De afgelopen maanden zijn letterlijk en figuurlijk in een stroomversnelling voorbij gegaan. Letterlijk, omdat ik hard aan het trainen ben geweest voor de New York Marathon!! En figuurlijk, omdat er op werk weer zoveel gebeurd is! Daar werd ik pas echt van bewust toen ik de afgelopen maand Sinterklaas tegen het lijf liep..terwijl ik nog aan het idee aan het wennen was dat de zomer weer voorbij was. Read more…
Archive for 2010
Full speed ahead!
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Jongleren kun je leren
Het is tijd voor wat nieuws. Ik ben op dit moment bezig met het oriënteren op een nieuwe rol binnen de energiewereld, en kijk daarbij ook stiekem over de schutting bij de buren: chemicaliën. Het ‘afrollen’ is het inruilen van je oude voor een nieuw project en is altijd spannend omdat het moeilijk is om van tevoren in te schatten wat je precies tegen gaat komen en vooral met wie je gaat werken. Mijn ervaring bij Accenture met de zoektocht naar een nieuwe opdracht na het afsluiten van een oude is goed: ik heb de vorige keren een goede stap naar voren kunnen maken qua verantwoordelijkheden en inhoudelijk ontzettendveel opgestoken. De periode waarin je die overstap regelt is echter een behoorlijke uitdaging. Niet alleen moet ik zelf nu echt goed na gaan denken wat de volgende stap idealiter zou zijn, ook moet ik kijken waar ik die het beste kan zetten – en beiden zijn lastig.
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User Acceptance Testing: het moment waarop het systeem van de klant wordt
De User Acceptance Test (UAT) voor Performance Management is voorspoedig gegaan. Het is altijd plezierig om mee te maken dat wanneer nieuwe gebruikers voor het eerst een SAP Enterprise Portal zien, ze eigenlijk heel verbaasd zijn over de gebruikersvriendelijkheid daarvan. Dergelijke sessies zijn altijd heel verrassend, maar zeker ook behoorlijk stressvol. Er zijn een hoop zaken die komen kijken bij een testfase in een project.
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Analyze it….it is worth the investment
“It’s not information overload it’s filter failure” – Clay Shirky
In a world full of information how does one filter through the fluff…? It is not only a frustrating task for the consumer; organizations face the challenge as well.
In the June 2010 Vision Statement from Harvard Business Review they break down the ‘6 ways to find value in Twitter’s Noise’. Key word: value.
1. You can learn alot from how your customers talk about your competition
2. You can identify innovations for your product/service not yet known to you; but widely evident to your customer
3. Don’t settle for a pretty graph; dig down into the details and understand why the trend is appearing
4. Gain raw feedback from your customers as to your products/service usability
5. Identify potential complaint drivers in advance and prepare your inbound customer service channels
6. Listen for dominators in the conversation; take note and make an action plan! Read more…
Research shows marketers are changing their strategy to one of ‘Profitable Growth’
In a recent Accenture research more than 400 marketing executives from companies in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, China, India and Australia were asked about their thoughts on the post-recession world regarding customer behavior, their most important business issues, the performance barriers they encounter and their strategic focus.
According to the respondents, the recession has significantly altered the ‘needs & wants’ and overall purchase behavior of consumers. More than ever they expect more value for their money, have higher product quality expectations, are increasingly price-sensitive, have higher customer service expectations and expect that their time constraints are being respected.
Uitdagingen op de kruising van Technology, Consulting & Business
Inmiddels ben ik net terug uit de sportschool. Ik was er aan toe eigenlijk om eerlijk te zijn! Deze week heeft weer laten zien dat het hard werken is bij Accenture. Krijg je er ook wat voor terug? Ja, natuurlijk… Maar daarom blijft het wel hard werken natuurlijk. De go-live, de dag waarop de nieuwe SAP systemen in gebruik genomen gaan worden is op 3 januari. Op 6 december echter moeten we helemaal klaar zijn met de bouw en wordt besloten of we wel of niet live gaan. Nog een week eerder moet de UAT (User Acceptance Test) fase afgerond zijn; het moment waarop de klant daadwerkelijk de oplossing accepteert. Daar zijn we nu druk mee bezig, met die UAT. Spannende tijd! Er zijn nog wel een aantal problemen uitdagingen te overwinnen namelijk! Read more…
Celebrating 5 years of Blogpodium: my vision on the future for corporate blogs
We increasingly read stories in the blogosphere that (ironically enough) predict the demise of corporate blogs in their current format. Why? The corporate blog was originally seen as a medium that was less marketing-driven than a corporate website, and one that would allow consumers to communicate with ‘real’ people, so they would get to hear the ‘real’ story behind the brand or the company. After the first successful experiments by pioneers in corporate blogging, such as General Motors in the consumer market, and Accenture in the professional services market, corporate blogs reached sufficient critical mass for the late majority to also set up corporate blogs. However, because marketers did not fully recognize the essence of the power of blogs in particular, and that of social media in general, a situation arose in which these channels were still being used too much as traditional ‘push’ channels.
In addition, other companies took a quite different – more dangerous – route, and started abusing social networks by promoting their company under the name of someone else. The effects of this have become apparent in the past few years. Every year, renowned communications agency Edelman (that also happens to be our downstairs neighbor in our Amsterdam headquarters building) publishes the Edelman Trust Barometer study. Their most recent study shows that respondents’ trust in their ‘friends and peers as a reliable source of information about a company’ went down from 45% in 2008 to 25% in 2010.
Forrester has noticed the same trend, but their results are even more shocking: only 16% of their respondents say that they trust corporate blogs. That is even lower than all other communication channels that were examined in the study, including print media, direct mail, and corporate emails. Read more…
Employee Share Purchase Plan: a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have
Should all employees be given the opportunity to own shares in the company? That was the main question in the BNR Leiderschap radio program in which I recently was a guest, together with Leen Zevenbergen (CEO Qurius) and Pascale Nieuwland from Stichting Nederlands Participatie Instituut. The interview with BNR Deputy Editor Rens de Jong was triggered by a study carried out by Radboud University Nijmegen, which showed that a share purchase plan that covers the entire company has a positive effect on the company and the productivity of its employees. Read more…
Cloud Computing Alphabet Soup: I for Integration
Blog post written by Bas van Hengstum. Bas is a former blogger on Blogpodium and is an Integration Architect at Accenture Netherlands with a great interest for Cloud Computing.
Cloud Computing enjoys an increasing popularity, and more types of services arise in the Cloud. Traditionally there was a relatively short list of Cloud services consisting of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (Paas) and Software (or: Application) as a Service (Saas). Nowadays we start running out of acronyms, as services such as Process as a Service (PRaaS), Storage as a Service (also SaaS), Integration as a Service (also IaaS) and Enterprise Service Bus as a Service (ESBaaS) have been added. This trend of having every thinkable service in the Cloud has even evolved into Everything as a Service (EaaS, XaaS or *aaS).
With my background in Integration Architecture, I wrote this article to provide insight in the world of Integration as a Service and to introduce an Integration-as-a-Service Offerings Model.
Lesson #1: friendliness doesn’t guarantee a positive NPS score
This week I received the ‘fresh from the press’ 2010 report from MarketResponse for the most customer friendly company in the Netherlands. This was the 4th consecutive year for this research and I was truly interested in what new discoveries it would hold. The report begins with a high level summary of the results; industry wide the average was 7.66 (out of 10) for customer friendliness. Telecom (includes triple play providers) organizations scoring the lowest with 7.19 and home shopping stores the highest with 8.02. No big surprises there as the customer frustrations with the telecom industry are known and readily available for your viewing pleasure on programs such as Radar, and more recently Twitter (i.e. Youp). What was surprising to me was that they scored 7.19. Considering that everyone I know in my personal network can tell their own horrifying customer service story with a Telecom company I was expecting an overall lower score than 7.
