UniPhi is going global

It's been a hectic couple of weeks for us at mbh but the long hours and extensive travel has bared fruit with the acceptance of a proposal to roll out UniPhi globally with one of our largest clients. Over the next 2 years UniPhi will be used by over 2000 users in 5 continents and over 100 offices around the globe.

It has always been a buzz for me to know that while I have breakfast or eat dinner someone is using UniPhi to assist them deliver some real investment somewhere in Australia or the Middle East. Now this really will be a 24 hour proposition. Well done Murray and the software development team on a great result.

 More news on this to come

Distributed versus centralised data capture

One of the key changes in the public domain created by software has been the ability of millions of people to enter information into a centralised source. There are two examples of this; one the general updating of information through web pages aggregated through Google and the other the specific updating of social information and its aggregation through Facebook. Many organisations have identified this change and leveraged its value as a distribution channel for marketing and sales and more recently as a source of customer feedback. The central element of success is that millions of people add information that is then aggregated and re-purposed either through a web search or through a pre-designed portal.

What's interesting though is that business to business software is yet to take full advantage of this concept. Most areas where this type of architecture has been developed is in the "non-sensitive" areas of Intranets and customer relationship management systems. Anything financial is still collected and then keyed in at a central source. This puts a great constraint on the system and results in real time business information being delayed as well as their being a lack of breadth and depth in the information being presented.

UniPhi is one of the first business applications that requires the distribution of data entry for it to be a success. The concept is similar to the Facebook one, get hundreds of end users entering in their piece of the puzzle directly into a centralised system and then present this information aggregated and re-purposed into the slice relevant to the user logging in. The executive running a company with 55,000 people can know how many projects are late, on schedule and ahead of schedule across their company in the same way as an individual at Facebook could theoretically aggregate the 800 million Facebook users into those that like Star Wars and those that don't.

This distributed data entry model is the biggest productivity improver since the invention of the PC. Companies that recognise this now and implement the change programmes to take advantage of it are going to out perform their peers like never before.

UniPhi 6.0 released and Data Warehouse Out of The Box announced!

Well UniPhi 6.0 has been out now for 3 months. Check out the press release for new features. We've quickly moved on to the next round of developments. The big launch for UniPhi will be our next release which will see what I believe is the first data warehouse and BI out of the box application on the market. The unique structure of UniPhi has enabled us to develop a data warehouse process and analysis services cubes that cut the need for internal naval gazing and reflection. Most companies spend millions defining their warehouse structure and designing and building BI Tools to overlay this data with tools for end users. UniPhi provides all of this structure out of the box. Deploy UniPhi either on your own SQL and Web server boxes or subscribe to our cloud infrastructure and bingo you're ready to analyse your data and see how you're performing. Use the profit cube to analyse fees, book to burn rations, slipping projects, market segments that you're performing well in or not so well and employees who are kicking goals both for and against.

I will update with more info on this exciting development in the coming months.

To error is to be an executive

We have heard plenty lately about the bad judgment of a recently departed head honcho of David Jones. While it's easy to file as 'bad judgment' or 'ill advised' the unwanted advances of a CEO to a junior executive at a company function, it is much trickier to separate the 'wheat from the chaff' when it comes to executive strategic decision making.

In a recent McKinsey Quarterly survey of 2,207 executives, only 28 percent said that the quality of strategic decisions in their companies was generally good, 60 percent thought that bad decisions were about as frequent as good ones, and the remaining 12 percent thought good decisions were altogether infrequent.

In a March 2010 McKinsey Quarterly entitled, 'The case for behavioral strategy', the authors, Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony, assert that '...cognitive biases affect the most important strategic decisions made by the smartest managers in the best companies. Mergers routinely fail to deliver the expected synergies. Strategic plans often ignore competitive responses. And large investment projects are over budget and over time—over and over again.'

The authors' advocated remedy for the problem of 'biased' management decision making is for organisations to adopt processes that 'debias' strategic decisions.

It just so happens that UniPhi is an enterprise process that debiases strategic decisions. Once deployed and used by key stakeholders across the enterprise, executives can easily track, manage and report on the progress of key organisational initiatives. Accurate, real-time project and portfolio data is at the executive's fingertips.

UniPhi provides a more objective road map for an executive's strategic decisions, ensuring they are guided by objectively-tested facts and figures, instead of 'gut feels' and 'intuition'. In my view, UniPhi represents an invaluable tool for debiasing executive decisions and making sure strategy development is informed by reality, not 'hisimagination'. Of course, I may just be biased, but use UniPhi and then prove me wrong.

UniPhi 5.0 to be released

After 9 months of intensive development, we are about to release our biggest launch of UniPhi yet. UniPhi 5.0 is a major step forward for mbh and for the product itself. After significant and greatly appreciated feedback from our thousand strong user base, we have been able to enhance many existing features and bring in new ones. The contracts management functionality was completely overhauled with significant productivity improvements to the creation of the full suite of contract admin components (variations, progress claims, EOTs, RFIs etc. This new contract management also has the capability to manage your fee with the client as well as all other contracts on the project. Adding this to our new fee management system and existing lifecycle feature and we can now tell you how many jobs you're winning and how many you're losing; in what sector your winning and what one's you're not.With transparent real time internal KPI performance management, I can see already that many potential clients are going to be threatened by how visible their performance is.

This release would not have been possible without the dedication of our software development team. This cosmopolitan group of guys who all reside in Australia but hail from all over the world makes our Sydney office a vibrant and buzzing place to be. Although the hours are insane and juggling the business with running my kids to school, soccer practice, ballet and the like is not easy, it's great to never wake up in the morning with the words "oh no, it's only Wednesday". Thanks guys for making each day an enjoyable event!

We have scheduled a series of breakfast seminars along with our monthly webinar to present this new release across Australia and will follow it up with a roadshow across the middle east in September.

You can read more about this release and the roadshow at our website. Please come to the breakfasts if you can, we'd love to see you there.

UniPhi expands to the middle east

8 months ago I caught up with a colleague from school days. We had met a few times post school through a mutual friend of ours. On this occasion (as usual when catching up with old acquaintances) we started updating each other on events since the last few years. Francis, my school colleague, had been living in the UK for 8 years, had gotten married and had had his first child about 6 months before we met. He was back in Australia, sadly, due to an illness of a relative. Yet through every sad event, a silver lining can be found.

Francis had recently moved from the UK to Dubai. Having tested the market there briefly before his Australia visit, his business radar piqued when he heard about UniPhi. The next day Francis came to our office in Sydney and had a look at what we'd developed. Another 24 hours later and he had put together a proposal to distribute our software in the middle east. He has worked tirelessly since and this climaxed with us exhibiting at the Cityscape conference in Abu Dhabi in April. Unfortunately, due to other commitments I was unable to attend but thanks to the project management efforts of Katja Abramova (mbh project manager) and the tireless Sarah Quinton (mbh director) who flew over to support Francis in showing off UniPhi to the world all went well.

Below is an image of our stand and feedback from the show has been exceptional. I am very excited about becoming an Australian exporter and international markets will now become crucial components in what we hope will be the rapid commercialisation of what I believe is the best portfolio and project management application on the market.

The exhibition was a great success for us. It has led to four very strong proposals being sent to potential clients and over 160 business cards being collected at the booth.

Thanks Francis, Sarah and Katja for all your efforts!

UniPhi deployment

It’s exciting working on a UniPhi deployment. The moving of the UniPhi software from an application to a real life working environment is a beneficial experience . The developing and integration of the clients fundamental business requirements to the UniPhi software is integral to a deployment.

Each organisation or business area is unique, as has its own wants and needs that are required to be met. The changing working environments and the people I work with both internally and externally on each deployment are the most rewarding aspects of working with UniPhi.

Trials and tribulations of windows authentication

Windows authentication can be both a blessing and a curse when it comes to developing an intranet based application. From the users perspective, they can use their standard PC login to access the application - functionality which is seamless when using internet explorer. From a developers perspective, you can rely on the network to provide authentication to the various systems that you are integrating, such as databases, reporting services, etc.

Unfortunately, often times passing windows credentials around breaks down, specifically when you begin to grant access to your application outside of the intranet via SSL or perhaps port your application over to using forms authentication, such as we have done recently.

The specific problem I needed to address today was with UniPhi's automated .pdf generation when emailing a document. Windows authentication credentials were not being passed through to the page that renders the pdf attachment when the end user was accessing the application via SSL. The possible solutions provided by a google search were many and varied, several stating that passing through the credentials was unsupported. In the end the solution to the problem was simple - don't pass credentials at all, move the pdf generation to a library rather than calling the asp.net page directly.

It usually pays to sleep on a problem such as this, let the solution come to you.

Reset locked remote desktop

To connect to a server on which "terminal server has exceeded maximum number of allowed connections", run the following command to remotely connect then reset the non active connections:
start | run - mstsc -v:0.0.0.0 /f -console

Restoring databases to Server 2005

Whilst attempting to restore a database backup to SQL Server 2005, I encountered a "restore failed" error due to "the file or filegroup cannot be selected for this operation". After some trawling of the Net, I found the solution.

There is an option in the Restore window to copy the script generated to the clipboard. Cancel out and paste the script into a New Query. Delete the two "FILE = " options from the line then execute the script. Bingo, you have a newly restored database.