 Omni Channel From Brand and Agency Viewpoints takes you behind the curtain of the digital provider world. The audience of the Digital Analytics Association’s Chicago Symposium was focused on omni-channel from the point of view of how its moving parts functioned because members buy and sell media and marketing content. Brand and agency digital professionals are caught in the tidal wave of data, which is straining legacy processes and relationships to the limit.
However, “Attribution” stole the show from omni-channel—and, for a fascinating reason. The same capabilities that enable big data give ecommerce vendors the ability field solutions that “attribute” the value of each media asset to the customer purchase. Hence, attribution is a massive accounting exercise, but it is disruptive to the digital media ecosystem because it enables, in theory, far more inclusive and granular counting of digital content’s impact on ecommerce or mcommerce or even in-store purchase. This is bringing accountability to digital and advertising firms. Just think of all the media that customers see before they purchase something. Agencies and vendors […]
Digital Transformation’s Personal Issue reveals personal treatment to be the key to breakthrough customer experience, and it shows how digital social spaces enable Chief Digital Officers to use personal treatment to create more profit. Before they arrive, though, they need to lead their organizations through the Personal Issue. 
The Personal Issue refers to a perceived conflict between empowered customers and profit-starved companies. Digital social technologies are enabling customers to “re-personalize” business and society because their online interactions among themselves are personal, which is changing their expectations of all interactions.
However, businesses resist treating customers personally because they fear cost and inefficiency. They don’t understand the digital social economics of treating customers personally online, at scale.
Meanwhile, the missions of chief digital officers (CDOs) and chief customer officers (CCOs) are creating bold new “customer experience” and profits by using digital technologies to transform organizations, brands and businesses. They will fulfill their missions far more quickly and completely by using the key.
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 The rise of design signaled the fall of Nokia, RIM and Motorola describes how engineering is becoming less important in distinguishing hightech and other products from each other. It also presages a seismic shift away from product towards customer experience in determining market leaders for people-oriented products and services. A very large portion of product companies will follow in the footsteps of these three former mobile phone titans unless they transform their focus from product features (engineering) to customer experience (design).
By no means do I imply that engineering is not important—in fact, it is more important than ever—I assert that it is less important than design in differentiating people-oriented products. Engineering is abstracted away from the customer/user of the product, and design explicitly addresses how the customer uses the product to attain outcome(s).
Design is to the Knowledge Economy what engineering was to the Industrial Economy.
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 Omni-Channel Retail, Mobile and Big Data offers tantalizing glimpses into current and future omni-channel retail trends and technologies. I “sat down” with three thought leaders and a crowd of smart people on AllAnalytics’ real-time webcast, which featured real-time Q&A with the panelists afterward. You can watch it here.
Panelists Dr. Erik Brynjolfsson, Dr. Yu Jeffrey Hu and Dr. Mohammad Saifur Rahman collaborate on numerous projects, and they are intensely interested in retail transformation. They also referenced one of their recent papers, Competing in the Age of Omnichannel Retailing, and I have added some of its points here as well. The webcast was well moderated by AllAnaytics’ Noreen Seebacher and Beth Schultz.
Although it wasn’t discussed in depth, I observe that big data is especially poignant to retailers for two reasons: they have extremely rich internal, proprietary transaction data on customers (loyalty cards, credit cards, returns information, call center information, service information) and retail customers are the most free-wheeling online. Retail customers discuss their experiences in situations in which they use most types of products. This gives retailers priceless […]
 Hightech and U.S. Healthcare Transformation recaps The Future of Healthcare: How Technology is Enabling New Models of Healthcare Delivery, which was cosponsored by Katten Muchin Rosenmann and the Illinois Technology Association. The seminar featured five panelists with various points of view: two CEOs of healthcare start-ups, one venture capitalist, one healthcare management consultant and a healthcare attorney.
The consensus was that, at long last, U.S. healthcare is going to progress beyond the waiting room; a perfect storm of market forces and technology enablement has created the conditions for significant reform. Regulations are balancing privacy, protections and digitization, and start-ups are attacking pockets of inefficiency, often through mobile applications and cloud solutions. Technology empowers patients and providers because information is increasingly available real-time. Information enables patients to be more aware of their health as well as the ramifications of their decisions, and it can improve collaboration between provider and patient.
Government is a major change agent; the U.S. taxpayer is footing a higher and higher bill, and healthcare has absorbed all wage gains for many years now, effectively preventing Americans from improving their quality of life. Read on for my […]
 [UPDATED] The Future of the Retail Store in the Omni-Channel Age is third in CSRA’s retail & omni-channel series, and it is especially relevant to Chief Digital Officers, who orchestrate profound organization change using digital technologies and processes. It also offers rare opportunity to high-stakes CMOs. Part1 of The Future of the Retail Store outlines several aspects of market disruption that are affecting retailers as a group, albeit by varying degrees. Part2 features examples of “reimagining retail” for mobile, banking, grocery, hardware and apparel “stores.”
“Future” provides practical examples for the main thesis carried through the series: retailers can thrive by thinking beyond “the product” and its selection, assortment, pricing, etc., because these have a decreasing impact on revenue and profit. Digital social enables customers and retailers to focus on how customers create value with products and services, so when properly used, social is a strong profit driver, and profits are what retailers need to survive and thrive. As examples illustrate, retailers can go with the “showrooming” trend by enabling customers to imagine […]
 Chicago-Style Innovation is my notes from Lightbank Innovation Day, which took place on 9 May 2013 at the City Winery (presentations) and Lightbank’s offices (networking). Throughout the day, it was obvious that the Knowledge Economy’s Social Channel was unfolding; entrepreneurs’ startups are stripping off an increasing breadth of enterprise processes and using digital social software to improve them. For example, Needle’s platform creates experts in user (customer) use cases and outcomes that outperform anyone at retail; Fieldglass, HighGround, Fooda, oDesk and TalentBin take aim at various parts of human capital while Aon Hewitt showed how to practice enterprise innovation on the inside; DoubleDutch aims to [at long last] digitize trade shows and conferences through its platform’s geosocial functions. Sprout Social and Contently offered social tools.
Presenters Gian Fulgoni, J Schwan and Ramon De Leon shared valuable advice for entrepreneurs, investors and enterprise executives. Fulgoni provided statistics that showed how mobile was eclipsing ecommerce and analog commerce; Schwan opened the audience’s eyes to Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet of Things, and De Leon showed the power of (pervasively ;^) being yourself.
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How to Tap the Social Business Double Value Proposition outlines an efficient and rigorous process for using social business for digital transformation in two ways: social business itself can drive reputation, preference and profit, and it’s the fastest way to develop requirements for mobile, ecommerce and big data investments.
![How to Tap the Social Business Double Value Proposition [CDO Guide to Social Business Part2]](http://rollyson.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/CDO_socbus_2_main2.png)
The social business double value proposition works because it discovers, engages and validates the organization’s understanding of stakeholder outcomes. Every organization’s crucial stakeholders have outcomes that they hope to attain by interacting with the organization or using its products or services. Developing deep and broad knowledge of stakeholder outcomes enables the organization to serve and quickly deepen their relationships with their stakeholders—by helping them attain their outcomes by collaborating online; moreover, since it opens fast and inexpensive communication and collaboration channels with them, it can create a continuous innovation process and sustainable advantage over rivals.
The Guide to Social Business Part2 shows how to maximize efficiency by using external and internal analyses to create and execute social business strategy, […]
TheSocial Business Enabler of Digital Transformation reveals how social technologies have changed the economics of interacting and collaborating, and it presents four ways that Chief Digital Officers can use social to lower risk and boost returns of digital transformation.
![The Social Business Enabler of Digital Transformation [CDO Guide to Social Business Part1]](http://rollyson.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/CDO_socbus_1_main2.png) Social business competency is pivotal to digital transformation because it combines four unusual characteristics. First, it makes interacting and collaborating an order of magnitude faster and less costly than current processes; second, few organizations understand how to use social business to interact with key customers to boost profit, so leaders enjoy rare advantage; third, when compared to ecommerce, mobile and big data & analytics investments, social business shows results quickly and costs less. Lastly, social business reveals what stakeholders really think when organizations aren’t in the room, so it’s effective for due diligence and “requirements analysis” for ecommerce, mobile and big data investments.
As Social Business Enabler of Digital Transformation explains, social business has a two-fold value proposition for Chief Digital Officers: they can use social directly to drive reputation, innovation and […]
How Social Technologies Have Disrupted Organizations is a quick overview of the business and social environment around commercial, government and nonprofit organizations that sets the context for using social business for digital transformation.
![How Social Technologies Have Disrupted Organizations [CDO Guide to Social Business Preview]](http://rollyson.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/CDO_socbus_pre_main2.png) [UPDATED] Social technologies are quickly changing the context around why people buy products and services. Leaders of organizations in business, government and nonprofit sectors harbor a false assumption that is becoming lethal in the digital social age: they assume that products and services have inherent value to customers and constituents. In fact, products and services represent costs to customers and revenue to producers and service providers.
Customers must use products or services to create outcomes that are personally or professionally meaningful. The use of the product or service is where the customer or constituent produces value. This is why they buy. “So what,” you might be thinking. In this post I’ll show how digital social technologies are weakening mediocre products and services and how organizations can use social business to strengthen their offerings. Read a more in-depth treatment in […]
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