Twenty-five years ago, Shergroup began its digital journey. Over the years we have transformed our mainframe systems, to server rooms, and leased lines to a streamlined cloud-based system.
We are not techies per se. We are realists! IT for us is about bending the technology available to meet the needs of our business solutions group. We don’t like tech talk or expensive tech. We like sensible cloud-based legal management systems which do “what it says on the tin”.
We also like our tech to join up – or at least be capable of being joined up. Xero for accounting, WIX for web, and SKYPE for internal comms. Its low-tech cloud management in many ways. The gateway to our systems is our website and we have been rebuilding that into an e-commerce platform over the last year. The content on the website leads our client to be able to buy our services as digital products rather than a brochure format of telling people what we do. We listen and absorb ideas from our gurus – Donald Miller (Storybrand), Pat Flynn (SPI) and Ryan Diess (Digital Marketer). These gurus have imagination and followings that we aspire to create in our own cloud-based platform.
Our platform called SHERPA (it had to start with SHER) is a backbone created in the cloud management platform which focuses on developing software around its core database to deliver services to our client community. We have chosen a supplier who has remodelled the original SHERPA platform into a customizable system built to our specification. We are developing our custom applications to fit the solutions hub we are building. Our SHERPA UBER system is now at the hub of our CRM system. We junked well-known platforms because they were just too heavy in terms of time and training and to deploy. And worse they just weren’t logical. Now SHERPA UBER carries the load of our data and client conversations.
Benefits of Cloud Monitoring? Which cloud metrics should be tracked?
SHERPA is being customized like a monitoring tool or cloud monitoring tool which is used for measuring and comparing the performance, uptime, costs of all the solutions we deliver. Cloud-based Analytics and more and more data help us understand our performance and helps our clients understand why they should choose us over our competition. In an increasingly competitive environment, data is the new truth of what’s really happening. We put the data in front of our Create Sales team every day – it’s easy to see – easy to forecast with data being added to our pipeline. Every business needs a pipeline of where its next sale is coming from and we have that in our systems today.
In terms of how we deploy SHERPA UBER – we do so driven by the systems and ideas of our gurus. Smarter people than us have discussed what is needed today and for us, it’s all about “eyes on your product”. If you think about it even businesses that deliver services can box them up and sell them as products. It’s not a huge shift in imagination to do this. Apple has been selling smart boxed up software for years in its gorgeous shopping environments. We are following the path of brands we admire.
We now have the capability to hang all our processes of the SHERPA UBER backbone. It is a great feeling to know everything is going to be in the cloud software and organised. It is exciting to know that the pieces of the jigsaw – our business – are coming together in the Cloud in different parts of the world.
From Sheriffs to Business Solutions – this is our story. For the techies out there, we apologise this is not techie content – instead it is content that is our experience of the Cloud Computing. It has revolutionised our thinking, enabled us to build an international collaborative team, and deliver services across territories.
Today we are now only limited by our own imagination. That is why we celebrate cloud-based computing. It has enabled us to grow our community and our brand.
