At first glance many would assume that with a CFO background I wouldn’t have the right traits to be responsible for a customer experience management program. After all, customer experience is about people while finance is about numbers. Customer experience deals with emotions while finance involves facts. However, here I am today doing just that. I sit in front of customers and prospects weekly helping them answer the question, “I know it is right to invest in our customer experience, but how do I justify the economic value to my stakeholders?”
Posts Tagged ‘ROI’
Journey of a CFO to Customer Experience Expert
Friday, March 30th, 2012Business on Board – Part II
Thursday, March 15th, 2012In my last blog, I made some assertions about why it’s often difficult to get the business to understand and embrace technology solutions like those offered by Vivisimo—even though the business value delivered by those solutions can be considerable. That’s because the business rarely knows what it wants or needs when it comes to technology. IT doesn’t always do the best job of selling the value of technology internally and SaaS is enabling the business to more easily make its own bad technology decisions.
In this blog, I’d like to make some suggestions about how IT can facilitate good technology decisions by the business—so the business, IT and awesome technology vendors like Vivisimo can all come out winners.
Vivisimo’s Federal Day 2010
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010Awesome — only word to describe Vivisimo’s Federal Day 2010. So many great insights expressed, I would be remiss to not share. Yes, I’ll admit the Nationals Park Conference Center venue and Nationals vs. Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game, featuring Stephen Strasburg’s major league debut, did not hurt!
Dr. Bob Mikelskas, recently retired CIO of MITRE Corp., started the day with an excellent presentation on “Information Advantage for the Enterprise CIO.” Dr. Mikelskas’ key point was that most of the layers of the IT “stack” such as storage, routers, operating systems, databases, ERP, etc., are mature enough to offer easy choices and low risk for the CIO. Two components that remain challenging, however, are cyber security and information access. Focusing on information access, Dr. Mikelskas laid down a challenge to the industry to meet the needs of knowledge workers while maintaining security and incorporating legacy systems and content.
Wealth by Access
Tuesday, April 6th, 2010Venice rose to power and great wealth in the Middle Ages not because of its own natural resources or productive capacity—but because it uniquely provided access to the silk, grain, and spices of other lands.
Many of America’s greatest family fortunes can likewise be traced to the railroads that accessed the collective agricultural and industrial productivity of a growing nation—rather than to the farms and factories themselves.
Google serves as a contemporary example of this same principle. Google didn’t generate wealth by producing information, goods, or services. It did so by providing access to those things.
These examples and others highlight a fundamental principle of commerce. Often, the best way to create the most wealth isn’t to produce a limited number of things of value. It’s to provide access to a great number of things of value.
