Symantec Survey Reveals Risky State of Information in the Enterprise

One of the advantages that cloud technologies have afforded us is the ability to share and access content without having to create more than one copy. So you’d think there would be a lot less document duplication in the enterprise. But according to a new report from Symantec, you’d be wrong.

The Cost, Value and Risk of Information

According to the 2012 Symantec State of Information Survey, which examined how business and IT executives at 4,506 organizations in 38 countries store and access information, 42 percent of business information is duplicate. And that’s just the information that they can find. Additionally, they don’t really know how much of what is duplicate is important.

What does this mean? It means that the enterprise needs to re-examine its information governance policies. It isn't just that duplicate information can put information at risk — it can also cost money. According to the survey, SMBs on average spend US$ 332,000 on information, while enterprises spend an average of US$ 38 million. But it’s not just how much money you spend, it’s the value of the information being created and stored.

Based on the responses from 4,506 IT professionals, an estimated 49 percent of the worth of an organization is derived from the information it owns. As a result, if any of the information were lost, it could be devastating to a business.

And yet, information governance strategies aren't sufficient to safeguard how information is created, shared, stored or destroyed. It isn't that companies are unaware, but rather that they aren't focusing on the right things. The survey shows that organizations have fairly low storage utilization rates, with 31 percent inside the firewall and an even lower percentage (18 percent) outside. In addition, two thirds of businesses said they had lost important information in the previous 12 months due to causes such as human error, hardware failure, software failure and lost or stolen mobile devices.

Get a Governance Plan That Works

What can you do to decrease the amount of duplicate information within your organization and subsequently reduce your risk? The report outlines three integral simple steps to help ensure sure your information governance program is on the right track:

1. Ensure C-level buy-in for the information governance program. It’s essential that the corporate culture be focused on effectively protecting the information created, shared and archived by employees within the organization. Projects and information should align with common business goals of risk mitigation and cost control, which can reduce the potentially expensive tendency to silo different aspects of the organization.
2. Concentrate on focused projects. Give attention to specific initiatives such as compliance, e-discovery and data privacy. With specific goals, procuring an adequate budget will be easier. Implement technologies with a high ROI such as e-discovery, archiving, deduplication and data loss prevention solutions.
3. Establish the importance of your information. In order to effectively manage information, it’s essential to know what it is and how vital it is to business functions. Classify your current information to more easily make decisions concerning information storage, security and accessibility.

Businesses are facing huge challenges when trying to manage their information and it’s not like the rate at which information is created will start decreasing anytime in the near future. The sooner companies start developing and implementing information governance strategies that tackle the key issues, the sooner they can begin to take control of their information.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Unison Releases 'Room'-Based Enterprise Social Network

There’s a new enterprise social collaboration product out. The New York City-based Unison Technologies has unveiled a new version of its service, a quick-to-launch social network based around virtual rooms. 

The company, which also has an office in St. Petersburg, Russia, is led by CEO Manlio Carrelli and CMO Rurik Bradbury, who founded and sold corporate email hosting company Intermedia. They’ve told news media that their goal is to “fix how people communicate at work, in a way that email can’t.”

Focused Around Rooms

Unison's service is aimed at small- and medium-sized businesses, runs on Windows and Mac computers, Android devices and the iPhone, and is also available as a Web app.

One of its key selling points is that it can be up and running in five minutes, with conversations focused in “rooms” instead of being sifted through streams of updates – a combination of a physical space metaphor with a virtual social network.

A user might create a room for a particular project or team, for instance, for posting documents, updates or comments.  

By entering a room, a user can see who’s there at the time and view the communications between individuals or among the group. Questions and documents can be posted inside the room, issues can be discussed in groups, room occupants can IM or use voice/video chat, and rooms can be open to anyone or closed to room members only. Conversations in each room update themselves, without page refreshes.

Users can easily create a room for a project or team.

External people, such as clients or suppliers, can come into a room, but they will only see content for which they’ve been given access. When you @mention someone, they get an alert about the referring comment. To find rooms where you were mentioned, click News in the side menu.

Room access controls allow users to determine how much content is shared within the group and with external people.

'Rooms' Reduce Clutter

Compared to other enterprise collaboration platforms, Unison said that it is the “only enterprise social network that is simple to set up and simple to use.” Its distinguishing characteristic, the rooms, is intended to create a communications workspace for each project or team, instead of the streams and groups that other business-focused social networking services offer.

By segregating teams and projects into analogues of the physical world’s use of meeting rooms, and by pushing a message directly to a non-room user, the idea is to avoid cluttering a user’s intake of information. 

The enterprise social collaboration space is booming with revived versions of established tools, such as Chatter, Salesforce's continuing social reinvention of its business platform, and a crop of new and newly-acquired companies, including Campfire, Convo, Socialcast (now owned by VMware) and Yammer (owned by Microsoft).

The Unison service uses a “freemium” business model, in that a simple social network is free, while a premium version, which adds administrator controls for adding and removing users or administering room ownership, will be available in fourth quarter at an as-yet-unannounced price.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Meet the C-Suite: The Chief Marketing Officer Must Focus on the Customer

The onslaught of new technologies, media and marketing channels introduced within the past decade have definitely changed how the C-Suite approaches sales and marketing. Not only is the role of marketing included within a company’s key leadership positions, the responsibilities of the Chief Marketing Officer include more than just advertising and lead generation. In fact, it’s more common to have an executive who’s more content strategist than sales guru.

CMO: Marketing & Technology

The Chief Marketing Officer works closest with the Chief Technology Officer. At some companies, there’s been an emergence of a Chief Marketing Technology Officer, in which the executive must combine technology and analytical expertise to make sense of and leverage the vast amounts of customer and market data.

However, it’s still more common to see separate CMO and CTOs roaming the C-Suite. As a result, sometimes your digital marketing strategy is only as good as your technical infrastructure. However, like the CEO and CIO, who must focus on empowering employees through more efficient workflows, the CMO must empower customers to engage with a company across social networks and online communities.

More Challenges Than Success

In their 2011 CMO study, IBM uncovered a few common themes among CMOs, namely a need for better collaboration with CIOs, a more comprehensive focus on the customer and subsequent responsive communication, as well as a system of engagement that maximizes value with each interaction.

As a result, the study found that many CMOs are struggling to manage the impact of key changes in marketing. A successful CMO isn’t just a social networker, she needs to be a data scientist, adept at gleaning information from customer analytics and evolving key marketing messages accordingly.

It’s no surprise then that turnover among CMOs is quite high. According to a study by SpencerStuart, the average tenure for chief marketing officers of leading U.S. consumer brands is 42 months, which is higher than it was a few years ago, but half of what it is for a traditional CEO.

Customer Marketing Officer?

According to the following IBM CMO study infographic, the biggest problem CMOs have is adapting to the customer-centric social landscape. It’s not about market trends — it’s about the customer. Additionally, it’s not about the data, it’s about how data can help build relationships.

 

What Does the Future of the CMO Hold?

When the economy is good, great marketing is just icing on the cake. When times are tough, marketing is often the first to blame for bleak sales. While the CMO must focus on both data and customer relations, at the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line.

However, a company must invest in the cultural, organizational and technological infrastructure so that a CMO can spend more time fine-tuning key messages for the appropriate audience, rather than building the foundation upon which great content can be delivered. You can't have one without the other, and a CMO is hard pressed to do it all, making it essential that the C-Suite works together to support one another.

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com

Webinar Redux: Rethinking Web Engagement - Leading with Content Marketing

Digital marketing is being disrupted. New technologies, including social media, and increased consumer sophistication are requiring digital marketers to rethink how they engage their audiences.

As detailed in CMSWire's August 8th webinar, “Rethinking Web Engagement - Leading with Content Marketing,” by changing their approach to a content- and journey-centric marketing strategy, marketers can weather this change and distance themselves from the competition.

Read on for a recap of the webinar content and to access the full recording of the event.

The event featured presentations from Robert Rose, a 15-year content marketing veteran who authored the book, “Managing Content Marketing”, and is a contributing senior analyst with Digital Clarity Group and Ian Truscott, VP, Product Marketing, SDL Content Technologies Division and director at CM Pros Association. Barb Mosher Zinck, CMSWire's Managing Editor, served as moderator.

Marketing Processes Change

Robert Rose began the webinar by describing how marketing processes have changed in recent years. Media filtering technologies such as Netflix, Spotify and Twitter allow consumers to pinpoint what information they receive according to their specific interests, weeding out advertisements and extraneous information.

In addition, years of exposure to these technologies has trained consumer brains to serve as media filters, meaning a consumer looking at an online or physical environment full of marketing messages will only see the ones that meet a particular interest at that moment. 

IT Strategies Must Also Change

In response to changes in marketing processes, where consumers can now effectively filter out any message they don’t want to receive, Rose said IT strategies must change as well.

Where content was once delivered in the 1990s through desktop publishing and in the 2000s by Web Content Management Systems, in this decade it must be delivered via combination of tools and process often described as Web Engagement Management.

 
“We must facilitate the buying journey,” said Rose. “It’s more important to get IT involved as the way we implement (Web Engagement Management) tools becomes more technical and complex.”

Rose said the marketing and sales teams must align as part of this process to understand the “buyer’s journey” and the personas of the consumers they are targeting. “It’s not enough to facilitate the sales process. We must look at the journey holistically. Web Engagement Management is delivering value to the customer every step of the way.”

IT can support this holistic view by helping deliver value to consumers through functions such as landing page management and delivering content through social and mobile channels.

Rose cautioned that in addition to communicating with consumers to ensure the engagement process is buyer-focused, marketers must clearly communicate their needs to the IT department, and must understand which systems the IT department care about (and will interfere with) most.

“IT guys don’t care which analytics you select,” he said. “At that point they’re busy playing World of Warcraft.”

Engagement Cycle Disruption Produces New CXM Model

Truscott then initiated his portion of the webinar by offering thoughts on how the traditional consumer engagement cycle has been disrupted. “Engagement used to be a linear process,” he said. “The customer would see and respond to messages.”

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com