CRM and ERP News

I am still thinking about SAP's announcement last week that it would invest in a new business model to bring its new SOA mid-market products to the market place. I thought it was a significant enough announcement that I wanted to offer an opinion on it right away, which is why I did a piece last week, and a few days' perspective have given me additional thoughts. If you parse the announcement you may conclude that it is significant, but perhaps more because of where SAP is in its own evolution than for what is offered.

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The ITIL Critic wrote an interesting article about making the case for ITIL:

Make sure your business case...

Takes away pain or fear.
Deliver on key people's personal agendas.
Radical transformation because she is new to the job and wants to be seen to have made a difference?
Align with key business initiatives.
Measure the business case in terms of the initiative's deliverables.
Use the right buzz-speak.

In Mike McBride: part 1, Mike shared who he was and what his favorite part of the Help Desk is, important things in getting to know a bit more about what makes Mike tick. When I read Mike's answers, I felt like I got some great insights.

Now, we'll dive a bit deeper into Mike McBride's Help Desk, and what makes it successful.

Phil: What is your key metric for success on your Help Desk? Mike: That's an interesting question. Actually, measuring the work of help desk folks has been a recent topic of discussion on my blog because I'm not sure how you do it, really. I've never been a fan of using the number of tickets closed as a metric because it's too easy to rig that.

On the other hand, you have to use something as a manager to measure, and I don't know what that is. Since I'm not in management, I can come up with my own subjective "metric", and how I measure myself is by the number of issues that are unresolved. My feeling is that 90-95% of the contacts I get from people (calls or emails), I should either be able to resolve for them or identify the person who can resolve them and get that person the proper information to do it, and the other 5-10% I should be able to explain why there isn't anything we can do to resolve their problem. (i.e. when someone can't get to a website because the site is down, or can't get an email to a client because their mail server is down, I can't resolve it, or put them in touch with someone who can, all I can do is explain it and ask them to be patient.)

To me, any time I'm unable to do any of those things with an issue, it's unresolved, and I've failed to provide support. Obviously, you'll always have an issue or two like that come up, but if it starts to happen frequently, then I need to examine why, and figure out what skill or knowledge I'm missing that could resolve them.

Phil: Interesting answer Mike. I've never thought about measuring the way you mentioned. We'll have to talk more about that sometime. Managers: Is this a valid metric? Do you have better ones? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.

Phil: Tell me a bit about your Help Desk. How large is your Help Desk (agents and customers)? What are your hours? What is your most popular call, besides password resets?

Mike: As I said, it's a mid-sized law firm, about 350 users, spread across our main office and two small satellite offices, each about 2 hours away. All of our IT staff is based in Columbus , including the Help Desk. Help Desk support is available 7:30AM-6PM Mon-Fri. There are two full time Help Desk Specialists and our Help Desk Manager will cover the help desk at various times when he is not occupied with his other title, Training Coordinator. We stagger our work schedules so that there is always someone manning the help desk during those hours, I work the late shift, 9-6. Off hours, emergency-only support is handled by either our help desk manager or, if it's a network/server failure, one of our networking guys. They are all salaried, the two help desk specialists are hourly employees, so we are the last person any one wants to call. It costs too much. :)

Our most popular calls, I would imagine, are similar to any law firm's most popular calls. Helping a user sort out the document management system. They are huge and powerful, yet very complicated, systems. They take a lot of getting used to, and there are any number of things that can cause confusion from folder locations, to searching for documents, to folder/document security settings. It's not easy to keep track of everything, believe me I know this as well as anyone, we rolled out our new document management system and made it available to users my very first day on the job. For the first couple of weeks, the users had more training than I did on it. I had to get up to speed very, very quickly and I did that by tracking down answers to questions everyone else had.

Phil: This was very helpful at finding out a bit more about your desk Mike. We'll be posting more of our interview tomorrow and throughout the week. We're getting to the good parts now!

The business world is rife with acronyms, jargon, and buzzwords. Anyone who has ever gotten "pushback on a TQM touchpoint" is familiar with how the business-speak of a particular company or industry can evolve into its own language. And, while some people might think that BPM falls into the category of "just another acronym," it is, in fact, a practical integration of technology and strategy that can help businesses operate more efficiently.

BPM stands for Business Process Management, as well as Business Performance Management, depending on whom you ask. Either way, BPM can be defined as a tactic that combines software and policies with the aim of streamlining process flow among departments in order to improve communication and efficiency.

Although there are several vendors like Tibco, Appian, and SRC that specialize in the space, BPM is more than a set of technology tools. It can be a way to bridge departmental boundaries and fill in information gaps that might be limiting a company's effectiveness.

New and Improved

The term "BPM" has been used for years in reference to activities that improve a company's business process, but has been at the forefront lately thanks to more software tools that help companies to implement better processes faster.

A decade ago, companies first began looking at dismantling and reorganizing their processes through "business process reengineering." Those efforts tended to focus on a one-time overhaul, similar to changing all the systems in a house and then forgetting about them until something breaks.

With BPM, there's a deeper sense of continuous change, acknowledging that communication is constantly evolving, and needs to be developed and tweaked regularly.

At a basic level, BPM identifies, documents, monitors, and automates activities within a company, which are usually connected to the development of a product or service. Processes might encompass procurement, distribution, or R&D procedures.

Unlike project...

When a new billboard in San Francisco scrolls the message "Motor On Vera!" it's a good bet that someone named Vera is driving her Mini Cooper at that moment. Or that her car is nicknamed Vera. A billboard using Radio Frequency Identification technology started "talking" Monday. In a new twist on tech-savvy marketing, the board flashes a personalized message as the driver cruises by with a Mini-provided key fob that sends a signal to activate the billboard. It's all part of the flippant, quirky attitude of Mini and its loyal following.

Retail companies could improve financial and supply chain planning, and thus increase profits, by using business intelligence systems, according to speakers and some attendees at the National Retail Federation 2007 conference.

Though I.T. officials from some retailers said BI systems remain too expensive and too hard to implement for their operations, others maintained that the benefits would likely outweigh the costs.

Specialty apparel retailer Tween Brands Inc. is in the process of replacing an analytics system that used Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and mainframe applications with an integrated system made up of products from multiple vendors, said Roy Deegan, vice president of I.T. solutions delivery and process engineering at the New Albany, Ohio-based retailer.

The new analytics system includes an Oracle 10g database, application server and portal; Oracle Retail Price Management software; and merchandising intelligence applications from SAS Institute Inc., all running on IBM p595 Unix servers, he said.

The project began in 2004 when the retailer launched a plan to upgrade its BI capabilities as part of an effort to boost efficiency, cut costs and create a better buying experience for customers, Deegan explained. The plan called for Tween to improve inventory planning and create "one version of the truth" for the company's financial and inventory analysts.

"When it came to the technology, we started with a clean sheet of paper," said Deegan.

The Oracle Retail Price application went live last August. The company began rolling out the SAS software last spring, and that project is ongoing, he said.

Deegan said its too early to project a specific return on investment, but Tween does expect that the rollout will lead to improved profit margins.

Kevin Stack, vice president and CIO at Jo-Ann Stores Inc., a retailer of crafting, decorating and sewing products, said his firm is holding off implementing a BI system because of the high costs and...

There's a four-letter word I.T. pros know all too well: risk. In 2007, I.T. executives will need to clearly evaluate risk as they weigh sometimes opposing proposals to bolster security, increase wireless connectivity, extend more business processes over the Internet and address regulatory requirements.

In the end it's a balancing act. For starters, security will be no less challenging in 2007 than last year, when plagues of bots, spam and phishing attacks threatened corporate environs. This year, in addition to generic phishing, enterprises will have to contend with custom Trojans and spear-phishing, aimed at specific individuals or corporations.

"The year 2007 is going to be the year of the custom-Trojan attacks," says Richard Stiennon, chief marketing officer at Fortinet. "These Trojans, which will be targeted at the help desk at a bank, for instance, will avoid being detected by the signature base. Traditional antivirus signatures will be increasingly futile."

"Malicious code won't go away, but attackers will shift their attention to social-based engineering attacks," predicts Oliver Friedrichs, director of emerging technologies at Symantec's Security Response division. This means using every trick in the book to fool a victim into thinking an attacker is a trusted source.

If that's not enough, some say the adoption of VoIP technology, which is subject to denial-of-service and stolen capacity, may lead to disruptions in traditional circuit-switched telephony as well.

"More trouble is yet to come in VoIP, and hackers are going to gain complete control over your VoIP network," says Rohit Dhamankar, senior security manager at 3Com.

Because VoIP servers "are interfacing with traditional 'old phone' networks," he points out, hackers are likely to launch attacks through VoIP that will seriously affect the telecom infrastructure, such as Signaling System 7 for call setup. The result: downtime and criminal exploitation of the circuit-switched phone system through VoIP.

Other trends, says Friedrichs, can...