CEO Insights: Matthew Browne, CEO, DoneSafe

What do you feel are the three most important things your customers are looking for in a supplier?

As a health and safety software company, our customers are looking for a supplier that is listening and willing to adapt product strategy to meet requirements, not bending business process to meet the supplier requirements. The legacy path of steering customers down a rigid defined path and then pushing customisation at high cost has been lucrative for incumbent vendors; customers are becoming more savvy and looking for configurability out of the gate, not customisation.

Customers are becoming more price sensitive and want value for money; no longer can software vendors charge million-dollar implementations and licensing fees as customers are looking for ongoing service-based pricing with everything built in — the software as a service (SaaS) subscription model has been gaining popularity across all industry sectors as customers can vote with their feet if a vendor is not performing.

Finally, customers are looking for someone to partner with to grow innovation. The health and safety software space has been stagnant for some years and there has been growing resentment in the legacy players; customers are looking for organisations they can trust, who are building products with the user experience in mind and who will innovate with them.

What emerging trends or developing technologies may influence or change the way your industry sector will do business in 2016?

The move to the Internet of Things (IoT) and a greater adoptance of mobile first for business is changing the way organisations can and will manage health and safety within the extended workplace. Organisations can now empower their employees to interact with safety while on the move and employees are expecting that they can use their own devices (BYOD) to access company data.

The push to BYOD is influencing the direction of development, meaning that software companies need to be building for all modern device types as standard and looking for creative ways of managing data security without impacting privacy of end users.

Geolocational tagging of records is opening up new ways to report and notify personnel of issues in their vicinity; a move into virtual reality is allowing whole new ways of training employees without exposing them to hazards prematurely.

IoT devices are also shaking up the way we do business, near frequency communication is allowing devices to interact with each other, facilitating a number of safety improvements including proximity awareness, fall alarms and in-car monitors of driver behaviour.

This perfect storm of technology change means listening carefully to what the customer is after and keeping both eyes on the horizon as the sheer volume of options for technology vendors to explore means that it can be easy to lose focus or miss out on critical opportunities to get involved early with a new breakthrough and deliver something great.

There are now a number of new and emerging technologies in the market to assist with overall business efficiencies, such as cloud computing and Industry 4.0; however, the uptake is slow. What are your thoughts as to the reasons behind this?

As with any change there is an element of fear of the unknown, coupled with an 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' mentality. The usual suspects of 'that's the way we have always done it' or 'we need to focus on business as usual' need to be terms that are deleted from the collective conscious. Smart, agile businesses are embracing change as usual and looking for solutions that are as agile as they are.

The cloud is one of those agile solutions and is here to stay; it is an affordable and secure way of doing business. Organisations moving from safety software on premise to cloud providers will notice a number of immediate benefits including reduction in cost, mobile first with the ability to roll out changes globally in real time, better engagement and culture by putting safety in everyone's hands, real-time reporting and analytics, and the ability to scale up or down without hefty consulting fees.

Industry 4.0 where product, machinery and software all cohabit in one cohesive ecosystem is still in its infancy and realistically, it will be a number of years before it is adopted into the mainstream. Where software companies like DoneSafe can help is to create open, standardised and transparent APIs allowing customers and other vendors to integrate easily and affordably so as to remove barriers for companies wishing to adopt this ecosystem approach.

Matthew Browne is the CEO of DoneSafe, “The people's safety software". DoneSafe is a multi-award winning application and offers an easy-to-use, easy-to-implement, easy-to-integrate and affordable platform that is truly safety, your way. Better yet, you can access a 30-day free trial, just visit www.donesafe.com.