The current economic environment cries out for sustainable technology standards to be established at the core of information governance. The profound losses in the financial markets were the result of weak governance, failing risk management, and little regard for the consequences. The time has come to define and implement the methods needed to identify and manage risks, ensure oversight, and enforce corporate policies and procedures to exploit extensible business reporting language (XBRL). This extremely challenging economic climate is stimulating the demand to leverage the expanding taxonomy for financial reporting purposes to meet the challenges of operational risk and compliance management as part of the natural evolution of XBRL.

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The worn-out saying about how we learn new things every day applies to this blog topic too. Namely, my interest in Progress Software Corporation has long been due to its renowned OpenEdge development platform. Indeed, many enterprise resource planning (ERP) and other applications providers leverage (embed) OpenEdge as Progress Software partners. Sure, I also follow and have recently written about the company’s forays in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) space with its two respective offerings: Actional for web services management and Sonic for enterprise service bus (ESB) and messaging.

But in late 2007, out of mere courtesy, I accepted a briefing about Progress Apama, the company’s platform for complex event processing (CEP), algorithmic trading, and whatnot. Given the overwhelming nature (“rocket science” of a sort) of the offering’s concept, I now admit that I could not wait for the briefing to end.

Actually, I felt bamboozled like those ordinary mortal FBI agents in CBS’ primetime hit show “Numb3rs.” In that show, time and again the whiz kid math genius (the brother of the FBI team leader) tries to explain to these action-rather-than-theory agents how some complex and arcane math theory can be applied to make sense out of seemingly chaotic and unrelated events. Eventually, complex math solves some important crimes, often by detecting patterns that are not obvious to the naked eye.

Well, fast forward to early 2009, where at Progress’ Analyst Summit (a traditional Boston winter fixture event) we could all find out that Progress Apama is possibly the best performing and growing part of the company. OpenEdge, while still contributing to over 60 percent to Progress’ total revenues, is a mature business that is now sold mostly to independent software vendors (ISVs). In addition, the recent financial markets (and consequently the overall economic) crisis and related cases of high-profile frauds (”white-collar crimes”) have made me conduct my own study of Apama and become familiar with its underlying concept. Read the rest of this entry »

Part I of this blog series introduced the burning issues of food safety and the resultant need for a holistic and proactive safety strategy (rather than to reactively recall plagued products). The previous post also talked in more detail about Lawson Software’s holistic approach entitled The “4Ps” of Food Safety.

In this part, Rory Granros, process industry and product marketing manager at Infor, also strongly opines that in order to protect product safety, companies need a holistic and proactive Product Compliance Strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

Food production and distribution is a serious and strategic business, and I am not aware of anyone in my surroundings that takes it lightly; food can not only delight us, but can also make us quite sick and indisposed. While my inner circles (pets included) have luckily not been casualties of recent salmonella, E.coli, and whatnot outbreaks from tainted chilly peppers, tomatoes, spinach, pet food, or most recently peanut butter, the 2008 year-end holidays were not much fun for my family.

Namely, the “G.I. bug” that our 18-month-old likely got in her playgroup spread so quickly and violently to anyone who was in contact with her (including the broader family members that stopped by to just traditionally exchange holiday gifts). Sure, viral gastroenteritis might likely have had nothing to do with what we ate at the time, but the feeling of being listless and other unpleasant (and unspeakable) G.I. bug symptoms were quite similar to those that food poisoning outbreaks can “treat” us to.

Food processing and distribution are not be the only market with burning product safety issues, since similar issues can also apply to the drug and pharmaceuticals sector or consumer packaged goods (CPGs); remember lead-tainted toys or antifreeze-laced toothpaste coming from China? Still, we all seem to be the most sensitive about food-related breaking news, possibly due to the likelihood of those hitting home (perhaps even in a willful way by bio-terrorists).

Thus, some food processing market experts have lately been frustrated by companies’ focus on location and lot control, serial number tracking, and traceability as the panaceas to solve product safety issues. Read the rest of this entry »

We all agree that being “green” (more environmentally conscious) is great. But businesses often struggle with exactly how they can get closer to this wonderful color. To a certain degree, product lifecycle management (PLM) can help manufacturers with their “green initiatives.” There is an excellent Green PLM blog series—written mainly by Kate Bourdet, at Dassault Systèmes—explaining what PLM has to do with green, more or less from a product lifecycle activity point of view. In this blog post, I will provide some complementary writing from a slightly different angle.

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Recently, I touched on the idea of building a vendor portfolio to help manage risks associated with software outsourcing practices in the article Should North Americans Send More Software Development Work to China? I’d like to use this blog post to give some complementary readings for those who read the article and felt the vendor portfolio idea interesting.

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