Inside ASI-AP

A number of you have asked me recently how come my blog here is not getting updated as often as it used to.

The main reason is that I have moved to a new tool called Yammer (www.yammer.com) which is like Twitter but it is internal to ASI. Which means I can talk about confidential goings-on at customers and it stays confidential within ASI staff. We have been using Yammer for about 3 months now.

I like Yammer because you can post short snippets, like Twitter, and post often. It requires a lot less thinking than putting together a blog entry.

Of course the downside is that outside of ASI you can't see what is going on, which was the whole point of this blog in the first place ....

I sat in on the iMIS 15.1 customer briefing in Melbourne last Thursday, which was the first one of these I have been to this year. Marla has already posted photos and Colin also posted about the customer briefing series.

We had the biggest attendance so far for the Melbourne seminar which was held in our boardroom, with 60 guests registered. We hired in some additional seats and the seating was more comfortable than I was expecting.

Colin spoke well to a fairly long presentation of 50+ slides (PDF version here iMIS Customer Briefing Melbourne July 09.pdf) but I really feel we have some work to do in improving the way we explain the benefits of the 15.1 upgrade. The presentation was good in explaining what new things are on offer with 15.1 including some of the current promotions, but what was lacking was explaining the benefits to the customer.

We held our first luncheon of the year with our CEO and general manager contacts last Wednesday under the iMIS Business Excellence branding. It was our largest lunch so far and I think reflective of the importance of non-profits, and in particular our customers, understanding the importance of business excellence, and in particular iMIS Business Excellence, in the current environment.

To have 24 CEO's and GM's in the room listening to our message is a great outcome and on top of that, we just get better and better at delivering the message. Similar to the last few lunches, I did the opening 10 minutes, and then after main course Mick spoke for just under 10 minutes, and then Mick spoke again after desert.

Following on from our recent results of making the top 50 great places to work in Australia (previous posts here, here and here), this article is the first in a series on the actual results for the survey questions that everyone completed towards the end of 2008.

The questions were divided into 5 major areas - credibility, respect, fairness, pride and camaraderie. For each article I am going to cover off one of these areas, and then over the remainder of the year there will be continued discussion on individual points as we work to make ASI an even better place to work.

The annual iBEF Executive Forum for our top 10 or so customers was held last Wednesday and Thursday at the Peppers Torquay Sands Resort, south west of Melbourne.

We welcome Kelly Jones and Pauline Hipkin to the local ASI team. Both started on the same day - Wednesday 13 August 2008. After spending time with Julie first up Wednesday morning, then joining myself and some of the other ASI managers for lunch, it was straight into bootcamp with Jay and Kevin; photo below in the team room with Kevin.

Thursday morning I had the ASI strategy and industry overview sessions of the Bootcamp, pictured below are Kelly and Pauline in the boardroom listening to my presentation. What you can't see is the dancing going on - part of my regular strategy Powerpoints - "The Star Wars theme", "I'm so excited" and "I'm on the road again" all get a short play!

For the past 7 years we have run an annual executive briefing/forum for our top 15 association customers, and since last year we have also added a twice yearly IT round table for that same group of customers. For the first time we are taking the executive forum program to our top fundraising customers.

While we have had a number of large fundraising customers for the past few years, with strong sales in the last year into large fundraising organisations we now have a core group of at least 20 organisations that give us the numbers to run our first executive forum.

The executive forum is scheduled for Wednesday 3 September to be held in our temporary Sydney office. A save the date email has just been sent out - copy below. This is an invitation only event where we have invited the senior executive responsible for iMIS in each of our top fundraising customers. The agenda will be high level and based around the concepts of the iMIS Business Excellence Framework program and the 7 business drivers of high performance non-profits.

The first event run by our new iMIS 15 customer - the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF) www.nbcf.org.au - is now live online and ready for registrations, sponsors and donations. The Pink Ribbon Breakfast is a well known annual event with many high profile stars as ambassadors led by chief ambassador Sarah Murdoch.

The Pink Ribbon Breakfast website www.pinkribbonbreakfast.org.au went live this week using the iMIS Friendraising module. The registration home page is shown above.

On Thursday 24 July we hosted our 2nd IT Round Table event in the Melbourne office. This is an invitation-only event for the IT managers of our largest customers and customers in the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF) program. It followed on from the Executive Forum we ran for the same group of customers earlier in the year (for the Exec Forum the invitations are for COO's and senior executives). I posted some notes on our preparation here.

Based on feedback from the IT round table last year we are going to run these 1 day events every 6 months. The next one is scheduled for November and we will move to Sydney for that event.

I missed posting both the customer survey results for Q1 and the BSC results. So this is a catch up for Q1. I should have the Q2 results done in the next couple of weeks, so look out for those then.

Q1 is a great example of how the BSC works as a management system. Before the BSC we generally managed the business on financial results. But in the balanced scorecard, financial results are only 1 perspective of 4 total perspectives. The financial results for Q1 in AP were outstanding, and without the BSC everyone would be happy. But if you look at our BSC strategy map below you will see we have some significant red areas in the 3 other perspectives. And since it flows from bottom up, reds will eventually flow up and lead to poor financial outcomes if they are not addressed now.

The dates and location have been set for the AP NiUG Discovery conference - set for Wednesday 15 October to Friday 17 October up at the Australis Noosa Lakes Resort in Noosaville (on the Sunshine Coast).

Already there is a large contingent of international speakers confirmed for the conference - including Marty Rabenovets (ASI's Director of Product Management), Doug Morris (CEO of CSI Inc. and NiUG International board member), Rob Wenger (CEO of Higher Logic) and Jeff from Informz.

On Friday 1 August we moved out of our North Sydney office which had been our Sydney home for the past 4 years. In fact we have been in North Sydney since Jason first moved there to open up our Sydney presence over 6 years ago.

Now we start our move into the Sydney CBD. For a few reasons - firstly to get higher quality premises equal to our Melbourne office, to get access to flexible boardrooms so we can run events in our office, to be closer to customers, and to be closer to central public transport. These are all the same reasons we moved our Melbourne office into the CBD last year. The Melbourne office move has been one of the best things we have done and I would like to see similar success with the Sydney move.

Customers that purchased iMIS 15 recently in the Asia-Pacific region include:

Malaysian Nature Society (live)
Starlight Childrens Foundation (mid implementation)
Leukemia Foundation (event pilot live)
National Breast Cancer Foundation (mid implementation)
Professional Golfers Association (PGA) (implementation not yet started)
Australian Film Institute (AFI) (live)
Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (implementation about to start)
Australian Orthopedic Association (implementation just starting)
Aged & Community Care Victoria (ACCV) (live)

Please welcome all to the iMIS community!

June is our half-year for financial reporting so it is a significant set of results. In AP we have had a record 6 months - and not just beating previous results by a few % points, but in fact smashing them. Revenues were just under $4m for the 6 months - 15% ahead of budget and 34% ahead of last year. And all that with no increase in headcount - in fact there has been a decrease.

EBITDA results have also been strong ahead of both last year (by $500k) and budget (by $300k). Of particular significance is that Q2 was a great quarter in it's own right, further extending the already ahead of budget results posted in the first quarter (see full story on Q1 financials).

With the new VMWare ESX infrastructure now live in our Melbourne hosting centre (see previous post) we have updated our hosting prices to reflect the new options for virtual dedicated servers. If you haven't seen the new price sheet contact me. In essence the pricing is broadly the same - but customers will receive a better solution - virtual dedicated servers instead of shared servers. For some configurations the new pricing is even a little lower.

We have added the option to sign 1, 2 or 3 year contracts (previously hosting did not require a contractual commitment to any period other than a month). Longer term contracts attract bigger discounts off the standard prices, so there is some incentive for customers to sign longer terms with us, save some money and get a better solution.