The Savvy CIO

CRM isn’t just a piece of technology. Orienting your business around knowing, serving and connecting with your customers is a process and a culture. Process and culture are truly the heart of CRM. And it isn’t easy.

But there’s no reason the technology that enables a customer-centric culture has to be hard to use. But frankly, CRM technology has often been a bear to work with.

Most CRMs take a complex piece of technology (encompassing marketing, sales, support, contracts, quoting, etc.) and combine it with a clumsy, click-happy user interface. That’s a recipe for disaster.

With today’s launch of Sugar 6.0, Sugar has taken a “good enough” user interface and made it exceptional.

Sugar’s new tagline with the launch is “CRM Made Simple”, and they’ve clearly targeted the user experience. I’ve been using the new Sugar interface for several months. In short, it’s incredible.

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There are two major methods of developing software: waterfall and agile. If you’re considering a development project, you should consider how your software should be made.

Waterfall development goes through distinct stages, with requirements gathering in the first stage. In the waterfall method, a group of decision makers think, imagine, script and whiteboard how the system might be used. These working sessions create a set of requirements for the application. After the requirements are set, the waterfall method flows down to future stages of development, testing and deployment.

In contrast, agile development breaks a project down into small stages. Each stage tackles a small area of the application, gathering requirements, building, testing and then putting the growing application into the hands of users. This process allows requirements to emerge over time, as users and developers learn together exactly what the application needs to accomplish.

Waterfall development assumes the requirements of a system can be fully predicted and codified before any development begins. Agile development assumes requirements only fully emerge during the process.

Waterfall development aims at a stationary target. Agile development aims at a moving one.

So which method is best?

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People use laptops, smartphones, iPads and other mobile gadgets all the time everywhere they go. Maybe you’re one of them. Many companies are moving to notebooks instead of desktop computers and equipping employees with smartphones to enable increased mobility. Maybe you belong to such a company.

Do you know how secure your business information is when you connect to wireless Internet in your hotel or at the airport or hook up to free WiFi at a cafe? It can be very risky, but there are a few simple ways to protect yourself, your company and your clients. In a recent article about information security, Chris Drake from E-Commerce Times stresses educating yourself and your workforce about the best methods to keep yourself safe from hackers. He offers these suggestions:

For Wireless Internet Connections

• Stay off the free wireless Internet. If you do use it, go through a secure VPN connection with the latest encryption methods.
• Subscribe to a mobile broadband service and use the mobile Internet access card.
• If you are not using your wireless connection, turn it off. This will help regulate when you are actually connected.

Use the Right Hardware and Software

• If possible, use a “travel only” laptop that contains only the basics and not all your work history information.
• Access your email through the Web instead of through physical software.
• When you are done on the Internet, clear your browser history.
• Store everything on an approved network instead of on your local harddrive.
• Type in passwords instead of having your computer remember them.
• Equip your mobile device with “lojack-like” software. In the event of loss or theft, you will be able to wipe out the contents on your device.
• Install antivirus software on your laptop.
• Require two-factor authentication to access your system

Drake also cautions to always keep your belongings with you at all times. It only takes a minute of turning your back or leaving the table, and your laptop could be hacked or stolen. Thieves and cybercriminals look for any opportunity.

Don’t assume that your boss or the IT department have everything covered. Know what methods you have in place to protect yourself. How valuable is your company’s information to you and your job? Can you afford to take chances?

Running a business well takes specialized knowledge. Not only in the core service and marketplace of your business but increasingly in law, human resources, technology and more.

Most businesses don’t have the need to maintain a full-time lawyer, HR administrator or CIO. Typically these roles have either been outsourced or simply neglected.

In the last few years, this approach has changed, moving from “outsourcing” law or technology advice to retaining “virtual” advisors.

The change in wording is more than mere semantics; it reflects a change in focus. Outsourcing work focuses on the vendor. Your legal questions, HR needs or technology plans go into the queue of a company that performs the exact same actions for a hundred other businesses just like yours. Virtual assistance focuses on you and provides unique, on-demand assistance. A virtual advisor gets to know you and your business, providing expertise as an informed, long-term trusted advisor.

At Highland, we believe in the virtual model. While most small to medium size companies invest in IT-either full time staff or an outsourced firm-very few have the need or resources for high level technology planning in a full time CIO. As specialists in business technology, we provide the benefits of strategic technical thinking in a virtual role.

The benefits of long-term planning, disaster preparedness, and aligning technology with your business goals are immense. A virtual CIO gives business leaders confidence that IT is driven by business thinking and frees them to focus on other core tasks.

I don’t praise the value of a virtual CIO because it’s one of our services. Virtual arrangements are the smartest way I know for businesses to fill out their expertise. Highland retains a virtual HR department and a virtual lawyer. We practice what we preach.

Are there other specialized roles you’ve seen work well as virtual advisors? Have you experienced key benefits or drawbacks from this model? Share your comments below.

One of our techs installed a really nice graphics card in a computer in our office last week.

A few years ago, everyone would have been wondering if someone was sneaking in a bit of World of Warcraft over lunch. Normal office work just didn’t require that sort of  processing power.

Not anymore. Widescreen monitors with high resolutions are graphically intense, and fancy new website technologies like AJAX (that allow you to interact with only part of a webpage without refreshing the whole page—think Facebook, Gmail, Zimbra) can tax a PC graphically as well.

So our sluggish PC got a major graphics upgrade, in the form of a GeForce 9400 GT 1GB DDR2 PCI-E 2.0 Graphics Card.

I admit that’s a product name with gamer written all over it.

And be warned that getting the sleek, foreboding black and green box into your office might gain you a couple of curious stares. A backpack or a paper bag could be called for.

But even though the graphics card market still clearly targets the PC gamer, office PCs supporting large monitors or working in web applications can see a big productivity boost by using graphics cards with significant memory and processing power. Plus, the prices have dropped substantially in the last few years, and are easily under $75 for a good card.

So put some gamer gear to work in your office. You may be surprised at the difference.

Every now and then I like to browse the websites of other technology companies. Recently, as we’ve been putting the finishing touches on a brand new website launch (coming in June!), I’ve been doing it a lot more.

While I’ve come across sites both great and terrible, I have noticed a discouragingly common trend. Many technology companies are overly specialized in a particular type of technology.

The most common example is Microsoft, of course. Legion are the IT companies who display their “Microsoft Gold Partner” badge and the long list of Microsoft certifications their staff holds. Such specialization is a good thing if you need assistance with a piece of Microsoft technology. However, if you were to approach such a company with a business problem to be solved or goal to be achieved, you would undoubtedly receive a Microsoft-shaped solution.

But what if Microsoft’s offering is actually inferior or overly costly for your business issue? read more »

Bigger, better, faster.

That’s been the trend in all things Internet over the last ten years. Computers and connections are faster. Monitors have been growing bigger and bigger. Websites and web applications have been stretching into all of that new screen size and bandwidth to deliver big, fast, media-rich, interactive sites.

Now that’s starting to change.

Bigger, better and faster aren’t going away. But a rapidly increasing number of people using the Internet are trading some of that in for other values: mobile and accessible.

Tiny phone screens and modest tablet screens are going to represent a sizeable part of web traffic in the future. I have not always been a believer that the mighty PC and laptop would actually be supplanted for “serious” Internet use. But I believe now. It’s still early, but the trending is clear. read more »

The primary ways of accessing the Internet are changing. Now that large, wide-screen, flat panel, high resolution monitors are affordable and easily available, they’re being abandoned for tiny screens on mobile phones. Exactly why so many of us would choose to access a website on a screen the size of a playing card (while attempting to walk down a sidewalk at the same time, no less) can be bewildering, but there is no denying the “mobile revolution” has gained critical mass.

The stronger your online presence, the more people there are looking at your website or newsletter or blog on a mobile device. Do you have any idea how it looks?

If not, go ahead and try it out. It’s usually not very pretty.

The bad news is that all of the attention, effort and resources you’ve poured into your website, newsletter, blog, e-commerce site, etc. amounts to almost nothing on a mobile device. Load times are so long and screen sizes are so strange that only the most determined mobile browser will be able to find the information they’re looking for.

The solution? Start providing mobile alternatives. read more »

Some months ago we did a breakdown of the costs of Zimbra versus Microsoft Exchange. I’ve long been negative about the costs of Exchange. The price doesn’t scale down at all for small companies, and scales up far too quickly for larger ones. But the previous breakdown was a hypothetical scenario. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s what we all do when making a purchasing decision. But now there’s some real life data to turn to.

The University of Pennsylvania runs both Exchange and Zimbra. They have nearly 1,000 users on Exchange and over 6,200 users on Zimbra, and the same technical support team takes care of both systems and their respective user bases.

My primary complaint with Exchange is how time-intensive and difficult it is to support and maintain. Support and maintenance are entirely hidden costs at the point of purchase, and many unsuspecting buyers have been lured in with steep license discounts only to discover the ongoing costs were far more than they bargained for.

The data from Penn agrees. For Penn, supporting an Exchange user is over 9 times more time consuming than supporting a Zimbra user.

For 1,000 users, Exchange requires 3.2 full-time equivalent staff members to support. With over 6,200 users, Zimbra requires 2.2 full-time staff members to report. That’s right, 33% less time spent on support for six times the users.

When Penn analyzed the total cost of ownership for Exchange and Zimbra (licensing, hardware, maintenance, support, etc.), Exchange came out at $7.50 per user. Zimbra was under half the cost at $3.00 per user.

Adam Preset, an IT technical director at Penn, discusses their deployment: read more »

It’s the classic CRM problem.

Management puts massive amounts of time, energy, money, resources and excitement into a new CRM system. They’re giddy with the possibilities of sales forecasting, reporting, customer satisfaction, and all sorts of information that will help marketing and sales to be more effective.

The big training and launch take place, there’s a flurry of activity…and a week later 20% of the sales reps aren’t even using the thing.

CRMs don’t work unless sales reps use them. And sales reps won’t use them unless there is something in it for them. Entering call reports at the end of each day doesn’t exactly get a sales rep fired up, and there’s no direct line between that thankless work and the next commission check.

When deploying a CRM, you need to keep your end users in mind.

The system has to be easy to use and valuable for reaching the goals of the reps (not just the goals of the company).

Here are some ways we’ve seen it done in our work with SugarCRM:

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