Photo from Minasodaboy on Flickr

Looking at Technology in a New Way

It has been a busy few weeks for Sivad. We are in the middle of new customer implementations with a few more that need to be scheduled. It is a good sign to see companies who realize that even in a down economy spending money on new technology solutions is a good investment.

It’s no different for us at Sivad. We strive to keep our costs down and look to implement the right technology solutions to achieve our goals. One area that we have improved is the digital storage and access of documents. While this might be a basic function, we have found a unique way to access any document that will give us the needed knowledge to make fast, intelligent decisions.

While having archival of old documents is important, at Sivad our biggest concern is more our day-to-day business and market intelligence. We want to know what is going on with our market, our customers, our prospects, our competitors, and technology in general. In the past if we found an interesting article on the internet it would get printed out, stuck in a folder with good intentions of reading it, but in reality it was likely never to be seen again. That has all changed now. We took a product from one of our vendors, aXs Info, and used it in a way that best benefited us. Along with a scanning interface, we have the ability on the fly to print or drag documents directly into their system. This can be web pages or internet articles, emails, Microsoft Office documents, videos or just about any other document. There is a very easy indexing process and all the documents are run through a process that saves all the text in order to search on it later (I call this our internal Google search). This process of quickly saving documents is great, but best part is being able to find what we’re looking for, with a few keystrokes.

We don’t use their supplied searching interface, instead we use an option they offer called “the integrator”. This makes any application that we’re using, the searching interface. For example, I could be reading an email and see something that I need to react to, but before I do I want to know if I have any more information on the subject. To find out, I will highlight a word in the email and select a pre-determined “hotkey”. The aXs Info system will search all saved documents and any that matches that highlighted word will appear in a search results box. I select the document I am interested in seeing and it opens right there without leaving my email. I can perform this same search in web pages, in Word documents, accounting applications and just about any other application you can think of.

This has been a somewhat non-traditional way to use this application, but we have realized for our needs this way offers the most benefits. That’s a good point to keep in mind when using a new technology, it might be marketed for one use, but once it is understood it can be used for something else. I have seen many an executive who has the vision to reconfigure it, to ensure the most value for their company. I would encourage you to try to do the same with your present installed technology solutions.

Exploring the Sivad Framework

One of the most common questions we get is, “So what exactly does Sivad do?” We will explain the services we offer and for those who’ve seen or used services similar to ours, they get it. For others though, it’s not so clear. It was on one of these occasions that I decided to explain it visually and the light bulb went on in the person asking. Since that time we always use what I call the “Sivad Business Solutions Framework” to describe what we do, and how it can make a company more productive and profitable. Recently I had someone film this visual model in a meeting so that it could be used to answer this question in the future. I’ve just added it to my latest blog post and we’ll soon be adding it to our website. I’d love it if you’d take a few minutes to watch it and let me know what you think.