Tag: outsourced IT

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Lessons Learned (or Not): Development and the Cloud

Lessons Learned (or Not): Development and the Cloud

Talk about agile technology and how great things are because we can experience rapid software solution development and deployment via the cloud is shining a brighter light on certain IT management issues which have existed for quite some time, but perhaps went largely unrecognized.  One of these issues is product development direction and influence, and where it really comes from.  If you think most IT companies determine their product lines and offerings from the top down, with detailed specifications supported by a strong business case, you may want to think again.  Based on my experience and that of a lot of other folks, there are many companies out there offering products and services  that were crafted in more of an ad hoc manner than through a focused “product development” effort with long term sustainability in mind.  In some cases, this demonstrates ingenuity and a desire to look at things in new ways.  Sometimes it’s just uncontrolled and unstructured chaos with dollar signs attached.

“there’s a school of thought, put forward by the small but influential analyst firm RedMonk, that developers now occupy the role of IT kingmakers. This theory holds that the traditional model of IT adoption, which assumes that major decisions emanate from the top, is wrong. Instead, the decisions that appear to come from a CIO are, in fact, dictated by the choices made by people way down in the IT organization-the traditionally denigrated developers. CIOs merely ratify the decisions made by “lowly” developers.”

It goes like this:  a high level concept comes from upper management… some “great idea”.  This high level idea is communicated (at a high level) to the production teams who will make it real.  The production teams decide what it really is, how it will really work, what it will look like, and how it will be offered – and all of this generally based on the preferences, skill sets, moral guidelines, belief systems, and work ethic of those involved in the development process.  The product details are run back up the food chain, where they then become the defining elements of the new solution.  In many cases, refinements and changes are argued against by the developers, citing various reasons or roadblocks to making changes to their prized construction.  But hey – they got it ready to go out the door, didn’t they?  So what if it’s not quite what you envisioned, and doesn’t necessarily represent a sustainable strategy?

Experience in business does count, particularly if you learn from it.  There is a saying I heard once, and I’m still not sure how I feel about it other than it proves to be so very true each and every day.  The saying is that “there is no morality without context”.  In business, context is often experience, understanding the cause and effect of an action or activity.  Without this learning, without the experience earned within the organization or by others, there is no context guiding the development.

“It’s irresistible to poke fun at some of the most egregious aspects of today’s IT practices-change control committees that only meet once every two weeks;ITIL implementations that place more emphasis on paper trails than actually, you know, getting things done; operations groups that resist application updates in the name of stability, and so on and so forth.

However, the fact is that these functions, if not their manifestation, exist for important reasons. Overlooking them-or outright ignoring them-is not the right solution. Ensuring that updates to production systems are made, and being able to track who makes changes to infrastructure, are enterprise functions are that won’t go away just because cloud computing is in the picture.”

Lessons previously learned will need to be learned again, and addressing problems after-the-fact is generally far more costly than being proactive and trying to avoid them in the first place.  It can be a very painful process, watching the company go through puberty all over again (particularly if it had once reached some level of maturity), yet this is what can occur when the bright and shiny new idea causes management to forget fundamental lessons previously learned.

In a recent article on Computerworld.com, author Bernard Golden makes a number of really good and interesting points about the opposing viewpoints of this “agile” development enabled by the cloud (the article focuses on AWS – Amazon Web Services, but it is completely relevant in the broader context).  Link here to access the entire post, it’s worth the read.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9230040/How_the_Cloud_Brings_Developers_into_Business_Process

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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Is great customer service the entire customer experience?

Is great customer service the entire customer experience?

I’ve been working with accounting technologies for a long time, and much of that time and activity has been focused on online accounting models and solutions.  The Authorized Hosting Program for QuickBooks is a good example of the type of service model that’s garnered a lot of attention over the past couple of years, particularly since desktop QuickBooks editions continue to be the accounting solutions of choice for new and growing small businesses, even as those businesses look to leverage the cloud for remote and mobile access to business information.  But hosted QuickBooks delivery models vary tremendously from provider to provider, so how does an accounting professional or their client business owner know which service will suite them best?

At the surface, most of the QuickBooks hosting services available today look pretty much alike.  In concept, they are, but in reality the technology each provider elects to deploy makes a big difference in the experience of the hosted service user.  Some deployment models require a lot of 3rd party software to make the service work, and some providers have constructed their own “black box” technology to make the delivery possible.  The result is a wide variety of service models and delivery approaches, some of which may perform better or offer more functionality than others.  But these details are often difficult to discern when evaluating the various provider deliveries, so most folks simply resort to pricing comparisons.  Unfortunately, this isn’t really the best way to measure the quality of the provider or the service.  There’s still some truth to the old adage that “you get what you pay for”, even when a service has become commoditized in the market.  On the other hand, just because a service is more expensive doesn’t mean it is better.

It is often difficult to get prospective customers to see or understand the technical  nuances of any given hosted delivery, so many service providers are trying to find other ways to set themselves apart from the competition.  One approach that’s become quite popular is to tout the availability and quality of the customer service offered by the provider.  While I do believe that quality customer service should be available for subscribers at all times, I also recognize a bit of a problem with this marketing approach.

To illustrate the problem, I’ll describe a conversation I had with a hosted client last year.

This particular client was with an engineering firm, and the company was subscribing to hosting services for a variety of Microsoft applications, including MS Project (not that it matters, really).  Anyway, this client called me up one day just to chat about something that was frustrating him, and that was an issue of irregular system performance.  Sometimes it was really speedy, and sometimes things would slow down to a crawl and nobody seemed to know why.  He said that he and his team members had been regularly in contact with the support department, and that the support team was always cheerful, helpful, and willing to work with them to find out what the issue might be.  Unfortunately, they didn’t find anything, and suggested that the client continue to contact them when there was a problem.  This went on for quite a number of months, and the client continued to be frustrated with the service performance but quite pleased with the support response.  Then he told me a story.

He said that he used to have a Mercedes, and he loved that car.  It was beautiful and fun to drive, and yes, pretty expensive.  The car had frequent issues, and for this reason he got to know the guys at the Mercedes dealership really well.  He knew all of their names, and they knew his.  He even sent them Christmas cards every year.  He couldn’t have wished for a nicer group of people to service his vehicle.

Then he bought a Toyota.  He really liked this new car, too.  It was fun to drive, sporty, and a little more affordable than the Mercedes was.  This car didn’t need nearly as much maintenance as the previous one, and he had far fewer problems with it.  He never got to know the names of the guys in the service department at the Toyota dealership, because he didn’t go there very often.  When he did, the service was fast and courteous – pretty much what he expected.  But the best part was that he didn’t become closely acquainted with the dealership service team, because the car just worked.

You know those car commercials on TV, where the sales person is telling the customer about how great the warranty on the vehicle is?  Yeah – the one where the customer wants to know if they should buy a good car, or buy a car with a good warranty.  Makes you think, doesn’t it?

When you’re looking for a hosting service provider to deliver QuickBooks and other desktop software to you via the cloud, remember that great customer service is only part of the puzzle.   The best solution is the one that just works, and doesn’t leave you needing a lot of support.

Are you on a first name basis with your hosting support team?  You might want to think about why that is.

Make sense?

J

Read more about using the cloud to extend your access and collaboration beyond traditional boundaries.

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Food Truck Research Revealing Small Business Trends: low cost ops, mobile, social

Food Truck Research Revealing Small Business Trends:

low cost ops, mobile, social

In a recent article on InformationWeek.com, author Patrick Houston distills Emergent Research data relating to shifts in food service paradigms and the growth of the Food Truck Industry into 3 important points that every business should consider.  With the trends driving these mobile businesses towards specialized and customer-oriented service, certain realities are revealed regarding how this segment of the food industry, and small businesses in general, are addressing increased cost and competitive pressures.

Emphasis on operating expense

Businesses are shifting away from large investments and fixed expenses and are more frequently seeking variable cost, or “pay as you go” services.  Even shifting from capital expense to operating expense isn’t enough; the operating expense base must be reduced where possible.  “The shift reflects a broad reality of the post-recession economy. For the foreseeable future, that reality affects IT plans, as you seek to meet line-of-business strategies designed to please customers seeking the same opex-vs.-capex advantages.”

Smaller roll-outs, and “prototyping” of services is essential

Small businesses aren’t in a position to gamble on the success of a major product or service roll-out, and are finding that localized testing or limited release of services is a good way to gauge success without going all-in.  Particularly with the challenges in obtaining financing for any sort of startup operation or business expansion these days, businesses are learning that going in small may not only be the best option, it may be the only option.

Be mobile, local, and social

Food trucks aren’t the only businesses that recognize the value of mobility, localization of services, and social involvement.  Small business owners of all types have always found new opportunity by making valuable connections through social interactions.  The rise of social media services on the Web has served only to increase these opportunities by introducing users to virtual communities and groups, extending reach and influence beyond localized boundaries.  That being said, the social approach also serves localization very well, and allows businesses to interact at deeper levels with those in the local area or region as well.  Mobility is also critical to delivering the cost reduction and agility for the business, and creating a means to meet the customer on their own terms.

The big thing to get from this article is the message about doing more with less.  Smaller businesses, or smaller workgroups, are more agile and can generally innovate more readily than large groups.  Cloud computing and leveraging technology to benefit the business can introduce amazing capabilities for the business, yet don’t have to represent the big expenditures that purchasing and installing technology used to require.  And remember that the customer experience is what’s important, and you have to do business with the customer in a way that suits them.

Make Sense?

J

  • Doing more with less is what sustainability is all about.  Read more…
  • Data Warriors – Accounting in the cloud.  Read more…

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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