Client Success

An Update from the CGI Advantage Steering Committee Chair

This is my first opportunity to reach out to the user community as Steering Committee Chairperson and I’m excited to let you know about several initiatives we have been working on with CGI.  Last year’s Chairperson, Lori McClannahan, focused on communications and under her leadership the Steering Committee made significant strides.  My focus is to build on that foundation for improved communications and to push for making the product more flexible for the user and more adaptable to changing needs.

To improve communications, the Steering Committee emphasizes the importance of the following three tools as we move forward this year:

• Discussion Groups – There are Discussion Groups in place for seven functional areas.  I strongly encourage your participation in these groups since they provide peer-to-peer exchange on topics of common interest and assist sites in solving operational problems.  Please review the Meeting Calendar on the Advantage Support Center to join a Discussion Group and attend an upcoming meeting.
• Discussion Gateway - The Discussion Gateway is a great tool to ask questions and gain information on what other sites are doing to address operational matters. Check out the Discussion Gateway to post questions or concerns for discussion with other members of the CGI Advantage user community.
• Sharing Reports - The development of an Artifacts Library to share items between sites is nearly complete and will be announced later this year.  The first area for the Artifacts Library to focus on is locally developed reports using the Business Objects universes.

The Steering Committee continues to work on ways to improve processes related to Enhancement Requests.  We have nearly finalized a new process that will incorporate “small” enhancements into fix-packs rather than sites having to wait for the next minor release.  This allows us to address minor changes which provide improvements in efficiency and generate operational savings.

This year at the Steering Committee’s March meeting with CGI we were given a unique opportunity to provide input into CGI’s future strategic plans for the Advantage product line. We enthusiastically took on this opportunity and it was exciting to see that our input was in line with the thinking of the CGI product managers. Four themes, the Steering Committee pushed for include:

• Improving usability for increased efficiency and effectiveness;
• Increasing mobility to access information and process documents from remote devices or through the internet as our users are becoming more dynamic in their use of tablets, smart-phones and non-traditional devices;
• Reducing the total cost of owning and maintaining the Advantage product line; and
• Enhancing the ability to capture, view and analyze information that has been collected.

The CGI Forum is back as a live, in-person event.  It is scheduled at the Sheraton Wild Horse Pass in Chandler, AZ on October 14 – 16, 2012.  The Steering Committee has assisted CGI in planning a packed agenda of informative topics.  This continues to be a fantastic educational opportunity and a chance to exchange ideas on how to improve our daily operations. Register now  to take advantage of the early registration discount.

One last point I would like to emphasize, is to encourage you to use the Discussion Gateway, participate in the Discussion Groups and use your Steering Committee members to get your voice heard.  Our CGI Advantage user community is a very knowledgeable group of individuals who have great vision.  They have a lot of good ideas on where they would like to see the product moving and have developed very creative solutions to improve their operations in efficient and cost effective ways.  Use these groups and tools to leverage the hard work of all of us.