Deliver Order from Chaos

"A heads up for folks who are interested in learning more about (a) customer service and support, (b) marketing or (c) Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) -- I'll be leading a workshop session at the 'Customer Service is the New Marketing' conference next Monday here in SF."

"Best-in-class companies differentiate themselves from more 'ordinary' peers with their ability to master five practices: process, organization, knowledge management, performance management and technology."

"Companies are trying to improve efficiencies and performance of many day-to-day and real-time activities, such as customer interactions, finance and accounting processes, and activities involving transportation/shipping, sales, manufacturing, inventory management and marketing. Aberdeen research conducted for Smart Decisions: The Role of Key Performance Indicators, published in September 2007, found that Best-in-Class companies are improving their time-to-decision through capabilities, technologies and services that enable faster delivery of mission-critical information to the people who need it, when they need it and how they need it."

"The steady expansion of outsourcing continues, according to a new study recently released by Gartner. Taking a comprehensive look at the worldwide outsourcing space, the industry research firm expects to see market growth of 8.1 percent in 2008; more notably, Gartner forecasts growth at a faster pace (11.6 percent) in the business process outsourcing (BPO) segment -- in which contact center outsourcing primarily lies. Gartner's forecast has the BPO segment expanding from $160.7 billion in 2007 to $235.2 billion by 2011."

"It is here that Enterprise Decision Management, EDM, comes into play. EDM is focused on the automation and improvement of decisions - making a system decide what action should be taken and then taking it - not on the support of manual decision making. As such it is both inherently actionable - as it is all about actions - and ideal for delivering those actions to front-line staff and systems. Instead of focusing on actionable insight, you could say that EDM focuses on insightful action."