CRM - January 2009 - (Page 23)

FOR ABILENE CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY, the decision was easy—and involved a measure of fate. Associate Vice President of Operations Kevin Roberts happened to be attending a Google presentation at the annual EduCause conference when he got a call that made that session suddenly relevant: ACU’s email administrator had quit. Concerned about the effect of a new hire, Roberts listened to the Google information and did a bit of research with his team. Given ACU’s infrastructure, the email administrator position was a laborious one—but Roberts was being told that the job itself wouldn’t even have to exist if he moved the school’s Sun Microsystems–based system to the cloud and let Google take care of the details with its Web-based email application, known as Gmail. Why not forgo the administrator position altogether and let the cloud take over? “We started digging around and realized this has a lot of potential,” Roberts recalls, but he says that even then he knew it had to be campuswide or it wouldn’t happen at all—no point converting just students to Gmail and keeping faculty and staff on the legacy system. So the decision was made: ACU offered Google Apps to students in April 2007, setting a September deadline—the start of the school year—for shutting off the old email client. Eighty percent of students opted into Gmail the first day, Roberts says, and they offered zero pushback. The only resistance was with faculty members who had years and years of messages archived. Yet, by the end of autumn, the entire university was Google-oriented. Roberts says that he couldn’t be more pleased.“[Usage] has taken off very quickly,” he says. “It’s ingrained itself in the culture of how we do things at ACU.” The technology department originally had email as its top-of-mind priority. Yet, as ACU experimented with Gmail, Roberts says the other benefits of Google Apps became clear. Essentially, the university replaced the email administrator with a developer capable of creating custom university applications for Google Apps. Professors now share Google-hosted presentations with students. Students share Google Docs with teachers. Faculty members use the collaboration capabilities to share budget documents with one another. All told, Abilene Christian saves nearly $100,000 a year. “It’s like what Apple has done…in elementary school[s] to disrupt the PC market. It’s the same thing at the application layer with Google,” states Jeffrey Kaplan, founder of software-as-a-service (SaaS) consultancy ThinkStrategies.“Education is the best place to change long-term behaviors.” But the classroom is only Step One. In what many are calling the “consumerization of business technology,” there has been a noticeable willingness to consider business adoption of consumer-oriented technologies. And who’s driving this push? Consumers, of course—the ones who work for you. A new wave of employees is entering workplaces with iPod headphones in their ears, Facebook profiles on their computer screens, and smartphones in their hands. This generation, more adept at technology than even senior-level executives, is making demands for computing in the workplace to be on par with the sophisticated computing they have in their homes. CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT | JANUARY 2009 23

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of CRM - January 2009

CRM - January 2009 Contents Front Office Feedback Reality Check Customer Centricity The Tipping Point The Shots Heard ’Round the World 30,000-Foot Views Of the Cloud Stuffing the Ballot Box— With Complaints The Marketing Line for ’09 CRM on Twitter Technology Helps Insurance Weather the Storm Required Reading The Google-ization of CRM The Feedback Funnel Email: What’s Inside? Shake Your Moneymakers Lead Sweet Lead Incentives at the Speed of Lightpath Sales Contentment for Content Management A Worthwhile Excursion Into Call Recording Secret of My Success Re:Tooling Connect Pint of View

CRM - January 2009

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