IT or BT? The debate is on!

We have heard of IT, MIS and IS as acronyms to define the information management wing of every company, I just came across a debate to rename this to BT (Business Technology).

This is very interesting, at the core, IT or IS or even MIS describes the function they serve well. By renaming to BT the emphasis is clearly on engaging the business and ensuring that the business can succeed and has the tools to effectively leverage technology to improve efficiency, effectiveness, productivity and bring about change! (or transformation if you prefer).

I am in favor of this rename and new acronym (though we have too many already!)

Here's a link to the posting from CIO.com, Happy Reading!

"Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are my own only and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employer (present and past) "
"Please post your comments - Swati Ranganathan"

Better Resource Utilization - Using Business Applications?

In an earlier post, I had outlined an idea to improve the usability of enterprise systems by creating a unified task dashboard. By having one dashboard for all activities, which could span multiple applications, users/resources can get a holistic view.

In this post, I want to extend this idea and would like to propose to the software companies/product manager’s work on expanding the capabilities of their tasks/work flows and start looking into unified resource utilization!

The first step would be to capture business process execution with accurate tasks within workflows. The second step would be to accurately estimate the time required to perform the tasks.

If and when we can track all tasks across all applications, we should be able to generate data, reports and metrics on resource utilization and be able to estimate current and future work loads accurately and be able to assign the right resources to the right problem and thus improve effectiveness and efficiency of the organization.

"Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are my own only and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employer (present and past) "
"Please post your comments - Swati Ranganathan"

Profile data of migration leader

What skills do you need to become a data migration leader?

If you have gone through my posts on this subject, you will be able to guess!

1. Strategic thinker with excellent analytical skills, able to balance strategy with tactical execution
2. Excellent understanding of business process (flow of information, physical parts/products and finance) and
3. Excellent understanding of technology (Databases (SQL, Oracle), Business applications (ERP, PLM, CRM etc.), programming,
4. Project management whiz

This might be a tall order but start working on each of these skills. Practice makes perfect.

"Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are my own only and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employer (present and past) "
"Please post your comments - Swati Ranganathan"

Intelligent part numbers! Why and Why Not, Can PLM / ERP systems help?

All companies that make and sell products have to make this decision very early on. Some companies might not have the maturity or business processes in place when this decision needs to be made. Changes to policies done at a later time could result in additional complications so most companies chose to remain on their current policy and process.

Intelligent part numbers are used to clearly identify the type of part, its commodity or sometimes even the location of use in the overall product. Typically companies develop a matrix mapping commodity to specific sequences of part numbers. For example 12-???? Could represent sheet metal, 13-??? could represent PCBs and so on.

Unintelligent part numbers on the other hand are based on ERP/PLM system’s ability to automatically generate the next higher number.

Companies that develop intelligent part numbers can clearly distinguish between top level products and lower level assemblies easily, in addition be able to develop logic to drive procurement, review and approval cycles based on part number sequences.

Developing part number sequences can be costly, they require manual setup, customization of applications (ERP, PLM etc.) and require due diligence on the part of engineers to follow a defined process. Depending upon the rules, the business groups must pay attention to number of possible parts for a given commodity (by projecting in to the future) and also plan on adding new commodities as the need arises. Typically this could require an additional head count to manage the process and tools. In my experience, a lot of engineers would rather focus on innovation and turn out their designs and go quickly from concept to prototype to production release and not be bogged down by having to pull a new number and update their documentation and slow things down.

Unintelligent part numbers provide engineers with the ability to conceptualize their design and generate new numbers easily with minimal data in the beginning and quickly release their designs and then provide additional data. Often engineers might not know what the right commodity / material needs to be when they are working on a concept. This lack of knowledge typically results in non value added work in recreating parts with the right material and commodity if they had made a mistake. Unintelligent part numbers do have a drawback which is that it doesn’t provide any information on the part type or any other data.

As ERP & PLM systems have matured, most have introduced a classification scheme / module with which parts can be classified. Typically classification systems capture information like whether the part is OEM or not, commodity, material, assembly or not, compliant or not (for RoHS, WEE, Reach etc.), Critical part or not, in addition the description can be broken down to clearly identify the parts. For e.g., socket head cap screw could be classified into a class of screws with a sub group of socket head or not and so on.

So if we can get so granular and capture all the information we need, we could use the classification system to drive activities like procurement based on commodity, ABC coding by commodity / part class and conditional workflows for ECO cycles based on part type and whether a full review is required or not. In addition, there are other uses like knowledge management and capturing the right questions when quality issues occur based on type of part/product.

New part creation could be streamlined by checking against classification schema and existing parts to see existing parts can be re-used. This re-use has a lot of benefits. I have seen/heard of benchmarks done by a number of companies where they have found that the cost of a part through its lifecycle (concept to obsolescence) is around $3000 to $5000.

Implementing a classification system is more complex than implementing intelligent part numbers. If you chose to do this mid stream, you will need to launch a data quality / clean up program to ensure data integrity and adherence to rules of classification and then launch this activity.

In summary, there is no easy answer for the debate on intelligent vs. unintelligent part numbers. Classification systems provide a lot of merit which outweigh the effort required clean up existing data and setup a new system.

"Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are my own only and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employer (present and past) "
"Please post your comments - Swati Ranganathan"

Unified Task Dashboard! Utopia?

In an earlier post, I had listed a number of emerging or new TLA's (three letter acronyms) in the enterprise application space like ERP, PLM, PDM, CRM, SCM, SRM, BPM etc...As the usage of these of applications and technologies mature within different organizations, users will soon have a set of task dashboards which outline the tasks they have been assigned within each of these applications and when it is due.

this begs the question, if we can integrate applications and have strategies like data integration / master data integration why cant we integrate the applications and create a unified task dashboard?

Most of the integrated software vendors could provide this capability but companies which have chosen best of breed applications will struggle with this unless they learn to federate and build services which can kick off / complete tasks and seamlessly integrate the applications and provide their users with one interface.

This could impact user adoption and greatly increase speed to proficiency of users and is rarely considered during software selection, planning and implementation!

"Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are my own only and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employer (present and past) "
"Please post your comments - Swati Ranganathan"

IT change management part 1

Change management within IT has gained a lot of traction in the last 5-10 years, in some cases this has been accelerated by the need to comply with SOX regulations and wider acceptance of ITIL concepts and best practices.

In order to help the business meet rapid changes, IT needs to react quickly and without impacting the quality and stability of the environment and the service levels. Changes to IT systems are required due to a number of reasons, some of which are related to
1. Application
2. Hardware
3. Software
4. Network

For e.g. if you have to upgrade your business systems / business applications to the next release or upgrade / change hardware like CPU, RAM or other peripherals, or if you have to make changes to software like operating systems due to new patches or fixes or changes to your network infrastructure.

Change management as evolved from an ad-hoc basis into almost a science with specific goals, metrics, risk management and methodology.

The goal of change management from a business perspective is to ensure

• All authorized changes are based on business needs and are approved
• All changes requests are addressed and implemented in a efficient and conforming manner
• Business risk is managed and minimized
• Standardized methods and procedures are used for handling of all changes
• All changes to the IT infrastructure (software, hardware, applications and network) are recorded and documented

Now you might wonder, why I wrote from a business perspective…the changes should be based on good business reasons, it should be tied with a business approved initiative or have a valid reason such as potential adverse impact to the business. If you have to install a patch and explain the need for this change to a business person they may or may not understand the reasons. If you put it in the context or risk or benefit to their operations (possible impact of downtime to their applications / users), they will become interested very quickly.

How do you go about implementing a change management methodology within IT?

First define your process /policy clearly define
• Scope (which some or all pieces of IT infrastructure should follow this process).
• Roles, responsibilities and procedures related to change management
• Define best practices for change management and configuration of software
• Review frequency of your policies, procedures and standards
• Key performance indicators which indicate your service level and operating level performances.

All business critical applications should be under change control and best practices defined for change management should be adhered to. Without having a proper change control mechanism in place, business could be impacted by poor or no risk assessments and unauthorized changes could occur.

Roles and responsibilities related to change control are essential to ensure proper implementation. There needs to be a distinction between developer, tester or approver and implementer of changes. This can be complicated further, if you have multiple environment such as development, QA and production. Change control is not easy thing to accomplish as it involves participation and adoption of all stakeholders within IT. In some cases, smaller organizations may not be able to assign different people to different roles.

Standard operating procedures must be developed based on industry and software/vendor best practices. For example, changes to codebase of business systems must be stored within a code versioning system. Configuration management of all business systems and operating systems should be considered. There are a number of solutions which can address this. At a minimum, consider a spreadsheet based solution which highlights changes and what files/directories were impacted and tie these to change requests and package updates.

As roles and responsibilities change from a function perspective, change control processes and procedures should be updated to indicate the current state. In addition, based on lessons learned, changes to documentation might be necessary. Setup a reoccurring meeting to discuss policies and procedures on a frequent basis, maybe start out with once a quarter.

KPI’s should highlight ability of IT to react to the business and how quickly the changes were impacted and should also include adverse impact to the business through downtime, missing functionality etc in terms of dollars and hours. Review these KPI’s with the business on a frequent basis and work on areas where improvement is required.

"Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are my own only and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employer (present and past) "
"Please post your comments - Swati Ranganathan"

Convert Failures into Success!

I recently came across an article from CIO.com , on why IT projects fail.

It had some data on a study conducted in 2007 study by Dynamic Markets Limited of 800 IT managers across eight countries which showed that:
• 62 percent of organizations experienced IT projects that failed to meet their schedules
• 49 percent suffered budget overruns
• 47 percent had higher-than-expected maintenance costs, and
• 41 percent failed to deliver the expected business value and ROI

This got me thinking about the failure rates…in my opinion these numbers are on the low side. After all, no one wants to admit they were late or did a poor job on key company wide initiatives…

If you are trying to implement a new system, how should you go about it?

I would start with assessing

(1) Drivers for change: why do we need to change our current modus operandi for executing business process? Is there a clear advantage of the new system? Is it going to add value? Are we at risk due to obsolescence of existing platform(s)

(2) Are we ready for change? Even if the new system is the right thing to do, are we ready for change? Do we have the resources required to plan, define, test and implement this new system in addition to taking of care of day to day business? Do we have the discipline to adhere to the rules and logic built within this new system or are we going to modify it so that we can continue with business as usual but in a new locale? Is this a key initiative? If so is executive management aligned with requirements, costs and possible impact on performance?

(3) Do we really understand our current business processes and systems? In most cases, it is easy to blame the instrument (business solutions) and not the musician. If you truly understand your business process and can clearly identify the flow of information, material and finance at each and every step of your end to end processes, then proceed with scoping, feasibility, selection and vendor assessments. If you understand your system (process and business solutions), then in some cases, you may not need a new tool, you can super charge your existing toolset and reap the same benefits.

(4) Software selection, my approach would be is establish a budget based on fund availability. Then benchmark with companies within your space and similar sized companies not in your space. Analyze their success and failure stories, gather as much information as possible on how much they spent and on what. Get information on what vendors they reviewed and why they selected a particular vendor. Now that you are armed, create a check list of must have capabilities to support business process! Don’t focus on technology rather focus on capabilities to bring about success by implementing a new business solution. Be

(5) Implementation, ensure that your change is well socialized and aligned to at all levels, use best practices in IT change management, project management and run the implementation as you would run your business. Focus on your customers and ensure that their success is an integral theme of your implementation. Ensure you test well and properly to ensure that all your processes will execute well within the new system. Establish a super user community ahead of time and implement a “train the trainer” program. This will ensure that your support group doesn’t get overwhelmed upon go-live.

These points are general guidelines, over the next few weeks I will add more details on best practices for each of the bullets.

"Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are my own only and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employer (present and past) "
"Please post your comments - Swati Ranganathan"

The Business Case for Data Management (MDM, Data Quality, Data Governance)!

In an earlier post, I had outlined impact of poor data management. In this post I would like to discuss the data quality and need for governance/accountability systems and technological solutions like MDM (Master Data Management).
Characteristics of good data
In order to analyze the data stored with applications and used by end to end business processes, let us review certain characteristics to check if our data is of good quality and where/what do we need to work on:
Completeness: Is all the requisite information available? Are data values missing, or in an unusable state?
Conformity: Are there expectations that data values conform to specified formats? If so, do all the values conform to those formats? Are these formats specified in the same way across all your applications (data silos)?
Consistency: Do you have conflicting information about the same object? Are values consistent across applications and business processes (data silos)? Do interdependent attributes always appropriately reflect their expected consistency?
Accuracy: Do data objects accurately represent the “real-world” values they are expected to model? Are there variations in spelling or reference information (id related to customer, supplier and employees)?
Duplication: Are there multiple instances of the same data objects within your data set?
Integrity: What data is missing important relationship linkages? Does the data adhere to a predefined set of rules?
Timeliness: Can the right people access the right data at the right time?

The fundamental nature of data is that it changes continuously making it difficult for organizations to put the data to the best possible use and achieve benefits. Furthermore, much of the data within organizations resides on different systems (for example, ERP, CRM, Order management, Customer service, PDM, PLM etc). And it is often difficult to keep all these systems in sync.

Poor data quality isn’t always apparent in processing your day-to-day business transactions. The purchasing department, for example, may not see the difference between entering “3M” or “3M Corporation” or “3MCorp.” in a database. All of these seem to get the job done. But if you dig deep, you will find that this could potentially save $$$ in time and resources utilized in creating duplicates of data.

In most organizations, most resources are fully utilized and certain “nice to have” functions are dropped as a result. One such item that is commonly ignored is data quality!

The benefits of accurate data are clear. They include decreased product development and sales costs, better customer service and increased employee productivity. However, building the business case in order to launch a data quality management initiative has traditionally been a challenge!

As organizations face stiff demand and need to churn out products and services faster, there is an increased demand placed on the availability of good data to support faster and better decision making! Without a doubt, data has become the raw material of the information economy, and data governance is a strategic imperative.

In addition, increased requirements on timely and accurate data placed by regulatory compliances like (SOX, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, RoHS, WEE, Reach, HiPAA, Osha) have stretched the capabilities of process and business systems owners.

These demands have resulted in the development of data governance and technological solutions like MDM. Master Data Management (MDM) is the technology, tools, and processes required to create and maintain consistent and accurate lists of master data.

Some organizations hope to improve data quality by moving data from legacy systems (or consolidating data silos) to (ERP) and (CRM) packages. Other organizations use data profiling or data cleansing tools to unearth dirty data, and then cleanse it with an extract/transform/load (ETL) tool for data warehouse (DW) applications.

A word of caution: unless data quality and governance is approached from a top down manner with alignment from all levels, we will not be able to achieve accurate, complete and timely data! A program to address data quality is not to fix a business system or application, neither is it an implementation of technology solution like MDM, BI, DW. This program is to fix behavior, flow of information across the enterprise and improve operational effectiveness, efficiency, control and success. Merely focusing on technology will result in the same problems but in a different application.

"Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are my own only and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employer (present and past) "
"Please post your comments - Swati Ranganathan"

Leading Change. Part 1

First step in becoming a successful change leader is to fully understanding your organization and matching the initiative to your organization’s real needs. This means not just adopting the latest management fad or implementing solutions for the sake of implementing new and emerging technologies.

Recognize that bringing about useful and meaningful change is fundamentally about changing people’s behavior. It is not primarily about installing a new system or business process. If people in the end do not behave and work differently, then the money and time spent in “doing stuff” is wasted.

How do you go about becoming a change leader?

(1) Focus on needs of the business. Understand the business (environment, business processes, business strategy, business needs (current and long term). Don’t assume anything, especially when considering technological solutions.
a. Is your proposed change important to the organization?
b. Why is it important?
c. How does it support the strategy?
d. What are the benefits? ROI
e. What is the cost impact? From an implementation perspective as well as from impact to resources, training, time to come up to speed and execution to previous levels
Help the business to succeed

(2) Focus on alignment: Competing messages from the people at the top is the kiss of death for a change initiative. Important change initiatives will always cross the boundaries of groups, departments, and divisions. Creating and sustaining agreement among key leaders may be one of the most important factors for successful change
Help the leaders manage their business, ensure that they are successful

(3) Focus on stakeholders. The stakeholders are the resources who will have to adopt and execute the change.
Don’t underestimate stakeholder management! Socialize the idea first, gain their acceptance and then engage them throughout your project from requirements gathering, design of business process/systems, get ideas on how they could make your change better, training needs, method for delivering training etc. this engagement will ensure that they feel that they are the customer and that this change will indeed help improve their day to day functions.
Help the organization (resources) to succeed

"Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are my own only and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employer (present and past) "
"Please post your comments - Swati Ranganathan"

Debate: Six Sigma vs. Innovation

I recently came across an article on business week about the debate over if six sigma stifles innovation.

The key takeaways for me from this article was
(1) Six Sigma is designed to inject more efficiency and productivity into a company's systems
(2) Disruptive innovation is going to be more entrepreneurial.
(3) smart companies separate the efforts at innovation from ongoing efforts at continuous improvement
(4) if managed properly, Six Sigma and innovation can go hand in hand

This got me thinking about my past experience, when I played an active role in facilitating product development and worked very closely with engineering. We had established processes for products which were in beta or production life cycle stage. Process adherence was essential as the tools and systems were shipped to customers when they reached this level of maturity.

By impeding new product introduction with rules did increase cycle times and caused endless frustration. So we came up with a solution, to allow engineering more freedom and flexibility in creating parts and bill of material structure with minimal requirements. We did ensure that certain checks and balances were in place so as to ensure proper procurement using revision control. Fast track changes with minimal approval cycles were also of great value.

In an organizational development activity, we studied profiles of leaders and managers. A similar issue was raised about leadership without management.

We should allow flexibility to encourage an entrepreneurial spirit with minimal guidelines!

"Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are my own only and in no way represent the views, positions or opinions - expressed or implied - of my employer (present and past) "
"Please post your comments - Swati Ranganathan"