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Here is a copy of the speech which Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam had given when he visited CIT for its Golden Jubilee valedictory function. He chose the topic convergence of technologies and he said it will be convergence of technologies that will rule the world and that there will be lot of scope for Bio-Informatics, Nanotechnology and other convergence technology. He also mentioned about shairng of knowledge between countries, and by these joint ventures, new products can be developed.
India in transformation
India is well on its way to become a knowledge power, there are all round growth in all sectors of the economy namely the agriculture, manufacturing and services. Today we have an opportunity to take the leadership in the knowledge revolution. Knowledge Revolution is indeed the foundation for leading India into a Developed Nation. For this, the time is ripe because of the ascending trajectory of the economy, availability of great institutions for capacity building of the human resource, abundant bio-diversity, and other natural resources and above all, our 540 million youth who are determined to make the nation prosperous, happy and a safe place to live well before 2020. With this background India must take the lead in mobilizing and integrating national and international knowledge resources. Keeping this in mind, I would like to discuss with you on Convergence of Technologies, Societal Grid leading to World Knowledge Platform.
Convergence of Technologies
The information technology and communication technology have already converged leading to Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Information Technology combined with bio-technology has led to bio-informatics. Now, Nano-technology is knocking at our doors. It is the field of the future that will replace microelectronics and many fields with tremendous application potential in the areas of medicine, electronics and material science. When Nano technology and ICT meet, integrated silicon electronics, photonics are born and it can be said that material convergence will happen. With material convergence and biotechnology linked, a new science called Intelligent Bioscience will be born which would lead to a disease free, happy and more intelligent human habitat with longevity and high human capabilities. Convergence of bio-nano-info technologies can lead to the development of nano robots. Nano robots when they are injected into a patient, my expert friends say, it will diagnose and deliver the treatment exclusively in the affected area and then the nano-robot gets digested as it is a DNA based product.
Convergence of ICT, aerospace and Nano technologies will emerge and revolutionize the aerospace industry and electronics leading to nano computing systems. This technological convergence will enable building of cost effective low weight, high payload, and highly reliable aerospace systems, which can be used for inter-planetary transportation.
Bioinformatics:
The convergence of bioscience and IT into Bioinformatics has given the thrust to researchers for genomics-based drug discovery and development. Pressure is mounting over the pharmaceutical companies to reduce or at least control costs, and have a growing need for new informatics tools to help manage the influx of data from genomics, and turn that data into tomorrow’s drugs.
Bioinformatics data play a vital role and emerging as a business model for the medical and pharmaceutical sector. Key areas such as gene prediction, data mining, protein structure modeling and prediction, protein folding and stability, macromolecular assembly and modeling of complex biological systems are thriving and IT has major role to play in these areas in bringing the tools to manage the high throughput experiments and the data they generate, and sharing and integrating all the data in a meaningful way resulting into the detailed models of complex systems, particularly biological pathways.
Bio Suite:
I launched the Bio-Suite at Hyderabad on 14th July 2004, which is an important software package that caters to all aspects of computational biology from genomics to structure-based drug design. It incorporates the latest publicly known algorithms, as chosen by a panel of academic partners, and has been coded entirely by the Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) team, using the software engineering practices. It can be used by academic and R&D institutions, small and medium and large biotechnology companies. This bio-suite was developed by TCS in collaboration with Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) and academic institutions for cost effective drug development in India.
Nano Technology:
When I think of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology, I would like to discuss about three scientists who have laid the foundation on nanoscience and nanotechnology. Mr. Richard Feynman, who described the concept of ‘building machines” atom by atom in his talk at Caltech titled “There is plenty of room at the bottom”. Mr. Eric Drexler, who wrote the book titled ‘Nano Systems, Molecular machinery, manufacturing and computation”. Prof CNR Rao, who pioneered and fostered the nanoscience research in India. Molecular nano technology has enormous potential for future aerospace systems and health areas. Research has shown that newly discovered class of molecules, leading to the development of carbon nano tubes that they have multiple applications in the system developed in the areas of electronics particularly nano-electronics and power systems. Carbon nano tubes are normal form of carbon with remarkable electrical and mechanical properties. It is hoped that such materials could revolutionize electronic design and open the space frontier by radically lowering the cost of launch to orbit.
Carbon Nano tubes reinforced with polymer matrix will result in composites which are super strong, light weight, small and intelligent structures in the field of material science. This has tremendous aerospace applications.
Molecular switches and circuits along with nano cell will pave the way for the next generation computers. Ultra dense computer memory coupled with excellent electrical performance will result in low power, low cost, nano size and yet faster assemblies.
Energy for future generations:
The era of wood and bio-mass is almost nearing its end. The age of oil and natural gas would soon be over even within the next few decades. The world energy forum has predicted that fossil based oil, coal and gas reserves will last for another 5 – 10 decades only.
Hydrogen fuel and solar rays are the two modes to get clean power. The solar rays, when passed though presently available solar photovoltaic cells have an efficiency of less than 20%. I would like to discuss the latest research in the area of photo-voltaic cells using Carbon nano tubes which can give an efficiency of over 45%, nearly three times the efficiency which the present technology can offer.
CNT based solar cells for higher efficiency
The low efficiency of conventional photo voltaic cells has restricted the use of solar cells for large application for power generation. Research has shown that the Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) based PV cell with multi junction device could give maximum efficiency of 30%. Therefore, the present research trend is on the use of Carbon Nano Tube (CNT) based PV cell. Both single wall CNTs and multi wall CNTs have been used as electrodes, as electron acceptor, which can split exciton into electrons and holes to produce electricity.
The CNTs provide better electron ballistic transport property along its axis with high current density capacity on the surface of the solar cell without much loss. Higher electrical conductivity and mechanical strength of CNT could improve the quantum efficiency to the order of 35%. But, this is not sufficient. Recent research abroad has shown that the alignment of the CNT with the polymer composites substrate is the key issue and this aligned CNT based PV cells would give very high efficiency in photovoltaic conversion. The polymer composites increase contact area for better charge transfer and energy conversion. In this process, the researchers could achieve the efficiency of about 50% at the laboratory scale. The optimum efficiency was achieved with the aligned CNTs with poly 3 – octyl thiophene (P3OT) based PV cell. I am sure, scientific researchers in Coimbatore Institute of Technology (CIT) will be excited to work in this area of research in partnership with industries so that we can get large scale production of aligned CNTs with P3OT based high energy solar cells. Now I would like to describe the societal grid, which is essential for bringing the connectivity for the billion people towards building the knowledge society.
Technology to Society – Societal Grid
Development of technologies and their convergence have significant influence on the society in terms of knowledge, health care, governance and economic development. To maximize the synergy between the various components of education, healthcare, e-governance, rural development we need to establish connectivities among them. These connectivities will certainly bring seamless access and information flow among the various domains leading to maximization of GDP and productivity; hence, there is need for establishing the GRIDs namely Knowledge grid, healthcare grid, e-governance grid and the PURA (Providing Urban Amenities in Rural Areas) grid. This interconnecting grid will be known as societal grid. Knowledge sharing, knowledge utilization and knowledge re-use is very vital by all constituents of the society for promoting non-linear growth. Details of Societal Grid are:
1. Knowledge GRID - Inter connecting universities with socio-economic institutions, industries and R&D organizations.
2. Health Care GRID - Inter-connecting the Health Care institutions of Government, Corporate and Super specialty hospitals, research institutions, educational institutions and ultimately, Pharma R & D institutions.
3. e-Governance GRID – Inter-connecting the Central Government and State Governments and District and Block level offices for G2G (Government to Government) and G2C (Government to Citizen) connectivity.
4. PURA GRID - Connecting the PURA Nodal centers with the Village Knowledge Centres and Domain service providers.
We have, so far discussed all the four connectivities required for the societal transformation. With this transformation, India is poised for creating the World Knowledge Platform for promoting synergy amongst partner nations.
World Knowledge Platform
During my visit to Singapore, Philippines and Republic of Korea, I have put forward the concept of “World Knowledge Platform”, which will integrate the core competencies of the partner countries to develop knowledge products. This platform will enable joint design, development, cost effective production and marketing of the knowledge products in various domains based on the core competence of partner nations to international market.
In India, we have today an example of a successful joint venture which harnessed the core competencies of two nations India and Russia, who have different cultures, languages and design standards. The product which has come out is of world class, much ahead of other countries due to the joint working of best of minds from both countries. This proves that if the core competencies of nations are combined, best of knowledge products can emanate well ahead of time.
Missions of World Knowledge Platform:
The convergence of Bio, Nano and ICT is expected to touch every area of concern to the humanity. The “World Knowledge platform” will take up the missions, in some of the areas given below, which are of utmost urgency to all of us to make our world a safe, sustainable and peaceful and prosperous place to live:
1. Energy: exploration, storage, production and conversion
2. Water: treatment and desalination
3. Healthcare: Diagnosis, drug delivery system
4. Food: preservation, storage and distribution
5. Knowledge products :Hardware, Software and Networking Products
6. Automobile: Hardware and embedded software integration
In addition to the areas mentioned above, areas such as electronics, ICT and Automobile Sector may also be focused especially in the areas of design, development leading to productionization for meeting the market demands of partner countries and the world market. The core competence of India is software and the core competencies of the other partner nations are hardware and software, it can lead to design, development and marketing of world class systems that is equally dominated by the software intelligence and hardware innovation. The world knowledge platform will also evolve a virtual design centre with the participation of collaborating countries.
The much awaited Windows Vista was launched yesterday. Liane Cassavoy in PC World has given a Live update of the launch straight from New york city.
According to him – Steve Ballmer was very enthusiastic and enthusiasm was the theme of the day and the big flat screens said “Wow Starts Now”
Vista is the major update of Microsoft after Windows XP and is called as Longhorn. After Windows 95 launch, this is the first time where both the operating system and Office tools are being launched together. Yes, yesterday both Vista and office 2007 was launched together and both products were the talk in the market for many years.
Here is a screen shot of the welcome screen of Vista 
Watch – the slide show of the screen shots of windows vista in PC Magazine.
According to Liane, Ballmer stated the following during the launch:
Ballmer says that in the next 3 months, Microsoft expects to sell five times as many copies of Vista compared with the sales of Windows 95 in the same period after its launch. He said the company also expects to sell twice as many copies of Vista as it did as copies of Windows XP in that time.
Among the highlights of the new software:1. Its ease of use and excitement: he cites the new Aero interface and the integrated search in Vista and the new ribbon in Office 2007 as part of this.
2. It’s safer, with a focus on security, he says, citing parental controls, and antiphishing features.
3. It’s designed for digital entertainment, such as photos, movies, and games.
4. It’s also about helping people connect, whether that be multiple computers, multiple devices, or to Internet-based services.
Ballmer is joined by some of Microsoft’s industry partners from Dell, Intel, Toshiba, AMD, and HP, and will be answering questions from the press.
Liane also writes what Bill Gates had to say during the launch. According to Liane:
When 95 was released, Gates recalls, your computing tasks centered around things like creating documents and then hoping you were able to print. Fonts, he recalls, were an amazing innovation. Tasks like digital photography and online shopping were just a gleam in our eye, he says.
Today, everything has become digital, he says, noting that as things have gone digital, people have high expectations. In 1995, there were no portable computers. Now, people want their PCs to run with their phones, he says. And, of course, he believes that Windows Vista is the key to the era we have today.
I wish I could also have been there during the launch. Its really exciting to watch the launch of Microsoft products.
I delivered a speech On Nanotechnology for Cyberfest – a technical symposium about which I had once mentioned it in the blog – Cyberfest2007. The theme chosen was “Nanotechnology” to be in line with the upcoming Convergence Technology. So, here is the writeup of the speech.
NANOTECHNOLOGY:
“ I have often wondered how even after many years, the colour of the peacock feather does not fade away. This phenomena of long lasting original colour to the peacock has come from God’s own creation of nano materials coated in a peacock’s feather. Observation of nature and the role of science in understanding it from our research in nano sciences can be converted into a technological product”
– Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam.
Nanotechnology is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the branch of technology that deals with dimensions and tolerances of less than 100 nanometres, esp. the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules.” A nanometer is one billionth (one-thousand millionth) of a meter.
A breakthrough technology is one that breaks through the dam of conventional wisdom and slow progress, opening up prospects for transformative change. This holds true for nanotechnology’s claim to novelty. The emerging fields of nanoscience and nanoengineering – the ability to manipulate and move matter – are leading to unprecedented understanding and control over the fundamental building blocks of all physical things. These developments are likely to change the way almost everything – from vaccines to computers to automobile tyres to objects not yet imagined. Nanotechnology is the builder’s new frontier and its potential impact is compelling.
“There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom” – This famous quote by physicist R. Feynman is often seen as the birth of nanotechnology – The vision of a whole new world that goes beyond simple miniaturization because the laws that govern interactions at this level are quite different from what we are used to. Understanding these interactions is important to be able to assess the potential of such technologies – for good and for bad.
The main thing to know about nanotechnology is that it’s small – Really small. Nano, a prefix that means “dwarf” in Greek, is shorthand for nanometer, one-billionth of a meter: a distance so minute that comparing it to anything in the regular world is a bit of a joke.
When Eric Drexler popularized the word ‘nanotechnology’ in the 1980’s, he was talking about building machines on the scale of molecules, a few nanometers wide — motors, robot arms, and even whole computers, far smaller than a cell.
Nanotechnology matters because familiar materials begin to develop odd properties when they’re nanosize. Tear a piece of aluminum foil into tiny strips, and it will still behave like aluminum—even after the strips have become so small that you need a microscope to see them. But keep chopping them smaller, and at some point—20 to 30 nanometers, in this case—the pieces can explode. Not all nanosize materials change properties so usefully, but the fact that some do is a boon. This is like you shrink a Flash Drive and keep shrinking it, and then at some point, all at once, it turns into a DVD.
In its original sense, nanotechnology refers to the projected ability to construct items from the bottom up, using techniques and tools being developed today to make complete, highly advanced products.
Nanotechnology is often referred to as a general-purpose technology. That’s because in its mature form it will have significant impact on almost all industries and all areas of society. It offers better built, longer lasting, cleaner, safer, and smarter products for the home, for communications, for medicine, for transportation, for agriculture, and for industry in general.
In practical terms, most people will encounter nanotech through an apparently simple device called a nanofactory that may sit on your countertop or desktop. Packed with miniature chemical processors, computing, and robotics, it will produce a wide-range of items quickly, cleanly, and inexpensively, all controlled by a touch screen.
The major breakthrough has been achieved in field of medicine where Nanotechnology is being used to. The first nanomedicines are already bringing clinical benefit to thousands of patients, said Professor Ruth Duncan.
“Progress in the development of nano-sized hybrid therapeutics and nano-sized drug delivery systems over the last decade has been remarkable. A growing number of products have already secured regulatory authority approval and, in turn, are supported by a healthy clinical development pipeline. They include products used to treat multiple sclerosis, AIDS, cancer, hepatitis and arthritis.”
Furthermore, the improved understanding of the molecular basis of disease has led to “real optimism that a new generation of improved medicines is just around the corner,” said Professor Duncan.
Some breakthrough’s that can be achieved using Nanotechnology are:
- Nearly free consumer products
- PC’s billions of times faster then today
- Safe and affordable space travel
- Virtual end to illness, aging, death
- No more pollution and automatic cleanup of existing pollution
- Reintroduction of many extinct plants and animals
- Terraforming Earth and the Solar System
So, to achieve all these breakthrough’s all we need to do is
“Think Big in this Nano Size World”.
This is my report on Enterprise computing and Customer Relationship Management. I am developing a software in J2EE platform for maintaining easy customer relationship. This is a SRS that I had presented.
Enterprise Computing:
Enterprise Computing refers to the Information Technology in a larger organization. Timing has always been a critical factor when organizations adopt new technologies, and the accelerated pace of the information-driven business model puts greater emphasis on response times. Organizations need to be able to project enterprise systems into various client channels, and to do so in a way that’s reliable, productive, and capable of sustaining frequent updates to both information and services. The principal issue is how to keep up with today’s business challenges–whatever they may be–while maintaining and leveraging the value of existing information assets. In this environment, timeliness, productivity, security, and predictability are all absolutely critical to building and maintaining momentum. A number of factors can enhance or impede an organization’s ability to deliver custom enterprise applications quickly and to maximize their value over their lifetime.
Enterprise Data: Enterprise Data are usually common to most of the departments and so it is important to maintain a common database for those departments. It is the data that gets circulated in the organization and is used by various departments for various purposes. For example – A Customer related information is used by the sales, marketing, as well as the service department. So, it is necessary that all the departments get the facility of accessing the information of the customers. Thus, Enterprise Computing comes into play.
Enterprise Computing helps in creating enterprise software for the whole organization rather than department wise.
Enterprise Computing and J2EE:
The Platform for Enterprise Solutions
The J2EE platform represents a single standard for implementing and deploying enterprise applications. During its first two years, the J2EE standard’s success has transformed the marketplace for distributed computing products. This success is largely due to the fact that the J2EE platform has been designed through an open process, engaging a range of enterprise computing vendors to ensure that it meets the widest possible range of enterprise application requirements. As a result, the J2EE platform addresses the core issues that impede organizations’ efforts to maintain a competitive pace in the information economy. Organizations have recognized this and quickly adopted the new platform standard.
J2EE Platform Benefits
With features designed to expedite the process of developing distributed applications, the J2EE platform offers several benefits:
- Simplified architecture and development
- Freedom of choice in servers, tools, and components
- Integration with existing information systems
- Scalability to meet demand variations
- Flexible security model
- Secured Web Transactions
Due to these benefits of the J2EE platform, we use J2EE for the enterprise application. Moreover, as the J2EE platform has 3 tiers and can easily separate Data and business model, it is very easy and secured to create Enterprise applications in J2EE platform.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) – INTEGRATION
Synopsis:
For any organization, its customers are most vital. The organization needs to interact in a coherent, consistent manner with the customers and Customer relationship management (CRM) covers methods and technologies used by organizations to manage their relationships with clients in several front and context. In new economy, when the competitor is just one step (or one click away) whenever a customer interacts with an organization for service, solution or for resolving any issues, it’s necessary that the organization capture, articulate and contextualize the information about the and the service rendered to the client for future references. And with the help of CRM systems all information capture and articulation process gets embedded in the work-flow, so that the interaction’s becomes ‘pain-free’, and personal as well as serves as a future references in both ‘best’ and worst ‘practices’. When a Sales Personnel approaches a client for the sales of the product, it’s necessary for the sales force to maintain the information about the client and the information stored on existing customers (and potential customers) is analyzed and used to this end. Customer relationship management is a corporate level strategy implementation tool, focusing on creating and maintaining relationships with customers.
The CRM known as the “Front Office Solutions” mainly focuses of the Front-Office activities like the Sales, Marketing, and Services where the customer interaction and customer information play a vital role. It focuses on tracking the key customer details, answering the query from the customers, providing online technical assistance to the customer.
The Sales activity in an organization is the key activity where the sales personnel’s interact more with the customers. With CRM enabled – on work-flow-embedded documentation of the interactions, the sales person can comprehend the needs of the clients in much more efficient and effective way. Through the reporting and tracking features of CRM the sales manager can track the sales of the products or solutions to their clients, which enables them to identify the key clients and also to analyze the daily moment of the product in the market in order to trace the requirements of the customer. This pays way to the Sales Force Automation (SFA)
The marketing activity in any organization targets the customers regarding the products of their own company and also makes the customers aware of any new products launch. The details collected by sales personnel’s is analyzed and with the recognized patterns help companies to target particular segments of customers who more likely to be interested in a particular product. The Enterprise Marketing Automation helps to analyze their competitors thus improving their marketing efficiency.
In case of post sales service and conflict resolution It’s the responsibility of the organization to provide help for the customers in timely basis. When a customer approaches the organization and registers a complaint or for getting a service, the organization needs to keep track of the customer’s service and intimate the customers at regular time interval. The Service Automation helps the organization to keep track of the customers and their services and helps to maintain the relationship with customers
All these above discussed points gives way to the knowledge Management where the articulated and contextualized knowledge captured by CRM provides employees with instant access to the knowledge gained throughout an organization in an efficient way. Aggregating employee knowledge about business practices, products and customers over time may point to new ways to turbo charge old habits and turn them into productive new ones. By integrating the KMS with the CRM enables the organization to maintain the knowledge about the customers and provide instant support to the customers.
Purpose of the project:
The CRM Integration system helps an organization to manage its customer by providing timely information and service to the customers thus enabling the organization to interact with the customers in a pain-free manner.
The CRM system focuses on:
- Identify factors important to clients.
- Promote a customer-oriented philosophy
- Adopt customer-based measures
- Develop end-to-end processes to serve customers
- Provide successful customer support
- Handle customer complaints
- Track all aspects of sales
- Create a holistic view of customers’ sales & services information
- Providing Charts which helps the organization to analyze the profits, sales and customer response for the products.
Product Features:
The various features of the product include:
- Tracking orders of a product
- Calculating the profits, sales and revenue
- Provide online assistance for the customers regarding product and service
- Online support for customers to order products
- Intimate customers on timely basis regarding their orders and services
- Provide E-Mail services for the organization to send mails to customers
- Identifying key-customers and provide support
- Intimating customers about the new product launch
- Providing assistance for the sales-force in order to maintain the relationship with the customers
- Provide bar charts as a tool for analyzing the profits, key customers, product move in the market etc.
- Quick and easy access to the data
- Provide Calendar and reminder support for the managers and sales force to intimate regarding meetings with the customers
- Providing assistance for marketing personnel for identifying the target customers
- Integration of Knowledge Management System enables the organization to maintain information for the future use.
System Features
CRM is the acronym of Customer Relationship Management. CRM is a business system that consists of enterprise goals, business strategies, business processes and enterprise information systems. CRM software systems automate many customer-related business tasks. Goals of CRM is to learn more about customers’ needs and behaviors in order to develop stronger relationships with them, and to facilitate acquiring, enhancing and retaining of customers. The CRM Integration System contains the following functionalities:
Sales force automation (SFA) or Sales force management systems:
These automate some of a company’s critical sales and sales force management tasks, such as forecasting, sales administration, tracking customer preferences and demographics, performance management, lead management, account management, contact management and quote management. It can increase the productivity of sales personnel. It enables the sales personnel to maintain the details of the customers who have purchased the product and enables them to provide an online support whenever necessary. The CRM Integration system enables the sales manager to analyze the customer’s interest in a product by providing bar charts for all necessary analysis. It also enables the sales manager to record information about the customer’s needs which will enable the organization to give a detail study on the requirements of the customers. It enables the organization to take orders from the web making it easy for the customers to choose the product. It also enables the organization to send necessary information and intimate customers about their orders being processed via E-Mails and also via the Mobile Devices which will make the organization to maintain easy relationship with the customers. It helps in:
- Providing efficient communication with customers across a variety of communications channels
- Providing online services to reduce customer service costs
- Providing access to customer information while interacting with customers
Enterprise Marketing Automation:
Marketing is a set of promotional activities in which direct contact is made with the target customer. This software allows companies to identify target customers for particular promotional criteria, generate direct mails, and analyze response from target customers. Common techniques include direct mail, telemarketing, and etc. This can automate and streamline many of those marketing efforts. It also helps to analyze the calls made by the customer to track the number of calls and the conversation carried about by the customer for any product enquiry.
Service Automation:
The service automation system automates service requests, complaints, product returns and enquiries. When a customer comes to an organization for a service request, the CRM Integration system stores the information about the request and enables the service team to send mails and intimate customers regarding their service request process also it helps the quality assurance team to analyze the complaints and product returns in order to maintain better quality in the next product cycle.
Knowledge Management System:
Today, customers want an answer from your company, as soon as they think of a question. They call, they email, and they look to the web twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for immediate gratification. Today’s successful companies appreciate the opportunity of this constant contact with customers and turn it into a huge advantage in growing brand loyalty and customer retention. The price of this success is often staff overload because they can’t handle the huge volume of communication. Additionally, if these communications are not handled effectively and to their fullest potential, the result is missed up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
Many experts believe that tomorrows main source of competitive advantage will be a firm’s ability to leverage corporate knowledge and to learn faster than others in their field. The management of collective corporate intelligence and its distribution becomes an even more powerful tool in global organizations. Giving employees access to knowledge in a widespread distribution can shorten time to market and help resolve many everyday issues throughout an organization. Companies feel the impact of knowledge loss as they lose employees. All employees possess company knowledge to varying degrees. Each and every day that an employee walks out the door of a company, the knowledge that employee has about products and procedures may not be returning. In good economies and bad, employees change jobs frequently or companies are forced to change staffing through reductions in force. With the right systems in place, a loss of employees should not mean a loss of company information or expertise.
KMS is a fully web based, self-help and information management system for customers, employees and partners. It is a platform where diverse departments can build a common knowledge warehouse. Externally this information can then be accessed through Website search to solve customer problems, disperse product knowledge and lower the costs of customer touch points. Internally this information can help you build on competitive intelligence, reduce redundant employee research and establish best practices across an organization. Through the web, customers can find automated resolutions to questions, problems and new product options. This quick resolution to customer needs enhances customer loyalty and brand preference. Self-help also greatly increases conversion of web visitors into customers while at the same time lowering the cost of customer interaction.
A quick graphical summary of core tasks of CRM in plain English
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems can give your salespeople a detailed picture of a customer’s sales and service history, whether the customer’s point of contact is via the Web, by phone or in person. Here’s how a typical enterprise CRM operation works.
Customer order
A customer orders 10 new widgets through sales. When the salesperson enters the order into the CRM software, the CRM database is updated with this new sale information.
Customer support
If there’s a problem, the customer can call a support line and enter a customer identification number. This prompts the CRM software to call up the customer’s history and route the call to the most appropriate agent, who can upsell the customer based on its purchasing history.
Upselling
If a customer decides to buy additional products online, the CRM database will recognize the customer and make unique purchase suggestions or offers based on its purchasing history.
Track trends, fix problems
Using CRM analytics software, the company can track customer trends from call center data and act to fix problems or anticipate new ones.
CRM systems give your sales, customer service, and technical support divisions access to a shared database of customer data, whether the customer’s point of contact is via the web, by phone or in person.
KMS System:
This post is to notify the students pursuing their masters degree in Computer Science or Information Technology(preferably MCA) that Computer Technology and Application Department of Coimbatore Institute of Technology is conducting its technical symposium on Jan 19th and Jan 20th.
Every year in the month of January CIT comes out with a technical symposium for the students to show case their talent in various events starting from paper presentation, web designing, C/C++ debugging, marketing, treasure hunt, net hunt, Quiz, System Analyst to software project management. This year too, we have come out with Cyberfest 2007. Following the tradition of Cyberfest of having a theme for each year – This year theme is E9 Technologia. E9 represented in mathematical form for Nano and Technologia meaning Technology in Greek language. So, thus the theme becomes Nanotechnology.
Do visit – http://www.cyberfest2007.com for more details and if you are more interested to register, do drop in a comment here, we will get back to you or drop a mail to
Cyberfest2007@gmail.com
Looking forward to see you there
Most of us own a mobile phone and in that percentage of mobile phone users, a certain percentage of the users have enabled GPRS and have access to internet via their mobile phones. With many Mobile Network Services providing their own services and packages for the users to connect to internet. I have seen many of my friends enabling it and using it for various purposes or even using bluetooth technology to access the internet via comp enabling the connection with their mobile. We all know about getting connected to internet through mobile phones. Technology has improved so much that we don’t need to find a comp to check our mails. All you need is a mobile phone with an internet connection. But are the people using it to the maximum possible is what Mike Elgan asks in his article on computer world and gives five tips to access the blogs, mail services in a much faster way.
Trick 1: Get access to blogs instantly via plusmo
Accessing the blogs from mobile phone takes much longer time to download. So, what is the trick? Plusmo gives a feature where we can add plusmo to the blog home page and people can subscribe to it and receive it on the mobile phones, but what they will need is a plusmo client to download the blog. But when I tried I could not get access, Because it supports only US Networks for now. Well I am hoping to get access in a while as they have assured to come up with their service for other countries too.
Trick 2: Get access to your mobile voice messages via emails
Callwave gives the feature by which we can convert voice messages to mails and other features include:
- Hear your cell phone messages in your email
- Respond to messages instantly with powerful text reply and call back features
- Permanently save your messages on your computer
Trick 3: Get Blackberry like email alerts
Blackberry devices has the facility of giving an alert when an email is received without us prompting it to give a check. But can all afford for a blackberry? So, whats the trick here we can play? According to Mike Elgan:
The basic technique is to set up your normal e-mail account to auto-forward to an e-mail service that filters spam and then automatically forward e-mail from there to an online IMAP mail service. You then access that service through an IMAP-compatible client application on a smart phone.
Say, for example, you use a Palm Treo smart phone, Gmail as the spam-filtering e-mail service, AIM e-mail as the IMAP e-mail service and Chattermail as the IMAP-compatible e-mail client on the Treo (by the way, Chattermail is vastly superior to the default VersaMail application that comes with the Treo). These are just examples — you can use your own alternatives.
Trick 4 – Get Driving Directions
Are you stuck in the middle of the way not knowing where you have landed in an unknown land and you dont have your laptop with yourself, dont worry – Use Google’s mobile application to find where you are through the map service provided by Google mobile.
All these apps are available at the Google Mobile Web site. You simply enter your cell phone number, and Google sends you an SMS link. When you click on the link, you’re offered all four Google Mobile apps, which are installed on your phone over the Internet.
Trick 5: Access cellphone contacts online
Get a backup of your mobile data and get instant online access to your mobile’s contacts and calendar with ZYB. By signing up, you’ll be able to store, manage and even share your mobile’s content online with friends within minutes. No cables or downloads needed.
So, what are you waiting for? Get access to the facilities right now and if your mobile is GPRS enabled, then you can get access to my blogs through Plusmo as I have added it in my blog home page
