Three Big Data Rules to Live By

The Internet walks into a [karaoke] bar: “Every breath you take, every move you make…I’ll be watching you.”

In today’s increasingly connected world, practically everything we do creates an electronic record. Every purchase, every status update, every Like becomes a part of the digital ether — a tiny but permanent speck in the growing collective. And as organizations continue to amass this so-called Big Data, so grows the pressure to prove its intrinsic value. If you’re lost as to how, you’ve got a lot of company.

Here are three important rules to keep in mind:

1. Don’t Treat it Like it’s New

While being romanticized by a new/new-ish term is a pretty easy thing to fall victim to these days, when it comes to “Big Data” we really should know better. Companies have been analyzing large data sets for decades.

In other words: data have always been big.

Myriad social technologies — blogs, geo-location, networking platforms, etc. — have certainly sped up both the creation and collection of data, and our response has (naturally) been to speed up our analysis in return. But doing so hasn’t exactly yielded the results we’d hoped for.

In some ways, we are going in the wrong direction … there used to be time to digest the information between data dumps. Companies would spend time thinking about the numbers, looking at benchmarks and making thoughtful decisions. But that idea of forecasting and diagnosing is getting lost today, because the data are coming so rapidly. In some ways we are processing the data less thoughtfully," Peter Fader, professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

Tip: Don’t bet on a first analysis. We’ve been good at being thoughtful about data up until this point — that practice shouldn’t change just because we’ve got more of it.

2. Know What You Know — and What You Don’t

Let’s pretend you’ve been bitten by the Big Data bug and have decided, as a result, that a multi-faceted beast of an analyzation product is absolutely necessary for the future of your organization. You shell out the money for said product only to find that the information you really need to get ahold of is inconveniently dispersed, inaccessible or totally M.I.A. What then?

"Sure, if we could crack the code on big data, we'd all be swimming in game-changing insights. Sounds great. But in my day-to-day work with clients, I know better,” explained Deloitte director Greg Szwartz. “They're already waging a war to make sense of the growing pile of data that's right under their noses. Forget big data — those more immediate insights alone could be game changers, and most companies still aren't even there yet.”

Tip: Move from small to big — not the other way around. Before you go on a new mining adventure, do a simple gut check: how much of a hold do you have on the surface stuff? If it’s shaky, you’re probably not yet ready for a deep dive.

3. Have a Question (or Three)

Lastly, keep in mind that analyzing data just because everyone else is doing it isn’t the right attitude. Whether it’s one of customer retention, operational efficiency, or the general health of your business, you should have some question in mind. After all, if you can't define the goal of an effort, where’s the sense in pursuing it?

In an article from Forbes, Piyanka Jain outlines three basic starting points:

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

7 Key Activities For Getting Innovation Right

These days innovation is everything--and yet it’s nothing if it doesn’t succeed in the marketplace. Sure, innovation is about generating great ideas. But a great idea alone is not enough. It must have the legs to get over the obstacles that innovations inevitably confront.

The real trick is building something people are compelled to acquire, getting it into their hands in a form they can put to use, and generating the cash flow needed to grow. Getting innovation right means not just creating something new—it requires successful delivery of that new product or service.

Experience working on hundreds of projects in some 60 organizations has taught me that seven key activities will lead to successful innovation. Putting any one of these into practice will put you ahead of the competition. Bring them all to bear and you will systematically uncover potential, capitalize on opportunity, and generate traction that drives success in the marketplace.

1. Discover Inflection Points
A positive inflection point is a game changer that has the power to propel you forward. Expert innovators are able to sense the potential in inflection points before they take place, and then ride these dramatic shifts toward four strategic targets: growing your base, increasing the offerings your customers buy, generating loyalty, and moving you up-market.

2. Build Capacity
Systematic innovation relies on the ability to contain and the three inherent stresses of a successful innovation environment. Strong innovation leaders recognize this and intentionally cultivate the people and the environment that provide a strong foundation. The three stresses are:

A. Pressures of everyday operations – just keeping the doors open brings its own special set of challenges that include everything from suppliers dropping the ball to irate customers to unplanned successes that require your attention.

B. Movement and stress that comes with new ideas, products and services – although necessary for sustainable growth and profit, innovation is by definition not business-as-usual. When it courses through your organization it demands attention and creates counter-forces that can wreak havoc if you are not ready for it.

C. Market forces: sometimes rapid, always unpredictable - every business owner knows the market can shift on a dime or a headline. Positive inflection points are sometimes generated in response to these changes in market conditions. For innovation to thrive, you must have the capacity to provide both the stability required to weather change as well as the flexibility to jump at sudden advantage.

3. Gather Business Intelligence
The best innovation rises from a sea of information about products, services, customers, competitors, market conditions and internal capabilities. Business intelligence is the data that supports your ability to make strategic decisions. It could be information about products, customers, competitors, the market or internal capabilities—or all of the above. Effective innovation requires intelligence to make smart choices that take into account each of these areas.

I have been conducting business intelligence for my executive clients since 2000. I find it surprising that so many have little or no intelligence efforts in-house, let alone the ability to exploit this resource. It’s a stark absence. They cannot act on their information because they have none or what they have is haphazard, built upon conversation and hunches only. It is a sad state considering that much of this valuable input is readily available for a negligible cost.

4. Shift Perspective
In order to see new opportunity you must be able to get out of your own box. Successful innovators question their own assumptions and try on alternative and helpful points of view.

Shifting perspective is essential if you are going to get innovation right. Your current assumptions are constraining your thinking, whether you’re aware of that fact or not. In this chapter I will show you how to challenge those assumptions by applying four techniques for shifting perspective that should put you in a new relationship to everything you thought you knew. From this new perspective, you’ll find it easier to get innovation right.

Your clients, competitors, strategic partners, and industry observers each have a sense of the value your organization provides. But is it the same value proposition you and your marketing team have worked so hard to create and articulate? Maybe not!

5. Exploit Disruption
Successful leaders learn to identify the opportunity embedded in adverse conditions. It can come from anywhere. If ignored or mismanaged, it throws business into disarray. But what if you could take the forces behind these intrusions and turn them to your advantage? That’s what the masters do. Instead of being waylaid by adverse conditions, they use them to get the upper hand. You can and you must become an expert in exploiting disruptions. Don’t fight change but use it to your advantage.

Market fluctuations are normal, including fast, painful declines and long, confusing morasses. Rapid fluctuations are particularly disruptive. The market plunges, a sexy new competitor moves into your space, technology changes too fast to keep pace, customer expectations slam you. We've all been there. Welcome to life in the 21st Century. Learn how to put disruption on your side.

6. Generate Value
Value is what causes people to reach in their pockets and spend. Skillful innovators understand what drives value and how to generate it. Value is at the center of everything. With it, you can hobble along in other areas and still score a goal. Without it, you are doomed to eventual failure regardless of your other accomplishments.

Value has been at the basis of commerce since the beginning when we first went beyond producing goods for our own use and began to use them for trade. Value is what we want, what compels us to pay or barter. Value is what drives all the activity tallied daily in the world’s markets. Value is the holy grail of business – you must keep your eye on it 24/7.

7. Drive Uptake
Every stage of the innovation process holds opportunity to engage the community of people who will be most interested in your offerings. Innovation leaders intentionally drive this uptake, or market acceptance, for maximum effect. There is nothing more gratifying or necessary than seeing your offerings purchased and put to use. Uptake is customer acceptance of a new product or service. Without it innovation is an empty shell, a wasted effort. With it, new ideas come into their own as they are taken up and applied by the people who most desire them – your customers.

Innovation is the successful introduction of a market offering that profits everybody involved, both you and your customers. Innovation happens when a new product or service creates a return in the market that far exceeds the time and money it takes to develop and execute. When a new offering is accepted and embraced, generating the resources that make it possible to support and grow its place in the market – that is innovation.

Seth Kahan is a change specialist who has consulted with CEOs and senior managers at over 60 organizations including World Bank, Shell, Peace Corps, and 30+ associations. This is an excerpt from Seth Kahan’s forthcoming book, Getting Innovation Right: How Leaders Create Inflection Points that Drive Success in the Marketplace to be published by Jossey-Bass in early 2013.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

5 Things Not to Do with Your New SharePoint Intranet

As many of those who have used Microsoft SharePoint will know, it is a bit of a "kitchen sink" product. It offers the typical enterprise a bit of everything — a bit of workflow, lots of document management, social features, calendars, basic task management — this list goes on. As a result it can be difficult to know what bits to use and how best to use them. Intranet projects can quickly become bloated and the final product is met with a resounding whimper by end users.

To help with this issue, here is my list of five things you should not be doing with a SharePoint Intranet.

1. Implement Workflows

So many Intranet projects try to make use of SharePoint workflows. Some even plump for an add-on like Nintex, which provides a really powerful platform for building almost any custom workflow you can think off. But you should avoid workflows on your Intranet. Why? Because they are so very hard to get right.

Implementing a badly thought out workflow will kill your Intranet before it even has chance to get going. Workflows are often sold as a way to improve users working lives, to streamline, to save money. Instead users normally end up with a clunky process, that involves more steps or convoluted workarounds and turns users off SharePoint altogether.

Why not try instead …

Keep your Intranet simple to begin with and launch with only a core set of features. Then spend some time and money investigating how people really work, and the processes they carry out. Only once the Intranet has seen some adoption and you truly understand a given workflow, should you try to build it. And again, keep it simple.

2. Build Infopath Forms

Infopath is similar to workflow, in that often people are sold on the idea that every form in the business can be put online, with all the advantages this supposedly brings. Instead they get complex forms that are harder to fill out than the paper versions and never end up being used. Infopath is a complex tool and producing usable forms with it is a real skill. People often see it as a close relation of Word and dive right in to build a "Sickness absence" or "Holiday" form. The results vary wildly.

Launching a new Intranet with substandard functionality will turn users off and they will never adopt the system long enough to see the benefits. Forms are an easy trap to fall into — easy to build and very difficult to get right.

Why not try instead …

Keep all forms as Word documents, but store the masters on the Intranet. That way people have to use the system to get a copy of the form in the first place (use content types if you are really doing it properly). Completed forms, in Word or scanned, can be saved in a document library.

Keep things simple to begin with (see a theme developing?) and once people are used to the system, you can expand with well thought out Infopath forms.

3. Implement a Custom Graphic Design

The issue of graphic design, SharePoint and Intranets, is something of a pet topic of mine. Basically don’t waste time skinning up SharePoint to match your website or corporate brand guidelines.

The time and money spent on this work can be much better spent on functionality, training or adoption activities. These things have a much greater return on investment than making sure your brand themes are interpreted accurately. This issue is even more pertinent for SharePoint 2010. Microsoft’s offical advice is not to touch the user interface — so don’t!

Why not try instead …

Put your logo on your SharePoint master page and create some themes that use your color palette. Then create some site templates that consider good layout and information architecture.

4. Replace All Existing Fileshares

SharePoint is great at document management, it really is. Check in and out, versioning, even the interface: all good features well implemented. Even SharePoint detractors can’t help but admit that it does documents well. But don’t do what many companies do and migrate all documents to the SharePoint Intranet and remove the existing fileshares.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Video Blog: Importing Labels to SharePoint 2010

There are many positive features to using the Term Store taxonomy management feature within SharePoint 2010. Unfortunately, not everything that we need as information managers is one click away. 

For example, when importing terms into the Term Store using the .CSV template, the ability to bring along synonyms such as alternate spellings or acronyms isn't as seamless as it could be. This video discusses two workarounds to importing "Other Labels" into the SharePoint 2010 Term Store.

Editor's Note: Mike Doane writes and blogs frequently with taxonomy tips. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Data: Why YouTube Will Never Look Quite Like TV

Even as YouTube pursues television-quality content, data is helping mold decisions about everything from hip hop dance moves to throat-slitting horror gore.

“This is the Steve Martin,” says Charlene “Chi-Chi” Smith, swinging her arms as she demonstrates the dance move: two exaggerated hip-hop steps to the left and another two to the right.

Smith, dressed in jeggings with black converse sneakers laced up to her knees, is Shakira’s former dance captain and has performed with the likes of Snoop Dogg and Diddy. Online instructional video creator Howcastrecently recruited her to teach the rest of us how to dance.

When it’s time to demonstrate the Steve Martin to music, Howcast’s senior director of production, Heather Menicucci, hits play on her open laptop. Fifteen seconds later, that’s a wrap. Smith has flawlessly improvised a professional-quality dance lesson without so much as stumbling on a word. Thirty minutes later, she’s also given one-take demonstrations of the Cut Daddy, the Robo Cop and the Dougie.

Smith is an awesome dance teacher, but the reason she's here today has nothing to do with hip hop. It’s about data analytics.

“Hip hop” is a topic plucked from Howcast's topic-selecting program, which selects winning video search terms based on their search volume, search competition, advertising yield, public competitor data and the past performance of similar themes. The company is filming its fifth series on hip hop and teaching us how to Dougie for the third time because both topics had a high “z score,” or likeliness of profitability.

In the realm of Internet video, Howcast is as good at data as Smith is at the Dougie. It makes almost every programming decision--from how much content it releases to whether a video should include an intro--based on the numbers.

Not all channels take their data analysis to the same extreme, but almost all of them base at least some creative decisions on their data dashboards. Even as YouTube pushes for high-quality, TV-like content, data is molding Internet video into a distinct medium.

“The way I think about [web video] is how I think about web 2.0,” says Tim Shey, director of the YouTube Next Lab. “The web 2.0 companies don’t spend years building their platform and then launching it and crossing their fingers … you launch with the minimum feature set you need to keep your audience happy. And then you iterate and improve.”

Shey is charged with coaching YouTube’s more than 1 million ad-serving channels to maximize their performance. As of late, that job has involved more data tools. YouTube continually refines its content creator tool set. In November, it launched a revamped data dashboard, including a new option to see how far viewers watch a particular video. In March, it announced new tools to analyzing total watch time on videos.

This sort of minute-by-minute feedback provides cues that Nielsen television ratings never could. And paired with online video’s relative low barrier to entry, it enables experimentation that would be inefficient or impossible to interpret in a traditional broadcast.

Before YouTube acquired his company, Next New Networks, in 2011, Shey led a handful of YouTube channels. He credits attentiveness to data with his success on the platform. For instance, one of his most successful channels, called Barelypolitical, originally targeted an older audience that actually followed politics. But when it introduced Obama Girl, with her tight shirt and gushing songs about the 2008 election's democratic candidate, it realized the channel had untapped potential.

Not only were Obama Girl’s music videos a hit, but other musical comedy about pop culture on the channel were gaining steam. Data showed the channel’s audience was also getting younger. Reacting to these factors, Shey and his team decided to create a weekly pop culture musical comedy segment called “The Key of Awesome” and aimed it at a teenage audience. It ended up blowing past their previous successes to the tune of more than 1 billion views.

Barelypolitical accidentally discovered a hit format it may have not noticed without analytics. Howcast's data-driven experiments are more deliberate.

Smith has planned to create 40 videos on the day that I visit the Howcast studio. In a handful of them, she’ll teach dancers in the room with her instead of demonstrating solo. Again, this decision has nothing to do with hip hop. Howcast wants to know if its audience responds better to a solo teacher talking to them directly, or to a teacher and student combo. So it’s filming samples of each method to use as a test.

The company has run about 35 similar tests since it started in 2007, according to Rick Bashkoff, Howcast’s VP of Business Development & Marketing. At one point, for instance, it added short expert introductions to each of its videos, but a look at the drop-off data showed the 10-second clips were sending users clicking elsewhere. Now Howcast videos jump right into the action.

CafeMom Studios, a channel that hosts mostly talk shows, noticed a similar slump when it verbally transitioned from story to story during its daily news show. It, too, decided to ditch its intros.

“As a result, we have seen audience retention smooth out--we no longer lose viewers between stories--and more are now sticking around for the whole video,” CafeMom EVP of Content Tracy Odell tells Fast Company.

Sticking around for the whole video is something YouTube is pushing for. In addition to investing heavily in high-quality content, It has also began rewarding videos that retain viewers, not just attract them, by favoring them in search and suggested videos. As a result, Shey says that time spent on YouTube has been rising. Viewers watch 4 billion hours of video on the site every month.

Shey says data can help creators make content that keeps people watching their videos.

“Especially if making long-form content, you can really understand at what point do people rewind and watch parts of the video again and again, do they fast forward, do they drop off, you can really look at videos and see how far they’re watching and then try to understand why,” he says.

Bashkoff agrees. Howcast sticks to a short how-to format, but he's thought about how data might also shape episodic, long-form content. Do people navigate elsewhere when that guy’s throat is slit? Now you know where your optimal gore line sits. Is a character more engaging when he’s fat and bald or handsome and fit?

Howcast’s co-chairman, Kevin Law, has a unique vantage point from which to approach the question. He’s also the CEO of Uncommon Content Partners, which makes shows of television length and quality for YouTube. According to him, the data-based decision making of Howcast doesn't translate well to the entertainment-focused content of Uncommon’s Reserve Channel.

It would be too expensive, he says, to do the sort of experiments Howcast uses to program its instructional videos on the long-form shows that populate Uncommon’s YouTube channel. Data isn’t nearly as useful when making programming decisions, either.

“You make a video about how to fix a flat tire because you are addressing an individual need of theirs,” he says. “It’s not that the person who fixes a flat tire wants to see a show about cars.”

“When you’re entertaining somebody, it’s more subjective. You’re trying to anticipate what is going to make somebody laugh or cry or be inspired.”

Uncommon’s creative process may be all art, but it can’t escape science. Just like Howcast--which gets between 30 and 40% of its traffic from search and most of the rest from suggested videos--the majority of the Reserve Channel's viewers find its shows through some type of query. Most people do not yet commit to watching any YouTube series every week the same way they do television shows.

Data drives how each of Uncommon’s shows is paced. It changes how they’re promoted, and it will ultimately decide which shows get dropped and which shows get their own channels.

“It’s an interesting combination of art and science,” Law says. “I don’t think it’s ever really existed to the extent it does now, for video programming, because of the web.”

Source : fastcompany[dot]com

Is Anxiety About Our Wired Choices Misplaced?

Instead of dialing up our anxiety about privacy in the changing online world, we should use it as an opportunity to question and test the security of everything--driver's licenses, plastic credit cards, paper medical records.

As an engineer and a millennial who has grown up with an Internet connection, I’m constantly connected to some device. I read email while I’m running on the treadmill. I built an app that knows where you are at all times, which more than two and a half million people opted in to using. Not everyone consumes technology as voraciously as I do, but nearly half of Americans tote around smartphones. As we become more keenly aware of these phones’ ability to track our every move, strangely almost in lockstep we find that we can’t live without them.

Why do we have so much anxiety about being found when we clearly choose to be wired?

If you want to live a truly private life, ditch your mobile, disconnect your Internet, pay with only cash, get rid of your highway toll transponder, forget about loyalty cards, stop answering the census, stop answering the door, build a bunker somewhere underground in New Hampshire (live free or die), drive a pre-2005 unregistered vehicle without a GPS (or better yet, a horse without a GPS), stock up on canned goods, become extremely paranoid--and don’t forget to hide from the IRS.

Unfortunately, going all Thoreau isn’t an option for most of us, despite our desires to keep our online identities under lock and key. And as the recent epic hacking of Wired reporter Mat Honan tells us, we aren’t entirely immune.

But, all things considered, we should be far more paranoid about the real-world constructs centered around identity that we’ve failed to question for decades -- sometimes even centuries. The problem is, we’ve grown up with so many blatant divulgences of personally identifiable information that we think are completely safe.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Why don’t we question things like credit cards we carry around in our wallets that link our personal information to static and easily visible digits on a piece of plastic? We willingly hand this piece of plastic to strangers almost daily, allowing so many opportunities for massive fraud to happen. Not to mention we print our social security numbers on paper cards and sometimes even send them--unencrypted--over email.

I’d argue physical media (be it paper or plastic) is our identity’s public enemy number one. From medical records to mortgages, there’s so much paper in the world that exposes our identities to anyone who can open a folder in a filing cabinet.

To contrast, the online world that we understand considerably less is a far safer one. Technology is uprooting some of these decades-old constructs that just don’t work, and shouldn’t be status quo for our modern lives. But technological change understandably scares us, as most revolutions do.

That fear is not totally irrational. The trade-off here is one of scale of security breach. While storing your medical records on paper in a doctors office allows for easy data theft, the limit of that theft is the size of the office. It's easy to break into a doctor's office (I don't know this from experience -- promise!) but you can only get a couple hundred records. On the other hand, while digital storage is incredibly hard to break into, if you do make it in, the scale of the breach is hundreds of thousands of records.

In my opinion, this is a good tradeoff. The absolute value of data theft should decrease with intensely secure centralized storage. Yes, breaches are larger, but there are far fewer of them. The lesson here is that we need to take that natural scale of the Internet into consideration when designing systems that touch sensitive data. Encryption is critical. Human security perhaps even more so. But also old-school techniques like dividing the data across multiple systems with heterogeneous security systems and completely different architectures.

My hope is that consumers will simply be more aware of these tradeoffs. If it turns out that there is a more secure digital solution, let's analyze, optimize, then embrace it. Payments is a prime opportunity. If there isn't a better digital solution, then let's stick with the current physical solution until technology evolves to offer a better one. Driver's licenses are perhaps the most poignant example of this, and they are the last thing that still forces me to carry a wallet.

No matter what, I’m happy that we’re questioning technological changes and becoming more informed consumers. Maybe we should be using our anxiety about our changing online world as an opportunity to question everything, no matter how long we’ve managed to put up with it.

--Author Seth Priebatsch is the founder and chief ninja of LevelUp and SCVNGR.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com