Archive for October, 2008

‘Agility’ is such an over used word I feel so I am often reluctant to use it. However, given recent events in the markets and the air of uncertainly, there has never been more of a need for a business to be agile.

Market conditions are constantly changing so your business needs to be able to react and change direction as fast as practically possible. Do do this, its important to break down some of the bureacracy and layers in decision making whilst also striving to maintain a unified direction. Tough call.

Managing through change is never easy and its often painful to a lot of businesses. Sadly not all make it through.  Agility and the abilty to adapt and change is a vital ingredient for any businesses – credit crunch or not. Think for a second or two about some of the major corporations and institutions and consider, where they started, how they have reinvented themselves. Did they merge or aquire businesses along the way? I can’t think of many businesses that haven’t.

The pace of modern business is constantly gathering pace and the now the pace of change has also been knocked into turbo.

So how will your businesses adapt and survive? How will your inject more agility into your business, yet keep a unified view of the business?

How do you do it now? I know I have my ideas and they are coming soon. But I would love to hear yours.

Well before we jump into why you should care about it, let’s and cover off what it is.

A workflow, for the sake of simplicity is a business process or series of actions. In a typical working day, you may encounter a whole raft of workflows as you go about your daily business. If you ever find yourself working out what actions gave to be done in what order in order to achieve something, then you just unintentionally made a workflow.

In workflow, individual tasks can be allocated to other staff members or suppliers. I like to think that workflow is the act of allocating the right task to the right person at the right time. By playing close attention to workflows, a manager (or business process owner) can streamline a process, remove unnecessary actions and ‘fine tune’ the engine of the business

Simple Workflow

A workflow system can be a powerful way to not only allocate tasks and manage your business but to also add a layer of accountability in your organisation. Tasks can now be tracked and the work rate monitored in a granular form. If you are a strong believer in business process then you can understand that a solid well thought out workflow system can hold people to that procedure and ensure that things are done properly. A custom application can be used to ensure that the right information is collected verified and put to work in a centralised repository. If roles are set up in the system, the system can allocate work to employees that it has calculated can handle more.

A more advanced system will allow you to make changes to your business process (workflows) on the fly. This simple function can have a significant impact on the business in times of change. No longer does the Business Process Owner need to consult or engage in IT, they can now design a new workflow, publish it and reap the rewards today rather than weeks or months down the track. This kind of agility has an enormous benefit in times of significant change.

 

Simple Everyday workflows

 

Workflows are everywhere and you may be able to see how they can be approved already. Alternatively, I am happy to discuss with you how we can streamline and add agility to your business.

I am great fan of google apps especially google. I pointed my mail server records to Google for all of my websites and so I can truely access email from anywhere.

I have been using Gmail on my PDA for a couple of years now and its fantastic, but could be better.

So my curiousity was peaked when news of the android platform came out. Would they embrase the opportunity to do something good here.

Well it turns out they will.

If your curious too, then follow the jump to the developers blog page

Apologies for the lack of updates. I’ve been head down working on a ’secret announcement’ that we think will rock the IT world. In the meantime, here are some interesting web technologies that I have been trialling out.

For those of you that twitter you will be glad to know that both of these sites / tools work with Twitter. (Follow me on ‘davebirchall’)

Remember the Milk

 

This is so simple but yet so effective. It’s basically just a to do list but you can break it down into list of your choice, prioritize them by time, add them to your Google calendar and more. I can access it from my PDA, or laptop. If I don’t have an internet connection, Google gears allows me to work offline. You can assign tasks to your colleagues ,wife or dog if he can use a computer. I can reach everything from within Google apps also.

http://www.rememberthemilk.com/

Tweet what you spend

 

Again, such a simple idea. I am furious I didn’t think of it myself. Would you like to keep track of your spending without having to carry lists around? Now you can simply tweat the amount using some special syntax and have it land in your tweat what you spend account. From there you can categorise and sort to your hearts content and even export to excel.

http://www.tweetwhatyouspend.com/

 

Because we are using twitter, I can also text both of these account to enter into them. Very mobile