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Be Open to Customers Ideas, or the Competition Will Hear Them

The column you are about to read is true. It was inspired—provoked, actually—by my online interactions with a brand-conscious global ...

 

August 15, 2005CIO

The column you are about to read is true. It was inspired—provoked, actually—by my online interactions with a brand-conscious global financial services giant whose charge card I carry in my wallet. The name of this company is not important: I would prefer that readers focus on the point I’m trying to make rather than on the company I’m using to make it.

So, here I am on American Express’s website, banging away on my laptop, doing the thing I most despise doing as a consultant: expenses. I hate—no, loathe—expense reports. Even though expense reports are the most remunerative writing I do, they’re a pain, and keeping and tracking paper receipts is a nuisance. I remain desperately eager for easy and frictionless ways to get swiftly reimbursed for the hotels, taxis and other financial effluvia of my nomadic existence.

As I try in vain to define and cut and paste my airfare from a particular date (and my hotel receipt and taxi rides from the same date) from my online account into a Word document that will soon double as a digital expense form, it hits me: There’s a better, smarter and easier way of doing this. Much better. Much smarter. Much easier. I feel the happy tingle of hair rising on the back of my neck that physiologically signals: good idea!

As a fast-calculating idiot savant with an entrepreneurial bent, I do a quick back-of-the-mental-envelope number-crunch and figure that this is, conservatively, a $50 million-a-year idea for my charge card company. That’s real money.

But because I’m the kind of guy who will cheerfully give away a $50 million idea if it will make my life easier, I immediately stop doing my expenses online and draft a 650-word e-mail telling Amex how it could design, prototype, test and deploy this scheme.

In a moment, I’ll explain the idea and justify its multimillion-dollar valuation. But the real reason I’m writing this column is not to tout my idea’s brilliance but to declare my frustration. My charge card company—and I’ve been a member in excellent standing for over 15 years—simply would not let me submit my memo either online or via the phone.

You want to talk CRM? You want to talk about sustainable sources of strategic advantage? Let me emphatically state: If you don’t have infrastructures or apps that make it easy for your best and most profitable customers to give you—give you—ideas about how you can do better and be better, you need to rethink what digital networks can and should mean in your organization.

 
 
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WHITE PAPERS

The Future of Financial Reporting

Finance and accounting executives must understand, adapt to, and manage the costs associated with changes: and doing so opens an opportunity to leverage this shift to better position their companies in the eyes of the investment community.
 

Offset Expenditures with Old Switches

Learn how to unleash the hidden cash in your used equipment.
 

Managing an Offshore Development Center

Since the early 1990's companies have been searching for places in the world where they can tap into reduced development costs and a better business environment.
 

Power Considerations for Virtualized IT Environments

This paper describes some of power challenges related to virtualization - and the readily available technologies to address them.
 

The Convergence of IT and Facilities

If IT and Facilities could work collaboratively, organizations can operate more efficiently and effectively...
 

The Evolutionary Stages of the Data Center

How to avoid unplanned obsolescence in the power distribution infrastructure.
 

WEBCASTS

Managing Client Systems in the Enterprise

Keeping client systems costs under control is just one of the many initiatives IT must address when trying to manag...
 

IT Consolidation Made Easy

The Primary IT Initiative for Reducing Costs
 

Webcast with Dan Vesset: Investing in Business Analytics Technology

What exactly is business analytics and why should you care? Dan Vesset of IDC and Gaurav Verma of SAS answer this a...
 

Capitalize on Your SAP Content

After 18 years of partnership and over 3,000 successful customer deployments, Open Text has become SAP's premier pa...
 

Enterprise Cloud Computing: Ready for Primetime?

The progression toward enterprise cloud computing is happening today, as industry leaders deploy technologies that ...
 

Preparing Your Business Services for the Future

Would you trust your network monitoring tools enough to know when something is truly halting a business service? Wh...
 

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