The business climate is getting gloomier by the day. Expansion plans for most companies have been shelved as credit is getting harder to come by. The sudden frost in the credit markets though of grave concern, it is not what most companies are getting worried about. Companies are getting jittery about the climbing cost of doing business. As demand for products slows down, the spread between the net profits and the opportunity costs is shrinking. Companies loose value when they are unable to grow revenues and are unable to improve their profitability. What are companies to do in recession?

The answer to that question will depend on the industry you are in. However, in most cases, it is simply to continue improving your return on invested capital (ROIC) and gear for organic growth so that your are ready when the demand picks up again. There are several steps companies can take to improve their performance.

1) Get cash wise : Cash is king and the companies with strong cash flows and decent cash reserves will be in a very strong position to weather the downturn. This period can bring lucrative M&A options when a competing or supplementary business may be in need of a bailout. Focusing on cash flow will also identify all the major cash-drains in the company. Assess all major projects that are underway or in the pipeline for approval for their value in contributing to organic growth. Shorten the cash-to-cash cycle by working with your customers and suppliers.

2) Innovation : In the frenzy to conserve cash, do not stifle innovation. Make sure your R&D dollars are spent on programs to develop or extend products or services that your customers will appreciate. Support the effort to innovate because that is the most important factor for organic growth. Facilitate innovation by providing a organizational culture that eschews silos and promotes organization wide collaboration.

3) Supply Chain optimization : Ensure that your material and information flow is smooth and snag free. Having demand for you product is no good if you are not able to fulfill that demand. Keep a close eye on cost because that will ultimately make a difference in your cash flow.

4 ) Customer relationships : Know your customer. Be it your website, price structure or delivery performance, customers reward companies that are consistent and easy to transact with. As your customers evolve with their operating environment, so should your product offerings. This especially true in a downturn. Understanding what can help your customers in the current business environment can be the differentiator that enables a successful business to surge ahead of its competition.

5) Stock up on talent : People are the greatest asset for any business. Having the right people is key to the success of a business. Unfortunately the best people often move on if a company does not offer enough of a challenge or appreciation. A downturn is a ideal time to scout for talented people because a fair number of them loose their jobs due to market pressures. Take the time to evaluate your staff and supplement the team with the right people in order to support your growth.

All of points discussed above are things that most companies should be doing in their normal course of business. They simply take on added significance in a downturn.

We are living in a new world where if we want people to get excited about an idea/concept, we give it a version number. We started with Web 2.0 and now we are discussing Enterprise 2.0, and some of our cutting edge technologists are already discussing what feature would be part of Web 3.0! I am not in complete agreement about the versioning numbers, as Web is something that has been around for less than 20 years, but enterprises have been around for 100’s of years and to put everything till now as 1.0 is not doing it justice (I know, I know, you need to start somewhere, but we could have started with Enterprise 9.0 as well).

I was reading about Enterprise 2.0 conference and came across their definition of Enterprise 2.0, it seems pretty good, but I felt one of the main statement of this definition can cause confusion on what Enterprise 2.0 stands for, this is the part of definition that could be confusing “Enterprise 2.0 is the term for the technologies and business practices that liberate the workforce from the constraints of legacy communication and productivity tools like email.”

At first, I didn’t understood why email is a bad productivity tool? I am a Blackberry junkie and my work life depends on email, so how come it is bad? As I thought about it, I understood this is trying to explain (among other things) that legacy way to communicate information in a top/down manner is Enterprise 1.0 and now your email consumers would like to see this communication in a way that your consumers have choice of reading or participating in conversation, not just with you but people like them are reading it. This also brings them to your web-site and keeps them engaged, where you can tell/sell them more!

This does not take the email away, it is still useful for communication with one person or a small group, but as your group size gets bigger and communication is/was more formal, Enterprise 2.0 has tools for you to make this communication effective (hint - it is called Blog in Web 2.0).

ERP systems have been around long enough that it is no longer necessary to explain their importance in running a business. While ERPs still is the favorite system that most users like to complain about, the problems faced are largely dependent on the size of the company (number of users) and the number of people that are actually knowledgeable about ERPs.

I notice that small and mid-sized companies that have bought any one of the JBOPS (JDEdw/Baan/Oracle/Peoplesoft/SAP) software often struggle the most utilizing their ERPs. That is mainly because they implemented ERP in a hurry and never took the time to explain the workings of the software to their users. Saving consulting costs play a major role in this but that is not the only reason. The pace of business and the workload per employee does not offer too much free time to explore and learn in small-mid sized companies. Users are generally not motivated to learn a software in their free time unless they plan to use it on their resume. Additionally, IT departments get (strapped with) the honor of having to manage a system that seriously impacts the business. This become a serious problem when the IT group and its management has only a fuzzy idea of how the business actually works. It is no use having an “business liaison”, unless this person has the executive backing to be a change agent (I am assuming the person understands both ERP and business processes). The organizational silos in such companies stifles communication even further where business units often fail to learn from each other despite having so-called “collaboration” tools.

So what is the solution for improving the utilization of the Enterprise Application Suite? While it is true that certain applications are stronger than others and they may have strengths in different functions, all of them are basically capable of supporting 80% of the business needs. Some customization will be needed to get a better fit. If you notice the problems really revolve around people, company culture and management. These things are difficult to fix unless there is communication across departments and championed by non-IT executive leadership. Selecting a competent set of people from the various departments and getting them trained in the theory of ERP helps. Once they have the basics, reinforce it with ongoing application training. This is a relatively small effort compared to what is gained. Rotate people in these groups till a majority of the users are now on board with the program. The improved awareness will lead to process improvements. Some staff may need to be replaced but you will end up as a markedly efficient and a better aligned business than before.

There are a lot of solutions to this problem. If you have faced this problem, feel free share your opinion on the subject via a comment. If you would like to discuss this directly with us for the sake of confidentiality, use the “contact us” link for our site.

When I first learned about IT security in Internet world, I was told to assume “that some hacker is already in DMZ” before I architect any security framework. It helped me tremendously, whenever I was involved in web-sites security projects or related discussions. I was also aware of direct hacks from the browser, if your application is not written with security in mind. I did not realize how fast this field of “browser hacks” have grown.

While reading a blog entry from John Conroy of CMSWire (How They Hack Your Website: Overview of Common Techniques), it was quite tempting to try some of the hacking options and see if your preferred sites breaks (I tried and could not break it, I am happy about it!). There were good points in the comments by Jason and others to round up the blog with overall perspective.

What jumped out to me from the blog was that how vulnerable web-sites have become that a simple slip can cause a much bigger problem (Harvard Site Hacked, Alleged Content Hits BitTorrent). Of course, with packaged application (as most ECM products are) it is difficult to achieve complete control of code and how it executes different components. So, one of the due diligence you own is asking the Vendors about their application’s design from security perspective that thwarts “browser hacks”. It could also occur when you lack a trained team, who should not only understand the basics of web-sites management, but also design application to be secured at all levels (not just protocol, code and configuration as well).

In this world of highly interactive web applications, it is very easy to put lot of logic in browser to make interactions easy and closer to end-user, but this can open up new pathways to hack into your application, if you do not take appropriate steps to block it. Now, if I am participating in any security discussions, rather then mentioning my old advice “someone in the DMZ”, I say “someone has crossed DMZ and is trying to manipulate your application”.

I came across Tony White’s blog recently and his post “WCM and Portal” by Any Other Name, Still “WCM and Portal” caught my attention. I have run into this problem more than few times, where a customer would be stuck on not using “Portal” for their solution, although this product whose name ends in “Portal” satisfies their requirement, along with rest of the proposed solution (e.g. WCM + Portal is the solution). They would vehemently oppose any use of portal for that particular solution or may have a corporate portal which they can use, but is not the right fit for the solution.

On other hand, I have run into customers who want to use “Portal” for their solution, irrespective of whether that is a right fit or not. For instance, customers may want to control layout from WCM and do not have many requirements on personalization, still would like to use portal and then would like to customize everything about that portal to meet their needs.

To be fair, there are valid instances where a new portal or WCM would make customer’s environment more complicated and managing it from IT perspective would take more resources. On other hand, if existing Portal/WCM do not satisfy customer’s requirements and they try to fit new WCM/Portal to this mix, it would create bigger issues on managing the customizations that would have to be developed to meet the requirements. This is where Tony’s suggestion on looking at solution from requirement perspective is the safe approach, as you can weigh different set of product capabilities equally.

Name of the product and its categorization still carries a lot of weight while choosing a solution. I have seen ECM vendors trying to sell their “Portal” as “Presentation Engine” with advanced features, so they do not get dragged into the “Name” fight. Can we still say, what’s in the name?