It is unsurprising that almost 74% of business owners now have a CloudFirst strategy, which in other words means that they prefer to use cloud based tools for their line of business applications before investigating alternatives.
The pros and cons of cloud is not something covered in this blog, but providing you wish to use cloud apps, where do you start.
Here at Fusion, being only 4 months old, we were in the position where we had no legacy systems or legacy data – it was an IT Directors dream!
We set out mapping out what systems we needed and based this on some simple workflows which captured our users journeys and also the systems needed so that we could meet our clients objectives.
By way of example, our tax clients send us confidential data which needs to be stored securely and we need to get their electronic signature on official documents to process their tax returns.
In order to best choose the right applications, it’s important to do some online research and categorise systems into logical groups – ie:
- CRM – somewhere to store all information on your prospects clients contracts and Sales activity
- Accounting – somewhere to generate sales invoices, book purchases, do book keeping and get business intelligence
- Compliance – something to send and receive electronic documents with time stamps and electronic signatures
At Fusion we carried out a lot of due diligence on the apps available and ultimately chose:
- Dropbox for business
- Citrix RightSignature
- Pipedrive
- Mailchimp
- Xero
In part 2, we will talk about how to integrate these systems together.
