The Application Suite's main function is to put together the PBX phone system of a company and its databases, including CRM and email systems. The result is that whenever an office phone rings, the application server automatically brings up on the phone's associated computer all the information the company has about the caller, thus improving customer service and productivity. The system also captures information about all outgoing calls, email, SMS, and instant messaging, data that managers can mine to assess employee productivity. If a particular salesperson devotes 60 percent of his calls to customers that account for only 10 percent of revenues, for example, managers are alerted about the mismatch.
5: Business Intelligence
Business applications like Corebridge's are expected to become mainstream in the near future as Asian companies lay down basic broadband and wireless infrastructure, build enterprise portals, and implement ERP, CRM, and other enterprise software applications. All these transactional processes throw up huge volumes of information that can tell the company valuable things about future trends, deepen its understanding of itself, and generally sharpen its competitive edge — if the data can be mined, cleaned up, and analyzed. This is the business of business intelligence, or BI.
"Usage of BI in Asia Pacific is growing significantly," reports Matthew Mok, senior manager in Hong Kong, financial intelligence practice, for leading U.S. business analytics provider SAS. "In 2004, total revenue for the BI industry in Asia Pacific was US$230 million. By 2010, we will see spending on BI total US$600 million." Says John Kiesel, business unit executive, Worldwide Business Intelligence, at IBM: "You will see BI inside every application that's delivered to the desktop in five years' time in Asia. Business intelligence is available only to a company's business analysts today; tomorrow it would be available to everyone in the office."
Users will no longer need to frame queries and set parameters in order to get answers to specific questions, as business analysts do now. Instead, the BI software will analyze historical and real-time data continuously and alert staffers to potential problems through their laptop, EDA, and even mobile phone. "And not all BI is decision support," adds Hale, the IBM analytics leader. "Some really advanced BI will change the operation of the company automatically." One such system is already in place at some stores in the U.S. When there are bargain sales on beer, for example, the BI system will automatically increase replenishment orders for chips and pretzels.
The BI software can also track employee performance, grade, and rank it, and publicly display the results. "Bank One in the U.S. was losing something like US$500 million a year because it was driven by revenue growth, not profits," Kiesel recounts. "When Jamie Dimon became its CEO [in 2000], he gave finance officers 90 days to put together a portal containing all the tools that would help branch managers improve their unit's profitability. The portal also had a BI application that ranked every manager based on his or her unit's financial results. The top performers got big bonuses. The bottom ones got canned." It was stressful but effective. "In two years," says Kiesel, "Bank One made US$3 billion in profit."
6: Virtual Collaboration
How people work will obviously change as a result of developments in office infrastructure, IT tools, and business processes. "They will free up the organization and enable it to have a worldwide labor pool, so you can use people from everywhere," says Kathy Harris, group vice president at Gartner. "The hottest workplace application will be collaboration." With high-speed access to enterprise portals, mobile devices, and a constant stream of company data, staffers can easily form and reform various working groups across the global organization, and even tap suppliers, customers, and other outsiders, as they go about their daily tasks.
Harris estimates that up to 80 percent of all knowledge sharing today is done through email, but she sees new collaboration drivers in instant messaging, blogs, wiki (a server software that allows anyone to create and edit web pages) and web conferencing. "Organizations can also engineer communities, such as those that build customer communities out on the web," she adds. "These customers talk and give each other advice about the company's products, pulling a lot of the work out from call centers and company agents."
Last year Microsoft issued an upgraded Live Meeting web conferencing service, which runs on any PC with an internet connection. "You can use Live Meeting with a camera, you can use voice, you can use document sharing, or everything at once," says C.K. Taneja, general manager in India of U.S. market researcher Greenfield Online. The system allows staffers from different parts of the world to collaborate on the same Excel spreadsheet, Word document, Powerpoint presentation, and other Microsoft applications, as well as PDF files. Every participant sees and can make changes to the document on his PC screen in real time.
The faces are tiny on a computer screen, but a Live Meeting session can be projected to a full screen in the office conference room. Taneja says he detects no time lag or synchronization problems if the session is hosted in the U.S. or Singapore, where Live Meeting has servers. "But there would be some time lag if you host in India, because Live Meeting does not yet have a server here," he adds. Live Meeting's competitors include WebEx, eCollaborate, and Cisco's MeetingPlace.
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