Workflow has been defined as “the glue that binds business processes together.” Depending upon your background and experience that particular definition may or may not be as clear as mud. Despite having been a key factor in business application processing for a very long time workflow is still very poorly understood by many in business and is more often than not too narrowly defined.

For example, you do not need to pay big bucks for a heavy-duty workflow package and all the services associated with it to implement workflow in your organization. Workflow is really about automating some business process using whatever tool is appropriate. You can automate a business process with Word or Excel or Outlook for that matter and the most common starting point is to first capture a paper document as a digital document using simple tools like a document scanner. You don’t even need a computer (apart from the human brain, the world’s best computer) to implement workflow.

Designing and implementing workflow is more about the thought processes, about evaluating what you are doing and why you are doing it and then trying to figure out a better and more efficient way to do it. It is about documenting and analysing a current business process and then redesigning it to make it more appropriate and more efficient. It is by making it more efficient that you make productivity gains; ideally, you end up doing more with less and adding more value.

You shouldn’t undertake any investigation of new workflows without first having defined objectives and metrics. You should also always begin with some basic questions of your staff or end-users:

1. What are you doing now that you think could be done better?
2. What aren’t you doing now that you think you should be doing?
3. What are you doing now that you don’t think is necessary?

I call these the three golden questions and they have served me well throughout my consulting career. They are simple enough and specific enough that most end-users can relate to them and produce answers. These three simple questions provide the foundation for any business process re-engineering to come. They are also the catalyst to kick off the required thought processes in your end-users. Out of these three simple questions should come many more questions and answers and the information you need to solve the problem.

In every case in the past I have been able to add value well before using tools and creating workflows just by suggesting changes to current manual business processes. As I said earlier, workflow is really about thought processes, “How can I do this in a better and more efficient way?”

Adding value always begins by saving time and money and usually also entails providing better access to information. Real value in my experience is about ensuring that workers have access to the precise information they need (not more and not less) at the precise time they need it (not earlier and not later).  It sound simple but it is the root of all successful business processes, that is, “please just give me what I need when I need it and then I can get the job done.” Modern ‘just-in-time’ automated production lines only work if this practice is in place; it is fundamental to the low cost, efficient and high quality production of any product or service.

When something ‘just works’ very few of us notice it but when something doesn’t work well it frustrates us and we all notice it. Frustrated workers are not happy or productive workers. If we do our job well we take away the sources of frustration by improving work processes to the point where they ‘just work’ and are entirely appropriate and efficient and allow us to work smoothly and uninterrupted without frustration and delays. This should be our objective when designing new workflows.

Metrics are important and should always be part of the project. You begin by taking measurements at the beginning and then after careful analysis, predict what the measurements will be after the project. You must have a way of measuring, using criteria agreed beforehand with your end-users, whether or not you have been successful and to what degree. It is a very bad trades person who leaves without testing his work. We have all had experiences with bad trades people who want to be paid and away before you test the repaired appliance, roof or door. Please do not be a bad trades person.

Metrics are the way we test our theory. For example, “If we re-engineer this series of processes the way I have recommended you will save two hours of time per staff member per day and will be able to complete the contract review and sign off within two days instead of seven days.” The idea is to have something finite to measure against. We are talking quantitative as opposed to qualitative measurement. An example of a qualitative measurement would be, “If we re-engineer this series of processes the way I have recommended everyone will be happier.” Metrics are a quantitative way to measure results.

In summary, implementing workflow should always be about improving a business process; about making it better, more appropriate and more efficient. Any workflow project should begin with the three golden questions and must include defined objectives and quantitative metrics. The most important tool is the human brain and the thought processes that you will use to analyse current processes and design improved processes. Every new workflow should add value; if it doesn’t you should not be doing it.

Critically, workflow must be about improving the lot of your staff or end users. It is about making a process easier, more natural, less frustrating and even, more enjoyable. The staff or end users are the only real judges because no matter how clever you think your solution is if they don’t like it, it will never work.

Document imaging or the scanning of paper documents, has been around a long time. Along with workflow, it was the real beginning of office automation.

Document imaging did for office automation what barcode technology did for physical records management and asset management. That is, it allowed manual processes to be automated and improved; it provided tangible and measurable productivity improvements and as well as demonstrably better access to information for the then fledgling knowledge worker.

Today we have a paradox, whereas we seem to take document imaging for granted we still don’t utilize it to anything like its full capabilities. Most people use document scanners of one kind or another, usually on multi-function-devices, but we still don’t appear to use document scanning nearly enough to automate time-consuming and often critical business processes.

I don’t really know why not because it isn’t a matter of missing technology; we seem to have every type of document scanner imaginable and every type of document scanning software conceivable.  We just seem to be stuck in the past or, we just are not applying enough thought to analysing our day to day business processes; we have become lazy.

Business processes based on the circulation of paper documents are archaic, wasteful, inefficient and highly prone to error because of lost and redundant copies of paper documents; in fact they are downright dangerous. Yet, every organization I deal with still has critical business process based on the circulation of paper. How incredibly careless or just plain stupid is that?

Let’s look at it from the most basic level. How many people can read a paper document at any one point in time? The answer is one and one only. How many people can look at a digital image of a document at any one point in time? The answer is as many as need to. How hard is it to lose or damage a paper document? The answer is it is really, really easy to lose of damage or deface a paper document. How hard is it to lose or damage or deface or even change a secure digital copy of a document? The answer is it is almost impossible in a well-managed document management system.

So why are we still circulating paper documents to support critical business processes? Why aren’t we simply digitising these important paper documents and making the business process infinitely faster and more secure? For the life of me, I can’t think of a single valid reason for not digitising important paper documents. The technology is readily available with oodles of choice and it isn’t difficult to use and it isn’t expensive. In fact, digitizing paper will always save you money.

So why do I still see so many organizations large and small still relying on the circulation of paper documents to support important business processes? Is it a lack of thought or a lack of imagination or a lack of education? Can it really be true that thirty-years after the beginning of the office automation revolution we still have tens of thousands or even millions of so called knowledge workers with little knowledge of basic office automation? If so, and I believe it is true from my observations, then it is a terrible reflection on our public and corporate education systems.

In a world awash in technology like computers, laptops, iPhones and iPads how can we be so terribly ignorant of the application and benefits of such a basic and proven technology as document imaging?

Some of the worst example can be found in large financial organizations like banks and insurance companies. The public perception is that banks are right up there with the latest technology and most people look at examples like banking and payment systems on smartphones as examples of that. But, go behind the front office to the back office and you will usually see a very different world; a world of paper and manual processes, many on the IT department’s ‘backlog’ of things to attend to, eventually.

Here is a really dumb example of this kind of problem. I recently decided to place a term deposit with an online bank. Everything had to be done online and the website didn’t even offer the download of PDFs which would have been useful so you could read through pages of information at your leisure and find out what information they required so you could make sure you had it handy when completing the forms on the website.

I managed to find a phone number and rang them up and asked for the documentation in PDF form only to be told they were paperless and that everything had to be done online. So I persisted going from page to page on the website, never knowing what would be required next until the last page and yes, you guessed right. On the very last page the instructions were to print out the completed forms, sign them and mail them in. Paperless for me; much to my inconvenience and paper for them, again much to my inconvenience.  There is really no excuse for this kind of brainless twaddle that puts the consumer last.  Their processes obviously required a signature on a paper document so the whole pretence of an online process was a sham; their processes required paper.

Hopefully, when they received my paper documents they actually scanned and digitized them but I am willing to bet that if I could get into their back office I would find shelf after shelf of cardboard file folders and paper documents. Hopefully, next time I ring up they can actually find my documents. Maybe I could introduce them to the revolutionary new barcode technology so they could actually track and manage their paper documents far more efficiently?

The message is a simple one. If you have business processes based on the circulation of paper you are inefficient and are wasting money and the time of your staff and customers. You are also taking risks with the integrity of your data and your customer’s data.

Please do everyone a favour and look carefully at the application of document imaging, a well-proven, affordable, easy to implement and easy to manage business process automation tool.

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.

I have written about this many times before (see links below) but our customers continue to ask for advice, usually when being ‘told’ by IT that they will have to use SharePoint as their records management solution.

http://www.knowledgeonecorp.com/news/pdfs/IntegratingWithSharePoint.pdf

http://www.knowledgeonecorp.com/news/pdfs/SharePoint%20-%20A%20Primer.pdf

In the past I have treated the subject softly and leaned over backwards to be kind to SharePoint, after all, who am I to argue with mighty Microsoft? Now however, I am just going to tell it how it is.

• Out of the box RecFind 6 is an infinitely better and lower cost and faster to roll out records management solution than SharePoint 2010.
• You can easily and quickly configure RecFind 6 to meet one hundred-percent of your records management requirements. No matter how much time and money you throw at SharePoint 2010 you will never be able to meet one hundred-percent of your records management requirements.
• Whereas the initial licensing costs of SharePoint 2010 may appear to make it a better financial proposition than RecFind 6, once you start pouring in the money required to get SharePoint to do what RecFind 6 does out of the box the situation reverses very quickly. By the time you finish paying your SharePoint consultants (and you probably never will) you will end up paying at least ten times what you would have paid for RecFind 6.
• Worse, whereas Knowledgeone Corporation does all the maintenance and adds all the new features to RecFind 6 as part of your annual maintenance (ASU),  with SharePoint you have to design, implement, test and fund all the maintenance and improvements to your SharePoint system. This means that the ongoing costs are also around ten times what it would cost to maintain an equivalent RecFind 6 system.

It is important to note that this is just not my opinion. As an example, please refer to the advice given to state government agencies by NSW State Records:

http://futureproof.records.nsw.gov.au/initial-advice-on-implementing-recordkeeping-requirements-in-sharepoint-2010/

Allow me to summarize:

• SharePoint 2010 is a good collaboration & intranet solution but will not apply good records management functionality out of the box.
• It will take a significant investment of time, money and strategy to build an effective EDRMS with SharePoint 2010.
• While licence costs for SharePoint may be relatively inexpensive, the complexity and cost of designing, developing, implementing and maintaining a SharePoint 2010 EDRMS is considerable and needs to be factored into the decision to implement EDRMS functionality with SharePoint.
• SharePoint 2010 is not compliant to records management standards including with reference to:
• Difficulties in capturing email;
• Lack of native security classification and access control; plus
• An inability to manage hybrid records (i.e. both electronic & hard copy records).
• As SharePoint generally operates as a series of team sites, the complexity & costs of design, development, implementation and on-going maintenance should reflect the fact that each team site will need to be specifically implemented to meet the particular recordkeeping requirements of each business area.
• Without proper design & implementation a SharePoint EDRMS implementation will become another sprawling, uncontrolled network or shared drive environment, with content existing everywhere. SharePoint’s native structure is much like a website, where it is possible to implement as many specific sites for different teams and projects or business areas as your organisation requires. Without strong records management frameworks, recordkeeping can quickly scale out of control in this kind of environment.

If your main interest is physical records management then don’t even begin to consider SharePoint because it simply cannot do it.

If your main interest is email management then SharePoint also does not have the required functionality.

However, RecFind 6:

1. Delivers all of the EDRMS functionality a customer will every need out of the box.
2. Is fully compliant to all known records management standards (e.g. has achieved full compliance with all of the latest VERS standards).
3. Has comprehensive out of the box capabilities to manage hybrid records (electronic and / & hard copy records).
4. Has the administration application called the DRM that allows the customer to customize RecFind 6 and change almost anything including the data model and any business process, easily & quickly, without source code changes, whilst remaining on the standard product.
5. Has a SharePoint 2010 integration module so that a customer can take advantage of the good collaboration & intranet capabilities of SharePoint and the best-in-class EDRMS functionality of RecFind 6 within the one integrated environment.

So there we have it, no more Mr nice guy. As a records management solution RecFind 6 blows SharePoint out of the water. It costs less, is easier and faster to roll out and has infinitely more RM functionality in the standard product than you will ever be able to develop in SharePoint.

Now I feel much better.

It is simple, it is brilliant and it came to me this morning as I tried to find any breakfast news channel showing real news instead of endless rehashes and boring talking-head analysis of the embarrassing and grubby Gillard-Rudd squabble. We do a trade.

Greece is in financial trouble and has millions of people out of work with little or no prospect of employment. Australia has a need for workers and a long and proud history of successfully integrating Greek immigrants. Australia also has a large Greek community, especially in Melbourne, well able and willing to support and advise new Greek immigrants.

Greeks may well have a reputation for not working hard in Europe but not so in Australia. Greeks in Australia have always been well regarded as hard-working, industrious and strongly family oriented people; exactly the kind of people Australia needs to grow and prosper. The history of Greek migrants in Australia is a history of hard work, home ownership and pride. In our experience, Greeks look after their families and their homes and take pride in being employed and productive. We need more Greeks.

Julia and Kevin on the other hand we don’t need and don’t want and neither has added anything to our economy other than new taxes and expensive stuff-ups (ceiling bats, school revolution, etc.).  So the equation is simple, add Greeks and take away Julia and Kevin for a growing and healthy Australian economy. It is so simple and logical and such a self-evident solution to our current woes that I don’t know why Tony Abbott hasn’t yet proposed it. I am sure our new Greek citizens will vote for Tony as long as he reduces their taxes (and mine).

Here is the deal. We make an offer to Greece for Australia to take one-million Greek immigrants. The offer includes us funding the travel and relocation costs. We are already doing this for the illegal boat people so it shouldn’t be a problem doing it for legal immigrants. In return, Greece takes Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. It gives them Greek citizenship and a seat in parliament so they can continue doing what they do best. The dysfunctional Greek parliament should be an ideal environment for Julia and Kevin to practice their trade. The Greek economy is already so screwed up it is not like Kevin and Julia can do much harm. Greeks already mistrust and dislike their parliamentarians so Kevin and Julia will fit right in.

The value proposition? Kevin and Julia leaving Australia will have an enormous and positive impact on the Australian economy. Kevin and Julia arriving in Greece will make little difference to an economy already in its death throes. One-million Greek immigrants will have an enormously positive impact on the Australian economy. One-million less Greek citizens and unemployed people to support will have an enormously positive impact on the Greek economy; significantly reducing the debt burden and almost certainly solving the unemployment problem. The Greek and Australian economies will both grow and everyone will be better off.

The downside? The Canberra press gallery will have little to write about and news programs will have to spend more money on gathering real news. Other than this, it is all good news.

Does anyone have the contact details of the Greek ambassador in Canberra?

I have been in the application software industry for most of my professional life. I started in bureaus designing and programming bespoke applications for a variety of clients then moved to mainframes and online and real time application software development and then to my own software company in 1984. I have worked with thousands of customers and hundreds of applications and I have never seen any customer use anything like one hundred-percent of an application’s functionality.

Whenever I visit my customers there is a common dialog that goes along the lines of, “It would be great if RecFind could do …….” To which my reply always is, “Actually it can, would you like me to show you?”

Yes, before you ask, we do provide detailed help screens and manuals and both classroom and online training. We also have a plethora of helpful information on our website including white papers, a Knowledgebase & FAQs, News, helpful hints, product descriptions, etc., etc.

We also employ inside sales people who talk regularly to our customers and we communicate via newsletters and emails and, of course, this blog.

There is no shortage of information on what our products can do. There is however, still a big gap between what our products can do and what our customers understand about the capabilities of our products. From my experience, the knowledge gap is common across all products and software vendors because no one has yet come up with a mechanism to continually train and remind the customer’s personnel about a product’s complete functionality and entire range of capabilities.

Nor, do I suspect, would the average customer’s end user be too happy about being bombarded with unsolicited information of this kind. The fact is people only have time to work on a need-to-know basis. They only want to know enough to get the job done and this is entirely understandable.

Customers have multiple application products to work with and unlimited work to complete in a limited time frame. Typical end users do not have the time to become expert in any one application product and nor do they have the time to explore all of its capabilities or even to keep completely up to date with an application product as its moves from release to release.

This is a common dilemma for all application software providers. The best they can hope for is a single ‘champion’ within each customer that does his/her best to keep up to date and informed.

The end result of the above reality is that no customer ever manages to get maximum value from its application software. No organization ever gets a full return on its investment. There will always be many things the application software could be configured to handle that would improve productivity, solve burning problems and reduce costs but the knowledge gap prevents this happening.

The only solution I can think of is for the customer to pay the vendor to provide a resident onsite application expert who continually looks for application niches where the software can add value. However, the two flaws in this approach are:

1. Where does the customer find the money?; and
2. Where does the vendor find the people?

Apart from these two minor flaws, it is the perfect solution except for the fact that the application expert would also need to also be an expert in the customer’s business. You have to understand the customer’s business processes before you can determine whether a particular application software product could be a solution. This means that our application consultant needs to be pretty clever and very experienced with bags of initiative and there aren’t a lot of these people around; which brings me back to flaw number 2.

Archimedes was supposed to have said, “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

I say, “Give me enough smart people and I could automate the world.”

In both cases, we are missing the essential ingredient.

The difficulties don’t mean that we give up, au contraire; they force us to work harder at a solution. The vendor and the customer need to work together to find new ways for the vendor’s product to add value to the customer’s business. This is a mutually beneficial partnership.

Our product RecFind 6 was specifically designed and engineered to be able to handle multiple tasks simultaneously. It was designed from the outset to be a multi-application solution and to enable the customer to use the one piece of application software to solve multiple business problems. To be able to leverage off a single investment and use the one product for multiple business application needs.

We provide the high level tools free of charge with RecFind 6 so the customer can configure multiple solutions (e.g., records management, help desk, asset management, contract management, document management, email management, customer relationship management or CRM) using a single copy of RecFind 6. The tools also allow the customer to ‘partition’ the various applications so each group of users thinks it has its own solution.

However, despite the unique capabilities of RecFind 6, we still have the problem of knowing enough about our customers to be able to propose additional uses for our product. Maybe if all of our customers had their head office in North Sydney our task would be easier but I doubt it. As it is, we have customers all over the world in all time zones and in some very remote locations.

The Internet and Citrix tools like GoToAssist, GoToMeeting and GoToTraining largely solve the distance problems and do so in the most economical way without airfares, expenses and hotel charges. We use these tools extensively and our customers love the convenience and low cost of the solutions we are able to provide thanks to our friends at Citrix. But, there is still no substitute for being onsite and in face to face dialog to best understand a customer’s business processes and needs. It is a case of the old way is still the best way.

Our challenge in these austere times is to convince our customers of the value of our proposition. That is, that an investment in an onsite investigation of needs will always provide bottom line and productivity benefits; that it will more than pay for itself in the short term.

It is early days yet for our model but many of my customers are already using RecFind 6 to solve multiple application software problems. It is always a battle for both of us to find the time and resources for the investigation but it always pays off.

We are continually looking for new ways to simplify and systemise the processes required to determine where we can add value. We don’t have a perfect solution yet but we keep trying because the value proposition is undeniable; do more with less. Buy a single product instead of having to buy ten products. Learn how to use a single product instead of having to learn how to use ten different products. Deal with a single vendor instead of having to deal with ten different vendors. No integration required instead of having to integrate ten different products.

We know we have the right paradigm, now we just need to reach our audience.

This is the question that keeps Microsoft executives awake at night and gnawing at their fingernails.

Will home users, corporates and government agencies rush in to upgrade their desktops to Windows 8? I for one don’t think so and this is why I don’t think so.

The Vista debacle is still fresh in every CIO’s mind and I have not spoken to anyone who is planning to upgrade to Windows 8 in 2012 or even 2013. Most of my customers are still using XP and planning to upgrade to Windows 7.

Microsoft released Vista two years before it was ready and in doing so it inflicted a huge cost and productivity burden on its customers. Those same customers have long memories.

This isn’t a debate about whether Metro is a ‘good’ UI or whether or not Windows 8 should have a start button or whether or not the ARM version should have/will have the option of switching to the classical UI. That particular debate is for the techies and bloggers, not business owners and executives. For serious people this is a debate about value, cost and risk avoidance.

• What is the value proposition of Windows 8? What are the compelling reasons for upgrading to Windows 8? What are the benefits of Windows 8? What effect will Windows 8 have on the bottom line? How will the CIO compose a cohesive business case to convince the board to allocate scarce funds to a Windows 8 rollout?
• What will it cost to purchase Windows 8? What will it cost to upgrade all desktops to Windows 8? What will the cost be of lost productivity as your users grapple with the changes and differences? What will it cost to retrain your users?
• Will the initial Windows 8 experience be a repeat of the Vista experience? What is the risk of this happening? What is the risk of some of your current devices not working with Windows 8? What is the risk of some of your current applications not working with Windows 8? What is the risk that you will have to upgrade or replace some of your PCs? What is the risk that your will have to roll back to Windows 7 from Windows 8 as many customers had to roll back from Vista to XP?

Value Proposition

As a business owner I don’t believe Windows 8 has a compelling value proposition. I don’t see any reason to upgrade from Windows 7. Windows 7 works fine and I will follow the old but wise maxim, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

Cost

In my business, if I add up all the potential costs including manpower and retraining and lost productivity I come up with a minimum of $1,000 per desktop to upgrade to Windows 8 and that doesn’t include any hardware upgrades that may be required. And this cost assumes that Windows 8 is not a Vista and that all my current devices and application programs (like accounting, CRM and payroll) continue to work fine. The absolute worst case would be $2,000 a desktop if my assumptions are incorrect.

Risk

There is no reason to accept any risk. I will be recommending to my customers that they stick with Windows 7 and wait at least two or three years until Windows 8 has gobbled up a couple of service packs and proven itself.

Maybe Microsoft hasn’t noticed but most of the world is still in recession and every one of my customers, private and government alike, is still trying to cut costs and do more with less. I don’t know where Microsoft thinks the money is coming from to fund a Windows 8 upgrade.

From my perspective as a long-term Microsoft .NET application software developer I have decided not to redevelop my Windows applications for Windows 8 because of the huge amount of retraining, effort and money required to do so. I have been on the Microsoft treadmill for 28 years and have dutifully upgraded, redesigned and redeveloped my applications for each new release of Windows over that time. This time I do not believe the effort and cost is either justified or required. Instead, I am concentrating on converting all my application client functionality to both web clients (to run in a browser) and mobile clients (supporting smartphones and tablets). There will be some inevitable tweaking to do for Windows 8 but for the most part my new RecFind 6 clients won’t care if the user is running Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8, Linux, Apple OS, iOS or Android.

I actually can’t think of any good reason to redevelop for Windows 8 and have to believe that there will be lots of developers like me that will go the web client and mobile client route instead of spending scarce R&D funds and important developer time just to comply with Microsoft’s latest idea of how desktop applications should look and work. I already have enough trouble keeping up with the rapid changes in Android thank you.

It is every software developer’s dream to have just a single set of source code and to support multiple platforms with the same source. Unfortunately, this has never been possible but I still have to manage costs by minimizing the number of code variations I have to support. The advantage of a web client is that it is largely compatible with most operating systems and browsers and I can build and maintain my web client with a single set of source code albeit with a number of “ifs” to cater for variations in browsers and operating systems. I need separate source code for Both Android and iOS for my ‘native mode’ mobile apps so I end up supporting three development environments, browser, Android and iOS. This is fine because my customers are demanding web clients and mobile clients so I know that my investment in these three environments will pay off. No customer has yet asked for a Windows 8 compatible/certified RecFind 6 client but it is early times yet.

My applications (all based on RecFind 6) are in the Enterprise Content Management (ECM) sector and are designed for the records management, document management, document imaging and business process management sectors. As such we could best describe RecFind 6 as an information management solution and luckily for us this is an ideal application for the three environments we now support, browsers (web clients), Android and iOS (mobile clients).

My customers are also happy to use my products in these three environments so I have absolutely no compelling reason to redesign and rewrite RecFind 6 for Windows 8. My browser clients will run under Windows XP, 7 and 8 so there is absolutely no need for me to build a ‘native’ Windows 8 RecFind 6 client. Hopefully, my current Windows 7 RecFind 6 client will run with only minor tweaks under the Windows 8 ‘classical’ desktop so that my clients that still want to run my ‘fat’ client can still do so. However, there will be no need to do so because my RecFind 6 web client will be faster and easier to install and maintain.

What if a majority of software developers think like me and Microsoft ends up with a new desktop platform and very few ‘native’ applications, especially designed and written for Windows 8? Customers buy Windows to run applications, to do work. If Windows 8 doesn’t have the applications they need they will not bother with it.

Microsoft has thousands of very, very clever people and a marketing budget I can only dream of so we should never write them off. They proved they can get it very wrong with Vista and they have also proved they can get it very right with Windows 7. Fingers crossed that they again get it very right with Windows 8. But, they are taking a very, very big chance and with most of the western world still in recession they have not chosen an exactly auspicious time to launch Windows 8.

To reiterate, and for all the reasons espoused above, I do not see Windows 8 being the success Microsoft is hoping for.