Collaborate for Better Execution and Effective Decision Making

The power of collaborative management and use of collaborative tools cannot be underestimated in driving business agility. In a rapidly changing business environment, at the higher levels in an organization, leadership may show the path, present the options for direction, and define the boundaries for the decisions that teams will make in the various spheres of influence. Effective leaders push decision making to the edges of the organization where information is more relevant, available, and real time. Management facilitates the creation of the agreed processes and then acts as guardian to ensure that they are not broken, either by a change of context or by those operating the processes. In this role, management does not make process decisions but facilitates the creation of the process and then identifies when the process needs to be upgraded.

As anyone who has worked in a sizable organization knows, there is no guarantee that the organization as a whole will perform efficiently and achieve its goals, even if each employee is individually efficient and every team has a high level of productivity. To achieve enterprise productivity, it is necessary not only for individuals and groups to “do things right” by working productively but also for the enterprise as a whole to “do the right things”—form the right teams, make the right decisions, allocate resources correctly, and effectively coordinate activities across the entire organization.

Most organizations fall short of the optimal level of enterprise productivity because of one or more of the following reasons, all at a great cost to the business:

• They are disconnected from themselves, with various parts of the organization unintentionally working at cross-purposes with each other.
• Information that exists is not getting shared or reused.
• Human talent is not being applied where it is most needed.
• The same problems are being solved repeatedly by multiple groups.

Intelligent collaboration through automated business processes has the ability to alter the course of any important business activity, with a potentially dramatic impact on the financial performance of the business. Whether it is a simple e-mail exchange, a physical or virtual meeting, a task force, or a large-scale project, the activity is inherently collaborative. In fact, collaboration can be defined as the work that takes place among people when a business process is not predetermining how the work should take place. Collaboration is many things: information sharing, brainstorming, problem solving, best practices negotiation, innovation, coordination of activity, alignment of purpose, and so forth. Collaboration is the white space between the business processes; it is the glue that holds an organization together, as well as the lubricant that allows the machinery to keep running.

Let's visualize a dynamic business environment with collaborative tools and systems that enable people to work and collaborate efficiently to perform and execute their tasks. In a sales scenario, Steve, based in the United Kingdom, receives a request for proposal (RFP) from a prospect that he needs to respond to and submit before the due date within four weeks. After initial study of the document, Steve knows that he will have to seek information and content from various team members located in different cities in different countries in multiple time zones. Does it sound familiar to you? Steve identifies his key team members who would provide the content and contribute with their inputs for the proposal. In order to collaborate with his team for this RFP, Steve first creates a wiki page and uploads the RFP document; he then invites his team members to review the RFP. The wiki allows Steve and his team members to review, upload, and edit content remotely, breaking the barrier of geographical locations and time zone differences and enabling him to submit the response to the RFP in time.

In this chapter we evaluate and examine the power of various collaborative tools that help provide business agility in this dynamic business environment. Collaborative tools, popularly known as Web 2.0 technologies, are rapidly transforming user expectations of enterprise systems. Today's knowledge worker is typically overwhelmed by e-mail and conference calls and frustrated by an inability to intuitively derive answers from the applications at hand. But through highly customizable applications and collaborative services such as blogs, wikis, and social communities, businesses can empower their employees with access to information and content in context and optimize the connections among people, information, and applications.

Enterprise 2.0 is the new paradigm that has emerged rapidly and gained adoption at a fast rate. The term was coined by Andrew MacAfee, a professor at MIT. It is all about easy communication and collaboration with other workers, team members, customers, vendors, and clients. The acronym SLATES, which stands for search, links, authorship, tags, extensions, and signaling, refers to the key elements in Enterprise 2.0, which is primarily driven by Web 2.0 technologies, increased socialization, and business cultures that enable companies to collaborate among employees, partners, and customers. Internet computing technology has experienced at least two revolutions. The first wave, referred to as Web 1.0, provided the platform to publish information about products and services to external and internal consumers. Currently, technology is advancing through a second revolution, referred to as Web 2.0. We have already started witnessing the evolution of Web 3.0, which focuses on semantic web and personalization. Web 3.0 is where the computer is generating new information, rather than humans doing so.

Rich Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, tagging, linking, discussions, and RSS (Rich Site Summary/Really Simple Syndication) provide dramatic efficiencies to people working together with global virtual teams, partners, and customers. Social media tools like blogs and microblogs (Twitter) offer new dimensions to publish the content on the Internet via smartphones and smart devices. Enterprise-wide networking, content, and voice collaboration have been the second driver of Enterprise 2.0, moving from data-centric models to people-driven applications. Web 2.0 allows for the collection and dissemination of increasing amounts of intelligence, and social applications are bringing data to the right people, allowing them to collaborate in real time and in a virtual environment. The third key to Enterprise 2.0 is emerging new business cultures, which are the most important part in the adoption of Enterprise 2.0. Social applications rely on the people, process, and technology, and therefore it becomes important to obtain senior management participation and support. This also enables senior management to get real-time feedback from employees, partners, and customers via chat, forums, and blogs. It eliminates all barriers and bureaucracy within the organization and brings transparency.

In order to deploy and have successful implementation of Enterprise 2.0, all these tools and artifacts need to be integrated and implemented on a highly secured and robust platform.

Use of Wiki in Enterprise-Wide Team Collaboration

Wikis are an example of collaboration software that solves all these problems with ease of use; they are simple enough for nontechnical employees to adopt quickly. Wikis (wiki meaning “fast” in Hawaiian) are a promising new technology that supports conversational knowledge creation and sharing. A wiki is a collaboratively created and iteratively improved set of web pages, together with the software that manages the web pages. Inspired by Apple's HyperCard programming environment, the first wiki software was created in 1995 by Ward Cunningham as a way to manage the Portland Pattern Repository's site content. The best-known example of a wiki is Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia that is written and maintained by anybody who feels like it. A wiki is a website where every page can be shared and edited in a web browser with secured access and validation.

Conversational knowledge creation emerged as the most popular way for organizations to create knowledge, largely in the context of online or virtual communities. In conversational knowledge creation, individuals create and share knowledge through dialogue with questions and answers. The conversational model of knowledge creation is different from other models, where knowledge is created through abstraction or aggregation of information, as in data or text mining.

Discussion forums are a key online conversational knowledge exchange and the core technology for many online communities. The leading online community platform, such as ezboard/Yuku, manages the discussions of millions of communities. Instant messaging is promoted through a number of free services, including ICQ and AOL Instant Messenger, each of which serves tens of millions of users. Instant messages enable multiple conversational modes from one-to-many to many-to-many.

The wiki's uniqueness lies both in its software and in the use of the software by collaborating members. It enables web documents to be authored collectively. It uses a simple markup scheme, usually a simplified version of HTML. Wiki content is not reviewed by any editor or coordinating body prior to its publication. Creating and editing wiki pages are necessarily a simple activity. The wiki author uses a web-enabled form field to enter the comment he or she wishes to publish. Authors can use plaintext or often a simplified markup language, although more sophisticated implementations (e.g., TikiWiki) may also allow the use of HTML. Wikis use a common repository (i.e., a database server), an application server that runs the wiki software, and a web server that serves the pages and facilitates the web-based interaction. Wikis are thus available at any time and in any place where there is web connectivity, and have a single common knowledge repository. As a result, they enable and empower multiple users to collaborate whenever and wherever on the same centrally stored knowledge product, and are able to see and use the entire work product. The basic unit of information in a wiki is a web page. In a wiki, if there is a mismatch between knowledge concepts and wiki pages, it can be adjusted either by breaking the content into multiple pages or by combining multiple pages into one.

Wikis as groupware stress the collaborative capabilities of wikis in areas where knowledge may be changing dynamically or where viewpoints differ about the knowledge.

We can very easily implement and use wikis across enterprises in the following 15 ways:

1. To-do list. A wiki helps in creating the most productive list, the to-do list.
2. Project management. A wiki can be a great way to plan and manage a project, from conception to completion. Assign tasks, make a time line, add notes, paste images, and incorporate other media—whatever you need for a project; there's no simpler way to organize it all.
3. Operations manuals. Documentation such as user and operational manuals can be created online and updated when things change, so that anyone can view the updated version at any time. Things change so quickly these days that a printed version of a manual is outdated as soon as it's printed and distributed.
4. Checklists. Wikis can be used for creating the checklist.
5. Plan an event. Conferences, weddings, off-site meetings, parties—events of all kinds have been planned with wikis, because they're perfect for that purpose. Multiple people can access the plans, create checklists, and add notes, ideas, images, contact info, and much more.
6. Log client work. Track client work either by hours spent on a project or by number of projects completed along with dates, rates, and other notes.
7. Track invoices. Wikis help in tracking invoices to each client, the work done, dates, rates, and so on, along with when the invoices were submitted, when they're due, and when they are paid.
8. Notes and snippets. Web workers take notes, pull snippets from pages, and save images all the time, and yet it can be hard to keep track of all of them. A wiki will help in keeping them at one location.
9. Goals. A wiki helps in setting and measuring goals.
10. Contacts. A wiki can be an easy and quick way to add contacts and find them at any time and any place you need them.
11. Workspace. Besides being a place to keep notes and snippets and images together, a wiki helps in keeping articles, reports, and the like together.
12. FAQs. A wiki helps in publishing FAQs to eliminate frequent calls by customers.
13. Collaboration. Changes are made and tracked, and collaborators can revert to previous versions if necessary.
14. Reference. A wiki helps in quick reference to lists, documents, codes, instructions, and the like that may be referred to regularly.
15. One place for everything. One of the best reasons to have a wiki is because it can do all of the preceding tasks, and more. It's versatile—more so than most other tools on the web.

New technologies such as Web 2.0, wiki, chat, forum, tags, and RSS have enabled teams to have effective communication and content collaboration. Many software applications based on these technologies have attempted to address these challenges, targeting different consumers across industry sectors.

Central Desktop: Powerful Tool for Effective Team Collaboration

Central Desktop is one of the many software solutions in this segment. It has drawn attention due to the fact that the Obama campaign used it to manage precinct captains—volunteers who get out the vote and spread the campaign message in specific precincts across the state. Although it might seem that choosing the right software depends on several factors and the team's preference within the enterprise, there are some general guidelines that apply to all, such as:

• Ease of installation
• User accounts (so name is automatically attached to all changes you make)
• Page change subscription by e-mail and RSS
• Page history and stored revisions
• Document attachments
• Page edit locking
• An easy-to-remember syntax

As per its website (www.centraldesktop.com), Central Desktop claims the following:

Central Desktop delivers a pure web-based social technology platform for next-generation business teams to interact, share, and manage their daily work activities from anywhere at any time. Built collaboratively over four years with direct feedback from its users, Central Desktop's collaboration software platform provides enterprise-grade functionality without enterprise solution resource requirements. Founded in 2005 by Isaac Garcia and Arnulf Hsu, Central Desktop is a privately-held company located in Pasadena, California and offer[s its] software services SaaS (Software as a Service) based Social Technology Platform.

It is extremely easy to create a workspace and upload the document one wishes to collaborate on with the team members in real time. With the platform's web meetings and audioconferencing features, one can also collaborate with customers or partners by voice, sharing the desktop, or remote presentation. It offers integration with Skype (with voice supported), Yahoo!, MSN Messenger, AIM, ICQ, and Jabber, centralizing all communication, and also provides an option to integrate with Microsoft Outlook. In order to collaborate with a virtual team, one can create, edit, and store online docs and spreadsheets in a secure workspace environment in real time.

Central Desktop also offers the ability to track document history and revisions. Its extensive search feature allows for full text and document search for fast retrieval, even if it's in a document, a conversation thread, or a different workspace. As this application is based on software as a service (SaaS), which does not require any local installation or setup, it becomes ready to use up front and provides the ability to access workspaces from anywhere. Although mobile browser-based access is possible with a smartphone, it's a bit cramped and not technically supported currently. Considering the fast adoption and use rate of smartphones such as iPhone and BlackBerry devices, they need to address and provide the integration.

Central Desktop is ideally suited for project collaboration and management. One can create a variety of workspaces, each with a slightly different feature set. These workspaces are all very useful, and include a wiki workspace, a project management workspace, a public workspace (no login required), a user forum workspace, a corporate blog workspace, and a database workspace that allows the capture of data with a web-based front end, which is very useful for surveys, client questions, or just general data capture. I think the most powerful part of Central Desktop is the reporting module, which allows the creation of custom, ad hoc reports on all data in one or any workspace managed in Central Desktop. This is useful for all kinds of tasks, from executive status reporting to day-to-day management of a project.

For project management in particular, Central Desktop is one of the best lightweight solutions. One can easily create tasks or task lists and assign each task to a milestone. Unlike some other products, one can assign due dates and priorities at a task level, which is incredibly important when managing even the simplest milestones. The file management interface is interesting, and allows setting it up in a familiar file folder hierarchy, which helps in managing lots of files. The ability to check in and check out files for version control and to capture all comments about the files as they are being discussed is really helpful. The project dashboard is easy to use and informative. Overall, I think the only things that Central Desktop is missing are the more complex project management features such as task dependencies and resource-leveling features that the more expensive solutions offer.

Mindjet (Spigit): Great Tool for Collaborative Ideation

Spigit, acquired by Mindjet, is one of the innovative collaborative solutions giving organizations the platform they need to make sustainable, ongoing innovation a part of everyday work. Employees and customers have a community and a rich set of features for sharing and collaborating around ideas. Managers have visibility into the ideas that will become the next innovations. As per their website (http://www.spigit.com/), Spigit integrates the collaboration tools of social software with traditional enterprise work flow and quantifiable metrics to bridge the innovation gap, such as:

• Source ideas through focused innovation campaigns and on an open-ended basis.
• Drive the front end of innovation with contributions, assessments, and interactions by community members.
• Collaborate with a full suite of social software tools: forums, wikis, blogs, reviews, voting, and tagging.
• Leverage social network's diversity of viewpoints to refine and build out ideas rapidly.
• Surface the best ideas, track the idea portfolio, and identify key contributors through analytics and administrative controls.
• Build for the enterprise with role- and event-based work flow, integration with internal systems, application programming interfaces (APIs), and high configurability.

Connecting ideas with colleagues and with management's objectives is both a revolutionary opportunity and a significant challenge for organizations. Every day, employees generate ideas for new businesses, products, and process improvements. Enabling others to collaborate on these ideas, and surfacing those with the most merit, is a powerful new approach to accelerating internal innovation.

InnovationSpigit is the enterprise platform built for internal innovation communities. InnovationSpigit integrates emergent social collaboration with traditional work flow and analytics.

InnovationSpigit features include:

• An intuitive and engaging user experience
• Configurable idea templates that support graphics, videos, file attachments, and links
• Work flow through idea stages, role-based requirements, and criteria for idea advancement
• Full suite of social software tools: forums, blogs, wikis, social profiles, activity streams, and tags
• Advanced analytics engine for finding the best ideas among all contributions
• Dashboard providing real-time updates on activity, hotspots, and employee contributions
• Idea trading market that allows employees to buy and sell ideas
• Participation-based currency with redemption for rewards through internal or external stores
• Enterprise authentication through LDAP/Active Directory and single sign-on
• InnovationSpigit widgets that can be embedded in SharePoint, portals, intranets, and other applications
• Full set of APIs for deeper enterprise application integration

IdeaSpigit features include:

• Customizable site skins to reflect company branding
• Easy access via customer self-registration
• Configurable idea templates for simple text ideas or more advanced media support
• Lightweight voting and ratings that capture crowd sentiment
• Discussion forums for each idea as well as site wide
• Advanced analytics engine that surfaces the best ideas among all contributions
• Optional sharing of ideas via popular social media sites
• Multiple communities that can be established for different businesses
• Engagement events to drive participation and ideas for specific areas
• Dashboard providing real-time updates on activity, hotspots, and customer contributions
• Full set of APIs for integration with other applications and sites

In order to meet these challenges, large enterprises are considering enterprise-class solutions that meet key criteria such as open standards, technology platform and architecture, ease of use, security, total cost of ownership, flexibility to customize and adapt to changing business needs, minimal learning curve and training, shorter implementation, and all under a portal framework. Enterprise-wide deployment must consider consolidation of content repository and virtualization of hardware, database, and application to eliminate any downtime and redundancy.

Oracle WebCenter: Enterprise-Wide User Experience Tool

WebCenter makes it easy for users to get the information they need and to collaborate with others to make the necessary changes to business applications and processes. It provides a single, modern framework for the development of all styles of websites, portals, and composite applications. It provides a composer or workspace for users and site administrators to highly personalize the behavior, look, and feel of the portal to meet user needs. It offers direct integration with Oracle's Enterprise Business Dictionary and provides prepackaged integration with applications, content and rich media, business processes, and business intelligence applications in an integrated architecture. With an integrated set of WebCenter tools and services, it empowers end users and IT to build and deploy next-generation collaborative applications and portals that take advantage of the creativity and intellect of every user to improve internal and external business processes for effective collaboration and integration in a real-time environment.

Enterprise-class collaboration software is making an effort to encapsulate all these tools and features within suites under a flexible framework and architecture. Oracle WebCenter Suite is one of the enterprise-class solutions providing all these technologies such as wiki, tags, RSS, chat, forum, bulletin, whiteboard, presence, workspace integrating with all other widgets such as Outlook, smartphones, and the like. All departmental and virtual team-level applications for collaboration will need enterprise application-level integration and consolidation for better manageability and security, and therefore large organizations need enterprise-class solutions.

Rapid growth of wikis, blogs, and intranet portals experienced internally at Oracle has challenged the internal IT team for their manageability, security, and centralized content repository. It has also had a severe impact on the cost to provide separate servers, database, and backup recovery. Therefore, tools like WebCenter offer comprehensive solutions for enterprise-wide deployment on a secured platform.

Enterprise knowledge workers are invariably engaged in starting, moving forward, or completing a process, assignment, or enterprise work flow, including actions that need to be performed on a regular and ongoing basis. This could be preparing to present to a new client, opportunity updating in sales forecasting, customer support case resolution in customer relationship management, general ledger reconciliation in finance, or bringing a new team member up to speed on a project. Many actions driven from enterprise applications or systems of record are inherently collaborative, and for any deviation from the ideal process (typically conceptualized when a specific enterprise application was installed and configured), collaboration is required. This collaboration takes place outside of the application, and is typically not recorded completely or in one location. This means that it is not available for later reference to provide understanding as to how the decisions were made, when an exception reoccurs, or to identify when a process or policy change may be needed. If it is in an activity stream, entries will have swept by, or as e-mail, pieces of the collaboration are caught in individual inboxes (depending on the whims of the individuals involved). Social network posts, voice, and instant messaging (IM) discussions are typically lost forever.

Without a record of the previous and ongoing discussions, it is difficult for participants to garner sufficient context for their deliberations and decisions, especially if they are brought into the process late. At best, a great deal of time is lost educating new stakeholders. At worst, decisions are made without critical information that was available elsewhere in the organization. Current software-based collaboration solutions also require that the user choose the communication in advance—picking up a phone, sending an e-mail, microblogging—before determining if that is the appropriate mechanism or group for the discussion. This is exactly counter to an ideal face-to-face interaction where additional people, voice, text, documents, presentations, and whiteboards can be brought to bear as needed or desired. This results in a need to replay or reschedule discussions again and again until the right combination of context, history, tools, and people is found.

Enterprises have begun to turn to systems of engagement (SOEs), modeled after consumer social tools, which provide an environment in which their staff willingly spends time and which allow the staff to communicate, participate, find, and offer expertise and broaden their networks to enrich and improve both their work deliverables as well as their personal engagement with the business. Traditional systems of record reflect the reverse of systems of engagement: The individual sees little or no value to themselves through participation, and they are of restricted personal interest and are generally treated as a burden to maintain. The ideal is the easy maintenance of system-of-record data, providing managerial and corporate insight, with the communication of valuable changes or updates being efficiently disseminated to appropriate but potentially unknowing individuals throughout the organization. A cohesive, designed interaction between the systems of record and engagement offers that potential.

What is needed, then, is a solution for handling enterprise collaboration that reflects the best of consumer-style social models, preserves both context and history, allows the widening of the participant set as needed, and provides the appropriate media required for a given communication. It also must preserve the ease and fluidity of e-mail, IM, and short message service (SMS), and stream posts while tightly integrating with enterprise applications and software infrastructure. It must extend into as well as out of systems of record, placing the collaboration in context and equally bringing the key record data of the context into the collaborative application. Otherwise, it risks becoming yet another enterprise work flow application with its own set of exceptions (project management applications are notorious for this failing) or just another inbox, a further silo of collaboration data to deal with.

Oracle Social Network: Cloud-Based Enterprise-Class Collaborative System

Oracle Social Network addresses the collaboration gap through stream-based conversations that are designed to capture information from people, enterprise applications, and business processes to facilitate collaboration between individual users and teams of people both within and across enterprises. As a system of engagement, individuals can collaborate, network, drive decisions, and update data, both in the focused pursuit of business objectives as well as in the serendipitous discovery of information and expertise.

With a unique integration of communication, coordination, and social functions into a single tool, Oracle Social Network enhances productivity through contextual collaboration, as a stand-alone tool, or embedded into enterprise applications. Extending beyond the organizational boundaries to connect the enterprise with its suppliers, partners, and customers, Oracle Social Network enables social networking without the noise.

By socializing enterprise applications, business processes, and content, Oracle Social Network enables the social business. By providing a collaboration and networking platform that connects applications, processes, and content to people as well as to each other, Oracle Social Network provides a system that engages the individual rather than being yet another system that demands action. This system allows for cross-enterprise knowledge rather than adding to the silos of lost information.

In Oracle Social Network, collaboration is based on a context that evolves in form, structure, and content, as dictated by the particular needs of a given collaboration. Within that context, Oracle Social Network provides a rich set of tools to choose from. These tools provide for communication, coordination, content management, organization, decision making, and analysis—all essential aspects of collaboration. Every collaborative interaction will evolve differently; therefore, the Oracle Social Network tools utilized will change with each interaction. Some interactions will evolve to represent work spreading over the course of years and involving a large, distributed team, whereas others may involve a few people and some may not evolve at all. Regardless, all collaborative contexts are built from the same parts, utilize the same concepts, and start the same way. The principle of graceful escalation is that you use only the tools and structure you need, so you incur only the complexity you need.

Most communication has an extremely short shelf life; that is, it may not be very useful a few hours or even a few minutes from now. But as we do not know when communication will need to turn into collaboration, it is best to provide the capabilities, latent and available, and let the conversation evolve as needed.

Real-time interactions and presence information as a core capability throughout Oracle Social Network give the participants a sense of social engagement and the application a sense of life that goes beyond even consumer applications today. While real-time communications are being added to networking applications in the form of chat, every interaction within Oracle Social Network happens and is reflected without refreshes in real time. Individuals can see the flow of updates, the volume of participation, their friends' and colleagues' focus, and the trending groups and themes, but remain able to drive decisions (albeit with reduced latency) with all the required and up-to-date information available.

Oracle Social Network enables business users to find and collaborate with the right people within their enterprise and across enterprises—for example, with suppliers, partners, and customers—using information from the human resources system and their own private social network. Oracle Social Network enables business users to collaborate with each other using a broad range of collaboration tools, including personal profiles, groups, activity feeds, status updates, discussion forums, document sharing, cobrowsing and editing, instant messaging, e-mail, and web conferencing. Oracle Social Network is seamlessly integrated with Oracle Fusion Applications, business intelligence, and business processes, allowing users to receive real-time information feeds from these systems and to collaborate and resolve business issues quickly and effectively, including updating applications and business processes from Oracle Social Network.

Oracle Social Network is designed to allow mobile users to stay connected always and to participate in business conversations by providing native applications on a variety of devices, including iPhones, iPads, and Android devices, as well as a modern, easy-to-use browser interface. Oracle Social Network is designed to meet corporate demands for security, privacy, and information protection by providing each enterprise and its users with a virtualized and private instance for collaboration with configurable retention and audit policies for traceability.

Oracle Social Network helps salespeople to identify potential prospects, build effective teams, prepare convincing sales presentations, resolve issues with customer service and contracts, collaborate with partners on joint opportunities, and build lasting relationships with customers.

Oracle Social Network helps marketing teams to design more creative marketing campaigns, target the right customers and partners, and collaborate with sales teams to generate the highest-quality leads.

Oracle Social Network helps human resources professionals and managers to collaborate on workforce planning and staffing, build effective compensation and benefits programs, set goals and objectives, and drive more effective talent management processes. Oracle Social Network can be used by project managers and project teams to build effective project plans, collaborate on project tasks, resolve issues and change requests, and track and update project milestones. Oracle Social Network provides personalized and configurable alerts that enable users to stay informed of actions but to filter out superfluous chatter, enabling them to pay attention to important information.

Businesses are offered a plethora of choices in the collaborative platforms and technology solutions. These solutions on the cloud with a scale-out model will be more appropriate for enabling digital businesses.

CIO-CMO Collaborative Alignment

Digital business success stories share the common feature of relationship management being a core competency that enables business agility. Here we focus on the relationships between the chief marketing officer (CMO) and the chief information officer (CIO) in delivering the business value of IT. The best practices for a CIO-CMO partnership in terms of digital business management are viewed through the lens of business agility readiness.

Use cases presented are in conjunction with the “CMO-CIO Partnership for Collaborative Marketing Agility” scenario. This business value theme is developed using a strategy of innovation for CMO-CIO alignment around big data analytics based on collaborative marketing best practices. A Business Agility Readiness Roadmap, using a balanced scorecard as a framework to describe and measure the alignment gap, provides the context of evolution from a system of record to a system of engagement. Such a tool may be used to assess how to best vet the internal/external collaboration activities associated with management of big data for driving prescriptive analytics. This is a critical success factor in managing the digital business for competitive advantage of the business ecosystem as a whole. CMO insights focus on how CMOs may leverage their understanding of these converging technologies to communicate better with their customers through the media they prefer, engage prospective customers through common interests, and utilize information to build stronger, more personal and more lasting relationships.

The following CMO insights are offered by Blake Yeaman, who is a seasoned marketing and information management veteran. Blake has decades of experience as a leading marketing executive and consultant. Here he shares his lessons learned as marketing chief at Hornblower, Inc.

In the next chapter, we further expand and discuss mobility and use of mobile and smart devices that have changed and revolutionized the current business environment, thanks to Steve Jobs of Apple, who created iPhones and iPads that revolutionized the whole new concept of technology convergence of voice communication, e-mail communication, video communication, music, navigation, payment, and many more in one device. This technology has surpassed many innovations of the recent past and opened the door for unimaginable creative applications and usage that will further accelerate business agility.