I agree with culprit #2 that senior management needs to understand the solution as well as look past what's on the surface. I think sometimes companies try to keep up with the latest technology or try to do what the competitor is doing without fully understanding how the solution impacts the business. That's why I feel it is so important that end-users along with IT support staff are fully engaged or at least have a voice when deciding on a new solution since they are the ones that will work with it on a daily basis. They can provide much insight on how the solution would fit their current business processes or how they could improve the process. This way, senior management could get rid of or at least minimize indigestion when making a decision.
True, Kim. It makes sense to scrutinize processes and procedures fairly regularly. It's not necessarily comfortable, but typically just because we've done something a particular way for years, doesn't necessarily mean it's the 'best' way to do it! With new technologies becoming available, chances are we have new tools at our disposal that can save time, remove paperwork, eliminate manual processes, or improve profits--but only if we look for them.
It's also great, when moving to a new approach, to use a consensus-building approach that allows a department or organization to reconsider existing practices and procedures, especially if it's moving from a paper-based to digital process as you mention. Ownership can help prevent people from relying from tried-and-true, but often unwieldy and antiquated, methods!
It seems that to succeed, vendors of cloud services need to not just focus on technology, but also on redesigning customer business processes. Not the first time this has happened with enterprise technology, and probably not the last.
Very apt way to describe an enterprise's lack of adjustment to cloud services, Mary. It never occurred to me that indeed, using cloud isn't the same as using services that are simply located elsewhere. The underlying connections and updates make it a new paradigm for day to day tasks.
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The US National Security Agency learned the hard way that it can be dangerous to give a contractor too much money and access, with too little scrutiny. The NSA and other government agencies hire tens of thousands of contractors
a year to analyze data. Edward Snowden -- who revealed himself as the NSA leaker after fleeing the country -- was one such contractor, reportedly holding a $122,000 salaried position at Booz Allen Hamilton at the time of his departure.
Midsize businesses rarely achieve the same standards of security in their own datacenters as professional providers that specialize in delivering these services to organizations.
Big-data and analytics tools enable marketers to understand customers as individuals, identifying unmet needs and addressing each customer as a "segment of one," says John Kennedy, VP corporate marketing, IBM.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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