Blog Entries tagged 'peterborner'

I recently posted a question on LinkedIn...

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Are you getting value for money from your CRM solution?

I have spoken to several Execs over the past few weeks about their CRM systems. I heard differing views when I asked the question "Are you getting the ROI that you expected from your CRM system?". The answers ranged from "Adoption has been difficult" to "I am not sure I trust the data" to "The repeatability brought to our Sales Process has shown significant improvements".

I have decided to write a blog entry to further the discussion and would appreciate your thoughts about the value you get from your CRM system. What aspects of your implementation add value to your business? What would you change? What are your biggest pain points?

Sometimes when you ask a question on LinkedIn responses are quick, and numerous. For example, previously, I asked which is more demoralising, losing a sale to a competitor that you know can't deliver or winning the deal to then have the project cancelled before you got started. Within a couple of days I had a large number of responses with varying views and a plethora of advice on how to avoid both issues.

My CRM question did solicit a few responses but not as many as I had hoped. Curiously, a number of the responses were sent directly to me, the authors preferring not to publicise their views. What conclusions can I draw from this?

My initial thought was that perhaps I could have worded the question differently. However, a more detailed review shows that, aside from one response from a friend that co-owns a CRM software company; most people didn't want to publicly admit that their CRM system provides little real value to the company. Senior management tended to not believe the data because it rarely proved a good indicator of actual performance and sales execs tended to avoid using the CRM system as much as possible because it was cumbersome and was seen as simply a management reporting tool.

It is clear to me that the adoption issue can be resolved. We have turned around a number of companies that were failing in their use of Salesforce through the application of our LEAN and BPM experience. Our starting point is always "How can we engineer the process to reduce waste and add value?" For some customers this has meant integrating with external databases like OneSource for company background and financial data or LinkedIn to help make connections to the potential client. For others it has meant integrating with internal systems like their ERP and document management systems to provide a 360 degree view of the client. Either way, it has been the Sales Execs that have driven the requirements and have therefore bought-in to the concept. As a natural consequence of better adoption we have achieved cleaner more accurate data within the system. Management dashboards and reporting have necessarily been more accurate and more believable.

Perhaps I should have reworded my question and aimed it at the Sales Execs and Business Development Teams? Perhaps I should have asked two questions?

1) "What additional information would significantly improve the quality of a lead in your CRM system?
2) "How would you simplify your CRM system to improve usability?"

Applications, Business Process and the Cloud

peter@peterborner.com — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0100

In the last 30 years I’ve seen a plethora of trends in the software market. The two that currently dominate both A&M activity and end user buying behaviour are BPM and Cloud computing. I have searched in vain to find an organisation that is truely process focused and has used BPM to derive Activity Based Costings across their business. This led me to thinking about what are the barriers and why aren’t companies achieving value from their BPM initiatives. BPM is bought by many IT departments as panacea to the problem they have of trying to bridge the gap between user demands and their capacity to deliver. The slick vendor “Proof of Concepts” convince them that time to market and RoI are at their fingertips. Yet the first deployment in my experience is always a classic application that is owned by IT and not the business process owner. People are making the same mistakes with BPM as they did before with BI and CRM. In my view this is because the process owner fails to establish the measures of success for the project upfront and IT let this happen. When requirements creep sets in, hey presto it’s an application delivered in 6 man months that has no reuseable components and is a nightmare to maintain. The labour model for BPM projects is the single most important decision in the project – get this right and you have a team capable of building a cross discipline centre of excellence that can transform your business processes into value based processes that give automation, control, visibility and measurement. Which leads me to the Cloud wave if you pardon the mixed metaphors! SaaS as an opex model was championed by frustrated users (those bullish sales types) that flocked to Salesforce et al. For todays graduates that are lucky to get a job, they land in a strange environment – the tools they use personally like Facebook, Twitter, I-Tunes and all the other social media tools are locked out behind the firewall of the enterprise they work in – they can’t even watch a YouTube video if they work for a government department. The usual tools they use to learn, communicate and get things done are taken away and they get indoctrinated in the “one size fits all” corporate computing domain that is suffocated by IT budget restrictions and complexity. It strikes me that in the next 5 years it will be this user community that accelerates cloud / paas / saas solutions as a means of breaking down the firewall in order to do their jobs effectively as knowledge workers – IT will still own security / data / WAN but will anyone spend a fortune on in-house systems and networks as productivity tools or will people build their own virtual communications groups in the cloud that are permission based and have preference based disclosure? Chatter from salesforce is an early example of where I believe collaboration / convergence and content will collapse into one platform. I guess there’s along way to go with BPM and Cloud but I can’t stop thinking that if all each organisation did effectively was one end to end process in 2010 and they experimented using the cloud to deliver it and MEASURE the results how many more they’d plan to do in 2011.

A System is not a Strategy

peter@peterborner.com — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0100

My company, Axispoint Solutions (http://www.axispoint.co.uk/) is a leading implementation partner for Salesforce.com and I am often called upon to be the Exec Sponsor for our larger deals.

It never ceases to amaze me that people believe that implementing a CRM system (Salesforce or otherwise) is the answer to their problems. Why is it so difficult to understand that a repository of data without a sales process will not yield competitive advantage? In order to be successful, your sales team need to have a greater understanding of your clients business than ever before. Your CRM system must provide rich data as part of the initial lead AND it must guide your sales team through the qualification and bid process.

We have shown (http://www.axispoint.co.uk/lead2cash/) a number of prospects how easy it is to link Salesforce with external systems like OneSource, Hoovers and Google News to provide the background information that give them an edge when calling or meeting their prospects and they are excited. However, too often, they fail to see the wisdom in ruthless qualification supported by a properly implemented sales process.

At Axispoint, our sales process (for complex sales) has a "Bid Review" step where the Sales Exec must:

Show a full 360 degree understanding of the clients business, Be able to articulate the problem our solution will address,Monetize the As-Is and To-Be to demonstrate the RoI for the client,Describe their relationship with the problem owner, the budget holder, the IT Director and the Business OwnerDemonstrate the clients desire to solve the problem and their ability to pay.Unless all of the above can be demonstrated our sales process will not let us move on to the next step. It may be that the Sales Exec needs to do a little more work and re-review or we simply "No Bid". The key metric for us is that we are currently winning 90% of the opportunities that we decide to bid on. You might argue that we might win some of opportunities that we decide to "No Bid". However, with a 90% win/loss ratio and a better than 40% improvement on revenue year on year I don't mind one or two slipping through the cracks. I would mind if my sales team were wasting their time bidding on deals that we clearly aren't going to win. Thoughts?

The Need for Organisational Transformation

peter@peterborner.com — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0100

It has been quite a while since I wrote a blog entry. This is mostly due to the volume of work I have been experiencing. However, I have recently been able to reflect on how we are trying to reshape our organisation in the UK and how we are working with a number of our clients to implement IT infrastructure and BPM processes to underpin and support their organisational change.

Many leading firms understand the need to fundamentally transform their organisations if they are to succeed in the future. Their objective is remove change-resistant, rigid hierarchical organisational structures to become more open and dynamic. The firms most likely to succeed are those best positioned to build an entrepreneurial spirit among staff and to build long-term relationships with suppliers, partners and customers alike so that the firm has more people willing to challenge entrenched thinking and champion change. They need more people who approach problems creatively; more effective listeners; better communicators; skilled relationship builders; strong negotiators; skilled, diverse business and social networkers; people they can trust to act autonomously and they need people who combine many these qualities.

How does this affect your business? From an IT perspective you will need to implement systems and policies to support people working unusual hours, from remote locations and on the technologies of their choice You will need to provide the ability for staff to build and develop multiple diverse networks that reach out to a wider and wider pool of potential contacts. From an HR perspective you will need to adopt a more flexible approach to hiring talent and your senior management must be committed and lead the effort to drive through these changes.

I am committed to helping driving through these changes at Axispoint and we are working with a number of clients to help provide the IT systems and HR Processes to underpin their change process.

United at last in BPM?

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0100

Are vendors that describe themselves as System-Centric, Human-Centric or Document-Centric being very short-sighted and missing the point of BPMS value?
Gartner's latest report "People, Processes and Information: United at Last in BPM" says that vendors that describe themselves in one of those buckets as being very short-sighted and missing the point of BPMS value.
At Axispoint we have found that an organisation new to BPM is unlikely to have the right set of skills and experience on hand, a sub-optimal methodology will deliver sub-optimal results and poor communication causes frustration and distrust bringing about resistance to change. The best way to deal with this complex challenge is to adopt a holistic approach. Unlike traditional application development, implementing BPM necessarily involves changes to business process, and invariably to culture, not just to the technology.
People, Processes and Information must be truly united for BPM to be successful.

What are the roadblocks of change?

peter@peterborner.com — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0100

John P. Kotter, in his latest book A Sense of Urgency [Harvard Business Press, 2008] cites two reasons why, by his calculation, 70% of Business change either fails to deliver or is never instigated in the first place. These two reasons are complacency and false urgency.

He believes that complacent people do not realise they are complacent and that they believe someone else is responsible for solving the challenges the business faces. Kotter goes on to describe complacent people as tending to avoid leading and trying to maintain the status quo. He describes false urgency as being created by people who are very active but not necessarily in meeting the challenges of their company. They tend to be stressed, tired and feeling the weight of too much expectation. They typically spend too much time in meetings where people are more interested in making themselves look good than in meeting new challenges.

Kotter describes true urgency as being fueled by the belief that the world contains great opportunity among the challenges.

If you, like me, are proactively seeking new challenges, have gut instinct and determination to take a challenge head on and win then I reccomend you read this book and find out how to remove complacent and false urgency from situations where urgency is required... How to find opportunity in a crisis.

It is time to play the long game!

peter@peterborner.com — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

We seem to be in a downward spiral. I hear people all around me firmly focused on short-term recessionary issues. How often have you heard a conversation that starts "I've never known it so tough. I have had to cut my cost base by 40%, lay 25% of my staff off and my pipeline has dried up"? Put two like-minded people together and it doesn't take much to get to the bottom a deep recessionary hole. Why do Managers, Directors, Financiers and the media feel it necessary to talk themselves into a recession?

I am taking a more positive approach. I firmly believe there is a future for businesses in the UK. You just have to be positive and stretch your view from the immediate to the medium term. The key factor that is helping my business grow in todays market is the strength and creativity of my team. We are working hard, looking for creative innovative ways to be more efficient and to strengthen our pipeline. We are constantly looking to hire strong sales and delivery people. We are also in accquisition mode as there are a number of firms that are struggling and are therefore under valued.

I m looking forward to riding the recovery wave.

Can an ERP Installation take your company down?

peter@peterborner.com — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Last week I had the pleasure of listening to Phil Gilbert, Lombardi Software's CTO at the Lombardi European Partner Conference in south-west France.

During his keynote, Phil quoted a VC friend as saying "We look for companies doing Oracle ERP installations because we know they will probably go bankrupt soon and then we can buy them on the cheap. As a VC, ERP installation projects are our pipeline".

Clearly we are in an uncertain world right now. So, if large ERP implementations are high risk and the level of volatility in the world is such that we have to do things differently, have we reached the time where pureplay BPM vendors like Lombardi are in the ascendance?

BPM Delivering ROI within the first 90 days?

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

As a regular reader of Dennis Byron's excellent BPM in Action Blog, my interest was peaked by his latest entry (http://www.bpminaction.com/blog/2008/10/bpm_viewpoint_what_new_aiim_st.php) where he discusses the new AIIM study on BPM (http://www.ebizq.net/news/10483.html).

As a centre of excellence for BPM our aim is to deliver value as early as possible in any engagement. Typically we look for processes to attack in the initial iteration that can start to deliver an ROI within 90 to 120 days. This is clearly in line with Dennis' advice in his blog post. My view is that, learning to walk before you run is a key success factor in all BPM projects. After all, a lean, agile, reliable approach that has early success will never be a job loss or balance sheet writedown issue!

If have published a number of solution briefs for those of you looking to introduce BPM into your business. You can find them here: http://www.axispoint.co.uk/dl-white-papers

Organisations need to be lean and agile, and to execute reliably (right first time).

peter@peterborner.com — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Organisations can derive these benefits from technological solutions, but can they meet these short term needs (downsizing for lean-ness and moving towards centralised control for agility) whilst also addressing long term strategic aims that prepare them to exit recession better equipped for the future than they were when they entered?

I believe that they can. This is having one's cake and eating it, and a solution to this dilemma is Business Process Management.

BPM is getting a lot of attention. Forrester Research estimates that BPM license, services and maintenance revenue will grow from the $1.2 billion we saw in 2005 to more than $2.7 billion by 2009 "an adoption trend vendors and practitioners alike can't ignore".

BPM has come a long way from the workflow systems of the 1990s; those old workflow systems managed document-based processes where people executed the workflow steps of the process.

Today's BPM systems manage processes that include person-to-person work steps, system-to-system communications or combinations of both. In addition, BPM systems include integrated features like enhanced (and portable) process modeling, simulation, code generation, process execution, process monitoring, customisable industry-specific templates and UI components, and out-of-the-box integration capabilities along with support for web-services-based integration.

All of these ingredients translate to increased interest today in BPM suites because they bring businesses a higher level of flexibility for business processes while reducing risks and cost. Think of BPM suites as offering a way to build, execute and monitor automated processes that may go across organisational boundaries.

But the key here is higher level of flexibility and reduced cost. Lean and agile. Just what we need now, in turbulent times, and to set ourselves up for the future.

Do firms with strong IT capabilities achieve stronger company growth?

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

My premise is that firms achieve growth through the use of information technology to scale their business processes more effectively than their competitors. So how do we measure the strength of a firms IT capability?

I use an "IT Scorecard," based on an original framework developed at Microsoft, to measure and track IT capability in five key business functional areas: sales and marketing, finance, operations, empowered professionals, and IT infrastructure.

Typically a firm that does well on the IT Scorecard has a high capacity for business process scalability. That is, their processes tend to be able to scale to meet the needs of a rapidly changing business environment. For example, through good process knowledge and standardisation they can more easily manage the complexities involved in growth; they are able to streamline their operations and achieve grow without significant additions to headcount; they are flexible and able to respond quickly and take advantage of new opportunities and they have good visibility into their critical business processes.

Interestingly, firms that have a high capacity for business process scalability often do not realise that they have this capability. However, results can be off the scale for firms that understand their capabilities and embrace the business process scalability they have developed because they are able to identify the specific process changes needed to drive each business lever and then quickly and efficiently implement those changes in their BPM system.

Is BPM winning at the expense of the 600lb Gorilla?

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

I read yesterday's article in Silicon's online magazine entitled "SAP sales drop as credit crunch looms large" with interest. It is clear from the article that the current economic climate is hitting the 600lb Gorillas hard. SAP shares are down 16% (the biggest drop for 12 years) and Oracle are down 7.6%. Shares in Microsoft, Cisco and EMC are also reportedly down.

The article reports that Henning Kagermann, SAP co-chief executive, said of the third quarter: "The market developments of the past several weeks have been dramatic and worrying to many businesses. These concerns triggered a very sudden and unexpected drop in business activity at the end of the quarter."

My experience is that there is a tendency to increase spending on IT during times of economic downturn. This is because smart business leaders see it as an opportunity to streamline and position for the future. The Businesses that "get it right" are those businesses that ride the recession and come through it stronger and better placed to handle the up-turn.

So, if the major Hi-Tech firms are seeing a downturn, where is this investment going?

I would hope that firms are looking towards pure play Business Process Management technologies like Lombardi, PegaSystems, K2.net, Global360, Appian and Savvion because coupled with a strong iterative approach they can provide quick wins and give business visibility and ownership to make a difference in the current fiscal year. If a major SAP deployment goes wrong it can very easily become a job loss/annual report write down issue. Through fast, agile BPM projects, the lessons learnt in the initial deployments can lay the foundations for larger "Building the Future" projects that deliver significant longer term benefits.

Can IT deliver tangible results and value?

peter@peterborner.com — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

As a CIO you are always looking to add value to the business. You want to deliver that competitive edge which will help your company overtake the competition.

In the current "credit crunch" climate, however, it is difficult to make significant new purchases. You are under great pressure to "stretch out your current resources and make do." Add to this the probability that anywhere from 50% to 80% of your budget is pre-allocated to maintenance and support and you find yourself between the proverbial rock and hard place.

My natural inclination is to suggest you consider introducing BPM technology as a way of adding value. That, of course, is difficult to justify when you consider the inventory of other projects your team is focused on delivering. Even if you do try to introduce a more process oriented approach as a way of adding value it is likely that you are either operating in a culture where process is not part of the DNA of the Enterprise or the Business is already fully engaged in a six sigma business process improvement programme of their own.

My experience demonstrates that if IT can act as a showcase to demonstrate the value and approach, the Business is more likely to buy in, as they will see a less risky and more immediate release of value from an iterative approach to BPM deployment. What better way to deliver and demonstrate tangible results and value than by addressing your own IT process improvement challenges?

Can we achieve effective/efficient processes?

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Businesses want to improve their processes for a number of reasons ranging from increased efficiency and increased effectiveness through to increased visibility and improved collaboration.

Increased efficiency is about ensuring all the steps in a process are necessary. Can we drive down costs by streamlining the process?

Effectiveness is the process of driving Business value? Can we making more money for the company? Can we deliver better service?

It's a moving target, things change! Credit crunch, Globalization, Compliance, etc., all have an effect on business processes so it is important to build a platform for continuous improvement.

To achieve this we need to:

Examine current processes (The Operational Walkthrough)
Model current processes (the "As-Is")
Model and Simulate proposed efficient/effective processes (the "To-Be")
Implement the improvements
Measure and adapt for continuous improvement.

Having the ability to measure performance and adapt for continuous improvement is key to stealing the march on your competitors. It's not about doing everything perfectly. It's about having the edge over the competition, delivering that extra level of customer service.

The big mistakes come when you try to boil the ocean and try to solve everybody's problems all at once. A better approach is to understand what people are trying to achieve right now and help them model their business processes, help them produce new, more effective and efficient, business processes so that they can move forward by aligning IT and the Business.

Why do IT Projects fail?

peter@peterborner.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

From long and bitter experience of both infrastructure and software projects I am firmly of the opinion that all failures of IT projects come down to two things, poor planning and a lack of business involvement and commitment.

My experience shows that successful projects create a mutual dependency between IT and the Business. I have seen that this requires an unprecedented amount of team work, at least 60% of this effort involves change management and getting organisations to think about process in the business. So if you fail to get the Business and IT working together from the outset, your project will most likely experience problems, cost overruns, etc.

I am eager to gather your input. What does your experience of IT project delivery tell you about why some projects succeed and others fail so dramatically?

How important is Information Management?

peter@peterborner.com — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Yesterday I watched an excellent webcast by Jonathan Steel, CEO of technology researchers at The Bathwick Group where he discusses the results of a survey into the importance of Information Management to a range of companies. Jonathan states that the survey found that 75% of respondents said that good information management is a key to profitability. Bathwick's research into Smart Companies also found that good information management is a key to profitability and productivity.

I found it interesting that 60% feel that they are doing an adequate job and only 30% feel that they are doing a good enough job at information management. It was clear that respondents felt that they are doing a good job given the tools that they have but 85% said that they would be able to reduce costs by having better information management solutions and 75% said that they would also be able to sell more because they would have better insight into existing customers and potential new customers.

The big issues reported by companies in the survey were:

Combining multiple data sources to provide a single operational view of the businessThe ability to capture all data in the first place because data exists outside of the core systems, on paper, in local spreadsheets, etc.Being able to efficiently report for compliance

The alarming fact that is, that 37% of companies report that they have critical data out on desktops across the enterprise leading to the inability to produce a single operational view and an inability to see all the data that pertains to a customer in a unified view.

Emphatically, respondents see the need to create a more integrated solution. In the Enterprise space 90% of respondents said that this is something they specifically need to do and 25% said that they are trying to do it. However, 50% feel that it is either prohibitively expensive or will require a lot of consultative input.

As a leader in the field of Business Process Management I am often asked to deliver a solution that:

Orchestrates information flow, Integrates with existing back-end systems (to maximize current investment),Provides a single operational view with up-to-date status of all in-flight business processes andDelivers a Return on Investment within the first 90 days.Perhaps the 50% of respondents that feel a solution to their problems is prohibitively expensive are looking in the wrong direction!

Process is only good process if it makes sense and works!

peter@peterborner.com — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

There are some processes that we must follow legally and they are forced into an organisation through the compliance route. How often, though, does this implementation of process, in the name of compliance, cause resentment because the process has not been properly thought through? For example, I have been reviewing the "Know Your Customer (KYC)", "Anti Money Laundering (AML) and EU's "Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID)" regulations. I have noticed that most financial institutions state that their processes are compliant with these regulations. However, their processes appear to be mostly paper based, highly manual and require large multi-page paper forms to be completed. Add to this extraordinary level of bureaucracy the overhead of trawling back through the forms every time a sanctions list update is received to ensure existing clients haven't suddenly become "undesirable" and you can see why it is now so difficult to do business with a financial institution anywhere in the developed world.

The implementation of business process is often perceived as a negative because it is seen as a control mechanism that does nothing but add overhead. However, implementing the right process can create a quicker, more streamlined and compliant business. Using the right tools can provide the additional benefit of visibility in to the status of all in-flight processes thus building a platform for continuous improvement.

Communicating the benefits of the new process can lead to a better tolerance for process efficiencies. However, if the process is not well designed, is onerous or adds a burden of bureaucracy then it won't matter how much benefit the organisation gains from the process, it will not be fully adopted by its users.

In my experience, involving the business in an operational walk-thru so that they understand the shortcomings of the "as-is" process and own the "to-be" process will lead to better process design and hence a stronger uptake by the process users.

Top tips for ensuring your suppliers are green.

peter@peterborner.com — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

Managing your organisation's strategy for green computing has come sharply into focus over the past few months. Some organisations have signalled their intention to be fully carbon neutral (for example, see IBM's announcement that they will spend $1 billion on Project Big Green). Public sector organisations are also moving towards green computing initiatives through consideration of environmental sustainability during the procurement process.

So, here are some top tips for consideration when engaging with IT partners and vendors:

Ask about their strategy for sustainable development and their environmental policies. Establish whether they can be delivered from the beginning of the project.
Always force your suppliers to be accountable for their environmental impact by requesting they provide measurements of their performance and incentivise them to improve.
Set realistic goals that the supplier can meet. Be clear and concise in your SLA negotiation and ensure measurements are easy to take.
Agree a clear set of key performance indicators in to your contract to provide a benchmark against which you can measure your supplier's performance.
Agreeing green strategies shouldn't be adversarial; KPIs and SLAs are systems and processes that are well understood and used to cover non-green elements of IT contracts. It should be a simple extension to bring the same model in to play to cover environmental standards.

BPM -- All Mashed-Up?

peter@peterborner.com — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

There has been much talk over the years about the ability of the various business process management (BPM) offerings to create an orchestration layer that provides the communications layer necessary to bring order and controlled flexibility to horizontal processes.

I think that most proponents of BPM would agree that it is clear that you cannot succeed in BPM without communication. BPM can be thought of as a reaction to the changing communication patterns of modern businesses because problems with processes often reflect more horizontal than vertical integration issues. This change is a result of new ways that businesses and the people inside those businesses communicate with one another to increase agility and lower costs.

Are we starting to reach the time where horizontal collaboration tools like BPM are mashed-up with vertical specific, "run-the-company" processes to create flexible application frameworks that allow companies the capability to embrace all major forms of IT-enabled collaboration, with enterprise security policies and business processes, without major disruption to how the Business gets on with the job?

For example (and I apologise for the shameless self promotion) my company, Axispoint, is currently working on a project to provide a GRC solution for a client. The solution will be a mash-up of the various risk engine and sanctions list provider services, etc. and will be built on a BPM framework to provide control and visibility into the in-flight processes. I haven't found others that are using mash-ups and BPM technology in quite the same way. I would be interested to hear from anyone that is working on these solutions.

Are you getting value from your IT projects?

peter@peterborner.com — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0100

How often do you see projects that fail to get deployed or where the implementation costs are greater than the value the solution provides?

It is perennial concern, one that most large IT departments seem unable to resolve. I have, in my career, produced endless business cases, cost justifications and ROI projections. I have championed project management methodologies and striven to place emphasis on the value of the initiatives in comparison to the project costs but in my experience there is a high chance of failure to deliver real value from IT led projects.

I am happy, to report, however, that times have changed!

Since joining Axispoint some two years ago, we have built up a global Business Process Management practice. We focus on opportunity cost and have developed a highly iterative methodology that is designed to start to deliver an ROI within 90 days.

Opportunity cost is a big issue for most companies as the amount of IT projects is always greater than the resources available to deliver them. So when projects are ill-conceived, you end up wasting time, effort and budget; valuable resources that could have been used to deliver a more useful project.

Successful projects create a mutual dependency between IT and the Business, requiring an unprecedented amount of team work and process definition. Too often, I see the business stakeholders in a project delegate the modelling process to IT - this is a disastrous move and one that will suffocate downstream innovation.

You hear a lot of people banging on about bridging the gap between IT and the Business but it is clear that using a cost based model simply drives a wedge between the two and makes business alignment more difficult. The goals should be:

To get buy-in by getting the Business involved and helping them understanding the overall cost and effort much more regularly.
Ensure your Subject Matter Experts define and map the business processesInitially focus on one process, iterate and deliver early. You should aim to get your first process into production within 90 days.