Turning SharePoint from good to great

I touched a while back on the problem with SharePoint trying to be all things to all people and in our offering to clients this has recently taken shape in a meaningful way. With 100 million (yes, 100,000,000) or more seats sold over the last some years there is no getting away that SharePoint has a powerful place in the business software landscape.

The CEO of our author partner - FlowCentric - has published a white paper on turning SharePoint from Good to Great. This harks back to my previous points that it attempts to be all things to all people and in doing so fails to be great at anything.

In reality as we see Microsoft mature its marketing message it appears to move away from the quite exact terms in 2007 of "Streamline Processes" and "Business Intelligence" to more generic terms in 2010 of "Composites" and "Insights". Reading between the lines this suggests to me an acknowledgement that all-things-to-all people is not a viable path to success. Rather it shows an acceptance that SharePoint is a framework and perhaps the plumbing that underpins an array solution sets delivering outcomes to end users.

In the area of Streamline Processes/Composites this allows for and supports the existence of specialist fit-for-purpose tools to address composite areas across the business whilst standing firmly on the foundations that SharePoint brings in the server layer.

So how do we turn it from good to great? By bringing worthwhile and tangible benefits to the key stakeholders - more control for the IT department, better and more visible process outcomes for the business, less confusion for end users.

Get a copy of the whitepaper "FlowCentric turns SharePoint from Good to Great" here.

I thought I was buying a kitchen splashback ...

A little while ago we finished off the tail-end of our home kitchen renovation. The cupboards and benchtop and appliances etc had been in place for ages but the missing thing to bring it all together was glass.

Now it wasn't as simple as a splashback behind the stove, it was that and much more - feature glass on the exposed cabinets facing the external deck, pretty little glass shelves to hold kick knacks and mobile phones, a floor to ceiling mirror at the end of a hallway, a shower screen, new bathroom mirrors - not an inconsequential job but all just commodity stuff, right?

Using a shortlist of glass suppliers gleaned from magazine articles and friends' recomendations we started the "measure and quote" cycle. we had the naieve thought that this was a cost based decision and for the first 3 companies it was. The guy would arrive and ask what was going where, do his measurements, hem and haw about an exposed corner where two sheets of glass were to join, fill in his form and hand over the quote. You couldn't pick any one of them from the pile.

Then Ray arrived. He sat down and asked us what we were doing and what the overall goal of the renovation had been. What did we like about the kitchen now that we had been using it for some months - was our experience different to our expectation? He walked around the room pointing out things from different angles. He sat on the deck and looked back in to where the feature glass was to go. We discussed the mix and match of colours and textures and surfaces and the natural elements outside (sky and plants) that would be reflected within at different times of the day. He made good considered suggestions about what would work where and why. He showed us pictures of other jobs he had done and told us about the satisfied customers. He talked about our feelings for the project. What? Our feelings?

By the time he got around to taking the measurements we were like putty in his hands. We thought we were buying glass. His glass was no different to anybody else's and all the quotes were within 10% of eachother but Ray knew it was about more than that, Ray sold us lifestyle, and he got the business.

In a nutshell - he added value.

Will you respect SharePoint in the morning?

I think SharePoint is one of those software applications that has the potential to be a spectacular disappointment - perhaps undeservedly so. Rarely does one hear or read about an organisation that has easily been able to harness it to its best abilities. It always seems to be "just not quite there".

I think there are a couple of points worth discussing and although this post by Bjorn Kuruknap speaks a lot of truth and left me with tears in my eyes I don't think I'll quite take the same hard position.

Firstly anything that sets out to be all things to all people sets out to fail. The maxim for success is "focus" and SharePoint just doesn't have it. It purports to do document management, knowledge management, process management, content management, business intelligence/insight, portals etc but it really doesn't crack it for any of them.

Secondly when you get something for free (thinking the WSS flavour here rather than MOSS) it doesn't earn much respect from you - so it can easily be treated in a casual or dismissive way. Just because the software came for free doesn't mean you can plug it in, switch it on and expect to get happy users and a quality outcome.

The threat of SharePoint is the viral spread of poorly formed and executed team sites and processes that leverage and further entrench the likes of Word and Excel based forms and edge-to-edge thinking in an unmanageable and un-auditable environment. For business it means no better control and little discovery of areas crying out for improvement (no "lightbulb moments"). For IT it means added drain and chaos in support and significant challenges when the time comes for upgrades. For end users it means confusion in where to go to do what and an enforcement of an unnatural place to go to do things (personal note: I live in email and I hate being forced to go to a portal/website to do something - "don't make me go somewhere, just let me do something").

Like any multi user application/framework, you need to understand your requirements, priorities and your desired outcomes. From that you need to consider what is an appropriate approach to addressing your needs and then you need to plan and design how to achieve the best results. All of this entails the hard slog of thinking and communicating, not website development.

With the proper due diligence in place you are in a strong position to start looking at possible solutions. SharePoint may very well be the right answer, or more likely part of the answer. Your due diligence will help you identify its weaknesses and strengths for your specific purposes and help identify if other tools are needed to fill the gaps. But thinking is harder than hard work and most organisations don't apply themselves in a coherent way to the challenge so SharePoint ends up being a spectacular disappointment.

It's been a year ....

How did that happen? I took my eye off the blogging for a minute and 12 months slipped by.

Getting back into it now, and what a year it has been, I'm not going to bother commenting other than to say "I don't think that is a sea bird sitting on the bow, there must be land nearby".

What is really coming into its own now is the whole business process management story - the "do less with more - leverage your existing investments - get efficient, get smart" mode of thinking. We are seeing a lot of companies under pressure to maintain and improve their customer service whilst still reeling from one or more bouts of cost cutting in the last 12-18 months. And of course "cost cutting" for many means less people, either through deliberate reduction or non-replacement of attrition.

But they are not pulling the lifeboat up on the beach just yet. There are few plans to initiate major projects. What is of interest is the opportunity to cost effectively extend the footprint of the existing solutions, to reach out to different stakeholders and include them in a controlled and efficient way, to start a process in the way they wish it to be completed - accurately and audit-ably.

And that is a BPM sweet spot.

Some of the recent projects of note we have been delivering for customers include:
- better asset management to reduce additional capital purchases
- better employee onboarding to get people generating revenue earlier
- better invoicing processes to shorten the time to cash
- better spend control to reduce unnecessary costs

All very focused "do less with more - leverage your existing investments - get efficient, get smart" activities that have bring rapid results and tangible return on investment.

Certainly looks like a coastline in the distance.

Check out my Wordle to date

This is fun - a Wordle makes an image of a block of text based on the frequency of words used within it.

Check out my blog Wordle as at 15 Sept 2008

Operating in a constrained resources environment

With employment hovering around 4% in Australia these days the brutal reality is that the people available for work quite frankly can't or won't. Many businesses, my employer included, are scrambling to find quality people to fill the vacant positions throughout the company.


This brings two interesting issues to the fore:

- you need to be efficient and effective in what you do

- you need smart tools and systems for people to work with


Why?


Efficiency and effectiveness enables your people to do more with less or the same. It allows people to process the 80% straight through activities with the least amount of perturbation and confusion. It frees time for the smart and skilled people to focus on the issues of importance, the 20% exceptions that really need the rigour and focus of the human touch.


Smart tools and systems encourage people to see the value that is placed in their own skills and experience. If you seduce new hires into the business and then present them with fractured and flawed processes that demand they spend an unreasonable amount of time and effort in administration they may well decide to look around again for somewhere that respects them more.


So what can we do as businesses to become better employers of choice then the next guy? Well my employer takes part in the Hewitt Best Employer initiative which measures and reports on the work force engagement across a wide range of focus areas - this is a great initiative and well respected within the business.


At an operational level over the last few years we have implemented a number of improved business management systems including time sheeting and CRM. We have also automated a wide range of internal finance and HR processes within FlowCentric that have radically improved the content gathering, verification and delegated approval activities and unbelievably reduced the time lag. These processes including adding and changing financial customer and supplier records, personal expense claims amongst others. This is an endless journey, there are always new processes to automate and improvements to make to the existing ones.


Interestingly the change management was not as challenging as we had thought it would be. The take up of these improvements and the employee survey feedback has been extremely positive. The web and email environment for the automated processes reduce to virtually zero the amount of face-to-face training required. The speed of process initiation and execution has been pretty much universally welcomed. Indeed now the level of expectation has risen to a point where what was "special" has become just "business as usual".


We are proud of the process improvement solutions we bring to market, we use them ourselves, they work well and deliver genuine and measurable benefits. Our people are more efficient in their jobs and respected in their workplace. We know we have to operate in a constrained resources environment for the foreseeable future and we continue to focus on improving.


Try it out for ourselves - we could deliver a measurable benefit in a key process in your business within 30 days - not must risk or cost in that.

Where do you start the BPM adventure?

I have had a number of conversations recently with an array of different people - colleagues, partners and clients - all on the topic of "where do you start?". How do you choose what activities and operations in the business are the best candidates for review and improvement? The answer of course is "it depends" (spare me the classic MBA speak please!).

We have a little team of experts that have all sorts of clever tools to help work that out through impact, risk and benefit matrices and I will cover some of that another time. But I think there is a very fundamental issue that rapidly focuses down on the BPM ground zero. "It depends"..... on who the project sponsor is.

It appears to me that there are typically two ends of the business that foster process awareness - cost and customer service. And when I say "cost" I bundle into that the areas of risk, governance and compliance as well. Invariably the project sponsor will be either someone focused on tightening the way things are done to drive down the cost or they will be focused on improving the customer experience.

Neither is the right or wrong place to start - each is the appropriate arena of influence for the sponsor, for the person who cares. And that is actually what it comes down to, someone in the business must care enough about what their responsibilities and goals are to look outside of "what is" and consider "what could be".

Glad it's not T5 for me

I am heading for London again late April and I was hoping to have the joy of Terminal 5 rather than the bleak and harried T's 1 through 4 that I have hated and blogged about before - but it was not to be - and aren't I glad after the last few days of total chaos after the inglorious opening.

The news reports here mention that BAA executives were doubtful of the systems capability to handle the volumes some weeks ahead of the opening. The baggage handling had only been tested to 80-90% capacity. Even though they throttled back the number of flights for the opening days they still managed to choke the systems.

As usual it looks like BAA treated their customers with complete contempt and left them to lie around the place for hours on end without much succour and comfort. Catastrophic. Thank goodness it wasn't me. Makes the old T's look like a walk in the park.

I wonder what would happen in Beijing if they hit the same problem pre-Olympics. I suspect they would bus in 500,000 workers and just manhandle the bags around the place, chin up, smiling hard!

The Environmentally Sustainable Procurement Policy

With “greening your business” being a fashionable corporate catch cry these days I thought I would put together my thoughts on what could be involved in an environmentally sustainable procurement policy. I think it would be fairly obvious to everyone that you won’t become carbon neutral by policy issues alone, for that you will need to purchase carbon credits in some form, preferably from a reputable and certified carbon trader. I think there are lots of people buying credits for trees that will never be planted out there.

The initial steps most organisations will take in “greening up” are well covered in the media and elsewhere and include recycled paper, low energy light bulbs, water aerators on the taps, waterless fresheners in the gentleman’s urinals (yes, really – see them here), auto sleep on the photocopier, switching off all the computers and monitors, time controlled lighting, removing all those light bulbs beside the building windows that are there just for show and the like. These are all tactical responses to address specific areas within the business environment and I wholeheartedly support them.

What I wanted to address was the policy and practice around “what we buy” and “where things are sourced from” that could result in some major improvements to buying behaviour within the business.

What are you sourcing from geographically distant locations? Do you need to buy from that supplier or can you source the goods from a more local vendor to drive down carbon emissions from transport? Do you really need those exact goods or will a similar but not quite identical alternative of acceptable quality available from a closer distribution point be acceptable?

Where are the goods that we are buying originally made/sourced and how much effort has gone into transporting them to our geography in the first place? Do we really need South American cherries on the boardroom fruit platter?

Have you made a purchasing decision based purely on price rather than holistic value? Would you be willing to pay a little more to reduce the carbon cost of shipping the cheaper goods to us? What level of premium would you be comfortable with? 5%? 10%? 20%? (My swift Google based research of research suggests around 10% is the tipping point for the majority) What if you went to a more local supplier and negotiated a contract with guaranteed volumes that shared the difference between the two organisations in support of a greener outcome?

What about the overall total cost of ownership? If there is only a modest purchase cost differential and the more expensive option comes with a better warranty and maintenance package then the total lifetime of the product will be longer and time to replacement will be extended. That has a green benefit as well as a commercial one.

What products are you buying that are environmental plunder? Warning – rant approaching - My personal hobby horse here is bottled water. Since when did we need to drink water from a PET bottle in preference to a tap? Disregarding what is a ridiculous markup on the raw material – my local water supplier pipes fresh, clean and cold water to my door for $1.339 per thousand litres whilst 500mls of, for all intents and purposes, the same product in a bottle in the fridge at the local convenience store is $3.00 or more – how can it be more expensive than milk for goodness sake? – and what makes it seem like a good idea to have a fresh bottle every time we need a drink? That plastic doesn’t grow on trees you know. End of rant.

Where purchasing involves paper and wood based products have we assured that all orders are fulfilled with materials from sustainable sources? If you are getting new chairs in the boardroom do they really have to be from Indonesian old growth teak forests?

A dreaded by-product of purchasing is waste. Have you published a waste management policy that supports and encourages waste avoidance/minimisation, product reuse and materials recycling? Can you work with the building management company to improve waste recycling within the whole building if there are not already sufficient services available?

Where chemicals are used in the business can efforts be made to select bio-degradable and lesser toxic alternatives than those with the harshest agents in them?

Are there areas where commercially recycled products are available as an alternative to new? – I am thinking here of photocopier toner cartridges and the like.

When looking for ideas on where to green up the business look no further than your own workforce – send out a call for ideas and suggestions – you could well be swamped.

Is there a place in the business for a “green team”? A group of motivated individuals from throughout the business whose goal is to reduce and improve the company carbon footprint on an ongoing basis. There will be a surprising amount of people willing to volunteer for such a remit. Give them a target and make them accountable. Advertise their existence and celebrate their successes within the business (without flying in a crate of French champagne!). This volunteer responsibility should be acknowledged as career resume enhancing.

Have you communicated to your suppliers that you are interested in and have a preference for goods that can be shown to have a lower carbon footprint? Don’t expect to be able to make sensible decisions on your own – push the responsibility and motivation out to your supply chain – publish a policy that assures preference in your buying contracts to environmentally conscientious suppliers.

What about preferential agreements for suppliers that have initiated and can demonstrably display/disclose their own environmental management and waste reduction policies and programs.

Some things are not going to change easily in the business. You can’t easily cancel existing supply contracts, however you can encourage suppliers to improve their own behaviour within existing contracts.

You can’t change sourcing of critical or strategic components for the business and jeopardise your operational activities however you can urge strategic suppliers to look within their own businesses for environmental responsibility.

What happened to that quarter?

Boy - January to March seems to have disappeared this year. I know the years get shorter as we get older but this is ridiculous. What happened? What did I rant about? Who knows? Who cares?

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.