A couple of weeks ago, I published a blog post called Customer Relationship Manufacturing. In this blog post, I described the symbiosis between the sales and production departments within a manufacturing company, mentioned some customer relationship management (CRM) vendors that seem to have adapted their products for the manufacturing industry, and I also promised I would get back to you with more information on these products. Read the rest of this entry »

The recent economic slowdown has illustrated how interwoven our global economies really are. The demands to increase enterprise performance has accelerated. Whether it’s to find new opportunities to increase or maintain market share, or to generate new revenue opportunities, each of these areas represent additional challenges in fulfilling customer expectations and demands. Read the rest of this entry »

Part 1 of this blog series introduced and analyzed some mixed feelings and doubts that we might still have about the noble concepts of talent management and human capital management (HCM), while Part 2 provided some definitions of these two software categories’ respective scopes.

No Laughing Matter, Indeed

The discussion so far has ascertained that talent management, as a strategy, requires both appropriate systems and an organizational commitment to attract, acquire, manage, and measure the talent needed to achieve a company’s business objectives. Without the alignment of business and talent management systems and processes, and without closing the gap between workforce strategy and execution, companies will sub-optimize their benefits and put their goals at risk.

Going hand in hand with strategic alignment is another significant trend in recent years, which is the recognition that automating transactions in silos (within only, e.g., recruitment, performance, compensation, succession) is not helping the human resources (HR) department. It is indeed difficult to expect any strategic alignment between business and the talent roster with fragmented data, applications, and talent pools, where data is often lost, and there is consequently no single view (or single version of truth). Read the rest of this entry »

How many of you have walked into a store with the expectation that the product you purchase will probably not work? How many industries do you think can get away with product defects and incompatible components?

For almost three decades, the software industry has convinced consumers that “Bugs” (product defects) and “System Integration” (incompatible components) is a cost of doing business. Granted… enterprise software can comprise of millions of lines of code performing very complex operations. Moreover, today’s complex global economy made possible by the internet has complicated things further with businesses required to support the multiple languages, government regulations, and consumer demands of its customer base. Read the rest of this entry »

The end of 2007, at least in the space that I cover, has certainly been “the most wonderful time of the year” for one vendor - NetSuite. True, prior to that, Deltek had a decent initial public offering (IPO) , and possibly even more important, a stellar Q3 2007 quarterly report thereafter.

However, on December 20, 2007 NetSuite Inc., a vendor of on-demand, integrated business management application suites for small and medium-sized businesses [evaluate this product], opened for trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the ticker symbol “N” (NYSE: N) after its more than successful IPO in which it raised $161.2 million. Various bloggers have duly covered the well-orchestrated IPO Dutch auction proceedings, such as AccManPro, BloggingStocks and ZDnet to name only a few. Read the rest of this entry »