In the spirit of the season, as heat waves roast major cities around the world, solar energy is a hot topic. From residential rooftops to all of the power plants to experimental aircraft, solar energy is having its season within the sun. After spending 26 hours aloft, a solar powered airplane landed on Thursday. And this week the Obama administration pledged about $ 1.85 billion in guaranteed loans to develop a solar energy power plant and solar panel factories. But there's a cloud.

(am I being too sensitive here...?)

Have you noticed these nasty-looking characters on advertisements displayed prominently in many U.S. airports? www.Downwithbigerp.com There are images of these greedy fat cats, "It's not about you, it's about us!"

 Jim McGlothlin Blog

 Curtiss Barnes' blog

The new buzz term is "Governance, Risk, and Compliance." GRC. I think the word "management" is implied. Which of the following topics would you say falls under the GRC umbrella?

• Assuring that all members of a research team have documented, up to date certifications required for a grants project.

 Rob Smyth's Blog

 The Performance Driven Government Initiative

Unless you were paying close attention the last few weeks, you probably missed an important series of events and announcements in the world of interoperability standards for the learning industry.

Sorry this is slow in coming after my first entry back in July. This one got a bit bogged down in our internal review process. Surprisingly, it emerged fundamentally intact. Go figure.

I suspect this is true: I am the very last blogger to write observations about the Community College circumstances in 2009. This is an amazing and truly dynamic situation. The extreme economic downturn has created a perfect storm for U.S. job losses, industry skill shifts, and realignment of government strategic priorities. So all of a sudden, it has become swimmingly popular to proclaim the unique benefits of our U.S. community college system. Everyone is awake.

This is my first blog, ever. I’m a little nervous about this endeavor since I’ve read somewhere that the average blog has a viewership of 1.5, which tells me that, mostly, the writer and the fractionally-multiplied reader are the same person.

Please visit the weblink for Summit Magazine, a Canadian publication focused on public sector purchasing, to read an article I authored on the 3-1-1 program and its' capacity to fulfill service delivery transformative priorities for our governments.

Download The Canadian Performance-Driven Government Program file

The most exciting aspect of attending higher education conferences is the high level of engagement and incredible energy devoted by every attendee to derive the most value out of the opportunity. While overall total registration numbers were down at the recent HEUG Alliance conference, as they have been at all conferences across the board, the attendance at sessions, engagement with vendors supporting higher education, and using the conference to network with peers and peer institutions was higher than ever.

Happy New Year 2009!

So let's say you have an E Business Suite implementation, you run Financials - link this with Projects and Procurement and have Teleservice for when your suppliers want to talk to you. Now you have decided to embrace the internet and want to make your system work for your providers in that environment.

For all those of you who have a technical bent, we have published a white paper with our recommendations on how to devise an architecture to keep your Siebel application running. This is one of the many benefits of owning both the application and the technology stack.

Check out Reducing Siebel Downtime with a Local Standby Database

The new release of Siebel CRM is soon to be upon us and contains new features and functionality in the Public Sector space.

If you wish to attend the one hour launch, click this link.

For anybody interested in using Siebel for Court Case Management an interesting paper has been published by one of our pratners HCL on this very topic.

It is called:
Judicial Departments Ride the CRM Wave – CRM's New Avatar : Siebel Case Management Solution.
You can find it from the link here, note that registration is required.
http://www.hcltech.com/white-papers/index.asp?id=1211992433015

Oracle has recently announced the next wave of computing, catchily entitled iGovernment. To see the innovations check out:

http://www.oracle.com/goto/igovernment/

My particular interest is of course in improving service delivery. More information here:
http://www.oracle.com/industries/government/case-management-crm-government.html

One of the benefits of acquiring products with a view to how well they fit together is that quite often two good products come with a ready made integration.

It's a couple of years since Siebel was acquired, but only in March 2008 did we announce the purchase of testing products from Empirix.

Two interesting papers have been released showing how CRM On Demand can help new customers quickly get up and running with On Demand solutions. Business & Enterprise North East are based in Seaham, England.

Has the “sustainability” trend snuck up on you?

With the fanfare that accompanied the new Apple Appstore, I trust that you have all downloaded a whole bunch of productivity tools and the odd game or two. Well, hidden in the 500+ apps is an Oracle one.

Oracle Business Indicators

Enjoy!

Hi, if anybody is interested, Oracle will be hosting an Immigration Industry Forum for Immigration Case Management and working in September in Amsterdam. Details will appear soon on oracle.com but in the meantime if you are interested leave me a message and I will forward the invite on.

Here in the UK, we are doing some work on Case Management in government with a local newspaper, The Guardian. The report is due out by the end of July and you can register your interest here:

Case Management in the Public Sector: Exclusive Report from The Guardian and Oracle

or you could buy the paper!

Well, you mention Social CRM and then up pops a new Oracle blog:

Social CRM

How social is that!

Formal RFP-style solicitations are a fact of life for IT vendors doing business in the U.S.

Everbody knows what business applications.  Forms based, mainly blue and white, if they need to be high volume then keystroke based as well as mouse pointing.  Expense systems spring to mind.

Well, my children are in exam mode at the moment and in a few years they will be looking for jobs.  What do they use in IT?  iTunes, Messaging, Google, facebook, bebo, picasa, Nintendo wii's and iPods.  They will expect much more from their computing experience.

I am often asked, what exactly does a Sales Consultant do?
This question comes from friends, my children, my wife; and rather scarily from colleagues.

Well today, I have just finished for the week and I thought I would reprise the type of activity I have done:

Monday - Early train to London

• Meet with a partner to discuss Siebel CRM in the context of a larger SI programme.
• Internal discussions on upcoming release of software