As software matures and the body of knowledge on processes continues to be well understood, the concept of long implementation times becomes intolerable to most firms. Users want to Activate! not implement. Elegantly architected, well-designed technology, which is focused on accessible functions and data, as well as role-centric/user-centricity, process or workflow capabilities, and adaptability are all key.
Total Cost of Ownership, a higher adoption rate, and hence, a long-term relationship between the technology firm and their customer is the outcome of quality. There is nothing more exciting to all involved to ‘see it working’.
Activate! or fast implementation times are a key requirement of today’s customers. However, it must be said that not all projects will fit into the Activate! scenario. If you are deploying the technology to enable business transformation, your expectations need to be set. There is a lot of work to do. Technology projects have mostly fallen into two different buckets: the on-boarding of ‘standards based processes’ or business transformation strategies. Software firms often get themselves into trouble when they promise Activate! time to value for transformation projects. Users themselves should take responsibility for the realistic time to benefits efforts, since they are the ones who will have to face their management and work mates when things don’t go according to plan.
Having provided these caveats, lets delve into the Activate! concepts.
Though networks do provide an advantage to these rapid on-boarding concepts, we do not want to leave licenser software behind. Software quality and adherence to industry standards are the main issue we wish to address. The participation in a web centric world with web services, networks, etc. does have a key advantage for Activate!, because users can access sharable data, sharable code, etc. that can be used by the trading community. But this is not sufficient for Activate! The tools need to have a number of properties that make on-boarding easier.
There are several properties that must be addressed in order to support Activate!:
- Technology-both architecture and functionality
- Services-both consulting and maintenance
- Partnerships that work for the customer
- Customer passion.
You must be committed to this type of strategy.
Technology?
Technology firms, you are responsible for Six Sigma code and Six Sigma Implementation tools and strategies. The more you address these issues, the more you endear your customers to adopt more solutions for your firm, as well as reducing the cost of sales and keeping margins, in general, higher.
Your software has to reflect the highest functional value-your product management people have to be top gun functional, industry people and brilliant architects-nothing less!
If you are not really really focused on this, you will find your relationships with your customers eroding. An excellent example of this is PeopleSoft’s Total Ownership Experience. They have taken some of these concepts and more-workflow, task flow navigation, and highly accessible data, to make processes highly visible. They understand that tools and utilities reflect a respect for the customer. They also have implementation wizards, etc., to try to simplify the installation. On a maintenance level, they have adopted techniques used in the hardware business-online diagnostics for bug fixes, etc.
The point is to create clean, easy to install and easy to use software. One must understand the key user issues, and strive to support them. What does the user need to know, do, enter, etc. to get to the point where the ease of implementation and time to value is extremely fast.
And more: Metadata modeling tools; an ability to enhance the system after go-live, without an army of consultants; online documentation-that is really there and germane-what a concept!
Partnerships That Work for the Customer
Software firms can make the process easier for their clients by adherence to industry standards and best practices. They can create tools for integration, data management, etc., that make the whole assembly process easy-rather than create moats, whose sole goal is to keep so-called competitors out, but in reality make it hard for users to install, use and upgrade. It appears that the protection of market turf is more important than customer service and value. You have to ask yourself, is a firm like that really worth my allegiance, when their goal is their revenue vs. my business success.
Users also need help with the whole process integration. One Click on Amazon is an excellent example of what can be done to integrate the whole process. Adherence to standard processes, full integration with partners on the software level which moves from software platforms to trading partners while the user still feels they are ‘here’.
The software firm has to take some ownership in supporting things like ‘certified’ partnerships, etc., which are not just about driving business to the software firms, or attending a one week training class for the consultants. We attended many user conferences over the years with partner events. These were not partnerships with the customer in mind.
The software firms with the best experiences at integration reflect the knowledge of the whole process. These tend to be the so-called best-of breed vendors, who are close to the operations of the business, and actually, their very livelihood depends on making these links work.
However, we don’t see software firms hanging around enough to see if the partnerships work for the customer-especially on the consulting front.
Users are well aware of the squabbles behind the scenes between various vendors on project activates. But the users’ desire to make it easy on themselves actually smacks of lack of responsibility. The ‘one throat to choke’ concept, though easier as a human interface issue, separates users from their technology providers, who are innovative and can be customer-centric. Some times there isn’t much a vendor can do about this, since the biggest consulting firms often have a ‘lock’ on the customer relationship. However, vendors beware. There needs to be a post implementation objective audit that allows the user to truly review all the issues, schedule, return on investment, knowledge transfer, etc. This not only should be part of the partner audit, but should also be used to feed into the continuous implementation improvement programs of your products and services.
Conclusions:
For tech firms: Fundamentally, commitment is the issue. The more obsessive one is the more clean the nooks and crannies are. PeopleSoft did not get those accolades from Forrester Research[1] and the Meta Group[2] for nothing.
Being obsessive about customer dialog is also key-what do they need, think, etc. We are appalled by the number of software firms who do not talk and interact with their customers regularly! We have heard about firms who did not visit their clients for years!
Dave Duffield, from the inception of PeopleSoft, had the customer in mind (the people in PeopleSoft?) and obviously the culture is intact.
For user firms: Part of your on-going operational costs is due to incomplete automation of the business processes. Get real-get with it. The more you subscribe to the O3 Rule[3] (that’s not oxygen, but it might help you breath better), the more efficient you will be, and the more the systems will yield business value for you, the user. You own the cynicism surrounding these systems! Your Six Sigma is about your project management and your ownership around your processes. When you yield responsibility away, you increase costs, implementation times, and generally lose the genius that can be inherent in these projects. It is not that there aren’t committed sincere and brilliant people in the market to serve you, but you are still the ultimate owner of what is being created.
[1] An independent research study completed by Forrester Research found that PeopleSoft scored highest overall in Forrester’s Application Ownership Satisfaction Index.
[2] Porter Novelli will get us the actual stats for Total Cost of Ownership.