A Reflection by Your Name
Innovation is a buzz word in modern day businesses and in fact it never went out of style. It is innovation that has enabled certain companies to stay ahead of the rest and command a premium in the marketplace, products, services and stock value. However, the lack of innovation process and management in an organization leads to underutilization of its most valuable assets in namely: knowledge, ideas, experience and judgment of the workforce. The article represents a framework of Innovation Management 2.0, incorporating the development of both tools and philosophies that enables the employees to be engaged much more fully in the innovation process. The white paper proposes nine separate keys to effectively carry out the process of innovation management and enable innovation to be a regular activity in the organization, rather than being a once in a while phenomenon. The paper concludes with how Spigit delivers on the Innovation Management 2.0 by the application and utilization of three core elements: Community, Analytics and Workflow.
The principle audience of the white paper is the upper management and senior executives in the organization who are seeking to build more innovation friendly environment in their workplace and thus have a competitive edge over their competitors. Since many organizations are often unable to tap into the rich resources of ideas, knowledge and experience of the workforce and thus fail to remain innovative, the white paper sets to eradicate such shortcomings by educating all employees, senior or junior and help them to become innovative and establish the system of Innovation Management 2.0
The nine keys to innovation management, which happens to be the centre of focus for the article, are activities and principles that reflect the growing importance of involving employees and their inputs into the strategies and operations of organizations. The nine keys identified by Spigit are: 1. Treat innovation as a discipline, 2. Common dedicated platforms to increase Innovation IQ and strengthen innovation culture, 3. Innovation benefits from a diversity of perspectives, 4. Prevent employee self-censorship of ideas, 5. Create a culture of constant choices, 6. Focus employees’ innovation priorities, 7. Recognize innovation as a funnel with valuable leaks, 8. If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, 9. Pursue a balanced portfolio of incremental and disruptive innovations. The article then talks about these ideas in detail and outlines some of the ways to implement absorb them into the culture of the organization. As per the article, there are two primary reasons for failure in innovation. Those are the classical but now redundant approach of innovation being the responsibility of a few and the inability to track a new idea and build upon it. Spigit then talks about the process of Innovation Management 2.0 at its organization and how it is deeply rooted into its culture through the three core elements.
Spigit outlines some very important principles and ideas relevant in the modern day business environment. Treating innovation as a discipline and having a proper management system for evaluating and monitoring innovation are the areas where special focus is required and failing which the innovation cannot be measured and thus fruitless. As a conclusion Spigit presents their process of innovation based on three core values.
I think that Spigit raises some very interesting and relevant thoughts in its white paper. However, this article apart from outlining 9 keys helps very little in identifying ways to implementing it. The article rather acts as a piece of advertisement for Spigit to spread it word on its process and the benefits an organization can draw from seeking their help.
Walk Before You Run: Comity Technology Advisors
A Reflection by Student Name
The customer today is well educated, collaborative, hyper-connected and very needy. It requires a modern approach for organizations to be able to satisfy the customer and build strong customer relationships. CRM is the primary tool of organizations today through which they provide best customer experience possible. The emergence of social media has opened up new channels for the organizations to explore and enabled even stronger customer interactions. The article recognizes the growing importance of the social media and states that there is need for organizations to understand that both the tools are equally important in designing of effective customer engagement strategies. The article seeks to provide a road map for integrating the two channels into the customer experience strategy. This is where the article states that SugarCRM, Comity Technology’s flagship product is designed in such a way that enables the integration of the two channels in the most effective and lucid way.
The audiences for the article happen to be organizations, or their divisions which focus on customer needs and satisfaction. Since in the modern day business every organization must understand the needs of its consumer, it is thus targeted at every corporation, big or small. The article also interests those who are looking for CRM solutions and want a technology and process which is future ready. The Comity Technology advisers present its SugarCRM as a platform enabling the exploitation of both the cannels, new and old.
The article stresses on the principle that it is necessary to maintain sufficient focus on the core tenets of CRM before newer avenues could be exploited. The functionality that CRM offers should not be neglected at any cost. The ability to receive and push information in real time is one of the biggest strengths of CRM and essential to customer satisfaction strategies. CRM application is the system of record for customer data. The major hurdle in integrating social data is in using and manipulating it—deciding which data to display, which to copy and which to own. The next step of integrating the social data requires a better understanding of the word social. The article proposes that for integration into CRM, social channels, which is made of social networks and social media needs to be well understood. Social networks comprise of Facebook, Linkedin etc. and social media includes youtube, metacafe and other websites where people share their views on various subjects. The article then proposes that in order to be harness the social channel, the organization must be social itself. The article then outlines how SugarCRM and 3rd party applications on it help the organizations in becoming active in the social process.
The article concludes by saying that since the landscape of the modern day business is changing and the customer today is more informed and demanding than ever before, SugarCRM enables organizations to have a platform on which they can build emergent and next generation customer-centric strategy. The technology infrastructure of SugarCRM is flexible and can have both server or cloud deployment and enable workers to focus more effectively on customers.
I found this article to be very informative of the changing trends in customer relationship strategy of the organizations. The article since it beginning has been clear of its motives: to inform organizations to adapt new channels of communicating with customers while continuing with established valuable methods of CRM. The article very well points out SugarCRM as a solid platform to enable the integration of the two channels.
We’re all marketers now: Tom French, Laura LaBerge, and Paul Magill
A Reflection by Student Name
The authors of the article talk about the modern day process of marketing. The article discusses how the marketing techniques have evolved today and it is the responsibility of the whole company rather than a select bunch to carry out engagement with the customers. In this process the article also informs how the definition of a marketing organization has changed. The marketing organization of today, differ from the traditional marketing ones as the consumer now does not differentiate between the product and the promotion. It is the total experience that counts for consumer and thus makes the whole company a marketing organization. This brings in new challenge of ascertaining responsibility and accountability towards marketing activities to individuals or a group.
The article is meant to be an informative to each and every individual in an organization. The article talks about the diminishing boundaries of marketing and other activities in an organization and states that marketing is now involved in each and every aspect of business. Thus, it is duty of all to embrace such changes and prepare to be held accountable towards such activities.
The authors begin with the evolution that has taken place in the engagement of the customers. The engagement has been brought about by more and more involvement of social media in organization-customer relationships. This has made push advertising much less effective as the more aware customer now seeks a more fruitful overall experience with a product than before. The traditional push marketing techniques have given way to more pervasive techniques now employed by the companies. The pervasive marketing principles are built on the thought that customer interactions should be viewed as a set of related interactions, which when seen as a whole, make up the customer experience. The pervasive marketing technique is a process which involves designing, building, operation and continuous renewal. The whole process is centered on having a creative dialogue within all entities in the company. The pervasive organization thus emerged bears a new look. However, for sustenance of the marketing organization, it must evolve along four critical dimensions. They are: 1. Distribute more activities, 2. More councils and partnerships, 3. Elevate the role of customer insights and 4. More data rich and analytically intense.
The article concludes with discussing the major barrier to engagement being organizational rather than conceptual. That is customer engagement difficulties today does not suffer from misunderstanding of the term. It requires more involvement of entities outside the marketing teams so that the whole organization can be referred to as marketing organization. The companies that do not make this transition run the risk of lagging behind the competitors who do embrace this change in marketing methods.
The article was a very informative piece on the marketing methods that are warranted in the modern day market. The article also serves as an eye opener for the reasons why traditional marketing methods cannot work in increasing the customer engagement and what measures the companies need to take in order to remain in touch with the consumers. All in all, the article was very informative and builds upon the concept of marketing organizations, a term which means that marketing is th responsibility of the whole organization, rather than a select group.
