Adele Sommers, Ph.D (Author of the award winning “Straight Talk on Boosting Business Performance” success program) has highlighted the pain points faced by many organizations today

Many of us struggle daily with absent or incomplete facts and data within our own organizations, or in relation to communications from vendors and service suppliers. Sometimes we can feel as if we’re running around like chickens with our heads cut off, trying to locate even one piece of timely and accurate advice!

In her article - Don’t Let Information Gaps Sap Your Business Success, she listed down 5 ways to close the information gap:

1. Compile a set of complete and current knowledge base of information required for
2. Enable your customers and employees to access the information easily
3. Simplify those complex processes
4. Give personnel access to job support systems
5. Troubleshoot any clogged communications

Dion Hinchcliffe in his latest blogpost – The value drivers for next-generation businesses asked whether businesses are focusing on what really matters and nicely summarized the value drivers of next-generation businesses which I agree totally. I have list some of the points and my comments on it.

1. Strategic control over valuable data – Information is power. A lot of enterprises are archiving a lot of data, but more can be done to unleash its usefulness by making it more easy to digest and reuse the information.
2. Peer production – By tapping on the power on teammates and feedbacks from the clients, companies will be able to be more efficient and provide what their clients really value.
3. Self organizing – With so much information flowing around nowadays, it is a big overhead to attempt to organize the information. It is also a challenge as information can be classified under more than 1 category.  It should be done as a side effect of work given a properly planned framework that can be evolved.
4. Mass Self-servicing – Time is money. If your clients need to spend 10mins on the phone menu and 10 mins to wait for your operator to answer their call, they are more likely to look for another service provider. Studies have shown that people are more than happy to self service their request through the web instead of requesting through a phone. It is a win-win situation where businesses can reduce their cost and yet their customers happier.
5. Ability to dynamically adapt and rapidly respond to current needs - Companies might want to look in principles-driven processes and extensible IT solutions to enable themselves to evolve.

The truth about using paper

Do you know paper uses 2 of our most precious resources? It takes 6% of a tree and 5,000 litres of water to produce 1 ream of paper?  And do you know a mature tree can absorb 21kg of carbon dioxide per year? Do you know 5,000 litres of water is equivalent to 21,000 glasses of water which can last a person for 7 years? And today, 42% of the world’s industrial wood harvest goes to paper. And trees are our valuable resources in absorbing carbon emissions.

At the beginning of the IT revolution, creating a paperless office was touted as one of the key benefits of IT adoption. However this did not happened and it was forgotten.  According to a 2001 study by OECD, pulp and paper production has increased 300% over the last 30 years and the usage is expected to increase at an average growth rate of 2.8% each year. It is estimated that we will use over 420 million tons of paper in 2010.

Little known facts about recycled paper

People are getting more environmentally conscious and paper recycling has increased these few years. However there are a few known facts about paper recycling.

• Not all the paper end up being recycled
• Contaminated paper cannot be used for recycling
• The fibers in the paper can only be recycled up to 4-6 times
• Recycled paper still need water and energy to produce
• The waste from the paper recycling process (e.g. inks, usable fibers, etc) are either burnt or buried underground

Other benefits of going paperless

Apart from being more green, there are also other benefits of going paperless:

• Save storage space – one 100Gb hard disk can store 900 metres of books on a shelf
• Save time – on filing and organizing the papers
• Reduce business cost– on buying paper, ink and others
• Easier to search – searching for a piece of information electronically is much faster
• Easier to duplicate – how much time does it takes to photocopy a report
• Easier to transport – it is a chore to carry an encyclopedia to work everyday
• Easier to distribute – how much time is spent distributing documents around the office

Other initiatives of reducing paper usage

A lot of organizations are aware of these benefits of going paperless and are taking proactive actions in doing that. Here are some examples:

• Singapore government replacing physical forms with e-services for citizens
• Newspapers providing electronic subscriptions for news
• Companies providing the alternative of sending bills electronically
• Companies like HSBC and Citibank sending electronic newspapers in place of physical newsletters
• Google is working with libraries to digitize the books to make it more accessible
• Amazon and Sony are coming up with innovative ebook readers like Kindle and Reader

The time is right

While it is not possible to eliminate the use of paper in office, reduction of paper usage is possible today with several developments in technology.

1. Popularity of laptops over desktop – Laptop sales have overtaken desktop sales with prices of laptop going below $1,000. More and more office workers are using laptops.
2. Laptop going smaller and lighter – It is much easier to carry them around.
3. Availability of wireless networks in office – There is no need for messy network cables in meeting rooms.
4. Availability of information repositories – Enterprise wikis and shared file servers allows the most updated documents to be circulated and access in real time.
5. Information linking with web applications – Related information can be accessed through a link rather than flipping through the pages to find the required information.
6. Broadband infrastructure available – A lot of people have broadband subscription at home. Some of them even have mobile broadband subscription. This enables them to access to the internet or office network (via VPN) and access to information easily at their fingertips.
7. The convergence of devices – Besides PCs and laptops, information is also accessible through mobile devices like iPhones and Sony PSPs.

How can we do it?

It is possible that offices can reduce the usage of paper. All it takes is just a little change in the way we work.

The first way is to think twice before you send a document to the printer. Ask yourself how long the printout will be useful to you before it lands into the bin. Are you going to refer to it after tomorrow and are you going to print another updated version soon?

The second way is to move away from the concept of documents, as documents are designed for printing and implicitly encourage people to print it. In order to move away from this age-old tradition, we need to have an alternative where the electronic form is more useful than the printed form.

A good alternative will be wikis that is made well-known by Wikipedia. The features of wikis are so useful such that they have been enhanced with features for business use.  Enterprise wikis provide more value when the content is read on the screen than the paper:

1. Useful and related information can be linked together or accessed easily
2. Relevant discussions can be tied together to the content, making it easier for sharing information
3. Information can be searched easily and fast
4. Rich media like videos and interactive widgets can be embedded
5. Change history are recorded
6. Provide the most up-to-date information by ensuring a single source of information
7. Allows identification of authors and subject matter experts
8. Timestamp provides clue whether information has expired
9. Ability to enforce viewing/editing permissions
10. And it is still possible to print out or generate PDF version of the information

Reducing paper usage with IT is a possibility

With the technological developments, it is now a possibility for IT and businesses to renew on its promise to reduce paper usage. All it takes is just a more environmental conscious mind for management and workers to tap on these green technologies.

As the world recovers from the financial crisis, we are facing another impending crisis – The Climate Crisis.

We are experiencing more and more hurricanes in the recent years, hotter temperature and rising sea levels which means our houses may be submerged under water in time to come.

Although the world may not end in 2012, it is likely that the end may arrive soon if we do not start doing something about it now. A new movement “HopenHagen” is gathering the support of all the citizens of Earth to demand world leaders to take proactive action to reduce carbon emissions to 350ppm (parts per million) and preventing irreversible climate damage.

Akeles Consulting invite you to join HopenHagen together with us to make a difference now.

A lot of people may think that a wiki is just for business or collaboration with a large group. In fact, it can be useful for personal use or within friends.

Recently, I went to Mount Bromo for a short trip and the scenery was very beautiful. I wanted  geo-tag the photos so that I can know where those beautiful shots are taken. Geo-tagging adds the location information to the photos so that people can know when & where the beautiful photos are taken. It also allows me to plot the route that I had covered for the trip.

If I had “wiki”ed down some notes the last time, I would have saved the time and effort to reinvent the wheel again. Therefore I told myself I should do it, because it is likely that I need to refer upon this information in years to come.  By having these information on my wiki, it would also be useful for those who wants to borrow my GPS receiver and my old Windows Mobile handphone for geotagging their trips as well.

It does not take a lot of time to wiki down the information, but it can save me a lot of time in future.

You can refer to my wiki on the full story and my notes on how to geo tag.

And here are some pictures of the beautiful place.

Great news from our partner. Atlassian has been named by IDC as “10 Innovative Applications Companies under $100M to watch“.  Atlassian has exemplified herself in the following key trends in applications:

• Acceleration of software as a service (SaaS), business process outsourcing (BPO), and open source over traditional on-premise software

• New business models for software use by service providers (software-within-a-service)

• Web 2.0-like functionality moves into the enterprise (e2.0).

Another great news is that Atlassian has moved up ranks in this year’s Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. The report cites

Atlassian is a Challenger because it has demonstrated the ability to penetrate a global market with its popular wiki functionality…

Both news are good recognition of Atlassian’s good business strategy and effort to deliver good & useful applications to the world.

For our clients on Confluence and JIRA, you can rest assured that you are on a leading platform and expect more useful & interesting features in time to come.

This week, I will like to share with you my experience with Gliffy. Gliffy is a online diagramming tool which is also available as a plugin for the Confluence wiki.

Before Gliffy and Confluence, we were using Microsoft Visio or Microsoft Word and a number of other tools to draw diagrams (process flow diagrams, flowcharts, UML diagrams, etc.) for our work. It was very tedious to work then. We have to open Microsoft Visio to draw the diagrams, and then copy and paste into the word documents. Finally, we can email it to our colleagues or external parties for review. However, the story does not end there. Sometimes, the other party do not have Microsoft Visio or the tools to view or edit the diagrams, we will  have to convert it to pdf format and the original author will need to spend time to understand the comments and integrate the changes into the diagram. That was very tedious for collaboration.

The moment I saw Gliffy for Confluence, I immediately recommended my boss to buy it.

After we installed Gliffy on our Confluence wiki, collaboration became much more easier. We can create diagrams easily on the fly without having to install applications like Microsoft Visio on our computer. It can be easily done on any computer with a web browser. It is easy and simple to use with a user friendly interface. We can edit the diagrams without worrying overwriting the original files as it keep tracks of the history automatically (it’s a real chore to restore overwritten diagrams). And the diagrams created with Gliffy look professional without much formatting effort.

Indeed Gliffy is an useful tool for working with diagrams. As a matter of fact, I think Gliffy helped us to pull more people onto the wiki bandwagon as it enabled people to do things in a fast and efficient way. If you are curious, I have embedded a short video demo on Gliffy below

This week is the anniversary of the fall of the Lehman Brothers and the financial crisis. The media has been giving a lot of coverage on it. One of the most popular topics is about the compensation scheme of the top banking executives in the States. Before the crisis, they were given huge annual bonuses based on the profits earned by their banks for the year. This has encouraged a short term view and risk taking within the industry. Currently, proposals are given to implement the Clawback scheme where the bonus earned in the current year is to be distributed in a number of years.

I think this spirit of the idea is also applicable for the IT industry. For the last few decades, IT improvement initiatives are usually packaged as a transaction between the buyer and the seller. The seller will help the buyer to deliver the required solution based on the requirements provided. At the end of the project, the seller will receive a monetary reward for the services provided. The buyer can optionally choose to continue the thread-thin relationship by signing up for a maintenance contract with the seller.

However, there are some weaknesses with this model to both the buyers and sellers at different stages of the project.  The underlying reason is because of the one-time payment as a transaction.

Beginning of the project

For the buyer, they will need to incur a large sum of money upfront to “invest” in the IT solution that can help the company. This result in a lot of time and effort spent to justify for the “investment” and to manage the project.

For the sellers, they will to ensure the profitability of the business. Therefore their pricing may limit themselves to the bigger players who can afford, and leaving out a large majority of smaller players untapped. They have to spend more time and money on marketing and sales to clinch new projects.

During the project

As the project progresses, we will see more weaknesses showing up with more changes in the requirements popping up.  Because the project is a one-off project, there is a tendency to scope the project as big as possible to enjoy the economy of scale and larger revenue. However this increases the complexity of the project as it is very difficult to gather 100% of the requirements upfront.

Therefore new change requests will definitely arises during the midst of the project. The buyer will try to get the sellers to do more without busting the budget whereas the sellers will try to charge back from the extra work to be done. In an effort to meet the schedule and cost constraints, some projects will suffer from a buggy system or a system that is difficult to use and maintain. In some extreme scenarios, there are a lot of unhappiness generated and losses incurred at both sides.

End of the project

Once the system is implemented, the end users will be sent for the training. However from then on, new end users will be trained on the job basis by those people who have been trained. Little or no additional training will be given for new features added subsequently. As a result, we hear illogical stories from end users like this. “You need to resize this window before you click this button, otherwise the system will crash”. End users will start developing their unorthodox ways of using the systems which limit the benefits of the original design of the system. It is like spending hundreds of thousands buying a sports car and putting it to waste by filling it up with diesels instead of petrol.

And as the world is getting more and more dynamic nowadays, we see more changes in the business rules and processes. The end users will devise new ways of using the system like overloading the original features of the system.

For the buyers, they are losing the productivity due to additional distraction of their staff and system failure due to incorrect usage.  After a few years, they will realize that the system is not delivering its purposes and they have to spend money to invest in another brand new system. In fact this is a common sight in the industry where money is being wasted on migration to new systems every few years.

For the sellers, they are losing the opportunity to provide their assistance to their valued customers for additional revenue. They get bad publicity when people blog or comment their systems are lousy just because the end users are not aware of certain features or correct way of usage.  If their solutions are truly helping their customers to earn more money, I believe it will be much easier to justify for a better reward.

So is there a better way?

I am sure that a lot of IT professionals will agree with the points that I have stated. In fact, some of them have come up with other pricing models to address these weaknesses. One of which is the Software as a Service (SaaS) pricing model that is popularized by Salesforce.com. Rather than to pay a huge sum of money to invest in IT solutions, companies can now enjoy the benefits of the IT solutions immediately by paying for monthly usage fees.  This provides a consistent flow of the revenue to the service providers and lowers the barriers to entry for the IT adoption. We should extend the idea of the SaaS from hosted applications to on-site implementations.

In additional to that, we should create the additional role of the Solution Specialists. These experts will visit the end users on a regular basis to coach them on the best way to use the systems and identify any new needs or changes required. They will also update the management of the companies on the best practices from other companies and latest innovation in the market that might be applicable to them. And because the companies are paying on a subscription model, there is incentive for the service providers to continue to refine the system to retain the customers.

Conclusion

We will be able to create a win-win relationship between the buyers and the sellers by changing the reward model for IT projects. Instead of treating IT solutions as a commodity that can be traded in transaction, we should look at it as a service or utility. In this case, the cost of implementation can be lower. The payment will also be tied to the value and contribution to the business over the long term. This will encourage the sellers to align their solutions to the business. For the sellers, they will be able to have a larger and consistent flow of revenue. This is what a real business partnership should be.

Atlassian is currently running a promotion for JIRA 4.0 for users to trade in their bug tracker for a free version of JIRA 4.0 (10-user licenses)

Beside keeping track of bugs and change requests, JIRA can also be used for

• Project Management – Track, allocate and report on project tasks with real-time statistics
• Technical Support /Helpdesk – Escalate cases, monitor response statistics and manage team workload.
• Agile Development – Estimate, allocate and track your iterations.

For those that haven’t tried using JIRA, here’s a good opportunity to try out the full enterprise edition of JIRA with no cost!

For those are using JIRA, you might want to share this information to your colleagues who are still using Excel worksheets, Bugzilla or other tools to track issues.

Here’s 10 more good reasons why you want to consider this attractive offer now.

For more details on this promotion, you may check out Atlassian’s website.

And here’s a quick preview on the new features to be launched in JIRA 4.0