DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

It’s been getting more an more difficult to sit down and write posts lately due to all sorts of work priorities. The only time I really get is on the commute to and from work. The reception around Sydney is patchy so I’ve been toying with some kind of offline solution so that I can still update my wordpress blog from my netbook when I feel the urge to write.

Of course MS Word offers one such capability, but I also found Windows Live Writer. What I like about writer is some of the additional control I have over how I publish the blog.

I can publish to different blogs, publish as a draft, preview the blog and spell check really easily. One thing I also like , that word doesn’t do is to give you easy access to your blog dashboard to approve comments.

Simple but effective

Electronic Mail or email as it has more commonly become known dates back several decades, as early at the 1970′s. With the widespread adoption of the internet, webmail, exchange technologies, email adoption expanded massively in the last decade in particular.

The latest development to aid in emails success is the proliferation of smart phones and Blackberry’s. Now emails can be sent anytime and anywhere. Email is decades old but more popular than ever- but what is the business case for email? Does email actually create more problems than it solves?

Whilst email has an important role in fast and effective communication, it can sometimes be counter-productive when you put the technology under the spotlight.

One of the drawbacks of email is also its strength – The convenience with which an email can be sent or received makes email addictive. In the 21st century there is an expectation that you should receive a timely response from the recipient which in turn leads to users frequent checking of their inbox. This is not only a time waster but also disrupts thoughts patterns which further hinders productivity.

Further to this, email has some more important drawbacks. Email users, in the course of ‘getting things done’ go about there business in highly erratic ways. From one user to the other, from one job to the next, work is completed in a very inconsistent manner. This means that efficiencies gained from the division of labour and process analysis are not available and all too often we find than menial tasks are completed by overqualified and expensive resources.

Important information captured along the way has a tendancy to remain on the email rather than being stored in a centralised location for easy access by other colleagues at a later date. Down the track, a customer is then asked the same questions over and over again which in turn can lead to customer dissatisfaction and perhaps eventually the loss of a customer.

Lastly, email systems have no way to measure the performance of the operators. Simple metrics to enable your business are not available when work is allocated over email. Examples of such metrics could be average order time, workload balancing, and the number of stuck orders.

Are there solutions to these problems?

A Business Process Management (BPM) or Workflow solution can counter these problems by enforcing and measuring processes, based on the roles and skills of the users. Information captured in these systems can be stored for reuse and easy access by work colleagues at a later date. The information can also be integrated with other systems such as an ERP or accounting package. These solutions promote a better understanding of the processes, which in turn promotes consistency and the ability to automate processes.

These technologies are no doubt better designed for the allocation of work than the decades old email platform, so why is email still so widely used? As we have already mentioned email can be addictive which means that the habit can be hard to break, but there is another important reason to explore.Previously, these systems have attracted lengthly development cycles and a large pricetag. People have the perception that customised workflow system are too expensive or difficult to set up, but is this really the case?

Advances in technology means that workflow systems can now implemented quickly and cost effectively. Solutions can be implemented in days or weeks rather than months or years. The payback is often staggering with massive jumps in customer service satisfaction, efficiency and cost savings.

Practical steps to get email undercontrol

1) Explain the role of email to your staff, when to use it and when to avoid it.
2) Encourage set times to check inboxes
3) Set more realistic expectations with your colleagues and customers; use autoresponders to let people know when you will check the inbox and what to do if its urgent
4) Implement a cost effective workflow solution and promote a culture of efficency and process centric thinking.

Today we launched our new Youtube channel. Feel free to check it out and follow our future updates.

Our first video shows you a high speed tour of Bizagi Process modeller. With the free Bizagi Modeller, you can model processes and publish them for easy reference. We’re currently doing lots of exciting work with this modelling tool so watch this space for future updates.

To find out more about how Bizagi Can help you, you can drop me a line or check out the website at www.imsx.com.au

New this week is a smart move by Google to gain some mindshare with MS office users. Love it or hate it, most larger organisations are using office variants.

Google cloud connect allows you to connect save and your files with your Google Apps cloud account. Its an attempt to eat into the MS cashcow that Sharepoint has become by allowing usesr to access files from anywhere rather than their domain alone.

Here’s a video and how they compare.

Google Apps versus sharepoint

Download it

Google Analytics is a hugely powerful and often under utilysed tool for web owners to understand site traffic trends. There are however a few areas where some third party tools can offer a little more incite into your site visitors.

• Setting up e-commerce and site goals can sometimes take a little longer than you intend. After you finally get around to setting this up, you don’t need to wait to aggregate data in order to start seeing results. Paditrack.com allows you to suck in the data from your google analytics account and retrospectively view goal funnels and site stats and decide what to do next. The goal funnel view is great in sites with a number of steps for the visitor to progress through such as ecommerce. If you can see that one particular step is causing visitors to abandon their cart, then that’s where you concentrate your efforts and increase your conversions.
• Heat mapping site activity is not a new idea. What is new is that its now affordable and accessible for your average webmaster. Clicktale.com is a great way to track user behaviour on your website. Studies have shown that mouse movements can be linked to eyeball activity when it comes to understanding how people view websites. So why is this important? Imagine you had identified a problem page but didn’t know why users were exiting the site. Clicktail heatmaps can show you a how long people view certain parts if the page. If an area around a certain control is red hot, then some A/B testing on this control is needed.

I realised that some of my blog readers may not have received the update on the Business Process Management Training next month.

The training is intended for people to get hands on with a BPM tool and to create workflows and processes. 80% of what s taught is tranferable to other standards based BPM solutions.

For more info go to

http://imsx.com.au/training

My absence from this blog has been a long one. It’s just what happens when you’ve got a lot on your plate like exploding business and family commitments.

Note to self: Must get more disciplined with my blog. Must say no more often (but not to family)

I’ve also been putting a little bit of thought into what I’d like the blog to do so you’ll be seeing some changes in the coming months that will make things a little cleaner and easier to digest.

Somethings that have been keeping me busy:

• Bircko Business Solutions now has hundreds of free  tutorials on using Cpanel and installing CMS software. (www.bircko.com)
• IMSX are now providing support for Bizagi Business Process Management Suite for the first time in Australia  (www.imsx.com.au)
• Synoptic Consulting are involved in over 5 events this year including speaking at the Australian Computer Society and Business Analysts World.(www.synoptic.com.au)
• E-whizz online are expanding their products offering to include a range of ultra portable devices and technologies (www.e-whizz.com.au)
• We became authorised Google Apps Resellers late last year which means that we can assist businesses in achieving fast implementations of their email and intranet solutions. We are working on a website that can explain this more fully.

Hope to talk more in the coming months

Last week the Joomla! extension directory reached its 6000 listing which means that it if you use this measure, its still in the top 3 extendable CMS systems along with Drupal and WordPress. While WordPress has more extensions listed, I would question the quality of some and Joomlas announcement is quick to point out that there is a far higher download of the extensions on its directory.

Here’s there announcement

I’ve been with Google apps from the very early days. From what appeared to be a spin off from gmail, they have evolved the technology to what is now a very robust, cost effective enterprise solution.

The perception out there is is that its a quick and dirty alternative for small companies but I’m guessing many of you would be surprised by some to the customers that have already got on board and already reaping the benefits of making the switch.

Here’s a selection of customers that have made the switch already and their individual motivations for doing so.

Berlingske Media’s story

I’d like to share with your some off piste business technology or to put it another way, its a bit of a tangent for a business technology blog. I think it is however a great bit of technology so I’m happy to share it.

This one is for the fitness fans out there and those in particular that have a leaning towards things with a apple symbol on the side of them. I was a late convert for Apples iPhone but I have to say I have become a bit of a tragic now. The iPhone became my organiser, email and calendar, guitar tuner, games console and many other things.

One thing that it didn’t do which was a great source of frustration was to let me record and monitor my heart rate for cardio vascular training. If you want to approach fitness training in a structured way, you can’t beat a heart rate monitor strap and monitor. This gap was previously filled by my Polar cycle computer but when that finally gave up, I wanted to get my iPhone to do the job, since it did everything else. After a fair bit of searching I concluded that such a thing wasn’t possible and gave up.

Then, one day and email in my inbox alerted me to this. Enter stage left the Fiscia Sensor key for iPhone which is a bit of hardware that connects your iPhone to your ANT+ chest strap – Yes!

It’s part of a family of products that allow you to get all speed and fitness data you need when your out for a run or a ride, It also a great little gadget to show off at the pub afterwards too.

Heres where you find out a bit more.