Archive
The Lost Art of Conversation
I’m concerned about the lost art of conversation. Not because I’m worried about dull dinner parties and tedious receptions I hasten to add. But, because I see it costing our clients time, money and competitive advantage. And that’s not something a good host can fix with wine and bon viveur!
In our role as digital product delivery specialists, we’re often asked to help organisations understand how they can improve working practice. Distilled, this quite simply translates to “how can we bring the right product to market faster?”. While there are many facets to the answer, a starting point must be an effective and efficient delivery team. Sadly, that’s often simpler in theory than in practice. The good news, however, is that one of the most common problems we uncover is very, very easy to fix. Communication.
Digital Product Management – Lean and Centralised?
Digital Product Management is a young discipline. It hardly existed only a few years ago – its functions typically falling under the remit of sales and marketing teams, project managers of course traditional product managers.
Now however it is recognised as unique and highly valued a discipline in its own right. Getting the digital product management mix right in a modern, fast moving and often highly transformative corporate environment is a regular topic of conversation with many of the organisations we engage with at Magic Milestones.
Better business the Web2.0 way
I just love “Web2.0”. It’s all about collaboration, sharing and niche expertise. It’s a world where everyone sticks to what they’re good at, helps others and just gets along great. But what, if anything, can we learn from the shiny new world of syndication, mashups and web services that will actually help us run businesses better?
Does every Cloud have a silver lining?
Infrastructure is expensive. Whether you’re a small IFA or an international financial services vendor it is likely your IT will devour a reasonable chunk of your annual budget. To make matters worse, Moore’s Law kicks in and you have to replace the whole shebang every 3-5 years. Ouch! But help is (apparently) at hand. The wonders of “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS) and “Platform as a Service” (PaaS) promise to banish the woes of managing, maintain and upgrading racks of tin in a data centre – your server estate at least, will be replaced with a nice friendly and cost effective solution out on the Cloud that is someone else’s problem and that you can put down to OpEx. But is it all too good to be true, does this Cloud really have a silver lining?
Is there a place for SaaS in Financial Services?
Run a Google search on ‘IFA SaaS solutions’ and you won’t find much. In fact, our last blog post on the topic currently comes up top of the pile! However, change the search to ‘SaaS solutions’ in general and you’ll suddenly find a whole world of diverse products and providers. There may not be much on the market-specific SaaS plate right now, but SaaS is big and will continue to grow. This is for two simple reasons: software as a service (SaaS) is easy to buy and it is (usually) cost effective. It’s also the most established of the Cloud Computing space ‘as a service’ solutions (more on ‘infrastructure’ and “platform” as a service in upcoming articles).
Back to school with web marketing
When I was at school, one of the things I enjoyed most was showing my friends and family what I’d done. Everything from English essays to artwork and stuff I made in design & technology lessons. Likewise, when I was racing bicycles, I loved having friends and family there to see me compete and (on occasion) win.
Showing was always much better than tell. Somehow, it doesn’t feel as good to rely on words to paint the picture. I guess the old adage is true: “seeing is believing”.
Parting the Cloud to SaaS
IntelliFlo launched its IFA offering back in 2004 and are held high by many as the first to bring a “software as a service” (SaaS) solution to the adviser market. They are seen as the SalesForce.com of the financial software world taking on a brave new business model: chuck out traditional software licensing and delivery and allow an IFA to sign-up to use their product on a monthly basis all hosted “in The Cloud”.
Alexander Craig's blog 