Deception Point @ CRM

Dears,


This article is more of an introspection of the CRM program execution that prevails over a decade and an attempt to identify some vital deception points in CRM initiatives.
When companies started to realize that they might have been just a little misled about the costs and benefits of CRM, one of the witty professional renamed it as 'Clever Repackaging Mechanism - CRM'. This was because he believed that CRM was just a combination of some very simple classic business disciplines, such as customer database marketing, key account management, people management, quality, supply chain management, change management, risk management, customer service and latterly e-business, combined to create a rather complex but often not very well articulated, planned or managed business change programme.

When the first CRM disasters began to occur, the same witty professional referred to 'Client Rip-off Menu' – CRM, because in retrospect many more System Integrators and Product Vendors than clients seemed to have made money out of CRM! One way System Integrators and Product Vendors achieved this was through a sustained campaign of hype, consisting of a combination of almost 'self-evident' requirements, such as 'a single customer view', justified by different 'burning platforms' such as, for example, severe customer attrition, escalating costs of customer recruitment, the need to reduce the costs of customer management radically and quickly, and of course that all-purpose justifier, competitive advantage and so forth.

Over a decade, most CRM programmes are barely worth the name, particularly when a vision of CRM has been foisted on the client by a high-powered consultancy or firm of analysts. Before we explore the perniciousness of this, let us explain why so many companies were (and still are) vulnerable. It is because the quality of what we call 'business discourse' has plumbed depths usually only plumbed by poor CRM evangelist and Business Consultants. One reason for this is PowerPoint culture, which makes managers decreasingly able to produce connected arguments.

This low quality discourse occurs in a less detectable and possibly more pernicious form within CRM. This version of the disease is called 'personification'. For grammarians, personification means treating something (anything from a car or a company to a country) as if it were a single person. This is harmless in daily life, but potentially catastrophic in management. Why? Well, consider the phrase, 'Company X does Y, or believes Y'. While a small company might be so in control of its actions or thoughts to achieve this degree of consistency, the large companies who constitute the suppliers and clients in the world of CRM are rarely in this situation. Take the suppliers of CRM systems. They can be divided into suppliers of CRM software and services (including implementation and outsourcing), with many companies straddling the two.

While suppliers of single software packages might be capable of maintaining a relatively simple vision of what CRM is and how information technology supports it (indeed, this vision may be their prime differentiator), the implementers - particularly those who serve very large clients - are in a very different situation. The largest implementers are giant companies, usually global in scale. They are typically involved in helping giant clients, themselves often global in scale, change the way they manage their customers. Neither supplier nor client can in these situations ever be personified as described above. Our experience is that successful suppliers succeed because they work closely with their clients, whose view of where they want to go in CRM is often fragmented. For example, a big insurance company may in each country in which it operates have different visions of where it wants to go in CRM in its direct division, its life and pensions division, its broker division, and so on. Many such companies have tried to bring their different visions together, and failed. Some have turned to consultancies that have produced simple templates representing visions and implementation plans, and tried to use these templates to impose change upon the organization - and failed. This is because of big differences in the skills and capabilities possessed by the different divisions, and of course differences on the buy side - different competitive pressures, channels of distribution, and of course customer needs.

The lesson - the bigger the company, the less relevant and the more foolish the idea that a single vision is needed. In many cases a portfolio approach could be more relevant. The idea that a very large supplier should or even could have a single vision is similarly stupid - many large suppliers succeed by having the skills and flexibility to work with different business partners (eg software suppliers) to develop and deliver very different visions of CRM to their clients. This is, by the way, true in nearly all areas of systems. Of course, there are massive economies of scale to be gained by standardizing on systems, but as our research has shown again and again, brilliant systems are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for success in CRM. That is why the more discerning clients do not want a vision, but pragmatic advice and results, taking into account the variety and possible inconsistency that exists in their own situation

The moral of the story is simple every organization has its own vision formulated and diversified in terms of what they want to achieve in a different portfolio of their business , CRM should become the enabler of this vision accommodating the diversified needs of business group rather than to superimpose the CRM Product vision on the Client ‘s Vision. This exercise of resisting to CRM deception points is not simple as it may sound and requires intelligent introspection from top executives of the company to lay down their CRM plan before it gets baptized by third party arguments and still hold on to the true CRM vision of the company.



Loving P&C


DC*

CRM Signs of Trouble: Act or Be Acted Upon

CRM Signs of Trouble: Act or Be Acted Upon

Dears,
The Life has its own signs to show you well in advance what you will be going through in near future, some pick these instincts..Act Fast and rest fall prey to be acted upon. The CRM world is not to different and fix it small before becoming a bigger problem.

Some IT systems are designed and built without a lot of regard for the organizational structure of users. Of course you pay attention to users’ needs and preferences, but an accounting system is deployed pretty much the same no matter who's in charge of the accounting department. But CRM systems present a unique challenge because they need to be very tightly aligned with the user organizations. If you have a big reorg or bring on a whole bunch of new channel partners, you're likely going to go through major changes in the CRM system.

Problems come in 3

This is what makes CRM systems so much harder to get right, but also effective when they are done right. The CRM system is tightly bound to the way the organization works, and the twin goals of the system are to (1) improve leverage and collaboration, and (2) more closely understand and influence the customers' buying patterns.So when you've discovered a problem with the way your CRM system is working, you need to look for corresponding (or compensating) problems in the organization that's using it. The problem symptoms to look for in CRM systems is:

• A technical issue, such as data quality or fragile integration.


• A business process issue, such as pipeline formation and nurturing.


• A policy issue, such as "we ignore disqualified leads."

As an IT leader, you'll probably notice the technical problem first. But users won't see that one: they'll be paying attention to the measurable business issue in the second category. Unfortunately, they'll likely be blind to the third problem, which was probably somebody's brilliant idea from a couple of reorg ago.

Why do I bring this up? Because solving only one of the issues won't make the problem and its symptoms go away. You have to troubleshoot and resolve them as a set. If you don't, the system imbalance will continue. New variants of the original problems will soon grow to replace the "solved ones." Even if you think there's a pure IT problem, in the CRM world there will be corresponding elements outside your domain. Count on it.

These intertwined problems tend to cluster in the heart of the following business processes:

• Lead generation, processing, and nurturing

• Lead conversion and opportunity creation

• Trials and demos

• Pipeline development and forecasting

• Deal closing and order entry

• Order management and expediting

• Commissions and referral fees

• Fulfillment, distribution, and shipping

• Support entitlement and case creation

• RMA and reverse logistics

In some cases, the problem trio is almost entirely within the span of a single organization. These lucky situations don't involve a ton of politics. In contrast, the juiciest situations are those that span organizations. As these problems can be the embodiment of long-standing political feuds, unraveling them may involve more time in meetings than anything else

Where to start when trying to resolve these issues? There's nothing wrong starting out by doing the spade-work that is internal to IT. Your team can be productive for a while without involvement of the user organizations. However, it's not uncommon to find lots of IT cruft — software and database tables and integrations surrounding the CRM system — that really aren't necessary any more. These elements were often constructed to compensate for an ill-conceived policy or a misaligned business process. So leaving these extra system elements in place — or worse, "repairing" them, will only reinforce the other two parts of the problem triad.
Consequently, the real work won't begin until you have a closed-door conversation with the VPs of the organizations involved, helping them realize that the only path to the solution will mean changes to things they measure and policies that they may have championed. The VPs themselves won't be the solution, but they can certainly stand in the way of one.

If the VPs are digging in their heels, ask them questions like:

• Does this policy or business process actually help you reach your goals faster and more predictably? Or was this just a "quick fix?"


• Do your team members genuinely prefer it this way, or is it causing them pain?


• Do our competitors do it this way?

• Is it creating an advantage for our company?


• Do our customers prefer it this way? Is this making us easier to do business with?

Once the VPs have given their blessing to solving all parts of the problem, make sure they've assigned a knowledgeable underling to help redesign the business process and refine the policies that need to be changed. With the right will and direction, troubleshooting and resolving the non-IT parts of the CRM problem can be resolved in just a few meetings.

Loving P&C

DC*

Everyday Customer Champions

Dears,


“Service to Humanity is Service to God “, you may feel that I sound too philosophical today. The truth is different; the Soul of our service is very deep roots to this saying. Everyday Customer Champions are the people who inspire you to go back to an establishment again and again—whether B2B or B2C. Often they are the unsung customer heroes at the front lines or big renowned corporate houses who ensure that provides a great experience or that your problem is solved—even if it means going out of their way.

Providing customers with a flawless and memorable experience that gives them what they want – and brings them back – is the goal of any company. Those that get “customer experience” right say that the key is to focus on relationships with buyers at so-called “touch points” along the way, from long before until long after a sale takes place. At the end of the day customer want relationship more than anything else.

Wal-Mart Makes a Difference

Wal-Mart made a major shift in its marketing focus in 2009/10 — and the buzzword became "value." Television ads touted the company's Great Value line of foods, telling the story of how parents could feed their families for $2 per meal. Part of the "Save Money, Live Better" campaign also included a branded web site with videos, free classified ads and a message board where shoppers swap tips on stretching paychecks. In the bottom-left corner of that site is a constantly updated ticker — currently just over a quarter of a trillion dollars — that shows "the amount of money Wal-Mart has saved American families since January 1, 2009."

CRM Professionals Commitment
CRM is such a powerful thought that makes a great difference to everyone’s life. Take an extreme example of helping the citizen of War Torn country like Iraq helping the citizens to share their thoughts about the rebuilding their country and work in cognizant with US forces to make them help better. The entire CRM concept could be deployed in such scenario and what is required is some humane effort to take such step. We the IT Professionals see our job more as a way to exhibit our talent and intelligence beyond this there is great value add by making someone’s life better be it a employee of your customer or customer of your customer. The great organization are great for a reason that they have the everyday customer champions who knowingly or unknowingly putting a great effort in building great relationship with customer.

So, who is your Everyday Customer Champion? Is it a barista at Coffee Shop’s or a salesperson at your Super Market or perhaps your local dry cleaner or gas station attendant, or maybe it’s a B2B sales or service rep at a supplier’s firm? Take a moment to recognize him or her below. You’ll be glad you did.

Loving P&C


DC*

Open Source CRM

Dears,

Though I am an evangelist of popular CRM packages, I want to explore the options of Open Source CRM. Before we get into what open source CRM is, the only reason that CRM is interesting to me is that it’s the only science of business that attempts to reproduce an art of life. That would be the art that's involved in crafting good human relationships. CRM itself attempts to figure out an approach, a methodology and a program that will recreate how humans interact in good ways - but in what is a constrained business environment... It could be about whatever it is feeling like talking about - as long as the human psyche, human emotions, personal interactions and business consequences are somewhat involved. That gives me something of a wide range of imagination about CRM as Art and Science.

I have to remind you of one thing. It's CRM -- regardless of how it's constructed. The applications are classically CRM, with sales, customer service and sometimes marketing -- the so-called "customer-facing" applications. Open source CRM can be delivered exactly the same way any other CRM is delivered -- as on-premise or on-demand, or even as a hybrid. It takes developers to develop it and implementation teams to install, configure and customize it. It takes skilled professionals to administer it, and it is used the same way that any CRM application or service is used -- by users. When doing a deep technical dive, it has a similar architecture and needs source code to develop the applications related to it. And, to bust a recurring myth, the open source model doesn't guarantee free software.

But where it differs is in the way the source code is distributed and in the culture that surrounds it. Those differences affect how it's priced and how it's used -- but not always. This is by no means a blanket condition. @REG

What is the open source model?

When you hear that something is "open source," you are actually hearing about a culture and a license. The source code for an open source application is freely provided under any one of a number of licenses approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). For example, the license that SugarCRM uses is an unmodified version of the GPL version license, but it is just one of 70 possible licenses. What these licenses provide is a somewhat constrained allowance for use of the software code under certain conditions. The conditions vary from license to license.

As much as open source represents a license, it is also the manifestation of a culture. It stands for "openness," meaning that proprietary, non-standards-based source code is not aimed for. It represents a culture that doesn't treat source as a trade secret but often retains it as owned intellectual property. It means that others are permitted to alter the code for their own purposes, though, again, within reason. The culture is also collaborative. Many of the open source vendors in any area have dedicated individual developers who spend time developing applications and add-ins, improving load times and making myriad other changes or additions to the source code. These developers do not work for the software companies. All of this is done with encouragement from the vendor providing the code. Often, vendors throw in other resources such as software tools or marketplaces to make the developers' lives easier or to enable those developers to sell the fruits of their labor.

Why choose an open source CRM application?

When it comes to evaluating open source CRM, it should be considered for the same reasons you'd consider any CRM software. Open source CRM doesn't provide more or fewer features or functions than any other CRM application. It doesn't have a different delivery mechanism. It can be implemented on-premise or on-demand. The one area where you might find a bit of an advantage is in the pricing of open source CRM. It is slightly less expensive than other CRM packages, often because the developer community working on it is working pro bono, for the love of developing that particular source code. If the open source CRM Company is smart, it will pass on some of the cost savings to its customers.

What are the benefits and risks associated with the open source model?

The benefits of a good open source CRM application are the ones mentioned above -- pricing can be favorable for the customer, and there can be a wide array of applications, add-ins, or even fully customized versions of the open source provider's applications. This may not be available in more standard forms of CRM because the developer community is not as large or as open. Instead, many of the more traditional CRM companies have their own developers working on their tightly held proprietary source code. Innovation and creativity are stifled by this type of approach, so instead of a wide variety of additional capabilities or specific versions, they give you -- to their credit -- an improved version from a tightly controlled roadmap with specific features being developed.

There are risks, however -- the biggest being quality control over a community of unpaid developers, and the second being uncertain feature release dates and availability because the developers control their own destiny and are on their own time. The developers can't be held to any standard if they are involved in the core feature release. Some open source CRM companies have employed developers or paid contractors to work on features for core releases and have then had the developer community work on the ancillary capabilities. That's one way of avoiding the release date problems.

The other risk is that open source CRM is often built on open source platforms with open source tools. Typically, you'll need the right infrastructure (e.g., MySQL databases and Linux operating systems). If you are to use an open source CRM application, you can't ignore this. At a minimum, you'll need Linux to run the applications. This problem is, of course, mitigated by a hosted solution.

Also, because there are such robust external developer communities, there are always some concerns about the security of open source CRM. Because of the easy availability of the source code, writing malware to breach security is a bit easier to do, and there is no way to monitor the quality and/or qualifications of the individual developer without a strong quality-assurance program in place.

How much has the open source market grown in recent years?

There has been modest growth in open source CRM licenses over the past year, but nothing explosive. The open source market isn't really a market per se. It is part of the broader CRM market, and if you had to distinguish it in any way, you'd simply include it with the same distinctions raised between the on-demand market and the on-premise/traditional license market. There is no real reason to separate it out. Again, we're looking at a culture and a license, not a fundamentally new way of delivering or architecting CRM.

What is the up-front investment in open source CRM?

The classic consultant answer is: "It depends." For example, if you have a strong need for customization -- if you choose an open source CRM application with a robust developer community -- there is a chance that either what you need has already been developed or you can find a developer through the community to help you at less expense than through traditional means. Implementation costs are dependent on whether or not you're using a hosted or an on-premise version -- not unlike their proprietary cousins. It will always depend on what you need.

Open source CRM means that the code is licensed in a way that makes it more freely available, and the culture of the companies involved is more open. There are free versions, but even they will cost something to maintain and install. Providing support for those free versions is often how the companies that produce them make their money.

In conclusion, open source CRM is certainly a small but stand-out niche in the world of CRM, but it shouldn't be treated differently from a proprietary CRM package. Check out the features, functions, code, pricing, corollary applications, total cost of ownership and the professional services offered when you are making your decision. If open source CRM meets your requirements, Check it..

Loving P&C
DC*

Is your CRM SOO Compliance?

Is your CRM SOO Compliance?


Dears,

Some Interesting Fact before Exploring the SOO. Here are some of the blue chip names (and market caps) you can get at a lower valuation than Facebook, Estimated at 50 Billion. That’s power of people network in commercial terms the power to capitalize on Customer Intimacy.



• EMC – $47.2B

• Bristol-Myers Squibb – $45.1B

• France Telecom – $42.5B

• Target – $42.5B

• BMW – $42.4B

• Grainger – $42.3B

• Nike – $41.6B

• Morgan Stanley – $41.4B

• Dow Chemical – $39.9B

• UnitedHealth Group – $39.4B

• News Corp – $39.2B

• Colgate-Palmolive – $39.1B

• Eli Lillly – $38.9B

• Nokia – $38.0B

• AIG – $37.3B

• Halliburton -$36.7B

• VMWare – $36.6B

• BlackRock – $36.3B

• Walgreen – $36.1B

Customer value is a major factor in the overall valuation of a company across a variety of business value measurement methods, such as balanced scorecard. Customer value can be improved by leveraging meaningful insights about your revenue-generating clients. The premise here is that the better you know your client the better you can service their needs which will improve customer retention as well as improve the probability that your clients will spend more with your company. This is an embodiment of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) concepts.

IT organizations, particularly those with continually improving service management practices have a very rich set of information regarding clients and, quite often, are directly involved in relationships with those customers across multiple contact points. These contact points include call centers, electronic mail services, as well as a variety of web sites and social networking mediums. Service Oriented Organizations that leverage customer information and customer contact points can markedly improve customer intimacy and thus add IT value to the business.

Customer Intimacy and a Service Oriented Organization

Customer intimacy is a valuable strategy that can enable a company to create competitive advantage, growth, and profitability. Customer intimacy is not just a sales or marketing department’s responsibility. It should be, ideally, pervasive across a company and is a particularly valuable strategy for IT organizations. Intimacy implies a two-way relationship between your company and your clients. That said, the onus is on the supplier of services, your company, to foster the relationship. This is where deep insight about your customers is so valuable.

Good Service Oriented Organizations have already defined their IT offerings in terms of services leveraging ITIL/ITSM or equivalent practices. These organizations can tell you what is in their service catalogs and provide good benchmarks of their service levels and costs compared to other, usually external, IT service providers. For example, a good Service Oriented Organization should be able to give you performance characteristics and costs of the electronic mail systems provided by the company. But this, by itself, does little to improve customer value and does not insure persistent value of IT to business.

Better IT organizations, higher up on a hypothetical SOO maturity model if you will, are those that have not only embraced fundamental service orientation, they have invested some of the savings realized from being a good service provider to bring CRM concepts into their daily operations and service management practices. Better Service Oriented Organization s, using the email example, can also tell you how many electronic mail messages come and go from all your top clients, how many messages get responses in a timely fashion, who those clients interact with most, and the subject matter of most of the messages. Making timely decisions and taking actions on this information is key.

Electronic mail may not be the most important client touch point service, but it is likely among the top five methods your company uses to collaborate with clients. Similar parallels can be made with most other touch-point services that include product web pages, call centers, and more recently social networking platforms that customers interact with daily. The point here is that IT is very often the closest to the source of very important information that can provide deep insights into customer usage and even desired usage of your company’s products, services, and information. Putting this insight information to use is the next step. An IT strategy that lays out a measurable and executable roadmap that leverages this information is essential in achieving a desirable future state.

IT Strategy and Customer Point of View

IT strategy, like a company’s over-arching business strategy, must support the objective of creating long term value for the business. The business value of an IT organization will be in the eyes of the business unit leaders. Frankly, few C-level executives are going to be interested in the details of ITIL, ITSM, or even Service Oriented Architectures. CEO’s care about what it takes to win and retain customers, and ideally what it takes to increase the profitable earnings with those customers. Executives will be more interested in your strategy and investments when put in the context of how they will affect your revenue generating customers.

At a most basic level an effective IT strategy needs to lay out two things. First is to define a future state or vision of where the organization, its investments, and its systems will be in the future. The second is to lay out a roadmap of measurable, tactical steps that an organization can follow to reach the aforementioned future state. The key suggestion here is that a strategy of high business value will use service management information to paint a picture of the future and steps needed to get there, in terms of how the IT investments and activities will benefit revenue generating customers.

A future state IT vision is often a relatively brief statement. It may have a long range strategy or shorter range tactical focus, or both. An example might be:

Our company’s vision is to embrace our clients as trusted partners providing them a high quality of online services while we continually improve business effectiveness through consistent and timely collaboration of ideas and knowledge with our clients and our eco-system partners.

Short and sweet, right? Vision statements are intentionally short for easy consumption by executives, employees, and customers. Whether this example is inspirational for a future state is a matter of judgment, though it is safe to say that there is little in this statement that gives an audience any level of what this means from a tangible or measurable perspective. This is where something more descriptive is needed.

A useful tool to consider as part of your IT strategy is to describe what the future will look like, and the milestone steps to get there, from a customer’s Point of View (PoV). More specifically, a PoV would describe the characteristics of the steps and the end state in such a way that it is meaningful and can be broken down into tactical actions. A PoV must complement a vision statement and succinctly paint a more descriptive picture of that future state. Using the previous vision example, along with some of the electronic mail concepts, a sample PoV characterization might be:

• In three years our company will provide all of our top customers with a rich, collaborative experience that is easy to use and consistent in content.


• Collaboration with our top customers will be available across channels of communication that include Electronic Mail, Phone calls, Chat, and customer specific communication methods.


• Our top customers can expect proactive monitoring of service levels, secure 24x7 online access to your information, and responsive acknowledgment to inquiries and requests.

This describes intended outcomes of the vision statement in terms of characteristics that customers can expect to experience. The intention is not to create a detailed service level agreement, though certainly salient points of service level objectives can be surfaced in a PoV. Importantly, this approach helps set expectations of top management on how a vision will be realized. In addition, this tool is also a useful way to improve your IT team’s line of sight between the services for which they are accountable and your company’s clients.

Once a future state has been characterized, the steps to reach this future state can be built relatively easily and in such a way that progress can be tracked. These steps should be based on metrics gleaned from the IT team’s core service management measurement results. The linkage can be very explicit and provides a concrete connection of the IT organization to your company’s customer value chain. This is measurable business value.

2 Cents....
Creating an IT strategy, a vision, and a customer Point of View should not be done in a vacuum. These should be created in partnership with your company’s sales and marketing organizations. Ideally, this process will also include your clients. Their voice is a valuable component of the desired state. An IT Strategy that has customer focus might offer answers to questions such as:

• What will your revenue generating clients experience with the investments you plan?

• How do you see these client experiences improving the relationship between your companies?

• Will these investments improve the revenue and/or the profitability that your company realizes from these clients?



The Information Technology team should not independently answer questions like these. These require teamwork. IT organizations that proactively reach out to their marketing and sales counterparts to leverage this information into actionable plans are well on their way to being true value added business partners.

The services that IT organizations provide are often closest to where the rubber hits the road when looking at a company’s client touch points. Too many IT organizations relegate themselves to be only conduits and custodians for customer information and do not take advantage of that information that can be used to improve customer intimacy and business value. If this is true of your company you are missing a very important opportunity to be a contributing member of the customer value chain.

This article advocates that IT organizations continue to evolve and build upon their core service management capabilities by incorporating CRM practices. One suggested linkage for an IT organization to create long term business value is to have and execute an IT strategy that focuses on revenue generating clients.

An effective IT Strategy should not focus only on technology. The strategy should provide tangible descriptions of a future state, and the steps leading to that future state, by leveraging revenue generating customer information gleaned from the appropriate IT services. Developing the strategy and a customer Point of View in concert with your company’s sales and marketing teams is vital to success. This requires an ongoing focus on inter-organizational teamwork, collaboration, and perhaps needed transformation, to be both service oriented and revenue customer focused.

Loving P&C
DC*

Oracle Fusion Applications – To Fuse or Not to Fuse

Oracle Fusion Apps – To Fuse or Not to Fuse

Dears,

This article is an interesting extract from the various article published /information shared on Oracle Fusion Applications. Hope you will find this useful. Most high-tech vendor roadmaps, if customers can get their hands on one, are usually paved with good intentions. These roadmaps offered by enterprise software vendors—which provide guidance on future versions of products, services or software-delivery options—are critical for their customers. The maps enable CIOs and senior execs to chart their application portfolio strategies: which upgrades they'll commit to, which legacy apps they'll "sunset," which vendors they'll do more business with. But just like anyone else, software vendors reserve the right to change their minds: a sudden acquisition or decline in sales can significantly alter a vendor's roadmap. And that can wreak havoc with any CIO's short- and long-term apps strategy.

The enterprise application roadmap for Oracle customers has, for the past five years, always pointed toward one destination: the Oracle Fusion Applications Suite.

Fusion Apps, as its better known, is Oracle's next-generation suite of open-standards-based software, available on-premise or in some "cloud" form. The suite covers seven core business areas: financials; governance, risk and compliance (GRC); human capital management (HCM); procurement; project portfolio management (PPM); CRM; and supply chain management (SCM). There are approximately 100 modules within the seven product groups. As Fusion Apps become generally available in early 2011.There's been little pressure on customers to rush into buying Fusion Apps. CEO Larry Ellison had this to say during the OOW 2010, when he rhetorically asked if all Oracle customers should immediately invest in Fusion Apps: "No, absolutely not.... You can move to Fusion at the time of your choosing. Over the next five years, at some point, we think you'll move to Fusion."

The reviews so far about Fusion Apps have been favorable. The fact is that the expected benefits of the new-age software will eventually be worth it for most of Oracle's existing enterprise app customers (running E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards and Siebel).

But how each customer actually gets to the Fusion Apps destination is another question altogether

What's Special about Fusion Apps?

The Fusion Apps project kicked off circa 2005. During each subsequent year, it seemed like the next-generation suite of business applications was roughly halfway to GA. Steve Miranda, Oracle's SVP of application development, joked at OpenWorld 2010: "This was the longest NDA ever." In describing Fusion Apps' lengthy development, Oracle states (in a user experience document):

"We watched sales representatives, accountants, product managers, CFOs and shop floor engineers firsthand. Before a line of code was written, Oracle enrolled more than 800 customers in its User Experience Customer Participation Program. Oracle shared design concepts, asked questions and continually listened to customers to make sure we got the right feature set, the right business flows and the right user experience."In July 2009, Floyd Teter, a VP of the Oracle Applications Users Group and enterprise apps guru, blogged about his week-long "validation testing" experience with Fusion Apps. He wrote:

"I should also point out that the overall quality of the apps is much higher than I would expect it to be at this point in the development lifecycle. Yes, I did hit some bugs...but not nearly as many as I expected to see, and nothing that prevented execution of business processes. The whole idea of using an iterative development approach to improve product quality seems to have paid off handsomely on the quality front."Coming out of Oracle Open World 2010, Constellation Research CEO Ray Wang noted that Fusion Apps "highlight a new level of design. The apps infuse Web 2.0 paradigms with enterprise-class sensibilities, and role-based screens present relevant tasks, alerts and analytics."

Key to the Fusion Applications Suite is Fusion Middleware and its integration capabilities. Oracle has promised that, owing to the modularity of Fusion Apps design and magic of Fusion Middleware, customers can unite their portfolio of legacy applications with Fusion Applications—that the old (E-Business and PeopleSoft apps) will play nice with the new (Fusion Apps) modules. (At this time, though, it's not fully clear what sort of additional investments in middleware customers will have to make.)

Oracle executives have, as of late, been pushing Fusion Apps' cloud capability—dual-delivery of FUSION Apps on-premise or in the cloud. "Fusion runs both places. You decide where you want to put this," Ellison stated on Oracle's Q2 2011 earnings call in December. "You can't do that with Salesforce.com. You can't do that with Workday, a lot of these guys. So we've got this brand new, extremely modern Java-based suite of applications called Fusion that runs in the cloud, runs on-premise, and is going to dramatically strengthen our position against our cloud-based competitors like Salesforce and Workday, and our traditional competitor SAP."

But Will Oracle Customers Care?It's obvious Oracle took its time with Fusion Apps. It had, in fact, plenty of time. Oracle's customer base—mired in a global economic recession for two years and facing flat or declining budgets—was barely ready for the challenges of the next fiscal quarter, never mind laying out millions on next-gen, expensive and untested technology from Oracle.

In a recent blog post, Why Don't People Understand Fusion?, the U.K. Oracle User Group's Debra Lilley writes: "Most people have spent the last year or so trying to avoid big IT projects, so why look at what you are not going to do?"

Enterprise-class ERP packages from the likes Oracle, SAP and other vendors also still suffer from administration inefficiencies, exorbitant legacy costs, and over-customization and shelfware problems. Of the 350 respondents to MorganFranklin's survey at Oracle's Collaborate 2010 show, 53 percent were not aware of all of the functionalities that their ERP applications had to offer.

Therefore the crucial question, now that we've moved into 2011 and FA will be GA, is just how will Oracle customers approach Fusion Apps?

So far, the response has been a mixture of curious technological interest and corporate indifference. A recent survey of Oracle's apps customer base by Computer Economics found that Fusion Apps "are not on the radar for most customers, with only 10 percent planning to migrate to Fusion."

To Constellation Research's Wang, FA adoption will depend on each customer's existing landscape. Oracle's customer base typically falls into three categories, he says: Die-Hard Red Stack Believers, Best-of-Breed Customers by Accident, and Net-New Greenfield. Here's how each category will likely approach FA, according to Wang:

"Expect Net-New Greenfields to consider the full Fusion App suites as they compare existing Apps Unlimited products and SAP. Best-of-Breed Customers by Accident will most likely be drawn to the 100 modules to be delivered on demand and on premises. Die-Hard Red Stackers most likely have upgraded to the latest Fusion Middleware and will consider product replacements and module adoption. Fusion Apps remains fairly horizontal and those customers with rich and stable vertical capabilities will most likely hold off for future releases." As 2010 wound down, Oracle execs made sure to talk up the Fusion Applications roadmap and the customer flexibility FA offered via its modular design.

"This mix and match [approach to Fusion Apps with different modules] and the clarity of the roadmap we've given our existing customers and the fact that Fusion is here now so you can see it and touch it hugely de-risks the question for customers," stated Oracle EVP of Product Development Thomas Kurian, at a meeting with financial analysts in September 2010. "The choice of when they go and how they go to Fusion, and if they go to Fusion, is theirs and theirs alone, OK? No other applications vendor has this breadth of capability or the choice."

Do Oracle Customers Care?

It's obvious Oracle took its time with Fusion Apps. It had, in fact, plenty of time. Oracle's customer base—mired in a global economic recession for two years and facing flat or declining budgets—was barely ready for the challenges of the next fiscal quarter, never mind laying out millions on next-gen, expensive and untested technology from Oracle. In a recent blog post, Why Don't People Understand Fusion?, the U.K. Oracle User Group's Debra Lilley writes: "Most people have spent the last year or so trying to avoid big IT projects, so why look at what you are not going to do?" Enterprise-class ERP packages from the likes Oracle, SAP and other vendors also still suffer from administration inefficiencies, exorbitant legacy costs, and over-customization and shelfware problems. Of the 350 respondents to MorganFranklin's survey at Oracle's Collaborate 2010 show, 53 percent were not aware of all of the functionalities that their ERP applications had to offer.

Therefore the crucial question, now that we've moved into 2011 and FA will be GA, is just how will Oracle customers approach Fusion Apps?

So far, the response has been a mixture of curious technological interest and corporate indifference. A recent survey of Oracle's apps customer base by Computer Economics found that Fusion Apps "are not on the radar for most customers, with only 10 percent planning to migrate to Fusion." To Constellation Research's Wang, FA adoption will depend on each customer's existing landscape. Oracle's customer base typically falls into three categories, he says: Die-Hard Red Stack Believers, Best-of-Breed Customers by Accident, and Net-New Greenfield. Here's how each category will likely approach FA

• Expect Net-New Greenfields to consider the full Fusion App suites as they compare existing Apps Unlimited products and SAP

• Best-of-Breed Customers by Accident will most likely be drawn to the 100 modules to be delivered on demand and on premises.

• Die-Hard Red Stackers most likely have upgraded to the latest Fusion Middleware and will consider product replacements and module adoption. Fusion Apps remains fairly horizontal and those customers with rich and stable vertical capabilities will most likely hold off for future releases.

This mix and match [approach to Fusion Apps with different modules] and the clarity of the roadmap is going to be game changer for Oracle Fusion Apps.

The Coexistence Strategy


The term "coexistence" is not just a plea for peace among warring nations. It's an oft-used slogan employed by Oracle executives to placate Fusion Apps-wary customers who envision a big-bang, rip-and-replace scenario. Oracle's application customers have been following their own routes via the Applications Unlimited program, which has promised customers continued enhancements on the vendor's current business applications. Oracle's application strategy does not require [customers] to rip and replace their existing implementation of Applications Unlimited in order to pick up Fusion Applications.With Fusion Apps GA now looming, decisions on whether to upgrade their core business apps will get tricky for customers.

The question I get most is “do I wait for Fusion, or go to EBS [E-Business Suite] 12 or Siebel 8.1v? Most customers will stay on their current path and upgrade to latest release. Other customers, however, will embark on the coexistence strategy, adding a new Fusion Apps module when the time is right, rather than upgrading the legacy app.

Kurian offered this example (during the webcast)- "I'm going to keep financials, HR, procurement on E-Business Suite, and I'm going to pick up Fusion for supply chain management or CRM." At OpenWorld, Oracle termed it: "Upgrade, adopt and extend." The overriding strategy, of course, is to avoid unnecessary expenditures. "Customers don't want to spend twice the money on the upgrades.

The customer can adopt some of the net new modules alongside existing products, or go deeper into the migration of core modules from the existing apps. At this stage, few customers are willing to take the Fusion plunge, but are intrigued enough to dabble in non-mission critical areas.

As Fusion Applications get released to the masses in 2011 Q1, Oracle would come up with a comprehensive roadmap that they have to offer to their customers. Now it's up to those customers to chart their own paths forward. Fuse it your Way :)

Loving P&C

DC*

Walking Over “Cloud” Bridge – SaaS/Cloud Integration Options

Dears,
This is sequel to my previous article. Cloud-based or SaaS applications need to live in an ecosystem, integrated with the rest of your infrastructure and enterprise applications. Sure -- but what integration strategy actually works best? There's a lot of noise from vendors of every stripe about the cloud. Unfortunately, in the vendors' efforts to show how all their products are cloud-based, there's a lot of blurring about the specifics of what it means to be a cloud application.

With that disclaimer behind us, one of the distinguishing characteristics of cloud software is the variety of ways it can be integrated. As most cloud applications present themselves as a series of Web services, they lend themselves to a service-oriented architecture, even if they don't follow all the SOA protocols. With the right toolkits and development attitude, you can integrate cloud applications with a variety of techniques...and use as many of them concurrently as you like, even in the same application. Of course, you have to understand the limitations of each approach—but there's nothing wrong with getting things done quickly. Let's look at this as layers of an onion.

Layer 1: On-Screen Integration

Otherwise known as mashups, this style of integration is the ultimate in quick and dirty. The coding exercise is the construction of iFrames for the screen layout and URLs with lots of parameters for grabbing the goodies from the other cloud. This is the baseline method for pulling images, maps, news items, and data feeds from publicly available services like Google or Yahoo This method will become increasingly powerful (particularly for demos) as graphing packages and other document services become commonplace as cloud services. AJAX can give the pages a modern, intuitive, and responsive UI. Unfortunately, mashups don't inherently offer much in the way of security, so you'll have to look at tricky coding practices and server-side validation for sensitive data and you'll probably want single sign-on or other authorization infrastructure to control access without irritating users. So the tradeoff at this layer is: simple code and read-only, or secured with complex code.

Layer 2: Presentation Layer Integration

Depending on the way your cloud application generates Web pages, you may have a programming layer on the server side which provides fertile ground for cloud integration. (In contrast, the mashup strategy works almost entirely in the browser.) While the mashup strategy is great for stitching together entire segments of a page (e.g., adding a map or graphic to a layout), integrating at the presentation layer shines in its ability to add individual fields within a section of a page. For example, it would be nice to add an indication of "how many days overdue is a customer payment" to the summary area of the CRM account page, but this field might only be available in your accounting system. Pulling this in at the presentation layer gives the users what they need to see, and is faster than doing a full-blown integration.

Of course, the strength of this approach is also its weakness: that payment overdue indicator would not be stored anywhere in the CRM system, so it wouldn't be available to support reports, alerts, or other functions. This approach is usually used for read-only data, as the presentation layer may not have the kind of security infrastructure available in the rest of the system. It all depends on the language you're using and the Web service security libraries available — but it usually doesn't make sense to attempt complex security mechanisms when integrating at the presentation layer.

Layer 3: Business Logic Integration

This is where the heavy lifting of integration gets done, because this is where the application context is kept and where the best security and Web services infrastructure is available. What really sets cloud applications apart is the richness and ease of their APIs: do they support call out and call in, WSDL/SOAP, RESTful APIs, or only simpler conversations with XML, JSON, or similar vocabularies? For productivity, there's no substitute for accurate documentation and code samples...so evaluate cloud vendors on this basis.

Most cloud applications' integration architecture is quite loosely coupled and based on a request/response model. Frequent polling is rarely a good idea, and tight integration loops (like two-phase commit) are tough. In situations where a cloud must push a message, your developers will have to create logic within that application to trigger sending the message. Your developers will also need to develop a strategy (perhaps using a dedicated integration server) to handle network timeouts, application downtime, and guaranteed message delivery. At this layer, integration code will have access to all system objects and functions, so security will be essential.

Layer 4: Data Integration

This is dealing directly with the cloud application's database. In many cloud systems, there is no real way to directly access this level because it's really not safe for writing. Even for read integration direct database access can be problematic, as the table has no indication of application state or transaction coordination. That said, for bulk reading of data (for example, to replicate it for an on-prem data warehouse or a cloud-based analytics tool), nothing beats the speed of direct database access.

At this layer, security is an issue because the application's security model transcends what's visible in the tables' access controls. In most cases, data integration will be done with super-user privileges so the resulting data flow should not be directly accessible to standard users.

Loving It, Your P&C
DC*

What keeps Legacy Apps out of Cloud ?

What keeps Legacy Apps out of Cloud


The hype about cloud computing without getting some firm answers for running Enterprise Applications that are built to run Companies and conglomerate gives a feel that there is long way to this cloud journey. Let’s be realistic and try to see Cloud computing as an option rather than Master of all Universal Applications. One thing that may drive it into that trough — other than the unrealistic projections by some providers of cost-savings and easy capacity planning — is the difficulty in getting certain legacy applications to run on it effectively.

What are the difficulties? Here's a look at five key hurdles.


1. Today's clouds are not alike No one "cloud platform" exists - each is different, meaning the specific migration, support, cost and capacity issues vary from vendor to vendor. And moving a legacy application to the cloud means taking a proven quantity in a known environment and moving it to a new environment that will make almost everything about it different .Legacy applications come with a lot of integration with your other systems, and usually they had to be done fast, so you have a lot of direct database calls from one application to another and that kind of thing that may not work when one endpoint is outside the perimeter. There's the tiny straw issue, too; there is an order of magnitude more bandwidth available inside the data center than outside it. And you have to decide whether it's important that you manage everything from one pane of glass, because the management tools are not up to doing that with cloud and legacy applications yet. There are a lot of basic technical issues that are often not addressed.

2. Security worries Security gets top billing as a risk of cloud computing because the idea is new and the locks aren't as fully tested as those on legacy applications. At least as big an issue for many companies is knowing who is using the applications or accessing the data, whether they have permission to do so or not. For enterprises that have security or compliance concerns, multitenant cloud infrastructures are just non-starters right now, because the tools to monitor or control that has not been addressed yet.Single-tenant clouds - that is, cloud platforms a company owns and manages itself - only solve part of that issue. Being able to physically limit access to the cloud by controlling the rest of the IT infrastructure makes the contained cloud safer, but still doesn't provide the detailed audit trail many companies need to comply with financial or privacy regulations.

3. Licensing and interoperability concerns Legacy applications are supposed to be the creaky inflexible problem when it comes to migration, but neither major software vendors nor cloud providers are making the migration any easier. While most legacy applications have been upgraded from the homegrown, no-public-standards era of corporate computing, most are built with databases, communications or data-translation modules and other commercially-licensed technology. That means vendors like Oracle, Microsoft, SAP and others would have to change their licensing to support three weeks running on three servers, then one week per month expanding to ten and only paying for the capacity you use.. Most licenses are still tied to one physical box, although Oracle has made some movements in this direction. Legacy apps typically also don't typically support the newest technology except in the user interfaces that aren't part of their cores - exactly the technologies on which cloud platforms are built. Microsoft Azure is based on its .Net programming architecture, which most legacy apps are not. Google's App Engine is designed to support software written in Python - a Web-friendly language popular with developers of PHP-based software running on Web servers. Salesforce.com has a proprietary application and data structure.

4. You don't know your own legacy Your company may live and die by its line-of-business applications, but that doesn’t mean you know everything going on behind the endlessly-customized codes, interfaces and forms that started out as business automation and turned into a rigid legacy application, There are some vendor tools are designed to extract data, metadata, business logic and security information from legacy applications using a mix of custom-written and canned analysis and conversion utilities, so the resulting code can be run on cloud computing platforms - usually internal clouds rather than public ones. With all the data, data structures and policy guidelines extracted, these tools can analyze security, data-access and compliance rules from both commercial and homegrown apps - often finding huge holes in the process. Siebel isn't designed to share [access control list] data with SAP and vice versa, so no one knows users have all this access; when we take all that out, you can see the access points and potential breaks in security.

5. Migration is manual and darn few tools will help Even at their best, master data management (MDM) providers such as Oracle, Siperian and Initiate Systems - convert only a portion of the application and data, leaving the end-user or service provider to deal with the rest, When will the situation improve? VMware is working on the problem, but not for legacy applications. Smaller companies such as the Israeli firm Gizmox will put an AJAX GUI on a legacy app and run that in the cloud, but don't take care of its guts.SAP and IBM - both of which have extensive custom-development and migration divisions - are also working on legacy-to-cloud migration tools, as is Oracle which is adopting technology developed by Sun.

By taking into consideration all the arguments put forward , The hour glass is still on for Legacy application to get into cloud. Cloud OOOOOOOOOOO  9 !

Loving P&C
DC*

Get Smarter with SaaS CRM on Demand Quality Data

Dears,

What’s the biggest obstacle to getting the most value from your CRM? Answer me quick within a second. Quick…. Chances are you said it’s your data. Customer management professionals tell us that poor data management is one of the biggest barriers to getting value from their CRM systems

As a CRM professional, this probably isn’t news to you. You know that a unified, current view of your customers and prospects would help you identify your best customers, retain them, find new cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and acquire new customers just like them. You could identify and avoid potential compliance and credit risk. And, your sales force would be focused on closing deals, not on entering information or using outdated, inaccurate information to try to develop relationships. But elusive is the right word, because data management, in a word, is hard. Why?

• Business is real time, but the data fueling your CRM isn’t.

• You struggle with data quality, accuracy and completeness, resulting in duplicate accounts, out of date information.

• There are more information sources than ever before: not just your own information and traditional external business information sources, but also blogs and social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

• Your sales people need demographic details, and, even more important, comprehensive contact details, especially email, to reach the right decision-makers.

That’s the bad news. The good news is cloud computing and on-demand data approaches are making real-time data updating and integration easier than ever. Through applications you already use, like Salesforce.com Or Oracle CRM on Demand (CoD), you can now bring together your information, standardize and synchronize it with a trusted external information source, incorporate relevant in-context content from social media and news feeds – and keep it all up to date, automatically.

3 STEPS TO QUALITY DATA

Quality data starts by cleaning and standardizing your customer and prospect information – and even more important, adding context to it and stopping new errors before they’re entered, saving you time and money. With Cloud/SaaS CRM, you can:

1. Cleanse and standardize your customer and prospect information to ensure that it is up-to-date, accurate, and actionable.

For Example : To detect and correct data errors before they occur, identify a current, trusted source of business information to act as your reference source. Now through Salesforce.com, for example, you can connect immediately to D&B’s world-leading database of more than 170 million global businesses and 53 million contacts, along with relevant real-world context from social media and news feeds, without ever leaving your CRM.

2. Add context to your information with demographic details, contacts and no obvious relationships such as corporate family tree membership to add insight and show previously hidden up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
Business information that can enrich your existing customer knowledge includes SIC codes, sales volumes, number of employees, net worth, executive names, and predictive scores, among hundreds of other variables that can provide deeper insight into your existing customers, enabling you to better service them and offer tailored products and solutions.
3. Automatically update your data right through Salesforce.com/CoD so it remains complete and current.

Until recently, keeping your data up to date meant updating it once a quarter, maybe even less. You’d go through the data cleanse and update cycle all over – every time. In the meantime, you made decisions on less-than-optimal information. Here’s where newer developments like cloud computing really are making a difference. By embedding quality data on demand directly within applications like Salesforce.com, you can keep your data current, complete and up to data – automatically. By connecting your CRM to a quality source (like D&B) through on demand access, you can:

• Automate and eliminate the manual work of sending files back and forth to a data provider.

• Check for existing accounts as new accounts and opportunities to enter

• Stop data entry errors before they start by comparing your accounts to a trusted data

• Popular and customize demographic details to enrich and add value

• Incorporate external social media and social media through seamless links And, since your data access stays “always on,” your data does, too – keeping it complete, current and relevant.
To figure out how to make customer data work for you, see D&B’s on-demand insight solution

Following these three steps transforms your customer information into complete, integrated, actionable insight you can use to better understand the behavior of your best customers and act on new opportunities. It’s time to expect more from your investments in CRM. Stop spending time managing your data – and more time putting it to work for you

Loving P&C
DC*

CRM Nation, All about Public Sector CRM

CRM Nation, All about Public Sector CRM

Dears,

EGovernment and Public Sector CRM adoption, utilization and payback has risen to mainstream acknowledgement and begun to rival many private sector CRM accomplishments. However, unlike the private sector, Government CRM (Citizen Relationship Management or Constituent Relationship Management) comes with requirements, problems and objectives unique to the public sector. Many articles on eGovernment briefly address CRM when referring to aspects such as one-stop government or a multi-channel environment directly or indirectly.

Governments are actively seeking to promote citizen-centric government as well as more effective relationships with business. Increasingly, they are looking to the principles of Customer Relationship Management (CRM), as developed and applied by private enterprise, to achieve their goals. .Interest in CRM in government is relatively new, but it is growing. Governments are taking decided steps to improve their CRM capabilities—investing significantly in initiatives to improve service. However, oftentimes governments struggle to realize the benefits expected from developing modern CRM capabilities. Many still have not been able to bridge the gap between the envisioned impact of CRM and their current experience.

CRM for the government: A square peg?

Several CRM vendors have created software specifically for the government. Despite those efforts, CRM doesn't always mesh perfectly with the public sector. For example, economic development projects are shaped by politics, which are difficult to translate into a CRM process. How do you fit political forces and political discussions into the standard sales cycle? And Technical integration can be tough too,

CRM systems work best when integrated with the back-office systems and many of the government systems are quite old, the technical integration can become very difficult. Moreover, many government agencies are working with extra impediments. Security requirements may be tighter for government. Agencies may require additional encryption or ban the use of hosted or on-demand CRM services. On the other hand, government agencies are beginning to embrace business concepts such as marketing and customer service. So there is some good and bad news together.

A new report from a renowned global consulting firm indicates a global shift in e-government strategies, as countries move from viewing online services merely as cost-reduction tools and regards them more as a way to improve relationships with citizens. The Survey conducted by agency shows 93% of the e-government officials polled ranked improving citizen satisfaction a top priority. Eighty-three percent of respondents cited customer demands for new and better services as a driver, and 77% are attempting to meet government performance targets. Whereas in the past, cost reduction was a primary driver of many e-government projects, this year slightly more than half listed savings as a major motivation.

There are five major themes that define the current state of CRM in the public sector:

1. Government agencies are becoming more comfortable thinking of the people and organizations they serve as their customers and are placing a very strong emphasis on customer service delivery as a major priority for their organization.

2. Agencies have embraced the fundamental principles of CRM, but are struggling to get the building blocks—customer insights, customer offerings, customer interactions, organization performance and networks—solidly in place.

3. The majority of agencies is focusing largely on the technological aspects of CRM and is struggling to reap the expected benefits.

4. While agencies have visions for the service models they would like to adopt, they lack the management and operational skills and experience to be able to do so alone.

5. Many agencies now recognize the value of marketing to drive take-up of channels and services; however, the majority of current marketing efforts are neither targeted nor value driven and, as a result, have little impact.

Creating a CRM Nation

We are fortunate to work in some Public Sector CRM initiatives; one such is for government commerce agency in the MiddleEast. The project requirements are very similar to any of the Private Sector enterprise project except to bring about a governance strategy into CRM and bring about an order within the government enterprise to appreciate and use the CRM.

For any Public Sector CRM project there are 2 key value enablers. The first is the Case Management and second the eGovernment services. The operation of Government departments within a state differs but the common thread is the Service to Corporate and Individual citizen. The Critical success factor for any Public Sector CRM project is to create the gateway for the citizens to get into the government sphere through eservice without many challenges. The second critical success factor is to create a discipline for the government agency to respond to citizen queries and complaint in predefined SLA timings which are automated through CRM workflow and assignment rules for different type of cases created.

Once you have achieved these 2 milestones you have made a difference to that Government department and other initiatives will soon follow the success path without much challenges. There are varieties of CRM services you can implement for government agencies,take for example a State Government Municipality the services could run from 100 to few thousands with inclusion of types of accreditations, certifications, Penalty impositions etc. or take Judicial Department which enforces the civil and criminal penalties against the accused and collaborate with Police and Immigration department to make sure the penalties are imposed all these are tracked in the Case Management module of CRM.

As I mentioned beyond Services Government agencies are also focusing on the Social Marketing initiatives such as Campaigns for variety of Government services – Vaccination, Tax Payments etc. In the near future there could also be Loyalty Points which you may use to deduct for taxes or penalties.

There are lot of room for CRM in Government Agencies and A nation has the potential to become a true CRM Nation and What binds government and citizen is just “ Relationship “

Loving P&C

DC*

CRM, the True Companion for Wealth Management Advisors

Dears,

A monumental shift is currently underway in wealth management, as transactional “brokers” make the transition to being true “advisors” and the service model transforms from a static traditional approach to a dynamic one driven by client needs. To make this change about more than just terminology, however, wealth management firms need to embrace client-centric strategies at a profound level, re-engineering their processes, embedding consistent best practices within their systems, and empowering advisors to build deeper, more enduring client relationships.

Day in the Lay of a WM Advisor – Too Complex and Challenging

Advisors are at the front lines of client-relationship building, and their ability to cultivate these relationships and make them more profitable is increasingly dictated by the information and tools at their disposal. The faster they can access and understand the data they need, the better—and more efficiently—they can serve clients. This translates not only into higher client satisfaction and more client confidence; it also directly affects an advisor’s productivity and ability to manage their book of business. An efficient advisor can manage more assets and more clients, and as the number of new clients and size of their wealth is growing faster than the pool of available skilled financial advisors, the resulting resource crunch is going to increasingly affect wealth management firms’ ability to take advantage of growth opportunities.

The situation is already shockingly dire: one-third of advisors feel that they do not get enough time to service clients, and advisors on average report that contact with existing clients is limited to 30% of their overall time. As their workloads increase, one can only imagine what the impact could be on the level of service advisors are able to deliver to clients. Equipping financial advisors to be as effective and productive as possible is therefore of paramount importance to wealth management firms. By bringing the best tools and information possible to the advisor desktop, they empower advisors to perform at a higher level, delivering better service levels while managing a larger book of business.

One concern in furnishing advisors with a wide range of tools and information sources, however, is ensuring that they are usable, not overwhelming. No matter how great the tools and data, switching between multiple systems to accomplish a task or checking multiple data sources to get a comprehensive picture is sure to slow down even the most nimble and tech-proficient advisor.When productivity is critical, this simply isn’t acceptable.

CRM, the Advisor’s Companion

To solve this problem, many wealth management firms are looking to integrate as many systems and information sources as possible into a single intuitive interface for their advisors. This gives them the best of both worlds: the “best of breed” tools and information from the best internal and third-party sources, all with a single access point.The most natural system to use as a unifying hub in this capacity is the CRM system. CRM systems are designed to be the single source of aggregated client information, and they make excellent portals for integrating client-facing tools and data. Wealth management firms should first and foremost look for CRM systems that incorporate the broadest set of strong features—encompassing marketing, sales, and service—to eliminate unnecessary point systems, but they should also seek systems with high flexibility to allow for integration of additional systems and incorporation of data from third parties or other specialized internal systems. Some CRM systems fill this role particularly well, incorporating external applications or links in context—for example, one-click access to a map program or ticker information within the client file to display client-related directions or stock information. Again, flexibility is vital here, to allow the wealth management firm to deliver a system that best fits its advisors’ work styles and confers a competitive advantage. Systems the firm might wish to integrate into the CRM hub could include portfolio accounting systems, analytics programs, and trade execution platforms, for example, and external data types to incorporate might include custodial data, market data, financial headlines, ticker information, and more. Given the ubiquity of Microsoft Office and Outlook and the important roles these programs play in advisors’ daily activities, CRM systems that offer pre-built integration between the CRM system and these programs can be of immense value to wealth management firms and can really cut down on the number of different applications firms need to integrate and advisors need to open. CRM systems offering Microsoft Outlook integration, for example, may allow e-mails to be seamlessly created and sent to clients or colleagues directly within the system, automatically appending them to the client record for clear communication tracking. Similarly, Microsoft Office integration can, for example, allow letters to be drafted using Microsoft Word and mail-merged with CRM contact data, all without leaving the CRM system. Another Microsoft application that is growing in importance and utility for financial services firms is Microsoft SharePoint; built-in integration between it and the CRM system allows a broad range of files and documents to be stored in an organized fashion along with client records. For example, a scan of a hand-written KYC form or signed Investment Policy Statement could be easily stored in a SharePoint library associated with a specific client and available right there in the CRM system. Pre-built integrations with these intuitive and familiar tools cut down on training time and dramatically limit the need to switch between programs, saving time and increasing efficiency.

As clients’ product interests have expanded and wealth management firms have moved to more product-agnostic fee-based models, the complex range of products with which advisors deal has expanded exponentially, making it hard for advisors to hold in-depth knowledge of all available product options. Integrating product information into the CRM system is thus a great way to provide advisors with easy access to rich product information when and where they need it: in the context of client interactions. By storing product information within the CRM system, advisors can instantly call up the facts and features they need to position offerings to clients and prospects. Some of the more advanced systems will allow flexible product components and features to be dynamically combined to fit client needs. Some CRM solutions also allow competitive intelligence to be stored within the system so that it is easily accessible at the point of sale. This enables the advisor to proactively compare proposed products with competitive offerings the client might be considering or overcome any objections, highlighting their product’s differentiators and comparative advantages. In some cases this could rule out the competition right from the outset, dramatically shortening sales cycles. Some CRM systems also allow for automated literature fulfillment, accelerating follow-up to clients with product documentation and materials.

In addition to integrating internal and external systems and data sources, the CRM system should give advisors a rich assortment of productivity tools, including personalized dashboards, lists of daily scheduled tasks, links to clients they need to call that day, alerts, and reporting tools. The system should also enable advisors to quickly find any information they need, such as a list of all clients with a certain product interest or hobby, using sophisticated built-in querying tools.

What should always be kept in mind in configuring the “turbo-charged” advisor desktop, of course, is the end goal of making advisors more effective, informed, and efficient in serving clients. Integration of client-centric tools and data into a centralized CRM hub helps advisors cut down on time spent hunting for information, entering duplicate data into multiple systems, switching between programs, or completing laborious administrative tasks, ultimately increasing the percentage of time they can spend on high-value client-facing activities.

Furthermore, by bringing all these tools and details together in the context of the client relationship management system, the firm establishes a client-centric infrastructure that always keeps the client front of mind.

Oracle’s Siebel Wealth Management CRM Solution

One of the pioneers -CRM Solution for Wealth Management Companies is powered by Siebel CRM solution from Oracle Corporation. Siebel CRM for Wealth Management companies is Full-featured, web-based CRM solution that is easy to use and quick to deploy. Siebel CRM helps sales, marketing, and customer service teams find new customers, close sales faster, and build more profitable relationships. With Powerful and tight front-to back-office integration across CRM and ERP for a true 360° view of customers

Unique Features of Siebel CRM for Wealth Management Companies include:-

Multiple Account Management: Unlike traditional Sales Organization where Client is usually assigned to one Account Manager, Wealth Management Companies assign separate relationship manager and financial adviser distributing duties between them. Siebel CRM for Wealth management companies allow you to assign multiple account managers for various activities

Client Induction and Check Process: Powerful workflow management capabilities allow you to define your own process to induce new client and makes sure that you capture all required information. Define your own logic, process and validation for client Induction process

Know Your Customer or KYC compliance: Mandatory and Flexible KYC definitions allow you to dynamically change and maintain KYC compliance required by Government Authorities. Powerful Escalation rules allow you to define leakage rules in KYC compliance management

Portfolio and Product Management: Unlike Securities Trading Companies, Wealth Management companies offer a comprehensive and dynamic of various investment instruments including equity, Mutual Funds, Gold ETFs, Arts and antiques and other investment avenues. Siebel CRM allows you to integrate with external Portfolio Management Systems to give you 360 degree view of your customer.

Relationships and Household Tree: Siebel CRM for Wealth Management Companies allow you to define family tree of your client, define relationship and setup complex security rules to allow cross access of Portfolio. An example would Father having access to Portfolio of his children and combined portfolio whereas Child only has access to own portfolio. Household tree also offers many up sale and cross sale opportunities for your sales team

Self Service: Self Service Allows your customers to log in your secure client portal and interact with your team for query resolution, complaint logging and monitoring and on top of it view his/her portfolio online! Secured multiple level security allows you to set complex to break yet simple to use online services for your customers.

Territory based Lead management: Siebel CRM allows you to define complex rules for automatic assignment of leads to your sales force; you can define rules based on Salesperson’s territory, specialization, portfolio size, product etc. Lead assignment engine works on top of your defined rules and does auto allocation of leads to be followed up.

These are some of the key features of Siebel and It has many more to give you the complete cover for Wealth Management CRM services.  Give your Advisor the Winning Edge with a CRM Solution All the Best
 
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DC*

Predictive Analytics, the Next “BI” (G) Thing

Predictive Analytics, the Next “BI” (G) Thing

Dears,

The recession is possibly the best thing that has happened to business intelligence, allowing the power of BI analytics to finally come into focus.
BI analytics is about finding patterns in the avalanche of data generated by, and relevant to the business that allow it to anticipate future events and help drive business decisions.

The BI enthusiasts predict “Predictive BI analytics” the next best thing to a time machine or crystal ball. A data-driven crystal ball, that is.



Predictive Analytics like many an IT term, refers to an amorphous discipline that involves using statistical and other complex mathematical analyses of data to predict the future.It is not exactly data mining, the industry experts like to point out, and it's certainly not data mining for data mining's sake. Predictive BI analytics identifies patterns in the volumes of data generated by a business and by relevant external sources. Those patterns are used to predict the future so the business can adjust its strategies accordingly. Using analytics to shape business strategy is not easy to do, however, and not just because it can be expensive or because it's a relatively new undertaking for many but the biggest corporations. Putting predictive analytics to work in the corporation requires change management skills, finding the right people and the right mind-set. Organizations or departments with an "analytical pain," are good places to begin a new BI analytics project


Here are some insights for what CIOs / IT Heads should keep in mind as they get started on a Predictive BI analytics program -- and some reality checks from CIO attendees.


1. Find great analysts.


People good at this flavor of predictive analytics not only are inquisitive and critical thinkers but also like to experiment and are "doggedly persistent." They have to know both the data and the business processes that produce the data inside out; they also need to know how to use the tools -- a rare combination. The best analysts are not philosophers living in ivory towers; they know which business questions to ask for actionable results -- increased profits, Social scientists, statisticians and people trained in Six Sigma have an affinity for this work, as do ambitious data analysts ready to take their career to the next step. The best people are pricey. Competitors will try to woo them away.


2. Put analysts into a centralized group.


These analysts will work better and more creatively if they are together, So, rather than "bury" them in business departments, companies centralize business analysts and locate them near the data warehousing team, the people with whom they will be working closely.


3. Cultivate a fact-based culture.


A fact-based decision-making culture is willing to test assumptions, embraces transparency and often uses dashboards up and down the organization. Such organizations also recruit other analytical leaders. The very top leadership helps decide which analytics projects to take on and when, and funds them. Executive support is critical because the best analytics projects cut across departments.


4. Start by testing one assumption to gain support:


Predictive BI analytics is about testing assumptions, which by definition are hard to dislodge. By starting small, with a pilot project, it is sometimes possible to effect a culture shift. An example: To gain support for analytics, a BI professional at a major retailer of online office supplies asked to test a long-held assumption of the business: the belief that online customers stopped ordering or decreased their orders if a big office supply store, like a Staples, was located within a certain distance of them. In fact, the data showed that the critical factor was not geography, but frequency of purchases. Online customers who placed four orders every 60 business days showed a retention rate of 95%, regardless of the number of stores on the ground. Frequency of purchases is a key metric for measuring customer retention, and the sales exec immediately "got it”.


5. Don't get uppity.


Never come off smarter than the executive you're supporting, or suggest the data model is smarter than the executive. "It is the kiss of death," If the results from the data modeling and statistical analysis make "intuitive sense" to the business exec, as in the example above, so much the better. Too often the team keeps the business intelligence strategy and performance measures to themselves. But what many successful BI initiatives have in common is a large degree of transparency,


The IT head should spend 25% to 30% of his time marketing and selling predictive analytics because once you are scalable as far as number of users using the applications and numbers of processes that take advantage of those applications -- without those economies of use, you don't get ROI and results of Predictive Analytics may go without appreciation and Its important the Tool gets the due credit for the makeover.

If you think about it, Predictive analytics is really the next frontier for competitive advantage.
Good Luck Amigos


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DC*