Inside ASI-AP

We held the first boardroom luncheon in Melbourne office last week on Thursday 21 May. For the last 2 years these have been called the "Managing Director's Boardroom Luncheon Series" and they ran only in Melbourne. For 2009, we have refined the format and renamed them to the "iMIS Business Excellence Luncheon Series"; and for the format, we are introducing other speakers besides just me, and will be running them in both Melbourne and Sydney.

For the lunch last week Mick Varga was the featured speaker, and the audience was IT managers and IT executives from both customers and prospective customers. We also changed the format and made the presentation style a little more hard hitting, less high level and giving more practical advice that can be put into action right away. I spoke for the first 10 minutes to provide the introduction and overview, then Mick spoke for 10 minutes between main course and dessert, and again for 10 minutes after dessert.

With the focus on iMIS Business Excellence (iBEF) for the lunch we have also started to build up the iBEF social networking site over on the NiUG website (powered by GoLightly of course!). Mick has posted a number of blog entries - including the lunch speech and slides, and a number of issues faced by organisations plus solutions to those issues. Go here for the social networking site for iBEF.

A full copy of the speech is listed out below (see the social networking site to get both the speech and slides).

Courtesy of Marla there is also a slideshow of photos:

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Luncheon speech for IT executive contacts iMIS Business Excellence Lunch 21 May 2009

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, and yes I know networking is one of those lingo-bingo buzzwords, but I would like to think of today being a little different. Firstly, all of you in the room work for non-profit organizations. The other thing all of you have in common is that you are IT executives or IT managers. 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. We will not be asking you to introduce yourself to the whole room, but I do ask that you make the time during lunch to introduce yourself amongst your table and get to know your peers.

The second objective is to talk to you about iMIS Business Excellence, which I am going to start with right now. After main course Mick Varga, the manager of the iMIS Business Excellence Program will be speaking, and then Mick will be back again to close off the luncheon with you after dessert. I did just want to take a moment to give you a brief overview of ASI and iMIS as some of you are new to the iMIS community.

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! 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 problem of the day.

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 business excellence.

Over the past year, we have been talking to many of you about the iMIS Value Cycle. Whether you use iMIS or not, this chart will help drive your organisation towards business excellence. It starts at the top with Relationship Management – essentially the CRM functions of your system – and then circles clockwise, to marketing and communication – getting the right message to the right person at the right time, and then getting the right result – a transaction – commerce – like a membership renewal, an event registration, a product sale. And then we use all that information to build business intelligence that allows us to refine our relationships, our marketing and our commerce to go around the cycle again. Continuous improvement, one of the key concepts of business excellence. Continuous improvement.

Unfortunately, while we talk about the iMIS value cycle extensively, the organisations we deal with still have difficulties in changing the way they work to implement these concepts. And that has got to change. With the regulatory reviews currently underway by state and federal governments and other forces already at work, the non-profit sector needs to embrace business excellence programs and best-practice concepts sooner rather than later. And if you are an iMIS customer we are going to be driving you this way harder than ever before. While at the same time ensuring each version of iMIS, including the latest version iMIS 15.1, allows you to implement and build on business excellence.

So for the Boardroom luncheons this year, we are going to spend more time on giving you practical solutions that you can implement today. To drive your organisation towards business excellence with iMIS. We are going to tell you things you may not want to hear and ask you to face up to problems that you may actually be a big part of. And we also acknowledge that as the IT leaders in your organisation you can play a significant part in driving forward the concepts we are talking to you about, more than ever before. And we need you to do so.

If you have been to one of my luncheons here before, you will recall that we asked you to write down and share with us "things that keep you awake at night". You have already told us the things on your mind. Let me read you some of those back:

- Producing useful reports quickly for decision making and analysis
- Integrity and accuracy of data
- Quality of data input
- Reporting accuracy
- Timeliness of finance reporting
- Profiling members and donors

We agree with you. We want you to sleep at night, peacefully! So let's agree to get started today.

If you think about the value cycle here on the screen, you will see that all the challenges I just read back to you underpin everything on the value cycle. They are like the foundation items. If you can't get those things right then the value cycle journey will be a dream. So today we need to get you started on getting the reporting and measurement basics in place.

[slide]

I want to summarise the challenges you may be facing into these six broad areas, and you can read them here on the slide. I just want to take a moment now to outline each of these areas. After main course, I am then going to ask Mick to lead the remainder of the presentation which will provide you with tactics and solutions to solve the first couple of these challenges using iMIS 15. All of this information – including more detail on some of the challenge areas that Mick will not cover today - will be emailed out to you, along with links to our social networking site and wiki pages. So rest assured you will have plenty of follow up reading resources after you leave the luncheon today.

1. Needing the IT department - for some of you this may seem like good news, for others you will realise it is bad news. We believe it is bad news too and this needs to change.

2. Not having the right information - this is more common that you might think and people seem to accept it. But you shouldn't, it is just not good enough to keep doing so. And this leads directly onto

3. Where we put everything to Excel and go off an collect the data manually. Also not good enough anymore.

4. Some organisations do manage to get all their reporting out of the one system, but then there are so many variations and exceptions to processes that the numbers mean nothing.

5. This is related to the ability to be able to get trend and time-based data into your reporting, to look at trends over time. This needs business intelligence style thinking and systems, including implementing data warehouse concepts, and less than 10% of you actually do this.

6. And finally, an item which is the flow on effect of the previous 5 points, is that we can't embrace continuous improvement where we add or change a process and then can't tell if it made the business performance better or worse.

While you are having your lunch, I would like you to spend just 2 minutes completing a very quick survey on your organisation. Mick is going to be talking about these topics after main course, but we would like to get you thinking now and making a quick assessment of your organisation's current status in these areas. On the left hand side you will see a list of issues and challenges. Against each one, you just need to tick the column for "yes" – that is, yes we have this issue at our organisation; or "no" for no we don't have this issue at our organisation; or if you don't know if you do or don’t, then just tick the "don't know" column. We will be collecting these up towards the end of the luncheon and will use them to have a follow up discussion with you on your next steps towards business excellence with iMIS 15. One last task before we eat - 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.

[Main course served]

As Paul said, I will talk about solutions to address some of the issues he has raised. I want to spend the next few minutes talking about something you can start doing the minute you get back to your office - is removing the IT department as the bottleneck for effective access to the organisations data.

The IT department has to stop being an obstacle in getting the necessary information from key systems. I don't think that anyone here wants to spend time, nor have members of their departments spending time, building one-off reports. Yet, I'm sure most of you commit hundreds or even thousands of hours of IT staff time spent doing just that. Creating reports that get used once or twice and by one person, never to be seen again.

Constant requests - Can you tell me how many members based in Melbourne attended the course on Wine appreciation, or How many new members have we added in the eastern suburbs in the last 6 months – I'm sure you can identify with these. Think about your reporting menus in iMIS – littered with reports that were built for a single purpose, run once, never to be run again.

To address this, access to data needs to be available in ways that are both more structured and simpler. Users need generate ad hoc queries completely by self-service and to be able to start building most reports themselves.

Your focus – the focus of the IT team - needs to be on delivering the ability to do this to users. This goes beyond tools. Providing better tools is only one piece of the puzzle.

Things you should do include:

- Be structured and holistic. Stop building one-off case-by-case reports. Responding to requests for information on a case-by-case basis is not scalable.

- Build a data access framework – a library - of business objects and queries. This is a set of queries and business objects that lock in key business rules and definitions. Do this instead of reports. From now on, when asked for a one-off report, break it down to the core business definitions and build those. Then show the person making the request how to build the query or report themselves (unless of course it's the CEO – then just build what they ask for).

- Use the framework as the basis for all information extracted from the system. Separate presentation from data access. Using technology now available, the same set of queries can have multiple uses – delivering data to your website via web services, as the basis for target groups in Informz email campaigns, as marketing target lists and segmentation jobs, and to serve data to dashboards, reports and ad hoc queries. The more you commit to this, the more queries and object are used, the more robust and complete they will become.

- Make sure the processes and rules for how you manage the library of objects and queries are clear and documented. This should include where objects and queries are stored, who can access what and naming conventions.

- Continuously train your user community in how to use the framework that has been created. Train them in leveraging the objects and queries by either building queries on queries and joining queries together, or both. And train them in the best way to manage their own library of queries. Publicise constantly. Just building it will not make it work.

[slide]

To illustrate how this might look, I've put together a couple of screen shots with some simple examples.

Firstly, the concept of query on query. The example is obviously very simple, but the concept is powerful. The rules that go into defining a customer could be complex and potentially involve joining together many pieces of information and creating complicated selection criteria.

[slide]

To the user building on top the core query, that doesn't matter. They simply choose to base subsequent queries on the all customers query and add their own refinements as much simplified selection criteria.

Not only does this become something that a user can do simply, but we now have a single set of business definitions. Now, the definition for a customer is locked down. The membership department can't have a different definition to the events department.

[slide]

The next concept is joining queries to create a subset. Here I have 2 or 3 standalone queries that can be used in their own right.

[slide]

I can run a query to get a list of customers that have attended a specific event, where I just enter the event code.

[slide]

I can also run a query to get a list of prospects in a particular state. These are both queries with defined rules and criteria that have been locked down.

[slide]

I can them simply join them together to get the subset of these queries, by once again just using the ability to add queries as sources and to then join them together.

[slide]

The result is the subset list. All the selection criteria, including selections available at runtime provided without any additional effort. It really is 2 minutes to build once the base queries had been built.

[slide]

And lastly, to start adding some reporting features. In 15.1, by choosing the new report option from the IQA menu, I get stuff like pagination, the ability to add the report straight to the iMIS menu and to export it out to add further formatting in SSRS.

[slide]

I get subtotals.

[slide]

And totals.

[slide]

And better export options with improved report style look and feel.

one of this will happen, though, unless you commit to this underlying fundamental change. You need to commit to enabling your users get self-service access to their data. It won't happen by just providing the raw tools. You need to create the framework and structure on top of the tools.

Or, of course, you can just keep building one-off report after one-off report.

This is something that is in your direct control that you can start action on now.

[Dessert served]

For my second and last few minutes, I want to look at something that might be a longer term initiative for you. It is intended as a means of explaining why being process focussed and getting accurate and timely data is so important to effective measurement.

To start, here is a dashboard that has been created in iDashboards. I like to think of this as checking the pulse of the organisation, or maybe checking its vital signs. It is real time reporting with the data coming straight from our data access framework. Because we've put in the effort of creating this, we know all the definitions on here are consistent and correct.

We can see lots of figures that relate to how the organisation is tracking. I guess that these are the typical things that you look at now. Perhaps not quite as nicely displayed, or as well integrated into iMIS so that you see them every time you log in, but definitely reported on in some way.

I want to draw your focus to the Membership Retention area of the dashboard and look at the retention of new members. As you can see, this area if showing as at risk. We're in the Amber area – we haven't achieved our goal.

What I see occur at most organisations do when this becomes apparent is that they call a management meeting and ask the management team, or maybe just the relevant manager, to explain the result. The answers will tend to be fairly anecdotal. At the moment, global economic conditions will certainly get a mention. Or maybe the most recent story that manager heard from a lapsed member will come up and all the blame will be attributed there. But very rarely will there be cold hard facts.

But being process focussed means we have the facts. Let's take a step back and look at defining a process to see how this helps.

[slide]

We started with some analysis of historical data. This told us that there is a better retention rate of new members when they attend at least 1 event in the first year of membership.

[slide]

So we define and document a process that outlined what we do to ensure first year member retention

[slide]

And we build a Process Manager process that outlines what steps and tasks we should complete to support this. Now, the outcome of each step is recorded in iMIS so all the information we need is in iMIS and all we have to do is run a report

[slide]

In this case, another Dashboard. When we look at this, the answer is obvious. Our first year member event attendance is down. We know from our analysis when we defined the process that we need 1st year members to attend events. There is no story – it's just a fact and we can now make decisions based on this.

We can run a special campaign targeted at new members, for example, or survey them on our event offerings to see if we have the right product offerings for them.

The fact that we have defined and implemented an agreed process where we have predicted outcomes based on each process step mean we can measure effectively. We can look at each step and pinpoint problems and opportunities.

But it has to start with a commitment to defined process.

[Closing remarks - by Paul]

That brings us to the end of the presentation. A couple of key date reminders before we leave.

If you or one of your team would like to see a demo of iMIS 15 you need to register to attend one of our free webcasts – there are both live and on-demand webcasts – goto our website for the schedule. I am also very pleased to announce that the NiUG iMIS user group – a true independent user group - is formally established in Australia. If you are an iMIS user and not already a member of NiUG you need to join. They are running a user group conference late in October and everyone in this room should be attending that conference.

With iMIS we promise to keep you upgraded with technology and with current best practice and business excellence - 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. In closing, I just want to come back to the objectives for today. Firstly networking. I trust that the lunch environment, the exclusive IT executives only invitations, the table layouts, helped you meet your peers today. I welcome your feedback.

Secondly, achieving business excellence with iMIS 15, and giving you practical solutions to start your organisation on the journey towards business excellence. Myself, Mick 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]