Michael Maoz

If there were 100,000,000 leaders, would anyone be a leader? I’ve thought about this since beginning the process of having an occassional weblog. Every now and then I get a stinger email from a reader that includes a reference to the head of someone elses religion (mine has no head, which likely explains why I [...]

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I didn’t blog while travelling. It was a more than full time job to listen to clients as I went from country to country and city to city, meeting IT and business executives from over 85 non-US and non-EU countries. About 2% of them use software as a service according to the Gartner definition. They [...]

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I began writing research about collaboration and social networking with a piece about Mercury Interactive’s use of social networking to drive down support costs and improve brand and reputation. That was seven years ago, and I had a single call from a business about the concept. Underwhelming response. They say timing is everything, but it [...]

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I’d like to report that communities, forums, Twitter groups and the like were sure-fire business improvement tools, but you know as well as I that this is not true. There is a lot of nuance that goes into getting Social CRM right. Years ago (six) I was writing about a topic I called the “Intent [...]

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I am in the middle of a few different discussion threads with clients and colleagues about the definition of ‘business value.’ It started over Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing. Clients who do care in any way about SaaS usually come from the business and not from IT, and are hoping to get [...]

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I am writing a series of research pieces with some colleagues at Gartner on Customer Centric Web Strategies. What we are focused on is the hodgepodge of applications that most organizations have cobbled together to serve customers. Portals, order entry, inventory, chat, email, pricing, marketing content, search, customer service knowledge bases: a mess of data [...]

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Since I’m on vacation today, I’m going to say it: the forecast for CRM applications: partly Cloud-y. Forget the camp, though, and hear what my clients are struggling with. The line of business responsible for customer experience, customer service, and sales is just looking for the functionality to be successful. They have no intrinsic interest [...]

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