Improving It

The end of RIM is nigh

2012-01-23T09:19:00.000-05:00

I remember using a Blackberry for the the first time. My boss at the time was driving to meet a client, and I was riding shotgun. Of course, he had no idea where he was going, so he handed me the blue device and said "look in my email, you'll find their phone number". Without fear, I found the little thumbwheel thing did just what I expected. A big block moved up and down and pointed to just what I needed. The device was more intuitive than I could have imagined. Even when it came to opening a browser to find the elusive phone number, then just clicking the link to call it. I needed no instruction. It just worked. So, dear Blackberry makers, Research in Motion (RIM), what happened?

I'll admit that I remember that first Blackberry use more vividly than other tech experiences. So I understand why people (especially salesmen, bored in airports) got hooked. The 'crackberry' was addictive. People needed them. So what changed? It certainly wasn't the Windows Mobile devices, which looked similar, but had the intuitiveness of a brick.

Well, the Appboy blog claims that you can blame the late, great Steve Jobs, not for changing the mobile market (at least not in this context), but for being the presenter and imperfect idol that he was. He just set the bar too high for RIM executives. His flair and presentation, his innovation, just made it impossible for a little accidental success like RIM to survive. Certainly an interesting take on it, and a scathing judgement of the new CEO.

Then of course, there is the likelihood that there were Blackberry users who wanted a big screen device (those were the days when mobile phones were getting smaller, not bigger) that felt solid and real. They weren't Blackberry fans though, and quite easily were taken by the bigger screen iPhone. Close to useless for business people in its initial form, with poor email support, virtually unusable calendar and a single mobile carrier (AT&T) unable to manage the load. So the few accidental Blackberry users who didn't really care about corporate email moved to iPhone, the masses moved to iPhone and the mobile market changed beyond recognition.

But, Blackberry should still have had a grip on the business market. It had infrastructure to support them, and an apparently intimate knowledge of how their users could make subtle shifts of their thumbs to control their electronic world. No repetitive strain inducing swiping a whole hand to scroll through your email. Typing in a moving car on potholed Boston roads was possible with a real raised keyboard (as long as you weren't driving). But still RIM lost the plot.

A touch screen Blackberry was a nice idea, though you couldn't exactly type in a car any easier than an Android. The Playbook was just stupid branding in my opinion, and apparently it didn't have a native email client, so it wasn't really a Blackberry, just a toy for the kids of Blackberry owners. It touted that it had support for Flash, just as Adobe announced that it was going to scale back development of Flash on mobile devices. Bad luck, or bad planning?

If RIM is to survive, seven minute monologues by the new CEO is not going to save them. Neither is another Playbook. As Appboy said, innovate, innovate and innovate some more. Hell, make a tablet called a Workbook with real email support. That's your market, so stop trying to expand out of the one you've got when you are barely keeping a grip on it.

I have to say, good luck to RIM. There will be disaster in corporate IT if you go away. Many people rely on getting their email through your servers. If the company goes, the infrastructure goes, and that possibly makes the devices instantly obsolete. Don't panic!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Aspen QR Code review - 100% fail!

2012-01-09T11:43:00.000-05:00

I had the pleasure of spending Christmas and the New Year in Aspen, Colorado, skiing. It was a great place, although Mother Nature could have lent a hand with some more snow. While I was there, I picked up some of the local free papers and glossy magazines, with the intention of testing my theory that advertisers and marketers are starting to understand the value of QR Codes and the importance of mobile friendly landing pages and websites. Aspen is a pricey place. Consumers are wealthy and many have ample free time to spend a small fortune. Extracting some of this fortune is the top priority of businesses. Advertising should be top-notch, right?

As you've probably guessed already from the title of this post, my theory that QR Codes have "come of age" was squashed. In the Aspen Daily News and the pull-out TimeOut supplement for December 23rd, there were only five advertisers that I spotted using QR Codes. In 56 pages. That says to me that QR Codes are by no means saturated yet. They are still unusual and readers of printed publications will still notice them.

Worse still, of the five QR Codes I noticed, only one scanned with my old iPhone 3G. A phone with autofocus might do better, so I'm not going to beat people up over my outdated technology. Target consumers in Aspen have the latest and greatest, so I'm just not representative. Still, two of them were completely unscannable even after digitally enhancing with photoshop. That's just a waste of ink. And my question is whether the people designing the ad even bothered to scan the QR Code on the proof before going to print.

Most distressing of all though - 100% fail - not one had a smartphone-friendly website sitting behind the QR Code. Beautiful websites they may have been when I got home and looked on my PC, but unusable on my phone. Why bother with a QR Code if you are going to send a visitor to a site that just annoys and frustrates them. Have them call you or email you instead to find out what they need.

A new years resolution for all print advertisers should be to investigate QR Codes. They stand out. And when done right, your company will stand out too.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

QR Code Blunders #2: Heinz Ketchup - Our Turn to Serve

2011-12-02T10:56:00.000-05:00

This is the second in the series of QR Code blunders, which I think is not as bad as the first, but a little unfortunate given the worthy goal. This time around, Heinz Ketchup features a QR Code on restaurant squeezy bottles of ketchup, which can be scanned to quickly help you support veterans. The idea is that you scan the QR Code, and either 'like' Heinz Ketchup on Facebook or send a veteran an electronic postcard, and Heinz will make a 57 cent donation to the Wounded Warrior Project.

Here is a photo of the bottle, sitting on the bar at a local watering hole. There is a nice blurb about the project and a decent sized QR Code to scan. Now, this restaurant has decent lighting, but I still have an older iPhone (the 3G), which does not have autofocus. Still, it can still take a decent enough photo and scan a reasonable QR Code. In this case though, the blunder is not in any of the instructions, or the size of the QR Code.

In this case the blunder is a simple one: the QR Code contains a full length URL (not a nice shortened one), so the number of blocks that make up the QR Code are a great many more than is necessary, making them too small for older phones to pick out clearly. I'm not the only person in the world still toting an older iPhone or Android, which is why this is unfortunate.

When I got home, I did a little image manipulation to see what the QR Code contained. Here is the link I managed to get out of it:

http://www.heinzketchup.com/rd/btrestaurant

And please do take a look. There is nice mobile friendly website under it, and more importantly you too can add your own little contribution through a like or an e-postcard.

What should the QR Code have looked like? Not like the one below that I extracted from the bottle. Way too many blocks.

Here is more what it should have looked like (I faked the blur and background on this for effect to show how larger blocks show up better). A shortened URL like the one that this contains ( http://cnsd.co/7vq ) takes just a few seconds to produce, and generates QR Codes that are readable in worse lighting by older phones.

Can't scan me? Browse to: cnsd.co/7vq instead

The rule is to always, always shorten a URL before creating a QR Code. This gives you three benefits:

a more readable image on more phones in poorer lighting or printing conditions
the advantage of being able to track scans (how many, when, location, etc)
a URL that is easier to type in on a mobile phone keypad if the user just can't scan the thing (11 characters rather than 40-ish)

For more information about QR Codes for effective mobile marketing and producing mobile websites to support them, visit http://consected.com/mobile

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

QR Code Blunders #1: Beck's Vier Ireland

2011-11-14T18:34:00.000-05:00

I've been meaning to start this series of blogs for ages, and tonight I realized that I had too big a blunder to miss. This is a QR Code blunder that is just too big to pass up. I'm currently in Dublin, Ireland, a land where competition for beer consumers could be considered to be large. Very large. So seeing a QR Code on the beer mat pictured here, I had to go with it.

The QR Code on the beer mat could be considered to be a smart marketing ploy (it is one I have suggested in the past and actually have a small, regional client in the UK doing). Imagine this following scenario. Think of grown men, in pubs in Dublin during the day, a bit bored while their friends go off to get another pint from the bar. Ooh, shiny object (QR Code), let's see what it does.

Well, in the case of the Becks example, not a helluva lot. Or if you have an older iPhone, even in great lighting (not renowned in pubs, anywhere), nothing at all. Beyond the fact that the QR Code is too small to scan and doesn't use a shortened URL, so it is more pixelated than it needs to be, there are a bunch of other failures:

the URL points straight to the Facebook page they want you to visit - there is no real way to track this action and see how many people scanned that QR Code, so who knows whether the beer mat QR Code campaign is working? Just the webmaster at Facebook and I don't think he's going to tell you that for free
the URL points straight to the Facebook page they want you to visit - "so you want me to login to the really slow mobile facebook page that my QR Code scanner sends me to so I can see the page? Oh look, here comes my pint. This thing is a joke."
the URL points straight to the Facebook page they want you to visit - I forgot, this is Dublin, and the Guinness has to settle on the bar twice as long. I had time to login to Facebook. First thing I see is some irrelevant post about architects having more creativity than artists. Or something unrelated to beer (despite the really small tag line I missed at the bottom of the beer mat about turning beer into art). "Childish male drinking humour almost kicked into my brain sitting waiting for my pint - art, rhymes with...? Ooh, pretty girl just walked past. Where am I?". No click on the Like link should be expected.

So my pint turns up, and Beck's still only has 2184 Facebook friends, and everybody thinks that QR Codes are a stupid idea. Not really, you just have to do them right and target your audience better.

Cheers to them for giving me a great example to kick off this series of QR Code blunders. And feel free to visit the Facebook page for the unreadable QR Code at http://www.facebook.com/becksvierireland (I had to take a photo with a good quality digital camera, then photo shop the image to get it to scan.)

I hope that Bulmers, the owners of the distribution rights to Beck's Vier, and eightytwenty/4D who announced with such pride that they are handling the digital activity for the Bulmers brands realize the error(s) of their ways. And its easy for me to criticize here and now without offering solutions to the problem, but let me suggest that QR Codes work if you actually try scanning them with a real phone, life-sized, before going to print. And you don't rely on Facebook for your MAS (minimum attention span) marketing to mildly intoxicated blokes.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Go Mobile, Global

2011-11-03T12:48:00.001-04:00

Google is finally shouting about mobile websites. They have released GoMo and are putting on a mobile event in Alabama to start pushing businesses to convert their regular websites to a smartphone-friendly format. At Consected, we feel we need to crash the party, although we're not going to Alabama. We're not even going on the road. Read on to find out about our global party-crashing plans...

Google probably feels it can focus on mobile websites having reached a milestone with the Android platform, overtaking Apple and the iPhone as the operating system the majority of smartphones are running. They have 200,000 apps on the Android marketplace, although a large proportion of these are meaningless copies of poorly performing websites, with little or no advantage to Google in promoting their advertising. So Google has (rightly in my opinion) decided that real, mobile-friendly websites need a little helping hand. and GoMo is the way they are shouting about it - along with some expensive sponsored listings from vendors who they claim can get businesses going fast. But before you go, let's revisit why you want a mobile website and not just an app.

A mobile website helps every potential customer who wants to use a service, not just the limited number who have a phone that works with the app. Apps are great for software developers who have a contract from big corporates to build them, first on iPhone, then on Android, then maybe a Blackberry version. Apps are great for consumers playing games and using real productivity applications (think of Excel on your phone). They are completely unnecessary for the majority of mobile marketing requirements (I don't need an app to search for special offers from my favorite retailer, TalFart). And, as people are starting to find out, many apps don't work well on tablets like the iPad or Galaxy Tab, well unless you like a pokey little mobile phone sized app in the middle of your large screen, or want to pay the developer even more money.

Holsworthy Ales mobile site
A very recent new client

Having a mobile website is essential if you have a business with customers on the go. So feel free to try out some of the services that are being touted through the Google website. Please accept a little advice though -- spend some time really looking at the result. A nice menu, all the text from your website pasted blindly on the page, much of it irrelevant to a customer trying to find you on her smartphone. Everything else stacked at the bottom, as the robot creating your site didn't know what to do with it. And really very little control over the end result (pink or blue is about the choice). This is why Consected wants to crash the mobile party. A mobile website is not just a vertical version of your current website. It needs some TLC and a real person.

Here is where we crash the Google GoMo party. We will create a custom mobile website, by hand (think of an artisan mobile website) for any customer who prepays for a 12 month mobile website hosting service with us. You'll get:

a real, working, zero effort mobile website
a home page following the style of your current website
a contact page with "tap to call", "tap to map", "tap to SMS", and links to your Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn pages
up to three pages describing your services or products (we'll even edit the text to make it useful and concise)
your logo in the header
ad-free and our logo does not appear anywhere on the page
QR codes for every page
your own domain name linked to the site
free access for you to login and change any part of the website you desire

You don't have to be in Alabama to claim it. You don't even have to be in the US. The time for us to build the website by hand exceeds the value of the hosting service, making the mobile site effectively free. Free is a pretty good deal for a mobile website that looks professional, useful and something you can use to promote your business.

To join us in crashing the Google GoMo party, and claim your own mobile website, built by hand, just fill in this quick form: http://cnsd.co/5n5

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Mobile, local and loyal - small business customers

2011-10-11T09:14:00.002-04:00

Local, mobile and loyalty.Deals for real people

Many people are saying that the daily-deals sites like Groupon are struggling, especially after they turned down a once in a lifetime $6BN opportunity to be acquired by Google and had to drop a proposed IPO. The reason I believe is that consumers are maturing, or maybe just reverting to human nature. We shop, eat and enjoy ourselves more when we don't have to travel halfway across the country to do so. Daily deals give the impression of offering local offers, but local just means Massachusetts or Ireland, not Boston or Dublin. People are getting tired of this and so the announcement today by theadmenu.com about a new local online service [also see the Irish Press Releases site] is really interesting. I've been working with theadmenu.com for a little while now, so this makes it even better!

If you run a small business, a shop, restaurant, bar, hair salon, car dealership or lunchtime deli, you know that your customers typically come live or work close by. They are local. Since you have the type of business where the number of feet through the door is proportional to the amount of business you do, you know that you need to catch the attention of people on the move. Your potential customers are mobile.

The thing that many small businesses struggle with is persuading customers to come back again and again. Your most profitable customers are not one-offs, they provide repeat business and so you need loyalty. Beyond one on one exceptional customer service, loyalty is hard to promote. But we all know that there is big business in loyalty, since every big brand store, every airline, even the railways have loyalty programs. The question is how can smaller businesses get in on this?

TheAdMenu, the new service I've been working with, is based in Dublin, Ireland and aims to address "local, mobile and loyalty" for local businesses. It is quite simply a mobile-friendly website that uses the location services of smartphones (also known as GPS, geolocation, satnav, etc) to help customers find the services they want in the local area, at the best price possible. And it then takes the one-off special offers, and helps customers and businesses benefit from loyalty, by making it easy for business to provide repeat promotions to existing customers, and customers to find out what deals or new services their favorite shops are offering.

Mobile sites, like the cities that will be represented by theadmenu.com should be targeted at their local audience, not just a way to try and sell the same old stuff to bored commuters across the country with iPhone or Android in hand. With Consected mobile sites technology, I'm proud to be helping TheAdMenu deliver simple loyalty programs to local business that want to attract and retain mobile customers.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Apple does little but keeps app developers busy

2011-10-05T09:54:00.000-04:00

Apple collected a lot of tech reporters together for an event to make a big announcement. Everybody held their breath, guessing at what the next big revolutionary change would be in the mobile space. What huge leap would we see in smartphone technology? According to Mobile Marketer's Chantal Tode, this amounted to not a lot except that the Apple iOS update poses challenges to existing apps in App Store. Yes, there is an iPhone 4GS, the next version of the ever popular smartphone, but its not ground-breaking. Instead, it was time for the operating system software, the "face of the phone" to move forward.

And this represents a dilemma for many people. Unless you are desperate, you're not going to buy a 4GS, knowing that the chance is greater than ever of an iPhone 5 with a great new screen and cool new stuff being just around the corner. If you are the owner of the iPhone 3 (like me), with a device that is running slower and crashing more than ever, will you even have access to the new iOS upgrade to hopefully fix some of your issues introduced by Apple's previous update? That could give your phone a few months more life (hopefully not screw it up even more), perhaps putting you in the running for an iPhone 5 (not me, I'm going to try Android next time).

And for app developers, the guys and girls building all the apps you find in the App Store, the 200 new features that could help some apps work better, break others, and finally completely replace others still, make for a busy time. The iOS software is tired, it need some TLC to make it more desirable, and hopefully add some of the missing essential business features (rich text emails for example). It needs to allow me to get notified of things that are going on with less pop ups. But any major change to an operating system represents a challenge for developers. In testing, in new development to benefit from new features, in quick fixes and late nights.

Of course, if you don't want to have to worry if your business's mobile app will work on iPhone 4GS, 5, Android, Windows Mobile, etc, etc, then it is worth considering developing using open standards like HTML5. Otherwise known as good old "web development". With some work, a mobile optimized website can avoid the constant arms race against for each vendor you want to support, giving you a consistent, easy to use and highly functional mobile website or app.

Thanks Apple, I won't hold my breath until your next big smartphone breakthrough. Mobile web optimized apps are already on their way, and companies like Consected are making them more about configuration and self-contained solutions, and less about development.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Being mobile is having a location

2011-09-12T13:21:00.000-04:00

Location matters, even online. We are social creatures. We love interaction with real people. We don't just "like", we love people that we have conversations with (even on Twitter and Facebook). This human nature extends to "being local". It is not just for reducing a carbon footprint that people are interested in local businesses. We like our communities, and we love the businesses that serve them well. Yeah, we can all jump in the car and drive for an hour to the big box store. But there is a warm feeling that comes from chatting to a local shop owner before buying something, then stopping for a coffee at the local cafe, or a pint at the pub. So how on earth does this work when you are online?

It is alright to have an online personality. OK, its better than alright, it is essential, if you want to be part of the social media conversations that people crave. So if you have a personality online, why can't you have a location too? Everybody recognizes that your presence is faked if you appear to be online 24 hours a day. Instead you are somebody real if you are in a location that finally recognized it was time for the sun to set and you to go offline. That is only one way to have the appearance of "location". If you truly are a local business, one that requires people to inhale the aroma of your coffee as they sit and enjoy sipping it, or discussing the merits of this widget over that one when fixing a blocked drain, then you need to go a step or two further.

As a local business, having a website is essential, even though 99.999% of the world's population will find it irrelevant. But you do want your online presence to be relevant to 100% of your local population and visitors who might want to make use of your services. For this, your website needs to do three things:

1) help people find you

2) help people learn more about how you can help them

3) help people remember you

Maybe you'll be surprised that being local to people online is easy. In fact, you can be closer to potential customers than perhaps you would like to be in reality: nestled in their pockets and purses. Yep, you need to be on the smartphone that people resort to when they didn't plan well enough before leaving the house so they can find your address, in Google mobile search results when they are looking for a place for lunch, or finding out how to fix that blocked drain from somebody who knows. Being mobile is having a location close to your customers, whether they search for you or scan your local newspaper ad with a QR Code. Having a website just isn't enough.

With a mobile friendly website, people can find you when they are close to you and ready to buy (there are some trick to this that make it work even better). They can learn what you have to offer when they have found you. And if you are smart they can remember you by a quick click to Like their Facebook page, follow them on Twitter or join your email newsletter. Because the best customer is the one who is local and comes back again and again. Being mobile gives your location and online personality a meaning, and gets you more of the best customers.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

End of summer - plan for better, not cheaper

2011-09-02T07:40:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Is it me or are the days feeling noticeably shorter already? There are pluses and minuses to the end of summer. Kids are back at school, the weather is cooling down and companies are planning for next year. Depending on your viewpoint, all of these can be good or bad. It is also the end of the year when companies in the US start to really look at what the outlook is for the next year, and what resources they need to achieve their goals.

For many, this end of year 'planning' is unfortunate, since this often relates to cost cutting and downsizing. And as the news already starts to leak out about large corporations across the country shedding staff, I know that the end of the year can really be a time for corporate change. But why can't change occasionally be a good thing? We rarely hear about companies planning to improve business processes, bring in new trainers to help employee development, or add new websites to improve online customer service.

Unlike politics, where it seems politicians rarely have time to do anything positive before they are back on the road for re-election, companies could take the option for longer-term planning and change. The reality of the situation is that stock price drives decisions, and Wall Street and the City vote on a daily basis how we should feel. How often does the Board of Directors vote in favor of the CEO with long term goals at the expense of short term stock price?

At this end of the year I would love to see companies present a positive approach to their investors. Aim for growth, by changing things that help attract new customers more easily, retain customers who buy more, and develop employees to be more productive happily (and not just through fear for their jobs). And I mean present this approach as real strategies, not just investor spin.

I'm already working with companies making changes for the better, so I hope this is a sign of renewed fortunes in the economy. Business processes, employee development, software and marketing all go hand in hand. Let's consider how we can work with next year's forecasts for a turn-around in fortunes, by using the tools we have available for real, positive change.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

The Consected Blog on Alltop

2011-08-29T21:52:00.000-04:00

The Consected Blog has just been added to Alltop along with other great business technology sources, so take a look at what is out there. And welcome to Alltop readers as well.

With some new inspiration, I'll be back to blogging about business technology and mobile marketing very soon.

Phil

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Reporting - or processes 'gone bad'?

2011-07-20T09:41:00.000-04:00

My clients have a range of experience in improving the way their business processes run. They range from "expert" to "what's a business process?". After a little while working together, they generally come to the agreement that the Phil Ayres view of the world is that "everything is a process". Not in a bad, bureaucratic way. Instead, if there are a series of steps to be followed to achieve a task, and you have to do the same work more than once, why not make it easier for people by providing them guidance for what to do next, and maybe even automate a little to remove the drudgery of some really repetitive activities? Not surprisingly, I would treat many of the reporting functions that businesses perform as potential processes, gone bad.

Businesses create reports of everyday activities for many reasons. They believe that it is to provide supervisory control over the work that people are doing, to make sure that nothing is missed. In reality, mostly reports are created and used just because that is the way the back-office computer system manages can tell them what is going on. Why reports? Because it is easy for a system to put together a snapshot of data of the status of work, and dump it onto paper. Many systems have very little understanding of a business process, beyond the series of options they present on screen during data entry. A report is the best they can do.

Reports can be really troublesome for businesses. They represent a queue of work from yesterday, or last week. The information on them is already out of date, and there has already been a lag in handling any of the items on the report. Sometimes, batching up work like this can lead to more efficiency (i.e. less overall manpower required to finish the work), because one person plods through each item in turn without having to thing too hard. Sometimes, it just means that people get upset waiting for a response to a simple question. Really, if a report represents a list of work that is currently outstanding, and tomorrow it will show the same work with a different status, how does it really help us, beyond showing us that we have work?

Of course, sometimes you just can't get away from reports. They make sense. They show what is going on in the only way the back-office systems know how. In many cases, managing people from the information on a report is going to lead to trouble. In other cases, I have been asked to put processes around the distribution of reports, to make sure people actually read them to know what work they are supposed to be doing. In some cases, this is acceptable - its just a checkbox that says, "I did my review". In other cases you end up reporting on reports of reports.

Consider the reports you have in an organization. Look at the ones that are handed out to people to check off their work as they do it during the day. Behind each line on that report is often a business process. The person doing the work knows that process. But if that person takes a long trip to Hawaii, do you know what that process is, beyond highlights on a printout? Wouldn't it be better to notify people of the work sooner, and guide them to completing it faster? That is what business process improvement gives us. Escape from "processes gone bad".

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

QR Codes - a survey of what works

2011-07-13T12:22:00.000-04:00

I was just pointed to this interesting survey about how effective different QR Codes are, by QR Mediacodes. The questions asked were pretty straightforward, and although the results are not entirely surprising, they do provide us some reminders of what works better in mobile marketing.

The questions they asked were:

Have you ever seen or heard of a QR Code? (75% YES)
Which QR Code catches your eye? (79% the colorful, attractive looking one)
Which QR Code would you be more inclined to scan? (73% the colorful, attractive looking one)
Have you ever scanned a QR Code? (37% YES)
Did you find the scan useful? (96% YES)
Would you scan a QR Code again? (98% YES)

So, there could be some importance in making your QR Code stand out from the crowd as QR Codes become more prevalent. But as a scientific survey, I would rather see a test of what the scanning rate is for the pretty versus the plain QR Code is when they are not seen side-by-side but standalone. That is what really matters right now: will people scan your QR Code at all and is the information they land on valuable?

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Why do I need a mobile website?

2011-06-27T19:39:00.000-04:00

I've been doing a lot with mobile websites and QR Code recently. Putting together a service to help people publish mobile friendly pages and actually designing and hosting whole websites. So, when I was asked today, why a company might need a mobile website, a quick list came to mind of the businesses that can use them and why:

Restaurants - menu, location, weekly deals
Bars - location, drink specials, two for ones, history
Wine cellar - QR coded bottles or shelf labels, linking to tasting notes and region details
Food supplements and vitamin - videos that show why they're different, every product has a QR code
Construction supplies - QR codes on specialized items, so people can identify them when they are on the construction site
Car dealerships - QR code on every windshield - get more details about the car without a pushy salesman
Real Estate agents / Realtors - QR code for every home - on the For Sale sign and in the advert in the advertising and mailings
Direct mail advertising - put QR codes on the stuff that falls through the letterbox to get people into your site more easily - even better, completely personalise the post so there is a QR code for every person and a dynamically generated landing page (this is a premium offering!)
Insurance broker - general information, different lines of business
Party supplies wholesale/retail - different products offered

Anything that can be marked with a QR code or you can think of where a page could help get people interested is a good target. The aim of a mobile website is to do several thing:

make a link between a paper advert and more information online - space in you advert cost money - on your website it costs 'nothing'
get people engaged when they are on the move - help them remember you exist when they get home by getting them interested in your product and signed up for a newsletter
help people find you when they are local and looking for a service like yours

If you can think of a time when people could benefit from more information, that's probably a good time to offer them a mobile website!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Improving an "information driven" business

2011-05-25T09:55:00.000-04:00

Some businesses are driven by events (something happened and I need to respond), and others are driven by information (lots of things happened and I need to respond to them en-masse). Flows of work (as modeled, measured and improved by business process management - BPM), take individual events or transactions and guide them through to completion. So if you are an "event driven" company, your customer requests, orders and other transactions are generally easily improved. But what if you are an "information driven" company? Get reports, print them, file them, seems to be a common option. There are some really big challenges in improving the "information driven" company.

Around this time last year I started working with a client on what seemed like a simple electronic document management project. As a company in the financial services sector, there are needs for managing transactions, obviously, but there is a huge amount of the business that is driven by information. Compliance and Credit especially are areas where firms like this need to look at the information about clients on an aggregate basis in order to make decisions and spot red-flags. So what was needed? Well, let's just take all the reports, deliver them electronically, and those that can't be processed in that way (too much manual line-by-line, page-by-page review and annotation) get scanned and stored.

This project was eye opening, and reinforced some ideas I hadn't seen in a while. When improving a business across many business processes there are some approaches that are worth considering:

Avoid rat-holes by working backwards: look at the end result of the paper trail that is produced and work backwards through the people that handled the information to identify the "happy path" process
Use the org-chart to find natural order: people tend to work within the constraints the organization places on them in terms of departments and teams. Understanding this can help you get familiar with a new business faster
People hate working on-screen: if your people must stare at reports all day long to get the information they need, it is unlikely they will transition to working on-screen without a fight

The challenge is that a well trained human mind is a great tool for analyzing and understanding patterns across large amounts of data, allowing information on reports to translate into a distillation of information and possibly events that can be understood by people with different skills. How do you represent what goes on in an analytical human mind when processing information? Can you automate it (and do you really want to?)? And how can you make the processing of this information better, faster, repeatable, and less paper-based?

There are many options, depending on a specific needs. I'm looking at tools as simple as checklist, as common as rules engines, as widely used as 'business intelligence', and as futuristic-ly powerful as Complex Event Processing. There is definitely not one hammer for every nail when dealing with information-driven problems.

It is the challenges like these in business improvement that sometimes are not easy to address, but are extremely important. These are the fun ones!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

What's in your records?

2011-05-19T09:47:00.000-04:00

Things have been quiet on this blog while I was kicking off a new project with a client. The good thing about this is that I have loads of ideas about things to talk about. At the top of my list is one that reinforces how important it is to maintain quality document records about a client if your customer relationship management (CRM) or equivalent client management system doesn't give you the absolute full story.

When you need to look at the whole history of a client, does the structured data you have about the client, usually stored in some sort of database or CRM system, show you everything you need to know? If you were pressed to show all the information, for an auditor or a lawyer, could you say when the client requested to change her address, when another client added a new service to his contract, or how many times a company had contacted you with a question or complaint? Although this sounds like pure CRM, I would bet that many companies with CRM in place just couldn't do it.

The problem is that clients communicate with companies in many ways - through email, the website, paper, phone, fax. If a company is good enough to have an organized repository for client communications, organized by client and type of communication (or better by the request or case), then the documentation gives you all the information you need. For this to work, you need to be sure of the following:

The information is complete
You can identify which documents and communications belong to which cases
The client information and related documents can be viewed side-by-side
There is no way that important discussions or communications with a client don't get captured
A full history of important client events can be easily identified without forensically picking through documents

If you have the full view of the client in this way, you have worked hard to get there - congratulations!

Challenges come if you rely on documents for a history of your clients, but can't be sure that these documents contain a full history in a single view. This is case management, or just a complete client record if you want to avoid adding another unnecessary term to the mix. And when companies work out how to do it well, they are able to service their clients far better, and avoid troubles with auditor and lawyers.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Future payment transactions - not as dumb as paper

2011-05-04T08:42:00.000-04:00

Pay by phone, the smart way to pay
(Image from Mobile Marketer)

Mobile payments technology is a hot space at the moment. The ultimate goal is to make small retail payments easy, fast and cheap for businesses and consumers. This means that the solutions have to get away from paper, coins and magnetic swipe cards with huge costs attached to every transaction. Add consumer interest in everything about mobile device apps on iPhone and Android, with location services and the ability for the devices to communicate for themselves (something no credit card can do), and there is a huge opportunity for the company that owns your data to direct your future spending with loyalty programs and offers. It is with this in mind that PayPal announced its acquisition of Fig Card - this story in Mobile Marketer adds some nice commentary.

Now that's not to say there aren't challenges with mobile payments. If it was all as easy as just tapping your phone on a black box to pay a retailer, we'd probably not be carrying cash already. The challenges amount to these, and Fig thinks they know the answers:

Making the hardware retailers need simple, cheap and secure
Getting enough retailers interested in doing something different
Educating consumers on a new approach to payment
Ensuring that consumers don't need new hardware, just a new app
Building a secure infrastructure that can capture payments for a retailer without them ever storing consumer's details
Being able to scale the infrastructure to support a nationwide, then international payment infrastructure
Putting together value add features such as loyalty programs that offer consumers more and make the service pay for itself

PayPal seems to be in a good position to offer much of this know-how and the backing to make it happen. Fig Card gives them the opportunity to go out and chase the incumbent credit cards with a viable alternative, addressing most, if not all of the challenges above. And they haven't forgotten the appeal to retailers, consumers, and their own bottom-line in the power of information.

If future payment "transactions can be as smart as a computer and not as dumb as paper,” (to quote Mr. Chu, Senior Director of PayPal Mobile), then PayPal could be hot on the heels of more than just the payment card industry. Move over Groupon - if you don't own the payments, you know nothing about potential customers. They may just stop coming to you, when more appropriate offers come to them at no cost.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Don't just ask 'why'. Start with 'who'.

2011-04-21T10:36:00.000-04:00

I was chatting with an associate in consulting firm yesterday about all kinds of software solution requirements. He shared a little revelation that put a lot of my day into perspective. He said to me something like,"I love working with vertical solutions, those things helping pest control companies, or lawn care companies, or whatever, work better. It is so much easier to be able to find the words describing what keeps the owner awake at night when you get your head into it, rather than trying to talk to the CIO of a major insurance company about strategic systems architecture". Gaining enough insight to see the issues a unique company is having is hard, but it gets so much easier when you can share war stories from similar businesses doing the same type of things.

I have always believed in selling solutions to business problems, possibly because selling technology for the sake of technology seemed tough to me. What little salesman there is in me is true to the point I learned in "How to Win Friends and Influence People" years ago. You can't sell what you don't believe in, and if there is not a problem being solved I find it hard to get passionate about the technology. So I try hard to sink myself into business problems to make the technology desirable (to me and a potential customer).

Yesterday, I messed it up big style. I have been looking at solutions for real estate agents, among very many other industries. I have bought a house, admittedly in a different country years ago. House buying had a different set of terminology and rules, but I feel that I understand what it is like to be a home buyer. Things have moved along, and we now have smartphones, GPS, and QR Codes on the For Sale signs. Mobile websites make finding information about a house you are standing outside so much easier. I thought I could build enough empathy to feel what goes through a modern buyer's mind, and what will make them into a profitable client for a real estate agent. The thing is, I didn't keep an open enough mind to really see the power of mobile technology. I obsessed about the home buyer, the "realtor's" client. I missed the fact that an agent can benefit from mobile technology even more directly.

Crap! I know nothing about selling houses. I know nothing about spending your week on the road visiting properties with clients. It should have been obvious to me that the agent is an even bigger consumer of mobile technology than the home buyer. It took a partner with real estate sales background to jam that thought home. Now I have it.

So, I may be the creator of some of my own thoughts, few of them completely unique I'm sure, but that doesn't mean that I know everything. Humility means that I'll assume nothing for a while and stop trying to be the expert in anything. I will ask more questions. Not just 'why' does something matter, but 'who' does it matter to. For any business involved in designing products or delivering solutions to customers, an occasional slap in the face like this is important. It keeps you grounded in not just what you think your customers want, but who your customers actually are!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Break bad document filing. Give folders a personality.

2011-04-19T11:13:00.000-04:00

Anonymous and dull.
No wonder nobody really
files documents correctly.

I have held a theory for a long time that a new application that looks like another popular application (or operating system) will encourage users to use that application in the same way, bad behaviors and all. When I first started working with document management solutions 14 years ago, the constant push was for systems that looks just like Windows. Even before Vista, Windows was not very attractive and was clunky to use (so some things never change). But companies who had invested the time and effort to get users trained up to use the new-fangled technology wanted to make as much from that investment as possible. So if it looked like Windows, people could use it without extra thought, right?!

Fast forward 15 years and we are here in 2011. Windows really looks the same, despite a constant buffing to make it appear modern and slick. The common productivity apps, Microsoft Office continue to confuse the hell out of people by moving all the menus into a ribbon that constantly shifts where you expect to find things. And buyers of new software solutions still want document management solutions to look like Windows -- because everybody knows how to store things effectively on Windows, right? WRONG!

This is the big problem. We might have spent the last 20-ish years teaching new users how to work the basics of operating a desktop or laptop computer with a mouse. But we have never taught them the importance, or even basic know-how required to effectively manage documents. We could have guided them with predefined folder structures, but we didn't. We just let people throw their valuable creations in whatever folder suits them.

In the future, when we realize that there is a huge risk in our business, we start to put some structure in place with a formal document management system. We want this to be the quick fix we need, but we don't want to train people, so "that system had best look like Windows or nobody will use it - I know my people!" (the words from the General Manager or similar role). And with that new system, everybody still needs free rein to create their own messed up filing systems, just like on Windows.

Why do we allow this? Because companies often don't realize that the software or OS is not to blame for terrible filing habits, it is the users, as a direct result of the fact that we have never helped them to do it right. People don't magically learn how to file documents, whether you give them 10 days or 10 years.

I have one great way to break bad filing habits. Give users a simple document management system that looks quite unlike Windows, but does have big pictures that look like individual clients, projects, employees or accounts or whatever it is they need to be filing documents for. Give those folders a personality. You instantly break the view of a faceless system that provides a bunch of anonymous folders, "so it doesn't really matter where I file stuff". When you give real people a face to match a folder, the reality that a document relates to somebody or something sets in, so "I have to put it in the right place". This is easy behavior to influence.

The anonymity of Windows, and the lack of guidance we have given people has made document management a disaster in many companies. It can be fixed with simple improvements to software that definitely does NOT look like Windows. Document management systems do not have to be faceless and dull - giving them personality helps people use them better, and understand why they are filing documents in the right way.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Is the process app store the future your business processes?

2011-04-05T12:22:00.001-04:00

Image via CrunchBase"Is the process app store the future of BPM?" was today's discussion on the ebizQ business process management forum. Should we buy business processes (such as travel expense processing) in an online app store, the same as we buy Angry Birds for our iPhone? As much as we would all like to believe that process applications can be delivered this way, getting a replacement business process implemented is tough. You have to:

find a process application that fits your needs
get it customized, configured and generally implemented
manage the change of people's attitudes and activities internally to get it to work.

Since business processes are so much part of the DNA of a business, implementing new ones makes them extremely hard to deliver as apps. Even a simple travel expenses process or a holiday/vacation request process is done in a million different ways by a million and one businesses. Why would they want to change the way they work to fit some cheap application they bought online?

My own experience, putting pre-built process apps out on Google Marketplace is that even if small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) come to take a look, they can rarely spend the time to really dig in and understand what the app can do. A cursory single look, a "this sounds hard" internal discussion is about the best you can expect. No matter how much person-to-person hand holding you offer (and trust me, I've offered), the typical app buyer in a small business just doesn't have the time, resources or motivation to get a real process change implemented. As Ian Gotts commented on the forum:

For an SME this is too hard. Instead, they continue to run on "staff heroics"

Now I'm not saying that the apps we deliver at Consected are always perfectly simple to use! The ultimate flexibility that is rightly demanded by the buyer whatever size company, balanced against the "so simple a caveman could do it" need, makes these applications more expensive to develop than the $4.95 per user per month cap that seems to be the limit anybody will consider (often less).

The next issue really comes from a complete lack of change management being possible when you sell through an app model. Being able to work with a customer remotely who doesn't have time to really speak to you, or any real wish to speak to you, makes any sensible change to the current business processes really hard. The best business process implementations come with a change to the way work is done, not just moving it "to the cloud". Apps give the impression that we can just install and go.

Apps need to be really well packaged if they are delivering business application functionality through a software as a service (SaaS) model. Which means that the value of a flexible process environment is lost on the end user, because too many options just get in the way. But without the flexibility they can do their job the way they need to. Somebody will work out the magic to this, though its definitely harder than it appears!

Successful app vendors have to play a numbers game and sell large volumes to make any real money. And business processes seem to rarely fit the one size fits all requirement to make this happen. So please feel free to take a look at the Consected Instant Apps. They are free or cheap (by enterprise software standards). And although they require a little time, thought, and some communication with us to get them to really fit your needs, they can make a huge difference to your business.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Justifying business process improvement without being a fool

2011-04-01T07:47:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

This year is the fifteenth that I have been working with business process management, document management and business information systems. Or when people ask what I do, "I'm in IT, but I can't fix your PC". Over the years not much has changed. The same business problems are still there. Companies still have an over-reliance on paper or email, because it is just too hard to get started in a process improvement project. Communications with customers are still on paper. Yep, you can get your bank statement online, but that isn't a transaction that results in a business process. Nope, processes are still manually guided by individuals driving a desk and an email account. Am I a fool to think that people want to change this?

In the last two years, I have been focusing more on small and mid-sized businesses. They seem to offer a great opportunity, hanging on through grim economic times, and needing some attention to be able to work better. The problem is that there is never a lot of money or time to spare in small businesses to change the way things are done. Rightfully, people focus on doing what needs to be done right now, trying to grow the business (or just stay afloat). The idea of adding some process rigor, to make it easier to do common repetitive tasks in the future, just doesn't figure. In many cases, a process incorporates a grand total of one employee and a customer. A checklist is a more effective process management tool than a formal workflow, and managing information, data and documents with minimal hassle is a much bigger issue.

Mid-sized businesses have process needs that are reminiscent of the processes I have worked with in giant corporations. Since the multinational monsters are always split into business units and smaller departments, the scale of what needs to be done is often the same as the requirements of a mid-sized company anywhere in the world. Which is great news, as that means I have some great experience to offer these smaller companies from my time spent with the big guys.

The problem is this: it is far more transparent where the cash comes from to pay for business improvement in a mid-sized company than a multinational corporation -- the owner's bank account. In large corporations, you can make an ROI and justify it two levels above you, and you're still not even in the peripheral vision of the CEO. In a mid-sized company, the ROI has to be real, and offer real results.

So am I just fooling myself trying to work with mid-sized businesses? Or will the lessons of transparent decision-making make me into a better process improvement specialist? My job is no longer in fabricating an ROI for an enterprise software salesman to present to his prospect in the department of a huge company. My job is to recognize that mid-sized businesses have process problems that need fixing, in sensible, justifiable ways. And if you can't justify making a change, things will carry on fine just the way they are.

Reality is, in 15 years my job hasn't changed. I'm still "in IT, but can't fix your PC". I just have to focus on the real business problems, not the ones that used to make a salesman a fat commission!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Making a big deal out of mobile

2011-03-29T08:01:00.002-04:00

Publishing a website suitable for mobile phones used to be a real challenge. There were many factors that played into this, pre-iPhone, and it wasn't just the size and usability of the screen:

Bandwidth was limited (oh yes, you think AT&T "4G-is-coming-because-the-rest-of-our-service-is-sooo-slow" is bad, try booking a flight over a standard GSM connection)
Usability was clunky at best, Windows Mobile at worst
The software development tools were limited, web protocols were obscure (for standard web developers), including WAP and others, all trying to seek standardization and best use of bandwidth, and achieving limited adoption
The mobile devices just weren't ready for the general public's use of the Internet (I would struggle with one, my wife would throw it out the window)

Things have progressed in leaps and bounds. The devices are amazing to use. Even the cheapest smartphone 'handset' offers a pretty decent 300x400 pixel screen, completely adequate for browsing simple, standard HTML sites. We have mobile web browsers, with real browser technology squashed down from the desktop. From a distance, things look like websites.

Some devices like the iPhone 4 even boast 900x700 size screens. But that just squashes everything into the same physical size. Side by side with an iPhone 3, the new one looks crisper, sharper, brighter. But it doesn't really do much for my overall web browsing experience. iPad and other tablets aside, the phones have reached a plateau on what they seem to be sensibly delivering from web browsing capability.

So I'm regularly asked questions like "but an iPhone can browse regular websites, right? So why do you need special mobile sites?". The answer is clear when you actually try. This blog appears okay on an iPhone, if you don't mind zooming and dragging the window around to read it. But anything with multiple columns, Flash, crazy drop down menus -- well, they're usually usable but tiring, and often just look ugly.

So you want to impress customers with your new fancy website? Make sure that those customers who are on the move can get your information fast, clearly and easily on a mobile website built for mobiles. Because you can guarantee that after waiting 30 seconds for a web page that is mostly flash and wide columns of text, they will just hit Google and search for your competitors.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Who says you can't have custom apps in the cloud?

2011-03-24T10:31:00.001-04:00

Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

When I first started down the path of building out a software as a service (SaaS) platform for business applications, a common criticism I heard about SaaS was that they were really limiting in what you can do with them. You either take the application the way it is, or you go somewhere else. Beyond a few simple configurations and changing the odd color-scheme here and there, prepackaged applications running in the cloud were limited.

Now enterprise applications on the other hand were apparently not limited. You could spend tens or hundreds of thousands on professional services to customize the app of your dreams. So that made them better. Hmm, no wonder I often heard the 'build vs. buy' discussion during lengthy sales cycles.

These seemed to be limited options if you needed an application that fitted your businesses:

build from the ground up
invest in an enterprise software application and professional services
build your app on the Salesforce platform and still write loads of code

Now I'm not saying that the argument about finding an application online to run a common business process, such as travel expense reports, doesn't mean that you are going to get whatever the vendor believes is the right way of working. And for the cost, there needs to be a general, reusable approach. You don't get a lot of options when you're paying $5 a month or less. But this is a feature of the business model (shifting high volumes of cookie-cutter product).

If the platform has been built right, as Salesforce has shown, it is not the technology behind the scenes that prevents a vendor from offering far more configuration and customization. Salesforce has gone to an extreme it seems. But it does show that without just building a completely new solution from the ground up there is the possibility to get software specific to your requirements in the cloud. At the same time, just like building off any platform, there are constraints that you must adhere to.

These thoughts come to mind as I'm just finishing off the testing phase of a help desk and equipment management application for a TV station "out west". I'm enjoying that I have a great platform to be building on (yes, Consected does really do some great stuff!) and can put together process and information management solutions like this really quickly with 98% configuration. I'm even happier that the platform can be extended. Not just with an API and a whole bunch of new software following the Salesforce model. But with some simple tweaks of the software itself, allowing an improvement for every client, or a completely new chunk of functionality specific to just the one client. This is the joy of owning the platform itself.

So if you ever need a custom solution that does not need the full expense and hassle of those other options, do look a little further than the closed SaaS applications that meet the needs of many, just not you. And don't assume that custom applications always require teams of software developers, for enterprise application customization or Salesforce. There is a middle ground, and some smaller vendors like Consected can provide the flexibility that the "box-pushers" can not.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Don't use 'personas' to hide the fact that can't do 'usability'

2011-03-22T09:38:00.000-04:00

Personas are commonly used by analysts in collecting requirements for building new software, so that the essence of the needs of different users can be distilled and transferred to a group of developers who have never had contact with those end-users. A persona is a profile for a common type of user the software is catering to, and tries to embody not just the fixed requirements (it must calculate my travel expenses exactly), but also the experience, personality and working practices of different types of end user (the software needs to be used by my dad, who types with two fingers, occasionally, but still manages to book vacations to far-away places online).

Personas allow an analyst to engage just a little right-brain creativity to the process of requirements gathering, by writing a fictional biography of the type of person being targeted by the new solution. The bio (always accompanied with a stereotypical photo snagged from some website or other) adds a human element to the requirements, which is supposed to help people understand not just what the requirements are, but why they exist, who they relate to, and how.

Wow, you might be saying to yourself. Those software guys are smarter than we thought. We just assumed that software was churned out by a bunch of geeky hackers sitting in a room, surrounded by glowing monitors, half-empty pizza boxes and Diet Coke cans. Well, appearances can be deceiving, and you may walk past a software developer on the street without realizing that he fits the geek profile, but most of the rest of it is true. The real nuts and bolts software does come out of some creative juggling of code. The personas are just there for the analysts and product managers to believe that they are transferring some additional useful information to the software developers. In fact the personas are just giving the analyst a creative outlet for the fact that they are supposed to NOT suggest a solution to the requirements they are writing, for fear of limiting what is produced by the developers. Yes, the developers are really going to come up with a better solution if you don't restrict what they produce!

So the persona is really just a doodle on a page. It reflects the fact that gathering requirements for new software can be incredibly difficult and sometimes dull, and that all of us need to show some creativity. The persona is meaningless to most software developers (in my opinion), since the people represented are so alien to them in terms of technical experience that they might as well have two heads and three green tentacles for working the keyboard. If you have never worked in a real business environment, how are a few words on a page describing a stereotyped personality going to assist you in coding your software? They are not, so the team leader (or technical interpreter) gets the slideshow of the personas, makes a vague attempt at keeping a straight face while describing what 'Corporate' wants, then everybody prints them, pins them to their cubes and scribbles facial hair on them.

Perception is clouded by experience. We can't expect the personas, the human faces we add to our requirements to be meaningful to anybody who does not have experience in what we are trying to explain. We need somebody with experience of business requirements to translate. That person, and I would hate to give them the title 'Usability Expert' knows enough of what the personas really represent, and enough credibility with the software developers, to be able to bridge the gap and state in solid terms, "put a single text box and a big button on the screen that says Search". Nope, the persona with the picture of my dad, and a bio discussing how he plays golf on weekday mornings (because its cheaper) and types with two fingers, did not result in Google. It just took a very creative 'somebody' with some profound creative thought to say, "this is how we are going to make web-search usable by the masses", and enough credibility with the software developers to convince them that it was worth the effort of writing extra code to make things easier for the end user, and that they wouldn't miss all that other stuff that was previously just cluttering up the screen.

So personas have been absorbed into the marketing of software more successfully than the building of it. Therefore I'll suggest that we should not use those picture-profiles of our intended end users as a cover for the fact that we have no real idea what will work for them. Two options remain: make lots of excuses and just accept that we are going to have to do a lot of training of our end users, or; get ready to refine our software a lot after we release it and start getting feedback from end users on how much it sucks!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Why Do Checks/Cheques Still Dominate B2B Payments in North America?

2011-03-18T08:18:00.001-04:00

You have heard this theme from me before, and it was triggered again when I read a post on Finextra by Matthew Dragiff, "Why do checks still dominate B2B in NA?". In it, he suggests that IT and the need to develop a business case for a project such as electronic payments stops any change in its tracks:

The mantra, “do more with less” pervades today’s business climate, and companies increasingly struggle with how best to allocate limited resources so they have the most impact. The elimination (or reduction) of paper checks is perceived as requiring system changes for which a business case must be developed and funding approved long before projects can even be considered for the IT development roadmap.

My personal opinion that the paper check, and the vague attempt at electronic payments (by printing paper checks - ha!) needs to just go away. Despite this, I am never going to suggest doing a big expensive project without a good business case. This is nothing to do with today's business climate though. IT constraints have alway been a block on producing highly polished solutions in the US, compared to what I was familiar with in Europe.

When I first arrived in the US to do professional services and sales engineering for an enterprise software company (8 years ago), I was surprised at the difference in the style of enterprise software implementation projects between the territories. I had the definite feeling that US companies were happy with "just good enough". This mostly translated into projects with a lot of rough edges, software that with little customization for the end users, and anything at the end of a business process (in this case check payment) being swept up by a mass of available labor.

The question was asked, "why would I pay for integration when humans could do the job more easily?". Fair enough. Its hard to get past that when you are building a business case, and it doesn't matter how many less quantifiable attributes you throw at the argument, like:

reduced risk of fraudulent payments
reduced risk of errors
easier tracking of payments within a full bank-reconciliation process

An ROI is an ROI, and there was definitely the view that automation was not needed around the edges of processes. And frankly the banks didn't make it much easier. With little option but complex sounding ACH / wire services, nobody but the specialists even considered it. And the cost per payment does not seem to be going down, and is still much higher today than using paper checks.

So, although Matthew says that ERP systems can handle this stuff easily, via middleman services, its not the cost of IT that is going to be the block, but the cost of paying your bank and a middleman for making each individual payment. Costs have been shifted, but they have not gone away.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

My website wants to be the "belle of the ball"

2011-03-17T09:59:00.000-04:00

Image via Wikipedia

Am I an amazing website designer? No. Do I know a great website when I see one? I think so. The challenge I have when designing a website is not getting carried away and trying to copy the slickly designed sites that are intended to show how great the designer behind the scenes is at design, rather than providing a clean website packed with useful information for my customers, prospects and random Googlers. As I balance a desire to produce a slicker website, I constantly have to remind myself why it is there. And that in itself opens up quite a can of worms. Why is the website there? What is the point of the business it is representing? Can this thing be beautiful and functional?

As a small business owner, I have the self-imposed responsibility for the company website. I'm quite comfortable with this, despite it being horribly time consuming. If I can spend the time to verbalize what I think the company offers customers on the website, then I'm in a better position to talk about it with prospects and partners. It reflects what I alway knew about the best software salespeople I worked with in a previous life as a product manager -- the best of the best could understand enough of the technology to talk lucidly with customers about what they were selling. They didn't just walk in the door with shiny shoes, a big smile and hand over the show to the sales engineer to do the talking. If I can write decent copy for the website, I understand what is being sold well enough and what value it offers the customer. If I end up in technical jargon, or marketing fluff, then I need to think a bit more. Yes, I do regularly go back and read what I have written. Then I add it to the to-do list to fix up later.

So a website now has great content, an aesthetic appeal to match what it is selling. What more is there? If the website has the potential to be the "belle of the ball", but never stops staring at itself in the mirror, then nobody is going to notice it. Twitter, Facebook, whatever other social media tools are all very nice, if you can generate a credible number of real friends. But as I've seen from my own website stats, a little paid advertising can go a very long way!

My one rule of websites: flaunt what you have, then when people talk about how beautiful you are you can stun them with your depth of knowledge too.

(It seems that this blog and the Consected website still need a little cosmetic work!)

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Strategic thinking in the "Browser Wars"?

2011-03-15T09:36:00.000-04:00

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Web browsers have started to develop again really quickly. Cloud computing, so central to the marketing from the biggest technology players, relies on fast, well designed browsers. So the "Browser Wars", the fight for dominance between Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla' Firefox is becoming interesting again. Largely because Google threw in a little flare a while ago to light things up, in the form of Chrome. Believe it or not, this really does matter to businesses, large and small, not just teenagers browsing dubious websites. With three big releases from the big browser players with us, we can start to see how the whole PC market is going to shape out. Yes really.

Taking a look at the article in CIO, Five Changes CIOs Should Care About, and you'll get a good idea of the importance Microsoft is placing on the newest release of its browser. Browser design, in my opinion prompted by Google Chrome's minimalist view of the world (you have one text box and a button for everything) has started to realize that people are most interested in the application that is running inside the browser, not the fluff and toolbar buttons around the edge. Looking at the official IE9 website, it shows the browser with a minimalistic frame around the website, a bigger Back button a large address bar and some tabs:

Simplified yet enhanced, the user interface brings sites forward. Characteristics of each website are reflected throughout the browser, allowing you to be more immersed in each site you visit.

Great, so the browser has been designed down to what it should always have been - a container for showing websites, not a flashy application that distracts and makes browsing or application use harder. So, what's the big deal?

Browsers have got faster. Much faster. And this matters for the growing adoption of cloud based applications. Google Chrome pushed the envelope, and gained a significant market share for three reasons:

it looked good
it worked fast
it was secure

I used to use Firefox. It was starting to get bogged down under its own weight, and not managing the load of modern websites and software as a service (SaaS) / cloud-based applications. So I tried Chrome and never looked back. Internet Explorer has been slowing down for years, as the Microsoft teams placed little relevance on the importance of the browser. But if Google can make the browser the primary operating interface for all applications (since all your apps are apparently moving into the cloud and off the desktop), then that starts to make the Windows operating system irrelevant and largely an unnecessary expense for most PCs. So it was time for IE to fight back. And this is where the Browser Wars strategy seems to get confused.

IE9 is fast. In some tests it is faster than the newest release of Google Chrome 10, and likely to be faster than the much delayed Firefox 4. They are all fast compared to IE8 though. This is great news for everybody. No matter which browser you choose, your browsing experience has just got hugely faster on the slickest websites (and trust me, that makes it much more enjoyable to use sites with smooth transitions, images that fade in and out, menus that do clever things, etc). You are starting to use some of the power of your PC hardware again.

But then we come to that "strategy" topic. Microsoft have decided that IE9 will only run on Windows 7 and Vista. XP is dead in the water. Why would they do this? Well, cost is the primary reason. Its easier to develop and support for two versions of Windows, rather than three. Then there is the fact that Microsoft must be acknowledging that the browser really is making Windows irrelevant. If they give you a great browser (for free remember) on XP, why would you ever buy Windows 7? This is where I find the strategy to be flawed.

If the browser is so important to the OS (and you'll remember that Microsoft ended up losing a lot of money in the European courts for tying IE and Media Player to Windows to try and destroy the competition), then I'm not going to upgrade from XP to Windows 7 just so I can use a fully featured browser with the latest security. Oh no, I'm going to install Firefox 4 or Chrome 10. Microsoft loses more market share with the older OS users. The users come to realize that they really don't use that annoying Windows stuff behind the scenes, their browsing experience just got better without a new PC, and the next time they come to upgrade they buy the absolute cheapest edition of Windows they can possibly find (you can't get a PC without Windows pre-installed, so you'll have to suck up the Microsoft tax). And they'll install the same browser they've been using for the last 18 months, which will not be IE.

So, cost aside, Microsoft is basically telling people with older versions of Windows to go and try a competitors browser until they upgrade their PC next. But then Microsoft doesn't really care about that mass of users. They want the bigger slice of the pie, the CIO and his or her re-growing IT budget. Which is just a shame, as the next big companies (those growing from SMB to Enterprise status) will be using Google Apps or Zoho in a Google browser, not Windows, Office and IE.

Whatever happens, I'm happy to have faster, prettier, more secure browsing. Even better that I don't need to worry about botched Windows releases anymore!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Enchantment - its as much about 'you' as it is your business

2011-03-08T09:43:00.001-05:00

By now you must have heard that Guy Kawasaki, the master of Mac marketing has just released a new book. Enchantment covers every tool marketers, sales and even customer services people have available to them to individually and collectively enchant customers. I've written my impressions of the book, and even have a Q&A direct from the mouth (well really keyboard) of the master himself, so read on!

(On a mobile device? Click to read the mobile version.)

The big question the book addresses is "why enchant customers?". The answer, obvious to the social media generation maybe is because they advocate your products and your brand, buy more and persuade others to buy more. Enchanted customers, as Kawasaki explains with multiple examples, are a powerful force, and are way more valuable to a brand's success than the "rich, famous, and traditional influential people", the media superpowers such as himself. After all, if I can be a blogger, anybody can be a blogger, and many (most) of you are going to be a hell of a lot more influential than me. When you add all those voices together, if you can get them to talk about you, many more people are going to hear, believe what they are hearing, and will subsequently buy what they are hearing about. In Kawasaki's words "Nobodies are the new somebodies in a world of wide-open communications".

The book has been described by several reviewers as the "How to Win Friends and Influence People" for the 21st century, and even before I read the other reviews (or even the back of the beautiful book cover) I was coming to the same conclusion. There is a lot written about how you, as an individual can affect people's perceptions of you personally, and therefore the brand you represent. I wasn't reading this as enchantment (initially), just how to be a better salesman and not piss people off. As I read on though, it starts to fall into place. If you are an insincere or bad person, you are going to struggle with enchanting customers and might as well stick with conning them into buying your junk using your current devious tactics. Kawasaki reinforces the importance of being good and not confusing successfully 'selling' with 'enchanting' several times as the chapters progress. He even has a fun online test to see how enchanting you are.

An interesting theme that I found challenging in the book was around building an ecosystem around your product. I understand this is hard, and a great point that Kawasaki makes is that for an ecosystem to work, you have to create something that is worthy of that ecosystem. You need a great cause, and if you have it the ecosystem will probably grow itself. The challenge for me out of this, and many small and mid-sized businesses is providing one thing that can be identified as good enough to warrant and ecosystem, and identifying enough like minded people who can seed it. The ecosystem starts to be a realistic concept when you already have some success. I was going slow when I read this, as I kept trying to understand how a startup with five paying customers can develop and ecosystem. The book is targeted at all phases of a lifecycle of a company, and this part just happens to be down the path from where many of us are now.

So, the really good bit of this post is the stuff that you won't read in the book. A really quick Q&A. Questions are from yours truly. Answers are from the master of enchantment, Guy Kawasaki.

PA. Enchantment sounds like a wonderful goal for big brands (and there are many big names [in the book] to back it up). But what about the small businesses growing from the ground up? What is the most important thing a small business owner can learn from the book?

GK. Enchantment isn't a big, expensive, "hire a consultant to get it done" activity. Not at all. In fact, those qualities are the enemy of enchantment. The bottom line is that a small business should employ people who are likable and trustworthy, and it should sell a great product or service. Money isn't the gating item. The hard part is realizing that there is a better way to do business, and the flexibility to give it a try.

PA. The enchanting experiences require us to think differently and interact with customers differently. Is this just a change in the way we educate employees, or do we need to fundamentally change the nuts and bolts processes that businesses run to allow this to happen?

GK. There is a causative relationship: if you educate employees and empower them to enchant customers then, quite naturally, they will change the nuts and bolts processes of the business. Management, however, has to believe in enchanting customers. My recommendation is that instead of announcing a great enchantment campaign ("Oh God, the boss read another book..."), management should start with small things. Stuff like answering email faster or returning all customer phone calls. Take it a step at a time and build upon success.

PA. Working with customers in an enchanting way sounds like it is extremely time consuming and probably quite costly. Are there any short cuts a small business can take?

GK. Quite the contrary, enchantment is not time consuming and costly. How much more does it cost to smile, dress appropriately, and give a good handshake? And to act in honest and trustworthy ways. "Shortcuts" is a loaded word. I don't recommend shortcuts that amount to putting lipstick on a pig. But the foundation of enchantment is not hard or costly. It's just different.

As you can see from just the answers here, there is a lot for small and mid-sized businesses in Enchantment. And it comes down to personal commitment and presentation, as much as complex organizational changes and expensive marketing campaigns. We think the same it seems: simple changes to the way a business works can have profound effects.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Do mid-sized businesses have money to burn?

2011-03-04T09:36:00.000-05:00

Image via WikipediaIts interesting that as soon as a company grows large enough to fill more than a shared services office space, they consider themselves big enough to throw money around like crazy. I offered my thoughts to reporter writing a story about how small and mid-sized businesses could save money in the IT department, and realized that many small businesses are way ahead of their bigger cousins in terms of working more cost effectively -- without losing anything in the way they work.

Since I didn't hear anything from my pitch to the reporter, I'm going to share this information with you. You'll look and say, "of course - that's ridiculously obvious", but really how many mid-sized businesses have taken the plunge into saving money rather than being trapped in overpriced 20th century technology? Bear in mind also that I have 15 years experience around software, so if you know how to manipulate Dell for a better offer, let us know! (I go to NewEgg for my hardware requirements - they offer small name PCs cheaper that work just as well as the big names).

Productivity Suite: Use Google Apps as a replacement for Microsoft Office. It is significantly cheaper, especially considering how small a piece of the functionality of Office most people use.
Dump Windows: Now that you have a friendly Office productivity apps in place, start using Linux on your new desktop and laptop PCs, when it comes time to replace them. Nobody is going to complain, since they are doing most of their work in a browser, and Ubuntu (my OS of choice) is as clean and simple to use as any Windows 7 machine for all the remaining desktop tasks a user may have. And with that, you save on buying licenses for resource and wallet hungry virus scanners.
Save it to the Cloud: Install and maintain complex and expensive network attached storage? Why bother, when cloud-based storage is cheap, flexible and saves you not only hardware, but the hassle of backups too.
Need Windows for Quickbooks? Some business applications just haven't been made workable in the cloud - Intuit's offering is an example where some users will still need Windows to install some real software. So consider using virtual machines with Windows installed to run them. Why? Because the next time you have to replace the hardware, you don't need to buy yet another license for an OS you already own.
Work Better! All of this has been about saving costs for IT. How about giving back to the business a little? After all, its the reason IT exists. Encourage the use of process, content and collaboration tools that will help people work better, share information better and save emailing every document they work on backwards and forward a hundred times.

Let me know your tips that we can all use to work cheaper and better.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Not great customer service

2011-03-03T11:40:00.002-05:00

We all say that providing great customer service is important to us and our businesses, but how many of us really mean it? Sometimes words and actions just don't align, and I have what I consider a great example. Ready for a short rant? Read on!

I use a Citibank credit card, so I can collect airline miles for occasional trips to go and see the family in London, and its been fine. How hard can it be? I buy things, pay the bill and Citi credits me with some miles. So this week (despite the date of February 18th) I received this letter, which in summary (and jest) said:

On January 1st, you tried to buy some flowers for you mother's birthday. We rejected your card a bunch of times. You assumed it was the fault of the vendor, as their site stopped accepting any card you owned. That's probably because we were providing merchant card services for them too. Though you can only guess at that. Anyway, almost two months later we are going to remind you of this bad experience and give you vague assurances that it won't happen again. Love and kisses, the CEO (who will claim he never even saw this letter if it comes down to it).

Now, thanks for reminding me of an unfortunate experience with your credit card, which I could have just assumed was somebody else's issue. Doing so, so long after the event is just crazy in my opinion. I'd forgotten about it long ago, and have been frankly more irritated by the incessant calling from your India based sales reps trying to sell me fraud detection services I don't want (to the point that I will dump the card if I see that Citi telemarketing call pop up on caller ID once more this month). Though you kindly reminded me that you can't be trusted to run a decent service, and that I'll receive more calls from Sales than for any useful customer services. And if you are going to send me a really personalized letter (wow - it addresses me by my full name), at least make it sound personal. That letter must have taken at least two minutes less than the time it took me to write this blog post (including the time to get it reviewed by Legal). Maybe you could learn something from my discussion of aligning employee development with business process improvement. You might get a meaningful letter out in a timely manner.

Sorry Citi, but you have no idea how bad the perception of your customers is over annoying telemarketing, and misjudged customer service like this (or maybe you don't care). I am not looking forward to the day when you screw up my bill or block my card due to "fraud detection" and I have to actually try and speak to somebody real to get it fixed. I think on that day all my eggs will be in one basket with Bank of America, who provide me really good service. If you would like me to help with an assessment of why this letter irritated me so badly, and whether other customers feel the same, just give me a call. I'm sure you have my phone number on file as your sales reps are going to wear it out.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Your phone: pay for more (but not in the usual way)

2011-02-22T08:42:00.000-05:00

Image via Wikipedia
So you already think that your mobile phone can do everything? There's an app for this, an app for that, we can email photos taken by pinhole-sized phone cameras, and we can all wonder how its possible for an average teen to walk and text simultaneously. So are you ready to pay for more with your phone? And for once I don't mean this the same as 'pay more', I mean pay for more things, as you would get cash out of your pocket to buy a can of Coke from a vending machine.

FloridaToday.com talks about the rise of contactless payment technology (thanks to Bob Wieseneck at Applied-InfoSystems for sending me this story). It seems that this long discussed, and usually ignored function that has been so popular in Japan, and almost completely ignored in the rest of the cell-phone using world might be gaining popularity.

An interesting stat from the article:

The Smart Card Alliance estimates that there are half a million contactless terminals in the U.S., in 150,000 to 200,000 locations. That compares to perhaps 6 million locations in the U.S. with traditional card readers

Many of these terminals are in New York city taxis, which have the contactless NFC chips. This in my opinion is an ideal location for contactless technology. When in a cab I'm more likely to have easy access to my phone, or its already in my hand. I don't need to grope for my wallet in the dark, dropping $20 bills and my house key on the floor, when I can just tap the phone against the reader and I'm done. Better for the driver, better for me. Its the same anywhere I don't want to be troubled or risk taking my wallet out and flashing the cash and cards. I want to buy a Coke from a vending machine on a busy subway station? Tap and go. The same for parking meters. The benefit is not just speed, it is convenience and security as well.

An interesting point comes when you consider, according to the article:

In stores, phones with NFC could be popular if they do more than merely replace a wallet of credit and debit cards. They could help merchants track and reward loyal customers, replacing both loyalty cards and printed coupons.

What is it that allows stores to do this? Well, the stores are a little restricted with what they can do with your credit card number, and what you will allow your credit card to do (if I can buy thousands of dollars of stuff with a card, you guys aren't getting my permission to mess with it!). The technology and security around credit cards limits the information stores can collect and use at the point of sale. After all, its just a number, and your data and preferences are very separate. Outside the US, chip and pin credit cards have shown the security and anti-fraud benefits of getting away from a swiped card number.

With contactless technology, the stores aren't bound by Visa, Mastercard, Amex or the consumer's perception in the same way. If they can get your permission to use your contactless device to act as a loyalty card and payment card in one, then they start to get some interesting applications. It seems that the humble 2-D barcode I've been chasing for tracking consumer preferences could have a run for its money. You may now have an option: scan or tap to find out more about that enticing offer on the shelves of the local retailer?

I'm ready to pay for more with my phone. And maybe this technology will be led by smaller businesses as they upgrade their point of sale equipment a bit at a time. The large corporate retailers may be too slow to catch up given a need for standardization and mass rollouts of new card payment machines. This could mean that the little guy has a better chance of catching this wave of adoption of contactless payment technology by consumers.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

CRM made meaningful AND easy?

2011-02-16T09:01:00.000-05:00

Small business does not need enterprise software (because it sucks) is a post I wrote just a couple of weeks ago. And CRM is one of those Big Enterprise systems that just screams "spend hundreds of thousands in consulting to implement me!". Even Salesforce doesn't make it particularly easy for small businesses that just want to manage their clients, prospects and contacts. Getting started is just too hard. Well, it seems that things might be changing. Just a few minutes ago, TechCrunch put out the story that Constant Contact Buys Social CRM Startup Bantam Live for $15 Million in Cash. For any of you who have been reading about my exploits getting my first email newsletter out to my contacts using Constant Contact, you'll know that I love what they do (and you may also remember that my wife works for them - I have not been rewarded for writing this). So I'm interested in how this new addition of Bantam Live to the Constant Contact suite will help small businesses to really know who they know.

I'm sure that Constant Contact are downplaying what this acquisition means right now. Sure, when I looked at Bantam Live during some research for my own efforts with Consected, just a couple of months ago, I would say that ease of use and fast start for getting contacts into the solution from numerous sources (including your social media contacts like Twitter) was appealing. And this is going to be considerably better than the sufficient email contact upload capability Constant Contact has available currently. But my hope is that you smart guys at Constant Contact are thinking about this more broadly. What do I mean? Well, as I have your attention, here is what I, as a small business owner want...

Just remember, as a small business owner I don't want to be looking in multiple places for customer contact information. So the CRM capability needs to really live up to the C in CRM - 'Customer'. Not just another contact I can engage through your email, event and social media marketing. But a true customer who is spending money with my business, and therefore sometimes contacts me about stuff. I need to know their history, know the key contacts, even mark some of them as 'do not send marketing emails', so that I can truly manage the customer relationship. And it all needs to just be there, up and running and configured when I first login. I don't have time, or energy to work out how to get it configured or choose from lots of options - it just has to work - now.

It is around the true management of customers that I hope the really solid features of Bantam Live live on. Easy to use social CRM will certainly help me in the engagement of my contacts, not just through email. But the collaboration and task management capabilities seem to allow the opportunity to offer more of a small business suite than mere email marketing alone. I'm bullish about this for one reason - Constant Contact has proven to hundreds of thousands of other paying customers that they can make previously complex technology accessible to users who rarely venture away from their Yahoo home page. If they can do this with the Bantam Live CRM + collaboration capabilities, then I think they are on to a winner and will be loved by more and more small businesses, for more than email newsletters.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Why are we afraid of accounting processes?

2011-02-15T08:52:00.000-05:00

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I didn't question it too deeply when I was a product manager for an enterprise Business Process Management (BPM) software firm, although it was always there nagging at me: why don't we do more work with accounting systems and the Finance team in general? They are core to the running of a business, but BPM (at least the stuff I worked with) generally tries to avoid those types of business problems. Looking back on it I think there are two easy reasons. But before I get to them, I'll repeat to myself and others the justification that always came out from the marketing team's collective mouths:

Our solution, ExeClassyProcess720 (made up name, and now waaay uncool as any teen snowboarder will tell you - since everyone is landing 1080's now) focuses on the bigger business problems. You know, like the ones that address the customer facing transactions which when done consistently well help companies attract new clients and make current clients more profitable and happier. That back-office stuff doesn't interest us because that involves working with accountants, and they never have any money to spend.

That's a fictional description of how enterprise BPM justifies any particular niche it works within. The real issue is not the first piece of the discussion, which may be a very realistic way of positioning an individual product if that's where its strengths are. But it is the second piece that really gets to the meat of the matter: it is perceived that any team that reports to the CFO is unlikely to have any money to spend on improving how they work. Is it really true? After all, Oracle seems to do a pretty good job making money out of businesses requiring Financials packages and all the related modules.

So BPM software vendors go the easy way - they look for the obvious issues that they can solve, then when they run out of the easy stuff they get stuck. So during a vendor's decline, it goes down justifying to itself why it can't address the thousands of other process problems that appear in a business, because the mind-set is still locked in the "can't go near the Finance team" mode.

Back to my two easy reasons why BPM avoids anything that has accounting software related to it:

BPM'ers are scared of accountants as we don't know their business
BPM doesn't play well with other software, despite all the hype

Why are BPM'ers afraid of accountants? We've been pretending we know or can learn other people's business better than them for years, so why can't we raise the same level of BS with accounting? Probably because the numbers don't lie, whereas there is such a lack of formal measurement in other parts of the business that its easy to "bluff it and hope" when fixing some of those other business problems.

The reality is that accounting packages really don't address well many of the inputs and outputs related to the financial running of the business and could really do with some help. I'm thinking of travel expense reports, accounts payable invoice handling, and even the financial planning and forecasting process. These are ripe opportunities that any BPM'er could address, if they could get over their allergy associated with accounting.

The fundamental issue I think is that enterprise BPM is put off by the fact that an accounting system exists and is the guardian of its data. Business processes can only touch that data, feeding it, watching it for an hour or two like a good aunt or uncle, but always returning it safely and soundly to the watchful accounting system when its time is up. Despite all the 'web services' hype, BPM tends to be greedy. It wants to consume that data, chomping on those healthy numbers and mixing it with its diet of junk food data from operational processes. If it really can regurgitate those numbers in any useful form, they needs some really good cleaning up before returning them home.

Despite the rather gruesome imagery, BPM just doesn't play well with others. The accountants that BPM'ers are afraid of will make them look dumb, and the data that those accountants so carefully enter into the accounting system are just too pristine to mess with in a BPM solution. So BPM software and practitioners back off, and wonder why the big consulting firms just get bigger.

For small firms like Consected this is great. It leaves plenty of room for financial management systems, ERP, and big consulting firms to do such a bad job that eventually the CFO will recommend some new investment in technology, with a proven ROI (imagine that in other parts of the business). At that point the non-BPM crowd get their chance to show that business processes can be made better where there is an accounting system and that we can all play well together.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Email marketing - it really works!

2011-02-03T11:30:00.000-05:00

I've been talking about my experiences with email marketing, after my wife who works for Constant Contact persuaded me to give it a go. The main effort I have been putting into it is providing subscribers of my newsletter (mostly Consected customers) with valuable information that they want to receive in their inbox, not just another spammy sales effort. Well, it has finally come together. I sent out my first newsletter to a test group of 99 email addresses on Tuesday. Why 99? Well the free-trial from Constant Contact limits you to a small list of contacts initially. But this set was plenty for me to start to see the response. And I can say that based on this I have already signed up for the real service! That represents a high recommendation for the service, trust me.

Following some advice from the expert on communications, my wife, to go with a single topic for the newsletter, I managed to pull together some pretty good content. It followed my current area of interest, barcodes, and how they can help business organize information better. For those of you interested in seeing the newsletter, and the demo it contains, take a look at the archived copy: Can you improve your business with hundreds of little dots?

What kind of feedback did I get? Well, the Constant Contact reports are nice. They report email opens, link click-through, and other useful stuff. I signed up because I was amazed to see that the email was opened by more than 30% of recipients on the list. That means that 30 people at least opened the email to see what it was talking about, rather than just hitting delete. A couple registered 'do no mail', which is good to know. But frankly I messed up on the click tracking, as I disabled it in a few important links, so the Constant Contact reports don't give me that information and I have to hunt around elsewhere for it. And quite honestly, my cheapie website host kept putting my shared server offline the day the email went out, so many people wouldn't have got to the website anyway. I see a move to the Consected production Rackspace servers in my crystal ball.

But I went one better than the great open rate. After seeing the newsletter, a business partner I hadn't spoken to in months contacted me -- with a great new business opportunity! That will be worth the effort and monthly subscription fee without doubt!

I'm going to follow the same format for my next newsletter, in early March. If I get the same rate of response I'll be stunned (and happy)!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Small business does not need enterprise software (because it sucks)

2011-01-27T09:33:00.000-05:00

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I've been getting really involved in applications for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) over the last few months. And a constant eye opener for me is the importance of making business applications as simple and intuitive as feasibly possible, while retaining a huge number of options and configurations to fit every need. Why is it an eye opener? I suppose I had never needed to consider the usability of software that could be used by a regular consumer -- the enterprise software space is different. Again, I ask myself why?

It seems to me that enterprise software has things easy when it comes to usability for end users. The natural assumption is that the software is complex, and that large companies will invest extra in training their workers to use a new system. The fact is that enterprise software is complex, but at a technical level. The problem is that the technical pieces of the software tend to show through the cracks in the user interface, leading to strange ways of working and difficult memory tests for end users as they try and remember what they have to do next to get their tasks done.

SMB software is often technically simpler for the simple reason that it hasn't been growing for 20 years, through a range of technology trends and software languages. It tends to have less churn to deal with, so the complexity of its functionality doesn't have to compete with the complexity of the code that makes it run. SMB software and especially newer software as a service (SaaS) products can spend more time considering how the end user needs to use the system.

So there are no real surprises. Enterprise software has become lazy, and IT buyers who are rightly most interested in the technology that makes it run help perpetuate this laziness. Enterprise software can focus on tech buzzwords, not usability. My challenge for today is how to make an application so blindingly simple that a user logging in and using it for the first time knows exactly what to do, without hiding the options that allow it to be used by more than 0.0001% of companies that might want to use it.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Email marketing - sending my first newsletter to myself

2011-01-19T12:06:00.000-05:00

My trial of email marketing from Constant Contact continues after a short delay. Last step was to chat to an email marketing consultant, who provided me with a lot of information to get me started. The next step was to try and put together my first email, and send it to the enormous mailing list of one person, me! I did start to read some of additional resources that I was sent as well, but frankly I'm more in a "get on and do it" mood, so I'll be making a lot of mistakes along the way.

To get started you have to pick a template for your email from all the categories presented. It feels like hundreds, so you'd think there would be one that jumped out at me. But this turned out harder than I expected. In the end I rejected the typical "business people around a PC" styles, opting for something more bright and friendly. Hey, I don't have to get it right first time, and hopefully nobody is judging Consected services on my aesthetic tastes. Just as long as the template is not clearly obnoxious or pink and flowery I think I'm okay.

So, a green template picked, now its time to start editing. For users of the Google Chrome browser, you'll get a warning that the editor is a Beta version currently. Which means presumably that the engineers haven't really had a chance to validate that everything works correctly, although for me it seemed to work alright (better than the editor I'm using to write this blog to be honest).

To make it obvious that it is a newsletter you are writing, the editor is split into the major blocks of the page:

Title
Table of contents
Greetings
Articles
etc, etc...

You get to edit each block independently of the others, which prevents you from completely screwing up the layout of the email if you delete something incorrectly. It also really helps to guide your thought processes, rather than starting from a blank page.

One gripe is around the simple image upload facility, which worked fine generally. Although I'll say that is seems kinda backwards to have to resize your images where you upload them into the library, rather than where they appear in the text. Maybe I'm missing something, but even this Google Blogger editor manages to be a little more intuitive in that regard.

Now, the big challenge. Something that no service can help you with really. What on earth do I write about? So my current areas of interest are barcodes for information management and marketing, and travel expenses. Woohoo! This is going to be exciting fodder. So let's get creative.

So I start writing, and find that the conveniently small article blocks that you start with really help you keep your thoughts concise and to the point. I want to capture people's interest in the email, not write War and Peace. So that part of it is easier than I expected. But I want each teaser article to lead to more useful information, on my blog or website. But I don't want this to just look like an obnoxious ploy to get people to my website to sell them something. This is about engagement, after all. So the hard part I realized is having some content already published somewhere that I can point reader of my newsletter to. The really valuable stuff that the newsletter teaser leads to.

Well, that's where I've got myself stuck. So I sent the test email anyway, just for the hell of it. And it looked pretty good, I must say! But I now need to put some thought behind what is going behind the scenes. Writing good content, that I really want to publish on my website takes a little time. This blog, well you can already see that this is a different story. But it would be nice for people to get something useful from the website. So it seems I have another item for the to-do list. Which gives me a perfect opportunity to sign off until the next installment of my email marketing story.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Concur acquires TripIt - expense your itinerary?

2011-01-14T11:30:00.000-05:00

Travel organizer TripIt sold to Concur for up to $120 million is the headline I just read. The aim of this I believe is for Concur to get into business travel earlier in the cycle, rather than just dealing with expensing it, they can persuade you to buy it from them as well.

In my previous corporate lives I've been forced to use many travel booking services for business travel. All charged a hefty fee so that the CFO could get a better handle on what services were being used, and to hopefully be able to achieve better negotiation with preferred hotels and airlines than trying to work blind. The reality for those of us traveling was that we would typically find the airline routes and schedules we wanted with Kayak, then book with the travel service for the same amount, while paying the fee for the privilege. As an outsider to the benefits (we all assume that the CFO and CEO get million-miler platinum rewards kick-backs from the service), it seemed like a waste. And worse still, not once did it help me with the travel expense reporting process. Will Concur be any different, given that they control travel expenses for some large firms? Possibly, but given previous performance of most companies doing this, unlikely.

For the rest of the businesses out there that won't be negotiating lock in travel booking deals, travel expenses continue to be easier to control if you put the process online, capture receipts electronically, and import transactions directly from credit card electronic statements. Do you really need your employees to sticky tape every receipt to a piece of paper, so they can fax it or FedEx it to your accounting team? Or do you want them to email the receipts directly to an electronic expense report that can be reviewed rapidly, signed off by supervisors or project managers, and passed for payment, without a single piece of paper being generated, Excel spreadsheet being emailed, or travel booker and expense processing vendor trying to lock you in to another deal that only benefits them?

Congratulations to TripIt and Concur on their new togetherness!

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Barcodes - bigger than beans

2011-01-14T10:51:00.000-05:00

Barcodes are on virtually every product we own, from cans of beans and iPhone boxes to airport boarding passes. Even look in hidden parts of your car like door sills and you'll even find them there. They are everywhere, so we ignore them. But they are everywhere for a reason. For a business to organize information, the humble barcode is invaluable.

With the advent of the 2-D barcodes such as QR code and Data Matrix, we have seen people start to embed carefully encoded URLs, which will allow your smart phone barcode app to take you to an individual web page. Incredible for marketing. Equally incredible for business information.

The examples in the image show exactly what I mean. Starting at the bottom image, the lowest common denominator is a simple URL. Point your smart phone app at that, and it will take you to a very special web page. Marketing at its best!

In the middle we have a UID sticker, a printable label that describes all the relevant details of an imaginary aircraft component, allowing the supply chain for aircraft parts to be managed more carefully. Scan this and you'll instantly know what this part claims to be, and where it came from. Then at the top, let's manage people in the same way. The secure visitor's pass goes one better than the old sign-in book on reception desks in traditional offices. Have a person greeting visitors enter their information, capture a photo with a webcam and click GO to print the visitor's badge. Better yet, the next time the person visits the information is already in the system (unless they want a new photo with the much improved hairstyle!)

There are many ways, outside of just scanning stuff in the supermarket that barcodes allow businesses to run more efficiently and control their products and information (check your electricity bill, I bet it has a barcode on it). We have many ideas from experience (both ours and the 120 customers already using Consected Barcode Templates). Many of which of these ideas we have already, or are planning to put into ready to use templates. If you have something you need, just let us know.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Email marketing for small businesses - the trial continues

2011-01-11T17:21:00.000-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I chatted about my quest to try out email marketing for the first time. Not spam, but the idea of sending really engaging to contacts and customers about not only my products, but many things that may interest them and their businesses.

Here we are almost half way through the first week and I need to give a little more feedback. Constant Contact throws more ideas, information and educational materials at you than you can possibly consume. This is a good thing, since they lay it out in a way that allows you to understand what you can do with the service, so you can pick the way that you absorb information best. Want to just play? Your email marketing service is there, and a quick document walks you through how you can send a test email to see it in action. Want to read some more about the concepts? Pick from a range of relevant information. Want to see an online walk-through? 2pm ET will get you that (plus some other options I don't remember). Just need a little personal Q&A? Well, my friendly Constant Contact Consultant, Jon, can help me with that. I might need him to guide me a little when it comes to our next check in at the end of the week. He knows my aims and what my company offers, and I'm sure he'll have his notes in front of him when we chat next.

So far, I have to say that I'm impressed with the amount of information available, and the non-pushy service that I've been receiving. Remember, this is all part of my 60-day free trial. I'm not paying for all this yet. Obviously, its all part of a cunning sales-ploy, but who cares when you get this type of service?!

Check in tomorrow to see what progress I'm making. Later in the process, I might even sign up for a competitive service or two, just to see which one really works for me.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Reviewing how to keep customers and prospects engaged

2011-01-10T11:30:00.000-05:00

What a challenge it can be for small businesses to find new customers. I know, as I have to struggle with it, just like everybody else. So after all the effort of getting people interested in your products or services, keeping them interested is essential, and equally tricky. Over the next few weeks I'm going to review a tool that claims to help: email marketing.

I recently signed up for a 60-day free trial with Constant Contact, to see if email marketing is a valuable supplement to my other efforts to keep customers interested in what Consected offers, and how we can work together in the future. Can an email newsletter every few weeks work better for me than this blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc...? I think there may be a chance, since this blog is a broadcast and despite my best efforts to generate some discussion, frankly I have no idea who reads it, when or why. An email, with equally valuable content, but aimed at my customers and contacts seems surprisingly more personal.

So I will confess at this point that my wife works for Constant Contact. That's why I picked them over services. I'm a technology guy at heart, so I might have enjoyed tinkering with other options out there, and would probably have wasted loads of time. But what I need is the support that Constant Contact touts, around supporting small businesses in understanding what email marketing is, how to create effective content, and just how to use this "email is sexy again" approach to keeping in contact with customers.

For small businesses out there who are interested in my experiences, which I promise to keep fair and balanced, please sign up for this blog's RSS feed or the email, and I look forward to hearing your comments and experiences too.

A post from the Improving It blog

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A refreshingly honest acquisition message

2011-01-07T09:02:00.001-05:00

Image via CrunchBase

Some of you may have heard of DimDim - a free alternative to WebEx and GoToMeeting type web conference services. I have used it myself, as it made sense for the limited screen sharing requirements I had. Well, DimDim has announced that it will be acquired by Salesforce.com [CRM], in a surprisingly blunt email message sent out yesterday:

Dear Customer:

Dimdim has been acquired by salesforce.com.Your free Dimdim account will remain active until March 15, 2011. After that date, you will no longer be able to access your free Dimdim account.

Please see the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for additional information.

We appreciate your understanding, and we thank you!

I understand that free is free and therefore nobody really has any obligations either way. It is kind of refreshing to not hear the regular corporate language that DimDim's customers are the most important thing, and that everybody will be embraced and adored so maybe a few more people will be signed up into the Salesforce services. Salesforce obviously wants the on-screen collaboration technology to accompany its Chatter capabilities, not the probably fairly minimal paid subscriber-base that DimDim has acquired.

To DimDim - thanks for your free service. It has been useful and helped set expectations at WebEx that no small business is going to pay $30 a month for something they use very occasionally. Good luck making the technology an integral part of the Salesforce collaboration set. And even better, thanks for not blowing smoke and telling us customers how wonderful we are, when we all know that we were just a tool to you guys making some big money on an acquisition!

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AP: I promise I'll do better next year

2010-12-16T12:02:00.001-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Many people start to wind down a little at this time of year. Calls to customers start to tail off, marketing spend for business-to-business companies slows down, and everybody starts to save their energy for buying a wrapping stuff for the kids. For the poor souls in finance and accounting, this is just the calm before the storm. Financial years come to an end with a flurry of activity, and worse yet, tax season in the US starts to cause pangs of remorse. "Why did I not keep my paperwork more organized through the year?". "What are all these travel expense receipts?". "Can I hide on a small Caribbean island?".

Well, 2010 is almost done. Feel free to spend much of the end of December and all of January running around, finding what you need for your annual reports and IRS filings. But ask yourself, "do I want to be doing this again in twelve months time?". Especially as the new health care reform bill has an impact on the tax reporting of transactions (in the same way that the housing assistance support bill did several years ago), making the accounts payable team miserable. Yes, filing 1099 forms for every vendor that you spend more than $600 with (not just the unincorporated ones) in the course of the year sounds like running a report or two, then filling in the paperwork - not fun, but not world ending. But wouldn't it be better if you could kill two birds with one stone, fixing your messed up paper and Excel accounts payable and travel expenses processes, and ensure you can meet the 1099 reporting needs more easily?

It seems to be true that despite the hype of the burden on small business, a big chunk of the responsibility for patching up the leaky tax collection problem goes back to big business. The merchant banks, credit card companies, whichever organization handles an electronic transaction, becomes responsible for reporting these transactions. The tax code already demands this, and the requirement appears to have been extended. So, I've been complaining this week that electronic transactions are too costly for small business. Maybe that cost starts to be put into context when I consider the reporting costs in the future if I write a lot of large checks.

Its time to get ahead and start streamlining those accounts payable processes. Its really not going to be that hard, compared with the year end chaos that ensues anyway. And it could make 2011 a more restful and peaceful year, for accounts payable at least.

Remember: I know nothing about tax law or any other regulations affecting your business. So check with a professional before doing, or not doing anything.

A post from the Improving It blog

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2010-12-14T10:25:00.000-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I discussed why electronic payments are great for customers and banks, but terrible for small businesses dealing in high value, low volume transactions. This morning, Finextra relays the press release announcing the partnership of S1 and PayPal. S1 provides integration with online banking, so that person-to-person payments can be made directly from an individual's bank account. The actual payment is made through the PayPal infrastructure, giving the security and support that is needed for this to actually fly.

This news is interesting, since it is giving smaller institutions such as credit unions the opportunity to offer competitively priced money transfer capabilities. It starts to put in place a real competitor to the legacy fund automated clearing house (ACH) and wire transfer systems used by the banks for Electronic Funds Transfer. EFT is perceived as being highly complex and may be considered one reason why electronic payments are going to be such an expensive proposition for small businesses. If you make a payment to a small business electronically through an online banking site such as Bank of America, its likely that the bank prints and mails a check. The small business owner has the inconvenience of the paper check still. This is not an end to end electronic solution, it just suits the customer, and the bank gets to hold your money for longer.

If PayPal and S1, or similar propositions start to really compete in the marketplace, I hope this could put pressure on the big banks to start providing better and cheaper check-free approaches for business to business payments, completely integrated with real small business online banking. This is what small businesses want, direct integration, not another service that they have to transfer funds to so they can pay a third-party. The rather hefty charges, and complexity of funds transfers to the PayPal account before making the payment need to be reduced, and competition is the only way it will happen.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Electronic payments - a cost of doing business for SMBs

2010-12-13T10:46:00.000-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Electronic payments such as credit cards, debit cards and PayPal are outnumbering check payments in the US. Debit cards, counted the highest non-cash transactions, at 37.9 billion payments, while checks dropped significantly to 27.5 billion written in 2009. This is according to a short article in Financial Services Technology.

This all sounds great for businesses, since electronic payments are so much easier to handle, receive and reconcile than checks. But electronic payments come at a cost. 2.9% of the transaction is what a small vendor will pay for merchant processing. Despite the efficiencies involved, this is a big chunk of change, especially if you are dealing in a small number of high value transactions.

As check usage continues to plummet, and customers start to demand electronic payments from even small vendors, it seems that all the benefits sit with the consumer and the middle man processing the electronic payments. Eeking every efficiency possible out of the use of the electronic payment system is perhaps the only way that small vendors will be able to make up the gap. Process improvement in Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable become essential areas to focus, especially as the paperwork burden to manage a 1099 for every vendor receiving over $600 in transactions in a year could come into effect.

If small businesses have recommendations of how they receive and pay for large transaction goods and services electronically, please leave a comment.

A post from the Improving It blog

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You can't build BPM

2010-12-09T10:49:00.000-05:00

The BPM forum on ebizQ today asks:

A question from this blog, What's Better - Building a BPM Solution or Buying One? and an important question for companies looking to take the BPM leap. And what metrics should they use to make the decision?

Build or buy will be driven ultimately by the preferences of the organization.

1) completely tailored, business wide processes
2) solving specific business problems

If you need #1, then almost certainly you'll be buying an enterprise BPM suite, and building a lot of integration into your environment. BPM software is really a set of repeatable building blocks, made general enough to match common requirements for many business processes, not just those of one business. Therefore it seems hard to envisage building a BPM internally. Really what a business should be doing if it is looking at building software is using BPM methodologies alongside other requirements analysis approaches, and building just what is needed to make the solutions work in practice and make them maintainable in the future.

Smaller companies can do a lot more, since they are less likely to be driven by technological ego. There are many SaaS solutions that solve #2, common business problems, without building anything or even designing and 'configuring' new business processes. For example, why bother creating a travel expenses process from scratch, when there are many SaaS solutions available off the shelf?

When custom processes are absolutely necessary for SMBs, an enterprise BPMS is not going to be a good fit. Even the software vendors don't use their own software, due to its complexity and cost to implement ( see my blog post about a dirty little secret )

Finally, a guarantee of success should be something you can measure. Building anything adds risk to this equation. If the solution is the right size for the problem, there should be an ROI up front, which you can balance against the risk of build-or-buy. Soft benefits alone, like customer service improvements, does not make an investment invalid, just harder to justify ( see a quick animation that explains this from the perspective of the value chain ).

Build or buy of BPM is not the question. Companies should be asking themselves where their problems are and the fastest and best ROI for fixing them.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Enough is the best

2010-12-08T10:48:00.001-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Is 'Enough' the new 'Best'? That is the question asked by Idris Mootee on Blogging Innovation this morning. I have long been a proponent of "good enough" for business processes, which would be probably taken out of context in a sound bite, so don't quote me quite yet.

Mootee discusses the Muji stores in Japan, the non-brand brand that espouses the idea that as consumers there is stuff we need and want to buy, but why do we have to be forced into believing that one label makes a product better than another? Brands are there to do this, without adding any value to the actual thing that is being bought.

Unfortunately business improvement strategies have taken the branded non-value add approach. We have branded our business improvement methodologies, Lean and Six-Sigma are two common examples, to add caché. Hell, we even retained the Japanese-named concepts that came out of the manufacturing philosophies that don't always translate well into western thinking, because it makes the approach sound cool. What, after all, is wrong with translating concepts into plain English to make them accessible to a wider audience, rather than forcing people to buy expensive training and textbooks?

Strangely enough, despite maintaining a significant amount of branding to make its concepts sound bigger than sometimes they are, Lean really does follow the concept of 'enough is enough'. Maybe not 'enough is best', but knowing when to stop to avoid wasting effort in removing wasteful activities from your business processes. So, going back to my likely to be quoted out of context quote, "good enough" really has some value. The question is, do you want to spend money making one process that is performed close to perfect when the rest of your business needs some serious fixing? It is like seeing a house with a beautiful kitchen complete with granite and stainless steel, but the stairs leading up to the bedrooms are collapsing.

Small and medium-sized businesses should be especially sensitive to this pursuit of perfection in their processes. There is typically not spare cash to be invested in business improvement. Surprisingly, sometimes the best way to get bang for the buck is to do several things at once. Make sure you reach a milestone where the work done on a project is useful, but have enough measurable objectives in place to understand which of the simultaneous projects is really going to achieve what you want. Your understanding of what is important changes as your processes improve.

Like branding, sometimes a single laser-like focus on one project ends up dragging you into a endless cycle of polishing and perfection. Mootee may be right, at least in my view: "Enough" is the new "Best". You can quote me on that.

A post from the Improving It blog

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A world without people is not a fun place

2010-12-07T11:29:00.000-05:00

Image via WikipediaBusiness process improvement is fundamental to the best performing companies, although we rarely hear or talk about it. Instead we focus on how great the employees are, how they are trained to deliver great customer service, and how well their leaders inspire their people work better. Maybe it is because consumers of services are human-beings that we focus on the people part so much. Or maybe it is because so much of the focus of business process improvement has been in the mechanization, automation and general dehumanization of business processes that we have become immune to its benefits. Business processes are seen as tools that should just work, when we should be looking at them as better systems that involve talented people.

The thing is that business processes, unless you are talking about straight-through processing (STP) and ultimate automation, include people. This isn't about the marketing that we are seeing from business process management (BPM) vendors, classifying themselves as "leader in human-centric BPM for Java platforms", or some other ridiculous classification that allows somebody to be the leader in a niche that is unimportant to real business users. This is about helping people do their jobs better within processes, and helping people understand the processes that they work within so that they can make them better.

Linus Fernandes on his blog, Rubber Tyres -> Smooth Ride looks at it this way:

Most new software system implementations require people to be trained or re-trained; they have to understand why the new way of doing things is better, how it will make them more productive, how it affects the bottom-line. [...]

Yes, BPM can work, it does work, but it’s necessary to recognise the other associated costs especially with human capital.

The more fundamentally you try and change your processes, the more likely it is that you will need to train or employ specialists to understand and run them. Whereas, if you can keep your processes more natural, rather than something-centric, the more likely it is that you'll be able to benefit from the skills and experience your employees already have. Allow people to do the things that require intelligence and human-interaction. Feel free to automate other parts, but don't feel bullied into it by software marketing. If there is no value in automation, just help people work better by providing them the information and tools they need to produce a quality product or serve customers better.

For more thoughts on how customer service and efficiency fit together, see this short video.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Why bother with DIY BPM?

2010-12-03T12:17:00.000-05:00

Companies that have tried improving their business processes, either through manual improvements or software BPM solutions, know that the DIY approach can be a big time-suck. So why bother? Everybody looks at the return on investment in projects based on hard costs, and the costs with in-house software are never small. But few people look at the costs on your time, the business person who desperately wants things to change, but can not spare the time to think about things deeply enough to make the changes useful rather than plain damaging.

I've been chatting with Ian Lever at Forward Look about alternatives to IT-centric BPM tools for business improvement. To steal one of his thoughts: why would you invest in building a leave/vacation request process, a travel expense process or a time sheet system using internal IT and business users, when there are a hundred low cost, ready made alternatives out there already? For many large companies, it seems easier to call the ERP vendor and have them enable the module and customize it to your needs (for tens of thousands of consulting and licensing costs), rather than suffer the indignity of going online and signing up for an easy to use system that doesn't really integrate (but doesn't need to) to your ERP. Burn some IT budget and get something in six months, that's the only way to go for many locked in by their IT department. For the rest of us, where that one project spend like this would exceed the annual IT budget, build versus buy becomes a big question. Doing it yourself is not always the cheapest way to achieve the goals, and unless you are really handy with the tools it is rarely going to achieve the highest quality result.

For this reason, software as a service (SaaS) vendors exist to deliver solutions for what you need. This isn't like the BPM vendors and their 'templates'. This is real running solutions, ready to go. For this reason, Consected will be announcing some new Instant Apps. Look out for these new, free and low-cost apps at Consected Instant Apps.

"Great!", you say, "but nobody does what I want, my way". Well, if you really have faced that problem with the lack of appropriate SaaS solutions for you specific business need, add a comment below or contact me (select 'customer service', since I'm not in sales mode), and share your ideas, wishes or gripes with me. A problem shared...

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Saucepan in a saucepan

2010-11-30T09:15:00.001-05:00

According to Joe Shepley on his blog, Cereal in the Saucepan:

If we wanted to organize our kitchen to maximize space, we would never do things like store empty pots and pans or glasses in one place and disposable boxes of dry goods in another…we’d dump the dry goods into those empty pots, pans, and glasses and toss the disposable boxes they came in–et voila: maximized space!

Put in simple terms, Joe says that we should organize the filing of our documents on the processes behind information as much as the storage of those documents. If we have masses of information and documents, how useful is the traditional Windows file system approach to document storage? Who really cares that a document is on the C: drive? The C: drive is like the mechanics of the filing cabinet drawers that allow them to slide in and out easily despite being full to overflowing. It doesn't tell us anything about the information we have stored on it.

It gets slightly better, as savvy computer users (not my mother-in-law) start to put things into folders for each type of work they do. Now in an office, we end up with the F: drive being the place where people throw all the junk, with a folder of "Accounts Receivable", one for "Travel and Entertainment", etc. Careful filenames keep the documents in order. But frankly that offers us little better options than knowing that an expense claim is in the bucket, and got dumped there around 3 months ago.

Why is it so hard to classify our documents by business process, and the meaningful business information that generated them? You know, keep them in context, rather than make them an issue of searching for them? Because the good-ol' PC doesn't let us do that, and we don't want to spend time naming documents and hundreds of folders in a way that lets us find them.

I have always been a great proponent of keeping documents in the context of the processes that created them. Not in the old workflow / document automation way of "it arrived in the workflow, and its stuck there", but a meaningful classification that let's us use the fact that an employee travel expense claim has meaningful attributes (or metadata) for the employee, for the accounting group, and for the auditor. Keep the information (expense form, scanned receipts, manager approval) organized in a meaningful structure, and the attributes used to identify the processes information belongs to just takes care of itself. Yes, just have an information management app that is meaningful while documents are in the process and when we are finally done with them, without having to waste time filing after the face.

Me, file documents? The documents were filed in Consected almost before they were used. Put another way, my saucepan is already in the dishwasher. My cereal is in me. And its time for another coffee...

A post from the Improving It blog

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The value chain doesn't have to be linear

2010-11-23T08:55:00.000-05:00

Porter Value Chain (from Wikipedia)

Working with clients face-to-face is always interesting and enlightening. However much a company may need help from a consultant in a specific area of their business, the consultant always learns a new way of looking at business problems. For me, a recent trip to a client led to many discussions about strategies for improving the business, both the little things and the big things. The big things, such as M&A and moving to a new headquarters, often have the greatest payback, but in terms of looking at the day to day operations of the business, looking at how a firm can improve its customer service quality while reducing wasteful activities can also pay back big.

During my visit, we started discussions about the value chain. We envisioned a long paper chart, pinned to the office wall, showing everything from prior to attracting a new prospective customer to the business, through serving them successfully and profitably, to finally ending the relationship and eventually dissolving that closed account completely. Its a compelling visual, since it touches so many pieces of the business, and can help business people who have become so entrenched in their piece of the puzzle to look around and see how their work impacts others, both positively and negatively. This long value chain / enterprise business process will make a great project for somebody, one day.

The issue I have whenever I look at the value chain, is that it is often viewed as a fairly linear and blocky thing, showing a flow of activities leading to value at the far end. Maybe this is just because many examples focus on manufacturing and the success of production lines. Of course outside of a production line, we all know that this linear view is just not the case. Activities go on in all areas of the business that deliver value, and different departments aren't always as remote from the action as the Porter Value Chain diagram (above) would suggest. Especially in services industries, I would suggest that we would end up with a series of segments of an orange all pointing in to value generation in the center. After all, it is hard to say whether a client will be more upset about a screw up in one group or another, when the financial outcome is about the same. In financial services, if a firm delays a wire transfer for $100k, or a rep delays placing a securities trade that increases the individual's risk, the actual cost may be small, but the perception from the client may be huge. Finance was responsible for one error, sales for the other, and only an orange slice view of the value chain puts them on equal footing. Reversing the view and delivering top quality service in both areas of the business may also deliver equal financial and value to the customer and then back to the business.

The issue with all of this is that the orange slice view of value does not help people understand the business processes that are being performed. It highlights that we are all one "big happy team", but in terms of understanding, it shows little else that is tangible to a business person. So the value chain can not replace business process definitions, which show the way work related specific transactions flow through the organization. And business processes rarely show where the valuable work is done in the organization, just showing where work gets done in an overall timeline. So my reminder to myself as a consultant is this: "just because I can make a business process work better, I must look at the value chain to understand where to focus my efforts". Nothing new, but a good reminder to all of us to get out out the weeds and look at the orange. And when things start getting a little too high-level-strategic with little focus, I can alway dive back to fixing specific business processes that I've now shown will deliver value to the business, and importantly its customers.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Advertise all you want, but what happens to the leads?

2010-11-08T11:43:00.000-05:00

Advertising a small business's products is great, but the leads you get from your advertising investment are what matter. I spent a morning at the Javits Center in New York City last week, thankful to be out of the rain for a little while. One side of the building was taken over by the super-fit marathon runners preparing for a grueling 26 mile Sunday with some retail therapy buying fitness clothing. The other side was largely taken over by ad:tech, a chance for media channels, technology and ad buyers to uncomfortably mingle in one place. It is interesting that LinkedIn ads occupied a booth maybe 8 times the size of Microsoft advertising.

For me, where the rubber meets the road for advertising is when all that spending pays back and you get solid leads. The ad:tech presenters I heard were so overcome with excitement that you could count and measure these leads, slicing and dicing them in every way, that nobody seemed interested that you might actually want to follow up on those leads. You know, see if the leads are real, what the potential customer's need are, start building a rapport with the buyer. Nope, the most exciting thing apparently is drawing a pretty chart so you can optimize your advertising messages the next time.

So, you all shout, "just put the leads into Salesforce". Yeah, well how many small businesses have got through the learning curve of Salesforce to actually make it a useful system? In a quick poll I made, only one had finally invested the resources needed to get it to work. Even then, the leads coming in end up being entered laboriously by hand from the website. But hey, they can now get fancy reports to see how many leads are in the funnel. And it only costs $25 per user unless your are considered 'professional', in which case start considering how it will impact the kids' college funds.

Along the same lines, I have to relay the little chuckle I had when I walked past an expensive ad:tech expo stand (I won't name the company). The rep was talking to some interested people about the service he was touting. They asked for a copy of a case study, which he didn't have to hand. So what did he do? Scribble the person's email address on the back of one of his own business cards and promise to follow up. "But if you don't hear from me, do drop me an email to remind me", I heard him say. Yeah, lost cause I thought to myself - I wonder how many leads like that were wasted?

So, Salesforce takes some effort to get start on. If you already have it and are advertising to get some real leads, bite the bullet and work out if it really will work for you. I use my own software to capture lead information received face to face and on the web, through a simple contact web page powered by Consected. It gets the information directly into a lead workflow, helping us follow-up and track the responses. Fancy analytics, not so much, but to be honest I wouldn't know what to do with them even if they were there. It takes a company investing way more in marketing than we do to be able to really make use of that information.

If your company would like to improve how it captures and tracks its all important customer leads, contact us and I can help you get up and running in about an hour.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Fix the little things, and get big results

2010-10-27T14:11:00.000-04:00

Workflows are just not big enough for us to pay attention to any more. Why bother fixing things that just involve a handful of people working to get a job done?!

Most business process practitioners experienced the days when a business process was represented in reality by a paper workflow. The movement of work from one person to another represented the process for specific work to get done, so we called it 'workflow'. The word workflow seems dated. Despite this, the paper workflow still exists, although in many cases the workflow has become email based, with just a piece of paper to be signed by the customer.

Business process management, both methodology and technology decided along the way that it needed a bigger piece of the pie. If you just transfer work from one place to another, surely that's not very exciting. Every professional needs more than that. Let's make sure we can measure the process in a way that was never needed before, analyzing it to a level of detail that could be considered obsessive. Let's model a new improved process and simulate its inside workings so there are no surprises. Let's step it up another notch and implement the new process with tools that could run real-time stock trading.

None of this stuff is bad, just for many organizations (okay, all organizations), there are simple workflows that are run on paper or email. They don't need much analysis and they don't need simulation. They certainly don't need a 6-digit piece of software to run them. These workflows are common: accounts payable, check/cheque requisitions, complaints handling. Business process management wants to think big and be big. So nobody ever focuses on the fact that some of these processes have an impact through the value chain on customer satisfaction.

So while we are trying to fix business processes at an enterprise level, don't forget fixing business processes, oh hell, call them what they are, WORKFLOWS, at the departmental and team level. Its amazing (although it shouldn't be) how picking off some of these smaller items can help a company be significantly more profitable through better customer service.

A post from the Improving It blog

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What? Not Collaboration?

2010-10-19T08:11:00.000-04:00

Anybody who has read my posts for a while will know that I have big stretches where I post nothing. Looking back,you can see my blogging rate follows a pattern: it starts solidly, maintains itself well, before building a crescendo (of quantity or quality) and then fizzles out pretty fast to a long period of silence. Since I'm not communicating with the outside world through my blog, nobody will really know why this is. Well, its two word that don't really fit together neatly: "relationships" and "process".

Social networking and everything "Web" has tried to teach us that you can maintain meaningful relationships online, with people you've never met and are never likely to meet. That's fine, and I won't deny that there are names I recognize on screen that I have discussed matters with that I would never have known in a past life. I work from a home office, so I understand completely the importance of online communications. Hey, I even can enjoy chatting to people on the phone if its somebody I genuinely like. But its never quite the same as "face time".

This is why my blogging pattern is erratic. I work hard for clients because I like them, or grow to like them. But its like having a new best friend, it tends to exclude others for a while. Now with a client, the relationship is kinda weird - its a big love-fest with multiple people AND a project, all in a big boardroom. I suppose I'm a geek at heart. I enjoy technology and I enjoy seeing how businesses work. But I have come to realize what I enjoy from it is seeing how people respond to the technology and how they interact with each other to achieve their daily work. I genuinely want to make it better for everybody. That is why I like business process management. What? Not collaboration?

Business process management is great, as it addresses the fact that in business processes you are trying to force people to do what comes naturally to only a few: work together smoothly, efficiently and consistently in a fairly alien set of activities (if you are telling me that most of the work we do in offices is natural evolved behavior I'd probably not believe you, therefore its alien). If you can help people work in a structured way for work needing that structure, the end result can be quite impressive. I've seen customers' employees just glowing with excitement and happiness that so many of the stupid annoyance of their working lives have been removed. This isn't collaboration. Collaboration let's people do something that is natural (work together in unstructured interactions), doing it better when it comes to information sharing. Its great and useful, but its a different animal.

My reason for not blogging and chatting with some of you recently? I've been helping a client deliver three business improvement projects simultaneously. One is a big catalyst for many other business changes going forward. I have a relationship with the people around the project and the project itself. And when a just bit more process improvement is eeked out of it, I'll be very happy and blogging again with great gusto! My new best friend will have a great process. And great processes make everybody happy.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Processes need more than 2-D maps

2010-09-10T14:26:00.004-04:00

Just in case you wondered why business process mapping fails us, here is a very short presentation (well, Prezi) to help me get my point across.
(If it doesn't start automatically after clicking, click More then Autoplay)

Business processes - control with creativity on Prezi

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Business processes and the rear-view mirror

2010-08-11T08:51:00.000-04:00

I have a growing appreciation of why certain financial institutions have got themselves into so much trouble. Attempting to manage a business, supervise minute-by-minute trading and review brokers' activities is hard enough, but its made even more challenging by the fact that many firms still attempt to do this by the human study of exception reports. I say 'study', because that's what it looks like: some very talented people picking through printed reports line by line, looking for patterns or anomalies. In some cases this is essential - a necessary step in what is being done is to review the past. But as the recent TV ad from IBM shows, and a range of software companies have hinted at in the past, running your business looking in the rear-view mirror is not only tricky, its downright dangerous.

So what do you do? Well, one approach is to take the printed exception reports and re-make them electronic. Keep them in a format where some clever software can supplement the clever people and look for the obvious patterns, based on predefined business rules, and the less obvious patterns, based on some seriously smart heuristics. But the rear-view mirror is still your issue. You are catching errors after its too late to do much about them - much beyond making a correction, apologizing heavily and reprimanding the employee that messed up.

The second approach is to revert to the old days of decision making: a person makes the decision, but there is an approval process before any decision is actually executed. Great - its hard to screw up - and harder still to get anything done. For financial services that depend on the trading of smart, bullish individuals, running in near real-time, that just doesn't fly. But as the business rules management guys will tell us, even for less challenging environments than securities trading, automated business rules management is still not widespread enough in business. Why? Because for them to work as part of the whole, they need to be part of the overall business process. Not just tacked on the side where they can be bypassed easily, but fully embedded and completely enforced. And for that you need a system in place for managing the business processes in which the rules are enforced. A system for doing this is not email, its a real system that guides the correct flow of work, its delivery (between human beings, business rules and other systems). It doesn't have to be a multi-hundred thousand dollar BPMS / SOA / software vendor's ticket to paradise. But it does need to exist and start to become part of the workings of the business.

For now, making the rear-view mirror work better, while giving intelligent people more time to lift their heads and look ahead is my goal for clients. I will help them get to the next step when they have time to see the value of doing things differently.

A post from the Improving It blog

Old approaches to business process management are failing companies

2010-07-28T08:31:00.000-04:00

We all know that companies of all sizes are facing tough economic challenges at the moment. These challenges are coming from one of the toughest directions possible: customers are not spending money, making it more important than ever to convert the few available prospects into profitable customers. Improving business processes is a powerful way for companies to work better, but the old business process management (BPM) approaches companies often rely on just don't fit the current challenges.

Companies invest in business process management from two direction:

methodology - the way a company can fix its problems
technology - applications helping people work in a more structured way

The reasons for doing this were all reasonable in an economy with plenty customers with cash in their pockets:

reduce headcount
do more work with the same resources
improve the quality of a product or service

In the current economy, these types of improvement are not enough. Whether a company is a bank, a manufacturer or a law firm, the challenges facing the business is that the economy is making it harder to attract new customers and retain them.

This is where modern business process management solutions kick in. First, they offer a faster startup time with more focused analysis of problems, which means less money is spent on teams of expensive consultants trying to build strategies for things that don't matter. Second, the solutions offered already include a range of business templates, helping companies to build to a tried and trusted plan rather than always reinventing the wheel. Finally, and possibly most importantly, the methodology focuses on iterative improvement, rather than trying to get every little thing right first time. When the tools are designed to adapt to this types of constant change, the company can improve based on experience rather than luck.

With this lightweight approach to business process improvement, the flexibility to change processes based on experience and best-practices allows companies to do something that in the past was really difficult:

treat each customer as an individual rather than force fitting them into a standard model of a customer
allow the processes that serve customers to extend and adapt based on circumstances
help the business owners introduce new improved processes rapidly and with minimal cost

Business process management can help companies meet the challenges of the current economy. Companies that adopt new methodologies and technologies can become known for great customer service at a good price. In these times when social media is the marketing machine, and word of mouth spreads corporate reputation like wildfire, companies can attract and retain more customers than ever before.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Rescuing struggling business processes from the back office

2010-07-21T17:16:00.000-04:00

I have a short article just published on ITBusinessEdge talking about how business processes in offices can be so much harder to rein in and control than manufacturing work with a production line:

So much has been written about efficiency in manufacturing that its is time for the masses of us office-bound companies to get a look in. A production line in a manufacturing company works so well to improve efficiency of building widgets because it constrains the way the half-completed widgets move, who gets them next and what they do with them. In the back offices of companies, things aren't so easy, so it can be hard to see why there is lots of activity with minimal productivity.

Take a read of the rest of the article to find out how I think that simpler online / SaaS solutions may often be better than complex and expensive enterprise software, even for the big enterprises that can afford it. This is just part of my white paper for rapid process improvement: Seven Steps to Escaping Process Chaos.

A post from the Improving It blog

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When documents and processes come together

2010-07-08T09:41:00.001-04:00

I'll admit that the coming-together of processes and documents (BPM+ECM) has been a common theme of this blog for the four years that I've been spouting-off here. My background was imaging and workflow, then I got trapped along the way in understanding records management and even more trapped when process improvement became BPM suites, and more about the process than the stuff in it. I can not avoid feeling that I've heard this all before, but still wasn't satisfied.

Yesterday, a forum on ebizQ brought together some of the opinions about the question "Is it inevitable that BPM and ECM will be integrated into one system in the future?". For companies running both of these technologies in house, the answer is probably a no-brainer. ECM and BPM are already integrated, because the customer did it themselves. For vendors, nobody has worked out really if they can make money from it.

I've included some quotes from the forum that I think sum up the range of opinions, though its worth reading through the whole thing if this topic interests you:

Ian Gotts of Nimus: "The two are inextricably linked already. If I want to perform some task such as sign off a PO then I probably need to access the Purchase Policy document which will be part of ECM."

Malcolm Ross of Appian: "There's a definite need to unite the features of these two worlds to create more powerful content and process systems."

Doug Mow of Virtusa: "From the customer, patient, subscriber or end user perspective I want a seamless UI that doesn't distinguish between any class of functions. "

Brian Reale of ProcessMaker: "It is one thing to route a document or a PO, add a signature, and then store it in a DMS. It is another thing to start a process in a rich contextual environment and have that environment intelligently populate with the pertinent information based on attributes like user, place, time, and company policies. "

Peter Evans-Greenwood: What's a document/record anyway? A page in a wiki? An email? SMS? A tweet? Defining the scope of BPM and ECM as processes and documents ignores the ongoing erosion of boundaries between organisations and communications channels, and existing solutions are too intrusive to push into these new channels.

I'll quote my own response in full:

The short answer is this: in any business that uses BPM in critical applications, BPM is already integrated with ECM. I think it unlikely that we'll see anyone but IBM and maybe EMC really producing a credible E-BP-CM suite.

Why do I believe this? Well, its important to ask why ECM is so important to businesses... Its not the collaborative-Sharepoint-less, "let's be happy and work together" stuff. Its the fact that in real business, at the end of everything we do in a business process there needs to a record of the transaction, the decisions or whatever that formed the outcome. Of course, that does not need ECM if the data we were work with at every step was fully structured (an online form producing structured database records). But for the real world, documents do exist, and ECM provides a way to handle them.

As Doug says we must interact with documents, and as the vendors hinted, document management ain't that hard for BPM vendors. The problem is that throughout a process, documents will form part of the final business record. BPM vendors rarely manage to focus on understanding the complexities of electronic document and records management, therefore they rarely do much more than routing documents -- plain old-fashioned 'imaging and workflow'.

What is really needed from BPM is a final step: registering the records and the decisions of the process in the corporate records management system, keeping the context of everything that was done. Working with documents and process context appears in some of the marketing around case management. Though more often than not people get more excited about how processes can change dynamically, than how they can be recorded permanently. So I expect adaptive case management (ACM) to be another missed opportunity.

It really is a shame that records management has such a 'stodgy' appearance, since it is such an important part of business processes.

This is one of those tough areas where the integration of technology for vendor gain often eclipses the needs of the end customer. Careful consideration is required on what is needed for any particular business, and navigating the options depends largely on experience.

A post from the Improving It blog

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Cases crystallize out of chaos

2010-07-02T09:32:00.000-04:00

Coming via the bp3 blog by Scott Francis, Frank Micheal Kraft talks about Patterns of Knowledge Work. His discussion hits the point that many activities performed that are not 'production line' processes are really based on the activities of a knowledge worker: a person who is knowledgeable about what they do, and builds up structures around their work to keep stuff organized.

This ties into my discussion a week or two back that in my own client work, I've started to see how I can examine the records of business activities, the documents and paper reports, and track back through them. In doing so I build up a view of where the major business processes in an organization live, who does them, and at a high level at least, what the activities performed are. Amazingly, the often overlooked org chart helps me in seeing order in the chaos. It is interesting to me to see that there is a natural order to processes and information in business.

For Kraft, he talks about the three ideas he has come across:

Managing my own knowledge work. As I wrote my own Adaptive Case Management system for my own knowledge work, I was able to organize my own work. As the number of cases increase – 3000 now including sub-cases – I become aware of patterns.
Feedback from my first pilot. This was very interesting, because the main focus for my pilot is usability. Usability is strongly interwoven with these patterns of knowledge work.
The things I always wanted to model, but never was able to. I governed the modeling of thousands of models of structured processes from all areas of business processes. But because the modeling language was only able to model predictable processes, I never was able to model unpredictable processes.

In my view, he has done with these three points what many business people have had to do -- build a mechanism for structuring his own work in a way that allows him to be productive and get value out of work he has done before. For many people, this is a matter of building a filing system, putting together checklists and tasklists, maybe even putting together an Access database recording people or indexing their files. Oh that, and never going on vacation, as nobody else can quickly pick up the structure and work with it.

Kraft has written his own Adaptive Case Management system, probably because he felt he could put some structure around the work he was doing, and that structure was adaptable enough to help others in their own work. With my own consulting and software work I have done a similar thing. And as Kraft says: "As with all knowledge work the result of my effort is not completely predictable. But I am making good progress.".

I couldn't agree more. And with every new client or process I hit, more structure and flexibility crystallizes into something that benefits the next client down the line.

A post from the Improving It blog

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BPM taking off should not be about software vendor profit

2010-06-29T09:38:00.000-04:00

If you have ever followed a Group on LinkedIn, you'll recognize that most of the discussions fail to pick up steam. A few people drop by, lob in their short comment to try and get noticed, then step away again. The discussion Why do you think BPM could not take off like ERP or CRM? apparently caught some attention. Its up at 80 comments, the vast majority well thought out and directed from individual opinions that are not just shameless plugs selling a product. Beyond its size, the discussion is interesting since it highlights the follow points:

There is little agreement on whether BPM is a management methodology, a class of software, or just a bunch of marketing garbage
The methodology people and software people can not accept that the other side has a right to exist
BPM as a software is too complex, expensive, and lacking in appeal to CxOs to ever be as successful as ERP or CRM
Success seems to be measured by the amount of profit the software vendors make, rather than the positive impact on a business

For most businesses, there is room to organize information, processes and people better. There is a need to keep client files electronically, relying less on paper and making savings on printing, copying,filing and offsite storage. There is a need to be able to simplify and control repeatable business processes, so that they take less time and less brain-power to complete, reducing the cost and number of errors. And there is a need to make it easier to track work that is not necessarily repeatable, but is easy to lose inside email inboxes. In short, with well thought out BPM, businesses can do more work, more accurately, with fewer errors, happier customers at a lower total cost.

This is what my kind of business process management would solve. Either the guy holding the purse strings gets the value of what is offered, or he moves on. No need for constant bickering between vendors that their spin on a product is better. The software and methodology says what it will do, without a vast education of needs. I like that form of business process management.

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Another natural order to processes and records

2010-06-23T18:22:00.000-04:00

Just a couple of weeks back I talked about how you can work backwards from corporate records to get a clearer view of the high-level business processes being run in an organization. The approach here basically was saying that if you can identify the records of business transactions in an organization (and in any fairly mature organization this should be relatively easy), you can step backwards through the processes that created them, avoiding all the rat-holes and exceptions that muddy the picture. This is great, but what happens when you don't have a clear view of where records are created? Well, this is where I'm going to aim for a quick win and get "two for one". And, yes there is a reason for the incredible animated image.

As you are reading this, bear in mind that I have the benefit of working with a financial services firm as my client of the moment. This tends to make things easier for me, since the regulators have always insisted on a decent structure for record keeping that means I'm not working from a completely blank page when trying to identify records. But still it is true that many firms don't have a corporate file structure that shows a heat-map of where records are produced and what they contain. So I can walk around the building talking to the owners of the business functions, or I can consider an alternative starting point. As much as I love talking to people, many of them have real jobs to do.

This is where the org chart kicks in. Yes, many employees wonder why it is so important for companies to build that 'tree' of people, beyond inflating the managerial ego. In my case, the org chart is an incredible tool to help me get started understanding not only where business functions are performed, but it gives me therefore the starting place to look for filed records and the business processes that created them. Its like the computer generated fractal pictures (the crazy animation) that follows natural effects. You jump to the major focal points, then drill down in a never ending fashion into the details of the business and the records that are produced. If I was really detailed-oriented, this type of work could keep me occupied for years. Even though I'm not, there is a certain natural order to things that yet another holistic view of the organization can provide. Perhaps the organizational studies will not result in a beautiful image, but there should be a nice structure that helps keep things organized.

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Fractal image found on Wikipedia at Phoenix(Julia).gif

'I hate working with documents on-screen', and other issues we reinforce

2010-06-21T09:29:00.001-04:00

You've heard the phrase "Knowledge is Power". There seems to be a human character trait that says by keeping documents close at hand, preferably within steps of my office chair, I am more powerful. Filing cabinets for individuals, and "working copies" of client files are everywhere in offices. Take that easy access to information away and people fight back. You are removing some of their ability to hoard information, all of which is a duplicate of something available elsewhere, but it exposes a frailty that leaves them uncomfortable. "What if somebody else has the file the one time in a million I actually need it?", or, "What if I'm caught off-guard, a client calls and I don't have their information to hand?". This is just one of the ways employees resist the introduction of enterprise content management (ECM), case management and business process management (BPM) solutions that try to limit the amount of paper moving and filed in the organization.

I have had the 'exciting' opportunity to spend some time working with lawyers over the last couple of years. From helping smooth immigration paperwork to cleaning up company contracts, it doesn't seem to matter who I work with I experience the same thing: paper. When it comes to the workings of a law office, I am frustrated by the apparent waste of paper (and the subsequent charges for photocopying applied to my account). When I think about it though, the issue is obvious with a lawyer because the multiple copies of documents happens typically right in front of you, while you're sitting there in the office. Although not so obvious, regular offices experience the same issue. Most of us I'm sure have seen the pervasive footer on emails, "Do you really need to print this email?". There is no way to know how much paper is wasted on unnecessary printing and copying in offices, because it is not charged per page.

For the 14 years I've been working with electronic imaging technologies, I've always encountered the concern that it is hard to work with text on a screen, but early on companies worked hard to limit the concerns of employees. In the UK at least, as a user of a screen and keyboard, an employer was required to ensure your working area was set up to avoid discomfort and to improve your posture. Companies investing in document imaging put in place minimum specifications for screens, and usability requirements for applications to make it easier and more productive for people to work without paper. These lucky people of the 90's working with electronic documents had it good.

Now when I visit clients, it is not unusual to see LCD monitors in every cube. Screen technology has progressed to a level where great quality should be available on every desk, but we have instilled the concept in the heads of employees that it is hard to work with documents on screen. Why, beyond an aversion to change, does this persist?

I think that the problem comes not from the screen, but from the documents. Many regular people think of Word documents when reading on screen. Word is an editor, not a document viewer, and it does a terrible job of making documents easy to read. People remember this. Adobe Viewer for PDFs presents nicely prepared documents beautifully. But so often we end up reading marketing brochures prepared in multiple columns for glossy printing, needing to scroll around with every paragraph read, that we learn to hate it. The same with the trend to scan documents to PDF. The viewer does a generally poor job of making scanned documents appear attractive and clean.

My feeling is that companies wanting to become more paperless need to concentrate on the underlying issues of the documents they try and have people use. If your scanned documents look ugly on screen, people won't want to use them. If you force people to use daily reports by scrolling around left, right, up and down, they complain of RSI and general reduced performance. If you archive Word documents for constant reference and record-keeping you're asking for trouble in so many ways. As an aside, I saw a Word document archived in a large government agency that was unreadable, because the pretty font used by individuals was no longer available. This applied to thousands of documents.

Maybe it is time for companies to focus on how they can make the information that gives people the power to make good decisions not only available, but easy to use. This isn't just document scanning. Good application design and recognizing that people want to organize information their way will help people work better. Companies need to focus their investments in document management, business process management, and case management on making users actually want to use the new applications, since this desire to use the application is so important to getting paper off everybody's desk.

A post from the Improving It blog

Pigeon-holes are for the successful

2010-06-16T11:13:00.003-04:00

Unfortunately this 'fun' discussion wasn't as a result of something I blogged, but its worth a look. According to Adam Deane:

My view is that Case Management should be implemented by ECM vendors, not BPM vendors.
Case Management revolves around data, documents and data therefore should be dealt by ECM professionals.
ECM requires a different set of skills than BPM.
It would be in the customer’s best interests to have separate systems for BPM and ECM.

I personally believe that it doesn't matter where Case Management sits. Its the business value that this type of solution can bring to businesses that is important. And until my business, or somebody else's is as synonymous with the that specific category of solution as SAP is with ERP, we all need to just accept that the industry is a bunch of pigeon-holes.

Follow along with the comments on Adam Deane's blog. Its getting fun...

A post from the Improving It blog

Avoiding rat-holes by working backwards

2010-06-09T10:07:00.005-04:00

I'm working on business process improvement with a client in a way that some people would consider to be 'backwards'. I'm not starting by obsessively picking at a business process being performed and constantly refining it so that it works better. I'm actually looking at all the records of transactions generated by the company, which are filed and stored off-site, and I'm working my way backwards into the business processes that created them. For me at least, this is a great way to approach things.

So many times, in business process improvement, especially when selling or implementing BPM software, we already have been told which business process we are working on. A client contact has already made a business case to fix up a specific part of a business process, as she owns the particular department affected by that piece of the puzzle. As much as BPM'ers love to believe they think holistically with end-to-end business processes, the reality of the situation is that they really are just rubbing ointment on a sore spot to take the pain away in that area. Less pain for their primary stakeholder signifies success for the BPM solution, and everybody is happy - except for the fact that the organization as a whole is suffering.

My current backwards view of an organization is turning out to show a stunning landscape of interrelated business processes and information. At this point I'm not talking about 'enterprise architecture'. Oh no, nothing that technical yet. From looking at all the printed reports, paper forms, photocopied documents, Excel spreadsheet and printed then scanned emails, I'm seeing an amazing interconnectedness of activities that is hard to get at when you look at a process as just a series of tasks to be performed.

Now that I've convinced myself that the organization is like one living organism and Mother Nature has overtaken my client, how does that help me actually make things better? Well, there are two approaches to mapping out the way to take process improvement: I can ignore this new view and select a business process that appeals, starting to fix it up, digging in from the 'request' in my diagram; or I can follow the paper trail backwards, from the final result of all the work that is going on (the record), back through all the high-level activities that produced the result.

What I'm finding is that by working backwards, I'm getting a clearer picture of the best-practice straight-line business processes I'm hoping to nurture than working start-to-finish. By working from the absolute end result of the process, which is the records to be kept that are evidence of a successful transaction, I can track back through all the activities that were performed to get there. For a start this allows me to discard the waste output that is often filed because nobody really knows if they can throw it away. More importantly, working backwards tends to hide the rat-holes, exceptions and distractions that typically appear from working the other direction (the benefit of hindsight?), allowing me to see what I really need: what a successful, streamlined business process is supposed to look like within the context of the whole organization. I can then use that information to select the most valuable business processes to focus on fixing, while already having a great view of how they should work.

I like this approach to starting a business process improvement project, although I know I'm going to have to avoid confusing my client with what appears to them to be an ass-backwards view of the world.

A post from the Improving It blog

The cloud is not so fuzzy after all

2010-06-02T09:04:00.002-04:00

In technology many of us are comfortable voicing opinions about what is good, and what is not, without any practical experience. I'm as guilty as anybody. After all, you just can't touch and play with everything that exists (some of its just way beyond the prod and play level of trial and error attempted my mere mortals). But the cloud is a different matter. It is a whole mass of technology and unconventional (for software) business models that us mere mortals can touch and hopefully understand. So why was I still talking about it without truly experiencing it?

Last week, I kicked off a new program for developers who wanted a nice platform on which to build those killer business applications that they had been struggling with for so long. The Consected API was born -- or at least conceived, since its still a way from being much more than a glint in a developer's eye. So what better opportunity did I have than to put together a new environment for my little developer community than in the cloud? None really, so I bit the bullet, pulled out my credit card, and signed up for the Rackspace Cloud. Yes, the kings of server hosting, with the tag line for their level of customer service service being 'Fanatical Support' have a cloud offering. I'm pretty sure they bought the technology from somewhere, but if the hardware is supported according to Rackspace doctrine, then I'm sure I'll be in good hands.

So why Rackspace and not Amazon with its elastic compute cloud (EC2)? Because the name, the presentation of the service and some of the feedback I've been reading suggests that Amazon EC2 is way more techy than I want to be prodding and playing with while I have better things to be focusing on. Hell, it sounds like your servers can disappear at a moment's notice, reappearing elsewhere in the cloud without data or anything intact (OK, so I oversimplify), so you have to build your solution around the complexity of an underlying server that is so elastic it just rebounds to nothing, but can stretch to enormous if your processing demands. Nope, for me Rackspace offered a cloud solution I could get my head around. Its just like renting a space for a virtual machine, but the business model doesn't tie you to that space. You can shrink it to nothing, or grow it to, well frankly larger than I'm going to need.

The nicest thing for me is that I don't need to rebuild my applications to benefit from the flexibility of the cloud. I don't need specialized developer toolkits. I don't need the cloud API. There is a real operating system (of my choice) under the covers. I get full permissions to install the software I need on my virtual machine while its running, then generate an image of it online, redeploying if I screw something up, or making copies if I need new instances of that server. All from a simple web page in my private control panel. I own the spot I'm running my image on, until I choose to shrink it or grow it. Then the machine will be stored as a snapshot and moved to its new (larger or smaller) home in the cloud. No data lost. No difficult architectures. Just like clicking a button and having a virtual tech come and install more CPU, memory and hard-disk in your server. In under 10 minutes.

So, what is the Rackspace cloud? In my opinion its a different way of charging for a nice, large, well put together virtual machine environment, backed up with Rackspace's 'Fanatical Support'. I like it when some technology is as easy as you hoped it would be. In this case, it really seems to be.

A post from the Improving It blog

You are nothing without a public API

2010-05-26T10:44:00.002-04:00

I am going to build an API. Who wants to help me shape it? After all, every self-respecting web 2.0 service has an API. And my self-respecting web 2.0 service wants to be the best platform in the cloud for developers to build super-profitable applications.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the concept of an API on a web-based service (for those of you that are, bear with me) the API is like Lego for geeks - it gives smart developers with a wish to "get rich quick" the opportunity to build out their killer-app, using the building blocks of an application that already has done some of the grunt work for them. This isn't just a way for developers to leach off the hard work of others. Its really about a service being able to bring in smart, innovative individuals, at minimal cost, and in return for the talent and ideas they put into building applications around your service you take much of the mundane stuff out of the picture for them. Innovation can thrive and isn't stifled by maintaining servers, doing backups, or building login and security. And both developers and service providers make sure that there is a way they can make a good healthy profit if one or other sells the new application.

APIs are great if the service that you build on hits one of two criteria:

It is so successful that you stand a chance of picking up some of the available market of 50 million people using it
It is so useful and makes the development of your applications so much faster that your app can offer real business benefits

As I have been looking at SaaS/cloud-based business process management (BPM) and workflow tools, none seem to offer a truly open API, allowing developers to hack together whatever they need to around the central core to get to the application that they desire. Why is this?

BPM tools have come from the enterprise software school of thought. You install one in house, spend thousands of dollars on training, build an application for a department, then wait for IT and the business to find the budget to repeat. Software as a Service BPM / workflow offerings (Consected is one, although there are a handful of others) take the grunt work out of putting a new workflow system in place. We handle the servers, the backups, security, etc. We also have to make the configuration far easier than our enterprise software grand-parents, as we're not going to be able to attract people with a 10k price tag for training. This can make some of the flexibility at times a little limited...

So this is where the API comes into play. The underlying capabilities of a service such as Consected really help developers build applications faster. Sure, they're probably not building another FriendTweeter, or whatever, but if there is a real business problem out there that they see companies have, and some smart hackers have never really found the tool they want to build it on, this is a great option. SaaS BPM gives a developer this great stuff:

Workflow - real, structured workflow, tracking work as it flows through a series (possibly very long) of activities performed by people
Task tracking - allowing simple ad-hoc tasks to be created, delivered to users and tracked through time
Structure - an obvious way of structuring applications where work or activities performed by one or many people fit together really easily
Notification - configuration by users of how they want to be informed about work targeted at them
Search - ensuring that work you create can be found
Storage - of data, documents and related information
UI - yeah, you don't necessarily want to have to build all the stuff that's been done before, just build on it
Security - authentication, authorization, roles, audit, user and password management, etc

Consected has an API today. But I think that it could be better. The underlying service works great, and is fast to build applications on. But developers are what make services in the cloud successful. And how often as a developer do you get to shout out your ideas and have someone put them in place for you, so you can get on with building your killer app?

If you'd like to see how Consected can take the dull work out of your next killer app while giving you the chance to create the API and platform of your dreams to build on, take a look at the website (its a bit corporate, I know), contact me (phil.ayres at consected dot com, twitter.com/consected, etc), leave a comment on the blog, or even pick up the phone and give me a call.

We are open to ideas for us to have fun building applications, get noticed, and hopefully make a bit of money too!

A post from the Improving It blog

I am a client, not a case folder

2010-05-25T09:56:00.005-04:00

Over on Redux, Tom Shepherd talks about Case Management, and how the WfMC (Workflow Management Coalition for people outside the industry) is attempting to put some relevant thoughts around the non-workflow aspects of business processes. There have been many attempts at defining what Case Management is, and I don't care to write yet another one - I've blogged enough times before and frankly nobody cared then either!.

An important point for case management is the case folder. Okay, so this is the core differentiation of the product that Tom manages, and what allows it to call itself a case mysanagement product, rather than an imaging and workflow (document-centric BPM, in industry lingo) product. Its a great product - from a consulting side, I managed the implementation of an insurance underwriting and policy management solution based on it in under three months with just a few pains and late nights along the way. But aside from the product, is the case folder concept really anything special?

The problem for all product vendors is that they need a name for each feature of their product. Especially with business process management, the business problems that you can solve with a product are often so broad and unrelated that trying to give a piece of functionality a name that is meaningful to a business person just pigeon-holes it into one industry. That is the problem with the case folder - it is meaningless to a business person, but its virtually impossible to find a name that is more useful.

I've seen case folder concepts from multiple software vendors - hell, Consected has its own take on the concept (though it borrows none of the intellectual property from Tom's product, or the Tower/Vignette/OpenText product I worked with previously, before random corporate organizations with no better way of generating income start trying to make my life miserable). The approach I take though is this: to assume nothing about the case folder up front, beyond the fact that it is a way of representing business information or entities (a client, an insurance claim, a 'know your customer' (KYC) bank application review, an invoice, an employee, an account, a securities trade). A 'case folder' may or may not have structured database-style information. It may or may not have documents associated with it. It may or may not capture comments or discussions from users. It may or may not sit inside or contain workflows. It may or may not have checkbox tasks, deadlines or whatever. It may or may not be related to other business entities.

Most businesses don't get what a case folder is. Trying to beat them over the head to understand the term, just to make it easier for vendors to sell them software is not really the best approach (in my opinion). If we sell solutions, we conveniently forget the functionality and buzzwords of our software, and instead pick up the needs and buzzwords of the industry we are working with.

So, I agree that information, processes and 'case folders' must work together sometimes, standalone sometime, and not exist at all many times. The name and the functionality of a particular vendor's manila folder approach to organizing information does not interest me or the business I'm working with. As a business user, what matters to me is the 'something' I'm working with. Businesses benefit from focusing on their customers, as much as software vendors do, and helping them do that by putting a 'client' not a 'case folder' in front of users is a huge benefit in a solution.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Despite Twitter, email is still where we communicate

2010-05-24T11:34:00.004-04:00

I have a love-hate relationship with email. For tracking work and tasks to be performed, especially in common workflows, email sucks. For communicating with people, the 'offline' nature of email is perfect, since you can send a message and that message will sit and wait in the recipient's inbox until they get a chance to read it. At the other end of the spectrum, Twitter and Facebook feeds just can't claim that: the messages are so transient that they are more like watching TV or listening to the radio, so if you weren't staring at the screen when a post came through, it is likely you'll never know about it.

So my renewed love of email (over social networks, at least) was given a little spark by the news that Constant Contact (don't claim you have never received a newsletter or event invitation from a company using them, because I won't believe you!) acquired Nutshell mail. Why is this interesting to me, or you? Well, quite honestly Twitter and Facebook really start to stress me out when work/life balance skews itself in the 'work' direction. I want to follow what is going on in the network of my friends, associates and the companies I follow, but keeping my head in an application like TweetDeck is unreasonable and a terrible distraction. So the idea of getting a notification email summarizing everything that has happened in my social network world, that sits there until I'm ready to decompress a little and read it, seems like a great idea. Finally, there is a better chance that I will not miss the last minute wedding announcement from a certain friend the far side of the world (you know who you are...), and that I will not miss another VIP announcement related to a local event that my small business is sponsoring. This is what Nutshell mail can offer, a nice summary of what is going on in your online social world, in a consumable email, ready to read when you are ready to read it.

So I still think that email sucks for work that people do in offices that is routine and repeatable: HR recruitTell him its about self-promoing; employee onboarding; travel expense claims; account payable and invoice tracking; new customer account opening; and so on. If you do these types of work regularly, you don't want the tasks getting lost in your email inbox, the same way as you don't want to have to stare at your Twitter and Facebook feeds all day long to know what is happening that affects your business or makes your sales efforts generate more leads. Email is great for less distracting communication, since it isn't just the Twitter equivalent of a crowd of people standing in a room shouting and waving 'HEY, LOOK AT ME!'.

I'll be interested to see where Constant Contact takes Nutshell Mail. It seems like a great addition, as it puts important messages for you where they should be: in your inbox. This ties in really nicely with the process improvement work I do with companies, where we work to free up employee's email inboxes by taking the routine work out of them, leaving the inbox to do what it does best: hold messages you need to know about but can deal with later.

A post from the Improving It blog

Edit ... OK. So the scoop is I'm married to a senior-ish person at CTCT. I'm not being paid for this blog post (the obvious pay-back is no more than you'd expect - and a whole pile of chores to complete at the weekend). And if you have read my blog before you'll know that this post is as relevant to the constant information sharing (and subsequent self-promotion) that is a blog such as mine. There you go - official cya declaration done. Oh, and the second declaration is that as much as I enjoy the concept of Facebook and Twitter, they really do stress me out. But please do follow me anyway at http://twitter.com/consected

Cheers, Phil

Paper reports keep everybody else in business

2010-05-21T10:53:00.004-04:00

I've been working with a financial services client on a bunch of projects, one of which is how to move from a world of daily reports to something (anything!) a little more efficient.

Today, and every day, the firm pays a large amount of money for the reports to be printed by a third-party print bureau and delivered by truck nightly to their offices, for a guy to then wander around and deliver them to individual desks. Some of them are shredded without even being delivered, and others are immediately scanned when they are received and emailed to branch offices. This is the real world of business, where the expenditure related to inefficient operations such as handling paper reports keeps everybody else in business. Your firm is keeping the economy moving - 'well done'!

Let's look at a potentially fictitious example at Financial services Firm A:

Generates on average 200 paper reports each night (including the weekly and monthly runs of some special reports).
5000 pages are printed at the print bureau nightly
The print bureau charges the firm $10k to print and courier the reports to Firm A HQ
A full-time employee organizes the reports and delivers them to individual desks, shredding any reports that are unassigned
200 pages are printed directly in Firm A HQ
100 pages are scanned at firm HQ and emailed to different offices, taking an hour of one administrator's day
Individual employees work with the reports, ranging in activity from: picking it up and shredding it immediately, to examining it line by line and noting the review performed in pencil for later audit.
Many draws of filing cabinets are filled to capacity
A box of reports per night are made available for off-site storage, eventually

So, we are keeping money moving very effectively: paying organizations to print reports; paying for paper to print reports ourselves; paying people to courier and delver reports; paying people to scan and email reports; paying people to box and handle storage of reports; paying external organizations to archive boxes. The only valuable piece came from the handful of people that perform meaningful work and reviews based on the reports they receive.

But its OK. For now, until we fix the root cause of the problem, we can feel good that we kept the economy afloat. Fortunately, non-fictitious Financial Services Firm B (name changed to protect the innocent!) knows that it needs to change, and I'm having fun helping them to do that. No more private bailouts!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

At $24k a year for server hosting, the cloud can't fail

2010-05-19T08:16:00.003-04:00

The tech industry's current love affair is with cloud computing - that hard to describe set of technology and infrastructure that is the obsession of companies large and small. Much like the industry's previous 'squeeze', SOA, the joy of the cloud is that you can make almost any technology fit under the name. Put plainly though, I see the cloud as a flexible set of server and storage resources that can host applications, somewhere out there, though you don't have to know where. With this comes the ability to reduce costs of running enterprise and SaaS applications.

There are many discussions about whether the IT teams of real companies will allow the cloud to become the platform for running their enterprise applications. There are risks that seem to come from the cloud that are fairly easy to identify:

This is a new style of technology, so you have to trust your vendor
Security of data is harder to understand than with dedicated servers
Reliability and high levels of service shouldn't be an issue, but you have to wonder if capacity is 'elastic' and can expand, what chance is there that it can suddenly shrink without warning too
Server resources are completely outside the control of IT, so you can't even call up and say, "my Window's server is going slow again. Could you reboot it?"

I look at it this way. If a dedicated server hosting company (in a location that Rackspace does not serve locally) wants to charge me $24,000 a year to install and babysit a single, basic server, it doesn't take long for my company to work out how to deal with the risks I stated (both technically and emotionally), and come out better off.

Put easily, the cloud is the perfect example of 'economies of scale'. But is there any reason that a hosting company has to view hosting, sourcing hardware and and managing a running data center as a single server proposition? Rackspace and others (despite their push to the cloud) are successful because they can view dedicated server hosting with the same mindset they use for their cloud offerings: the server is already here in the server room, installed and ready to go, alongside the other hundreds of boxes we have already running. They just don't plumb it in to the rest of the cloud infrastructure. Hosting a dedicated server cost effectively is not the complex, hard to get your head around elasticity of the cloud, but it is a mindset that doesn't treat every server as completely different from the last one either.

Dear Rackspace - please open a data center in Canada. My sides are still hurting from laughing at the $24k a year quote I received from one of your across the border competitors yesterday!

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Give me more rewards - I'll feel better about myself

2010-05-13T08:33:00.003-04:00

I hadn't realized how close marketing and games had come. A little piece of the computer gaming industry and marketing influenced one another (or maybe aligned, just because the target is human beings with cash). That little piece or gaming and marketing is around 'rewards'. People love to be rewarded for their actions, making them feel better about what they do, as well as keeping them coming back for more. Since the first days of computer games, players have received points for every fried alien they sent to its maker, with bonus attainments for reaching the end of a level (reinforced with the chance for a feel good breather and reduction in adrenaline). Marketing and rewards programs (frequent flier miles, free S'bucks coffees, grocery store rewards points) all carry the same concept: get points for buying (frying the aliens) and get a bonus or a flight for buying stuff you don't really need over a long period of time (reaching the end of a bonus level).

So now it is obvious to me, especially after watching a lively presentation from a games expert and professor at Carnegie Mellon University, Jesse Schell: the DICE 2010 "Design Outside the Box" presentation is fun to watch, even if you take some of what is said with a pinch of salt. Schell is quite a character in the gaming and 'imagination' industry, and watching him speak, you realize if you didn't know already that there is a huge amount of psychology behind computer games that lead to their success or their failure. Schell mentions some of the surprises as well, that many of us would never have seen coming, like the Facebook games (Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc) or even the Wii. This psychology is the same in clever marketing, not the 'leverage, symbiotic, synergistic' marketing language bingo we see from tech CMOs, but marketing and advertising to regular human-beings at the level of 'buy another S'bucks coffee 'cos it will give you a buzz and its more impressive to your peer group than going again to Dunkin Donuts.

I have no real background in the gaming space, although I was hooked on software shoot-em-ups when I was a kid. The presentation at Finovate this week by Bobber Interactive (excuse the terrible writing in the linked blog post - if you understand the challenges of trying to write stream of consciousness about a seven minute demo, when the demo is the thirtieth you've seen that day, you'll forgive me), took game theory and applied it to a full on game environment for teenagers starting out in personal finance. I recognize that I know little about what motivates teenagers. One area I've come to recognize is the need for constant reinforcement required by a teen for how great they are, and as much as I don't see the need for being told what an amazing achievement doing something I should have done anyway is, I can see the potential for marketing to it.

So thanks to the Bobber guys (CEO Eric Eastman and ..., crap, no rewards for losing the COO's business card!) for introducing me to this concept of game theory in marketing, and good luck with Bobber!

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Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Finovate, 24 hours on

2010-05-12T16:46:00.002-04:00

Anyone that took a look at my blog yesterday must have wondered what the hell was going on. A mad, semi-literate ranter appeared to have taken over. So I apologize now to anybody that started reading my posts out of context. I was at Finovate, the mad financial innovation conference where the audience is bombarded with presenters, much like speed-dating on stage. With every company having just 7 minutes to run a live demo, the value of a crisp, clear, jargon free message was essential. As you can see from my posts, some of the companies understood the value of talking to the audience in terms that made sense, and others let their Chief Marketing Officer on stage with a game of marketing buzzword bingo. From many of my posts, you can see that I barely managed stream-of-consciousness writing in the 7 minutes per demo, so a clear demo helped me formulate my thinking and a clear post is a good indication of a clear presentation (although sometimes the confusion from the previous demo leaked over into the next one).

The consensus from the crowd at the end, a little more relaxed with a beer or cocktail in hand, was that big well-established companies struggle with the innovate products and in the free for all innovative setting such as Finovate, purely because they have set themselves too many rules and feel too constrained. More bullish startups think they can change the world, and will hammer on a problem (such as regulatory approval) until it just goes away.

So we can expect XBox playing teenagers to be investing in mutual funds and planning their retirements using some previously unheard of service before the big banks have even worked out how to engage their customers on Twitter.

For those of you that read my blog regularly, its back to regular service from here on in. Thanks for bearing with me!

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Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Finovate: Jemstep

2010-05-11T19:14:00.003-04:00

The last demo of the day here at Finovate. Ready for a beer. And unfortunately technology is failing us. I hope the clock isn't ticking down.

Help investors make better investment decisions. If you had 10k to put in mutual fund, how would you find the best fund for you? Will your broker find you the best objective information. Or will the web provide you something personalized?

The demo - James is going to invest for the first time. He does some simple setup of his objectives, Clean and easy looking. And he can look at a recommendation he received from his uncle.

The funds James sees in results are tailored to him. Its not just a standard list. There is the usual info presented prettily plus a Jemscore. This score takes into account not just fund performance, but his own personal circumstances and preferences. The background behind the score is given to him, showing why other funds are a better fit for him.

Behind the scenes there is powerful ranking engine which uses personalization at all stages. As the consumer gets more sophisticated in his investment capabilities, he can control more aspects of the profile and therefore how the ranking engine personalizes his recommendations.

This bringing personalization helping you to assess the funds now and in the future they'll offer stocks and exchange traded funds

A clear, clean, nice demo. Good work!

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Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Finovate: Backbase

2010-05-11T19:07:00.002-04:00

How to engage your online banking customers. Enterprise portal application, not personal finance management, not a packaged online banking app. They are trying to get banks to spend money on a better customer experience through the current portal they have in place.

The value is improving customer experience through their toolkit of stuff. The backbase next generation portal apparently wont displace the online portal a bank has in place already. It will supplement them. And it uses pretty AJAX and nice pretty web styling to make things smooth and float around when you click or drag them. Perfect for the finger tap world of the iPad. Oooh another iPad app.

The demo appears to be making my bank online site into my iGoogle home page, adding content that is interesting to me (e.g. financial news). I think banks might be forgetting that I don't want them to be my home page, just to securely process my transactiosn.

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Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Finovate: blippy

2010-05-11T19:01:00.002-04:00

I can share the purchases I make to blippy, For example from Zappos. I can publish automatically, or select what I do and don't share. I can share the cost if I like. Or not. According to the presenter finovate stands for f^&%&^% innovate. A quote there, I'm sure.

Blippy is aiming to help people build apps with an API. Imagine an app that tells you all the recipes you can make based on items in your fridge. Imagine a customer loyalty app that scans you stream and says you have bought 9 coffees at Sbucks, they could offer you a free cup when you come back. I think there may be some value, though showing off the Adidas shoes I bought last week seems to be only for the most vain.

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Finovate: Ideon

2010-05-11T18:52:00.002-04:00

Where do people with cash put their money nowadays? There's little upside to a bank savings account and too much risk in the stock market

The product allows customers to build a savings product. In three easy steps, you build it, review then open it.

First you select what you want to save and when do you need the cash. Now you customize. When do I need the cash? (e.g. this is a bunch of cash for a college fund that needs to start paying out in 12 months time). If the interest rate does not fit (like its 1%), you can gamble that puny amonnt against the possibility that she might be able to get a 'bonus' rate if one come up in the future. Gamble, without risking your cash.

Now you can see how this will work for you against the historical performance of the stock market and other saving vendors.

The Choice Savings product contains a range of features to provide these end to end customized products through a bank

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Finovate: Smart Credit

2010-05-11T18:44:00.002-04:00

Jean Chatzky back with another dot com. Smart Credit is taking new look at the credit rating issue for consumers.

The smart credit report turns the credit report horizontal, making it easier to read(?). Basically you can drill down through your credit report to the credit card companies. You can communicate with the creditors directly through the website, without knowing your account numbers. I lost my card, I have a question, etc

The Jean Chatzky Scorebuilder application. Nothing like a brand built around a person. But anyway. The site cleans up the credit report and highlights what is helping and hurting their scores through simple actions. The site guides you to reach a credit score goal.

The consumer is guided with simple actions, prepopulated language for getting problems fixed that can be sent straight to the creditor. This streamlines the evaluation for the creditor while helping the consumer making it easier.

This can be white labelled for FIs as well, helping banks encourage customers to improve their score so you can take more business

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Finovate: liqpay

2010-05-11T18:37:00.002-04:00

Liquid payments through mobile phones. The person's phone number is their unique ID. This is an eastern European (Ukraine?) offering that has added 700,000 customers in the last month alone.

Send cash to a mobile phone. The sender and receiver get a simple SMS. You now credit your current Visa card with the information you have been sent, so it should be really easy to get cash to people.

And amazingly, you'll never get a pocket full of coins again. In the Ukraine, merchants can give you your change from large denominations in liqpay coin management payments. An interesting way of avoiding lost coins and the costs of handling them.

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Finovate: goalmine

2010-05-11T18:29:00.002-04:00

Open a mutual fund with $25. And make the funds accessible by selling a mutual fund gift card in the store.

The website is designed to look unlike any bank website, making it appealing.

Personalize your goal - Hanna's college fund

What is your goal amount? If they don't know how much, they'll help you.

How much do I need to put away?

The aim is to make investing accessible by avoiding technical investment jargon. The customer is buying the actual underlying product, not just making recommendations.

Now you have an account, you can make easy contributions, through the gift card, from your bank account or whatever. And the funds are liquid. You can get at them daily.

Whatabout fund raising? You can put a simple web page online to make the investment social. It encourages friends and family to contribute on Hanna's birthday. With a cute picture of Hanna at age 1.

This is an interesting product to encourage people to invest more.

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Finovate: FTRANS

2010-05-11T18:23:00.002-04:00

How do we get more cash back onto bank balance books? Outsource accounts receivable, having cash get back into the bank account faster, enabling banks to get at the funds faster. This is a service offered when your small business has debt with a bank. This simplifies the AR process for businesses and gets some control back for the bank.

Its an interesting idea for banks wanting to reduce the risk on many loans they have with small businesses and maybe it will convince banks to start lending to small businesses again.

More than just AR, there are a lot of risk related dashboards for the bank to help them analyze the risk on the many loans they have.

Interesting idea that would take a little more thinking to get my head around it

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Finovate: Point of Wealth Systems

2010-05-11T18:14:00.002-04:00

POWR - clear vision - enable financial security for millions of working americans.

A reverse ATM, converting cash into electronic funds. 50B USD paid out in bar / restaurant services in cash compensation. But cash held by individuals has grown 13% according to FDIC. POW is aiming to roll out 25 thousand reverse ATMs over the next few years.

What happens to the 137m USD earned by bar and restaurant industry workers daily? The target is the unbanked or the services industry workers without the benefits from their employers.

This is like an ATM with touch screen. They can put cash in the machine and contribute to a retirement fund (IRA) opened at the machine, add credit to a cell phone, top up a prepaid Visa card, etc. You can even buy stuff on line and have it shipped - paid in cash. The partners who place the machines pickup the cash nightly, and an account is credited over night.

So this is really looking at getting the cash out of peoples pockets into fair cost accounts and services. This is an opportuntity for small FIs to get into this broad market of people rapidly.

Simple and easy.

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Finovate: Expensify

2010-05-11T17:32:00.002-04:00

Handle expense reports with some humor and a new iPad app. There is an integration with QuickBooks.

The strength has moved from allowing people to submit expenses electronically, to the manager to be able to track expenses that have been submitted and get analytics around them.

They import data from the credit card information. You start to get access to the merchant data. Which hotel chain is getting our money? Now we can negotiate with vendors, not just telling our employees to stop going to the W. Now let's compare Bob against the other employees.

Finally, we onto corporate fraud. Let's slip in cash expenses that are made up. Maybe Cathy takes taxis as well as renting cars. You can start to look around your data a lot more easily than you could previously.

Save money, cut fraud and do everything great! Expensify can help the employee, the manager, the accountant. Simple, real time solutions that just work. Love it.

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