Driving in Brazil is a bit different than driving in America. It is perhaps hard to understand these differences until you have experienced them but I will try to convey a few of the differences and then make some unique comparison with how it is similar to Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress portal development project.

While they have many of the same laws for driving, in Brazil, they are not as strictwith enforcing these laws so driving is a bit like the wild wild west. Every one seems to be beyond impatient and they are pushing to pass everyone and often "get nowhere fast vs. someplace slowly". There is an unofficial imaginary lane for passing where you are just expected to get out of the way if a car is passing and coming at you head on (Big Trucks included and there are many). Not a place where you can win "The game of Chicken". The biggest violators are motorcycles since they seem to dominate this 3rd lane even on the curviest roads with the busies traffic and inhibited sight lines for oncoming traffic. Driving a motorcycle though can get you to your destination often in a fraction of the time than with other vehicles. Though there are many accidents most folks drive bumper to bumper and fearless to the consequences. The first time I road as a passenger in Brazil I never let go of the upper right handle and I felt incline to say a sincere prayer prior to getting in to any vehicle. My 7 year old son has two words for driving in Brazil; "impatient and maniacs".

In the world of web development I see several similar contrasting approaches to developing a web site and the same "maniac and impatience" type of behavior. Most folks are in far to much of a hurry and they too drive their projects fearless to the consequences. I often see folks burn up a lot of time and money going too fast with little thought of the impact or steps involved to make the best decisions. I know everyone else is in just as big of a hurry but making a fatal mistake will leave you frustrated on the roadside as others pass you by. Technology and globalization are moving forward in near chaos as folks are trying to latch on to where they want to be in the world of the web, what lane to travel on and which vehicle to drive.

One of the things I like about the not so recent trend to use content management systems such as Joomla CMS, Drupal or Wordpress is that these sites are dynamic and allow you to respond quickly in real time. Joomla! CMS in particular is very flexible and offers over 6500 extensions. While this is a great opportunity, if you run off like a maniac installing every cool widget and extension you can find this can create a big mess and leave you on the sidelines starting over or cleaning up a lot of garbage. Our Joomla CMS team has many of times been tasked with transforming Frankenstein into sleeping beauty and it is not often an easy or an inexpensive feat once the monster has been created and presented to the public. On the contrary, since this is Open Source code and a global community of developers have contributed so much already, you can build just about anything imaginable with less cost and in shorter development cycles.  Make sure though you think through the features that are most important and research the components you are using for compatibility and usability.

One thing that Joomla CMS and other Content Management Systems do is they allow you to progress  like the unofficial 3rd lane in Brazilian traffic to charge in front of your competitors by getting information presented quickly and dynamically. However, you have to be careful as you scoot through the windy roads and limited visibility so that you do not lose sight of making sure your portal is secure with proper upgrades and support. In other words "wear a helmet and be careful when you try to pass". One fatal mistake is to think you can just "turn on your car and drive without caution." Folks with the most successful Joomla Drupal or Wordpress portals realize that ongoing maintenance is part of the cost of doing business online and they budget monthly for technical or development support and proactive security maintenance.

Building your Content Management System and presenting your content is also still a bit like the wild wild west since doing business online is now global in nature and while the technology allows us to connect and interact with each other the laws and governance are still being sorted out. There are a lot of maniacs called "hackers" that are trying to "Game the system" and disrupt your initiatives. This past year alone hacker activity is reported to have increased over 600%. There are though a growing set of web standards to prevent this and to allow developers to respond to vulnerabilities quicker. One of the most encouraging aspects of working with Content Management Systems in general and particularly in the Open source community is an incredible sense of collaboration and cooperation.

In conclusion, there are a lot of approaches to driving down the road of success and getting the right balance of speed to market with the thoughtfulness of ongoing security and maintenance. If you combined this with careful planning it will get you further down the road with less cost and risk. You need to be aware as standards and technologies evolve so you can protect your online investment and continue moving forward at a reasonable pace and in the right direction. Do not let impatience or some other maniac on this ever changing road of technical chaos dictate how you should respond to the marketplace or present your content. Best in my book to remain calm, aware, responsive, thoughtful and move with cautious aggressiveness.

 

 

 

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Ahh it is siesta again...

I am working remote this month from our office in Brazil. One of the things I am growing accustom to here is siesta, which is a 2 hr break in the middle of the day from noon to 2pm. As an American, when I first experienced this I thought it was rather inconvenient since I was used to working through the lunch hour and it always seemed to be when I was able to get the most done.

Well it has taken several trips here now for me to get used to it and rethink my planning of a regular work day. However, what I have found is that it can actually help me be more productive with less stress and better insight since the "down time" time allows me to recharge a bit and enables me to be able to jump back to my work with new perspective and fresh ideas.

When I think about this concept I can not help but notice how the same mindset or process can be effective with Project Management. The tendency with most projects is to charge forward and get everything done in as short of a life cycle as possible and then transition into maintenance mode. While there are many advantages for this methodology there is also value in shorter spurts of forward progress with brief cooling off or reflection periods to help you gain perspective and evaluate where you are and where you are going. This can reduce the potential for mistakes and add more insight and creativity to your outcomes.

Of course every project is unique and there is not a cookie cutter solution for every project.  There is value though in taking time in your process to reflect in a way that is not under intense pressure for a deliverable.

There is a old saying about "not seeing the forest through the trees" and it is my opinion that a little "Siesta" at appropriate times in your project life cycle is a good idea for seeing both with clarity.

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CRM Timeline tells how we made it to Social CRM

This past week I was contacted to review a CRM Timeline. This timeline covers many of the high points in the evolution of CRM and is very interesting for a general overview of the evolution of CRM (Know more now as Social CRM) as an industry. One of the recommendations I made was to include the open source movement for CRM that really began with the SugarCRM project. Since projects like Joomla! CMS have help to pave a way for open source and the adoption of Social Technologies for small businesses so too has the branch of SugarCRM called info@hand and it's powerful integration with the Joomla! CMS. This combination is an ideal solution for Social CRM or as we affectionately call it "Social CRBM".

Discovery of the Info@hand CRBM

Our company CNP Integrations jumped on this bandwagon of "CRBM" (Customer Relationship Business Management) early on just as Sugar was gaining momentum and generating buzz in the open source community. After using the Community edition of SugarCRM we found that it just did not have a complete solution so we started exploring other options that were more inclusive. It was then that we found Info@hand CRBM which  has more features useful for business management rather than just salesforce automation and it seemlessly integrated with Joomla! CMS.

Since this new CRM system integrated with Joomla! CMS as a frontend customer portal solution and I was already on my was as an evangelist for this amazing new platform, I quickly grabbed Michael Whitehead's book "Implementing SugarCRM" and a few others including Paul Greenberg's' "CRM at the Speed of Light" and I set out to become "An Expert". Well the journey I found to be quite significant and I will never gain the depth of knowledge a CRM guru like Paul Greenberg has, but I was able to become a power user of the info@hand CRBM platform and found that our experience was worth sharing with other customers to offer extended support as a VAR partner for the info@hand CRBM. Support for Info@hand was a natural addition to our portfolio of services to the Joomla! CMS community since we already had this expertise.

One great integrated platform is a lot to keep track of

Well that was four years ago and though the CRM timeline introduces the birth of SugarCRM they did not include the birth of the Info@hand CRBM solution in this evolution as they rightly should have.  Folks like Paul Greenberg have been keeping track of the massive complexities and ongoing growth and transitions of the overall CRM industry while we have been closely involved in the specific evolution with info@hand CRBM as a VAR partner.  Believe me, I do not know how Paul does it since we have our hands full with just staying on top of one mighty platform and what we believe it is by far the best choice for small b2b and b2c businesses that use Joomla CMS!.

Keeping Pace and Stride with the big players

We have watched a significantly smaller well focused development group at the Long Reach Corporation combined with a dedicated user group and partner network surpass products with big money behind them.  While many of the CRM platforms like Salesforce which have significantly deeper pockets both for   development resources and marketing, the Info@hand CRBM platform has been steadily growing in features functionality and stability to offer a competitive edge for features but significantly lower cost of entry for small to midsized business enterprises. With the gigantic buzz around Social technologies and "Social CRM" Joomla was the perfect marriage for info@hand since Joomla Now has one of the best platforms for building out Social Communities.

Time fly's when you are building any business

This has been a fast passed path and keeping up with the comparisons has been a rather time consuming process we are not always able to keep up on documenting but every time we do we see Info@hand clearly taking strides over their peers.   In our own info@hand timeline, we have seen the evolution of integrations with QuickBooks, Microsoft Outlook, and eCommerce transaction management (Sync with Virtuemart Shopping Cart System for Joomla! CMS) with inventory, shipping, and ERP functionality. Integration with DimDim conferencing and GoogleDocs, Calendars, event, email campaign and subscription management and much more...  Perhaps someday we will have the spare time to gather our own timeline and present it but for now we are just happy this platform delivers such robust features with a fraction of the overhead costs.

"Surf's up"

One day very soon this best kept secret of the Info@hand CRBM with Joomla! CMS is going to catch the right wave in popularity with the big boys and we will see small businesses flocking the call out of "Surf's up for Social CRM"

Drop buy http://www.learningcrm.com or http://www.crbm.net or http://www.joomladesignservices.com to dig into this a bit more.

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Education for corporate training and elsewhere is a big topic these days. Funding cuts in our schools and the high turnover in the workplace combined with the need to tighten our belts and refine business processes are all waking folks up to the value or improved and quality training resources.  It is proven that education in the workplace will improve efficiency and productivity and help your company or remain competitive in a global economy. These key factors are all opening the door for the Joomla Content Management System with Learning Management capabilities.

There are a lot of options for Learning Management but two top contenders in the open source world are Moodle and Joomla with the various 3^rd party Learning Management System (LMS) extensions.  There is even a "bridge" between the two systems that allows you to use both Moodle and Joomla for the same user base. CNP Integrations is one of the early adopters for this bridge on our http://www.givetoed.org  project where we integrated a host of tools for K-12 educators, parents and community leaders to collaborate and engage in conversations about the future of education and related topics.

There are a lot of tried and true systems used for traditional learning institutions and larger organizations but these are often very expensive solutions to implement. Until recently this has made them far out of reach for the small and mid size business or non-profit organization. What we have found is that by leveraging Joomla CMS (http://www.joomla.org) with LMS capabilities or Moodle (http://www.moodle.org) or combinations of both we can help deliver a reasonable scale of features and student tracking capability that puts the power of Learning Management Systems at the fingertips of small and mid-size businesses and non-profit organizations. Not only is this technology platform much more cost effective but all of the curriculum and training resources that we develop can be designed to be SCORM compliant and thus can be integrated with virtually any other SCORM compliant Learning Management System should your needs ever outgrow the platform. However, since the technologies continue to improve and scale with new features you may never need to look elsewhere.

If you are a small business training can help you deliver your products more consistently and position your company to be able to scale up or down to meet the needs in the marketplace and protect you from risk in employee turnover. If you are a School or educational institution it is important to segment your user types and track student progress.  If you are launching complex business tools on the web you need to empower your users to get the most out of your technology investments.  What this means is that utilizing the capabilities of Learning Management can offer benefits to businesses and organizations of many types and range in size. It also means that this may be a wise investment that can have short term and long term payoffs.

Since most of our team has backgrounds in education and training there is a lot of passion in our company for incorporating professional development and training as part of the value in our service offerings. We will be dedicating the Month of September as "Training Month" at CNP and moving forward you will see a lot more from us in training and curriculum development for educational products and services. We hope the articles and information that we present will generate conversation and help us find creative ways to help you engage your customers and better train your workforce using many of the cost effective solutions that we support.

If you would like to have a demonstration or more information of any of the Joomla based learning management solutions or training we can offer, feel free to contact us so we can help you assess if what we offer will fit your needs.

Additional information can be found at: http://www.joomladesignservices.com, http://givetoed.org and http://www.learningcrm.com

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I was reading "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu last night. This text has been a popular classic for developing strategy for business and rightly so since being competitive is often much like a battle in war. I was struck by one of the passages in the book that read "without deception you cannot carry out strategy, without strategy you cannot control the opponent ".

I appreciate the brilliant insights in this book and I do not mean to take this out of context here but there are many interesting thoughts revolving around this concept in modern business and I must challenge it as a sensible approach in the current global marketplace. Though a brilliant strategic mind Sun Tzu had for war and battle, I cannot help wondering what this author would have written considering the reality of social media and a flattening world economy as it relates to customer relationship management.

Strategy for Social CRM

My first thought around strategy for Social CRM is that we must never consider the customer as the "opponent" or someone you should be out to conquer. The reality is that collaboration and adding value to a mutually beneficial relationship has far more power than any divisive approach. Since customers now have access to so much information and public opinion, they can easily see through smoke and mirrors. With all of the mistrust in the geopolitical marketplace, consumers are hungry for a more personal and accountable relationship with you and they are taking more time to carefully pick who they will do business with. You must make customer experience your top priority and actually care about what you are delivering and how you are delivering it.

• Competition is global and crosses many international boundaries yet to be defined.
• There is also more and more aggregation of data which will only continue to offer more transparency.
• We have gone through a phase with technology automations that were not always used effectively and this has turned many folks in search of more personal connection with their venders and suppliers.
• Clumsy use of phone prompt systems, email auto responders, web sites that only allow you access via email or a ticketing system and yikes "Robo Calls" all have left a taint of frustration with many folks who want to buy your products or services.

If you can use technology innovations in a way they remains transparent and effortless, only then can these tools  make a difference in building your customer relationships. Make your customer appreciate the value they bring to you, be honest and care about giving or providing something they can truly benefit from and you can gain their loyalty and trust. Chris Brogan co-authored a book called "Trust Agents" where they devote a good portion of this book exploring this very concept. I highly recommend it.

People want to talk to people

One of my common rants in circles of discussion regarding social technologies is that people want to talk with other people not technology, so if the tools get in the way of the conversation they take away value from the relationship and if they empower more conversation and engagement then they add value. Take facebook for example, which I choose to use personally rather than professionally, as long as this helps me keep in touch with my friends or family and can nurture existing relationships it is a useful tool but it can never become the relationship itself since I alone hold the responsibility for that. If the technology went away I would still have the responsibility with these relationships. The difference though is that these kinds of tools can really help you manage more relationships and as long as you do not lose sight of the quality and priorities with your relationships.

Dependency with perspective

I suppose it is ok to be a little dependent on the tools over time. As a guy that helps companies implements these tools into their web programs yea... sure get addicted, it is good for business. If you use them more they will only offer a greater positive impact as long as you keep them in perspective.

Trends in the industry are telling us that people now get it when it comes to social media and as we see the gap between social networking and customer relationship technology systems lessen we will not only see more folks using them in new and exciting ways but they will grow more dependent on these socially aware CRM tools. Competition will transform more often into collaboration and we will all benefit from the new social culture that it creates.

"15 people fast" or "300 people strong"

For example our small but mighty company is made up of a group of specialists. Each adds value to the bigger picture of meeting the needs and satisfaction of our customers. We are globally dispersed and connected through our web based tools. This allows us to function actually more efficiently than a more traditional business all housed from a single bricks and mortar location. Since we are able to draw upon labor pools in areas with specialized skills and varied economies we are actually able to provide greater expertise with efficiency and added value to our customers. Our application of Social CRM also keeps our overhead lower and thus passes even more value to our clients. In addition, having Social CRM as a foundation for our operations and delivery infrastructure we can scale up or down to meet growing demands or downturns in the marketplace without passing on additional costs or losing any of our core knowledge assets.

Collaboative cultures built on trust

One of the things more and more companies are realizing is that you have to build a collaborative culture and sensitivity in your workforce of care and respect for your customers. It is especially important and possibly more challenging to achieve as more and more folks will be working from home, logging into their companies Social CRM system, putting on a head set and joining into a online "Go-To-Meeting" type collaboration session. In the end game our customers are people that want to connect to people. In general I think they/we all want to collaborate and contribute and not be dominated or controlled and all of the rules of human nature regarding us being creatures of social habit apply.

It is a brave new world out there in the Social CRM space and plenty of tools to distract us but we shall all have to remember "There is Art in Truth" if we want to win the hearts and minds of our next generation of customers. Building trust and loyalty are the most important factors of any successful relationship.

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