The Four Technical Pillars of Digital Transformation

There's no doubting that the path to successful Digital Transformation involves changes to: people (e.g.skills), processes, products (e.g. the creation or improvement of customer facing software) and proposition. The temptation is therefore to assume the technology will just "sort itself out" without an investment in thought, effort and finances. 

So what technology is now supporting the transformation to digital?

Here's my top 4:

The move to cloud

The use of online cloud-based services such as Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft (Azure) means that issues such as the hosting and the scaling of digital platforms becomes an on-demand Operational Expenditure (Opex) rather than a Capital Expenditure (CapEx) cost. With this high cost barrier now radically changed (as we create a shift from one column to the other on the Finance Department's spreadsheet), this means that demand and growth of online services are easier to deal with.

The digitisation of services
The conversion of the physical into software has been happening for some while. We've had digital media players and MP3 collections for many years now and you only have to look at how many of our daily tools are on our mobile devices, including: cameras, credit cards, health meters, maps, messengers and travel tickets. Now, with increased processing capability everywhere, what else can now move from being tangible to tap-able?

The creation and use of APIs

Organisations increasingly want simpler user interfaces that present and collate functionality and content from multiple systems behind the scenes. Your users don't care if your systems are having to pull together multiple source of data to present their online information in the way they want it, if you don't they will get frustrated (and consequently look to go elsewhere). Building Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for each software system  enables this flexibility by providing the means for others to remotely invoke your applications functionality in a system-to-system way.

The adoption of DevOps

As the speed and complexity of digital delivery increases, companies realise they must integrate software development and IT operations. DevOps is the newer approach to this, where continual deployment becomes the norm and the ability of your tech team evolves form just being able to create stable code, to also deploying this code to a stable managed (typically cloud) environment.

Never bet against Google in 2014

Over the last dozen years Google has grown to be one of the most dominant online players, perhaps the biggest. Its current market value is about $350bn and all signs are that it can continue ruling the online space, despite several factors, including:

1.  More and more people using mobile devices for their daily searching and browsing activity
2.  Increased competition from Microsoft’s Bing.com search engine (which has blatantly tried to copy Google’s model and put a lot of money behind it’s promotion)
3. A list of discontinued products that have surprised on-lookers and left some users high & dry (e.g. Google Apps: closed in early 2012 and Google Reader: a feed-based news aggregator which was dropped in July 2013)

However despite Google’s mantra of “Don’t be evil”, which tries to set it apart from the more traditional software and IT services companies... it’s sheer size and might means it can’t help but disrupt any market or segment it decides to move into. From mobile phone operating systems & devices, to the Chrome operating system and a web-based email service (that became the top provider about a year ago) Google continues an upward trajectory. The consequence of this is that it is probably the only company able to challenge Apple in some areas of consumer electronics and communications.

What this means is that betting against Google in anything it decides to do is an unwise move. So if it targets any market or products that your company is in over the next year or so… my advice is, get out.

PPC : change nothing and nothing changes

I've helped a lot of organisations over the years optimise their digital advertising campaigns. This means I've seen a number of different ways of setting up and configuring paid search in services like Google AdWords, Microsoft's Bing Ads (previously Yahoo's own Search Marketing efforts) and others.

In several notable examples the PPC (pay per click) campaigns had seemingly reached their peak and the organisations concerned were happy to carry on doing the same thing day after day. In nearly every case the person managing the activity was happy to spend a very similar amount each day or month and deliver the same amount of visitors. (If I'm honest, they were almost scared to make changes once they found a set-up that worked).

Unsurprisingly, this infuriated the heck out of me for various reasons:

1. There is never an optimum way to build PPC campaigns. If you think you're doing the best paid search you ever could, then you're sadly mistaken.
Note: If your digital marketing agency says there is and that they've found it... They are trying to either get an easy ride or hide something

2. Google, Microsoft and the rest of the search engines never stop evolving their products, so failing up change your paid SEM will only risk leaving you with outdated approaches and techniques.

3. New competition comes into the market all the time (and some leave) and the current ones get smarter or more determined. More competition for the same terms will therefore push the bidding price up in systems such as AdWords.
Note: Your clever competition knows that change is good and how it can help to improve customer acquisition costs... Do you?

4. Websites change and therefore variables such as Google's Quality Score vary over time. If you're directing prospects to a site where the content and catalogue information is changing all the time, you can bet your QS is fluctuating too (it might even be changing when you have a static site!).

But more importantly than all if these should be the urge in every online marketer to improve on what is there... Not necessarily by making huge changes to your PPC account on a daily basis, but by the use of incremental changes and small experiments that test new ways and wording.

After all... Don't you want to learn and find out more about paid search? Do you want your skills to stand still in a market place that rewards talent? Don't you want to compete against your peers out there, all intent on bettering those CPC and conversion rates ?
(Or are you just happy to take your employer's or client's money for the short term?)

The confusing Microsoft messenger

The World's largest software company has me confused (again). But not this time over the naming of their software development tools or their licensing agreements for SME's, but over a seemingly small piece of technology, the enterprise messenger tool set.

It's pretty obvious that Microsoft's general consumer instant messenger product is no longer used by half as many people as a few years ago. In fact a quick sign in to MS Messenger (something I've not knowingly done in years) shows very few of my old contacts do the same. I guess the complete take-over of the social space by Facebook, which has its own messaging service, and Twitter has taken its toll. So many people now use Twitter as a peer-to-peer messaging service, as well as a way to broadcast their thoughts...it's taken over (within my sphere of friends anyway) as the primary online tool for 1-2-1 dialogue..... with mobile chat & text still the major platform with the younger generation.

I've also recently started using Lync, the computer-telephone integrated software that is described by Microsoft as their 'Enterprise-ready unified communications playform'. If you've never used it before, it is: part Messenger, part Skype, with Outlook integration. Note: it even has a mobile app, that I've not yet got to work.

So why then did MS this May just pay $8.5billion for Skype (making it their biggest every acquisition) and then only a couple of weeks ago agree to purchase Yammer, a leading provider of enterprise social networking services for $1.2 billion in cash?

Although Skype will create its own division (department not rift) within the software giant, Yammer will join the Microsoft Office Division. Potentially meaning that it will be integrated somehow with Lync and possibly Skype & Messenger?

This sounds like too many packages all doing the same thing to me. Each has it's own unique productive functionality, but they all also have significant functionality overlap, that will have to be integrated, standardised and quite possibly rationalised.

Augmented Reality for retail

A couple of weeks back I was told about an innovative 'Virtual fashion mirror' from Cisco. As well as being covered by the BBC, Cisco also blogged about it here:
http://blogs.cisco.com/retail/cisco-styleme-virtual-fashion-mirror-inspires-sales-across-all-age-groups
Although this immediately gained the interest of the techie press and the online fashion community, a little digging found that this technology is still in its infancy and that the actual technology isn't available right away.

Now Microsoft have demonstrated their Holoflector, a large translucent mirror with an LCD panel  behind it, connected to a Kinect camera
.
http://www.geekwire.com/2012/video-microsoft-research-holoflector-augmented-reality-mirror


Is this the future of retail?

Is mobile your company's biggest challenge?

So..... 40% of Fortune 500 companies claim their biggest mobile challenge is developing their online services across multiple operating systems and devices

 do they?

Well fragmentation in the online industry isn't anything new for web developers. We've been living with this since the the days of the Mosaic and Netscape browsers (and if you don't know who they are, then I'd stop reading this blog now if I were you). This confusion was then multipled with the arrival of Microsoft 16 years ago, who then went onto make a complete mess of browser standards, that we've been living with ever since.

However things have got even more mixed-up in the last few years with the growth of the mobile channel, fueled by smartphones and tablets such as Apple's iPhone & iPad, as well as a host of Google's Android mobile OS powered phones. For me 2011 has definately been the long-awaited "year of the mobile". Although this is a title that online marketing consultants have been foretelling for the last decade, in my opinion this year is it and according to research from Gartner.... smartphone sales globally will reach 467m in 2011.

But the fragmented mobile landscape is directly affecting many organisations’ plans to implement an effective mobile channel. No one device or operating system entrely rules the roost (at least not in the UK) and right now if a company plumps for just one.... typically the iPhone... then it is excluding a huge user base. But to try and get comprehensive market coverage is an expensive and exhaustive process....

Does Facebook Places mean the end for Foursquare?

As regular readers and followers of my Twitter stream will know, I'm a frequent user of the Geo-location based application Foursquare. I've been using it for most of the year now and I like its combination of gaming (I am currently having a competition with a fellow nearby user to be the Major of our local Pizza restaurant) and tips... where I have been know to give the odd negative review.

However, Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement last week that Facebook will now extended the availability of its geo-tagging service Facebook Places to the UK (and Japan).

Facebook Places has up until this week only been available in the US, but it is now live here in the UK and already seems to be building up users (if my friends are anything to go by). The service is already built into the iPhone Facebook application, however other mobile users (Blackberry, Android, etc.) will have to wait for their developers to catch-up and for now can only use the service via the 'touch' version of the site accessed with a mobile browser.

But with the launch of this service, I am sure I'm not the only Foursquare UK user who thought "hey, why use two applications when one will now do?". Or to put it anther way, given the 500 million Facebook users, does this spell the beginning of the end for Foursquare?

Possibly... but I have an idea... sell the product to a bigger company right now!

But who? Well.... if:

• Google has Latitude & Places
• Facebook has errrr Places
• Yahoo has..... mmmmm... actually Yahoo hasn't done much since it failed to by Foursquare back in April. But it did go and buy a little Indonesian Geo-location service called Koprol which it has integrated, plus it has a 'geocoding API' called.... PlaceFinder

So who's left to buy up little old Foursquare?

Microsoft?

Perhaps. Although it also failed to buy Foursquare in April for the assumed $100m+ price tag, you can't help but think that Foursquare's value may have decreased a little now that Facebook has entered the market.

Is Google a Monopoly?

Surely any company that has a 70% - 90% share of any market could be seen as having a monopoly?

Well Google currently has the following shares of the search market in these countries:

• USA: 72% [source]
• France 91% [source - in French]
• UK 90% [source]

However, I can't help feel that a lot of this hype about Google's monopoly has been based upon fear from its competition (e.g. Microsoft's multi-million pound lobbying of Washington to block the Google & Yahoo advertising partnership last October) or worry from those who have old business models.... newspapers please take a step forward. And talking about Microsoft, weren't they themsleves found guilty of all sorts of anti-competitive activity several years ago? It therefore makes it all the more hypocritical that they "wolf" now.

But even though Google may have power in the search market, it doesn't necessarily mean that this has corrupted them does it? Well according to Jon Leibowitz ,the new Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, when asked last week if he saw Google abusing its power, said:

"I certainly don't see Google as abusing its power right now, no. And also it's brought many benefits to consumers."

But nevertheless Google has gone on the defensive, readying itself with information such as this presentation to potentially defend itself against the Anti-Googlers.

One thing is for sure, there's a lot of jealous companies out there who would love even a fraction of Google's wealth... and they show no signs of letting up in the current market conditions.