This conversation was started on linked in group Back Office Best Practice Forum but it is worthy of a mention in our blog.

eg’s CEO, Elizabeth Gooch summarised thoughts as follows:

“One of the issues here is that ‘back office’ means different things to different people. It can include many different functions from a single sales support person in a regional office to groups of people processing customer orders, claims or mortgages, financial transaction processing, even HR and payroll processing. For eg it means the people behind the front line where transactions are processed that are critical to delivering the customer experience but are often unseen by customers.

Unlike call centres, where the one main input channel is the telephone, work can come in many shapes and forms via many channels. As a result transactional processing is vastly more complicated and difficult to manage than the call centre will ever be. However, transactional processing has the scale and scope to deliver great operational efficiencies so investing time and money to performance manage these back office areas should reap significant financial rewards – businesses need to reduce cost.

I disagree that there is an emerging class of Back Office Workforce Optimisation tools are designed to accommodate the issues in the Back Office. Back office planning is not the same as front office and it is this misconception that prevents WFM tools being used effectively in the back office as they do not address core requirements of back office operating environments (latency, backlogs, multiple channels etc). There is only one back office product on the market that properly addresses all of the requirements of the back office and since it has been around for many years it can hardly be called ‘emerging’.

Adrian’s point about the cultural and behavioural challenges are true and should not be ignored. The tools will only give you partial benefits. It is the Managers and Team Leaders using those tools that will deliver the real benefits with the right training.

I think the biggest factor that stops people using WFM for back office planning is that ultimately these are not fit for purpose. End users with back-office WFM needs should ensure that the solution they select can effectively meet all of their requirements for specific back-office processes, ideally with purpose built functionality that works”.

In response to this one of the members posted:

What a great post. I can’t comment on the different vendors but you make some really great points. Back office environments are so diverse – even in my own organisation I’ve yet to find two that are the same! Thus we use bespoke methods to plan for them in order to make our planning relevant and meaningful.

Read the full conversation http://linkd.in/tbLdqG or comment here on your thoughts.

This question was posted on the Professional Planning Forum Back Office Linked in Group and here is eg’s response:

I think that your question has two points to it. Firstly which back office solutions can use the cloud rather than having to rely on desk-top applications to capture relevant back office data. Secondly, which solutions also provide sufficient flexibility to integrate with existing solutions such as WFM. eg’s back office optimisation software suite provides the most complete functionality on the market whilst delivering guaranteed benefits together with being fully accessible from the cloud. Standard integration components are also included that can use a secure gateway to our cloud service to allow data exchange with our back office solutions. I would be more than happy to share further details either directly; through this post or at the upcoming PPF Best Practice Seminar in Altrincham on 3 November.

We know the temptation of using eg production data for testing, training or support because you often want the same volume, variety and type of data which is hard to re-create.  But using production data backups without the necessary security measures, is potentially in breach of regulations and compliance laws.

Even when data is stored in a test or development environment it still needs to be protected against security breaches – this can often be overlooked.  The same issues arise when you want training environments, or when you copy data to investigate issues.

Fines of up to £500,000 can to be issued by the UK Information Commissioners Office for serious security breaches – and regulators are getting tough.

Are you protected?

* Overcome these issues and carry on testing with backups of your live data in eg work manager®/eg operational intelligence® WITHOUT THE RISK – by applying eg work manager® de-sensitisation

* Ensure legal, secure data management for test, training and support activities.

* Avoid serious security breaches and subsequent fines and penalties.

If you want a no obligation review of your eg data management just complete the form below or call 01785 715772.

Promises, promises, promises….with the proliferation of BPM, BI and Continuous Improvement initiatives do management really understand what their true operational intelligence requirements are?

We tend to over emphasise the roll of technology yet fail to fully appreciate the fundamentals that truly differentiates day to day operational excellence from “betting the bank” on the latest technological fad.

Too many project-based initiatives that focus on improving efficiency and effectiveness do not sustain long after the relevant project has completed – I have heard this time and time again.

How is one able to address the following in a single focused initiative with quantifiable results as rapidly as 2, 5 months after commencement:

• Internal and external service level compliance
• Risk based quality framework
• Transformation of management’s capability to run the day to day operations
• Improved productivity by between 20 and 50%
• Reduced costs

while focusing on real-time operational activity with the existing processes and technologies?

Please share your experience with me at tonycohn@egsa.co.za  as I hear more and more often that promises of such results often fail to deliver.  Even when we do know what we are looking for….

Recently I have found myself attending an increasing number of webinars.  Some have been to help me learn new skills and keep up to date with Marketing tools, others have been hosted by analysts or industry experts to help with market research and some have been organised by potential suppliers to help me understand the products and services they have on offer.

I started to think about whether webinars are a positive or negative trend: yes they are convenient, ‘green’ in the sense you have immediate access to anyone/any company anywhere in the world without spending money or wasting energy on travel and you have the ability to quickly capture and share new information with your wider team.

But on the other hand, web meetings and web conferences are not suitable for all types of gatherings.  Human contact plays an import role in relationship building with customers and suppliers and should not be underestimated.  There is often no substitute for face-to-face contact, particularly at the start of an important business relationship and for the purpose of networking.  

Would you buy from a new supplier without meeting them in person, only via web contact?  Do we need to achieve a balance between face-to-face and web contact?  I would be really interested to know what you think.

A key element of my role as a software developer at eg is to keep up-to-date with ever-changing and developing technologies as these are essentially the tools of our trade.  I intend to write technical posts for the blog around changes and developments in the world of software.  If you have any feedback, please leave a comment and I will respond.

Retrieving data is probably the most important function of any development effort, and apart from many third party tools, Microsoft have released a couple of innovations related to representing and querying data with .NET 3.5 Service Pack 1.  The developer, now more than ever, has a myriad of ways to communicate with a database.  This post delves into these new technologies.

With the release of Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 many new data access features were added to ADO.NET 2.0 and there are now substantially more new data-related technologies and components than delivered by any .NET Framework and Visual Studio version since 1.0.

These changes have a common set of goals for the developer.  Foremost reducing the amount of code required to perform data related tasks and to reduce or eliminate what’s often called the impedance mismatch between the code for managing data, which usually involves Structured Query Language (SQL), and object- oriented (OO) programming.

What are these technologies, how do they relate to one another?

The first is the new Entity Data Model exposed as part of the ADO.NET Entity Framework.  The Entity Framework and its related designers, wizards and tools abstracts the relational (logical) schema of the data that is stored in a database and presents its conceptual schema which supports an upper layer of custom business objects, which can represent a domain model.

Furthermore a set of extensions were added to the .NET Framework for integrating queries into the programming language known as LINQ.  Language Integrated Query (LINQ) extensions were added to the Visual Basic 9.0 and C# 3.0 languages and compilers provide developers with a set of standard query operators to query a variety of data sources with a standard query language similar to SQL. LINQ extensions to VB and C# are said to implement the LINQ pattern.

ADO.NET Data Services Framework (formerly Project Astoria) enables developers to make data available as a simple Representational State Transfer (REST) Web service with Atom Publication (AtomPub or APP) format or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as the wire format.  EF is Astoria’s preferred data source; LINQ to SQL or other LINQ-enabled data sources create read-only Astoria services.

ASP.NET Dynamic Data (DD) is a framework for auto generating complete data-intensive Web sites from a LINQ to SQL or LINQ to Entities data source.  DD is a highly enhanced version of an earlier project named BLINQ.  DD can create an administrative Web site for a complex database in a few minutes by a process known as scaffolding.

What bodes for the future of Data Access?  Microsoft envisions an Entity Data Platform that enables customers to define a common Entity Data Model across data services and applications. The Entity Data Platform is a multi-release vision, with future versions of reporting tools, replication, data definition and security all being built around a common Entity Data Model.

With version 4.0 of the .NET Framework waiting in the wings it will be interesting to see how Microsoft moves towards its Data Access Strategy.