Numerous State, County and Municipal entities are facing difficult times managing finances and workforce cost. With the continued economic slump, government and its departments/business units are experiencing tighter budgets and are insisting upon greater value from investments. At the same time, financial and budgeting systems have aged to the point where it’s time to look at replacing them. While still useful, many existing business systems are lacking integration capabilities, hindering much-needed increases in workforce efficiency and effectiveness. New systems come with high expectations for improvement.

Financial ERP systems for State, County and Municipalities will be a major focus area for replacement and upgrades. While IT organizations have been prominent in developing project management offices (PMOs) over the last several years, IT leaders seem to have still not discovered how to gain the full support of the business. And with so Read more …

I’ve been thinking about the software-plus-service model, where a vendor offers online (hosted) software components that integrate with the vendor’s software installed onsite at the end-user organization (i.e., the customer). Microsoft is pushing this approach in response to on-demand offerings from Google and other providers. More recently, SAP AG has jumped on the software-plus-service bandwagon as it has backed off its on-demand-only efforts. In some ways, this “hybrid” model makes sense. In other ways, it seems like it could be the worst of both worlds.In the case of SAP, the idea that some ERP components should remain onsite with the customer seems to make sense because of the security and reliability concerns I have with the on-demand-only model used for crucial enterprise applications. For example, if your hosted ERP application goes down or becomes unavailable for almost any length of Read more …