Wednesday 10 March 2010
about ABC
ABC was established in 1990 and in the intervening 20 years we have worked for a diverse range of clients, large and small, in both the public and private sectors:
from FTSE100 companies to SMEs
from manufacturing, through finance, IT, leisure and the service sector to retailing and professional firms
from central government departments, through agencies and other NDPBs to charities
Organisations that have benefited from our expertise, past and present, include:
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Our team has wide-ranging skills and experience in IT, and a background in sales & marketing,
direct mail & advertising, and seminar & conference organisation.
Our information technology experience stems from programming
the world’s first desktop computers in 1979; as computer hardware
and business applications software have evolved so have our skills in
using them. We have spent around 25 years managing databases, and
have been heavily involved with overseeing
customised direct marketing and mailing projects. Our strong sales
& marketing experience makes us particularly confident to
undertake marketing communications projects, including sales lead generation and enquiry fulfilment.
Having worked in or alongside industrial or commercial concerns most of our working
lives we fully understand the needs of private sector clients.
At the same time, because of an ongoing involvement with central government and several NDPBs, some of which flows from a working relationship with the Department for Education that began in 1992, we also have a long and detailed track record, not to mention empathy, with the public sector. We have also had an ongoing working relationship with several divisions of the former DTI since 1996 and the Department for Transport and CLG since 1997.
Regarding our customer base, the key issue is that we enjoy working with as wide a range of clients as possible, since we believe this helps us to develop a well-rounded skillset, which works to the benefit of our clients as a whole.
We are sometimes asked whether we can match other blue-chip players in terms of resources. Our response is that there are two separate issues here: one practical, the other philosophical:
On a practical level, it never ceases to amaze us that some
so-called ‘big’ companies seem to lack the resources to do
the job, let alone being able to match ours. This is often because managing
data is tacked on as an afterthought to their core business, whether this
is as a mailing house, event organiser, marketing agency or whatever.
Many choose to channel resources into bag carriers or professional ‘lunchers’
and other corporate extravagances, rather than things that will actually
benefit their customers (such as comprehensive address checking software,
resilient backup storage etc).
What they do have is more or less permanent voicemail (“This is Fred Flintstone on Tuesday the 6th…” — even though it’s now Thursday!), maddening automated call attendant systems (“Listen carefully to the following six options…”) and irritating Music-on-Hold. Frankly, while we have all of these features, we try to ensure that our customers experience as little of them as possible.
Philosophically, ABC is a speedboat
to their supertanker, being infinitely more flexible, and often able to
respond to tighter deadlines. So whereas our competitors are more likely
say “Sorry, we’re rather tied up at the
moment; how about three weeks on Tuesday?” or, when taking
a brief, “Er, how do you mean?”,
with ABC you’re more likely to hear “Can
do” and “No problem, we’ve
got all that.” Most importantly, and in our view unsurprisingly, we can often seem cheaper sorry, more cost-effective,
than so-called major players!
In terms of ABC’s processes and procedures, many clients seek reassurance regarding how
their data is being held. Can it, for instance, be readily output in a
form that normal people can do something useful with? Does ABC use ‘mainstream’ database management systems (DBMS) and other software applications? These
are understandable concerns, since many IT contractors take their customers’
data and ‘mangle’ it using outmoded hardware or software (rather like in this picture!),
rendering it unusable by anyone except the contractor — presumably in
an attempt to make themselves indispensable.
We, on the other hand, employ a wide range of well-respected software tools: For our main in-house database work we primarily use Visual FoxPro; this traces its heritage back to dBASE II, which we began using in 1982. We use this because it is fast and powerful; by programming in its own high level language and through SQL queries we can get results in a fraction of the time it takes in other DBMS packages. It also stores data such that it can be read directly by a wide range of applications, including Access, Word, Excel etc, as well as writing datafiles in any number of standard formats in the blink of an eye. But note that even if you have something obscure by way of an output requirement we have not been defeated yet! For our web-based applications, data is stored in MySQL databases that we then interrogate using ColdFusion; this combination is sufficiently fast and powerful that performance is usually as fast as if it were running on your LAN. Better still, in many applications you can call for a data extract and it is delivered to your inbox in seconds, properly formatted and immediately readable in Excel.
In terms of hardware, ABC uses computing and communications equipment that is fully-featured
yet industry-standard, extremely powerful yet instantly replaceable. As well as all the usual software and hardware internet security measures, we protect against power interruptions with numerous UPS units. We
obviously take data security very seriously, since data is virtually our
sole irreplaceable asset. Our backup regime includes various NAS devices, and we also back up to DVD-RAM (transient) and DVD-R (for permanent archive). User authentication details are notified to clients using encrypted e-mail, and when data leaves our premises in Flash memory it is password-protected, since we wouldn’t relish the prospect of telling any client that we’d left their (viewable) data in the back of a taxi!
Our communications infrastructure is also kept abreast of current technology, from ISDN for much of the 1990s, to broadband DSL and VoIP today. Our objective is always to have a highly configurable and thus extremely flexible setup, without the need for expensive maintenance, at a continually reducing cost.
In order to manage data, companies must be registered under the Data Protection Act. ABC’s registration covers all that might be asked of us, and more; to see our Data Protection registration, click here.
Unsurprisingly we believe that most of our clients’ future data or communications
strategies will include a remote (eg. via the Internet)
component of one kind or another. We have already noted that there is
no incompatibility between an enterprise having its data professionally
managed by a specialist organisation while having the same data viewable
by its own staff. Viewing data via a browser, particularly for widely dispersed organisations, will become
the norm, exactly as you are reading this now.
Going further, segmented mailing databases will continue to be used for targeted mailshots, but these will be increasingly delivered via e-mail broadcasts (EMBs). Increased spam filtering will mean that content will need to take account of this (consider ‘adult education’ or ‘sex discrimination’ as examples), while anti-spam legislation (such as the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications) obliges you to give B2B customers an ‘opt out’ ie. to unsubscribe. Click here for an interesting overview on how to avoid your newsletter being treated as spam.
Stakeholder communications, whether newsletters, bulletins, stock lists or whatever, are all moving increasingly towards an EMB-type solution. Some are self-contained, but most enable customers to ‘click-through’ to appropriate points on one or more websites, rather than all the content needing to be in the EMB itself; e-mail content filters are accelerating the process towards shorter, less content-rich (but greater value-added) EMBs. Fax broadcasting has long ceased to be effective, and is disliked because the recipient ‘pays’.
Fulfilment that currently takes the form of an expensively produced brochure or factsheet being posted out to requesters is rapidly being replaced by an e-mailed response enclosing one or more links to webpages, including to documents that may be downloaded, or enclosing Adobe Acrobat (.PDF) or other viewable documents (eg. Flash Paper).
Whatever the future holds, you can be confident that ABC will evaluate new technologies as they emerge. We will ensure that we harness the tools that are worth using and which yield tangible benefits, and discard those that are over-hyped and under-specified.
For those
wondering about the oak tree, ABC is based in the heart of the Warwickshire
countryside, and our logo reflects this. The tree is at the centre of this
photo taken locally by Rob Talbot, featured in Shakespeare Country
by Susan Hill (ISBN 0718127382
but presently out of print).
© Arden Business Consultants 10/03/2010
E & O E
