Following my sudden Search Engine reputation drop (for some reason I dropped beyond the 50th page for Software Development Blog?) I decided to go private 
I’ve moved this blog to a new location: http://www.reliablesystems.co.uk/blog/
RSS subscribers, please update your feeds to point to this location: http://reliablesystems.co.uk/blog/index.php/feed/
Just a quick note with a conclusion – it doesn’t work when done on a low budget.
When you have a 1/4 of a page with your article published in a magazine targeted to “businesses” in general, chances are you will be contacted by about 0 people, given an audience of tens of thousands.
This wasn’t a very costly lesson though, as I say, I did it on budget
I’ve published yesterday a Case Study about Autosafe Products Ltd (Dragons’ Den). Have a nice read!
Business Software has been around for few years now, but I feel it still has many misconceptions and myths about it.
I’d like to devode this article-to-be to characterise this kind of software and offer my perspective on it.
What is Business Software, anyway?
I think it’s easiest to use an example – it’s a computer program, which business users use to accomplish a business goal.
You could try calling Microsoft Outlook a business program, but in my opinion – it’s a generic purpose Organiser, you can use it for organising your schedule both in and outside of work.
And e-mail – every teenager now uses e-mail, this isn’t enough to call this program a “Business application”. It’s nothing more than a Personal Information Manager.
What I call Business Software – is a software which communicated with you using business names people at your company use.
For instance, whenever you can ask your software to provide you with a list of recent orders, unresolved customer enquiries, or sales forecast for the next months - this indicated you are using a proper Business Software.
You have to say, these things sound smart, don’t they?
Normally what happens when you want to know these information is – you ask a Person (let’s call him Steve) which is responsible for managing this exact area of your company’s activity, and ask them to provide you with the information you need.
Steve then uses his tools, usually Microsoft Office (Excel in particular) to come up with the figures you need.
This spreadsheet is then e-mailed to you, you print it out and have a hardcopy on your desk.
But imagine, wouldn’t you like to have such a report every week? Or every day? Or maybe every hour, to be able to trace how your recent advertising campaign increased the sales growth dynamic?
I bet Steve wouldn’t be too happy if you’d ask him to provide you with hourly reports, would he?
This is where Business Software, and Management Information Systems in particular come into play.
The problem with paper documentation is – it becomes outdated the moment it is printed!
This way of thinking is a bit different than we are used to. We like to send e-mails, call people up, and meet with them face to face to exchange information and chat. But this isn’t always the best way to get access to information you, or your people need.
Switching from the culture of “reporting to the line manager on request” to “logging daily activity in the System” - you gain a whole new level of understanding of your business - you can review past periods, and seek patterns in them, for example - did you know, that most of your orders come in at Monday, and the peak hour is 2pm? Maybe it would be good to have twice as many sales rep in the office on Mondays, than on Fridays?
Of course, this isn’t a complete magic – people knowing their businesses very well can observe these patterns every day, but they need to be vigiland, it’s hard to miss some important pieces of management puzzle in a typically hectic day.
And besides – who always has the time to de-brief staff when they go to holiday? I bet you called someone - or someone called you while on holiday, to ask few questions about your project’s progress.
Using an Information System anyone (with the necessary level of privileges) could access progress reports on-line, instantaneously.
But how much does it cost?
There’s a common misconception, actually two of them.
As always, truth is in the middle.
Bespoke Business Software doesn’t have to cost millions anymore – the skill of Enterprise Applications Development is now much more common than it used to be – and frankly, most small and medium businesses don’t need the level of scalability and availability as huge organisations do.
Obviously I don’t mean systems for smaller businesses can be of second quality - but the availability of 99,9% should be enough for most organisations, there’s no point to pay lots of money to gain another ”9″ in this figure. Also, if your software doesn’t automatically send statements to 40,000 clients, a potential bug in it won’t cost you as much as in a bigger organisation.
In recent years, the Enterprise Applications had to be written in Java by a high-class consultant, which wasn’t necessarily the brightest programmer available – but happened to have a good training and certificate given to him by a big organisation.
Gradually these magic certificates became less meaningful, and what started to count was the pure talent and expertise.
Also, the technology became more popular, descibed in multiple books on the subject, so anyone keen enough to learn it could possess new, system-building skills.
Open Source platforms offer a basic set of free tools to make low cost (and high quality!) software development possible, and software written in PHP/Ruby isn’t necessarily any worse than one written in Java/C#.
All these trends caused the significant fall of systems’ prices, since the knowledge became more common, and more effective tools gained popularity.
Why isn’t Business Software dirt cheap, then?
This is an important question.
In the scenario of Microsoft, or any other Software Vendor - the software is being developed once, and resold through various channels to multiple clients in one form - the Program.
You cannot call Microsoft and ask them to make you a golder paper clip, or disable this feature by default. You cannot ask them to enable Outlook to do something it doesn’t do already.
Yes, you can submit your feature requests to Microsoft (or any other company operating in that model) and wait (usually years) for the next version of the software to find out whether or not your desired feature has been implemented.
This model, called shrink-wrap software basically means “Software Vendor creates an application, many clients buy the rights to use it”.
There’s nothing wrong with this model, it works successfully for many years and will work for many years to come.
But – what, if you really want to have a software solution to make your life easier?
Let’s say – your company produces Widgets. You can go to Google and ask it for “Widget producer software”, but chances are – there isn’t any.
And besides, your Widget company might be based in UK, and only American versions of the software are available for your niche. And Americans, like with most things – have their own laws governing your business sector.
What happens is – the software you’re after cannot be used by enough other clients to make the shrink-wrap model feasible.
You need to hire an IT Consulting company to assess your needs and advise on the best strategy to ease your organisational pain.
The software they create is created especially for your company, based on your requirements, and used exclusively by your organisation.
That’s what makes the fees go significantly up.
This is where you need to assess if the gains from implementing the system will be bigger than the costs, and in most of the cases - they are.
The thing with software is - it doesn’t only give you financial profits. People work more efficiently, are less stressed, your workflow is better organised, you have less delays in daily operation, your clients are being served better - you really cannot put a pound figure on it.
Business Software is usually used by companies employing between at least 5 and 10 people, and the bigger the company – the more it needs a good Information System, and the costs are becoming less significant, but profits – bigger, scaled up by the number of users of the new system.
But what can it actually do?
The Business Software has its principles and limitations.
First of all – the system needs to be fed all the necessary information in order to be able to analyse it afterwards. So – it might seem like an additional work.
But – when people put the necessary information into the system – everyone who works with them knows about it immediately. This is the first benefit. For example – a new order has been placed on the website. It’s much better if a whole sales team received an e-mail message about that. What is different when using an Information System – any member of the Sales Team can log into it, and browse orders’ history and make various reports of the data already in the system. Appointing a “best salesman of the month” becomes as simple as clicking an appropriate button.
The beauty of Information Systems is – they do all the heavy lifting. Your staff only needs to provide the accurate information once, everything else happens automatically.
Very frequently used functionality, but rarely spoken about – is a document generation.
Let’s say you are a recruitmeng agency and wish you send information about unsuccessful application to your applicants.
Normally what you’d do is to prepare one template letter, and then copy and paste each applicant’s name and address on it and print it out from Microsoft Word. This works. You could also try to automate this using Mail Merge, but it requires you to do some confusing things with some data source, so you quickly ignore this option.
Frankly – I have only used the Mail Merge once in my life, and had a simple problem with it – I emailed the document, but I lost the “Data source”, which rendered my whole action worthless…
Anyway – having an Information System you could select a “Position” (click), then click the desired position ”Account Manager” (click), then “Candidates List” (click), mark one of the candidates as ”successful” (click), and a select ”Notify of unsuccessful application” button.
What happens then is – the System analyses your database for you, gets information about all the candidates who applied for the selected position – and merges for you one document containing 50 letters, correctly named and addresses. What more can you want?
This is a significant time saving, but also a money saver - you can do more things in one day!
What your system could also do for you – is to store a “Log” of all actions that occured in it, so you could easily go to “Last week” and see which positions have been open/closed/filled and who from your office called which candidate. This can increase your effectiveness at the tactical level, and make your life simpler.
After all – why repeat yourself, if computers can do the work for you?
I’ve just created a Whitepapers section on our website. The first PDF document was published a few moments ago. I’ve got to say, blogging is a great way to prepare written materials, allow readers comment on them and correct them.
Not to say that I got many comments, I hope I’ll have at least few times more next time ;-)
Well, not we directly, but my client, Autosafe Products Ltd was featured Today on Dragons’ Den!
The company was given an investment it sought in order to promote their life saving product, a Seatbelt Height Adjuster for children.
I’ve got to say, the website visitor count skyrocketed! This month’s visitors quadrupled in total ony in the last 4 hours!
Whoa man, this is huge!
The best bit is – before I got to manage his site he wasn’t listed on google at all because of a huge Flash animation on his homepage preventing Google (or any other search engine for that matter) from indexing his site.
A month down the line and we’ve increased the visitor count tenfold, but Today’s events are just incredible!
Thanks, Dragons!
And Peter – congratulations, you well deserve it!
We’re looking for testers for our new application YourClients (web based help desk software), if you’re interested in test driving our system, please contact me on marcin (at) brzezinski.net
This is an attempt to characterise the current state of Internet, trends, fads, and their meaning for businesses.
Top growing trends:
Technically speaking – it’s creating places which gather all the possible relevant contents and allowing users to access it in a single location.
This reduces the amount of labour final users have to execute to find exactly what they’re looking for – instead of browsing for all Used Cars Dealerships they can simply log onto www.autotrader.co.uk, put their postcode and view all the relevant offers from their region – and filter them as they wish.Business impact
Crowded niches need to move to aggregation services – because increasing number of people will find it very hard to compare in a reliable way offers of all available companies. And sooner or later someone will create an aggregator for any niche – when this time comes, it’s best to be the owner of the system, but this isn’t frequently possible – the second best is to be present in the system’s data.
The big losers of that battle will be companies which fail to register with these services.
This is a slightly different flavour of data aggregation – it covers “news and updates”.
Nowadays, people start to shy away from “surfing the web”, they follow links from their known websites to discover new ones – and then usually try to find the “XML/RSS” icon on them, to sign up for the updates, if they find the contents of the site relevant to their interests.
This enables users to track activity on a number of websites/forums simultaneously without constantly visiting them.Business impact
First one is obvious – falling advertisement revenue. If your website relies on CPM (cost per thousand) advertising, then it’s against your interests to allow your content to be syndicated, and effectively – viewed without the accompanying advertisements.
Second one is subtle – if you don’t want your feed to drown in the avalanche of information sent to the user - you need to constantly provide quality stream of relevant news and updates.
This however has a great value – if your company needs to be able to broadcast a message to a wide audience, RSS feed is a great medium to achieve that – it isn’t endangered by spam filters, or full inboxes of your clients!
Up until recently most users were using “horizontal portals” like Yahoo! to find the information they were looking for. These portals usually offered a structured directory of other websites, so the whole Internet adventure was quite controlled by the Portal.
Recently however, the percentage of all Internet sessions starting with a “search” command has overtaken the “browse” habit.
This means, that more and more people are starting their research by using search engines, instead of following links from “known” websites.Business impact
Businesses should try hard to speak the clients’ language – if your company offers “bespoke, custom-tailored garment solutions” – cut the amount of buzzwords to minimum and focus on your real field – being “clothes”, or any other basic word people know and use. Your guide for achieving that goal should be: The Plain English Campaign. Simplifying your language makes it much easier for search engines to index, people to actually ”hit” the appropriate keywords, and visitors -to actually understand your contents.The growing number of Search-dominant users also stresses the importance of appropriate Search Engine Optimisation of your site, so you can actually be found when you’re sought after.
“OK, that looks like a nice laptop, but do other users still think so after the purchase?”
This, and all sorts of similar questions are always on your clients’ minds.
Nowadays, there’s nothing simpler to find out – the number of websites offering product reviews have soared significantly in recent years, and more and more consumers use them to make decisions on their future purchases.Business impact
In “offline business” it was a rule that a satisfied client will tell about your company to 3 others – but a unsatisfied client will tell about the unpleasant experience to 10 others.In the current state of affairs – this is even more dramatic. Satisfied user may tell someone about you – when he’s asked.
But unsatisfied client – will definitively let the steam off on one of online forums, which are automatically indexed by search engines and included in the search results.What this means is simple - the facts about your customer service are permanent. You won’t be able to delete that comment from Google’s cache. You won’t prevent other customers from finding that out. This might be an impulse for medium enterprises to actually start value Customer Care teams and strive for excellence in that area. At this point in time, however - this is only their ”mission”, not the daily reality.
It’s time to change that.
Now things are getting really interesting.
For example – discovered Today a web-based solution for table seating arrangements. This clearly represents the power of rich user interfaces, these are no longer boxes where you put text into - this is a full-featured application, but run from the Internet, not from your computer!
The proliferation of AJAX, Flash (and Macromedia Flex) makes the boundary between Desktop and Web applications slowly disappear, the natural move seems to be to port desktop applications to web environment.
This movement has already begun, for example – GMail instead of a client application like Outlook.Business impact
Rich web applications are here to stay.
Using them can allow you to lower barriers for your software/services, reach new audiences, and most importantly – develop applications quicker than before, because you no longer have to check if your software operates correctly on a Windows98 machine with Chinese character set.
Even if you are after an “internal system”, the web platform is a much better choice than desktop – the only difference being hosting the application in your internal, secure environment.
But even in the case of internal systems – central management is essential and makes everyone’s lifes easier.
This is the current state of Internet applications, significantly different than anything we had before.
Well – at least in terms of marketing
The real meaning of Web 2.0 is the same as “dot com bubble” – we have lots of new companies being formed without a clear business model, and their only exit strategy is to be bought by Google.
This isn’t real business in that sense.
However, the whole different aspect of Web 2.0 is the technology behind it.
The new technologies are:
- RSS (covered above)
- AJAX - this is kind of a nerdy one. Basically this allows the Web Page to ask the Server for information this page doesn’t have at the moment of being generated. For normal people it means only that the Web Page doesn’t have to reload/refresh in order to show the results of the form being submitted. A good example of it is an Autocomplete feature present in Google Suggest.
- Tagging – say goodbye to categories. Tagging involves describing “items” (e.g. web links) with keywords that spring to mind when trying to categorise them. You are no longer limited by rigid category structure and you no longer have to worry about the “appropriate category”, but you can simply describe the link to Google’s search engine as for example: “search” or “google” - whatever you like. You will see the list of your tags afterwards and will be able to navigate through them quickly.
- Social Bookmarking - what most people like is to share and be surrounded by like-minded people. That’s where social bookmarking comes into play - users can share links to their favourite things (websites, photos, films, music) with others, and browse the link collections of other people. The most popular content automatically ranks higher on the ”top 10″ list, and a social rating system is being born this way.
- Podcasting – this is a new phenomenon, however the technology it uses has been on the market for quite a while. Basically podcasts are amateur radio programs compressed to MP3 format for others to download and listen to.
The fact of the matter is – advertisers don’t want to pay for the sole fact of their advertisements being displayed. They wants real results. And this caused the rising popularity of “Cost Per Action” advertising model. The mode of emission of the advertisements is unchanged, being still the banner ads and similar “broadcast” types of advertisement, however the advertiser actually measures the amount of people that actually make a desired action – for example fill out a registration form, or buy an item.
And this number of actions undertaken by users – is then converted into cash value. This way advertisers are protected from spending zillions and having no return from the investments – however this model skews the scale towards advertisers, forgetting about websites which offer the advertising.Business impact
CPA takes the risk out of online advertising – that’s a big bonus for all advertisers, so if you still weren’t sure whether to consider online marketing in your next campaign – now you ran out of excuses.
For owners of smaller sites this is also a chance – up until now advertisers were reluctant to commision campaigns to smaller sites because of the lack of trust – in my opinion, the CPA model helps to eliminate that risk, so if you have a small/medium site, this might be a possibility for you to earn a few quid towards the costs of hosting. But don’t expect much, the CPA model doesn’t usually pay all that much as CPM did.
With the proliferation of different browsers and mobile platforms, it was never more important than now – to follow the World Wide Web Consortium coding standards for sites and systems. This is The Way to go, and will ensure your application to work in wide variety of browsers and platforms. Of course the utopia is – you won’t have to check them on each and every platform separately, but I believe we’ll get there one day.
In the meantime, XHTML+CSS is doing a pretty good job in detaching the documents presentation from its actual contents, and both designers, developers and users lifes easier.Business impact
This isn’t a thing that businesses have to care about – this is a task of the agencies commissioned to take on online work, but the Standards Compliance should be high on their clients’ checklists.
I think you wouldn’t use Outlook if it didn’t allow you to send e-mail only to other Outlook users, would you?
This is exactly the point of open environments – when you create a new system, or platform, also provide at least a way to export users’ information to other platforms/systems, if not in a well structured (OMPL file being a prime example), then at least allow people to export their data in a CSV format so they could view it in their Excel.
This will reduce the ”walled garden” effect your users might be afraid of.
Take a look at iTunes – their music is only playable on an iPod, and it’s incompatible with any other MP3 players available.
Few of us have the market power at the beginning to risk that attitude.
So – be open, allow your customers to cancel at any time, and get their data somewhere else.
Big falling trends:
As described above, the Cost Per Thousand (Mille) model is slowly going to an end, however it is still popular in some circles, especially multinational corporations, which like to submit campaigns for ”10 millions of impressions”. But as life shows, only the high-end content proviers can count on the interest of these advertisers.
What’s the use of a nice and flashy website, if you can’t find it listed on Google? So – always provide an alternative, plain text (HTML) format of your contents in order to be found by people who are looking for you.
Flash only websites are a big no-no in 2006.
This is the opposite of Open Environments – you keep your clients’ information for life, and if they want to get away from you – it’s their loss, the only thing they can do is to make screenshots of their information, print them out and re-type into another system.
This is a big no-no, avoid that when you can
Just a quick note, Today I’ve launched the “properly designed”, www.yourclients.co.uk, the Web Based Help Desk Software I develop - right now we’re in the phase of templating the backend (administration panel) and we’ll focus on the user experience and cool features afterwards.
If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester – do let me know by filling out this contact form.
Thanks!
We’ve now got the MVC framework, basic classes + few pagecontrollers up and running, you can add new clients, support tickets, and followups.
Looks good on the functionality front.
Next week we’ll start working on the layups and templates for the system, and in the meantime I have to add user authentication and some security protection, since the system will store data which are sensitive, at least to some extent.
