Nathaniel Richards

As your business matures to the point that you have begun to develop systems, processes and methodologies, your business will need to decide on tools to manage these processes and enforce the best practices.

For example, my business is a professional services company, so the following are key processes for us: performing estimation, authoring proposals, tracking time, invoicing for time. This is effectively the "Operations" of our business, and therefore the software that supports these operations could be referred to as "line of business" software.

If your business has any data associated with its operations (yes, this means 100 percent of you), you need line of business software. This software will, over time, accumulate the data that you will study and analyze to learn about your company's effectiveness as well as to identify shortcomings and opportunities for improvement.

For example, in my business, I might like to know the following:

In my first “Virtualization” post, I looked at the idea of a virtual office at a very high level, starting with some of Ubertor CEO Steve Jagger’s ideas and then outlining three distinct models. Today I will drill down a little more on the models and characterize them in a bit more detail.

Full: Totally Virtual with Zero Office Space

As the co-chair of Membership for EO Houston, I recently attended our Global Leadership Conference (GLC) in New Orleans, which is an annual summit for EO chapter board members from both North and South America. During one of the breakouts, Steve Jagger, founder and CEO of Ubertor (and several other companies) spoke about virtualizing and decentralizing your business using new technologies to manage the information.

In his talk, Steve covered several reasons that his company outsources/off-shores/automates everything they possibly can. And “it’s working for them, but could it work for me?” I began to question.