There are many benefits associated with the small business web, aka the cloud for small businesses. The variety of tools available seems to grow with every month. A recent report by IT Market Dynamics indicates the key benefits and challenges that businesses perceive with the adoption of cloud services and applications. Many recognize that they can do more with less, yet are concerned about security and control.
There has been a continued penetration of cloud solutions into every part of business. Witness the wave of human resource and talent management applications that give a business of any size payroll, employee talent management and general organizational development capability.
One key benefit we believe is the availability of analytics in cloud based services. Not all services will include analytics, but when considering solutions make sure analytics is a key piece of the solution. We’re not talking just reports, either.
Good analytics in a cloud based product will allow you to visualize a lot of collected data and enable critical decision making that make your business more agile and responsive to the needs of your clients and prospects. Analytics can take many shapes and forms but they can include:
- monitoring traffic on your online presence including inbound marketing and search engnie campaigns
- identifying the bottlnecks exist on your various forms that you put in front of your clients and employees
- gauging the return on investment on various marketing campaigns, outbound and inbound
- monitoring cash flow in your billing system to identify which clients pay on time, which don’t and how to instill your clients to pay their bills faster
We are still looking for an all-in-one analytic tool that can tie the various pieces together of the NewPath Consulting cloud suite of services. For now, each cloud based solution has a variety of places to find analytics, but they may not literally be labeled as such. In a cloud-based environment there are some very different dynamics that can occur as thousands (even millions) of users can be using the same system recording various analytics against a similar business process. The best cloud vendors will enable you to learn from what their other clients are doing while enabling a service level agreement that keeps your data private.
This opportunity has previously never been realized (or even attempted) as systems were silo’d in separate server farms and applications were not nearly scaled to tens of thousands, even millions of users. In fact, many cloud based vendors will use analytics to determine which features are used, which are broken or complex and which need to just be removed due to lack of use. This mass analysis of system use is unprecedented and we believe will lead to huge increase in the usability of cloud based applications.
In a future article we will describe a huge bottleneck we found with our client’s online ecommerce systems. We will describe how we went about benchmarking the bottleneck and fixing it, yielding a much better user experience and more sales.
Analytics: it’s where it’s at!
