Looking at Life Cycle Management February 15, 2008
Posted by Steve Cochran in Business Community Management.Tags: community management, compliance, enablement, Life Cycle Management
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Business Community Management starts with getting everyone onboard, engaged, and working together. Once this is accomplished, many feel they are free to move on. In reality, these individuals are making a simple assumption that the community onto itself is static. As with most challenges, business community management is an ongoing battle. It’s like going on a diet, focusing and working through it, and then going back to the way you were once you reach your goal. It doesn’t work.
Think about the management of a community as a life cycle event. It’s dynamic, and requires attention and focus in order to maintain its efficiency to the extent that if you don’t continue to focus on it, it will become stale and ineffective over time. For example, just thinking about managing who’s in the community. People come and go all the time—especially if you take the concept of a supplier community. There are companies who are being added to the community that fall on their own because they can’t produce, they may be torn out because they don’t produce well enough, they may get distracted with customers that aren’t viable, or there are simply just too many alternatives and they get kicked off a list. There are a thousand companies that come and go, and they come and go every day, especially in a large community. Exit points and entry points are in the top level of managing a community.
Once a company’s in the community: who in that company is the right individual to engage to get things done in that company in maintaining and keeping track of that level of point of contact and keeping it current so that if there is an issue that needs human interaction, the right person is there to react to it? Again, people come and go out of jobs, get sick, and leave the company all the time. You may not need to manage it every day, but if you don’t deal with it, it will bite you because if you try to fix something, the person you need may not be there, or even the company may not be there to correct the issue.
What MFT and Your Home Stereo Have in Common December 18, 2007
Posted by Steve Cochran in Inovis Solutions.Tags: Supply Chain Visibility, MFT, Managed File Transfer
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Image taken from http://blogs.ign.com/Matt-IGN/p21
Let’s talk about what Managed File Transfer and your home stereo system have in common, starting with file transfer. On the supply chain side, file transfer is done in a very structured fashion. We use EDI, XML, everything’s well defined, there are committees upon committees, and there are all the accoutrements that go along with that. There’s a lot of energy that goes into making sure file transfer works consistently, and after twenty years of working on it, we’ve got that part down pat.
The rest of the business community non-supply chain side where you’re sending HR records, finance information, or whatever it may be, is not so well defined. People use email, people use instant message (much to the IT Department’s chagrin), people use attachments, and people use FTP because those are things the IT guys figured out you can send big files back and forth with and get around firewalls from the email server.
There are a lot of point solutions that work clearly well for one particular thing, and they’re all piled up. The problem with that strategy is those point solutions are probably reliant upon one or two really sharp IT guys who are the heroes and the firefighters. They’re probably not well documented, and if anything happens to those guys, the probability of you using it or replicating it in some place is almost zero. In real life, it just doesn’t work that way. At Inovis, I’ve experienced this, I understand it, and I don’t like it much.
I’ve found that the perfect analogy for this situation is your home stereo system. Any of us that have unboxed our brand new home theater system know this scenario well. You’ve got your DVR, your home theater system, your DVD player, your Xbox, and you set them all up on a rack. You’re proud because they look really good, and they look like they’ll work perfectly. Next, you get behind there, you figure out the wiring, you get it all hooked up, and you think you’re doing a great job. You get the tie wraps out, you strap them down, and you think it looks pretty. It’s laid out, and it’s great. Then you turn around, you fire it up, and when you turn on the DVD, the TV sound comes on. Then you come around to the back again. The first thing you say is, “I’ve got to move these cords.” The only problem is that you can’t move them because you’ve strapped them on so tight. You’ve got to disconnect them all, and you end up with a big ball of wire in the back. That ball of wire is going to stay there until you get a new home theater system, because there’s no way to go back and retool that. If you walk away from that in a month and come back; you’ll have absolutely no idea how to rewire that ball.
It’s the exact same scenario. Your scripts, your little pieces of knowledge, and everything else create this big, great fur ball of File Transfer ‘stuff’ in your organization. Now imagine the home theater police coming in and wanting to inspect and audit your stereo connections. Most of us would be in a really bad place if we were graded on our setup or fined because it wasn’t clean and neat. In business, you have auditors who want to know where you sent what, how it got there, how the recipient obtained it, and if it’s securely encrypted. Managed File Transfer is clean, secure, and doesn’t rely on that one IT hero in your company. Now if only there was a Managed Stereo Home Setup solution…
Partnerships are like marriages: some good, some not so good November 9, 2007
Posted by Steve Cochran in Analytics and Business Intelligence.1 comment so far
When looking for a company to provide technology services, first look at the company’s offering. Is their offfering comprised of technology that they own, care, nurture, love and are enthusiastic about? Does their offering have a good, strong future? If the answer to these questions is no, or if their offering is tied closely with a partnership, there are some serious risks within the future of the use of that technology.
As the CIO, I have to consider this all the time. If I’m going to make an investment in a product or service that I intend to use, one of the first questions that I always ask is, “As the vendor of that service or software, do you own the intellectual property and are you currently investing in that; or are you relying upon a party that you’re re-selling to me or re-selling as a part of an integrated suite?”
This is a good question, because as we all know, things happen with companies. Sometimes they go out of business. Other times, they change strategies because what was important to them at one particular time period may not be their primary focus in future time period; especially if it’s not their absolute core of business. Things that are related to the product can be bought by someone who’s on a different mission from the plan, and who doesn’t care about the product line. If two companies offer a VAN application and they both provide half of it, it may or may not be a long term engagement because the alliance is not necessarily carved in stone.
So, whenever you are looking at a technology vendor that you want to buy technology from and use as a mission critical part of your business, you need to consider, much like considering a partner, if they’re in it for the long haul and if everything they’re representing is actually theirs to represent so you won’t be disappointed later on when you realize that things may not have been what they appeared. This goes for both marriages and businesses.
Will the Real Managed Services Please Stand Up? October 26, 2007
Posted by Steve Cochran in Analytics and Business Intelligence.Tags: data center, managed services, multi-tenant, outsourcing, platform, scalability
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Contrary to what you may have been told, not all managed services are exactly alike. When choosing which managed service to go with, making a sound and educated decision will land you a more advantageous service that will maximize profit and cut out needless expenses. Once your company has made the decision to outsource, it’s time to look at two options.
- The first alternative is a cut and paste method of sorts. This service takes exactly what your people are already doing and uses their company’s people to do the exact same thing. Next, they take the exact implementation of the products and services that you are currently using, and install them in their outsource facility in the same arrangement your company currently has them in. This method initially meets those requirements you’re looking for to know that the burden of responsibility has been given to someone else.
- The second type of service takes the requirements and functions you are trying to meet and deploys them in a structured environment where the systems, people, and processes are optimized to fulfill your goals and needs. Resources are leveraged across a much broader base.
While both options sound pretty good for giving you what you want, only one of these choices is oriented for future growth and success.
With the first option, your ability to scale and grow your business is no different than the ability you had internally. you have n number of people doing a particular job. You have n number of so much investment in the platforms you need. You have the same kind of level of reliability (if that) as you have inside your shop because your instance is your instance. You’re going to stay focused to do it in the same way you were doing it, only someone else is going to do it. It doesn’t really lend any particular value proposition to you other than the fact that it’s not an immediate headache, and you don’t have to go hire people because someone else hired them.
You don’t really have scalability, and you don’t really have efficiencies. You have added risk to your process because someone else is doing it, you really can’t control it, and they can’t really leverage much because it was kind of the same way you were doing it to begin with. So, it’s questionable whether this form of service actually gets you where you want to be. Is it really, truly adding value for you or is it just something that you don’t have to worry about and are letting someone else worry about?
On the other hand, if you use a service that is built to handle multiple entities (a multi-tenant arrangement) with specialists that have their own processes, controls, and procedures, a few things can happen.
- You’re in a situation where that platform handles not just you, but a whole bunch of customers. It will continue to function properly and most likely has the reliability, stability, and the kind of solid foundation that companies are looking for.
- Adopting their processes, controls, procedures, and using what they know professionally creates a more efficient process, more value, and gives it much more flexibility from a price stand point.
- You would most likely get it at a lower price, not because it’s a lesser service, but because it’s a more efficient service, and you’re not having to pay for every license and all of the costs you would noramlly incur. They’re able to leverage and divide it across all of the different customers that are using it.
The cut and paste method doesn’t have much advantage to it. It does get it off your desk, but the risk profile goes up because they’re probably going to be doing the job about as good as you’re doing it. If you go to a place that truly has a multi-tenant, scalable platform with ITIL processes and controls in place, then you’re going to be in a position where you probably can get a better price for it, you can sleep better at night because that’s what they’re doing for a living, and their systems and processes are built for that.
What is my strategy for choosing between the two? Option two, because it’s the better one.
