Wednesday, February 22, 2006
ORA again
Ownership, responsibility and accountability - my favourite topic again. One of the various email newsletters I get is from Just Sell which is a sales practice forum. Their latest posting is called "A letter to Garcia" and reprints a missive from Elbert Hubbard in 1899 - the ORA concept brilliantly put all those years ago. Check it out for yourselves.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
Why is business process management (BPM) a big deal ...
…and why should small and medium companies be looking at this practice? The answer is simple – dollars, dollars, dollars. Over the last decade we have seen the wax and wane of the big IT project throughout the enterprise – ERP, CRM, intranet, ecommerce etc. Time and again these projects failed to meet expectations, ran over budget, implementations rolled on endlessly and no-one talked ROI at the end of the day the way they did at the start. I think most would agree that the one big technological innovation that has boomed for everyone (indeed now becoming a victim of its own success) is email – and it crept up on us bit by bit to a point where now perhaps we can’t function without it. Email has automated the business process of interpersonal communications.
The problem with email from a procedural viewpoint is it is unstructured, fluid, uncontained and virtually unauditable. Let’s face it, when you want to get someone to do something in this day and age, even though they are only down the corridor, you bash out a quick email and hit the send button. Unfortunately the intent or expectation of your message is not always correctly digested or enacted by the recipient.
A request along the lines of “please do a credit check on A.N. Company” may be merrily replied to with a “done” but, have the tasks that were required and expected by the sender been performed by the recipient? Did all three credit checks with existing suppliers of longer than 3 years, a trading history scorecard from a credit reference agency, and a verification of the company registration number all get “done” with the results recorded in the files – or not? That is the mystery and the danger of email. And remember – this is the realm of email because few of the mid-tier financial or ERP systems incorporate a workflow or automation framework outside of the transactional lifecycle. Adding a new debtor to the ERP system generally starts at the data capture screen [you know the drill, New record, Code = , Name = , Address = ……..] – but hang on – what about all those prior steps involved in capturing all the data and assessing and approving the debtor for trading purposes in the first place? Those business processes fall through the cracks of your average FMS/ERP because they are about communication – not transaction.
Business process management is the structured execution of tasks based on pre-defined policies and procedures. So when the credit check is performed, the person engaged must follow through the approved set of tasks and actions and record the results as they go before being able to reply “done”. If they don’t do it and record that they have done it, then they can’t set it “done”. The process may start and end with an email as before but the correct steps were taken in between – every time. Simple, consistent, foolproof and money-saving – every time.
In every company across the planet there are myriad processes demanding structure when you think about how to improve and control your business communications and operations. Drive down costs, drive down risks, drive down errors – dollars, dollars, dollars.
The problem with email from a procedural viewpoint is it is unstructured, fluid, uncontained and virtually unauditable. Let’s face it, when you want to get someone to do something in this day and age, even though they are only down the corridor, you bash out a quick email and hit the send button. Unfortunately the intent or expectation of your message is not always correctly digested or enacted by the recipient.
A request along the lines of “please do a credit check on A.N. Company” may be merrily replied to with a “done” but, have the tasks that were required and expected by the sender been performed by the recipient? Did all three credit checks with existing suppliers of longer than 3 years, a trading history scorecard from a credit reference agency, and a verification of the company registration number all get “done” with the results recorded in the files – or not? That is the mystery and the danger of email. And remember – this is the realm of email because few of the mid-tier financial or ERP systems incorporate a workflow or automation framework outside of the transactional lifecycle. Adding a new debtor to the ERP system generally starts at the data capture screen [you know the drill, New record, Code = , Name = , Address = ……..] – but hang on – what about all those prior steps involved in capturing all the data and assessing and approving the debtor for trading purposes in the first place? Those business processes fall through the cracks of your average FMS/ERP because they are about communication – not transaction.
Business process management is the structured execution of tasks based on pre-defined policies and procedures. So when the credit check is performed, the person engaged must follow through the approved set of tasks and actions and record the results as they go before being able to reply “done”. If they don’t do it and record that they have done it, then they can’t set it “done”. The process may start and end with an email as before but the correct steps were taken in between – every time. Simple, consistent, foolproof and money-saving – every time.
In every company across the planet there are myriad processes demanding structure when you think about how to improve and control your business communications and operations. Drive down costs, drive down risks, drive down errors – dollars, dollars, dollars.
Monday, February 13, 2006
Environmental sustainability is our responsibility
I am writing this on a plane to London – 24 hours of enforced inactivity – plenty of thinking time. I have a jammed week of meetings with our UK resellers ahead and this may be one of the only times I get for a rant.
Before I left I checked the level in our water tank. We have a modest 3000 litre tank in the back garden fed by the runoff from the main living area roof. It is connected to a smart little pump system that feeds the water to the toilets and the washing machine. If the tank runs low a sensor kicks in a “Rainbank” device that diverts the feed from the mains water instead. Cool, hey? The problem with Sydney is rain is infrequent but torrential – it pours down for a few days and the tank fills up rapidly – then it doesn’t rain for weeks on end. Four weeks ago the tank was full to the brim, this morning there was about 10 days left before the sensor would be exposed. That’s important to me at the moment because the sensor is faulty and I want to replace it when the tank empties out but must make sure not to run the pump dry. That’s one of the little things we do around our place for environmental sustainability and it should pay itself off in 15 years unless the cost of water skyrockets! I would love to go the solar energy way and feed kilowatts back into the grid but the cost is mind blowing – and in a country like Australia it should be a no-brainer.
On the plane I have just read a newspaper article giving dire warnings of the world’s impending doom as the populations of India and China grow their economies at such an exponential rate that their demand for the world’s resources increases in a generation at the rate that the western world saw over hundreds of years.
On the radio in the taxi on the way to the airport I heard some of the federal government “question time” – generally boring as and mindless with the Dorothy Dixer rubbish that they set up for themselves – that woman has a lot to answer for (whoever she was). One of them was pounding on about the exciting events that took place in January when 6 of the countries that refused to sign the Kyoto Convention on greenhouse gas control and reduction – Australia shamefully being one of them, others I think being China, India, Korea, USA and Japan (known jointly as “AP6”) – got together to chinwag about what could be done to lessen the destruction of the world as we know it.
Earlier, at the school bus stop, I was talking to another school dad who is working with a company that is aggregating a bunch of small rural manufacturing and distribution companies across the country to build a coast to coast backyard environmental supplies chain – water tanks, grey water systems, sewage management, solar power devices etc – great idea.
Last weekend I was shopping for some big chunks of foam rubber seating (riveting I know but the window seat demands cushions) and the extremely helpful and knowledgeable shop owner said “buy now because in February the prices are rising 15%”. Apparently foam rubber has a critical component called TPD – or maybe TDP? –and this is of course a by-product of oil and only made by three companies worldwide (Dupont being one) and (take a breath here!) China’s demand for this substance is such that the supplies for the rest of the world have been frozen at current levels and all increased capacity is going to China (and presumably India when they work out how obviously precious it is). There must be a huge demand for window seat cushions in these developing countries.
In November 2005 I was at a breakfast seminar where the keynote speaker was Jack Knight of Frank, Knight, Sinclair fame – a helluva nice guy it seems. He was saying that Shanghai has more multi-story construction cranes in operation at the moment than the rest of the world put together.
The New South Wales government has been threatening to build a water desalination plant to lessen the threat of massive water shortages for Sydney in the coming decades – then magically this week they announced the discovery of a new aquifer in the Sydney basin that will “never run out” – that sounds like politico talk to me.
Where am I going with this? – I seem to be rambling – but hey, that’s the beauty of blogging. There just seems to be a constant noise these days about our voracious consumption of the planet we stand on. What sort of a world are we chewing up and spitting out for our kids? Will anything be left for my far off grand children? We each of us need to be doing more to maintain the resources we have.
Innovation and invention in new technologies to lessen our dependence on oil and coal and increase the output and affordability of renewable resources should be given greater incentives and broader support. We all need to look at our own consumption patterns for ways off reducing waste and our drain on natural resources.
Before I left I checked the level in our water tank. We have a modest 3000 litre tank in the back garden fed by the runoff from the main living area roof. It is connected to a smart little pump system that feeds the water to the toilets and the washing machine. If the tank runs low a sensor kicks in a “Rainbank” device that diverts the feed from the mains water instead. Cool, hey? The problem with Sydney is rain is infrequent but torrential – it pours down for a few days and the tank fills up rapidly – then it doesn’t rain for weeks on end. Four weeks ago the tank was full to the brim, this morning there was about 10 days left before the sensor would be exposed. That’s important to me at the moment because the sensor is faulty and I want to replace it when the tank empties out but must make sure not to run the pump dry. That’s one of the little things we do around our place for environmental sustainability and it should pay itself off in 15 years unless the cost of water skyrockets! I would love to go the solar energy way and feed kilowatts back into the grid but the cost is mind blowing – and in a country like Australia it should be a no-brainer.
On the plane I have just read a newspaper article giving dire warnings of the world’s impending doom as the populations of India and China grow their economies at such an exponential rate that their demand for the world’s resources increases in a generation at the rate that the western world saw over hundreds of years.
On the radio in the taxi on the way to the airport I heard some of the federal government “question time” – generally boring as and mindless with the Dorothy Dixer rubbish that they set up for themselves – that woman has a lot to answer for (whoever she was). One of them was pounding on about the exciting events that took place in January when 6 of the countries that refused to sign the Kyoto Convention on greenhouse gas control and reduction – Australia shamefully being one of them, others I think being China, India, Korea, USA and Japan (known jointly as “AP6”) – got together to chinwag about what could be done to lessen the destruction of the world as we know it.
Earlier, at the school bus stop, I was talking to another school dad who is working with a company that is aggregating a bunch of small rural manufacturing and distribution companies across the country to build a coast to coast backyard environmental supplies chain – water tanks, grey water systems, sewage management, solar power devices etc – great idea.
Last weekend I was shopping for some big chunks of foam rubber seating (riveting I know but the window seat demands cushions) and the extremely helpful and knowledgeable shop owner said “buy now because in February the prices are rising 15%”. Apparently foam rubber has a critical component called TPD – or maybe TDP? –and this is of course a by-product of oil and only made by three companies worldwide (Dupont being one) and (take a breath here!) China’s demand for this substance is such that the supplies for the rest of the world have been frozen at current levels and all increased capacity is going to China (and presumably India when they work out how obviously precious it is). There must be a huge demand for window seat cushions in these developing countries.
In November 2005 I was at a breakfast seminar where the keynote speaker was Jack Knight of Frank, Knight, Sinclair fame – a helluva nice guy it seems. He was saying that Shanghai has more multi-story construction cranes in operation at the moment than the rest of the world put together.
The New South Wales government has been threatening to build a water desalination plant to lessen the threat of massive water shortages for Sydney in the coming decades – then magically this week they announced the discovery of a new aquifer in the Sydney basin that will “never run out” – that sounds like politico talk to me.
Where am I going with this? – I seem to be rambling – but hey, that’s the beauty of blogging. There just seems to be a constant noise these days about our voracious consumption of the planet we stand on. What sort of a world are we chewing up and spitting out for our kids? Will anything be left for my far off grand children? We each of us need to be doing more to maintain the resources we have.
Innovation and invention in new technologies to lessen our dependence on oil and coal and increase the output and affordability of renewable resources should be given greater incentives and broader support. We all need to look at our own consumption patterns for ways off reducing waste and our drain on natural resources.
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
Business Process Owners
Another of my current personal responsibilites is the commercial ownership of our Business Process Management (BPM) solution FlowCentric. The whole concept and practice of BPM is fairly new and evolving within the small to mid-tier enterprise and is frequently referred to as workflow (the big boys have been playing here for years but we have a great, affordable solution for the more cost sensitive organisation) .
One of the regular conceptual challenges is that of a business process owner - being someone who owns and is accountable and responsible (sound familiar) for the complete lifecycle of a process within the company. The reality is that many - if not most - people cannot get their heads around this idea. The general response is that "I own it from here to there, then Fred owns it to there and then Mary owns it and then ..." - in other words edge-to-edge rather than end-to end responsibility - no-one is measured on a lifecycle KPI.
The result of this blinkered view into process execution is that it can be challenging to achieve quantifiable efficiencies and improvements end-to-end unless each edge-to-edge champion gets a bite of the benefit cherry. Without a single, butt-kicking, head-on-the-block, KPI-driven, process-owner things are always going to fall through the cracks and get lost in the grey areas of handover.
The following snip from www.bpminstitute.org gives a nice definition to business process owner.
"The notion of business process owners was introduced by Michael Hammer in the 1990’s as part of the Reengineering discipline, but integration of this notion into business practice has been limited. A process owner, as stated in the iSix Sigma Dictionary, is the one "accountable for sustaining the gain and identifying future improvement opportunities on the process." These folks become your cross-functional link across all facets of the end-to-end process. They are the ones who ensure that improvements in one segment of a process don’t negatively impact downstream process segments. Identifying executives who will own the measures, improvements and success of each business process is critical to the implementation and on-going success of your process management efforts."
One of the regular conceptual challenges is that of a business process owner - being someone who owns and is accountable and responsible (sound familiar) for the complete lifecycle of a process within the company. The reality is that many - if not most - people cannot get their heads around this idea. The general response is that "I own it from here to there, then Fred owns it to there and then Mary owns it and then ..." - in other words edge-to-edge rather than end-to end responsibility - no-one is measured on a lifecycle KPI.
The result of this blinkered view into process execution is that it can be challenging to achieve quantifiable efficiencies and improvements end-to-end unless each edge-to-edge champion gets a bite of the benefit cherry. Without a single, butt-kicking, head-on-the-block, KPI-driven, process-owner things are always going to fall through the cracks and get lost in the grey areas of handover.
The following snip from www.bpminstitute.org gives a nice definition to business process owner.
"The notion of business process owners was introduced by Michael Hammer in the 1990’s as part of the Reengineering discipline, but integration of this notion into business practice has been limited. A process owner, as stated in the iSix Sigma Dictionary, is the one "accountable for sustaining the gain and identifying future improvement opportunities on the process." These folks become your cross-functional link across all facets of the end-to-end process. They are the ones who ensure that improvements in one segment of a process don’t negatively impact downstream process segments. Identifying executives who will own the measures, improvements and success of each business process is critical to the implementation and on-going success of your process management efforts."
Friday, February 03, 2006
Ownership, responsibility and accountability (ORA)
This is a subject close to my heart and something I expect I will bang on about from time to time. One of my personal responsibilities is the commercial development and distribution of an eprocurement solution called iPOS for SunSystems. Some time ago I was asked to attend a meeting with a client that was complaining that their purchasing policies weren't beeing adhered to by the system.
As a colleague and I probed deeper into the problem it became obvious that the issue was not system related (these things rarely are) but people and culture related. A number of senior staff had taken the "don't you know how important I am" approach to business environment change - in fact they had avoided it all together by getting their secretarial or personal assistants to perform the online approval function for purchase requisitions. These assistants were generally not capable of making the decisions about what was and wasn't appropriate for team members to purchase and hence just approved everything that popped up in the email inbox. The results spoke for themselves.
There are of course a number of technical solutions to this situation that would force the correct person to have to login to the system and perform the approval process (digital signatures, dongles, two factor authentication etc etc) however that is not the point.
ORA means that an individual owns a task to the point where it can be handed over to another (or completed) and performs the task in a responsible way - surprisingly enough in this case that does not include giving your password to someone else and then blaming them (and the computer system) when they do your job incorrectly.
In another organisation I came across the dark side of ORA - I'll come back to that another time.
As a colleague and I probed deeper into the problem it became obvious that the issue was not system related (these things rarely are) but people and culture related. A number of senior staff had taken the "don't you know how important I am" approach to business environment change - in fact they had avoided it all together by getting their secretarial or personal assistants to perform the online approval function for purchase requisitions. These assistants were generally not capable of making the decisions about what was and wasn't appropriate for team members to purchase and hence just approved everything that popped up in the email inbox. The results spoke for themselves.
There are of course a number of technical solutions to this situation that would force the correct person to have to login to the system and perform the approval process (digital signatures, dongles, two factor authentication etc etc) however that is not the point.
ORA means that an individual owns a task to the point where it can be handed over to another (or completed) and performs the task in a responsible way - surprisingly enough in this case that does not include giving your password to someone else and then blaming them (and the computer system) when they do your job incorrectly.
In another organisation I came across the dark side of ORA - I'll come back to that another time.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
Customer service at my ISP
Negligent customer service really annoys me and unfortunately I seem to be coming across it a lot at the moment - maybe its me, not "them". My latest ISP is a support quicksand, I logged an online trouble ticket on 24th Jan and never heard from them again. I followed it up with a phone call today and the tech phone support desk announces they don't have access to the trouble ticket system - "that is another department" - but he takes my ticket number down anyway! My problem was resolved over the phone but I couldn't be transferred to anyone of meaningful responsibility to voice my opinions on my customer service experience. My dissatisfaction in their support service would be passed on to the "relevant people" by my trusty new friend on the phone.
So, I learn't a few things today:
1) My ISP tech support doesn't have access to its own tech support systems.
2) They also don't appear to have any structured way of managing complaints.
3) The individual person involved didn't seem to care about me or indeed that his life would be easier if there was a complaints process he could follow.
Taking into account the fact that I didn't sign up with this ISP - I was sold with a bunch of other customers by an ISP I had been with for over 10 years - I will be shopping around for a new ISP - that was a bad investment for the purchaser - no recurring revenue from me - I wonder how many others they have stuffed around and lost. With the easy availability of non ISP email addresses like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail etc - there is no need to be worried about the ISP email address being a personal asset - it can be changed at the drop of a hat.
This rant is about customer service - but really the issue is about poor or non-existent business processes. Efficiency and effectiveness are what all companies should be striving for. Get good and clean about what you do - particularly around any customer facing area - happy customers spend their money and come back for more. It is that simple.
So, I learn't a few things today:
1) My ISP tech support doesn't have access to its own tech support systems.
2) They also don't appear to have any structured way of managing complaints.
3) The individual person involved didn't seem to care about me or indeed that his life would be easier if there was a complaints process he could follow.
Taking into account the fact that I didn't sign up with this ISP - I was sold with a bunch of other customers by an ISP I had been with for over 10 years - I will be shopping around for a new ISP - that was a bad investment for the purchaser - no recurring revenue from me - I wonder how many others they have stuffed around and lost. With the easy availability of non ISP email addresses like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail etc - there is no need to be worried about the ISP email address being a personal asset - it can be changed at the drop of a hat.
This rant is about customer service - but really the issue is about poor or non-existent business processes. Efficiency and effectiveness are what all companies should be striving for. Get good and clean about what you do - particularly around any customer facing area - happy customers spend their money and come back for more. It is that simple.
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