DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Archive for May, 2009

Successful Business owners and senior managers share an ‘efficiency mindset’. In everything they do, they seek the most cost effective method and look to maximize ROI at every stage. Following on from the Global Financial crisis, managers have been put under unprecedented pressure to lean up their business and every cent of every dollar of expenditure has been put under scrutiny. This flurry of cost reduction activity has caused some senior managers to become somewhat over excited. The mindset has moved from ‘doing more with less’ to one of simply survival.

The biggest problem with this mindset it that sooner or later when the economy does turnaround, your business needs to be fit enough to survive the feeding frenzy that will ensue. It may be attractive to cut suppliers or reduce your headcount now but what does that do for your operational effectiveness. Is your business really capable of reacting to a spike in demand?

Managers are therefore on the lookout for cost reduction strategies that can save money now but have more long term operational effectiveness.

One area that CFO’s and COO’s look towards are business process improvements initiatives. By analyzing the processes in a business and ‘re-engineering’ them, substantial cost savings can be realized and in the process, making the business more effective and agile.

The benefits of Business process improvements are well known and acknowledged but they are largely thought about as long term initiatives. Most CFO’s view business process improvement initiatives as an exercise that will take a minimum of 6 months to implement and it’s not uncommon for projects to blow out to two or even three years. In this current economic climate, many ‘C’ level executives are overly focused on short term initiatives and rule out business process engineering before they have really had a chance to consider it.

The reason that this is such flawed logic is that Business Process engineering doesn’t have to take this long. Modern days consulting houses such as Synoptic document, analyse and re-engineer a business process in only 5 – 8 days. Exactly, how they do this is beyond the scope of this article but the time-frame is involved is what is most important to understand.

Next, having established our “to –be” processes a vehicle is needed to ‘operationalise’ the changes. Again, based on previous experience ‘C’ level executives perceive Software implementations as both longwinded and costly affairs and sadly some of the best intentioned projects never see the light of day.

Software development has moved on in leaps and bounds in recent times which means that ‘C’ Level executives need to takes a revised view what is possible with modern software development toolsets.

One such toolset is SEBA from Solentive. Rather than start from scratch with each new development, a licensed version of their software development ‘chassis’ is made available. This means that timeframe and budgets for the implementation of new business processes are reduced with dramatic effect.

A tool set is made available to Managers or ‘business process owners’ to allow them to build or modify business processes as they change. What the manager perceives as a business process in their management application is viewed as a series of screens for the end user at the shop floor level.

Furthermore, through a powerful combination of workflow and business rules engine technology, SEBA can guide the user to make more cost effective decisions at decision points along the path of the process.

By combining the best of both of these approaches, ‘C’ Level executives could potentially move from mapping to implementation of business processes in less than 14 days. This can be very attractive to a manager who is looking to refine business processes and see a rapid return on their investment.

More business technology articles by David Birchall can be discovered at http://www.davidbirchall.bircko.com

The Neat Company – Neat Company Scanner Software.

Check out this for a sweet piece of kit! I was on the look out for a card scanning solution to sort out my huge pile of business cards in the corner of my desk. On my travels, I discovered this…!

The neat card scanner is part of a family of neat products that can declutter you life. Take the neat receipt scanner. What better way to declutter you wallet that with a trick scanner that uses OCR to populate a ledger for you.

Or if you want to go all out, try instead the all in one solution to declutter your desk. Neatdesk does documents, receipts and business cards.

Neat!!

If there’s one thing I have learnt in the world of IT sales, it’s this: Busy IT buyers have enough on their plate without all the waffle and three letter acronyms (TLA’s) that get banded around the IT industry.
In my experience, people appreciate it if you just get to the point and quickly. So without further a do, here’s 10 reasons why I choose to evangelise InRule Technology. See how much of this makes sense for your department / business.

1.) Write business logic code faster and more efficiently

InRule allows you to write business logic statements and create decision tables without the need to for code. As a rough guide 5000 lines in C# can be achieved in only 150 rules in InRule. Faster programming means quicker return on investment, a happy boss and more chance of getting your annual bonus.

2.) Write business logic statements that communicate directly with the business , not just your IT department.

Ask yourself what the average business person understands… a page full of code or a report or repository of business rules using familiar and domain specific language.You can even set your own vocabulary. Wouldn’t that make life easier?

3) Centralise and collaborate on your business logic.

Two minds are better than one,three minds are better than two and the story goes on. Remember the days when you could only make changes to a website via an HTML competent webmaster? Along came content management systems, changed all that and we have never looked back. This evolution in technology allowed us to make changes to content and fast track the change management process. Now, multiple staff members could work simultaneously on web content.

The development of a truly functional rules management system allows your business to enjoy the same benefits in your business logic. However, this evolution in rules management has a much larger consequence for the business.

Since rules exist in every part of the business, there is now an opportunity to catalyse every area of the business. Rules can now be placed in a centralised repository or catalogue and can be understood by non technical business users.

When everyone has visibility of business rules, you can start to collaborate, and that’s powerful!

4) Easy integration with minimal coding or SOA connectivity

InRule can be bound to your business logic layer with only a few lines of code in .NET. If you’re using another flavour of code or you have mixed architecture they have thought of that too. InRule has SOA functionality out of the box making connectivity a doddle.

5) Complement the connectivity of BizTalk with the rules functionality of InRule for a killer package

InRule for SOA comes with irAdapter for Biztalk server. This means that InRule and Biztalk can function harmoniously and make your life easier.

6) Inline ruling of not –it’s your decision

Put your rules in single long line or organise them in branches. Create rule on rules, time trigger them, lock them down, print them off, verify them…. the list goes on. Well there’s a reason it’s called business rules management

7) Killer performance

What use would a knock-out Business Rules Management Application be if it wasn’t backed up with a highly optimised, low foot print rules engine to execute them. Let’s just say that InRule doesn’t disappoint us here.

8)It’s not going to break your budget

It’s free to try and pretty darn reasonably price to buy. Given the impact that Rules management can have on a business, I struggle to think of a singular piece of technology that provides more business value.

9) You’ve never met a bunch of people more willing to help

They were great with us when we were a customer of InRule and we’ve since met plenty of other customers that sing their praises. Just let them know what you’re trying to achieve and they’ll do their best to help you achieve it.

10) Business Decision Management Works

When a Top 5 Bank in the US moved from hard-coded logic to automating business logic with InRule for use in Risk Rating scorecards for various forms of lending, they enabled risk analysts to “configure new scorecards and revise existing ones, taking 68% of programming out of the cycle time and significantly enhancing the Speed to Market.”

To find out more about how managing the rules can make your life easier and your business more effective visit http://www.inrule.com/
Or visit http://www.inrule.com/products/productEvaluation.aspx to start your free trial