Changepoint Acquires Daptiv, Adding Cloud PPM and PSA to OnPremise and Hosted Portfolio

Today Changepoint announced their acquisition of Daptiv, adding pure cloud solutions for professional services automation (PSA) and project portfolio management (PPM) to the Changepoint portfolio of OnPremise and hosted products. Changepoint, a long time TSIA partner and advisory board member, has been the top installed PSA platform for the last two years, according to my annual Global Technology Survey, and this acquisition will give them even more reach into PS, IT and development organizations wanting a SaaS solution.

PSA has three main modules: resource management, project management, and project accounting, and is used by professional services teams to automate the staffing of projects to maximize utilization rates, as well as providing dashboards so managers can track project status, costs and margins, identifying problems early enough to step in and correct the problem before the customer or project is impacted. PPM offers similar capabilities for IT and development project teams, matching skills and experience to projects, tracking project milestones and deliverables, as well as total costs for internal projects.

Changepoint’s PSA offering, available in OnPremise or Hosted options, is ideal for large organizations needing sophisticated capabilities. I’ve praised them in the past for their innovative approach to analytics, imbedding IBM Cognos into a release last year to deliver real-time management dashboards. However, with IT departments being downsized, more companies want at least one pure SaaS provider on the short list when evaluating PSA vendors, and Daptiv gives Changepoint a competitive edge, since they now can compete in deals for any deployment model.

Daptiv has been receiving good reviews for their technology, including a strong position in the Leader quadrant in the 2014 Cloud PPM Magic Quadrant from Gartner. Gartner even notes that Daptiv has been moving upmarket, with their average deal size now more than 200 seats, meaning they are competing with traditional players for large enterprise deals. Interesting, Daptiv has also imbedded IBM Cognos into their application for sophisticated analytics and dashboards, which provides a nice consistency across the Daptiv and Changepoint product lines.

Congratulations to the Changepoint and Daptiv teams on the deal! And as always, thanks to you for reading!

 

 

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Best Practices for Successfully Migrating to a New CRM Platform

Over the last few months I’ve received multiple inquiries from companies moving to a new CRM platform, asking for any best practices to make the migration efforts less painful, and to ensure a successful result. Most companies I talk to have 3-5 different systems in place, usually due to acquisitions and mergers, so they have an even bigger task of migrating everyone off disparate systems onto a single platform moving forward. Based on my experience working for CRM vendors, doing consulting projects as an analyst with companies implementing CRM, and many recent conversations with companies moving to a new CRM platform, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Change is hard. No matter how long you’ve had your old system, and how much people may grumble about using it, getting employees to embrace a new system isn’t easy. The #1 complaint from employees when I do system audits is “they shoved this new system down my throat.” This is one of those times when you should over-communicate with employees. Tell them why you are making the change. Give them demos of the new system. Buy everyone a mug or t-shirt with the new vendor’s logo. Do what you can to get them informed and excited about the new system before you start training them to use it. This will go a long way towards getting acceptance and rapid adoption for the rollout.

• Change is good. The biggest mistake I see companies make when they migrate to a new system is just replicating the old screens and process flows on a new platform. You need to take a very hard look at your legacy implementation and figure out what’s working, and what’s not. Do a real audit of the current system so you know what NOT to recreate in the new platform. I even recommend surveying employees about what they like and don’t like in the old system, which goes a long way toward getting them invested in a new system. Typically, a lot of fields and process flows were added over the years for one reason or another, and many of them need to be eliminated. Process analysis isn’t fun, but you need to look at all your customer-facing processes and identify where changes should be made. Implementing a new CRM system is a wonderful opportunity to change what’s not working.

• Minimize customizations. Popular CRM systems have thousands of customers, and their “out of box” capabilities and screens reflect the most common, i.e., best practice, approaches used by their customers. Try to stay “out of box” as much as possible. If you see areas—and you will—that need major customizations to meet your current processes, ask yourself if those processes are really providing competitive differentiation for your company. Maybe going with a common industry approach is the right thing to do. The other thing to keep in mind is that the traditional OnPremise CRM platforms are fairly complex, and customizations may require a highly trained system administrator with some programming skills. In newer cloud CRM platforms, customizations are very simple to do with little training. This is both a blessing and a curse. Because customizations are so easy, companies go crazy making constant tweaks, which can wreak havoc for users and degrade usability. Make sure you have a process in place to evaluate and approve every customization before implementing it.

• Prioritize integrations early in the project. I’ve done a lot of writing and inquiries about integrating CRM to other systems to enable “quote to cash.” There are many 3rd party applications you should consider integrating with CRM to streamline processes and avoid employees juggling multiple applications. Knowledge management is an obvious example, with integration performing automatic searches of the knowledgebase based on incident text and field values. PSA is another example, with integration to CRM automatically passing along new project information to the PSA system to enable resource and project management. The majority of the time, companies say, “Let me just get CRM up and running, and we’ll do the integrations in Phase 2.” The problem is, Phase 2 never happens. Hopefully, you have selected a CRM platform with integrations in mind, as each CRM vendor has a set of ecosystem partners with packaged integrations to minimize the effort required. Get a realistic estimate early in the project about time/costs to integrate each 3rd party system, and try to get as many integrations as possible into the initial project phase.

• Pick your implementor with care. I guess this goes without saying. But I’ve heard some horror stories about really bad implementors, so be sure you carefully evaluate their credentials and check several of their references. As I said previously, implementing cloud CRM may not require as much technical/programming skills as OnPremise CRM systems. A decade ago, most CRM implementors worked with big accounting firms, and you were assigned a project team with deep experience in process optimization and certified on the CRM platform so they knew every bell and whistle in the system. Unfortunately, today I see companies hiring some yahoo whose only experience was implementing a cloud CRM system for small non-profits or a 5 person insurance office, and they have no clue about “best in class” processes or any real depth of knowledge about the platform.

I know many of my readers know as much or more than I do on this topic, so please submit comments with any other suggestions you may have on what to do–or what to avoid doing–to make moving to a new CRM system successful. Thanks for reading!

Technology Trends: Complexity, Remote Support, Managed Services

Back in my Forrester days, in addition to customer service technology I also covered IT help desk and related tools. When I moved to TSIA I stopped having much visibility into tools developed for IT, but that is changing as external support organizations begin investing in many of the same tools IT departments use to automate problem management and streamline problem resolution with remote monitoring and diagnostic capabilities. As TSIA members grow more interested in this topic, we are starting to add new partners to our ecosystem with expertise in this area. One of those new partners is SolarWinds®, a provider of network management, system management and help desk automation, security information and event management, and database management. In preparation for an upcoming joint webinar on August 21st, “Managing the Complexities of Technology Support,” the team at SolarWinds interviewed me for a blog post about industry trends I’m tracking that may be of interest to the SolarWinds community. I thought I would share that interview with my readers to help give you an introduction to SolarWinds and the problems they solve. Here a look at the conversation I had with Vinod Mohan, Product Marketing Manager at SolarWinds:

Vinod Mohan: TSIA has published a lot of research about the rise of technical complexity and the impact it is having on enterprise support organizations. Could you talk about this complexity and some of the related drivers/trends?

John Ragsdale: In our support services benchmark survey, we asked the question: “How complex are the products your company supports?” The range of options include standard complexity, moderately complex, and highly complex. In 2003, less than half of tech firms defined the technology they sell and support as “highly complex.” Today, more than two-thirds of companies say their products are “highly complex.” This rising complexity has big impacts on support organizations. When I first started as a technical support rep back in the 90s, by the time I finished training and went live on the phone, I knew how to handle more than half of the problems I would encounter. After about 6 months on the job, I’d seen just about every problem customers could potentially have. Today, because products are loaded with features and customization options and run on a myriad of platforms, it takes years to really become an expert on a product. This makes the learning curve extremely steep for “newbies” just out of training. In addition to product complexity, technology environments are contributing to the complexity. Today’s hardware and software tools are so tightly integrated and interconnected that it is hard to identify a single failing component. As a result, we see average talk times and resolution times stretching out and first-contact resolution rates trending downward.

Vinod: Each year, you do a survey that tracks technology adoption and spending plans for tools used by service organizations. I know that remote and proactive support technology is one of the categories you track. Could you share some of your data around this technology category?

John: Currently, just over one-third of enterprise technology firms (37%) have remote/proactive support tools in place. However, just over half (51%) have budget for these tools in 2014-2015. Any time you see half or more of tech companies investing heavily in an application category, you know that an industry shift is occurring. In this case, service organizations are looking for opportunities to dramatically improve service levels without hiring more employees, and remote and proactive support tools can help achieve this. I expect to see the adoption numbers rising each year until the technology is as common as CRM, incident management, and knowledge bases. I really can’t imagine a technology support organization in 2014 functioning without remote diagnostics and monitoring.

Vinod: TSIA launched a new association discipline on managed services last year. Could you tell us TSIA’s definition of managed services and why you see this as a hot investment area for technology firms?

John: The easiest definition of managed services is “paid to operate.” Clearly, IT departments don’t have the staff they did a decade ago, but their hardware and software environments are bigger and more complex than ever. When a company is struggling to manage all the equipment and software in their environment, they often look to the vendor of that technology to assume responsibility for maintaining it, customizing it, upgrading it, and supporting it. In other words, the vendor’s managed services team becomes an extension of the customer’s IT team. TSIA sees this as one of the fastest growth segments for services, and more tech firms are looking to managed services to generate additional services revenue. While many companies are investing in cloud solutions to minimize their IT footprint, the truth is that many cloud solutions are best suited for smaller firms. Large companies need highly sophisticated enterprise tools, which usually means owning the implementation. Managed services allows a company to have a “best of breed,” on-premise implementation, but with none of the ownership headaches.

Vinod: Earlier this year you conducted a survey of your managed services members specifically around the technology they use to remotely support and manage customer hardware and software. What were some of your findings from that survey?

John: George Humphrey, head of our managed services research, will be publishing the findings from that survey in time for our October conference. But a sneak preview of the data shows that the majority of managed service operations have made heavy investments in technology to support remote customer equipment, including proactive monitoring of application and network performance, ITIL-compliant help desk tools for incident and problem management, configuration management databases (CMDB), and release and capacity management. This survey was what first brought SolarWinds to my attention, because half of the companies surveyed were using SolarWinds for application and network monitoring.

Vinod: We see great interest from our customers around improving the efficiency of support and ITSM when there is always a growing volume of tickets and a lean support staff. How big of a role do you think technology like SolarWinds plays in efficiency improvements?

John:  I’ve been involved in the support industry for more than 25 years, and I can tell you that more than any other department in the company, support and help desk operations are experts on “doing more with less.” We are often the first hit with budget cuts and downsizing, and unfortunately, many service teams are still being operated as a cost center. We hire smart people, train them well, and our processes are fine-tuned and compliant with industry best practices. In my opinion, it’s up to technology to “take us to the next level” for efficiency and productivity improvements. Over the last decade, tools proven to work within IT help desks are finding larger adoption among external customer support teams, and definitely within managed service operations. Flexible and customizable help desk software for ticketing automation can easily reduce the time to open and manage incidents. IT asset management is critical to know what equipment is where and who is using it. Change management can automate common, repetitive processes—from adding new users to upgrading systems—making sure every process is complete and accurate. Underlying all of this is knowledge management—capturing new information in a searchable repository so no one ever has to “reinvent the wheel” to solve a problem.

Vinod: You have conversations with companies about selecting and implementing remote support technology. Where does the ROI for this investment come from?

John: Remote and proactive monitoring technology has huge potential for lowering support costs, increasing service levels, and ultimately improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and repurchase. By identifying problems at a customer’s site quickly, support can fix the problem before it impacts end-users. This increases uptime and lowers the cost of supporting customers. In fact, we’ve had members present case studies at our conferences showing that customers who encounter problems and have them fixed rapidly have higher satisfaction and tend to buy additional products—knowing that you will take care of them no matter what happens. A surprising fact one large hardware company uncovered is that customers who experienced a fast resolution to a problem are actually more satisfied than a customer who never encountered a problem. And, we are seeing more companies leveraging remote support to generate revenue by offering this capability as part of a premiere support package.

Vinod: John, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today!

John: It has been my pleasure. Thanks for having me!

I hope everyone tunes in to our live webinar, “Managing the Complexities of Technology Support,” on August 21^st, at 10am PT. If you aren’t able to attend, register anyway. We’ll send you a link to watch an OnDemand version of the event, as well as a link to download all the presentation materials. And as always, thanks for reading!

TSIA’s 2nd Annual Knowledge Management Survey Is Now Open!

I am pleased to announced that TSIA’s 2nd annual Knowledge Management survey is now open! Knowledge management (KM) is one of the most frequent inquiry topics from TSIA members across service disciplines. In fact, 24% of my inquiries over the last year were about KM and self-service, which is pretty impressive considering I cover 24 categories of tools and services in my research.

Though adoption of KM tools is very high, most companies are not happy with their existing implementation. In my 2014 Global Technology Survey, KM received an average satisfaction score of  3.6 on a 5 point scale–hardly an endorsement of existing KM tools. As a result, over half of technology firms have budget for new or additional KM tools in 2014-2015.

Drivers for KM spending include retiring workers, mobile access, and increased interest in internal and external collaboration. TSIA’s 2nd annual KM survey examines core KM processes, tools and metrics, as well as emerging topics such as:

• Capturing lessons learned by consulting and protect teams
• Corporate culture regarding knowledge sharing
• Expertise management, unified search, and crowdsourcing content

This short survey will only take 5 minutes to complete. The survey findings will be unveiled at my Power Hour session at the Technology Services World Conference in Las Vegas on October 21, 2014, and all survey participants will receive a copy of the published survey results. Your responses will be kept confidential, and only reported in the aggregate. The survey will remain open until midnight on Friday, August 29th. Here’s the link to participate:  http://www.tsia.com/survey/2014-knowledge-management-survey

Thank you for your interest in knowledge management, and for your support of TSIA Research!