As a small business, it can be difficult to stand out in a competitive industry. But more and more small businesses are discovering how various bespoke software solutions can help them not only work more efficiently and be more profitable, but also reach more clients faster than ever.
In this blog post we’re taking a closer look at the competitive impact of having access to great, tailored business software at your fingertips.
The power of bespoke software
Here at DCSL, we’ve had the benefit and pleasure of helping businesses of all types and sizes to solve problems and become more successful with the help of software. There is really no limit to what software can do for an organisation, but most of the solutions we see typically fall into one of six broad categories:
1. Operations and Management
Business management software and ERP systems often hold the key to any organisation’s ability to grow successfully. Without a structured model for planning workflows and optimising resources, it can be very difficult to keep track of everything that goes on in the business on a daily basis. However, a powerful business management system will allow the leadership team to create and follow a structure for every department and ensure all areas of the business are performing well.
2. Retail and Commercial
Whether you are an online merchant or own a brick-and-mortar outlet, you will benefit hugely from the support of good software infrastructure. Payment systems, stock management, shipping, discounts, advertising and marketing – all these functions and more can be made highly efficient and profitable by using bespoke features. Most off-the-shelf retail systems are difficult to scale and will never fit your unique needs seamlessly, which is why many businesses now choose to have their own software custom built to work perfectly in line with their processes ( gak ).
3. Relationships and Communications
There are plenty of great ready-made CRM and marketing systems available, but they often come with a hefty price tag in the form of monthly or annual licence fees. The key benefit of bespoke CRM software is that is can allow you to individually shape all the functionality for email marketing, social media automation, publishing tools, user portals and more. This allows you to strip out any unnecessary functionality and instead add the specific features that you and your customers will value.
4. Intelligence and Analytics
As businesses, we often generate a large amount of data that never actually gets used for evaluation or forecasting. A bespoke software system can allow the organisation to capture, analyse and report on any type or combination of information. With the help of highly specific user data, statistics and performance measurements, you can create reports that support smart decision making and strategy development.
5. Internet of Things
One area of fast growth at the moment is the Internet of Things (IoT) , which is the concept of using wireless communications to collect and send data from and to devices anywhere. By using bespoke software, a business can create very specific mechanisms for communicating with machines like manufacturing tools, robots, surveillance equipment, thermostats – even vehicles. This opens up a whole new world of smart operations, where software allows machines to operate “intelligently” based on a number of patterns or criteria. Internet of Things can make a huge difference to the bottom line when used to optimise resources and make the most of hardware investments.
6. Mobile apps
For many organisations a mobile app is just as useful as a desktop one, if not more. Most of us tend to carry out work and communications while we are on the move, and we often want to have the ability to access the same systems wherever we are. Field workers often rely on mobile apps to complete tasks, log their work and report issues, but there are no out-of-the box mobile app solutions that can be customised enough to suit every organisation. Creating a bespoke mobile app is by far the best way to create a tool that gets the job done and that users love.
The economy of bespoke software
A monthly software licence fee for a ready-made, off-the-shelf solution may seem attractive for a cash-strapped business. However, using a general software solution means you can’t have the technology designed around your processes. Instead you need to adapt your processes to the software, which can also cost money to do.
For many businesses, the initial investment in a bespoke software solution offers better value in the long term, thanks to the ability to scale and tailor the system whenever you want. (Also, you never risk getting unexpected end-of-life announcements!)
You may have heard the term ‘serverless computing’, but do you actually know what it means? And, more importantly, do you know whether it’s something you should pay attention to in your business? This week we’re taking a closer look at the latest cloud trend and how it’s making ripples across the world, for big brands as well as small.
What is Serverless Computing?
The word ‘serverless’ may seem slightly misleading. In fact, serverless computing still uses servers – but they’re operating behind the scenes. It is an infrastructure that builds on the strength of many users sharing the same utilities and deploying code more efficiently, with all server-side operations being run as a managed service. Many people now use the terms serverless computing and FaaS (Function As A Service) interchangeably. While traditional software development is about creating and executing a series of functions which make up the operations of an application, serverless computing can split out the entire application into separate components which can connect to each other at any scale. These all run alongside each other in functional containers, which can all be replicated and scaled rapidly when needed, based on real-time demand. Serverless computing is offered by many cloud providers as a managed service, where the provider handles all the tasks around setup, capacity planning, server management and more.
The Benefits of Going Serverless
Many world-leading brands like Uber, Airbnb and Coca-Cola have applied serverless infrastructure to their services, in order to meet fluctuating, instant demand. But many smaller, up-and-coming apps and services have been able to benefit from the same technology to compete on the global scene. Let’s take a look at the main benefits that are driving the take-up of serverless computing.
A serverless future
Here at DCSL, we are fans of all and any technological progress that allows us and our customers to care less about hardware and more about software. Serverless computing is still in its infancy but we’re confident that the future will bring many more levels of efficiency to the way we share the costs and maximise the resources of the world’s computing power.
In the age of GDPR , a data breach may seem like your worst nightmare and one you’d rather not think about. But if you do find yourself in a position where a data breach has occurred, it’s important to have a clear plan of action for dealing with it. In this blog post, we’re taking a look at what the most important steps are for dealing with a data breach and limiting any potential damage to the business.
What constitutes a data breach?
A data breach is what we typically refer to as a security incident where confidential or sensitive data is exposed or released to a person or organisation who is not authorised to see it. Of course, a data breach is not always malicious. It can simply be a result of an accidental release of information. However, the legal implications can be just as severe regardless of whether the breach is caused by malware, a targeted attack, a lost laptop or a stray email.
The steps to take after a breach
So what do you do once the unimaginable happens? In an ideal world, your business should have a detailed incident response plan that you can immediately launch and follow. But whether or not you have access to a plan, we want to share some of the key elements that should be part of an overall checklist for taking action to deal with the aftermath of a data breach.
Moving on as a business
A data breach – when handled well – does not need to mean complete disaster for an organisation. It’s important to start focusing on the future as soon as possible and use any lessons from the incident to build a stronger, safer data security policy going forward. And remember: You don’t have to do it alone! Find a solid, dependable IT security partner who can give you all the confidence you need.
All industries are being impacted by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and software development is no exception. Every part of the software development process can benefit from the input of AI, from software design and testing to decision-making and automated code generation. Today, many AI applications focus on improving existing processes and development tools. However, research firm Forrester predicts that AI will eventually completely re-write the way that the sector works, as it starts to seep into every part of the software lifecycle – improving processes that are traditionally inefficient and prone to mistakes.
Redefining how software development works
Historically, developing a computer program would require a developer specifying what they wish the system to do, and then hand-engineering all desired features. However, there are many tasks that are too complex to code using traditional rules and algorithms. As an example, it would be virtually impossible to hand-engineer software to correctly identify photos of dogs. There are simply too many variables, such as fur colour, size, tail length, ear shape and much more. That’s where AI techniques like machine learning and deep learning can help.
Machine learning in action
In a recent example, developers succeeded in teaching a computer to differentiate between a chihuahua and a muffin using AI. With machine learning, a computer isn’t given rules on how to make decisions and complete certain actions. Instead there is a set of curated, tailored data that teaches the machine what to do. Positive feedback can reinforce certain actions, whilst negative feedback will stop other actions from recurring. In many ways, this is how the recommendations work on Amazon and Spotify. A customer buying a recommended product or adding a song to their playlist acts as positive reinforcement for the machine-learning algorithms behind each platform.
The future of programming
We expect to see software development increasingly shifting towards a machine-learning model, where programmers will rely less on traditional programming methods. The software developers of tomorrow will most likely move away from writing code to instead doing more scientific tasks like collecting, processing and analysing data for an AI engine to use. As author and Google research engineer Pete Warden predicts : “In ten years, most software jobs won’t involve programming.”
Current uses of AI in software
Before this AI-driven future, however, there are more commonplace applications of the technology that are being used now. Let’s take a look at some examples!
AI is a work in progress
Much like software itself, AI technology is constantly evolving and improving – which holds exciting potential for software development. While the current benefits of using AI come from efficiencies in the development process and improved decision-making, it will most likely alter our very notion of software development in the future.
One day, AI will be better at coding than the best human programmers – which is a good thing for the entire industry.