As operational excellence becomes the norm rather than the exception in business, companies need a new source of competitive differentiation. Increasingly, market leaders are creating strategic advantage through their ability to manage the performance network, rather than just transactional processes. This new imperative is called Management  Excellence. To achieve it, companies need to become smart, agile and aligned.
The Strategy-to-Success (S2S) framework expands the scope of traditional performance management to offer a framework by which companies can deliver Management Excellence. Enterprise Performance Management Systems (EPMS) then enable companies to realize their management process goals by connecting disparate management activities and bringing together strategy formulation, execution and feedback.
This paper introduces Management Excellence as a new business imperative, outlines six steps in the S2S framework, and illustrates how companies are deploying EPMS to attain their management process goals.

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Dealing with almost 40 billion USD worldwide software business forecast is a mess, then where to focus?

Now that no one has evidently acquired a majority in a certain vertical, obviously the big two players Oracle and SAP will offer more vertically focused applications in the coming few years.

As more vendors supplement their core ERP applications with third-party products, offering more vertical functionality will be paramount for the growth of large ERP vendors. It’s not so much a battle for customers anymore, it’s a battle for seats within those customers, a battle for industry specialization coverage. Sweet, that’s when people become of more value, that’s when i can see wages going high up.

And SAP won’t be left out, i think so …

Though, as an Oracle partner, i can see that Oracle are typically known for growing by adding vertical functionality through purchasing other companies, and i have to say they are worth the credit for that.

But SAP said adding industry-specific functionality is just as important as its dominant growth strategy of going after more small and midsized customers with SAP Business One and Business All-in-One. “It’s twofold,” said some vice president for SAP. It’s just as important to continue working with SAP’s more than 2,000 partners to increase vertical functionality in their applications, he said, but did he manage to know that from those 2000 partners, only very few are adding real value?

Eventually i have to admit, the judgment will come tomorrow, am not unbiased obviously, but i am favoring Oracle for various factors, will state them in future articles.

Being on a trip, to my favored business destination, Saudi, in 2006, when i used to work for Atlas Telecom at that time, I had to make it with a fast dinner at the Radisson SAS hotel where i usually stay when i visit Riyadh.

I remember this “Olivia” or “Olivio” restaurant, a decent enough place for dining alone, as they serve good meals compared to Riyadh’s restaurants lack in quality …

I was warmly welcomed, seated, provided with a menu and had the items described by an East-Asian waiter who was fairly smiling at me, and politely suggesting meals without complicating my life with the sophisticated menu items.
Few minutes later, the same waiter was serving another gentleman, he seemed to me an old westerner from where i sat, the waiter did exactly the same with the old man, who at his turn, said some few words of praise to the waiter, “thank you for your great service, and be sure i am already enjoying the meal”.

Me, a bit surprised, as i considered him a good waiter, but didn’t feel the need to praise him for just three minutes of a chit-chat with a client; then i was fairly and quickly served, at probably the regular rate of service attendance, but the gentleman was the center of the world for that waiter, i felt a bit jealous i admit, as the waiter kept running around the man’s table in circles, changing his spoon, filling his glass, my table was good, but the guy’s table was perfectly arranged all meal long.

That made me think twice, at that evening, i wondered, is rewarding people, or at least giving them a promising incentive, will turn their minds into positively productive cells, and is rather a better approach than that of the punishment-when-failing approach?

Though it seemed very influencing, i think the combination of both triggers a better individual, punishments and rewards are both incentives.