ITGumbo: spicing IT up

Hello to my readers,

You all know what TCO is and if you don't, quickly go and read about. Because I have a surprise for you.

Yesterday, I met with the TCO. It was a one hour meeting, but I did manage to characterize for myself.

It is a man, in my case he was European. He has a degree in over-engineering from a well known establishment.

From what he told me, he had many years of experience in high-end applications, mainly in the maintenance of infrastructure.

He spoke gently about the importance of responsibility, accountability and management.

When I explained my wishes, he talked about good process, control, security and procedure.

He did not know much about WEB 2.0, SaaS, Agile and other fancy words in the software world.

In other words, he is a plumber of bytes, and we all need a plumber.

By the way, he earns more than all the memory and disk you could think of for your application.

Now, how to reduce the TCO?

Hope you sleep well at night.

Yours truly,

Noam

Hello there,

I hope that by now you read the stream of posts about increasing the number of users.
Previous posts: 1, 2, 3

Now, I will show an idea that you may use. I do not protect this idea but it would be nice to know if you tried to implement it.

Some borring information in text:

Keep fighting for your voice to be heard,

With you all the way,

Noam

Hello to the brave developers,

So, did you wait long? I hope the anticipation was not too hard.

Following my last post I would like to fulfill my promise.

Last time I stopped the flow of writing with the idea of looking for somebody in the organization that is not the application user.

Also, try to find what in the application, would interest this somebody or even better, assist them to do their work.

I will jump directly to a real life example.

Imagine yourself as a truck driver. You work in an independent logistics firm and sometimes you deliver goods for some company's warehouse.
Let's call it SCW. Now, imagine a hot day and you arrive with your truck to SCW. At the gate, the gatekeeper checks your papers and tells you that this delivery is totally unexpected and you cannot unload or even get in because of new security regulations.

Now what? You could park your truck, try to walk into SCW and raise hell until they found out what went wrong.
Another alternative for the less aggressive would be to call your office and they will try to get hold of the purchasing guy or the SCW manager and sort it out.
Both alternative will take a lot of time and the day is hot.

Now back to your reality as a developer. What would the truck driver need out of your application? It is simple, the person that can help and solve the problem.
How would he get it? simple, he got a paper with a Delivery number, this paper was issued from the application. Someone created it, probably it has a reference to a Purchase order or Sales order. There must be some contacts there.

If you, the developer, could expose this information to the driver via extranet, that would be great and by doing one phone call the problem is solved.

Now the only task is, how to expose this data. I think you already know how. After all, you developed the application.

One last request from my side: You are welcome to add your comments and ideas in the comments section.

See you next time,

Noam

Hello to all developers out there.

Back to the question of increasing the number of users of your system.

Following my previous post http://itgumbo.com/openforbusiness/2008/09/how_to_increase_the_numbers_of.php.

Lets start with a protest:
This is a BLOG for developers. You may think that this kind of ideas should be raised by your friendly Product Definition colleague.
Now would you?
No! I say, developers should take responsibility into their own hands. Ideas for new functionality can come up by simply looking at your users.

So, back to reality. What is required is to get familiar with non-users in the customer's organization.

For example, you probably know the accounting department because they call you all the time.

Now the question is, who are they serving? who serves them? within that periphery you should find at least one who is not a user of your system.

This guy (or girl) is not your user but he interacts with users, so maybe there is some need there.

Maybe these poor fellows who need the service of the accounting department (poor them) need some information in that area but it is not accessible to them.

So, my dear developer, you should know your customers, go and find out these guys and characterize them.

Once you do it, the next idea will pop.

I promise that in the next posts, I will share one idea of mine that you will be able to use.

Power to the developer!

Noam

Hello all,

Most enterprise applications, ERP, CRM and others are charged by the number of users.

So, the main challenge of these software vendors is how to increase the number of users.

Even in the cases that the customer is charged by usage, the purpose is to increase the number of transactions that users are doing.

There are traditionally two ways:

1. Add more functionality that will appeal to more users
2. Wait until the customer organization will grow and increase the number of users.

I would guess that the latter is realistic but requires too much endurance.

So, what is the functionality to add? again there are two alternatives:

1. Add to the application modules that will cover new areas of business
2. Offer new services on top of the existing data and functionality

Personally, I would prefer the latter. This alternative is requires less effort and more creative thinking.

I have one idea that I will share in another posts. But in the meanwhile, I would start with the following direction:

How many employees in an organizations are also users of ERP, CRM etc? I would guess that no more than 50% in any given organization for any given application.

It could be that most employees are using some application, but you, my dear, are concerned only with one application. Your own!!.

So the direction is to find who are the employees that are not using your application and what would they need out of it. Simple daa!!!

See you in the next post,

Noam