IT Process Automation

I read today that unemployment has risen to 7.6%.  Yes, its official – we are in a recession.  However, that does not mean there isn’t opportunity because there is.  If everyone believed everything the press is saying our economy does not have a chance and the United States is going to cease to exist.

I also read today that the U.S. government is going to re-visit its parameters for H-1B Visas because they are being used by recruiting body shops rather than giving foreign nationals the real opportunity that they seek.  This means that application developers and specialist are going to be able to make up ground that they have lost to foreign nationals in the past.

My suggestion is for developers to increase their skill-set now before the economy begins to get worse.  Information technology consulting has never been a steady business it always has had peaks and valleys.  When the economy is good projects are plentiful.  When it starts to decline projects usually come to a grinding halt.  But is you have multiple skills it decrease your odds of becoming a statistic.

Organizations try to do more and more internally rather than outsource it when the economy begins to falter.  The more skills a person has the better chances one has to stay employed.  This holds true for IT staffing, development and consulting.  Additionally, when a developer or infrastructure architect can show an organization how to safe time, investment and people through the implementation of their solution they will endear themselves to that particular organization.

Good information technology strategy can more than pay for itself in this economy.  Organizations everywhere are dependent on technology and they need processes to become dynamically automated so they can accomplish more with less while the move towards models of efficiency that will contribute to the productivity of the organization.

Make it your mission to learn more applications and methodologies that can greatly increase the productivity of any company.  To do this is to build value for the organization and you by ensuring there will always be a job for those that are willing to innovate and create a better way.  

This is your opportunity.  Make it happen!

The global economy is tanking, layoffs are everywhere but organizations need to remain positive and work through these difficult times.  Information technology is no exception to this statement.  Often times when companies decide to cut budgets the information technology department is a prime target to be cut.

So, what can a prudent CIO do to address budget cuts while still operating his/her organization at a competitive advantage?   Here are some suggestions that may help:

• Ratios - Look at your ratio of onsite permanent IT employees.  Perhaps you could reduce the number of permanent employees to only those that are essential to the mission.  Outsourcing the rest of the work to a local firm often times is far more cost effective than permanent employees.

• Time-to-Market – If products and applications can be delivered faster, though a combination of in house personnel and outsourced talent then companies will reap the benefits sooner.  Work closer with your outsourcing partners to save time, investment and even the dreaded budgets cuts.

• Revisit your Processes – By working closely with your outsourcing partner.  If your team can find how to deliver applications an automated process with fewer touches and less defects there will be less time and money spent on re-works.  IT departments must leverage knowledge, experience and tools to gain a competitive advantage while decreasing cost.

• Productivity Improvements – Your internal and your external outsourcing IT partner must embrace being able to accomplish more in less time and at a lower investment.  The true business value of IT will be felt across the enterprise.

• Negotiate Your Rates – Any true business partner or business technology consulting firm, will be open to rate reductions if you are willing to negotiate a long term partnership.  Dedicated consultants are looking for long-term business partnerships.  If you are willing to commit to a set amount of hours they will br eilling to negotiate rates with you.

Application development outsourcing and IT staffing outsourcing can have many benefits in these times of economic challenge.  Your organization still needs to operate on a day-to-day basis.  Re-think your approach for the mutual benefit of your organization and your outsourcing partner.
 

The current economic situation is not looking good in the near term. The U.S. has lost 1.2 million jobs this year, with 140,000 of those jobs being IT related. Job cuts are happening at Citi Bank and Sun, with companies like Intel not forecasting a rosy outlook for their sales. Old timers like me remember 2000 and 2003, and are beginning to see that 2009 may look like those years. What’s an application development team member to do? Simple, prove your worth to your organization. The harder answer is how.

I have talked to you about changing your perception, and communicating, well now is time to put this into action. Any process that you or your non-IT colleagues use probably has problems. Focus your energy on streamlining faulty processes for your business. Management is looking to keep those application development team members that have their eye on the business, not technology. When working on your proposal, try to come up reasonable time and money estimates. For example, saying "this process will reduce data entry by 30 minutes, and will save us $100,000 by reducing error corrections that are caused by manual steps" is better than saying "we can automate this process".

By sharing your process findings with management, you are showing that you have an interest in the business and you too are concerned with the bottom line. Don’t expect your findings to go unchallenged. This is where the office politics side of work raises its ugly head. I can’t help you there, except to say that if you can prove to upper management that your boss’s department is important, and you are important to the department, you will have a better chance at retaining your job. I know that we application development teams focus on technology to do our jobs, but at our core is the desire to solve problems. Right now, it’s your business processes that need your attention, and those who can show how to get more business with what that have are the ones who will ride out the storm.

Those of us that have been a part of the Web from the on-set, have witnessed various stages of web and Internet development.  Web 1.0 was about Commerce, Web 2.0 is about community, and the next phase Web 3.0 is about connectivity.

This means we will need improved security, service oriented architecture (SOA), RSS feeds, bookmarking or tagging, crowd sourcing, crowd hacking, and user generated business applications that can be built by technical and non-technical people alike.  It also means that there will be new career opportunities in web development because organizations of all types will need to improve the level of communication by utilizing technology tools that can automate and intelligently route information

This newly developed web connectivity will play a proactive role in getting multiple generations to adapt to new processes and tools for the purpose of creating more efficiency, which will lead to greater productivity.  The next evolution of web development will improve the velocity of getting things done by using new Web based tools to coordinate, mandate, and route workflow.  Organizations will need to embrace the fact that technology and web application development can make the impossible – possible.  One is only limited by their own imagination because the next generation of web development applications is going to make connectivity to prospects, customers, and future customers a reality.
 
The fact-of-the-matter is, globalization is here to stay and organizations need to respect the fact that with the new push of connectivity through the web, mergers and acquisitions will move to a global scale and worldwide conglomerates will gain power.

Researchers have predicted that 3D immersive communities will be a part of Web 3.0 as well.  In the business-to-business atmosphere, manufacturers, distributors and retailers will be able to put their perspective clients into a 3D immersive environment so that end-users can experience life-like environment right from their desktop.  Is your organization ready for the next generation of web application development, or do you need some guidance to prepare for the next step?

As more service organizations have become more similar and commoditized, many have found the only way to acquire and maintain high value corporate customers is to differentiate on service.  While that strategy might appear to require an investment in customer service technology and staff, many companies are deploying integration technology to simplify operation procedures along with customer information systems on a single global platform.

The resulting ease of company-to-customer communications, streamlined work flow, and business process visibility, creates a highly differentiated environment where organizations and their customers can decrease inefficiencies and drive revenue growth.

Information technology consulting professionals can assist an organization to become integrated while automating human processes.  Today’s high competitive business market requires the ability to quickly meet or exceed customer expectations.  After years of dealing with expensive resource planning implementations, organizations need to deliver models of efficiency because their customers demand it.  Through proper enterprise application development and IT business solutions, any company can ensure that they can deliver rapid, pain-free reliable solutions to their customers.

Organizations that insist on relying upon high complex legacy systems will face a significant challenge in today’s world of “I want it now” mentality. So how does a serious competitor meet customer needs while still maintaining attractive margins and offering differentiated services?

Here are some suggestions:

1.  Implementation of a multi-enterprise gateway that will simplify complex internal data and customer communications. Differentiating on service with faster response times and access to business intelligence supporting customer efficiency and growth

2.  Simplify complex data and customer communication.  The simplification of the complex value-chain is important to any industry, but is doubly important to financial firms.  To enable more efficient and secure communications, banks need to look at business process automation, enabling their customers to connect with a single connection gateway.

3.  Protecting Against Risk – more and organizations are required by their customers and their partners to provide service level agreement with built-in standards that endure workflow and delivery.  Sarbanes Oxley has made it imperative that organizations have documented standards, or risk both penalty and claims against them.  An effective multi-enterprise information exchange gateway enables visibility into communication s traffic so that any organization can fix issues with a quick resolution before problems occur.

With better visibility and control, organizations become more informed and efficient operations.  When organizations are freed from ongoing pressures to manage connections and standards, they can focus on driving growth through accelerated business development and bottom-line productivity.
 

Succeeding in today’s competitive business environment requires constant innovation and execution of new strategies.  To stay one step ahead of the competition, companies may modify business models, design new products and service offerings, acquire new lines of business, or create a new channel strategy.  Optimization of a companies’ supply chain or business process automation are all solutions that are created to increase overall efficiencies. 

Even though companies go to great extremes to streamline their operations, they usually struggle to execute their strategic objectives.  Studies have shown very few strategic plans are executed and that in nearly every case, failures are caused not by a lack of planning, but through a lack of execution.

Business technology consulting firms try to plan for the worst while expecting the best.  However, once an IT consultant turns over a program or a developed application to a given firm, human error intervenes and the best laid plans go by the wayside.

I suggest that there are steps that can assist any organization can use to minimize the risk of an unexecuted strategic plan.  Those steps would include:

•  Clearly communicate strategies and plans to everyone involved
•  Define strategy and align people, metrics and practices with the corporate goals
•  Use the “carrot and the stick” approach to drive behaviors for cooperation
•  Monitor and discuss initiatives to seek out potential problems
•  All performance should be measured through the use of key performance  indicators (KPIs) to resolve and issues early

All of the steps that I have mentioned here should be interdependent on one another, which will increase the probability of bridging the gap between strategy and execution for any project or enterpise application development project.

Leaders of many organizations fully understand that the IT department must contribute as a partner to offer value to the enterprise.  However, too many organizations still look at IT as nonstrategic service provider or as a cost center.

So how can any IT organization change this perception?

• Change your focus.  I would suggest that IT leaders need to change their culture and speak in terms of strategic growth rather than bare minimum maintenance.
• IT directors should not try and create vision in vacuum. Instead, solicit a select group of IT leaders that have vision and encourage them to brainstorm everything from IT infrastructure, to application development, to IT outsourcing services.
• This vision could be a detailed five year plan, along with a list of specific actions to engage others in meeting the groups’ targeted goals. To do this, break your chosen leaders into groups.  One group could be responsible for the ways to improves success and progress of maintenance projects.  Another could be to drive the effectiveness of the PMO, and still another could create metrics to gauge success by along with value demonstrations.  A fourth group could be tasked with eliminating the bottlenecks of process redesign.
• Build business-oriented IT managers.  Ensure that your senior managers have good business sensibility. Today, careers are not just about upward mobility, but about getting experiences across the enterprise.
  Having the entire team to contribute will give any organization a more comprehensive plan.  Furthermore, it will assist in building teamwork and focus for the individuals on the team in realizing that they are helping to change the culture while adding value to the entire organization.
• Perhaps one of the most obvious values of IT is to help drive cash to any organization's bottom line.  This can be done either directly or indirectly through IT optimization, IT automation, or business process automation. 

Each of these areas drives business value for the IT department.  If an organization is product focused IT capital investment can align itself directly to new product development.

Is your organization doing all it can to make sure IT is seen as vales rather than a cost center?

It is said that technology changes every eighteen months or so but I believe it actually moves quicker.  The one constant that never changes though is all of the business application development projects and data that existed in any organization before new information technology solutions arrive still remains after the new technology is installed.

CIO’s and Chief Operating Officers have all types of “buzzwords” and technologies presented to them as the solution to solve the problem of disparate data.  Furthermore, many of these proposed solutions such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are costly and time consuming to implement.  Organizations and vendors have good intentions when these projects start but if they are not managed correctly over-runs on the project and usually at this point the project stalls and the organization is still faced with data that they cannot get top.

At STAR BASE Consulting, Inc. we pride ourselves in help organizations realize their full information technology potential.  From our perspective we do everything within our power to develop applications that can empower organizations to gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.  To accomplish this organizations’ need to have the right information at the right time regardless of location. As a consulting firm we are constantly searching for new tools and solutions to assist us to serve our clients.

One of the tools that we have found and partnered with is Instaknow-ACE™ (www.instaknow.com).  Instaknow provides the software and STAR BASE, Inc. provides the application integration expertise.   Instaknow’s “Deploy by Example” software has the patented ability of watching your business processing steps and then automating them in real-time, regardless of fragmented data, disparate systems and documents, complexity of decisions and the need to intelligently manage exceptions. Since no programming is required, new business capabilities are added in days. No change is needed to current systems. Now you can deploy integrated, high performing business capabilities, optimizing performance of people, assets and information, without the risk, time and cost of complex, protracted technical efforts.

Perhaps the next time your organization struggles with disparate data, multiple systems, internet application development and/or multiple websites, keep in mind there is a solution that actually does what it professes to do and quite possibly can be help reduce your organizational workload.

If you would take the time to talk to any senior level executive today they would tell you that talent management and the lack of employable talent is one of their most pressing challenges.  The lack of IT talent is well documented and many of these firms are outsourcing their talent needs to foreign countries. Research shows that on top of this baby boomers, the most populous age group are retiring at the rate of 6,000 individuals a day and the generation that follows has already shown that they have other interest outside of pure work.

I remember back in the 80’s President Ronald Regan spoke about making this country strong by growing the technology business and developing the talent that we need to continue our dominance in this sector. However, a strange set of occurrences has developed along our technological supremacy journey.  As more corporations become more  “globalized” they have determined that less was more and started outsourcing their IT departments to foreign countries which has cost jobs and  discouraged workers.  This resulted in resentment from American workers who loved application development and working in the IT industry but  watched their jobs erode and continually went to foreign countries.

Corporate America is a fickle bunch because today the cost of doing business overseas has become more costly because of the add-on cost of translations, work processes and the de-valued dollar. Meanwhile, more and more firms look to have the work done domestically but complain they cannot find enough talent. 

Those of us in the consulting business that provided IT talent as well as informational technological leadership have adapted to globalization and we can find talent anywhere at anytime regardless of physical location.  However, I find inadequacies in hiring practices and I wonder how some organizations hire any staff at all.  As strategic as some of these organizations are in many of their departments they still try to hire subjectively and more times than not they get burned.  Who gets blamed for this?  The responsible party that shoulders the blame is usually the consultant that presents the candidate to the client in the first place.

In our consulting practice we focus on how IT can transform business into a competitive advantage.  Our focus goes far beyond application development and enterprise integration.  We pride ourselves in being a full-service IT outsourcing firm that can handles everything from application development and integration to process automation.  There is also another critical offering that organizations need as well and that is qualified staff to handle internal projects.  The staffing of internal projects is a part of talent management which is on the mind of every C-level executive today. I would welcome the challenge from any organization professing to have difficulties with hiring and can show them where problems with their hiring approach are.  We believe that hiring needs to be strategic and mapped to a set of goals and objectives similar to any other strategic initiative throughout the organization.  If you cannot find the right people today, don’t blame the market. The problem is likely internal, and it is within your control.

For every dollar spent on developing infrastructure it takes clients another three dollars to manage it.  Statistics show that 80% of all downtime is a result of human error and mis-configuration.  Needless to say this costs any organization, time, investment and profit.

STAR BASE has been successful in showing clients how to automate repetitive, manual tasks and reducing the margin for error and allow IT to get things done more quickly.  With IT Process Automation your organization can develop compliance standards with actionable standards that are not exposed to potential errors that can occur over mis-calculations.

Other values can include:

•  The cutting of operational expense while increasing the availability of your applications and infrastructure
•  Assurance that all changes meet security, regulatory and operational standards
•  Reduce the risk of change in the data center by eliminating unmanaged change
•  Reduce the effort for configuration changes
•  Reduce the time to roll out production applications through IT Process Automation
•  Increase the effectiveness of virtualization through accurate planning, deployment, and management

Cintas is a major manufacturer and distributor of uniforms and laundering uniforms is a complex manufacturing operation with multiple processes and types of equipment.  In addition, it requires human intervention to inspect each garment and direct it to the appropriate laundry service.  Cintas used a multi-step, time consuming, labor intensive process to determine the garment type, condition and history.

Through the use of IT process automation STAR BASE integrated systems and streamlined the entire process in just one step.  The IT automation process saved the organization time and investment through reduced labor costs, fewer operational errors and simplified audit procedures resulting in increased efficiency.

It process automation is a solution that can actually interconnect applications and systems in an intelligent scheme and aggregate data to be delivered to the right user. These types of solutions are valuable for consolidating process workflow, as well as integrating and automating routine tasks. It is possible to develop cost-effective prebuilt automation for repetitive tasks which don't require much effort to build processes using those automations.

There are several tools out on the market that state that “their process automation tool” can completely automate any systems quickly and efficiently.  I do not doubt that some of these claims hold an element of truth however those of us that have considerable amounts of experience have seen magic boxes before.  Regardless of what any software claims the fact of the matter remains that there will be customization and integration that will need to take place before any system or process meets the needs of the end user. 

With that being said the value of IT process automation is real and can provide a savings in time and investment once it has been properly planned for, developed and implement.  The promise of gaining a competitive advantage within your given market space gives any organization the business proposition further.

Cincinnati, OH IT Community

I have been involved in the Cincinnati, Ohio Information Technology Community for twenty years and during that time I have witnessed a great many changes.  Perhaps the biggest change that I have personally witnessed is the trend of companies to leave the city of Cincinnati and the State of Ohio in pursuit of a better tax base or more favorable land deals.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article entitled “The Self-Inflicted Economic Death of Ohio” Chester E. Finn Jr. states that Ohio has the fifth-heaviest state and local tax burden in the country (up from 30th in 1990) and finds itself stagnating.  The unemployment rate, 6.3%, is above the national rate of 5.5%, even as the state's work force shrinks as people leave.

The company I work for STAR BASE, Inc. a company that was founded to serve the IT needs of organizations in and around the Greater Cincinnati area.  We have built subject matter expertise in the areas of information technology, application development, system integration and custom applications.  Clients in the area have also have asked us to provide them with candidates as well for their own internal information technology projects.

However the overwhelming question remains, if companies are moving out of the areas as the above article indicates, what value is there in claiming we are a local owned IT consulting firm?  Being an active member of the technological community I attend meetings at The Cincinnati Circuit  which is the Information Technology Association of the Cincinnati region. The organization is very good and all of its members are sincere in the goal to support the growth of Cincinnati technology.

However, I would suggest there is a real disconnect in the pursuit of this goal.  Not only are companies leaving but a recent article in the Cincinnati Enquirer suggests that bright students are choosing to go out of state to study.  The article states that almost half of the top high school seniors are planning to pursue their education at out of state campuses.  National statistics have shown that once these individuals graduate they go where the opportunity and money is and right now that does not appear to be in the State of Ohio.

Everyone that is a part of the Cincinnati, OH information technology community needs to make locally own businesses aware that we have outstanding technological talent in the area despite what the above statistics show.  Business and the community must work harder in making their political representative aware that we need to do every thing we can to protect our investment of good technological talent.  IT Outsourcing does not mean providing talent for another state or community.  We need to encourage young people that are attracted to technology that we have some of the best talent in the nation right here in Cincinnati.

Universities need to make sure they continue to offer courses in application development, IT strategy, infrastructure management, IT process automation and much, much more.  It will take the entire community to make a difference but it starts with the recognition that we have good local talent here and we need the assistance of the politicians and the government to make a real change not simply talk about it.  The technology community along with the business community needs a real “call-to-action” for any measurable changes to occur.  The politicians need to listen for a change!

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