Jay McKeever Bio/Archives
Oversees Cincom's marketing operations spanning 23 countries including the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and Europe. Bachelor’s in communications. Previously held positions in communications, human resources, operations, contracting, and marketing at Mortgage Now and United Parcel Service (UPS). Specialty: customer-centric communications.
The KISS Principle and Occam’s Razor
By Jay McKeever
We all like things that are simple, but in business that’s a rarity. It gets worse if we don’t deliberately work at simplification on a regular basis. When we keep things simple, we gain competitive advantage by being faster and more productive, by being easier to work with, by producing products and services that are easier to learn and use, by being more approachable, by resolving customer needs more consistently.
At McDonalds, you give them money for a hamburger and they give you a hamburger. At UPS, you give them money and a package and they give the package to someone else, somewhere else by 10:00 AM the next day. But behind the simple scenarios, lies a set of processes that have been honed to perfection.
When we began the venture to build a blog around the concept of simplicity, of course, we did some background research work … to give you a foundation of understanding upon which to design your path toward simplification.
The KISS Principle got its start in the 14th Century. Franciscan monk William Occam (1285-1349) spent his life developing a philosophy that God’s existence was a matter of faith that could not be justified by rational proof. Occam insisted on paying close attention to language as a tool for thinking and on observation as a tool for testing reality. His thinking and writing is considered to have laid the groundwork for modern scientific method. His insistence on parsimony or minimalism led him to write simple, to the point phrases that cut through to the essence of thought … hence people referred to it as Occam’s Razor.
On the subject of “complexity/simplicity,” Occam realized that the weakest link in a chain would be the one that failed … and that the longer and more complex the chain, the greater the chance of a critical meltdown somewhere along the chain. He wrote: “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate.” This roughly translates to “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.” Today we translate this as “the simplest solution is usually the best.”
Occam’s Razor becomes a methodology wherein the simplest or most obvious explanation for several competing ideas is the one that should be preferred until it is proven wrong. As Einstein later said: “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Or as we now say: “Keep it simple, stupid.”
What have you simplified today?
Posted by Jay McKeever on August 11, 2005 at 05:11 PM in Business Optimization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Consolidation in Health Insurance and Financial Services
A new study by McKinsey points to a huge transformation in the healthcare insurance and financial services sector -- two industries in which Cincom has long and proudly served, and ones in which we have considerable expertise. The study points out something we have been observing first-hand:
The health insurance and financial-services industries in the United States are converging as consumers take a more active role in saving for their own health care.
The movement is shaking up the health insurance industry, leading to once-in-a-generation profit opportunities but also to big competitive threats from financial-services and benefits administration companies.
Health insurers are already responding by looking for ways to get closer to the consumer. Some are partnering with financial-services firms.
Whenever such seismic transformations occur, managers need to look closely at their internal processes for simplification opportunity. One process that deserves a close examination is the paperwork -- no other industries combined (with the possible exception of Federal Government) generate more paper. And the paper systems cost a lot of money.
MTL Insurance cut their document production time for policies and other customer-personalized documents by 60% to vastly simplify internal processes. Here's their story.
Posted by Jay McKeever on July 6, 2005 at 09:47 AM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Learning from GM
Posted by Jay McKeever on July 2, 2005 at 12:39 AM in Business Optimization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Process Automation and Outsourcing will Stimulate Innovation
Huge Opportunity Awaits Entrepreneurs Who Tap the Emerging Market
Two phenomena are at work concurrently that will force Western markets toward more innovation: process automation and the inevitable tide of off-shoring. Both are driven by the cost of labor. Cincom’s CEO Tom Nies has positioned the company to help customers succeed at converting both of these phenomena into competitive advantage.
It is essential for business to automate repetitive tasks so that fewer workers can do more. This simplifies business operations, improves quality and enables efficiency by transferring knowledge from highly skilled workers to less skilled workers. In turn this frees up the highly skilled to innovate new to the world solutions that further increase competitive advantage. Process automation is a form of outsourcing – moving jobs into software systems.
It is also essential to outsource tasks of all sorts to markets where skilled labor abides in great numbers. There are over 3 billion people in India, China and Russia who are educated, talented and in need of work. Getting these new entrants into the global workforce is essential for a growing global economy. In the long view, offshoring will spur Western economies to innovate new business models that take advantage of new opportunities – and provide goods and services to the world where eventually these +3 billion new workers will be buying stuff.
Our futures will depend upon innovation – how we create new opportunity. We then must encourage creativity and risk taking so that the phenomena of process automation and offshoring in the end provide real advantage to all of us.
Intel’s Craig Barret gives us the right frame of mind when he says: “Let’s compete – by training the best workers, investing in R&D, erecting the best infrastructure and building an education system that graduates students who rank with the world’s best. Our goal is to be competitive with the best so we both win and create jobs.”
Posted by Jay McKeever on July 1, 2005 at 06:20 PM in Business Transformation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Do Your Employees Know Where You are Headed?
Simplifying business processes rests heavily on the way employees view their situations and their tasks. It turns out that just 50% of employees indicate they know the goals and strategies of their company. This according to a survey of 12,000 employees by Nordisk Kommunikation. It will be near impossible to simplify business processes in your company if internal communications have not clarified where you are going and how you plan to get there.
Posted by Jay McKeever on June 23, 2005 at 10:25 AM in Business Optimization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack
