The Importance of Being Earnest(ly Current)

New Year, New Resolutions, right?  One that I always put on my list is ‘keeping up with my workload and staying current with technology’.  I put them together since they really work together.  Anyone remember getting a TripTik from AAA for a cross country drive?  Compare that to turning on your mobile phone navigator and speaking the destination to get a dynamic ‘from here to there’ map with voice prompts for driving.   Staying current with technology translates, in many cases, to saving time and being more productive.

Working with SaaS systems is no different.  Let’s take NetSuite OpenAIr, a strong PSA solution that has new feature releases every 6-8 weeks.  Can you even imagine how many system changes happen in just 1 year?  Well, actually I can because we at TOP Step take the time each release to evaluate those feature to get the most out of our investment and help our client base do the same.  For those of you who use NetSuite OpenAir, remember how to rename reports before the report edit function came out in 2011?  It was time consuming and avoided, basically, which resulted in poor report names in some cases or replicated reports that were hard to maintain against a standards list.

The extra challenge with keeping current in a SaaS product, I feel, is that the vendor makes the new features transparent for the most part so it’s really easy to forget to check ‘what is new’.   Buying and installing software packages, like QuickBooks, makes you stop and think about what changes are in the new software because the look and feel may change, menu items may change, and so forth.  Installing an upgrade of a product makes you think in terms of ‘what is new’.   When releases happen with SaaS products, you may not even realize anything changed because the vendor has done such a good job with configuration management to not impact you unless you want to be impacted.  Great plus!!!

But there is a downside.  Time goes by and you still haven’t found time to evaluate the new features – if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it as the saying goes.  So now you’re 6 releases into the year and haven’t changed your use of the SaaS system.   What you may have missed may have been able to save you hours or days of effort (and frustration) in interacting with your system.   You may not have time to evaluate things on your own, but find a trusted vendor or partner to help out so you can also stay current.  It’s better to be Earnestly Current than Hopelessly Behind!!!
[tfg_social_share]