Resolution: Collaborate or else :Enter the modern Software-as-a-Service(SaaS)

[dhilipkumar]

A new year, so let's make some resolutions. Sure, you do it every January and little happens, but this year will be different. This year, the tightening economy will force people to pay more attention, watch what their customers and competitors are doing and look for an edge. Collaboration will give you that edge.

                  New Year's Resolution 4: Backup, backup, backup

You have phones in your office and in your pocket. You have texting for the phone and e-mail and Instant Messaging for the computers (if you can stand to thumb your phone constantly and stay at your computer all the time). But those tools are from the old days, and no longer give you an edge.

Take a step back and look at how you're communicating (or not) within the company. If you're still a small company in one location, yelling down the hall may be the same as an all-hands memo. But since few small companies have a single location anymore, and even those that do need to communicate with workers at home and on the road, you'll need to be connected to something somewhere.

Enter the modern Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, where vendors host applications that users access via their browsers. There's a reason every single "Top 10 IT Priorities for 2009" story puts SaaS at or near the top of their lists.

Why SaaS? Because the technology sidesteps three problems small businesses have with any communication technology: cost; distributed access; and security.

SaaS costs work in your favor. There's no hardware or software to buy or applications to program. You pay a flat fee per user per month. Add a person? Pay a few more dollars per month. Lose a person? Pay a few dollars less.

We talked about wikis as a way to "Get more work done with less e-mail" a few weeks ago, so lets look at brainstorming and project management angles. The brainstorming cliché of a whiteboard and a group of people scribbling away has gone Internet, and you can now do it from different locations and at different times. If you're a visual, draw on napkins type of person, the new world of whiteboards should thrill you. Check out Scriblink, skrbl (beta) and DabbleBoard (beta), among hundreds of others.

Once you sketch out your plan of attack on your virtual napkin, the logistically minded will need project management tools to help keep everyone else on track. In the past, that usually meant Microsoft Project, but no more. There are hundreds of online project management tools that do most or all of the same things but do them for many people in many locations at the same time. Some offer quite a few more features than Project, and all help organize a team around a project. Spreading the project management chores across the team, rather than locking up the details with one person on one desktop, provides a good jolt of collaboration from the beginning.

Why SaaS? Because the technology sidesteps three problems small businesses have with any communication technology: cost; distributed access; and security.

SaaS costs work in your favor. There's no hardware or software to buy or applications to program. You pay a flat fee per user per month. Add a person? Pay a few more dollars per month. Lose a person? Pay a few dollars less.

We talked about wikis as a way to "Get more work done with less e-mail" a few weeks ago, so lets look at brainstorming and project management angles. The brainstorming cliché of a whiteboard and a group of people scribbling away has gone Internet, and you can now do it from different locations and at different times. If you're a visual, draw on napkins type of person, the new world of whiteboards should thrill you. Check out Scriblink, skrbl (beta) and DabbleBoard (beta), among hundreds of others.

Once you sketch out your plan of attack on your virtual napkin, the logistically minded will need project management tools to help keep everyone else on track. In the past, that usually meant Microsoft Project, but no more. There are hundreds of online project management tools that do most or all of the same things but do them for many people in many locations at the same time. Some offer quite a few more features than Project, and all help organize a team around a project. Spreading the project management chores across the team, rather than locking up the details with one person on one desktop, provides a good jolt of collaboration from the beginning.

Potential customers don't believe testimonials nearly as much as they believe blogs or forums with interaction between you and your customers. You can fabricate testimonials in an ad, but not the give and take between customers, potential customers and your sales and support people.

Does that mean you have to leave up a complaint that an installer was late and took twice as long to do a job? Yes, so potential customers can read your explanation, see that the job was finished properly, and the customer didn't have to pay extra for a longer installation period.

Even in companies where ownership hasn't embraced the modern world of collaboration, workers communicate well enough to get the job done most of the time. Now let's look at collaboration from your customer's point of view. Many say that's the only valid viewpoint, since if you don't have customers, you don't have anything else.

If you or your management still think of sales as something you do "to" customers, life will get progressively harder. Few items today can't be researched and purchased over the Internet. Negotiations hurt when your potential customer has lower price quotes for your products and services in hand after a few minutes with Google. It's time to start regarding sales as a collaboration between you and your customers, and getting those customers involved in helping sell other customers.

Blogging is no longer a new, unproven technology, it's a way to converse with your customers publicly so potential customers see how you manage your business. Early on when I advocated blogging in speeches, people would raise their hands and ask how to keep customers from posting negative comments about their product or service. The quick, funny answer was to tell them "quit screwing up," but the real answer is you don't want to hide complaints, you want potential customers to see them and see how you resolve those issues.

Every process, especially the sale and subsequent installation of anything, leaves a bit of a mess behind. Potential customers know this, because they have problems with their current vendors. The issue is whether you and your company clean up those little messes quickly and to the satisfaction of your customers. You can't avoid all the mistakes, but you can avoid letting a mistake turn into a customer fiasco. Look back at last week's column for some examples.

Potential customers don't believe testimonials nearly as much as they believe blogs or forums with interaction between you and your customers. You can fabricate testimonials in an ad, but not the give and take between customers, potential customers and your sales and support people.

Does that mean you have to leave up a complaint that an installer was late and took twice as long to do a job? Yes, so potential customers can read your explanation, see that the job was finished properly, and the customer didn't have to pay extra for a longer installation period.

Does that mean you have to leave up personal attacks from the random crazies out there? No. This is a business collaboration and communication tool, not a therapy session for nutjobs. But delete only the crazies, not the complaints.

Collaboration tools like blogs and threaded discussion forums work best for these interactions, and cost little or nothing. If you have a time sensitive product or service, such as a conference or trade show with minute by minute schedule changes, some customers will want Twitter updates. Again, little or no cost, and you make those customers happy.

Use internal collaboration tools to organize and update employees and coworkers. Use external collaboration tools to reach out to current and future customers. Keep the two systems separate, but keep them up and running as your first New Year's resolution for 2009.