Outside Innovation

Protecting IP without Trashing Computers

Sony and parent company BMG have had a rude awakening over the past couple of weeks. Sony has been trying to deal with the negative consequences of badly-implemented DRM software on 50 CD titles released this fall. The uproar has been justified. It's one thing to protect your copyrighted content from unauthorized copying and file sharing. It's another thing altogether to place invisible (rootkit) software on a CD that will be inserted into peoples' computers, making those computers vulnerable to viruses and hackers. In fact, spyware is now against the law. Both the State of Texas, of "don't mess with Texas" fame, and a California-based digital rights group have filed lawsuits against Sony BMG, citing their states’ respective anti-spyware laws. If found guilty, the penalties levied in the Texas lawsuit alone can be as high as $100,000 per affected user.

Predictions for Print Licensing Models

The print/publishing world is waiting for the resolution (through settlements or trial) of the lawsuits pending against Google by publishers and authors accusing Google of violating U.S. Fair Use when they scanned and digitized copyrighted works for their Google Library program(see our report, “In Google We Trust?”). In the meantime, both Yahoo! and Microsoft have embarked on their own "digitization of everything" programs. Here's what's at stake. If the courts decide that it is legal for search engines to digitize copyrighted works without the copyright holder's permission in order to show snippets of search results, that will remove one important right from the author's/copyright holder’s control: the right to determine what subsidiary rights to allow for their works. Once a work has been digitized and scanned without the author's/rights holder's permission, the horse is out of the proverbial barn. It's very difficult to control what uses are made of that digitized information.

What’s Really Up with Web 2.0: Customer Innovation and Design It Yourself

Chris Nuttall's Comment and Analysis in the Financial Times on November 17, 2005 titled, "Way of the Web: Start-ups Map the Route as Big Rivals Get Microsoft in Their Sights” does a great job of summarizing the challenge that's facing Microsoft and other established industry leaders by Web 2.0. Chris describes the challenge this way:

"A new wave of Internet development is drawing on established software tools to offer a more dynamic online experience at low cost." He describes the new wave of startups enabled and empowered by Web 2.0 technologies and principles.

The Evolution of Advertising and Direct Marketing (and Google)

As the battle continues between Microsoft and Google over AOL, I find myself thinking about what it is that makes Google’s advertising model so compelling and why all the other players are emulating it. The money that keeps rolling into Google’s coffers (and away from traditional media advertising venues, like newspapers and magazines) makes it clear that Google is winning a large proportion of the worlds’ advertising spend. It’s also clear to me that Google is gaining advertising dollars from tens of thousands of companies (like ours) who would never in a million years use traditional forms of advertising.

Software Companies Are Redesigning Themselves around the “Software as Services” Model

This services-oriented approach is more than a repackaging of software. It's also having a profound impact on the organizational structure of companies. Software companies, in particular, are beginning to shift their organizational structures to accommodate the growing importance of services. This new organizational model has the ability to be much more customer adaptive. It's a good example of Outside Innovation organizational design.

The Link between Customer Experience and Service-Oriented Architecture

We're the first, and maybe still the only, analyst/consulting firm that has made a strong connection between customer experience and SOA. Since 1994, we've been writing and consulting about "making it easy for customers to do business with you," and since 1989, we've been writing and consulting about distributed objects, networked computing, and their evolution into the SOA model. We were the first to jump on the Web Services band wagon. Our Quality of Customer Experience^SM methodology and our Customer Scenario® Mapping tool have included services discovery and definition since its inception 15 years ago.

Microsoft's Anti-Google "Software as Services" Play

This week, Microsoft made a big splash about embracing the "software as services model" and trying to cut Google off at the pass. Microsoft quickly wrapped up and deployed a set of "Live" Services on the Ideas.live.com Web site. Microsoft is using the Google Labs model to publish software services that end users can access,play with, and embed into their lives and their applications. It's about time! Now the services race is really on.

What's Your Customer Experience Vision?

Today I'm starting a new series on Outside Innovation organizational design. You can also think of it as a series on Customer Experience Management. (I don't really like the term Customer Experience Management because it's too "inside out" and manipulative sounding.) I believe that you should be designing your organization to be easy for your customers to do business with you, to fulfill customers' needs, and to transform their lives. You do that by understanding who they are, what they care about, and what they need and/or by designing products and services that will transform customers' lives.

I begin this series with a level-setting report that:

• Summarizes the pain I hear from clients all over the world as they try to shift their companies' cultures and processes from inside out to outside in.
• Describes the shared vision that clients have about how a truly customer-centric organization should look and feel.

We've all seen or felt this vision. Think of this Outside Innovation Vision description as the end point on a Customer Experience Maturity Model.

Some of you actually work in companies that embody this vision—Lands' End, L.L. Bean and Nordstrom come to mind. So do Harley Davidson, Lexus, BMW, and Apple. But most of us work in companies that don't yet (or no longer) feel as if they truly deliver the brand experience we want customers to have every time they interact with us, our touchpoints, and our products. We don't put customers first in everything we do. We design from the inside out, then we check to see if our customers are still with us. A truly mature "outside innovation" company typically doesn't have a customer experience department or a CX executive. But most of us aren't that mature, and we need a way to get from here to there. Chronicling that journey and providing a road map is the goal of this new series of reports. Here’s a link to the first two reports in the series, “Meeting the Customer Experience Challenge” and “How to Approach Customer Experience Management”.