Thought-Provoking Commentary for the Lawson Software Community
Lawson’s CEO Harry Debes certainly isn’t afraid to speak his mind or express his feelings. But Harry’s latest remarks deriding Software as a Service (SaaS) might just put him in the doghouse:
“How do I fix xyz?”
Thinking about how to troubleshoot reminds me of trying to fix my leaky shower.
Consider an organization which, up until now at least, has had 7-hour workdays. And, not for all employees, but for most administrative staff, except IT. To justify the exclusion of IT, they say “IT workers make too much money already”. Gee, how appreciative.
But anyway. Most admin folks (like the Finance staff) get an 9:00-4:30 day, with the requisite 30-minute lunch (which naturally gets stretched to an hour, right?).
Being a non-profit, they “just can’t afford the salaries offered by other for-profit companies”, so they compensate in other ways such as offering up better benefits like more vacation and the 7 hour day. Which is being taken away.
I think it goes something like this: “’tis better to have loved and lost, or to never have loved at all?”
To put a twist on it a bit, is it better to have competed and lost, or never to have competed? That is the question.
An interesting comment in the recent FY08 earnings conference call, made by CEO Harry Debes:
“I think some of our competitors in the case of Microsoft delivers no services, in the case of SAP and Oracle deliver a lot less services. It’s a strategy of ours to in fact be intimately involved with our customer not just to sell them software, we don’t think of ourselves as a software publisher. We think of ourselves as a solutions company and that involves services.”
P-Cards are always a love/hate topic. Some people swear by them as an easier-than-easy way to purchase goods and services without a lot of paperwork and process. Others despise them as a way to bypass the entire purchasing process. And as an invitation for fraudulent use. Witness this gem:
I’ve never been a fan of complicated scripting, whether it’s shell scripts, Perl, python, or whatever. The reason I don’t like it is because it’s usually written by developers who think they’re being “clever”, when what they are doing is costing their organizations money down the line, since their “solution” will need to be scrapped when no one can understand it.
Business Week published an article, “Ten Penny-Pinching Ideas for 2008” (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2007/tc20071120_184990.htm) which got my attention. No, it wasn’t the sarcastic reference to “the best ways to soak your overpriced tech consultants for free advice” in the opening teaser. Read more of this post
If you’re a subscriber to The LawsonGuru Letter, you know I always have a lot to say. There’s always a lot happening during each month between issues. So I have decided to try out this new (well, for me at least) communication medium called weblogging–or a ‘blog’ for short.
The beauty of the blog is that instead of me always being the only one on my soapbox, blogs are more interactive. By commenting on my postings, you become part of the action!
I’ll probably limit my postings to issues relevant to Lawson and it’s product offerings and business practices, as well as other areas related to the ERP marketplace. This will not be a technical Lawson forum. If you’re looking for that, please visit my LawsonGuru site.
So, let’s get started…
LawsonGuru.com Forums
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