Strategic Service Management

Hello and welcome to our Strategic Service Management blog. I’m Ross Rankin and I’ll be writing on a number of topics in technology and its impact on service. I’ve been in technology my entire career so hopefully it will display some authority on the topic. We’ll see…

This week I’m at Oracle OpenWorld representing Servigistics. Today is the second full day at the show and it has amazing scale. There are about 50,000 people here for Oracle and all its many products. There are about 320 sessions a day, covering 8 buildings, and a few city blocks. It’s an amazing undertaking just to feed this many people and entertain them.

My focus here is to meeting with a few Oracle representatives in keeping up our ISV relationship. However, I’m also here to review the competitive offerings that Oracle now offers in their E-Business Suite. Well, I have to say Service is not a focus or a priority for Oracle here at OpenWorld. This show clearly outlines the problem with going with an ERP vendor for your service applications.

As I mentioned, 320 sessions a day, how many are dedicated to Service? About 1 ½ a day… Why a half? Because after attending these sessions with a service slant, it’s more about billing, time keeping, compliance, and procurement than service and its metrics. Why go with a best-of-breed rather than the huge ERP suite vendors? Focus.

If service is strategic for your company and - based on the data on margin contribution, customer satisfaction impact, and brand equity, it should be - but why would you risk your service delivery with a company who can’t dedicate a single session to service? In a climate where service can contribute up to 50% of an organization’s profit, doesn’t it deserve a bit more airtime? You can Google post-sale service and see that corporate leaders, analysts, and publications agree that post-sale service is critical in generating revenues, smoothing out business cycles, and building customer relationships.

My opinion is that best-in-class service requires dedication and focus, something the big guys haven’t quite figured out yet. Not that these same big guys don’t put out great products on the execution side, they just don’t have the drive, focus, and domain expertise that a dedicated player does. Oh, they also know how to put on an event.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Oracle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.