CIO Talk Radio Blog

In my last blog, I wrote about IT agility. I wrote about three items that, if embraced, can enable IT agility: (1) agile software development; (2) strategic leveraging of SaaS and PaaS; and (3) virtualization.  However, besides these process and technology opportunities, what can an IT organization do to enable agility?

Web 2.0 with all its plethora of collaborative social tools is encroaching on work. Once upon a time, social media was a corporate taboo, viewed as a time waster, but today, ‘no business colleague is an island entire of itself; Every manager is a piece of the corporation' and social media makes it as easy and quick to share business information with others, as it is to share photos and chitchat with family and friends.

It's that time of the year again - 2012 project planning!  We're all most likely spending time brainstorming and deciding what work needs to get done next year.  Of course we focus on projects that will add value to the company and aim to make a difference that really matters by achieving incredible results - but how do we do that?

There is irrefutable evidence that companies cannot flourish without integration of IT and sales-force functions.  According to Peter Ostrow (Research Director for Sales Effectiveness, Aberdeen Group), “Companies that use co-browsing or screen-sharing solutions within their sales organizations typically see about 73% attainment of the annual sales quotas (as against 60% for companies that do not use it) ….Companies that use real-time Web visitor tracking have representatives that hit their numbers annually 54% of the time (as against 40% for companies that do not use this technology)” (33:30-34:41). It isn’t just that sales people need good, relevant information readily available while making the sale.  Good sales is much more than persuasively informing a prospect, and it is not the art of mastering a discrete relationship, that of the sales situation.  What is not sufficiently appreciated is that sales efforts are contextual and that IT plays a major role in context formation.

John Goodman (author of Strategic Customer Service, Co-founder Tarp Worldwide) estimates that only one in ten companies provides the kind of IT-informed support for lasting retention of customers.   He claims that almost 50% of companies are lulled into the unverified belief that good support obtains due to the fact that the company gathers its general impression from the small number of aggrieved customers that call.  However, it is just the case that only about 10% of customers are sufficiently motivated to act on their complaints.   Additionally, 50% of companies, says Goodman, view customer service almost exclusively as a cost to be minimized.  In other words, there is nothing like widespread enlightenment on the positive relationship between good support and the bottom line.