Organizational change and the Olympics

Originally posted on IT :: redux:
The London Olympics has kicked off in earnest and someone reporting on the news used the phrase “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” when referring to the UK’s rather lacklustre medal count. And it got me thinking. With the economic crisis as it is everyone is treating enterprise change as…

The future is an app

It took us a while to get there, and we had to get mobile first, but apps are about to explode as the best way to do business. It just makes sense to have light-weight, purpose-built functionality that’s highly specific to the various tasks within roles in the organization. We’ll look back someday in the […]

A Strategy for Another Time

Yesterday, I stopped in at my favorite vacation coffee shop in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Looking around, I was suddenly struck that seven out of the eight laptops on the tables were Macs. This sea change in computer preferences is not just limited to hipsters you might expect to find at a coffee shop in a […]

McKinsey says social has a long way to go

Social is a funny thing. While the media hype is perhaps dying down, the debates about social are very, very active. Much of that talk is about where the value really lies or if there truly is value in the concept of a social enterprise. I can’t speak for everyone, but in my workday, social […]

You gotta put in the work

I’m a devout follower of Seth Godin (@SethsBlog). I encourage you to follow him. A recent post focused on how the best strategy in the Universe is useless without a focus on executing the details of that strategy. That really hit home for me as process person. There has been a lot of recent attention […]

Please step away from the keyboard

Don’t do it. Don’t approve that budget for $1.5 million for that 18-month effort. Don’t book the meeting to start the functional requirements. Don’t start the data dictionary. Just stop. Catch your break and think. Everything has changed just in the past two years. Bespoke (‘custom’, for the non-English) application development is so 2009 unless you […]

The new detail of retail

Retail has gone through enormous stresses in the past decade, with more to come. Just the normal ups and downs of local and global economies, supply chains and personal taste are a huge challenge. Add to that mix the increasing maturation of concepts like e-Commerce, Big Data, RFID and mobile. Each of these would be […]

What is your model for business success?

Models are the way we conceptualize and visualize interacting with our customers, our coworkers, our partners and our systems. As the world moves quickly toward 24×7 business and real-time analytics and responses, models are becoming the key to keeping the business intact as the landscape shifts. Regardless of what’s spelled out implicitly, every business has […]

Big Data is so much bigger than that

The following is a guest blog by Simon Hall from Newbury, England. In Simon’s words, “Sales and selling have been my life. I’ve never been more excited than I am now about what the future of technology and business can be.” We’ve all heard Big Data can help us to find the proverbial needle in […]

Why would you want to boil a frog?

Supposedly, if you drop a frog in hot water, it will jump out. If you put a frog in cold water and gradually heat it, the frog will die, unaware that it could have escaped danger. Funny thing…this gets repeated as a metaphor for both avoiding danger and sneaking change into organizations. (Never mind that […]

Data in motion divides the haves and have nots

Data in motion is not a new term, but it has more meaning today than ever before. There is a significant shift in the way technology is being used thanks to the increasingly cheap price of RAM (Random Access Memory) and an increasingly interconnected world. RAM was always the ‘pricey’ memory that was also volatile…it […]

Originally posted on IT :: redux:
I’m not a football fan by any means, but the ability for 50,000 people to rally support and spur on 10 men to victory is compelling, let alone believe that they can do it. Thinking a little smaller, remember The Hunt For Red Oktober ? That scene where the submarine…

Security in an insecure world

In a recent TechCrunch article, Just Like Everything Else In The Enterprise Space, Security Is About To Be Disrupted, the author argues that the momentum of change in enterprise technology will roll over this space as well. I’m going to tell you why simply shopping for a security vendor may not be enough. The good […]

What is a job, anyway?

A recent article in Forbes on how millennials see their careers talked about the difference between how my parents’ generation saw work and how the millennial generation has taken a new perspective. I’m not a millennial, but it doesn’t matter. It was me. Au revoir, Paris I’m an attorney by training and started off like […]

The exciting future of Platform as a Service

Although Cloud computing is just starting to make its way into the manufacturing industry, Cloud development platforms — or platforms as a service (PaaS) — hold great potential for the future of manufacturing software. PaaS has the potential to open up new opportunities for manufacturers by allowing them to access more powerful and customized systems […]

Is the social enterprise relevant to you?

Last week, I listened to SAP’s weekly radio program, In the Cloud with Game-Changers, and the topic was the social enterprise. The program featured a panel of the following very talented social business experts: Brent Leary, Partner at CRM Essentials Sameer Patel, Global VP of Enterprise Social Software at SAP Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, Social Media […]