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LeWeb3 - Doc Searls: Introducing VRM, Vendor Relationship Management
http://www.lunchoverip.com/ 2007/ 12/ leweb3---doc-se...
(Running notes from the LeWeb3 conference in Paris.) -- by guest blogger Susan Kish Doc Searls is the co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto", the book that first suggested that "markets are conversations". Prompted by host Loic Le
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Can "Conversation" Support Business Process?
http://evolutionofbpr.com/can-conversation-support-business-...Can "Conversation" Support Business Process? Author: Gregory Yankelovich 28 Feb I am very intrigued by a concept of Enterprise information flow based on knowledge workers’ conversations as opposed to "snap shots" of data, stored and based in contemporary databases. "So we’re going to see some things change in the enterprise. Conversation is going to be captured and archived and retrieved and enhanced and allowed to flow. We’re going to use blogs and wikis and twitter and IM and audio and video, we may even have tiny pockets of e-mail and fax and (dare I mention it) telex. Every conversational action will hit an enterprise ping server, populate search engines, aggregators, data miners and online media and even text scrapers." "Musing about enterprise information and flow" J.P. Rangaswami This appears to be an attempt to deal with the perennial adoption problem - people like to communicate using unformalized data supported by conversations, chat, email and wiki technologies, while Enterprise software applications need normalized data to process into meaningful information in order to support business processes. The root of this problem can be exemplified by the desire to gain great value of 360-degree visibility of Customer at a minimum of user keystrokes, which in my opinion is not a technological issue, but a change management one. It requires substantial intellectual effort to transform contextual data of tribal knowledge into Enterprise grade information, and even more so, if we consider a model of extended Enterprise, as it is proposed: "We will be able to manage vendors at least as well as they manage us. We are calling this VRM, Vendor Relationship Management. The project is being launched within the Harvard’s Berkman Center. The core concept is that the individual should be able to manage their relationships with their vendors and suppliers, based on the idea that they actually know more about specific preferences, updated data, etc. And, further, that most CRM systems oversimplify customer data in order to segment, and to effectively manage the info; ultimately they are just a sales system, not a relationship system." Doc Searls "The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind. - Maya Angelou (-1928) Perhaps a better question to ask would be "How can we "mine" conversations to support a Business Process? - There is a lot to learn. In the words of Robert Heinlein - "I am only an egg". 0 Comments Filed under: Change Management, Organizational Transformation Pages (2): 1 2 » Entries (RSS)
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Merger target suspect Citrix assembles virtualization products as Delivery Center
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/?p=2606Citrix Systems, Inc. has announced a restructuring and rebranding of its key virtualization products, as well as the introduction of a new orchestration technology. My question is when will the cloud computing, virtualization, SaaS and advertising combined synergies bubble up to show Citrix’ substantial strategic worth? Who will get it and bet on it first? First things first. The Citrix Delivery Center will serve as an umbrella for a new family of products that includes XenApp, formerly the Citrix Presentation Server; as well as, XenDesktop, NetScaler, and XenServer. The Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based company said that it is renaming the presentation server to capitalize on the connection of Xen with virtualization and to make it fit in with the rest of the product line. Citrix has also announced the release of XenServer Platinum Edition. This will give users the functionality they need to provision both virtual and physical machines. It includes the ability to stream a workload to any server or server farm and will provision servers simultaneously from a single standard workload image. It will also include capacity on demand and the ability to dynamically manage provisioning for disaster recovery and business continuity. Back to the meaty stuff. On an even more fascinating note, came consultant Sramana Mitra’s pithy ruminations this week of how a Citrix and SAP merger would work. And the timing of that tidbit coincides nicely with rumors of a Oracle buy of Salesforce.com. I think both of these scenarios make a lot of sense, and demonstrate that strategic advantage in three years will be cast though a cloud. In other words, everyone who’s anyone in applications needs a services fabric story. They will also need the ability to mine whatever relationship will emerge between enterprise applications delivery and advertising. I’d say even an IBM-Citrix matchup makes sense. Citrix has assembled the means to pivot and weave to work this market disruption in many directions. It can stay on-premises, go to the cloud, deliver the desktop as a service, among other permutations. And there’s always the Microsoft relationship. Indeed, you should have seen the glint in the eyes of the Citrix executives last fall in Key Biscayne when I asked when they will inject ads into their applications delivered as services. I almost saw dollar signs amid the Florida sun-inspired crinkles by their eyes. And let’s not get hung up on the “there will never be ads in business apps” bull. Like I told Henry Blodget in a recent comment to a blog of his: … advertising will surely morph into a smorgasbord of sponsored web services, mashups for hire, affiliated networks, search-oriented lead generation, pay as you use online infrastructure, multimedia informercial snippets, and –most importantly — more intelligent matching of a buyer’s needs and a seller’s outreach. … In a matter of months or few short years, the cloud will permit much richer buyer-seller interactions, things we should not rightly call advertising. Users can get what they need to be more productive, at a price. Sellers will find direct lines to those ready to buy, for pennies per sale. It is semantic selling in one direction, and vendor relationship management, as Doc Searls says, in the other. And this will be a productivity boon to B2B, B2E and B2C commerce. We will soon be able to grease the skids of automated matching of buying and selling, across nearly all goods and services. Ester Dyson has some good thoughts on the subject, too, in a recent WSJ op-ed piece. Back to the more mundane (but necessary) news: XenServer 4.1, according to Citrix, offers more than 50 enbhancements. A full listing of the features and functionality of Platinum Edition and the latest release of XenServer 4.1 are now available on the Citrix Website. The new Citrix orchestration technology, known as Workflow Studio, is designed to tie together the company’s application delivery solutions and integrate them with users’ existing technology components. Workflow Studio is built on Microsoft .NET, PowerShell and Windows Workflow Foundation technologies. This extensible design also makes it easier for customers to link Citrix products into broader systems management solutions from partners like HP, IBM, and is designed to allow everything to function seamlessly within large enterprise environments. ZDNet’s Paula Rooney sees the news as a move away from the company’s open-source mission and said that Citrix officials were trying to back away from Xen by branding its products under the Citrix Delivery System banner. While Citrix is using the Xen name for its individual products, it is positioning the entire stack — including its NetScaler web acceleration platform — as the Citrix Delivery Center. From that, it appears that Citrix is diluting XenSource’s core identity as a virtualization company in order to score points with Microsoft and catapult Microsoft’s forthcoming HyperV hypervisor as VMware’s chief rival. This led Simon Crosby, Citrix CTO, to respond: Xen is profoundly important to Citrix, is changing everything about the way that Citrix develops and delivers its products. Citrix is fully supportive of open source and the community, and you will see much more than just Xen as a core community focus from Citrix in the not too distant future. I’ve been bullish on the Citrix/Xen Source combo, since they joined forced last year. Back then, I said: The acquisition also sets the stage for Citrix to move boldly into the desktop as a service business, from the applications serving side of things. We’ve already seen the provider space for desktops as a service heat up with the recent arrival of venture-backed Desktone. One has to wonder whether Citrix will protect Windows by virtualizing the desktop competition, or threaten Windows by the reverse. The individual products in the Citrix Delivery Center family can be purchased today. A tech preview of the new Workflow Studio solution will be available in Q2 2008. Citrix XenServer 4.1 is currently available as a public beta from the Citrix web site and will be generally available in March 2008. Citrix XenServer Platinum Edition will be generally available shortly after in Q2. That’s provided someone hasn’t bought Citrix first.
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What happens when THEY'RE in charge
http://zane.typepad.com/ccuceo/2008/01/what-happens-wh.htmlThey're your customers, your users. What happens when users are in charge is a pose by Bruno Giussani on Doc Searls' presentation at LeWeb3.
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http://briandrpm.blogspot.com/2008/01/organizational-permeab...
This weblog is going back to its initial purpose of finding articles and weblinks that help to create personal beneficial paradigm shifts. One of the more important areas to learn from has been marketing. As with so many other topics of interest the definition of marketing has become "New" again and seems to continue to expand. My main source of insight and inspiration has been Seth Godin but others also contribute to my education. My take on the following isn't really "marketing", its more communication and collaboration. Each of the following links though provides some important insights as to how to best achieve both both internally and externally to whatever organization you are trying to nurture. Seth's Blog: Meatballs and permeability When your organization starts freely sharing internal data (like rolodexes and schedules and cost info) and allows easy use of motivated outsiders, things get faster and cheaper and smarter. That's one of the side effects of organizing around the new marketing as opposed to organizing around the factory. This strikes me as creating not only an organization knowledge base but an organizational identity as well. The Entrepreneurial Mind: Is Web Changing the Nature of Customer Relationships? The TaxingTennessee blog has a post about an interesting analysis at the Lunch Over IP blog based on Doc Searls' The Cluetrain Manifesto. (Lots of links, I know, but this whole blog thing is supposed to be a conversation after all). It is arguably not only a conversation but one that is as open as possible. There are limits to be sure but increasing communication within in organization up and down the organizational levels and beyond the organizational limits seems to be a requirement for organizations to grow and thrive. ROI? Not With Those Ads You Won't... If you haven't been around forever, you don't have as much money as a companies like Coke or Pepsi (who bombard consumers with brand messages so hard and consistently that it's a wonder the subconscious hasn't caved under attack), distinguishing yourself, making people care, and making them remember who you are can be tough. Before you agree to pony up thousands for a pretty face, a catchy tune or just the services of one more run of the mill advertising firm, make sure you think about how effective your portrayal of your brand message is within the already over crowded space that is the consumer's mind. This suggests that you already have your organization's portrayal or public face firmly established in the mind of all of your members. Knowledge is power is a well known adage and all too often managers develop their power by denying others knowledge. Even when knowledge is shared, if its the wrong knowledge in the wrong market its not going to do anybody any good. Seth's Blog: Your ads are not for you Here's the puzzling math of advertising, offline and on: Everybody doesn't read, remember or click on your ads.Nobody isn't the right answer either. In other words, you don't get 100% attention when you buy an ad. In fact, you don't get 50% attention or even 1%. If you're very very good and very lucky, it might be .1% but it's more likely to be one in 10,000. Which is exactly the right number, it turns out, to make advertising work. I am beginning to believe more in "niche" marketing. You don't have to beat out Britney Spears for Google hits your just need to get your message in front of those who need to see it as stated below. Seth's Blog: Frequency, Frequency, Frequency and the paradox of the Net I think there are two strategies that are shaping up online. The first: burn your permission. Every time you have something to sell, either buy enough ads on popular sites to achieve frequency, or just burn out your core base by repeating your message over and over again. At least you'll make enough money to be able to rebuild your audience later. The second: go easy on the frequency and embrace your audience. Give them what they want (interesting, new stuff) instead of what you need (frequency). Play for the long run. My natural inclination is too go for the second though I realize their are times when the first is more appropriate but I would tend to error towards the long term if left to my own devises. You can target your audience and you can create two way dialogues. Seth's Blog: The joy of the commons Garr Reynolds shows us the joy of the commons. Basically, he's written a book (the book) about presentations and PowerPoint and put entirely too much effort into it. It appears that it has taken him tens of thousands of hours, tweaking endless invisible details to bring us this piece of work.Because the market is crowded, he overdelivered. Dramatically. And it shows. I've built a page about his book and his work. I can't imagine someone who gives presentations not being positively impacted by this book. Well worth it. In the end , it is not only what you say but how you say it. Forwarding webpages with highlights and sticky notes, powered by Diigo
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What happens when THEY'RE in charge
http://zane.typepad.com/ccuceo/2008/01/what-happens-wh.htmlThey're your customers, your users. What happens when users are in charge is a pose by Bruno Giussani on Doc Searls' presentation at LeWeb3.
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