Squizz.com For IT Professionals

Before reading on please ensure that you have understood the following topics:

• Getting Started/Overview
• Personally Signing Up To SQUIZZ.com
• Registering An Organisation
• Organisational Data

For each organisation registered within the SQUIZZ.com platform there is a need for it to setup several aspects and settings. Additionally several different kinds of the organisation's data needs to be imported into the platform to enable it to buy, and sell on the platform. With these aspects in mind there is the ability for individual IT professionals and support organisations to help setup and manage other organisations on the platform. These IT professionals could be existing businesses who already help support an organisation's networking, computer systems, websites, Ecommerce, accounting software, or other systems.

IT professionals could be employed by an organisation to help develop strategies for managing data, communication, selling, buying, and data transfer between other systems and the platform. Strategies help ensure that the people within an organisation are aligned and working towards common goals, using the features and functionality in the platform to reach the goals that the strategies outline. Ideally an organisation would have the following strategies in place:

Commercial Strategy

An organisation's commercial strategy should outline how the organisation as a whole is going to set itself up to effectively trade within the marketplace, and be successful. The commercial strategy should outline the kinds of customers the organisation will target, and the business structures required to effectively sell to the identified customers. This may include setting up divisions within the organisation, and outlining the kinds of people who need to be employed meet the commercial targets. With a commercial strategy defined it should then help define the next list of strategies below.

Selling And Promotion Strategy

The selling and promotion strategy should outline the kinds of goods and services that the organisation will sell, and how it is going to sell it to future and existing customers. This strategy may outline how products need to presented, the kinds of data each product should have set, and how much products should be sold for to specific customers at certain times. As a part of this strategy it should outline how promotions could be used to entice new customers to buy products, and how to get existing customers to come back and buy more products or services. This strategy may outline the best times to sell certain products at a given time the year, and the events that need to happen so that customers are able to buy.

Buying Strategy

The buying strategy should outline effective ways that an organisation buy goods and services off its suppliers, either for its own uses, or to on-sell to other customers. A part of a buying strategy may be to outline the times when the organisation needs to buy products, such as before inventoried stock runs out, or at specific times of the year when the cost of buying is less. The buying strategy may outline how to manage suppliers, and the people within the organisation who are allowed to make purchases on behalf of the organisation. This strategy may also outline how to automate purchasing, such as using the platform's connections to automatically import purchase orders back into an organisation's business systems.

Data Strategy

The data strategy outlines the kinds of organisation data that need to be created, managed, and where that data will be set up and stored. The data strategy should tie into the other strategies since the others will most likely depend on data being created and stored. This strategy should outline the systems and data sources that should be used to create and manage data, this may include:

• Accounting Systems
• Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems
• Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
• Spreadsheets
• Databases
• Cloud Systems

The data strategy should also outline the people who have responsibility for creating and managing data. For example a person may be in charge of entering product data into an accounting system where the products are stored. This person may need to know how to get the descriptions of the products off their suppliers websites, or through purchase orders using the SQUIZZ.com platform.

The data strategy may incorporate using the SQUIZZ.com Connector software, which allows data to be retrieved from several different business systems and data sources and imported into the platform, or exported from the platform.

Marketing Strategy

The marketing strategy determines how an organisation promotes and sells its products to its target customers. The marketing strategy may include using feeds within the platform to post messages to new customers or existing customers. The strategy could include setting up deals, promotions and discount prices to entice new or existing customers to purchase more products. It could also include using offline tools such as mailouts, TV, radio, trade shows, or having other organisations sell products for the organisation. The most effective marketing strategy may depend on the kinds products that the organisation sells, the customers it sells it to, and where the organisation is positioned within the market. A part of the marketing strategy is defining ways to measure the effectiveness of the strategy, and continually refining it as it is executed.

Social Strategy

The social strategy defines how an organisation interacts with people online in social platforms, as well as offline. The social strategy may define the people who manage talking on behalf of the organisation, both within the organisation's own feeds, but as well in other organisations feeds. It could define how an organisation manages messages posted on its own feeds, the processes that are needed to handle negative content posted by people, and processes for handling different questions posted by people. An effective social strategy should help build and maintain a harmonious community of people around an organisation. The social strategy may be a part of marketing, data, and commercial strategies.

Once an organisation has registered in the SQUIZZ.com platform there is the ability to connect its associated business systems into the platform. The business systems could include accounting systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, warehouse management systems, and any other systems that the organisation uses on a day to day basis. Connecting these systems can require specialised knowledge of each system, as well as how an organisation is set up and configured to use the system. This is where IT professionals who have specialised knowledge in these systems can come in and help organisations get their systems connected to the platform. Organisations may need help to manage the following:

• Set up internet connections, networking and firewalls. Internet connections may require static public IP addresses, DNS records, and setting up port routing.
• Install security certificates to allow the organisation's business system to be accessible to the platform.
• Configure the organisation's business systems to connect to the platform, either through the SQUIZZ.com Connector software, or through direct connections that the business software has built. These configurations may include purchasing licenses, enabling connectivity with technology such as ODBC, or enabling additional modules or features of a business system.
• Set up other data sources to help organisation manage data required for the platform.
• Set up and monitor hardware that an organisation uses to host its business systems. Upgrade hardware as required.
• Teaching staff within an organisation on how to do any of the above points.

With each organisation registered on the platform there is a need for it to manage and import a wide variety of data to use different features of the platform. The kind of data that need to be managed can be seen in the Organisational Data document. 

One of the most prominent features is for an organisation to be able to sell on the platform. In order to sell an organisation needs to import products, taxcodes, price-levels, prices, sell units and customer accounts as a minimum. This is one example where IT professionals can come in and help organisations set up, structure, guide and manage these kinds of data. Setting up product data is of particular importance to an organisation, since its what customers will be looking for and buying. There are many fields that can store data for each product. Coming up with ways to find and set data for fields such as product code, name and description can be the difference between a customer purchasing the product, or looking past it.

IT professionals may be able to use a range of techniques to help organisations manage their data, this may include:

• Obtaining data from suppliers and customers through mediums such as spreadsheets, pdfs, and websites.
• Reworking existing data stored within an organisation's business systems. This could include cleaning up data, joining data together, or separating data out.
• Creating new data by finding people with the knowledge to be able to do so. Tools may need to be provided to allow these people to extract knowledge from their mind and place it into systems, spreadsheets, databases or other data stores.
• Writing computer software that allows data to be generated in an efficient way. Such as writing macros within spreadsheets to extrapolate out useful data that can be imported.
• Writing computer software that allows organisation data created in the platform to be imported back an organisation's business systems.

The SQUIZZ.com Connector is one tool that can help different types of organisational data be effectively obtained, manipulated, pushed and pulled from the platform. The Connector can be used to obtain data from many different data sources, as well as receive data from the platform and send that data onto configured data sources. See the Connector's documentation for more information on what it can do.

Management of an organisation's data should be defined in the organisation's data strategy. This helps ensure that all the required people within an organisation understand how they should be managing data, using processes and tools to effectively do so. The amount of data that an organisation stores may grow at a large rate, because of this organisations may need help in order to cater for this growth. This could include provising additional computers, storage, and software to handle the growing amount of data. Or introduce more efficient ways of managing data, such as changing business system software and migrating data away from legacy systems. There can be a role to play for IT professionals to help organisations manage strategies around data, or contract out work to create or manage the data itself.