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you are here: > Self > 21.
Ekasys
| 21.26 | Current key business issues |
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| Today, enterprises around the world are faced with a number of key business issues (see the clickable list to the left). How well an enterprise addresses these issues will largely determine their relative success in the next few years. |
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| The commonality of issues |
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| While every business is unique in some way, all businesses have at least one of the following key business issues as a priority. |
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| For service related corporations, it should be more likely that a corporation has all eight listed. |
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| These key business issues are:
-Issue management |
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| Information management |
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| The average staff person in a service organisation now has to deal with hundreds of emails, dozens of pieces of paper, phone calls and faxes each day. Just sorting out: (a) what is junk?, (b) what is just reference/cc and (c) what are genuine new items takes the average staff person hours each day. |
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| More importantly, new emails, phone calls and pieces of paper are often related to some previous communication- a new phone call relates to a previous meeting, a new email relates to a previous phone call etc. The common thread between these different communications is the underlying "issue". |
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| For example, the underlying theme between a collection of different communications might be a new business project. Alternatively, a set of communications might relate to an ongoing dispute and/or complaint. |
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| Staff productivity | ||
| Individuals employed in service organisations now have to perform more tasks (work) in less time than every before. From handling emails and phone calls, through to attending meetings and being able to use a computer. |
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| The delivery of these work tasks now happens from a number of sources- email notification, personal TODO list, project software, spreadsheet lists of group tasks, action items from meetings. |
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| Staff productivity is then how an individual staff person performs these tasks in terms of quality of delivery, time delivery of service against measurable key performance indicators. |
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| Staff retention and skills development |
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| Individuals employed in service organisations now have to perform more tasks (work) in less time than every before. From handling emails and phone calls, through to attending meetings and being able to use a computer. |
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| At the same time these individuals are under pressure to develop and maintain specialised expertise in their various fields as services have become more specialised and competitive. |
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| The combined effect of specialised knowledge, multi-tasking and certification to use equipment means individuals in service companies need to be more skilled than ever before. |
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| Staff skills and development is then how an organisation measures its skills requirements, the existing skills and certificates of its staff and contributes to ongoing skills development and staff retention. |
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| Customer growth |
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| Making sales it central to any commercial enterprise. If a company doesn't make sales then it will quickly go out of business. |
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| A similar term often used to describe customer growth is new business. However, customer growth is preferred to describe this important issue as it better describes the key components of : potential value analysis, opportunity management, new business from new customers, new business from existing customers. |
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| Compliance | ||
| In recent years a raft of globally publicised corporate collapses and law cases have highlighted poor records management as the reason that faults/frauds were not detected earlier. As a result, many governments around the world have introduced tough new laws requiring organisations to maintain virtually perfect systems of all electronic documents. |
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| At the same time, the same laws have increased the pressure on organisations to provide wide an varied reports on the nature of information stored on its IT infrastructure. |
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| Compliance then is a complete fulfilment of the obligations under laws and regulations in the country of trade that usually includes the secure, comprehensive and transparent storage/management of all electronic correspondence and documents. |
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| Customer profitability | ||
| A popular rule of thumb for any business is that around 20% of customers generate around 80% of revenues, while the majority of customers (80%) produce marginal profits. |
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| The importance of this rule is significant when considering whether new business campaigns are attracting profitable or more marginally profitable customers. |
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| Cost control | ||
| Controlling costs while ensuring a business is able to respond to market opportunities is one of the great challenges of any business. |
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| If cost controls are too loose then a business or a business unit might quickly become unprofitable. |
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| Alternatively, if controls on expenditure are too tight then a business might lose its competitive edge. |
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| Information management | ||
| The advent of the personal computer combined with the internet has resulted in an explosion in the number of variety of electronic documents an organisation has to manage. |
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| One individual staff person working for two years can accumulate literally thousands of emails, electronic faxes, word documents, spreadsheets and other formatted documents. When viewed across an organisation, the number of individual electronic documents can easily number in the tens of thousands. |
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| Information management is about where these documents are physically stored, controlling versions, tracking a master record of items and how the organisation is able to easily find and manage these documents and records on a day to day basis. |
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