Good morning and welcome to day two in Istanbul. The first day of the Universe Conference was – I have to admit – pretty exhausting, but has exceeded my highest expectations. Today's agenda again is packed, including some customer reports that tie in with what we've discussed yesterday. For example, Professor Prandelli of University Bocconi Milano, will talk about the high potential that lies in collaborating with customers. Her topic connects well with the keynote speech by Soumitra Dutta yesterday.
Dutta's ideas about new communication structures got me thinking. In his opinion, the participatory Web 2.0 has the power to overthrow existing hierarchies and, therewith, power structures. He calls this an e-ruption – pretty interesting, I think, and already observable: Just look at President Obama's election campaign. It proved the growing relevance of social networking portals like My Space and Twitter, not only in private lives of the younger generation, but also in politics. They have the power to actually change established ways of influencing public decision-making.
What does this mean for business? For one, as Professor Prandelli in our media roundtable already pointed out to some of us yesterday, Web 2.0 creates new opportunities to actively and consciously involve customers in the product development from the very beginning. Using data warehousing and intelligent solutions for unstructured data, you can even go beyond this and automatically monitor external internet forums to pick up the implicit feedback that people give there. To fully leverage these data, you need to integrate it in your data warehouse where you can analyze it in context of the rest of your data, linking them to your quality management, CRM and marketing. Then you can find out what has led to a customer's evaluation? Is it the quality of a given product, the service or a marketing measure? The gain is immense: At the end of the day, you'll understand the needs of your customers a great deal better.
Let's see what's more to discover today!
Mario Bonardo
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