Specialty retailer EMS uses blogs, wikis, and BI tools to expand collaboration internally and with business partners.

January 01, 2007
URL:http://drdobbs.com/adventures-in-x-treme-web-20/196800287

At Eastern Mountain Sports, we like to use interesting new technologies to engage users and partners and make it easier to do business with us. Toward that goal, Web 2.0 technologies are a perfect fit, and we intend to expand their usage.

We're focusing the first phase of our Web 2.0 implementation on the IT group and other savvy users. Later, we'll pull in business users, vendors, and strategic partners as we drive collaborative conversations across the extended enterprise. We're also experimenting with various types of conversations internally, as I'll outline below.

What led us to this plan? We know that end users have a high degree of experience in finding and sharing information. Outside of their work lives, they participate in online communities that routinely employ so-called Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS feeds, Weblogs, and wikis that let groups of people create content and exchange insights. Increasingly, users want to apply the same sorts of tools in the work environment, and to easily access data that's tailored to the roles they play in the organization and the business metrics they influence.

At EMS, Web 2.0 tools encourage collaboration within our analytic dashboards—not only to find, summarize, and integrate relevant data, but also to ease the process of sharing it with internal and external stakeholders in an interactive way. We use RSS feeds to report on exceptions and alert users when certain operational metrics are out of tolerance range. And we're experimenting with wikis as a way to test hypotheses and spread new ideas across the organization. In short, Web 2.0 technologies are starting to influence our overall business intelligence (BI) strategy.

IT isn't our main business; it's an enabler. A leading specialty retailer with annual sales of $200 million, EMS has more than 75 stores, a seasonal catalog, and a growing online presence.

We design and sell a wide variety of gear and clothing for outdoor enthusiasts. To ensure we always have what customers need for their adventures, BI software helps managers determine which products are in demand and make sure they're in stock.

In 2005, soon after I came on board, we created a merchandising dashboard available to most employees throughout the organization. We built the dashboard in about three months using Information Builders' WebFOCUS 7.1.3 platform, and rolled it out across the organization in four weeks.

The architecture is straightforward: We use Information Builders iWay integration technology to access point-of-sale information on an IBM AS/400 computer and load it into a Microsoft SQL Server data mart. From there, WebFOCUS presents the data through a series of dashboards that users can view via their Web browsers.

In this way, decision-makers can quickly access a unified, high-level view of key performance indicators (KPIs) such as sales, inventory, and margin levels, and drill down to granular detail that analyzes specific transactions. They deemed the BI environment an instant success.

Now we're enhancing this dashboard to create a multifunction employee workbench called E-Basecamp. We want it to contain all the information relevant to corporate goals, integrated with productivity tools and role-based content customized to each individual user. Finally, we want to bring it to life by interweaving Web 2.0 technologies for collaboration among internal and external stakeholders. We'll launch this new version early this year.

Our company uses about 20 operational metrics to govern the fundamental health of the business. For example, managers in the merchandising area have to stay on top of inventory positions and stock turns. E-commerce managers monitor hour-by-hour Web traffic and conversion rates. Each area of the business relies on the dashboard to learn when certain KPIs are out of tolerance range. We make this easy with a color-coded system of red, yellow, and green alerts to indicate metrics that are over, under, or at plan.

In response to customer requests, we're also experimenting with embedding RSS feeds into the dashboard to drive more focused inquiries. In addition to providing a structure for decision-making, the idea is to encourage online conversations and information-sharing. If certain items sell better than others, it should be easy to analyze the transaction characteristics and selling behaviors that produce these results, then cascade that knowledge throughout the organization.

Blogs and wikis can be great collaboration tools, but they open a can of worms when it comes to intellectual-property and patent rights. Bad blogs can blast IP, says Ilan Barzilay, an attorney at Wolf, Greenfield & Sacks, P.C., a Boston firm specializing in intellectual-property law. "If an overenthusiastic employee inadvertently discloses a company trade secret on his or her blog, the company loses its rights forever—any competitor can now legally use your former secret," he says. The law firm advises businesses to discourage most blogging on company time, and also to make sure that employees clearly understand the difference between personal and company information. — Paula Klein

The challenge now is figuring out how to encourage these collaborative interactions throughout the company and make them almost automatic. The goal is to let any dashboard user pose a hypothesis and invite commentary, almost like a notepad alongside the dashboard. That's the type of capability BI is supposed to provide.

Our dashboard examines Web visitors and sales by hour. We've successfully tied that data to an RSS feed so managers don't have to visit a Web page to view the latest numbers—the information now pops up on their desktops automatically.

We also plan to create a wiki that will let the user community test and refine hypotheses. In particular, we want our associates to share tips and best practices and initiate dialogues. If certain items sell better than others, the associates should be able to analyze the transaction characteristics and selling behaviors that produce the results, then use the collaborative tools to extend that insight throughout the organization.

One way we plan to do this is by creating blogs around a piece of data or a key metric. Blogs are a great way to post information to a Web site on a regular basis and invite comments. Many tools make it easy to archive, search, and categorize blogs for easy reference.

For example, if sales per payroll hour hover at $125 most months and suddenly drop to $75, a store manager might want to post an explanation or inquiry concerning the anomaly. A blog attached to a metric might reveal that payroll hours were higher that week to handle additional back-office work. Keeping comments in a blog lets readers observe patterns they might have overlooked using data analysis alone.

Longer term, we plan to pull in the extended organization as well. Perhaps our footwear suppliers would like to monitor the return rate for their products or keep track of the average cost per order. If suppliers know exactly how well certain products are selling and why, they can ramp up production accordingly. It's just a question of visibility and implementing security at the right level so our partners have access only to what we authorize them to see.

This next phase involves institutionalizing what we've learned, driving skills and capabilities across the company, and inviting others to join the conversation. The discussion becomes progressively more important as the number of outside partners increases and as business processes move across several companies in an ecosystem. For example, some of our

E-commerce suppliers ship directly to customers—we don't own the inventory, but simply pass the order to them. For these companies, we'd like to share sales plans and progress against those plans.

The objective isn't only to optimize cross-functional interactions, but also to build a tighter bond with companies that have a vested interest in our success. One piece of the dashboard focuses on camping equipment, for example. We'd like to be more transparent so that all pertinent camping vendors can access this part of the dashboard to view top-line sales information and post comments to a blog. Our product manager for this area could use a wiki to pose challenges for the next season—such as a proposed percentage increase in sales—then ask vendors to suggest innovative ways to achieve these goals.

Some of our customers and partners subscribe to an RSS feed on our E-commerce Web site called Extreme Deals, which refers to products that are marked down significantly for a limited time. RSS provides an efficient means to keep interested parties apprised of this information. Now we're asking ourselves what types of information we might want to share with our suppliers and business partners in a similar manner.

We're also embedding a blog into our product-management life-cycle tool to let product-development managers and sourcing vendors have virtual conversations. Ultimately, we'd like to add buttons to our merchandising dashboard so users can receive real-time updates as key metrics change. Other buttons would allow them to comment and view comments from others as they monitor fluctuations in our KPIs.

BI users want relevant, customized content tied to enterprisewide conversations about managing and running a successful business. CIOs can provide that with BI solutions that have the basic functionality of an

information dashboard, but that also enhance decision-making processes by encouraging collaboration within the user community.

Instead of having these conversations occur in the hallway, where you need to be in the right place at the right time to benefit, they can take place within the dashboard, where all interested parties can participate.

CIOs can encourage these interactions and help marshal the user community around topics and content that fulfill the charter of the organization. At EMS, we believe it's easier to drive adoption if you use tools, techniques, and methods with which people are already familiar. That means Web 2.0—it's how EMS users expect the Web to work.

Jeffrey Neville is CIO at Eastern Mountain Sports, where he's responsible for strategy, technology, and an Alternate Channels business that includes EMS.com.

Are you implementing Web 2.0 technologies at your company? Tell us about them.

See Related Articles:

E2.0 Evangelists, September 2006

Web 2.0 Meets The Enterprise, May 2006

Web 2.0 is all about creating conversations and enabling users to collaboratively post content. It's also about authoring and customizing content to match individual interests.

EMS defines a few commonly used terms as follows: