I am a big fan of Seth Godin’s Blog. The brilliant post, which inspired me to write this, is named The magic of low hanging fruit.

It’s way more profitable to encourage each of your existing customers to spend $3 than it is to get a stranger to spend $300. It’s also more effective to get the 80% of your customer service people that are average to be a little better than it is to get the amazing ones to be better still.

Read the rest of this entry »

One area where Enterprise 2.0 technology makes dramatic inroads is Project Management tools. There are many web based Project Management and Time and Activity Management software based on “social software” technologies available now. Personally I have always maintained that there is no need to manage competent professionals, they can use thought leadership, support, sounding board for discussion, but not management. Therefore I had to maintain time lines and budgets for the projects, largely by “keeping a ear to the ground” and using anything from spreadsheets to MS Project for management reporting and accounting.

Read the rest of this entry »

I had a new experience today being a guest speaker on InsideCRM webinar of the same title as this post. Chris Bucholtz was extremely nice to me, first inviting me to participate in their “Ask the Expert” panel, and now to share my CRM implementation thoughts. I am very grateful to Chris, to Erica Hsu who kept this undertaking on an even keel, to Leo Manson, my co-presenter from Microsoft, and the rest of InsideCRM folks who contributed to this event.

The webinar can be viewed by clicking on this link. If anybody is interested in the copy of Powerpoint slides and or notes, please email to me at gyankelovich@evolutionofbpr.com, and I will be happy to send a copy to you.

I am not a fan of MS. The Apple zealots scary me. The fact that people get so emotional and irrational about a company, a technology or a product, has puzzled me for years. It is surely a testimony of the powerful Software Marketing machine, which turned a preference for tools into a religious war.

Bill Gates is falling a victim to the success of his own business model - “dazzle them with functions and features until they forget about reliability and performance”. Well it worked for a while, but it gets harder and harder to remember why I opened this program in the first place.

I don’t get this blogger’s frenzy about a 3 year old email either. Not that I do not see the irony, but did you really think that Bill unconditionally loves every piece of crap his company has ever produced? Is it a hate for everything Microsoft?

I find most software is designed by people who understand marketing much better than the processes they are suppose to make easier to execute. Personally I do not find Mac any more intuitive than PC, but they sure market much better and I admire that. And is there less hate for Oracle than Microsoft, because Larry got less money than Bill? Or does anyone really think that Oracle Financial’s, or any other Oracle business application, is less convoluted and frustrating for users than Dynamics? You may have noticed that I don’t even want to mention the usability of SAP products.

It seems the Software Giants got themselves into a position similar to the Telephone Giants, they are more interested in protecting their cash flows than innovating and re-building from scratch. If they treat their existing code and architecture as a capital investment, such a strategy makes financial sense, but..

It is very common to see a gap analysis as a very first deliverable in most Business Process optimization initiatives, regardless how these initiatives are branded. For that very reason, quality of the result for this exercise can either completely obliterate any chance for this investment to show any return, or give a reasonable opportunity for the initiative to succeed. Yet, many projects allocate a very small proportion of time and resources to this critical stage in the initiative’s life cycle.

Read the rest of this entry »