Archive for the 'Packaged Solutions' topic

Information Technology is one of the top 10 problems of 20^th century management!

Information Technology incorporates a wide variety of unsolvable problems

Information Technology (IT) employed today has many inherent problems that many expensive solutions have never been able to solve:

• Information technology is managed as technology, rather than as capital preventing integration with the business
• Information technology employs large monolithic information systems that are laid over the business, instead of information processing solutions that are utilized by the business
• Information Technology defines different architectures to define and align the business, systems, hardware and networks, and data and information, rather than integrating each with the business
• Different categories of information capital are mixed in many systems using different entity names and definitions producing information complexity and preventing proper information capital management
• Since the business is not organized, information systems manage information related to structures laid over the business and do not capture, process, or report actual business data and management information
• Information Technology is difficult to manage because it mixes business, facility, and management capital that require diverse management and operating capabilities
• It is difficult to manage return on IT investments since the investments are lumped together and do not produce direct measured business improvements
• Information Technology has grown into a large expensive empire that involves much unnecessary processing, extensive overheads, and unsolvable problems

These problems can never be solved with 20^th century management that tries to improve the enterprise by laying new or improved structures over the business.

Information Technology problems disappear when using R-pM to organize the business for 21^st Century Management

The only way to eliminate the Information Technology problems is by organizing the business with Result-performance Management (R-pM) to enable 21^st Century Management. R-pM integrates information technology in the business as capital defined as specific performance solutions utilized to produce specific business results. R-pM provides the following measures to eliminate the unsolvable Information Technology problem:

• R-pM organizes the actual business as specific performance solutions, including IT solutions, to produce specific business results
• Information system solutions are defined and integrated with the business process as modules to produce a specific result or a chain of results
• Information systems focus on managing actual business data in result value and quality, performance cost and effectiveness, capital worth, and return on capital investments that is not processed today
• Information Technology is defined and organized as capital, with other capital of the same category, for proper capital management by those with the professional capability
• Information capital is defined and managed as business data, human knowledge, facility records, and management intelligence to produce information solutions needed by the business
• Enterprise information is integrated by performance solution utilized, result produced, supplier, customer, time period, business transaction, etc in an enterprise Business Information Base for one set of complete and accurate business information
• Information systems and processing devoted to managing arbitrary structures laid over the business and special systems to address problems in data reconciliation, information integration and extraction, and management reporting are discontinued, if not directly needed by the business
• New information system implementation integrates business and information processing with other performance solutions to produce specific output results needed by the business
• The business is organized for a new generation of 21^st Century Management systems and business-information process modules, to process the actual business result by result, and provide one set of consistently-defined management information

Using R-pM to manage information technology as capital utilized by the actual business eliminates the unsolvable IT problems in business alignment, information complexity, data reconciliation, unknown costs and value, unknown capital worth and returns, CIO and IT management capabilities, data integration and control, and on and on.

The Information Technology Problem

Enterprise information systems include a wide variety of systems that are laid over the business

Since the business is not organized, different management structures must by laid over the business to manage the enterprise. [more...]

Processes and systems are monolithic entities laid over the business

Over the past 15 years, corporations and other enterprises have implemented business process and packaged information systems, like ERP, SCM, MRP, and CRM. These processes and systems are laid over the actual business and provided general improvement, but usually still include extra costs and inefficiencies. Often old performance problems remain after new process and system implementation. Many enterprises want to improve their process and system utilization, but lack a fundamentally-sound method. This subject is explained further in the article “How to maximize Benefits from existing Processes and Systems” published in 21^st Century Management Magazine.

R-pM can make significant improvements to existing processes and systems

R-pM provides the method by identifying and managing the actual business that lies hidden under the processes and systems. Performance problems are inherent in specific performance solutions. R-pM redefines processes and systems as value-quality chains, so the enterprise knows the specific results produced and performance solutions utilized along the chain. R-pm integrates the business and system processing as the business process solution and separates other solutions utilized. The enterprise can then solve performance problems with specific solutions, and minimize the performance and maximize the result produced at each link in the chain. This enables the enterprise to solve problems, reduce performance costs, and manage result value and quality across existing processes and systems.

Analyze existing processes and systems as a value-quality chain

The only method available to redefine existing processes and systems is explained in the download “How to Build Value-quality Chains“. The only method to manage business change effectively is explained in the download “How to Manage Business Change“. The only method to manage a business change or capital development project properly is explained in the download “How to Manage Projects in the 21^st Century“. The full details to improve existing processes and systems are provided in The R-pM Toolkit, your 21^st Century Management Manual. These downloads are available now at Result-performance-Management.com. .

Conventional enterprises develop arbitrary organization structures that are overlaid on their businesses. Then, the enterprises overlay structures on the organization for strategy development, planning and budgeting, performance management, business processes, costing, quality management, management reporting, accounting, corporate governance compliance, etc. Each of these methods uses its own set of entities and definitions, which must be interfaced with the entities and definitions used by other methods. These overlays complicate the business and prevent transparent management of the business.

There is a big need for one method that replaces all the methods that management now uses, and provides a simple and clear definition to organize and manage the business.

Result-performance Management (R-pM) organizes the business for 21^st Century Management

Result-performance Management (R-pM) is now launched to provide one simple integrated management method. R-pM organizes the actual business results produced and performance solutions utilized. R-pM standardizes the definitions of five basic entities to manage the business directly, as summarized in the R-pM community download “R-pM Explained”.

The corporation overlays organization structures, strategic plans, chart of accounts, performance management reports, and other methods on the business

We see the problem every day, when we cannot relate what we are doing directly to our strategy, our information reporting to organizational responsibilities, our money and costs to what our money and costs are producing, our symptoms of poor performance to the actual poor performance, the cost of improvement to the benefit of the improvement, etc. We see the unsolvable alignment problems between our systems and the business, outsourced solutions and internal solutions, capital development and operations, etc. [more...]

We lack a sound structure for packaged solutions

We have had a basic problem in developing packaged solutions for use by enterprises, due to the lack of a fundamentally sound structure for the enterprise. This is particularly true for application software solutions. The solutions have to overlay contrived data collection and processing requirements on top of whatever organization is in place, rather than implementing the natural data capture and processing of the organization.

Packaged solutions are becoming more complex for specific applications

At first packages were fairly high-level and incorporated the most widely used functionality, so they could be utilized by diverse enterprises. Then packages became more complex providing more than the 20 percent of the potential functionality used 80 percent of the time, making the 20 percent more difficult to use. Each industry wanted industry-specific solutions. Different solutions labeled their own set of methods as “industry best practices”. So, different solutions installed different best practices, requiring the same solution be used across collaborating enterprises.

Package solutions are dictating the enterprise organization and management

Package solutions are getting more specific for industry functions covering everything that the enterprise does. Different solutions enforce different ways of doing the same thing. [more...]>