Not unlike most consultants, my EDI career has been challenging at times. I've been in EDI for over 20 years and continue to see the same issues no matter what company I am working at. Listed below are my top 5 roadblocks to an EDI team's progress.
If you are a gadget geek like me, this article will be right up your alley.
This weekend I picked up a gadget called the “Nest”. Little did I know at the time that it would find its way into my article this week.
Nest is a learning thermostat for your home HVAC that identifies your heating and cooling patterns and habits and “learns” to program itself. I thought this would be a neat gadget to have since it would save me money on my heating and cooling bills. But then I discovered all of the OTHER gadgets that Nest interfaces with.
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While it is not likely your IT group has sales people, it is likely that IT resources and business sponsors are required to sell the cost/benefits of project initiatives (capital projects or otherwise) to the CFO, CEO, COO, or project committee.
As we look into the future, we look at the past. The use of a contract or contingent workforce was extremely light in the early 1980s and decades before that. Business and workforce needs were more predictable, you know...employment for life, along with low levels of automation and computerization requiring a physical workforce.
As business cycles became more varied along with increased use of computers and robotics, resource needs became more varied. In the late 1980s and particularly the 1990s a contingent workforce became more appealing. Reasons why contingent resources became popular, and remain so today, include supplementing current staff, acquiring expertise not available on staff, to get a fresh approach or different perspective on a problem, to acquire experience from different companies in your industry or cross industry experience, to do the repetitive/complex task that no one else wants to do, to off load work (outsourcing or managed services) which enable staff to concentrate on core competencies, vacation/expertise/cross trained backups, try before you buy contract to hire, and so on.
So with a look at the past and present, what does the future hold?
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