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By Alan Berkson, July 16, 2010 5:33 pm

Shouldn’t Customer Service be a Marketing Opportunity?

Customer Service: The Saga Continues…

Dell Saga: You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

FYI, the issue which started on July 4th has yet to be resolved.

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By Alan Berkson, April 28, 2010 9:30 am

I was inspired by Francine Hardaway’s recent blog Social Media Analytics for Small Business: Still Missing in Action and ensuing spirited commentary to talk about the impact of enterprise standards in the SMB marketplace. In her blog Francine talks about a report by Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group and John Lovett of Web Analytics Demystified on measuring results in Social Media and questions the value of sophisticated measurement techniques to SMB’s. She writes:

The problem I have is that most of the small businesses I deal with don’t know how much it costs to get a customer, and only measure their marketing with a single business objective:  does this help me get customers?

When we started InfoManage back in 1995 our goal was to bring enterprise level support to the SMB marketplace. Our original marketing material talked about how:

…we make enterprise-level support available to small and mid-size businesses…

We could do this by implementing enterprise standards within our service offerings and then doling out portions of our  service to our SMB customers. By association, our customers were now implementing these same enterprise standards, already “baked in” to the service – similar to what Managed Service Providers and SaaS vendors routinely do today.  As I commented in her blog:

The beauty of the “Web” era is how much it levels the playing field for SMB’s to have access to technology/resources/strategies that were once well beyond reach. This goes for standards as well. Very few small businesses know what ITIL is yet they can leverage ITIL ( as implemented by service providers, SaaS, PaaS, et al) to make their businesses more successful.

What Jeremiah Owyang and John Lovett are doing here is setting a process in motion to create a standard. From there, bright entrepreneurs will figure out a way to product-ize these standards. So, what may seem like rarefied air enterprise speak can and will find its way into the life of the SMB market.

While I’m not sure if I believe in trickle-down economics, I do believe in trickle-down technology. There is tangible value to the SMB marketplace for efforts like Owyang and Lovett’s Social Marketing Analytics report. While Enterprise drives innovation and standards to increase operating efficiency and improve the bottom line, these same innovations and standards eventually find their way into ROI equations for the SMB’s.

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By Alan Berkson, April 19, 2010 9:00 am

A while back I remember reading a blog by Merv Adrian, Why Virtual Conferences Suck, in which he says:

Virtual conferences are an opportunity to think about what conferences are for again. There are big social opportunities that can be enhanced, made asynchronous, documented better, and extended beyond the event.

And finishes up with:

 As we say on Twitter: FAIL.

I am going to take some license and extend his comment to apply to virtual seminars as well. 

I recently attended a webinar on Social CRM given by Jeremiah Owyang and Ray Wang of the Altimeter Group. The content of the webinar is interesting as a side note since it was about the impact of Social Media on Customer Relationship management, but what’s more interesting is how I “consumed” the content. I was dialed into the webinar on the phone, logged into GotoWebinar on my computer and was using Tweetdeck on my computer to view my Twitter stream. At the beginning of the webinar, the first slide included a #hashtag to follow along on Twitter. 

As the seminar commenced I experienced an interesting dynamic: listening to the speaker, reading the Powerpoint slides on the webinar, and following along the running commentary on Twitter. As the webinar continued, I also posted my own commentary and replied to others’ tweets. 

The experience was *way* more engaging then just being on the webinar. You got the feeling of sitting in the audience and hearing chatter around you, having a side conversation with your neighbor. It was a revelation. 

Some observations: 

• I felt compelled to contribute to the conversation which in turn made me pay closer attention to what was being said; 
• Seeing what others thought was important enough to tweet gave me a deeper understanding of the content; 
• Got retweeted a bunch of times = fun; 
• Got new followers.

In addition, by the following their own hashtag the presenters had a feedback loop on the effect of their presentation. It’s worth noting I have attended dozens of webinars in the last 6 months but this was the first one which actually suggested a Twitter hashtag. There’s some real value to be had leveraging all the tools at your disposal. What’s your POV?

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By Alan Berkson, January 28, 2010 12:25 pm

I can’t imagine there’s a high-level executive in any Fortune 1000 company that isn’t walking around with two devices on his or her hip: a Blackberry for business; an iPhone for personal use. And he or she probably keeps asking the same question: When will I be able to use my iPhone for my business?

The short answer is I think we are close. 2010 looks to be the year that RIM’s strangle-hold on enterprise communication may finally be broken and iPhone may be the disruptive technology that drives it. With it’s flexible application development platform iPhone (and now iPad) may finally give enterprise software developers enough incentive to finally target Apple for enterprise products.

For the last decade RIM has created a monopoly for enterprise mobile communications with their Blackberry devices and Blackberry Enterprise Server software. The US government is so dependent on them that they wouldn’t let them be shut down during a pending lawsuit. Even our President carries one. What makes them so special and beloved in the enterprise?

Simply put: control. With the alphabet soup of compliance regulations (SOX, HIPAA, PCI) there is a heightened awareness of digital chain of custody. As enterprise IT managers, we need to maintain control over, and an audit trail of, all data that enters and leaves the enterprise. For most businesses mobile communications represents an unsecured border for data traffic.

A short list of must-have security measures includes:

• Remote Management – Since the mobile device is an extension of the enterprise we need the ability to remotely manage the device from a central system (BES, e.g.) including the ability to apply group policies and remotely wipe it clean;
• Secure Communication – All traffic between the remote device and the enterprise needs to be encrypted;
• Audit – This is the big one. Emails forwarded from the device to 3^rd parties (outside the enterprise) need to be tracked (audit trail).

There are many solutions out there that are close, from mainstream vendors like Sybase to new ventures like Codex Development. Maybe I can finally give in to my iPhone envy. We’ll see.

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By Alan Berkson, December 4, 2009 10:25 am

One of the hardest things to quantify is how investments in IT affect your bottom line. In an interview with the Wall Street Jounal, Dr. Peter Weill, Chairman of the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Information Systems Research says “… IT-savvy companies are 21% more profitable than non-IT-savvy companies.”

He is co-author of “IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to Go From Pain to Gain” and you can read the interview here.

Has IT made you more profitable? I’d love to hear about it. If not, maybe we need to talk.

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By Alan Berkson, November 25, 2009 1:17 pm

There is a great deal of excitement surrounding mobile devices like the iPhone and the new Android-based phones. One of the most common questions I seem to be getting these days is “Can I connect my iPhone/Droid/Pre/Blackberry to my mail server?” I’m not going to go into the virtues of the various mobile technologies. However, it brings to mind what I see as a common cycle. Technology goes from being laughed at, poked and prodded, grudgingly accepted to, finally, indispensible.

Let’s take email. Twenty short years ago the only people using email were academics and some brave consumers. Remember when CompuServe ruled the world and AOL was an upstart? You had entirely user-friendly email addresses like 12345.12@compuserve.com? Today, there isn’t an enterprise around that doesn’t rely on email to operate on a daily basis.

My pivotal email moment came a few short years ago. When I was out of the office during the day I would usually carry around my laptop so I could keep in touch – check email, instant message my staff. One day I came back to my office after a day of meetings and was confronted by partner:

“Didn’t you get my email??!?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t bring my laptop with me today…”
“You’re getting a Blackberry!”

It was at that moment that, for our business, constant access to email became a business necessity. We went ahead and implemented an email strategy to meet this need. However, we avoided a major technology pitfall. It’s what I like to call technology sprawl.

For many companies this is an all-too-common occurrence: technology is deployed out of necessity (the CEO has to have an iPhone) without regard to standards and supportability. Before you allow expanded access to that nifty application you have running in your test lab you need to stop and consider the greater impact on your environment. Otherwise, before you can say “hard disk failure”, you have a “production” system down, with no redundancy or recovery strategy.

It is true new technology breeds greater productivity but this leads to greater risk when the technology fails. Technology vendors will continue to tempt us with new technology that promises even greater productivity. The lesson for IT managers is to strive to maintain order amid the chaos.

Have an interesting technology sprawl story? I’d love to hear it…

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By Alan Berkson, November 12, 2009 4:36 pm

An interesting take on the HP/3Com deal by Steve Duplessie at Enterprise Strategy Group:

via HP and 3Com is a much bigger deal than you think.

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By Alan Berkson, November 11, 2009 11:47 am

Buzzwords can be confusing. Take Cloud Computing. Dave Hitz of NetApp recently posted this fairly lucid description:

If I am a business person and I have a business problem that can be solved with IT, there are two ways to go about it. The traditional way is to chose an application, find some hardware to run it on, find some storage for it, find space and power in my data center, find people to operate it, and so on. The cloud computing way is to find a service on the internet instead of an application I run myself, and to let someone else handle all of those other steps. I don’t own a data center, buy any equipment, or operate anything. All my capital expenses are converted to a service fee, or – more common in clouds for consumers – the service is free because I have to look at advertisements.

You can read the rest of his blog entry here.

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By Alan Berkson, October 19, 2009 10:37 pm

Consider these questions:

• What are the annual  IT support costs for your organization?
• What staffing levels do you need?
• What skill sets should they have?

One of the biggest challenges I have selling support services is getting organizations to come to terms with their support costs. In most cases they don’t even know what they are. So when I give them a price, they have no frame of reference to judge my proposals. Is the price high? Low? They just don’t know.

In a typical IT organization everyone wears many hats: the application developer also does support and helps out with implementations; the LAN Administrator installs and maintains servers but fills in for the Help Desk. Even IT Directors end up doing desktop support for the CEO or some other VIP. Then, at the end of the day, everyone wonders why the staff is overworked and they still missed all their project deadlines.

Support isn’t “sexy” and it doesn’t have an obvious impact on a company’s bottom line, but when it doesn’t happen or it’s done poorly, people  notice. We can talk about the impact and cost of downtime to an organization. We can talk about how many servers or desktops one technician can support. Whether that number is 150 or 400, it’s still tangible. There’s still an FTE cost associated with support. The bottom line is…knowing how much you are spending on support and, more important, how much you should be spending on support  will affect your bottom line!

So here are my Top Two Tips Tor Improving Your IT Support:

1. Track Time – Simple, yet oh so difficult. If you don’t have one, get yourself a ticket system. You can shell out cash for a FrontRange Solutions  or a CA Service Desk Manager. Go open source with an OTRS . Or just use an Excel spreadsheet. Whatever way you go, you need to find a way to track the Who, What, Where, When and Why…but most important…the How Long?
2. See Item 1 – That’s not a joke. Tracking time spent doing support is important enough for two spots on any list.

That’s it. Track your time. It’s not fun. It requires additional overhead. It requires a great deal of discipline. But the return far outweighs the effort.  Try it for a few months. When you look back on the data you’ve gathered you will gain valuable insights into what it really takes to support your organization. You’d actually be able to answer those questions I asked at the top.

Need help getting started? Give me a call…

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By Alan Berkson, September 25, 2009 2:20 pm

I have a system for keeping stuff in my house. When not in use most of my stuff ends up piled on the floor in my home office. When that fills up I move it to more permanent storage: my basement. When that fills up? My attic and garage are the final resting place of everything I may need someday that I need to keep…just in case.

Finally, I run out of space to put stuff. Then comes “the purge.” After a great deal of blood, sweat and (sometimes) tears I end up with a curb full of garbage bags.

Did I need to keep the stuff in the first place? Sure, some of it. Should I save my girls’ baseball mitts for next spring? Absolutely. Should I save that umbrella stroller? Three years ago, maybe. Now my kids won’t even fit in it. The point is some of the stuff I store I retrieve and use. The rest of it “expires.”

Companies are no different. For companies, “stuff” is information. Like any living entity, information has a lifecycle: it’s born, it has a useful life and it dies. For information, death means no longer being relevant or useful. Companies are great at creating information and pretty good at protecting it while it’s relevant. The problem usually comes with knowing when to let it go.

For more than half a century information management methodology has focused on making sure we can “get the data back” while ignoring the question of “do we really need it anymore?” There are acres of warehouses filled with magnetic tapes protecting a company’s valuable information assets. How much of those “assets” should really be in a garbage bag on the curb?

In comes Information Lifecycle Management.

There is a growing trend in corporate circles to attempt to reign in the pervasive data sprawl that has come about as a result of cheap real estate a.k.a. disk space. As data center costs increase with no limit in site for the amount of data being generated, IT departments are asking corporate management to buy into retention strategies. Whether it’s email, collaboration suites, or data warehouses, there is more and more urgency being assigned to the need to manage the Information Lifecycle.

In the coming weeks I will review some relevant topics in Information Lifecycle Management including:

• Backup Retention Policies
• Record Schedules
• Data Security

Have a specific question? Let me know.