Summary
This post should serve as a generic jump off point for companies with varying degrees of drag within their application and infrastructure portfolio.
As a useful exercise, complete the sentence:
This year, my business commits to spend more money for less _____.
As long as a business continues to use on-premise technology, feel free to add any relevant word to the end of the sentence - Security (check), Productivity (check), Scalability (check), Integration (check).
By continuing to operate on-premise, businesses are trapped in a proverbial ‘box’ that ironically, needs ‘outside the box’, hosted, on-demand solutions as a means of providing remedy.
The following list of 3 items are provided in an effort to provide a preliminary roadmap on where to focus attention in an effort to radically improve business operations’ agility.
1. Drive Operational Efficiency and Effectiveness – applications, infrastructure, and personnel supporting technology and day-to-day business processes. Services include document authoring (ppt/doc/visio/xls), resource & document collaboration (inlcuding video conferencing, Calendar & Resource management, and Intranet/Portal Definition and management. Additionally, it is assumed these services need be made available on any workstation, laptop, mobile device seamlessly, asynchronously and instantaneously.
What are we solving for?
- Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery – redundancy is expensive when contained within traditional on-premise solutions. Similarly, keeping internal resources on call/at the ready to manage the care and feeding of applicable infrastructure (patch/repair/release mgt) adds incremental drag to an organization’s ability to be(come) more agile, nimble, and react to the constantly changing market opportunities and conditions.
- Resource Alignment – Generally speaking, traditional IT resources tend to be greater parts expense than innovation. An agile/lean company derives a degree of innovation on par with (or, ideally, greater than) expense. A proven method/means of further extending and challenging the existing resource pool is change. Rid yourself of the burden of on-premise technologies/responsibilities and transform the DNA of IT from supporters of aging technologies to innovative, thought-leaders, and integrators of/for the business processes they already know inside out.
- Expense Reduction – IT has rarely, if ever, been touted as a revenue generating part of the business. To be fair, the technology, security, and viability of on-demand/hosted products has only become a more relevant and dependable solution for businesses in the past 3-5 years. Infrastructure comes with costs. Transactionalize your business by moving to a secure hosted model (see 2:15 into preso) and reduce your hardware maintenance, licensing, and support costs by (as much as) half.
Which products should be considered? Choose between viable SaaS options – any consideration of an on-premise upgrade or installation is, honestly, career suicide as well as being downright irresponsible
- Google Apps - $5/month/user (features) for SMB
- Microsoft 365 - $6/month/user (features) for SMB
- LotusLive - $X/month/user (features) for SMB (more an ala carte pricing alternative)
Recommendation = Google Apps (choosing any other option is akin to asking your parents if they’d mind parting with their old Dodge Caravan.)
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2. Build/Extend Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – a widely implemented strategy for managing a company’s interactions with customers, clients and sales prospects.
What are we solving for?
- Data/Reporting - an agile operation requires a better set of optics given the various methods, mediums, and channels both prospects and customers use as vehicles to aggregate information, make buying decisions, voice concerns or sing praises.
- Binding Pipeline with Operations/Delivery/Support – ‘sell the dream and I’ll support the nightmare’ isn’t the best recipe for growing a business. Successful implementations of CRM provide pipeline visibility to all other parts of the organization. The value in so doing is better preparedness which leads to retention of both customers and internal human capital.
- Competitive Advantage -Having (or extending) Customer Relationship Management as a form or promoting, tracking, and reacting to prospects and customer needs has quickly moved from option to necessity. Companies who fail to quickly adopt and introduce CRM into their daily operations will quickly find themselves outpaced by competitors who do.
Which products should be considered (using Salesforce professional edition as benchmark)?
- Salesforce.com - $65/month/user (features)
- Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online - $44/month/user (features)
- Oracle OnDemand - $75/month/user (features)
Recommendation = Salesforce.com (innovation, scale, cost, community, and the roadmap/product inclusiveness for/in support of the social enterprise has it roots in Salesforce.com – what Google has done/is doing with Mail, Salesforce.com has done/is doing with CRM)
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3. Join the Social Enterprise – The Social Enterprise exists to provide request and response with influence being the z-axis; a recommendation and retaliation engine contained within individual ecosystems. Will the company you’ve spent years developing offline loyalty around be on-par in the social space? The answer depends, in part, on what and how you engage in the Social Enterprise.
What are we solving for?
- Customer Experience – share your dirty laundry and don’t be afraid of how bad it stinks. The by-product and benefit of becoming more transparent as a social-enterprise revolves around the positive impact on your brand and bottom line. Cable Operators have become quite useful with this tool during an outage – simply ‘tweet’ or ‘update status’ that their experiencing an issue in area codes 73123 and 78532 and the followers located in this zip code are aware of the fact the issue is known, being worked on, subsequent updates and, upon resolution, root cause (as/if applicable).
- Expense Reduction – continuing the Cable Co analogy, one of the by-products of being transparent is the action (tweet) and applicable impact on call volume. Presumably most cable customers would rather not talk to their operator – by knowing the issue is being addressed, the phone call becomes less critical to filling the customer’s need bank.
- Authority – take your industry knowledge and fuel/fan the fire thereby socially staking your claim; establishing your business’s reputability and increasing its credibility. This isn’t an insignificant accomplishment. The customer’s habits are quickly shifting. They’re moving away from traditional seek/find (aka-search) methods to using the social networks and influencer’s opinions to drive and dictate buying behavior. That said, it would seem illogical a prospect would base a $100,000 investment on the contents of 140 characters. However, variables such as the aggregate collection of 140 characters combined with the number of followers will certainly add credence to the business/brand identity and overarching value proposition/proposal.
Which products should be considered to assist/supplement a Social Enterprise strategy?
