Business justification

[FirstLight]

Please use this thread to post your ideas and suggestions for how best to create compelling business cases for investing in Semantic technology projects.

[FirstLight]

I read the following blog post recently that sparked a few thoughts, *How to Explain Ontologies to Any Audience*.

https://enterprise-knowledge.com/how-to ... -audience/

My thoughts were it's good at an abstract level, but I think it misses the mark on concrete detail. My experience is that to get buy in, one has to motivate with the prospect of real, practical, buildable, and measurable solutions that solve intractable problems or capitalize on new opportunities move the needle in a big way, and then deliver, rinse, and repeat.

This is our main topic for the April meeting.

Michael

[FirstLight]

Posting the scratch notes I had prepared for our April meeting. I hope you find these useful - many are just plain obvious and common sense.

Selling investment in semantic content is a marketing activity. You’ll often be selling to multiple constituents, often with different priorities when it comes to value. Adjust the message for each. Different audiences something includes:

• Content practitioners
• Content managers
• Decision leaders
• Engineering architecture review boards
• Purchasing
• Vendor Risk Assessment
• I/T
• Executive product management
• C-suite

Even within content, if your solutions span content pillars - marketing content, support content, partner content, enablement content, developer support content, and so on, each should be adjusted for those as well.

There are many angles of focus you can choose from and prioritize per audience including:

• Customer satisfaction
• Reduced friction
• NPS
• CPO
• Time-to-Value
• Quantifiable cost savings; stem growth of resource
• Cost avoidance (which is different than cost savings)
• Support case deflection - support agents
• Support case deflection - self-service
• Revenue impact (including up-sell and cross-sell) - typically conversions
• Market share (competitive intelligence)
• Application unification - solutions, bundles, suites
• ....and many more

You can use multiple of these for a specific audience, but best to seize on the top 3.

How to choose:

• Choose pain points that matter. Ask!
• Opportunities and white space that really moves the needle in their eyes
• Remember the fundamentals many of us learned in school and apply them:
  • Know your audience
  • Persuasion/Marketing Comm 101: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Anything of real value can be quantified:

• Repetitive cost of doing something – frequency times cost per instance minus the cost of the solution
• Time is money; the burden rate is your friend, but remember conservative and verifiable wins the pushback

• Don’t sell technology, sell the elimination of major pain-point and significant business opportunity
• Call out where it makes things previously unachievable or not feasible, possible
• What barriers does it break through? Be prepared to explain how, but in simple terms- use relatable analogies

It's all about Applications! It's true, with advanced semantic technology the sky *is* the limit for new types of applications. A few off the cuff ideas:

• Semantic content cuts the cost of support cases – a big percentage of failures are due to poor search relevancy. Semantic content provides proactive content assistance for support agents
• The same is true for customer self-service/case deflection – and can be directly measurable
• ( True dynamic content- busing the content silos – users don’t see the company functionally- they want all of what they need in one place, not hunt for content across multiple websites and channels
• Tech content role (or really, the absence thereof) in the marketing/sales funnel
• Chatbots that REALLY work – precision answers from a large, curated content corpus
• Competitive insights – where is the competition beating your org, by how much, and then apply the semantic intelligence to crush them as if you have night vision - and they don’t (or at least before they get it too).
• Use proven models. Amazon’s secret to success is a frictionless experience, driven by semantic intelligence, to bring the right content to the user.
• Real personalization, not lip service – driven by semantic technology.
• Semantic tech is the real, practical gateway to AI/ML that’s not going to happen without
• Content that provides guidance for scenarios with multi-function products and across multiple products. "Cognitive content is the next step beyond task-oriented "intelligent" content.
• Proactive vs reactive user assistance; assistive vs failure mode content
• Web 3.0 - from information wars to knowledge wars, and the dire risks of not starting now.

Remember, you'll likely be up against competing requests for scarce funding. Ask yourself -why would a decision maker choose improved content over funding resources for new or more product offerings? Go in ready to play.

Finally, seek out cohorts. Going into battle with another partner exponentially improves your odds. Some groups make odd buy effective bedfellows. For example, it's not difficult to find birds-of-a-feather, even between content and engineering teams that all need to standardized on terminology and inter-application content models. Team up! One area clearly ripe for such an approach is a common taxonomy management strategy and resources.