With digital commerce, the business of selling has become a lot more interesting and exciting. New business opportunities are getting created with technology trends like business virtualization, Big Data and software such as personalization tool. These on one end would help predict consumer behavior, and on the other end support seamless processing of data, creating a holistic shopping experience. 

Does the efficiency drive kill your ability to change at reasonable costs? Good ideas that are disruptive and transformational need the core processes to be uprooted and an invasive surgery done on the business operations to put an idea into action. To mitigate the risk of failure, one decides to prototype and pilot. The costs associated with such an implementation approach are quite taxing on organizational bandwidth, time and coffers. 

With Microsoft pioneering the Do Not Track feature in IE10, the marketing guys will have to work hard to make the digital advertising world and the CRM strategies effective. In this blog, I am not touching upon the ethics part of tracking a customer's behavior online, I am merely analyzing the challenges this will pose to the enterprises and the effect on technology strategies related to CRM.  

The big question today companies must ask themselves, repeatedly, is how can they proactively engage their consumers to a point that they will become an integral part of products and services launches, and build up better businesses practices on a win-win scenario? The challenge is not in asking the right answers, although that's hard enough. It's following through with the answers. 

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is the key to business-IT alignment, and a very important measurement for IT at Vodafone. The key driver is our intimacy for our customers both internally and externally. and endeavors to convert our IT to act like a service provider and be a trusted partner of our business. We now see a change in how IT is being seen more as partner rather than a support function.  

IT plays a critical role in market expansion, especially in businesses that operate in the online space. There are some organizations that do a great job of leveraging the online space as well as the traditional channels. In Vodafone India, we have increased our percentage share of online revenue by four times in last two years. We have been working a lot to leverage the online channel.  

Information Technology for any organization today is not just the backbone. It is like the blood flowing in the body. It's everywhere. You name a function and IT is there. With its all-pervasive role, it is important that IT and business align to a great extent, and so do CIOs. 

The need is to have a group of people within an enterprise who should be able to lead their lives as social network inhabitants do. This group should feel and think like them to successfully emote and transact with them; A group that does not necessarily operate under the shadow of people-process-system umbrella. 

In a corporate house, while there is a debate around ideas, once a decision is made, the enterprise collectively approaches to meet the goals even if a few individuals were initially against it. On the social network, no such rule is binding on participants of the social groups. People will walk away from a movement as quickly they walked in with support. All of this could happen in a flash and without a warning. 

Digital marketing, although a baby of the CMO, depends hugely on the CIO and his team for support and sustainability. Yet, a study involving 300 senior IT and marketing executives of 50 leading companies, shows that the relationship between marketing and IT too often remains "dysfunctional," with both sides complaining about insufficient support involvement.