News Updates etc.

Retail Week carries a very nice piece on how Otto used VoiceSage to reduce the overall level of late payments in its catalogue businesses. I can tell you here (because this is private isn't it?) that they reaped many more rewards than you might expect. Why? Well, when you reduce the amount of time that people are in arrears they tend less towards bad debt. In effect, you shift your curve in and down. Its not unheard of for companies to bring in their money twice as fast. The implications of this are actually quite interesting, but I won't rob our sales guys of all their stories.

Force.com (appexchange related) have an interesting development where if an object or entry is changed, you can get notification. I guess this would be interesting in financial services, where the sales person might wish to know that one of their customers has been downgraded from a credit standpoint. If he knew this, he might choose to contact them to re-negotiate or help to manage the account before it ran into trouble.

Web2Ireland and Fergus Burns point out how light weight API's and mashup can be used to re-design how government projects are run. With Sky News carrying the story about how the mayor of London wants to make crime data available as an API, you will be able to not only map these to house prices, but potentially make crime reporting a citizen activity, where people actually get to recommend solutions.  I really like this because IT and Software needs to address real big societal issues, if it is to make big impacts. See umair for more on this.

Mathew Lees of the Patty Seybald Group, has a nice piece on Enterprise 2.0 Lessons. Although I agree that taking a more social approach to computing will reap massive rewards, I think that "unplanned innovation" is akin to "build it and they will come", i.e. it doesn't work, and hasn't ever worked. But that's another conversation.

Andrew McAfee has an interesting question list relating to the kinds of questions people ask before engaging in an Enterprise2.0 Initiative. Josh Bernoff of Forrester has a very nice run down on why Enterprise Clients could be the real "sweet spot" for 2.0 approaches. There was a lovely comment after the article "connecting people with people is helpful, connecting people and business is valuable!"

TechCrunch urged us all to "stop before you voicemail", which is a neat take on what is happening in the hyper connected world. Because basically, no one has time to check their voicemail anymore because "they live in other environments", i.e. their Google Reader, or MS Outlook. I know of one Irish financial institution that has banned employees from turning on Voicemail. Employees were just turning it on, getting down to their paperwork, but were not being responsive to customers and other employees. Their customer satisfaction and customer service ratings were taking a hammering as well because if you left a message and an employee didn't answer it until the next day.... well, there goes your SLA.