Of course, people can have any number of valid reasons for not being able to make it into the office, from illness and injury to family crises and annual leave. But even the valid excuses need to be tracked and monitored to ensure regulatory compliance and adequate levels of productivity.

The key to tracking the whereabouts of an organisation’s people is time and attendance (T&A) software, which provides an accurate recording of an employee’s time and movement. At its best, rather than just making people feel spied upon, T&A software aids employee engagement.

As a starting point, you’ll need to make sure that your T&A software records the HR basics, such as working hours, flexi-time, absence and lateness. Such an approach will allow your organisation to create an accurate and real-time record of staff movement. T&A accuracy can also be maintained through flexi-time reporting and functionality that manages leave, time in-lieu and holiday entitlement.

T&A software can also provide a tighter grip on HR administration and instant access to timely information, enabling improved decision making whilst helping supervisors to quickly identify potential T&A issues.

The need for additional T&A functionality is dependent on organisational demands. Functionality-rich T&A software can identify job costings, for example, showing how much particular employees or contractors financially contribute to the business.

By opting for a solution that allows the business to track and trace employees’ movements throughout the organisation’s offices, T&A technology can also be used to aid security

Overall, your system should be easy to configure, compliant-ready and integrated with other key HR and payroll areas to produce a holistic approach to human capital management.

Staff also tend to respond positively to having time and attendance controls in place as it ensures a level playing field. After all, when staff appear to ‘get away with’ poor time keeping and repeated absence, it can breed discontentment within a team, potentially leading to disengagement and disruption.

And so, with the right T&A technologies in place, the organisation is ensuring that its most valuable and costly asset – its people – are being effectively monitored without being too ‘big brother’.

Perhaps clock-watching is a good thing after all!

Automating corporate clock-watching is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

Take this year as a starting point. The projected amount of digital information created in 2010 will be 1.2 million zettabytes which is equivalent to a full-length episode of TV series “24″ running continuously for 125 million years, according to research from IDC and EMC (see further reading, below).

Such figures are amusing but almost impossible to fully comprehend. And without the means to track, trace and interpret information, the results of such an information explosion for your business could be tremendous.

Gartner’s report concludes that, with the proliferation of mobile devices, collaborative technologies and social media, the quantity and variety of digital data will continue to grow. While managing this information is a challenge, it also presents a remarkable opportunity.

By putting the right foundations in place for managing and analysing your data, your organisation will be more able to make data-driven decisions moving forward.

Business intelligence, for example, can pull together an organisation’s data to provide a single version of the truth, allowing executives to make timely decisions based upon a consistent view of data from across the organisation.

Other corporate performance management tools, such as forecasting and planning software, also help organisations to work smarter whilst aiding decision making. With forecasting and planning, for instance, organisations can plan and model scenarios before making data-driven decisions.

The fast pace of IT development means that the number of data sources is only likely to increase and so it’s key to leverage this data for the benefit of the organisation. Ultimately, successful analytics is about creating an effective partnership between IT and the business; make sure you have the right tools in place to make this happen.

Further reading:
http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/press-releases/gartners-2010-hype-cycle-special-report-evaluates-maturity-1-800-technologies

http://www.securityweek.com/content/emc-digital-universe-data-growth-study-projects-nearly-45-fold-annual-data-growth-2020

Enabling data-driven decisions is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

1)     People Management

People Management is the official magazine of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), the professional body for those involved in the management and development of people.  Two blogs are run from its website – the Editors’ blog, in which People Management journalists comment on the latest HR news and developments, and the Specialists’ blog, where top HR commentators offer their observations on the business world.

2)     Personnel Today

 The ‘editors’ blog’ of this leading industry publication is a great source of information about everything going on in the world of human resources. Packed full of news and views, this blog is a must-read.

3)     HR Headmistress 

A personal blog from the MD of Milton Keynes-based consulting firm Russell HR.  Regularly updated, the blog provides an interesting perspective, proclaiming its existence is an opportunity to let off steam about employment law, HR, politicians, plumbers, the importance of shoes and all the really major issues of the day!

4)     HR Magazine

This blog from the much-respected magazine HR Magazine aims to put HR into a business perspective. Blog postings cover a wide range of topics, from flexible working to employment law.

5)     HR Zone

HR Zone is a popular site which allows everyone to submit blog postings and get their thoughts on HR topics or issues of their chests. All you need to do is log-in and start blogging!

Top of the blogs….part two is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

You can find the article at the url below:

http://www.telegraphbusinessclub.co.uk/default.asp?p_id=search&showresults=1&showarticle=2947

Sun Tzu and the art of corporate performance management is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

You get to see all the action but don’t have the wherewithal to get involved.  Sometimes you wistfully think about what you would do if you were running the organisation.  What if the day-dream came true?  Well it turns out that you have less and less time to make a difference and this day-dream may quickly turn into a nightmare.

According to Mark Gottfredson, Steve Schubert and Hernan Saenz in their  February 2008 Harvard Business Review article ‘The New Leaders Guide to Diagnosing The Business’ they pointed out that 1 in 5 of the CEOs who left their jobs in 2006 had only been in position for 8 months. This is hardly enough time to get your new office furniture, the corner room redecorated and your Blackberry fully functional.  

It brings to mind the story of the new CEO who briefly met her predecessor before she was enthroned.  

‘Is there any advice you can give me, Sir, I am new to this role and I would really appreciated some help?’

The old CEO said, ‘You’ve got to find your own way really.  Market conditions change and you will have your own take on things.  But I will do for you what my predecessor did for me.  I’ll leave you 2 envelopes, one in the top right hand drawer of your office desk and one in the left hand drawer.  If things get bad, open the envelope in the right hand drawer.  And if things get really bad, and I mean really bad, then open the envelope in the left hand drawer.’

The new CEO thanked him and thought he’s right I have got to have my own take on things if I am going to move this company forward.  

Three months passed and things weren’t getting better.  In fact, in one of the divisions where profits had traditionally been highest, even though the cost base was high, there was an emergent new upstart that was offering better products at lower prices.  

The company was taking a severe battering. The main investors, sharp minded and sharp-tongued heavyweights wanted to know what the new CEO was going to do.  Nothing had prepared her for this.  Racking her brains about what she was going to do she remembered the envelope in the right hand drawer.  It had got to be worth a look.  With trepidation she opened the drawer, took out the envelope, slit it open and read the note inside.  

It said simply, ‘Blame Your Predecessor’ .

‘Brilliant’, exclaimed the new CEO.  Her presentation was a re-hash of everything that had gone wrong under the old CEO, with no punches pulled.  The investors were impressed and felt that their new person understood why they had had to get rid of the former incumbent.  

‘This will buy me time’, the CEO thought while the project that he was personally overseeing would bear fruit.  It was after all a sure fire winner.  It worked so well at her former company and got her name known in the Business press. The company’s simple products were to be more finally attuned to match the needs of a much enhanced profiling of customers. Alas, here it just seemed to add costs. The sales force could not understand the new product differentials, and they were much more difficult to administer in the Back Office, which led to a sharp increase in costs.  

Well things were truly bad now.  Costs up, market share down.  The CEO remembered the old CEO’s second envelope.  The first one, with it’s brilliant simplicity, had saved her, what would be in the left hand one.  If she had been nervous opening the first one, it was nothing to the cold sweat she found herself in now.  She opened the envelope.  She read the words and a faint smile came over her lips as she read ‘Now prepare 2 envelopes’.

In Gottfredson, Schaubert and Saenzís article they think that the new CEO should approach things differently.  You have to act fast.  To act you need to know.  They recommend a 4-pronged attack.  

First of all look at costs and prices and remember that these, over time, always decline.  If you are out of sync then you are in trouble and don’t forget that your competitors will have moved by the time you reach them. 

Second they make an interesting point that there is a strong correlation between a company’s Relative Market Share and their Return On Assets.  So beloved of consultants they even have a grid in which the best place to be is the top right hand corner.  The companies inhabit this area have a high return on assets and a large market share and need to keep raising the bar to competitors.  If you are in the high market share and low return on assets then cost cutting is in order.  Low market share and low return means the activity is ripe for divesting. And what they term over-performers need to be aware whether this is because of some set of factors which won’t last.  If it is act accordingly.  If it is to do with something like brand loyalty then cement this.  

Thirdly, understand with which customers and which products you are making money.  How much of your customerís wallet are you getting, and could you get more?  They recommend the use of the Net Promoter Score as a simple tool to test loyalty and likely retention.  Basically you ask your customers whether would they recommend you on a score of 1 to 10.  9 and 10 are recommenders.  These are the good guys.  7 and 8 are the passives. Those scoring 0 to 6 are your detractors.  Simply divide promoters by detractors to give you your percentage scores.  Understand what you are doing right with the promoters and stop annoying the detractors.

Finally cut complexity.  Be careful about adding too many product innovations. Also watch out for too many layers in the organisation.  Calculate your average reporting span.  Too narrow means that you probably have too many managers and decision-making will be slower than it needs to be.  Look for areas in the organisation where it is notably narrow. In fact, don’t wait for the new CEO.  

Start the process now and have these 4 areas on the Board Strategy agenda.  Customers are always asking me where I would recommend that they start, for those organisations that are looking to take performance management seriously these areas would be a pretty good place.

Act now to find out where your business is going wrong is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment

A lot of implementations that I see, and the discussions that I have with practitioners who have implemented them, seem to offer little to the business and display only a passing acquaintance with anything that could remotely be termed as intelligence.

Why is this? Organisations, like people, are deeply flawed. They are prone to behaviours that in the short term seem to offer solutions but in the long term deliver little.

Who is to blame? Well many people would blame suppliers. Just as we often do in our private lives when we see that we drink and eat too much and exercise too little. If only there weren’t so many adverts on TV pushing unhealthy foods and so many of those tempting ‘buy one get one free offers’ in the stores with their easy access and parking then I would be that slim Adonis, that is struggling to get out of this current wreck of a body. Suppliers are as ready in the corporate IT world to pander to our organisation’s weaknesses as they are in our private lives to our own weaknesses.

Middle Age writers looked at Man and saw what a weak vessel he was and came up with the Seven Deadly Sins of pride, covetousness, lust, envy, gluttony and drunkenness, anger and sloth. I have looked at modern businesses and have likewise come up with the Seven Deadly Sins of Business Intelligence. Just to avoid the charge of pride, I realise that they don’t quite have the grandeur of Saint Thomas Acquinas’s Summa Theologica, and I don’t expect to see an upsurge of Morality Plays based on them. On the other hand, I do expect to see projects that work and which deliver the real value to every organisation.

The Seven Sins are:

1. Being unprepared.
2. Lacking direction.
3. Unsuitability of those doing the job.
4. Wrong culture.
5. Technology fixated.
6. Underestimation.
7. Unthinking.

And of all of these Technology Fixation is the most prevalent. I get to read lots of invitation to tenders and visit prospective clients who have invested an enormous amount of time and effort in coming up with what the technology needs to be able to do. There is often a direct correlation to the lack of thinking that has been done with what they will actually do with these products when they get them. To be clear these projects rarely fail because of technology.

There is a lot of wishful thinking that goes on. Think about exercise bikes and home gyms. We know we are too fat and unhealthy. We would like to be like the photos of those lithe athletes. They are peddling the exercise bike and using the home gym. If only we had that exercise bike and home gym we too could look just like that. Which is correct other than the fact that we are lazy couch potatoes who will not take an hour out of our day to actually do something, unlike the beaming models that so obviously do.

Business Intelligence is no different. Business Intelligence tools work well and have been used to great effect by lean and fit organisations, those that have a sense of purpose and vision, that have a culture of analysing problems and doing something about them and that are prepared to invest, not just the money, but, so much more importantly, the time and effort required.

So many other organisations are in the position of the 9 stone weakling, who having sent off to Charles Atlas, the body builder, for his famous exercise regime, was forced to write in:

‘Yesterday, I received the Dynamic Tension programme in the post. Could you now please send the muscles?’

Business Intelligence should be about the transformation of the organisation. There is a technology aspect to this but don’t be fooled that it is as easy as buying a product. Look at your organisation and think about the hard work that needs to go into turning it into one that can use Business Intelligence to improve and compete.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Business Intelligence is a post from Advanced Business Solutions - Supplier of accounting software, business intelligence and document managment