thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

There is a great deal of hype around software as a service (or SAAS) at present. If you need help with sorting the hype from the useful content and want to know how we might be able to help keep reading.

If you have already got it all sussed click here to reward yourself with a free tshirt and check back soon for the next post.

Products
In most businesses a combination of software product + applied services + sustainable sales and marketing disciplines are needed in order to succeed.

Software
We have used and experienced a very wide range of CRM & ERP related products and vendors over the past decade and can help you assess the strengths and weaknesses of the products you may be considering.

For most projects there is no single right answer as you often have to leverage existing investments in other systems which is one way we can help with independent review and analysis of the options and combinations.

Increasingly it is the interface and interplay between front of house systems like CRM, websites, email marketing, RSS and blogging platforms where we see huge potential for a holistic best practice customer relationship focus.

Knowing a wide range of software products very well will help us ask the right questions on your behalf, if you would like help with product selection or ongoing project implementation. There are also some newer products becoming available that we can also introduce should the opportunity be suitable.

Services as a Product or SAAS*
It seems everywhere you look now there is a new “*software as a service” product. Essentially these are services developed as self service style products with pricing and self drive options for the savvy and lots of new complexity for the software consumer.

Ultimately for smaller and medium sized businesses SAAS offers the potential to outsource some IT needs and avoid most of the back room technical issues.

For CRM or marketing activities there maybe strategic implications. In the early days many of us were nervous about customer records being held at a remote data centre but ironically they are often more secure there that in the “back room” at most businesses.

What has now happened with SAAS is that there now more choices of service based products but the actual project complexities don’t go away. There is a still a great need for configuration, customisation and alignment of business processes and software frameworks.

The temptation by vendors has been to downplay the technical side and oversell the pricing model of x services for y$ per user per month or some variation of that formula.

The flipside is that many SAAS vendors are still working on their business models and the reality is that extra expert services still need to be budgeted for if you are to have a successful project.

Some vendors have also confused online distribution for online marketing and sales. For example just because you offer an online application or service doesn’t mean you don’t have to invest and pay sales and marketing staff.

Somewhere in the pricing equation there has to be a budget to pay for the real and hidden costs of not doing the job properly. This also applies even and especially if you decide to use open source software.

At DialogCRM we specialise in practical ways to best use and fully utilise those products and/or services that help with developing the best customer facing results.

We can work alongside your current team or partners to provide independent product review and analysis and or implementation services as well if there is a need to fill the product / skills gap.

For many business projects selection of a product or supplier is seen as the end when it is really only the beginning. Every system lives or dies on how well your staff and culture articulate and maintain sustainable relationship strategies and desciplines.

We also have the capability and methodologies to discover and enhance the thinking that best serves your business and turn those ideas into action. To read more about crm strategy…

About 8 or 9 years ago there was a real glut of conferences on the impact of the internet and most presenters felt obliged to talk about Moores law which applied then mostly to hardware.

In fact we are surrounded by lots of “business cycles” and ripple effect such as the innovation cycle – start something new, refine it by bringing down costs and so on over time, while expanding and changing markets in new and interesting ways.

Increasingly more people are realizing that there are parallel and social effects in other technology related areas like software and business cycles for instance.

Two of the thinkers I really like on the wider tech implications are Paul Graham and David Cowan.

Paul has a large number of very helpful essays and this one from October ’07 really caught my eye – he was talking about The Future of Web Startups.

(This essay is derived from a keynote at FOWA in October 2007.)

There’s something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper.

It’s a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there’s some device that’s very expensive and made in small quantities. Then someone discovers how to make them cheaply; many more get built; and as a result they can be used in new ways.

Computers are a familiar example. When I was a kid, computers were big, expensive machines built one at a time. Now they’re a commodity. Now we can stick computers in everything.

This pattern is very old. Most of the turning points in economic history are instances of it. It happened to steel in the 1850s, and to power in the 1780s. It happened to cloth manufacture in the thirteenth century, generating the wealth that later brought about the Renaissance. Agriculture itself was an instance of this pattern.

Now as well as being produced by startups, this pattern is happening to startups. It’s so cheap to start web startups that orders of magnitudes more will be started. If the pattern holds true, that should cause dramatic changes.

David Cowan recently speculated in a video that we are now at the stage where perhaps every 18 months or so it becomes half as expensive to roll out an application to the web in some kind of echo of Moore’s law.

The mathematical element is not as important as the key point that many more thousands of developers, entrepreneurs and business people everywhere are using the latest software tools and technologies to accelerate just about everything.

From my perspective many of these observations come across like that ancient story of the blind men describing an elephant. The elephant is large and each man describes a different part of what sounds like more than one animal.

As a creative generalist myself with extremely diverse interests and training in multiple disciplines I recognize many of these perspectives all being part of the same large elephant – as it were.

So where is all this heading? On the Paul Graham essay already mentioned he thinks:

10. Faster Advances

There’s a good side to that, at least for consumers of technology. If people get right to work implementing ideas instead of sitting on them, technology will evolve faster.

Some kinds of innovations happen a company at a time, like the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution. There are some kinds of ideas that are so threatening that it’s hard for big companies even to think of them. Look at what a hard time Microsoft is having discovering web apps. They’re like a character in a movie that everyone in the audience can see something bad is about to happen to, but who can’t see it himself. The big innovations that happen a company at a time will obviously happen faster if the rate of new companies increases.

In New Zealand there is a temptation to invent something new because we can’t find an obvious answer. It is now becoming much harder to do that and go global as many of these opportunities are already driving entrepreneurs simultaneously in multiple timezones at warpspeed. There are still advantages to be had from this though.

As David Cowan suggests it much better to come clean and stimulate the discussions by leveraging the wisdom of crowds.

The other great point in his video is that now it is possible and even desirable to move down the pyramid to innovate and invest outside of the top few large companies.

Now with the rate of change and ease of deployment across the internet it is becoming easier and more necessary to be able to provide new products and services in smaller and medium sized businesses.