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Ed Schlesinger

Monday, 12 March 2012 07:36 Denis Pombriant

Thought Leader Interview

Entrepreneur Ed Schlesinger has been building a Force.com application for students in higher education called Studentforce. Ed’s bullish on the higher ed market and he’s locked and loaded to roll out Studentforce.

This market resembles human resources in some respects. In each case, the business processes are much more like the front office processes mediated by CRM than they are like back office processes that they are often lumped together with. Perhaps this explanation accounts for the relatively low penetration of automation into these spaces so far. ERP style applications are bulky and expensive and higher-ed and human resources have needed to wait for the front office to catch up. It appears the wait is over in both arenas as this interview shows the big opportunity in education.

Denis Pombriant: Ed, you've been pursuing the idea of an online application that college students can use to help manage their day-to-day college experience. What got you started in this?

Ed Schlesinger: I’ve been a salesforce.com user for about 10 years (CRM) and recognized its power as a platform early on. Ironically, when I started using salesforce.com I had been selling ERP implementations, specifically PeopleSoft student information systems to universities. That was the late '90s, early 2001. At about this time my children began looking closely at colleges and started working with admissions applications. And being that I was aware of the lack of, what's the word, organization of updatedness, a bad word, but just how confusing it was to do business with the university from the students’ perspective. I realized that the student was expecting a better experience and I started working with Salesforce.com evening August 2005; before the app exchange to put together Studentforce. This was before you could change tab names, create objects and before workflow had been deployed

DP: What drew you to the Salesforce platform? It sounds like it was in a primitive state at the time.

ES: Primitive to what it is right now, but way advanced to what was out there. Again, I was doing sales, and sales is a process, filling in an application for a college is a process. Going through university is a process for the student as well as the administration and the faculty (Higher Ed calls it the student life cycle). And there’s value I believe in tracking, creating a profile of the work you’ve done and attaching documents. And, again, there was a bit of intuition with the consumerization of IT that the market was going to catch up to the users, users being the students.

DP: Okay. In other words, what does Studentforce then provide to student on today's campuses that they can't live without once they have tried it? People have been going to college for a long time and they haven't had a Studentforce.

ES: A single interface, customizable to the university where the student can, from any device, wherever they are, as long as they can get to a browser or a mobile device access and track their assignments, their classes, their digital content, share, collaborate of note-taking and task management. Again, only one place, simple, easy, a few clicks or a few — what do we call what we do on iPads and touch devices — a few touches and swipes.

DP: Okay. So this is something that enables the students to interact with each other, interact with administration, interact with professors?

ES: Correct. And also on the other side, since the platform for the university is such that once the students have access to Studentforce, (the point solution), the university administrators and faculty can take advantage of the platform for recruiting and admissions such as is done with products like Enrollment RX. I don't know if you're familiar with that?

Last Updated on Monday, 12 March 2012 07:44 Read more...

Short Tale Awards 2012

Monday, 27 February 2012 08:54 Denis Pombriant

Beagle Short Tale Award 2012

Introduction

short tale original 2012
The second annual Beagle Research report, the “Short Tale Awards 2012” for excellence in video production by front office software companies contains some notable efforts. The winners offer a mix of animation, interviews and demonstrations that vendors used to get their ideas across. The breadth of messages might be the most interesting aspect of this year’s competition.

Notably, most vendors surveyed appear to believe that the industry is at a turning point and many use their videos in an attempt to paint a picture of the future, at least their vision of the future. Naturally, the futures envisioned rely on a great deal of technology to mediate the interactions between vendors and customers—a far cry from a decade earlier when CRM was positioned as a way to accelerate front office business, contain costs and deflect complaints.

It’s also getting harder to distinguish stand alone CRM from a more integrated technology environment. Thanks to social media’s impact the lines between front and back office are blurring and if some of the futuristic prognostications are accurate this will only accelerate.

Today when we think of front office processes we do so in terms of better understanding customers and their needs. This focus on the customer is causing many organizations to become more social to the point that at least one vendor, Salesforce.com is promoting a new model—the social enterprise.

As with last year’s awards the winners represent a broad cross section of the industry and while many of the largest companies in CRM are represented, so are smaller companies proving that big budgets are not necessarily the keys to success in a creative effort.

Last Updated on Thursday, 01 March 2012 11:46 Read more...

Your Customer Service Duty

Monday, 07 March 2011 09:29 Denis Pombriant

Your Customer Service Duty

There’s good news for any manager who has grown exasperated with trying to delight customers through “over the top” service. You may be working too hard and the benefits are not forthcoming. We’ll do anything to keep customers because they tend to buy more from us and the cost of replacing them if they leave is so high. But according to a study published in Harvard Business Review, “Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers” by Matthew Dixon, Karen Freeman, and Nicholas Toman, vendors would be better off sticking to their service knitting instead of looking for ways to “delight” them. This is not to say that the customer experience is unimportant, just the opposite. The question is what constitutes the customer experience from the customer’s perspective.

Last Updated on Wednesday, 09 March 2011 16:44 Read more...

Ted Elliott

Thursday, 23 February 2012 11:52 Denis Pombriant

Thought Leader Interview

Ted Elliott Ted Elliot has been at the forefront of aapplying cloud computing to the human resources market, which he sees as a business process extension of CRM. Like CRM, the HR department has to market and sell people and jobs and work hard to retain people. Moreover, in an age where everyone understands the value of hiring and retaining A players, automation can make the difference between a quick, thorough and professional hiring process and a missed opportunity. Elliott's company has won numerous awards for its advanced ideas and it is a perennial favorite on Salesforce.com's AppExchange.

Denis Pombriant: Ted, you’ve seen major disruptions in many areas of the software industry in the last 10 years as cloud computing has made it affordable to work in very different ways than in the past. Is human resources next?

Ted Elliott: Yes, and I also think human resources has probably been part of that [disruption] over the last 10 years. But I think it’s going to be more visible to the rest of the organization in the coming years mainly because it’s allowing HR to get access to the same kind of technology and ideas that are used in other parts of the business. Instead of HR being siloed and relegated to on premise technology, HR is going to get access to the capabilities in social network marketing and play a pivotal role in the adoption of collaboration tools. And I think you’re going to see that it’s going to actually make HR more relevant to the overall social enterprise.

Last Updated on Thursday, 23 February 2012 12:04 Read more...

Short Subjects

Thursday, 18 November 2010 11:48 Denis Pombriant

Not long ago, well actually a couple of years ago, I began writing about the need for increased use of video in our communications. I was mostly thinking vendor to customer communications.

My logic was three fold, first the technology needed to create video is now available on the desk top. On the Apple platform, which I am more familiar with, Garage Band for creating music loops, iMovie and iPhoto for movies and stills form the basis of a creative suite that enables a talented but not necessarily expert user to create engaging videos. The Adobe Creative Suite is also powerful and runs on Windows and the Mac, but for my money is unnecessarily complex, but you need Adobe or something like it to do some of the more advanced graphics. The challenge for the developer is to keep the video in a duration range of three to five minutes, and of course, to be engaging.

Check out videos in the RESOURCES menu or read on.

Last Updated on Tuesday, 23 November 2010 15:08 Read more...