GuruOnline Blog

Last week I gave a brief overview of one of the new IBM sets on GuruOnline all about IT Support, this week I’m going to explain a bit of what is covered in the second new IBM set about performance management and business intelligence.

Stephen Brook is from IBM Cognos Innovation Center and he explains in detail how performance management and business intelligence can work for business.

Business intelligence and performance management is really concerned with providing the tools and processes to help you make better business decisions. It tends to be characterize in terms of being able to answer three critical questions, the first is, how is my business performing? Secondly is, why is that so? (Understanding the driver behind your business) and thirdly, being able to say in the light of that, what should I be doing next? Answering the how question is usually done with tools like dashboard, score cards. Understanding why you’re getting the results you are, is something you typically do with reporting and analysis tools, finally understanding what you should be doing next is with planning and forecasting.

Stephen then goes on to explain the differences between business intelligence and performance management.
Business intelligence is sometimes characterised as having an effective corporate memory, it’s about being able to take the data you have in your organisation and turn it into useful information that people can use.
Performance management is an umbrella term that extends that concept, and talks both about understanding that process and the drivers in your business and pulling that information together then using that to make forward decisions like budgeting to forecasting.

In essence you will see improved business performance, and the ability to make better business decisions faster, that’s about being able to identify the key risks facing your business, and understanding how to mitigate them, and also about being able to identify opportunities, and very quickly put action plans in place to capture those opportunities. In practical terms, it’s about avoiding situations where people in your organisation are arguing or debating whose numbers are correct and what data is correct, because they will have the correct single version of the data at their fingertips if you have a performance management system in place.

These are just snippets from three videos, taken from a set of 17 videos. For the rest of Stephens free business advice on performance management and business intelligence, follow the link to GuruOnline to watch them all.

We’ve recently added yet another new contributor to our ever expanding list on GuruOnline, IT Performs Limited is a specialist information technology consulting firm.

IT Performs Ltd was established by like-minded Business Intelligence (BI) and Data Warehouse practitioners, who shared both a passion for the huge benefits that BI could bring to organisations, and frustrations about the failures and missed opportunities that they had historically observed – usually when called in to resolve the resulting problems.

In these unique sets, CEO Glen Westlake offers free business advice on business intelligence including how, from a manager point of view, you could benefit from business intelligence, practical approaches to implementing business intelligence, building your data warehouse, data management and data quality and management considerations for business intelligence projects.

So what exactly is business intelligence? Well, in general, business intelligence is taking your data and generating business benefit from it. So what this means is, taking data, turning it into information, creating knowledge, then getting it out to people at the right time in the right place in the right format so they can make better decisions to drive business benefit.

Due to the fact that business intelligence spans many departments and many functional areas of a company, you quite often find it exposes the differences of those parts of the organisation. The data you’re reporting at an operational level is very siloed, so you have a single set of users, a fairly narrow scope of requirements, so for example your finance package will do finance, this means they’re very isolated so they’re actually quite stable in their functionality, their requirements and the data that goes in them. As soon as they’re compared and the data is pulled together you start going across boundaries in your organisation. This usually cause issues of constancy, management issues around communication etc, so there’s a challenge there with having to pull different people together with different parts of the organisation, overcome users with different requirements, users with different skill sets (so you may have users that need information that are at the bottom of the organisation right up to users at the very top of the organisation) will have different skill sets and different views so there’s quite a broad span of enterprise, data, business and users that business intelligence has to cover which can be challenging. This challenge is addressed by only doing short deliveries into each department and have an organisational structure with a business intelligence steering committee and pull the bodies together so when there’s any conflict senior management can resolve it, prioritize and move on.

The above is just a tiny snippet of the information covered by Glen on, you can view all the sets on business intelligence in full on GuruOnline now.

Another one of the more popular Gurus is Richard Denny and his set on Sales and Selling Techniques. It’s popularity is not surprising, this is a must view set for anyone who works in sales, whether they’re new to the industry and want to discover some trade secrets or even if they’ve been in the industry for years, they’re still likely to pick up some useful tips and information.

Richard Denny explains that like a lot of people, he got into sales by accident and never aspired to work in sales as a child. After having a surplus of large eggs, which wouldn’t fit into the packaging, he sold them to Harrods marketed as large free range eggs and his empire soon expanded. In these exclusive sets, he gives away some of his trade secrets and explains how your attitude can be your best asset, so long as you know your product and industry and you believe in what your selling you can succeed.

He starts off explaining exactly what his definition of sales is; a sales person is a mind maker upper. Their job is help people make up their mind to buy the right service or product that’s right for them. The job of the sales person is to guide that process through.

One of the toughest parts of working in sales can be the rejection and being told no. Richard explains that this shouldn’t be a deterrent as a ‘no’ is only a no at that current moment in time. Your potential customer may not be interested in your product or service today, but circumstances can change, tomorrow, next month or next year, your product or service may be just what they’re looking for. By keeping in touch (but not pestering) you will stay in their mind, so, when they do want your product or service, you can turn that no into a sale.

Next to the ‘no’ response, sales people will also hear the potential customer already has a supplier which they’re quite happy with. This is another response that doesn’t necessarily mean an end to a potential sale. Asking questions is often the key to securing a sale, ask them if when they made the deal with their current supplier, they made it because they were offered the best service at the best price, (which will be the most common reason a contact was negotiated), they will more often than not agree to this, then you simply need to ask them if that still stands today. You then tell them you believe you can offer them the best service at the best price today, ask them if they would consider just giving you a trail with a small section of their business, once they’re happy with that service and you’ve earned their trust you will be able to get more business from them.

These are just a couple of snippets from dozens of videos by Richard Denny; why not take a look at the rest of Richards’s sales advice on GuruOnline now.

This week’s blog is going to look at another new contributor on GuruOnline.
Harley Young are a small niche company of ‘Change Management Specialists’
They achieve affective solutions by using sustained & absorbed change, rather than ‘moving the furniture around’. This requires external objectivity. It also requires building strong relationships with clients to help them withstand the knocks and scraps of change.

Harley Young co-founder, Philip Cox-Hynd, covers five different topics on change management and has over 140 videos currently live. He covers, how to approach organizational change, what the different parameters are for delivering successful change, change through effective management & powerful teamwork, what can stop change being successful and directing and sponsoring change.

So how do you know when your organisation needs to change? There will often be an obvious reason which would have alerted you to the notion you need to do something different, it may be a merger, an acquisition, an expansion into a different market place, a restructuring or something that is of a specific nature. To gain the buy in of your workforce it’s important to find out what for them needs to stay the same and what needs to change, you need to hear their opinions as it will give you a better indication as to where you are. This will give you an unflustered and unbiased set of opinions that can be critical and often dovetail with strategic change objective that you’ve already got in mind.

The best way to implement change is thoughtfully. Its important that the objective for change is thought through, there’s a difference between what can be called organic change, which is something that’s happening all the time to all businesses non stop, and prescriptive change or planned change. If it’s the latter than careful thought needs to be given to the objective, the time scale and what’s realistic against what’s wanted. Once it’s planned people need to be engaged with, not just talked at.

The best way to measure change is subjectively and objectively. Subjective, because opinion is critical, there are three areas they you need to collect opinions from, they are employee opinion, what do your employees feel has been successful in the change? Secondly, clients, suppliers and partners, collect antidotal evidence form them. Thirdly, senior managers should have been tasked with behaving more inline with the new company. So you need to measure the opinions of people within the organisation to how well their role modeling those new behaviours.
On the objective side, churn rate should have gone down and retention should have gone up, retained business should have been increased and new business won should have also been increased.

For more change management advice check out the rest of the sets on GuruOnline

Since GuruOnline was launched last year it’s gone from strength to strength with every month seeing more visitors than the previous one.

One of the more popular sets on Guru, are the IBM ones and in particular, Darren Adam’s sets on how to improve collaboration in a mid sized business. In one of my previous blogs I gave a brief overview of the IBM sets in general so you know all about the different great topics there are for you to chose from. In this blog I’m going to try and condense Darren’s 28 sets down into just one blog to give you a more in-depth overview of the type of free business advice on offer.

The two main themes around collaboration are the quota restrictions on inboxes and the file attachments often sent round with email. Due to the fact that a lot of organisations impose restrictions on the size of employee’s inboxes, staff end up spending time keeping their inboxes in check rather than concentrating on their actual duties. When file attachments are sent round with emails, you have no control on who can edit the content and to what extent, so you never know who’s working from the original and therefore cannot verify its content.

A simple solution to this problem would be for staff to start storing their content centrally, which would ensure everyone who needed it, has access to up to date information. The tools which are used to do this have to be easy to use and easy to integrate into everyday working life. Having documents managed centrally also gives an extra level of security as you can control who can read and edit the document too.

Another method of improving collaboration in mid sized businesses is unified communications, this is a very broad term for the unifications from a desktop point of view of access to things like telephony, voice over IP, video and unified messaging. When used properly, these tools can help utilize time effectively, for example, through instant messaging services, you can not only see at a glance whether someone is at their desk, but also whether they’re available to take a call – which is much quicker than having to phone them, maybe go through their secretary and inconvenience them if they’re busy.

Activity centric computing has to support both ad-hoc and structured modes of working. Ad-hoc, because a lot of business activity had to happen within a matter of days and will come up very quickly and therefore has to be completed quickly.
It is equally important to support structured activities as there will be many things which are repeatable on a monthly basis so the activity centric computing has to support a more template driven approach.

Comprehensive collaboration is not just for the benefit of your own business and employees, it’s very important to be able to collaborate effectively with organisations outside of your own, if you don’t, then the common denominator that you have is email. Which we already know can have too many failings.

The most important aspects in terms of collaborating outside your organisation is going to be security and access control because you’re starting to share some of your content and business processes outside of your organisation. The important thing however, is that it has to be easy for people to access not only in terms of security and login but also in terms of the tools they use on a day to day basis, what you use in your organisation might be very different to what another organisation uses, therefore open standards and an adoption and integration of commonly used business tools and productivity suits is very important to ensure you can collaborate in the same way.

This is just a brief overview of some of the things Darren talks about in his sets. For more business advice on collaboration why not check out the rest of the sets. Don’t forget, there are loads of other sets from IBM covering a whole host of topics from IT security to IT finance to information management.

If you’ve had a look round GuruOnline, you’ll know we only work with the leading figures in each industry to ensure our community gets the best free advice possible.
Our latest contributor on Guru is Aktrion who are experts when it comes to outsourcing. We currently have over 60 different videos for you to watch all answered by Aktrion’s Managing Director Chris Baumann. Chris covers all areas of outsourcing from what outsourcing is exactly; to how it can benefit your business and how to ensure your outsourcing is cost effective and efficient to your organisation.

Outsourcing is when a company allows an outside company to take responsibility for certain parts of their operation this can be done to change the working practices and efficiencies of that part of the organisation or to increase the resources which in turn increases production and output, it provides additional management support to improve the cost effectiveness of the overall operation.

This can sound a bit like an employment agency but outsourcing differs from employment agencies in several ways, for example, if your business were to go through an employment agency, they would technically by employed by you, if you were to go through an outsourcing company it would be them who would have full employment liability.
Perhaps the biggest difference between an outsourcing company and an employment agency would be the level of personnel provided. An outsourcing company would bring management to the organisation, which isn’t something an employment agency would necessarily provide, For example a professional outsourcing company could provide operational management to help implement health & safety procedures etc.

Before you start outsourcing, you need to have a clear idea of what your objectives are and long-term goals. It’s not just the transition which needs to be well planned, but also what happens after the transition that will need to be thought through too. Without everything being clearly planned out, the end results may not correlate with what was originally needed.

The above information is just a snippet taken from a couple of the sets (there are dozens more!), so for more information check out the new outsourcing sets from Aktrion and if there’s anything specific you want to know that we haven’t covered, please feel free to get in touch and we’ll do our best to help you.