Dovetail Software Blogs: CRM Integration and Here Comes Microsoft
“Stories
coming from the company’s annual Convergence conference this week in
San Diego recount impressive integration between Microsoft’s CRM application and the Office suite. The Redmond company could become a huge player in the CRM market, bringing flexibility and interoperability to the rapidly evolving CRM system.
“We’ve
developed for the .NET platform for several years now, and our choice
of this Microsoft platform is one of the great benefits we’ve been able
to bring to the Amdocs Clarify™ development path for companies. Our
open design philosophy, from the very beginning, enabled Companies with
a Clarify database to expand beyond the box, with our hundreds of APIs,
and now Web services.”
The Rise of Crowdsourcing
“Six
years later, critical components of more than 35 percent of the
company’s initiatives were generated outside P&G. As a result,
Huston says, R&D productivity is up 60 percent, and the stock has
returned to five-year highs. ‘It has changed how we define the
organization,’ he says. ‘We have 9,000 people on our R&D staff and
up to 1.5 million researchers working through our external networks.
The line between the two is hard to draw.’
“NineSigma is
an online marketplace for innovations, matching seeker companies with
solvers in a marketplace similar to InnoCentive. ‘People mistake this
for outsourcing, which it most definitely is not,’ Huston says.
‘Outsourcing is when I hire someone to perform a service and they do it
and that’s the end of the relationship. That’s not much different from
the way employment has worked throughout the ages. We’re talking about
bringing people in from outside and involving them in this broadly
creative, collaborative process. That’s a whole new paradigm.’”
Off-the-Shelf Collaboration Opens Up
“The
plummeting costs of collaboration and the advantages of harnessing a
larger talent pool are causing many to rethink their assumptions about
innovation. Unlike the previous generations, today’s entrepreneurs can
buy, off the shelf, practically any function they need to run a
company.”
Ten New Rules for Project Managers
“Collaborate.
Really collaborate. Make it your rule to plan with those people who
will be the performers of the plan. Don’t wait ‘til the project has
gone south to get their help. Start out that way. Continue
collaborating as the usual way you work through the project.”
1 MORE thing CIOs should know about requirements
”Business rules are NOT requirements - After
all, business rules are about how your business takes decisions, not
about how a system works. Trying to capture business rules the way you
capture any other kind of requirement is not going to work – simply
trying to write better requirements will not get it done, I think
system requirements, use cases and business rules are great complements
to each other”
Microsoft Scoops Up Tellme
“Microsoft’s
acquisition of speech recognition firm Tellme could propel the software
giant into several new niches, including voice-activated customer
service and mobile search. ‘We’ve made great strides in speech
technologies but have only scratched the surface of what is possible,’
said Jeff Raikes, president of the Microsoft Business Division.”
