Insight About the Right Customers at the Right Time

Anthony Lye discusses how customers are getting new capabilities in their customer-facing applications.

PROFIT: What is consumable CRM, and what are its benefits?

LYE: In businesses where users collaborate and participate, it's important to support them and broaden the ways in which they do so by building tools and extending the applications they use. The core of Oracle's CRM software will be extended to support a lot more collaboration, social interaction, and participation. The idea is to allow the users themselves to suggest and implement modifications or improvements, and to use Web 2.0 techniques like social bookmarking, social tagging, social networking, and collaboration to drive best practices in the application.

Traditionally, sales coaches that are part of the software are defined by one person and pushed down to everybody in the organization. In a consumable application, every salesperson is able to define his or her own sales coach. Through a library of sales coaches and usage and tagging patterns, the organization is able to see which business process or sales coach provides the most value to the organization as a whole. Someone can say, 'Thanks for the sales coaching; I do it a little differently.' Or, 'This is a very good step, but this one is unnecessary. I add this, and I don't do this.' This way, you're starting to capture a lot more of the tribal knowledge.

PROFIT: What are some of the industries that can benefit from consumable applications?

LYE: Consumable applications make sense for industries in which managers are looking to drive innovation and efficiency from the end users. In these industries, companies hire highly educated, knowledgeable people for a very simple reason: the knowledge of those individuals carries more value than the repetitive element that any process could deliver. There just haven't been tools and technologies available to extend, enhance, and improve upon the methods that those people already use.

People who focus on more-complex relationships tend to work in industries where products are configured or built to order. When Oracle sells software, or Boeing sells planes, or Ingersoll Rand sells its products, these companies tend to have lower volume and higher margin, and the sale and the service are far more complex. They tend to supplement their product lines with more-expensive, knowledgeable resources, because that's where they feel they can get differentiation and drive innovation.

PROFIT: You mentioned Web 2.0. Could this be called "Enterprise 2.0"?

LYE: Yes. It's where Web 2.0 meets the enterprise, and where enterprise applications recognize the value of Web 2.0 standards and technologies and of the internet as a whole. The new applications will use significant parts of the internet to provide a far more socially capable platform to help people differentiate and drive innovation.