At a conference last week, I ran into Rick, an old colleague from a previous employer. Rick told me about a problem he had with a drop-off in conversion on a business website. His company hired a consultant to upgrade their product sales website and create a mobile app so customers could browse and purchase products on smart phones. After the launch, the enterprise noticed a decline in sales on the site, and poor results in user adoption of the sales app.
Cloud is no longer difficult for people to understand, express or accept. There were initial regulations and what not’s that did not make it through for cloud computing to become the stable of almost 95% of enterprise consumers.
If one looks at how everything started, thing were not looking good for cloud. The first and most basic issue for cloud computing was to make sense of the benefits they had to offer.
For those who did not understand that cloud was working in their benefit against a home grown full-fledged operation that runs through fully owned server farms.
May be, perhaps not an accurate comparison… okay by now, it should be about Joomla.
If you are working in business today, you have probably heard of WordPress. What you might not know is that WordPress has grown in popularity for small to large businesses in pretty much every vertical industry.
If you are looking for a great way to present and organize content, if you want to launch or upgrade a content management system (CMS), WordPress is an attractive option. BUT, before you rush into the design and development process, let me tell you a story.
Not too long ago, a website was a nice to have list on a business card. Today a website is all addressing system of qualification.
It didn’t take long for the world to say, where is your website?
Nor did they take time to confirm back with you on their expectations and start judging you on the basis of how well your website is made.
Some of the quality websites that remain updated takes hours to make and are made with intense focus on the communication!
Whilst, some are made for a simple reason that there should be a website that talks about you, your services, products, customers and what not.
Then again, there are the transaction supportive business platforms that are mistaken for website, though are hosted and managed in much the same way.
These could your business applications; these could your website that just runs a shopping platform, a community or whatever it can be.
Ever wondered how many types and classifications of business application exist?
Well to be honest, there are no defined systems of classifying a website.
Brimming with optimism, businesses tend to apply marketing and lead generation techniques, store business data acquisition in to their CRM’s and do a lot of things in several closely related, but largely disconnected modules.
At least that is how things worked in the regular ERP’s of the world. There is no exception to this, not even Oracle Apps or Microsoft Dynamics ever managed to make any difference on these matters.
The disconnects were serious disconnects, there was no direct synthesis between what working on sales and how marketing is impacting the sales operations.
The biggest disconnect perhaps was in the lack of workflow and process integration towards sales, marketing and invoicing teams.
The field level data and integration with business integration, dynamic value chain developments etc were altogether missing in regular CRM and ERP applications.
There is tech involved in enterprise governance and those are sometime so old that that its difficult to find people who are still working or are alive and can work to fix any issues.For enterprises that have inherited and are working with legacy architecture and applications going mobile can be huge a factor or challenge.Some of the core challenges include the adoption and development of service layers that can be shared on a mobile platform.The sheer size of database and data being rendered on handheld devices could be very large and leads to quality issues.The manner of technology adoption pose regulatory issues… for instance, the French now passed a law that forbids sending out emails to employees after working hours.
Technology is flying at its fastest rate yet and the pace of change can make it hard for businesses to keep up. It seems as if you just finish your software product or application and it is time to tweak things to adapt to change. This adaptation is not just a nice thing to have, it is a necessity. Users will not tolerate poor performance, clumsy navigation or other signs of aging software.
A recent survey analyzed the social shares of over 100 million articles in 8 months to see what makes people share content.
