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.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
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.
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.
Friday, January 05, 2007
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)