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?

I was surprised to see this topic for an upcoming event in NYC hosted by ISF and SIM (Feb 26, 2008). Surprised, not shocked, as I have seen enough customers to know the sentiment, and I believe that there is some truth to it.

CMS promises to be ultimate in flexibility, and it does not lives up to it all the time. Rather than accepting the limitations, many customers end up walking on heavy customization path and then find themselves in a position where base product cannot be customized any further. Now, they have invested a lot of time and money, and they still don’t have what they wanted and so the sentiment comes out, “I hate my CMS”!

I think we have to start accepting that there is no magic-bullet when it comes to CMS and CMS do have limitations. If we understand its limitations and see that we choose right platform for our current and future needs, with focus on reducing customizations, you could have a winner.

There is always a first time, and this would be my first to write a blog. I was thinking about ECM as a topic, but decided against it. I would have lot more opportunity to do so in my future blog entries.

Today, I just want to say Hi and explain how you could gleam something positive from these blog entries. I have been working in Web world since I got my first Job (12 years ago) and last 8 years, I have been working with Vignette’s ECM  products. I have seen Web world change over this period of time, to the extents that I wonder how I did my tasks without the help of current tools (I am sure some of you would understand that sentiment).

Well, enough of my talk, time to stop it here and start planning about my next topic, which would be ECM related, I promise.