By David Bicknell
A recent blog asked whether businesses need the IT department when it comes to purchasing cloud services for business units. After all, the piece suggested, the Internet is all about eliminating the middleman from the transaction. https://www.infosecisland.com/blogview/15280-Informal-Cloud-Buyers-A-Growing-IT-Problem.html
The same argument could apply to non–Cloud apps where SMEs are increasingly providing turn-on-a-sixpence like agility to deliver apps and end-to-end solutions to business units, by-passing internally-focused IT departments that look cautious, defensive and too eager to pull up their ‘it’s not strategic’ comfort blanket.
In fact, ‘informal buyers’ make five times as many software buying decisions as the IT people who are supposed to be in charge, according to Forrester. According to a Q4 2010 Forrester survey, 69 percent of 3,000 business managers reserved part of their operations budgets to buy tech services directly, rather than through IT.
Faced with IT’s frequent intransigence in embracing new innovative solutions provided by SMEs, and citing their need to move quickly and with agility, business units are insisting that they want end-to-end solutions that truly understand business problems and solve them, meeting immediate business needs today, not in six months’ time once IT has a done another strategic review.
Buyers want to take advantage of the rich innovation offered by specialist SMEs who probably understand the business’s needs – and what’s more, relate to it – far better than the internal IT department, which too often understands technology, but not often enough, its own business.
Those specialist SMEs include Mvine, which gives business people all the tools they need to work in partnership across corporate boundaries, productively and securely. Indeed, Mvine is finding that increasingly the business is not looking for IT-driven point solutions with a technology-led tag, such as collaboration, but a flexible, end-to-end platform that understands and speaks the business’s language, while delivering on the business’s multiple requirements, from document management to business intelligence. This approach facilitates effective communication and collaboration with customers and enables closer engagement with both partners and employees, outside the corporate silos, but still inside a secure, trusting environment. In the insurance world Exvine is attracting interest amongst business executives who quickly grasp the flexible, end-to-end capabilities of the platform and are impressed by the speed of deployment, usually only 4-6 weeks from concept to full production system. The rapid implementation, thanks to Cloud delivery, and flexible design features are proving to offer a refreshing alternative to traditional IT delivery approaches, which have often been slow and costly.
Mvine’s latest innovation, 6.0, available to both Mvine and Exvine customers, provides a number of feature enhancements including compatibility with new technology such as tablets, improved search capabilities, data exports to Outlook, the creation of sales reports, security switches, multi-chapter video enablement, improved image quality and digital assets and event functionality.
What Mvine is now offering is a vision for the future of social business, creating a rich data store on companies and people, complete with email, videoconferencing, telephony and links to social media such as LinkedIn and Twitter that weaves a tapestry of relevant corporate communications including recent events, conversations, video, company updates and pictures: an interactive database of information and communication to replace the static spreadsheet. Mvine enables employees to get to know each other better, without exposing the organisation to the risks of social networks. It’s local , not social networking.
And because business intelligence is now so important to companies, customers can create reports of what their users are doing with the site in real-time. Information created, detailing data such as age, gender, frequency to the site, downloads, location, job function, can then be used to produce reports and help target marketing campaigns and generate sales leads, providing a bespoke service to customers and intelligent approach to understanding your user base.
The Mvine platform also has the capability to pull in and harness a wealth of data from physical appliances and fixtures, such as light fittings and plug sockets, entering this information ‘from the Internet of things’ into the platform’s BI tool for a widening list of uses, from environmental purposes through to practical maintenance enquiries. Such pure data, duly tuned or distilled so that extraneous ‘noise’ is filtered out, is the currency that enables organisations to make better business decisions.
Why is all this so important? Because in future instead of pockets of knowledge, companies will have one central nervous system that unifies every piece of corporate information and fundamentally changes how companies do business, unlocking the vast amount of information generated by everyday operations and making it instantly available. These ‘Activity Streams’, as Gartner calls them, humanise every business process inside a company, adding a social layer to data and opening up real-time collaboration.
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