Category: legacy application modernization

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Data Warriors – Accounting in the Cloud

Data Warriors – Accounting in the Cloud

The cornerstones of building and supporting a professional accounting, bookkeeping or financial services firm are the tools and resources that assist the professional in building their practice clientele.  In today’s market, that means understanding the value and application of cloud computing models and services.

Information management paradigms are changing, and professionals who can help their clients to achieve maximum performance and profitability through increased efficiency and innovation will find that the practice evolves into a more effective and agile organization, and the quality of their client engagements is taken to an entirely new level

Not participating in a cloud technology model is making a decision to not participate in today’s technology-enabled flow of business opportunity.  Ensure your continued relevance and value, and communicate to your clients and peers that your firm is prepared to meet the demands of an intelligent and informed clientele and market.

What does the “cloud” really mean to accounting and business?  Well, it means a lot of things.

  • Centralized access to information resources
  • Distributed storage and management of information resources
  • Collaboration and co-working
  • MORE data collection than ever before
    • MORE data being produced by various operational systems
      • MORE need for controls on data flows and exchanges
        • MORE need for analysis
          • MORE need for critical thinking

It’s been proven that any time things become more complicated or complex, it creates a need (read = opportunity) for specialists.

There is a current a growing need for accounting and business professionals who understand how all of this “connectedness” will work.  And the question isn’t really a technology question, as there are people way smarter than me handling all that.  What I’m talking about is the flow of information and data throughout the system.

This used to be more in the domain of the CIO; information systems guys and data analysts.  Accounting and finance, for all its business value, was the final dumping ground for after-the-fact financial data.  Operationally, things could be humming along in the business and looking just fine, but the business was losing money and nobody knew it before it was too late.

But we’re finally coming to understand that virtually EVERYTHING in business has a financial impact leaving an imprint on the business: every action and activity, every relationship and interaction.

With the applications and service now being made available to businesses of all sizes, even small businesses are  now able to leverage the tools and gain the insight that only the largest of enterprises were able to do in times past.

The key is in enabling the business – facilitating their processing and getting their work done – using connected applications and mobile data access tools, or even simply helping with the collection of job or invoice or expense information electronically and in real time.

The earlier in the process, where you convert information into electronic data, the better.  You can then use connected systems or integrations to move and share data with others – other systems or other processes – within the business.

Accountants are already familiar with many of these concepts and tasks, where detailed customer activity and information is distilled into an AR entry, or where vendor and payments and various enterprise expenditures and resource utilizations are summarized into AP transactions and inventory valuations.  Operational systems are simply ‘exploded’ views of these subledgers and subsystems, where operational data and process-specific functionality resides.

With a traditional ERP/MRP approach, software systems were designed to meet the integrated business model by hanging all of the functionality and capability off a single framework or foundation.  Everything in the business was an extension from the core accounting and finance system.  Less intuitive for the user than a function or process-specific tool, at least the comprehensive integration of data was there.

What businesses may benefit from with a cloud-supported model is a similar result in terms of information being shared and enterprise collaboration being supported.  The difference, and the real and amazing benefit, is that specific and unique tools can be applied to support each operational segment or functional requirement in the business, and it can be done affordably and dynamically because it comes with the integration and real time information (data) exchange that single-framework enterprise systems provide.

The accounting professional becomes of greater importance in this connected system of data and functionality.  Their experience with and understanding of back-office and bookkeeping process, and the collection and preparation of subledger data for proper accounting treatment, is an integral role to play in establishing the proper integrations, syncs and data flows to and from “accounting”. Accounting becomes not an after-the-fact silo of historical data, but the centerpiece – the key – to unlocking business intelligence which leads to deeper understanding of business performance. When information is power, data analysis becomes the weapon, and the accountant the warrior who wields it.

Make Sense?

J

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Is Cloud Ringing the Death Toll for ERP?

Is Cloud Ringing the Death Toll for ERP?  Nope.

Software developers are being forced to recognize the business benefits of cloud computing models, and must shift their thinking along with the demand.  ERP isn’t dead or dying.  It’s changing, and delivering new agility and capability to businesses of all sizes.  Developers are going to have to find ways to modernize and adapt old, large frameworks to address these new demands, or lose out to newer players.

“Cloud on its own doesn’t affect the validity of ERP. Businesses still require management software to help them run their organization effectively. What Cloud does do however, is level the playing field and make ERP solutions more accessible to the consumer. That means publishers and resellers need to pay attention.” 

an old ERP The Right Way! guest blog by Jason Carroll with contributions from Brett Beaubouef

Make Sense?

J

Read more about legacy application modernization, and why IT and back-office outsourcing makes sense for a lot of reasons 

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The race to find the “secret sauce” for hosted application services for small business

The race to find the “secret sauce” for hosted application services for small business

Cloud computing is here to stay.  What was once viewed as bleeding-edge technology fraught with peril and risk is now recognized as an emerging standard for application deployment and delivery.  The race to the clouds represents a significant challenge, however, when issues of application interoperability and integration are introduced – particularly when it comes to small business solutions which traditionally reside on the local PC and network.

Today’s available technologies and platforms quite nicely facilitate single application deliveries, yet frequently fail to address the dynamic provisioning and deployment requirements of a rich integrated application environment.  Users who desire to select from a variety of applications in a hosted environment are most often met with barriers which won’t allow them to have the particular mixture of solutions they need.

While virtualization approaches for platforms and applications are gaining popularity and increasing in capability, the reality of the problem still rests with the fact that, in order for the applications to integrate, they must be installed on the same machine.  There is a race amongst the virtualization platform providers to find the “secret sauce” of application hosting; to enabling a flexible, dynamic, rich application delivery method which overcomes the need to have integrated applications installed together on servers in pre-selected ‘packages’.  With the secret sauce, the provider would be able to offer the customer any possible combination of available applications, and offer them as fully integrated solutions, regardless of whether or not those applications were actually installed on a machine together somewhere.

Currently, the solution is addressed (sort of) in how the provider deals with three main elements in the service model, which are packaging, provisioning, and business rules.  With these three ingredients appropriately approached in a flexible infrastructure and partner network, the potential for broad hosted application delivery and distribution exists.   Service providers are still stuck with the requirement to pre-select their various partner or integrated application inclusions, but it is possible to offer the perception of maximum flexibility without actually having it.  The challenge is not presented with the business rules, but in the packaging and provisioning processes.

Packaging is the step where the item to be provisioned is combined with other elements, resulting in a service or installation “package”.  Much like a manufacturing assembly process, packaging takes into consideration the total resource utilization or requirement, accounting for all resources combined into or used to create the package.  Packaging cannot be performed without first understanding, at a detailed level, what can be provisioned and how.  With the variety of applications, data services, implementation methodologies and models which exist, a single method approach has proven to not address a majority of software products currently available on the SMB market, and is unlikely to in the near future.

An example of this challenge is partially revealed when we look at the diversity of applications involved in the Microsoft Office ecosystem.  Many businesses rely upon the functionality present on the Office suite desktop products, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint.  For some application users, this functionality is not present in their primary use software, but is presented via desktop level integration methods.  In order to deliver the full functionality and capability of the primary use application, the installation and integration support for the Office applications must also be provisioned and packaged into the service.   Offering even limited integrations and options like Office for inclusion in the package can introduce challenges in data access and management, permissions and file level security, and ISV licensing of applications.  For these and other reasons, attempting to provide a rich, user-selected mixture of deliverables poses the ultimate challenge to the application service provider.

When a cloud or application hosting provider can offer their customers the ability to sign up for, purchase, and utilize without complication or delay their selections of desktop or web-based applications, services and integrations, and pay for them as a subscription service accessible at any time and from anywhere – that’s the secret sauce of application hosting and cloud IT that everyone’s looking for.

Make sense?

J

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The Holistic Approach to Cloud-Enabling Your Firm

The Holistic Approach to Cloud-Enabling Your Firm

Today’s professional accounting or law practice has a number of issues to contend with, not the least of which is technology.  While IT has been serving the firm for years, shifting paradigms in computing are leading professionals to wonder exactly which direction they should turn for advice.  It’s easy, at a high level, to see the value and benefit of outsourced IT services and being able to focus on your core offerings, but it’s a little harder to find exactly which path your firm should follow.  One thing has proven true over the past few years: taking a holistic approach to cloud-enabling your firm is far better than any uncoordinated exchange of applications and services.

There are four areas the firm should explore when looking to more fully leverage technology to its benefit, which is what “cloud-enabling” the practice really means:

  1. Transitioning to a paperless (or less paper) office
  2. Exploring alternative billing methods (value versus time?)
  3. Outsourcing non-core and non-strategic tasks and processes
  4. Streamlining procedures to create consistency in service levels

The challenge is that firms have numerous options and approaches being thrown about, none of which represent obvious solutions to the entire problem.  In pieces, cloud services and online applications can deliver new capability and functionality, but a professional practice has the requirement for systems to work together to be effective.  Re-entry or redundant storage of data is inefficient, so it is difficult to streamline procedures when the systems run on different platforms or don’t integrate well.

One approach is the “hybrid” approach, where you take the best of the tried and true, and deploy it in new ways to create new capabilities.  Also introducing cloud-based and SaaS solutions where they can truly help the firm innovate makes sense, as long as those solutions can connect back to the core systems. The key is to not lose what efficiency and business intelligence the firm already has while attempting to transform and improve upon those models (digital transformation).

The new thinking by some firms is to adopt web-based practice management solutions that make it easier to collaborate with team  members and clients.  Many of these solutions get great reviews and indeed do make it easier for users to access information from anywhere and on mobile devices.  Lots of neat features for the forward-thinking practice are available, yet the problem is that these solutions usually don’t have general accounting functionality required by the business, nor do they address some of the fundamental capabilities that apps on the desktop can.

For the online applications serving line-of-business functionality, the easy answer to finance department questions is to connect to an online accounting solution, like QuickBooks Online.  While this may serve the needs of the developer, the needs of the business finance department often outpace the functionality available in the smb online accounting products.  To address this reality, many developers have created the means to export data to the QuickBooks software running on the local desktop.

The desktop editions of QuickBooks remain extremely popular with professional service firms and the businesses they serve. In a cloud and mobile world, the firm and their client doesn’t have to be tied to the local desktop in order to keep their desktop software or collaboratively work in the data.  When the QuickBooks desktop software is setup within a secure remote access environment (whether on-premises or with a hosting provider), users benefit from the same mobility and realtime collaboration advantages as with a SaaS solution, like anytime/anywhere access.

Virtual desktops and remote application models allow users to access what seems like a workstation in the cloud, with business applications such as QuickBooks and Microsoft Office and whatever else the firm uses. The desktop is a true Windows platform, so the features and functionality are just as they are when working directly on a local PC.

Most remote or virtual desktop setups also let the user access the Internet and use a browser on the remote desktop, allowing users to run the SaaS solutions they’ve subscribed to alongside their desktop applications yet still remain in a totally virtual and mobile working environment. This approach allows the firm to centralize management and administration of internal servers and networking resources, or eliminate much of the maintenance and management by outsourcing to a hosting provider. Outsourcing the hosting and management of systems further establishes predictability in cost and increases IT agility.

The thing to remember is that one size does not fit all, and every firm will need to work within their own requirements and motivations to come up with the proper approach.  What works for a solo practitioner or small firm won’t necessarily work for a larger firm… or maybe it will, depending on the company culture and structure. There are a lot of options with the cloud when it comes to outsourced information technology models, online practice management and other business solutions, and mobile services which reduce the impacts of time and distance.  It’s time to start implementing on-demand access and mobile-friendly service options before the competition leaves you behind.  Interestingly enough… the competition that looks like a huge and successful firm could be just one person using some really smart IT.

 

Make sense?

J

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The Cloud is Not the End of ERP

With the emergence and general acceptance of “cloud” technologies and services, many in the information technology industry have begun to wonder if the traditional approach to enterprise software – the ERP solution – is nearing its useful life.  Is this the end of ERP?  Well, the hype sometimes becomes the reality, and businesses are moving in droves to software-as-a-service to find the cost and efficiency benefits promoted in the sales materials, and they’re finding them.  Look at Sage’s acquisition of Intacct as an expression of increased focus on cloud-based solutions. This activity around the cloud and cloud-based software-as-a-service represents a major change in how people access and consume information technology and business services, a change that’s being driven by the huge momentum of the overall growth of “cloud”.  The market is moving to a customer-centric subscription model, where the legacy approach was more in tune with the “purchase it once and use it forever” mentality, and customer relationships were largely centered on upgrade cycles.

“As an economy and a culture, we are rapidly moving away from owning tangible goods and, instead, gravitating towards becoming members of services that provide us with experiences  – such as listening to a song, using a car, watching a movie or collaborating with our colleagues.

Of course, this cultural transformation has profound implications for business models. Why? Success is no longer gauged by counting how many units of your product you have sold. Rather, success is measuring how many customers are using your service on a recurring basis and how successful you are monetizing those recurring relationships.”

Forbes.com guest post written by Tien Tzuo http://www.forbes.com/sites/ciocentral/2012/02/09/the-end-of-erp/

While it sounds like the cloud is the right approach for everyone, looking at the variety of real business situations in the market suggests that, as always, one size does not fit all, and more “traditional” ERP solutions may well continue to be the right foundation for many enterprise operations.  Particularly when considering that many businesses already significant investments in platforms and infrastructure, software and data integrations, and operational process support, cloud software solutions may not provide the necessary functionality to support existing business.  Further, integrations that may be available and supported with legacy systems are often not available with cloud-based counterparts, while different integrations based on cloud standards may be present.

For smaller businesses and those in emerging markets, subscription-based IT models may make more sense, especially as popular traditional software makers have introduced their cloud-based counterparts which will likely incorporate the features or functionality of their legacy systems, while taking advantage of the capabilities introduced through cloud integration and interoperability standards.  Strong consideration should still be given to “traditional” ERP solutions, however, as there may be a level of stability, usability, or process support desirable by the business.

Utilizing these traditional ERP systems does not mean eliminating the potential for the business to benefit from cloud solutions.  Rather, cloud platforms and hosting solutions, as well as cloud-based integrations and extensions, are enabling mobility and collaboration around legacy systems, delivering cost and efficiency benefits just as significantly as those who have adopted a full-on “cloud” approach.

“It also makes sense to explore “edge” investments. […] there are significant innovation opportunities outside of core operations. Look to take advantage of the ERP platform’s capabilities in these spaces. Or implement low-cost, smaller-footprint solutions – even if on an exploratory basis. If they are fully adopted later, you can integrate them into the ERP backbone and expose standardized data and processes to the edge.”

from Deloitte’s Tech Trends 2011 report titled “the end of the “Death of ERP” 

So, what does this mean for your business?  It means you need to consider all the possibilities.

First, evaluate cloud-based options, and balance features with cost, time-to-value, and operational requirements.

Then, selectively innovate.  Figure out which areas of the business give you a competitive differentiation and innovate in those areas.

The traditional thinking, which is in line with the traditional ERP approach, is that all of the business functionality has to be incorporated into a single platform solution.  This is certainly no longer the case, and businesses are finding that they now have an ability to take advantage of the benefits of their existing systems while extending and innovating through the use of cloud services.