Inside ASI-AP

Our 6th Annual Executive Round Table is scheduled for May 20 and 21 to be held at the Sofitel Mansion and Spa in Werribee, just outside of Melbourne. We have made a venue change this year and gone back to the Sofitel chain for a better quality hotel and dining experience after being at Moonah Links for the last 2 years. Plus it is not as far for Marla to drive to when I lock my keys in my car!

The theme for this year's round table is "achieving business excellence" with specific focus on process centric cultures and targeted customer offerings. We will also be presenting an iMIS 15 roadmap for the first time - something that customers have been requesting for the last couple of years. Bob Alves is host once again, and the ASI team includes Mick, Jay, Marla and myself from AP, and David Riffle is also flying in from the US. Colin arrives back from the US right as the round table starts so he should be attending but not having to present. And we have a great guest speaker which I posted about earlier in the week.

Bob will be in Melbourne and Sydney later this month - arriving into the Melbourne on Monday 19 May, then heading to Sydney on Saturday 24 May prior to flying home on Sunday 25 May. While in Melbourne his main responsibility is to host the Annual Executive Round Table for our invitation-only largest customers; he will also be in the office for a couple of days on Thursday and Friday catching up with me, my review and AP business plans and budget reviews. And if there are no delays to his incoming flight he should also be joining us in person for the quarterly pizza lunch and CEO address on the Monday 19th.

As I posted about during the Innovations conference last month, the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) program is to be rolled out in the US embracing selected AiSPs and customers. Bob has appointed Neil Kleinberg to lead the program launch in the US, and over the coming weeks Mick and I will be meeting with Neil and others to help co-ordinate and support the launch. I am also in the process of creating a wiki that will incorporate all of the iBEF documentation so it can be opened up for collaboration with ASIer's in the US, the AiSP's in the program and to customers - I'll post more on this as the wiki nears completion.

It was just Lap joining me for lunch today from Melbourne office for our first quarter recognition luncheon. Lap was awarded the core value award of "respect" in the first quarter of 2008 - congratulations Lap! After a year of going to Rockpool each quarter I thought we would try a new restaurant this year, so it was back to Crown again and to the new restaurant right next door to Rockpool - Bistro Guillaume (www.bistroguillaume.com.au).

While promoted as french bistro style the prices were high-end restaurant but luckily the food was outstanding, and I would certainly go back. Lap enjoyed for the first time ever snails for entree and a souffle for dessert !

Mick was in Sydney yesterday visiting with the Taxation Institute of Australia (www.taxinstitute.com.au) and conducting the first of their iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) meetings. The first meeting agenda was a workshop session with their strategy team to better understand their strategies and key initiatives. I normally attend these meetings with Mick in person but this time we decided to keep me in the office and connect me in using Sykpe video instead.

While we have conducted many video conference meetings on our Tandberg video units, these are only ASI office to office - customers do not have the Tandberg equipment for us to call into customer boardrooms. So enter the $100 webcam and Skype. Mick setup the webcam in the Institute's boardroom and then ran the meeting for 3 hours with me sitting in my office. The quality was far better than expected and I would certainly use it again.

Mick and I went over to Melbourne Uni today to visit with Dr Mile Terziovski, Associate Professor in Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Melbourne Uni and he is also the Executive Director of the Centre for Global Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Mile was our lecturer last year at AIM on the subject of managing operational improvement and he is a highly regarded expert on the topics of process centered organisations, learning organisations and innovation - all cornerstones of business excellence frameworks including our own iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) and the 7 business drivers of high performance non-profits.

Further to my post a few weeks ago on how blogs can improve the shared communication process in place of email, I read some other posts today which share other useful ideas. The original post was from Tantek Celik on how email is not working for him, and this was picked up by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders on email insanity. 43 Folders is a great website full of useful ideas for improving personal productivity and provides coverage on the book Getting Things Done (or GTD).

I met today with an export advisor from Austrade (specifically the Tradestart program) to better understand the options available to us for export assistance into Asia - via government programs, grants and also paid consultancy. We talked specifically about our existing relationships with NZ, Singapore and Malaysia and then on understanding how Austrade can help with new markets like India, Pakistan and further into the future China, Japan and Korea. While we have been aware of such programs before - to sit and hear them all at once was both exciting and stimulating.

I caught up with Ross on Friday night by phone. The official Olympic qualifying period had just ended and Ross did not qualify for the Beijing games this year. It is disappointing for Ross, but in many ways the cards were stacked against him this last 12 months or so, and he showed a lot of courage to dig deep and keep it all going. He is enjoying life in Gent, Belgium and is starting to find a routine with his local fencing club and getting onto the European circuit where there are high calibre fencing tournaments every weekend - and just a train ride or car ride away. He is getting to see a lot of Europe - make sure you follow his photos on Facebook if you aren't already.

The annual consulting satisfaction survey is underway again with email invitations to complete the survey being sent to all ASI direct customers globally. Note that we are using Informz for iMIS for both the email and the online survey.

A total of 3,200 email invitations were sent with almost 800 opened as of Friday. Over 100 surveys have been completed in full (that is a direct customer who has actually used ASI Consulting recently), and half of those have been from AP. The average time to complete the survey so far has been 4.5 minutes. If you are talking to customers please encourage them to complete the survey to help us understand how we can continue to improve our consulting services and performance.

I was a guest of AIM Vic at their "Managing the Future" lunch series on Tuesday where the keynote speaker was Bob Welsh, CEO of VicSuper. Bob has been leading VicSuper with sustainability as a core operating principle since 2000, and has recently been recognised by the UN for his achievements in this area.

There was certainly of lot of interest in sustainability with over 200 people in attendance at the lunch, in many ways driven by the new government's plan to introduce a carbon emissions trading scheme from 2010. This will mean that the cost of carbon will directly impact an organisation's bottom line and as a result costs for many services - including electricity - will go up.

I hosted our first boardroom lunch of the year yesterday - 30th April - and we had an invited audience of finance managers and finance executives. We had a slightly smaller crowd than expected with a few same day cancellations but overall I was very happy with who was in attendance.

Last year we used the theme of "what keeps you awake at night" as a means of getting feedback and prompting discussion. This year I am adopting a new theme based on the 7 business drivers of high-performance non-profits and the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF). The 2 business drivers I used for this luncheon were "automation" and "process".

Two interviews were held today with Jason, Alan (US) and Lara (US) representing the ASI panel. I sat in on the first interview which was for a Melbourne based candidate; for the second interview the candidate was in Sydney. A third candidate will interview next week.

One of the things I noticed during the interview is just how much we take for granted the facilities we have at ASI to make global meetings a "1-click" reality. It certainly was a little overwhelming for the first candidate - to have Jason in Sydney on the screen, Alan in Virginia on the screen, Lara in Texas on the phone, and me in person sitting across the desk from him. Wow!

In writing up todays monthly luncheon I realised I did not post my speech for the previous luncheon which was for CEO's and executives back in November. The lunch was held on 16 November 2007 and was well attended due to our special guest - Bob Alves, ASI's CEO. We even had 2 execs from a potential customer in NZ fly over for the luncheon and to meet Bob - which was a first!

Like the October luncheon for finance executives I based this presentation on the iMIS Value Cycle; plus I also discussed the Australian Business Excellence Framework and ASI's own 7 Business Drivers of High Performance Non-Profits. The business excellence frameworks are very relevant for forward thinking CEO's and proved to be a popular topic. I also used the same "what keeps awake at night" question to get feedback on some of the issues the CEO's in attendance are facing.

Jay presented the first Friendraising seminar today in Melbourne, with about 16 attendees in total. The seminar was promoted as an educational event on Friendraising technology without specific reference to iMIS or ASI. I believe we earned a lot of respect in taking that approach with the audience today.

Jay had put some new slides together to explain the Friendraising model and they are the best explanation I have seen so far of the social networking fundraising model that we call Friendraising (also called peer-to-peer fundraising or team based fundraising or even a-thons). Jay had a video camera recording his presentation today so in the next week or two there will be a video available for everyone to watch.