Imagine No Points!

Once again one of my newer favorite voices on SCN has caused me to launch the ultimate response to his question:
http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/20660

The post was about why have the number of active contributors measured by points dropped and do we care. My answer is I would love to see that number drop to zero. Whoa.. you mean no contributions on SCN? Actually what I mean is that points are no longer rewarded period.

Y'all know if you are reading this how points evolved on SCN. The problem is that in order to move the community forward we need to grow beyond points for contributions. We must acknowledge to grow quality contributions we need to eliminate the point motivations.

Now everyone is going to say points are a currency or points motivate people, or without points things would stop happening. Guess the sky won't fall if we got rid of the points and figured out a new system of exchange.

What I propose is that you need to earn the right to ask by sharing. The system is simple to consume/retrieve content you need credits. Each consumption to unlock the content requires 1 credit. When you join the site you get a monthly allowance of credits to view content. This is prevent gaming of earning the credits. To earn credits you can do the following:

- Answer a question
- Rate an answer or other content
- Provide content in forum of a blog or wiki or article
- Participate in community driven events online or in person

Credits can also be traded or given to other members as needed. You might give a fellow member a credit to view the content that you just created.

Sweet now we have community where you have to participate in some fashion to gain full access. Technically this would be probably hard to implement and keep track of, but this would give the incentive to participate without asking people to achieve any type of artificial goals.

Like my favorite song title "You get what you give" this would truly require all of us to participate in order to get a benefit.

I'm posting this on my personal blog, because honestly this is more of a revolutionary statement, than working within the system.

Let me know what you think.

Radio Silence

For the last three weeks, it feels like I have gone into radio silence mode without much explanation. I thought I blog real quick what has been personally happening with me so those of you following me know what's happening.

For a quick recap let's review my 2010 so far:

January 2010 - My son Zachary(2nd child) was born on the 12th. It's been a busy household adjusting to two kids

February 2010 - Calm before the storm. We finally get into a routine with Zachary and Emily and life is flowing with the new normal. Little did I know that things would change again in about two weeks

March 2010
The first big issue is that Zachary has bad reflux and is not gaining a lot weight and has a ton of spit up. We find out after his two month appointment. I end up taking a half day off work to help my wife deal with the reflux issues after his doctor appointment. Good news now is that it seems to be under control now and he is finally showing more weight gain.

The second piece is that I found a new opportunity and will be leaving my current employer and be joining a new company. As I get more settled in that position I will talk about the transition as my job role will be changing from what I am currently doing at my present employer. As you can imagine it's been very busy winding down my old position and getting ready for the new position.

That's the short summary of what has been happening and I will post more later in the future.

Take care,

Stephen

Rainy October

It feels like I need to build an ark with all the rain happening around here lately. It almost parallels what I have been up to lately, so let's do a recap
- Future of SAP CRM webinar
- ASUG Virtual Education Summit session recording
- Vacation in San Diego
- ASUG Virtual Education Summit chat session
- SAP Teched Phoenix for the SAP Mentor Program
- My daughter's 3rd birthday

Yeah that is probably more than enough with everyday life. Which reminds me also I'm also helping my wife get ready for our second child due in January.

Green/Sustainable CRM

So eventually I'm going to blog on this topic on SCN. However until all my research is done, let's outline a few concepts:

Drive to eBusiness

Sales

• e-Commerce real time retail availability

Prevent consumers from making unnecessary trips by providing up to date in store inventory.

• electronic mailing

Send out all communications via electronic methods

• webinar based selling

Conduct followup "sales visit" using web conferencing and reduce number of physical trips

• paperless discounts

Eliminate all paper based discounts, including coupons and rebates.

Marketing

• Communication preferences

Keep customer preferences up to date and gear people towards electronic medium. Only use physical marketing materials when preference expressed

• electronic mailing

Once again use electronic channel to reduce junk mail etc. Offer different types of e-goodies to replace traditional promo items given out

• improve targeting

Reduce physical materials by better segmentation and analytics

Service

• e-Service requests

All documentation regarding service etc.. in electronic format. Paper copy optional

• self service / improve scheduling

Allow self service scheduling of appointments + early cancel mechanism via web.

• remote diagnostics

Provide more remote troubleshooting capabilities when possible.

Consumer Habits
Default to electronic channel, paper on request only

End of June

Wow it is almost the end of June and things have gone by so quickly. I'm looking back at this month and realizing that I have about 4 works till my Anniversary trip with Karon and 8 weeks until vacation.

I'm looking forward to vacation as I'm going back to San Diego with Karon and get to take Emily out there with us. Karon and myself love San Diego and went there on our honeymoon. It will be special to take our daughter out there to see everything out there.

I'm also have been gradually working on getting the room that acts as my office in my house ready to be painted. Unfortuantely there is a lot of junk that needs to be moved out, packed up and some of gotten rid of. However I have a few weeks to get the room fully ready, and by the end of this week I plan on packing/moving another bookshelf out, plus empty most of the closet.

Well I probably should get going here, but I will post more later on some CRM related topics when I think of something good.

Take care.

Thank you and other thoughts

I wanted to follow up and once again thank in generally everyone who sent their congratulations and thank yous after the SAP Mentor News. I'm impressed with how friendly/welcoming all the SAP Mentors have been. The group itself is quite impressive, so it is quite a honor just to get to associate with this group of people :)

I think I have been given a great chance to learn, but also help other people grow. Here is what I would like to try to accomplish during my year term as a SAP Mentor.

Community Goals
- Further build the CRM online community by encouraging blogging, wiki gardeners and participation beyond answering questions in the forums.
- Continue to grow the CRM online knowledgebase(wiki, blogs, and wikis) so that common questions can be found easily and discussions grow more technical
- Attempt to bring people who won't participate on SCN due to "noise/other issues" to participate, even if on a irregular basis
- Spread the word about SAP Mentor Program and the value of participating in the SCN community to help better enhance/maintain/install your SAP software implementation.

Personal goals
- Get to know/communicate with other SAP Mentors and SCN community members on a more regular basis, including those outside of my area of expertise
- Organize some type of community call for CRM open to all SCN community members
- Further develop my CRM knowledge understanding
- Have fun while trying to accomplish all the goals, and not take myself or anything way too seriously.

Feeling Better and SAP Mentor

Well it has been interesting last couple of days. I'm now feeling almost 100% after getting sick last week, which is good considering I'm done with the meds prescribed. The weekend was interesting as my wife's car has been in the shop since Saturday and hopefully it will be finished tomorrow. In addition my father broke his arm on Saturday and is still trying to recover from that issue.

The last couple days have been busy as we over at my parents on Sunday to visit my dad. Monday night I headed over again to help getting his wireless setup and moving some furniture. Tuesday was taking care of the household, and tomorrow if it doesn't rain I'm hoping to cut the yard again. Thursday is the wing ding at Bass Pro near my house, so the week is pretty jam packed.

On the work aspect of life I found out on Friday from a phone call that I was selected as a SAP mentor. I had the first welcome call this Monday, which was pretty interesting. I'm still working on my prep work for the welcome call. I have a rough draft done for now, but need to formalize part of it. In addition I'm finally starting the last phase of my user conversion projects. All I can say is that I don't enjoy spending several hours in excel preparing all the source files for the conversion. Don't ask my why I'm doing it, besides the fact that it just needs to get done. It beats waiting for project requirements, but that is another long story.

So if I haven't been as "active" lately it because things have been quite busy. The good news is that I'm finishing up my backlog so things will get back to "normal" again.