The Savvy CIO

We recently programmed a client’s business-to-business e-commerce site to display competitor pricing alongside their own pricing.

Sound crazy?

We don’t think showing your competitor’s pricing is smart for everyone. But the idea behind it is embracing the truth that you can’t hide information from shoppers. Most visitors already know the lowest prices for the items they’re buying, or can double-check in under 10 seconds. There’s no hiding anymore.

Last week I found myself at an enormous, local mall hunting for a pair of shoes. Like most shoppers, I had a set of assumptions in my mind about what was important to me in my purchasing decision. In my case my criteria were, in order:

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I’ve spoken before about Mr. IT Fix It. Mr. IT Fix It is an outsourced technology consultant who gets paid for fixing your technology when it breaks.

Hiring a Mr. IT Fix It appears to be a good way to keep costs down as you only pay when you need his assistance. But this relationship can actually end up increasing your technology costs because no one is tending to the regular maintenance of your technology to prevent problems and reduce costs.

Which is cheaper: installing a new battery in a smoke detector or dealing with a house fire?

I know, an extreme example, but it illustrates the point.

Mr. IT Fix It makes almost nothing for installing a battery but can make a lot for putting out a fire. In contrast, a Managed IT team–paid a flat monthly fee–will gladly spend a lot less time and energy performing this kind of necessary, low-profile work because it means they (like you) won’t have to deal with a time-consuming crisis (during which, like you, they will not make any money).

In short, you want your outsourced IT to care for your technology as if they own it.

The key question: is your relationship (and compensation structure) with your outsourced IT treating them like Mr. IT Fix It or like Managed IT?

Here are five lessons learned from homeowners about how business leaders want their outsourced IT to behave.

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So says Forrester’s Research Chairman and Chief Executive Officer George Colony. (HT The Magic Software Blog)

Business leaders need to know finance. They need to know the pulse of marketing and sales and operations. But too often when it comes to technology, leaders can be content to let “that guy” handle it.

Such an approach made some sense 10+ years ago, when technology was on the periphery of many businesses. But today technology is so closely intertwined with business goals that it has become mission critical.

This underlines Colony’s main point, that technology has ceased to be primarily about information and is now about business.

Colony stresses that business technology:

1. Increases revenue
2. Reduces overhead
3. Expands market share

These are core concerns of a business leader, and in today’s business world they require familiarity with business technology.

You don’t need to be a techie. Frankly, it’s probably best not to be, so there is no temptation to get into the details of the technology itself. There’s no need to be able to parse SaaS or LAMP. But there is a need to know what relevant business technology is out there for your company, so you can drive innovation.

Where do you start?

Get an educator.

Someone who can explain technology in business terms instead of technology terms. Yes, they need to speak the language of technology, but they also have to speak business and plain English.

Technology is mission critical, and it’s not OK to be ignorant anymore.

A video of Colony’s presentation is below. read more »

Suppose your sales staff write really bad proposals. What do you do?

Track down advance copies of Word 2010 to solve the problem?

Of course not. The writing will still be bad!

Yet business leaders are often tempted to think new technology can fundamentally improve sales or customer service or operations or fulfillment, when the root problem is a shortage of quality skills and processes.

Sales are down? Bring in a Sales Force Automation system!

Customer satisfaction is low? Deploy a Customer Relationship Management database!

Online revenue is slipping? Upgrade the e-commerce site with improved business intelligence metrics!

These businesses will fail. Why? read more »

In a typical arrangement, your outsourced IT technicians and consultant gets paid when things break. It doesn’t have to be this way, but this is still the predominant model. This arrangement is counterproductive and can breed distrust and frustration between you and your IT consultants.

What if instead of being rewarded (i.e. paid) when things break, your outsourced IT was rewarded for regular, preventative care and planning?

Consider the way we take care of our own homes:

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Google has released a handy gadget for web site design last week. It’s called Browser Size, and it shows what most people see when they look at your web site. The results may surprise you.

Web sites are made by techie people (like us), and techie people spend a lot of time in front of big monitors with high resolutions. Sometimes, the result is a web site that looks great for people with big monitors but looks different for the majority of your web site visitors. Look at Google’s example: read more »

We develop, customize, build, integrate and host web applications and web sites, and we do it almost exclusively on open source software.

Why open source?

There are several reasons, but here’s a big one:

Open source saves you money.

That’s you, the client. Open source saves you money. read more »

It’s easy to see CRM as the silver-bullet to solve a host of sales and support related problems: organizing and overseeing sales staff, centralizing company information, improving accuracy of forecasting and planning, among others.

Yet successfully deploying a CRM takes much more than just turning on the technology.

Without some foresight, care and planning, business leaders can actually sabotage their own CRM, dooming the project to poor acceptance and eventual failure.

The most common forms of sabotage?

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We’ve been long-time users (and advocates) of SugarCRM.

Sugar fits within our preference for flexible, powerful, open-source platforms, and we’ve found it to be incredibly useful through the past few years, both internally for our business and as a platform for our clients. We’ve used SugarCRM both “out of the box” and as a foundation for some very deep customization and integration work.

Sugar’s next major update, SugarCRM 5.5, is now generally available, and it adds several great new capabilities to Sugar Professional:

• Mobile Studio: Customizable interfaces for mobile smartphone access.
• Cloud Connectors: Real time data integration from online sources like LinkedIn and Hoovers.
• Dynamic Teams: Add multiple teams and individuals to a single record.
• Social Feeds: User created Facebook-style work status updates.

Here’s a closer look at how these new features can benefit your business:
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Why put a server or a service in the data center?

Here are the four main advantages we hear from our small business clients:

Full On-Site and Remote Management

With 24/7 on-site staff and robust remote management tools, maintaining or repairing a server in the data center is significantly faster than doing so in your office. Plus, server-side maintenance becomes the responsibility of the provider under the data center agreement. read more »