The Enterprise 2.0 Vision

Open source, SaaS, SOA, offshoring, Web 2.0 and other emerging technologies and models are reshaping the future of corporate computing.

One of the hardest things for organizations to do is to retire old applications. Unlike hardware that tends to be replaced on a regular cycle, old software sticks around way too long. It definitely over stays its welcome. I remember when I worked at John Hancock decades ago and watching as departments struggled to replace aging systems. While they were ready and willing to make the change, they often didn’t know precisely how these old systems worked. The developers never documented what they wrote and those people had retired years earlier.

Now you would think that the problem had gone away. In reality, the problem got worse with the advent of client/server computing where there was less structure applied to the development process. I came across a very old article I wrote back in 1996 that talked about a lot of those issues (please ignore the picture). Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, web based development came along. Instead of having a few hundred developers, the web brought the advent of thousands of developers all provide changes and updates to applications. We are now at a cross roads that is quite unique.

While we still have many aging applications that cannot be easily updated, we also have the need to move to Web 2.0 to create Rich Internet applications (RIA). Web 2.0 offers a way to dramatically transform the user experience. Organizations are looking to this approach to development to make access to knowledge and information much more immediate and intuitive than ever before. But the transition isn’t easy.

I got thinking a lot about the transition from client/server applications and old web based applications when I met with Nexaweb a few weeks ago. The company has been around since 2000 and specializes in the Web 2.0 space. While there has been a lot of hype around Web 2.0 it actually is a very pragmatic technology infrastructure. While I think that a lot of customers assume that you can just approach Web 2.0 as though it were a simple web application. The reality is quite different. In fact, good Web 2.0 applications have to be well architected. What I liked about what Nexaweb is doing is their approach to application modernization with a Web 2.0 spin. In essence, Nexaweb is focused on modernization of aging client/server applications by providing tooling that documents the existing code. It is designed to identify bad code and provides a tool to generate a model driven architecture. Like any good consulting organization, Nexaweb has leveraged best practices used to help its consulting clients move old applications to Web 2.0. Nexaweb is selling a set of productivity tools that can generate a model driven architecture. It is intended to generate code as part of this process. The company claims that it can reduce the cost of transforming old code by as much as 70 percent.

The new product called Nexaweb’s Enterprise Web Suite including a UML modeling tool, a reporting tool that identifies repetitive processes, and code that is no longer used. Clearly, Nexaweb isn’t the only company taking advantage of modeling tools and an architectural approach. But the fact that the company is focused on helping companies transform their aging client/server applications into modular, service oriented approach is a step forward. It is one of the set of companies focused on not just updating applications by transforming into Web 2.0. What stands out is the fact that Nexaweb seems to be combining application transformation into business services (can you say Service Oriented Architectures). However, I must add that IBM has been on this track for quite a few years. Through its industry models, IBM has been helping companies transform its aging areapplications into industry specific business services. In addition, Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Air are adding a new level of sophistication to the momentum. WaveMaker, that I discussed in an earlier entry is making a contribution as well.

The trend is clear and it is good for customers. We are finally seeing software companies providing a path to moving code into the new world that is based on reusable, modular services that are architected. The next stage in the movement towards a service oriented architecture is applying this approach to the new generation of Web 2.0. Let me add a disclaimer — this isn’t magic. There is hard work here. None of these approaches or tools are automatic. They give customers a head start but there is hard work to be done. The alternative is to hold your breath and hope that things don’t break too quickly. There are so many promises of easy solutions to hard problems. There are solutions and tools that take the drudgery out of leaving legacy applications behind. But there is worthwhile hard work that really has to be done.

Judith Hurwitz is president of Hurwitz & Associates This piece originally appeared in her blog.

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Shaun Smith's Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM

This week Shaun Smith posted an article on CustomerThink titled, “Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM .”

As Shaun points out, execution is the often the hardest part of creating a branded customer experience.  That’s because you must mobilize employees at all levels and align competing agendas, functions and executives.

Drawing on his experience with leading brands across the globe, Shaun has observed a number of mistakes that are all too common in so many failed initiatives.  In this article, Shaun outlines ways to avoid these pitfalls when implementing your own customer experience initiative.  Here are his “Top Ten Tips” for success:

1. Successful deployment requires the active and continuing involvement of leadership
2. Ensuring cross-functional ownership is vital
3. Focus on your most strategically important customers
4. Find out what these customers truly value
5. Design CEM before installing CRM systems
6. Use customer experience to retain customers rather than attempting to lock-in them in through so called loyalty cards
7. Deploy customer experience before allowing your agency to communicate the proposition
8. Provide ‘branded’ training to ensure that employees all understand the brand story
9. Measure the customer experience and align performance KPI’s with it
10. Sustain deployment through measuring customer experience rather than customer satisfaction

Shaun expands on each of these points with his own insights and examples of successful organizations that follow these tips.  So if you want to join these winners, make sure you read and follow Shaun’s advice in “Top Ten Tips for Deploying CEM."

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Indian IT Firms Brace for US Slowdown

As fiscal 2007-08 comes to a close, there is a feeling of uncertainty in the IT sector. The reason: a slowdown in the world’s largest economy, the US—the Indian IT industry’s biggest revenue generator. Tier I offshore firms—Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosys Technologies, Wipro Ltd and Satyam Computers—are all keeping a close watch on where the US economy is heading, with a strange mix of cautious optimism and bullishness. Recently, the country’s largest software exporter TCS came out in the open and said two of its top 10 clients might show subdued demand in the fourth quarter of the current financial year. Similarly, IT bellwether Infosys has projected a muted quarter. On the other hand, Wipro and Satyam have been bullish and have expressed comfort with the near-term demand.

“The near-term impact of the slowdown in the US market is going to be for both big and small players. There is still uncertainty over clients’ budgets and visibility is expected only by the month-end or early April. It is not just the BFSI that is taking a hit, it is even affecting other verticals like retail and manufacturing,” says an official of a Tier-I company. “There have been price increases and also renegotiations have been successful. But volumes may be muted. Also large projects may get delayed,” says a top official of an IT company.

At the end of the third quarter, the top IT companies had all admitted that IT budget decisions by the US corporate houses were getting delayed, especially in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) segment. They had expected a clearer picture by January-end or early February. The worry lines have begun to emerge as the decision-making process has gotten prolonged and their potential clients continue to be on a wait-and-watch mode.

With the BFSI segment contributing nearly 40 percent revenue to the top IT firms, any adverse impact on discretionary spending by the large financial institutions and global banks will be a drag on their fortunes. But what is reassuring is that, in spite of the near-term demand being less visible than earlier, and an increased competition to Indian players from global peers, offshoring as a trend continues to be attractive.

Recently, a top team of global investment bank JP Morgan met 15 IT and BPO firms and interacted with various players in the offshoring industry. It found that secular trends towards offshoring remained resilient. “While the overall IT demand may be tighter than previous years and could create a rough patch for stocks near-term, we share the consensus view that the offshore demand will increase in response to a slower environment and drive-acceleration in the second half,” the report said.

In 2001-03, during the post-tech boom and the dotcom crash, the Indian IT industry had gone into a sluggish phase following lower demand from the US corporates and had to cut rates leading to impact on margins and lower profitability. But, this time around, the players are better prepared for the slowdown. “Most companies have employed more variable compensation, while there is still flexibility in general and administration (expenses), utilisation, headcount and increasing productivity. Helping matters is the more rational pricing versus the last slowdown,” the report said.

There are four main inter-linked factors that have had a direct impact on the Indian IT industry’s competitiveness— the rupee appreciation, the tight labour supply and wage inflation, and macro issues. Compounding these is the vanishing tax holidays for IT firms in March 2009. The rupee appreciation against the greenback—nearly 10 percent in 2007—has adversely affected the margins of the Indian IT players that have taken a hit of 0.4 percent to 0.5 percent and have been unable to pass on the impact to their clients because of the deteriorating macro-economic situation. Although most companies have hedged the rupee against the weakening dollar, in the long-run, unfavourable currency appreciation may put pressure on earnings.

The supply of labour and wage inflation are directly co-related. With demand surpassing supply, wages have been rising 15 percent annually. Apex software companies’ body Nasscom estimates an annual supply of 200,000 engineers, 24,000 MCAs, 30,000 post-graduates and 350,000 graduates. Currently, there are 1.6 million technical professionals employed in the IT industry and Nasscom estimates that the number will grow 25 percent this year to touch two million. But the lack of quality talent is quite alarming. Only 15 percent of the non-engineering graduates and 50 percent of the engineering graduates are employable. This has forced Companies to open their purse strings to get the best of the lot.

As costs have piled up, India’s edge as a low-cost offshore provider has started diminishing, with other countries trying to close the gap. Indian IT companies have to go in for cost-beneficial strategies that would help them maintain profitability. The slowdown would also catalyse the emergence of winners and losers, with companies going in for a hybrid model— onsite or near-shore delivery with offshore presence—likely to emerge the winners.

So, what has made the industry observers and analysts to be optimistic about offshoring in difficult times? It is the adaptability of the Indian IT firms to the hybrid model and also to embrace different service lines and go in for geographic diversification that has a big positive impact on the industry. For instance, Indian firms looking to offer remote infrastructure and management to compete with its global peers and also looking beyond the Indian labour market to eastern Europe, Latin America and China would help them to sustain their revenue graph. Also, with uncertain global macro-economic environment, wage inflation may ease during 2008 as Indian firms reduce hiring and increase utilisation rates, while global IT majors show a reduced sense of urgency in ramping up their India operations.

So, even as there are concerns and fears of a slowing economy and a potential negative impact for Indian firms due to a cut in IT spending, the impact is expected to last for a short-term and may actually result in an increased offshoring in the long-run.

Source -  Rajesh Menon, The Financial Express

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It’s just a wake up call for the IT industry

It would be pessimist and unfair to assume that we could no longer be the greatest providers of outsourced software services for the world. The industry simply needs to evolve to grow into a bigger industry with larger targets. At the same time, the country needs to prepare as a whole to provide an appreciable environment to overseas customers.

The country is fretting over what seems to be a not-so-bright-future for the Indian IT industry. For those making the bucks, India’s fairytale story can’t seem to go bust so soon. And it might not. Yes, the IT industry is being met with serious challenges that it needs to address immediately. But the good news is there is still a chance and all we need is to prepare for the future. Going by the past trends, the IT industry has always seen it ups and downs. Concluding anything on the Indian IT | ITeS industry would be premature. A recent interview with NASSCOM president Som Mittal, in which he stated that the IT sector expects to meet or even exceed its software export target of $ 60 billion and overall software and services revenue goal of $ 73-75 billion by 2010. So dismissing these numbers would not be appropriate.

However there are surly certain issues that require a thought or considerations. On the surface, there seems to be a downturn in India’s bright and booming IT industry. To start with, there is the appreciating rupee against the Dollar. The Indian rupee has strengthened 15% against the Dollar the last one year. But America being the primary provider of outsourced business to India’s IT companies, their dipping economy fares trouble for companies here.

Another twist to this tale is the reduced spending on IT services by American companies as their economy slows down. Not only has this caused a drop in the rate of salary hikes and hiring, American firms are also passing on and creating lesser work for Indian’s IT companies. As the bulk of work lessens, India being the largest provider of low-cost outsourced services, the impact is reflected surely and poorly.

As Infosys Chief Mentor and Non-Executive Chairman Narayan Murthy has constantly pointed out, another bottleneck the Indian IT space faces is India’s clogged infrastructure. Any foreigner, who steps down at the Indira Gandhi International Airport in Delhi or the Bengaluru International Airport for the first time, will not get the best first impression. For a country that opened its doors for other countries almost a decade back, there is poor development.

Our airports need serious makeovers. Let’s hope the new ones will provide the extraordinary experience that a visitor deserves. If you walk down the road from Bangalore’s airport to the city’s best-known hotel Leela, the traffic and pollution are stifling. Similarly, if you land at Delhi or Mumbai’s international airports, there is nothing welcoming about them yet. The efforts are on, but it needs speed and urgency. Or we are bound to lose work to competitors like China, Eastern Europe and Russia, who not only provide low-cost services but also better propriety. With new fiscal budget awaited in near time I would advocate for policies that would aid to sustain the India IT shining story. The Government will also need to look in continuing the tax holiday to smaller STPs beyond 2009

Competitors are another major threat to Indian’s IT industry. While the industry might not be as organized in countries like Russia and China, they are on their way. And they are also producing quality engineers, comparable to India. Even countries in central Europe are not very far from achieving what we have been bloating over. Emergence of these countries in the IT space has already started impacting our client’s preferences and margins.

India needs to stabilize the way IT firms are working. The talent is there but we still fall short of the demand. If we want to continue supplying work to firms abroad, we need sufficient talent within the nation to meet the demand. Engineers don’t simply need to provide outsourced services that mainly involve testing services. If the industry wants to survive, it will need to train professionals to do substantial tasks that will help firms move up the value chain.

Even companies that are outsourcing work to us now want to pass on more evolved work to India. They will soon be automated and we will be forced to take on other work. We need to prepare our systems and professionals for a future that involves different work like developing systems and solutions for foreign clients including diversifying in the various other geographical regions. Companies like TCS and Infosys have taken the clue and are already undertaking work that will help them grow from a service provider to a policy enhancer with larger foot print. Besides, the kind of outsourcing services we are providing right now might become redundant very soon.

At the same time, despite what the scenario looks like, salaries are being hiked at tremendous rates. Salaries of those higher up in the ranks is soon likely to match of those in the United States. This is not a positive sign for the low-wage advantage that we currently offer. Cost arbitrage may very soon not be considered as a differential factor but a hygiene one.

Fortunately, this is not the end of the story. So far, Indian companies have been providing peripheral work to foreign firms. But times are a changing and any IT firm that wants to keep evolving at the same rate will have to grow to be able to provide higher margin work like consulting. We need to the move up the value chain to sustain the advantage that we are currently offering to the world. In the recent NASSCOM leadership forum there was a great talk or recommendation to the India IT | ITeS company to move up the value chain to sustain the competitive advantage.

With annual growth rates of nearly 30% in the past ten years, Indian IT industry has been resting in peace. We have provided a bulk of talent and spearheaded some of the greatest software development any country has provided. The stats for future does looks encouraging provided the industry works together to over come the hurdle to reverse the IT down turn. It’s time to gear up. If we don’t change, and fast, we may very well be headed for a fall.

The fundamental business model of Indian IT industry of earn is $$ dollar and spend in rupees would prevail in the coming years with amendments of Earn in Yen, Euro, Pound, Dollar…..and spend in Rupees. However the ability to sustain would require a considerable cumulative effort of the industry and government.

Technorati Tags: India IT,Weakness of India,Future of India

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Cincom Acquire shortens and accelerates inquiry-to-cash cycle

Worldwide software provider Cincom Systems (www.cincom.com/manufacturing) announces the first release of its new selling and business acquisition software, Cincom Acquire^TM (www.cincom.com/acquire). The Cincom Acquire Solution Suite is the only end-to-end selling and business acquisition solution for companies that sell complex products and services. It is designed to fill the gaps in traditional CRM- and ERP-based systems strategies such as guided selling, channel and distributor collaboration, sales and product configuration, quotation and proposal management, project and bid management, and contract and order management.

Collaborating for Growth

Built on the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server architecture, a leading enterprise collaboration platform, Cincom Acquire supports collaborative selling processes. Our customers’ product management, engineering and marketing divisions can now align information and strategies, and move that information closer to the sales cycle. All the applications and processes that Cincom Acquire delivers are accessible through well-known Microsoft desktop applications with which customers and end users are already familiar.

Cincom Acquire integrates with “out-of-the-box” Microsoft Dynamics CRM. It also easily integrates with other Microsoft Dynamics ERP systems.

Cincom Acquire’s core components have already assisted manufacturers selling complex engineer-to-order or configure-to-order products successfully streamline their sales, design, and proposal processes by delivering critical product and sales knowledge to the point of sale, while significantly reducing “quote to cash” time. Cincom has helped manufacturers reduce proposal generation time from five days to 15 minutes, decrease time to close a sale by 80 percent, and cut lead times from 14 weeks to six weeks.

Cincom Acquire is currently nominated for Microsoft’s Office Business Application of the Year.

Today’s announcement was made at Microsoft Convergence, Microsoft’s premier Microsoft Dynamics event. For more information about Cincom’s products and solutions for complex manufacturers, visit www.cincom.com/manufacturing.

Technorati Tags: Cincom,ERP,CRM,Microsoft,Sharepoint

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Economic dilemma: Decoupled or shackled?

Decoupling is very much in vogue. The debate is essentially whether India and other emerging economies would suffer synchronised recession along with the US. Suppose these economies are coupled together like the coaches of a train, with the US acting as the locomotive pulling the rest along. If the US slows down, so would all the rest. If, on the other hand, the economies are decoupled, a US slowdown or recession would be less of a worry.

For many observers, the way the Sensex tumbles when bad news comes out of the US has clinched the argument against decoupling. Such a conclusion would, however, be facile. To begin with, one must appreciate the short-term divergence between financial markets and the real economy. When the US Fed cuts interest rates, to stimulate a faltering economy, the markets actually go up.

Shouldn’t the Fed’s confirmation of a slowdown on the horizon move the stock market in the opposite direction? In actual fact, the immediate response of the market is driven by the short-term rise in liquidity arising from the Fed’s rate cuts. Movements in financial markets, let us be clear, have no one-to-one correspondence with developments in the real economy.

The latest issue of The Economist examines the decoupling debate in some detail. It finds that developing countries are far less dependent today than they were in the past on the US as an export destination. Exports to the US account for only 8% of China’s GDP, 4% of India’s, 3% of Brazil’s and 1% of Russia’s. And these economies together contributed 40% of global GDP growth last year. The US contribution to global growth was just 16%.

The point to note is that growth and prosperity in the emerging economies also drive trade amongst them. China is India’s fastest growing trade partner. Emerging markets collectively sent more than half their total exports to other emerging markets.

In fact, China by itself absorbed more than 15% of all emerging market exports, a little more than what the US did. If China were to go into recession, that would be a real problem. While the Chinese authorities are indeed trying to slow down their economy from last year’s 11.2%, that slower rate would still be a fabulous one.

If the global economy were indeed to be hurt by a US slowdown or recession, the least reprieve we would have got is lower commodity prices. But oil continues to soar. Steel makers are happily hiking prices, as are virtually all other commodity producers.

Rising prosperity also increases the demand for high value foods. When crores of Indians and Chinese start consuming milk, eggs and meat on a regular basis, the additional demand this creates for animal feed can be imagined. Well, in retrospect, no one anticipated the sustained demand for goods of all kinds that high growth in India and China would unleash. Hence the shortage. It will take some time for capacity to be created to meet this demand.

That process of capacity creation will drive up real investment. Which is what has been happening in India. The investment rate (investment as a proportion of the total value of goods and services produced) in India has shot up from under 23% in 2001-02 to upwards of 37% in 2007-08.

Investment is taking place in infrastructure — new townships, roads, power plants, power and telecom towers — and not just in industrial capacity, of which export-oriented units is a subset. Whether these investments would
be sustained or not depends more on domestic policy than on the global economy.

If growth has slowed down in India, that is the result of deliberate policy action by the central bank, to ward off inflation. And Budget 2008-09 offers the stimulus, through tax cuts and a hefty fiscal deficit, to insulate growth from any global slowdown.

In other words, India’s real economy can and is decoupled from a slowing US. But the financial markets are not. Perceptions of risk general, rather than country-specific make fund managers to pull their resources out of emerging markets and transfer them to the US and the EU. It will take demonstrated high growth over a few years in India, even as US growth slows down, for the global investment community to determine that India can, indeed, offer a safe haven for investments even as growth in the west slumps.

Source - Economic Times, T K Arun

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Hardware 2.0

Quite recently the term Web2.0 is all over the place and it seems that everyone wants to get over this bandwagon. Though I shouldn't be complaining as I am in the queue to get onto the web2.0, web3.0, web4.0 and so on. These are surely new and exciting times\tools for the marketers.

Well I can go on and on over the Web 2.0 however selecting the topic of Hardware 2.0, hence need to keep the focus onto the same. A good example of Hardware 2.0 could be iPhone, and with the Apple release of an SDK for the iPhone and iPod touch, we can expect more and more application that we can be used on iPhone. Though not being an analyst, I will not be able to justify the new paradigm shift in the Hardware business. However with visible trends seen in the case of the Web's of the world surely foresee a new dimension to the hardware and its business as well.  Conceptually it will create a dimensional shift from what and how we know our hardware today.      

We all know how the "Soft" has changed over the years; yet can we say the same on the "hard" side? This encourages me to think that aren't we to much focused on diversifying in the software and not that much about on the hardware side. Is it to "hard".

The software side has gone and is expected to go through the hyperdisruption however I am yet to see this happening on the hardware side.

With the introduction of the Apple iPhone, and my friend being kind enough to let me see the features of it has forced me to think that we have gone through so much of development in the software, telecommunication, mobile technology however are we still living in the same age of enterprise "hard" automation. Can we we expect it to change? 

Things like Google, Salesforce, Appexchange, Mashup, so on has changed the way we compute today even at an enterprise level. The thing I would like to imagine is, can we move in direction on Hardware "hyperdisruption".  I have been hearing now and then the cloud computing, however still do not know that will I call it as enterprise disruption.

SMB, SME, "target the small", seems to be the flavor of all enterprise targeted sales. But sometime I do wonder that are the companies gear to understand the implication that the SMB sector entails. I may be talking specific to the Indian domestic market, with not even a single person in the name of an IT department in an SME organization that I have visited or known. Please do not take me wrong, I am talking about companies with annual revenue of $30 millions sustaining their IT on single free email id. Then we talk about things like online\on-demand application and we conveniently assume that the organizations we are targeting will have T1 lines with redundancy, backup, etc, etc.

Not going much in detail would like to put the question to wonderful people who have been kind enough to read this post -

• Can we imagine having a single "hard" server that will allow us to "add to cart" application(s) that are only one time downloadable & are pre integrated? Application that suits our requirements, at the time when we require, and not worrying about having T1 redundant net lines?
• Switch on & off application as per our requirements.
• Ability to create hardware that does not require a power connection and runs on power from the network cables as phone lines does (conceptually).
• Not to worry about backup, maintenance, etc. as that will build in by the hardware provider who providing you the servers.
• Can we imagine Hard 2.0, Hard 3.0, so on?

The answer is a probable "YES".

Technorati Tags: Hardware 2.0 Future of IT

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Hottest CEO tool: Blogging

Brands such as O2 and Topshop have been quick to jump on the social networking bandwagon by using sites such as Facebook to target consumers, but a more recent trend and one that carries some risk has been the use of personal blogs as a communications tool.

Last month Waitrose managing director Mark Price, nicknamed the ‘chubby grocer’, launched a blog on the retailer’s website in which he shares his experiences on a healthier eating regime and tracks his efforts to lose weight, as well as arguing for the introduction of tea trolleys to airport immigration halls.

Price’s actions are relatively unusual, as corporate blogging is still in its infancy in the UK. However, it is thought likely that it will become as popular as it is in the US, where practitioners include General Motors vice-chairman Bob Lutz.

Several other brands, including Dell and Benetton, also operate blogs where employees and consumers can interact.
The appeal is obvious. Blogs are a way of achieving vast reach at a minimal cost. Microsoft chairman Bill Gates spoke about the benefits of communicating with customers via blogs at Microsoft’s CEO Summit in 2004.

It had advantages over more traditional communication methods such as emails, he argued, which could be too imposing or exclude potential audiences.

Microsoft encourages its staff to talk to consumers through blogging; it claims that more than 2000 employees use blogs to keep people up to date with their projects.

“It is a great way to communicate with a wider audience,” says Dave Gartenberg, HR director at Microsoft UK. “We are lucky that some of the most prominent bloggers in the world are based at Microsoft.”

Ian Pearman, managing director at Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO, which handles Sainsbury’s advertising, believes many consumers will react well to chief executives taking full responsibility through blogging. “It implies the kind of care and provenance that might be expected of a smaller business rather than a big corporation,” he says.

However, this comes with substantial caveats. Unlike traditional advertising campaigns,blogging demands long-term investment by a company or individual.

“Chief executives can’t start a conversation and then stop it on their own terms,” stresses Pearman. “Once the floodgate is open, the responses will keep pouring in and every one will expect a response [from the blogger].”

This was demonstrated in 2006 when Charles Dunstone, co-founder and chief executive of Carphone Warehouse, started his corporate blog at the same time as the company launched its ‘free’ TalkTalk broadband offer.

Dunstone stated that he would “update his blog regularly to keep [customers] up to date with what’s happening” , but as the firm struggled to cope with the demand for its latest offering , leaving thousands of customers angry and frustrated, Dunstone stopped blogging.

Depending on the content, blogs can also invite ridicule, some consumers, for example,might not take kindly to reading how a chief executive spends his big salary on exotic holidays or hear about his daughter’s Pony Club exploits.

Jane McNeil, managing director of digital agency Agency Republic, warns of the risks of using a fictional identity, known online as ‘sock-puppeting’. “The views of the blogger will be seen as the views of the company,” she says.

McNeil cites the example of John Mackey, chief executive of US grocer Whole Foods Market, who was exposed for posting negative comments about rival firm Wild Oats Markets on Yahoo! chat rooms for eight years, under the pseudonym ‘rahodeb’, an anagram of his wife’s name Deborah.

One post stated that Wild Oats management ‘[doesn’t] know what it’s doing’ and he also complimented himself as ‘cute’.

Whole Foods confirmed that Mackey had written the posts between 1999 and 2006, while Mackey himself claimed he had “posted on Yahoo! under a pseudonym because [he] had fun doing it”, adding that “many people post on bulletin boards using pseudonyms”.

Similarly, Asda, owner Wal-Mart incurred the wrath of web users in 2006 when it was revealed that a blog called ‘Wal-Marting across America’, charting the journey of ‘average American couple’ Jim and Laura across the US in a mobile home, spending each night in a Wal-Mart parking lot, had been engineered and funded by the retailer’s PR company, Edelman.

Jim and Laura were, it transpired, a Washington Post photographer and freelance writer respectively.

“Authenticity of voice is imperative,” says Rory Sutherland, executive planning director at Ogilvy and an avid blogger. “It’s not a good idea to have a PR blog on behalf of the chief executive as, ultimately, they’ll be found out, which could be disastrous for the brand.”

If done effectively, Sutherland sees a bright future for blogging as a form of business communication, alongside web-casts and social media, that encourages ‘openness’, and he urges marketers to judge audience size in PR terms rather than advertising terms.

“A blog may only attract 30,000 readers, but those readers are self-selective and often the most influential consumers,” he points out.

©Bennett, Coleman and Co, Source - Times Of India

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China should learn from India in outsourcing: Expert

A Chinese political advisor and senior corporate executive has strongly advised the government to draw upon the experience of IT giant India in developing outsourcing business to make the country shine in the sector.

Indian firms garnered 65 per cent of the world's IT industry outsourcing market and 47 per cent of office work outsourcing in 2006, Zhang Chunjiang, a member of China's political advisory body, the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said.

Speaking at a plenary meeting of the CPPCC, Zhang cited the governmental industrial strategy, specially "free-of-tax policy" as a major factor for Indian firms doing well.

"The government shall expand preferential tax policies on software firms to all outsourcing business so as to help develop an advantage based on low cost," he said.

Zhang said in contrast to foreign outsourcing firms, including Indian, Chinese companies lagged behind in service quality and attracting the talent.

CPPCC is composed of representatives of the Communist Party of China and non-Communist parties, personages without party affiliation, ethnic minorities and social strata of different hues, including celebrities, scholars and experts.

About 60 per cent of members of the CPPCC, now in its annual session, are non-CPC members.

He said training programmes should be introduced in line with international practice, adding, the government at various levels should take the lead in outsourcing their services and encourage domestic companies to do likewise.
"The country has unique advantages to boost outsourcing business," he was quoted as saying by the official Xinhua news agency.

China's high-quality and effective IT infrastructure network had laid a technical foundation for the business and the country has already attracted a number of multinationals, which could be potential clients, Zhang said.

Source : Economic Times

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