A Cut Above

HATFIELD LIPTAK ADVISORS

Keeping the Shred-it work force close to its customers also keeps its employees further from centralized IT support services that are often critical to ensure efficient, effective and compliant use of new software products. Dan Snider, vice president, Business Solutions, Shred-it, had concerns that the IT team would not have sufficient visibility into the real end-user experience with the SAP CRM application and the issues individual employees were encountering. "The 'go-live' implementation of solutions such as SAP CRM can require a very intensive, hands-on end-user support practice," said Snider. "In those early critical weeks, everyone using SAP CRM should be in the line-of-sight of a support person."

Shred-it chose to deploy Knoa EPM to help ensure adoption and effective use of SAP CRM by the end-user population. Knoa EPM monitors application execution from the perspective of the end user, and provides precise metrics about the user experience as well as measurements on how people interact with software applications. The software delivers the most accurate metrics possible on the performance of the application, and an unprecedented level of visibility into the actual performance of the end users.

Shred-it recently completed its initial implementation and is currently using Knoa to capture a wide variety of metrics about the SAP CRM application, including:

-- End-user experience metrics comprising transaction response times, application errors and infrastructure faults

-- End-user performance, covering adoption, utilization, compliance and user proficiency

"We were surprised by the depth and breadth of the information Knoa EPM gives us. When an employee calls us with a problem, Knoa gives us targeted contextual information that allows the team to find the cause and deliver a solution quickly," continues Snider. "More importantly, we will have complete visibility into our globally dispersed user community. In a CRM implementation, silence can be hard to interpret. With Knoa, we know if that silence masks adoption issues; if users are struggling with problems they aren't reporting; or if, in fact, things are going as well as they seem."

"Shred-it clearly understands that critical business objectives will only be achieved when each customer-facing employee is able to execute the SAP CRM application efficiently and effectively," said Thad Eidman, CEO, Knoa Software. "We are delighted that Knoa EPM gives Shred-it a single software tool to further optimize this rollout, while boosting worker effectiveness and efficiency. The result will be an even more powerful approach to Shred-it's relentless pursuit of customer service excellence."

About Knoa

Knoa(R) Software is leading the performance management industry with end-user experience management solutions that reach beyond infrastructure and application performance to monitor, measure and manage how end-users are utilizing corporate software applications to optimize business process execution. Knoa customers not only know if core enterprise applications are delivering an acceptable user experience, but also, if application users are executing key processes effectively and efficiently - the key to achieving business value and ROI. Knoa was recently selected by Gartner as a "Cool Vendor", for its capabilities in end-user experience and performance management and was listed as a Leader in the "Forrester Wave: Passive Agent End-user Experience Monitoring". Knoa is headquartered in New York, NY. For more information about Knoa, please visit www.knoa.com.

Note: Knoa is a registered trademark. SAP and all SAP logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries. All other company and product names contained herein are the marks of their respective holders.

SOURCE: Knoa

PAN Communications
Erica Burns, 978-474-1900
knoa@pancomm.com
or
Knoa Software
Greg Izbicki, 212-807-9608
gizbicki@knoa.com

With the Games in China, one of the greatest ideological divides has been accepted. To make it even more convincing, China would have a full house of the International Olympic Committee's 205 members. It is a great departure from the 1980 Games that the United States of America led a western-boycott of Moscow. The Eastern bloc retaliated in 1984 in Los Angeles.

Feeble efforts at garnering support for Tibet gave way to the enthusiasm of the world to please China , a burgeoning economic and military power.

Back to the Year of the Rat, which is celebrated every 12th leap year, the importance to Chinese reflects in its 128 million internet entries. The Beijing Olympics has only 1.34 million entries.

According to legend, the Jade Emperor invited animals for a party. The rat was the first of 12 animals to arrive. All the animals - ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, rooster, dog, pig - form the 12-year cycle Chinese zodiac life in the order of their arrival.

Those born in the "Year of the Rat" are reportedly clever, ambitious, creative, hard-working, fastidious, charming, and sociable, but can be a bit stingy when it comes to sharing their wealth or possessions.

To sum it up, the positive side of the rat personality includes being easy-going, smart, magnetic, quick witted and well-liked! On the other side, rats have also been known to be a tad cool, calculating, selfish, and protective when they are not in top form, according to the Chinese.

As the Chinese zodiac cycle begins with the Year of the Rat, Chinese believe those born within this category like to be first, pioneers, at the forefront of the action. They tend to see themselves as a cut above the others. Restless and inquisitive, those born under the influence of the rat are active, both physically and mentally, and tend to lead busy lives.

Challenge is essential to them for they love the thrill of living dangerously, adapting easily to different environments, and surviving against all odds. With clairvoyance, intuition, perspicacity and an eye for detail, rats are formidable problem solvers, finding workable solutions to the knottiest problems.

These attributes the Chinese have displayed as they cut through the challenges that lead to the Games, where they are expected to astound the world with the unknown sides of China , aptly in the Year of the Rat.

Winners in Beijing Games would be worthy Olympic champions, not winners of the rat race.

However, what took me aback was the vicious attack on the use of Kiswahili in Tanzania's institutions of learning at all levels. Because Kiswahili was Tanzania's national language, Tanzanians spoke it freely and even preferred it in institutions of learning.

Quoting a number of professors from the University of Dar-es-Salaam, it was revealing that professors were frustrated by the low level of English language forcing them to resort to Kiswahili in order for their lectures to have meaning. More disturbing was the realisation that Tanzanians may not be as good masters of Kiswahili as the rest of East Africa may think.

A number of them were said not to speak it well and even considered it as foreign as English. In Kenya, we always assume that Kiswahili is an urban language only useful for communicating with other ethnic communities when we are in town.

When we get back to our rural homes, we abundantly indulge in our mother tongues with relish to the extent that for one to be elected a Member of Parliament in a rural constituency, proficiency in one's mother tongue becomes a prerequisite.

What I didn't know was that this is also the trend in Tanzania, contrary to our belief that Tanzanians only speak Kiswahili. Right now, many Tanzanians, journalists included, speak sheng Kiswahili, a corruption of English, Kiswahili and other local languages.

It is very common to find words such as feki for fake, penalti for penalty and bethidei for birthday in reputable daily newspapers.

For this reason, many able Tanzanians are sending their children to local expatriate schools or better still send their children to Kenya and Uganda before shipping them to the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries for quality education. Quality education here includes the notion that a good command of written and spoken English makes one a cut above the crowd.

If this degrading of Kiswahili succeeds, Nyerere's philosophy of one language, one nation will have faltered. My fear is that if Tanzania loses the grip on Kiswahili, there may be no real motivation for the rest of the East African Community citizens to master the language considered the lingua franca of our region.

However, the most shocking setback for Nyerere's enduring philosophy was the realisation that last week, the Tanzanian Parliament finally made it official that the country had abandoned Ujamaism-the country's version of socialism.

This policy statement was made in Parliament by Tanzania's minister for East African Cooperation as part of the clarification that the breakup of the EAC in 1977 was due to divergent economic policies pursued by the three partner states at the time. For that reason, implementing protocols on the Common Market, Customs Union and the Monetary Union became impractical.

At that time, while Julius Nyerere's CCM pursued Socialism with vigour, Milton Obote's UPC was toying with the Commonman's Charter while Jomo Kenyatta's kitchen cabinet clung to the Western mode of capitalism inherited from the British and buoyed by the Americans.

With the death of Ujamaism, the curtain will definitely fall of the most celebrated Arusha Declaration where the philosophy of Nyerere's African Socialism was expounded.

What may worry ordinary Tanzanians most is that as they embrace the new culture of capitalism that made them disparage Kenyans as a man-eat-man society, will they stomach the new culture of greed that has seen so many of their leaders in the Kikwete government thrown into the political wilderness?

It is true Nyerere's economic policies failed miserably to the extent that before he quit office, Tanzania was truly a man-eat-nothing society. There was nothing to buy in the shops. A bar of soap or cooking oil could cost and arm and a leg. However, despite all these hardships, Tanzanians were a proud people.

There were few beggars on the streets while common theft or bank robberies were unheard of. All the land belonged to the state.

Will the end of Ujamaism usher in unbridled greed and high level corruption that has permeated the Kenyan society?