Lots of people will remember Donald Rumsfeldt and his description of military intelligence. The media ridiculed him for speaking goobledegook but I didn’t think that – I understood what he meant. Twenty five years selling software has taught me there is an awful lot of otherwise intelligent people who don’t know that they don’t know what they don’t know.
Where’s the relevance? Well Front Office Box is one of those things they don’t know that they don’t know.
We get asked all the time what does it do? Our answer is it brings together who you know and what you know with what you want to do. That really gets some people confused so we explain it has an address book to keep companies and contacts. Here they start to blow us away – everybody does that. Sure, and we have opportunity management. This gets us the response – oh! your CRM, there are hundreds of those. Sure, and we have Webrequest. Now we’ve really lost the discussion. Were put in a box of also rans, trying to scrape a living while Microsoft/Yahoo/Google etc all do a better job. Forget it, NEXT.
This is the typical reaction we get from people who don’t know that they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s usually the self appointed experts who’ve never been involved in really managing a small business. They wan’t to put us in a box with some stupid label dreamt up by Gartner, or AMR, or worse still, the marketing departments in Microsoft/Oracle/SAP etc.
The trouble is they can’t, because the box doesnt exist, because nobody has ever done what we do. We’re Web 2.0 and they don’t understand so they dismiss us as Web 1.0 losers.
So how are we different? Firstly Front Office Box isn’t built to fit one of those boxes. Secondly it isn’t built to suit the programmers, its built to suit the users. Thirdly it isn’t built to provide employment for all those IT Department people. We don’t need them thank you very much. Lastly it isn’t built to create fees for consultants and training companies, we don’t need them either, thank you very much.
The majority of our development budget has been spent on creating software that stays out of your way.
We’ve simplified business processes down to lowest common denominator – generic, common sense stuff – and then made it as flexible as possible so people can use it in whatever way they want.
We’ve worked really hard, at every point in the system to anticipate what the users might expect, and put it there for them.
We’ve taken new technologies – tags, wikis, dynamic languages – and turned them into features that really work in the business context.
We made it look and feel nice to use – not a Windows box in sight- and colours and layout that add value to the data, not detract from it.
We took away the walls between the data and created in software what the users would create themselves on paper. Our company view shows the company, all of the people, actions (completed and outstanding), correspondence, notes and documents. All this on one page. Try doing that with Outlook, or Excel! The rest of Front Office Box is just as good.
So why did we do it? Im the oldest so get to go first. Too many years explaining to customers they had got what they really wanted, when it didn’t work for them whilst at the same time trying to manage relationships and projects in Outlook, Excel and losing documents in Windows Explorer.
Gareth is the brains! He spends most of his time building systems for hedge fund traders. These are people who know what they want, and want it now. A new system can help them make millions – today.
Immense credit goes to our team:
Nathaniel Talbott http://www.terralien.com pulled the team together and helped us with the big questions.
John Carlin http://sd2.com did all the difficult stuff under the covers.
Rich Powell http://www.samedis.com helped us understand the interaction between humans and systems and used colours and shapes to create context.
We also had a lot of help from friends who manage their own businesses, and helped us by using Front Office Box, telling us where we could make it better. Paul Barnard in Phildelphia uses Front Office Box to manage his insurance business. Dave Hoover http://www.obtiva.com provides consulting, development and training in Chicago. Jaska Malmgren http://www.direxon.fi consults on identity management in Helsinki. Ernie Hill sells and installs office furnishings in England and Craig – Tiny – Parks Hilden helps golfers all over the North West USA understand how far it is to the flag.
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