Featured
Era of Reasoning
Enterprise software is becoming a system of reasoning that weighs decisions and acts. Its limit is meaning, and the contest is who owns the reasoning layer.
When the Org Chart Stops Organizing
Every company is two graphs, the org chart and the value chain. As agents absorb routing, the chain becomes the one the company runs on.
Themes
The Return of the Builder
Intent, clarity, and the craft of building software when implementation gets cheap.
9 articles →
The Self-Driving Enterprise
How AI is reshaping enterprise software, from ambient ERP to autonomous workflows.
22 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
![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…
Five Ways to Keep Innovation Alive in Your 2021 IT Strategy
This year, the pandemic taught us the truth of old proverb “necessity is the mother of invention.” When companies had to close offices on short notice to control the spread of the virus, IT teams…
Welcome to the world of pervasive ERP
For decades now, users of enterprise resource planning software have been trained to believe that all the action must take place within the core of the system.
Has business technology focused on the wrong thing?
Why do businesses buy new technology? Historically, it’s been an operational investment to reduce costs, simplify administration, speed up processes and measure results. These are admirable objectives…
More than a feeling: why sentiment’s the missing link in professional services success
Accountability is critical in business. Professional services companies are held to high standards, and client expectations need to be met. But are the goals being measured for each project telling…
Do you have what it takes to be a successful self-disruptor?
Entrepreneurs have disrupted nearly every industry, developing start-ups that transform the way business is done. Airbnb for example has changed the world of travel forever. Today, this company enjoys…
Hybrid Cloud Can Smooth the Digital Transformation Culture Shock
Digital transformation is a given across all industries in today's economy. If a business wants to succeed, it must focus on meeting customer demand through growing and evolving the customer…
Unit4 2019 Predictions: The Year Ahead for the ERP Market
As we transition from one year to another, it is customary to look back on the past year and begin to consider what might unfold in the year ahead. We are in a period of massive technology-driven…
How to avoid ERP lock-in and seize the service imperative
The future is XaaS – Everything-as-a-Service. While XaaS stems from cloud computing, it has quickly evolved to something that embraces anything that can be delivered via the Internet that used to be…
Software will never be beautiful – it’s the experience that counts
For almost a decade, we’ve talked about wanting to modernize enterprise software user interfaces (UI) to match consumer software, but we’ve gone about it the wrong way. The modernization of UI was…
How bots will shape the future of work in the financial industry
When the average person thinks of bots entering the workforce, scenes from X-Men: Days of Future Past leap to mind, but actually, bots are not the future, they are already adopted and deployed among…