IBM STUDY: If You Don’t Have a SOCIAL CEO, You're Going to be Less Competitive

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Mark Fidelman, Contributor

An OP/ED View of the Next Generation Enterprise-TECH

 

The list of the world’s CEOs regularly includes celebrities, billionaires, big egos, risk takers, and failures. What it does not include are social media experts; but that’s about to change. When IBM (NYSE: IBM) conducted its study of 1709 CEOs around the world, they found only 16% of them participating in social media. But their analysis shows that the percentage will likely grow to 57% within 5 years.

Why? because CEOs are beginning to recognize that using email and the phone to get the message out isn’t sufficient anymore.

The big takeaway: That using social technologies to engage with customers, suppliers and employees will enable the organization to be more adaptive and agile.

“As CEOs ratchet up the level of openness within their organizations, they are developing collaborative environments where employees are encouraged to speak up, exercise personal initiative, connect with fellow collaborators, and innovate,” the IBM study concluded. 

Simply put, CEOs and their executives set the cultural tone for an organization. Through participation, they implicitly promote the use of social technologies.  That will make their organizations more competitive and better able to adapt to sudden market changes.

Other key findings of the study include:

• The study reveals that CEOs are changing the nature of work by adding a powerful dose of openness, transparency and employee empowermentto the command-and-control ethos that has characterized the modern corporation for more than a century.
• Companies that outperform their peers are 30 percent more likely to identify openness – often characterized by a greater use of social media as a key enabler of collaboration and innovation – as a key influence on their organization.
• While social media is the least utilized of all customer interaction methods today, it stands to become the number two organizational engagement method within the next five years, a close second to face-to-face interactions.
• More than half of CEOs (53 percent) are planning to use technology to facilitate greater partnering and collaboration with outside organizations, while 52 percent are shifting their attention to promoting great internal collaboration.
• Championing collaborative innovation is not something CEOs are delegating to their HR leaders. According to the study findings, the business executives are interested in leading by example.
• CEOs regard interpersonal skills of collaboration (75 percent), communication (67 percent), creativity (61 percent) and flexibility (61 percent) as key drivers of employee success to operate in a more complex, interconnected environment.
• The trend toward greater collaboration extends beyond the corporation to external partnering relationships. Partnering is now at an all-time high. In 2008, slightly more than half of the CEOs IBM interviewed planned to partner extensively. Now, more than two-thirds intend to do so.
• CEOs are most focused on gaining insights into their customers. Seventy-three percent of CEOs are making significant investments in their organizations’ ability to draw meaningful customer insights from available data.

I’ve often held IBM as the best example of a Social Business and a company to emulate rather than Apple. I believe this study and the analysis behind it, reinforces that view.

The IBM study shows that CEOs and the companies they manage must constantly evolve to stay competitive. Partners, suppliers, employees and customers want CEOs to communicate with them on a personal level to build trust and to help align them to the organization’s strategy. There is a lot at stake here. And if CEOs continue to hide in their Ivory Towers under the guise of some old command and control mentality, the next chapter in their career might be written somewhere else.

No one wants that!

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Mark Fidelman, Contributor

Mobility Changes the Shape of App Development

BY DION PICCO, PROGRESS SOFTWARE

There’s no denying that smartphones and tablets have changed the way we find and install the applications we use, and what we expect from them. Added to this is the increasing desire to use these devices for work purposes, driving a need for enterprise applications.

Image: Risager/Flickr

Previously we’ve only relied on our phones for calls, texts and maybe emails. But with the rapid adoption of smartphones, apps have taken over and developers are looking to provide a richest experience possible. This is also being driven by the fact that mobility provides a good entry point to cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-delivered applications.

Mobility is still very nascent, but the space is evolving rapidly. This is having a tremendous impact on how we run our lives and our businesses. According to a recent study by InformationWeek, only a quarter (26 per cent) of business technology decision makers don’t have custom applications or have plans on developing them, and the vast majority are evaluating at least one mobile operating system for use within the business and/or for developing custom mobile applications.

As a result of these factors, the majority of modern application development is taking a ‘mobile first’ approach. This is bringing a new interface paradigm –– driven by these smaller devices and touch screens.

The Power of Mobile

Mobile devices and the ubiquitous connectivity they enable, brings a whole new level of remote working for employees and a range of ‘self-service’ opportunities for customers and users. This includes activities like checking the status of an order, buying tickets or updating details — all of which traditionally needed a phone call or visit to a branch office — thereby saving operational costs, while boosting customer service.

Compared with desktops and laptops, smartphones are limited in terms of processing power and screen size, but are also packed with a lot more sensors such as touchscreens, GPS, accelerometers, cameras, Bluetooth and NFC — all of which can be leveraged by smart applications.

This can help offset some of the limitations of mobile by offering a range of smart interface possibilities as well as adding levels of context and capability that desktop applications can’t match.

Hybrid Apps: Write Once, Run Anywhere

From a developer perspective, this explosion of smart devices has created some incredibly complex challenges, mainly due to the number of different platforms and devices around. Not only do developers considering native mobile applications have to consider developing for iOS, Android, Blackberry and Windows Phone, they also have to consider the variety of different form factors of today’s smartphones and tablets. Furthermore, this has to extend to Q&A and testing as well as making sure the application meets the requirements for the various app stores that will be the delivery mechanism.

As a result, some developers have turned to developing web-based apps in HTML5. Because these usually run in the device’s browser, they do not have the same complexity challenges that native app development brings. But these apps also don’t offer the same local ‘app experience’ and can’t tap into the added features that these devices contain. Similarly, concerns around security and performance exist for web-based applications.

According to InformationWeek‘s research, the native versus browser debate is still raging, with each strategy garnering 74 per cent of respondents who plan to deploy custom applications in one form or the other.

While some apps are best suited as specifically native or browser based, in many cases, the answer lies in the hybrid app. A hybrid app is one that is developed on HTML5 and Javascript libraries, such as JQuery, but delivered in a “wrapper” that makes it look and feel like a native app. This gives developers the advantage of the browser-based “write once, and run anywhere” while allowing them to tap into the functionality, security and performance of a native app, as well as the delivery model, such as being downloaded from the app store. In this scenario Q&A and testing is simplified down to a single version. This approach not only simplifies development and maintenance, but also delivers consistency for users regardless of their platform of choice.

Mobile Apps: The Next Generation

Organizations want to modernize their existing applications, resulting in a much more mobile-first approach. This includes moving the back end from on-premise servers to a more cloud-based architecture (whether that’s public, private or hybrid) and updating the front end to be intuitive and mobile-capable.

This is augmented by a move away from old development practices and a shift towards a more process-centric approach, which lends itself to creating an externalised rule system, meaning logic is no longer hardwired into the application. This allows for greater collaboration between developers and other stakeholders such as business project managers and the creation of simplified, easy-to-navigate interfaces, within an intuitive drag-and-drop development environment, which binds to the existing back-end.

As a result, development cycles are shorter, user acceptance is faster and, ultimately, ramp-up is quicker — something vital in the mobile world where the demand for new apps is so great.

We expect this trend to develop into ever more process-centric and rules-centric application development, combined with API-based mashups across on-premises, cloud and mobile applications. This will bring higher levels of agility and support the rapid innovation needed by the world’s best companies.

The App is Dead – Long Live the App

Mobility is changing the shape of application development. Demand for cross platform support is growing, development cycles are shortening and users’ expectations are evolving.

Exploiting these devices to their full potential means empowering employees to use them to be more productive and enabling customers to be more self-reliant. Changing development techniques offer developers a real opportunity to take the lead in optimising business processes for mobility and stake out an app development strategy, while collaborating more closely with other stakeholders.

Whether it’s developing a native app, a browser-based one, or taking a hybrid approach, mobile apps are a unique species and it’s not possible to just attempt to transfer techniques that worked well for desktop application development. The key is to embrace these new methodologies and seek out best practice from partners and providers to find the right applications to empower users, both within and outside the business.

With our thanks to Dion Picco:

Dion Picco is Manager, Product Management at Progress Software.

Digital to Account for One in Five Ad Dollars

Growth in digital 

to remain in double digits through 2015

Worldwide, digital ad spending passed the $100-billion mark for the first time last year, according to new eMarketer estimates, and will increase by a further 15.1% in 2013 to $118.4 billion.

That will put worldwide digital ad spending levels—including online and mobile advertising spending, other than messaging-based formats—at 21.7% of the total spent on ads in all media this year, and on track to account for more than one-quarter of all ad spending by 2016.

North America accounts for the greatest share of all digital ad spending, at 39% as of the end of 2012. As emerging markets in Asia-Pacific and Latin America up spending, however, North America and second-place Western Europe will lose share slightly throughout the forecast period. By 2016, 36.7% of spending will come from North America, and 23.7% from Western Europe. By the same year, Asia-Pacific will contribute 29.8% of all digital ad spend in the world.

The fastest growth in spending will come from the emerging markets of Indonesia, India and Mexico—though that growth is coming from a relatively small base of spending.

As a percent of total ad spending, Western Europe’s digital spending is slightly ahead of North America’s, at 24.9% this year vs. 24.6%. Asia-Pacific is not far behind, though in the world’s lagging region, the Middle East and Africa, just 7% of all ad dollars go to digital media. eMarketer expects this percentage to nearly double by 2016, but the region will still be far behind the near-30% of ad spending devoted to digital in Western Europe and North America.

North America and Western Europe also boast the highest regional levels of digital ad spending per internet user, at $168 and $112 this year, respectively.

eMarketer forms its estimates of digital ad spending around the world based on the analysis of various elements related to the ad spending market, including macro-level economic conditions, historical trends of the advertising market, estimates from other research firms, and consumer internet usage trends.

Article Link : eMARKETER