Phil Ayres

New Media on Ulitzer There has been a big rise by the business process management (BPM) software vendors to get in on the 'social' game. As people become more comfortable with using Twitter and Facebook than they do Word and Excel, a new tag has appeared: Social BPM. My argument is that, once upon a time this was called 'collaboration' and the big software vendors (Documentum/EMC, Vignette, etc) did it. Collaboration software was about helping teams of people, typically on projects or with a need to share information to get a job done, to set up 'collaboration spaces' or 'team rooms'. There was not a lot of process enforcement, because the workflow capabilities of the products were limited and the aim was to focus on ad-hoc collaboration of people, rather than strict process flows. This lack of process management was probably a shortcoming, since companies grew a... (more)

Yet Another Security Regulation - Does This One Have Teeth?

Following hot on the heals of the new HIPAA HITECH Act, the new Massachusetts regulation for data security and information privacy came into effect at the start of this month. It has seen lots of activity from the software security vendors, as it gives them another opportunity to scare the dollars out of corporate wallets. The full regulation is 201 CMR 17.00: STANDARDS FOR THE PROTECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION OF RESIDENTS OF THE COMMONWEALTH The document doesn't make a particularly exciting read, although it is not that hard to get through the barely 4 pages of content. The stri... (more)

At $24k a year for server hosting, the cloud can't fail

  The tech industry's current love affair is with cloud computing - that hard to describe set of technology and infrastructure that is the obsession of companies large and small. Much like the industry's previous 'squeeze', SOA, the joy of the cloud is that you can make almost any technology fit under the name. Put plainly though, I see the cloud as a flexible set of server and storage resources that can host applications, somewhere out there, though you don't have to know where. With this comes the ability to reduce costs of running enterprise and SaaS applications. There are ... (more)

Do Your Employees Hate the IT Department?

We all know the joking, and sometimes snide comments about the IT department that come out around the water-cooler. Fredric Paul on the Enterprise Efficiency blog relates an interesting story that highlights how easily the CIO and the IT team can make themselves not only the butt of jokes, but truly disliked. Fredric's example is a light-hearted, but imagine the result if IT reacted the same way to a new process improvement solution proposed by a senior manager. While around a collection of after conference IT bods, Fredric's relates his story: What bugged me, though, was that ... (more)

AIG Selling $50B Units – Integration Struggles Ahead?

As AIG plans to sell off two large units from its core, it makes me believe that there are interesting people-, process- and technology-times ahead for the companies acquiring them. As I talked about yesterday, insurance companies are used to the fact that they have different lines of business running different systems. According to Matt Buttell at Financial Services Technology, AIG's Asian life business goes to Prudential PLC, and hopefully next week American Life Insurance Co (ALICO) goes to MetLife. The interesting thing about these transactions is that both Prudential and Met... (more)