Issue 5 October 2008
For example, Jet Blue
5
, an American airline, has set as the ability to introduce software into the company
up an account on Twitter
6
and they listen for customer by prototyping and rapidly iterating solutions. Using
comments about their service. So if you’re on Twitter an adoption led approach rather than a procurement
and you send a message that says ‘I just had a terrible driven approach would mean that you would reduce
Jet Blue experience’, within a few minutes you’re quite implementation cycle times and enable choice in
likely to get Jet Blue responding ‘I’m sorry to hear that. the procurement of service, support, warranty and
What went wrong? How can we make it right for you?’. indemnity services.
Their competitors just don’t deliver that service.
Secondly, based on my experience as a customer
Another company that’s doing a particularly good of RBS for quite a long time, RBS Group is not the
job is actually one of Sun’s competitors, Dell. At their easiest company to interact with. I would like to
IdeasStorm website
7
, they invite customers to suggest see you experimenting with things like listening for
and vote on the products and service changes they’d customer comments on blogs, on Twitter and on
like to see. Another surprising example is the UK Instant Messaging.
Cabinet Office, which has a very fine petition website
8

where citizens can set up petitions and public voting is Also, where are your employee blogs? You’ve got
used to prioritise policy issues. loads of brilliant people who work at RBS. Liberate
them, get them out there talking to customers, talking
And then finally I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Sun. about their work, talking about how they’re changing
We’ve now set up blogs.sun.com
9
, wikis.sun.com
10
and the bank. Use them to improve your engagement with
other employee facilities. We’ve got over five thousand the marketplace by directly engaging employees rather
employees routinely engaging with customers about the than always relying on the twentieth century idea of PR
products that they’re working with. and Marketing.
bw» and to finish, let’s pretend for a minute that bw» you’ve left us with a good challenge. simon
it’s your first day at your new job at royal bank Phipps, thank you very much.
of scotland Group, what are the first things you’d
do?
1 http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
2 http://www.schneier.com/
3 http://research.sun.com/people/diffie/
sP» Well obviously the first thing you do in any job
4 http://Twitter.com/
5 http://www.jetblue.com/
at a new company is to shut up and listen for a while.
6 http://Twitter.com/jetblue
After that I would probably want to investigate two
7 http://www.dellideastorm.com/
areas in the bank.
8 http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/
9 http://blogs.sun.com/
10 http://wikis.sun.com/dashboard.action
One of them would be the degree to which you use
Open Source software and the benefits this brings such
16 | Perspectives on technology
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