By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Modesto Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition:
Sorry there was no column yesterday, let’s just say the privatization of Turk Telecom can’t come too fast for me.
…
RightNow Technologies has announced that it’s
decided to strengthen its focus on the public sector needs. Maybe they read the
recent First CoffeeSM column on how the Department of Defense
decided what the heck, let’s double this guy’s contract from $200-odd million
to $400-odd million. Great kind of customer to have, government.
RightNow is already hitting the sector pretty hard, they
have over 125 public-sector customers around the world already, including the Army
Corps of Engineers, Canberra Connect ACT Government, the Centers for Medicare
and Medicaid Services, the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security
Administration… all the way down to the State of Colorado Department of Revenue,
and Sydney Water.
Efficiencies do result. At the Environmental Protection
Agency, RightNow quickly produced a 70-plus percent reduction in email volume
in participating offices RightNow officials claim. They say they did it because
their “intelligent workflow routing” makes it easier for EPA agents to route
issues that are outside of their domain expertise.
“Public-sector organizations are driven by very different
missions than their private-sector counterparts, and thus require their
technology partners to be knowledgeable about their particular objectives and
functional constraints,” Steven Nesenblatt, VP of RightNow’s government team.
…
Another win for the
good folks over at Sage Software, who are announcing that Aspyra,
a global provider of clinical and diagnostic information products for the
healthcare industry, has deployed Sage CRM SalesLogix integrated with Sage MAS
90 ERP to equip its on-premises and mobile employees with real-time access to
customer sales and support data (draw breath).
The combined Sage Software product has, according to Sage
officials, “streamlined Aspyra’s sales prospecting efforts, improved day-to-day
business administration and increased customer satisfaction.”
Since deploying Sage CRM SalesLogix with Sage MAS 90 ERP
integration, Aspyra has seen full adoption by the more than 100 employees using
the system, and Aspyra officials report improved sales forecasting accuracy and
decreased resolution times for customer support inquiries. Additionally, a
global update rollout feature eliminates the need for Aspyra’s system
administrator to apply new CRM functionality and customizations to individual
user desktops.
…
The pastor of my church in high school had a favorite saying
that “Man’s solutions become his problems.” He would’ve laughed – probably is
laughing – at Australia’s cane toad
problem.
It’s a conviction of this column that everything is
connected, no man is an island, blah blah blah, English majors with experience
washing windows and playing guitar in Boston subways can rise in the world to
become customer relationship management writers, lessons learned in one area of
human endeavor can apply in others, meaningless sports clichés serve admirably
as meaningless business motivation seminars clichés, pictures of mountains make
nice backdrops for motivational slogans, a failed explorer named Shackleford
can launch a thousand success in business management books, all of which manage
to ignore the fact that he was most famous for failing, etc. The web of life.
Jesus and other religious leaders used a lot of parables
about seemingly unrelated things like sheep and coins, pearls and dissolute
sons to make great points about God. So draw up a chair, get a cup of coffee,
make yourself comfortable and hear ye the parable of the cane toad:
In the early 20th century Australia had a
problem. One of its major crops, sugar cane, was being eaten by cane beetles.
This was a Bad Thing. One reason the beetles thrived is they had no natural
predators.
Australians searched around for someone else who had solved
the problem of bugs eating their sugar cane and noticed that hey, Hawaii has a
lot of sugar cane and not much problem with insect pests. Hawaiian officials
said yeah, we have this toad, Bufo marinus,
does a pretty good job keeping the bugs down.
Australian officials wanted to see if that would solve their
problems, so they took a (no doubt government-paid) trip to Hawaii, went into a
room, threw some of the cane beetles that had been destroying Australia’s sugar
cane on the table in front of the toads, who ate them up. Great. Bring ‘em
over.
Cane toads were brought to Australia, which had no native
toad species – in other words, no natural predators, they could reproduce at
will. All the better, wildlife officials thought. They took the boxes of toads
to the sugar cane fields and released them, went back to the nearest pub and
raised a beer to celebrate. Go get ‘em, toads.
What no Australian noticed, and what no Hawaiian thought to mention,
however, is that in Hawaii the bugs the cane toads ate lived at the bottom of
the sugar cane plant, on the ground. The beetles destroying the Australian
sugar cane lived at the top of the plant. Cane toads can’t climb sugar cane
plants.
So after a while the cane toads got hungry. Question: What
else besides cane beetles do cane toads eat? Answer: Whatever they can find.
So the cane toads began foraging, eating the native insects
and foliage and doing a fairly thorough job destroying whatever they could find.
Oh, and one other fact about cane toads: They’re toxic. So not only did they
have no natural predators in Australia, they didn’t develop any – all the
snakes and lizard who tried to eat them died, throwing the ecological balance
further out of whack.
This was now a Very Bad Thing. Australia managed to exchange
the fairly serious problem of cane beetles chomping up their sugar cane crop
for the even bigger one of cane beetles continuing to merrily eat the sugar
cane while cane toads devoured anything they could find – except cane beetles.
So with no access to their usual diet and no predators to
keep them down, cane toads have wrecked hundreds of square miles of Australia.
And in the latest cheery news, reported yesterday, scientists found they’ve evolved longer legs. Thereby
enabling them to cover of Australia to destroy even faster.
Professor Richard Shine, of Sydney University, and colleagues
stationed themselves at the invasion front 37 miles east of Darwin, the Daily
Telegraph reports, and waited for the toads, which can travel just over a
mile a night. The first to arrive had longer legs, showing that evolution is favoring
those leading the charge into new territory: “The toads in the vanguard had
hind legs about 45 per cent of their body length,’’ Prof .Shine said. “Later
arrivals had progressively shorter legs. When we looked at museum specimens
gathered over a 60-year period from long-colonized areas, the relative leg
length just kept dropping.”
Prof. Shine told The
Daily Telegraph “I find it absolutely staggering that a small dumpy
creature like a cane toad can travel over a mile a night – night after night.”
No doubt soon Aussies will get serious about the problem and import another
species to wipe out the cane toad, which will then run wild, causing more
damage than the cane toad ever could.
America had a problem with needing to fill in a little
ground cover here and there so they imported this vine called kudzu from Japan,
and watched helplessly as it took over untold thousands of acres of the South,
destroying whatever native flora it touched. Some early New Zealander just over
from Britain had a problem with no native mammal species to hunt on weekends,
so he brought a shipment of rabbits over and released them, and with no natural
predators now they’re a much-detested pest costing the country many hundreds of
thousands of dollars annually in destroyed farm land. The entire history of the Soviet Union is the story of solutions becoming even bigger problems.
Man’s solutions = even bigger problems. Sound like anything
you’ve been dealing with at your company recently? Okay, sermon over, amen.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
