I’m leading two digital lives. One digital life leaves me feeling glum and underwhelmed and my other digital life leaves me feeling open, connected and free. The Serenity Prayer has become my guiding maxim for managing my dual digital lives.

After being a long time holdout, I caved in not so long ago to the cult of Steve and bought my first MacBook Pro. Truth be known I’d planned to buy one about 2 years previous but didn’t have the readies to make it happen. I’ve regretted that decision as I’m frankly over the whole Windows thing. Anyhoo, I’ve been using my Mac on the job for a a while now and really like the experience particularly the seamless interconnectivity with my iPhone. What’s more I really like using tools like Evernote, Dropbox, Things, 1Password, Numbers, Pages and I’m getting to know Keynote for presentations. I’ve also setup VMWare Fusion so I can run any Windows apps for work such as MS Project, which I can’t stand but that too is a story for another time. In summary, I’m a convert. I’m a happy Mac user.

It was with some personal trepidation then when I started doing some work for a large financial institution. I did have some concerns that the IT Fun Police would try and stop me using my Mac at work but I was planning on being sensible about it. I assumed or more honestly hoped that they wouldn’t hassle me if I didn’t connect my Mac to the corporate network and kept it isolated. Still I thought it wise to not make a big deal about it.

On day one of the new job I was handed the brand new Dell laptop. Here’s where I entered a digital time warp. The laptop came with some locked down Standard Operating Environment image which had a bunch of old software, a hard drive where I’m only allowed to use 30Mb of local disk space, no command line prompt, no access to the Windows Control Panel and no Internet access at all. Nope – have to “apply” for that. I assume I’d get approved without any dramas but I can just imagine the ultra filtered list of sites that I’d be permitted to use all the while knowing the IT police are watching my every move and if “inappropriate material” should accidentally come my way I’d be up for instant dismissal, no questions asked. Can’t say I’m interested in a filtered, censored version of the connected, digital world.

I feel just like that woman in the maternity ward of Monty Python’s Meaning of Life….

“What do I do?”
“What?”
“What do I do?”
“Nothing dear, you’re not qualified!”

Am I qualified to use these tools? Clearly not.

Then there is my iPhone. In a desperation move I thought there may be some chance I could connect my iPhone to the corporate Exchange server. At least I could get my calendar synch and my email sorted. After all, the iPhone can actually do this. Nope – can’t do that. According to the corporate policy (myth?) iPhones are apparently nowhere near secure enough for accessing calendars. Again, rrright. Let’s just park the whole argument about my email and calendar not needing to be secure because there’s nothing there being vaguely interesting enough to justify securing. Not planning on fighting that battle.

I have accepted the things that I cannot change. I cannot change Enterprise IT Fun Police and thus have learnt to live within their restrictions. I continue to use my Mac though which keeps me happy and productive. Armed with a 3G pocket wi-fi and iPhone tethering, I’ve created an island of connectivity to the world beyond. Using their laptop with all the restrictions keeps them happy. Manual synching of calendar activity via email and an old school USB drive does a good enough job to bridge the gap but I feel like I lead two digital lives. One is the 2011 version, the other is like I’m stuck in a digital time warp where the Internet doesn’t exist and useful tools which are available for free through open source and as Software as a Service offerings are figments of some sci-fi writer’s imagination.

What this all means for trying to deliver some innovative, business-driven, modern solutions to address ever increasing business cycles is a story for several other future blog posts, or a book one day…

John Maxwell Sherman

There are many techniques that can be used to gather business requirements for technology solutions but no matter what the specific technique chosen, the traditional approaches involve these basic steps:

Step 1: Identify a broad need
Step 2: Get some initial funding for requirements gathering
Step 3: Identify stakeholders
Step 4: Engage stakeholders to get their feedback on what’s needed
Step 5: Prototype solution
Step 6: Re-engage stakeholders to obtain reaction from prototype
Step 7: Write up requirements, socialize them once more to obtain signoff
Step 8: Business case and funding stage
Step 9: Go build something based on the requirements
Step 10: Deploy the solution in a production environment and hope to realise benefits

These broad steps have worked well in times where the business cycles are reasonably static but the longer the project, the more likely the business requirements will change. Thus, the validity of business requirements diminishes with time.

As colleague PEG discusses in his post Why we can’t keep up, we’re not a in a period where business cycles are reasonably static. We’re in a period where business cycles are increasing at a rapid rate. Business opportunities are appearing and disappearing in ever more shortening timeframes. In these circumstances, we’re seeing the period of validity of business requirements continuing to reduce. 

Validity of requirements diminishes with time as business needs change

A common technique to mitigate this situation is to continuously engage the business stakeholders but the main problem with this approach is the difficulties of controlling scope and budget. The industry has made a number of other attempts to address this situation with approaches such as Rapid Application Development (RAD), Joint Application Development (JAD), Agile etc. and these types of approaches have their pros and cons as well.

The case for Rapid Productionising
We don’t have to design the perfect system and have a perfect business case before we start a project any more. It’s never been easier to quickly build and deploy a system if you start with the mindset that we should do something and deploy quickly to derive business value and evolve the solution from there based on live feedback from the customer. We’re moving to a mindset of Rapid Productionising.

The Rapid Productionising approach

What is making this possible?
There are three key factors coming together at the same time to make this approach possible. Firstly, infrastructure and related services can be provisioned and brought online very quickly and turned off when I don’t need them anymore. Secondly, the rapid growth in SaaS offerings means that I can rollout substantial capability across a wide category of services to stakeholders in days / weeks compared to them waiting months / years in the past. Thirdly, it’s never been cheaper or easier to quickly develop and deploy some custom software as needed to test an idea.

The evolving landscape
One of the axioms in gathering business requirements has been: how can the stakeholders tell you what they want when they don’t know what’s possible? The technology and business cycle landscape is moving so rapidly down a service-based path that we don’t even have to show them any more. Instead of showing them a picture of what night be, why not give the stakeholders something to touch, play with, use and actually use to derive value. The approach doesn’t need to be perfect from day one. Do something, attempt to solve a key piece of a larger problem, rapidly productionise it and evolve it over time.

I recently wrote a piece about how we’re seeing more and more misalignment of the business cycles between IT and business. IT departments are apparently blocking business achieve more and can’t keep up – well maybe not intentionally.

Webjet reached a situation where their business has grown so rapidly that their marketing people couldn’t generate further demand because the internal IT systems couldn’t cope. CEO Richard Noon said “We used to have a situation where the marketing department had to check with our technology people whether it was ok to send out a campaign.”

In dealing with this misalignment Webjet have struck a deal with Macquarie Telecom to establish a more flexible approach to manage its website and ticketing applications.  Their response has been to commoditise the provision of the production IT infrastructure to a 3rd party provider that has the business model and flexibility required to support Webjet’s changing needs.

In doing this at appears that Webjet will retain the really important piece – site content and business rules – the essence of their customer relationship if you will. The next most logical step for them would be to optimise this further to drive differentiation.

There’s obviously been a lot of noise about Apple’s very recent announcement of the iPad device with many technology and in particular Apple devotees out there salivating like excited Shar Peis. For me though, my interest was piqued not in the device itself but about the business of Apple and in their ways that they continue to use emerging technology to redefine technology markets.

Firstly about the device. Clearly a clever piece of positioning sitting between the phone and the laptop with a clear roadmap. They’ve announced version 1 without a camera and without a GPS. The lack of GPS in particular is interesting but will no doubt come reasonably soon particularly with growth in location based news and services markets.

Apple have seen Amazon’s Kindle carve out a nice niche in the eBook space over the last few months in particular. Overnight this segment has basically disappeared. Bad luck for those Amazon folks who make a living out of the Kindle device but you didn’t need a crystal ball to recognise that they only had a limited window of opportunity. Apple’s tie up with 5 major book publishers will ensure that the Apple bookstore will only be a success in the same way iTunes has changes the music landscape.

Another market segment that may vaporise quickly is the Netbook segment. This is another area where manufacturers such as Asus, Acer and others have done exceedingly well. As with the Kindle I can see their days as being numbered. Just over 12 months ago my wife and I were considering a purchase of an electronic photo frame. I convinced her that for just a few dollars more a Netbook was the way to go. The screensaver would show all of our family photos, she could setup her calendar to run the daily family life, she could browse the web from the kitchen, play music etc. She now loves it and can’t do a whole lot without it. I can see the iPad creating a whole new segment in acting as the hub for family activity. Apart from doing all of the above as a really fun experience, you can add in reading books, newspapers, remotely running Apple TV, AirTunes etc. All of this would be run from a docked, touch screen device that could sit tucked away in the kitchen. Samsung was perhaps onto something when they put a PC in a fridge but it’s taken Apple to take that concept into a device for every home. I can see every Mum wanting one of these.

The other piece of the puzzle that interested me was taking the concept of the cheap and somewhat disposable app from the iTunes App Store and extending that into traditional desktop software. I’m now used to just paying a few dollars for an app for the iPhone and with the iPad, Apple is saying spend $10 for iWork, KeyNote and Numbers and Microsoft wants me to spend hundreds of dollars on MS Office?

Perhaps most tellingly has been Apple’s approach to exposing its products to entirely new segments. For many years, Apple dominated a couple of defined segments, particularly graphic design and education but had never been able to break into the more mainstream PC markets. The iPhone exposed many millions to the ‘Apple experience’ and this has subsequently driven demand for Apple Macs, Macbooks etc. I can see the iPad driving this even further.

Finally, the real marketing master stroke is Apple is taking advantage of the position and leverage that the iTunes store gives them. They can offer the iPad at such a price that the mass will want one. Once you’ve bought an iPad, you’ll have entirely new market segments transacting in the App Store with Apple taking a clip on everything. It would not surprise me if Apple is subsidising the iPad hardware to leverage this position further. Nice work Steve.

We’ve been hearing with increasing rapidity about organisations grappling with an apparent misalignment in business cycles and the other day I came across a local organisation who’d come to grips with this situation and addressed it in a thoroughly modern way. Their approach was to recognise that some key functions within the business such as payroll, staff roster management, finance and telephone sales didn’t actually add much value to the business and hence they chose to carve them off and outsource them to specialised third party organisations in different geographies. They even took this further by outsourcing key components of IT such as the maintenance of the Enterprise Service Bus to a little company who specialised in this area. Another interesting point to their strategy is that they have formed relationships with a number of nimble, second-tier service providers both locally and offshore which provides them with the resource agility to rapidly respond to change.

A key element to their success was to structure the service contracts with the 3rd party providers to ensure that there was appropriate SLA coverage and to have good quality manual backup procedures where appropriate. So what did this mean for this particular organisation? Their IT department operates with literally a handful of people and their roles are really to orchestrate business innovation projects and drive business outcomes. As a wise sage once told me (you know who you are Chris) “There’s no such thing as an IT project!!!!!”.

While this is interesting for this particular organisation, it’s only really become possible through a number of emerging trends towards the commoditisation of infrastructure through virtualisation tools and techniques, cloud computing and huge growth in the availability and importantly a change of attitudes towards Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings.

A recent article from TechCrunch Cloud adoption in the enterprise: The coming Tornado takes this apparent movement further. “The coming shift echoes the disruptive transformation of IT in the ’90s, driven by companies like Oracle, Microsoft, Lotus and Sun. Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm” and “Inside the Tornado,” studied this transition and described the chain of adoption for enterprise technology: innovators are followed by early adopters, visionaries, and finally IT departments. And when enterprise technology hits this latter group, we’re officially in the Tornado.”

“Well the dust is beginning to swirl once more. Over the next two years, enterprise IT will follow in the footsteps of today’s early adopters and visionaries, finally embracing the Cloud and moving content, applications, and processes to the web. So what are the catalysts for this perfect storm? A combination of maturing platforms, generational and cultural shifts, and compelling economics, making cloud-based solutions the undeniable choice for nearly all future non-core technology purchases. Managing infrastructure and technology that is not competitively-additive has become competitively-expensive.”

A recent piece of research by Gartner goes yet further by somewhat startlingly predicting “By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Several interrelated trends are driving the movement toward decreased IT hardware assets, such as virtualization, cloud-enabled services, and employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks” .

As these trends become more mainstream, there will be a profound and broad impact on internal company staff, the nature of local IT work and the structure and approach of local supporting IT services organisations. A prediction in an article published some years ago in CIO magazine on the future of jobs and innovation in 2010 is proving eerily accurate “Commoditized work will go overseas. Some more creative work — like non-commodity one-off and unique projects — will go overseas. But where interface with the business is important, that work will remain here. What will continue to go overseas are the repetitive activities, the things that will ultimately be automated anyway.”

The key message that I’m seeing emerging in our day to day work is that people, not just organisations have to adapt and change their thinking to thrive in this rapidly evolving environment. Those business functions that can be commoditised, are being commoditised. The old ways of IT departments providing a full suite of onsite, local supporting services is rapidly diminishing. IT people must become more business savvy from top to bottom to ensure their contributions are adding value and can’t be commoditised. The organisations that are willing to embrace these changes can position themselves to take advantage of every business opportunity that comes their way and adapt accordingly.

We’ve been talking a lot at work lately about innovation not just being about the hunt for the new “bolt out of the blue” idea but being also about synthesising existing ideas from within and without the industry you’re working in. Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne is seen as the seminal text in this area.

I’m a relative newbie to the whole iPhone / iTunes thing and yes I’ve been somewhat of a philistine. I’ve never been good at just following the crowd down a well-trodden path but that’s a story for another time.  Apple is being held up as a poster child for innovation and the market demand for iPhones is on a huge growth curve and has in fact started eating into Apple’s own iPod growth.  But what is it about the iPhone that is truly innovative?

Let’s look at the components:

• Mobile phone: Been done once or twice before
• SMS: Standard feature for many years
• GPS: Now common-place
• Web browsing: It’s been pretty common to be able to do this in phones such as Nokia’s for years but the experience has been pretty clunky
• Email (Push and Pull): Pretty ubiquitous these days although the Blackberry has been the leader in this area for some years
• Mp3 player: Standard feature these days
• Camera: Standard feature and has been evolving in capabilities for years and the iPhone camera is ordinary compared to others out there
• 3rd party applications: Been done for a number of years particularly in the Symbian world
• Touch screen interface: Been done before initially by HTC and then by Samsung et al
• Online shopping: Has been around in the Symbian world for some time
• Accelerometer: Apple wasn’t the first and now many consumer devices are complemented by inbuilt accelerometers

So if the iPhone doesn’t have any new components, what’s truly new about the iPhone??  Nothing, that’s what. So why has it been so successful?

The true innovation has come from the synthesis of existing ideas from multiple places into one experience. It’s easy and pleasurable to use this device. It’s easy to send and receive emails, browse the web from wherever you are. The use of the accelerometer is kinda fun. The integration with iTunes is particularly easy. They’ve changed the game for smartphones by taking existing concepts and created a simple, pleasurable, desirable experience for the consumer, not just the corporate email junkie. What’s more, their marketing hasn’t been targeted at a typical feature vs. feature comparison of my mobile device vs. your mobile device. Apple’s marketing has been aimed at creating desirability through simplicity and fun. They’ve turned the Nokia and Blackberry approach on its ear by taking the complexity out of the experience. What’s more by making desirability a key component of the consumer equation, Apple has been able to command such a significant price and profit premium on its competitors that it’s threatens to send them bankrupt.

Following this line of thinking I’m starting to gather up a catalogue of other examples of this type of synthesis in innovation. Here’s a couple:

• Barnes & Noble: changed the book purchasing experience by adding lounges and coffee shops to their stores to encourage people to take their time, relax and read.
• Global Post : In an era where traditional newspapers are dying rapidly and anybody with access to the Internet can contribute thoughts, ideas and commentary from anywhere in the world, Global Post has created an online only newspaper where the content comes from independent journalists, correspondents and readers and has engaged the readership in vastly different ways to traditional newspapers.

I’d be really interested if people have any other examples that they’d like to share. Drop me a line.

I’ve heard this complaint from business people on and off for some ten years or more but lately it’s become a somewhat common theme. In a number of recent in-depth conversations with senior business people across a range of industry segments it was all they wanted to talk about. Is this true? Has IT truly become a blocker to business velocity? What’s more: if it is true what can we do about it?

Many modern IT departments show some interesting common characteristics:

• Strict governance frameworks – no application can get near production unless it’s been through an entire project governance process which requires time and money.
• The adoption of offshore development and operations has reinforced the need for strong disciplines in areas such as requirements and Functional Specifications. This discipline takes time.
• CIO’s and whole IT departments are being increasingly measured on production uptime but stability of systems = high availability. Why would any CIO encourage rapid change in these circumstances?
• Have become geared towards large projects that take time, money and discipline.
• IT struggling to remain a strong contributor to business success rather than merely act as another supplier to the business.

Many of the business people I’ve been talking to lately are saying the following:

• Opportunities are appearing and disappearing more frequently.
• Feel that their IT departments can’t move fast enough to support them.
• They can now do so much without the need for their IT departments getting involved. This is because so many of these tools are becoming democratised – businesses can adopt them quickly to receive value without intervention by IT. Business can now sign up for all manner of services from e-mail to CRM to document management, web site setup and management, Business Intelligence, HRMS, GIS etc. etc. All of this can be done without the involvement and even the approval of IT and what’s more they can do this in a matters of days and weeks.

If these characteristics are anywhere near typical, IT departments are not deliberately blocking business progress, but have become constrained to large projects and large delivery due to circumstances and a misalignment of business cycles. Business wants to take advantage of new market opportunities in a matter of weeks but is increasingly unable to do so because their IT departments can’t or won’t move fast enough to support them.

As my colleague PEG discusses in his “Why we can’t keep up” post business and IT cycles have become misaligned. IT departments are typically geared to static cycles in both time and project investment while business cycle times are accelerating and project investments are reducing.

PEG’s misaligned cycles

We’re seemingly reaching a point of no return where business can go rogue and go outside of IT, without their inputs and blessing to get things done. This is far from ideal. So what can we do about this? How can we bridge the gap between business and IT and support the needs and constraints of both parties?

One approach is to introduce the concept of an initiative incubator strategy where an external party works with both the business and IT develop and trial new business initiatives without threatening production systems. When and only when the business value of the initiatives are proven to a limited scale in the marketplace and the business case is de-risked do we then transition the initiative to production-scale toolsets and deploy to production within the standard project governance frameworks. Why external? Because an external party can provide additional capacity and ideas without disrupting business as usual activities.

They key to this strategy from the business’ point of view is to not try and solve all of the problems at once – how can we deliver 80% of the business value in 20% of the time to a small audience to prove (or disprove) the value of the proposition? From IT’s point of view, they need to know that rogue projects won’t threaten production systems and when the business value of the initiatives are proven, they will be given the opportunity to introduce appropriate of tools and disciplines before the initiatives can be considered production ready. The parties must be engaged to appreciate the benefits and controls of the approach.

Step 1 – Identify the highest priority initiative that the business wants to prove / disprove.

Step 2 – Break this initiative down into chunks that deliver the most value first.

Step 3 – Use a third party to quickly build a ‘conference room’ style demonstration of the initiative. Most IT departments are usually resource constrained and the introduction of an unencumbered third party that can focus on the task at hand can speed up the process and introduces new ideas.

Step 4 – Evolve the initiative based on initial feedback.

Step 5 – Launch a closed, externally hosted trial of the new initiative to a limited audience.

Step 6 – Evolve the trial initiative based on user feedback (weekly? daily?), monitor and evaluate.

Step 7 – Slowly increase the scale of the initiative by borrowing from Google’s Gmail strategy. Allow each of the trial participants to invite a small number of their friends / colleagues to also participate in the trial. This allows the shaping and managing of the demand curve.

Step 8 – Decision time. Does the business proceed to the business case phase with the knowledge that it has real, valid marketplace data to justify the transition to production development and deployment or does it shelve the initiative having spent a fraction of the cost of an at-risk project? Shelving of the project does not necessarily mean throwing it away. Perhaps the timing of the introduction of the initiative isn’t right. Maybe the initiative is a good idea at the wrong time.

Step 9 – While production development work is underway the trial can continue and the business can continue to receive value. At the appropriate point in time, IT can deploy the new initiative to production the externally hosted trial can be turned off.

The beauty of this approach is that multiple initiatives can be conducted in parallel for a fraction of the cost of at-risk projects. The initiatives can be constructed and introduced quickly, without significantly impacting production and only those that will be truly successful are transitioned to production.

Option 4 – If I’ve customised my recommendation offers to include outdoor items, include an examination of short term weather forecast from places like The Weather Channel or Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology to tune the offer. If the weather looks good next weekend offer me some barbecue products, outdoor entertaining products, cookbooks, gardening products and the like.

This information combines information from both the surface of the organisation and outside and is very recent. As such, this would be of high value to me.

Option 5 – Mix in community-based event calendars such as Melbourne’s Spring Racing Carnival, International Film Festival, Comedy Festival, exhibitions and the like. The information isn’t as current for the offer but is still somewhat pro-active in nature.

Option 6 – Use demographic-based statistical information from sources such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics to identify what customers in a similar demographic as me have bought from within the customer base. This combines both internal and external information to sharpen an offer. Statistical information gathered through censuses and surveys can be quite old and as such the value is diminished.

Option 7 – Add external sources of product / service reviews from sources such as Australia’s Choice or CNET to sharpen the pitch e.g. allow me to customise the offers to only push to me products / services that have an average rating of greater than 3 ½ stars. This would add credibility to the offer while maintaining personalisation. These types of product reviews can become quite quickly outdated however which would diminish the value over time. An extension of this from the retailer’s perspective is to cull their product range to only stock highly rated items.

Option 8 – Introduce a more immediate, market-based ratings system such as Tripadvisor.com? In 2007, my family were planning a trip to Canada, the US and Mexico for 2008. We used Tripadvisor almost exclusively to determine where to go and where not to go, where to stay and how to get there. The information posted to Tripadvisor is immediate and combines both historical and current views to determine recommendations.

Option 9 – Introduce a more immediate and current sense of community ratings by introducing a ‘What’s Hot’ list a la the Apple iPhone Apps Store which I can interrogate to see what others are buying and have rated highly. This could combine multiple external sources to create a picture of a more broad, but immediate picture of the marketplace for specific types of products. The information here would be live and dynamic, be sourced from multiple external sources and could be tailored to suit my preferences which would add immense value to me.

I’m totally over the whole generic retail offer thing. It bewilders me why supermarkets still think they should stuff my letterbox with junk mail telling me I can save 25 cents on butter this week. Some years ago, the “Amazon recommends” approach was new and innovative and may have worked for a while. Personally I just ignore them now. So why can’t we look to add value to retail offers?

As PEG argues, we can add value to information by including external sources and making those sources of information real-time or even predictive in nature. In the retail market world if you could take that information and combine it with the ability for me to personalise the offers then I would know that each and every offer put to me was valuable to me. The central point that retailers need to consider is would this make me buy more? Damn right it would.

I’ve been using Hotmail as my main email account for more than 10 years now, since before they were owned by Microsoft and always saw this account as my email for life. People could always find me there no matter where I was in the world. There was a certain comfort to that, but I’ve reached a point now where my Inbox has become full of impersonal rubbish that I pretty much ignore retail offers such as these nowadays. Do I buy products from offers such as these at the moment? Absolutely not.

This most recent email though got me thinking though about some work that PEG, a colleague of mine has been doing on the value of information. PEG’s central premise is that time and distance drive the value of information. That is, information value is at its highest if the information is sourced from outside the organisation and is pro active.

PEG’s line of thinking has been getting some traction both within our organisation from Rod in his ‘What next?’ article and outside through Andy Mulholland at Cap Gemini and Gary Cokins at SAS.

PEG and I have discussed the concepts a few times relating to some of the customer engagement work we’ve been doing recently and the most recent Amazon email got me thinking about how we’d map the formation and value of retail offers in this way.

Option 1 – Use what I’ve bought before to offer the same or similar product again. As an example, let’s say I’ve previously bought a 1^st gen Ipod, now offer me the latest, just released model. The information is historical in nature and while largely “internal” in nature is based on my purchases so is closer to the Surface where the customer touches the organisation.

Option 2 – Mine the customer base to find other customers who have bought the same products as me and then see if there’s a pattern to other products they’ve bought. This is the Amazon model. “We’ve noticed that other customers who’ve bought Zoot Suit Riot have also bought yada yada”. The information is still all ‘internal’ to the organisation and while is still based on historical data is arguably only slightly more pro active.

I find these offers of pretty poor value given their historical nature and lack of tuning and it looks like I’m not the only one.

Option 3 – Add value by allowing me to customise the types of offers sent to me through establishing a profile of likes / dislikes. The information here is closer to the surface of the organisation where the customer touches the organisation and becomes more pro active rather than generic in nature.

While these retail offer business rules undoubtedly would help drive sales, (at least for a period of time until some customers may start ignoring them, they are all “internal” in nature. They have some value but following PEG’s line of thinking the more recent the information and the more external the source, the more valuable it would be. It got me thinking – What if we started to add external sources of information into the mix to determine what to offer me?

I’ll add some thoughts on that later…