You have invested heavily in IT; you have a financial system, a HR system, a website, a customer database or CRM system, and maybe a core operational system which drives your core business. But you are frustrated; by the complexity of managing disparate systems, by the lack of integration between systems, and by the manual effort required to keep the systems in step - effort which could be redirected at more value enhancing activity. Unless you have invested very heavily in one fully integrated system that fulfils all of your IT needs, some of this is likely to be familiar.
Another article about the benefits of systems integration? Not quite, it is aiming a little higher than that; true business integration. Imagine for a moment that there is some "magic glue" that can receive a message from one of your systems, translate it into something meaningful to another of your systems, and transmits that message to the destination system - repeatedly and without fail. This is great as far as it goes, but business processes require people making decisions as well as systems. So imagine that additionally you can configure the "magic glue" not only to integrate systems together, but also to integrate people together with systems and people together with people. This can also include the systems and people belonging to your suppliers and clients. In this way all of the components required to conduct your key business processes can be made to work seamlessly together.
So, for example, if a customer makes a large order via your website and a credit authorisation is required before goods are dispatched and invoiced, the "magic glue" would detect the order on the website, send an authorisation request by e-mail or SMS to the appropriate person and, once authorised, extract the order details from the website and posts it in the correct format to the financial system for picking, dispatch and invoicing.
There are, of course, many more complicated business processes that incorporate both people and systems that the "magic glue" could handle, including both core operations and non-core processes such as HR and finance.
You’ve probably guessed that the "magic glue" is not so magic or elusive. This kind of translation and orchestration software is becoming well established, and many of our clients are taking the fundamental decision to use it as the central hub of their systems architecture. If you’d like to find out more about this, and particularly Microsoft BizTalk, then please feel free to get in touch.
William Morris
But it has certainly managed to confuse a number of businesses and consumers, with the VAT rate change of last year and the imminent return to 17.5% from January 1st 2010.
This whole episode has caused much debate – has the reduction had the desired effect and boosted consumer spending? - should the temporary 15% rate have been left in place for longer? – Should the rate in fact be increased to 20% or even higher to boost the government coffers? Whatever your views are, if you are in any line of business you may well have to make a change to one or more of your underlying systems.
Hopefully, if you are reading this in the run up to Christmas you will by now have thought this change through - if not you may have some work to do so that you are ready in time for the new year! Even if you have not considered this change yet and find yourself with a bit of unscheduled Christmas work in your Accounts system for example.... think of retailers (and hopefully you are not an unprepared one of these).... as retail customers are less likely to be patient with an apparent price change at the point of sale, if that change is an increase rather than a decrease. A year ago some retailers were caught on the hop slightly (not much notice given by the government to be fair) but at least any price changes then were in favour of the customer! Another interesting one is pubs and clubs serving VAT rated goods as New Year's Eve becomes New Year's Day. The same drink could instantly cost more as Big Ben chimes, although I believe that common sense has prevailed here and certain businesses have dispensation to only alter their prices from 6am on New Year’s Day.
As regards your own systems, think about the following;
Identifying which date the transaction relates to (the 'tax point' in other words) can also be problematical. No time to explore this here, however guidance is available from the HMRC website.
Anyway, if the above has not given you too much pause for thought, or too much work to do... think of the change from the consumer perspective and perhaps bring forward that major purchase to avoid the extra charge.
Niall
Software as a Service has been with us for a while now and the initial hype has died down (only to be replaced by Cloud Computing hype, although this is moving out of its own hype phase and has to start delivering on its promise now). But what is the real uptake of SaaS and is it the future?
SaaS has been hugely successful in some areas, and with good reason. The most obvious examples are email (Google, Microsoft) and CRM (SalesForce, Oracle) where the promise of low monthly costs per user and the removal of all the systems management work have appealed to a lot of people. Where a very standard, functional service is needed that doesn’t deviate too far from the norm, organisations (particularly SMEs) will turn to SaaS to avoid upfront capital costs and get a solution in place very quickly. Sometimes these decisions are also made to bypass internal IT departments who are perceived to slow down the procurement process.
However, SaaS, at least in its current state is not the answer to everything. Most offerings provide relatively little opportunity for significant customisation, and integration with other systems is often very difficult and/or limited. If your IT systems are meant to be a differentiator and give you competitive advantage, then SaaS doesn’t appear to be a viable option in many cases. Other concerns also linger about the privacy/security of data and the danger of SaaS providers disappearing – it isn’t much of a stretch in the current economic environment to envisage a SaaS provider suddenly stopping its service. If that happens then the backlash on all SaaS providers could be significant.
SaaS is clearly going to be with us in the future, but I think it’s a long way from being the future of all IT solutions. For more commoditised types of applications then it’s a great idea but I don’t think many companies (beyond the very small and straightforward) are going to be going 100% SaaS just yet.
Andrew
