Larry Marion

Have you had a sustainability report fire drill yet? If not, you will soon. It may start with a discussion at a board meeting, or a request from the CFO based on a new regulatory mandate. All of a sudden your company needs to track energy use, its carbon footprint and other metrics of how […]

We need a new candidate for the title “Most Loathed Enterprise Application Software,” hereafter known as MLS. Three decades ago, the tortured (read: costly and disruptive) implementations of enterprise resource planning systems practically made the three-letter acronym ERP an epithet worthy of being banned by the Federal Communications Commission. Then the phrase Y2K rose to […]

In case you were wondering if everyone else was stunned by the rapid rise of big data as a normal topic of business and IT conversations, the fast answer is yes. I, too, was surprised how last year’s buzzword du jour became Standard Operating Procedure for so many companies in so short a time. A […]

The debate over whether to provide mobile device access to enterprise business intelligence applications and data stores is over. The result: If your shop doesn’t provide access, then top IT management will be looking for a new job very soon. The new and hot debate is over how you provide that access—via a native app […]

With all the hype about the tsunami of cloud computing wiping out internal data centers, you’d think it’s only a matter of days before the thousands of internal data centers in the corporate world were converted into foosball playgrounds. Yet all of the talk about cloud computing as a corporate IT revolution, especially the public […]

If you’re already tired of hearing and reading all the hype about sentiment analysis, also known as social media monitoring tools, the noise level is going to get a lot higher. Determining customer views about your company from Tweets, blogs, YouTube videos, Linked In and Facebook postings (and other forms of digital outbursts) is rapidly […]

The shift has been coming for at least five years, but it is now official. The majority of business intelligence projects implemented and deployed in the past two years were done outside of the IT department, according to a report by Howard Dresner, of Dresner Advisory Services. The former Gartner “Research Fellow” and father of […]

If you’re in the IT department of a manufacturing company, this is your lucky day. A new survey by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services has documented proof that nine IT technologies are pre-requisites for organizations that want to produce more and better new products. These technologies also drive more profitable new products as well. Essentially, […]

Everybody has an example of a bad customer experience. The cable TV company can never get anything fixed when they say it will be fixed. The car dealer has no idea what cars and parts are available at other retailers in the area. The PC manufacturer doesn’t offer competent support on the help desk and […]

Just when you thought the smartphone headache couldn’t get any worse, the CFO waltzes into your office. He tells you his team of roving internal auditors and analysts must have increased access to the accounts payable, receivables and credit data in the ERP system while they’re traveling. And no, he’s not talking about them using […]