BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
FEATURE: BUSINESS SUPPORT
Consolidation is the Key to Improving Productivity The world is changing, we are all expected to keep track of a whole lot more information than ever before. Note that I didn’t say memorise. Instead of remembering all the information necessary to do our jobs and keep our lives on track, we leave it to apps and systems to do the remembering for us. All we have to do is remember where we put which piece of information.
As we all know from the hours we spend throughout our lives searching for our keys, this isn’t the easiest thing in the world. To make this even more difficult for ourselves, we tend to silo information in different places, because some new tool or app or gadget is really good at storing the one type of data, but can’t store another, so then we have to get another app. There are so many tools out there, just waiting to help us organise one aspect of our lives, that we are always in danger of becoming overwhelmed by them. When you boil it down, we all forget to do things from time to time, but now we are forcing ourselves to have to hunt in more and more places to figure out exactly what it is we’re supposed to be doing. And then we wonder why productivity—that business buzzword—is falling.
14
The solution to this, in my mind, is simple: consolidation. Instead of having all your tasks divided up between your flashy, trendy apps, find a product that will allow you to keep the majority of your business data in one central location.
This means that, if one of our developers needs to find a piece of information about one of their projects, they’ve really only got two possible places to look: our CRM system and our internal messaging app. If it isn’t there, they know that it has to be in the code itself.
Don’t get me wrong, you’ll never find a system that will do everything, but by finding something that will store 80% of your data and 90% of your processes, you’ll end up with a much more organised and streamlined team.
When you think that this information could instead be split across specialised task, project, contact, or document management tools, in addition to an internal messaging system and email, having three places sounds like a win to me.
For example, we use OpenCRM to manage just about every single thing that our business does: sales process, project management, technical support, HR, marketing campaigns, etc. But there are things that it doesn’t do: it’s not a phone system, it isn’t an internal chat product, and you can’t screenshare directly from it.
Yes our world is more complex now and yes this means that we all have to be masters of a variety of tools, but there’s no reason to make our lives more difficult by silo-ing information into half a dozen systems.
That’s not really a problem though, because it covers about 80% of our business processes. I then spent about six years finding a product to manage all of our communications and screensharing, bringing us to around 90% of my team’s daily activity being covered by two systems. The other 10% of our tasks are managed in dedicated products that are individual to their job role, i.e. accounting software, programs for writing code, etc. But even so, the specificity of these systems mean that most people only have between three and four places to look for the information they need.
To talk to a member of the OpenCRM team about how CRM software can benefit your brand, just call 01748 473000 or visit the website: www. opencrm.co.uk.
Graham Anderson, is the CEO and founder of OpenCRM, one of the UK’s leading customer relationship management systems