The Social Internet

Circle of change - CRM (1990 to 2010)

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjeev Kumar) — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 18:07:00 +0000

Change is expensive, disruptive, and often unpredictable. In the previous article in this series, we related rapid advances in technology fuelling new businesses and business processes and the consequent circle of change.

The picture below depicts how managed CRM became feasible with the advent of Database technologies in late 1980s. It helped automate management of several customer facing operations including support, sales, and marketing. Today CRM solutions are either delivered as a SAAS or are seamlessly integrated into enterprise applications using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The evolution of CRM business processes followed ground breaking changes in database, networking and computing technologies. A snapshot of this relationship is evident in the picture below.

Some facts

Vantive, Clarify, Scopus and Remedy were one of the first CRM product vendors in early-mid 1990s. Vantive was acquired by PeopleSoft, which in turn was subsequently acquired by Oracle. Scopus was acquired by Siebel, which was subsequently acquired by Oracle. Clarify was acquired by Amdocs.

I worked for the core engineering team at Clarify from 1996 to 2007. Oracle, SAP, Microsoft are now leading vendors of CRM products.

Disruptive change #1: Client-Server to Internet

The first commercial-off-the-shelf CRM products were built using client-server (2-tier) architecture. Typically, the user-interface, database-interface, and business logic, which were implemented as static libraries in C/C++ programming language, constituted the client part of the application. The vendors of these applications focused their operational energies in supporting different combination of client platforms (Windows, Mac, Unix) and DB-server platforms (Sybase, Oracle, SQL).

Internet as a client platform was disruptive for these CRM vendors, as it put to waste a great deal of energy that went into supporting multiple client platforms. Vendors, like Siebel, who did not invest deeply in supporting multiple clients were able to transition to the internet platform faster than those who did.

Similarly businesses which did not invest deeply in customizing off the shelf products, found it easier to migrate to the newer versions.

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Migration challenges

Many businesses had liberally customized out of box features of the product by using the extension interfaces (VB scripts, custom metadata), and also added several of their own to fill the feature gaps.

Customizations could not be migrated to the new architecture. They had to be re-implemented in the new architecture.

Experience and skill-sets developed during prior customizations were not useful in the new architecture.

Many businesses chose not to upgrade and continued using the client-server version for a long time.

Architecture/Design Lessons – Clarify vs. Siebel

In retrospect, I realize that there were minor, yet fundamental differences between Clarify's and Siebel's product architecture. Siebel could win a substantial marketshare event though Clarify had early lead. Of course, at the next disruption point (SAAS), salesforce.com and new competitors beat Siebel at its game.

Siebel (early)	Clarify (early)
Supported only Windows client. Consequently its development processes were greatly simplified.	Supported multiple UI clients. Complexity of development and support increased many fold. The user interface was minimalist. Clarify subsequently moved to windows only client, but by then Siebel was focusing on other differentiators.
Invested in 3-tier architecture right from the beginning.	Was stuck with 2-tier architecture for a long time. Took a long time to see value in 3-tier architecture.
Provided metadata driven customizations. Migration of metadata was easy, than migration of code.	Clarify provided an integrated VBA (Visual Basic) engine. Customers were encouraged to write lots of custom-code in addition to creating metadata for customizations. Migrating custom code (automatically) to new architecture was later found impossible.
Downplayed customizations and insisted on usage of out of box features and simple customizations.	Showed ease of customizations as a key differentiator, and spent a lot of focus on getting the technology right.
Articulated technology attributes effectively as key differentiators – be it UI, active-synch, n-tier architecture, web-client or integration interfaces.	Even though Clarify had more successful deployments than Siebel, it was always playing a catch up on differentiators.

Amdocs-Clarify and its customers could smoothly tide over the second change-point, when the client framework was upgraded to smart-client. We had imbibed and incorporated the architectural lessons learnt during the first disruptive change.

Circle of Change

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjeev Kumar) — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 16:59:00 +0000

Information Technology has evolved considerably over past few decades, and has contributed significantly to the value chain of businesses. However, in spite of significant improvements in software project management processes over the past several years, the percentage of failed and delayed IT implementations remains staggeringly high (68% as per the Standish Chaos report 2009). On the other hand, the average shelf life of an IT solution is shrinking, due to rapid advances in technology and pressures in adopting them for competitive advantage. Consequently, applications are found to be churning more than optimum resources in the maintenance phase of their lifecycles. A significant percentage of these resources are spent on ensuring seamless upgrades.


IT advances feeding into complexity of business processes	Example of IT advances over a timeline

Figure-1 above depicts a continuous cycle of rapid advances in technology causing changes in business processes, and business processes in-turn fuelling IT changes. For example, Java and Internet brought about significant changes in the way business was conducted. The consequent needs of businesses triggered new technologies such as SAAS, Cloud computing and SOA.

It is therefore an imperative for organizations to not only design IT solutions to address current business needs, but also to architect them for continuity in a constantly changing landscape. A rigorous architectural practice, along with well defined implementation governance plays a crucial role in achieving this goal. There are tens and hundreds of design best practices, reference architectural patterns, and architectural frameworks to address these needs. A mature architectural practice identifies the best design and architectural solution patterns in addition to addressing the functional and TTM (time to market) priorities of a business.

Social CRM - Plausible Solution Model

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjeev Kumar) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:05:00 +0000

Social CRM, per Paul Greenberg definition, is a philosophy & a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes & social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted & transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.

While a great deal of work is in progress in identifying the business models and architecture artifacts for Social CRM, I present a plausible concept diagram, from a technology solution perspective.

The proposed model builds on existing traditional CRM solutions, and leverages "Corners Social Platform" for interfacing with all popular social networks and smart devices. Corners supports build once, and deploy anywhere (on any social network, device) paradigm. More than 1500 popular widgets / applications, built on Corners platform, are live on Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Hi5 (and other social networks).

Business plan framework - "Who" is your customer

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjeev Kumar) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:58:00 +0000

In the previous blog (part-1) "Framework for creating a Business Plan", I proposed an ontology (framework) to organize a business plan. In continuation of the previous article, we will examine how to structure information in the "who" column of the Business plan matrix.

Whats a business?

A business can be defined as an organization that provides goods and services to others who want or need them.

We can safely postulate that the most important "thing" for a business is its customers who "want or need" the product/service offered and "who will pay for the same". The identification and categorization of potential customers of a business is done in the "who" column of the business plan matrix. In this column, we also identify other key sets of people who are/will-be part of your business. For example - Partners, Employees, Suppliers, Board members etc.

Terminology and guidelines

Aritifact - An artifact is a work product such as a catalog (list of things), network diagram, a use-case specification, diagrams, a matrix, an office document, or even a hand written paper. Every cell in the business plan matrix contains one or more artifacts.

Lets now examine the artifcacts that go in the individual cells in "who" column of the business plan matrix. Each row is vantage point or perspective of the business that provides a different level of detail on the entities involved in the business. For example, If in the conceptual scope (row-2) you identified the need for a manager to run restaurant operations, in the execution scope you will list the qualifications of such manager and estimate salary ranges for different grades of experience.

Row-1 : Contextual Perspective
The cell in the first row is a reference perspective. Assume there are reference business plans spanning domains such as restaurant business, online portals, retail, online bookstore, training etc. These community contributed plans will serve as a starting point (reference) for anyone planning to start a business on similar model. For example, an "online music store" can use the "online bookstore" and "online portals" as references. The diagram below shows an example artifact for the restaurant business.

Reference - "Who" column for Restaurant business

Row 2: Conceptual Scope
This cell identifies all the sets of people who are likely to be involved with your business. The artifacts for this cell include -

A comprehensive list of potential customers of your business (ex: Corporate customers, retail customers, college students etc.)
A list of key employees/positions required to manage the business and to execute the business plan.
A list of potential partners (types of organizations that you can partner with)
A list of potential suppliers (or types of organizations that will serve your resource requirements)
List of potential board of directors of the organization.
List of venture funds who can bring strategic value to the business.

The artifacts for this cell are mostly documents with list of entries. These artifacts can be created as a list of handwritten papers, text documents, excel spreadsheets, schematic diagrams or even UML diagrams.

Note: If your product is a free web portal, then the users of your portal do not qualify to be categorized as customers, as they do not pay you for the services. However they are an integral part of your business plan. You can classify them as partners in the "who" column or as "assets" in the what column (explained in a subsequent article).

Row 3: Planning scope
In this cell you identify the attributes of the key people involved with your business. The attributes to be identified are those that are important to your business. For example, if your business is about online-dating, then attributes such as age, sex, demographics are important identifiers of your customers - you are likely to segment your customers as college students, single male, single female, metropolitan etc.

The following set of documents are likely to be created as artifacts for this cell -

Divide your target customers into all possible segments (artifacts can be UML diagrams, text document, excel sheet or hand written)
Identify attributes of the key employees of the business (example - experienced software architect, hotel management graduate, Management graduates from reputed business schools). This could be an UML diagram, or an office document.
Identify 3-4 key partners and explain the value they bring to the business. If you cannot identify any names, attempt to list down attributes of potential partners (example - Reputed 5-star hotels, can provide access to high networth indiviiduals)
Identify key suppliers for each type of resource you will require.
If you have a large list of potential board members, business partners, create 2-3 best combinations that will enhance the value of the business.

By now you might have realized that filling the cells is an iterative process whereby you are likely to visit each cell several times or create several versions of the matrix before you have it all mapped out. Here is an example artifact identifying key employees/divisions for an online-dating portal business.

Row 4: Execution scope
In this cell you organize information from your virtual and real execution of your preliminary plans. For example, notes from the discussion you had with a potential supplier or partner or list of the salary ranges for the key employees (based on your research in the employee market). This information will help you fine-tune your planning. For example, if you realize that salaries for hotel management graduates are beyond your budget, you can change your plans to hire diploma holders instead for your restaurant business. The following set of documents are likely artifacts for this cell.

Potential market size for each customer segment identified in planning phase. The artifacts here include summary excel sheet along with references to market research document.
Market salary ranges for the key employees identified.
Notes of discussions with potential partners, suppliers.

Row 5: Competition scope

Identify the customer segments being served by your competitors.
Identify the organization structure of your competitors (this serves as a reference)
Identify suppliers, partners of your competitors.
Identify the board members and the value they bring to the business.
Identify the funding sources of your competitors.

Identifying and listing out important attributes of competition is a key step. It helps you not only in expediting your planning process, but also in improving your marketing pitch.

to be continued...

Framework for creating a (real) Business Plan

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjeev Kumar) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 05:09:00 +0000

Recently I was looking for some help (guide, tool or template) for documenting a business idea, related market opportunities and other details to create a comprehensive business plan. The templates and guides I managed to find on the internet, were about creating (executive) business-plans targeted towards venture-fund audience. But I was not thinking about funding yet (venture or my own). I wanted to organize my thoughts around a business idea and iteratively improve them. Finally I devised my own methodology (framework) which I present here.

In this article, I propose a framework for systematically organizing information required and related to converting an idea into a business plan - A framework to create a real “plan” for a business idea.

A framework can be defined as a logical structure that organizes for a specific subject, a set of related artifacts, shows the relation of the artifacts of the chosen subject area, and brings a totality perspective to hitherto individual ideas. A framework, therefore makes, the unorganized, organized and coherent.

A framework that helps structure and organize a business plan should have the following characteristics.

It should provide a structure for organizing information that defines the scope of the business and how the areas of business relate to each other.
It should help in comprehensive and impassionate analysis of the idea as an investment opportunity.
Help prioritize and identify your core competencies enabling you to assign key resources to critical needs first.
Help identify and mitigate potential risks in your selected paths of action and investment.
It should help in clearly identifying and segmenting the market opportunity
Guide in estimating the investment required to start and sustain the business.
A summary extracted from such framework should serve as an executive business plan for venture funds.
Finally, the framework should be easy to understand and use, and should not require knowledge/usage any specific tool(s).

The Business Planning Framework (BPF) I propose is inspired by the Zachman Enterprise architecture framework, which in turn is inspired by the descriptive representations(the architecture) of buildings, aeroplanes and other complex industrial products.

The BPF is a classification schema, represented visually as a table of columns and rows. Each row represents a distinct view of the business, from a unique audience perspective. A row is allocated to each of the following audiences

Theorists - Generic/Reference contextual view of the business
Owner / Funder - Has a conceptual view of business and its processes
Planner - Strategic view of the business
Executor - Nuts and bolts view of the business
Competition - A perpsective and analysis of competition

The columns of the framework consist of six functional areas best described by a set of interrogative questions –

What – The product / service that constitutes the idea
How – Strategies for running the business
Where – Location of the business and its related entities
Who – People; customers, partners, executive team and employees
When – Schedule of important events from pre-inception to succesful running of business
Why – Motivation for the business. The customer pain points your business addresses. The cost your customer will be willing to pay you for the product/service.

	What	How	Where	Who	When	Why
Contextual Scope	eg: List of products and services.	List of processes the business performs.	Types of locations.	List customer segment, org. structure...	typical lifecycle of business.	goals and strategies of the business.	Reference model
Conceptual Scope	brief desc. of idea	Overview of core business processes. eg: marketing	list ideal locations.	Potential customers, partners. list founding team members.	high level schedule plan.	Identify the customer pain points that this business will address.	Owners / Investors
Planning	Detailed Product / Service specification. eg: Entity-Rel, workflow diagrams.	eg; marketing strategy, essential partnerships.	location and logistics	Segment your customers (ex: by age). org structure for development/delivery.	Master schedule	ex: identify each pain point and	Business Planners
Execution	eg: phased development, agile methodologies.	ex: Business process models for core business functions.	Systems, Hardware	ex: Identify the market size for each segment (numbers and purchasing power), class diagram for detailed org-structure	Component schedule	Cost structure for each service type (per customer), and profit after expenses.	Operations and Management
Competition	List competitors and their product/service. (ex: GAP analysis comparison)	List marketing strategies, business processes of competitors.	Locations charecterstics of competitors	Document the customer segment catered by competition (eg: GAP analysis). List the executive team, partners and venture funds.	ex: Important events in competition since inception.	Customer pain points addressed by competition and the price charged by competition for it.	Competition Perspective
	Description	Strategy	Location	People (clients/providers)	Schedule	Motivation

BPF process summary

I will follow up with a series of blogs explaining each of the rows, columns, and cells in this ontology. Lets briefly examine some concepts here -

Whats inside a cell - Each cell in this matrix contains one or more artifacts. An artifact is a work product such as a network diagram, a use-case specification, a a catalog (list of things), diagrams, or even matrices. For example, a class diagram describes the organization structure, or a GAP-analysis document is part of competition scope.

Iterative process - Planning a business is an iterative process. As you continue organizing your ideas systematically, you may run into new ideas, plans and dependencies. You will perhaps go back to a cell multiple times till you get it right.

Mistake focussing only on column-1 - Without an organized plan several of us focus only on the product-design and service-delivery planning (which constitutes only 5 cells in column-1). This is mostly true for those in software development and services field. As we can now relate, a business-plan constitutes 25 cells of information gathering and analysis. Focussing only on 5 cells (in column-1) is a recipe for disaster. With more insight (from 20 other cells), your plan is more prabable to succeed.

Contextual Scope (Row1) - This is a contextual/referential representation of the business. Example-For a generic "dating portal" business, the "who" cell (column-4, row-1) will include "single men/women". Similarly the "who" cell for a generic "restaurant" business will include "customers, suppliers, employees and partners".

Next Steps

I will appreciate any feedback to improve this framework. If you want to work with me on this task, please email me at sanjeev(at)corners(dot)in.

Apart from completing the blog series I intend to do the following over a time period -

Create reference contexts (row1) for some common scenarios such as Restaurant business, dating portal, offshore software development service
Define in necessary detail, a methodology to fill each of the 30 cells - through example artifacts such as ER diagrams, documents
Identify open-source tools that can help in creating different artifacts
Create an open-source project to store reference plans
If time and resources permit, create an Eclipse based EPF project to automate the steps

Facebook.createApplication API - a great utility for developers

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjeev Kumar) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 13:29:00 +0000

Facebook has recently released the Create Application API to make integration of websites with Facebook more easy and seamless. With Create Application API, the process of creating Facebook applications can be automated. Thus a website can provide easy interfaces for the visitors to encapsulate interesting content into interactive facebook applications. Here is an example on how useful this API really is -Corners enables users to encapsulate a collection of videos, pictures, events, expressions, opinions on any given topic into a facebook application. Currently users have to go through a manual process of collating information from the Facebook application to Corners Application. With the Create Application API, any user can create a rich fully functional Facebook application with just one mouse-click. However, the API does not seem to be complete yet to be really of any significant use. The API contains two variation of a createApplication method -

FB.Connect.createApplication -- the Javascript client library method.
Facebook.createApplication -- the FBJS method.

This method creates an application with a given name and assigns it an application id, app-key and authentication secret values. However, other application settings are left empty. It will be really useful if this method is complemented with API to get/set other application settings programmatically.

A new facebook application from Corners

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjeev Kumar) — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:04:00 +0000

Corners is readying a new facebook application called 'repartee' for release in a day or two. Try it out. This application uses advance facebook integration API - streams API and notifications API. The application is a simple fun game involving friends, where friends tease each other, repartee (quick reply), and exchange comments on teasers involving common friends. The application uses Facebook Stream API to publish every "teaser" action on a wall feed. When a teaser is sent, it is published to the friends wall as a feed. When the reciever replies to this feed, the reply is logged as a comment to the original feed. Similarly when common friends (of sender and reciever) comment on the teaser, the comments get logged to the original feed. Facebook notifications API helped us solve a technically difficult problem, which was related to privacy of exchanges between friends. Below is a brief description of the problem and how we solved it. Problem Statement 1. A teaser should be accessible to the sender of the teaser and the reciever from inside the application. 2. A teaser should be accessible to common friends of sender and reciever from inside the application. This is to enable friends to comment on the teaser and make it more interesting. Technical challenge Assume a user "John" logs into the application. Presenting the teasers sent or recieved by him is easy as this information is logged in Corners database. Presenting teasers involving friends of John would require us to get a list of ids of John's friends (using Facebook API), and query for teasers sent and recieved by those ids (in Corners database). This would be an expensive query. Facebook notifications API came to our rescue. Every action on a teaser is sent as a facebook notification to the sender, reciever and their common friends. These facebook notifications are now available to applications through Notifications API. When John logs into our application, we present him with the list of notifications from this application. Each notification contains a link to the teaser that originated the notification. Try teaser application and discover how we used facebook API to convert a simple exchange of information into a social game.

Facebook connect your website

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjeev Kumar) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 04:00:00 +0000

Facebook connect has evolved as an important tool for increasing traffic and user engagement for websites. What is Facebook Connect? Facebook Connect is a free API for websites, desktop applications and iPhone, which facilitates users to easily share your content and the actions users take on your site with their friends on Facebook. With Facebook Connect APIs you can gain access to

Identity: a user’s name, photos, and more.
Friends: data about a user’s friends.
Distribution: all of the integration points within Facebook, like stream stories and notifications.
Integration: profile boxes, profile tabs, and publishers just like apps on Facebook

What is the work involved in implementing Facebook connect? Technical integration of Facebook Connect with your website is a breeze. However, creativity and effort will be required to enable a more social and engaging experience on your site, that can effectively use the viral channels and the data about users and their friends. Before you hit the trail on connecting your website with Facebook, it is useful to understand the integration points. 1. Identity and Access - Use Facebook Connect functionality as a login mechanism for the users of your website. Facebook APIs provide you access to users name, photos, data about a user's friends etc. You can chose to store or not store user data in your database. For more information refer to Authentication and Authorization. 2. User's wall - One of the coolest benifit of Facebook Connect is the ability for your site to publish stories to your users' Wall and News Feed (of his/her facebook profile). These stories describe some activity the users took on your site.. These stories can contain text and multimedia elements such as images, videos, mp3s and flash elements, thereby providing you a powerful platform for reaching out to all the friends of a user and a mechanism for increased user engagement. More information on streams API here. 3. Notifications - Facebook Connect provides you the ability to send emails and notifications to the friends of a user. For example, if the user starts a discussion in a forum, or wins a game, or expresses liking for a video or an image a notification can be sent to all his/her friends, which in turn will help bring them to your site. 4. Profile boxes and Profile tabs - Your application can install a profile box or profile tab on users profile, which serves as a free promotional space for your application. 5. SQL Style access - You can query the facebook social data such as user details, friends lists, notifications, inbox, events, wall posts using a SQL style interface called FQL (facebook query language). The same information however is available through complementary APIs. However you would use FQL for flexibility and performance reasons. Where do I start? 1. Start with the Introduction to Facebook Connect. 2. Have your development team familiarize with the API 3. Refer to some of the websites that have implemented Facebook Connect. 4. Work on redesigning parts of your website to enable better social and engaging experience that utilizes the viral channels provided by Facebook Connect API. 5. Evaluate the technical choices available for integration - XFBML, Javascript Client Libraries or Server Side REST libraries. Ofcourse, you can intermix the three approaches on your site. Finally there are several open source libraries available to further simplify your integration task. Once you are ready for integration, you can make an appropriate choice depending on your applicaton platform (php, java, ror) and the requirement specifications. We will examine the implementation choices and some best practices in another post to follow. Thanks Sanjeev

Internet Marketing - catch up to catch'em

noreply@blogger.com (Sanjeev Kumar) — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 05:44:00 +0000

In 1995, when search engines came into being, only a few thousand websites existed. Today the number of websites are a whopping 190 million sites. In the same period the internet population has grown from 16 million to 1700 million users. Reaching a target audience has always been a challenge for a website; so much that marketing a website is an industry in itself called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Over the years, SEO investments have progressively seen diminishing returns, as the techniques keep evolving rapidly. Some of the older and prevalant SEO techniques include search keywords, google adwords (paid), meta tags, headings and structure. Cross-links were subsequently added as a paremeter to the search engine algorithms. Blogs and social bookmarking sites such as stumbledupon, digg, reditt and newsvine offered social cross-linking solutions, and became an important internet marketing strategy. Social networking sites Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin have now evolved into major internet marketing platforms. Individuals, companies and websites have created their accounts and pages on these sites and are vying to ride the social graph of their target users on these sites. Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites have opened up access to their platforms through a programmable API. Facebook connect and Twitter API are the latest techniques being put in practice by marketing pioneers to get visibility for their brands. Needless to say, these techniques continue to evolve, thereby keeping internet marketers on their toes in the game of catching up. This blog will offer technical insights into some of the latest solutions on brand/website marketing. Thanks Sanjeev Kumar CEO / CTO, Corners. Note: We have used these methods to grow the user base of Corners to more than 3 Million users. We too are in this game of catching up with the ever changing technology landscape.