Business Software as a genre
Business Software has been around for few years now, but I feel it still has many misconceptions and myths about it.
I’d like to devode this article-to-be to characterise this kind of software and offer my perspective on it.
What is Business Software, anyway?
I think it’s easiest to use an example - it’s a computer program, which business users use to accomplish a business goal.
You could try calling Microsoft Outlook a business program, but in my opinion - it’s a generic purpose Organiser, you can use it for organising your schedule both in and outside of work.
And e-mail - every teenager now uses e-mail, this isn’t enough to call this program a “Business application”. It’s nothing more than a Personal Information Manager.
What I call Business Software - is a software which communicated with you using business names people at your company use.
For instance, whenever you can ask your software to provide you with a list of recent orders, unresolved customer enquiries, or sales forecast for the next months - this indicated you are using a proper Business Software.
You have to say, these things sound smart, don’t they?
Normally what happens when you want to know these information is - you ask a Person (let’s call him Steve) which is responsible for managing this exact area of your company’s activity, and ask them to provide you with the information you need.
Steve then uses his tools, usually Microsoft Office (Excel in particular) to come up with the figures you need.
This spreadsheet is then e-mailed to you, you print it out and have a hardcopy on your desk.
But imagine, wouldn’t you like to have such a report every week? Or every day? Or maybe every hour, to be able to trace how your recent advertising campaign increased the sales growth dynamic?
I bet Steve wouldn’t be too happy if you’d ask him to provide you with hourly reports, would he?
This is where Business Software, and Management Information Systems in particular come into play.
The problem with paper documentation is - it becomes outdated the moment it is printed!
This way of thinking is a bit different than we are used to. We like to send e-mails, call people up, and meet with them face to face to exchange information and chat. But this isn’t always the best way to get access to information you, or your people need.
Switching from the culture of “reporting to the line manager on request” to “logging daily activity in the System” - you gain a whole new level of understanding of your business - you can review past periods, and seek patterns in them, for example - did you know, that most of your orders come in at Monday, and the peak hour is 2pm? Maybe it would be good to have twice as many sales rep in the office on Mondays, than on Fridays?
Of course, this isn’t a complete magic - people knowing their businesses very well can observe these patterns every day, but they need to be vigiland, it’s hard to miss some important pieces of management puzzle in a typically hectic day.
And besides - who always has the time to de-brief staff when they go to holiday? I bet you called someone - or someone called you while on holiday, to ask few questions about your project’s progress.
Using an Information System anyone (with the necessary level of privileges) could access progress reports on-line, instantaneously.
But how much does it cost?
There’s a common misconception, actually two of them.
- First one is - “a Management Information System has to cost you millions”,
- Another one is - “software is cheap, you can buy a Microsoft Office for 300 pounds, why some simpler systems should cost more?”
As always, truth is in the middle.
Bespoke Business Software doesn’t have to cost millions anymore - the skill of Enterprise Applications Development is now much more common than it used to be - and frankly, most small and medium businesses don’t need the level of scalability and availability as huge organisations do.
Obviously I don’t mean systems for smaller businesses can be of second quality - but the availability of 99,9% should be enough for most organisations, there’s no point to pay lots of money to gain another “9″ in this figure. Also, if your software doesn’t automatically send statements to 40,000 clients, a potential bug in it won’t cost you as much as in a bigger organisation.
In recent years, the Enterprise Applications had to be written in Java by a high-class consultant, which wasn’t necessarily the brightest programmer available - but happened to have a good training and certificate given to him by a big organisation.
Gradually these magic certificates became less meaningful, and what started to count was the pure talent and expertise.
Also, the technology became more popular, descibed in multiple books on the subject, so anyone keen enough to learn it could possess new, system-building skills.
Open Source platforms offer a basic set of free tools to make low cost (and high quality!) software development possible, and software written in PHP/Ruby isn’t necessarily any worse than one written in Java/C#.
All these trends caused the significant fall of systems’ prices, since the knowledge became more common, and more effective tools gained popularity.
Why isn’t Business Software dirt cheap, then?
This is an important question.
In the scenario of Microsoft, or any other Software Vendor - the software is being developed once, and resold through various channels to multiple clients in one form - the Program.
You cannot call Microsoft and ask them to make you a golder paper clip, or disable this feature by default. You cannot ask them to enable Outlook to do something it doesn’t do already.
Yes, you can submit your feature requests to Microsoft (or any other company operating in that model) and wait (usually years) for the next version of the software to find out whether or not your desired feature has been implemented.
This model, called shrink-wrap software basically means “Software Vendor creates an application, many clients buy the rights to use it”.
There’s nothing wrong with this model, it works successfully for many years and will work for many years to come.
But - what, if you really want to have a software solution to make your life easier?
Let’s say - your company produces Widgets. You can go to Google and ask it for “Widget producer software”, but chances are - there isn’t any.
And besides, your Widget company might be based in UK, and only American versions of the software are available for your niche. And Americans, like with most things - have their own laws governing your business sector.
What happens is - the software you’re after cannot be used by enough other clients to make the shrink-wrap model feasible.
You need to hire an IT Consulting company to assess your needs and advise on the best strategy to ease your organisational pain.
The software they create is created especially for your company, based on your requirements, and used exclusively by your organisation.
That’s what makes the fees go significantly up.
This is where you need to assess if the gains from implementing the system will be bigger than the costs, and in most of the cases - they are.
The thing with software is - it doesn’t only give you financial profits. People work more efficiently, are less stressed, your workflow is better organised, you have less delays in daily operation, your clients are being served better - you really cannot put a pound figure on it.
Business Software is usually used by companies employing between at least 5 and 10 people, and the bigger the company - the more it needs a good Information System, and the costs are becoming less significant, but profits - bigger, scaled up by the number of users of the new system.
But what can it actually do?
The Business Software has its principles and limitations.
First of all - the system needs to be fed all the necessary information in order to be able to analyse it afterwards. So - it might seem like an additional work.
But - when people put the necessary information into the system - everyone who works with them knows about it immediately. This is the first benefit. For example - a new order has been placed on the website. It’s much better if a whole sales team received an e-mail message about that. What is different when using an Information System - any member of the Sales Team can log into it, and browse orders’ history and make various reports of the data already in the system. Appointing a “best salesman of the month” becomes as simple as clicking an appropriate button.
The beauty of Information Systems is - they do all the heavy lifting. Your staff only needs to provide the accurate information once, everything else happens automatically.
Very frequently used functionality, but rarely spoken about - is a document generation.
Let’s say you are a recruitmeng agency and wish you send information about unsuccessful application to your applicants.
Normally what you’d do is to prepare one template letter, and then copy and paste each applicant’s name and address on it and print it out from Microsoft Word. This works. You could also try to automate this using Mail Merge, but it requires you to do some confusing things with some data source, so you quickly ignore this option.
Frankly - I have only used the Mail Merge once in my life, and had a simple problem with it - I emailed the document, but I lost the “Data source”, which rendered my whole action worthless…
Anyway - having an Information System you could select a “Position” (click), then click the desired position “Account Manager” (click), then “Candidates List” (click), mark one of the candidates as “successful” (click), and a select “Notify of unsuccessful application” button.
What happens then is - the System analyses your database for you, gets information about all the candidates who applied for the selected position - and merges for you one document containing 50 letters, correctly named and addresses. What more can you want?
This is a significant time saving, but also a money saver - you can do more things in one day!
What your system could also do for you - is to store a “Log” of all actions that occured in it, so you could easily go to “Last week” and see which positions have been open/closed/filled and who from your office called which candidate. This can increase your effectiveness at the tactical level, and make your life simpler.
After all - why repeat yourself, if computers can do the work for you?