Here is the 411 on bloggers: we take the time to share our quotidian experiences at work with kindred souls who may have had similar encounters. Bloggers aren’t special except to the extent that everyone is special, and we take the risk of ridicule when we stray too far from the common denominator. If we do, Twitter, or the wonderful world of widgets (www) like Friendster, Facebook, Myspace, Xanga and hundreds of others will carry this flotsam along for pillory.

Why risk it, then? Not to be heard by the many – most of us write on small, small topics that would bore the digits off of 99.999% of readers. We do it to share whatever meager insights might provoke thinking. When we fail, which is what we generally do, the reader doesn’t come back. If we succeed, most of us will develop a very tiny sliver of return readers.

So far I have been pleased to read your emails back – the criticism and the praise both. We (Gartner analysts) spend a high percentage of our time working directly with end-user clients, helping them solve nettlesome IT and business process problems. If you occassionally read something and say: OH, THAT IS CRAZY TALK, it could be that it is hard for any of us to look in the mirror. Or it could be that it is all Quatsch, and I’ll be sure to hear about it!!!

Keep on writing back when you find my insights off target. It will keep me on target!

There is much more on this in our research, but for SaaS to go from straight-forward, non-industry specific tasks to a software system that handles complex operations at a compelling return on investment to the end user organization, the jury is still deciding who the true beneficiaries will be. This was especially evident in the repeated questions about ‘who owns the data?’ and ‘how much of my data is available in real time?’ and the cost for various forms of SaaS (isolated infrastructure / data / applications, simultaneous multi-lingual usage….). There isn’t much transparency in the market about the true five year costs of different models, nor much of a track record of vendor-viability.

And the connection between Cloud and Saas? There was mostly eye-rolling and empty looks. Some didn’t know, and the rest weren’t sure why it mattered today. We are earlier days than is often thought on both of these topics.

Listening is a skill. Good sales people listen extremely well. They are like wolves that analyze prey for the slightest weakness and then exploit it. I say this in the most positive of ways. If the rest of an organization could be as focused on uncovering what motivates a customer to act with the same degree of success that sales people do, more businesses would thrive. But what have we all done over the past 20 years? We’ve done our best to stop listening to the customer. We did it gradually and incessantly. First we reduced or eliminated physical locations where customers could see us and interact. But we gave them phone-based agents who were from somewhere in their own geography. Then we switched the local agents for agents from far away, with whom our customers had a harder time relating. And we layered on voice response systems so that they would not reach any human anywhere. Then this self service layer was extended to the internet. Our customers now find their own forms, search for their own answers and products, configure their own custom versions of their insurance or flight plans. And have few genuine opportunities to be heard.

Basically, we have stripped away as many opportunities to listen directly to the customer as possible – pushed them away from identifying with our businesses and value propositions. When customers want advice and want answers and want to vent – where do they go? To their peers. They Tweet. They post. They blog. They SMS. They post YouTube content about your horrendous service.

And then we wake up and say: ‘We should be listening to all of this chatter. We should participate, or analyze, or manage, or enable dialogue.’ It is a lit bit ironic that we focused intense effort on lowering costs through extreme self service, draining away our ability to listen, and now that we achieved what we set out to achieve we want to go back to the beginning and learn to listen. This is a great goal in two meanings: complex and positive.

Ah, but wait: are you going to go back and recalculate the true saving of outsourcing and all forms of self service to factor in the added costs of analytics, personnel to manage the listening, social software, and committees? The original cost-saving scenario will be tarnished, so my bet is you won’t do it. It is a fool’s errand.

If your new efforts at listening and gaining insight fail to cause you to rethink the effectiveness of your many interaction channels (not their efficiencies), it is unlikely you will find your listening skills, or bottom line, much improved. Social CRM is crucial – cross channels and across your business.

Most of us are not Disney. We can, however, begin to formally map out the intentions we have for our customers. I see such elegant architecture strategy documents and application portfolio maps, that it would leave customers stunned to know that the same company that can detail minutely how applications will evolve cannot describe a comprehensive map or story about the customer expierence.

Here is an easy way to advance your abilities in understanding the customer’s intent: leverage communities. Most of you work hard to move every transaction to something automated: voice response, email, online self service, kiosk, ATM – and in so doing lose the ability to understand what the customer might be trying to tell you about their wants and needs. But a social network, properly observed, analyzed, and maybe even participated in (more on that piece in another blog) can yield insight into how you as an organization need to change if you are going to win customer loyalty.

Just tossing up a social site, or giving customers the tools to interact, won’t help. You will be heading towards a more Social CRM that will require the same discipline that most of us failed to maintain with our previous (pre-social networks) CRM initiatives. Without corporate commitment, you might as well be handing out sharp knives to a party of three year olds – someone’s going to get hurt.

But then there is the irony that the majority of the products architected for your website are not SaaS or Cloud Apps, but old fashion hosted or client/server. They are also a hodgepodge (or, that terrific British way of putting it, a ‘dog’s breakfast’) of cobbled-together applications with chat, email, ecommerce, search, content management, marketing-design-firm Flash objects, social networking (if you are really lucky), and more.

The really funny thing is that when I point this mess out to folks, and want to discuss how to create great customer experiences while lowering complexity and costs, I get two reactions: 1) we don’t want to talk about it, because we are ‘heads down’ in our Web 2.0 initiatives. 2) we have no clue how much maintaining the website costs anyway, so we’re not sure it needs improving.

These arguments are hard to overcome. Web 2.0, or making our websites more ’social’ is an important tactic, but it isn’t the strategy. The strategy (if you are a business) is to attract customers, get them to interact and buy and keep buying, profitably. Chatter and interaction and idea sharing and gossip are all a part of it, as is managing your reputation. But these are all tactics in the overall corporate goal of profitably growing sales and revenue. If that means looking at the more mundane aspects of your website, the old fashioned pre-Web 2.0, in addition to the social aspects, then that is what you have to do.

The eye-opener is the tiny span of control our different stakeholders have on the web – they are finding it difficult acting strategically, because none of us has the ultimate ownership of the website or the customer experience goals. When you see a corporate officer evolve with a title like, “Director of Social CRM,” you’ll know we are getting there.

This is treating your customers like house guests you are trying to get rid of: don’t replace the towels, give them left overs, and stay away a lot. They’ll get the picture. Meanwhile, we are building up enterprise application suites for the back office. Most of us are deploying, or have deployed, integrated ledger/financials/HR/Sales automation/Inventory as suites from a single vendor serving our own employees.

Where are these large and mid-sized focused business applications vendors when it comes to delivering an integrated website application? Most of us are ten to 12 years into our websites. That isn’t a long time. But it is time to take stock of where we need to go now. Where are these applications in their evolution to software as a service or meeting the criteria of Cloud Computing? Are any of the vendors likely to develop a suite of applications that are customer centric web applications?

In the meantime, we force our customers and partners and prospects to use websites that are woven from multiple applications, that are hard to navigate, and inflexible to change rapidly based on user input. It’s been a good start, and it’s time to look to the next phase.

If we go over to IT, the CIO is obviously not against any of the objectives and goals of the folks in sales, marketing, and service. At the same time, these folks are neither her/his boss nor peers. A lot of times customer service managers (probably the most important role in the entire company) are under operations or sales. That gives them little discretionary budget to innovate.

And here is the rub: for all of the IT innovation, application governance, application consolidation, there is rarely any ROI that is rigorous enough to say: this initiative lifted sales, improved marketing effectiveness, boosted customer loyalty. From that perspective IT seems to be failing. That isn’t to say it IS failing – but without an ability to create a tight and convincing argument that an initiative is helping with the core reason we are in business, there could be trouble down the road.

My closing request to the CIO is to work to elevate sales, marketing and service to your level in decision making, and jointly commit to IT planning and measures of efficacy. The goal of unified enterprise application suites, for example, may be admirable but ineffective. I like the research that shows most of the material in human DNA is junk. I think IT should live with that – maybe to you a lot of what your lines of business ask for or procure to achieve their goals is ‘junk’ to you, but it just might be the way that your company achieves a competitive edge!!!!