Spin the Fortune wheel , The CRM Predictions for 2012

Dears,

Hope everyone is enjoying the fantastic holiday season. This year, CRM had a mixed bag of performance and the same is true for many organizations.In a global economy where change is the only constant, getting to the top is hard, but staying there is even harder. Most companies do well in suitable market conditions, but are unable to adapt to business cycles. Other enterprises survive downturns but are unable to rebound. CRM partly helped every organization to do something better and for some organization the same CRM altered their fortune (both good and bad).  As a CRM evangelist I love to predict what is in store for CRM in 2012 and I will assure you will see the majority of this come true next year.

Prediction 1:  Cloud CRM to expand

The reason for every major vendor made acquisition in the cloud space is primarily to expand their CRM footprint. Be it

Oracle, SAP or Microsoft everyone want to expand their CRM footprint. The recent Oracle acquisition of RightNow CRM is evident that it’s betting high time on Cloud CRM. The flip side of the cloud crm is that it doesn’t provide a robust integration platform as that of Enterprise CRM. The year 2012 will be very demanding for these product vendors to provide a unified integration platform.

Prediction 2:  Integration is back in business

The weaving net to interweave all new cloud crm and enterprise apps is the Integration platform. The Integration projects will see new lease of life to bring back the charm of enterprise CRM in Cloud platform. The promise of enterprise crm in cloud crm is still a big question but however every vendor is making their best effort to make their cloud crm offering an enterprise one.  New age middleware technologies will offer extension to the cloud platform with Cloud adapters.

Prediction 3: Social Media intruder

It’s too early to expect the intelligence out of unstructured data that is churning out of social network sites.  Be it a twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other god knows types. Every one of them has data about the customer but the data is in unstructured form and you will not be able to make any meaningful conclusion with or without analytics. The so called social crm applications just provide the integration to these social network sites but not really the meaningful insight about the customer or his/her behavior. The negative trends did have a damaging impact on variety of brands but some of them are intentionally spread by the competitors. There is no means to control such actions but atleast the CRM is getting into this sphere of influence and there will be lot of bolt on solutions that may get developed by the Apps developer for the big vendors.

Prediction 4: Mobility everywhere

Apples and Berry’s gonna rule the CRM and every sales superstar want to use only mobile crm apps. They are gonna make laptops and desktops redundant. The data is gonna be on finger tips and you got to have a gorilla scratch of your IPAD if you don’t like the data inside. The real challenge is gonna how to secure the mobile enterprise apps and when so much of sensitive information is gonna be in your hip pouch. You will see again lot of mobile enabled security apps comes to play here to secure the enterprise data. The HTML 5 and Java gonna set the trend for CRM UI development.

Prediction 5: Consumer driven Web commerce

Consumers will gain edge over the distributor and partner. The choice of service and product will be determined by the customer. The innovation will be driven by customer experience and advance product and price configurations will become part of web commerce application. The Nike stores which offer the flexibility to design your pair of shoes and Home depot which gives you the flexibility to configure your own consumer electronics will set standard to other industry to bring innovation to life in the web commerce space.

Prediction 6: Industry Vertical Solutions

The “One size fits all “generic CRM will eventually die the natural death and more of industry focused CRMs will regain the glory. The word of caution for all the cheap promises made by some of the small crm vendors and consumer will baptize those vendors for demand of more industry specific functionalities which they may not be able to provide. The System Integrators role to provide the right fit solution to the consumers also will make big impact on the vendor selection.

Prediction 7: Integrated Hubs and Data Enrichment

The time for integrated hub which will have the capability to tie together customer golden record with that of product/service hubs and other hubs such as site, activities, suppliers etc. Customer will ask more on the data quality front and it’s not just cleansing but to enrich the data with standardized reference files from industry data specialists like that D&B, Reuters etc.

These prediction lists may go on and on but the mentioned ones will be the top priority ones for great almighty customers who are waiting to see the dawn on the investment they made in CRM. The CRM technology has been a fortune wheel and you need great luck to have the right fit CRM, the right System Integrator and more importantly the right organizations and its users to make the CRM program a success. When you get all things right you are customers are the first ones to reward you with right incentive.

Happy New year to all my Partners and Companions

Loving P&C

DC*

Relationship Quotient @ Work

Dears,

I am a quote freak. Good quotes pull me up, keep me on the run and give me sound sleep at night. One thread which connects all my favorite quotes is about relationship. Some of the biggest challenges in relationships come from the fact that most people enter a relationship in order to get something: they're trying to find someone who's going to make them feel good. In reality, the only way a relationship will last is if you see your relationship as a place that you go to give, and not a place that you go to take. The real path to success in your career and in your personal life is through creating an inner circle of “relationships" - deep, close relationships with trusted individuals who will offer the encouragement, feedback, and generous mutual support that every one of us needs to reach our full potential. Whether your dream is to lead a company, be a top producer in your field, overcome the self-destructive habits that hold you back, lose weight or make a small difference in the larger world.

The professional success is very much directly proportionate to your relationship quotient and there is nothing called Lone Professional superman. In projects the team members get to live a life bigger than their personal circle ultimately it is largely dependent on being there for one another – Having Each Other’s Back and giving the customer the ultimate value for his investment and getting the customers into this relationship circle. Extraordinary business success can be attributed to strong leadership and effective management and utilization of project teams.  In today’s fast-paced, competitive business environment, integrated and effective project teams are required to use cutting edge technology to achieve unprecedented financial earnings.  Often however, these projects fall victim to ill-conceived, poorly-executed business plans that completely ignore the importance of relationships among the people making up the project team.  To ensure corporate survival under these conditions, leadership must secure a competitive advantage.  As Jack Welch, former CEO and Chairman of General Electric simply stated:  “If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.

Relationship building and consensus are critical to effective innovation, risk management and corporate growth.  The Learnings which l would like to share is out of some of our project experiences both good and bad, the centerpiece for success and failure lies in relationship. What would you get out of good relationship? A question asked by one of my colleagues I said “Harmony and Inner peace”, the great driving force for any successful execution of a program. The Harmony with Self, with your team & with your customer. Sometime sheer magnitude of the project drives us crazy and what brings us back to harmony is relationship. We have seen most rough and tough customers come into your circle with relationship. The relationship building is Art and Science, Its Art by the way you express and it’s a science when you have right facts to demonstrate and strengthen your relationship.

I would like to bring to your notice some of the significant component of relationship building.

Forgiving Makes You More Important

Forgiveness can be very transforming for an individual.  Imagine what it can do for an Organization. This component may sound little abstract but this is tremendous catalyst for great transformation. The willingness to admit and willingness to forgive forms the core part of relationship. I have seen number of times the project leaders take unprecedented stand on penalizing the coworker for their mistakes and I am not advocating that is right or wrong what I suggest is to see things beyond that particular incident and give a chance to someone who can prove himself the next time and go that extra mile for you in your project. 

Nurture the relationship in your Nest

While you need to be outgoing to make a relation but you need to nurture this in your nest. Be it a coworker or your customer you need to put forth your best foot to build a relationship and more importantly you need to nurture this by keeping the human touch alive. Mails cannot bail you out all time and you need to reach them in person and build this relationship. We have seen during some of our projects the hot pot escalations just evaporate when you meet and greet the tough customer. Sometimes a dinner with your hostile friend would save plenty days and month of hard work.

Round of Applause for our Social Network Technology

“I am not Facebook to like”, one of my hilarious quote. Keeping the fun part aside you did get to see lot more happening on the social network sites be it a Twitter, FB, MySpace, Yammer etc. what do you think they are out there  for, if not for great market caps these companies made but from the people point of view they are building their relationship. When there is hue cry about privacy we also see people want to reach out and connect to bigger circle and more meaning to their daily life beyond work and immediate family. I use this as a medium to connect to my customers, coworkers and friends. It’s kind of soother to the daily stress and it gives you a feeling of being part of a community which share the pains and pleasure of our daily life.

Relationship building is a mindset and when you have the right frame of mind to do it, you will find a way to do it better.

Loving P&C

DC*

The 3rd Apple, Master of Innovation

Dears,

Three apples changed the world; Adam's, Newton's, and Steve Jobs’. The inspiration for this article has come from Carmine Gallo’s new book, “The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs”. This book is a tribute to a great leader, who has inspired the people of this era in so many ways, to the Edison of our century. Some of the innovative thoughts he exercised to make great innovations are put forth for your view.

1.       Put a Dent in the Universe: “Innovation requires a team and you cannot inspire evangelists unless you offer a compelling vision….”

2.       Sell Dreams, Not Products: Steve Jobs doesn’t rely on focus groups. He avoids most focus groups like the plague. It comes down to the very real fact that most customers don’t know what they want in a new product. Apple customers should be glad Jobs doesn’t do focus groups. If he had, they may never have enjoyed iPods, iTunes, the iPhone, the iPad, or Apple Stores. Jobs doesn’t need focus groups because he understands his customers really, really well. Yes, sometimes better than they know themselves… Sure, “listen” to your customers and ask them for feedback. Apple does that all the time. But when it comes to breakthrough success at Apple, Steve Jobs and his team are the company’s best focus group. Asked why Apple doesn’t do focus groups, Jobs responded: “We figure out what we want. You can’t go out and ask people ‘what’s the next big thing?’ There’s a great quote by Henry Ford. He said, “If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me ‘A faster horse’.

3.       Say No to 1,000 Things: “Steve Jobs once said the secret to innovation comes from “Saying no to 1,000 things.” In other words, Jobs is as proud of what Apple chooses not to do as he is about what Apple chooses to focus on.  This philosophy has helped Apple introduce products that wow consumers because of their elegance and simplicity…”

4.       Create Insanely Great Experiences: “There are no cashiers at an Apple Store. There are specialists, creatives — even geniuses — but no cashiers. Although the Apple Stores have no commissioned sales staff, they generate more revenue per square foot than most other widely recognized brands. Why? According to Jobs, “People don’t want to just buy personal computers anymore. They want to know what they can do with them, and we’re going to show people exactly that…”

Reflecting on the above four innovation secrets, the one that stands out for me is the ability of Steve Jobs to understand what the customer actually wants and not just what the customer needs. It is this the unique ability of great leaders, to gain deep insight into their constituents and to provide a vision, purpose and dream that speaks to their unspoken desires and aspirations. Just as a changing context allows new and innovative products to be created and become successful. A changing context calls for new kinds of leaders and new approaches to leadership. The ten practical ways leaders can influence innovation in the Organization are given below

1.       Remove fear from your organization. Innovation means doing something new, something that may fail. If people fear failing, they will not innovate.

2.       Make innovation part of the performance review system for everyone. Ask them what they will create or improve in the coming year and then track their progress.

3.       Document an innovation process and make sure everyone understands it as well as his or her role in it.

4.       Build in enough looseness into the system for people to explore new possibilities and collaborate with others inside and outside the organization.

5.       Make sure that everyone understands the corporate strategy and that all innovation efforts are aligned with it. However, also create a process for handling the outlier ideas that don’t fit the strategy but are too good to throw away.

6.       Teach people to scan the environment for new trends, technologies and changes in customer mindsets.

7.       Teach people the critical importance of diversity of thinking styles, experience, perspectives and expertise. Expect diversity in all activities related to innovation.

8.       Good criteria can focus ideation; however, overly restrictive criteria can stifle ideation and perpetuate assumptions and mindsets from the past. Spend the time necessary upfront to develop market and success-related parameters that will take you into the future.

9.       Innovation teams are different from “regular” project teams. They need different tools and different mindsets. Provide enough training and coaching so that when people are working on an innovation team, they can be successful.

10.   Buy or develop an idea management system that captures ideas in a way that encourages people to build on and evaluate new possibilities.

In one of his decorated speeches Steve Jobs made this remark “No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary “. Truly an immortal statement for every aspirant who want to live his own destiny.

Loving P&C

DC*

Oracle’s CRM Cloud Strategy

Dears,

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison famously said in 2008, “Maybe I'm an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? It's complete gibberish. It's insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?”He was referring to the term “cloud computing”, which he said was silly, since it described something that companies were already doing. He promised back then to make some sort of Oracle “cloud computing” pronouncement, and so he has finally done.2011 Oracle Open World, Ellison unveiled Oracle’s public cloud service which will run on the company’s Fusion software. Well, what he really unveiled was a new functionality that would allow businesses to access custom-built applications, or those crafted by Fusion, via the internet. That category of software is known as cloud.

The CRM (customer relationship management) market got a bit busier this month with the entry of Oracle's long-awaited Oracle Fusion CRM, which is also the foundation of Oracle's new Public Cloud. As the latest entry in a very competitive market, Oracle will have to stand out to get noticed. So how does it stack up against established offerings from the likes of Microsoft, Salesforce.com and SAP? And perhaps more importantly for Oracle's longtime customers, will Oracle Fusion CRM spell the end of CRM on Demand, its existing cloud offering based on Siebel, and Siebel CRM?

"The Oracle cloud is a little different," said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison when he introduced the product suite at the Oracle Open World 2011 user conference recently. The Oracle Public Cloud is both a platform as a service and applications as a service, he explained."The key difference is the Oracle Public Cloud is based on industry standards and supports full interoperability with other clouds and your data center on premise," he said. By standards, he primarily meant Java. Oracle's cloud claims to run any app written in Java. 

One of the main principles of the Fusion Applications development effort was to bring the best ideas, architectural patterns and business practices of all "legacy" applications (eBusiness Suite, PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Siebel CRM, Retek, and so on) into the new suite. The trained eye will see typical 'Siebel patterns' in Fusion CRM. On the other hand, the requirements for CRM have drastically changed in the last years, so there are lots of new things as well. Siebel customers have three options: Stay with their legacy application by upgrading to the most mature version (Siebel 8.1.1); augment their existing legacy app with new functionality offered by the Fusion Applications stack; or ditch the legacy stuff and embrace the new Fusion world. Customers are given a option to run a hybrid applications because Fusion Applications are designed from the ground up to co-exist with Oracle's legacy apps. I believe that Siebel CRM is not dead. Too many hours and dollars/Euros have been spent by customers in Siebel projects to naively believe that they will just dump it all for version 1 of Fusion CRM.While I usually don't do too much IT crystal balling, we should see another decade of thriving Siebel projects, but there is a new flower in the garden which we shouldn't neglect.

Oracle's application services include Fusion CRM, Fusion HCM and Social Networks, while its platform services include Java Services and Database Services – and to this Oracle added cloud customer service with the acquisition of RightNow. Oracle claims, among other things, that its Oracle Fusion CRM Cloud Service enables organizations to combine customer and product master data information with all CRM processes – which the vendor says is a first for cloud-based CRM solutions. Oracle also claims that the service delivers a consolidated customer center for all CRM business processes.

The Oracle Cloud offering is based not on multi-tenancy, but on virtualization containers that allow customers to seamlessly switch back and forth between the private and the public clouds.  A big selling point for Oracle could be that the same Fusion middleware software sold on-premises is available in the cloud and that the programming model for Oracle Public Cloud is the same open standards-based languages of Java, BPEL and Web services.

While Ellison announced a collection of cloud services – 4 SaaS applications and 4 PaaS services – only a subset of these appear on the cloud.oracle.com . Only the company's database and Java services are shown as PaaS services, with the already pre-existing CRM and human capital management as SaaS applications.

Oracle is paying great attention in strengthening his CRM Portfolio with recent acquisations of ATG,Inquira,Datanomics,Endeca and Fatwire in addition to RightNow. Its quiet fascinating to see the CRM portfolio to grow beyond the conventional modules and this gonna be most exciting time for all the CRM consultant to expand their breadth of knowledge and ability to adapt to diversified technologies and Standards

Loving P&C

DC*