|
We understand small business budget's is tight, and we provide tools
that offer great value for money. We will work closely with you
to understand your objectives and devise a plan where your priorities
will be balanced against the efforts, so the highest returns will
provide the best visibility within your business. Most development
efforts fail due to poorly defined objectives.
Some of the tools we have developed that can add a great value
to small businesses:
Intranets
Intranets are a great tool to provide a centralised point of access to different
parts of the organisation. They can be small and contain only lists of commonly
used documents and a telephone book, or can be very sophisticated catering for
needs of different groups within the organisation.
Intranets offer an identity to the company, providing a common look. They can
easily grow, and become unmanageable, therefore the challenge in creating ownership,
and a clear steering into its real objectives and business' drivers.
Roadmaps
Roadmaps capture the knowledge of knowledge workers translating
repetitive tasks into a standard way of performing a job, like a
recipe. This process facilitates maintenance, enforces quality control,
and creates a robust audit trail. As an example, rocess roadmap
stages may be mapped for different types of projects, clients, or
contract values. Personalised Roadmaps are also a great way of sharing
information among team members and be used as an online repository
for project information.
Online Documents
Online Documents allow large word documents to be viewed in a usable html online version. You can browse through the online version created for a environmental report. The original report was over 10 MB, whilst the online pages are at the most 50 kb.
Interactive forms
Online interactive forms can save paper, and more importatntly
time while enforcing quality control. Forms can encapsulate your
company's business rules for request submission and keep an audit
trail about submitted information. Once the information is submitted
and captured in databases, it can be re-used and reported for different
audiences and timeframes.
Workflow
Workflow can be defined as a technology to route events from one task to another,
collaborating in getting the work done. The original work item may be merged with
other work, transformed, or routed to another workflow.
The simplest workflow example is a form that requires user to provide details and
then needs to be submitted. Action then needs to be taken upon the form submission.
The workflow system needs to ensure that:
- correct information is being submitted;
- correct action is being taken; and
- correct people are being requested to participate in the process.
Identity management (IDM)
Everyone seems to be talking about personalisation, but the first question that
needs to be answered is: do we know the person we want to deliver personalised content
to? Most small businesses maintain separate systems to collect and maintain directory
information such as:
- Phonebook or white pages
- Email
- Human resources (HR)
- Logon
- Helpdesk
- Workflow
- Custom applications
Identity management solutions aim at providing an integration level between all
these applications, identifying authoritative sources and information consumers.
As an example, HR main maintain the bulk of directory information, and often claim
to be the source for telephone related information and email. Chances are that the
white pages information is normally maintained by some PABX system, and email by
IT. Wouldn't it be great if instead of having all these systems maintaining redundant
information they shared the information. An IDM system would collect PABX information
and distribute it to all others systems that use this information, eliminating redundancy
and ensuring the information is up-to-date.
Authentication
Helpdesk normally report their number one issue being username and passwords.
Small custom application tend to sprout like mushrooms. Often times the applications
will have their own authentication mechnism, consisting of a username and password
stored in a database. This means more usernames and more passwords to be maintained
and be remembered. Using the current login should always be an alternative, such
as Novell NDS, or Microsoft active directory for example.
|
