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It has traditionally been assumed that enterprise users are very transactional in focus and not interested in fluffy experience stuff.  There are a few key ideas that no longer hold in this assumption.  First of all, the fluffy experience stuff isn’t just fluff.  Enterprise users, even more than consumers, don’t have time to waste.  Forcing an enterprise customer to porpoise in and out of multiple systems through various interfaces and different logins to accomplish a simple, logical task flow is bad for them and your relationship with them.

In the early days of the Web, people were happy to have the ability to get at information and perform self-service.  Enterprise systems exploded with Web offerings and experimentation in the early 2000’s only to have money pulled back after the dot com bubble burst.  These systems continued to creep along and organically evolve into cobbled together sets of offerings.  Meanwhile, this channel moved from being experimental to a core business channel and in many industries, such as financial services, it is now the primary interface to customers.

These customers don’t just interact with the tortured experiences they have with their business partners. In their personal lives they have experiences on Amazon.com, Facebook, iGoogle, and iTunes.  These users come into work and legitimately ask themselves why the business partners they spend millions of dollars on subject them to an experience so far below what they get from the above consumer offerings for free.  It’s this paradox that is fundamentally the forcing function behind the consumerization of the enterprise.

In this series of blog posts I am going to examine the factors a company must consider as the enterprise evolves.  First, I will examine the factors that are driving the consumerization of the enterprise key amongst these: The Shift-consumer digital experiences are driving the demand for a richer experience in the enterprise, The Arrival of the Digital Native in the Workforce-the impact of Digital Natives entering and moving up the workforce dramatically changes the talent pool.  Second, I will examine the factors that directly affect the capabilities of a company to proactively evolve the enterprise: Commoditization of IT and Offshoring-IT organizations are not structured in ways that are highly conducive to the idea of being user centric and consumer oriented, Existing Process/Structure-a basic understanding of User Experience and deliver capability tends to be the furthest most enterprises have gone and many have no capability at all.  Finally, I will provide a very compelling case study that exemplifies the success that can be obtained by reinventing a company’s digital offerings and experience.

Let’s start with examining why the consumerization of the enterprise is not just a luxury, but an essential next step for businesses.

The Shift
In the traditional enterprise model, organizations dictated the tools and technologies employees could use in an inside-out push model.  During this time, enterprise level investment from industry and government (military) fueled both the demand and profit for cutting-edge technological innovations.  New developments trickled down into consumer usage.

Source: Forrester, February 2008.  Embrace The Risks And Rewards Of Technology Populism

However, key forces have shifted the balance of influence, with employees and individuals voicing greater expectations on the tools and technologies they work with, creating a strong outside-in movement.  Users in turn bring their consumer expectations into their work environments.

This trend continues to gain momentum from a combination of:
1.    Vast consumer market growth and rate of tech innovation in consumer products.  Innovation is no longer concentrated at the enterprise level.
2.    Shifting social demographics of the workforce as the boomer generation shifts into retirement or other activities and a growing population of digital natives/millenials/generation Y enter the workforce bringing their native tech skills and expectations (more on this topic below).
3.    Blending work boundaries with employees expecting mobile access to information anytime, anywhere.  Workers are exercising greater flexibility with telecommuting/mobile computing accessing both work and personal information in a location agnostic way.

The enterprise 2.0 user is not attached to a desk in an office. Sixty-four percent telecommute at least part-time, compared with just 34% of non-enterprise 2.0 users.  And more enterprise 2.0 users spend time working at locations other than their desk around the office and at client sites than their nonuser counterparts.  As such, large numbers of enterprise 2.0 users have laptops (55%) and smartphones (27%) — the tools that allow for flexibility in working location.

Source: Forrester’s Workforce Technographics US, Canada, and UK Survey, Q3 2009.

Source: Forrester,  February 2008.  Embrace The Risks And Rewards of Technology Populism

The enormous volume of the consumer market and fast adoption cycles draws new tech innovation efforts.  Users in turn bring their consumer expectations into their work environments.

Source: Forrester, November 2008.  The Hour Of The Vendor Strategist: Three Mega Business Trends Will Reshape The Tech Sector”

Users enjoy rich interactions online and via a growing range of networked devices.  Similarly Social Media has permeated the fabric of life.  As people adapt to and embrace new technologies, the gap between consumer and enterprise experiences creates pressure on organizations to leverage the best tools to enhance worker productivity rather than hinder.

Smart phones/mobile is definitely a huge part of this phenomenon and will be explored further in a separate set of blog posts as it is worthy of its own focus.  Smart Mobile devices are not just valuable to hip consumers but also to sales and services resources in the field and to all workers on the go.  Likewise Social Media is worthy of extended discussion in its own post and is becoming an increasingly important part of the enterprise landscape.

Here Come the Digital Natives
The impact of Gen Y, also known as Millennials or Digital Natives, entering and moving up the workforce dramatically changes the talent pool.  As this generation has entered the workforce their expectations of being able to network and interact on-line has met with woefully poor intranet and extranet capabilities and experiences.  Having not grown up in a disconnected world they are intolerant of this lack of capability and not easily impressed by merely being able to get by with basic functionality  Often missed is that this group is far larger than the generation that proceeded it and depending on how they’re counted, larger than the famous Baby Boomer generation.  They are becoming recognized as an echo of the Boomers.  Much attention has been paid to the impact of the Baby Boom generation and their impending retirement but the impact of the Digital Natives is just beginning to be felt.

The key thing to remember is that increasingly users don’t view there to be a major distinction between the technologies they interact with in their personal lives and in their business lives.  Business in the consumer market emphasizes usability, personalization, and customer intimacy.  In contrast business service providers emphasize security, central control, compliance, cost efficiency, and standards.  When designing new or updated services, companies can leverage the benefits of consumer technology usability and personalization.  People who understand consumer behavior can translate best practices into the enterprise environment.  Total cost of ownership should take into account improvements in productivity and speed of response.

In the next post I will examine the organizational inhibitors that create setbacks as companies work toward the consumerization of the enterprise.

If you consider yourself a Twitter-addict or happen to visit new media blogs regularly you’re probably aware of the buzz that was generated the relaunch of the Skittles.com corporate website a few weeks back.  If you haven’t heard about it or haven’t yet seen what all the talk is about you should take a look for yourself at www.skittles.com.

The site has generated a lot of discussion within the interactive community, and this includes the folks here at Roundarch.  The opinions expressed have been strong and varied, ranging from those who think this is the beginning of the end to those who think this is a publicity coup and harbinger of a very different web.

Given the level of discourse around the “Skittles Gambit” we decided to take a moment to discuss the topic and walk through some of the aspects we think are the most interesting.

What am I seeing?
In keeping with Skittles’ irreverent and somewhat quirky brand identity, their updated site blurs (some might say erases) the boundaries between brand and customer identity.  It does this through the wholesale integration of social media services and content.

Of course we’ve all seen social media incorporated into websites before, however, the difference here is that Skittles has replaced four out of six site areas with external social media pages; Wikipedia (Home), Facebook (Friends), Twitter (Chatter), and YouTube (Media/Video), Flickr (Photos).  To summarize, Skittles has virtually reduced their site to a navigational aid/overlay.

The concept is pretty simple; create an in-page frame that automatically resizes to fit the content, load a specific location on the social media site inside it, and position a transparent overlay with your “global navigation” on the page to tie it all together.  While Skittles technically owns or manages the look of some pages on those third-party sites, the nature of social media content means the messaging itself comes from customers.

Why is this important?
The idea of leveraging social media sources is nothing new; many brands monitor chatter to understand how their brand is perceived, and the last few years has seen a growing trend towards integrating third-party services and content into brand sites (e.g., Digg, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.).  At the same time the basic interface concept behind the idea (using a global navigation element to unify disparate sites together under a common identity) is well established; major media companies like Lycos have been doing this since the ‘90s.

What’s different here is the degree to which Skittles has decided to decentralize and deregulate their brand.   Skittles has transformed their web site from an arm of their marketing group to a window on their market, nearly replacing “managed” brand messaging (most of the pages still belong to Skittles) with user generated content from third-party sources.  This has wide range of implications that are worth paying attention to.

What are some of these “implications”?
There are a lot of ideas to digest here, maybe more than you initially considered.  How do you manage content generated by customers on third party sites?  What’s your liability for comments on “your pages”?  How do you facilitate experiential continuity when using the disparate websites and applications?  What do you do if a critical third-party service is unavailable (e.g., Twitter.com’s problematic uptime numbers)?

All important questions that should be answered as part of an initial strategy.  However, aside from the operational concerns, a few of the more interesting implications involve strategic concepts around Brand Strategy and Cloud computing.  Yes, THAT Cloud computing… hang tight, we’ll come back to that in a minute.

Brand as a Mirror, or Is That a Window?
The feedback in the community and within our company has been fairly divided around the topic of brand strategy.  Some people feel that Skittles.com is a good example of everything not to do when managing your online brand identity.  Others feel that Skittles campaign has been effective in the near term and could be substantially so in the long term.  Who’s right?

Among the former group the feeling is that true brand strategy engages customers, keeps them involved, and provides compelling content and services to reinforce the identity the brand has fostered and marketed.  For this group a decentralized and laissez faire approach to content leads to a stale and uninspiring experience, subsequently undermining the brand’s effectiveness and inspirational capabilities.

On the other side of the aisle we have a slightly larger group who believe that the Skittles.com redesign, while poor in certain respects, hits or comes very close to the mark.   For this group the site is at least an effective viral campaign (look at the press), and at most the introduction of a nimble brand platform.

So where does this leave us.  Any decentralized model that leverages customer content to the degree that Skittles.com does runs the risk of become an outdated novelty.  However, this is as true of an owned corporate site as it is a fully deregulated one, perhaps even more so.  The main success of either approach lies in the brand’s ability to selectively introduce the content necessary to support and incite their community.

If we accept this commonality the big difference becomes one of reach; an owned corporate site relies on pulled traffic and unique visits, while a decentralized site pushes content into ancillary networks that can propagate and disseminate the material faster and more widely than virtually any corporate campaign.

Cloud Computing, The Early Years…
At the same time, the Skittles strategy provides a great example of something much larger than brand perception and marketing.  That is Cloud computing, a term you’ve probably heard bandied around by media pundits and technology gurus, but which you likely only have a fuzzy and general perception on.  Yeah, we know, wha?!?

Cloud computing is a lot like Web 2.0; the exact definition you get depends on who you ask.  For some folks Cloud computing conjures up ideas of dynamic data repositories accessible to an assortment of different applications across a variety of devices and mediums.  For others the “Cloud” is about bringing disparate services and applications together to form a larger experience.

The short answer is that both of these descriptions are correct.  The web as we know it is migrating towards a paradigm where content and services are decoupled and decentralized.  In this “web of the future,” online services will likely be both intelligent and portable, with content from one site sourceable to an application on another that is then integrated into a larger suite of services somewhere else.

Of course this isn’t going to happen overnight… not only does the technology and infrastructure not exist, but the basic interaction and behavioral patterns needed to support these kinds of services haven’t been adopted yet.  Instead it’s going to involve a progressive evolution, with a variety of different solutions appearing along the way.

Enter Skittles.com, which as lowly as it is, provides a protozoan example of this new paradigm in action.  Yes, it’s kind of ugly, and yes, it’s a little raw.  However, Skittles.com is forcibly assembling third party applications into a self-serving agglomeration, the site becoming a thin skin on a much broader set of distributed services.  The power of Skittles.com is thus its ability to provide a digestible “Cloud” example to people who have difficulty conceptualizing this far reaching future.

Bringing It Full Circle
So where does that leave us… Skittles.com, a canary of danger or a beacon of a compelling future?  The truth is that it’s probably too early to make a definitive call either way, and the success of the approach – both as a brand venue and as a harbinger of Web 3.0 – will depend in large part on how Skittles manages and uses their new toy.

However, what we can say is that this example is symptomatic of an accelerating trend towards an interactive medium in which there are fewer and less distinct boundaries between discreet digital applications and services.  Previously formal distinctions between brands and their customers are becoming increasingly less relevant, with companies looking to leverage the viral and associative aspects of social media networks to extend their message and increase the granularity of their touch points.

Scary and exciting all at the same time… now to wrap up and take a look at status alert I just received from my close friend, Jif.  Maybe you know him?