Featured
When the Manager Stops Routing
Agentic AI relieves managers of routing. Delivery sits with teams, standards with governance, capacity with management.
What I Got Wrong Building With AI
Three projects built with AI agents. One worked, one collapsed, one held. The variable was not the technology. It was the shape that existed before the code.
Themes
The Return of the Builder
Intent, clarity, and the craft of building software when implementation gets cheap.
8 articles →
The Self-Driving Enterprise
How AI is reshaping enterprise software, from ambient ERP to autonomous workflows.
21 articles →
My Life with AI
A personal narrative of building alongside machines, from a TRS-80 to today.
3 articles →
Random Thoughts from the Trenches
Software craft, leadership, estimation, and whatever else is on my mind.
38 articles →Articles
Back to Basics: 2023 ERP Trends and Predictions
In a year marked by uncertainty, organizations are looking for ways to reduce operating costs and streamline processes. Efficiency is on the mind of every business leader. Deploying automation to…
Integration Isn’t Enough: The Business Case for Integration-as-a-Service
Organizations use a variety of applications to handle business tasks, and at the center of many point solutions is the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. In an ideal state, data from various…
What the on-demand economy means for the future of work
I’ve been the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Unit4 for around three years, but I joined as Chief Architect in our innovation labs closer to eight years ago. When I arrived, many of the questions my…
Vendors and customers alike are facing some frank discussions about their relationships
Gartner has suggested that by 2025, 75% of companies “will break up with poor-fit customers.” In reality, this will prove to be a two-way process. It's worth exploring the important reasons why this…
Forget the hype: think about ERP integration before AI
The technology sector has always been prone to hype and promises of silver bullets. Marketers get ahead of engineers and evangelize over the promise of the Next Big Thing. Conferences dedicated to the…
What You’re Getting Wrong About DevOps (and How To Make it Right)
DevOps is now the top software deployment strategy by a mile — 77% of organizations say they use the approach to roll out new software. This is good news because a DevOps approach is an important…
Is It Time to Replace Your Legacy ERP System?
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have been around since the 1990s, helping organizations manage and integrate business processes. However, as companies implement digital transformation…
The low-no-code series - Unit4: 3 reasons low-code is over-hyped
I have worked in the IT industry for many years and sometimes it’s hard not to become a little weary of the hype around the latest trends. Low-code/no-code is one of those trends where hype can…
The architecture of future-proof ERP
Every ERP vendor will tell you their software is 'future-proof'. But what characteristics really make enterprise software a smart investment in an unpredictable future? I believe there are four main…
Why edge computing matters to enterprise software
Edge computing means processing data near where it's produced and consumed. It's another dimension to that age-old workload placement question, "Where's the best place to do this?" The trend this…
![Making ERP [e]xpert, [r]emote-friendly and [p]ersonal](/media/24082295-cae2-3b43-b242-ffa7c0e4512a/image.png)
Making ERP [e]xpert, [r]emote-friendly and [p]ersonal
The criticism commonly levelled against enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is that they are monolithic and generalist software slabs: suites of applications, dense with features and functions, designed to cover just about any need an enterprise might have, with a uniform user interface layered over for a common look and feel.
Automation's Critical Role in Driving Efficiency
Last year in this space, we predicted that "the humanity of the enterprise will be at center stage." The pandemic certainly brought people front and center in ways nobody could have foreseen. COVID-19…