Free the Data

In today's all digital world, there is a never ending onslaught of data. For example, in 2007, it's estimated that there are 20 million users getting their email on wireless devices(i.e. Phones, PDA's, etc). This number is estimated to grow to 350 million users by 2010.

Whether it's email, digital pictures, mobile transactions or just 'more data', the critical business problem is:

'The Information Value Chain' - allowing companies to share and understand data to support better decision making. In other words, more data makes your SAN salesperson very happy, transforming that data into actionable information allows your business to prosper.

Data is a lot like milk. Being the nerd that I am, I don't really care for milk, but I do like pizza which requires the transformation of milk into cheese. Left untreated or cared for, milk spoils and creates a stench. 

So, what does this have to do with Customer Experience Management, and Tealeaf?
Tealeaf creates a lot of data -- we need it to power a visual replay of a user's web session. However, just as there are milk consumers, soda-pop consumers and pizza eaters our customers have different needs for Tealeaf data -- and different processes for turning the data into valuable information. Some folks need a snippet of the data in real-time, others need a full forensic interface to the data. How do we keep everybody happy?

Here's an interesting example of how to leverage the value of Tealeaf data: Does the tail wag the dog, or does the dog wag the tail?

The convergence of Web 2.0, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and EDA (Event Driven Architecture) are causing some interesting changes in the application development, deployment and monitoring spaces.
In classical engineering education, we are taught the concepts of feedback loops. We study how an airplane adjusts its course by determining its location and how far off course it may be. The following sentence is always the word of caution to 'not adjust course too often', otherwise you induce the plane into instability and crash.

Today's applications are being built with the notion of an information highway. The applications, consume, generate and transform information put onto the 'bus', i.e. the highway. Not only do the application components inter-operate via the highway and its associated on/off ramps, the application monitoring and diagnostic tools also make use of this common infrastructure. Remember Field of Dreams, 'If you build it, they will come.'

In a Web 2.0 world, subroutine calls have been replaced by HTTP/HTTPS invocations. The abstraction of HTTP/HTTPS allows for components to operate anywhere -- and not just within a single computer or single network. This integration/disintegration can occur at any spot on the highway -- i.e. it can take place during the page creation or it can take place within the user's browser. In plainer words, content aggregation can take place either on the server or on the client.  Welcome to the world of Mashups (Wikipedia).

During the Internet Bubble, few things were as wildly hyped as Personalization and the touted ability to customize each and every user's online experience. The reality didn't quite match the hype and/or the cost outweighed the benefit -- however I feel this class of 'feedback' coming back -- albeit with a new infrastructure.

Just what does it take to influence somebody's behavior?

• Is it a billboard for a gas station when your car is approaching empty?
• Is it the offer for help when your car has a dead battery in the airport parking lot?

It's the right data at the right time
Have you ever noticed that many of the internet acronyms (SOA, EDA) are 3 letter abbreviations for 'now', as in I want it 'now'. All of this data flowing, oozing and cruising down the highway needs to be analyzed and acted on in real-time as well as new applications and application flows constructed dynamically.
With the technology stack that we now have, we can even change the behavior of an application without changing the structure of the underlying application.

On the Tealeaf website, we say:
See your online customers...Capturing the details of every single interaction, Tealeaf delivers insights that explain why your customers succeed or fail in their transactions.

In the past, we would have talked about our ability to discover sessions, to replay them and/or to score them/evaluate them. With the latest Tealeaf release -- we can do more -- we can influence the app itself and build a foundation to leverage applications dynamically.

We now have an API to send the data out of Tealeaf in real-time. We can send our view of the application that we are monitoring back onto the information highway. For lack of better terms, we call this the 'Event Bus.' As web 2.0 applications started using RIA(Rich Internet Application) Frameworks such as Ajax, Flex and Flash -- we've also evolved our data collection capability. While the bulk of our data is collected passively via a server side packet sniffer, we now complement that view with methods to see what's happening inside of the browser. Initially we did this work in order to power replay of Ajax applications.

Our hooks for capturing activity from inside the browser come from including some simple JavaScript on the page. Ordinarily, the JavaScript collects client-side activity and asynchronously posts this information using an Ajax call. What happens when there is an intelligent listener to this Ajax posts? This opens up a channel to talk back to the user's browser. Utilizing this mechanism, we could dynamically offer:

• Chat or customer assistance to people who appear to be lost or who are having unproductive sessions.
• Surveys or other forms of customer follow-up.
• Targeted offers based on activity.
• Detection of fraudulent behavior and

I am not suggesting that Tealeaf will enter the 'spaces' described above -- but that our data, analysis and infrastructure can be used to power and partner these application solutions to deliver additional value.

Clearly, Tealeaf is not the only vendor working to exploit opportunities that are arising from the 'Now paradigm' -- load balancers from F5 and Cisco now have full external API's that can be used by the applications themselves. There's even the potential of browser bloat as every vendor of chat, click-to-call, survey offer, etc want to get their own JavaScript stack embedded into your application. It's not just the code -- these hooks also need to talk to a server taking up more resources, etc. The analytics companies are also feeling the tension to perform real-time analysis.

I am suggesting that the Tealeaf infrastructure makes building these class of applications a lot easier and will enable more robust interactions.  It's been said that 'There's a thin line between love and hate', there's also a thin line between application monitoring and feedback -- Welcome to the new world order.

What's worth more, an ounce of insight or a pound of data?

Free the data, let it be used to produce the insight that you need.

-- Robert Wenig, Founder, CTO, Member of Board