I recently conducted an unscientific survey of association executives, asking them what their plans are for business intelligence. Of the 71 responses received, here were the results:

+ Only 15% said they have a business intelligence plan in place.

+ Thirteen percent said they will have one in place by the end of 2008.

+ Over a third responded that they have no plans for implementing a business intelligence initiative in 2008.

+ And finally, 1/3 of the respondents said “What the hell is business intelligence?”

So what does all of this mean to you? For starters, if you don’t have a BI plan in place, and you don’t have one planned for this year, you’re still in the majority. Fewer than 1/3 of the respondents will have one in place by the end of 2008.

This also means that there is still a lot of hype about business intelligence, but not a lot of reality…yet. But BI is real and your organization should be thinking about it, even if you’re not doing it yet.

So if you’re one of the majority, put it in your plans for 2009 to at least start discussing how BI might help your organization.

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) has released a survey of how businesses are using social media. The contents of the survey can be found here.

The survey looks to be based on 134 responses of business to business (B2B) companies. Some interesting highlights:

1. The percentage of companies already offering social networking technologies is 42%. The percentage planning to in the near future is an additional 36%. So some time in "the near future" nearly 80% of these companies will be offering some form of social networking.
2. The primary benefit to these companies, from their perspective, is to reach new audiences and increase user engagement. Based on their own experiences, about 40% of the respondents believe they are reaching new audiences, while another 40% expect to. Thirty-three percent are increasing engagement while another 52% expect to.
3. Just over a third of those surveyed (34%) have user generated content, but another 24% expect to have it soon.
4. Over half (54%) have blogs. Interestingly, only 35% think blogging has had a positive effect. The other 65% felt it had a "mixed" effect. But none felt it was a pure negative.

The results of the survey are also worth reading for the open-ended comments that are provided.

I'd be interested to know how this compares to the association market. My gut says the numbers across the board would be much lower, but I'm unaware of any recent association industry surveys about social media. Perhaps my buddy Ben Martin can help us out here.

My two take-aways from the survey:

1. Clearly, social media is important to the vast majority of these companies. It's not going away.
2. Blogging is a net positive. Even if most of the respondents felt it had a mixed effect, I've got to believe there are more positives than negatives, especially since not a single company responded that blogging was purely negative.

Forrester Research is an independent technology and market research company. Forrester recently released a list of its CRM "best practices." The list includes the following:

Forrester based this information on interviews with 22 executives to determine this list. I'm pleased to say that with the exception of the "governance structure" concept, I've been promoting all of these ideas to my clients for the past eight years. I've written about most of them (the links next to the bullets).

So now you know, it's not just me saying these things. Even Forrester Research has (finally) figured it out.

In this post I talked about IT salaries in the general population. At the time I wasn't aware that ASAE had updated their Association Compensation book, but now that I have a copy of it, I can report how the association salaries compare to the at-large IT population.

It's difficult to make an absolute apples-to-apples comparison, but based on the Global Knowledge IT survey and the ASAE study, when comparing the database adminstrator position, the numbers looked like this: $74,263 in the IT survey, $62,092 in the ASAE survey.

That's a $12K disparity, or a nearly 20% premium for the for-profit sector. As I said in the first post, if you're underpaying your technical staff, you're getting what you pay for.

A recent survey by Accenture found that the level of customer service that companies think they are providing their customers does not match what their customers believe. (See here for more info.) For example, in the survey, 75% of executives felt their customer service was moderately or extremely good, but 57% of consumers described themselves as upset or marginally to extremely dissatisfied with their experiences. Wow! That's a serious disparity.

The question for you, of course, is how does your perception match with your customers' perception? Most of us probably think we provide pretty good customer service. But do we? Are we asking? Do we have any idea what our customers and members think of our customer service? And frankly, do we really care?

The key distinction between associations and the technology companies surveyed here is that the technology customer can go to another company, but frequently our members cannot. Many associations have golden handcuffs on members (be it through certification or other products that can't be found elsewhere). This doesn't excuse poor customer service, but we're not going to see members vote with their feet. Although they may vote with their pocketbook by buying only the products they need from us (and that they can't get anywhere else).

So while our associations may not overtly suffer from poor customer service, they certainly won't grow as rapidly or successfully as they could with good customer service. But do you even know what they think about you?

I had not seen these stats before, but they are striking.

From a 2004 Gartner report entitled "CRM Demands Data Cleansing" (http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?ref=g_search&id=463228) a survey of 600 major enterprises in Australia, the UK, and the US:

• 75% of respondents reported significant problems as a result of defective data
• More than 50% incurred extra costs due to the need for internal reconciliations
• 33% failed to bill or collect receivables

That last one is absolutely amazing to me. Fully 1/3 of the respondents had some billing or collections issue due to bad data!

The good news is, you're not alone. Everyone has problems managing their data. The bad news is, everyone has problems managing their data.

As organizations, we must do better than this. For the vast majority of associations, there is no excuse for failing to bill or collect receivables. When I've seen this happen (and I have, believe me) it's more likely due to bad process than bad data.

Take a look around your organization. Are you having these kinds of challenges? And if you are, what are you doing about it?

I received a complimentary copy of Global Knowledge's IT salary survey a couple of weeks ago. The survey covered over 1,600 IT professionals, and there were some interesting tidbits that may be relevant to the AMS world:

1. Average salary for the title database admin/analyst was $74,263.
2. Average salary for a project manager was $83,668.
3. Overall for all respondents, base salary was $71,556, plus an average bonus of $3,963.

The survey broke out salaries by industry, but associations/non-profits was not one of the categories. The closest was perhaps Education and Government (state/local), with average salaries for these of $57,544 and $61,535, respectively. Taking that state government average, that's a full $10K less than the overall average!

I don't know how this compares to actual association numbers (I don't think ASAE has done a salary survey in a couple of years) but if associations refuse to pay as high as the for-profit market, they're very likely to get below-average performance from their IT staff. I know, I know, there are exceptions to this (I've met many smart association IT folks. Some are even smart enough to hire me!), but overall, if you're underpaying, you're getting what you pay for.

How does your association stack up?

Gareth Herschel, research director at Gartner Inc, says: "There are two things to focus on to ensure CRM success. One is the notion that you are never done with CRM. Things are constantly evolving. The second notion is that it takes 18-24 months to change and reinforce the behavior of end users with new CRM software."

UPDATE: Link fixed: http://searchcrm.techtarget.com/qna/0,289202,sid11_gci1252855,00.html 

I agree completely that CRM (or in our case, AMS) mangement is never done. Databases evolve, the technology evolves, and the demands of our customers (both internal and external) evolve.

I think the 18-24 month adoption period is perhaps a bit long for most associations, given their relatively small staff sizes. Most associations have 50 staff or fewer; if you can't get adoption from that size organization in under two years, I think you have other issues.

I read an interesting report from CSO Insights. The report is a study on premise-based CRM products (e.g., Siebel, Oracle) as compared to on-demand CRM products (e.g., Salesforce.com, netSuite). The result of the study shows that on-demand customers have higher satisfaction ratings, did better on budget, and had dramatically shorter implementation times.

I find this interesting because the initial assumption could be that on-demand is better than on-premise implementations. I don't think that's a fair assumption, though. I think there's an "apples-and-oranges" thing going on here.

I think that on-demand customers are different from premise-based customers, in several key areas:

1. On-demand customers have lower customization needs. They can work with a more "vanilla" product.
2. On-demand customers have fewer in-house technical resources.
3. On-demand customers know that they have to give up some long-held processes in order to better conform to the on-demand product.

On the flip-side, premise-based customers probably want more control over the application, want to customize it to their needs, and may perceive that on-demand products do not provide enough flexibility or control. So in the end, these are two different types of customers.

So what does this have to do with the AMS world? Well some of the vendors (e.g., Avectra, ARC Solutions, Affiniscape) are offering on-demand products. And they're pretty slick. But I also think they are not appropriate for all organizations. You have to really know what you're getting into, and what you're willing to give up, when you commit to these products.