Inside the Biz with Jill Dyche

They’re Baaaack! IT Spending in Retail Returns

In which Jill peeks into the pipeline—and sees retail for a change!

In the arena of retailing, we’re all players. But many of us are also spectators, sitting high up in the stands and watching as the game plays out. Lately, the retailing game has been a blood sport, and household names—Circuit City, The Sharper Image, and Linens n’ Things among them—have been casualties.

We’ve been working with retailers since Walmart got its first data warehouse (my partner, Evan, was one of the system engineers on their first Teradata installation), since Kmart beamed POS data over satellites, and the apocryphal diapers-and-beer saga went mainstream. In those early days, it was all about analyzing POS data. Subsequent merchandise management and supplier exchange initiatives cemented the need for IT as both a strategic and operational enabler.

In the early 2000s, as they struggled to implement customer loyalty programs and endured criticism for over-investing in CRM technologies, retailers curtailed their IT spending. They had data warehouses—often several—and kept their attention focused on enterprise applications and e-business capabilities. With the exception of some beleaguered grocers and a sprinkling of catalog companies, we didn’t see many retailers spending on either consulting services or new software solutions.

But things are changing in retail, due in large part to five key areas that retailing executives have earmarked as strategic priorities:

Social media: It’s one thing to create a corporate avatar, set up a Twitter account, and lure customers to your Facebook fan page. It’s another thing altogether to proactively collaborate with customers on product ideas, garner feedback on service improvements, cement your brand messaging, and monitor the buzz. Retailers are getting serious about social media. After JCPenney ran a contest asking customers to post photos in their Penney-purchased apparel, the retailer’s Facebook fan base began increasing by a few thousand a day. “It’s a much more significant part of our marketing mix and it will continue to be a bigger part of our marketing mix,” said a Penney exec about social media.

Survey software: Put simply, retailers are formalizing feedback mechanisms, and executing on their findings. Several retailers we work with have announced new “Voice of the Customer” programs, driven by C-level executives. While most large retailers continue to rely on market research, they’re combining it with customer surveys at the time of purchase in their brick-and-mortar locations as well as on-line. Discounts on future purchases not only get customers coming back, but shopping via different channels—customers who shop across multiple channels are known to be more profitable—thus increasing the retailer’s share of wallet.

Master Data Management: Retailers not only need to manage customer relationships, they must share that data across sales channels, locations, and brands. Retailers came late to the MDM party but they’ve taken a seat and are listening to the music. More than ever, retailing executives are seeing the business impact of so many silo-ed applications and are mandating a “single view” of their customers. MDM not only promises to help retailers harmonize individual customer records across channels and brands, it helps them reconcile their product catalogs and store locations and standardize pricing. Welcome to MDM, retailers, pull up a chair!

Retail in the cloud: Retailers still hamstrung by headcount and IT budget cuts are turning toward the software as service (SaaS) model to enhance both operational and analytic capabilities. Many are looking to hosted services companies like PivotLink and Retail Solutions to deliver self-service, web-based analytics or to provide POS and inventory data to suppliers. Larger retailers may look to outsource customer identification and data enrichment functions by leveraging third-party providers like Acxiom. Mid-market retailers in particular have been looking to the cloud to enhance their reporting and data quality capabilities without adding headcount or hardware.

On-demand reporting: As they increasingly compete on service, retailers are exploring ways to deliver customer intelligence to front-line sales staff. “We use a range of analysis tools, from basic reporting to statistical modeling tools,” explains Kakoli Seal, Vice President of Customer Insight and Database Marketing at Saks 5th Avenue. “But getting information into the hands of our sales associates so they can deliver superior service is a priority.” Saks 5th Avenue uses sophisticated clienteling software to deliver customer contact and other details to its associates. Similarly, a specialty retailer uses mobile dashboard vendor Webalo to deliver purchase history to sales associates, thus enabling them to advise customers as they shop.

With all the emerging technology hoopla, retailers are still focused on two main issues: managing inventory levels and retaining customers. Both involve a little art, a little science, and leaders who are willing to question established industry norms. Indeed the days of unwieldy enterprise applications and IT infrastructure overhauls are a thing of the past in retailing. In their quest to be nimble, retailers are seeking new solutions—and fast.

Interested in learning more about how retailers are re-embracing business intelligence? Read Jill Dyché’s latest white paper: Information for Everyone: BI Evolving in Retail. Download the paper here.

photo by NNECAPA via Flickr (under Creative Commons license)

CRM and Social Media: The Rules Still Apply

In which Jill reminisces about CRM failures past—and warns that past is prologue.

Last year a large brokerage firm engaged Baseline to review its customer strategy and build a CRM program plan. The firm’s customer service and marketing departments had collaborated on a CRM vision and now needed a tactical roadmap for moving forward. That roadmap would include things like an information strategy, new tool acquisition, and a plan for social media.

I love engagements that meld our experience with CRM delivery, customer data deployment, key technology recommendations, and building roadmaps. When the client signed the statement of work, I felt particularly happy, like I’d come home to discover Viggo Mortensen singing in my shower. Here was a project I could sink my teeth into.

We recognized the warning signs almost immediately. A long and random wish-list of new functions. Disproportionate energy around technology acquisition. Disagreements about outcomes. IT circling the wagons while pushing its enterprise app vendor’s CRM suite. It was just like the old days, only with a lot more talk about Twitter.

It’s almost as if this company—where everyone admitted that, when it came to technology, “we have one of everything”—hadn’t heard of the sins exposed in the heyday of customer-focus. It was as if they’d forgotten all the lessons learned, namely:

• Define your requirements before investing in technology
• Articulate end-state goals—and be sure they’re customer-focused
• Be willing to change business processes and job roles to accommodate new customer-centric practices
• Define customer value tiers—and focus on conversion
• Measure both hard and soft ROI
• Create a feedback mechanism to let the voice of the customer drive improvements

Traditionally blame for many of the classic CRM failures has landed squarely in IT’s lap.  But this time IT was off the hook. The business hadn’t been clear about the desired outcomes of its new customer-focused vision, never mind how it wanted to leverage social media to help deliver it. All the lofty mission statements in the world won’t get customers to return to your store or exalt your service on their Facebook pages.

We went back to executives in marketing and customer service and asked them to answer the following questions:

1. Can we agree on our “desired outcomes” for improving the customer experience?
2. When customers who participate in our social communities share more information about themselves and, how will we use this newfound information? How will we avoid mis-using it?
3. What existing capabilities and technologies can we leverage to deliver this new vision? What investments do we need to make?
4. Can we anticipate the organizational impact of these new changes? Are we willing to support them?

Once we collected their answers, we brought executives together and had them discuss each others’ responses. It was clear that while the business wanted to participate in CRM, they expected IT and line workers to actually execute. We helped them understand that their ongoing involvement—and the need to enlist their peers in the Sales, IT, and e-Business organizations—was necessary for customer acquisition and retention. And to instill customer-centricity into the

Yes, it was more complex than they thought it would be. But ultimately they got a comprehensive roadmap for deploying CRM, including a robust plan for incrementally-delivered social media capabilities. And I must admit that when we delivered the roadmap to executives, I felt newly happy. Like Viggo had just asked for the soap.

Commenting on the Comments on my Social Media Post

In which Jill discusses what to wear. Or what not to wear.

I recently wrote a blog post on social media and CRM, “Meeting Customers Where They Are: When Social Media Misses the Mark.” In the post I described a client meeting in which two cavalier, t-shirt wearing social media consultants spouted aphorisms about social CRM without understanding what the sponsors really needed, and where they were on the CRM continuum.

The post got a lot of hits, and a lot of comments. Thanks to those of you who weighed in on the topic, I think everyone made valid points. But the first paragraph of one of the more recent comments by a reader named “rune” took an interesting turn. Rune wrote:

hey- is wearing a T-shirt hitting a rough spot in some of you.. watch your customers, they all wear them.. are you in any way better then them.. come on. But multitasking while presenting is pherhaps a bit to much eaven for me. But do this kill the content of their presentation ?

I’d like to state here for the record that I do not in principle object to t-shirts. Au contraire! I say the more men wearing t-shirts in the workplace, the better!  A man in a t-shirt says, “Hey, I’m a casual-but-confident guy, comfortable in my own skin. Wanna beer?” Indeed James Dean in a t-shirt was nothing less than a gift from God. (You never saw a picture of him sporting a logoed golf shirt, did you? I rest my case.)

I particularly appreciate the so-called “Beefy T,” which has been worn by some of the greats, and in its latter years often morphs into useful cleaning implement. Many a dish has been dried, and myriad dirty dog paws have been wiped clean with a Beefy-T. The Beefy-T is smart and versatile. It’s up for anything. The Beefy-T is the George Plimpton of t-shirts.

But I am truly sorry if my blog post offended. My apologies to any t-shirt wearing social media consultants—their unfortunate sartorial judgment notwithstanding. Apologies to Zac Efron, David Beckam, Antonio Zapato Junior, and Marky Mark. Please keep up the good work, guys. And, in the interest of equal time, Pam Anderson and Eva Mendes can definitely rock a t-shirt. Bygones, ladies.

Finally a special apology to the good people at Hanes and Fruit of the Loom (and, to a lesser extent, BVD). You really are providing a public service. Most of the time.

photo by emdot via flickr.

Meeting Customers Where They Are: When Social Media Misses the Mark

In which Jill watches Social CRM consultants get naked—and throws them a towel.

Don’t look now, but I’m about to marginalize social media for CRM. For those of you still reading, I’d like to share a recent client experience with social CRM. The V.P. of Customer Service at a Top 20 U.S. insurance company had a vision for using social media tools to help insurance agents, and then call center reps, to interact with their customers.

This client spent entirely too long Examining the Role of Social Media in Customer Relationships. There were off-site meetings with key executives in marketing, customer support, operations, IT, and sales. There were strategy documents. There were alignment and ownership discussions. There were cocktail confabs, private appeals to the CFO, and even a few ad-hoc debates in private Yammer groups.

And yes, there were the social media experts. I sympathized with the two guys who came in to lead a discussion of how social media can be a strategic game-changer. They wore t-shirts and alternately spouted clichés about customer loyalty and the importance of transparency. They had the bad manners to tweet as they presented, but the good sense not to use the client’s name. The tone was “let’s get naked and party—online!” One of the consultants proclaimed, “You can’t do CRM without going social.”

Daring? Yes. True? No. You see, the insurance company had already tried enticing agents to use social media. In turn, the agents tried enticing their customers, many of whom they’d known for years. The fact is that social media, bright and shiny though it may be, is still one of many communications channels. In a survey of agents, most admitted that they were available by phone “during 90 percent of the business day, and often thereafter” but they nevertheless tended to use social media “occasionally or when I’m bored.”

The social media dudes advocated enlisting the CEO who, unsurprisingly, was busy doing things like communicating with Wall Street. (And I’m pretty sure that most of those conversations weren’t done using Twitter.) When he was finally asked to publically advocate instant messaging accounts for all agents and a corporate Facebook page, he e-mailed his direct reports a missive that said something along the lines of the following (although shorter, and a bit more colorful):

Who are we kidding? Our agents are our channel. We’ll give them every tool they want to engage our customers, but we’re not going to force them to use new tools for the sake of it. They know our customers—it’s their choice.

Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m all over social media. But when you come right down to it, a company’s effective adoption of social media has everything to do with its knowledge of its customers. As CRM Magazine managing editor Josh Weinberger pointed out in a recent blog post, “that doesn’t mean you’re absolved of the responsibility to maintain the relationship.”

The fact is your customers should dictate the forum via which that relationship is maintained. And who your customers are, their behaviors, their preferences, and their history with you, has everything to do with that. Factors like tenure, demographics, product offerings, branding and other factors tells us that customers of the Auto Club are far less likely to engage the company via social media, and customers of JetBlue—who don’t interact with JetBlue as much as they stay tuned to JetBlue—are more likely to use social media.

And that’s just how the insurer decided to move forward. Our strategy, in essence, was simple:  “In Touch. Inform. Engage. Inquire.” 

We would establish a social media presence and start “pushing” interesting, relevant, and timely communications to an opt-in community of tuned-in customers. We would then gauge who was listening and use that data to refine messages to the customer segments most likely to use social media. Once there was some history and those segments’ habits and preferences were better understood, new segments could be determined where additional social media strategies could be deployed, and see how they were interested in keeping the conversation going.

Call it an experiment. Call it a community prototype. You can even call it “bottom up social media.” But unless you’re meeting customers where they’re at, don’t call it Social CRM.

Photo via MikeBlogs via Flickr

Happy Birthday, Jill!

In which we learn that when the cat’s away the mice will play, as Jill’s Baseline colleagues put up a special tribute in honor of her...29th...birthday.

Jill’s busy with birthday plans this week, so new insights will have to wait. We understand her birthday theme this year is “Kick-off and Cold Cuts,” in which everyone is invited to partake of a platter of ham and turkey while strategizing for how to plan next year’s birthday. From what we hear, party games include a Business-IT three-legged race and a rousing game of “Pin the Blame on the Data Steward.”

In Jill’s absence, and in honor of her birthday, we’ve decided to share some of our favorite recent "jillisms" (all via Jill's Twitter account).

"Apologies to all guys who own labradoodles. Didn't mean to imply you were pencil-necked, OCD, anal-retentive girlie-men (eg, pug owners)."
 
"I just went and washed my face with Noxema and cold water and I feel fresh as a daisy. Just thought I'd share."
 
"The Neil Diamond song, 'Cracklin' Rosie' needs metadata. Seriously."
 
"@NeilRaden Re: Friday's tweet: I'm tweeting a picture of a naked woman and you're asking about ad space? (I read it online, so dunno.)"
 
"Newsflash! Between Trader Joe's Cheesecake Brownie Bites and Costco's PetiteBrownieBites--Costco Takes it HOME!"
 
"David: 'I'm an a$$.' Jill: 'No, you're not an a$$. You just ACT like an a$$.' David: 'Oh. I didn't know that. Thanks.'"
 
"I'm obsessed with cushion-y hiking socks."
 
"I challenge anyone to find a Flamenco guitarist who isn't just flat-cool. Or a Christopher Walken imitator."
 
"There is no way you can be a Flamenco dancer without the aid of an underwire bra. (Unless, of course, you're a male Flamenco dancer.)"
 
"Haiku-du-jour: 'Spam on Twitter sucks. It makes me confuse my friends - with my enemies.'"

"I had a piece of carrot cake for lunch. There was at least 1 serving of vegetables in it. Plus the raisins. Shoot, it was practically salad."

And finally, a Jill tribute wouldn't be complete without mentioning one of Jill's favorite quotes from the sage guru of all that is Americana:

"You don't win friends with salad."

                                                   -- Homer Simpson

Thanks for the wit and insight, Jill! And Happy Birthday from Baseline Consulting!

Rebranding and the Customer Experience

In which Jill argues that rebranding is in the eye of the beholder.

 “Watch your elbows! Coming through!” The outward briskness of the flight attendants is a physical manifestation of their collective intention, which is: “Let’s hurry up and feed these trapped masses so we can retreat to our jumpseats and read ‘OK!’.”

 “We have no implements,” a flight attendant replied when I asked for a spoon. I was 5 rows behind first class, where the tinkling of utensils was drowned out only by the clatter of the liquor cart rolling on its well-worn casters. The twitch at the corner of what was otherwise the straight line of her mouth betrayed her. We were both in on the ruse.

In an act of sheer passive-aggression, I stuffed all my dirty napkins into the seatback pocket, along with a dozen reply cards from various magazines—seven of them from a single issue of Vanity Fair—used the first-class restroom, and contemplated breaking the ultimate rule and texting some friends. I was in a bad mood, suggesting that the Stockholm syndrome is indeed alive and well at 35,000 feet.

Interestingly, this same airline recently rebranded. But rebranding is a hollow exercise if it’s not accompanied by changes in the customer experience. A revamped logo and a signature cocktail in business class hardly count when the flight attendants continue to patrol the cabin like martinets. In the world of customer loyalty what counts is the way your behaviors change. And no, you may not have the entire can.

photo by Aaron Escobar (via Flickr)

Customer Surveys and Social Media

In which Jill maintains that “Who Were You in a Past Life?” isn’t the only survey on Facebook. At least, it shouldn’t be.

I just bought a car. And I just saw my doctor. In the spirit of their respective customer-focus initiatives—of course I don’t know whether either has a customer-focus strategy, but it’s a good bet—both the automobile company and the HMO surveyed me about my experience.

The automobile company called me a week after I bought my car. After leaving several voicemail messages, an agent finally reached me and asked me a series of shockingly banal and uncreative questions. “Was the showroom clean and well appointed?”  Look, I was there to buy a car, not to eat off the floor. “Was your salesman knowledgeable about the car?” Well, he couldn’t get the navigation to work but that’s only because it had never been installed. “Would you buy a car from this dealer again?” I don’t ever want to buy a car again, from this dealer or any other, so that one’s a loaded question.

The truth is: I didn’t particularly enjoy my car-buying experience—who does?—but I love my car. Did the automaker inquire about their new customer’s initial impressions with the product? No. Did they even ask what I thought of their brand before and after my purchase? Nope. Did they ask if I’d tell my friends about the car? Well, if you read this blog you’re my friend. Do you know what kind of car I bought? You get my point.

The HMO’s survey was more structured, and their questions were more relevant. Do you feel like your doctor spent enough time with you? Do you feel she really listened to you? Did she offer useful information? Were the nurses courteous? Did they pronounce your name right? Were all your questions answered by the time you left?  These factors really do contribute to the patient’s care experience, and I appreciate how deliberate and well thought-out they were. Trouble is, the form was two pages long and I had to return it via snail mail.

The surveys were completely different in almost every way, save for one. There was no attempt to cultivate an on-line relationship. I’ve had automobile and healthcare clients, and both industries are extremely focused on-line customer interactions. Many have invested in building on-line communities, encouraging their customers to contribute to an ongoing dialog and gathering important data in the process.

So what gives? Why not ask me for my e-mail address, and have me fill in an on-line form so I could share the fact that I spent more time waiting around for my sales guy than I did talking to him? (Amazingly, this was not true of my physician.)

Better yet, what if one of the questions was:

Would you share your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn accounts in the space below? This way we can send you periodic updates and service reminders. Plus, we’d be happy to give you access to our site, which compares your responses to people who bought cars at the same dealership [saw the same doctor].

Sure, you could do this via e-mail (neither survey requested an e-mail address), but social media communications are generally more engaging, more interactive. I would really like to know whether I was hyper-critical of my car dealership, or whether other car buyers, like me, are repressing the memory of the purchase process and are now enjoying their new cars as much as I am. I’d be interested in understanding whether my doctor spends the same amount of time with all her patients, or whether I truly was special. In the process, these companies could not only learn more about themselves, but learn more about me. By opting in, I could receive tweets like:

@jilldyche We’ve received your completed survey! Here’s a link to how your answers stack up with some of Dr. X’s other patients. Tweet us @hmo if you have any follow-up questions.  Meantime, don’t forget your 5000 IUs of Vitamin D!

Customer feedback via social media not only personalizes the message, it reflects my preferred way of communicating. After all, differentiating customer treatment based on the customer’s history and preferences is the very definition of CRM. So what’s taking so long?

A Letter to Our Users, From Your BI Team

In which Jill writes a rebuttal letter to a rebuttal letter, this time from IT.

 

Two posts ago, I penned a fictitious (albeit observation-based) letter from a group of BI business users to their IT comrades. The post got lots of hits and tweets, many of them gently requesting equal time. (Okay, demanding it.) So I’m putting my IT cap back on and diving headfirst into the fray once again, this time with a rebuttal from the BI team.

Dear BI Users:

Thanks for your letter and for taking the time to write it. Sometimes we’re not sure you even know we’re here. In fact we’re working hard, and we’re grateful for any type of feedback.

Speaking of which, we invited you all to a Lunch & Learn session last Thursday where we presented a prototype of the Customer Event Management solution you’ve all been asking for. We’re one step closer to predicting the churn of high-value customers, but we need your input. Most of you accepted the meeting invitation, but only four of you showed up. What happened?

Okay, we don’t want to seem defensive but if you don’t feel listened to, well, neither do we. We understand that you’re not wild about those architecture and infrastructure conversations, and we try to shield you from that stuff whenever we can. But sometimes we need your approval for investments in foundational technologies. If IT indeed supports the business, both sides need to know what’s being supported.

But since you asked, we’ll tell you where we’ve been. We’ve been trying to explain to you that we can’t develop the custom software you’ve requested for a packaged price. It seems you all want Microsoft Office-quality tools, but we have a nine-person BI team here! And, not to burst your bubble or anything, but here it is:  there’s really no such thing as BI-in-a-box. All BI work is custom development. So, to answer your question for the 99th time: No, we can’t just “plug and play.”

We’ve also been delivering the 24x7 support you’ve wanted—or haven’t you looked at the SLAs we created? This stings a little, since we’re on call day and night. You don’t know this because you’re fast asleep while we’re loading your data and upgrading systems to support your requirements. After all, there are nine of us on the team, yet you want operational-class support. How many people staff members are involved in building our operational systems? (Answer: More than nine.) But we can’t get you guys to come look at the stuff we’re building for you. At lunchtime. With sandwiches.

Our conundrum is this: the business funds IT, so we’re beholden to you for money. Yet when we want to make sure your money is used well, we can’t get you to share where you’re going, let alone evaluate the solutions you’ve asked us to build!

And believe us, we’d like to fix the data as much as you would. But we don’t own the data, the operational systems developers do. And they say no one ever complains about it. Seriously, we are only as effective as the data we get from those systems and our understanding of the rules needed to fix it. We could put you guys in touch with our Accounts Payable/Accounts Receivable system developers and you can get them to write your reports. No? We didn’t think so.

Look, we’re happy to rethink the way we work together, to define new rules of engagement. We’re even happy to fund a resource to shadow you while you do your jobs so we don’t have to keep on asking you what’s next. But we need you to meet us halfway. Shoot, we need you to meet us, period. How about lunch?

You know where to find us,


Your BI Team

Photo by footage (via Flickr)

Manners in Twitterland

In which Jill looks in vain for the “undo” key.

photo by Robert Scoble

When it comes to Twitter, I embrace my friend Donald Farmer’s (@donalddotfarmer) metaphor that Twitter is a lot like a fish tank. You stop by and watch some interesting fish float past. It’s a temporal experience that yields interesting observations, exotic surprises, as well as some completely unremarkable specimens.

I’ve been a Twitter user for over six months and have established habits. I check out new followers and follow most everyone back. The exception is those with more than ten tweets in succession about getting more Twitter followers. I’ve also been known to count the number of “Good morning!”or “’Night, all!” tweets and make my follow decisions accordingly. I make it a point to re-tweet interesting, informative, and hilarious tweets, yet generally avoid re-tweeting Twitter heavy-hitters like Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) or Laura Fitton (@pistachio). Both are great to follow but people re-tweet them enough and this strikes me subtly cloying. Not so subtle are the “Read my blog!” DMs arriving daily from the legions of social media experts. 

 I follow smart professional friends like Ray Wang (@rwang0) of Forrester, Josh Weinberger (@kitson) from CRM Magazine, Scott Humphrey (@scotthumphrey) from Humphrey Strategic Communications, and strategy and leadership guru Art Petty (@artpetty), and I monitor tweets from my own firm, Baseline Consulting (@BaselineConsult). I don’t deploy bots that automatically thank people for following me, and I only recently began using the groups feature in Tweetdeck to organize my tweeple. (The Twitter lexicon just creeps up on you.)  I make it a point to log on to Twitter daily to stay in touch, but sometimes don’t tweet as often due to my hectic travel schedule. As my buddy Michael Cristia (@mcristia) once tweeted, “Jill, no tweets for three days! Traveling internationally?”

But despite my Twitter routine, I’m still very much of a dilettante. One follower I’ll call Pam had over 37000 of her own followers, making her a charter member of what I call the “tweet elite.” Pam’s profile described her as a social media-savvy professional woman, and her tweets were generally informative and smart. I followed her back. But I noticed a certain political theme recurring in her tweets that was squarely partisan (no problem), slightly mean-spirited (hmmm), and often hostile to those that disagreed (deal breaker). I’m all for healthy repartee, but in Pam’s case I could have logged off Twitter and turned on The O’Reilly Factor. I’d heard the term “unfollow” and decided to do it to Pam. 

So I typed “Unfollow @Pam.”  Less than 30 seconds later, I received a DM from Pam:

“If you are on a campaign to have people unfollow me on Twitter, then allow me to do the same for you.”

Uh oh.

Here was a hard-won lesson in Twitter diplomacy.” Crestfallen, I’d once used the “block” command on Anderson Cooper (@andersoncooper) because I was convinced his tweets weren’t his, but I’d never explicitly unfollowed anyone and figured it was just an in-line command. It wasn’t. And now Pam and her hearty army of loyalists were going to unfollow—or more likely block—me en masse and I was not only going to lose Twitter followers but some personal friends who weren’t even on-line, six degrees of separation being what it is.

“Yeah, I saw your tweet,” said my friend and our VP of Marketing, Tamara Dull (@tamaradull) when I shared Pam’s icy reply. “She’s a Twitter bigwig. I’m surprised it took her a full thirty seconds to see it.” Tamara coached me on how to go to a Twitter user’s profile and then click the “Remove” button there. “Then you might want to go back and delete the tweet,” she suggested, “and maybe remove it from your Facebook page, too.”  Tamara’s too nice to finger-wag in these situations but she could have, and I would have taken it, head bowed.

The obvious moral of the story is to learn to at least dog paddle before swimming with the big fish. But at the end of the day, the real lesson is that social media is new water altogether, and sometimes you have to just hold your breath and jump in.

Dear IT: A Letter from Your Business Users

In which Jill writes a rebuttal letter on behalf of her business clients.

photo by aflcio2008

In my last blog post I told a story of a client who, in an effort to explain the value of business intelligence, wrote a letter to his CEO explaining the business value delivered by BI and the ROI projections for newly-integrated data. The letter worked. The BI team got the funding it needed to propel itself from project to program.

But at many companies it would take more than a letter and a value proposition to convince business users of the value of BI. Knowing some of the harsh realities at other companies, I’ve penned a sort of rebuttal letter from the BI user community back to IT.

Dear BI Team:

Long time no see. And by that, we mean where the hell have you been? We know you’re around. Seems you’ve been complaining to our execs about the lack of user adoption. And that we never engage you. And now you’re mad that we’ve hired consultants to come in to help us build a roadmap.

Well guess what? We had no choice. While you’re letting that big database vendor buy you lunch and having dashboard bake-offs and devising new IT standards—again—we have work to do. This may have slipped your mind, but the company has just downsized. Despite this rough patch, our responsibilities haven’t changed. Remember the CEO’s company-wide webcast in January? The one where he promised that in the coming year the company would cut costs while increasing customer acquisition and driving innovation? Well, that’s our job. And we’re trying to get it done.

Frankly we’re not sure whether to feel resentment or resignation. After all, we know what you guys have been spending and, frankly, all that funding should align with our needs. You’ve been loading data warehouse tables for as long as we can remember. But no one’s asked us if we wanted any of that data. And if we hear the question, “What keeps you up at night?” from one of your business analysts one more time we’re going to throw the poor bugger down the elevator shaft. Odds are he’ll bounce off one of those big servers in your data center.

We read someplace that IT is supposed to act as a supplier to the business. We deal with suppliers all the time. But none of them expects us to understand their internal processes—they just help us solve our problems. You guys insist on us working within your framework. Whatever it is.

Here’s what we’d like. We’d like to track the results of our marketing campaigns by the hour and make continuous adjustments. We’d like to monitor and respond to the buzz about the company through social media. We’d like the account reps to know about support and payment issues when they’re writing customer bids. We’d like management to understand the true profitability of our products, not just their revenues. We’d like our numbers to reconcile between finance and sales.

So while you’re mounting your campaign against our consultants and lamenting our shoddy technical skills, why don’t you calendar a face-to-face meeting with us and ask us about this list? No, this isn’t another requirements gathering session. Instead, it’s us offering you an opportunity to participate. We’re hopeful that maybe you can help us solve some of these problems? Or maybe it’ll just be business as usual.

In characteristic anticipation of something new,

Your Users