Content-centric sales process automation
As you might know, I started in IT in 1980, as a night-shift operator of several IBM mainframes. I made sure that backups and batch jobs ran, and occasionally loaded data via punch cards.
As I stared at whirling tapes, and flashing lights, I had no comprehension of the applications and business problems I was solving. I yearned, and I mean yearned to be a bit passing through the tag and bus channels of the mainframe, and to this day, I am fascinated to learn how systems work.
In 1986, I joined an apparel ERP vendor called Apparel Computer Systems. The co-founder was a brilliant chap named Lew Jenkins. I did not get a chance to work with him much, because he resided at headquarters in Concord, CA. But I did look up to him. It was not the fact that he took a very complicated item master with multiple attributes; style, color, size and dimension and simplified it, but more interesting, he was able to design and build the first “off the shelf” Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) software product for IBM’s System 38 and AS400. Eventually, this became the actual product that the IBM direct sales force sold as part of the AS400 solution. The product changed names to Premenos, and was sold to off Sterling Software. I have since lost track of Lew, but his impact stayed with me.
Lew’s approach to the market and to information looked at commonality across data sets instead of differences. Because of that insight, he developed a product that one company used to ship mops to Wal-Mart, and allowed another, say a couture fashion house to sell and ship their designs to Neiman Marcus. As I think about how Lew was able to see through complexity, and how he could come up with a program that worked across disparate industries, it always left me with a nagging urge to unite, to unify, to to find commonality in a world with so much content that can’t be found.
Where are we now?
When I started my taxonomy quest 3 years ago, I looked no further than a company’s Income Statement, specifically Sales, General and Administration (SG&A) reporting. Every publicly traded company in the United States reports earnings based on SG&A. Taxonomy was natural, the problem being that the average Fortune 500 company has twenty plus application vendors proving technology for 1,800 or so activities included under the SG&A umbrella. To exacerbate the problem, every application had their own data silo and language. To this day, information silos and lack of common vocabularies are the biggest inhibitor to productivity and efficiency gains within a company.
So what has changed?
Three years ago, if you asked me what company was going to solve the content complexity problem, I would never of guessed Microsoft. Even back then, when they had won the enterprise desktop battle, they lacked a data repository that enabled the ability for quality search. To this day, there are horror stories of failed initiatives on earlier versions of SharePoint.
What does the future hold?
Done correctly, search and findability has significantly improved with SharePoint 2010. I am not saying SharePoint’s term store is the best solution for ontology, taxonomy or metadata management (the key to search and findability). But the inroads that SharePoint 2010 has made, and the progress with the 2010 term store’s ability to house metadata, added to the productivity gains inherent in the integration with desktop tools; Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Office, makes Microsoft SharePoint a force to reckon with in the enterprise space including the ability to integrate content-centric processes and transact from disparate information silos.
To see an content-centric process in action, visit the sales management process site and register for a case study on how a seven hundred person sales force consolidated to SharePoint for sales process automation.
