If your business process management isn’t up to par, you’re not alone.At the Six Sigma IQ website, BPM expert Dan Morris assured readers that many companies suffer from stalled BPM. But whether you are stuck on simple improvements rather than true transformations or whether you are being overly tactical instead of strategic, there is a way out of the tunnel.What’s your first step? Morris offered a self-test that can help yo...
Alec Sprague is not an IT guy. His background is in consumer advocacy, but in his position as database developer for Work for Progress, he has instituted a culture of citizen development at the fast-growing nonprofit organization.“Our organization is scrappy,” Sprague said. “We operate on shoestring budgets to maximize our benefit to society and our return-on-investment for our funders and donors.”At the beginning of his te...
A recent survey of 600 American and European IT decision-makers done by my partner Xerox shows that the time to go fully digital is now, but most organizations still aren’t ready.Survey respondents predicted an average of only nine percent of key business and office processes will run on paper in the next two years, but more than half admitted that their organizations’ processes are still largely paper-based today, and abou...
“Don’t boil the ocean” and other advice from the leaders whose teams develop business apps by the hundreds using low-code rapid application development.At last week’s EMPOWER 2016 conference, we heard from a panel of executives regarding lessons learned from their rapid application development implementations.The panel was moderated by Ankit Shah, senior manager of platform and product marketing and strategy at QuickBase, I...
My 4-year-old daughter Serena will be 30 in 2041. Assuming that she has a college degree and eight years of work experience, how might she fare in a world dominated by contract workers, fluid teams, human-centered work, persistent pay gaps, blurred work-life boundaries, and biases that have been around since the beginning of time? Well, let’s investigate.1. INTERNATIONAL COMPETITIONSerena was born in 2011, the year the U.S....
The second part of our goal setting series looks at Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), as well as the modern business hurdles none of the current approaches seem to be able to solve.The Rise of Key Performance IndicatorsAn outgrowth of MBO and S.M.A.R.T. goals was the Key Performance Indicator (KPI), or a key factor in monitoring the performance of strategic objectives integral to an organization’s success. Like S.M.A.R.T....
When the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, first passed, many speculated that there would be an increase in part-time employment. By reducing the work hours of existing full-time employees, or by increasing the number of part-time employees hired, employers could avoid ACA’s mandate that they must offer health insurance to all full-time employees.To briefly recap, the Affordable Care Act provision for employer s...
This year is shaping up to be an interesting one for HR compliance. The most buzz, it seems, is occurring around paid sick leave. In his 2015 State of the Union address, President Obama asked the U.S. Congress to pass national legislation granting American workers the right to paid sick days when they or their family members get sick, or to deal with sexual assault and domestic abuse.Paid sick leave is another benefit that...
You’ve probably heard that most businesses fail, but the reasons why are not always clear. Lack of managerial expertise may be one factor. After all, most inexperienced people who get jobs in large corporations aren’t put in charge right away. Rather, they may be given small responsibilities until they have sufficient business acumen to be trusted with larger ones. On the other hand, small-business owners are often overconf...
When we think of brands, we tend to picture the big ones. We forget that a powerful brand can be important to every company and especially small businesses that hang their hats on customer loyalty.According to a recent survey by Rosetta Consulting, engaged customers (those who are strongly attached to a brand) buy 90 percent more frequently, spend 60 percent more per transaction and are five times more likely to indicate it...