We hope you enjoyed reading the first edition of Real Times.
Real Times
is our quarterly customer communication bringing you real issues, real comments and real solutions from around the business world.
It is also possible to access a pdf version of the previous issues of NExT TIMES (former name for Real Times) via the “Archive” section
Below are some links relating to the articles in the current edition which provide additional information in the form of either downloadable pdf documents or links to other web content.
Empowerment crucial for successful offshoring
Language is not the barrier to successful offshoring: companies need to empower agents and rethink the metrics used for assessing customer satisfaction. Danny Bradury, a regular contributor to The Independent, The Guardian, The Financial Times and many technology trade magazines, investigates.
A new report has found that companies are not doing enough to measure customer satisfaction and warns of a consumer backlash against offshore outsourcing.
Researchers at the University of Michigan have found that in some cases standards have dropped, and customers are genuinely concerned. However, it’s a mistake to think that offshoring itself is the problem; companies need to rethink their outsourcing processes and look towards outcome-based metrics to motivate outsourcers.
In this issue...
- The value if idle chit-chat
- The New Tigers: Brazil
- Future Technologies: The Sun worshippers
- Guest Writer: Richard Cree
- Customer Case Study: Numonyx
- Future Technologies: Telepresence
- Welcome to smart city
- Unified communication increases business productivity
- Customer opinion: mobile telephony
- IT's a strange world
- Upcoming events
The value of idle chit-chat
The latest Web 2.0 application to take the Internet by storm is Twitter, and for once it may prove a boon to businesses. This micro-blogging innovation is helping companies get instant feedback from customers about their performance - and their rivals.
Twitter started life as a one-to-many instant messaging service. Participants entered short messages - 140 characters maximum - about what they were doing into Twitter.com, which would broadcast them to anyone subscribed to their feed. However, users have found new ways to exploit a seemingly trivial service into a tool that is altering their relationships with business partners and customers.
James Governor, Founder of analyst firm RedMonk, uses Twitter as a form of collective intelligence, constantly polling the community to find unique perspectives on industry developments. With 2,000 people following him on Twitter and 500 people in his own list of Twitter feeds, the system has become almost indispensable to him.
Booming Brazil
In the first of this new section on the world’s key emerging economies, we look at Brazil, which is riding the wave of an economic boom fuelled by oil and agriculture. But this is not whole picture; a significant domestic market is emerging, attracting major multinationals to a stable, growing middle-class and increasingly IT-literate workforce.
It was perhaps a little surprising when Goldman Sachs brought Brazil into the collective of Russia, India and China to form the BRIC economic opportunity.
The investment bank predicted that by 2050, the BRIC economies would be worth more than the original G6 (US, Japan, Germany, UK, France and Italy) combined.
Unlike other BRICs, such as China, Brazil has steady rather than stratospheric economic growth.
To find our more about Brazil, please click here:
Guest Writer
Director is a monthly business magazine for business leaders, published on behalf of the
Institute of Directors. As such, we regularly cover issues such as the costs and benefits of flexible and remote working.
For August we decided to explore some of these issues first hand. In a brave attempt to embrace the wonders of technology, the Director team experimented with working
remotely. The idea was to put together an entire issue of the magazine from our sofas, gardens and home offices. In the process we tested some of the theories on remote and flexible working.
Technology, people and the British weather being what they are, it wasn’t long before we were out of our gardens and back in our offices in the Pall Mall, London.
While there were bound to be problems shifting an entire team in one go, technology was not the issue.
Customer Case Study Numonyx:
creating a IT and telecoms infrastructure in just five months
Created as a joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Intel, Numonyx became one of the world’s largest flash memory manufacturers overnight. For its launch in March 2008, this $3.5 billion start-up needed a brand-new IT and communications infrastructure that was entirely geared to making memory, making it cheaply, innovating quickly and delivering to customers just in time.
‘without a close partnership, this rapid development simply would not have been possible’
>> Numonyx designs and manufactures a full complement of integrated NOR, NAND and phase change non-volatile memory technologies and Flash memory cards
>> It has more than 7,000 employees, spread across more than 20 sites worldwide
>> The company’s revenues are in excess of $3.5 billion
Future Technologies
Sun worshippers: the future of solar power
Solar power has long been heralded as a major renewable energy, but the economics have prevented it becoming mass-market.
Now, with the breakthrough in thin-film technology combined with record oil prices, companies see a ray of hope.
Companies on both sides of the Atlantic are basking in the sun. In the U.S., Google has a 1.6Mw solar array on its Mountain View buildings that generates 30% of the peak power needed on campus. Wal-Mart, worried about energy security, announced a pilot project last year to install solar panels across 22 stores, producing an estimated 20 million kWh per year.
To find out more about solar power:
Sungri
Prometheus
Nanosolar
Cool Earth Solar
Google Greens
IT moves into solar
Wal-Mart goes solar
Immersed in meetings with telepresence
Videoconferencing’s high-definition big brother telepresence promises to realize the vision of effective remote meetings. By offering an immersive meeting experience, telepresence gives global businesses a real alternative to executive travel, allowing them to benefit from lower traveling expenses and carbon emissions, and improve the work-life balance and productivity of employees.
And unlike video conferencing, telepresence has captured the interest of senior executives. A survey of IT decision markets from IDG Research found that 34 percent of respondents were either evaluating or planning to implement telepresence solutions within the next 12 to 24 months.
Crucially, telepresence avoids the pitfalls of legacy video conferencing inthat it's easy to use.
To find out more about telepresence:
Frost
Wainhouse Research (PDF)
Human Productivity Lab
Welcome to the smart city
The Arabian Gulf is the hottest place in the world for real estate
development.
An estimated $3 trillion is being invested in creating new cities from sand and sea. We talk to Giancarlo Duella, Director of Consulting Services for Orange Business Services EEMEA, about the potential for these mega projects to become smart cities with fully integrated communications, entertainment, education, healthcare and civic services.
What is the basis for the miraculous growth of the Gulf economy in recent years?
What role does technology play in creating the smart city?
How can Orange help create the smart cities of tomorrow, today?
Unified communications increases business productivity
Unified communications is a hot topic as companies look to manage the complexity of multiple devices and communication channels more effectively. A new service from Orange Business Together with Microsoft, brings all communications under a single presence-enabled user interface.
The result: reduced delay in business processes and improved productivity.
Communications have changed dramatically over the past 20 years. You may have started work with only a phone on your desk, but now, according to Sage Research, the average business person uses up to six different communications devices or applications.
Making sense out of mobile
Mobile telephony has transformed how we communicate, by ensuring that people are no longer out of touch when out of the office. However, its benefits come at a cost for organizations if they struggle to deal with the complexity of a large mobile estate. In our first customer opinion, we speak to John Killeen, UPS Director of Global Networks Systems, about how the world’s largest package delivery company gained control of its mobile telephony.
If you have an opinion you would like to share with Real Times readers, we are keen to hear from you.
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