Coffee Break With Game-changers, Presented By Sap

With social media and smartphones fueling consumers’ expectations and enabling them to impact your brand, the customer experience is now your competitive battleground. Everyone has a customer experience horror story. What’s the buzz about your company? Are you prepared to put customers at the center of your thinking to transform them into your best advocates? Meet Reza Soudagar, Vinay Iyer and Dr. Volker G. Hildebrand, authors of The Customer Experience Edge: Technology and Techniques for Delivering an Enduring, Profitable, and Positive Experience for Your Customers. Based on market research, case studies and statistics, they will explain how to combine strategy, leadership, organizational change, and technology to develop highly valued products and services, transform your customers into loyal evangelists, and convert emotionally-bonded customers into profits. Pour a cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought on The Customer Experience as Competitive Game-Changer.

There’s a global financial crisis, and struggling companies are reducing staff, or worse, shuttering doors. If you’re out of a job, you’d be out of your mind to consider starting a business today. Right? Not true, says small business expert Susan Wilson Solovic. “We are entering a new era in which the majority of Americans will either own a small business or work for one....While it may seem counterintuitive, a recessionary climate can actually be an ideal time to start a business.” Need proof? Hyatt Corporation, Burger King, FedEx, MTV, CNN and HP started small in down economies. And college dropout Bill Gates started Microsoft in a sluggish economy, eking out just $16,000 in revenue his first year. Whether you’re a big biz seeking to contain costs, a small biz in need of advice, or just have an “I wanna be my own boss” gleam in your eye, pour a cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought on the Era of the Entrepreneur: Small Business as the New Economic Game-Changer.

Your holiday gifts may already be unwrapped, but we’ve got more surprises for you. Ten former guests will predict the exciting game-changer technologies that could transform, disrupt and shake up your business status quo in 2012. Their conversation may spark ideas on better ways to run your company – or start a new one – and move you in amazing new directions. Since our October debut, you’ve heard business leaders, analysts, influencers and authors discuss diverse game-changing trends – Consumerization of IT, Big Data, In-memory Computing, Cloud Computing, Social Business, Information Governance, Real-time Data Analytics, Customer Relationship Management, and many flavors of Mobility. Listen on-demand in our Episode Directory. Will 2012 bring more of the same, or entirely new approaches to growing and competing in the intensely dynamic global marketplace? Pour a cup of Joe, Earl, OJ or even Dom, and join us for a special menu of food for thought here at the game-changers’ table.

Some things never change. “The customer is always right”, a slogan associated with Marshall Field’s department store in the late 19th century, and attributed earlier to French hotelier César Ritz, holds true today. Consider this: You do everything right – deliver the right merchandise at the right price, right terms and guarantees, at the right time and place – yet some customers loudly declare they’ll never buy from you again. Why? Perhaps a delivery person who doesn’t work for your company, or anything else beyond your control, left a bad taste about your brand and spoiled what you thought was a perfect transaction. Want to avoid this ‘last mile’ mishap? It’s all about CRM – Customer Relationship Management. Tune in to hear how the CRM system of the future will be smart, dynamic and personalized enough to help you score a better grade on your customer report card. Pour a fresh cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought as we explore the world of CRM today and tomorrow.

In our unwired world of business, millions of mobile devices connect the boardroom to the shop floor to the consumer across the entire supply chain. These laptops, tablet and smart phones – which aren’t tied down by a power cord and data cable – empower employees at every level and the companies that employ them. If you’re still on the outside peering into the window of today’s game-changing mobility, this show is for you. Meet Carolyn Fitton, co-author of Enterprise Mobility for Dummies, the guide to application development and deployment, management and security for all the devices on your network. Carolyn and our panel of mobility experts will explore the basics your management and IT teams need to select the right technologies for your company, including mobile hardware, mobile applications, and the tools to manage it all. Pour yourself a fresh cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought as we explore the world of Enterprise Mobility. Tweet your questions to #SAPRadio.

Imagine such fast access to all of your data - even field-fresh information less than a minute old - that when you ask a question, you get an informed answer in milliseconds! Not minutes, hours or days like you’d get from spreadsheets on different computers. Milliseconds. Essentially “real-time”. Now think of the powerful intelligence this would give you in response to “I want it now” customers and do-or-die business decisions. You'd have immediate and deeper insights about sales, customers and pipeline from any source. Guess what? Organizations that already harness automated analytics are able to take a scientific, predictive approach to decision making. And if they’re your competitors, watch out because they’re winning, even in this tough economy. Pour yourself a fresh cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought as we explore the world of real-time analytics. BTW: Tweet questions for our experts to #SAPRadio.

Whoosh! That’s the sound of data flying in and out of your company. Information today is indeed king. But if you’re not governing data flow and handling with solid policies and processes, you’re missing the boat on maximizing information business value and minimizing risk exposure. If this is on your perpetual to-do list or if tentative rules are scattered around the company, listen up! Today we explore the burgeoning world of Information Governance (IG): how bringing together the right people, processes, policies, and technology can deliver consistent, trusted information across your organization. Whether you’re small, midsize or a large enterprise, hear how to empower your users to own and manage data as a strategic asset, and guarantee data quality throughout its lifecycle. Pour a fresh cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought as we travel the road to true Information Governance. Tweet your questions for our experts to #SAPRadio before or during the program.

In our Era of Pervasive Mobility, most of us take the benefits of smart phones and tablet devices for granted. But it wasn’t so long ago that we didn’t have on-the-go connectivity to people, information, shopping, entertainment and work. On Nov. 23, two days before Black Friday starts the 2011 holiday season and the year’s busiest travel weekend, we’ll look at the social and business impacts of today’s ubiquitous personal mobility devices that connect people of all ages to whatever and whomever they choose, wherever they are. Meet mobility industry giants Paul Greenberg, the ‘father of CRM’; Sheryl Kingstone, Yankee Group mobility guru; Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, leading advocate for mobility in customer service; and Gregory J. Dunn, a key player in Sybase’s revolutionary 365 mobility strategy. Pour a cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought on how our untethered access to mobile content and ecommerce services affects lifestyles for individuals, communities and businesses.

Our Nov. 2 Breakfast with Game-Changers weather forecast predicted prevailing clouds disrupting business-as-usual in a good way far into the future, with bright stars lighting the cloud-filled skies. Of course, we were talking about “the cloud” as in “cloud computing” – and what it can do for your business, whether you’re a new or mature small, mid-size or large company. Still in the dark, you say? Just a lot of hot air, you protest? Too nebulous to be real, you challenge? We’ve invited our guest experts to continue to explore the vast game-changing cloudscape. Topics: public vs. private cloud; how a private cloud can fail; ownership, security and accessibility of your data in the cloud; whether the cloud always saves costs; roadmap for a successful cloud journey; and tips for choosing a cloud vendor. Pour yourself a cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought, as we look skyward again to help you get your head in the cloud.

Facebook this. Tweet that. Blog something. LIKE this. FOLLOW that. Social media. Social networking. Social business. Whatever you call it, it’s here to stay. And it’s moved from the domain of y-/i-genners’ personal trivia to a new business sandbox where companies big and small play to win high-stakes customer relationships. The theory: “Be in the game or lose the opportunity.” So where is your company on the social business debate: waste of time or marketing brilliance? Are you peering from the sidelines, wondering if you have to be there and how to justify the cost? Or do you already use social media gurus to make your brand a player in the fast-paced chat-o-sphere? Either way, you may be overwhelmed by the many approaches to Social Customer Relationship Management. Pour a fresh cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought as we explore the world of social business. And if you tweet your favorite breakfast beverage to #SAPRadioCoffee, you may hear your name on the air!

You’ve heard the buzz and hype about ‘the cloud’, but do you know what it can do for you and your business? While Sand Hill Group’s research saw a dramatic leap in cloud computing adoption in Q4-2010, it also found that many small to midsize businesses are still confused about the meaning of ‘cloud computing.’ Can you tell the cloud apart from high-tech trends like Web 2.0, social media, virtualization, Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and web-based tools like e-mail and collaboration apps? And if you’ve decided to go to the cloud, do you really know the must-have’s and the gotcha’s? Pour yourself a fresh cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought as we look skyward to help you demystify the cloud.

On last week’s Big Data program, we discussed how today’s massive data volume, velocity and variety are challenging the creative coping skills of companies around the world. Now we’ll examine how to shake, bake and serve your data in far less time than it takes Rachael Ray to cook-up her newest yummo recipe. Yes! In-memory, real-time data analytics are the newest game-changing tool that can boost your company’s cost-saving productivity by 4% in the next 5 years and help you win big in the new global marketplace. Grab a fresh cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought on how you, too, can take a light-year leap into the exciting realm of real-time business.

Big Data. The world of Three V’s. Gartner describes “big data” as a three-dimensional data growth model: Volume of data; Velocity or speed of data in/out; and Variety of data types and sources. When we do the math, “big” typically ranges from a few dozen terabytes to multi-petabytes or more in a single data set. The bottom line: Big data is waaayyy too much for common software tools to efficiently capture, manage and process within a tolerable length of time. This is a job for game-changing solutions and exceptional technologies. What does big data mean to you and your business? What kinds of data do you need to care about – social data, sentiment analysis, RFID and more? What does your data look like today and what will it look like tomorrow? And how do you turn your data into usable information? Pour a fresh cup of Joe, Earl or OJ and join us for food for thought: Big Data - The Big Picture.

Look what’s walking in your door this morning with your employees: their ipads, ipods, iphones! Why? Because their on-the-go lifestyle requires continuous personal and work connectivity. But at the end of the day, they may walk out the door with your proprietary data on their devices. This rapid consumerization of IT is already a reality around the globe. Are you ready for this new fact of business life? Have you decided how to enable your workforce to optimize their productivity? Do you have a corporate mobility policy for monitoring data traffic? Pour another cup of fresh java and join us for food for thought on Mobility: The Big Picture, Devices, Apps – and most important, IT’s role in securing your data as it goes mobile.

Wondering who today’s business innovators are and what’s on their plate that can change the way YOU do business next? Pour a fresh cup of your favorite breakfast beverage and join our expert panel for the debut of Breakfast with Game-Changers, as we explore these timely questions: How do game-changers think? What inspires them to develop breakthrough technologies that disrupt, excite and improve companies everywhere — and even become the stuff of legend? How long before their next “Aha moment“ impacts the way you run your business? And why do we listen to them at all? We’ll also deep-dive into the topic of Mobility. Why is it considered today’s leading game-change technology? How has this cataclysmic shift impacted the drivers of today’s technology market? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter at #SAPRadio.