Escape information hell and prepare for scale by using the cloud and English for building a time-space-culture neutral platform

When spreadsheets are rocket science then chaos is just around the corner
My previous start-up project was SpokenWord AB. It was a booking agency for spoken word artists that mainly took the form of a rebranding project of the genre in Sweden. We succeeded fairly well with the rebranding through multiple PR-campaigns, our own TV-show, multiple appearances on Sweden Got Talent and our own successful bar show. Businesswise the project was a fiasco with low probability of getting any significant revenues before I got grey hairs from age or from stress when trying to make the impossible happen. The company administration wasn’t a huge success either. It wasn’t that we were bad at organizing; both my partner and me did a good job at organizing our share of what needed to be organized. The problem was that there was no real sharing. All our documents were locally produced and stayed locally hosted unless the document was requested and verbally transferred, emailed or even printed and handed over at our next encounter. As we were bootstrapping we didn’t have a shared office space, so the alternative to walk over to each other’s desk at office and have a sneak peak wasn’t a viable alternative. So there we were, stuck in the good old days of analogue communication with e-mail and Excel spreadsheets almost looking like rocket science. We were proud of our spreadsheets back then. Curiously we didnt even reflect over the idea of a shared server appeared. I think we both thought of it as too time consuming to think of and set up compared to the tiny problems we had. Anyway, I think we underestimated the problems of inefficient sharing. In retrospect I think I could have saved many days of reproduction, waiting to receive the right document before I could proceed with a task, constant worrying and over thinking due to lack of control and just the pure relationship-undermining aspect of continuously having to nag each other for the sharing, searching and losses of small insignificant docs.

Why have a gym when you can have an access-safe folder structure?
But the problems we had at SpokenWord AB were really baby problems compared to the communication problems I experienced once I started my new job in January 2010 at one of Sweden’s fastest growing companies. One of my first assignments was to research and propose a solution to a more efficient mechanism for internal document sharing. In specific it was about the sharing of up to date documents that were produced continuously and were to be shared with different departments within the company.

I started out by interviewing all the managers of different departments and different people in other positions that for some reasons had key positions in relation to or knowledge about the internal info handling mechanisms. In total I interviewed about 20 people at the 180 people large company. The deeper I dug into the problem the more complex the issue started to look like. My tiny problem that was supposed to only be an introduction and take one or two days evolved. At the core of the problem was the "old" (the company has only been in existence for about 5 years), server system that was based on a simple non-searchable folder structure. On top there were no extra layers of information management software. It was a pure desktop structure with manual "click and you will find"-search. Combined with this desktop structure was a need for a rigid access structure within the folder system. So, in reality, the departments only had access to their own stuff. For management reasons middle management often had cross-access, but often non-middle management employees were dependent on documents from other departments to perform their tasks. The problem was that they couldn’t be given access to the folders of the other department because the document they should have access to shared folder with some other sensitive documents that they were not supposed to have access to.

To surpass the boundaries of the folders, document sharing through e-mail and Google Docs (essentially an invite through e-mail) was the instrument of choice. So basically sharing was reduced to a one-on-one request-and-share structure. So everybody producing documents to be shared had their own lists of internal customers to whom they had to send the docs. As the company growth-speed was so extreme people kept changing positions, new people were getting hired and so on. As a result recipients were often missing from the mailing lists, resulting in growing frustration for many recipients that constantly had to be begging and nagging to get the necessary stuff. Also, the rate of document reproduction was a common issue, where people would spend days at reproducing already existing documents just because they happened not to have access to the right folder to be able to realize in time that the document was already there. Of cause they couldn’t just go around and ask all of the time if a doc was there or not so people just simply reproduced over and over again. On top of all this, the internal servers had a tendency to go down every once in a while and reboot the access structure.

Adding to the problems was a language problem. The company started out as a local Swedish venture and thus had produced all the core company documents in Swedish. Now the company was fast expanding into new markets and thus the more and more common English speakers had an extra tough time to just handle what they actually could get access to.

The CEO experience
When interviewing people I soon got to understand that for most, the information sharing was really an emotional issue and a weekly source of annoyance and shaking heads. When I sat down with the CEO to talk about his specific info-sharing requests, he showed me his point of view: the dozens of weekly reports landing in his inbox for unknown reasons and to never be read, the dozens of haphazardly organized Google Docs he had access to often for unknown reasons getting him stressed out every time he opened his Google account, and to make things even better, after the last server self-reboot the server guy had forgot to give the CEO access to all the folders on the server. So now he didn’t even have access to the core documents of his own company. Just like everyone else he wasn’t very happy about how things were going with the document flows.

The potential price tag
Now I knew the info-sharing problem was kind of disturbing to everyone and for many causing multiple extra cross-office walks and talks on a daily basis. But, when I made a poll to estimate the real costs for the lack of efficient info sharing, I was truly shocked to find that the costs where potentially somewhere about 500-600k EURO per year. That’s about the cost of ten employees or 1/18th of the company spending on employees. It’s not insignificant. Of cause, there is always some level of inefficiency in human communication, but a better-designed system could probably have some nice and large cost and frustration cutting effects.

So why didn’t they just implement a better system?
The main reason was the growth rate. The company had been and still was so tremendously successful that all efforts have to be put on just serving to the extreme rate of growth. Between when I entered the company in January and when I left in May (to do SkrivaPå), the staff grew from 180 to 240. In September just 4 months later, they were about 330. No wonder nobody had time to care for some document structure when exponentially growing streams of hard cash had to be managed and everybody was overloaded with more urgent issues to cater to until the work force could be expanded to give some time to contemplate internal issues.

Lessons learned: some information philosophy
If you want to grow fast you might want to optimize for internal “fast thinking”. At the core of efficient internal scalability I believe is the possibility of instant and effortless sharing. As the amount of documents, knowledge and parallel processes keep growing, you can’t manually keep requesting and sharing updates on each and every thing that is produced. With increasing amount of documents and increasing amount of people the points of connection grow exponentially and soon the complexity is impossible to manage manually without getting lots of black holes in mind space. There is just not enough time to do the patching and growing the business at the same time. Therefore the sharing has to be automated somehow. In a way that people that are supposed to have the access, effortlessly can share and receive the company productions. The "stream of consciousness" should be naturally easy to plug into.

Two barriers to scale
I believe there are two main needs that are necessary to satisfy to achieve successful automation:
1. Language: A language accessible to everybody. If you are going to grow exponentially in a global world and you want to go global you don’t want the language to be a hindrance to hiring top talent. I’ve heard its in the loop, but there are still a few years before we will be able to have real time translation through Google Translate. Therefore I would recommend English as the language of choice.
2. Instantation: You want sharing to be instant. You don’t want people to wait with sharing and wait with getting. Optimal productivity comes from lean production chains. Not only in industry concerned with material production but also in soft businesses concerned with intellectual output. Therefore time and space is key. The information cannot be local, neither in time nor in space. Cloud computing is the new revolution catering to that need of instantation.

7 cloud apps we love
So before we wrap up lets look at 7 cloud apps we use internally at SkrivaPå. The services have been chosen specifically as a result of a trade-off between affordability, setup-costs, scalability and lean. We consider the choices optimal for us as a bootstrapped and small teamed transaction-based IT-start-up. If you are too, then these tools probably can be really useful. If you’re not, they still might be or they might inspire you to research and find other and more fit alternatives for your needs. Good luck!

Dropbox
This is really a genius instrument for primitive desktop sharing if you don’t want to host your own server. You just share folders by a simple e-mail invite and de-share folders by a simple two click process. Also, if you’re lazy and don’t want to leave your e-mail inbox, you can directly save docs in the right places through e-mailing documents straight into the chosen folders with the help of AirDropper (AirDropper is still in beta so it hasnt yet fully reached its potential). Check out Dropbox.

Highrise
An exquisite slimmed CRM-tool for the small business. Administering and sharing contacts is made so intuitive and easy and the time costs of setup are minimal. This is perfect for the small business that cant afford the high price of other services such as SalesForce.com and don’t have the man resources to set aside a full timer for two months to configure the CRM to become lean and free from annoying fluff. Back when I did SpokenWord AB I researched CRMs for 2 months in total and couldn’t find any that was nicer to use and cheaper than Highrise. Cudos to 37Signals. Check out Highrise.

Pivotaltracker
An errand handling system specially designed for agile development (which is necessary if you want to be fast in the IT-dev world). Just two weeks ago I would have recommended Google Docs spreadsheets because of its pure simplicity and because if you just add the correct categories its really easy to sort by columns depending on what you need to know. But Pivotaltracker really kicks-ass when it comes to effortlessness and sorting. It doesn’t take more than 5 minutes to setup and another 5 minutes to learn. I love the restrictiveness of the software and the lack of features except just the essential stuff. Also I love the real time reports when something has happened so that I can keep track of and affect developments in real time without being intrusive. I’m not really a master of agile, but I was surprised to find that exactly the same structure as I intuitively had designed for us in Google Docs is the structure of Pivotaltracker. First you have the icebox, things you might do. Then you have the backlog, things you will do. Finally you have the sprint, things you are doing this week. And all this can be sorted smoothly in the order you want it to be taken care of. And as opposed to Google Docs where all the stuff has to be copied and pasted back and forth between documents, here you just drag and drop. Check out Pivotaltracker.

Google Apps
Let Google host your e-mail servers. They do it for free and it’s spam free, reliable, fast, encrypted and the risk of ending up in someone’s spam box is minimized. Also cross company sharing of calendars and booking meetings is made so much easier. You don’t have to request someone’s calendar to have the access. Also you don’t have to e-mail to get a confirmation for a meeting. You just schedule a proposal and the system e-mails you to say if the meeting was booked or if the other person suggested another time. Check out Google Apps Standard Edition (free version).

Skype
Of cause you know Skype, but do you have the habit of using it for your meetings? If you are not in the same office, meetings through Skype are the bomb. For some reason seeing the other persons face makes the meeting so much closer. Also, the feature of sharing the screen makes it possible to really demonstrate things in real time. It’s just like standing over someone’s shoulder and having them demonstrate something on their computer. Also we do a lot of our sales calls directly through Skype. And of cause, you don’t need to have a phone or a land line connection; it’s all in the cloud. Check out Skype.

SpeedLedger (swedish)
It’s an online accounting program that is directly connected to the company bank account. When transactions are made through the account SpeedLedger automatically creates verifications from that. The only thing one has to do is to choose the correct account for counter-booking the transaction and press ok. By making sure that all our transactions are registered through the account we can be sure that the bank status and the accounting status are always in sync and thus we can minimize time spent on trouble shooting when doing the book keeping. Also we can share our books with our accountant without having to send the stuff by paper. We just share the accounting account with him online. Its genius and we love it. Check out SpeedLedger.

SkrivaPå (swedish)
Really, I mean it. We love our own service! It has been so helpful in making it easy and effortless when writing our staff NDAs and immaterial rights agreements. Our team happens to be dispersed all over the world with programmers in Pakistan, Nepal, US, GB, Poland and Sweden. If we wouldn’t have our own contracting service we most probably wouldn’t have had the energy to administer the sending of the NDAs all over the world thus increasing business risk. Or, if we chose to send it we would have to wait for days or weeks until we could take people on board. Now we can get the papers signed in minutes and people can get started within one hour. If you’re interested just give me a notice by e-mail (emaillink: lukas[at]skrivapa.se) and Ill set up an account for you. Check out SkrivaPå.

OMG, this post was long. Have a rest and look at the demo of our service.