Why does your organization use all these software solutions (sometimes 15 different systems)? Is it for cost reduction, efficiency or just to have it? In my opinion you should forget all these reasons, there is one important reason! You want to be a REAL-TIME enterprise, that’s the best thing that can happen to your company. I will explain more in this post.
What does REAL-TIME mean? Now, fast, instantly, speed and hurry up man! Depending on your business real-time can mean: seconds, hours, minutes or days. Weeks and months are not real-time for me.
I (and I think we all) got hooked with this real-time enterprise thing many years ago when the internet was already popular but not fully integrated into business yet. In these years we started to get used to faster delivery times and instant feedback on orders we placed (your credit card has been processed) and didn’t we all love it? Or better, still love it!I think we agree we all love it but it can put a lot of pressure on your organization. Real-time only works if you are well informed yourself and if others are informed by you. That means that If you deliver for example a product to a customer that you keep him up to date on the process. What you don’t do is saying “you can expect it to be delivered in two or three days”. The last one is old style for me. Do you expect your customers to be at home the whole day to receive a package? If yes, please read this post more in detail and adapt to the new Internet age.
Keep in mind that if you sell products, that many competitors already deliver the same product with a lower price and faster! Speed is really a key differentiator nowadays and better information is too. Instead of the 2-3 days delivery approach it would be very customer friendly to keep customers up-to-date on every change in the delivery process.
The same with support calls or requests for information, make them almost real-time and you will win! Don’t you hate it when you request information and it arrives 10 days later. I recently just wanted to buy something based on that information request and now the momentum is gone. In those 10 days, I as a customer, checked out some other web sites and found the same product with a better price and almost real-time delivery, a winner! And this also applies to your internal organization.
Why is all this related to SharePoint? Well, you can guess. SharePoint is a great platform to get informed yourself or inform people. The dynamic nature of SharePoint (easy to change) makes it a perfect candidate for the real-time enterprise. Deliver sites to your customers and use these sites to keep them up-to-date. And what do you think about internal customers or users, use the same principals over and over again.
My sample with the information requests is also related to internal use. I have been working at organizations where a new site request would take 10 days to process, ridiculous and it kills all initiatives.
Two of our initiatives perfectly fit into above scenario of the real-time enterprise, TunnelPoint and blogging. The first one to integrate external services like package tracking into your site and the second one to be up-to-date on colleagues and how they solved problems. It is all about information. Nobody will always expect real-time solutions but almost real-time communication would be great.
In SharePoint we have out-of-the-box tools to make everything more real-time. Things like: workflows, alerts, RSS feeds, Wikis, blogs and many other things that can help.
For me there is a simple but important rule “delay is away”. Never expect customers, both internal and external, to wait for your delay. Nowadays there are plenty of options and sure you have a fancy intranet with SharePoint but if you don’t use is it to its full capacity people go away and seek somewhere else.