Amanda M Rossetti
Micropayment Save Journalism
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/big-idea-2015-coming-disruption-walter
Walter Isaacson thinks that the new innovation of micropayments could save journalism. The idea of micropayments is that you would use your device to pay very small amounts at a time for items, such as news articles. With newspapers finding it increasingly difficult to make revenue Isaacson things this is just what they need to save journalism. He also asserts that it could be used for crowdfunding as each person would be giving just a very small amount of money. He asserts that digital currencies and micropayments will be the disruptive innovation of 2015.
Do you think this could save journalism? Would you use the system to get access to articles? What about for crowd funding? How do you think this will effect other areas of business? Do you think it will be the dissruptive innovation of 2015?
IT Can Matter
http://smallbusiness.chron.com/pros-cons-technology-business-today-2709.html
Chris Joseph from Demand Media identified some positives and negatives of how engrained IT has become into business today.
He said that the major benefits were saving money and time. Because you don’t need to all be in the same physical location anymore and teleconferencing technology has improved greatly money is saved by some workers working form home and others not needing to travel to hold meetings. Technology has sped up many business processes that has in tern saved a lot of money.
The drawbacks he identified were dependance and the need to upgrade. Unfortunately, technology does not always improve efficiency. Being so relent on technology can cause massive losses if that equipment or software were to go down. Also, since technology is always changing you will always need to upgrade your systems which will cause many expenses in the future.
Do you agree that these are benefits and drawbacks of technology in business? Can you identify others? Which do you think are the most important to consider.
When CRMs Go Too Far
https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2012/07/does-customer-service-ever-go-too-far.html
Corinne Roberts from Salesforce wrote an article on what aspects of customer service turn customers off of buying products. She identified 3 key areas to keep in mind when using your CRM. These are:
Oppressive: She said that you should make yourself available through many channels but not communicate with the same customer through all of them. People get annoyed when you sent them too many messages. The best way to utilize your CRM is to identify the way customers prefer to be contacted and only use that channel to talk to that customer.
Intrusive: Customers don’t want to feel like you’re constantly watching them. She warns to be careful of how much predictive analytics and targeted advertising you use so they don’t feel like you are invading their privacy.
Unsafe: Just because you can do something, and it might be more convenient for the customer, doesn’t mean you should. For this one she gave an example of a car company putting an espresso machine into a car that will endanger drivers. I think a better CRM specific example would be posting publicly about a customer’s current location or their daily routine.
What do you think of these practices she identified? Do you think there are more way that companies can go too far with their CRMs? Do you have any examples of a company going too far?
Youtube 360 Degree Videos
http://gizmodo.com/youtubes-ready-to-blow-your-mind-with-360-degree-videos-1690989402
Youtube has released the option to post 360 degree videos. On the browser you click and drag and can look around the person filming and on the phone you move you’re phone to see the whole area. There are some issues right now but they claim it will be fixed soon. For example you have to use a python script to make it actually work in your browser. I think this is a great sustaining innovation though, because they have been doing flat videos for over 10 years. There are not a lot of consumer cameras that can shoot in 360 degrees thought.
What do you think of this? Do you think people will use it with the python necessary? What about without it?
Growth from Disruptive Innovation
Disruptive Innovation An opportunity for growth
Khattab Al-Ali outlines what businesses should do in the face of disruptive innovation and how they can use them to grow. He recommends not trying to use an innovation that your business model cannot support as well as not following competitors into new business segments if they have expertise you don’t have. He says that listening to customers for what innovations to invest in is a good idea but not to give the customers everything they want on a whim, it does not always make good business sense. He also says when evaluating disruptive innovation you need to not only focus on the standard metrics. Some innovations have consequences that people would not originally think. Finally he says that when addressing the disruptive innovation you should separate it from your main business as to not add risk to your current business.
What do you think businesses should do when evaluating new innovations? How do you think the organization should structure these endeavors?
Effective Elevator Pitches
Cliff Ennico says your elevator pitch should do three things, while not making three big mistakes. He says in your pitch you should introduce yourself, talk about the most important feature of your business plan, and get the person excited and wanting to hear more from you. These are very similar to the things we talked about in class. He says that you should not describe the “skills rather than the purpose”. Many of the people who went over time in their elevator pitches got too into the details of their application. The next thing he said people do is not tell an interesting story. If people are not interested in what you have to say they will tune you out. We talked in class about opening up with the problem and following with how your application fixes that problem. The last thing Ennico says people do is not rehearsing or being unprepared. While we all know what our applications do fitting that information into 30 seconds is difficult without preparing first. Sitting down and thinking of what three things you want to convey will help get your message across.
Do you agree with Ennico’s points?
What things do you think should be included in a good elevator pitch?
What things do you think people tend not to do well when it comes to elevator pitches?
When should an Organization Implement a Global ERP
Going global: Is it time to streamline your ERP?
Today in class we discussed the difference between IT many years ago and today where years ago in order to include IT in your business you needed to spend a lot of money implementing complex systems and today with software as a service and cloud models you just need a credit card and an idea. This got me thinking about when a business should switch from individual systems to an expensive ERP. As with many things, I believe it very much depends if an organization should use an ERP or continue with individual systems. When looking into what it depends on I found this article by NetSuite which has their recommendations on how you know your organization is ready for an ERP. NetSuite Inc. does sell ERP, CRM, and eCommerce software solutions so they are biased because they want you to buy their ERP, and the conclusion basically spells that out, but the article is in the educational materials section of their website and I believe the body of the article makes some good points.
The article focuses on organizations who have multiple locations in multiple countries and recommends ERPs to gain a more centralized management approach. The first subheading says that an organziation should implement one ERP system if they are duplicating ERPs or resources between officers or countries. At first this seemed like a logical conclusion, duplicating systems means more money spent and less sharing between offices or countries. This continues in the second point, if a company is manually reconciling accounting and finance information. Having all of the finance information in one place for the whole organization would make sense, especially when paired with their last point of a company struggling with many tax and legal issues. A single ERP could make filing taxes and organizing the financing of a company easier. I don’t, however, completely agree that a global ERP will fix all of an organizations problems, or that it won’t cause more problems. Having all of the decision making in a single are could cause legal and operational issues. Businesses in different countries run differently, be it culturally or legally. Having a once size fits all approach may do more harm than good. Take something like sales as an example. One country might do most of its sales remotely while another country sales are all done in person. When trying to implement an ERP with a single sales process this could cause issues.
Do you think a single ERP for a multinational company is the best approach? What benefits would the organization reap? Are there possible downsides? Do the benefits out way the downsides? When do you think an organization should implement a global ERP?
Prestige Worldwide New Project Proposal
New Project Proposal
- Name of the Organization: Prestige Worldwide
- Project Title: Ingredient List Decoder
- Project Overview: Our project is to create an app that will help users avoid ingredients or chemicals in products they are using such as allergens. The app will suggest alternative products that do not contain ingredients they wish to avoid.
- Project Timeframe: January 20th 2015 – May 4th 2015
- Prepared by: Jacklin Altman, Dominic Lyate, Brittany Cougle, Arren Soroko, Amanda Rossetti
Project Summary
- Ingredient lists are complex and hard to read and some are incomplete. People with allergies or have chosen to avoid certain ingredients need a quick and easy way to decipher if the product they are safe for them to use. Our app will fill this gap though allowing users to enter in ingredients and chemicals they wish to avoid. Users then enter or scan the barcode of the product they are looking at and the app will tell the user if the product contains anything they wish to avoid. If it does have ingredients the user does to want the app will then suggest substitute products that are similar but do not contain anything the user is avoiding. Users can use the app to purchase these products and have them shipped to their door.
Project Objectives
- Application should store user data on what ingredients and chemicals they are avoiding
- Application should be able to scan barcodes and search for manually entered products
- Application should be able to notify users if the product contains ingredients or chemicals they wish to avoid
- Application should suggest alternative products when searching
- Application should interface with major online retailers (such as Amazon, Walmart, Target etc) where it will allow users to purchase suggested products through the application
Project Deliverables
- Project Proposal
- Contains summary of the project
- Contact information for all involved
- A background of the problem that our application is going to solve
- Objectives for proposed app
- List of deliverables
- Weekly Progress Reports
- States the work performed to date
- States what still is in the works
- List of Stakeholders
- List of people who are directly affected by the project
- Budget
- States how much money will be allocated for the project
- Work Breakdown Structure
- An incremental decomposition of the project into phases, deliverables and work packages
- Risk Management Plan
- Foresees risks, estimate impacts, and define responses to issues
- Communications Plan
- Describes communication channels between stakeholders involved in project
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