The Better Business analysis Institute presents the Better
Business analysis podcast with Kingsman watch.
Hello and welcome back to the Better Business analysis
podcast. And this session, we're going to
continue on talking about technology and why it's
important for a ba to understand technology.
And the last session we did get down and geeky and really
covered some of the lower level Concepts around computer
science, effectively, you do computer, science degree and 30
minutes this time. So we're going to bring it right
up to the general kind of Enterprise applications that are
used out there. So we're going to talk about
what Erp system is, what a CRM system is.
What a Content management system is and web apps and they're kind
of the fundamental architecture. Technical architecture solution
architecture for like that. And that is is fundamental for
most of the time. Customers in which you're going
to be working with are your clients and it's important to
kind of understand what these packages do, what platforms?
They kind of run on and appreciate the general
functionality, that they provide out of the box and, and also
from a configuration point of view.
So configuration being an interface where you can make
changes to the application or or the or the president.
Product. You then have customization,
which is sometimes not necessarily well-defined, which
I Define as the egg. Microsoft definition, which is
you are doing more than configuring a system, you may be
writing, pseudo code, or you may be integrating with the system,
you're customizing the system for your needs and that
generally involves some level of technical knowledge.
And then is coding of course, which is fully customized fully
specialized, for maybe use case, that is required for your
particular problem, that you're solving.
So those those different Seas. I guess we'll cover those off.
But this session we will be talking about the Enterprise
products and applications and Platforms in which most
companies who are bigger than a A small company will be using
and actually small companies use these but they might be just the
cut down versions online as assess product and hopefully
that gives you some insights. So when you go into another
organization you hear that they're using type of one of
these applications, you'll have a better understanding and where
to start and what kind of some of the challenges you might
experience. Okay, so welcome and without
further Ado, we'll get straight into it.
So what does an Erp system and Erp system stands for enterprise
resource planning? And that's a fancy word, which
is really means a system that has a whole lot of components
that work together to run your business, your back into it.
Usually associated with warehousing or operations
processes manufacturing. And I guess that's the point of
the resource planning planning resources across your
Enterprise. For many different types of Erp
systems commonly you might find some, in the Microsoft Family,
sappers a massive Erp system, which can be configured for
pretty much any solution there are kind of local, governments
software, that's almost an Erp system.
And so there's a lots of Rangers and vendors who create these
systems and they usually bigger players.
So it took about Oracle, we talk about set which will that
Microsoft each one of them. The idea of those systems is
that they can be configured to meet the needs of your
particular business and you pay a lot for that.
That's what we talk about when we talk about Erp system.
Now, what is a CRM system? Serum stands for customer
relationship management. It evolved from really a Content
management system and no organizations and contacts link
link to them the customer and then integrated the sales
process. Yes, and Lead opportunities and
orders. And most of the serums you see.
Today, Zoho, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics.
They have expanded out of just customer relationship
management, and really allow you to do everything in relation to
your experience with a customer. So, that might be marketing,
that might be customer portal activities, and these are always
always really wrapped around. The interaction with external
stakeholders. So as opposed to a set Erp
system which is your back-end processes and usually focused on
your internal stuff, this is usually the system that holds
your customer information and your contact information and a
lot of these platforms integrate with one another.
So Microsoft will you know so you're both the cerium and an
Erp salesforce's integrates with Erp systems and set will do the
same. Now the third application,
that's very common, across the Enterprise and actually this one
anyone with a website will generally have and that is a
Content management system, so a CMS you sometimes hear.
Now again, this is the generic term for this type of
Technology, but you'll generally have brand names the same for us
cerium and an enterprise system. So, a lot of people talk about
Salesforce, Really, it's the serum system which is trying to
do that Erp, and trying to do better content management.
But primarily as theorem system the same for Dynamics and the
Microsoft realm. When we talk about a CMS system,
however, the content management system is a system that manages
content, that's externally focused.
So this would be your website primarily so there's a very
popular senses. Mm sorry.
See you Is called WordPress. You may have also heard of
Shopify or wax. And these are all content
Management systems that allows a business or organization to
create websites by dragging and dropping and hosting content and
managing external users to their system.
So, this is your face of your business and when you have a CMS
A stem a Content management system and you have Annette's
hosting your website. That's what you wish website is
used. I use that to create it and to
update it that can integrate generally with these other three
fundamental applications, I talked about.
So for example, Microsoft Dynamics has a feature called
power apps and that can be used externally.
But this power-ups portals, which is an external Component
that allows you to build website, a customer portal.
And there is slight slight difference between the external
public facing website, like, when you go onto Google and
search for someone's domain, and a customer portal, we call that
almost an Extranet because you need to usually log in to access
that content. But effectively, you've got
external content managed by your customer relationship management
system that may have some Croatian with your CRM system.
HubSpot would be a great example.
A lot of users used for, for example, when you fill in your
contact form on your website, that information May flow
through as a lead into your serum system and then your CRM
system. Usually there might be a
connection around the order fulfillment, or the kind of
production site to an Erp system primarily and the other round.
I'm that is, is a usually, a module within the CRM or Erp
system would be your financial area every company or
organization. Generally runs.
What's called a general ledger, Ledger of accounts that allows
you to manage your money coming in and your money going out and
that Financial module is quite critical and it usually lives in
one of these applications, or you might have what they call an
S financial management system that separate to those.
That is very good at managing finance and it's managed by the
financial Team. All the accountants, let's vary.
So we look at the top, you've got the sixth almost externally
facing system, which you can change, which is your seam, CMS
your content management system that host your website.
You might have the CRM system that integrates with that which
is taking customer data like signing up for new accounts.
During the sales process managing your contacts database
and then below that in terms of your fulfillment of orders or
your production side and some of the backend functions like
Finance you might have an Enterprise management, sorry and
resource management system which an Erp system which allows you
to do back in functions. So those three components are
very common obviously the financial management side like I
said, might be It will part of your Erp and they that's kind
of, very a very common architecture for a large
Enterprise. Now, they are the containers of
applications, those three fundamental applications.
However, when it comes to the CRM side and when it comes to
the customer side has to management side and then back in
side which is your Erp. They may not be just one system.
They might be a collection of Of systems that talk to one
another, you met what we call decouple those different
functions into systems that suit your business better and they
may all be integrated through apis or through integration
software. But I think it's important to
think about those layers. They generally relate to some
conceptual layers, which is your front end, you know, your middle
layer and then you're kind of your kind of back office layer.
And then of course, Data that supports all that.
As what you generally also find is that, if you choose the type
of one of these products, for example, you decided to work
with Microsoft and may may make sense for you to, you know, get
their serum system, their Erp system and find a product that
from a Content management system or a website product that
integrates with that negatively, that will make Your architecture
more simple and obviously it will be cheaper to integrate
those products because they're all made by the same vendor and
they'll come together. She's usually fine when you are
working with a kind of a Midstream organization kind of a
small medium-sized business which is very common.
In New Zealand. They will go with one vendor to
when they when they decide what kind of products they want in
that space. So their architecture and the
cost to integrate these two I listened what I haven't talked
about. So those are when we talk about
those three fundamental systems that most Enterprises have to
kind of run their major data areas where major processes.
You've also got what we call product to productivity Suite or
productivity tools and they are tools that we use just to do
normal things in business or to run an organization.
So these are products like email.
Products like a wording, a word processing tool, you know,
sheets or an Excel tool, presentation layer and we're now
seeing in that space and evolution of maybe a team
collaboration space where you can chat and you can share
documents. So what's very common there.
As for an organization to usually choose one of two, many
years, one is the Microsoft Family so Microsoft 365, which
used to be called Office, Microsoft Office, and and you
should know, I mean, if you're in business, you'll know that
that comes with things like Word and Excel and PowerPoint.
And some email Outlook Outlook, is their product and now teams
as part of their base, sweet and teams is like an application,
which allows you to do video calling.
But also share and chat with documents and teams actually
sits on a product called SharePoint, which was their old
document management and actually, in some ways team team
product. So Microsoft has this office
suite, which it uses for its productivity.
So basically daily operation or it.
And, and that works very well on Windows, which is also owned by
Marxist haft. And also works on Mac and then
you also have the Google Google Suite.
So I think it's called they change their names pretty pretty
frequently, but I think it's called Google for business and
Google, for business provides all the same kind of functions,
usually at a lighter touch, but usually easier to use for
businesses as well. So that's almost an alternative.
If you don't, you could go the Google way, he go to the
business and there's some pros and cons on those products,
depending on what your business does.
Now, if you were to, for example, have Microsoft Office,
and teams and officers being your productivity suite for all
your employees, and obviously, that cost money, and there's a
cost Factor there. Some of these three fundamental
tools. I talked about the Enterprise
might have a CMS solution, content management system, your
Erp and CRM. If you were to choose a
Microsoft version of those, or one that at integrated with
Microsoft, it may make life easier because you've already
using a Microsoft product for your productivity Suite.
So, an example of that is, if you were doing a using a
Microsoft CRM system, and you wanted to send an email, it
would, there would be a slight advantage.
And obviously, we've got government regulations that that
try to stop these companies from having a monopoly and forcing
you to use all of their products and have a choice.
But I can tell you if you're using Microsoft 365 as your
office, you know, your productivity suite and you have
Dynamics 365, which is their CRM product, they will integrate
very well together and there would be an advantage for you.
Two to go that way. And it would mean that you as a
as a as a worker or other users within the organization would
get very familiar with the kind of ux Azure the top where the
toolbar was and how to perform functions.
And there would be advantage to go that way.
So I am kind of getting into architecture and how you select
these products but these are things you need to think about.
Now that is kind of the main, the main applications and tools.
An Enterprise will have those three.
I talked about fundamental ones and a productivity suite and I
did mention one other common word you might hear, which is
Records and document management system.
You hear less about these these days.
But they have they were common and, you know, you may have
heard about the product SharePoint, which is one of
these. But there are many out there and
they vary depending on the complexity and need, you have to
manage your records. And a record is is defined as
something that you need to keep for us.
In a matter of time, there's lots of rules around how long
you need to keep those. And if you're a government
Department, you may need to keep records of your transactions in
your business for a long period of time.
So we usually take those away from our productivity tools like
you know, the everyday documents we write and we usually save
those types of Records. So they're important to keep a
hold of could be contracts for example, or it could be
employment records and maybe in another container another
system, which is called a System and you might find that your Erp
system integrates with one of those or your serum.
And I think it's more common, these days that your
productivity Suite, the ones that you use to create
documents, have a kind of a back-end function for managing
documents and in the Microsoft world, when you save a document,
you can save documents to SharePoint.
And that, as a one of these document Management Systems I
talked about, so, I've talked about a lot of systems there
might be quite confusing. However, yeah, it's important to
know, there's these bigger systems, these kind of run the
processes around your business and we're going to come to that
soon. And then you have these kind of
working system's for producing documents or any ad hoc
information or logging in or creating email, for example,
which is your productivity suite and wished your your working
area. Okay, so that's cool.
But what is, how does that kind of help when you're a be a
knowing that? Well, when you do a change
program so you're not touching on necessarily the daily
operations so you don't generally change your operating
system, you might change your devices but you won't really
change your productivity Suite that often you might change that
every 10 years. Once you've decided to go with
Microsoft, you kind of baked in with office, or if you decided
to go with Google, you baked them with Google.
That doesn't happen that often. And you don't generally change
your Erp system or your serum or your CMS system and your website
often either because they're very expensive to change and you
know, you might there's a lot of work involved and making those
changes. So, once your architecture is
put into place and we use the word architecture to talk about
the systems and how they talk to one another just like a house,
the dark kind of set. For a while, but we might
change, what we might change quite often, is the
configuration or how we perform these processes and these bigger
systems in these, you know what I said, Sim custom content
management system website. And we'll talk about web apps.
Just now, the Erp or the CRM system, we enter data in those
systems and we may change our processes, our main business
processes will generally live in those systems or the or at least
those containers of systems. I just said the word web app.
So what is a web app? I guess we refer to them to apps
on our phone and the word web is as almost a legacy term because
everything's on the web. Now, everything's connected.
And we were to add a web app that generally means
customer-facing or public. So the same technology that's
used to create websites to take him.
Nation to host that information. So, your Serum is as your
content management system tools, can be used to create specific
web apps that do things. And I think it's very important
to just think about an example, would be a phone application
that you might have. So, we'll just take the example
of using Outlook again. So, actually, Microsoft Outlook
if you go onto Ooh, the web page for Outlook if you go to
offers.com, you will be using web app.
So the experience that you have on your web browser, that is a
web and then you have your local version of Outlook which is
installed and install that that's kind of difference.
And you also have the mobile app version of that, which is on
your phone and for a developer who's developing all those
products when they're trying to make.
Consistent. They generally use the same look
and feel the same style sheet and actually ideally similar
code, which can be deployed in all those different channels.
All those different destinations usually find the mobile
technology and the web technology is very similar and
those that are installed locally on your computer usually
involved, a completely different methodology or even code set.
So web application is just something you can use on the
web. And it has a front end and it
might have some server and which it or apis on which it is using
to populate the information on that web app and it might send
information back through those apis to various systems or
databases and servers. So when you hear web apps, a lot
of companies create specific apps to perform certain
functions and they might be hosted or assistive all via
their website. So their public facing That's
what we have is we have apps. So I'm just going to Chuck that
into the same container as I see as our content management and
web site area. When I talk about this
customer-facing stuff, I consider that in the area then
we've got our ER our CRM system and possibly an Erp or a
back-end system. Now those areas like I just said
they will be that will be where we our customers or our our our
ourselves. They'll Staff are able to
perform these business processes.
So if we just parked there for a second and look at an
organization, they will have many business processes in which
they carry out. A great starting point, is to
look at the apqc model, which is the American process control and
quality control Institute organization.
If you go to the website, they will specify kind of generic
process sets that most organizations or industry is
might use So I'm just going to refer to that, as we talk about
how we use these systems are actually 12 top level systems in
the generic apqc model and they range from managing your
technology managing your financial assets managing
customers and whatnot. If you like they these 12
processes fit together and cover everything that a business would
do at a very generic level. And and if you read add that and
you look at that process hierarchy.
You may not like the language and you might think it your
business different but it's a really good generic set for
having this conversation. Those process areas that
hierarchy we have talked about proceeds, hierarchy.
Before you would generally find that that you can associate
steps within those process areas with the systems.
So for example, when we talk about Sales marketing or
managing a sales and marketing that process would generally
always be managed within your CRM system because your CRM
system is where the sales and marketing components and
features are built in. So, yes, has the technology side
the features. So there's, you know, ability to
create a marketing list, identify who you want to Market,
to create the marketing collateral.
Send it out, and that Her is generally in your CRM or with an
app that integrates with it like SurveyMonkey for example or
MailChimp. And then you've got your sales
process which is your identification of leads, the
conversion to opportunity, working the opportunity down to
closing the sale which turns into an order and that process
that sales pipeline is managed within a CRM system typically,
and so, both sales and marketing worked.
That because those they do naturally as a function within
an organization and those two features are highly, you know,
99%, you'll find those features within a serum system because
they use the, they are the ones who identify customers and
they're the ones who Market to your customers and contacts.
So you can start to really as a ba, see how some of these main
functions at a very high level will fit Within In these various
three fundamental systems I talked about before obviously,
so there might be some crossover.
So capturing new leads in a reactive way when a lead comes
to our website. For example, they may be very
interested in whatever service were providing and they might
fall in a contact form and you will generally find that it
makes sense that a serum system can spit out some code or Form
that's hosted on our website, a secure form.
So when that information is entered and our website hosted
on our content management system, that that lead
information may go one way and be stored straight into our
serum system. That's a very common use case
these days. And so you can have, you know,
there might be a combination of systems that may may satisfy all
the processes Within These groups but you can Actually map
them. And so this is the and you say
why Ben, why is that useful one? It helps you understand these
technology this technology stack and how processes can it with
it. But the reverse is true.
So if you are looking to work on a piece of a project or a
program to implement a CRM system, you should know through
this conversation and through more research that these These
are the functions, and these are the process areas and which the
serum will operate. And that's very powerful because
we can start to now say are there any other systems that
exist in our architecture that already overlap and this area
already provided provide these functions?
And so we need to look at those the scope of our project and we
should know that maybe we should be using what we call the out of
box functionality of these tools to do these basic functions.
If you and I think that there's a bit of a line here, I'll come
back to the I'll make a statement I'll come back and
explain what I mean I'm a big believer that you shouldn't
customize. Or code customize and create
custom code for areas of your business or organization that's
quite generic. And and that's a bold statement
and it also is can be subjective because people can think they're
quite unique in their sales process, but they're not.
And as a ba, you need to really work out with the business owner
work out, what is different from the process or pro project
you're working on and What needs what we require.
Special requirements, effectively, if the requirement
that there's two types I guess is requirements in terms of
requirements that you're quite happy that our high level that
could be met by out-of-the-box functionality in, you have
requirements that unique that you either need to change and
say we're not going to meet those because it's going to be
too expensive to implement or they're so unique that we need
to do that their must-haves and that we need now need to do
custom coding to meet those specific one.
And so you will have different requirements will fall into
different areas and hopefully all of them are at the highest
level and your business requirement level such that you
don't need to spend any money kind of coding or doing any
custom code, but you can just configure a system to meet that.
So I'm going to give you an example about what I'm talking
about with a Serum with this kind of Syria Miriam.
We're talking about managing marketing and sales and our
sales and marketing stakeholders.
Sigh. Look what they want to do is
they want to be able to manage leads and opportunities.
And I want to better Market to our customers and they're
currently using spreadsheets. They may have you were to go
deep with them and ask them what their requirements were at the
kind of user story level. They might say well I'll give
you some examples real real life than life stuff where they'll
say I'll win a new winner new customer comes in, we want to
capture the sand. I want to send an email and by
having that conversation, ocean at the lower level, you're
actually doing a disservice Especially if you haven't
selected a product or eat what you should be doing, is really
having a high-level conversation and asking a straight-up.
Why question and saying, why are you, why would you like to put
this system in or this process in this new system?
And I say we because we're doing sales and marketing and
spreadsheets and we're doing them and other applications and
all over the place and say, we want one centralized system,
you'll say cool. When you talk about sales and
marketing at a general level, do you just want common sales and
marketing functions? Don't ask them specifically just
say, you can you give me an example of another organization
you work? Can I just roll up on?
Can we just step back a bit and start talking about the highest
level processes? And it's very common that in a
sales and marketing area that team specially if your team
isn't that isn't your core business?
Has say you were in the the market of selling vacuum
cleaners your sales and marketing highest level
processes or functions. I would guess are not that
unique, the same as every other company that sells Arkham
consumer product. So therefore we shouldn't be
spending too much time going deep in that area and when we do
our requirements we should keep that at a high level for that
area, which means it allows Us to focus on what does matter
where we should go to lower their requirements.
And then we just really need to focus on the change management
side of teaching our customers, sorry, our both our customers
and our internal staff, how to use the out of box functionality
of that various product. So I could think of HubSpot or
Salesforce or Microsoft CRM, they'll do a pretty damn good
job of doing sales and marketing and of our sales and marketing
team, just need basic sales and marketing.
Functions, any of those tools will be okay and they'll do what
you need them to do, right? That's not going to be critical
in an organization where your company, which makes vacuum
cleaners because your actual unique business process is the
construction design of the vacuum cleaner.
And so your sales and marketing process could be generic.
And so therefore you as a ba need to be aware about where
you're spending your time and energy to capture those unique
requirements, And by having this technology, understanding that,
most serums can provide sales and marketing functions out of
the box without any need for additional cost or and it won't
add any value to tweak those. Then we can now we know that
from a technology point of view, we can persuade the business to
spend, or to focus their time and their workshop time and
their user story development time on areas which are more
important AKA process. Acer's around manufacturing,
back in cleaners, I'll cover the soft in a specific podcast.
When I talk about how you decide where you should spend your
money during an organization, but I just really wanted to give
you this one example about how business processes relate to
these core systems and how you as a ba should understand these
systems and the general functions.
They provide at a very high level doesn't matter about the
name or as it sells for sir. Mark soft.
They all do the same these days really and understand that when
you're generally talking to your stakeholders and users that the
functions that they want, which are just at a very high level of
your implementing one of these platforms that they're the,
they're out about out of the box.
Functionality is probably going to be enough for you for your
generic functions, okay? So there was a little bit around
technology there. Was a little bit around how that
related to process and hopefully you're a little bit wiser.
When you hear these acronyms, you hear Erp or your CRM or you
see his CMS. We have financial management
system. Ask when you hear some of these,
sometimes you hear a slight variations of like XR M or E RS
which they're actually just mean, very something very
similar to vendors, decided to be about funky with xrm is very
popular at the moment, which means anything a ship management
but it's primarily the same as a serum.
So by having this understanding of this technology stack, you'll
be, you'll become a better ba. You don't really need to
understand how these systems operate at the user level.
You just need to understand the functions, they provide Okay,
that's enough for today. I'll catch you next time.