My thought of the day.
Does technology give your company a competitive advantage? Think on that one for a bit. We’ll come back to it.
Yesterday I got a reply from an individual who said that he’d rather get a free application to manage customer support rather than pay for something that was integrated. This might make sense for his business, but then I got to thinking, why?
Most productivity tools that are available to the market place have been there for years. It’s rare for a really new technology to come out that blows everyone away. And when it does it makes money for the developer (normally) as opposed to the first few users.
So, no, technology can’t give you, as a consumer and user of that technology, any kind of long term competitive advantage. Maybe you can get ahead of the curve and be a first or second mover, but likely the technology is available to anyone, and just having the toolset is not enough.
Therefore, and this is very important, the evaluation of productivity tools should not be undertaken from a “what’s better” for individual tasks or operations, but how does it support your unique processes, which do give you advantage. Put another way, what does the technology enable you to do?
An application focused at a specific area may be right for you if it enables you to optimize the associated processes, without impacting downstream activities.
An integrated application may be right for you if it enables you to optimize the complete business process, without impacting productivity along the way.
Of course the CRM world is a great example of this. SalesForce.com vs NetSuite vs all the other CRM and ERP vendors.
Remember that for the “Best of Breed” approach there is a cost to integration. This might not mean developing a connection between two different systems, or buying addons, it might mean the cost of the human effort to move information, or to navigate multiple systems. Or there could be a cost in information being missed and lower customer satisfaction.
The final thing to keep in mind is that many processes and most stratagies live outside of technology. How you engage customers and partners, how you compensate employees, and how you communicate, amongst other things goes well beyond the tools you use.
Every business out there, even ones that sell the same products to the same customers, can have the same technology platform and still be completely different companies for the processes that really matter.
