A company’s website is said to be its window to the world. It is supposed to be the portal through which business flows in from all corners of the globe. (Now that is a silly expression, since when did a globe have corners?) Notwithstanding the silly expression, the Internet and a company’s website are supposed to be the foundation of the modern marketing paradigm. In this new model, everything will be sold online and Cloud and SaaS will be the most used and abused marketing terms.

However, there are a couple of minor flaws in this model.

Have you ever tried to do an online demonstration or presentation to 27 people, all with different agendas? I have and it is almost impossible to be effective in this environment.

Have you ever tried to understand the nuances of a complex commercial application requirement using only the telephone, email and online sessions? I have and it is impossible to really understand one hundred-percent of the requirement.

Sure you can sell books and computers online but it is a far from perfect model when selling complex application systems that will eventually be integral to the successful operation of your customer’s business.

In our business we make good use of technology to better communicate with our customers and prospects all around the world. We in fact couldn’t operate without the Citrix tools GoToAssist, GoToMeeting and GoToTraining. They, or tools like them, are essential for running a software and services company like ours with customers all around the world.

In this day and age, and especially after the GFC, no company can afford to have ‘local’ staff in every town, state or country where it does business. Nor can any company, no matter how big, afford to fly pre-sales staff in for every one-hour demo requested by a prospect or every one or two hour support session for a customer.

However, in our sales cycle (application software) there are still many things that are best done face to face and there are some things, like application consulting, that can only be done face to face.

At this time we handle the face to face requirement by telling people we hire for consulting and support jobs that they must be available to travel and frequently, both inter-state and internationally. We make this requirement a prominent part of the job add and the interviews. Having a ‘flying squad’ of support people and application consultants is now an integral and essential part of our sales paradigm and from the customer’s viewpoint it works very well. But, it is a far from perfect solution from our viewpoint because of the high cost and lost time or ‘opportunity-cost’ of dead time spent in transit.

The flying squad will always be an important tool for us when delivering solutions but as we grow it needs to be supplemented and complemented by partnerships with local firms with the skillsets our customers require.

A few years ago, conscious of this need to partner, I registered a new website called bizzpartnerships.com with the intention of starting a new business primary designed to locate and connect business partners all around the globe. Sadly, the pressure of running and growing this business didn’t leave me much time and like a lot of good ideas, it is gathering dust.

It is still a great idea because there are literally millions of businesses like mine that need partners to both win and support customers; partners that can provide that essential face to face contact that is sorely missing from most modern business models. It fact, the situation worsens year by year as vendors cut costs and outsource almost every function to countries like India, China and the Philippines. I stopped dealing with a well-known hardware vendor because they told me my account manager would no longer be local but would be based in a call centre in India. I have gone from spending millions with this company to spending absolutely nothing.

Notice I am not talking about outsourcing, which I hate, but partnering, which I love. Anyone who wants to know how I feel about outsourcing should read one of my previous Blogs:

http://www.knowledgeonecorp.com/blog/post/2012/02/05/Outsourcing-will-destroy-the-west.aspx

Partnering provides that much needed and much appreciated local, face to face contact; outsourcing takes it away.

My prime objective from this point on will be to forge partnerships with companies that can add value to my customers. I believe that this is an essential component of the still maturing online model.

So, if you are reading this blog and you are part of or know of a quality customer-centric services company that can add value to an enterprise content management software installation then please let me know about it. In a good partnership, everyone benefits, especially the customer.

Twenty-eight years ago we released our first records management product, DocFind I.

Twenty-six years ago we released the first version of our iconic records management product RecFind 1.0.

Twenty-five years ago we released our first imaging enabled records management product, ImageFind 1.0.

Thirteen-years ago we shipped our first fully featured Electronic Document and Records Management Solution (EDRMS) with a full complement of records, document, imaging and workflow functionality, RecFind 3.2.

Twenty-five years ago I used to do a lot of trade show and seminar presentations about the coming paperless office yet here we are today with more paper records in existence than I would have ever imagined all those years ago. The fabled paperless office as far away now as it has ever been.

It isn’t because of a lack of functionality to deal with the problem. Most of the other vendors did what we did and produced products merging records, document and imaging functionality many years ago so the functionality to facilitate the paperless office has been around for a very long time. Yet, governments and private companies are still using paper as records and are still using and storing billions of sheets of paper each year. Organizations like Iron Mountain and Crown are rushing to build new warehouses all over the world to store boxes of paper records and there seems to be no end in sight. We are drowning in paper.

In order to understand why we are still storing millions of boxes of paper every year we have to ask ourselves two very important questions:

1. What are we (still) doing we shouldn’t be doing?; and
2. What is it we should be doing that we are (obviously) not doing?

Answering number one is easy; we are still using paper and are using it at a rate many, many times that of twenty-five years ago.

Answering number two is also easy; we are not taking advantage of available technology.

The next and most important question to ask is why? Why are we still using paper and why aren’t we taking advantage of available technology?

I have pondered the above questions for a long time and have discussed them at length with my customers and staff and associates in the industry for many years. Whereas you are likely to get any number of responses from industry experts, I am going to narrow it down to four simple issues.

1. Paper is actually still a great medium for many applications and its convenience, cost and flexibility is hard to beat;
2. Most electronic document management systems on the market today are expensive to buy, difficult and expensive to roll out, difficult to use and difficult to maintain;
3. Most EDRMS implementations fail (albeit over time) because very few organizations budget for or are prepared to pay the huge ongoing cost to retrain workers as software changes or train new workers as staff turns over; and
4. Records management is not a core business activity in most organizations and it is seen as a cost centre, not a profit centre so it gets little senior management attention and little funding.

Basically, in most large organizations senior management is aware of the paper problem but it is not high on their agenda and it is easier to just maintain the status quo; keep packing files into boxes and sending them off to Iron Mountain. It is a lot like the Greek Debt problem, that is, keep ignoring the problem and leave it to someone in the future to solve.

To summarize, management says, “It works and isn’t my major priority so I will leave it for someone else to solve.” Or, applying that time-honoured old maxim, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

The reality is that we have to find ways to manage paper. The additional reality is that very few of the ECM/EDRMS software packages on the market today do the job well or even at all. SharePoint 2010 for example is hopeless at managing physical records so don’t even think about paying a consultant hundreds of thousands of dollars to configure it for you to solve the problem.

Luckily for us, and largely because we started developing applications for physical records management back in 1984, we have incorporated a rich subset of physical records management functionality (our legacy if you may) into our latest product suite, RecFind 6.  This means we are one of the few vendors with a product that can easily handle any physical records management requirement.

Also, and this still surprises me, we are receiving more and more inquiries for a product that just does physical records management. To be honest, if anyone had told me twenty-five years ago that I would still be receiving requests for a physical records management product in 2012 I would have laughed at them. Yet, here we are today in a world swimming in paper with organizations all around the world desperately needing to solve a paper records management problem.

Now I am really glad that I insisted that my design teams maintain upwards compatibility through all of our product releases and that they should continue to refine and improve our physical records management capabilities.

I hope I am happily retired in another twenty-five years but just in case I am not, I will set myself a reminder to re-read this post and once again review how far we have progressed in replacing paper records with digital records. With luck, I will be living in a luxury apartment converted from an old Iron Mountain warehouse and there won’t be a sheet or paper or archive box in sight.

What will they do with all those warehouses?

I am luckier than most because I live on the edge of the city and only 1Km or so from my office. However, that 1Km is an Everest-like climb up hundreds of steps and not on when I am carrying all the gear (iPad, research papers, laptop, etc.) I religiously carry to and from work (yes, I own my own business and need to work when home).  So, I drive and it takes fifteen to twenty minutes depending upon how congested our city is and what time of day I leave for work (the earlier the better).

The traffic is awful because our road systems have been assiduously ignored by generation after generation of incompetent politicians and bureaucrats totally focussed on the now and not the future. They have hidden their incompetence under the great green banner (cars are evil and cause climate change) and generations of gullible voters have actually bought this crap. The end result is a grossly under-capitalised and under-maintained road system with few alternatives for the vast bulk of commuters because our public transport system was also underfunded by the same politicians and bureaucrats. They ignored our need for a better transport system and instead added tens of thousands of public servants to the payroll instead of investing in infrastructure. So, in the state where I live we have the worst of both worlds; a rubbish road system and a rubbish public transport system.

In the last fifteen years or so the ‘solution’ has been public-private partnerships and toll roads. In most cases, public roads have been narrowed and lanes taken away for 24 hour bus lanes and bicycle lanes to force long-suffering commuters into the expensive toll roads. Now these same toll roads are virtual parking lots with average speeds below 20 or 30 Km per hour; we are paying to sit in traffic jams. How clever of the politicians and bureaucrats to come up with this twist. “Let’s just not make them suffer, let’s make them pay to suffer!” Oh, and of course the tolls are cleverly ‘indexed’ so the cost continues to rise faster than inflation and at the same time the services levels continue to drop as average commute times rise.

The same idiots that under-invested in transport also closed railway lines and stations because the grossly-inefficient bureaucracy was unable to run them profitably. We now have thousands more trucks on the roads because the railroad system (the most efficient way to transport goods) has been emasculated by successive short-thinking governments.

Everyone says we don’t have an alternative because most of us have to earn a living and most jobs require us to be at the workplace. So, we continue to suffer and the transport system continues to deteriorate and the population continues to grow further exacerbating an already intolerable situation.

Is there a better alternative? Politically none of the existing major parties have the gumption, the imagination or the vision to solve the problem; they are all happy to make promises and then to sit fat and happy, snouts deeply into the public-funded trough enjoying the benefits of maintaining the status quo. I also don’t see any new political party with the vision required to make any difference. It is as if they all realize that it is far easier to make and break promises than to actually do something.

We are lost in a sea of mediocrity with no sight of land on the horizon and no life-saving breeze. It is no wonder that road-rage is a major problem or that that depression is a disease of epidemic proportions. Commuters are stressed to the hilt before they even get to work.

So if we can’t rely on our politicians to fix the problem what should we do? We can’t just resign because we all have responsibilities and bills and families and mortgages and car payments and school fees and the like. Making sure we are heavily indebted is part of the system because it ensure we continue to work and pay taxes.

Personal bankruptcy isn’t an option for most of us. We also can’t refuse to pay tolls and sales taxes on cars and gasoline on the basis that we aren’t getting what we paid for.  The government cleverly opts out of normal consumer protection laws that apply if we buy a commercially available product that isn’t fit for purpose. There is no protection for consumers against governments that lie and fail to deliver what they promise. I often wonder why that is; why do we have parliamentary privilege and why do we allow politicians to enjoy the benefits of office after they have lied to us?

The answer of course is that the public sector (government) has become the public master. The public sector no longer serves us; we serve the public sector. It is our job to pay enough in taxes (and tolls and levies and fees and charges and licence fees and stamp duty, etc., etc.) to keep them in the style to which they have become accustomed. Hell, I imagine they even get mad if we take time off or become unemployed because we are not contributing taxes and are threatening the good life our politicians and bureaucrats enjoy.

A fundamental part of this awful system is to re-direct monies from things like infrastructure spending into salaries and pensions and benefits for our huge public sector. And, on those few occasions when a large investment in infrastructure is required, the public sector borrows the money instead of allocating it from the tax income they already receive.  They are stealing from you today and borrowing against your grandchildren’s future. They are even borrowing to pay inflated pensions when the economy is in a downturn. I bet most of you would like some of that borrowed money in your pension fund.

I don’t have a guaranteed pension pegged at a high percentage of my final salary; do you? Yet most public servants and politicians have guaranteed pensions paid regardless of where the economy is. I bet that the rest of the workforce (the people who actually create the wealth) would love to have the same system in place instead of being at the mercy of the stock market and the avaricious superannuation funds (that all make money even when you don’t).

Why did we let this happen? Are we all crazy or masochists or just plain stupid? They talk about lambs to the slaughter; compared to us lambs are geniuses.

We also have present-day Europe to study and to see what awaits us in the near future. I read an article yesterday where the author called Europe the world’s greatest Ponzi scheme and he was brilliantly correct. Keep borrowing money to pay the outgoings until a time comes when you can’t borrow any more. We are emulating Europe and will follow them down the same road to ruin unless we all wake up and accept the fact that there should not be any free lunches for anyone, especially public servants and politicians.

However, how do you change a system when it is in the best interests of the people running the system to perpetuate the status quo? Who are you going to call, the Ghostbusters?

The system is broken in this country just as it is broken in Europe and the USA. You can’t run your household by borrowing more than you earn (not for long anyway) and you can’t run a state or a country like that either. The time will come when the Piper needs to be paid. We can all blame the hedge funds for taking advantage of a bad situation but they didn’t create the underlying problem; we did by continuing to support politicians who lied to us and promised us more than we could afford in order to stay in office. The root problem is greed and it always has been greed. Greed exacerbated by the gullibility and outright stupidity of us voters, all of us expecting a free lunch.

They say you get what you deserve and in our case that is absolutely true.

The only long term solution is for us is to start living within our means, as families, as local governments, as states and as a country. Sadly, I don’t see that happening any time soon so get used to the chaos and ever rising cost of living because there is no end in sight without a quantum change in our attitude as citizens of this great country.

Maybe I need to start a new political party, one committed to (a much) smaller government, a balanced budget, politicians and public servants on the same pension system as us workers and new rules that would enable us to force liars out of office? Problem is, where would I find all those honest politicians? Then again, it could be that they are all currently employees of private enterprise or business owners like me, similar-minded and absolutely fed up with the current system.

Something has to change and I fear that it is up to us ordinary, hard-working people to make it happen.  Are you ready for change? How would you make it happen? Do you care about your grandchildren’s future?

As we all know, the world of IT and applications is changing rapidly and most of us application software vendors are trying to second-guess where the market is heading. The two key questions are:

1. How should we deliver applications? and
2. What should we be developing?

If we read and believe the IT press, especially the IT industry blogs, we should all be convinced by now that every application needs to be delivered on a mobile device. However, I am not fully convinced because I am a long-term and avid user of mobile devices, smartphone and iPad, and my experience tells me that mobile devices still don’t have the capabilities I need to be able to run all the applications I use. I also struggle to understand how to make my applications totally usable on mobile devices, especially smartphones.

For example, my smartphone is invaluable for checking and responding to emails when on the move. It is small, light, convenient (it sits in my shirt pocket) and has a long battery life. It also ‘connects’ to the Internet from most locations and 3G/4G and Wi-Fi services provide acceptable performance for email monitoring. But, it isn’t suitable for reading big documents and it isn’t suitable for lengthy responses. It is also painful when accessing web pages; the processor is too slow, the screen is just way too small and the QWERTY keyboard too small and too awkward for anything other than simple responses.

The iPad 2 is a lot better mainly because it has a bigger screen and more usable keyboard but it is still far from perfect.  Whenever I have to do real work (like writing this blog or writing program specifications), I end up working on my powerful laptop or desktop.

Strangely though, when I look at my laptop and desktop and all those messy cables and connections they look like museum pieces next to my iPad 2. In my opinion, the industry is somewhere between the old paradigm and the new paradigm but we haven’t got there just yet. Today’s mobile devices are a good first attempt but they don’t yet have what it takes to replace the desktop and laptop for serious business users.

The choice for us really comes down to developing and delivering software applications in either native mobile app mode (e.g., iPad apps developed in Xcode) or web-client mode (i.e., ‘thin-client’ applications that run in a browser and are developed using tools like HTML5, JavaScript and Ajax).

The web-client model is the best for us because it provides platform independence and the lowest cost delivery model. That is, it enables your application for all types of mobile devices as well as traditional notebooks and desktops and it is delivered just by the end user typing in a URL. It also only requires a single set of source code rather than the multiple sets of source code required to support native mobile apps for devices like the Android phone, iPad and Blackberry. It is therefore the lowest cost to develop and maintain and the lowest cost to roll out and support.

Ironically, the web-client model is also very old technology and I am surprised that after all these years we don’t have anything better to replace it.

As to what we should be developing, well that is literally the (multi) million dollar question. Our traditional fare is Enterprise Content Management software (ECM) or more simply, Information Management software. The ECM bag includes a host of horizontal market applications like document management software, records management software, contract management software, knowledge management software, etc. Our product RecFind 6 provides all of the above capabilities.

So, given that we already have a pretty clever and flexible ‘multi-application’ solution what should we replace it with or, what should we add to it? More importantly, what do customers need and want and even more importantly, what are they prepared to pay for?

Our customers happily tell us all the time about the new and extended functionality they would like to see in our products but usually their assumption is that we will fund the changes and provide the extended functionality free as part of a future upgrade. Usually they are right because we continually add new and improved features to successive upgrades provided under the customer’s maintenance agreement. However, for software vendors wanting to provide additional value and grow revenues, the real question is “is there a totally new product the majority of customers would need and want and be happy to pay for? “

I spend a lot of time thinking about this question. “What can I design and build that will provide significant value to a customer?” So much value in fact that the customer will be more than happy to outlay the funds to buy it. You might say it is the Holy Grail of software development, often called the ‘Killer App’. It may come as a surprise to those outside of our industry but many software developers spend enormous amounts of time and money building products no one buys.

A great idea doesn’t necessarily translate to success in the market. Similarly, because a customer says it wants something it does not necessarily follow that it will be willing to pay for it. As a software developer you have to ask the question, “If I build it, will you buy it?” This sounds a bit like Kevin Costner and his field of dreams movie, “Build it and they will come”, but in our case that isn’t necessarily true.

I have lots of ideas and have written lots of specifications and have built lots of applications but that killer app still eludes me. It must be time again to go out and ask our customers, “What would you like us to build? What application or feature or functionality would make a real difference to the running of your business? What application functionality do you need most of all? What do you believe will add the most value to your business? What would you like us to build next?”

Customers always have great ideas and they are often able to think outside the square. Software developers like us are more often than not too close to the problem. Now let’s see what they tell me, maybe that killer app is just around the corner, just like that next big lottery win.