Most enterprises consider business applications to be their priority. Enterprises haven’t given importance to becoming information-centric all these years but it is visibly changing. Priority business applications are ERP, business intelligence and accounting apps.
Primarily, these business applications have helped organizations convert ‘unstructured information’ into a ‘structured format’ that allows for easier management of business critical information. But, organizations have realized that this alone is not enough and there is a lot of knowledge that is available in different forms and buried in different processes across the organization. It becomes imperative for them to manage such content and capture knowledge to be efficient in their business.
This has prompted many enterprises to look at text mining tools that would allow them to do in-depth mining of ‘unstructured text’, both online and offline information, and convert them into actionable inputs for enterprises. This will include customer complaints, call center transactions, email communication etc. Though, this certainly is a few years away for this to become an enterprise priority.
Enterprises definitely have a taken a step in that direction where information-centricity will be sought, with other business applications and data mining application.
ISVs that engineer enterprise software face a number of challenges with respect to flexibility, scalability, extensibility, availability, performance etc. In my mind, the top three challenges that enterprise software face today are:
- Integration with third party software and IT systems
- Transaction types from different data sources and support for disparate client types
- High-volume transaction capability
If a software is architected keeping in mind these three challenges, most issues related to the enterprise software will cease to exist.
I’ve started writing a book on ‘how do you get your customers to buy your product or service?’ specifically with the B2B segment in mind. My writing is going to be based on the following, though not in the same order:
1. My writings will be based on the work that I did – with more focus on what one shouldn’t do rather than what one should do
2. I strongly believe in the fact that there is no such thing called the ‘right way to market’ – it would speak about the experimentation that is required and how to keep it low-cost
3. New age marketing tools like Social Media Marketing, buzz marketing etc.
4. Why is it so important not to lose focus on traditional marketing principles; for instance, value proposition and positioning statements remain sacrosanct irrespective of the medium that you choose
4. It would also have templates that would allow one to do their marketing plan
5. It would have practical examples with which one can de-risk their marketing intiatives
6. Series of interviews with marketing practitioners from different settings. These would also be covered in the book
7. Lead generation techniques, lead nurturing techniques and its effectiveness
8. Thought leadership – it certainly is about thoughts?
9. Marketing ideas that you can take and implement immediately; ideas that wouldn’t take you more than 2 minutes to start implementing
10. Taking it out of social marketing, specific focus is going to be on twitter – I am going tweet about this book as well effectively
I’d appreciate your comments and also appreciate inputs on what you would like to see in this book.
Social media is gaining popularity is stating the obvious. It has in fact become so disruptive that it is affecting businesses, and I want to take the example of Recruitment consultants. Their main revenues was in finding talents that hiring managers can look at.
What has happened now with the growth of social media is, internal recruiters of corporations have started using sites like facebook and linkedin, over and above the job portals and are able to scout for talents very extensively. This has put the brakes on these specialists whose ability was in identifying talents and qualifying them before the hiring manager gets to see them. Now this is getting compromised and for the recruitment consultants to survive, they need to re-invent themselves and start focusing on verticals, level of hire, headhunting etc. and you cannot survive by being just another recruitment consultant.
Social media is here to stay, and for good enough reasons, it is helping individuals and companies in their pursuit. At the same time, it is pushing the limits on traditional means of doing business.
Software Trends, Views, Issues, producteering, and services 