Keeping pace with change

The past few weeks have been pretty hectic here at the Ark Group head office. Not least our re-location to new digs and the flurry of activity associated with the move. I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome EI’s new managing editor Graeme Burton, who has also taken over the reins of our sister publication Inside Knowledge. I’m sure you’ll join me in wishing him the best of luck in his new role.

Getting back to the move, I’ll be the first to admit that I love our new premises – mainly because they quite considerably cut my freezing, winter-morning trek from the train station. But sadly for others, the journey to work is now slightly longer. It is an apt reminder that for every positive reaction to change there is a negative. Every organisation implements change. It’s an essential part of today’s business environment. Continuous advances in enterprise technology are opening up new opportunities for growth and we must be agile and flexible enough to keep pace with these developments.

Business-process-management software, automated workflow and portals enable us to bypass wads of paperwork. We can remove sluggish, people-centric processes and replace them with artificial logic and precision. And we can analyse and tune our processes using business-intelligence (BI) tools.

Our recent BI Connect event was hugely popular and attracted representatives from a wealth of high-profile organisations. But for 47 per cent of respondents to our 2005 BI survey, the lack of an overall strategy and/or vision for BI was the biggest barrier to its wider use. So, to inspire you, we’ve pulled together analyst comment, case studies and the full survey analysis, and gift-wrapped them in a special report on BI, which you’ll find inside these pages.

But that’s enough about us. What have you been up to? EI is always on the look out for high-quality case studies and workshop articles. And as the subscriber you have first refusal when it comes to article ideas. Is your organisation embarking on an innovative e-learning project? How are you coping with compliance? Have you had a portal nightmare with a happy ending? Your experiences are invaluable, so if you are interested in contributing an article or opinion column, e-mail me at kclifton@ark-group.com.

In the meantime, best wishes for a happy festive season and a prosperous new year from all at EI.

Kate Clifton
Deputy editor

Features

Cover story: Lessons from the insect supply chain Free
‘Entomology’, for those of you not familiar with the term, is the scientific study of insects. If you, like me, are finding that the cruel UK winter temperatures are wreaking havoc on your ability to form a coherent sentence, ‘bugology’ is the less-technical, conversational option.

Interestingly, most forms of entomology adhere to a ‘taxonomic specialisation’, whereby experts specialise in a particular family or single order of insects. This got my attention. How could entomology be applied to the everyday workflow processes found at the enterprise level – and, more specifically, how could it be applied to supply-chain management using portals?

Trend tracker: Business process management Free
Until recently, IRCEM, a French insurance and pensions group, was experiencing significant problems in managing the vast amount of documents it needs to keep on its seven million policy holders. Staff at the company were spending too much time filing, searching for files and photocopying documents. Document storage costs were escalating and flood damage and ‘paper mites’ – a skin irritation caused by excessive amounts of paper dust – were a real threat to the long-term preservation of files.

Workshop: Improving enterprise search Free
If money were no object then we would all employ full-time information architects. We would have dedicated teams of people maintaining and enforcing our taxonomies. And we would have technical staff spending all day refining and tuning our in-house search technology.

Workshop: Innovative EDRM Free
Many organisations are continuing down the same old EDRM path, often with a poor end-outcome. But less traditional, rule-based and role-based applications are paving the way for success.

Workshop: Portal implementation Free
We have now reached the half-way stage of the eight-step approach to deploying an enterprise portal. So far this series has detailed the processes involved in developing the portal business case, understanding user requirements and functionality, defining your architecture, and installing portal products. Having developed your taxonomy and categorisation scheme (as featured in last month’s workshop), you are now ready to progress to steps five and six.

Regulars

Opinion: Lynda Rathbone Free
Back in the 1940s and 50s, the year 2000 and beyond was considered to be the distant future. People spent a lot of time dreaming up ‘what if…’ scenarios, like “what if there was life in outer space?” and “what if we could fly to work?” While I know I still want to fly to work someday, the New Year is almost upon us and I’ve been doing a bit of predicting myself.

The last word Free
Grouchy he may be on occasion, but no one can deny the saintly Sir Bob Geldof’s skill for articulating an argument. At a recent conference organised by innovation company What If, his target was not the debt-relief policies of G8, but the proliferation of e-mails in the workplace, which he blamed for “giving a feeling of action, which is a mistake”. Commenting that he dreaded seeing a mountain of e-mails in his inbox, Geldof’s advice was reminiscent of Nancy Reagan’s stance on drugs: “Don’t do e-mail”. He has a point.