Claromentis Intranet Software Blog

I had a thought provoking meeting yesterday with an extremely competent publicly funded but private industry facing organisation with whom we have been in discussion with for a year or so.

The discussion ranged over the challenges for a ‘normal’ UK company to fully embrace technology with all of the productivity benefits that might bring – and how naturally consultative technology vendors like ourselves might be given resources or encouragement to encourage that consultative, process orientated engagement with UK companies.

I found all of the discussion extremely interesting. Some fundamental questions for Claromentis for us all to consider were :

1.    To what extent does it fit our business model to really become consultants, rather than naturally  trusted advisors, in the collaboration space?

2.    Can we preserve the essence of our collaborative relationships with our clients if we specifically charge for such a consultative relationship?

3.    Much or our expertise comes from practical experience with a cross section of global companies – how would they react to Claromentis sharing those experiences to refine our engagement models with other companies, some of whom might be their competitors?

4.    To what extent does our relationship depend on the engagement team – our key staff – having many years of experience with Claromentis, and the unusual experience of our customers having a direct line to the people that control the direction of our platform? If we build up a BPM team – for the first year they would lack that confidence that comes from the experience of helping many other companies meet and exceed their goals from deploying Claromentis.

But these, on reflection, turned out to be exciting and interesting open ended questions.

I am sure that by having access to BPM toolkits and expertise, we can simply engage those customers that might benefit from our increased resources and skills to provide a more formal approach to our current free, pragmatic advice that would increase the quality of that early engagement.

We can partner up BPM staff with our existing engagement teams.

We can then absolutely leave it to the customer to chose if they would find a more formal Business Process partnership with ourselves to be useful as they deploy processes – or alternatively we just deploy what they themselves understand that need.

Encouragingly every customer we talk about e-forms and business processes ( almost all of them ) seem very, very open to advice on what they are trying to achieve, putting it into context – and making sure they are not having us deploy a process into the platform that actually was broken, even in its paper equivalent.

So I do believe the core values of Claromentis, the overarching nature of our framework and the highly configurable nature of our e-forms solution (indeed all of our products) means we certainly have a configurable code base to listen, understand and make a difference.

The  current confusing space for a typical UK company trying to work out what software company might actually  listen to what they have to say, understand their business, and then implement software and training that really impacts the way they perform what are to us very understandable tasks all leads Claromentis to give this more formalized approach to our consultancy a priority for 2009. With the current emphasis on e-forms in our development road map there is a certain sense that the timing is relevant.

Fundamentally – we right now have a sensible, listening approach to working out how we can help every company we engage with. If formalizing and extending this relationship to more a more structured analysis of our customers processes – looking for wider business context for improvements before we configure any software at all – is of value to any company then of course we should offer this service of Business Process Management.

After all, our clients can always just say ‘no’ – that is their choice and that that is great – our client relationships are fun and that is how it should be and must remain.

General Intranet Posts, People and Cultural Issues, Services BPM, consultancy, e-forms, eforms, intranet consultancy

An interesting question is surfacing in the Claromentis world – what should the correct sales department response be to the question of ‘How much Intranet Consultancy will I need?’

Many times I am in meetings with potential new clients, and we get that question ‘Is that available out of the box?’

Well yes, many things are. Massive applications. But then they need configuration.

For example - yes of course we can connect to many disparate data stores and display dashboards on any required permissioned basis within the intranet. We do that all the time.

A management KPI area, an IT status dashboard – you imagine it – we can deliver it. But not out of the box. You don’t need to buy anything – all Claromentis applications are included in the system - but someone has to make the connections, configure the output to match requirements – drill down multi level bar charts by month, next layer down to show days, graphing only data points with values over £x – yes of course. Its just a data gatherer – but someone has to write it and configure that dashboard.

The client gets all the application, the admin panel, but at the end of the day they probably don’t want to actually do the work. So what should the honest account manager be trained to say?

I think I am coming down to that answer we developed a long time ( in intranet terms ) ago, which is for now, lets focus on Phase 1. Our obligation is to describe to you, the potential customer, the art of the possible - you prioritise it, with or without our help as you wish - you make definite decisions on whether you want us to do that or your own staff that we will train – and then we can sensibly give you a year one budget.

I can hear you say that this is all obvious. But I think it is just not clear to most companies looking to leverage permissioned collaboration to make a difference to their business. There is just too much information to absorb, to many requirements to gather from departments where I know, once they talk to us, they will be inspired in the art of the possible and dream of this or that great functionality – they will immediately want phase 3 – before they have even selected a vendor.

I was going to conclude that ‘walk before you run’ springs to mind, but this is I think not correct. We need to work together to help clients run, and if running is what they actually need then I believe they don’t have to walk first. But they need to understand that going from a standing start to winning the race is not a matter of installing Claromentis code – someone has got to make it happen, and with the best will in the world, if that enabling resource works for Claromentis not your own company, they will need to be paid for..

General Intranet Posts, Services intranet consultancy