 | managing-change-effectively-with-erp-the-impact-on-5-key-business-functions.pdf View | 450k | Dr Damigos; PhD |
20110112
MANAGING CHANGE EFFECTIVELY WITH ERP: The impact on 5 key business functions
Expanding the enterprise: Breaking the barriers to collaborative product development.
| expanding-the-enterprise-breaking-the-barriers-to-collaborative-product-development.pdf View | 382k | Dr Damigos; PhD |
Security & Fraud: The Latest Tactics and Potential Business Impact
| fraud-alert-the-latest-phishing-tactics-and-potential-business-impact.pdf View |
20110107
O2 INSIDE BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
>>> ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS
>>> KNOWLEDGE YOU CAN TRUST
Dr Damigos / O2ibm >>>Achieve More While Doing Less
Amplify’d from o2ibm.blogspot.com
Achieve More While Doing Less
Achieve More While Doing Less
By David R. ButcherWhen confronted with a daunting quantity of work, it may help to concentrate less on time and more on efficiency. Some say working smart beats working more. Here are some ideas for working better, not harder.
Many of us are trying to do a lot more with much less: fewer resources and less time. A possible solution to this imbalance is to concentrate on effort and accomplishment and not on the amount of time spent.
"The more goals you're chasing, the harder it is to keep enough attention and energy focused on any one of them," the Dumb Little Man blog says. "Many of us could achieve much more by doing a bit less."
Dr Damigos >>>Successful Strategic Planning
Amplify’d from o2ibm.blogspot.com
Successful Strategic Planning
Successful Strategic Planning
In times of great uncertainty, strategic planning must shift from a bureaucratic, linear process to a more targeted approach that is both analytic and creative...
Making Change Happen, and Making It Stick
Amplify’d from o2ibm.blogspot.com
Making Change Happen, and Making It Stick
Making Change Happen, and Making It Stick
Five factors make the greatest difference in fostering the new behaviors needed for a transformation. All of them reflect the basic importance of people in implementing and embedding change.
Few organizations have escaped the need for major change in the past decade, as new technologies and global crises have reshaped entire industries. However, the fact that change has become more frequent does not make such changes any easier.
Change is, at its core, a people process, and people are creatures of habit, hardwired to resist adopting new mind-sets, practices, and behaviors. To achieve and sustain transformational change, companies must embed these mind-sets, practices, and behaviors at every level, and that is very hard to do — but it has never been more important.
Some organizations have managed to develop approaches to change management that address change comprehensively. A successful business transformation effort must capture the hearts and minds of people who need to operate differently to deliver the desired results. The good news is that it can be done...
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bktiu
The Seven Deadly Sins of Measurement
Amplify’d from o2ibm.blogspot.com
The Seven Deadly Sins of Measurement
Jim Champy, coauthor, with Harry Greenspun, of Reengineering Health Care: A Manifesto for Radically Rethinking Health Care Delivery, introduces a lesson on the pitfalls of measurement from Faster, Cheaper, Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done, by Michael Hammer and Lisa W. Hershman.
The late Mike Hammer always delivered the unexpected in a strong voice with an intelligent edge that woke you up. When we coauthored Reengineering the Corporation, I discovered that no partner could have been more insightful, more probing into the behaviors of companies and their managers. Mike also had a great talent for metaphor. He said that inefficiencies were like fat marbled into a piece of meat, and that to get costs out you had to grind up the company and fry out the fat. That metaphor never made it into our first book. I told Mike that executives wouldn’t respond well to the notion of treating their companies so brutally.
But that didn’t stop Mike from being a radical thinker, always challenging the way things are done. He disdained the notion “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In this excerpt, from the book that Mike was working on before his untimely death at age 60 in 2008 (a work completed by his colleague Lisa W. Hershman), you will see that even things that look right can be wrong. Read it several times to grasp everything that’s here on how managers misuse metrics and measurement processes — sometimes unwittingly, sometimes purposely to deceive. It’s quintessential Hammer.
— Jim Champy
Excerpted from Chapter 2 of Faster, Cheaper, Better:
The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done
In the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great formulated his famous list of the seven deadly sins — gluttony, greed, wrath, lust, sloth, envy, and pride. There are also seven sins of corporate measurement. Gregory’s list was meant to help an individual’s quest for salvation. Ours is more mundane: saving companies from fatal flaws in performance measurement...
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bktin
Change
Amplify’d from o2ibm.blogspot.com
Making Change Happen, and Making It Stick
Making Change Happen, and Making It Stick
Five factors make the greatest difference in fostering the new behaviors needed for a transformation. All of them reflect the basic importance of people in implementing and embedding change.
Few organizations have escaped the need for major change in the past decade, as new technologies and global crises have reshaped entire industries. However, the fact that change has become more frequent does not make such changes any easier.
Change is, at its core, a people process, and people are creatures of habit, hardwired to resist adopting new mind-sets, practices, and behaviors. To achieve and sustain transformational change, companies must embed these mind-sets, practices, and behaviors at every level, and that is very hard to do — but it has never been more important.
Some organizations have managed to develop approaches to change management that address change comprehensively. A successful business transformation effort must capture the hearts and minds of people who need to operate differently to deliver the desired results. The good news is that it can be done...
See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bkti1
Growth through Focus: A Blueprint for Driving Profitable Expansion
Growth through Focus: A Blueprint for Driving Profitable Expansion
Rather than seek increased revenues and profits by expanding products and markets, companies should follow a seven-step strategy for achieving more with less.
Illustration by Philippe Lardy
However, this approach is exactly the opposite of what business leaders should do to drive increased revenues and profits. A typical “growth through more” strategy diffuses the organization’s efforts. It increases the complexity of the organization and its operations. We have found that “growth through less,” or more precisely “growth through focus,” is the best prescription for growth, regardless of the economic environment. This conclusion is based on our own experience in three well-known companies — Kraft Foods, Unilever, and Fonterra Brands (a dairy products business based in New Zealand) — on three continents over 10 years. In all three cases, a deliberate strategy of focusing on a few markets, brands, and categories produced impressive revenue and profit expansion. We have learned that seemingly mature businesses can be energized by making fewer but larger bets and by focusing relentlessly on executing a simple but powerful vision.
Growth through focus is not as easy as choosing what strategic bets to make. Rather, it requires the leadership team to follow a systematic approach that spans everything from strategy and vision to execution and measurement. We propose a framework that consists of seven steps that an organization must go through in its quest for growth through focus. Our framework is grounded in three key ideas: focus in strategy, simplicity in communication, and empowerment in execution.........
Building Support for Change
Building Support for Change
A successful change management initiative requires commitment from all the organization’s leaders, not just the CEO.
To study the effect of leadership on organizational change, the authors explored the results of a change management initiative at Kaiser Permanente, a California-based HMO with more than 1 million members, 3,000 physicians, and 19 medical centers. Historically, Kaiser Permanente’s business plan had been predicated on its expansive relationships with a huge number of patients and providers, which enabled the company to offer competitive healthcare at reduced costs. But by 2001, management found that patients generally viewed Kaiser Permanente as bureaucratic and impersonal. Under a new CEO in 2002, the company attempted a significant shift, refocusing on quality and service. This meant introducing a new scheduling system, revamping call centers to improve responsiveness throughout the organization, and improving communication links between physicians and patients. After tracking the results of the initiative over two years (2001–03) in real time, the researchers concluded that efficient, thorough organizational changes resulted not because of the technology or procedures being introduced, but because of the commitment of Kaiser Permanente’s leaders — and not just those at the very top level.
The researchers used data from detailed satisfaction surveys of 50,000 patients and more than 300 physicians to gauge the success of the new plan. The study followed physicians in eight departments — including emergency medicine and pediatrics — at six Kaiser Permanente medical centers. At Kaiser Permanente, physicians report to a department chief (also an M.D.), whose immediate boss is the physician-in-charge (PIC), the executive responsible for the overall operations of the individual medical center. Kaiser Permanente’s CEO oversees all the PICs. The physician surveys explored how well the supervisors at all three leadership levels articulated a vision, set measurable goals, rewarded progress, dealt with organizational hurdles, and motivated employees. The research found that the more physicians perceived their department chief and PIC to be competent managers in all aspects of their job, the more they supported the strategy shift; in addition, patient access and service ratings improved most when physicians viewed both the CEO and PIC as effective leaders. However, when physicians felt that their bosses were less than adept, their performance on patient satisfaction surveys was markedly lower. Although the CEO imparted the same call for transformation in responding to patients throughout the organization, physicians who lacked respect for their managers tended to interpret this change agenda more negatively. Overall, patient ratings improved over the two-year study period.
It has long been assumed that CEOs drive organizational change, and that success or failure hinges on how well a single leader can articulate his or her vision. But this paper finds that organizations are much more nuanced, and leaders at many different levels can have a significant impact on whether their departments embrace or shun new initiatives. The authors advise CEOs to spend time making sure their leaders throughout the organization are fully informed, committed, and effective before undertaking a major change initiative.
Bottom Line: Organizational change is much more effective when leaders at all levels of a company are united behind the shift in strategy. Although CEOs can articulate an overall vision, the success of a new initiative often depends on the competence of managers at lower leadership levels.
Author Profile:
- Matt Palmquist was a founding staff writer and is currently a contributing editor at Miller-McCune magazine. Formerly, he was an award-winning feature writer for the San Francisco–based SF Weekly.
Title: How Leadership Matters: The Effects of Leaders’ Alignment on Strategy Implementation
Author: Charles A. O’Reilly (Stanford University) et al.
Publisher: The Leadership Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 1
Date Published: February 2010
Global Innovation 1000: How the Top Innovators Keep Winning
The Global Innovation 1000: How the Top Innovators Keep Winning
Booz & Company’s annual study of the world’s biggest R&D spenders shows why highly innovative companies are able to consistently outperform. Their secret? They’re good at the right things, not at everything.
Illustration by Otto Steininger
What matters instead is the particular combination of talent, knowledge, team structures, tools, and processes — the capabilities — that successful companies put together to enable their innovation efforts, and thus create products and services they can successfully take to market. This year’s edition of the Global Innovation 1000, our sixth, analyzes the capabilities systems that the most successful innovators have assembled to execute their distinct innovation strategies, and the ways they have aligned those capabilities with their overall business strategies. Innovators that have achieved this state of coherence, we have found, consistently and significantly outperform their rivals on several financial measures.
We believe that this assessment of key innovation capabilities comes at a particularly opportune time. This year, for the first time in the more than a decade we have been tracking global R&D spending, total corporate R&D spending among the Global Innovation 1000 declined, from US$521 billion in 2008 to $503 billion in 2009, or 3.5 percent. (See “Profiling the 2009 Global Innovation 1000,” below.) Clearly, the global recession, which had not yet taken its toll on the world of innovation in 2008, finally came home to roost last year. Yet that decline makes it even more imperative that companies spend their available R&D dollars wisely. Our goal this year is to examine the capabilities needed to maximize the impact of a company’s innovation efforts in good times and bad, and to highlight the benefits both of focusing on the short list of capabilities that generate differential advantage, and of clearly linking the specific decisions within innovation to the company’s overall capabilities system and strategy..........
Billion-dollar Ideas: Finding Tomorrow’s Growth Engines Today
Billion-dollar Ideas: Finding Tomorrow’s Growth Engines Today
To create growth in uncertain times, use this disciplined and market-focused methodology. It can help you discover and distill attractive new ideas and build a business case for implementing the best of them.
There’s no going back to the growth ideas that were bouncing around the organization before the global financial crisis. Executives need a robust framework to help them rapidly develop a long list of opportunities and then choose the very best ideas from it. The process must be comprehensive, efficient, rigorous, collaborative, and focused on “market-back” opportunities designed to meet customers’ needs. And it must be bold — the company must resist the temptation to do what has been done in the past.
Booz & Company has created a methodology for this, based on five lenses used for evaluating growth strategies. The five lenses — share of wallet, new regulations, technology and applications, distinctive capabilities, and business models — represent discrete and complementary ways to find and judge unconventional and unseen ideas. This approach has already been used successfully by companies in many industries and geographies...
A right to win: Undisputed competitive advantage.
The Right to Win
Business strategy is at an evolutionary crossroads. It’s time to resolve the long-standing tension between the inherent identity of your organization and the fleeting nature of your competitive advantage.
Photo illustration by Holly Lindem
The first option focuses on innovation. The company would rapidly develop and launch many new types of snacks and foods, packaged in new and interesting ways, offering leading-edge nutrition and convenience.
Under the second option, the company would get closer to its customers, producing the food people ask for. It could incorporate ideas gathered online into its offerings and provide busy working families with customizable, convenient, and well-balanced meals.
The third option would involve transforming the dynamics of the relevant food sectors by competing more aggressively. The company would become a category leader by investing in new process technology, rightsizing operations to push costs down, and completing key acquisitions.
After the screen goes blank, the CEO leans forward and asks a simple question: “Which strategy would give us the greatest right to win?” His tone, calm and direct, makes everyone sit up a little straighter. And they probably should, for this is the core question underlying every business strategy, although it isn’t always phrased that way.
A right to win is the ability to engage in any competitive market with a better-than-even chance of success — not just in the short term, but consistently....
The 7 Deadly Sins of Measurement
The Seven Deadly Sins of Measurement
Jim Champy, coauthor, with Harry Greenspun, of Reengineering Health Care: A Manifesto for Radically Rethinking Health Care Delivery, introduces a lesson on the pitfalls of measurement from Faster, Cheaper, Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done, by Michael Hammer and Lisa W. Hershman.
The late Mike Hammer always delivered the unexpected in a strong voice with an intelligent edge that woke you up. When we coauthored Reengineering the Corporation, I discovered that no partner could have been more insightful, more probing into the behaviors of companies and their managers. Mike also had a great talent for metaphor. He said that inefficiencies were like fat marbled into a piece of meat, and that to get costs out you had to grind up the company and fry out the fat. That metaphor never made it into our first book. I told Mike that executives wouldn’t respond well to the notion of treating their companies so brutally.
But that didn’t stop Mike from being a radical thinker, always challenging the way things are done. He disdained the notion “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In this excerpt, from the book that Mike was working on before his untimely death at age 60 in 2008 (a work completed by his colleague Lisa W. Hershman), you will see that even things that look right can be wrong. Read it several times to grasp everything that’s here on how managers misuse metrics and measurement processes — sometimes unwittingly, sometimes purposely to deceive. It’s quintessential Hammer.
In the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great formulated his famous list of the seven deadly sins — gluttony, greed, wrath, lust, sloth, envy, and pride. There are also seven sins of corporate measurement. Gregory’s list was meant to help an individual’s quest for salvation. Ours is more mundane: saving companies from fatal flaws in performance measurement...
But that didn’t stop Mike from being a radical thinker, always challenging the way things are done. He disdained the notion “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In this excerpt, from the book that Mike was working on before his untimely death at age 60 in 2008 (a work completed by his colleague Lisa W. Hershman), you will see that even things that look right can be wrong. Read it several times to grasp everything that’s here on how managers misuse metrics and measurement processes — sometimes unwittingly, sometimes purposely to deceive. It’s quintessential Hammer.
— Jim Champy
Excerpted from Chapter 2 of Faster, Cheaper, Better:
The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done
The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done
In the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great formulated his famous list of the seven deadly sins — gluttony, greed, wrath, lust, sloth, envy, and pride. There are also seven sins of corporate measurement. Gregory’s list was meant to help an individual’s quest for salvation. Ours is more mundane: saving companies from fatal flaws in performance measurement...
Making Change Happen, and Making It Stick
Making Change Happen, and Making It Stick
Five factors make the greatest difference in fostering the new behaviors needed for a transformation. All of them reflect the basic importance of people in implementing and embedding change.
Few organizations have escaped the need for major change in the past decade, as new technologies and global crises have reshaped entire industries. However, the fact that change has become more frequent does not make such changes any easier.
Change is, at its core, a people process, and people are creatures of habit, hardwired to resist adopting new mind-sets, practices, and behaviors. To achieve and sustain transformational change, companies must embed these mind-sets, practices, and behaviors at every level, and that is very hard to do — but it has never been more important.
Some organizations have managed to develop approaches to change management that address change comprehensively. A successful business transformation effort must capture the hearts and minds of people who need to operate differently to deliver the desired results. The good news is that it can be done...
Change is, at its core, a people process, and people are creatures of habit, hardwired to resist adopting new mind-sets, practices, and behaviors. To achieve and sustain transformational change, companies must embed these mind-sets, practices, and behaviors at every level, and that is very hard to do — but it has never been more important.
Some organizations have managed to develop approaches to change management that address change comprehensively. A successful business transformation effort must capture the hearts and minds of people who need to operate differently to deliver the desired results. The good news is that it can be done...
Successful Strategic Planning
Successful Strategic Planning
In times of great uncertainty, strategic planning must shift from a bureaucratic, linear process to a more targeted approach that is both analytic and creative.
Strong strategic planning is critical to the success of every organization. It is the process by which strategy is translated into concrete short-term actions. It can also be a vehicle for deciding which markets are important to your company’s future, and which capabilities you will need to reach those markets effectively.Over the years, the exercise of strategic planning has created strong advocates and fierce critics in equal measure. The recent financial crisis has renewed many people’s skepticism about strategic planning — as unimaginably bleak scenarios forced businesses to rapidly recast their most fundamental business assumptions and recalibrate their priorities. But there is no reason to be skeptical if you orient your strategic planning process to the unique needs of your company. Together, the following five pillars of corporate strategic planning ensure that your processes are up to the challenges of today’s dynamic business environment...
20110106
Achieve More While Doing Less
Achieve More While Doing Less
By David R. Butcher
Many of us are trying to do a lot more with much less: fewer resources and less time. A possible solution to this imbalance is to concentrate on effort and accomplishment and not on the amount of time spent.
"The more goals you're chasing, the harder it is to keep enough attention and energy focused on any one of them," the Dumb Little Man blog says. "Many of us could achieve much more by doing a bit less."
Here are some ideas for doing just that:
Top Business Management Reading 2010
Best of Recommended Reading 2010
By Ilya Leybovich
The following 10 books were the most popular Recommended Reading choices in 2010. From business know-how to historical analysis, these books will keep you entertained and informed in 2011.
Poorly Made in China: An Insider's Account of the Tactics Behind China's Production Game
Poorly Made in China is a dramatic and often witty travelogue of one man's journey through China's export manufacturing sector. Author Paul Midler reveals what really goes on behind the scenes of the Asian giant's export industries. The story follows the author from one project to the next, capturing why so many quality failures could come out of China at once and exploring what the consequences of the country's rapid economic rise mean for the world.
Hardcover, 256pp
Wiley, John & Sons, Inc., April 2009
Barnes & Noble online price: $16.63
The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
In tracing the development of the steam engine through a close examination of the creative processes of pioneering inventors, award-winning author William Rosen's The Most Powerful Idea in the World sheds light on how tremendous innovations come into being. Along the way, Rosen introduces readers to a huge cast of colorful historical figures and illustrates how the world sprang into a sustained period of rapid growth and development within a single generation.
Hardcover, 400pp
Random House Publishing Group, June 2010
B&N online price: $18.67
Awesomely Simple: Essential Business Strategies for Turning Ideas into Action
Running a business in today's world can mean dealing with all sorts of distractions, but in Awesomely Simple, author John Spence provides practical strategies for cutting through the day-to-day clutter of operating a company. Using case studies, easy-to-follow guidelines and tips for improving efficiency, this book shows how a streamlined approach to business may be better than an unnecessarily complex alternative.
Hardcover, 208pp
Wiley, John & Sons, Inc., September 2009
B&N online price: $15.83
The 4-Hour Workweek, Expanded and Updated: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
Ever wished you could start living more and working less? Serial entrepreneur and "ultravagabond" Timothy Ferriss offers his strategies for escaping the rat race but without sacrificing your income. His bestselling, step-by-step guide shows you how to build a career on short work bursts, take mini-retirements, get rid of unnecessary work and find ways to make more money. The expanded version features over a hundred pages of new material. Hardcover, 396pp
Crown Publishing Group, December 2009
B&N online price: $11.58
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High
Communication is paramount in business, which means that staying calm and collected during important interactions can be the key to success. In Crucial Conversations, a team of corporate consultants breaks down the methods for handling conversations with expertise and finding ways to achieve the results you want. Learn how to persuade others through talk and how to keep your conversational cool in high-pressure situations. Paperback, 256pp
The McGraw-Hill Cos., June 2002
B&N online price: $10.19
Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
Learning to adapt can be difficult, even when it's the smartest possible option. In Switch, authors Chip and Dan Heath examine why people are reluctant to accept beneficial or necessary changes. Drawing on research in psychology, sociology and other fields, the Heaths show how everyday people (including managers and employees) can be motivated to accept new ideas.
Hardcover, 320pp
Broadway Books, February 2010
B&N online price: $14.22
Getting to Plan B: Breaking Through to a Better Business Model
Starting a new business can be fraught with uncertainty, even with a solid business plan. In Getting to Plan B, authors John Mullins and Randy Komisar explain that having a plan that changes as new challenges arise is the key to keeping a new business functional. They provide a rigorous "stress test" to see if your initial plan can keep up with your company's needs and determine whether you need a path to plan B.
Hardcover, 272pp
Harvard Business Press, September 2009
B&N online price: $19.97
Mass Career Customization: Aligning the Workplace with Today's Nontraditional Workforce
Offering a personalized experience to your customers is a great way to improve business, but employees may need a similar level of engagement if a company is to maintain its competitive advantage. In Mass Career Customization, Deloitte talent strategists Cathy Benko and Anne C. Weisberg explain how keeping employees engaged and connected will be increasingly important as the workforce shrinks, and they explore the four key factors in customizing a career.
Digital eBook
Harvard Business School Press
B&N online price: $10.78
Topgrading: How Leading Companies Win by Hiring, Coaching and Keeping the Best People
A company's success isn't only based on its business strategies — it also depends on its people. In a revised and updated version of the 1999 classic Topgrading, author Bradford D. Smart offers a practical approach to finding and managing the top talent. Drawing on case studies and interviews, the book provides helpful advice on how to harness a business's most valuable resources: its workers. Hardcover, 592pp
Penguin Group, April 2005
B&N online price: $19.97
Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?
There are some people who are simply indispensable to an organization. In Linchpin, business expert and bestselling author Seth Godin explains how these essential people innovate, connect divergent parts of the company and lead others — regardless of their position. Godin also illustrates how you can become indispensable by overcoming the resistance that holds people back.
Hardcover, 244pp
Penguin Group, January 2010
B&N online price: $16.77
Top Trade Shows for 2011
25 Trade Shows to Visit this Year
By Beth Goodbaum
2011 Hiring Outlook
2011 Hiring Outlook
By Ilya Leybovich
Following a difficult two-year period of mounting job losses, unemployment conditions in the United States bottomed out in 2010. But while the general economy has been recovering from the economic downturn, the job market has remained volatile and the national unemployment rate has hovered just below the 10-percent mark for most of the year. With millions of Americans still struggling to find work, the hiring outlook for 2011 will determine whether this will be a jobless recovery or not...
10 Innovations 2010
10 in '10: Innovations
By Ilya Leybovich
While lingering recessionary effects continue to affect research and development funding and many businesses have scaled back on their innovation initiatives, major advances were made in the fields of science and engineering last year. From sophisticated electronics to remarkable structural engineering projects and materials breakthroughs, 2010 proved that limited budgets cannot stop the march of scientific progress...
What Manufacturers Expect in 2011
What Manufacturers Expect in 2011
By David R. Butcher
The nation's manufacturing sector has held up better than other sectors during an uneven economic recovery and is expected to continue expanding. Economic forecasters and business leaders are boosting their year-end and 2011 estimates for United States growth, prompted by higher demand and increased production. Moreover, manufacturers are more optimistic about an economic uptick for their businesses in 2011, according to a spate of new data....
The Best-of-class Financial Systems Strategy
The Best-of-class Financial Systems Strategy: An Alternative to ERP Platforms
Also featured in this white paper: TEC's suggestions for identifying financial system functionality that will support your organization's changing processes. The latter portion of this white paper includes a descriptive checklist for soliciting such information about enterprise software solutions.
TEC recognizes the thought leadership role and industry expertise of the UNIT4 group. However, this document should not be construed as an explicit TEC endorsement of the CODA Financials software suite.
Introduction
For better or worse, most companies have purchased financial software from large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform suppliers over the last decade. But as companies search for ways to lower costs and respond to a difficult business climate, the merits of implementing large-scale ERP platforms have come under closer scrutiny. This paper will examine an alternative approach that may be more appropriate and strategically sound for many companies: a best-of-class systems strategy.With that notion in mind, this paper will contemplate the following questions:
- Have ERP platforms grown too unwieldy for some organizations?
- Does ERP make sense for all types of business, especially in today's fast-changing and frugal business environment?
- Are ERP platforms being sold to companies that simply don't need it?
- Have technological advances eliminated some of the reasons for ERP platforms in the first place?
- Is the drive for competitive differentiation causing companies to develop more of their own operational systems, thereby eliminating the value of ERP?
- What does a best-of-class strategy entail, and what are the advantages?
Building a Best-run Finance Organization: A New Role to Address Today’s Business Realities
Building a Best-run Finance Organization: A New Role to Address Today’s Business Realities
.
There is a company executive with a growing influence in today’s boardroom – the chief financial officer. And the role of the finance organizations that these executives lead is expanding as well.While the advent of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act has focused enormous attention on the financial accountability and internal controls of companies across all industries, company executives recognize that individual business activities do not occur in a vacuum. All functions – such as sales, marketing, manufacturing, service, and even human resources – affect not only the bottom line but also a company’s financial integrity. Increasingly, prudent companies are drawing their finance organizations into greater collaboration with the operational aspects of the enterprise. Moreover, companies are asking their financial officers to take on a more prominent role in defining company strategy.
This SAP Executive Insight examines the changing role of the finance organization in today’s business environment. Further, by answering the following questions, it describes how companies can develop best-run finance organizations:
- What operating characteristics help companies develop best-run finance organizations?
- How do you measure a best-run finance organization?
- How does the focus of an organization change as bestrun finance methods are applied?
Executive Agenda At a Glance...
20110102
Change Comes in Waves
Paul Saffo: Change Comes in Waves
One of Saffo's most interesting perspectives is that innovation moves in phases. New scientific discoveries come in waves, and following these discoveries you have new technological applications that change everything. Chemistry innovations in the very early part of the 20th Century led to new giant companies like IG Farben and others. Then physics, in the second or third decade, and then electronics (or IT), in the 1950s. This is the scientific discovery that has shaped the entrepreneurial landscape over the last several decades. Now, we're seeing big discoveries in biology. And of course these industries overlap. The structure of DNA was understood in 1954, then the human genome project came fifty years later, and the biotechnology revolution is starting to happen.Each wave of new science creates new technological possibilities, but also changes our own perspective about reality and how the world works. He had some interesting illustrations of biomimetics - using biological learning to create new products and technologies. For instance, Geckos cling to walls based on nano-filaments of hairs that actually tap the weak nuclear force to adhere to surfaces, and there are new products now based on this, or being considered - like bandaids that don't require adhesives, etc.
In fact, for about $5000, Saffo says you can now buy everything you need, on E-Bay, to create your own organism in your kitchen. It's harder than people realize, but it's not impossible. And it will change the way we think about the world, which means we'll discover even more new ideas. He said it takes about 20 years to go from scientific discovery to technological takeoff.
Innovation: Why is it so difficult to sustain success over time
1. Why is it so difficult to sustain success over time (i.e., to innovate again and again)? and
2. Is innovation really as much of a random event as it seems?
His tongue-in-cheek conclusion is that the principles of good management taught in places like Harvard actually sew the seeds of failure and ensure that innovation doesn't succeed.
These are the accepted management principles he faults for the failure of innovation at most firms:
1. You should listen to your customers to develop innovation ideas
2. Focus your investments on those opportunities with the highest margins
3. Outsource whatever possible, whatever is not your "core competency"
4. The value of an innovation can be expressed in net-present-value terms
5. You should ignore fixed and sunk costs, and focus on marginal outlays
6. Large markets represent the biggest growth opportunties
7. Understanding the customer is the key to successful innovation
Disruptive technologies often aren't as "good" as the incumbent technology or product, but are still highly useful to customers. Some innovations make imminent sense in a vacuum but are simply impossible for incumbent companies to do.
The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it's selling him
He had a table showing different companies that had created innovative products at one time, then been successively replaced by cheaper products always moving up up up in this sustaining innovation trend. So disrupting technologies earn their place at the table at the low end - the simple end, the part of the product category that is either not served at all or very poorly served by the high-end products - and then they too migrate up and devour the incumbents. But soon another wave will come behind them. So General Motors had its business slowly eaten by Toyota, from the bottom up. And now Toyota, competing with Mercedes and BMW at the high end, is going to have its business eaten by Hyundai, and maybe Tata.
Now consider green energy: think about solar power. US and European govts have spent about $16b on this so far. But we have big problems - clouds, air conditioning, nighttime. Solar electricity has been 7 years away from cost-competitiveness for 30 years. So is there any hope for it? Christensen said his daughter was a missionary in Mongolia, and she took him into the capital city, and they happened on a bunch of vendors selling dirt-cheap solar panels, shrink-wrapped with rabbit-ear TVs. But the Mongolians are all NON consumers of electricity, so even this level of inconvenience is still infinitely preferable to non-consumption, right? There are 2 billion people in Asia who are non-consumers of electricity and among this population, solar energy is a booming business, with lots of cottage businesses meeting this need.
One of the other issues Christensen promised to cover was debunking what he called the "gospel of outsourcing."
A Networked World is a More Random World
A Networked World is a More Random World
By their very nature, networks - of customers, Web sites, weather patterns, evolutionary systems, or economic competitors - are subject to random and unpredictable movements.Networks of interrelated things, whether we are talking about the Web or a collection of stock and bond prices, often grow in a kind of "cascading" pattern. For instance, because one person buys a stock, others think it must be valuable, too - so they buy it. Influential customers become more influential at a faster rate than those who aren't already influential. The most visited Web sites gain visitors faster than others, and wealthy people become wealthier at a faster rate than others. The reason this kind of cascading occurs is easy to understand, but the effects of cascading like this can be quite random. Cascading means that two systems could be set up with nearly identical initial conditions, but even very slight, almost undetectable differences between them will inevitably escalate into major differences after just a bit of time, creating what has come to be known as the "butterfly effect."
All reality is, in fact, time-dependent. Everyone's life today is a culmination of all the sometimes random events that have shaped it. Think about how you met your spouse, for instance, or why you chose your college major, or how you landed your first job, or how you just missed an important flight, or how you got rear-ended by someone. Each of these events is memorable to you and will have had an important role in shaping your life, but many of them could easily have turned out differently, in which case you might have a completely different life today, with a completely different perspective.
One consequence of network structure is that periodically a whole system will go through a very significant change for no obvious reason. For instance, while current thinking is that the dinosaurs and many other species were apparently eradicated by a catastrophic meteor strike, it is in the nature of evolutionary networks that periodic massive species extinctions will occur with a certain predictable probability, with or without massive externally generated disasters. This is simply the way complex systems behave.
As technology brings increasing "connectedness" to our world, the volume and speed of the various feedback loops that link human beings and all economic actors are increasing. Our system is speeding up, in other words. It is cycling into different states at a faster pace, so the butterfly effects of minor changes and perturbations will be felt even faster and more significantly in the future.
While we can all try to pin the blame for the current financial crisis on various factors - deregulation or over-regulation, greedy business executives or cynical politicians - the fact is that any economic system as complex and interconnected as ours will almost certainly go through occasionally comprehensive and wrenching changes.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to repair and upgrade our economic system once in a while, in order to try to avoid the catastrophic consequences of these ups and downs. But it does mean that no matter how good our efforts are, they will be temporary at best, and the next cycle hit us with just as much surprise as the current one has.
Alignment, Compensation, and Engagement
Alignment, Compensation, and Engagement
Earlier this week in Boston, we ran a small, intimate workshop for about 20 of our 1to1 Media "insiders." These are folks who regularly access our Web site and Webinars, subscribe to the 1to1 Magazine or to our new journal, and so forth. We hand-picked the participants from our opt-in database, in order to ensure that the room would be filled with people who had their "fingers on the trigger" of analytics at their companies. What we wanted most were those folks who were wrestling with the problem of starting, upgrading, or just managing their companies' customer analytics functions.It's clear now, from our vantage point almost one tenth the way through the 21st Century, that numbers and analytics of all kinds will play a more and more important role in our existence. If you haven't yet read the book Super Crunchers, by Ian Ayres, you owe it to yourself to get it and learn why numbers have become more dominant in nearly every arena of life. And there are a number of other books out there chronicling the same trend toward ever more useful and pervasive quantitative analysis.
Nevertheless, the typical business still can't get its act together when it comes to using numbers for anything other than financial reporting.
Customer Loyalty: Is It an Attitude Or a Behavior?
Customer Loyalty: Is It an Attitude? Or a Behavior?
The people who've tried to define customer loyalty have usually approached it from one of two different directions - attitudinal and behavioral. Although each of these directions is valid, they have different implications and lead to very different prescriptions for businesses. (This is analogous, but I don't think it is precisely aligned, with Estaban Kolsky's distinction between "emotional" and "intellectual" loyalty.)The attitudinal definition of loyalty implies that loyalty is a state of mind. By this definition, a customer is "loyal" to a brand or a company if they have a positive, preferential attitude toward it. They like the company, its products or its brands, and they therefore prefer to buy from it, rather than from the company's competitors. In purely economic terms, the attitudinal definition of customer loyalty would mean that someone who is willing to pay a premium for Brand A over Brand B, even when the products they represent are virtually equivalent, is "loyal" to Brand A. But the emphasis is on "willingness," rather than on actual behavior, per se. In terms of attitudes, then, increasing a customer's loyalty is virtually equivalent to increasing the customer's preference for the brand. It is closely tied to customer satisfaction, and any company wanting to increase loyalty, in attitudinal terms, will concentrate on improving its product, its image, or other elements of the customer experience, relative to its competitors.
Is Lifetime Value a More Useful Metric than Loyalty?
Is Lifetime Value a More Useful Metric than Loyalty?
Let's grant that behavioral loyalty is what pays the bills, but that attitudinal loyalty is also important, especially when it can be used as an indicator of higher behavioral loyalty. I think that's the general, if not unanimous, conclusion of the discussion on this topic.And when it is positioned as a straight yes-or-no proposition, the concept of customer loyalty, as a behavior, is relatively easy. A magazine subscriber who elects to renew her subscription at the end of the first year is engaging in loyal behavior.
However, the real world is rarely described adequately in strict yes-or-no terms. If the magazine subscriber renews her subscription again in the third year, and perhaps again in the fourth, fifth, and sixth years, doesn't her behavior exhibit a greater and greater degree of "loyalty?" In other words, loyalty is not simply a yes-or-no proposition at all, but is a matter of degree.
And it can get more complicated than that. Consider a new car buyer. The owner of a Brand A car who buys another Brand A when he retires the first one would be said to be loyal, of course, but what about when he chooses to use his dealer's service area, or to get his car financed from Brand A's financial services division? Or what if he owns two cars, but only one of them is Brand A?
The "loyalty" concept is equally difficult to deal with in other categories - most categories, actually. Because most business categories are not simple subscription businesses. If a breakfast cereal consumer buys one box per month of Brand B for her family, and then begins buying two boxes a month, does this mean she is twice as loyal as before? What if she also went from buying one box a month of Brand C to buying three boxes a month? Would that mean she is LESS loyal to Brand B? (Note that we are still describing her behavior, here, even though we might be inferring her attitudes.)
The fact is, a much more useful concept than "loyalty," when thinking about desirable customer behaviors, is probably "lifetime value." The net present value of the expected stream of future profits attributable to a customer is a much more rigorous and useful variable, simply because it is a vector: it has both a direction AND a magnitude. In its ideal state (a state that can never actually be measured precisely, of course), lifetime value would capture all the various behaviors and activities of a customer that have any bearing at all on the enterprise's profit from that customer.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
