7 Steps to a Successful Business Model
At the heart of every successful business is a sound business model. But what exactly does a business model entail? Essentially, when somebody asks you about your business model, they’re asking how you plan to make money. In this article, we’ll take a look at seven questions you should ask yourself when designing a business model, from who comprises your target market to the need to utilise learning management software. But before we get into that, let’s take a brief look at what not to do…
The case of the missing underpants
There’s a famous episode of animated TV show South Park entitled ‘Gnomes’. In the episode, a group of tiny, rogue gnomes sneak around town, breaking into residents’ houses and stealing the underpants from their drawers. When the South Park boys finally encounter the gnomes and ask them why they’re stealing everyone’s underpants, the gnomes reveal a whiteboard with their three-step business model. It reads:
8 Pros and Cons of Cloud Computing
These days, in the business world, a lot is being made of “the cloud” — that is, the delivery of computing as a service, rather than a product. In the cloud, your organisation’s data, resources and software do not reside on servers hosted on your own premises; instead, they are hosted remotely on servers that are shared by many other organisations. But is this necessarily a good thing? In this article, we’ll compare the pros and cons of hosting your enterprise content management system in the cloud.
Pro: There is no upfront capital investment
When it comes to implementing an on-premises software system, you’ll need to expend a significant amount of money upfront. With cloud-based services, however, you simply pay a subscription fee to access the service, with no up-front capital investment beyond ensuring that employees have a PC with which to access the service.
Con: It may cost more over time
5 Ways to Take the Headaches Out of Hiring
Whether your company is large or small, the step of hiring new employees is always a hefty one. The hiring process inevitably costs time and money — and that’s in the best case scenario where you find the perfect employee straight away. Often, the employee turns out to be unfit for the job, or moves on when offered another opportunity, or simply chooses not to take the job in the first place despite hours of interview time. In this article, we’ll offer a few tips for taking the headaches out of the hiring process, from offering a competitive salary to utilising induction software.
1. Offer a competitive salary
There’s no getting away from this one. The price needs to be right if you want to attract the best candidates – employees are unlikely to accept a job that doesn’t meet their financial needs and expectations. If you’re not 100 per cent sure about a competitive salary for a position, try searching your competitors’ job listings. Alternatively, you can check out websites such as mycareer.com.au or payscale.com to get a more accurate idea. And if you’re not in a position to offer a top-tier salary, then think about what else you can offer the employee in terms of work culture, perks, and benefits — things to make your organisation stand out from the rest.
9 Elements All Great Websites Should Possess
Whether you’re running a web site for your business or yourself, there are certain elements that all web sites should possess if they are to succeed. In this article, we look at nine of the most important, from excellent visual design to personal or enterprise content management.
1. Excellent visual design
Ever been through a town and found yourself attracted to the clean, well-presented cafe instead of a run-down takeaway? Well, the same principle applies to web design. Great visual design on your web site establishes professionalism and trust from the moment the user arrives.
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6 Ways to Attract the Best Candidates
Every business owner knows that getting the most out of their organisation’s human resources is one of the keys to overall success. And in order to achieve that, it’s important to attract the highest quality employees to your business in the first place. In this article, we’ll take a look at seven ways to attract the best employees, from putting out the right advertisement to utilising a learning management system.
1. Use an online recruitment process
A great way to attract strong candidates is to have a well-structured online recruitment process. This provides your business with the ability to respond to candidates quickly and with quality feedback. This is particularly beneficial for larger organisations with ongoing recruitment needs, as the resumes of clients who may not be suitable for the current role but who still show a great deal of promise can be kept on file for when a more appropriate role emerges.
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What is Enterprise Search?
Broadly defined, an enterprise search system is one that offers a way to make content from multiple data sources available to a defined audience. Primarily, it is used by businesses that require the means to store, retrieve and track digital information in an efficient manner. This may require pulling information from a range of containers — such as desktops, email servers, application databases, enterprise content management systems intranet web sites and more — and organising and ranking these in results according to company-defined parameters of relevance.
Enterprise search vs. Internet search
A good way to wrap one’s head around enterprise search is to compare it with internet search — something that we are all familiar with through online search engines such as Google. These search solutions are used to catalogue the public documents that can be found around the World Wide Web. However, internet search engines cannot access information contained behind an organisation’s firewall or in private company databases. And vice versa — typically, enterprise search systems don’t bother with public documents on the World Wide Web.
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What is Web 2.0?
In the early days of the World Wide Web, the browser experience was not interactive like it is today. The average person couldn’t create a web site or even contribute information to the Web; instead, web sites were the result of large capital investments from organisations with the resources to do so. Web 2.0 has changed all this. The use of enterprise content management systems and interactive web sites such as Facebook and YouTube means that the average person is now able to contribute to the mass of information on the web in a meaningful way.
Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0
When attempting to understand Web 2.0, many people assume it can be placed in a timeline in relation to its predecessor, Web 1.0. In reality, this isn’t really the case. Most of the Web 2.0 technologies have been around since the early days of the Internet in one form another; it’s just a matter of how the technologies were used to transform the user experience. In this sense, Web 2.0 can be viewed as an attitude towards the World Wide Web as much as anything else.
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5 Secrets to Better HR
Human resources (HR) management refers to the management of staff within a business or organisation. It may seem somewhat cold to refer to human beings as “resources”, but in the context of business, getting the most out of employees is essential to overall success and, as a result, putting systems in place to get more out of your organisation’s human resources is paramount. In this article, we’ll look at a few ways to improve HR management, from offering performance-based incentives to utilising a learning management system .
1. Offer performance-based rewards
5 Ways to Streamline Your Organisation
In science, the word “streamline” refers to a path that offers the least resistance to a flowing liquid. In the world of business, this word has been adopted as a way of referring to creating processes that increase efficiency in a business — basically, which offer the least resistance to business success. In this article, we’ll look at five ways to streamline your own business or organisation, from tightening deadlines to moving towards an electronic paradigm with software and a learning management system.
1. Tighten deadlines
6 Ways to Improve Staff Motivation
The most productive and successful businesses are ones where employees are motivated to work. They’re the ones where staff enjoy their time in the workplace, instead of meandering through the day with one eye on the clock. In this article, we’ll look at various ways to create that positive environment and help build employee motivation, from using a learning management system to holding team building days and events.
1. Match tasks to talents
Employees who succeed at a given task are more likely to feel motivated. In order to ensure this success, it’s important to understand your employee’s strengths and weaknesses. To begin with, match them with tasks that play to their strengths to ensure positive outcomes. If an employee finds themselves pigeon holed in a task or area of your business which they don’t find comfortable, they’re more likely to become disillusioned.