Business of Tech

Alignment, staffing and culture are often more critical than software and apps

State of Cloud ERP: Small but Growing

24 Feb, 2012

Back in December I wrote a post about how SaaS was making inroads into the ERP market, citing studies from both Aberdeen Group and Forrester Research. It's hardly making huge inroads, however. As ...More >

BPM Is Key to Proactive CRM

17 Jan, 2012

As useful as business process management has been in helping companies improve and streamline their internal processes, I think it holds even more promise as a way for them to perform the same kind ...More >

Analysts Air Concerns Over Salesforce.com's Outlook

06 Jan, 2012

Wall Street analysts usually welcome news of acquisitions, seeing them as a sign that companies are gearing up their growth plans. CRM giant Salesforce.com has been gobbling up smaller companies for ...More >

SaaS ERP Making Inroads

21 Dec, 2011

There's no question companies drop a lot of money on ERP systems. But I've always gotten the sense they look at ERP investments in much the same way I view the several thousand dollars I spent last ...More >

Momentum Continues to Grow for Mobile Business Intelligence

12 Dec, 2011

For years now, business intelligence vendors have been talking about making BI accessible to employees throughout companies and not just senior executives, based on the idea that BI is more effective ...More >

The Cloud's Role in Standardizing Business Processes

30 Nov, 2011

A few months ago, I wrote a post about cloud computing's possible impact on business process outsourcing, in which I mentioned Indian outsourcing giant Infosys' introduction of Infosys Edge, a series ...More >

No More CIO? At Forrester, New Title Signals New Approach to IT

28 Nov, 2011

Back in 2009 I wrote about Forrester Research CEO George Colony's suggestion that the information technology (IT) function should be renamed the business technology function. I cited an interview ...More >

CIOs Focusing Less on Infrastructure, More on Innovation

23 Nov, 2011

In last week's post in which I wondered whether the dedicated CIO was an anachronism, I shared a column written by executive recruiter Tim Cook, who said new roles combining key business functions ...More >

Making Hadoop Accessible to End Users

21 Nov, 2011

Data management professionals would have to have been hiding under a pretty big rock for the past year or so to avoid hearing about Hadoop, a framework that's being used for a wide range of data ...More >

ROI for Social Technologies? In a Word, Squishy

18 Nov, 2011

A few months ago, I wrote a post in which I cited a survey administered by Jive Software that found both executives and knowledge workers believe social software will become a necessary part of doing ...More >