2014 TSW Vision Awards at Service Revolutions: Recap

Last week at Technology Services World Best Practices, the closing event of the conference was the Vision Awards at Service Revolutions. This “American Idol” style competition gives tech companies 7 minutes to demo their coolest technology. The competition was hosted by our CEO, JB Wood. A panel of judges, consisting of Al Gray, Vice President, Bentley Systems; Tony Brucha, Director, Advanced Services, WebEx Customer Success, Cisco; and yours truly, asked questions and made somewhat relevant comments after each presenter. Audience voting determined the winners.

To be considered for Service Revolutions, technology firms submit applications in 3 categories:

• Service Practitioners. These are service organizations within tech firms, showing off technology or programs they have developed to improve customer service, streamline operations, or drive service revenue.
• Commercial. These are established technology firms selling products to service organizations. The products must be in Beta phase or newly released.
• Startup. These are brand new tech firms within their first 2 years, often pre-VC, showing off products yet to be released. The winner of the startup category wins a check for $10,000!

The finalists who took the stage were:

• Service Practitioner: Blackbaud. Blackbaud demonstrated their group consulting model for professional services.
• Service Practitioner: SAP. SAP demonstrated their Learning Hub for customer education.
• Commercial: Ancile. Ancile demonstrated their in-product dynamic help technology.
• Commercial: Radialpoint. Radialpoint demonstrated their Google extension which incorporates internal content into employee’s Google searches.
• Commercial: Transversal. Trasnversal demonstrated Prescience, their voice self-service product.
• Startup: SimpleQL. SimpleQL demontrated their dynamic analytics tools, “the Festivus of Business Intelligence.”
• Startup: XOEye Technologies. XOEye demonstrated their camera and video enabled saftey glasses for field service, with a price point in the hundreds–not thousands.

The winners were Blackbaud, Radialpoint and SimpleQL. I thank all the presenters for great demonstrations, and congratulations to the winners!

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Gamification At Work: New Book Provides Rich Examples for Enterprise Apps

I did not jump on the gamification bandwagon early. I’ve attended a lot of webcasts and conference presentations on the topic, and I kept hearing the same unconvincing stories over and over, with no great examples of how this applies to the world of enterprise applications. Too many vendors have added a “Like” button somewhere in an application and call it gamification. I’ve seen people talk about revolutionary gamification strategies to drive worker productivity, but it was the same old incentives for extra effort we’ve used for decades. I had started to think that gamification was like the infamous emperor–maybe not completely naked, but at the least scantily clad.

I’m happy to say there is a new book about to be published that finally convinced me the gamification movement is real, it is revolutionary, and it definitely has a place in enterprise software and service operations. The book,”Gamification At Work,” was co-authored by two prominent design professionals, Janaki Kumar, Head of Strategic Design Services at SAP and Mario Herger, a Senior Innovation Strategist at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, California. With a real background in enterprise software, Janaki and Mario provide a deep dive into gamification examples for software, productivity and even support communities (using actual examples from the SAP customer community). “Gamification At Work” will be published later this month, but the publishers have provided a link to access an online version of the book, just for “Ragsdale’s Eye On Service” readers, so please click through and check it out: http://www.interaction-design.org/books/gamification_at_work.html?p=c782

I knew I was onto something when on the very first page, I found this: “[The authors] caution against taking a ‘chocolate covered broccoli’ approach of simply adding points and badges to business applications and calling them gamified.” This has been my exact complaint, so I knew these guys had figured it out.

The previous presentations I’ve seen on gamification give gaming examples and say, “Think how we could use that in corporate America!!!” But they don’t give examples. This book gives examples. Not only does it provide a look at the psychology of gaming, and walks you through the typical push backs on the topic and why they aren’t valid (things like it only works for kids, or women won’t use it), but it also details gamification elements, gives the root of the idea from the gaming world, then shows how it can be leveraged in enterprise apps or corporate processes. My favorite part of the book is Chapter 6, describing various gamification elements, and not just points and badges, but interesting concepts like Scaffolding, Narrative and Emotion.

This book is must read for enterprise application designers, and the examples about online communities and worker productivity make interesting reading for service management as well. Please take advantage of the free online version while available, or order now from Amazon!

Thanks to Janaki Kumar and Mario Herger for sending me an advance copy, and to Lee Traupel of the Interaction Design Foundation for extending the free online version to my blog readers. And as always, thank you for reading!

SAP CRM: Momentum followed by innovation

Today I attended the SAP CRM Virtual Influencer Summit to get an update on SAP’s CRM practice. I love the virtual approach for analyst summits as I have access to all the content without having to lose a day flying somewhere.  Here are some updates:

• Twitter integration. SAP unveiled a CRM Twitter Solution that pulls in Tweets and performs sentiment analysis, so you can take action on negative comments automatically.

SAP Twitter integration with sentiment analysis

SAP Deepens Functional Coverage in ITSM and Contact Center

I had a chance to do a deep-dive with SAP lastweek in two areas, SAP IT Service Management (ITSM) and SAP Business Communications Management (BCM), and there were some very good surprises along the way. My overall finding is that SAP has made HUGE progress in leveraging strong elements from CRM and other applications across their portfolio, so not only do you now have a more consistent look and feel across the various applications, but they surprised me with some sophisticated features in unexpected places giving them a ‘best of breed’ distinction when ‘good enough’ would have probably been acceptable (and let’s face it, that’s the strategy many suite players use).

ITSM, or tools for IT support, may not seem like an obvious interest area for me, since the SSPA is external-customer facing. But with services revenues growing, SSPA and TPSA members are now finding themselves offering all sorts of advanced service options, sometimes acting as the IT outsourcer for implementations of their technology at customer sites. As a result, member companies are facing more requirements for ITIL compliance, service catalogs, CMDB-like asset tools, and they need to be able to speak with IT customers using the ITIL terminology of ‘incident/change/problem’ management. In other words, the line between internal and external support has thinned, and ITSM tools and philosophies are becoming more common in tech support.

A few exciting things for me in SAP ITSM are: