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Every business blog needs to find a reason to include a cat picture - everyone likes cats, right?

So here we go, a business blog featuring a cat in a box.

You may have heard of the 1930s thought-experiment called Schrödinger's cat.

If not, Schrödinger postulated that a cat in a closed box could either be alive or dead and the only way to determine the state of its health was to open the box and observe it.

Can you imagine how difficult and expensive it was marketing a business in the dark ages… the 1990s!

You were reliant on archaic tools like the Yellow Pages. And advertising in newspapers and magazines. Makes me shiver just to think of it.

We are smack bang in the middle of a communication and information revolution. It’s happening right now. It’s changing how people think, research, and make buying decisions.

For those who are not aware of this acronym, HIPAA stands for Health Insurance, Portability & Accountability Act. It is US legislation that addresses patient confidentiality and ensures your records can be moved between healthcare providers without hindrance.

If you provide services to the healthcare sector in the US, you will be aware of your responsibility to make that service provision HIPAA compliant.

Obviously, for software that deals with patient records this is a key requirement built in from day one. Similarly, cloud storage and backup solutions used by healthcare providers have clear responsibility to ensure patient records are protected by multi-level secure access controls.

Those of you who follow trends in service desk methodology will have heard of “intelligent swarm”.

For those of you who haven’t heard of it, this blog looks at the commonalities and differences between this methodology and Agile Service Delivery, the other current evolutionary trend which we have discussed in our blog on agile service delivery.

If effective and simple resource management is the Holy Grail of professional services automation (PSA) software, the ability to produce a revenue forecast worth reading must be the golden Unicorn’s horn.

Why is this so hard?

Well, first let us discuss what is meant by a revenue forecast and the many equally valid interpretations people place on this seemingly simple concept.

It may sound strange, on the blog of a PSA system, that we should ask this question. It turns out that while we live and breathe PSA functionality all day long, there remain many people who don’t know what one does and why they should buy one.

So, here goes, PSA 1/1...

Consulting and service organisations have an inherent need to provide their services in accordance with their quality management principles. Whether formally or informally, this is true of all such organisations.

At a certain point of scale, or in response to the provision of services to government bodies or large corporations, they will find it necessary to formalise such principles and ultimately to achieve ISO (International Standards Organisation) certification under ISO9001.

Every product believes itself unique in the way it address the needs of its customers.

In the PSA space, people talk about the market being crowded with offerings and if you list out all those products that use the suffix, there are quite a few.

However, if you restrict the list to products that provide support for both project and service desk functionality, the number shrinks dramatically.

But offering this capability is, to our way of thinking, insufficient differentiation.

In any business application, the homepage is a key area of real-estate. It provides an opportunity to inform, alert and communicate, while delivering fast access to work that needs doing.

Harmony has always had a clean and powerful homepage, but as the capability of the system has developed, we realised that there were features we could use to turbo-charge the user experience.

So, welcome to our exciting new user homepage, containing all the information you need at your fingertips, configured by you to save time and improve communication and organisational effectiveness.

Agile methodology is now so firmly entrenched in software development culture that any challenge or deviation from the “Agile Manifesto” is seen as heresy.

And that’s fine, we agree that Agile has its place in delivery of software - we use it internally ourselves.

The challenge comes when the approach is applied to the type of projects generally running in your PSA system; namely customer-driven billable ones.