This is no wonder, for one of the most innovative area of work that Towers Perrin specializes in is Employee Engagement.

Their Global Workforce Study (2007-2008) titled “Closing the Engagement Gap: A Road Map for Driving Superior Business Performance” is an insightful study into how businesses can leverage its people to their full potential and derive business results. It is based on a survey of over 90,000 employees in 18 countries.

The following extracts summarize the key points in the study:

Organizational Goals and Challenges

Increasingly, organizations face a daunting, and sometimes seemingly contradictory set of goals:

• Provide a differentiated customer experience while reducing the cost of delivering that experience.
• Generate significant growth while continuing to manage the bottom line.
• Use technology to drive efficiency without sacrificing the “personal” connection to customers, employees and other stakeholders.
• Standardize…and customize.

One common element grounds organizations’ ability to advance through this environment: People.

People are more than ever a source of critical skill and knowledge, as well as sustainable competitive advantage. And, based on views of close to 90,000 workers in 18 countries around the world, people want to invest their skills and knowledge on behalf of their employers. Yet few organizations are fully tapping that source and achieving the results that come through full investment of the workforce.

What Employees Want

• Employees want to give more, but they also want to see a clear and measurable return for their effort.
• Only 1 out of 5 workers today is giving full discretionary effort on the job – going well above and beyond what’s required because they’re caught up in the passion and purpose of creating a better product, service or customer experience
• Close to 4 out of 10 workers are disenchanted or disengaged. They are not performing anywhere near their true capability because they don’t have the necessary rational, emotional and motivational connections to the company

But the silver lining is that engaged employees are not born, but made. Organizations can create the right conditions to nurture engagement and drive better performance.

Top 10 Drivers of Employee Engagement

1. Senior management sincerely interested in employee well-being
2. Ability to improve skills and capabilities
3. Organization’s reputation for social responsibility
4. Employees inputs into decision making
5. Quick resolution of customer concerns
6. Setting of high personal standards
7. Excellent career advancement opportunities
8. Challenging work assignments that broaden skills
9. Good relationships with supervisors
10. Organization encourages innovative thinking

What can organizations do to close the engagement gap?

1. First and foremost, organizations must have effective — and engaged — leadership at the top.Closing the gap between the traditional leadership model of the last century and the characteristics required for engaging leadership has implications for management selection and training as well as leadership succession and development. Organizations need to review their leadership programs to ensure that leaders understand the enormous positive impact they can have on employee engagement, retention and performance. Organizations need to validate the following requirements:
   • Do existing leadership competencies and development programs focus on building the right “muscles” in the senior team?
   • Are high potential leaders assessed, developed and promoted based on the right leadership criteria?
   • Do performance management programs emphasize the right leadership activities and key touch points that leaders have with employees (e.g. coaching, sponsoring, recognizing, role modeling, communicating, involving)?
2. Second, organizations need to customize and shape the work environment and culture to match their unique basis for competitive advantage, tangibly aligning workforce strategies with business priorities.Organizations need to design workforce strategies and allocate their finite supplies of time, management attention and financial resources. The questions to address are:
   • What are the organization’s unique cultural differentiators, based on its specific priorities and strategies?
   • To what extent is the existing culture supporting and driving the behaviors required for success?
   • Are the organization’s human capital strategy and underlying programs and processes aligned to create a high performance culture?
   • What changes are required to reshape the culture for enhanced performance?
   • Is the HR function equipped to develop and execute new strategies and support for the change process?
3. Third, organizations need to put their workforce under the same microscope as they do their customers – to understand employees’ needs, issues, values and “buying” patterns, so as to give themselves a competitive edge in attracting, retaining and engaging employees, as well as in channeling employees’ energy and brain power most effectively.Top 5 drivers for attracting employes
   • Competitive base pay
   • Career advancement opportunities
   • Challenging work
   • Convenient work location
   • Flexible schedule

   Top 5 drivers for retaining employees:

   • Organization’s reputation as a great place to work
   • Satisfaction with the organization’s people decisions
   • Good relations with supervisor
   • Understanding potential career track within organization
   • Ability to balance work/personal life

   Top 5 drivers of employee engagement

   • Senior management sincerely interested in employee well-being
   • Ability to improve skills and capabilities
   • Organization’s reputation for social responsibility
   • Employee input into decision making
   • Organization’s ability to quickly resolve customer concerns

Conculsion

Engaged workers are not born – they are made. The organization is uniquely positioned to make a significant difference in the employee’s discretionary effort. The vast majority of employees today are looking to make a difference in an organization that makes a difference in the world. It is up to the organization to help make this happen.

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A sales person is already juggling with multiple opportunities in the pipeline that are fighting for attention and that take long to close. What the sales person needs is a way to simplify the information and make it actionable. And he needs to be able to get this without feeding in a whole lot of data in the system.

Dave suggests the following:

What these salespeople require is a sales-centric application that helps them with the issues critical to their personal and departmental success such as:

1. What’s the next specific step I need to be taking with each prospect in my pipeline and when should I take it based on the natural, not forced, progression of my prospect’s buy cycle?
2. What information do I need to gather next from my prospects that will provide and build on the contextual knowledge I must have in order to best help them visualize how my products or services will help them achieve an objective, satisfy a need or solve a problem.
3. What information do I need to convey next to my prospects that will provide and build on the contextual knowledge they need to properly and fully understand how my products or services will help them achieve an objective, satisfy a need or solve a problem.
4. Which of my prospects should I prioritize my time and attention to based on how they’ve demonstrated their levels of interest?
5. What members of my extended sales team do I need to involve now in my sales opportunities and what will they need to accomplish?
6. How can I delegate administrative but necessary tasks to optimize my sales time with prospects?

What is required is a customizable template that the sales person can use to track the progress of each opportunity with minimal data entry. The template needs to act as a sales guide and a reference for the sales person to use when evaluating and prioritizing opportunities.

The template can easily capture the progress of the opportunity through various sales stages or milestones, and automatically measure the time taken to move through the pipeline. This gives the sales person a measure of the pipeline velocity – or the speed at which the opportunity is moving through the pipeline. This is a very important metric that can help the sales person prioritize opportunities.

Recognizing that the sales person is the primary constraint in scaling up sales, any system can serve to improve sales performance only when it improves the throughput of the sales person.

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Laura writes about her recently published report that recommends a four-point strategy to B2B marketers to avoid becoming obsolete. She advises against merely increasing marketing spend by creating new campaigns or clever advertising will not deliver results. And suggests that blindly getting into online or social marketing will only de-focus the marketing strategy.

To avoid obsolescence, B2B marketers should undertake four transformative steps:

1) Build a marketing-only database to capture buyer insight.
Today, stalking prospects with outbound, undifferentiated messages yields unpredictable results. But this is what happens when marketers rely primarily on list providers, database marketing services, or other sources of information for targeting buyers. To make campaigns pay off, marketers need to collect and analyze more information about what separates their best customers from the others. Build a marketing database to do this. Big firms may need to look at something from Aprimo or Unica, smaller firms can get by with less. But get a handle on your prospect data in 2009.

2) Shift from simply generating demand to managing it.
When marketing delivers a new batch of leads, sales wants to know exactly which ones have the most potential, regardless of whether marketing outsources the leads or not. To convince sales that marketing-qualified leads are worth pursuing, marketing must execute multifaceted campaigns that engage — and qualify —prospects while extending marketing’s responsibility further along the sales pipeline. Top marketers focus on managing demand, not generating it. They also score their leads numerically, systematically.  I’ve talked about this before, but you can see how you rate here.

3) Combine digital and traditional tactics to build dialogue around needs and motivations.
Business buying cycles are long, and marketers use this to their advantage when they weave together digital and physical channels to engage buyers emotionally, deliver brand experiences, and form ongoing relationships. Integrated marketing success in B2B depends on leveraging the strengths of different channels to build an ongoing conversation with buyers. To do this well requires organizational alignment, an outcome-based strategy, deep customer insight, analytic planning, and consistent measurement. Find out how you stack up here.

4) Embrace the groundswell and community marketing principles.
As Social Computing moves into the business world, B2B marketers dial down on acquisition and step up to community marketing. To set community marketing strategy successfully, marketers must know whether target customers willingly participate in social activity on the job.  We have data to share with you about how buyers behave socially while working. Come preview it at our teleconference.They also need to set social objectives that align with business outcomes, and evaluate tactical and technology choices last.

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• High cost of sales, low margins
• Lack of clear product/offer differentiation
• Complexity in mapping customer requirements to product/offer
• Long sales cycle with unpredictable outcomes
• No consistent sales performance, difficult to forecast
• High level of stress in sales team, high turnover
• You can make/provide as much as you can sell

In short, if scaling up sales is the major bottleneck to scaling up your business, then here are some ideas to help you understand and tackle these challenges better.

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A review of the book by Dennis Howlett says:

Essentially the book is a collection of stories covering a broad spectrum of industries and their efforts to see the next thing that is likely to impact their business, take corrective action or seize opportunity. It includes companies like Pirelli, casino giant Harrah’s, Spanish ex-pat bank Solbank, FedEX, Southwest Airlines, amazon.com, E&J Gallo Winery, Essent Energie. I wish they could have talked about a host of others I came across but am not allowed to mention. Believe me when I say TIBCO has a customer list to die for. More important are the characteristics these companies share:

• Customer-driven – not focused but driven
• Embrace cultural change – they don’t fight change
• Management by exception – the routine stuff is assumed to be taken care of
• Innovation – they don’t shy away from change
• Merit-based alliances – there’s no entitlement in a relationship
• Meritocratic and entrepreneurial – no consensus here
• Leaders provide opportunity – organizing staff to empower themselves
• Short planning cycles – event driven and highly responsive to market conditions

These are all characteristics I believe the modern professional practice should aspire to if it is to be super successful.

… an ideal set of characteristics that we would like to attribute to our favorite term Evolving Enterprises. Some of the visionary clients that we have the privilege of working with, like APW President constantly exhibit these very qualities, and continue to prosper in the face of ever changing market conditions. We salute their vision!

Waiting to get hold of the book…

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Some of our clients have sales teams and project teams that are located in different cities and towns acrosss the country. We have observed their process for routing expense claims to be slow, resource-intensive and cumbersome. The employees are typically expected to fill in vouchers and attach supporting documentation such as bills and submit them for approval. These claims are then approved by a local authority and then passed on to the central accounts department.

From our observations, having supporting documentation is a necessary evil. However, most of the paperwork is required primarily during initial approval by the local authority, and subsequent consolidation by centralized accounts can be much simpler if all the expense claims are digitally recorded in a central repository that is accessible to all locations.

The Expense Claims Workflow that we built provides the following procedure for expense claims:

The workflow proceeds as follows:

1. The employee situated at any location logs in to the application, enters expense claims using a simple form, that could be integrated with any other workflow such as the Sales Activity Management workflow, or Order Processing workflow.
2. At the end of the week, the employee takes a print-out of the report showing the expenses incurred during the week. He hands over this report, along with supporting documents such as bills cash memos, etc. to the local area manager. The area manager logs into the same application and views the claims and verifies them against the supporting documents, where relevant. The area manager may mark expenses as:

   Approved: The area manager may approve all or part of the amounts claimed. Those expenses approved by the area manager are forwarded to Accounts on a weekly basis. (The collective printouts of the expense reports along with the documents are forwarded by courier each week).

   Clarification: Expenses marked for clarification are sent back to the employee for clarifications. The employee gets an email alert with a link to the expense in question.

   Denied: Expenses marked as ‘Denied’ by the area manager may be reviewed later with the employee as required and can then be re-submitted subsequently.

3. The Accounts department at the head office receives all claims approved and forwarded by area managers from all locations. Accounts then looks up these claims in the same application. Accounts can then mark each claim as:
   Approved and Locked: Expenses approved by accounts are considered Passed and Locked. Approval may be granted for the entire amount or part of the amount only. The area manager then cannot modify the approval status.

   Clarification: Some expense claims may be returned to the concerned area manager or employee for additional clarification.

   Denied and Locked: Expenses denied by Accounts are considered final and locked. The area manager then cannot modify the approval status.

In the above workflow, all concerned persons, such as the employee who entered the claim, the area manager, or other persons with supervisory roles and permissions, may track the progress of each claim through the entire workflow. A stipulated time frame can be set within which claims are to be processed through the system, failing which alerts are generated and the defaulting claims are escalated to top management.

Finally, the expense information is tagged against other information in the workflow system, such as:

• Employee who incurred the expense
• Location / Division where the employee was located when the expense was incurred
• Expense Account Head
• Customer or prospect that was served
• Sales opportunity, project, or order against which the expense was incurred
• Travel, customer visit or other event that resulted in the expense claim

Due to the fact that each claim has all this information tagged to it, a detailed analysis can be provided that tracks the levels of expenditure by various above fields.

We shall soon post sample screen shots, analytical reports and graphs that the system generates.

We would like feedback and suggestions regarding any additional features that we could incorporate that may make the system more useful in different usage scenarios.

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Small businesses owners like Manoj are seeking solutions that will help them grow and join the surge in the Indian economy. And most of them assume that the solution to their scaling up needs is the one-size-fits-all ERP solution. After all, do we not keep reading about how every large manufacturing company in India has spent millions on large scale ERP implementations? If it seems to work for them, maybe it should work for us too.

As technology providers, we know that “One size does not fit all”, as Andy Hayler likes to point out. But as a small business owner, what issues does one have to consider?

Here is the discussion we had with Manoj:

1. Firstly, let’s begin by looking at what your existing pain points are. What fires do we need to douse? Where are we the most inefficient? What issues are waiting to become emergencies?
2. What do we want to achieve in the next 3 months, next 6 months, etc.? How fast do we want to grow in size? How many people? How many locations are these people spread across? What is the level of computer-friendliness do the people have at different levels?
3. Next, we look at the information base. As we grow in size, the main point of failure is lack of information availability. When we are a small team, its easy to keep in touch with every detail. As we grow in size, we lose touch with small details. The first issue to tackle is to plug the leaks of information flow from the bottom to the top. Now that’s not as easy as it sounds. Problem is, the information needs to be captured where and when it is being generated, in a format that can be re-used and analyzed. That means, you need:
   a. The infrastructure and systems to capture information at every point in the extended enterprise
   b. People who actually bother to enter the information
   Out of the above two, the latter issue is far far more difficult to achieve, especially with the kind of business processes Indian companies follow – ie, no processes – which is great when you’re small, but its un-scalable.

   So, we need to find a path of least resistance in creating the system to capture the information. This means finding a good balance between information value and ease of use. Creating a monster of a system makes it extremely difficult to implement. Its far healthier to do it stage-wise, in a way that we can change the plan as we go ahead, based on where we find least resistance and maximum value.

4. Where do we start? Obviously, information that is directly related to business transactions is of paramount importance, without which the business would not run. So I assume that the basic accounting system must be in place. But accounting is an extremely inward perspective of the business. The main drivers of a service-oriented business is customer responsiveness. How fast, and how efficiently are we able to respond to a customer’s need and find and deliver a solution that fits . Unless you have some other pain points that need immediate attention, the area to look into is the process of capturing customer information and the process of servicing and retaining customers by keeping information about them up-to-date and accessible at any time.

So what do you think about this approach? We would like to hear…

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It used to be you’d beat your competitors by achieving greater scale in your operations, enabling you to spread your costs over more products and thus push down the cost of producing each product. Scale was tangible, a manifestation of plant and equipment and other real assets. Today, you strive to beat your competitors by creating an idea or a model that can scale without constraint, expanding easily and flexibly to handle ever more business. Scalability is intangible.

So scalability is achieved as a net result of the entire business process being scalable, instead of merely increasing “production capacity” or efficient “resource planning”. As Nicholas points out, this scalability is easier to achieve in a pure technology business like Google, where building a good business is not all that different from building a good data-processing system. But in other industries that involve human actions and physical products, achieving this kind of scalability is not that straight-forward. The ability of a business to achieve scalability is directly proportional to its ability to create a standardized workflow that can then be scaled up to deliver higher throughput.

Scale and scalability both have strengths and weaknesses as business strategies. We know the strengths and weaknesses of scale pretty well by now. We’re only beginning to understand those of scalability.

It is our endeavour to try and unravel precisely this mystery for our clients. Its an interesting adventure!

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One solution we created to overcome these hurdles was to create a Client Web Server. It was a small foot-print web server that was installed on each client computer, and which did all the work of the user interface, and made network calls to the server only to fetch data from the database. It worked great, because the network traffic was minimal and user interface was fast. We were thrilled with our solution. Based on its success in the small, two location installation, we later deployed the same solution in Branch Management System for an engineering company which had several branch offices spread around the country. This was when we faced the big hurdle – managing installations on several client computers was no mean task. With the Windows 95 OS that was prevalent in those days, we had to repeatedly re-install the web server every time there was virus infection or other such frequently occuring disasters.

Fortunately, by then the connectivity scene was much better, and we abandoned our Client Web Server model for a traditional centralized web server with normal browser clients.

Now, browsers are becoming more and more intelligent, capable of doing user interface tricks that could earlier be implemented only on native applications. Technologies such as DHTML – or Dynamic HTML allowed web applications to modify entities in the user interface dynamically using Javascript. CSS – or Cascading Style Sheets simplified the process of stylizing the interface – such as fonts, colors, and later, even the layout of entities on screen. The latest development termed AJAX – or Asynchronous JavaScript + XML – a term coined by Adaptive Path allows web applications to retrieve data from servers witout refreshing the page, thereby providing faster interfaces in the web browser. We have recently started using AJAX extensively in our applications and are thrilled by the performance enhancements.

The question that this all raises is how far can we, or should we push this model? Jason Kottke’s excellent article on Web based Operating Systems – or Web OS talks about how big guns like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are tooling up for creating the next new frontier of the web. He talks about precisely the same model that we used five years back to overcome connectivity problems – a client side web server! How interesting. But hopefully, if one of the big guys are behind the effort, they will have the deep pockets required to see this model through its inevitable teething problems.

We’re all excited by the possibilities of where and how far we can push this model. Just to give a brief idea of how we’ve matured in web based applications, here are a few screen shots of applications we’ve built over the years:

Web based Order Manager – 2000

Web based File manager – 2003

Web based Sales Management System – 2005

As we stretch the possibilities of web applications into the enterprise, the capabilities of applications on the client side become increasingly important, and we hope to see the advent of a widely supported Web OS soon.

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Everyone believes that Information Technology can do wonders to the productivity of an enterprise. Yet, as a business owner, it is far from easy to put your finger on exactly what IT can do for a small/medium sized enterprise. A previous article attempted to answer this question – What can Information Technology do for a Small/Medium Sized Business Enterprise?. It discussed how an enterprise can create a Business System, consisting of processes and policies that are used by people and resources, aided by information technology, to generate enhanced performance.

Once a business owner is convinced that IT can enable higher performance, and is prepared to upgrade processes and policies to make them techno-savvy, the next important questions are:

• Which technology solution to choose?
• What are the risks involved?
• What are the costs involved?

We shall attempt to answer these questions here.

Which technology solution to choose?

Technology is undoubtedly one of the fastest growing industry sectors. And this growth is accompanied by innumerable options provided by IT service providers ranging from hardware manufacturers, operating systems, database systems, application software, connectivity, etc. that all form part of the solution. To complicate matters, each service provider introduces new jargon that purportedly differentiates their product or solution from the rest and rises above the noise. But as a business owner, all this makes the decision of choosing the right combination of technologies and providers extremely difficult.

In an attempt to reduce the noise and get some clear picture about what technological options one needs to consider, we have taken the metaphor of constructing a building. We have identified three basic areas in which one needs to make a choice, while selecting a technology solution:

1. Architecture
2. Construction
3. Ownership

The diagram below lists out the choices in each of the above three areas:

1. Architecture

The three types of architectures available for implementing an IT solution are:

1. Stand-alone – where a single computer contains the entire solution – stand-alone solutions are useful for personal productivity applications like word processing, spreadsheets, email, etc. where a single individual creates information and accesses it from a single computer, with little or no requirement to access the information from anywhere else.
2. Client-server – where the solution involves a server on which the main application and data is stored, and client computers where special client application software is installed for accessing and processing information from the server. This model is used extensively for conventional enterprise applications that require information to be captured and accessed by multiple people connected to each other by a network.
3. Web-based – where the solution is primarily installed on a server, and is usable from any client computer with only a web browser – no special client application software is required to be installed. This model is suitable for applications where information is to be captured and accessed at multiple locations that can connect to the server via a network- including via the Internet. Web based solutions are gradually becoming widely available for all types of requirements.

2. Construction

The four construction options are:

1. Standard Product – This option represents solutions that are available as standard products. The product encapsulates a set of built-in features, much like a pre-fabricated building. If the features available in the product are a good fit for the requirements of the business processes and policies, a standard product may be a good choice.
2. Customized – Several standard products have facilities to configure and customize features, requiring varying amount of expertise. The amount of customization required to achieve the required facilities is the prime consideration to choose this option.
3. Custom-built – Custom-built solutions have a high degree of flexibility and can be built to suit the exact requirements of the business. However, the costs and risks can be higher. New development methodologies like Agile Development, can minimize these costs and risks.
4. Open Source – Open Source applications have emerged as a new option for constructing IT solutions. Built by teams of programmers who collaborate by volunteering their efforts without compensation and for mutual benefit, several open source applications have grown to become feature-rich products with complete source code available to any user. Enterprises can use open source applications with low upfront investments, and with relevant technical skills, can customize the code to match their requirements. Open source alternatives for basic requirements like email access, web site management, basic collaboration, etc. are now easily found, but applications for business process management are few and not yet mature enough. However, this is a space to watch.

3. Ownership

1. Purchase (License) – Conventionally, most software products are available in this model. Payment is made once, and the purchaser is given a license to use the software with certain restrictions based on number of users, computers, servers etc. as per the license purchased. This model does not take into consideration, the frequency of use of the solution, or the features used. The purchaser usually pays for all the features in the product, irrespective of which ones actually serve the requirements. This model usually involves products that are physically installed on the purchaser’s own computers.
2. Rental (ASP) – A new ownership model is emerging as an alternative for some IT solutions. Enterprises can rent an application that is physically installed on the service provider’s computers and accessed by the purchaser via the Internet. The service provider is called an Application Service Provider. This is still an emerging model and not many applications are available.
3. Per-per-use – This model of ownership is an extension of the Rental model, but instead of paying a fixed recurring fee per user or per period (month or year), the pay-per-use model allows the user to pay for every usage. For example, online payment services usually allow a model where customers with a small number of transactions can use the service free with charge deducted for every transaction. Similarly, software solutions that are not used often – for example, online surveys, marketing campaigns etc. can follow a similar model of payment.

Choosing the right combination

We have seen above, that the permutations and combinations of options for choosing a technology solution are several. To choose the right mix of architecture, construction and ownership, a cost-benefit analysis needs to be made. The benefits one needs to consider are in terms of :

1. Suitability to current requirements:
   1. Is the solution suitable to be used by the number and nature of people and resources in the business system?
   2. Is the solution suitable for handling the processes and policies of the business system?
2. Flexibility to handle future requirements – For how long can the solution serve the business system? Can it handle the changes in the business system that are inevitable during the time frame planned? Will the solution handle the growth expected?

What are the risks involved?

The next important issue to be considered while choosing a solution are the risks involved. Statistically, the failure rates of software projects is extremely high – over 90%! The factors attributed to failure of software projects are :

Project Challenged Factors	% of Responses
1. Lack of User Input	12.8%
2. Incomplete Requirements & Specifications	12.3%
3. Changing Requirements & Specifications	11.8%
4. Lack of Executive Support	7.5%
5. Technology Incompetence	7.0%
6. Lack of Resources	6.4%
7. Unrealistic Expectations	5.9%
8. Unclear Objectives	5.3%
9. Unrealistic Time Frames	4.3%
10. New Technology	3.7%
Other	23.0%

(from the CHAOS Report by the Standish Group. See Why software projects fail – and how we make them work for more details)

As seen from the above list, some of the major causes of failure of software projects is related to user inputs, and requirements. In conventional software development methodologies, requirements were expected to be completely defined, and unchanging atleast through the lifetime of the project. However, if we look at how IT helps a business system, software is merely an enabler for a business system to deliver enhanced performance. It cannot be successful unless the processes and policies are re-designed to take advantage of the technology. In such a scenario, working out requirements needs an assumption about how the upgraded processes and policies will work. Such assumptions can easily be found lacking, and when actually implemented, may require changes and re-tuning – which in turn may require the software to be changed too! This is what causes the most failures in software projects.

These risks are minimized in the emerging technological options – such as web based architecture, agile development and rental applications.

What are the costs involved?

When choosing a technology solution, one needs to consider the total cost of ownership of the solution. An IT project typically involves the following costs:

1. Hardware – servers, client computers, peripherals
2. Platform – operating systems, basic server software applications like database servers, web servers etc.
3. Application Software – License, Customization, Development, Hosting
4. Connectivity – Network, Internet
5. Training – upgrading manpower skills to utilize the new processes and policies in the context of the new technology
6. Administration – Every solution needs to be administered. Administration requires expensive skills that an SME may not be able to completely justify
7. Support & Maintenance

Costs are easier to manage with the emerging technology models – such as web based solutions, agile development and rented solutions.

Conclusion – go for IT as a service

If we look at the general trend in new technological developments in architecture, construction and ownership, the trend is to convert Information Technology Solutions into a full-service.

The above diagrams shows a comparison between implementing IT solutions as a product v/s IT solutions as a service. The diagram on the left shows the conventional options of IT solutions – stand-alone or client-server architecture with standard or customized products, owned by purchasing licenses. While the diagram on the right shows emerging IT as a service options – web based architecture, with custom-built agile applications or open source applications, owned as rental or pay-per-use solutions.

Bottom-line: Choose IT as a service
But where are these options available?
Contact Us to find out.

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3. Software for Everyone How hardware vendors are bringing down costs of hardware, and...