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Topics include:

• Creating an integrated and consistent view of your customers
• Tools to see which product offerings are best suited for your customers
• Complete activity and interaction tracking with customers
• And more …

Date & Time: Aug. 26th, 10AM — 11AM PST
Location: Webcast
Registration link with details: http://bit.ly/9VuMZU

Case Study — Professional Associations Membership Management System

The webcast will feature demos showcasing

• registrant contact management and regulatory information database use,
• professional conduct review,
• practice support tracking and documentation,
• online demographics, event registration, publication ordering,
• online membership renewal, registrant lookup, application status,
• document and records management,
• and more …

Date & Time: Aug. 24th, 1PM – 2PM PST
Location: Webcast
Registration link with details: http://bit.ly/9yFYLA

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Learn how the Patient Outreach Screening Solution provides the tools to manage various patient outreach functions:

· Recruitment and retention eligibility criteria for each screening program
· Automation of program booking, and follow-up process
· Complex mailings to patients and/or their physicians / healthcare sorting algorithms that can be integrated with a Microsoft-based data warehouse to store clinical and demographic patient data that is subject to rigorous privacy restrictions
· Duplicate detection and merging/splitting of client and health care provider records
· Government mandated audit reporting

Contact Ron De Giusti at Knowledgetech today if you want to find out more about this solution!
Email: rdegiusti@knowledgetech.ca
Phone: 604-551-9172

I recently read a fascinating article in the April issue of Vanity Fair about Michael Burry’s bet against the massive subprime mortgage bubble in the United States. Why was he the only one to find the financial mechanisms to bet against the bubble? The information was out there. The knowledge was not. From the available information, Michael developed the knowledge that ultimately resulted in his fund delivering a gross gain of 726% with a profit of $100 million for himself and $725 million for his investors.

For Michael Burry and other fund managers, there was plenty of information out there showing the terminal decline in lending standards. Unlike others, Burry wasn’t satisfied with just the information. He wanted the knowledge that would enable him to bet against the subprime mortgage bubble. To build and manage the knowledge from the available information, and therefore to optimize his fund management business, he spent months scanning and reading mortgage bond prospectuses and pairing that knowledge with the use of credit default swap (CDS) financial instruments. CDS instruments (essentially insurance policies against the defaulting of corporate bonds) enabled Burry to put his knowledge into action and systematically build up a large and successful bet against subprime mortgage bonds.

Burry’s story, like many others, illustrates that having information is not enough. Information (in all forms: electronic, printed, in people’s heads) needs to be processed and managed in a way that elicits and disseminates knowledge. Knowledge management also includes processes and activities that elicit both tacit and explicit knowledge from people in the organization. For example, your company may have people in the field (e.g. repair and service personnel working at customer sites) that have built up valuable field knowledge over the years. Is that knowledge being captured, disseminated and reflected in your current business processes and analytics? If not, you’re missing out on a key avenue for business optimization that could help improve customer service while lowering the costs of delivering that service.

Knowledge Management systems and platforms provide the tools that help capture, classify and disseminate knowledge but they are not the key to capturing knowledge. The key is people. That may be obvious, but it’s not uncommon to see IT systems implemented with the expectation that knowledge will follow. Mining the tacit and explicit knowledge within your organization needs more than an intuitive Knowledge Management system. It needs an approach focused on encouraging and rewarding knowledge contribution. The service professional in the field making service calls needs both a way to easily contribute their knowledge (the “system”), and a reason (the incentive) to contribute their knowledge. Do the service personnel carry hand-held devices that can easily be used to capture knowledge? If not, can hand-held “knowledge capture” devices be effectively introduced into their working practices? Do you instead (or also) schedule regular meetings with service personnel with the explicit agenda of capturing their experiences, information, and feedback in order to dig out and capture tacit knowledge? What do the service personnel receive in return for their additional efforts to record their knowledge? Of course, you don’t have to reward your service personnel for their additional knowledge capture efforts, but you’ll likely find that they contribute less without reward. And, if knowledge management is one of the keys to business optimization, it thereby follows that any hindrance to knowledge capture will slow business optimization efforts.

My experiences with many organizations are that knowledge management is ad-hoc and minimal at best. How many times have you heard such a questions after someone has left an organization: “How did John …”, “Why did John …”, “How did John figure out …”, etc? Clearly, John’s knowledge was either not captured and/or, people aren’t trained to know where to look and/or, systems were not in place to effectively capture John’s knowledge. Net result is less than optimal: work is redone, knowledge is lost, and mistakes are made. The fix is Knowledge Management, one of the keys to business optimization.

Introduction

Enterprise Architecture was formalized into a specific discipline with advent of John Zachman’s “Zachman framework” in the 1980s. Zachman developed his framework because of what he saw then as a need for better alignment between IT services and business needs within an enterprise. In the last 25 years, as technology has become a key strategic advantage in virtually every industry, we believe this the need for business and IT alignment is not an option. Enterprise Architecture is thus an essential part of any organization looking to leverage technology in a strategic way.

In this article, we will look at three different approaches to designing and implementing Enterprise Architecture (EA). Two of them, Zachman and TOGAF classify themselves as frameworks while the third, Gartner, describes their approach as a process model with a related framework. Each one has a slightly different focus and the goal of this article is to provide the reader a better understanding of when to use each one.

Zachman

The primary idea of the Zachman framework is that different people in an organization need different views of systems and that all views together, describe the complete enterprise. Zachman created a 6×6 matrix or schema that identifies all the different views and sets a standard representation for each one. The rows are used to translate the architecture from an abstract representation (Scope) into a concrete representation (Operations Classes) and the columns are used to communicate different views of each representation (What, How, Where, Who, when, and Why).

When to Use: The Zachman framework is clearly focused on the actual architecture artifacts and can help an organization standardize how their architecture is represented.

Other Considerations: If an organization is looking for a process on how to implement EA, it is advisable to look at other approaches as well.

Gartner

Gartner’s approach is divided in to two main parts, the process model and the framework. Gartner’s focus is on organizations that are at the beginning of the process of implementing EA and are looking for ways to get senior level buy-in and participation in their EA initiative. Hence, the focus is more on the process and governance rather than the artifacts. The goal is to create better understanding and knowledge and generating a change in how IT investments are made, including better collaboration between the business and IT. Due to this focus, their model can to some users not be descriptive and practical enough, but this is where their or other frameworks can play a role.

When to Use: Organizations seeking help in taking the first steps in building the business case for Enterprise Architecture.

Other Considerations: For actual implementation, you may want more clear support from the artifacts available with either TOGAF or Zachman.

TOGAF

TOGAF or The Open Group Architecture Framework is published by the Open Group which is a vendor-neutral and technology-neutral consortium. TOGAF’s core part is the Architecture Development Method (ADM) which is a comprehensive set of processes and guidelines on how to create the Enterprise Architectures. Hence, TOGAF is, just as Gartner’s approach, process focused. One of the earlier limitations with TOGAF was that it was too process focused and did not contain a complete description of the actual artifacts. However, this has been addressed in version 9 of TOGAF with the addition of an extensive content model. The goal with TOGAF is to be an open industry standard that can be applied to any situation. Therefore, TOGAF has been designed to allow the user to adjust the framework and use the pieces that fit his/ her situation.

When to Use: For training purposes to develop new enterprise architects, or to create the artifacts for enterprise architecture, TOGAF has excellent resources.

Other Considerations: For practical implementation processes and governance, you may want to look at Gartner.

Summary

When an organization is evaluating different Enterprise Architecture approaches, it is crucial that they first evaluate where they are and what their specific situation is. What business problem are they trying to solve with EA, what parts of EA are already in place and what unique challenges are they facing. Once there is a clear picture of the current status, objectives and the challenges ahead, organizations can start looking at different approaches and find the one that is right for them. In most cases, a combination of several models, including IT Governance frameworks like COBIT and ValIT, will achieve the best results.

Let’s start with the basics of an Enterprise Agreement. The Microsoft® Enterprise Agreement is designed specifically for an organization if they have 250 or more desktop PCs and anticipate that Microsoft technologies may be a significant part of technology and application solutions (e.g. desktop operating system and productivity applications, business applications, and servers) to serve their business needs. Each Enterprise Agreement enrolment period is a three-year term with an annual price per desktop, providing the organization with a defined amount of time that the terms and prices of the purchasing relationship with Microsoft will remain consistent for all products covered in the initial order. This gives the organization the ability to plan and budget for software license purchases up to three years in advance. Each enrolment has the option for either a one- or three-year renewal term.

However, are you getting the most of out your Enterprise Agreement? Often organizations ask this question and others such as, how will these set of software features help me with meeting my business goals and, am I double-paying for capability or how can I measure the success of these new software capabilities?

Creating the implementation business case and roadmap

Often, the first step in positively answering these questions is to engage a consulting firm to provide Enterprise Agreement Services (EAS). EAS help companies maximize the value of their software purchased under their Enterprise Agreement in several ways.

By initially inventorying existing organizational IT capabilities and anticipated future IT capabilities and overlaying them with the capabilities of the Microsoft software and future product roadmaps included in their Enterprise Agreement

Next, they take strategic business initiatives and align them to the EA investments in a roadmap format, to create a baseline business case and implementation plan.

Finally, in taking the results of the first two activities integrating them with the organizations’ other priorities, and accounting for resource constraints and dependencies. Doing so creates a plan to use the investments in ways which will be of greatest benefit to the organization.

Measuring results

In order to measure the value of the different software investments, a further step is required. Specific key performance indicators (KPI)’s for each new capability must be created in order to measure their material impact to the organization. As an example, to determine the impact of a particular feature when an impacted work process cycle time is reduced by 2 hours as a result of the feature being deployed and this process is repeated 20 times a week, 50 weeks per year, and the cost of labour is $100 per hour, we can immediately determine that the cost reduction the software feature delivers is $200,000 per year. Then, we estimate how many years the feature would be in use (for the sake of example, let’s assume 3 years). This creates an estimated gross cost savings of $600,000. Then, by calculating the cost of implementing the feature (including any net new operating costs) we can establish if the deploying the feature has a positive or negative return on investment. By conducting this kind of analysis across the suite of anticipated features to be deployed, companies often have a clear understanding of the value that they get from their Enterprise Agreement and have a good set of metrics to determine when an upgrade cycle is warranted.

Other considerations

In addition, IT groups are being asked to do more with less, while accelerating deployment timelines, and providing tangible strategic capabilities to the organization. Often organizations emphasize the need to enhance the value of their IT investment by coordinating IT efforts across geographies, reducing complexity and inefficiencies, and improving and maintaining security. To accomplish this, IT groups must think strategically, aligning their initiatives with business goals rather than focusing on individual IT components. These initiatives need to become a strategic asset to their internal and external customers. EA services help give IT group the tools to make these alignments sustainable and inevitability strategic in nature.

In Conclusion

Each organization must evaluate the return on investment of an Enterprise Agreement, by translating software features into easily measurable performance improvements and strategic advantages. Only then can they determine if they are achieving their expected value from that investment.

It used to be that I would pour my morning coffee and then sit back and watch the morning news on TV or surf news on the web. Now I still have my morning coffee, but I read blog posts instead and then interact with those posts either by commenting or re-tweeting those posts to Twitter. The key thing to note here is that I have gone from passively viewing and reading my one-to-many mediums (TV and internet news) to interacting with many-to-many mediums (blog-posts with comments, Twitter, Digg).

Hasn’t this always been the promise?

We have been told for the longest time that the internet was revolutionary in that it was not a passive medium (i.e., you interact with it as opposed to passively sitting in front of your television). But, it truly has not been until the significant uptick in social media (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, blogs) use in the prior year, 2009, that the general internet community has moved away from passive use. The net is finally delivering on its message.

Delivering on social media for corporate use

OK, so you get-it that social media is being used because even your parents are on Facebook; but, is it just a great big corporate time-suck or does all this web 2.0 social media stuff have a corporate use? And the answer is: Yes, of course it has a corporate use.

I want to go out on a limb here and make a bold statement: SOCIAL MEDIA HAS ALWAYS EXISTED AND CORPORATIONS HAVE ALWAYS USED IT.

So, before I go on and explain how social media has always existed I guess I’d better define what ’social media’ is first. Social media is the act of having many-to-many conversations as opposed to one-to-many (e.g., TV) or one-to-one (e.g., phone call). Today the tools for these many-to-many conversations are Twitter, Facebook, etc. In the past these many-to-many conversations were limited to the pub after work or perhaps in company lunch rooms. Another example of many-to-many conversations already taking place in the corporate world are when marketing agencies offer companies focus groups with round table discussions about their product or service in order to garner feedback.

Today, the new tools of social media mean that our many-to-many conversations reach a much wider audience right out of the gate. And, the responses of those conversations can be captured in unstructured data that can be analyzed with fantastic new analytic tools that have only recently appeared.

What are the examples of corporate use of social media?

There are many (remember, you simply have to think of a many-to-many conversation that would add value for a corporation). One use of social media may be for employee feedback to the HR department where the HR department host a SharePoint site to solicit comments and feedback. Another use might be for a mechanic company where mechanics can tweet out questions to their other fellow mechanics about how to solve some unique problem they have encountered in the field. The list really could go on and on.

Has your company implemented social media tools? And if so, are you seeing an uptick in customer and employee interactions?