Right now, your customer has 500 emails in his inbox, 20 voicemails on his phone, 85 percent of his DVR box is full. She has 25 apps uploaded on her iPhone (of which she only uses five on a daily basis). More often than not, he’s texting, emailing, watching CNN and eating all at the same time. She’s on the road 30 weeks a year and is constantly searching for a Wi-Fi connection. Yes, these customers may be typical high-powered executives, but they certainly don't want their CSP to treat them as anything like “typical.” They want a personalized experience, they want to be understood, and they want to know that someone is out there, listening and supporting them.

As competition continues to increase, treating customers as individuals (as opposed to a generic group, or worse, just another up-sell opportunity) will become a key differentiator for providers. Service providers will need to focus on understanding and anticipating customers’ needs. To do this, they must leverage technology that helps them understand and cater to the needs of customers' situation or location, their likes and dislikes. In other words, providers need to see the whole picture when it comes to their customers, and the only way they can achieve this is by marrying a customer's individual profile with their real-time usage call patterns to obtain a clear end-to-end visibility into customers' unique situations. 

With competition steadily increasing, the ability to offer real-time personalized services, which are more useful than simple location-based promotions, will become a key differentiator for service providers. Only by gaining the complete view of the customer can CPSs hope to present tailored services that will appeal to, and make a difference for, their customers.

It’s this type of personalized service that will keep customers loyal and help providers maintain and grow market share in the future.  

Governments and nations are in current movement around the world - the Arab spring, presidential elections in France and the US, political upheaveal in the Euro Zone, just to name a few. All these events have had repercussions across supply chains. In a recent statement made by President Obama, US companies were called upon to ensure they come up with a strategy to secure supply chains. What does this mean? What is the role of nation states in our supply chains? 

Reading the statement from the White House, what strikes me is that there is nothing new in what's being asked: responsible governments seek to secure a nation's domestic interest. Without diving too deeply into hegemonic stability theory, the United States carries an additional responsibility in the global economy and with extended supply chains, that responsibility extends to the the safeguarding of global trade and the flow of products. The Obama Adminstration appropriately used more business-oriented and supply chain terminology for an undertaking the US government has assumed since the 1940s. 

Government is not responsible to ensure I have a fresh flow of iPads, bottles of Bandol 2007 red wine, Kobe beef or any other product imported to the United States. The Government is responsible for ensuring that vital items - those which are important to national security - are protected. Energy, medicine, basic sustenance, to name a few.

Governments are also called upon to assist when events impact the supply chains - natural and man-made disasters. For this reason we witness the global community rallying when events such as the Japan tsunami or the floods in Thailand strike. The need to rapidly get these areas back on their feet is important to the global economy.

The video from the Navy is a great piece on the role of an extended government:

Governments provide an ecosystem for supply chains to compete. It is up to companies to focus on the fundamentals to achieve their goals. End-to-end visibility and an understanding of the impact of these events on the business are the first steps. Once organizations gain this real-time visibility, they can begin to put in place the executionable means to gain constant business process improvements - in other words, to become more operationally responsive.

I recently came across an interesting post on GigaOM: Which is less expensive: Amazon or self-hosted? by Charlie Oppenheimer. The point of the article is to walk through an example that supports his claim that “if you have a significant amount of load that is well known and predictable then you may be able to save some money by bringing a portion or all of that inside,” or in other words, self-host. Amazon is MORE expensive. While the majority of his analysis was pretty good, there were a few gaps that - in my opinion - need to be addressed.

1. How often is this type of decision ever ONLY about cost? Rarely. There is a lot of strategy work and planning that should go into the Cloud vs. self-host decision. If you were an ISV start-up seeking funding, how many VCs would fund your business plan if it contained a large budget for buying hosting infrastructure hardware? My guess is zero. Deployment strategies can and should vary. Fortunately, there are ways to manage your deployment within a Cloud environment that can give you more flexibility. Leveraging reserve instances instead of running entirely on-demand could dramatically reduce your run-time capacity requirements without sacrificing the ability to keep up with fluctuating demand. Plus, it will ultimately lower the overall cost of deployment, too. A true win-win.


2. If you ARE focusing on cost, then you need to consider whether or not it is more effective for your business to work with Capital Expense (CAPEX) or Operating Expense (OPEX). More often, I hear from our partners and customers that OPEX is the way to go because it is much more predictable and stable from a budgeting and forecasting perspective. The finance department will thank you for it.


3. Labor costs CANNOT be excluded from the analysis or the conversation. There is just too much variation between the resource demands of a self-hosted environment vs. a Cloud-based environment in terms of time, money, and personnel needed to scope, implement, manage, and maintain the system. A big part of why we built Progress Arcade was to address the need to simplify application deployment in the Cloud for our partners and customers. Excluding labor costs from your analysis is like refusing to set aside money to pay your taxes each year. In either case, your revenue model will be distorted and incomplete. You can’t see the complete picture.

Bottom line: do your homework and make an informed decision based upon YOUR unique set of requirements. Don’t let someone else “calculate” your success.

Thanks and, as always, please feel free to drop me a line and let me know what you think.

Following last week’s CEB TowerGroup, my main observation was that bankers are facing a ‘perfect storm’ that will necessitate a change in approach across the whole industry. Unfortunately it seems that bankers are still denying the circumstances they face, believing that they will survive.

Why do I say this? In a mobile, connected world, customers are becoming used to service levels that take into account their previous buying preferences, interests, background with the service provider and even their location. They are used to accessing services wherever and whenever they need to, via any channel, and are increasingly savvy to offers and promotions. Despite media stories of ‘Groupon fatigue’, the popularity of daily deal and voucher sites speaks of a new generation of bargain-hunters that often won’t make a purchase without some kind of added incentive.

Banks are not yet interested in this consumer trend, but they should be. Instead of seeing payments as a cost centre to their business, the data it gives them about customer spending habits, when combined with today’s mobile technology, provides a massive business opportunity.

At the moment, it seems like the banks are unable to see the bigger picture. Much like the railroad tycoons in early twentieth century America, they have the cash to invest but are not seeing the opportunity. Airlines were just setting up internal flights, which eventually became the competition that turned the railroads into a second-choice service that could only compete by discounting prices. The railroad owners could have got into the airline business, but instead of seeing themselves as transport providers, they only concerned themselves with the smaller world of railways. Bankers today, similarly, see themselves as providing a customer service that goes beyond today’s boundaries of banking. Traditionally, they’ve been the consumer’s trusted advisor. Now that trust is eroding, they will lose out if they don’t capture new ground. Otherwise, banking becomes a commodity and the only way to survive will be to drive further efficiencies and reduce costs.

In the very near future, customers will realise they don’t need banks, they need banking – and will shop around for the best offer if their loyalty has not been secured.

Solving the problem will require looking to new areas. At the CEB TowerGroup event, the key note speaker made this comparison: after 100 years of failed expeditions, Mount Everest was eventually conquered when new explorers brought in nylon ropes from the world of sailing (to avoid the problem of frozen ropes snapping) and oxygen masks that had been developed for fire fighters. Innovation is ‘out there’ – you don’t need to find it in your own discipline or reinvent the wheel, just observe how other sectors are embracing change and see what might help solve business problems in your area. When it comes to innovation, bankers would be wise to remember that to get to the top, they need to look to other areas for inspiration.

So where should banks look for innovation that will help them adapt their business for the next 20 years? Much of the technology they need to become more responsive to customers’ needs and open up new revenue streams already exists. Bringing together the engines from algorithmic trading, BPM technology from the telecoms industry and location-based services from the mobile world, they could make full use of the information they already have about what consumers like to buy (and where and when) to develop new, more targeted, offerings.

We have a vision for Responsive Customer Engagement, a technology approach that means a bank can respond to a customer’s actions and turn it into an opportunity to secure more revenue – and, perhaps more importantly – customer loyalty. One business model for this could be in providing a customer buying one item on their credit card access to offers and promotions from other merchants in their locality. The merchants – also the bank’s customers – would also become more bought-in, as their payments provider becomes their access to a mass of new custom.

I will be talking more about how these technologies could help banks tap into consumer trends and bring the change they need to survive in future blog posts. For now, I’d like to leave you with a thought from the mountain: if you haven’t yet reached the pinnacle, perhaps you are using the wrong tools. Don’t get left behind!

Given the proliferation of service options and add-ons available to today’s mobile user, keeping the customer happy is a task that has become more and more challenging in recent years. As the number of customer services options increase and diversify, the number of disparate business and operational systems involved in that customer’s experience has also  increased. As we all know, the backend is not one network and one system, as dozens of legacy and new systems need to integrate to provide one unified view of the customer.   

It is possible to manage the end-to-end customer experience, but visibility is key. The best way to achieve this holistic view is to bring all customer-impacting activities together. Only with a comprehensive view of all systems can SPs begin to solve customer problems on one call.  

This complete service view will become the single biggest point of competitive differentiation for mobile providers in the coming year. To prevent churn, providers need to respond to business events as they happen, allowing them to proactively address and fix network issues before the customer suffers from poor service and is left with no one to call but the competition.

Many have you have read various predictions related to the Banking industry over the past few months. Here at Progress Software, we’d also like to chime in with a few observations of what the industry looks like today and what 2012 will bring.

1. As we have seen with the airline industry, 2012 will witness the emergence of more banking alliances. To win customer loyalty, banks will partner with retail and other third party consumer businesses to create more cross-sell opportunities. But we think this new model will be a bit harder for banks to adopt due to the “siloed” nature of their organizations and infrastructure.
2. Banks will do their best to launch social media apps as part of their mobile and channels strategies to better serve their customers. However until banks understand how to capture payment and other transactions in real-time, they will struggle to deliver real value.
3. With the boarding of financial banking apps on smartphones, new ways of skimming will appear. Anti-virus companies will hop on the bandwagon and banks will have to develop strategies and tactics to sense and respond in real-time to these types of fraud.

 I look forward to discussing any thoughts and opinions you may also have as well.

Earthquakes, political uprisings and unforeseen every-day disruptions are just some of the stressful events that supply chain executives face daily. For any supply chain exec – especially those managing networks that span diverse geographies and markets – having visibility into the extended supply chain is a key component to staying on top of issues, improving responsiveness and meeting SLAs. All told, a lot goes into being a responsive supply chain executive in today’s environment. Here are two main must haves:

Real-time Visibility

Many businesses suffer from supply chain blind spots, impeding their ability to quickly recover from unexpected events and efficiently re-sequence their extended supply chain. A responsive supply chain executive must have real-time visibility throughout the entire network. This visibility allows managers to effectively “light up” those blind spots and proactively monitor the entire chain (no matter how dispersed it may be) to ensure that all processes are running smoothly through every touch point along the way. It also empowers executives to spot disruptions early, at any point in the system, and respond to them before they snowball and affect end deliverables and SLAs. Which brings us to our next must have…

Actionable Insight 

Being able to see the disruption is all well and good, but if you can’t react to it and address it, all benefit is lost. Responsive supply chain executives must have actionable insight, meaning they must be equipped with the ability to correct disturbances rather than simply acknowledge their existence. The ability to quickly respond to out-of-plan events allows execs to rapidly re-sequence their extended supply chain, meeting every SLA.

Until the day when we can correctly predict the future, supply chains will always be hindered by unexpected, uncontrollable events. When confronted with such an event – whether it be a natural disaster, geo-political issue or simple human error – the ability to quickly identify and respond is critical. In the absence of a crystal ball, advanced technology arms us with the ability to sense trouble and respond so we can keep supply chains active and flowing, despite what the world may throw at them.