There is an old, over simplified business school adage that revolutionary information technologies are invented outside the USA (the World Wide Web in Europe, ERP, Contact Center Quality Management’s roots in Israel), funded out of New York, evolved on the West Coast but that the real practical usage and application is developed in the heartlands of the South, the Mid Atlantic (especially with the influence and spending power of the Federal Government) and the Mid West before really cashing out in Europe, Asia Pacific and ANZ.

There is an ever stronger move towards companies wanting to know, being able to analyze and even being willing to pay to know what customers are doing every minute of every day. While companies like Google can track an ever more interesting set of information on your internet interactions one of the most critical pieces of information will be where you are and what you are doing. Thanks largely to our friends at ATT Mobility Georgia has established itself as one of a half dozen leading centers of excellence in the use of Mobile technologies.

As the volume of customer information stored online increases there is also a strong move in companies towards separating general behavioral information (important) from information about what people are actually buying (critical).  With the growing importance of Georgia in financial technology and transaction processing thanks to the faith in our community shown historically by companies like Total Systems and more recently by First Data and our own rapidly growing Global Payments we will have more information about financial transactions than almost any other community in the world at our fingertips. That is transactions on the web, in stores or by phone.

Add to this Georgia’s historic leadership the use of information to help companies make smart decisions and improve business outcomes as evidenced by our historic market leaders like Dun & Bradstreet Software, Equifax and the long list of companies they spawned (Choicepoint becoming Lexis-Nexus, NDC Health and so on), Total Systems as already mentioned, Worldspan (now part of Travelport) in the travel industry, Mckesson Technology Solutions and some other leading healthcare providers and how many of us have paid attention to the rise of IntercontinentalExchange.

And finally if you want to store all this information and make it available globally you had better know how to secure that information. We have proven that with the growth of Internet Security Systems (now part of IBM).

If you haven’t read Technology Association of Georgia’s (TAG) State of The Industry Report for 2010 (http://www.tagonline.org/soir.php) take a look.

When you combine our leadership positions with a strong industry trend and hunger for all companies looking to move from Customer Relationship Management strategies to the delivery of actual, tangible business outcomes and results and Georgia is uniquely placed to be the global leader in this revolution. Watch this space. You could argue that is the 1990’s was the decade of Georgia as “home of the Olympics”, the 2000’s saw our growth as a business hub and emergence as a leading global city but the 2010’s will be the emergence of us as a global leader in applying these technologies to understand customer behavior and maximize the results gained from this insight.

With 27 years of global leadership in CRM and Customer Interaction strategies and 20 years residency in Georgia, Graham Clark is Chair-Person of TAG CRM, VP South USA for Touchbase USA, a global leader in optimizing business communications, collaboration and customer contact strategies, and founder of Customer Results LLC, a research and business enablement firm focused on helping companies move from CRM strategies to Customer Results Management strategies delivering tangible results and outcomes, they will issue their first publication and launch their website at www.customerresults.com at the end of 2010.