Posts Tagged ‘research’
Herding Consultants 2.0
What kind of title is “Herding Consultants 2.0″? I suppose for search engine optimization reasons I should have used “aligning” instead of “herding” but at some point the whole alignment theme can get boring. I’ll stick with “herding” this time. Having been on both sides of the consulting table leads to some firm convictions about what that means in an era of highly available sources of judgment and advice. In the “old” days (before the late 1990’s) consultants found consultants based on their business offerings, sales campaigns and contacts. A relationship was built based on repeated personal contact. The competitive differentiator was the consultant’s previous work and their skills inventory. That ultimately led to a “resume bake off” when consultants competed for your business. That model is still viable to a large extent.
A new model has appeared over the last few years based on Internet based tools and virtual presence. Blogs have grown rapidly and any consultant worth his salt has one (me included). We use some tool to subscribe to the blogs that interest us, such as our email clients, browsers or any number of other tools. My preference is a tool called BlogBridge. That keeps the blog posts out of my inbox which reduces clutter and makes them easy to scan. The end result is that I now have subscribed to many blogs. I did that because there are many topics about which I want to stay current or have an interest. That creates a need to assign levels of credibility to each blog. BlogBridge makes the assignment of a ranking very easy. It’s the deciding on a rank that’s hard.
My current technique is to look over my “herd” of consultant blogs to spot trends. Once I do that I decide if I’m in agreement with the consensus. If not, I research the topic more to validate my opinions. I’m not trying to be a technical expert but I am trying to understand the topic well enough that I can offer my own options and judgment in a way that adds value for my target clients (C-level executives in mid-market manufacturing or manufacturing related service businesses who are trying to make decisions on the use and deployment of technology tools). I will then vet my opinions with a few people whose opinion I trust and who have differing backgrounds.
This just reinforces the point I have made before. It’s the personal relationships that matter most. It also reinforces the idea that there is just a huge amount of opinions and “experts” out there. Another way of “herding” all of the consultants you rely on for advice is to let the large consulting companies do it for you. For example, both Gartner and Forrester have become active bloggers. You can also just sign up with either of them and get even more information. Essentially, by relying on their blogs you are letting them do the vetting for you. There are other, smaller consulting groups like ebizQ and TechRepublic, which offer similar capabilities. I watch some consultants from each of these.
In summary, my point is that we need techniques to vet the web-based consultants we have all come to rely on. We each need to decide how much effort to apply to that vetting exercise and how to leverage our own personal networks. I have my approach and I recommend that you develop one that works for you.
Thanks for stopping by. Stay tuned for more…
Forecasts, Optimism and Questions
First, I apologize for this post being late. I will endeavor to get back on schedule. I will not promise never to be late again. This post will focus on an interesting document Gartner has put out. It’s titled “Gartner Perspective: IT Spending 2010″. For your convenience, a link to it is provided here. I’m not going to discuss the entire document, only the parts that I found most interesting. The survey was based on global data. I am most interested in North America because that is where I buy my groceries and my customers buy theirs.
The most interesting table is Table 6 shown below.
What I find most interesting in this table is to compare the actual amounts, not the percentages. If we compare the 2010 forecast to 2008 data we see that spending actually should grow in 2010 over 2008 in the USA, Latin America, the Middle East/Africa, Japan and Asia Pacific. That is not true for Eastern & Western Europe and Canada. For those of us who rely mainly in the USA for our source of business this is good news. It implies that 2009 will be an exception to otherwise steady growth. Remember, 2008 results were dropping off by the end of the year.
Another interesting table is Table 7, shown below.
Since this table is global, it implies that Europe and Canada are depressing the vertical results. On a global basis all verticals are off about 4.7%. The Gartner report has additional insights.
Finally I want to focus on Table 9.
(Warning: below is a blatant self-serving pitch)
What I like about Table 9 is that it prioritizes the focus areas for all businesses. It ranks business process improvement as first priority and ranks improving enterprise workforce effectiveness as third highest. Both of those areas are the focus of StrAIT Advisors. The idea of business IT alignment delivers on both of those. I am delighted to see this data in this report. Obviously, this means that you should take both of those areas and business IT alignment very seriously. Oh, and think of StrAIT Advisors at the same time.
(End of blatant self-serving pitch)
I want to encourage you to get a copy of this report. It’s free and readily available. I think it provides some very useful insight. I find it to be a source of optimism with a few questions. We all can use a little optimism these days.
BPM is a Matter of Survival
The folks at Appian recently released a copy of a research note from Gartner, Inc. I have included a copy of it in the Files section of this blog. The key findings are listed below.
Key Findings
- Companies that use BPM create business process models that identify process redundancies, hidden costs and avoidable risks. Companies survive by using cost savings from BPM efforts to fund critical business operations.
- Applying BPM enables process visibility, allowing better collaboration among the activities being performed.
- For struggling companies, compliance is often another burden. BPM is well-suited to drive costs out of compliance and regulatory work.
- Simplifying the administrative work of your employees can increase morale and enable them to spend time on high-value work. It can also help companies in survival mode do more with less.
Recommendations
- Gain a competency in BPM now.
- Before you wield the cost-cutting axe, construct a high-level business process model to understand the impact of head count and resource cuts across the enterprise so that you do not decrease process efficiency and inadvertently drive up costs.
- Use BPM to manage your business case justification and measurement processes.
- Identify processes where costs may be high and there is not a focus on measurement. Target one of these processes for your first or next BPM project, and demonstrate tangible results.
Survival Actions
Put BPM to work immediately:
- Identify your most-valuable business processes.
- Select from that set the business processes necessary for survival and where money may be wasted.
- Target one of these processes for your first or next BPM project.
BPM can be a powerful tool that plays a critical role in the survival of your company — it can reduce costs, ensure compliance, avoid mistakes and create the visibility needed to manage processes as assets to your enterprise. Initial projects can produce impressive results. You cannot, however, simply focus on one-off projects. You will need to assess the impact of cuts to the process overall, not just isolation in one area. To scale and integrate BPM into the fabric of your organization requires attending to the discipline of BPM and putting the constructs in place to support the practice of BPM. Although much of the survival work will focus on projects that generate significant results, resources must also be allocated to communicating and making BPM repeatable and scalable. For step-by-step information about building an effective BPM program.
When building a BPM program, be sure to pay attention to some critical elements:
- Build communication into your BPM work to address the cultural and political implications that will arise.
- Start up the business process competency center to ensure that your efforts will scale.
- Prove the results by doing several short-duration, high-impact projects.
- Educate your organization about BPM — build the skill set, and strive to embed continuous process improvement into everyone’s job.
Laying the groundwork for BPM and proving results are powerful and can become a platform to elevate BPM to its true potential — BPM as one of the strategic management disciplines — and enable your organization to move from using BPM to survive to helping your organization to thrive.
StrAIT Advisors recommendations
This research note includes some specific savings example, which is always helpful and should be valuable to you as well. I recommend that you take these observations and recommendations seriously. For those of us that have been around a while, we remember recessions past. As usual, there were many jobs lost. And as usual, as the economy recovered many companies found their experience inventory in core areas had been depleted. This lack of experience where it was needed most seriously hurt those companies. It took them years to recover.
Download a copy of this research note and share it within your organization. It’s clear, direct and important.