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Turn Geeks into Leaders

June 17, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM U.S./ET (GMT-4)

Larry Bonfante, CIO of the U.S. Tennis Association, will discuss the skills and approaches that your rising IT leaders must learn to be effective in an executive capacity.

How to Handle Your New CEO: Managing Turnover at the Top

June 18, 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM U.S./Eastern (GMT-4)

Turbulent times have increased turnover at the top. Find out what Council CIOs have done to "break in" new CEOs—build relationships, set expectations, educate on the role of IT.

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July 15, 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM U.S./Eastern (GMT-4)

We'll highlight relationship priorities and best practices identified in a Council study, and we'll interact with a CIO panel on the approaches they've used to improve strategic vendor partnerships.

Executive Competencies Assessment Tool

Assess Your Business Leadership Skills with the Council's new benchmarking tool. Rate yourself in change leadership, strategy, customer focus and more.

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Making Workflow Work and Flow for You

Workflow isn't rocket science, but it isn't magic either. While workflow can make major improvements in the way an organization runs, it achieves that goal only when its principles are applied correctly. We explain the success factors and the benefits that the process can provide.

 

October 23, 2007CIO

From a business perspective, workflow is a way to make people, information and computers work together consistently and efficiently to produce the results the business needs. In effect, workflow applies the equivalent of systems analysis to the entire process, not just to the part done on a machine.

From a bottom line perspective, adding workflow to a process saves money, increases customer satisfaction, gets results quicker and largely eliminates things getting lost in the shuffle.

From a manager's perspective, the most important benefits to workflow are saving cost and saving time.

"With workflow, the process is really in focus," says Wilhelm Ederyd, a technical project manager at Bonver, a major Scandinavian distributor of home entertainment products, such as films and music. Another benefit, Ederyd says, is "hiding unnecessary complexity from the users."

As an example of a typical workflow, Ederyd cites building support for individuals and businesses ordering broadband services via the Internet, postal mail and e-mail. "This can be a rather complex process, with the need for the systems and personnel to interact efficiently in order to make the process slim and pleasant to the customer," Ederyd explains.

You can think of workflow as systems analysis that mixes humans, machines, documents and other information. In Edervd's case, he designed the process for ordering and installing the broadband connection for the customer. Typically that means—given a whole raft of business requirements generated by others—working out how the process would flow from the customer's initial contact to the actual installation: who does what, what the IT system does, when decisions were made and who made them. If you were doing this all on a computer, you'd probably call it "systems analysis."

Ederyd's example is a classic case: a fairly complex, multi-step process where computers and people have to interact as smoothly and efficiently as possible. It's also a process that is exposed to the customer, and delays or mistakes can damage customer relationships.

For Defense Health, an Australian insurance company, customer relationships were particularly important. "We needed a system that would let us answer a customer's question up front rather than saying 'We'll call you back,'" says Andrew Guerin, COO of Defense Health. For Guerin, that meant having processes in place to access information as quickly as possible. Using workflow tools from OpenText, the company designed processes that combined IT systems, documents and people to get a handle on customer queries quickly.

 
 
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