Strategic Innovations is pleased to announce the expansion of the business as Cindy Causey takes a more active role. Ms. Causey is assuming responsibility for clients who have engaged Strategic Innovations for financial management and accounting services. In the past, these clients have received service from President Jeff Causey on a regular basis. By transitioning these clients to Ms. Causey's responsibility, Mr. Causey will be able to focus on more unique projects that require heightened project management skills and attention. He will also be able to devote more attention to the development of new services and products, including enterprise content management systems and customer/constituent relationship management systems aimed at the public sector and not-for-profit organizations.
Ms. Causey is an experienced, executive-level finance professional. In the past, she has held finance director positions with organizations like the American Red Cross (Charlotte chapter) and Alsco, a national building products manufacturer. Ms. Causey also has municipal government experience having managed the utility billing and revenue management functions of a large North Carolina city. Ms. Causey is a graduate of Meredith College with a degree in Business Management/Accounting.
If you are interested in the services that can be provided by Strategic Innovations for your organization, please feel free to contact
or
.
Causey Interviewed for CFO Magazine
Written by Jeffrey G. Causey
Monday, 06 August 2007
Strategic Innovations, Inc., president Jeff Causey was recently interviewed for CFO Magazine. The article, Spreadsheets Are Free, (also available as a pdf) is a quick review of the OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, and especially the Calc (spreadsheet) component. Mr. Causey represents a "user" in the article and an example of someone who has built a business without using Microsoft Office or Excel.
Strategic Innovations has been recommending OpenOffice.org as an excellent alternative to other office suites, especially Microsoft Office. Many benefits can be realized by making the switch to OpenOffice.org, including:
cost - not only is the cost of OpenOffice.org - free - a great benefit, but organizations can also avoid costs related to license management. If you buy "packs" of licenses for an application like Microsoft Office, making a switch can also help you avoid tying up resources in spare (excess) licenses.
training - As Microsoft Office 2007 starts to make inroads into the market, you may be faced with training issues. First is the cost of retraining your employees to use their office suite, which can be avoided by using OpenOffice.org which sports a familiar interface. Also, if your organization transitions to Microsoft Office 2007, you will incur a reduction in productivity while employees learn the new software and then deal with the inevitable errors.
document formats - by using OpenOffice.org, organizations can benefit from using an ISO approved document file format. This increases the number of options available to use the documents (many other programs can open OpenDocument Format documents, the default for OpenOffice.org). For organizations with long-term archival responsibilities, this may be an issue as well as the OpenDocument format is publicly available, ensuring documents can be accessed long after today's software is relegated to history.
"togetherness" - as noted in the article, our personal experience with OpenOffice.org is that it is much better at sharing information between the different component parts (e.g. pasting spreadsheet information into a text document). This is based in the suite's roots as noted in the article and it shows in real life usage.
These are just a few of the benefits of OpenOffice.org. If you would like more information or assistance in transitioning your organization to using OpenOffice.org, please contact
.
Last Updated ( Monday, 06 August 2007 )
Strategic Innovations Completes Information Technology Strategic Plan
Written by Jeffrey G. Causey
Thursday, 17 May 2007
Strategic Innovations is pleased to announce the recent completion of a strategic information technology (IT) plan for a non-profit organization. Over the years, this organization had developed and implemented a variety of hardware and software solutions on an ad hoc, largely unplanned basis. Heightened by personnel changes and growth of operations, this method of making IT investments had produced a lack of awareness and understanding of deployed assets as well as an inability to leverage IT assets in pursuit of the organization's mission.
After an assessment and gap analysis was completed with the client, Strategic Innovations developed a plan identifying both long- and short-term objectives tied back to the organization's mission, values and overall strategies for service delivery.
Moving forward, Strategic Innovations will be assisting the organization with development and implementation of several of the recommendations in the IT Plan. These will include development of policies and procedures related to measuring IT investments, asset replacement policies, and business continuity/disaster planning. Strategic Innovations will also be assisting with deployment of a constituent relationship management (CRM) application, a document management system, and a new collaboration system. Using the IT Plan as the framework, Strategic Innovations is projecting savings of over $20,000 for the organization compared to their former methodology for making IT decisions.
For more information on how Strategic Innovations can help you with your IT planning or deployment of various systems like CRM or document management, please feel free to contact us.
Last Updated ( Thursday, 17 May 2007 )
Strategic Innovations Helps Sponsor Healthy Kids Day
Written by Jeffrey G. Causey
Wednesday, 18 April 2007
Strategic Innovations is pleased to announce our participation and support for the recent Healthy Kids Day - A Day in the Park. This event was held on April 14th at Burlington City Park in Burlington, NC. The event is a joint undertaking of the Alamance Partnership for Children, the YMCA, and the Burlington Recreation and Parks Department. As noted at the YMCA web site, Healthy Kids Day is designed to "encourages kids and their families nationwide to stay active, connected and healthy". Strategic Innovations is proud to support this event and the efforts of those in our community to prepare our kids for great life. Be sure to check out the flyer from the event!
Last Updated ( Wednesday, 18 April 2007 )
Strategic Innovations Completes Business Process Analysis
Written by Jeffrey G. Causey
Tuesday, 03 April 2007
Strategic Innovations is pleased to announce the recent completion of a client project to revise and update financial policies and procedures. An important component of the project was the business process analysis that occurred as Strategic Innovations worked with the client to ensure policies and procedures not only reflected best practices for financial management processes, but that the policies and procedures reflected actual operations. Even though the client had access to and used a set of policy/procedure templates in the past, no attempt to reconcile these to actual processes had occurred. This was an important component of the project as this agency is regularly audited by the Office of State Auditor for the State of North Carolina and being able to show compliance with policies is key to a successful audit.
In addition to the business process analysis, Strategic Innovations also worked closely with the client to ensure the policies and procedures were easy to understand and the materials available to staff would be used as a regular part of their jobs. Strategic Innovations was able to supply an end product that makes it easy for staff to figure out what needs to be done and who is responsible for completing a task.
If you would like more information about how Strategic Innovations can help you with business process analysis or with the development of policies and procedures (financial or otherwise), please contact us via e-mail or phone at 336-675-1652.
Last Updated ( Thursday, 12 April 2007 )
Strategic Innovations Sponsor for NCCCMA Winter Seminar
Written by Jeff Causey
Wednesday, 07 February 2007
Strategic Innovations is pleased to
announce that we are serving as a Bronze level sponsor for the NC City &
County Management Association Winter Seminar. The Winter
Seminar is being held at the Sheraton Imperial RTP from February 7 - 9, 2007.
The theme of the Winter Seminar is "Managing for Tomorrow:
Sustaining the Council Manager For of Government in the 21st
Century". As a former attendee in my role as a manager and
assistant manager, it is very exciting to be on the "other side of
the table" providing financial and other support to the NCCCMA.
If you are attending the conference and are visiting the site,
please come by our booth for more information about Strategic
Innovations and the services we can provide. If you are only
getting around to this after the seminar, please feel free to
contact us for more information on how Strategic Innovations can
help you!
