Well maybe some things like Facebook, LinkedIn, Wikipedia and the occasional good weather! And yes, of course it goes without saying Dimensional Community's user-to-user forum SCD-iki is FREE.
Over the past few weeks we have met many wonderful people who all seem so positive and love our SCD-iki. That said, most people remain cautious over Dimensional Community’s intent. Skepticism is a natural reaction and usually comes to the fore when people are left with unanswered questions and that’s why I’m writing this blog. Let’s tackle this head on and remove the elephant in the room.
Let’s start with where and why this Community came to life.
Our idea for a community came from various conversations with clients of SCD. They expressed a need to network more easily and to ask questions without necessarily involving the vendor. The biggest bugbear for clients was that they didn’t want to continuously experience the same shortfalls that those before them encountered. We truly believe this user-to-user experience will make daily work with SimCorp Dimension® easier, it will help resolve issues and guide you in making better informed decisions on what SCD project to embark on next.
To reconfirm and ease the concerns we have heard, here are three examples of why it would not be beneficial to us, or to you, to up-sell our services based on you using this forum.
Example 1: A member creates a post that they are experiencing issues with a functionality.
You may well see this as information that provides us an opportunity to upsell. But realistically, if a member is asking for advice and guidance, 99% of the time this is something that will only require short-term assistance. Hence there is no value in Dimensional Community selling an unneeded resource. We cannot fix this problem by adding additional resources to the project but only by a knowledge-sharing exercise.
Example 2: A member/company is curious and asking questions about a particular SCD module to gauge whether they would like to implement the module in the future.
This is an early indication of a company’s interest in furthering their SimCorp® usage. To us there are so many stages that you must undertake internally and with the vendor before a consultancy is even a consideration by yourself to help or support your project. Based on this, and the fact that clients are always looking to further develop their usage, we do not see this as an opportunity to upsell.
Example 3: A member has asked questions in order to seek help but hasn’t received any responses from other users.
The questions received on a forum will generally be aiming to get a work around or solution to a problem from other users. In contrast, Dimensional Community is a dedicated consultancy service and therefore we seek only to support you on long-term engagements. However we will do our best to answer any unanswered questions.
Why is this free? Is there a hidden catch? And honestly the answer is: No. There is no catch other than by offering you all a valuable service that’s FREE. Should you however find yourself in need of SCD expertise we of course hope that Dimensional Community will be first on your mind to contact.
We hope that you will sign up, try it out and refer your colleagues, and other SimCorp® clients you think would benefit using our forum.
So yes, it is free, no strings attached.