Forrester Research

January 27th, 2010

Apple's iPad will come into the enterprise through the consumer door. Again.

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 12:34 pm

Categories: Information Workplace

Tags: Apple iPhone, Mobile, Information Technology, Apple Inc., Tool, Workforce, Wireless, iPad, Mobile Professionals, Productivity

Apple just announced its media tablet (we coined these things mobile media tablets in 2005 in private client conversations and in print in 2007) amidst much excitement and surprisingly little secrecy. There wasn’t much if anything in the announcement that the bloggers hadn’t anticipated.

This product will appear in 60 days with WiFi and in 90 days unlocked with AT&T data plan for $629 and $29/month. It will catch on quickly as an employee-provisioned third device, particularly for Mobile Professionals, 28% of the workforce. IT will support it in many organizations. After all, it’s just a big iPhone to them and already 20% of firms support them.

Most of the media coverage will discuss the impact on consumer markets. I’m going to talk about the impact on businesses and on information & knowledge management professionals, the IT executive responsible for making the workforce successful with technology.

Make no mistake, this is an attractive business tool. Laptops will be left at home.

One thing’s for sure, Apple knows how to time the market. And the market it’s timed this time around is an important one: information workers self-provisioning what they need rather than what their employers provide. We have called this trend Technology Populism (AKA consumerization of IT), and it’s important enough that we’re writing a book called Groundswell Heroes about how to harness it.

Apple also timed the rest of it right. The technology, the media industry, the digital experience, the developer ecosystem, the retail presence, the applications, the operating system, the increasingly HTML5-enabled Web, the price, and the wireless industry is ready for this product.

Oh, I’m sure it will have problems. Despite the claims, battery life’s sure to be inadequate for someone on the go all day, for example. But the iPad extends all the things that Apple’s already got up and running. And Apple has addressed the usual problems already: cost, availability, accessories, wireless access.

And it offers some superior characteristics for the things that Mobile Professionals care about. Mobile Professionals are one of the four Workforce Personas we’ve defined. This segment is 28% of the US information workforce defined by a high need for mobility and a lot of applications. Mobile Professionals care about:

• Messaging and collaboration on the go. (Need email, calendar, contacts, Web conferencing.)
• Full Web experience. (Big screen, big Web pages. Duh.)
• Business media. (The New York Times app is just the beginning).)
• Full-size document tools. (Execs review, tweak, and present a lot on the go.)
• Secure wireless connectivity. (Any time, any place. This one needs work.)
• And let’s not forget, Looking cool. (Haven’t seen it yet, but it’s sure looking good.)

This thing will take off among high net worth mobile pros. And IT should be okay with that, at least in non-regulated industriess where the lack of application management and device control tools are not big issues. After all, iPad is really just a big iPhone.

And in April 2009, 17% of enterprises and 25% of SMBs supported iPhone and in September 2009,16% of US information workers used iPhones for work, even at the world’s largest organizations.

Now, some “What it Means” (WIM) points:

WIM #1: The importance of great document tools just increased. Apple’s support of iWorks on the iPad gives execs what they need to present on the road and leave the laptop at home. Microsoft should build best-in-class iPad software in the Office formats. (Or watch execs move key material to the iWorks formats.) Adobe should take responsibility for a great PDF reader. And these readers must also be great presentation tools.

WIM #2: The importance of application push just got greater. Apple should make this a priority in its v4 release of the software. (We expect to see the v4 release in July 2010.)

WIM #3: Google has even more need now to retain control over the Android experience so developers can target that platform with the same relative ease as they can target the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad market.

WIM #4: The market for device and application management just got more important. Apple, make the management APIs a key initiative to allow vendors like Good, Box Tone, and Sybase to solve that problem. (Device management vndors, feel free to comment below if you want to be included in the conversation.)

January 20th, 2010

Lotus knows ... but do you know Lotus?

Posted by Sheri McLeish @ 1:33 pm

Categories: Information Workplace

Tags: IBM Corp., LotusLive, iWorkers, Sales Strategy, Social Networking, Collaboration, Groupware, Sales, Online Communications, Marketing

First, thank you IBM/Lotus for getting me out of Boston before the snow. I know that has something to do with my good mood. But that aside, what Lotus unveiled at its 17^th annual Lotusphere in Orlando this week warms my heart in another way. For all the advancements in its product portfolio and technologies, the real accomplishment is Lotus’ keen focus on people, context, and simplicity.

IBM wants us to have a Smarter Planet, and Lotus “Knows” how to get there. Its vision for collaboration is deeply connected to personal productivity. With LotusLive, launched just a year ago, the effort is to allow people to be able to stay in their in-box and bring work tasks, information, and people together, in context. It has 18 million users today compared to just about 1 million each for Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) and Google Premier Apps. It’s landing more huge enterprise accounts, including the just announced more than 150,000 seats with Panasonic. Yet it still seems that many people don’t know Lotus, because most of my inquiries continue to ask about Microsoft or Google. Let me share.

So much of the iWorkers day is spent searching for information, toggling between applications, and pulling content together from various sources to support a business activity or process. Unlike Google Wave, which does try to innovate to accomplish similar collaborative experiences, LotusLive doesn’t require radically altering behavior to get there (see Ted Schadler’s related Lotus blog). Email is an hourly addiction for iWorkers, so LotusLive starts there and integrates Web conferencing, social networking, and collaboration within the environment.

Symphony, Lotus’ free Open Office productivity suite, will soon also be integrated to provide a web-based document document editor for creating and sharing (which surprisingly drew spontaneous cheers from the crowd).

Critical mass matters for the success of social networking and collaboration. So does trust and track record. IBM/Lotus meets the security litmus test because of its proven ability to support enterprise needs across its product portfolio. Google has yet to earn that trust. Microsoft engenders the same level of trust and is hot on the heels of Lotus with its 2010suite of products, slated to be launched midyear. But in the cloud, Lotus is way ahead and offering the kind of ease of access to people and content in context that Microsoft has yet to master. Consider:

• iWorkers suffer from ADD. With plenty to distract iWorkers from their task at hand, people increasingly need help to compartmentalize their work to stay the course. Need to locate the latest sales numbers to put in your presentation to the board? This can trigger a investigation to find who has the latest information, how to best reach them, or perhaps to try and discover if the information is already documented elsewhere. LotusLive addresses these challenges by enabling easier connections to people and content through searching and social networking that don’t require switching applications. You can contact someone based on information published, through integration of a “business card” fed from Connections/SameTime, and escalate from a threaded discussion to voice, video, a meeting, and presence.
• iWorkers need context. We know that information taken out of context is misleading. Value comes from understanding the genesis of information as well as its application in a given scenario. Because of the ability to filter by a lot of work dimensions, such as people, projects, time/date, or specific keyword searches, it’s much easier to surface content and people in relation to what your information needs are. With the ability to find sales numbers and also view related discussion threads or additional presentation materials or documents, greater understanding of the data is possible because more context is provided.
• iWorkers want simple. Ok, I admit it, I am the epitome of the KISS principle. I really don’t adjust well to new technology. I’m lucky to have a husband that manages all of the electronics at home. But I do know good design. It’s simple. It’s clean. I don’t have to think about it. It’s intuitive. What LotusLive accomplishes is a strikingly simple UI that doesn’t force me to change my behavior. iWorkers will relish being able to do what they’ve always done and delight in the ease of discovering more content, more people, and ultimately, be more productive..

Given the concerted effort to solve iWorker pain points through actual use cases, within their core customer industries like banking and healthcare, Lotus is able to deliver what Google Wave fails to address: providing a solution that improves personal productivity without forcing a change in work behavior. The “build it and they will come” approach generally fails. Just look at any efforts around document collaboration and team sites usage. Incrementally improving upon the investments that you already have without forcing a cultural change, however, will be a powerful differentiator. Who knew? Lotus.

January 13th, 2010

Why VMWare bought Zimbra: It's the seats

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 7:56 am

Categories: Collaboration, Information Workplace

Tags: Zimbra, VMware Inc., Cisco WebEx Mail, E-mail, Virtualization, Business Services, Online Communications, Hardware, Phil LeClare

Zimbra has been the sleeper cloud-based email provider for the enterprise. I’ve known about the Bechtel deal — roughly 50,000 seats globally — for some time, but couldn’t talk about it. Though it’s been a while since I’ve spoken to Ramesh May, he did share some important facts with me:

1. Zimbra’s code base is open source, with a 20,000 active members in the community. This code base, which runs on Linux, is also the foundation of Cisco WebEx Mail (formerly PostPath) user interface.  

2. Yahoo! Zimbra was selling an email seat for $28/mailbox/year for 50+ seats. We’ll be interested to see how the pricing changes.

3. The company was working with the community on adding instant messaging, expanding widgets, and building an offline email client. We also saw some interesting mashup and document viewing features.

4. Back in April, the company had 130 employees, 600+ .edu customers, 44M mailboxes, and 60,000 customers.

So why hasn’t Zimbra been bigger on the national stage selling its hosted (80% of seats) and on-premises (20% of seats) email and calendaring solution? Two reasons.

First, Yahoo! did not build a direct sales force that way Google and every other enterprise email provider did.

Second, because a lot of these seats are sold through service providers. Comcast and NTT Communications have been selling Zimbra seats. You may be running Zimbra and not even know it.

So now it becomes clearer why VMWare bought this massively successful email provider. 

1. The cloud email market gains a high-quality competitor. A high-quality email solution hits its stride and provides yet another alternative to LotusLive.com, Exchange Online, Google Apps, and Cisco WebEx Mail. IBM has been making hay with service providers white labeling LotusLive.com. Google’s reseller channel is almost 1 year old (see last year’s post). Cisco WebEx Mail is about to kick in. And Microsoft has dropped the cost of an online email seat in half in the past year. Let the competition begin!

2. VMWare expands its stack to include SaaS, a move to help service providers and the channel sell seats and win accounts. VMWare now as an application to go help service provides and channel partners win business. With the future of cloud computing wrapped up in the business models of service providers, VMWare has raised the bar for every other cloud technology supplier. Let the cloud channel wars begin!

3. IT shops get another reason to develop their internal clouds. Remember, Zimbra can also run on-premises. With VMWare’s virtual machine running Zimbra, IT pros can build out their virtual data centers with a real application: email. And they have only one throat to choke if something bombs: VMWare’s. How much better is that for mastering an internal cloud than having to piece together the entire stack carte blanche? Let the internal cloud build out begin!

 

Love to hear from you on this.

January 8th, 2010

Cloud-hosted collaboration: multi-tenant or dedicated?

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 12:07 pm

Categories: Cloud computing, Collaboration

Tags: Solution, Cloud Computing, Multi-tenant, Groupware, Collaboration, E-mail, Virtualization, Enterprise Software, Software, Online Communications

We just had another of our regular cloud research meetings at Forrester. In these meetings, we cut across our research organization to examine cloud computing from every angle.

Compared with even just a year ago, it’s amazing how important and pervasive cloud computing analysis (as opposed to cloud computing guesswork) has become in our research calendar.

You can see the existing cloud/SaaS research here and our planned research here. As the meeting host, I mostly listen, probe, and take notes, but ocassionally I get to jump in with a thought.

To wit: We are often asked about whether cloud-based collaboration (email, team sites, instant messaging, Web conferencing, social computing, etc.) works best on multi-tenant, dedicated solutions, or both. The answer is both, but trending towards multi-tenant. Our clients are interested in both multi-tenant and single-tenant or dedicated cloud solutions — as long as the price is right.

The future of cloud-based collaboration is clearly multi-tenant for two economic reasons:

1. Multi-tenant enables the fundamental economic benefits of a shared resource. We can see this in the price war going on in email right now — a 50% price cut in the last 12 months with multi-tenant cloud email. The floor on email cost keeps dropping, fueled by the better economics of multi-tenant solutions and high capacity utilization.

2. Multi-tenant is a much faster way to deploy improvements. With multi-tenant, Gmail can add features overnight; Exchange only once every three years. Multi-tenant Cisco WebEx gets a quarterly update; IBM Lotus Sametime can’t (though LotusLive.com can). Because there is a single instance of the code in a multi-tenant cloud solution, the innovation is continuous, incremental, and globally available.

Multi-tenant is also the path that every major cloud collaboration vendor is on. Microsoft, for example, is running Exchange Online for $5/mailbox/month in a multi-tenant solution that now scales past 25,000 seats. Salesforce.com and Google have always been multi-tenant. And Cisco WebEx Mail and IBM LotusLive.com are also multi-tenant from their core.

So when does a dedicated (single-tenant; servers dedicated to you) solution make sense?

1. If you aren’t yet comfortable with the security assurances of a multi-tenant solution. This is what keeps most companies away from the cloud at all. It’s the number one concern in our surveys of IT decision-makers around the world.

It’s also what led Google to build a dedicated data center for government workloads. At least there, the government data won’t mix with the data of the hoi pollois. But this is mostly about getting the security assurances nailed down. I view it as a short-term limitation.

2. If your content & collaboration application must be highly customized and integrated tightly with other applications. This doesn’t apply to most collaboration solutions today. But for SharePoint or Notes applications it does. And while it has kept SharePoint off of Microsoft’s solution so far, even SharePoint will go multi-tenant in 2010 with a sandbox to keep your custom application walled off from other apps. We also expect some Lotus Notes and Connections features to show up on the multi-tenant LotusLive.com in 2010.

3. If you workload won’t run in a virtual machine. Okay, so this is a bit down in the technical weeds. But applications do run on silicon. And limitations around memory, buffer space, processing speed, and the like define what kinds of things you can actually run in a virtual machine, hence in a multi-tenant cloud. For more on this, see Frank Gillett’s report on scale-out workloads.

Disagree? Agree? Have other thoughts? Please share.

January 4th, 2010

Microsoft will pay i4i but Word won’t get left behind

Posted by Sheri McLeish @ 10:22 pm

Categories: Information Workplace

Tags: Microsoft Word, Microsoft Corp., XML, Software/Web Development, Web Development, Phil LeClare

Enterprises shouldn’t worry about the U.S. Federal Court of Appeals injunction barring Microsoft from selling Word 2007 and Office 2007 in the US on January 11, 2010. The court upheld a ruling that an XML feature included in Word infringed on a patent held by i4i. As i4i rejoices over its $290 million vindication award, Microsoft wants to stay focused and is preparing for the next major launch of Office. Even if the Supreme Court is requested to hear the case, Office 2010 doesn’t contain the XML feature in question, and past copies sold are not at risk.

But the case does raise some thoughts for approaches to generating and using XML for content management and delivery. XML and its numerous variations are core to a variety of content uses, from search and display to dynamic publishing, compliance, and file conversion. Most of this content originates in Word, which remains one of the most entrenched apps in the enterprise. And people like it. In fact, companies like i4i and Quark, with its XML Author for Microsoft Word, are doing good business enabling people to author in Word and make XML documents with no knowledge of XML.

The other common approach to generating XML content is to let people continue to use their favorite writing tool and do XML conversion post-authoring. Solutions like MarkLogic’s XML repository have also been doing a brisk business, taking unstructured content such as Office files and PDFs and automatically converting them to XML documents.

In the case of i4i, the “little used” feature, as Microsoft referred to it, was manifested in any Microsoft Word products that have the capability of opening .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML. Indeed, it’s probably a relatively small number of users that would likely be manipulating Word files with custom XML. But there are some. For enterprises, where there’s a greater and greater requirement to store content in XML for the flexibility it affords, the question to ask is how do we get from authoring to custom XML. Word won’t be left behind, but it may also benefit from some help to make the most of what XML can do.

So how does your company approach creating XML content? Do you prefer to empower information workers, or does back-end conversion make more sense?

December 30th, 2009

Consumer broadband is the workforce technology of the decade

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 6:32 am

Categories: Enterprise mobility, Information Workplace

Tags: Collaboration, Broadband, Workforce, Consumer Broadband, Teleweorkers, Telecommuting, Broadband Internet, Network Technology, Workforce Management, Telecommunications

That call may surprise you. You might have put storage or Gigabit ethernet or the Internet itself at the top of the list. But when I think about what’s different in the life of your average information worker as the decade comes to a close, it’s the instant-on access to just about everything that the adoption of consumer broadband has fueled.

From our Consumer Technographics(r) survey of over 50,000 consumers every year for the last 12 years, between 2000 and 2009, consumer broadband soared from 2% to 63% of US households. For context, home PC adoption grew from 51% to 77%.

But why is consumer broadband the workforce technology of the decade? Three main reasons:

1. Telecommuting has become a way of life for millions of information workers. We have been watching — and forecasting — the growth of telecommuting. The impact is immediate and obvious: more hours to work; more location flexibility in hiring and retaining; and more work-life control. Telecommuting in the US is dependent on cheap broadband to the home. Telecommuters will rise to include 43% of the US information workforce by 2016.

2. Broadband-enabled markets have triggered massive IT innovation. Google; Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and LinkedIn; WebEx, ZoHo, and Smartsheets.com; Amazon EC2, Google App Engine; and Windows Azure; open source and Web 2.0. All of these and thousands of other technologies and companies are built on the back of broadband to the home. The network innovation over the last 10 years makes the Internet 1.0 era look like a pre-season warmup game.

3. Consumers master new technologies at home — and expect the same at work. This is the big one. Technology Populism — the rise of technology-enabled employees — is in full swing as empowered employees bring their own smartphones to work; use LinkedIn to prospect their customers; tap PBWorks or Smartsheets.com to collaborate across corporate boundaries; and borrow the YouTube strategy to put training videos into employees’ hands. Today, according to our most recent survey of empowered employees, almost half of US employees feel that the technology they have at home is better than what they have at work.

So what does the rise of consumer broadband mean for collaboration professionals?

• What it means (WIM) #1: Expect more and better broadband to the home. This is a duh, but in any workforce techonlogy planning scenario, be sure to factor in more (75% of US homes by 2013) and faster broadband. Fiber to the home, curb, or cable POP will fuel the speed. Be prepared to harness it.
• WIM #2: Plan on a full suite of collaboration tools to support telework. Teleweorkers are twice as likely as desktop- boudn employees to use every collaboration tool. Duh. Be sure to deal with the network access issues that home workers will face. Best practice is to treat every employee as if they are coming in over the Internet.
• WIM #3: Make telework the centerpiece of your desktop video conferencing strategy. Desktop video conferencing is a killer application for the next decade. The seeds are planted with Skype, Google Talk, Webcams, and the collaboration toolkit strategies of Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and Google. Be sure to put remote access and telework as the center of any solution. In other words, expect faulty networks, open networks, and random quality end points.

My last comment is to ask you to comment on two questios:

1. Why is consumer broadband cheaper in towns with only one broadband provider?
2. Why is business broadband is so much more expensive than consumer broadband?

Comment away. Oh, and happy happy new year!

December 18th, 2009

Innovation Matters More Than EU's Acceptance Of Microsoft Browser Menu

Posted by Sheri McLeish @ 1:40 pm

Categories: Uncategorized

Tags:

The EU’s decision this week to accept Microsoft’s proposed browser menu means in March European consumers purchasing or upgrading their operating system will be presented a choice of browser. Beyond that, the acceptance means little for enterprises. Businesses in Europe will be able to bypass the menus for enterprise installation and the menu will not extend beyond the European Union. What matters more for Microsoft will be innovating Internet Explorer to enable better web experiences, from security and administration to personalization and productivity.
After 10 years and more than $2 billion in fines, Microsoft needs to put issues of technical transparency and monopolistic practices to rest, especially in the browser market, because:

• Browsers are everywhere. A decade ago Microsoft did own your browser. But now there are rivals like corporate giants Google and Apple trying to level the field and a nonprofit organization in Mozilla Foundation keeping it honest. Browser choices abound and they are freely available for download. Hence comments like: “People in the EU should be embarassed (sic) about this. Basically it says that they admit that the people are too stupid to download their own browser of choice.”
• Internet Explorer needs to win with innovation, not just Windows. Everyone expects to get online when they fire up their computer. Along with email and word processing, web browsers are a killer app in the information workday. The reason Mozilla’s Firefox continues to slowly and steadily increase its market share among general users (nearly 50%) and enterprises (20%) isn’t simply because it’s an alternative; it’s because it offers features and performance that draw users through word of mouth. You may be able to get users by packaging your browser and operating system together, but that won’t keep them. Microsoft must offer more compelling reasons why IE8 becomes the default browser of choice.
• The browser’s potential remains untapped. We know Google’s not stupid, and there’s a reason it’s developing its own browser and operating system. Calling them both Chrome probably merits a taunting penalty … but, the point is: We ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The way the web, SaaS, Cloud, and online apps are changing the way we work, iWorkers and consumers will benefit from more intuitive user interfaces, fast support for complex online computing tasks, and strong security to protect content. We can already see new use cases driving design: the “social networking” browser Flock from Mozilla is intended to keep users in tune with friends and their activities. So in this way, the browser market of the future can be anyone’s to own.

December 15th, 2009

IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5 is "Click to conference"

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 11:36 am

Categories: Collaboration

Tags: IBM Lotus SameTime, Video Conferencing, IM, IBM Corp., IBM Lotus Sametime 8.5, Sametime 8.5, Collaboration, Groupware, Instant Messaging, Enterprise Software

Pal Henry Dewingand I heard yesterday from IBM’s Rob Ingram about Lotus Sametime 8.5, the real-time collaboration product available on December 22. Lotus Sametime is the client/server product that first made enterprise instant messaging a global possibility back in 1998.

This dot release is IBM’s first major overhaul of the real-time messaging product in three years. (My take is that they kept the 8.x version number to align the version number with Notes/Domino.) For those firms that understand the power of real-time collaboration tools — the ability to get an immediate answer, hold a virtual ad hoc meeting, or ping someone without bothering them with a phone call — this product is an important upgrade.

Why? Because it has the core elements of click-to-conference — not just instant messaging and presence — baked into it. And for ad hoc collaboration, clilck-to-conference is a much richer and easier thing to do that loading up separate applications for instant messaging, video conferencing, and Web conferencing.

I think of click-to-conference as “the ability to have an ad hoc meeting supported with rich media whenever you are online.” It includes these elements:

• One click to send out an invitation via instant messaging.
• One click to join a meeting.
• A permanent meeting room for projects or teams.
• Communication via text, audio, and video conferencing.
• Access from any computer or smartphone.

Sametime 8.5 has most of that (all but complete smartphone support, though that is promised) and of course a whole lot more. Zero-download client for guests, IT-controlled access to trusted partners, follow-the-speaker video conferencing, integration with other video conferencing solutions, pesistent meeting rooms and documents, and so on). For details, see the IBM Lotus press release.

In case you haven’t noticed, IBM Lotus not only didn’t go away, it’s here with a vengeance. LotusLive.com claims 18 million users, the 8.5 release of Notes/Domino is a winner in storage savings, Lotus Connections beats other social software platforms on many dimensions, and Sametime’s pushing the envelope on real-time collaboration at a global scale.

You can probably tell that I think this is a good product for companies whose employees must work together across a distributed and often global organization. But there are other click-to-conference products:

Microsoft offers click-to-conference in its Microsoft Office Communications product, as does Cisco with Cisco WebEx Connect, Citrix with GoToMeeting and Adobe with Adobe Connect Pro (and at least 20 other vendors that aren’t catalogued here, but who should feel free to comment on this post to let people know).

Love to hear about your click-to-conference experiences and real-time collaboration stories. Please share.

December 11th, 2009

Office 2010's June release: Time to strategize - and segment

Posted by Sheri McLeish @ 8:00 am

Categories: Information Workplace

Tags: Strategy, Information Worker, Office 2010, Microsoft Office, Office Suites, Software

Last week, Microsoft disclosed that it expects Office 2010 and related products to be generally available to consumers at retail in June 2010. Office 2010 and related products will be available to business customers through volume licensing earlier in the first half of 2010. This launch confirmation means massive effort by the Redmond product teams to work through feedback from the public beta and ready the suite for launch.

For Information & Knowledge Management professionals, it means there’s still plenty of time to plan and refine your Microsoft Office enterprise strategy. Office is a big line item for most companies – an expense that often comes into question the closer it gets to renewal time. I’ve spoken with firms that are weeks away from their license expiring and others that have calculated the ROI for their Office investment six years out. In all of these discussions clients want to get the best value and tools for their information workers.

So what are the best practices for developing your Office strategy? First off, get to know what your information workers do all day. Most all I&KM pros acknowledge that Office is standard operating procedure for certain parts of the business: the number crunchers in finance using Excel won’t function without it. But recent Forrester data suggests that six of every 10 information workers don’t need a full-featured word processor to get their job done. Gathering data about your workforce’s use of their tools will improve your negotiating position, help determine who in your organization needs a full productivity suite, and enable you to apply personas to segment your workforce.

But Office strategy isn’t all about license costs, or even usage. For many of the companies I’ve spoken with, there’s no will to disrupt the apple cart. Their calculations of the per user cost through volume licensing are attractive enough to forego the potential for business disruption and cultural upheaval of introducing an alternative productivity suite. For these enterprises, optimizing Office tools for efficiency and integration with collaboration and business processes become a more significant part of the Office strategy.

Microsoft has a lot riding on Office 2010. As it toiled on its fourteenth version of the world’s most popular knowledge worker toolset, the market dramatically changed: Cloud computing and SaaS have fueled Office alternatives like Google Apps and Zoho, while OpenOffice suites have reached a level of interoperability with Office to make them truly viable alternatives for many information workers. But Microsoft still has an ace up its sleeve: a majority of enterprises own SharePoint for content management. And that content is overwhelmingly created in Office apps. In this sense, the strategy for most companies is clear – and now the RSVP date is, too. No regrets.

December 10th, 2009

Harness the power of workforce personas

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 1:13 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Enterprise mobility, Information Workplace

Tags: Workforce, Telecommuting, Recruitment & Selection, Workforce Management, Payroll Solutions, Human Resources, Phil LeClare

Do you truly understand your workforce and what they need from technology? Hint, it’s a loaded question. You might think so, but you’d probably be wrong. They’re not like you. Not at all.

We weren’t sure, either, which is why we surveyed 2,001 US information workers — people that use computers in their jobs to find out what technology they use and what they need to be successful in their jobs.

We discovered something that consumer market researchers have known for generations: Not everybody needs or wants the same stuff. So we drew on our decade of experience with quantitative analysis and created a segmentation that highlights the differences between employees based on their need for location flexibility (mobility) and their application use:

• Location flexibility, a.k.a., mobility — drives differences in the need for smartphones, wireless networks, collaboration tools, and telecommuting support.
• Application use drives differences in social computing, consumerization of IT, and tolerance for virtual desktops.

We brought these segments  [license required] to life by borrowing a technique from market research and creating “workforce personas” with a name, picture, and detailed description of what they need.

• There’s Michael, a Mobile Professional, who needs to be connected and productive from anywhere;
• Diane, a Deskbound Contributor, who wants you to keep it simple, but powerful;
• Oliver, an Offline Practitioner, who’s typically on his feet but needs access on the go; and
• Andie, an Accidentail iWorker, who uses computers only because she has to at work.

Meet your real workforce below.

What does knowing your workforce personas really mean? It means you can do a much better job with that desktop virtualization project, with saving money in your next upgrade of Microsoft Office licenses, with a smarter smartphone strategy, with more targeted social network or wiki investments, with better telecommuting decisions, with training programs, with IT satisfaction measures.

It also signals the end of one-size-fits-all provisioning and ushers in a era of persona-driven provisioning. Start by analyzing what your own workforce truly needs from technology.

Questions, thoughts, experiences? Please share.