Somewhere in Georgetown this morning, a finance manager is hunting for a number she knows exists. It is in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was built by someone who left the company in March. The formula behind the number sits three tabs away, and nobody has opened it since. That company is not badly run. It is ordinary. Guyana’s economy has outgrown the record-keeping of the companies driving it. Stock is counted on paper and reconciled from memory. Approvals travel by WhatsApp and live nowhere afterwards. The accounting software a firm is already paying for was never wired to the till, so somebody retypes the day’s takings every evening, and everybody quietly treats the second number as the real one. None of that is a technology problem in the way the phrase is usually meant. It is what happens when a business outgrows the way it keeps track of itself.
What has changed
EICCIO Advisors is now an IBM Service Business Partner within IBM Partner Plus. The agreement sits with the Guyana practice, here at La Grange on the West Bank, and it covers the work we were already doing: consulting, advisory, implementation and managed services. We have said for years that the firms selling this work into our market are usually somewhere else. They price for a market that is not ours. They support from a time zone that is not ours. And when something breaks on a Friday afternoon in Leonora, there is nobody to call who can reach the building. Joining the programme does not change where we are. That is rather the point. We are here, and we now sit inside a partner programme carrying the training, certification and technical enablement that comes with it.
The four things this is aimed at
Getting businesses off paper. Not a transformation programme with a two-year horizon. The first step, done properly: records you can search, operations that survive the departure of the one person who understood them, and systems that hand information to each other without a human retyping it. Artificial intelligence where it changes the work. There is a great deal of enthusiasm about AI in this region and not much of it survives contact with a Monday morning. We are interested in the uses that take a real task off a real person’s desk, and candidly uninterested in the ones that demonstrate well in a boardroom. Technology that smaller firms can actually reach. The companies employing most Guyanese have historically been too small to be worth an enterprise vendor’s phone call. They make up most of our client list. The practice was built for them. Payment security. The volume running through online checkouts and financial services in this region has climbed far quicker than the safeguards built around it, and this is the one area where a later phase is not an option. When this fails, it reaches your customers before it reaches you.
We also build the software, and we did so before this
Advisory work has a limit. At some point a client stops needing a recommendation and starts needing the thing itself: something that books the appointment, takes the payment, holds the record and sends the receipt. So we build. Our own products were designed, written and put into service before the ink was dry on any partnership, which is rather the point of mentioning them. LNC Pro Suite runs a salon: bookings, client records, technician commissions and chair rent, stock, point of sale and payments. It carries four interface languages, handles eight currencies, and keeps working when the connection does not. LNC Bookings is the customer side of it, built on a principle we were stubborn about: booking is never a gate. A customer can book and walk away without opening an account, installing anything or agreeing to hear from anyone. Everything beyond the booking, offers included, is hers to opt into afterwards, and only from the businesses she has chosen to connect with. EDEN Kesef is an installable storefront and payment tool for small traders, built for a handset from the start rather than shrunk down to fit one. All three are live. Behind them sit the platforms that carry our delivery: EDEN Da’at, Guyana Search Intelligence and EDEN Ezra. EDEN Da’at is a learning platform educators run their own courses on. They bring the course, the cohort and the standard they teach to. It supplies the rest: lessons, assignments and marking, progress tracking, a tutor that answers only from their own approved material, and a credential at the end that a stranger can verify for themselves. Guyana Search Intelligence is in development. It is designed to connect what a Guyanese business spends on being findable to the calls, messages, bookings and sales that actually follow, and to say plainly where the evidence is thin rather than dress a guess up as a number. Web platforms, internal business systems, and mobile applications for Android, iOS and the web. Built and run by us, rather than specified by us and handed to somebody else to get wrong. This is a deliberate direction for the practice, not a response to a particular request, because a firm that can only advise leaves its clients standing alone at the hardest step.
Who this is for
A manufacturer in Region Three with sixty staff and a stock system that lives in one person’s head. A credit union needing controls its regulator will accept, without buying something priced for a bank ten times its size. A distributor running three locations who cannot see all three at once. A payments business that wants its security examined by someone willing to put their name to the findings. Often enough these conversations turn out to be about money before they are about systems. If the step in front of you is a business plan for the Guyana Development Bank or a commercial lender, that work has its own home at eiccioadvisors.com. If any of this is recognisable, the conversation is worth having. It costs nothing, and we will tell you plainly if we are not the right firm for the job. Talk to us about what your business is carrying that it should not have to.
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