Velocity to Results: Solving Your Business Problems Faster, Better, Cheaper

 digg it |   delicious |   StumbleUpon |  reddit 

Written By Richard Hearn, CEO & Managing Director, Crown Partners

Maximizing your technology investments is crucial to your bottom line. Whether you're weighing your software and hardware options or are focused on how to best implement them in your IT environment, you need to know that you're making the most strategic, cost-effective decisions for your company. And to be sure, this cost-effectiveness extends far beyond looking at the purchase price of IT solutions. Rather, it also lives in how effectively you implement and leverage your new technology so that you can get the best return on your IT investment. That is, how much more efficiently you can drive your business processes as a result of these new solutions, how much more productive your teams can be, how much better you can serve your customers, and so on. You also want the fastest time to value possible, enabled by speedy implementations and appropriate training for both IT and end-user personnel.

When companies lack the resources or skill sets needed, they elicit the help of IT consulting agencies to advise them or assist them in the best way to use IT to meet their business objectives-which always includes reducing expenses and increasing profitability. But here's the dilemma for more and more companies these days with locked or diminishing IT budgets: They're trying to cut costs and so turn to IT consulting companies to help them run more efficient corporate machines. But are they spending excessive amounts of money on consulting services and custom products in an effort to eventually streamline operations, to the point that they're greatly diminishing the ROI on their total investment to get these solutions up and running, use them, and maintain them?

The Cost of Custom Consulting: A Bunch

The truth is, the consulting business is typically about trying to bill for as many consultants per hour as possible, and for as many functions as possible. And how can they justify this? They're developing a "custom solution" expressly for you, convincing you that it's the only way to truly get your business needs met. Even if they can ultimately get you where you want to be with your new technology investments, what will it cost to get you there? And even more important, what are they leaving you with as far as tools and knowledge and a maintenance strategy?

Custom solutions are fine and even necessary in some circumstances. But sometimes, these "custom" solutions are so customized that companies not only pay dearly for the product-they take 6 to 12 months or more to implement, are extremely complex to debug, and are even tougher to maintain. Worse yet, if they're integrated on top of an existing platform-such as a content management, records management, imaging, or analytics system-and that platform is upgraded to the its new release, your custom solution will need to adapt to the upgraded platform. How will you get there? Your one-off custom solution may stand alone where integrating with future upgrades of surrounding systems is concerned. It may work great today, but its future is a complete unknown.

Another mistake companies make in turning to IT consulting firms is looking for a solution to a current business problem without looking for a way to make that solution repeatable in the future. Take for example a company that solicits the expertise of an IT consulting company to help them migrate massive amounts of data from one repository to the next. Today, many companies are faced with migrating EMC Documentum eRoom documents and data to EMC CenterStage repositories. Some of these companies are hiring consulting teams to migrate all of their content to the new EMC platform. And the next time they need to migrate content to a new EMC system? They hire a consulting firm to perform another custom migration, which is often unnecessary.

Clearly, custom consulting is big business with big bucks in it for the consulting firms. But what if IT consulting instead had your back? What if IT consulting founded its practices on the best way to empower your organization to need them for as little time as possible today, and for little or no time down the line?

We're Not Like the Rest

Well, here's where Crown Partners is distinctly different than other professional services firms out there. We do have your back, and we're not in it to make the greatest profit possible from our engagement with you. Instead, we're here to help you run your business more efficiently and more profitably. Here's the Crown difference in a nutshell and what it offers you:

• Crown's "software first" approach to enterprise solutions - Our years of industry experience and ongoing research tells us that regardless of how customized a solution might be, 80 percent of the solution is standard to countless other companies in the same boat. To put it a different way, others in that same industry or facing similar business challenges, such as web content management or loan origination processing have 80 percent of the same problems and only 20 percent of problems unique to them.
• Our relentless automation of repeatable tasks - Crown automates those capabilities that address the standard 80 percent of the business challenges, in the form of Crown software products and utilities, as well as frameworks. This saves companies huge amounts of money, and significantly increases their return on those already pared-down investments. We turn $500,000 migration projects into $50,000 migration projects, and leave you with the tools and know-how to do future migration projects yourself. We can save companies from implementing a $4 million loan origination system by instead implementing a $400,000 loan origination system, and in six months instead of three years.
• The best practices we pass along to you - Our long history of implementations on platforms like EMC Documentum, Oracle Hyperion, and Microsoft SharePoint allows us to roll our practical knowledge and best practices directly into our solutions. In this way, you don't just purchase our expertise during a consulting project; you get to reuse our proven best practices through our robust software solutions, along with our guidance on how to implement them or through our implementation and upgrade services. We also develop our solutions parallel to the platforms they integrate with, so that when upgrades are made to EMC CenterStage, our products will continue to seamlessly integrate with your EMC platform.
• Our depth of industry expertise - We launched in 2001 and have remained successful since. But even more, we've earned the reputation for being one of the world's leading software and professional services firms-exclusively focused on enterprise information management. We're a Certified Advantage Partner with Oracle. We've been accredited as "Designed for EMC" since 2004. Our innovative Crown Buldoser product was selected by EMC as the Designed for EMC "2008 Offering of the Year." When you hire Crown, you hire the collective experience of our talented, intensely knowledgeable team. And when you purchase our products, you get that knowledge plus intelligent automation packaged into the Crown solution.

Cruising at the Speed of Crown

So what does all of this mean to you? It's proof that you don't have to buy into the inefficiencies and exorbitant costs of custom consulting. Instead, you can allow Crown Partners to help you automate your business processes and operate more intelligently-whether we're providing our management consulting, technology expertise, turnkey IT solutions, or application hosting. And whatever we're providing, you'll see better outcomes dramatically faster than you'll see from the typical IT consulting firm. It's the Crown difference: delivering "velocity to results," that produces a tangible result that you can achieve affordably.

Questions or comments? info@crownpartners.com