Local solutions are only part of the answer

Ken Banks has a great write up in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on the most recent Mobile for Good Conference. In it he talks about the tendency of Western development to throw technological solutions at problems in the developing world without knowing the environment. This isn’t only a problem of development organizations. Most Fortune 500 businesses have had very expensive failures where a technology solution was applied to solve a problem without first considering the real problems stakeholders face. 

Customer journey mapping for the BoP, or Amadou Hates his Pump

In my last post, I explained how to develop the customer experience lifecycle, the touch points inside of each lifecycle, and the need for clearly assigned responsibilities. In this post, I will explain how to explore each touchpoint from a customer’s perspective.  We do this through journey mapping. Ideally, you should have a workshop made up of a mix of customers and employees. You also want the functional areas that will be responsible for a given touchpoint to be represented so you can insure you have buy-in during the design process.

Customer lifecycle mapping helps deliver on promises made

Think about a company you like to do business with. Have you ever thought of what your lifecycle as a customer is with that company? First, you probably identified a need for something, and you investigated your options for addressing that need. Once you found a company you think could fulfill that need, you started a conversation with them, found their features and benefits they offered satisfied your need, and you bought from them.

NextBillion and the agenda for this week

I have a guest post this week on NextBillion. It’s a website that focuses on enterprises targeting the base of the economic pyramid (BoP), a concept that first became discussed in academic and business circles through C.K. Prahalad’s book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

Reprint of Glen's NextBillion.net post from 1/14/2013

The post below is a reprint of the recent article I wrote for NextBillion.net. To see the orginial post, please click here.

Base of the pyramid (BoP) organizations may arguably have some of the best intentions the private sector has to offer. But even they don’t always get it right. As the Grameen Foundation’s Leo Tobias pointed out on NextBillion recently, Grameen has long used mobile phones as a point of access for the BoP. But the organization has learned that 22 percent of their customers may not even own their own handsets, so they’re either shut out of Grameen’s mobile money solution or vulnerable to security risks if they use someone else’s handset to transfer funds.

Can Big Data be trusted to represent frontier market populations?

This week, at the WorldBank’s Big Stats meeting , they discussed the need for governments to look closely at how big data can be applied to official statistics. Big data allows for quick results that provide really interesting answers that come out of questions asked of unstructured questions. On the other hand, official statistics take sometimes years to compile, are often out of date, but are usually trustworthy.

But what happens when you look at frontier markets? Does big data still have the same appeal, since so much of it is dependent on tracking through social networks accessible by only some of the population?

Why do we trust Facebook with our data more than the government?

Do you trust Facebook more than the government? Facebook openly knows a lot about you, and much of it is information people would never report to the government. Don't believe me? Sign up for Wisdom on Facebook, and then do a data search using the Wisdom network: what you will see is an annonymized version of the info Facebook knows about you and