Testing for the API Economy

Creating integrations is hard, but testing them is even harder. Every web service API has its own vocabulary, semantics, nuances, and bugs. Every release of a web service potentially involves breaking changes, syntactic and behavioral. When these web services are controlled by 3rd parties, it gets even harder. As creating integrations is our business, we...

Bringing Instant Insights (Not Just Charts) to Sales Planning Meetings – Enrich Consulting

The starting point for most conversations about a candidate drug’s sales potential is a chart of drug sales by segment and time—month/quarter/year, depending on the planning horizon. Digging deeper, you are ‘treated’ to a huge table, or perhaps a bunch of bar charts, tallying the number of afflicted people, those afflicted who have insurance, those...

A Game-Changing Approach to Providing the Right Medical Devices to Developing Countries

Is This a Click Moment? Last month I attended the Medical Devices 10X Conference in Minneapolis. There I met Terry Mandel, founder of BioMedLink – a woman who believes in serendipity or, as PIPELINE Keynote Frans Johansson would say, “click moments.” These moments – when the right ideas, people, and circumstances come together to seed...

The Remarkable Reason Complacency for Spreadsheets May Reach Critical Mass

How One Cell Discredited the Way the World Measures the Ratio of Debt-to-GDP and What That Should Mean for Using Spreadsheets for Finance At every FP&A conference I have ever attended, the subject of spreadsheets comes up and those with a great argument for keeping them receive, what I perceive to be, the loudest applause. Usually...

Innovation and Portfolio Management: Wise Tips from the Wire

As event manager for the PIPELINE 2013 conference, I have had the pleasure of getting to know Dr. Kevin McFarthing. The word that comes to mind when I think of him is “enthusiastic” and I truly appreciate that he has been a wonderful supporter of PIPELINE and the innovation education it offers attendees. When you...

Warning: Talent Cliff Ahead—Part 1

The Looming Technology Workforce Shortage A Guest Contribution by Service Performance Insight This article is the first of a two-part series on the pending “talent cliff,” an important topic to professional services leaders. We discuss why this critical situation exists and provide some related insights from the newly published 2013 PS Maturity™ Benchmark for professional...

Black Swans Are More Common Than You Think

The term “Black Swan” was coined by University of Oxford, Saïd Business School professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb to describe high-impact events that are rare and unpredictable but in retrospect seem not so improbable. In the world of IT, black swan projects reap catastrophic effects and even result in a complete corporate meltdown. According to Taleb’s...

Four Questions on the State of Technology for Professional Services

According to recent research, the professional services industry is growing aggressively and seeing very specific growing pains in talent attrition, project profitability, and resource management. In trying to encapsulate what organizations can do to alleviate these issues, we asked subject-matter expert, Steve Beaumont four questions on the state of technology for professional services to help...

Lessons Learned: Assessing the Skills of 450 Research and Development Professionals

The superheated economy of the late 1990s was punctuated by a scramble for resources and market-share. Stalwart companies like IBM were waking up to the reality that they could not skate on their size and reputations — they too had to become masters of change and improve research and development skills. IBM’s mantra, “A new...

How to Build the Business Case for Enterprise Architecture

Building the investment business case for Enterprise Architecture (EA) requires speaking the language of business and delivering quick and ongoing returns. That was the advice from Bodhi Choudhuri, director of Enterprise Architecture at American Express, during Troux’ recent Building the Business Case for EA webinar. With EA initiatives facing stiff competition for funding and CIOs...