.:RIMproInsider:.

Iron Mountain announced July 29th the acquisition of the assets of the Ottawa, Ontario-based franchiser Proshred Security International and eight of its Canadian franchisees. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The acquisition strengthens Iron’s geographical coverage in 12 existing and five additional Canadian markets, including: Victoria BC, Kelowna BC, South Western Ontario, Peterborough, Ontario, and Saint John NB. Iron Mountain will gain 120 employees from Proshred and its franchisees.

Iron Mountain also announced second quarter results the same day
- Total Revenues are $445 Million, Up 24%
- Operating Income is $87 Million; Up 27%
- Net Income is $0.17 per Diluted Share

We have some great software designed for our lines-of-business. But what I am not seeing is any effort to make this software integrate well with other business software, especially software common to Records and Information Management. What we lack are applications that are intended to integrate together through a common LOB application server (line-of-business application server).

I was checking out other service industries, and they are doing this. The hospitality industry, the legal business, even dentistry! They all have business packages that relate to a specific LOB server (not necessarily one with the letters “MS” in it).

RIM vendors need to take our businesses in a new direction when it comes to software choices and development. Our business software needs a common LOB server application standard. Not only will this help us to overcome the frustration of trying to mix-and-match software, but will allow us to reduce our business costs and increase our sales potential by analyzing business information mined from our business applications.

It’s like we’re trying to make phone calls without a switchboard.

Fourteen hundred CFOs were asked, “Which of the following employee benefits do you feel your workers value most?”
Flexible schedules were cited by 30 percent of respondents. After that were retirement plans (17 percent); extra time off (16 percent); spot bonuses (13 percent); health benefits (13 percent); equity incentives (3 percent); and don’t know (8 percent). An independent research firm did the study for Accountemps of companies with at least 20 employees.

With the type of businesses we run, I am not sure flex schedules are that easy to pull off. But look at the remaining ideas and see if they are implementable.

I heard of a mother who always served the filet mignon to her family and served the chuck roast to the guests. Seems to me many of us spend give the best stuff to our “suspects” not our clients. I encourage you to reverse the trend. Well fed clients can be the ultimate marketing machine.

From Cool News. The advertising world is going online.

By the year 2008, marketers will spend more dollars on online advertising than on print advertising, predicts a new report from Jupitermedia’s JupiterResearch, as reported by Brian Steinberg in The Wall Street Journal. Jupiter’s report, set for release tomorrow, begins with the projection “that marketers will spend $8.4 billion on online advertising in 2004, while earmarking $12.2 billion for magazines. In 2007, the two platforms each will get $13.8 billion. In 2008, online ad spending surges ahead, capturing $15 billion, compared to magazines’ $14.5. The gap widens in 2009.”

Jupiter is, of course, famous for its predictions! Back in 1999, it forecast that online advertising (defined as “a paid message featured on a website, online service or other interactive medium, such as instant message or e-mail”) would reach $11.5 billion. They were off by only $4.9 billion, However, its new report does reflect a continuing soft, albeit recovering, market for magazine ads. Jupiter’s dim outlook for magazines is further supported by a study by Veronis Suhler Stevenson, showing that “the number of hours per year that consumers spent with print media has dropped steadily since 1997 and is expected to continue to decline through 2007.

Not everyone supports so dismal a view of magazine vitality, though. “Online is being added to plans, but it doesn’t necessarily take away from the amount spent on other media,” says Alex Tamayo of Media Contacts. And Michael Clinton of evp of Hearst magazines says that consumers prefer online for quick updates and print for a more a more leisurely reading experience. “One does not preclude the other,” he says. However, where advertisers are concerned, the web offers perhaps a more accountable spend, suggests Jupiter senior analyst Gary Stein. He notes that web publishers have become “more targeted and much smarter, particularly in the area of “paid-search advertising.” He also cites growing potential for TV-like commercials online as broadband expands, as well as growing momentum for online display ads.

An interesting stat…

Only 42% of law firms have conducted a formal client satisfaction survey in the last two years, according to a 2003 BTI Consulting survey.

I have yet to poll this industry to discover the same. But I suspect it is around the same amount. The winners do it with regular frequency, as a part of a constant plan. What are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? Where can we improve?

Secondarily, every client satisfaction survey is also an opportunity to discover new needs in your clients, what they are doing and where they are going. Wouldn’t it be good to know if your clients are looking into an entire “scan on demand” or “digital archiving” solution for their company? Wouldn’t it be valuable to your long term success if you knew that your client was planning on buying their own shredding machine? If you don’t know what your clients want or are planning, you’re missing out on a lot of potential revenue. If you don’t know what they want or are planning, you could potentially be losing a lot of revenue.

So, are you doing one? If not, why not? Are you willing to begin?

The best and easiest way is to schedule a meeting in the next month with your top 5 - 10 clients. Let them know the only reason is to see how your staff is doing, where you need to shape up and what they as clients are doing. Then do 5-10 more the following month. Make it a habit. It will reward you.

Although we wish we knew more about our businesses, we actually have more data than we realize. The relationships between pieces of data are what produce information. Pieces of information join together to give us business knowledge. And business knowledge leads to business intelligence. But at the very root of all of this are data relationships.

And this is the problem. We cannot have data relationships because the data from our different types of software are not integrated. The programs that gather and manipulate our data are not integrated with one another. For example, we know the revenue for various types of businesses from our invoicing and billing software. We know the sales potentials for various types of businesses from our sales software. But do we easily know what businesses provide the most revenue for their potential? We know how far away a section of the city is. We know how much it costs to run a truck. But do we know the actual trucking costs to specific sections of the city?

We have the data. We don’t have the information, because the diverse pieces of data cannot be related. The software that keeps the data isn’t integrated. The above examples are simple and only the thin edge of the wedge. We need information to have the kind of knowledge that will allow us to take our businesses to the next level. We need knowledge to run our businesses more intelligently.

Think of each piece of software as having three parts: 1) user interface, 2) data manipulation, and 3) data storage. The user interface is what shows on our monitors. Good software allows you to customize the look-and-feel of the interface, especially if it is web related. Data manipulation is the internal programming that runs the software. Now it’s the data storage that is important here. And good software will allow the data to be accessed by another application. This is what makes data integration possible.

If you have, for example, MS Office, you can use the suite of programs to integrate data from other programs to give you crucial information you need for business strategy, and even have it sent to your Blackberry wherever you are. This not only gives you more ROI from your software purchases, but also from the time you spend inputting data into those programs.

This is merely an overview of the challenge and its solution. But it hopefully shows that we can exploit the data we already have to give us more information about where we want to take our operations.