Is your boss the main reason you call in sick on Monday mornings? Do you need to “manage” your boss in order to get any work done? Do you find yourself in the position of having to defend your boss when talking to colleagues?

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Q: How many doomsday prophets does it take to change a light bulb?
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Having trouble sleeping at night? Lots of people are these days, and for good reasons.

The economy is in the dumps. Jobs are on the endangered species list. We’re steadily running out of oil. And terrorists are trying to kill us. Now, if all that isn’t enough to keep you awake at 4 o’clock in the morning, there’s always the fact that the planet is threatening to terminally overheat.

Yup, life can cause insomnia, but I’ve found the cure. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series talked about the historical background of the JRocket Marketing Grape Escape(TM) event. Grape Escape has become a June fixture over past several years, after the high traveling season to major vendors’ events subsides and before everyone takes their summer vacations. It is a signature event that showcases the intimate analyst relationships (AR) and event expertise that JRocket Marketing’s president and founder Judith Rothrock delivers to her software vendors’ client base by giving them exposure to a selected group of industry analysts.

Part 1 also analyzed the news announcements by Jeremy Roche, CEO of FinancialForce.com, followed by the testimony from its customer Wi-Fi Alliance. Part 2 analyzed the Grape Escape 2010 news announcements from Meridian Systems CEO John Bodrozic and SYSPRO US CEO Brian Stein, followed by these vendors’ customers (Walt Disney and Lee Spring, respectively).

Part 3 analyzed major news coming from UNIT4’s Agresso product line, as presented by Shelley Zapp, CEO of UNIT4 North America, and followed by the company’s higher education customer, Augsburg College.

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Every June over past several years, after the high season for traveling to major vendor events subsides, and before everyone takes their summer vacations, a group of selected enterprise applications analysts have become accustomed to attending the JRocket Marketing Grape Escape(TM) event. “Grape Escape” is a signature event that showcases the intimate analyst relationships (AR) and event expertise that JRocket Marketing’s president and founder Judith Rothrock delivers to her enterprise software vendors’ client base. Read the rest of this entry »

Montreal, QC — April 1, 2010 — Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC), a world-wide leader in enterprise software evaluation, has released a new decision support system for pragmatic decision makers who already know what’s most important for their company: jDICE™ (just Decide—Ignore [Your Idiot] Customers and Employees).

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Here’s an often overlooked factor in ERP software selection, and it’s got nothing to do with ERP functions or features:

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‘Twas the night before selection, and all through the place,
Enterprise software was a decision we faced.
Our requirements are gathered, BPM is all done,
Now all that’s left is a choice; only one! Read the rest of this entry »

This happens either because customers did not want to pay for upgrades or customizations all year long, or vendors simply ignored their clients’ needs and requests. Christmas is the time of year when business software proves what it can really do because it’s used very close to its full potential , when sales and purchases are at a very high level. Read the rest of this entry »

If you haven’t read the blog post ERP Vendors, Are You Green Enough? that I wrote a little over a year ago, I recommend you read it first. After you’ve checked it out, I assume you’ll understand that I used a flawed and extremely simplified approach to “confirm” my impression of the correlation between the size of enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors and the greenness of their offerings (see below for further explanation). About a year later, I used the same method to go through the same seven ERP vendors I had looked into the last time, and this time my focus was the growth of the green counts. My “conclusion” is that, on average, these ERP vendors have become 71 percent “greener” over the time span of roughly one year. Let me show you some data:

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The joke “If … Made Toasters” (here is one of many variations) has been circulating and evolving on the Web for quite a long time. The first time I read it was at least 10 years ago, but once in a while I still receive it in my inbox. Since we’re always looking for something different, I’m taking the initiative and starting a new topic in a similar pattern—how do people in different regions select software? Read the rest of this entry »

While conducting “research” for another project, I stumbled across Max Weber’s notion of classification of authority, which was news to me, as is most serious Western thought.

According to Weber, there are three types of authority: Read the rest of this entry »

After attending the iWay seminar on Enterprise Information Management (EIM) yesterday, I was thinking that a CIO who implemented their system might sing the following after the implementation: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s always good to remember that science and technology follow general laws, and that those laws are inviolable. This is especially true when it comes to Murphy’s Law: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
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There are multiple answers for how a bad product is developed; many of them are rooted in myopia in the development process.

This morning, when I was leaving a subway station through a tunnel, a billboard caught my eye. Actually, at first glance, I was kind of scared by the weird eye of one of the women in the picture. A second look revealed that the weird eye was a bolt (on top of a washer) located very close to her right eye. Read the rest of this entry »