Evolve or Die

The principle of continuous improvement is fundamental to the growth and success of all businesses, but none more so than online information services. Our services are essentially a suite of connected applications that work in unison to perform complex processes and as such they require constant auditing and diligence to maintain. But maintenance of the accuracy of the core database (not just the bare bones changes required for security patches and platform upgrades) is just the minimum commitment required. Like sharks, online information services need to keep improving or they will die a slow death of ever decreasing renewal rates. And by ‘improvement’ I mean a commitment to continuously increasing user efficiency and end-user value, which involves a lot more than just routine maintenance. Efficiency Improving the efficiency of an online service is often a function of tweaking code to decrease processing times, but the most significant process efficiencies are unlocked when processes themselves are re-engineered. However it is accomplished though, the one true measure of efficiency is the length of time it takes a user to perform a standard task so this should be measured, and then the steps required in the user’s query process are reduced until the performance time is optimized. This improves the user’s ROI perception and overall renewal rates. Value Adding value can be accomplished via software enhancements, but it is usually more a function of the nature of the data driving the service. Services with very timely and/or unique datasets establish a major barrier to entry for competitors and they deliver more core value to the end-users paying the subscription fees. Continually offering more data (broader geographic scope, adjacent/complementary industry datasets, more frequent updates, deeper metadata) is essential to the value of the subscription service. If we want to increase the value of our services (both to end-users and businesses in general) we need to always treat them as “works in progress” that are always evolving toward an ideal state via improvements in the efficiency of their software’s performance and the value of their offering. To do less and expect that these services will do fine with a “set it and forget it” attitude, is to sow the seeds of the service’s eventual irrelevance.