What is IT Strategy?

By |July 7th, 2014|

  We hear it almost every day: IT Strategy, Business Strategy, strategic customer accounts, strategic widgets, etc. Strategy is applied to so many areas with so little understanding that the word has almost become meaningless. I decided to build my own research-based model around strategy because of all of the buzz and the lack of clarity or simplicity. I wanted to answer a key question: How do you determine if you are being strategic or just using tactics you are calling a strategy? Wha [...]

Will SAP HANA Lead to a Big Data Revolution?

By |December 17th, 2012|

Many people focus on HANA as a competitor to Oracle, and it is. Even if HANA adoption and sales were to completely devastate SAP's biggest competitor (Oracle), that would not be HANA's biggest impact. The HANA product has the potential to disrupt entire industries in the context of Big Data. Unlike Big Data, I have been skeptical about the benefits and use of social media in the enterprise, writing about it in Why Social Media Marketing Success Is Elusive for Business and Social Media Fads and [...]

Sustained Business Value from SAP Business Software

By |February 20th, 2012|

From time to time, I review academic literature about the application of technology and offer my SAP experience-based perspective. A while back, I was reviewing one of these studies, which was about enterprise software. In this study, the authors made a key clarification. They recognized two types of implementations: problem based (i.e. address your “pain points”) or innovation based. Their suggestion was that some elements of both would be present on any large-scale IT project, but each type o [...]

SAP IT Governance – Achieve Business IT Engagement

By |October 24th, 2011|

Proper SAP project governance is a function of the business in partnership with IT. With the exception of a few of SAP’s technical applications (such as parts of Solution Manager, HANA, etc.), the entire application suite is about business-- business transaction processing and business processes. If key business resources are not directly engaged in SAP project governance, you may never realize the SAP benefits you expect. This leads me to ask: What benefits you expect from an SAP implementatio [...]

SAP IT Convergence Beyond Business to IT Alignment

By |September 6th, 2011|

In the new global business age, organizations need to leverage technology organization expertise for business benefit more than ever. Too often, technology organizations focus on technology for the sake of technology, rather than for how it might improve products and services or how it might create more customer focus. In today’s competitive global economy, filled with international economic instability, no part of the enterprise can afford to move very far from what pays the bills. If your SAP [...]

Toward an SAP Center of Excellence or SAP Competency Center – PART 2

By |July 27th, 2010|

Part 2 of 3 SAP Competency Center – Doing Things Right VS SAP Center of Excellence – Doing the Right Things The SAP Center of Excellence approach assumes a dynamic organization that is experiencing a fair amount of change, at a pace that causes the organization to stretch. This is usually the case with growth-oriented companies that are seeking new competitive methods and ways of operating in a challenging global climate. The SAP Competency Center approach assumes a fairly stable business model [...]