aheadCRM

Digital Transformation, much like customer journey mapping, customer engagement, customer experience management, is all the rage at the moment. Everybody - and their dog - talks about it. Including me ... but then I think the term is widely overused. The other ones, too. Many companies strive to 'digitally transform' themselves. Because this is what one does. Everybody does it. But why? How? What does digital transformation deliver? Does it deliver? And what is digital transformation at all? Lets start with the last question. A transformation is a wholesales change of an organisation, e.g. a business. A transformation touches all departments of the business, its whole value chain. Digital, in its broadest sense, refers to anything computer. So, in combination 'digital transformation' means to change a business in order to take more advantage of computers and software, in all departments, along the whole value chain. It can even mean a change...

A brief while ago I had a talk with  Ian Hodge , a very established Australia based consultant. One of the topics we talked about was what customer experience is and how to measure it. This led to following brief conversation here on LinkedIn. Hi Ian, you told me that you are thinking about what customer experience is about. Have a look at below article by Paul Greenberg. The main topic is something else but in the second half there are some very good thoughts. http://www.zdnet.com/article/adobe-doubles-down-but-it-cant-stay-in-vegas/ Cheers Thomas Thx Thomas - interesting. I like the "catch 22" problem that delighting a customer runs the risk of increasing expectations etc. An interesting challenge I perceive is the integration of data analysis with creativity in design. This was always an important aspect of "marketing" and now applies more intensively and broadly with designing "customer experiences". Look forward to keeping in touch. Rgds Ian ...

Back in 2012 thought leader Esteban Kolsky went through the efforts of defining a  pure, open cloud architecture  with its three constituting layers: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS, and samples of their interactions.  A core focus lies on how an open cloud model solves the issues of security, scalability, and integration. Esteban also makes it abundantly clear that it can easily take 10 to 15 years to be widely adopted. First things first: He is right – at least to quite an extent. Personally I am of the opinion that any open cloud model necessarily includes private, and thus hybrid clouds. I say this while I agree that the panacea is the open model. Private and hybrid models are at least challenged in the security aspect and, to a lesser extent, in the integration with the latter usually being mitigated by maintaining a white list of ‘approved’ applications, technologies, vendors, etc. Scalability shouldn’t be a private cloud issue for most companies, given that they wor...

Back in February  I argued that SAP does not exhibit a real strategy in the CRM world  and is leaving on premise customers out in the cold with all the talk focusing on HANA, having Hybris, Cloud for Customer, doing lots of (often good) stuff for on-demand solutions while minimising investments into their powerful, yet somewhat outdated, on premise products. And this without a migration path.  While it was clear that Hybris is to become the leading entity - after all "Customer Engagement and Commerce" was organised around Hybris there have been a number of products and solutions with overlapping scope, mainly in a still emergent state - yes, I am talking about the C4C suite of products.  It was, and likely still is, not really clear  to customers whether there is a better transition than re-implementation for them and how it could work.  Along came Hybris marketing, maybe initially a re-branding of the marketing cloud but nowadays more...

Today I came across a short discussion between two great analysts -  Esteban Kolsky  and Ben Kepes  - who, naturally, take different positions. I mean, where would the value of a discussion be when everybody agrees from the outset ... Whereas Ben maintains that he very much accepts having his behaviour, whereabouts and preferences collected (in the example by Google) and used to receive targeted advertisements that match his interests Esteban counters that it is none of Google's business - and you can freely replace Google with any other brand name - to know this and use this, without your explicit consent. Though I think that targeted marketing can be better than the scatter-gun approach of earlier times I side with Esteban. I do not want to become the "target" of a "marketing attack" in Washington DC when I happen to show up there in May, just because Apple and Google, and name-them-all, know that I like a good coffee. If, and when I want a coffee (a...

Today I ran across  this post  on the Oracle blog, which in its essence is a statement of success of Oracle's business model, in particular their cloud offerings. While one cannot do other than congratulating them for their success there is some disturbing news in there, too. Disturbing, not from a company- or investor point of view, but from a customer point of view. It is the statement on their existing and targeted gross margin. Oracle’s cloud business is getting ever-more profitable, as the company’s aggressive spending on data centers and other cloud infrastructure tapers off amid rising revenues. Oracle reported that the gross margin from its SaaS plus PaaS business came to 50% in Q3, up from 45% in the year-earlier quarter, and it’s climbing toward the company’s target of 80%. While I am aware that gross margin and net margin are different this target raises an interesting question: How much value for the customer does a profitability target like this leave? Or: C...

Earning my keep to an extent with consulting in the SAP orbit it of course is of interest to me how the no. 1 enterprise software vendor is doing in my nape of the world. And I am deliberately not talking about other regions - just mine. And yeah, I also may be wrong, but here's my take. Starting from a look at my specialty - CRM - it appears that not a lot is going on in the SAP arena. While it is true that many companies still consider CRM as not so crucial to their business a deeper look reveals that there is no real drought. There are implementations, but apparently, in the words of my former boss Bob Stutz, then at Microsoft and now at SFDC: "We do not see SAP, the final decision is between SFDC and us". And MS Dynamics grew considerably in the past years. This indicates that there is a market. So why doesn't SAP get the implementations? Is it because of problems with the imlementation projects? They surely exist, believe me! But then other vendors suffer fr...