Outside Innovation

Is U.S. Government Surveillance Wreaking Havoc with U.S. Tech Firms’ Cloud Solutions?

On February 25, 2015, David Tanis, Manager of Information Systems and Frontline Analytics for Commonwealth Bank of Australia was quoted during a Gartner Information Management Summit in Sydney as saying:

“The policy needs to be clear," said Tanis. "We like our data managed by the company, for the customers and kept here in Australia."

~ Commbank Rules Out Public Cloud Storage

Also in late February, 2015, the Bank of Queensland (Australia) announced that it is abandoning its Salesforce-based CRM system, due to “a failure to meet operational and regulatory requirements” with the cloud-based computer system. The Bank took a $10 million write-off. Liam Walsh, the reporter at the Brisbane Courier-Mail who wrote this story explained:

“Cloud-based systems and outsourcing of information-technology have previously been in the sights of the banking watchdog, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority. APRA just last year, in a response to the Financial System Inquiry, said while it was not in favour of one technology or another, it had key concerns about cloud computing. These were for banks to be able to continue operations following a loss of cloud services, and issues surrounding confidentiality of data and meeting prudential requirements.”

Mobile Apps: The Path of Least Resistance for Customer Co-Design

We predict that 2015 will be a great year for customer co-design initiatives. There are four converging trends that bode well for customer-centric executives:

1. Mobile app development is a popular investment among top execs.
2. Mobile apps are well-suited to customer co-design.
3. Mobile apps require close integration with customer portals, customer-facing web sites, social media, contact centers, and customer service.
4. Customers’ priorities and success metrics (transmitted through stories) trump organizational politics.

Mobile app development is only one of many areas in which customer co-design shines. Ideally, you want customers to lead any new product or service innovation or re-design activity. But let’s get real. Embedding customers into your internal design and development processes is hard. It’s counter-cultural for most organizations.

Can IBM Be a Major Player in the Apple Enterprise Ecosystem?

As I mentioned last week, in my post, “Enterprise Customers Forged the Apple/IBM Ecosystem,” what tickled me about the exclusive worldwide partnership announced by IBM and Apple on 7/15/14 was that it was a great example of IBM’s running around in front of the customer parade. Enterprise customers—led by their CEOs, sales execs, and top-earning rainmakers—had already voted with their proverbial feet and adopted Apple iPads and iPhones as their devices of choice for getting work done on the go. That meant that their IT organizations had to adapt by accommodating Apple devices and apps, and they did. Soon, an entire ecosystem of third-party tools and services sprang up to help enterprise IT professionals manage iDevices, support them, develop apps for them, and deliver back-end enterprise data and applications securely to employees. Apple helped primarily by getting out of the way. That evolution began four years ago, shortly after the introduction of the iPad. Apple supported these activities with its iOS Developer Enterprise Program, which allowed corporations to develop apps for their own institutional use and not have to publish them in the Apple App Store.

Now, IBM has made a dramatic entrance into this ecosystem—with four offerings specifically targeted for their many enterprise accounts: IBM MobileFirst for iOS, IBM MobileFirst Platforms for iOS, AppleCare for Enterprise, and MobileFirst supply and management. The first two offerings are targeted for application developers and are iOS-specific instantiations of IBM’s MobileFirst offerings, which we described in IBM’s MobileFirst “Customer Cloud” Strategy, in late March. Essentially, this is a cloud-based development platform that is designed to help enterprise app developers develop, deploy, secure, and integrate corporate apps into their (IBM and other ERP) back-end systems and services. IBM has developed 100+ starter kit apps for over 10 vertical industries.

Amazon’s Faux Pas Comes at a Bad Time

This week Amazon announced Amazon Prime Music—1 million songs/tracks available for free for Amazon Prime users. The company also announced more seamless integration between listening and reading to e-books. You can be reading on one device, hop in your car and listen on your phone, picking up where you left off. Pretty nifty.

Amazon is also poised to announce new capabilities and broader reach for its e-payment system—a move we foreshadowed in October 2013 in my article: Why “Pay with Amazon” Is a Big Deal.

This is all part of the run up to the expected release of an Amazon smartphone/music device/e-reader/shopping buddy as early as next week.

The one problem with all this upbeat activity surrounding the Amazon brand is the lingering bad taste left in our mouths from the public airing of Amazon’s contractual disagreements with publisher Hachette. Because the two companies apparently couldn’t come to terms on Amazon’s profit margin or the selling prices for Hachette’s e-books, Amazon retaliated by slowing deliveries of Hachette’s (and other publishers’) hardcover books. This cost Hachette sales, angered authors, and frustrated customers who were waiting for their new best sellers. While we understand that companies often have differences over margins and rights, it was not smart of Amazon to publicly punish Hachette by slowing sales of its books. Customers found out about this bullying tactic, and began to react by pasting these “I didn’t buy this at Amazon” stickers on their books. Amazon’s customer-friendly brand has been tarnished.

When you are about to announce a blockbuster product, you really don’t want your customers and your suppliers annoyed at you. What was Jeff Bezos thinking?

Edward Snowden’s Call to Action

Edward Snowden has mobilized the Tech and UX communities to improve and to rescue the Internet. This is a watershed event. It’s an irresistible and catalyzing challenge that I believe WILL produce results. This week, Snowden threw down a gauntlet: Save the Internet by designing easy-to-use end-to-end encryption.

I believe this challenge will not go unheeded. I expect thousands of motivated user experience professionals and cryptographers to partner in creating the next generation of communications tools for the Internet and for mobile devices. These tools will not only be more secure; they will also be easy to use. Today, if you want to keep from being surveilled, you have to become a techno-weenie. That’s not right, according to Snowden. We should all have the right to be protected against unlawful seizure and search.

Edward Snowden is, of course, the most famous whistle blower in history. He leaked documents from the NSA to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, documents which have proved that the U.S. “domestic” security agency has been collecting, seizing, storing, and analyzing all the email and phone traffic that takes place on the Internet. Snowden spoke at an ACLU-sponsored event at the South by Southwest SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas on March 10^th via Google+ video link through seven Internet proxies. You can watch the conversation between Ben Wizner and Chris Soghoian of the ACLU and Ed Snowden here:

Open Letter to Microsoft’s New CEO

I don’t believe I’ve met Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s new CEO. But I do know Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and John Thompson (the chairman of the board). I like the new management team.

I’ve been disinterested in anything Microsoft does for almost a decade. Why? My clients—customer-centric, tech-savvy executives in both large and small companies—stopped caring about Microsoft. They used to care a lot. Now, what Microsoft does is largely irrelevant to their business and personal lives. Many of my clients still use PCs. But most have non-Windows phones, and they typically have non-MS tablets. They still use MS Office apps. But they don’t care what Microsoft does.

The “post-PC” strategy that Nadella has telegraphed finally piqued my interest. Of course Microsoft is going to focus on mobile phones and on the Cloud. What else would they do? The big danger I see ahead is for Microsoft to chart a predictable course. If they focus on evangelizing Windows Phones and Microsoft Azure, they’re toast! Nobody will care about Microsoft’s phone OS or about Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing alternative to Amazon AWS, IBM’s cloud, HP’s cloud, or Google Compute cloud.

Best of 2013 Customers.com Articles

To kick off the New Year, we offer you our best articles from last year. In fact, in order to make it easy for you to read these, we’ve removed the “paywall” for all of them for 30 days. We hope you’ll take a few minutes to sample those you haven’t noticed or had time to read during the last 12 months.

Every week we publish a new article. Each one takes hours of research, thought, and preparation. Which of these articles did anyone read? Of the visitors to the Customers.com website in 2013, the largest number of you landed on, lingered on, and/or downloaded these 5 of the 60 articles we published last year.

Strategic Thinking:

1. Defining the Customer-Centric Organization: What Are the Attributes and Behaviors that Define True Customer-Centricity? by Ronni Marshak, 7/25/2013
 

2. Peer-to-Peer Business Models: Facilitating “Matchmaking” between Individuals for Fun and Profit, by Ronni Marshak, 7/12/2013

CX How To’s:

3. Utility Customer Experiences: Stark Contrasts in Dealing with NStar and National Grid: What Each Did Right and What Needs Improvement When Helping Customers in Need, by Ronni Marshak, 1/31/2013
 

How to Avoid the 4 Biggest Pitfalls in Customer Engagements

By Patricia Seybold

There’s nothing worse than recruiting customers to work with you to come up with new solutions and then falling flat on your face because you weren’t actually able to deliver what customers wanted. That has happened to us and our clients a few times. But we’ve learned a lot from those experiences. And you are the beneficiaries. We’ve distilled what we’ve learned from our failures and near misses into a set of clear success metrics.

Secret to Successful Customer Engagements
Beware of These Four Things that Will Doom Your Customer-Centric Initiatives
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, September 27, 2013

(Read the short sample and download the full article in PDF.)

 

When Mobile Phones Are Free….Where Will Most Innovation Come From?

Rumor has it that Amazon’s next mobile phone will be free—presumably subsidized by the increase in impulse downloads and purchases we do from our handy phones. On Tuesday, September 10, Apple announced its lower cost iPhone 5C. Technology analysts quickly reported that the low-cost phone is still too expensive in China.

But, guess what, phones and phone service are already getting really inexpensive in the developing world. I was listening to a 2010 TED Talk by Nathan Eagle on Mobile Crowdsourcing, in which he reported that, in Kenya, you can buy a phone, complete with a SIM card and airtime for $15. I highly recommend this TedTalk. Nathan points out that “in reality, the vast majority of web surfers live in the developing world. There’s more people using mobile phones, living in rural villages in developing countries than every western white collar worker on earth. The mobile phone is a developing world technology. It’s their technology. They represent the vast majority of the users and ultimately it has impacted their lives far greater than it has impacted our lives.”

Nathan Eagle points out something that I have observed in my semi-annual peregrinations to Uganda--that everyone in every rural village now has access to a mobile phone, and the applications they use include many that are more sophisticated than what we have—such as the ability to easily and securely pay for things and to transfer money from person to person.

So, as we watch the jockeying for position between Apple, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft in the mobile phone space over the coming months. Let’s remember: the REAL battle is for the pockets of the billions of people who live, work and play in the developing world.

Yeah! Red Sox Owner, John Henry, Just Bought the Boston Globe!

When I wrote about the Globe's amazing coverage of the Boston Marathon bombing, I was really impressed with the reporting, but also with the editorial team's use of social media to help them in their round the clock coverage. The Globe used social media to correct misinformation, to gather tips from citizen journalists, and to communicate in real time with the millions of concerned people around the globe. See: Boston Globe Masters Social Media in a Crisis.

At that time, the newspaper was for sale, and had been for some times. The New York Times had bought the Globe from the family who had owned it for a long time. But the Times wasn't willing or able to invest to keep this amazing and innovative team going.

One of the things that the Globe has going for it--more than many other papers--is the fanaticism of its local sports fans -- as well as those of us who no longer live in Boston, but are scattered all over the Globe.

After writing that case study, I started thinking about the best buyers for the Boston Globe. In my blog post, "Who Should Buy the Boston Globe?", all of my top candidates were local and passionate about Boston culture and would be equally passionate about preserving and amplifying the quality of the Globe's journalism. John Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, was one of my top choices back in April. I'm SO glad that he stepped up to the plate. I believe this is both an emotional and a sound economic investment.

Today's metropolitan newspapers have a real challenge in finding a business model that keeps them profitable. But the Globe's current editorial team and local managers have shown themselves to be truly innovative, scrappy, and hard-working. They are an amazing team. And now they'll be run by an executive team that knows how to nurture talent.