If your CEO is like ours, he (or she) is always looking for additional revenue streams for the company and ways to free up IT resources.
We learned that fact after integrating Izenda into thousands of applications, and asking CEOs what their motivation was for integrating a third party Ad Hoc reporting solution. Here are their top three answers:
- Increased revenue from existing customers.
- Made their product more competitive against the competition.
- Satisfied their customer’s (or internal user community) requirement for better ad-hoc reporting.
As you might imagine, once these CEOs started seeing the benefits mentioned above, they always told us they were sorry they took so long to get going. So, why did they take so long? (See if any of this sounds like your shop.)
- CEOs and VPs of Product Development always try to determine where they’re going to get their biggest payback. In addition, they have to juggle the human resources and money available against the demands of their user base and customers. They mistakenly believed that putting out the fires of the day, would lead to customer satisfaction down the road. It’s the “Maybe now they’ll be happy” syndrome.
- Analysis – Paralysis. Analyzing the pros and cons to death and failing to commit to any strategy. Probably enough said here.
- The “not invented here” culture. Most companies we deal with are Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). Many of these companies believe they have to write all the software their company uses. “Hey, we have great coders here. I’m sure we can do it ourselves.”
Unfortunately, they fail to take into consideration three very important points:
- There is great amount of value to a company for sticking to its core competencies. Doing what you do best. Focusing on your core application suite and bringing in third party components to enhance that application.
- Opportunity lost revenue. Simply stated; How many deals are we losing, or how much more upset are our users getting, while we work internally on the add-on?
- The internal cost to develop and support the add-on product. You should be able to add up the cost of your development team’s salaries, benefits, etc., and make a sound financial decision on “buy vs. build.”
While this article may sound like a self-serving way to get you to try out Izenda, we believe this scenario is true for any third party add-on going into your application suite. We would really like to hear from you on your experience, and guidance to other users, on using third party add-on applications.