Here is just *some* of what we can do for you each and every month of the year:

Real Marketing

1. Write press releases and submit to reputable sites related to your product or service.
2. Write articles, how to’s, FAQ’s and other content that adds VALUE to your site. We can source or supply experts.
3. Submit well written, thoughtful contributions to forums, blogs and industry sites RELATED to your business activities.
4. Use leading edge SEO such as keyword diversity in content and link creation.
5. Create and manage (if required) Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIN and company blog – i.e why not outsource your social media – it’s not your core business is it?
6. Write content and manage reputation for all your media presence above.
7. Monitor your industry and roll up reports – we will provide an intelligent funnel of what is happening in your space.
8. Create and manage mailing lists – still a great way to connect to your customers.

On Page Optimisation.

1. Usual SEO optimisation of meta tags, page headings, titles, content and relevency.
2. Site navigation, usability, relevence and customer/visitor profiling.
3. We will find out things about you customers I bet you don’t know.

Marketing Analysis

1. Competitor and keyword analysis.
2. Compliance with usability and accessableity standards (government mandated in Australia in 2013).
3. Full Google Analytics with interpretation and reports for management.

Is there a better way? If you can get past the idea that all your IT infrastructure must be on site then virtualization infrastructure is not only cheap to set up but doesn’t require major specialized knowledge to get started (if you really believe all your infrastructure must be on site please contact Clarity and give us one hour of your time to convince you otherwise). You do however need to understand what you need to and can achieve and plan accordingly.

Even the smallest businesses (start-ups especially) using a couple of servers are generally only utilizing perhaps 10-20% of their potential capacity but are paying for all the same overheads as if they had a room full of servers operating at 100%. As a SMB if you took the opportunity to virtualize you could scale infrastructure with little capital expenditure and allow the business to grow seamlessly into new environments or capacity as required.

Not only does it reduce capital expenditure, it also reduces operating expenditure. Since staff no longer need to manage a piece of hardware for every server and are able to administer their entire environment from their desks, staff efficiency is significantly increased.

Some studies have found that efficiency of staff can be increased by an average of 10%, but this can fly right up to a 270% increase, allowing a single administrator to oversee and manage 1800 servers. It also allows for faster deployment of new environments and applications, since a new piece of hardware isn’t needed to be provisioned. It’s as simple as selecting options from a web based interface to your cloud service provider.

Additionally, these expenses are reduced further, since less floor space and power consumption is required for a cluster of virtual hosts over an entire data centre of servers dedicated to a single task. VMware says that 70% of organizations have seen a “real measurable cost saving” from switching to virtualization, and it’s pretty easy to see why.

Initially, virtualization may require a slightly different design methodology. You’ll need to evaluate service level agreements and to think about what services you wish to use and how they will be managed. Security and network connectivity must be carefully considered and configuring multiple hosts are recommended for failure resiliency and additional network equipment may be required to lessen the likeliness of a single point of failure, but the benefits pay off. This kind of work allows small businesses to boost their uptime as high as those that previously only a large provider could boast, such as 99.999%.

It truly levels the playing field, allowing start-ups and small/medium businesses alike to play on the same level as large providers that have significant money to invest in sprawling infrastructure. It opens up opportunities for start-ups who can’t afford to hire a team of engineers to operate their own infrastructure with 99% uptime.

Not only that, small businesses are the ones who experience the most explosive growth, and virtualization allows them to rapidly expand while keeping down both capital and operating expenditures for their projects. This is a generational opportunity for the right organisations.

• Promote your web address (domain name) everywhere you can – business cards, letterheads, in house, on your van(s), cars, using promotional stickers, posters – in fact in all your advertising. This not only helps existing clients but encourages people looking for your type of business to visit your website.
• Maximise the efficiency of your advertising cost by putting the minimum effective amount of information on the ad to make it work and invite Readers/Listeners/Viewers to visit your website for further information about your services or special offers.
• You should have a feature page or a special offer page that you change frequently to encourage visitors to come back – discount vouchers, information that customers will appreciate, regular news updates are all reasons for repeat visits.
• Ensure you have an electronic message service (like the Clarity® Messenger Service used on the PerthWA.com service directory). This will encourage potential clients to at least contact you above others on a general search for your type of business. Remember it is likely most Internet customers will find your business outside working hours when they cannot contact you by phone!
• List yourself in free business directories such as PerthWA.com because your own web site is not likely to achieve a decent ranking on search engines. Operaters of directories can get their sites well positioned and therefor most potential clients will flow from these sites no matter how much money you spend yourself on rankings.
• Your website works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, so ensure that your customers and potential customers can get at a response from your business outside your normal working hours. We offer an autoresponder service to help you if you find this difficult.
• If you carry a range of stock or saleable items you should consider an online stock and ordering system – these are ways that your website can seriously contribute to your bottom line with little extra effort.
• Collect email addresses of people visiting your site and don’t forget to gather them directly from your clients. We can help you with getting the most out of your mailing list so contact us for details.
• Regularly check your web site traffic statistics (your ISP should provide these as part of their service). You need to know  how many vistors you are getting and when, what pages they are viewing and and monitor the effectiveness of your promotions. You should track your media advertising in terms of web site statistics as a measure of the effectiveness.  Clarity uses Google Analytics and can provide a turnkey solution to gaining insight in how your digital assets are performing.
• Never get complacent – Web users want to see changes, updates / special offers/ new pics/ new products – to encourage them to come back again and again. If this is too much for you to manage in house then consider using LOCAL providers of dedicated digital marketing services. Why local? Well in the Australian vernacular you need to get the ‘vibe’ right. If you are dealing with Australian customers trust me get an Australian service provider  such as Clarity to manage your on-line activities.  We know the enviroment, the customers and can help you in ways you probably won’t think about (and certainly they won’t tell you).
• Remember- it is all about promoting your business – you must make the effort to continually promote your website and by entension your business. They are not two seperate things but part of an integrated whole!   If you are not happy with your current site,  consider it too much work or expensive to fix then contact Clarity for a free review of your on-line strategy and presence.

Governments need to accept that technology and society evolve instead of trying to hold back progress at the behest of corporations?

A fun competition, an angry public – what could possibly go wrong?
Qantas via Twitter

By now, most people will have heard of the social media disaster which even provided its own hashtag: #QantasLuxury. Ironically, this was everything but a luxury for Qantas.

What it did illustrate was a marketing department that was totally out of touch with what the company was doing and what it really needs to do to overcome the PR disaster that was the grounding of the Qantas fleet on October 29.

So, how did the story unfold?

At 9:00am on the yesterday morning, the “social media team” at Qantas, as part of an ongoing “social media campaign”, released details of a competition on Twitter:

Twitter

They had run campaigns like this before. The prize? Well, as you can see from the photo at the top of this article, hardly something that would launch a Twitter frenzy of positive sentiment. The most notable part of the prize were the pyjamas …

What they got – instead of a few tweets of marketing fodder – was a deluge of sometimes caustic, but at best sarcastic, vitriol reflecting more on the ongoing labour relations battles with the unions and the grounding of the fleet than the quality of the service.

Another interesting observation is that once a Twitter trend starts, it is self-feeding: supporting tweets appear that are self-referential, about the trend itself.

Twitter

The negative commentary took an even bigger dive when a parody of Downfall – a film depicting the last days of Adolf Hitler – was posted on YouTube, as seen below.

The problem for Qantas was that the parody was very well written and pretty much summed up the sentiment of the public, and probably of CEO Alan Joyce himself.

An analysis of approximately 2000 tweets gives a graphic illustration of the way the Twitter trend maintained the sentiment over the course of the day.

wordle

Fortunately for Qantas, as the east coast of Australia went to bed the tweets died down. It will be interesting to see if this changes today (Wednesday) but the sentiment has been vented.

trendistic

On the positive side, Qantas has now received some fairly unambiguous market data about how the public feels (and it was free). It seems clear the Qantas “social media team” are astoundingly amateurish and probably reflects the low priority that Qantas puts on this.

A statement that Qantas had recently hired social media staff to monitor social media for sentiment about Qantas was denied on Twitter.

As Hitler says on the QantasLuxury Downfall parody: “With any luck someone will post a new funny cat video”, otherwise he will “ground the whole internet”.

This article was originally published at The Conversation.
Read the original article.

The traditional organisational chart views the organisation by functional areas such as marketing, accounting, production and so on and makes no reference to customers, products, services or work flows and yet these are essential parts of a business. This is the rational for developing a ‘systems and process’ model as an alternative way of looking at an enterprise. When looked at this way value chains can be identified and optimised.

This however raises issues between as Harmon puts it on page 71 the “lumpers” who want to “include everything that is even vaguely similar and arrive at one or very few values chains” and the “splitters” who can end up with many value chains. As he points out there is no right answer and consensus needs to be achieved from within the organisation.
Strategy

“A business strategy defines how a company will compete, what its goals will be, and what policies it will support to achieve these goals” (Harmon page 31).
Defining a strategy is important because this, in essence, becomes the reason for a business to exist. Harmon describes an approach advocated by Porter published in his book ‘Competitive Strategy’ in 1980 as essentially a three phase process of determining what the company is doing now, what is happening in the external environment and what the company should do next.

Porter illustrates generic strategies such as cost leadership, differentiation or niche specialization and the need to be able to construct or maintain a competitive advantage by using value chains related to strategic positioning rather than operational efficiency alone.  He warns of ‘hyper competition’ where companies are locked in a race to improve operational efficiency that in the long run cannot be sustained because competitors will also be able to achieve this.
A business needs to create a ‘value proposition’ and develop a strategy around this. Activities must be aligned, and if possible tightly integrated with the strategy position to not only to support the strategy but to also protect that position from competition.
Personal Reflection

The functional organisation of an enterprise is also critical to its success and therefore the challenge for many organisations is to align processes with functional areas.

For instance if the organisation is essentially on a common platform with a seamless integration of their IT infrastructure and associated  information systems   then to a large degree the criticism of various functional areas maintaining their own databases and creating communication and process ‘road blocks’ can be alleviated.

Functional areas contribute capacity to the enterprise in ways that do not always neatly fit the current ‘value chain’, particularly in a changing environment and so I am wary about taking a too narrow focus on ‘process’ over ‘function’.
I understand in certain situations, particularly in industries like mining and manufacturing optimising a value chain is crucial and a process driven model will be the best way to optimise a value chain.

On the other hand as an example many organisations were able to transition to Internet enabled applications at a significant competitive advantage by having functional areas developing and using Internet based technologies long before the enterprise was able to leverage, or even define these, as part of their value chain. They were able to enter new markets or take customers from competitors simply because they had developed a capability that at the time may have actually appeared disruptive to their existing value chain.

Porter introduced the idea of value chain to think of processes as complete entities from the customer purchase through to fulfilment (Harmon page 41) and so therefore perhaps this is not incongruous with the definition of a value chain and the important immediate concern is that functional areas remain integrated to the value chain and strategy of the organisation.

Nevertheless I have trouble with the concept that each activity in a value chain should (or must) add value to the final product. I was heartened to see on page 41 Harmon comment “It’s a little more complex of course ….. there are some activities or steps that don’t add value, directly, but facilitate adding value … there are some process’s that are “value enabling” activities ….”
In my experience there are also activities associated with government regulation or other compliance issues that would go into the category of ‘the cost of doing business’ rather than efficient process management.

He then went on to suggest that the reasons to focus on value however is to identify activities which don’t add value and have become, for one reason or another, not relevant to the process. I am much more comfortable with looking at value chains from this perspective.

[This is an extract from an essay I wrote as part of a Master of Commerce assignment - Doug Robb, Clarity Software]

The advantage of this approach was that existing applications and data structures could be leveraged to create, extend or automate new business processes without disturbing the existing infrastructure. The problem however is that middleware itself is complex, difficult to maintain and the various disparate systems linked together were usually on different operating systems, used different databases, programming languages and generally were incompatible in every way.

Middleware was a means to an end but very inefficient because organisations were still supporting multiple disparate systems as well as the middleware itself. The next phase in the evolution information systems was the growth of ERP style systems such as SAP, a single integrated environment with common data structures, languages and reporting tools shared across the enterprise.

Hence vendors such as SAP and others moved beyond simply controlling the data itself but into managing and controlling the processes and work flows of an organisations entire value chain; this facilitated the evolution of workflow management systems where software can define create and manage workflow across the enterprise.

There was no need for middleware because ERP vendors transformed the previous generation of discrete monolithic ‘off the shelf’ applications for work areas such as accounting, inventory or human resources into a cohesive set of linked applications (modules) so data could be maintained across the enterprise in a seamless fashion (since they were all using the same database objects).

These systems not only manage work and process flows across an enterprise but in many cases facilitate best, albeit common practice for functional areas. This leads us to where we are now with enterprises typically supporting information systems that are accessible with industry standard communication protocols and data formats and providing the means of BPMS managing enterprise business processes.

Key Issues:

ERP systems are by no means a panacea as they are complex, expensive and require significant human and technical resources to maintain.

Many organisations customised their ERP applications and this not only adds further expense but is time consuming and fraught with the  danger of introducing workflows that don’t integrate across the enterprise (the very thing you are trying to achieve). It also introduces considerable maintenance overheads coordinating these changes across new versions.  That is, as vendors release new ERP modules customisations need to be redone and often divisions become locked into old or multiple versions of ERP systems out of step with the rest of the enterprise.

BPMS are an alternative to this scenario. These suites are potentially more agile and productive, easier to develop and maintain and can focus on bridging the gap between process managers and software developers. There is a lower implementation and development risk as they can be layered over the top of ERP and other corporate data systems. They can be developed, tested and even replaced with alternative systems without disturbing the existing architecture.

The difference between middleware and BPMS is that these suites are usually integrated to a homogeneous environment rather than needing to connect disparate IT systems as was the case when middleware oriented solutions first appeared. This need not be the case of course but usually enterprises like to lower their cost of ownership by adopting standard operating environments (SOE).

The current generation of communications and data standards; based around Service Orientated Architectures (SOA) such as Web Services and XML (Extensible Mark-up Language) have created the opportunity for vendors in the BPMS market to add considerable value to the enterprise without requiring them to replace their existing investments.

As an example I have compared two such suites chosen from the BPTrends Report on  five of the criteria cited in the report. I have chosen to compare the Oracle BPEL Process Manager (version 10.1.2) and Adobe Live Cycle Workflow (Version 7).

I chose these two because Oracle is a major vendor of ERP systems and well placed to integrate their BPMS offerings and Adobe, although not a developer of ERP systems is one of the world’s largest and diversified software companies whose specialisation has been on the desktop.

I was interested to see if the  different backgrounds of these vendors would be reflected in their products. The first point of comparison is the BPM Engine.

The BPM engine is essentially a server providing the technical nervous system for the BPMS. It must manage communication and database connections, data and process flows, allocate and de-allocate resources and provide the executable environment for the various applications that use it.

The functions within a BPM engine generally require IT infrastructure; such as Microsoft .NET or J2EE the java platform supported by SUN Microsystems and others. Some vendors write their own languages (such as BPEL) and application servers rather than use the native support from major IT vendors. In for example standard web page servers such as Microsoft IIS or open source Apache are replaces by propriety applications servers providing similar functionality.

Not surprisingly both Adobe and Oracle support a Service Orientated Architecture that facilitates component based architecture. Therefore they both support Web Services and the full suite of standard communication protocols (eg HTTP, SMTP) and data formats (XML).

They also run on both J2EE (Java) and Microsoft .Net application servers/platforms. This is important because organisations will have an existing commitment to a development platform and will not necessarily want to maintain two different environments and indeed this is often creates tension and unnecessary conflict within development teams.

However both of these products require J2EE application servers so in a Microsoft Internet InformationService (IIS) environment it may require maintaining two technical skills sets (both .NET and Java) in the enterprise.

Of course the whole point of Web Services is to be a language agnostic, message based environment however typically organisation cannot avoid doing work in the native languages of a particular platform.

Integration of both products to existing IT infrastructure however is good since they both support the full set of Internet and SOA protocols and services (for example WSDL, email, XML, JDBC, HTTP GET and POST)  and many other protocols enabling connectivity to back end systems and services.

Oracle uses their BPEL product as a development platform. Therefore if the organisation doesn’t already have a commitment to an Oracle based ERP solution (like PeopleSoft for example) there will be significant start up costs in training and support to develop using this language.

Both Oracle and Adobe support Application Programming Interfaces (API) to their systems but only for Java and Web Services are required from other languages.

Both have graphical user interfaces for modelling and design and in the case of Adobe this has the distinct advantage of having the look and feel of familiar Adobe desktop products. It also offers a library of templates and components for assembling and creating workflows without programming. On the other hand the Oracle, with its years of investment in languages and programming tools has taken the path of using the usual drag and drop graphical capability to produce fully operational BPEL code. Their BPEL Designer then is a far more capable product in terms of capability but again to get the most out of this an enterprise may need a significant investment in an Oracle ERP based system.  The Oracle product also includes wizards to model common process and work flows.

The scalability of both Oracle and Adobe are similar since they both provide for load balancing, clustering of servers and Light Weight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for user management. This is essentially achieved on both systems by using standard technology from major IT service providers rather than creating their own propriety architecture.

Similarly both use the XML based query language XPATH and SOA services for the creation, control and maintenance of business rules. Both have graphical tools to achieve this.

A cost comparison is not possible because of the many variations vendors use to determine their pricing so for this class of software it requires creating a request for proposal or similar and soliciting quotes. The article mentioned the cost of the Oracle BPEL Process manager at $40k per processor (at the time) and the Adobe price is only available after requesting a consultation.

Personal Reflection

This class of software is difficult to select and as mentioned organisations would typically outline their requirements in a document and call for a request for a proposal (RFP).  In my experience alarm bells should start ringing when the only means to establish the cost is to go through this sort of process. Typically vendors will seek to charge on the basis of ‘what you can afford’ particularly for larger organisations.

There are complex variations of charging models with named users, seats, client access licenses and so on making the comparison of costs between various systems difficult to ascertain. The selection of a product on technical and operational issues is difficult enough but the sales process is often more challenging especially if there is the opportunity to split offerings into many modules and dependencies further complicating the purchase decision. 

The sales division of vendors in this class of software are often focused on maximising the return for the vendor rather than simply selling a product as is the case with vendors that sell
more mainstream ‘off the shelf’ products.

[This is an extract from an essay I wrote as part of a Master of Commerce assignment - Doug Robb, Clarity Software]

Additional Reading

Harmon, Paul. Business Process Change (Chapter 15,16).
Khan, Rashid N (2006). BPM A Global View, BPTRENDS web site.

Mistake #1: Hiring Based on Price Alone

There’s a reason this is the first mistake. It’s committed more than all the other mistakes combined. People have a tendency to think that all developers are the same, so cost should be the major determinant in who they hire. It’s a big mistake, and unfortunately I’ve seen some people make this mistake more than once.

In reality, hiring the wrong company starts a viscious cycle. When you hire the wrong company you enevitably make other mistakes such as paying too much in advance, not having complete functional specifications or setting unrealistic milestones. And once you’ve paid out enough money you are caught between a rock and a hard place. Do you keep going to save the money you have already spent or cut your losses and walk away and start again? Either way it’s a waste of time and resources.

So can you avoid this? First, past performance is a good indication of future performace. Rate the companies you are considering based on factors other than cost alone. Check references, review similar projects and ensure your functional requirements are well defined. These are obvious items but here are some you may not have thought of:

• Ask them how you are going to monitor the progress of the project. Make sure they don’t just add this as a functional requirment and add it to the cost of the project!
• Ask them if they use Subversion (or any similar repository)? All experienced developers know what this is.
• Ask them about Continuous Integration, and which tool they use to manage their builds.
• Verify the exact coding standards they use when documenting your code.

These are not iron clad questions, but I have interviewed many developers over the years and I am shocked how many get all four of these wrong.

Mistake #2: Don’t Pay Too Much In Advance

If you committed mistake #1, I can just about guarantee you’ve committed this one too. Understand that I am not just talking about the initial deposit or advance.
You don’t want to pay too much more than the work that has actually been done – just like building a house. If you do, the developer is stuck with a lot of work and no future revenue to offset this cost. What about the money you already paid them? It’s gone. It was used to finish another project before yours that also turned into a disaster.

Structure your payment schedule around deliverables, or milestones. Basically pay for the next part of the project on completion of the current part. Pay on deliverables or results. Keep in mind that it is critical that you understand how much of the project will be complete, and then make sure the payments you make roughly represent the percentage of the project complete to that point. This also means you need to understand what work is being done and monitor progress carefully. Why do you think costs for projects balloon out by massive amounts- people just keep paying having no idea at what stage the project is at.

Mistake #3: Not Getting a Non Disclosure Agreement

How do you feel about the software you’ve paid to develop being shipped out the back door as a product of the developer? Suddenly they are experts in something you have designed and it’s a product they now sell to your competitors. If you have a good idea, and your product becomes a huge success, the last thing you want is find yourself in a dispute with the developer. It is critical that you have the company you hire sign a Non Disclosure Agreement and also and agreement to assign all rights to the software to you. In fact, you should have this NDA in hand before you even start discussing your project with any company. We give one to every prospective client.

#4: Not Owning the Source Code

You are hiring a company to write a lot of code. This code represents the product you are buying. You need to make sure that the agreement you sign grants you sole ownership of this code. Otherwise you’ve just paid your competitor to steal your idea. You need to own the code not the developer who in the absense of an agreement to the contrary will own it. If you don’t own the code you have no rights to it including developing it further with another developer. You need to own it. Period. Get this in writing.

#5: Undocumented Source Code

This has to be one of the most common mistakes. Imagine this. You pay a company to write thousands of lines of code. When they are done the program works fine. You call the company back to get some changes done, only to find out they no longer exists. Fortunately you have the source code so you confidently search for someone else to continue development. And then you get the bad news. The source code has absolutely no comments or explanations describing what the code does or why it was written the way it was. This is a huge issue in our industry. In 9 out of 10 cases, the new developer is going to tell you it is easier to start over again and in most cases that would probably be good advice. Well documented code is as good as a design specification and even recoding from well documented code is a benefit.

We have a simple way to avoid this issue. We perform code reviews on a regular basis to verify that our coding standards (which include commenting source code) are being followed by all members of our team. Our internal audits are designed to make sure this situation does not happen.

#6: Not Asking for Documentation

You are paying good money for your software project. You owe it to yourself  to get all the documentation the software company created during the life cycle of your project. Why is this important? Imagine for a minute that the company you hired goes out of business a year or two down the road. What do you think of the chance of ever getting documentation? We provide clients with functional specifications, business requirements, test cases, data dictionaries, and a host of other project artifacts. At least now you have a good chance of finding another company to help you support and enhance your product. It is often more important to know why something was done a particular way than to know how it was done.

#7: Not Doing External Audits

If you really want to cover yourself, you should hire another company to  review the code your developer is building. This has several benefits. First, there’s nothing like an external audit to make sure your programmers have double checked and fixed their sloppy code. The company you hire to do the audit also wants to give you value, so they are more than likely going to find some issues. This doesn’t mean your programmers are bad. Everyone misses something every once in a while. But by letting the company you hire know from day one that an external audit will occur at some point, you are already putting everyone on notice. We’ve been on both ends of this, and the client always came out the winner for it.

So there you have it. Seven mistakes you can avoid if you want your  software project to have a good chance of success. Good luck!