Content Shift

In a competitive marketplace, delivering compelling and consistent customer experiences is one of the best ways for an organization to differentiate itself from its competitors. According to Forrester Research, focus on the customer experience has become a top corporate objective since 2012 and will continue to increase in importance as businesses realize the value it can bring*.

Leading organizations focus on creating compelling brand experiences at every customer touch point. In our digital world, marketers can use a range of platforms to set the stage for the customer experience. The marketing toolbox has grown to incorporate new devices, channels, and types of media into its programs.

Clearly, having the right technologies in place helps to deliver experiences in an efficient, pleasing, and consistent manner. Web Experience Management (WEM) facilitates the management and optimization of experience across all channels and platforms — to create compelling customer experiences, ensure consistent omni-channel brand experiences, and improve engagement with responsive design.

Designing responsive websites is the first step to providing customers with more contextual and consistent experiences. It’s an approach that involves building sites for optimal viewing across a range of devices, platforms, and resolutions to support intuitive navigation, easy reading, and an enhanced user experience. Responsive design promotes a device-agnostic website and the continuity of the customer’s web experience to ensure delight. The management of websites is streamlined and sustained, as is the overall brand experience.

Consumer expectation runs high for tailored, adaptable, and even predictable digital experiences. Omni-channel delivery focuses on consumer need and behavior to provide consumers with a consistent brand experience across channels. Instead of perceiving a variety of touch-points as part of a brand, omni-channel delivery expands experience beyond the channel to encompass all aspects of the brand. Marketers can target specific consumers by their purchase patterns, click-stream data, social networks, website traffic, and content analytics. This helps to paint a holistic view of data across all stages of the customer lifecycle. Programs can be refined and marketers can calculate their Return On Marketing Investment (ROMI) to be more efficient and save on customer acquisition and support costs.

WEM can help your organization deliver a consistent and relevant customer experience across all communication channels to increase brand loyalty, customer retention, and profit margins. Make all of your brand moments matter. Witness the next generation of customer experience solutions in action at the WEM release event: The Art of the Experience.

See what WEM can do for you. Attend our upcoming Webinar: WEM 8.5: A Deeper Look or view a recording of Optimizing Your Customer Experience Through Responsive Web Design.

Read about the latest trends and technologies in optimizing customer experience in our CEO White Paper Series: Customer Experience Management or visit our website.

*Bodine, Kerry and Rogowski, Ron. “2013 Customer Experience Predictions.” Forrester Research Inc. January 3, 2013

According to recent studies, CEOs are experiencing high levels of complexity in both their environments and markets, and this is only expected to rise over the coming years. Underlying trends like globalization, technological change, the “speed of innovation”, organizational restructuring, and morphing operating models are contributing to an increasingly volatile and unpredictable marketplace.

A publication of The Global Simplicity Index revealed that complexity is costing 200 of the biggest companies in the world 10.2% of their annual profits – which adds up to a whopping, collective $237 billion. In another study, 10 % of managers identified that 30% of their productivity losses were due to complexity. Other research has revealed that as many as 70% of executives believe complexity to be one of their company’s biggest challenges.

The pressing need to manage complexity has moved up the priority list for executives. A good first step, according to an article in Forbes Magazine, is an information management strategy. So while it is part of the problem, technology can also provide a solution. Enterprise Information Management, or EIM, with its unified infrastructure consolidates your information across departments, repositories, applications, and silos. When information is aligned, it’s easier for your departments, cross-functional teams, and even the C-Suite to collaborate to achieve your corporate goals.

Under every challenge lies the opportunity to do great things, to transform a threat or setback into competitive advantage. What follows are ways that EIM can help executives reduce the complexity of their environments to significantly change the game:

• Capitalize on the value of unstructured data. Discovery technologies like analytics can transform your unstructured and structured data into insight and action for business results. Executives need timely access to quality information. Quick decisions mean even quicker execution. The results are an ability to respond to changing market needs, take advantage of new opportunities, and grow your business more aggressively.
• Build a digital, collaborative enterprise. Develop new business models based on the application of disruptive technologies. Leverage technologies like social networks to fuel the free-flow of ideas, collaboration, and communications. Pilot ad-hoc innovations at the business-unit level. Nurture an information-sharing environment to build trust and improve relationships both internally with employees/colleagues and externally with your customers.
• Explore new ways to connect with your customers. Get to know them better. Develop effective ways to collect, analyze, and disseminate customer data from both traditional and new sources. Meet customer expectations by applying integrated customer data and across a variety of channels.
• Streamline business processes to improve efficiency and operations. Deploy business process and case management systems to keep your operations flexible and dexterous.
• Consolidate, integrate, and transform data and content across silos throughout your information ecosystem to unify channels and increase business impact. Federate information across all sources. Mitigate the risk and control the costs of growing volumes of content. Facilitate efficient, secure, and compliant exchange of information inside and outside of your organization.

CEOs are recognizing that technology is playing a more critical role than it has in the past to address complexity in the enterprise. EIM can help to remodel the complex systems, processes, and structures in your organization, allowing you to create new opportunities for your business – including creating better strategies, expanding into new markets, and improving business performance for competitive advantage.

The role of the CIO is evolving. This makes good sense because the technologies that CIOs and IT executives commandeer are evolving – some faster than the enterprise can keep up with. The focus of the CIO has shifted:

• Then – Infrastructure, operations, performance, cost reduction, risk control, customer satisfaction (internal) and adoption

• Now – Security, governance, centralization, consumerization of IT, customer satisfaction (internal and external) and adoption, innovation, growth, revenue, and competitive advantage

The responsibilities of the CIO (obviously) hinge on mastering a multi-faceted and rich technology infrastructure whose greatest disrupters are cloud computing, consumerization, and mobile technologies. This aligns with a recent survey conducted by IDG with respondents adding Big Data to the mix.

Today’s CIO is focused on delivering value at individual, departmental, and enterprise levels. This reaches beyond the firewall to an ability to create and capitalize on opportunity. To implement technology solutions that build competitive advantage. According to Forrester Forrsights, many organizations agree that technology plays a pivotal role in helping to differentiate from competitors.

In the IDG survey behind the CIO report 76% of survey respondents indicate that IT plays a key role in ensuring that organizational objectives are met.

Let’s take a look at social media as a case-in-point. Consumerization of social networking has impacted the way we work together and create and share information. More and more organizations are seeing its value and adopting it as an internal tool for collaboration and an external too to help reinvent the customer experience. The IT department is working more closely with business units to define requirements and develop social media pilot projects that deliver business value.

Technologies like social media and the way it is consumed (the consumerization of IT) are impacting the tech buying process. In a Forrester report entitled Forrsights: Cautious Optimism in 2012 IT Spending Plans, an increase in budget (albeit conservative) has been designated to areas of mobility, analytics, security, and collaboration. These areas align around enterprise content. Content that must be created, shared, transformed, analyzed, shared, and protected. Doing all of this well helps to differentiate an organization from its competitors. Data and analytics, for example, add insight to improve business decisions and uncover new opportunities for business transformation.

Clearly, the CIO’s relationship with information is a complex, multi-layered one. A holistic vision that simplifies access to enterprise information and functions securely across silos makes good sense.

Don’t take my word for it. According to the CIO of Mosaic, Doug Mills: “The ideal future for me would be that there would be this one, simple, information management solution and approach that you would implement once and that would manage any type of unstructured data or structure data in the enterprise.”

A perfect world is a simplified world (for all of us). This approach is being considered by a good number of CIOs.  According to Forrester Research, many firms are planning to implement a content management solution above other technology solutions like web analytics and social networking.

This is further substantiated in the IDG report, in which 31% of survey respondents say it is “critical” for their companies to have a comprehensive Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strategy, while 55% recognize the importance of EIM in solving existing business problems, and only 5% say it is of low importance.

Despite the recognition of the business value behind a unified approach to information management, the call to arms has not been heard by all. More than two-thirds of the CIOs and IT execs surveyed by IDG do not treat EIM as a strategic priority.

The CIO intersects with many departments and colleagues at senior levels, and holds a great sway of influence over the success of colleagues, departments, and companies on the whole. Today's CIOs and their IT departments drive the momentum behind seizing opportunity, exploring new markets, and leading current ones.  

The CIO has to stay on top of change, both in the organization and in the marketplace. As the masters of change, they are commandeering an information technology reformation and supporting the use of disruptive technologies to explore new fronts.

Frost & Sullivan has honored OpenText with the 2013 Global Company of the Year Award for the Enterprise Digital Media Market.

The award is a prestigious recognition of accomplishments in the digital media sector. Based on a 20-year legacy in the content management market, the award acknowledges OpenText as a pioneer with extensive experience and the foresight required to stay ahead of the curve and address customer needs in digital media and content management solutions.

This approach has enabled OpenText to deliver a comprehensive solution with “consistent quality, scalability, flexibility, user friendliness, system robustness, and security.”

With its focus on optimizing user experience, asset creation, and content management, OpenText has established a leadership position based on enterprise-scale solutions designed to help organizations create, manage, and distribute media assets across a variety of channels to convert assets into opportunities and enhance user experience.

Our Media Management solution ensures brand consistency throughout the enterprise (locally and globally), improves efficiency through centralization of assets and speed of delivery, and lowers cost by reducing the resources required to manage digital media and monitor its effectiveness. Marketing return on investment is realized through the ability to analyze and measure usage and impact to identify trends, patterns, sentiments, and behavior for further refinement of the customer experience.

In receiving the award, OpenText outpaced its competitors in all categories, excelling at strategy, implementation, innovation in products and services, customer value, and market penetration.

I’d like to congratulate the OpenText team of executives and employees for excelling at innovation and creativity in the digital media management market. Find out more about our award-winning media management solutions. Attend the Media Management Webinar: Fast Forward Your Digital Media Revolution.

Content marketing has grown to become one of the most important components of an integrated marketing strategy. It’s defined by the Content Marketing Institute as “a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”

Although quality content is being given a sovereign spot in the marketing mix, marketers today are failing to effectively develop and manage their marketing content.

According to a commissioned September 2012 Forrester study conducted on behalf of Open Text (The Rise Of Content Marketing: Invest In Content Development And Management For Success), while 86% of the companies surveyed recognize the importance of content marketing; half of these organizations fail to do it effectively.

Why?

Today’s content is different. Marketing has been impacted by all of the digital channels available for content distribution and consumption, including the Internet and mobile apps. Reaching consumers requires a complex, multifaceted approach across many direct and indirect channels.

Just as content has evolved; consumers have changed. These days, people aren’t looking just to buy; they’re looking to learn. They’re turning to peers and friends for recommendations about products and services. People are having online conversations about their brand experiences, good or bad. Consumers are becoming more transparent with their needs, wants, and fears – and much of this is happening on social media channels.

These wants and needs can be mapped directly to your products and services, but only if you’re listening. This is just as important as being there when the consumer needs you to be there, with quality content, when and where they are ready to consume. Yesterday’s sales funnel is being replaced by a content-oriented orbital model that focuses on creating long term value. The emphasis is on maintaining relationships with loyal customers and community members over and above funneling leads through the buying cycle.

 
The Sales Funnel is Replaced by an Orbital Model

Just as they are striving to create and distribute quality content, marketers are also under pressure to accurately measure the impact of their marketing programs. In the same Forrester study, 70% of marketers have trouble measuring the impact of their content strategy on their overall marketing success. More time and resources dedicated to the creation, management, and measurement of content goes a long way in helping marketers develop and measure the effectiveness of their programs.

Professional Customer Experience Management (CEM) tools can make a difference. CEM helps you reach your markets and customers by creating a rich and consistent digital presence across all touch points, managing the creation and distribution of your marketing content, and providing the tools for measurement, analysis, and refinement.

Read more about how CEM can help your organization optimize your content marketing in a recent installment of our CEO White Paper Series, Customer Experience Management: Experiencing the Power of Information.

Recently, we put together a research paper with AIIM called “Information Security for the Modern Enterprise: How Safe is Safe?” based on findings from over 200 organizations surveyed.

The research paper examines current enterprise information assets, how these are stored and managed, what types of security are being deployed and the potential risks these assets pose. It searches for answers to questions like:

Do organizations know where their information is sitting? Is this information safe? Where do security risks come from?

The collaborative nature of today’s business, enabled by emerging technologies, is empowering people to create and share information faster than they ever have before. The need for information security has never been more pressing with enterprise information fragmented across mobile devices, residing in multiple applications and repositories, in both private and public clouds.

Based on the organizations surveyed for this paper, most felt that they have good security in place (firewalls, VPNs, and SSL) against external threats. As far as storage goes, the private cloud suffices.

What the paper revealed – and what is most compelling – is that while these organizations have good external defenses, the real threat comes from within. Over half of the respondents to this survey acknowledged that information security risks were more likely to come from unauthorized access by employees or past employees. The risk of security breach, then, is from the inside out.

The Most Likely Source of a Security Breach (c) AIIM 2013

I explored this in a previous blog post with a focus on Preventing an Enterprise WikiLeaks as an example. As I stated in an article in ZDNet: "We must understand the security issue that really matters today is not about people from the outside breaking in, it is people from the inside breaking out. So by setting controls such as what and how many files can be sent or downloaded, or a firewall, firms can better control data leaks and better leverage [technologies like] social networking."

EIM and Enterprise Content Management as a component technology provide the framework required to support governance and compliance with internal policies, enabling the enterprise to collaborate, innovate, and evolve, while keeping its information assets secure.

For a sneak peak at the survey results that provided the foundation for the AIIM and OpenText research paper, view the Webinar. It features a discussion about information security between author of the research paper David Jones, a Market Analyst with the AIIM Market Intelligence Division and Dave Arbeitel, Vice President of Product Management at OpenText.

Read the research paper.

I’d like to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday season, and to take a look at the hot tech trends  in information and communications technology that will continue to bring value and opportunity to the enterprise in 2013.

• Big Data: While many of the Fortune 500 have been dealing with Big Data for decades, only now has focus shifted to more effectively managing unstructured information to realize the value inherent in Big Data. Here at OpenText, we wrote a book about Big Data called Behind the Firewall: Big Data and the Hidden Web. 

• Volume, Variety, and Velocity of Content:  The nature of unstructured content is based on the “three V’s” – volume, variety, and velocity – and these will only continue to fragment enterprise information. OpenText CEO and President Mark Barrenechea explores the evolving nature of information and how Enterprise Information Management (EIM) technologies can help manage unstructured information in his CEO White Paper Series.

• Enterprise Information Management (EIM):  EIM refers to set of technologies and best practices that helps organizations unleash the power of their information. Global organizations can use EIM to create opportunity and profit from their information, while addressing the key risks and challenges related to enterprise information. 

• The Mobile Enterprise: Extending content to mobile devices increases the value of information by giving people real-time access to information and resources at any time, in any place. The “bring your own device” era is here, and as people continue to combine their personal and work-related information on their device of choice, the enterprise will be under pressure to balance the promise of increased engagement and productivity with the threat of serious security threats and information breaches.

• You Can’t Have Mobile without the Cloud: The rapid adoption of mobile apps has been driven by devices like the iPad and the Smartphone from distribution platforms like iTunes and the Apple App Store. Referred to as the “Consumerization of IT”, this model has redefined the client as mobile and the server as in the Cloud and is already significantly impacting IT departments. It will dominate computing well into the future. Read my post on the Enterprise App Center.

• IT Consolidation:  IT departments will continue to consolidate solutions (for content management for example) and invest in products that integrate multiple functions for improved efficiencies and reduced infrastructure costs. We have an Information Access Platform that enables organizations to do just this.  

• Security: Organizations will be continually challenged to keep up with managing content that is created on new devices, in a variety of formats, using cloud-based applications. A key to success is for organizations to develop policies and procedures around usage. This was done effectively with our G-20 Summit social network, which combines a social media front end with a complex and secure records management back end. Watch for an upcoming post about the current and alarming state of information security in the enterprise.

• Other Technology Trends: Trends like gamification, the social Web, and more that consumers in general and the Net Gen specifically are bringing inside the firewall to live alongside mobile apps and social networks as part of an enterprise’s multi-textured technology fabric.
  
  All the best and see you in 2013!

Gamification refers to applying gaming elements and concepts to a business setting to engage audiences and achieve business outcomes. At a basic level, it makes work more fun. But more than this, gamification has the potential to improve both the way we connect to each other and the way we work. 

As the gaming industry grows, the enterprise is increasingly implementing gamification techniques in areas like employee performance and training, customer service, and marketing. According to analysts, this technology trend is here to stay. M2 Research predicts that enterprise gamification software will reach $100 million dollars in revenue in 2012 and Gartner forecasts that within two years, 40% of the Global 100 will use gamification to transform business operations.

“Gamified” websites, processes, and applications are being introduced to the enterprise just as social media apps have been very recently, resonating with the younger generations that enter the workforce. Having grown up with Facebook, YouTube, and mobile apps, this demographic expects to use the same technology at work as they do at home to connect, communicate, and collaborate. The new approaches, technologies, and ways to work include gamification.

Gamification presents users with an immersive (and typically social) experience that deepens their engagement, which in turn increases user adoption and creates a a greater inclination to achieve a business objective. Gamification techniques work well in an enterprise setting and the benefits are many: a more engaged and loyal workforce; improved levels of performance, productivity, and innovation; enhanced collaboration and communications; greater insights into consumer behavior; increased sales; and improved customer engagement and satisfaction.

New Online Immersive Technologies

As well as making people more productive, gamification also has the potential to improve data quality. From an Enterprise Information Management (EIM) perspective, in order for people to connect to the information they need, the information must be captured first. In other words, users need to add it to an enterprise system or process before it can be searched on, shared, or consumed. Gamification presents new ways to capture and share knowledge in the enterprise. Introducing gaming elements into mobile apps, for example, can improve knowledge exchange by giving people compelling ways to add, access, and share information. Gamification helps to optimize the value of enterprise information through its potential for enhanced data capture, discovery, and analysis. EIM is all about unleashing the power of information, and gamification can help the enterprise do just this.

In early November, I was honored to join our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, on a trade mission to India to discuss the growing Canada-India trade and investment relationship. I joined the delegation as co-chair of the India-Canada CEO Forum. Alongside Mr. Hari Bhartia, Co-Chairman and Managing Director of Jubilant Life Sciences, I presented an early view of the CEO Forum’s plans to enhance trade and commercial relations between the Canadian and India Governments.

India is a very important and growing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) market. The Canada-India CEO Forum is focused on increasing trade to create jobs and prosperity in both countries. This meeting presented an invaluable opportunity for government and business leaders to come together and engage in a dialogue to gain a better understanding about how trade relations can lead to increased opportunities.

According to Ed Fast, Minister of International Trade and Minister for the Asia-Pacific Gateway, who was part of the delegation, “More than 500 Canadian companies are currently doing business in India, and many more are making plans to do so. The Canada-India CEO Forum will help us reach our shared goal of tripling our trade, and that will create jobs and prosperity in both our countries.” 

Over 300 companies in India are deploying OpenText solutions to help manage their business-critical information, including the likes of Mumbai International Airport Ltd., eBay, Kotak Mahindra Old Mutual Life Insurance, and Infosys BPO Ltd. To support this growing customer base and the demand for enterprise information management, we recently announced the opening a new Mumbai office and expansion of our Hyderabad research and development center. The center is located in the Special Economic Zone, an area with industry oriented around export and foreign direct investment in India.  This is all very exciting, given that India is a strong research and development hub, and continuing our presence in the Asia-Pacific Region is very important to us.

Watch my video interview about the importance of Asia to Canada’s future.

View the presentation.

Recently, I presented at the World Congress on Information Technology (WCIT 2012) in Montreal, Canada. The theme for this three day meeting was "ONE Vision for a Global Digital Society" and attendees included 3,000 delegates, ranging from ICT senior executives to large technology users, as well as representatives from academia, governments, NGOs, policymakers, and business leaders from around the world.

The continual goal of this signature event is to create a Global Digital Society Action Plan that will establish principles aimed at maximizing the potential that digital technologies can unlock across diverse sectors and institutions. The digital age, with its innovations in IT, promises great prosperity and development—but how do we capitalize on this great potential?

As a keynote at the event, my focus was on the impact of Big Data and Cloud technology on the enterprise, as well as on nations. As Cloud architectures become mature, one of the most promising applications that will drive organizational change is Big Data. The use of Big Data by large public Web sites provides an early indication of the possibility of uses within every organization that houses large, unstructured content archives. Understanding the origins and techniques of how to collect, organize, manage, and understand large unstructured content archives within an organization is an essential step in taking advantage of Big Data applications.  

Big Data can re-invigorate digital investments in content, both within and outside the organization, to increase user experience and retention, and drive activity and revenue without great increases in expense. A major challenge is striking the right balance between transparency and privacy. As unstructured content becomes further digitized and connected throughout an organization—and increases its impact on the delivery of more effective services—the secure management of this information becomes a critical competitive factor for both organizations and nations. Having an effective digital strategy which includes digital media infrastructure is key to remaining competitive in the age of Cloud architectures and Big Data applications.

Watch my interview with The Globe and Mail's Simon Houpt at the 2012 World Conference on Information Technology.