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.