Front Office Box Secret Sauce

John Jantsch asks What’s Your Killer Technology

This is a fabulous question, to the point where I can’t stop at pointing readers to it.  I have to answer just what our “Secret Sauce” (his description) is.

He doesn’t necessarily mean silicon or language etc. He does mean something our users can identify as being uniquely ours – something special.

In my terms that’s “value add”, but that’s those years in the consulting business re-surfacing.  “How are you different, and what does that do for the users?” is more meaningful.

Answering this question isn’t a stretch for us. Rather the problem is persuading people to embrace our technology. Front Office Box isn’t like other software, because we built it not to be.

The people who have trouble understanding Front Office Box are just more familiar with 1980′s technology than 2010′s.

Our technology and business model has been built on what we expected the software industry to do.

So where is our “secret sauce” as John so typically pointed describes it?

You might want to read “It Started in the Burlington Coat Factory” to understand how our thinking developed. But, in an effort to keep this post shorter than it would otherwise have been, these are the fundamentals.

• Build software that adds real value – elegant to look at, easy to learn and use, flexible so you can fit it to your business process, rather than the other way around.
• Build best practice into the way the software works – so users get done the things they need to do, more easily.
• Build it in ways which minimize costs – development, maintenance and hosting.

So Front Office Box “Secret Sauce” is a recipe which serves up business software that lets people work the way they want, helps them do a better job with less effort, and costs nothing, or close to it.

And what’s in the recipe?   Ours isn’t secret.

1. A single, sharable database of relationships, plans, schedules, tasks, assignments which enables a seamless front office process from First Call to Referral.
2. Plan, Act, Review workflow so users can apply best management practice, with no effort.
3. Elegant design which presents information where and when it’s needed and without the tradition clutter.
4. Ruby on Rails for fast, inexpensive development and maintenance.
5. Every decision about “how it does what” is made by people who use it themselves, every day.

What’s that?   You still don’t get it!   Yep, I know.

But you didn’t “get” the iPod until you used it.

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Tagged as: John Jantsch, Rails, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software industry