Prolifics and IBM's Digital Experience Software: Enhance, Extend and Enrich...

by Niral Jhaveri, Vice President,  User Experience, Prolifics

Hopefully you got a chance to attend IBM’s recent digital experience launch.  I know we’re excited about the evolution in IBM technology which will provide our customers even better ways to personalize content for their site visitors. It also excels in the analyzing and optimizing of site and campaign performance to drive desired results.  For example, With IBM’s Digital Experience Software, we can further help our portal and collaboration customers develop and manage dynamic content and rich media while delivering multi-channel applications - providing the ultimate, optimized customer experience. Prolifics is dedicated to providing customers with solutions that promote collaboration, empower conversation and bring together communities. Leveraging IBM’s Digital Experience technology stack, Prolifics can assist companies:


Enhancing
Upgrade to IBM Digital Experience
Migrate systems from older versions to IBM Digital Experience

Extending
Multi-channel extension of applications to mobile and tablets
Extend business applications beyond conventional desktop
Creating a mobile strategy

Enriching
Conduct health checks on aging applications
Provide tuning to improve performance and improve application longevity

Check out our latest video to see Watch for more on how Prolifics empowers businesses with mobile, social & collaboration.

Exceptional Web Experiences 101

As I continue to prepare for Lotusphere 2012, I am reflecting on my experience last year at the conference in 2011. At Lotusphere 2011 there was lot of attention on providing an “Exceptional Web Experience” to the customers. And rightly so. At the end of the day, it’s all about making the customer, the end user, the client (or whatever they are called) happy. There can be a lot of misconceptions in the User Experience space about the concept of “web” experience”

So I asked my self this question: Is an iGoogle Page (that I view every single day) a good web experience?

Sure enough, the iGoogle page provides me with the information that I need. But to get the information, I had to enter my zip code 5 times and my address a couple of times. And none of the snippets or widgets of information talk to each other. Is this what you would call “Exceptional”?

This year, I participated in a few IBM Social Roadshows last year and I decided as part of Prolifics commitment with IBM I would talk about the whats and hows of this social experience and also present some trends in the space.

So what exactly is an “Exceptional Web Experience”? How do you achieve it?

When I looked up the meaning, I found the following answer: “it’s about how a person feels about the system”. To me that said it all, but the real question is how do you design the user experience (UE) so that it makes the end user feel good about the system? How do you attain the level of excellence?

According to me, these are some of the key drivers in creating a great User Experience
1. It’s about Relevance - Create highly personalized customer interactions

2. It’s not only just about the product - Design experiences, not features

3. Go beyond the desktop or laptop - Having a mobile presence is a must

4. Earn the trust of the customer - Improve customer loyalty and relationship by enabling “Social”

5. It’s about Web 2.0 and beyond… Web 3.0 - Visual Appeal + Ease of use = Wow customers. Keep the UI Simple, Interactive and Responsive (SIR principle)

For over a decade, IBM WebSphere Portal has led the web 2.0 space in providing a seamless web experience. But now with the help of its accelerators (Social, Collaboration, Mobile etc) it’s poised for providing greater results in the enterprise business and social space. IBM WebSphere Portal delivers greater flexibility by creating personalized web experiences that seamlessly combine back-end applications, commerce solutions, social media sites, and cloud-based services.

Speaking of Social, there is phenomenal potential in the power of introducing “Social” into day-to-day business.

I have observed some trends in how customers and clients are using the power of social to engage customers.

Social Trend #1 - Engage the Customer on the Site

This is the single biggest focus of most customers and clients. Two questions that normally arise in a UE discussion are: how do we keep the user engaged on the site? How can we have share information with users and between users?

Answer: Leverage Social. By Enabling Users to Socialize:

• Share conversations and information between users
• Wikis, blogs, forums, communities
• Ratings, commenting, tagging
• Shared bookmarks, files, activities for work & ideas

Search
• Based on profile: expertise, projects, responsibilities, and interests.

Customer Service
• Enable customers to get problems resolved quickly with click-to-chat functions.Provide them targeted results

Social Collaboration
• Improve brand awareness by syndicating content across the web, into other online properties, such as Facebook, Twitter, Google etc.

IBM WebSphere Portal provides a great point solution to start your social initiative. Concepts like tagging and rating are essential components for developing collective intelligence about the site/product. They have also proven useful in engaging customers on the site and creating a trust and a sense of community between the end of users. Out of the box templates like Blogs, Wikis, Newsletters, Communities have made it very easy for clients to share information with the users. (Requires no development, only customization). Tools like click-to-chat, integration with RSS feeds from external sources like Facebook, Twitter, Google etc have added a great social dimension to Portal which was always perceived as “single point front end solution to IBM SOA framework"

Now if your business is ready for a more mature Social strategy IBM Lotus Connections is the right solution. To highlight some of the key features that product presents
• Profiles – Find people and expertise in your social network
• Community - Connect with people of common interests to share ideas
• Forum - Start discussions to solicit feedback from end users
• Activities - Dashboard of to-dos and activities within your network
• Files - Share variety of artifacts with your individuals and groups


Social Trend #2- Expand Beyond Traditional Web

There are 4.6 Billion mobile customers. To me it means 4.6B reasons to expand the outreach of your products to beyond traditional desktop. Having a mobile presence does not mean that users can access your site via a smart phone. But a true mobile experience comes from having a site to adopt the rendering process based on the smart phone. UI elements like themes on the portal pages, the navigation schemes should be able to differentiate between an iPhone or a Blackberry or any other smart phone.

Keep in mind the following consideration for developing a mobile strategy

• Create a device agnostic presentation
• Utilize common business logic and services
• Cater to device specific requirements (iPhone maps, geo location etc)
• Create lots of screen presence despite limited real estate
• High Response time despite broadband limitations
• Leverage one common theme

There are several questions in this space. What sort of a mobile strategy should customers adopt? Should I create a native iPhone app? What about a mobile website? What’s the buzz about HTML 5?

Consider your requirements before choosing a solution. Here are some options

There are several other options for non-Portal, non-IBM based customers as well, such as using one of the open source mobile and HTML 5 based frameworks.

Social Trend #3- Optimize the Experience with BI Analytics

One of the focus areas in social business is optimizing the experience based on real-time data, site usage and social analytics.

• What drives BI Analytics?
• Who is coming to my site?
• How did they find it?
• What are they doing?
• What did they search for? Did they find it?
• What are the most popular areas?
• What are the most popular topics/content?

Leverage analytics to:

• Improve user engagement by measuring and then fine tuning the customer experience
• Intelligently manage your marketing resources
• Make better decisions faster
• Exceptional web experiences engage, attract, satisfy and retain customers and partners.
• Being nimble and agile is required to keep web content fresh, engaging and relevant.

I look forward to seeing how these trends have evolved since Lotusphere 2011 and discover new trends to look for in 2012. Click here to see what Prolifics has in store for Lotusphere next week, including information about our 4 speaking sessions.

Niral Jhaveri is the User Experience Practice Director at Prolifics and has extensive expertise in the IBM Lotus, WebSphere and Rational family of products. He has played a key role at several strategic clients by providing technical leadership. Niral has an extensive background in the design and development of IBM WebSphere Portal, SOA and Web 2.0 applications with a proven track record of consulting and architecting solutions for several industry verticals like Finance, Retail, Insurance and Technology.

A Social Approach to Solving Business Problems

In today’s world of empowered individuals, world leaders and businesses must use potent new technologies and harness social media to organize themselves, to show authenticity, fairness, transparency and good faith.

Social can be categorized broadly into: socializing with your external subscribers and socializing with your own employees. In order to maintain a healthy relationship and get active feedback, a system that enables subscribers to provide an honest opinion that lets you address the issues and concerns in a timely manner is critical to business. Facebook, G+, Twitter, and Foursquare are established open platforms that can very well engage these external subscribers. Another way to engage and socialize with your subscribers is through a secured and controlled platform, your own corporate portal, which empowers your subscriber with information that they need, when they need it and how they need it.

Social engagement within an organization can be looked upon as socializing between the employees, departments, channels etc. The synergy that you can generate through a true social enterprise can show dramatic ROIs on your record books. IBM Connections is one such product that helps organizations create an internal platform that they can leverage to manage internal and external social networks. Connection's mobile capabilities ensure that employees are connected 24/7 across the globe providing the best possible value to subscribers. In conventional systems, information flows via emails; appreciations, issues and suggestions are shared in a closed loop. However, with Connections they are discussed openly, bringing in the necessary empowerment and transparency to work culture.

Discussing a business requirement with one of my customers, I realized how the Social aspects between External subscribers and Internal Employees could be bridged using an IBM Connections platform. The customer wanted to revolutionize information exchange between their subscribers and customer service representatives. As subscribers login to the Web Portal, they would receive a highly personalized set of alerts, links to blogs and content relevant to their preferences. The subscriber can ask questions, share their concerns or any other appropriate information including rich media with the customer service representative. As we worked with the customer through this requirement to identify relevant COTS Products, IBM Connections came in as the closest fit. Given the social value provided by IBM Connections, the decision was an easy one for the customer to make.

A social approach to solving common business problems can help businesses optimize their processes, bringing in necessary transparency to their subscribers and employees. It also adds a different dimension to the traditional delivery approach by promoting an active engagement between various stakeholders.

To learn more about Prolifics' social business solutions, click here or visit our website at www.prolifics.com.

Prabhakar Goel is a Solution Architect with Prolifics and a key member of highly specialized team of IBM WebSphere experts involved in architecture and delivery of Business Integration solutions, High transaction commercial portals and Solutions based on Open source technologies. He is an expert providing End-to-End SOA implementations utilizing IBM suite of products like Portal, Connections, Content Management, Process Server. He holds Masters in Software Systems from BITS, Pilani and a Graduate Degree in Electrical Engineering from Kurukshetra.

Portals: The Next Generation

Devi Gupta, Vice President of Marketing

We’ve been building Portal applications for years…with over 230 implementations under our belt. The obvious “first implementation” done by most organizations is to create a Content Portal, otherwise known as Employee Portal, Intranet Portal, etc. We can get a typical content portal up and running in 3 weeks and can obviously do more extensive custom implementations. Today we are seeing the “next generation” trend for these portals to be adding in Dashboards and adding in Social Networking capabilities.

For Social Networking we are starting to introduce Lotus Connections and Quickr into a Portal environment to benefit from communities, blogs, wikis, etc. We’ve done this internally at Prolifics as well for our own Intranet and its really improving our ability to collaborate and share information.

For Dashboards, portals have been accessing dashboards, reports, and scorecards already, and you can also start to make those items actionable, such as drilling down for quicker problem resolution and associating reports with different applications. But many dashboard solutions require programming. If you already own Cognos for your Business Intelligence data and have reports, then you can start to make these available within a portal and can start to make these have actionable qualities as well. Generally gaining a richer overall environment. And in this case you don’t require portal programming capabilities.

When will you start exploiting your portal to capitalize on the information available to you? These little changes can make a big difference to the value of your existing portal.


Devi Gupta directs the market positioning for Prolifics and helps manage the company’s strategic alliance with IBM. Under her guidance, Prolifics has made the critical transition from a product and services company to becoming a highly reputable WebSphere service provider and winner of several awards at IBM including the Business Partner Leadership Award, Best Portal Solution, IMPACT Best SOA Solution, and Overall Technical Excellence Award. Ms. Gupta has been key to Prolifics and has fulfilled a variety of principal functions since joining Prolifics in 1991, from Product Manager to VP of Marketing. Her computer science background has allowed Ms. Gupta to move freely between the engineering and the business development/marketing sides of the technology industry, which gives her a unique ability to apply the client’s perspective to the on-going evolution of Prolifics’ technology and solutions.

Collaboration and Rational Tooling

Greg Hodgkinson, Methodology Pratice Leader

Running effective software development projects requires a certain level of tool support. For most organizations, the tools they have come from multiple vendors, and may also include a mix of both licensed and open-source tooling. As tools tend to be acquired to meet point problems, it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture – how your team and tools fit together to deliver the business solutions needed. Integration (SOA) projects bring with them a new set of challenges which may require tooling of a type that you don’t currently have. Do you find yourself asking any of the following?

• How do I drive my team’s work in a way that allows me to track progress?
• How do I figure out what work and changes went into a build of the code created 6 months ago?
• How do I keep my distributed team aware of each other’s actions and progress?
• How do I ensure that my best practices are being adhered to?

These are questions we hear on a regular basis from our customers. Having tested and used various tooling, we have had great success with Rational Team Concert which is highly effective for team collaboration. Below are some slides I've put together which illustrate what I'm referring to...

Greg Hodgkinson is the Methodology Practice Leader at Prolifics. He has worked in software architecture since 1996, initially in the field of component-based development (CBD), then seamlessly on to service-oriented architecture (SOA). His extended area of expertise is the software development process, and he assists Prolifics and IBM customers in adopting agile software development processes and SOA methods. Complementing this is his expertise in software development environment architecture. He is still very much a practitioner, and has been responsible for service architectures for a number of FTSE 100 companies. He presents on agile SOA process and methods, has co-authored a Redbook on SOA solutions, and regularly writes for DeveloperWorks.