Alex A. Hutnik

At large organizations around the world, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is changing the way companies manage their resources, both human and monetary. This post is the first in a series about how ERP is becoming increasingly valuable to organizations in their efforts to realize their potential.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 5% [?]

In class, we talked about a few different ways to create a flexible work environment that allows employees to better balance their work and home life. By allowing employees to work from home, they will be better able to keep an eye on their children, wait for the cable to arrive and install cable TV, etc.

But how do you accomplish this? How do we enable the employee to use company resources while on a remote network? If you have traveling sales men, the answer is easy: you’re probably already doing it. You need only to train the employee and set up their home machine (or lend them a laptop to take home) to interface with the corporate network.

Here’s my personal experience: I live on one end of campus and work at the exact opposite end. In Cleveland, it is sometimes cold outside. On some days, I do not feel like walking all the way to work. However, I still want to make money. Lucky for me, I can remote in to my work computer using Windows Remote Desktop to accomplish many of my tasks. Remote Desktop is accessible from other Windows machines, Macs and Linux machines. It scales well to different connection speeds, so users will still be able to use their remote computer as if they were still sitting at it. This has big implications for telecommuting workers. Remote Desktop, paired with a videoconferencing system, will allow users to “recreate their presence” at the office.

Products like Remote Desktop are revolutionizing mobile computing and enabling those away from the office to stay connected.

Popularity: 5% [?]

To stay current with my blog entries, I encourage you to subscribe. It only requires a free registration and you only get e-mailed when I add something to a section you’re interested in.

Popularity: 6% [?]

This video is pretty interesting and got me to think about IBM’s relationship with the open source community.

IBM is able to take what is being done for free in the open source community to further their own business. This is a very interesting concept because IBM has to pay $0 for the software they can turn around and offer at a price to customers and vendors. In most cases, they need only attribute ownership to the proper authors. The company is banking on the flexibility and wide support of Linux to further its business products. I use Linux on my servers and have had a tremendous amount of success.

The key idea here is that by using what tools are freely available and updated, IBM is able to cut down on development costs (as well as gain geek-cred with IT managers).

Popularity: 5% [?]