Stories by Thomas Wailgum

SaaS ERP: It's what Aberdeen Research, in 2007, called the "Last Bastion of Resistance to SaaS."

Customers have a message for SAP: Your SAP <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/40940">supply chain</a> mojo has not been rising. And we're not happy about it. Among the myriad, daunting challenges facing <a href="http://advice.cio.com/thomas_wailgum/so_long_saps_leo_apotheker_we_hardly_knew_ye">SAP's new co-chiefs</a>--and there <a href="http://www.cio.com/article/516963">are many</a>--is what to do about its core supply chain management product portfolio.

Got Issues? Enterprise software sure does.
That's according to a new report from Forrester Research's principal analyst Paul Hamerman, appropriately titled Enterprise Apps Customers Have Issues.

What does Oracle think about those companies that offer third-party maintenance and support services for Oracle's software - for up to half off Oracle's price? Look no further than the names of these two lawsuits:
Oracle v. TomorrowNow and Oracle v. Rimini Street.

There's probably no greater indication of a CIO's strategic importance to his company than what happens at the time of a merger or acquisition: Is the CIO a key player during pre-deal negotiations and analysis? Is his expertise sought on whether back-office IT consolidation will be able to produce the desired &quot;synergies&quot;? Does the board ask for his risk analysis on whether key ERP, CRM, BI or supply chain systems will be harmonious or disastrous?
Or is the CIO relegated to afterthought status, as in the CEO wondering: &quot;I guess we should ask Gene if he can actually pull this off?&quot; - after the deal has been consummated.

IT departments today have many well-defined responsibilities. But what about helping business users with not just the technical side but also the creative elements of their PowerPoint decks and presentations?
While that may seem a tad outside IT's traditional jurisdiction, Forrester Research analyst Sheri McLeish contends that IT has a significant role to play: IT and knowledge management staffers have a responsibility to &quot;teach design principles, educate workers on content restrictions, and provide visual resources will improve the accuracy and quality of information workers' everyday presentations,&quot; McLeish writes in a recent report, IT's Role In Creating Better Presentations.

Since the fall of 2004, I've invested a lot of time, given way too much thought to, and probably annoyed plenty of people over all things Lost. Like a crazy, unpredictable friend in your life, the show has consumed me, frustrated me, surprised me, exasperated me and kept me on my toes.

ERP investments have long held a stranglehold on corporate IT investments. The Great Recession, however, has pushed boards and budgeting committees to examine IT spending like never before. Not surprisingly, ERP's juicy slice of the corporate spending pie has come under closer scrutiny.
Now, Panorama Consulting Group's 2010 ERP Report, when compared to its 2008 data set, provides some evidence that companies have seen the errors of their ways in managing ERP systems and have taken small, but important corrective actions for the future. (Panorama's data comes from survey respondents at 1,600 organisations that implemented ERP during the past four years.)

The pressure on CIOs to deliver business intelligence tools and analytic applications -on the cheap and ASAP - has been building steadily for years. In 2010, survey results point out that that demand has reached a fever pitch with which CIOs are very familiar.
&quot;The interest in BI, use of it and sophistication of the use just grows every year,&quot; says Bill Swislow, CIO and SVP for product at Cars.com. &quot;There are always business problems, and people are always looking for new BI tools to solve old problems.&quot;

The battle and competition in the enterprise software market between SAP and Oracle has fast become one of the hottest rivalries in high-tech. And while it might not have the pop-culture pizzazz of Red Sox-Yankees or Coke-Pepsi, the passion of the thousands of the combatants involved makes it no less fervent or important a battle.
As it stands now, these companies are big. Not only in revenues, customers and market cap, but also in the number of employees who call each vendor &quot;my employer.&quot;

It's been little more than a week since the New Year's Eve ball dropped, and people everywhere may have already dropped the ball on fulfilling their important work-related resolutions. How many of these apply to you?
Resolution: &quot;Embrace&quot; social media. First step: Start using Twitter.

Any and all executives or managers looking to get more productivity from their information workers - and, really, what company isn't shamelessly espousing a &quot;more with less&quot; philosophythese days? - might want to pay attention to the following strategy: Set your workers free from the office.
&quot;Teleworking,&quot; or working from home/Starbucks/not-within-corporate-walls, of course, is nothing new. High-powered laptops, ubiquitous broadband and Wi-Fi connections, and even-my-grandmother-has-one cell phones have all enabled a seamless virtual work-experience for the modern employee.

It was January 2000. Post-Y2K euphoria still lingered over the offices of businesses and high-tech vendors everywhere--the bubble had not yet burst on the party -- and Oracle Corp., the relational database king founded in 1977, was riding high on good fortune: Its stock peaked and split, and the vendor was set to ship E-Business Suite Release 11i, which Oracle touted as the first integrated-suite of enterprise applications.
Oracle claimed that by chowing on its own E-Business Suite dog food, it had saved the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company a cool US$1 billion a year.

Since 2003, Tiger Woods has literally become the sole face, the strategic embodiment, the business essence of <a href="http://www.accenture.com/">Accenture</a>, the $22 billion global IT, outsourcing and business consultancy.

Conventional wisdom has long held that CIOs should never say "Wait until next year," because that year often doesn't come for them. Everyone knows that CIO stands for Chief Information Officer, but in the early 1990s, it stood for something disparaging--"Career Is Over"--due to their purported brief tenures (two to three years, we were told).