The adrenalin is gently subsiding after keynoting the Inspiring Performance 09 in front of 400 enterprise customers. It is interesting to look back on a key theme that was pervasive throughout the Nimbus and 10 + client presentations who included Balfour Beatty, Barclays Capital, Cisco, Marathon Oil, Nestle and the excellent Carphone Warehouse closing keynote.
The key message was “If you are documenting your business processes, and nobody reads them, why are you bothering?” The audience are the 10,000 end users or "consumers" in your organisation.
At the conference we talked about the different audiences of process, in terms of what hat they are wearing. White Hat: IT, Blue Hat: Systems Integration, Green Hat: line of business, Red Hat: compliance.
So if you focus on the audience. Increasingly that audience is the end users or consumers of the content. 1,000’s or 10,000s of people who use them to understand how to do their job. These are Green Hats ranging from seasoned professional in their 60’s down to the new starter in their teens – the iPod Generation.
Interestingly or scarily, for many businesses it is the iPod Generation who touch the customers and therefore communicate the company brand and promise.
So, if you were writing a book or white paper you would really think about the audience before you put pen to paper or keyboard. But too often process projects start documenting processes and storing them in databases as the business management system without considering the ‘consumer’ of the information. They fail the “So what?” test.
Richard Butterfield from Balfour Beatty talked about the attributes of the ‘business management system’ which is the collection of end to end business processes aimed at end users – Green Hats, and also Red Hats. Those attributes were Simple (to understand), Elegant (and pretty to look at) , Integrated (so all supporting information linked) and Personalised (look & feel / content / access).
How many business management systems can say yes to all those? Delivering thought MS Sharepoint certainly helps with some of these aspects. Nimbus launch of the Nimbus Control Desktop player which mimics iTunes and the Nimbus Control for iPhone application goes a long way to addressing all these points.
Carphone Warehouse presented the final keynote with a video shot in one of their stores with ‘real users’ – the guys who work in the Richmond store – explaining how they used the implementation of Nimbus Control called How2. The video will be posted on the Nimbus website early next week.
The results in terms of ROI are staggering.
- The time from thinking about building How2, through selecting Nimbus Control , documenting their store operations and then rolling out to 815 stores around the UK was 11 months. The fact that Nimbus host the software as service (SaaS) has certainly contributed to the speed in implementation.
- Since implementation the performance of the worst performing stores have helved the gap between them and the best performing stores. Now How2 is not entirely responsible, but is has supported the drive to transform the operations.
The presentations of the conference will be available at the Inspiring Performance website.