Sunday, July 10, 2011

Unified Delivery System

Unified delivery approach
Systems suck today at supporting the process of delivering professional services.  I define professional services as services provided to organizations for contract.  This typically includes:

  1. Legal contracts
  2. Payment
  3. The delivered work
In order to create this simple type of transaction, several systems are required to support the process (but I can't find one system that does it all for some reason):
  1. Track leads, accounts and opportunities - CRM (SalesForce, Sugar CRM, Sales Force)
  2. Estimate and track work - Project Management (MS Project)
  3. Invoice and track accounts receivable - Accounting (QuickBooks)
It shouldn't sound to this point that professional services delivery is complicated but for some reason it is.  I have not yet found an integrated system that supports the basic functions highlighted above.  This means that  managers are left to procure many of these systems individually and then *somehow* integrate them.  

It's the integration part that's the hard part, I think.  There's some interesting thinking out there like in Master Data Management (MDM) and the like for doing this in an automated way...but this might be the bleeding/cutting edge.

I'm going to start putting together the pieces -- for myself, my companies, and for resale--the systems required to support and automate the process of delivering professional services.  

Please let me know if you know of good-working, all up system integration.  

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