July 2006

Three letter acronym (TLA) meltdown

July 31, 2006 General

Ever it was so and a topic I first explored in the late ’90s when C&W got itself embroiled in a Siebel implementation that become a major cock-up and which ultimately cost Siebel £7 figures to straighten out…. My selection: ERP (enterprise resource planning) – sounds grand but often means accounting + payroll with a modicum of spliced production planning for Big Boys CRM (customer relationship management) As James says SFA (oh s**t – sales force automation) but with some call centre and field service capability tossed in. Never had anything to do with customers or the relationships they hold with business BPM (business process management) – guffaw – workflow renamed – in most cases SCM (supply chain management) Never happened, what they often meant was constraint based demand management and even that didn’t work HCM (human capital management) Apart from the fact that HR professionals usually find this term offensive, it is only now anyone has any clue as to what this might entail and who benefits.

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Meet Michael McDerment: CEO FreshBooks

July 31, 2006 Innovation

Mike didn’t seem concerned with reaching professionals but I am wondering how long it will be before CPAs in the US/Canada and CAs in the UK meet clients who, effectively, are light years ahead of what they themselves are able to do…. Thanks to Stowe Boyd for facilitating the conversation (he’s shamelessly pimping FreshBooks per his words) and last but not least, thanks to Gary Turner for introducing me to Stowe – all through the power of blogs.

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Tony Blair goes Valley yomping

July 31, 2006 Innovation

Tony Blair turned up in Delancey Street to see how ex-cons can be rehabilitated without government funding and all the baggage that goes with it…. Note: Yomping became part of the collective consciousness during the Falklands War when British soliders marched many miles across hostile territory to reach Port Stanley.

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The No Asshole Rule

July 31, 2006 General

Bob Sutton has become one of my favourite reads so it was with some envy that I picked up on Sig Rinde’s assessment of Bob’s latest book: “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management”…. Like many others I suspect, I’ve worked in organisations where the competitive spirit becomes obsessional to the point of damaging to both health and family life.

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EXCLUSIVE: Microsoft raises applications costs with new pricing model

July 31, 2006 General

Here’s a list price example: 30 user Navision (now Dynamics brand) site in South Africa: Essentials: USD: 47,545 Advanced: USD 84,175 To make things complicated: What used to happen is that you specified each Navision ‘granule’ according to what the client needed…. If the client wants financials and full CRM, they will have to buy the Advanced edition, even if, as in service industry examples they don’t need production etc. A partner add-on product that requires the Job and Resources granule can only be used in full if the customer buys the Advanced Edition.

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Tech vendors – their own worst enemy?

July 31, 2006 General

On the upside, one client uses self-billing so I get the invoice and remittance notification all in one – and they pay like clockwork…. Please don’t send me paper remittance advices – it’s a waste of time and money on both sides apart from representing dead tree technology.

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Inaccessible accountants?

July 31, 2006 General

I’ve said this privately to others but now is as good a time to repeat in public: The 50% advertising doesn’t work rule has understated the reality about advertising effectiveness for a very long time – more like 98% People come to sites like this because they want to…. It provokes and makes people think Sites like this are concerned with differential attention – those who influence real things, not those who skim through web pages as though they were TV channel hopping Blog sites have an array of tools that allow us to know who turns up, how often, what they’re interested in and how to address them.

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Crunch time for best practice

July 30, 2006 Tax and Ethics

Taking people out of that place is the real goal of consulting – IMO – so they can objectify their circumstances rather than continue to jump up and down in the bucket of crap in which they’ve been standing before the stink got bad enough they’d call guys like me in. That’s when clients see solutions for themselves rather than being sold a solution…. Because…as Irvin Wladawsky-Berger points out in relation to understanding the service component in business: Such systems are not just incredibly complex because of their sheer size; they are inherently unpredictable or emergent, because they now encompass market forces and the behavior of people who are themselves unpredictable.

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The fallacy of SME research

July 30, 2006 Cloud Computing/SaaS

So explain to me how the incestuous nature of marketing and selling in the SME market, helps end user in making choices other than a so-called ‘safe’ option?… Anita Campbell argues the very fact that Linux based desktop solutions have not made great penetrative strides is proof that the status quo argument and the hypotheses upon which they’re based is correct.

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