Last week an intern working for CollegeZapps (our extremely cool company helping students apply to college using Efficient Forms’ TOP technology) came up with an idea to promote CollegeZapps to its target market: namely high school students applying to college in the fall. Her idea was to follow the Warped Tour in a bus wrapped in the CollegeZapps logos.

This idea quickly caused flash backs to the various crazy ideas that were quickly vetoed by my father when I was that age, like the crazy idea to take the Trans Canadian highway to Calgary Olympics in my piece of crap Oldsmobuick….I’m actually glad I listened that time…

Anyways, I know I am getting old, but this was a time when I could actually hear my dad’s voice in my head about to explode out saying “Hell no!!!!” Luckily, I kept that voice squelched as our College Zapps VP of Marketing pitched the idea and we all agreed to go for it!

Less then a day later the “Where’s Zapps” web site was up and Hannah (the intern) was all over the planning. Turns out buying a bus isn’t too hard with eBay so they decided to get a short bus which was purchased within 2 days of the idea.

Scot Talcott, the VP Marketing for CollegeZapps, is a stickler for cheap accommodations and insisted that the crew commit to less then $40/room/night and other similar restrictions. Funny thing is everyone was down for it (I got that “down for it” from my kids). A lot of planning on the route and the designing of the bus all came together in an incredibly short time and they were off to the races.

The crew starts in Pittsburgh on Monday the 28th and I hope all goes well. Check out their web blogs from the www.whereiszapps.com , and lets all cross our fingers we only get in the press for positive incidents.

Amazingly, the child poverty rate growth is not necessarily because government assistance is not available. In fact, counties are sitting on over $136 million, as explained by Allison Sherry in the Denver Post. Counties haven’t been creative enough in how to spend the moneys allotted and therefore reserves build up while people are not served. Knowing that there is $136 Million of unspent funds sitting in county coffers causes me to go insane. Crazy, right?

Knowing that there are numerous assistance programs that families qualify for but are not applying for due to difficult and redundant application processes adds additional frustration.

The primary application process is the much maligned CBMS. While officials claim that it is fixed, our sources at county and non-profit offices say differently.

At Efficient Forms we have been quietly working behind the scenes speaking with several counties, state officials, non-profits and local foundations discussing the Colorado Benefits Management System (CBMS) and applications to other need-based programs in the state. Many of the comments I have received from various government officials start out like this:

“Why in the #!&#@ would you want to get involved with fixing CBMS, what with all the bad press…”.

As a local company we care about our state and want to have the rest of the country think highly of Colorado (not just for the skiing). We also care about people and want to do our part to make the lives of children and others better. If we can use our Colorado-based SaaS solutions to do that even better. How many of the resources EDS or Deloitte use to pile up hours and dollars on the state tab actually live in Colorado?

Seamless Compassion

Check out past articles here regarding the CBMS solutions we could quickly deploy in a non-disruptive fashion. Rather then re-hash, I wanted to introduce a new phrase and concept we have been mulling over in the last two weeks, namely “Seamless Compassion.” I will craft another post articulating Seamless Compassion further as we are still roughing out how exactly to deploy and how far to go with the idea…

Seamless Compassion starts with a single citizen-facing portal which can be accessed from any number of state, county, city, non-profit, foundation or other web sites. Similar to the way Turbo Tax® has allowed nearly everyone to complete their own taxes, the Seamless Compassion site allows for citizens to quickly apply for assistance to all programs that an individual qualifies for regardless of whether it is a federal, state, county, local non-profit, or other program.

Bottom line: we want to make it much easier for people to get the assistance they qualify for regardless of the source of assistance, hence Seamless Compassion.

Stay tuned…

If you have read my blog in the past, you probably figured out I like what we do at Efficient Forms (if not feel free to contact me at 303.785.8638). One of the coolest parts of my job is getting to see the diverse ways the Transaction Origination Platform (TOP) is being deployed. Four years ago, I could not have imagined a fraction of the potential uses for TOP.

We regularly have various entities (that find us from typically unlikely connections) present new and exciting uses of TOP that I had no clue would be such an exact fit. The really fascinating thing for me is TOP-created Content Enabled Vertical Applications (CEVAs) will potentially save lives and may drastically improve the lives of families in need, along with helping students apply to college and other socially responsible things. This makes us feel good, even though these CEVA uses are typically not our ideas. We just enable them.

An excellent research report on Content Enabled Vertical Applications was conducted by Gartner.

“Gartner believes that CEVAs and line-of-business offerings are the future for most traditional ECM vendors. CEVAs are used when business processes are driven by documents, forms and other content (applying for a mortgage is one example). Although enterprises have asked for this for years, and vendors have responded with standard products and lots of professional services, a transformation has occurred with more demand and focus being placed on repeatable solutions. When well-thought-out policies, information architecture and process management are put in place beforehand, CEVAs can deliver process improvements not only in terms of speed but also in terms of accountability and rigor.”

Originally, our motives were purely capitalistic. And while that is still a focus, it still amazes me to realize that the social benefits we can help many entities attain with TOP. As I have mentioned in previous blogs, our goal was to create “Turbo Tax®” for everything else, and what evolved was TOP, a CEVA creation machine that can produce socially responsible solutions and still provide us with the margins we look for.

So, who will come up with the most creative and socially beneficial use of TOP over the next year? Check back for regular updates, and who knows, we might even come up with Dave’s TOP 10 CEVAs list.

Of course, I have no idea what was going on at HP other then some awfully great dancing by EDS officials. And since I have absolutely no idea what was going on, I will of course lend my two cents on the subject.

First of all, IBM seems to have found success from its purchase of Price Waterhouse Coopers Consulting, and many people dissed that move. Of course $3 billion wasn’t $13 billion, and my gut says that HP is no IBM.

I will suggest that there may be troubles for this merger down the road. I am not intimately knowledgeable with HP or EDS, but if my recent interactions are any indication of a larger trend (and it feels like it is), the current professional services business model seems to be in jeopardy. (”I’ll take EDS brings HP down for $13 billion, Alex.”)

In the last year, I have been exposed to numerous large entities, from large corporate fortune 500 companies to federal, state, county and city government entities, whom have begun to completely abandon the old adage “Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM” (or insert any of the large professional services companies EDS, Accenture…). These entities are crying for specific Content Enabled Vertical Applications (CEVAs) that are specific to their business, but they don’t want to pay the outrageous amounts being charged by the professional service company to custom build these solutions.

These same entities also want to be able to easily configure the CEVA solutions to meet their evolving needs, which just doesn’t happen when professional services companies get paid by the hour or when they make much of their profit on change requests. It seems that some professional service companies are counting on the customer never knowing what they want until they first see what the professional service providers build (6 to 12 months later) and then realize, “it ain’t that!”

My belief is that professional service providers together with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) companies (like IBM, Oracle, EMC, etc.) need to quickly evolve to provide real CEVA solutions that are quickly deployed, maintained and adaptable to specific industries and diverse markets if they want to retain market share.

But, I don’t see it happening.

I will most likely expound on this topic again and again, but I would also like to find out your opinion. Or, share your experience, from any viewpoint. If you want more context, check out my previous posts on the CEVA subject or any post to get more information on Efficient Forms.

HP-EDS Merger Articles of Interest

The Street.com: Big Blue to Meet Its Match in HP-EDS
Fortune: Why HP is smart to gamble on EDS

In two recent articles by Ann Imse in the Rocky Mountain News titled “Glitches take toll on real people” and “State Data Systems Get Some Glue,” Imse discusses many of the issues frustrating counties’ workers as well as people applying for benefits through CBMS. She writes, “For four years, Colorado’s welfare benefits computer system has been plagued with glitches - ones that are more than just an IT headache. The flaws are a throbbing migraine for the real people seeking help from the Colorado Benefits Management System.”

The articles by Imse are just two of the many other articles that have chronicled the problems with CBMS. So you might ask; “Why would any local software solutions provider want to throw their hat into the contentious CBMS ring?”

Well, the answer is simple. Efficient Forms can solve this problem quickly and cost effectively, and it helps people get the benefits they qualify for faster.

With Efficient Benefits Application Solution Service (eBASS) by Efficient Forms, everyone wins, from the state and the counties to the people seeking benefits and those who are not.

Our goal is to have the eBASS deployed this year, but it will take the counties, states and foundations to come together to help us, help them. Several counties and foundations are already interested in giving us a chance. That’s a good place to start.

For more context, read my previous two articles on this subject: Part 1 and Part 2.