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.