Inside ASI-AP

Thought I'd post this as I'm not sure that everyone will know about it. You can have Lap set up your phone message system to email you a .wav file of the recorded message.

A great feature - hope I wasn't the only one who didn't know this!

The current ugly pictures of the men and their mo's.

Do not look any further if easily offended!!

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"(Companies) have fallen into the trap of having thought that they have bought a solution, whereas what has really happened is that they have bought some technology. This technology may make things work faster – but if the over-riding CRM processes are bad, all you will do is hack off customers more quickly than you were doing before – and possibly more of them."

I tagged this article in Del.ic.ious but thought it was worth everyone's read. The key takeaway is that to be successful a client needs to have good, defined business processes and that software will not fix bad processes.

"Many moons ago, one of the areas I covered as an analyst was customer relationship management (CRM) software. It rapidly became clear that although the majority of the software had much in the way of capabilities, many businesses would not gain from them, due to misconceptions around what CRM software did. The common approach seemed to be along the lines of "we’ve spent £x million on CRM, and it’s not worked". Much blame was laid at the feet of the vendors (OK, a lot of it was well-founded), and much more money has been spent since on trying to get the expected returns from the investments.

Looking for feedback or suggestions on who we might ask to act as guest speaker at the IT Managers tech briefing on 13 September. Thoughts so far have centred on getting someone to talk on a general IT topic (such as Web 2.0) that is both interesting and that can be related somehow back to the day's agenda.

People thought about so far include:

James Farmer - an expert in utilising Web 2.0 for education and information management

Someone from the Data Managers Association

Others?

The following article - http://freeusabilityadvice.com/category/Process_and_Strategy/ - was a click-thru from www.imiscommunity.com. It was interesting to think on the difference. So often we are selling to the "Customer", who are the people making the decision, but the evaluation of the final delivery that comes out of PD is often based on a set of End-User or usability requirements that often don't form part of the decision making criteria.

I wonder if we should be giving thought to each as part of the implementation process? Perhaps as parts of the BPR?

I attended the "Membership Bootcamp" course run by Belinda Busoli, the MD of Not-for-Profit Network (NFPN - www.nfpn.com.au) in Adelaide yesterday. My notes are below:

Attendees

If you want to know who attended, I have published an internal only page here

Overall thoughts on course

It was a good introduction to the basic issues facing member organisations and techniques for managing membership. Touched on concepts around segmentation as a critical need but talked only about segmentation from a static (slow moving) data perspective. Didn’t deal with behavioural segmentation.

I cut and paste the article so you don't have to create an account on the relevant website

Many IT professionals swear by project management, yet that concept hasn't filtered up from the department level to the C-level, where projects and budgets are approved. But executives need to realize the value project management brings to the table so IT departments can justify the resources needed to implement projects. It may be a tough sell, but it's worth the effort.

As you will have seen with Paul's announcement on Friday, ASI AP has commenced development of a program to offer a premium set of services to our large customers. This is directed at creating partnership relationships with these customers, where we will work with them to understand their strategic plans and show them where we can help them implement their plans successfully.

There will be a series of webcasts over the coming months to explain to everyone the key messages we are trying to deliver. These customers include:

The main reason for the trip was to work with Stuart to prepare the plans for the new implementation at ECU. For those of you wondering, Edith Cowan is on our $50 note and was the first woman elected to parliament in WA. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Cowan

They've bought iMIS to support their Alumni department primarily, with the Graduate management area using iMIS to manage their Graduation ceremonies. This project will really kick-off around mid-April as they are right in the middle of a graduation at present and some of the key people are not available.

Third existing client on the list was IFAP, where Stuart and I met with Neil Ringshaw.

Neil is a very forthright character who has no issue with "telling it like it is". Once again, he had great things to say about iMIS and about working with Stuart in particular. They are still finding their way with iMIS and are still in that period of transitioning from their old system. It doesn't matter how good iMIS is and how bad the old system was, people still really struggle with that change. I agreed with Neil to try to get someone to spend some time with his team documenting issues and to help us formulate a plan to get them to the next level with iMIS.

Also while in Perth Stuart and I visited Chris Tonge at CPSU. Once again, Chris was strong in his praise of the benefits that iMIS has brought. He talked about the ability to use custom windows to track specific campaigns and the information they collect about their members from these campaigns. (This year the big campaign is ousting the federal liberal government!!) He also talked about better reporting and better structure in his data.

As part of my Perth trip, Stuart and I went out to meet Peter Byala and Brad Crew from AIM WA. On the whole they were very positive. Peter was particularly complimentary of Stuart and the work that he did there and they have definitely renewed their commitment to iMIS. Peter spoke about being committed to his software update and being current with iMIS.

There seems to be a lot of opportunity there. Brad talked about the number of satellite databases they had (mainly in Access) that they thought they needed to cater for areas where iMIS was not suitable. But when we drilled into those areas they were really core product areas - Certification / Accreditation management and some specific Event management were 2. And while they talked about being current with iMIS, they seemed to have no intention of keeping current on the upgrade path. I think we have some work to do there to create an understanding of the benefits of staying current.

I know it was mentioned a few times at training, so I thought I'd throw a link up to a Cranky Middle manager podcast. It just so happens that this one - http://cmm.thepodcastnetwork.com/index.php?p=183 - is about leadership and has some interesting comments by Jim Kouzes, who was mentioned at least once in the 2 days of training

How many people in AP are using Skype (www.skype.com) as a chat and voice over IP tool? I have been a skype user for a couple of years. Jay and I converse regularly using skype. It is good quality and reliable and is very easy to use (including video).

I've been getting a whole bunch of requests from people in the Us to be added to their skype directories, so this seems to be becoming an ASI