Thursday, January 08, 2004

Group Blogging / CRM Blogging According to Science Daily, blogging is often seen as a solitary effort.  I've certainly never viewed it that way.  For example, we have a group blog that is accessible by PIOs and others from multiple state agencies to generate the news for our State business portal.  We have other multi-party blogging ideas in the works.  We may even use blogging as an inexpensive, easier and more effective way to do customer relationship management / contact management for an internal service fund.  For example, each customer agency becomes a category in the (internal facing) blog.  People post to the blog category any time they have contact with that agency.  Managers and CRMs can subscribe in their aggregator to those agencies (categories) that they have an interest in.  Add a search engine to the blog for additional power.  You have an effective solution in hours or days rather than months. 5:15:25 PM    comment []

FTTH in Truckee Business 2.0  reports a new fiber-to-the-home project in Truckee, CA.  The article mentions that Utah's UTOPIA project is the biggest such project in the country. 11:13:51 AM    comment []

Contact Management In 1990, the State of Utah created the first statewide automated fuel network.  I had enlisted Neal Francom after working with him on a project to create a database financial model for the olympic bid.  One of our first steps was to analyze our potential customer base and develop a strategy for contact management.  Within a few years, we had enlisted about half of the cities and towns, 75% of the school districts and the majority of the counties in the state, in addition to every state agency and every college and university - over 1000 agencies which we carefully tracked as unique customers.  We carefully managed our relationships with each customer and tracked their utilization of our service.  Our goal in doing this was to minimize the unit cost that we would have to charge to any given customer.  This practice is standard for any business who wants to remain in business.  It is not always standard practice for government internal service funds.  One of my first goals with ITS will be to analyze how we are managing customer relationships, what kind of contact management system we have in place and to improve this process - make it more proactive and less reactive.  A good contact management system that is shared by our CRMs, section managers, etc. will be a critical element of this goal.  We own a limited number of licenses of Siebel, but have not implemented it.  We have Remedy that we use for help desk management.  Open source solutions are also available. I will also be asking a few ITS managers to put Linux on their desktop (Linux/Windows) along with Open Office in order to have some experience with these tools in case our customers take an interest.  It is something that we should be able to support if necessary. 7:54:52 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 David Fletcher.