Executive Profiles: Disruptive Tech Leaders In Social Business – Ian Hersey, Attensity Group

June 12, 2011

Welcome to an on-going series of interviews with the people behind the technologies in Social Business. The interviews provide insightful points of view from a customer, industry, and vendor perspective. A full list of interviewees can be found here.
Ian Hersey - Global Chief Technology Officer and EVP, Products, Attensity Group

Biography
Ian serves as Attensity Group’s global CTO and head of products and brings more than 20 years of experience delivering innovative research technology into the commercial mainstream. Ian is responsible for providing the technical and strategic product vision to complement the company’s business vision, setting the tone and direction for Attensity’s Group technologies and business applications and driving Attensity’s global engineering organization. Prior to Attensity Group, Ian was vice president of technology development and strategy at Business Objects, an SAP company. He came to Business Objects through its acquisition of Inxight Software. As co-founder of Inxight, Ian led the definition and development of what became the industry's broadest text analysis platform; he also held senior product management and engineering management roles at Logos Corporation and Inso Corporation. Ian began his commercial career at IBM as a computational linguist.
Ian received his bachelor's degree from Rice University, with graduate study at University of California, Berkeley, and at universities in Ghent and Leuven, Belgium. Ian is fluent in German, and he is an avid Ironman and competing member of the Team Sheeper triathlon team.
The Interview
1. Tell me in 2 minutes or less why Social Computing is changing the world for your customers
Ian Hersey (IH): All of us are users of social media platforms. Few of us have opted out. General awareness and ubiquity that we’ve never seen before. When my mom got email, that’s when I knew internet and email took off. Now she’s on facebook, it’s really arrived. As a body and collection of data, I’m likening this lately to essentially a big grid of human sensors. Unlike robotic sensors and particularly RFID tags or manufactured sensors, humans give off lots of noise and not always the output you would expect. But it’s useful, and it tells you a lot of things you didn’t know. If you combined it with location based services, not just the location of the sensor, unlike in the past, when in the past, when companies controlled the sets of communications and what people are telling them and how that information got distributed, complaints in the contact center never knew, now they all do in social. This has all moved out to the wide world where anybody can tap into it. This is scary for companies on one hand. On the other hand, they can do what market researchers have promised – give you intelligence on what people think instead of sampling and at a large scale.
I’ve been in the text analysis lab for years. I worked with IBM research technology that ultimately became Watson almost 2 decades ago. We have spell checker, grammar checker, and search technology sensitive to the different languages and deal with text in a more comprehensive way than simpler techniques in the past. A lot of this technology first made its way into search applications back then.
View meta data instead of facets. The evolution of this into analytics and early adopters. Attensity started in 2000. My previous company started at Xerox Parc in 1997. This market was emerging for almost a decade. What social computing did was all of a sudden highlight a use case to run this technology at scale.
2. What makes social computing disruptive? (Why is this disruptive in general for the enterprise)
IH: The company no longer fully controls the conversation with its customers. Instead of picking up the phone and calling the contact center and sending and email to the support line, we now have a forum and multiple forums to express ourselves and love/hate of the products or service. The fact that these platforms are widely available to everyone, people are copying what they see. People didn’t start on twitter to complain with #fail all over the place! This is a tidal wave by slowly building momentum. People are now trying to game the system.
When you look at utilizing this as a framework of a business process like customer support, it has become a new channel. Comcast cares was a famous one. The revolution starts in social media and moves its way into the contact center and into marketing. We have generations now using sms instead of email or the phone.
One of our SE’s was on a trip to PHX and connected via Burbank. The flight got cancelled, he walked around and people expected some resolution right there and they were vocal about it in social, in real time. Expectations are rising. Conversations are very public and the consequence of that expectation has ramifications of customer support processes, data analysis processes – you have to be able to process 1000+ tweets per second and spot the issues and find what to action.
3. What is the next big thing in Social Business software?
IH: Where does it go next? A couple of things. Volume will keep growing.
We have 8B articles in our search index. 2 months ago it was 7B. Staggering growth rate for just a few months. The impact of this, in the future if we think about will be huge. Google rearchitects their back end every 2 years to match user and data volumes. Big data innovation will be hot.
Second thing – globalization, our customer HP has 16 languages we track from social media. There is a bias towards English in social media. Building out languages in other use cases will be key. We need to deal with feedback in other languages. I think the number of sources and voices, whether its discussion boards or other types of human sensor data will increase.
People will want to amass as much information about the individual together to get to patterns. Account for conversations in social media along with other channels. Start to understand not only your customers email but twtter. Communities of interest will have information. Social media participation will not be priva

4. What are you doing that's disruptive for Social Computing?
IH: We are deploying the capabilities in huge companies and increasing scale. We bought a social media listening post. The thing that drove us to own versus partner, was the fact that audience content is so critical to us. Information is never complete, customers will want to tap into a review site or their industry or what have you. We had to provide the subsequent web harvesting along with monitoring. We had do both and make it a production process.
We need to extract trends and keep the full content base . We have the rich text analytics and the broad social media post together in one platform. Instead of bulk retrospective analysis in arbitrary body. How do we create a real time sensor grid? We need to employ technologies to keep up with the rate of the incoming sensors.
Where are people complaining about cable outages and where are they saying this from? The same feed can come to these customized processing streams.
We have a lot of big data, a lot of streams, a lot of unstructured data that we aggregate and act on in real time.
5. Where do you see technology convergence with Social?
IH: Offer management, predictive analytics are key areas where we see this to augment traditional market research, marketing analytics and, ways of finding patterns in ways to create new offers and bundles. You now can have interactions and ask open ended questions which provide more details. You are sitting down having a conversation with millions of people. CRM , customer experience management, and social crm will see a lot of convergence.
Can the big vendors move fast enough?
6. if you weren't focused on Social Computing what other disruptive technology would you have pursued?
IH: I would focus on cyber security and there are some interesting usages of the technologies I’m familiar with, especially mobile security.
7. What's your favorite science fiction gadget of all time?
IH: Transporter. I fly a lot and I find that to be the most inefficient and unproductive use of my time.

Your POV
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