It’s not new in itself being basic flow diagrams but it’s really nice how they have represented the value of things like micro credit, experience and free services into the modelling approach. Not just representing the value of money which is a mistake people often make. They could actually go a step further and represent social and environmental value in a business and produce model that allows for social capitalism.

Business Model Kit – by Board of Innovation from Nick De Mey on Vimeo.

Seriously, no-one owns the customer. I personally think it’s very disrespectful of the customer. At the end of the day the customer calls the shots via their wallet. Where this isn’t the case there is usually something else at play and it’s often more sinister, something I call intellectual deception. These behaviors are often legal and facilitated by the system and regulations for that industry. In law you see this all to often.

This TED talk by Philip Howard below actually hits on some of these issues (you need to read between the lines). I think Philip may be editing himself. It takes a brave person to do this talk and face off against his peers and industry. It’s not just in the area of Law that you see this. It’s observable in banking, accounting and financial planning.

In business we should have some control over the customer relationship but it must be earned and lay in a bed of respect. If you kill their problems, find ways to save them time and help them get what they want, then you are deserving of their trust. Then your grip will be firm. Quite often customers have faced intellectual deception and they end up “lawyer haters”. So they become careful with their trust. Then as a business you are only as good as your product, advice and possibly the most recent dealing you had with them.

Many thanks to AWIA for a great event and inviting me over to speak and attend. My talk was about ecosystems, and if there is one ecosystem you must join if you use technology in your business then it’s AWIA.

Here’s my preso I did at the conference which I have posted on slideshare.NET

Kiva help developing nations from the ground up. They don’t donate cash, they lend it to entrepreneurs (we relate to these guys!) to help them start a business. Teaching them to fish for themselves (so to speak) rather than throwing them a fish.

One of our first loans on Kiva was recently repaid. Kiva is a great service if you want to make a difference. The best thing is the funds are repaid and then recycled so the model is not only proven to work (impressive statistics on field partners) but it keeps on working.

Kiva is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit in the US.

Saasu further supports the non-profit, education and health communities. So if you know anyone in those segments tell them to give us a bell so they can get their free or discounted stuff. We don’t have a formal program we look at it on a case by case basis.

I did some work in Cambodia (in Takeo province outside Phnom Penh) a few years ago as part of some other stuff and they have had a rough time over the years so it is nice to see some progress. Although, with only 3 in every 1,000 people having internet access, that progress is very slow (read about it on Reuters AlertNet).

But don’t just take our word for the fact Kiva do a great job, they also recently won a prestigious Webby which is very cool.

Saasu also had some more praise recently. Our good fortune continues in the form of customer feedback and and also globally recognised industry awards.

On top of the many great comments we get every day for our latest release(see below), we have also been nominated for and listed as finalists for three awards at CeBIT 2008 some of you might remember last year we won the big one

Three of my all time best customer testimonials recently are (paraphrased) -

• We chose Saasu over Netsuite on price (mid market customer)
• We chose Saasu over Zoho on features (small business customer), particularly Saasu Catch
• We chose Saasu over MYOB on ease of use and because it is online (small business customer)

This demonstrates at the coal face the Saasu productivity and cost benefits. Our unique delivery model is really performing for businesses and individuals.

Now for the fun stuff. Saasu has made the finals for three CeBIT 2008 awards –

• Business Advantage Award – Saasu.com is a finalist and made the final 5
• Excellence in Technology Services Award – Saasu.com is a finalist and made the final 4
• Platinum Award for Export Excellence – Saasu.com is a finalist and made the final 2

Thanks to all of those who support the Saasu foundation via our products. Congrats to Kiva and Boun Kim Loun. Oh, and fingers crossed for the CeBIT 2008 awards.

CeBIT is THE International Trade Show for Information Technology, Telecommunications, Software and Services. In other words, if you want to geek-out or get a real competitive advantage for your business you will love it.

Last year was good

Last year Saasu won the one and only highly prized ‘excellence in innovation platinum award’ for our flagship product NetAccounts. We were going to insert lots of other blatant boasting and superlatives here but thought that was probably more than you can take already.

This year will be even better

This year there will be something like 750 exhibitors from 20+ countries.

This year we will be speaking at the conference in the Transaction 2.0 section, chairing a session and of course exhibiting.

Best of all, as part of the Saasu tech community work we do, Saasu will be the sole green sponsor for the event, we are making the venue carbon neutral for the event for EVERY EXHIBITOR just so we can say we did our bit. Gold standard of course.

Special Bonus (or two)

As a special bonus you can register free as a friend of Saasu just quote code SAASUCA08 and you will get in free which is a fairly substantial saving off the normal door price of $40.

If you visit us at the show you will receive an extra month on your subscription for new and current customers! We will be asking all our visitors two questions – what do they like most about Saasu today and what would they like to see in our coming releases?

You will also be able to see our latest release demonstrated and talk to the experts about your needs, wants, desires and passions in the field of financial management success.

Finding Saasu at CeBIT

So do drop by stand S45, on the main aisle right next to our mates from salesforce.com (in case you have been living in a cave and hadn’t already heard, saasu integrates instantly with salesforce).

We are smack bang in the middle of the main business-software/e-finance/CRM section which takes up most of halls 4 and 5.

Want to know more?

We thought you might so here is a taste of what you will see, watch the videos or read some more
from the CeBIT marketers –

CeBIT Australia 2008 is the largest and most important business-to-business technology event in the region. Join 35,000 business professionals at CeBIT Australia this year to understand, analyse, sample and select the right technology solutions for your business’s future success.

Finding the right solutions has never been easier, CeBIT Australia is organised into 30 show floor categories – ranging from CRM, VoIP, e-Marketing & Search Engine Optimisation, Web Applications to Open Source – making it the number one stop for business professionals seeking the competitive advantage.

* 150 FREE show-floor Seminars
* International Keynote Speakers
* Business Networking
* Interactive Panel Sessions
* 6 High-Level Conferences
* 750+ Solution Providers
* 5000+ Technology Experts
* 30 Show Floor Categories

Visiting CeBIT Australia 2008 will teach you how to make your ICT investment work for you

* Get more out of your website
* Unleash the power 2.0
* Retain your top talent
* Discover online trading
* Slash your communications costs
* See next-gen CRM systems
* Learn about Green IT

And much, much more… most importantly you will arm yourself with knowledge that will give you the power to take your business to next level!

See you @ CeBIT Australia,
20 – 22 May 2008
Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre,
Darling Harbour

If you have not seen Marc’s excellent recent post on Sustainable Business you should read it.

Today we will build on that article and take a slight tangent to focus on the specific use of SaaS (software-as-a-service) to improve your business and improve (not just simplify) your life with SaaS in three areas.

With SaaS we can develop more -

• Environmental Sustainability – reducing the pressure on the environment generated by your business activities
• Quality of Life Sustainability – in the sense of the impact working in your business has on your people
• Commercial Sustainability – knowing that most new businesses last less than three years in most countries and less than two years in many countries what can you do to reduce risk and improve best practice

The focus is on using SaaS to avoid the commuting into work every day, we are not discussing productivity savings yet, we believe that those are even bigger but read on and you will be amazed just how dramatic just the commuting savings are from SaaS.

Environmental Sustainability

The impact here is big, so big in fact it is remarkable but it takes a minute or two to really see it, here goes.

SaaS can reduce commuting, this is the single biggest benefit of SaaS to the environment in terms of carbon footprint.

If just 3 in 10 clients of Saasu.com can work from home (or arrange an online meeting instead of travelling) twice a month, the carbon savings are dramatic. Here are the maths per 10,000 clients:

24 (days a year) x 3,000 (commuters) x 40km (average km per return trip) = 2,880,000 km of travel.
At 3,600 km per tonne of Carbon this is 800 tonnes of carbon generated.

We should do some surveys of our client base and get some even harder data on this impact.

Quality Of Life Sustainability

Using the assumptions above, and if people work a 10 hour day including travel then we really really like the idea of 720,000 hours being put back into quality of life each year for every 10,000 users we have. Remember this is even before we help customers become more productive which we will cover in another article.

SaaS can help sleep & relationships – we can’t be so scientific about the personal quality of life value of a couple of days working from home each month but the simple ability to have 30-60 minutes more sleep, more partner, more children, more gym time leaves you working in a more considered way with a fresh mind – rather than spend 2 hours commuting which is the alternative – it must be good for you. Over the course of the year, that is a lot of additional quality time with your partner. Maybe not enough to help address the global growth in divorce & separation but it certainly can’t hurt.

SaaS can help obesity (ok so this is a stretch goal literally!) – If that time was converted into exercise instead of sleep we can help work on the obesity issues in most developed countries.

Saas can help financial health -If the commuting money is spent on fresh fruit and veg and home cooked meals because we have the time to do it, it helps our waist and our wallet simultaneously.

SaaS can help community health – If the time saving is spent on volunteer work in communities rather than commuting, imagine what you can build with over 80 person years of time – build a scout hall or a community centre or a youth education program or volunteer as coach for local sports clubs.

Commercial Sustainability

Of course, most of the time we spend working on the business we are thinking about money, but SaaS can also do more with a business than just manage the money.

SaaS can reduce risk – by delivering a proven business system of processes that brings the wider SaaS community of needs together in one place you are getting ideas for improving your business and ensuring compliance not just from us but from all the users of our products.

SaaS can improve cash flow – by increasing the rate at which your debtors pay you with email invoices and statements and follow-ups rather than repeatedly incurring snail mail delays. Also by improving your visibility on your cash needs with dashboard creditor and debtor information that is always there, every time you use the system.

SaaS can deliver improved inventory management – by increasing fine tuned accuracy on restock levels and having central point of control while using of multiple simultaneous distribution channels (e.g. shop, web, warehouse sale, Ebay) all connected electronically.

So, SaaS does improve life, not just simplify life!

The work environment and how we work in it is one of the biggest sustainability factors we will face. However, it is second only to the impact we have at a global level by selling an environmentally sustainable product such as the Saasu web finance engine.

If Saasu prevents thousands of old style software licenses from being sold then we can facilitate behavioural change in the workplace that has a positive impact on the environment. Scanning instead of photocopying, emailing instead of mailing and signing in to the website instead of manufacturing CD’s and paper help manuals. The list goes on and on. This has a potential impact of saving thousands of trees, reducing energy consumption and many other ecological knock-ons.

Indirectly teaching thousands of people to do their work in a different way through SaaS technology helps humans achieve sustainable business practices and save money doing it!

Do you want a paper based help manual or a living tree as your legacy?

It’s your choice when you decide how and what you buy. That is the power of those who can and want to help by carrying and using a “green wallet” as we call it here at Saasu.

Aspects to be explored include; Ethical, sustainable, visually appealing, human habitable, brand building, a great vibe.

Our Eco List

Efficient use of resources

• Scan it, don’t copy it – Create procedures which lead to scanning being the preferred option but still allow for copying. Let’s be realistic.
• Less paper – but not paperless. Again, let’s be realistic:
  • 100% recycled and not heavily bleached – Look into the production cycle for the paper if you can.
  • Review you printer and their sources – We currently source from Whirlwind Print
  • Keep marketing collateral to a page or two at the most – Re-design layouts by collapsing the content into simple, tightly designed material.
• No paper help manuals – paper presentations or otherwise are not offered to customers or prospects unless specifically requested.

Effective use of technology

• Subscribe to online services (SaaS) – Don’t buy boxed software! It has loads of paper manuals, cardboard dividers, plastic wrap. Producing it costs the environment a small carbon fortune.
  We love SaaS and don’t have to make any “green” apologies for it:
  • Accounting – Saasu.com (plug)
  • Spreadys, Presos and Docs – Google Apps
  • Email – Gmail
  • Email Sending – Campaign Monitor
  • Service Tracking – Trac
  • Stock Photo’s – iStockPhoto.com
• IP phones (VoIP) using existing internet infrastructure – Save installing and maintaining additional phone lines and services. We believe that if we aren’t using surplus capacity net energy cost could actually be higher with VoIP so think carefully about this one. We like the Philips VoIP 321
• Fax to PC – Prevent the need to buy Fax machines and reduces phone line burdens. We use Mbox
• Voice mail to PC – prevent the need to buy Voice mail telco infrastructure.
• Downloads in lieu of paper – bank, credit card and some supplier paper statements are no longer necessary.

Saasu Green Web Finance Engine

• Email invoices – increases cash flow velocity which improves economic efficiency. Reduces mail and paper burden.
• Direct bank payments – less paperwork, easy to PDF or save as a file (saves scanning and printing).
• Email payslips – save mail (fuel/capital), paper and preparation labour
• Online time sheeting – saves faxes, paper and labour duplication.
• Single data source efficiency – Duplication costs the environment. Having a single data source can create efficiencies in communication, report printing, backups, and other aspects.

SOHO’s and Telecommuting

• Long term sea change – SaaS improves businesses connectivity to the city.
• Lower transport consumption – SaaS enables work from home online.
• Virtual Services – Saasu enables disabled bookkeepers to work without travel, web developers, secretaries and accountants can provide virtual services. They can service customer from their SOHO and reduce travel consumption and infrastructure requirements.
• Centralised Infrastructure – In organisations like Saasu we need to look at the trade off that exists between additional infrastructure costs required for staff to work from home versus centralised infrastructure in an office. For example every home office needs a printer but the office can have everyone share one. Also the shared heating and lighting can create a net gain. Heating 100 employees in an office is cheaper than heating 100 separate houses or even the occupied rooms in those houses. These are the negatives that are sometimes forgotten in the Telecommuting equation. In short it isn’t clear without proper analysis on a business by business basis. Even then you need to analyse your logistics, procurement and sales impacts based on the SOHO worker versus the in-office worker.
• Centralising people around an intermodel public transport – this is clearly a plus of CBD locations which tend to have everyone use public transport. Our old location wasn’t as convenient so there was more drive to work employees.
• Office versus SOHO productivity has an environmental impact – consider productivity trade offs of working from home versus a central office location. For example if you lose 10% productivity across each employee then you have to look at the cost of this from a financial and an environmental perspective. A 20% loss in customer sales? Expending more resource to make up the shortfall in productivity? Lost sales of your green product or service – an environmental opportunity cost? What’s the net result? It’s never as simple as saying I helped the environment by working from home. 1st degree analysis is nearly always wrong in observing these environmental impact situations.
• Discourage Driving – Not providing car spaces helps, make employees pay if they want a car space.
• Office Bikes – Quick, cheap, and helps your staff get fit. Supply helmets!

Saasu’s Green Investments

• Banking Green – We lend our cash surplus to the worlds greenest bank Westpac Bank
• Green Investment – Saasu is an investor in the soon to be launched Carbon Offset broker/arranger Iceus

Maximise natural light in your office

• Remove walls and use glass – Glass is expensive to produce in terms of energy but the life span savings are significant when it comes to decreasing the artificial light burden and reducing future waste by building with recyclable materials.
• Light colour pallet advantage – Paint white walls and ceilings or in very light colours. Using colour for feature walls only means less pigments/dies are used and it intensifies the available natural light.
• Reflective surfaces can help intensify natural light – Glass, aluminium and stainless steel surfaces are some examples.
• Presence sensitive lights in lift areas – They’re off until someone comes out of the lift.

Scrubbing our air

• Plants – preferably edible ones like chilli’s, herbs and the like that we can put in our Laksa’s!
• Access to air – our balcony, employees can get some chill time in Hyde Park on their laptops.
• Ozone – Using the photocopier less will mean less stinking ozone particles.
• No smoking – Definitely a no even in outdoor public areas.

Making sure you have a Green Wallet

• Know your footprint and know what it costs to clean it – We are calculating footprint in consideration of buying carbon credits with proceeds from subscriptions to offset energy used by our servers for the life of the subscription.
• Green buying – Use portals like the soon to be released Iceus (plug) to track our footprint and buy green consumables
• Recycled buying – recycled papers, print cartridges.
• Glass and aluminium for in house drinks – In house drinks should all be bought in aluminium or glass preferably as they have the highest probability of being recycled.
• Communal Media consumables – Magazines, newspaper and journals to be kept in common areas. Decline free publications where online version exists.

Kitchen and bathrooms

• Washable towels – instead of paper kitchen towels.
• Speciality or heritage dish – have a weekly or monthly turn by each person in you team make their speciality or heritage dish. It saves you consuming takeaway containers (saves time and money – food production in bulk). Helps you get in touch with what they eat, who they are. Food is an important part of community. Kas, one of our coders makes an awesome chicken curry with sambal (fried onion and chilli). Rips ya lips off!
• No plastic utensils – no plastic cups, bags, cutlery.
• Comfortable breakout area – time away from the screens is an essential mind refresh.
• Get photos of where you drains go – photos of North Head and Bondi where our local outfalls are can be placed directly above the kitchen sink so no-one is tempted to drain anything that shouldn’t be.
• No instant boil devices – keeping water hot for convenience is a luxury unless you have a very high turnover kitchen. It also wastes electricity overnight so if you need to use this method put it on a timer.
• Kitchen sink drain trap – sounds obvious but they only seem to be in houses I’ve noticed.
• Green cleaning products – make sure our detergents and cleaning liquids are eco-friendly. Orange oil spray is a great one I personally love.

Eco friendly Office Equipment

• Energy Efficiency – consider energy used by computers bought. Reduce consumption rate by buying memory and not upgrading quite as often. Better to have one big 24inch screen than a couple of smaller screens. Net energy consumption should be lower (in theory). Review electric goods energy consumption before purchase.
• Scanners instead of printers – keeping with our SaaS philosophy of no-paperwork.
• Old Computer Recycling – computers are only entering their second life when they become second hand. Check out one of our customer who redistributes PC’s to offshore.
• Avoid Batteries – Our new Macs and PC’s are mouses still with their tails! Wireless mouses require batteries which is a higher cost on the environment.
• Devices on Standby – many don’t need to be such as shredders, permanent hot water boilers and photocopy machines. If you need it a lot your paper practices aren’t great, your scanner is what should be on standby!

Sustainable Office furnishings

• Glass Top Desks – Reduce wastage and asset depreciation dollars. Achieve longer lifespan and total cost of ownership. Glass dates less than other materials and can be re buffed to revamp it. Even though it has high energy consumption in production when you look at it from a life cost perspective it is quite good.
• Furniture Mobility – everything is on castor’s to allow for ease of movement and office redesign without knocking down and replacing walls.
• Minimise Ducting – wall or wireless internet connections and low cable PC/Mac options.

Recycling

• Obvious Candidates – Paper, glass and aluminium cans
• Recycling Food Waste – An in office worm farm (Digital Eskimo’s suggestion – cool idea guys!). Remember don’t feed them meat, worms are vegetarians.
• Mixed Recyclables Bin – For broken PC’s, old mobiles, printer cartridges and batteries as examples. Have a procedure for clearing the decks of these things once a month.
• Non-current PC’s – give them to Surplus Remarketers and they will ensure they are sold or recycled to reduce landfill. We love this companies idea.
• No under desk bins – they tend to collect mixed rubbish from lazy people!

Eco-behaviour

• Empower you staff to come up with green ideas – Give your staff a gift, or an early mark for coming up with an idea that adds sustainability to your office.
• Green Corporate Gifts – Emails instead of cards, corporate worm wee (idea from Digital Eskimo), donate to charity in lieu of gifts.
• Green Conference Locations – Choose conference locations based on the venues environmental track record.
• Beat Your Green Chest – Tell our peers and customers about our sustainable office practices so they catch the sustainable bug.
• Banned Products List – Make sure that you have a banned products list.

Sustainable is not possible without a sound Mind and body

• Mental sustainability – Place to have an evening staff or client drink (I like the closing scene in Boston Legal).
• I See Green – Proven to be calming and have good associations. Green plants, flowers or in our case a nice outlook onto the Sydney CBD’s Hyde Park should do the trick.
• Pet fish in the Office – They are soothing but get some native fish – Rainbows, Barramundi or Australian perch and no foreign species water plants.
• Contagious but not too sick to work – It’s easy to work from home when still a little sick or contagious when you operate a SaaS based business infrastructure.
• Create a Micro Sea Change – Stress leave can be reduced if you can offer up work from home when people are getting tense in the office environment. It’s better to say. Look spend a week working from home than to say spend a week not working.

Eco-Culture

• Ethical Attitudes – They will usually lead to environmentally sustainable ones.
• Balanced Lifestyle – Encourage a work and home life balance. See The Calm Space for inspiration.
• Green Culture – Constantly thinking and doing green.
• Exercise culture – This will tend to divert people into healthier eating and general lifestyle choices which have so many parallels with sustainability
• Culture of Re-use – Writing on the back of used paper, re-using boxes for storage, re-using manila folders etc. Non confidential printed paper can be used at home for the kids to draw on. See the post I wrote on WWF’s FutureMakers.com website

Office Life

• Use that Hot Server Air – duct hot air from server rooms into main premises during winter to reduce heating load
• Air conditioning as a last resort – I admit in our office that we have limited control as we occupy one floor of the building
• Who’s turning the lights off – when you go home does the last person turn them off?
• Power Save Mode – Turn on the power save feature on your computers

Sustaining sustainability – leveraging and improving sustainability

• Environmental Officer – Make sure you appoint an environmental officer
• Triple Bottom Line – Track and record your footprint, get rated and improve from your baseline.

Learn and Contribute to the Global Green Knowledge Base

Keep researching new ideas, use your blog, share your ideas, create conversations which will generate IP that will help the environment for all. Try these websites to get yourself in the mood;

• Future Makers
• Synapse Chronicles
• Inhabitant
• EcoGeek.com
• WWF

Credit to Grant Young who has always been an environmental inspiration to our company.

When we were thinking about charities to donate to, we wanted to choose organisations that matched the values for our business. One of our beliefs is that business can be a force for positive change – especially small businesses.

With this in mind, we felt that Kiva was a great choice. Kiva is an online service that allows people around the world to make small loans to micro-business owners who may otherwise not be able to borrow the money they need – a concept known as “microfinance”.

Now that the Saasu Foundation is formal and announced, I thought it appropriate to point to our Kiva profile page which lists the businesses we currently support (a list which will grow in months to come).

Needless to say the team at Saasu would like to wish our first three business owners, Charkaz Mammadov, Seruz Nuriyev and Boun Kim Loun all the best in their endeavours.

This is our attempt at a sustainable initiative to improve our world by donating to meaningful charities that don’t just feed people but ‘help them to help themselves’. We will donate -

* 2% of all profits,
* 2% of all product and
* 2% of all team time

This will be given annually to charities that our team selects (and board endorses) that we think will improve the world a little.

This might be helping entrepreneurs get started in maturing nations with kiva.org or by supporting local initiatives with donations of product or hands on time donated by our staff working on projects of their choice. It is early days but we think this could be big. Suggestions and feedback very welcome.

Cheers, Peter.