18 months ago, my first blog post at Forrester discussed industrialization trends in the IT services industry globally. I suggested then that IT services providers would have to focus their industrialization efforts on shared resources, self-service and automation capabilities.

On the automation front, most efforts till date have been incremental in nature – mostly focused on removing redundant and mundane tasks via process redesign and/or tools implementations. The recently announced Infosys partnership with IPsoft is taking these automation efforts to a whole new level. Infosys will leverage IPsoft’s autonomic based automation capabilities as part of its effort to improve the performance of its infrastructure services delivery capabilities.

Why is this partnership important?

From an operations perspective, this technology is expected to improve the competitiveness of Infosys’ infrastructure services offering. In a nutshell, the scripts used in traditional tools to automate a particular task are replaced by self-learning, self-optimizing software agents, which yield much faster time to resolve. According to IPsoft, such technology can automate at least 60% of level 0 and level 1 issues in a support environment by automating time-consuming labor such as diagnostics.

There is a shift underway with master data management (MDM) that can't be ignored. It is no longer good enough to master domains in a silo and think of MDM as an integration tool. First-generation implementations have provided success to companies seeking to manage duplication, establishing a master definition, and consolidating data into a data warehouse. All good things. However, as organizations embrace federated environments and put big data architectures into wider use, these built-for-purpose MDM implementations are too narrowly focused and at times as rigid as the traditional data management platforms they support.

Yet, it doesn't have to be that way. By nature, MDM is meant to provide flexibility and elasticity to managing both single and multiple master domains. First, MDM has to be redefined from a data integration tool to a data modeling tool. Then, MDM is better aligned to business patterns and information needs, as it is designed by business context.

Enter The Golden Profile

When the business wants to put master data to use it is about how to have a view of a domain. The business doesn't think in terms of records, it thinks about using the data to improve customer relationships, grow the business, improve processes, or any host of other business tasks and objectives. A golden profile fits this need by providing the definition and framework that flexes to deliver master data based on context. It can do so because it is driven by data relationships.  

As an avid personal investor I’m often appalled by cable shows that report on the markets as if they were non-stop sporting events. Seriously, how many people care how the NASDAQ or the Dow are doing on any given minute of any given day? But apparently there are enough day traders out there that noon reports from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange are as compelling as half-time reports during the NFL playoffs.

Nah.

I have to confess that there is one piece of financial analysis that I do look forward to – though in my defense, this is an annual occurrence and not an hourly update. The analysis comes from Jon Picoult, a gentleman who runs Watermark Consulting.

For a while now Jon has been taking the data from Forrester’s Customer Experience Index (CXi) and using it to do a thought experiment. In this experiment he looks at what would have happened if, back when we first published the CXi, an investor had taken two equal buckets of money and created two U.S. stock portfolios.  The first portfolio would have consisted of the top 10 publicly traded companies in our index (the customer experience leaders). The second portfolio would have consisted of the bottom 10 publicly traded companies in the index (the customer experience laggards).

In Jon’s model the investor would have held each portfolio for a year, then sold them both and taken his profits (or losses). He would have then used the proceeds to purchase the new year’s leaders and the new year’s laggards, continuing this cycle of selling and buying for all six years that the CXi has been in existence.

Intriguing, right? Even those of us who believe in the business value of customer experience (or in my case can prove it through research) don’t normally look at the impact on stock performance.

The Forrester Research Mobile Commerce Forecast, 2012 To 2017 (US) indicates that nearly 40% of US mobile phone owners will become mobile phone shoppers by 2017. While this statistic sounds impressive, it means that the majority of consumers will be reluctant to purchase products on their mobile phones. Why aren’t all customers attracted to the unprecedented convenience of anywhere, anytime mobile shopping?

Forrester’s Consumer Technographics® data shows that while consumers use the mobile channel to research competitive product pricing while they’re in a store, they often prefer to purchase their desired product off the shelf, even if the physical item in front of them is not the cheapest option. Consumers are driven by convenience, sometimes at the expense of price:

Let’s put it this way: social media and security don’t work together very well today. Marketing professionals who see social media as a vital communication channel view security as a nuisance, whereas Security pros view services like Facebook and Twitter as trivial pastimes that expose the business to enormous risk. The problem is, when it comes to social media, these two facets of the organization need to come to terms with each other – and this was clearly on display Tuesday when the Dow Jones briefly plummeted over 100 points due to false Tweets from AP’s hacked Twitter accounts that indicated President Obama had been injured by explosions at the White House.

This recent breach signifies two things: 1) the potentially damaging impact of social media is real and growing, and 2) companies today aren’t doing enough to mitigate the risks.

As social media becomes a legitimate source of news and information, the implications for inaccurate or inappropriate behavior continue to grow. Damaging or disparaging comments on Twitter (whether intended or not), can have a real impact on your business and the way customers view your company and brand. Companies need to do more to protect their organization from social media risk because: