News & Views

Episode of Cheers – “’Well you see, Norm, it’s like this . . . A herd of buffalo can only move as fast as the slowest buffalo. And when the heard is hunted, it is the slowest and weakest ones at the back that are killed first . This natural selection is good for the herd as a whole, because the general speed and health of the whole group keeps improving by the regular killing of the weakest members. In much the same way, the human brain can only operate as fast as the slowest brain cells. Now, as we know, excessive intake of alcohol kills brain cells. But naturally, it attacks the slowest and weakest brain cells first. In this way, regular consumption of beer eliminates the weaker brain cells, making the brain a faster and more efficient machine. And that, Norm, is why you always feel smarter after a few beers.”

March 31, 2010 from Big Fat Finance Blog – “Extensible business reporting language (XBRL) becomes a requirement for financial disclosure in 2011 in the U.S. and much of the world. In the process, many expect XBRL to bring about convergence of U.S. GAAP and IFRS. Additionally, some hope that it will finally get the CFO enthused about technology tools. “Finance is the last frontier of automation,” observed Jaideep Shah, Senior Product Manager, Fujitsu, and David Taylor, VP, Strategy & Global Business Development, Trintech, during a recent XBRL tools webinar…”

180 View – I think XBRL will be useful for accessing financial information that in the past was only available in pdf format and required rekeying. But to think that it will “automate finance” and “help speed the time to posting results for management” is misguided. It’s also misguided to think that it will allow for convergence of GAAP and IFRS. Finally it’s not true that finance is the last frontier of automation. In fact, finance was the first. I could go on with other problems in the article, but I don’t want to be harsh.

2010 from Info-Tech – “Calling a suite of IT project and asset management tools “IT governance software” raises the false promise of out-of-the-box IT/business alignment. Alignment cannot be purchased – it is earned through capable management processes. Focus on the processes first and then look to how these powerful tools can help…”

180 View – The same argument goes for any enterprise software. The article also identifies a number of IT Governance vendors.

The website has been rewritten to improve navigation of the site and optimize search engine performance. You may have noticed before that there was a lot of information but it was difficult to find it. Not any more. It’s logically organized and a click or two away. We have also added articles and research you may not have seen before.

AccountingWEB provides accounting news, information, tips, tools, resources and insight for the accounting profession. Their information includes articles on technology and systems, and they have chosen to include two of our articles on their website. They clearly offer useful information to their readers.

ERP Business Case Webinar

I (Michael Burns) am very pleased to be once again able to present at the Financial Technology Show in Vancouver on October 7 and in Toronto on November 24. (I was out of commission for health reasons last year.)

We are also doing something new with the Financial Technology Show. We will be hosting a series of webinars on ERP business case where I will describe how to do a business case followed by a case study presented by the client of an ERP vendor. SYSPRO kicks off this series of webinars. Register by clicking here.

We have just launched a website for CRM (http://www.crm180systems.com/), to join our other websites on ERP (http://www.erp180systems.com/), Corporate Performance Management/Business Intelligence (http://www.cpm180systems.com/), and Business Process Improvement/Governance Risk Compliance (http://www.bpi180systems.com/)

The objective for all these site is to provide unbiased information about products, implementers and relevant articles. We would appreciate any suggestions on how to improve the site and recommendations for products or implementers to add to our site.

June 2-3, 2008 – Technology is one of the best levers to improve business process, but technology is constantly changing, over-hyped, and full of acronyms that make no sense. The CICA IT Solutions Conference and Showcase is a great opportunity to get the facts. And besides, Michael Burns will be presenting Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Technology Galaxy, Independent Analysis of ERP Systems and an ERP Shootout.

August 1, 2007 from a subscriber of 180 Systems’ News and Views – “Wi-Max is alive and well in Canada. Rogers calls it their portable internet. Bell calls it their wi max. I have it at my cottage now (Muskoka).

It is slower than cable in the city, but it is 25 – 35 times faster than dial up. I regularly get download speeds of 1.7MB and upload of 256KB. For reference, cable in the city is about 7MB download and 512KB upload. Not bad for coming in off of the cell towers. And, it has been 100% reliable for the last 7 weeks since I installed it.”

180 View – One of our subscribers sent this information to us after reading the artice entitled “The wide world of Wi-Max” in last month’s issue.

July 22, 2007 from Globeandmail.com – “A fundamental change in the design of microprocessors is presenting software developers with a challenge — and a huge financial opportunity.

Chip makers are no longer racing to have the fastest microprocessor and have shifted their focus away from building chips with a single, super-fast calculating core. Instead, to save energy and reduce heat, they’re putting multiple cores on the same chip — the equivalent of several computers on the same slice of silicon.

The cores run slower but are more energy-efficient, and are designed to break up big chores and work on the separate pieces simultaneously.

The resulting technology is ideal for the most demanding multimedia tasks, such as processing large video files, pulling information from multiple databases at the same time, or playing a computer game while downloading music and burning a DVD.

The problem is that many software applications weren’t written for chips with multiple cores, and the hardware is advancing so fast that the software runs the risk of being left behind…

But now that chip makers are no longer focused solely on speed, programmers must change their tactics and learn to send instructions to different parts of the chip instead of through a single processing core…

“The software industry would have been very happy if the processor industry could have been able to double performance every two years without having to go to this parallel world,” said Marc Tremblay, chief technology officer for Sun Microsystems Inc.’s microelectronics business, where he oversees the server and software maker’s processor road map. “Unfortunately people ran into roadblocks, and the winners will be the people who can actually leverage this disruption.”

180 View – You’ve heard of Moore’s Law whereby the number of transistors on a computer chip, and thus its power, doubles every 18-24 months. The “Law” was first introduced in 1975, and for those of us who have been around long enough, have seen unbelievable progress. Although the article describes a disruption of Moore’s Law, it is also possible that by running parallel processes that we will continue to reap the benefits of faster processing as developers apply new techniques to take advantage of multiple core technology.

June 2007 from CAmagazine – “Virtualization makes it possible to use just one physical machine to run many platforms (or operating systems) and to make more efficient use of the hardware’s capacity. Each of these operating systems runs within its secure sandbox. With virtualization, you can improve resource allocation, allow for online migration of applications from one server to another and offer developers a safer environment for debugging and testing new applications…

180 View –Yves Godbout, who wrote this article, is the technical editor of CAmagazine and is another reason for reading this magazine.

July 2007 from Popular Mechanics – “The software giant has built a new touchscreen computer—a coffee table that will change the world. Go inside its top-secret development with PopularMechanics.com, then forget the keyboard and mouse: The next generation of computer interfaces will be hands-on…”

180 View – We suggest you check out the video to see what’s coming down the pike.

Advertising

May 18, 2007 from CIO Today – “According to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s purchase of aQuantive for $6 billion in cash represents the next step in the evolution of Microsoft’s advertising network, with MSN and the broader Microsoft network that includes Xbox Live, Windows Live, and Office Live serving as key components of that strategy.”

Web Conferencing

May 18, 2007 from CFO.com – “Cisco Systems’s $3.2 billion purchase of Web-conferencing leader WebEx was more than just another deal for the acquisition-mad networking giant. In shelling out so much for an established Web-services firm, Cisco made it clear that it intends to move beyond its base in networking hardware and take on rival Microsoft in the nascent “unified messaging” market…

Jain predicts the Web-conferencing market will triple, to $21 billion, by 2011 and expects Cisco to make other sizable acquisitions as it attempts to dominate the space.”

180 View – You can expect to see a lot more content on the internet that will justify the investments being made in advertising.

Web conferencing is a great tool already but will only get better as live video is added and prices fall as the vendors fight for market share. There is thankfully less need to hop on an airplane to make a business call, which can’t be good for the airlines.

March 2007 from IT Compliance Institute: – In this article, the author discussed emerging trends which included:

“The first several years of SOX involved a mad dash to get needed IT controls in place to ensure compliance. Firms typically first instituted manual controls, and have been steadily replacing those controls with automated ones, to create more easily repeatable, demonstrable, and cost-effective compliance.

Unfortunately, many of these controls are actually ineffective, claims Forrester Research analyst Michael Rasmussen in a recent report. The problem: “In a rush to avoid being fitted for orange jumpsuits, firms don’t devote nearly enough consideration to the adequacy of the controls that compliance teams are implementing.” Rather, many companies rely on one-size-fits-all checklists of controls—“because firms all want a ‘get out of jail free’ card that assures their executives that if they do these three things in order, litigators and regulators will leave their companies alone.”

As a result, he says, “many compliance teams have implemented controls that may not make sense for their businesses.” Thus controls are either overblown, which siphons off valuable IT time and resources; or more often insufficient, which leaves organizations vulnerable to attack, as well as potentially noncompliant with regulations. Hence as regulations mature, expect auditors to take a much closer look at whether in-place controls actually do the job…”

“Increased security spending will also be needed to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) version 1.1, which was released in September 2006. The PCI DSS is a security standard that was developed by the founding payment brands of the PCI Security Standards Council, including American Express, Discover Financial Services, JCB, MasterCard Worldwide and Visa International, to help mitigate emerging payment security risks, while facilitating the broad adoption of payment account data security. Simply put, PCI specifies minimum policies, procedures, data security, network architecture, and more for any merchant handling credit card data. Unlike SOX, which many deride as being so vague that many auditors aren’t even sure what it requires, experts say PCI is a model of clarity, clearly spelling out what companies must do…”

180 View – Hopefully it’s not as bad as Forrester claims. No doubt SOX has been expensive and in the end it’s unlikely that the benefits exceed the costs. However it’s another matter if the new SOX controls have been both ineffective and inefficient. We see a parallel in replacing ERP systems as a result of Y2K. The implementations were often done in a rush without consideration of optimizing business process at the same time, which is what ERP should be all about. In the same way, organizations rushed into compliance without concerns for efficiency and effectiveness. Expect a second wave of compliance to include business process improvement.