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Years ago I was given a tour of a company’s factory by the CEO who was credited with engineering its recent turnaround. We were walking along a gallery one story above the shop floor when he pointed down to it and told me that when he first looked down on this scene he saw people dashing madly back and forth. Rather than taking that as a good sign of a busy factory, he said it was a clear...
Read MoreTopics: Sustainability, Environment Management, Uncategorized, CFO, finance, Green
If you’ve walked past a playing TV recently, there’s a good chance you’ve noticed that Microsoft thinks it can profit from “The Cloud.” The folks in Redmond would have you store your pictures there so the family can access them, use it to collaborate over the weekend in a small business – you name it, Cloud Power can do it.
The cloud is much discussed in the business arena these days as well,...
Topics: ERP, Cloud Computing, Data Integration, Uncategorized, CRM
A colleague recently asked of an online professional group of which we’re members, “Is your personal computer faster than the one the boss gave you?” While answers are still trickling in, it looks pretty clear that the answer is, “Yes, of course.”
Now, we do tend a bit toward the geeky, so there’s a bit of built-in bias. But it also stands to reason that business- and corporate-issued technology...
Topics: Data Integration, Information Management, IT Analytics
Someone slashed the top on my convertible a few days ago in a futile effort to find something of value. He or she got nothing; the perpetrator also managed to cost me at least the $500 deductible and, far worse, throw me into the maw of the monster that is the auto insurance bureaucracy.
What will come out the other end still remains to be seen; I’ll keep you posted. But what this unexpected...
Topics: Data Integration, Information Management
Ventana Research recently completed its 2010 Financial Performance Management Value Index of the major financial performance management suites. Financial performance management (FPM) is the process of addressing the often overlapping issues around people, process, information and information technology that affect how well finance organizations operate and support the activities of the rest of...
Read MoreTopics: SAP, ERP, Financial Applications, Financial Performance, CFO, finance, Financial Performance Management
Most people involved with contact centers know of NICE Systems and its SmartCenter suite of workforce optimization products that support key contact center management capabilities such as call recording, quality monitoring, workforce management, customer feedback management and a variety of performance management and analytics tools. NICE recently received the top ranked Hot Vendor rating in the...
Read MoreTopics: Customer Experience, NICE Systems, Customer Relationship Management, Operational Performance, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, CRM
All the buzz in the contact center market these days is about the “contact center in the cloud.” I have written on the subject, in particular “Is a Contact Center in the Cloud a Reality?” and “Will Cloud Computing Finally Bring Innovation to the Contact Center?”. In considering this issue my thinking focuses on what goes into a contact center and then what vendors offer these systems in the...
Read MoreTopics: Customer Experience, Customer Relationship Management, InContact, Operational Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center, CRM
The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) “Interactive Data” initiative continues to progress forward. Thus far, some 1,500 corporations have filed their financial information using XBRL tags to facilitate review and analysis, of which almost 400 have had done detailed tagging of their footnotes. By June 2011 all public companies will have to provide an XBRL-tagged, interactive version of...
Read MoreTopics: Office of Finance, XBRL, IT Performance, Business Performance, Business Technology, Financial Performance, CFO, Corporate Finance, Financial Performance Management
I have written a couple of pieces this year about the exciting news that a few vendors are now able to provide companies with a call center they can access in the Internet cloud – Will Cloud Computing Finally Bring Innovation to the Contact Center? and Is a “Contact Center in the Cloud” a Reality? There is currently a lot of hype around any kind of cloud-based computing, and the same is true of...
Read MoreTopics: Customer Experience, Customer Relationship Management, LiveOps, Operational Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM
At its annual user conference in Las Vegas, Kronos unveiled the next stage of its approach to workforce management to its customers and partners, showing an aggressively confident posture after completing its fiscal year 2010 with revenue increased 9 percent to $741 million. Kronos is the largest provider of workforce management systems for time and attendance, scheduling, absence tracking,...
Read MoreTopics: Human Capital, Human Resources Management, Kronos, Mobile Applications, Operational Performance, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Workforce Performance, Compensation, Talent Management, Workforce Management
Among the important findings of our latest benchmark research on contact center analytics were these two: 88 percent of companies said they can use analytics to improve the performance of the contact center (41% said they could make significant improvement), and the main issue holding them back from doing that is an excessive reliance on spreadsheets (90% indicated they use spreadsheets on a...
Read MoreTopics: Customer Experience, Customer Relationship Management, Enkata, Operational Performance, Cloud Computing, Customer Service, Call Center, Contact Center Analytics, CRM
Ventana Research has just announced its Value Index for Financial Performance Management (FPM) for 2010. Our value indexes are user-focused assessments of how well software vendors and packages enable companies to improve their execution of core processes. This one is designed to help businesses, especially the finance organization, evaluate the FPM software suites offered by major vendors in the...
Read MoreTopics: ERP, Office of Finance, Financial Applications, Business Performance, Business Technology, Financial Performance, Business Planning, CFO, finance, Corporate Finance, Financial Performance Management
I’ve written quite a bit about integrated business planning (IBP), which is the process of connecting aspects of the planning function across an organization to improve its internal alignment and financial performance. IBP begins with operational – rather than financial – planning (that is, budgeting) because it’s about running the business and figuring out how to make the financial aspects work...
Read MoreTopics: Performance Management, Project Portfolio Management, IT Performance, Operational Performance, CIO, Financial Performance, Business Planning, CFO, Initiatives Management, Initiatives Planning, Operational Planning
Aurix is not a widely recognized vendor in the speech analytics market even though its technology powers products provided by companies such as CallCopy, KnoahSoft, NewVoiceMedia and OnviSource. In fact its strategy is to provide the engine that these and other partners use in market-facing speech analytics solutions. Its main product, Aurix speech search SDK, is a search engine that searches...
Read MoreTopics: Customer Experience, Speech Analytics, Voice of the Customer, Customer Relationship Management, Customer Service, Uncategorized, Call Center, Contact Center Analytics, Voice Analytics
Tableau Software officially released Version 6 of its product this week. Tableau approaches business intelligence from the end user’s perspective, focusing primarily on delivering tools that allow people to easily interact with data and visualize it. With this release, Tableau has advanced its in-memory processing capabilities significantly. Fundamentally Tableau 6 shifts from the intelligent...
Read MoreTopics: Data Visualization, Enterprise Data Strategy, Tableau, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, CIO, In-Memory Computing
Interest in and development of in-memory technologies have increased over the last few years, driven in part by widespread availability of affordable 64-bit hardware and operating systems and the performance advantages in-memory operations provide over disk-based operations. Some software vendors, such as SAP with its High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA) project has been advancing with...
Read MoreTopics: Database, Enterprise Data Strategy, IT Performance, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, CIO, Complex Event Processing, In-Memory Computing, Information Management, Information Technology
Mobile computing isn’t new anymore. The capabilities of smartphones, among other things, enable businesses to run applications across an enterprise and workers to collaborate across business and social networks. In this endeavor Microsoft was early to market with its Windows CE devices that provided e-mail and Web browsing to phones. For the first years it was a low-level battle among Microsoft,...
Read MoreTopics: Microsoft, Mobile, Mobile Applications, Mobile Technology, IT Performance, Operational Performance, Business Performance, Business Technology, CIO, Mobility, Digital Technology
At its annual user conference in Boston, Saba provided insights to industry analysts on its progress over the last year and its direction for 2011. Best known for its learning management system (LMS), collaboration and more recently its talent management applications, Saba now has more than 19 million users in 1,400 customer organizations that are mostly in the public sector, have 5,000 or more...
Read MoreTopics: Human Capital, Human Resources Management, Learning, Mobile Applications, Performance, Business Performance, Cloud Computing, Workforce Performance, Compensation, Saba, Talent Management, Workforce Analytics
Actuate held its annual customer day in San Francisco amid the happy chaos of the World Series champion Giants’ ticker-tape celebration, and on that day the company’s ticker symbol changed from ACTU to BIRT (a shift, incidentally, botched by NASDAQ). There was a great deal of focus on its ActuateOne platform (which my colleague reviewed here) and the advancements in using open source software...
Read MoreTopics: Microsoft, Open Source Software, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, CIO, Information Management, Microsoft Excel, Spreadsheets
In the weeks leading up to and as part of its Information On Demand Conference that my colleague assessed, IBM introduced version 8.5 of InfoSphere Information Server and several related product updates. As my colleague suggested earlier, IBM has an ambitious agenda to provide comprehensive information management capabilities through a combination of product development and acquisitions. The...
Read MoreTopics: Enterprise Data Strategy, IT Performance, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, CIO, Data Integration, IBM, Information Management, Information Technology
