With little doubt that the US economy is in or near recession, the big question now is whether we’re heading into a global credit freeze and financial meltdown. If the worst happens, all bets are off—we’ll be pretty much in uncharted territory. But if we do manage to escape with nothing more severe than a typical recession, what approach should you take towards IT spending? Read the rest of this entry »

Making the blog rounds today: points about enterprise software purchasing in response to poor economic conditions. I’m thinking about the relationship to free and open source (FOSS) enterprise systems as well as the pricing and priorities companies are facing in terms of their means for purchasing and implementing things like ERP systems.

Curt Monash’s NetworkWorld.com article predicted a rocky September for IT vendors. He didn’t pursue a level of granularity that distinguished types of enterprise software but if you look at some of the recent news from both proprietary and open source vendors you get the impression that organizations buying these systems are acting as Monash suggests.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sure, by now most of us have heard about the importance of strategically managing talent and human capital, but how many of us are convinced that companies truly buy into those lofty concepts in droves? Some of us will even have read McKinsey’s now classic study from the late 1990 that coined the term “the war for talent.”

In other words, now in the new millennium, we find ourselves in the talent age. The article’s authors claimed that in an environment where competition has become global and capital is abundant (well, at least it was 10 years ago, well before the recent collapse of banking investment giants, and the US and German government interventions), “…all that matters is talent. Talent wins.” Read the rest of this entry »

Those that follow manufacturing-oriented enterprise applications have likely noticed for some time an uptick of conversations about the need to better integrate high-speed manufacturing operations (the real-time world of the plant) with the planning and engineering departments (the transactional and design world of enterprise systems). The nirvana (or utopia) hoped for thus far has been to provide a single point of operation and control for manufacturers to: Plan, Define, Control, Execute, and Analyze Production.

Why do we need integrated manufacturing operations, or manufacturing execution systems (MES) linked to transactional enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, likely via some plant-level integration hub and visualization & intelligence layer? Read the rest of this entry »