The Services Dashboard

Right now I am working on a “services insight” paper for members titled “The Services Dashboard.” How to create an effective dashboard is one of the most common inquiries we receive. Every line of business eventually establishes a dashboard to communicate the health of the business. Service businesses are no different.  There is an entire industry composed of both software vendors and consultancies that support the creation of business dashboards.  These vendors and consultants cite common attributes for an effective dashboard:

• An intuitive graphical display that is easy to understand
• A logical structure to the information presented
• Little or no user training is required to interpret the dashboard
• Regular and frequent updates of dashboard information for accuracy and relevance to current conditions.
• A consolidated source of Information from multiple sources, departments, or markets can be viewed simultaneously.

With these design principles in mind, the leaders from all of our associations have worked with both member companies and leading industry consultants to craft a baseline services dashboard that can be used for almost any line of technology services (support, professional services, managed services, etc.)

The Bifurcation of Sourcing Strategies

Our closing keynote at TSW last week was Jeff Howe, author of the book Crowdsourcing. Fantastic presentation and a great Q&A followed. However, despite advances in technology, the concept of self-service, and the emergence of “crowd sourcing” problem solving, the delivery of technology professional services remains a very human capital intensive endeavor for product companies. Complex services solving complex customer problems require complex skills sets from delivery resources. The never ending challenge for product companies is that it is always easier to burn another CD or build another mother board than it is to hire, train, and deploy a competent services employee. However, product companies are becoming much more aggressive and creative in the tactics they are pursuing to increase their ability to scale services capabilities. To secure product adoption success or maintain account revenues, product companies needs service offerings to be available in a global and consistent manner. To guarantee services are available on a consistent, global, scale, product companies are turning to five key resource pools.

Market Predictions

Technology Professional Services organizations are human capital intensive endeavors. This means it takes time to both scale up and scale down delivery capacity. Global resourcing models have made this challenge a little easier. However, the profitability of PS organizations is still very susceptible to swings in market demand.  Right now, there are three data streams PS organizations can access to better understand the direction of the TPS marketplace.

Calculating Utilization: European Perspective

Last week at the Technology Services Europe conference, I had the chance to speak with a gentleman responsible for global PS within a large European based product company. In our conversation on the challenges of managing embedded PS, he made the comment he had read my post on Calculating Utilization—and he wasn’t so happy. He liked portions of the guidance, but there is one recommendation I made he strongly disagrees with.

Webcast: Restating Revenues

On Friday, March 27^th, I will co-present a webcast with BDO partner Jay Howell. The topic is revenue recognition for product companies and some pending changes in the regulations.

To register: http://www.tpsaonline.com/webcasts.asp#vsoeinps

Jay is an expert on the topic of VSOE. He heard my plea in my previous post VSOE and the Auditors that stated “auditors that instruct product companies on how to interpret 97-2 are not motivated to publish their specific guidance.” Interest in the TPSA community on the topic of revenue recognition practices remains high. And for good reason. If a product company struggles with their interpretation of “revenue recognitopn principles”, revenues may need to be restated.  A March 23^rd press release from Taleo makes the point.