This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

This week, I was reminded of an interesting stat that frames the current era in an interesting way.

“More people own mobile phones than toothbrushes” – Bill McDermott, SAP CEO

— Brian Vellmure (@BrianVellmure) May 14, 2012

We are indeed on a steady march towards global connectedness. Surprisingly, there is still a ways to go.

Only 32.7% of the world’s population has access to the internet, and only 17% have access via mobile device.

Connections and Collaboration

The trajectory is, however, exponentially marching towards real-time connection ability with anyone on the planet. As we gain greater capacity for connection, we are discovering dozens of new opportunities for collaboration. The implications are significant. Business models will be forced to evolve and new crowdsourcing and ad-hoc value chains will emerge.

Not only are we simply becoming more “connected”, the myriad of ways that we can connect are broadening as well – in our personal and professional lives, whether we are the customer, or whether we’re communicating with our customers. Additionally, as technology advances, we’ll be communicating with computers and machines more often, furhter adding to communications opportunities and challenges.

Next generation interactions will also include augmented reality applications and yet to be developed devices and the blending of physical and digital spaces.

In the end, all of these are simply enabling good old “Mind to Mind” and “Heart to Heart” communication. Past, current and future communication channels are simply props and mediums to facilitate the exchange of information, ideas, emotions, and solutions.

What is the impact on today’s CIO?

So then, what is the organization’s role in all of this? To facilitate, support, and leverage evolving communication channels to maximize the effectiveness of every interaction, internally and externally. (The lines between internal and external will continue to blur)

A growing argument is that the mass migration to the cloud is displacing IT resources. Like many of today’s roles, those (individuals and institutions) who don’t recognize and evolve with the current realities of the marketplace will likely be displaced. However, today’s CIO and his/her respective teams have plenty of critically significant work before them.

Their focus should include the following:

(1) Educating their organizations about potential benefits of the changing IT landscape
(2) Collaborating with their Line of Business counterparts to create new value streams
(3) Architecting platforms for interoperability to ensure that ecosystem participants have the right tools to communicate in the most effective fashion
(4) Assuring compliance with regulatory requirements
(5) Linking identities across networks and channels into one unified record
(6) Extracting insights from the interactions that take place across an ever evolving myriad of channels
(7) Building predictive models, leveraging multi-channel interaction data

Building and evolving the infrastructure to enable the next generation enterprise to operate with speed, agility, and flexibility should be towards the top of every CIO’s agenda. Enhancing communication and collaboration across the ecosystem sits smack dab in the middle of that priority.

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

In the early morning of September 11, 2001, I was driving through downtown Los Angeles, shocked at what I was hearing on the radio, and awestruck by the police and military helicopters circling and protectively watching over the City of Angels skyline.

Like many of you, as that day progressed, I watched the news intermittently, contemplating what these events might mean for the world, our country, friends and loved ones in New York City, and my new bride and me (We had just purchased our first house the night before).

What I didn’t know until just a few days ago , is that while I was somberly working at a client site, comfortably detached from the horror of the collapsed skyscrapers, hundreds of thousands had fled away from the burning twin towers and found themselves trapped on the South side of Manhattan. In the chaos that ensued, bridges, tunnels, roads, and other public transportation were shut down. There was no way off one of the world’s most densely populated islands.

It was in those circumstances that the largest maritime evacuation in all of history took place without any previous planning, infrastructure, or dedicated staff.

Yes, this was larger than the Dunkirk evacuation (commonly known as the Miracle of Dunkirk) in WWII where 339,000 Allied soldiers (British, French, and Belgian) were rescued over the course of 9 days. In this case, over half a million people were evacuated in less than 9 hours – without any previous planning, processes, leadership, infrastructure, or dedicated staff. .

I’ve embedded the video at the bottom of this post. It is a remarkable story narrated by Tom Hanks and well worth the 11 minutes to watch it. It is a tremendous story of heroism, and the triumph of the human spirit.

I believe it also provides a powerful metaphor for the promise of social business in the context of an increasingly connected, complex, and intelligent world.

A Powerful Social Business Metaphor

While the daily triggers and challenges in most of our business lives aren’t remotely as dramatic as what happened to the twin towers that day, we DO live in a business (government, education, NGO, Ministry) climate where cycle times are increasingly compressed, and never explored frontiers of opportunity are literally emerging every few years, instead of every few decades or centuries.

It will come as no surprise that global CEOs (in the 2010 IBM Global CEO study), say that the business environment is increasingly more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and structurally different than it was before.

This is not a temporary phase, but the pace of change is accelerating.

We see the meteoric rise (and falls) of companies like Borders, MySpace, RIM (makers of Blackberry), and Nokia – companies that dominated and then were dominated their respective domains. We witness companies like Pinterest, Facebook, Groupon and Twitter emerge from nowhere to gain multi-billion dollar valuations nearly overnight.

We watch huge organizations like Proctor & Gamble and IBM morph and change much quicker than their competitors as they harness talent from within and outside organizational boundaries.

Describing the experience

The following quotes were taken from mariners who participated in the 9/11 boatlift. I can’t help but draw the analogies between these quotes and what is increasingly the case in the corporate world.

“You couldn’t have planned nuthin’, to happen that fast, that quick”

“No training. This was just people doing what they had to do that day.”

“You forget all about what you’re supposed to do – what they teach you at school…”

“Average people. They stepped up when they needed to”

Quickly organizing around a “job to be done”

In the case of the boatlift story, someone recognized a “job to be done” , and they quickly expressed a need to an anonymous group of sailors. The initiators quickly and creatively came up with an idea, shared a need, and a brief and urgent “call to action”. They had no idea who would respond, how they would respond, or what would happen next. There were probably dozens of unanswered questions.

How many can we take?
Where will they go?
How many need to leave the island?
Is there enough fuel?
How will traffic navigate the harbour?
What will happen after debarkation?

The list could go on and on with unknowns.

What was known was that there was a common need. That need was shared amongst those with a common interest (boating), in a common geography. Quickly, a critical mass of talent, passion and availability was assembled. Hundreds of available and previously unknown and disconnected resources worked together to solve a problem. And they did it with unprecedented speed.

The technology in this case was a Marine Radio. The emerging publicly available and enterprise class tools, applications and devices now allow common connections and information sharing with the whole world… or pre-defined, mutually agreed upon segments. Increasingly, these connections transcend our legacy institutional boundaries.

On a smaller scale, scenarios like what’s described above are playing out daily across geographies and other institutional boundaries.

I wrote along this exact theme in a post two years ago titled “Circles” .

The speed at which this astounding feat was pulled off would have arguably taken years to organize if abiding by traditional planning means. Conflicting schedules, conflicting priorities, political factions, process inefficiencies, human and capital resource constraints, etc.

• What if the rules/laws prevented it?
• What if all of the logistics jurisdictions needed to coordinate and meet?
• What if licenses needed to be checked and earned?
• Hard enough to coordinate across departments within one organization, what about cross-departmental collaboration?

These are the same boundaries preventing progress in organizations today.

What this story illustrates is that the facilitation and alignment of motivation, ability, and passion in the context of a self organizing community around an emergent need can be VERY POWERFUL.

Key Takeaway

First movers who can construct, facilitate, and/or nurture environments where creative resources can work quickly to harness complexity will enjoy an early advantage in the next era.

Peering further into the future, these capabilities will be table stakes for institutions of all types and sizes, in order to succeed in their respective domain for any sustained period of time.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

Several years ago, my wife and I ran out of toothpaste in a remote part of small Southeast Asian country. We spent half the day trying to find a place that carried a halfway recognizable form of packaged toothpaste. It was more of an adventure than you might imagine. We ultimately found one unopened Colgate toothpaste box covered in dust in a small bazaar kiosk. In that case, we were excited and thankful. It didn’t matter much that the box was a bit dusty, nor that it wasn’t our typical preferred choice of toothpaste.

I remember coming back to the United States several months later, and going shopping for toothpaste once again. I found myself paralyzed in the aisle as I tried to make sense of shelf space that looked similar to this:

Too many choices

I remember hearing a story about an elderly woman in post communist USSR who stood crying in the aisle because she couldn’t choose the right kind of toilet paper. (Much of her previous life was spent often waiting in long lines for just one roll of the only toilet paper she had ever known). The sudden presentation of varying sizes, patterns, colors, and prices were overwhelming the underdeveloped analytical part of her brain.

In the era of Big Data, I believe that we all represent that woman to a certain extent. How many times, from a personal or corporate perspective, have you experienced some level of stress or anxiety because of the amount of information you have to sift through in order to make the right decision?

We’re increasingly overwhelmed. When we type something into Google, we don’t want 4,456,761 results.

When we are making purchasing decisions, Google found in 2011 that the average shopper uses 10.4 sources of information to make a purchasing decision (nearly double the number of sources they used in 2010).

To illustrate the point, Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University, who has dedicated much of her life to analyzing the concept of making choices, ran a study by placing a free tasting booth in a grocery store.

First they offered 6 different jams. 40% of the customers stopped to taste. 30% of those bought some.

A week later, they set up the same booth in the same store, but this time with 24 different jams. 60% of the customers stopped to taste. But only 3% bought some.

*** Having too many choices made them 10 times less likely to buy. ***

To complicate matters even further, we now can get this information from a variety of screens, and devices. A recent study of a small sample of 20 somethings found that they switched media screens 27 times in an hour!

How many choices do we want?

According to Iyengar, “when humans are given 10 or more choices, they make bad decisions”.

Perhaps that’s why marketers have been trying for so long to get on the first page of search engines. Jeff Bullas shared the following results from an AOL study on search.

The first ranking position in the search results receives 42.25% of all click-through traffic
The second position receives 11.94%
Third position on the first page obtains 8.47%
The fourth placed position on page one receives 6.05%
The others on the first page are under 5% of click through traffic
The first ten results (page one ) received 89.71% of all click-through traffic.

Writers, content producers, and other media have long known that “Top 10″ lists attract eyeballs and attention. People crave simplicity they can digest and manage from an authoritative source.

The typical American makes about 70 decisions per day. 50% of CEO decisions are made in 9 minutes or less, and less than 12% take more than an hour to make.

We collectively spend a alot of time not just trying to gather and analyze information to help inform the decisions we are making, but trying to absorb the information that comes at us unexpectedly, where we are not directing the stream of content.

But, this is taking its toll.

ForensicPsychology.net found that “heavy internet users are 2.5 times more likely to be depressed and that they also suffer from a reduction in white matter in their brains (goo that transmits signals around the cerebrum) in the emotion, memory, sensory, and speech centers by 20%”

Enabling better decision making

Big Data brings with it a whole set of opportunities, but also challenges. According to IBM, 90% of the data in human history was created in the last 2 years. According to McKinsey&Company, that pace will be accelerating at a pace of 40% per year.

Design and creativity take an increasingly important role in the process.

From the hyperlinked article above:

Advances in technology – faster, more powerful,less expensive – are concrete and visible. Design is subtle, more subjective, more open to human interpretation. But, as our increasingly advanced technologies enable us to build larger, more capable, more complex systems, the role of design becomes ever more important. It is the only way to ensure that our technologies will help us deal with our increasingly hectic lives.

The challenge then for marketers, product managers, salespeople, customer service, consultants, advisors, designers of products, services, and experiences, and anyone else who is initiating or sustaining progress is to take all of this data and information, and translate it into a digestible, understandable, and insightful menu of choices for their audience.

Regardless of your industry, your customers (along with your executives, your partners, and other stakeholders) will likely resonate with the following statement.

“Help me make sense of everything that is happening. Help me know what to pay attention to. Surface a narrowly defined selection of the things that most closely align with my needs, desires, and jobs to be done. Help me evaluate quickly pros and cons of each decision, and then help me make the best decision.”

Organizations of all sizes that are able to center their focus on answering that call from their customers will thrive.

So, then, let’s get to work. But I know..it’s much easier said than done.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

Growing up, I spent much of my time playing competitive team sports. I played soccer, basketball, and (American) football. In each case, almost immediately after some level of effort, I knew how I had done. I got immediate feedback from my coach(es), other players, and often from the crowd. I knew how much weight I had lifted, how fast I had run, if my shot had gone in or not. I could look at the scoreboard and see where things stood.

Brian Vellmure making a tackle against Colorado State 1994 Source: Associated Press

As I progressed in age and level of competition, we increasingly watched hours of recorded film to analyze steps, movements, body positioning, reaction time, and what actions had led to success or failure.

Daily, my teammates and I attempted to perfect our skills. We took the feedback we received and made adjustments; sometimes immediately, sometimes daily. Refining and honing our skills and performance, we attempted to perfect and ingrain habits of the things that worked, and tried to correct the mistakes that we were making.

John Hagel, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison start off their book “The Power of Pull” with a story about how 5 surfer kids on Maui used passion, data, analysis, and peer feedback to continually improve the execution of their craft and rise to be considered amongst the best surfers in the world.

Playing with no feedback

While I can’t imagine the futility of playing without any of this feedback, simply doing the same things over and over, and never seeking to improve. it seems to happen all the time in the business world. Employees get a quarterly or annual review. Customers are sent an annual feedback survey that a small percentage of them fill out. Often times, this is a matter of administrative formality, than really useful for any party. Some have put all of their trust in “The Ultimate Question”. But are we really listening and learning to the extent that we could, or should? And, how often is any meaningful action taken based on this feedback?

Without feedback (or the capability to listen and adapt based on it), many organizations and the people within them simply continue on with the same course of action without really knowing how they’re doing, and how the marketplace is reacting or responding to their activities. The result is underperformance.

Shorter Cycle Times / Greater Feedback Mechanisms

In an era where cycle times are rapidly being shortened, and more of our activities are performed digitally, the potential to gather feedback and re-calibrate our responses in real time to align with customer expectations, assist with customer jobs to be done, and provide ever better customer experiences is steadily increasing. In addition to the tried and true feedback mechanisms of the past (focus groups, surveys, etc.) we are able to keep our pulse on our actions in real time. (The counter-argument that a lot of this data exhaust is simply noise is a post for another day)

The social web provides opportunities for real time analysis. Keynote speakers get immediate feedback on how their session went by looking at the stream. Television broadcasters get realtime engagement metrics based on streaming content. Airlines, retail stores, and financial institutions get real time unstructured feedback about their customers’ experience. Elected officials get immediate feedback on their speeches from their constituents.

Mobile feedback vendors are providing opportunities to capture customer experience insights within minutes of the brand experience. Response rates in some surveys have been unbelievably high (and arguably more accurate) by capturing feedback in the flow of the experience vs. several days or weeks later when customers are detached physically, mentally, and emotionally from their interaction.

Text Analytics allows companies to sort through vast amounts of unstructured feedback to surface patterns and themes captured in hundreds, or thousands, or even millions of conversations about your organization.

Speech analytics technology continues to advance into the mainstream and provides the ability to coach and prompt call center agents in real time, providing coaching based on tone and words that might indicate defection, loyalty, or propensity to have interest in a complimentary product or service.

And all of this customer feedback data can be processed and analyzed in a fraction of the time. Terabytes of data can be crunched in milliseconds. Data analysis that used to take weeks can now be done in just a couple of hours, or even minutes. This Japanese facial recognition company can actually scan 36 million faces in one second. (Never mind the privacy and big brother implications)

Answers are there. How are we leveraging them?

So with legions of people providing or potentially providing feedback about your product, service, industry, or need, are you listening? If you are listening, is your organization calibrated to take that feedback and incorporate it back into your product and service development efforts, your customer experience initiatives, your marketing messaging and sales strategy?

The concept of gathering and incorporating stakeholder feedback is nothing new. Technological advances are paving new ways, however, not only to gather, but also respond in real time. How is your organization leveraging the latest technological advances to listen, collaborate, and respond to your customers?

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

Undoubtedly you remember scenes from the Terminator when Arnold gets all sorts of intelligence about his surroundings, complete with risk assessments and recommendations of what to do next.

Several weeks ago, DARPA revealed that they are close to releasing contact lenses for soldiers that “give warfighters access to systems that greatly enhance their awareness, security and survivability.”

Currently being developed by DARPA researchers at Washington-based Innovega iOptiks are contact lenses that enhance normal vision by allowing a wearer to view virtual and augmented reality images without the need for bulky apparatus. Instead of oversized virtual reality helmets, digital images are projected onto tiny full-color displays that are very near the eye. These novel contact lenses allow users to focus simultaneously on objects that are close up and far away. This could improve ability to use tiny portable displays while sill interacting with the surrounding environment.

Today, Google revealed Project Glass, a wearable device that aims to bring similar capabilities and interactivity to everyone. Watch the video below.

By the way, here is where Google may have a considerable advantage into the future, being able to bridge search (or all digital activity), location awareness, social graph activity, productivity applications, email, phone and mobile OS all together into an embedded device. I am reminded of a quote from Eric Schmidt from a couple of years ago.

What are your thoughts?

Would you buy one if commercially available and how much would you spend?

More importantly, what impact would widespread use of interactive augmented reality devices have on society?

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

Last weekend I had the pleasure of introducing a movie for the first time to my 5 year old son – a movie that incidentally, I first saw when I was 5 years old.

In it, an iconic message was communicated via a channel that hasn’t quite been brought to the mainstream yet (though it seems we’re getting close).

The clip is below.

Considering the explosion of channels we have available to us now, I began to wonder “How would things have played out differently if she would have sent an email, a text, placed an intergalactic phone call, did a quick video conference, or simply waited to communicate in person?”

How would things have been different if she simply posted this message on her facebook page?
Would the response have been different on facebook if it was a video vs. text?

We could stop there, and simply consider the options, and their effect on the plot of the movie, but in the interest of time, let’s move on.

The multifaceted spectrum of human interaction

As technology advances, and communication channels expand, decision makers continue to wrestle not only with how to best leverage each channel, respectively, but how to optimize communications with their customers and prospects across an ever complicated blend of channels.

In a world where an increasing array of richer channels will become available, how will we optimize the exchange of information for the proper channel, taking into consideration the stage of the buying process, the preferences of the individual, and the desired intent, complexity, and nature of the content?

While many of us still gain comfort by placing confidence in the traditional marketing funnel, tell our sales reps to stick to the “sales process”, and check a box in our CRM system for our contact’s preferred method of communication, the reality is that human dynamics are far from linear and static. Technological advancements towards real time access to information and individuals across synchronous and asynchronous channels continue to complicate the matter even further. The line also continues to blur between our personal and professional interactions and habits.

From Joseph Walther in “The Handbook of Interpersonal Communication”

“Lore aside, technology sequences and their relational significance deserve an update: If a man takes an interest in a woman he sees in a class, he may want to scan the Web for information about her. If that search suggests potential reward, he may talk to her to establish a minimal basis of familiarity so that he can request access to her social network profile and be able to see how many friends she has, what they look like, what their comments have to say about her, and how she interacts with them in turn. If results are encouraging, a face-to-face conversation may come next, followed by a reinforcing e-mail or social network posting. Do increases in channel access signify relational escalation? Do we meet new partners’ Flickr family photo collection before we meet the parents, and why? Rather than resign ourselves to undifferentiated, massive multimodality, future research may begin to contemplate the strategic and interpersonal signification possibilities it presents as its users exploit the vast relational potentials of CMC (Computer Mediated Communication).”

This multi-channel, non-linear journey mimics how consumers and business buyers also court vendors today. What actions and interactions can be perceived as buying signals? Loyalty signals? Advocate signals? Detractor signals?

Below is a representation of a customer who makes two appliance purchases over four years, and twice shares content about it:

Image Source: MarketingProfs

While many organizations are venturing into the world of defining their customer journey and optimizing the experience by providing the relevant content for the appropriate stage, I believe these efforts can be further enhanced by beginning to overlay channel preference data across each stage in the customer journey, personalized for each recipient.

Savvy companies will be able to optimize interactions not only by providing the right content, but providing it in the most appropriate context and channel of choice for the intended audience. In other words, if fully optimized, the same content might be published to differentiated audience segments across multiple channels for optimized reach.

Make no mistake, the research and analytics to undertake such an effort would be significant. However, an unmatched customer experience leads to armies of customer advocates. Benefits associated with this type of loyalty and advocacy experience amplifier effects in a networked world.

This post is on behalf of the CIO Collaboration Network and Avaya

Wayne Gretzky is by most accounts the greatest hockey player ever. His father gave him a piece of advice that has been almost immortalized in business circles over the past several years.

“Go to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

So, where will the puck be 8 years from now? I’d be foolish if I thought I could tell you exactly, but there are an ever increasing number of data points that we can leverage to collectively map our corporate strategies. Highlights from one such data point is below.

The Economist Intelligence Unit, in a study sponsored by RICOH, surveyed 567 senior executives across industries in late 2011 on their expectations of the impact that technology will have on business between now and 2020.

The survey results highlight the reality that the general consensus amongst senior business leaders is that our future is more uncertain and up for grabs than it has been for most of the last century.

Not only do 37% of leaders surveyed believe that they won’t be able to keep up with the pace of change, but 1/3 of IT industry leaders believe their business will actually disappear in the next 8 years.

Flattening and Widening

62% of Business Leaders expect decentralization of key business functions, and most expect that customers will be the primary source of new product and service ideas, switching relatively rapidly from today’s R&D departments.

The digitization of everything is flattening out organizational structures, even beyond corporate walls. More participants are contributing to corporate efforts than ever before in roles that are still in the process of being defined, or haven’t quite yet been invented.

All images above were taken from the “How will you work in the future?” infographic.

The concepts of open innovation, crowdsourcing, and collective intelligence are growing as businesses try and leverage the collective wisdom of the crowd to compete in ever shortening business cycles.

Instead of the heavy investment in developing and retaining capabilities, a networked world provides the ability to tap “capabilities on demand” from individuals and partners. The construction of new ecosystems, networks, and flows for information, goods, and services marks the biggest challenge for business leaders for this next decade.

Perhaps one of the most interesting predictions of the study is that Mid-Size companies will be less common in 2020. From the Executive Summary:

“Mid-size companies will be less common in 2020, not least as micro-entrepreneurs proliferate. Technology advances will support a rise in micro-entrepreneurs in the decade ahead, and will enable these tiny businesses to act like far larger ones. This has direct implications for mid-size companies, which will increasingly need to choose whether to become larger to compete on scale, or smaller to compete on speed. Many will face this decision in the years ahead.”

While I generally agree with the assessment, I believe that yet a third opportunity exists, and that is for mid-size companies to potentially morph into integrated networks of smaller companies. Whether these smaller companies are separated at the entity level or not, evolving into platforms that enable integrated and dynamic value chains may be a compelling third option for today’s mid-sized organizations.

Smaller units will increasingly have the ability to leverage units of capability from complimentary goods and service providers and create value for their stakeholders accordingly.

Questions to consider

Given your vantage point, do you agree with the executives surveyed for the study?

What steps are you taking to adjust to a world where innovation cycles are shorter and more dynamic, customers are more empowered, and more of our (corporate and individual) actions are digitized and measured?

How will you balance the pressurs of executing to meet today’s requirements while preparing for an environment that might look significantly different than today’s?

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

This past week I had a chance to spend some time with Microsoft executives, customers, partners, and industry “influencers” at Microsoft Convergence 2012 in Houston, TX.

Perhaps one of the largest announcements at the event was Microsoft’s pending support of multiple platforms and multiple browsers of its Dynamics business applications, a change in its strategy that has long sought to bundle platform, infrastructure, and software components together, exclusive of other alternatives. Microsoft Dynamics CRM just became, or will shortly be iOS, Android, Blackberry, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox friendly. Couple that with some pretty compelling demonstrations of new mobile and Windows 8 applications, and it seemed like a refreshing change for the computing pioneer that many believe has lost its swagger and innovative edge.

However, the consistent customer response to these announcements at the conference was positive, and underscored the point that Microsoft customers are clearly moving in step with popular enthusiasm around device, OS, and browser agnosticism. In a telling sign that things are definitely changing in Redmond, I even saw one Microsoft leader intermittently working between his iPad and Windows 8 laptop (nope – not telling who).

In the big picture, this announcement (amongst others) could simply be taken as nothing more than some logical feature enhancements to compete in the current landscape. However, I tend to weight it a little more significantly. I believe this announcement is worth a little more consideration from Microsoft decision makers, customers, prospects, and competitors. Bear with me for a few minutes further as we explore this together.

TWO KEY QUESTIONS COME TO MIND:

Was this a hint of a deeper participation in a networked world, or simply a change that had to be made to survive in the short term?

DEFENSIVE: Is this a forced surrender to a market that has clearly moved on from the Microsoft centric PC era (where Windows and Office were the only viable corporate candidate in town), and is rapidly embracing the new leaders of the post PC era: Google (Android, Docs, Gmail), Apple (iOS and the best devices on the planet), and rapidly emerging cloud computing platforms (a la Salesforce, Workday, Evernote, Dropbox)?

OFFENSIVE: Or is this the first of several strategic steps that recognizes that the customer is in control, and that the fast changing complexities and variables of today’s business landscape require technology interoperability amongst hundreds of platforms, databases, applications, and devices? Does Microsoft recognize that it’s strategy (and all companies for that matter) must evolve from protecting and extracting value from a fixed set of assets to participating in a broader set of fast changing assets and information flows?

The answer to these questions may very well align with the answer to whether Microsoft will move back into the ranks of innovative technology leader or die a long and slow death milking their cash cows in shrinking markets.

What Customers Want

In my experience, there are a rough grouping of two sets of corporate IT customers.

The first wants wants flexibility to “work the way they want to”.

The second can’t be bothered with architecting solutions. They just want it to work, and are happy to defer to the experts on defining a solution, as long as the price makes sense.

The sweet spot for Microsoft historically has been the latter scenario. Windows Server, SQL, Windows, Dynamics, Office. It all just works (except for when it doesn’t – perhaps you’ve seen a MS error or two in your day?). The latter scenario traditionally has lent itself very well to the small to mid sized markets who have limited resources. Ironically, this has also been Salesforce’s strength, especially in the CRM market. By many accounts, Salesforce.com has beat MS at their own game here, simplifying things even more.

The first category of customers have more often been larger organizations. However, this is changing. Customers that fit into the first category are not just enterprise customers anymore. Across business sizes, the craving for easy to deploy, on-demand tools that can perform increasingly complex tasks with absolute ease across devices and platforms is driving more and more corporate spending.

What was unthinkable a decade ago for many organizations due to cost and resource constraints, is now becoming commonplace. In fact, a recent Gartner analyst predicted that by 2017, CMOs would ACTUALLY SPEND MORE ON IT THAN CIOs. Line of Business leaders are now finding that they have direct access and capability to deploying applications and technology that help their respective teams perform better, without having to worry about heavy investment in infrastructure or even involve their own IT resources.

While painted above as two simple scenarios, the reality for most organizations is not quite that straightforward. Regardless of size, this is not as simple as being fully dedicated to On Premise or Cloud. It’s not as simple as being fully dedicated to SAP, or Oracle, or Microsoft. IT departments don’t just issue corporate blackberries anymore, and make their employees use them exclusively. Most companies have a slew of technologies that is increasingly convoluted, with a larger mix of applications, devices, services, and standards than ever before.

Most business process(es) and supporting technology are increasingly differentiated from one another. These situations are also changing quickly due to market pressures and advances in technology. It’s frightening how quickly Blackberries gave way to iPhones and Android phones, and how quickly Windows based laptops are givinh way to iPad and MacBooks in the corporate world. Similar replacements are taking place up and down the the IT landscape in increasingly shorter cycles.

And here is where Microsoft’s move towards interoperability can and should be key. The fact that they do have an evolving and maturing cloud computing presence (Azure), and a decade or so history with On Premise business applications, are *still* the default for corporate operating systems, email, and productivity suites, and have in place a relatively large and savvy partner channel, allows them to potentially compete across the entire spectrum of two key marketplace matrixes:

• SMB to Enterprise
• Cloud to On Premise

The Opportunities Ahead

The ability to compete across each of those spectrums is something that Microsoft may be as well positioned for as anybody. The pure cloud players don’t have much capability in On Premise deployments, nor many of the other capabilities that Microsoft has. Bundling their product offerings across their entire suite, AND simultaneously decoupling them to be available across multiple infrastructure and data platforms, with users accessing from a wide and varied slew of devices both offer compelling opportunities for Microsoft (and similarly for the incumbent enterprise software giants SAP and Oracle).

The key challenges and opportunities for Microsoft seem to be:

(1) Better orchestrate their relatively deep set of assets and core competencies across the entire IT landscape (Server, Database, Application, Device) both On Premise, in the cloud, and in various flavors of Hybrid deployment.

(2) Opening up more interoperability to the entire landscape has the potential to create many more opportunities for customers that have traditionally chosen to not operate on the “Microsoft stack”, and carve out new niches in increasingly hybrid corporate technology environments.

It will be interesting to watch things play out, and I have a sense that more people will be watching than ever before.

DISCLAIMER: Travel and lodging expenses were paid for by Microsoft and arranged for by their public relations firm, Waggener Edstrom

Corporation.

Non-Profit.

Community.

Business.

Cause.

Platform.

Government.

The clearly defined borders that have traditionally enveloped the institutions above are blurring and we’re trying to make sense of it all. The music industry is still trying to figure out what happened. Broadcast media, newspapers, and publishing are in the midst of a dramatic reshuffling. Governments are trying to figure out what organizations like WikiLeaks really mean, and how to deal with them. Groupon and ZipCar and countless manifestations of various crowdsourcing and sharing models are flipping previously well defined economic models on their head. Chief Marketing Officers are coming to grips with the fact that their brand is truly in the hands of the market. I’ve seen projections of Facebook becoming the equivalent of its own nation in 5-7 years. There are at least two experiments of new countries; one is developing off the coast of California, and a there is a floating island making its way around Europe. Occupy Wall Street has morphed into a global distributed movement dissatisfied with the status quo.

We like definitions because they help us make sense of the world. But we’re seeing a rise in new constructs and entities and they don’t quite fit into the boxes and definitions that have helped us manage and make sense of the world around us for decades. Debates cascade and echo across multiple domains, all sounding strangely similar as leaders and industry analysts in their respective verticals try their best to accurately frame the issues upon us.

Is this simply evolution as it has always been? Is this a paradigm shift? Is this the modern version of the Dutch Tulips mania, or just a new flavor of new and improved snake oil?

Ultimately, IS THIS (whatever this is) WORTH OUR TIME AND ATTENTION?

As I watch and interact with people across different domains of my life, I see lots of different responses to what’s happening right now. Some are oblivious. Check that, many are oblivious. Some are panicked. Some don’t care. Some are focused on one narrow aspect of the bigger picture. Some are simply trying to put food on the table, pay their mortgage, and get their kids to soccer practice on time. Amongst the digerati, there are plenty waving pom-poms, singing social kumbaya, and congratulating themselves with digital ego metrics and accolades.

But, perhaps the most common scenario is that many of us have a hint of what’s happening, trying to make sense of newsbyte fragments flying past in the activity stream, but aren’t quite sure what to do, how to respond, or ultimately what any of this means for us, and the generations behind us.

What’s really going on?

Institutions are, in fact, being rewired before our very eyes. Industries and niches within them are being born, and/or being recast. While it’s easy (and important) to discuss the financial crisis of 2008, the de-leveraging of excessive debt, and high unemployment, set against the backdrop of a rapidly emerging environment of social, mobile, and cloud technologies, it’s equally or more important to recognize the additional and perhaps more foundational long terms shifts happening beneath the surface.

A team of folks at Deloitte Center for the Edge in their 2011 Shift Index highlight the sobering fact that:

“...asset profitability (Return On Assets) has shown a downward trend over the past four decades; a trend illustrating a steady decline in firm performance that not many have even noticed, much less investigated. Indeed, there continues to be a profound cognitive dissonance around this point: on one hand, we all acknowledge experiencing increasing stress as performance pressures mount; on the other hand, we seem unwilling to accept that all of our efforts continue to produce deteriorating results…

…we expect, over time, that performance will improve as firms begin to figure out how to participate in and harness knowledge flows. Doing so will require significant institutional innovations, not just changes in practices, resulting in value creation through increasing returns performance improvement.”

NY Times Columnist Thomas L. Friedman stated something similar in 2010:

We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks — the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace — into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows”

Reconsidering what we thought we knew

Not only are institutions being redefined, but even age old terms like Employee, Profit, Currency, and Capital are being reconsidered, revised, and expanded.

The digitization of everything, increased connectedness, and media innovations, by which ideas are communicated, challenged, and iterated upon are changing the fabric of our world, and how it works. Some of these changes are incremental. Some are dramatically disruptive and will change our world in ways we can’t yet comprehend.

The factors above are also paving the way for new methods of measurement. Triple bottom line measurement continues to gain traction, where corporate success is measured not just on economic profit, but also on ecological and societal impact. The switch from accountability and focus on short term shareholder profit to long term stakeholder benefit will likely continue to also reshape the “mashup institutions” of our future. A new entity type, representative of these shifts, has recently been created. B Corporations use “the power of business to solve social and environmental problems”.

Answering the pressing questions

While senior executive teams wrestle with the present mandates and realities of operating in a slowly fading industrial economy, there are a number of questions that leaders should be asking to guide existing organizations, and/or create new relevant organizations for the future.

I’ve started the list below – what else would you add?

- Who are the stakeholders who we can and do impact (in addition to shareholders)?
- How do we (co-)create value for each stakeholder group?
- What value can we realize in exchange for the value “we” create?
- What are the (new) mechanics and measurements associated with these value exchange scenarios?
- How do we gain access to new information, human, and capital resources?
- How do we harness these new resources, in combination with our existing resources to further create value for our various stakeholder groups?
- How do we structure our organization to be more adaptive and responsive to market needs in (near) real time?
- How would we perform if we were to evaluate ourselves based on Triple Bottom Line Measurement?

I suspect that for some organizations, the end result of a deep series of questions may ultimately result in the strategic creation of a new hybrid organization that straddles the boundaries of industrial age institutions…and they won’t be alone on their journey. The scope of implications on the mid-market are not different than the enterprise or small businesses. The societal changes described and the pressing questions above are equally relevant to organizations of all sizes.

This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

If you don’t have the data. then you can’t have the right information.
If you don’t have the right information, you can’t derive any meaningful insights from it.
If you don’t derive any meaningful insights, you can’t create a competitive strategy.
If you can’t create a competitive strategy, you can’t create a solid work plan.
If you can’t create a solid work plan, you can’t execute.
If you can’t execute. well… you’re done.

Get the right data. It’s foundational.