Only a few years ago, most businesses felt the pain of being software licensees. The cycle went something like this: 

1. Issue an RFP, then pay big bucks for proprietary software.
2. Pay annual service agreement fees so the software company will provide tech support.
3. Assign IT resources in your company to install, configure, and customize it.
4. Pay for trainers from the software company to train staff how to use it.
5. Endure endless installs of patches and upgrades.
6. Find out, a year or two later, that another company has a better software product now that wasn’t available when you purchased the other software. But now you’re too invested in the original software to switch to another. 

Sound familiar? That’s why Software as a Service, or SaaS, has become so popular over the last few years. Also known as Cloud Computing, ASPs (application service providers) or On Demand Software, some say SaaS is just a trendy new tech term for something that’s been around as long as the Web has been around. In the last coupld of years, however, there has been a cultural shift in the way businesses evaluate their software needs. And SaaS is looking like a better option, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses that don’t have the IT resources and infrastructure of larger-scale enterprises. 

The principle behind this is an application service provider can take advantage of economies of scale to offer cheaper, more reliable, and often better applications than companies could afford themselves. 

One example of this is Web content management systems (CMS, which provide a platform to make Web content changes less technical and more manageable. Typically, large companies who want to purchase enterprise-level CMS software pay capital costs of anywhere from $20,000 to $200,000, not to mention implementation and training costs, followed by ongoing operational costs for support, training and enhancements.   

A Vancouver-based company A Vancouver-based company (with offices in Miami as well), Sitemasher (www.sitemasher.com), offers an attractive and award-winning alternative. Their Sitemasher platform enables companies to design, develop and host a Website on Sitemasher, which has an integrated content management system that makes it easy for even non-technical staff to make content changes to the site. And it’s all offered for a basic subscription price of $99 a month for three seats (users). 

Kevin Kinghorn, Director, Website and New Media with the Vancouver Canucks, says Sitemasher was a clear choice for the redesign, hosting and management of their GM Place site (http://generalmotorsplace.com/), which will be completed later this year. 

“We’re very excited about getting our hands on (Sitemasher) and really figuring out new ways to leverage the power of the SiteMasher environment, and possibly developing some new features with the team. 

“It was easy to see how Sitemasher would help us in an environment where several different users of various skill levels are relied upon to maintain a corporate website.” 

Of course, one of the challenges with SaaS can be the level of support you receive. Some services provide real-time chat on their Website, a toll-free number, a peer-to-peer forum for users to post questions and get answers from other users, or an email address where you can send inquiries. But with some SaaS providers, levels of service can be, shall we say, less than desirable. 

Not so with Sitemasher, says Kinghorn. When asked what advantages they saw in using an SaaS instead of buying content management software and running it on their own servers, he cited their customer service experience. 

“That’s easy: the support and the development,” says Kinghorn. “The SiteMasher team has really gone out of their way to help make the transition easy – including conducting on-site training. And where a purchased CMS might fall short of our needs, they’ve developed the product to suit. Not only that, but their hosting environment is second-to-none, which takes a lot of strain off our IT department.” 

Although the Canucks team Website can’t switch to Sitemasher because all NHL teams are being hosted on the NHL’s CMS, Kinghorn says  there are several different applications for a product like SiteMasher within their organization 

“The SiteMasher team has been unreal. We’ve got very specific needs on this project. Whenever we’ve run into an issue, they’ve simply developed the product to accommodate them. It sounds like a line from a marketing brochure, but they’ve really blown us away.” 

The main risks in going with an SaaS provider are when a company’s IT systems require extensive integration with an SaaS application, when a company requires a large amount of customization from the vendor, and also when an SaaS company becomes financially unstable i.e. what happens if the system you’re relying on goes out of business overnight? Or is sold to another company? Or what if subscription prices go up drastically when it comes time to renew the contract? Each SaaS provide should be evalulated with these risk factors in mind.   

SaaS applications are usually priced on a per-user basis, often with a small minimum number of users and scalable plans for additional users and extra bandwidth and storage.  The types of SaaS applications available on the market right is very broad (see this site to look up SaaS providers by category: www.saas-showplace.com/saasproviderdirectory/saasapplicationcategory.html), and here are some examples of popular SaaS applications in some of those categories. 

Office productivity and tools: Zoho (http://zoho.com/) is a reputable SaaS company based in India that provides a wide range of office applications online at cheap or reasonable prices. There’s an online Word processor, spreadsheet application, document management, customer relationship management, project management, business intelligence…the list goers on and on. Free versions are available with limited features, and prices for additional service levels start from a few dollars up. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Salesforce.com (www.salesforce.com/) bills itself as “the world’s favorite CRM,” and it is indeed one of the leaders in providing a customer relationship management database to organizations for sales, service, marketing, and call center operations. The company offers a full-featured CRM for as little as $9/month per user for their Group Edition.  

Online Invoicing: Freshbooks (http://www.freshbooks.com/) takes the challenge of invoicing off your desktop and onto the Web.  It can create, manage and send invoices, track time and expenses, and even accept payments through PayPal. There’s a limited free version and after that pricing starts at $14 per month. 

Media Monitoring and Collaboration: DNA13 (http://www.dna13.com/) helps companies manage their communications, public relations and media management processes online. It was recognized last December by IDC as “One of 10 Canadian New Media Companies to Watch.” It’s used by RBC, Westjet, Scotiabank, City of Calgary, L’Oreal and Nestle, to name a few. Prices for the service are not available on their Website. 

Internet Payroll: Ceridian Canada’s Powerpay Web (http://www.ceridian.ca/)  is an Internet solution that allows employers to input payroll data and process payroll on the Web. Pricing details are not available on the Website, but there is a base charge per payroll run plus a nominal fee for each payment produced. 

Performance Management and Compensation: Salary.com (http://www.salary.com/) offers on-demand software for talent management and compensation data for personal use, small business and enterprise level organizations. Prices are not available on the Website.

This article was originally published in Douglas Magazine. Garth A. Buchholz (Garth@DigitalPractices.com) is the President and Chief Usability Analyst at DigitalPractices Media Inc.

If only we could rise on a weekday morning without having to put on our work clothes, start a cranky car, fight our way through smoggy traffic, pay for expensive parking stalls, then do it all over again at the end of the day. Think of how we could minimize our footprint on the environment, save ourselves money on clothes, gas, and parking, and save our companies the cost of expensive office space.   

That seems to be the common wisdom when people talk about telecommuting or telework – synonyms for the use of Internet and communications technologies to work outside the traditional office or workplace, usually at home. MSNBC.com calls it “the quiet revolution” and predicts that by 2009, 27.5% of U.S. workers won’t be driving to the office.

Governments in Canada and elsewhere are starting to take telework seriously. The Environmental Quality branch of BC’s Ministry of Environment makes this recommendation: “Consider a condensed work week or telecommuting as a way to work effectively and cut air pollution.” For many disabled employees it can also present a way to be an active member the workforce without having to undertake the challenges of commuting or office access and facilities.

According to the 2008-2009 WorldatWork Salary Budget Survey of total rewards programs used to attract and retain talent (www.worldatwork.org), telework has shown the most substantial 12-month increase in both Canada and the U.S.  Although telework in the U.S. had a significant increase – from 30% in 2007 to 42% this year – the increase in Canada was even more dramatic, rising from 25% in 2007 to 40% this year.  

“It’s been a perfect storm,” says Anne C. Ruddy, CCP, president of WorldatWork. “Rising gas prices, leading-edge technology, and the push for work-life flexibility have all come together in the past 12 months to create a pretty dramatic increase in telework across the U.S. and Canada.”

BC’s TELUS Corporation found that teleworking can increase employee productivity by about 20%. The company conducted a 2006 pilot project where the company allowed 170 employees to work at home, and not only did it increase productivity and morale, but it also saved 114 tonnes in greenhouse gases and almost 14,000 hours of time in traffic.

Yet even though more organizations in Canada and the U.S. are beginning to implement telework options or at least develop telework policies, and many employees and unions are embracing the opportunity, some employers — and even their employees – are still reluctant.

In an article in Ontario’s Business Edge magazine (www.businessedge.ca/), writer Sharon Adams says “Old-line thinking – better suited to the industrial revolution – is holding us back from the full benefits of telecommuting.”  She quotes Bob Fortier, president of the Canadian Telework Association (himself a virtual worker) who found that “There are a lot of managers who say, ‘Not on my watch.’ “

Technology such as Web-based applications, video conferencing, webcams, instant messaging, and VoIP/telephony can enable virtual workers to work from homebase much more efficiently and accountably. Organizations also have to consider other issues, though. In the Sept 3 issue of ITBusiness.ca, employers are advised to ask themselves these six questions before implementing a telework program:

1. Is full-time telecommuting a smart decision?
2. How will you define and measure performance?
3. Will creativity suffer?
4. How will telework affect collaboration?
5. What about employees “left behind” in the office?
6. Do you have an exit strategy? (i.e. if you decide to discontinue the telework option)

Here are some of the tangible benefits and potential pitfalls of telework programs — from the perspectives of employers and employees – along with recent research that has been done on this hot topic.

Telework is a great recruiting and engagement incentive.

As we noted earlier in this article from the WorldatWork survey, telework is on the rise as an incentive to attract and retain talent. Both young workers entering the workforce as well as workers closer to retirement also have an interest in the flexibility of at-home work options. And for younger workers, there is no clear line between their work-life and personal life, so it feels natural and comfortable for them to them to work from home. 

Telework offers meaningful lifestyle options so employees can have a better work/life balance. This can improve employee morale and reduce stress, with the end result of a more satisfied, stable and productive workforce. EKOS Research found that 33% of Canadians would choose telework over a salary raise, while 43% would actually quit their job to work somewhere that allows telework. 

On the other hand, older or more established workers, who haven’t experienced telecommuting and are used to being in the office, may have some reluctance, especially at mid-career. A recent U.S. survey of 700 white-collar workers reported that almost two-thirds of all the respondents expressed fear that working from home “will hinder their chances at a promotion due to the lack of contact with the employer.” About 71% said they believed their manager wants them around to prevent a decline in productivity, while another 62% said they think their employer needs them in the office to prevent communication issues.

Telework can net huge savings on the high cost of office space.

Not only can home-based employees help organizations reduce the costs of office overhead, include leases costs, taxes, energy costs, and equipment and supply costs, they can also help solve the ever-present urban issue of available office space (especially in places such as downtown Victoria). Through telework, AT & T reported saving $500 million in office costs since 1995, and IBM reduced the need for office space for a savings of $56 million per year.   

Telework can help improve the efficiency, performance and productivity of your employees.

As many organizations become more reliant on information technology for their operations and communications, teleworking can actually help companies get a better return on investment from their workplace technology. American Express reported that their teleworkers handled 26% more calls and produced 43% more business than their office-based counterparts. At IBM Canada, where 20% of the workforce teleworks, studies showed that teleworking employees were as much as 50% more productive.

However, trust – on the part of employers – remains the looming shadow behind the sunshine of telework. Production-focused workers whose output can be quantified electronically are less concern than workers whose productivity is often measured by their managers in terms of what they’re seen to be doing in the office. A series of Dilbert comic strips chronicled Dilbert’s brief telecommuting experience as he descends into comical non-productivity. It’s exactly what most employers fear, but employers who take the risk often find that the main change is the need to manage more diligently. 

“You’re trusting people to do the work,” said Steve Lundin of BigFrontier Communications group, quoted in the Sept 7 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle. . “There is some fluff time you’re paying for, but what you bill out for is far more than what you’re paying them.” Lundin added that one downside to telecommuting is the “additional management of people,” and said he has to spend more of his time speaking to his telecommuters over the phone.

Teleworking employees may also find that their collaboration and creativity in certain jobs or roles may be impacted because their physical isolation keeps them from the stimulating personal interaction they would normally have in informal or formal groups, pods and meetings. Employers can remedy this by ensuring teleworkers have opportunities to meet face-to-face regularly, and this may even reduce the number of unnecessary or unproductive meetings that are called just because workers are onsite.   

The Green Commute - telework options can show your corporate commitment to the environment.  

Your organization can improve its “green” image and show its commitment to the community by helping reduce vehicle emissions as well as saving energy and energy costs by reducing gas consumption. This can be demonstrated in hard numbers on an annual report, too. A U.S. article in the Sept 5 issue of the Hartford Courant reports that an employee with a 45-minute commute could cut his or her monthly gas expenses by 40%, or about $80, if allowed to telecommute two days a week.

Organizations that operate across several time zones or want to expand to global markets can hire and deploy teleworkers in other countries with ease.

There’s also the issue of the costs and logistics of relocating staff to other regions or even other countries. Statistics Canada reports that it costs companies an average of $42,000 to relocate workers to another city. With telework, some workers can be allowed to remain in their own hometown while conducting work for a branch in another location. 

Telework can be a selective program offered to specific categories of workers without impacting the availability of employees that are needed on-site.

ITBusiness.ca points out that telework works best for task-oriented jobs (such as IT positions) that don’t require a lot of face-to-face interaction with others. In fact, this can even help improve productivity for these types of employees who can work in a private environment without any non-work-related distractions. Call centres are increasingly using telework as a way to save costs and allow employees to handle calls routed to their homes where they can use online databases and tools to help customers resolve issues. In fact, this can even help organizations increase the number of number of customer service hours available to the public as teleworkers can work longer, later, or staggered hours at home and not have to worry about transportation or even personal safety issues. This can, however, lead to a problem with a “digital divide” separating those left behind in the office and those who are teleworking.

Telework can help reduce overtime for office staff and may even help reduce absenteeism.

When it comes to minor illnesses or health issues that might normally keep workers absent and unproductive, telework offers some employees (in some cases) the option to work from the comfort of their own home when they have minor health problems without the physical stress of having to be in the office. Less travel time also may mean less overtime costs. Absenteeism averages about 8 days a year (6.9 days for men, and 9.2 days for women) says a study Statistics Canada, and Health Canada has reported that the cost of balancing work and family is about $2.7 billion.

Canadian organizations that telework.
Source: Canadian Telework Association 

This article was originally published in Douglas Magazine. Garth A. Buchholz is the President and Chief Usability Analyst at DigitalPractices Media Inc.

What if you could share your own private network with the people and organizations you trust, exclude all other Internet connections (Web, email, etc) unless it passed your own criteria for inclusion, and could police your network by blocking any sites or emails that violated your rules in any way? What we think of as “the Internet” could fast become “the Intranet (capital ‘I’)”.

While everyone’s still garnering an understanding of what Web 2.0 means, a Web 3.0 could creep up and overtake it because of bandwidth, security and proprietary content drivers.

EXAMPLE 1: BANDWIDTH AND ACCESSIBILITY

SavetheInternet.com is a coalition that has “banded together to save the First Amendment of the Internet: network neutrality.” Their site defines Net Neutrality thusly:

Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It’s why the Internet has become an unrivaled environment for open communications, civic involvement and free speech. The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies – including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner – want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video – while slowing down or blocking their competitors.

Their concern is that the open playing field of the current Internet, where everyone gets equal; bandwidth consideration, will be lost in favor of a Web 3.0 where private enterprise offers a faster, but more exclusive Net for those who can afford it.

EXAMPLE 2: SECURITY AND USABILITY

Personal InfoCloud, by Thomas Vander Wal of InfoCloud Solutions, talks about about how users have a kind of preferred way of accessing information online, what he calls the “Local InfoCloud”:

As the my understanding began to lean toward familiarity as a core component of the definition of Local InfoCloud, the term began to embrace the social and community aspects (I am working on shying away from the term community as it is a broadly used term and I am trying to be a little more precise). Interactions with people, services, networks, applications, etc. that are familiar are means of bringing information closer to us as people with data, information, and media needs. The Local InfoCloud eases access. It eases the ability to find and refind information. It is information that is closer to us, not necessarily in physical proximity, but in the ability to access, in which familiarity is bread. I spent much time considering changing the label from local to community or social, but there were elements that did not perfectly fit that either.

Location-based services may be created by a service, but understanding the mindset, terminology, dialect, and cognitive frameworks that are germane to that physical location the information can be structured to resemble or mirror the social elements of understanding in that place. I will get to a better understanding of this when I talk about the Location aspect of the Local InfoCloud. As well, thinking in the Model of Attraction framework the Local InfoCloud is that which is attracted closer to us than the Global InfoCloud.

What I extrapolated from Vander Wal’s blog is that the Internet, or the “Global InfoCloud”, could become much less appealing for users than their own private network where they could control how they find and refind information, and how they interact with more familiar people, services, networks, applications.

EXAMPLE 3: PROPRIETARY CONTENT AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Back in the late ’90s when I wrote a weekly Internet column for our local newspaper, one of the things I predicted was that the Internet would become more proprietary, just like how online subscription services such as AOL, Compuserve and so on used to operate a few years earlier. That’s not to say that you won’t be able to access any content on the Net, but any content worth accessing would be fee-based.

In a recent New York Times book review, the issue of digital publishing is given another spin. When all books are digital, it makes it easier to combine and recombine information like never before:

Liberating books from their physical contexts could make it easier for them to blend into one another, a concept heralded by Kevin Kelly in an article in The New York Times Magazine last month. “Once text is digital, books seep out of their bindings and weave themselves together,” wrote Mr. Kelly in an article that was derided by Mr. Updike in his BookExpo polemic. “The collective intelligence of a library allows us to see things we can’t see in a single, isolated book.”

Of course, that should alarm the entire publishing industry, especially authors. Up till now, a book with its two sacred covers was a complete work, a product, a publishing unit of sale, a reference and an ISBN number. But if your book simply becomes a part of the swirling maelstrom of data on the Web, integrated into other databases and chopped into fine bits like the old K-Tel food processor infomercials we used to see on TV, who makes money on it? And who gets the credit if your content is simply hashed up into other dynamically generated pages of material?

Again, that’s where a network of private intranets would appeal to those who want to preserve the integrity of their intellectual properties. You control who can access it, who can buy it, and what they can do with it. I can think of many other reasons why Web 3.0 may happen sooner than we think, but I’d really like to hear from others on this subject. Post your responses here, or email me  and I’ll share your thoughts in this blog.