Supply & Demand and Expectations for SAP talent in the US

30 April, 2007
ERP, Tech Management
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Consider these conversations over the past few weeks: At SAPPHIRE, I spoke with many from the big Fortune 1000-type companies, on outsourcing (or "co-sourcing", a new PC term). Lots of discussion around India; they have memorized the flight schedules, swap stories about social disparity and the caste system, and rattle off all of the cities they have visited. Note that it's not all about India; I talked with organizations who have moved their SAP Center of Excellence (support and/or development) to…

Moving from Search to Find: Anticipate the Next Big Problem

16 April, 2007
Knowledge Management, Purposeful Innovation
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I've talked with a couple of IT leads that are thinking about putting in an enterprise search capability. It always seems to come down to two basic options; search integrated with a collaboration / portal platform, or a dedicated appliance, pointed at the G: Drive. You know the G: Drive - every corporation has one (ok, sometimes it's the F: drive, or the Common folder). I'm pretty sure the name is a throwback to the late 80's, when DOS was…

Buzzword Management ABCs

A bit of Friday fun ... I was at a trade show a few weeks ago, and noticed a repeating pattern on many slides. I've heard this in vendor pitches and internal presentations as well - every piece of software and/or process must be for the management of something. So, as I sat trapped in a droning presentation, waiting for the "vendor showcase" to begin (free dinner!), I wondered how difficult it would be to hit every letter in the…

Driving to a Decision on your Projects

I've written about the basic project proposal (for consulting groups) or charter (for internal IT) in the past. The point of any project summary document is to tee up the what and the why, using an outline like this: Description: What are we trying to accomplish here? What is our ultimate goal? Objectives: These are project objectives, not business objectives. How will we know we are done? Benefits: Why should we consider doing this? What are we getting? Alternatives: Are…

Defining an Effective IT Metrics Framework

21 January, 2007
IT Management, Metrics
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Had a really good conversation about metrics the other day. We've been discussing ways to express how our systems are performing, delivering value, and staying available - and I'd like to use the same general structure for all systems, regardless of function (transactions, integrations, analytics) or platform (Wintel, AS/400, Open Systems). For each type of metric, we need to understand two dimensions: Performance against some Target. This can either be a baseline (a minimum or average expected score), or a…

Another caveat for the erstwhile agile developer

15 January, 2007
Application Development, Change Management
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If your objective is a "sense of urgency", or maybe "time to value", please don't think this gives you carte blanche to push patchy, chewing-gum-and-bailing-wire solutions out into production. Expect the expectation that the production systems' availability level must be maintained. Confused? It sounds like I'm taking two opposing sides ... I want speed and quality, and doesn't the Iron Triangle force you to pick between the two? It's possible, of course, you just need to practice a little discipline.…

The Iron Triangle – Quality is a Feature that We Choose to Omit from Projects

Project managers must communicate the trade-off between additional functionality and the time required to fully test the work. Don't assume testing will be completed - it's something that takes time!

A great mission statement for Corporate IT

This is actually an old story, from a previous life, but I need to get back on the posting bandwagon. Way back in the day... ... there was a site on the public Internet with Company Confidential Information out there. The site was put together by an ambitious sales rep with some time on his hands, a few technical books, and a yen for something interesting to do. It was a nice little site, too - even had user ID…

Funny, how techies talk to each other

I'm writing an email to my favorite SQL guru, about a pretty sticky little problem I'm working on, and I found myself making up words ... In the LotesDB, comments / notes are kept in a single field. Each comment is time and date stamped, with a uname, so that's pretty predictable. The data in the field looks like this: 02/15/2002 03:46 PM (Steve Manager): Capital was approved on 2/11. Project Number has been assigned in SAP and server hardware…

War Stories from the Change Management front

Stories make our ideas real and relevant, and are helpful tools when introducing change. This article has a few examples of stories - all around the topic of introducing change.