News & Events

March 30 - April 1, 2011 | Los Angeles, CA | JW Marriott LA Live

Sara Roberts is invited to present her workshop on 'Change management: creating a customer-centric culture' for a group of CMOs and strategic-level marketers at Gartner's 2011 Customer 360 event.

Description of her workshop:

Truly customer centric organizations are designed from the outside in. Every decision is made with the customer in mind. Service and retention has equal or higher priority than sales. They are zealots about the integrity of their brand and they empower their employees so they might respond quickly to customer needs.

In reality though most companies are far from this. Many are internally focused navel gazers so fixated on financials, product features, and price they’re unable to really achieve the customer loyalty they long for.

To become customer centric, it will take the vision, values and the accompanying change management strategies to effectively align your people, organization structure, processes, incentives, products all to the customer. This interactive session will explore:

• Considerations for creating a vision, mission and values focused on customer value
• Defining “customer-centric” operationally - establishing metrics that define success and the right behaviors to reinforce
• Strategies for putting people first – how that translates to employees and empowering them to fulfill customer needs
• Aligning organizational systems and practices to ensure employees can deliver against the brand

Additional speakers at the event include Bernd Schmitt, Ph.D. Professor at Columbia Business School and Don Tapscott, renowned thought leader and Chairman of Moxie Insight.

Learn more at their website >> http://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/na/customer-360/index.jsp

February 16, 2011

Sara Roberts will be speaking at Enterprise 2.0's Virtual event where the theme is 'leveraging social software and a culture of collaboration to drive business performance.'

Her presentation titled 'Employee Experience 2.0 – Engaging Employees through Collaboration Tools in the Workplace' describes how some of the world's top companies (...and their clients) are creating engagement and driving change across their enterprises.

Other speakers include:

• John Hagel III, Co-author, The Power of Pull and Co-Chairman, Center for the Edge, Deloitte & Touche
• Christian Finn, Director for Collaboration and Enterprise Social Computing, Microsoft
• Sameer Patel, Partner, Sovos Group and blogger, PretzelLogic.org
• Kimberly Edwards, Collaboration Program Manager, Open Text
• Meghan Scott, Senior Manager, Yum! Know-How & Innovation Center, Yum Brands

Find more information and register for this free event >> http://www.e2conf.com/

For his October 28, 2010 article, 'ECM implementation efforts need focus on interoperability, end users,' News Editor, Mark Brunelli, quotes Sara Roberts on ways to effectively navigate change for enterprise content management initiatives.

To read the full article, click here http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/news/2240024133/ECM-implementation-efforts-need-focus-on-interoperability-end-users

Excerpt:

....to ensure end-user adoption of new ECM technology, analysts say organizations need to keep a cross-section of rank-and-file business users involved in the decision-making process from start to finish. But getting high-level executives on board can present a major challenge, even if they’re the ones who approved the project in the first place, said Sara Roberts, founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Roberts Golden Consulting, which focuses on change management issues.

Immersing business users in an ECM implementation
“When you talk about change management for ECM, you absolutely have to focus a lot of your efforts on the management and leadership layer,” Roberts said. ”Because let’s face it, managers are really the most influential people in an employee’s day-to-day working life.”

One way to get both business users and executive leadership invested in a new ECM implementation is to conduct technology “immersion sessions,” Roberts said, describing them as similar to training sessions but longer and much more interactive.

“You would bring those [users] into the room and let them play with the technology,” she said. “It’s kind of fun because it gives them a non-threatening environment where they can learn to really understand [the technology] and be able to see the business applications and the use cases right then and there.”

A final method of ensuring ECM uptake is to work closely with end users and executives to help them understand that the new functionality has the potential to make their jobs much easier.