
Endings and Beginnings
Almost ten years ago I did a slight career course change and moved from senior roles inside software companies to software market analyst. In that nearly ten years with analyst firm IDC, leading what has grown into a broad team of highly respected software market analysts, I have grown professionally and personally. For the first […]

Proximity Marketing
Proximity marketing or hyperlocal marketing as it’s sometimes called, is on the upsurge this year. The fact that the smartphone market continues to grow with ~1.3B shipments in 2014 WW, and a CAGR of near 10% through 2018 (based on the IDC Smartphone Tracker) is a part of that of course, but also the technology […]

Some Non-Predictions for 2015
It’s that time of new year when you get deluged with analysts / bloggers predictions and prognostications. I join in most years, and of course there’s the IDC predictions process to contend with as well. This year I swore that I was skipping it. I’ve already done the new IDC “Futurescape” document and webcast with my […]

Transforming Data into Action – Part 3
In part three of the series we will focus on sources of data beyond in-house transaction data and data collected from social listening, and the impact of the Internet and Cloud Computing on both the distribution of data and the business models that are evolving around that data. Data brokers, that is, companies that aggregate […]

Social Business and Digital Strategy
Social business, collaboration, community and content, is there real business value tucked away in those words? Digital transformation, digital strategy and digital disruption, are businesses really feeling the pressure to do somethings differently and by changing can they be more competitive, grow faster and be more successful? What’s different today that would help businesses unlock […]

Why is Good Customer Service So Difficult?
This could easily be a rant based on some recent customer service experiences but I’m going to avoid that and instead look at what companies are facing today in trying to meet customer expectations. I read recently that Comcast has finally appointed a VP to try and address their extremely poor customer service (I’d say […]

Is Collaboration Part of Your Customer Experience Strategy?
The conversation about customer experience as a business strategy continues to get lot’s of attention as companies struggle to figure out how to do business in a changing, consumer driven marketplace. A lot of these conversation have focused on the outward facing issues, changing marketing and sales or executing customer service in a new or […]

Engagement or Experience?
This may sound a bit like a rant, and I suppose it is really, but I’m tired of having this conversation so thought it would be easier to just point to a post. It’s semantics but being clear on what…

Disrupting Today’s Workplace – Part One
I laugh every time I write the title “future of work”, I mean, how presumptuous can one document / post / presentation be to outline the entire future of work. I’m going with “disruption of work” for this one. Oh well, titles aside, it’s a topic that I’m extremely interested in, and have been looking […]

Social Business Maturity Model, The Next Generation
Way back in 2011 we published a maturity model for the adoption of social technologies and the resulting cultural and process changes that those technologies could enable. Quite a lot has happened since then of course but happily some of the fundamental business impacts from the use of social technologies hasn’t. We do understand them […]