SAFIRA 2.0

No, it’s not a post with the lyrics to the ABBA song. Truly sorry about that.

It’s 2 AM last night and I’m there thinking about presentations (go figure). I’m thinking, how can I make a powerful message about the tremendous responsibility we, as a company and as a team, face every single day working for the high profile customers we chose to work for? Then I want to make another point about how prepared we are to handle that responsibility.

Just minutes before starting this post I recalled NRP’s presentation at the kickoff. Then I recalled a couple of things more, and they all started to point into a common direction. I’m thinking, “our software handles serious loads of money, every single day, innit?”. Taking NRP’s slide about money moved by some software we recently for one customer as a sample, that application handled roughly 77,5 million Euros in a single day, on the 12th of February. Business as usual, no biggie there, right? Riiiiight!

How about some e-banking stuff, retail and corporate, we’ve been working on since circa 2001 for some other customer? How much money do those apps move in a day? And I really mean plural because I’m counting six of them off of the top of my head.
And how about some financial products platform gizmo we did for this other customer? How much does that baby move around each day? Our own site mentions a case study at BES-Vida about our software handing 1.500 million Euros a year in risk products contracts. That’s 1,5 billion Euros a year in some cultures, but its 6,25 million Euros a day in every culture I know.

My point is, the apps we’ve been developing over the years, and that are currently into production, handle some serious money value every day. Thats a great responsibility! Exactly how much money our apps move every day is what I’d like to know.

So, guys, can you help me figure out how much money does Safira’s software handle on an average day? Money transfers of all types, contracts subscribed, contracts canceled, and every type of order that has an Euro value attached to it counts.
I want to come up with a number in Euros that is the sum of what all Safira developed apps handle on an average day. Depending on what we can come up with, this might just be usable for the kind of message I’m trying to pass.

Can you go into your apps and ask them logs how much money are they handling these days, then report back to me, please? While you’re at it, try to figure out how many customers and customer sessions your app serves a day as well. That might be another interesting number.

Don’t post answers here. E-mail them to me directly.

Thanks.

Damn right it is!

Maybe more than we think at this point. It wasn’t by chance that I mentioned it in my Enterprise 2.0 presentation at SAFIRA 2008.

EPM deployment in January 2007 has changed something fundamental, but it seems to me that we (as a team) haven’t completely realized the full scope of this change …yet.
The project is thoroughly documented. We had training sessions. There’s an EPM site on MOSS about it with lots of references and reading materials. Still, there seems to be something missing. Here’s my 0.2 EUR on what that is.

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Blogs on blogs.safira.pt, by default, are public. As you well know, this means your posts are accessible to anyone on the internet. We believe this encourages you to create your blog, and contribute to the community of your choice.

By blogging under the safira.pt domain, your opinions and the information you give away on your blog may be regarded by anyone from the outside as being related to, and endorsed by, our company. This carries some responsibilities.

SAFIRA is developing a simple weblog policy and will publish it soon. Until then, be reasonable, and follow some simple, common sense, ground rules when blogging.

Take care not to disclose customer information. Customers trust us with their information, and don’t expect us to be talking about them without their knowledge or authorization. Imagine your doctor blogging about your medical condition.

Take care not to give away customer or company property.  You all have access to digital assets, such as code or documentation, that are a property of Safira or it’s customers. If you publish them on your blog, you might be giving away something that is not yours.

Be responsible for the comments as well. Don’t be afraid to moderate, and remember that it’s up to you to decide if *anyone* can comment or only members of the community.

Be respectful of our company, your colleagues, our customers, our partners and our competitors.

Watch your language.

More than being careful, be respectful when blogging. Be 2.0.

I just created a group named Safira at ma.gnolia.com.

This is great for sharing bookmarks about Safira applications, blogs, wikis and everything else that is a part of our corporate Web.

By bookmarking this URL, you’re bookmarking the only URL you’ll ever need to find out where Safira’s internal and external sites are

By subscribing the RSS feed Ma.gnolia about Safira, you get the latests links as soon as the moderators team posts them.

By joining the group, you can contribute with bookmarks that you learn about, and help with the tagging.

Will love to get feedback on this.

Have a great day.

Google SAFIRA

Index and search an entire enterprise using the Google technology, the best and most widely used search technology. At SAFIRA we do it with the Google Search Appliance, aka GSA, which is nothing more than Google in a yellow box.

Create awesome mashups and plug-ins to index reference corporate data and internet Web Services. Return everything there is to know about a customer, in a coherent results page, just by searching his customer ID. It’s easily accomplished by developing Google plug-ins that index our ERP, CRM, documents, project wikis and everything that has an URL or runs on a database. And that’s just the beginning. Search employee information (except salary receipts), corporate news, pools, surveys, group calendar and every other bit of data.

Remeber life before Google? Didn’t think so. Make Goggle SAFIRA the front door to our corporate web 2.o, just like Google.com is the front door to the Internet.

Visit www.safira.pt or www.google.com/enterprise for more information on Google Search Appliance.

Devise and implement a plan to attract and retain a solid user base, just like launching an online public service. Listen to user feedback, improve and launch new features, improve usability a reliability to keep your users happy and coming back for more.

This project is part of SAFIRA’s Enterprise 2.0 initiative created to completely revamp the way we work, communicate, collaborate and manage the company, by introducing a new breed of social software behind and across the firewall. Be a part of a corporate cultural shift!

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Dear Team Leaders,

SAFIRA 2008 (SAF2K8), our annual kickoff event, will take place on 15th February. Following the format started last year’s second quarter summit, I hereby present you with the opportunity of talking about your projects to the whole SAFIRA community, and share your successes and experiences with all of us. Speakers not participating in the previous event, SAFIRA 2007 Q2, will be given priority.

This year’s agenda has three 10 minute slots for project presentations, like the previous event.

GUIDELINES
Your 10 mins presentations should focus on the following:
- Mission and goals
- Plan (project chronogram, where applicable) and project team (names and roles)
- Benefits to the customer
- The value of SAFIRA to the project
- The project’s value to SAFIRA

This means 5 slides maximum, with 2 mins per slide. Also works well 3 slides at 3 mins per slide. I strongly suggest illustrative slides (diagrams, charts, gannts, clip-art), not endless bulleted lists. Less text, more talk.

Watch this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLpjrHzgSRM !!!

DATES & DEADLINES

23/01/2008, 12:00h, Proposals submission

25/01/2008, 14:00h, Orientation
01/02/2008, 12:00h, 1st draft PPT delivery
08/02/2008, 12:00h, Final PPT delivery
15/02/2008, 10:00h, Presentation

Thank you for participating.