Ive been in CRM for 22 years

Recently I saw someone (quite visible in the CRM, IT, SW space) mention that they've been in the CRM space for over 22 years. CRM companies like Siebel and even before it Contact Management companies like Goldmine and others have not been around that long.

So what was this person talking about. What this person was saying was true and we've all known it, but it often gets overridden in todays CRM deployments for the technology bells and whistles. Also in the epiphany lies the revelation that has made some recent CRM SW deployments highly successful.

CRM is not Siebel, Salesforce, SAP, Goldmine or anything else. CRM is a business process .. a way for an enterprise to increase shareholder value by managing customer relationships well .. in all stages of the relationship. This is what the person was highlighting in their statement that he has been involved in the customer relationship business processes for 22years. Maybe they were not fully automated processes etc but it was still CRM .. maybe CRM by using paper and pencil .. or the good ol Rolodex .. but CRM none the less.

Now in all honesty most customers fully comprehend this. However they get so caught up in the automation part during the CRM deployment that they end up with a highly automated version of their existing business process (in most cases degraded versions) and provides no new business value add.

So in effect their CRM initiative turns into a bitter pill that's hard to swallow (read as, another notch on the failed CRM list).

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) .... Really!!

Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS) 3C = Content, Commerce, Community 4th C = Context P = Personalization VS = Vertical Search
Tim Berners-Lee, O'Reilly and Sramana Mitra -> WWW, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0

Not sure if Sramana would really qualify for that. Also the Web 3.0 formula proposed above while intersting and slickly packaged does not add anything new. Adding the Context, Personalization and vertical slant to it all does not qualify for 3.0. My contention is that we need to have this in 2.0 anyways.

I guess people are looking for their marketing fix by trying to be the first out there to define 3.0 when we're still trying to get going with 2.0.

So in a similar though lighter vein I propose that

Web 3.0 = Web 2.0 + ∆
where ∆ = increases in service quality, access, continuity and context;
∆ tends to ∞.

What is CRM 2.0?

When I started posting on this blog some folks whom I shared this with started asking me .. "so what is your take on CRM 2.0?" Are you just going the "i" and "e" way of early 2000 and appending "2.0" to your blog name as the latest fad to get more visibility and ultimately more visitors.

So today I've decided to write this post on what CRM 2.0 means to me.

CRM to me is a set of business process that organizations can apply to ultimately increase shareholder value. I use the term shareholder in the broadest possible way because CRM is applicable to all organizations like one person proprietorship's to non-Profits to SMB's to large mega-corporations. Now its 2.0 time in the CRM world because there is a sustained resurgence of CRM initiatives over the last 2-3 years and its semi-woven into Web 2.0 technologies and concepts like social media, networking through the web, community participation, experience management, captive attention, Wiki's and YouTubes of the world. In CRM 2.0 the most critical concept that changed atleast from my perspective is not the technology, but the realization that there is a "C" in CRM and it stands for the customer, who should be the center of the CRM universe.

Somehow that simple message got lost and it was so CRM 1.0 for organizations to equip themselves with all the CRM technologies and solutions horizontal, vertical, on-premise, hosted, hybrid what not and then try to engage the customer as a drive by target.

Hello World!!

Hello World!!

This is Darayush Mistry and I'm finally "officially" joining the amazing world of blogs. After ghost writing for a couple of years now and posting every now and then on my other website (http://www.parsiworld.com/) I've decided to start blogging regularly on things that interest me in general. Hopefully some of it will be of interest to you as well. Things that interest me are software products, applied technology, machines, architecture, WWW, AI, human brain, humour, enterprise software applications, digital identity, extreme transactions, digital media, film making, space, stars, social networks and constructs, religion, Zoroastrianism.

A little bit about myself, I'm currently located in the SF Bay Area, CA USA working as a Director of Product Management at Oracle. Over the last decade I've worked mainly in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) space and related technology, however my current team focuses on Oracle Server Technology (aka Fusion Middleware) working on some exciting products in the desktop productivity, disconnected mobile, search, audit and application Life Cycle Management space.

When I'm not being paid for work, I'm spending time with my family, two wonderful kids and our darling dog Tito, that is if I'm not tinkering with some personal projects on social networking, digital media or film making. Got hooked on films as a little kid and it got really heightended while working as a Management Trainee at Leo Burnett in India right after my MBA. Was recruited at LB as a Mgmt Trainee for Client Services and went through their remarkable "Polishing the Apple" program. As part of the program we had to learn and work through all the areas of the agency from services to creative. That's where I ended up making my first full length advertising film (for a 30sec spot). Anyways the professional work I do today is very far from films and media in general.

So lets get the blog juices flowing.