Category: Business Process Automation

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Easy deployment in the cloud: What about users and applications?

Easy deployment in the cloud: What about users and applications?

cloudpagingBusinesses are migrating their systems to the cloud, it’s true.  Organizations of every size and type are taking advantage of the cost savings and flexibility introduced with cloud deployments and hosting services.  Rather than focusing efforts on procuring, installing and maintaining servers and applications in-house, IT departments are moving workloads offsite to cloud providers and hosted platforms.  The tools are readily available to help these IT workers configure and light up VMs in hosted infrastructure, and certain platform licenses and other elements are made accessible to customers.  But there’s something missing in the toolsets provided by platform hosting companies – a certain something that ultimately determines how useful (or not) the hosting platform service is when IT is ready to deploy users and applications in the environment.

Conceptually, hosting services are supposed to provide a centralized management and administrative capability for an organization.  While this is true in the context that most of the system and resources are assembled inside the datacenter, proximity alone doesn’t make things easier to manage.  In fact, some virtualization and delivery models can exacerbate issues that IT at least had a known way of dealing with when it was in-house.

Consider that, even in hosted and virtualized infrastructure, everything that needed to be done to build the in-house network still has to be done – only now it involves the on-premises computers (sometimes with client software still requiring installation and management), the local LAN, the Internet, the datacenter facility and network, and computers and software in the datacenter.  Most of the complexity may reside in the datacenter with the hosted systems, but even that scenario isn’t necessarily plug-n-play.  IT must still bring up the servers, and then the fun begins.  Fun, in this case, means setting up policies and permissions, users, and applications.  The unfortunate thing is that there are few tools being made available which directly and specifically address this requirement for customers in hosted infrastructure.  Hosted customers are still burdened with the requirement to not only establish and manage their permissions and user accounts – they also have to still install, update and maintain application software in the environment.

Most IT teams recognize that installing an application once is way better than having to install it a bunch of times, so there is a tendency to lean towards hosting models where a single (or few) machines service desktop and application sessions for lots of users.  Reducing the number of actual application installations, this approach (such as with terminal services) can make software implementations go a bit easier than if the app had to be installed across a lot of machines.  On the other hand, there is a fine art to implementing some applications in terminal server environments, and not all apps behave well in the delivery model.  Many engineering hours have been spent trying to get user apps working on terminal servers – sometimes much more time than if the application were simply installed to multiple PCs.  On an ongoing basis, technicians fight with applications and broken functionality, wishing the entire time that they could bypass the terminal services issue and get back to working with individual machines and app installs.  At least they knew the apps would work.

Companies determining that a VDI or DaaS solution would more directly mirror the individualized PC approach quickly find that managing and maintain the working user environment, including the variety of applications and functionality demanded by entry-level and power users alike, is just as complicated and time-consuming as it was when they were managing individual user PCs.  And, lacking quality software distribution and lifecycle management tools in the platform, find that template-based VM imaging doesn’t go far enough in terms of easing the burdens of installing, updating and maintaining applications on a user machine, whether it’s the local PC or a managed VM.

The truth about many cloud solution offerings and hosting platforms is that they are often oriented towards the enterprise customer and IT department, expecting that the customer has the skills and capability required to do the right things in deploying the hosted solution for the company.  Leaving all of the time-consuming aspects of service management and delivery to the customer – the parts of the delivery which address the actual users, desktops and applications – simply shifts the location of work for IT, but not necessarily the nature of the work.   They’re still going to spend a bunch of time not just setting up groups and users and applications; they’re going to spend a bunch of time managing and maintaining them, just like they always have.

There should be smart solutions to these problems – tools which could be made available to customers having a desire to deploy their operations in hosted infrastructure and that deliver the automation and ease of management which enables IT to realize gains through process efficiencies at all levels of the deployment.  The heavy lifting isn’t buried in the building of a server.  The heavy lifting – the grunt detail work that nobody really wants to deal with – exists around groups, users and applications.  Get some truly useful automation tools in those areas, and hosting becomes even more viable and beneficial for value added resellers, IT departments, and their users.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

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The CPA for Small Business: Proactive, Responsive, and Helps Paint a Beautiful Picture

chartI once read an article written by Doug Sleeter which describing the findings of a published report titled What SMBs Want from Their CPA.  The report was a summary of results from a study conducted by The Sleeter Group, and was intended to help accounting professionals understand the factors in the market which influence business use of professional accounting services.  While adoption and use of technology was not named as the top item on the list, capabilities which can be rendered only if such adoption occurs were.  In short, it’s not the technology that clients demand, but the level of service that professionals can only deliver by embracing advancements in technology and applying them to the client engagement.

The report and article placed a specific focus on trends relating to technology adoption and use in the professional practice, and establishes a foundation for firms to understand why technology is and always has been a key factor in the success of the CPA-client relationship.  It’s not that the accounting professional must become a skilled technologist and promote high technology to the client.  Rather, the success factor rests with the firm’s motivation to implement technologies and tools which will improve their ability to deliver more (and more valuable) service to the client in a more direct and timely manner.

The survey’s two critical questions posed to small business owners who use the services of a CPA were 1. What factors played a role in your decision to leave your former CPA?, and 2. What types of services would you like to receive from your CPA?   Both questions are pretty straightforward, and the top responses from surveyed SMBs were equally unambiguous.

To the first question (factors playing into a decision to leave former CPA), the top two answers indicated that reactive and/or unresponsive are the problems which ultimately cause a small business owner to change accounting professionals.  The top response was “Former CPA didn’t give proactive advice, only reactive”.  The close second response was “Former CPA had poor responsiveness”.

Unfortunately, these responses more than accurately describe many professional firms and their approach to client service.  These firms are perfectly content with waiting for clients to deliver after-the-fact information, delivering reports long after their relevance has past, and providing no sense of urgency in helping clients address business issues facing them here and now.  These firms are content to work with their write-up and trial balance solutions, depreciation and amortization and tax products – and give little consideration to how they could adjust their operation to a better, more relevant and rapid delivery of service and insight to the client.

The second question, “What services do SMBs want from their CPAs?”, was met with the same responses professionals have been hearing for years; small business owners need help with business planning and business strategy and they wish the help would come from their CPA.   It is surprising how many accounting professionals list business planning and strategy among the services they promote on their websites, and then just sit back and wait for clients to ask.  Communication with clients remains relegated to annual reminders for tax information, or maybe slightly more frequent notes about other tax or compliance work to be done.  It may be a bit unfair to place all the blame on the professional.  Regulatory and reporting impacts on business are increasing and are increasingly complicated.  Many professionals find it challenging enough simply to keep up with changes relating to the services they currently and regularly provide.

This is where practitioners should seriously take notice, and accept that the ability to meet changing market and customer demands is by intelligently leveraging technology to accomplish what people and process cannot do alone.

  • It takes information technology to speed up the bookkeeping, accounting and reporting processes; technology is required to help turn information into useful and relevant data;
  • technology facilitates the faster collection of information from and the delivery of information to clients;
  • technology is applied to reflecting numbers as pictures and helping users visualize the meaning of the data, and
  • technology enables the collection and analysis of “big data”, which leads to AI advancements and greater intelligence delivered through the applications businesses use.

The Sleeter Group report clearly demonstrated that small business owners continue to need and want more than just tax returns and post-facto reports from their accounting professionals, and that the lack of attention in these areas pose a direct threat to the small business/CPA relationship.  Professionals can remove the threat by working closer with their small business clients, applying technology and process controls to get better information in a more timely manner, and returning the result with greater insight.  Be proactive and be responsive, and apply the necessary technologies and business philosophy to get there before the client base looks for satisfaction elsewhere.

I’ve said before that small business owners don’t care about the numbers, they care about the picture the numbers paint, and they care about getting to a place where the picture is absolutely beautiful.  With the right tools in place, their CPA can help guide them there.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

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Go Ahead and Shoot the Server: End of Microsoft Small Business Server Inspires Cloud Adoption with Small Businesses

shoot_the_serverMicrosoft has made a decision to include more “cloud” capability in its offerings for small business, ending the life of the successful Small Business Server line and replacing it within the Windows Server 2012 family.  Some businesses are continuing with locally installed servers and are upgrading to Windows 2012 Essentials (or other editions) for in-house use, but more businesses every day are electing to deploy their servers and systems in the cloud instead.

Back when Microsoft introduced the Small Business Server, small business owners found that it was now really easy to implement way more technology in the business than they could directly support.  In one happy little package the SMB could get Windows Server, Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, Remote Web Access, an internal Company Website and more.  Information technology service companies, on the other hand, found it to be a big driver for delivering equipment and services to small business customers, and the product line’s adoption and implementation numbers grew.  Even the smallest of businesses could enjoy enterprise-class email, file and document sharing, client-server applications and remote access for a (relatively) affordable price.  It was this type of offering which created opportunity for server virtualization technologies to be used in small business, as the various server types each benefitted from their own “sandbox”, and IT providers recognized another opportunity to leverage their expertise at the customer location.

Business use of technology continues to expand rapidly so it makes sense that the Small Business Server offering from Microsoft is pretty popular.  In fact, Foresitetech.com says in an article on the subject that “The overwhelming majority of small businesses (80%) with less than 75 employees use Microsoft’s Small Business Server (SBS) software.”

But this fast-paced world of technology continues to move along, and Microsoft has ended the life of the SBS 2011 product.  In its place, small business customers are encouraged to upgrade to one of the editions of Windows Server 2012 as a replacement for their beloved SBS and hopefully they can find an edition which (affordably) delivers the functionality and features the business has come to rely on.  Unfortunately, there isn’t an edition of Windows Server 2012 that offers quite what SBS did, so now there is a big buying decision for the customer.  As the Clash sang it: “do I stay or do I go?”

Microsoft’s elimination of the feature-rich and friendly-sounding Small Business Server has created a lot of opportunity for VARs and IT service providers to move their customers to cloud services, SaaS solutions and hosted environments.  Particularly as information technology continues to become more complex, small businesses (well, businesses of all sizes) are recognizing that they may be better off focusing on running the business operation and managing the company as opposed to spending a lot of focus on IT system purchasing, installation, administration and management.  They have come to understand that IT services are critical to the business, but the server doesn’t have to be under the front desk or in a back closet in order to function for the business.  There is simply too much evidence in the market for these business owners to ignore;  shooting the server is now a viable option.

Every day more business owners are being inspired to [shoot their servers] seek out the services that will allow them to continue to benefit from innovations in technology while relieving them of the direct responsibilities of equipment purchasing, implementation, administration and lifecycle management.  Cloud services deliver this capability, and channel partners and Value Added Resellers should recognize their opportunity to get inspired as well, and to start offering cloud-based and hosted services to their customers and capture the “buying decision” opportunity that Microsoft has created.

Ready. Aim. Fire.

jmbunnyfeetMake Sense?

J

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Keeping Up with Expectations: Buyer Satisfaction and the Customer Experience

Keeping Up with Expectations: Buyer Satisfaction and the Customer Experience

There used to be saying in business that the customer is always right and anything or everything should be done to make the customer happy, even if it includes throwing someone under a bus.  On the other hand, some professionals in sales and service would contend that keeping the company mission in mind and fairly representing the company side of things is a better way even if the customer goes away mad.  Realistically, both mentalities have some merit, and it is the challenge of finding balance between making customers happy and doing what is right for the business that makes things difficult.  What many businesses fail to recognize is that they are no longer directly responsible for setting the customer expectation, so they must understand and adapt to the environment and influences impacting the buyer in order offer a customer experience that satisfies.

A customer experience is not simply what happens after someone buys.  The customer experience is composed of the entire life cycle of interactions between the company and the buyer, including any “impressions” the buyer may have experienced through social venues, personal interactions and in media.  Creating and managing the customer experience doesn’t mean simply tracking interactions like sales calls and emails, as with a customer relationship management or sales force solution.  Crafting a customer experience embodies all aspects of the business – from the outside face shown to the public and market to the internal mechanisms that help get work done, the attitudes of the people involved, and the influences of others.

Businesses used to have more sway over how their customer experience flowed, and a great bunch of people providing quality services would generally be a “win” with the buyer.  In today’s market, the table has turned and it is the consumer who dictates what, exactly, they want their customer experience to be.  If the experience doesn’t meet with expectations, it is likely to be a failure regardless of how well the company executes on it.  The exceptional difficulty introduced is that each and every buyer is different – has different motivations and priorities and agendas – and meeting all the expectations of a diverse audience is not easily accomplished.

It’s sort of like with those advertisements you see now, where prospective college students aren’t willing to accept the “old way” of getting an education.  They want to have classes that interest them, they expect to get educated when and where it is right for them, and to get that education in a manner that fits better into the way of life they imagine.   Everyone wants it “my way”, and they’re getting it because they have come to understand that technology and the Internet have made it possible.

Technology and information systems are the foundations of creating and delivering a customer experience and level of service which will keep customers engaged and coming back for more.  Businesses have been trained to look to technology advances and identify opportunities to leverage new developments towards the defined business goal.  In the market that has now developed, where social and mobile computing are the norms, it is the consumer rather than the technology which is driving change.

The individual experience – how the buyer perceives the solution to fit within their business and lifestyle, and how the buyer benefits from the interaction – has become the basis for measuring quality of service and delivery.  Regardless of how technically perfect and flawless a product or service may be, the overall customer experience is the basis on which a stay or go decision is formed.

This shift in focus has changed how businesses view service delivery and support performance, and has introduced the concept that every department in the business should act a little bit like the marketing department – listening to and learning what the buyer deems important and adjusting the process or message based on the finding.  By placing a focus on the buyer priorities and developing an approach that allows a buyer to guide their own experiences with the company, businesses are finding great success in engaging with increasingly demanding buyers and improving overall satisfaction with the experience.

Make sense?

J

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Why #Accountants Should Implement #Cloud Services | QuickBooks and Beyond

Why Accountants Should Implement Cloud Services

Most professional accounting service providers, accounting pros included, are recognizing that customers are increasingly demanding lower costs for service but want more flexible methods for obtaining the service. Where the business value of the service provided used to be enough, providers are now expected to deliver their services how and when clients want them delivered.

Evidence of the mobile and social impacts of technology is visible everywhere, and no business is immune to the requirement to adapt or perish. Rather than viewing the shift in technology application and use as a threat to previous well-rehearsed process models, wise practitioners are finding opportunity to change things around a bit, facilitating workflow and process improvements and creating new opportunities where they didn’t previously exist.

Breaking Down Time and Distance Barriers

via Why Accountants Should Implement Cloud Services | QuickBooks and Beyond.

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A Higher Level of Customer Relationship Management: Building Closer Customer Relationships

A Higher Level of Customer Relationship Management: Building Closer Customer Relationships

Most businesses recognize the importance of creating a quality experience for customers doing business with them.  The thing that many business owners overlook is how their internal workflows and information management systems serve to either support or impede the delivery of a well-rounded positive customer experience.  Growing businesses must adjust their processes and improve their tools in order to have the necessary information available to workers at various levels of the organization, providing a centralized means for collaboration, data sharing and analysis.   With the right information systems and process support, even small businesses are able to function at exceptionally high levels and provide the consistently high-quality service and customer experience that establishes long-term value in each and every customer relationship.

Businesses which excel at providing very high levels of customer service tend to have a few common characteristics – features of the business that identify it as an organization geared towards growth and success in driving the customer engagement and business value.  Among these characteristics is the recognition of the need to use technology better – leveraging automation to a greater degree to create consistency in work performance, and improving information collection and integration to provide more context and depth to the data. Added efficiency which affords employees time to focus on customer oriented tasks and elevating the customer experience even more is the payback.

total-business

Many CRM solutions describe the benefits of a “360 degree” view of the customer, yet these solutions often orient themselves to supporting only sales and Contact Management and do not address product and/ or service delivery (fulfillment of what was sold/ordered)  or project management, contracts and agreements tracking or other aspects of doing business with the customer.

Granted, customer interaction occurs most frequently with sales and service teams, but there are potentially vast number of processes and tasks performed within the business which operate with the same information as sales and services, and which would benefit by integration within the same information and workflow framework.

By selecting a solution that addresses the wider variety of business and information management requirements rather than focusing solely on sales and support, business owners and managers find that they are better able to address internal workflows with streamlined process automation.

The result is significant improvement in the quality and completeness of the information available to users throughout the organization, ultimately improving the quality and nature of customer engagement and interaction. Perhaps even more impactful is the ability for the business to better understand  the context of and motivations for customer interactions, and (most importantly!) having the capability to take immediate action based on that knowledge.

With the right customer relationship and business management solution in place, and with a focus on systematic approaches to enabling process and workflow automation, businesses can become more flexible and responsive to changing customer needs and expectations.  Creating the complete view of the customer relationship and capturing the data which helps users understand the dynamics of the entire relationship serves to build closer customer relationships that will strengthen and grow over time.

When a business needs to implement a Customer Relationship Management solution to address sales and support needs, it makes sense to also review information management requirements for:

  • Delivery of products and/or services  – i.e. fulfillment of what was promised by sales
  • Scheduling of Work/Service Orders and integrated billing based on completed work
  • Time and personnel activity management as well as time reporting and billing
  • Project or job resource and time management and reporting
  • Documents, contracts, before & after pictures, and agreements of all types
  • Products and services, proposals and quotes, price books and channels

Additionally, since the processes are so closely related in terms of the information collected or used, it makes sense that the CRM solution would also work with:

  • Marketing campaigns and activities, lead generation systems and e-newsletter solutions
  • Accounting solutions which also utilize customer, product, job, time, cost and other data
  • Expense spending management, approvals and reporting

To be truly useful, the solution must also support remote and mobile workers since field service personnel and other workers are often not in the office when they need to get something done.  Whether the access is via hosted solutions providing full remote desktop functionality, or via web-based application extensions allowing device independent access (or both!), the solution should be designed to allow users to access the system and perform their work from wherever it is required.

Even more, a comprehensive approach to managing business activities and information, particularly with a focus on providing all departments with all the information and capability they need to get their jobs done properly, requires that everyone in the company be on board.  There really isn’t a great way to centralize and manage critical business data when the approach is to give a few people some information and functionality, leaving it up to human beings and individual initiative to connect the dots (and the data).  The result is almost always a series of gaping holes in various processes where information and requests get lost.

Among the best solutions I have found which delivers the foundation for all of this functionality is Results CRM.  Thousands of users have successfully migrated from ACT!, Goldmine, Telemagic, Salesforce.com and other SFA and CRM solutions to the Results CRM platform, and have benefitted from better workflow automation, more logical company and contacts associations, and a broader range of functionality supporting everything from sophisticated quote and proposal development to comprehensive project, time and expense management.

At the end of the day, it’s the reporting that wins.  If the data isn’t in the database, you can’t report on it.  If you can’t report on it, you can’t measure it. If you can’t measure it, you can’t make good business decisions and grow the business.

Make sense?

J