Inside ASI-AP

I hosted our fourth boardroom lunch of the year this week - 1st October - and we had an invited audience of CEO's and senior executives.

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 have adopted a new theme based on the 7 business drivers of high-performance non-profits and the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF). The focus for this presentation was on process management rather than functional management using the "join now" process as the example. See more in the copy of the speech below.

Instead of asking for feedback on 3 things that "keep you awake at night" I asked for feedback on 3 things that you could "automate within your join now process". I have started a new wiki page to track these answers (note an ASI staff only login is required to view this page since it is confidential).

Handout: Slides for EXEC contacts MD Boardroom lunch 01Oct08.ppt

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Luncheon speech for CEO's and senior executive contacts MD Boardroom Lunch 1 October 2008

Good afternoon and welcome. It is my great pleasure to host our monthly boardroom luncheon today.

We have 2 objectives today. Firstly, networking. Networking – ohhh, I hear some of you sigh - not another networking event, our calendar is already full of them! Well that may be true, but today is a little different. Firstly, all of you in the room work for non-profit organizations. As an aside, you may be surprised to learn that the iMIS community in Australia is made up of almost 2,000 people like you. But we need to go a step further. The other thing all of you have in common is that most of you are directors or CEOs. And for that reason, I know you have common challenges that you face in your jobs, and we would like to think that over lunch you will talk about some of those challenges.

The second objective is to talk to you about iMIS 15. Which I will be doing after lunch.

So – let's get started. You have 2 tasks to complete before we serve lunch. The first is to look at your profile form in front of you. We would like to share your contact details with the rest of the group here today, but to do that we need your permission. So please check your details are correct, cross off anything you do not want us to publish, and if you are OK to share just with this group here today, tick the box.

At the bottom of the same profile form you will see space to write 3 things that you would like to automate in as part of your new member join process. Automation? Huh? Why would you want to tell me that? Well, let me be a little more specific. I am going to talk after lunch about process management and iMIS, and the principles of business excellence. Automation of certain tasks helps implement consistent process. So we are going to take a simple example of a new member join process - and get you thinking about what steps of that process you could automate - things that you would like to happen automatically. This could be a task you currently do in a manual fashion or you might not even do it at all right now. The what you would like to automate list will not be published, it is just for my reading.

Now your job over lunch is introductions. Here's how we are going to do this – you need to nominate someone at your table to be the 'introducer' – and it can't be one of the ASI staff. Each of you need to introduce yourself to one another at your table, and then the introducer will stand up after main course and briefly introduce your table to the room.

So nominate your table introducer and introduce yourself to your table, and we will being serving main course.

[Main course served]

Welcome back. And lets hear the introductions from each table.

[Desert served]

[Main presentation]

Welcome back, I trust you enjoyed lunch and your conversation with your peers and that you explored the steps around your new member join process.

Let's move on now to our second objective of the luncheon – an update on iMIS 15.

Before I do, however, I just wanted to give a brief overview of ASI and iMIS generally.

iMIS is the only complete, upgradeable, web-based not-for-profit business software system available. iMIS provides a broad range of relationship management, marketing communications, commerce and business intelligence functionality. That all sounds fancy, but there are really some pretty basic principles here. iMIS gives you a single, complete system to manage your members, your donors, manage your events, manage education and training, manage your marketing, manage your website and process all the commerce related to your members and donors, including online e-commerce – all in the same system! But I will come back to this shortly.

So, that's one of the reasons your organization would invest in iMIS.

Another reason, and equally important, is because ASI believes in customer for life. We believe once you buy iMIS you will never have to buy another system.

Customer for life – that is a big commitment to make. And for us to make that promise, we have to do 2 things. We have to keep iMIS upgraded with both current technology and with current business practices. And secondly we have to give great service and support.

Unfortunately for us, when you first buy iMIS, customer for life is a pretty hard message for us to get across. You generally buy iMIS to solve some business problems.

For many of you, the actual reasons for buying iMIS may be lost with previous management. But that doesn’t really matter, because iMIS needs to keep solving your business problems, today and into the future. So we have to keep you up to date. Customer for life.

Which is a great introduction to iMIS 15. iMIS 15 is the next upgrade of iMIS from iMIS 10. Why the numbering? Actually this is ASI's 15th year in business. iMIS 10 was released in our 10th year, and iMIS 15 in our 15th year.

Importantly, iMIS 15 is an upgrade. It has already been shipped to you on a CD that you can use to upgrade from your iMIS 10.6 system. It is like an upgrade to Windows or to Office.

So what's new in iMIS 15?

Great question.

[slide]

The iMIS Value Cycle is a great way for me to show you what iMIS does for your organisation. And the Value Cycle also reflects our goals to help you become a world class organisation - embracing concepts like continuous improvement and excellence.

As I am sure all of you here know, iMIS does a lot more than what you are probably using of it today.

[Explain briefly and unscripted the 4 parts of the iMIS Value Cycle - how the relationship management component is like traditional CRM, etc]

If we take a typical iMIS customer today, and if I was asked to rate them on how well they use iMIS, this is what I would produce - as a typical customer.

[slide] and [pause]

Of course we would like to see a typical customer using these lower parts of the value cycle far more extensively. This is how I would like the report card to look!

[slide]

The reason I show this is that much of the new functionality in iMIS 15 is around these areas - the lower 3 - because we need you as organisations to fully embrace iMIS and we need to offer features and function in these areas that you can use. iMIS 15.0 is giving you new features to fully embrace the iMIS value cycle - and we need you to!

[pause]

I thought the best way to get my point across today is to take an example. The example is one that I hope you talked about over lunch - and that is the "new member join" process. This is process that is fairly common and I would think most of you here have some form of new member or new customer join process. So I hope the example is of relevance to you.

If I was to ask you to write down the steps of your new member join process, or to draw a flowchart of the process, typically this is what I get back.

[slide] and [pause]

Some of you may have some extra steps in there for Board approvals or checking pre-requisites, but at a very high level I would think this is pretty close. OK?

The challenge we have here however is that what we are looking at here are very functional steps. This is really a list of functions that the membership department performs. I would argue that this is not really a true picture of the overall process.

[slide]

What we need to do is take it up a level. And this really gets to the heart of the differences between functional steps and process. And that needs to happen at your level. We have to move away from the departmental silos, take the member's view on how they interact with your organisation, and really look at the end-to-end delivery of the process. This will of course impact on other processes as well once you widen your view.

We need you to drive this process thinking into your organisation. iMIS 15 can help you.

[slide]

Let me come back to the new member join process. Take 2! Once we widen out the thinking we see there are other business problems. [read the 2 problems out].

How does this impact our new member join process? Are they related? Absolutely. Let's look at the end to end process - which starts by attending an event, or purchasing a product, and does not end until they complete their renewal at the end of the first year.

[pause] then [slide]

Again, taking a typical customer, here is a process, end-to-end, that would more accurately reflect the new member join. [go through each box in turn]

You should see that this is a true process, a broader view than the functional steps I had in the first take. This is about business excellence. Continuous improvement. Managing variation.

If you think back to the iMIS Value Cycle, you will see in this process we are fully embracing the value cycle. If we implement a process like this, we are using a lot more of the iMIS functionality - and iMIS is helping us run the process and improve the process, not just recording names, addresses and transactions.

[pause] then [slide]

So process management is critical and iMIS 15 supports these principles. The principles of business excellence - integrated departments, standards, consistency, efficiency and quality.

In case you are wondering how iMIS actually supports these principles, let me briefly explain some of the modules in iMIS.

[slide]

The key functions here are controlling the process, automating the process, and measuring the process. Just for the new member join example I gave you, these are the modules of iMIS you will be using. [review slide]

[pause]

I do not want you to leave here today thinking this is just a business theory. Firstly, ASI believes in practicing what it preaches. We use iMIS to run our business, and as an example we use all of these tools to manage our sales process - our new customer acquisition process. Our data is in iMIS and the process is managed by iMIS Process Manager. What changes when you take this approach is the way you manage the business. Sure I have the standard reports - customer counts, rentention rates, revenue numbers - that all come from iMIS. But let me show what I get when l look at process management.

[slide]

These are Excel charts with the data coming directly, and live, from iMIS. Run charts are a standard form of process control - looking for variations and optimal efficiency of the process. This run chart is week by week.

[slide]

I manage the overall process by looking at different buffers along the steps of the sales process and ensuring the buffers are in range. Out of range measures - like a couple on here - need attention now. I don't have to wait until the end of the quarter to get my new member/customer join numbers. I manage the process. All this data comes directly from iMIS and iMIS Process Manager and feeds the Excel charts live.

[pause]

Finally, I mentioned earlier that ASI wants to help you be a world class organisation. To embrace the full parts of the iMIS value cycle, continuous improvement and the drive towards excellence. The Australian government also wants to help you.

[slide]

The Australian Business Excellence Framework is a national program based on quality management to help Australian organisations be world class. This slide shows the 12 princples of business excellence that have been determined by the Australian business excellence team. Take a look at some of these and notice how supports what I have been talking about with you today. Improve processes, systems thinking, using data effectively, understanding variation, customer focus, continual learning.

[pause]

There is a lot of information presented here and I realise we do need to try and keep things simple. You can get started fairly easily on the road to process management with iMIS by jumping into some process mapping.

[slide]

A swim lane diagram - like this - is a good starting point. The new member join process is also a good example process to start with. When you look at true end-to-end processes, from the customer perspective, without delving into departmental functions, you will probably see that you don't have that many processes.

ASI can help you with this.

[slide]

So let me try and wrap it up. The iMIS Value Cycle and whats new with iMIS 15. Strong use of iMIS here for most customers (relationship mgt), OK use here for commerce, but lacking in the marketing and intelligence areas. iMIS 15 will help you implement the full iMIS Value cycle. And I showed you today, using the new member join process, how you could do so.

We promise to keep you upgraded with technology and with current best practice - and we are doing that. And we promise to give you great service and support. Anytime we do not do that you need to please let me know. My email, my direct phone number and mobile are on the handout sheet.

That brings us to the end of my presentation. A couple of key date reminders before we leave. If you or one of your team want to see a demo of iMIS 15 you need to register to attend one of our free weekly webcasts – goto our website to signup. I am also very pleased to announce that the NiUG iMIS user group – a true independent user group - is now formally established in Australia. If you are an iMIS user and not already a member of NiUG you need to join.

In closing, I just want to come back to the objectives for today. Firstly networking. I trust that the lunch environment, the exclusive CEO and executive director only invitations, the table layouts, helped you meet your peers today. I welcome your feedback.

Secondly, an update on iMIS 15, the next upgrade to iMIS to keep you as a customer for life. And the iMIS value cycle – with a particular focus on process management to fully embrace iMIS in your organisation.

Myself and the other ASI team members are available here until around 2.30 if any of you have questions or would like to speak with us individually.

Otherwise - that is the end of our proceedings today, and the luncheon is now closed. Thank you for joining me.

[close]