We’ve Seen Climate Change Coming. We Need to Act Now.

In 1896 Swedish Scientist, Svante Arrhenius, predicted carbon dioxide emissions from human activity would increase global temperatures via the green house effect. He thought it would take 3000 years to double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting in an average global temperature increase of 5 to 6 degrees Celsius.  (Too bad it will take less than 150 years instead of 3,000.)

In 1958, Charles David Keeling began meticulous recoding of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.  His work, now continued by others, is the longest continuous record of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the world and shows carbon dioxide increasing in relation to human activity.  In 1963, the National Science Foundation issued a warning regarding the green house effect and cited Keeling’s research. 

With initial warnings sounded over 100 years ago, global warming is far from a new idea, and in 2012 it doesn’t take scientific genius to see first hand what Arrhenius and Keeling had predicted.  In spite of the advanced warning, human-kind is paralyzed in the face of climate change.  We’re in a climate train wreck of our own making, and we’re still shoveling coal on the fire, but we should be applying the breaks on green house gases. 

Compared to the coming climate crisis, the financial and economic crisis that started in 2008 will look like a pic nic.  The climate crisis and related extreme weather will deliver direct impacts to food supply, water supply, land and territory, loss of life and property.  In addition to the suffering from those direct impacts, it’s safe to say that economies dealing with all those problems won’t be providing more for future generations.

The climate train wreck is inevitable, and some would say we’re already seeing extreme weather that is the result of climate change.  In spite of the natural processes that remove it from the atmosphere, carbon dioxide emitted today will have an effect on the climate for a hundred or more years.  The increasing global temperatures are thawing perma-frost which in turn releases more green house gas.  Ice and snow melt already brought on by green house effect means heat from the sun is absorbed more, rather than reflected (i.e., the albedo effect). The world population is on track to grow from 7 billion until it tops out at 10 billion while per capita carbon emissions are increasing.

Although huge impacts of climate change are unavoidable, we still have the chance to make it worse or reduce the impact.  The old sayings about a “stitch in time” and “he who hesitates” hold true in this case: the longer we wait to act, the faster we’ll be accelerating into the carbon hole of climate change.  In the United States, we need action on all levels in order to get to the general goal of reducing per capita carbon emissions to 1/7 of current (that’s right, reduce by 7/8).  Here’s what to do:

·      Individual conservation.  Reduce your carbon footprint by conserving electricity, heat, and fuel.  Most people know what to do, but it’s a matter of actually doing *all* of it

·      Use greener energy.  Get the certified green alternative from your electricity provider.  Make your next car (if you need to have one) electric.

·      Become a social change agent.  Help your friends, family, and community be aware of climate change, and help them know what they can do.

·      Community activism.  Join and participate in an organization such as 350.org or betterfuture.org.

·      Political action.  Know the voting records of your government representatives (e.g., www.treehugger.com), let them know how you feel, and vote to put the people in office who will take action to slow climate change.

E-tailers Will Turn to Amazon Alternatives

Amazon’s 85 million unique visitors a month produce huge sales increases for e-tailers who participate in Amazon’s MarketPlace, but those e-tailers also suffer crippling competitive set backs at Amazon’s hands.  The fees and strategic costs of doing business with Amazon present an opportunity for another market leader to offer an un-Amazon model.

Amazon’s charges to MarketPlace participants range between 6% and 15% of sales, and for larger sellers, may also include a monthly membership fee.  Many e-tailers would be thrilled with that, if that were the only price to pay to obtain the 50% average increase in sales experienced by MarketPlace participants.  The bigger price to pay is that Amazon takes the best ideas from the MarketPlace and enters into direct competition with the e-tailers.  With Amazon charging up to 15% and controlling the placement of products on the site, many e-tailers who came to MarketPlace to grow their business instead struggle to maintain sales volume.

eBay’s shopping.com is an advertising platform that serves as an un-Amazon alternative to MarketPlace.  If ebay.com resembles a sophisticated flea market, shopping.com resembles an on-line shopping mall.   With 100 million unique visitors per month, shopping.com offers the traffic that e-tailers need to boost sales. Shopping.com offers a straight-forward cost-per-click pricing model and the advantage that the aggregator doesn’t compete with the e-tailers who offer their products via the site.  E-tailers gain additional advantage at shopping.com, because it feeds traffic into the e-tailers’ own on-line stores giving the e-tailer control over their own image.

The history of the brick and mortar department store offers parallels to Amazon’s MarketPlace.  Department stores have always had to balance between offering designer labels that attract fashion conscious shoppers with the value and margin control of equivalent products under the in-house label. Much energy has always been expended in managing this difficult relationship.  Amazon is replicating the challenges of that relationship.   Much as Levis started The Gap to go around department stores for direct access to customers in shopping malls, e-tailers will gain direct access to online shoppers via alternative aggregation model such as shopping.com.  

As the on-line shopping world flattens more and more, e-tailers will turn to Amazon less-and-less.    They will discover a wider range of options.  They will strengthen their own stores and will turn to alternatives such as shopping.com.

Information Sources: Wall Street Journal, 6/27/2012, “Competing with Amazon on Amazon” by Greg Bensinger, www.ebay.com,  www.shopping.com.

eCommere Sales through Tablets: Going Up!

It’s a good day when your customers start shopping via tablets, because they open up the possibility for a new, more engaging shopping experience than PCs or smart phones.  Tablets provide convenience and simplicity that PCs don’t.  Tablets provide a bigger view of your catalog and products that mobile phones can’t.  It’s a good day when your customers start shopping via tablets, but when is that day and will you be ready?

Apple iPad was introduced in April 2010. By the end of 2012, there will be an estimated 50 million tablet users in the United States, with projections for continued double-digit growth in subsequent years.   If your customers are professionals under the age of 35, they are likely using tablets now.  If your customers aren’t using tablets now, it’s a good bet they soon will be.  Current high rates of consumer adoption and projections for continued brisk growth is the first reason why now is the time to include tablet in your eCommerce strategy. 

Today, Apple’s iPad and Android tablets are numbers one and two in market share.  In the coming months, Microsoft is expected to release its Windows 8 operating system.  Windows 8 is not only for PCs.  It is designed from the ground up with tablets and touch screens in mind.  Regardless of whether Apple, Android, or Microsoft tablets win in the market, the stream of product and marketing investment from three strong providers will spur more excitement and deliver more value.  The strengthening push from tablet providers and the related market excitement is the second reason why now is the time to include tablet in your eCommerce strategy.

Including tablets in your eCommerce strategy means making a plan for a shopping experience that is designed with tablet in mind.  The first step in any plan for the shopping experience is to understand the customer perspective.  In the case of tablets, this means knowing how quickly your specific customers are adopting tablets and how they use them.  Generally speaking, younger professionals are adopting tablets more quickly now, but touch screen simplicity and low price point will bring the tablet to a wider range of ages and incomes than PCs.

With an understanding of the customer’s view of tablets, a plan for integrating tablets into the shopping experience addresses:

• Touch screen – Touch screens of tablets let customers interact with the shopping experience more quickly and easily than PCs.  It’s a whole new world of shopping speed and ease that means customers can act more quickly, easily, intuitively.
• Shop anywhere – The wireless nature of tablets lets customers shop anywhere in their home, office, coffee shop, and with cellular data service, anywhere in between. The shop-anywhere aspects of tablets means customers can act as needs or impulse arise, without opening up a laptop or getting to a desktop.
• One-handed operation – Tablets present an on-screen keyboard that can be used with two hands, but sometimes tablets are held in one hand while the other hand navigates.  Tablet shopping experiences can include interactions best undertaken with two-handed typing (e.g., registration), but should also embrace one-handed navigation for repeated interactions (e.g., product selection) 
• Right-sized screen – Tablets provide more visual and input real-estate than a smart phone, but less than a PC.  The shopping experience should be planned to show the number and size of products and options appropriate for the tablet, and increasingly offer “same-screen actioning” that allows them to take quick touch-screen action on displayed products.
• Other factors – As they evolve, new aspects of the tablet experience need to be integrated into your strategy.  For example, as network speeds increase, video, real time community interactions, and game-like features are likely to become increasingly important.  As magazines and newspapers become increasingly electronic, integrating shopping experiences with those electronic publications will present new opportunities for on-line sales.

Tablets offer speed and convenience not possible with PCs or smart phones. Tablets present the opportunity to deeply change your customers’ experience and establish a closers relationship.  With the growth in tablet adoption, now is the time to plan to take advantage of the unique features of tablets, and make them a part of the shopping experience you offer your customers.  

Yes, CMOs and CIOs are on Different Planets. Now What?

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) are on different planets. They have different agendas and they speak different languages. There’s lack of coordination, working at cross-purposes, and full-scale political warfare. For businesses that fix this problem now, there’s immense and growing potential. For businesses slow to fix it, there’s stagnation and decline. You’ve seen it yourself and it’s a much discussed feature from CIO Magazine (10/4/2010, “CMOs and CIOs: Can this Relationship Be Saved?”). Everyone knows about it, but what’s to be done?

The marketing-IT relationship is broken in a deep way. The organizations and their leaders lack trust and norms for cooperation. A fundamental shift, which bridges the two planets and provides new momentum, is required. The shift depends upon a bridge to overcome the barriers of entrenched agendas and different languages. The shift also depends on new momentum based on shared success. When woven together, the bridge and new momentum reinforce each other. The result is unification of existing skills and knowledge, leveraged to realize strategic business potential.

Infusing the fundamental shift from an external source is expedient. The CMO and CIO want to make the shift on their own, but they are mired in past behaviors and politics. Attempts to pull out of the downward spiral by internal mediation, visioning, or edict will be too slow or completely ineffective. In comparison with the historical animosities between marketing and IT, the external source presents an opportunity for success. Neither CMO nor CIO can continue the failures of the past, and allying with an external source presents them with an alternative they could not achieve on their own.

In a difficult marriage, the husband and wife seek the assistance of a counselor to change chemistry. The marketing and IT functions must align through a fundamental shift, but like the husband and wife, the CMO and CIO can’t do it on their own. Without an infusion from an external source, they’ll continue the dire status quo. The benefits of aligned marketing and IT are too great to pass up. The CMO and CIO may not be able to agree on much, but one thing they should agree on is to get an external infusion that bridges their different planets and provides new momentum.

New Drivers Revive Old Ideas in New Ways

Veterans in information technology have a sense of déjà vu relating to virtualization and cloud computing. Yes, they are new, but they are also reminiscent of old. IBM VM (Virtual Machine), a forerunner to today’s virtualization, was introduced in 1972. RSTS (Resource Sharing / Time Sharing) is a precursor to cloud computing that was introduced in 1970 by Digital Equipment Corporation.

In those earlier days, managing relatively scarce and expensive computing resources was the challenge. Sharing the cost of the computing resources made computing affordable. As a result of Moore’s law and huge advances in data networks, the cost of computing and information resources is no longer an issue. Information processing is available in the post-industrial world to [almost] anyone [almost] anywhere.

The old ideas may have come back, but they are coming back for a different reason. The driver today is keeping up with change. For competitive, risk, legal, and compliance reasons, companies need to stay up-to-date with technology. Even companies with great wealth find the endless process of keeping up with technology change to be a distraction. The pace of change in underlying technology has increased to the point where it consumes too much attention that could be focused on the core business.

Businesses are not worried that sharing virtualized infrastructure in the cloud will provide an advantage to their competitors. They are worried about being slower than their competitors to get on a cloud bandwagon that provides an advantage. The shared commitment to a cloud environment will keep a company more up-to-date, without distracting from the core business, at a cost no more than it would have cost to do it themselves.

Whether SaaS, utility computing, web services in the cloud, platform as a service, or some other formulation, there are increasing opportunities to contract-out the job of keeping up with technology. Whether HP, IBM, Google, Amazon, or a wide range of providers focused on specific applications there are providers ready to contract for that service. With the pace of change speeding up and increasing opportunities to contract-out the risky business of keeping up, those old ideas delivered in new ways are going to be around for a lot longer.


(I mention RSTS and VM in the post above because of my first-hand exposure to them. I used RSTS in 1978 at school, working on Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11/34. I first encountered IBM’s VM in 1984 while working on Nixdorf computer’s 8890, an IBM 370-4300 plug compatible.)

Case Management, Low on Hype, May Deliver the Promises of Its Ancestors

Provide workers the information they need to get their jobs done. It’s a great idea. Like most things, it’s been done before.

Provide workers the information they need to get their jobs done. That’s my one-line explanation for the knowledge-enabled processes of the 1990s.

What’s different now?

Software and solutions have been sold under the banners of knowledge management, content management, collaboration, workflow, business process management, and business process automation. All of those ancestors of case management have played their role, and in some cases, not lived up to the hype. Now the hype has been replaced by experience and the technologies have matured. The experience and maturity are being blended together into case management.

Unlike its ancestors, case management is low on hype. Unlike its ancestors, case management is not a stretch on the features of deployed solutions. The key benefit of case management is not new, unheard-of functionality. The key benefit of case management is to deliver easily-conceived functionality in a more productive user experience, with parameter-driven deployment, and with modest integration effort. Case management promises to remove technology barriers between content, data, process, and collaboration, to deliver the information the business wants, economically.

At first, EMC seems an unlikely candidate to deliver on this vision for case management. On further thought, case management may be the ultimate synergy of EMC’s eRoom, Documentum, Captiva, and Pro-activity heritage. eRoom achieved incredible heights of user appeal and deployability. Documentum has always been exceptionally integratable. Captiva brings world class ability to transform information on paper to electronic information, so that workers can get their jobs done. Proactivity offers the highest level of business process science. In its xCP product, EMC is showing strategic commitment to exactly this combination in the case management space. With this combination and commitment, xCP may be the product that exceeds industry hype.

Get Ready for More Information about Product Origin

Point of origin is important for consumers, manufacturers, retailers, and governments. Technology and infrastructure are evolving to increase access to accurate point of origin information.

Consumers care where a product was made. Consumers of a given country are often more likely to buy a product that was made in their own country. For some products, consumers associate special value to specific countries and country of origin is becoming an important brand. For example, Columbia invests in consumer awareness of it coffee, Switzerland invests in consumer awareness of a range of products such as watches, and Volkswagen promotes German origin as a desirable attribute for cars. In some cases, not only country but region is an important distinction for consumers; some consumers want smoked salmon not from Canada, but from Nova Scotia or sparkling wine not from France, but from Champagne.

Because consumers care where a product was made, it’s important for manufacturers and retailers to communicate point of origin or point of manufacture to consumers. Manufacturers and retailers know consumers will favor goods from their home country and in some cases pay a premium for goods from a particular country or region. They spend money to promote the value of goods from a particular region, and those who can give consumers confidence in point of origin will be able to obtain a superior return.

Governments invest in their national brands, and maintaining integrity in point of origin information is important for protecting the brand. Governments want to enforce trade restrictions (e.g., United States does not allow the import of highly desirable cigars from Cuba) and keep accurate statistics on imports and exports (e.g., United States Department of Commerce restrictions). Governments want to collect import and value added taxes fairly and efficiently. Finally, governments want to control and track movement of some valuable commodities, such as antiquities and nuclear material.

The infrastructure and technology to confirm point of origin is developing to the stage where businesses and governments can begin to incorporate into their plans an increasing awareness and ability to track point of origin. Goods are increasingly identified with RFID tags and pass through intelligent portals when entering a leaving a country, warehouse, truck, or ship. Additionally, in-store hand held RFID readers are also being deployed. The Electronic Product Code transmitted by RFID tags can be used to confirm the origin of the product.

With point of origin information becoming increasingly available, branding and consumer awareness of micro-geographies will increase. For example, Consumers will always be pleased to know that their coffee comes from Columbia, but will be fascinated to know the specific grower who produced the coffee, and the growing techniques used by that grower. As the technology and infrastructure continues to develop, a whole new world of origin awareness is on its way.