Data, like unrefrigerated milk, goes bad fast. In fact, some pundits estimate that 25% of the database will sour within a year. Add poor import practices and other minor mistakes and bad things quickly snowball. It isn’t until senior management realizes they are making strategic decisions on the back of sub-par data that heads begin to roll.

Blame is a complicated thing. Do you yell at the person responsible for cleaning the data in use, the person responsible for preventing low quality data from getting into the system, the sales people for not updating contact info or the marketing department for not scrubbing the unworkable email addresses? Or should the executive team look in the mirror because clean data was not a strategic priority?

Some organizations try to fix the problem by assigning an intern to scrubbing the data instead of committing to a permanent process change. Others will look longingly for new gadgets, tools, hosted software, widgets, mobile apps or various marketing automation tools to fix the problem. These things can provide a wonderful shiny distraction and maybe an incredible technology advantage…but they are no substitute for permanent process change.

Need to rationalize it to upper management? The ROI for clean data is simple. All things being equal, a company with a larger database of clean prospects will close more business than a company with a smaller database of clean prospects.

Data quality is not a one-time event. Cleaning your data will cost money and so will the process improvements needed to support ongoing data quality.

But in the end it is worth it. Although the option to continue working harder not smarter is always appealing, a fast way to improve sales and marketing success is to fix things that can be fixed. Data quality is one of those things that can be fixed fast.

In fact, $15.34 was the revenue raised from the Alexian Brothers vegetable garden, along with $70.00 from the Strawberry Festival and $1085.10 from the Fair.  That’s a far cry from what nonprofit based hospitals like Alexian Brothers Hospital Network are charged with today in their philanthropic efforts.  With healthcare facilities in Arlington Heights, Elk Grove Village, and Hoffman Estates, Alexian Brothers Hospital Network and its Foundation now have lofty fund raising goals in the millions of dollars.  And you can guess it has to be accomplished with much more than vegetable and strawberry sales.

Yet in today’s ailing economy, nonprofits like Alexian Brothers Foundation need to be creative when it comes to fundraising.  One fund-raising tactic involved a little bit of “cat herding.” Alexian combined the contributions from three local companies – Teleformix (www.teleformix.com), United Marketing Group (www.unitedmarket.com) and DataCo Solutions (www.datacosolutions.com)- to create one platinum event sponsorship package worth $50,000. 

For Alan Portelli, CEO of United Marketing Group, stepping up to help Alexian, even in a down economy, was, in his own words “a no-brainer.”

Portelli and his team toured the Alexian Brothers Center in Arlington Heights and realized they were “truly doing amazing work.”              

It’s an inspiring business story that can lend a lesson to companies, big and small, that they can stand behind a cause and make a difference … even in an economy of cutbacks.  The Alexian Brothers may have had to “beg” for $626.28 back in 1880, but today they are letting their outstanding work in caring for those in need do the talking.

http://www.biztechmagazine.com/article.asp?item_id=660

Every reptilian instinct in my body wanted to find a way to bad mouth the agency’s work. But their creative, positioning and the execution was brilliant. We couldn’t find fault in the agency’s work.

We dug deeper and asked to look at their new CRM – the foundation for the entire product launch and the basis for all of their prospecting efforts. It fueled their direct mail, email newsletters, catalog mailings and sales outreach.

The problem was immediately obvious. The turd in the proverbial punchbowl was data quality. The client had spared no expense building world class creative and but left the task of data hygiene to a group of marketing interns who would rather mop the floors than scrub data.

In the post mortem, we learned the interns received various Excel files containing old data, questionable lists, incomplete lists and exports from a variety of personal contact management applications. Then, with bubble gum and bailing wire, the master list was normalized, checked for obvious data format requirements and imported verbatim into the million dollar CRM.

In hindsight, the client was incredibly candid. No one wanted to own the data hygiene. It wasn’t sexy and it cost a lot of money to do right.  So, in the hopes of prevent future CRM data quality disasters, here are few tips you can use to get the biggest bang from your CRM dollar:

1)    Data quality is not a one-time event. Your data will get dirty and cleaning it is an ongoing set of activities so it helps to design processes that keep data clean. For example, after an email blast, a single individual should be responsible for removing or updating undeliverables. In addition, sales people should also be responsible for keeping data clean. They own the accounts and it is in their best interest to champion the data. Additional quality checks such automation of duplicate record checks also stops problems before they get out of hand.

2)    Duplicates cost you. A single company record should be tied to a set of addresses and contacts. Failure to tie together information about an account to a single company record dilutes the effectiveness of the data – especially in key account selling.

3)    Humans matter. While automation of data clean-up is useful, humans are essential to the process. Computers miss things that are usually obvious to a human such as a division’s relationship to a corporate entity.

4)    Protect your data from good intentions. With CRM, it is far too easy for individuals without an understanding of data hygiene practices to import data from external sources. An equal opportunity automated and a manual review process should always be applied to external data before it is imported.

5)    Find a balance. It is easy to be compulsive about data quality but it is not practical. Your data changes every day, making sure it is always accurate is not financially feasible. That is why it is important to strive for “good enough.”

Good data is the foundation for effective CRM. In B2B it is impossible to build strong marketing unless you know the names of the people most likely to buy from you. Maintaining a clean CRM punchbowl requires more than a summer intern.

NOTE: This article originally appeared on the ZoomInfo blog: http://zoominfoblogger.wordpress.com/tag/ben-bradley/

(This article was a collaboration between Robert Hamilton and myself)

It seems every week we talk to just another IT services shop trying to kick-start their marketing and sales process. We sit down with the founder and ask the same question: “so how are you different from all the other firms out there?”

When we ask that question, we get the same answer: we have a global delivery model, we are client centric, we put people first, we are domain experts and/or we really understand our clients.

Woop do flipping do. Welcome to the club. With those credentials, you are beautiful and unique, just like everyone else.  Your competitors have the same answer. They have a global delivery model, they are client centric, they put people first, they are domain experts and they really understand their clients.

So if you are just another IT services shop, what do you do when it comes to answering the question: “so how are you different from all the other firms out there?”  How do you differentiate yourself in the undifferentiated world of IT Services?

There are really three interrelated ways to answer that question. All three answers build on each other and are critical to each other. But explaining all of them here would take too long and is beyond the scope of this post.

The first answer is “trusted customer relationships.” We believe this answer is most critical, actionable and more important and therefore will be the basis of this article. The second answer falls into the camp of messaging, positioning, and defensible-niche creation. We’ll discuss that answer in the next article.  The third answer comes at the question from the inside-out perspective – company  culture, decision making process, and internal trust. Again, this is a topic for another article.

Trusted Relationships and Hunting Big Accounts –  the founder’s problem of scale

Say the word “trusted customer relationships” and many definitions and meanings come to mind. Each definition has a different context. In this case, we need to be very specific about context and so we want to talk about a very specific scenario.

In our work with professional services firms in the $1 to $5 million/year revenue range, what we generally see is a founder who has left a senior Fortune 500 IT position to start a company. As a first customer, the new entrepreneur lands his account by selling services back to his former employer – a whale (a large farmable account capable of more than $1M annual billings and a well known brand or reputation).

In this scenario, other than a trusted relationship, there is very little that on the IT services menu that differentiates the IT services shop from the competition. Aside from marginal differences in talent, culture, expertise and methodology, almost every other $1M to $5M competing IT services firm can do a job as well as any other.

So when we talk about trusted customer relationships, we’re talking about founders who are friends with their new clients. They have leveraged a deep pre-existing relationship to become entrepreneurs. This relationship was built over many years through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency.

Because of the relationship, the founder brings speed and nimbleness to problem solving. This is due to the fact that he or she has an intuitive grasp of the project goal (i.e. benefit to the company) AND the culture’s style of generating support for the goal AND the culture’s preferred style of organizing execution toward the goal.  Together all this means a relationship that is hard to duplicate.

The problem of scaling this kind of relationship begins when the founder wants to find another major whale sized account that is just as profitable and farmable as the first major account.

The entire problem for finding the second whale is creating what was “second nature” with the founder’s former employer.  How do you replicate in the selling and marketing process the relationships that were created over time through interaction, integrity, success/failure, transparency and consistency?

The answer (and the currency by which the trust is established, earned and scaled) is USEFULNESS.

In sales-processes, the conversations, the relationships, the personal network and persuasion have always been the de facto currency. If people buy from people and if a brand is really the sum total of a customer’s interaction with a company, then it follows that in B2B, the personal brand of the founder is really all that matters when it comes to finding the next whale.

And, if you accept the fact that, for IT services firms of this size, the definition of a successful marketing and sales campaign could be the addition of one new whale per year. In this context, the sales and marketing discussion takes on an interesting new perspective.

The web and social media did not create the idea of a personal brand. Leading with value and emphasizing relationship value over a quick-transaction have always been the hallmarks of successful professional services organizations.

The only difference that social media makes is that the technology finally got granular enough and accessible enough and instantiated enough to be useful in facilitating this level of the ageless human dialog of value exchange.

The tendency of people to become known through repeat encounters is as old as walking upright – and establishing a brand of credibility and openness to repeat transaction is earned by being accessible and broadly useful to the challenges prospects face – across the whole lifecycle of the problem solution.

Unfortunately, many founders of professional services organizations somehow got disconnected from this simple truth. You can see this in their marketing departments – day after day churning out me too SharePoint webinars with co-op Microsoft funds. If everyone is using the same campaign materials and selling the same products, then there is no differentiation.

For that and many other reasons, a dedicated emphasis on personal branding may overlap and replace some of the “traditional” tactics in marketing’s tool chest. The highest value of these personal branding activities is how they reach past the product attributes and into the underlying human issues beneath the problem the prospect company is experiencing.

Professional services marketing needs to take the next step to scale personal branding. Marketing’s ability to speak to, or at least package the pitch, to speak to this broad set of human issues feels like the leg up that the sales organization needs in order to stand out, be remembered, and be valued as sources of solid thinking, not just products.  Again, before trusted advisor, before regular meeting, even before someone recognized your name comes USEFULNESS – which we believe is the new universal of finding and growing a business through new sales. 

At first, this approach is not a substitute for the “core” business building activities. Over time, however, it will replace the shopworn marketing tactics that just aren’t working like they used to. Marketing will soon be measured by its ability to reach into the inner recesses of the decision process around every significant buying decision. The way buying decisions are made is so complex within major accounts that nothing other than pure USEFULNESS could penetrate the dialog.

Great sales people have always done this – communicated the solution when it was time, and then spoken in specific about how it could be sold inside by the champion, and how it would be implemented, and described the benefits that would accrue. Equipping the internal champion to carry the message further and generate some kudos for himself in the process is natural.

Tom Searcy, author of “Hunt Big Sales” says “People only buy what they can safely sell to others, or defend if challenged. Our job as whale hunters is to equip and train the buyers to defend themselves from the attacks that will come later.”

It is in such a discussion where you first get to cross over into the advisor role, almost coaching the internal champion on how to make the case succinctly for your solution. Not only is this valuable, but you quickly pick up other cues about the company’s comfort level with the disruption that comes with change, entrenched interests and some of their agendas, priority of the need against other investments the company is making, etc.  These are exactly the kind of things that are “walking around knowledge” for the recently exited employee when he hangs out his shingle and sells services to his former employer.

In transferring this knowledge to new whales, over time, the more useful encounters you have with the prospect/customer, the more quickly you can get to equipping them to defend themselves and eventually co-own your goal. Co-owning a goal is not just implementing the solution, but helping your internal champion adequately share and evolve the problem and its solution.

Co-ownership is an exploration of how the whale’s culture generates appropriately widespread concurrence on this problem. How does it get on the priority list of problems to be attacked? How does the company’s culture establish resources for those sufficiently high-priority problems it decides to attack? What is the current decision-maker’s role in those deliberations about priority and resources?

When these questions are answered, THEN, only THEN can the sales machinery begin sketching a proposal that speaks to prospective solutions AND how to help steer consideration of those solutions through the company’s internal machinery, equipping the current decision-maker to advance the dialog, not just show a product list and price sheet from a vendor.

Trying to short-circuit this natural process is much like getting married on a first date. It only happens to a lucky few.

The sales process must itself be value-add if it is to stand out from the competition’s.  As satisfying as it would be to sit in a prospect’s office and take an order, most substantial-dollar transactions cast a 6 to 18 month shadow in front of them. Helping with the decision dynamics of getting your solution chosen is a way to equip your internal champion, to lead with value, and to stand apart from the show-up-and-throw-up types. 

In our experience working with IT services organizations, the one true differentiator that separates one IT services firm from another is the relationship it has with clients. Unfortunately, this aggregate concept is tired, shop worn and not even a memorable cliché.

Yet, if the personal relationships of the firm are the true differentiator, then the co-ownership of problems that keep the project on track, on the priority list (to preserve resource allocation) and interim results appropriately socialized to maintain support.  These dimensions are what is inside the “relationship” concept and the goal of ever more familiarity is ever faster grasp of the goal of co-ownership.

The ideal scenario for finding the next whale begins with discovery of the client’s pain-points, or challenges, or problems – because then the dialog can begin about possible solutions.  All too often, in the rush to “close the deal” we’ve seen too many founders jump straight from this discovery to an internal mapping back to his company’s potential products and services for addressing the prospect’s problems.

Instead of rushing to a solution, co-ownership should begin with fresh perspective about the issues surrounding the problems, the solutions, the challenges, the benefits, untethered to promotional push to sell the products.  It’s the intellectual property that is related to the solution-provider’s area of specialty that can be scattered around like seeds, to find fertile ground wherever they can. 

This really is where the payoff is when it comes time for the customer to source his next solution – it shows when the sales person gets the call telling him of the need, it shows in the degree of involvement in helping shape understanding of the need, perhaps even contributing to the internal defense document to secure funding. 

This is far beyond “will the prospect know whom to call” when he needs something.  In every case, the IT services firm that wins disproportionately is the one that has established trusted relationships with clients, possibly  many years in advance of projects.  

Recurring features of such a relationship include:

SKIN IN THE GAME.  Perhaps this is better framed as alignment. Do you have skin in the game? Are your fees tied to the client achieving their project goals as well as their business goals? How closely is your success tied to the client’s success?

TRANSPARENCY. This is another component of co-ownership. When your profitability is aligned with the client’s goals, there is a level of transparency and trust built into the transaction.

RELATIONSHIPS. Invariably project success will involve interactions beyond just the sales person and the internal champion – to what degree does the sales person have relationships with sources of special knowledge or experience when helping refine a solution?

ACCUMULATED LEARNING.  The essence of repeat-interaction is that no one has to start from a blank sheet to establish a baseline understanding of the challenge, the resources, the culture, the goals.  The sales person with a trusted relationship is this “on steroids.”  Not just having access to previous purchases, but having notes about issues learned while implementing the solution, technical notes, people notes, management hot-buttons, etc that broaden the reach of the internal champion as he navigates the project.

The items listed above, when appropriately investigated, can lead you to the answer of what is different. It can help you help the client mitigate risks (and in some cases share risk) as well as understand your critical thinking abilities.

If product specs, delivery times, rates, and service level guarantees are all very close and can be put on the IT “menu,” where can the differentiation come from?  As all veteran sales stars know, the differentiation happens when youhuman beings finally make sense of chaos –  when data becomes information, specs are aligned with goals, project timeline get fleshed out and dollars are allocated.

The IT Menu of services can be neat, clinical and rational; the messy part is in the eating. No one ever gets nourished consuming the menu.

Now it’s the phone’s turn.

Once the only way to initiate and conduct a spontaneous, real-time interaction with a remote person, telephony has become just one method among many for initiating and conducting a dialog.  And, when compared to the other, mostly data and web-based methods, it is not always the best, and certainly not the most manageable.

As use of email, instant messaging, text messaging, web conferencing and collaborative portals expands, many companies are bringing the phone up to date by unifying communications across the enterprise. But, like anything worth doing right, it takes work to realize the promise of Unified Communications.

In fact, according to CDW’s 2009 Unified Communications Tracking Poll, top concerns among organizations planning for UC implementations are network security (45 percent of responders), equipment and capital costs (44 percent) and operating costs (42 percent).

IP-based platforms can be just as reliable as circuit -switched networks. However, the right implementation and architectural foundation are critical and depend on a well-conceived implementation plan. The best solutions address the people and technical readiness of the organization.

Integrated work needs integrated communications.

The bedrock people principle underlying unified communication is the idea that “work” crosses traditional boundaries and therefore unified communication is the most reliable way to manage an entire suite of technologies and practices that aim at seamless functional integration of voice, video and other data regardless of device or media used.

The good technical news is that existing IP networks already form the backbone of protocols and practices that underlie web-based technologies (websites, instant-messaging, streaming, point-casting, multi-casting, etc) and unified communications adds the various aspects of telephony into that mix.

So what is unified communications? Depending on who you ask, there are a number of definitions. UC combines IP-based platforms with web, audio and video conferencing as well as instant messaging and other presence applications under a single control panel so that end-users can manage preferences for their mobile and desktop “presence.”

Research firm Gartner Inc., takes it a step further and defines UC as “a direct result of the convergence of communications and applications through the integration of products that facilitate the use of multiple enterprise communication methods, including equipment, software and services.”

The key word in Gartner’s definition is ‘enterprise.’ Because UC adoptions are enterprise wide and usually involve stakeholders from networking, messaging, data and telecom, UC requires careful pre-rollout analysis and a clear understanding that not all networks are created equal, says Sarwar Raza, 3Com’s product line manager for IP telephony.

Not all networks are created equal because some networks grow organically while others grow through mergers and acquisitions. The landscape is further complicated by the network itself as some networks evolve from traditional PBX platforms, others evolve from traditional data-switch platforms and a third group is designed from the ground up for IP-based communications. No matter what scenario, the complexity of the deployment and the architecture that supports the implementation should be carefully evaluated.

Look before you leap

“Before you do anything, identify network bottlenecks. A successful migration to unified communications requires a comprehensive evaluation of the amount and type of voice traffic carried over the network. Conduct detailed network assessments (the more granular – by floor or department for example, the better), and end user surveys that capture current pain points as well as determine what currently available features users can’t live without. You never know where your traffic is coming from unless you look,” said Raza.

Raza advises organizations to conduct traffic simulations based on applications they plan to deploy.

“Factor in the nature of your business and how critical your new solutions are to accomplishing your mission, how your users will accomplish their missions, the age of your infrastructure and applications, and the availability of talent (in-house or external) and funding needed to ensure your business keeps ticking,” said Raza.

The planning and discussion is worth it. Unified communications represent a big IT win due simply to operating cost reductions and consolidation of infrastructure. The ROI story is even stronger when the additional benefits of improved reliability, better utilization and support for remote workers, reduced travel expenses, improved communications reliability and better collaboration among distributed workgroups are factored in.

“Making life easy for someone in the executive-suite should not translate to adding several steps to a commonly performed task elsewhere in the organization. Account for everyone’s needs before making a decision. Coordinate rollout timing with slow times and anticipate and plan for a little down time and end-user training/ramp-up,” adds 3Com’s Raza.

In addition, user demand drives “rogue” adoption of IP-based tools such as instant messaging and personal mobile devices. UC minimizes the arrival of “rogue” services on the corporate network and the exposure of confidential corporate information to “after hours” work on unauthorized platforms further reducing corporate liability in the event of breach

Although the benefits are easy to see, in recessionary times, making UC a priority and getting executive buy-in requires a compelling ROI argument.

Build a business case to reduce latency

Irwin Lazar, VP of Communications Research for Nemertes Research advises IT execs to focus on areas where a key performance metric is customer response time. UC naturally speeds customer response and helps departments such as sales and customer service provide answers to customers faster.

After all, the intent of UC is instant communication beyond traditional phone and e-mail with voice, video, IM, and wireless.

“You can’t sell soft productivity improvements in today’s economic climate,” said Lazar. “You need hard numbers. One area for fast ROI comes from a reduction in human latency  – situations where you answer a customer faster or respond to a customer support request in less time. UC naturally lends itself to situations where speed matters.”

Building the business case usually starts with a line of business manager. Lazar stresses the importance of building a cross functional team represented by governance, voice, messaging, desktop and security roles. Power users of the current and new systems should be part of the pilot program (in addition to the IT staff helping with the decision) and should be required to present detailed use cases of key everyday tasks.

“We recommend getting all these people talking to each other early in the process. We’ve heard stories where line of business teams get half-way through their vendor selection and only then do they bring in, for example, people from compliance,” said Lazar. “You don’t want to find out half way through the project that the retention policy for email may be different from the voice mail retention policy. The last thing you want to do is go back to the drawing board.”

Security

Getting security involved early in the process makes sense. In fact, adds, Kevin Johnson, security product manager at Avaya, “You already have a security policy in place. If you are comfortable with your existing policy, adjust it to accommodate the specific UC functionality. There is no need to start from scratch because many UC products run on a standard operating system (often RedHat) and you already have security policies in place for the common operating systems. Leverage the existing policies and add in the UC specific requirements.”

It is also important to factor the impact of various government regulations such as HIPAA, GLBA, SOX, Basel II and PCI when it comes to setting your UC security policy.

“Thankfully, if you look at your existing security policies, most of these regulations have already been considered. For the UC specific functionality, continue to use common sense. Just because the device exists on your network doesn’t mean you should assume that it is trusted and secure, use strong authentication, lock down all ports and encrypt the signaling / media communications.  This translates into minimizing opportunities for a breach to occur from outside or inside of your network,” said Johnson.

Budgets drive architecture decisions

Kevin Gavin, VP of Marketing for ShoreTel, a Sunnyvale, CA based provider of unified communications systems, says that operating environments and budgets will determine whether previous investments in technology will be incorporated in the rollout or discarded in place of more fully featured UC platforms.

“As a buyer, it makes sense to look at the architectural approach that the various vendors are using. Different approaches can have a huge impact on reliability, scalability and total cost. Look hard at what it does and how does it does it. Ask yourself what are the implications for me as a buyer?  What happens if for some reason a piece part fails? How quickly can we recover? And, make sure you ask how much it will cost you to implement, administer and operate?”

Gavin recommends the following:

* Bring at least three vendors to the table and evaluate their architectural approaches. Ask vendors and their customers to explain and demonstrate the associated advantages/disadvantages.
* See the real working system with your own eyes. Ask the supplier for a demonstration of capabilities so that you can see the system working first hand.
* Conduct a thorough TCO evaluation keeping in mind that the upfront cost is not the total cost of the solution. The upfront represents about 30% of the total lifetime cost. The biggest expenses are maintenance expenses. Capture all their costs and various cost components, do a proper financial analysis.   Simple solutions are the least costly over time
* Get references. Make sure you ask for references that are similar to your company in terms of size and architecture. Ask the tough questions and listen hard to their responses. If the references aren’t raving fans, you haven’t found the right vendor.

For any IT organization, the promise of UC is realized when the voice silo disappears and telephony becomes a seamless part of the total technology stack.

Anticipating future requirements

It is impossible to predict the future.

“But,” said Jeff Rodman, co-founder and CTO of Polycom’s voice division, “the ideal UC infrastructure has everyone playing the same game, with the same strategy and the same rules. Early in the evolution of UC, we saw end users and suppliers building their own ad hoc UC capabilities. They stuck half a dozen tools together in a way that did a basic job but none of the parts worked well with the other parts,” said Rodman. “Thankfully, the industry has moved toward standards and we are evolving very nicely toward a world where UC components can communicate across functions and across companies. Many of the major vendors are playing by the same rules now.”

For companies concerned about the cost of major infrastructure upgrades to support major UC rollouts, this is good news because most UC systems now openly communicate. Rodman advises IT buyers to make sure any new investment decisions keep an eye to the future.

“Keep your options open. Every IT manager should look for systems that use common standards for interchange. Your current vendor may not be the vendor that provides the best functionality for a given function. When your systems communicate with open standards, that gives you the most flexibility in evaluating future vendors.”

And finally, advises 3Com’s Sarwa Raza, “just because it is web based doesn’t always mean it’s trivial to configure and manage. Make sure administrators take full advantage of training/certification options, and service and support contracts, and that they have the correct tools at their disposal to be able to manage and troubleshoot performance issues (almost always network related) and day to day tasks (moves, add, changes etc.)”

PITFALLS

UC can drive major organizational cost savings and improve collaboration. According to Sarwar Raza, Product Line Manager for 3Com’s IP Telephony solutions, it is important to understand the following implementation pitfalls upfront to avoid making costly mistakes.

* Don’t make the assumption that all equipment and applications can be ‘ported’ as is from existing systems.
* Make sure any new investment decisions keep an eye to the future: pick UC vendors that support industry standards, and can interoperate with other vendors’ products and applications.
* Avoid rushing the discovery phase to avoid surprises during roll-out.
* Ensure that all aspects of the rollout have been planned and budgeted for.
* Conduct detailed network assessments (the more granular – by floor or department for example, the better), and end user surveys that capture current pain points as well as determine what  available features on the system being replaced or upgraded users can’t live without.
* Involve business stakeholders in all phases: discovery, planning and implementation
* Coordinate rollout timing with known slow times for the business and anticipate and plan for a little down time and end-user training/ramp-up.
* Buying decisions should account for realistic and likely growth – in various forms. Not all organizations will grow in the same location or at a predictable pace.
* Pick platforms and vendors that are proven to play well with other systems and vendors, and insist on open standards instead of vendor specific protocols and technologies for assured investment protection.
* Web based does not equal trivial: Just because it’s web based doesn’t always mean it’s trivial to configure and manage.

TAKE AWAYS AND LESSONS LEARNED

These “take aways” and more are available in the CDW Unified Communications Poll, available at http://www.cdw.com/uctrackingpoll.

* UC will only function as well as the infrastructure it is built upon. If that infrastructure is not robust enough to handle the increase in network traffic, you will not get the results you are hoping for.
* Review your current business and network environments, assess current and future needs, and incorporate all three into the Scope of Work for design and implementation.
* For most, UC is a phased approach leading to an end goal that meets your business/organizational communication goals – it is not a one-size-fits-all, packaged solution. Enlist a trusted advisor to help determine which approach and component technologies are best for you at each step.
* Organization or facility changes and infrastructure updates are an opportunity to implement component technologies and lay the foundation for UC.
* Identify key drivers and stakeholders; the organization drives overall telecommunications, while operating units drive application integration.
* Be clear on what are requirements vs. nice to have; involve end users.
* Use strong project and schedule management methodology throughout the process.
* In most organizations, dedicated technical resources work best, and leads should be given responsibility to own a portion of the project.
* The challenge doesn’t end with cutover; Day 2 support needs to be part of the design.
* Training plans are critical for administrators, end users, and call center agents alike. Begin preparation during installation and configuration.

The recession has taken aim at higher education.  It’s too late to hide, the carnage is everywhere. 

Even Harvard feels the pain.  It offered buyouts to 1,600 employees after suffering an $8 billion endowment loss. In California, the situation is ugly – a $97 million cut for FY09 at Cal State University and another $66 million reduction in FY10 resulting in a $283 million operating hole.

Illinois spends about $3 billion a year on higher education, not including capital investment and tuition.  Not enough, according to university leaders.  What’s their response?  Freeze hiring, increase tuition prices and beg for Federal funding.  That’s activity without a purpose and certainly not a strategy.

This begs a bailout-esque question, “Where did all that money go?”  One analysis [1] shows a whopping 44% of all academic spending goes to administrative support and a falling share to faculty salaries and student instruction.  Higher education has grown fat on a steady diet of tuition increases and unbridled growth in administrative overhead.   

Imagine stockholder’s reaction to a company whose overhead costs rose double digits on zero sales growth.

Given the Illinois’ $11 billion deficit and a $53 billion FY2010 budget (give or take a $billion here or there), should higher education be untouchable?  The state’s budget shows higher education spending flat over FY2009 but up 10% since FY2008 (excluding contributions to retirement).  That’s $3 billion in taxpayer subsidy for starters, not including tuition payments from mom and dad or contributions from non-parental donors.  

As a bailout-fatigued parent of 2 future college students, I’m going to ask the hard question:  Could Illinois taxpayers get better results on our $3 billion annual higher education investment if a product manager ran our state’s portfolio of universities?

Ultimately, leadership is about strategy, resource allocation and results.  Even though their organizations and products are different, higher education should take a lesson from basic product management before politicians step in and do it for them.  How?  Two simple performance metrics — product profitability and yield — can help higher education manage smarter.

Product Profitability.  Imagine that all the colleges across the University of Illinois were brands, its programs were products and courses were components. The College of Engineering and its 7,600 students has a strong brand. Its Department of Computer Science provides tremendous value through tuition, federal research grants and alumni donations. In contrast, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) provides comparatively less brand value but educates more than 15,000 students. LAS’ Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures, while well-respected, provides less value to the University than Computer Science. I’m not picking on Slavic Languages at all; just using it as an example.

A product manager would calculate the profitability of each course taught in each department within each college of the university, allocate revenues from outside sources (i.e., donations, gifts, research grants) and subtract department’s faculty, staff and other direct costs.  Once this database is organized, results can be viewed at a course, department, program, or college level.  This makes analysis of contribution margin is quick and straightforward. 

A product portfolio manager would take a broader perspective and look at all courses taught in all departments across all universities in the State of Illinois.  Why?  To align resources in a way that 1) satisfies student demand, 2) educates students profitably and 3) provides a stimulating and sustainable environment for scholars to flourish in their chosen fields.   

How, specifically?  Let’s start with Slavic and Baltic Language departments as an example.

If there are 8 Slavic and Baltic Language departments across Illinois’ public universities but demand for only 25% of capacity, is it prudent for Illinois taxpayers to foot the bill for 75% excess capacity?  Probably not.  Is it wise to get rid of all 8 departments due to low demand?  Of course not.

So, what steps could any single department undertake to improve its profitability or minimize its loss?  With only a local perspective, each department keeps enough faculty and staff to sustain academic excellence and enough courses to be attractive to students.  With a wider lens, however, one might argue that merging 8 departments into 3 bigger departments and allocating them strategically based on demand and geography would make more sense.  Students interested in Slavic languages could still choose 1 of 3 schools to attend, academic excellence would improve as more scholars collaborate together, and selective reductions that balance capacity with demand would yield the cost reductions state budgets demand.  Moreover, the University with the best Slavic and Baltic Language department could expand its product footprint by franchising instruction to other Illinois universities that can’t afford the fixed costs of a boutique department through in-residence, electronic or blended delivery models.

Product managers don’t just downsize.  They also expand capacity to steal share from competitors.  Let’s use the Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois’ College of Engineering (ranked 4^th nationally) as an example.

The capacity of the Department of Computer Science is constrained by classroom space, faculty and its budget.  Despite its strong ranking, enrollments held steady between 590-625 students for the past 3 years.  As a consequence, hundreds of highly qualified Illinois students were forced to attend out of state schools where they pay two or three times more for tuition.  Hundreds of out-of-state students who are willing to pay tuition premiums at Illinois could not attend.  These “leakage” and “stock-out” problems represents more than lost revenue for the College of Engineering and University of Illinois.  When markets don’t clear, inefficiency brings a cost.  In this case, the State of Illinois is deprived of scarce human capital that creates new technologies and builds new businesses, and Illinois taxpayers subsidize higher education more than they should.

To be clear, I am not advocating elimination or expansion of any particular department or college.  The point is to optimize a product portfolio and find a sustainable operating structure across the state’s publicly funded education system where budget reality and scholarship coexist at the appropriate scale based on market demand and financial constraints. 

If an institutional haircut is inevitable, insight from product profitability analysis can be the difference between a smart trim and a buzz cut.

There is still time for Springfield and higher education to collaborate on a smarter haircut, but budgetary tweaking isn’t enough.  Without a different approach, I see Bailout 3.0 right around the corner.

[1] http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/15/delta

You’d think these old school morons would somehow find a clue. Probably too much to hope for.

The rolodex is irrelevant. Certainly, who you know matters. But the thing that matters more is what you do with your rolodex.

There is a fantastic article on this topic over at MyVenturePad. Check it out.

The entire article is available here… http://www.strategy-business.com/resilience/rr00069?cid=rr20090511

Here’s a quick exerpt…

This shift, which has become increasingly apparent in the last few years, has been confirmed by “Marketing & Media Ecosystem 2010,” a landmark cross-industry study that Booz & Company recently completed in partnership with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), and the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA). An ecosystem is an appropriate metaphor for today’s marketing environment. It is a dynamic, complex, and interconnected community in which marketers, advertising agencies, and media companies depend on one another, to a certain extent, to survive and thrive. But it is also a brutal, competitive arena, where a kind of “digital Darwinism,” or survival of the fittest, holds sway, rapidly distinguishing winners from losers. Companies that possess certain preferred traits in their organizational DNA or that have superior skills of self-adaptation are positioned to flourish in this ecosystem. Those without either face almost certain extinction.

http://business.theage.com.au/business/squatters-creating-twittering-confusion-20090429-andk.html

Trademark Twitter identities are being snapped up.

Some companies such as Billabong have been quick off the mark, snapping up names. Billabong spokesman John Mossop said: “Billabong has a strong online presence and that includes three official Twitter addresses — billabonggirls, BBgirls and billabong1973. It would appear none of the other Billabong addresses are ours so we’re making inquiry into their ownership.”

Others, such as Coca-Cola, have been forced to make do with less than satisfactory monikers, such as CocaColaCo. But in something of a first the company has complained directly to Twitter about squatting on its trademark and succeeded in getting the CocaCola identity handed back.

Yesterday a Coca-Cola spokesman reported: “We are now officially in possession of the ‘coca-cola’ account, as Twitter acknowledged the name as a registered trademark of The Coca-Cola Company. Clearly Coca-Cola sees the value of Twitter as a way of it having ‘real-time’ conversations with our fans and followers, primarily around our shared passions for sports, music and online activities.”

http://business.theage.com.au/business/squatters-creating-twittering-confusion-20090429-andk.html