Chris Boorman
How Cloud, Mobility and Social Media are Driving Sales Productivity to New Levels
Recently I read an interesting article in Computerworld entitled “Sorry Tablets – Laptops still dominate the Enterprise“. It had me thinking about all the changes happening around us - the very essence of IT is changing with the “where”, the “what” and the “how” of computing shifting from on-premise to the cloud (the “where”), from transaction data to interaction data (the “what”) and from desktop to mobile (the “how’).
I chatted to a few of our sales and marketing folks and asked them whether they are currently using mobility and cloud, or whether they are happier using their traditional laptop PC’s. At Informatica we use salesforce.com (a cloud application) and Eloqua (another cloud application). We use LinkedIn and Facebook and Twitter together with Blackberry’s and iPhones and tablets. And everyone has a laptop PC.
I wanted to know whether we were seeing a productivity change as a result of cloud, social media and mobility. Some people were more advanced than others in their use of these newer technologies. However, when combined together I believe that the answer is a categorical “yes”. Here is what people shared with me:
- “I’m replying from my iPad. I just wanted to crank out a few emails before dinner. I didn’t have to wait 10mins for my PC to boot up and connect”. Great productivity improvement!
- “Today I photographed my expense receipts and quickly uploaded them to concur. That used to take me hours!”. Great productivity improvement!
- “Today I presented via an iPad through our projector. The people at the back were struggling to see the screen so I just pinched the screen out on my iPad to increase the resolution on a part of the screen that was too small. This has made my presentations so much more dynamic and exciting!”. Great interaction improvement!
- “Today I was visiting one of my best clients and wanted to check my notes beforehand and have a quick look in salesforce.com at the account details (I always like to check if there are any support issues). I find the smartphones today are just a bit too small, so I flipped open the iPad and was done in two minutes – so much easier than opening up the laptop lid, waiting 10minutes and connecting”. Great productivity improvement!
- “Today in my client meeting I wrote my notes in freehand on the iPad. The client was impressed – no paper book and no laptop. After finishing I synched the notes right onto the account record in SFDC for my SC to review”. Great productivity improvement!
- “Today I quickly jumped into salesforce.com from my iPad and checked my pipeline dashboard. I just pinched the screen out to expand the view on my iPad and chatted online quickly with a few people”. Great interaction improvement!
- “Today I had to have a call with my employee. I simply “face-timed” him and we were chatting away right there. It was so good seeing him full screen. He even showed me his whiteboard by holding up his iPad to the screen, clicking, taking a photo and sending it to me!”. Great productivity improvement!
- “Today I participated in a Webex from my iPad. I simply jumped on while in my car. We were looking at a dashboard – ball was passed to me and I showed some really cool dashboards to my team”. Great productivity improvement!
- “Today I didn’t use my PC. I was productive, I was dynamic, I was compelling, I was cool, I was on fire!”.
Tomorrow is going to be a hard day: I need to build a PPT – guess I’ll have to use my PC. I need to edit my spreadsheet – guess I’ll have to use my PC. I need to edit my dashboard – guess I’ll have to use my PC.
The Morale of the story is:
- I can’t do everything on my iPad … just yet anyway.
- What I can do is making me massively productive NOW.
- I wish I could do more!
What do you think? Is mobility, the cloud and social media having an effect on your productivity? Let me know!
What If We Could Do It Ourselves?
We have come a long way in the world of Data Integration. We can move data, virtualize data, clean data and control data. We can share data, archive data, mask data, govern data and act on data. However, Data Integration remains an undertaking that still requires effort to understand the intricacies of all things IT. In fact, it has been a very IT-driven practice that still, surprisingly; many believe needs a lot of hand-coding to integrate anything to well … just about anything. And, as we all know, hand-coding IS the primary source of the IT hairball that many enterprises are dealing with today and is the legacy of the 90’s IT fixation on application silos. Small enterprises and large enterprises alike all have to deal with it and significant IT budgets are dedicated to dealing with integrating data from these silos – which now include the Cloud, as well as the vast amount of social media data coming at us on a daily basis.
Big Data is Coming – Are You Prepared?
I don’t know about you, but I’m suddenly seeing an awful lot about “Big Data”. McKinsey have just published a great paper talking about the opportunities that are coming with Big Data. Meanwhile EMC has launched a new Hadoop distribution alongside Cloudera and even Loraine Lawson over at IT Business Edge is talking about it with her recent posting entitled “Big Data’s integration Hurdles“.
So what’s the big deal (no pun intended!)? (more…)
On The Road With Customer Centricity
I had the pleasure this week of presenting at two of our global Customer Centricity events in Europe – one in London and the other in Brussels. Attendance was strong in both locations (we even had to bring in extra chairs in London where drop-out rates are notoriously high). In London I presented with Andy Hayler (the CEO of analyst firm “the Information Difference”) and our partner Capgemini. In Brussels I was with RealDolmen – an Informatica authorised distributor for Belgium.
I really enjoyed all of their presentations and remember hearing a few wonderful quotes:
- In most companies perception of data is far removed from the reality – reality is always worse
- MDM is not a destination, it is a journey
- IT should not lead an MDM project
- Make sure you have a good business sponsor
- Don’t run out of money half-way through
- Don’t try to solve everything at once (more…)
Cloud Data Integration For Hybrid IT
Today we made a significant announcement regarding our cloud strategy under the heading of “Cloud Data Integration for Hybrid IT”. Exciting! We sent out various official communications such as a press release, a list of partner quotes supporting the launch here, YouTube videos showing the new release in action and a link to a launch webinar on 5th May here. I wanted to give you my perspective on why I think this is such a big deal … (more…)
Data Mining Beyond The firewall: Big Data, Social Data; Hadoop
I recently had the pleasure of contributing a guest blog on Mashable – the world’s number one site for all things relating to social media. The title was “Why Data Mining Is the Next Frontier for Social Media Marketing“. I knew there was a great deal of interest in the topic, but I was quite taken aback by the volume of tweeting, ‘liking’ and comments added to the post. In talking to customers and colleagues it is clear that many enterprises are now actively looking at how they can tap into this world of “Big Data” – both within and beyond their firewall – in order to gain competitive advantage and business value. I think there are really three major areas of interest:
- Using social media to help promote a viewpoint or a brand or a message, and interact directly with customers.
- Enabling enterprises to leverage data held within the social media landscape.
- Enabling enterprises to utilize Hadoop to drive massively parallel computational requirements.
As a marketeer, I am extremely interested in all three of these areas.
NCAA March Madness – From An Englishman In America
This is my third March living in the US and it continues to surprise me how enraptured the country becomes during the three weeks surrounding March Madness, the annual NCAA basketball elimination tournament. It becomes a focal conversation at the water cooler when people ask “how is your bracket going? what major upset happened last night? how are the match ups shaping up for the following day? This enthusiasm for basketball goes all the way to the top – as I have learned that President Obama is a huge basketball fan. Even the White House blog shares the Commander in Chiefs picks for the women’s and men’s brackets (and coined the term “Barack-etology”). (more…)
Can Services Truly Differentiate a Company? Informatica Believes So!
One of the major corporate objectives that Informatica tracks every quarter is “Improve Customer Satisfaction”. We look at at variety of metrics – both qualitative and quantitative – relating to how you, our customers, are engaging with us. We evaluate everything from Marketing to our technical support interactions, the critiques from our training courses, the engagement feedback from our professional services and more besides. All of these are reported regularly to our CEO and the Board of Directors.
So, we were delighted to receive an accolade recently in regard to our professional service organization. We were awarded the honor of being “best of the best” in SPI Research’s annual survey. This is very important to us, since I think it reflects our commitment to you - by focusing on differentiating ourselves by delivering the best possible service at all times. You can find the press release announcing the award here. (more…)
Embracing Social Data Within The Enterprise
Ten years ago the web was the new and emerging medium for communicating with your customers. It was critical to first have a website and secondly ensure that the content, data sheets, case studies, press releases and beyond were valuable to your customers and prospects. Then five years ago when the economy was growing exponentially, many marketing organizations focused on going to trade shows. There it was imperative to have the best booth location, have a set up that attracted individuals to come visit your booth and of course give away great tchotchkes.
During the past few years, the world of marketing and interactions with customers has radically changed again because of social media. I have spent a lot of time thinking about the role of social data within the enterprise. There are really two aspects that interest me:
- The use of social media to tell a story, drive thought leadership and deliver pipeline
- The ability to pull in data from the world of social media to understand more about our customers and prospects
It is the second of these that I would like to spend a few moments discussing since this is an area where we are seeing a lot of progress being made.
Developments Within Informatica Education Services
It’s been a few months since I last commented on what we have been doing to improve the service we provide in the area of customer and partner Education. As Informatica has evolved, so too have our education offerings. Let me explain:
An improved web experience
The first thing you may have noticed is that Informatica has completely overhauled our Education services web interface. The goal was to make the numerous educational offerings we have available much easier to find and register for. Customer feedback has been great and and they are telling us that the entire web experience is much improved – finding the relevant courses is easy, the website is intuitive and the course content is meaningful. Please take a look by clicking here. We simplified the interface to show the following: (more…)
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