News

Managing big enterprise wireless LANs is a matter of weaving together a variety of products and policies, according to St. Vincent's Hospital in Birmingham, Ala.
The IT group blanketed the hospital's five-building campus with 167 Cisco Systems Inc. wireless access points to create one of the biggest Cisco mobile deployments in the Southeast. In doing so, the group ran into a number of problems and discovered there is no silver bullet for solving them.

For some time now, enterprise software vendor PeopleSoft, like many other companies, has been hearing from customers considering Linux for some of their business applications. So what finally motivated PeopleSoft to announce this week that the company will port all of its 170 enterprise applications to Linux by the end of the year?

Getting rid of a US$4.5 million ERP system gone awry was supposed to be the first problem Robert Moon solved when he joined display products manufacturer ViewSonic Corp. as vice president of information service. But instead of replacing the company's troubled ERP system, Moon revived it.
Moon arrived at ViewSonic in early 2001 to find an array of heavily customized Oracle Corp. applications. The Walnut, Calif., company was running separate "instances," or versions, of Oracle's financial software in each of its three regional offices: one on Version 10.7 and two on Version 11.0.3.

We may never know what killed the dinosaurs. Comets crashing to earth? Ice creeping down from the poles? Smart little mammals running circles around them? But we will know what killed the giant enterprise application suites that ruled the last years of the 20th century: smart, little point applications. They've already begun to eat the lunch of those lumbering enterprise suites, and if the trend continues (and there's no reason it shouldn't now that Web services is here), in a few years CIOs won't be buying any more tightly coupled, multimillion-dollar enterprise systems from just one vendor.
Case in point: When FleetBoston Financial Corp. last summer decided it wanted to automate the process of identifying potential customers for new products, the US$13.3 billion Boston-based financial services company received two proposals. One came from CRM giant Siebel Systems Inc., from which Fleet had purchased millions of dollars' worth of software licenses in 2000. The other was from MarketSoft, a smaller $100 million vendor whose product focuses solely on the kind of lead management FleetBoston was looking to do. And despite the fact that Fleet had scores of unused Siebel licenses, the bank went with MarketSoft's more targeted product, opting for a best-of-breed lead management solution.

The US West Coast port slowdown and eventual longshoreman lockout last October focused US attention on the delicate condition of America's supply chain. An estimated US$300 billion worth of goods flow through West Coast ports every year, and as the giant container ships that carry it all sat bobbing, anchored at sea and unable to off-load for 10 days, companies across the country started to run out of inventory and assembly lines began to grind to a halt.
Mitsubishi, out of engines and transmissions (which it imports from Japan), suspended production of Eclipse convertibles and Galant sedans at its plant in Normal, Ill. General Motors Corp. and Toyota Corp. ceased operations at a shared assembly facility in Fremont, Calif., for one week until parts could be flown in. The Boeing Co.'s production of 767 and 777 airliners was disrupted because Asian-built cargo doors and fuselage panels were delayed at sea.

PeopleSoft Inc. has unveiled 13 products aimed at midsize companies. The modules are designed to streamline various business processes such as procurement, hiring and customer service.
The new mid-market products are not PeopleSoft’s first; the vendor already offers versions of its core human resources, customer relationship management (CRM) and supply chain management (SCM) products tailored to midsize enterprises with between US$50 million and $500 million in revenue. To date, 25 percent of PeopleSoft’s customer base – and 40 percent of new customers signed in 2002 – are midsize companies.

Why would you buy integration middleware from a packaged application vendor? That’s the question SAP AG and its peer vendors such as PeopleSoft Inc. and Siebel Systems Inc. are trying to answer as they expand their offerings to accommodate customers’ desires for cheaper and easier-to-integrate solutions.
After gaining fame and fortune showing IT managers of large enterprises a better way to do ERP, SAP is now at a crossroads. Despite its previous domination of the ERP market, the company must now square off for its piece of the enterprise software dollar with fellow megavendors IBM Corp., Oracle Corp., and Microsoft Corp. Each company is reaching onto the others’ turf, and middleware is shaping up to be the field of competition.

Before Bill Haser became vice president and CIO of Tenneco Automotive Inc. in 1998, he had spent 12 years on the business side, most recently as a group controller for a subsidiary of the Lake Forest, Ill.-based manufacturer of auto parts and systems. "I think part of the reason I got this job was that I was tired of having IT done to me," says Haser. So when he took the CIO job, he wanted to involve business managers in the IT process.
In 1998, the US$3.5 billion company had just begun the multiyear process of implementing SAP AG's ERP product to its 74 manufacturing facilities in 22 countries, primarily one location at a time. But initial implementations went less than smoothly. "The first projects we did were your typical IT projects: The business gave us their requirements, we gave them the system, and they struggled," he says. As the SAP work continued, Haser noticed another disturbing trend: Only 60 percent of project milestones were being met on time.

Depending on who you ask, Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp.’s entry into the customer relationship software (CRM) market will cause either a splash or a ripple.
Geared specifically toward the small- to medium-sized business market -- organizations with fewer than 500 employees -- the company’s Business Solutions unit officially unveiled Microsoft Business Solutions Customer Relationship Management in February. The application is built on Microsoft’s .Net infrastructure.

It was a calculated risk, upgrading a 1,200-user PeopleSoft system from HP 9000s to less expensive servers from Dell Computer Corp. and from a Sybase Inc. database to Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server.
But Damien Bean, vice president of corporate systems at Hilton Hotels Corp. in Beverly Hills, Calif., came out on top, getting the lower cost and higher performance he wanted. To do it, Bean says he had to convince his end users and vendors that "they could not afford to let a global brand name like ours fail."

In search of the real-time information exchange and collaboration required by complex supply chains, manufacturers are finding pre-specialized solutions may offer the boost they've been seeking.
Lessons learned from past supply-chain deployments helped enterprises realize that the deep industry knowledge and scalability offered by specialized systems can be key to streamlining a supply chain. In response, best-of-breed vendors are ramping up supply-chain offerings tailored for specific vertical markets, such as consumer packaged goods and process manufacturing. Other companies are turning to their ERP vendors for supply-chain modules that snap on to existing accounting and HR systems, and the enterprise application companies are mounting their own efforts to lasso vertical business by touting the easy integration of their products to existing back-end systems.

Benevolent entanglement." The phrase might be a mouthful, but the concept is what building an extended enterprise network ought to be all about, says Brandon Lackey, portal program manager at energy industry giant Halliburton Co. In other words, involve customers and suppliers in a business ecosystem that provides such high value, so simply, few would leave it.
"We want our customers to be so enamored with our simple processes, ease of use [and value provided through the portal] that they would never switch from Halliburton based on marginal price differences," Lackey says.

Struggling software vendor Baan Co. NV is up for sale, parent company Invensys PLC said this week as it announced plans to divest a number of non-core operations.
London-based Invensys purchased Baan, headquartered in the Netherlands, in August 2000, after an accounting scandal left the once top-tier ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor in tatters.

HP has held up last year's merger with Compaq as the best example of why its newly-unveiled enterprise architecture strategy will work.

Airlines should continue their ban on the use of mobile phones on board aircraft because of possible interference with navigation and communication equipment, according to a study published Friday by the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).

America: The land of herbal Viagra pitches, offers for graphic teen pornography, and low-interest-mortgage hard sells? That's the global face of the United States, thanks to spam, say Web experts from around the world.

Knowledge management commands a great deal of attention these days. But is it justified? The tendency by some potential customers is to dismiss it as a disingenuous attempt by vendors, especially those in IT, to boost flagging sales. While this suspicion carries a kernel of truth, compelling evidence shows that knowledge management can return impressive results to pharmaceutical and biotech R&D organizations.
What Exactly Is It?

While knowledge management (KM) programs may seemingly sprout up out of cracks in the sidewalk, they are in fact tender plants that require cultivation, care and feeding. Siemens AG, the huge German conglomerate with 426,000 employees in 190 countries, knows this and nurtures its KM with hands-on management and constant tweaking.
Guenther Klementz, Siemens' Chief Knowledge Officer, says that KM first got started on a grass-roots level at the company in 1997 when a group of employees banded together to share their experiences. "KM here is really a bottom-up approach," Klementz says. When employees from the human resources and IT departments realized they were both separately dabbling in KM and both facing the same challenges, they went to management to ask for support for a corporatewide KM initiative. Even with disparate offices around the world and a wide variety of business units in industries such as health and transportation, Siemens represents a fertile landscape for knowledge sharing. Besides, the corporation has such an intense focus on innovation (from 1980 to 2001, the percentage of sales from products five years old or younger climbed from 48 percent to 75 percent) that a coordinated KM program makes terrific sense. A top manager at Siemens helped the KM proponents prepare a paper that eventually led to the creation of a small corporate team to coordinate KM initiatives around the company.

No one can lay claim to originating the term knowledge management, but a big share of credit goes to the person who first turned the concept into a highly functional, industrial-grade reality: Robert Buckman, semi-retired CEO of Buckman Laboratories International Inc., a Memphis, Tenn.-based chemical company with approximately 1,400 employees in 80 countries.
In an interview with InfoWorld Contributing Editor Jeff Angus, Buckman discussed the origins of his knowledge-driven enterprise and how management should deal with knowledge initiatives in this tight-budget economy.

A dozen years ago, former Lotus Development Corp. CEO Jim Manzi used to make extravagant claims for the ROI of Lotus Notes. It might as well be infinite, he would enthuse, because there was no way to quantify the productivity gains flowing from better use of the assets lodged between people's ears.
Bzzzt. Try again. That ROI might just as easily have been miniscule or even negative -- and how would you know? Although numbers are hard to come by, we can we see in hindsight that results were all over the map. Some companies really did use Notes to support a vibrant collaborative culture, enriched with shared databases and discussions. Many used it as little more than an e-mail system.