Inside ASI-AP

To further strengthen the iMIS community through the independent user group - NiUG International (www.niug.org) - ASI is subsidising membership for new and existing customers. We believe NiUG membership is a positive influence on iMIS customers and we have announced the subsidy program to support that idea - for both new customers and existing customers.

The details are as follows:

Somehow I missed posting about our Q1 customer satisfaction survey so I will cover off both Q1 and Q2 in this post. While the Q2 results were slightly improved on the Q1 results - neither were great news. In fact, in Q1 we saw the lowest satisfaction numbers we have seen since we started the surveys.

The charts below show the results by question for both Q1 and Q2 separately.

ASI was pleased to host the very first meeting of 3 REI's (Real Estate Institute's) - Qld, SA and Vic (all iMIS customers) - in the Melbourne office last week, and I joined the team of REI's and ASI'ers for lunch. While both REISA and REIV have been long time users of iMIS, REIQ only recently joined the list of REI users and between the 3 organisations they agreed to meet up and share iMIS experiences. And they will be meeting up ongoing on a more regular basis as a result of the success of this last meeting. It was great for me to be able to meet with the key exec's from each and share stories over lunch. At lunch was David and Jason (SA), Ivars and Neelu (Vic), Greg (Qld) and Shearne, Colin and myself from ASI.

Sunday I flew Brisbane to LA – a 14 hour flight with me only getting about 1-2 hours sleep. Not to be encouraged. I arrived in LA at 7am with almost 8 hours between flights. I was happy that David Riffle and Marilyn were coming to meet me at the airport so we could get breakfast on the Sunset Strip. It was funny going to a restaurant with Marilyn, David and Greg and feeling that Marilyn and I would be treated as Aussies – but then Marilyn does have a US accent so she was treated as a local again and I was the only foreigner. Pancakes as big as manholes were on the menu. Hmm, I am so glad that the waitress suggested Marilyn and I share a stack since we were both ordering plain stacks. HUGE. I have attached a picture of David’s.

The rollout of iMIS 15 for Asia-Pacific region is now well underway. A summary of activity is as follows:

Existing customers upgrading - over 70 customers in the US have now upgraded to iMIS 15, and so far 1 in Australia has - Clubs NSW). We are planning to have 30% of the local customer base upgraded to iMIS 15 by the end of 2008.

New customers - All new customers that bought iMIS in the 4th quarter of 2007 are either live or being implemented on iMIS 15. The first local customer to go live was CEDA (see here) just before Christmas.

Colin and the Customer Care team kicked off the 'Preparing for iMIS 15' roadshow today in the Melbourne office. The 90 minute presentation now hits the road - Perth on 27 Feb, Wellington 5 Mar, Sydney 11 Mar and Brisbane 12 Mar (see www.advsol.com/ap/share for the details).

A copy of the presentation is here Preparing for iMIS 15 - AP 080219.ppt
and the handout here iMIS 15 Views Comparison 080131.pdf.

Many of you will remember the 'core values' PowerPoint and Enya music that I regularly play at staff meetings. It has been replaced by a new video that includes not just our core values, but staff from around the world talking about life at ASI. Included is our own Colin Bryant! Also featured is Niroo (Europe), Linda (Canada) and Sarah (US). Watch below, or visit our YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/asicommunity.

Because of Colin's US commitments and travel, he was unable to join the rest of the local management team in undertaking the AIM Graduate Certificate of Management course this year. In its place, we found a 5-day residential (live-in) management course for him to undertake, which he is doing this week.

It is the "Looking Glass" course run by the Melbourne Business School down at their Mt Eliza campus. MBS is highly regarded, and as is the Looking Glass program which is licensed from the US.

FIA have launched their new fundraising blog at http://advancingfundraising.wordpress.com/.

Sue-Anne Wallace, FIA's CEO, is an avid writer and I know that the blog approach is a great way for her to get messages out to the fundraising and wider communities. There are some great opening posts on:

The final results are in from our third quarter customer survey (previous results for Q1 and Q2 and a summary of the survey process) and we saw an improvement in most areas. The overall result for the quarter was 86% of questions being answered 'agree' or better; a total of 48 customers responded to the telephone survey. The answers were consistent across both membership and fundraising customers.

Over 94% of customers responded they were satisfied with iMIS. We also scored well (> 90%) in the questions on ASI stability, ASI technology and iMIS upgradeability.

Before heading up to Singapore on Tuesday evening, I spent the whole day of the 2nd October with Marilyn at REIQ in Brisbane. REIQ are now in the user acceptance testing phase of their implementation project – which has been going well in all areas except the education department. So part of my time was meeting with the senior team – including Dan the CEO – to remove the roadblock holding up the education testing.

My other job was to do a presentation to the majority of the REIQ office staff – split into 2 sessions – on what to expect after going live, particularly looking ahead the next 2 years. It was timely to remind people – especially as they are caught up in the grind of testing – why they bought iMIS and where the project is going.

Our biggest boardroom lunch so far was held this last week on Tuesday 25th with the invited audience being membership department executives, which over the years has been the bread and butter audience for iMIS. We had 20 guests the majority of who were customers.

I focused my after lunch speech on iMIS 15 process manager and segmentation - challenging our guests to look hard at their regular renewal processes and not just keep doing it the same way as last year. A transcript of my speech is below.

I am continuing to ask the questions on "what keeps you awake at night" and I have added the responses from this group to the wiki page here.

iMIS 15 is available for download to all customers via www.imis.com. We have still not made a general announcement to customers locally while we continue to refine the local policies around the conversion of licensing from concurrent to named users. Any customer wishing to install iMIS 15 needs a new license key. Until we make the general announcement (around the time of Discovery conference), existing customers can get an iMIS 15 license key after approval by either Colin or myself. We also have demo keys available for those customers wishing to set-up an evaluation system internally.

We held our very first IT round table event on Thursday 13 September. For me, I believe it is the best event we’ve run ever. And most of the delegates that attended agreed with strong agreement recorded on the feedback survey.

The IT round table was modelled after the annual Executive round table which we have run for 5 years now. The Executive round table is an invitation only event to our largest 10-15 customers, and for the past 2 years the customer executives at that function have suggested that we run a similar round table event specifically for their CIOs/IT managers. So we did - we invited the CIOs and IT Managers from our largest customers and hosted them in our Melbourne boardroom. We had customers fly in from NZ, Perth, Sydney and Canberra.

2 weeks ago I announced the cessation of support for Open Alms effective from 1 January 2009. All existing customers were sent letters, and these last few days Peter has been calling into all customers to confirm they have received the letter packs.

There is more information for customers on our public web site www.openalms.com.

And for staff additional information including staff FAQs is on the staff site www.advsol.com/staff - under Departments then Asia-Pacific.

A copy of the letter text sent to customers is below.