Wow. This is pretty inspiring. We at https://erpnext.com have been looking to help govt agencies implement our Open Source ERP, but lack a forum where we can connect with such needs. Can you suggest us a way forward. I think our product can serve a great need for government organizations.
You don't seem to do any custom development / extensions, which according to our experience¹ implementing OpenERP solutions, it's pretty much mandatory for any large company or governmental agency.
We initially burnt hands doing custom development so stay away these days. 90% of our revenue comes from cloud hosting, which is opposite of OpenERP (which gets 90% of revenue via Partners). If we do custom development, product will suffer, so we are staying out. But we are happy to consider it if it really makes sense.
Will be happy to hear your views though (will send you a separate mail on this).
Yes, we don't do any custom development at Akvo either. Our revenue comes from hosting, training and implementation consulting services, but not technical implementation services, but implementing the tools themselves within the organisation.
We avoid technical implementation services, as most organisations we work with have a really low internal technical knowledge. If we then take the responsibility for implementing the technical side, we find that they don't take the ownership of the bigger issues. These are things like learning to publish open data and the changes in culture which this implies in the organisation. Then their failure to embrace the change needed in the organisation is projected as our failure to implement the technical side.
We have technical account management, but require for our partners who implement our tools to either have in-house the required technical skills or hire in the required skills. If they don't do this we don't do the projects, as they are very likely to fail.
Thanks! I agree that your product has a huge market for government and other organisations. Our success comes out of a few core things:
- We brought together domain experts as equals, i.e. people working in international development, water and sanitation issues (our starting market), network organisations, computer software and services, computer software marketing and communications, to solve a problem.
- We say our team is a three legged stool. Partner team (more about that below), software team and communications team. If we don't treat all three equally the stool falls over. We go so far that we think it is imperative to not have an organisation run by the tech or the international development side, but by both sides. So we have until know had two directors of the organisation, one from each domain. Working very closely with the comms director.
- Maybe most importantly though, we have a very experienced partner team. They have worked in this market for decades. They know "everyone". We literally have connections to thousands of organisations through our networks and we understand how to talk to those organisations. Our partner team know where all the gremlins are and how the processes work. They know how to get the required startup and expansion investments as well as how to get the big organisations to use our tools.
About the partner team. We don't consider us having any customers. We treat all of the organisations that work with us as partners. They then treat us as partners too and it completely changes the relationship when you are trying to solve a problem. Of course it helps that we are a non-profit foundation. (We are also not-for-loss. We have a functional business model. This is critical.)
In a traditional company our partner team would consist of strategic sales people, account managers, project managers, consultants, trainers etc. We have a partner team that fulfils all those roles, but they are a _partner_ team. Sales are not done on a quota, no bonuses are paid (which often drive really crappy sales in a s/w company) etc.
We have no marketing and PR team. We have a communications team. Most of our staff communicate. Everyone is in fact encouraged and empowered to speak for the organisation. The communications team just supports everyone learning how to communicate well. We hardly do any PR. We may need to increase it, but it mostly does itself based on our peoples open communication.
I could write a lot more, but we are creating the Akvo Handbook, which will outline all of this, and be available under an open content license. You can read it all there then. But don't hesitate to ask any specific questions you may have.
Thanks for the awesome replies. They were really insightful - specially the idea to have an all round team to work on this. Surely some food for thought for a tech-only company like us. If you ever come across a need for accounting / inventory type solution, do keep us in mind, this would be something of interest.
