Oliver Bell’s Weblog

Like many other recent weeks, most of the last seven days has been consumed by travel and interspersed with real work at a couple of really interesting events. On the plus side, I did get to undertake part of that travel on SIA’s new Airbus A380, a stunning plane and a stunning experience, returning home on one of their 777s from Christchurch next week just won’t be the same.

Anyway, the first part of the week was spent with colleagues from the United Nations University in Macau attending their ICEGov event, the second part in Sydney where I got the opportunity to participate in the symposium that the University of New South Wales were hosting, looking at the technical and legal aspects of Open XML as they pertain to the needs of Australian users, developers and business.

And to round things off I’m now sat in a hotel room in Sydney, trying to catch up on the events of the week and clear my inbox down to a point where it becomes manageable again, as I am sure you have read before we exchange a LOT of email inside Microsoft.

The ICEGov conference was pretty unique in its makeup, we have been working with a couple of members of the faculty for a little while now on some research questions around eGovernment and Interoperability but this was the first opportunity I have had to visit the school and gain a wider view of the work that is going on there.

Unfortunately I could only stay for the first two days of the event, the sessions I attended looked at elements such as applying formal engineering techniques to eGovernment development, Interoperability through decisions around architecture and technology, eGovernment policy management, and a session on eParticipation which is an area of eGovernment where I personally believe we will see an increasing focus in years to come.

Usually at this type of conference sessions consist of various government or industry leaders presenting best practice based upon recent projects that they have been involved in. These types of events are interesting, it is always good to learn what is going on elsewhere in the world, but every government differs in terms of technology use, social structure, culture and related government policy so it is sometimes hard to see how these best practices can be picked up and put to good use in another jurisdiction.

The format of ICEGov was far more academic in its approach, with each of the sessions being closer to half a day and the format of the content being constructed more as a topic tutorial, drawing on occasional cases where needed. I found every session I participated in helpful, and in every case walked out of the session with a handful of new ideas that I hadn’t walked in with.

Great stuff, and a big congratulations to the organizing team who I know put a lot of effort into pulling this together.

The second event was equally as interesting. The symposium at the University of New South Wales’ CyberLaw Centre has been arranged for some time, about 30 people took part in both halves of the day. The first half was a technical discussion, the second half was looking at the legal coverage for the specification.

As is always the case with these events it was a spirited but constructive discussion with Rick Jelliffe and Matthew Cruickshank facilitating conversations around the technical aspects of Open XML and then Colin Jackson presenting the views of the New Zealand Government on the topic of Open XML and open documents in general.

The conversations during the afternoon session were led by Ronald Yu and Microsoft’s Steve Mutkoski. Good points were made all sides of the debate, and several of us agreed that a post-February beer or two might be a good idea.

I would really like to see more of these types of event in the region. The debate on the Internet sometimes consists of one side throwing a grenade over the wall at the other, then the other side throwing one back. Events like the one at UNSW give everybody a chance to spend time getting into the technical, legal and standardization questions. I know that I learned a few things on the day and I would like to think that some of the other participants did as well. It was good fun, there is always a lot to be gained from open conversation.

As I start writing this post I have to say that I am unsure if it will result in something positive or if it will just turn out to be a rant. My intention is really to talk more about what a growing group of people see as a potential next big step for CRM, I’m going to use the airline loyalty programs as an example, and after a truly terrible week of travel I’m not sure where that will take me. Here goes…

I travel too much, I know that, my friends know that and my family know that. Of course Singapore Airlines, our national airline, also know that although for them it isn’t too much, for them their CRM systems tell them that I fit into the category of being a valued customer.

SIAs customer relationship management system is second to none, their PPS program rewards me in all sorts of ways including personalized check-in, priority boarding and some great touches while I’m on board a flight. Speaking as a customer of SIA I obviously have no objections to any of this, but for SIA themselves it is a huge investment for what I sometimes think must be very little return.

For SIA I am already a captive customer, I’m going to fly with SIA regardless of how far out of their way they go to look after me. The general service that they offer is attractive, they fly to all the destinations I need, they have a great track record for on time service and so on. Of course I’m not complaining in any way about the extra touches, I’m just not convinced that they are the key to why I will remain a loyal customer.

The problem occurs when I use another airline, which on a number of occasions I really have no choice about. As an example I have been back in the United States this week and have had cause to use American Airlines a couple of times, another fine airline, but one that I have no status at all with.

My experience with American Airlines is of course a degraded one as a result of this, something that is additionally impacted by how spoilt I am when I travel with SIA. I joined a long line at check-in, trekked through security and queued for my seat which was situated in row 89W.

I’m starting to notice that I’m sounding a little like a spoilt brat at this point, I’m really not complaining though and somewhere in here I have a point to make, I’ll continue…

The Customer Relationship Management opportunity here is relevant to both of the airlines that I have traveled with this week.

First of all it is for Singapore Airlines, and for them the question revolves around when and how they see value in looking after their travelers, this proposition is a tough business decision for them and I am glad that my responsibility here ends with just writing something random on the Internet.

Ostensibly the decision is to either look after their customers only when they’re traveling with SIA, or will they at some point step up to being an airline that looks after their customers  regardless of which airline that they’re traveling with.

I’m sure that travelers like myself could be easily profiled into a category where it was obvious that additional carriers are frequently necessary, and a higher tier of PSS (which I would work hard to attain) could throw me into a complex set of managed partnerships and inter-airline agreements that ensured that customers are always looked after providing that SIA remain the core carrier whenever possible.

Speaking as one traveler, I would be happy to see SIA invest less in the services they offer me when I’m aboard their own planes in return for this service.

The second opportunity is for the other carrier in my scenario, and is probably an easier business decision but a more complex technological challenge. At no point during my travels this week did American Airlines try to collect my Star Alliance membership details, and why would they, it isn’t their network and I am therefore not their customer.

The opportunity though is not to just track the customers that you have with CRM, but to think about the customers that you could potentially have.

American could learn a great deal about me by capturing and in someway rewarding details of frequent flyer programs that are not theirs, maybe they could offer me a more rapid route to earning status with them with the goal that I will become a customer in the future, choosing American on my next trip to the US, or choosing to make them my default carrier if I ever relocated back to the States on some future date.

In short, CRM today is very much about how you look after your own customers when they are consuming services offered by your own company. In the future CRM has to evolve to give you ways to ensure you retain your customers even when they are choosing a different provider, or to track other companies customers with the goal of making them your own.

Back to my airline scenario, around ten years ago the One World and Star Alliance partnerships were created between a limited number of airlines with some of these goals in mind, but the evolution of these programs seems (speaking as a customer) to have stopped there. Technology offers us so many more opportunities today, and it is probably time to revisit some of the network programs that exist in many industries with today’s possibilities in mind.

I am confident that this opportunity is not confined to the airline industry, and I apologize for having picked on that single industry as an example in this post, I’m sure you get the point…

In my last role for Microsoft I was based in Redmond and I was no stranger to long haul flights. Flying from Seattle it was always around five hours to anywhere on the the east coast of the United States, or the first leg of any international flight would be around ten hours.

I’m currently heading back to the USA for a few days, and the journey back has left me pondering the life that was, and the one that is just beginning.

Living and working in Singapore has brought some unexpected side benefits, not least of which has been the fact that most of the countries in South East Asia are either right on my doorstep, or at worst only a small number of hours away. The result is much less time spent waiting to be somewhere else, along with the counterbalance of much more time being available to engage directly with people or projects.

The change in travel patterns are dramatic, but not the only change in lifestyle that comes with a move half way around the globe.

It has been fascinating to see how the patterns of technology adoption differ just as significantly between my old home and my new one. Of course, anything I write from here will be a disputable generalization.. so take the follow text as nothing more than my own observations.

In the United States the demand for personal technology, in my personal view, frequently seemed to be driven by the demands for entertainment in the home. As a general rule homes built in the USA today will probably have CAT5 or CAT6 points in every room, and the occupants will plug an array of devices into those points that deliver common media platforms that serve voice, video, data, music and other communications to the entire home.

After less than a year in Singapore I would describe the demands of technology users in Asia as having a different focus, and I’ll give it a high level banner of “social efficiency and productivity”.

First and foremost the mobile phone (or hand phone) plays a much more significant role in day to day life, text messaging is only just gathering momentum in the USA, while in Singapore it is the general rule that somebody will walk into me as I come off the MRT due to their single focus of tapping out a message on their phone.

The services that emerge as a result of the focus on the smart phone are pretty much taken for granted by the average Singaporean, but have been exciting to discover for somebody just arriving in the country. The idea of being able to order a meal, summon a taxi or check in for a flight using just a text message was an amazing revelation to me - while I watch many around me take these types of service for granted. 

The net result is that advanced technologies are probably a much more pervasive part of day to day life in Singapore than they have been in places I have lived in the past.

The array of devices that people carry in their pockets, the amount of data that the average member of Singaporean society can summon up from from those devices along with the speed at which people exchange information and communicate is nothing short of amazing.

Of course folks in the US get excited about cell phones and the technology that you can find there, and of course folks in Singapore build common media platforms in their homes. However, the technology that you find in stores and in pervasive use appear on the surface to represent different core contexts and use cases.

What does all this mean.

Well, the obvious point is that we live in a diverse world, where people will always use technology for whatever drives society. A more complex point for me personally really involves watching and learning over the coming few years as I settle into the region, and working out how I represent these significant differences to the many product groups that I work with at Microsoft.

There probably are no significant revelations or world changing ideas in these observations, but they are an interesting overlay to decisions I get involved with on a day to day basis and in my interactions with people in the region.

I’m beginning to wonder if maybe the world is not quite as flat as I was led to believe…