small business performance – Page 15

June 24, 2014November 29, 2017

Justifying the IT Budget: the Cost of Not Spending

“Competitive and ever-increasingly sophisticated in the marketplace”[1] describes a company positioned for long term business survival. Complacency takes the business nowhere but into irrelevance-land, which I think we can all agree is not where most business owners wish to end up… it makes selling the company slightly more challenging. Even in markets which were once firmly held to be localized are now open to new – and new kinds of – competitors, due in most part to advancements the development of information technology (IT) as well as how it is applied. These days, competition is globally facilitated rather than locally, and it’s becoming the standard approach. Welcome to the cloud.

New paradigms in IT capability and use are spawning huge shifts in what were broadly recognized normal or traditional business approaches. This realization has created the need for businesses to radically change their view of IT investment and the value of IT within the organization and operation. Yet IT is rarely an area which gains a strategic focus for investment within most businesses, and is frequently considered to be like a pencil or a particular chair… something the business needs but which has little impact on the company’s ability to compete better. Au Contraire, Mon Frère: Information technology is at the heart of business competitiveness, but justifying the desired investment is the great challenge. Maybe it’s because the focus is always on the great benefits to be achieved with the spend, rather than looking realistically at the impact of not doing it well or at all. Especially with information technology, there is a large potential cost to be paid for not spending adequately.

While business operations are sustained through IT involvement, economic pressures continue to weigh down business interest in funding IT operations. (which is weird, as there is a lot of evidence that the good bet is on those who do just the opposite). This regular spending reduction and cost control plan has good intentions of reducing the overall cost of business operations. The unfortunate reality is that operations are less efficiently sustained and are even more frequently unable to create or manage any level of growth. Reducing all IT spending is only useful when profitability is also improved and quality is maintained, unless it is an effort to simply stay afloat as revenues decline (and it’s recognized that quality will decline as well). But reducing costs does not help the business seeking to remain competitive in a rapidly changing marketplace, and pulling the pins out of the department primarily responsible for at least keeping things currently in operation operating serves only to chip away at the once-solid foundation. It’s a real problem, this difficulty with increasing interest and justifying increased funding for business information technology. And it all stems from the inability of organizations to clearly and with tangible benefit cost justify the investment.

It is this justification – demonstrating IT investment as a strategic asset presenting an advantage over competitors and positioning the business for future success – which requires effort and analysis to fully describe. Information technology is not a set of servers and software, and it is not websites and portals. It’s not click thru rates or SEO scores. Well, it’s all of that, but it is none of that. There is so much to consider and incorporate, and there are many degrees of success which might be experienced along the way. Information technology is a fundamental requirement in each and every business, and dependency upon it is increasing at a startlingly rapid pace, yet we still can’t quite figure out how to put it all on paper with provable numbers.

It might be easier to forecast in little departmental or functional pieces, but that doesn’t provide a total picture of the enterprise. And it’s often really difficult to quantify the impact of not doing something, or doing it only OK rather than really well. When this data does present itself, it often comes too late and in the form of a comparison to the competition, revealing where the business just didn’t meet the mark as compared to others in the same space.

It all boils down to businesses coming to the realization that information technology investment must be made on a continuing basis. The justification for IT funding must be made, and that justification must necessarily be balanced against the potential implications and impacts of not implementing. This is the only formula which can ultimately describe the value of IT investment in the business.

Make Sense?

Read the entire article on LinkedIn

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140624161243-633314-justifying-the-it-budget-the-cost-of-not-spending

[1] A model for investment justification in information

technology projects: A. Gunasekaran et al. / International Journal of Information Management 21 (2001) 349–364

May 6, 2014May 6, 2014

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

Businesses 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.

jmbunnyfeet Make Sense?

April 29, 2014December 7, 2017

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

I 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.

jmbunnyfeet Make Sense?

April 9, 2014September 25, 2018

4 Rules of Thumb for Considering Cloud Applications in Business

With all the talk of cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service models, businesses are increasingly questioning their continued use of on-premises and “traditional” software implementations. Having heard that cloud applications are cheaper and better than locally installed solutions, some small business owners and IT managers are actively seeking alternatives to their current software selections. In too many cases, however, these business owners or IT managers aren’t looking at the longer term impacts of their decisions, and may be adopting cloud software solutions simply because it seems to be the way things are going these days.

The cloud is simply a term being applied to a new way of looking at information technology – how businesses buy it, how they use it, and what they expect from it. Even as technology gets more complicated, users are demanding greater ease-of-use and lower costs. The response to these conditions is the cloud: addressing basic and common requirements and delivering the solution for a low-cost to many users. While the approach meets the simplicity and affordability elements, it may or may not fully address all the functional, compliance or sustainability needs of the business.

One size never fits all, and this is as true with cloud computing as it is with bathing suits. For the business owner or IT manager considering adoption of cloud-based applications for the business, keep in mind these 4 Rules of Thumb so that the hype and excitement doesn’t cloud your judgment.

Rule 1: Software is software, and it is installed somewhere. Just because an application is accessed using a browser (which is software) doesn’t mean the product isn’t installed somewhere. When it’s a SaaS solution, the product is simply installed and running on the provider’s servers rather than your own computers. Software can fail even when it isn’t on your computer, so it should be expected that failure could happen with SaaS solutions. The difference is that a failure of an app on one machine isn’t news; failure of an app that lots of people are using at the same time is news.

Rule 2: Software that talks to other software means there is integration between the two. Whether the products are installed on the PC or whether they run from different providers’ systems, they still have to be able to communicate together at some common level. The Windows platform used to provide a “common” standard for integration of Windows applications. When applications move from the desktop platform to the web, many of the common integration approaches no longer work and new methods must be developed. Just because a solution integrates with the desktop edition of a product does not mean it will automatically integrate with a web or SaaS edition of the product (QuickBooks exemplifies this).

Rule 3: Software still requires hardware and other resources. When cloud-based solutions are implemented, the cost of the server and storage facilities (along with other elements) may be included in the subscription price. The efficiency and scale economies developed by the provider will ultimately determine their profitability, but it is generally the case that centralization of resources, management and administration can significantly reduce the cost of operations. With most cloud solutions, it is the assumption of scale (leveraging a single asset base to many subscribing customers) which makes things more affordable than deploying similar capabilities individually for each customer. Consider also that any deployment of cloud software solutions still means that businesses must retain their local networks and devices. While PCs, laptops and tablets may not be running business applications, they are still computing devices which may need to connect to networks, have virus protection, have remote access or connection software installed on them, and any number of other things. In short, moving to the cloud does not remove the requirement to have and maintain user devices, printers and LANs. And really, don’t most people still want Office applications on their devices, even if they also have remote access to such applications? Office for iPad is somewhat of a tell in that respect; kind of proves the point.

Rule 4: Not all data is stored in the same manner. This is as true on a PC or LAN as it is in the cloud. However, cloud solutions can introduce quite a wrinkle when it comes to keeping copies of business data over time. With PCs and local networks, a business would back up their data in any variety of ways, preserving the files and formats for possible later use. As long as there was software available to read and open the files, the backed up data would be usable. Simply due to the popularity of some data formats, there might also be tools or utilities available to read the data even if the original application was lost. The wrinkle introduced with cloud solutions is not necessarily that the format of the data is strange – it is likely that most cloud-based business applications use fairly proven and recognizable database technology. The difficulty is that the actual database file(s) containing a company’s unique data may or may not be separate from other company data. If it is separate (single-tenant database), it is unlikely that the database as structured is portable. The fact is, most web-based or cloud solutions will allow users to export data from the database, but cannot provide actual structured data files ready for use with another application, lacking logical data or table relationships. Some solutions suggest that simple list exports are sufficient, and others may say they have data conversion capabilities, but the reality is that data existing in a cloud application is not very portable. Business intelligence is a terrible thing to waste, so it is really important to be able to take all the data with you (in a meaningful way, not as a bunch of disparate lists).

Cloud computing covers a really broad spectrum of technologies and delivery models, and most of the above is more about SaaS applications rather than actual cloud platforms. The platforms are where the applications live – server and network environments. This is where hosting companies do their work, as the things they host live on the platforms.

Businesses electing to add mobility, management, fault tolerance and other capabilities to their systems should explore the benefits of application hosting and cloud platforms, and not immediately look to SaaS and cloud application alternatives to their existing software solutions. By deploying their systems in a managed hosting environment, businesses can often keep using their existing core software products, integrations, and data archiving methods while gaining the best benefits of “cloud”.

Joanie Mann Bunny Feet Make Sense?
J

March 19, 2014

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?

March 10, 2014

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.