Predictive is the new black

I was having a chat last Friday with my friend and fellow blogger Michael Krigsman about crowdsourcing and wisdom of crowds and our conversation turned to predictive capabilities and the idea that in the near future businesses will start to use social data to predict behavior. That conversation sparked some more thought about the whole concept of predictive software (versus reactive software).

Earlier this Summer I participated with a group of analysts and CRM experts in an exercise with CRM Magazine and DestinationCRM to look at the next 5 years of evolution of social CRM in the CRM Maturity Model. In looking at the future of sales and marketing for example, I can clearly see the promise of getting to a place where a business had created such a close relationship with its customers that it could “know” what the customer was going to want in the future and how they would want to be marketed to (the when, where and how concept that I’ve used in talking about social customer support works the same in this model too).

Forgetting for a minute the slightly uneasy feeling that might conjure up for you, think of the value and experience of having your needs and desires …

I was having a chat last Friday with my friend and fellow blogger Michael Krigsman
about crowdsourcing and wisdom of crowds and our conversation turned to
predictive capabilities and the idea that in the near future businesses
will start to use social data to predict behavior. That conversation
sparked some more thought about the whole concept of predictive
software (versus reactive software).

Earlier this Summer I participated
with a group of analysts and CRM experts in an exercise with CRM
Magazine and DestinationCRM to look at the next 5 years of evolution of social CRM in the CRM Maturity Model.
In looking at the future of sales and marketing for example, I can
clearly see the promise of getting to a place where a business had
created such a close relationship with its customers that it could
“know” what the customer was going to want in the future and how they
would want to be marketed to (the when, where and how concept that I’ve
used in talking about social customer support works the same in this
model too).

Forgetting for a minute the slightly uneasy feeling that
might conjure up for you, think of the value and experience of having
your needs and desires met seemingly as you think of them. OK, we’re
not quite to that point in our use of social software and social
concepts, but we are moving in that direction.

I’ve talked
about the progression of the development of application capabilities
before, that is, the progression from transaction (data creation) to
analytics (information creation) to automation of events based on the
information created. The automation is based on a software concept
called event driven architecture. I suggest that with social software
we have another level of progression beyond event-driven architecture
to prediction-driven architecture (and yes, I just made that up; I doubt
we need another meaning for PDA at this point, but you get the idea).
Predictive capabilities could be implemented for sales, marketing,
customer support/service, product marketing / strategy, even internally
for HR (how about predicting an employees true motivators and build
rewards and perks to meet those desires).

We’re just now seeing the
movement of social concepts into enterprise software with the merging
of social platforms with enterprise platforms (like the RightNow
HiveLive acquisition I wrote about recently). In discussion with the RightNow / HiveLive
team last Friday I asked about their take on social analytics and where
they are looking next. The response, tie social data to RightNow’s
already robust artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities. That’s just a
whiteboard discussion today but probably not that far off as they move
to quickly integrate the two platforms. We’re not there yet by any
means but for me, predictive is definitely the new black…