Author Archive: Craig Himmelberger

Interfacing with Application Programming Interfaces

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The Guardian’s Chris Stokel-Walker penned the TechScape newsletter earlier this month. As any good piece and its author will do, it sets bells ringing. His immediate subject focuses on Twitter’s ending free access to its APIs, and calls into question exactly how changes at that level will impact usage. Notably, his sources are all external, and his conclusions based on what notable people/organizations/bots have been observed to be doing on the public web. This makes sense, as even Elon Musk has been unable to quantify exactly who and what has been accessing Twitter behind the scenes. So, as we happily travel down the Internet rabbit hole, the linked CNN story highlights Cyabra’s contract to externally monitor and analyze Twitter usage, and I’m guessing those folks […]

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Campbells Soup

Enterprise Risk’s Race to the Bottom: Sexy SAIDI

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Cue this one up for today’s soundtrack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSk5U4oHhu0 Today I learned the statistical acronym SAIDI: System Average Interruption Duration Index. It’s the internationally recognized formula for calculating the average outage duration for each customer served by a utility, and it’s calculated by the expression: For those of you still PTSD’d from high school algebra and things containing letters from the Greek alphabet, in other words, it’s the sum of all the customer interruption durations divided by the total number of customers. Why should anyone care, do you ask? Following up on our recent examination of supply chain risk under-mitigation, have you or anyone else in your company investigated the impact to your business if, suddenly, employees’ mobile phones stopped working for any extended length of […]

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Measuring the Impact of Just-In-Time

Measuring the Impact of Just-In-Time

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In a perfect world, people do exactly what they’re paid to do. Trouble is, in an imperfect world, people also do exactly what they’re paid to do, but it isn’t quite the right thing. Compensation managers who design plans based on unquestioning loyalty to executive mandates can often be missing opportunity to be a better partner to the business. Case in point: Though they got the closing Biff Tannen quote wrong, (it’s “and get out of here”), this right here is chapter next in the seemingly never-ending saga of “Just In Time Too Often Isn’t.” When I first started out, I honed my airport-fu to the fine edge of a Shaolin sword. That is, until it dawned on me that “success” wasn’t about how many […]

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When Is a Software Company Not a Software Company?

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From the newswire: Atos shareholder calls for chairman to resign. On paper and from a certain perspective, Atos’ business focus sounds great—among many other things, they’re a Platinum SAP partner, with lots of products and services to sell, and a ton of big-name customers. But peel back a layer or two… Years ago, when DBS (Dun & Bradstreet Software, and, yes, I go back that far) started their own consulting arm, a very wise man observed to me that you can’t sell both software and services—your focus and your bottom line have to be one or the other. Sure, you can dabble across the fence for fun and profit in support of your primary business. However, get lost in what looks like all that green […]

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A Recipe to Evaluate Technology

A Recipe to Evaluate Technology: How Big Is Your Picture?

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I had opportunity this week to trot out one of my favorites from Nathan Myhrvold: “Among modern occupations, only cult leaders and TV weathermen rival the technological visionary’s ability to retain credibility despite all evidence to the contrary.” (It’s funny because it’s true). And it IS true. But, before we step away, let’s also step back to acknowledge human nature’s own contribution to all this nonsense. Roy S. Durstine called it in 1945: “My mind is made up. Don’t confuse me with the facts.” That, of course, goes well for pundits, but I’d also like to suggest it goes double for the audience which solicits the ideological solipsism in the first place. Let’s face it—we, the audience, are quickest to lap up punditry of the […]

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Playground Rules for the World of Work

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My colleague, Jennifer Dole, got me started this week with an extremely thoughtful piece on one of my lightning rod favorite topics—youth sports. (If you haven’t read Bob Bigelow’s book, Just Let the Kids Play, you really should). Because Jennifer and I are business and software research nerds, things immediately veered into dimensions of relevance to the Future of Work, and we had quite a bit of fun in the comments. The part that’s stuck with me today is how naturally and effectively kids organize themselves to optimize their play. If you are, like me, “of a certain age”, (and didn’t grow up burdened by uniforms, playing between the lines, being whistled at by referees, and hectored by over-zealous parents), you know how it works: […]

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The Launch of Zuora Secure Data Share for Snowflake Is Only Logical

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“Star Trek: The Next Generation” isn’t quite the original, but The Borg absolutely deserve a place in the Pantheon of Sci-Fi nemeses right beside Klingons, Tribbles, and Harcourt Fenton Mudd. It’s impossible to work with enterprise application software and not be fascinated by The Borg. Advances in automation are constantly and inexorably being assimilated back into the enterprise collective. (Resistance is futile.) General ledger achieves automated input from accounts receivable (financials). Next, AR becomes connected to sales (CRM). Eventually, sales bills directly from the catalog (procurement) and automatically feeds commissions (payroll), which pays employees (human capital management, HCM) via bank accounts (treasury), and it all eventually becomes “ERP.” Or so we’d like to think… The first rule of assimilation (sorry, that’s Deep Space 9) is […]

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The Opaqueness of Corporate Culture

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Hat tip to The Economist‘s Bartleby column (and its unnamed author, Philip Coggan) for continuing to shine the light on possibly the most powerful business force on the planet — “corporate culture.” In my earliest career, “corporate culture” both built, and then savagely destroyed, the two then-world-leading enterprise application software companies, McCormack & Dodge and MSA: In 1983, Dun & Bradstreet Corporation bought McCormack & Dodge for what The Wall Street Journal suggested was around $50 million bucks In 1990, the inelegantly renamed “Dun & Bradstreet Software” bought its biggest competitor, MSA, for around $330 million bucks In 1996, the whole sorry mess of incompatible corporate culture was cleaned up and taken off D&B’s red-ink-bleeding books by GEAC for a fire sale valuation of around […]

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Paying and Getting Paid — The Future Is Already Out of the Barn

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“I want it all, and I want it now!” belted the late, great Freddie Mercury on a criminally underrated song by the rock band Queen. Was he channeling typical first world consumers and employees from some four decades into the future? He might as well have been. People these days, not all of them want it all, truly, but most seem to want whatever it is they do want, now. They expect every accommodation. Leeway and speed are what they want. They want what they buy to arrive as soon as possible. They want to pay in the easiest way available, in a way most accommodating to their needs and wants. And they want the pay they’ve earned so far, right now — not in […]

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3Sixty Insights Infographic

Infographic: Outsourcing Global Payroll: Getting Ahead on Employee Experience, Data Security, and Compliance

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Getting global payroll right is mission-critical, and a significant share of the responsibility for it falls on CIOs, naturally. Absent order for the enterprise software ecosystem touching global payroll, so much can go wrong. This profoundly affects an organization’s people. The infographic here delves into the specifics around outsourcing global payroll—the seven warning signs that you should do, the three major upsides for your organization, and more. Read the full Research Note here: Research Note: Outsourcing Global Payroll: The Impact on Data Security & Compliance. Read the full Research Note here: Research Note: Outsourcing Global Payroll: The Impact on Data Security & Compliance.

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Research Note: Outsourcing Global Payroll: The Impact on Data Security & Compliance

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Payroll is a mission-critical activity. Personal fulfillment and career advancement are important, but for most people the main reason they go to work is for a paycheck. Get it wrong, and the ramifications can be swift and bruising. Nearly half (49 percent) of the workforce is willing to tolerate just two problems with their paycheck before beginning a new job search, according to The Workforce Institute at UKG. This is probably because 69 percent of individuals would experience financial difficulty if their paychecks were delayed for a week, according to results from a 2020 survey conducted by the American Payroll Association. It’s a phenomenon other data corroborate. Nearly four-fifths (78 percent) of the workforce lives paycheck-to-paycheck to make ends meet, according to CareerBuilder, whose findings […]

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Square Meets the Moment with Afterpay

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Square, the digital payments giant co-founded by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, has this week acquired Australian fintech company Afterpay. The announcement has already made the rounds; plenty of outlets have proffered their own predictions of the effects this acquisition will have on the market. We at 3Sixty Insights see this going far beyond the market moment: we believe that buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) will continue to increase in relevance at the point of sale. By connecting AfterPay directly to purchase transactions, this acquisition has the potential to have a profound and lasting generational effect. Pay and Payments in the Present On-demand pay (ODP) has taken the HR world by storm since DailyPay was founded in 2015. There’s Dayforce Wallet (from Ceridian). Last month, global payroll provider CloudPay […]

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Market Alert: Immedis Pay Reengineers the Way Companies Remit Cross-Border Payments to Employees, Tax Authorities, and Statutory Third Parties

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What Happened In mid-July 2021, Immedis announced the availability of Immedis Pay, an automated solution for organizations to manage cross-border payments to their beneficiaries, including employees, tax authorities, and statutory third parties. Built on the foundation of everywhere-local expertise in global payroll, Immedis Pay gives companies local payments expertise across the globe to simplify payments, increase accuracy, and eliminate challenges with compliance. Cost savings from the use of Immedis’ network of API-connected local payment network providers and banking partners are significant. Immedis Pay currently delivers 99.98 percent error-free payments in 145 currencies across more than 200 countries. Background As part of its global payroll offering, Immedis has been expediting payments for customers since the vendor’s inception in 2016. The coincident expertise and global reach put […]

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3Sixty Insights Anatomy of a Decision

Channel Fish Anatomy of a Decision SAP Business One

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The first decade of the 2000s saw a sea change in IT  spending. Until about 2009, spending oversight was starkly different from what it has become at most companies today. Chief Information Officers were generally happy to sign off on anything that stayed within their budget, so IT departments were free to make the technological and system decisions they thought would be best since they would be supporting that technology should anything go wrong. In the last decade or so, however, there’s been a shift. It’s far more common today for every purchase decision to go through finance and other departments, involving colleagues who may be unfamiliar with the provider or the ultimate use of the system and potentially slowing the adoption process (3Sixty Insights […]

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Research Agenda: Finance Research Practice H2 2021

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Companies have benefitted from rapid deployment of cloud-based ERP. “Customization” once delayed legacy implementations, but now “Low/No Code” environments enable personalization and better adaptation to unique business requirements. As AI, IoT, and other acronym-rich trends increase the pace of change, rapid system updates and increased leverage of available capabilities become more and more valuable. Putting predictive, intelligent, and mobile capabilities into the hands of front-line resources will further increase the payoff. The Financials and ERP practice at 3Sixty Insights plans to explore these and other themes over the next 12 months: Concrete vs. Abstract Finance: A New Way for Organizations to Look at ERP Enterprise Structure vs Line-of-Business Initiatives: Achieving Balance in Location of Power Suite vs Point Solutions vs Specialized Systems: Where Should Finance […]

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Tuning Up Your ERP/Finance Infrastructure

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To judge the ultimate immaturity of the “Cloud” ERP/Finance solution market, look no further than the broad success of vendors offering MDM (Master Data Management) solutions. Ironically, one of the perennial leaders in the space is one of the biggest purveyors of “you only need one” ERP/Finance solutions talking out the other side of their mouth—the 800-pound gorilla that is SAP—calling into constant question whether there can ever be a single, central solution to any company’s ERP/Finance needs. This actually makes perfect sense: Even within a unicorn single-instance ERP/Finance implementation, there will always be utility in matching incoming and outcoming transactions/messages to the proverbial “Golden Record”—to/from suppliers and customers who so often represent the true source of the information contained therein. (How many times has […]

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Fintech, meet Foodtech

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Markets are easily distracted by Fintech news. Just the other day, I found myself meandering around the internet researching a series of Fintech acquisitions that amounted to fewer than $8M in 2021 sales to a single-billion-dollar shrinking dinosaur. I woke up mid-webpage with a major déjà vu headache wondering how many times we were going to read that very same story before we learned to save ourselves the time and the trouble. (The Highlander already knows the way these things ultimately work). Okay, to be fair, and as Yum Brands knows, like their progenitor PepsiCo who spun them off, there’s usually at least two–right, Coca Cola? But there’s never 100, let alone 1000, let alone 10,000 in a market, like there are estimated Fintech startups […]

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Research Agenda: Finance Research Practice 2021

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Companies have benefitted from rapid deployment of cloud-based ERP. “Customization” once delayed legacy implementations, but now “Low/No Code” environments enable personalization and better adaptation to unique business requirements. As AI, IoT, and other acronym-rich trends increase the pace of change, rapid system updates and increased leverage of available capabilities become more and more valuable. Putting predictive, intelligent, and mobile capabilities into the hands of front-line resources will further increase the payoff. The Financials and ERP practice at 3Sixty Insights plans to explore these and other themes over the next 12 months: Concrete vs. Abstract Finance: A New Way for Organizations to Look at ERP Seeing Through the Haze: Where is Real Value in the Cloud? Data vs Information: The Rise of Analytics Enterprise Structure vs […]

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News of the New World | Move Over Bitcoin—Robux Rising

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Since Hewlett and Packard first redefined the garage, billionaire new-tech superstars have taken on a succession of cultural fixtures. The vaunted Sears and Roebuck catalog is now Amazon. Both Encyclopedia Britannica and Rand McNally are now Google. And everything from town criers to daily newspapers is now found on Twitter, Facebook, and the like. One similarity among these cultural sea changers is that they’re continually pushing the “real world” ever towards a digital doppelganger. Deeply in that spirit, David Baszucki joins Hewlett, Packard, Gates, Jobs, Bezos, Page, Brin, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Musk, et al. etc. ad infinitum in the pantheon of new-tech billionaires. But where predecessors have repeatedly erased real-world institutions and interactions, Baszucki’s Roblox is firmly embracing them in an entirely new way. Not your […]

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What do Kings of Leon, Jack Dorsey, and Sumner Redstone share in common?

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Intellectual Property (IP), like music and video content, intersects with Software as a Service (SaaS) in every meaningful way. It’s fascinating to see so many threads knitting themselves together in the headlines from one single week. News about FinTech companies, like Jack Dorsey’s Square, is generally limited to the business section. In contrast, music streaming services, like Jay-Z’s Tidal, are everywhere but. Yet there is Jay-Z’s picture all over the Wall Street Journal. The Venn Diagram of those two worlds is usually like peering through a giant pair of blurry binoculars. So what are we really looking at, anyway? To gain clearer focus, we’ll need first to pan out and check in with Rolling Stone—and the latest on Kings of Leon’s recent album release. (Seriously!) […]

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