Welcome to the 2006 Innovations Conference!
Believe it or not 2006 is the 15th anniversary for ASI and iMIS! Yes that little membership screen that I first saw in the spring of 1990 on Don and Eddie’s garage deck has carried us all the way to 2006! And you know I think it is going to be like the Everready battery! It will keep on going and going and going!
Over these 15 years we all have prospered in so many ways ! We have established a powerful iMIS Community of partners, customers and employees which is positioned to go on and thrive for many years to come. You could even say it will go on forever as long as we keep our customers satisfied and moving through technology changes forever!
What are the Secrets of this Success? And what was behind this success? Why did all of us get up every day to make it all happen? What was our purpose?
The answer to that is easy! “We help people achieve great things through innovative solutions!
I believe all of us have found our own very personal motivations from this simple statement that embodies why we do what we do!
What do we believe in that gets us through the tough times? What values do we hold dear?
Well, we have the COURAGE to do the unconventional. We have the Courage to go for our dreams!
And we all believe in delivering a high level of EXCELLENCE in everything we do.
And most importantly, we RESPECT each other and our customers and everyone else we deal with!
Our customers notice that we believe in these values! And they appreciate it very much!
There is more ! We have committed ourselves to a mission to “Keep our Customers for Life!” And I believe this inspires all of us to bigger and better achievements year in and year out.
Recently, I attended the Software 2006 Conference in Silicon Valley. This was a big industry event. There were 800 to 1000 people there. The keynote speakers were software industry gurus and they all agreed that in general, customers have not been satisfied with what they were getting from software companies over the last five years. Apparently, the SEIBEL’s, SAP’ss and yes the Avectra’s, TMA’s and Aptify’s of the world have become famous for delivering incomplete solutions which result in never ending services and runaway costs. I don’t believe this criticism applies to us! In fact, I think we should all be proud of that fact we understood many years ago our big competitive advantage was delivering the iMIS solutions on-time and on-budget!
So let me say it once again in another way, “Keeping our Customers for Life” is a powerful and worthy mission that we can accomplish by making sure our customers are happy and always kept in a position to easily upgrade their systems.
I want to talk about this a little more because I wonder some times whether or not everybody appreciates the absolute power of this message and the effect it has on our customers and prospects? Especially, the C level executives, by that I mean senior management types, CEO, CFO, CIO, etc. I get emails from time to time from customers who have heard this message and say “I want to be a customer for life” please call me to fix this problem. I love those messages!
I was in Australia recently and I met with Susan Herron CEO of the Australian Institute of Management. They are close to buying a large system. She told me one of the biggest reasons they selected us was this message made them feel like we were interested in building a long term relationship with them as opposed to simply selling them a product.
Coincidentally, or maybe not the American Management Association bought a system last December and it is one of our biggest sales ever. One of the reasons they bought iMIS was they loved our mission to keep them as a “customer for life.”
Our work over the last 15 years has positioned us all to continue to be extremely successful providing software solutions to the not-for-profit industry.
“We truly have the only complete membership, fundraising, and Web site management solution available in one ready-to-use software suite.”
This unique iMIS Solution we provide combined with our mission to “keep our customers for life” will lead us to higher and higher levels of success in our businesses.
I have talked a little about the past today and I want to touch on the present now for a little while.
When the ASI Management Team asked what the plan was for 2006 my reply was “do what we do better”. That sums up the present short term plan! This translates into simply focusing on the fundamentals of our business. Better quality of products, better focus on software license sales and a special emphasis on profitability! In 2006 we expect a 440% growth in our Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation and Amortization (EBITDA).
To help us focus better and achieve our 2006 objectives as well as our future strategy we have adopted a new management system at ASI called the Balanced Scorecard! The BSC is widely known and widely accepted as one of the best management systems available. The system was developed by two consultants named Robert Kaplan and David Norton.
The BSC started as a book. The benefits of the BSC include;
- Making sure the only work we do at ASI is work that contributes to our goals and strategy. This means the system forced us to define what is important work and what is not before we started the BSC implementation.
- Gives us new ways to measure our progress toward completing work that contributes to making our goals and strategy.
- Helps all ASI employees understand how their work directly contributes to ASI success.
That is the biggest news about the present so let’s talk about the future!
I know there is a lot of anticipation for an iMIS release that is drastically different than iMIS 10.6 in many ways. We have been working on what some of you know as iMIS Freedom for three years now. And I know you want it yesterday! You don’t have to remind me because I pay the bills to develop iMIS Freedom!
What we have realized is that in order to successfully deliver a new iMIS in a way that allows customers a seamless upgrade we have to take more time than originally planned. We have decided we do not want to be in the position of appearing to have two separate products for customers to choose from for any length of time at all. We decided that all the new software we are creating has to evolve as a software update under the normal software update process we have established. I spoke with one of our largest customers in the world, CPA’s Australia, who has been with us 12 years and when they understood they could get the new software as an update they said, “Great”! Now we won’t have to look at other new alternatives to iMIS since the costs to update will not be substantial enough to trigger a competitive review.” This conversation makes it more obvious to me that coming out with an update from iMIS 10 to iMIS 15 is the right thing to do and it supports our mission to “keep customers for life!”
I want you to take you back to the late 80’s early 90’s when IBM came out with the O/S 2. It was a 32 computer with a Windows like User Interface. Everyone thought the 16 bit, character based IBM PC and all the DOS based clones would be slaughtered by new technology. But it never happened. The reason it never happened is all the software for the DOS PCs did not work on O/S 2. So there was no upgrade available to enable a sudden rush from DOS PCs to O/S 2. That delay allowed Microsoft to develop Windows and more importantly offer one click upgrades for Word and Excel files from DOS to Windows. O/S 2 was never heard from again.
We are making progress toward writing and rewriting the iMIS software solution as a pure web-based .NET application. Before the year is out we intend to ship iMIS 15 which will have many more web based, .NET applications than we have now. Further, we intend to provide our clients using iMIS 10 an easy upgrade path to iMIS 15!
Beyond this year looking into 2007 and 2008 future releases for iMIS, we intend to expose major improvements to iMIS as we know it today.
Things like:
- Better .NET tools to extend iMIS applications without jeopardizing the upgrade path.
- Better Accounting
- A more modern browser based interface for the entire system
- New capabilities that will blow you away.
- And a more open and collaborative approach to software development by ASI so you have more opportunity to develop solutions that snap right into iMIS.
When I see iMIS 15 presented I am extremely pleased and impressed with what our team has created! The key point to remember about the future product releases is we are going to be delivering better iMIS functions not simply a .NET re-write! This is important because we are not convinced that .NET on its own justifies all the work involved to in effect re-write iMIS. We are not yet clear when Microsoft will actually deliver a .NET version of MS Office or Great Plains? So in case .NET does not have the impact people think it will we will use our move to .NET as an opportunity to provide substantial improvements over the current iMIS system we all know and love today.
However, we no matter what happens we believe we can establish a strong competitive advantage in the Not-for-Profit market built on these 3 strong pillars;
- Better functionality for Not-For-Profits (NFP)
- New functions for NFP’s never offered before
- And of course a .NET solution
- A new collaborative development environment designed to leverage the power of the iMIS community of experts inside and outside ASI.
In Summary,
I am excited by the position we are in today. Frankly, it feels great to be here after 15 years and see that we have built a “MEANINGFUL BUSINESS” that many people rely upon for many things, that has a “LASTING FOOTPRINT”
Perhaps more importantly, it is great to still be here working with all of you in a way that creates a win/ win for you, and ASI and all of our customers. I am even more enthused at the thought of all the fun we are going to have as we bring iMIS 15 to market and watch as this new product evolves and fulfills the grand vision we have for it.