Earlier this month, Gruden CEO Todd Trevillion spoke with iStart about the importance of streamlining processes utilising technology efficiencies in an economic crisis.
Here’s what he has to say:
What I’m hearing from clients is all about how they can work smarter by the use of technology efficiencies across the whole company. You’ve got reduced headcount, work is being dumped on someone’s desk, how do you deal with it?
When it comes to process and workflow, clients are asking how to use technology to eliminate human touchpoints. The problem is typically that they have new initiatives to deliver, but no more headcount.
The article also went on to discuss Gruden’s approach to finance and insurance companies trying to grapple with the strain of the current financial climate.
Gruden deals with finance and insurance companies, where, Todd says, these issues are focused around signing up customers. Gruden uses products from the Adobe suite (“flex” and “livecycle”) to take care of the back-end and tie the two together.
“Adobe flex is a smart way to create intelligent forms that are easy to complete and so make for a nice user experience. Rather than have people step through a series of buttons, you have everything on one screen. This results in a much higher completion rate,” says Trevillion.
The forms are made even less daunting by only including important information, and by being nicely presented. This saves on staff time, as customers are effectively doing some of the work. Dashboards are then included in the back-end, so staff can see the current status of start up at any time.
Essentially, the possibilities of Adobe Livecycle are exciting in terms of increasing operational efficiencies via technology implementations. Here at Gruden, we’ve been working hard in conjunction with Adobe to help our clients get the most out of Flex and Livecycle, assisting them in weathering the storm of the global financial crisis and improving efficiencies long-term.
If you’re interested in a demonstration of Adobe Livecycle or would simply like a little bit more information as to whether it’s the right solution for your business, give the Gruden switchboard a ring and ask for Adam or Philippa. No pushy sales spin, we’ll simply assess if it’ll be a good fit for your company and give you the information you need to make an informed decision.
And so the story goes; the cobbler’s children are the last to have new shoes.
It seems that we’ve been so busy working on everyone else’s websites that we haven’t had time to stop and kick-off the new design & development of our own. At last, the Grudenites have got together to talk about everything Gruden online.
We’ve decided to document the entire process as we go along, so you can see what really goes into a complete site refresh. This covers scoping to go-live and everything in between, and will all be live via the Gruden blog.
Here you’ll be able to check out our workshops, brainstorms, wireframes, look & feels and late-night sabbaticals, including a running tally of Dan & Jacko’s coffee intake and the use of the term “engagement”.
We kicked things off late last week with a 2-hour workshop to help develop a shared understanding of our users and their goals, and how they matched up with our own internal business goals. This touched on how our site could meet user and business needs simultaneously, and what was needed in order to roadtest the process.
Grudenites asked themselves a few key questions, including:
Why would a user come to our site?
What is a user looking for?
What are our key business objectives of the site?
Who are the people at the intersection of the use cases and business objectives?
What’s our vision statement for the site?
What’s our site setting out to achieve?
We also spent some time developing “personas”; a scoping technique we sometimes use which profiles a user via physical characteristics, demographic information, experience level and digital touch points. This gives us a benchmark for user acceptance testing later down the track, asking ourselves; ”Would Sam be able to perform this task?”
Grudenites have now been sent off with some homework in order to gather some intelligence on user flows. Mark, (resident Headmaster) will be checking in on us all in the coming weeks to make sure no one skips class for a smoke behind the toilet cubicles, and get the ball rolling on the next phase of scoping.
At our next workshop, we’ll be concentrating on information architecture, content, SEO and task analysis (usability).
Having just completed a massive project (which you’ll be reading about here soon), Anthony from our interactive team decided to have a play with the recently released FLARToolKit which uses the Flash player in your browser, your web cam and a specially crafted image to overlay 3d objects onto a real-world scene. The results of this have to be seen to be believed.
Visit this page and allow access to your web cam when prompted
Hold your print-out in front of your web cam so that the four outer corners of the dark square are visible to the camera and the image isn’t obstructed.
Be amazed by the awesome, spinning Gruden logo!
For those of you who don’t have a web cam here is a demo:
The possibilities of this technology are just beginning to be realised – however there are a couple of coolexamples out there and the ideas were flying rapidly around our office tonight so watch this space!
Ferrier Hodgson has been getting some great feedback for the new website that Gruden recently deployed for them.
The revamped site has been well received by both internal partners at Ferrier Hodgson and also their customers.
Ferrier Hodgson – Asia Pacific’s highest profile provider of turnaround, reconstruction and forensics services within the financial sector – approached Gruden with a brief to completely overhaul their website’s content management system (CMS), refresh the design and improve their information architecture.
Using the .NET framework, the Sitecore CMS has industry-leading ease of use, flexibility and scalability – so it was a perfect fit for Ferrier Hodgson. The company can now manage web content itself without relying on third parties, ensuring the site is always up to date and able to communicate effectively with partners and customers.
Ferrier Hodgson’s next assignment for Gruden is to implement a Sitecore Intranet service that will not only reflect the design and function of the public site but enable the company to improve internal workflow processes.
For more information about the Sitecore CMS platform visit www.sitecore.com or contact us here at Gruden.
Other Grudenites (including the more code-challenged amongst us) get the chance to vote on our favourites, and marvel at the cool concepts our dev team come up with.
This round’s topic is based on the concept of previewing music tracks online. Stay tuned to see what the team comes up with.
Have an idea for the next session of Code Wars? Let us know!
“Contextual advertising” – another buzzword on the radar in the online space. (Hard to keep up, isn’t it?) The theory is that the ad server understands the context of the pages the advertisement can appear on and places the ads appropriately. In practice these systems are often absent, leave much to be desired or have a fine sense of irony.
In any public advertising/marketing sphere context is key, so why do websites regularly see advertising on their site as just a dollar sign without regard for effectiveness or value-add? Is it because online advertising is often seen as a secondary priority to traditional media placements?
Here’s an example of some not-so-successful contextual advertising:
It’s unlikely that Sprint (or Palm for that matter) was hoping to promote the idea of cancer-causing cell phone radiation in their marketing strategy. This example highlights the need for companies looking to enter into the online advertising space to seek adequate consultation in online media planning before dipping their toes in the water. The set & forget approach can often have damaging consequences.
Just as importantly, companies featuring advertising on their public-facing websites need to ensure that the advertising that appears on their site does not detract from the brand or message in any way – or they risk losing credibility. Whilst many companies are taking big strides in the right direction, it’s clear that there’s still a long way to go for many marketers hoping to successfully utilise the web to promote their brand.
UPDATE: You know the one about lies, damn lies & statistics? Well perhaps unsurprisingly this research has caused some controversy.
Internet consumption has topped television, radio and newspapers for the second year running, a new survey by Nielsen Online has revealed. The annual Internet and Technology report, based on more than 2000 responses from internet users, points to an increase in technology ownership, wireless devices, broadband access and a trend in multi-tasking to the growth in online consumption. Overall weekly media consumption reached 89.2 hours last year, a significant increase from a base of 84.4 hours in 2007 and 71.4 hours in 2006.
Internet commanded the majority of consumers time last year with a total of 16.1 hours spent online in 2008, up from 13.7 hours in the previous year. Meanwhile TV consumption took a dive from 13.3 hours in 2007 to 12.9 hours per week in 2008. Radio, newspaper and magazines also reported declines in weekly consumption, securing just 8.8, 2.8 and 2.0 hours of consumers’ time respectively.
And yet online radio grew from 4.2 hours in 2007 to 4.6 hours each week and PC video (either downloaded or viewed on a computer) climbed to 4.6 hours last year from 2.5 hours in 2007 to. Video games also grew from 4.6 to 5.4 hours last year. While almost 90 hours were spent engaging with some form of media last year, a high proportion of internet users admit to “multi tasking” with 61% saying they watch television while online and half use the internet while listening to the radio. 63% of those surveyed owned a laptop, up from 49% in 2007.
