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Gary Edwards

Business Process Documentation: Automate It! | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...documentation-automate-it.html

Business-Process-Documentation

shared by Gary Edwards on 02 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Training Documents. Creating step-by step-documents for training business users on how to perform normal process activities (such as creating a new order or processing a shipment), has historically been time consuming, tedious, and quickly outdated. With software like Worksoft AnalyzeTM, step-by step-training materials include a narrative of each process step along with sample data, full screenshots, and even highlighted data entry fields used for every transaction. Results are automatically generated in MS Word or PDF documents. Best of all, when part of a process changes (because a business user has captured a process in a new way), new documentation is generated with the click of a button. With automation software, the generation of training material is automatic, and automatically updated.
  • Audit & Compliance Documents. When external or internal auditors are deployed in your organization, one of the first things they ask for is a description of the processes used in your business. In my experience this is time-consuming and takes away valuable time from your team’s normal activities. In addition to detailed, plain-English process narratives described above, Worksoft Analyze allows you to provide auditors with up-to-date flow charts describing the overall process (when an overview is needed), as well as detailed step-by-step documentation. Manual steps or signature approval blocks can be easily added because the process description is generated in easy-to-edit formats, like MS Word. There’s much more we could discuss, so don’t hesitate to contact me if you’d like to continue the conversation. Next time, we will describe how you can layer analytics on top of captured business process flows for process optimization, streamlining, and re-engineering.
  • Gary Edwards on 02 Jun 15
     
    "Audit. Compliance. Team training. Process re-engineering. Every one of these activities requires that your team have accurate business process documentation in-hand to maximize success. Is it optional? Not really. For a variety of reasons, complex enterprises need to have a firm understanding of how they actually conduct business and "how things really work around here." And it needs to be written down in a way that your team, your auditors, your regulators, and your business analysts will understand and be able to use and customize for their intended purpose. Challenges. The problem is that generating and maintaining accurate business process documentation is a real pain because it's time consuming and difficult. The knowledge of the process has to come from business users and business analysts, whose time is expensive - and any time spent creating documentation takes them away from their primary mission of running the business. Even worse, once this hard-won information is captured, it can become out-of-date in a matter of days or weeks as business processes change over time. The cost of documenting your business processes can run in the hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct costs for consultants, interviewers, and document preparation - not to mention your team's opportunity cost which can be much greater. An Automation Path. If you've made it this far, it's because you're looking for a better way - and the good news is that automation provides today's most effective solution. With software for automated business process documentation, the business user turns on a process "capture" feature from their desktop toolbar when executing a business process in their enterprise application of choice, such as SAP or a web application. When the process is complete, they simply turn off the capture feature. Every business process function, keystroke, and transaction has been uploaded into the automation software. In this way, the softwar
Gary Edwards

The Next Wave of Business Software is Smarter, More Predictive | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...s-smarter-more-predictive.html

enterprise SaaS BizOps

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • Today computational capacity is not the problem, and big data is not the problem.  The challenge is identifying how to focus resources and capacity in the right areas – the ones most important to your business.
  • First, how do you make sure that every business process and every supporting application works like it should? Second, how can you achieve that very, very efficiently?
  • The enterprise is in the midst of a move to highly automated business process testing, covering every core process – and the company is almost half-way there. The aim is to test every process and app every day, and eliminate the high-severity software defects that have plagued key systems several dozen times over the last 3 years. But in a global business of this complexity, where do you focus?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • . The company applied intelligent automation to combine real business transaction data with comprehensive business process maps. With accurate process information and actual transactions, they’ve been able to layer the two and develop “heat maps” to show exactly what transactions, processes, and systems are most critical – and where to focus their testing and QA resources. It’s made their priorities clear and focused their actions and resources to best achieve their objective – which is top-notch business execution with no glitches.
  • Has it made a difference? Absolutely. As I mentioned, the company’s transition to high speed testing for their whole portfolio of business processes is only about half complete. But already business-impacting Severity 1 errors are now “hardly seen” and today Severity 2 application errors are typically spotted and resolved within 2 hours – usually before the business team even notices. “We couldn’t do it manually,” they observe.Without question, the next wave of business software will contain more embedded intelligence, more automation, and more advanced analytics – all things that will drive your firm’s future actions and priorities. In fact, it’s already here. So get ready to catch the wave.
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 16
     
    "Recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at Forbes CIO Summit that there is a major shift taking place in the global business software space - toward smarter and more predictive software. According to Benioff, analyzing data and suggesting the future course of action are the next wave of business opportunity. With that growth potential in mind, Salesforce has been acquiring a number of machine learning and data analysis startups, including PredictionIO, MinHash, Tempo IO and RelatelQ. Benioff said "This will be the huge shift going forward, which is that everybody wants systems that are smarter. Everybody wants systems that are more predictive, everybody wants everything scored, everybody wants to understand what's the next best offer, next best opportunity, how to make things a little bit more efficient." More smarter, more predictive enterprise software. That's exactly what we're seeing in the marketplace as well - and it's an enormous trend. The demand today for intelligent automation and cognitive analytics is unprecedented. We hear it from system integrators who are moving with us into these solution areas, and we see it from our end customers. Big data has unlocked enormous volumes of information, in-memory databases have made it instantly accessible, and today's cloud environments deliver virtually unlimited computational horsepower.  With all that, what's a business to do? This has now become the key question."
Gary Edwards

NEC partners Nintex to provide workflow automation for SharePoint and Office 365 - ARN - 0 views

www.arnnet.com.au/...tomation-sharepoint-office-365

workflow-automation business-process-automation

shared by Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • As cloud computing grows, particularly in Australia, customers are increasingly looking for ways to create efficiencies and automate critical business processes.” Nintex's workflow automation platform, which includes Nintex Workflow and Nintex Forms for SharePoint and Office 365, streamlines processes on and between today's most-used enterprise content management systems and collaboration platforms, connecting on-premises, cloud workflows, and mobile users. Nintex vice president of sales in APAC, Dan Parker, said the company was founded in Australia, and that the local market had always been a key focus for the company.
  • Its diverse partner channel supports hundreds of customers in Australia, including several ASX 200-listed companies and multinational corporations across all industries. Melbourne-born entrepreneurs, Brian Cook and Brett Campbell, founded Nintex in 2006.More than 5,000 organisations in 90 countries are currently running millions of workflows daily using Nintex technology.
  • Gary Edwards on 05 Jun 15
     
    "Nintex has partnered NEC Australia to provide customers with the company's workflow and forms solutions. The partnership with NEC Australia will allow Nintex to provide additional support to the many customers looking to boost their workplace efficiency and effectiveness. Nintex has a strong presence in Australia and is continuing to evolve its partner network in the region to ensure customers have the best possible experience with Nintex's workflow productivity platform. The rise of organisations focusing on streamlining and automating their business processes demonstrates an increase in partners looking to Nintex to provide a value-added offering around workflow automation to their services and solutions, according to a company statement. NEC Australia partner alliance practice lead, Tim Pagram, said he had seen businesses across the board experience significant gains in productivity and customer satisfaction by using Nintex technology."
Gary Edwards

Gigaom | WebRTC is a Natural Fit for the Enterprise - 0 views

gigaom.com/...natural-fit-for-the-enterprise

WebRTC

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Up until today, communications took place in a separate logical and often times even physical network. Be it cellular, wireline or VoIP service, these get built in its own private network or virtual LAN within the enterprise. And the interfaces built into these products in one of two ways: communication-based, which is hard to handle (think SIP or Megaco as an API layer for IT developers); or on some proprietary API that is hard to interface and integrate with. Advertisement WebRTC changes all that. It not only makes VoIP more accessible as a technology, but it almost forces developers to think with standard web protocols on how to use and deploy it. As an example, it gets your CRM vendor build his own contact center, many times with players such as Twilio who offer their own WebRTC SDK. Advertisement
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Jun 16
     
    "Here's something funny. While most complain that WebRTC isn't suitable for the enterprise, it is probably the next best thing happening to enterprises. And it is all because we're in the midst of a digital transformation. WebRTC is a five-year-old technology, so it is rather new to the scene. At its core, WebRTC enables adding real-time voice and video communications to any website without the need to download a thing. Need to get a customer on a quick support call? Just send him a URL. The naysayers dismiss WebRTC because it still isn't available on Safari or Internet Explorer. While that is true, it is changing. Support already exist in the new Microsoft Edge browser with reassuring rumors about Apple and Safari's plans towards WebRTC. Ubiquitous WebRTC support everywhere is on the horizon. Which brings me to enterprises. Enterprises today are going through a digital transformation. In each and every vertical, businesses are being redefined by having the information that runs through the enterprise turned into digital assets that are then used to drive business processes and analytics. This takes shape in many different ways: enabling customers to use self-service channels instead of using human operated contact centers, using big data and data lake projects to deduce insights and personalize services, streamlining sales processes through marketing automation, etc."
Gary Edwards

Announcing Usermind: finally harmony among SaaS apps… | Matt Murphy | LinkedIn - 0 views

www.linkedin.com/...ny-among-saas-apps-matt-murphy

Matt-Murphy Menlo-Ventures VC BizOps SaaS

shared by Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • One thing is clear: the shift to SaaS and its consumption and digitization of almost all enterprise processes, is unstoppable. Along with this transformation has come an explosion of vertical apps and data silos. If you want to check your user cohort data, send a customer an email or notification, make a payment, evaluate churn, or prioritize which customers to contact — there’s an app for that. However, if you want to write a simple process or workflow across those applications, it’s complicated, often manual, and slow.
  • The best apps focus on solving a key pain point, and thus end up having a fairly narrow scope. If you want to work in the best-in-class applications for your use case, you end up with a broad tech stack and disconnected processes. This is where Usermind comes in: a platform to automate cross-application workflows and business processes, and unify disconnected customer and product data from all of those applications.
  • It’s a great time to be investing in SaaS. We are particularly interested in the next wave of SaaS (affectionately called SaaS 2.0), which offers some combination of “mobile first,” integrates machine learning to make workflows smarter and better (e.g., Insidesales.com), and moves beyond "the system of record” (e.g., CRM, HRM) to reimagine a variety of new horizontal and vertical apps — or in the case of Usermind, enable them all to work well together!
  • Gary Edwards on 16 Mar 16
     
    "I'm thrilled to announce the public launch of Usermind, my first investment at Menlo Ventures, and one that I'm particularly excited about. Within the first 10 minutes of meeting Michel Feaster, founder and CEO of Usermind, I knew I had to invest. Michel is an impressive entrepreneur - smart, high-energy, passionate, thoughtful, and a big product thinker - and she just happens to be addressing an incredibly important problem in the enterprise that is getting more pronounced by the day."
Gary Edwards

Why CIOs can't sell enterprise collaboration tools | CIO - 0 views

www.cio.com/...prise-collaboration-tools.html

collaboration Cloud-Computing Cloud-Productivity-Platform wordsdk

shared by Gary Edwards on 13 May 15 - No Cached
  • Enterprise collaboration is a dubious pursuit. You can almost sense its impending failure the minute it gets introduced to a workforce and becomes just another tool that employees are supposed to use.It doesn’t help when CIOs downplay the value of collaboration tools by simply procuring something that meets the lowest common denominator and enables them to check another item off their to-do list. More like this 6 IT leaders share tips to drive collaboration How Mobile, Social Tech Elevate Enterprise Collaboration CIOs Need to Snap Out of Complacency on IDG Answers How to retrieve data lost from Outlook address book after creating a shortcut? State of the CIO 2015 More than 500 top IT leaders responded to our online survey to help us gauge the state of the Read Now “There’s a lot of failures in enterprise collaboration, loosely termed, because people don’t really know what they’re aiming for so obviously they don’t hit it,” says Joel Confino, CEO and founder of the enterprise Q&A platform Haydle.
  • The promise of collaboration is to replace face-to-face communication, but if the implementation isn’t well-planned, it can’t become something extra that people have to do, Confino says. Collaboration also has to perform better than the incumbent, which is email for most people.
  • CIOs can’t merely launch a tool and tell employees to go forth and collaborate. The C suite needs to lead by example and use these new tools to accomplish meaningful business objectives.“The majority of these implementations are underperforming and plenty of them are just outright ghost towns,” says Confino.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Why these tools are failing to supplant a technology as static as email is a question vexing the minds of countless IT managers. The reason for enterprise collaboration is still so hazy that relatively few CIOs agree on what challenges lie ahead.
  • CIOs and other IT decision makers face a host of challenges in their pursuit of enterprise collaboration, some of which are ingrained into the culture of their companies. Resistance to change is the obstacle facing CIOs at most companies and the reasons could include anything from workplace culture to perceived cost and complexity, says Scott McCool, group vice president of IT and CIO at Polycom.
  • One of the biggest challenges is determining how to implement enterprise collaboration in cross-functional manner, says John Abel, senior vice president of IT at Hitachi Data Systems,“Teams are pretty good at communicating within their own group but when it comes to integrating across departments silos tend to happen, which ultimately becomes problematic when each team needs to align on certain campaigns or key topics,” he says.NetScout’s CIO and Senior Vice President of Services Ken Boyd says the landscape of collaboration tools available today makes it difficult to pick the best ones for a specific workforce.
  • “Locating a collaboration tools provider that can offer the right balance for the needs of our enterprise users can be a significant challenge,” he says. There are many point solutions for voice, video, chat and document collaboration, but splicing together those solutions from multiple vendors isn’t always the most productive or cost -effective method.
  • “There is an atomic shift taking place in how the enterprise operates, and so the CIO and CIO's team must decide whether [on-]premises and cloud-based collaboration tools can and will address the needs of the enterprise users -- anytime, anywhere, and on any device -- plus smoothly work between business and consumer applications,” says Boyd.
  • CIOs must also navigate and please the different age groups, says Chris McKewon, founder and CEO of the managed services provider Xceptional Networks.
  • Millennials are more comfortable with video, short messaging and have embraced newer collaboration tools like Slack and HipChat while older execs are still trying to master WebEx and GoToMeeting, and unfortunately there’s no common ground, McKewon says.“CIOs need to shift their mindset, strategies and projects to be more inclusive and collaborative,” says Shamlan Siddiqi, vice president of architecture and application development at the systems integrator NTT Data.
  • The biggest challenges, according to Siddiqi, are organizational buy-in on major transformational decisions, employee adoption, sustainable engagement, security, content quality, standardization and tool selection.
  • Brian Pillar, IT manager at the software firm TechSmith, agrees that adoption is a major challenge. Enterprise collaboration tools rarely come cheap, so making sure the organization rallies around the new platform is key.Organizations will never realize their return on investment for collaboration until individuals or teams stop creating workarounds to avoid an enterprise collaboration tool altogether, says Pillar.
  • Ruven Gotz, director of collaboration services at the IT solutions vendor Avanade, says collaboration is about helping people work together to achieve more meaningful and impactful outcomes.As such, the biggest challenges lie in approaching collaboration with the right mindset, he says.“Technology is an amplifier of human touch and interaction. Its effectiveness in enabling collaboration is entirely dependent on achieving results with methods that make sense to the way people actually accomplish work,” says Gotz
  • “You really have to understand the true nature of the business results you seek to achieve,” says Gotz.If you can’t see the business result you seek to achieve, take the time to stop and find it. If you can’t rationalize a process that is simple to understand, don’t try to automate it, he says.“Understand what the tool imposes on the experience,” says Gotz. “Don’t let the tool bind natural human interaction.”
  • Gary Edwards on 13 May 15
     
    "Collaboration platforms offer the promise to eliminate unnecessary meetings, phone calls and other time-consuming interactions. However, to succeed those tools have to perform better than the incumbent, which for most people is still email."
Gary Edwards

Task management app Asana raises $50M at a $600M valuation led by YC's Sam Altman | Tec... - 0 views

techcrunch.com/...aluation-led-by-ycs-sam-altman

Asana Productivity Cloud-Productivity-Platform

shared by Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 16 - No Cached
  • As more businesses move their work processes online — creating documents and other data in apps like Quip or Google Docs or Microsoft through; communicating with each other (think Slack or Yammer) — productivity apps are having a moment right now. Just last week, BetterWorks — another platform that helps workers set and manage tasks and goals — announced a Series B of $20 million.
  • Indeed, in addition to BetterWorks and Asana itself, there are others like Basecamp, Wrike and Trello all offering ways to boost productivity and help organize so-called knowledge workers (essentially, those tied to keyboards or screens to get their jobs done). That makes for a competitive landscape but also a sign of how there is a ripe opportunity to do more.
  • For its part, Asana has been testing a beta of a product called Track Anything, which sounds like a dashboard-style product that will let people automatically signal to colleagues jobs for completing tasks without them having to do the legwork. In a working world where we are forever multitasking and may be more intent on getting things done rather than ticking and updating progress reports to let people know that we have, adding in automation seems to be an essential development. This is a challenge that others are tackling, too. BetterWorks is building integrations with whatever software use most, which in turn communicates our progress on a task in the background.
  • Gary Edwards on 30 Mar 16
     
    "Asana, an enterprise app that lets people set and track projects and other goals, has hit a goal of its own: today, the company is announcing that it has raised $50 million. The Series C round - led by Y-Combinator's Sam Altman - values the company at $600 million, the company tells me. As a bit of context, Asana last raised $28 million in 2012; that Series B was at a $280 million valuation, according to our sources. Co-founded in 2009 by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and early FB employee Justin Rosenstein out of the belief, in their own words, that "every team in the world is capable of accomplishing bigger goals, and that software could help empower them to drive work forward with more ease, clarity, and accountability," the company will be using the funds to continue building out Asana's functionality (more on that below) and also expand its customer base internationally (it's largely a US-based list of clients today)."
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