Ambassador Solutions is excited to welcome Krista Knab to the firm as our first, fully dedicated Marketing Coordinator. Krista joins a veteran team that has been providing IT consulting services to Greater Indianapolis since 1989.

Krista comes to the company with a wealth of experience in creating and executing successful marketing campaigns. She has worked with a variety of regional and national clients to meet their objectives for spreading brand awareness, fostering customer loyalty, and increasing sales.

Greg Siefert, VP Solutions Formation
Krista Knab, Marketing Coordinator

Recently, we've put a great deal of thought into our marketing strategy and, ultimately, how we define our business. Given this current focus, we thought it would be interesting to examine how marketing has evolved.

Production Orientation
In the early 1900s, the prevailing thought on marketing was that “if a product is made, somebody will want to buy it.” This was manifested in business as manufacturers pressed to quickly make a higher quality product to offer at the lowest possible price. In a time with much less competition and few channels for distribution, this strategy made sense. The focus on better, faster, and cheaper provided customers with enough variety in products to choose from, but the production orientation was only part of the picture.

Sales Orientation
A shift in thought occurred after World War II when the supply of produced goods was greater than the demand for the products. At this point, marketing focus shifted to convincing the customer that they had a need for the products being produced. The emergence of television at this time was followed by a surge in advertising, as companies now had a new vehicle for touting their products and services. As a result, competition intensified and companies began to focus on product differentiation. However, the major focus was still on the product being produced and pushed (through sales) to the customer.

Marketing Orientation
As we entered the 1970s, another shift occurred. Companies realized that they needed to do more than simply produce products and then persuade customers that these products would fill a void. Instead, companies realized that they must focus on developing products that catered to customer needs. To do so, they began to put marketing forethought into defining WHO the target customer is and discerning WHAT it is they need. This marketing orientation shifted companies from the “push” model (production orientation and sales orientation) to a “pull” model where customers demanded their products. During the marketing era, companies also realized that there are many differences in the needs of different customer groups. In reaction, they began to segment the market and offer different products or product configurations to the different market segments.

IT Service Delivery
At this point, you may be wondering how this brief overview of marketing correlates with IT service delivery. Looking at these trends provides a relevant lens to view our own business. While delivering our services to our business customers, it is good to focus on delivering better, faster, and cheaper. We need to increase our productivity and evaluate new opportunities in an effort to improve operations. Additionally, there are times where a technology initiative needs to be produced and pushed through the organization for consistency and cost savings (e.g. information security or messaging consolidations). However, focusing on those two things alone are not enough. How well does your organization realize the subtle differences in the needs of your business customers? Do you have the frameworks and architectures in place to respond to these needs? How well are your IT operations aligned with your business?

We'd love to hear your thoughts - please take this quick survey to anonymously let us know how well your company aligns the business and IT functions.

Take the Survey

If you have any questions, please email Greg at gsiefert@ambassadorsolutions.com or Krista at kknab@ambassadorsolutions.com.

Kory Geyer
Solutions Strategist

We all understand that being a great organization is more than earning a profit. But when the chips are down, we start to see conflicts between building a high performance culture and our drive to improve the bottom line.

I introduced Ambassador's Portal Optimization Model (APOM) in the last Abuzz newsletter. In this issue, we are going to explore the ‘Cultivating Culture and Community' component of the model. I will first explain why ‘Culture and Community' is important to your business. I will then explain how your portals can be used to help build a high performing culture and sense of community within your organization.

Why Is It Important

Culture

Research shows that financially stronger companies--defined as those with an ROI of 30 percent or higher--are also strong in key, measurable aspects of corporate culture. On the other hand, financially weaker companies--those with an ROI of 9 percent or lower--score low on those same measurements of culture.

One of the drivers behind building a high performing culture is finding and retaining the right people while keeping them energetic and motivated to succeed. This article is not about how to find the right people (although portals can help with that as well). Rather, let's assume you have the right people onboard. Now we need to make sure that we give them the right tools and incentive to achieve strong performance.

So how can portals (intranets and extranets) help build a strong sense of culture that we need? Portals can create new ways to build culture as well as improve existing aspects of your current culture.

Click here to read the rest of this article.

If you have any questions, please email Kory at kgeyer@ambassadorsolutions.com.

Ronda Woldmoe
Senior Account Executive

Our approach is to provide experienced, high caliber consultants and motivate them to do superior work on every engagement. We deliver these services via three delivery models - Expert Services, Project-Based solutions, and the Extended Community model.

I know what you're thinking…What is an Extended Community?

The classic consulting model typically employs one of two types of service delivery: Project-based - where the client has a problem and needs an experienced team of technologists or strategists to take ownership of the project and provide an end-to-end solution. Or Expert services - where the client has a problem that requires a subject matter expert to lead or supplement their team for a designated period of time.

Both of these delivery models are very effective for Ambassador and have enabled our clients to achieve their goals. There are some cases where we have found tremendous value in taking this one step further offering an Extended Community Model - a model in which we extend the community of our client's team, whether that is the development team, analysis team, architecture team, project management team, infrastructure team or quality team. We help the client where they have a tactical need or a strategic desire to improve. The idea of the extended community is based on three core tenets:

Long-term resource assignment - One of the challenges that clients face with outsourcing work to a partner is the learning curve required for the partner to understand your environment, culture, norms, and objectives. Additionally, when outsourced projects or initiatives come to a close, vendor resources with the hard earned intellectual capital move on to another client and another engagement. The extended community relies on the commitment of Ambassador to dedicate a group of people over the long term and the commitment of the client to commit to using these people on project after project for the long term.

Opportunity to provide additional value added services - In addition to producing results by completing work assignments, the Extended Community embraces the idea of knowledge transfer, coaching/mentoring, and collaboration. Our team works closely with you and becomes an extended part of your team. We leverage the entire Ambassador team to offer lunch and learn sessions on topics relevant to your business, contribute to standards and governance discussions, and provide key insights and recommendations to help you make the best possible decisions.

Consolidated terms - The challenge in our business is how to keep the utilization of our people high so we can keep our rates down. A very effective way to provide our clients with superior talent while offering attractive pricing is to establish utilization targets that create a win-win relationship. Typically, with an extended community, the base utilization target is around three people for three months.

It is also important for the terms to be straight forward and understandable. Additionally, it is beneficial to provide a predictable cost as opposed to wild variances. To that end, all of the Extended Community resources are priced at a single blended weekly rate (professional week of 40-45 hours) or monthly rate (professional month of 168-180 hours). The goal is to remain within the weekly or monthly hourly range, but we understand that exceptions may occur. When exceptions occur, we will adjust accordingly by prorating the billable period by the agreed to, up front hourly rate.

I invite you to participate in a veryshort survey (anonymously) toshare your thoughts on how the Extended Community Model can provide the most value to IT organizations today.

Take the Survey

If you have any questions, please email Ronda at rwoldmoe@ambassadorsolutions.com.