Purpose

	Entry Title	Xegy Accelerator
	Submitted by:	Granite Technologies, Inc.
	Contact Name:	Kathy Larson, President
	Phone:	303-302-1186
	E-mail	kalarson@xegy.com
	Address:	112 N. Rubey Drive, Suite 135 Golden, CO 80403
	Logo:
	Sponsoring Customer:	Brown-Forman, Global Spirits Bob Hausladen, Director of Leadership Development

Companies strive to achieve the highest possible levels of productivity. While most companies typically have vast and varied repositories of data, systems, training, requirements, human expertise, and tools, they do not have a fast, simple way to map and support the execution of business goals. Think about the average week for a new employee. They face new tasks, a multitude of forms to fill out, new people to meet, implicit norms and expectations, and usually a manager with hundreds of things to do other than hold their hand. They need to learn about the organization, industry, and their role in the whole scheme. And...they need to produce as quickly and sustainably as possible.

Performance support systems should present a clear roadmap to success. Defining a clear roadmap to successful accomplishment of business goals is, and should be, evolutionary and iterative. Today's performance systems are challenged to produce immediate benefits and be resilient enough to evolve on demand.

Companies will often spend a tremendous amount of time and money to capture business processes. You see them on the walls and on the bookshelves of companies everywhere. But how many of those processes are living, breathing, and used every day. More often, they become lifeless albatrosses, not the everyday guides aligining efforts, organizing resources, and driving results. Xegy Accelerator was developed to support continuous planning, evolution, and executing any business process. It is designed to be deployed quickly, and built and populated by the people who know the business, but don't necessarily have a Ph.D. in technologies. Some examples include:

• New Hire Development
• Succession Planning
• Product Development
• Franchise Opening and Operations
• Sales Process

Currently, Brown-Forman, Royal & Sun Alliance, Kinko's Inc., The Education Commission of the States are using some variation of Accelerator.

The key performance issues addressed in the application include:

Actionable Path to Success, Grounded in the Real World

• Businesses need manageable ways to plan, map, iterate, logically populate, and track progress through business strategies. There is tangible value in providing a means to simply organize and structure a viable path to successful completion of a goal or goals.
• Rather than creating a snapshot plan, what's really needed is an integrated approach to everyday work support. The system has to seamlessly join learning, activity support, management support.
• Often, even if there is a defined roadmap, performance indicators track irrelevant data, ignoring the information that is truely useful to the average user or manager and drives improvement.

Time Savings

• Front-line users may be new to a process or to the company and they will spend time looking for information, trying different approaches, talking to people, inventing a new way, or giving up.
• Administrators typically spend unacceptable amounts of time learning the system, troubleshooting the technology, and supporting users. Architecting and populating the system should be a non-technical work, eliminating the need for programmers, which slows development due to continuous handoffs and rework.
• Experienced users need to be able to get in and get out quickly and they need to see an explicit value for their goals.
• New users need easily navigated support. It should be easily adopted with minimal training required.

Management Support

• Managers may or may not know the best course of action for every situation. Even if they do know what to do, they still time thinking appropriate responses to particular actions on the part of their team or direct reports. Intelligent prompting helps even the most experienced. If they don't know what to do, they will spend time looking for information, trying different approaches, talking to people, inventing a new way, or giving up. Ideally, management support is structured into the system.

Flexibility - Evolving Needs

• Many systems don't allow companies to plan and change their systems to focus on pragmatic issues, the larger and "more powerful" the less nimble the application.
• The ability for business users, rather than technical people, to develop and manage the content. They are closest to the need and understand the "language" expressed through the content.

High Impact Progress Tracking

• One of the key challenges faced by managers is the ability to quickly and easily assess progress toward a goal. Tracking needs to match the the day-to-day use of the system. It needs to be readily accessible, current, and mapped to defined activities.