21 March 2017
Gaslight: Hello (Again)
2016 was a year of change for Gaslight. This change was especially meaningful to me because I’ve had the pleasure of serving as Gaslight’s CEO for the last 9 months. If you are already a friend of Gaslight’s you know that we have been delivering high quality software solutions, with the best talent in Cincinnati, for the last 7 years. If you are just meeting Gaslight for the first time, like I was last summer, you’ll find yourself blown away by the incredible skills and the amazing future opportunities for Gaslight. In fact, a local consulting firm that helped Gaslight was so impressed with Gaslight’s bright future that this winter we decided to enter into a formal partnership together. Regardless of your former association with Gaslight, I’d like to explain more about how Gaslight is transforming in 2017.
As we closed out 2016 and were working on our 3 year strategic plan we realized the marketplace was demanding more from Gaslight. We were helping our clients take advantage of unique opportunities to improve their businesses, but there were issues running parallel to our work that we didn’t have the ability to solve for them. They include:
- Organizational Issues - under-performing people and inefficient processes leading to poorly run internal operations.
- Underutilized Business Analytics - a failure to thoroughly leverage business data to understand their business and drive better decision making.
- Underdeveloped Go-to-Market Plans - over-emphasis on software features at the expense of a plan to take the software to market in manner that will maximize ROI.
- Development Teams Lacking Best Practices - internal development teams struggle to apply best practices in a challenging enterprise environment.
- Challenges Growing a Development Team - there is a limited supply of development talent in Cincinnati and many companies have trouble growing their internal development teams.
- Insufficient Growth Capital - not allocating enough capital to take advantage of the market opportunity after the technology has been developed.
Identifying these common issues has led to a change in our vision. Gaslight’s new vision is Tech that Transforms. Our goal is to leverage technology to drive transformation in our client’s businesses. In order to deliver on this goal, we’ve optimized our current project delivery practices to drive business value. We are also expanding the breadth and depth of the services we offer.
Even with these changes there were problems our clients were experiencing that we didn’t always have the skills to properly address. This is where we expect our new partnership with Amend to drive even more value for our clients. Amend has a wealth of experience changing lives and transforming business through comprehensive business consulting skills. In a future post, I’ll go into more detail about the new service offerings the partnership will bring.
In addition, there are a few more topics I’ll be writing about in the coming weeks and months. I’m a business guy who knew next to nothing about custom software development before I joined Gaslight. I recognize now that there is tremendous business value that can be derived from leveraging custom software, but there is a process you must follow in order to maximize that value. With that said, in the next few weeks I’ll be covering the following topics:
- Gaslight: Bigger, Faster, Stronger
- Custom Software vs. Off-the-Shelf: What’s the Right Solution for Your Business
- Agile Software Development: For the Non-Technical Person
- Product Development: Maximizing ROI
- Apprenticeship Program: Build Your Business to Grow Your Team
Please keep an eye out for these upcoming posts and I look forward to meeting more of you out there in the community.
