Initiate BYOD Approach

BYOD is the means to the end, always keep in mind for the ultimate business goals,

More reputable industry surveys show IT’s accepted that “bring your own device” programs are here to stay. Fifty-six percent of companies now consider themselves proactive toward or accepting of consumer-centric tech; and 59% indicated security is the main concern, at the heart of security is Data, data is the queen in BYOD, where is it islocated, data ownership, data storage, data integration, data governance, data analysis .etc.

After decoding Five Myths of BYOD Management, here, we continue to explore effective Mobile Data Management.

 1.    Focus on Securing Data than Device

The weakest link of organizations is usually people, and what are the weakest link at BYOD management? Data is one of the weakest links, and how to strengthen such weak links? 

 IT has been focused more on managing the device and putting security around data within the confines of the environment. This mindset needs to change to a focus on securing data 100% or as close as possible,  focus on the data not the device. Really understand where it is stored and how it is used. If you can manage your data; the rules around how it can be used and by whom.....this should eliminate most issues for BYOD....this is a fundamental change in how IT thinks

(1) Organizations will have to come up with mobile information strategies to make sure it is well aligned with the organization policies related to information security. Yes that comes down to people, process and technology, however,  it also comes down to the businesses ability to clearly identify the value, sensitivity and compliance needs of its data. 

(2) Not every piece of information is the same, categorize information into different level of security concerns, focus on key data protection, to enforce availability, confidentiality and integrity

(3) Think more holistically about security/GRC, Evaluate an "emergency" plan. What is the risk for the company if some documents are made public. As today's mobile/cloud/social bring unprecedented opportunities for building up business democracy, but it takes innovative approach to embed GRC into business processes, and improve productivity for long term.

2.    Trust but Verify

So is there a possible solution that makes a CIO and employee win-win? Definitely so. What if  businesses were able to create data layers that resulted in corporate policy compliance without sacrificing employee personal data loss?  How to provide enterprise IT with a layer of security and management on top of the consumer services, making it as much transparent as possible to the employee?  Companies also need follow some guidelines:

(1)Don't have too many restrictions... employee must be effective on their environment, if they aren't, they will simply find another way and this way is often worst than just giving enough rights to people. 

(2) There’re processes ready to verify: develop technical applications to:

a) encrypt data and require special access keys in order to review data; 

b) allow the "corporate" level to remotely deactivate access and/or purge all data,

c) ensure that personal device / user is who they claim to be 

d) allow "corporate" rules to be enforced; such as a rule where access is only granted within a particular area and devices taken outside of that area would not allow access to and/or would remove the data after a certain time period,

e) disable functions that could be used to share confidential data (screen prints, copy/paste, etc.) 

f) evaluate & develop an "emergency" plan. What is the risk for the company if some documents are made public?

3.    Treat them same by treating them differently

Not every position has the same requirement for mobility, the goal is to provide customized BYOD solution to empower employees to do the job and serve customer the best  Not every employee or position is the same: treat them same by treating them differently; provide customized service to improve employees' productivity & satisfaction.

Thus, BYOD data security will need the introduction of an efficient and effective role based approach that aids in addressing authenticity of the user, authorized to store and access BYOD data, coupled with a privacy policy that is enforced by the employer linked to the sensitivity rating of the data stored on the device. BYOD solution should leverage the value/risk/cost ratio.

a) Give them the empowerment to decide who can access the information
b) protect data, not data containers
c) use claim base security approach. 

4.    Cultivate Security Enforcement Culture

There are many things that can be done to create a good secure BYOD solution, and don’t just look at it via the technological angle, look at policies, procedures, training, etc too, as the best business/IT solution always well integrate people, process and technology:

Employee education is key:

    a)    Do you have good training program to well educate staff with any type of data sharing, a certain level of trust must exist, and this is reinforced with employee training on BYOD.
  

b)     Does organization have a good guideline? trust, but verify, and cultivate the good GRC culture

c)     Is your BYOD easy to access? Make sure your BYOD policy is accessible and understood by everyone who is accessing data, confidential or not. The more an employee understands about the potential consequences of being careless with their device, the more secure that data is

Culture and process matter. from industry survey, those revenue leaders usually also have stronger security/GRC discipline, compared to laggard, as they well embed them into key business processes; they also cultivate more effective culture to enforce security.

5.    Three-Phase Approach

 Mobile as fast-growing technology, and BYOD as new emerging phenomenon, it is still not fully mature yet, thus, the speed to adopt to BYOD may depend on your business nature and security tolerance,  businesses may establish the technical infrastructure requirements, and rolled these into three phases.

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(1)  Allow all users to access to all public offering via internet but no access to corporate data at the 1^st phase;

(2)  Permit only certain devices and the ability to come in through corporate VPN,  but most of devices are still not part of domain at the 2^nd phase;

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(3)  Apply more complex and comprehensive MDM,  NAC, VPN technologies to manage end to end Mobile solution at the third phase

BYOD is the means to the end, always keep in mind for the ultimate business goals, The goal of BYOD is to shape the trust & enablement culture, provide rapid access to decisions / approvals / escalations, reduce barriers to workforce collaboration, increase asset efficiency, reduce customer care costs, empower & delight employees to achieve high performance result, and yes, protect, manage & understand your data asset, which is new gold in digital business today. 

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The Leadership/Skill Traits Future of CEO & CIO Should Share

Both digital CIOs and CEOs are great contemporary practitioners in strategic thinking, governance, relationship building, and talent management & board interactions.

There’s an interesting debate recently spurred in the CIO forum: should more CIOs aspire to become CEOs? It attracts varies thoughts and comments: on one side, most of CIOs today are still acting as underdog infrastructure IT managers, lack of breadth & depth of business insight to be perceived as business leader; on the other hand, a significant majority of CIOs don’t aspire to become CEOs, not necessarily mean CIOs lack of ambition, more because, in our society, the CEO is also a controversial role, we do have few inspiring CEOs around, however, the CEO is not always a good role model, sometimes they turn to be victims of scandal, or entertainers of political play., etc, CIOs may feel they are not so "thick-skinned" enough to be CEOs.

Though we’ve already brainstormed about the future of leadership trends; and key ingredients in contemporary leadership earlier, here, we intend to generalize leadership essentials, and specialize leadership authenticity again, what're the characteristics of effective leadership, besides detailed responsibility, What are some common elements or traits great CEO & CIO leadership share in common, will CIO be the step stone to CEO in the future?

1. Have the Vision to make Decisions & Have the Courage to "BREAK THE RULE" 

• Effective Decision Making: The role of a CEO is predominately in the confines of decision making, and a CIO is a better candidate to advance an organization since he/she has an eagle view of what will work for an organization outside its parameters via business information asset, and they are not narrow-minded in decision making which can help well connect the dots and better collect key information to make decision-making processes open and highly consultative.

• Courage to “Break The Rule”: Senior leaders play a critical role in governance such as enforcing policy setting and rules making in enterprise & industry or global economy; at today’s business dynamic. Innovative CEOs or CIOs should also have the courage to “break the rule”- those invisible rules cause career ceiling or the intangible barriers to hurt humanity,  in order to inspire creative thinking, the new way to do things and transform business culture. The true transformational CIO needs to play a significant part of CEO role, even with highly insightful understanding of business, customers, talent, based on information asset which CIOs steward for, because most of the times, technology leads creative destruction in many industries; the inspiring leaders take courage, creativity, confidence, curiosity, and communication, we can learn from those crazy ones--the astronaut, the entrepreneur, the veteran, the polyglot, the Olympian., etc

2.  Thought leaders by In-depth Communication

• Leadership is Influence: Leadership at digital era requires brilliant mind, open heart, and in-depth communication skills, as leadership is influence, and your social influence more depend on your digital footprint about who you are from both your heart and mind, than your social status; command-control style leadership is no longer sufficient, leaders need to communicate deeper with empathy. The great leadership influence comes from persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence.

• Chief Empathy/Enchantment Officer vs. Chief Influence/Interpreter Officer: If CEOs are Chief Empathy/Enchantment Officer, then CIOs are Chief Influence/Interpreter Officer, they need to influence end customers, shareholders, business-ecosystems, they need to be wise and nice, with sharpness and openness, be the coach and learner at the same time, their depths of communication come from character, wisdom and intellectual cognition, and bring more value for business, be a polyglot to master the languages in whole business & ecosystem.  

3. The Balance Between Leadership & Management 

• Leadership vs. Management: Management is about how to manage business efficiency-doing things right, but leadership is to ensure business effectiveness-doing right things, they do have overlap, leadership is more about influence, management is more about facilitation, leadership is to inspire alliance, and management is to avoid chaos. Best CEO & CIO should well-mix leadership & management skills to deliver better business performance.

• Chief Transformation Officer: In leading change, the Leaders such as CEOs or CIOs should act as Chief Transformation Officer, Warren Bennis said, “Management is getting people to do what needs to be done. Leadership is getting people to want to do what needs to be done.”  Managers push. Leaders pull. Managers command. Leaders communicate. Ultimately, we need to find the balance between the two, no matter how difficult it seems, building lasting relationships, creating a productive and inviting atmosphere, and ensuring that the necessary tasks are being completed 

• Wisdom vs. Experience: The Wise Influencer knows what to do with what she knows and uses that knowledge to add value to her organization. There’s a difference between wisdom and experience. Wisdom teaches the lesson before the decision. Experience teaches the lesson after.

 4. The Generalist with a strong understanding of the context

• Business Generalist: The role of CEOs demand more comprehensive skills in leadership, strategic thinking, relationship building and management, crisis management and public relations, in addition to finance, sales & marketing, HR;  similarly, the modern CIO position requires a working knowledge of operations, marketing, sales/marketing, finance, and customer support; as IT is so pervasive, permeating into whole enterprise and interact with the aforementioned areas of an organization with any frequency; A CIO is a subject expert and Chief advocate of INFORMATION, which means he/she is an effective organ to drive the business change in today’s world.

• Heart & Mind of Business: If the CEO is more about the public face of business, then the CIO is the heart of an organization. The CIO must also be a diplomat, a technical visionary, a financial wizard, an operational wunderkind, and a salesperson par excellence. In short, a wide combination of skills is essential in the makeup of the modern CIO. Be curious to all knowledge in various important areas, have a strong desire to learn, succeed and connect with people and master as much skills as possible to move beyond your comfort zone, become a true C-level business partner and develop all capabilities to serve in a CEO role.

 5. The Strategist Know How to market 

How to Promote Business/IT: CEO-like CIO is a "Super-CIO" - an IT leader who participates in the C and board-level discussions - so that there was a perceived position for IT in steering the business direction and a growth path for CINO to become a CIO and benefit both IT and the business. The CIO does need to master at promoting IT, as an innovation engine, as a business catalyst, as a profession, and as an advocate to inspire STEM education. 

• How to Promote Business Ideas/Brand: Influence over others, including regularly selling ideas and, in turn, gaining acceptance and prompting others to help carry out those ideas, CIOs should be promoted to CEOs, if and only if they have a grasp of what the business entails–having been CIO for a number of years matter less, it’s rather the diverse range of experience and know-how one has about a business, and how that person can continue to create, retain, or add value to sustain a business year in and year out.

 6. Talent & Culture Master

• Business Culture Change Agent: If CEO is an “official” owner of business culture, then CIO is the biggest culture influencer, as the CIO is at unique position to well integrate technology, process and people in driving culture transformation business needs; All those magic “I”s in the CIO title: Innovation, Insight, Influence, Improvement, Integration, Intelligence, Intrapreneurship, Infrasture, Inspiration., etc. perceive CIOs as change agents;

• Shaping Global Mindset: We have many global companies in the US, however, there are very few authentic global leaders. We need global leaders at CEO, the CIO, and all senior leadership positions to deal with the level of complexity to “leverage its fundamental forces to have a positive impact” in the hyper-connected, interdependent global economy. Global Mindset is the worldview that looks at problems or issues in such a way that a solution emerges through a collaborative multicultural approach involving global psychological capital, intellectual capital, and global social capital. Being “Global” involves a personal intention to focus on being global. Companies don’t exist in silos but within systems, especially global ones. Being global is about crossing not just borders but also cultural divides between business, government, and social sectors.

7. The Customer Champion, The Process Warrior 

• Process and information are two sides of the Same Coin: Both CEOs & CIOs need to master business processes, as the process underpins business capability, and business capability decides how strategy gets executed. For CIOs who aspire to be CEOs, the barriers could be overcome by being exposed to the business as a whole, understand the end to end business processes,  learn the value proposition of the business, create, retain, and expand that value for the business holistically.

• Innovation means more about process: At most of the companies, CEOs are advocates of innovation, via reputable industry survey, now, more CIOs have been officially “promoted” as Chief Innovation Officer in business, as innovation is the only light all businesses, large or small pursuit now, the point is: today's IT is neither commodity nor luxury, it's business differentiator, the engine for business growth and headquarter of business digitalization & transformation. 

• Customer Champion: What both CEOs & CIOs and all senior leadership team care is the Big “C” word: CUSTOMER, how to build up an untethered, customer-centric business is key to compete at the age of digitalization, it’s about superior customer experience, faster delivery, cost optimization, and operational excellence.            

In Conclusion, should CIOs have equal opportunities like other C-Suite to be promoted into the CEO role? From the majority of responses in the discussion thread, the answer is yes, as at many traditional organizations, the CIO's role may get stereotyped as IT manager, rather than a business leader who is a good practitioner in strategic thinking, governance, relationship building, and talent management & board interaction. if CIOs are really good at a few C words such as the customer (both end customer and internal customer), capability, and change., etc, they should have potential to become the CEO, even the very best one.

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CIO’s Five Take Away from IW 500 Report

IT is business catalyst, especially for those customer-centric businesses cross-sectors.

Recently released Information Week 500 report provides comprehensive analysis regarding latest technology trend and top IT project priority for IT innovation leaders, here are top five take away for CIOs.

     1.IT Rules is Changed

IT plays more critical role in leading business changes, compare to a year ago, there’re some priority change for IT projects:

• Customer Centric Priority: In the survey of 500 business technology innovators, customer-centric priority has risen, 46% of the 500 companies this year, are introducing new IT-led products and services for customers.  Back in 2009, only 37% had that as a top priority.

• Efficiency Improvement: 49% of InformationWeek 500 companies cite improving the efficiency of business processes, making this efficiency area the most-cited priority. But that’s down five points from a year ago, and down from 60% back in 2009’s recession

• Cost Reduction: 29% cite “lower business or IT costs” as a priority, down sharply from 2009, when 47% did.

 2. CIO is “official” Chief Innovation Officer

• CIO as Official Chief Innovation Officer: The innovators realize the rules for IT have changed, and CIO roles are changing accordingly. One-third of IW 500 CIOs now have formal responsibility for innovation in their companies, more than double the 16% who did in 2009.

• The new IT mantra “do more with innovation” may be the bigger opportunity for many organizations. Beyond mere cost cutting, IT is coming up with creative ways to offer new and improved services to their internal users and to the end customers.

 3.Cloud/Mobile/Big Data Analytics are Mainstreams

Mobile devices, cloud computing, and big data analytics are blowing the old IT rules to pieces.

• Cloud computing is firmly established among IW 500 companies. Eighty-five percent use cloud software, and 27% use a cloud platform-as-a-service.

• Mobile is main focus: as customers are shopping across channels in stores and on the web with mobile blurring the lines, mobile apps become silver lining to delight customers and satisfy employees.

• Analytics Everywhere: Analytics has been getting increasingly sophisticated. from predictive analytics to sentimental analysis, analytics touch both customer front line and internal operation and value chain. Analytics maturation mirrors the broader IT industry’s move from rear-view mirror reporting to predictive and proactive analytics. Innovation leaders uses the deep insight it gets from all of this analytics to develop new breakout brands.

4. Customer is King, Employee is Queen

As this year’s rule change, customer-centricity becomes IT project’s main priority:

• Customer Focus: Mobile apps are a major driver of the customer focus—companies are getting mobile apps out to customers even faster than they are to employees. Already, 37% of IW 500 did. Right alongside this cost focus is to “improve Web operations and customer experience" (31%) and “engage customers in new ways” (30%—up a whopping 10 points from 2009).companies have widespread deployment of customer-facing mobile apps, compared with 25% for employees. Businesses also gather more data on consumer buying habits and profitability of pricing model, to improve customer experience and business growth.

• Satisfy Employees: Big wins are possible with employee-facing apps, too—38% say that deploying iPads or other tablets is among their biggest productivity boosters, emerging BYOD phenomenon has noble purpose to improve employees’ productivity and working satisfaction.

5. Cross-Functional Collaboration is New Normal

• Cross-Functional Collaboration is Key: One of the toughest challenges for the project’s IT leaders, in fact, was coordinating their planning, deadlines, and processes with other business teams, including product engineering and marketing. CIOs and their teams will have to take this journey, as e-commerce, mobile apps, and social media become more important.

• The Emerging Partnership with the CMO is Ultra-important. CIOs are accepting that customers don’t want to unplug—they want relevant apps that add to their experience This emerging competency around customer facing systems is just not something that IT is used to doing,. And IT need work closely with marketing to deliver. IT has to align with these other product cycles and make sure they were ready to deliver it at the right time when it was ready from a marketing standpoint.

• Build up more Creative Working Environment: CIO is running not just an IT organization aligned with business priorities, but one in a position to lead the business with its close customer relationships. Business also wants to create “a collaborative environment that’s fun for people.

In conclusion,  IT is business catalyst, especially for those customer-centric businesses cross-sectors, IT, marketing, product/service are working more closely than ever to optimize customer experience and improve business process, IT is at the center of business innovation and transformation.

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Top Ten Roadblocks in BPM Journey

BPM continues its rocky road journey, took a few value trails, taste drops of Mighty Waters, met a big social wind,  it hits more roadblocks as well.

1.Lack of Coherent Leadership: The BPM project is not well defined, there is too much internal politics going on, there is a lack of leadership in BPM project, failure to get the necessary support from management. The business doesn't have a clear vision of how the project will deliver ROI, or the BPM implementation team simply has other priorities coming from some other part of the company's leadership team.

2. Lack of consistent communication and expectation, which stems from an inadequate understanding of what BPM is. People will translate it in a myriad of ways and as such there will be no common understanding of the goal, method or implementation. Without a common understanding, there is no way to reach a common goal. Without a common goal, there is no unified measurement of success or failure. Perhaps one persons BPM success is another person failure.


3. "T" Driven BPM is Set to Fail: The B in BPM stands for BUSINESS: Business driven, business change, business outcomes. , not TECHNOLOGY, Not IT system, IT project, IT implementation, but a big factor is treating a BPM effort as too much of an IT project and not a business project, with required organizational and process change. In cases where that *is* clear, then a big factor is inability to actually implement the new processes - no power or influence to make the necessary changes to meet the goals. for BPM project, you may need begin with the end in mind, well define business problem need be solved, don't make it as technology challenge only


4. Start too Big. Keep them small at first. Overwrought expectations are sometimes a result of vendor hype, but just as often, they're a natural outcome of the internal sales process needed to get a project off the ground. Managing by process is day to day business and it will shake up organizations via continuous journey.


5. Lack of well mixed Skills. You shouldn't need to be a programmer to roll out BPM, but you do need a certain comfort level with technology. Make sure somebody on your team has it, not only the right technical skills are needed, but also the right communication skills





6. The general notion of Workflow = BPM is also one of the reasons for a Project failure. BPM ecosystem offers much more than that. But we just force fit the product to ensure that we have leveraged BPM in most of the places in the enterprise.


7. Failure to manage change: fail to introduce the cultural change or change management initiative. It's not like BPM projects are magically different from any other cross-departmental initiative, they all need people buy in, leadership vision, quick win and long term focus, and business metrics, however, change management itself has high failure rate, without successful change effort, BPM may not have fertilized soil to grow mature.


8. BPM initiatives not managed by CoE, or no CoE at all: Center of Excellence BPM may help share resources and knowledge, broadcast success story or best & next practices, provide proper training, amplify collective human capabilities, and prioritize & manage BPM project portfolio.


9. Lack of governance and KPI monitoring: The adequate governance and well defined KPIs help manage and measure BPM’s effectiveness and efficiency, to ensure process both doing the right things and doing things right. With the latest emerging digital technology, more processes need go beyond automation, for innovation and optimization.


10. A right BPM tool was not chosen –Not every project need a hammer, sometimes, a ruler is more effective. Beyond BPM/BPMS pairing up, BPM will be successful when it is integrated with EA, BI, PPM., SOA seamlessly, some other tools may include the latest project management methodology such as Agile or Scrum, or Lean/Six Sigma, but remember, keep it simple with the right tools, don’t add complexity for technology’s sake. 

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Big Tool or Big Talent, Which one is Big Data Master

Big Data is big phenomenon: the use of “big data” analytics for improving the ability to identify areas of improvement across the organization; and increasing the degree of decision making based on facts.  Big data analytics does this by helping organizations uncover patterns and trends in both structured and unstructured data assets and translate them into meaningful insights for competitive advantage.

Interestingly, there’re hot discussions spurred recently on weather emerging Big Data tools would replace data scientist to discover Big Data.

Big Data Tool or Data scientist, which one is more crucial to master Big Data?

1. Data Scientist & Data Artist, Are you still Big Data Master?

Big Data deployment is both art and science. as some data experts well put: Data science is a collaboration between "human and machine”, the human knows the business problem, but the machine can do the grunt work of generating hundreds of thousands of potential useful signals from the data. The machine then searches those signals, and surfaces the ones that may be useful. The human is in the loop, and the machine makes the human work better and faster.

That said, the patterns that captured from data help its transformation into information and then to knowledge. The value of this transformation to the ultimate beneficiary is the quality of insight. There will always be a desire to automate in the interest of speed and convenience, but the definition of 'unstructured' work, is about leveraging the cognitive strength of the human talent. So far, human may still be Big Data master.

In addition, companies must move from the current model—the implicit strategy of maximizing the benefit of a set amount of data usage—to an explicit model where all employees are expected to maximize data usage to drive business benefits.

There are many talent  Big Whos to master Big Data:

• Data Scientist:  A data scientist is somebody who is inquisitive, who can stare at data and spot trends. It's almost like a Renaissance individual who really wants to learn and bring change to an organization. Put simply, data scientists will have portions of their job automated, but their work will be much less automated than one might hope. Although we might hope to replace knowledge workers with algorithms, this will not happen as soon as some would like to claim.

• Data Artist: Data Scientist is no longer enough, the emergence of the title "Data Artist", which is a Data Scientist in a Marketer's body with the ability to tell compelling stories that management can actually understand and act on, think both like a marketer/scientist. read good textbooks on arketing, advertising, etc

• Data Solutionary:  If the c-suite can't understand what's being put in front of them because it's too technical, too much "jargon", it will be ignored, Also, explore the field of epistemology, philosophy of science, and critical thinking to learn what knowledge is and how it is created,  and it takes a human to move beyond the obvious statements that data makes, and provide the subtle analysis that can only be uncovered using intuition and insight, to solve business issues, which means beginning with the end, the end is business value that Big Data can deliver. 

The future of tools need be sophisticated enough to help less-skilled user to come to satisfactory results. The sophisticated, but easy-to-use tools will cultivate more Big Data masters.

2. Big Data Tools are emerging

 Automation is a good thing as it will replace repeatable effort. Horizontal-scaling technologies now allow the storing and processing of that data in ways that do not exponentially raise costs.

• Apache Hadoop is a platform that provides pragmatic, cost effective, scalable, fault-toleranct infrastructure, which is made up of a distributed filesystem called the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem, or HDFS, and a computation layer that implements a processing paradigm called MapReduce. Apache Hadoop is open source.

• Why use Hadoop? Hadoop solves the hard scaling problems caused by large amounts of complex data. Unlike older platforms, Hadoop is able to store any kind of data in its native format and to perform a wide variety of analyses and transformations on that data. Hadoop stores terabytes, and even petabytes, of data inexpensively, it is designed to survive in complexity by not only tolerating hardware and software failures, but treating it as a first class condition that happens regularly

• Hadoop is an ecosystem. In addition to products from Apache, the extended Hadoop ecosystem includes a growing list of vendor products that integrate with or expand Hadoop technologies. HDFS and MapReduce together constitute core Hadoop, which is the foundation for all Hadoop-based applications. For applications in BI, DW, and big data analytics, core Hadoop is usually augmented with Hive and Hbase., etc. As the amount of data in a cluster grows, new servers can be added incrementally and inexpensively to store and analyze it. Because MapReduce takes advantage of the processing power of the servers in the cluster, a 100-node Hadoop instance can answer questions on 100 terabytes of data just as quickly as a ten-node instance can answer questions on ten terabytes.

• 360-degree customer analytics: Big Tools such as Hadoop helps discover new facts and relationships typically results from tapping big data that was previously inaccessible to BI. Discovery also comes from mixing data of various types from various sources. HDFS and MapReduce enable the exploration of this eclectic mix of big data. Hadoop can provide insight and data to bump that up to thousands of attributes, which in turn provides greater detail and precision for customer base segmentation,  more granular analytics, 360-degree customer view, and most customer views include hundreds of customer attributes.

In summary, Big Data is both art and science.The science part can be understood, automated via machine/tool, to improve efficiency; However, the art piece may need human's intuition & wisdom to understand the holistic business context and behavioral relevance to determine 'what do to', and more importantly, 'what to do with insights', is probably a long way off, to make judgment, and ensure effectiveness -doing right things instead of just doing things efficiently. While we can—and will—develop better tools for data analysis in the coming years, we will not do nearly as much as we hope to obviate the need for sound judgment, domain expertise and hard work which human talent can offer.

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Five Elements in Customer Service Excellence

Besides attitude, collective business capabilities are also crucial for superior customer service and people-centricity.

In the age of digitization, every company is an information management company that has been more accurate than ever; in today’s economically challenging, customer-driven business environment, more customer-centric businesses across sectors, no matter what you sell, package delivery, airline tickets, hotel rooms, consume goods or services, also declare they are at customer service business. 

But how to improve customer satisfaction and delight customers becomes a strategic imperative to survive and thrive. So customer service is not a job for one department, it's everybody's responsibility and crucial working ethic across boundaries.

1.    Customer Empathy

•  “Moments of truth”: Customers experience their service through, what some may call the “moments of truth”: which are the moments the great customer service companies earn trust and loyalty as customers invest a high amount of emotional energy in the outcome (for instance, a lost mail, a canceled flight, a damaged piece of merchandise., etc.)

• Navigation Point: customer-centric businesses should also ask via navigating such 5W+1H questions: Which customer interactions lead to attrition, advocacy, and greater spending? When should we focus on service instead of product or price? What service experiences hurt customer satisfaction the most? Who are the best social influencers for our service, who are our service advocates, and our most profitable customers, How to empower employees to take extra mile., etc.

•  Entire Set of Touch Points:  Besides moments of truth, defining more critical touch points, identifies the customer interactions,  that drive attrition, advocacy, and greater spending as well as the service experiences that delight customers the best or hurt customer satisfaction the most.

•  Social Touch: every company and industry is different. It’s a process of being thoughtful about where and how these kinds of exceptions are occurring that are real pain points, and then figuring out where and how social software could be deployed in a very targeted way in design, implementation, and optimizing key business processes.

•  From staff empathy to customer empathy: senior business leaders may not work at the front line of customer service every day, however, the golden rule: treat others as you want to be treated, delighting customers by respecting & empowering employees, from staff empathy to customer empathy are positive management philosophy to gain customers empathy by understanding staff first.

2.    Attitude & Aptitude

The business attitude isn’t only about how your front-line employees serve customers, it’s about the collective attitude, which is business culture, how the business as a whole thinks and acts to delight customers?

• Passion: From the top down, Creating meaning and clarity of purpose for both management and people in frontline work, thereby addressing their thoughts, feelings, values, beliefs, and emotional needs, leaders lead via passion, help the team find its true mojo; and deliver service with passion & “take extra mile” attitude;

• Curiosity: Teams have such curiosity to ask “Big Why” and gain customer empathy when following routine processes to serve customers, with an ownership attitude to improve or optimize business processes;

• Learning Agile: Good customer service takes both analytics and in-depth communication, there’s no such thing as a repetitive job, and continuous improvement in customer service is key;

Besides attitude, collective business capabilities are also crucial for superior customer service:

• Business Digital Capabilities: web, mobile phone, and social platforms., etc offer multiple digital channels for customers to connect and engage and have a significant effect on the customer’s experience, how to integrate, and enhance such digital capabilities more seamlessly will directly impact business’s long term growth;

• Collective Human Capabilities: improving the capabilities of employees—and influencing their mindsets—so that they acquire the right emotional and technical skills to provide premium services; Enlisting frontline leaders to serve as role models and to teach emotionally intelligent behavior, to enhance the intrinsic emotional intelligence of employees

• Business Service Capabilities: build a service model that enables and motivates the average employee to achieve excellence, and to extend across the whole front-line network about the excellence of exemplary individuals, branches, and offices.

3. Resources and Budgeting

• Total customer-engagement budget: Many organizations have silo structure and budget on a functional basis, they lack holistic oversight of their total spending on customer engagement. Hence, they don’t capture the opportunities to make cross-functional trade-offs or optimize investment portfolios across the full set of touch points. It seems always short of budget because each function competes for limited resources and seeks increased funding to improve their part of customer interaction,  but it may become a losing game at the organizational level to improve customer service in the most effective and efficient way.

• Cost Optimization: Successful service company turnarounds often start with a restructuring of the portfolio to enable management to focus on the core business, they will also focus on cost optimization, product/service revitalization, and customer service reinforcement, to ensure both the front-line and customers realize that improving financial performance, increasing customer satisfaction, and boosting product/service quality can all go hand in hand.

4.    Continuous Process Optimization

• Redesigning the Service Strategy. A compelling service proposition focuses on a multitude of touch points, which is consistent with the overall value proposition, sets service ambition levels, and designs & prioritizes initiatives based on value and cost,  to implement and strike the right balance across the service, execution, and tone of brand.

• Training Process: Many frontline employees receive extensive customer service training, businesses create incentives and design metrics for training,  and senior management is evaluated and rewarded on the basis of customer-centric results which emphasize the relationship between employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction, and shareholder return..

• Reconfigure System & Structure: Putting structures, reward systems, and processes in place to back up the positive changes, amplify success stories and effective processes, to measure progress toward specific milestones ensure changes are sustained, and always reward new behaviors and creative ideas.

• Customer Listening Center: More businesses establish listening centers that monitor what is being said about their organizations, products, and services on social media, blogs, and other online forums, to gain the breadth and depth of customer empathy, build up in-depth customer relationships and on translating the resulting loyalty into higher sales of goods and services, as well as a healthier bottom line.

5. Metrics & KPIs

Finally, the measurement systems must be put in place so that management is held accountable for customer service performance and so that success is evident to the front line via asking: What is a customer experience, and how is its improvement measured?

• Focus on measuring effectiveness. enterprises should shift their focus from tracking KPIs that measure the efficiency of the customer centers to KPIs that measure the effectiveness of the centers via customer-level variables

• Highest-level metrics that matter to the senior executives typically might be financial metrics, which include both top-line revenue growth or bottom-line result; overall service image and customer retention, loyalty and satisfaction, and the customers’ perception of the service.

• Operational metrics: this is not a simple question to answer without a thorough understanding of the specific operational details of each business and a view into the broader customer service operation, management may ask what those operating metrics are going to drive financial performance, and drill down even further to front line metrics daily, and figure out how social or optimized process can enhance the performance in line with those metrics

The selection and use of KPIs is a dynamic process that is relevant for measuring efficiency across operations, as well as effectiveness in achieving the financial and customer service goals of the enterprise via evaluating their current performance measurement tools through the lifecycles of their customer centers and supporting customer service functions.

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.    --Peter Drucker

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2012’s 100th Blog to Celebrate Labor Day: Think Deeper, Blog Louder

Labor Day pays tribute to the contributions and achievements of American workers. It also symbolizes the end of summer for many Americans, and it’s time to welcome the Fall, the harvest season, not only about the leaf turning to beautiful golden yellow; but also for the mature of life beings.  Here, we celebrate Labor Day holiday via the year’s 100th Blog, to appreciate the abundance of thought leadership, the flow of collective wisdom, and the multitude of social influence.

Social Computing becomes forefront for both organizations and individuals to share and cheer, fight and fear these days, it’s the new mindset to win, the new way to thrive and new virtual space need master for.

If twitting is too “light” as only a click away to distribute the content, then blogging is a “heavy” work, takes wondering & pondering to co-create content, well, it’s just like life, takes some “light enjoyment”, but need more hard-working. 

1.    Leading via Blogging

For many knowledge-intense businesses’ web site, their “blog” page becomes the most dynamic and readable section, they present to their customers with updated content almost daily, via collaborative effort, it’s fresh,  it’s diversified,  and it’s food for thought for their target audience. It’s also about the new added social process to improve business transparency and talent pipeline.

For business leaders and talent professionals, blog may also becomes your influence, your brand, about who you are in-depth with consistency, your value & your calling, your insight & your pondering, your expertise & part of your digital footprint. 

 

2.    Blog with Humility

Blogging is more about knowledge sharing and new idea creation, for business and talent, should blogger become:

• Philanthropist of Knowledge: Knowledge is power, though we may live at the era of information abundance, not all information is knowledge, the well- thought, knowledge-fresh blogs, make us enchanting, like smell the flower or drink a cup of coffee or tea. The bloggers may also feel humbled, as their work is just like a drop of water flowing into the Ocean of knowledge.

• Symbol of Progress: Blogging is a continuing journey, it takes learning, de-learning, thinking and creating, it’s like a wheel, you have to keep running to touch the ground and up to the speed. It’s such humility to understand the world of wisdom.

• Writer of Dynamic book: Blogging also makes you humbled, because, it seems you are plotting a book, however, because the world changes so fast, the knowledge is updated so dramatically, the more content and ideas continue to push in, so the dynamic book may never ends. It is humility.

   

3.    Flow of Knowledge & Collective Wisdom

The future of world become both Big and Small, the exponential data & knowledge created by humankind make the world more enriched & bigger than ever; on the other side, the multi-channel social platforms are shaping such a small world, we may all find much more like-minded friends all over the world easily via the wisdom sharing, knowledge crafting and information flowing at social platform, it’s power of technology to amplify collective human capabilities and shorten the physical distance, to weave a colorful & better world.  

Three Wonders of Wisdom

Three Big Trends of Future of Leadership

Three Big Why about Big Data

Ponder the Future, Wonder the Wisdom, Think Deeper, Blog Louder, Work Harder,  and Happy Labor Day!

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Alphabetical Soup of Cloudification

Cloud is the trend, not fashion, as fashion will fade away, but trend turns to be the reality.

From Wikipedia: Cloud Computing is the use of computing resources (hardware and software) that are delivered as a service over a network (typically the Internet). The name comes from the use of a cloud-shaped symbol as an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it contains in system diagrams. Cloud computing entrusts remote services with a user's data, software, and computation

Cloud is both reality and mainstream now, but the cloud is more as an evolution than revolution. Small is the new big. Thin is in, in devices too. Some say we are addicted to shrinking devices with expanding services. Cloud computing is the engine that supports the continued trend of getting more done on smaller devices, regardless of location. Cloud computing provides the way to seamlessly access massive data stores via the elegantly simple services you find on your mobile device.

1. Cloud Lenses

Some may say, Cloud is a bit ambiguous, as Cloud has indicated the abstraction of  IT As A Service eco-system.  an overarching computing delivery model, it means different things for a different audience and customers.

(1) From business/IT leader perspective

Cloud becomes a cornerstone of almost every organization’s strategic differentiation to its customers, and the most valuable tool to engage its users. The more important question is: What is your customer-centric, cloud supported strategy? Will it deliver business benefit? Along with what business benefit?

• Agility: how to tackle business problems or enable innovation via better, faster, cheaper IT services, which can be accessed anywhere? Or running IT more like a business.
• Elasticity:  Scale up/down easily.  New business ideas testing / piloting without upfront capital investment of IT, software development teams are using cloud computing to accelerate development operations and achieve efficiency and effectiveness;
• Integration: Cloud instances and virtualization greatly enhance continuous integration and delivery. Cloud computing and virtualization make it easy for agile development teams to seamlessly combine multiple developments, test and production environments with other cloud services.
• Resilience: via Cloud based backup restore or business continuity services, business has better disaster-recovery capability;
• Flexibility: Update 80/20 rule: IT can spend the majority of resources on business innovation-related projects. 

(2)  From Enterprise Architect /IT Professional perspective:

SAAS model may not be a new concept for many IT veterans, it's more about the evolution of traditional IT, the Consumerization of IT, a more radical digitalization. Cloud makes EA ponder deeper on how to enhance SOA (application portfolio and virtualization) to the actual infinite hardware resource, how to use API to glue Cloud building blocks, how to blueprint outside-in architecture to delight customers?

From one of the industry surveys:  "Everything" has already changed, say the 511 business IT professionals, all from small to large businesses, Adoption of cloud services has been on a consistent upward pace for the past four years, One-third of 2012 respondents' organizations are already receiving services from a cloud provider, and an additional 40% are in the planning or evaluation stages."

(3)  From employees or individual consumer lens:

It's the internet of things, if you use the internet, email, social media, mobile, etc., you are already on the cloud. Interestingly, from another consumer survey: "54 percent of the respondents said they never use cloud computing, but nearly all of them do. The services they use constitute a decent outline of what consumers can actually do with the cloud. Forty-five percent said they have played online games; 29 percent store photos online; 22 percent store music or videos online; and 19 percent use online file-sharing.". 

2. Alphabetical Soup of Cloudification

  

Cloud does become critical tech “air” to survive and thrive both individual and business life though it maybe still too soon to say XAAS –Everything As A Service, it’s time to cook interesting alphabetical soup of cloudification with all letters available:

API as a service (APIaaS) 

 Business Process as A Service (BPaaS), Back-Up as a Service

 Communication as a Service (CaaS),  CMAAs (Cloud Migration as a Service), CRM as A Service

Database As a Service (DaaS). Desktop as a service (DaaS)

Email as a Service, ESB as a Service (Enterprise Service Bus), EDM(Enterprise Data Management) as a Service, Encryption as a Service..

•   File as a Service, FOSS (Free & Open Source Software)
•  Governance as A Service, Gamification as A Service
• Human Capital Management as A Service
• Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), Integration as a Service
• JDK (Java Development Kit) as A Service; JDBC (Java Database Connectivity As A Service)
•  Knowledge Management As A Service
• Log Management As A Service
• Monitoring as A Service (MaaS) 
• Network As A Service
•  Open Source As A Service, OLTP (Online Transaction Process) as A Service
• Platform as a service (PaaS), Procurement As A Service
• Quality Assurance As A Service (QAAS)
•  Risk Management As A Service
• Software as a service (SaaS),  Storage as a service (STaaS),  Security as a service (SECaaS) 
•  Test environment as a Service (TEaaS) 
•   Unified Communication as A Service
•   Video As A Service; VOIP As A Service
•    WLAN as A Service
•    XML Web Service
•   You Tube Service
•    Zettabyte Data at Cloud

 3. Cloud is A Business Strategy

Cloud is the most natural progression of web advancement and technology revolutions. However, just going to Cloud for the sake of cost reduction couldn't help business for long term, as major gaps in how organizations are selecting, integrating and monitoring the services their employees depend on. The bulk of cloud initiatives come from the ground up and are reactive, in response to line-of-business requirements. IT rarely has an overarching vision of how it all fits together.

The business risks of using these services also depend on two key requirements: durability (protecting your critical data from loss) and availability (keeping your systems up and running). It is essential to evaluate the roles and failure modes of cloud services in your application, and how they affect durability and availability.

There're three phases of evaluation and preparation in Cloud journey:

(1). Pushing the Cloud envelope takes good strategy; Organizations need well articulate the business cases, the goals, the pros and cons, the value/risk/cost when migrating to cloud; Especially for businesses which have well done the experiment on cloud, to take more aggressive steps, EA or data life cycle management, GRC., all need be considered accordingly.

(2). Cloud Vendor Evaluation, not every cloud is shaped as same: some rain makers, some may not, and not every vendor is true cloud service provider, do research and accumulate more knowledge before jumping in. And get consultant's opinion if necessary.

(3) Cloud Security/GRC Enforcement: security and GRC may still be the biggest concern to step into cloud, the reality is: Cloud doesn't make your business more secure or less secure, it's just the different set of issues facing organization, and it's actually good time to re-imagine the possibility of security innovation and GRC convergence.

Cloud is about new mindset, cCoud is the democratic way to enjoy technology, what a wonderful life in Cloud!

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Seeing is Believing: From Big Data to Big Picture

Seeing is believing, one picture is worth a thousand words, all being said, Big Data need be painted into Big Picture, to capture big insight.

In order to create an effective visualization, business need to understand the meaning of data, after taking 5W+1H navigation, and using five senses to make sense of data, now, are you ready to move Big Data to the next level, from science to art, from common sense to unconventional wisdom, from black & white to full color spectrum?

And the right set of tools will make work more enjoyable, according to 2012 InformationWeek Business Intelligence, Analytics and Information Management Survey. Nearly half (45%) of the 414 respondents to the poll, which was conducted late last year, cited "ease-of-use challenges with complex software/less-technically savvy employees" as the second-biggest barrier to adopting BI/analytics products. That was just behind the biggest barrier, "data quality problems," cited by 46% or respondents.

 From data visualization to advanced data visualization, it’s not only about more advanced, easy-to-use visualized tools, but also about advanced data talent, they are artist, story teller, poet, anthropologist, historian, philosopher, and they  happen to be data scientist too  -the data analyst who lives in California or beyond,  with open mindset in designing, building, and using interactive, fluid, dynamic, and even three-dimensional visualization.

Like artist, they master the visual design elements, such as line, form, shape, and color, with principles like balance and variety, to make a visualization more vivid and customized for trends and comparisons. A piece of fine art does have both deep meaning and elegant style. 

  

Seeing is believing! Advanced Data visualization will provide better features such as:

• A Single Screen Shot:  one can fit tens of thousands (an order of-magnitude difference) of data points onto a single screen.

• Visual Querying : relatively easily visualize and identify a pattern or click on a portion of graph or chart,  then quickly zoom in to research the details;

• Multi-dimensional linking & Chart: you can select one chart, via dynamic link, you can navigate into other charts . An extra axis in space, alongside an existing one or in a new direction (for a 3D chart), can also be useful for showing new variables

• Personalization. The visualization tool is easy to use with personalized design, also addressing privacy and risk issues. You can give power users more in-depth view, and the view depend on one’s position, job requirement and role-base access privileges. 

• Humanization: To get value from big data. Especially those "deep and broad data sets”, you must add contextual information and place analytical capability in the hands of those who need it, taken from the world of bits and bytes and converted into real insight & foresight for real businesspeople.

It takes sense and sensitivity to transform Big Data into Big picture, it’s not illusion, but illustration, to capture big insight from our big busyness world and small mankind world, always keep customers in mind, keep business purpose in mind, keep long term perspective in mind; but also open mind to be bold, creative and colorful.

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