How To Make Co-Creation Work?

It’s over a decade since the late C K Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy wrote their seminal book The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value With Customers. During this period, users have written millions of articles on Wikipedia and posted zillions of updates and photographs on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social networks. Judging by the explosive … Read more

Right And Wrong Ways Of Using Case Studies

All business development teams understand the importance of case studies in B2B technology sales. But, when it comes to producing and using them, we’ve come across two diametrically opposite approaches followed in many IT companies: Kool-Aid: Use case studies for everything Phobia: Shun case studies altogether  Case Study Kool-Aid Vendors in the first category launch into … Read more

How The Obama Credit Card Decline Shapes The Future Of Analytics

President Barack Obama’s credit card got declined in a New York restaurant. Because, to quote Obama himself, “…I guess I don’t use it enough, so they thought there was some fraud going on.” While this is the most high profile example of predictive analytics going awry, it’s not the first, and it certainly won’t be … Read more

Five Ways To Win Lost SaaS Customers Back

Many of us have signed up for free software trials and not upgraded to the paid version when the trial period ended. Some of us might have bought a subscription for the paid version, used it for a few months, and then bailed out. In all these cases, we become the SaaS vendor’s “lost customers”. … Read more

Difference Between Data Mining & Predictive Analytics

I’ve been asked several times about the difference between Data Mining and Predictive Analytics. Well, that’s not strictly true. I’ve been asked only once and that too in the following tweet from @IBMAnalytics visible to me among 15.7K of its followers: https://twitter.com/IBMAnalytics/status/459004965298528256 Replies ranged from the ubiquitous “depends” – will some people begin all their … Read more

How Can Fincumbents Grow When Banks Are Shedding Customers?

In their diatribes about the underbanked, unbanked and financial inclusion, many suppliers of financial services technologies to banks (aka “fincumbents“) and members of the digerati threaten banks with the risk of losing customers to prepaid cards, P2P lending platforms, money transmitters, and other types of fintechs. In their urge to dish out free, unsolicited advice, … Read more

IT Services Company Gains Massive Visibility Without Any Advertising

Here’s our latest success story: IT Services Company Gains Massive Visibility Without Any Advertising Thought leadership generates huge exposure among decision makers With a solid track record of providing development and testing services for one of the largest streetworks systems in the United Kingdom, this midsized IT services company gained substantial expertise and experience on … Read more

Calling BS On Banking The Unbanked

“Financial inclusion”, “banking the unbanked”, blah blah blah. Call them what you want. But they all mean the following: Financial Inclusion / Banking the Unbanked – What They Mean People want to borrow money only from banks; people want to deposit their savings only in banks. But, since they can’t access a bank, they’re forced … Read more

Frictionless Loyalty Programs – FAASO’s Case Study

The quick service restaurant chain FAASO’s recently launched MOBILE wrAPP, an ordering, payment cum loyalty app. Available on Android, iOS and Windows, the app lets users locate stores, browse the menu, place delivery or takeaway orders, and make online or cash on delivery payments. To incent repeat purchase, the company credits INR 400 (~US$ 6.67) … Read more

Does Cloud Increase Vendor Lockin Risk?

For all the marketingspeak from technology providers about open systems blah blah blah, seasoned CIOs know that every software purchase is accompanied by a certain level of risk of getting locked in to that particular vendor. The risk is caused by user comfort, proprietary programming language and opaque database structures, among other factors. Cue to … Read more