IBM Project Northstar launch- breaking down my thoughts early #ibmexperience
Tags :ibmexperience Project Northstar Customer Experience Suite social media ROI
Last week at NLLUG there was some show and tell around Project Northstar as well as a recent email I received inviting me to the launch event. Here is what I have gathered from the site, information and working with it so far.
The initiative revolves around measurement of your customer interaction through social media sites, your own CRM type infrastructure and learning social context of how your information is perceived and used based on location, device and their own individual preferences.
To simplify this, consider it social media influencer measurement and ROI of these. This is the same topic I presented at the Social Media Business Forum last Oct in North Carolina. One of the hardest things for companies to understand is the importance and then measurement of their exposure across the social web. Plus the tools to complete this daunting task are hard to find, usually incomplete and never quite right for your organization.
IBM Project Northstar appears to be, according to the IBM Japan site, a Webpshere Portal based system to:
Providing outstanding Web experience
Northstar Project IBM, the content management framework and provides enterprise portal mash-up, the standard real-time communication and social communication, search, personalization, marketing tools, integration, support for mobile devices, real-time analysis provide customers with innovative ways to combine and other rich media management functionality. That these functions work together, to meet the evolving needs of customers today are very attractive, personalized offers to customers of IBM's own Web experience.
Linked from the page was an IBM PDF publicly available with the following information:
Meet expectations with exceptional experiences: A comprehensive vision
IBM Project Northstar is IBM’s vision and multiyear roadmap for helping you create differentiated, exceptional web experiences that attract and retain the best customers, improve brand loyalty, and lower operational costs. IBM shaped the vision—which is focused on providing businesses and organizations with all of the capabilities needed to support an exceptional experience—from the results of thousands of customer engagements and interviews with business leaders around the world. It is based on the idea that capabilities must evolve in“Internet time” as well as the following tenets:
UPDATE as of 3pm: Interestingly Wikipedia of all places is the the IBM Customer Experience Suite will drive Project Northstar:
IBM Customer Experience Suite is a set of software tools that enables companies to build customer targeted external facing web portals.
In August 2010 version 7.0 was announced as an enabler of IBM's Northstar project. Project Northstar is the IBM's vision on building Exceptional Online Experiences
As I ran across the wikipedia I also then came across the full PDF with system requirements and more of the IBM Customer Experience Suite that drives Project Northstar. You can also find a Quickstart Guide for the Customer Experience Suite online at IBM and available.
The Websphere Portal blog covers announcements made around Northstar a few weeks ago in Chicago:
The focus of IBM Project Northstar is to bring together the capabilities organizations need to create and deploy exceptional Web experiences that attract and retain the best customers, improve brand loyalty, increase customer satisfaction, and lower operational costs.
Finally from the Perficient blog of Michael Porter, who seem to be a key partner in this with Ascendant and Ephox (blog noting announcements):
Project Northstar wil focus on 5 capability segments in engaging client.
1. Create – video, audio, and other content
2. Target – key users
3. Socialize – allow people to do this
4. Optimize – understand the use of the system and make a better experience. Could include predictive analysis
5. Realize – Do it wherever you happen to be.
They won’t lose track of integration to other apps, processes, and content.
What does this mean to existing portal customers?
- Portal Family of offerings are strategic components of Northstar
- It will completely leverage existing portal investments
- Stays in sync with future with customers expanding portals
- Brings toegether the scope of technolgy, services, needs, etc.
- Will bring new packaged offering to allow ease of deployment
- This represents IBM’s commitment to lead and outpace any alternative challengers
Now looking at the main website, they are bringing together numerous tools from across the social web. Twitter, Facebook, blog postings, Flickr groups, YouTube and more. Interesting how they are grabbing the streams on the site and making a mashup of them. Just what you would expect to share with customers of all your own content. I can see templates and more inside Portal to easily hook to the social services by account name, hashtag (as they are doing) or URL. I also found an actual Project Northstar fanpage on Facebook and the Portal manager talked on This Week in Lotus. Part of the Northstar team has started a blog as well on analytics.
Disclosure: I have no embargo information, no secret information or anything else. This is all my thoughts strictly from the web and what I have received in invites. I will have more thoughts during and after the event on Thursday.
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On Monday, September 13th, 2010 by Chris Miller
