Inside ASI-AP

Meeting at the EMA Central offices in Wellington, right after the iBEF Exec Forum - Bob Alves and Paul Ramsbottom from ASI

Paul Winter (CEO) and David Brandon (Corp Svcs Mgr) from EMA Central

"better business practices"

Lack of web functionality in iMIS and Coresoft compared to what they already had with Pivotal – this surprised them

Still using Pivotal for lookup - really??

"Disappointed" about what can be done on the web - compared to Pivotal

Justification for iMIS
1. give members the ability to manage their own communication streams
2. straight thru processing from the web into iMIS

Bob Alves and Paul Ramsbottom in Auckland, 2 Sep 2009

The first week of June marked the beginning of Customer Briefings - the topic: iMIS 15.1 Maximise your Potential. So far we have presented in Perth and Wellington. Other capitals are being scheduled for the coming month.

The purpose of the briefing is to show a lot of the great new features of 15.1. Customers will see a lot of benefit in Site Designer, Content Designer, IQA Improvements and also SSRS support (SQL Server Reporting Services). There is real potential in 15.1 for every customer.

As part of the briefing we also recommend every customer review their iMIS usage regularly - get back to basics and make sure you are making the most of your current investment. We provide each attendee with a personalised iMIS Value Cycle profile for their organisation to help them have meaningful discussions with their Customer Sales Executive or other ASI Staff.

ASI Customer Sales staff are hitting the road in June to host a series of face to face Customer Briefings that will coincide with the release of iMIS 15.1.

Perth - Thursday 4 June
Wellington - Thursday 11 June
Melbourne, Brisbane & Sydney dates to be confirmed

The briefings will offer customers the opportunity to catch up with the local iMIS Community and meet with ASI staff.

Presented will be valuable information on:
• New features of iMIS 15.1 - the latest release of iMIS
• The iMIS Get Smart initiative - a roadmap for navigating the economic downturn
• Recession-Buster discounts available to iMIS customers.

After being in cold London for a week, I arrived in DC Sunday evening and although the temperature was lower, it felt warmer – at least for the first day. The week started off cool (-2 to 1 C) then got cold (-4 to -1 C) and then by Sunday warmed up (-1 to 11 C) - completely different to Melbourne.

It was a busy week with meetings. I started Monday with Moji going through some process and other training items in using the Customer Care Dashboard and opportunity management. I met with Beau Harbin regarding iMIS Training as he is now managing the schedule in the US – we spent time discussing strategy for getting more customers to training, including courses, segmentation and promotion. The rest of the day was spent time catching up on emails.

Friday night I flew from Melbourne to London via Hong Kong. Although I have done this long flight before, it is normally on the way home to oz not towards work. I arrived in London to stay with a friend who is a school teacher there. The weather all week ranged from -2 to 5 degrees Celsius. Sunday we took the opportunity to walk around the city and even took a ride on a ‘duck’ boat on the Thames.

Monday I was in the London office meeting with Niroo Rad (ASI Europe MD) regarding our Customer Care staff meeting that week. In the afternoon I took the train to the Steyning office which is just over an hour train ride. The Steyning office is based in a small town with the office above a Butcher and Pet store.

iMIS Webcasts will be back in 2009. We're offering a range of webcasts suitable for customers currently using iMIS as well as prospective iMIS customers. Apart from our Intro to iMIS overview we will focus also on Friendraising, Social Networking, Marketing Suite in the first few months of 2009. Details and to register at www.advsol.com/ap/webcasts.

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.