Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Being Cloud, Social and Mobile is the next step in being humans?

In the past few days the computer science world lost two of the most valuable gems, Steve Jobs and Denise Ritchie. While Steve jobs was the people hero, Denise Ritchie was a computer science hero. While the two did the things they did decades apart, there was one common trait shared by both of them, they both worked hard to make things simpler and build a platform for others to take charge.

Looking at C programming language no one will say its simpler but if you compare with the assembly language before C you will know the simplicity of it. Looking at Steve Jobs inventions right from the Mac to the iPad, they also tell similar story, the inventions were made for simplicity.

An ad for iPhone simply states, what do you want to do with this phone? No jargons, no complexities. The c language had similar concept, what do you want to do? Printf? Scanf? getCh? Computer engineers will know these keywords, for others they are part of c programming language. Only the ones who have worked or taken a class in assembly language (I took two one for microprocessors and other for microcontrollers, how glad am I to work with force.com) will know the power c have to them.

If we have to learn one thing from both these visionaries, it is, make things simple. They both strived hard to make complex things very simple. Simple so that everyone could use them. In CRM this is the simple problem we try to solve, how do I connect to my customers easily? How do easily understand what they are saying?

Most importantly where are they complaining?

Most of these customers now are social, they are using the social channels to communicate. It makes sense to meet them halfway there, by quickly migrating to SCRM, the company can bridge the gap between complains and customer service. The employees of the company who will be constantly in touch with the costumers, will be using the smart phones. It makes sense to give them the flexibility of mobile access, so that they can work freely with the customer.

Finally using cloud systems also makes sense. We live in subscription based economy, business users need not understand the complexity or the concept of server software. There is a concern about data privacy but that can be addressed by a trustworthy vendor. Simply code in your username and password and start using it.

We are in this world for a limited time, instead of increasing complexity of the things we do, let's make things simple. Many suits won't agree to this but business should be as simple as using an iPhone.

Simple. Easy. Enhancing.

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