Multichannel in a complex world

The proliferation of devices and channels has brought new challenges to just about every organisation in delivering consistently good customer experiences and effectively joining up service provision with marketing activity, data and content. A good multichannel strategy and execution is increasingly becoming essential to marketers and customer experience professionals from every sector. This report seeks to identify the key issues, challenges and opportunities that surround multichannel and provide some best practice insight and principles on the elements that are key to multichannel success. As part of the research for this report, we spoke to six experienced customer experience and marketing practitioners from large organisations across different sectors. In Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success, Akin Arikan (2008) said: ‘Because customers are multichannel beings and demand relevant, consistent experiences across all channels, businesses need to adopt a multichannel mind-set when listening to their customers.’ It was clear from the companies interviewed for this report that it remains challenging for many organisations to maintain consistency across so many customer touchpoints. Not only that, but the ability to balance consistency with the capability to fully exploit the unique attributes of each channel remains an aspiration for many. The proliferation of devices and digital channels has added complexity to customer journeys, making issues around the joining up of customer experience and the attribution of value of key importance to many. Whilst senior leaders within the organisations spoken to seem to be bought in to multichannel, this buy-in was not always replicated across the rest of the organisation and did not always translate into a cohesive multichannel strategy. A number of companies were undertaking work around customer journey mapping and customer segmentation, using a variety of passive and actively collected data in order to identify specific areas of poor customer experience and create action plans for improvement. Others were undertaking projects using sophisticated tracking and tagging technologies to develop an understanding of the value and role of specific channels and to provide better intelligence to the business on attribution that might be used to inform future investment decisions. A consistent barrier to improving customer experience is the ability to join up many different legacy systems and data in order to provide a single customer view and form the basis for delivery of a more consistent and cohesive multichannel approach. Whilst there remain significant challenges around multichannel, there are some useful technologies allowing businesses to develop better insight into customer motivation and activity. Nonetheless, delivery of seamless multichannel experience remains a work-inprogress for many

OptBPPlanner: Automatic Generation of Optimized Business Process Enactment Plans

Unlike imperative models, the specifi cation of business process (BP) properties in a declarative way allows the user to specify what has to be done instead of having to specify how it has to be done, thereby facilitating the human work involved, avoiding failures, and obtaining a better optimization. Frequently, there are several enactment plans related to a specifi c declarative model, each one presenting specifi c values for different objective functions, e.g., overall completion time. As a major contribution of this work, we propose a method for the automatic generation of optimized BP enactment plans from declarative specifi cations. The proposed method is based on a constraint-based approach for planning and scheduling the BP activities. These optimized plans can then be used for different purposes like simulation, time prediction, recommendations, and generation of optimized BP models. Moreover, a tool-supported method, called OptBPPlanner, has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. Furthermore, the proposed method is validated through a range of test models of varying complexity.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009-1371

How collaborative innovation and co-creation can deliver value: a stakeholder approach

This project explores how collaborative innovation and co-creation between stakeholders can deliver value for firms. In today’s increasingly competitive and fast-changing global marketplace, firms must seek to develop more frequent and higher quality innovations (Ngugi et al, 2010). In addition, customers, employees and other stakeholders are demanding opportunities to co-create and collaborate with businesses more and more. As Ramaswamy (2010) comments: “Providers of products and services are challenged by customers who are increasingly informed, connected, networked and empowered. Customers, employees and stakeholders are demanding higher quality interactions and experiences from businesses and a deeper engagement in the value-creation and service delivery processes” (Ramaswamy, 2010, pp. 22). Given this increasing need to collaborate, innovate and co-create, firms need a better understanding of how they can engage in these activities in a way that maximises the value created for all stakeholders; this project, through exploratory, qualitative research interviews and a wide-ranging literature review, seeks to make a contribution in this area

Thought for Food: the impact of ICT on agribusiness

This report outlines the impact of ICT on the food economy. On the basis of a literature review from four disciplines - knowledge management, management information systems, operations research and logistics, and economics - the demand for new ICT applications, the supply of new applications and the match between demand and supply are identified. Subsequently the impact of new ICT applications on the food economy is discussed. The report relates the development of new technologies to innovation and adoption processes and economic growth, and to concepts of open innovations and living lab

Design for Social and Environmental Enterprise

SEED Foundation undertakes action research to develop new, innovative ways for design to most effectively contribute towards sustainable development. The research that follows is not the result of academic investigations but rather, a culmination of 20 years direct professional involvement in the sector. By aligning current political goals with cutting edge design thinking and good business sense, this paper presents our ideas on how more designers can profitably solve social and environmental problems through their work. It specifically investigates how the still emerging discipline of service design, in dealing more with relationships and experiences than material objects, offers inherent social and environmental benefits and is naturally transferable to sectors broader than private business –where designers traditionally work. By working in public and third sectors, and especially with social businesses, this paper uncovers new roles and business models for comprehensively sustainable design practice. Keywords: Design, Service design, sustainable development, social enterprise, social and environmental</p

Organising water: The hidden role of intermediary work

ABSTRACT: The increasingly complex challenges of making water management more sustainable require a critical and detailed understanding of the social organisation of water. This paper examines the hitherto neglected role that 'intermediary' organisations play in reshaping the relations between the provision and use of water and sanitation services. In response to new regulatory, environmental, social, and commercial pressures the relationships between water utilities, consumers, and regulators are changing, creating openings for both new and existing organisations to take on intermediary functions. Drawing on recent EU-funded research we provide the first systematic analysis of intermediary organisations in the European water sector, examining the contexts of their emergence, the ways they work, the functions they perform, and the impacts they can have. With a combination of conceptual and empirical analysis we substantiate and elaborate the case for appreciating the often hidden work of intermediaries. We caution, however, against over-simplistic conclusions on harnessing this potential, highlighting instead the need to reframe perspectives on how water is organised to contemplate actor constellations and interactions beyond the common triad of provider, consumer, and regulator

Optimized Time Management for Declarative Workflows

Declarative process models are increasingly used since they fit better with the nature of flexible process-aware information systems and the requirements of the stakeholders involved. When managing business processes, in addition, support for representing time and reasoning about it becomes crucial. Given a declarative process model, users may choose among different ways to execute it, i.e., there exist numerous possible enactment plans, each one presenting specific values for the given objective functions (e.g., overall completion time). This paper suggests a method for generating optimized enactment plans (e.g., plans minimizing overall completion time) from declarative process models with explicit temporal constraints. The latter covers a number of well-known workflow time patterns. The generated plans can be used for different purposes like providing personal schedules to users, facilitating early detection of critical situations, or predicting execution times for process activities. The proposed approach is applied to a range of test models of varying complexity. Although the optimization of process execution is a highly constrained problem, results indicate that our approach produces a satisfactory number of suitable solutions, i.e., solutions optimal in many cases

Managing knowledge in the context of sustainable construction

The 21st century has been a growing awareness of the importance of the sustainability agenda. Moreover for construction, it has become increasingly important as clients are pushing for a more sustainable product to complement their organisations’ own strategic plans. Sustainable development can be defined as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Sustainable construction is therefore seen as the application of sustainable practices to the activities of the construction sector. One of the key factors in making construction projects more sustainable is overcoming the obstacles of capturing and managing the knowledge required by project teams to effect such change. Managing this knowledge is key to the construction industry because of the unique characteristics of its projects, i.e. multi-disciplinary teams, dynamic participation of team members, heavy reliance on previous experiences/heuristics, the one-off nature of the projects, tight schedules, limited budget, etc. Initiatives within the industry and academic research are developing mechanisms and tools for managing knowledge in construction firms and projects. Such work has so far addressed the issues of capturing, storing, and transferring knowledge