Browser, Clients, Credit and 2.0

Enterprise2.0 & Office2.0, Clients and Browsers

Phil Wainewright has a truly excellent piece on the use of mashup's on RightNow Technologies. Some of the points I am fascinated with is Phil's contention that in many situations "browser only/ no download" culture of Office2.0 may not actually deliver benefit, and that there remains a role for the lightweight client.

Credit and Collections in The News

The Wall Street Journal reports that credit and collections is now a front and center concern for all US banks. They are focusing on getting in front of customers as soon as their is any indication that they may be struggling; making more offers around helping construct partial payment and late payment plans; and they are using these interactions and incentives to help "renegotiated the debt relationship" they have with the client (i.e. reduce limits, introduce new terms etc.) Interestingly, they are also investing in self service solutions where customers that find themselves in a "bit of trouble", can develop and deploy their own late payment plan entirely on their own and without having to speak to the agent or collections agency.

Oh, and $969bn is the amount on rotating credit, ie outanding on credit cards. Gee, its sounds a lot when you say it like that.

Getting All 2.0 On Your Credit

Another service called BillShrink is also trying to help customers manage their credit card debt (VentureBeat). What I love about this is that the service makes obvious what other benefits might be (i.e. air miles, fees, etc.). It asks you a few simple questions around what your spending is like, and how much your credit limit is, and then gets to making some suggestions.

I sincerely believe that there are opportunities to more accurately asses the true nature of a persons payment risk through higher levels of data granularity; using data from different data pools, and ideas lifted from the world of social media.

To return to the question of "how you spend your money will impact your credit score": from what I remember if you buy groceries with your credit card, this is not good. The credit card company might make some high level assumptions about what this means. But wait.

Techcrunch reports on Expensify, a solution that is a credit card, that allows you to take a picture of your receipt, and file the whole thing. You can then print out your receipts by trip, in order, and attached with proof of payment (this is where I go, OMG, like a 13 year old). They take a 3% fee for doing this (woah.... what? but wait a minute, how much time would you spend doing your expenses, how late are you usually in handing them in, and what is your usual charge on that? yes, it does, it does add up). Of course the real beauty with Expensify is that they could be your "credit information broker", and unlike Billshrink they won't be asking you to guess, you just gave them permission to track your spend.

Human - Machine Interaction, When and Why.

A new report from Nortel and BT, "Fragvergence: Changing Consumer Attitudes to Diverse Contact Channels", has found that there is actually a good consumer reaction to getting an automated message, in the right context.

They ran both a quantitative survey of 1,018 on U.S. and U.K. consumers and a qualitative set of in-depth interviews with consumers (how many of those, they don't say in the release, and I am waiting on the full report).

- 71 percent of U.S. and U.K. consumers would be happy to receive a call that used voice recognition to inform them that their plane, train or bus would be late.

- 80 percent reported that they would look favorably on automated calls that informed them of the time of delivery of goods to their homes.

Gee, shock horror. VoiceSage is doing this day in day out for leading brand name companies in the UK right now, today.

The report goes on to say that the end user would be happy for the company to use Voice Recognition if it reduced cost, and of course this cost was passed on to the consumer. Really? Customers are interested in better service at lower cost? I must read on.

They point out that American's are much more likely to like automated IVR, for reasons that remain unexplored in the PR Release, but may, just may have something to do with other research which shows that the American public would rather talk to a machine than someone from the Philippines.

But the report does strike some interesting notes: for instance, many product decisions are now "de-facto" service decisions. When I buy a laptop I am comparing various technical specifications against my belief in the brand, and my expectations as to the probable level of service I will receive if/when something goes wrong. This is an excellent point that is somewhat lost in the overall release.

They also draw our attention to the finding that:

Customers appear to have stark preferences on which channels they wish to use for different services. For financial services, for instance, 56 percent of U.S. respondents and half of U.K. respondents welcomed voice recognition for checking their account balance. Only 12 percent and 13 percent respectively liked the idea of setting up the direct debit using IVR

Now there is a very simple "work around" to that and it is "don't expect completely new to the service customers to sign up on an automated system, but instead, connect them through to an excellent call center agent?" I can also let you in on another little secret, VoiceSage is helping companies (Telco's, Utilities, Financials) to use outbound Interactive Voice Messaging to collect payments every single day, and our customer satisfaction and feedback rates are very positive. 

In fairness Andrew Small, head of CRM capability, BT Global Services, says in the statement "Our research showed that consumer preferences are both particular to the sector and also the application being used.” With this I would agree absolutely, and that is why you should do business with someone who understands that process.

E.2 Barriers To Adoption

 

Why Senior Management Invest In Enterprise 2.0

Here's a little conundrum: all project management and product development books will tell you top team sponsorship is essential for success. So why are all the Analysts saying that "enterprise 2.0 is under the radar", its "user generated", its wild-fire? Well, because that's what happened with Web2.0 Retail. Companies that spent a fortune gaining first position in their vertical were overcome by new 2.0 players, often within a 12-18 month time frame. (see UK real estate players for examples). But me-thinks Enterprise is a bit different.

Bill Ives on The FastForwardBlog says there are four business reasons for adopting enterprise 2.0 that got senior execs excited.

1. As company grew there was an increasing need to collaborate across time zones. This became apparent as they made more acquisitions and at first, had difficulty just going across one time zone. The enterprise 2.0 tools addressed this issue.

2. When they were a regional bank, the bank found that company events (picnics) and activities (softball league) helped build commitment. Now they saw the need to build a similar sense of community and commitment on a global basis with the new enterprise 2.0 tools.

3. Like many companies they have maturing workforce and were concerned with the lose of knowledge. Now with enterprise 2.0 tools they are capturing knowledge in the process of work through wikis, blogs, and similar means.

4. They saw the need to engage generation y workers. This caught imagination of senior executives when their research showed that generation y workers come with greater engagement but within a year they dropped to below average on engagement because there were no tools for engagement. The new employees were also driven down by the hierarchy. Enterprise 2.0 tools provide the means of engagement with tools they are used to using that allow for participation

So, Senior Management are concerned about Motivating and Retaining their young talent; they want to try to capture tacit knowledge, routines, and relationships; they want to build team spirit and feeling of "company belonging"; and they wanted to enable people to find others in their company, even across timezones. So far, so 1987.

More on The Adoption of Enterprise2.0 From Office 2.0

The Office2.0 Conference guys noticed 5 categories of barriers:

(1) Culture: resistance to change, resistance to new tools, familiarity with current environment, lack of rewards

(2) Awareness: lack of awareness of what the tools are. At client site, I was talking about twitter and a business problem we were working on, and using twitter to get some ideas. For the client, the firewall prevented them from using it. Most people know about LinkedIn and Facebook, but there is a lack of awareness beyond that.

(3) Technology: concerns about privacy, security, protection, particularly in financial services. Hospital argument — spend money in case someone might die. Same thing with security

(4) Security: privacy protection, etc.

(5) Generational differences: if the organization doesn’t have a lot of younger workers, there seems to be no acceptance. Many companies are not worried about the younger generation.

So again, Culture, Reward Structures for Desired Behaviors, Clear understanding of Security and Governance, i.e. who is in charge, and who is responsible for the implementation and its deliverables. Gosh, I sound so old school here.

Getting Over The Barriers

(1) Get upper management to use tools themselves

(2) Show use one small tool to solve one problem (reduce complexity and make benefit clear).

(3) Build on successes.  Let others see that their peers are having success and they will want to follow suit.

(4) Build group and let others see that others are using IT—peers using it

(5) Use new system in parallel with traditional collaboration processes so they can see the benefits Ex: email vs banned email

(6) Build support processes at the same time as introducing the new tool (remember individuals can change tools, but the organization changes very slowly).

(7) Build/engage culture where it's ok to experiment/take risks

(8) "Social media policy' you represent the company so 'be an adult'

(9) Use summer interns to bring in new technologies.  Are you a “stock” or a “Bond” (or maybe an “option”)- let someone else take the risk

(10) Kill the old systems so the new system is the only option

(11) Provide “guide on the side” training environment. Staff the role of community manager with the right person to engage others and teach others and manage content to get networking site going

(12) Start by addressing a business problem, not just bring in the tool.  When the business problem has been successfully addressed, then collaboration can be seen as a nice 'byproduct' of the solution.

From where I stand, this makes a lot of sense. And from where I stand if you had a plan to implement a "2.0" strategy and had a 12 step plan to overcome barriers to adoption, and you had worked out a clear business case for using it, well, you probably wouldn't have to use the phrase "2.0" at all.:)

Update: Dion has a massive post on getting 2.0 into the enterpise. It takes a different tack to the "traditional approach", and its well worth the read. Dion's take (IMHO) is that you need to "break the china" and go big with the big commitment to 2.0.

Big Theme, Little Theme

Big Theme: Serendipity, Patterns of Interaction, Culture.

When John Hagel speaks, I listen. Today he posted about "The Big Sort" and "The Difference", and the role of cultural diversity in creating "productive friction", which in turn enables long term innovation. While many theorist have pointed out that the urban flows (of traffic, of housing, and retail / commercial districts) set up a little "social tube" that we move around without really reflecting on it, I think not enough attention has been paid to "interaction styles" and culture. We can all pass each other in the street and say "good day, nice weather, I hope it holds", God knows, in Ireland the weather is always an occasion for conversation. But its a known pattern that isn't deviated from often. I am sure that just as many "known patterns of interaction" take part every day when a sales person is speaking with a customer, or a customer care agent is dealing with a call. The "formula" enables you to get through the interaction predictably and without offence. But it doesn't create the opportunity for insight. It doesn't help you understand "what else is going on around here" that could be influencing this interaction.

Little Theme :) Cumulative Benefits

Companies are now starting up to compete with SpinVox and the heavily funded Speech to Text product companies. Speech to Text means that you can dial a number, say what you want to do, or say a message, and have it delivered to a number of media or modes (i.e. email, SMS, etc.). VentureBeat reports on MessageSling which allows you to send a message to a group in any mode on any network. The article points out that you can do any network messaging on from SpinVox through uReach. I can also point out that www.dial2do.com has a speech to text engine. Yesterday ReadWriteWeb had a piece on using the iPhone as a satnav type offering. The opportunity to create applications and services that are a mix and match, a mashup, of various other platforms can often be a problem too, inthat the start up hasn't really thought about cumulative "lock in's" that discourage the user from leaving for another service.

Getting With The Big Themes: SaaS and Media Consumption

TechCrunch carried the piece that Joost would move to entirely browser based delivery. The even bigger news was that the social consumption aspect of the service would now be much more prominent. I always thought that joost should be the "virtual couch" where you and your friends could watch TV, Media, Games, and then just comment, show other related clips etc. You could say to your friends "hey, wanna watch CSI tonight at 10.00?". Others say that Joost just didn't have the compelling content it needed to draw users in. I learned a lot from my trial of the spotify.com alpha service. It has great player, loads of content, clean interface. What I missed about my lastfm was serendipity. And that is what John Hagel was talking about.

Appointments 2.0: A specific instance of "micro-process" drags.

Kristen Nicole at Mashable brings us news that HeyCosmo brings the world a service that uses the phone to help schedule your life.  You could use the Concierge service to phone the HeyCosmo number and ask it to phone all the restaurants in a particular area and see if they have a table for 7pm. One presumes that who ever picks up the phone and confirms that they have a table will then be connected back to you.. It sounds nice but you will never ever use this service unless it is connected to an accurate and useful store of directory assets, or social network ratings, etc. I must admit Ijust don't see these guys being architected to do this. HeyCosmo reportedly has plans to expand into a kind of referral based service based on Geo-location/ local data. With 11 staff and Silicon Valley based, it can't be a cheap start up either.

Update: RWW thinks HeyCosmo needs more emphasis on the receiver's experience. Bang On Assessment in my view.

Presdo (as in "press-do") are another 2.0 start up that enable you to invite people to events "on the fly". Drag a link to your toolbar and start booking events with friends and colleagues. This service is email driven and very "gooleicious". Which leads me to Google Calendar. Use Gmail and Calendar, hey even stick an SMS reminder into the routine, and your good to go. And with Google Gears for Calendar about to debut you have even more reason to use it.

TimeBridge on the other hand have a brief "negotiation" capability in that the initiator can choose 5 potential meeting times, and the recipients choose "best, available, not good" for each of the times, and then an email negotiation is entered into. It also synchs with  all the available calendaring softwares. The key pieces here are "installed software base", and "negotiation". If the negotiating service was also "aware" of some of your meeting habits, relationship strengths, and work priorities, then it might actually become effective. These are key "micro-process" drags based on problems of co-ordination and communication.

Phil Wolff of SkypeJournal totally nailed it this week with this posting.

While the diagram above is an obvious reference to Alex Saunders "Presence 2.0" it illustrates how much deeper the conversation has to go to actually solve something as "simple" as an appointment routine. If you think of an appointment setting in your outlook as an "object", you may wish to see notes on the conference call, attached to-do's, products referenced in the call, etc. As your organisation scales in number, and the number of interactions / appointments between you and the customer scale, the issue becomes non-trivial.

Imagine: you have an appointment with an installer from BT, who said they would be at your house by 10.30. Why not go to the calendar page he emailed you as part of the confirmation cycle, hover over it, and it shows you on a map, where he is right now, and how long it will take to "next appointment"? Think of it as a FexEx for Everybody in your always live calendar. There is a opportunity to solve a real problem here, but we're all a bit away from having the social and technical infrastructure in place to crack it on a large scale. (IMHO)

Batch and Weave

Micro-Processes , Structural Processes, and Shorter  Product Development Times

The theme is well understood at this point: those that can sense and respond to market needs and demands, and can iterate their products, designs, features etc. faster than the competition, eventually "out evolve" them. I saw this years ago in Japanese manufacturing strategy called lean production.

A key part of this "lean" was the ability to turn production processes away from "long lines" to "flexible cells". Then, within each cell there was (usually) a key machine that had a "set up & turnaround time". This was a key constraint. But here is something you probably didn't know: operators of these machines kept very detailed log books of how the machine operated in reality, and issues that effected its performance. We are talking a "log book on a string" here. These books would provide details of real "constraints" in the production process so designers could see that their design changes would have key impacts on the production line. Underpinning the systems thinking here, was a clear culture that understood the upstream and downstream impacts of their performance and failures. Micro-processes (Machine Set Up Constraint) fit seamlessly into Macro-Processes (Product Development Process).

For all the talk about Lean Production & Agile Enterprise we still don't seem to be doing a great job of this in the last 20 years. What strikes me here, again, is that there are many Micro-Processes that an individual can capture, and these will matter in themselves to the individual capturing them, and in aggregate to those involved in strategy, finance and marketing. This is one theme of the Enterprise 2.0 debate that isn't really being brought forward enough.

CEBP (communications enabled business processes) are one way of unlocking some of those key constraints, but perhaps there are very many other opportunities to capture and share micro-processes. I am sure that a lot more could and will be done with CEBP and internal organisational efficiencies.

 Costs and How To Curtail Them

Denis Howlett has a posting on how to look at costs a bit more closely: a lot of smaller companies don't have a formal review process for this, but just by asking existing service providers to re-tender you can regularly attain decent cost savings. Denis does recommend that companies also look to see how they can refocus from offline to online marketing. At VoiceSage we attend quite a few conferences but we also do quite a bit of our work through "teleweb". Of course a core part of what we do around here is help companies bring in their outstanding debtor days/ sales days outstanding by using Interactive Voice Messaging (IVM). One of our Clients is a Catalogue company called Otto, and it brought in its money twice as fast using VoiceSage. But there are add on points to this: we know that companies can reduce their outstanding debt by Communications Enabling the Credit and Collections cycle. But have you traced all the upstream and downstream benefits of being more in control of this process?

 Telco2 Themes: The Continued Importance of CEBP

The guys at Telco2 continue to show the way in terms of what is possible for all parties in the new CEBP marketplace. looks like another good line up for the November Brainstorm. Let me throw a theme into the hat: "What enables you to create a platform of availability"?

Follow Up On Last Post: micro-processes

Are Conversations The Missing Piece Around Micro-Processes?

The ever excellent PersonalInfocloud comes forward with some interesting comments around Enterprise 2.0 and why it might be a bit different from Web 2.0. The bits that particularly caught my attention were that many of the micro-processes (my term) were not captured in an organisation, and information around even well defined processes were also not caught and captured and thus saved to "organisation memory".

Enterprise has gone through its phases of knowledge management tools, from forms for capturing information, forums for sharing, and up to enterprise content management systems (ECM) that encompass document management, content management, knowledge management, and information harvesting. But, the gaps still exist.

These existing gaps are around conversations not being captured (the walls of the halls have no memory (well today they do not)) and increasingly the ubiquitous communication channel in organizations, e-mail, is being worked around. Quick decisions are not being documented as it is not enough for a document or worth completing a form. As the iterative processes of development, design, and solution engineering are happening at quicker and smaller increments the intelligence behind the decisions is not being captured or shared. This is largely because of the tools.

How Would You Get Those Micro-Processes Out of Company?

TechCrunch reports on Worklight, a server based application that sits behind the firewall of the corporate and then enables corporate information to be "widge-fied" a la iGoogle. So, you see you're stock levels, your delivery times, etc. etc. I think this is a great idea and just know that this is the way all corporate interactions will move, both for internal employees, and for company customer interactions. The only "vision thing" I would ponder is shouldn't the server be hosted somewhere?

That Sounds Cool: Could We Do This On Some Web2.0 Stuff?

For those of you thinking that "our product would really sell well into large corporate users", beware. Its a serious commitment as a sales and marketing strategy, and needs good capitalisation. Ed Sims has more here.  In a related point Tom Evslin asks can you have a strategy for a start up if there is no revenue plan? Yes, you can, if you have a lot of personal money, a low personal burn rate, and the frame of mind to do it :) For those who are used to selling into large enterprises, expect "higher than web2.0 rates of friction".

Process: More than "the computer says no"

I have been interested in transaction cost economics for a number of years, particularly from the organisational & supply chain point of view. At what point do the internal efficiencies of process and formalisation become more effectively performed outside the organisation? How much formalisation should we have versus "organicity" and "self direction"?. From what I learned, quite a lot of "reality" gets "codified" through "formal procedures". We've all seen it happen in our companies, or in former places of employment: the report says "good to go", but you know there are risks not mentioned in that report. That's where the informal processes and network does its work, and those conversations are probably happening in emails, IM's, and social networks. So, formalisation is and always was mediated and augmented by conversation.

Being thorough in following process and procedure can drive effective performance, even in medical environments like Intensive Care. It can help in the diagnosis, in the doing, and in the reporting.

I was intrigued when the FastForwardBlog had a posting on Taylor and Micro-Processes. To quote:

examples (of micro-processes) might include:

• Customizing an existing sales presentation for a meeting with a new prospect
• Designing the agenda and preparing materials for an internal brainstorming meeting
• Putting together the briefing materials for a quarterly business review meeting
• Analyzing and making sense out of a competitor’s recent pricing announcement

These micro-processes are characterized by:

• A small number of steps
• Ad hoc design created by the knowledge workers responsible for the process
• Loose definitions of the beginning and end of the process
• Loose notions of control, sign-offs, and approvals
• Technology-enabled, if at all, by email and office suite tools.

None of these processes were ever explicitly designed; they’ve evolved over time. The cumulative pain and productivity drag imposed by these processes is accepted as a fact of organizational life. While various technologies are offered up as ways out of the swamp, we need an overall improvement strategy to provide the necessary direction

There is much to ponder here. Given that there has been little progress made in bringing "Taylorism" to knowledge work, how we can use process-based orientation to expose these hidden drags could lead to an explosion in productivity. God knows, our economy could do with it. VoiceSage takes a process perspective to drive out drags in communication and collaboration, particularly in communications to the customer base, but there is no reason why a similar focus could not be used on internal processes. Indeed Thomas Howe has numerous examples of how document sign off and management creates unnecessary and expensive drags that when traced and measured cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Odds and Ends of Week

Evert Bopp is following up on his idea for a co-working space in Ireland. Eirpreneur uses Twitter to have a virtual watercooler for teleworkers. Bernie Goldback does the Sunday Papers via Qik, the instant video solution from your smart phone. Oh Yeah, and Ireland gives James Enck some serious link love around his return to the world of Blogging, and being "cutdown in subprime". So what's it all about?

Well in a way there are some fairly big themes going on here and they have to do with broadband, broadband availability, and the impact of this on work patterns and social communications. From ip-networks to social networks, if you will. I have to admit that I am more than a little interested in how people can maintain social networks, and business networks through a combination of online conversation, webinars, and physical presence. Ken Thompson calls it 3 types of network dialogs "Getting Things Done, Grooming, and Emoting", and a viable network has to have all three to be sustainable.

I've been around a few years now, and I think that I've found that particular people can be great networkers, but it is so very very hard to extend that capability to groups, and to organizations as a whole. Yet, everywhere we look the researchers are telling us that "open innovation", "networked organisations", "virtual organisations", are the future of our global economy.  Cisco have put very big bets on just this kind of social change and collaboration (thus their purchase of webex).

I'd love to hear of great examples of these virtual networks. How far do people have to be apart for it to fall over? Is it iterative or or are they like the may fly that dies once its purpose is completed?

For my book, I am watching the guys around Twitterphone with great glee, (www.maxroam.com, www.dial2do.com, www.zong.com). What I love about it is that for a relatively small amount of money, three players were able to get together and make a big bang in the world of early adopers. Perhaps it isn't the belly of the whale, but its on its tale, and its making it way.... "press 2 to talk to the whale".

CEBP + ME

Thomas Howe has an interesting take on why Ribbit acquisition by BT is all about the next generation of services for the enterprise. One of the key things will be "communications enabling business processes", or CEBP. Who companies look to to deliver this capability is one of the reasons he reckons BT is so interested in the acquisition. The "typical enterprise developer" will not tackle telephony solutions in his humble opinion.

Jay Philips over at Adhearsion has a great posing on why the Asterisk open source PABX is not developed upon to a higher degree. "Beyond that point (..of getting a basic function to work)Asterisk becomes prohibitively unintuitive and that impression sticks and becomes a reputation" He also says the developer retention rate is less than 1%. This is very, very interesting, and maybe also why Ribbit, in turn, is interesting. If applications can be niche, and faceted to their actual use-case situation, without programming, then they become "long tail". Maybe what the open source movement need here is a "container" that enables people to play, without programming.

If Ribbit was as easy to use, as say, iTunes, would it be adoptable? If there were zero programming? If literally, you did not see one line of code, not even a "copy this, and paste it where you see <body" :) Perhaps this is the bet BT are making.

Well don't let me scare you, but if you had popped inside VoiceSage you would see that our applications are entirely deployed without you having to write a line of code. Could it be made as "easy as iTunes"? mmmm.....Lets see.

Just a few very cool little gadgets

Techcrunch has a few iphone apps listed that make me actually want an iphone because it might be useful. Capture my expense slips through the camera and post them to my Salesforce.com account? Yip. See how my Supply Chain analytics are performing in real time: Yip.

Misalignment of what you think is important and what your customer thinks is important.

 Dimension Data has an interesting report on 45% of respondents to their survey would prefer to use DTMP (punch a number for each option), than to use Voice Recognition. This kind of thing happens when you fall in love with your technology, and a distance grows between you and the people that actually use your solution.

Now, that's quite a headline issue right there, but the central one of interest to me is that the "customer use case" in this research has some pretty interesting "implicit assumptions". For instance, "when I call, or get called", "reason for calling", "where I am". This is all good Telco2 stuff. Yet more than half of people and vendors believe that the Voice Recognition IVR implementation is primarily driven by cost savings:

Now, there is nothing wrong with trying to save money, but where is the two way benefit in the relationship? yes, if you pass on this benefits of low cost interaction in the form a low cost business model, the low cost has clear shared value for the customer.

Only 18% of customers thought that their interaction with a Voice Recognition Platform completely addressed the reason they called up in the first place. I think this is just a totally mindblowing figure.

VoiceSage is an outbound Interactive Voice Messaging service so when, where and for what reason you contact the customer must be very carefully examined. You must focus on why are you interrupting this person, what is the two way value to be communicated and demonstrated to the customer, and how closely can I reasonably meaningfully personalize this experience? By more closely examining the reason for the call, and the two way value generation potential, you will take this 18% problem resolution figure, and blow it through the roof.

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.

Update on Symbian Release

As usual, the most in debt analysis of what might be going on from an IPR and technical point of view with regards Nokia's release of Symbian into the Eclipse environment. Mr. Geddes.

Nokia OpenSource Symbian ? eh, What?

This is a bit of a technical post, and lets face it, the musings of an outsider. I don't have any special knowledge, just some speculation to offer about why Nokia open-sourced Symbian and what it means for mobile services.

- Someone did the maths and figured out that they might get "linuxed". If they did not open source the developers would have to go elsewhere, eventually (Android, Red Hat, other). By opening up, they stand the chance of being "the developers friend" and retaining "third screen space" on the mobile device. How deeply they open up will be the telling point.

- Nokia need, and want, business users. This doesn't mean becoming "the next blackberry", it means being the "Anyberry", i.e. on any phone, anywhere, completely interoperable with your enterprise software. It also means inventing a whole new bunch of services, and delivering them through the network (nee cloud), to the end user enterprise.

- Hey, if you want to be "Anyberry", that would mean doing something with MSFT, right? I expect that integration with exchange will continue to erode RIM's dominance in business email messaging. MSFT & Nokia are compelling combination in this space. Of course, MSFT & Nortel are also getting very cosy around the Unified Communications space. Oh, and isn't Nortel on some kind of IBM middleware?

- Being interoperable, means middleware, and middleware means Eclipse. Funny how Eclipse was the only environment it was released into isn't it? Not really, IBM just released their big vision of the cloud, the grid, the big thingy in the sky. So IBM would really like to be your "Amazon for Hosted Business Services". Oh, and if you want to provide services to big companies, you better have a background in doing so. mmm... who would Nokia use to offer such services into the enterprise, who might Nokia trust to build their own Hosted Business Services?..... oh, and Dana Gardner points out that "Eclipse.org needs a cloud story". Lots to ponder there.

- To do this properly, Nokia also needs to be "Nokia-Network-Inside" (see location based services plays, location based advertising, etc.). To be sure they have some network presence through joint ventures, but nothing as central as Cisco. So, what I would do is look to a hugely influential company, with a massive installed based of communication products, with a network presence and an enterprise footprint. What's going on in Nortel these days? Oh, hold on, aren't Nortel & MSFT doing some nice work together on UC for the Business, and didn't we just say that Nortel is built on some neat IBM middleware?

So the question might be, what part of the overall delivering services through the cloud story does the symbian purchase and outsource release? As many have pointed out, the new apple iPhone 2.0 does a neat side step around the carrier for managing notifications. That's all I'll say. I have to go away and take my medicine now. Upate: As per usual Martin Geddes nails it.http://www.telco2.net/blog/2008/07/how_open_is_open_or_whats_up_w.html#more

Making Change Matter

In the spirit of new technologies doing things that matter and impact society, the Fast Forward Blog has a project to use public TV to help people make connections around the issue of Mortgage and Debt problems.

For me, there are a couple of brilliant points in the middle of this project: The Public TV acts as "the trusted place" where the conversations can be initiated; to paraphrase earlier posts by Seamus McCauley and Umair Haque it is a trusted place, where people like us can share some opinion and knowledge to make a change. The other thing I find interesting is that they are using Ning to support the service from a social networking point of view.

A central problem in "surfacing this community of interest" is that to date they may not want to "hold their hand up", and go search for a community. But because there is a "mass media" outlet that can centrally direct them to a trusted place, there is the potential for critical mass. These people can "get organised"

My Data or your Data?

Hatip: Geek and Poke:

It does raise an interesting point though. If you are mashing up data, from different sources, and end users can add data sources of their own, who is going to be responsible for overall data integrity?

Enterprise Two-Dot-Oh-Dear....

ReadWriteWeb have a very nice piece on why Enterprise 2.0 has to be different. They list 8 Attributes of E20: I have just posted my inflections on each of these points after each:

(1) Monthly Subscription fees, not upfront perpetual license fees. This means the vendor has to be good to keep earning the $$$. The vendor also gets a predictable revenue line, so they can invest in R&D with confidence.

(A) This is a bit off the mark in my opinion. The value of monthly charging, historically, is that the smaller amount every month, doesn't hurt as much. Smaller numbers also don't draw attention to themselves during review processes. Yet, larger corporate clients look for value, and don't mind paying upfront fees/ forward paying usage, if they get better value. Consider this to be a reflection of your Enterprise customers confidence in the service.

(2) Adoption by users, not forced by corporate policies. Users "vote with their mouse", so it has to be good to get traction and bloat gets quickly punished.

(A) I am afraid this is just a clear result of having a clear value focus. Is it useful to the user or not? Remember, there are still corporate issues that have to be addressed no matter how "cool and funky" your user thinks Skype-Conference calls are, if your company operates in a regulated environment, then they may not be a viable option. Dion Hinchcliffe referred to a recent webinar he was on and the main issues raised by CIO's are still, Governance, and Security. Ignore corporate policy at your peril.

(3) Usable without a manual within 30 minutes, still valuable for a sophisticated power use 2 years later. That is the mark of greatness. It is a real art. The great ones make it look simple - it is not simple!

(A) Completely agree with this. And would like to add that the more people use your system or service every day, the more usability issues come to the fore. When trialling a system, you may be quite happy to go through 3-clicks to make a contact request. Using it every day, you want one click. So an emerging E20 rule might be "Usability is more important on day 30, than it is on minute 30".

(4) Hosted SaaS, so that vendors can invest R&D in new features and not in the intricacies of different platforms forced on them by an internal IT department.

(A) Completely agree with this. The caveat of course being that you may have to have broad customisation capabilities versus "the one interface for all". Users want to move things about to suit their work habits, let them. But remember, some of the most useful applications retain their background structure, so that your adaptations don't end up just creating a mess. This also effects how you roll out features (i.e. if they are important to some customers but not others). As far as I know, some of the more successful SaaS apps are standard to all users.

(5) Enabling secure, fine-grained communication across the firewall. This is the big issue for enterprises. Not many vendors do this right yet. Today we see too much binary "you are either inside or outside". The winners will enable security in a much more fine-grained way.

(A) This one is becoming more and more important. You can see that the "100% browser based solution" approach is attractive from a number of perspectives, but the limitations are clear when you have large volumes of data involved. It is also, I believe a reason why the Adobe Air development is so attractive. Perhaps companies will all have their own "iTunes for Applications" strategies.

(6) Loosely coupled, not attempting lock-in, enticing but not forcing use of related modules/products. This is a real biggie. Bringing any new system into a company involves a horrendous amount of co-ordination and interfacing. The one's that say "you can have just this little bit and it takes in data this way and spits out data this way" will win.

(A) Yip. Reduce friction to adoption at all points. One thing VoiceSage has done to address this is to enable you to use as much or as little data integration as you feel comfortable with. This reduces friction in the adoption process. Yet clearly, there are many benefits that can only be driven out with higher levels of data integration from an input point of view, but also from a report generation point of view.

(7) Freemium model, so some early experimentation can be done free of cost. This also reduces the vendor's sales cost, so they can invest more in R&D and/or lower the price enough to drive adoption.

(A) Agree, BUT. People/ Companies that want a free service are not always the people that will move to pay for a premium service. I think its somewhere like 2% move on? What FREE might give you (where there is near zero marginal cost) is more information on what people want from your service, and more usage behavior. The real thing that should be made as free as possible as an experiment that enables experience of benefit/value. Just using the service is nothing, experiencing measurable benefit, that you can put a money value on, is everything. Enabling customer experimentation is rarely truly free to deliver.

(8) Fun, relaxed, not taking itself too seriously. Taking off the suit helps adoption.

(A) Well you know, some customers like to know that you take their business and concerns seriously. If your customer/ client needs to see a suit to feel that, then you have to call it. At VoiceSage we like to think that we help take away the veil of complexity, we like to reveal the simplicity. How you interact with the client needs to reflect that "organisational value", not a notion of "cool", or general cultural trends towards informality.

29% of Agent Time Spent Talking to Customers

From Silicon republic: Independently run, Siemens Enterprise Communications sponsored:

- Employees are finding it too difficult to manage all the different software they have to use, and are spending too much time logging this information at the end of the call.

- As a result, only 29% of an agents time is actually spent conversing with the customer. of that 16% is spend conversing about the query, the remaining 13% is spent building up a rapport.

- The remaining 71% is spent entering notes, entering data, and seeking advice, and looking up screens.

Clearly this needs a radical simplification. 15 different solutions to solve one customer query? Wrong question I'd say. It doesn't matter how many apps are involved, what matters is your User Interface (single log on, customer and agent, dynamic context dashboard). OMG Paul, have you any idea how hard that is?

Some Observations on Customers and Technology Use

With the talk of GoogleLabs (gmail) last week, it was obvious that Google was launching products based on actual observed consumer behavior. Compared to Microsoft, they also seemed to have a much much smaller development team. These are the result of being a completely hosted service. There are no legacy software to manage, no partnership / software alliances that have to be supported. The web is the platform and the it is a liveweb.

It's possible to look at this another way: Google's very broad base of users give it the capability of sensing and seeing user behavior in near-realtime. Google can also track the rate of "launch success" against other factors it now has at its disposal: "do early adopter lessons cross over to the main stream for this type of application"?

While everyone has being looking at GooData as being "the best advertising information in the history of the world", perhaps the behavioral and profiling information coupled with expertise in discerning "intent", have made Google the most formidable "product development company" in history. After all we all buy products and services "to achieve an intent", be that latent or overtly expressed.

Now before everyone goes crazy on me, (all two of you) and says the obvious ("Google is a one trick pony, with a a dodgy hind leg, i.e. applications), let me posit that Google is learning how to use this information to build products, because to date, Google has not been a "product development company", but an "advertising platform". It will launch and fail, launch and fail again, but it will learn better than anyone else, how to fail successfully and how to incorporate the information into the next iteration. It won't approach this like an old school Proctor and Gamble, and I ultimately, I think they will make these kinds of "use-case-scenario-analysis" available as an API. Why not?