Measuring the Business Value of Twitter

Twitter has just released a new useful guide covering the basics, best practices and case studies for using Twitter for business. 

They are trying to stress that Twitter should be viewed as a tool for building relationships rather than a tool for broadcasting announcements, PR, etc. in their words:

“Instead of approaching Twitter as a place to broadcast information about your company, think of it as a place to build relationships.”

It is still a great vehicle to get coupons, deals and specials out, but the long term value will come for said relationships.

Another interesting subject they address is measuring the value of Twitter. 2 things are important in this regard:

1. Twitter ( as other social media activities) links should be tagged and reported in web analytics tools using special tags embeded in the tiny URLs so they could be seamlessly rolled up along with all other measured media
2. As an engagement tool, it brings to focus the tracking and value placed on brand engagement as part of the value of the web activities and interactions. Think about the value that can be assigned to a user reading branded messages several times a day.

For more information about best practices in using Twitter for business see our previous post on the subject: bulding the collaborative enterprise.

Begin at the end … ensuring data quality success!

posted with permission from Data Quality Chronicle

Due to the fact that data is there before a data quality project, and it is there after a data quality project, data quality is not as clear an impact on the business as a traditional application development project.  This is particularly true of customer data management oriented data quality projects where the primary objective is to “de-dup” or consolidate the data.  After all, in the end there is just less data.

When this is looked upon purely from a software perspective there’s not much difference.  Sure, there are cost savings associated with the reduction in the storage requirements.  There might even be some increased performance in dependent applications due to the reduced volume.  However this is hardly a justification for the investment that a typical data quality initiative requires.  This is particularly inconvenient considering most of the investment is in software and other technology related resources.

However consider the impact of a data quality project which consolidates customer data from a business perspective and see a different side of things.  Consider the benefits of less, unnecessary, possibly inaccurate customer data.

• fewer mailings to reach the same customer providing a direct cost savings
• fewer mailings to reach the same household providing a direct cost savings
• fewer mailings required overall providing a direct cost savings
• fewer failed mailing attempts due to address validation providing a direct cost savings
• fewer customer service requirements due to single view of the customer providing a direct cost savings
• more accurate perspective of customer product portfolio providing a direct increase in marketing opportunities

Now (re)consider the substantial impact that can be realized from a consolidation effort.  Furthermore as long as data quality initiatives are implemented into ongoing operational data services, these cost reductions extend into the future producing benefits in the long term.  This further justifies the cost of implementing data quality services into an organization as a long term solution.

This is why it is critical to the success of a data quality project to have clear goals that are aligned with a business initiative.

However this is not the end of the line when it comes to ensuring success.  To do this you have to start with goals like the ones listed above and define ways in which these types of goals can be measured.

For example the first bullet point is a data quality goal tied to the business initiative of reducing duplicate customer data. To support this, a data quality matching process can be defined that uses criteria to identify redundant customer transactions and consolidate them into a survivor record.  The affect the data quality initiative has on this business process can be measured in terms of the reduction in total mailings required to complete a marketing campaign.  More importantly, it can be measured in terms of a reduction in total dollars required to fund the new and more concise direct mailing campaigns.  Now the data quality process and its results can be linked directly to a reduction in budget.  Clearly metrics like these make it obvious that a data quality initiative that merely reduces data has a tremendous amount of value.

If you define a list like this with business stakeholders driving the process, before the data quality project is implemented, there will be a clear path to success as well as an easy way to quantify it once the solution is deployed!

Fresh! Content is King

Up until few years ago most companies were satisfied with creating websites that were largely static.  A website designer would organize largely pre-existing content into a collection of content buckets, slick graphics, and flash presentations and a website developer would bring the website into existence. New content would be added when either the old one became obsolete or new products or services were created. This model is essentially one step above the electronic brochure style websites of yesteryear, when companies essentially copied their existing paper brochures to web and called it a website.

In today’s environment of social networking, blogs, and collaboration, static content is not only passé it prevents companies from driving advantage from their internal and external user bases and communities of experts. Fresh and timely content helps drive new traffic to the website and is an effective marketing tool. Unfortunately, most companies do not realize the need for fresh and rapidly evolving content on their website and the role it can play in engaging their customers and prospects. Even companies whose products and services remain largely stable overtime need to think about their websites differently. It is not just a one way medium to push static content outwards, it is in fact one of the most cost-effective mechanisms to engage customers and prospects and turn them into a long-term asset. If you believe that the nature of your business is such that you don’t need to think about using your website to engage your customers and prospects, chances are you haven’t fully explored the possibilities. It may take some effort to figure out creative and effective mechanisms to drive advantage from your ability to create fresh and meaningful content and interactions with your customers and prospects, but the rewards are well worth it. From local doctor’s offices to insurance companies to Fortune 500 companies, all can benefit from large, loyal, and engaged communities of customers and prospects.

However, most likely your existing static content-based website can’t support the type of content and interactions needed to support what we just discussed. If your website infrastructure still relies on IT staff to update the content chances are you won’t be able to morph your website into a hub of fresh and dynamic content that attracts new and repeat visits. The business users or the content creators must be able to update the content easily and as frequently as needed.

Of course, you would want some sort of approval workflow and a content publishing process to manage rapidly changing content. Fortunately there is a category of software that is designed to do just that. Web content management systems (WCMs) such as Drupal, Joomla, Microsoft SharePoint, DotNetNuke, etc., are designed to give business users and content creators control over the ability to update content easily and frequently. In most cases, users can manipulate the content by logging into the administrative version of the website and updating the content in a WYSIWYG environment. Content creation and updates can be brought under customized workflows and approval chains which are quite important in a fast moving environment. WCM systems also boost many other capabilities like:

• Content Categorization
• Document Management
• Delegation
• Audit Trails
• Content Creator Grouping
• Content Templates
• Discussion Forums
• Blogs
• Reviews and Ratings
• Etc.

Discussion forums and blogs can be used to create vibrant user and expert communities that revolve around your products and services and continuously create new content that keeps customers and prospects coming back to your site. These tools not only provide a mechanism for external parties to contribute new content but also provide a mechanism for them to communicate directly with you about what is important to them. Insights gleaned from such content can be quite valuable in creating new products and services or improving the existing ones.

Now that we’ve talked about the virtues of fresh content and using your website as a two way medium, you are probably wondering if you would be able to afford it. A little known secret about good WCMs is how cost effective they can be. Creating a custom website from scratch can be a very onerous and expansive proposition. However, most well respected WCMs offer out-of-box templates and web components that actually make is much faster and cheaper to build a website if you take advantage of their off-the-shelf goodies. If you are considering investing in an upgrade of your website – even if you are NOT (consider the cost of lost opportunity) investing any money in your website —  it would behoove you to look at the benefits of upgrading your website using a WCM system.

Straight Through Processing & Underwriting ~ THE STARTING POINT

Over the past several years, insurance carriers have engaged more and more in Straight Through Processing (STP) initiatives.  I see many different areas where STP can play a significant role for carriers:

• Underwriting
• New Business
• Billing and Collections
• Policyholder Services

Early adopters honed in on the imaging of paper documents as the starting point for STP automation.  The focus should be less about imaging of documents and more about capturing data in electronic format, then using the data in the life cycle of a policy from underwriting through the claims process. 

As I work more and more with our clients on these initiatives I often hear the following:

“Our STP initiative is focused on the  automation of our new business process, utilizing electronic policy data from our agents/agencies to feed directly into our Policy Administration System”. 

I am not in complete disagree with this statement, in fact I am in favor of it.  But, I do not believe that this is the best starting point.  The underwriting business process and the underwriters are where STP needs to start in order to drive efficiency and consistency throughout organization.

Why do I believe this?

For one key reason – the ultimate objective of STP is the ease of doing business with agents and policyholders.  This starts with new business, which is rooted in the underwriting process.  New business cannot exist without underwriting, so why start with new business?  You must start with the foundation of new business – Underwriting.

The goal for carriers then, is the optimization of the underwriting process, because it sets the foundation for the issuing or declining of policies.  Key objectives of insurance carriers is to consistently work with their agents and brokers to give them the products they need, AND streamline the issuing process to be more efficient and cost effective. 

Too often in my analysis of current underwriting practices at P&C and LH&A carriers I see underwriters handling every policy that an agent or agency submits.  I often ask “Are you adding any value when you touch it?”  If the answer is “NO”, then I say automate!  If you start with a goal of automating 25% of the underwriting process and an average underwriter handles 50 policies a day, that equates to 12 policies taken off the hands of the underwriter.  These policies go through the process with little or no human intervention – the ultimate goal of STP. 

Now, you maybe asking “What do I automate and when?”

Great question and one that has been asked many times over.  You begin with four developmental points:

1. Develop or purchase a “Business Rules Engine” to add and support your underwriting rules.  Start small, with a select group of easy to automate products, such as Term Life or Auto insurance;
2. Incorporate the ease of electronic submission;
3. Establish or improve your agent or agency interfaces for faster and more efficient uploads and downloads of electronic data and;
4. Create a real-time policy decision process, and put it in the hands of the agents (accept, pend or decline).

Figure 1 below depicts the process of using an Underwriting Rules Engine as the driver for the new business STP process.  

 

Figure 1

The underwriting engine houses all the underwriting rules for those products you have selected.  The engine then impacts 4 critical areas in your STP process:

1. Supports on-site policy issue by allowing underwriting rules to be downloaded to an agent or business rep’s laptop;
2. Utilized by your administration system for further evaluation of a policy;
3. Supports one central location where underwriting rules are stored, and;
4. Allows the business owners and not IT to update the rules engine in a fast and efficient way, leading to a quicker turnaround on new or updated products.

In helping clients move forward with their STP initiatives I will consistently start with a detailed analysis of their underwriting process and build the foundation from the underwriting perspective. 

Where are YOU in your STP process and is underwriting part of it?
 

Physicians Insist, Leave No Data Behind

“I want it all.” This sentiment is shared by nearly all of the clinicians we’ve met with, from the largest integrated health systems (IHS) to the smallest physician practices, in reference to what data they want access to once an aggregation solution like a data warehouse is implemented.  From discussions with organizations throughout the country and across care settings, we understand a problem that plagues many of these solutions: the disparity between what clinical users would like and what technical support staff can provide.

For instance, when building a Surgical Data Mart, an IHS can collect standard patient demographics from a number of its transactional systems.  When asked, “which ‘patient weight’ would you like to keep, the one from your OR system (Picis), your registration system (HBOC) or your EMR (Epic)?” and sure enough, the doctors will respond, “all 3”. Unfortunately, the doctors often do not consider the cost and effort associated with providing three versions of the same data element to end consumers before answering, “I want it all”.  And therein lies our theory for accommodating this request: Leave No Data Behind. In support of this principle, we are not alone.

By now you’ve all heard that Microsoft is making a play in healthcare with its Amalga platform. MS will continue its strategy of integrating expertise through acquisition and so far, it seems to be working. MS claims an advantage of Amalga is its ability to store and manage an infinite amount of data associated with a patient encounter, across care settings and over time, for a truly horizontal and vertical view of the patient experience. Simply put, No Data Left Behind.  The other major players (GE, Siemens, Google) are shoring up their offerings through partnerships that highlight the importance of access to and management of huge volumes of clinical and patient data.

Why is the concept of No Data Left Behind important? Clinicians have stated emphatically, “we do not know what questions we’ll be expected to answer in 3-5 years, either based on new quality initiatives or regulatory compliance, and therefore we’d like all the raw and unfiltered data we can get.” Additionally, the recent popularity of using clinical dashboards and alerts (or “interventional informatics”) in clinical settings further supports this claim. While alerts can be useful and help prevent errors, decrease cost and improve quality, studies suggest that the accuracy of alerts is critical for clinician acceptance; the type of alert and its placement and integration in the clinical workflow is also very important in determining its usefulness. As mentioned above, many organizations understand the need to accommodate the “I want it all” claim, but few combine this with expertise of the aggregation, presentation, and appropriate distribution of this information for improved decision making and tangible quality, compliance, and bottom-line impacts. Fortunately, there are a few of us who’ve witnessed and collaborated with institutions to help evolve from theory to strategy to solution.

Providers must formulate a strategy to capitalize on the mountains of data that will come once the healthcare industry figures out how to integrate technology across its outdated, paper-laden landscape.  Producers and payers must implement the proper technology and processes to consume this data via enterprise performance management front-ends so that the entire value chain becomes more seamless. The emphasis on data presentation (think BI, alerting, and predictive analytics) continues to dominate the headlines and budget requests. Healthcare institutions, though, understand these kinds of advanced analytics require the appropriate clinical and technical expertise for implementation. Organizations, now more than ever, are embarking on this journey. We’ve had the opportunity to help overcome the challenges of siloed systems, latent data, and an incomplete view of the patient experience to help institutions realize the promise of an EMR, the benefits of integrated data sets, and the decision making power of consolidated, timely reporting. None of these initiatives will be successful, though, with incomplete data sets; a successful enterprise data strategy, therefore, always embraces the principle of “No Data Left Behind”.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2009 – What’s New?

It was interesting to visit the Web 2.0 conference last week and see the progress and trends compared to my last year impressions.

Here are some of my thoughts:

• SharePoint is the de-facto standard for Enterprise 2.0 While other vendors have compelling products and features, a CIO that is looking for an internal, comprehensive, secure and maintainable solution has almost only one choice (unless you are on an IBM stack..). Other tools focus on providing point solutions, hosted environments, plugging current SharePoint holes and extending functionality. Microsoft had the biggest and most impressive presence and were heavily promoting the next version SharePoint 2010 that will be launched in the SharePoint conference in October. (Some preliminary details here).
• The field has definitely matured over the last year. There are more case studies and research about usage, benefits and trends although most companies are not sharing explicit ROI numbers. Some vendors have disappeared while others are growing and establishing themselves at a level where they may be considered long term players and safe for the enterprise.
• The experts are still frustrated with the slow rate of adoption and the seeming growing gap between the prevalence of social tools and technologies used by marketing and sales to communicate externally Vs. they almost complete absence internally. The rapid adoption of tools like Facebook and Twitter for customer communication not just in retail but in Healthcare and other industries creates glaring discrepancies where the same companies have no tools internally and sometimes even block their own marketing teams from external use of these tools under some outdated IT policy.
• IT is still not part of the discussion. That is unfortunate because as Steve Wylie, the conference director expressed in a guest post at ZDNET last week, large scale adoptions will not happen without IT.

  “While we could argue that this is a very new market and that businesses take time to change, I also believe that Enterprise 2.0 will be challenged by large-scale adoption until corporate IT is fully on board.  Early adoption has been largely driven by business users and department-level managers.  They had a problem to solve and were fed up waiting for IT to provide the solutions they needed.  They took matters into their own hands by finding workable, web-based solutions and even celebrated this new found freedom from IT.  With a few exceptions, IT took a reactive posture to Enterprise 2.0 and viewed it as a threat to be managed, secured and even blocked in some cases.”
  

• Tactical view. One of the most frequently asked questions was “what is the best way to get started?”. The pretty universal answer for vendors and corporate users was to approach it in a tactical manner and find a specific business problem you can solve using collaboration tools. Be it an HR portal to boost morale, tools to help virtual project teams work more efficiently, sales best practices portal or any of many other ideas. Define a narrow business case and implement. So far, trying to approach this in a strategic manner makes finding ROI a herculean task and as noted above, puts IT on the defensive. I hope that this trend will start to change as these tactical solutions rarely provide long term sustainable benefits.
• Rise of the Community Manager. The most active forum was the one where the newly created function – community managers shared their challenges and tricks for getting people to take part in the social activity. First, It is great to see that many leading organizations have realized the importance of such a task although many had it as a secondary responsibility they volunteered to do rather than a full time position. Creating and maintaining a vibrant and active internal community requires skill, passion and process and the focus should rightfully be as much on that as on the tools that enable the community.

Additional impressions:

Enterprise 2.0 2009 Conference: Aggregate and Organize