Ideation solutions are like brainstorming on steroids

One of the most interesting aspects of collaborative strategies and tools is the promise of co-creating solutions with customers, partners, citizens and anyone else that your business or government agency interacts with.  The promise, of course, can only be achieved when goals have been clearly defined and articulated to all involved.  Success is not guaranteed, hard work and careful planning is required.  For those who have their act together the benefits will be seen.

You might be asking yourself, what is John talking about when he says, “Ideation”.  Simply put, ideation is a strategy, leveraging appropriate tactics and tools, whereby the company/agency collaborates with its customers/citizens to decide what products, features, services, are needed and the relative priority of those needs.  Ideation can be accomplished on a small scale through customer advisory groups or on a large scale as the US Federal Government is doing with it’s Federal Agency dashboard (http://www.opengovtracker.com/).
 
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution the high-level approach will look something like:

• Determine if an ideation solution  will help you reach your business/agency goals.  While any business/agency could make a case for an ideation solution the reality is we live in tough economic times.  Determine if this is the most important investment for you to make now.
• Set expectations, yours, your peers, your management, your teams.Be clear that results will come but that they will time.  There are very few overnight successes.
• Find a trusted partner.  Successfully creating an ideation strategy requires understanding your business processes, your goals, your people, as well as the software that you are going to deploy.
• While defining your ideation process consider these questions:
  • How will you promote/market this to your customers?
  • What expectations should participants have for their ideas?  Will all be considered or only those with a certain # of votes?
  • How transparent will you be?  The Federal Agency Dashboard is an example of a great dashboard, do you want something similar or less visible in terms of high-level metrics?
  • How will ROI be measured and how visible will this metric be?
  • Will you allow anonymous submissions, voting, comments or do participants have to be registered members of the community?
  • How often will ideas be reviewed internally?  How will process be measured internally and how will results be communicated to your community?
  • What reward system will be setup?
  • Have I mentioned that I feel strongly you should err on the side of transparency?
  • Measure results often.

Your customers, your citizens, know what they want from their relationship with you.  An Ideation solution gives them a channel to share their thoughts, both positive and negative.  Give them the platform.  Listen.  Engage.  Make changes.  Not only will you improve your business, you will improve your entire marketplace.
 
John

Looking for legal guidance for your social media efforts

I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.  If I did I would really love to be a Perry Mason type of lawyer, the man was gifted…    Oh well, we’ll discuss my acting desires another day, for now, just a couple of quick thoughts on the legal side of your social media efforts.

The lawyers are working through the legal issues and a lot of it is still up in the air.  As you might remember, I asked a semi-random group of lawyers for their opinions and they shared their thoughts on who really owns your social media account.  While attending a Government 2.0 Unconference this past weekend I learned about the Massachusetts Legal Guidance toolkit, check it out.  Note:

• This is written from the State agency perspective and is meant to give guidance to legal counsel in other agencies.  However, it is also a very good starting point for those in private sector and worth a review.
• The guidelines note the need to have guidelines for employee use of social media or corporate accounts, for private account used at work, and for private accounts used away from the office  The more time I spend within the collaboration space the more I am convinced that this is necessary.
• Record retention expectations are covered. Your business, whether mandated by Federal regulations or not should strongly consider maintaining archived copies of all corporate social media activities.

Dig in and let me know what your thoughts are on this topic.

John

Quick! Call 911 to get the 411 on 311

There is a lot of discussion about the need for governments to become more open, more transparent, sharing data with citizens.  311 services, anything considered non-critical services, are getting a lot of publicity now with Washington DC and San Francisco making big public splashes around their open 311 efforts.  Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO, said this about Open 311:

“Too often, people grumble that their complaints about government – be it city, county, state, or federal – get swallowed by the bureaucracy.  Open 311 is an answer to that problem, placing the role of service evaluator and service dispatcher in the power of citizens’ hands.”

These open datasets give opportunity for businesses to build applications around, for citizens to get more valuable information from their government, and for government at all levels to better manage individual and group performance.  That may sound like a lot to expect, but it’s a sunny Sunday morning and anything is possible.

Before the details John, why should I care?

There are several reasons to care, of course, but let me start with MONEY.  Do you have any idea how your dollars are being spent?  Probably not.  Outside of a handful of people in any town no one, not even the State government, has a clear picture of where those dollars are going.  Each town, each city, reports different data in different formats and it is nearly impossible to find anything from the information being provided. 

Performance.  How are the towns really doing with their core services?  The data, turned into useful information, enables transparency.  Potholes, the gateway drug for citizen engagement, are one of the better examples people point to.  Citizens report potholes, the data given to geomapping services that show where the holes are, how long since they were reported, etc…  Town governments can point at this data, available to everyone, and ask hard questions about why things are not being resolved quickly enough. 

CRM providers, software developers, a heads up.  Helping towns and cities manage this data is a huge opportunity.  There is a major need for those that can help cities and towns better track this data so that it becomes actionable information (CRM), that serves the data to other application providers (web service developers and third party development shops).  Take a simple example from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.  The Department simply provided raw bus schedule information in machine readable format (XML)to anyone that wanted to use it.  Within a month, several applications were built to leverage this data at no costs to the Department or to citizens.  Hey, anyone want to help me write an iPhone application for my blog?

Alright, I see the need, tell me a little more

Yes, I know, you are about to fire up Visual Studio or Eclipse and start cranking out some code.  Slow down, though, here are a few important points before you get started:

• Open 311 is not really a standard.  You can check out the Open 311 site, but keep in mind it is really the result of Washington DC, San Francisco, and some talented developers working to define the starting point of what could one day grow up to becoming a real standard.
• Along the same lines, I have already suggested to Kevin Novak, EGOV Chair at W3C, that they should consider taking ownership and making this into a real standard.   If W3C takes ownership we could see this grow up to becoming a truly useful standard, similar to what has happened with HTML and other key web-related standards.
• Small towns and cities are lucky if they have 1 IT person who could work on this effort.  States and Federal Government are really not much better off when it comes to having money to spend.  The smart vendors will look at alternative pricing models where they help these cash-strapped towns create and maintain Open 311 data at little or no cost but then take a piece of  the revenue from application developers.  Does this require a new way of thinking?  Absolutely.
• State Governments will need to take a stronger role in demanding standard reporting formats and information.  Each town provides data in different formats (PDF, CSV, etc..) with different pieces of data being reported.  Standardization must be demanded from the top.
• Washington DC and San Francisco must look at Open 311 as more than a showy political statement and continue to be thought and technology leaders, open sourcing their efforts.  I look forward to seeing them open source their code on sites like github.com..
• There will be resistence from many directions on providing this information.  Small towns that are struggling will fear looking bad, potentially hurting political careers.  Again, the State Governments must demand it.

Will this make a difference in our lives?  Possibly, but only if the points above are taken into account.  If not, this will just be another great idea that ultimately goes the route of the Sony BetaMax.

Finally, what can the private sector learn from this?

There is great opportunity in the public sector for those creative application development shops, for CRM vendors, and for others.  However, the is not the gold rush of the mid 1800s.  While there is great need there is little direct revenue to be found.  However, look to leverage these opportunities for indirect revenue opportunities.  For example, if you can build mash-ups that tie public information with private information you might find some very interesting, lucrative, applications.  Be creative and be smart.  Who knows, you might just create the next big thing.

John

Government 2.0 in person

I am attending an unconference today, focused on how to leverage open solutions, technologies, social media, and data to truly benefit citizens.  The concept of the unconference is that it is created on-the-fly by the participants who come to the unconference.  Sessions are proposed, and then delivered, by those that have come together to discuss the topic.

The unconference is at the Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, MA, and has participants from local town governments, state government, businesses, students, and even curious bloggers like myself.  I’ll write more about the various topics that are covered over the next couple of days, stay tuned, it should be very educational.

John

RightNow Technologies issues the cloud challenge and it is a good start

RightNow announced a new licensing model today, one that is part marketing hype and part true value add.  I applaud them for both efforts and wanted to take a moment to highlight the good, the bad, and where I would like to see this go in the future.  Keep in mind that I am a CTO at a company that offers SAAS services and I have delivered on the SAAS model since the beginning of 2000.  In other words, I understand the challenges of the vendor side as well as of the buyer side.

What is the Cloud Challenge?

RightNow has clearly laid out the cloud challenge on its web site and I would urge you to read through it.  At a high-level, however, it addresses the following problems with SAAS pricing:

• Shelfware.  Too often customers end up buying more product or usage than needed.  For example, a company may need 1500 licenses of a product during peak season but only uses 1000 licenses the rest of the year.  The problem, most vendors will force the buyer to buy 1500 licenses to account for max usage, leaving unused licenses on the shelf during non-peak season.
• Lack of certainty in pricing.  Hidden costs, ever-changing prices, they are the negatives you must be aware of when buying SAAS software. 
• Contracts lock-in.  Want a better deal?  Buy three years of the product and you’ll get a discount.  We’ve all seen this (and yes, have worked at companies that sell this way) .  Lock-in, while great for vendors, leaves customers unable to change vendors when their needs change.

These are real issues with the traditional SAAS licensing model. 

How is RightNow meeting this challenge?

The details are on their site, but the key points are:

• Annual usage alignment up/down (No more shelfware).
• 3 year renewal price cap, 3 year of price caps. RightNow customers will know what they will be paying for the next 6 years.
• Annual termination for convenience.  Customers can walk away annually, no long-term contracts.
• Annual pools of capacity (rollover usage).
• Cash credits if RightNow does not deliver on committed SLAs.

A quick complaint

My one complaint is that the opening and closing videos hammered on the competition: Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAP.  RightNow, if you believe you are delivering real value you do not need to bash the competition.  Differentiate, yes.  RightNow’s CEO, Greg Gianforte, noted, and I paraphrase:

Oracle is the poster child for bad customer relationships.. Not just oracle, its offspring as well… Salesforce.com

Greg, the challenge and licensing model you are promoting stand on their own.  Enough said.

This is good, but…

Great first step, but, if you want to really want to change the world:

• Work to bring other vendors into the game.  This is an undesirable model for most vendors.  As you noted, Enterprise SAAS Software providers will probably go under if they adopt this model.  That means…. drum roll please, that it’s not yet right.  Consider:
  • An independent group made of up buyers and sellers should be created  to hammer out a framework for SAAS pricing.  Ray Wang of the Altimeter group would be a great leader based upon his work with the SAAS Bill of Rights.
  • This group should include major and minor vendors including RightNow, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and others.  This group should include a mix of Enterprise and SMB customers.
  • Call me, would love to take part.
  • The pricing framework should make sure vendors and customers win.
• Add a non-negotiation clause to your challenge.  To truly reduce buying cycle time, a noted goal, state prices as they are, no negotiation.
• To support the above, ensure pricing is flexible enough to meet the needs of small and large customers.
• Support the model with a public facing dashboard highlighting the following:
  • If you do not offern a non-negotiation model put your average prices on the dashboard.  If the price is per seat, document your average cost per seat (that customers are paying at that moment) so that your customers will know if they are getting a good deal.
  • Document average amount of shelfware.  In other words, document on the dashboard the number of rollover seat months.
  • Document renewal numbers.  How satisfied are customers with your service?
• Take the shelfware revenue and either give back to your customers or to a charity.

Keep in mind, I like the first step.  However, it is not yet a game changer, more work is needed.  What do others think?

John

Keep learning via Twitter Chats

If you spend time on Twitter you should consider participating in the weekly chats that take place.  These chats, covering topics from Social Media to PR to Open Government, are providing a number of benefits, benefits you might be missing out on:

• Learning, of course.  I have been learning from thought leaders and visionaries around the globe on a variety of topics.  I have learned more from these conversations than I learned years ago in college.  Of course, it was hard to carry those rock tablets from cave to cave bck then.
• Learning about job opportunities.  These chats are focused but also allow for side conversations and banter with jobs occasionally being discussed.
• Finding mentors.  This chats include people who are at all stages of their careers, from the beginning to the end.

While this lt is far from a complete list, it does cover some of the chats I know about, what other ones should I add:

• journchat on Monday at 8 PM ET.  All things journalism are discussed.
• pr20chat on Tuesday at 8 PM ET. All things PR are discussed.
• custserv and sbbuzz on Tuesday at 9 PM ET.  Customer service and social business items are covered by these groups.
• IMCchat and smallbizchat on Wednesday at 8 PM ET.  Integrated Marketing Communication and Small business issues are covered during these chats.
• localgovchat on Wednesday at 9 PM ET.  A new chat, focused on making local government more transparent, more open.
• ict4d on Friday at 12 PM ET.  Discussions about leveraging information and communication technologies in some of the poorest areas of the world.

Let me know what else I am missing.

John

Two thumbs way up! INgage Networks and MSU

While I have known about this partnership for a while it was great to see INgage Networks and Michigan State University announce their partnership yesterday.  I asked Kim Kobza, CEO of INgage Networks, how the projects will be selected and how they will decide success, here is what he shared:

“As part of our agreement we jointly establish project goals and measurement criteria for all projects. The measurements are output driven (as opposed to simply measuring network activity).  Measurement is always put in terms of cost savings, continuous business improvement and building institutional memory that enables a clear understanding of solution possibilities that lead to better, more effective decision making.”

I am excited about this project for several reasons, including:

• It is more important than ever that the public and private sector work together.  These initiatives, if successful, will help bring jobs to a very depressed area of the country.
• Smart businesses understand the value of reaching college students and sharing their solutions, their strategies, their philosophies.  As MSU students graduate and begin looking for social solutions I will guarantee that INgage Networks enter their mind before solutions from other vendors. A smart move by INgage, a move the competition should make as well.
• Students, educators, local and state government, are all going to learn how to strategically deploy collaborative networks.  The people in this partnership will see past the hype and into the true power of these networks. As these students enter the workforce they will bring this past learning to their new organizations.  In 5 years, the power of collaborative networks, of Social CRM, of IMC, will become the norm.  These students will help lead the way.

What do you think about this partnership?

John

The dichotomy that is Comcast customer service

Comcast is one of those companies on the leading edge of leveraging social media for delivering high levels of customer service.  In fact, I recently gave them praise for quickly helping me resolve a networking problem in my house entirely through Twitter.

Sometimes, however, even companies that understand customer service fall down when it comes to the basics, as can be seen by what is taking place in my small home town of Winthrop, Massachusetts.  On Thursday afternoon my father in-law lost TV reception in his house.  We called and, after navigating through the IVR system, reached a message stating that there were known problems in our area, stay tuned.  It is now Sunday night, no TV service.  This, in isolation, is not a big deal, however, as you start to dig in, this is a major failure by Comcast, a failure that I hope is addressed both in restitution to the customers affected and also in the processes and systems where failures have occurred.  Lets dig in:

• My father in-law has called Comcast more than a dozen times and I have called for him as well.  Each time, people have no knowledge of the past calls, that his house was added to a broader ticket.  He has had his box reset, been told it is a broad problem, been told to wait.  No information on when this problem will be fixed.
• The IVR system forces you down a path where you enter your phone # and, if you answer the prompts correctly, are always taken to the automated response that tells you to wait.  You must answer the questions incorrectly to reach a real person.
• As my father in-law has chatted with neighbors he has learned that many of them are dealing with their own television outages.  Some of these failures have gone on for a week or longer, each of them waiting, calling multiple times a day, no resolution.
• One of the times I called for my father in-law I had him added to a ticket covering multiple homes, being told that Winthrop was having a large outage, ongoing, no clear time for fixing.  If I wanted to call another department I could discuss a refund.  What?!?!?!  Comcast, you are failing to deliver service, failing to deliver answers, and failing to simply reach out and take care of those customers….  This is not acceptable.

Please understand, I have nothing against Comcast or its people.  However, these failures are indicative of a lack of process, poor system integration, and a misunderstanding of how to service your customers.  Comcast:

• Please let me know how many customers in Winthrop are down and the total # of days they have been without service.
• What is your plan for proactively solving the problem and “making things right” with these customers?
• Lets sit down and discuss where your system or process failures are happening.  If handled properly we can work together to fix these problems.
• I know you want to deliver great service.  The efforts of people like Frank Eliason show me that you’re on the right track.  Lets see if we can work to make failures like this a thing of the past.

John

Meeting people where they are, the State Department does it right

I chatted with Bill May, the State Department  Director of  the Office of Innovative Engagement, on Friday.  The State Department is on the leading edge of collaboration, of social media, understanding the need to balance engagement, transparency, security, and common sense.  As expected, Bill understands all of this well, businesses and other agencies can learn from the examples Bill shared.

When the President was planning a trip to Ghana it was important to lay the groundwork that the American President was coming and that he was looking to engage, to hear from people and to answer their questions, concerns.  In the United States this would be a challenge, but, between papers, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and more, there are plenty of channels through which the message can be delivered.  In Ghana, however, around 3% of the population has internet access, a problem common in many parts of the world.  Fortunately, mobile is in use by roughly 80% of the population and provided a better channel.  Understand, when I say mobile, I am not discussing the iPhone.  We are talking about much simpler devices, much simpler communication is required.  Here is what the State Department did to reach the population:

• By understanding the demographics, the technology available, by using common sense, they initially reached out via old-fashioned press releases.  The release informed citizens that the American President wanted to hear from people, hear their questions.  It was distributed in four languages, through multiple channels, and it offered short and long SMS codes for people to respond back.
• Want to know how many responses they received? Around 17,000 people used the power of the technologies they had available to respond back.
• The questions were reviewed, summarized into 5 areas, areas such as government corruption, and given to the President and his team.  The result was a six-minute podcast, distributed back out to people through the local embassies.  Not only were people given a channel to ask questions, they were given a channel to hear the response.  Collaboration, engagement, social media, came together.
• The South African population is slightly different, however, and to reach this user base, which is younger, more technologically advanced, they worked with a company named Mxit (http://www.mixtlifestyle.com/index) which provides mobile instant messaging services in South Africa.
• What were the results in South Africa?  More than 250,000 comments were received.
• The population in South Africa, those that responded, were younger and their questions reflected it.  Instead of asking about government corruption and the impact of HIV, for example, they were interested in learning what the President’s favorite basketball team was (just one example). 

What excites me, personally, is the fact that I see this same process unfolding domestically.  I see messages on Twitter asking people if they have questions for the President, questions he will respond to in a future Youtube video.  Nice, open government is slowly beginning to work.

These same practices can really benefit your business or agency.  Local towns and governments can cheaply leverage the same process to reach citizens.  Enterprises can use the same process to reach employees, to reach customers.  Just remember that not everyone you want to talk to is on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube.  Understand where your audience lives.

An important aspect of this communication is security.  Both personal security in some of the African countries, and data security across the board.  The State Department understands this and you must also understand it as you roll out your collaboration strategies.  Here are a couple of quick points:

• While the State Department knew the phone #s responding, there is no data tying these #s back to individuals.  Is it possible to do so?  Absolutely.  However, this data was kept anonymous to ensure everyone’s safety, everyone’s willingness to respond.
• Bill and I chatted on Skype during our phone call.  We chatted, however, on a completely separate network isolated from the main agency/business networks.  Understanding the risks enables your company/agency to make smart decisions. You must engage, just do not be blind to the risks while doing so.

While we covered a lot of other topics during our chat, that is all for now.  If you have questions or comments, let me know as I am sure we can get them answered.

John

A few random thoughts as we near the end of February

So few thoughts, so much time…  Oh wait, I think I meant so many thoughts, so little time….  Oh well, either way, in no random order, here are a few of the items I have on my mind at the moment:

• Facebook was granted a patent for news feeds…. Dear Patent Office, could you please give me the name of the insightful geniuses that approved this patent.  I have decided to patent the respiration system, having used it for years I feel I deserve a patent for my role in its development.  Dear Citizen’s of planet earth, don’t fear, you can still use yours but you may have to pay me a small fee.
• The White House is working to hire an official Tweeter for the President.  Mr. President, I have a face for Twitter and would appreciate your consideration for this position.  I like this move, honestly, as the majority of senior political twitter accounts are 1-way push communication channels.  If this is an account that will engage in 2-way dialog, good move.
• The open government movement is real and is being taken seriously by those inside and outside the government.  Well known citizens like Craig Newmark and Tim O’Reilly are doing their part but we all must participate.  While there are countless examples, pay attention to:
  • The Federal Agency IdeaScale Dashboard, OpenGovTracker, is continuing to evolve as a platform and, even more importantly, great ideas are being discussed daily across a variety of agencies.  You have to check this out.
  • The Top 10 Government Twitters To Follow is a great place to find some passionate people who are driving this change.  Check it out and, while you’re there, could you give me your three votes?  Well, since you’re there anyway, I thought I would ask…
• Those that doubt the power of Social CRM need to reconsider.  Yesterday, while struggling with my Comcast network access, I was able to get out a tweet to the good people at Comcast.  Within 5 minutes a rep, ComcastBonnie, was on it.  With a communication style fitting Twitter she quickly had the problem resolved.  Thank you.
• I like the moves being made by Lithium on the partnership front.  Their partnership with Sapient is a sign of good things to come, expect more announcements soon.
• I read a great post on how to handle negative comments in social media and blog that I highly recommend you read.
  • The conversation reminded me of the poor behavior of some of my fellow members of the Social CRM community, the anonymous attacks I wrote about recently.  As is often the case, addressing the comments head on (offering to let them respond on a blog post) resulted in them quietly disappearing.  When have negative comments or anonymous attacks, address them in the open.  If there is value in their comments, recognize it.
• Finally, a prediction.  Watch Salesforce in Q2.  My money is on them buying a listening platform, perhaps Radian6.  It would be a great addition to their offering and I like that pairing.

What is on your mind?

John