Crowd in the Cloud

In the pre-cloud era people dedicated time to maintaining well cataloged diaries to record birthdays, tasks, maintain contacts and meeting notes. Today people directly assign tasks to you, birthday reminders pop out of nowhere and contact information is automatically synced based on people’s Facebook profiles. Tiny droplets make an ocean and today we have the means to aggregate the tiny droplets, thanks to crowd sourcing tools.

This has a huge impact on business as well, one example is Tech support. Tech support now is a culmination of video logs on YouTube, so customers know what the problem is before they contact the help desk, they just want the support personnel to fix it and do it quick. Yet, it amazes me how the likes of HP and Apple mostly have marketing videos on YouTube and the product fixes and workarounds are mostly posted by random amateur techies. I am sure both the customer and HP would rather have the fix coming from the authorized technical support personnel rather than some amateur videos. Further call centers can no longer run robotic checklists with impatient customers who know exactly what they want.

Today’s savvy customers are quite freely embracing these tools and get their job done faster, while the corporate machinery is playing catch-up. Probably because those defining the organization strategies are not yet plugged-in and still thinking call centers and off-shoring when it comes to customer service, not to mention the challenges managing compliance and risk.

Social media is not just a buzz word that the marketing teams flaunt and put out attractive videos, these tools are transforming the way we service our customers, significantly improving efficiencies and re-defining SLAs. The bottom-line is companies today need to be nimble and have a holistic social media strategy, in short they need expert advice.

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Never remember never forget

Today everyone is forgetful. I don’t remember birthdays, holidays, meetings and my tasks for the day. My faithful smart phone does it for me. Three thousand years back the Vedas, a Hindu religious text, was handed down generations by word of mouth and took a lifetime to perfect. Generations were dedicated to carrying the body of work intact. Then the Chinese invented paper and everything changed. People still chanted the Vedas but there were some who dedicated their years for a different cause. This in turn spurned mass education programs and eventually the industrial revolution.

Today we are confronted with a different problem we have an information overload, there are approximately over 1.5 million books in the western world alone. Google dedicated six years using sophisticated scanning equipment with robotic arms to digitize them, just so that we can search and find anything we want. Google enables us to solve almost any problem in the world just by helping us find the solution. So the challenge is no longer how but about finding the right solution to a problem.

Having all the facts in your finger tips is no longer a factor of memory but how accessible your enterprise information is. So now what matters is the ideas I can bring to the table and leave the facts to my faithful gadgets in the cloud.

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One for all to all for me

Pre-Cloud the world assumed people in general are the same, you had one news paper, one News channel and people ran the same trail for years. Today everything from your news to your coffee is personalized. You determine how much milk you want in your coffee and the temperature if you may. You chose your morning news from a collection of topics on YouTube channels and custom build your morning paper using your faithful e-reader. Everyone does not want to be like the other and believe they are different. This mindset change is pretty dramatic and revolutionizes the way we service customers. From a world where everything was commoditized and mass produced, we are in a world where everything is personalized, custom built and yet mass produced.

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The old world and the new

One might wonder, if people had the same routine for the last 60 years, what has changed? People have been reading the news, the weather report, going to coffee shops and meetings since the last 100 years, so why are we so plugged in? Because depending on how you look at it everything has changed or nothing. My father visited the Grand Canyon and took a helicopter ride across the canyon in 15 mins, I hiked it over 2 days. My father still tells me he did what I did over 2 days in 15 mins and I still maintain he has not seen the canyon.

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Living in the cloud (Blog series)

Us humans have walked the planet earth for over 200,000 years. In this time we have seen a stone age, bronze age, the industrial revolution and now we are entering a new age which is just as pivotal, what could be called the age of the cloud. Yet when you live through each day so much seems to have changed yet nothing.

I wake up in the morning brush my teeth, grab some coffee, check the weather, catch the morning news, read the paper, go for a quick run, shower and check my calendar, drive down to meet a client, check in to the nearest coffee shop and grab a quick breakfast just in time to make it to my appointment. Probably fits the description of any urbanite in the last 60 years. So then what’s changed?

Let’s quickly rewind the morning scene and play it back a little differently now. Wake up in the morning brush my teeth, grab some coffee, log into Wunderground check the hourly forecast, switch to my news reader catch my personalized news, turn on my trail tracking software go for a run, compare the speeds of my last 5 runs, check my phone calendar, jump into my car turn on the GPS, spot a coffee shop on the way to the client office, grab a quick breakfast , whoops I’m late, so just dial into a video conference and continue to enjoy my breakfast.

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