Jeff's Blog

Over the weekend I took my family to see a movie.  After the movie, my son suggested we cross Route 4 and go to Sonic for some ice cream. He also suggested that we cross the highway on foot and play frogger.  You might ask what this has to do with information technology consulting?  It got me thinking about a business concept called leapfrogging.   This is where you are behind your competition in some manner, but are able to institute something to allow you to leap in front of your competition.

A lot of times, information technology comes into play to enable a company to leapfrog.  One example of this is a company that had old analog phone system.  It worked perfectly fine for its intended purpose and the owner saw no need to replace it.  One day, the phone system crashed and they were forced to find a replacement.  All of their competitors have changed phone systems years ago and were able to transfer calls to where ever a person might be located. The salespeople were always able to handle customer requests.   However at this particular company, they could only transfer calls into the venerable voice mail and messages could only be retrieved while in the office. 

With the new phone system, they had come out of the 70’s.  Voice and data were integrated with their current network. Not only could they do what their competition was doing as I described above, but they could also send quotes and have all correspondence logged with their CRM system.  This allowed them to respond faster than their competitors and increased their customer satisfaction. This capability allowed them to leapfrog their competitors. 

Cincinnati and Dayton tend to be more conservative than other parts of the country.  Because of this, a lot of companies tend to have older IT solutions.  Could new web application development give you a competitive advantage that would allow you to leapfrog?