ISVs have focused on adding features to products that bring stability, reliability, scalability and continuous improvement. With the impact of mobile, cloud, social media, better connectivity, etc today’s customers want data real time that can be available anywhere anytime.

How do we make the product move away from a structured approach to provide real time data and more personalized engagement to improve user efficiency and productivity? Let’s discuss on how the systems of engagement can bring in changes to the product in today’s social web world.

Social: Social media tool integration is required for products where a user can engage with social medial tools like Twitter, Facebook, Crunch base, etc.  The product also needs to have social platforms  to connect with their outsourced business partners and affiliates.

Collaboration:  Move away from structured one way conversation to two way by collaborating with groups, individuals & different machines. Data needs to be exchanged with business partners and affiliates so that conversation is seamless and smart. Developing or integrating a collaborative platform which helps the customer to collaborate and engage with partners to process key transactions globally.

Real-time processing: Products have been transformed to services and today many services are outsourced with business partners and affiliates who use different product services catering to their business. We need to have good connected platform so that data is real time for end users who use their services.

Visual Intelligence:  Business rules, work flows and data information were more hard coded and hence users were presented with a one way or predefined sets of rules and workflows. Visual intelligence platform should be built-in to allow users to change the workflows, business rules with help of visual tools.  Providing users with personalized dashboards, activity streams, alerts and notifications with features like drag and drop, customized or personalized widgets can provide better user experience

Analytics:  With systems of engagement, data content comes from different sources and it needs to be aggregated and analysed before the data is presented to the customer in a more meaning full format.  Features like trends, context based search, comparisons, drill down of data, identify events and relationships etc. should be incorporated.

Multi-channel reach: With major technology players moving to IOT platform, it is important that software connects these channels and exchange is made easier with these computing smart devices

Image source: www.forbes.com

It is very clear that, SoE is going to be a key enabler of the future enterprise. This will soon rearrange the landscape of IT organizations, technologies, architectures, budgeting and governance. It is not surprising that in this age of the customer, SoE are finally getting attention.