This post marks Virtusa’s fiftieth blog posting.  Starting in April of 2010, Virtusan’s have offered their insights into a wide variety of technology issues, trends and business challenges.  It seems fitting that our half century mark should come at the end of calendar year 2010.

The year 2010 saw the arrival of the mobile app as an indisputable force to be reckoned with.  With iPhone and Android app stores carrying hundreds of thousands of applications each, there is no denying that apps have arrived.  As we watch new mobile devices, new social sites, and slick new apps being released with blinding speed we are quite possibly witnessing an inflection point in human history.  Consider this time the dawn of the true technology era.  Like the Italian Renaissance, we have our artists and visionaries.  Instead of Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Galileo in Italy we have Gates, Jobs, Berners-Lee, Metcalf, Joy, Torvalds, AT&T Bell Labs, Xerox PARC and Silicon Valley.  One hundred years from now historians may look back at this time and declare this period of time the start of the technology revolution.  Star Wars and Matrix are our Mona Lisa and statue of David?  Scary.

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Well, one more momentous year for BPM is coming to an end. With many new possibilities of BPM applications and the overall awakening in the technology vendor market for BPM, we are seeing a significant change in BPM focus. It is a good time now to retrospect on the BPM developments during the year.

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Innovation is ingrained in all aspects of business and needs to be promoted, prompted and nurtured as a culture and a conscious activity. Most enterprises are facing the question of how do we bring a discipline around innovation and facilitate the process so that it does not remain as a branding or R&D activity.

As we scan the different industry segments, there are processes that cut across lead-to-order, order -to-cash, and trouble-to-resolve areas in all organizations. Each of these broader areas consists of many individual processes. In each of these processes, there is an opportunity to identify gaps or improvement areas around which innovation can be triggered. What are the innovation drivers? Launch of new products, improving the speed to market, optimizing costs, improving user experience and creating new markets are some of the drivers. Every step in an existing process that touches one of these should be tagged for promoting innovation. (more…)

This is in continuation to previous blog post “Actionable Web Analytics part-1”, in which we discussed about web analytics and its benefits. In this post we will discuss some more benefits.

1.   Trial to non-trial conversion

All the trial users can be effectively monitored by their application usage so that eventually they can be converted to subscribed/paid users. Using web analytics one can:

a.   Identify critical success factors for trial to non-trial user conversion such as frequency of usage and which features are being tested by the user etc

b.   Analyze the failed cases and make the program robust by focused marketing and training efforts to the trial users who are using the application sparingly. (more…)

Web analytics has evolved to become a serious business now. Gone are the days when web analytics was something you just added on to your application as an afterthought but today, it is considered a major feature that gets discussed up front in business circles when planning for a Web application and building a business case. What exactly is driving this tremendous change for Web analytics? To answer that we need to review the myriad business benefits you can get out of Web analytics provided you have planned and designed for it.

Web analytic tools can collect, analyze, measure and report on Internet data which will help in understanding user behavior and application usage. The data captured using other sources, like CRM tools, can only help inform reactive action and not proactive measures. For example, it is possible to identify how many users cancelled their subscriptions using tools like sales force, but not how many users will cancel. With Web analytics, customer usage patterns and associated pain points can be identified up front and that can help companies be proactive about those pain points and, hopefully, in the end game, retain those “at risk” subscriptions.  But, that is just one example out of many more “business benefits” you can expect to get out of using web analytics. (more…)