For many organizations, exploring the proposition of performing an upgrade is daunting, unclear and seemingly costly at the very least. With the proper framework, tools and perspective, the upgrade process can be streamlined and efficient enough to minimize negative impacts on the business/resources while still improving business processes and ultimately the company’s bottom line. In this white paper, we hope to provide you with some of our insights into the upgrade process, tips to reduce your risks and efforts in order to increase the likelihood of your project success.

Return on Investment (ROI) is the reason why investors give companies money, and is the reason why senior managers give their managers budget funds. In this white paper, we lay out the components of a good, solid business case. A good business case balances the good with the bad, and presents management with an objective analysis of the key drivers and risks that must be addressed in order to obtain the promised benefits.

Alignment of strategy, operational and financial people, and core processes is a primary responsibility of the executive leadership of an organization. Misalignment of improvement initiative goals causes a lack of organizational focus, resulting in wasted resources and disillusionment. Alignment is difficult when bringing clinical, financial and IT areas together to agree on goals and objectives. A Goal Alignment analysis is an effective technique to gain insight around the challenges and issues within an organization. It provides bottom line benefits that increase the chances of project success. It can either be a focused analysis that is performed before a system upgrade or implementation, or a broad strategic analysis that aligns departmental goals with the goals and missions of the entire organization.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for Government can be defined as the strategy, processes, and technologies that enable a government entity to manage, improve, and perpetuate relationships with its customers. Its goals include optimizing customer satisfaction with services, increasing operational efficiency, and reducing costs. In this white paper we argue that these goals can be achieved. The key is to develop an enterprise-wide strategy that fully considers each of the Four Vital Building Blocks to CRM Success: Integration, Process Optimization, Knowledge Management, and Measurement.

Web services are simply business services, composed of a set of standards that allow different entities – with different platforms, languages or operating systems – to exchange information or perform a business process together. Web services can render information to an ERP application in another division or company, a B2B exchange, a customer service portal or a logistics provider’s wireless device. That is a powerful concept. Think of it as an anytime, anyplace, any-information service in real-time across the value chain. Let your imagination roam and you will think of a number of business problems Web services could solve.

Oracle Policy Automation (formerly Haley) provides integration opportunities that will reduce the technical development efforts of customizing applications to maintain and implement complex rules, policies, and procedures required by virtually all organizations. In this paper, the discussion will focus on the integrating Oracle Policy Automation (OPA) and PeopleSoft Enterprise applications. Leveraging OPA’s Determinations Server and PeopleSoft’s Integration Gateway, the development, maintenance, and deployment of the rules will be put in the hands of the policy makers or super users, using familiar tools; such as, Microsoft® Word and Excel, reducing the technical programming effort.

ERP systems can produce positive ROI when implemented as part of a comprehensive Business Process Optimization (BPO) program that clearly defines the desired future state; ensures that the goals of the project are aligned with those of the organization; redesigns business processes so they are first efficient, and then can effectively take advantage of delivered software functionality; and manages the change impacting the organization and its people. Successful projects result when expectations are tied to the realistic capabilities of the system, the business processes it supports are efficient and properly designed to leverage its capabilities, and people using it are educated, trained, and encouraged to be successful in the new environment.

Recruiting in the public sector in general – and urban K-12 education in particular – is a significant challenge. Lower pay than the commercial sector and suburban districts as well as challenging environments make it difficult to recruit top talent to public service. In addition to having a wide range of available recruiting alternatives, which erodes the ability to cost-effectively focus on a large portion of the market, recruiting professionals must spread scarce resources too thinly across multiple channels. Adding to this, many public sector organizations have under-invested in developing metrics and the necessary predictive measures to determine the most effective allocation of resources – a critical key to improving recruitment success rates.

This paper discusses approaches to measurement and the effective development of metrics as well as how an urban school district successfully applied metrics to re-direct its resources to the most effective recruiting channels.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enables the automation of key business processes as well as facilitates the integration of functionality and data across platforms and operating systems, much like Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), but at considerably lower cost. This paper will help you internalize, at a high level, the technology that is enabling this advance, as well as the most cost effective way to start this journey.

This paper will define organizational readiness and briefly discuss its groundings in the foundations of Change Management. Most importantly, this paper will present for discussion, strategies for integrating organizational readiness into systems implementation projects chiefly to increase the rate of user adoption (aka behavior change) and overall organizational productivity.