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November 2007 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – “In October, we talked about using the company responsible for your ERP implementation – often called the value added reseller or VAR – to help build your “to be” business process. The rationale was, “Why reinvent the wheel, when your VAR already has a solution or can easily leverage processes already embedded in its system?” You could go to a different VAR or solution provider but it’s a huge job to convert to a new system. It should be a last resort based not just on requirements but also on the VAR’s vision, the software developer’s R&D investment, and support capabilities…”
November 13, 2007 from CBR – “The deal, valued at $5bn, or roughly $58 per share, would absorb the last-remaining top tier BI (Business Intelligence) pure play vendor still standing…
With the field’s top three vendors (Business Objects, Hyperion, and now Cognos) sold off, players in what’s left of the independent BI market are pointing to opportunities and omissions now that the usual suspects are off the map.”
180 View – ERP systems have been characterized as data rich and information poor. By including BI in ERP (which partly explains the acquisition of Hyperion by Oracle and Business Objects by SAP), organizations should not need to customize their systems to extract or slice and dice their ERP data. Although IBM does not sell ERP systems, they do have big opportunities with Cognos. A portion of IBM’s existing clients will be interested in Cognos, and IBM can also offer their services to Cognos customers. As well, Cognos will be used by some of the customers of the ERP vendors including SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. As IBM does not compete in the ERP space, IBM could be recommended by SAP, Oracle, Microsoft… for Cognos implementations as IBM is not an ERP competitor.
2004 from Harvard Business School – “When Jack Welch described the budgeting process as the “bane of corporate America”, he was articulating the frustration of many senior executives and academics who recognize that this annual exercise is rarely justified in today’s fast changing, highly competitive environment. We couldn’t agree more. In fact, we believe that if budgeting is to have any value at all it needs a radical overhaul. In today’s dynamic marketplace, budgeting can no longer serve as a company’s only management system; it must integrate with and support dedicated strategy management systems, process improvement systems and the like.”
180 View – This paper is old but not dated. The article described the problems with budgeting:
- It’s inefficient
- It rapidly becomes obsolete
- It doesn’t motivate the right behaviours
- It’s out of sync with the strategic plan
And what to do about it.
October 22, 2007 from gantthead.com – “We’ve seen an inexorable effort to define, to document, to map and to generally improve our processes. Numerous consultants have attempted to argue that their way of representing processes by drawing boxes and arrows was new, proprietary and, most importantly, better. Literally thousands of them have simply bypassed that debate, and have spent hundreds of hours, days, weeks and months drawing lines and boxes on paper as they define and chart their customers’ “current state” and “future state”. The problem with all of this is that boxes, lines and arrows are just so much ink, Post-it notes and flipchart paper. They aren’t the processes, they’re simply the representation of the processes. Processes are how people work, collaborate, communicate, expedite, stall, obfuscate and in general do the work that they want to do while avoiding the work that they don’t…
What human beings bring to the table that process doesn’t is judgment. We have the ability to engage in critical thinking and reasoning. We are able to respond situationally, and recognize that the most appropriate course of action may be “it depends”. We can recognize a customer service challenge, and make the individual call that the customer needs a discount, or free shipping, or a compliment, in order to salvage the situation and keep them as a customer.
All of this completely defies the logic and rigid guidelines of normal business processes. I have never seen a process map with a box on it saying “apply judgment here”. I think it would be pretty awesome if there was, but so far this has been an elusive source of satisfaction for me…”
180 View – The author, Mark Mullaly, of this article challenges some of the current thinking about business process improvement. We think the problem Mark discusses is not in the process mapping but in the level of detail. If improvement is the objective of the process maps, then the level of detail should be only sufficient to identify a weakness or a control. By keeping the process maps at a higher level, the time to do them is significantly reduced and it avoids the “rigid guidelines” discussed in the article.
We agree with Mark’s closing paragraph which reads “Improvement isn’t simply about a faster way through the process. Although that can be part of the solution, it isn’t the whole solution. Improvement is about finding ways for people to better engage with their customers, helping them to enjoy their jobs more and allowing them to feel engaged and challenged by their work. If we want better processes, we need to leave the space and capacity for judgment, for critical thought and for mixing it up a little. That’s where people create the most value.”
Our biggest gripe with the article is in the title. It’s cute but appears not relevant until the very end, but even then it’s not just organizational change that is the issue. It’s also about the other drivers of business process improvement including motivation, empowerment, skills and environment.
2007 from Deloitte – “The corporate governance revolution began in the United States with one piece of legislation — the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002. Canadian regulatory reforms have been introduced in a piecemeal fashion through separate instruments and legislation, issued at different times, and by different regulatory or legislative bodies…
CEOs and CFOs must personally certify that they have designed and overseen appropriate disclosure controls and procedures (DC&P); for 2006 annual certificates, they will also have to certify as to the design of internal controls over financial reporting (ICFR).”
180 View – There are some major compliance differences between the US and Canada. In the US, an independent auditor must attest to the effectiveness of the internal controls. This one sentence has huge implications. Testing can take more time than evaluating the design of the control. As well, the US does not allow the external auditor to do the compliance work as they are not deemed independent.
October 22, 2007 from CFO.com – “Corporations are gradually shedding their unease with electronic payment methods, an evolution that likely will accelerate over the next few years, according to a new report from the Association for Financial Professionals.
The typical organization still makes 74 percent of its business-to-business payments by check, but that’s down from 81 percent in 2004, said the association, which in September surveyed 493 corporate financial professionals about their payment practices…”
180 View – I (Michael Burns) recently reviewed Telpay for a presentation at the Financial Technology Show. Telpay is an electronic payment system that allows Canadians to pay any bills both nationally and now internationally. Telpay processes 22 million transactions worth $10 billion annually. If Telpay does not have electronic account information, they will cut the cheque the old fashioned way.
November 21, 2007 from The New York Times – “The British government struggled Wednesday to explain its loss of computer disks containing detailed personal information on 25 million Britons, including an unknown number of bank account identifiers, in what analysts described as potentially the most significant privacy breach of the digital era…
In sheer numbers, the breach was smaller than several in the United States over the last few years. Last year, a computer and detachable hard drive with the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers of 26.5 million veterans and military personnel was stolen from the home of an analyst, but recovered apparently without any harm. In 2003, a former software engineer at America Online pleaded guilty to stealing and selling 92 million user names and e-mail addresses, setting off an avalanche of up to seven billion unsolicited e-mail messages.
But the disks lost in Britain contained detailed personal information on 40 percent of the population: in addition to the bank account numbers, there were names, addresses and national insurance numbers, the British equivalent of Social Security numbers. They also held data on almost every child under 16.”
180 View – “The disks were protected by a password, the government said, but were not encrypted.” How many wake-up calls are necessary before sensitive data is routinely encrypted?
180 View (written by Esther Friedberg Karp) – Many baby boomers grew up remembering the phrase “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” Whether that was a misquoting of GM’s then-president Charlie Wilson or not was irrelevant: it was the feeling of the time in the post-World War II era.
That was so then. Times have changed and so have the fortunes of General Motors and other big-name manufacturers who were our economic rocks. Now their world is being “rocked,” and not in a good way.
It is such a different world that my maternal grandparents, for instance, who passed away in the 1980’s, would not recognize it at all.
The Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto-based think tank, and software maker Intuit, Inc., based in Mountain View, have commissioned a three-part study regarding the trends of the future, and to date the first two parts have been published and are available at http://www.intuit.com/futureofsmallbusiness.
Part One analyzes entrepreneurs, what demographic groups comprise this tidal wave of business owners, and what economic events are contributing to the explosive growth of entrepreneurship.
Part Two covers social and technological advances, which are contributing to the fact that small business is the future in this country, regardless of which country you happen to be in when you are reading this. In short, the 1960’s through the 1970’s brought social change. The 1980’s through to 2000 and beyond saw technological change. Cumulatively, they have set the stage for the economic transformation in this millennium that is screaming “small business.”
Part Three of the study, expected to be released by the end of 2007, will cover how small businesses will affect society and the economy in 2017.
Whether they are measured by sheer numbers of businesses, numbers of people involved, or the dollars that they generate, small business is where it’s at now and where it’ll be in the future for the vast majority of us and our descendants.
Barriers to entry into business have been greatly diminished or altogether eliminated by dramatically lowered costs, better systems and tools, and better ease of operation of these tools. It is now quite reasonable that a small business would have systems in place that are equal to or better than those of much larger enterprises. Small companies can play with the “big boys (and girls)” on an equal footing because they have access to cost-effective, super-efficient, and easy-to-learn options for communications, information, customer relations, promotion, financial management, and outsourced goods and labour.
Keep your eye on the Institute for the Future’s third installment. New businesses based on someone else’s revolutionary business idea are quite successful, including “mash-ups,” which combine information from several sources to create a new business. One such enterprise is HousingMaps, which brings together craigslist and Google Maps to create a new real estate business. The opportunities for creating new businesses on a shoestring are endless; the opportunities for servicing them with their outsourced needs are likewise endless. This is where the money is.
April 25, 2007 from Harvard Business School – “Most people at one time or another feel as if they are just spinning their wheels, unable to gain traction either in career or in life. This feeling of being stuck in one place, while troubling, is part of a necessary crisis leading to personal growth, says Dr. Timothy Butler, Senior Fellow and Director of Career Development Programs at Harvard Business School. “
180 View (written by Lawrence Young) – How often do you feel that you are ‘stuck in the mud’? What do you do when the challenge you face seems overwhelming and insurmountable? When was the last time you approached a difficult problem by truly thinking ‘outside the box’?
In this Harvard Business School article, HBS’s Timothy Butler shares with us his six-step approach to getting ‘unstuck’. He tells us how to determine when we’ve really ‘hit the wall’, and more importantly, how to get beyond the impasse we face both at work and at home.
If you find yourself making the same mistakes over and over again, or if you simply have difficulty managing change in your life, this article is a must read for you. It was even an eye-opener in certain places for a change management consultant with 30+ years of experience like me.
November 6, 2007 from PC Magazine – “Google finally announced that it would release something it calls the Open Handset Alliance, and 34 companies are already on board! This is the Google phone initiative we’ve been hearing about. The Google phone is coming!
Over the years, I’ve noticed that any company, anytime it wants, can now get dozens of other companies to agree to become a so-called strategic partner. This is done only to save the cost of postage for the strategic partner, who gets some lame press release distributed for free.
When I see a bunch of joiners jumping on some unknown, unreleased unfinished pipe dream, I actually laugh.”
180 View – On November 5, 2007, The New York Times hyped “What Apple began with its iPhone, Google is hoping to accelerate, with an ambitious plan to transform the software at the heart of cellphones. The personal computer is climbing off its desktop perch and hopping into the pockets of millions of people. The resulting merger of computing and communications is likely to revolutionize the telecommunications industry as thoroughly as the PC changed the computing world in the early 1980s.”
Isn’t it great to get such diverse opinions about the same thing?
