One Drive for Business – Best of Both Worlds

We all know the panic of a catastrophic PC failure. “How can I recover all of my files?”

We’ve all experienced the struggle of replacing a computer. That nagging question that refuses to let you sleep at night: “Did I really get ALL of my files?”

Thankfully, technology has an effective answer to these issues: cloud storage. By storing all of your documents in the cloud, hardware failures and upgrades can be reduced to minor inconveniences, rather than guaranteed mental breakdowns.

While many vendors offer cloud storage services, Microsoft’s OneDrive for Business provides all of the benefits of cloud storage AND the support, security and reliability of Microsoft.

Let’s face it – it is pretty unlikely that any individual or business could possibly match the resources of Microsoft when it comes to security and reliability.

Considering a move to cloud storage for your user files? Curious about the benefits and pitfalls of implementing OneDrive for business? Contact Covenant, we can help answer your questions and facilitate your move to the cloud.

Top 5, no, 6 Real Reasons People Buy Dynamics CRM

It was suggested that we create a blog post listing the “Top Reasons to Purchase a Business Solution from Microsoft,” and, even more fun, the top reasons were provided to us – but we aren’t big fans, to be honest. These are all good marketing-speak, sure, but are the really real? Tell you what: you look at the list we were given, then look at our list, and tell us which one resonates more with you.

Here’s what we were given:

• It’s More Than Just ERP
• Helps You Work Better, Faster, and Smarter
• Looks Forward, Not Backward
• Gets You Up and Running Quickly
• Provides a Flexible Deployment Model
• Works the Way You Do
• Transforms the Way You Work and Connect
• Drives and Supports Your Business Growth
• Reduces Your Risk and Propels Your Business

Okay, maybe all those things are real, but are they as real as the list we’ve come up with?

1. Full integration to Microsoft Office, including – and especially – Outlook. No more getting customer-critical information locked in someone’s inbox. Cross-functional teams can become a reality when information is generally available from within a single CRM record.
2. Workflows that work the way your business works. No more modifying your business to match your software. Ugh. Who wants to do that, anyway?
3. Time formerly known as “business-idle time” – sitting in the car, in the restaurant, in the airport – can become mission-advancing time where notes, quotes, and more can be done from whatever device you have handy.
4. Those ordinary business maintenance things, like setting up a new product, new accounts, and creating quotes – things that are usually done in a variety of other systems – can be done in one system (Dynamics CRM) and then sent along to the other systems once completed.
5. It’s much more than customer relationship management; it can also work for you in Marketing, Customer Service, and ultimately can become the heartbeat of the business, and the only system you need to check to know the pulse – what is happening, in real time.
6. Bonus reason: the cost for Dynamics CRM is significantly lower than comparable solutions from other vendors, and it fully integrates with the entire Microsoft stack. I can’t think of a single reason – other than habit and maybe sunk costs – why any organization invested in Microsoft technologies would not be using Dynamics CRM.

So there you have it. Based on our experiences with a number of CRM implementations, these are the top five six reasons that the people, and the organizations for which they care, purchase Dynamics CRM.

Which list makes more sense to you?

Process Management is IT’s Penny Doubled

There’s a question many of us were asked when we were kids: “Which would you rather have – one million dollars, or a penny doubled every day for a month?” Remember?

The million dollars seemed like the most obvious answer – an easy choice – the low-hanging fruit. Little did we know that, with a little patience and a penny, we would end up, at the end of thirty days of doubling, with more than five times that million dollars, and even though my first exposure to that question was now decades ago, our culture’s current appetite for instant gratification has only increased.

When it comes to corporate budgets, the easy choice is always the one with the most immediate return. We’ve seen that projects with a payoff that takes longer than the current budget year are less likely to be approved. Whether in IT, or HR, Marketing, or any other group, dealing with long-term objectives can be difficult. In other words, take the million and leave the other four million on the table because we don’t have time to wait (the metaphorical) thirty days.

Because we solve problems with technology-based solutions, we’re going to focus on what is going on in IT. We’ve reviewed performance improvement research being done by Gartner, and it is absolutely clear that there’s a challenge with providing IT services that tie to business value – with a shrinking IT budget.

In fact, trending data shows that IT Operations budgets are expected to do more with less – a term you’ve heard for the past ten years (at least), but a challenge still apparently un-met. While many recommendations were offered at Gartner, one prominent recommendation is a focus on process management; the value delivered to the business by identifying redundant tasks, automating, measuring and improving them within your IT operations is absolutely quantifiable.

So… why aren’t more IT organizations going to the business with more process improvement projects? Why aren’t more of those projects being approved?

Consider this:

• The more that IT can intertwine itself with actual business process, the more inoculated IT is against budget cuts
• The closer that IT can get to customer-facing processes, i.e. improving the customer experience, providing additional services to customers, streamlining purchasing, returning, exchanging, and paying, the more obvious value IT provides to the business

Gartner provides an example of how IT can cut costs by automating process, and, while we all know “you can’t cost-cut your way to prosperity,” increasing the bottom line is always a good thing.

From Gartner: “Consider the potential savings of converting highly manual, approval-intensive, multi-touch activities like equipment requests and purchases into an automated fulfillment model. In this sample scenario, the time and labor from purchase request to fulfillment includes five hours of active management at a labor rate that averages $30 per hour. A single instance can cost upward of $150 per request. In an environment where 100 requests are processed per month, the labor cost can run in excess of $150,000 per year. When automation can reduce the required human interactions by 30%, $50,000 savings per year, per purchase instance is a reasonable outcome.” http://www.gartner.com/technology/research/business-process-improvement.jsp

What if IT could create multiples of this example – the metaphorical penny?

Something else to consider: process improvement can, in many cases, be done with software and services that IT is already providing to the business. Go for incremental improvement over time, and you’ll end up with a much better result.

All you have to do is start with a penny. We’ll help you double it, and double it, and….

Wax On, Wax Off – Scale Up, Scale Down

It’s all in the wrist. Really. Whether you’re shining up your ’67 Camaro (and learning karate in the process, of course), or you are the guardian of an army of web servers, the control is all in the wrist. How you ultimately exercise that control can make the difference in whether your competition pummels you or falls at your feet.

Maybe I should explain, huh?

My inspiration for this post comes from a case study I recently read about Callaway Golf. While the case study has a ton of great information in it, for me, the overall message is this one: Callaway was not providing a wonderful, brand-aligned experience to either its customers or its employees, and they chose to cure that situation by transitioning to Microsoft Azure.

There are some big numbers in this case study – “from $30,000 a month in co-location fees to $3,000 a month for the same number of servers in Microsoft Azure,” for example. However, the hard numbers are a relatively small part of the story. In their old world, when demand jumped (like right after a major golf tournament), there were issues. “It was difficult to scale our web hosting environment fast enough, and consumers and resellers could experience slow response times and even downtime.”

In the new world, the ability to scale up server capacity when needed, and scale it back down again when not needed, is a flick of the wrist and a click of the mouse. What Callaway has done for its IT group is fantastic – simplified management, faster deployment of new services, more control over IT assets – all of these combine to create a more agile IT environment and some significant hard cost savings. That is awesome.

While the case study talks a lot about tools and services, the somewhat under-played point is that the experiences for customers and employees have already dramatically improved.

That is the real bottom line. When decisions made in IT create a wonderful, brand-aligned customer experience, when IT impacts significant indicators like customer acquisition costs and retention rates, when revenues increase while costs are more controlled – these are the real wins.

Microsoft Azure, and all that goes with it, is the Crane Kick that you don’t want your competitors to know you have – until you’ve used it to beat them.  “If do right, can no defend.” Mr. Miyagi was a very wise man.

A-B-C Sales – More A and Less C Please

There’s an old rule-of-thumb in the sales business, and it goes like this: A-Time is what you get paid to do; B-Time is preparing for A-Time, and C-Time is everything else. In Sales, the A-Time is what you want more of – being in front of customers, and the C-Time, typically administrative tasks, is what you want to decrease. Easy, right?

Except it isn’t easy at all. We want salespeople to keep good notes about their sales calls, manage opportunities through every sales stage, participate in a proposal

It’s a Buyer’s World – How Do You Live In It?

Years ago, there was a clothing store in St. Louis with the tagline “an educated consumer is our best customer.” While the story of that tagline is not important to this post, the fact is that most organizations have been caught a little flat-footed by the rise of the educated consumer. Let me explain.

• 9 out of 10 business buyers say they will find you when they are ready to buy
• Buyers get 57% of the way through the buying process before they even want to talk to you

The traditional model has Sales involved from the beginning. When the customers realized they had a problem to solve, especially one that they perceived could be solved

When a Process is Improved, Everybody Wins

The client had a problem: getting approval for changes to standard operating procedures was taking weeks, and, in some cases, months. The process for making a change was lengthy, arduous, and partially paper-based, and clearly, it wasn’t working. Now you might wonder, why would anybody have an approval process like this, in this day and age, with all the technology that is available to help with that.

It happens more than you might think. Even though the documents were kept on the client’s SharePoint intranet, there was still a habit (and a hard-to-break habit at that)