Phil Ayres

A sponsored IDC paper, "Embedding Additional Value into Applications: What Enterprises Need Most from Application Vendors" talks about the results of a survey on why application vendors need to ensure their applications can integrate and operate effectively inside and alongside other applications. Ignoring the obviously sponsored tone of the paper, one chart showing the results of the survey jumped out at me:   Of the optional responses to the question, "Please rate how important it is to your organization that each of the following features be embedded within your application vendors' transactional applications", the lowest number of respondents placed an importance on a "Configurable workflow engine to automate and optimize processes". Does this mean that optimizing business processes through automation is not important? The question in fact is leading up to an... (more)

BPM Discipline, Not Dogma

In his new Forrester blog, Derek Miers talks about his entrance into Forrester and some of his focus for upcoming research. His interesting observation upfront is how companies need to build a 'Discipline' around BPM, especially once they transition from the first project and attempt to use BPM more broadly across the organization. Summarizing Derek's points (see his post for more detail): And there are a great many challenges and domains to overcome as we build “The Discipline of BPM”: Building organizational BPM Capabilities Exploration of Methods & Tools From Project To Prog... (more)

Onboarding employees - flying by the seat of our pants

Introducing a new employee to your company, getting him or her enrolled in appropriate benefits plans, ensuring the legal paperwork is appropriately filled out, even making sure there is a desk, PC, phone available, often appears chaotic. For many new employees and the HR / office managers that run around trying to pull everything together, there appears to be little predefined process to the onboarding 'process'. Flying by the seat of your pants is a better description, and the benefit of this approach is motivated by not needing to think about it ahead of time rather than getti... (more)

Corporate IT Won't Run Linux Desktops Because of the 'Skype Attitude'

Ubuntu Linux Journal on Ulitzer Skype is not a small product or small company. Their VOIP product is used by millions of people every day (it currently tells me that 20,944,942 people are online), and carries more international phone calls than AT&T. Skype's attitude to Linux desktop users is frankly disturbing. Take a look at the chart of software issues for the Skype client: 76% of issues in the JIRA database are new. Compare this with the Windows client, where 21% of issues are new. It seems that Skype is truly uninterested in their Linux user base, expending minimal or no res... (more)

Protecting online banking accounts - is there an app for that?

Losses from falsified online banking transactions tripled in the third quarter, and it seems that the banks have no way to stop them, reports Joseph Menn for the FT. At $120m, this is only about 17% of the total cost of identity fraud and bad checks / cheques, amounting to a total of $700m, although significant enough that you would believe banks would be working hard to stop the problem. The issue for businesses it seems is that many banks are not feeling much of the $120m cost, ensuring that the losses remain with the business account holders. Compensation is something the bank... (more)