Inside ASI-AP

On Tuesday Jay, Mick and I were at APESMA (www.apesma.asn.au) for the fourth of a series of meetings with each of their key departments to help us plan out a one year roadmap as part of their iBEF program. APESMA have some unique challenges in that it was recently restructured to split the commercial business units from the traditional union organisation. The commercial units - including Chifley Business School (www.chifley.edu.au), Member Advantage (www.memberadvantage.com.au) and ETM Search & Selection (www.etm.com.au) - are all substantial businesses in their own right, but they also share infrastructure and many services with APESMA.

Because of the varying nature of the APESMA businesses we are approaching the iBEF meetings a little differently in that we are spending time first meeting with the departments individually to understand departmental requirements before looking at the overall picture.

The meeting on Tuesday was with the marketing teams from APESMA membership, Chifley, Member Advantage, ETM and the web manager. As well as spending time understanding their requirements for the future and their current issues, Jay also provided an overview demonstration of the iMIS Marketing Suite, iMIS for Informz email marketing and a brief look at iMIS TaskCentre. Each time I watch Jay present the marketing suite overview it reminds me how critical it is we get customers to understand the value of these tools.

We have one more department meeting to run at APESMA and then we move into the review and planning stage to jointly agree on a roadmap that will see us through the remainder of 2008 and into 2009.