If an organization already uses Outlook and email to communicate and work together, why does it need Emagineering?

Emails are excellent for expediting quick communications among several people. But an email stored on an end-user's PC and inaccessible to others is of no help later to an executive who wants to better understand an issues' decision-making process or a new team member who wants to quickly get up to speed. And even project leaders who have critical emails stored on their PC swill have difficulty accessing them when needed - or even recognizing when they may be helpful to others who did not originally receive them. Emagineering overcomes these common problems, referred to as mismanagement-by-email, by allowing executives to store important emails in the discussion area of the appropriate issue and initiative.

If an organization already uses project management software, why does it need Emagineering?

Emagineering is complementary to project management software. Emagineering is the brain that allows senior executives to proactively lead the creation of the correct policies and processes to achieve the organization's goals. Project management software is the brawn that schedules the resources and tasks required to carry out the multiple projects necessary to meet the objectives set by the Emagineering software. Project management software reports the actual status of budgets and task completion dates against plan - but does not give senior executives the ability to directly resolve the blocking issues that cause cost overruns, schedule delays, and the inability to deliver what was promised.

Emagineering is critical for making an organization's installed project management system an effective executive management tool. Senior executives never directly use project management software - they only monitor the reports generated. But they do use Emagineering to provide the guidance necessary for project managers and team members to correctly make decisions and successfully deal with both unanticipated and blocking issues.

Why does Obian emphasize that Emagineering is enterprise-level software?

There are many project management and collaborative software packages that claim to provide many of the same services and use the same descriptive terms as Emagineering. But all of these packages are designed to support small groups (4-20 concurrent users) of dedicated departmental staff working on a single project. When a project is completed, the learning and documents remain on the departmental server and are accessible only to those who know their physical location.

Real world initiatives are enterprise-wide in scope. These enterprise initiatives often involve hundreds of individuals located throughout the world; hundreds of thousands of pages of documents; and tens of thousands of contributions and comments. This learning and the documents generated during the course of an initiative should be stored in a comprehensive, scalable document management system in order that they are accessible to others for reuse to minimize duplication of effort and meet governance/compliance requirements. To truly support the entire enterprise as opposed to a few specialists, the EIM software that supports the organization's executives must be intuitive in nature and require minimal or no training to be effectively used. Emagineering provides these enterprise-level requirements and more.

What will the impact of Emagineering be on an enterprise's culture?

Emagineering assists senior executives in establishing the agile, collaborative management culture that has fueled the success of so many great companies.
Emagineering specifically gives credit to the contributions of every member of an initiative team; adds discipline to the issue decision making, and maintains a compliance record of how, why and by whom decisions were made. Emagineering embodies the best-management practices for successful initiative planning and deployment based on over a decade of research at hundreds of companies.

The bottom line is that Emagineering can act as a catalyst to improve an organization's culture to be more responsive to the changing requirements of today's business environment - but only senior management can actually lead and direct a significant change in an enterprise's culture.

Does Emagineering add another level of effort to the workload of executives who are already out of time?

No - Emagineering is a productivity tool that increases the effectiveness of the time devoted to managing initiatives for both executives and initiative team members.

All the documents, comments and decisions made that will be stored and managed within Emagineering are currently created and communicated in an unstructured, ad hoc manner using email or during briefing meetings. The content of these communications is often lost or not delivered to the right executives at the right time. As a result, critical communications must be recreated many times and it still is not always received by the appropriate decision makers at the proper time.

More frustrating, senior executives report that they spend at least double the time they should in unproductive meetings re-reviewing analyses and information they have already evaluated or being asked to make decisions on subjects about which they have not been properly briefed. And operational executives complain about being left out of important initiative planning meetings or being asked to travel from remote locations to provide less than 10 minutes of input while sitting though hours of discussion that does not involve them.

Emagineering allows executives anywhere in the world to collaborate on the resolution of initiative issues based on their schedules; ensures that all decision makers have access to a comprehensive, centralized repository of the initiative information they need for making informed decisions; and minimizes duplication of communications. These are all productivity enhancing capabilities that will increase the time executives can spend on driving initiatives to success.

How can Obian help deploy Emagineering throughout an enterprise?

Many organizations do not have the resources available to deploy Emagineering on their own. For these customers, Obian provides a four-week Mobilization Service. This Mobilization Service:

1. Installs Emagineering on the customer's servers;
2. Imports from the customer's LDAP server the authorized Emagineering users and provides them with the appropriate rights and privileges;
3. Puts the customer's Initiatives and their associated team members, issues, features, deliverables and status report forms into Emagineering;
4. Trains the customer's systems administrators on how to maintain Emagineering;
5. Educates Project and Task Leaders on how to use the system;
6. Supports the initial users on a one-on-one basis.

What is the financial justification for Emagineering?

For an Emagineering system supporting 100 executives who are devoting 30% of their time on average to managing enterprise initiatives, Obian would project the ROI at 564% using the following assumptions and calculations. Contact sales@obian.com to obtain your custom ROI calculation.

Why is Obian introducing Emagineering to the marketplace now?

Because we can!

Until Web Services technologies had matured to the point they could be relied on to support business-critical, enterprise-wide applications, the functionality provided by Emagineering could only be delivered to a limited number of users through a departmental client-server system. And a departmental client-server system with its limited capabilities and high costs for managing unstructured data would be ineffective as an Enterprise Initiative Management platform. Emagineering provides high-end scalability, excellent security, speed of installation, and ease of use due to its advanced Web Services document management technology foundation.

In addition, Emagineering has been developed by senior business executives for other senior business executives, while most software applications have been developed by one group of technologists for use by other technologists. The best-practice management principles embodied in Emagineering represent the lessons learned from e-Business successes and failures, Y2K crisis management, and in-depth interviews with executives who planned and deployed strategic initiatives that provided their corporations with significant competitive and productivity advantages.

Can you concisely define Enterprise Initiative Management software?

Enterprise Initiative Management (EIM) software is a collaborative tool that allows senior executives to lead the organizational efforts required to create and deploy the policies, processes and products necessary to achieve the organization's strategic goals.

EIM software must be able to draw out and store the constructive contributions of any and all individuals within the organization - as well as strategic business partners - in the collaborative process of identifying and resolving change issues.
EIM is frequently used to set the objectives for the multiple projects and numerous tasks that must be carried out during the course of an initiative deployment.

In addition, EIM software is critical for resolving the unanticipated problems that always arise during the course of a project and must be quickly and correctly solved.

What are the top ten reasons Emagineering is the leader in Enterprise Initiative Management?

1. Can be used by senior executives - from any PC with an Internet connection located anywhere in the world
2. Provides the types of reports senior executives want and need for making decisions
3. Real-time issue identification of potential blocking issues and disciplined decision making
4. Allows senior executives to continuously focus the organization on the enterprise's goals
5. Roles encourage and require executives to participate and contribute - all stakeholders are included
6. Preserves enterprise learning and knowledge and encourages reuse
7. Cuts across silos and flattens the organization's decision making processes
8. Can be securely used in partnership with strategic business partners and expert consultants
9. Enterprise-wide initiative management that can be tailored to meet every organization's unique needs
10. Recognizes the contributions of organizational leaders located throughout the enterprise