Articles

Ever wondered which ERP vendor is best?

Panorama Consulting Solutions ranks ERP vendors for 2017 and comes up with a winner… That winner is Epicor – but at iStart, we have a nagging suspicion that the very notion of ‘the best ERP vendor’ is something of a ‘how long is a piece of string’

CIOs seek balance between innovation and thrift

Australian CIOs are engaged in a balancing act – attempting to deliver the digital agenda that boards and investors crave, while keeping tight rein on costs… According to industry analyst Gartner Australia will this year spend $83.5 billion on IT. But carving up that investment is increasingly

Arm against IT project failure

Nearly half of all IT projects fail and the seeds of failure are often planted early in the process by failing to prepare properly and truly understand the return on investment that you can expect from an IT project. Research results published in the Harvard Business Review,

A Better Way to Access Business Software

For many years now, there has been a general trend in business to focusing on what you do best – that is, your core competencies – and engaging third parties to provide other equipment, people, expertise, and services. Typically specialist providers can do those other things better,

Watch for these six business continuity gaps that can cost you

With an abundance of factors that can disrupt operations, effective business continuity strategies are challenging… Business continuity encompasses three core elements: resilience in how business functions and infrastructure are designed, recovery to restore systems that fail, and contingency to cope with incidents and disasters that occur. Stuart

Worldwide IT spending to grow in 2016 – but only just

Just how much will the tech-crazy world blow on IT in 2016? Around US$3.54 trillion… While that number represents growth, it is only just in the green according to the Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast. At a mere 0.6 percent over 2015 spending, the researcher is anticipating

Why a $50k System is Overkill for Your Small Business

If you’ve ever bought a computer, you’ve felt it. Felt the pain that comes from seeing your shiny new system drop in price by 10% soon after you bought it… or 25% or 50%. With technology moving as quickly as it does, this price-drop pain is almost inevitable. But

Man, machine and the productivity story

Technology has increased productivity and emancipated humankind from day-to day tasks, enabling automation over drudgery, hasn’t it? As the march of the machine continues into the digital age Chris Bell explores economist Robert Solow’s famous quip that you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics…

CIOs lose control of the enterprise IT budget

A recent report from Forrester Research reveals that chief information officers are losing their grip on enterprise IT budgets with line-of-business managers taking up the slack… In 2010 74 percent of enterprise IT budgets was spent by CIOs. Last year that had plunged to 58 percent according

Budgeting for the cloud

Cloud computing is creating an expectation of offering a lot of functionality for next to nothing, but there are broader costs to deployment… There’s a lot of buzz around the cloud and its potential to transform IT in business. However, as with most things in life, there