Intersys Spotlight 1/2016 (English)

Customer Magazine Intersys AG

Editorial Dear reader Will we soon face the situation where many people will rather pursue their hobbies than work as a days occupation? Will we all soon be artists, philosophers or sports professionals? The once by com­munist ideologists propagated ideal state of society might be closer in our reach than what we believe.

The ongoing digitalization and auto­ mation of work more and more affects even skilled labour and work processes are being performed by robots already today – in a better quality and cheaper than before. Once again IT plays a vital role in this transformation. But this time, it might even automate IT labour itself.

The effects of digitalization on society cannot yet be fully estimated. However, It becomes more and more clear that payable and affordable labour turns

more to a rare topic. Taking this into account, it is time to start thinking about future social scenarios and models. Let us hope that the related discussion takes place prior to the Swiss poll in early June where Swiss people can express their opinion on the “unconditional income” according to which each person in Switzerland will have a base salary independent of their professional status. It would be highly dangerous to only reduce this discussion to the normal ideological fights between the established political parties in ­Switzerland.

Ji í Petr CEO

SPOTLIGHT 1/2016

New strategy – new executive board member 2016 promises to be an important year for the development of Intersys. A revised strategy and adopted organizational structure allow Intersys to continue its growth while keeping up what the company is good at. Traditional business areas like individual software development will be continued and will keep playing an important role.

Test Management is a new focus area with the development of a test framework which supports midsized companies in their challenge to control software quality. The new initiative “digitalization” will support companies in their quest to optimize their business using IT techno-

logies (see article on page 2 of this issue). To support all these activities, the company has decided to expand its executive board to include 3 persons. Fabian Rezzonico started his new role as CTO on Januar y 1 st 2016 while still being member of the board of directors. The presidency of the board has been transferred to Matthias Miescher, who is member of the board already since the beginning of 2014.

Fabian Rezzonico, CTO

Regional customer event – IT from Solothurn Did you know that Solothurn has a lively IT community that is capable of delivering a wide range of products and services?

During the regional customer event, taking place on September 1 st 2016 in Solothurn, we will highlight why partnering with local providers is beneficial for all parties. Together with other IT com-

panies, we can provide all necessary services and products to satisfy today’s customer’s needs. Working closely together among the IT partners, the customer enjoys a single point of contact to deal with. Quality and reliability are no less than what can be expected from any other provider.

Additionally, supporting local companies also makes a statement in favor of the region Solothurn and the development of it’s labor market. We will be inviting existing as well as prospect customer from within the region. This will also make for a good networking platform.

Would you like to know more about the event and the local initiative? Please contact us on sales@intersys.ch or call on 032 625 76 76 for further information.

Customers case studies

Digitalization of the econony – is your company ready for the future?

Digitalization is THE hot topic in today’s economy. Companies are pushing to perform the necessary changes in order to align their traditional business to the new realities, making sure their position in the market will stay or even expand.

Companies and public offices generally have t wo areas where digit alization ­m atters the most: – The complete service portfolio of the organisation needs to be digitized. This means: enabling of existing services and products with IT capabilities. This will reduce the cost of the products and services and extend their reach to new potential customers that have not been addressed before. New products are designed with this new reality in mind which will allow for new, prospective business models.

– T he optimization of the organisation itself using digitalization mechanisms.

The company will only sur vive when its processes and data are fully digital and optimized. With this base, it’s easier for the company to address all stake­h olders, customers and to stay competitive on the market.

Intersys has a long histor y of supporting companies in their digit alization efforts, optimizing data and related processes. For the year 2016, Intersys has decided to emphasize and prioritize this business area to further focus on pro-

ducts and s­ er vices that will enable companies to be more efficient.

Intersys’ value adds to its customers focusses on helping them improve their organizations in regards to the following economic effects: – Speeding up processes, thus greatly reducing processing time and achieve faster time to market

– Helping to make sure legal compliance is achieved thus reducing risks for the organisation Intersys main focus centers on supporting companies optimizing their processes and products. With the addition of an ECM (Enterprise Content Management) product to its portfolio, Intersys can offer each customer a key component in order to find the optimal start into the world of d ­ igitalization.

– Helping to improve quality of the processes and products thus reducing cost of defects – H elping to reduce process related costs thus optimizing the bottom line

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ECM deals with the creation, the management, the long term storage and the provisioning of a company’s Information base.

Additional information regarding the Intersys ECM portfolio can be found on our ECM-Website.

ECM Offering

by Intersys

ECM for archiving of eMails

Intersys offers the optimal electronic file storage for your organisation. No matter what tools you are using today, there is an optimal way to integrate them into the centralized storage: – C ommon office suite documents (Word, Excel, others) – Email messages – Documents from ERP, CRM and other applications – Paper based documents using scanners

Email archiving from the mail inbox of a user is considered standard in today’s archiving solutions. There is also the possibility to archive mails right from the mail server using business rules and automated text recognition.

Intersys is your specialist for integration of all of these document sources and offers a set of related services supporting your efforts. Aiming at a high degree of automation right from the start will make sure that your investment is spent wisely and will also protect money invested (e.g. through migration).

The Intersys ECM system offers the most advanced mail archiving client that will plug in right with Microsoft’s Exchange Servers, be it on premise or in the cloud. Using these mechanisms, your company can save on work efforts and raise the overall employee satisfaction while being compliant with legal requirements. Find out more from ­I ntersys.

ECM Starter Kit Building up and getting a digital archive into operations should be cost effective and straight for ward these days. For this purpose, Intersys has introduced a starter kit, which will facilitate the basic installation, targeting small to medium sized companies. The kit contains all necessary components to support a company with its needs: – The necessary archive license, the integration into Microsoft Office based documents, email archiving and web access to the archive – The necessary services to install the system on the customers premise or in a outsourcing center Ask for our pricing and the optimal setting for your company.

ECM and Collaboration Up to date electronic archiving systems today have built in mechanisms to support collaboration among the various stakeholders of a company. No need for information workers to send mails forth and back to update on relevant changes in the archive. This automatically results in less mail traffic.

Today’s digital archives are far more than just filers. They support efficient and fast handling of information that is used in everyday work situations.

Product / Services

Introducing the project management and solution architecture team When is the time a PM is happy with his work?

Whenever the customer is happy. Personally, I’m very happy if I meet the three main goals of a project: cost, quality and time. Additionally, it is also important to me keeping the load on my team at an acceptable and sustainable level. To the benefit of everyone involved.

The PM Team: André Vocat, Thomas Günter, Hans-Peter Schmocker, Thomas Laubscher

The Team of Hans-Peter Schmocker is responsible for project management (pm) in Intersys’ development projects. It is a very professional and easy to lead team, he states, having highly qualified and self-driven team members. Their qualifications include, among others, certificates for requirement engineering, DataStax Solution architect (highest possible level within DataStax partner model), SAQB certified professional for software architecture as well as IPMA (pm).

Why is the analysis phase of a project so important even though the customer knows already what he needs?

Quite often, various stakeholders are involved on the customer’s side, that have different requirements towards an individual software system. During the analysis phase, we have to make sure we cover them all and build a solid base for the next phase. There is also a clear need to define and agree on what’s included and what not. The better this can be specified, the higher the chances that we will be ending up with the targeted functionality and the fewer changes will be needed during later project phases. The efforts for changes in a later project phase will increase exponentially as the project progresses into the development and deployment phase. Summing it up: the analysis phase has a ver y vital role for the overall project success.

What are the main challenges in a software project from a PM’s point of view?

They depend mainly on changing requirements during the project. IT projects have to meet the stakeholder’s expectations and add a business value. If the customer’s business or his requirements change during the course of the project, this inevitably has a consequence on the further proceeding of the project – be it on the specification, the implementation or last but not least on already implemented test cases. For this reason it is

important to have a clear change procedure that will be applied. No need to state that the main challenge of a software project is meeting cost, time and quality targets at all times.

What established PM methods are in use in your company?

Depending on customer’s choice, we are using the classical waterfall method or the newer, agile development. Classic methods are used for instance with telco operators where the resulting systems are mission critical and need to run at all times. Upgrade times of such systems are very short, typically 2–3 times a year.

Those customer’s internal processes are still very much focused on the waterfall method so we easily adapt to them. As project controlling method, we are using the so called “Earned Value Analysis (EVA). With this method, simply stated, we have a mean of regularly measuring project progress on the time and cost axes and we are also able to project the project targets on these axes. Regarding agile development methods: One of the big advantages of the agile framework lies in the fact, that customer requirements and actual development results can be compared, adjusted and reprioritized at the end of each sprint, which is typically ever y two to four weeks. This greatly helps reducing the risk of heading in the wrong direction for too long a time without knowing either on the customer or on our own side.

What’s the relation in efforts between creating a specification and building and testing the system?

Using the waterfall method, which includes an extensive analysis phase, specification is approximately 20% of the overall effort. Using agile methods, where, according to the “agile manifest”, the interaction with the stakeholders and the resulting software product are more important than the documentation, it is clearly less. In agile projects, testing also requires a decent effort. Our test specialists build test regression frameworks, which support automated testing, e.g. once every night. Once written, they can be reused. Overall, this amounts to about 25–30% of the total effort of an agile project. The development itself accounts for about 50% of the total efforts.

Why should a customer come to Intersys for a software project?

Because we have excellent competences in driving a thorough analysis and the following development phase will make sure we meet the customer’s needs.

Additionally we also provide support services during and after go live of a system and are experienced taking respons­i bility.

How do you deal with the following 3 trends: the increasing importance of leadership and communication skills for PMs, changes in the relationship with stakeholders due to the popularity of agile methods and the increasing complexity of IT projects?

Leadership in software development teams depends on project phases. In the beginning of a project – the storming phase – where roles within the team need to be clarified, it is important to have some clear directives from the project manager – even up to a statement of authority. In later phases, my team normally is able to organize itself independently. From a communication point of view: honesty is a ver y important factor for me, be it among the team or towards the customer.

I also tend to look for a close relationship with the stakeholder. In “Scrum” projects (agile framework), the “Product Owner”, which is quite often a role our PM’s take over, has to regularly control, manage and prioritize requirements together with the stakeholder and feed

these requirements into the “product backlog”. Additionally, at the end of each sprint, there is a review phase of what has been provided by the development

Intersys Services Intersys is able to cover all your needs regarding specification, implemen­ tation and operation of a mission critical application. Having skilled special­ists, we can cover business analysis, development, database development, test management and support ­s er vices, offering you a “One-StopShop” experience. Intersys will support you over the entire life cycle of your application.

Further details can be found in the ­I ntersys portrait on the Intersys homepage following this link. w w w. i n t e r s y s . c h / e n / a b o u t - u s / portrait

team. A close relation to the customer thus is an inherent factor of each agile project and therefore a success factor.

Complexity in a project results from my point of view during “feedback loops” which can create an unexpected dynamics within the system.

In a project, this is generally caused by changing requirements which lead to feedback loops, additional efforts and timely delays. As many of today’s IT projects are under high time pressure and quite often moving targets in terms of requirements, this inevitably leads to higher complexity. Since transparency and inspection, but also more and more adoption are key cornerstones of the agile framework, it has become clear that agile projects can help to better manage raising complexity.

What makes a good PM? Skills in PM and methodology but also social and communication competences.

A PM at Intersys additionally has to be customer oriented and ser vice driven, which is important when delivering ­i ndividual software.

News

Partnership with ELO Digital Office

Contract management by Intersys

German based ELO Digital Office is a new strategic partner of Intersys for covering the market of digitalization.

Intersys became an official Business Partner of ELO in Switzerland, allowing us to distribute ELO products and deli-

Do you have all of your contracts under control and know, when they expire or need to be renewed? And where they are stored? As an add-on module to the digi-

ver related ser vices. More about Intersys ECM services in this issue. www.elo.ch

Partnering with unadox

Partnering with UBK GmbH Germany based UBK GmbH specializes in supporting and consulting customers in their way finding a new ERP solution.

UBK offers ser vices like business process optimization, specification, vendor selection, contract management and project controlling. Intersys works closely

tal archive, Intersys can help you to manage your contracts efficiently and timely. Please enquire for more details.

with UBK delivering integration and test management services to round off each resulting ERP project.

The Swiss start-up company unadox has developed an online claims management solution for insurers and other businesses. Intersys is actively supporting unadox with professional integration services to ensure optimal integration into

IT systems of unadox customers. Find out more: www.unadox.com

www.ubkgmbh.de

New customers in 2015/2016 The year 2015 has shown a decent amount of new customers for Intersys.

Several projects were implemented to the full satisfaction of our new contacts.

Following some examples from our list of new customers: – A scanner based solution for delivery of news titles for Tamedia, one of the largest media companies in Switzerland.

– Centris AG, a service provider in the health care market was supported with a test automation concept and testing services.

– S itasys AG, a company in the public security space was supported with an application concept.

2016 has also started well with new customers: – Webshop development for a local meat distributor.

– Web presence renewal for Weber Werbung.

– New web portal for a local semi-­p ublic company in the insurance space.

– A new test automation project in the IP Telephony space for Swisscom AG.

Participate in our new contest! With the help of a little luck, you can win a new Samsung Gear S2 Classic Black smart watch. Participate by scanning the QR-code and filling out the resulting form or visit our website www.intersys.ch/contest. The winner will be drawn from all entries. Contest deadline is 30th Mai 2016.

All people aged 18 and older are eligible to take part in the

Winner of our last contest The winner of our last Spotlight contest (2/15) is Manfred Schild. Mr. Schild is heading the grid application department within the national Swiss Powerline ­o perator Swissgrid in Laufenburg.

He did win an Apple Watch of the newest generation which he received at the Intersys headquarter in Zuchwil. Please see below for the new contest.

Comicstrip von Andreas Thiel

Contest contest. Only one entry per person. There is no legal recourse after the prize draw. The prize draw is excluded from the jurisdiction of any court. The winner will be notified in writing by eMail and/or letter. There is no cash alternative to the prize. The prize is not transferable to another person. Information entered by the participants can be used by Intersys for advertising purposes, however, they will not be passed on to third parties. Employees of Intersys AG and Business4you AG are excluded from the contest. The contest will close on 30th Mai 2016.

Which business area of Intersys is being enforced with the new strategy? a) Consulting b) Software Development c) Test-Management

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