Accenture IT Report Encourages Businesses to Lose Control

February 22, 2011

Is your business ready to lose control? That appears to be the direction of enterprise computing, according to a new set of predictions just released by management consulting powerhouse, Accenture.

In the free report, Accenture Technology Vision 2011, Accenture’s information technology (IT) team, led by Kevin Campbell, chief executive of the company’s technology group, reviewed such sources as the subjects of keynote speeches at technology conferences, the types of projects receiving venture capital funding, and the predictions of well known IT experts. These sources are similar to those John and Carrie Vanston recommend consulting when analyzing the viability of trends in their book, MINITRENDS. The Accenture report arrives at a short list of eight trends that are transforming IT.

Accenture sees “a world of IT that barely resembles what enterprise computing looks like today,” according to Gavin Michael, Accenture’s managing director of research and development, as quoted by TMCnet reporter, Rajani Baburajan.  “IT is no longer in a support role. Instead, it is front and center driving business performance and enriching people’s lives like never before,” Michael said.

Accenture sees three major rivers running through its predictions:

1. Greater Distribution of Data: “Data is dispersed across many more locations, and under the control of far more owners.”
2. The Separation of Software and Hardware: “Technology today enables decoupling of entities and layers once deemed inseparable.”
3. The Meteoric Rise of Analytics: “Analytics will become the super-tool with which to drive more agile and effective decision-making.”

You have to be something of a mindreader to parse the jargon of the report and glean the pearls of wisdom it contains, but they are there. Accenture sees decentralization at the core of technology trends, such as cloud computing, which we have frequently covered on this blog.

The report’s insight that IT security needs to move from a “fortress mentality” to a layered and distributed series of security checks is prescient, as is the awareness that greater automation in security and the ability of software to handle “noise” will improve results. Imagine how the technology behind IBM’s Watson (the new Jeopardy champion) will enable computers to understand natural language and anticipate security breaches instead of waiting for an attack.

The Accenture report, like most similar surveys, sees the rise of the social platform in enterprise computing. The website will no longer be the primary connection point between an organization and its constituents. Companies will have to set up shop where the consumer is — on sites such as Facebook and Netflix — rather than waiting for the consumer to come to them.

The report concludes with this powerful insight: The primary role of IT in the past has been to reduce an organization’s costs; in the future, it will be to enhance the user experience. The authors of the report foresee technology that goes beyond Apple Computer’s famously intuitive user experience to something that instantly and seamlessly shapes itself to the unique characteristics of the user.

Accenture’s vision is at once thrilling and unsettling. Organizations will have to move out of their bunkers, distributing their computing resources and allowing users to take control. Like a fast-paced, high-tech amusement ride, it’s going to be scary but enjoyable for those entities able to loosen up and cede control of their IT resources to the audiences they are charged with serving.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “Accenture Technology Vision 2011” (PDF), Feb. 7, 2011
Source: “Accenture Maps Eight Trends That Will Drive Future of IT,” infoTech Spotlight, Feb. 9, 2011
Image by Mulad (Michael Hicks), used under its Creative Commons license.

What is Social CRM? Major New Tech Trend Takes Hold

February 15, 2011

If you haven’t heard about “Social CRM” yet, get ready. Predictions are this will be the “technology trend of the year” for 2011.

Simply stated, Social CRM is the marriage of your Rolodex with Twitter. The Rolodex represents your Customer Relationship Management system, or CRM: your database of contacts, clients, prospects, employees, customers, or anyone else your organization keeps tabs on. Twitter represents the social side of these contacts, whether they express themselves on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, through comments on blogs, or other ways online.

When you merge your CRM system with social networking, what you get is an amazing lifecycle understanding of how your customers were influenced to contact you, what they purchased once they did, and how those purchases worked out for them. Imagine being able to ask a customer, “How did you find out about us” and “How is that purchase working out for you” without having to ask — and being able to rely on the answers as honest and real. That’s the power of Social CRM.

Social CRM begins when an organization starts to listen to what people are saying about it online, and posts its own messages through social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Social CRM deepens when organizations go beyond watching themselves to watching their customers, employees, and other contacts. According to CRM expert and Inc. magazine reporter, Brent Leary, “2011 looks to be shaping up as the year companies go beyond focusing on marketing and promotion” with Social CRM.

Leary is on the board of the Customer Relationship Management Association and editor of its newsletter, “Insights.” His article for Inc. magazine reviews a conference on Social CRM at the University of Toronto held at the end of last year. The conference was the inaugural event for the new Center for CRM Excellence at the University’s Rotman School of Management. Leary debriefs several experts on Social CRM including Greg Gianforte at RightNow, Marcel LeBrun at Radian6, Alex Bard at Assistly, and John Bastone at SAS.

Social networking gives organizations the opportunity to eavesdrop on contacts as they reveal their opinions through actions and comments online. Social CRM gathers those tidbits of information and combines them into reports about contacts that are far more elaborate than professional profilers ever could have imagined. Social CRM makes it possible to, among other things, fix a customer’s problem before they even know they have a problem, or before they report it. That’s powerful marketing!

Another excellent article comes from Maria Ogneva at Mashable, a site not known for deep articles. Ogneva has an interest in the subject, as the director of social media for Nimble, a social relationship management firm. Still, Ogneva intelligently lays out the fundamentals of Social CRM:

The social customer may go to Twitter with a question, a user forum with a customer service query, Facebook with a compliment, or Yelp with a complaint. The processes you establish will largely determine your ability to respond quickly and with the relevant information, while uniting all of these interactions under one customer record.

If you think Social CRM is just another fad that will soon disappear, maybe Gartner will persuade you otherwise? In a study released this week, the giant IT research firm predicted that Social CRM sales will exceed $1 billion by 2013. Spending on Social CRM is expected to double this year, from 4% to 8% of total CRM spending.

Chris DiMarco, Web Editor for TMCnet, nails the significance of Gartner’s report when he writes, “The utility to include and target individuals based on information they’ve provided voluntarily on social media sites will likely be necessary to compete in the very near future.” In short, if you don’t get Social CRM, you don’t get the customer. And that’s the simple reason Social CRM is shaping up to be the app of the year for 2011.

STEVE O’KEEFE
News Editor, Minitrends Blog

Source: “2011: The Year Social CRM Goes Mainstream,” Inc., December 27, 2010
Source: “Why Your Company Needs to Embrace Social CRM,” Mashable, May 21, 2010
Source: “Gartner Says Spending on Social Software to Support Sales, Marketing and Customer Service Processes Will Exceed $1 Billion Worldwide By 2013,” Gartner news release, February 8, 2011
Source: “Social CRM to Explode in the Immediate Future says Gartner Study,” TMCnet, February 8, 2011
Image by nerissa’s ring, used under its Creative Commons license.