Documenting Business Process with Swimlanes

October 2007 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – “Swimlanes are often used to document “as is” (i.e., current) and “to be” business processes. Although you’ll find swim-lanes very useful as a conceptual tool, you will still come up against one major obstacle, especially with the “to-be” version. This obstacle is of the human variety: gaining consensus.

Some people may not have a clue what should be done. Others might get mired in the details, missing the big picture. Others still may want to protect their turf and stick with the status quo. Others still will come up with grandiose or expensive solutions. You could have a real battle on your hands. Moreover, changing the swimlanes can be labour intensive…”

SAP Buys Business Objects for $6.78 Billion

October 8, 2007 from PC World – “The acquisition is intended partly to help SAP reach an ambitious goal of doubling its customer base to 100,000 by 2010. Schwarz said about 40 percent of Business Objects' customers are using SAP today. Business Objects has roughly 45,000 customers, suggesting SAP will gain about 27,000 new customers through the deal.

SAP has made some progress with its own business intelligence software, including an analytics engine called BI Accelerator. But Business Objects excels in ease of use and user interface technologies, which will become increasingly important to BI in the future, IDC's Lykkegaard said.

"Business intelligence in the future will increasingly become a user interface for applications," he said. "You'll do your analysis from the BI interface and then dive directly into the transactional data you want to examine."

180 View – For those of you who don’t know Business Objects, you do probably know Crystal Reports, which was acquired by Business Objects in 2003. We think it’s going to be a hard swallow by SAP in that Business Objects has multiple products that overlap not only themselves but also with SAP’s existing business intelligence tools. Also difficult will be supporting all the competing ERP vendors that rely on Crystal reports.

Caveat Emptor: The Impact of Vendor Consolidation on Business (Corporate) Performance Management Buyers

October 17, 2007 from Business Intelligence Network – “In the enterprise market, end users now have fewer choices. If you wish to purchase from your preferred database or ERP vendor, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, Infor and mid-market focused Exact Software each have a value proposition and products worthy of consideration. The companies recently acquired by these vendors will each attempt to maintain their “open” status regarding connectivity to other transactional systems, but depending on the company, that may get more difficult over time. If you wish to buy your performance management and business intelligence applications from a source database independent vendor, Cognos, SAS, and Clarity Systems are the leaders left standing – for now. In addition, for mid-market to small businesses, there are still plenty of choices. Less well known, but still enterprise-strength KCI has successful clients in the upper end of mid-market to enterprise level. Budgeting upstart Adaptive Planning has stirred up the mid-market with their easy-to-use, hosted planning application, and have started to move up to larger enterprise clients. Centage, Prophix, Alight Planning, Host Analytics and Satori Group are all slugging it out in the mid-market and SMB category.”

180 View – The article refers to Business Performance Management, but we think it’s more often called Corporate Performance Management (CPM). CPM typically consists of strategic planning, scorecarding, budgeting and forecasting, consolidation and business intelligence functionality. It’s a logical progression for ERP vendors to extend ERP to include CPM. It’s happened with the Tier One ERP systems with SAP’s purchase of OutlookSoft and Business Objects, and with Oracle’s purchase of Hyperion. And it’s also happening with mid market ERP systems with Exact’s purchase of Longview. The trend will clearly continue.

Global ERP: You can get there from here, but should you?

October 15, 2007 from Computerworld – “One of the biggest pieces of the change management puzzle is gaining buy-in from local business leaders accustomed to suites tailor-made to support their unique business processes, says Forrester analyst Paul Hamerman. “There’s often reluctance among business units to give up the systems they use,” he says."

180 View – The same problem exists for small companies with different operating groups, each with their own system. Good luck trying to convince these operating groups that standardization is the way to go. They won’t care if the corporate CFO is able to generate financial statements in fewer days. They won’t care if the IT group can save money. They only care about their business and for what they are accountable.

Governance, risk management and compliance and what it means to you

July 5, 2007 from Network World – “Get ready for a new buzz phrase to descend upon the IT department: “governance, risk management and compliance,” or GRC. You’re probably already familiar with compliance, especially if your company has to comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA, GLBA or any number of other government or industry regulations. Now it’s time to understand your role in corporate governance and risk management.

Looking at your company as a whole, there are people at the top who are trusted with running the company in an ethical way, making sure that the company establishes appropriate objectives and shows measured achievements toward those objectives. This is governance. Up until the days of Enron, WorldCom, et. al., governance took place quietly in the background. Now it has been thrust into the spotlight, and it is much more closely tied to risk management and compliance.

Risk management is the practice of identifying, measuring, reporting on and appropriately managing the risks that could impact the company’s governance objectives. For example, risk managers look for competitive threats, political situations and new government regulations that could impact the business. They study the known risks and come up with ways to mitigate them.

180 View – GRC has been around for years but seems to be taking off as the compliance component of Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) work diminishes. For a more detailed explanation of GRC, click here for a whitepaper from the Compliance Consortium published May 16, 2005.

Nine things you need to know about SaaS

October 15, 2007 from Computerworld – “It's an alternative to in-house operations and outsourcing that IT shops can and should use to deliver services and improve their infrastructure in a cost-effective way. SaaS can offer high-quality services at a lower cost than other alternatives, and it's particularly good for supporting mobile and geographically disbursed populations, whether they are sales staffers, telecommuters, customers or business partners worldwide. And in its latest iteration, says West, the technology is offered by leading SaaS vendors as complete platforms unifying normally stovepiped sets of services, supporting underlying data capture and analysis.”

180 View – It seems to us that only a small percentage of enterprise systems are available from SaaS vendors today. An educated guess would be about 5%. But that number seems to be rising every day. In a few years, we predict the number to be over 50%.

The Cost of Complexity

September 27, 2007 from CIO Insight – “Is enterprise software just too complex to deliver on its promises?" That's the excellent question posed in an article on the Web site of the MIT Sloan Management Review by consultant Cynthia Rettig. Her answer is a forceful but thoughtful yes. And the upshot is that it's preventing companies from being flexible and IT organizations from being the force for innovation they could and should be.

And Rettig thinks the SOA, like ERP, will fail to solve the problem: The hallmark of SOA is its ability to claim to build modular business processes. However, "software does not work as Legos do," she writes."

180 View – SOA (Service-oriented Architecture) gets a lot of hype. A good chunk of my (Michael Burns) career was in software development, and we called SOA reusable code then. We tried hard to make code reusable but the more generic we made it, the more complicated it became. At a certain point, we gave up and kept it or tried to keep it simple. I have been thinking that perhaps I don’t know enough about the great software tools available today and should be less cynical about SOA. But I am not the only one who is skeptical about SOA.

Microsoft 'Unified Communications'

October 16, 2007 from PC Magazine – “On Tuesday, Microsoft officially launched its "Unified Communications" initiative, which promises to treat voice as just another data type that can be routed around an office, much like email…

“The transformation to software-based communications will be as profound as moving from typewriters to word-processing software," Gates said.”

180 View – There are other voices that question the hype. For example Information Week wrote on October 20 – “In introducing Microsoft's unified communications products last week, Bill Gates predicted a change in the way people work "as profound as the shift from typewriters to word processing." Uh-huh--in the same way tablet PCs were to replace pen and paper? We're still waiting…

The mixing of voice, video, messaging, and collaboration capabilities holds great promise for the way people work, but infrastructure upgrades are required. And Microsoft isn't the obvious choice for VoIP; if anything, it has catching up to do. A crowded market of established competitors awaits Microsoft.”

Also on October 16 from InfoWorld – “In light of all the hoopla around unified communications--especially at today's Microsoft UC event in San Francisco --and in light of the fact that the backbone of any UC platform is VoIP [Voice over IP], I just thought I'd inject a brief note of realism into the discussion of the future of UC and the current reality. In other words, when it comes to VoIP, the emperor has no clothes. Or at least let's say he is scantily clad. What do I mean? Simply this. VoIP is not half as good as my old AT&T service. I not only speak for myself here but friends and relatives who are using it as well.”

I personally love VoIP using Skype but it's true that it's not yet 100% - Give it a little more time.

Cafe Latte attack steals data from Wi-Fi PCs

October 17, 2007 from NetworkWorld – “If you use a secure wireless network, hackers may be able to steal data from your computer in the time it takes to have a cup of coffee. At the Toorcon hacking conference in San Diego this coming weekend, security researcher Vivek Ramachandran, will demonstrate a technique he's developed to attack laptops that use the WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption system to log on to secure wireless networks.

Developed in the late 1990s, WEP was the default method of securing Wi-Fi networks. Though the WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) system replaced it, about 41 percent of businesses continue to use WEP. That percentage is even higher among home users, security experts say.

That's unfortunate because WEP has been riddled with security problems. In fact, WEP was blamed for the recent TJX Companies Inc. data breach in which thieves were able to access 45 million credit- and debit-card numbers."

180 View – Why take chances? Upgrade to WPA.

Dealing with the ‘Irrational’ Negotiator

October 3, 2007 from Harvard Business School – “What do you do when the people with whom you are negotiating act in ways that can best be called counterproductive?”

180 View (written by Lawrence Young) – Unless you live alone on a deserted island, you are constantly required to negotiate for what you need to live and what you want out of life. Whether it’s getting your kids to do their homework and eat their vegetables, or getting your boss to give you a raise or a promotion, what do you do when you seem to be negotiating with someone who ‘just won’t give in’? Have you ever tried persuading someone to see it your way that just doesn’t seem to ‘get it’?

In this Harvard Business School article, HBS professors Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman tell us that “Negotiators who are quick to label the other party ‘irrational’ do so at great potential cost to themselves”. They then describe how to improve our dealmaking skills by showing us what to do when the other party’s behavior does not seem to make sense.

To further learn how to negotiate more skillfully and confidently in any environment, click here for another HBS article published on September 26, 2007.