With COVID-19 causing many businesses to lock their offices and have their employees work from home, there is a renewed interest in a "digital business" - so that people could be productive from everywhere - or anywhere. But is that really all a digital business is? A shared cloud storage,...

If any role has become prevalent in the last five years, it is the "Customer Success Manager" at Business Application vendors. The premise is that successful customers buy more software - simple, clear, and difficult to dispute. But customer success has many dimensions - short, mid, and lo...

The last decade was filled with the term: Digital Transformation. The "Cloud" was going to bring the "fourth industrial revolution". There certainly have been some changes in the last decade, but a revolution? - Far from it. A much larger and faster transformation occurred during...

Australia is often referred to as "The Lucky Country" - blessed with beautiful scenery, natural wonders, areas with great soil for agriculture, and resources. Many resources. But luck does not give you the edge, the edge is gained by understanding the advantages and using these to compete....

The COVID-19 crisis is affecting us all. We will also get through it. So far, we have survived at least two cataclysmic impacts (Younger Dryas), super-volcano eruptions (Toba), various forms of plague, and the Spanish Flu - and we survived all that without the wonders of modern technology or medicin...

COVID-19, or the Corona Virus, is having a significant effect on how we interact. The consequences of this virus are not yet entirely known, but one thing we do know is that the rate of infection has taken everybody by surprise. Whilst a wide-spread panic is not going to help anyone, some precaution...

When ready to start your Digital Business Transformation Journey, you have selected the platform, and assembled the team to implement (Systems Integrator, Software Vendor, or a collection of contractors) - there even is the Scrum Master. But how do you decide to select the Product Owners? Simple, ri...

The office has gone through some interesting evolution over the last century - from a classroom style where the "manager" sits in the front, and rows of employees with typewriters in front of them hitting the right levers on these noisy machines - to the Beanbag, Pool and Foosball table fi...

A "purpose driven business", fashionable, but what is it exactly? And what purpose is driven by the business? Most importantly - does it matter?

The answer to the last question is YES! It matters - but not in the way you would expect. In this article, we break down the purpose, and what dr...

Go and ask for a quote for an IT solution delivery, and the first thing you get asked is: "What is the scope?" Seems fair - if you want to get a price commitment, you will be asked for a functionality boundary. But what does this actually do to the delivery of your solution? Nothing good, ...

If you ever played a computer game, you know that great games start easy, and incrementally introduce new complexities. As Nolan K. Bushnell coined the phrase to describe the best games: "easy to learn, difficult to master". So what does this have to do with business applications? Surely, ...

When you change your business model from advisory to full software sales, implementation and support partner, it is not a trivial change. Added to that, a full technology change from Microsoft to Zoho, it is an opportunity that does not come without risk. The numbers are in, and it is looking very p...

I would like to share with you two different experiences I have had dealing with support - in both cases the respective companies were represented by courteous support agents, willing to do what is necessary to resolve a ticket satisfactory. Yet the outcome and experience could not have been a bigge...

Over the last decade or so, many technology vendors have made significant investments in Customer Success Management Teams, but the definition of customer success varies from vendor to vendor. In his book "The Outcome Generation", Paul starts by clearly defining the three generations of su...

Customer success teams are here to stay. It is inevitable that the vendor of a subscription based software application takes a keen interest in the success that has been achieved with that software. After all, even the most specialised software application is in danger of being "commoditised...

CRM  (Customer Relationship Management) Solutions have been around for over two decades (in one form or another - I started my journey in sales activity management (SAM) in 1996 - and the solutions have evolved significantly since that time). CRM may have evolved, a lot of the questions regardi...

Many entrepreneurs and small business owners outsource their accounting and bookkeeping needs, so they can focus on the growth of their business. And most bookkeepers do an excellent job of keeping the books away from the continuous descent into a state of total disorder - and accountants, in partic...