I’m generally a big advocate of making your software go as far as possible, even to the extent of using your general ledger as a simple data warehouse. But sometimes, trying to make your packaged software do everything doesn’t yield the best result. Here’s an example:
Read more on Should You Use an ERP System for all Your Data?…
CFO magazine has a good article titled No Employee Left Behind in its April issue. The article describes how insurance broker Marsh is training its entire firm in the basics of finance. As in everyone. As noted in the article, this isn’t uncommon in the financial sector. But Marsh differs in the effort it’s putting into it – using internal resources as opposed to canned content and making financial education mandatory, not optional.
Read more on How Important is Financial Education for Non-Financial People?…
Lawson: Beyond the Maintenance Vampire?
When Infor purchased Lawson last year, I wrote a blog post about how this wasn’t going to be good for customers. Infor isn’t known as a forward thinking software company, as Vinnie Mirchandani wrote in a recent blog post:
The other night, my wife and I saw One Man, Two Guvnors on Broadway. You may wonder why I’m posting about this on the Red Three blog. But as I thought about what I liked and didn’t like about the play, I realized it relates directly to point 5 of 7 Ways to Make Data Work For You – tell a story.
Read more on On Being Funny Versus Telling a Story: Making Data Work for You…
I saw this article this article on Bloomberg about non-financial statements that companies issue with their financial information. Things like corporate responsibility statements and environmental impact statements. The article’s worth a read. Here are a couple thoughts:
Read more on Corporate Responsibility Statements – A New Metric?…
In my last post, I discussed the problems of old code when it comes to training. Today, I’m going to talk about how old code becomes problematic when it comes to maintenance.
Read more on Spring Cleaning on the Brain: Maintenance and Cleaning Up Old Code…
I have spring cleaning on the brain as our housekeeper’s been away, and I’ve been doing more straightening around the house. It’s put me in a “throw things out/clean things up” kind of mood. I’ve written recently about how you can’t trust old reports. But now I’m taking it a step further. You need to throw out old programs you don’t use any more and clean up programs that work but are difficult to maintain (called refactoring in geek speak). There are two reasons for this: training and ease of maintenance. In this blog post, I’ll discuss how old code creates problems in training. In my next post, I’ll explore how old code creates problems for maintenance.
Read more on Spring Cleaning on the Brain: Training and Cleaning Up Old Code…
I spend a lot of time with a large variety of software. Some of it is really specialized stuff most people have never heard of, and the complexity required to use it borders on elaborate voodoo rituals. So it’s a rare breath of fresh air to discover an app that Just Works™, such as SQL Server Reporting Services.
Read more on Repeating Header Rows with SQL Server Reporting Services…
More Lessons from Chess
In a March blog post, I wrote about staying creative and the benefits of online chess. In the post, I mentioned how one of my programmers uses chess to decompress and keep his creative juices flowing. My programmer, Phil, wrote a response to this post – which I’ve posted below. I may even try to learn more about chess. I play with my 8-year old, and even he can tell I’m kind of clueless.
A recent article in The Economist, From Bitter to Sweet: How One of America’s Most Messed-up Firms Became One of Its Best, describes how Honeywell turned itself around by introducing new standards for production. Taking a financial view of the turnaround (since I have little shop floor experience) I was struck by this particular quote:
Read more on Honeywell’s Turnaround: Generating Cash vs. Declaring Profit…
