Implementation Basics: Remember Lessons Learned from Y2K and Go Back to OP = Q+R+S+T

Yep, it's true, sometimes we all need a flashback refresher. These past few weeks I've been with clients who are looking to either quickly implement a new ERP system or rapidly complete an upgrade. As many of you know, that's not that easy. But what's been so unsettling is how little we have learned from the Y2K experience. Let me share with you a few universe truths that keep coming up:

• Governance must not be all talk, no action. Proper executive sponsorship continues to evade upgrades, re implementations, and even new project selection . Executive sponsorship remains a key component of success and companies can't afford to lose business and IT collaboration.
  
• Program management remains a necessity, not a luxury. Change management, issue resolution, milestone tracking and communication strategies were the critical success factors for successful implementations. With almost 4/5 CRM projects and 1/2 of ERP projects failing, the key factor was strong program management. It starts with the internal organization. Whether or not you go with PMBOK best practices or seek PMI certification, don't skimp on this!
• Future state has to be determined before you start, not on the fly. Implementations which have not gone through the rigors of defining a future vision upfront often fail. With proper governance, program management, and a detailed design, terprises must invest the resources for business process redesign, reduction of duplicate data models and architectures, and design and testing by use case scenarios. This blue print should define a framework for the future state. Enterprises should also carefully evaluate where heavy configurations are required and what customizations should be minimized.

• Finally, the law of physics apply when talking about the outcome of a project or (OP).

OP = Q + R + S + T

Outcome of project = Quality + Resources + Scope + Time

1. Outcome of the project refers to the overall success and result
2. Quality refers to how well the project is delivered to specifications and requirements
3. Resources refers to the money, labor, and effort deployed on the project
4. Scope refers to the project objective and expectations planned
5. Time refers to the duration required to achieve the desired outcome

The bottom line.
Successful project outcomes require a level of upfront planning and organization. The interlay of people, process, technology, and solution ecosystem ring true and enterprise who fail to learn from the lessons of Y2K will continue to make the same mistakes leading to negative outcomes of project. By keeping in mind 3 critical success factors and OP = Q+R+S+T, enterprise will reduce the risk of failure.

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2008 by R Wang. All rights reserved

Event Report: Lawson Cues Up New Offerings with Flair

(Courtesy of Lawson Software Inc.)

Lawson CUE 2008 attendees once again were treated to one of the best key note presentations in the enterprise software industry. Amidst CEO Harry Debes "Dean Martin Show" themed key note and SVP Dean Hager's "The Office" parody on Day 2, the team strongly articulated Lawson's progress, current successes, and future direction. Key announcements include:

• General availability of Lawson Talent Management. As a part of Lawson's Strategic Human Capital Management System, Talent Management delivers capabilities in talent acquisition, performance management, succession management, learning and development, and compensation management. The solution can be delivered as a SaaS model or directly integrated within the Lawson Core HR application. Facebook integration, Smart Client capability, and an International roll out strategy help move Lawson from a North American offering to one with Web 2.0 relevance and international reach.

• Lawson Smart Office information workplace offering. Smart Office is a Rich Internet user experience for S3 and M3 customers that is a part of Lawson's User Productivity Platform (UPP). Key features include dynamic personalization, collaboration and workflow, interoperability with Microsoft Office, and integrated Business Intelligence. The offering brings together tools such as Microsoft Word, Excel, Outlook, Powerpoint, and Groove within the Lawson environment. Capabilities in rich personalization include personalized field labels, bookmarks, conditional styling, tab order configuration, personal alerts, and configuration of fields and columns. (More screen shots courtesy of Lawson). Collaboration and workflow deliver "Visio based" approaches to managing business processes. Built on Windows Presentation Foundation, Lawson's Smart Office interface runs rings around current offerings from larger ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP and is in the same League as IFS' Project Aurora and Epicor's ICE 2.0 interfaces.

(Courtesy of Lawson Software Inc.)

• Lawson M3 Trace Engine 3.0 designed for food safety for food and beverage enterprises. Meeting current and future compliance requirements for EU and US food safety regulations, M3 Trace Engine simplifies the process of tracking ingredients and finished products. This latest release brings key functionality to the US market. With growing concerns about overall food safety, enterprises need to share trace data such as product origin and transport data, provide evidence about product trace lines, and recreate history in the event of food safety incidents.

• Acquisition of Freeborders for key PLM capabilities for the fashion industry. Lawson acquired the PLM division of San Francisco based Freeborders. With very short product life cycle times for product concept to retail store shelf placement, PLM will provide fashion manufactures with quicker sourcing capabilities and lead time reduction. Lawson will add 79 global customers and the product will be sold as a stand alone product.
  

The bottom line

Feedback from customers at CUE, one on one's with key executives, and discussions with partners demonstrate that the senior management team has managed to turnaround the company while also digesting an acquisition. New offerings with a strong industry focus and future product strategy bode well for the 4000+ customers and potential prospects in key industries such as health care, public sector, food and beverage, fashion, equipment service management and rental, and distribution. Expect Lawson to continue to expand its international presence while remaining focused on its core markets.

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2008 by R Wang. All rights reserved

Event Report: Microsoft Convergence 2008 - Microsoft Ends Project Green, Renews Enterprise Focus

(Copyrighted 2008. Photo by R Wang. All rights reserved)

New Management Shows Long Term Commitment to Business Solutions Group

Recent Microsoft Business Solutions departures have brought into question whether the Redmond , WA giant is serious about the business applications market. Estimates of year over year growth from 2006 to 2007 have fallen from double digits to the high single digits, and this has raised doubts about Microsoft’s commitment to this $1B + business. (See Josh Greenbaum's latest) Yet, after a string of high level departures including Jeff Raikes, Doug Bergum, Satya Nadella, Tammi Reller, and James Utzschneider, it appears the new management team may be here for the long haul.

The good news - meetings in Orlando with partners, customers, and Steve Ballmer’s key note have helped mitigate many doubts while highlighting a renewed corporate wide commitment that goes beyond the appointment of inside veterans such as Kirill Tatarinov and Chris Caren, and a new business solutions head, Stephen Elop. The message from Convergence was loud and clear – Microsoft is committed to the enterprise apps space, SMB and the large enterprise.

Revised ERP Product Roadmap and Strategy Arises From the Ashes of Project Green
Project Green, Microsoft’s attempt to build a new ERP replacing all code lines, failed because partners strongly expressed as desire to keep building in their code bases, the initiative would hinder development of application breadth and depth, and Microsoft did not want to incur channel disruption across all product lines. On a technical level, existing products lacked the architectural foundations for convergence. With the death of Project Green, the Dynamics ERP team enters a new era. Early evidence shows increased collaboration among the system, platform, and tools teams; streamlined ERP product teams headed by Microsoft veteran Hal Howard; and a continued focus on long term product roadmaps crafted by Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Mike Ehrenberg. What has become quite clear:

• Lessons learned from Project Green demonstrated in current releases. Despite the death of a converged product, customers already benefit from a new role-based personas focus leading to industry leading user experience. Though each Microsoft Dynamics product will retain their existing programming languages, increased platform adoption of SQL Server and VS.NET technologies allow each product line to adopt SOA, process-centric, and model driven design in an evolutionary approach. Teams will increase sharing of design specs, though not code, within the product families.
  

• Shared investment will drive evolutionary convergence. Today all product lines share one user experience design team which implements UI with shared controls from one set of code that fits to each product’s architecture. Over time users can expect more Dynamics Attached Services, SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) report design/execution, unified communication (UC) integration components, and common analyst designer for Windows Workflow Foundation (WF).
  
  
• SQL Server will play a critical role in future product direction. Cooperative development between the NAV/AX and SQL teams leads to new features optimized for SQL Server 2008 such as proprietary reporting to SQL Sever Reporting Services (SSRS). With Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009, preliminary performance benchmarks show the best scale on SQL Server 2008, though the product will still support Oracle databases. In addition, BI will be delivered out of the box for Dynamics AX. Via SQL Attached Services (SQLAS)
  
  
• Future roadmap will optimize on Microsoft VS.NET middleware. Existing ERP applications all now use SharePoint as the portal and will leverage the capabilities of unified communications (UC) over the next 2 releases. Microsoft Dynamics SL has already been rewritten in Visual Basic .NET. Microsoft Dynamics AX, Dynamics GP and Dynamics NAV incorporate Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). Microsoft Dynamics GP has supported Visual Studio developers with their Visual Studio Toolkit which exposes, Dynamics GP objects, classes, events and forms to the VS.Net developer. Recent releases of Microsoft Dynamics NAV now incorporate more VS.NET features at run time. Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 as well as Dynamics GP already leverage web services from Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). Complex roadmap dependencies on underlying Microsoft platform and Office releases, however, impact the extent to which Microsoft can update its Dynamics products, potentially resulting in delays of future releases.
  
  
• Software plus Services initiative signal potential “SaaS-like” solutions. Future roadmaps indicate a movement towards new deployment options that include hostability, attached services, and finished services. With the changes in the 2006 Service Provider Licensing Agreement (SPLA), partners can deploy hosted solutions that will reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and improve deployment options. Attached services like payment services and fraud prevention technology for credit card payment processing from PayPal and Chase Paymentech Solutions will extend functionality with relevant business services and integrate with on-premise ERP applications. Finished services intend to deliver new functional or vertical solutions in the cloud hosted in Microsoft data centers.
  
  
• Industry Builders Initiative replaced with two new programs with more rigorous certification. Microsoft confirmed that Industry Builder, an independent software vendor (ISV) and system integrator initiative designed to deliver core vertical expertise, would be replaced with two new solutions, Microsoft Dynamics Industry Solutions (MDIS) and Certified for Microsoft Dynamics (CfMD).[i] This decision reflects an internal decision to hold off vertical expansion until the horizontal platform has been significantly revamped to support a broader range of vertical requirements. MDIS requires deeper partner synchronization to product roadmap, code quality assurance, translation, localization, documentation, and testing processes. MDIS will offer industry solutions OEM’d by Microsoft, sold on the price list, and synchronized with the Dynamics product development organization. CfMD provides validation and marketing benefits to existing veritical ISV solutions. Solutions must be tested and provide 10 customer references to qualify.
  
  

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  [i] Industries include apparel and textiles, automotive, construction, consumer driven planning, CPG distributors, CPG manufacturers, field services, food and beverage distributors, food and beverage manufacturers, industrial distributors, industrial equipment manufacturing, manufacturing, oil and gas – energy financial management, process manufacturing – process industries, professional services, retail chain manager, and supply chain execution.

The bottom line
It appears that Microsoft has made a renewed commitment to the Dynamics product line. Future innovations will come from both the Microsoft Business Solutions division and the system, platform, tools, teams. End users can expect to stay within their product family and not to be forced down a path of artificial convergence. Despite the death of Project Green, customers will benefit from an evolutionary approach, albeit this will take much longer than originally expected.

[i] Industries include apparel and textiles, automotive, construction, consumer driven planning, CPG distributors, CPG manufacturers, field services, food and beverage distributors, food and beverage manufacturers, industrial distributors, industrial equipment manufacturing, manufacturing, oil and gas – energy financial management, process manufacturing – process industries, professional services, retail chain manager, and supply chain execution.

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2008 by R Wang. All rights reserved

Customer Experience Management: The Experience is in the details...

I am not sure where you stand in the debate over Customer Experience Management -- or if you even stand somewhere. However, most people relegate it to management-consulting-fad category and would prefer that it goes away as quickly as Knowledge Management, Process Management, and Order Management... wait, none of those are going anywhere anytime soon, are they? Well, hate to say that neither is Experience Management.

However, we need to make more sense of it. Let's see if I remember how the typical vendor pitch goes... if you work with us we will redo all your processes, change your organizations into a customer-centric organization, and make your clients for life -- greatly enhancing your wallet-share, yada-yada-yada. Although some of the concepts are certain, most of the pitch sounds impossible to accomplish (and usually it is).

We are starting to see some successes in this arena though. No, it was not the "forklift" approach to process change, or the "complete redesign of the experience around the customer" that won. It was the detailed, meticulous approach to taking care of customers.

Yep, there may not be a need to change ALL your processes after all, or deploying costly and complex systems. You may just be able to do it by focusing on what you need to do, how you need to do it, and what you need to do it. If then, and only then, you notice you are missing some DETAILS, then - by golly - fix that. Chances are your business has survived quite some time by now... so you may know what you are doing. That does not mean you cannot improve it.

And, that is where the detail part comes in. Focus on the details, let the processes fix themselves (as a former mentor of mined used to say "if you take care of the minutes, the hours take care of themselves"). Don't spend your energy trying to come up with the ultimate experience - you will never be able to do it. Even if you do succeed, it will be outdated by the time you release it. No, you are better than that... You will focus on making sure your emails get answered within 12 hours (as Bank of America does), knowing that then your customers will come back to use that channel. You will make sure that you communicate with the client clearly in all your interactions (as ATT Wireless agents are trained to do) and that you manage expectations throughout the entire process ("I will place you on hold for no more than 2 minutes while I research the best plan for you", as opposed to "please hold"). You, in essence, will treat the customer the way they expect to be treated. And the hours will take care of themselves...

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2008 by Esteban Kolsky/ RWang. All rights reserved

Introducing: Esteban Kolsky on All Things Customer Service

Former research director at Gartner Research, Esteban Kolsky brings his 2 decades of expertise on e-business, customer relationship management (CRM), customer service, and e-service to the Software Insiders Point of View. Recent research focused on trend setting topics such as Enterprise Feedback Management, Customer Service models and eService Suites.

In a previous life, Esteban founded a company that invented a technical architecture to provide point-of-need customer service. Other professional experiences includes serving as the:

• CTO of Tiedosta
• Director of CRM at Intraware
• Senior Manager at BDO Seidman

Look to more interesting customer experience insights to come as Esteban covers the world from his vantage point and joins former Forrester Research Director and current Head of Research at SSPA, John Ragsdale in pontificating on their views of service and CRM in their free moments.

(The personal contents in this blog do not reflect the opinions, ideas, thoughts, points of view, and any other potential attribution of my current, past, or future employers.)
Copyrighted 2008 by R Wang. All rights reserved