Americanisms to learn and love

Having spent some time in the presence of a few of our American cousins over the last couple of months either at presentations or in phone conversations I record here a few vocabularistic (!)distractions for your enjoyment. They are not necessarily wrong, just were unusual to hear in day-to-day conversation or jarring in context.

Yeoman people - the day to day workers

Munge - no idea what this was but doesn't sound nice

I-cap - intellectual capital

colourisation - I couldn't find it in the dictionary, I am guessing "colouring"

attrited - as in making a verb of attrition

inculcating - I had to look this up - "to impress by repeated statement or admonition" - Aussies, thing of the recent "working families" Ruddism.

A brave new SOA world?

Yes, it has been a while, but I have been busy and preoccupied. Following my last post on SOA I decided that I needed a good hard look at the whole SOA story - there seems to be so much noise and marketing about it that I feel my small and addled brain has missed out on the important points that make it oh-so-exciting.

To that end I have attended a couple of seminar presentations on the topic from a case study and a major vendor point of view - my life is not as exciting as it sounds! But hey, the free breakfasts were good.

OK, I think I get it a bit more now - however I think many of the major SOA "pushers" are heavily focusing on the techie feature-function issues and haven't got such a strong grasp around the tangible business benefits yet - or if they have they are failing to articulate them. Sitting in a presentation where a vendor product executive was extolling the virtues of their forthcoming (over some years) SOA it was hard not to notice the air of disinterest across the roomful of financial and business attendees.

Here is a great business benefit courtesy of PepsiCo - it costs between US$20k and US$120k per annum to support an application interface. So if you, like they, have upwards of 1200 (!) of the suckers across the enterprise then your IT application support and maintenance budget is a serious cost to the business. A sensible goal would be to collapse and consolidate the application landscape into a core set of common tools and a select set of specialised components. If you can then build a process centric layer over an SOA (or Enterprise Bus) that allows you to standardise a range of those user interfaces and remove them from the constraints of dealing with the original application suite then you are on the P&L bus to saving tangible costs.

So in an environment like this where is an SOA layer going to come from? Is it sensible to expect that capability and commitment to openness to exist end-to-end across the business application portfolio you use? Probably not. I think there will be components of ready made exposure from core application suites and these will need to be extended and enhanced through additional bespoke development in line with the business processes.

This is where I think the reality clashes with the dream - as you build ever increasing layers of specific complexity on top of a generic core application SOA how much threat do you bring to the solution when fundamentals changes are made to the foundation SOA? Further to what extent have you got the capability to actually achieve the full objective if so much of the underlying process logic is buried in a framework you are completely reliant on and yet have absolutely no control over?

Even today we are all exposed to the vagaries of the existing APIs over commercial applications. Only last week our team had to devise a workaround to overcome a potential weakness in an API to achieve an appropriate level of audit control for a client's SOX compliance requirement. It probably wasn't a weakness in the API when the purposes for the process were originally foreseen however times have changed and compliance demands have increased. In fairness to the application author the latest version of the API resolves the issue however upgrading wasn't a viable option for the client.

So in our brave new Utopian SOA world how will we handle demands for change? I am guessing in exactly the same way we do today - with bespoke developed workarounds and customisations that add support and maintenance cost to the delivery of IT systems into the business. Sound familiar?

I think the SOA story as pushed by application vendors is a defensive move on their part to protect themselves from client attrition through application malaise, attrition or retirement. If you are serious about an SOA in your business then you may have to bite the bullet to develop the whole end-to-end capability for your self. Interestingly that is pretty much what Pepsico seems to have done in conjunction with a BPMS.

Asking

Following on from my previous post "How to buy as a corporate" I was delighted to see the following at JustSell which also suggests the path of an explicit sales process.


Step 6 - close - agree to purchase.

That means "ask for the order".

The "Lego dream" of SOA

Sticking with Cynthia Rettig she has some great comment on the realities of the current tech buzz around SOA - "The Lego dream has been a persistent favorite among a generation or more of programmers who grew up with those construction toys. Unfortunately, however, software does not work as Legos do".

Boiling SOA (service orientated architecture) down to some very simple points, I see it as 1) the removal of business logic from the application interface layer and 2) the exposing of said business logic in a way that it can be consumed on demand from any application (ie an API or web service). As Cynthia says - this is a massive job for legacy applications and riddled with complexities and pitfalls - not least of which is what happens when these things get nested on top of each other and you hit a problem buried deep down in the underbelly of the beast?

I get the business benefit of this for software application behemoths - who appear to me to be the ones most pushing this barrow - "hey, don't throw out our old stuff - just drive it in a different way". What I struggle with is the genuine business benefit for the business user. The argument consistently put is that you can flexibly consume an end to end business process with a modular approach to the application layer.

It's seems like a great idea but when I put it in terms of some crude analogies does it really stack up?
The boomer couple retiring from their inner city lives are moving out to the hobby farm in the mountains - rather than sell the 2 door soft-top sports car they have taken the SOA approach and dropped in a sturdy 4x4 chassis and transmission. While they were at it the SOA'd the cat by peeling off the skin and fur and replacing it with a border collie shaggy dog model.

Hmmm - didn't quite get the expected outcome there. I think this SOA thing has a long time to run before the true business benefits are fully realised.

Hope is not a strategy

Quoting from a recent Cynthia Rettig article ..."TECHNOLOGY has always been about hope. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, businesses have embraced new technologies enthusiastically, and their optimism has been rewarded with improved processes, lower costs and reduced workforces. As the pace of technological innovation has intensified over the past two decades, businesses have come to expect that the next new thing will inevitably bring them larger market opportunities and bigger profits. Software, a technology so invisible and obscure to most of us that it appears to work like magic, especially lends itself to this kind of open-ended hope." Read the full article here.

And as Rick Page says "Hope is not a strategy".

Cynthia (and many other IT pundits) cites examples of organisations wasting tens of millions of dollars on unsuccessful implementations, and you know, in the small-mid tier market it is just as frustrating and disastrous wasting tens of thousands of dollars on a bad outcome.

The problem so many times as she well articulates is that most systems available now are blindingly sophisticated and complicated and come with so much potential customisation that the implementation projects invariable run off the rails and frequently very early on in the time frame. This is exacerbated by the fact that there may not be a clear definition of what is to be done and how, and even if it was defined it may well have changed between system selection, project initiation and implementation.

The hairy-chested challenge for any organisation is to be able to meaningfully define their system requirements in the form of people, processes, systems and outcomes (and to keep it up to date) and to be able to articulate these requirements in a way that allows 1) potential solution partners to understand and affirm that they can deliver a solution and 2) for the company to be able to compare a number of potential solutions, do a gap analysis and assess the risks and rewards of each offering prior to making a selection.

It's a big ask and one that is generally too hard to both achieve at the start and keep current through the project - so the requirements tend to be boiled down into a request for information/tender document as lines of "yes/partially/no" compliance for feature/function wish lists. It is very hard to describe a business objective and supporting end-to-end process in this manner and even harder for a solution partner to respond at any level of reliable detail. There can be an awful lot of "it depends" in any RFI response. So invariably there are some (or many) iterations of this as questions are asked and answered as a part of the qualification stage for both parties.

Upon system selection the maddening customisation journey begins and again there are challenges to all parties to keep focused on achieving the objectives that were not really defined well enough to start with. And there goes the budget, the time line and the project managers hair.

So is there another way? We think so. Use a process modelling tool to map, model and describe what the overall system requirements and objectives are. Involve stakeholders from throughout the business to add accuracy to their areas of specialisation. Give them a simple tool that allows them to depict what they require within the constraints and standards of the overall framework. Save this into a navigable website that allows everyone to traverse through end to end processes and track what the actual objectives and desired outcomes are and then issue that as part of your RFI/T pack and use it to assess the responses and do the gap analysis. Get really smart and issue a simple tool to the RFI respondents allowing them to truly relate their solution to the specification.

It moves the system requirements and fulfillment process into a new world and brings great transparency and clarity to the task for all stakeholders. The effort invested upfront pays dividends all the way to the end of the implementation as there is an accurate and consistent benchmark to work against for the life of the project.

This sort of approach removes the "hope" from your systems selection and implementation strategy.

The Disney Process Magic

Yes yes - its been a while since I last blogged - a busy time on the work and home front - not least being a few weeks holidays with the family that had us slog through my all time favourite place - Heathrow airport - not once but three times - we'll come back to them.

One stopover was a trip to Tokyo Disney Land - a magical place for the true believers under 8 years old and also surprisingly a magical place for those of us interested in customer service and process driven things. I have been triggered today by someone elses visit to an American Disney franchise here.

Let me start by saying that Disney Land is not for the feint hearted as it is perhaps at the pinnacle of American commercialisation however the Tokyo location is almost surreal as it wraps a lovely Japanese-ness around the rapacious American core. Then again it is very much a Japanese domestic tourist destination and as an international tourist with none of the local language maybe I missed the more subtle nuances of how they extract extra cash from the wallets of the day's "guests".

Let me tell you what Disney Land is brilliant at - people processing. Yes, there are queues but they obsessively (and happily) tell you how long you will have to wait from check points - you knowingly choose to wait that long (we were generally at the "only 5/10 minutes from this point" on a rainy midweek day but there are plenty of "only 45 minutes from here" signs which would make for a very slow day). Yes, there are barriers setup to allow the daily parades to occur but they are very low key and are erected so subtly and disassembled so rapidly that they barely interfere with the crowds. Everytime you think "where is ...?" or "how do I ...?" or "I wonder if ...?" there is a smiling and willing "Cast Member" at hand to guide the way and with a charmingly over the top little flourish which I gather is the "Disney way" of giving directions throughout the franchise - and always with as genuine a smile as you could expect in this sort of environment - more of that great global training that Tom Hoobyar refers to. As a queue grows beyond the guide rails to contain it as if by magic additional rails are smoothly and quietly clicked into place to bring control back to the crowd. They know where they want the queues to form and they manufacture the queue in such a way as to get best space efficiency and least interference to the other spaces in the vicinity. The place is spotlessly clean and I got the impression that if you did drop any litter (deliberately or otherwise) a smiling sweeper would appear out of nowhere to pounce on it with glee. There isn't even a chip missing in any of the thousands of bench seats scattered everywhere. I was told by Ariel's (one of 6 apparantly) boyfriend in the queue at Narita on the way home that the maintenance crew works 24x7 to keep everything in near perfect condition - and it shows. As you walk around what is one of the top tourist destinations in the world there is no sense of shabbiness, over use, wear and tear or threadbare - the place is like new despite the millions of bodies that surge through it every year.

Now let's compare that to my nemesis - Heathrow - where do you start - 2 ends of the spectrum. Sure Disney is a commercial enterprise very focused on maximising the dollars it can extract out of your pocket and a destination you have actively chosen to visit - and Heathrow is probably neither of those - but does that excuse their unwillingness or inability to be efficient and effective at what they do? Just about any customer centric business (and what isn't these days) could benefit from a Disney-like culture of cast member engagement and obsession with efficiency. The Disney "successful guest outcome" was surprisingly seductive for this sceptic.

Lights out processing for SunSystems

The concept of “lights out processing” is well known in the supply chain and logistics arena – it is the concept of day to day operations occurring at such a low level of human intervention that for most of the time the lights aren’t even switched on in the warehouse and the machines just go about their automated business in the dark.

This is the goal that Professional Advantage has in bringing an extensive suite of enhancement modules to the SunSystems world. What, however, does “lights out processing” actually mean when applied to the standard company finance department? To us it means achieving an 80% or greater rate of straight-through processing where transactions flow through their lifecycle from inception to completion with the minimum human intervention. The beneficial outcomes to this goal include the increased level of efficiency, the reduction in wasteful administrative costs and the freeing up of people’s time to focus on the 20% (or less) of exceptions that occur in the business and the strategic effort that actually adds value to the business plan and the shareholders returns.

How is this premise applied within our product suite? As some examples:

- raising a purchase requisition through to approving a supplier invoice – what can be done to automate and orchestrate the many process steps and business rules in that transaction path? iPOS for SunSystems delivers on this objective. The alternative invariably includes paper forms, intrays and, no answer to the “where is it” questions and extensive delays.

- Within cash management how can the tedious and administratively repetitive and error prone bank reconciliation process be sped up, automated and performed in an auditable way? Bank Reconciliation delivers huge improvements in balancing the bank account on a daily basis. The alternative is manual data entry and allocation with the associated risks of human error and delays.

- Management reporting demands a consolidated view of the distributed enterprise in a timely enough fashion to be able to respond rapidly to any warning signals. Consolidations for SunSystems builds a rule-set that summarises, normalises and centralises all the necessary SunSystems business units through a visible and auditable framework delivering a consolidated view of the enterprise for on demand management reporting. The alternative usually includes database level SQL scripts, inconsistent “black box” rules and un-auditable results.

Every company can benefit from striving for a "lights out processing" model in the financial administration layer of the business.

How to buy as a corporate

One of my colleagues came back from a meeting with a prospect with a grin spread across his face, when asked why he said "these guys actually know how to buy something". As a result of the meeting the project sponsor had turned to our hero and said "it is obvious now that the next step is we need to buy this software and we will arrange the purchase order straightaway".

This may seem like the bleeding obvious - but in my opinion many people don't actually know how to buy - they know how to get their groceries, pick a new fridge, update their big-boys-toys etc - but not how to buy in a corporate setting.

There are extensive training courses and sales techniques and philosophies in existence and I "tip my lid" to all of them however for the simple minded like myself there are basically 6 steps to it:

1) The company identifies an area of concern or improvement - this may be through introspective analysis or as a result of external review and assessment, or even prodding by a persistent salesperson - either way they have a pain that they want fixed.

2) They look around for potential suppliers of a solution and review one or more in a short list at a summary level. Formal corporate and solution overview presentations are made to the appropriate company decision makers and stakeholders. There may be a few rounds of these for everyone to come to grips with the differences in offerings and approach. This is "pre-sales" and generally provided free of charge by the prospective supplier as their opportunity cost.

3) The company selects a front runner and jointly they work through a more detailed needs analysis, project scope, implementation plan etc and agree on how solution gaps and project risks will be addressed. There may well be a small scale proof of concept (POC) to confirm some specific operational requirements. Quite likely this will be as a chargeable project by the prospective supplier.
This is the qualification period for both sides - the company builds confidence in the proposed solution and supplier that appear to be the best fit and the prospective supplier confirms their comfort with the project requirements, senior management buy-in, available budget, and importantly compelling reason why the company will actually do something rather than just talk a lot and then stay with the status quo. The expected result is both parties decide they would like to proceed.

4) The preferred supplier now puts forward a knowledgable proposal covering objectives, deliverables, roles, responsibilities, time frames and costs.

5) The company places an order - now this is the part that can go badly awry - everything goes well until this part where big decisions need to be made and real money needs to be committed. If both parties know what they are doing then this shouldn't happen very often. The prospective supplier will have smoothed out any objections, addressed the decision makers, confirmed any details, responded acceptably to any objections. Equally the company will have setup the internal decision chain, have an approved budget in hand, nominated a project coordinator and internal team. But sometimes it comes unstuck and for a really weird reason - the sales person doesn't say "to move ahead now we will need to get your purchase order" and the company buyer hasn't read all the signs to know that this is the next step in the process and it is his/hers alone to take. So the one side isn't asking and the other isn't offering and things go off the boil. Weird to have got so far and invested so much to suddenly get lost.

6) The final step is the execution of the sale, project implementation, scope change management, user training, post implementation review, handover from implementation team to support team, final project sign-off. The downhill run, slalom for sure, but still downhill.

Coming from the supplier side I say to all salespeople "remember to ask for the order"!

Be audacious and start small with BPM

Time and again we see a pattern re-playing in our business process management projects - attacking these things at an enterprise level for most organisations is just a bridge too far. The budget, resources, buy in and intellectual and emotional stamina required are simply too great for a successful project.

Having an audacious goal is laudable and an important part of the impetus to get started, however BPM is a marathon not a sprint and it generally succeeds by achieving small, digestible wins along the way rather than a big bang burst.

Find a point pain that has vocal stakeholders and tangible but modest value to the business (modest value = modest risk) - possibly an internal or backoffice process. Map, model and automate it. Communicate the success and recruit the next volunteer. After a couple of below-the-radar operations a queue of patients will materialise outside the surgery door with increasing benefits and value to the business - commonly in the customer facing area.

Don't think you will get it right first time around - map, automate, deploy, learn, modify - progressive improvement is the reality. Oh, and any number of unexpected events can come along and turn it upside down overnight - celebrate them, embrace them - automated changes are much quicker and easier to deploy and far less upsetting for people than manual process changes.

The world is a village

Last week a second cousin of mine died in a horrific and pointless motorbike accident in Durango, Colorado, USA. This is obviously a very personal event for our extended family and I agonised over posting anything about it in this blog.

But yesterday I Googled him and found a blog of another of his cousins - a US attorney who had acknowledged Conor's passing.

The world is a village and the Internet is more than a superhighway, it is an endless network of roads, byways and sleepy lanes that enables us to connect with people in previously unimaginable ways - a simple and obvious thought I know. It has joined together two strangers in their mourning.

Tell your loved ones you love them.

11 April 2007 - I have had some kind thoughts in comments and I thank those people for them however I will not be publishing them.

Cubicle Commandos

This is an interesting little book recently published which will get stacked up on my bedside table. The premise is that for those people who have an entrepreneurial spirit but not the courage or resources to go out and do it alone, there are still strategies for making a difference and influencing change from within a corporation. It is a celebration of, and encouragement for, all those souls that strive to improve a business from the inside.

I can strongly relate to this idea and its under-the-radar practitioners - time and again at seminars and user groups we meet people struggling to do better within their circles of influence. They look for ways to improve what they and others around them do and protect the business from repeatedly falling into holes. Most improvements sought are based around changes in how the people and processes operate in the business, and sooner or later that comes to product (applications) - the 3P holy trinity of business process management.

The challenge for many Cubicle Commandos is that although they're close to the action and know what can be done to improve they frequently are not in senior decision making roles nor do they have discretionary budget to call upon. So they struggle through the bureaucracy and red tape in the business to get some localised improvement over the line. Then they have to go out and do it all over again.

If you are a decision maker and budget holder, take time to seek out your Cubicle Commandos - nurture them - they might make a big difference to your day. Looking beyond the localisation, there may be a way to clean up a process end-to-end rather than edge-to-edge.

Biggles boggled out

The Australia Day Google Maps fly over is long past and I promised a link to the spot where we went so here it is. Clifton Gardens, a nice harbourside beach with small waves, safe for the kiddies to play in.

Unfortunately due to last minute air traffic control restrictions and time challenges the Google Biggles didn't actually fly over us - we saw the plane out over the harbour but it never came in to us - so I'm not in the picture - in fact no-body is, it must have been taken in Winter.

The much more famous and fabulous Bondi Beach and Manly came up a treat though. And a great view of a surf lifesaver carnival at Freshwater.

Death to death by PowerPoint

Part of our Best Employer initiatives is regular communication across the business on what and how we are doing and where we are doing it. We recently had the past quarter company update that is a morning session comprising of about 8 different corporate and divisional presentations, supposedly for an hour but some quarters long past are remembered for their record breaking overruns!

It was not unusual for these sessions to turn into "death by PowerPoint" and you all know what I mean by that. Over the last couple of years a brave group of pioneers started to change the way they built their presentations. Rather than a slide buried in bullet points there would appear a single topic along with a picture. Now when I say "picture" I don't mean a graph or a logo, I mean a genuine photograph or cartoon of people, places or situations that was in some way evocative of the topic in hand. The presenter then talked to the topic whilst ideally drawing in some reference, however obliquely, to the picture. Very novel. Mind you, this was skunk-works, nothing officially mandated.

It had two outcomes, these presentations started to be rated as the "best" in the following online survey, they also tended to stay within their allotted time - no bloat. The message to all? people like pictures. Last week the presentations were riddled with pictures and it only ran marginally late - possibly a record breaker. Purely through exposing everyone to different ways of doing something the mass had adopted the change as a norm.

So strip out all the bullet points in your next presentation, put one key message on the slide and support it with picture that ties your message up in a memorable package. Give it a try, you might find it fun.

Now, where to get the pictures? The Internet dummy! There is a raft of stock photography suppliers online that sell low res images at very affordable rates. I'm not going to favour any one over another by naming them. I have really been delighted with the kind and generous nature of many of the amateur photographers that post on http://www.flickr.com/. There are millions of images here and I have found that generally the owners are delighted for you to use an image of theirs at no cost as long as the source is referenced and the presentation is not something that is being sold as part of a commercial offering. Find one you like and ask the owner - you may be surprised. The world is full of givers just waiting to be asked.

Bank your emotional credits early

I was chastised today for letting my blog entries lapse - time is a precious commodity these days and work, travel, kids, ill family members and handyman jobs have conspired to keep me away from the keyboard last month.

Another whirlwind week of business in London during Feb and another battle with the misery that is Heathrow airport. That place must be terribly demoralising to work in – it seems to suck the smiles out of people as they arrive – international travel has become a tedious and stressful thing since 2001 and it is made even more so by the surly, dismissive attitudes of ground staff.

In contrast some of the clients and business partners I caught up with are just brimming with energy and enthusiasm, ideas and innovations. It is amazing how the power of an individual can be magnified by a positive corporate culture.

I had three recent interesting conversations that led me to today’s post.

We have been providing training to some of our partners recently and one attendee was espousing how much better the experience was with PA than another organisation. Only wanting to beat our chest slightly, we are proud – and I think justifiably so – of our iPOS "boot camp" training, a lot of effort has been put into it by people much smarter than me. The comment was that we gave freely and willingly of information whereas getting things out of the other party was like pulling teeth.

We also have two large, publicly listed organisations using our Consolidations for SunSystems application who recently communicated their joy and delight with its functionality and operations. They both have achieved significant and tangible cost and data integrity benefits from the implementation to the point where they could now not easily function without it. Each of them have also requested enhancements and modifications to make it even better. Always on the lookout for good marketing I asked each if they would provide a "Consolidations from PA is great because ....." statement that we could use as a testimonial.

One turned a brilliant statement around overnight - a giver.

The other came back with a mealy mouthed "when you do what we have asked then we might think about it" - a taker.

In a previous existence I had the pleasure and privilege of having a smart and generous man as the business owner at a client. He called this sort of thing "emotional credit". We did a good job all month every month for his company year-in year-out and he constantly offered his services to us for case study and prospect references. He liked to bank his emotional credits early so that any time he did have a problem he knew there was a deep well of goodwill to draw upon to ensure a best possible resolution. And he was right, if the excrement hit the air movement device we pulled out all stops to deliver for his business.

Bank your emotional credits early. You get a whole lot more out of life.

Happy Googled Australia Day 2007

Google have been very smart with their marketing this year and have given all Sydneysiders the opportunity to make a personal appearance in Google maps. Check this out. (Update 29 March 2007 - Sorry, they deleted the link! They were planning to fly the camera plane around the cebtral, harbour and beach suburbs of Sydney to update the Google Maps images and give us Aussies a chance to be noticed.)

I am hoping to get into it and if it works out I will add the link here in due course.

What is it about process?

What is it about process and why do we want to manage it?

I am always pondering on ways to explain this to clients and watching Shane Warne retire recently from Australian international cricket gave me another insight. Warne, with perhaps an unimpressive track record off the pitch, is without doubt one of the world's best cricket bowlers, if not the best to date - even I who doesn't follow the game with much passion or attention can see this much.

Bowling of course is a process, a process that many of us are completely hopeless at and one that Warne is simply spectacular at. With a combination of talent and practice he consistently manages to bamboozle the opposition batsmen and take the wickets. The problem for the Australian cricket team now is how do they replace the loss of such an important "processor" in their business? Indeed the loss of three very competent cricket "processors" as Glenn McGrath and Justin Langer also bowed out on the same day.

This is the problem with manual processes (and processors) - you spend a lot of time and money training and skilling someone up to perform the task efficiently and effectively and in doing so you become exposed to the risks of losing that person with catastrophic effects on productivity and results. From a human resources management viewpoint you also want to be able to offer personal development and growth opportunities to individuals and this will be hampered by your reliance on specific people doing specific tasks above all else. Procedural documentation is all very well but "processing" is all about doing, not describing.

This is where a business process management suite (BPMS) can protect you from the storms of workforce turnover - not much help admittedly for the Australian cricket team - but masterful for directing and controlling the everyday business processes that earn you your crust every month. If a business process can be codified by a set of rules, then it can be orchestrated and trafficked through a BPMS. So anyone in your business can disappear tomorrow and your operations will survive the day.

Obviously there will still be training, productivity and efficiency challenges as people move in, around and out of the organisation however the rules and escalation points defined in a quality BPMS implementation should keep things moving along very nicely.

The time-to-value quotient

I was recently asked to compare one of our products to a supposed competitor in the marketplace. In reality we see the two as playing different roles and in some ways complementary to eachother. Different users have different needs and goals and the two products in question would be of value to intersecting subsets of the overall user community.

As I worked through a somewhat lengthy list of differences I came to the benefit of "time-to-value". There is frequent talk about the ROI (return on investment) and this is undoubtedly an important criterion when assessing the corporate spend - hey - you want to get a return on that don't you? If not, why are you doing it? And of course there is "hard" ROI in terms of money saved, time reduced, risk mitigated, and "soft" ROI in terms of happier people, fewer nuisance queries, better survey results - those things harder to measure and sometimes harder still to marry improvements back to a specific cause.

"Time-to-value" is a little different - how long will it take for you to start recovering some of that return on investment? The ROI may be substantial but in the case say of rolling out a new ERP system the project could be long and tortuous and it may be some time before you start to get your hands on a little of that "value".

The companion process solutions for SunSystems from PA have without exception a very rapid time-to-value. This benefit comes predominatly from one single core premise - a product that is seamlessly and natively integrated to your core system "out of the box" (in our case Infor SunSystems) is always going to give you a shorter and more cost effective time-to-value than an alternative.

Some of our small footprint products can be up and running with key users trained within half a day. The challenges and complexities of getting one piece of software to talk to another are largely removed from the installation task because of that native integration.

On the other end of the scale our iPOS eProcurement for SunSystems suite may need anything from 5 to 50 days to implement and configure depending on the size and complexity of the client requirements. However our knowledge of the market tells us that this is invariably only 50% of the time required for competitive products that are missing the all important pre-existing, deep seated integration.

Time-to-value is a very worthy criterion during a product selection process.