INFORMATION MANAGEMENT PROCESS OPTIMIZATION KNOWLEDGE CENTER ABOUT CSI

iSixSigma - Six Sigma Strategy: Understanding the Customer Process (Bryan Carey and John Munce, 12/1/2004)
Companies need an organized approach to making change happen in order to enhance the customer experience and positively impact the company’s profitability. The initial step for top management is to define and document a customer strategy

DMReview Magazine - Successful BI Requires the Right Focus (William McKnight, 12/1/2004)
In the world of business intelligence, the focus can easily be shifted from the important to the expedient. Such is the case with many business intelligence programs that start out recognizing a business focus but quickly shift to a more technical focus. The focus becomes the sun, and the rest of the project orbits around it. It becomes the prime mover for the decisions that are made and ultimately the measure by which the program judges its success. Following are some focuses, in order from healthie

iSixSigma - Yellow Belts: Creating a Corporate Sense of Inclusion (Bryan Carey, 11/3/2004)
A more general knowledge across an organization may pay bigger dividends than deeper knowledge in fewer Six Sigma experts. Yellow Belt training mitigates potential impediments to improvement and change by creating a sense of corporate inclusion.

DMReview Magazine - Rafting Into the Business Intelligence Future, Part 2 of 2 (William McKnight, 11/1/2004)
BPM (business performance management) is the latest buzzword manifestation of the business analytics craze. It is the modern take on KPIs, business analytics, executive dashboarding and the like. With this modernization comes a plethora of new rules and possibilities for business analytics. Real (or "right") time is a very real requirement for many business analytics today. Also, a fairly comprehensive set of potential analytic measures are interesting these days, as is comparison to peer companies.

iSixSigma - Important to Understand the Process Before Improving It (Tracee Lee Beebe, 10/6/2004)
To sustain continuous improvements in organizational processes, an organization must first understand its processes. And in a services environment, this can be difficult. A single process may be perceived as diversely as the people performing it.

DMReview Magazine - Rafting Into the Business Intelligence Future, Part 1 of 2 (William McKnight, 10/1/2004)
Business intelligence has become essential in most organizations. BI is not constrained to individual departments in organizations, but rather is viewed as essential at the corporate level with many organizations now focusing on growing their BI maturity vis-à-vis prior states as well as peer organizations. Maturity would seemingly be important in a 12 to 15-year-old successful industry such as BI, and it surely is.

iSixSigma - Customer-Centric Risk Management Via Hoshin Planning (Bryan Carey and Joe Walsh, 9/8/2004)
Risk management should be a "best practices strategy" aligning data, technology, people and processes across the organization, and not an "audit compliance task." That is especially true in the face of implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Basel II.

DMReview Magazine - The New Business Intelligence Architecture Discussion (William McKnight, 9/1/2004)
No longer is there a mighty struggle within the ranks of IT architects and consultancies about the best architecture for business intelligence (BI). We can’t deny the efficacy of having a centralized data store with quality, integrated, accessible, high performance and scalable data. The discussion now revolves around the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) architecture.

DMReview Magazine - Trend: Good Enough Isn’t (William McKnight, 8/1/2004)
As business intelligence (BI) budgets return to pre-9/11 levels, the sentiment of many shops I come in contact with is the same - "We’ve been living with this functional BI environment for some time, but it’s not good enough for our future." Investments are being made in complete or near-complete "do-overs" of BI environments. This does not necessarily signal that the first (or second, or third) round of BI was a failure.

DMReview Magazine - Building Business Intelligence: The Second Wave User Perspective (William McKnight, 7/1/2004)
Users are the lifeblood of business intelligence (BI). Yet, how often do builders of business intelligence truly consider the user’s point of view? While many users clamor for business intelligence, almost giddy with excitement at the prospect of getting access to more information in a user-friendly format and with more currency than ever before, a majority of users approach business intelligence initiatives with more apprehension than excitement.

iSixSigma - Before Deployment: ‘Minding Your Ps to Get Your Q’ (Bryan Carey, 6/16/2004)
Within an organization, it is easy to find agreement on the need to be quality-focused. What cannot always be agreed upon is an assessment of an organization’s maturity in continuous improvement process and its readiness for adopting a culture change.

DMReview Magazine - Using Judgment in Business Intelligence (William McKnight, 6/1/2004)
Most business intelligence environments resemble a mishmash (yes, that''s the technical term) of well-architected structures and those that were obviously designed to meet an urgent need regardless of the longer-term consequences. This is true for best practice programs, beginning programs and programs that have experienced multiple failures.

iSixSigma - Art of Integration with the Help of Lean and Six Sigma (Bryan Carey, 4/21/2004)
It may seem un-Six Sigma-like to use art concepts in a discussion of Lean/Six Sigma and the merger of two large financial institutions. But in fact, any serious approach to integrating two complex organizations can benefit from thinking in terms of art as well as science.

iSixSigma - Combining the Power of DMAIC with Testing Processes (Joe Walsh, 4/7/2004)
Companies today make great financial investments in testing their processes and systems. If they want to ensure they can meet customer expectations, it is sensible to bring the testing processes under the DMAIC method of Six Sigma.

DMReview Magazine - Business Intelligence Return on Investment Issues (William McKnight, 4/1/2004)
Many business intelligence (BI) programs calculate the financial ROI, and this calculation is being made with increasing frequency. The very act of considering how BI will improve the bottom line of a company through increasing income and/or reducing expenses will help to put BI on the path to success. This success could be the actual measured financial ROI, or it could just come about as a by-product of the initial focus on ROI.

DMReview - Business Intelligence Continuums (William McKnight, 3/1/2004)
Good people diverge from one another on many of the business intelligence continuums of our day. For each of these, a program must choose its course of action. Understanding the need to compromise in order to keep the program iterative and moving forward is an important first step for each business intelligence practitioner. Laying the groundwork for participation in this process is an essential part of business intelligence leadership.

DMReview Magazine - BI Business Value: Does it Come from the Program or the Projects? (William McKnight, 3/1/2004)
As discussed last month, many programs are attempting to calculate the business value or return on investment from their business intelligence programs. What are you going to do if upper management asks you, "We are funding million for business intelligence per year - what is the company getting out of it?" Are you going to get out those accounting books or find an ROI spreadsheet? Not so fast.

iSixSigma - How to Make Interbank Image Exchange a Reality (Eric Casteline and Tony Kneisley, 2/25/2004)
More and more banks are using Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) to help them to take full advantage of such modern processes as electronic check presentment, thereby reducing expenses and increasing profits.

DMReview Magazine - "Re: William, You’re Mortgage Applicat1on" (William McKnight, 2/1/2004)
Spammers continue to fight for the right to send us e- mail regardless of whether we’ve opted out either specifically or generally. It seems to me that the spammers are getting the ends and the means mixed up. Why would they want to send their message to someone who would ask not to receive it? Studies show the "upside" is a turn-off (or magazine column fodder), not return on investment (ROI).

iSixSigma - Comparing and Blending ISO9000 and Lean Six Sigma (Bryan Carey, 1/28/2004)
Though each methodology was originally seen as distinct from the other, businesses are now coming to see that there are valuable synergies between ISO9000 and Lean Six Sigma. And the two can be blended to achieve maximum effect.

DMReview Magazine - Hybrid Approaches to Business Intelligence (William McKnight, 1/1/2004)
Today, most successful business intelligence (BI) programs are not built by popularized approaches, but by functional, hybrid, modern approaches. Some of the first data warehouses utilized a hybrid approach. The people deploying hybrid approaches to BI are incredible builders of data reservoirs ungoverned by emperors, but creating functionality for some very big enterprises with modern plumbing.