Vision from the Top 2013: Mark Cunningham, Indicee
Which of the following current topics will significantly change the market in the next year? And what is the impact? (Business Intelligence/Analytics, Customer Engagement, Mobile, Security, or Social)
The confluence of analytics and social media will continue to drive significant change within the workplace this year. I believe that 2013 will be the year of social business analytics, which means we’ll see a marked rise in the perceived importance and prevalence of analytics on the social tools driving greater collaboration within the enterprise, as much as on external channels such as Twitter and Facebook.
As companies strive to become more social, there is a real need to be able to define success. We must be able to measure it, analyze behavior, and then identify the tools and strategies that reap the highest rewards. “Social” applied to the workplace should be a no-brainer, but it’s those companies that have clear success metrics and are able to leverage the right social forces that will enjoy a competitive advantage. For example, we see many enterprises that have collaboration tools already in place but have no idea if anyone is using them. And, without a baseline for adoption, these companies are stumbling around in the dark when it comes to tracking any other social initiatives. If we go a step further, it’s clear that analytics can also be the key to unlocking much of the inherent value in social business. For example, getting a window into the conversations happening across the company, without having to manually sift through every feed, can surface innovation, provide early indicators of problems, and give insight into where social activity is leading to improved business performance. Unfortunately, we too often see social investment without measurement and an over-reliance on anecdotal evidence for success.
However, this is beginning to change. Social business is transforming the landscape for every company, in every industry. We’ve already seen how analytics for externally-facing social channels has brought about a greater sophistication in our understanding and expectations of this media over the last few years. Introducing better social analytics to workplace collaboration is the logical next step, and a sizable gap in the market right now. Those companies that started rolling out social business tools 18 months ago or more, are now going beyond the experimental stage and want to get empirical evidence on their social effectiveness.
In addition, the accessible nature of the SaaS marketplace means that the typical workplace has multiple collaboration tools in use at any given time. As the benefits of social business are widely evangelized, many companies are starting to focus in on the tools that best fit their workforce and represent the greatest value. The need to link social investment with tangible business objectives is something we hear all the time.
Clearly, the growing demand for social analytics is changing the landscape for software vendors too. Whether it’s Social CRM, pure-play collaboration vendors, or any one of the hundreds of app providers that now incorporate social elements into their core design, providing powerful analytics is a pressing concern, as well as a challenge. Social data is high velocity in nature, and a combination of complex structured and unstructured data means it cannot easily be handled by your average in-house business intelligence (BI) tools, spreadsheets or guesswork. It requires deep BI expertise to bring together the different data streams to tell a useful story. As a result, we’ll see many independent software vendors (ISVs) turn to business intelligence specialists to develop the social analytics portion of their products in the coming year.
In summary, while a huge percentage of social business transformation is cultural, having the right tools to support it is critical. This year, we will all get more serious about measuring our internal social initiatives and spend more time looking from the inside out, to understand how well social activities are impacting productivity, innovation, customer satisfaction and revenue.
This interview was published in SIIA's Vision from the Top, a Software Division publication released at All About the Cloud 2013.