Business and Technology

Conversations seem to come in batches. Over the past 2 weeks or so, I have had a lot of independent discussions about technology and business (my business, our customer businesses and others).

The conversations have spanned topics like taking out systemic costs, gathering and assessing information for better decision making, testing revenue assumptions with very light CapEx and efficient marketing tools.

There have been several discussions about how cheap and easy it is to test certain kinds of product innovations. A great example is our Sherpa product line. We launched a new, multi-million dollar product line where all of our consumer facing technologies are built on open source tools and are hosted in the cloud. We made some minor modifications to WordPress and included modified but pre-existing plug-ins. While it is a mouthful of technology jargon, it means we went from idea to market in under 90 days, had almost no capital tied up in the creation of the service, rented the servers and bandwidth by the drip and were able to quickly test demand with very low risk. This represents a fundamental shift in product innovation cycles and costs. The cost and time compression in the innovation cycle has been amazing in the past couple of years. If used correctly, this change in capital requirements for innovation will enable established companies to compete with venture backed launches in a much more aggressive way.

At NCI, we pride ourselves on creating extremely efficient processes for high-touch services. In our Digital Sherpa world we are trying new technologies that can make a meaningful shift in cost per curated piece of content and learning systems that will help us improve the quality of content over time (in this case, quality of content can be measured in terms of how much audience, engagement or lead activity each content element generates). In a business predicated on efficient servicing of customers and measurable marketing benefits, the application of these technologies are critical. So, what is new about using technology to drive out cost? What we are seeing is again, very lightweight apps that cobble together other, pre-existing services to play like a Fortune 500 company with scraps of a budget. One great example is our use of Open Calais and Zemanta. Both of these are free plug-ins that make content curation faster by reading our posts and recommending tags, similar articles and images – all work we would need to do unassisted without the free tools. Our only real investment has been in training around these tools, while the payoff will be measured in reduced labor per piece. These solutions are not “industrial strength”, but they work well and provide real savings.

We have been playing with efficient communication tools for a long time. Products like Basecamp, Google Docs, and CubeTree have made project collaboration and information sharing significantly easier. The transparency of communications and information has reduced political friction and increased our speeds of decision making. Most of these tools are either free or nearly free.

One of the most amazing transitions I have seen of late is the reduction inn cost to get good, actionable data about the performance of a business. We have a small division that sells most of it’s product through email direct marketing. With a super cheap, open source CRM solution on top of a pay-per-drip email service, we can track the profitability of eery one of our marketing campaigns to the penny. When we want to test something new or different online, we use Google Analytics for free to gather tons of valuable data – if it seems to be working, we develop an industrial strength tracking protocol into Omniture. Our decision making around effective marketing vehicles has jumped by quanta by focusing on this end-to-end tracking capability. Cheap tools, valuable results. We had no need for a 100k+ investment in Siebel to play as sophisticated a game as the big guys.

Here is the last example for this post. I am on the board of directors for my building. When we are not listening to noise complaints, we are very focused on saving the building money. We just are now using free data to measure the efficiency of our boiler (we spend a lot on fuel oil). By focusing our attention on gallons consumed per “degree day” (a term I had not ever heard before), we are able to track efficiency of our overall system. With a couple of cheap remote thermometers, feeding info back to our system, we can stop overheating parts of our building to accommodate the “cold side”.

Technology has gotten cheaper (nearly free in some case), better (it seems to work most of the time) and more interoperable (we can aggregate data from everywhere to make good decisions). This should be powering mid-market companies to gain more operational efficiencies, test more innovations, communicate more effectively and make smarter, fact based decisions.

Tagged as: crm, decision making, google Analytics, Metrics, technology, wordpress