Relationship Marketing

The key goal of marketing is to develop deep, enduring relationships with all people or organisations that could directly or indirectly affect the success of the firm's marketing activities.

Thus relationship marketing paves the way for attaining this goal.

Relationship marketing is the process of attracting, maintaining, and enhancing relationships with key people.

In good times and bad, savvy business people have but one focus --- the customer. They know it's much more cost-effective to sell more services to an existing client than to fund new customer acquisition. Their client list is their most valuable asset, but more than that, they develop long-lasting relationships by keeping in touch -- in good times and bad.

Relationship marketing delivers many benefits to a firm, big or small. Slowly but surely, as you build your client and prospect list, you'll be able to reduce marketing expenses, build referrals, and grow your business in step with your clients' needs.

Your marketing dollars will go further if you use it to build, nurture, and develop your customer relationships. This isn't as difficult as you think. Building these relationships just means treating your customers and clients as if they truly are your strategic partners and showing them that you truly care about them. It's important to try to satisfy them with the right products and services, supported by the right promotion and making it available at the right time and location. Customers can easily detect indifference and insincerity and they simply will not tolerate it. Long-term client and customer loyalty is a long-term challenge that you must strive for every day and with every transaction no matter how big or small.

While a growing business needs to constantly capture new customers, the focus and priority should be on pleasing your existing customer base. Companies that fail to nurture and retain their customer base ultimately fail. You will also spend twice as much to get new clients as you will in maintaining your existing customer base.You will also be limited in your ability to attract new clients if you can't hold onto and satisfy your existing customers and clients.

The bottom line is that one of the key components in marketing and business growth is to spend the majority of your time and effort nurturing customer relationships, so that you get business from existing clients and customers. This is a strategy that will move you forward in increasing your sales without increasing your budget.

1. Change your Perspective from "Here's what I do" to "What do you need?"
   
   The cornerstone of successful relationships is to discover precisely what your clients need and want. When you meet with them, you listen to their problems and recommend solutions. When you contact them after a meeting, you suggest resources for helping them address the issues you discussed. The solutions and resources you recommend may include your products and services, of course, but you don't stop there. You also offer answers that don't involve hiring you.
   
   The impact of this kind of generosity on your prospective clients can be dramatic. Instead of considering your calls or e-mails an interruption, they will welcome hearing from you. They will no longer count you as a salesperson or vendor, but rather as a valuable resource and important person to know.
   
   This requires a shift in your attitude, to being of service instead of selling a service.
   
   
2. Recognize your Vulnerability
   
   In the midst of a project, you might be in touch with your client several times a week. But it's the time between projects that is crucial to relationship-building. Once the work is done, you drop out of that enviable top-of-mind awareness position. Over time, your client isn't as likely to think of you as their first port of call for a solution to their problem. This is when you're most vulnerable to replacement by a competitor.
   
   Fortunately, an affordable solution can help you retain those clients you worked so hard to acquire.
   
   
3. Keep in touch
   
   It's such a simple concept, but keeping in touch often sinks to the bottom of the 'to do' list. The single easiest way to keep in touch is to publish an email newsletter. Ask clients to subscribe and insert a subscription box on your site to capture email addresses of prospects who like the look of what you're doing.
   
   The secret to a good newsletter is to avoid blatant self-promotion, and instead offer valuable information to your subscribers. With their permission, you have the opportunity to drop into their email boxes every month with news, tips, case-studies, FAQs, and other relevant info that subtly promotes your services, reinforces your brand, educates your clients, and builds trust.
   
   
4. Position Yourself as an Expert
   
   Words matter. Prospective clients are looking for more an elegant portfolio of sites you've built. Your job is to tell them how you can meet their needs. Your Website is the perfect place to start, but the focus must be on the client, not on you.
   
   Include white papers, special reports, case-studies, and links to other resources that will educate your clients on the best solution to their needs. Be careful to avoid jargon, overly technical concepts and acronyms. If you're publishing an email newsletter, use it to introduce this new content and bring subscribers back to your site.
   
   When you are perceived as an expert, you become attractive to prospects who use the Web to research. They see you as someone who has answers to their questions, and who can help solve their problems.
   
   
5. Grow to Meet Client Needs
   
   Websites are hardly stand-alone entities that need an occasional tweak. For most businesses, they're but one tool amidst many that are used to build brand, increase revenues or minimize costs. And by offering more tools that help your clients reach their goals, you become more valuable. Build affiliations or strategic relationships with specialists whose talents will benefit your clients.
   

The Payoff

The benefits of a relationship marketing approach go both ways. Your client views you as a valuable consultant, rather than a cost center. Your potential for increased revenues and a long-lasting relationship is real.

There's payoff for you, too, including reduced marketing expenses measured in both time and money. If you can retain more clients for longer periods, you'll trim costly space advertising and other marketing costs.

If you ask, you'll get more referrals from your clients. Priceless word-of-mouth endorsements from satisfied customers will result in new business which magically walks in the door.

You won't even have to request client testimonials. You do include several on your Website... right? Start by recognizing when you receive a spontaneous testimonial, whether it's in an email, thank-you letter, or a conversation. Ask your client if you may use his words and name in your brochure and on your site, with a link to his business. Most often, the answer is yes. Testimonials are a critical piece of successful service marketing and worth their weight in whatever precious metal you value.

Case-studies will be a breeze and add a powerful marketing tool - perfect for your Website or for inclusion in printed marketing materials. Follow a 'situation -- problem -- solution -- benefits' flow to highlight how you solved the client's problem, stressing the benefits the client now enjoys as a result of your work. Use a handful of client case studies in industries you're targeting for new business development. Examples of "just like me" situations help prospective clients understand exactly how useful your services are.

Relationship-focused marketing isn't something that will happen overnight. It requires a change in thinking and some discipline along the way. Your email newsletter won't do much good unless you publish it regularly and the content is valued by your subscribers. But the rewards can be significant. And the truth is that no matter how wonderful you are, clients go away. Their businesses close down, change focus, or are sold.

But if your objective is to build relationships instead of Web application software, you'll be one of the designers in business for the long run.

HTML5: The OS Killer?

By allowing the Web to become a universal operating system, and making mobile devices more powerful than low-end laptops, HTML5 (also sometimes referred to as Web Applications 1.0) is transforming IT more profoundly than any development since the advent of the Internet. As HTML 5 becomes the widely-adopted standard for authoring on the Web, it will radically transform the IT landscape.

The Web Applications 1.0 (WA1) specification updates HTML, but that’s not all it does. WA1 also defines several application programming interfaces (APIs) that have been de facto standards, and adds new ones. WA1 improves on the abilities to use the web as an application platform by adding things such as document state storage in the browser history, local data storage, offline browsing, drag and drop, copy and paste, undo and redo history, cross document messaging, and more.

Unlike XHTML2, which doesn’t have any support from browser vendors, HTML5 has support from all the major browser vendors except Microsoft.

HTML5 is almost the Holy Grail, offering the ability to run applications regardless of the underlying operating system. While the browser isn't more important than operating system today, Google this week firmly suggested it is only a matter of time.

At its developer conference, Google demonstrated HTML5 applications support inside future versions of its Chrome browser and the future Android 2.0 operating system. Mozilla executives also promised HTML5 support inside the forthcoming Firefox 3.5 browser.

Google demonstrated how HTML5 allows tighter integration of browsers and applications, such as its Google Web Elements. Developers will be able to add applications to web sites by adding only a few lines of HTML5 code, much as they already do with Google Web Elements.

The rate of browser innovation is accelerating, with new browser releases nearly every other month. The progress towards the level of UI functionality found in desktop apps through adoption of HTML 5 features in browsers has been quite rapid. It's also fascinating to see how mobile browsers are in the forefront of the innovation.

The technology is here even if the standards committees haven't caught up. Developers are taking notice of these new features, and aren't waiting for formal approval. That's as it should be. As workers on the web today, we reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.

Support by four major browsers adds up to "rough consensus" in my book. We're seeing running code at Google I/O, and I'd imagine the 4000 developers in attendance will soon be producing a lot more.

Never underestimate the web. We believed that web apps would never rival desktop apps. What was once thought impossible is now commonplace.

Java was supposed to raise apps above the level of the operating system, offering cross-platform "write once, run everywhere" applications that would break the coupling between an application and a specific operating system. Proponents predicted Windows would become less important with the rise of Java apps.

While Java has accomplished a great deal, it's potential as an OS-killer has not been realized. HTML5 has a better shot.

What does this mean for users?

HTML5 is a standard that is still being developed and is likely to remain so for several years. Its focus on running applications within the browser is an important driver of interest in cloud computing, where applications live somewhere off on the Internet and are delivered by the browser.

The focus of future browsers will shift from "going places" to "doing things." This will be a boon to free operating systems, which will increasingly be able to hide themselves under the browser user interface. While Windows and Mac OSX won't go away overnight, the pressure on them will be to innovate beyond the browser, perhaps through a common set of extensions for HTML5 applications to use.

It is too early to start betting against desktop operating systems from the major vendors. However, it is clear their role and importance is likely to change--and probably diminish--as browsers become dominant in users' lives.

The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition - Free 207 Page Preview!

A compilation of the best solutions provided to common PHP questions.

The PHP Anthology will save you time, and eliminate the frustration of completing PHP tasks, with a comprehensive collection of ready-to-use solutions. If you're building web applications with PHP you'll never let this book out of your site!

Offered Free by: SitePoint

Get it here: SitePoint

Download sample chapters here.

The Google Analytics API and PHP

The Google Analytics API allows developers to extend Google Analytics in new and creative ways that benefit developers, organizations and end users. Large organizations and agencies now have a standardized platform for integrating Analytics data with their own business data. Developers can integrate Google Analytics into their existing products and create standalone applications that they sell. Users could see snapshots of their Analytics data in developer created dashboards and gadgets. Individuals and business owners will have opportunities to access their Google Analytics information in a variety of new ways.

Google Analytics API PHP Class

Cris Hope has created a PHP class for accessing the Google Analytics API with CURL and using DOMDocument to parse the XML. The resulting class and example script can be downloaded here and there are a number of posts on this website showing how to use it.

Code Reuse

Feel free to use the class as you wish but if re-posting it on other websites or using it in your own projects or for your customers, please retain the notice in the analytics class file attributing the original work to Cris.

GA API Introductory Posts

The following posts cover a couple of things about the Google Analytics API:

• Get the ID for the Google Analytics API IDS parameter
• Google Analytics API dimensions vs metrics
  

Code examples

The following code examples have been posted for using the Analytics class:

• Basic data example getting the most popular pages
• Get the profile id from the accounts list
• Get data without a dimension
• Looping through the data
  
• Using filters
• Paging through result data
• Calculating a page's bounce rate

25 Mashups for Music Lyrics

From: programableweb

You now have your choice of over two dozen web mashups about music that also integrate song lyrics. If you look at this list of 25 song lyrics mashups, you’ll see that most of them make use of either one of the 2 lyrics APIs we have listed, one from LyricWiki.org and the other from Lyricsfly.

We currently have 11 LyricWiki mashups and 11 Lyricsfly mashups. These mashups are some of the most complex we see in terms of number of APIs used. Many use 4-7 different web service APIs to pull in photos, videos, reference data and streaming music.

The LastLyrics mashup is a classic example, it combines the LyricWiki API and the Last.fm API to let you type in the username of any Last.fm user, and immediately get back the lyrics for many of the songs on that person’s playlist.

There are now 44 music APIs and 230 music mashups in our directory. Use our Music API and Mashup Dashboard to see the latest in this space and our Music Feed to get the latest music-related APIs, mashups and news via RSS.

Building a billion-dollar niche company

Many leading venture capital firms from the U.S. are willing to invest in, and have begun to bet on, niche Indian players. Consider this, till five years ago an investment of $7-8 million in a niche services company, operating on an outsourcing model from India, was considered big. Today, the average size of investment a leading venture capital company makes is anywhere between $20-30 million.

This growing trend among VCs of investing in ‘niche players’, gives me a sense of satisfaction about what I ventured out to do six months back; which was to set up a company focused on ‘business/enterprise mashups’.

As an entrepreneur, I realized the potential of the 'mashup' market and set up Business Mashups LLC, to capture the exciting and tremendous business opportunity that ‘mashups’ provide. And since then, Business Mashups LLC has been growing significantly.

Contrary to what comes to mind when thinking of a ‘specialized niche company’, Business Mashups LLC is not built around a small opportunity. In fact, it is possible to build a $1 billion company in this niche segment of ‘business mashups’.

Let me illustrate my point. Once a strong value proposition is built to focus on a particular niche segment, one needs to identify an opportunity that is scalable. Here, I would like to clarify that, while in the Indian context scalability often refers to how quickly a company can increase its headcount, in the U.S., it is measured by the market opportunity the company has the potential to capture. Hence, it is required to determine the quantum of business already being generated by the big players in the niche market, as well as implementing an effective ‘go to market strategy’ to effectively compete in the market for business.

On attaining considerable growth in its industry segment, it is also advisable for the niche company to diversify into peripheral or related services. For example, a player in the ‘mashup’ market could look at providing ‘security services’ as well. Also, various niche players with related business interests could work through ‘partner referral’ programs which would enable them to offer the entire range of specialized services required by the customers to meet their business needs. The attempt here is not to expand by becoming an ‘end-to-end player’, but to grow the business, while not losing focus on one’s core service offerings. Additionally, a niche player needs to invest in, and build, new competencies in the focused areas. Success is measured by the ‘true value’ provided by the niche company’s services and products to the customer’s business, which will help retain as well as increase the client base.

To reinforce the ‘value proposition and branding’, niche players periodically need to get their messages out in the market they operate in. This could also involve ‘a re-branding’ exercise, wherein the company considers changing its logo, tagline, external and internal messaging to its customers and employees respectively. This is also a positive statement in communicating the company’s ‘key differentiators’ from its competitors and to maintain its ‘leadership position’ in the industry.

A niche player could also communicate its value proposition to its customers through new and innovative pricing and packaging. For example, a mashup firm could charge for its services appropriately, after analyzing the amount the customer currently spends on technical support (post-product deployment). If the spending is minimal, it could result in increased returns for the mashup firm. The pricing could also vary according to the number of bugs one finds in the product.

On the packaging side, one could draw up a list of ‘top 20’ functions and charge it as a package, rather than charging for all the services. For example, in the arena of security testing, this ‘top 20’ list could constitute a set of services deployed to detect security flaws.

A niche player should clearly articulate the business benefits that would accrue from engaging the company’s full services to the customer, including the ‘financial savings’ in the entire product lifecycle, rather than limiting it to specific services concerned. Experience has taught me that this is one of the strongest factors that help win and retain customers.

Niche players are extremely effective at working closely with their customers to build and maintain long term relationships by innovating and challenging the existing norms in the industry, thus adding value to the project, program, and organizational level. The best organizations in the world want to work with the best, and if you as a niche player can be the best at what you do—and this can really happen only if you focus in one area—then you will have great success.

In conclusion, I would like to add that, the toughest challenge an entrepreneur faces while building a $1 billion niche company, is to convince people to believe in the ‘value proposition of offering only specialized services’. While a niche firm often succeeds in attracting the best talent with the requisite specialized skills, it does encounter challenges to retain them in the face of competition from the big ‘end-to-end players’ in the industry. Hence, it is imperative for a niche company to consolidate its workforce with appropriate talent, value proposition, and the conviction of being a ‘big player’ in the industry, while offering them promising career paths.

HTML 5 WebSockets: A better pipe for a better expierence

AJAX, with its asynchronous updates, enabled a richer user experience on the Web. It accomplished this primarily by obscuring the latency issues that brought a simulated feel to traditional Web applications. Comet reintroduced HTTP-based “push” communications to enable Web applications with real-time events through a medium, namely JavaScript and a variety of transports (e.g. long-polling, forever frames, XHR Streaming, etc.), that is far more accessible than “push” technologies of the late 90's, and which further lessens latency concerns felt by end-users, creating a more dramatic, and interactive Web experience. Both AJAX and Comet can attribute their respective successes to addressing various short comings of HTTP communications, whether that be with the introduction of asynchronous requests/responses or server initiated events, but it is the resolution of these trouble areas that have enabled the user experience of the document-driven Web to rapidly evolve.

Today, with the advances brought about by AJAX and Comet, we enjoy the rich Web experience delivered by applications such as Meboo, Gmail with GChat, Google Docs, and Mint.com, but these applications, however impressive, simply represent a tipping point in user experience and, more importantly, still demonstrate a continued lag in the resolution of HTTP's limitations. Such applications approximate the experience afforded by the desktop, but do not deliver an experience that is as equally compelling. Granted, better “eye candy”, as provided by the canvas tag or plugin-based technologies such as Adobe Flex and MS Silverlight, helps to close the gap, but even with better visual effects, latency remains the beast of burden that drags down much of the user-experience delivered over the Internet, and as a result costs the industry money.

Yes, there is something to be said about the old adage “time is money.” Amazon.com recently stated that 100 ms of latency costs Amazon 1% of every sale. Google VP Marissa Mayer, at the 2006 Web 2.0 Expo, stated that a half a second delay content delivery is correlated with a 20% drop in traffic at Google.

Therefore, to further address latency concerns, and bridge the gap between desktop and Web applications, we must look to a new communications paradigm. Fortunately, HTML 5 WebSockets, as defined in the communications section of the HTML 5 specification, represent the next evolution of Web communications. WebSockets provide not only a standard against which Comet- and AJAX-style, or any other RIA application, can be built, but also a socket, native to the browser, that facilitates network programing from the browser with efficient bi-directional (or full-duplex) communication over a single connection, eliminating many of the connection limitations that surround Comet and AJAX. The result is the promotion of the browser and its associated applications to the same citizenship on the network as that of rich desktop applications.

HTML 5 WebSockets

The HTML 5 specification introduced the WebSocket interface, which defines a full-duplex communications channel that operates over a single socket and is exposed via a JavaScript interface in HTML 5 complaint browsers. The full-duplex capabilities of Comet and AJAX, unlike WebSockets, are not native to the browser, and rely on maintaining two connections –one for up stream and one for downstream-- in order to stream data to and from the browser. With the introduction of one succinct interface we can now divorce ourselves from the mind bending hacks all to often associated with Comet and focus on the task at hand. Furthermore, by moving to a single, streaming channel of communications, we can overcome the insufficiencies of techniques such as long-polling and “forever frames”, and as a result further reduce latency.

Utilizing the WebSocket interface couldn't be simpler. To connect to an end-point, just create a new WebSocket instance, providing the new object with a url that represents the end-point to which you wish to connect. A WebSocket connection is established by upgrading from the HTTP protocol to the WebSocket protocol during the initial handshake between the client and the server. Once established, WebSocket data frames can be sent back and forth between the client and the server in full-duplex mode. The connection itself is exposed via the onmessage() and postMessage() methods defined by the WebSocket interface.

Before connecting to the end-point and sending a message, you can associate a series of event listeners to handle each phase of the connection life-cycle.

To send a message to the server, simply call postMessage and provide the content you wish to deliver. After sending the message, call disconnect to terminate the connection. It really couldn't be much easier.

One of the more unique features WebSockets provides is its ability to traverse firewalls and routers, a problem area for many Comet-enabled applications. Comet applications typically employ long-polling as a rudimentary line of defense against firewalls and proxies. The technique is effective, but is not well suited for applications that have sub 500 millisecond latency or high throughput requirements. Plugin-based technologies such as Adobe Flash, also provide some level of socket support, but have long been burdened with the very proxy and firewall traversal problems that WebSockets now resolves.

A WebSocket detects the presence of a proxy server and automatically sets up a tunnel to pass through the proxy. The tunnel is established by issuing an HTTP CONNECT statement to the proxy server, which requests for the proxy server to open a TCP/IP connection to a specific host and port. Once the tunnel is set up, communication can flow unimpeded through the proxy. Since HTTP/S works in a similar fashion, support for SSL is inherent. Note that Web sockets are not natively supported by modern browsers, however there are a few vendors that provide implementations that enable today's browsers to take advantage of this emerging technology. Two vendors are Kaazing and its Kaazing Enterprise Gateway offering, due for release in early Fall 2008, and an early stage open source initiative, the Orbited projected, which provides its own Python-based server.

In addition, the WebSocket protocol supports a diverse set of clients (e.g. JavaScript, Adobe Flex, JavaFX, Microsoft Silverlight, etc.). However, in the case of JavaScript, WebSockets cannot deliver raw binary data, because at present JavaScript does not provide support for a raw binary type. Therefore, binary data is ignored if the client is written in Javascript, which in turn limits JavaScript clients to the usage of text-based protocols. Fortunately, other client types such as Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight do provide support for binary types, enabling more than text-based services to reach the browser. As an additional note, some vendors, such as Kaazing, provide libraries to support binary types in JavaScript via base 64 encoding.

Latency is the mother of interactivity, and in no place is this more apparent than on the Web. Every slip of a millisecond equates to a slower end-user experience which in turn translates into elevated risk that a user's eyes will avert elsewhere. Both AJAX and Comet attempt to obscure latency problems, and certainly address the issue of user-perceived latency. However, WebSockets removes the need to obscure such problems and introduces a solution, one that does not play tricks on the perception of our end-users, but delivers content in real-time with real results.

Business Intelligence for the Retail Industry

The retail sector was one of the first sectors to make significant investments in collecting and integrating customer data in data warehouses. Retailers have generally earned a significant return on their IT system investments by using business intelligence systems to analyze the data to improve business performance with a focus on reducing operating costs, without sacrificing the customer experience. The levers that a retailer can use to optimize performance include: price, promotion, markdown, assortment, space, allocation and replenishment. Data-driven decision making is key to successful decisions regarding all of these levers.

In the future, firms will need to continue to be cost effective but increasingly will need to focus on using data to drive revenue by better understanding their customers’needs. Increasingly, this understanding will come from supplementing internally collected data with vast quantities of external data generated or made accessible by the Internet. Organizations need a new generation of business intelligence (BI) tools and applications to integrate this cross-enterprise, inter-enterprise and external data in order to achieve insight and transparency, across all channels. Enterprises that effectively harness the vast quantities of information that IT systems generate both within the corporation and outside its walls are poised to gain competitive advantage.

Value Proposition

Competition in the retail sector is becoming increasingly fierce as the complexities of global expansion, rapid product cycles, currency fluctuation and changing customer preferences continue to transform many segments. Putting retailers further at risk are macroeconomic issues such as low rates of consumer’s savings, high oil prices and the faltering U.S. housing market. Each of these phenomena is putting pressure on consumers’ purchasing power and by extension on retailers’ bottom-lines. In addition, disruptive new technologies are coming online that may inevitably commoditize retail sales even further. For example, today in Japan, having your smart phone take a picture of a UPC code on a product in one store may offer you a more competitive price in another.

The historical comfort of 100%+ markups and traditional assurances of profitability for this industry have long passed. In these maturing markets it is not enough for retailers to understand what customers want; they must anticipate customers’ future needs in order to get in front of competitors with innovative, market-leading product assortments. Today, business intelligence is no longer limited to the traditional, narrow definition of “delivering reports to users.” BI now encompasses the use of data to derive insight and achieve competitive advantage by not only answering the question “what did customers want?” but by increasingly answering the questions “what do customers want now?” and “what will they want in the future?”

The potential to do so now increasingly depends on the effective use of business intelligence systems to utilize available data to help create value for customers. As it has for the last 30 years, a portion of the data will come from inside the firm in the form of customer databases that hold information culled from point of sale terminals, online activity, loyalty cards, credit and debit cards and other customer activity. Different geographic markets have different levels of sophistication in the use of this customer data but it is clear that these systems are going to be a baseline requirement in all global markets in the future. Increasingly, however, data will also come from outside the firm in exceptionally diverse forms that will have value in the future. For instance, retailers in Florida may want to track weather patterns off the coast of Africa in the autumn as they will potentially be predictive of hurricane activity several days later. A lead time of several days may provide for the stocking of products such as bottled water and generators that customers demand in the event of a hurricane actually happening.

Historically, inventories could be built to effectively respond to an upcoming marketing campaign but this is no longer always the case. Instant communications and the Internet are enabling consumers to find the “it” product of the day much more quickly and by extension increasing the speed at which items can be either “in” or “out.” The efforts to extract, scrub, transform, and load sales or customer data often occur too late and highlight opportunities now lost, more than future opportunities to be found.

In this paper we discuss how technological advances are enabling improved decision making across three broad axes: simplicity and relevance, agility and integration.

First, new interfaces and approaches to business intelligence are empowering more decision makers by providing relevant data in a user friendly interface. Second, new technology advancements such as inmemory BI are poviding new levels of performance and helping users gain real-time insights into their data. Finally, BI needs to be interated within business processes and more widely distributed to functional business units such as merchandising, warehousing and store operations, so decisions can be made at the point of impact.

Simplicity and Relevance

Effective business intelligence systems are simple to use. Simplicity allows a large number of disparate users to access the information through an interactive, user friendly interface, regardless of the type or source of information. In addition, effective business intelligence systems are relevant in a world that is swamped with data. They allow access to accurate relevant data in a timely manner for all users. There should be no question that the “single version of the truth” is accurate and as all encompassing as possible.

Simplicity

One of the key success factors in harnessing the data to provide simple and effective input to decision makers is to ensure the information is delivered to the right user in the right form. In other words, the goal is to empower decision makers with precisely the information they require for their immediate decisions. For executives this may mean simple dashboard data, for merchandisers or the finance department it may mean powerful interactive tools and for front line workers it must mean easy to use interfaces that require little training. Although many will benefit from access to relevant information, few managers or front line workers need to be (or want to be) BI “power users.” Additionally, the retail industry has also had a proportionately higher employee turnover rate (especially at the store level) than other industries increasing the importance of easy to use systems that require little training.

Whereas new reporting solutions once were only suitable for technically-savvy software developers, Business Mashups LLC enables business users to explore data without prior knowledge of data structures or content. Business Mashups brings together the simplicity and speed of search capabilities with the trust and analytical power of BI tools, giving immediate answers to business questions. Users employ familiar keyword searches to find information hidden in data sources, and then navigate and explore directly on data—no existing reports and metrics are necessary. By increasing self-service BI and maintaining IT control, this technology empowers business users to create their content thereby reducing IT report creation backlog. It reuses existing security, metadata, and other services from Business Objects Enterprise, meaning it’s easy to administer and quick to deploy, often in a matter of days, thereby abbreviating time to market and expediting decision making.

Relevance

Retail employees at all levels of the company are surrounded by large quantities of data sometimes to the point where the pure quantity makes it difficult to act. Data can come from customer transactions through any one of the retailers’ channels, loyalty programs, marketing program response rates or new vehicles such as online browsing histories or RFID tags. The key to insight and competitive advantage is not the quantity of data, but its relevance and because the retailer owns the direct relationship with the customer they have access to the most relevant data.

One way to increase the relevance of data is by utilizing “best practice” templates to help bridge the gap between IT professionals and the business units they serve. These templates include pre-defined data models, queries and metrics while incorporating industry best practices into the implementation process, which not only saves time, but also helps the BI initiative deliver on business needs.

Business Mashups customers that exploit the power of user focused tools can also access “business blueprint” templates. These data models and templates solutions include a bundle of technology and industry knowledge that leverages substantial business knowledge, which was developed over many years while delivering software solutions to the world’s largest companies. By leveraging these “packaged” industry best practices, customers increase the likelihood of a successful BI deployment. At the same time, they shorten development cycles and lower costs. The business blueprint templates can act as a foundational solution that individual organizations can extend to meet their specific requirements. Specific components of business blueprint templates include: pre-defined “extractors,” large quantities of pre-defined data models, master data objects, authorization roles, query views and reports all of which are delivered in the software.

The simplicity of business user oriented tools and the enhanced relevance enabled by bundles such as business blueprint templates are enabling solutions for competitive advantage. The ease of use and enhanced relevance of these solutions build on the capabilities of existing BI systems, thus increasing their value to the organization.

Agility

In order to drive retail performance in the future, a key requirement will be business intelligence systems that can gather and distill the mountains of information from across the supply chain, exchange it between parties in real-time, enable collaboration based on the most current data, and support business decisions regarding inventory, promotion or pricing. The good news is that this data is increasingly available. The bad news is that the quantity of data is growing so rapidly that it is often outstripping firms’ capacity to effectively utilize it.

Analyzing product movement, seasonal and promotional, margins, placement, and product affinity (products typically co-purchased) by, among other things, location is indeed complex. The amounts of data gathered can be staggering. Understanding it all is difficult. Who has time for multiple 30-minute queries through a 10 terabyte database, looking for an insight that may, or may not, be uncovered? Rapid response rates (i.e. less than a few seconds) on queries of millions of entries can provide significant competitive advantage for two key reasons. The first reason is the potential insight that comes from data-driven decision making. The second reason is that employees will actually use them!

Recent developments in hardware and software technology are now capable of delivering real-time decision support through a technology called “in-memory business intelligence.” Traditional business intelligence systems rely on modeling (or guessing) about end user requirements and then optimizing systems to meet those requirements. But technologies such as in-memory business intelligence solutions help solve this problem: with more (and cheaper) memory now available, today’s BI solutions can process reports on the fly by loading complete data sets into memory, and eliminate some of the old bottlenecks.

In-memory technologies provide two significant benefits. For the management team, instant response rates (i.e. less than a few seconds) on queries of millions of entries can provide significant competitive advantage; especially in retail where having the right inventory in store at the right time is the primary profit driver. Additionally, for the IT team, using in-memory technology reduces the need to design, build and maintain intermediary data sets. If the in-memory approach works with the complete original data, that creates a simplified architecture and allows the IT organization to focus on providing more value-added services.

Business Mashups believes that organizations will increasingly load detailed data into memory as the primary method to optimized BI application performance. This trend is a response to the continuing and accelerating pace of technological change and represents a wholesale change in how business intelligence and performance management will occur in the future.

Integration

A significant piece of the business intelligence puzzle is related to how solutions are integrated into daily business operations and processes, and ultimately, how the data is gathered and structured. With effective systems, retailers can react quickly to increased customer demand, out-ofstocks and changing competitor offerings.

Additionally, in today’s networked retail economy, many of the processes and data sources such as inventory availability that will drive competitive advantage will not live inside the boundaries of a single firm. This means business and IT architects should design process-driven BI and MDM solutions for an environment where business processes stretch across multi-company business webs and global supply chains.

The simple definition of a “transaction” can reveal significant discrepancies across departments and users. By the time a particular transaction is completed, so many deductions, rebates, discounts and other trade spending has occurred that it is almost impossible to specifically identify profit centers at a granular level (i.e. by customer, by product, by channel). And without this level of detail, planning for profitable volume growth is no more than an educated guess. The challenge lies in the insight, not in the availability of the raw data.

As business intelligence is integrated with business processes, there is also an opportunity to revisit the existing processes and ensure they are representative of best practices. After all, accurately documenting and measuring an ineffective process is doing nothing to improve the business. Most effective business intelligence solutions will provide industry-specific resources, in the form of expertise (e.g. consultants) or specific technical resources (e.g. templates, queries).

The previous sections address the quality of the insight needed and the importance of linking with business processes. The processes by which data is collected, processed and stored has an immense impact on the quality and the value of business intelligence tools (i.e. the “garbage in, garbage out” maxim applies). For this reason, master data management (MDM), which describes how data is managed from initial collection to final use, is a critical underpinning of successful BI implementations. Combined with tools for data quality management, this provides the trusted information foundation that companies base their analytics on.

The concept of MDM is fairly straightforward: without clean and properly aligned data across the organization, it’s difficult to answer key business questions. And although it might appear just as straightforward to solve it, the level of complexity of today’s IT organizations poses a real challenge. Globalization of supply and demand networks is a large contributor to this pressure to implement MDM. Until recently, when a large global retail chain wanted to see a report of all the products in a specific category that all suppliers had provided, they struggled to piece together all the various customer numbers and products numbers used by different vendors. The implementation of MDM programs is helping to eliminate this issue.

The Payoff

The challenges faced by the retail industry will only grow with time. Trends such as skeptical consumers, increased data volume, business globalization, social and regulatory compliance and complexity are here to stay. To maintain competitive advantage, organizations must leverage internal and external information into an accessible, usable medium and provide business intelligence to a larger number of employees. Business intelligence solutions will continue to evolve as exciting new capabilities such as in-memory arrive and are adopted broadly in the market.

Organizations that enable business intelligence solutions built on the tenets of simplicity and relevance, agility and integration have the potential to sustain competitive advantage in world where change is the only constant. Simple and relevant BI tools can empower employees to make effective decisions with increasing speed and agility. By integrating real-time decision making with mission critical business processes smart retailers can keep up with and even excel in the innovation-driven world of the 21st century.

Retailers have been at the leading edge of the business intelligence wave and those that have executed well have derived significant advantage from their efforts. In the future however, the bar has been raised and evolving to the next generation solutions represents a giant step forward. Corporations will face a choice: execute these best practices or fall by the wayside. The leaders will see empowered employees, rapid execution and adjustments to plan, resulting in both top-line and bottom-line growth.

Free spell checkers in HTML Forms

A few days ago, some friends on toostep asked a question about doing a spell check in the postings and edit and do spell check in the comments. This post is in response to that question.

In this post I want to suggest you five interesting and free spell checkers for HTML Forms (input and text area) ready to use in your web projects. I also provided some suggestions regarding how to implement them on your pages using a few lines of HTML and Javascript code. Try them!

Any suggestion about this topic? Please leave a comment, thanks!

1. Spellify

Spellify is a script.aculo.us based spell checker, released by Nikola Kocic, for form fields that utilizes Google as its spell check engine. Spellify can also be configured to different languages (refer to spellify.js for more information regarding language settings) and requires:

- PHP 4+ with CURL library installed (developed using PHP 4.4.6)
- script.aculo.us 1.8.0 (only effects.js and scriptaculous.js required)
- Prototype JavaScript Framework 1.6.0

To install Spellify on your pages add spellify.js, prototype.js and scriptaculous.js on the tag of your page:

<script src="spellify/prototype.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="spellify/scriptaculous.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="spellify/spellify.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

...and copy the HTML code you find in the step 3 of this page. Then add a form with some fields like these:

<input type="text" id="search" name="search"/>
<input type="text" id="city" name="city"/>

In this way, all fileds will be cheked while an user types a word into them. Spellify can also ignore a specific text field by setting its class attribute to spellify_ignore. For example, if you want to ignore the input field "city" use this code:

<input type="text" id="city" name="city" class="spellify_ignore" />

Take a look at the spellify official page for a live preview.


2. GoogieSpell

GoogieSpell is a Gmail like spell checker that you can use in your own web-application. It support for around 27 languages; well tested and works on IE 5.5, IE 6.0, IE 7, FF 1.0+, Safari, Opera etc; generic, extendable and easy to install; AJAX based (without page-reloading; Lightweight (around 50 KB); Well documented and with GoogieSpell Multiple it's possible to spell check multiple text fields at once. Take a look here for the demo and for the code.


3. Ajax-Spell

Ajax-Spell is a useful spell checker for HTML text area which requires at least PHP 5 and either pspell or aspell. The only thing you have to do to work with ajax-spell is to include spell_checker.js and the MooTools javascript library in the tag of your page and add the class spell_check to any textarea you want to have a spell checker added to.

For example, add mootools and spell_checkers.js in this way:

<script src="mootools.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="mootools.js" type="spell_checker.js"></script>

... and add a text area like te following:

<textarea class="spell_check" rows="12" cols="40" name="text"></textarea>

Take also a look at this page for other information about this script.

4. ActiveSpell

ActiveSpell is a free ajax script to implement spell checking on any text box. It's maintained by ActiveCampaign, Inc and is based off of Ajax-Spell by Garrison Locke. You can fina download it here.

5. PHP Spell Checker
This simple PHP Spell Checker is used to spell check any of the input field of the HTML form. It is useful for webmasters who want to add spell checking to any text box (textarea) on their website or corporate intranet. The script is designed not to mess any way to your main script processing of the form. It just return modified (already spell-checked) text into any input field. It is written on PHP and using JavaScript as minimum as possible. Take a look at this page for more information.

Hope the toostep team will use these free resources to meet the needs of its users.