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The Power of Widgets, According to IBM and Google

We told you that widgets were coming, and now two powerful icons of the online world and the corporate network – Google and IBM respectively – have combined in an agreement to share 4,000 Google Gadgets with millions of WebSphere users.

Widgets are small software applications that are little more than services – they perform nothing more than very specific tasks, certain routine computations or retrieving data from larger databases, for example. Google calls its collection of these widget services “gadgets”. Perhaps the most famous one right now is Google Maps. There is a bewildering variety of Google Gadgets.

The Web is the largest network in the world, and the perfect place for tightly specialized interest groups and individuals to generate these specifically focused services, and then offer them to public utility. The Web is now monetized to quite a degree of sophistication – with Google’s ad-serving capability as the forerunner and most obvious engine. This makes a great software market for the low scale of development involved in widgets.

The enterprise network is monetized differently, wherein all its users receive a paycheck to participate. To a great extent, the market economics required to generate widgets (with the Darwinist elimination of many failed concepts along the way, at no real cost to the network) can’t exist on the enterprise network. In-house IT can only create so many custom utilities. Both worlds need each other, and the corporate net can afford to buy the cream of the Web’s produce.
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Permalink: Thursday, March 01, 2007 1:00 PM
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Daily Dovetail Links 2007-03-01

SOA - Almost As Good As Dovetail . . . . Service Management and the IT Infrastructure Library . . . . Amdocs Sells CRM to UPC Broadband . . . . Microsoft CRM Migration – Moving from one domain to another . . . . Calgary eLearning Network – PKM . . . . Identify High Value Relationships
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Permalink: Thursday, March 01, 2007 8:23 AM
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Software Enables the Human Touch, Reveals its Power

The acronym CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management”, and yet when it comes to the intangibles of customer service it has always been up against the prevailing slogan, “Conclusive Results Matter”. Salespeople have always lived by this mantra, they know that talk is cheap, that leads are nothing until closed, and that only performance counts. Added to this layer of first-time customer acquisition is the deeper and more subtle layer of customer retention, more bluntly called repeat business, and this is a world that salespeople don’t necessarily involve themselves in: the metrics of retention are often far removed from anything they can claim as performance.

“Most revenue systems focus on current period costs and revenues and ignore expected cash flows over a customer’s lifetime.” Beyond risk and compliance: Driving customer value

CRM software has developed along the lines of these underlying dynamics: the focus has been on customer acquisition. Changes in thinking that now lead the software into realms of service and support, and into providing a unique experience for each individual customer, derive more from the brutal facts of customer loss and subscriber churn than from any epiphany of good marketing. All this because analysts have been begging corporations for decades to look closer at retention. . . . .
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Permalink: Thursday, March 01, 2007 12:39 AM
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SOA - Almost As Good As Dovetail

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) resonates with executives throughout today’s business computing environment because it offers opportunities to improve business performance, with limited risk, incrementally, and at relatively low cost.

SOA offers increased flexibility, improved use of assets, alignment with business objectives, and reduced integration costs, but its adoption within the enterprise is by no means simple.

“Butler Group believes SOA represents a transformation in the way the organisation operates, and executive sponsorship is therefore vital, as seen from many successful SOA implementations. Internal politics is often a major contributor to difficulties with SOA, especially as services and resources are now shared” SOA Will Transform the Way IT and the Enterprise Interact by 2012, Says Butler Group

Corporate executives know that their primary mission is to keep the machine producing revenue, all the while that new courses of innovation and change are laid in. The upgrade or overhaul of major parts of the enterprise computing environment is a weighty matter, where miscalculation could conceivably bring the machine to a halt.
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Permalink: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 12:50 PM
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Daily Dovetail Links 2007-02-28

Daylight Savings Time (DST) Impacts Clarify Database . . . . Congress won’t patch your CRM system… . . . . Extraprise Introduces First Onshore CRM Support Center . . . . Customer Service Champs . . . . Are CRM and Proper Development Mutually Exclusive? . . . . Meeting the SaaS Security Challenge
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Permalink: Wednesday, February 28, 2007 6:56 AM
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Daylight Savings Time (DST) Impacts Clarify Database (and Rest of World)

Those who have called Daylight Savings Time a folly from the beginning may snicker at the Congressional decision to alter the dates, but those who have anything to do with software aren’t laughing. Changing the dates of the Daylight Savings Time active period, for the first time in decades, will throw a lot of clocks out of sync.

Dovetail engineer Steven Weintraub has compiled a list of dates affected by the new law, and instructions to update Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the Clarify database

“This requires a good knowledge of CLARIFY database setup and SQL. This is a problem. I am sure Clarify is providing a solution for those using Clarify support – but this does not help the many customers who have stopped paying support.

“For those customers (and this blog post is for you) – they have to know how Clarify stores daylight saving time. There is a table daylight_hr that stores daylight saving start and stop time per year per timezone. First you need to delete the records for the USA and Canada timezones from 2007 on. Then you have to add an entry for each to each US and Canadian timezone (make sure you include ‘Eastern Indiana Standard Time’ but not ‘Arizona Standard Time’). The times for the start and stop dates from now to 2049 are at the end of this post. If you do this right you will delete 387 records and insert 473.” . . . .
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Permalink: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 11:26 AM
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Filed under CRM, Dovetail Software, Dovetail, Clarify, Customer Service and Support, CS&S, Customer Relationship Management, customer service & support, knowledge management, km, daylight savings, daylight savings time, DST
Daily Dovetail Links 2007-02-27

Weatherproofing Customer Service and Support . . . . Too many companies are like bad marriages . . . . Meeting the SaaS Security Challenge . . . . Why Do Retailers Need Our Data? . . . . ERP and CRM: More mainstream for the medium-sized . . . . InvisibleCRM Marries On-Demand Sales Offerings with Desktop Applications, Nucleus Research Finds
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Permalink: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 7:39 AM
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Weatherproofing Customer Service and Support

Within the field of CRM, customer service and support (CS&S) often shows itself to be a fair weather friend: when the storm hits, the system fails. The recent customer experience delivered by Jet Blue, stranding travelers in storm conditions, has received significant deconstruction in the industry, in part because the airline has been noticed in the past for its canny deployment of CRM.

In Jet Blue’s situation, their infrastructure proved inadequate to their system – in the crisis they didn’t have enough phone lines to manage all the information trying to flow. Business rules couldn’t advance cases, and management intervention couldn’t rewrite inadequate protocols on the fly. In the crunch, the company lacked sufficient agility.

”’One bad experience washes away a lot of good ones, and in this case, we are seeing what airline CRM is like,’ Denis Pombriant, managing principal with Stoughton, Mass.-based Beagle Research, wrote in an email. ‘In airline CRM you get all the buzzwords and none of the follow-through.’ In the travel business, the limited number of carriers on specific routes makes airlines compete on price. They are unafraid of losing customers, according to Pombriant, making customer attrition a revolving door.” Is there a CRM lesson in JetBlue’s snafu? . . . .
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Permalink: Monday, February 26, 2007 11:35 AM
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Daily Dovetail Links 2007-02-26

CRM 2007: On-Premise, On-Demand, and Services Everywhere – Part 3 . . . . Six strategies to stay competitive in a global labor market . . . . CRM – debunking the myths . . . . Workers of the world: Six strategies to stay competitive in a global labor market . . . . CRM – debunking the myths . . . . AMI Report: CRM and ERP Becoming Mainstream for U.S. Medium Businesses . . . . Forrester CRM Wave for Mid Market . . . . Think customers: The 1to1 Blog
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Permalink: Monday, February 26, 2007 7:09 AM
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CRM 2007: On-Premise, On-Demand, and Services Everywhere – Part 3

With all the fuss being made over widgets – and there is much more looming – will a commentator someday say that the cute little services known as widgets were like the small furry animals that stole the dinosaurs’ eggs, driving whole breeds into extinction? And if so will that be accurate? It will depend, as it often does, on the aggregations of individual users, the innovations that arise and the new habits that form.

Even as the major CRM vendors are pursuing strategies of vertical consolidation (and more from us on this in a future post), SAP at least has turned part of its labs over to the exploration of these small services. As SAP sees it, in its paper “Widgets and the Rise of Niche Enterprise applications”,

“Both producers and customers want suites of software that work seamlessly together. Custom Bred applications are applications tailored to smaller and smaller user bases. This allows for use specific customization of UI interaction and client-side mash-ups on top of service enabled Best in Class suites…Widgets are an extreme case of the decomposition of monolithic business functions and applications.” [full story] . . . .

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Permalink: Friday, February 23, 2007 12:21 PM
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Filed under CRM, Dovetail Software, Dovetail, Clarify, Customer Service and Support, CS&S, Customer Relationship Management, customer service & support, knowledge management, km

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