customer

Innovating with Ideas – Real World Remixing

Three good stories from the past week - great for me, since I am hearing feedback and "remixing" for things published here on this blog. But good, because they are nice examples of people taking ideas and tweaking them to fit their particular situation: Phil saw my presentation earlier this year on IT Strategy, and latched on to the bridge between the tactical "run the business" (RTB) work (for IT, operational support tasks), and the strategic "enhance the business" projects…

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A Company is like a Sphere

Where do these great analogy ideas come from? Full credit - I got this one from a speaker at the SAP Research Center in Palo Alto, last spring. A company is like a sphere. As it grows, volume increases much faster than surface area, and the larger a company gets, more people get embedded and hidden from the end customer than are on the fringe, in customer-facing roles. As a general rule, this is a bad thing. Well, maybe a…

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The Best Way to get Web 2.0 Into the Enterprise

There are a few ideas circulating in the blogosphere as to what will bring Web 2.0 into the enterprise, including ... The Influx of the Millennials; recent college graduates who have come to expect social networking, instant messaging and collaboration via the cloud. This groundswell of pressure will force IT to implement these new technologies. Consumer High-Tech; populist technologies like Apple hardware and Google's suite of software has taken hold in our homes; folks who expect interoperability with their employer's…

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Do you want it good or fast? Prioritizing Time-to-Value over Requirements

I have a background in software product development, iterative "methodologies", and the sort of fast-twitch life cycle that characterizes entrepreneurial startups, high-growing businesses, and "lean" process improvement projects. Unfortunately, this style is also favored by departmental developer wannabes, sloppy coders, and impatient Gen-Y newbies that want to apply a consumer products mentality to corporate IT. <aside>Yes, I'm throwing a bit of a challenge out with that last statement. I understand that as the demographics of my IT team changes, management…

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Interesting How the Mind Works

My mother has always been an accomplished letter writer - her travelogues are definitely worth keeping. Lately, she's adapted her flair for the written word to email, having amassed a healthy mailing list of relatives, grandchildren, etc. Here's one she sent last month - I thought it was an interesting insight into the nature of learning. She's taking care of my aging grandmother, and writes ... ... when I was cleaning out mother's [room] ... I found a pile of…

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Customer DNA – A Different Take on Understanding Markets and Networks

My blogroll includes tech-focused blogs as well as general business sites (along with some humor). It's an interesting cross section, that allows me to see a wide variety of reactions to news such as MacTel, Office XML, Offshoring, and other things. The variety reminded me of an old thought exercise I led at a previous job, discussing CRM for the pharmaceutical industry and how it had so many meanings within the same relatively small group of people / departments. It's…

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Customer Service, Roles and Responsibilities

This week the marketing group is getting a bit frustrated, because we're having a difference of opinion about service levels, resource availability, access to databases and servers - all exacerbated by the new owners handing down edicts for reporting requirements that are absolutely taking priority over all other work, no matter what expectations may have been set in the past. Observation #1: Is the term "Customer Service" applicable to IT? Some of the pushback I get comes in the form…

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