Positioning Technology Products – Don’t Sell the Swiss Army Knife!

In my consulting and speaking work with technology companies, I am frequently asked a question – how should you position a mass market software product that has thousands of features for a specific customer segment?  Consider products like Microsoft Office, Intuit’s Quicken or Adobe Photoshop.  These are gargantuan products that have evolved over decades and are marketed to a very broad set of customers.  These products have features galore and offer something for everybody.  Positioning these mass market products seems to fly in the face of a basic tenet in product positioning – that you must define the target audience precisely and as narrowly as possible, so that the benefits you offer are relevant to the audience.

In thinking about this problem, I found a useful analogy – think of these “do-all” products like a Swiss Army knife.  The classic Swiss Army knife is famous for being a “multi-tool” – it consists of a number of tools stowed inside the handle of the knife.  The number of tools can be dizzyingly large – one giant Swiss Army knife has 85 tools, costs $999 and holds the Guinness Book World Record for the largest number of tools in a single instrument.

Regardless of how many tools a multi-function knife has, customers will only use one at a time.  And most customers will use only a few of the tools.  So, while the knife may have lots of tools, there are only a few that are relevant to a specific customer, depending on the situation they are using the knife for.  So what they will end up doing is to stow away the tools they are not using, and only expose the relevant tool, one at a time.  The rest of the tools are there, just hidden away.

And so it is with a complex technology product like Microsoft Office.  It is like a giant Swiss army Knife in terms of the number of features and functions it performs.  But a specific customer segment will end up using a very small subset of these features. For instance, I am an academic and I also do a lot of public speaking. I use Microsoft Word to write academic articles and therefore I really like the bibliography and cross-referencing features in Word. And I use PowerPoint quite intensively to make presentations.  Within PowerPoint, I use SmartArt quite frequently as it allows me to communicate visual concepts elegantly. And I like the new “broadcast” feature in PowerPoint, which allows me to set up a quick-and-dirty remote presentation easily.  If I was a salesperson or a lawyer or a high school student or a bond trader, I might use Office very differently.  To continue the analogy, all customers use the same Swiss Army knife, but they expose a different set of tools.

So that’s how you should market these products – by highlighting the relevant functionality for each customer segment, while keeping the other stuff “stowed away” because it is not relevant to that customer segment.  The same product can therefore be positioned differently for different customer segments, by “dialing up” and “dialing down” the features and benefits that matter most to them.  And when you launch a new version of your product, you may “dial up” only what’s new, while not talking about the thousands of features that already exist.  For instance, when Intuit launched the 2009 version of its Quicken product, it highlighted the new capabilities for keeping track of your budget and for stretching your household dollars further, keeping in view the economic recession and the fact that many households were seeing a decline in their incomes and net worth.

But too often, I see technology companies sell the “whole knife”, as it were. The pitch – “look how many tools we have in our Giant Swiss Army knife”.  The fact is that this pitch will fall flat for most customers, because you are marketing “just in case” features instead of “just in time” features.  As a result, your positioning becomes fuzzy and sounds like motherhood and apple pie. 

So take a long hard look at your Swiss Army Knife, and stow away the tools that don’t matter when you are marketing your product.  Of course, there are two other options.  If you are Apple, you separate the tools (the apps) from the knife, and market the fact that people can pick their own tools to attach to the knife. And if you are a niche player like Amazon.om with its Kindle, you can argue that a dedicated knife or screwdriver will be more efficient and effective than a bulky Swiss Army Knife!

• Share

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

1. Solve a real problem: The problem you solve for your customers should be real in that it should address a valid pain point. Sometimes, founders of startups are enamored with problems they believe are real, but customers don’t actually see things the same way!  For instance, Netflix solved a real problem of usurious late fees charged by Blockbuster, as did Blue Nile, when it helped men to buy jewelery in private without looking foolish in a store. 
2. Solve a focused problem: Too often, “world domination” and the pursuit of the mythical “mass market” leads to startup failure. The more focused the problem is, the better your chances of success because you won’t have “just-in-case” features in your product! Consider Segway, the revolutionary personal transporter from Dean Kamien. When Segway tried to pursue the “mass market for pedestrian travel”, it failed to gain market traction because the value proposition wasn’t compelling for anybody in particular. But it has become much more successful in the focused niche market for public safety, with its Segway Patroller for beat cops.
3. Solve a big problem: You should solve a problem that a lot of people have and problems on which a lot of money is being spent. If you create an e-commerce site to sell hot sauce (e.g., www.hothothot.com), how big can this be? On the other hand, the market for cloud infrastructure services is likely to be huge, so its well worth chasing.
4. Solve a difficult problem: Ask yourself – what prevents someone else from solving the same problem as you? What’s proprietary about the intellectual property and the knowledge? What’s difficult about the technology and the operational capabilities for your venture? For instance, the folks at www.diapers.com solved the difficult problem of online sales and direct distribution of bulky, low value to volume ratio commodities like diapers. Bigger players like Amazon had ignored this market because the logistics simply did not work. But these guys figured it out with amazing innovation in warehousing and distribution.
5. Solve an obvious problem: If you are asked “what does your startup do”, and you need more than 30 seconds to convey the core problem and solution, you’ve got issues! Your problem should be easy to define. For instance, Akamai “decongests the Internet” and GrouponNow finds you “deals RIGHT NOW, in your neighborhood”.
6. Solve a complete problem: Too many companies leave customers at the altar by creating incomplete solutions to a problem. A problem 80% solved is a problem not solved at all! That’s why Best Buy is aggressively building its Geek Squad service, because it knows that selling consumer electronics is not enough – they need to help customers install and set up the gear.
7. Solve a worsening problem: Pick a problem that is likely to get worse over time and you will guarantee that your market opportunity will grow for years to come. When Google set out to make the world’s information useful, its a problem that is getting worse by the day. So there’s plenty of headroom for them. On the other hand, distributing DVDs in stores or by mail is not a problem that has legs, which is why Blockbuster Video is bankrupt and Netflix is moving to online streaming.

I hope these seven tests will guide startups to problems that are worthwhile and can present a valuable business opportunity.

• Share

A fundamental tenet in marketing is that you should reward customer loyalty.  In fact, loyalty programs are an important pillar of competitive advantage and profits for airlines, hotels, credit cards and retailers.  The more you fly with an airline or the more nights you stay at a hotel, the better they treat you. This makes perfect sense.

But not in the telecom and utilities business, which has it all backwards.  They reward customer disloyalty and their customer loyalty programs are customer hostage-taking programs!  Let’s take a look at Comcast, a leading voice, data and video provider. They advertise their Starter XF Triple play bundle at an introductory rate for $99/month for the first 12 months. After 12 months, the monthly service charge jumps to $114.99 for months 13–24. After 24 months it jumps again to $129.99/month.  So if you stay with Comcast for more than 24 months, you are rewarded with a $30/month penalty for the rest of your life!  And the agreement comes with a handcuff of 24 months to ensure that you don’t run away.  No worries, though. After 24 months, you can switch to AT&T U-Verse, which has a similar introductory offer only for new customers. And then you can switch back to Comcast! Wireless carriers have similar asinine pricing plans that reward hopping and switching. So the Belief Project from U.S. Cellular, which actually rewards you with points for doing more business with them, comes as a breath of fresh air.

I wonder when people at telecom companies will figure out the difference between a loyal customer and a hostage. And I also wonder when they will figure out that rewarding customers for leaving you will increase churn, especially when many of your loyal customers are really hostages. When will we see “old customer discounts” from Comcast or AT&T?  I’m not holding my breath.

• Share

We all marvel at the innovation and value that Apple has created in the past decade. But the lesson I take away from Apple is the power of focus . Apple basically has only five products, yet it generates $65 billion in revenues and has a market capitalization of almost $300 billion! One thing that Apple has alway resisted is to proliferate their brands or product lines. The iPad is just the iPad – you can choose different capacities and connectivity options, but there is only one brand. It is the same with the iPhone and the iPod. Contrast this with Samsung in the mobile device business. It has dozens of sub-brands including Instinct, Galaxy, Captivate, Epic, Fascinate and so on. The result – each of these brands has limited awareness and weak brand equity. The benefit of focus for companies like Apple is that they are able to put “more wood behind fewer arrows”. They can focus their resources in fewer brands and products. Companies like Sony, Samsung and Microsoft need to learn from this. They have thousands of products and hundreds of sub-brands. We see the same phenomenon in packaged consumer goods, in retail, in pharmaceuticals, in technology as well as in financial services.

Companies need to pick lenses through which they choose to focus. The lens may be a geography, a vertical market, a brand, a product category or a channel. Consider an example: in the case of Fonterra Foods (a dairy products company based on New Zealand), they chose the Foodservice channel (selling to restaurants and other commercial food establishments) as a lens to focus their growth efforts. While they narrowed their focus on the channel front, they offered a broad range of dairy products through the Foodservice channel. Dell used a channel focus (direct to consumer). Southwest Airlines has focused on the domestic market and on one type of aircraft (the Boieng 737) for 40 years. Enterprise Rent-a-Car has focused on a segment (Replacement cars for customers whose cars are being repaired or have been stolen). The insight – if you want to broaden your revenues, you have to narrow your markets!

Focusing doesn’t mean you are selling less. On the contrary, you are actually increasing scale but you are doing it in carefully selected areas. Therefore, if you pick a few brands to focus on, you need to take them to the world. And if you are going to pick a few markets then sell everything into those markets. So, you do need to pick the lens and then you need to drive that to scale through organic growth as well as through acquisitions. What companies have to assess is the product of the number of products, categories, brands, markets, geographies and channels the company has in its portfolio. For instance, a company may have thousands of products, but if they are all focused on a couple of vertical markets like health care and manufacturing, then they are still a focused company. But, if you have complexity along multiple dimensions, then it is quite likely that you have exceeded the point of diminishing returns and are unfocused.

• Share

Fundamentals are fundamentals for a reason. They don’t change. We tend to get carried away by newness, and assume that everything needs to change. As the French saying goes, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” – the more things change, the more they stay the same. We tend to forget this. I remember the heady days of e-commerce and dotcoms where we believed that the laws of gravity and economics had been repealed – that assets and profits did not matter. Just visit the warehouses and data centers of Amazon.com to see how many bricks it takes to support the clicks! And we believed that “pure-plays” were the way to go. However, I tried to remind people that “customers don’t come in offline and online versions!”

And so it is today. In all the excitement about social media and digital marketing, I see fundamentals take a backseat yet again. The Second Digital Gold Rush is in full swing. Eyeballs are back as valuation metrics (Twitter and Facebook being two stellar examples). And while people are making real revenues this time (Groupon, for instance), I don’t believe these revenues are sustainable long enough to justify the valuations. Groupon’s valuation of north of $15 billion is hard to justify. Yes, they have stumbled upon a brilliant model to deliver customers to the door to merchants (and their new offering GroupnNow is a brilliant way to match demand and supply in real-time for providers with high fixed costs and demand volatility), but this too shall pass. Remember how excited we were about eBay as a radical new way of doing commerce (“Dynamic Commerce”)? People eventually got tired of chasing auctions, and now PayPal is the saving grace for eBay. Similarly, merchants and customers alike will discover that Groupon-like services end up selling services that customers don’t necessarily want at prices that merchants cannot really afford to acquire deal-loyal customers.

I was asked recently by an executive from a large technology company – “how do we do good digital marketing?” My response – “Do good marketing digitally!” Digital marketing is still marketing! True, social media has some unique characteristics, but it is still merely a tool and a means to an end. In executing a social media campaign, you still need objectives, a target audience, a creative value proposition and metrics. I continually remind people of this “back to basics” idea. I feel that while we should have our “head in the clouds of new possibilities”, we should also have our “feet on the ground of fundamentals”. After all, a person with his head in the clouds and his feet on the ground is a very tall person!

• Share

I had posted earlier that I did not understand what need the Apple iPad really fills, and what use cases and scenarios it enables that are currently not possible. I had concluded that the iPad had no clear purpose and no clear position.

Well, I’m being forced to reconsider my thoughts for two reasons. First, as a marketing expert, I should have known the power of emotional appeal. Everyone who owns the iPad that I have talked to gushes about how “gorgeous” the device is and how much they love the experience. When pressed about WHY and WHERE they use the iPad that the couldn’t use their iPhone or their Mac or their iPod Touch, people aren’t clear. But it doesn’t matter. The user experience is so intuitive and the device is so damn sexy that people are willing to vote with their wallets. Most people admit they don’t need an iPad, but they absolutely WANT one. And as we all know, in a battler of heart over mind, the heart wins every time. After all, 3 million iPads have been sold and counting. The lesson – understand the power of emotion. Apple is a true master at “selling lust”.

The second reason relates to consumer behavior in relation to computers. Ten years ago, if you think about what people did on their computers, you realize that we spend a large percentage of our time creating content and very little time consuming content. After all, there wasn’t much content to consume. There was no youTube, no iTunes, no Pandora, no Facebook and so on. We did word processing, email, spreadsheets and presentations. All these applications required creation of content, and hence keyboards etc.

But now, things are quite different. We have become voracious consumers of content. If you measure the percentage of time that people, especially younger people, spend consuming content versus creating content, I bet you would find that the vast majority of the time, we are in consumption mode. Particularly with all the applications on the iPhone, we are playing games, reading stuff, networking wih friends, watching videos and so on. And that’s what the iPad is about – it is a fantastic content consumption device. Content consumption requires a great browser, great multimedia, great display, great sound and an intuitive user interface. Hence the value of the iPad. If all we do in creation mode is email, and that too, we spend more time reading emails than responding to them, then the iPad does 90% of what we need to do with a laptop, and with a far superior user experience. And this trend will continue. All this bodes very well for the iPad.

In summary, the iPad will usher in a new era of “consumption-optimized” devices and will prove to be a big success for Apple. I stand corrected!

• Share

Last weekend, my wife made a convincing case for an interesting kitchen appliance – the Keurig Platinum Single Cup Brewing System.  The device is really innovative – it brews a single cup of coffee, tea, hot cocoa or even iced coffee in less than a minute, using “K-Cups” that you load into the machine and discard after each use.  It is easy to use, easy to clean, and looks really cool.  And you can choose from a lengthy list of branded providers of beverages. 

I was skeptical, arguing that we didn’t need yet another space-age kitchen appliance and that the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) was very high.  But she won me over with her arguments that convenience trumps TCO and a hot cup of on-demand Joe was well worth the financial sacrifice and shelf space.  As I sip my cup of Newman’s Own Extra Bold coffee that I made on the Keurig, I must say that she was right, as usual. This machine is the greatest thing since sliced bread!  The coffee comes out piping hot, it tastes great, and the kids love the fact that they can make hot cocoa in less than a minute whenever they want. 

But what impressed me more than the device is the innovative business model that Keurig and its competitors (Tassimo and Lavazza, among others) have created.  I call it “Apple iPod/iTunes meets coffee”.  Let’s look at the similarities:

·         Like Apple, Keurig began with the premise that, while coffee makers have been around for a long time, the customer experience of making a hot, consistent and convenient cup of coffee in the home leaves a lot to be desired.  Coffee makers are difficult to clean, a hassle to operate, the coffee sits there and becomes cold and bitter, and it is difficult to figure out exactly how much coffee to put into the filter.

·         Like Apple, Keurig created a superb end-to-end customer experience consisting of an elegant hardware device, single-use “K-Cups” and a comprehensive ecosystem of “content” from 13 branded beverage manufacturers.  Further, like Apple’s proprietary AAC format, the Keurig K-Cups are not compatible with other systems.

·         Like Apple, Keurig sells the hardware for a similar price point as the iPod ($199), and content at a similar price ($0.60 per K-cup).

·         Like Apple, Keurig creates an “open yet closed” customer experience by allowing independent content providers to offer their own branded beverages, while maintaining tight control over the buying and brewing experience.

·         Like Apple, Keurig has been able to convince all beverage providers to sell the beverages at the same price.  Just as i-Tunes sells all songs at $0.99, all K-cups sell for $13.95 for a pack of 24.

·         Like Apple, Keurig has created a number of accessories, including reusable filters, milk frothers, travel cups, etc. that it sells at healthy margins.

·         Like Apple, Keurig has created a strong lock-in effect because of the investment that customers have made in its hardware and accessories.

All this allows Keurig to make a killing, first on the coffee maker and then on the K-cups.  For my household, here is the stimated CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value), assuming a 36-month horizon:

·         Coffee Maker: $199

·         Accessories: $50 (we have already spent about $30)

·         K-Cups: $6,000 ($0.60/cup x 10 cups/day x 365 days x 3 years)

That’s a CLTV about $6,150, assuming a 10% discount rate. And you thought Starbucks was an expensive habit!!

Here are the lessons to be learned from Keurig and its competitors:

·         Even a commodity category like coffee can be reinvented by focusing on creating innovative solutions and an innovative customer experience.

·         Business model innovation has far greater payoffs than product innovation

·         There’s a lot you can learn about business model innovation if you look beyond your industry

Now, I wonder why P&G and Kitchen Aid haven’t thought about creating a “personal laundry system” or a “personal dishwashing system”. This could include appliances that would accept proprietary “pods” of Tide or Cascade that would be inserted for each load, and would take the guesswork out of doing laundry or dishes.  If HP can make money from ink, Gilette from razor blades and Apple from MP3 players, what’s stopping other consumer packaged goods companies from using a similar “razor-razor blade” business model? 

• Share

Customer segmentation is probably the most important concept in marketing. But it is also one the most difficult to do well. In this post, I reflect on four key issues that marketers must address in their segmentation work:

1. Scope of segmentation – What is the appropriate scope at which segmentation studies should be conducted? Specifically, how do we reconcile the level of depth required by engineering with the breadth required by cross-business alignment?
2. Inbound versus Outbound Use of Segmentation – How do we reconcile segmentation variables that are useful for inbound product development decisions versus segmentation variables that are useful for outbound product marketing decisions?
3. Refresh Cycle and Stability of segmentation – How we ensure that segmentation remains relevant between the time the product is initially conceptualized, through development and into go-to-market? How often should we “refresh” segmentation studies to ensure that they are tracking changes in the market structure or demand?
4. Segmentation for Multiple audiences – how we approach segmentation and targeting for products that cater to multiple audiences?

1: Segmentation Scope:

The broader the scope of segmentation research, the less actionable the results are for specific business groups and products. On the other hand, the more focused the segmentation research, the less the “interoperability” and reusability of the research for other business/product contexts. If the scope is defined too broadly, you can end up with a very generic segmentation approach. At the other extreme, segmentation of a very narrowly defined audience will lead to very precise segments, but it would be of no relevance for other products/markets.

Specific questions that you need to think about related to scope:

• What are the different levels of scope at which segmentation is currently done?
• How “interoperable” are the segments/segmentation variables in segmentation studies done for different products/business groups?
• How feasible is it to “standardize” segmentation across business groups/products?
•  What is the “sweet spot” in scope between too broad and too narrow?
•  What can we learn from other companies or other industries in terms of best practices?

2: Inbound vs. Outbound Segmentation

When segmentation is done at the inbound stage to guide engineering decisions, it will emphasize variables such as:

• End-user behaviors
• End-user needs
• Usage scenarios
• Technological environment
• Desired features
• Depth and breadth of product use
• Skill level

On the other hand, when segmentation is done at the outbound stage to guide marketing decisions, it will emphasize variables such as:

• Audience
• Attitudes
• Demographics/Corpographics
• Psychographics
•  Life stage
• Media habits
• Price sensitivity
• Channel preference
• Goals and outcomes

• Share

For students of marketing, Barack Obama’s campaign is an excellent marketing case study on positioning and messaging. Here are some lessons I take away from his campaign:

Focus on pain points: Successful marketers are very clear about the customer pain points that their products or services address. Apple improved the lousy experience of buying and listening to digital music with the iPod. And then it improved the lousy experience of web browsing and gaming on mobile devices with the iPhone. So did the Obama campaign. When you sort through all the campaign pronouncements, plans and promises, Obama focused on two main pain points – people are sick of the war in Iraq and ordinary Americans are worried sick about their personal finances. At the outset, Obama defined his campaign around his opposition to the Iraq war. Then, as the financial and housing market crisis deepened, he dialed up his focus on middle-class tax relief. Those are the only two issues he focused on. These pain points were real and they were both areas where his competitor was weak.

Craft a simple message: If you ask any Obama supporter to define what Obama stands for, you will get a three word answer – “hope and change”. This is not an accident. Obama has been hammering away at this message for two years. He has had variants of this message in his stump speech for a long time. At one point, he used to say that “doing the same thing over and over again in Washington and expecting different results is the definition of insanity”. His message of hope goes back to his defining speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention, where he uttered the famous line – “there are no Red States and no Blue States – there are only the United States of America”. Even his message on tax relief was defined in terms of one simple number – “not a penny more in taxes for anyone who makes less than $250,000 a year”. Change plays well to voters who are sick of the way things are going. And hope complements change because it shows voters a vision of a better tomorrow. These were the twin pillars of Obama’s positioning. Hope and Change. Simple to understand and simple to rally around.

Stay the Course: Too often, I see politicians behave like candles in the wind, buffeted by what the focus groups and pollsters are telling them from day to day. I believe that pollsters, led by Mark Penn, were the undoing of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. She let pollsters define her in terms of what they thought voters wanted, as opposed to who she really was. The result was a lack of clarity and consistency in her positions. This in turn led to the perception that she was an opportunist who would do anything and say anything to get elected. This is a pity, because Hillary would arguably have been the best president among all the candidates. Later on in the campaign, John MCain shot himself in the foot with his ill-conceived “Maverick” move to “suspend” his campaign and parachute himself into Washington to help solve the financial markets crisis. In retrospect, this will rank as one of the “100 Dumbest Political Moves of All Time”. It made McCain look like an impulsive hothead. It was terribly presumptuous of him to believe that he could be the catalyst to seal the bailout deal. People including myself, were left wondering what McCain would do if, say, North Korea decided to launch a nuclear missile or conduct a nuclear explosion. My take – he would “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb” first and ask questions later. I think we have had one too many gun-slinging cowboys in the White House! Crisis calls for calm. That’s what we saw in Obama. As McCain was rushing off to Washington, Obama didn’t bat an eyelid. He stuck to his message and continued with his campaign as if it was business as usual. To me, this was an important turning point in the campaign because it told voters a lot about his temperament and how he would respond to a “3 A.M.” crisis.

Speak to the heart: Ultimately, I believe no election is about the issues. It is about the person. And no election is about the head. It is about the heart. That’s why Al Gore lost his bid to be president, despite being orders of magnitude more knowledgeable and intelligent than George W. Bush. And that’s why Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan won their bids. People want to be inspired. They want to believe, even if they don’t know what exactly they are being asked to believe in! One of my cousins, who voted for McCain, was incredulous that “no Obama supporter can speak for more than 5 minutes on WHAT Obama would do as President and what this change that he talks about is really about”. But this, I pointed out to him, was exactly the point! People believed in Obama as a person. They were inspired his fresh face and his passion. Did they read his tax plan or his health care plan? How many of us can quote chapter and verse from any candidate’s plans or positions on issues? That’s politics of the head. It will always lose to the politics of the heart. Just as brands that focus on emotional value (think Mini Cooper, Apple, BlackBerry, Singapore Airlines) will always trump brands that focus on functional or economic value.

Target non-consumption: Brilliant marketers don’t just fight for a bigger share of the pie. They expand the pie by bringing new consumers into the market. When Southwest Airlines got started in the early 1970s, it did not compete against airlines. Instead, it took people out of cars and put them on planes by offering dramatically lower prices and point-to-point short haul service. Obama did something similar. While most politicians worry about “energizing the base” (remember the angst that McCain felt at not being able to energize his conservative base). Obama went beyond this and successfully expanded his base. In particular, he focused on two segments who were less engaged with the political process – young voters and African American voters. By inspiring these two segments through the message of hope and change, Obama brought millions of new voters into the political process. And these new voters supported him overwhelmingly. Just look at the candidates’ share of voters by age in Florida, and you can see how Obama won the elusive state.

In summary, most people believe that Obama is a brilliant politician. But to me, Barack Obama is a brilliant marketer. His historic campaign embodied many best practices in marketing. Of course, now we will find out if he can really deliver the goods!

• Share

I gave a keynote last week at the Teradata User Group Conference in Las Vegas. The subject was “Collaborative Analytics”. To me, it seems logical that two key trends – the rise of Collaboration and the interest in Analytics should come together to create the concept of Collaborative Analytics. I define Collaborative Analytics as a process where inter-organizational teams organize, analyze and interpret federated customer and operations data to make better joint business decisions.

In this presentation, I first talk about the importance of Collaboration, and the rise of the Collaborative Enterprise. The Collaborative Enterprise consists of Collaborative Business Processes, which are inter-enterprise processes that need to be designed and optimized at the Business Network level, not at the level of the enterprise. Next, I discuss the concept of Collaborative Analytics, which is analytics for the Collaborative Enterprise. I point out the promise and potential of Collaborative Analytics, and discuss the challenges in implementation. I also offer a 5-step process for putting Collaborative Analytics to work.

The presentation can be viewed here:

Collaborative Analytics

• Share