Flemmings blog on ScanJour R&D

The 3 common traits of optimized organizations

2011-10-24T12:59:00.001+02:00

People and processes – Part II

At the end of the day, optimization is aboutgetting your organization to produce results faster and at the lowest possiblecost.

As I wrote in part I of this post (People and processes part I)), I believe thereare three traits shared by organizations that optimize their people andprocesses successfully:

Transparency: They define processes in a practical way
Measurability: They define their parameters for success
Automatization: They use tools that help standardize processes, but at the same time, do so in a flexible and practical way

While these three prerequisites to optimizationare in no way trivial, they are definitely possible with the right approach.The rest of this post offers a description of each characteristic, and sometips for how to achieve it.

Transparency: Define processes in a practicalway

Many attempts to automatebusiness processes have gotten stuck for months – or even years – at the stageof describing and defining them. You cannot, however, measure, automate andoptimize processes unless you have a shared understanding of them in yourorganization. These definitions and descriptions are absolutely necessary.

Be familiar with your own processes, input,output and activities

Optimization typicallyrequires a method to describe and define processes in a structured form. Forexample, BPMN (Business Process model andNotation) is a widely used method to describe business processes, the peopleinvolved and their interactions.

Comprehensible to both humans and computers

Comprehensibility is aprerequisite, not only for transparency, but in fact, also for the other twocritical characteristics – measurability and automatization. As mentioned, youcannot measure and improve if the people involved don’t have a commonunderstanding of the processes. Likewise, you cannot automate if thedescriptions aren’t understandable to computers.

Describe at the right level of detail

Many large IT providers (Microsoft,SAP, Oracle, Accenture, for example) have developed their own models forvarious business areas. In my opinion, they are rarely useful in practice,however, because they’re either too high-level, too detailed or not relevant(for example, dependent on the IT provider’s own software tool).

Tip: A best practice with regardto definitions and descriptions is to start with one simple and concreteprocess based on some objective criteria. This could, for example, be largevolume/high frequency or high quality/minimal use of time.

Measurability: your parameters for success

In order to optimize, you haveto know how processes work and be able to measure them.

There are many interestingnumbers in this context. For example volume (number of cases), duration (startto end), time usage in the individual steps of a process (identification ofbottlenecks), costs (number of hours per person involved), quality (the case’soutcome, error rate), and so on.

Consider measuring manually

Although obviously moredifficult, it is possible to measure manually. It might require extra manualregistering or time measurements with a stop watch, for example. Nevertheless,it can be worthwhile, and in fact, is often used (in systems employing Leantheory, for example) – especially in the initial implementation/optimizationphase.

Repeat and automate

Optimization often requiresrepeated measurement, and that the process is automated with the right software– one which can do the job in a cost-effective manner. Measuring the process is kay in order to achieve the optimization which typically was the reason for automating from the beginning.

Automation: Standard, yet practical

Automation standardizesprocesses, but it’s important that it does so in a way that is not too rigidfor the individual user. If users have difficulty using the system, then itdefeats the purpose.

A concrete example

An example in the context of ScanJouris our Captia implementation for handling of Article 20 -- the so-called, §20-questionsrule introduced to Danish parliament. The Captia solution for handling theassociated requirements has both a well-defined process and preciserequirements for process deadlines built into it.

The process is described at two levels (master-flowand sub-flow) and is driven by the Windows WorkflowFoundation(WWF) with ScanJour’s ”Adaptive Process Framework” (APF) built on top of WWF aswell as in Captia.

Standardized yet flexible

The system was designed to enable processes tobe described and defined in a standard way (using WWF and if desiredBPMN). What’s more, the individual userdoesn’t necessarily have to be familiar with all the details of the entireprocess.

A familiar tool

This is achieved by means of a very familiarmedia (the mail client in Outlook), which is used to deliver information,initiate activities and approve or reject phases of the process.

This method of automation has many advantages.One important aspect is that users can handle process information andparticipate in the process without having to adapt to yet another new piece ofsoftware and interface. Furthermore, theprocess can be contributed to from many different devices – as long as there isa standard mail client.

What will the future bring?

We believe that in the future, more and moresoftware will be developed with built-in process support. From ScanJour’s pointof view, our R&D department is very much focused on this with regard toboth our Captia and APF solutions.

We believe quite simply that the currentcomprehensive Captia functionality for process support can help increase theoptimization of case handling and information search in the continuingdigitalization of the public (and private) sector.

Learn more about Captia

Read Part I of this post

LinkedIn and Twitter updates

2011-10-18T15:59:00.000+02:00

Are you also getting more and more annoyed of useless Twitter updates on LinkedIn?

I am - but since LinkedIn does not provide a setting allowing you only to elinimate Twitter updates the consequence is that I am now hiding updates from all people redirectiing their Twitter updates to LinkedIn...

Here is how to do it:

In the upper right corner of a status update from a peson you click "Hide". This will effectively hide all updates from that person (including Twitter, TripIt and other useless updates).

People and processes - Part I

2011-10-11T15:01:00.021+02:00

The thing that makes knowledge-based organizations tick is people and processes. Some organizations seem to operate like the old “Bornholmer” clock – manual winding required, not quite accurate, looking a bit antiquated but still ticking away in its own quiet pace.

Others seem to be top-tuned like a sophisticated pulse watch and capable of adjusting and reflecting the exact performance at any given time. This kind of organization knows its present state and what to do to get even better – the people and the processes feel he heartbeat and optimizes continuously.

Surely it is interesting to understand the difference between these two kinds of organizations.
In my opinion it’s a matter of getting people and the processes to work in symbioses without the one part taking over completely. Keep in mind that it is possible to kill performance completely by overdoing either the people part or the process part. I think the main characteristics of an organization which (from the outside) is performing optimal are,

Transparency
Everyone (inside and outside) understands the processes, what is done and who is doing it. Even though a person only contributes to part of a process they “get the picture” and understand why their part is important. From an outside perspective the same level of detail and insight may not apply but to the outsider there is a clear understanding of what goes on what the expected result is.

Measurable
Another important aspect of a well-tuned organization is the capability to present key performance indicators of the processes on a monthly, weekly, daily and perhaps even hourly basis. If the processes are not measurable how can you know whether they are performing and improving?

Automated
Everything else being equal it is assumed that a fully automated process is cheaper to run than a manual – and less prone to errors. In that perspective, an organization should strive to automate processes as much as possible.

Obviously the automation part is where IT comes into the game – and this is where it gets exiting seen from a software vendor like ScanJours perspective.
One of the first rules creating good software is to make sure you understand the users.

To that end we have created a persona model covering the generic user roles in companies working with software like ours. For each persona – for instance “Michael” - we describe what Michael does in his daily work, which tools he is using, who he interacts with and in which ways. Based on this we create an intelligent role based user interface. Sometimes it makes sense to group several personas like “Martin”, “Susan” and “Johan” into a group – in this case “Information workers”, because they share some characteristics.

In Scanjour we believe in creating a role based user experience targeted the different users. Currently we are doing this based on two offerings, the Web client for Captia and the Office client for Captia. In the coming release of Captia we will furthermore showcase a new thin client browser based user interface, which will step up the overall user experience and introduce a number of new concepts which we believe will set the standard for enterprise case- and content management solutions.

In part II of this blogpost I will further discuss the process aspect further and how it relates and links to people.

It’s not just ESDH!

2011-08-16T15:08:00.015+02:00

In Denmark the category for the kind of software solutions we do at ScanJour for many years has been called ESDH – “Electronic case and document management”.

Personally I am really not a big fan of acronyms, buzzwords and narrow categorization of software. Most software I have been part of creating typically can do so much more than their “category” indicates. Anyways, the categories are typically invented by analyst companies and are frequently changing in an effort to try keeping the interest from their readers and thus becoming less useful.
What I find intriguing is to make mission critical software - mostly because it is really, really difficult to get right. Without this software running companies will typically not survive more than a few days or even hours. In other words, it IS the software running the company. Let’s look at a few characteristics of this kind of software solutions,

• It keeps information critical to the company and it’s business, e.g.
o Relations such as employees, customers, vendors, contacts etc.
o Documents (often legal) such as correspondence, contracts, invoices etc.
• It handles the key business processes in the company, e.g.
o Customer/client request- to case resolution management
o Quote-to-cash scenarios
o Transactional data and trace information

Many companies within manufacturing, logistics and distribution or professional services utilize ERP solutions with these characteristics. With an ERP solution the company gets in total control of their physical and financial transactions. Over the 90ties and 2000’s ERP solutions have matured a lot and has been deployed from large to small companies (ref: Dynamics AX). Other kind of companies may rely on other more dedicated mission critical solutions, an example could be the core insurance solutions used in the insurance sector (ref: TIA Solution).

For companies with a focus on servicing their customers/clients and keep track of the related information we create the ScanJour solutions. ScanJour Captia, Ibox and related offerings are mission critical solutions for those companies. It runs their business.

This is why we think of our solutions as much more than an ESDH solution. The combined offerings of ScanJour are really about managing the business processes and information throughout the company.

On September 8th ScanJour is hosting our yearly customer conference. Measured by attendance it will probably be one of the largest information management events in DK – if not the largest.

At the conference we will focus on the efficient Information Worker. How can the individual as efficient as possible produce, manage, archive and retrieve relevant content and information – and how can others benefit from this information.

It is about making it simpler to archive than not. It is about giving everybody access to all of the relevant information assets in the company whether in form of case information, relations, documents, e-mail or other content.

At the conference we will explain how we see the future information worker, their daily job, optimizing the business and getting the most out of the information already present. This includes preview of the new Captia currently in the works in R&D, the IBox solution, our Advanced Process framework and the new features within our Office client.

We are looking forward to the opportunity to engage with our customers and users, and we are eager to give our customers an exciting day, which will show that “it’s not just ESDH” anymore…

For more infromation check out ScanJour Kundeseminar

@ Microsoft WPC

2011-07-12T22:57:00.003+02:00

I am currently attending the Microsoft Worldwide Partner conference in Los Angeles and thought I wanted to share a few impressions from the conference so far.

I was invited by Microsoft as part of ScanJour to attend the conference including a pre-conference day on Sunday – the “partnering executive summit” – for a selected number of around 200 partners (the conference has around 15000 participants in total).

In terms of our R&D and the tools we use at ScanJour we are fully embracing the Microsoft stack using Visual Studio TFS including the integrated test- and lab management parts of TFS. In fact we are deploying perhaps the largest setup of the Lab Management module of TFS in Europe. As such in our internal use we are far ahead in relation to topics such as virtualization and hosting of our R&D environments. Together with Microsoft we are currently thinking about how we can extend the use of Microsoft’s technology stack to including more of Sharepoint and SQL server.

Business Intellligence
During sessions Sunday and as part of Satya Nadella’s keynote Tuesday, Microsoft demoed among other things a very interesting new project codenamed Crescent, which is going to be part of the new version of SQL Server (codenamed Denali). This was an end-user BI tool running with a Sharepoint client UI. It was extremely simple and fast to create very compelling dynamical reports and graphs directly in Sharepoint. Imaging the tool as a sort of mix between creating a Powerpoint slide and a Pivot graph chart directly inside Sharepoint – but with dynamic drill-down capabilities - pretty cool! And it could include data from all kinds of datasources. Microsoft also showed an existing add-on to Excel called Powerpivot which was super cool. The guy on stage had an excel sheet with 62 mill. rows (!) which he sorted with the same speed as it had only be a few hundred rows.

It looks like Microsoft has a good chance of conquering significant part of the BI space with a focus on simplicity and performance. This seems to be a good match for a company like ScanJour with some very data-heavy solutions which can benefit from a sophisticated BI solution on top.

Lync (communications platform)
Lync was demoed (the new unified communications platform) and Microsofts strategy in this area seems very compelling. Basically people should be reachable both within an enterprise and outside on whatever device. For those skeptics this is much more than Messenger/Communicator. On main stage they demoed a few super cool scenarios with Lync video conversations going across the PC, Windows Phone as well as Xbox! . Pending regulatory approval of the Skype acquisition this would also extend to Skype users. The one IM conversation actually was happening with Bing translation on the fly from English to Spanish via a Lync add-in. Super cool.

Windows Phone
My person opinion is that Windows Phone has the potential to be very big. The new version codenamed “Mango” was demonstrated and Microsoft showed some very compelling scenarios. The speed of the UI was impressive and better than any of the competitors (Android, Iphone) and the level of integration in the UI of 3rd party apps, Bing search and others, was amazing and completely blended in seamlessly. The only thing lacking comparing to my own IPhone seems to be the selection of relevant apps on the Windows Phone Marketplace – If I could bring my favorite apps with me from my Iphone when Nokia (hopefully) soon builds and ships a high-quality phone I’m on Windows Phone. The user experience seems much better and fresher than that of IPhone.

Cloud
One thing which is prevalent on this conference is the enormous focus on Cloud. There is no doubt that Microsoft really is all-in with regards to moving all of their stuff to the cloud. This is very very big business. I would say that more than 80% of all topics on this conference have a relation to Cloud and/or Windows Azure. Tony Scott (Microsoft CIO) gave a few examples of internal use of cloud solutions, one being Microsoft’s own e-mail. As he put it, today Microsoft IT no longer runs their own exchange e-mail servers – this is all moved to the cloud (a.k.a. Office 365) exactly the same way all companies can choose to run e-mail as a cloud service from MS. Pretty impressive. Tony Scott also talked a lot about the benefits of a cloud service in relation to high scalability at peak periods. For instance an internal HR performance management solution they use, where 90.000 employees typically access this tool twice a year during a day or two.

All in all an interesting conference so far with a lot of relevant content. As an independent ISV it’s comforting to hear about the focus and sincere wish Microsoft has to create new opportunities together.

Servicing citizens digitally

2011-06-28T12:50:00.004+02:00

In todays papers in Denmark you can read about municipalities failing to respond adequately to 2 out of 5 digital requests from citizens (read: Version2 article).

As a citizen I can see why it sometimes becomes difficult to communicate digitally with municipalities and other public bodies in a simple way. The current implementations of public websites in Denmark (e.g. http://www.blogger.com/www.rudersdal.dk) seems to be very focused at exposing information to the readers (and the thesis seems to be the more the better) as opposed to letting the users get in touch with the various public bodies in a simple way.Coming from a world of software development another approach would be to look at user scenarios and then start by designing the websites with possibilities for handling the most commonly (volume based) scenarios right from the frontpage.

The article mentions scenarios like applying for new medicare card, passport, moving address, tax reporting, pension and change of primary physician. The interesting thing is that many of these scenarios are already supported but in different ways and not easily found. The website http://www.borger.dk/ does a bit better job than municipalities by actually placing four selected links to digital selfservice scenarios right on the frontpage. But if you want to do something else you're out of luck and left to a general search mechanism. Funny enough, on another part of the page there is a column for "what can we help with..". Some of the options here are duplicates and a few additional. I especially like the link to "I am going to be married" - surprisingly the first bullet is NOT instructions on how to "pop the question" :-).

There are probaly a couple of points to make here. First of all - usability (as always) is key to success. My experience shows that when it comes to usabilty, less is definately better. Secondly it's evident that digitalising user scenarios is not a straightforward thing to do. It's clear when trying to get an overview of what is possible, that the public administration consists of many different backend soultions, which is is probably not simple to connect up to a user friend-ly self-service web front-end - and something which is going to take a while.

At ScanJour we are obviouosly responsible for one of these often used backend solutions and we are naturally concerned with how we can play a part in this digital challenge and enable citizens to communicate efficiently with the public administration.

At an interesting meeting last friday at "Økonomistyrelsen" variuos new initiatives around the digital adminstration was discussed and we are eagerly awaiting the new strategy for digital public communication expected soon (Computerworld).

The first post

2011-06-27T14:09:00.003+02:00

After a month and a half in my new job as CTO of ScanJour I thought it was about time to get a blog started.

You may wonder why the blog is in english...given that so many of our customers in ScanJour are within the public sector in Denmark.

Well - first of all I'm sure that people working in the public sector in Denmark also speaks english. Actually I believe that more and more people within public service become exposed to other languages than danish - not at least considering the the growing EU legislation. Secondly - and more important - ScanJour do have customers outside Denmark and this in fact means that our primary written language in ScanJour R&D is english. Since we have many non-danish speaking talents as part of our R&D team it becomes even more so a necessity to communicate in english.

But enough of that, my intention with this blog (regardless of language) is to provide my personal view and comments on our products and how they can be used by our customers and users.

If you have comments to the bog, feel free to post them - also in danish if you prefer that.

Flemming