Swimlane flowcharts

June 1, 2007 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – “Remember drawing flowcharts? As accounting students, it’s something we all had to learn — and it was usually a struggle. The charts took forever to draw, and then were left to gather dust as soon as they were finished. But if you think flowcharts are passé, think again. Business process improvement is the new mantra of business, and process maps are a key component. Fortunately, we now have a flowchart technique called swimlane that is easy to understand and apply...”

Nine ways to screw up a good BI implementation

June 4, 2007 from CIO Insights – “According to a BusinessWeek Research Services survey released in the fall of 2006, 62% of respondents said recent large-scale or strategic business intelligence (BI) initiatives returned the value they expected. What about the other one-third?
Vendors touting BI like Cognos, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM and Business Objects say it can deliver knowledge, efficiency, better decisions, and profit to almost any organization that uses it—when done wisely.

Even the smartest companies can make some dumb mistakes when it comes to business intelligence.

Dumb idea #1 – Not having BI. No surprise that Gartner's 2007 survey of 1400 CIOs found BI was again the most highly ranked technology priority. A Ventana Research study in the fall of 2006 of 488 companies indicates that 53% of companies plan to implement query and reporting software, while 40% plan to implement analytics and data mining applications.

Dumb idea #2 – Not having a BI roadmap and buy-in. "Just build it, they will come," is stinking thinking. Too many IT departments build a data warehouse based on the assumption that once it is built, users will automatically see the benefit. They don’t, unless you get the users on board.

Dumb idea #3 – Reliance on spreadsheets. Admit it, you know people who hide behind spreadsheets. They do it because they are comfortable with them and because they know how to manipulate the numbers to satisfy the politics of their organizations. Not smart in the long run..."

180 View – We especially like the “stinking thinking” re “just build it, they will come”. The writer says you need users on board to overcome this problem. We agree that will help, but often users don’t know what they want. As the writer discusses in dumb idea #8 (“Not knowing how to define information requirements), BI needs to link back to metrics that support the business. We think that the metrics should map to the critical success factors (defined as those things you must do well in order to be successful). BI is not just about technology; more importantly, it’s about knowing what to measure and how to motivate.

Sentai

June 15, 2007 based on a 180 Systems interview with Sentai – Things are generally improving in the ERP marketplace, but according to Sentai, they are on a roll. I asked why. The biggest change was a rewrite to their user interface. Rather than the old character based/Windows screen scraper look, they now have a thin client that looks like Windows and runs under both Windows and Linux now and possibly other operating systems later. Thin client means that only the user interface commands move from workstation to server, which dramatically improves remote performance.

Sentai has also embedded Cognos reporting, OLAP (On line Analytical Processing using PowerPlay) and portal services into their system. This overcomes the traditional problem facing many ERP systems in being data rich and information poor. They have also embedded many of the key elements of CRM in their system, which overcomes the problem of working with third party systems that are not integrated.

Sentai focuses on distribution companies. They claim that they can beat the competition on handling distributors with large volumes of data – not because of the underlying database but because of their thin client and their handling of mass price and cost changes and ability to automate vendor price uploads. Sentai will also appeal to distributors that are dragged into supporting EDI as they make it affordable with a small upfront charge for each trading partner and a small fee for each transaction. Sentai also includes their own integrated eCommerce and warehouse management systems.

Sentai is doing well in Edmonton, Florida and Cuba. We predict that Sentai will expand their geography as the word gets out about their capabilities.

Microsoft Surface: Behind-the-Scenes First Look (with Video)

July 2007 from Popular Mechanics - “The software giant has built a new touchscreen computer—a coffee table that will change the world. Go inside its top-secret development with PopularMechanics.com, then forget the keyboard and mouse: The next generation of computer interfaces will be hands-on…”

180 View – We suggest you check out the video to see what's coming down the pike.

‘omg my mom joined facebook!!’

June 7, 2007 from the New York Times – “I HAVE reached a curious point in life. Although I feel like the same precocious know-it-all cynic I always was, I suddenly am surrounded by younger precocious know-it-all cynics whose main purpose appears to be to remind me that I’ve lost my edge…

So last week I joined Facebook, the social network for students that opened its doors last fall to anyone with an e-mail address. The decision not only doubled its active membership to 24 million (more than 50 percent of whom are not students), but it also made it possible for parents like me to peek at our children in their online lair…

But although he didn’t go so far as to say he disapproved of my parenting skills, Professor Wesch reminded me that what Facebook’s younger users really are doing is exploring their identities, which they may not want to parade in front of their parents.

“Can’t I explore my identity, too?” I asked. “Why does everything fun have to be for them?”

He pointed out that there are a number of other social networks — sober, grown-up places like Linkedin.com (for making business contacts) and Care2.com (for social activists) and Webbiographies.com (for amateur genealogists) — where I could cavort without offending my daughter.

180 View - OMG (Oh My God) if you don’t already know about Facebook. It’s a treasure house of information. For example, I found out from one of my daughters that one of my sons was back together with his girlfriend. Imagine how useful this kind of information would be in the business world.

What many boards and executives STILL don’t know about the health of their businesses

April 2007 from Deloitte – “In March and April 2004, the Economist Intelligence Unit surveyed 249 senior executives and board members around the world and interviewed a number of corporate directors in North America, Europe and Asia. The report concluded:“While the overwhelming majority of board members and senior executives say they need incisive non-financial information on their companies’ key drivers of success, they largely find such data to be lacking or, when available, of mediocre to poor value…

Almost three years later, Deloitte and the Economist Intelligence Unit worked together to see whether things had changed and conducted the research along much the same lines as before. A global survey fielded in December 2006 obtained responses from 175 senior executives and board members. Then, through January 2007, in-depth telephone interviews were conducted with senior executives and board members at large companies.

Some key findings include:
(1) Existing performance measurement frameworks are inadequate, and the majority of executives perceive a growing need to better understand the underlying drivers of their performance through non-financial measurements.
(2) Though companies are aware of the pitfalls of focusing exclusively on financial performance, the ability of executives to measure and monitor performance through non-financial measurements appears to be inadequate. Companies either do not have or are not sharing critical nonfinancial performance data with their boards.
(3) Despite the dissatisfaction with the quality of non-financial measurements of performance, current impediments to the broader use and greater sophistication of non-financial performance metrics include undeveloped tools, organizational skepticism relating to the value of these tools, unclear accountability for nonfinancial performance, time constraints and the concern that such metrics may convey too much information to competitors.

180 View – Every problem for someone is an opportunity for another. There are many consulting firms and software developers that are standing by to help.

The non-financial data is a key to the balanced scorecard. See our white paper
“Corporate Performance Management - It's ready - Are You?” for a discussion of balanced scorecard under Scorecarding.

40 Fastest-Growing Software Companies

June 11, 2007 from DevSource – “The biggest public software companies are increasingly relying on acquisitions for growth, as they pick off weaker competitors or startup companies that have decided not to go it alone.

Most software companies that grew more than 20% last year were helped by an acquisition, a Baseline survey shows. The acquisition trend is putting more control, and power, in the hands of a few relatively well-known companies.

For instance, Oracle has spent well in excess of $20 billion making acquisitions over the last few years, from its $11.1 billion buyout of PeopleSoft to its $6.1 billion pickup of customer relationship management giant Siebel Systems. Oracle has continued its acquisition binge this year, buying Hyperion, a maker of business intelligence software, for more than $3 billion in April...

From a profit perspective, too, the industry looks healthy. Aggregate profit at the 49 biggest software companies last year was $22.4 billion, for a profit margin of 20%. But the profitability was concentrated in the three biggest companies, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP.

Microsoft alone which has typically emphasized organic growth over acquisitions accounted for 40% of the revenue and 56% of the profits among the companies we considered…

Baseline's ranking of the 40 fastest growing software companies—those with sales of at least $150 million in 2005 — is intended to provide a health check on the enterprise software industry. What you won't find: companies that aren't purely in software such as IBM or Sun. Or for that matter, Google is not included because it derives most of its revenue from consumer services.”

180 View – Take a look at the list of the fastest growing companies. Many of them you will not recognize. The software business can be extremely lucrative not just for the huge firms like Microsoft, SAP and Oracle, but also for the smaller ones that pick a niche and run with it.

Infor Moves Into Government With Hansen Acquisition

May 16, 2007 from AMR Research – “Given Infor’s current size and desire to grow, it was only a matter of time until it looked to nonmanufacturing industries. For its first several years, Infor targeted the manufacturing and distribution industries, buying software companies with a strong presence in the industry: Geac, Lilly, and Mapics. It then turned to distribution industries with the daly.commerce, NxTrend, and Aperum acquisitions. The company supplemented all these purchases with additional supply chain functionality, such as demand planning from Mercia. Then came the acquisition of SSA, which doubled Infor’s size.

The most recent acquisitions have been for products and customer bases that are strong within the service industry segments: enterprise asset management (EAM) vendor Datastream, financials and performance management provider Extensity, and workforce management application vendor Workbrain. With Hansen, Infor gets an extensive set of public entity operations capabilities for managing building permits, business licenses, parks and recreation, water distribution, and sewerage.”

180 View - When we seek solutions from Infor for our manufacturing clients, it’s difficult to know which one is the best suited. At least when it comes to public sector operations, it won’t be confusing which of Infor’s products to consider.

NetSuite's kung fu fighting talk

June 20, 2007 from mycustomer.com – “Last year NetSuite upped its marketing ante with a witty mickey take of Star Wars – featuring the evil Darth New Kid who bore an uncanny resemblance to rival Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com. This week’s launch of NetSuite 2007 in London saw another entertainment theme in play, this time the 1970s US TV series Kung Fu…

This was the first time that a NetSuite release had premiered outside of the US. The new version has three main planks: Easy ERP, Global CRM and SuiteAnalytics. "Easy ERP is something of an oxymoron,” said Zach Nelson. “We’ve introduced Netsuite assistants for set up, data import, matrix items, forms, e-commerce set up and e-commerce content.”

"To date there has been no real global control over CRM. What multinationals need is to manage subsidiaries of firms in a single instance of NetSuite. You can have hierarchical view of the organisation in real time. We also have a single data model so we have single data warehouse sitting under NetSuite and added more and more layers of BI functionality to the products. Our first dashboard had pre-canned KPIs. In 2004 we let third party BI tools link to it. In 2005, we added on-demand dashboard alerts. Now we’re announcing ability to embed any formula you like into the applications so that you can do excel–like calculations."

180 View – At the launch, Zach apparently took on some of his rivals with “SAP is characterised by lot of power and not so much ease,” and “On the other hand, Salesforce.com is ease without power.” And “The Sage business model is to buy lots of products, then live on the maintenance revenue from them.” As we didn’t attend the launch, we don’t know exactly what was said but you can bet Zach either had great things to say or did not say anything at all about Oracle considering Larry Ellison is the CEO of Oracle and a majority owner of NetSuite.

Google Is Watching You

June 22, 2007 from BusinessWeek – “The Internet's most popular services enable people to do everything from research ailments to virtually tour Times Square—for free. But when you type in a Web search, your words are stored by Google and other search providers, along with information tying those words to your personal computer. If you surf the Web, the pages you visit and what you do on them are tracked with "cookies," tiny text files that download to your computer so they can report back to their ad network owners..."

180 View – Although Google’s business model does not include extortion, there are security concerns which need to be addressed. But the potential threat of getting exposed, may be good incentive for some people to clean up their act.