Throughout history, humans have always created purpose-built tools that serve a specific need. Even in the Stone Age, humans shaped their stones to build a toolset to do different things. Sharp stones served as cutting tools, while larger hammerstones were used to strike or pound things. Purpose-built tools are pervasive in every industry. We are…
Woo, not sue: That’s SAP’s new strategy for dealing with customers that want to access their core ERP data through a cloud-based CRM system. Customer relationship management (CRM) overtook database management and enterprise resource planning (ERP) to become the biggest business software category in 2017, and is set to be the fastest-growing in the years…
Historically, services organizations have managed the planning and scheduling of resources through informal ways, where tribal knowledge is a critical element of the process. For example, resource planners often have years of history and close working relationships with many personnel, with conversations across the office, email, unintegrated point solutions, and spreadsheets most commonly used. The…
Implementing change in an organization is no small task — it requires time, energy, budgeting and employee and stakeholder engagement. For IT leaders who are responsible for organizational change management with hardware, software or services, there are plenty of training programs to help strengthen your change management leadership skills. Check out these 10 change management…
Want to decrease IT costs without increasing technical debt? Enterprise architecture is a good place to start. Want to improve business/IT integration? Enterprise architecture promises to be the tool of choice. How about establishing a more streamlined and effective business? One guess as to where you should look first. And therein lies a paradox: Improving…
If a significant customer relationship management (CRM) system project is on your agenda, here are checklist items that you need to look out for in vendor proposals. 10 things a CRM proposal should include 1. A project plan focused on user adoption. As I’ve written before, a CRM system without active users and a rich set of…
Companies are facing a digital imperative to revamp business operations to better serve customers. To accommodate these shifts, CIOs are making sweeping organizational changes, adding key roles, reskilling employees, setting up innovation labs and experimenting with emerging technologies to meet strategic mandates issued by their CEOs and boards. Social, mobile, analytics and cloud (SMAC) forms the…
When engineer Shannon Lubetich left Snap last fall, she didn’t go quietly. According to a recently released memo, Lubetich took aim at Snap’s culture and hinted that the company mirrors many others in Silicon Valley: sexist, racist, hetero- and cis-normative with halfhearted attempts to improve diversity and inclusion. Here’s her email, as published by Cheddar.…
Fewer technologies are hotter than artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) and several enterprises are harnessing the technology, which mimics the behavior of the human mind, to woo customers and bolster business operations. And the trend will only gain more traction in the years ahead, as AI and ML will be a top five investment…
The days of workplaces located in a single office are done. Today’s workforce is distributed — across multiple small offices, embracing work-at-home-employees, and spread across continents — and IT has always been at the forefront of that change, eagerly embracing new communications technologies that make it possible. But we’re only a few years into this…