My interest in workflow management is specifically for managing work among groups of individuals. My specialisation is managing processes that are not as complex as project management where tasks are completely unpredictable – but not as simple as the conventional workflows like insurance claim processing, where there are predictable standard tasks that are repeated. I have worked out models for managing this in-between and successfully implemented these solutions for various enterprises.
A framework that describes the various layers of cloud platform services starting from virtualized hardware up to end-user software applications Read more →
Daniel Pink gave a brilliant talk on TED about the mismatch between “what science knows and what business does”. A related post on his blog claims that “Money cant buy you performance”.
When working in teams, small slip-ups and sometimes big goof-ups are often justified by “communication problems”. Justin Roff-Marsh, proponent of his highly effective Sales Process Engineering methodology that incorporates the techniques from Theory of Constraints into the sales process – … Read more →
Dave Hurlbrink writes how conventional CRM or SFA applications are not designed to serve the needs of a sales person. The value proposition of a “360 degree view of your prospect/customer” is not what the sales person needs to improve … Read more →
Are you facing these challenges in scaling up your sales process? High cost of sales, low margins Lack of clear product/offer differentiation Complexity in mapping customer requirements to product/offer Long sales cycle with unpredictable outcomes No consistent sales performance, difficult … Read more →
Companies having a team that is distributed across multiple locations, with a centralized accounts department find it cumbersome to process expense claims by employees. This article suggests an expense claim workflow that is best suited for such distributed teams. Read more →
With the booming Indian economy, every business is looking at scaling up. Here are some perspectives on scaling up businesses. Read more →
Web based applications are becoming more and more capable. What started out as a mere web browser for viewing web pages has now matured into a stable client-side platform that can run Rich Internet Applications – covering the entire spectrum of enterprise applications. How far can this model be extended? Can we extend it to become a “Web Operating System”? Read more →
Small businesses owners are hard-pressed for managing with scarce resources. How can technology ease their stress levels? Information Technology (IT) is often touted as the magic potion that has solutions for almost any business ailment. But IT is a confusing world of jargon, with incomprehensible abbreviations like ERP, CRM, SFA, SCM, EAI, BPM … and so on. How does a small business owner make sense of all this jargon, and what is a practical approach to adopting IT? This is the first article that begins the series to analyze and answer this question. Read more →
Sales cycles of solution-driven enterprises tend to be longer and more complex than sales cycles of product-driven enterprises, because they involve more detailed needs analysis and solution design. In such cases, assigning and tracking sales performance, in terms of targets and incentives also becomes more complex. This article discusses this issue and suggests a strategy for assigning and tracking sales targets and incentives for solution-driven enterprises. Read more →
Solution-driven enterprises quickly recognize an opportunity in the form of a problem or pain-point in the market, and are able to design and deliver a solution. Every small company typically starts as a solution-driven enterprise. But as they grow, companies face a bottleneck in their ability to analyze needs and design solutions for a growing number of customers. Most companies then transform into product-driven enterprises, and lose their agility. This article enquires into this phenomenon, and discusses strategies that that solution-driven enterprises can use to grow without losing their agility. Read more →
LIMS – Laboratory Information Management Systems – specialized applications for automating and R&D Laboratory, are typically available as off-the-self products. However, most LIMS installations are expensive to implement and difficult to justify in terms of ROIs. This article explains how a combination of practical technology, workflow management, and XML databases can ease the process of LIMS implementations. Read more →
Open distributed enterprises commonly exhibit certain key characteristics, which are scalability, rate of change and trust. Read more →