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You know,
better than anyone else, the challenge facing
midsize companies. Competition against large
rivals with deep pockets forces your organization
to run lean and mean. Because of your company’s
size, however, you may have at least one powerful
advantage over bigger organizations: business
agility. You can respond quickly to changing
market and economic conditions. While the
larger players are still deciding what to
do, you can size up potential business opportunities
or threats—and act fast—before
they do.
Herein lies the challenge; on one hand you
have to focus on standardizing process and
product to improve operational excellence
and on the other hand you have to retain process
flexibility and adopt transformational technology
to maximize business agility. How can you
manage both at once?
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The initial
position of both Oracle and most GEMMS customers
who wished to move into OPM on Oracle 11i
was that a series of upgrade scripts presented
the optimal path. The base release of Oracle
11i is sufficiently different from prior GEMMS
and OPM11 versions that a series of upgrade
scripts and processes were developed and offered
by Oracle to the market at large. The biggest
disadvantage was/is that they are very complex,
and required a significant blackout period
during the upgrade.
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The
Second Coming of the Web (2.0) – Advantage
Business...
Web 2.0 Services’ tools that are revolutionizing
the way someactive participants and beneficiaries
of the radically changing web and world of
the Internet.In simple terms, Web 2.0 Services
are a second generation of services available
on the World Wide Web (www) that allows people
tocollaborate and share information online
through interactive and dynamic Web pages.
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Business
Intelligence – Lifeline to the Healthcare
sector ...
For an enterprise, information is one of the
most key resources. Theimportance of making
decisions based on timely and accurate information
can not be stressed enough. Business intelligence
(BI),which refers to a broad category of expert
information, knowledge,applications and technologies
for gathering and analyzing data to help enterprises
make better business decisions, has become
imperative for businesses in order to have
a comprehensive and in-depth knowledge of
all of the factors affecting it and to make
effective and good quality business decisions.
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Never
Too Late to Blog the Profits - Blogging is
still a corporate rage ...
Even after about seven years of stepping into
the world-wide Web of the Internet, blogging
is witnessing an unprecedented growth and
the frenzy surrounding it is only growing
by leaps and bounds. More and more corporates
– largest corporations and latest start-ups
– are joining the bandwagon. Corporates
- seeking answers to why they should blog,
what makes their blog successful, and how
it facilitates growth, and how measurable
is the ROI due to blogging – are living
up to all the hype surrounding it. In fact,
more than 5% of the Fortune 500 companies
blog externally. |
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IT
Risk Management
There are many providers of security products,
assessment services, and training that follow
standard security best practices. These types
of activities are necessary to reduce the
risks related to information technologies.
However, improving the quality of risk management
requires improvement the quality of the decisions
that can be made surrounding the trade-offs
between technologies and operations. Risk
management is performed to enable business;
to be effective any solution that is developed
will need to focus on supporting the business
needs and goals of the organization. Ultimately,
the best solution for the management of IT
security and operational risks will include
the integration of best of breed elements
of technology and processes from several vendors
along with the culture and goals of a client.
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Application
Portfolio Management
Capital projects are crucial to organization
growth as they are investments for the future.
Critical questions arise when investments
are to be made – how much should be
invested and in which projects? In most organizations,
it is difficult to know if these decisions
are being answered correctly. Capital project
funding among business units tends to be tied
to traditions or revenue generation, instead
of organization needs, leading to local optimization
of investments, and perhaps leaving the organization
unprepared for the future. |
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Innovation
in the Utility Industry
Real-time generation of operating, financial,
and regulatory metrics allows for improved
management and credible communications to
customers, regulators, and financial markets.
Integrated views of disparate projects, systems,
and jurisdictions, tying together data from
multiple sources such as GIS and AMR systems,
correlating data to create actionable information
for managers. A field force that can interact
and collaborate dynamically while mobile to
respond rapidly to outages, and solve service
problems on-the-spot. These are some of the
innovative ways in which utilities are creating
new systems that leverage existing IT investments
to directly address business challenges, and
meeting goals of revenue growth and increased
profitability. |
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Left
Hand-Right Hand Framework
Every day senior executives face a schizophrenic
set of challenges. On one hand, they constantly
struggle to manage current business more efficiently
from day to day and quarter to quarter. At
the same time, they must prepare for the long-term
success of the organization by pushing into
new, unproven business areas. In the following,
we describe a framework to manage these seemingly
contradicting goals. We use the model and
our observations to illustrate how selected
organizations have successfully tackled these
operational and strategic challenges with
solutions that build on their plain vanilla
IT and organizational capabilities. |
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Unlocking
Enterprise Data
Although most companies maintain vast databases
of customer, supplier and internal information,
very little of this information is ever utilized.
Revenue and market position can be greatly
improved by unlocking enterprise data. Indeed,
a major locomotive company that pursued this
endeavor succeeded in lowering downtime due
to repairs, saving $4000 per hour. Similarly,
a large value-added reseller succeeded in
turning widely varying and often negative
margins into consistent profits at contract-mandated
levels. |
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Innovation
and Collaboration
Innovation and collaboration are essential
endeavors for any organization that seeks
to remain competitive in a progressive marketplace
to undertake. As technological and process-based
advancements are made and adopted by rivals,
a static organization loses its competitive
advantage. Indeed, as new processes, products,
and technologies are introduced over time,
the organization faces the potential of assuming
both an aura and reality of obsolescence.
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The
Rapid Application Development Process
This paper introduces the Rapid Application
Development process for software development
and summarizes its advantages and limitations.
A description of the goals of the process
is given before presenting the various components
that make up a RAD project. The team structure
is also shown and the roles of each member
are described. The RAD phases are defined
by specifying their deliverables and the deliverables,
in-turn, are detailed with recommendations
on their use and content. Examples are given
throughout the reading and some diagrams are
presented as clarification tools. |
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