Inside ASI-AP

Liza and I had an introductory meeting this week with our new Authorised iMIS Consultant (AiC) in New Zealand - Mr Bruce McPhail from Karapoti Consulting - www.karapoticonsulting.co.nz.

Bruce has been working with a number of iMIS customers in NZ for the past year but recently agreed to formalise his relationship with us by becoming authorised and formally joining the iMIS community. Bruce is a 25 year industry IT veteran and brings this experience to iMIS customers.

The outcome of the call with Bruce was to outline a training plan to fill the gaps in Bruce's iMIS skills and to help him drive customer satisfaction for iMIS customers in NZ.

The Wednesday after conference was a full day for me with Chairman's Circle breakfast in the morning and then a full day Board meeting followed by a Board dinner.

The Chairman's Circle are the top AiSP's selected on an annual basis; for 2008 it is about 16 organisations. At the breakfast – which is hosted by Bob and Don – we handed out a draft of the Product Development Outlook document, which is a new document that we intend to publish next month on the iMIS product plans through to 2010. This document has been requested by customers and AiSPs for a couple of years now to help them plan better and get aligned with iMIS releases and technology. The AiSPs were very happy to be asked for feedback and they had some great suggestions on how to make the document a little better. I also spent a lot of time talking about the iBEF program and we explored ways we could have the Chairman Circle AiSPs adapt all or parts of the iBEF program in their own businesses with their own customers. This also got some great feedback and as a result we will be making more formal plans to do this.

A copy of the presentations given both my Steven Tan from Ingram Micro and myself on Friday 5th October are attached below. See this blog posting for the full story.

The lunch on Friday 5th October was hosted by TAK Systems, Ingram Micro and Sun Microsystems. It brought together technology partners, including ASI and a local managed hosting service provider – with about 7 non-profits and the NCSS (National Council of Social Service). The format of the lunch was similar to the MD Boardroom lunches that I host in Melbourne each month, but more interactive and more open discussion. Also, the non-profit invitees were sent some questions by Chris (TAK) in advance regarding challenges they may be facing in the areas of: 1) Managing information; 2) fund raising methods and analytics; 3) communications; 4) events and activities; and 5) process management.

On Friday morning 5th October Keith, Chris (TAK) and I spent a couple of hours in a closed partner briefing session for 4 hand selected Ingram Micro (IM) resellers to invite them into the iMIS/Sun bundle program. These resellers already have customers in the non-profit sector and will be offered pre-configured iMIS and Sun hardware bundles for different size non-profits, along with implementation services from our Singapore AiSP TAK Systems.

Keith and Chris outside the IM head office

Last week, on my first trip to Singapore this year, I finally got to meet Chris Tan, the director of TAK Systems, our Singapore AiSP (and previous training posts here and here).

Chris is a few years younger than me, but we have a lot in common in our careers so far. Like me, he was running a small IT business during his years at university; and like me, he also studied engineering (robotics). After completing his studies, he built up his business into a full time job and has never looked back.

N.Selvam Consult has been an authorised iMIS consultant for the past year in Kuala Lumpur supporting WWF Malaysia. This month, they have taken the next step and signed up as a full Authorised iMIS Solution Provider (AiSP) – and now they can sell and install iMIS (instead of just installing). Keith has been working for the last few months with N.Selvam to explain the benefits of becoming an AiSP. Welcome to Selvam and his team to the AiSP community.

Last week saw the start of the iMIS training for the new AiSP TAK Systems. In this session we did the iMIS overview of the basic iMIS modules (Including Customers, Events, Billing, AR Cash and Fundraising). This week David and Keith will be conducting sales training and I will then follow up next week with iMIS implementation process training.

Chris also kindly showed me around Singapore and introduce me to some of the local culinary as this was my first visit to Singapore.

Pictured below is the team from TAK systems

Top left to right: Gordon, Jian, Paul & Denis
Bottom left to right: Paul & Chris

Keith has finalised the training program for our new Singapore based AiSP - TAK Systems - and we get straight into it from next week. TAK signed up with ASI last month (see here).

Next week (week of 27th Aug) Jason will be travelling to Singapore to conduct 3 days of iMIS overview training. The following week (week of 3rd Sep) Keith and David will be in Singapore conducting sales training, plus doing a number of meetings with prospective customers. And finally, the week after that (week of 10th Sep) Jason is going back to complete the initial batch of training with 2 days of iMIS technical implementation training.