The City Club event is aimed at senior executives from IT, finance and general management who want to gain a clear picture of how this technology will effect organisations in general and their costs in particular.

Morgan Hill will show where the IT cost savings arise: why, when and how. Taylor Wessing, a leading international law firm will illustrate the legal and security issues. Amazon Web Services will describe the technology that lies behind cloud computing.

For more information please see Morgan Hill Events

Our View: There are several interesting points about this:

1. TMG was an early adopter of Google apps over MS Office and Google’s mail services over Exchange, partly a decision based on cost. This move not only continues with a service based strategy but also implies that what went before must have been successful.
2. The financial service will apparently integrate with a more traditionally provisioned ERP system. If this is correct then it should provide a significant amount of comfort to those still worried about where critical systems and data resides.
3. A company of this standing integrating cloud services with traditional systems is a good indication of the growing acceptance and use of this service based technology.

Read more on ZDNet

“Business Analysis provides workable skills and techniques,
underpinned with academic theory. It is a practical introductory guide
for anyone involved with any aspect of business analysis or improving
the effectiveness of IT and its alignment with the organizations’
business objectives.”

Read more at BCS

Business Analysis Techniques: 72 Essential Tools for Success
James Cadle, Debra Paul and Paul Turner

“Business analysts are generally charged with the investigation of
ideas and problems. Their role is to formulate options for a way
forward and produce business cases setting out conclusions and
recommendations. The development of business analysis as a
professional discipline has extended the role of the business analyst
who now needs the widest possible array of tools. This book provides
72 possible techniques and applies them within a framework of stages
such as ‘Investigate Situation’, ‘Define Requirements’ and ‘Manage
Change’.”

Read more at BCS

Wired for Innovation
Erik Brynjolfsson & Adam Saunders

“While it has been recognised for many years that information
organisations contribute to the economy, the ways of accounting for
intangible assets and corporate capital has not reflected that
contribution. The costs of process development and training for
example are normally treated as expense rather than capital investment
and their lasting value is not necessarily recognised.”

Read more at BCS

This move has been described as a response to all sorts of ailments within the company. Issues written about in the press include: delays in launching software, a failure to grasp the nettle with software as a service, job cuts, high customer charges and …, the list goes on.

Our view is more simplistic. Whilst all the above might be true the real problem is that the company relies on a business model which now resides in the past. Large, expensive, comprehensive but complex systems that require lots of resources to build and operate are being replaced with smaller, much less expensive and much more flexible systems. SAP and others like it will have to learn to become much faster at releasing software, provide more options in how that software is delivered and become a great deal more flexible in the way customers are charged. SAP may well be able to rely on legacy customer contracts for some time, but eventually people will move.

OpenOffice.org is a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The full feature list is available at OpenOffice.org