Budget Gem 1: Agree onThe Purpose Of The Budget

Many organisations budget either because they have to, or because it’s something they always do. While visiting a large client who had expressed concern over the time it was taking to open up a budget data entry sheet, I was astonished to find it had around 1300 rows and 36 columns (they were attempting to set a budget for the next 3 years). A quick calculation showed that users were expected to enter around 46,800 numbers. Now assuming that you could enter numbers at the rate of 12 a minute, that would take each user approximately 65 hours to complete! This is assuming that they don’t have to think about what the numbers mean.n>

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2014 Latest Trends in Analytics

At last month’s UK & Ireland SAP User Group conference, Hans Loekkegaard of Red Commerce interviewed me on the latest and greatest trends in analytics. The full video is below – we had an good-natured chat covering roughly these topics: Where does the term “evangelist” come from? What is the biggest trend in analytics today? Where are organizations in…

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How To Become More Productive With Decentralized Business Processes

It’s a fact that new technologies like cloud-based accounting are changing standard business and decision-making processes for many companies. The threat of a bottleneck forming in the finance department increases as an organization grows and departments need much faster financial approvals and accurate, timely information.

In a spot survey of CFOs conducted by GCE during its seminar at SSON’s 8th Annual IT Financial Management Week, participants were asked, “How would you describe the distribution of information in your organization?”

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What Words Tell Us about Analytics and Performance Management

What trends have developed over the past century for enterprise and corporate performance management methods and business analytics?

One way to find an answer is if we performed research using a Google database that was unveiled in 2011. It includes 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008. With this database, one can input search words and phrases and discover how frequently those different terms were used during different past time periods.

With this Google database, researchers have been learning about interesting and possibly relevant shifts in social values or cultures. For example, one study revealed that between 1960 and 2008 self-centered phrases about an individual increased while group-related communal phrases declined. That is, phrases like “I come first” increased as “community” and “common good” decreased.

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The 6 Steps of the Blue Ocean Strategy from a Process Perspective

The Blue Ocean Strategy is highly related to process innovation. The idea of this strategy is to build new businesses where none existed before. So-called Blue Ocean industries are more profitable than traditional business fields with head-to-head competitors. In the Blue Ocean strategy, you must offer your customers a value innovation (i.e. tangible product or service advancements) accompanied by demonstrable savings. To be able to do that, you have to look at your process innovation from a new perspective. Let’s revisit the six steps of the Blue Ocean strategy from a process point-of-view.

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Happy 100th Birthday, Ford Assembly Line!

When Henry Ford began making cars in the early 1900s, “state-of-the-art” manufacturing meant car bodies delivered by horse-drawn carriage, with teams of workers assembling automobiles atop sawhorses. The teams would rotate from one station to another, doing their part to bring the vehicle together. Parts deliveries were timed, but often ran late causing pile-ups of workers vying for space and delays in production. Fortunately for the future of industry, these archaic practices came to an end Oct. 7, 1913. …

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5 Ways to Initiate an Organizational Culture of BPM

Why Implement an Organizational Culture of BPM?

I’m holding a focus group with some call center associates from the general customer service queue of a major financial services institution.

I’m thinking that I’m going to have to sell them on why we’re here, work hard to get their support, and tenuously pull information from them. After all, they probably don’t want to be here…this is a part-time job for some, a stepping-stone job for others, and a placeholder job for the rest…and I need their honest, and probably negative, feedback to do my job.

My job is essentially to improve their jobs. I could not have been further from the truth.

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The Great Process Debate: Business vs. IT

So we’ve all probably heard the questions, either from direct or indirect customers, either straightforwardly or in a round-about way. Who’s making us do this? How is this benefiting my team? Is BPM even applicable to this project? Is BPM an IT or a Business methodology?

If you’re not a direct practitioner of BPM within an organization, then it is often hard to understand the value of the methodology. I’ve even been a part of projects within which the team members felt that BPM was being imposed upon them, almost as an administrative task or check-the-box, stifling their progress and affecting their timelines.
Who’s making us do this? The BPM bullet had to have been shot from one side or the other…IT or the Business; because of course this couldn’t benefit both, and their priorities are rarely aligned.

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9 Steps for Launching Your BPM Program Successfully

Any process development program is a phased program. The first important phase is the launch. You need a plan in which the organization describes how it will roll out the Business Process Management initiative, selects processes for development and trains the people to lead the actual implementation.
Your plan for a successful BPM deployment should include, but is not limited to the following nine steps:

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