A Neaderthal named Grongus and Build Versus Buy

Ther Neanderthaler Fund, 1888

A Neanderthal was the first innovator of business productivity tools and started the road to the big question of “build versus buy”. Long before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, our early evolutionary ancestor (let’s call him Grongus) started spending the time to make tools. He probably didn't do this because it was fun (although maybe Grongus had a little time to kill between hunting and finding shelter). Like many an innovator he got lucky, by observing accidentally that a broken flint could cut things, allowing him to shape a piece of wood to fit alongside another piece of wood and make a frame for a shelter.

So add some time, thousands of years and a plentiful supply of flint, and tools became a natural part of what drew us out of the caves. It was long after Grongus that anybody started to think about making the creation of certain types of useful tools a repeatable thing - a product. Early craftsmen were the innovators of products (pots, spears, bags, etc), and we call all thank Grongus for why the iPhone exists today and you work with a PC or Mac on your desk.

Despite this long history, still today we struggle with balancing the cost of creating custom tools and the significantly extra time it takes to make them into useful, repeatable products. Modern day craftsmen, the innovators of products come at a cost. And as consumers of products we need to remember that if we want more of our unique desires and requirements for a product to be met, we have to pay for that to happen.

Software is a tool and it is the coolest thing, since it lets us create products that would not otherwise exist. There is not a person out there who doesn’t use software, on a PC in the office, an Android in your pocket, setting your microwave to cook a TV dinner, come to think of it the TV itself, driving a car, buying a train ticket at the station. Then there are all the amazing websites, the places where you can buy almost anything without disconnecting eyes and brain from screen (except to dig down the side of the sofa to find where your credit card slipped). And of course there is the enterprise and SaaS software that allow businesses to run more automatically and workers to be more productive.

I’ll say it again: software as a tool is the coolest thing, and that's because of the things that we can create with it. It also highlights the ongoing balancing act between tool and product. It is the balance between the effort to develop useful websites, automate business processes and build databases of your customers, and the exponentially larger time to make that pile of code into a product so that almost anybody can create a website, optimize business process management, or configure a CRM system.

The tool/product balancing act is always hard for innovators. It requires a strong business plan that shows you can create enough user-friendly functionality to hide the nuts and bolts technology, at a cost that is much lower than the number of times you think you can sell this product to people who find it useful. From the customer perspective there is a compromise, especially with business software. There are things businesses want to do with software that can’t be done with pure configuration of software products, especially if your business is in the slightest way unique. Most business software allows for customization, for additions to be made by smart software developers using tools. But then again comes a cost.

Balancing tools with products may mean buying a more expensive and more closely matching product up front to avoid manpower for customization. Or it may be in buying that more expensive product you are wasting a ton of stuff you don’t need, meaning that starting with a lean, lower cost product and paying for some customization is more cost effective. How much you tailor your software for the bespoke solution is often just a matter of taste.

After all is said and done when comparing software tools and products, calculating the “build versus buy” equation never equals a cost of ‘free’. The time you are pulled away from making your business more successful while you learn and configure software products, or the time you pay others to do the job through software development, it all carries a cost. If you have strong requirements for a website, a business improvement application or a customer marketing automation tool, you can expect there will be a price, in expenses or opportunity cost. The only way this cost (of the product and configuration and customization) can be avoided is to reduce your requirements and expectations to virtually nil, so you can use a free, advertising supported, sign-up and go product. And compromize heavily to accept where there are gaps.

If you have unique business requirements, creating the perfect product you can configure absolutely to your needs is time-consuming. With free products you get what you pay for with a leaner product that requires it to be customized with additional effort. Do you want to pay more for a product so you can do the work yourself? Or will you employ somebody to do it for you? One way or another software developers, business analysts, project managers and YOU all hope to get paid. You have options that Grongus never had: it is just about finding the balance of "do it yourself" or "done" that works for you.

Challenged with a build-vs-buy conundrum or selecting the right software for your business? Leave a comment to share your thoughts.

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

Big Data, gold nuggets and the email abyss

Gold on Wikipedia

Big Data is a big buzz in the software world. It is an attempt to create small nuggets of gold from a steaming mass of information. It is not a product or a theory, more a collection of tools and platforms for organizing, analyzing and visualizing masses of data in new ways. This isn't a post on which vendor has the best visualization, the best data management, or whatever. It just provides a quick glimpse into what Big Data is, and how one of its biggest failings is common to small businesses as much as the huge research establishments that coined the term.

Big Data has sprung out of the desire for corporations to gain more meaning from all the data they collect every minute of every day. The information they are collecting about customers, about activities people perform, what they buy and the decisions they make. It is based on techniques grown in scientific research such as the Large Hadron Collider (that enormous “atom smasher”), that attempts to make the results of its 150 million sensors producing millions of sets of data every second into something that mere humans geniuses can understand. It provides medical research with a ways to make the human genome project into something more than a big experiment, developing drugs to address real diseases. And of course, government, with ways to meaningfully understand the requirements, trends (and tax evasion) of tens of millions of citizens.

Big Data is one big funnel, with megatons of data flowing in the top, and ounces of precious observation dripping out the bottom. And just like any organization, dealing with any insight, issue or lead it is at this point the Big Data analysis organization falls over and resorts to... email. All that effort in understanding an aspect of client behavior, drug interactions, or financial transactions takes real human effort. The care taken with a valuable result it is to dump it into a large abyss of junk mail and Facebook notifications.

Large corporations, governments and small businesses are all alike; everybody suffers from the same issue. They spend a lot of time working on problems, finding leads, understanding clients, but have no way of really organizing the useful information into something meaningful, to ensure that the value in the data doesn't get lost. That the potential new customer doesn't just forget she asked for information on your website. That your biggest client doesn't get upset at poor customer service and Tweet #fail about it to the world. That the analysis of your customer’s spending patterns doesn’t just leak out the bottom of a busy executive’s iPhone messages.

Sometimes email is good enough, but often we all need just a little more organization of information, a defined business process to follow and some simple management of who gets to see what, when. This combination of workflow and simple tools is all that is needed to prevent your own Big Data gold nuggets disappearing into the email abyss.

Follow more of my information management, Big Data and process rants: @consected on Twitter. Or ask me about how to prevent the precious information in your business leaking away.

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

Methodology does not trump human nature

Methodology. An ugly word. When used alongside business process improvement, 'methodology' suggests that there is a logical approach, a preordained series of steps, a pretentious way of saying there is a method to fixing business process problems. Like a workflow for fixing your workflows. At a high level, I’ll concede that this may be reasonable, but get much deeper than “analyze, measure, improve, rinse and repeat” and the methodology is just a hack of a bunch of experience and skills (I hear the Six Sigma guys beating at my door already). A methodology when used without care can blatantly ignore human nature, organizational behavior, and sheer common sense. I prefer my methodology to be more a constructive generic framework.

Things get even worse when the eventual goal is a strictly defined, no nonsense Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) map of the process. Any graphical notation for drawing ‘workflows’ that requires a 538 page PDF specification probably needs the support of an equivalently strict methodology so its developers don’t stray off too far from some form of best practice in drawing their pretty workflow diagram.

As we all know, there are many ways to actually handle the implementation of business process improvement projects:

• a business process management (BPM) tool to implement the workflow
• a suite of tools to draw, develop and analyze the processes
• a bunch of offshore software developers to produce some vaguely usable services for end-users
• some common sense guidelines for workers to help them guide the process better themselves
• any combination of the above

The reality of many successful business process improvement projects, independent of the implementation approach, is that the more methodology you try and stuff into the analysis and development of the ‘solution’ to your problems, the less room there is to maneuver when it comes to the actual reality of business processes: human nature and company politics trumps everything.

My proven approach (call it a methodology if you must) to business process improvement projects, (whether they depend on software development, business process management (BPM) tools, or plain simple task lists) is simple:

flexibility, iteration and communication

I unfortunately haven’t had the pleasure of re-engineering a process of 15,000 people, which likely requires some significant structure to making it all work. My experience is more for the 15 to 150 people processes, and to do them well often requires less methodology and more flexibility.

Think I'm completely wrong? Follow @consected on twitter and tell me!

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Focus on focus. Focus on customers.

With all the tweets and posts about 2012 highlights and 2013 predictions out of the way, I’m going to miss headlines like "Mayan’s preferred Microsoft", "Android buys iPhone" and "Big Data eats Samsung CIO at Las Vegas CES". But a heavy dose of reality (two weeks in, how am I going to make the next 50 really count?) has helped me focus on my focus - what does my company, and therefore what do I, do best?

Focus on the customer is the mantra of many of companies. Knowing your customer should be more than knowing where to send the bill. It includes organizing and making available information (not just data) of all types, to the right people, at the right time. What information?

• what are the customer’s business problems?
• why did they pick your service, solution or product?
• would they recommend you?
• what are their current issues or concerns with your product?
• when did they last call for support or help?
• what marketing communications do they receive and respond to?
• how are they connected to your other customers?
• are they interested in other products you have?
• where do we send the bill (and does it get paid on time)?

Customer focus is an information problem for sure. It is also a process problem. The problem is preventing the day-to-day, week-to-week issues from getting in the way of a great customer experience. Put simply, it requires the back-office operations staying nicely hidden in the back-office, not leading your customer to fret about how disorganized you are and having to deal with unnecessary issues. Simply put:

• are your bills sent on time, for the correct products, to the right place?
• is there an easy process for changing changing details?
• can customer support issues be easily tracked?
• are renewals and updates handled automatically?

Customer focus requires giving employees the power to service customers well. Your systems must support employees with all the information they need to make good decisions, and taking some of the load off them by automating some of the repetitive things that nobody really wants to do. Put this into a package and call it Customer Relationship Management or Case Management if you need a software industry term for it.

Recognizing how to change processes, information and technology is something that is hard to do when you and your employees are stuck in the middle of doing their jobs. An independent, outside-in view is often needed to recognize opportunities to work better and improve customer focus.

Follow me on twitter @consected and Google+ for updates on process, information and technology.

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Mobile and tablet technology is more than a distration

If you are new to this blog, welcome! If you have been following for a while, let me apologize right away for the break since the previous post. Over the last few months I have been focusing on the direction of Consected, to continue to serve our customers well, and to attract new opportunities. So you could say that my creative juices have been directed elsewhere. What does this mean for you, the blog reader? Hopefully, it means that you’ll be seeing more fresh and interesting posts from me on a regular basis.

Over the last couple of years, technology, both consumer and business, has been absorbed in the explosive mobile technology space. Consected and this blog have been following closely from as soon as the iPhone really started to impact the way we thought about the lump of plastic we wedge against our ears and shout at. The desperate catch-up scramble from Android devices led to some messy (and ongoing) patent disputes that resulted in interesting competition. Then the iPad hit the streets. The Netbook revolution that never really happened got swamped. Everybody wanted a slab of supercomputing plastic and glass. Consumers led businesses into what many would identify as the Star Trek tech era. After all, why would you want to lug around a monster laptop, with a charger and battery that weigh more than a large house brick, when you could enjoy having a slim, light tactile device in your hands at any time?

Businesses are still struggling with the idea of employees buying their own devices that trump the work PC, which they want to attach to the corporate network. The ‘bring your own device’ (often referred to as BYOD) struggle continues. As does the love-hate relationship with social media.

Consected and therefore this blog has been following all this, for the sheer novelty of it all, and because we know there is a real business (and technology and social) impact. For me, the mobile / tablet revolution has opened my eyes to several things:

1. The apps we have been using on desktop PCs are clumsy, overloaded, and frankly ugly. Users are demonstrating that they can do more with less on-screen clutter, fewer menus, and a UI you jab with a finger rather than carefully align with a tiny mouse pointer.
2. Business processes, those back office operations that make everything tick (or often grind) by day-by-day, need fresh thinking to accept that not only do our customers want to communicate with us everywhere, but so do our employees.
3. It has become really hard to operate without an always-on Internet connection, since ‘the Cloud’ is king. Everywhere. Anytime. On the train, in the car, in the office, at home, at a bar. Handling that offline time is where our devices (and our sanity) are failing.

So my focus for this blog, and Consected the company, is to really start addressing these things holistically. We have a lot of experience with mobile web technology now. Consected has some great mobile products to help others with that experience. The aim for all of us is to start pulling mobile technology, the use anywhere / use easily devices and apps, back into the business processes that are the life-blood of larger companies and organizations. From the point where we start to meet new potential customers (our leads), through to when we are serving them well and eventually dealing with issues that arise, online and offline devices matter. Facilitating employees to do their jobs better and more easily, and to remove (or at least hide) some of that annoying administrative stuff that detracts from everybody working well and being profitable.

That’s my round up of where me, Consected and this blog have been, and a little of where we are going. Our big exploration into the mobile space is part of a bigger-picture, and I hope it really is a great opportunity for everybody to work better.

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

APE it up. Author, publish and market your own creative genius.

Have you ever considered writing a book? Is it your calling? Do you hope it will make you rich (and famous)? Are you trying to promote yourself to get extra business? Whatever has you thinking about putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), you've almost certainly wondered about getting your work of creative genius published. And if you have read a book sometime this century, you've definitely looked at Amazon. And probably wondered if you can publish your book, yourself. This new book by the master of marketing, Guy Kawasaki and his tech sidekick Shawn Welch talks plain and simply about the benefits and pains of self-publishing. APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book is that book, which of course, is itself published by the authors themselves.

Personally, I haven't felt the urge to lock myself away to author a serious work. My simple endeavors into writing some free e-books on the subject of mobile websites and e-commerce have demonstrated to me that writing is a time consuming, and quite frankly wearying experience. But I have friends and family who are serious writers. And my wife recently led the production and promotion of a serious business book on Engagement Marketing for small businesses. So I read a review copy of APE with interest.

The book is honest when it suggests it be read quickly, from cover to cover the first time. To get a sense of what matters and what is involved in self-publishing, or even the initial writing and editing of a book,  skimming through the chapters in an evening can make you much more of an expert than you were previously. This is what I did. Each chapter of APE gets deep into the details of every step of the writing, publishing and marketing of books, so the skim avoids you ending up in the weeds. But even if you do so, the book handles those weeds in an unintimidating, easily accessible way. Sometimes even just skimming through, one of the many illustrations, screen-shots or photos catches your eye and you start reading about details that you'll possibly never need. But the writing draws you in as the personality of the authors shows through.

Overall, Guy Kawasaki and Shawn Welch have done an excellent job with this book. It is quite possibly going to become the self-publishing bible that it pitches itself to be. And its own success will be the best review and recommendation. So if you are serious about authoring and publishing a book, whether you are considering self-publishing or not, this could be the best ten dollar addition to your e-book collection there is. Find it on Amazon: APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur-How to Publish a Book

By the way, I've been terrible at writing this blog recently for all kinds of 'overworked, underpaid' reasons. I promise in the New Year to do better! Happy Holidays / Merry Christmas to you all.

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

Growing customers - advertise to attract, reward to retain

In the last week or so, Constant Contact has released a new 'deals' product designed to give Groupon and LivingSocial a run for their money. Or more importantly, Constant Contact's SaveLocal aims to help small businesses control the deals they offer. With discounts they can afford businesses attract new customers by rewarding current customers that share their coupons with their network. It is an interesting concept, and just one of the tools that small businesses can use to attract new customers. But do deals just downplay the value of what a business offers, cheapening the product and the vendor?

The concept of SaveLocal, is that by offering rewards to current customers for sharing your coupons with friends, you are more likely to grow a local and loyal new customer base. Today's New York Times online article, A Groupon Alternative Aims to Offer Small Businesses a Better Deal talks with Constant Contact's CEO to flesh out the details of the way it works. When it comes down to it, the argument is that small businesses typically thrive on referrals and endorsements from current customers, since the new customers they bring in are likely to provide repeat business.

Groupon on the other hand does the opposite, focusing on a mass of previously unknown wannabe customers sharing with their bloated social networks, in order to satisfy the entry requirements for getting 50% or more off. The Groupon masses are likely to just take the discount and never be seen again. Which means that your discounted rate minus fees still has to cover costs, because a businesses is unlikely to recoup much from a new customer base. If profit margins are over 75% on your products (remember that Groupon takes half of your discounted coupon value, so you effectively see 25% of the full price) then Groupon can get you a flood of customers really fast. Some may come back.

This is the issue with deals to attract new customers: like any discount scheme, the customer's expectations have now been set based on the discounted rate. In future they may not want to pay double what they paid the first time. And if a sub-standard service was offered, there will be no repeat business anyway. There are not many wins in this.

For years, this approach to attracting and retaining customers has worked for companies big and small:

market for awareness, advertise to attract, reward to retain

Advertising your products at full price, spending 25-40% of your sales on advertising may ensure that your brand doesn't suffer a devaluation up front. With new customers in place from advertising, the SaveLocal approach can then help keep them loyal, since they've paid full price for the products and now feel rewarded for coming back again and again, and encouraging their friends to do the same.

So it seems that deals can be seen less as pure devaluation of your products and more as rewards for loyalty, as long as you use them right. Huge discounts to an unknown crowd seems like a risky proposition. I think I'll stick to marketing with valuable content (does this blog count?!), using free business listings (Manta, Google Places and Consected's own Roaming Local), Google AdWords for online advertising (contact me for a $100 coupon to get started - no obligations), and rewarding my current customers in very individual ways.

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

Business excellence - how do you know you've got it?

There is a concept of 'excellence' that is often used in business improvement to show that we are doing something so well that everybody agrees that we are excelling at it. On the BPM ebizQ forum this morning, the question came up of what is process excellence, and what is a key metric to show it?

A great response from Steve Weissman sums up the difficulty of measuring any form of excellence:

It's sort of like pornography in that – as Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart famously once wrote – it's hard to define but "I know it when I see it."

My thinking was along similar lines, that excellence is hard to measure but easy to know when you observe it working in practice:

I'll suggest that process excellence is an emotional response to a process or set of processes. "Happiness" could be the very untechnical metric.

If everybody is truly "happy" with an organization's processes, there is a good chance they are excellent. When we don't have process excellence, it is hard to measure but easy to observe: users don't fully adopt them and there is rarely additional investment.

As with anything we do in business, happiness with processes just means that they are delivering the results that everybody wants without getting in the way. So maybe I could have suggested an even better non-metric to define business or process excellence:

If you don't notice that you are performing a process or activity because it is so easy and natural, and it has the desired results every time, you have probably achieved excellence,

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Facebook welcome pages - but why?

Last night I received a question from a customer asking how his new Facebook welcome page can help the ranking of his main website. He suggested it was a dumb question, but when you think about it carefully it is hard to see the link between all the effort that goes into Facebook and getting the rankings on a regular website up so you can convert more visitors to new business.

So, it is not a dumb question at all. Here is the way I look at it, and it is likely that social media gurus will be able to scream at me and say I'm missing something. So go ahead, scream! That's what the comments box at the end of the post is there for...

But back to the real issue, how does a fancy Facebook welcome page help drive up your main website rank?

In short, the more people you can get to Like the page, the more likely you are to keep them engaged and have them share things you post that point back to your website. This will get you more traffic to your main site, and will get you a bigger likelihood of links from other blogs and sites. This drives up page rank.

Of course, people aren't going to do much if your Facebook timeline is empty. So it is essential that you share something at least once a day on the Facebook page to make it worth people coming along and coming back to take a look.

In general, for promoting the Facebook page with the aim of getting more people to visit your website, I would suggest a few things:

1) discuss your Facebook page in a blog post, and reference how it is (or you hope it will grow into) a community of people interested in your area of business and sharing their experiences etc.

2) is there something you can give away? Can you offer discount coupons or similar things? Maybe you can offer one of your longer articles you've been sitting on for a while, made into a simple PDF ebook. Visitors will only get it if they like the page (see the Consected page for an example, which I put together today, where you get a free eBook if you like the page)

3) if you do have a give-away of some form, make sure you send an email newsletter pointing people to the page, discussing its merits as a community and telling them what they get for free when they 'like' it

4) once you get more people involved in it, tweet about interesting items on the page occasionally

5) everything you do needs to keep people involved in your brand and so the more activity there is, the better chance of higher page rankings

There is no causal link that I'm aware of between a Facebook page with plenty of fans and a higher ranking website. The page rank may not get boosted directly, but the amount of traffic you get back to your blog and website will grow, which is the real aim of the exercise. Visitors are where your leads come from, not a mystical page rank number. So keep blogging, keep sending email newsletters, keep Facebooking, keep Tweeting and keep updating your website.

And if you'd like a Facebook page like Consected, just drop me a note!

A post from the Improving It blog

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

The end of RIM is nigh

Image via Wikipedia

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!

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