For me 2010 has been a real foundation year, a year that by itself will not look that great, yet a year that is the bedrock for future achievement. Did I become rich during this year? No, but I survived and have built a number of things which will be shaping the future for me and my family.  Just a few highlights that must be included are:

☺ Assisted my son in finalising and publishing his first novel

☺ Collected my on-line articles and compiled my own book

☺ Co-Founded a Social Media consultancy

☺Completed my Competent Communicator award at Toastmasters (started in 2009)

☺ Purchased a new home

I had hoped to add to that list other significant advances, yet they will have to wait for a future time (and I am passionate about many of these so I know they will ultimately succeed).

Currently I am passionate about leveraging my skills in global corporate consulting in order to assist small and mid-sized corporations succeed whether with their Social Media or marketing or through deployment of Business Intelligence solutions, or in the area of corporate risk. Whist at first these do seem to be diverse areas in which to be creating a consulting practice, yet they are linked.

Social Media is on the surface a marketing tool, yet in reality it is an holistic tool that has so many diverse uses. Customer services is an important aspect here, none the least because social media is a great tool for building trust. Whilst many aspects of Social Media cannot be measured in the true Business Intelligence style there is a specialist form of intelligence called social media intelligence and this is an area where I am able to assist my customers in building a listening post that acts as a foundation for their social presence.

Much of what we achieve is about helping others succeed. This is one of the reasons why I have spent much time with my son in assisting with publication of his first novel; eventually getting it self published. We have had many successes, but are still looking for a partner who can help us open further markets in the books world. An in respect of helping others succeed and seeking someone to act as a mentor for in order to assist them is achieving their own greatness.

We are always looking for new customers, so if you feel that we can assist you then please call on 289 296 4089 (new number) and we shall be pleased to assist, or send me an email.

We have a few more days till Christmas and the New Year will therefore be very soon after, but I would like to wish you all seasons greetings:

But I would like to leave you with a question – What does the future hold for you and in what way has 2010 been a superb foundation year for you? Please add your own comment here or answer the associated LinkedIn Question.

Also please note that I am looking to mentor 1 person during the course of 2011. Please email me any suitable candidates. My only stipulations are that they are in the same time zone (EST) and that they speak English as a first language. I wish this to be a Social Media focused mentoring effort, so I do anticipate communicating through Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or another medium.

One of the things that Mr Murphy discusses is ‘introducing an IT-led product or service’; a term he does not actually define. In this context if he means that IT should be leading business focused change initiatives, then that is agreed. However this is not the context this reader interpreted it as. If what is meant by this statement is the introduction of technical tools, or even the technology department dictating change then I would disagree.

Recently I argued that IT leaders need to be contributing to revenue generation or assisting to reduce costs by being involved in business led initiatives. It is automation or rapid solution deployment that can often contribute to that overall success. It is the business that needs more effective tools in order to assist overburdened staff in all areas of the business, and this involves the business processes as much as any technical solutions.

If there is to be any imminent return to growth then IT’s role is in transforming business to a smarter more collaborative organisation, and not simply as provider of technical components. Part of this is about improving efficiencies across the business, by looking for opportunities to automate tedious manual processes. Each of these areas will make the organisation more effective and more economically savvy.

As much as we would all like to see a return to growth as soon as possible, it is unlikely to happen on a global scale before 2012. There is no individual industry, or even country, that is taking a real lead at this time, the belts remain quite tight for the forthcoming period. Right now the challenge seems to be about doing more with less resources, those that are in a job are often overworked, yet at the same time there are too many talented people looking for work.

Virtualization of services is of course perhaps the only exception to this rule, yet at the same time this should be considered a part of a corporate cost saving initiative, with providing more effective use of existing resources.

Budgets for IT departments may be on the increase – they had to from the severe restrictions faced in 2009 and 2010. No matter how far, or how deep cuts go it is a fact that business will always subsequently find it necessary to replace certain aging capital assets, or respond to stimulus from outside the business’s control. It is this that is driving any spending right now rather than expansion in response growth.

If hiring is still frozen then it is unlikely that major budgetary growth will occur. It is unlikely to allow room to expand the number of staff, or contractors that can be engaged.

It is good to see that technology leaders feel they have a role to play in driving new products and services to market. For too long there has been too little involvement in this process for IT leaders, with many only being told of release plans only days beforehand – necessitating bolt-on’s to existing systems instead of proper impact assessments.

Where we can agree on is the need for corporations to better leverage data in order to drive revenue and aid growth. This is one of the basic aims of business intelligence; and sadly one misunderstood by many corporations. Understanding the natural flow of business can aid both when to release a product to market and optimisation of production schedules. Sizable investments can be put into context by proper use of BI. For one corporation this meant a saving of over $30 million as they discovered that changing production schedules for existing manufacturing facilities abrogated the need to build a new factory. It also saved layoff’s in at least two sites. All possible because of leveraging readily available information.

Data driven revenue and savings opportunities abound across the average corporation, their is either insufficient expertise or training available to recognise available options.

One of the major goals of this existing time is in the way IT departments advance any appreciation of the organisations they are an element of. Each part of the organisation should  be working together with other company departments in plotting a path through the difficulties the business may be facing. Within this context technology departments have got to emerge as they key internal strategic partner for change as opposed to a simple overhead or cost centre.

The known conditions that are a part of our current decline remains throughout most industrial sectors and corporations remain more severely challenged than at any moment since the depression of the 1930′s. To a sizable extent revenue development and reduction of costs have turned into key corporate priorities. For many it may be a pipe-dream to ever return to pre-2008 income and profit levels. The current vision for some organisations may now be modestly a case of developing product sales to a stage that a sustainable income is possible;  after that it may be possible to leverage this as the foundation for steady future advances.

IT executives ought to be securing a relationship with the corporate management, understanding the enterprise capabilities and possibly contributing assistance for crucial change programs which assist your firm to achieve its goals. Three of the priorities in this regard include:

* Knowing the enterprise
* Thinking strategically
* Taking action and being in charge of enterprise transformation initiatives

Knowing the business must be with reference to knowing the desired ambitions in addition to objectives for particular areas and identify methods through which technical solutions is able to help in answering enterprise troubles. Largely this is about automation of things which may otherwise take extensive manual labour to complete. One of the rewards here can be projects that utilize rapid deployment techniques; technology should be capable of quickly delivering answers. Your aspirations at this point needs to be focused on helping the organization with achieving all their aims and objectives, and not on specific technology goals.

Thinking strategically relates to developing a specific knowledge of the company, its ambitions and as a consequence implementing strategic system functions which assist in the achievement of these needs. It is not possible to take your eyes off a changing and developing big picture it is necessary to constantly reassess all projects against these changing goals. Yet at the same time any critical assessment must substitute the focus from IT as being a overhead to becoming a profit enhancing centre of distinction which makes the necessary contribution to the future outlook of the enterprise. The sum total change initiatives should focus on aiding the organisation to strengthen, and attain its objectives.

Responding to and leading corporate transformation initiatives is important since this is an area where IT has built a solid status during many years. Nevertheless what is distinctive at this point needs to be that improvement ought to be business motivated and definitely not technology driven. This represents a key improvement in thinking for a variety of technology management.

Closing of year-end accounts should simply be part of a business process that includes both automation and human input. There should be no special requests to process. We know that there are often changes to the statutory reporting rules but having an annual deadline of 31st October (with a change board meeting on in the first week of November) seems eminently sensible and gives adequate time to respond. Asking for a change on the 11th of December is not acceptable, especially for an IT department that has been trimmed to the bone.

The message that needs to be learnt this year is that any process we create in the next few days needs to be repeatable next year and that we should always be planning ahead. This is a matter of leadership and planning for future need rather than responding at the last minute.

What I mean here is that during the discovery phase we involve a wide audience, we gather information from everyone. Yet in the documentation phase we will write down our discoveries into a word document that is often only published to a limited audience. Yet there is a distinct advantage in writing our business requirements and specifications on a more modular basis, in a form of documentation that becomes available for comment and change by a larger audience.

My thinking here is that documentation, like programs, relate to specific problems each of which need to be documented in turn. Obviously discussions have to be documented, usually by a business analyst and that is often best accomplished by one person. It is better to publish the results of our findings a few days after the original meeting in order that this is fresh in everyone’s mind. Obviously a good BA has always published their findings, most often done in the form of an email. Many times the documentation is not as visible as perhaps it should be in a world where visibility is increasingly key.

This is perhaps one of the original ideas behind CASE tools to make the documentation available to everyone. However CASE tools are  possibly not the right tools to achieve this goal. Whilst diagrams do convey concepts they often do not include the detailed descriptions. Besides CASE tools have always remained a high-cost per user item and are generally limited to development team members, and sometimes only a subset of them. The idea of a Wiki on the other hand provides the capability to publish our results to a wider audience, and have them remain in the public eye. I would love to see a CASE to Wiki publication mechanism that ensures diagrams that all updates can become visible to a wider audience without having  to manually re-publish. On the whole Requirements Management should be about collaboration within the company.

Some of the pain points should our BA leave the project is having the new recruit understand their predecessor’s thinking. The point here is as far as possible to have the thinking available to a wider audience in the company.

The other aspect that concerns me is that once the project is delivered and the corporation is now working with its shiny new system the documentation is forgotten about, then eventually lost, even if those involved in the project remain in the company. At then end of the day though we need to be able to take the new enquirer back to the “large wall and the bunch of colour post-it notes” (with all the modifications in place of course) so that they may understand the thought processes that were in play. This should short-cut future investigations in this area. The truth of the matter is that we are all busy people and cannot be experted to remember all the aspect of a project that we worked on five years ago, our focus has moved on.

One of the first uses of a Wiki that I encountered was in the area of user documentation and corporate terms. This was useful because it was a public resource and was visible across the corporation.

Over the last 12 months the value of the Chief Information Officer’s role has been called into question by a number commentators. In an earlier article (CIO Strategy Development) I stated “CIO’s role is more than simply managing IT staff and ensure that systems and networks are up and running” and that they “have largely become the Chief Change Officer by leading their organization’s strategic business change initiatives”. We are at a time when many CEO’s are questioning the value of the entire team on the top table, with The Bolton Group stating that 20% of CEO’s rate their top teams as ‘High Performing’ I feel it is particularly important that IT provides an extraordinary performance. In fact there is a revenue generating opportunity opening up right now that many corporations are missing as the world changes in front of our eyes.

Web 2.0 is adding to the corporate challenge. The relationship between employer and employee is changing. The change is more of a social change than it is a technological one, albeit founded on a technological platform. Each worker connections booth professionally and in a social context. The development of Social Media may have allowed us to reconnect with out old school and college friends but it also has the perspective to allow business development. However in some respects the world of Business and Social activities are different, but are they? The biggest group of new users to Facebook is in the 50 to 59 age bracket, many of whom are people of real influence in business today.

In the business world we are not interested on my auntie Mavis as she explores the world (well perhaps you are if you are in the Travel industry), but you may be interested in connecting with the production manager that I know in order to sell them Lean/6Sigma training. The fact that we are connected may facilitate that sale.We must understand that posting something on a social networking site has a different dynamic to chatting at the water-cooler. Having a Twitter conversation is not private – others will be listening. Whilst the majority of our listeners are ambivalent to our messages, some can have sinister intent. Some listeners may also be clients or prospects, so we had better watch what we say. The way we leverage relationships is changing, our network is one of the keys to building our business. We also have to be on our guard for mis-information, especially where we are looking to react to changes in the marketplace.

However should a corporation change everything that it is doing to adopt Social Media? This is where it is important to understand whether any new channel is going to give benefit. This understanding comes from leveraging a technology the corporation already has, its Business Intelligence solution. This is developing a new focus, a Marketing Intelligence. Marketing intelligence should look at our sales, customer services, and marketing efforts and ensure that they are correctly focused. There is little point is saying “All is well we are selling millions of widgets” when the company wishes to expand the market for ‘dongles’. The question is largely selling the right thing to the right person at the right time.

A couple of years ago I deployed a solution for a Telecom company that leveraged Business Intelligence to enhance the existing Customer Services and Sales solutions. The demographics about the customer, plus information on past performance would determine whether to offer an improved service to a customer, particularly when they wanted to terminate their service and move to a new supplier. If the demographic was right valuable offers could be made that would retain the customer. For this corporation BI drives their sales and marketing efforts. At the same time you must also be able to recognise that a customer is not worth the effort and therefore minimise sales effort as they are not profitable.

This value proposition is even more important when is comes to marketing through the Social Media channel. Whilst Dell have claimed to have made $1million via the Twitter channel in 2008, see here, I am not sure that many corporations can quantify the impact of Social Media sales so accurately. Predicting it is much more complex.

Leveraging Social Media for marketing must be cost effectively deployed. This is more that merely defining a Social Media policy it is about having a corporate policy that leverages this new channel to its advantage.