deal architect

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.

The Real Deal: Ben Pring on the Room in a Flat World

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

This time it is repeat contributor, Ben Pring who co-leads Cognizant's Future of Work Center, a global think tank that researches and advises organizations worldwide on the promise and challenge of digital business transformation. He is also the co-author of Code Halos: How the Digital Lives of People, Things, and Organizations are Changing the Rules of Business.  Ben joined Cognizant in 2011 after spending 15 years with Gartner as a senior industry analyst researching and advising on areas such as cloud computing and global sourcing.

This time he writes about the continued need for physical presence in our virtual world.

As someone who’s worked remotely for the last 17 years at companies leveraging “flat world” principles  it may surprise you that I’m about to extol the virtues of the “face to face”; but here goes!

There are a ton of elements of most jobs that can be done anywhere; if you write code to a spec you can do it in the office, in your bedroom, in Starbucks, in the bath. Nowadays, nobody really cares. As long as it’s good and on time, anything goes. If you handle customer service calls you can do it on the massive floor of a call center or at your kitchen table in Lebanon, Kansas, as long as your turn-around times and customers’ satisfaction ratings are up to snuff. If, like me, your job mainly consists of the three R’s – reading, ‘riting, and ruminatin’ – a “clean, well-lighted place” is about all you need.

Except … when you need the heat, and energy, and frustration, and excitement, and drama, of intellectual hand-to-hand combat to find, build – and win – the future of your work. Then there is no substitute – still no substitute – for being in the room.

The phone, Skype, email, Slack, video conferences, Jabber, FaceTime, Hangouts, are all great and serve their purposes well, but when you want a group of people to come together to really talk, really focus, really energize each other, really be creative and innovative, really sell ideas to each other, and really dig deep, then being in the same physical space at the same time really still takes some beating.

In our Collaboratory in midtown Manhattan we see the truth of this every day. Our customers are energized by being in the room with their peers (some of whom they hardly ever see in person), and our consultants, and engineers, and designers, and strategists. Building off the vibe and energy of the world’s ultimate 24-hour city and a WeWork building full of entrepreneurs and creative millennials (“is one of these guys the next Zuckerberg?” you catch yourself thinking in the elevator), they step outside of their Q by Q, day by day, minute by minute concerns and give themselves the time and the space to think differently about what comes next, and what they should do about it. As we develop more Collaboratorys around the world (in Amsterdam and London already, coming soon to Australia and Singapore as well as India and California), we’re finding a new “hybrid” model emerging in which we meld the still amazing upsides of working wherever and whenever with the catalytic heat that “the room” generates.

In 2016 the world is flatter than ever but, paradoxically because of that, the “room” matters more than ever, too.

The Real Deal: Bill Hewitt on Contracts meet Machines

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

This time it is Bill Hewitt. Bill joined Exari in 2015 as Chief Executive Officer, responsible for the company’s vision, strategy and business operations. Bill has a strong track record of growing technology companies including Kalido, PeopleSoft and Hyperion Software. Bill began his career at IBM in sales, marketing and executive management. Bill holds a degree in business administration from the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. 

I recently interviewed him for my upcoming book on how automation is changing various occupations and it was fascinating to hear how Exari is transforming the world of lawyers and risk managers.

Here he writes “thar’s gold in them contract hills” if you only know how to mine them

Imagine a world where the contract process is virtual. Companies negotiate with each other in cyberspace, taking best practices from a universal library of clauses and precedents. Automatic scoring of risk gives the negotiator visibility into how exposed they are, allowing them to ensure they are putting proper protections in place. Finally, the contract is analyzed against all previous contracts of its type and the libraries are updated even as the contract whizzes through cyberspace with electronic counterparty signatures. The contract and its core data are stored and now ready to inform downstream and upstream systems of the new rights and obligations.

That future is not that far off. But it is jarring because the traditional contracting process has been slow, cumbersome and error-prone. Anyone who has been through a contract cycle knows it.

Why?

Because for years contract management has been about documents. The future is about data. Exari’s focus on 100% contract certainty is all about extracting relevant data from contracts and making it accessible for business decision making. Until now, if a company wanted to find out their rights and obligations, they would either pull the contracts, review them one by one, keep key terms in a spreadsheet or turn to their outside law firm for a lengthy- and expensive- review.

Fast forward to today. Exari has created a “machine” to extract key data from contracts and deliver insights instantaneously. We’ve created a “Universal Contract Model™ that can harmonize any contract, regardless of the form, language or style. Why does this matter? Because contracts are intended to be business tools and today, most contracts are artifacts and only exposed when something goes wrong. The fact is, if companies could operationalize their contract data, they would not miss revenue opportunities and would be 100% informed as to the risk of their contract portfolio.

More importantly, industry specialization matters. For years, we have been working with the world’s largest banks and are the leaders in using near real-time contract data to manage counterparty, credit and collateral risk. Last week, Exari acquired CMA Contiki, a leader in the highly regulated Oil & Gas market. Their expertise and depth in understanding the complexity of project-intensive industries is unrivaled.

By working with leaders in business, we are breaking new ground in how contract processes are automated, not just from a workflow standpoint but from a contract intelligence standpoint.

The Real Deal: Jason Prater on Manufacturers, Mobility, and the Internet of Things

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

This time it is Jason Prater who leads product and platform development teams, from design to deployment at Plex Systems, the manufacturing cloud vendor.

Here he writes about dramatic changes sensors, wearables and cloud computing are bringing to the shop floor.

Twenty years ago, it was hard for people to picture a manufacturing shop floor lined with PCs. But it happened. More and more manufacturers began to rely on desktop computers because they wanted to access data on the manufacturing process.

Today, it’s hard for people to picture a manufacturing shop floor with no PCs. But it’s going to happen. And it won’t take 20 years, or even 10.

The way technology is going, manufacturers will soon be able to leverage the Internet of Things and wearable devices to get the rich data they need at any stage of the manufacturing process.

This isn’t just a matter of wanting to get rid of big, bulky, crash-prone computers. This is the dawn of an age of “always-on” communication between man and machine. The result? Leaner, more cost-effective manufacturing.

How can a manufacturing operation thrive on data yet not have a single computer on the shop floor? This may sound far-fetched. But it’s clear that this is where we’re headed.

For example, machines are already becoming smarter (and maybe even smarter than us). We use smart refrigerators, smart thermostats, and smart smoke alarms, and we’re used to it. This is all part of a trend called the Internet of Things in which machines are talking to us, and amongst themselves, in ways that help them run better.

So, yes, the machines are already talking behind our backs. But are manufacturers talking to the machines? We at PLEX recently ran a study to answer this and other questions.

Among the manufacturers we surveyed, 48% already use sensors and 80% say they incorporate consumer mobile devices into their manufacturing operations. Some 27% use low-power Bluetooth—a technology that’s still catching on.

Manufacturers are clearly eager to let their employees communicate with machines in real time. The changes on the shop floor will be obvious, and radical.

Between mobility and the Internet of Things, I’m convinced that the PC will basically disappear from the shop floor within the next five years. Why? Manufacturers won’t need them. Instead, they’ll rely on computers that will be hidden in tablets, phones, wearables, and smart tools and machines.

What does this all mean for the forward-thinking manufacturer?

Your first order of business is to gather, store, and analyze as much data as possible. We have a customer that’s storing sound recordings of the rattles and creaks in the cars they produce. If they can identify trends in the pitches of these noises, they may be able to start predicting problems.

Another PLEX customer—a major manufacturer of large diesel engines—is using sensors to stream data back and forth to each of their custom engines. This way, maintenance staff can know instantly that an engine was built to particular specifications to meet the needs of a specific client. This information helps them deliver more tailored service.

You can’t accomplish any of this if you’re collecting data manually. It’s absolutely imperative that manufacturers tap into the Internet of Things and let their machines talk to each other. It’s equally important to move ERP systems to the cloud so that they can freely exchange data with machines.

Here’s a stat that may blow your mind: more than 50% of the traffic in the PLEX manufacturing cloud is already machine-to-machine. Yeah, it’s safe to say that our customers are way ahead of the curve.

Of course, gathering and analyzing data is just one part of the equation. How will people interact with this data on a day-to-day basis?

Get ready to see lots of your employees walking around with Google Glass and other wearables. Rather than sitting down at a computer to get the results of the latest quality check or download a report on whether machines are running, they’ll just get alerts and real-time updates on their glasses.

Think of what this really means. Less time at a computer means more time at a shop floor. Frequent updates delivered to your body allow for faster responses, earlier intervention, greater efficiency, and less waste. Who wouldn’t want that?

But this doesn’t stop at the four walls of your factory, or even at the borders of your country. If you’re taking your operations global (as so many manufacturers are), you need to gather equally rich data from all facilities. And when you close a plant in Thailand and open one in Brazil, you need to be able to stop and start the data collection process with the ease of flipping a switch.

You can’t do that with on-premise ERP—but you can with cloud-based manufacturing solutions. So, as your machines continue to chat, and as you look for ways to crunch the data they generate, the cloud will become Command Central for the global manufacturing enterprise.

The Real Deal: José Duarte on Digital Disruption in the Service Economy

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

This time it is José Duarte, CEO of Unit4.  José developed most of his professional career at SAP where he held multiple leadership roles, including President of the EMEA & India region as well as President of the Latin America region. 

Under his leadership, UNIT4 has developed an expansive view of the service-centric economy as I posted here. Here he writes about trends in that economy which he knows extremely well having previously served as President Global Services for SAP.

The Service-centric economy is big and growing rapidly. An eclectic range of companies like Airbnb, Netflix, Amazon, Zappos, and Starbucks epitomize the digital revolution having risen above competitors through digital customer engagement and business model innovations. Their success depends on delivering flawless service, and flawless service depends on people. Their people therefore need infrastructure that helps them perform with excellence. In order to do that, today’s workforce has huge expectations for application simplicity driven by familiar and intuitive consumer applications. At the same time business has become increasingly complex. This creates a gap that service organizations strive to close. Their attempts to close this gap is driving significant churn in the enterprise software market.

Changing business models clash with increased pressure from a new breed of workers for simpler, more intuitive systems and applications. The root cause of this disconnect is that traditional business software/ERP was designed with manufacturing and products in mind, not people. As such, the service organizations driving our economy are making software concessions that result in four fundamental problems:

1. Extremely high costs of owning and maintaining software.

2. Radical slow-down in business execution

3. Bad experience for employees due to laborious processes and the inability to work smart.

4. Severe effects of business disruption, due to costly, complex and slow work needed to update systems to ongoing business change. This impacts both the organization and its customers.

The bottom line is that systems used at work hamper the ability to work smart and prevent organizations from delivering exceptional (sometimes even acceptable) customer service. The systems are clunky, slow and do not reflect the changeable reality of the business. Service organizations are looking for alternatives.

What will today’s digital disruption mean for service organizations in the future?

Service-centric businesses need to provide their people with an environment they can flourish in. To develop new ways of working based on the digital realities of people’s everyday lives. Today that means a digital workplace that delivers a tailored, intuitive user experience – based on simple, relevant and complete access to the information needed and the tasks to be done.

• Simple: Enterprise software designed to meet specific requirements of service organizations and their people. It’s time for a smarter approach that frees people from laborious administrative processes, removes unnecessary work, and lets them focus on what really matters: delivering great service.

• Relevant: Unlike their peers in product-focused businesses, those in service organizations deal with much more complex information. There are also more types of users, each needing different types of information in order to perform well and make their specific contribution to success. They need to be saved from the overwhelming array of unfiltered data and be presented with what they really need at the moment they need it. In addition, since change is a constant, information can only be truly relevant if it is a current and correct reflection of the business reality at that moment.

• Complete: Success in a service environment is not created in isolation. Systems need to support, motivate and connect people, so that they can collaborate quickly and easily, to gain the full picture that they need to be effective.

The road to digital enlightenment & great customer service

Along with a new digital mindset, enterprise software designed for service delivery is essential. Organizations can simplify user experience by digitizing and automating business processes, liberating people from tasks that provide little or no value to the business. By applying advanced analytics and intelligence, systems can streamline information, eliminate the majority of manual steps related to business processes as well as eliminating some business processes altogether.

The churn we’re seeing in the enterprise software market is driven by organizations looking for digital enlightenment. There is a better way. We’re moving towards a world where enterprise applications ‘drive’ themselves and take initiative, leaving people to focus on the things that people do best.

The Real Deal: Bruce Richardson on Why Salesforce Nation is very different

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

This time it is Bruce Richardson who joined Salesforce in 2011 as the Chief Enterprise Strategist.  He may be best known for his coverage of the enterprise applications market during his 20-year tenure as Chief Research Officer at AMR Research (now part of Gartner).

In his new opus SAP Nation, Vinnie Mirchandani makes a compelling argument that SAP’s reliance/overt dependence on system integrators and partners has resulted in deep estrangement from customers. After SAP sold the licenses, it let a host of third parties assume responsibility for new implementations, instance consolidations, ongoing support, and upgrades. This created an irreparable chasm between buyer and seller.

In following the accolades and comments around the new book, some readers have asked whether other vendors are also at risk of losing touch with their customers. Some have even questioned whether Salesforce and other cloud leaders may be destined for that same fate.

While it would be fun to offer a personal spin on SAP’s past, present, and future, Vinnie has already done that with his book. Instead, let’s look at five reasons why Salesforce is different, and why it’s not destined to slip down the worm-hole.

1. No painful technology transition. The current ERP leaders took advantage of the last major tech shift in the early 90s by being the first to offer client-server apps that worked across different hardware platforms and databases. Seemingly overnight they crushed the mainframe and minicomputer vendors who failed to move fast enough to “open systems.”

Fast-forward to today and there is a similar technology shift. The ERP vendors are now in the same deathtrap as their mainframe/mini brethren. They can’t move fast enough to meet the demand for cloud solutions. Ten to fifteen years ago, they were the beneficiaries of customer demand for a single, integrated solution that spanned the whole enterprise. Now, they are trying to distract buyers with a crazed story about a hybrid architecture of on-premise software, private clouds, and Franken-app acquisitions.

Contrast that with Salesforce. When the company was founded in 1999, one of the primary design goals was to build a public, multi-tenant cloud. This commitment continues to drive out cost and inefficiencies, and makes it easier to secure.

2. Creating a unique user experience. Salesforce was the first to make using enterprise software as intuitive as ordering a book from Amazon. This ease-of-use was extended to the payment model. While subscriptions are standard today, it was a departure from how almost all enterprise software was sold at the time. It wasn’t that long ago that first time buyers were pushed to buy more software than they needed (resulting in extensive shelfware), forced to pay an annual maintenance tax of up to 22% of the software license cost, and later subject to costly upgrades every 18-36 months regardless of whether they needed any of the new features.

3. Open up the platform: ERP vendors were never good at partnering, preferring to create their own applications regardless of whether they had domain expertise. The rare exception was the “purple squirrel,” an ISV that provided a unique piece of code for a small, niche market. Salesforce took the opposite approach. The company created a “customer success platform” with shared platform services and open APIs, and allowed any and all third parties to build on top of it, including ERP vendors. Today, the Salesforce AppExchange includes more than 2,700 partner apps (nearly 3 million installations). The overall ecosystem numbers more than 1.8 million independent developers. Customers have embraced the open platform, too, creating more than half a million custom apps. Many are building new cloud apps that had been running on their on-premise ERP system.

4. Actively invest in future tech stars: Over the last five years, Salesforce has helped fund more than 100 new ventures. If you saw the recent interview with John Somorjai, SVP, Corporate Development and Strategy, the company is looking at new opportunities in machine learning and intelligence, wearables, industry-specific applications, and mobile. Salesforce’s “mobile-first” development strategy was the catalyst behind the formation of its Salesforce1 fund last fall. The company has seeded it with $100M.

5. Stay laser focused on customer satisfaction and retention: Renewal rates/attrition and customer satisfaction metrics are closely tracked at Salesforce. In a recent survey conducted by a third party research firm, 98% of customers said they will continue to use Salesforce in the future. To drive up retention, Salesforce has long offered its “Customers For Life” program whereby buyers had access to resources to make sure that they were getting the most out of their Salesforce investments. This was a first in the industry, and became an incredible success for both customers and the company.

Here is a summary of the lessons learned over the last 15 years:

· When technology is in flux, you need to make the right bet on the future. Being late to a tech shift can be fatal.

· Create a unique user experience based on ease of use and management.

· Offer an open platform. This attracted thousands of partners who helped build out the product suite and increase sales and marketing coverage.

· Continue to invest in new ideas, technologies, and people.

· Create and retain happy customers. This simple strategy and subscription model gives Salesforce executives a clear view into the future. As a result, the company has issued FY16 guidance of $6.45B to $6.5B in revenues.

The Real Deal: Jon Reed on Young Technologists in a changing Man-Machine world

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

From Google’s driverless cars to Amazon’s delivery drones, it would be silly to pretend machines are not taking over many activities humans have been trained to do. In the December Workday Predict and Prepare videocast, I touched on that as one of the 2014 predictions and you can see the dialog Naomi Bloom and I had about impact on jobs and the HR function. In the last few weeks, the Enterprise Irregulars have had a thread going on the topic and Jon Reed of Diginomica was especially eloquent about what he is telling younger people about changing job markets.

Jon has published a book on the virtues of the entrepreneurial life that was inspired by his conversations with college grads about their future prospects in an automated world. Here is a short version:

We find ourselves in a situation where even higher education is out of step with where the world is headed. I have a lot of friends with PhDs that are basically irrelevant to how they are making a living (to be fair, some are happy teaching).

The critical thinking I learned in college was probably invaluable, but for those youngsters who are not entrepreneurial and creative out of the box, I think there is an argument to be made that trade crafts such as plumbing and electric and carpentry are not such terrible skills to have (with modern applications such as solar power and geo thermal installations and so forth) – and may be a far better use of time than a four year degree.

Advanced degrees still offer options in some fields, what I worry about is kids who either don’t finish college or who land in the working world with a general bachelor’s degree and nothing else. I am friends with a number of such folks around here as I write in a couple of the local cafes and brewpubs, and if you’re not careful you can get stuck in an extended period in the lower end of the service industry where the money might sometimes be ok (e.g. bartending, waiting tables) but the future prospects and advancement are minimal.

What I advocate in my conversations and more formal talks with young people are:

- Develop an entrepreneurial approach to your career (make job moves pro-actively and pursue challenges aggressively)

- Develop a personal brand by giving away meaningful content (publishing, code sharing, videos, etc)

- Foster creative skills but don’t count on making money on your intellectual property. View intellectual property as a way to build visibility around your area of mastery which can then be monetized via speaking, consulting, or better job offers.

- Live lean and develop an enforced savings mentality that includes not only retirement savings at a young age but cash reserves, to be invested in both “safer” (e.g. precious metals and real estate) and “speculative” investments (e.g. a stake in a startup or small business). Lean living will also give you more flexibility to take “high upside” opportunities such as an equity role in a startup.

- Develop a “continuing education” mindset about your chosen area of mastery. Constantly invest in learning and networking opportunities around your chosen profession/skill.

- Pursue areas you are passionate about but also consider how marketable such areas are. Use the Internet to market test ideas to get a better understanding of how audiences will respond to your ideas and to reduce some of the risk of pursuing new ventures (e.g. accelerate the feedback loop via blogging on various topics to gauge audience interest, etc).

- As Vinnie might say, be a polymath, learn several related disciplines and always work to connect siloed thinking into new possibilities. Develop related financial and business skills, not just a technical or trade proficiency. Learn how to negotiate and sell so that you can cut deals favorable to your interests. Straddle technology and business.

- Don’t put too much faith in job stability, develop “career capital” that goes beyond one employer. If an employer prevents you from sharing content and being involved in your field in a public manner, change employers.

- Put money into assets beyond your job. Don’t count on salary alone to ensure your livelihood.

- Adapt and change, it’s the only constant.

- Pay it forward whenever you can.

Oh, and: put your phone down and get some real work done.

Jon is a co-founder and frequent contributor to diginomica.com, where he blogs and videocasts on enterprise trends.

Code Halos – High Praise and Furrowed Brows

Final post in a series by Ben Pring who co-leads Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work.

In laying out how “Code Halos” – aka our digital fingerprints –are changing the competitive rules in fast digitizing markets worldwide, we have provided the backstory, defined the various attributes and types of Code Halos, and revealed a model that we have seen play out time and again among Code Halo pioneers

In this final installment, we offer few concluding thoughts based on the feedback we have received from- Cognizant clients and prospects, Cognizant staff, industry analysts and other interested parties. Firstly, the response to our ideas around Code Halo-thinking is overwhelmingly positive. I and my co-authors, Malcolm Frank and Paul Roehrig, have spoken at dozens of client and industry events and engaged in numerous post-presentation discussions with a wide array of senior IT and business leaders who when presented with the Code Halo idea and follow us through our Crossroads Model tell us of the opportunities Code Halo-thinking offers (including the risks of “extinction events”) are very real in their industry or market. For example, the narrative resonated with a major soft drink manufacturer that saw a new way to think about the social network around its soft drink; with an international airline which is beginning to socialize and internalize the new metaphor of a Code Halo- to rethink how it moves customers from point A to point B; and with a leading financial services institution that admitted it was only too aware of the “ionization” happening all around it as new ideas from start-ups begin to change the competitive dynamics the company faces.

The second major reaction though – which may or may not surprise you, if you’ve read any of the previous pieces here, or on New Florence, is that many people immediately internalize the Code Halo story and find “the dark side of the Halo.” Rather than focusing on the positive transformational commercial opportunities Code Halos present, they land on the dystopian, Orwellian world of constant surveillance by Big (and little) Brother that Messrs Assange, Manning and Snowden (which sounds like a perfectly respectable firm of solicitors in the Herefordshire countryside, doesn’t it?) have brought to the fore in recent weeks, months and years.

Typically we hear a torrent of worst-case scenarios. “I don’t want to share my information with retailer x”, “I don’t want the government to have even more information on me that they do already”, “this is just going to make hackers’ lives easier”, “I get bombarded by enough advertising already; this is just going to make it even worse”, “I don’t want to live in 1984”, “I am not a number”, “how can I control who knows things about me”, “this is the final nail in the coffin of privacy”, “these ideas will never take off.”

The prism (excuse the pun) that people have is perfectly understandable. Their concerns and fears are, of course, entirely valid and understandable. We share many of them. As digital immigrants ourselves we are at times as dazed and confused as any set of middle aged men by the emergent and volatile social mores of the new world and have to fight back the temptation to wallow in nostalgic revelries of how “this wasn’t the way we used to do it back in the day/old country.”

The grand experiment that we are all engaged in – creating a world of unprecedented hyper-connectivity of time, space, and culture - which the Code Halo phenomena is supercharging, is, by its very nature, unknowable and logically contains good things and bad. Lots of good things are going to happen in a world of Code Halos, as are lots of bad things.

In short, we have no intention to deny that bad things will happen as a result of code meeting code. We fully expect they will. There is a very real dark side of the halo. All of the worst-case scenarios with which we are presented will happen., and are happening now. People will get hacked. Government intrusion will grow. Advertisers will create new ways to embed advertizing into every nook and cranny of our lives through every IP addressable form factor we use. Privacy will recede. The nefarious will have new opportunities to hurt us. Many innovations enabled by Code Halos will have unexpected consequences which will compound over time to produce unanticipated negative outcomes.

And yet we firmly believe these fears, concerns and objections are overblown, irrelevant or moot. Every objection is entirely the same objection that people raised as Al Gore’s Information Superhighway was entering the public consciousness in the middle of the 1990s; “I’ll never put my credit details onto the web,” Average Joe said in 1996; now Joe is routinely spending thousands of dollars online.

The Internet has been a crime scene in the last 20 years -- repeatedly. And it still is. And it always will be. But, today the Internet has 634 million websites and 2.4 billion users, according to uptime monitoring company, Royal Pingdom, and is here to stay. Nobody is going to un-invent it.

In 2013 so much of our lives are already online – shared, visible, transparent, open, all proffered voluntarily through Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, et al, or less voluntarily via our credit score, phone records, movements, and key strokes that the government can impound without warrant -- that privacy is already an illusion, hackers already hack, advertisers can already advertise within our email, pharmacies already send our 16-year-old daughters coupons for diapers when neither they nor we knew they were pregnant; we are numbers, we are code.

The world that we are describing is already here. The Code Halo era is not imminent. It is now.

Just as the upside of the Internet has won over the downside we believe the upside of a Code Halo world will win over its downsides. The “give to get” ratio of the Code Halo world will be so positive that, in the same way that the cost and convenience of Internet era 1.0 triumphed over its doubters, the new Internet era of Code Halos will similarly see it detractor’s voices diminish and disappear.

And one last thought; the ultimate value of Code Halos will originate out of the openness of data that is shared and this, of course, will mandate good behavior and accountability. Just as lousy service that once went unpunished is now broadcast on social media with sometimes devastating impact, individuals or corporations that misuse or exploit information exchanged via Code Halos will struggle to enrich and inflate their Code Halo and to generate commercially material sparks. Bad Code Halo behavior will exist in a world of instant high visibility and will push some towards their extinction event.

If you’ve enjoyed these blogs over the last few weeks please look out for our upcoming app and book “Code Halo” where we’ll be exploring these ideas in more depth. In the meantime please check out below the trailer video for our app and please share your thoughts about the world of Code Halos and the Crossroads Model at www.unevenlydistributed.com

The Real Deal: Ben Pring on Code Rules

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

This time it is Ben Pring who co-leads Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work. He joined Cognizant after spending 15 years with Gartner as a senior industry analyst researching and advising on areas such as cloud computing and global sourcing.

"What one key characteristic separates today’s high-flying outperformers– such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix and Pandora – from fast-followers, wannabes, and laggards? It’s a precision focus on the information that surrounds people, organizations, products and processes – what we call Code Halos^TM – to build new business and commercial models. These leading companies have realized that the data – or Code Halo –that accompanies people, organizations and devices contains a richness of business insight that far outstrips the value of physical assets that have historically underpinned market leadership. Conversely, companies that have missed or misunderstood the Code Halo phenomena are now struggling to cope in markets that are moving at warp speed; some, in fact, have already succumbed.

We are in the early stages of an exciting and important new era in which Code Halos radically reshape the rules of business competition. Built on the SMAC Stack^TM (social + mobile + analytics + cloud technologies), Code Halos are being harnessed to help enterprises advance from old-world industrial models (premised on physical assets) to new structures informed by digits. Our study of Code Halos, in fact, reveals a new “crossroads” that businesses across industry must navigate to achieve sustained market prosperity and avoid what we call an “extinction event.”

From Personal to Business Code Halos

Each one of us is creating our Code Halo with every click or swipe of our phone, tablet, laptop, Glass, Nest, FuelBand, dashboard, or other smart device. Every transaction we make, every “like” we record, every preference we note, is building a digital fingerprint of who we are and what makes us tick. Our Code Halos, which have been building and deepening as more and more of our lives have become digitized,contain a multiplicity of attributes that reveal our likes, dislikes and behaviors, from recommendations of  great new books to  personalized radio stations that play our favorite songs, many of which haven’t left their CD cases for a million years.

The Code Halos that exist around individuals are unlocking incredible new value for all of us and for the companies that we do business with.  But the Code Halo story doesn’t end in the consumer world. More and more smart companies are realizing that the concept of Code Halos isn’t confined to (relatively) simple B2C activities,such as book selling or online music. Instead, they’re recognizing that their very organizations have a Code Halo and that within their organizations they have hundreds, thousands, millions of Code Halos, made up of every digital interaction with every smart device they touch across “the Internet of Things”  (all of which of course have their own Code Halos).

This realization is sending profound shock waves through board rooms, as forward-thinking business and technology leaders begin to seethe impact that the management – or mismanagement of Code Halos – has on corporate fates. In fact, many are now coming to grips with Code Halo intersections and how they can impact every meaningful aspect of their business operations, from design, to production, to selling, to talent management.

Winning in the New Code Rush

Whether it be the hipster in San Francisco using Square Wallet on his morning latte run  or the engineering conglomerate getting its turbines to Tweet or the Singaporean government establishing its homeland as a “living analytics” test bed, the leverage of Code Halo thinking is making businesses big and small think about how the code they generate can collide with the code generated by other people, devices, and organizations. And, perhaps more importantly,how this datacan be mined to create new products and services that are genuinely innovative.

Over the next three weeks we’ll be outlining additional examples of how Code Halos are changing business and commerce. We will also dive deeper intothose “Code Rules” we think are essential for ensuring enterprises win at the new code rush that is now taking form.

To learn more about Code Halos, download our white paper at unevenlydistributed.com "

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Ben can be reached at Ben DOT Pring AT cognizant DOT com  

The Real Deal: Mark Herring on "APIs everywhere, but not many I can reuse"

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

This time it is Mark Herring, SVP of Product Marketing at Software AG. I recently heard him talk about "Big Services" as a unheralded cousin of Big Data and invited him to write about the changing world of services and APIs, which his webMethods product gives him a nice perch to observe from.

“In my role I meet with many customers and have the unique privilege of seeing the hype cycle through the eyes of my collective customers. Many customers are moving aggressively in exposing their systems as API’s as they try to address the huge demand for mobile access to their systems. One misconception that I have to often address is the perception that there are so many API’s already out there that by combining a few API’s together they should be able to get their systems out even quicker.

The Programmable Web lists almost 9,000 APIs that are publicly accessible, which should be a boon to productivity. Basically the theory sounds fabulous – create new applications by combining an API from vendor A, with another API from vendor B, with a bit of business logic from my business. Unfortunately the truth is that most reusable API’s are not being reused. There are a few reasons for this lack of reuse:

 Many of the API’s that are out there are in the category of “No one cares!”. Well maybe someone cares, but by in large do we need another photo sharing service, a daily fact API or a classified service API. I would put this list at about 50% of all the API’s out there!

The next category “Interesting but no SLA” accounts for another 35%. There are a plenty of interesting API’s that I might want to use but either the company providing them is unknown, or the API has no service level agreement. There is no way that I would want to put this API in my application or mashup since it going down would mean problems for me. No one want to deal with the error “Sorry service unavailable”.

The next category is what I call “Great.. BUT”.  These APIs seem usable, they provide a service I need, they meet my requirements for availability, BUT if only they had this extra return value, or this one extra feature. There are by far the most frustrating API’s to deal with. The most common way around these is just rewrite them to give the exact results I was hoping for. This probably accounts for an additional 10% of the publicly accessible API’s.

The final list is “Widely used”. This is by far the smallest subset, I attribute 5% of all APIs in this category, but even then I think I am being a little too generous. The list includes APIs such as FedEx/UPS tracking,  Google Maps and potentially Credit Check.  The limitations with these API’s is that often an account is needed because the API provider is assuming risk/liability. For instance the Credit Check API will be provided by one of the credit bureaus or card processing services and if the check passes and funds are credited they may assume the liability if at a later stage the transaction was deemed to be from a stolen card.

What Does This Mean For YOU?

Review publicly assessible API’s, but don’t be disheartened that many of them will not fit your needs. API reuse is only one benefit; arguably the biggest benefit of API’s is mobile access to business systems. When building your own API think of public usage and reuse, since these are good design patterns to emulate. And finally, adopt a robust and secure API management strategy."

Mark can be reached at mark DOT herring AT softwareag DOT com