Hello again, Moore’s Law
There are rumors of massive layoffs at IBM. True or not, there is no denying the company has had years of consecutive quarterly revenue declines. Poor Ginni Rommety gets the blame, but my view is IBM forgot about Moore’s Law and continuous value improvements as it diversified into software and services over the last two […]
The State of Customer Science
Bluewolf, the consultancy that was founded to assist customers implementing and deploying Salesforce.com, has released its annual State of Salesforce report. The company started this practice a few years ago using MIT Sloan School of Management personnel to interview Salesforce customers and the methodology is tight. So what’s in the report? Just what you might […]
Shame on who?
You have heard the expression “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me”. But if you get fooled 6-7-8 times, who do you blame? As I go through every nook and crevice of the SAP economy for the book I am writing, it is staggering how every type of vendor has […]
Showing Up to Share: From Fear to Fun
During the 1990s, a recession gave rise to a series of popular belt-tightening management edicts that consultants vowed would bring our economy back from the brink by establishing predictable revenue streams and operational efficiencies. Management gurus such as Michael Hammer led the charge with his audacious howl writing in the Harvard Business Review, “Don’t automate! […]
Kids Birthday Parties, Six Sigma, and Analytics Don’t Mix…(or do they?)
We did a combined birthday party for our oldest kids this past weekend. One of the other fathers in the group, who served as a chaperone for the party, has a similar finance, procurement and operations background to many of the re…
Is Middle Market Procurement Really Any Different? (Part 1) — Summary
I had the chance this week to connect with a fascinating gentleman that I hope to collaborate with in some capacity. This gentleman is pursuing a new type of organization to enable middle market companies to identify, learn and ex…
Gartners IT Debt Scare
Gartner made a name starting in the mid-90s forecasting the estimated cumulative cost of Y2K remediation. I was there – and the big numbers it bandied about helped focus enterprises on the core problem. But it also led to hype, panic buying (and …
Mama Weer All Crazee-Social Now!
Indeed, a Quiet Riot is percolating in the heretofore boring ERP sector. I spotted Josh Greenbaum‘s post on “Enterprise Relationship Planning” this afternoon. In the Council, we have dredged up a 90s label– The Extended Enterprise– to categorize discussions about how our members are architecting their socio-collaborative initiatives to span partners in their supplier, distributor, […]
The Dangers of Lean — Ignore at Your Peril
Even though I’m married to a Six Sigma black belt who wants to run Kaizen events to improve my personal organization and process efficiency both in the office and out, I’ll be the first to suggest that lean principals can introduce material risk into the supply chain — especially in volatile and risky economic markets. […]
Modeling the Procurement BPO of the Future (Part 1)
The offshore BPO industry is in the midst of a gradual (some might argue more rapid) transformation from delivering low-to-moderate value services and results for commensurate costs and returns to serving as the process equivalent (or better) for in-house functions in Global 2000 companies. A recent column in India’s Financial Express highlights this emerging evolution […]
