While today's workers are increasingly relying on the use of mobile devices to do their work, mobile technologies are being used not only for ensuring effective communication, but also for tasks that were previously performed at the desk during business hours.
Since the 2008 economic crisis hit, many firms have been forced to cut back in order to keep their businesses afloat. Enterprise software spending is one area where cutbacks have been most noticeable. But now that the global economy is starting to rebound and information technology budgets are unfreezing, companies are evaluating upgrade or replacement enterprise resource planning systems with added functionality to support their changing business needs.
The good news is that software acquisition does not happen often, but the bad news is that this infrequency uncovers another hidden facet of such projects. Employees and management of a company that do not purchase and implement a significant number of software applications on a regular basis are, in fact, amateurs that are mandated to deal with software vendors whose only order of business is to develop, promote, and sell their software, every day.
Buying a large enterprise software system is not something that many organizations do on a regular basis. While software vendors are constantly hyping the benefits of their particular system, buyers do not necessarily have the background needed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Analyst Insight: When a conveyor in your warehouse is broken, but you're not sure how to fix it, what part needs to be replaced, or who can provide it to you, you risk losing both time and money. Enterprise asset management (EAM) and product lifecycle management (PLM) functionality can come to the rescue.
- Gabriel Gheorghiu, research analyst, Technology Evaluation Centers
Analyst Insight: Though there is no question that modern business process management (BPM) applications have the potential to solve many technical aspects of business processes challenges, the productive consolidation and integration of this evolution into the corporate culture requires that the management of business processes shift toward an approach that is data-driven, widely supported, and better communicated at the organizational level. - Jorge GarcÃÂa, research analyst, Technology Evaluation Centers