Oh’s and Woe’s – Identifying Innovations.
Innovation is the root of any business success; all business need to come up with something original and new. Even if the business model addresses traditional lines of ideas; the packaging, the application, the tuning being unique can still be an innovation. Today organizations get caught in the web of ROI, P&L and addressing ongoing PGM routines that innovation has become a negligible and in most cases a rejected case. Lets leave aside the ecosystem for nurturing innovations; these days organizations do not have the capability to differentiate between a successful innovation and a stale drummed up rhetoric. So dismal is the stance that everything that does a workflow with few colors is deemed as an innovation.
As business and organizations evolve, innovation is becoming a key driver of performance. Firms striving to maintain high rates of innovation need a continuous flow of new ideas. Innovation is like field that has to be set right; for the seeds of ideas from key personnel fall and sprout into a worthwhile result. The organization not only need the supportive environment where the birth of an idea happens; it also should be ready with the cradle and life support for the idea to evolve into an innovation.
Woe to the organizations that do not have the capability to differentiate. The breed of intellectuals are a rarity; their ideas and practices if leveraged and nurtured well can help build new channels of business expansions and value. Organizations that cannot innovate or build environments to breed innovation cannot survive in the market. Lets first look at how Innovations can be identified; what can actually be termed as Innovation?
Identifying Innovation:
Well, that’s what organizations struggle with. When you say organizations, we relate to the people in flesh and blood who hold offices that across the leadership stack. Innovation happens under the radar; unless your organization boasts of having the wherewithal of setting and managing an innovation management COE – center of excellence.
Lets now dive deep on how we can identify an innovation. With the many ways of identifying innovations the following DND approach can be one of the ways you can identify and value an Innovation.
DIFFUSION:
Diffusion is the way in which innovations spread, through market or non-market channels, from their first micro implementation to different consumers, countries, regions, sectors, markets, and firms. Without diffusion, an innovation will have no economic impact. We look at the diffusion in many aspects; we gauge using audience excitement, value generated, market segment addressed, market size, idea investment and ROI, value impact analysis.
NEW:
A product, process, marketing method, or organizational method can already have been implemented by other firms, but if it is new to the firm (or in case of products and processes: significantly improved), then it is an innovation for that firm. An innovation cannot be termed new if for example a product is purchased off shelf and implemented true to its features in a business practice to achieve the features therein and thereby terming it an innovation. NEW to the Organization, NEW to the Market.
DISRUPTIVE:
An innovation that creates ripples and impacts a market and thereby upsetting the existing norm and creating new value chains; change the structure of the market, create new markets, or render existing products obsolete. Disruptive innovation focuses on the impact of innovations as opposed to their novelty.
Effects of Successful Innovation [DND-E]:
* Increase or maintain market share
* Enter new markets
* Increase visibility or exposure for products
* Reduced time to respond to customer needs
* Achieve industry technical standards
* Reduce operating costs, increase margins
* Increase operational efficiency
* Improve communication and interaction among different business activities
* Increase sharing or transferring of knowledge with other organizations
* Increase the ability to adapt to different client demands
* Develop stronger relationships with customers
Copyright © cran.edge/@jesuvaliant @valiantblogs
Self Service Frameworks for Support
Self Service Frameworks
Self-service as a concept enables and empowers end users to solve their own IT problems, thereby allowing support organizations to gain efficiencies through a reduced incident and request workload. Self-service can be deployed in multiple variants [DIY, Decision Support, Tech Tree., etc.,] to suit the preferences of the audience. The audience should be empowered with the right “companion” tools and processes to support the self-service routines.
Knowledge delivery through self-service frameworks is far more complex than the routine functions offered in the Knowledge base. The function of accruing and storing the vast amounts of information into the accurate taxonomy, to be delivered via multiple web 2.0 tools is the core aspect that organizations have to deal with while evaluating the adoption of a self-service framework. It is also about learning how to manage the whole knowledge life-cycle of creation, nurturing, application, embedding, revising, retiring, leveraging and relearning to develop organizational learning, memory and performance.
For all organizations the core business objectives of introducing self-service framework are as follows.
- Empower customers with unprecedented control over their decisions, real-time access to solutions, driving more return visits and greater customer loyalty
- Stay open for business 24/7 around the world, while also providing cost-effective customer self-service options to your customers
- Customized content enables you to create a true one-to-one marketing platform, letting you publish information to specific prospects, customers, or entire groups.
- Customers can enter trouble tickets by logging onto your site, rather than calling or e-mailing you. They can access content that’s been customized just for them, and can easily access relevant support documentation
- Build workflows from the customer case creation perspective that will strategically try to achieve a call diversion by placing the right KB articles, Forum categories and other tools before actually enabling the customer to open a case.
Process Adoption Preliminaries:
- Content management and life-cycle workflow
- Qualified KB content to be ready
- System Access control framework
- ODM – Online delivery model compliance
- Information architecture and taxonomy
- CRM Case management process review for data capture & correlation
Jesu Valiant – 2013
Knowledge Management in the Services Industry
The discipline of Knowledge management (KM) aims at discovering, capturing, sharing, preserving, developing & leveraging the knowledge capital. A structured Knowledge management routine helps organizations improve its performance and helps obtain a competitive advantage. Knowledge management best practices are evolved after continuous exposure to a whole assortment of challenges addressing varied communities and supporting the end to end ecosystem of the support & service businesses. Knowledge management Services covering the key aspects of Knowledge Management should help transform your current support services by incorporating well-structured, balanced and proven processes,
methods and systems.
Support 2.0 – Knowledge Centered Support model
Based on a recent analysis performed over enterprise technical support customers, we could see exponentially at least 15% of customers demanding better Knowledge base, better content on articles, DIY kits – Self-help systems, searchable, indexed knowledge base for them to drill down into the solutions. Structuring a robust and efficient Knowledge management practice helps both the customer in better adoption of service or product and for the engagement teams to help in better performance metrics impacting the entire support process altogether.
Intended Audience:
This recommendation is intended for organizations who require implementation of a Knowledge centric support model, knowledge management workflow, methodology and its adoption resulting in visible ROI. This recommendation is also appropriate for product managers whose products align with or enable the KMS practices.
Business Objectives:
- To introduce Knowledge management processes, best practices on rendering Knowledge centric support
- Creating a Sustainable Knowledge Management Framework
- Create strong product and process knowledge repository and build routines to leverage such an IP. Knowledge accumulation and usage is a key to business success.
- Improve operational performance levels with visible measurements and analysis to show the ROI of adopting Knowledge management / Support 2.0 framework
- Build & deploy closed loop Knowledge management process targeting varied audiences covering support teams, engineering teams to customers and business users
- Promote Information Exchange from among communities or between organization layers & community.
- Create thriving online spaces that deliver measurable value.
- Present a free, fair, open & transparent culture; helps gain value.
Successful adoption of the Knowledge Management methodology offers profound benefits for any information-intensive organization. For most groups, this is transformational in that it changes and increases the value proposition of support. The benefits realized in the short term can be tracked using traditional support metrics. The longer-term benefits are in new areas of value creation and, therefore, require new measures that we will deploy.
The near term benefits that will be targeted:
- Improved FCR
- Reduced escalation
- Initiate call deflection routines
- Higher Rate of Resolutions
- Increasing CSAT trends
- Technology expertise appreciation
- Higher productivity
- Lesser case reservoirs
- Product knowledge appreciation
- Qualitative Transactions
- TCG Resolutions Expertise
The longer term benefits that can be targeted:
- Higher adoption of self service, DIY systems by the communities.
- Reduced training time for new employees
- Improvement in call deflection percentages
- Building strong domain and product KB repository
- Position community support as a brand differentiators
- Web / Self-support offering with Video / SIMS
- Include E-Commerce Routines
- Overall support process optimization adopting KM as a practice
Jesu Valiant – 2013
Strategic Acquisitions – How? and What?
All organizations try to achieve the maximum growth in the shortest possible time. The trajectory that they want to take depends on what strategies they adopt to manage the varied challenges that they will face. There are many strategies that can be deployed in the wake of time-lines based growth targets. Its almost a undeniable fact that we have growth targets breathing down on CEO’s and the Board in all organizations and the route that they decide to take spells either the knell or the trumpet.
To swell any organizations revenue the strategy and the impending road-map is key; growth can be achieved by multiple ways. Defining a strategy and the under lying mesh of a plan is a hard job and usually the CSO – the strategist does that; he has to further that his conviction to persuade the brass of the organization. Lets take a look at the varied examples of growth strategies that have been successfully used on most occasions to improve the swell of revenues.
Growth through Acquisition, examples and top reasons:
With Nortel filing for bankruptcy and the entire global telecom community completely aware of the ‘cash cows’ of a customer base with Nortel. Avaya’s acquisition of Nortel ensured it roped in the top enterprises where it can up-sell / cross sell and also the key Large Systems piece that had many fans in the enterprise world. With Nortel’s strong presence in NA, Avaya could get a rapid entry there with its newer range of products targeting the UC opportunities with Aura and other range of newer products.
Salesforce acquisition of Radian6
With all the CRM systems loosing out to minnows of smaller organizations thanks to the capability of Social Media analytics that these start ups have created. With Lithium’s intended acquisition of Scoutlabs and the market thirst for Social media analytics, Salesforce jumped into the bandwagon and identified and completed the acquisition of one of the market leaders in Social media analytics “Radian6”. Salesforce overnight added capability to penetrate a big chunk of the market and also provide new capabilities to its huge and delighted customer base.
Tata Motors acquisition of Jaguar & Land Rover
Tata Motors acquisition of the British icons Jaguar and Land Rover was seen as an achievement; here Tata Motors without wasting much time and realizing the economic slowdown in European and American markets completed the acquisition rather swiftly. It provided Tata Motors opportunity to spread its business across different geographies and across different customer segments. Tata Motors did not hesitate to incur a huge capital expenditure in planning to invest US$ 1 billion in JLR in addition to the US$ 2.3 billion it had spent on the acquisition. Well Tata Motors now had global reach, varied market segments penetration, infrastructure, labs and technology.
JP Morgan acquisition of Bear Stearns
JPMorgan Chase acquired Bear Stearns for $10 per share, a price far below the 52-week high of $133.20 per share. JPMorgan Chase made the last-minute buyout was aimed at averting a Bear Stearns bankruptcy and a spreading crisis of confidence in the global financial system. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government swiftly approved the all-stock deal. As all could see JPMorgan benefited most in Bear Stearns’ prime brokerage business, which completes trades for big investors such as hedge funds. Bear Stearns collapse was spectacular just before the acquisition falling to 1% in 16 days.
Whats in a Acquisition?
Acquisition is an inorganic growth tool, many times this is the most sought after growth tool. There are many cases of pure failures in acquisitions thanks to the fine art that is required to compose a strategic integration. Acquisition tests the ability of most leaders who have little, or no expertise in shaping a joint market strategy and driving existing share holders commitments. Approaches abound and any failures in the estimated revenues are directly due to the lack of proper research and analysis over priorities and integration dynamics. In certain events acquisitions could have been avoided and strategic alliances could have been the key.
How to make an Acquisition work?
Before even the ideas over a target company are framed, even before the very first exchange of numbers happen, there has to be a business analysis done from the market perspective invoking the best of methodologies. The earliest of activity starts with getting the priorities of the organization correct; priorities cover non-negotiable stance of the acquirer. This list of priorities are essential to even start mapping the possible targets that would help in fulfilling the non-negotiable stance.
Secondly the acquirer organization needs to ‘listen and monitor’ the market having its scanner on the alert not to miss any available opportunity, there can be missed opportunities that emerge that would otherwise been a launchpad for growth. It would be wise of the board members or CEO’s to avoid compulsions which would emerge from almost everywhere.
Jesu Valiant
Recent Comments