The impact of differing IT investment strategies was apparent this week in the difference between comments made by the House of Fraser and ASOS (As Seen on Screen).

In an interview with House of Fraser’s IT Director, Computing reported that established players are too far in to their old systems to change: “We have made such a big investment in our core platforms, so I cannot see us moving away from them,” said their IT Director.

“Nowadays it is not about wholesale replacement anymore, but about maximising and consolidating what you have. We have spent a lot of time and money on our systems over the past couple of years and it is now time to sweat the assets ­ and that is not a bad thing,”

“You can understand why financial trading needs to be at the sharp end of technology, but retail is all about consistency of delivery, operability and cost of ownership.”

“We never used to allow people to access the internet, but when we moved to the new building we provided everyone with web access, with some simple rules to protect us and the staff,” said Gray.

The rules mean that sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are banned and can only be used by the e-commerce team.

Does this bricks-and-mortar based organisation feel a little constrained, maybe even a bit backward-looking in its strategy? Certainly it feels as though House of Fraser could talk more about what IT can contribute to customer loyalty, or selling a wider product range… With the demise of many high street players in the recession, embracing technology’s role in engaging with customers makes more sense than ever.

This compared with Computing’s report on the role IT has played in ASOS’s astonishing success.

“The company reported a 92 per cent profit increase to £14.1m compared with £7.3m in the previous year. Sales also rose to £165.4m from £81m reported in 2008.”

A major back-office overhaul has supported the Asos’ positive performance. The programme covered buying, merchandising and fulfilment, with the rollout of a new warehouse management system at the firm’s Hemel Hempstead warehouse.

“Use of social media was also one of the highlights for the firm over the past year, with official pages being set up on Facebook, MySpace and Bebo.

With Twitter, the firm used a different approach, by allocating 55 staff members to actively talk to customers in addition to providing real-time news, offers and service updates. As a result, Asos now claims to have the largest Twitter following of all UK retailers.

Another initiative in social networking is the launch of Asos Life, a platform which allows customers to talk to each other and key people within the firm.

“It is clear that the structural shift to online continues and I believe that Asos is ideally placed to exploit it,” said chief executive Nick Robertson.”

An IDC survey of 515 Western European IT decision makers in organizations with more than 50 employees showed surprisingly high usage of open source enterprise applications. 9% of respondents reported current use of an open-source back-office application, while 7% of respondents used an open source CRM application.

From a general perspective, the survey showed that the main driver behind open source adoption is the absence of an upfront license payment along with a lower total cost of ownership. The main inhibitor inhibiting organizations from adopting open source applications are concerns related to the level of software support and the quality of open source software.

“In an enterprise applications market in which large vendors boast a 10% market share, adoption rates of 9% and 7% appear very high,” said Bo Lykkegaard, research director, European Enterprise Applications and Services, IDC. “Of course, usage can mean anything from departmental use or niche use to enterprisewide deployment. We expect the majority of users of open source enterprise applications to use commercial enterprise applications at the same time. Despite this reservation, the survey results show that open source adoption in ERP and CRM has reached a critical threshold and should now make a ‘bleep’ on every vendor’s radar screen, particularly for those that compete in the midmarket.”

“We see vendors of open source enterprise applications attracting equity investments and heavyweight leaders and growth rates are typically above 20% per year, sometimes much higher. IDC believes the net effect of the emergence of open source enterprise applications will be one of price pressure, in particular in the midsized segment. We do not expect a religious war between an open source community on one side and commercial proponents on the other. Rather, it will all come down to a battle over who can provide the customer with the most ERP or CRM per euro.”

This recent Harvard Business Review article entitled “The Power of Old Ideas” sparked some thoughts about how you can build on your organisation’s heritage and your marketing team’s ideas to create more powerful communications and ultimately, therefore, enhance the performance of campaigns.

The Harvard article argues that great ideas and innovation do not involve reinventing the wheel. Instead, it suggests, your corporate history and its ideas/inventions are often the greatest sources of innovation. It even goes so far as to argue that most companies already know how to innovate and use their historical understanding to their advantage, but that few do because it would cause too much disruption to their profit models and established structures and processes.

As Mark Twain once said, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes. How often, in the melee of day-to-day marketing activity, do we really have the time to stop and examine how far we really got with that brilliant idea from the last team day out? Or take an hour or two to delve through the corporate archives?  For example, I recently came across the very first presentation we ever gave to a client about The Marketing Practice. It’s 7 years old and absolutely focused on what the core of the business is all about today.

I think this is especially relevant at the moment, where innovation from old ideas and nostalgia are thriving. A determination to hang on to what’s “really important” have become psychological imperatives. Hot water bottles and lunchboxes are experiencing record sales, “make do and mend” is making its way into the technical lexicon and everyone’s growing their own. A great example of this, which The Guardian has christened “the pin up of our age” is the Keep Calm and Carry On poster which adorns everything in the UK from shop windows to deckchairs, T-shirts to mugs.

The “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster - never officially released, was designed to be put up if Britain was invaded during the second world war. As Alain Samson, a social psychologist at the London School of Economics, says ”in times of difficulty people are brought together by looking for common values or purposes, symbolised by the crown and the message of resilience. The words are also particularly positive, reassuring, in a period of uncertainty, anxiety, even perhaps of cynicism.” The poster chimes in with a general feeling, and whilst we are clearly not being invaded, it’s the echoes of the feelings brought on by the current crisis that make the slogan so popular now. It’s a beautiful example of history rhyming – during times of perceived national crisis we revert to what’s comforting.

So if you make time to do one extra thing this month, take a look a long way back in your corporate history and see what’s always been there but hasn’t been implemented? What stems from a similar era or has a fond place in people’s memories of your firm? Whether used for innovating in internal or external communications tactics, taking those great ideas forward right now makes a lot of sense.

The UK Government’s Digital Britain report came out yesterday. Hailed as the report that will guide the UK’s strategy to make it a leading player in the new media revolution, Digital Britain was written by Stephen Carter, the minister for communications, technology and broadcasting.

The report lays out 5 goals:

1. To upgrade and modernise the UK’s digital networks to enable the economy to remain globally competitive

2. To attract investment for UK digital content, applications and services

3. To create UK content for UK users, in particular impartial news, comment and analysis

4. To ensure fairness and access for all

5. To develop the infrastructure, skills and take-up that enable the widespread online delivery of public services and business interface with government.

Computing Magazine’s useful roundup of its key findings are as follows:

The mainstream media has reacted to it by saying variously “big on rhetoric, short on action” The Telegraph, for The Times, the government “shows an extraordinary willingness to extend government intervention into almost every nook of Britain’s broadcasting and communications industry” whilst the FT and the Guardian focused on the introduction of the “surprise” 50p per month broadband tax.

And finally, joining Sir Alan Sugar amongst the government’s ranks of celebrity businesspeople, the report unveiled Martha Lane Fox as the new “digital inclusion champion”.

IDC said this week that its research shows cloud providers can utilise the telecommunications world’s proven approach for charging to help “monetise” the service. The research firm also claims that certain billings software vendors are already well placed to support cloud providers through their telco billings offerings.

“Leveraging a system to put a value on the transaction – “rate” in telecom language – will be a critical first step for cloud computing infrastructure projects.” says IDC. It argues that telecom billing vendors like Amdocs, Comverse, Convergys, CSG, Intec, LHS and Oracle include rating as a core component of a holistic billing system, which also includes capabilities such as customer care, partner billing, promotions, and payments and collections. 

“The business and consumer experiences of complex bills for technology services is often tightly associated with voice and, increasingly, data services, thereby making the telecommunications example instructive. A new generation of business and consumer customers mean that cloud providers need to take a critical look at the options.”

The IT budget decline in first quarter of 2009 returned IT budgets to near 2007 levels, said Gartner earlier today. Their recent survey of 900 CIOs showed 42% of respondents reduced their budgets in the first quarter of 2009.

“CIOs reported that renegotiating vendor contracts and head count reductions were the primary focus areas for accommodating budget reductions,” said Mark McDonald, group vice president and head of research for Gartner EXP. “CIOs report shifting more work to in-house resources and delaying capital expenditures more than reducing IT project investments.”

The survey found that CIOs expect the economy to recover between the first and third quarter of 2010. CIOs plan to increase IT investment projects and workforce levels as their first investments in such a recovery. Software, hardware and infrastructure investments are also high on the CIO’s agenda on the path to economic recovery.

A great sense check has been put on the web by the US organisation the Business Marketing Institute (BMI.) Called “Are you really reaching your reader? 20 questions to consider” the article focuses on how, in a “content is king” world, you can give your campaign or content real traction.

The BMI’s 20 questions amalgamated a number of checks against which to review your content for focus and appropriateness. It recommends the creation of “persona” of the recipient before approaching them – to ensure message and fit are absolutely right.

This makes a lot of sense – we’ve had many CIOs say to us “don’t assume I want technical content”, many seemingly time-poor executives happily read detailed 3 page letters that have broken all the “traditional” rules of direct marketing – all because the understanding of the target market and the journey they needed to be taken on was exactly right.

The very good Buyer Persona Blog recommends building formal buyer personas for each of your target demographics, and lists ways to go about achieving this.

And, just as importantly, can it communicate the fact that it’s satisfied the business when it’s got there?

The Forrester blog for CIOs is arguing that “old IT” (famous for one size fits all and blowing the budget according to Forrester) is dead. The new IT (from a silo mentality to a cross-functional business technology enabler) is apparently gaining ground rapidly.

But Forrester still perceives a gap between the business’ expectations of IT, and the perceptions of IT in the enterprise. It thinks this gap stems from a lack of decent IT governance (meaning CIOs are playing catch up on expectations) and that IT-to-business relationships are not as solid as they could be (highlighting that IT is not actively managing its clients). The author claims that “defining and marketing the portfolio of business technology services are critical competencies, as they set the objectives for the business-IT communications.”

This chimes with a point that Wyeth’s CIO made at our recent S&M Forum event - that she has funded post-project internal marketing activity to ensure a wider understanding of that project within the business and celebrate the success of the newly implemented technology. Certainly worth building in to every post-live ABM plan.

CIO Magazine’s CIO 100 for 2009 has just been released and makes interesting reading. The CIO 100 lists the one hundred companies that are creating business value by innovating with technology. Featuring high profile firms such as BP and Wyeth, through to smaller innovators such as Vail resorts and Midland Memorial Hospital, the survey goes into good detail about the BPM, SOA, CRM, Marketing, BI and ERP (and other) IT projects perceived to be truly innovative.

Useful detail is available on each project – for example Pfizer’s recent implementation: “Pfizer launched a voice-directed order picking solution within a regulated and validated pharmaceutical environment. Warehouse workers wear a lightweight, battery-powered device that connects to a Wi-Fi network, through which they can hear verbal commands that direct them to the location of a product. Pfizer says the system has reduced pick errors by 57 percent, which reduces the quantity of orders being returned. It has also saved 10 percent of costs due to overtime and reduced training time by 50 percent. Workers achieve maximum speed and productivity in four weeks rather than two months.”

This month the CIM unveiled a survey to help marketers in the boardroom. Entitled “Marketing’s Decline: A Wild Exaggeration?” it is reportedly designed to help marketers strengthen their influence and value in the firm.

Reporting on the release of the study in Marketing Week, the CIM released  few statistics:

• 74% of CFOs agree marketing has its place in an organisation they also say that the marketing department’s primary responsibility is marketing decisions and nothing else
• Both CFOs and CMOs also agree that marketers rarely show how their customer needs can be taken into account in strategy (79%). They also agree that marketers “are failing to engage both the analytical and creative side of their brain” while many feel their marketing lacks “novelty” and promotional strategies are routine
• Interestingly, CFOs have a higher regard for the quality of information processed by the marketing department than marketers themselves (65% versus 51%)
• The paper suggests that the marketing department must make sure that it is viewed as a facilitator that helps the whole organisation realise “that their business survives and thrives by serving customers.”
• The marketing team needs to stress customer proximity and the ability to convert this to commercial opportunities. It also needs “to get out of its silo and to champion customer needs across the firm and insure that customer needs are a foundation of corporate strategy.”