A few years ago I wrote an article about the importance of utilizing and automating the wide variety of information that is available to credit professionals looking to efficiently and accurately make credit decisions. Now, looking back, it is easy to see how the same concept of using the right piece of information for the type of decision you are making really applies to all job functions. It is an intuitive concept that better information leads to better decisions, yet a surprising number companies still rely on a single source of insight either because of budgetary constraints or the complexity and time commitment of IT integration projects.

Building on the theme that information wants to be free, both in the in monetary sense and in terms of accessibility, the time for non-IT information consumers has never been better. Now this going to sound like I’m picking on IT a bit, but as a friend of mine wrote a few months back in his blog, “Power is shifting to the users and away from IT departments.” I completely agree. Don’t get me wrong, there will always be an IT department, but the rise of on-demand applications has ushered in a new era of productivity and time to solution expectations. Instead of multi-year (or decade) ERP implementation, customers are achieving paybacks in months (and expecting it).

This has equally extended into the world of content with the rise of free and open APIs from 100s of companies the flow of information keeps getting easier and cheaper. Mashup directories such as Programmable Web and API delivery aggregators such as StrikeIron are providing gateways to find and deliver the information needed for essentially any application you want to build. Similarly, business intelligence vendors such as Business Object’s Information OnDemand are giving access to the data for the analysis you need to conduct. These trends, combined with widgets and plug-and-play integration provided by platforms like salesforce.com’s AppExchange make it even easier to simply access content you need when you need it.

So whether you are a credit professional setting up a credit line on a small business you’ve never heard of before, or a sales rep looking for a nugget of insight that will give you an edge, now is the time to help yourself.

Or you can just stay on IT’s waiting list.

It has been a busy few weeks as we wind down our annual spring user groups that started off in London back in February and finished in Louisville yesterday. Every year I come out of these meetings more inspired and encouraged than the previous year. Over the last several years I’ve had the privilege to watch as our customer community evolved from small subset of early-adopters to a vibrant and highly diverse group covering a wide range of company types and industries. The community is passionate and intensely involved in driving product direction and even influencing corporate strategy. Even more inspiring are the relationships that have developed between not only employees and customers but between the customers themselves. Words like “vendor” and “client” have been replaced by “partner” and “friend”.

So you might ask – how did you build such a strong and vibrant community? It is pretty simple. We partnered with our users to create a forum dedicated to listening. The user groups started small with only a few users in a few cities, but the message was clear for us – better listening equates to better products. Today we are in nearly constant contact with customers from the spring user groups to the fall global conference and many less formal discussions in between. I was sitting at dinner with a customer last night and he was complaining about another vendor (this is always fun when it’s not you!), because his sales rep came in and was attempting to tell him how to run his business and manage his policies. However, this person had never actually performed this function or worked in his industry. In a similar manner, building technology or information products is very much the same – you can’t build great products without involvement of great customers who live their profession and unique industry every day.

Of course it is easy to conduct these meetings and tell users that you are listening, but what happens after is equally important and takes companywide commitment. I often get asked, “What happens to all our feedback and ideas after this meeting? Where does it go? How does it get prioritized?” The answer is pretty straightforward. We compile it and look for trends across the user base. All feedback channels point to a central location and get prioritized, in most cases, by intensity of interest and customer business impact. The major ideas and new feature enhancements are prototyped and re-circulated back to the user community for vetting and further discussion. By the time a major feature makes it to market a majority of the community is well aware of the functionality and has had their individual chance to influence the newest release.

In summary for those reading this that are new to Cortera and our products and interested in our community philosophy or those simply looking to create your own user community for your respective products, here are a few tips:

• Listen: A user group is a meeting or a multi-day meeting dedicated to listening. Not pitching or selling. The customer has already purchased the product, now is the time for learning from both the vendor and the user. It is very easy to get caught up in the latest and greatest product features, but without listening you miss the simple enhancements and features that can have a huge impact on the customer user experience. Every meeting I come away with list of what I would call simple enhancements that can easily be rolled into the next release. Over time these “simple” enhancements add up to an enormous amount of goodwill. The best ideas come from the people who use the product day in and day out.

• Gain companywide commitment: It does cost money and time to start a user group community, so it is essential to have top down support. That said, sending only a customer service representative or even a product manager is not enough. We’ve had success because of the involvement across the board from developers, senior management, sales, marketing and professional services. The entire organization needs to hear from the customer. When it comes to our annual global conference we involve nearly department to ensure maximum exposure and interaction with our customers.

• Facilitate the feedback loop: This seems like a simple concept, but you’d be surprised how often we get the question, “Now that I am a customer, how do I get my enhancements and my ideas to the right people?” For us, it has been by asking each customer. Again it sounds simple, but without asking, a customer may be too polite or timid to speak up to tell you. So we ask, and ask often. From professional services and support team calls to user group meetings, we are constantly asking “what else?”, “what do you like?”, “what bugs you the most?” Of course once you have the feedback flowing, you need to ensure that you communicate when these new features and enhancements suggested by the community are included in the product. For us, we close the loop in a variety of ways: our regional user group meetings, webinars conducted by our product management team, release notes, our customer portal, professional services engagements and our annual global conference that is packed with training sessions. There is no such thing as over communicating.

• Be humble: Simply put, the product is never perfect and never done. Accepting criticism and being flexible (and nimble enough) to change shows your commitment to the customer. A defensive stance in a user group or community meeting will undermine the entire community effort. With each new product we develop our customers are actively solicited for feedback and product direction.

• Support your customer evangelists or heros: Every company has “go-to” customers that know your product probably better than you do in some cases. The sooner your embrace this group and empower them the better. This can take time, but get them involved in speaking opportunities, customer training sessions, expert panels and even public relations activities. Often times the benefit for your company is just as strong as the benefit for the customer in terms of career accolades and industry recognition.

• Community is 24/7/365: Provide a mechanism for customers to reach other customers. Whether this is an online community or simply sending contact spreadsheets out, the goal is the same – year round communication. Last fall I watched as two customers in Europe that had met only once at our European Regional User Group in London exchanged emails. I was cc’d in the exchange, but one customer had a question and went right to another for advice. In a matter of minutes several emails were exchanged, and expert advice was passed on from the best source, an actual user.

When all of these tips are working in sync you’ll know because references will occur without your involvement, prospects will approach the sales organization after you’ve been recommended by a peer and the most impactful enhancements will rise to the top of the list.

Let us know what you think.

Last week I spent three days at the O’Reilly Web 2.0 EXPO in San Francisco in an effort to better understand how emerging technologies and business models will impact the world of business information. This post is my attempt to summarize some of the key learning from the show and pose some hypotheses for how both producers and consumers of business information content can thrive in the changing world around us.

“Web 2.0″ is a muchhyped and little understood term and if you’re not familiar with the jargon, I would suggest you read Tim O’Reilly’s classic post, which is a bit dated in blog years (which are probably the inverse of dog years) but is still very relevant today. Wikipedia and Dion Hinchcliffe also provide excellent overviews of the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

Numerous business information providers (BIPs) either emerged during the heydays of Web 1.0 (e.g. the late ‘90’s and early 2000’s) or learned to leverage the Web to deliver their content. Their approach was a classic migration of a successful offline model onto the web - collect commodity information in a structured, centralized database, add some unique analytics, create a web interface or portal where users could come to access the information and charge high prices for access at the door.

There are several Web 2.0 concepts and technologies that are challenging this traditional approach:

1. Wikis - nowadays it seems there is a Wiki for everything and business information is no exception. TradeVibes has begun a Wiki for startup companies and while they may not have become a household name like Wikipedia, the concept has merit. The power of the model is that content is created by the community for free and if/once the community reaches critical mass, it can self-police and correct any errors or willful deception. However, managers who have been given the responsibility to make mission-critical decisions about target markets, sales leads, credit risk or vendor selection have long derided the veracity of information that is “self reported” to major BIPs. I think that for any wiki to gain traction as a source of business-class information, it will have to be complemented by rigorous quality checks, both machine and human. But the power of the model is unmistakable.
2. Social Networks - LinkedIn is the leading social network for business, although check out this list of almost 50 more. Online social networks for business replicate the offline notion of networking for jobs, sales contacts and the like. They do a better job than most of us too, because their memory for names and associations is perfect and they can help us visualize the indirect relationships between our direct relationships and lead to new connections. I like building my network and all, but I could do without the extra 3-4 emails a week from strangers wanting to “Join my professional network on LinkedIn”. And just like we’re not quite sure about the consummate networker collecting business cards at a cocktail party, aren’t we a little suspicious of the guy with 500+ LinkedIn connections? That said, you can’t deny the power of a network, like LinkedIn’s that has grown to over 20 million members in a just a few short years. BIPs that don’t think of ways to leverage social networks either between businesses or the employees of businesses are in for a rude awakening.
3. The Long Tail: Part I - The long tail impacts BIPs along two vectors: production and distribution. For a long time, the toughest economics in business information were in the collection and management of information on the long tail of businesses, the 25 million or so medium, small and SoHo companies out there. It’s much easier and more profitable to build a database on the 15,000 or so public companies that have to report their information to the world and who everyone seems to do business with. Now however, enabling technologies such as the aforementioned wikis and social networks make the creation of that content virtually free. With storage, bandwidth and processing power all at nearly zero marginal cost, the creation, storage and management of this content is cheaper than ever. BIPs that figure out how to leverage these technologies to help them create and edit information about small companies will enjoy a huge advantage going forward.
4. The Long Tail: Part II -The long tail may have an even bigger impact on information distribution. In the old world, BIPs built a centralized portal on top of their centralized database and charged people for access. The challenge is getting eyeballs (for ad supported sites) and/or paying customers to come to your portal and pay for access to the information. With the explosion of blogs, YouTube, Google and other content sources, users now face a bewildering set of choices for their business information. Rather than (only) trying to build a centralized portal, BIPs need to experiment with information content where the users are - on a blog, on an analyst’s web set, wherever. In the words of one of the Web 2.0 EXPO presenters yesterday, “You’re not building a web site. You’re building a service. That service should be built to be consumed everywhere and anywhere.” If you still don’t believe it, here’s a statistic for you - it was announced in one of the sessions that salesforce.com does over 1.1 billion API calls a month, which is over half of their total transactions.
5. Mashups - One of the most interesting sessions at the EXPO was John Musser from ProgrammableWeb talking about the rise of enterprise mashups. His message was that mashups have the potential to flip the traditional notion of top down, IT- or vendor-led application development on its head by empowering business users to rapidly put information, workflow and analytics from disparate sources together to solve a specific problem. JackBe, Kapow and Serena are a few of the interesting companies he discussed. In order to thrive in this environment, BIPs need to have nimble technology, transparent pricing, and an open approach to their data so that it can be consumed by an ad hoc enterprise mashup.

Let us know what you think.