ERP: The Solution Every Business Needs But No One Wants -- Or Do They?

One of the most important focus areas of business collaboration is on key business processes. Herewith, a suggestion for enabling more and better collaboration on one such process, and why enterprise resource planning (ERP) isn't more popular at more companies -- yet.

I recently had a great introductory briefing with members of the leadership team at Fishbowl, makers of Fishbowl Inventory, a very nifty inventory management solution that integrates pretty seamlessly and is pretty darned popular among users of QuickBooks.

The stimulating conversation reminded me of something Yankee Group founder Howard Anderson used to say in presentations about business technology adoption trends. To paraphrase, hundreds of thousands of drill bits are sold each year, but no one who buys one wants a drill bit. What those buyers want are holes.

No one wants ERP. Especially no one who works for a resource-constrained smaller or mid-sized business (SMB). But every smart leader and decision maker at every company shares two characteristics.

1. They work someplace that sells something.
2. That something represents an inventory that need management.

In short, where "ERP" is concerned in the real life lived by most decision makers, especially at SMBs, inventory is the primary "R" that needs "P" by the "E." Which means that inventory management is a critical, foundational element of what are, should be and will become sound ERP policies and practices.

The folks at Fishbowl understand this, and more. Which is why Fishbowl Inventory and Fishbowl Enterprise are designed in ways that make them easy to use and rapid to deliver measurable, scalable and sustainable business benefit.

It's a premise-based solution, something I don't recommend frequently. But I think this one is worth considering, especially if you're already running QuickBooks on computers that reside on your company's premises. (Fishbowl pricing starts at $4,195 and free trials are available.)

If your company makes and sells physical goods, you already know that inventory management is a drag on your colleagues and your company. Even if you don't, you have pools of assets that matter to your business, from the things you do sell to the people who sell and buy them. Each of these represents an inventory that requires management. Accurate, agile and responsive management, if you expect your company to compete effectively as more commerce moves online and under the control of buyers. So good inventory management buys your business a lot.

Take a good look at Fishbowl Inventory and Fishbowl Enterprise as potential solutions for your business. Then look at them as indicators of how your business might learn to collaborate on and love the resource management processes it needs to succeed and thrive.

Business Knowledge Optimization: The "Next Big Idea" in Collaboration

What does your business know? About itself, its competitors, the forces shaping its key markets, what its customers think of it and its competitors, or how its customers make purchase decisions?

How well does your business use what it knows to improve how it does business? How prepared is your business to turn what it knows into business benefit, today and tomorrow?

Many business decision makers have no idea how to begin answering the questions above, but it's not their fault. Business knowledge – information framed in a relevant, actionable business context – is often undervalued and poorly managed, if it's managed at all. At the smartest companies, the business knows what it knows and how best to use that knowledge.

Those two things define everything significant about every modern business. So taking a holistic approach to the collection, curation and leverage of business knowledge can maximize the agility, responsiveness and competitiveness of any business. Such an approach is what I mean when I say business knowledge optimization (BKO).

Does your business need BKO? Here are some signs that it does.

1. Your competition is consistently "eating your lunch." 
2. Your customers are upset, and you're not sure why, or how many are upset, or what to do about it. 
3. Your partners are wary or confused about your road map for the future of your relationships with them. 
4. There are no clearly defined or well-enforced policies, practices, or processes in place for collecting and leveraging knowledge consistently across the organization. 
5. There are no clearly defined or well-enforced policies, practices, or processes in place for ensuring that business-critical knowledge is retained when those who know it leaves the business. (You might know this as "institutional memory.")

What are the key elements of BKO? They include but are not limited to the following.

• Any and all collaboration and information-sharing tools your business uses today. 
• Any and all information repositories (such as databases) and the tools used to manage them, both premise- and cloud-based. 
• Any and all solutions used by your business for backup, recovery or remote storage of business-critical information. 
• Any and all tools and services used to capture, document or manage business processes. 
• Any and all information collected or provided by any and all tools that "touch" or are "touched" by any colleagues, customers, partners, prospects or others who matter to your business. (Examples include tools and services for customer care, support incident management and employee feedback collection. Additional examples include Web site analytics and social media monitoring and reporting tools, which also happen to be critical to a related big idea, online experience optimization (OEO).) 

BKO also requires a level of process consistency and enforcement that is ubiquitous yet unobtrusive to succeed. This is because your business needs to capture as much information as it can about and from as many sources as it can to ensure that its knowledge is accurate, timely and actionable. At some companies this will mean revisiting almost everything about the processes that drive the business. At some companies, it will mean visiting these operational areas for the first time.

I'll have lots more to say about BKO here and elsewhere, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, you can help my research into this critical area by taking my brief BKO survey, anonymously if you prefer. You can take the survey and request summary findings at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/P6KZKSX. You can also take two equally brief surveys on OEO at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/JJVTC6J and https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WFCM2KR. Thanks for your help – please tell everyone you know!

Unified Threat Management Solutions Now: Chatting with Lisa Phifer

As more and more business collaboration takes place online, threats to online security become greater threats to business agility and efficiency – and continuity. Herewith, some key take-aways from an online audio discussion and chat about unified threat management or UTM devices. These are basically computer-hardware-and-software "appliances" that automatically protect business computing and networking facilities from multiple threats, such as viruses, spam and unauthorized network intrusions. Their all-in-one design makes them affordable, manageable options even for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) and small or remote facilities of larger enterprises.

This online chat featured Lisa Phifer, president of security and networking consultancy Core Competence. She has been involved in the design, implementation, and evaluation of networking, security, and management products for more than 25 years. She was formerly a member of the technical staff at Bell Communications Research and senior staff architect at Unisys. She teaches about IT and security, has written extensively for numerous publications, and is a featured speaker at leading conferences.

The event, "Choosing the Unified Threat Management Product That's Right for Your SMB," was part of the Online Audio Series at TheSecureSMB.com, which is open to everyone with complementary registration. An archive of the audio portion of chat with Lisa is available at http://tobtr.com/s/2173127. Many thanks to The Secure SMB team and all of the chat participants for their great questions, some of which generated Lisa's guidance as summarized below.


UTM, the cloud and new network client options: One chat participant asked how UTM appliances can help companies to deal with the growth of "the mobile, social cloud," remote working and "BYOC" ("Bring Your Own Computer") initiatives. Such initiatives create an even greater role for network security solutions and their management, because business can't necessarily put security measures on every authorized device, Lisa replied.

However, "[UTM appliances] that do have the ability to fit into some type of NAC [network access control] architecture can leverage endpoint health and integrity inspection [features] to protect the net from infected devices," Lisa said. Some of those UTM appliances also offer intrusion protection features that can detect and help to "quarantine" infected device activities, she added.

Business and technology decision makers should strive to ensure close integration of the management of their chosen UTM and security solutions. Those decision makers should then invoke all of the available features of those solutions that make business sense and maximize protection against infection, Lisa affirmed.

UTM appliances vs. point solutions: Another chat participant asked, "Is it better than to have multiple devices than one device? This way you can upgrade pieces as they become the slower devices on the network [and] the costs can be managed over time," especially for cash-strapped smaller businesses.

"Multiple devices add latency and points of failure. They are also costly to replace," Lisa replied. "The idea behind UTM is to give you one device to reduce latency, management complexity, and points of failure. However, you do create a potential bottleneck – one that you can manage by upgrading the UTM [appliance] or replacing it with a larger model." Another option is to use load balancing, a feature included with some UTM appliances, to divide threat management across multiple UTM solutions.

YouSendIt: Ensuring that Your Files are “Signed, Sealed, Delivered*”

YouSendIt has announced release of the latest iteration of its cloud-based file-sharing service. With this new release, the YouSendIt platform becomes a far more powerful cloud-based collaboration solution for businesses large and small.

In business, everyone collaborates, whether with colleagues, customers, partners or prospects. And much of that collaboration relies upon a typically large and inconsistently managed shared store of documents. These can range from text files to full-motion, full-color high-definition videos, but they share some common characteristics.

Specifically:

• They need to be kept current, up-to-date and consistent, so everyone's working with the same version of the same information.
• They need to be accessible to authorized users anywhere, anytime, on any device and connection type.
• They need to be tracked and secured, regardless of where they are and who's using them.
• They need to be easily authorized via signature whenever necessary.

The new YouSendIt platform answers these needs admirably.

• Save and sync – YouSendIt users can save and sync content in the cloud with unlimited storage.
• Anytime, anywhere access – users can access files and folders in the cloud anywhere, anytime via desktop or mobile devices.
• Secure sending and sharing – users can collaborate with co-workers and business partners through secure file and folder sending and sharing, while the companies that own the contents of those files and folders can securely track those contents.
• Simple signing – users can review and sign business documents online, at a desk or on the go via a PC or mobile device. (The signing feature is very, very cool on a mobile device, by the way.)

There's more. Changes to files and shared folders are instantly update and synchronized across all devices, and users are notified of changes in real time. Documents and shared folders can be saved to and accessed from the YouSendIt cloud-based folder, from or to any device. YouSendIt also allows for multiple levels of sharing permissions – read and write, read only and read only without login.

You and your colleagues have to send, share, sign and synchronize documents to do business anyway. Some of you or your colleagues may be using YouSendIt already. The basic version is free, and the company claims more than 20 million registered users. (Paid single-user plans with more features and higher capacities than the free version range in price from about $10 to about $15/month. So-called "Corporate Suite" plans range from about $1,000/year for five users, or about $17/user/month, to $3,000/year for 25 users, or about $10/user/month. Greater discounts are available for larger deployments.)

Whether or not you've looked at competing solutions, this latest release of YouSendIt is clearly worth your perusal – and I'd love to know your feedback.

*With apologies to the great Stevie Wonder. :-D

Preton: Making Printing Less Expensive, More Efficient and More Green

Sometimes, a long memory helps with perspective. Sometimes, it's just irritating. Sometimes, it's both.

I remember the promises of office automation in the 1970s included that of the "paperless office." Instead, adoption of information technology increased and printing needs grew prodigiously.

Today, printing and its attendant costs, especially those of ink, toner and paper, are facts of life at most companies, despite those e-mail footers that remind users to "think before they print." And policies intended to reduce those costs, such as advising users to print in draft or duplex mode, are inconsistently applied and all but unenforceable.

Even worse, many business decision makers have no real idea how much printing is costing their companies. Despite the fact that inkjet printing ink can cost $8 to $10 thousand dollars per gallon and that an average employee can print 10 to 20 thousand pages per year, according to widely published estimates. This lack of visibility into actual printing costs makes credible, quantifiable business arguments in favor of investments that reduce those costs difficult to make.

These dynamics were largely responsible to the business media attention given to reports in 2010 of a default font change at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay. The university switched its default printing font from Arial to Century Gothic and saw printing ink requirements fall by some 30 percent, according to those reports.

However, there is no consistently effective way of enforcing such a change across most enterprises. Even the University gave users the option of reverting to the original default font, almost assuring at least some deviation from the policy.

What's needed are tools that enable and enforce printing practices that consistently reduce costs significantly and measurably. These tools must be applicable to all printers in an enterprise, and cannot interfere with or change how IT is used or managed in any way. Business decision makers also need the ability to know what printing is costing their companies, and how printing is being used, to optimize the business value of their investments in printing equipment and supplies.

Fortunately, such tools exist. Preton Ltd., founded in 2005 and headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel, has been shipping such solutions for years. (Leading technology market-watchers at Gartner named Preton a "Cool Vendor" in 2006.) The company's PretonSaver family of solutions uses patent-pending "Pixel Optimizer Technology" algorithms to analyze documents and then to print them in ways that save ink or toner without visibly degrading image quality. Independent testers found that Preton solutions can cut ink/toner consumption by as much as 70 percent for text and 50 percent for graphics and images while retaining acceptable readability.

PretonSaver software, installed on individual PCs or shared servers, operates transparently, requiring no changes to installed printers, printer drivers or application software. And the PretonSaver Premium and Enterprise editions (for 25 to 500 and unlimited users, respectively) can be configured for centralized implementation, enforcement and management of policies designed to reduce costs, enable greener business operations or to meet specific business needs.

For example, duplex printing – the printing of two content pages per sheet of paper – is often difficult and daunting for users to invoke from their editing applications or their printer control panels. PretonSaver Enterprise software can be configured to implement duplex printing across all networked printers and to invoke it automatically for every print request, if desired. It also offers detailed insights into who's printing what and how much each print job and printer is costing the company.

Most recently, Preton has begun offering the PretonSaver Home edition, designed for homes and offices with up to three PCs, as a free download. The software installs easily and requires no set-up or registration. And like all editions, it allows flexible choice of savings levels and print quality, for text, photos and graphics, as well as automatic omission of images from print requests.

Today, PretonSaver software runs on Microsoft Windows XP (with Service Pack (SP) 2), Windows Vista and both 32- and 64-bit Windows 7. The company is planning support for Linux and Macintosh operating systems as well, CEO and Founder Ori Eizenberg told me.

There are other solutions that promise to reduce printing costs. Notable among these are Ecofont, ecoPrint2 and InkSaver. However, InkSaver and EcoPrint2 are only available in editions for individual/SOHO (small office/home office) use, and EcoFont only reduces ink/toner consumption for text printing, not graphics or images. Also, none of these other offerings supports as many versions of Windows or as many types of printers or content as the PretonSaver offerings. And none of these alternatives supports Preton's Pixel Optimizer algorithms, nor offers annual subscription billing options available from Preton.

Whether or not you or your company cares about being "greener," both you and your company care about saving more "green" (or whatever color the money is where you are). In that regard, you need to manage your printers and printing in ways that produce ink/toner cost savings and provide visibility into what printing costs now and why. You also need comprehensive manageability of printers and enforcement of business rules and policies across all printers and users. These features will help you to optimize printing across your entire enterprise, even if you only have one printer.

I believe the PretonSaver solutions offer these features in ways that are affordable, easy to use and easy to deploy and manage. Further, I think the free Home edition could help to create potential "ambassadors" for the corporate editions, as those home users talk up Preton among friends and colleagues.

If you've got one or more Windows PCs and one or more printer, I encourage you to download the free PretonSaver Home edition, or a free trial of the Standard or Premium edition. I further encourage you to start using it, and perhaps to compare it to one or more of the alternative offerings I've mentioned. You may become one of those ambassadors, at your own organization and beyond.

Bamboo Solutions: Taking SharePoint Beyond Collaboration in the Cloud

My understanding is that Microsoft is seeking a new, improved cloud strategy. (Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer e-mailed the company, telling everyone that 23-year veteran Bob Muglia, president of the company's Server and Tools Business and gatekeeper for its evolving Azure Cloud strategy, is stepping down.) I have a modest recommendation. That strategy should focus on starting with what users are already using and build upon it, in ways that are easily accessible and affordable.

This is precisely the strategy adopted by a Microsoft Gold partner I've recently discovered and find intriguing – Bamboo Solutions. The company has built a number of offerings atop Microsoft SharePoint, a collaboration tool in use at and apparently delivering business benefits to many companies. Bamboo adds to Hosted SharePoint features for functions ranging from project and requirements management to sales and customer support.

Bamboo Cloud Applications include BambooCRM (which incorporates sales and customer support features), BambooSupport and BambooRM for requirements management. You can learn more and sign up for free trials at http://cloud.bamboosolutions.com/freecrm/. Pricing for BambooCRM starts at $29.95/user/month, billed quarterly on three-, six- or 12-month contracts.

Bamboo is delivering cloud-based collaboration tools that address specific business needs, build upon a known, proven and widely adopted platform and are available under clear, straightforward terms. They aren't going to be appropriate for every company of user, but they're worth looking at as examples of what to look for in such solutions. And they offer a glimpse at what might be possible if Microsoft were to take a similar tack with its hosted offerings – or at least to promote the ones that seem to "get" users' needs and desires with a bit more enthusiasm and clarity…

CloudPointe: Middleware that Matters to Business Users

If you're going to collaborate, you will likely want to share electronic documents. And you probably already use one if not several tools for creating, editing and storing those documents. So the last thing, and I mean the VERY last thing you and your colleagues want and that your business needs is yet another application to facilitate document sharing and collaboration.

What you really want is a solution that enables these abilities in ways that are, as the most popular and valuable business IT features always become, pervasive, ubiquitous and invisible. From a more technical perspective, what you want and need looks and feels a lot like middleware -- software that users never see or touch, but that makes the tools and services they do touch work better together.

From this perspective, I believe that I have seen the future, or at least one strongly compelling future, where document-centric collaboration is concerned. I believe a harbinger of that future is CloudPointe, which has just introduced a cloud-based service that enables users of Amazon.com S3, FTP, Google Docs, Microsoft SharePoint or Secure FTP (SFTP) to share, collaborate with and store documents easily and securely.

For more details, I direct you to a recent SYS-CON article on CloudPointe by my industry colleague and fellow Focus Expert Network member Tim Negris. You can find the article at http://dortchon.it/CloudPointe, and you should read and remember it, even if you never become a CloudPointe user. Tim makes several points about what's needed for effective document sharing and collaboration -- points I've decided that I don't need to make here if you read his article, because I enthusiastically agree with all of them.

Check out Tim's article, and let him (and me!) know what you think. Ditto regarding CloudPointe. Sometimes, it's true that the future is now, and I believe now is one of those times.