Get Customizable Web-Based Software and Get Productive: a 7 Tip Series

April 15, 2009 at 3:20 pm · Filed under Distributed Work, QuickBase, Sponsored Post, Web 2.0

We (Intuit QuickBase) recently wrote up some thoughts, compiled into a white paper, on seven ways you can improve team productivity with customizable web-based software. The first of those tips is shared below.

For the rest of them – about two a week - please visit the QuickBase blog and click on the industry trends category. Or, if you’d like to get all the tips now, click here to request a copy of the white paper – “7 Ways to Optimize Project Team Productivity: Using Customizable Web-based Software to Your Business Advantage.”

Tip #1 - Stop the “spreadsheet shuffle” and start working better – together

There’s an old saying: “When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” For many companies, the spreadsheet is the hammer they apply to any project. And just as a hammer is a poor way to measure dimensions or cut wood, the spreadsheet – though familiar – introduces more project management problems than it solves when you’re working with a team.

When you and your colleagues do the “spreadsheet shuffle,” your team choreography descends into chaos. Without a centralized location for all your project information – a place where individuals can update their pieces of information in real-time- you don’t have one version of the truth. Instead you’ve got spreadsheets and emails travelling around and potentially people working off of inconsistent/old information.

Spreadsheets hurt productivity in several ways. You waste time reconciling multiple document versions. There is a lack of adequate tracking and audit tools which make it nearly impossible to find errors. And, spreadsheet applications haven’t been designed to encourage and facilitate communication: they have no features for tracking progress, prompting activity or alerting team members to deadlines.

Emailing spreadsheets is a project work-around, not an effective means for managing work. The best alternative is an online project management application that centralizes project information, provides all team members with secure access to the information they need—whenever and wherever they need it—streamlines data gathering, tracking and communication, and makes it easy to stay on the same page and easy to monitor progress.

We recently asked a few QuickBase customers how they put a stop to the shuffle - check out their comments here.

One example: “We used to send these big spreadsheets as email attachments to the whole department on a reoccurring basis. Besides clogging up everyone’s inbox, we usually ended up referring to different versions once in a while, adding to the confusion. Another reason that pushed us into a better solution was that IT decided to strip our macro-based Excel files from the emails, sending us scrambling to find a solution around that new ‘policy’.”

Pretty neat, we think, right?

QuickBase

Two Webinars for the Coghead Community

March 2, 2009 at 1:57 pm · Filed under QuickBase, Sponsored Post, Web Apps, Webinar

As Bill Ives mentioned in his previous post, the QuickBase team has put together a special offer for Coghead ‘refugees’ left in the lurch after Coghead and SAP decided to shut the existing service down. We think, of course, that QuickBase is the best online database out there, and can solve the needs of both Coghead customers and Coghead partners.

I know moving to a new solution is a tough process. To help with the transition, we are going to host two webinars focused on giving partners and customers the information they need to make the best decision for their business.

For Partners - we are doing a webinar on Tuesday March 3d, 2009 at 10am (PST)

For Customers - we are doing a webinar on Thursday March 5th, 2009 at 10am (PST)

For more information, and to sign up for the webinars, please check out our blog post  - http://quickbase.intuit.com/blog/2009/02/26/quickbase-to-present-to-coghead-community/

QuickBase

“Closing the Last Mile”: An apps marketplace for small business

November 18, 2008 at 3:52 pm · Filed under QuickBase, Sponsored Post

If you’re a small business today, the breadth and quality of software and services available to help you run your business is limited. You just don’t get the same offerings that are available to the Fortune 1,000 crowd. Why is this? It’s just too darn expensive. We hear about infrastructure companies that have a “last mile” problem – as in – I can get the data to the town but getting it into each individual home is too costly.  Well, the same thing is true for the small business community.

Three things scare developers away from serving the small business market:

1) Price sensitivity: The value of a dollar is not created equal – small businesses need to see value and need to see it fast! Offerings will need to be priced accordingly.

2) Making it work with other apps: Software providers selling to the enterprise can send in swat teams to perform backend integration – who can afford to do that for a 5 person business?

3) Customer “reachability”: With roughly 26 million small businesses in the US alone, the market potential is enormous, but how do I reach them without a national TV campaign or shelf space at Staples?

We’ve seen this dilemma played out over the last few years. Millions of Small Businesses wanting more choices that fit their needs. And thousands of developers with expert domain knowledge on how to solve their needs, but no confidence they can do it and make a return on their investment.

Enter the Intuit Partner Platform – matchmaker extraordinaire, we believe. By leveraging the roles we’ve played in serving millions of small businesses with our own technology development over the last 25 years, we’re in a unique position to bring these two groups together. So how does it work?

For Developers: We offer a Platform as a Service that allows them to quickly and easily build a Software as a Service (SaaS) application for specific small business needs. We host the application/service, take care of the billing, user management, and much of the other stuff that makes SaaS expensive for the developer. In addition, we offer the developer one-click data integration with an SMB’s back-office – which is almost always their QuickBooks data. We handle the data synchronization, security and storage of the data, and free up the developer to apply their expertise to solving the customer’s problem. And lastly, we put their app in a marketplace and drive traffic through our marketing channels. We have 25 million employees in our QuickBooks customers and some good experience reaching the SMB market.

For Small Businesses: They get a single marketplace to discover and use a wide array of applications to help their business — and they can be confident that these new apps and their data is on a platform they trust.

So how does this all come together? Here’s an example: yesterday Universal Mind launched an application on the platform that allows small businesses to geographically visualize their customer data (check out this CNET story on the news). The app brings in a company’s customer data from QuickBooks and allows a small business to manipulate the data to glean valuable business intelligence. With map overlays of census data such as median house-hold income, SMB’s can now be far more intelligent in their business decisions. (Where are my best customers coming from? Where should I consider expanding? etc…)

Technology like this was previously unavailable to the small business community. But through the power of Software-as-a-Service, data integration, and customer accessibility, both the small business and the developer win, in our humble opinion.

QuickBase

Out of this Galaxy - Delivering Premium Customer Service Has Never Been So Easy

November 14, 2008 at 2:51 pm · Filed under QuickBase, Reviews, Sponsored Post

Luke Winter and Tristan Kampman bought Granola Galaxy 3 years ago when the company served less than 100 customers direct, mostly in its Northern California home market.  They liked the product, the brand and the potential opportunity for growth.

And grow it did.  Galaxy has added over 1,000 stores since Luke and Tristan showed up.  For the first two years, they used Excel to manage their customer information.  It didn’t scale and Luke nearly lost his mind trying to keep track of it all.  Out of frustration, Luke commented, “It doesn’t matter how good you are in Excel, it’s just not meant to be used as a database.” Yet so many people are using and abusing spreadsheets in this capacity. Luke and Tristan set out on a search for an appropriate database/CRM tool. Their requirements for the solution were that it must be customizable and flexible.

‘We considered Filemaker and Access; but knew it would require a lot of work to get started and we didn’t have that time and energy to put towards it. And Salesforce wasn’t quite customizable enough for our needs,’ said Luke.

So they decided on QuickBase and have been using it since January 2008 for their customer service management needs – specifically tracking the status of customers, where customers are located, what product the customers carry and how much they have in inventory at any given time, as well as other associated activities like in-store demo schedules and staffing. Recently Galaxy has moved their Purchase Order management to the QuickBase platform. Luke said, ‘QuickBase helps us provide a level of customer service and follow-up comparable to that of much larger companies.’

Even though Galaxy Granola is a small operation today, they are serving large customers across the US like Whole Foods, Wegman’s, and Albertson’s. They’ve got big plans for growth and that includes increased usage of QuickBase over time. As their business needs and processes evolve, QuickBase applications can evolve with them.

Luke commented, ‘QuickBase is a customizable online database that can be used for a variety of business functions. We really value the flexibility the product has to offer. QuickBase has a huge advantage there. We can adapt and make changes on the fly.’

QuickBase

Small business customer uses QuickBase to streamline work

August 15, 2008 at 12:59 pm · Filed under Collaboration, QuickBase, Sponsored Post, Web Apps

Last January, I sat down with the CTO of Zopa Inc., Rajesh Jayaraman to find out how he got started with QuickBase and how the company is benefiting from using it today. With just 13 employees, Zopa Inc., a small global business and pioneer in social finance, relied on QuickBase for project and task tracking at first, and has since grown its pool of applications to include partner management and customer support.

When we spoke, Rajesh had expressed that he wanted low maintenance, web-based software to keep everyone on the same page. He wanted a tool that was easy for people to use; but not so simple that it lacked in functionality. Once employees and partners took to QuickBase, the task of collaboration for everyone became far less intensive - from a time and effort perspective. Overall Rajesh felt as though work had become much more streamlined with QuickBase. Listen to Rajesh’s story here.

Just a few months ago, Rajesh also participated in an interview with IDC analyst, Judy Hodges. The IDC buyer case study summarizing the interview is a great piece for anyone considering SaaS to help run their business. If you happen to be a small business, the story is all that more pertinent. The study dives even deeper into how Zopa decided to purchase QuickBase and how they’ve become more efficient and productive since using the solution.

From a web-based applications vendor perspective, I found the first and last portion of the case study to be of interest – where IDC guides vendors on how to best serve small businesses. I’m a bit biased; but to me, it sounds like QuickBase is on the right track.

Download the case study.

QuickBase

Introduction and Welcome to the AppGap

February 11, 2008 at 2:25 pm · Filed under Enterprise 2.0, QuickBase, Sponsored Post

I’m Bill Lucchini, the VP and General Manager of Intuit’s QuickBase. All of us at QuickBase are proud to be sponsoring The AppGap blog, and are looking forward to being part of the conversation. At QuickBase we talk about the “Gap” that exists between emailing spreadsheets around and “Enterprise systems” that do everything and are “right for no one”. Today we have all gotten used to having things our way – whether it’s a Whopper with extra onions or a vanilla soy venti latte with a nutmeg twist. It’s time software followed suit and filled that gap so teams can work they want to without the pain involved in emailing spreadsheet or being forced to use a system that doesn’t work for anyone. I hope the conversation on this blog helps drive this issue forward.

As part of the launch of this blog we just hosted a webinar on the Future of Work with Josh Holbrook from Yankee Group, Jim Ware co-founder of Future of Work, and Steve King from Emergent Research and the Institute for the Future. The experience and perspectives they brought to the table made this a great conversation. Here’s the Future of Work broadcast and I encourage you to listen.

There was a lot discussed including a great section on the need for applications to adapt to the way people work – exactly what QuickBase is great at. The one topic I do want to comment on here is IT.

Josh quoted a Yankee Group survey of employees where they were asked if IT increased their productivity. 40% stated that IT neither increased nor decreased their productivity. How horrible! One interpretation is that IT just doesn’t matter in these organizations. Further, there was a recommendation to be productive even if it means going around IT and bringing tools into the Enterprise without IT’s permission or involvement.

My take on this is that the rapid change in technology that’s going on right now is an opportunity for IT to lead their organizations to greater than ever productivity. As Dion Hinchcliffe writes in his Significant workplace inroads for Enterprise 2.0? blog post, Enterprise 2.0 tools are finding success inside corporations and at QuickBase we see two kinds of IT teams:

• IT teams who are reacting by trying to stop the employees from adopting these tools
• Visionary IT leaders getting ahead of it and leading their companies to competitive advantage. Will Weider, CIO of Affinity Healthcare is a great example. He talks about ways they are using these tools in his Web 2.0 Favorites blog post. This is an opportunity and I hope IT will look at it this way.

With QuickBase we recognized that IT has a responsibility to the company to protect intellectual property and keep costs reasonable and therefore they still need some amount of visibility and control. Because of that, we launched our Enterprise Edition. Our goal with the Enterprise Edition is to continue letting business users implement solutions that are “right for them” while allowing IT the security controls and visibility to make sure they are doing their job. We’ve had great success with this balance between enabling innovation and creativity in business users and partnering with IT to provide an Enterprise-wide Team Collaboration tool.

I hope this blog will provide real-world value to you and that you’ll take away insights that will make you better at your job. It’s a topic we’re passionate about at Intuit/QuickBase so I hope you read, enjoy, and comment often - and listen to the podcast!

-Bill

QuickBase