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| January 26, 2011 - Chesterville, ON |
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Best practices in enterprise application
and project management results in improved
alignment of applications and strategic
organizational goals, better buy-in
from key stakeholders, and lower costs.
In this article, we share how Leo de
Sousa, Enterprise Architect, at The
British Columbia Institute of Technology
and Nav Bassi, of the PMO office at
the University of Victoria have realized
these benefits for their organizations
through strategic management of their
enterprise applications.
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| January 26, 2011 - Chesterville, ON |
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Kwantlen University has shown leadership
in introducing data governance and data
quality into their enterprise and student
information systems. If you manage an
enterprise application or are involved
in any part of data quality at your
organization, you can learn from the
lessons that Warren Stokes, Registrar
for Kwantlen, demonstrates in this article
we wrote about their experiences.
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| December 1, 2010 - Chesterville, ON |
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Many sites are deciding to homestead
on the HP 3000 platform. This article
provides suggestions for how you can
improve the effectiveness of your existing
HP 3000 applications, while positioning
you well for the future.
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| September 21-23, 2010 - Toronto, ON |
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The 2010 Enterprise Information Management
(EIM) conference took place in Toronto,
Canada September 21-23, 2010. The conference
brought together leading practitioners
of EIM from across North America. Much
of the conference was focused on networking
and building best practices. EIM is
still new enough that everyone is learning
by leaps and bounds. The following are
our notes from the conference.
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| August 30, 2010 - Chesterville, ON |
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As a software vendor with licensed
customers in the HP3000 market, I am
astounded by the number of IT shops
that have not clearly communicated to
their senior management the issues associated
with HP's December 31, 2010 end of hardware
and software support. You see, senior
management is often more concerned with
the budget than with the risks involved,
since financial analysis is something
the company is measured upon. However,
for all the companies I visit every
year (and there have been hundreds),
I have yet to see a company where the
Microsoft Windows budget is less than
the HP3000 budget (service bureaus aside).
Windows always costs more, and yet that
desktop environment does little to run
the applications required to run the
business.
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| April 11-14, 2010 - Fort Lauderdale, FL |
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The Ecometry Summit is the showcase
industry event for users of the Ecometry
retail application. Birket Foster, Chris
Whitehead, and Pedro Ibarra from MB
Foster attended the three day conference
in April 2010. These are our observations
of the leading trends and announcements
from the conference.
As we attended the conference it was
clear that there are two broad areas
where everyone needs to start working
on now for a future which is arriving
as we speak:
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| February 1, 2010 - Chesterville, ON |
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MB Foster, an Information Technology
and Services Company, specializing in
delivering applications and data that
match the needs of businesses today
and tomorrow, is pleased to welcome
David Greer.
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David joins the MB
Foster team as the Marketing and Sales
Director. "David was brought in to assist
with communicating and implementing our
strategic vision" said Birket Foster,
CEO of MB Foster. "We like David's background
in planning, operations and his knowledge
of technologies - it will be fun to work
this adventure together." |
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| January 12-15, 2010 - New York City, NY |
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The National Retail Federation trade
show was held January 12-15, 2010 in
New York City. More than 450 exhibitors
displayed concepts, equipment and services
for the 18,500 attendees from the retail
trade. There was a special exhibit area
for design and architecture with many
seminars on how the designs worked,
and awards for the best store designs
in various categories. The green theme
continued, and digital displays had
big innovations.
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| "It looks like the economy is coming back,
but the recovery is fragile," said Scott
Krugman, Vice President at the NRF. "Retailers
are especially interested in how they can
nimbly respond to the way consumers and
the economy will behave this year" quoted
in Store Magazine's daily tradeshow paper.
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| Here is our review of the major trends
that we see dominating in 2010. All of these
trends improve the customer experience and
position retailers for growth using technically
innovative solutions. |
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| November 4, 2009 - Chesterville, Ontario |
| Whoever imagined a conference agenda with
the discussions on the appropriateness of
using iTunes to distribute e-learning content,
or open-source versus proprietary applications?
How have things changed? |
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| This week I'm attending the Educause Conference
in Denver, where I will be taking a dive
into the modern world of educational computing
looking at these topics and more. |
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| June 25, 2009 - Chesterville, Ontario
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| We think of Birket Foster as the community's
futurist. HP has made it clear to the community
that the future of the 3000 won't include
Hewlett-Packard. Since the company is now
counting down its last two years of support,
we wanted to look beyond that coming initial
year of post-HP operations. Seeing into
that future, with more migrations and fewer
homesteaders, seemed a lively exercise for
Birket Foster, leader of the HP Platinum
Migration Partner MB Foster and a forward
thinker. His company has been in this market
since 1977, and a Migration Partner since
2002. He wanted to envision the 3000 market
10 years after that date. |
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| April 5-8, 2009 - San Diego, CA |
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| This year was the first year that the
conference was held on the west coast. The
conference featured support from Escalate
corporate and a review of the Escalate business
as a whole was given by Stu Bloom CEO of
the Escalate group. This conference was
focused on the Ecometry division, especially
with messages around PCI compliance, and
migrations. |
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| Theme |
| Brian Johnson is your Sherpa! Brian's
job is to help you and your company make
the trek to the summit... just like a Sherpa
on a climb of Mt. Everest. |
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| March 7, 2008 - Chesterville, Ontario |
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| In a continuation of our Q & A interview
with MB Foster's chairman Birket Foster,
we asked what issues a replacement migration
sparks for 3000 sites. His firm is one of
two HP Platinum Migration partners still
active out of an initial four. After six
years of delivering advice on the migration,
he had plenty to share. |
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| What have you seen at the 3000
site which needs to replace an application,
rather than adopt a system from a corporate
parent? |
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| We've been on many sites where we've helped
customers through the software selection
process. We look at what kind of items would
be mandatory, then nice-to-haves, and build
a matrix across software choices so they
can compare apples to apples. |
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