The Leonardo Blog

Did you know that many breakthrough and brilliant ideas started from ridiculously sounding ones? As most people where content with their physical book, Amazon took the lead in online book business. When most people thought videos were only meant for the TV, YouTube took the ‘wild’ business idea of creating a website where people can easily share their memorable experiences. Today, these companies are generating billions of dollars in revenue annually just because they were brave enough to put their seemingly ridiculous ideas into work. What’s the lesson here? Great ideas don’t happen out of pure luck and accident. Ideas, no matter how ridiculous they sound at times, happen and succeed by linking knowledge, insights and experience. These companies succeed because they know how to make connections. They are thriving because they focus on creating strong connections rather than on being stuck into the thought of having a stupidly sounding idea. It’s as simple as that.

For the organization to succeed, it needs to have a structured and business-centered prioritization process to manage innovation. What happens after generating tons of ideas? The answer is you screen those ideas: they need to be chosen and prioritized based on the organization’s needs and objectives. Criteria need to be in place supporting the measurement of an idea’s importance. The following questions can guide the prioritization process:

As SaaS solutions become commonplace in several industries, the market has felt the effects. IDC research shows that SaaS technologies are projected to constitute a quarter of all new enterprise software purchases by 2016, while PWC estimates that SaaS delivery will make up approximately 14.2 percent of all software spending. Overall, the entire SaaS market is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate of 21.3 percent over the next two years.” As a consultant working within a number of large and medium sized organisations over the past several years, I’m used to seeing common problems being solved over and over again, everywhere I go. Some big and some small, some more necessary than others and some with varying degrees of ‘fit for purpose’ tweaks. After all, every business is different and every implementation needs to fit the business context around what it supports. Shift toward ‘as-a-service’ However, there is a shift taking place and more and more businesses are starting to see the benefits of moving towards “as a service” type arrangements. The transformation isn’t necessarily a new one; the introduction of web based email and corporate social networks have become a staple of the modern organisation, as well as support and maintenance team products such as Sharepoint, Dropbox and Skype. All of these functions within the business which have begun the transformation to Software as a Service offerings have one thing in common which confuses the bigger picture. They generally still fall into the IT or technology bucket of the organisation. They perform well serving their single purpose but very often they support a technical role within the business - after all they are still technical tools.

In this week’s Process Session, we talk about the importance of selling your process model benefits using best practice marketing tactics and approaches. The transcript below has been lightly edited. -- Sandeep: Selling the benefits of process modeling is difficult. In fact it’s one of the hardest things that any process modeling project undergoes. A lot of traditional ways of selling process models have been questioned before and some of them have not worked. Others may have but what we’re offering today is a fresh new way to look at how process models have been sold. More importantly the benefits of these process models. I’d like to introduce you to Daniel Weatherhead who’s our marketing manager in Leonardo Consulting. He is here today to answer some of our questions and provide some guidelines on how process modeling or models can benefit from a marketing perspective. Welcome to the show Daniel. Daniel: Thanks Sandeep. It’s great to be here today. Sandeep: So before we get into actually answering the question of how process modeling can leverage marketing, let’s get some of the basics correct first. So Dan in your point of view, what are some of the basic techniques the world of marketing can inform and can educate the people in the modeling world? Daniel: What we’re talking about is a shift - a shift away from what we would call the old outbound marketing tactics. These are the tactics of the previous generation - the generation before. Interruptive tactics that don’t necessarily look to inform and educate but were very much placed there interruptively into people’s lives. Now think about your television ads, your radio ads, your newspaper, advertisements. These are the sort of things that shout at you. They are one-way traffic. People didn’t necessarily go seeking those messages.

An analysis on the next major paradigm shift. The goal of most business is to grow revenue, whilst reducing costs and increasing profits - sounds simple enough.