Unleash Organisational Effectiveness and Reduce Risk with Open Source Enterprise Applications

One way or the other, most of the major work of organisations is done through projects thus making project management a key competence of every effective organisation. Similarly projects get done through project members performing the various tasks that make part of their job (some which may be part of normal operations)

The main model for using IT by most organisations tends to be a host of locally installed applications on the users desktops to do things like word processing, project management, spreadsheets and personal efficiency etc. This model although it seems to be working is fraught with a lot of risk … ask the non-technical employee the pain of having their laptop crash:

• They loose access to their organized mail within the mail clients (especially since the vast majority of users tend to use POP rather than IMAP for mail access.
• All documents they created for the organization get lost especially seeing how ‘good’ we are at backing up on a regular basis.
• If employees are using Outlook or some variant to manage their addresses, tasks and todos … then a lost.

All of the above typically have the following consequences:

1. The organisation either doesn’t have an ‘organisational memory’ (i.e. a way for someone else to make use of a fact known by another person). This is particularly true when internal communication is not effective ( … like the US intelligence community having all information required to have seen the X-mas day attach coming). What results is islands of memory, typically stuck in different employees’ heads and typically not available to the rest. The matter gets worse if that information is in an email or document which is typically not available if the person is sick or away or has left the organisation.
2. The organisation is exposed high risk in the event that an employee’s computer crashes. Without a proper backup solution in place that is rigorously followed (which is rarely the case, even amongst us IT professionals who KNOW better). If the employees have to backup to USB drives or CDs on their own, there is no telling what sensitive information will be conveyed via those media into hands/eyes that have no business seeing it.

My proposed solution? Enterprise software hosted on servers on the organisation’s network that users can use through a web browser. Call it private ‘Cloud Computing’. And of course you should see this coming … there a really excellent Free and Open Source solutions out there besides other terrific proprietary and commercial alternatives. So what are the advantages of this model?

1. Financial Savings: Employees don’t need fat applications installed on their computers, just a web browser. The licensing fees associated with those applications become a cost saving. Even if the applications are free, the support costs per user are also eliminated because the applications is hosted on a server. Furthermore, as we eliminate the need for applications installed on the employees’ computer and most/all the work gets done in a web browser, organisations can further reduce their IT expenditure by moving to Linux on the desktop.
2. Reduced Risk: When work is done inside a browser, on the organisation’s servers AND the data is stored on those servers, backup can be automated and be regular. It can also be more appropriately secured.
3. Employee and Organisational Effectiveness: Should an employee’s computer crash, instead of waiting perhaps a 3 days for it to be repaired and her data restored, she can pick just about any computer with a browser and continue work from where they stopped … no downtime for the organisation, no frustrations to the employee.
4. Organisational Memory: Together with established, explicit and well documented processes, I believe “organisational memory” is one of the pillars of operational effectiveness. The specific tool here is the wiki ….a unified place to document processes and projects, collaborate as well as store all ‘living’ documents about organisational standards and procedures. Putting a wiki in place creates the infrastructure for organisational memory (which is otherwise non-existend), making use of that memory is quite another matter.

So, what are some of the FOSS enterprise applications I think organisations could leverage? eGroupware is like a Swiss Army knife … comprising of a host of different applications from calendering, resource, task, knowledge and project management, as well as pop/imap mail within a browser, a wiki, polls and a website application. As is often the case one size doesn’t fit all and some of the applications in eGroupware are great while others are terrible (Site Manager and the Wiki).

If you choose not to go take the one-size fits all approach, here are some great solutions I have come across.

1. Collabtive/ProjectPier: For enterprise general (as opposed to specific such as software) project management, there are lots of applications in the FOSS community. ProjectPier is quite mature and simple while Collabtive is new, very innovative and seems to have the spotlight at the moment with a very beautiful AJAX interface.
2. Tracks: Without doubt, the acknowledged best methodology for personal productivity management in the world is David Allen’s GTD (Getting Things Done as laid out in a book of the same name). While GTD is NOT about technology but about methodolody, it helps a lot to have a great application to help with the methodology … current PIMs like Outlook fall short. How about one that can be put on a server with accounts for each employee? …. Tracks is IT.
3. Mediawiki: What can I say that the success of Wikipedia (the fourth largest brand in the world) can’t demonstrate better? How about the company’s very own implementation of that? … this is the infrastructure for organisational memory.
4. Etherpad: While Wiki’s are good for asynchronous collaboration, sometimes what we need is really realtime collaboration. As an example, 3 people could sit at their computers and simultaneously write different parts of an article to the same document! (the review and correct it)…complete with version control. That’s the brilliance of Etherpad.

Just a word of caution … “If you are going to put all of your eggs in one basket (ie all your apps and data in the server room) … by all means try to get a titanium basket lined with air-cushions”. I’d hate to imagine the pain should that basket break or if some vermin gets into it.

Needed to make all this work for good and not just be technological tyranny and confusion is a CIO who actually ‘gets it’, one who continuously explores ways of integrating these technologies into the work processes of the organisation and provides employee training and on-going support especially to the non-technical employees. And it goes without saying that we also need employees who are willing to continuously explore more effective ways of doing their work. Now, how about that? Please I’ll be glad if you share your experiences so we can all learn from them and contribute to making them better.

Baby Steps for Leveraging ICT in Universities in Developing Countries

Let me start with a disclaimer, —- I don´t like baby steps, to me they usually end up in medocre solutions, I would rather fail at doing something really big and thus set the stage for someone else to do something significant by learning from my failure. However, sometimes, baby steps have their place – to set things in motion so here we go.

While many CEOs now find it trendy to talk about how their organization is using IT, that typically  means that there is Internet access and some dysfunctional website which is rarely updated. Sometimes i must admit, these organizations are overwhelmed by the complex solutions we in IT try to pitch. Here are a few very uncomplicated things any serious organization can start doing now …. especially higher institutions in developing countries:

1. Put a PDF copy of every major form used in the organization online. Yes forms are the instruments of bureacracy and in most institutions, there is rarely a  process that doesn´t use a form or another. In my experience, sometimes, there are no copies of these forms available or a copy that has been photocopied so many times it is illegible. So just make fresh copies and put them online in PDF — a fresh one is there for anyone to download and print. Going a step further, each form should have accompanying instructions for how to fill it, who to send it to and what else to bring along when submitting the form.

In the future, this could evolve to the ability for students, employees, customers to fill and submit these forms directly online.

2. Put soft copies of popular literature online – employee handbook, procedures for doing certain things, etc. Not to complicate issues (some of those documents might not be for public consumption), only put non-sentive information online.

This shall in the future evolve to an intranet or private part of the website accessible only to users that login, depending on their credentials.

3. Soft copies of all lectur notes (of course lecturers who simply pass of their old student notes or shamelessly copy other´s notes may resist this , slides, lab manuals etc that students use. I had the terrible experience of having to read notes that I could barely see [50th generation photocopies].

In the future, this shall evolve towards a full-blown Learning Management System (like Moodle).

4. Official lists of the institution eg Admission lists and why year books? (So now any organization can fish out those that falsely claim to have finished from one university)

In the future, this shall evolve to online applications for applying for admission online,  online registration, e-transcripts and to enable third parties authenticate certificates against forgery.

5. Payslips should be sent to employee´s email accounts (even if they are still using free webmail for now .. the ideal will be all employees use the institutions email system)

These things are easy, cheap and don´t require any contractors so COME ON!!

Leveraging ICT in Entrepreneurial Ventures IV: Use ICT to Cut Costs

Unifying your inter-office Communications: The typical small business office today has about 4 computers, need a printer or two (in fact one CEO I spoke with last year had a grand vision of putting a printer on each of the 20 desks and PCs in his office!!!). There also is some kind of voice system … and Intercom or PBX. Not only does this complexity increase maintenance costs, it increases the chance of something going wrong and is more importantly from and entrepreneurs perspective an unfortunate waste of money.
For starters, with ensuring that your computers are networked will allow the organization to get a lot more from it. Over the network, the organization really doesn’t need more than 1 printer for 10 people. With a network in place, a single Internet connection can be share by all computers in the office, printers, document templates etc. Furthermore, you can completely leave out the extra cabling and PBX for your intercom and do chat, voice, video and even application sharing on your local network. The resultant cost-savings are non-trivial.

Automate Back-end Processes: Information about products and services can be put on a company website. Similarly forms and information brochures can be put online so people can access them rather than having to call every time and make inquiries. Any work that involves filling of forms by your clients can be automated and done online – not only does it reduce the opportunities for mistakes (as the computer can validate data on the fly)
Go Quasi-Paperless or Fully Paperless: And with a fully networked office, do we really need to print a document that we want to send to a colleague in another cubicle/table? Definitely not. Such things as interoffice communications, memos and reports can be done completely digital. But a caveat here … for this not to be a recipe for a business disaster, there must be proper backups in place so that the entire business does not come down because a computer failed.
Keep Physical Office Space as Lean as Possible: Probably my most disconcerting suggestion, if the infrastructure exists, using innovative management, consider the possibility of cutting out fixed and recurring costs relating to maintaining a physical office and run your venture predominantly virtually. Rather than office cubicles for each employee, why not just buy each employee a laptop and let them work from their homes? This way you will substantially cut your utility bills – power, cleaning etc. This is quite disconcerting because poor management has a huge need to control and micromanage people but to with a forward thinking management system in place, this will work out quite well because it gives employees huge flexibility. Obviously this can’t apply to all ventures and a critical amount of real estate in the form of office space and accessories will still be required. Even in manufacturing where people need to be on ground, there are some staff that can do the majority of their work without being physically present. This is however not without its caveats and so….. Proceed with caution.
Communicating with Suppliers and Distributors: Since no business operates in isolation, part of normal business administration involves contact with supplies and distributors to manage the supply chain end-to-end. Communication with these partners has come a long way from physical meetings to phone calls and now the rich messaging applications are a new and exciting addition to the mix. It is now possible to hold meetings online (GotoMeeting, WebEx) with full videoconferencing with nothing more than your Internet connection and a relatively cheap value computer. On the lower side, plain email and instant messaging can do a tremendous amount of work. These same multimedia communication technologies can also be leveraged to make product demonstrations to customers in different parts of the world.
Leverage e-Learning: As multimedia computers, networks and the internet become more commonplace; start-ups can leverage them to provide training to their employees at lower costs that traditional, consultant led alternatives. The idea is not to completely eliminate consultants and their workshops but to provide tools for employees to get more skills and knowledge from the convenience of their personal computers.
Use Freeware & Open Source Software: Legally acquiring the software that most business need for office automation can cost significant amount of money (See the article “The Simple Case for Free and Open Source Software” at http://ibiztech.wordpress.com for details). It is possible to shave off more than 50% of the acquisition cost for relevant business applications by using software that is free of charge. Examples include Ubuntu Linux instead of Microsoft Windows for your desktop computers, several variants of Linux for practically all your server applications, OpenOffice.org suite of applications (replacement for Microsoft Office). Some of these applications are the best in their class and very reliable.

Leveraging ICT in Entrepreneurial Ventures IV: Group Collaboration

Collaboration can be between people within your organisation eg sharing documents, ideas, leads and a single contact database. We could take it further and use the Internet to collaborate with partners, suppliers, distributors as well as clients with new web tools like Wikis, blogs, bookmarks and social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace and LinkedIn.
The emergence of the knowledge worker means increasingly that more and more of the key assets of an organization rest in the brains of their employees. So if there isn’t a platform that helps your employees share their knowledge, then they won’t collaborate well and teams will function sub-optimally and no synergies can be formed. As an example, suppose you have a 5 person marketing team. Each goes to different parts of the market and makes their own contacts independently. What happens the day one of them gets sick and is unavailable? – it means all critical information relating to the aspects of the market she was handling is lost to the organization. Worst still, what happens when she leaves the organization? She takes with her (in her brain so there’s nothing you can do about it) critical business information that can confer an advantage to your competitors. Sure you might not be able to do anything to stop an employee who wants to leave, however, with appropriate IT systems AND the supporting managerial systems in place that had let your employees share knowledge, contacts and resources, that information doesn’t need to be lost to the organization.
Collaboration doesn’t need to be done only by marketing department. It can also be done with partners in different locations around the world, with existing customers on product support and why not product-design? Picture this scenario … during a recent trip to Lagos, you meet a potential partner on the plane and exchange contact information. Later on getting back to base, you send him and email and arrange to chat using instant messenger. Even though you are in two different parts of the country or even the world, you can discuss the framework for a future collaboration, agree on specifics and then meet physically only to seal the deal. How much will that save you in travel costs and time lost being away from your base?
Similarly, amongst your staff in the office, it will be more cost effective to collaborate on documents digitally rather than having to print. Not only does this save you money in terms of not using paper but it also saves the environment (a key selling point to most businesses these days if you haven’t realized) and is faster once a good system is in place.

Leveraging ICT in Entrepreneurial Ventures III:Business Intelligence

As your business begins to grow, you will need to carefully keep track of key information relating to sales, your customer and business contacts. ICT offers many tools to help you with this, from simple contact managers like Microsoft Outlook and Gnome Evolution to sophisticated Customer Relationship Management software like SugarCRM. When you venture has been able to run for about two years, you need to know the answers to the following questions:
• What is the profile of my typical customer? (sex, age, income etc)
• Which industries give me the most patronage?
• What products or services sell most in what geographical locations?
• What products or services sell most in what seasons?
• What products or services sell most in which industries?
• What products or services sell most in what organizations?
• Of your product/service mix, which one brings in the highest margins?
• What are the worst performing products or services?
• What are the relationships between the performance of a product/service with respect to time of the year? season? etc?
• Who is my most profitable customer?
• Which customer do we need to focus more|less on?
• Breakdown of product or service performance per quarter.
All these are questions that except for the most trivial business, will rely on data analysis to answer – hence IT applications to the rescue. The answers to the above question can help with marketing strategy, product strategy and consumer targeting.

OS [Ubuntu/Vista] Cross Compatibility – Critical Success Factor for Application Success in the Market

Anyone who has been reading my blog knows am a Ubuntu fan … and on all my computers, I dual-boot between Windows XP and Ubuntu desktop. It just occurred to me this morning [18th May 2008] why of two applications capable of achieving the same task, I choose one over the other even though both are installed on my machine.

Since I use both OSes approximately equally, what determines what application I use is whether I can continue my work irrespective of Operating system. It is for this reason that open file formats and cross compatible applications [even if file formats are closed] are an extremely important determinant of application success in the marketplace.

Even though I think Mindjet Mindmanager is way cooler than the Freemind, I almost always use Freemind for my mindmaps because it is installed both in my Windows & Ubuntu OSes and I can start my work in Windows and continue in Ubuntu [Linux] or vice versa. That is not as easy to do with Mindmanager unless u are a WINE guru — I for one frown on running XP in a virtual machine on my Linux just to run one application … thank you sir …. I’ll use Freemind.

Other applications in this category … ie those becoming more and more OS-agnostic [ie apart from web applications that is] which I frequently use are

1. Inkscape over CorelDraw [I think OpenOffice.org Draw sucks!!!]

2. Juice [Linux version is called Icepodder] as podcast aggregator vs Itunes.

3. OpenOffice.org Writer and Calc for wordprocessing and spreadsheets.

It may then be that one strategy for an application to take to gain market share is to keep your file format proprietary and closed but make the application OS-agnostic … and there better be a free [yes as in free beer] version or else …..

Leveraging ICT in Entrepreneurial Ventures II: ICT as the Product or Service of the Venture

ICT is particularly attractive for new entrepreneurial ventures because of the proliferation of the web and the increasingly complex things people have to do. The product options run from manufacturing to software services.

Here are a few of the opportunities that exist in the Nigerian and developing country market. Even though most of these are already crowded, with some creativity and innovativeness, an entrepreneur can find ways to cut down the price even further or even come up with high value products that they can sell at even higher prices to niche markets.

1. Provision of affordable computers: Even though the price of computers has fallen dramatically in recent years, there is still a large demand for computers especially by students and institutions of education. Businesses are also now using computers by default rather than typewriters. The secret is to find out how to make these computers even cheaper than most of the big manufacturers can.
2. Computer peripherals to help people get more value out of their computers. These include not just common printers and scanners but more specialized input devices like digitizing tables tablets for architects and artists, larger than ordinary printers and scanners, plotters etc.
3. Device Repair and maintenance: A lot of money lies in people’s offices in the form of equipment that is bad and cannot be repaired. These equipment can not be repaired either because there is no one competent to do the repairs and/or the parts needed for replacement are not available. This presents an opportunity for a technical services venture that helps people save money by repairing their bad equipment.
4. Re-furbished equipment: This builds on the last idea … you buy broken-down equipment from people and give-away prices (after all they haven’t been able to fix them), repair them and by cleaning them well, you could sell them at good margins.
5. Mobile IT Support – this would probably work best in middle-class and higher neighbourhoods – people with computer issues can call a number and have a technician be on ground within the hour to fix the problem.
6. Up-to-date demographic data for business intelligence. Suppose I want to start a new business or expand an existing business into a new geographical area. Wouldn’t it be helpful if I had some kind of data related to the demographics of the target market that would help me plan my strategy? But the reality is that such business data – demographics, updated directories etc.

Obviously, these ideas have not been explored deeply in developing countries as they have been in developed countries. So long ….

Leveraging ICT in Entrepreneurial Ventures I – Introduction

The ability to make use get business information from raw data in order to support business decisions is a critical ability of the information age. And the old saying in management that says …’what gets measured gets improved’ is still correct.
The value proposition of ICT to business can practically preach its own sermon: computers are at another level of speed, efficiency, accuracy and aesthetic quality above typewriters. The Internet provides via the world wide web, email, chat and newsgroups a means of communication that is richer, faster and more interactive than could ever be dreamed of via traditional snail-mail, printed brochures and whatever means of communication were available before the Information Age. In the same vein accounting software are another level of functionality and capability above traditional ledgers and so are databases with respect to paper files and filling cabinets. In a more central role, ICT supplies tools for decision analysis, market intelligence, sales and service support as well as operational excellence that lead to great savings in operational expenditure. However [and this is where the plot thickens] no single solution fits all – every business doesn’t need ALL of these technologies; they only need a subset of them and even then to different degrees. Thus while there are certain generic solutions for all organizations (- like the need for word-processing and communications via email), because every organization is unique, each one’s ICT solutions must also reflect this uniqueness for the solution to be effective.
For the entrepreneurial venture, ICT can either be the main product or service around which the venture hopes to create value or it could simply be the means to an end – in order words offer operational support for a different service or product.

Leveraging ICT for Business Productivity

I know this topic sounds strange, that is because it is supposed to be obvious. I mean everyone talks about how ICT makes business easier, faster and more efficient – yet you can walk into most businesses today and be amazed at the inefficiency and resource-wastage that goes on because ICT is being misused.

The value proposition of ICT to business can practically preach its own sermon: computers are at another level of speed, efficiency, accuracy and aesthetic quality above typewriters. The Internet provides via the world wide web, email, chat and newsgroups a means of communication that is richer, faster and more interactive than could ever be dreamed of via traditional snail-mail, printed brochures and whatever means of communication were available before the Information Age. In the same vein, accounting software are another level of functionality and capability above traditional ledgers and so are databases with respect to paper files and filling cabinets. In a more central role, ICT supplies tools for decision analysis, market intelligence, sales and service support as well as operational excellence that lead to great savings in operational expenditure.

However [and this is where the plot thickens] no single solution fits all – every business doesn’t need ALL of these technologies; they only need a subset of them and even then to different degrees. Thus while there are certain generic solutions for all organizations (– like the need for word-processing and communications via email), because every organization is unique, each one’s ICT solutions must also reflect this uniqueness for the solution to be effective, hence the need for thoughtful IT planning.

The Need to Re-Appraise the Role of ICT in Organizations

Our lives and therefore our organizations should be less about getting computers and software to work and more about them helping us work smarter – not harder [think 80/20 principle], and cheaper [The device and software makers have already spent sleepless nights about making computer and software work – or have they?]. For this to happen, each organization must properly re-position ICT’s role within its operations, strategy and value proposition for greater effectiveness. To do this, we must begin with a realization of the fact that it is the need to process information that is the essence of ICT in Business – it is only device and software manufacturers whose purpose ICT is. In this age, knowledge which is based on information is a company’s greatest asset and any company that has not realized this fact in both principle and practice will soon be out of business – if it already isn’t. Understanding this in principle is the first creation, the second creation – understanding it in practice is the more difficult because it entails putting just the proper mix of ICT technologies to form a solution that meets the organization’s business needs (including strategic ones).

According to the great management guru Henry Mintzberg, every organization does one or more of four things: it finds, keeps, transforms and distributes people, resources or information. Therefore the proper role of ICT begins with how information is used in the company, NOT how computers, switches, routers, servers etc. are used. In practical terms: it is because people within an organization need to share information that there should be a computer network in place and not because computers are more useful when networked – obvious isn’t it?

One of the biggest problems plaguing organizations in most developing countries today is the gulf that exists between the IT department and line management (and by interacting with other professionals in developing countries, I know know this isn´t unique to developing countries). The result of that gulf is evident in the fact that most organizations have spent and keep spending huge amounts of money on equipment that remain essentially under-utilized years after their acquisition despite the fact that a lot of business requirements are not being met. And a symptom of this malaise is the ICT solution that increases rather than reduces business complexity. Of course there’s the sad human factor of equipment being bought as a result of management’s overboard decisions [makes you wonder why management will impose equipment on the IT department – shady 15% commission perhaps?!]. On the other hand, some IT departments are run by people of questionable skill and leadership at best and at worst – plain mediocres and the only way to continually justify their employment and pretend to be relevant is to inundate management with requests to acquire impressive-sounding [and usually expensive] technology that doesn’t add substantial value to the organization’s value proposition. If key personnel in IT departments can learn more about business drivers and requirements, value propositions, return on investment and corporate strategy – with adequate empowerment from the organization’s top management, then the view of ICT’s role can be the same from both the perspectives of management and IT department and thus begins the repositioning process and the turning of the potential tap.

Understanding the Business Value of ICT – An Information-Centric Paradigm

Many experts have given their opinions on this issue in-depth in a 1999 Harvard Business Review on ‘The Business Value of IT’ and these can be summarized as thus: Fundamentally, ICT is a resource to the business, like people, money, and machines thus the effectiveness of its utilization depends how well it is understood. This means an on-going review of industrial trends and developments to continually identify solutions that suit the organization. According to John F. Rockart, to serve customers well, every organization must be proficient in the following areas:

• Reduced cycle time.

• Reduced asset levels (e.g. In inventories and people)

• Faster product development.

• Improved customer service.

• Increased empowerment of employees.

• Increased knowledge sharing and learning.

Interestingly, I can think of at least three ways in which ICT can help achieve each of these requirements for effective organizations. If your IT people can’t tell you at least one way, then you have a big problem in your company that may only become evident as the company grows in size. Better give your IT people some relevant education.

In conclusion, I’d say that most organizations shoot themselves in the foot with the aid of IT departments that are yet to understand that ICT infrastructure are not purchased for their own sake but because they are supposed to facilitate information flow in a manner that is as unique to that organization as its corporate strategy and value proposition. The way forward for effective solutions will come when IT departments and management sit together to analyze this question: ‘What are the critical needs of our business and what are the most appropriate IT solutions that can serve them taking into consideration our unique environment?” An honest, interdependent brainstorm of this question between competent people should yield the answers needed to put the organization on the right path to effective ICT-Business integration. So let the walls between the real IT guys and real management come down so that the questions, ideas and solutions can flow.

What’s Technology Worth?

20 years ago, possessing new technology might have been enough to give you an edge in business or the market place. Perhaps that was because it was expensive. But with the commoditization of technology … especially computing technology …. a purely technological advantage in the marketplace is ….. let’s just say a red herring.

For any technology … ICT included to deliver value to an organization, it must be put in its real place …. an enabler and effort multiplier (read my next blog on ICT & Leadership). To put IT in a role that is actually serves the organization requires IT managers with more than technical skills. These IT managers must command the respect of the business ‘suits’ and possess a broad range of managerial skills. To lead the IT gurus, he (I prefer she) must also understand their culture, their language and how they think.

Technology is worth ….. A LOT …. but only to the extent that it addresses some business need in an elegantly simple way. I am very much in love with the …. ‘every sufficiently advanced technology is indistiguishible from magic’ — Arthur C. Clark? You know IT is worth its weight in gold when it’s un-obstrusive and transparent to its users. Putting it another way, technology is worth what the brains that implement it make it.