Author: Frank Gilbane (Page 37 of 71)

Federal government to spend $1.4 billion on web content management and infrastructure

May 29, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Before we get to the spending mentioned in the title, there is some important background to cover. In an email to the Presidential Innovation Fellows program mailing list yesterday and a blog post with Small Business Administration Administrator Karen G. Mills last week, White House CTO Todd Park reported on the progress of a pilot program, RFP-EZ, to make federal government RFPs accessible to small businesses.

In addition to making it easier for small businesses to win federal contracts, a key goal is to save the government money since small business bids are typically lower than larger organizations’. Another significant benefit is that it makes it easier for agencies to purchase from innovative small businesses (since more are bidding). In the technology space especially, small businesses provide the lion’s share of innovation.

So how is this program doing so far? From Park and Mills post:

Applying agile development principles, the Fellows team designed RFP-EZ over a six-month period, publishing the platform’s code openly on GitHub. The team then launched the pilot by posting five relatively simple website development and database contract offerings, four of which were also announced via the standard government portal, FedBizOps. On a per-project basis, bids received through RFP-EZ were consistently lower than those received through FedBizOps—19% to 41% lower, and over 30% lower on average. Bids made through RFP-EZ also showed less overall variation. In addition, during the pilot period, RFP-EZ attracted more than 270 businesses that until now had never approached the world of Federal contracting.

Ok, now for the spending. First of all, note that the OMB says the total 2014 Federal IT budget is $77 billion. If you haven’t seen it yet the OMB IT Dashboard yet it is worth a look, and you can download a spreadsheet that has details on spending by agency and project. Park and Mills also said in their post that:

According to Office of Management and Budget’s IT Dashboard, the Federal Government will spend more than $1.4 billion on Web Infrastructure and Web Content Management Systems in FY 2014. Based on 2011 and 2012 results, we can expect about half of these projects to be under the $150,000 “Simplified Acquisition Threshold” that would make them eligible for contracting through RFP-EZ.

This may not seem like a lot at first glance, but at $150,000 each it would mean 4,666 web content management systems or web infrastructure projects it would be fairly easy for small vendors and consultants to bid on in 2014.

Presumably the numbers came from the OMB IT spending spreadsheet, but since software category definitions are fluid, to say the least, doing your own analysis would be a good idea. While our community knows that, for example, “web content management” can include or be a component of a collection of digital marketing tools for engagement or experience management, marketing automation, etc. we can’t assume all federal budgeteers do – or did when the budgets were developed.

All of this is excellent news for a substantial number of the vendors, integrators, and consultants who participate in the Gilbane Conference. It is also great news for federal government conference attendees who can more realistically do business with smaller companies who have the latest technology.

To participate in the RFP-EZ program sign-up using the very simple web form.

The Marketing Technology Landscape

May 13, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

It’s no secret that marketing continues to increase spending on technology, which raises the question of which technologies they are spending on. The answer is “lots” – the marketing technology landscape has become much larger, more varied, and more complex. One sign is the evolution of some web content management systems to solutions for web experience management, web engagement management, digital experience management, etc., which involves integrating with marketing automation, predictive analytics, social and many other marketing tools and back end systems.

Not all this is new. In 1999 more advanced businesses were already integrating e-commerce, web analytics, personalization, and marketing automation, but it was much harder then and there were far fewer options. I hesitate to say it is easier now, but it is in many ways – the technology is much better and we have much more experience with it. What is certainly not easier is navigating the technology landscape which is extremely dynamic, and contains categories with too many vendors. Both CMOs and CIOs need a marketing technologist function in some form, and would certainly benefit from input from analysts, and a <plug> vendor and analyst neutral conference </plug>. The illustration below may be scary, but should be very useful. Thanks to Scott Brinker for first pointing this landscape out. Scott also has his own similar graphic.

MARKETING TECHNOLOGY LUMAscape from Terence Kawaja

The Gilbane Conference is growing!

May 5, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

Some of you may have heard there is some exciting news with regard to The Gilbane Conference.

We have entered into a partnership with Information Today, Inc. to organize and manage future conferences in this 12-year-old series. As you may know, Information Today is the publisher of KMWorld and EContent magazines along with a host of other publications and websites. Information Today also organizes the KMWorld and Enterprise Search Summit conferences, so they are on familiar ground with respect to web content management, content marketing, social media, and many other related technologies.

Information Today also publishes CRM magazine and produces the CRM Evolution conference and exhibition, which will enable us to reach out to marketers and other customer-focused professionals.

We believe the synergies between The Gilbane Conference and Information Today will assist us in producing even better and more innovative conferences in the years to come.

The resources of a larger enterprise and the personal care and attention you’ve come to know at The Gilbane Conference are what you can expect this fall.

The next Gilbane Conference will be at the Westin Boston Waterfront, December 3 – 5, 2013. ~~We will be announcing the Boston venue and dates in the next week or two and~~ See the new Gilbane Conference website for more information where we will be posting additional details very soon. If you are not already on our mailing list for advance information you can signup using the quick form below.

Our theme this year is Content and the Digital Experience: Manage, Measure, Mobilize, Monetize, and we’ll be continuing our vendor and analyst neutral coverage of content, marketing, and digital experience technologies for enhancing both customer and employee engagement and collaboration.

We look forward to seeing you in Boston this fall.

We would love to hear more about your interests. You can tell us more by using our more complete form. Or send us a message.

Mobile development strategy – platform decision update

February 22, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 1 Comment

Last April I suggested that evolving mobile platform market changes meant organizations needed to re-visit their mobile development strategy and said

“What has changed? To over simplify: Apple’s dominance continues to increase and is unassailable in tablets; RIM is not a contender; Microsoft is looking like an up-and-comer; and most surprising to many, Android is looking iffy and is a flop in tablets with the exception of the very Amazon-ized version in the Kindle Fire.”

Not surprisingly, things have changed again. Two major changes are that Samsung is now a major player, and Google has finally made progress in tablets with the Nexus 7 and the much improved Android “Jelly Bean” release. Amazon’s second Fire is also more robust. There are now real choices in tablets – personally I have an iPad, a Fire HD, and a Nexus 7, and I use all three of them, and for many purposes I just grab the closest. But businesses making a significant investment in a platform for development need to carefully evaluate its stability and staying power.

One thing that hasn’t changed is the debate among analysts over what the iOS and Android market share numbers mean – specifically, whether the larger and accelerating Android market share numbers threaten Apple’s dominance. At first glance it is natural to think that dominant market share signifies a safer bet, and indeed many analysts make this point. But it’s not so simple. Last year there was evidence that even though Android devices had a market share advantage, Apple devices accounted for much more total online activity – were used more – and it is probably safe to say that use is a requirement of product success.

More importantly, if you look at profit share, Apple continues to dominate. So the opposing view is that Apple may be the safer bet since for most values of company/product health, profit trumps revenue.

In “The Mobile Train Has Left The Windows 8 Platform Behind“, John Kirk, who doesn’t mince words, has no patience for the view that Android’s market share means it will squash Apple:

“According to Canaccord Genuity, Apple took in 69% of the handset (all mobile phones, not just smartphones) profits in 2012. Samsung took in 34%, HTC accounted for 1%…

No one not named Apple or Samsung is making any meaningful profits from the handset sector…

Many industry observers have the handset market all wrong. They opine that Andoid is destroying iOS. What is actually happening is:

With 69% of the profits, iOS is doing just fine. More than fine, actually.

Android destroyed every phone manufacturer not named Apple (BlackBerry, Nokia, Palm, etc.).

Samsung destroyed every Android phone manufacturer not named Samsung (HTC, Motorola, Sony Erricson, etc.).

Pundits like to predict the imminent demise of iOS, but those profit numbers say just the opposite. And even as Android’s market share has increased, iOS’s profit share has increased too. Market share is no guarantor of profits. This should be self-evident. But apparently, it’s not.”

Kirk follows up with more entertaining disdain for the “church of market share” at “Does the Rise of Android’s Market Share Mean the End of Apple’s Profits?“.

In terms of tablet market share,

“According to Canalys, Apple – despite being supply constrained – sold 22.9 million tablets for 49% share, Samsung shipped 7.6 million tablets, Amazon shipped 4.6 million tablets for 18% share, and Google’s Nexus 7 and 10, combined, shipped 2.6 million tablets.”

In conclusion,

“Only Samsung and Apple are competing in phones. Only Amazon, Google, Samsung and Apple are effectively competing in tablets. The mobile “train” has left the station and companies like HP, Lenovo, Dell and Microsoft are standing on the Windows 8 platform, watching it pull away.”

For more on Microsoft see Kirk’s full post.

Mobile platforms are still evolving and the coming proliferation of new device types guarantee that there will be continuous and substantial change made to those that survive. No one responsible for a mobile development strategy should wait almost a year to evaluate their current plan. Fortunately there is no shortage of useful platform data. It just needs to be interpreted critically.

Big data and decision making: data vs intuition

February 12, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 2 Comments

There is certainly hype around ‘big data’, as there always has been and always will be about many important technologies or ideas – remember the hype around the Web? Just as annoying is the backlash anti big data hype, typically built around straw men – does anyone actually claim that big data is useful without analysis?

One unfair characterization both sides indulge in involves the role of intuition, which is viewed either as the last lifeline for data-challenged and threatened managers, or as the way real men and women make the smart difficult decisions in the face of too many conflicting statistics.

Robert Carraway, a professor who teaches Quantitative Analysis at UVA’s Darden School of Business, has good news for both sides. In a post on big data and decision making in Forbes, “Meeting the Big Data challenge: Don’t be objective” he argues “that the existence of Big Data and more rational, analytical tools and frameworks places more—not less—weight on the role of intuition.”

Carraway first mentions Corporate Executive Board’s findings that of over 5000 managers 19% were “Visceral decision makers” relying “almost exclusively on intuition.” The rest were more or less evenly split between “Unquestioning empiricists” who rely entirely on analysis and “Informed skeptics … who find some way to balance intuition and analysis.” The assumption of the test and of Carraway was that Informed skeptics had the right approach.

A different study, “Frames, Biases, and Rational Decision-Making in the Human Brain“, at the Institute of Neurology at University College London tested for correlations between the influence of ‘framing bias’ (what it sounds like – making different decisions for the same problem depending on how the problem was framed) and degree of rationality. The study measured which areas of the brain were active using an fMRI and found the activity of the the most rational (least influenced by framing) took place in the prefrontal cortex, where reasoning takes place; the least rational (most influenced by framing / intuition) had activity in the amygdala (home of emotions); and the activity of those in between (“somewhat susceptible to framing, but at times able to overcome it”) in the cingulate cortex, where conflicts are addressed.

It is this last correlation that is suggestive to Carraway, and what he maps to being an informed skeptic. In real life, we have to make decisions without all or enough data, and a predilection for relying on either data or intuition can easily lead us astray. Our decision making benefits by our brain seeing a conflict that calls for skeptical analysis between what the data says and what our intuition is telling us. In other words, intuition is a partner in the dance, and the implication is that it is always in the dance — always has a role.

Big data and all the associated analytical tools provide more ways to find bogus patterns that fit what we are looking for. This makes it easier to find false support for a preconception. So just looking at the facts – just being “objective” – just being “rational” – is less likely to be sufficient.

The way to improve the odds is to introduce conflict – call in the cingulate cortex cavalry. If you have a pre-concieved belief, acknowledge it and and try and refute, rather than support it, with the data.

“the choice of how to analyze Big Data should almost never start with “pick a tool, and use it”. It should invariably start with: pick a belief, and then challenge it. The choice of appropriate analytical tool (and data) should be driven by: what could change my mind?…”

Of course conflict isn’t only possible between intuition and data. It can also be created between different data patterns. Carraway has an earlier related post, “Big Data, Small Bets“, that looks at creating multiple small experiments for big data sets designed to minimize identifying patterns that are either random or not significant.

Thanks to Professor Carraway for elevating the discussion. Read his full post.

How long does it take to develop a mobile app?

February 9, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

We have covered and written about the issues enterprises need to consider when planning to develop a mobile app, especially on choosing between native apps, mobile web apps (HTML5, etc.), or a hybrid approach that includes elements of each. And have discussed some of the choices / factors that would have an effect on the time required to bring an app to market, but made no attempt to advise or speculate on how long it should take to “develop a mobile app”. This is not a question with a straightforward answer as any software development manager will tell you.

There are many reasons estimating app development time is difficult, but there are also items outside of actual coding that need to be accounted for. For example, a key factor often not considered in measuring app development is the time involved to train or hire for skills. Since most organizations already have experience with standards such as HTML and CSS developing mobile web apps should be, ceteris paribus, less costly and quicker than developing a native app. This is especially true when the app needs to run on multiple devices with different APIs using different programing languages on multiple mobile (and possibly forked) operating systems. But there are often appealing device features that require native code expertise, and even using a mobile development framework which deals with most of this complexity requires learning something new.

App development schedules can also be at the mercy of app store approvals and not-always-predictable operating system updates.

As unlikely as it is to come up with a meaningful answer to the catchy (and borrowed) title of this post, executives need good estimates of the time and effort in developing specific mobile apps. But experience in developing mobile apps is still slim in many organizations and more non-technical managers are now involved in approving and paying for app development. So even limited information on length of effort can provide useful data points.

I found the survey that informed the Visual.ly infographic below via ReadWrite at How Long Does It Take To Build A Native Mobile App? [InfoGraphic]). It involved 100 iOS, Android and HTML5 app developers and was done by market research service AYTM for Kinvey, provider of a cloud backend platform for app developers.

Their finding? Developing an iOS or Android app takes 18 weeks. I didn’t see the survey questions so don’t know whether whether 18 weeks was an average of actual developments, opinions on what it should take, or something else.

Of course there are simple apps that can be created in a few days and some that will take much longer, but in either case the level of effort is almost always underestimated. Even with all the unanswered questions about resources etc., the infographic raises, the 18 week finding may helpfully temper somebody’s overly optimistic expectations.

How Long Does it Take to Build an App?

How Long Does it Take to Build an App? infographic by Angelina.

Customer experiences, communications, and analytics

January 30, 2013 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

I recently discovered Scott Brinker’s Chief Marketing Technologist blog and recommend it as a useful resource for marketers. The Venn diagram above is from a recent post, 3 epicenters of innovation in modern marketing. It was the Venn diagram that first grabbed my attention because I love Venn diagrams as a communication tool, it reminded me of another Venn diagram well-received at the recent Gilbane Conference, and most of the conference discussions map to someplace in the illustration.

As good as the graphic is on its own, you should read Scott’s post and see what he has to say about the customer experience “revolution”.

Lest you think Scott is a little too blithe in his acceptance of the role of big data, see his The big data bubble in marketing — but a bigger future, where the first half of the (fairly long) post talks about all the hype around big data. But you should read the full post because he is right on target in describing the role of big data in marketing innovation, and in his conclusion that data-driven organizations will need to make use of big data though these data-driven and data-savvy organizations will take some time to build.

So don’t let current real or perceived hype about the role of big data in marketing lead you to discount its importance – it’s a matter of when, not if. “When” is not easy to predict, but will certainly be different depending on an organizations’ resources and ability to deal with complexity, and organizational and infrastructure changes.

HTML5 Definition Complete, W3C Moves to Interoperability Testing and Performance

December 17, 2012 / Frank Gilbane / 0 Comments

The W3C announced today that the HTML5 definition is complete, and on schedule to be finalized in 2014. This is excellent news for the future of the open Web, that is, all of us. If you were involved in discussions about mobile development strategies at our recent conference you’ll want to check out all the details at http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/html5-2014-plan.

Moving right along, the HTML Working Group also published the first draft of HTML 5.1 so you can see a little further down the road for planning purposes. See http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-html51-20121217/.

From the W3C newsletter…

W3C published today the complete definition of the “HTML5” and “Canvas 2D” specifications. Though not yet W3C standards, these specifications are now feature complete, meaning businesses and developers have a stable target for implementation and planning. “As of today, businesses know what they can rely on for HTML5 in the coming years, and what their customers will demand,” said Jeff Jaffe, W3C CEO. HTML5 is the cornerstone of the Open Web Platform, a full programming environment for cross-platform applications with access to device capabilities; video and animations; graphics; style, typography, and other tools for digital publishing; extensive network capabilities; and more.

To reduce browser fragmentation and extend implementations to the full range of tools that consume and produce HTML, W3C now embarks on the stage of W3C standardization devoted to interoperability and testing. W3C is on schedule to finalize the HTML5 standard in 2014. In parallel, the W3C community will continue its work on next generation HTML features, including extensions to complement built-in HTML5 accessibility, responsive images, and adaptive streaming.