August 20

In the earlier days of the PC software product business, there were lots of new ideas coming to market. Some of them were brought to the world with the creator's great excitement, only to be ignored or rejected by the marketplace. Within the industry, one occasionally heard sentences starting with "If the dogs won't eat the dogfood, ...". This gave rise to another expression, which I'll get back to shortly. But first, I want to relate some personal experiences.

The first of these happened in the early eighties during my tenure as the product development manager of a database management system for mainframe computers. These sold for a quarter million dollars per installation. We'd go to the semi-annual users group meetings, and we'd listen to user problems, listen to wish-list requests, and attempt to organize a consensus on what features to develop with not unlimited resources.

The picture came into focus in a rather unexpected way. At one point, it became clear that we couldn't track support incidents on scraps of paper any more -- we needed a bug-tracking system. We decided that our customer support group would build it, using our own database product.

Overheard in the halls a few weeks later: "It does what?!" A different perspective sunk in -- the customer's.

More recently, I was on a project on which we implemented a knowledge management and collaboration system using Microsoft SharePoint Portal. As program manager, I decided our team would use the product as the collaboration workspace and repository for the implementation project itself. At first, it was slick, useful, and effective. As we got further into it, the warts became more visible.

Which leads me to the other expression.... "We eat our own dogfood." We learned first-hand what really worked and what was troublesome. We came to empathize more with the target community. It lead us to make the product better. It lead us to make the work practices better. It lead us to make our training better. It helped us understand our users' problems more quickly, and it gave us more of a sense of urgency.

There's a certain satisfaction you get from knowing your stuff works, whatever it is. Use your own products and services. Test your own marketing, sales, and support. Pose as a prospect or customer if you have to. It's the only way to really know how your organization treats prospects and customers.

Our New Website

Well, we do "eat our own dogfood", and our website is a perfect example.

There are many ways to build a website. One way that gives the most control and flexibility is to use a tool like Front Page? or Dream Weaver? to create largely static HTML. That's how our last site was built and maintained. But that's not how, say, CNN.com is built. Can you imagine the frenzy of redesigning and testing every time news breaks?

Our old website became a business problem. I periodically publish newsletters or articles, and every time I did, I had to call my webmaster to insert the article in the library and put a splash on the home page. The problem? This costs money. Worse, it costs time, making it harder to keep my site current. Nice as it was, the website became an ineffective marketing tool.

The solution? A content management system. We're not CNN, but even for a small company, consider the benefits of setting the design themes once and inserting new content at will. This is Knowledge Management (KM) technology, and since we help our clients apply KM practices and tools to their business benefit, we thought we'd practice what we preach.

Our approach to this was the same as we apply at any client, only slower. Characterize what we need to do. Set a budget. Survey the available tools. Select and engage the vendor.

Our website is no longer static. We'll be adding material frequently, and we'll be adding a whole new section for my partner's financial management practice when his content is ready - without the vendor's help and costs. With one-time hints from the vendor, we expect our new site to score better with the search engines, hopefully making it a better marketing tool.

A fresher website that's a better marketing tool at lower operating cost. Business problem solved!

We'll be writing this up as a case study and publishing it on the site shortly. Of course, if you are interested in learning how we can apply this technology to your business benefit, please call us.

We invite you to visit our new website at http://www/AvatarSP.com. We'd love to hear your comments!

Recently Published

IndUS Business Journal published our article "'Customer Base Development' - Why It's Crucial" in the Feb 1, 2006 issue. While "CRM" has come to mean "systems", the article takes a broader view that includes people and process.

Our Services

Is your organization suffering from lack of technological support, or worse, from technology that obstructs more than it enables? If so, we can help.
Stephen E. Lipka, PhD
slipka@AvatarSP.com
(978) 440-844