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

We held our very first boardroom luncheon in Sydney yesterday. We have run these in our Melbourne boardroom for over a year now and they have been well regarded, and with the growth of our Sydney business it was time to run them in Sydney as well. Of course we don't have the same boardroom in Sydney as we do Melbourne, so we booked into Prime restaurant in the basement of the GPO building in Martin Place and enjoyed a nice 2 course lunch.

We had a combination of existing iMIS customers and prospective iMIS customers attend, including a few of our 10+ year customers from the earliest days we were in Sydney. The invited group were membership managers and executives and there was plenty of discussion around membership performance in the GFC.

We held the June boardroom luncheon in the Melbourne office today Tuesday 23 June. 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, with the first Sydney lunch coming up later this week.

For today's lunch Mick Varga was the featured speaker, and the audience was marketing and development managers / executives from both customers and prospective customers. 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.

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.

Home page for the monthly boardroom luncheons. Links to blog postings and speech transcripts for each luncheon:

2009

I hosted our final boardroom lunch of the year this week - 29th October - and we had an invited audience of membership department 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 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.

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.

Last but not least in a big few weeks of iMIS Friendraising launches (see posts on Pink Ribbon Breakfast and Light the Night), the Cancer Council Victoria (CCV - www.cancervic.org.au) launched their latest fundraising event "Girls Night In" at www.girlsnightin.com.au. The Victorian home page is shown below:

CCV is part of the national Cancer Council group that are deploying the Artez online fundraising solution all around Australia. In Victoria, since CCV are also iMIS customers, they are also implementing the iMIS Friendraising bridge.

Two big website launches this week for iMIS 15 .Net Content Manager. I already posted about the AFI website launch, and then just 3 days later the Global Illumination website www.globalillumination.org.au - went live for the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF www.nbcf.org.au).

This website was launched hot on the heels of the Pink Ribbon Breakfast website that I posted about here and rounded out a big couple of weeks for our teams.

The Australian Film Institute (AFI) purchased iMIS 15 earlier in the year. They went live with their back office system back in May to support their membership, events and the voting for the annual AFI Australian Film Awards - with Leo doing most of the project. For those that don't know much about the AFI, and if you like films, their annual membership of just $55 per year is a great deal - since it gives you discounts at all cinemas plus a chance to attend the screenings of Australian films in the lead up to the awards.

This week they launched their new .Net website - www.afi.org.au - using the iMIS 15 Content Manager module. The website was implemented in just a few weeks by Nasser and his team at Avion Software. This week was a soft launch with just content only available so far; later in the month the functional pieces we be added including the member only area, online join, online renewals and other functions for competition and voting registration.

Recently we purchased a Google Search Appliance to beef up the search functionality of the various ASI websites - and we have named it the Googlebox. It is currently available internally at the URL http://googlebox/.

The Googlebox is not just able to index website content but in fact anything in our systems - including SQL databases and Exchange email boxes. As most of you know we do have a lot of information stored in our own iMIS SQL database including all SMRs, community postings, consulting project postings, enhancement requests and other things. This will now go into a single search index on the Googlebox along with all of our websites, the docs.imis.com online manuals and files from Clarity.

We have invested over a hundred thousand dollars since the start of the year in our new hosting servers in Melbourne. Similar projects have also been undertaken in the US, Canada and UK hosting centres - the total spend worldwide is now just under $800,000. We have moved to a virtualised environment where we can manage a hundred or more customers on a single server cluster, instead of having to manage over a hundred individual servers. We are using VMWare ESX Server, which is the server infrastructure product of the same VMWare we have been using on our desktops for iMIS demos for a couple of years now. ESX actually runs Linux as it's core operating system, and on top of that it can run hundreds of Windows Servers, all virtualised.

I have seen a few issues of late with some data conversions so I thought this article that appeared in AIM's Management Today June 2008 edition would be timely reading for everyone. The article is called "Moving Critical Data" and it outlines 4 golden rules of successful migrations:

#1 - Data migration is a business issue
#2 - The business knows best
#3 - No one needs perfect data
#4 - If you can't count it, it doesn't count.

The full article is attached here: moving_critical_data_08.pdf

Colin, Liza and I sat in on a brown bag session given by Das last week on how to access the iMIS Analytics data warehouse via ProClarity. While the Analytics engine has been available on our internal iMIS client system for some time, it has now been made available to all managers globally, thus putting the information in the hands of people who can make something of it and do something about it. The US managers had their brown bag intro session some weeks ago.