Michael Porter

I found the CRN article describing Amazon’s adding their Relational Database Services to its Free Usage Tier.    What I find interesting is that when AWS became a household name (OK, industry wide name)  about two years ago, my first thought was that vendors like IBM, Oracle, JBoss, and Liferay ought to just add the db […]

I’m still guest blogging and have two posts over on the Financial Services Blog.  I put a fair amount of information into a social CRM post on how to improve your customer service. It includes a lot of examples and resources. I also just blogged on Citibank’s effort at social CRM from a Wall Street […]

The Wall Street Journal has an article posted an article on a topic we’ve been addressing here on the Financial Services blog around social media and customer service. Frustrated by the 40 minutes she spent on hold with Citibank customer service, Stacy Small tweeted her displeasure. To her surprise, a Citibank agent tweeted right back. […]

Over in Europe, Kernal Mag has a dark story about an accounting software blogger misusing his influence and power to solicit $$ for not writing up scathing posts about accounting software.  Just like anything else, power can be misused. “It’s extortion, plain and simple,” one accountancy software start-up said yesterday. “He writes endless negative posts […]

So it’s Open World time and CRN is reporting on some key announcements.  They note that Oracle is pushing almost all of their key services online including. Oracle Planning and Budgeting in the cloud (Hyperion) Oracle Financial Reporting (Not sure) Oracle Data and Insight (OBIEE???) Oracle Developer Cloud Service (could be part of Fusion and […]

While social media can have a large impact on the sales and marketing side, I believe the largest potential for this type of technology lies in customer service.  Like any customer service endeavor, it takes effort to address issues as they arise.  This effort can be categorized in two ways: listening and responding. Listening Most banks […]

GigaOM has an interesting article about why they think Amazon and Salesforce are blowing away the competition when it comes to cloud offerings.  Keep in mind that author James Urquhart is saying that these two are leaving companies like Google and Microsoft in the dust.  Here’s a couple quotes before my thoughts. I almost feel silly […]

I didn’t know whether to laugh about this article at Mashable or to take it seriously when I read the title, “Most People Don’t Use Social Media to its Fullest Potential”  My first thought that of course, we aren’t using anything to it’s fullest potential let alone a relatively new tool that half the population […]

I didn’t know whether to laugh about this article at Mashable or to take it seriously when I read the title, “Most People Don’t Use Social Media to its Fullest Potential”  My first thought that of course, we aren’t using anything to it’s fullest potential let alone a relatively new tool that half the population […]

From Technology Review comes an article about a new kind of robot who could transform manufacturing.  It’s one of those infrequent but eye opening views into what the future really holds.  This robot has sophisticated sensors, uses expressions, and can programmed by factory workers without a degree in computer science.  In short, this is just […]

So you have a number of possible tools to use in your marketing and customer relationship management.  What next?  Where should you invest and how?  Frankly, I won’t be able to answer that question for you and banking has some industry specific needs.  Instead, I want to focus on examples of engaging the customer and […]

This is the last of the series.  Here’s the other parts of this whole thing. User Interface Backend Integration Search Multi-site support Content Personalization   What do I mean by security? So security can mean many things.  I don’t want to only focus on whether , the web site is encrypted and behind a login […]