The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Scottish mopesters Belle & Sebastian's album "Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant," because if there's anything sure to make your own day seem better it's listening to overpaid, over-privileged, underworked people whinge and moan about how dreary, boring and difficult their utterly pointless lives are. Especially when it comes with a snappy pop-rock sound cut in whole cloth from The Kinks' 1967-1969 golden years of Something Else and Village Green Preservation Society:
Sage North America has announced SageCRM v6.2, a CRM system aimed primarily at small and medium-sized businesses. According to the Sagians, version 6.2 includes new pre-configured and customizable screen themes, an editor capable of handling multilingual e-mail campaigns and "an enhanced graphical view."
The product is available today as a standalone CRM system, and as part of the Sage Accpac Extended Enterprise Suite. It will be available in the Sage MAS 90 and 200 Enterprise Suite later this month.
David van Toor, senior vice president and general manager, Sage CRM Solutions North America, said the product lets organizations "outfit their CRM systems and access financial and operations data through ERP integration."
The new version has a branding toolkit to change the look and feel of SageCRM screens using provided themes, or administrators can customize or create whatever themes strike their fancy. Expanded relationship management is also on offer, company officials say, to "create and graphically view multiple relationships between primary entities such as a holding company and its subsidiaries, and many-to-many relationships such as multiple reps selling to an organization's various divisions."
Pricing for a standalone SageCRM system begins at $599 per user. Sage North America is part of The Sage Group plc, formed in 1981.
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First Coffee did a double-take at this next news item: My alma mater, Wheaton College, a liberal arts college founded in 1860 by abolitionist Jonathan Blanchard, has chosen WebGUI to help with the library's administration.
The campus is home to nearly 2400 undergraduate and over 550 graduate students. Buswell Memorial Library is one of the largest, if not still the largest - it was when I was there - private college (not university) library in the United States. I don't see that factoid in the promo materials anymore so it's probably not the case anymore.
Wheaton was also ranked as having the second-best food service of any college or university in the country, just behind Harvard, and my friends, I can assure you that wasn't true when I was there. Back then we were happy when the Cap'n Crunch didn't run out during dinner.
Anyway, Buswell Memorial Library staff found that their previous content management system couldn't handle the demands on it anymore, research materials through online resources. So they started looking for a system with separation of site style and content to maintain a consistent site appearance no matter who managed the content. And of course, because it's a college you need a system easy enough for non-technical dolts such as us English majors to use.
They picked the WebGUI system, which is capable of dynamically generating links to electronic resources from existing databases, and allowing any customized code created in-house to be reused throughout multiple areas of their site.
Wheaties say the WebGUI is an open source product that can be integrated with the library's existing underlying database structure while still following standard programming and design principles. Primarily, WebGUI allowed the library to reuse MyLibrary data by doing little more than writing an SQL query.
MyLibrary is evidently a database designed by librarians for presenting library resources to library patrons. WebGUI's platform, Apache, and its programming language, Perl, were standards, a plus for the library since they could not afford to recreate or convert their existing database. No doubt because I don't contribute to the alumni fund.
An evaluation of content management systems was published in 2006 by Robbins, Engel and Bierman for the University of Oklahoma Libraries. In their results they suggest that the main challenge in building an intranet that is vital to employees within an organization, "...requires an organizational commitment to developing tools that are easy to use and vital for the development of the Web site." Yes, people pay for studies to learn such things.
Buswell Memorial Library's experience with WebGUI has led the entire Wheaton College community to adopt WebGUI as its campus-wide content management system.
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Chicago-based Alterian, a marketing platform vendor, has announced that Jaguar Land Rover will use Alterian Content Management to manage its global Web sites. Jaguar Land Rover officials say they'll use the platform to, among other jobs, allow editorial control over local Web site copy "to be managed by business people, not the IT department."
The idea is to maintain "close control of global brand assets and campaigns with appropriate local control for regional variations" via "integration between the Alterian Content Management platform and Jaguar Land Rover's current CRM systems," according to the car makers.
Alterian Content Management offers a Web content management product for large enterprises to run intranets, extranets, Web sites and other digital channels. The Alterians say their product's multilingual capabilities "match with Jaguar Land Rover's need to simultaneously upload content in many different languages across their network of sites."
Alterian sells basically analytically-led software, with partners such as Accenture, Cap Gemini, Carlson Marketing and Euro RSCG Worldwide using it alongside their own products and services.
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"Engaging citizens" and "collaborating with a wider network of service providers" can help governments improve the quality of the services and outcomes they deliver to their constituents, according to a new report from Accenture.
In the report, titled "Leadership in Customer Service: Creating Shared Responsibility for Better Outcomes," Accenture identifies a new imperative for governments to find "a stronger focus on the quality of the service transaction toward a new relationship" with customers and citizens, that "improves the relevance and transparency of government decision-making, service design and delivery," while fostering "a deeper trust of government."
The report finds that the need now is to redefine the relationship between public services and citizens, from one of dependency to one of shared responsibility.
When it comes to government, "stakeholders are more than just customers," says Greg Parston, director of Accenture's Institute for Public Service Value. "The notion that an individual's engagement with government is similar to a commercial one, in which taxes are paid in exchange for high-quality services, fails to address the full range of an individual's interactions with government as a citizen, voter and member of a local community, as well as a customer and taxpayer."
Accenture identified four practices that can help governments share responsibility for improved social and economic outcomes with their respective citizenry, build a more co-productive relationship between citizens and governments, and bridge the gap between expectations and reality:
Number one, use customer insight to meet people's specific needs and improve equality of outcomes. A "one-size-fits all" approach to service delivery is neither effective nor appropriate.
Two, engage citizens, service users and other stakeholders to define outcomes and design services. Washington State Governor Chris Gregoire and her staff have held citizen workshops, community leader meetings and a series of town hall events that have provided citizens and other stakeholders an opportunity to have a say.
Three, coordinate resources across and beyond government to deliver outcomes. See, this is the sort of thing you have to tell government.
And fourth, focus on improving transparency and accessibility of information, so that customers can hold governments accountable. The New York City government is championing accessibility, transparency and accountability with their 311 call center program, launched in 2003, the study found: "More recently, the new City-wide Performance Reporting system, an online performance measurement tool, was developed to give New Yorkers access to regularly updated performance data from city agencies."
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