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"I'm often asked by IBM customers where the Net is headed.  I tell them:
Clearly, connectivity is important -  but it isn't the real issue. 
Let's say soon there will be 1 billion ways to get on the Net.  Then
what?  What will these connected millions do?  What will they want to
do?  What will they value?  And what will they be willing to pay
for?

A leading British construction company switched 1,800 users over to Google Apps on May 2nd, becoming the largest
live deployment in the UK so far for Google’s enterprise applications suite. In
a phone interview this morning, Rob Ramsay, director of IT at Taylor Woodrow, firmly refuted the allegations reported here
yesterday that Google applications aren’t fit for enterprise use.

Since implementing the CRM SaaS solution, beginning
in 2005, Equifax has achieved a number of important benefits:

Productivity gains. The company estimates that the time needed to
complete sales forecasts has been reduced by 90%, with greater accuracy. And the
amount of management time necessary to gather and verify sales data has been
reduced by 50 person-hours per month.

Quick time-to-value. The initial rollout to 400 users was
completed in 60 days, compared with an estimated 12 months that would have been
required for installing an equivalent on-premise CRM solution.

Short payback period. The initial implementation of the solution
in Latin America showed a payback period of 10 months.

Incremental profits. Equifax sales and profits are growing
rapidly. Although not all of the growth can be attributed to the CRM solution,
the company believes that 5% of its year-over-year profit growth can be ascribed
to CRM due to internal productivity benefits.

High ROI. Equifax estimates that the ROI from its CRM SaaS solution is 350% annually.

“We had 10 types of [payroll] systems as a result of acquisitions. To get
basic information, it was nearly impossible,” he recalled. “Some did payroll
with [an outsource provider]. Some did it on their own. We had no visibility of
any of this information. Plus, we were paying a lot of money to [outsource
payroll].”

8. Making businesses from information

Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities.

7. Putting more science into management

Just as the Internet and productivity tools extend the reach of and provide leverage to desk-based workers, technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models. From “ideagoras” (eBay-like marketplaces for ideas) to predictive markets to performance-management approaches, ubiquitous standards-based technologies promote aggregation, processing, and decision making based on the use of growing pools of rich data.

6. Unbundling production from delivery

Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever-smaller increments cost effectively. Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems.

5. Expanding the frontiers of automation

Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What’s more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service.

4. Extracting more value from interactions

Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities. As a result, a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions, as we call them. By 2015 we expect employment in jobs primarily involving such interactions to account for about 44 percent of total US employment, up from 40 percent today

3. Tapping into a world of talent

As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence.

2. Using consumers as innovators

Consumers also cocreate with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers.

1. Distributing cocreation

The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries.

O’Hern says Boater’s World had EDI connections with about 50 of the 300-plus
vendors in its supply chain, but lacked the ability to expand the use of the
technology because of the toll it would take on the chain’s internal data
processing resources. “We were struggling to add vendors,” he says, “because of
the amount of time that it takes to go through the testing, configuration and
certification process with each vendor.”

The second-largest U.S. marine supply retail chain, Boater’s World needed to
improve its communication with trading partners and vendors, O’Hern says. That
meant its computers needed to talk to partners’ computers through the process of
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI).

The overall cost per hire has been reduced by 60 per cent since the SaaS
system was introduced because the creation of candidate shortlists and reviews
for hiring managers is easier and the candidate is engaged with the business
throughout the recruitment process.

"Ownership costs are typically less — as much as 30% lower for a typical CRM
installation, according to McKinsey & Co analysis. Costs should drop even
faster for commodity services such as e-mail and messaging, which may soon be
offered at prices so low that the traditional licensing model will be
uneconomical."

"… many customers are eager for the shift because they're frustrated by the
traditional cycle of buying a software license, paying for a service contract
and then having to buy upgrades. Many customers believe they would have more
control over the relationship if they simply paid monthly fees that could be
switched to another vendor if the first failed to perform."