Talent (aka high value resourcing)

Excluding the meteoric rise of Google (just turned 10!), Microsoft has to be the greatest software organisation on the planet to date. Early and clear vision, utter market dominance, speed of development, and tenacious competitiveness points to extremely high capability and a very unusual agility in such a large and complex company. Great people, strong leadership.  Enough said really.

From Nathan Myhrvold, former Chief Scientist, Microsoft “The top software developers are more productive than average software developers not by a factor of 10X or 100X, or even 1,000X, but 10,000X.”

Exaggeration? Perhaps.  But there is no doubt that the spectrum between average, good and great technology people is significant.  Getting the mix right for any project teams is a ’success factor’.  Big time. Cue our ClearPoint value of ‘Talent Trumps Low Cost Everytime’.

It may sound altruistic.  The fact is that many kiwi firms can’t afford and/or don’t require the talent fulltime. ClearPoint exists to create an environment that energetic, talented people want to be part of, our clients want to work with, and together we are inspired to create and deliver great work.  Why?  Because there are endless ways technology and innovation and transfrom and add value to NZ businesses – and successful NZ companies are great for all of us!

Tech people rock!

Our values (High technology, talent, kiwi scale, etc) reflect how we are into technology people. Tech’s are cool and from from time to time we like to get together to shoot the breeze and talk about the interesting stuff that people are doing/seeing/hearing about.

Last night ClearPoint hosted our second ‘Drinks with Interesting Tech people’ at ClearPointHQ. RabidGremlin was kind enough to chat to us all about the Google programming competition for the mobile Android platform. An excellent interesting walk-through thoroughly enjoyed by all. Think maybe he may have motivated a few more entrants.

Next get together will be in a month or two. Email me if you are interested in coming along.

Technology New Zealand

Last Thursday ClearPoint we guest presented at the Auckland ICT Cluster.

In keeping with our core organisation values, we presented ICT New Zealand. In essence, this presentation captures our belief that technology has a critical role to play in supporting New Zealand’s economic prosperity – for all businesses big or small.

The general approach is to look at international themes and local pressures to put into context ICT strategy and emerging trends and how they can add value to New Zealand businesses. We see enormous potential in coupling kiwi “No8″ design flair with the very cheap, highly commoditised utility computing services available internationally. The key we believe is getting design right, leveraging technology and thinking beyond our shores.

Governance….Shared Services…..Local Authorities

A flurry of activity amongst NZ’s Auckland Regional and Local Authorities as the Royal Commission http://www.royalcommission.govt.nz prepares to digest and deliver their verdict on the next “super city” for the Region.

A combination of both national and local politics will inevitably prevail.

Will the end result deliver a sustainable and more efficient governance model which makes the rate payers of the region happier with improved services whilst better utilising the limited financial resources available?

Perhaps a transitional arrangement is required allowing all to understand the roadmap, consolidate leadership within the region’s support service functions and move in a co-ordinated manner toward:

• standardised systems
• smarter processes
• great capability
• a culture of excellence

Rather than wait for the output from the Commission – don’t our ratepayers need something done now?

Technology Design

Design is a core brand attribute of ClearPoint. The word itself means many things to many people.

Great design, for us, is about a certain naturalness of use. For the person experiencing the design, everything just seems to make sense. Conspicuously, it can be characterised feature-wise as much by what-is-in, as what-is-left-out. At it’s nub, design is carefully considered thought about how a solution (solution= process+capability+technology) is going to be used. It’s our view that design time is where the real intellectual creativity comes in, and why we believe so much in the value of talent.

Design talent, coupled with technology and strong leadership, is absolutely the key to implementing great things. When mixed with new ideas, it sparks innovation and the results are spectacular from creating new markets (SaaS ERP), to breakthrough products (iPod, iPhone), to dramatic changes to existing business models (airline online booking).

And what’s more – there is latent demand for (re)design everywhere. We are constantly thinking, challenging and wondering. Which industry is next?

SaaS PSA Tools

At ClearPoint we have a lot of experience at managing professional services (PS) firms, specifically in the IT consulting, business consulting and management advisory space. There a class of software tools, which are designed to provide the information PS managers require and to help automate the management of PS firms known as PSA – professional services automation.

Over time, we have evaluated many PSA systems, have implemented several and we love 1, namely OpenAir (www.openair.com).

We selected and are in the process of implementing OpenAir to replace our current system to support and automate several areas of our business, including:

• Timesheeting – time entry, approval workflows
• Projects – project management, task management and control
• Expenses – entry and reimbursement tracking
• Invoicing – we run “pre-billing” in OpenAir and export the information to our accounting system for invoice production and distribution.
• Resourcing – in my experience the most thorny issue of PSA and we look forward to seeing just how useable and effective OpenAir is for this tricky area. Excellence in resourcing is central to any PS firm and no doubt will be the feature of many discussions to come.

So what are the typical criteria most organisations need to consider to select a PSA system? For us the key ones are:

1. SaaS. Well, we currently have no IT infrastructure at all. We use Google Apps for email, intranet/wiki, web-based document sharing, website hosting etc etc. And it’s free for up to 100 users. So we need a hosted option.
2. Per Month cost. It’s based the on number of active users each month so you can expand and contract as projects demand. And it eases our cashflow requirements.
3. New features. I guess at ClearPoint we know a lot about PS management and OpenAir have been very “open” to our suggestions for new requirements, and they have promised add our new features into future roll outs. Of course being SaaS based, we don’t have to do anything to install new features – they simply appear and we can use them.
4. Integration. Primarily with our SaaS based accounting system called Xero (www.xero.com). We are starting with a simple export/import integration mechanism and plan to fully automate the integration over time.

We’ll share our experience of the implementation over time and we are interested in the view and experiences of both PS firms and corporates in this space.

We arrive!

Well. Here we are courtesy of WordPress.com.

This is obviously our blog home. It is our intention to post regular news updates, related work items, commentary, public presentations and general commentary as it relates to our business at ClearPoint.