Friday - March 18, 2005
Home-grown ERP systems are the Oscar Madisons of the IT world. Grizzled by years of service yet reluctant to change, these massive home-grown systems resist the efforts of CIOs to transform them. More often than not, the home-grown ERP system ends up changing the CIO. The complexity and lack of clarity makes some CIOs yearn for hosted applications to increase responsiveness. Hosted channel, CRM and analytics initiatives are showing usability improvements and offering alignment of work flows.
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Wednesday - March 9, 2005
The indirect sales channel has emerged as a sales environment distinctly different from conventional business-to-business or business-to-consumer selling. This shifting focus is long overdue, especially in industries such as technology, where a high percentage of products are sold through distributor and reseller networks that require different approaches to selling and management.
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Tuesday - February 1, 2005
Social networking software and Web-based tools have proliferated in the past few years. These networks operate by creating a tree of contacts beginning with the user, followed by the friends and associates she or he extends an invitation to, the friends they extend an invitation to, and so on.
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Thursday - January 20, 2005
Over the last few weeks, I have been busy putting the finishing touches on a new report scheduled for delivery to market later this month. My premise was that there might be a lot of enterprising companies in CRM or closely associated markets that are either new or that have new ideas that we should pay attention to.
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Tuesday - January 11, 2005
Twelve months ago, CRM faced some resentment in many organizations, but as the year progressed it began proving its value. "2004 was mainly a year of validating that CRM works, rather than [focusing] on major new functionality. A lot of companies focused on governance and integration, making what they had more valuable and more useful," said Erin Kinikin of Forrester Research.
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Wednesday - December 22, 2004
Time to go out on a limb, put everything on the table, and make some prognostications about what the big stories will be in and around CRM in 2005. This is all based on the best available research and written with the confidence of knowing that no one will remember any of it by next December.
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Wednesday - December 15, 2004
Earlier this fall an MBA student from MIT's Sloan School gave me a call. He wanted to invite me to be a panelist at the Seventh Annual MIT Venture Capital Conference. The conference was run by students and is part of something called MIT Innovation Week.
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Wednesday - December 8, 2004
The end of the year is always a good time for top ten lists and forecasts of things to come. It's a way for analysts and pundits to show how smart we are and that we "knew it all along" -- or at least to exhibit our 20/20 hindsight. Here are my observations of what was important to CRM this year.
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Friday - December 3, 2004
In the last U.S. presidential election the candidates clashed on the issue of privatizing the Social Security system. I'll leave the political debate to the professional politicians, but I would like to address this matter from the standpoint of millions of U.S. workers.
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Wednesday - November 10, 2004
In a move to compete in one of the Internet's fast-growth markets, IBM yesterday announced plans to start offering hosted service for its Web conferencing. Big Blue will target small- to mid-sized businesses (SMB) with an offering planned for December. Web conferencing software integrates teleconferencing and the Web to allow users to gather in an online forum.
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Wednesday - November 10, 2004
Luck plays a role in life. I don't pretend to understand it, and I believe we make our own luck as well as occasionally inheriting some from the cosmos. How else do you explain the timing of Salesforce.com's announcements last week at DreamForce, its annual user group meeting in San Francisco?
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