Years ago, in a conversation about ERP systems with the president of a Tier 1 automotive supplier, he said something that will forever stay with me.  We were talking about whether we (the company) should retire our legacy system in favor of SAP.  He said that if he really had his choice, we should develop our own solution in-house.  Puzzled, I pushed further and asked him what would drive him to reach such a conclusion with SAP, Oracle, our legacy product and a number of other industry-specific solutions available.  He responded that he doesn’t want to change the way he manages the business to make it fit with some off-the-shelf application according to how some software developer or any other company thinks his business should be managed.  Read More

If you have never put much thought into managing risk in your organization, a risk assessment is the place to start.  It can be an eye-opener for a number of reasons.  First, you’ll quickly see that no risk management methodology is going to allow your organization to avoid all potential loss.  Second, if you have never done an assessment before, you may be shocked to find just how many threats exist to your organization and how vulnerable you are.  Third, you may be equally surprised to find that there are likely several actions you can take in the near term, with little or no cash investment, to mitigate some of that downside risk.  Read More

While this can apply to a number of different scenarios, it’s especially appropriate to business continuity planning.  As business continuity professionals, we are often tasked with meeting certain goals and objectives.  Our success and the success of our programs depend on other people; people over whom we have no management authority.  Read More

I was cleaning up the photo gallery a bit when I came across some pictures that I forgot I had found after thinking I’d lost.

Did you follow that?  Read More

You know, several years ago… back when the Palm Pilot first came out, I was all over it.  I was an early gadget junky and had to have everything techie.  Back then, I was the typical IT guy walking around with a cell phone (a big, bulky one), two pagers and my PDA hanging from my “utility belt”.  I was an IT super hero.  Read More