This issue has led many of the business to rethink about their expense management policies.

In many instances, the violators did not violate the law but the items reimbursed were considered morally and politically incorrect, leading to some of the members involved stepping down from their post!

It reinforces my believe that where possible, management should communicate explicilty in a clear manner on the guidelines of what’s clamiable and what’s out of bounds.

For instance, I was drafting some policies around IT mobility services last year. I was pondering if I should include home broadband into the scope. From a service delivery point of view, we have clearly stated that this is not a IT-supported service. Should I also explicitly state that if this expense is reimbursable? After considerable musing, I decided that it is important to be clear about it even though it is more about indirect spend management (usually a finance responsibility) than IT service management (Finance may think this is a IT responsibility since it is a IT service, it doesnt matter to me, as long as someone steps up). I want to make it clear that I am not leaning either way if this is an reimbursable expense. I am, after a common and clear guideline for the employees to adhere to.

So, after drafting it, I had it presented to the senior management team and the collective decision was, no employee is eligible for it and every case was to go through a exception approval process (It could have gone the other way to allow employees from certain job functions to claim the expense). So far, there were a few approved exceptions (e.g. a group of mobile employees who do not have a permanent desk, they were provided with a fixed amount to get themselves a mobile broadband solution which covers their home too).

Today, the management team is glad that the policy was already in place helping in a little way to keep the indirect expenses low (it always about these little things that we do, right?).

So, what’s the lesson learnt? Make your policies and guidelines as explicit and as clear as possible. If you are not sure why your fellow peers are not doing anything about it, just step up and do it, if you believe it is the right thing to do. Most important, get your senior executive team to walk out with a collectively decision on the policy and be the sponsor!

And of course, making every one’s expense claims transparent helps!

Navigating through the dashboard, you can view a high-level spending by a select group of agencies with charts measuring the performance based on schedule, cost and each CIO’s evaluation against each project objectives.

The dashboard allows you to drill down to each project, showing key agency (Agency Head, Agency CIO), project information (project phase, Prime Contractor, YTD Actual spend, Project Completion Date)…etc

If you are involved in IT project management activities, you should be able to visualize what I am talking about by now, without jumping off this page to visit the dashboard site (I am not showing an image here intentionally because I think it is important that you visit the site itself to see for yourself).

The simplicity of the dashboard (in case you are interested, built using Drupal, an open source content management platform) is not in the technology, but the resolve to improve the returns of IT investments by making transparent all these information to the public (not just US government employees, not just US citizens, but everyone in the world, that has access to Internet). Citizens (and anyone in the world who is interested) can parse the data, mashup it with other data sources.

“Everyone knows there have been spectacular failures when it comes to technology investments,” Kundra said. “Now for the first time the entire country can see how we’re spending money and give us input.”

Scrolling through some of the agencies’ project, you will noticed that some data are missing (e.g. CIO’s evaluation) – a hint of not 100% adoption of the dashboard by the agency. Still, incomplete visibility is better than no visibility. The data can only get better because unlike typical IT application projects where you usually will find some reluctant users that you cannot do much with. In this case, the citizens (the true owners of the investment projects) get to see which agency is not doing their homework. This approach seems to be consistent with President Obama’s style of using his social network of public supporters not just for campaigning, but to govern.

One technology observation mentioned on the FAQ section of the site – monthly updates to the dashboard is made through a web interface as part of the dashboard feature and there are plans in future to explore using XML feeds for data submission. This is laying good foundation using standardized artchitecture integration to allow citizen integration – imagine private web developers using open APIs or receiving these dashboard data feeds in RSS, to present the data in another format or manner that may expose opportunities for improvements.

Despite that this initiative is confined to US government IT data, I am excited because it set a model example on governance for private sectors as well as for other countries’ e-government strategies.

In Kundra’s case, he built a platform (IT dashboard) for all the agency CIOs to use and open up this data to the public.

Is there an opportunity for your IT organization to lead the business by building a similar platform where every department/region can use and the data (non-financially sensitive) are opened up to all employees?

“If you don’t like the way someone is acting, understand you can’t change his behavior, you can only change his circumstances.”

He is right. People makes the best rational decision under the circumstances they are in. I often hear explanations like  “I had to call direct using the mobile phone at that time because it was a critical customer call, the deal was worth millions and I don’t do this all the time.” and from IT’s view, we just need 10% of the employees every month to have an exceptional situation to chalk up thousands of dollars (yes, each one can call up to $2000 per month when they roam) and you multiple that by the population that we have (thousands), you get the idea of the amount I am talking about.

Did a bit of self-brainstorming on how to change employee’s circumstances, below are a few ideas:

• Make every employee be aware and accountable for their indirect spend e.g. create a digital dashboard to let the employee see his cost to the company over time periods.
• Make the above dashboard public to the entire company
• Provide services that gives employees options to use cheaper alternatives e.g. provision spare phones in major offices and loan the phones to visiting employees
• Make best practice info on telecom usage, very accessible to employees

I have to admit, more time is needed to ponder on this topic. I shall revisit this topic again.

Suggestions/Ideas are welcome.

In my other post about evaluation of Netvibes, I introduced my discovery of Yahoo icharts (copy and paste this url onto your browser – http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/z?s=%5EDJI&t=5d&q=l&l=on&z=m&c=%5EGSPC,%5EIXIC,%5EDJA&a=v&p=s). What if, this wifi-enabled digital photo frames allows installation of widgets (or Google gagdets) and one of the out-of-box widgets is a web page widget that auto-refreshes at a configurable frequency? If I am a avid trader, I could set a url to Yahoo ichart page as above and this will allow me to constantly monitor the market on a separate ‘screen’ without the need to rely on a PC, anywhere!

Under Timezone and Weather tab, I have added a weather widget which shows the weather, local date/time of countries which I need to travel to or have regular correspondence with.

The rest of the tabs are simply filled with web pages widgets of financial charts from Yahoo finance. I discovered that Yahoo has a service called ‘icharts’. If you can figure out the input parameters as part of the URL  (hint: use Yahoo Finance charts to get what you want to see first, then decipher the html source codes using your browser), you can use the URL to get a rendition of the charts from any browser or widget directly (minus the ads and other content).

As you can see from my customized Netvibes pages, I have created a series of personalized charts for my long term investment analysis. It is a big productivity tool and time-saver for me. The charts when aggregated, allows me  (a non-regular follower of the investment market) to quickly get state of the market situation.

Do you, by now, see a hint of how Netvibes could be use by the BI industry as a mgmt reporting tool? I’d love to hear your thoughts in this area.

• Negotiate a deal with the vendor to allow unused data to be pooled for other cards and carried forward to the next month
• Work out a eligibility criteria based on cost-savings e.g. if a employee travels domestically for more than X number of nights per year and assuming that he/she pays the hotel a service fee to use the Internet broadband (if you are in countries like Japan, this is irrelevant because most hotels provide Internet broadband for free), then issuing a wireless data cards would be a cost-saving measure
• Pool the cards by depts or company level (depending on which is practically managable) so that the usage of the cards are maximized.

Other ideas are welcome

One of the tips that is being promoted to replace your old appliances with newer models as the newer ones consume less energy hence saving energy. One calculation that I wonder if anyone bother to compute if it cost more energy to make the new appliance (e.g. refrigerator) or to keep using the old one.  If everyone in the world replace their fridge this year to save 10% (just a hypo figure from my mind), how much demand will it generate to the fridge factories in China and how much energy will that factory consume to meet these surge in global demand?

I thought about this question because I am driving an 1972 Austin Mini which clocks over 8 km per litre. In view of the rising gas prices and climate concerns, should I scrap the car and replace it with a new fuel-efficient car like Honda Jazz? (Obviously, the most ideal option is to scrap the car and take public transport but that’s not my point of discussion in this blog).

Back to the above tip to replace old appliance with newer energy-efficient models, is that a economy-driven agenda by those coporations to keep their profits intact?

CIOs and IT leaderships have come up with various methods to addressed this challenge through IT governance framework (includes Project Portofolio management, implementing ITIL processes, deploying system management tools like HP’s BTO, BMC’s Patrol and etc.

Typically these solutions requires significant financial fundings and hence are only available to sizable companies. So, what about the SME markets? Such firms typically have a small IT team (in many cases, 1 IT staff) to handle all IT matters. Also because of the lack of budget, spreadsheets becomes the most important tool for these folks.

What if there are more free tools (e.g. Spiceworks) or perhaps low-cost subscription-based applications catered to IT professionals to help them improve their work?

What kind of applications would be most-valued added? What business model will make these applicatble viable?

I look forward to hearing about your ideas