As 2011 comes to a close, we at Model Metrics are very proud of our accomplishments over the last 12 months, including, but not limited to the introduction of Model FX, the first cloud design lab, and our rapidly growing Social Enterprise and Mobile practices. But what we continue to be most proud of are the people and company culture at Model Metrics and we were thrilled to receive the Chicago Tribune Top Workplace award for the second year in a row.
With Model FX, we launched the first creative design lab focused specifically on cloud technologies. This arm of Model Metrics takes cloud computing one step further and truly incorporates our customers’ brands from ideation to development. The Model FX team works to deliver innovative social and mobile cloud solutions with customized user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) baked into the overall design. We know that the optimal representation of a company’s brand is just as critical as functionality to encourage adoption and ongoing usage. The Model FX design lab now enables us to bring enhanced consultation and custom cloud design services to our customer base.
2011 also brought about a significant IT paradigm shift toward the social enterprise with companies looking to transform community engagement into business value. Model Metrics embraced this shift by introducing an expanded set of services designed to mobilize the workforce and improve employee collaboration.
None of these accomplishments would have been possible without the talent of each of our team members and since inception, we have made it a priority to create a different kind of work environment that truly embodies our core values, which include collaboration, innovation, honesty, responsiveness, philanthropy and passion.
Our continued efforts to foster a collaborative company culture and standout team were validated once again when Model Metrics took home, for the second year in a row, the Chicago Tribune Top Workplace award. This prestigious accolade recognizes Chicago’s best employers with a special emphasis on dynamic, supportive and inclusive company cultures. We’re excited to close out the year on such a high note and can’t wait to see what 2012 brings!
Model Metrics’ 2011 Accolades include:
Chicago Tribune’s Top Workplaces 2011 Award Model Metrics took home second place in the Top 5 small companies category for best places to work in Chicago. This recognition is followed by a first place win in 2010.
CRN 2011 Fast Growth 100 Model Metrics was ranked as #27 in a list of 100 companies recognized for impressive, exponential growth over the last few years.
CRN’s Next-Gen 250 Model Metrics was recognized for innovation in cloud computing services.
2011 Red Herring Top 100 North America Model Metrics was chosen as a winner from a pool of hundreds of companies across North America based on financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy and market integration.
CIO 100 Awards Model Metrics’ customer, Ingram Micro, honored based on the innovation and success of the Ingram Micro Cloud website that Model Metrics helped to design, develop and deploy.
The Forrester Wave: Salesforce.com Implementation, Q2 2011 (May 13, 2011) Forrester Cites Model Metrics as “Strong Performer” in salesforce.com implementation and received highest scores for client satisfaction, implementation life cycle, vertical expertise, key partnerships and go-to-market strategy.
Check out two new case studies from AH Holdings and Standard Register on Chatter deployments we recently completed. They are great examples of using social enterprise technology to improve your business.
AH Holdings, a growing conglomerate of healthcare support solutions companies, worked with Model Metrics to deploy Chatter for better knowledge sharing among its highly dispersed workforce serving hospitals across the country and internationally.
Just two months after going live, its transformation into a social and agile enterprise is gaining momentum. Sixty-six percent of employees are collaborating on Chatter and more than 112 groups have been created by associates’ initiative. As a result, they can provide better service to hospitals and clinics and drive business efficiencies.
We also recently completed a Chatter deployment for Standard Register, a leading provider of critical communications management, who wanted to deploy social enterprise technology as part of a transformation in the solutions and services it delivers. Together we underwent a methodical deployment designed to ensure business value. Today Chatter is used to better manage its sales efforts, enable closer collaboration between employees, and drive overall efficiencies.
Today's gamers include millions of Americans of all ages and backgrounds (72% of all American households play computer or video games according to the Entertainment Software Association) and the number is skyrocketing. Why should you care? Because gamification is making its way into enterprise solutions such as Salesforce CRM, and the aforementioned gamers are your employees and customers.
As the term gamification becomes more mainstream, it’s bringing in an influx of questions from organizations we work with, so we were thrilled to have TJ Keitt, a Senior Analyst at Forrester Research Inc., join us for a Webinar on Gaming in the Enterprise to answer those questions. TJ walked us through the evolution of gamification, what a gamified business application looks like and how companies can begin to gamify their businesses. If you missed the webinar, you can catch the replay here. Watch Video
It is with great sadness that our team at Model Metrics recognizes the passing of a true innovator in the technology world, Steve Jobs. Merriam-Webster defines genius as possessing "extraordinary intellectual power especially as manifested in creative activity," and we certainly couldn't say it better than that.
Mr. Jobs started Apple Computer in 1976 in his garage, and his visions over time became some of the most beautiful consumer electronic devices ever created. His ability to not just create devices, but define markets is unparalleled in this industry. Think about just the last 10 years:
iPod
iTunes
iPhone
iPad
MacBook Air
All of these either defined a category, or created one from thin air. Despite Mr. Jobs' many serious health concerns, he never stopped striving for what he saw as perfection, and encouraged everyone around him to behave in a similar fashion. He illustrates that will for excellence perfectly below in his commencement speech at Stanford University in 2005:
Zimmer is a worldwide leader in providing medical devices that improve the quality of life for people worldwide. To that end, they wanted to arm their sales team with the latest sales materials such as videos, powerpoints, pdf documents, and make them available on iPads. Watch this powerful presentation from the 2011 Dreamforce conference and learn from Zimmer how they accomplished this.
After a rather intense lead-up, Dreamforce 2011 is finally behind us – and what a show it was! 4 days, 45,000 registered attendees, Metallica, Will.i.am, MC Hammer, Alanis Morissette, Jay Leno, and on and on. This was one of the largest tech shows we've ever seen in terms of numbers, and the energy was amazing.
We unveiled our ongoing message of building the "Mobile Social Enterprise," which focuses on enabling mobile access to social networks. We build Chatter and Facebook/Twitter into so many of our mobile apps that it only makes sense.
This of course matches up well with Salesforce's big unveil of the Social Enterprise. Take a look at Marc Benioff's presentation below to get a true sense for their vision of the future:
These days you really can't visit a tech blog without seeing 3 stories on the front page about tablet computers. iPads, Samsung Tablets, BlackBerry PlayBooks, Xooms, and a whole cadre of cheaper wannabe products.
What makes them so hot? Tablets are cheap, tremendously portable, have thousands of apps, but most of all – people love using them. There's just something to interacting with a machine and its software so intimately.
Earlier this year we at Model Metrics commissioned a study by Dimensional Research to find out what exactly businesses are starting to do with these things. The results were interesting to say the least:
78% of respondents are deploying tablets by end of 2013
Only 51% have a strategy on what to do with them
72% of participants have iPads, but most of those are just testing the waters
We find this particularly interesting because we've found a few things that work, and work very well. If you've got the time, here is a 30 minute presentation on how you can start using the iPad in your business. Lots of use cases, from field sales to customer service, and anything in between.
Congratulations to our customer Ingram Micro for receiving the 2011 CIO 100 Award from IDG’s CIO Magazine. They won the prestigious award based on the innovation and success of the Ingram Micro Cloud website (www.ingrammicrocloud.com), which we're proud to say we helped to design, develop and deploy.
Today we released the results of an independent survey that shed interesting light on how enterprises are using tablets.
The results may surprise you. We hear a lot about how mobile is the next big thing. And from the conversations we have with enterprises, it most often is. But what we’re hearing, and this survey validates, is that we are still in the very early days of using tablets to deliver actual business value.
Most enterprises have tablets purchased by employees who are just “testing them out.” Perhaps using them for work email. Only 22% of companies have “officially” deployed them for business use in some fashion. This may even have occurred in a small department, not necessarily across the company. At the same time 72% know they are used by employees within their companies.
Along the same lines, 78% plan to have tablets officially deployed by the end of 2013, yet only 51% report having an adoption strategy in place.
This means there is a huge opportunity for enterprises to drive innovation with these new devices. The enterprises we talk to with the right mindset may not yet know exactly how to leverage them for business, but they see the potential to differentiate and do things differently. We’ve done some really interesting mobile projects for clients in the consumer goods, insurance and life science industries in particular that are really exciting.
Check out the results for yourself. Does your business have a plan in place to leverage the next generation of mobile devices?
Wait, what? That's right, this year you can manage your NCAA Tournament bracket in a Force.com application. Assembled by our good friend Reid Carlberg and the Force.com Labs program over at salesforce.com, it's easy to install. Simply head over to the AppExchange, install it, and you're off and running. Upon successful install, you'll have this in your org:
We will be the ones keeping the brackets up to date 3 times per day (scores, teams, etc) so you could say we have a vested interest in the app. If you have any questions or suggestions, post them below or hit us up on Twitter @ModelMetricsInc using the #brackets hash tag.
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