IT Business Process Improvement ENTERPRISE INITIATIVE MANAGEMENT

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1 All Strategic Initiatives Should Succeed! Seventy percent (70%) of all IT-based strategic initiatives either fail outright or do not achieve their planned goals in terms of functionality, cost, or schedule. The underlying cause of failed initiatives is the inability of Business and IT organizations to work constructively together. This is unacceptable - success rates must be increased dramatically for IT initiatives to show the high returns on investment that are necessary to increase market value. Success comes when executive leaders and their teams work closely together to establish accurate functional specifications and optimum business processes, update them as business needs change, overcome technology barriers and misunderstandings, avoid scope creep, and swiftly make correct decisions. Emagineering is the first and only enterprise software that provides critical management support for both Business and IT throughout the planning and deployment of ITbased strategic initiatives. Emagineering : Enterprise Collaboration and Issue Management Teams are most effective when each member's ability to contribute is maximized. Therefore, Emagineering provides functionality based upon each member's role - Executive Sponsor, Project Leader, Content Expert, Reviewer, Observer, Task Leader or Participant - on an Initiative. Within these Roles, team members identify the issues that must be addressed to establish an initiative's functional requirements. Using a disciplined approach to collaboration, they resolve each issue and publish the initiative deliverables. Emagineering 's issue resolution process is extremely powerful. It identifies issue decision makers and establishes deadlines; captures and maintains all documents and discussions; generates a summary report showing individual contributions; and publishes a weekly project portfolio report that escalates blocking issues up to Executive Sponsors. 1

2 The Top 10 Reasons Why Emagineering Will Cut Costs and Increase Success Rates 1. Significantly lowers IT costs. Strategic initiatives typically account for 20%-35% of a company's IT budget. Emagineering will pay for itself within months by dramatically reducing the costs to successfully complete initiatives and avoid write-offs. How? First, Emagineering will almost completely eliminate the write-off costs associated with initiatives that must be scrapped. Second, it will reduce the cost of completing those troublesome initiatives that overrun their budgets because of unanticipated problems. Third, it will appreciably reduce the cost of deploying even the best-planned initiatives. 2. Allows, encourages, and requires Business to pro actively participate in the proposal and deployment of IT-based strategic initiatives. Business can be assigned roles, such as executive sponsor, content expert or reviewer, within an initiative. Or they can voluntarily sign-up as observers. When their input is required, they are sent formal requests with due dates. The requests and their responses are stored in the system. They are automatically notified about updates to every issue on which they are a member of the resolution team. And because Emagineering uses the same Web browser interface and MS Office tools they are so familiar with, casual use is intuitive. 3. Establishes a disciplined approach to issue identification and resolution. Any team member can raise an issue. When approved by the Project Leader, a task leader and additional team members are assigned to analyze it. In addition, the task leader has the task of identifying the appropriate final decision maker. The decision maker can notify others whose opinions he or she wants when they will be required to provide their inputs. The decisionmaking process and timetables are then displayed in graphical workflow form. 2

3 4. Creates the appropriate portfolio management dashboard. Emagineering can support thousands of concurrent initiatives. And each of these initiatives can automatically generate a status report based upon each Project Leader's updates and approval. The top-level report summarizing the status of all the active initiatives within Emagineering in a green, yellow, red dashboard format provides the kind of information that C-level want and need. For those who want to better understand the current state of an initiative, it allows to drill-down into issue status and personnel contributions. For those who want to fully understand the company's current IT investment activities, it is a powerful portfolio management report. 5. Provides Real-Time Communications among Initiative team members. When join an initiative, they automatically become members of the team's Instant Messaging (IM) buddy list. It allows every team member to know the current availability of every other team member - whether in a cubicle next door or on the other side of the world - and to be able to efficiently confer on an issue. Task requests are stored in Emagineering as well as e- mailed using your company's existing system. And team members are instantly informed about updates to issues simply by subscribing to the notification service. 6. Draws out hidden knowledge within the organization. The most valuable asset within organizations is the knowledge of their people. When this knowledge is needed, the challenge is to identify where it resides. Emagineering inspires team members to contribute and share their expert knowledge to inform and educate the team as a whole - and to be recognized for their experience and ability to contribute. 3

4 7. Identifies and gives credit to all contributors. The manual approach of interviewing about their current business processes in association with requests for information about what processes they believe should be automated in the future gives little or no credit to those individuals who make important, constructive contributions. The effort of assisting an interviewer takes even the most conscientious away from their job responsibilities for way too long. It is critical that those Content Experts and Reviewers (particularly on the business side) who are indispensable to establishing the correct functional requirements be given credit for their assistance. 8. Escalates Blocking Issues. When a Project or Task Leader designates that properly resolving an issue may not be possible - missed due dates, lacking the proper inputs, a need for policy decisions, etc. - it immediately goes to status red. As a status red issue, other team members are notified of the problem and it is automatically included in the weekly status report to executive sponsors for guidance. The objectives are to ensure that there will be no more surprises and they are actively involved in solving the hard organizational problems that must be resolved for the initiative to be successful. 9. Lowers time away from "day" jobs and travel expenses. One of the largest indirect costs associated with implementing strategic initiatives is the requirement to pull business away from their operational duties and have them travel to meetings where their contributions may be critical, but require minimal communications time. The average overhead cost associated with these efforts is generally estimated to be $2,000 per executive day. We would never want to eliminate these critical face-to-face meetings, especially at the start of a new initiative. However, the use of Emagineering will lower this cost by 50% for each initiative and minimize the executive-hassle factor. 4

5 10. Preserves knowledge and learning from all initiatives as an asset on-demand. Emagineering can store the knowledge acquired from thousands of active, proposed, and completed initiatives. This knowledge can be retrieved using Emagineering 's integrated Free Text Retrieval tool to search across all initiatives or initiative documents can be re-categorized and stored in expert knowledge pools using Obian's optional document management system, Jupiter. This powerful capability allows the accumulation and reuse of techniques, know-how, and best practices across even the largest multi-national corporation. It provides for the sharing of unique knowledge contributed by company experts as well as the ability to locate authorities with specialized knowledge. A New Approach Using New Technologies Corporate have asked for the functionality provided by Emagineering for many years. Yet it could not be economically and reliably provided until the underlying J2EE, Web services, and document and business process management technologies had reached their current maturity levels. Emagineering has combined these underlying technologies with best management practice disciplines obtained from the research findings obtained from of hundreds of strategic initiatives. This uniqueness has allowed Obian to file a patent application for Emagineering 's technology and business process methodology. Emagineering Is the Solution You Need For Serious Enterprise Business Problems Until now, IT organizations have often turned to project, program, and portfolio management systems to more effectively manage strategic initiatives. These systems are intended for IT professionals to better manage resources and schedules against IT tasks - not for business to collaborate with IT professionals to accurately document what new business processes should be delivered as the outcomes from million-dollar plus strategic initiatives. 5

6 According to industry analysts, 60% of the problems and 80% of the remediation costs associated with new applications to support business processes are caused by inaccurate and improper functional requirements specifications. Coding the wrong application more effectively is not a solution. By providing continuous collaboration with business, Emagineering ensures that the right application is delivered at the right time - even when the functional requirements change radically from the time when the initiative was proposed to when it is finally deployed. Enterprises are acquiring Emagineering to: Create the IT foundation for new business processes that are required to meet the...corporation's strategic objectives, outmaneuver the competition, or support new business...units; Establish accurate business requirements and policies when implementing enterprise...applications from such industry leaders as Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, and Siebel; Capture the synergies of merging the business operations of acquired companies while..centralizing the IT operations of the two companies to reduce costs; More effectively manage outsourcing operations - especially those located offshore where..culture and time zones are barriers to accurate communications; Increase the return on scheduled maintenance efforts by ensuring that needed functional..capabilities are added to existing applications; Satisfy the demands of corporate who are insisting on being better informed..about as well as being more closely involved in their company's strategic initiatives; Significantly lower the costs associated with planning and deploying the IT-based strategic..initiatives required remaining viable in today's highly competitive global marketplace. 6

7 Emagineering Is Designed to Meet Your Needs Emagineering is a multi-tier, J2EE-compliant Web-services application. This architecture allows it to scale up to support thousands of concurrent users who need only Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0+ and an Internet connection to take full advantage of all its functionality. Systems administrators do not have to install and maintain any Emagineering -specific software on client systems. Emagineering maintains security at multiple levels, including granting access rights to view different initiatives by individual, logging and reporting all user transactions, and encrypting data. As a result, Emagineering can be safely used to lower the costs of working with thirdparty professional IT and business consulting service providers as well as to collaborate with suppliers and strategic customers whose participation is vital for establishing the functional requirements for cross-company applications. Emagineering complements the Oracle9iAS operating environment. It uses a single Oracle9i Database for its repository. Emagineering can be quickly and cost effectively customized to meet your organization's unique needs and to generate the specific reports your ' want. We suggest you to request one of our professional to contact you to help you understand Enterprise Initiative Management within the context of business strategy setting and execution of your organization. Just fill in an at info@webtechmanagement.com with necessary contact information and a few details and we will contact you ASAP. 7