Needs and Insight lead the way

This article has been revised to explore a practical aspect of the Cultural Fusion project and it's connection to iFOSSF and FOSS. When Alterian, a marketing software company, asked marketing service providers about their top challenges the results were no surprise. The primary five were analytics, data acquisition, database management, lead management and track ROI. Industry leaders seem to agree that the demand is for integrated-single serve solutions and this is leading providers to make strategic alliances.

Something I’ve not seen quite as much discussion about is the value of uniting marketing software and strategy to CRM strategy, because obviously CRM technology is the heart of sales software solutions. To refute this is in my opinion is to prevaricate the reality that failure to approach them holistically is nothing short of shortsighted, often denying consideration for the larger ecosystem in which the enterprise has to thrive.

Developing integrated answers to this jumble of defined challenges and needs points towards the need to identify the company’s core humanistic/social values. This in turn leads to expanding the idea of profitability to include social capital that can be leveraged for sustainability of the business and the context in which it has to operate/grow.

At the same time this means that new metrics and analytical tools must be developed to subsume this expanded understanding. It is clear that continuing to do business as usual is not the only alternative; in fact abiding short sided approaches to growth is guaranteed to create more problems simply because it is counterproductive it is destined not to be sustainable.

Now that Cultural Fusion is firmly underway my attention is being drawn towards the need for companion tools for calculating and analyzing the ROI of this conceptual framework where the definition of profitability is expanded and represented systematically. I think that points to a clear next phase for the work i've been engaged in.

Several weeks ago I was very excited about a very interesting application I ran across that I felt could work for some aspects of this project. However what is really needed is a FOSS based solution to measure and standardize quality assurance, promote transperency, reduce contract managment and monitoring costs, and support new metrics directly related to the significance of this project (and new product development) to serve the private and public sectors.

If the lessons learned thus far are any indicator (and they are) then the tools will emerge as the core concept evolves and gains attention then support. Especially if such interest exist within the FOSS community. With iFOSSF at the helm as the lead ICT partner for the Cultural Fusion series, new members are invited to submit proposals for collaboration. This is not only an invitation to contribute the technical development but the philosophical as well.

This project addresses art as the intuitive, while business is the technical expression of the opposite pole...ICT is one available bridge in my mission of:

"Developing work that shares informed insight into the impact on the social and business landscape when unique attention and awareness as expressed in exclusive products which represent creativity as an asset within a re-envisioning of the capitalist framework that embraces radical inclusion in a philosophical and economic approach."