An outlook on wikierp
Wikierp just started to take shape as a project but I’m looking to get as much early feedback as possible. In a true web sense I’m bootstrapping this in public. Right here, right now.
Small businesses (those between 1 and 15 employee) are the backbone of our economies producing a great amount of wealth. Some numbers (from Istat, referred to Italy):
- Average number of employee: 3.8
- Percentage of all the enterprises have less than 10 employee: 95.6%
- Percentage of the enterprises with less than 10 employee have just 1: 56.1%
We are not speaking only or even mostly of technology business, but of those other enterprises that build the things and provide the services that even us technosavvy need. We are speaking of the small brick and mortar shops like our grocery or the baker at the corner of the street.
This businesses are really made and driven by the work those entreprenuer (and I want to call them as such since they are really taking their risks) they are much more personal than the bigger ones and this people are looking for ways to help them in their job.
They need them to be competitive, they need them to be able to maximize the time they spend actually doing business (selling goods in their shops, building beautiful …).
And they are so poorly served by the vendors even if computer based systems would be ideal for this tasks. And they are in a grey zone between Enterprises who are taken care of by the big ERP vendors, and private users whose needs are fulfilled by office automation solution (now even online ones).
They are people needing a business solution.
Well fact is: you cannot scale down an enterprise solution to the limited resources (of money or time) that these businesses have to spend but you neither can scale up an office suite to offer an integrated system that covers the specifics of running a business.
The result (and i have seen this many times) is that the people running this small businesses are scared by the cost of implementing such a system, and they are scared by the difficulty of the systems on the market.
Wikierp aims to be a simple and effective solution for those needs, cheap enough to be affordable, compelling and easy to use to the best levels of consumer web services to be able to stick with its users and give them the benefits they need.
But it has to take a different approach to be successful.
All in all an ERP is a system (not a software) supporting a management model and the operations of an enterprise and in a smaller scale the elements that are needed are very much the same as on a bigger one.
While I agree that a traditional erp software is too rigid (specially for small businesses) I think that structured business flows don’t emerge out of nowhere and can’t self organize, at least not on the scale of the businesses that are the target for wikierp (and possibly never).
This is just as the semantic web doesn’t happen if you let the authors loose with HTML or if you constrain them too much by the web services standards BUT it may and infact it will happen through the injection of small amounts of structure in the flow commonly used by the content creators.
So the process of building wikierp will start by deconstructing what an ideal ERP system is, taking it into pieces and (re)building them into simple units of function .
Small subsystems (web based applications) ready to be used and freely mixable within and outside of the system giving extreme flexibility to wikierp. Great(er) value will come from the composition of those elements into choerent flows and models of management.
We might well talk about the widgetization of an ERP (but don’t take this term too literally).
The priciples that will guide the development of this are:
- leveraging the tools that people use on the net (Email, Feeds, IM)
- small improvements not big ones technology-wise
- an overall coherent experience
- enough structure (but not more)
The major challenges will be to come up with simple and cheap enough solutions lowering the barrier for smaller businesses (to use such systems) and to give enough (technological but not only) confidence with respect to the security and privacy of the system.
On this last aspect, targetting such a small entities means much less fear of having their business data on a third party server than say 50 people enterprises.
Wikierp will have the opportunity to play a triple role: the role of a solution provider selling access to the complete solutions for the end users, the role of a platform provider allowing advanced users / ISVs to hook into the basic building blocks to create customized solutions, and the role of a marketplace for generic solutions built on the common base by third parties.
Each of these three plays has (independently from the others) the possibility to be a source of revenue.
Wikierp (as an idea) will be successful even if we will just be able to raise the bar and catalyze the development of a new breed of software for small businesses, taking it to a new level of usefulness.