Mike Letulle’s Blog

Finally! There’s something so blogworthy going on that I had to stop working for a few a minutes and make a (sadly) rare post to this thing. Global360 has posted my recent demonstration of our New Account Opening solution. The really short story is that the processes that many financial institutions have around opening a new customer account are laden with issues. A lot of this is due to increased regulatory requirements that can be burdensome, complex, and costly. 

 The idea of properly using technology to not only get around the isssues and enhance the process, but also to make customer relationships more profitable while you are at it has been somewhat of a devoted cause of my manager at Global360, Phil Ayres. He has a Blog dedicated to these concepts. He and I have been hard at work over the last several months building a blueprint (or solution template - call it what you want) on top of our Case360 product which is what I currently specialize in.

Global360 just posted the recent 1 hour webinar we held in which Phil presents the business value and architecture followed by my delivering a 20 minute demonstration of the solution.

I’ve never considered myself much of a conspiracy theorist, but I can’t believe what I saw this morning was just a coincidence.  I’ve watched a lot of early morning TV with my kids (Hey don’t judge me!) I’ve never seen an EAS test on their channel ever before. This morning right in the middle of Noggin’s “Upside-down Show” this big scary siren starts going off and a red banner comes across the screen and starts explaining it is just a test of the emergency alert system, had this been a real emergency..yadda yadda yadda.” My 3 year old was literally scared. Then so was I. I started thinking about how sad it was we lived in a time that we needed to have such a thing, and that more and more the chances of our needing it seem to get hire. And then it hit me. TODAY IS PRIMARY DAY IN TEXAS! Someone must stand to gain by having Texas voters going to the poles today scared for their safety.

I just looked up about when these tests are supposed to be scheduled. Interestingly enough, I read on wikipedia : “RMTs must be performed between 8:30AM and local sunset during odd numbered months, and local sunset to 8:30AM for even months” . And March is month number three - an odd numbered month the last time I checked.  So why am I seeing this test around 6:30am on odd numbered month conveniently right when all these primary voters are getting their kids ready for school before they go vote?

I’d be willing to bet that if you figure out who has the most to gain by voters voting with fear, you’ll find who is behind the EAS test I saw this morning.

Or maybe I’ve seen too many X-files in my day…

This is quickly becoming the new mantra here at Global 360. I’m not sure where it originated exactly, but some of our sales guys in London are taking credit for it. It’s a simple statement that seems like common sense. How can one possibly manage something well if one can’t make the right kind of measurements against it at different times and compare performance? I’m sure it is this exact sentiment that causes many companies to rush to fill their portals with executive balanced score cards and dashboards with traffic lights and gauges. And come on who doesn’t like gauges? High-level managers and executives want to look at a simple dashboard and instantly know how all the different aspects of the business they are responsible for are doing. And they want to know this in as close to real time as possible. In an ideal world, if something important that I am responsible for even starts to look like it may be going off track, I should be proactively alerted via email or text message or whatever channel of my choosing. Companies are, in general, starting to get the importance of measuring the different aspects of their business. BI vendors have been making out pretty well in recent years because of this.

Many business processes require a special kind of business intelligence applied to it for it to be really meaningful. We at Global 360 call this BI that is specialized for process “Process Intelligence”, and we have a product called Insight360 that is ideally suited for it. It has two components to it that are both crucial to this whole measurement concept, simulation and analytics. The simulator allows one to model a high level business process made up of both human and system activities. One can setup participants who can work varying roles, be assigned costs, and even be assigned performance factors such as Mary works 30% faster than Bill. One can set up arrival patterns that describe how work enters the process, and these are so configurable that for example one can assign any one of about fifteen kinds of statistical distributions to it.

Bruce Silver, an independent analyst who focuses on BPM, wrote a pretty interesting post about simulators back in March of this year called Is Simulation Fake? .

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Those of you who have been reading my blog (both of you ) have probably noticed that posts have only been appearing about as often as the seasons change. Well partly this is just because of lack of free time on my part to write things. Those who have ever tried to keep up with a full time job, a marriage, raise two young kids (2 1/2 and 5) , take care of a house, a lawn, a pool, and one crazy-ass dog, will know what I am talking about here.

However, there’s been an additional problem for me as well. I have a bit of an issue writing about work-related things while a member of that company’s marketing team. I worry about how to make it sound like I’m not just a commercial for my own products.  Well I just decided that I don’t care if I do. The truth is I wouldn’t be at Global 360 if I didn’t believe in the company and its products. To quote the Donald:

 “You’ve gotta believe in what you’re selling. If you don’t believe it, if you don’t really believe it yourself, it will never work. It will never sell and you’re going to be miserable.” - Donald Trump from The Apprentice, season one episode nine

So it is highly likely that some of my following business-related posts will sound like Global 360 PR. But I commit this: I will never post anything I don’t 100% believe.

I went to the Austin City Limits music festival this past Friday. I’ve been fortunate to have gone for the past three years straight as it is always one of my wife and my favorite weekends of the year. They have something like 130 bands in the course of 3 days spread over 8 stages in the huge fields of Zilker park. And they always get tons of great bands. I recommend to everyone that will listen to me that if you don’t live here, make plans early in the year to get a nice hotel room here for that weekend, you’ll be glad you did (unless you don’t like hanging in crowds of really cool people listening to really great music for some reason).

Anyway we were unfortunately only able to go to Friday night this year partly because it has gotten so popular that all the babysitters go to it too! But still, we caught some of Crowded House (one of my all-time favorite bands that I’d already seen several times) LCD Soundsystem, who I’d never heard of but rocked, Spoon who were great as expected, and finished the night off about 30 yards away from The Killers who were simply amazing.

Now in my defense, I don’t drive a lot. I work from my home office when not traveling, and when I do travel, I drive to the airport and back, which luckily for me is only a 20 minute drive each way. Therefore I’m missing out on what is most people’s source for learning about new music - the car stereo.

Back when I was a senior in college, I was a college marketing representative for Sony Music (which had just changed its name from CBS Records because of the buy-out). Back then I knew all the new music. I was your go-to guy. It was my job to give out promotional CDs, schmooze with college radio and press people and club owners, and take people back stage to concerts. I miss WZLY (radio station at Wellesley College ) most of all for some reason. But no longer. I’m sorry to say my awareness of hip new music has fallen to quite pathetic levels. So it was a great surprise when watching the Killers when they played just about every song that I ever caught on the radio and loved and wondered who it was. In hindsight that seems pretty dumb as the lead singer, Brandon Flowers, has such a distinct Robert Smith-like voice.  They closed with All These Things I’ve done which was amazing, but the best tune and what I am definitely calling my favorite current song was Mr. Brightside. Unbelievable!!!

 But honestly it isn’t just the bands that make ACL great. It’s the people. Everyone is so chill and easy to get along with. You’ve got about 70,000 people and very little security, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything that resembled a fight there. You gotta love Austinites!

Last fall when I had decided it was time to leave Vignette, I had originally planned to start my own consulting business. In my role there as a principal sales engineer specializing in collaborative process solutions, I got more and more discouraged at Vignette’s lack of strategy, marketing, and quite frankly interest in their collaboration platform. They had acquired it from Intraspect more or less so they could check off the collaboration functions in the portal RFPs they were seeing. Vignette grew up as a web content management company and to this day, that seems to be all they care about. And that’s probably the right call as given their size they need to focus. They made several acquisitions that, in my opinion, they were never able to execute well on. I think a common problem when it comes to software vendor acquisitions is that the purchaser blows the whole budget on the acquisition without leaving enough for proper integration development and marketing after the fact. 

When it came to the collaboration platform, they never really grasped that you had to market focused solutions built on it, and not the platform itself. This was (and still is) the time that Microsoft was pushing SharePoint 2003 full speed ahead and for all intent and purposes, IT shops view that option as free (as it is bundled with most enterprise Microsoft agreements). Even though Vignette Collaboration was a far superior platform in many respects, it’s really hard to beat free. Now that I’ve been working with Sharepoint 2007 for a while, though that is not a statement I would feel comfortable making anymore. Sharepoint 2007 is pretty darn cool. I’ll write a post about that topic later.

The thing about the Vignette platform is, it’s very powerful and easy to build very useful applications quickly on it, but it requires someone who knows what they’re doing. Very few people in Vignette’s professional services group ever got up to speed on it. It got really frustrating when I would sell a great use case for it that would end up either taking forever to implement, or never getting implemented correctly simply because of lack of expertise. I therefore decided to go out on my own as a collaborative solution specialist with initial focus on the Vignette platform. The name of my company was going to be “Full Leverage”. I like the name for a few reasons. One of the things I was going to do first was sell services to customers who already owned the platform but who weren’t fully leveraging what they had. But it speaks to a broader context as well. Most companies do not use what they have wisely in terms of their employee’s (and customers and partners and suppliers) knowledge, ideas, relationships, and expertise. In other words, they don’t get full leverage from these assets. I have a network of friends who are experts on the platform from previous projects and jobs that I could tap into to sub-contract work as well. I was pretty excited at the idea. I was all ready to incorporate when I met with an amazing attorney here in Austin named Joe Fulwiler who explained why doing so was premature if I were initially going to do business as a one-man band. Instead on his advice (of which he gave me an hour for free, and all his advice was that I don’t use any of his services yet which is why I refer to him as amazing) I filed for a dba (doing business as) name in Travis county. 

When I told my current manager (who I had worked for at Vignette for a while)  what I was doing he suggested I work for him instead. Between that time and when I took the position with Global 360 a bunch of other options also surfaced, so it was not an easy decision. Six months into my position at Global 360 I’m very happy I chose what I did. I’m getting exposed to a lot of exciting technology and perhaps I have just drunk the kool-aid, but I really believe that business process optimization is here to stay for a while and only going to get bigger and bigger. And the concept of Full Leverage still applies - most companies have far less than optimal business processes. They still carry reams of paper around, have unneeded gates in their processes, lots of room for error, too much waste time, high defect rates, etc. They are not fully leveraging their employees and technology to optimize their processes.

 So for now, Full Leverage is a domain I own, a dba name I own, and the name of my blog site.

 By the way, I have been amazed at how many people don’t get the reference in the logo. Didn’t you people pay attention in 6th grade history?? Regarding the power of the lever, Archimedes is known for saying “Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.”

I was watching Apollo 13 the other night, which I tend to do almost once a year because I love that movie so much.  One of my favorite lines is when Tom Hanks’ character and his wife are outside after watching the first moon landing and he says “From now on we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it’s not a miracle. We just decided to go.”

 I love that line! I love the simple truth of it. It underlines some of what is best about us. I think it is hard for us to comprehend these days just how far we were from being able to do it when Kennedy made his promise that we would send a man to the moon that decade back in 1961. We hadn’t even achieved orbit yet. The cajones it took for him to stand up there and say that when he did.

We need another JFK. That’s the only way we will ever lose our dependence on foreign oil. Someone needs to just stand up there and commit to it. Then we will achieve it. And when it comes to George W, I can’t believe it when people are surprised that his best suggestion is that car manufactures build cars with slightly better gas mileage and a longer daylight savings time. Never elect an oil man to get rid of oil. I’m not sure if anyone in the current running has that kind of moxie. I’m actually excited about the idea of Bloomberg throwing his hat in - he may have it.  And a self-funded independent not beholding to any party or PAC contributions just seems like the kind of thing this country needs. Anything else is just broken from the start if you ask me.

I think one of the main problems with political issues that take more than a couple terms to fix is that few presidents want to work on and spend money on things that they won’t even be in office for if they work out. That’s why social security and health insurance stay broken. And when is the last time a presidential candidate has even mentioned the welfare state problem our country is still plagued with? But that’s a whole nother conversation. But even if it took a comparative expense to the space program, inventing a cheap clean energy source would be more than worth it. Just think of all the hundreds of billions we spend on wars in the Middle East that we wouldn’t need to spend if they were sitting on top of fields of stuff we just don’t need.

Back in 1999 I worked for Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in their outsourcing division in Wilmington, DE. I joined them for two main reasons. One of these is that I simply wanted a geographic change to move from Houston (which is just too damn hot and humid for me) back to the area I grew up in (Main Line, PA). The other was that having worked for only small System Integrators, I felt that there was a lot in the way of formal project methodologies that I could learn by working for one of the big 5. Well you know the old saying - be careful what you wish for. That place had way too much ‘process’ for my blood. We had meetings about meetings. I’ll never forget when we billed DuPont something like 450 hours for an application improvement I basically did in a day. Not that there was anything fraudulent going on. The team seriously spent that much time meeting about, documenting, and testing the very simple change. That’s one of the reasons I only stayed for 9 months. That and that the bubble was still growing fast and they weren’t sharing equity at the time. But I digress…

While there I spent most of that time working on a Six Sigma project tracking application for DuPont that was based on the Lotus Notes platform. This was the first time I had ever heard of Six Sigma and I thought it was a really cool concept. DuPont was very serious about it too. If I remember correctly one couldn’t even enter a project idea unless it stood to save the company at least $100,000. The application was pretty robust and let one track all aspects of all phases of the projects. It even had complex financial calculations which could export out to Excel for graphs and charts.

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I’m finally doing it. I’m adding content to a blog. Up until this moment I have literally had 3 empty blog accounts with various blog sites. But hey - how can I call myself a collaboration expert when I don’t even have my own blog? I’m not really sure what kind of stuff will end up on here, but my intent is to write things that are interesting to read for other people than just myself. I think most posts will be business related such as ideas and stories about better uses of technology to improve business processes and efficiency. But I’m sure some purely personal posts will find there way up here and I will try to keep things properly categorized as ‘business’ or ‘personal’ or something like that.

So thanks for coming by. I hope you enjoy your visit!