Donovan Jackson – iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment.

Hyper Ride delivers the fun, fast

Fergus McCall — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 02:32:54 +0000

Published on the 12/07/2022 | Written by Donovan Jackson

AT A GLANCE

Hyper Ride
https://www.hyperride.co.nz/

INDUSTRY

Retail

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

Leverage technology for growth
Build efficient low-touch processes
Easy to use systems for seasonal staff

SOLUTION

n2 ERP from First Software

BUSINESS BENEFITS

Growth supported without system updates
Automation features without major investment
Fast retail-ready data manipulation
Accurate, on-time delivery to customers

FOR MORE INFORMATION

First Software
W: www.firstsoftware.co.nz/
E: stewart@firstsoftware.co.nz
T: +64 9 573 2648

Recreational equipment supplier has n2 ERP at its core…

How ERP helped turn big dreams into reality at Hyper Ride

When New Zealanders want to buy the gear that makes fun possible, they turn to online megastore Hyper Ride. For more than ten years, the Auckland-headquartered e-tailer of leading surf, snow, skate, wake, cycling, motocross, and camping brands has provided easy shopping and rapid delivery of more than 100,000 products. What they don’t see is that behind Hyper Ride sits First Software’s powerful, locally developed e-commerce-ready Enterprise Resource Planning solution, n2. The software has powered Hyper Ride from day one, when it was little more than a great idea, and has facilitated rapid business growth without ever requiring the systems upgrades demanded by an increasingly complex organisation.

“n2 has facilitated Hyper Ride’s expansion with absolute ease”

Hyper Ride was co-founded in 2008 by Simon Furness and Richard Bush, who spotted an opportunity for online retailing of a wide range of equipment and accessories for sports involving a ride of any kind. The business has rapidly grown, building relationships with hundreds of the world’s most popular brands to provide the widest range, provide excellence in customer service and next-level convenience.

Situation

As part of establishing Hyper Ride, Bush engaged with First Software as a key partner. Familiar with n2 ERP from a previous business, he wanted to start with a system which, for most startups, would be considered too complex. “Startups don’t usually invest in ERP software,” he confirms. “But the vision we had for Hyper Ride was clear: this thing could scale, and with the right approach, we could carve out significant market share by doing online retail better and faster than anyone else.”

He says conviction is as important as passion for the ambitious new business owner. “It is impossible to see the future, but we wanted to plan for success from the first minute of starting our operations. It’s a decision that has stood us in very good stead; where most startups might run off Excel spreadsheets and maybe an accounting software package, we equipped ourselves with a system which was more powerful than we needed initially, but which has facilitated Hyper Ride’s expansion with absolute ease.”

Solution

Designed for New Zealand businesses with multiple branches, N2 ERP offers a complete set of modules working together for accurate handling of common business processes. Hyper Ride’s implementation includes n2’s eCommerce engine, Purchasing, Sales Order, Warehousing, Complex Freight Calculations, Marketplace Integration, Forecasting, and Customer/Supplier Integration. With multiple custom integrations to its suppliers, Hyper Ride offers the widest possible range of products through its website, with accurate inventory control. In practice, this means when a customer selects an item, it is in stock and ready for shipping.

But Bush says while the software is indispensable to Hyper Ride’s efficient operations, it isn’t necessarily where the most value derives from the long association with First Software. “What makes our situation unique is the proximity of First as a vendor to our business. They know Hyper Ride as well as I do, and that means they know what works for this business, where development effort should be focused, and what makes our customers choose Hyper Ride ahead of any other competitor.”

This extends to the Hyper Ride website, also designed, created and supported by First Software. The site, which incorporates multiple services so customers can pay the way they choose, is designed for ease of updating; with so many products available, full control by Hyper Ride staff is essential to keep creating offers, uploading SKUs, and removing them once stock has sold out.

Results

Probably the best and most durable result of its association with First Software is Hyper Ride’s effortless expansion from startup to major player, now shipping thousands of items across New Zealand every week. “Our business model is low-touch and high-throughput. Thanks to the software, we take on inventory, load it to the website and have it ready for sale within hours. This reduces the time stock sits on the shelf, and if we’re moving it rapidly out the back door, it means our customers are getting their orders fast whether they are down the road in Auckland, or in Invercargill,” says Bush.

Innovations which he believes would be either impossible or impossibly expensive if working with an international vendor include a warehouse scanning solution, and an automated process for item repricing. “Features like this make a big difference to our business,” he says. “It reduces handling time and that makes for efficiency and accuracy.”

Thanks to n2 ERP, Bush adds that running the warehouse which sits at the centre of Hyper Ride is easy. “As a seasonal business, we have short term workers – often senior school pupils – coming in and helping out in busy periods. The way things are set up, we can hire someone and they’ll be productive within a day or two. That’s thanks to great business processes, backed by software that just works.”

About This Vendor

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The post Hyper Ride delivers the fun, fast appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..

Sprint Fit beefs up with n2 ERP supplement

Fergus McCall — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 19:30:46 +0000

Published on the 08/07/2022 | Written by Donovan Jackson

AT A GLANCE

Sprint Fit

INDUSTRY

Online retail (sports supplements)

BUSINESS OBJECTIVE

Establish online business
Create a testing ground for n2 development
Handle complexity and growth
Agility to move quickly with business decisions

SOLUTION

N2 ERP by First Software

BUSINESS BENEFITS

True partnership between retailer and tech provider
Self-managed online merchandising
Accurate inventory
Fast order to fulfilment cycle times

FOR MORE INFORMATION

First Software
W: www.firstsoftware.co.nz/
E: stewart@firstsoftware.co.nz
T: +64 9 573 2648

Systems experiment turns into cash cow…

ERP from day 1 drives Sprint Fit’s business to new heights

While it takes more than a leap of faith, Auckland-headquartered online supplements store Sprint Fit has demonstrated the enduring value of starting up with a highly capable enterprise resource planning software solution provided by a vendor within direct reach. In a short period of time, the store has rocketed from experimental startup to a major player in the hyper-competitive supplements and nutrition industry, underpinning basic business principles with First Software’s n2 ERP & Ecommerce solution from day one – and carving out a meaningful competitive advantage as a result.

“This is also a high volume, low margin business, so we must carefully manage markup and stock holding on a razor’s edge”

Established in 2014 by brothers Alex and Leon Petraska, Sprint Fit was initially a test bed for business development with First Software’s n2 ERP and e-commerce solution but has rapidly grown into a substantial business with a million-dollar + monthly turnover. With offices and a warehouse in Auckland’s Onehunga, Sprint Fit stocks thousands of products from more than 20 major local and international supplement and sports nutrition brands, including Optimum Nutrition, Ghost Lifestyle, EHP Labs, Balance, Musclepharm, Goli and more.

Situation

The supplements industry is highly competitive, with an enormous range of products available internationally and locally. Product is also available in-store anywhere from cycle shops and other specialty sports retailers, to dedicated nutrition retailers, and even in supermarkets. This reality made a daunting mountain for Sprint Fit to climb. “Basically, we have to be better than anyone else, including every local retailer as well as the likes of Amazon and eBay,” confirms Managing Director Leon Petraska.

“This is also a high volume, low margin business, so we must carefully manage markup and stock holding on a razor’s edge”

Being better means creating and delivering the very best online experience. That starts with an easily navigable website and routine contact with customers with special offers, new products, information, and education. And then it extends to the mechanics of e-retail, and nowhere are those mechanics more important than fulfilment: Fast shipping, unimpeachable support, secure payments processing, and something every customer appreciates, a great deal every time.

“We have massive complexity in stock management. Not only are there more than 20,000 SKUs, but there are minor differences such as flavours and colours – and those differences are important to our customers,” Petraska explains. “This is also a high volume, low margin business, so we must carefully manage markup and stock holding on a razor’s edge – down to the cent, really. And we need to know costings, margins, and stock holding immediately, we need to see what is going out the door and have accurate information at our fingertips, or it’ll cost money.”

Solution

Where most other new businesses are often powered by hopes, dreams, and Excel spreadsheets, Sprint Fit kicked off with n2 ERP modules including eCommerce Engine, Purchasing, Sales Orders, Warehousing, Freight Engine, Marketplace Integration, Sales Analysis, Forecasting, Customer/Supplier Integration, and First Software’s custom n2 Ecommerce website

Petraska explains that the proximity of First Software – the companies initially worked out of the same office – wasn’t about testing software, specifically, because N2 was already proven in some 60 customers in New Zealand and Australia. Instead, it was about testing a business model where software vendor and user co-operate in a partnership.

“You see a lot of claims about software vendors partnering with their customers, but most of that isn’t much more than lip service,” he points out. “Most vendors work through a channel, so they have little to do with their end customers. With Sprint Fit, First Software doesn’t just provide the ERP system – it also provides guidance on business processes, routes to market, integrations with suppliers, and much more.”

Unusually for an ERP vendor, First Software also provides a crucial component of every online retailer: the website itself. All too often, retailers treat the front and back ends of their web presence as separate entities, with a tension between the web design people, and those who run the ERP. Clunky integrations and difficult website management are often the result.

“First Software actually built our website from the ground up,” says Petraska. “The focus is very much on functionality over form, although a great looking site is obviously essential. But we have fast moving goods and that means we need to update all the time, get the new goods loaded up, and remove the ones sold out. First Software has made that easy – which, again, means we have an edge. As soon as goods come into the warehouse, they’re loaded and offered for sale, often leaving to customers the same day.”

He adds that the website is ‘customisable to anything we want’. “Any idea that comes up, we can implement exactly. It’s a massive advantage – for example, at checkout, we put in upsells, and can easily control the offers, increasing order size and moving inventory. If we want a one-day special offer, up it goes.”

A further advantage that Petraska describes as crucial to Sprint Fit’s success, is his custom dashboard, drawing information from N2’s warehousing, logistics and custom integrations to suppliers – from supplement manufacturers to NZ Post. “The dashboard tells me everything. New and returning customers, average order values, margin turnovers, buyer behaviour, stock levels, stock which is and isn’t moving. Through the dash, we can design offers and give discounts, with multiple angles giving insights on what is happening on any given day.”

If things are slow, for example, he says, it’s possible to put together an offer and email it to customers within minutes. “That literally moves stock almost immediately.”

In fact (see below) Sprint Fit customers routinely rave about the speed of delivery, with orders to Auckland often arriving within hours of placement. Again, this comes down to First Software working closely with Sprint Fit; when NZ Post provided a Web service, Sprint Fit found printing waybills took 5 seconds or more apiece. “If you pick and pack a 1000+ orders every day, that was a lot of wasted time. So, First Software developed a better system, integrated straight into NZ Post, which prints the labels immediately straight out of n2 ERP,” Petraska explains.

Results

Thanks to n2 ERP, Sprint Fit’s business is information driven. Customers find the products they like on the website, place an online order which goes straight into the back-end warehouse system, which updates every second. The orders come through to the pick and pack department for boxing, with NZ Post courier labels printed in batches of 10. Tracking numbers go to customers as soon as the order is packed and again on dispatch, with often no more than 5 minutes between order placement and notification of successful packing.

Couriers visit several times per day, with orders fulfilled at mind-boggling pace. “Sprint Fit customers often comment on Google reviews about how quickly their orders get delivered. First Software has worked with us on an order processing optimisation effort,” says Petraska. “And with NZ Post label production embedded in n2 ERP, it’s literally ten times faster than the standard NZ Post software.” That optimisation effort means Sprint Fit offers multiple shipping upgrades – Auckland customers can, for example, place an order before 3pm for a 6-9pm same-evening delivery.

Petraska says n2 has played an integral role in the growth and success of Sprint Fit, right down to making it easy and engaging for staff members working on the shop floor. “The system is simple and intuitive, so we can train a new employee in minutes, and they will be proficient in as little as a week.”

More than that, he says the closeness of First Software is like having a tailored suit versus something off the peg. “Over the years, we’ve nipped and tucked on little things that add up to a lot. This has equipped Sprint Fit to process way more volumes with fewer people, so we can invest in demand generation. With straight-through processing, including views directly into supplier stock, we make fewer mistakes, get orders right more often, and deliver the experiences which keep our customers coming back for more.”

About This Vendor

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The post Sprint Fit beefs up with n2 ERP supplement appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..

SAP customers proactive with S/4HANA upgrades

Jennene Kelly — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 03:30:02 +0000

With recent news of the planned obsolescence of SAP solutions including its long established ECC and R/3 ERP products, users are under pressure to consider when they will migrate to the latest iteration of the German giant’s software. But for many in Australia and New Zealand, the advantages of SAP’s most recent flagship solution, S/4HANA, are such that migrations and upgrades are being completed proactively, long before any hard deadlines are brought to bear.

iStart caught up with Nick Mulcahy, CEO of Zag, one of Australasia’s leading SAP implementation partners, in a quest to understand what end of support means – and why many of Zag’s customers are already shifting to S/4HANA.

“We’re seeing a ‘soft landing’ from SAP, and that’s pretty unprecedented.”

Mulcahy immediately said there should be no reason to panic at the announcement of end of support for R/3 and ECC, initially announced as 2025, now 2027. “What’s interesting [in the changed deadline] is that we’re seeing a ‘soft landing’ from SAP, and that’s pretty unprecedented,” he said.

“A great example is that the original statement on end of support said all HR and payroll customers had to be off by 2025; a more recent announcement says anyone on existing on-premise systems can remain on them indefinitely.

“SAP was perhaps a little ambiguous with the initial announcement of 2025, but they quickly changed plans once they realised it may not be possible, with the number of partners available to assist customers with a migration, and so pushed that to 2027.”

What Mulcahy is alluding to is that like most ERP and digital transformation projects, SAP installations and upgrades can take time, investment and change management. This is not unreasonable, as SAP installations are also typically found in what he calls “the most complex” of environments: highly demanding, by necessity customised, at enterprise scale. An upgrade can be as challenging or even more so than a Greenfield implementation – and that means even the well-established partner ecosystem might find itself overwhelmed.

Mulcahy says it is encouraging that SAP is listening to its customer and partner base. “I wouldn’t expect them to be severe and the move as a whole fits with what customers want; all customers, including those on R/3 and ECC and even those on S/4HANA, can take comfort from the softening stance SAP is taking.”

Part of that relates to the reality of highly complex systems in global companies; another part reflects the realities of certain customers around the world who are unable to countenance a move to the Cloud.

The S/4HANA stampede has begun
To date, Zag has already brought multiple customers onto the S/4HANA platform. “We’re seeing significant adoption of S/4HANA, particularly in New Zealand; several are live, and we have more lined up for the coming year than we’ve already delivered,” Mulcahy confirms.

He adds that in the early days, the fastest SAP ever (first released in 2015), with its in-memory HANA database delivering what SAP describes as ‘Intelligent ERP’, sales were slow. “S/4HANA is a considerable upgrade and with considerable upgrades businesses often wait for a few other organisations to convert first, taking on board their lessons learnt. Now that the early adopters and industry disrupters have blazed the trail, we’re seeing a big group of companies in the early majority category eager to implement.”

It is in that organic momentum that the justification for the effort is to be found. In simple terms, S/4HANA is worth the effort. “We’ve never seen this before in SAP upgrades. Businesses are being proactive; they are requesting S/4HANA and they are going about it differently than before.”

One approach has been through completing a technical upgrade first, in which the SAP system is brought to the latest released version, and then the business case is delivered with innovation sprints. “Customers are completing anywhere between 5-10 sprints, each a month long and delivering specific functionality,” Mulcahy said.

This is noteworthy because it represents better business planning and ‘innovation in action’. “It also differs from the traditional approach which bakes the lot into a core implementation,” says Mulcahy, adding that the ‘sprint’ approach consequently delivers value faster. “The technical upgrade might take 5 to 7 months, then you cherry pick innovation sprints depending on where value is found.”

He believes the changed approach owes to customers becoming adept at digitising their businesses. “IT departments especially are getting well used to the agile concept and how to do it. The business side, perhaps not as much, but we are seeing more savvy Boards where they want milestones and value paybacks along the way not waiting until the end.”

The value is in the S/4
It’s all about value and Mulcahy is adamant that the numbers of customers willingly signing up (“We don’t have to push this,” he notes) is a confirmation that the juice is well worth the squeeze.

“Customers cannot execute their 5-10 year strategy on ECC and SAP legacy solutions because the underlying technology is holding them back from, for example, delivering procurement savings or having the ability to grow their business which requires changing the way they execute their supply chain,” Mulcahy explains.

Improved execution depends on a digital core and real time data, created with S/4HANA and enhanced with Ariba or C/4HANA or Success Factors. “Broadly speaking, these customers are taking customer-facing journeys, the stuff that McKinsey and BCG are talking about, with big programmes of work changing the way their business operates.”

Towards a brighter SAP future
Since S/4HANA offers considerable advantages in delivering a ‘digital core’, Mulcahy says every SAP customer should get it on their radar. What’s more, with a deadline coming and analysts around the world questioning the capacity of the partner ecosystem, those who move early are likely to enjoy easier access to services. “The talk is that the ecosystem will have to double to meet demand and even that won’t be sufficient to convert all customers by 2027. It’s therefore a good idea to look at your business cases and consider where your business is going – and for some, for example on ECC who haven’t had an outage for 5 years, maybe there isn’t a case and that’s fine. But if your analysis points to action, best to take it sooner rather than later.”

…

Canned beans show that every industry is an essential one

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 30 Mar 2020 00:59:51 +0000

A can of beans on a shelf for $1? It’s a simple good on the face of it but dig a little deeper and you’ll find it involved thousands of people in hundreds of vocations around the planet for its production.

It started with someone who produced bean seed and that would involve geneticists, horticultural experts, various scientists and so on. Then there was someone who made fertiliser, some people who moved and traded and retailed seed and fertiliser, someone who bought those things, while someone far away mined ore to make steel to make a can for the beans while elsewhere trees were felled and pulped so paper could be made for the label.

“It is those very visible hands that are likely to screw this whole thing up.”

Somewhere else, ink and a printing press were produced so the labels could be made…each industry with its own sub-processes which make it work. And each with thousands of ‘non-essential’ workers in their ‘non-essential’ industries.

Of course, all this tied together with information systems, databases and messaging systems that allow for transactions to be created, tracked, delivered and settled.

Note that at this point, we don’t yet have any beans, let alone baked ones in a can.

Then the farmer gets involved, with land, capital, tractors, machinery and so on, and grows millions of rows of beans. Time passes, harvest time comes, beans are separated from chaff. The tractors, farm bikes, utes and so on are serviced, maintained, fuelled and ‘tyred’ by an army of workers and invisible supply chains which stand behind every item, involving thousands upon thousands of workers, most in ‘non-essential’ jobs.

And yet we still have nothing we can put on the supermarket shelf.

Once the beans are harvested and pre-processed into dry goods, they go through a complex market where they might be traded by a commodities broker and may garner the attention of market speculators, trading on a price tick up. Are these guys parasites, or are they too essential workers? Guess we will be finding out soon.

Note. No beans yet. Nothing the supermarket can sell.

Now we have the (deemed essential) manufacturer producing 200k cans’ worth of beans a day; the plant is equipped with machinery, the machinery itself produced by manufacturers with their own complex supply chains supporting the engineering, production, sale and support of mixers, ovens and other gear. There’s other ingredients like flavours and preservatives that go into our can of beans, and that means the work of food scientists, production managers, labourers…another micro-universe of supply chains and complex interactions which are involved in the production of a simple good, whether it is sodium bicarbonate or just plain vinegar.

Once we’ve got a volume of cooked beans in tomato sauce, it moves on to a processing plant which puts them into the cans. What’s behind the processing plant and all its workers? By now you’ll have some inkling.

Now the beans are canned and labelled, marketed and sold on the international market before entering the complex logistical, distribution and warehousing operations of FMCG. Finally, a retailer receives the beans and puts a can on a shelf.

Decreeing who is and who is not an essential industry
One can of beans represents the efforts of probably hundreds of thousands of people working together, entirely anonymously and without any knowledge of their colleagues. Why? It’s the power of the free market and the incentives it invisibly provides for human society to collaborate on a grand scale. In fact, Adam Smith called the unintended social benefits of an individual’s self-interested actions ‘the invisible hand’ (perhaps trite that we’ve wound up with a can of beans masquerading as a social benefit).

The effort required to produce a can of beans is in every sense herculean. And every single one of those workers and those industries is essential to the production of a cheap can of beans.

Now we start to see the problem. Take just one section of that value chain out, by decreeing that say a printer is not an essential worker, or a trader, or a copywriter, or a service technician, or even a marketing manager, and what do you have? The simple answer is a more expensive can of beans on the supermarket shelf. There will also be fewer cans, since the automatically optimised value chain has been compromised.

The trouble with price controls
Nobody likes more expensive beans, so the shoppers complain. The PM introduces promises of help in the form of price controls or more politically expedient market intervention (now well practised as with bakers, butchers, and non-daily news media).

Let’s go back to the bean factory for a minute, while noting it is but one link in a complex chain. It’s geared for the production of 200,000 cans a day, with the economies of scale making it (ultimately) possible to put a single can on the shelf for a dollar (though there are of course hundreds if not thousands of variables involved in the production of those beans, as we have seen).

Let’s say the interference with the value chain means the factory can now only produce 100k cans a day – but the fixed overheads for the plant, machinery and other input costs are higher now per can of beans produced.

The price of beans must increase if the production is to remain sustainable. In highly simplistic terms, either the can of beans on the shelf has to be $2 to be sustainable (because now we have a shortage, which means scarcity), or the production of beans must stop because it is no longer sustainable.

And here we have the trouble with price controls. Prices rising in times of shortage is a valuable mechanism which ‘auto rations’ goods, because people must now think twice before buying what they perceive as a dollar can of beans for $2. If it is still $1, but shortages are either here or coming soon, it incentivises those with money to buy more than they need (and hoarding is an entirely economically sensible action to take, particularly if one can see shortages being likely).

So-called ‘price gouging’ automatically rations the available goods to those who really need them, while higher prices incentivise producers to keep producing. Price controls might seem to help keep things affordable, but in reality, it accelerates shortages because the supremely complex value chains which underpin the production of beans or any other good, must be sustainable through pricing mechanisms if they are to continue producing beans.

If you’ve kneecapped those processes by deeming half or more of the workers involved ‘non-essential’ you cannot hope to avoid scarcity and shortages, which must by necessity force prices upwards. If the prices are controlled, bean production must (and will) cease – hurting those who the price controls sought to help in the first instance, because now there are no cans of beans on the supermarket shelf, rather than fewer cans at a higher price.

It’s a problem of productivity
This is the real problem we face. It isn’t a problem of ‘money’, as hundreds of thousands are sent home from work. It is a problem of ‘productivity’ and it’s a global one.

Money is only worth something if it is backed by productivity, measured as GDP output. Our GDP has been compromised in a massive way, with the so-called non-essential workers sent home, and now a forlorn hope or expectation that we can put beans on the shelf at the same price as before.

At the same time, now non-productive workers are sitting at home with $580 a week (of their own money, it must be said, because all government money comes from those workers in the first instance).

When money isn’t backed by productivity, it becomes meaningless. At least part of the reason Zimbabwe had and has runaway inflation owes to an unproductive economy. If we aren’t working, our money is worth less.

In simple terms, if beans aren’t being produced at the same rate, there won’t be enough to go around. Shortages are likely. The cost of production will rise, and therefore prices to the end user must do so too if production is to remain feasible. That’s on the one hand.

On the other, we’re being issued with free money in the form of benefits – an unplanned experiment with a Universal Basic Income.

Because most of those involved in canned bean production are deemed ‘non-essential’ workers (and you can substitute any industry for beans), we’re not going to have quite as many cans on the shelves. Combined with an influx of ‘free money’, the situation is likely to become rather dire in the coming months.

The corollary, therefore, is that your business, whatever it is, is ultimately essential. Remember, if your industry wasn’t essential, it wouldn’t exist. So, stand firm arguing your case. Be over-protective of your workers’ health and safety to stop the spread but wherever, whenever possible, carry on being productive. Use the tools technology has provided us with. Choose activities and ways of working that are safe, rather than what’s deemed ‘essential’ by politicians with little real-world experience. It is those very visible hands that are likely to screw this whole thing up.

The economy matters because it feeds, houses and clothes us. And ‘the economy’ isn’t something abstract, it is you and I being productive so that society can be prosperous.

The post Canned beans show that every industry is an essential one appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..

Cloud in its infancy, but AWS works to grow it up

Jennene Kelly — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 03:44:26 +0000

That’s because AWS CEO Andy Jassy (pictured) has a lot to say. And he has a lot to say because AWS is famous for introducing torrents of new products and services at its annual re:Invent gathering, taking place now in Las Vegas.

But Jassy started with some advice for companies looking to transform their businesses with the cloud: “Cloud success depends on senior level conviction and alignment. You need aggressive top down goals,” he told an audience of more than 65 000 who made the pilgrimage to Nevada (and later reiterated in a closed press session).

“We remove the undifferentiated heavy lifting so customers can focus on the differentiating work.”

While the casual observer might feel the cloud has reached a stage of maturity, Jassy doesn’t share that opinion. In fact, he believes cloud is in its infancy, with the vast majority of computing still on premise. “We’re in the early stages of the most titanic technological shift in our lifetimes. In the fullness of time, relatively few companies will have their own datacentres. This will happen but I continue to believe it will take several years,” he said.

And he offered a warning, too, for those organisations merely toying with the cloud. “Inertia is a powerful thing. It’s easy to get excited about the cloud and dip a toe in for a long time [and then do nothing more], but that and talk is not the same thing as action. And you need to train people. While the cloud is easy to use, you will need skills.”

What AWS does is provide the tools for action and there are a lot of them. Right now, the company offers 175 services, up from 140 last year and 100 the year before that. And AWS isn’t content ‘merely’ delivering cloud services, either. After acquiring Israeli chip designer Annapurna in 2015, it now churns out custom silicon, too. And it even offers edge devices and a configurable box called the Outpost which helps bridge the gap between on premise workloads and the AWS cloud.

In his keynote alone, Jassy made more than 20 announcements of new products and features and if there is a theme, then it is machine learning and artificial intelligence. If that boggles the mind, consider this: In 2011, it released around 80 services and features; in 2012, nearly 160. In 2013, 280, in 2014, 516, in 2015, 722 in 2016, and 1,430 in 2017.

In 2018 that was up to 1,957 new features and services. AWS probably has a service running somewhere tallying it all up.

In a sit-down with iStart, AWS ANZ MD Paul Migliorini had the task of contextualising the many announcements for the local market; he agreed keeping track of it all isn’t easy. “At the outset, though, what we build comes from customer feedback. The volume of products and services is a simple function of the mathematics, we have many millions of customers all iterating fast and asking us to build new things. And when we build for one customer, everyone gets it.”

He singled out Wavelength, its SageMaker toolset which now includes a complete integrated development environment, and Outpost for special mention; as AWS doesn’t have physical data centres in New Zealand as yet, Migliorini said the general availability of its Outpost solution is likely to capture the attention of the customer base. “It lets you get a consistent AWS cloud into your own data centre and I think this is interesting for New Zealand organisations.”

He added that AWS Wavelength which brings AWS services to the edge of the 5G network will have appeal. “And we’re already seeing organisations using SageMaker with sophisticated adoption. That’s had 15 feature releases in the past year and a further six today; in New Zealand we have a lot of good developer skills but not a lot of data science skills and I think this really democratises machine learning and AI.”

When it was suggested that AWS does a solid job of commoditising advanced technology, Migliorini said AWS prides itself on leveraging economies of scale and returning the benefits to customers. “We see our job as removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting so customers can focus on the differentiating work. You don’t have to build a whole AI stack, instead you access that in AWS and then focus on the things that matter.”

He pointed to the example of the company’s Transcribe service, which takes notes for doctors, relieving them of a tedious but necessary task. “The principle carries through to whatever we do. And I like to think of it as democratising rather than commoditising as it means any organisation can access these kinds of services.”

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Quantum computing and…blockchain

Jennene Kelly — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 03:18:32 +0000

With the kick-off of its annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS was quick out of the blocks with a raft of announcements around the ‘new frontier’ for computing. Quantum computing is expected to boot the capabilities of the computer into an entirely new league, promising gains in performance which will, in a stroke, make a mockery of Moore’s Law.

Also, the first media round table raised the spectre of the blockchain, in this case being trialled by consumer products company Nestle to better track and trace the origins of coffee. Yes, heads were scratched and more on that later.

Quantum computing is far from mainstream, but AWS is looking to commoditise it already.

First, let’s look at quantum computing, starting with just what exactly that is. Those who have dabbled in physics, and possibly also those who have dabbled in James Bond flicks, will recognise that quantum generally implies very small things. In computing, very small things has long been recognised as advantageous, which is why you’ll see processor manufacturers bragging about the ever-reducing number of nanometres involved in the production of a computer chip.

Quantum computers go all the way past the atomic level to the subatomic, so nanoscale becomes rather like using a builder’s measuring tape when sizing up computer components. At the subatomic scale, particles behave rather oddly, capable of existing in more than one state at any time. Where regular computers are limited to two states – the one or 0 of binary, really – quantum computers aren’t.

By encoding information as quantum bits, or qubits, which can exist in superposition, the quantum computer can produce results far faster, perform far more complex calculations (including easily busting unbreakable encryption), leap tall buildings in a single bound, etc.

They can, but although theoretical physicists including the great Richard Feynman have theorised about quantum computers since the 1980s, there aren’t really any real examples of them in action today (Google AI and NASA recently said its Sycamore quantum processor completed in 200 seconds a task the equivalent of which would take a state-of-the-art supercomputer approximately 10,000 years to complete.)

Which is what makes AWS’s announcements noteworthy. The web giant said in a statement that it’s AWS Braket service, which is named for the notation for quantum states, lets customers explore, evaluate, and experiment with quantum computing hardware to gain in-house experience as they plan for the future.

Ah, but AWS is not building a quantum computer – rather, as is it’s wont, it is providing services on which you can…one day…potentially access and use an underlying quantum computer, to be built by third parties.

At the same time, it is establishing the AWS Center for Quantum Computing, and the Amazon Quantum Solutions Lab as it seeks to accelerate the development of quantum computing technologies and (crucially) applications. After all, quantum computing is so radically different from the Turing model of computing that, well, we’re going to need a whole new generation of nerds to make sense of it. Oh, and new applications, too.

In a statement, AWS SVP for utility computing services Charlie Bell, “We believe that quantum computing will be a cloud-first technology and that the cloud will be the main way customers access the hardware.” Translation: quantum computing is far from mainstream, but AWS is looking to commoditise it already.

Coffee blockchain
Call us dumb, but we have a hard time understanding why the blockchain would be good for, well, anything, really. At it’s heart, the blockchain is an ‘append-only’ ledger which can be publicly accessible. It can also be super, super inefficient, as demonstrated by its most (in?)famous implementation, Bitcoin.

But those are not reasons for Nestle to avoid trialling Amazon’s blockchain for tracing the origins of Nestle coffee. There’s a snazzy video which explains why Single Origin is a thing, but does little to explain just exactly what, if anything, the blockchain actually does to enable that.

Which is why it was a treat to have the affable Armin Nehzat, digital technology manager at Nestle, on hand for some additional insights. “No, I am not going to sell you Bitcoins!” he declared at the outset.

Why blockchain, then? The answer is that a lot of the data you might like to check to verify the origin of your brew is contained in ERP and other ‘proprietary’ databases. Hard to access, hard to share, hard to verify.

“This data is critical to do demand planning and product personalisation. Across the supply chain, we come up with SKUs and ship them to market, we ask consumers what they want, we ask farmers what they have. We need real time collaboration through the supply chain and blockchain was identified as the most suitable technology for this application,” explained Nehzat.

He also pointed out that blockchain comes in many flavours (not entirely unlike coffee, then) – and another media attendee later said in his opinion, Nestle’s pilot application is more like a private ledger.

If such matters pique your interest, check out how you can trace your morning bev here. Potentially due to intellectual limitations, your humble correspondent remained unconvinced as to how the blockchain allows you to see the full provenance, and somewhere a head is still being scratched over the Oracle problem.

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Readying up for PEPPOL

Jennene Kelly — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 02:20:37 +0000

Significant time, effort and money are tied up in invoicing and the Australian and New Zealand governments have indicated that the imminent introduction of a new standard for digitising the exchange of business documents could put A$30 billion back into the economies.

That standard is named PEPPOL, or Pan-European Public Procurement Online, and government agencies on both sides of the ditch have been consulting with industry partners to bring the benefits to life. One such partner is B2BE, which is set to become one of the early access points to the network. B2BE, with deep local roots and a global footprint as an electronic data interchange specialist, is expecting PEPPOL to go-live shortly and start putting those savings into the pockets of local organisations. This, says B2BE PEPPOL manager Jason Diack, will initially be driven by companies doing business with the government being encouraged and incentivised to use e-invoicing.

“This is a big step forward for what we generally call Electronic Data Interchange [EDI], because it effectively allows anyone to trade under a single framework whether locally or in Australia,” says Diack.

On the western side of the Tasman, the Australian Tax Office is the PEPPOL controlling authority; in New Zealand, the role is handled by the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Enterprise (MBIE). When the PMs of both governments jointly announced PEPPOL back in February, they estimated the A$30 billion would be cut out of invoicing costs over the course of the coming decade. “There are a number of pilot activities already underway around the draft specifications which have been established for PEPPOL locally,” notes Diack; “There’s obviously many document types, but PEPPOL is kicking off with the most common – e-invoicing.”

Clive Calder, Senior Manager Trade Technology at Pfizer New Zealand, explains the benefits of EDI. “With B2BE we cover numerous connections to our customers in the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry. Over time, we have expanded the number of customers we connect with, and this now includes electronic messaging of purchase orders, acknowledgements, shipping notes and invoices. This automation enables Pfizer to better serve customers with reduced effort, improved accuracy and quicker response. It is an important contributor in managing and optimising the supply chain.”

“It’s a faster, easier setup because everyone’s talking the same language.”

Praful Patel, in charge of eBusiness at NZSafety Blackwoods which has used B2BE services for over 10 years, adds that the efficiencies associated with EDI connections cannot be underestimated. “Our customers benefit by using a standardised procurement practice to raise and submit purchase orders, which allows for efficient processing and payment of invoices. B2BE make it simple by translating purchase order and invoicing formats so they work in our systems, and in those of our customers.”

He adds that NZSafety Blackwoods is likely to use the PEPPOL standard in due course. “If government agencies that procure from us are changing, we’ll partner with them on it. And we’ll work with B2BE to do it; their experience in the integration space is second to none.”

Pfizer’s Calder, meanwhile, says the pharmaceutical company has reviewed PEPPOL. “We do not have any deployments in place, but we will engage with B2BE in New Zealand if opportunities arose to drive procurement improvements for our customers. “

Diack points out the big advantage of PEPPOL over other EDI standards and methods: “As a single standard, it is an easy introduction to EDI. With ‘traditional’ methods, if you had 100 trading partners, you might spend $1,000 integrating each one to your business systems. It could be more, depending on how many document types you’re exchanging – purchase orders, advanced shipping notices, waybills.”

It costs that much says Diack, because most EDI requires custom programming on both sides of the transaction. “PEPPOL standardisation and conformity means you map one document to trade with all government departments and your trading partners. It’s a faster, easier setup because everyone’s talking the same language.”

A good question is where PEPPOL leaves ‘other’ EDI. It isn’t a case of ‘one ring to rule them all’ and nor has it ever been, explains Diack. “PEPPOL will broaden the reach of EDI particularly to smaller businesses, but it doesn’t replace custom integrations. These remain valuable, particularly those already in place. And a general standard doesn’t always provide for specific use-cases, so going forward, companies with process- or industry- specific EDI requirements will still find value in custom interconnections.”

Diack’s colleague and fellow B2BE BDM Grant Young says B2BE is extending its 20-year track record in the provision of EDI solutions to PEPPOL and certification as a PEPPOL access point. “We’re ready to help local businesses get on to PEPPOL so they quickly see the advantages and the cost savings,” he says.

And it’s more than cost savings; going digital is faster, more convenient and delivers a boost to the cash conversion cycle. Simply put, e-invoicing should mean getting paid faster, with less hassle – something every business appreciates.

B2BE is happy to speak with anyone seeking more information about how PEPPOL works and what is involved to get it set up.

Contact details:

Australia New Zealand

T: +61 3 9682 6388 T: +64 9 912 2200
E: au.info@b2be.com E: nz.info@b2be.com

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The enterprise goes postmodern

Jennene Kelly — Wed, 14 Aug 2019 02:26:09 +0000

With Industry 4.0 or the Fourth Industrial Revolution breaking all around us, businesses of every stripe are obliged to do better or stand by as competitors move in on their territory by delivering improved accessibility, convenience and service.

Doing so depends on appropriate systems to make it happen. The coincidence of many so-called digital transformations across organisations has heralded an ‘Age of Industry Transformation’ where data is much more fluid along the value chain. It is an era that will be driven by a postmodern enterprise technology architecture.

That is the idea put forward by Matthew Addley, business strategist and industry evangelist at Infor, who says that while there is an element of the foundational in core systems like ERP, they must also enable agility and innovation.

“Postmodern implies a willingness to co-exist… it’s a thin wrapper on those core services, into which other systems can easily be connected as and when required.”

“When you have digital siloes emerging, you have a problem. You need your core systems to be open and flexible and to do that you invest in the cloud and a suitably open architecture which gives you the ability to pivot and develop nuanced aspects with, for example, collaborative workflows and mobility within the same platform.”

Postmodern ERP, he explains, is a business applications strategy which features a connected portfolio of heterogenous applications.

“You are making sure to have rigour in the core, along with the ability to provide workflow and collaboration. Postmodern also implies a willingness to co-exist, rather than trying to be all things to all people; it’s a thin wrapper on those core services, into which other systems can easily be connected as and when required.”

The Age of Industry Transformation is to digital transformation what postmodernism is to modernism. It is an era where businesses have a sharp focus on customers and convenience, with less attention afforded to raw ‘cost’ (which, regardless of what anyone says, remains a fundamental driver for most buying decisions).

What this means in practice is the necessity for more integrated supply chains and business systems more closely married to the particular operations of any one business (Infor calls this ‘micro-verticals).

After all, convenience and customer service are differentiators capable of transcending even the powerful force of cost (people are always prepared to – and do – pay for convenience). And achieving convenience at scale depends on finely tuned operations.

Addley says this fine tuning starts with a solid set of foundations within the enterprise, but also depends on integrating other systems and data sources – IoT data, POS data, or the systems of partners and suppliers.

“The important bit is that your systems can integrate and they can enable collaboration not only at a systems level, but at a people level too,” he notes.

As for ‘openness’, that means Application Programming Interfaces, right? “One of the technologies is an open API, that’s the preferred method and it can perform well. But many businesses don’t have API-ready platforms themselves, so you have to offer more,” Addley confirms.

And it doesn’t have to be ‘high tech’ either, at least not conceptually. He says something akin to the humble chat app can play a major role in advancing the Age of Industry Transformation, and it all has to do with the fact that people do business with people.

“If you’ve got the procurement department beating up vendors just for another cent off, it doesn’t actually help matters, it introduces additional risk into the supply chain,” Addley points out. “But even in the absence of integrated systems [a preferred scenario, obviously], you can achieve better cooperation if people are equipped to talk to one another very easily.”

Addley looks to business collaboration apps delivering clever stuff like context analytics resting on data contained in enterprise systems, as well as easy sharing of screens and other information involved in various business processes. But at its heart, it’s simply a repurposing of a tool which has its roots somewhere back in the 1990s.

The Age of Industry Transformation is the topic of our Lunch Box webinar where Matthew Addley presents the concept to attendees, and then discusses in a roundtable with DX professionals representing enterprises who have or are undergoing transformational change.

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Here’s how culture makes bacon ‘n’ eggs of strategy

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 23:20:35 +0000

Management guru Peter Drucker’s memorable line that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ has a local incarnation in the winner of the recent CIO Awards ‘Best ICT Team Culture’ gong. Top SAP and cloud services partner Zag has added the accolade to its collection and it’s one the company is particularly proud of.

That’s according to Nick Mulcahy, Zag CEO. “It’s phenomenal to win, particularly given the growth we’ve experienced over the past year. And even though this award is aimed at internal IT teams rather than whole companies, we had confidence in our entry because everyone in our business is part of one team – team Zag.”

Zag recently rebranded from Soltius, with the new name reflecting the consulting provider’s approach of ‘doing things differently’ (where others zig, they Zag). There’s the usual stuff, of course, of focusing on customers and treating everyone with respect and dignity; these are obvious and generic requirements for common decency if nothing else, even if all too often it’s more lip service than fact.

The way Zag shows it is getting the bacon delivered is in some hard facts of its own. In business for 23 years, it has a 90 to 95 percent staff retention rate. It has 5 employees who have been with the company for over 20 years. The management team has a 50/50 gender split. Mulcahy started as an Enterprise Architect 16 years ago; the Chief Customer Officer as an IT Administrator in 2004. Zag is 100 percent owned by its employees, in fact, almost a quarter of them own shares in the business.

Everyone within the company is expected to actively live the values – which themselves were determined through engagement with every staff member

There are more numbers, too, and they point to the natural difficulty of maintaining an award-winning culture in a growing organisation. There’s the sheer headcount, for starters, which has gone up by 27 percent in the past year, following several years of 15-odd percent growth. This makes for some 200 employees. Then there’s the cultural differences across countries: Zag has expanded to Australia and the United States, both nations where things are done somewhat differently from God’s Own.

Those with an anthropological bent will know that co-operation with larger numbers becomes increasingly difficult. In fact, it gets to a point where it all falls down…unless there is a commonality which gets everyone pulling in the same direction.

That commonality is culture, and this is precisely why it eats strategy for breakfast.

It starts with lived values
Creating a company culture starts with values. Since values lists don’t generally vary much from one business to another, there’s no point rolling them out here; what is instead important is the approach taken by Zag in instilling them.

“Actions speak louder than words, everyone within the company is expected to actively live the values – which themselves were determined through engagement with every staff member,” says Chief People Officer, Sarah Millard. “It’s why, when expanding to Australia and the States, we made sure to have a consistent senior executive presence in the new offices. It helps culture grow through osmosis.”

Where Zag differs from many is through a desire to actively encourage, measure and manage windows into its culture. The primary tool to do that has been the Officevibe interactive platform. Feedback and comment are constantly assessed, either anonymously or personally, weekly surveys constantly measure the pulse and major changes or decisions impacting employees – like the creation of company values – are put to a vote.

“We have a high survey participation rate and thousands of comments or suggestions [in Officevibe]. Our leaders are constantly answering queries, acting on suggestions and most of all actively listening to what our people have to say,” Millard reports.

It means staff members aren’t isolated from one another or managerial decisions; Mulcahy likes to joke that his door is always open. That’s because he doesn’t have one, choosing to sit in the open-plan office with the same desk set up as the next staff member.

Investing in people
If you’re going to claim a culture of caring, demonstrating care is essential. “Our people are our brand and our identity is a tight-knit, high-performing team who do things differently,” says Mulcahy.

Keeping people happy, engaged and up-to-speed is crucial, adds Millard, and that, she says explains Zag’s high staff retention. “We invest heavily in health and wellness, and training and development initiatives. And we have company targets for new skills gained, knowledge sharing and completion of development plans.”

The company has ‘wellness rooms’, Fly-Home Fridays (where staff working at remote sites do just that) and provides flexible hours and work-from-home opportunities. It has even engaged a wellness doctor and mentorship coaches. Again, hard facts, not easy words.

“We might be involved in technology services,” says Millard, “but we’re in the people business. Looking after our people is the foundation on which Zag is built. In every decision we make, culture is thought about first and foremost.”

Company culture is probably a bit like marriage. In the early days, things progress well all on their own. As time goes by, more effort and investment are required. It’s something Zag clearly takes very seriously and by all accounts is endorsed company wide.

After all, just look at the Best ICT Team Culture trophy shining, amongst plenty of others, on the awards table.

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A fascination with the future of work

Jennene Kelly — Wed, 10 Oct 2018 21:41:41 +0000

There’s something of a preoccupation with how people are going to keep themselves busy in a brave new world of technological enablement, with intelligent systems and services doing much of the heavy lifting for us. But here’s the thing. It isn’t about employees or employment, it is about society. And getting work done isn’t about technology or how people spend their time at the coalface, it is about the effort involved to achieve a desired outcome. The future of work, then, requires a look at just what work is, and perhaps more importantly, to what end we ‘do’ work in the first instance.

That much became clear at a thought-provoking ‘Future of Work’ discussion at ServiceNow’s Now Forum which took place in Sydney this week.

“What will disappear is a lot of the stuff we do at work which doesn’t add any real value.”

For those who don’t know, ServiceNow is an American service management vendor which provides a ‘platform for work’ in the cloud. Built on ITSM principles, the hot new thing ServiceNow brought to the party isn’t the cloud or the platform, but rather the vision that these principles are not bound to the boring (to some) olde worlde of IT – and that’s a vision that led to Forbes describing ServiceNow as ‘the world’s most innovative company’.

The innovation lies in successfully applying this structured approach, along with workflows and process visibility to disciplines including HR, facilities management, business operations and elsewhere.

Work versus value
But what will disappear – thankfully – is a lot of the stuff we do at work which doesn’t add any real value.

Among the reference customers ServiceNow had on stage to share the problems they have and how new ways of working are solving those problems was Flight Centre. Mountains of uncoordinated systems including spreadsheets and emails, made it nigh impossible to look after the needs of some 10,000 employees. Everyone providing support was busy, to be sure, but the outcomes were sub-optimal, with the value these workers could provide mired in administration.

Enterprise Operations Manager Michelle Carroll said it is her mission to transform this mess into a ‘technology centre of excellence’, and ServiceNow has played a key role in bringing her vision to life.

“When I walked in, call volumes were through the roof, there was no self-service and we had in excess of 200 calls waiting up to 40 minutes at any one time.”

A month after ServiceNow went in, call volumes were down 50 percent, said Carroll, and wait times reduced to just four minutes. Subsequent introduction of ServiceNow for IT operations management delivered equally positive results, bringing visibility to the company’s operations along with an 88 percent reduction in mean time to restoration; “that equates to millions of dollars,” said Carroll.

And such is the non-IT nature of ServiceNow, that she’s got her eye on multiple other areas of Flight Centre where it can have an effect: “Risk and compliance is next, then Security Operations. We’re on a journey to complete the orchestration of all moving parts to achieve operational excellence,” she explained.

Fewer staff…is that bad?
So, what’s the problem here? What happens at companies like Flight Centre when the paper-shufflers are put out of a job?

Far from a Utopia where we’re relieved of the mundane and tedious, the worry is that, across companies like Flight Centre, engineering company WSP Opus and telecom provider Spark NZ (which are busy with digital transformations of their own, using ServiceNow as part of the exercise), a ton of jobs are going to go. Will we have more people than jobs? And despite technology advances of years past which appear to have put the lie to this theory, does the pace of the thing this time mean workers can’t adapt? While Xanadu beckons, will it be only for the select few? And what becomes of everyone else?

Amazingly enough, these are the sorts of concerns which occur not only to those in the ‘technological firing line’, but also to those enabling the change. ServiceNow VP and MD A/NZ, David Oakley hinted at it when explaining that this region is one of the most innovative in its use of technology – perhaps spurred by minimum wage laws – and companies like Australian bank NAB are reducing their workforces dramatically by ushering in new ways of working.

“I’m shocked at how quickly these things are playing out,” he said, referring to ‘massive technology disruption’.

And yet, the United States where ServiceNow is domiciled has just reported some of the lowest unemployment figures in years. The impact of automation, it seems, has yet to decimate the workforce.

But the best point that Oakley made was an almost throwaway comment. “We need to make sure automation is used in the service of people.”

Who are the people?
While the people Oakley was quite reasonably referring to are employees – those working within organisations and for whom cutting out tedious paper- or email-based tasks with automated, technology-driven tools makes their job experience surely better, there’s another set of people who are arguably more important.

It’s the ‘few’ versus the ‘many’. When talking automation and the future of work, the focus invariably falls on the few. Jobs are going to change, as they always have and as they likely always will. Many jobs will disappear, as they always have. The future of work will quite probably have us doing very different things to what we do today.

But what doesn’t change is the reason we do jobs in the first place.

And so, when looking at the ‘future of work’, it’s perhaps useful to go right back to basics with the sort of questions a five year old is likely to pose, simply because the rest of us tend to take the answers for granted, or we never wonder in the first place.

Questions like ‘what is work, anyway? Why do we work? How do we work, is it really ‘9 to 5’? Was it ever? Did we work like we do today, a decade ago? Fifty years ago?

The first two questions are apparently easy. Work is an activity involving mental or physical effort done to achieve a result. Why do we do it? Not because we need a dollar, but because society is needy, infinitely so. It doesn’t matter how well you meet the demands, there will be more tomorrow and the demands themselves will change. So long as there are people, there is work to be done.

And these are the people we should be concerned about. The needs of the many. Customers benefit when Spark improves its service delivery, by whatever means, and needs fewer employees to do it. Customers pay less when an insurance company processes claims automatically and instantly. Citizens benefit when the government administers taxes with a few thousand employees, rather than a few hundred thousand.

This is the future of work
More than being an innovative company itself, the software ServiceNow provides is used by partners and end-customers to themselves innovate and define how work is done in their organisations.

And that, really, is the future of work: it is what various organisations make of it, using an expanded set of tools to do it, and in response to the way in which the workforce makes itself available.

Donovan Jackson travelled to Sydney as the guest of ServiceNow.

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Google cranks up enterprise cloud ambition

Jennene Kelly — Thu, 27 Sep 2018 22:00:29 +0000

With an investment of some US$30-billion, an expansion of the number of regions in which it operates from three to 18 in just one year, and the announcement of multiple new products and services, the Google Cloud means business globally – and in Australasia, where it added a data centre in Sydney a year ago.

That was the overwhelming impression the Google Cloud Summit in Sydney this week set out to establish. Along with the usual ‘rah rah’ one comes to expect at vendor conferences, and the predictable preponderance of men in the nerd herd attending (and, to be clear, we’re quite OK with that), ample evidence of Google’s cloud ‘for business’ chops was presented.

“You have to create an intervention and make it inconvenient to continue down the old path.”

From a rapidly expanding partner ecosystem including the usual heavyweights like PwC and Deloitte (and around 998 others), through to product features and corporate customers (including PwC and ANZ), it all had the necessary gloss and sheen of a well-honed operation.

But there is a fly or two in the ointment. Despite ‘cloud born’ advantages, Google in the enterprise is the slow cousin compared to the real smart Alecs of -aaS: Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure (check out this detailed market share information which has Google languishing waaay behind, barely mustering single figures).

This is an anomaly: AWS started out as a bookstore, not a search engine, and Microsoft’s transition from a olde worlde on-prem vendor to a cloud business Forbes describes as ‘beating Amazon, Google and everyone else’, is nothing short of miraculous, no thanks to erstwhile CEO Steve Ballmer.

Be that as it may, it’s probably not incorrect to suggest that with its rapidly expanding footprint and the hefty investment going into Google Cloud Platform – the ‘proper’ term for the suite of cloud computing services – customers can look forward to the ante being upped in the so-called cloud war; demonstrating remarkable consistency, Forbes paradoxically says Google’s winning the fight.

Supercharged information
After a keynote in which he said Google’s intention with its Cloud Platform mirrors the company’s fundamental DNA of ‘organising the world’s information and making it accessible and useable’, A/NZ country manager Colin Timm explained that it is looking to ‘supercharge customer information with AI and machine learning’ – and there are plenty of enticing products there.

Coming soon to our region (planned for Q4) is BigQuery, a data warehousing solution with built-in machine learning. One partner enthusiastically declared that this development means ‘we’ll no longer feel like second-class citizens’. Clearly, he has a use for the technology.

Timm stressed that Google’s strengths lie in open source, cloud first principles and prominence with container technology (including Docker and Kubernetes) which spans the cloud and on-premise deployments.

As for features, Google live-demoed some of those ‘easy to use’ (while the products might have names which seem to change constantly, Google’s hits are generally user-friendly) AI and ML tools, showing how to train a computer to recognise various treats, including a Tim-Tam, a bag of Maltesers and a hundreds and thousands, and enunciate what they were. The computer even picked an odd one out, declaring ‘that’s Vegemite, maaaate’ to appreciative nerd laughter.

Minnow nibbles at whale
There’s another aspect of the enterprise where Google is a minnow looking to eat a whale and that’s in its office productivity applications. Now called G Suite after a dizzying array of name changes over the course of its some-12-year lifespan, and possibly better known by it’s next-to-last name Google Apps, the Microsoft Office pretender is chipping away at it.

It has, we were told by Google Cloud technical director Jenn Bennett, some 1.4 billion users, with four million businesses paying for the privilege (up from three million last year). Sounds a lot, until you consider the MS Office 365 behemoth’s 120 million business users. What’s new? AI is built into the suite, so it does stuff like suggesting responses, identifying available calendar slots and generally working to make your life easier (or harder, if you’re the sort of person who likes not being online constantly and glued to a screen every waking moment).

Said Bennett: “Transformation is not just about technology, but also about people and how they work.”

Major customer PwC has globally moved to G Suite from Lotus Notes; no prizes for guessing the real challenge for this rollout was change management. That was confirmed by PwC chief digital officer Hilda Clune, who explained that: “To get adoption, you have to make choices to remove things. Change is an imposition, so we made choices with what to take away as well as what to give [users]. You have to create an intervention and make it inconvenient to continue down the old path.”

Different strokes for different folks: she said for some, it came down to working with them one on one. With 220,000 PwC people now using G Suite, the size of this challenge is surely obvious.

Across the lot, but particularly in the office productivity space, we should all wish Google the best. It gives us all a lot of useful stuff for free (and in fact the ‘consumer’ perception is something Google has had to shake) on the one hand. On the other, competition, much needed in the office space, will drive down prices and drive up features and benefits in the ‘multi-cloud’ environments characteristic of the modern enterprise.

*Donovan Jackson travelled to Sydney as the guest of Google.

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Think you’re paying too much for ERP?

Jennene Kelly — Tue, 28 Aug 2018 01:35:24 +0000

Ever had a nagging feeling that those invoices for business software are bigger and more frequent than they should be? Do you wonder why ‘support’ and ‘maintenance’ bills are both frequent and eye-watering? Do upgrades frighten you, not only because they inevitably cost more than planned, but are also disruptive?

Vincent Cerra, general manager of Medatech Australia told iStart the perception that ERP is too expensive is widespread. “With the bigger software providers, it’s simple. Customers are charged for everything they do or want done. Need a little development? Want another report? It’s going to cost you. And that’s before you even look at the big upfront costs for licensing.”

“If we get into a small manufacturer and provide software which accelerates their business, without punitive pricing, we all win.”

With 15 years of ERP implementation experience under his belt, Cerra has worked closely with a range of clients, industries and ERP solutions.

And he’s often seen that even when it takes next to no effort to make a change or introduce a new feature (or unlock a feature already in the software), ERP customers can expect big bills for consulting and configuration. “This is the way the ERP world is run. It’s not even the software itself; look at the resellers, the business model of which is typically based on billing for everything that moves.”

There’s an element of branding, too, Cerra added. “It costs a lot to build a big brand and customers ultimately pay for that. What’s more, when you have a ‘big name’ ERP, you pay a premium price and still don’t get all the features. For that, you’ll usually need to buy additional modules or use third party add-ons.”

Cerra said it is Medatech’s mission to change this situation. The company is a reseller of the Priority ERP solution. Priority was founded in 1986 with a mission to make ERP easier and is today used by some 8,700 companies around the world in on-premise or cloud software-as-a-service configuration. The ‘sweet spot’ for the ERP solution is manufacturing and distribution (from small to large scale), although it is also suitable for almost any general business.

In addition to being a clear mid-market leader in its home country, Medatech is active in the United Kingdom and Australia and has customers across the Pacific, including New Zealand. The company has development and support teams in Israel, AU and the UK.

Picking up on Priority’s notion of ‘making ERP easier’ (and less expensive), Cerra said unlike other packages, Priority is rapidly implemented (“No other ERP offers complex manufacturing as standard, out of the box,” he noted), low-maintenance and provides seamless upgrades. Asked how it is that upgrades are no-impact, he said it is down to how the software is written, along with the vendor’s unique business model which is tailored to benefit the end customer in both service and price.

And pressed for an example of rapid implementation, Cerra said creating a mobile application for warehouse transfers, for example, would require just 30 minutes. “And you can do that on the shop floor.”

He said all the features are included in the software, rather than developed as add-on modules. This also contributes to the relatively simple upgrade process. “You’ll have an element of testing, of course, as nothing is perfect, and these are complex environments, but it is far simpler and faster than with other ERP systems,” he claimed.

Cerra said competing on price can be a funny thing. “With Priority, the solution isn’t ‘cheap’, although it costs far less than what you’d pay from a big-name brand – and note that none of the big ones have a list price, they keep that from you. Instead, I’d describe our pricing as ‘fair’. You can get a license from a ‘big name vendor’ for, say AU$300 per month, which won’t do advanced manufacturing or provide an out-of-the-box mobility solution, or you could get the lot from Priority ERP for AU$160 per month. That’s fair.

“We also feel that we should be here to help our customers. If we get into a small manufacturer and provide software which accelerates their business, without punitive pricing, we all win.”

Cerra tackled the topic ‘Demonstrating ERP value for money’ in an iStart Prodcast webinar. Listen to him as he rolls up his sleeves for an exclusive peek behind the scenes of how modern built-for-cloud ERP solutions can transform your business, not your bank balance.

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Why Oracle users must seek third party licence assurance

Jennene Kelly — Wed, 01 Aug 2018 21:08:44 +0000

But just like the software itself and the environment in which it operates is complex, so too are licensing regimes – and without the right expertise, your environment may be costing more than it must on the one hand. On the other, it could be non-compliant with the contracts entered with the vendor, leaving your business open to penalties.

“Software compliance is potentially the biggest unbudgeted exposure for many organisations,” said Anna-Rita Stanley-Best, MD of Palisade Compliance, an independent provider of contract, compliance and pricing advisory services across the full Oracle stack. “And that even goes for companies which have a Software Asset Management solution in place.”

Stanley-Best pointed out that in Oracle specifically, there are multiple complex layers in the vendor’s solutions which can easily result in using software outside of the license provisions or accessing features which aren’t licensed for use.

And yet, most companies believe they are doing just fine. “In my experience, probably 99 percent of organisations feel they are OK. That’s because they are using the software in good faith; very seldom are there any organisations looking to intentionally breach their obligations.”

She points to one of Palisade’s recent customers as an example. “This company told us we were brought in to deliver a mere ‘tick in a box’, as they knew everything was in order. The feedback after the engagement was ‘boy, were we wrong’. There’s a lot of grey areas in Oracle licensing and this company’s experience is an unfortunately common scenario.”

Stanley-Best, who heads a team which consists of multiple former Oracle employees (including herself) said it is advisable to have the experts run a ruler over things before an audit is initiated by the vendor. “The sooner you get an assessment from an independent specialist the better. If we’re involved before the audit, there’s more we can do – and you will be in a better position for any negotiations.”

She said a specialist like Palisade understands software contracts as well as the software itself; that’s important, she explained, as it enables Palisade to understand how features and functions in software translate into the contracts. “Something else worth noting is that the language in contracts stays the same, but the features and functionality in software evolves constantly. It is essential to clearly understand where everything is, and be secure in the knowledge that the software and the contracts are aligned.”

What the customers say: Australia
But don’t just take Palisade Compliance’s word for it. One of the company’s Australian clients, who spoke with iStart on condition of anonymity, made no bones about the complexity of Oracle’s licensing regime, nor the value delivered by Palisade. “We’re a pretty big Oracle user, with over 50 databases; and yes, we’ve been hit by Oracle audit letters several times over the years,” he said.

Just what kind of an experience was that? “Truly awful. They aren’t there to help you comply, they are there to extract money. And we suffered badly, to the tune of millions of dollars. Not because we’d done anything wrong, but because the licensing, it seems, is designed to trip you up. The licensing is very hard to understand, it doesn’t make sense. And when you get audited, they will find something, and you will pay.”

Asked if he feels taken advantage of through this process, the user was unequivocal. “Oh absolutely. To this day. We’ve been audited by other big software companies, Microsoft, IBM, those guys come in and work with you to make sure everything’s properly aligned. Not Oracle.”

Getting Palisade Compliance involved some three years ago completely changed the game. “We realised we needed experts. And Palisade has given us the confidence to negotiate; when we get anything from Oracle, we don’t answer until Palisade has looked at it first.”

The question to which everyone is keen to know an answer is ‘has this saved you money’. “Millions. This is what is at stake, and I am not overinflating it. If you are an enterprise Oracle user, you must – you must – have independent experts examine your licensing and contracts. I mean, just on maintenance alone, we went from over a million per year, to $200,000. It’s significant.”

What the customers say: New Zealand
Another client, this one based in New Zealand, prefaced his discussion with iStart by saying “Oracle licensing is a complex and scary area.” While noting that Oracle technology “underpins our core systems. As a business, we can’t work without Oracle at all,” the Kiwi customer stressed the necessity for external and independent assurance and support. “After our first review with Palisade, it emerged we weren’t in a very good position. The expertise provided by Anna-Rita and her team meant we worked ourselves into compliance for a couple of hundred thousand.”

What could it have been, had Oracle’s audit descended? “It could have been in the millions.” And the customer added that the cost of Palisade’s intervention is less than a tenth of what the organisation would otherwise be paying the vendor. “The really good thing is that we don’t buy or do anything with Oracle without first consulting Palisade or taking them along with us. And the people at Oracle appreciate that Palisade knows what it’s doing. The relationship with Oracle has definitely changed: it feels that we are on a more even footing now.”

Most importantly, the customer added that he can sleep soundly at night, knowing his organisation is safe – and that his own professional integrity is unimpeachable.

Asked if this rather fascinating situation meant a fraught relationship with Oracle, the customer said that wasn’t the case. “It’s just a professional, commercial relationship. That’s it.”

From her perspective, when asked which sorts of businesses should seek software compliance assurance, Stanley-Best said the short answer is any which uses Oracle software. “The analogy is that if you are not across your taxes, it’s probably not a good idea to walk into your local tax office and let them sort it out. You’ll do better to first visit an accountant who will optimise it for you and work towards the best possible outcome for you.”

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New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art goes digital for the billions

Jennene Kelly — Thu, 26 Apr 2018 23:10:19 +0000

Published on the 27/04/2018 | Written by Donovan Jackson

Digital technology holds the promise of big global audiences for world-famous institution…

Billions of people, that is. The famous museum isn’t driven by financial motives, but rather seeks to reach and inspire individuals no matter where they might be located. The answer to a massively expanded reach can be found in digital technologies – and Loic Tallon, chief digital officer of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) in New York, has a simple, yet brilliant approach to doing it.

“In the past, The Met’s audience was defined by those people who could visit the museum building in Manhattan, New York City. Today, digital technologies enable us to think globally about our audiences: we can develop a global impact in a scalable and sustainable way,” he told iStart.

If you thought this meant diving headlong into the pool of virtual reality, augmented reality and any one of multiple other buzzwords associated with digital transformation…you’d be wrong. “There are some 3.9 billion people connected to the internet and I believe we have at least one artwork in The Met’s collection which could inspire each one of those individuals. Enabling those 3.9 billion connections; that is my goal,” Tallon related.

The Met has some serious chops. Founded in 1870, it was originally located at 681 Fifth Avenue. Soon after, The Met moved to the historic building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, where it has remained to this day. It is the largest art museum in the USA, the third most visited art museum in the world (behind the Louvre in Paris, and – perhaps surprisingly – the National Museum of China) and it attracts over 7 million in-the-flesh visitors every year.

Tallon is delivering a keynote address at the CIO Summit, taking place in Auckland on 13-14 June, 2018. It’s not his first visit to New Zealand: ten years ago, Tallon was in New Zealand, studying the digitisation projects of the Auckland Museum, Te Papa and the Christchurch Art Gallery.

Before explaining how he is executing on this vision, Tallon shed some light on why The Met has a CDO. “For any organisation, the CDO is responsible for leading the digitisation of practices, processes and projects, and harnessing the opportunities that digital technology offers. The Met is no different. The Museum’s mission is to collect, study, conserve and present significant works of art across all times and cultures and connect people to creativity, knowledge and ideas; the building was the main tool to do that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.”

The game has changed completely with digital technology. “It gives us the ability to dream in new ways about how best to serve The Met’s mission, and to create impact with audiences that are orders of magnitude beyond what was possible before. We can, theoretically, reach out and connect every one of those 3.9 billion internet-enabled people to The Met’s collection.”

He pointed out that the raison d’etre of The Met is not, like most commercial organisations, to turn a profit. “Instead, it is to connect people with knowledge, creativity and ideas through artworks. There arises the question of how to create a meaningful connection between audiences and works of art online, one that is comparable to the experience of being in front of an artwork in the galleries.”

Does that mean digital technology can be used in the gallery to augment exhibitions and artefacts? That may seem an obvious opportunity, but Tallon doesn’t believe this is necessary or even desirable. “We receive wonderful feedback about the quality of the in-museum experience [it is rated 4.8 out of 5 on Google Reviews]. I’m a big believer in focusing on your biggest opportunity, and for us, that’s online, rather than augmenting the in-gallery experience. I want us to also be very careful not to use technology for technology’s sake, especially inside the museum. The gallery experience is what our visitors come for, not the technology.”

“The gallery experience is what our visitors come for, not the technology.”

He also seeks simplicity rather than complexity. This is best demonstrated in the approach taken to sharing The Met’s awesome collection. “Instead of making our users come to us – our website – we want to go to where they are already. This is how we use social media, Wikipedia, Google, Pinterest. While we have over 30 million visitors to our own website, the goal isn’t only to drive that number up. Our mission is create connections: to do that we want to put our collection on the sites that people already use.”

To enable this strategy, The Met recently released all images of public domain artworks in the collection under Creative Commons Zero, making the images available free of copyright. “This means that our audiences are free to use, reuse and remix images of over 300,000 artworks in The Met’s collection with no restriction.”

It almost seems radical. Tallon doesn’t think so. Nor, he added, does his board. “It comes back to how best to use the tools available to us today to fulfil the Museum’s mission.”

Measuring the success of this approach is not easy. “We can look at impact across the major platforms like Wikipedia and Pinterest, but there are many instances where audiences are engaging with The Met’s collection on a third-party platform which we aren’t aware of. But that doesn’t undermine the approach, I think it actually validates it – and when one of these comes across my radar with an unusual use, it is very motivating.”

There’s another organic measure, however. Does the ‘digital openness’ practiced by The Met drive more foot traffic? Tallon thinks differently about that question. “You have to ask, in the twenty-first century, is a museum just a building? If we believe that The Met can fulfil its mission both on site and in the digital space – and we do believe that – we need to move away from attendance as the sole measure of success. That said, with the reach of digital, the brand and collection is more accessible and discoverable than ever. You wouldn’t dare go to Paris and skip the Louvre. My ambition is to make it so that people wouldn’t dare to come to New York and not visit The Met.”

In case you’re interested, William the Hippopotamus depicted harks back to the Egyptian “Middle Kingdom” circa 1961-1878 B.C. (yes that’s B.C.). Find out more here: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/544227

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Digital acceleration presents new challenges

Jennene Kelly — Tue, 17 Apr 2018 21:24:19 +0000

Published on the 18/04/2018 | Written by Donovan Jackson

IDC research reveals organisational challenges to melding digital transformation into business-as-usual…

From experimenting with ideas like crowd sourcing, using mobile devices in new ways and applying technology for the ‘wow factor’, more businesses today are moving into at-scale deployments of digital technologies. That’s according to Joe Pucciarelli, Boston-based Group Vice-President of IDC – and he told iStart that the ‘digital winners’ are those which are able to successfully achieve these deployments and handle the new challenges that come their way.

“This is what determines the winners and the losers. And it isn’t about ‘deploying technology’, specifically, it is about doing things in new ways that expose new value,” Pucciarelli said.

“This is what determines the winners and the losers. It isn’t about ‘deploying technology’, it’s about doing things in new ways that expose new value.”

He used the example of Wal-Mart, which has recently deployed stock-taking robots to multiple stores. “An obvious benefit is that they are saving a couple of bucks on stock take.” Also, jettisoning a task which anyone who has worked in retail will recognise as utterly unpleasant. “But that’s not why this is important. The new value is that inventory can be taken every three days, where it was once done annually. That’s revolutionary. It sets up the possibility to do things differently, rather than merely counting cans of beans on shelves.”

In another fascinating example, Pucciarelli points to Steinway Pianos; with sales in decline, it looked to ‘digitisation’ to change its value proposition from ‘only’ selling pianos, to selling experiences. With digital technology, a new Steinway can play back performances from noted musicians. This goes well beyond the iconic 19^th century orchestrions (check out this Wurlitzer). A mechanical instrument, the orchestrion has none of the nuance and verve of a, say, Diana Krall – but the Steinway now delivers just that. And as a result, said Pucciarelli, sales are up.

Visiting New Zealand and presenting at June’s CIO Conference, he will be sharing these and other stories of how digital winners are innovating and adapting. Pucciarelli will also present new research, presently underway, into what is happening in the Asia Pacific region in terms of the impediments organisations are facing as they move into digital business models.

“This region-specific research will complement a global study we’ve completed which provides perspectives on the emerging difficulties – and some of them are quite surprising,” he noted.

Concluded in March, the global IDC executive survey on DX (DX being digital transformation) found that organisations’ top challenge relates to siloed DX initiatives and the establishment of a DX organisational structure, with 55 percent of organisations experiencing this problem. “Companies and their leaders are struggling. Stuck with underlying existing technology, they are approaching digitisation by introducing new technologies, but without changing the fundamental operating model.”

Pucciarelli said the ‘old’ model is like a castle and moat, isolating applications and (more importantly) data. To thrive, though, companies need to incorporate a new model that resembles an infinity loop, with data at the core where the loops intersect, and the curves acting as integration and feedback loops.

Secondly, and closely related to the first challenge, there are siloes of information and the absence of a digital platform, obstacles cited by 32 percent of respondents. A further 26 percent pointed to the third major challenge: an absence of vision. “The problem with digital transformation is the end-point isn’t clear,” confirmed Pucciarelli. “It just isn’t a start/finish exercise. But you still need a plan and need to set expectations with the board, while knowing that you’re looking at 2 or 3 technology cycles in the next decade and knowing that things might change – but leaders have to understand that isn’t a failure of vision; it’s an evolution of industry.”

Then there’s measurement; University of Tasmania’s Jeff Murray recently made the point that technology tends to have a ‘lag effect’ but also noted the value of metrics. IDC’s study, however, noted that the KPIs used for DX are outdated and often no longer relevant. “The traditional gold standard for metrics is revenue per quarter – but there is nuanced information that shareholders need to know. How many new customers? What is the rate of growth? What transactions are coming through the pipeline and from where? It is a richer conversation than ‘have we arrived or have we not’”, Pucciarelli said.

Finally, IDC’s study also showed a commonly encountered problem which is generally known as the ‘skills shortage’. “It’s a lack of digital capability,” Pucciarelli said, something cited by 15 percent of respondents.

The adage of ‘people-process-technology’ isn’t sufficient to address digital capability: people are needed, yes, but more specifically ‘talent’. “This introduces the possibilities of outsourcing to other geographies for talent and also capacity and capability with different clouds. But careful thought must be given to this process – you don’t want to separate the ‘heart and the lungs’, for example, and have closely coupled applications far apart. You need governance. And again, in terms of the infinity model, infrastructure doesn’t matter, it is the data which must be at the centre of things,” Pucciarelli noted.

Delegates can gain further insight, including a first look at IDC’s APAC study into digital transformation challenges, at the CIO Summit taking place in Auckland on 13-14 June.

Why digital transformation must be value-led

Jennene Kelly — Tue, 10 Apr 2018 02:41:59 +0000

One is that it isn’t new. Another is that it is a journey and not a destination – a process which, while it might have a definite start, doesn’t have a definite end. And probably most importantly, all efforts at digital transformation must be led by delivery of value to the organisation it supports.

That’s the observations from someone well into the process: The University of Tasmania’s CIO Jeff Murray. Over the course of five years, he’s guided a complete reinvention of the organisation’s business systems – a reinvention which has come with a price tag of around A$120 million, but which is delivering lasting and quantifiable benefits.

In a discussion with iStart, Murray said it all started by analysing where IT was sitting and realising that it needed vast improvement; “Particularly around service delivery, the supporting systems and infrastructure, it was clear that things weren’t ideal,” he related.

As is the nature of things in the technology industry (it is not for nothing that Gartner has a hype cycle), there is always the possibility of being led astray by the shiny new stuff. “At that time, there was a rush to the cloud. When putting together a strategy for digital transformation, it wasn’t a case of embracing the ‘latest and greatest’. Instead, we were looking to improve the way the organisation works, uplift innovation of the IT service and help people work better. Everything we considered was analysed in terms of the value it could add,” Murray continues.

Murray will share his story with delegates at the CIO Summit, taking place in Auckland from 13-14 June 2018.

The hardest yards, arguably, were to map every enterprise system over a 10-year time frame and how those systems were expected to evolve, whether legacy, custom, off the shelf or cloud. “We had a very close eye on understanding the way the ecosystem needed to work together to deliver a transformative journey.”

A lot went under the microscope, including the core student system the university runs on which Murray described as ‘the equivalent of manufacturing’s CAD-CAM’ and which itself is an ecosystem of some 20 subsystems. A lot of new initiatives were introduced, too, including CRM, a digital strategy for the external website, a course catalogue system, BI ‘which was virtually non-existent’ and a service management approach across multiple business units. He added that work is presently underway to digitise all processes where paper is involved.

What gave the University an advantage, Murray believes, is his description of the IT environment as ‘a good integration shop’. “We use TIBCO as middleware and that gave agility particularly around doing so many projects in such a short space of time. What that’s allowing us to do is combine front end service delivery into one shop for internal and external customers – something banks have been doing for 20 years, but which in education is unheard of.”

The introduction of service management, using software from ServiceNow, ‘really put digital transformation on steroids’, said Murray – but before explaining that, he said one thing which demands careful attention when making so much change is managing user expectations. “You get a general expectation from users that IT projects work seamlessly. That just isn’t going to happen. It takes time and careful management. Going live is often not the point at which value is realised and that is often the start of building features and functions which do in time add value,” he cautions.

Service management is being introduced across five departments in addition to the IT department. That’s involved the application of proven ITIL service management principles to marketing, student services and HR. More than the simple value of bringing order to chaos, Murray said this has another important benefit: it helps IT become a leader in the business where it once wasn’t.

“Take HR for example: they get 50,000 requests per year, so service management is crucial to help them manage better.”

Of course, investment demands results and Murray advocates the importance of measuring value. He reports that some A$11 million in annual savings have been demonstrated. In the time that’s passed, the University is now doing A$160 million more in turnover, which would likely not have been easy or even possible without transformed IT systems. The IT department is 30 percent more efficient in terms of people to run the show. And he believes everyone else is between 10 and 20 percent more efficient.

But these are still early days and he cautions those who look for rapid demonstration of value. “IT has a lag impact. It is difficult to say in advance what the benefits will be, but you must do it if the business is hurting, if the indicators are down, if you start needing more staff, if you aren’t able to process the transactions in the given time. When bringing in digitisation, you’ll only start seeing the benefits in one to three years’ time.”

You can hear directly what Jeff Murray and the University of Tasmania discovered on its digital transformation journey at the 2018 CIO Summit June 13-14 in Auckland.

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How back office transformation drives IRD efficiency

Jennene Kelly — Thu, 05 Apr 2018 20:23:21 +0000

The success of this component of the exercise will deliver lasting benefits to all New Zealanders, but also to the staff at IRD who will be able to continually focus their efforts on exceptions, rather than having to review all transactions through sampling.

That’s according to Paulo Gottgtroy, IRD’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer. He confirmed to iStart what deputy commissioner Greg James recently noted – that the organisation is looking to automate the process of paying tax as far as possible – and added that doing so would push decisions as close as possible to the point at which transactions take place.

“Every single step of the customer cycle has a decision which needs to be made. If we can automate the decision, it means we can avoid processing problems [that is, achieve greater and smoother throughput] while stopping any transactions which may not be valid.”

By so transforming the back office, Gottgtroy explained, IRD effectively takes all its focus away from those transactions which are ‘green’ – that is, valid and legitimate – and instead can zoom in on any which are ‘orange’ or ‘red’.

This ability has real-life implications for customers: “Think of the business which expects a tax refund. For every business, that money is important and the faster it is received, the better. When we achieve ‘straight through processing’ for every valid claim for a refund, it directly benefits customers with better cashflow. And for those claims which are problematic, it means we can intervene and resolve any issues.”

Gottgtroy is updating delegates on the progress of the IRD’s technology improvements at the upcoming Back Office Transformation Conference taking place in Auckland from 30 April to 1 May.

He provided insight into the thought processes driving the IRD’s mission. “Handling customers smoothly and efficiently is not a simple thing. It isn’t about the IRD number, but rather about the person or people behind that.”

This means knowing the path of transactions to know if any given one is aligned with the business of the person behind the number.

For business customers, this means understanding if the person is a sole operator or a shareholder of multiple companies, what their tax profile is and the types of transactions they would normally perform. “We want to make things easy for every IRD customer, and that requires that we know every customer. We need to understand if they are low touch or high touch – and at every touch, we want to add value to that customer. This is a core part of the exercise.”

Back office transformation, added Gottgtroy, for most customers will result in less rather than more interaction with the IRD. And that’s how it should be; after all, as James has said, most taxpayers just want to pay their fair share with no hassle. “The point is that you want to deliver the right treatment and go in the right direction with each person. If ‘green’, there’s no need for interaction. When ‘red’, we can focus our efforts on sorting it out. Touch is targeted.”

“If ‘green’, there’s no need for interaction. When ‘red’, we can focus our efforts on sorting it out. Touch is targeted.”

The technologies used to achieve this transformation, from his perspective, include ‘all the buzzwords you know’, quipped Gottgtroy. “It’s machine learning, it’s BI, it’s graph analytics, but it is also about expert decisions from people. Sometimes you don’t have enough data and then it always comes down to expert domain knowledge,” he explained.

Graph analytics? That’s a relatively new one. “That’s about establishing context around a person, knowing their transaction profile so you can identify good and not so good behaviour; it is a useful tool especially in identifying identity theft and subsequent fraudulent transactions, for example, by making inferences from the activity and validating them rather than depending on a ‘needle in the haystack’ approach to recognising and solving problems.”

The Back Office Transformation Conference takes place at Novotel, Ellerslie, on 30 April-1 May.

The post How back office transformation drives IRD efficiency appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..

A case in point: The value of back office transformation

Jennene Kelly — Mon, 26 Mar 2018 23:08:22 +0000

To get a good idea, look at the many firms providing accounting services to New Zealand’s small to medium businesses. By eliminating much of the administration, paperwork and routine tasks, accountants can move away from rote tasks and provide what their customers really want: advisory services.

That’s according to Anton Gargiulo, Northern Sales Manager at MYOB New Zealand.

“We’ve done research which reveals two important things: 70 percent of accountants would prefer to spend more of their effort on advisory if they had the time,” he said.

“70 percent of accountants would prefer to spend more of their effort on advisory if they had the time.”

The second thing? “SME owners report that seven of their top 10 unmet needs relate to advisory.”

It is, agreed Gargiulo, something of a beautiful symmetry which MYOB’s research has revealed. “Yes, I suppose we couldn’t have asked for a better result,” he chuckled. “It shows that what accountants want to do and what their customers need is well aligned.”

Gargiulo is presenting a keynote to the upcoming Back Office Transformation Conference taking place in Auckland from 30 April to 1 May.

While accounting is the case in point, the advantages of back office transformation – which can include the introduction of technologies and techniques including artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and digitisation of formerly paper-based processes – can be applied to almost any business. Indicators for back office functions which are crying out for transformation, therefore, include repetitive tasks, drifts of paper, and processes which seem to take up a lot of time and effort, but which deliver little organisational (or customer) value.

But there tends to be resistance to the notion of eliminating tedious tasks because it might also eliminate the incomes of those who perform them. We’ve looked at this potential issue from a number of perspectives, including that of economist Henry Hazlitt as well as the simple observation that in 2018, the unemployment rate of ~4.5 percent is well below the 1992’s ~11 percent (despite the massive wave of automation which has happened in those 25-odd years.

MYOB beefs up this view by citing a study by AlphaBeta which shows that it is possible that 29 percent of accounting is susceptible to automation. The study also notes that automation in the past 15 years has not lead to job loss, but rather to new tasks being incorporated into jobs; automation in the coming years, said AlphaBeta, means the equivalent of three jobs will be automated and the equivalent of two jobs will be doing new and different tasks and one job would be lost.

Gargiulo noted that for the tech industry, and society, the advances in technology which make back office transformation a reality for even SME organisations is incredibly exciting. “We’re living in an age with so much technology that has so much potential for change; in 14 years in the industry, this is probably the most exciting time I’ve seen yet.”

A lot of the technology is converging and interoperating, he continued, making it difficult to predict its future impact. “But we should all remember that the technology doesn’t happen in a vacuum and technology alone won’t change anything. Instead, it is up to the individual to choose how and where to apply technology to make changes – in your personal life, or in your business.”

And Gargiulo said some of the major megatrends impacting the accounting industry (and indeed society) include AI and machine learning, data and connectivity. “AI and ML really needs to be categorised as more automation which implies a lot less human data entry and processing.”

Combined with data and connectivity, he said accounting today is increasingly able to happen ‘in parallel’ rather than ‘in series’ as it was done in the past. “Historically, accounting was sequential: transaction processing, then bookkeeping, then compliance, and if there was any time left over for the ambitious firm, advisory with clients.

“With data and connectivity and the right tools, the first three things can now happen in real time,” said Gargiulo, “And that means there’s more time left over for advisory.”

The Back Office Transformation Conference takes place at Novotel, Ellerslie, on 30 April-1 May.

The post A case in point: The value of back office transformation appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..

CFOs need to think about the hole, not the digger

Jennene Kelly — Thu, 08 Mar 2018 03:15:38 +0000

Amidst the continued pressure to deliver innovative, services-driven business models and continued growth, financial leaders are playing an important, evolving role. Already the most important interface with investors, the CFO now also needs to become a key force in supporting business strategy and growth.

iStart caught up recently with David Krauss, cloud evangelist for San Francisco-based ERP provider FinancialForce, in a wide ranging discussion on why the landscape for CFOs is shifting – and found it is the software business that has a lot to blame for the changing sands.

It is tied to a perceptible shift from ‘product’ to ‘service’, and adding lifetime value to customers.

“For the CFO of yesteryear, it was about cost containment and pure operational efficiency. Now, it’s about how the back office can deliver top line growth to the organisation – and that means blending and evolving the responsibility for the CFO to facilitate growth, while cutting the cost of maximising lifetime customer value,” explained Krauss.

“For the CFO of yesteryear, it was about cost containment and pure operational efficiency. Now, it’s about how the back office can deliver top line growth to the organisation.”

In short, it’s a shift from ‘cost’ to ‘revenue’. “That’s in the context of a services economy; it’s easiest to think of that in terms of software as a service, but it applies to many more organisations, too. Think of the old days, when you sold software on a perpetual license. You couldn’t care less what the customer did with the software, whether they even used it or not, because the relationship ended right there.”

With SaaS (or anything ‘as-a-service’, for that matter), the vendor cares a lot about what the customer does with the goods. If they don’t use it, they stop paying for it. They stop paying for it and the CFO, the traditional bean counter, has fewer legumes to worry about. And that’s not a good thing.

Krauss knows this better than most. FinancialForce, part owned by Salesforce, is a member of a growing community of cloud software providers living and breathing on the Force.com platform.

And that environment really sums up the ‘value shift’ which has come along as part of the move to services. Vendors have far more interest in creating and adding ongoing value. Customers enjoy far more choice and (in most cases) have the power to simply move on if it doesn’t work for them.

Or as Krauss said, “The value is no longer in the ownership, but the utility of it.” You don’t want the digger, you want the hole.

Fair enough, then. But why is this a CFO problem; shouldn’t it really stay with sales and marketing, or maybe even the CEO? “Well, good question,” said Krauss, and it turns out, the answer is something of a data story “Consistent with the shift to the subscription economy, we’re seeing an evolving role and responsibility for office of finance, because with the right systems, the CFO has an unprecedented insight into the customer lifecycle.”

Krauss said the traditional notion of a separation between back and front office systems is giving way to one where it is possible to capture a multitude of data points from across the whole organisation: the touchpoints include customer interactions, invoices and billing events, support contracts and any engagements in the provision of the service. “These, in totality, create additional insight into how to maximise the value of the customer.”

Or, to look at it another way, to maximise the value your organisation can add to the customer. “Absolutely,” Krauss agreed. “You’re now able to put the customer at the centre of the universe. It’s a different way of looking at ERP, which in legacy terms, was architected around product and supply chain. We’re talking about architecting around the customer. And that should be exciting for everyone in the business – and CFOs in particular.”

iStart’s Lunch Box webinar “Top 4 CFO Imperatives for 2018” was a panel discussion looking at the evolving role of the CFO.

…

New ‘ERP’ slices into tough SME market

Jennene Kelly — Thu, 01 Mar 2018 20:02:42 +0000

And if you thought ‘shucks, must be hard to gain traction in a market that well traded’, the company’s boss Michael Haddon tells iStart he’s had to tone down the social media marketing in the face of over 1,000 enquiries per day.

But first, what is Kradle and what does it do differently, which is catching the attention of that many small businesses (a market which, traditionally, is notoriously hard to reach for tech vendors).

“Our product is designed and aimed at the SME and it comes from our own experience in finding a decent solution to manage a small company,” Haddon said; nothing like necessity for the mother of invention, then.

“It comes from our own experience in finding a decent solution to manage a small company”

And why is ‘ERP’ in parentheses? “When we started it became obvious that a lot of people are confused by the term ‘ERP’,” Haddon related; and instead, he said Kradle is a process-oriented business management software solution which allows for the creation and management of processes – like, any processes – to better run the company.

Unusually – and sensibly – the solution doesn’t include financials, because there are more than enough accounting packages around which do that very well, so it does ‘everything else’.

The gap in the market, Haddon said, became apparent when Kradle’s founders (there are now 23 people in the company, predominantly in Brisbane) became frustrated at how hard it was to get a solution to manage a small company. “You could go to large vendors like Microsoft or Oracle, but then you couldn’t afford it and it’d be far too complex. Or you could get an accounting package and plug the gaps with Excel. So we decided to develop our own package. We wanted it web-based, software as a service, and we wanted it to run and feel like a desktop package with no delays.”

These are all specifications that Haddon said Kradle has achieved; Haddon said although it’s in the cloud, response times of 43 miliseconds are standard. Cost-wise, it starts at around 50 bucks (Australian) a month.

And he added that using Kradle is simple, leaving control of your company in your hands, and not at the mercy of expensive consultants or tied at the hip to a big software vendor. “We wanted to create a software package where the business owner or manager retains control of company. Where you could build a data model without understanding how a database works, so the software builds the SQL without you knowing the SQL in the back end. And we wanted to give business owners the ability to create their own processes and workflows, with as many jobs, templates and so on as you want, with no limits. And we wanted to deliver something which would, at any time, let you look at the company and see where the processes are, where jobs are, and reporting on top of that.”

This, evidently, is what Kradle does. “There is a distinct difference in what we are proposing; we haven’t come across any other software where the user can build their own database and model the product to suit their own business. If you use CRM packages like Salesforce or whatever, you have to fit into their package. We work the other way around, as a blank which fits to your business. And we haven’t come across any other vendors which can do that.”

But there is a fly in the ointment. Endless customisability and flexibility has an upside, but also a down. Support can be a real challenge when everyone is doing everything their own way. Haddon acknowledged this as a potential issue, although he said it isn’t yet a problem within the SME market. “The system of navigation is called ‘blades’, which open from left to right within a single URL. Those blades stay open on the page and if support is required, we can see where the blade is at.”

He said this is difficult to explain – but also added that as businesses scale up with Kradle, he does anticipate the necessity to develop new tools for support.

Right now, he said while the solution is capable of meeting the needs of practically any vertical, most interest is coming from construction companies in Australia, from its work targeting markets in the UK, New Zealand and domestically. “But we are getting totally different interest from each territory. And the level of interest has taken us by surprise, with about 47 percent of it coming from the UK.”

And yes, Haddon said it really is around 1,000 enquiries per day, mostly through social media. And here’s the real kicker: it isn’t Facebook or LinkedIn which is driving the leads, but Twitter – who would have thought it was useful for anything at all. “We’ve had very good results, so much so that we’ve had to turn off the tap as we can only handle so many leads at any one time.”

Nice problem to have.

Check out or try Kradle for free.

The post New ‘ERP’ slices into tough SME market appeared first on iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment..

Donovan Jackson – iStart leading the way to smarter technology investment.

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