What Won’t Change

Gerald M. Weinberg
author of The Aremac Project, founder and host of the Amplifying Your Effectiveness Conference

The one thing I’ve learned from a half-century in the computer industry is that we can predict anything but the future. In other words, I predict that the future will surprise us, so to prepare for the future, we’d better stay adaptable.

Though the question “What’s coming?” seems to imply change, I feel somewhat safer predicting certain things that won’t change in the next 50 years because they haven’t changed in the past 50. First and foremost, human beings won’t change. They’ll continue to blunder around emotionally, failing to do what they know they ought to do when building and supporting computer systems. For that reason, the need for effective managers will not change, but it will grow more critical.

The Computer Industry

Joe Haldeman
professor at MIT, author of The Forever War, winner of three Hugo Awards and four Nebula Awards for science fiction

In some not-too-distant future, the computer industry will be as obsolete as the Old South’s “peculiar institution.” Once computers are self-aware and completely networked, they will do what benefits them, regardless of the desires of the mushy mortals who invented them.

The Customer Age

Paul Greenberg
author of CRM at the Speed of Light, President of The 56 Group

In order for CRM to have any future—meaning CRM as a strategy for customer engagement—the enterprises have to realize it’s time to cede control to the customers because the customers already have it. The ascension of wikis, blogs, podcasts, Web 2.0 and social networking, combined with the ability of the customer to easily acquire the products and services that they want from multiple places—whether it’s Best Buy, Circuit City or a local mom-and-pop shop, at roughly the same price and the same speed—have changed everything.

The move for companies is from a strategy of managing the relationship with customers to managing customer engagement so that the customer is not what we think of as a loyal customer but a customer advocate on behalf of the enterprise who can form a collaborative team. That’s a big shift in CRM.

Companies have to realize that the customer ecosystem is utterly dominant. The hard part for companies is acting on that, being transparent and making marketing the start of a conversation, as opposed to a division that pushes out hype to capture the customer’s attention. This will take CRM into the whole 2.0 world, which it’s currently not in. It will take a lot of companies a long time to get there.