to give our perspective on the important issues they face. We need our storytelling and messaging to be driven by the audiences and personas we see in the market. Our content should be conversation-oriented, engaging, and thought-provoking. Part of our job in marketing is to help our own experts and luminaries get their voices heard. Our executives are busy and count on us to help them package their vision for broad consumption. Storytelling is critical.

It has also helped evolve the relationship between marketing and sales. In the old days, marketing would pass leads from anybody who was showing a pulse. These days, with much of the buying process on the front-end, the leads we end up passing have much better insight though data we’ve collected so far in the process. It’s a much more qualified lead with actionable intelligence to help convert.

You have an advantage compared to many other companies in that you have an in-house creative design agency, right?

We are so fortunate to have one of the biggest design agencies in all of New York City under our own roof, Hook & Loop. The more than 100 people in H&L are not your typical software designers. We have a guy that did special effects for The Avengers movie, a Pulitzer Prize winner for info-graphics, and a designer for Kenneth Cole. They're not only focused on the user experience of our products, but also support our broader marketing and branding efforts. Everything from our website, advertising creative, customer videos, and our overall corporate identity. A pool of highly-talented creatives is unconventional for a software firm, but a big advantage for us. H&L helped with our brand advertising campaign, “No two clouds should be alike”, highlighting our deep industry specialization, and its importance to cloud software. No two clouds should be alike when you look at all of the unique needs of a given industry.

I've heard your CEO Charles Phillips say being headquartered in New York has been a huge advantage for Infor. How, as a marketing person, do you translate that location advantage?

New York is one of the most important, exciting, and influential cities in the world. We're proud to be headquartered here, and believe the heavy concentration of creative and design talent, much more than in Silicon Valley, is a major differentiator in a world driven by experience. Associating our brand with the great city of New York helps reinforce our global stature, not to mention New York is one of our biggest customers. Retail and fashion are major verticals for Infor, and we have a major relationship with the Fashion Institute of Technology, helping their students with the business and the supply chain of fashion design and production. This year we moved Inforum, our annual global customer conference, to New York City and expect more than 8,000 people. Our customers love to visit New York because there’s so much to experience, and when they see first-hand our innovation engine, it really highlights how different we are from a traditional IT vendor. (see my write-up on Infor's superb NYC facility - by itself a tourist attraction)

Interview with Paul Wright of Accuride : Steady Wheels Will Get You Far

I first met Paul Wright, CIO at Accuride at the Plex User Conference last year. I was struck by the level headed, low-hype way he approached technology, and also how much time he had invested with the user community around Plex. I recently spent some time with him for my research for the next book around automation and impact on various jobs. I got a very pragmatic set of comments around when automation makes sense (and he lives in the highly automated automobile sector).

 I also caught up on his Plex implementation and this post focuses on that. As you will see he is a firm believer that a solid ERP foundation - steady wheels – is critical for innovation on top.

First some background: Accuride Corporation is a leading supplier of wheels and wheel-end components to the North American commercial vehicle industry. Over the last 5 years it has refocused on that core business. As part of its “Fix & Grow” strategy, it has consolidated and upgraded its steel wheel capacity, expanding its aluminum wheel capacity, refurbishing its Gunite wheel-end business and implementing LEAN principles across the business. It has also been implementing Plex as a standardization platform

Paul : “Because Accuride was built through acquisition, each of the different businesses brought together had its own way of doing things, and some of our brands were using older ERP systems that didn’t fit with our business vision. Data was disconnected from the reality of our plants, and we were spending more time gathering and interrogating data than we were making decisions with it.”

"Our first plant was launched on Plex a couple of years ago, and since we've launched 8 more plants and they've all got sort of different processes, where you have to do from a foundry process, which is very much a process manufacturing type thing, to wheel plants, which is discrete manufacturing, to having forging processes inside aluminium wheel manufacturing, basically taking out over 200 different applications that were being used across different plants, to get all of that working through Plex. I think people have been more interested in having the data centrally."

He explained, it was not just a "shop floor" phenomenon.

"It’s about having a full vision, not that their manufacturing, but for instance our test lab. It now runs exclusively in Plex. Which means that all of the advanced testing for our product is going directly into Plex now. So it's linked to the long term quality of the product. We've done our commercialization process, which moves from design to the production, and we've got that whole process now captured within Plex. So there's been more of a push from the leadership team, to be able to see one version of the truth in Plex."

What about "cool stuff" like sensors and IoT?

"The higher value for us right now is still consolidating more of the plants that we not only owned at the beginning, but we decided to acquire, being on the same platform. That way we start to see trends in the data, both for supply chain, and also in terms of the customer climate geographically. There's more value for us in that kind of information right now, than there is in necessarily connecting another sensor to a press. I'm not saying we won't get there, but we've still got so many layers of the data that we've only just started to acquire."

But they already have plenty of sensors

"We've got production counters deployed across our environment, we've got vibration sensors deployed across our environment. Right now we're just starting to see some of that information into Plex, in terms of this field can utilize the typical machine readings. So through web services, you can send out messages and receive those messages. We've also integrated quite a few of our gauges into the system."

And there's more of that coming

"It's about putting those quality systems online. So it's not just about the defect, that's downtime related now. It's about a defect that's quality related, it's getting immediately to the quality team. It's about them being able to respond by broadcasting messages to our Plex stations on the shop floor, to say, ‘here's a quality alert, this is happening in this part of the plant, please look out for this everywhere’. You know we're really only sort of scratching the surface, we've got scanners everywhere. Everything is loaded with scanners, but they're all the hand held scanners right now. We haven't gone into the finger scanners because in our environment, with these big heavy things, it's not like someone is pushing things around on a cart, where a finger scanner would make a lot more sense for them.

"For us he's always on his forklift, and so we put the visual display on the forklift, so basically a full mobile PC environment that links up to the bluetooth scanner that he's got on his truck. Yes, we're doing that. We're only going to add layers of technology at Accuride when we think it adds something back to the process, that we can use it to effectively communicate both into, and out of Plex. So as soon as we're done implementing new plants, I think we get to do another round, and do a bunch of fun stuff. Right now we're sort of sniffing at it, and doing a lot of stuff around the edges, and maybe not doing it to the level that some other people may be right now."

"Or take vibration readings. So the machine knows that it's started to shift itself a little bit more. It requires investigation, and can the machine then tell us, basically self diagnose, that hey, something's the matter with me, yes, I think so. I think putting the maintenance, the PM's into tablets, and mobile phones, vs. people writing down what they saw, on a piece of paper, is important. I think that being able to, as soon as you know you have a problem, then look at the system and say okay, here's all the spare parts I need. Then be able to trigger, that if you're pulling too many of this type of spare part, in this period of time, then something has changed in your process."

" I think there's nothing more frustrating for the guys who are running on those lines, than if they're constantly up and down. People like it when they're making stuff, and everything just works. Anytime you can identify an anomaly, through automation, through sensors, through different types of usage, you better understand what's going on within your factory, and enables you to remove any of the anomalies, which makes everyone run better."

The Real Deal: Steve Mann on Neuro-Digital Marketing and the Quest for Joy

This continues a series of columns from practitioners I respect. The category "Real Deal" describes them well.

This time it is Steve Mann, former CMO of LexisNexis North America and who now leads AbleBrains LLC, a digital marketing consultancy. He has been selected by FierceCMO as one the top 15 B2B CMOs to watch.

Here he writes about the emerging discipline of neuro-digital marketing

We are designed to be happy! As a species we have been remarkably successful in creating a world that delivers pleasure because our brains are built to get more of whatever is bringing us joy.

The neurochemical dopamine plays a vital role in our level of joy – and the motivation to seek happiness. Our pleasure centers are driven by dopamine, as are our motor functions. And while endorphins make us like something, dopamine makes us want more of it.

The behavioral economist Antonio Rangel, studied the impact of product experience on joy. He took identical wines and marked them with either a $90 or $10 price point. When subjects knew the prices, they perceived the $90 wine as superior. But during blind taste tests, the subjects rated the wines as identical! More significantly, when the brains of these subjects were fMRI scanned while drinking the $90 wine, their brains showed more activity in the area associated with the experience of pleasure, than when drinking the $10 bottle.

When pleasure centers are stimulated, preference for one product over another develops. And dopamine drives desire for that product. We are, at our foundation, slaves to our non-conscious, pleasure-seeking brains.

Neuro-digital marketing, the mashup of neuroscience and digital marketing, speaks to the non-conscious, which is essential to influencing consumers. Gamification is a great example of how these tactics work to drive preference.

Gamifying Brand Engagement

SAP launched the SAP Community Network 13 years ago. It’s grown to become the premier online community for the SAP eco-system. Information about SAP products and services are shared in the community, as are discussions around the intricacies of deploying SAP software. However, when SCN transitioned to a new community platform, the SAP team immediately faced a problem: member engagement indicators dropped dramatically.

Rather than risk losing members or having to re-market to them, the team chose to gamify the experience by designing missions members could pursue. These missions were surprise, reward-oriented achievements, just like viral games, and are meant to stimulate our pleasure centers. In pursuing missions, members earned points that increased their reputation within the community. Example missions included; onboarding to the community, contributing content or showcasing expertise.

The surprise nation of the missions entice member to seek more influence, peer admiration, and respect. The SAP team initially launched about 30 missions. In true gaming strategy fashion, future missions were hidden until the prior mission was completed. This created the surprise element that is so important to engaging the dopamine-endorphin reward complex.

The preliminary results observed just one month after the launch were impressive.

Gamifying SCN filled it with engagement addicts driven by each member’s pleasure center. And hey, if being addicted to SCN makes you happy, then more power to you.

Somatic Marking

When I was 10 years old my father and I were getting in the car. We were laughing and I was gesticulating wildly while telling a story. I wasn’t paying attention though and slammed my finger in the car door. The pain was explosive. Non-consciously, my brain then linked the notions of “car door” and “fingers” and “incredible pain.” And I said to myself, “I’ll never do that again.”

This linking together of concepts, emotions, body parts and sensations is called somatic marking. Think of it as a decision shortcut in our brain, connecting our experiences with emotions and a specific behavior. These shortcuts provide a mechanism to help us make rapid decisions, whether its keeping our fingers out of a car door or “just knowing” which brand choice will provide the most happiness.

Imagine we’re online and shopping for shoes. We’ve bought from Zappos, Designer Shoe Warehouse and ShoeDazzle in the past. But which brand will we buy from again? We find ourselves perusing shoes from each store but we keep coming back to Zappos, even though each site has the same shoes at the same price point. We end up buying from Zappos. Why?

Zappos delivers happiness through an incredible customer support experience –surprising their customers with “upgrades” to overnight shipping, fast and accurate fulfillment and a customer support team that goes above and beyond the normal support experience. The company also has a corporate culture that puts the customer at the center of everything they do.

A customer’s past experience, which delivered them a feeling of joy, contentment and comforting body sensations, coupled with those emotions, shortcuts the buying decision and pre-disposes consumers to purchase from Zappos. Buyers’ brains have linked great customer service & joyful emotions to all brands that deliver those experiences. And the proof is in the pudding – on any given day 75% of Zappos purchases are from repeat customers.

Tony Hsieh, Zappos’ CEO, says it best:

People may not remember exactly what you did or what you said, but they will always remember how you make them feel

Although direct product experience plays a role in product selection, the non-conscious impressions a consumer has is so much more important. This is where true decision-making resides. These non-conscious experiences coupled with the pre-conceived notions a consumer brings to the table, dramatically influences product or brand preference, far beyond that of marketing focused on changing conscious thought.

My advice to you? Don’t focus on what you want your customers to think, instead focus on what you want them to feel.

Autonomous Cars: 3 years or 30?

Humans should not drive.

Chris Urmson, head of Google’s self-driving project, presented at SXSW last week and you can see all the crazy stuff drivers and pedestrians do and face on our roads.  Time magazine presented an even more powerful case for why we should give up our driver’s licenses in their cover story couple of weeks ago. Besides the reduced accidents and lost time in traffic gridlock, Urmson also pointed to the promise of less parking needed with driverless cars ““Imagine a world where the urine-scented concrete bunkers at the center of every city can be turned into residential and park space.”

But when is that world likely? According to Urmson, it could be 3 or 30 years.

As a technologist, and influenced by a wife who likes to read while being driven, I would love to see it in 3 years. And I can see it in tightly controlled scenarios – in a planned city like Masdar, in lightly traveled parts of New Zealand, in disciplined corridors in places like Singapore or in a truck platoon (where a human driver in the lead or middle of a train of driverless trucks). But my research for the book on automation tells me it is more likely to be 30 or even longer years for broader, global rollout.

For the book, I have looked at UPC scanners, artificial intelligence, 3D printing and bunch of other technologies and how they take decades to mature and even longer to go mainstream. The technology building blocks for driverless cars have been evolving for decades. The 1958 Chrysler Imperial first introduced cruise control to the masses, in 1992 Mitsubishi introduced a LIDAR based distance detection system and in 1999 Mercedes introduced Distronics assistive cruise control to the world. The DARPA funded Grand Challenges for driverless cars were first held in 2004.

The technologies are evolving fine and it helps that many of the large auto makers are now investing seriously in driverless concepts.

On the other hand, the infrastructure – physical, legal etc – needs to evolve quite a bit. Delphi, an auto parts manufacturer, took its driverless vehicle on a cross-country trip last year. It found that pavement markings are quite different in spite of uniform standards across states. Our traffic lights and other road infrastructure will have to become smarter with sensors and lots more fiber to be able to communicate with the new cars. This new investment will have to come as cities and counties struggle to find alternatives to speeding fines which will shrink in a world of much safer cars. 

Let’s not forget incumbent interests will not exactly roll over. The $ 200 billion a year auto insurance and  the $ 300 billion auto after-market industries don’t exactly want cars to be too safe. And those concrete bunkers Urmson talks about? The $ 100 billion parking industry does not either.

But the biggest incumbent resistance will come from drivers themselves. Mazda is betting on our continued love for “zoom zoom”. So are Porsche and other car makers who are counting on human versus robotic drivers. As Time said “There is no “right to drive” enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, but forced to choose, a lot of people would rather take the wheel than the Fifth”

Yes, stats show our young are less enamored of cars than we were – statistically, fewer 16 years are showing up for their learner’s permits. Yet, the US had its best year for car sales ever in 2015.

And here’s the final boost for drivers. All the software and sensors are making EVERY new car safer. Today few of us have the 35 Driver Assist features Audi has in its Q7 but over the next few years they will come to many more human controlled models.

Thinking of broader, global rollout, I was talking to a professor who is Indian and he asked me “Can you ever see driverless cars in Mumbai with no marked lanes, and competing with cows, dogs, pedestrians everywhere?” And he did not even mention that drive guidance in India is often based on landmarks, rather than cardinal directions. No wonder India’s carmakers as they plan their own driverless versions are testing them first in the UK and Singapore.

Not just India, many other parts of the world will have similar challenges. Let’s not forget most of the world still drives manual transmission cars, even though Oscar H. Banker was granted the patent for automatic transmission way back in 1940.

The “SAP X Factor”

Last February, SAP launched S/4HANA to plenty of optimism – CEO Bill McDermott called it “the biggest product launch in the last 23 years and perhaps the company's history”. I was certainly excited and started to write Volume 2 of SAP Nation, hoping to catalog a triumphant turnaround for the vendor. As months have passed though, SAP has dribbled out information about when pieces of S/4 functionality will be available. Customers are taking a gradual look at the pieces as they become available, and in doing so, risk losing the integration that made SAP attractive in the first place. Many customers have decided a substantial portion of S/4 will not be ready for years and are paying it little attention.

What should customers do in the interim several years as they struggle with an over priced economy around what now are legacy ECC and industry solution products for SAP and its partners? What should they do when SAP is more focused on selling HANA than evolving the applications they have heavily invested in? My book looked at multiple customer “coping” strategies, and Rimini Street has asked me to present on such strategies, not just on third party maintenance, as part of their “Unleash your SAP X factor “ executive briefing series. It is scheduled for Houston, Silicon Valley, Montreal, Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Boston in April and May. The venues all look very attractive.

Look forward to seeing many of you in those venues. Rimini is promising a customized Savings Analysis, an Innovation Roadmap, and an autographed copy of SAP Nation 2.0 for those who register and attend the briefings.

Google Fi and mobile trends

MVNOs - mobile virtual network operators - are doing pretty well. They lease network capacity from the Big Four U.S. carriers and resell it under their own brands with their own value added services. Google Fi has only been doing it for a few months, and the Android Blog recently shared some stats and it is clear it is making an impact in several areas:

a) Finally putting a dent on international roaming charges

“Since launch, more than 15% of our customers have used Project Fi abroad. From Mexico to Montenegro, customers have visited 110 of our 120+ supported countries all while paying the same rate for data that they would in the U.S.”  Actually, the 20c a minute for calls back to the US is even more impactful. 

b) Slowing we becoming less and less dependent on carrier networks even in the US

“We believe that using Wi-Fi should be seamless which is why we created Wi-Fi Assistant - a tool that automatically connects to high-quality hotspots and helps secure your connection. Over 50% of Project Fi customers are connecting to public hotspots using Wi-Fi Assistant on a weekly basis.”

c) Data-only SIMs are taking off

“We launched data-only SIMs in December to help Project Fi subscribers connect to data from devices other than their phones with no additional fees or restrictions. Since then, we’ve seen SIMs used everywhere from tablets to cars. While we’re just starting to experiment here, one thing is already clear: people want access to data on more devices.” As impactful is the ability to use your Fi phone as a hotspot without having to buy a separate MiFi and a plan for it. 

 

Thoughts on the Salesforce ecosystem

Salesforce highlighted for me this report which says “by 2018, Salesforce and its ecosystem of customer and partners will create 1 million jobs and generate $272 billion in GDP impact worldwide.”

My initial reaction was “Uh-oh” about the $272 billion. That’s about the size of SAP Nation. Is the Salesforce economy just as wasteful with items like $ 6 billion a year in consultant travel , and have as many massive failures, as my books have cataloged?

It is not, and the IDC report it quoted from assumed a four year horizon. Also, its systems integration partners mostly make money from implementations not from the long tail of post live hosting, upgrade and application management revenues which SaaS vendors (mostly) provide themselves. 

Still it led me to a few questions I hope Salesforce starts to focus on

a) Where’s’ the payback from the ecosystem?

Vendors like to talk about how many jobs their ecosystems create, but neglect to focus on the cost burden on customers. It would be nice for Salesforce to highlight payback customers have seen attributable to the “tax” for the use of the partners and technologies (see infograph below)

b) Why are more on-premise customers not leveraging the ecosystem?

In my interviews with SAP customers (and many other on-premise ones) I often hear that they cannot find broad functionality in the cloud. They tell me they can find plenty of core accounting, SFA, HR capabilities but vast swaths of vertical and even horizontal coverage are still missing. I wonder if Salesforce needs to make the AppExchange easier to navigate, and to also more aggressively recruit more application partners to attract tens of thousands of on-premise customers who are sitting on the sidelines.

c) Where are the metrics for the ecosystem?

Salesforce has led the software industry in sharing uptime and other metrics. It should do the same with its SI partners – metrics on timeliness and budgets, T&E as percent of fees etc. As I wrote earlier about the larger SIs Salesforce is increasingly attracting:   “Salesforce says it is being helped by customers who are much savvier now. That certainly helps but readjusting the mindset of millions of on-premise “citizens” (2 million just in SAP Nation) will take plenty of cat-herding and automation.”

Congrats to Salesforce for building out a vibrant ecosystem. Just as they rethought the core enterprise application concept, I hope their ecosystem blazes a new path, different from those around on-premise incumbents.

Photo Credit

Vertical Velocity

I predicted 2016 will be the year of verticals in the enterprise software space. We are off to a good start.

This morning Jose Duarte, CEO of Unit4 updated us about the Higher Education acquisition they made a few months ago and under NDA touched on other verticals they are looking at, within their broad focus on “people centric” industries.

NetSuite also announced this morning it has acquired its partner, IQity’s cloud business. Built on its SDN Platform, IQity should enhance NetSuite’s penetration of manufacturing customers with its  shop floor, resource capacity planning, finite production scheduling, batch work order management, integrated quality management and advanced data collection capabilities.

At HIMSS, the annual major healthcare event this week, Salesforce announcedthe general availability of its Health Cloud, a patient relationship management solution and an ecosystem which includes the Philips HealthSuite digital platform and tools like Apogee and MuleSoft to connect to electronic health record systems.

Infor has an analyst briefing coming up in a couple of week and I am looking forward to hearing about their momentum in the retail/grocery sector in particular.

Much more to come…

ABWA–Authoring by Walking Around

Over three decades ago, Tom Peters and Robert Waterman, used the term “Management by Walking Around” in their classic The Search for Excellence.

They also invented the concept of “Authoring by Flying Around” as they scoured the globe for “smart people who are doing cool stuff from which you can learn the most useful, cutting-edge principles”. Working for McKinsey gave them access to top executives in most companies – not to mention a generous travel budget

Their style has certainly influenced my writing. I like to use examples from many industries and many countries in my books. But the term “walking around” has been even more influential. I have walked the souks and side streets of over 50 countries. Since I got a FitBit a little over 2 years ago, it tells me I have walked 8 million steps. Most have been with the two neighbor dogs I try to keep up with, but I have been fascinated with writing while walking, and technology is increasingly allowing me to.

I conduct most of my interviews via Vonage, and record them on my Zoom digital recorder. The SD Card helps populate my Google Drive, and a copy of the files goes to Rev.com to transcribe. Freed of the need to take notes during the interview, I pace about.

I am starting to use the microphone on the keyboard of the iPhone and my Nexus to dictate early drafts of chapters on my walks.

I am looking at a standing desk to reduce sitting time even further. I  read somewhere “sitting is the new smoking” and that really hit home.

Most of my research is still sedentary but I can see Alexa or Siri or Cortana gradually becoming part of my team and allowing me to fact check and find interesting nuggets while I am pacing or driving.

One seat I would gladly give up is the uncomfortable one on the many flights I do each year. That’s mostly keyboard time – and usually awkward. I cannot wait for brain machine interfaces to evolve where I could dictate or edit some more text hands free.

Authoring by Walking Around – the search for that excellence continues.