Deliver Order from Chaos

The Coming Workforce

"The key element of the issues faced by the schools is that this is not some form of lawless, aberrant behavior: it’s a way of getting the day’s tasks done that doesn’t fit the infrastructure provided. In this the situation echoes the plight of enterprise IT, faced with redeveloping infrastructure across the board to accommodate today’s knowledge requirements."

US Small Contact Centers Will Increase Their Technology Spending from $821M in 2004 to $972M in 2009

"The SMB market is huge and has historically not in vested heavily in IT. In consequence it represents a rich source of new revenue opportunities vendors as growth in enterprise IT spending slows down. There are not only a huge number of SMBs to target, but many in this sector are willing to innovate or implement new working practices, which require technology to them, such as remote working. There are also a range of new challenges, which vendors need to consider when developing their SMB market strategy."

Authenticity Is the New Quality

"Companies need to systematically examine their decisions, actions and, especially, their offerings with this new lens of authenticity. In this sense, authenticity is the new quality -- it is a new management discipline, one that we are only now beginning to define, explore and delineate. Just as poor quality was the source of many calamities in the past -- and in response, companies developed rigorous tools and techniques for managing quality that have dispersed across all industries -- now companies must develop the same sort of rigorous tools and techniques for rendering authenticity."

Toward Customer-Centric Content Management

"In the survey, which was sponsored by Adobe Systems, eight in 10 executives believed that their companies lose sales each year because customers are not engaged while one in 10 estimated that insufficient customer engagement accounts for 50 to 75 percent of lost sales.

"The executives surveyed believed that stronger customer engagement would translate into improved customer loyalty (80 percent), increased revenue (76 percent) and increased profits (75 percent)."

Should IT model the real world?

"We need to think about this during analysis and design. Of course we should start with a model of the real world, but we should not attempt to capture and implement ever nuance. We should focus on the information activities where IT can add most value. We should carry out 'creative simplification' to build systems that present simple, powerful and valuable capabilities. We should be clear about the limitations of IT, and not pretend it can do everything."

Virtualized Services - What are they?

"Let's say for instance you can fully simulate a WSDL and to generate by itself the actual service endpoint. What this means is that before your development group has even shown up to build the actual service, you virtualize the service and creates a simulated version of the real thing (which doesn’t exist yet) – such that your consumers can invoke this service as if it already existed."

"In fact, there’s a great 'test first' model here, where developers of the actual service will know they’re done when tests written against the virtualized service work on the actual service. The consumers are confident that they will get what they need from the actual service when the virtualized service has been sufficiently executed against."