Information management

Eric Elliott
Director of Information
Technology,
OPTI Canada

An interview with Eric Elliott, Director of Information Technology, OPTI Canada

BearingPoint took sometime to sit down with executives in a series of discussion to get their insights into information management. This conversation is with Eric Elliott, director of information technology for OPTI, a Canadian energy company. The company, with its partner Nexen Inc., has formed a joint venture to develop oil sands projects in the Athabasca region.

He joined the company in early 2007 to help strengthen IT governance and operational processes. Given the highly regulated nature of the oil and gas industry in Canada, Eric is particularly focused on the content and document management challenges the company must address to operate successfully in the country.

In the conversation he discusses the importance of implementing an effective information management strategy at a start-up organization operating in the highly regulated fossil fuels industry. Including specifics on a current information management project they are undertaking and leading practices in dealing with your partners on information management and what lies ahead.

Read the full conversation

View the rest of the series

Healthcare Provider Portals: Channel Integration Strategies

Max Duprat
Senior Manager
BearingPoint

Join BearingPoint Senior Manager, Max Duprat, as he explores the first in a series of podcasts which will address how leading life sciences organizations are adopting a customer centric approach to marketing through HEALTHCARE PROVIDER PORTALS, or HCPs. What we’re seeing is that many life sciences companies’ sales and marketing practices relating to customer interactions are losing their effectiveness, while the health care providers and consumers are continuously turning to the internet for medical information. So many life sciences companies are creating health care provider portals to address these challenges. And once the decision’s been made to develop an HCP portal, it begs the question “Should we develop the portal as a channel extension or as a stand alone brand?”

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Throughout this podcast you will learn the key considerations and lessons learned when deciding whether to make the HCP Portal a channel extension or stand alone channel. We also explore how your decision will impact future operations of the portal. Through working with many life sciences companies, those who’ve adopted a customer-centric approach to marketing are finding they can establish themselves as trusted partners, enhance the customer experience and enrich brand loyalty. Tune in to learn the secret to their success and ways to bring these strategies into your own environment.

A New Perspective on C-Level Cooperation

Chief Financial Officers and Chief Marketing Officers are not traditionally thought of as best friends. It might have something to do with the juxtaposition of left and right brain thinking, or differing views on how to measure the performance of marketing programs and their impact on the bottom line that keeps these two executives from sitting next to each other at the lunch table.

Yet this relationship is becoming more important as both executives realize the value of more specific marketing and customer information to help drive strategic decisions; a merger of the creative and analytical minds can clearly help improve performance and fuel growth.

Many clients of BearingPoint’s World-Class Finance practice were asking about this, so we decided to partner with APQC, conduct a survey, and report our findings on the topic. You’re invited to read the resulting report: “CFOs and CMOs: partners in information management”.

One of the disconnects highlighted in the report is around the availability of data for customer segmentation and profitability analysis: while 80% of CFOs said they are providing sufficient data, less than 40% of CMOs said they are getting the data they need to make good decisions.

We hope these findings are helpful. Please feel free to share your comments and ideas here once you’ve read the research.

Author: Monica Huber

Effective Change Management: Building your internal change capability

Seventy percent of all large-scale change initiatives fail to achieve their anticipated business benefit ¹. That is an alarming rate of unsuccessful projects. This failure rate translates into billions of dollars in lost productivity, wasted resources, opportunity costs and rework—not to mention the human cost of lost jobs.

Companies that learn to manage change and consistently deliver expected returns from their large-scale change programs can gain competitive advantage. One survey revealed that 80 percent of CEOs called the ability to change a competitive advantage, and 82 percent identified change management as a business priority².

This recognition of the importance of effective change management is prompting many companies to build an internal change management capability. Such capabilities can help managers change their businesses as effectively and efficiently as they’re expected to run them.

Here is a paper that presents insights and guidelines to help implement change programs.

1 – Kotter, John P., A Sense of Urgency, Harvard Business School Press, 2008.
2 – Guy, G., & Beaman, K., Effecting change in business enterprises: Current trends in change management, The Conference Board, 2005.

Life Sciences Supply Chain: How mature is your organization?

Information technology (IT) departments within life sciences organizations are under constant pressure not only to maintain services but also improve them while controlling expenses. IT leaders face these daunting challenges amid funding constraints and continually shifting demands for IT resources. Combining supply chain principles with industry-leading practices, such as the Information Technology Infrastructure Library® (ITIL®), can create an effective framework for supporting cost transparency and IT resource capacity management to meet demand for IT services. Most organizations have some or all of the elements necessary to create an end-to-end supply chain, but these components are often at varying levels of maturity or are not integrated with other critical processes.

Read more about how to determine the maturity level of your organization’s IT supply chain, identify gaps and work towards an end-to-end solution that meets your service management needs.

Cost Management for IT Organizations

Join BearingPoint Managing Director, Julien Courbe, as he walks us through the latest edition of BearingPoint’s Financial Services Technology Journal on cost management for IT organizations. The fluctuations of financial services firms’ business volumes reflect the cyclical nature of the overall financial markets. These dynamics are often caused by specific crises or a slowdown in the economy. Professional IT managers know that controlling costs and aligning expenditures with overall business goals and spending are critical to organizational health. But it’s a classic case of “easier said than done.” With continuing overcast skies forecast for the global economy, every step you take to infuse your IT organization with fiscal agility now should be appreciated – at the bottom line and in every line of business.

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The November 2008 issue of BearingPoint’s Financial Services Technology Journal offers effective, up-to-date thought leadership on IT cost planning. From the critical right-now technologies (e.g., service-oriented architecture, cloud computing) to practices that involve outsourcing and out-tasking (i.e., outsourcing simple tasks) to new paradigms in service models, executives and technology leaders should find this journal to be an invaluable resource in their efforts to improve their organizational operating leverage.