The Trouble With
Enterprise Software
F A L L 2 0 0 7 V O L . 4 9 N O . 1
R E P R I N T N U M B E R 4 9 1 0 1
Cynthia Rettig
Please note that gray areas reflect artwork that has been
intentionally removed. The substantive content of the ar-
ticle appears as originally published.
C O N T R A R I A
Te ch n o l o g y h a s a l -
w a y s b e e n a b o u t
hope. Since the begin-
ning of the industrial
revolution, businesses
have embraced new
technologies enthusi-
a s t i c a l l y, a n d t h e i r
optimism has been
re w a rd e d w i t h i m -
p r o v e d p r o c e s s e s ,
lower costs and re-
duced workforces. As the pace of technological
innovation has intensified over the past two de-
cades, businesses have come to expect that the next
new thing will inevitably bring them larger market
opportunities and bigger profits. Software, a tech-
nology so invisible and obscure to most of us that it
appears to work like magic, especially lends itself to
this kind of open-ended hope.
Software promises evolutions, revolutions and
even transformations in how companies do busi-
ness. The triumphant vision many buy into is that
enterprise software in large organizations is fully
integrated and intelligently controls infinitely com-
plex business processes while remaining flexible
enough to adapt to changing business needs. This
vision of software lies at the core of what Thomas
Friedman in “The World Is Flat” calls “the Wal-
Mart Symphony in multiple movements — with
no finale. It just plays over and over 24/7/365.”1
Whole systems march in lock step, providing syn-
chronized, fully coordinated supply chains,
production lines and services, just like a world-
class orchestra. From online web orders through
fulfillment, delivery, billing and customer service
— the entire enterprise, organized end to end —
that has been the promise. The age of smart
machines would seem to be upon us.
Or is it? While a few companies like Wal-Mart
Stores Inc. have achieved something close to that
ideal, the way most large organizations actually
process information belies that glorious vision and
reveals a looking-glass world, where everything is
in fact the opposite of what one might expect.
Back-office systems — including both software ap-
plications and the data they process — are a
variegated patchwork of systems, containing 50 or
more databases and hundreds of separate software
programs installed over decades and intercon-
nected by idiosyncratic, Byzantine and poorly
documented customized processes. To manage this
growing complexity, IT departments have grown
substantially: As a percentage of total investment,
IT rose from 2.6% to 3.5% between 1970 and 1980.2
By 1990 IT consumed 9%, and by 1999 a whopping
22% of total investment went to IT. Growth in IT
spending has fallen off, but it is nonetheless sur-
prising to hear that today’s IT departments spe ...
Learn about how Enterprise systems have long defined the core value proposition of business computing, as well as the IT infrastructures that large organizations depend on to support both day to day operational processes and long term strategic initiatives.
Charles King, Pund-It, Inc believes that the term 'enterprise system' has to be redefined to meet the today business process, application and workload.To know more about the IBM System z, visit http://ibm.co/PNo9Cb.
BIG DATA is having an enormous impact on the profile of workforces around the world. If you've ever seen the technology and experienced the impact it has on the pace of innovation in a business then the predictations made by McKinsey Global Institute will come as no surprise ( and just in case you've been on holiday for around two years, McKinsey is suggesting that by 2018 the US will face a shortfall of close to 200,000 analysts and 1.5 million managers with the right skills. In this presentation I outline the impact of BIG DATA on workforce design. I hope you find it informative and fun to read. Ian.
The Robot and I: How New Digital Technologies Are Making Smart People and Bus...Cognizant
Our latest study shows that when enterprise robots are applied to automating core business processes, they can extend the creative problem-solving capabilities and productivity of human beings and deliver superior business results.
Learn about how Enterprise systems have long defined the core value proposition of business computing, as well as the IT infrastructures that large organizations depend on to support both day to day operational processes and long term strategic initiatives.
Charles King, Pund-It, Inc believes that the term 'enterprise system' has to be redefined to meet the today business process, application and workload.To know more about the IBM System z, visit http://ibm.co/PNo9Cb.
BIG DATA is having an enormous impact on the profile of workforces around the world. If you've ever seen the technology and experienced the impact it has on the pace of innovation in a business then the predictations made by McKinsey Global Institute will come as no surprise ( and just in case you've been on holiday for around two years, McKinsey is suggesting that by 2018 the US will face a shortfall of close to 200,000 analysts and 1.5 million managers with the right skills. In this presentation I outline the impact of BIG DATA on workforce design. I hope you find it informative and fun to read. Ian.
The Robot and I: How New Digital Technologies Are Making Smart People and Bus...Cognizant
Our latest study shows that when enterprise robots are applied to automating core business processes, they can extend the creative problem-solving capabilities and productivity of human beings and deliver superior business results.
DRIVERS AND IMPEDIMENTS TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION - THE RESEARCHTom Rieger
In August 2020 EnterpriseDB and Platform 3 jointly asked 1000s of IT professionals their perspectives and priorities. This paper is a detailed view of those results.
Serving the long tail white-paper (how to rationalize IT yet produce more apps)Newton Day Uploads
Businesses benefit from having fewer technology tools in their 'enterprise stack'. Yet CIOs still need to encourage innovation and employ software tools as an enabler for growth and cost reduction. This white paper focuses on the role of Situational Applications platforms to reduce the number of technology platforms whilst increasing opportunities to serve the long-tail of applications demands from individuals and communities of users whose needs are unfulfilled by core enterprise platforms.
It's Now or Never for Shift to Real-Time AppsPixel Crayons
Read the full blog here: https://bit.ly/2Ugo98g
Connect with us through:
Contact us : https://bit.ly/2IpPX7w
Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/PixelCrayons
Twitter : https://twitter.com/pixelcrayons
LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/company/pixelcrayons
Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/pixelcrayons/
Pinterest : https://in.pinterest.com/pixelcrayons/
Digital Transformation and Application Decommissioning - THE RESEARCHTom Rieger
The resulting research paper from the August 2020 market surveying of 1000s of IT professionals around the current state of affairs and what is happening over the next 18-14 months.
The Work Ahead: Soaring Out of the Process SiloCognizant
In this edition of our series, we look at how business leaders can turbo-charge operational efficiency and propel massive revenue growth and cost savings by digitizing their business processes.
Only few organizations wise up to new digital competitors, as they usually come from outside their own sector and are not taken seriously at first. Their allegedly inferior propositions confuse prominent players, who should in fact be the very first to be fully aware of potentially disruptive innovation.
To swing into action rapidly, existing organizations would be well advised to properly analyze anything resembling digital competition. Evidently, there are clear patterns behind the startup success marking a new techno-economic reality. Ecosystems, APIs, and platforms characterize this New Normal where customers have more freedom of choice and better service at lower costs.
These successful disruptors are called two-sided market players, also known as multi-sided platform players. Companies like Uber and Airbnb are getting all the media attention, however there are over 9000 players (and counting) active in almost every industry.
The new VINT report explores the new digital competition and presents:
A analysis of the success factors of disruption
10 design principles of the new digital competition like Unbundle your organization processes, APIs first. Access over ownership and Building trust with social systems
The need for every business to develop a API-strategy
An appeal to the CIO and the IT department to use a leading digital approach and map out an offensive technological route.
Why IT Struggles With Digital Transformation and What to Do About Itrun_frictionless
To win the digital transformation race, successful CIOs need to overcome three immense challenges: Massive backlogs, legacy debt and scarce resources. And, at the same time they need to embrace new methods, better suited to fast-paced innovation.
www.runfrictionless.com
The survival kit for your digital transformationrun_frictionless
To go digital, you need an IT organization, an enterprise architecture, IT processes, and tools that allow for new projects to go live tomorrow instead of next week. The ability to do this will give you a competitive advantage and it will also reduce costs. But how do you get there? This white paper will get you there.
https://runfrictionless.com/b2b-white-paper-service/
Digital revolution is disrupting businesses like never before! Ability to extract actionable insight from a large amount of disparate data has become the determining factor of competitive advantage! Everyday new business models are created around data and forcing the incumbents to reinvent themselves to be relevant. Consumer facing businesses felt this pressure early on but eventually every business need to be data driven. But what is the best strategy to address this digital disruption? Our experience says the core data infrastructure modernization is the logical starting point! In this session, we will share trends, strategies and our experience on rejuvenating data integration landscape to address digital disruptions.
APIs challenge every notion of IT – governance, financial planning, team composition, success metrics, security – and many notions of business – secrecy, precise business agreements, locus of control.
This is not because of APIs as a technical evolution.
This is because APIs are part of the vanguard of the new world of work, the beginning of a 20-year productivity boom that will unsettle traditional hierarchies and business models in an even more pervasive way than the 10-year boom of the Web.
Looking back from 2018, how will you describe the changes and how you led your company to a dominant market position?
The ecosystem equation collaboration in the connected economy @harvard biz @i...Diego Alberto Tamayo
IT infrastructure will play a vital role in enabling organizations to become
connected economy leaders. With an IT infrastructure designed for cognitive workloads, you can
act at the speed of thought. It accelerates technology breakthroughs through open architectures
that foster collaborative innovation. Finally, it works with your cloud platforms to extend the value
of your systems and data. Put it all together and instead of observing change unfold, you can seize
the opportunities created by the connected economy.
For many, web-scale IT is an alien and drastic approach being met with fear and resistance. So the first question for any organization should be; what is it? Cameron Haight, Gartner’s chief of research for infrastructure and operations, coined the term “Web-scale IT” earlier 2014 as a way to describe the new ways organizations leverage technology to provide their customers with content quickly and at massive scale.
As described in Lecture Note 1, geography is a part of everyday life.docxssusera34210
As described in Lecture Note 1, geography is a part of everyday life and the study of which ranges from how we design our cities to what lies on the ocean floor. One of the more important kinds of geography is political geography, which can involve everything from the creation of local zoning areas to borders between nations. In your opinion, which level of political geography is more important, that at the local level that impacts people’s everyday lives such as the ability to build an addition onto their house or a national one, which may involve disputed territory and result in armed conflict? Be sure to use examples to support your key points.
.
As an extra credit, Must discuss at least one (1) o.docxssusera34210
As an extra credit,
:
Must discuss at least one (1) other student's topic
Student discussion:
Since its emergence in the 1960's, plate tectonic theory has gained wide-spread acceptance as the model of how Earth's land masses shift over time. Plate tectonics developed historically in 1915 when Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of "continental drift." He stated that the continents plowed through crust of ocean basins, which would explain why the outlines of many coastlines, such as South America and Africa, appeared to fit like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
There are various types of plate boundaries such as: convergent plate boundaries, when two collide; divergent plate boundaries, when they spread apart; and transform boundaries, when they slide past each other.
http://scecinfo.usc.edu/education/k12/learn/plate2.htm
.
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Businesses benefit from having fewer technology tools in their 'enterprise stack'. Yet CIOs still need to encourage innovation and employ software tools as an enabler for growth and cost reduction. This white paper focuses on the role of Situational Applications platforms to reduce the number of technology platforms whilst increasing opportunities to serve the long-tail of applications demands from individuals and communities of users whose needs are unfulfilled by core enterprise platforms.
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The resulting research paper from the August 2020 market surveying of 1000s of IT professionals around the current state of affairs and what is happening over the next 18-14 months.
The Work Ahead: Soaring Out of the Process SiloCognizant
In this edition of our series, we look at how business leaders can turbo-charge operational efficiency and propel massive revenue growth and cost savings by digitizing their business processes.
Only few organizations wise up to new digital competitors, as they usually come from outside their own sector and are not taken seriously at first. Their allegedly inferior propositions confuse prominent players, who should in fact be the very first to be fully aware of potentially disruptive innovation.
To swing into action rapidly, existing organizations would be well advised to properly analyze anything resembling digital competition. Evidently, there are clear patterns behind the startup success marking a new techno-economic reality. Ecosystems, APIs, and platforms characterize this New Normal where customers have more freedom of choice and better service at lower costs.
These successful disruptors are called two-sided market players, also known as multi-sided platform players. Companies like Uber and Airbnb are getting all the media attention, however there are over 9000 players (and counting) active in almost every industry.
The new VINT report explores the new digital competition and presents:
A analysis of the success factors of disruption
10 design principles of the new digital competition like Unbundle your organization processes, APIs first. Access over ownership and Building trust with social systems
The need for every business to develop a API-strategy
An appeal to the CIO and the IT department to use a leading digital approach and map out an offensive technological route.
Why IT Struggles With Digital Transformation and What to Do About Itrun_frictionless
To win the digital transformation race, successful CIOs need to overcome three immense challenges: Massive backlogs, legacy debt and scarce resources. And, at the same time they need to embrace new methods, better suited to fast-paced innovation.
www.runfrictionless.com
The survival kit for your digital transformationrun_frictionless
To go digital, you need an IT organization, an enterprise architecture, IT processes, and tools that allow for new projects to go live tomorrow instead of next week. The ability to do this will give you a competitive advantage and it will also reduce costs. But how do you get there? This white paper will get you there.
https://runfrictionless.com/b2b-white-paper-service/
Digital revolution is disrupting businesses like never before! Ability to extract actionable insight from a large amount of disparate data has become the determining factor of competitive advantage! Everyday new business models are created around data and forcing the incumbents to reinvent themselves to be relevant. Consumer facing businesses felt this pressure early on but eventually every business need to be data driven. But what is the best strategy to address this digital disruption? Our experience says the core data infrastructure modernization is the logical starting point! In this session, we will share trends, strategies and our experience on rejuvenating data integration landscape to address digital disruptions.
APIs challenge every notion of IT – governance, financial planning, team composition, success metrics, security – and many notions of business – secrecy, precise business agreements, locus of control.
This is not because of APIs as a technical evolution.
This is because APIs are part of the vanguard of the new world of work, the beginning of a 20-year productivity boom that will unsettle traditional hierarchies and business models in an even more pervasive way than the 10-year boom of the Web.
Looking back from 2018, how will you describe the changes and how you led your company to a dominant market position?
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IT infrastructure will play a vital role in enabling organizations to become
connected economy leaders. With an IT infrastructure designed for cognitive workloads, you can
act at the speed of thought. It accelerates technology breakthroughs through open architectures
that foster collaborative innovation. Finally, it works with your cloud platforms to extend the value
of your systems and data. Put it all together and instead of observing change unfold, you can seize
the opportunities created by the connected economy.
For many, web-scale IT is an alien and drastic approach being met with fear and resistance. So the first question for any organization should be; what is it? Cameron Haight, Gartner’s chief of research for infrastructure and operations, coined the term “Web-scale IT” earlier 2014 as a way to describe the new ways organizations leverage technology to provide their customers with content quickly and at massive scale.
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Since its emergence in the 1960's, plate tectonic theory has gained wide-spread acceptance as the model of how Earth's land masses shift over time. Plate tectonics developed historically in 1915 when Alfred Wegener proposed his theory of "continental drift." He stated that the continents plowed through crust of ocean basins, which would explain why the outlines of many coastlines, such as South America and Africa, appeared to fit like missing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
There are various types of plate boundaries such as: convergent plate boundaries, when two collide; divergent plate boundaries, when they spread apart; and transform boundaries, when they slide past each other.
http://scecinfo.usc.edu/education/k12/learn/plate2.htm
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As an institution, Walden has long supported days of service and.docxssusera34210
As an institution, Walden has long supported days of service and encouraged students, faculty, and staff to give back to their communities. In the companion Assignment for this module, you are developing a plan for a proposed Global Day of Service project. For this Discussion, you will explain the Global Day of Service project you are proposing for your Assignment and offer feedback and support for your colleagues’ projects.
Important Note:
You will share your ideas regarding your Module 5 Assignment in this Discussion. Be sure to read through the instructions for this Discussion and the Module 5 Assignment prior to beginning work this week.
To prepare:
Review the instructions for the Module 5 Course Project assignment.
Review the Walden University sites regarding social change and Walden’s Global Days of Service. Consider the many meaningful opportunities found in early childhood programs, K–12 schools, and communities for enacting social change. How will the Walden Global Day of Service project you are proposing in this module’s Assignment support social change in your program and field?
Review the Callahan et al. (2012) paper in the Learning Resources. Which of the eight features of social change will be reflected the most in your Day of Service project?
An explanation of the following:
The Day of Service project you are proposing for this module’s Assignment
How your proposed project would support social change in your program and field
Which of the eight features of social change are integrated the most in your Day of Service project
For this Discussion, and all scholarly writing in this course and throughout your program, you will be required to use APA style and provide reference citations.
Learning Resources
Note:
To access this module’s required library resources, please click on the link to the Course Readings List, found in the
Course Materials
section of your Syllabus.
Required Readings
Fullan, M. (2016).
The new meaning of educational change
(5th ed.). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Chapter 13, “The Future of Educational Change” (pp. 258–265)
Callahan, D., Wilson, E., Birdsall, I., Estabrook-Fishinghawk, B., Carson, G., Ford, S., . . . Yob, I. (2012).
Expanding our understanding of social change: A report from the definition task force of the HLC Special Emphasis Project
[White paper]. Minneapolis, MN: Walden University.
Social Change Web Maps
[Diagrams]. Adapted from Expanding our understanding of social change, by Callahan, D., Wilson, E., Birdsall, I., Estabrook-Fishinghawk, B., Carson, G., Ford, S., Ouzts, K., & Yob, I., 2008. Baltimore, MD: Walden University. Adapted with permission of Walden University.
Cooper, K. S., Stanulis, R. N., Brondyk, S. K. Hamilton, E. R., Macaluso, M., & Meier, J. A. (2016). The teacher leadership process: Attempting change within embedded systems. Journal of Educational Change, 17(1), 85–113. .
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Briefly define cyberterrorism. Define hacktivism. Illustrate examples of each in current events within the last decade.
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How do you think our government’s response to such groups has changed our attitudes towards our own freedoms?
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Despite progress made over the years, racism continues to have an impact on the mental health of Black and African American people. Negative stereotypes and attitudes of rejection have decreased, but continue to occur with measurable, adverse consequences. Historical and contemporary instances of negative treatment have led to a mistrust of authorities, many of whom are not seen as having the best interests of Black and African Americans in mind. The culture from which many African Americans are raised, has a greater distrust of the medical helpers and medical offices alike, from the belief of racial bias. A great example is that of the Tuskegee experiment, where the abuses of slaves by white doctors, simply for the use of medical experimentation. There was no sense of consent or refusal from the African American participants to participate, just because of their lower level in society and the mass discrimination during that time. It’s those issues of the past, that resist black males from seeking the help they truly need, in order to bring them back to the feeling of self and self-worth; and to add a more recent impact, just look at the COVID vaccine, many are skeptical of receiving it, just because of what happens at Tuskegee. Despite progress made over the years, racism continues to have an impact on the mental health of Black and African American people. Negative stereotypes and attitudes of rejection have decreased, but continue to occur with measurable, adverse consequences. Historical and contemporary instances of negative treatment have led to a mistrust of authorities, many of whom are not seen as having the best interests of Black and African Americans in mind.
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As a work team
Decide on the proto personas each team member will create.
● Begin with your user assumptions worksheet
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● cluster these into 3 - 8 profiles (Take a photo)
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Address the following items within your group's Wiki page for Part 2:
Topic is Immigration
Is the policy identified by your group dictated by local, state, or federal statute—or a combination thereof?
APA FORMAT
2 REFERENCES
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Using support from the required readings, the Instructor Guidance, supplemental information derived from outside sources and your discussion, and information from the scenario below, you will (a) use information you have learned about Manuel to complete the
Child Study Team Referral Form
found in the
Week Three Instructor Guidance
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Scenario:
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how to realize the potential of RTI (Links to an external site.)
(Klingner, J, 2011) with culturally and linguistically diverse learners. The Child Study Team has been doing diagnostic work to see if there are other variables within the classroom and/or school environment that may be affecting Manuel's performance. What the Child Study Team discovers is that Manuel feels embarrassed by his slow reading compared to his classmates and does not see the relevance of classes that are not related to his intended career goal, engineering. The team also notes that Manuel is able to write well, but he often does not finish in-class assignments and tests, and his homework written assignments are very short. The lack of length in his assignments consistently costs him points.
When you talk to Manuel he shows pride when you compliment him on his bilingual ability and ask for his help in translating for a new student from Guatemala. Finally, the team becomes aware that Manuel does not want to be labeled "dumb" and is worried that he will be made fun of if he is pulled out of his regular classes for more intensive support. Manuel’s vision and hearing test were both are normal and his medical exam does not reveal any medical issues.
As a member of the Child Study Team (CST) and taking into account Manuel's interests and the social and cultural influences that may be affecting Manuel's school performance, you and the CST are planning your next steps. You and Mr. Franklin discuss what interventions would take into account Manuel’s cultural and linguistic background. .
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Stem Cells
Graphical Abstract
Highlights
d Naive rat PSCs robustly contribute to live rat-mouse
chimeras
d A versatile CRISPR-Cas9 mediated interspecies blastocyst
complementation system
d Naive rodent PSCs show no chimeric contribution to post-
implantation pig embryos
d Chimerism is observed with some human iPSCs in post-
implantation pig embryos
Wu et al., 2017, Cell 168, 473–486
January 26, 2017 ª 2017 Elsevier Inc.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2016.12.036
Authors
Jun Wu, Aida Platero-Luengo,
Masahiro Sakurai, ..., Emilio A. Martinez,
Pablo Juan Ross,
Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte
Correspondence
[email protected]
In Brief
Human pluripotent stem cells robustly
engraft into both cattle and pig pre-
implantation blastocysts, but show
limited chimeric contribution to post-
implantation pig embryos.
mailto:[email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2016.12.036
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1016/j.cell.2016.12.036&domain=pdf
Article
Interspecies Chimerism
with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells
Jun Wu,1 Aida Platero-Luengo,1 Masahiro Sakurai,1 Atsushi Sugawara,1 Maria Antonia Gil,2 Takayoshi Yamauchi,1
Keiichiro Suzuki,1 Yanina Soledad Bogliotti,3 Cristina Cuello,2 Mariana Morales Valencia,1 Daiji Okumura,1,7
Jingping Luo,1 Marcela Vilariño,3 Inmaculada Parrilla,2 Delia Alba Soto,3 Cristina A. Martinez,2 Tomoaki Hishida,1
Sonia Sánchez-Bautista,4 M. Llanos Martinez-Martinez,4 Huili Wang,3 Alicia Nohalez,2 Emi Aizawa,1
Paloma Martinez-Redondo,1 Alejandro Ocampo,1 Pradeep Reddy,1 Jordi Roca,2 Elizabeth A. Maga,3
Concepcion Rodriguez Esteban,1 W. Travis Berggren,1 Estrella Nuñez Delicado,4 Jeronimo Lajara,4 Isabel Guillen,5
Pedro Guillen,4,5 Josep M. Campistol,6 Emilio A. Martinez,2 Pablo Juan Ross,3 and Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte1,8,*
1Salk Institute for Biological Studies, 10010 N. Torrey Pines Road, La Jolla, CA 92037, USA
2Department of Animal Medicine and Surgery, University of Murcia Campus de Espinardo, 30100 Murcia, Spain
3Department of Animal Science, University of California Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA
4Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia (UCAM) Campus de los Jerónimos, N� 135 Guadalupe 30107 Murcia, Spain
5Clinica Centro Fundación Pedro Guillén, Clı́nica CEMTRO, Avenida Ventisquero de la Condesa 42, 28035 Madrid, Spain
6Hospital Clı́nico de Barcelona-IDIBAPS, Universitat de Barcelona, 08007 Barcelona, Spain
7Present address: Graduate School of Agriculture, Department of Advanced Bioscience, Kinki University, 3327-204 Nakamachi,
Nara 631-8505, Japan
8Lead Contact
*Correspondence: [email protected]
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2016.12.036
SUMMARY
Interspecies blastocyst complementation enables
organ-specific enrichment of xenogenic pluripotent
stem cell (PSC) derivatives. Here, we establish a ver-
satile blastocyst complementation platform based
on CRISPR-Cas9-mediated zygote genome editin.
As a future leader in the field of health care administration, you m.docxssusera34210
As a future leader in the field of health care administration, you may face many chronic health threats to various systems. As you work to combat these threats and ensure community wellness, you are likely to become an agent of social change. This objective may be more challenging and critical to achieve in matters such as health emergencies and outbreaks. For leaders, outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics elicit critical and timely attention to situations in health care administration.
In this week’s article by Gostin, Lucey, & Phelan (2014), the authors highlight the challenges present with an Ebola epidemic on a global scale. Using this Learning Resource from this week as well as 2–4 additional resources you may find from the Walden Library, current events, etc., consider your leadership perspective during an outbreak, epidemic, or pandemic.
As you collaborate with your group, individually select one of the following leadership roles that would respond during this outbreak:
Director, FEMA
Director, CDC
Governor of an afflicted state
Incident Response Commander
Response Leader, American Red Cross (or other nongovernmental organization)
***Health Care Administrator for a large medical center (
I HAVE SELECTED THIS ROLE
)****
After selecting your leadership role, use a systems approach to work with your group to establish an immediate response in preventing another pandemic.
The Assignment—Part 1:Individual Case Analysis (1–2 pages):
Based on the leadership role you selected for the Assignment, include the following:
A summary of the leadership challenges this leader would face in assuring the system changes necessary to be prepared for the next outbreak, epidemic, or pandemic
An explanation of how your leadership challenges as this leader relate to challenges of the other leaders listed above
Note:
The leadership challenges that you describe should be those you would face as an individual in the role of your selected leader, rather than the functional challenges of the agency this individual leads.
The Assignment—Part 2:Group Case Study Analysis (2–3 pages):
Then, using your leadership Assignment for the Case Study, collaborate with your colleagues to create a Group Case Study Analysis that includes:
An explanation of how the challenges identified in the individual case analyses collectively affect crisis response by the system and the individuals within it
An explanation of how transformational and transactional leaders might influence outcomes within this case
A summary of how poor leadership might affect the outcome of the case
.
Article Title and Date of the Article .docxssusera34210
Article
Title
and
Date
of
the
Article
The
Economist
“Insider
dealing:
euro
outs
fear
that
euro
ins
might
do
them
down”
October
17,
2015
Summary
This
article
posted
as
a
special
news
report
by
The
Economist,
is
focused
on
the
Eurozone
and
European
Union,
and
how
they
are
experiencing
some
problems
that
might
hurt
both
the
euro
currency
and
relations
with
non-‐-‐-‐euro
zone
countries.
At
the
moment,
in
Europe
there
are
two
types
of
observers:
the
Europhiles
and
Euroskeptics.
The
Europhiles
are
those
who
admire
Europe
and
favor
the
participation
of
the
European
Union,
while
on
the
other
side
of
the
spectrum
are
the
Euroskeptics,
who
are
those
who
are
opposed
to
increasing
the
powers
of
the
European
Union.
Currently,
the
alarming
political
issue
that
has
been
growing
in
Europe
is
the
negative
relationship
between
those
countries
that
belong
to
the
European
Union
and
Eurozone,
against
those
who
are
members
of
the
European
Union
but
not
the
Eurozone.
The
argument
here
is
that
those
members
belonging
to
the
Eurozone
have
been
meeting
together,
while
excluding
non-‐-‐-‐Eurozone
members
and
making
decisions
such
as
bails,
which
affect
all
countries
within
the
European
Union.
The
Eurozone
countries
believe
that
that
only
those
countries
that
are
members
of
the
Eurozone
should
be
allowed
to
voice
their
opinions
and
make
decisions
on
everything
regarding
the
euro,
since
they
are
the
ones
directly
affected
by
it.
On
the
other
hand,
the
non-‐-‐-‐Eurozone
countries
feel
like
the
euro
members
are
“ganging
up”
on
them,
meaning
that
they
feel
like
those
countries
in
the
Eurozone
are
making
decisions
regarding
their
own
interests,
and
not
the
collective
interests
of
all
members
of
the
European
Union.
Association
to
specific
chapter
material
and
concepts
2.4
A
Single
Currency
for
Europe:
The
Euro
(40)
Chapter
2
discusses
the
global
financial
environment
including
the
European
Union,
the
Euro.
Article The Effects of Color on the Moods of College .docxssusera34210
Article
The Effects of Color on the Moods
of College Students
Sevinc Kurt1 and Kelechi Kingsley Osueke2
Abstract
This research aims to discover the psychological effects of colors on individuals, using the students’ union complex in a
university campus. This building was chosen due to its richness in color variances. The research method is survey, and
questionnaires were drawn up and distributed to an even range of students, comprising both international and local
students; undergraduate and graduate. Questionnaires have been collected and analyzed to find out the effects different
colors had on students’ moods in different spaces of the students’ union complex. This research would contribute to
understand more about colors and how they affect our feelings and therefore to make better decisions and increase the
use of spaces when choosing colors for different spaces to suit the purpose for which they are designed.
Keywords
color, mood, architectural space
Introduction
We live in a world of color (Huchendorf, 2007, p. 1).
According to the various researches, the color that
surrounds us in our daily lives has a profound effect on our
mood and on our behavior (e.g., Babin, Hardesty, & Suter,
2003; Kwallek, Lewis, & Robbins, 1988; Kwallek,
Woodson, Lewis, & Sales, 1997; Rosenstein, 1985). In
clothing, interiors, landscape, and even natural light, a color
can change our mood from sad to happy, from confusion to
intelligence, from fear to confidence. It can actually be used
to “level out” emotions or to create different moods (Aves
& Aves, 1994, p. 120). The design of an environment
through a variety of means such as temperature, sounds,
layout, lighting, and colors can stimulate perceptual and
emotional responses in consumers and affect their behavior
(Kotler, 1973 in Yildirim, Akalinbaskaya, & Hidayetoglu,
2007, p. 3233). Therefore, it may follow that if we could
measure it, we may get a clue as to how our mood varies
when in any enclosed space. The ambiance of the interior
space affects the users’ behaviors and perception of that
place by influencing their emotional situation. In this
context, it is believed that the various physical components
including light and color have a great importance on the
environmental characteristics of space, especially in public
use like students’ union centers.
Hence, using the appropriate color in design is important
in such buildings. It is also significant to draw cognitive
map and way finding in interiors. Environmental
interventions that promote way finding can be implemented
on two levels: the design of the floor plan typology and
environmental cues, which comprise signage, furnishings,
lighting, colors, and so on. Vivid color coding may enhance
short-term memory and improve functional ability (Cernin,
Keller, & Stoner, 2003). So the use of color is one of the
crucial elements in designing the appropriate circulation of
public interiors. Furtherm.
Art museums and art galleries are two different types of entitie.docxssusera34210
Art museums and art galleries are two different types of entities.
The primary difference is that while one goes to an art museum to view art and learn about art from an educational or cultural experience; one goes to an art gallery to view art, discover new artists, possibly from the perspective of purchasing the art.
Most museums are funded by governments, foundations, and corporate and private donors, and they are operated on a non-for-profit basis. Galleries seek to make profit and gain exposure for themselves and the artists they represent.Art galleries, are usually small businesses or centers that exhibit art for the purposes of promoting and selling art. One would typically visit an art gallery to discover an artist, possibly with an interest in buying the art. Art museums, on the other hand, are larger and are intended for education and cultural experiences. One would typically visit an art museum to view and study its permanent collection or to visit a touring exhibit of works on loan from another museum or institution.
There are 2 parts
to your Museum Critical Review assignment to be completed after visiting one or more of the following museum websites*
:
Dallas Museum of Art
https://dma.org/
Nasher Sculpture Center
https://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/
Meadows Museum of Art
www.meadowsmuseumdallas.org/
Crow Collection
www.crowcollection.org
Kimbell Art Museum
www.kimbellart.org
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
www.themodern.org
Amon Carter Museum of American Art
www.cartermuseum.org
Google Arts and Culture Collections
https://artsandculture.google.com/partner
*Not all of the museums will have the diversity of time periods that you will need to complete the assignment. You may have to visit more than one of the listed museum websites if you choose one of the more time or region specific museums.
ARTS 1301 NLC Art Appreciation Museum Critical Review Assignment and Worksheet
I hope you are inspired by your visit to the museum websites.
This assignment is designed to meet both
Communication and Social Responsibility Student Learning Objectives.
There are 2 parts
to your Museum Critical Review assignment to be completed after visiting one or more of the following museum websites*
:
· Dallas Museum of Art
www.dma.org
· Nasher Sculpture Center
www.nashersculpturecenter.org
· Meadows Museum of Art
www.meadowsmuseumdallas.org/
· Crow Collection
www.crowcollection.org
· Kimbell Art Museum
www.kimbellart.org
· Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
www.themodern.org
· Amon Carter Museum of American Art
www.cartermuseum.org
· Google Arts and Culture Collections
https://artsandculture.google.com/partner
*Not all of the museums will have the diversity of time periods that you will need to complete the assignment. You may have to visit more than one of the listed museum websites if you choose to go to one of the more time or region specific museums. Your instructor may choose to.
As a clinical social worker it is important to understand group .docxssusera34210
As a clinical social worker it is important to understand group typology in order to choose the appropriate group method for a specific population or problem. Each type of group has its own approach and purpose. Two of the more frequently used types of groups are task groups and intervention groups.
For this Assignment, review the “Cortez Multimedia” case study, and identify a target behavior or issue that needs to be ameliorated, decreased, or increased. In a 2- to 4-page report, complete the following:
Choose either a treatment group or task group as your intervention for Paula Cortez.
Identify the model of treatment group (i.e., support, education, teams, or treatment conferences).
Using the typologies described in the Toseland & Rivas (2017) piece, describe the characteristics of your group. For instance, if you choose a treatment group that is a support group, what would be the purpose, leadership, focus, bond, composition, and communication?
Include the advantages and disadvantages of using this type of group as an intervention.
REQUIRED resource for assignment
A Meeting of an Interdisciplinary Team
Paula has just been involuntarily hospitalized and placed on the psychiatric unit, for a minimum of 72 hours, for observation. Paula was deemed a suicidal risk after an assessment was completed by the social worker. The social worker observed that Paula appeared to be rapidly decompensating, potentially placing herself and her pregnancy at risk.
Paula just recently announced to the social worker that she is pregnant. She has been unsure whether she wanted to continue the pregnancy or terminate. Paula also told the social worker she is fearful of the father of the baby, and she is convinced he will try to hurt her. He has started to harass, stalk, and threaten her at all hours of the day. Paula began to exhibit increased paranoia and reported she started smoking again to calm her nerves. She also stated she stopped taking her psychiatric medications and has been skipping some of her
HIV
medications.
The following is an interdisciplinary team meeting being held in a conference room at the hospital. Several members of Paula’s team (HIV doctor, psychiatrist, social worker, and OB nurse) have gathered to discuss the precipitating factors to this hospitalization. The intent is to craft a plan of action to address Paula's noncompliance with her medications, increased paranoia, and the pregnancy.
Click one the above images to begin the conversation.
Physician
Dialogue 1
Paula is a complicated patient, and she presents with a complicated situation. She is HIV positive, has Hepatitis C, and multiple foot ulcers that can be debilitating at times. Paula has always been inconsistent with her HIV meds—no matter how often I explain the need for consistent compliance in order to maintain her health. Paula has exhibited a lack of insight into her medical conditions and the need to follow instructions. Frankly, I was astonished an.
artsArticleCircling Round Vitruvius, Linear Perspectiv.docxssusera34210
arts
Article
Circling Round Vitruvius, Linear Perspective, and the
Design of Roman Wall Painting
Jocelyn Penny Small †
Department of Art History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA; [email protected]
† Mail: 890 West End Avenue, Apartment 4C, New York, NY 10025-3520, USA.
Received: 1 April 2019; Accepted: 2 September 2019; Published: 14 September 2019
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Abstract: Many scholars believe that linear perspective existed in classical antiquity, but a fresh
examination of two key texts in Vitruvius shows that 1.2.2 is about modularity and symmetria,
while 7.Pr.11 describes shading (skiagraphia). Moreover, these new interpretations are firmly based on
the classical understanding of optics and the history of painting (e.g., Pliny the Elder). A third text
(Philostratus, Imagines 1.4.2) suggests that the design of Roman wall painting depends on concentric
circles. Philostratus’ system is then used to successfully make facsimiles of five walls, representing
Styles II, III, and IV of Roman wall painting. Hence, linear perspective and its relatives, such as
Panofsky’s vanishing vertical axis, should not be imposed retrospectively where they never existed.
Keywords: linear perspective; skenographia; skiagraphia; Greek and Roman painting; Roman fresco;
Vitruvius; Philostratus
Two systems for designing Pompeian wall paintings have dominated modern scholarship: a
one- or center-point perspective and a vanishing vertical axis.1 Neither method works for all the
variations seen on the walls of Styles II–IV. The vanishing vertical axis is considered a precursor of
linear perspective, whereas center-point construction is a form of linear perspective. Many scholars
believe that linear perspective was invented by the Greeks, only to be forgotten during the Middle
Ages and “reinvented” in the Renaissance.2 In contrast, I propose that linear perspective was not
known in any form in antiquity but, rather, was an invention of the Renaissance, which also created its
putative ancient pedigree.
1. Background
1.1. Definitions
First, it is important to define four key terms.
“Perspective” applies loosely to a wide range of systems that convert a three-dimensional scene
to two dimensions. Most scholars, however, mean “linear perspective” when they use the unqualified
term “perspective”. No standard definition exists for linear perspective, but only linear perspective
obeys the rules of projective geometry. Formal definitions refer to “station points” (the point or
place for the “eye” of the “viewer” and/or “artist”), vanishing points, horizon lines, and picture
planes, among other aspects. Horizontal lines converge to the “center point” or, in the case of
1 This topic is remarkably complex with a massive bibliography. Small (2013) provides a reasonable summary of the
scholarship to its date of publication. Since then, I have realized that the standard interpretations of key texts and objects
needs to be totally rethought. This artic.
Artists are often involved in national social movements that result .docxssusera34210
Artists are often involved in national social movements that result in the transformation not only of the art world, but also of society at large. Discuss the transformations that occurred as a result of any of the following civil rights movements (African American, Chicano/a, Native American, gay/lesbian) or the feminist movement. Use a specific example of a work of art in your discussion.
.
We all have good and bad thoughts from time to time and situation to situation. We are bombarded daily with spiraling thoughts(both negative and positive) creating all-consuming feel , making us difficult to manage with associated suffering. Good thoughts are like our Mob Signal (Positive thought) amidst noise(negative thought) in the atmosphere. Negative thoughts like noise outweigh positive thoughts. These thoughts often create unwanted confusion, trouble, stress and frustration in our mind as well as chaos in our physical world. Negative thoughts are also known as “distorted thinking”.
How to Create Map Views in the Odoo 17 ERPCeline George
The map views are useful for providing a geographical representation of data. They allow users to visualize and analyze the data in a more intuitive manner.
The Roman Empire A Historical Colossus.pdfkaushalkr1407
The Roman Empire, a vast and enduring power, stands as one of history's most remarkable civilizations, leaving an indelible imprint on the world. It emerged from the Roman Republic, transitioning into an imperial powerhouse under the leadership of Augustus Caesar in 27 BCE. This transformation marked the beginning of an era defined by unprecedented territorial expansion, architectural marvels, and profound cultural influence.
The empire's roots lie in the city of Rome, founded, according to legend, by Romulus in 753 BCE. Over centuries, Rome evolved from a small settlement to a formidable republic, characterized by a complex political system with elected officials and checks on power. However, internal strife, class conflicts, and military ambitions paved the way for the end of the Republic. Julius Caesar’s dictatorship and subsequent assassination in 44 BCE created a power vacuum, leading to a civil war. Octavian, later Augustus, emerged victorious, heralding the Roman Empire’s birth.
Under Augustus, the empire experienced the Pax Romana, a 200-year period of relative peace and stability. Augustus reformed the military, established efficient administrative systems, and initiated grand construction projects. The empire's borders expanded, encompassing territories from Britain to Egypt and from Spain to the Euphrates. Roman legions, renowned for their discipline and engineering prowess, secured and maintained these vast territories, building roads, fortifications, and cities that facilitated control and integration.
The Roman Empire’s society was hierarchical, with a rigid class system. At the top were the patricians, wealthy elites who held significant political power. Below them were the plebeians, free citizens with limited political influence, and the vast numbers of slaves who formed the backbone of the economy. The family unit was central, governed by the paterfamilias, the male head who held absolute authority.
Culturally, the Romans were eclectic, absorbing and adapting elements from the civilizations they encountered, particularly the Greeks. Roman art, literature, and philosophy reflected this synthesis, creating a rich cultural tapestry. Latin, the Roman language, became the lingua franca of the Western world, influencing numerous modern languages.
Roman architecture and engineering achievements were monumental. They perfected the arch, vault, and dome, constructing enduring structures like the Colosseum, Pantheon, and aqueducts. These engineering marvels not only showcased Roman ingenuity but also served practical purposes, from public entertainment to water supply.
This is a presentation by Dada Robert in a Your Skill Boost masterclass organised by the Excellence Foundation for South Sudan (EFSS) on Saturday, the 25th and Sunday, the 26th of May 2024.
He discussed the concept of quality improvement, emphasizing its applicability to various aspects of life, including personal, project, and program improvements. He defined quality as doing the right thing at the right time in the right way to achieve the best possible results and discussed the concept of the "gap" between what we know and what we do, and how this gap represents the areas we need to improve. He explained the scientific approach to quality improvement, which involves systematic performance analysis, testing and learning, and implementing change ideas. He also highlighted the importance of client focus and a team approach to quality improvement.
2024.06.01 Introducing a competency framework for languag learning materials ...Sandy Millin
http://sandymillin.wordpress.com/iateflwebinar2024
Published classroom materials form the basis of syllabuses, drive teacher professional development, and have a potentially huge influence on learners, teachers and education systems. All teachers also create their own materials, whether a few sentences on a blackboard, a highly-structured fully-realised online course, or anything in between. Despite this, the knowledge and skills needed to create effective language learning materials are rarely part of teacher training, and are mostly learnt by trial and error.
Knowledge and skills frameworks, generally called competency frameworks, for ELT teachers, trainers and managers have existed for a few years now. However, until I created one for my MA dissertation, there wasn’t one drawing together what we need to know and do to be able to effectively produce language learning materials.
This webinar will introduce you to my framework, highlighting the key competencies I identified from my research. It will also show how anybody involved in language teaching (any language, not just English!), teacher training, managing schools or developing language learning materials can benefit from using the framework.
Palestine last event orientationfvgnh .pptxRaedMohamed3
An EFL lesson about the current events in Palestine. It is intended to be for intermediate students who wish to increase their listening skills through a short lesson in power point.
Operation “Blue Star” is the only event in the history of Independent India where the state went into war with its own people. Even after about 40 years it is not clear if it was culmination of states anger over people of the region, a political game of power or start of dictatorial chapter in the democratic setup.
The people of Punjab felt alienated from main stream due to denial of their just demands during a long democratic struggle since independence. As it happen all over the word, it led to militant struggle with great loss of lives of military, police and civilian personnel. Killing of Indira Gandhi and massacre of innocent Sikhs in Delhi and other India cities was also associated with this movement.
Cambridge International AS A Level Biology Coursebook - EBook (MaryFosbery J...
The Trouble With Enterprise SoftwareF A L L 2 0 0 7 .docx
1. The Trouble With
Enterprise Software
F A L L 2 0 0 7 V O L . 4 9 N O . 1
R E P R I N T N U M B E R 4 9 1 0 1
Cynthia Rettig
Please note that gray areas reflect artwork that has been
intentionally removed. The substantive content of the ar-
ticle appears as originally published.
C O N T R A R I A
Te ch n o l o g y h a s a l -
w a y s b e e n a b o u t
hope. Since the begin-
ning of the industrial
revolution, businesses
have embraced new
technologies enthusi-
a s t i c a l l y, a n d t h e i r
2. optimism has been
re w a rd e d w i t h i m -
p r o v e d p r o c e s s e s ,
lower costs and re-
duced workforces. As the pace of technological
innovation has intensified over the past two de-
cades, businesses have come to expect that the next
new thing will inevitably bring them larger market
opportunities and bigger profits. Software, a tech-
nology so invisible and obscure to most of us that it
appears to work like magic, especially lends itself to
this kind of open-ended hope.
Software promises evolutions, revolutions and
even transformations in how companies do busi-
ness. The triumphant vision many buy into is that
enterprise software in large organizations is fully
integrated and intelligently controls infinitely com-
plex business processes while remaining flexible
3. enough to adapt to changing business needs. This
vision of software lies at the core of what Thomas
Friedman in “The World Is Flat” calls “the Wal-
Mart Symphony in multiple movements — with
no finale. It just plays over and over 24/7/365.”1
Whole systems march in lock step, providing syn-
chronized, fully coordinated supply chains,
production lines and services, just like a world-
class orchestra. From online web orders through
fulfillment, delivery, billing and customer service
— the entire enterprise, organized end to end —
that has been the promise. The age of smart
machines would seem to be upon us.
Or is it? While a few companies like Wal-Mart
Stores Inc. have achieved something close to that
ideal, the way most large organizations actually
process information belies that glorious vision and
reveals a looking-glass world, where everything is
4. in fact the opposite of what one might expect.
Back-office systems — including both software ap-
plications and the data they process — are a
variegated patchwork of systems, containing 50 or
more databases and hundreds of separate software
programs installed over decades and intercon-
nected by idiosyncratic, Byzantine and poorly
documented customized processes. To manage this
growing complexity, IT departments have grown
substantially: As a percentage of total investment,
IT rose from 2.6% to 3.5% between 1970 and 1980.2
By 1990 IT consumed 9%, and by 1999 a whopping
22% of total investment went to IT. Growth in IT
spending has fallen off, but it is nonetheless sur-
prising to hear that today’s IT departments spend
70% to 80% of their budgets just trying to keep ex-
isting systems running.
According to a multiyear study of over 400 com-
5. panies by MIT researchers Jeanne Ross, Peter Weill
and David Robertson,3 IT departments tend not to
be innovative leaders within organizations, but
rather conservative forces, viewed by business ex-
ecutives as cost sinks and liabilities. In many
companies, it takes the IT department one to two
years to implement a new strategic initiative —
hardly the agility companies are striving for. The
research shows the typical IT structure is so dense
and extensive that it’s often a miracle that it works
at all. The researchers observe: “Legacy systems
cobbled together to respond to each new business
initiative create rigidity and excessive costs. Every
change becomes a risky, expensive venture.”
The Proliferation of Complexity
How did this happen? James Cordata, who has
written extensively about the information econ-
omy, points out that as work became more complex
6. and specialized over the 20th century, the use of
data — numbers and facts — as fodder for more
and more analysis and fact-based decision making
intensified. And digital technology “was perfect for
this kind of world.”4 Of course, digital technology
The Trouble With Enterprise Software
Has enterprise
software become
too complex to
be effective?
CYNTHIA RETTIG
FALL 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 21
This article, originally
published on the
MIT Sloan Management
Review Web site,
stirred up a good deal
of discussion in the
7. blogosphere, a sampling
of which is included in
the following pages.
22 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW FALL 2007
not only supported that complexity but also played
a large part in actually creating it, weaving a con-
tinuous web of unending data. “More computers
are better than fewer” remains a key belief of Amer-
ican business, Cordata says. “There are no limits to
how much is good.” Management became accus-
tomed to the idea that buying more computers and
more software would continue to cut costs and im-
prove operations.
But there are limits, some of which are inherent
in the nature of software itself. Software is code,
lines and lines of code that run sequentially. Build-
ing software programs entails accumulating more
8. and more code. Much of the seemingly boundless
complexity of enterprise software is founded on
conditional branching (if-then statements) and a
hierarchy of interacting objects, all of which ma-
nipulate information in a logical succession of
small steps. Each step contains explicit instruc-
tions. To build software, programmers routinely
break down processes into discrete steps, effectively
systematizing and standardizing how work is done.
An entire sequence of such instructions works
more like a calculator than a “thinking machine.”
Thus the so-called intelligence of digital technol-
og y ar ises not throug h mag ic, nor, in more
contemporary terms, through some emergent or
self-organizing principle, as some would believe.
The result is not greater than the sum of the parts.
Rather, it’s more akin to Adam Smith’s division of
labor and Frederick Taylor’s scientific manage-
9. ment, a process dependent on relentless analysis
and rationalization of the work to be done.
General software programming used in enter-
prise systems may contain intricate branching and
handle a huge number of conditions, all of which
allow it to control a certain amount of complexity.
It does not, however, tolerate ambiguity, inconsis-
tencies or illogical conclusions. To be sure, there
are fuzzy logic programs, dynamic simulations,
genetic algorithms and neural nets with subtler
powers, but a vast amount of software working in
today’s large organizations is not of these more ad-
vanced types. In fact, enterprise software systems
are more likely to succeed at relatively straightfor-
ward tasks such as procurement and order
processing. As the problems get more complex, so
does the software that solves them. It is estimated
that for every 25% increase in complexity in the
10. tasks to be automated, the complexity of the soft-
ware solution itself rises by 100%.5
Business users and management inevitably want
changes in their automated processes as their needs
and markets evolve. And they expect to be able to
customize their software to fit their own needs.
“Software is infinitely malleable,” says computer
historian Martin Campbell-Kelly.6 This is in theory
true; however, as enterprise software becomes in-
creasingly comprehensive and complex, the costs
and risks involved in changing it increase as well.
No single person within an organization could
possibly know how a change in one part of the soft-
ware will affect its functioning elsewhere.
Software’s supposed flexibility and unending
ability to manage complexity contributed to the
discrepancies between the great expectations and
mediocre reality that plagued the first round of
11. implementations of enterprise resource planning
systems. In the middle to late 1990s, U.S. corpora-
tions rushed to purchase and install such systems.
These systems — Germany-based SAP Aktienge-
sellschaft’s is the most common — promised to
eliminate the complexity of multiple operating sys-
tems and applications by replacing them with a
single set of interconnected modules to run the fi-
nancial, manufacturing, human resources and
other major functions of a typical multinational
corporation. Theoretically, a single monolithic sys-
tem would seamlessly connect various distinct and
geographically separate locations through private
C O N T R A R I A
From the Wall Street Journal
Business Technology Blog
http://blogs.wsj.com/biztech
Technology is supposed to simplify business. This has been true
from
the Industrial Revolution to the Internet age. But did the large
software
12. applications that were supposed to streamline large companies
instead
irrevocably slow them down?
There’s a compelling argument to be made that they have. The
aver-
age company spends $15 million on Enterprise Resource
Planning
software, the monolithic systems of record from vendors like
SAP and
Oracle, and many large companies have spent tens and even
hundreds
of times that, according to [Ms. Rettig’s article].
Some of this resonates. Certainly, companies that have tried to
cus-
tomize these systems to reflect their own customized processes
have
spent a lot of time and money to do so. And ERP systems do
introduce a
certain amount of rigidity. On the flip side, having a system of
record is a
benefit in and of itself that shouldn’t be discounted. — Ben
Worthen
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
http://sloanreview.mit.edu
FALL 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 23
networks. Companies understood that they could
customize these systems as needed to suit their
13. unique business processes.
That was the hope. But these massive programs,
with millions of lines of code, thousands of instal-
lation options and countless interrelated pieces,
introduced new levels of complexity, often with-
out eliminating the older systems (known as
“legacy” systems) they were designed to replace. In
addition, concurrent technological and business
changes made closed ERP systems organized
around products less than a perfect solution: Just
as companies were undertaking multiyear ERP
implementations, the Internet was evolving into a
major new force, changing the way companies
transacted business with their customers, suppli-
ers and partners. At the same time, businesses were
realizing that organizing their information around
customers and services — and using newly avail-
able customer relationship management systems
14. — was critical to their success.
The concept of a single monolithic system failed
for many companies. Different divisions or facili-
ties often made independent purchases, and other
systems were inherited through mergers and ac-
quisitions. Thus, many companies ended up having
several instances of the same ERP systems or a vari-
ety of different ERP systems altogether, further
complicating their IT landscape. In the end, ERP
systems became just another subset of the legacy
systems they were supposed to replace.
The Costs of Implementation
ERP systems were expensive, too, costing com-
panies more than they had ever paid for software
when costs had been based on per-workstation
usage. But that price tag was dwarfed by the in-
stallation charges, because companies had to
hire brigades of outside consultants, often for a
number of years, to actually get the software up
15. and running. While the average installation cost
$15 million, large organizations ended up spend-
ing hundreds of millions of dollars. Even such
large expenditures did not guarantee success,
however. In fact, 75% of ERP implementations
were considered failures.7
Try as they might to measure the productivity
gains of ERP implementations or IT in general, re-
searchers have yet to arrive at any coherent or
consistent conclusions. One problem is that there
is little statistical ev idence, especially about
whether the benefits of ERP implementations out-
weigh the costs and risks. Researchers even have
suggested that ERP implementations are so diffi-
cult that those companies that actually complete
them with relative success gain a competitive ad-
vantage in the marketplace.8 It seems that ERPs,
which had looked like the true path to revolution-
16. ary business process reengineering, introduced so
many complex, difficult technical and business is-
sues that just making it to the finish line with one’s
shirt on was considered a win.
All that complexity and all those options created
another conundrum. As Nicholas Carr famously
pointed out in his book, “Does IT Matter? Informa-
tion Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive
Advantage,”9 simply implementing the plain-vanilla
business processes that your competitors have does
not provide any competitive advantage. On the
other hand, as many companies learned the hard
way, customizing the already complex ERP software
created yet more complexity and even larger risks.
From Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog
www.roughtype.com
Over the last two decades, companies have plowed many
billions of dol-
lars into enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and the
hardware
17. required to run them. But what, in the long run, will be the
legacy of
ERP? Will it be viewed as it has been promoted by its
marketers: as a
milestone in business automation that allowed companies to
integrate
their previously fragmented information systems and simplify
their data
flows? Or will it be viewed as a stopgap that largely backfired
by tangling
companies in even more systems complexity and even higher IT
costs?
In “The Trouble with Enterprise Software,” Cynthia Rettig
deftly lays
out the case for the latter view. Enterprise systems, argues
Rettig, not
only failed to deliver on their grand promise, but often simply
aggravated
the problems they were supposed to solve. Different divisions
or facilities
often made independent purchases, and other systems were
inherited
through mergers and acquisitions. In the end, ERP systems
became just
another subset of the legacy systems they were supposed to
replace.
So what’s the solution? Rettig doesn’t offer one, beyond
suggest-
ing that top executives do more to educate themselves about the
problem and to work more closely with their CIOs. That may be
good
advice, but it hardly addresses the underlying technical
challenge. But
Rettig nevertheless has provided a valuable service with her
18. article.
While some will argue that her indictment is at times
overstated, she
makes a compelling case that the traditional approach to
corporate
computing has become a dead end. We need to set a new course.
— Nicholas Carr
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
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24 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW FALL 2007
C O N T R A R I A
Without intimate knowledge of how the integrated
pieces of these modular software packages actually
worked, customizing could lead to in-house bugs
and glitches that were hard to foresee and expensive
to fix. Perhaps even worse, customization made
changing the software later — or upgrading to a
newer version — far more difficult, and in some
cases prohibitively expensive. Christopher Koch,
executive editor of CIO Magazine, tells the story of
19. one head of a corporate SAP installation group who
bragged that he had his installation time down to a
mere three months for various facilities around the
world: “It didn’t matter that he was honing his skills
on a 10-year-old version of the software because the
costs of upgrading are so huge — tens, even hun-
dreds of millions of dollars, or as much as it cost to
install the stuff in the first place — that he keeps in-
stalling old versions of the software so that it will
line up with the old software they already have.”10
Unexpected bugs present another type of dif-
ficulty that increases with complexity. Robert
Pool, technology journalist and author of “Beyond
Engineering,” explains it this way: “It’s possible to
go through a program line by line and make sure
that each individual instruction makes sense but it
is not possible to guarantee that the program as a
whole has no flaws.”11 The average professional
20. coder makes 100 to 150 errors for every 1,000 lines
of code, according to a Carnegie Mellon study
conducted by Watts Humphrey.12 That means for
every million lines of code there would be 100,000
mistakes. Software developers do extensive testing
on the paths users seem likely to take and correct
many of these errors. Nevertheless, they cannot
test or even anticipate every possible usage path, so
released software inevitably contains unknown
defects. “Civilization depends on software. So al-
though much software code is poorly written, you
can’t just stop the world to fix it,” says Bjarne
Stroustrup, the Danish-born computer scientist
who designed the popular C++ programming
language. On the other hand, Stroustrup does
concede that “muddling along is expensive, dan-
gerous, and depressing.”13
The Vagaries of Data
The data that software processes and generates is
21. another constant and growing problem. Estimates
of errors are astoundingly high. Single systems can
have error rates of 50% or more from myriad
sources — everything from mistyped data to stale
information to data placed in the wrong fields
within the database structure. But the really nasty,
intractable data problems erupt when companies
integrate multiple data sources, as was necessary
for ERP implementations, so that they could have
all their product, inventory and production records
stored in one place. Because of differing formats,
conventions, abbreviations and so on, such inte-
grations can result in a 100 or more records that
actually point to a single product or customer. In
the case of enterprise system implementations,
data problems alone precipitate many of the fail-
ures perceived by business users and much of the
added expense as well. Overwhelmed by the sheer
22. difficulty and complexity of the new software itself,
companies literally “forgot about the data,” as exec-
utive vice president John Nicoli of Harte-Hanks
Trillium Software in Billerica, Massachusetts, de-
scribes it, until the tail end of the project, thereby
necessitating enormous reworking to properly
clean up and integrate the data.14 And with corpo-
From Andrew McAfee’s Blog
http://blog.hbs.edu/faculty/amcafee
It is certainly true that enterprise systems have failed in many
companies,
and it’s also true that, as [Ms. Rettig] points out, many others
have not
been able to shut off legacy systems to the extent they expected
after ERP
went live. But it is simply not the case that researchers have
been unable
to draw any coherent conclusions about these technologies.
Rettig’s argument falls into a long line of pessimistic writing
about the
value of corporate IT. Much of this writing takes the implicit,
and at times
explicit, view that the executives who make technology
decisions are
dupes, perennially falling for a “triumphant vision” of software.
The only
23. way I can see for the IT pessimists to be right is if the delusion
about IT’s
benefits is both persistent and virtually universal. And I don’t
buy that.
“ERP doesn’t help” is a testable hypothesis, and some
colleagues
of mine have tested it. NYU’s Sinan Aral, Georgia Tech’s D.J.
Wu, and
my friend and coauthor Erik Brynjolfsson at MIT recently
published a
wonderful paper, “Which Came First, IT or Productivity?
Virtuous Cycle
of Investment and Use in Enterprise Systems”
(http://papers.ssrn.com/
sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=942291). [This paper] contains a
vital in-
sight: If IT were not delivering value, rational decision makers
would not
keep investing in it.
I agree that it’s important not to naively accept anyone’s
triumphant
vision of corporate IT. But it’s also important not to make
claims in the
other direction that are too sweeping. Perhaps most
fundamentally, it’s
critical at some point to stop floating hypotheses about IT’s
impact (or
lack thereof), and to start testing them. — Andrew McAfee
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
http://sloanreview.mit.edu
24. FALL 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 25
rate data stores doubling every three years, such
data issues are only compounding.
Is enterprise software just too complex to de-
liver on its promises? After all, enterprise systems
were supposed to streamline and simplify busi-
ness processes. Instead, they have brought high
risks, uncertainty and a deeply worrying level of
complexity. Rather than agility, they have pro-
duced rigidity and unexpected barriers to change,
a veritable glut of information containing myriad
hidden errors, and a cloud of questions regarding
their overall benefits. Leaders in computer science
are clearly worried. “Complexity is death,” says
Chuck Thacker, one of 16 technical fellows at Mi-
crosoft Cor p. “We are hang ing on w ith our
fingertips right now.”15
Business executives, however, simply want to
25. continue to believe that technology will lower
costs, improve processes and reduce the size of the
workforce. They don’t want to understand IT is-
sues. In part, this is because technology requires
special skills and intellectual talents that are quite
distinct from those needed to understand and
manage business organizations, markets and
strategy. But it is also because executives do not
like to hear about the downside of technology.
Observes Jim Shepherd, senior vice president of
Boston-based AMR Research Inc., “Senior man-
agers often don’t particularly want to be told that
there’s a high risk and that there’s a great deal of
expenditure involved in minimizing it.”16 Yet the
only sure thing about new technologies and the
changes they introduce is their uncertainty. In
summarizing decades of research into technologi-
cal change, MIT Sloan School of Management’s
26. Wanda Orlikowski and the National Science
Foundation’s Suzanne Iacono conclude that
changes involving technolog y are both “pro-
foundly complex and uncertain.”17
For their part, CIOs and their managers rate
aligning IT with business strategy as their No. 1 pri-
ority. They struggle year after year to prove the value
of IT to the business side of the organization. Yet the
cost overruns, delays and outright failures of enter-
prise systems have if anything widened the digital
divide between IT and the executive suite.
The Next New Thing
The proposed fix for these problems — the next
new thing — is service-oriented architecture. Ba-
sically, SOA proposes to overcome the problems
involved with updating and changing legacy sys-
tems by building modular cross-system business
processes. These processes would connect the rel-
evant pieces of functionality from various IT
27. systems, thereby making it easier to change pro-
cesses to adapt to new business goals. But technical
realists point out that many difficult technical
problems must be solved before SOA can become
the backbone for a new strategic architecture, in-
c l u d i n g ro b u s t p ro to co l s f o r a cce s s i n g t h e
applications, high-quality integrated data stores
and a sound methodology for managing the over-
all process. Researchers Ross, Weill and Robertson
admit that most companies are in the early stages
of a four-part transformation to SOA that may
take many years — even decades — to realize.18
The estimates of how long this will take reflect a
growing acknowledgment of just how deep and
radical are the organizational changes these tech-
nological innovations mandate. It is a process of
From the ZDNet.com Blog
http://blogs.zdnet.com
28. There’s really nothing new in [Ms. Rettig’s] analysis. But
Rettig goes a
step further and says there’s no hope for the future. In fact,
while she
doesn’t offer any remedies for her gloomy prognosis, she does
quash
one — service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Rettig doesn’t offer any encouraging words about SOA as an
ERP
workaround. SOA may take years to come to full fruition, not in
enough
time to help beleaguered companies, she says. And SOA may
simply be
too slow to keep up the dynamic business environments of
today. Not to
mention technical challenges. Rettig says that SOA increases
complex-
ity, as it becomes “additional layers of code superimposed on
the
existing layers,” and she doesn’t buy the Lego-block concept
that un-
derpins much of the thinking about SOA.
Let’s put it this way: aside from SOA, what is the alternative?
No one
is willing, or can afford to, to stay with the rigid, stovepiped
systems in
their current form. One solution is just throw the entire mess
out, and
buy a huge, well-integrated, modular application. But no one
has the
time or budgets. The only workable approach, then, is gradual
integra-
tion between systems, and gradual, greater agility — if not
through SOA,
29. then how? SOA, pure and simple, is the first step to software
industrial-
ization — creating massive, adaptable systems in an automated
and
modular fashion through greater economies of scale. ERP was a
step in
this direction, since it modularized, and brought many vital
pieces of
the business together into a single standardized system. SOA
takes it to
the next level, beyond the domain offered by a single vendor.
That’s the
core value proposition of SOA. — Joe McKendrick
SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
http://sloanreview.mit.edu
26 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW FALL 2007
C O N T R A R I A
adoption and adaptation that by definition cannot
occur overnight. Nor, conclude the researchers,
can companies skip a step. Given that only 6% of
companies have made it into the later stages, this
model would suggest that companies are in for a
long haul if they are to escape the tangle of techno-
logical complexity inherent in large organizations
30. today, and it will be a journey fraught with cultural
as well as technical problems.
The timeline itself for this kind of transforma-
tion may just be too long to be realistically
sustainable and successful. The dynamic business
environments of today, where whole industries and
markets can undergo radical changes in a matter of
a few years and the horizon for corporate strategies
has shrunk from 10 years to three to five, makes it
questionable whether companies actually can
maintain a focused strategy long enough to align
their core business processes with IT.
Technical problems raise additional questions
about the feasibility of such an undertaking. The
hallmark of service-oriented architecture — one
reasonably might argue its entire raison d’être — is
the fundamental modularity of its software business
processes. A self-contained business process adopts
31. parts of the functionality from multiple enterprise
applications to automatically complete a set of tasks.
For example, a single business process might begin
with an order from a customer on the Internet in a
web services system and send it to manufacturing in
an ERP system. The same business process would set
up delivery in a logistics system and then send all the
relevant information to billing in an accounting sys-
tem as well as a customer relationship management
system. Companies would build (or purchase) busi-
ness modules for their core processes. They would
then be able to change these processes easily, snap-
ping out and in functional pieces of code from
enterprise systems in Lego-like fashion.
The Lego dream has been a persistent favorite
among a generation or more of programmers who
grew up with those construction toys. Unfortu-
nately, however, software does not work as Legos do.
32. For one thing, a unit of software code is not similar
to other software code in terms of scale or function-
ality, as Legos are.19 On the contrary, code is widely
various and heterogeneous. It contains different
numbers and types of connections to other code,
more like fractals, as Victoria University of Welling-
ton researchers James Noble and Robert Biddle
describe it, than Legos, with their uniform connec-
tions. Software engineering expert Robert Glass sees
another problem with the Legos idea: The notion of
reusable software works on a small scale. Program-
mers have successfully built and reused subroutines
of standard functions. But as software grows more
complex, reusability becomes a difficult or impos-
sible task. “It is simply a problem too hard to be
solved, a problem rooted in software’s diversity.”20
“Complexity is a deadly software killer,” says
Yale University computer scientist David Gelern-
33. ter, and he argues that managing complexity is
more of an art than a science, and a difficult one at
that, especially given the monumental real-world
systems today’s software attempts to automate.21
And to the extent that these service-oriented ar-
chitectures use subsets of code from within ERP
and other enterprise systems, they do not escape
the mire of complexity built over the past 15 years
or so. Rather, they carry it along with them, incor-
porating code from existing applications into a
fancy new remix. SOAs become additional layers
of code superimposed on the existing layers. That
means it is possible that a process will fail at some
point due to some fault in the layers below, and in
order to understand and fix that problem, software
engineers will need to deal with the layers of enter-
prise applications below the modular business
processes.
34. From the Deal Architect Blog
www.dealarchitect.typepad.com
The good news is [Ms. Rettig’s] article will get executive
attention. Not
that they do not know. I recently met an executive at a client
about to
start an ERP implementation. He sounded like a man headed to
the gal-
lows. Nervous, not excited about the project. (That afternoon, I
felt
really embarrassed for our industry that after 100K+ ERP
projects, we still
cannot make it a no-brainer.)
But it is way past talking about messes. Companies are in
various stages
of ERP hangover management, not always looking at software
as a service
(SaaS), as those vendors would have you believe — it’s not that
easy to rip
and replace a backbone ERP solution — but software as a
customized ser-
vice (SaCS). [Those companies are in] aggressive re-negotiation
of ERP
maintenance contracts or moving to third party maintenance.
The only ones who do not seem to realize the party is over are
the
vendors, who are using service-oriented architecture (SOA),
compliance
and more low payback justifiers to extend the run.
— Vinnie Mirchandani
35. SLOANREVIEW.MIT.EDU
http://sloanreview.mit.edu
FALL 2007 MIT SLOAN MANAGEMENT REVIEW 27
Culturally, this long-term plan calls for closer and
closer communication and collaboration between
the IT and business sides of the organization. While
much to be desired, this has proved difficult in the
past, and with increasing complexity in software sys-
tems, it is unlikely to improve by itself in the future.
Differing backgrounds and perspectives, goals, even
vocabularies — all hamper efforts to improve com-
munication across this internal digital divide. Biases
intrude: A recent study by Forrester Research Inc. of
Cambridge, Massachusetts, found that only 28% of
CEOs thought their CIOs were proactive or creative
in terms of business process improvement.22 For-
rester’s advice to CIOs is to get more deeply involved
in the business issues and educate executives on what
36. IT is and what it actually does.
Sound advice, no doubt, but it may be time for
business executives themselves to become more
proactive. Executives could educate themselves
more about technology. They could send promis-
ing younger executives to executive programs
designed to teach business people how to better
understand, communicate with and capitalize on
their IT. And business schools, too, could do better
at teaching the interdependence of business and IT.
At present, however, corporations see in software’s
seductive invisibility and seemingly open-ended
flexibility a never-ending frontier of promise,
where hope triumphs over reality and the search
for the next new thing trumps addressing difficult
existing problems. And hope, unfortunately, has
never been a very effective strategy.
Cynthia Rettig was director of knowledge management
37. for B2B consulting company Canopy International of
Newton, Massachusetts. She has consulted to software
companies for over 20 years. Comment on this article or
contact the author through [email protected]
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10. C. Koch, “The Monopoly That Matters More Than
Microsoft,” Nov. 13, 2006, http://advice.cio.com.
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14. Author’s interview with John Nicoli, executive vice
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16. M. Wheatley, “ERP Training Stinks,” CIO Magazine,
June 1, 2000, 86-96.
17. W. Orlikowski and C.S. Iacono, “The Truth Is Not Out
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1. What are the core problems and challenges presented in the
case study?
Many significant challenges were present in Accenture’s
journey of IT transformation. One major obstacle that they
faced immediately after separating from the original company
and becoming Accenture was the limitation in time for using
Anderson’s technology. For only one year, Accenture were
allowed to use Anderson’s technology infrastructure, which
41. raised their need to build a new infrastructure a short period of
time. This has led to another important decision to be made
about which application should be develop in-house and which
one they should outsource, and whether they should outsource
in or out the firm. Moreover, an issue was the high cost of
running and maintaining infrastructure. Considering the
diversity of their business offices all over the globe and the
offices’ adoption of their own systems, it was very difficult to
attain one-platform infrastructure for all their branches. After
opting to apply one-platform infrastructure, they had to decide
whether it was better to choose a single-vendor approach or it
was more beneficial to deal with different vendors. They used
one-vendor infrastructure for easier communication and
information sharing between the applications. However,
regarding to this decision, they had to overcome the problem of
one instance of the system for all the offices around the world
with their different needs. In addition, IT employees’ unwilling
to was a problem that Accenture needed to overcome. Accenture
had to convince IT employees for the invaluable opportunities
of business growth and cost reduction that the proposed solution
may bring to their businesses since it required IT employees to
learn and to change their rules to adapt to the new system. In
2001, Andersen Consulting took the brave step of parting from
Arthur Andersen, its parent. After separating from Arthur
Andersen, the new firm changed their name to Accenture. The
new firm had a bright future but it also faced some challenges
in building a new IT infrastructure that is capable enough to
support a global organization that offers consultancy on a
leading edge technologies. It was obvious that Accenture’s IT
infrastructure needed to be rebranded.
Organization structure of Accenture was quite different from
Andersen’s, so this also added to deficiencies of the firm. The
new firm also had a limitation for using Andersen’s
technologies for only 1 next year. So the constraints were
already there as the new firm emerged. Accenture had to face
few challenge in IT too while moving ahead. Their systems
42. were made up of patchwork of legacy applications that didn’t
interconnect among themselves. Also, the systems used outdated
software platform which made it impossible for the key systems
and database to be accessed remotely over the internet.
There was also a dire need of strong infrastructure for
individual accounting and HR software systems for different
offices since they had no global infrastructure with accounting
and HR systems. Due to the outdated software platforms they
were using, they major systems and data repositories were
inaccessible remotely from the internet. For this purpose, they
sought assistance of large and expensive private networks which
added to their costs. Mostly, they did the financial aggregations
and reporting manually which wasted a lot of valuable time and
resources.
Another challenge that Accenture encountered was to persuade
the group business leaders to migrate their customized local
applications to a standard platform. By standard platform, they
wanted business leaders to migrate their applications to a single
global instance of that platform. Accenture decided upon a
single instance platform since they thought that multiple
instances of a platform will result in complexity in a longer run.
In future, even if there is a minor update, having multiple
instances will demand that update to be run for all those
instances which becomes quite complex and is wastage of time
and resources.
In short, a smart transformation was needed that could cater
organization’s need to in building up a new IT infrastructure.
2. Describe at least 3 Management practices used by Accenture
in the IT transition process from 2001 to 2008.
· Changing management’s and employees’ attitudes towards
technology:
One major factor that clearly contributed to the prevalent
success of Accenture’s IT transformation was changing how the
firm as a whole conceive IT. Accenture dealt with IT like an
independent business, and a panel of C-level executives would
43. determine the budget the spending priorities of IT. Having
different executives would help have “strategic, financial,
operational, and technical” point of views, which guaranteed
more thoughtful, and thus, Accenture has succeeded.
· Ensuring efficiency and effectiveness:
During the tremendous transformation of IT in Accenture, the
steering committee has made many actions in order to ensure
efficiency and effectiveness. For example, when choosing the
platform, the steering committee decided to use one-vendor
architecture. They prefer one vendor to multiple vendors for
applications from one vendor can share information with each
other flawlessly, which would end up with effective and
efficient deployment of IT. Also, the products they develop are
driven by the internal customers’ and system users’ needs.
Instead of having an outsourcing company to decide which
applications and requirements are needed for the business,
managers and customers could contribute to the decision of
developing a new model.
· Considering cost reduction through the use of innovative
technology:
The IT has a dramatic influence in terms of cost saving. One
major decision the help reduce the spending was choosing one-
platform architecture. This allowed them to significantly
minimize the cost of deploying and maintaining IT in the
offices around the globe. Also, they sought cost reduction by
moving the servers from Madrid to Argentina.
After the transition process, the employees count has reached up
to 180,000 which was 75,000 back in 2001. There was seen a
significant increase in Accenture’s revenues which went up to
$21.6 Billion starting from $11.44 Billion in 2001. Their
revenue is reported to be increased by 143% after the
transformation process.
Accenture created a strong, central IT governance which
enabled them to reduce their IT costs by 64% after the transition
process. Another management practice that was practiced during
44. the transition process was about encouraging the innovation.
Accenture encouraged all positive ideas on improving their IT
infrastructure and the outputs were fruitful; they reduced their
IT costs and increase their revenue.
Accenture chose right people for right things which enabled
their firm flourish and prosper. All the people in charge were
aligned with the goals of the organization which enabled
organization to achieve success in this transition period. People
were motivated and enthralled, so they really made good
decisions for their IT infrastructure. The IT management of
Accenture’s had a clear and bright vision. They proposed IT to
run as a business within a business instead of running it as a
cost center and this is what made them stand out.
Accenture had managed to do proper project planning for their
organizational goal. They were focused and clear on their
organization objectives in the IT transition process. Also, there
was proper system for tracking and reporting project progress so
the stakeholders knew where they stand. This enabled them to
compare their actual progress with the planned progress so they
can estimate how far they are from reaching the actual goals.
These were key management practices that helped in a
successful IT transition process.
3. Pretend that you are the CIO of Accenture - What decisions
you need to make beyond 2009?
If I were the CIO of Accenture beyond 2009, I would
continue having an independent committee that would decide
for the budget and spending of IT. As it was in 2008, this
committee would include different C-level executives for
having a comprehensive thought of what might and might not
benefit the firm. Also, I would inspire the departments to
provide their suggestions that are related to IT to the committee
to be seriously discussed, as long as they are attached with ROI
analysis for more than a couple of year. I would rather highly
reward the employee who came up with the suggestion if its
efficiency, effectiveness, and cost reduction were proven. Also,
45. I would promote the innovation in using IT to support the
business. Overall, I would follow the steps of Accenture’s CIOs
since 2001 to maintain the prosperous story of Accenture
accomplishments in the IT field. Looking at the organizational
culture and available options at Accenture, I feel that it is very
important for Accenture to be equipped with latest technology
since 3/4th of their employees spend their time outside the
office and travelling to client locations. It is the need of these
road warriors to possess advanced technological platforms to
offer an extra ordinary level of uninterrupted services to the
customers. All offices of Accenture need to use a standard
information system to communicate date and information with
each other. Standardization is of great importance for any
organization as it efficiency of internal communication. A
standard information system is easy to manage and organize and
it helps in managing customer and partner relationships. I
would recommend the company to use SAP as their Management
System, Microsoft as their official software provider and Intel
& Cisco as the hardware providers. Cisco shall be used for all
network related equipment whereas Intel should be consulted
for all hardware related services. These 3 products meet firm
needs and demands with lower level of complexity and are
expected to offer greater benefit. The decrease in IT costs in the
past 9 years is commendable. SAP is a perfect fit with a single-
platform solution. SAP is regarded as number one platform to
offer financial solutions, technological services and HR
applications. It is important to choose one-platform solution
since it will enable the firm to have lower IT support resources
when dealing with single approach platform.
1. What are the core problems and challenges presented in the
case study?
Many significant challenges were present in Accenture’s
journey of IT transformation. One major obstacle that they
faced immediately after separating from the original company
46. and becoming Accenture was the limitation in time for using
Anderson’s technology. For only one year, Accenture were
allowed to use Anderson’s technology infrastructure, which
raised their need to build a new infrastructure a short period of
time. This has led to another important decision to be made
about which application should be develop in-house and which
one they should outsource, and whether they should outsource
in or out the firm. Moreover, an issue was the high cost of
running and maintaining infrastructure. Considering the
diversity of their business offices all over the globe and the
offices’ adoption of their own systems, it was very difficult to
attain one-platform infrastructure for all their branches. After
opting to apply one-platform infrastructure, they had to decide
whether it was better to choose a single-vendor approach or it
was more beneficial to deal with different vendors. They used
one-vendor infrastructure for easier communication and
information sharing between the applications. However,
regarding to this decision, they had to overcome the problem of
one instance of the system for all the offices around the world
with their different needs. In addition, IT employees’ unwilling
to was a problem that Accenture needed to overcome. Accenture
had to convince IT employees for the invaluable opportunities
of business growth and cost reduction that the proposed solution
may bring to their businesses since it required IT employees to
learn and to change their rules to adapt to the new system. In
2001, Andersen Consulting took the brave step of parting from
Arthur Andersen, its parent. After separating from Arthur
Andersen, the new firm changed their name to Accenture. The
new firm had a bright future but it also faced some challenges
in building a new IT infrastructure that is capable enough to
support a global organization that offers consultancy on a
leading edge technologies. It was obvious that Accenture’s IT
infrastructure needed to be rebranded.
Organization structure of Accenture was quite different from
Andersen’s, so this also added to deficiencies of the firm. The
new firm also had a limitation for using Andersen’s
47. technologies for only 1 next year. So the constraints were
already there as the new firm emerged. Accenture had to face
few challenge in IT too while moving ahead. Their systems
were made up of patchwork of legacy applications that didn’t
interconnect among themselves. Also, the systems used outdated
software platform which made it impossible for the key systems
and database to be accessed remotely over the internet.
There was also a dire need of strong infrastructure for
individual accounting and HR software systems for different
offices since they had no global infrastructure with accounting
and HR systems. Due to the outdated software platforms they
were using, they major systems and data repositories were
inaccessible remotely from the internet. For this purpose, they
sought assistance of large and expensive private networks which
added to their costs. Mostly, they did the financial aggregations
and reporting manually which wasted a lot of valuable time and
resources.
Another challenge that Accenture encountered was to persuade
the group business leaders to migrate their customized local
applications to a standard platform. By standard platform, they
wanted business leaders to migrate their applications to a single
global instance of that platform. Accenture decided upon a
single instance platform since they thought that multiple
instances of a platform will result in complexity in a longer run.
In future, even if there is a minor update, having multiple
instances will demand that update to be run for all those
instances which becomes quite complex and is wastage of time
and resources.
In short, a smart transformation was needed that could cater
organization’s need to in building up a new IT infrastructure.
2. Describe at least 3 Management practices used by Accenture
in the IT transition process from 2001 to 2008.
· Changing management’s and employees’ attitudes towards
technology:
One major factor that clearly contributed to the prevalent
48. success of Accenture’s IT transformation was changing how the
firm as a whole conceive IT. Accenture dealt with IT like an
independent business, and a panel of C-level executives would
determine the budget the spending priorities of IT. Having
different executives would help have “strategic, financial,
operational, and technical” point of views, which guaranteed
more thoughtful, and thus, Accenture has succeeded.
· Ensuring efficiency and effectiveness:
During the tremendous transformation of IT in Accenture, the
steering committee has made many actions in order to ensure
efficiency and effectiveness. For example, when choosing the
platform, the steering committee decided to use one-vendor
architecture. They prefer one vendor to multiple vendors for
applications from one vendor can share information with each
other flawlessly, which would end up with effective and
efficient deployment of IT. Also, the products they develop are
driven by the internal customers’ and system users’ needs.
Instead of having an outsourcing company to decide which
applications and requirements are needed for the business,
managers and customers could contribute to the decision of
developing a new model.
· Considering cost reduction through the use of innovative
technology:
The IT has a dramatic influence in terms of cost saving. One
major decision the help reduce the spending was choosing one-
platform architecture. This allowed them to significantly
minimize the cost of deploying and maintaining IT in the
offices around the globe. Also, they sought cost reduction by
moving the servers from Madrid to Argentina.
After the transition process, the employees count has reached up
to 180,000 which was 75,000 back in 2001. There was seen a
significant increase in Accenture’s revenues which went up to
$21.6 Billion starting from $11.44 Billion in 2001. Their
revenue is reported to be increased by 143% after the
transformation process.
49. Accenture created a strong, central IT governance which
enabled them to reduce their IT costs by 64% after the transition
process. Another management practice that was practiced during
the transition process was about encouraging the innovation.
Accenture encouraged all positive ideas on improving their IT
infrastructure and the outputs were fruitful; they reduced their
IT costs and increase their revenue.
Accenture chose right people for right things which enabled
their firm flourish and prosper. All the people in charge were
aligned with the goals of the organization which enabled
organization to achieve success in this transition period. People
were motivated and enthralled, so they really made good
decisions for their IT infrastructure. The IT management of
Accenture’s had a clear and bright vision. They proposed IT to
run as a business within a business instead of running it as a
cost center and this is what made them stand out.
Accenture had managed to do proper project planning for their
organizational goal. They were focused and clear on their
organization objectives in the IT transition process. Also, there
was proper system for tracking and reporting project progress so
the stakeholders knew where they stand. This enabled them to
compare their actual progress with the planned progress so they
can estimate how far they are from reaching the actual goals.
These were key management practices that helped in a
successful IT transition process.
3. Pretend that you are the CIO of Accenture - What decisions
you need to make beyond 2009?
If I were the CIO of Accenture beyond 2009, I would
continue having an independent committee that would decide
for the budget and spending of IT. As it was in 2008, this
committee would include different C-level executives for
having a comprehensive thought of what might and might not
benefit the firm. Also, I would inspire the departments to
provide their suggestions that are related to IT to the committee
to be seriously discussed, as long as they are attached with ROI
50. analysis for more than a couple of year. I would rather highly
reward the employee who came up with the suggestion if its
efficiency, effectiveness, and cost reduction were proven. Also,
I would promote the innovation in using IT to support the
business. Overall, I would follow the steps of Accenture’s CIOs
since 2001 to maintain the prosperous story of Accenture
accomplishments in the IT field. Looking at the organizational
culture and available options at Accenture, I feel that it is very
important for Accenture to be equipped with latest technology
since 3/4th of their employees spend their time outside the
office and travelling to client locations. It is the need of these
road warriors to possess advanced technological platforms to
offer an extra ordinary level of uninterrupted services to the
customers. All offices of Accenture need to use a standard
information system to communicate date and information with
each other. Standardization is of great importance for any
organization as it efficiency of internal communication. A
standard information system is easy to manage and organize and
it helps in managing customer and partner relationships. I
would recommend the company to use SAP as their Management
System, Microsoft as their official software provider and Intel
& Cisco as the hardware providers. Cisco shall be used for all
network related equipment whereas Intel should be consulted
for all hardware related services. These 3 products meet firm
needs and demands with lower level of complexity and are
expected to offer greater benefit. The decrease in IT costs in the
past 9 years is commendable. SAP is a perfect fit with a single-
platform solution. SAP is regarded as number one platform to
offer financial solutions, technological services and HR
applications. It is important to choose one-platform solution
since it will enable the firm to have lower IT support resources
when dealing with single approach platform.