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Service innovation and change from within

Mobile social money, the final frontier? In the final part of discussions of social networks, media, banking and money, I thought I would turn attention to the use of mobile devices as access media to these networks. Mobile usage in banking has grown to a crescendo in the past year, after bubbling away nicely since the turn of this century. This is in part down to the fact that the latest smartphones allow a bank to deploy fully functional internet banking services to mobile devices using the same platform as their main websites. In other words, it is now cost-effective and appropriate to do this. However, the challenge with mobile finance is that we tend to discuss mobiles as one homogenous group of devices when: (a) there are many devices; and (b) the use of mobile devices to access financial services are not homogenous. Let’s look at (a) first.

Boutique Consulting Firms

Boutique Consulting Firms

Boutique firms support their clients with highly-specialized expertise. Boutique firms choose to focus on a smaller number of industries (energy, life sciences, retail), functions (M&A, economics and litigation, turnaround), or methodologies (real options, EVA).

3. Growth PlatformsThis area of focus refers to the selection, prioritization and communication (both internal and external) of new growth platforms and business concepts that promise to deliver long-term, sustainable competitive advantage. It is here, most especially, that high performers begin separating themselves from the pack by making the strategic distinction between effective innovation in general and the effective commercialization of innovation. Accelerating growth through innovation requires becoming more disciplined at identifying a company's innovation "center," as it were. For some companies, such as Apple, innovation generally flows from its products and services. Other companies, such as Wal-Mart, fuel growth through operational innovations. Business model innovation has helped drive companies such as eBay and Skype. Companies must manage growth from that innovation center, rather than from the periphery. Part of that commitment to innovation involves embracing new and disruptive ideas. Another important aspect is leveraging open innovation and open sourcing methods that bring together suppliers, partners, employees and management. Companies that effectively commercialize innovation also develop more risk tolerance when scanning for opportunities outside their immediate business environment. They become more willing to cannibalize products and services when investigating new growth platforms. They become more adept at the operational requirements of their winning concepts, leveraging current partners, networks, assets and distinctive capabilities to help drive growth through innovation (see "Leading by imitation," Outlook, January 2007). Finally, these companies know how to communicate their growth and innovation strategy, both within their company and to the marketplace. Like the old story of the tree falling in a deserted forest, future value that is not communicated effectively to the marketplace doesn't make any noise.

Reversing the Enterprise 2.0 Pricing Model

Why is the Enterprise 2.0 market not taking off more strongly? The reason has to do partly with ill-conceived pricing structures: volume-discount (VD) schemes. Fix them, and you fix one of the obstacles preventing the market from expanding rapidly. And by fixing them is meant reversing them, in particular by using volume-increasing schemes. Pricing Tied to Volume Enterprise social computing offerings -- such as social networks or the numerous Twitter-for-the-enterprise applications that currently abound -- generally don't have complex pricing structures. They are volume-discount based: that is, the more accounts customers buy, and the more employees who use them, the larger the discount vendors give them, and the lower their average price per user will be. Some vendors advertise flat pricing schemes, but when a customer is big enough, a volume-discount deal inevitably creeps in. Value and Cost Out of Balance

Volume-discount pricing structures are simple, tried, and true. So, why aren't they efficient? The reason is because of where returns on investment (ROIs) are located. Enterprise social computing offerings provide increasing marginal productivity as they scale, at both the individual and organizational level. The more that employees use a service, the higher the margin gained by their company in productivity, and the more the company extracts value from the product. A corporate customer that has 10% of its employees using a Twitter-like product won't extract as much value as one that has 50% of its employees using it.

Technology is a key for banking in 2009 I found a whole range of technology predictions for 2009.  One of the best general forecasts comes from Gartner, who say that the top ten technology areas to focus upon during an economic crisis are:1. Reduce headcount or freeze hiring2. Renegotiate with technology and service providers3. Curtail data center expansion, virtualize assets and lease them back4. Consolidate systems5. Outsource commodity6. Offshore outsource7. Investment shutdown8. Prioritize projects9. Mothball businesses and projects10. Change leadership and restructure IT teamsI agree with this list.In banking, it goes further.  In banking, technology is a critical part of the solution for the crisis, and technology also provides a way to avoid the crisis occurring again.  That is why I titled this as technology providing 'a key for banking in 2009'.Technology is the key. 

Pricing on Purpose By Ronald J. Baker

"With Pricing on Purpose, Ron Baker had made an enormous contribution to the better understanding of pricing that will be accessible to anyone who wants to learn. People are intrigued by instances of what they see as idiosyncratic pricing. Sometimes it is idiosyncratic, but oft-times it is fiendishly clever and well researched. So is this book. There are examples that at first sight seem to have nothing to do with the subject at hand, but the learning points are all made and explained in any number of interesting and memorable ways. Pricing on Purpose is a welcome and valuable addition to the learning on pricing and I recommend it to professional pricers, marketers, and anyone interested in capturing the value their business creates." —Eric G. Mitchell, President, Professional Pricing Society, www.pricingsociety.com

"Ron Baker is what I'd call a 'thought giant.' In his first two books he literally began a revolution in the accounting and legal professions. Thousands of professionals in public practice now lead far better, more rewarding lives thanks to him. Now he's broadened his impact in a huge way. Read this book, implement the ideas and you'll never look at your prices or your pricing policies in the same way again. You'll be richer in many ways because of it." —Paul Dunn, founder and CEO, ResultsNet Australia, coauthor, The Firm of the Future: A Guide for Accountants, Lawyers, and Other Professional Services, www.resultsnetaustralia.com

Internet Banking: 2010 and beyond I’ve been reading a range of articles about the next generation internet, or the semantic web as it is called by those in the trade. Semantic is a method of looking for the meaning and relationships between things, and the semantic web effectively moves us away from files and downloads to databases and integration. In practice, this means that rather than going on to the internet to pull things out and push emails and files around, the internet continually monitors you and your tastes and finds things to push at you which match your electronic lifestyle. In other words, it makes everything online much more relevant to you as an individual, and moves us away from having to search because the semantic web will find for you. Take the way we use Google today. When you go into Google and search, it is very rare that you find what you want straight away. In fact, you often have to crawl through screen after screen, and change searches three or four times to even come close. The semantic web overcomes these difficulties because you will not have to search. The semantic web knows you and finds for you. It knows you work for a bank or technology firm, and therefore knows that when you say ‘payments’ you mean it in a professional sense, not a generic sense. Therefore it senses the most relevant things to the way you search and your profile of usual interests.

The next boom starts in ... 2014? I don't normally share or post my speeches - I prefer to just talk rather than read - but I wrote my speech last night for a dinner presentation and thought I would share with you a shorter version here.  The speech disappointed a few folks as it forecast two years of flat or negative growth to 2011, three years of slow growth to 2014, and then another boom period from 2014 onwards.  They wanted the boom forecast to be more like 2010 (a year away?) but hey, I could paint nice rosy pictures to make you all feel happy, but what the heck, I'd just be lying.

Webank | Are people replacing institutions?

Is the democratic and social nature of the internet changing the way we understand finance?

While in the past web-enabled innovation in the sector meant online banking and web-access to front-end customer services, there is today a growing set of organisations which remove banks and other institutions as intermediaries altogether.   Welcome to the world of peer-to-peer finance.

CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo

An introduction to personas and how to create them Written by Tina Calabria, published March 2nd, 2004 Categorised under: articles, intranets, usability & information architecture, websites Before embarking on any intranet or website design project, it is important to understand the needs of your users. It is then possible to identify the features and functionality that will make the intranet or website a success, and how the design can support users with different goals and levels of skill. There are many ways to identify the needs of users, such as usability testing, interviewing users, discussions with business stakeholders, and conducting surveys. However one technique that has grown in popularity and acceptance is the use of personas: the development of archetypal users to direct the vision and design of a web solution. This article explains what personas are, benefits of using personas, answers to common objections about personas, and practical steps towards creating them. It is meant as an introduction to personas, and provides enough information to start creating your own. If you want to know more, there are lots of resources available, particularly the work of Alan Cooper and colleagues at Cooper Interaction Design. Alan is credited with having created the first persona for software development purposes back in the early 1980s.

What are personas? Personas are archetypal users of an intranet or website that represent the needs of larger groups of users, in terms of their goals and personal characteristics. They act as ’stand-ins’ for real users and help guide decisions about functionality and design. Personas identify the user motivations, expectations and goals responsible for driving online behaviour, and bring users to life by giving them names, personalities and often a photo. Although personas are fictitious, they are based on knowledge of real users. Some form of user research is conducted before they are written to ensure they represent end users rather than the opinion of the person writing the personas. Below is a sample persona for an intranet project. This persona describes Bob, a 52 year old mechanic that works for a road service company. From Bob’s persona you can start to get a feel for his goals when using the new intranet. He wants to avoid feeling stupid, would like to retain his status as a mentor to his younger colleagues, whilst seeing the potential of the intranet to make him more informed when interacting with customers.

How do you innovate a business model?   You can create new products and services within the current business model to drive growth.  Or you can create a new business model and open up a whole new world of possibilities for the firm.  Either innovate within the current game, or change the game.  But how? 

"To build a breakthrough business model that rivals cannot easily emulate, you'll need to integrate a whole series of complementary, value creating components so the effect is cumulative,"

Here’s advise from Steve Jobs in managing in a downturn. "We've had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren't going to lay off people, that we'd taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place -- the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that's exactly what we did. And it worked. And that's exactly what we'll do this time."