Inside ASI-AP

I have been pretty occupied over the past couple of weeks helping out the consulting team with their current workload spike so have not had a chance until now to write up the week that Bob visited. Bob arrived on the Monday morning and after checking into the hotel came over to the Melbourne office to join the 1pm pizza lunch and listened to the CEO quarterly briefing. The rest of Monday and into the evening was spent on rehearsals for the exec round table event.

Tuesday and Wednesday was down at the Sofitel at Weribee Mansions for the 2008 Executive Round Table Briefing. I will post about that event separately, but suffice to say Bob believed it was the best round table event yet.

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.

The interviews for the initial round of candidates for our third Business Development Manager get underway this week to take advantage of David, Bob and Julie all being here in person. The current plan is to have one interview in Melbourne and two in Sydney. The new BDM will be joining Amanda and Martin in the new business group which is dedicated to bringing in new customers to iMIS. Both Amanda and Martin exceeded quota last year, and that along with a continued confidence in the new business market is a trigger to hire to ensure we capitalise on all of the right opportunities (with an emphasis here on the word 'right' - where the potential customer and ASI are aligned in strategies and values). At the same time we are continuing to work on our sales process cycle optimisation although it is harder than expected - but are committed to an outcome that will see higher quota's for both Amanda and Martin.

It was just Lap joining me for lunch today from Melbourne office for our first quarter recognition luncheon. Lap was awarded the core value award of "respect" in the first quarter of 2008 - congratulations Lap! After a year of going to Rockpool each quarter I thought we would try a new restaurant this year, so it was back to Crown again and to the new restaurant right next door to Rockpool - Bistro Guillaume (www.bistroguillaume.com.au).

While promoted as french bistro style the prices were high-end restaurant but luckily the food was outstanding, and I would certainly go back. Lap enjoyed for the first time ever snails for entree and a souffle for dessert !

Further to my post a few weeks ago on how blogs can improve the shared communication process in place of email, I read some other posts today which share other useful ideas. The original post was from Tantek Celik on how email is not working for him, and this was picked up by Merlin Mann of 43 Folders on email insanity. 43 Folders is a great website full of useful ideas for improving personal productivity and provides coverage on the book Getting Things Done (or GTD).

The annual consulting satisfaction survey is underway again with email invitations to complete the survey being sent to all ASI direct customers globally. Note that we are using Informz for iMIS for both the email and the online survey.

A total of 3,200 email invitations were sent with almost 800 opened as of Friday. Over 100 surveys have been completed in full (that is a direct customer who has actually used ASI Consulting recently), and half of those have been from AP. The average time to complete the survey so far has been 4.5 minutes. If you are talking to customers please encourage them to complete the survey to help us understand how we can continue to improve our consulting services and performance.

I hosted our first boardroom lunch of the year yesterday - 30th April - and we had an invited audience of finance managers and finance executives. We had a slightly smaller crowd than expected with a few same day cancellations but overall I was very happy with who was in attendance.

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 am adopting a new theme based on the 7 business drivers of high-performance non-profits and the iMIS Business Excellence Framework (iBEF). The 2 business drivers I used for this luncheon were "automation" and "process".

I always look forward to a busy schedule of events in the office as it means more and more people get to come in and visit us and hear our message. I am not completely convinced a message needs to be heard "8 times, 8 ways" before it sinks in, but I am convinced that the message needs to be communicated a number of times from different people. And for me the events we run are a key part of that communication.

This week we have the iMIS Friendraising seminar in Melbourne and Sydney (see here for event info), we have the MD Boardroom luncheon in Melbourne and we have some customers coming in for training.

As previously advised, ASI AP is a member of VECCI’s Grow Me the Money Program which encourages businesses to be environmentally aware. The following tip is from their latest Forum:

Most computers in Australia incorporate ENERGY STAR technology, the international standard for energy efficient electronic equipment. When enabled ENERGY STAR reduces the amount of energy consumed by a computer by automatically switching it into a 'sleep' mode when it's not being used. ENERGY STAR settings on your home or office computer are accessed via the Control Panel.

On a desktop computer running Microsoft Windows:

I apologise that some of you were not aware of the current job positions open in AP. Open positions are always on our corporate website, plus depending on how we are recruiting may also be up on Seek (search on iMIS or ASI). The current positions are:

It was great for Liza, Stuart and Shearne to come to the US this week and attend the Innovations conference for the first time. To sit in the opening session with some 150 people – who are just from AiSPs and ASI staff only! – makes you realise what ASI is, and what ASI has built over the years. Everyone in the room and their families depend on iMIS and ASI doing the right thing, and to me that is pretty moving. And that extends to all the staff that work at our AiSPs – and some of our largest AiSPs now have 30+ staff each dedicated to iMIS. They all depend on iMIS now and for the years to come. I take my part of that responsibility very seriously.

I had a number of company meetings to attend today related to some potential acquisitions so I only got to see a couple of sessions, none of them before lunch. At lunch the President's Awards were announced – I blogged about this earlier.

After lunch I attended the session on add-on products to iMIS mainly to listen in on the latest from Informz. The good news is that Informz will be sending someone to the NiUG Discovery conference here later in the year. I was particularly impressed to hear that some 300 iMIS customers now use Informz for iMIS (www.InformzforiMIS.com)! They showed the new adhoc query integration and also announced the new servers they have in Canada (which overcomes the objections some customers have with US law). There was also a demo of the CSA (Customer Service Alerts) and TaskCentre integration which is remarkably simple but opens up many opportunities for automated workflow.

We have a substantial number of AP staff travelling to the US over the coming weeks to attend our "Innovations" (www.advsol.com/innovations) staff and partner conference, as well as attend other scheduled meetings held at the same time. This is the only time of the year a large number of ASI global staff (100+) come together at the same time for training and product updates. I have decided to send 8 people from the AP team this year - our most ever - to ensure we make the most of iMIS 15 related activities for customers and potential customers. It is a substantial investment but I am already very positive about the outcomes and the opportunities that iMIS 15 brings to everyone.

I was interviewed recently for an article that has now been published in the February issue of Business Community Intelligence (BCI). The article, "Small Investment - Big Change: making a difference as a small to medium enterprise", discusses corporate responsibility and specifically our efforts in establishing a program including the ASI SMART Company Scholarship Fund.

A copy of the article in full is available to ASI staff at this private link.

Business Community Intelligence is an initiative of Our Community (www.ourcommunity.com.au). BCI is Australia's Premier Corporate Responsibility Newsletter designed specifically for the Australian business scene, with an eye to best practices and cutting-edge corporate responsibility thought leadership from this country and abroad. Issued quarterly, it provides case studies, community engagement ideas, insights, tools, and information on what works and what doesn't.

For those that need to meet with US staff, note that the US started daylight saving time this week. 9am Melbourne time is now 6pm VA time and 5pm TX time. Note that this will change again once we go off daylight saving time early in April. Useful world time zones website here: www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/.