CRM on the cloud

Most CRM systems today, particularly those used by large organizations, are implemented on large in-house servers that sit behind the corporate firewall. Access is enabled via secure LANs (local area networks). Remote applications are linked to the system using a synchronized methodology or Citrix.

Traditional client/server CRM systems have been used for a long time. They are very stable. However, the nature of these systems requires that remote copies of the database be resident on the users' laptops or be accessed by secure Citrix connections. If the remote copies are lost, stolen or compromised, this data may be compromised or fall into the wrong hands.

In recent years the client/server model has given way to web-based CRM implementations. These systems are accessed over the intranet or extranet, which replace the traditional LAN or Citrix access methodology. The data is accessed only while it is being used, so hundreds of copies of the database are no longer circulating outside the firewall on laptops.

However, the web-based implementations still rely on large amounts of server infrastructure, which must be purchased and maintained behind the firewall. So they are still quite expensive to own and operate.

With the latest deployment option, SaaS cloud-based CRM, the entire implementation is out on the web, and protected by advanced security systems. This approach has substantial advantages over its predecessors, the first of which is accessibility. Users can log into the CRM system from any location with internet access. Cloud-based CRM implementations lower costs in several ways. Hardware and much of the software requirements are standardized and this infrastructure is provided at a reasonable cost by the SaaS provider.  What's more, since there is no hardware or software to maintain behind the firewall, the CRM budget item for IT support is drastically reduced.

You can also develop and launch your CRM system a lot faster from the cloud. With either the client/server or the web-based approaches to CRM, you normally need to build separate environments for development, testing, production and disaster recovery before you can focus on your real objective - robust CRM that improves both customer satisfaction and sales force efficiency. With cloud-based implementations you can skip all the preliminaries and get to the heart of the matter - implementing a CRM system that maps seamlessly into your business process.

With all of these advantages, why wouldn't an organization adopt a cloud-based CRM implementation strategy? Because some institutions have made executive-level policy decisions that all proprietary and sensitive customer data must remain behind the firewall. These currently firm policies are likely to change as 'the cloud' develops a longer historical record for impregnable security.

Many other organizations are confident that the cloud is very secure because it passes all major banking and financial testing procedures. They have moved beyond the question of 'if?' and on to the important question of 'which?' If you represent one of these institutions, you need to carefully evaluate the offerings of the various SaaS cloud CRM service providers to make sure that in addition to a favorable cost structure they provide the openness and flexibility that will allow you to customize your CRM to fit your exact requirements.

Biography
Jay Bayer is President/Senior Process Consultant of STI Systems, Inc., a firm specializing in CRM and business process optimization. Bauer has 25 years of experience in sales and marketing management with such companies as CSC, Boeing Computer Services and Motorola, and has been the senior process consultant on more than 300 projects.

Cloud busting

For most CIOs, cloud computing promises to deliver agility and flexibility while also helping to cut costs and environmental impact. But with so much hype surrounding what EMC Chairman Joe Tucci – interviewed in the last issue of Business Management – dubbed “the next wave of IT change”, understanding what the cloud is and how it could work for your company is a challenging task. There are just so many parameters to work within, so many strategies to follow, and so many questions to ask.

But with data storage capacity needs seeing rapid exponential growth, they are questions that need to be asked - and many firms are finding the answers to their liking, with an increasing number of companies falling over themselves to align their business with a suitable cloud strategy. "Companies are looking at the cloud as something that can manage their increased workloads," says William Fellows, Principal Analyst for The 451 Group. "I guess many businesses see the cloud as the next great white hope."
Using the public cloud as a means of measuring the potential costs and scalabilities of an organization's internal IT is, believes Fellows, a smart move. Public clouds have already begun to replace internal IT infrastructures in many enterprises, so it would be foolish for a company to not at least investigate how cloud-based services could benefit their business.
However, while it is the public cloud environments offered by the likes of Google and Amazon that have captured the public's imagination, much of corporate America is taking a different tack. For most large enterprises, the majority of their IT spend is still going on premise equipment rather than third-party services - Fellows puts the ratio at about 75/25 in most industries - and with a majority of data remaining in-house, the concept of the private cloud is gaining momentum. "Most organizations have virtualized some or all of their data, but the prevailing thought process is that if they had some of the other features of the public cloud at their disposal they could enjoy greater benefits," explains Fellows. "Progressive companies are looking to emulate, replicate or imitate what the public cloud delivers; they are looking at their IT infrastructure and assessing what the total cost and ROI is for hosting and running their own workloads."
The private cloud is seen as a potentially cost-efficient implementation that many businesses can no longer afford to ignore. "Is it more cost-effective to host and store data internally than on a public cloud?" asks Fellows. "This is something that a lot of companies are looking into: whether they are better off investing in their own 'best execution venues', purchasing hosting capabilities that are suitable for their business in terms of price, performance and capacity."
Companies unsure of exactly where to start as they take their first tentative steps into the world of cloud computing should, says Fellows, follow a couple of practical steps in order to first assess their requirements. "The first step I would advise is for companies to simply create a service catalogue in order to at least understand what services are available to end-users in their organization. The next step is to look at the cost of provisioning and deploying to those end-users. Just this action of finding out cost allocation is proving an enormous driver because end-users are discovering the range of services that are available to them, and figuring out the specific cost to their business."

All this points to the adoption of the hybrid cloud, which is a managed cloud computing environment where some services are managed in-house, and other services are provided externally. The hybrid cloud, when implemented correctly, enables businesses to enjoy the best of both worlds: the security and control of internal IT mainframes, and the flexible scalability and cost-effectiveness of the public cloud.
"With the hybrid cloud there are a number of combinations that can be applied," says Fellows. "There will be vertically integrated clouds of IT systems in B2B chains where partners and customers will be able to access elements and process their supplies and data on the cloud. But it is going to take longer for the horizontally federated cloud to come into wider usage because the interoperability of different cloud providers is still problematic at the moment. It's not impossible to move workloads between different clouds, but the industry needs to go through a maturation period before we arrive at that stage."
The ability to easily and safely transfer data across different cloud providers will mark a watershed moment for a number of companies who still harbor reservations about cloud computing. Fellows believes we are about three years away from achieving complete interoperability, and what is currently lacking is the technology to make it happen.
For one thing, security concerns abound in the world of cloud computing. Companies fret over access to the data, control of their data and loss of their data. "We have found is that there is a pretty consistent level of concern regarding the issues of trust, control and security amongst end-users," says Fellows. "However, it is important to distinguish between security and trust. IT security - the security of your actual systems - is obviously a concern, but more important are the regulatory and compliance requirements. These issues are quite distinct and separate, but rolled up and bundled together. The major concern for a great number of companies is overall control and trust. And within that there are data management concerns, auditing, interoperability and so on."
Fellows' research has identified a number of inhibitors to adoption of the cloud, with control and trust forming what he calls the first set of inhibitors, and cultural concerns the second set. "Often reluctance to embrace cloud computing has little to do with technology," says Fellows. "Snagging points revolve around issues of internal resistance to change. Whenever the issue of power, trust and control come up, there are a whole bunch of organizational factors that have to mature or change in order for new practices to be accommodated, new working environments to be embraced and new technologies to be implemented. The cloud brings all three of these inhibitors to change to the very door of the executive decision-makers, so hesitation is understandable."
Overcoming these inhibitors is a challenge that the cloud computing industry must focus on if it is to promote an atmosphere of wider acceptance. Nonetheless, greater adoption of cloud computing will happen regardless, believes Fellows, as more and more companies begin to trust their instincts and take advantage of the wealth of services out there. "Wider use of cloud computing is happening by default because there are people in big organizations who are already using cloud computing to some degree, whether they know it or not," he says. "More pertinently, what we have found is that cost reduction is one of the main drivers to adoption of cloud computing; sorting out that bottom line."

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Building flexible IT resources
Mark Settle, CIO at BMC Software, believes the cloud is providing businesses with a great opportunity to get their strategic approach to IT funding in order. "Cloud computing offers to reduce capital expenditure and management burden, but it also reignites the knotty issues of IT chargebacks - an approach to IT funding that, due to its complexity, was in the past somewhat of a recurring nightmare for CFOs and CIOs."
Settle explains that IT budgets can be assigned by business unit, project or overall annual requirements. But cloud computing, as a centralized IT resource charged on a usage-based billing model, blurs traditional budgetary lines, reviving the concept of the IT function charging its costs back to individual departments. "In the past, chargebacks have been difficult to implement, as calculating the full cost of service delivery is an extremely complex process due the range of variables associated with it," says Settle. "With cloud computing, organizations can build flexible IT resourcing into their operational expenditure for managing cheaper, sustained and predictable business workloads.
"At the same time, they can access extra resource on-the-fly, when a business unit needs it, to get a new project up and running quickly for example, without having to factor in the extra hardware, power, maintenance and labor costs usually associated with new IT capital expenditure," he adds.
It is essential, therefore, for any CIO considering a move to the cloud must work hand-in-hand with the CFO to agree standard procedures for procuring, accessing and monitoring cloud resources and service levels to ensure each business unit pays for the IT they need and us, says Settle. "This is also why those IT departments with well-developed business service management (BSM) software deployments that allow them to align IT resource with business demand will already have a head start into the cloud, whether it is public, private or hybrid in its nature."

Is the cloud business ready? By Jitscale

Forming an opinion about cloud computing can be difficult since much has been written on this subject and sometimes articles are diametrically opposed. The usability and technical advantages of cloud computing described in those articles are not always crystal clear and often raise more questions than answers. Organizations need help in guiding them through the fog that has been created by the diversity of opinions.
Traditionally, hardware investments are based on expected peaks in workload. This means that a sizable part of your available server capacity is rarely used, except during peak hours.

A major advantage of using cloud computing for your infrastructure is flexibility. You no longer need to invest in systems and building a platform based on an estimated potential load or usage. By using cloud computing you can configure the size of your platform based on its effective usage. Scaling can be done vertically - computational capacity will expand - and horizontally - where new instances are added to the infrastructure dynamically.

A few providers, like Jitscale, even offer the possibility to scale a web platform using the cloud of multiple cloud vendors. In Jitscale's case, the strategy for using - and how to use - different cloud vendors is based on business logic in the Jitscale Management Layer. When, for example, a very high uptime is required Jitscale will use many different clouds from different vendors to create the highest level of redundancy. It could also be that due to the nature of a platform some clouds will need to be excluded because of legal restrictions. This is the case for some European financial institutes having to comply with EU-regulations with regards to safeguarding personal data.
For companies that service international customers through websites there is also the possibility of using a content delivery network (CDN). Using a CDN, content can be pushed - using specific geographic algorithms - to select clouds near the end-user to ensure a low latency connection, resulting in the best end-user experience.

Another advantage of using cloud computing is its financial model. Cloud computing not only incorporates sharing the same physical infrastructure, but also sharing the costs. The cloud vendor will invest in hardware, data centers, uplinks and - in some cases - even licenses. Because of economies of scale the rates for computer-power, data traffic and storage are kept extremely low compared to traditional infrastructures. Platform costs will be billed based on effectively used capacity and therefore makes pay-per-success possible. Your costs will only increase when the usage of your infrastructure increases and the costs will go down instantly when the usage decreases.
Recent studies show that one of the most used arguments not to migrate an infrastructure to the cloud is security; cloud computing is based on a shared infrastructure. Some cloud vendors are secretive about their security policies and there is a lack of standardization. This is no longer the case since some cloud providers are starting to implement ISO/IEC 27001, an information security management system standard which intends to bring information security under explicit management control. ISO/IEC 27001 requires that management systematically examine the organization's security risks, taking account of the threats, vulnerabilities and impact. Furthermore, management have to design and implement a coherent and comprehensive set of information security controls and/or other forms of risk adversion to address those risks that are considered unacceptable. Lastly, they need to adopt an overarching management process to ensure that the information security controls continue to meet the organization's information security needs on an ongoing basis.
In summary, we can conclude that cloud computing has definitely matured over the last years and is able to offer companies many advantages compared to conventional infrastructures, ranging from performance increase and potential cost savings to increasing user experience. ISO-certification makes security arguments obsolete and stresses the fact that cloud computing is business ready. Today.
Biography
Eelco van Beek is CEO of Jitscale, a company providing fully managed, secure, on demand, global, auto-scaling, virtualized and shared IT infrastructure-as-a-service. Jitscale has offices in the US and The Netherlands

Managing the Idea Monkey

When we think about the people who make innovation happen, we divide the world into two parts: idea monkeys and ringleaders. You need both if you intend to create anything new. Walt Disney was a genius, but if not for his brother Roy, Walt's flights of fancy would never have turned into realities.
Idea monkeys serve as connectors, readily joining numerous thoughts to new ones. They don't concern themselves with the myriad of reasons an idea might not work; instead they choose to pour their energy into possibilities. They are upbeat. Remarkably talented. And too often a major pain to rein in.
Do you manage these kinds of people? Then you are a ringleader (as in the person in the center ring of the circus).
A ringleader who knows how to awaken and manage the idea monkeys in an organization serves as an incredibly valuable resource. Since idea monkeys can be a handful, let us share eight ideas we have found helpful in managing them.
1. Keep the idea monkey's energy focused on where innovation happens. As you know, we believe innovation occurs at the synchronized intersection of the need and the idea, and the communication that connects the two. If the monkey comes to you with an unmet market need, tell him to find the idea and communication to go with it. Does he have a great message that your company should use? Terrific. Have him explain how it links to a compelling market need and an idea to fill it. When he tells you this is hard, agree. Say you are asking him to come up with the equivalent of an innovation trifecta. Monkeys love this kind of challenge.
2. Clearly define, quantify, and prioritize needs for the monkey to sink her teeth into. This has two advantages. First, her ideas will start out closer to the "finish line," because, presumably, she will concentrate on a key organization need, one that you can spell out for her. Second, the clear path to follow will make it easier for her to focus. As you know, monkeys tend to get distracted.
3. Further focus the idea monkey's efforts with clear objectives: "We are looking for a product that does X." "We need a service that does Y." "We want to create $100 million in incremental revenue in 24 months. It must leverage our core competencies in manufacturing, be branded under our name, and be patented protected." These sorts of things can function as guide rails.
4. Measure monkeys' progress on a regular basis. Set short-term goals to keep them engaged.
5. Create and share rewards for both monkeys and ringleaders. It will subtly underscore that monkeys need to work and play well with others.
6. Overcome the inherent fear of failure by making failure a positive part of your culture. Celebrate failing forward. Monkeys will feel liberated if you do.
7. Make it fun. Whenever possible, don't say "thou shalt not" or even "don't." You can get the same message across with positive (and even fun) language. Why do you want to laugh a little at work? Simple. Fun is the antidote to fear. A scared monkey is an unproductive monkey.
8. Don't let them get bored. Bored monkeys are not only unhappy monkeys but also potentially destructive ones. (They will find something to do with all that energy.) So, as tempting as it feels to give them a series of short-term tasks they can knock off in their sleep, don't. It benefits everyone if you give them your hardest challenges.
Idea monkeys can turn you into a star—if you manage them correctly.

Marketing planning aims and objectives

Behind the corporate objectives, which in themselves offer the main context for the marketing plan, will lie the "corporate mission," which in turn provides the context for these corporate objectives. In a sales-oriented organization, the marketing planning function designs incentive pay plans to not only motivate and reward frontline staff fairly but also to align marketing activities with corporate mission.
This "corporate mission" can be thought of as a definition of what the organization is, of what it does: "Our business is …". This definition should not be too narrow, or it will constrict the development of the organization; a too rigorous concentration on the view that "We are in the business of making meat-scales," as IBM was during the early 1900s, might have limited its subsequent development into other areas. On the other hand, it should not be too wide or it will become meaningless; "We want to make a profit" is not too helpful in developing specific plans.
Abell suggested that the definition should cover three dimensions: "customer groups" to be served, "customer needs" to be served, and "technologies" to be used ^[1]. Thus, the definition of IBM's "corporate mission" in the 1940s might well have been: "We are in the business of handling accounting information [customer need] for the larger US organizations [customer group] by means of punched cards [technology]."
Perhaps the most important factor in successful marketing is the "corporate vision." Surprisingly, it is largely neglected by marketing textbooks, although not by the popular exponents of corporate strategy - indeed, it was perhaps the main theme of the book by Peters and Waterman, in the form of their "Superordinate Goals." "In Search of Excellence" said: "Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed." ^[2] If the organization in general, and its chief executive in particular, has a strong vision of where its future lies, then there is a good chance that the organization will achieve a strong position in its markets (and attain that future). This will be not least because its strategies will be consistent and will be supported by its staff at all levels. In this context, all of IBM's marketing activities were underpinned by its philosophy of "customer service," a vision originally promoted by the charismatic Watson dynasty. The emphasis at this stage is on obtaining a complete and accurate picture.
A "traditional" - albeit product-based - format for a "brand reference book" (or, indeed, a "marketing facts book") was suggested by Godley more than three decades ago:

1. Financial data—Facts for this section will come from management accounting, costing and finance sections.
2. Product data—From production, research and development.
3. Sales and distribution data - Sales, packaging, distribution sections.
4. Advertising, sales promotion, merchandising data - Information from these departments.
5. Market data and miscellany - From market research, who would in most cases act as a source for this information. His sources of data, however, assume the resources of a very large organization. In most organizations they would be obtained from a much smaller set of people (and not a few of them would be generated by the marketing manager alone).

It is apparent that a marketing audit can be a complex process, but the aim is simple: "it is only to identify those existing (external and internal) factors which will have a significant impact on the future plans of the company." It is clear that the basic material to be input to the marketing audit should be comprehensive.
Accordingly, the best approach is to accumulate this material continuously, as and when it becomes available; since this avoids the otherwise heavy workload involved in collecting it as part of the regular, typically annual, planning process itself - when time is usually at a premium.
Even so, the first task of this annual process should be to check that the material held in the current facts book or facts files actually is comprehensive and accurate, and can form a sound basis for the marketing audit itself.
The structure of the facts book will be designed to match the specific needs of the organization, but one simple format - suggested by Malcolm McDonald - may be applicable in many cases. This splits the material into three groups:

1. Review of the marketing environment. A study of the organization's markets, customers, competitors and the overall economic, political, cultural and technical environment; covering developing trends, as well as the current situation.
2. Review of the detailed marketing activity. A study of the company's marketing mix; in terms of the 7 Ps - (see below)
3. Review of the marketing system. A study of the marketing organization, marketing research systems and the current marketing objectives and strategies. The last of these is too frequently ignored. The marketing system itself needs to be regularly questioned, because the validity of the whole marketing plan is reliant upon the accuracy of the input from this system, and `garbage in, garbage out' applies with a vengeance.

• • • Portfolio planning. In addition, the coordinated planning of the individual products and services can contribute towards the balanced portfolio.
    • 80:20 rule. To achieve the maximum impact, the marketing plan must be clear, concise and simple. It needs to concentrate on the 20 percent of products or services, and on the 20 percent of customers, that will account for 80 percent of the volume and 80 percent of the profit.
    • 7 Ps: Product, Place, Price and Promotion, Physical Environment, People, Process. The 7 Ps can sometimes divert attention from the customer, but the framework they offer can be very useful in building the action plans.

It is only at this stage (of deciding the marketing objectives) that the active part of the marketing planning process begins. This next stage in marketing planning is indeed the key to the whole marketing process.
The "marketing objectives" state just where the company intends to be at some specific time in the future.
James Quinn succinctly defined objectives in general as: Goals (or objectives) state what is to be achieved and when results are to be accomplished, but they do not state "how" the results are to be achieved.^[3] They typically relate to what products (or services) will be where in what markets (and must be realistically based on customer behavior in those markets). They are essentially about the match between those "products" and "markets." Objectives for pricing, distribution, advertising and so on are at a lower level, and should not be confused with marketing objectives. They are part of the marketing strategy needed to achieve marketing objectives. To be most effective, objectives should be capable of measurement and therefore "quantifiable." This measurement may be in terms of sales volume, money value, market share, percentage penetration of distribution outlets and so on. An example of such a measurable marketing objective might be "to enter the market with product Y and capture 10 percent of the market by value within one year." As it is quantified it can, within limits, be unequivocally monitored, and corrective action taken as necessary.
The marketing objectives must usually be based, above all, on the organization's financial objectives; converting these financial measurements into the related marketing measurements.He went on to explain his view of the role of "policies," with which strategy is most often confused: "Policies are rules or guidelines that express the 'limits' within which action should occur."Simplifying somewhat, marketing strategies can be seen as the means, or "game plan," by which marketing objectives will be achieved and, in the framework that we have chosen to use, are generally concerned with the 8 P's. Examples are:

1. Price - The amount of money needed to buy products
2. Product - The actual product
3. Promotion (advertising)- Getting the product known
4. Placement - Where the product is located
5. People - Represent the business
6. Physical environment - The ambiance, mood, or tone of the environment
7. Process - How do people obtain your product
8. Packaging - How the product will be protected

(Note: At GCSE the 4 Ps are Place, Promotion, Product and Price and the "secret" 5th P is Packaging, but which applies only to physical products, not services usually, and mostly those sold to individual consumers)

In principle, these strategies describe how the objectives will be achieved. The 7 Ps are a useful framework for deciding how the company's resources will be manipulated (strategically) to achieve the objectives. However, they are not the only framework, and may divert attention from the real issues. The focus of the strategies must be the objectives to be achieved - not the process of planning itself. Only if it fits the needs of these objectives should you choose, as we have done, to use the framework of the 7 Ps.
The strategy statement can take the form of a purely verbal description of the strategic options which have been chosen. Alternatively, and perhaps more positively, it might include a structured list of the major options chosen.

One aspect of strategy which is often overlooked is that of "timing." Exactly when it is the best time for each element of the strategy to be implemented is often critical. Taking the right action at the wrong time can sometimes be almost as bad as taking the wrong action at the right time. Timing is, therefore, an essential part of any plan; and should normally appear as a schedule of planned activities.Having completed this crucial stage of the planning process, you will need to re-check the feasibility of your objectives and strategies in terms of the market share, sales, costs, profits and so on which these demand in practice. As in the rest of the marketing discipline, you will need to employ judgment, experience, market research or anything else which helps you to look at your conclusions from all possible angles.

Marketing plan

A marketing plan may be part of an overall business plan. Solid marketing strategy is the foundation of a well-written marketing plan. While a marketing plan contains a list of actions, a marketing plan without a

sound strategic foundation is of little use

The marketing planning process

Marketing process can be realized by the marketing mix in step 4. The last step in the process is the marketing controlling. In most organizations, "strategic planning" is an annual process, typically covering just the year ahead. Occasionally, a few organizations may look at a practical plan which stretches three or more years ahead.
To be most effective, the plan has to be formalized, usually in written form, as a formal "marketing plan." The essence of the process is that it moves from the general to the specific, from the vision to the mission to the goals to the corporate objectives of the organization, then down to the individual action plans for each part of the marketing program. It is also an interactive process, so that the draft output of each stage is checked to see what impact it has on the earlier stages, and is amended