Stories by Michael Vizard

Be thoughtful when adding CRM to e-biz strategy

Far and away among the hottest sectors in IT for the past year have been all things related to customer management. After years of virtually ignoring their customers, corporations everywhere have awakened to the fact that there is a tremendous amount of untapped value in their customer base.

Another paradigm shift awaits

Sometimes it's more important to pay attention to the people who attend an event than what is said at the event itself. That was true during the recent launch of Groove Network, led by the original developer of Lotus Notes.

The platform remains to be recognised

With so many vendors now marketing platforms that promise to take customers to dizzying heights of new functionality, it's a wonder that most IT people are not suffering nosebleeds.

'E-business' over-used and much abused

The trouble with the word e-business is that it has become the most overused and least understood expression in our lexicon of technology and business terms.

Compatibility is step one in partnerships

Partnering has always been one of those thorny business issues that everybody agrees needs to be done to move any business forward. But figuring out who to partner with is relatively easy compared with trying to figure out how to accomplish the maoeuvre.

Wireless mania an IT headache

If you're an IT executive today, things pretty much work this way: so very often when you get a present from a family member, it's the latest in mobile computing devices. In fact, most executives in this business are already carrying wireless handheld devices alongside a two-way pager and a cellphone.
Of course, I personally can't wait to have my own version of a Dick Tracy watch, which means that just about anybody will be able to contact me whenever they take a notion to do so. But the fundamental problem with mobile computing is the need for such a concept - apart from existing IT services, that is.
To make matters worse, companies such as Verizon now are giving away free Internet-enabled phones to people willing to sign long-term contracts. Ericcson, meanwhile, is working with AT&T to create a new generation of wireless consumers by giving away wireless devices shaped like phones, allowing people to win prizes by interacting with the Who Wants to be a Millionaire television programme.
The reason this represents such an immense problem for IT is that all these executives are sure they can't live without such devices. Naturally, this means they want the devices connected to their work environments so that they can become ever more productive.
What most people don't realise is that this presents a huge challenge for IT. Each mobile device on the market today comes with its own set of built-in services for email and calendering. To integrate those services with existing corporate services built around Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange, IT organisations have to invest in synchronisation software that can be purchased from more than a dozen different vendors today.
The problem is that every time one of the devices this software is intended to synchronise gets updated, the synchronisation software needs to be updated. And of course anytime any of the core enterprise applications gets an upgrade, you'll also need to update the synchronisation software.
For IT people, this creates an infinite synchronisation loop that diverts attention away from their real jobs: to make sure that their company has a working IT infrastructure. This loop exists because the concept of mobile computing has not yet sufficiently worked its way into our application development and Internet infrastructure psyche. Instead of having to purchase synchronisation software to make the concept of mobile computing a reality, the technology needed to support mobile computing should be built directly into the applications we use and the services provided by ISPs.
Unfortunately, we're a good two years away from seeing this approach become a reality, so in the meantime we can expect to see continued proliferation of mobile computing products that just add to the problem.
Alas, trying to put a lid on this phenomenon is roughly akin to the effort back in the 1980s of trying to stop the infiltration of PCs into corporate environments. The reality is that you can't stop people when it comes to acquiring the latest gadget in an economy where people have far too much disposable income. And if you don't try to support it, end-users will once again view the IT department as a behind-the-times bottleneck that prevents them from attaining data nirvana alongside their latest stock quotes.
So the best thing you can do for the moment is make a short-term investment in synchronisation software because you will have some modicum of control. Nevertheless, IT organisations should also be putting a tremendous amount of pressure on ISVs and ISPs to create truly seamless mobile computing infrastructures.
After all, it's in their interest to do so. Once we have such platforms, everybody can participate. Until then, mobile computing will just remain a troublesome niche application for those who can afford to pay for it.
The only question that remains is, how long are we going to have to live with mobile solutions that only take us part of the way there?

HP-PwC deal forecasts hosting future

Whether or not the proposed merger between Hewlett-Packard and PricewaterhouseCoopers ever becomes consummated, one thing is clear: the ability to deliver large-scale software services over the Internet is about to permanently alter the competitive landscape of the computer industry.

B2B: The Web's latest Holy Grail

This time last year it seemed inconceivable that so many US dot-com companies would scale back their operations - much less close their doors. Today most survivors congratulate themselves on their ability to hire from a greater pool of talent as people who worked for these companies return to the job market.
The common thread between all these dot-com setbacks is lack of experience. As the specific business segments these companies entered began to mature, it became clear that most of the dot-coms lacked the technology and management experience to scale up the business to meet new challenges.
Most of these dot-com companies were focused on business-to-consumer ecommerce opportunities, which we all know now is inherently hard to do. In fact, the majority of the venture capital community is refusing to fund these types of entities because the cost of acquiring customers and the technology infrastructure needed to support them once they are gained is directly at odds with trying to make a profit.
As a result, everybody is now focused on the opportunities provided by business-to-business e-commerce, now the latest Holy Grail on the Web. At the moment, there is a lot more talk about this subject than actual business transactions, but just about every major IT organisation is gearing up to support those efforts.
How that currently manifests itself is in a lot of work on enterprise application integration. If you peel back all the hype focused on e-business, what you find on a technical level are efforts to create a common data architecture across multiple applications. For most companies, the heart of these efforts is XML, which provides a consistent interface for ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications to be integrated with e-commerce systems, customer management systems, and supply chains. Once this is accomplished, we should be able to drive days and even weeks out of business transactions, much of which is wasted transferring data between these types of systems.
What's ironic about all these efforts is that the negating factor for many of the undertakings will be the exact opposite of the one that doomed many of the earlier dot-com efforts. Whereas the dot-com companies are suffering from a lack of experience, the business-to-business space is likely to be weighed down by too much experience.
This issue will make itself felt on two distinct levels. At the technology level, a lot of time and effort will be spent on trying to retrofit legacy systems into new business models because there is some perceived business value in that system. At the management level, experience also will have taught some people that there is just no way that certain e-business transactions will ever work even though some competitor across the country might be making them work just fine.
Taken together, both of these perceptions can amount to a lethal cocktail for any business entity trying to move its operations to the Web. In fact, it is this experience factor that will lead directly to the collapse of some Fortune 1000 companies unable to adapt to new business models.
The bottom line in this world today is that too much experience can be just as big a problem as too little experience.
In an ideal world, most companies prefer to assemble teams made up of people with a diverse level of experience - to overcome being too dependent on one mind-set. But the reality is that maintaining that level of balance in your organisation is incredibly difficult to do because it involves more art than science.
In the current world of business, we live in extremely perilous times where a single misstep can cause your company to drop market share, to occupy the second, third, or even fourth market-share position in your industry. And as we all know, once you fall below third place in terms of market share, it's hard to justify your existence.
So buckle up. If you thought what has transpired in the last two years was fast and exciting, you haven't seen anything yet.

ASPs make vendors face facts

As more and more vendors transform themselves into ASPs (application service providers), an interesting phenomenon has begun to take shape. Vendors who attempt "to eat their own dog food" find they're having to eat their own words as well. In short, many of the things they either took for granted or ignored are actually turning out to be critical when building a service based on any given set of technologies.

Data centres power new computing model

We have seen the future of business computing and it belongs to Thomas Alva Edison. Just about everywhere you turn these days, vendors are in the early stages of crafting business strategies around computing as a service customers can tap into over the Web. Much of the reasoning behind this computing-as-utility model is drawn from the early days of the electricity industry.

E-Learning Curve

During the past year, Lotus Development Corp., as a unit of IBM Corp., has been steadily reinventing itself by focusing on collaboration, knowledge management, and distance learning as three separate but related markets. In an interview with InfoWorld Editor in Chief Michael Vizard, Lotus CTO Nick Shellness discussed how he sees these spaces evolving and how the Cambridge, Mass.-based company is maturing as a software organization within the IBM family of companies.

Time to re-evaluate helpdesk support

There is one area of IT that, despite the desire to worship at the altar of all things e-business, continues to get no respect and is frequently the butt of jokes from most end-users.

E-war needs smart weapons

If business is war, then in this age of the digital economy the application development department must be the equivalent of the munitions factory. The trouble is - as is often the case in war - most of the weapons on hand at the beginning of the conflict are tired relics that harken back to a bygone era.

IT workers get raw deal

In a world in which every new technology company that goes public makes the people who own shares in that company overnight millionaires, you can’t help but wonder if certain other segments of the technology food chain are now undervalued.

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